So, for weeks now I’ve been promising excerpts reviews of contemporary poetry books and lit mags by students in my Deeper Poetics class. I’m consistently surprised and delighted by what they’re up to. Here are a few snippets:

Helena B. on Darcie Dennigan’s Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse (Fordham U. Press, 2008)

Dennigan’s book doesn’t have anything so cheap as a moral. But in the crystalline strangeness and unfamiliar beauty of all of the poems; in the relationship between the poet and a young child (who may, in fact, be the child-self of the speaker herself) who each need the other desperately, and who agree to last; in the speaker’s wry and insistent and self-deprecating self-awareness (that can be found in nearly every poem but is most noticeable in “Eleven Thousand and One” and “Interior Ghazal of a Lousy Girl”) is some reassurance: that the world has already ended, that the world is always ending, and that we are still here. This is the kind of book that ruins me for doomsdays scenarios. May the ending of the world be half this beautiful.

Brandon V. on Lisa Jarnot’s Night Scenes (Flood Editions, 2008)

Lisa Jarnot’s Night Scenes begins with an epigraph out of Robert Duncan:

O, to release the first music somewhere again,

for a moment

to touch the design of the first melody!

Night Scenes is aptly preluded: sound and meter govern the poems in this collection. Jarnot pens the lyric—through implicit in the lyric poem is the myth of the proto-lyricist and first poet, Orpheus, and his songs of loss. Jarnot crafts scenes of sprawling fields and forests restful and bucolic and bathed in stars; these scenes, however, are as a dream, sung from a distance, projected like moonlight onto the page from Jarnot’s ostensible (as first seen in the poem “Bar Course Excise Insensible”) home in Brooklyn. Night Scenes is a searching, a reaching for that lost first music—and Jarnot takes up the task jubilantly, finding her melody in the wonder of the sensuous natural world.

Emily M. on Matthew Zapruder’s The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, 2006)

“Here you must make / wander a method / and from that method / be willing even to wander.” (“What I Need”)

Matthew Zapruder’s description of the Museum of Natural History in his second collection of poems, The Pajamaist, holds equally true for his poetic practice. Zapruder weaves a meandering trail through the text, stopping now and again to gaze or rummage or backtrack as desired. Following him down that path, one is more than likely to get lost. And yet, as we reach the end of a poem or a series of poems it is as if we have arriaved back home—that somehow the end was present already in the beginning and middle and lies before us now, somehow both puzzling and familiar. Zapruder embodies T.S. Eliot’s words, “we shall cease from exploration / and the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time”(The Four Quartets, “Little Gidding”).

Sandy W. on Jericho Brown’s Please (New Issues, 2008)

Throughout Please, Brown draws from a rich cultural heritage of musicians and their songs, weaving them into the poems, utilizing the titles of familiar songs about the themes he explores but re-appropriating them for his own words. He intersperses these “Tracks” in the format of an album, separating poems into sections under the heading: “Repeat,” “Pause,” “Power,” and “Stop,” which subsequently correspond to the physical buttons on a music player, indicating the power and possibilities of sound. They are action words, but also commands. As each section unfolds, its component poems express the heading ideas as related to moments in life, personal preoccupations, and the intersections of ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.

Melayna S. on Nathan Whiting’s Distancing (New Rivers Press, 1974)

When I was twelve years old, I was certain that the ultimate purpose of my life was to convince my parents to buy me a cell phone and to bribe them into letting me have a television in my room. Countless cell phone bills and approximately two thousand five hundred and fifty five hours of my eyes soaking in television rays later, I was left feeling like a disconnected girl in a big, big world that I did not understand. I had no secure sense of orientation to anything that was going on around me. And I felt trapped. And I felt like everyone around me felt trapped. And everyone looked trapped in their own separate and distinct worlds. Nathan Whiting understands how I felt. “What was I to do with my life? / I threw a tantrum when the T.V. was turned off / and became bored. / I was surrounded by the American dream. Surrounded. Surrounded.” In his book Distancing, he expresses his dissatisfaction with the emotionally cold life of New York City. The distance which he fells compelled to place between himself and material glorification ends up pushing him even farther away from the relational world bustling all around him.

Kejt W. on Kristina Born’s One Hour of Televsion (Year of the Liquidator, 2009)

[read as interconnected prose poems]

The first of these TV-Land poems begins without any explanation, “One thing we will do is improve the quality of processed meat and cheese. It is important that you feel safe when putting these things in your mouth.” The next TV-Land poem is about employing “pig babies” to shit into the ocean, fertilizing “plankton [that] may one day heal our planet.” In my high school environmental science class, I learned that some forms of plankton absorb carbon dioxide and may be able to halt the advance of global warming. So, in these two TV-Land poems, we have unsafe industrialized food, pig babies, and global warming, and then we return to the scene of the speaker and Jean-Philippe driving a car headed to Las Vegas after the speaker has just vomited on his hands. Given how much is going on in the TV-Land poems, it’s not surprising that I couldn’t follow the course of events in the road poems. One Hour of Television is actually obsessed with distraction.

James C. on Dorothea Lasky’s Awe (Wave Books, 2007)

Dorothea Lasky’s first book of poetry breathes its own heady aroma…and somehow every poem seems to convey a sense of wondrous sentiment; from cats to the apocalypse, everything becomes wild and magnificent; it’s like you’re seeing everything for the first time, and the effusiveness is infectious. This is not, however, the fake or artificial awe that contemporary poets use as a mean to an end. Awe’s semi-confessional quality lends Lasky’s poetry an air of emotional sincerity lacking in many of the machinations of modern poetry. Lasky’s poetry neither seeks to impress with its structural complexity nor its intellectuality; it just is, its image and emotion, plain and simple, almost a revival of romanticism, with its birds and souls, blood and moon love.

Zach E. on Poetry, July/August 2010

While the poetry in Poetry might seem slightly tame in this day and age of experiments in form and challenges to the aesthetics of craft—with the included works utilizing well-established methods of rhythm and forming and maintaining a cohesive narrative throughout—the pieces in this issue take on the task of clever (and, at times, highly effective) reinvention. The selection begins, for example, with Stephen Edgar’s regular-yet-subtly-irregular rhyme scheme (woven within even octets), seen explicatively in his politically charged, “Oswald Spengler Watches the Sunset.” The piece opens with a succinct characterization of how the titular character—a German philosopher who penned, among other crucial texts, “The Decline of the West,” an exposition on the cyclical natural of civilization—might perceive the world:

The air is drenched with day, but one by one

The flowers close on cue,

Obedient to the declining sun.

Forest and grasses, bush and leaf and stem,

They cannot move (and nor, you dream, can you)

Similar to the disdain incited in the reader against this “declining sun”—which we might well infer to signify the accumulated knowledge of western civilization—the language with the poem subtly rebels against traditional form in that, despite the presence of rhyme and meter within each octet, a unique rhyme scheme and rhythm are produced. Indeed, throughout Edgar’s pieces, there persists they type of rebellious application of form…

Matthew Zapruder in action.

A few days ago, the Poetry Foundation published “Show Your Work!” an essay by Matthew Zapruder, in which he calls for a sort of renewal of the spirit of poetry criticism. You should read the whole piece for yourself, but here’s the part that I take to be his thesis:

Critics can do one of at least two things. The first is simply to insist that something is good, or bad, and rely on the force of personality or reputation to convince people. The second is to write, with focus and clarity, about how the piece of art works, what choices the artist has made, and how that might affect a reader. Only then can the reader grow to meet work that is unfamiliar, that he or she does not yet have the capacity to love.

In short- Yes, absolutely. For more, flip to page A16.

"there is no method except to be very intelligent"

It seems to me that what Zapruder is calling for, in essence, is a sort of return to the ideas of the New Critics, only modified for use in a world radically different than the one they lived and wrote in. Of course, our world—our poetry world, anyhow—in large regard is the result of the New Critics’ existence and the battles they waged and won (and lost), so any sort of neo-New Criticism we might strive to engender or develop would necessarily look very different from the original incarnation, since this new incarnation will have to take the original set of developments, insights, failures, and all the artifacts of their actual criticism into account, and go from there. (That is, if it can. There’s no particular guarantee that lost knowledge is ever fully recoverable.)

Perhaps, in the more general sense, what Zapruder is asking for is a renewal of commitment to engagement with the art form—dedication not just to one’s own poetry, and the six journals that publish one’s own poetry, but to the entire state of the art.

The proof of how prescient such a call is is in the mostly miserable pudding of the comments thread on the post, which I’ve now been following for several days. Much like the UDP-NYT thread Mike Young posted about the other day, the few attempts at rational, intelligent discussion in Zapruder’s comment thread are drowned out by narcissistic yahoos, soft-skulled weirdos, opportunistic axe-grinders, and Bill Knott. I can’t tell if these people are declining to critically engage with Zapruder’s criticism of criticism because they would simply prefer to hear themselves talk, or if it’s because they’re actually too stupid to understand that what they’re writing is not, in point of fact, a contribution to the discussion.

Anyway. Moving along.

Without a vital critical tradition, and a living critical practice, an art form—and, no less importantly, the sub-culture dedicated to that form—has no way in which to describe itself to itself. It cannot engage in the process of what Harold Bloom calls “self-overhearing.” What Bloom is refering to is the process by which Shakespeare characters clearly demonstrate metacognition, aka the ability to think insightfully about one’s own thought processes and then respond to their own understanding of themselves. I’ll put it even more basically: Shakespeare’s characters seem to hear themselves speaking, and it is from this most human of traits/skills that their realism derives. They have consciousness, in other words.

Criticism, if it is to be useful at all, must perform a somewhat analogous function, though the metaphor obviously strains if we try to match its component parts up. Nonetheless, if we are to speak at all of art forms as singular entities (the field of poetry; the world of avant-garde ballet; etc) then it can hardly be too radical or ridiculous to claim that that form’s corresponding field of criticism is—or anyway, ought to be—the space where the art form self-overhears, and thereby self-actualizes, grows, changes, etc. In some sense: the criticism is—or anyway, should aspire to be—the consciousness of the form to which it is attached.

In my view, some kind of of self-overhearing is a necessary condition for the sub-culture’s being able to sustain its existence, to say nothing of achieving anything like progress, or to even broach the question of meaningful interaction with the culture at large–and this last, interestingly and commendably enough, is Zapruder’s goal, or anyway hope for poetry.

If I’ve gone somewhat afield from what Zapruder has written about here, I think it’s because even though I agree heartily with the argument he’s making, I’m not sure that the incredibly modest pre-conditions necessary for rising to his imminently reasonable challenge have yet been met. He writes:

Today, in American poetry, very few critics take it upon themselves to examine the choices poets make in poems, and what effect those choices might have upon a reader. As a consequence, very few people love contemporary American poetry. Many more might, if critics attempted to truly engage with the materials of poetry—words and how they work—and to connect poetry with an audience based on an engagement with these materials.

I’m not 100% sure of the cause-and-effect relationship here between the pitiful state of poetry criticism and the pitiful state of poetry readership. I’m similarly uncertain of what, if anything, can be done to reverse or alter the situation. There is no guarantee that even with Zapruder’s suggestions implemented poetry won’t fail to broaden or even sustain its present readership; without his suggestions, however, failure can be guaranteed absolutely. It seems to me that we’re better off taking the chance than not. The question, I suppose, is whether poetry criticism has its own house sufficiently in order to even attempt the things Zapruder is asking for.

One thing Zapruder writes about that I especially appreciate is the formulation that the critic’s job should be first to understand what the work is attempting to do. Anyone unwilling to ask “why was this written” and “who was it written for” shouldn’t bother asking “does it succeed?” How could you possibly know? All Bill Knott’s love for Sharon Olds–emphatic as it might be–isn’t going to help him with his reading of Mathias Svalina’s The Viral Lease. (Lucky for Knott, he seems unbothered by his own ignorance, but then he also doesn’t seem to suffer from the humanizing effects of self-overhearing.) I think that Zapruder is writing against Eliot here—Eliot opposed the practice of purely “technical”or explanatory criticism, which would seem to include the sort of “introduction to ___” method Zapruder suggests—but if he is against Eliot here, I think I have to side with Zapruder. Our poetry world is very different from Eliot’s, and much of what he would have (rightly, at the time) assumed his audience would already know, even take for granted, is for us essentially lost knowledge.

So we’re going to need to build our critical vocabularies back up, but in order to do that we’ll need to first build back up the vocabularies of the form itself. What do we talk about when we talk about poetry? Until we can answer that question articulately and succinctly to ourselves, we don’t have much of a chance of explaining it to anybody else.

In the meantime, since neither poetry nor criticism will stop while we all go to summer school, I think the best gift any critic can give to a work of art is sustained engagement—even if that engagement comes in the form of savage opposition. More than once I’ve heard it said of my old undergrad teacher, William Logan, that even though he’s about the nastiest poetry critic that there is, finding yourself on the wrong end of his shotgun is one way of knowing that you’ve arrived. If he took you for anything short of vitally important, he wouldn’t have bothered to try and destroy you, and it’s very clear when you read one of his reviews that he probably spends more time with a book of poetry he’s trashing than its top ten fans combined.

Of course, praise is nice too, but 1000 words of empty praise doesn’t offer anything more substantial than a “two thumbs up!” would have. An unqualified “good review” quickly becomes an embarrassment of riches, and the critic in question is often all too quickly revealed as a second or third-rate writer using the pre-text of a “good review” as an excuse to show off what they misunderstand as their own “writing skills.” They’re angling shamelessly for a spot on the book jacket and/or the publisher’s website–probably because they want to count it as a “pub credit”–and what they end up producing reads like cheap costume jewelry: not an embarrassment of riches, just an embarrassment—to all parties involved.

A critic of poetry (or anything else) needs to be able to identify his or her own aesthetic and artistic values, his or her own highly informed but still hopelessly (and unapologetically) subjective position relative to the form, including any and all biases both positive and negative, and then go from there. (Hopefully somewhere awesome and useful.) If he or she can’t do those things—articulately, succinctly, and convincingly—then s/he is incapable of offering a critical contribution to the art of poetry (and has nothing to contribute to the art of criticism, period).

In his introduction to The Sacred Wood Eliot wrote that “the great bulk of the work of criticism could be done by minds of the second order, and it is just these minds of the second order that are difficult to find. They are necessary for the rapid circulation of ideas.” What he meant by “second-order” minds was people who are not quite geniuses—intelligent, committed people who happen to suffer the ignominy of not being once-in-a-generation human comets like Emily Dickinson or Beckett. This perhaps painful self-knowledge of one’s own limits (cf. Mr. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse) is for better or worse a necessary component-part of establishing one’s abilities, and of making the most of them—whatever they are or aren’t.

A critic is a person who can combine extraordinary passion with extraordinary dispassion, or at least discipline. He or she believes so passionately in the value of the subject s/he’s writing about—the particular artist, or the art form in general—that s/he will devote his own best creative energy to writing about somebody else’s work: exploring that person’s project, theorizing about the artist’s intentions, cataloging references and influences, asserting an original judgment concerning the work’s success, etc etc. That’s the first part. The second part, the dispassion or discipline, is necessary in order to ensure that the critic’s passion-inspired job is actually performed competently. Passion is a great engine, but unreliable as a steering wheel, and even worse as a set of tires.