One Hundred Poets

Once I started, I could not stop until I set the limit of a hundred.  This list of authors and value judgments is unsystematic, the record of one reader’s reactions after sixty years of reading.  I restrict myself to a few lines of comment.  The writers mentioned below are not necessarily the greatest in my opinion.  The catalogue could have been significantly different.  I may collect a Part Two in the future.  There are plenty of candidates.  May someone someday read an unfamiliar poet on the basis of these insubstantial words. 

 

8^th century B. C. E.  Homer is grand and encyclopedic, an entire culture in a volume.  When read aloud by a someone able to do quantitative vowels, natural stresses, and pitch accents, he sounds like a symphony.

8^th – 7^th century B. C. E. Hesiod unquestionably preserves priceless mythological and historical data.  As a poet he is one of the first to leave words stamped with a distinct individual personality, cranky, anxious,  whistling in the archaic dark.

Circa 630 B. C. E.  Sappho is intense, incandescent.  The reader pleases the tongue by repeating the phrases of her melodious lyrics while recognizing along with the author the prodigious might of Aphrodite. 

ca. 518 B. C. E.  Pindar’s wonderful odes demonstrate the greatest mastery of the use of myth.  Though the only works that survive entire are those written to honor athletic victors, he could have been writing his high-flying associative poetry on any topic.   

84 B. C. E. Catullus, beloved for his enthusiastic eroticism, excels also at vituperation and pure verbal display, and there is never a misplaced syllable.

70 B. C. E.  The immense cultural weight of the Aeneid was intended from its composition, but Vergil’s epic was also repeatedly reinterpreted increasing its semantic density.  The poet’s georgics and eclogues are also fascinating in detail and impressive in impact.

65 B. C. E. Horace, the most craftsmanlike of Latin poets, recognizing the interpenetration of the grand and the mundane, wrote naturally of the gods and of everyday life, and his effortless line was marmoreal.

43 B.C.E.  a favorite of the Middle Ages, Ovid influenced the course of European poetry not only through the mythology he preserved in the artful tales of the Metamorphoses, but in addition he reshaped love poetry with his Ars Amatoria. 

365  Tao Yuanming was the great poet of the “fields and gardens” school, locating nature just outside his door.  His retirement from worldly activity, saying he would not "bow like a servant in return for five pecks of grain" became legendary.

699  An important painter as well as poet, Wang Wei is one of the greatest explicitly Buddhist poets, creating intricate works of art often within the four lined jueju form.

701  The West became fond of Li Bai through Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound, embracing him as he was said to have sought to embrace the moon’s reflection.  The Chinese seem to share the view of his as a Romantic and passionate natural poet.

712  Du Fu wrote on an extraordinarily broad range of topics.  He observed nature closely, engaged deeply with the turbulent history of his time, and wrote great-hearted poems of love and friendship.  He seems to me no less passionate for being a highly erudite poet.

8^th century  Through the chance survival of one manuscript, we happen to have the lone substantial Old English epic Beowulf in which the verse forms  native to the language are employed with full vigor in a beautiful and moving poem, with a heart-aching elegaic tone.

9^th century  For a time I was a Hanshan evangelist, giving out copies of Gary Snyder’s translations of this brilliant contemplative who wrote in the most colloquial dialect. 

1071  William IX, Duke of Aquitaine was a major lord whose work is the earliest in the Troubadour lineage.  His poems range from courtly love and piety to what looks like raucous locker room fooling, but all are artful.

early 12th century  Among the troubadours, Jaufre Rudel is unique for the intensity of his devotion to an absent lover. 

1135  Bernart de Ventadorn brought troubadour lyric to a classic perfection, displaying in his cansos the full range of convention of the genre, though freely manipulated to represent a range of themes.

ca. 1170  Wolfram von Eschenbach, the author of Parzival, conveyed to the German language the profound mystery of the Arthurian stories, as well as writing lyric songs and other narratives.

ca. 1170  Walther von der Vogelweide was the most celebrated of the Minnesingers, composer of a substantial body of love songs and political verses

12^th century  One of the three great epic romances of the Middle Ages, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Iseult ascends the heights and plumbs the depths of love and fate and god and power with rare insight and beauty.

ca. 1200  The Nibelungenlied draws monumental archetypal power from early Germanic myth, with its archaic story, seemingly straight from the backbrain, still potent in Wagner’s revisions. 

1265  In his grand encyclopedic epic of the afterlife and for his refined love poems Dante used the vernacular with no loss of gravitas.

ca. 1332  Piers Plowman in its several forms is William Langland’s only known wok, a great elaborate symbolic dream, filled with lively images and righteous sentiments criticizing religious and secular powers

ca. 1330  Writing in French, Latin, and English, John Gower maintained a cultivated eloquence in the tetrameters of his grand narrative compilation The Lover’s Confession. 

1340  Geoffrey Chaucer is a monument, able to pull off every sort of effect from sublimity to comedy to pathos to the delectation of pure beauty.  Out loud the Middle English is for the most part not only soon comprehensible, but melodious.

circa 1373  John Lydgate wrote many volumes of somewhat irregular verse, much of it retellings and compilations, also including love allegory (the occasionally luminous Temple of Glas) and translations. 

Late 14^th century  The Pearl Poet wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of most bewitching Arthurian romances, as well as the deeply moving Pearl and the rather sensational Cleanness, and the more pedestrian Patience.

ca. 1431  The most celebrated exemplar of the criminal poet François Villon wrote moving celebrations of life and plaints on aging and mortality using a grand idiosyncratic rhetoric.  Villon also composed lyrics in the street slang of the underworld. 

ca. 1460 William Dunbar, one of the “Scottish Chaucerians,” wrote courtly entertainments, allegories, and satire with extravagant language, energetic if unoriginal in a century when much of the greatest British writing was done in Scots.

ca. 1463  Puttenham called him "rude rayling rimer," but John Skelton’s greatest appeal today is his use of native English words, his free way with meter and a voice with a great deal of character, whether speaking on personal or public topics.

 1503  Thomas Wyatt is highly musical while retaining in his language the sense of the spoken word.  He is capable of love poetry of haunting and delicate beauty that nonetheless sounds like a natural voice.

1517  Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s sonnets are none the worse for being among the first in English.  He was also a pioneer in blank verse, using it for his translation of portions of the Aeneid. 

1552  Like Sidney a courtier poet, Walter Raleigh led a tumultuous life (in the end he, like Surrey, was executed) during which he found time to write beautiful poems, many of them occasional, nonetheless polished for using “plain style” language.

1552  Outstanding in pastorals and sonnets, author of an excellent elegy and a masterful epithalamion,  Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen is unique, a magnificent allegorical romance epic employing powerful mythic patterns in occasionally archaic language.  A poet’s poet. 

1564  Apart from displaying a mastery of rhetoric in the grad style of his plays, Christopher Marlowe wrote some unforgettable lyrics, the epyllion Hero and Leander, and a good translation of Ovid.

1572  John Donne’s lines are always fresh, if often rough in sound.  He plumbs the heights, sensual and spiritual, and what he made of the mingling of the two and preached great sermons.

1591  A master of light-spun lyric and the English poet most identified with the carpe diem sentiment,  Robert Herrick wrote charmingly of “brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,” but also of religious experience.  

1593  George Herbert, a dedicated priest by vocation, on the page harnessed the novel energy of the Metaphysical conceit to write some of the most muscular and concrete and authentic English poems on spiritual themes. 

1595  A painstaking craftsman influenced by both Jonson and Donne, Thomas Carew wrote intensely sensuous love poetry, including “A Rapture,” one of the most erotic poems in English.  

1613  The most baroque of the Metaphysicals, Richard Crashaw wrote from a devotional, almost mystical, sensibility.  His poems such as those concerning Teresa of Avila do not shrink fro m sensual and emotional express=ions of religiosity.

1618  Abraham Cowley had plenty of wit and learning, wrote Metaphysical-style love poems, but his distinctive form was the excited Pindaric ode.  

1621  Andrew Marvell kept a steady hand on his couplets in love, occasional and topographical poems.  His dizzying “Horatian Ode” on Cromwell shows that passionate political poetry can be subtle. 

1631  He needs a considerable number of footnotes today, but John Dryden was a master versifier and a first-rate translator

1636  Thomas Traherne ardently mystical poetry reflects a profound experience of god and nature that resists formulation in language.  His prose poetry in Centuries of Meditation opens his inner life to readers.

1647  It is true that John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester wrote the most obscene poetry until the twentieth century, but it is also true that he was immensely witty, writing about the complexities of love and expressing a wholly cynical, quite modern-sounding vision.

1685 John Gay wrote not only the memorable Beggar’s Opera, but a broad variety of poetry in other genres, including pastorals and fables, all of it witty, cynical, and always open to innovation.

1688  Pope has immense technical skills.  His masterful manipulation of sound values and syntax in the heroic couplet is dazzling.  He has as well a greater soul than some readers realize.

1700  Author of strong blank verse, including the affecting forward-looking nature poem The Seasons as well as the unlikely backward glance of The Castle of Indolence, a Spenserian allegory, James Thomson also wrote the words to “Rule Britannia.”

1716  Thomas Gray, known for a single work, the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” wrote as well some stirring Pindaric odes.  Though Wordsworth singled him out as exponent of an outdated style, he clearly anticipates Romanticism.

1721  William Collins used all the devices of neo-Classicism including artificial epithets and an adherence to what he considered ancient models, yet his passionate enthusiasm quickened the form of the ode, and he anticipated the Romantics in love for nature, ruins, and the exotic.

1722  The author of the most extraordinary visionary poem of his century Christopher Smart also wrote more conventional magnificently modulated religious poems, fine fables, and some surprisingly elegant courtly love flirtations.

1731  An inspired nature poet, William Cowper was once exceedingly popular, due in part to his hymns and other religious poetry and his anti-slavery agitation.  He mastered many forms, but not his own habitual depression.

1754  George Crabbe retained a neo-Classical line, but employed it to tell tales of people in modest spheres of life.  While his couplets are in detail unremarkable, his focus on ordinary provincial life is itself an imaginative breakthrough.

1757  Blake is intoxicating because of his visionary mysticism, a rare example of thought rather than poetic technique underlying greatness.  Blake’s rhythm and forms are often elementary, but his ideas sublime.

1770  With his long loose composition expressing a rhapsodic reimagining of ancient Greek culture, Friedrich Hölderlin shaped German Romanticism.

1770  William Wordsworth moved poetry forward, contributing some memorable lines, some sublime passages, and a great many forgettable lines. 

1772  Samuel Taylor Coleridge not only collaborated on the groundbreaking Lyrical Ballads in which his contribution foreshadowed Poe with his use of the exotic and fantastic; he excelled also at writing discursive “conversation poems” and seminal criticism.

1772  Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) a formative figure of German Romanticism, sought cosmic harmony through poetry.  His “magical idealist” vision informs his passion for love and the night.  

1788  Lord Byron wrote a few very pretty lyrics, but his strong work is in longer compositions such as the dramatic and picturesque Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the grandly comic Don Juan.  He conctributed incidentally a good deal to the modern idea of the poet.

1793  John Clare, son of an agricultural laborer, wrote some of the most remarkable 19^th century poetry, including wonderful nature descriptions and, in his madness, some equally marvelous lyrics.

1795  An outstanding image-maker, John Keats charms as well with his earnest and passionate affect and his belief in Poesy. 

1809  Perhaps Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry is more popular in France than in his native land, but it has always attracted me, primarily through sound.  “Ulalume,” for instance, has always been my favorite, though to Huxley it is “too poetical,” “a carapace of jeweled sound.”

1809  Alfred, Lord Tennyson was such an exemplary Poet Laureate that his posthumous reputation has suffered from his conventionality and his sheer volume of work.  Nonetheless, one of the most capable versifier ever, with a sharp dramatic sense.  

1812  Browning excels at images, conversation, and drama.  He wrote verse as comfortably  as prose, though today’s readers prefer to consume his work in smaller portions than his long poems.

1819  Like it or not, Walt Whitman is our grandpa and our national prophet.  It may be more true of Whitman than of Shakespeare that he might well have blotted a thousand lines, but we would not risk missing his lists, his glorious energy, his very extravagance.

1821  Charles Baudelaire contributed heavily to the modern notion of the artist as counter-cultural with his transgressive ideas couched in what appear to be Parnassian verse forms.

1830  With wit, precision, and buoyant spirit, Emily Dickinson worked out her states of mind, including unforgettable lightning flashes of insight, in unassuming stanzas often using common meter.

1837  Swinburne is a master of sound, but he has little else to sustain the reader.  His washed-out hedonism covers everything, his use of antiquity in particular. 

1842 Equally subtle in sound and image, Stéphane Mallarmé’s lyrics inspired subsequent poetic moves.  More even than most, his work defies translation.

1844  Gerard Manley Hopkins composed the most innovative and melodious poetry, managing to capture in dramatic imagery his startling experience of the divine.

1854  The bad boy punk who fragmented consciousness and poetry in a single act before leaving Europe and art, Arthur Rimbaud pioneered a collage technique of imagery.  For all his wildness the poet’s tender heart is perceptible and dear. 

1859  A. E. Housman, apart from being one of the preeminent Classicists of his age, wrote of love in limpid verses in A Shropshire Lad, quite rightly  set to music by a number of composers.

1865  William Butler Yeats, for all his cranky notions, is certainly one of the greatest poets of recent times.  From his early Romantic fogginess, through the mastery of his middle rhetoric to the gnomic pronouncements of Crazy Jane, Yeats excels in every style.

1871  Though better-known for his fiction, Stephen Crane’s spare intellectual poetry expressing a sort of late 19^th century existentialism in non-declamatory free verse still deserves readers.

1875  Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems are mystical and passionate, yet grounded in concrete images and in revaluations of Classical myth for the twentieth century.

1885  In Ezra Pound one finds the very finest free verse melodies and the most palpable images.  Though at times cranky and pedantic, he can make the reader weak in the knees with the beauty of his line.    

1879  Wallace Stevens builds with the essential materials of poetry: a love of the texture of words and of sharp and suggestive images.  He is perhaps the foremost English language Symbolist.

1887  A careful syllable-counter, Marianne Moore’s poetry has a delightful delicate dry beauty, demonstrating the aesthetics of restraint.  Passion and politics flow beneath the surface.

1888  A great critic as well as poet, T. S. Eliot, the  dominant Modernist for decades, may have been consciously conservative, but he was neurotic and innovative enough to represent the twentieth century and to alter the way people read and write poetry.   

1894  Ever so popular at his death in 1962, but little thought of these days, e. e. cummings, for all his Greenwich Village posing and sometimes unpleasant politics, wrote lovely, well-crafted lyrics, though readers are well-advised to ignore two out of three of his typographical idiosyncrasies.

1899  Hart Crane, America’s own symbolist, using what he called “the logic of metaphor,” crafted rock solid Modernist poetry lit with suffering and vision.

 

The list concludes with the end of the nineteenth century.  I might add the bare names of more or less contemporary poets whose work I particularly admire:  John Ashbery, Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Charles Olson, Kenneth Rexroth, Dylan Thomas.

Some Poetry Reviews

1. These short bits were in Chronogram.


Georganna Millman, Set Theory, Finishing Line Press, $12.00.

     Georganna Millman’s Set Theory proves less abstract than the title and the glyphs on the cover might suggest. In fact her poems quickly establish an elegiac confidential domestic tone (“I will tell you everything.”) that focuses on mortality most of all (“one misfire behind the eyes/ a migraine’s clutch rush of regret.”). Time is processed here through nature: “trapped fingerling trout” or a dead coyote in the snow. Her work is rooted in the region (with poems on the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and Utsayantha) and in everyday life including connubial bliss (too little sung) “Slick rapture – I am full of anticipation.” From her Catskills window she sees “a shock of fresh blood” in a snowstorm whose flakes seem no less than “lovers in free-fall.”


Lee Gould, Weeds, Finishing Line Press, $12.00.

     In title at least more democratic than Leaves of Grass, Lee Gould’s Weeds remains capable of a certain prophetic ambition. Though the author can indulge dreams and even whimsy, there is generally an edge to the fantasy (as in the screams of the female mountain lion in “The Basics” or the “Mermaid” that Goldie, who used to play “gin rummy with Uncle Harry” became). “Rope Burn” is incandescent with eroticism and “Routine Check-Up, Age 13” greets puberty with a vision of “skinny dipping every night/ in phosphorescent lakes.” But death is a more prominent theme in this collection: “We become at last food, God, for you.” The volume concludes with “Song of Songs,” in which, if death is not quite transcended by love, it is subdued for the moment.


Frank Boyer, Jumping Out of my Skin: Poems and Microfictions, ed, by William Wilson, The Doppelganger Press, $8.00

     Jumping Out of my Skin preserves poems Frank Boyer wrote half a lifetime ago when his life was unsettled, as the title suggests, but he was in synch with much of America then, and many will understand the cross-country jaunts recalled here: “misty farms, each lit by a single bulb, spin by like asteroids.” Invoking Kerouac and Jimi Hendrix, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, he portrays the Southwest (“the Rio Grande/ glimpsed through rust-colored brush”) and a hallucinatory NYC (“subway steps slick with blood”) as he moves toward “a fate we cannot guess.” Romance is redemptive but elusive. At its best: “She touched his hand. Their wounds were healed.” But love can be more ambiguous: she “curls up around my heart/ digs in her claws,/ and makes herself at home.”


Steve Clorfeine, While I Was Dancing, Codhill Press, $18.00. (art by Christoph Zihlmann)

     Steve Clorfeine’s While I Was Dancing is based on free-writing texts generated when the author and a partner practiced “moving and writing”: eyes closed, one would move while the other observed; then, both would write. Perhaps the most direct transcription of the process is the first poem in which the dance makes everything possible in a triumph of symbolic gesture: “Victory to fingertips/ (their willingness to fill the air).” The remaining poems range in reference from Buddha to Cracow and an old age home and in style from the lyric to the gnomic: “how we face each other/ how we face ourselves/ begin again.” The book includes a suite of neo-Expressionist etchings by Christoph Zihlmann that nicely complement the poems. May there be more such fruitful juxtapositions of words and visual art!


Fire Exit, Robert Kelly, Black Widow Press, $19.95

     Bard professor Robert Kelly, author of sixty-some books, once wrote “Language is astrology indoors,” and Fire Exit, a novel-length group of linked lyrics, reads sometimes like conjuring or incantation. One poem says, “the words come in like crows to wake us,” and awakening may range from gnomic pronouncement to arresting image to exquisite enigma. The flexible three line stanzas are strewn over the pages like flower petals or constellations. Attentive and off-hand graceful, the language is redemptive. In a single poem he moves from subatomic particles to apocatastasis to erotic images to “scissor up the Visa card and rest in peace/death is the opposite of cash/the mortgage that you can pay off never.”


Winter Crows, Barry Sternlieb, Codhill Press, $16.00

     The title of this winner of the 2008 Codhill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition might lead readers to think of Ted Hughes or perhaps Van Gogh, but in fact Barry Sternlieb’s crows appear neither as the metamorphosing mythic crow of the British poet nor as ominous birds over a dark wheatfield. Such a painting of crows can be a sublime masterpiece, but for Sternlieb there is revelation beyond art and the senses. He includes a few sweet erotic pieces, but he is attracted as well to the perfection of vacuity. For him the crows, even when “hounded” by wind in one poem, are an emblem of beauty’s survival.


The King, Patricia Wolff, W. W. Norton & Co., $24.95

     In The King, a collection of poems on pregnancy and motherhood, Patricia Wolff avoids preconceptions and conventions and provides the reader with on-the-money sketches of maternal moods cast in focused colloquial language that takes, at times, surprising turns. Her chiseled language handles ugliness or anxiety with aplomb. Instead of sentimentality or neo-mythic goddess-worship, the reader finds the startling title “I am on drugs” in which the persona declares her “irresponsibility,” saying the coming child’s life (like our own) will be “a test.” In another piece Wolff says “having had children” is what Buddhists call suffering. That suffering, of course, is nothing other than life.


Hurricane Hymn, H. R. Stoneback, Codhill Press, $20.00.

     With the first poem on the flooding of New Orleans, the reader is tossed into the hurricane’s maelstrom which in Stoneback’s rendering includes an unsettling variety of voices. His unashamedly ornate rhetoric runs a broad gamut of tone, rich with music and passion. Prior to joining the professoriat, he collaborated with Jerry Jeff Walker and played with Dylan at Gerde’s Folk City, and this background is evident not only in references to Fats Domino and Hank Williams, but in the poet’s highly accessible engagement. One poem’s title links the Fisher King with Delta Recon, and the language throughout runs smoothly from recondite to colloquial.




2. This has not yet been published.

Welcome to the Museum of Cattle, Jane Ormerod, Three Rooms Press: NYC, 2012. $15.00

     Jane Ormerod’s new book from Three Rooms Press Welcome to the Museum of Cattle is an effervescent syphon of words, bubbling over with sound collisions, found phrases, imagist fragments, and urgent unanswerable questions. Anyone with a weakness for words and a fondness for seeing them knock into each other, releasing unexpected associations and emotions, would relish this museum. Its exhibits may not strike the visitor as orderly or predictable, but they regularly feature a truly disarming level of energy. The verses spread across the page like an uncontrollable spill, like fireworks with a mind of their own, like a stream of flood-water taking new territory, like a new science just being uncovered.
     Language here is incantatory, self-supporting, fueled by some dynamo within to turn (as consciousness does) from one detail to another, leaving the forebrain always a bit behind in attempting to account for the gaps. Though she specializes in the discontinuous, Ormerod also regularly employs repetition to simultaneously familiarize and defamiliarize the phrase in a manner reminiscent of Gertrude Stein (and with the same fondness for simple diction and the concrete).
     “Lying Sideways, Eyes Closed, Rain,” the opening poem, which might at first seem to be stream-of-consciousness, turns out to be more like bricolage or Snyder’s riprap, with one element placed next to another. One finds little compressed riffs within a line (“That man and her of him ago and long I do I do”), repeated motifs (such as the emphatic “Hup!” and “Joist!”. The diction ranges from children’s story (the melodic sounds of “There is a scarf for little horse. etc.”) to floating portmanteaus like “nosewipe pipesmoke” to questioning (“Where? Whence? Whence?”) Dramas unfold in the turning questions and exclamations, concluding in exhilaration as the author invites the reader to share a “tree frog moment.”
     Indeed, jouissance emerges repeatedly like Zephyr in this stormy and ever-changing environment. In “Call Me a Cabernet Sauvignon,” neutral coded instructions (“STOP,” “YIELD,” “WET PAINT” are mixed with images of busy trade and low-key impressions (“Prettyprettypretty”), enthusiastic outbursts (“Fertility of travelers! Ranger Lynne!”), and indeterminate series: “Polytechnicals Moggies in limbo Hopscotching experts.” (For this last, it doesn’t even help to know, as Americans may not, that a moggie is a cat.) The piece moves, though, to offer in the end a magic hope: “Divulge the first color you remember./ Maybe we will then all become happy.”
     In “The Second Rebecca” Ormerod evokes Maurier and Hitchcock’s nervousness, the vulnerability of ignorance, and the perverse impulses of the ego seeking a “perfect tree” and a “postcard perfect Monte Carlo” while finding only scattered impressions and questions. But she does lay claim on the gem-like name of supporting player Lumsden Hare which strikes the reader as clumsy and yet perfect, a poem in itself. Settling for such satisfaction, she can conclude by analogy “There is no shame in the faltering surprise of your life.”
     The same haven in which lived experience is reclaimed by art is most dramatically proclaimed in “Breathless Around Roadworks,” which declares of our imperfect vision, in spite of a full recognition of the frustration of persona and reader alike, that “This may be the only face of human and irrepressible joy.”
     “Or Indeed Any Alcohol” ends on a similar rising note, in a linnet’s song (has the bird wandered here from medieval lyric?) which triggers a rising crescendo of “release,” and the purge of clean-burning alcohol which one might imagine purging doubt.
In “The Young and Innocent Ride Again” identity is barely containable and each alternative seems as glorious as the next.


Are you gold, a drunk, a listener, a wanton bitch?
A crowbat, an orphan? Are you the law?
A large bee on the shoulder of your enemy? A prize hog’s tale?
Are you over a port barrel
That feels like a keg of dynamite?
Will you ride again?


     Reading Welcome to the Museum of Cattle, I thought of Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck’s volume of similarly exploded poetry Fantastic Prayers. For its reissue, Huelsenbeck responded to those who took his texts to be random, aimed primarily at the destruction of conventional norms of beauty. He meant, he said, to exercise “constructive will in the world.” This activity of art-making, he went on, “lends wings to the course of the stars despite all the fallen angels.”
     Ormerod might shrink from such puffed language, as she does possess the ironic mirror of our belated age. In “Within This Progression, Warmth” she expresses her ambition with modest precision: “This is the few of the something somewhat better/ than the something not so much.” An allusion to an earlier bricoleuse Marianne Moore (“a wealth of fiddle”) precedes a wordlist with extraordinary ebullience (“ . . .dislocated shoulders, jerkins, jerseys/ kilts, mayonnaise, char girls, charming girls . . .”).
     And, just as the reader is convinced that all tones have been included in the varied procession of the Museum’s poems, wonder of wonders, at the book’s end, one is surprised once more as a reverent silence descends and the space on the page, like the space beyond the page, is dedicated, as it would be even without these words, to Ultimate Reality: “God/God/God/Welcome to the Museum of Cattle.”


3. This appeared in Home Planet News.

The Potential for Poetry. Eric Greinke. Rockford (Michigan): Presa Press, 2011. $11.95

     Theory and ideology are often derided as abstruse, artificial, and altogether too French, but in fact every writer, on the conscious level or beneath, works on the basis of a set of more or less coherent presuppositions, an aesthetic theory. Few artists issue manifestoes any longer, and most pay scant attention to their conceptual foundations, so, while theoretical speculation has flourished in universities in recent decades, it receives virtually no attention in “non-professional” literary circles. Eric Greinke is a rare example of a small press poet who has followed in the tradition of Sidney, Shelley, and Pound by addressing the question of what poetry is all about.
     Greinke will be known to those familiar with the small press scene, including readers of HPN. He is the author of something like sixteen books, most recently Wild Strawberries and Traveling Music, including a Selected Poems volume in 2005. What is unusual is his work as a man of letters, publishing reviews, translations (of Rimbaud), and speculation about literature itself. The provocative pieces reprinted in The Potential for Poetry first appeared in little magazines (including this one), and they well deserve this second life in a collection.
     Greinke discloses his general orientation clearly. As a Midwestern small press poet who pursued an MSW instead of literary studies in graduate school, he identifies with the avant-garde, the outsiders, and outlaws. Thus, in “The Small Press Movement,” he calls for mutual support rather than competition, an inclusivity he calls in another essay “The New Eclecticism.” The division appears as a class hierarchy in several essays, including his piece on the poet laureate in which he suggests that Donald Hall’s values, traditional and even conservative were perhaps “beaten into his head at Harvard” while Greinke, the rebel, “went to a state college.”
     However that may be, for my money, Greinke gets a good deal right. His discussion of the competing claims in recent poetry of an “inner-directed” group -- Bly/ Dickinson/Yeats – and a more “outer-oriented” Berrigan/Whitman/Pound group is useful. I agree with his statement that the poetic text is distinguished by “compressed multi-levels of meaning.”
     The title essay “The Potential for Poetry” is ambitious enough to address the purpose of poetry which for Greinke is to “expand consciousness,” through the discovery of “new ideas” in new arrangements of words. Though he does allow, almost parenthetically, for the value of art in simply transmitting received ideas, for him the Romantic goal of novelty is more significant. According to Greinke, the “primary purpose” of poetry is “exposing the unknown, forming alternate ways of perceiving our reality, and advancing human awareness.” He provides a varied list of possible techniques to “make it new,” many of which have been favorite gambits of the avant-garde for the last hundred years: rule-breaking in general, collaborations, multiple personae, and the like.
     In search of such new insights, he pursues what he, in another passage, calls the “the ‘Aha’ of revelation or confirmation.” His attitude is unapologetic: “Poetry is subversive to rigid, stagnant ways of being.” “Why should poetry tell us what we already know? Prose already does that.” This and his surrealist assumptions lead him to praise “intuitive,” “sub-conscious,” and “unconscious” thinking which to him is “divergent.” (One might object that archetypes by definition cannot be individual, but rather are universally shared. Are the dreams of which Breton made so much in the first surrealist manifesto likely to admit the individual to a realm of idiosyncratic improvisatory genius or to a timeless collective of wise Jungian ancestors? Or is the difference only in the decoding?)
     Greinke accepts literary value as inexplicable: “Taste is personal . . . One loves it and the other hates it. Is it the person or the song?” The question can, however, be productively investigated by using his own insight that literary value is constructed in the consumption of the work. According to his formulation, “A poem doesn’t happen on a page. The reader is the poet.” Thus the interaction can be analyzed in terms of the level of the reader’s competence and the richness of the writer’s exposition.
     His test case (which he warns the readers is protected by a level or two of irony) using his own poem “Life” seeks to establish clear bases for the work’s value through traditional explication, but retreats eventually into a less convincing claim that the reader’s evaluation of his poems is dependent on agreement with his theme. “The poem is great, if you also believe that life is great.” He insists on this point: he is entitled, he says, to call the poem great “if I also have the right to see life as great.” So would any poems asserting the “greatness” of life be also “great”? Would a poem claiming life is not great necessarily fail? And he concludes by backing into mystery at the end: “[The poem is great] Or not. It depends on the reader as all poems ultimately do.”
     At risk of being identified with the reactionary camp (though I, too, went to state schools, which I regarded then and now as among the nation’s best), I found some of Greinke’s statements careless. For instance, early poetry being oral, there can be no evidence for his assertion that it is the oldest art. It is absurd to say that prose “came as a product of printing.” (What of Herodotus, the Norse sagas, and Chuang Tzu?) He says that “upper crust poets rarely stand the test of time,” (Chaucer? Milton? Will Eliot fade?). It seems to me the idea of the artist as counter-cultural is hardly over two hundred years old. And the man tosses the accusation of fascism far too freely: a poetry Nazi is one who likes accessible verse or a teacher who doesn’t know about prose poetry. And if that weren’t sufficient, he calls these opponents “chicken” as well!
     But I bother to quibble only because he has so much that is substantial to say. Every page set me to thinking and reacting. His ideas are clearly bound to his own practice, and yet he is capable of sufficient generalization to aim right at the heart of literature. What are we doing and why? He has come up with his own answers based on a lifetime in the trenches of the art and his testimony is valuable, if not the last word.
     In the interest on continuing the exchange of views, and really as a salute to Greinke and an invitation to others to contribute in future, let me set down a few of my own assumptions here. Poetry and other art use the most densely meaningful of codes; subjectivities are all we have of truth, and poetry uses figures of speech and thought to deliver them more precisely than any other verbal technology. Poetry can express an entire worldview (and, for my money, upsetting and affirming expectations are equally important, indeed complementary functions). Among the ends of the aesthetic text as opposed to the non-aesthetic (a more useful distinction than poetry and prose) are pleasure, investigation of the mysteries, exploitation of ambiguity, generation of new ideas and expressions, foregrounding of the irrational, the intuitive, the appetitive, specifically all the subconscious drives to their true place in the total picture of human consciousness.
     Can poetry instruct? Only aesthetically, in suggesting that certain stances toward the facts of existence become us better than others. It would take divination to bring one closer to Truth, and the words of poets are the most accurate oracles to which most moderns have access. If art is play with style, surely Greinke is correct when he says “Anything goes . . .The real issue is how well a thing goes.” To evaluate how well it goes, one must see how much happens, and at what psychic depth when people consume the work.


4. This also appeared in Home Planet News.

Eros Descending. Edward Butscher. Amagansett: Amagansett Press, 2010. $15.

     Poetry is distinguished from other discourses by its ability to deal with mysteries, things like love, death, and Ultimate Reality. For these topics which can never be “emptied out,” art has been the investigative medium from the earliest times. Who, after all, seeking knowledge of death, would consult a medical book, or look into psychology research to learn about love, or turn to a theologian for final questions? Edward Butscher, in his valedictory collection Eros Descending, addresses these themes (especially the first two) head on with eyes wide open in sinewy, musical, clear-imaged poetry.
     These poems are death’s jest-book done anew interlarded with favorite sites from the Kama Sutra. Like the old Greeks he laments “flesh knobbed by cancer,” and finally “the dry turd of my own death” while celebrating art, the flesh, memory, and the ephemeral delights that remain. The old man’s theme of “Dust to Dust” (the title of a piece in the book’s center), in placed among reminiscences of early sexual experiences, visions of “women scudding home in melon/swells and escalating mini skirts,” and a delightful “Ode to Cunnilingus.” Those seeking a cosmic connection may or may not think they have found it when Butscher likens the big bang that started it all to “a sailor’s itch,” a “scab divine,” a back-room fuck that “triggered the first dung-fall/of grace into lesser beauty.”
     Butscher, who holds a Ph. D. and wrote significant critical books on Sylvia Plath and Conrad Aiken (but spent most of his career teaching in New York City high schools) brings a high erudition to his play of signifiers. He is willing to include notes and tags from Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and – bless him! – Catullus and Ovid, and his verse is dense and deeply figured. Highly conscious of melody, Butscher is particularly adept at managing assonance and alliteration. With his concentration on the transformations of birth and death and melody, he can sound like Dylan Thomas:


No basket baby ever cried in its crab
Arms or fled with wind-wailing seeds
From their reluctant release


     Learned data mixes with memory flashes and bits from old daily newspapers in the author’s notes to his poems which fill, in fact, the last third of the volume. There is some self-indulgence, perhaps, in the divagations of this discursive prose. The author gives permission for the reader to skip the section, but I enjoyed it, not so much as explication of the texts but as a series of new if dependent works. Still, one’s reading of certain poems is enriched by this miscellaneous material, a mélange of depictions of family members, celebrities of the past, evocation of other writers, some of whom, such as Simon Perchik and fellow schoolteacher David Ignatow, the author knew, and a variety of other information. Apart from literary links and anecdotes about Butscher’s aunties, the notes always provide a background wash for the work’s themes: stories of brutal poaching, a Turkish earthquake, or a suicide, for instance, resonating with the theme of thanatoskelly.
     Admitting that an erotic reverie may end in farts and the “Rime on the Ancient Lecher” can only be bathetic (“Wetness, wetness everywhere”), love still survives in this volume, though it may manifest in a poem or a dream:


Death’s anecdote
The Tahiti dream
Is the sole dose of god aging allows.


     Even the fantasy image alone still evokes reaction from his “half-limp penis as it rises in adolescent glee.” Thus in imagination one may obtain the grace of the dead boy who had (in a poem at any rate) “picked his nose/ and felt pure as a flute.” At that moment “a Grecian urn cradles love’s ashes” and the “sudden green upsurge” can console itself and live on to further generations in the face of mortality.
     Poetry in general is the thickest semiotic form —the most meaning per signifier, and Butscher is a master of compression, using poetry’s toolbox to delineate ambiguities and contradictions, including that central play between life and sex and love and the world on the one hand and illness, aging, decay, and death on the other. He ties the dialectic knot tightly.


we cannot comb
old screams from her skull
or escape the adhesive lair
between her scissor thighs

A Note on Radcliffe’s The Italian

     The distinction between high and low art used to be largely a matter of venue and milieu. Poetry appreciated in court circles such as troubadour lyric and sonnets is easily differentiated from folk-song, and one could hardly confuse Sidney’s Arcadia with a penny dreadful title. The growth of a literate middle class, however, that accompanied the coming of capitalism led to a new market with its own demanding taste. The novel itself was regarded as an inferior literary form for years (in China as well as in Europe), often composed and consumed by women who were no longer required to spend their leisure doing needlework.
     The work of Ann Radcliffe, praised by the great Romantic poets and a best-selling author as well, illustrates characteristics of both popular and high art. Every piece of literature confirms some expectations while denying others, but popular works tend to be toward the reassuring side of that continuum while “high” art often raises contradictions and ambivalences if not outright denial of received ideas. Radcliffe’s books, like most television narratives, conclude with the happy ending that reassures the consumer that, in spite of temporary upsets, all is right with the world. Her characters are flattened and overdone: the heroes are most “manly,” possessing at once good looks, courage, and an unerring morality, while the heroines are lovely, pious, and proper to the degree that in The Italian Ellena Rosalba in The Italian is troubled by such scruples as worrying about keeping company with a male admirer while he is rescuing her from vicious persecutors. Meanwhile the villains are black-souled indeed, though Schedoni practices such titanic and self-controlled machinations that he has been compared with Milton’s Satan and considered influential in the Byronic anti-hero.
     Between these factions, Radcliffe regularly distributes retributive justice in the most predictable manner. One need fear no more than in a comedy that all might not come right in the end. The loftier social classes are uniquely capable of fine feeling, of sensibility. The fair heroine’s marriage is impeded by her presumed lower status, yet she turns out in fact to have been high-born after all and from a virtuous father, rendering irrelevant the issue about whether alliances between classes are possible. Paolo is a fair type of the lower strata. He is an exemplar of the best quality of the low-born, which is to say he is fiercely loyal to his master. His hound-like devotion is so great that he repeatedly makes a fool of himself to lighten otherwise serious scenes, and he is rewarded in the end by being allowed to sing a repeated chorus of good wishes to Vivaldi, “O! giorno felice!”
     Though there is no questioning of the old stereotypes about men and women, morality, or the order of society, Radcliffe did participate in her day’s more intellectual and aesthetic currents. The “Gothic” novel has become a popular genre little remarked by critics, but in the late eighteenth century, it was a new and ambitious orientation toward the sublime. To Edmund Burke “terror is in all cases whatsoever . . . the ruling principle of the sublime.” To him the “Astonishment” associated with the sublime is invariably accompanied by “some degree of horror.” [1]
     Mrs. Radcliffe expressed derivative notions in her posthumous essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” [2] where she argues that “obscurity” and grandeur” combine to generate sublimity. To her this recipe holds “not only on frivolous occasions,” “but in the “most important pursuits of life.”
     For all that, to the modern reader, it is almost as though fear is used to ratchet up the story’s impact like sex in a music video. The Italian setting announced in the title is itself a somewhat sinister place smoky with Roman Catholic incense and moral corruption. The Inquisition even appears. All these thematics are as expected; what is “modern” in Radcliffe is the delectation, the self-conscious reveling in a safe, emasculated horror, whose epigone we see in the young college graduate of today who likes nothing better than to dress as a zombie or a vampire.
     The effect is similar with her descriptions of nature which may provide grandeur as well as mystery. [3] Sometimes extensive and pictorial, they remain thoroughly conventional, a code that should elicit the proper response. The topographical poets had particularized; Radcliffe is always painting variations on the same few scenes.
     Her taste is surely influenced by the Graveyard School poets, or she was a product of the same trends in taste. The enjoyment of a sweet melancholy, colored perhaps by a faint hint of the beyond, either Christian or pagan, a breath of the sublime was evidence of a person of sentiment, an aesthete. Radcliffe broadened the audience for such a vision by washing her stories with the same elements and ameliorating the edgier elements (such as Cowper’s real depression).
     Radcliffe’s reader sought a domesticated horror. Her books are filled with spooky, seemingly preternatural events, but they are virtually always explained rationally. By rational, though, I do not mean likely, for Radcliffe inherits from the Hellenistic romances a fondness for formal symmetry in plot, welcoming all-but-impossible coincidence such as the revelations of the identities first of Schedoni and then of Olivia. Far from a failure of verisimilitude, this was a clear literary code. Scott defined the romance by its “marvelous and uncommon incidents.” [4]
     She added the newer aesthetic ideas of the time, including the taste for horror and for landscape and a lugubrious sense of mortality, and attracted a mass readership as well as impressing Shelley, Byron (who called her the founder of a school) and Keats (who refers to her enthusiastically as an influence in his letters). She raised the ambitions and altered the direction of the novel genre, adding to the woman-in-distress theme of Richardson the “sublimity” of terror and of landscape, the power of meditation on mortality, and the love of the exotic (which is to say the partially understood) which made her and Mary Shelley avid travelers and original travel writers.
     Her oeuvre at once advanced the prestige and popularity of novels. Though some writers in other genres before had addressed a general audience and found critical celebrity (such as Shakespeare) and others had addressed an educated audience yet found a broader readership (such as Milton), Radcliffe mediated the levels of literature, using familiar themes dressed up in the latest aesthetic styles, and created new readership and new tastes for the form whose very name means new.




1. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757. Burke goes on to note that “obscurity” is effective as terror will dissipate with clear vision, adding that despots are secretive to excite fear in their subjects. He does not say whether such repression can result in the sublime.

2. First published in The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, vol. 16, no. 1, 1826, 145-152

3. See Sir Uvedale Price's essay “On The Picturesque.”

4. See his “Essay on Romance.”

Liezi

     The following comments are based on A. C. Graham’s The Book of Lieh-tzŭ. Rather than alter all the names and untranslated terms, in a confusing and monstrous hybrid of usage, my essay follows Graham in using the Wade-Giles system of transliteration, though my title uses the current pin-yin for the convenience of web searches by contemporary students. Thus I shall refer to Taoism rather than Daoism, Lao Tzu rather than Laozi, etc., though I am well aware of the current convention.
     Perhaps in this way I feel closer to the excitement I felt when reading this text for the first time fifty years ago when this version was new, and, in my suburban home, I ordered a copy from Blackwell’s which arrived from the U.K. bearing fascinating stamps and postal markings. Those Blackwell’s catalogues were an enchanted land in which an American high school student with a taste for words could wander without end, no less magical than the fabulous lands described by Liezi.
     Apart from sentiment I use this edition as I do not know of a newer complete translation. I have not seen the book of commentary Riding the Wind with Liezi: New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic edited by Ronnie Littlejohn and Jeffrey Dippmann.


     Lieh-tzŭ is the third text of philosophical Daoism. Something of an anthology, while attributed to a “Hundred Schools of Thought” sage of the fifth century BCE, it was probably assembled seven or eight hundred years later, though using some much older materials including passages from both the Tao te ching and the Chuangtzu. Less gnomic than Lao Tzu, less unified and structured than Chuang, never venturing into the alchemical or magical bypaths that came to use the name of the Tao, consistently amusing and engaging, the book may be the best brief introduction to philosophical Taoism. Taoism can seem remote and abstruse, yet its sages sought like Socrates a way to live a satisfying life that might be useful to everyone. Many conceive of life as a battle and thus make Sun Tzu our modern American ancient Chinese best-seller, but readers will find more in which to delight as well as more challenging mental moves in the relatively neglected Lieh-tzŭ.
     The paradoxes of the book begin on the first page when it opens (as does the Lao Tzu) by insisting on the inadequacy of words. This figure of speech is familiar throughout Western literature in versions both religious (“the divine is ineffable”) or secular (“words cannot describe my beloved”) versions. For Lieh-tzŭ, however, this opening announces a book on the theme not merely of the failure of words, but of effective will, of the senses, and of logic as well. The author (or editor) elaborates a system of utter skepticism which, for all its merciless rejection of knowledge, buoys the spirit. Without values he manages to portray exemplars. Lacking a mythological structure, his imagination knows no bounds. Though he claims that endeavor is useless, he describes super-adepts in every sort of human activity. Advocating doing nothing and knowing nothing, he prescribes a regimen of psychic focus and living in the moment so demanding that few can adhere to it. Not only is (almost) every anecdote entertaining and provocative, the reader may well find immediate confirmation and application in lived experience.
     The point of the celebrated story of Chuang Tzu dreaming he is a butterfly is not that he is either human or insect or something different yet. The point is that one cannot tell, will never be able to tell. Whereas the Hindu devotee seeks to peer behind the veil of maya, for Taoists the apparent is as real as the fantastic, the fraudulent as the authentic. The third book of the Lieh-tzŭ, called King Mu of Chu, expounds this inevitable uncertainty. Mr. Yin, the rich man who dreams of being a slave, and his servant, the poor one who dreams he’s rich are said to have identical lives. (68) Even the honest emotion of the nostalgic man made to believe he is reentering his home town is only a joke played by his companions. (73) One cannot tell what is normal and what abnormal. (72) A judge even with all the facts cannot decide the case of a deer’s disputed ownership. (69) All in all, reality is probably best avoided. A certain Hua-tzu lost his memory and objected when he was cured saying “Formerly, when I forgot, I was boundless.” (70) Taoism in its extravagance goes beyond skepticism to privilege what seems to be fancy and to cultivate amazing tales like people trapped in a dark cave, passing the time in imagined visions.
     If one cannot necessarily accept one’s sense impressions, emotions, or judgments, one might yet, like Descartes, proceed through purely rational means to reclaim God and reconstruct the world. Yet for Lieh-tzŭ, this option is also fruitless. Much of his Book IV is devoted to an attack on logic. The notoriously reasonable figure of Confucius is made willy-nilly to accord with the Tao. Finding that his life’s work has been in vain, Confucius reaches a point where he returns to history and poetry without expectations, not as before with the goal of making people into good citizens, but simply because the subjects appeal to him. He follows his nature without attachment to results. (76) The writer amuses himself with the paradoxes of Kung-sun Lung (86) (which resemble those associated with the name of Zeno), but more to show the absurdity of seeking truth with words than for any other reason. The true sage here is Keng-sang-tzu who has reached virtual omniscience through self-knowledge. (77) Lieh-tzŭ sounds very like a Buddhist when he says “Whoever gets the idea says nothing, whoever knows it all also says nothing. Whether you think that saying nothing is saying or not saying, whether you think that knowing nothing is knowing or not knowing, you are still saying still knowing. But there is nothing that he either does not say or says, nothing that he either does not know or knows. This is all there is to it.” (80) The wise traveler pays no attention to where he is going. (81) The correct answer to any question is “I do not know.” (94) Everything is relative, everything subjective. Because of this cavalier attitude toward logic, what has been taken by many as evidence of multiple authorship is very likely simply the author’s willingness to contain contraries without concern and to accept mystery, contradiction, and ambivalence.
     Lieh-tzŭ certainly sounds like a proponent of Sanlun Buddhism, the Chinese form of Madyamika. He propagates paradox and balances opposites in the tradition of Nagarjuna: “There is no limit, but neither is there anything limitless; there is no exhausting, but neither is there anything inexhaustible. That is why I know that they are limitless and inexhaustible, yet I do not know whether they may be limited and exhaustible.” (95) But for the Taoist there is a significant difference in affect. Lieh-tzŭ finds the world’s unknowability exhilarating. As Confucius is made to conclude, “Rejoicing in nothing and knowing nothing are the true rejoicing and the true knowledge.” (76)
     Lacking faith in sense impressions or in rationality, one has no way to make decisions. The individual has no dependable basis for action. One cannot out-maneuver destiny. As the 6th book Endeavour and Destiny insists, the individual cannot control the world. A course of action that might work one time will fail the next. It is rank superstition to believe that one’s striving is effective. To Lieh-tzŭ most people are like Johnson’s madman in Rasselas who had come to believe that his astronomical observations maintained the sun in its path. Another example is the neurotic man of Ch’i who worries like Chicken Little that the sky is falling. (26) With our anxieties and stress, do we differ from him only in degree?
     Even moral virtue is illusory – people do what they must. Duke Huan employed his enemy not through superior insight and ethics, but because “he could not do otherwise.” (126) If all destiny is inexplicable, all attitudes are equally “right.” (130) The best doctor is the one who does nothing. (129) Realizing that effort is useless, Pei-tung-tzu is wholly content (124), while Duke Ching decides to drink. (133)
     Whatever one tries to pursue, one can only encounter the alternation of contraries. “All things come about of themselves.” (122) Because of his intoxication, a drunk man is wiser than a sober one and less likely to be injured when he falls. (30) The craftsman who worked for years to create a precisely accurate sculpture of a mulberry leaf was daft since the most perfect models hang from trees. (161) A robot is an adequate facsimile of a human. (110) The Taoist term is tzu-jan, meaning self-so-ness, spontaneity, or naturalness. Fatalism need not result in resignation or passivity. Taoism counsels rather that one imitate the cosmos and cultivate tzu-jan. “There are ways in which earth excels heaven, and ways in which each thing is more intelligent than the sage.” (19) A clear and focused mind can produce unreflecting action which is sustained by a mysterious jouissance, the result of being in tune with everything else.
     The stylistic corollary of this high state of mind is the playful mythologizing with which the author ornaments his pages. To balance the fact that the book’s philosophy is an almost nihilistic skepticism, it expresses at the same time a deep engagement with things of this world and beyond that exhibit the most fascinating and unpredictable variety. Florid legends and semi-supernatural beings ornament the margins of the vision as though to entertain, illustrate, and assure the individual that one can never be certain of the truth. Jung Ch’i-ch’i strums a lute from excess of joy (24) and the centenarian Lin Lei sings as he gleans, happy since he never “learned to behave” or “strove to make his mark.” Without moral or ego goals, he is a free man. “You travel without knowing where you go, stay without knowing what you cling to, are fed without knowing how, You are the breath of heaven and earth which goes to and fro; how can you ever possess it?” (30)
     Yang Chu, Book VI of the Lieh-tzŭ, is generally called an anomalous interpolation as it advocates a straightforward hedonism of a simple and physical sort, more like that of Ecclesiastes than the sublime (or sublimated) version of the Epicureans. In contrast to Confucian shame culture, what most call virtue is condemned as valueless (146); “reputation is nothing but pretence” (138), and ritual, including offerings to deceased ancestors is absurd, nothing but useless self-deception. (142) One must obey every spontaneous desire (140) just as Blake prescribed. As life is suffering (139), any amelioration that one can find is reasonable. Po Yi who claimed to be desireless was a monster of pride. The same is true of Chan Ch’in who claimed to be moral. Selfish as everone else, they differ only in their hypocrisy. (141)
     Though both the Yellow Emperor and King Mu are said to have rejected the pursuit of pleasure, it seems an option consistent with the rejection of all values. Just as Confucius resumed his studies after recognizing their emptiness because such activities suited his nature, another individual might follow a different inclination into dissolute days.
     For most of the volume, though, the exemplar is a Taoist adept. Lieh-tzŭ exhibits an wondrously successful archer, a water-forder, a lion-tamer, a swimmer, a fisherman, a musician. In every field, excellence comes from the mental poise and detachment than congruence with the Tao affords. (The attitude reminds me ironically of the stories of scientists and athletes during the Cultural Revolution who gained a similar single-mindedness from study of Mao’s little red book.) In Lieh-tzŭ, though, there can be no striving. When the friend of all gulls became self-conscious, the birds shunned him. (45)
     As Lieh-tzŭ was about to move from Cheng, his disciples asked what his master Hu-tzŭ had taught him. His first reply was “What did Hu-tzŭ ever say?” (17) But he then proceeds, saying, “I did once overhear him talking to Po-hun Wu-jen” [whose latter name means no-man]. He goes on to expound the “Unborn” and the “Unchanging” with rhetoric whose dramatic lofty flights and dark shadows, for me at least, better account for the world I experience daily than would-be intellectual rigor or positivist statements of any kind. Like the mystics of the via negativa, like the poets who know their words can never wholly correspond to their intention, like the lover who admits his inability to express his heart’s full feeling, Lieh-tzŭ knows he communicates only in the most imperfect manner, and, in this way, all his cards on the table, he addresses my own mind as a brother.

A Few Proletarian Writers

     American literature has a grand heritage of progressive politics. Simply thinking of our great anti-racist Huckleberry Finn or of such supporters of old John Brown as Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman indicates that this is the main line of the tradition. The world crisis of the 1930s produced an intellectual milieu in which a great many artists considered themselves Marxist and developed theoretical literary perspectives based on their activism as well as producing poetry and fiction they felt would serve the revolution. The American 1960s, when I was in university, provided a weaker echo of this tendency.
     Though willing always as a good citizen to do my part to move society forward, I have never integrated my politics with my critical or artistic practice. In this I am not alone. I recall a number of academics whose disjuncture between theory and practice was the mirror image of mine. I took a graduate seminar from a Marxist professor whose home displayed expensive and beautifully framed Cuban graphic art, but who never appeared at campus demonstrations. I recall a European Marxist composer of electronic music who considered his abstruse pieces, heard by a small coterie of intellectual aficionados, to be his contribution to the coming revolution.
     And even the most orthodox Marxists must contend with the fact that Marx himself had what might have been called bourgeois, even aristocratic taste, admiring Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and Goethe, yet taking little notice of the engagé writers of his day. More pointedly Engels explicitly condemns ideologically driven fiction, what he calls the Tendenzroman, while noting that the novels of the royalist Balzac contain more data on French society than “all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period.” [1]
     It is difficult today for Americans to imagine to what an extent a vulgar sort of Marxist view of literature dominated intellectual circles during the late 1930s. This Depression vogue stimulated an efflorescence of writers whom few today read, yet some of those who might be described as “proletarian” were first-rate, and deserve readers of all tendencies.
     Edward Dahlberg, for instance, even in his early work, is a painstaking stylist. His Bottom Dogs the original edition (1929) of which was brilliantly, if oddly, introduced by D. H. Lawrence, who said it depicted “the mass of failure that nourishes the roots of the gigantic tree of dollars.” Lawrence goes on to analyze the American obsession with bathroom fixtures and halitosis as a sign of “secret physical repulsion between people,” a dramatic shift from the European “flow from the heart” that resulted in “thousands of little passionate currents.” Lizzie, the itinerant practitioner of barbering and related trades, reminds me of Neal Cassady’s feckless father, another bottom feeder. The story is told with eloquence and convincing verisimilitude. His rhetoric is straightforward but calculated and cadenced. He became a more ornate stylist (and I fancy this manner as well) in his later books Can These Bones Live, The Sorrows of Priapus and finally Because I Was Flesh.
     Charles Reznikoff is well-known today as a central figure in Objectivism and for expanding the sort of use of documentary material in Dos Passos and Williams’ Paterson into the powerful “found words,” the purposeful collages of Testimony and Holocaust. Yet his work received little attention for most of his life as he pursued art and integrity, ignoring money and fame. Reznikoff’s By the Waters of Manhattan (1939) is an unusually poetic version of the Jewish immigrant experience, including, as do most of the genre, the themes of poverty, bigotry, and the labor movement. His hero Ezekiel is convincingly Jewish in his sense of profound social alienation and in his ethical standards. Seeking the best, he praises Icelandic sagas and Aucassin and Nicolette, while, like the author but unlike some of his fellow immigrants, stubbornly resisting economic goals. And in each of these qualities, many non-Jewish readers will, of course, see themselves as well. As always, his words are palpable and well-chosen, laid into a solid masonry on the page, rarely attracting attention, economical and, so very often, just exactly right.
     Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930) simply and movingly tells the story of the hardships of a poor immigrant family. The fact that so very many Lower East Side Jews prospered in America, moving before long to Washington Heights, Queens, or Jersey, does not invalidate this negative example. Gold was a central figure in Communist Party USA circles for decades. If he sometimes refers all suffering to poverty, flattening his thematics, details such as the bedbugs and Mrs. Fingerman’s parrot make it sufficiently real to carry the reader. When he is not addressing culture (for him Gertrude Stein was an “idiot” and Marcel Proust a “masturbator”), I appreciate Mike Gold’s journalism as first-rate agit-prop.
     Nelson Algren’s first novel Somebody in Boots (1935) was originally to be titled Native Son before Algren decided to give the title to Richard Wright with whom he had worked in Chicago’s John Reed Club and the Federal Writers Project. In Algren’s case the “native son” was Cass McKay, a “Final Descendant of the South,” descended from landless, slaveless white workers, an incipient criminal whose native “Americanism” is presented as every bit as ironically as that of Wright’s Bigger Thomas.
     Written on an advance of a hundred dollars based on a single story and set in Texas where Algren himself was imprisoned for stealing a typewriter, whatever Romantic attitudes about poverty the author had, he, like Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Charles Bukowski, earned them.
     His other novels Never Come Morning, The Man with the Golden Arm, and A Walk on the Wild Side (which includes material from Somebody in Boots) made him more money, but for me his outstanding work is the short stories in The Neon Wilderness. Algren’s losers are presented with love and sympathy, for all their sordid foolish fecklessness.
His Chicago: City on the Make presents the most emotionally and rhetorically powerful arguments for a simple Marxist view of literature in combination with a defense of progressive tradition among Midwestern writers, a people’s history of Chicago, and a personal memoir.
     Though he once shocked and alarmed the city fathers (the Tribune called the book “an ugly, highly scented object,” a comment featured on the back of the book), I understand that a statue of the writer has been installed in his old neighborhood in the Polonia Triangle though the local Poles successfully fought against naming the location for him.
     On occasions such as that controversy, or the one during the 90s over National Endowment for the Arts funding, or over Chris Ofili’s elephant dung in the Brooklyn Museum, it is clear that right-wing opponents of art know nothing about the subject. Whereas I fear it may be that well-intentioned leftists may sometimes also make artistic judgments on non-aesthetic grounds, I recognize their far more creditable motives, and I am glad to recommend these books regardless of the dubious turns in political line some of their authors may have negotiated. (I am thinking of “democratic centralism” and tailing the Soviet line in particular. So far as I am concerned these policies harmed the American movement.) Now that the Occupy movements have focused the social contradictions on the most significant single element: money, it is well to recall the achievements of a long tradition of right-thinking American writers.


1. Letter to Margaret Harkness. In an earlier letter to Laura Lafargue, he expresses the same admiration, this time in contrast to the leftist writers: “all the Vaulabelles, Capefigues, Louis Blancs, et tutti quanti.” Engels refers to Balzac’s “revolutionary dialectic.” Both are included in Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow: Progress, 1976. p 93. Marx, too, thought Balzac, with Cervantes, the greatest novelist and planned to write a book on him. Fielding was another of his favorites. (Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, p. 439)

Openings in the Middle English Romance

(Before long, I expect to post my “Mythos and Non-Myth: The English Tail-Rhyme Romances and Structuralist Methodology,” a detailed study of the romance genre, not yet ready for even the informal publication of the blog.)




     Medieval romances, broadly defined, were surely the popular medium of the era, rightly compared by Loomis to today’s “theatre, cinema, radio, and television.” In form, like situation comedies and police dramas, they were highly conventionalized; in theme, like most popular and oral literature, they tended to reinforce readers’ preconceptions. Nonetheless, now as in the fourteenth century, convention is far from a mechanical reproduction of one work by another. Rather, conventional expectations in the reader allow the poet to convey more concise and detailed data.
     A rough notion of the breadth of variation in these texts is evident simply from a review of their opening passages. A narrative beginning “Sing, o muse!” must inspire different expectations from one beginning “Once upon a time” or “It was a dark and stormy night,” but each of these well-known phrases is associated with a separate genre. Examination of a few examples of the Middle English romance from those collected in Maldwyn Mills well-edited and accessible Everyman volume indicates a wide variation in initial orientation for the reader. Although many levels of irony or conventional intertextuality may complicate the code, these opening passages in general provide a considerable degree of self-reflective definition of a text’s identity in terms of genre, sources, traditions, and function. In this way the competent reading (or listening) community is equipped to be able to pursue productive directions with the narrative that follows, accurately adjusting expectations and interpretations to produce the most productive reading. A few examples will demonstrate that, far from stereotyped repetition, even this form utilizes a great variety of openings.

1. The Sege of Melayne opens with a definition of audience — it is meant for those who relish heroic tales, heroic nonetheless for being true, as the author is at pains to insist.
This theme allows him to articulate several critical oppositions according to which the world of the poem is organized: first of all, the ordered hierarchy of feudalism (the hero is “Charlies of Fraunce,” “the heghe kynge of alle”) and secondly, the opposition to the pagan enemy, the Muslims, in a political and religious act of self-definition. However, it is clear that the authentic heroic age is perceived as in the past, or, that is, in a “dream-time,” the realm of the imagination. In fact, the poetic text may been seen as the surrogate of the heroism missing from everyday life. Those who cannot themselves do great deeds with the style they can conceive, can at least be connoisseurs. These two axes intersect: the order of European society, from top to bottom, is matched against its evil pagan twin.

2. The first words of Octavian define a larger potential listenership: everyone. The poet speaks to a universal audience: “Lytyll and mykyll, olde and yonge.” Far from detailing their differences, the poet seeks to amalgamate them into an all-inclusive audience, the fan-base that is the target of every writer aiming for the best-seller lists and every television producer.

3. Emare, quite differently, begins with an extended religious meditation on the gap between the divine and the earthly with the implication that this poetry, like a liturgical formula or an invocation in a hymn will itself repair the distance it seeks to describe. To the poet, it is the duty of all “menstrelles” to speak first of Christ, the mediator between heaven and earth. (One is reminded of Skip James, the country blues performer who would customarily conclude his performances with a hymn, presumably clearing the conscience from the “devil’s music” that preceded the sacred.) He speaks of his Lord, not for any reason specific to his tale, but rather because, as a pious Christian, he “sholde.” This mere mention is efficacious. Again, the text is the mediator between opposite conceptual poles.

4. Sir Isumbras takes the religious theme further, in this case specifically asking for blessings for himself and his audience, transforming the entertainment of hearing a romance into an act hallowed and protected by the divine.

5. In Sir Gowther the religious opening is melodramatic, focusing on the devil’s manipulation of women. Here we have no formal nod to the divine, nor a positive prayer, but rather an involvement of the cosmic figures in the story through the actions of “a warlocke greytt.”

     Each of these openings seeks to define the binary oppositions that create the world of the story as the creation itself grew from the distinctions between light and dark, high and low, earth and sea. Though all the medieval romances recognize such pairs as god/man, truth/poetry, ruler/subject, us/not-us, they appear not as simple alternatives, but as the foundation of a complex dialectic. Thus Christ mediates between the divine and human realms and the individual believer may imitate him with hopes of being lifted to the celestial realm in the end. Poetry, likewise, though differing from lived experience, is, as Aristotle suggested, even more “true.” The king and serf, though occupying opposite ends of the social spectrum, are both necessary for the smooth functioning of society, and military enemies may one day be defeated.
     In spite of this shared ideology, aesthetic, religious, and political, the romances set off on differing notes, each with its own character determined by the narrative to follow and by the artist who composed the particular version of the story. As always, poetry serves to first define the painful, all but impossible, contradictions of life and then to provide an imaginative escape. This commonality, though, by no means implies that each text is a slavish repetition of its models. Rather, the shared conventions allow for a free artistic play intelligible to the audience.

Kerouac’s Redemptive Fault

Here I seek to show why Kerouac is great, in spite of yawning faults. This was written during the 70s, and I have left the colloquial tone and the topical references in place.


Everybody knows how Jack Kerouac shambled down hell road and recently it seems as though most of the world has chosen the same route. Not only is his poison popular; his books are, too. People still read him who read little else; at the same time, he's become inevitable in lit. courses, and the de Young and downtown museum are treading on each other’s heels to display his blown-up snapshots. Soon they'll erect his statue in Golden Gate Park, and a good thing that would be, too. But he's too important to hand over to Alioto and the Arts Commission, or to export to Russia as this generation's Jack London, not to mention the danger of his falling hostage to academics dreaming of tenure and an invincible army of footnotes. Too important despite the fact that he's a writer who tends to embarass his readers with his perpetual adolescence, his silliness about sex, and his outright fifties corn. Surprising qualities in an inventor of hipness? Or is it a tight yinyang situation? It's significant to note his earliest writing doesn't reveal those qualities (though he himself may well have, see Ann Charters' good and friendly biography). The Town and the City has those great drifting paragraph language dirigibles but oh so detached. For him at any rate. Like the writing of a literature sophomore who's got his shit together. Very much like the only people who read it. But On the Road, Dharma Bums, the books people lend around, the ones that you recognize on every living room bookshelf, these books grew from a different self-image and a different ambition: "spontaneous get-with-it" he said once, no revisions, total honesty. In spite of the fact that this spontaneous composition was largely a myth, he did let the cat out of the omniscient author bag and paraded his weakness, his vulnerability, in fact he made that weakness the principle theme of his novels. He renewed the confession but brought a certain amount of baggage: I think of Augustine's fog of piety and Rousseau's baroque elaboration of paranoia. But those defenses couldn't support him — he caved in, and for that reason the very qualities that make Kerouac's books poignant and strong also invite contempt. It's clear he found his inevitable style. Just look at the old pictures of him, hair flopping down and rumply undershirt. Compare with, say, Snyder, poised and posed in tidy robes with trim hair and ordered notebooks of Chinese vocables. But we think of Kerouac as so typically American for the simple reason that he painted his own portrait so authentically that the reader's reminded of his own adolescent awkwardness: horror at the body, horror at the abyss. His Buddhism like his plots dwelled insistently on mortality and all that it implies and the tune rang out devotional and elegiac as any Catholic saint's cult. Jack the earnest bumbler, the tragic real life Dagwood, the Buddha known as the quitter (and his coach at Columbia would have put it the same way and been as right), Jack so sentimental even over the flag, he ended up defending the war and calling that patriotism, this novelist maudit was the only writer of his time (to encounter little opposition since) to understand the fascism of the new critics and to hammer his own voice into a solution. He blew that personal confessional riff of stricken humanity with a rarely genuine humility but also at times with the confidence that grows from knowing the reader must recognize his or her own country, own maya, own image . He talked about himself as the quitter Buddha when it would take a brash guru on the tour today to speak with grace on the strange divine perfection that resides in the ability to digest weakness. Especially with Jack's example like a death's-head on the door. Chinese Buddhism has embraced a thousand drunks but the American variety like the Baptists prefer to conceal and twist their own. Kerouac’s bop prosody could have only one theme, but he worked it so thoroughly it shadows forth everything else. Painful as an old letter or notations in the margins of books. Vulnerability. Coming to terms with one's worst moments, the secrets each person carries about, beads of guilt sweat. So whenever Jack writes about women and ends up sounding like high school, you know his callowness is itself the theme. To emphasize the point he gives himself normative companions: Gary Snyder or Neal Cassady (whose letters he claimed taught him to write!) and then yearns to be like them. The final ethereal projection of the same desire is his dead brother Gerard. Gerard's sainthood like that of the canonical saints exists to underline the worshipper's inadequacies. Definitively, like a miniature Fall of Man. And Jack's version is an alternative to the Fall for people who can't seem to identify with Adam or Eve but who know they want to get back to the garden. The Fall is a tricky point for metaphysicians of any system to explain (even Alan Watts used to be forced to do some fancy dancing) but its obsessive ubiquity is proof of the depth of its meaning. The gap between the angel within and the husks from Levi-Strauss without, or the hair-shirt, if you prefer, has always been obvious in experience. So that's what Jack tried to work out: self-consciousness, dissatisfaction, the wrenching of desire that overleaps reality. You can set out to snare enlightenment with a Dharma-sword to split doubt but remember that the first truth of the Buddha is that life is suffering. It was this wall of fact against which Kerouac struggled and beat his head and spiraled his agony. And in the end his suffering turned out so intense and burning it can purge the rest of us.

In the twenty-first century, I visit a relative of my wife’s, an entertainment CEO, in a gated suburb of Los Angeles. His teen-age son avoids conversation, listens to Kurt Cobain with his door closed, mumbles when addressed, once begging off going out for dinner with the excuse, “I have to write a paper for English.” “Do you?” I respond, “On what?” “Just some dumb book my teacher made us read.” “And what was the book,” I ask, seeking to make contact. “Oh, just a stupid novel, it’s called On the Road.” I try to tell him that that book would never have been allowed in my high school, but he has already lurched off. As Pound says, “’Thus things proceed in their circle’;/ And thus the empire is maintained.”