Guests
by Troy Jollimore, October 5, 2007 10:52 AM
My thanks to Powell's for giving me the chance to blog for them this week. It's been fun; and it's gone by fast. And I'm afraid I left some loose ends dangling. I had intended, for instance, to return to the topic of the relation between poetry and philosophy. As it turns out, I won't have the space to do that here. I will mention, though, for anyone who might be interested, that this week I am also posting on the Philosophy Talk blog page ? in concurrence with the broadcast of that show's "Love, Poetry and Philosophy" installment, taped at Powell's City of Books back in June ? and I have addressed the topic there. Thursday afternoon I read at Central Missouri University here in Warrensburg. The turnout was good and I felt fairly pleased with the reading, and had a great time meeting UCM faculty and students. Today I head to St. Louis, for a benefit event for Observable Readings. St. Louis, as you may know, has given us some wonderful poets and writers: Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Frederick Seidel, and the fiction writer Harold Brodkey all were born or grew up in the area. And lately, when I think about St. Louis, I find myself thinking about the opening lines from Eliot's "The Dry Salvages": I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god ? sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The "strong brown god" that is a river may of course be the Thames, but on some level it must also be the Mississippi. In a nostalgic 1930 letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Eliot wrote that as a child, the Mississippi "made a deep impression on me; and it was a great treat to be taken down to the Eads Bridge in flood time." The Eads Bridge... In 1874, when it was completed, the Eads was the world's longest arch bridge, at a length of over 6400 feet. Its designer was James Buchanan Eads, whom history has largely forgotten, but who was famous in his day, and indeed seen as a kind of heroic figure. Engineers like him don't really exist anymore: like the other technical disciplines, their knowledge has been too specialized and the contexts they work in, too bureaucratic. We have almost entirely lost the sense that the landscape might be significantly shaped by a single individual: that way of thinking is so nineteenth century. Our bridges, like all of our major structures, are put together by committees. But in his day Eads ? whose other projects included a system of jetties to improve the flow of the Mississippi ? was widely admired and sometimes wildly praised. What current engineer could possibly inspire a poet to pen a 252-line encomium akin to Rebecca Morrow Reavis's "Ode to Capt. James B. Eads"?: EADS! Captain EADS! The name is grand ? ennobling ?
What was to Greece the name of Archimedes,
And, what to Germany, was that of Roebling,
To fair Columbia is that of EADS. Aye, more, for science in this mighty nation
Is great as EADS is peer among his peers.
Like Newton at the foot of Gravitation,
Does EADS stand at the head of Engineers. Admittedly, Reavis's poem is hilariously over-the-top ? and a mere two stanzas barely give a hint of the perverse, delicious pleasure to be found in reading the whole thing ? but to me, the grandiose sentiments and nutty rhymes only render it the more touching. To Reavis and Eliot, we may add the name of a third poet who took pleasure in Eads' accomplishment: Walt Whitman, who wrote in Democratic Vistas that I have haunted the river every night lately, where I could get a look at the bridge by moonlight. It is indeed a structure of perfection and beauty unsurpassable, and I never tire of it. That Whitman spoke of the bridge in the same terms so often used, in his era, to praise poetry ? "perfection," "beauty" ? is telling. Eads himself sometimes indicated that he regarded himself as a type of poet. Once, speaking of his tendency to work himself to the point of collapse, he said "I think too that like some poets who produce their most brilliant strains just before they go crazy, I am most successful as the disease increases in its intensity." And who but a poet could have had the vision to give birth to Eads' visionary final project? Arguing that constructing a canal in Panama would be vastly and unnecessarily costly, not only in financial terms but in terms of human lives (and indeed, over twenty-seven thousand workers would die during the construction of the Panama Canal, from yellow fever among other things), Eads imagined the Atlantic and Pacific oceans connected not by a canal, but by a rail system, so massive that it would carry fully laden ships. Sadly, Eads died before he could convince the government of the rightness of his plan. Of course, many critics claimed that it would not work. But they said the same thing about the Eads Bridge: the design, sceptics claimed, could not sustain a structure of this scale. And the bridge, as we know, is still standing. It is only fitting, I think, that engineers who design bridges should really be, at a deep level, poets. For what, after all, is a bridge, but a grand metaphor ? a metaphor for, well, metaphor? A metaphor brings together two previously unconnected ideas, reshaping the mental landscape. A bridge brings together two previously separated sites, and so alters the geography of the physical world. "Only connect," was E.M. Forster's advice to writers ? and what was Eads's aim, but to connect? The heroic conception of the scientist or poet as world-shaper was entirely natural to the romantic age Eads lived in ? the age of poets like Whitman and Alfred Lord Tennyson, whom Eads greatly admired ? and almost entirely alien to the post-romantic world of T. S. Eliot. For after the Great War it became vastly more difficult to see nature as manifesting an inherent rational order, which could be harnessed by the minds of talented individuals so as to bring about the betterment of human life. The idea of inevitable progress, at any rate, came to seem almost absurd. In works like Eliot's The Waste Land, the apparent pointlessness of human life, and the sense of spiritual entropy this generates, becomes one of the major t
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Guests
by Troy Jollimore, October 4, 2007 10:32 AM
In yesterday's post I mused a little about the fun of being part of an aesthetic cult, a small group of fans devoted to some obscure and underappreciated artist. Of course, this sort of thing can be carried too far; and I am well aware that many people think that with respect to contemporary poetry, it has been carried too far. Contemporary poets, many people seem to think, work very hard to make poetry itself into an aesthetic cult, and keep their tiny insular world as tiny and insular as possible. Why else would they write such difficult poems? Indeed, I come across many people who are downright offended by poetry's difficulty ? as if it were a personal affront to them, as if the poets had erected a "Keep out!" sign (or "Keep in!," perhaps?) at their own front door. Jon Carroll's August 3 column in the San Francisco Chronicle is a case in point, and seems to capture many people's feelings about the matter. Admittedly, Carroll holds off until the last paragraph before allowing himself to deploy what must surely be Americans' favorite term of abuse ? elitist! But he deploys it all the same. Now, it can't be denied that a fair bit of contemporary poetry is quite difficult, especially at first glance, and especially for people who haven't read much poetry. (You get better at ‘getting' poetry by reading poems, just as you get better at appreciating painting by looking at paintings.) Nor can it be denied that a lot of people feel a lot of anxiety about poetry. I once showed a poem by Kenneth Koch to a friend, a smart guy, who felt threatened by poetry. When I asked him, later, if he had liked it, he said "I'm not really sure what it means." "Don't worry about what it means," I said, "just start with this: did you like it?" He thought for a moment and then said, in all seriousness, "Well, how do I know if I liked it?" But the personal offense that so many people take at the existence of difficult poetry puzzles me, frankly, for a couple of reasons. First, a lot of other things are difficult, and the fact that they are doesn't seem to bother people at all. Cooking, for instance, is not easy; if it were, there would be no bad cooks. Sports aren't easy either. I know people who complain about the forbidding difficulty of poetry, but who are willing to put in countless hours working on their backhand or their golf swing. And if it's conceptual complexity we're talking about ? well, again, sports aren't simple. Someone like Jon Carroll seems to think that a person ought to be able to pick up any poem and, even without much background knowledge of poetry, immediately be able to grasp what is going on. But do they make the same demand of, say, football? In fact appreciating a game of football, or even having a basic grasp of what is going on in it, demands a considerable amount of background knowledge and perceptual training. This doesn't seem to bother people when it comes to football ? nobody says that football is "elitist" because it isn't immediately accessible to those who know nothing about it ? but for some reason it bothers immensely that one cannot immediately grasp a poem by John Ashbery. Frankly, I just don't see why this should be. The second puzzling and troubling aspect of this line of complaint is the implication that all poetry should be the same. "I like the poems of Billy Collins," Carroll writes ? and hey, so do I. But would I want everybody to write poems like Billy Collins writes? No. I wouldn't want everybody to write poems like Ashbery or Brenda Hillman or Martin Corless-Smith write, either. In fact, we seem to have exactly the right number of Billy Collinses, and the right number of Ashberries and Hillmans and Corless-Smiths: exactly one of each. More would be unnecessary. Fewer would be, in each case, a substantial loss to the culture. So it seems to me that those Billy Collins fans who wish that Ashbery/Hillman et al just didn't exist are just as much in the wrong as are those militant postmodernists who think that everyone should write like Ashbery or Hillman, or Michael Palmer or Lyn Hejinian. Both parties seem to think that, in reading a poet, you have to pledge allegiance to that poet's approach and sensibility, and forswear all others. And this just seems like an absurd thing to think. I suppose that part of this stems from the anxiety-inducing assumption that there is only a certain amount of attention to go around, that every reader that devotes herself to formalistic or otherwise traditional poetry means one less reader for more radical and experimental poets (or vice versa). But personally, I doubt that there is any level of attention that is in any sense guaranteed to poetry. Moreover I think that our best strategy for winning over readers is to present as wide and various and interesting a field of possibilities as we possibly can. Just call me a big tent guy, I guess. In fact, I think the more likely outcome will be that some poets act as gateway drugs for others. The reader who starts out innocently enough, minding her own business and reading Billy Collins on a quiet Sunday afternoon, may find herself having moved on to Seamus Heaney, then Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson, before she knows it. Or perhaps, looking for other humorous poets, she happens upon Kenneth Koch, and is then led to O'Hara and Ashbery, and from there she eventually comes to ? who knows? Mark Doty? Jorie Graham? Nathaniel Mackey? The possibilities are
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Guests
by Troy Jollimore, October 3, 2007 10:03 AM
I apologize for the random and scattered quality of today's post ? though I've been told, by friends who are much more reliable authorities on the art of blogging than I am, that it's perfectly acceptable for a blog to be composed of, as they put it, a "brain dump" ? i.e. a collection of more or less random thoughts that happen to be passing through one's mind on a particular day. I'm fairly busy at the moment getting ready for a trip to Missouri ? where I'll be giving poetry readings at Central Missouri University in Warrensburg on Thursday, and then, on Saturday, in St. Louis ? so I guess this seemed like a good time to take advantage of blogging's lax ? sorry, I meant open and flexible ? standards. • Last week I gave a reading in Chicago, at a bar called the Hopleaf ? part of Chicago's Bookslut series. (If you love books but are not familiar with the Bookslut website, well, check it out). Also reading was Rebecca Barry, author of the "novel in stories" Later, at the Bar. One of the poems I read from, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Ruined by Reading the Cantos of Ezra Pound," is entirely composed of book titles ? that is, each line is the title of some book I own and/or have read. After reading the second stanza, I paused to mention to the audience that that stanza was a particular favorite of mine because it contained four book titles by a single author ? an author who happened to be a favorite of mine, though he's not nearly as well known as he should be. I asked if anyone could name the author, and when no one else answered Rebecca Barry said, "Uhm, Lee K. Abbott?" Well of course, it was indeed Lee K. Abbott. And of course Rebecca Barry knew ? because later, when I got back to my hotel room and got out the copy of Later, at the Bar I had just acquired, I discovered the very generous 'thank you' Barry offers to Abbott in the book's Acknowledgments. (She writes that his "fingerprints are all over the collection," and basically states that the book wouldn't exist if not for his encouragement.) There's a blurb on the back from Abbott, too. An interesting coincidence, especially considering that I have read that poem to audiences several times, and have never before explicitly identified LKA ? or any of the other authors, for that matter. • I suppose this tiny incident connects with something I've been thinking a lot about lately, which is the way we form little aesthetic communities with others who are pleased, or attracted, or excited, by similar things. Alexander Nehamas talks about this in his recent and utterly fascinating book, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. Nehamas is responding to Immanuel Kant's claim that to state that something is beautiful (as opposed to merely claiming that one likes it or finds it pleasant, etc.) is to make a kind of universal claim ? a claim one expects everyone to agree with. There seems to be something right about this; but as Nehamas very sensibly points out, I don't really want everyone to find beautiful the same things I do, or to be excited by the same things that excite me. In fact, Nehamas says, there is something horrifying about the idea of a world of complete aesthetic agreement. Among other things, we would entirely lose something that tends to be very important to us, the feeling that knowing about and appreciating a certain work, or a certain artist, sets us apart, and makes us part of a special, distinctive, perhaps even (dare I say it?) elite group. In other words, you might despise the world for ignoring your favorite band; but if the world discovered your favorite band you'd be disappointed, and you'd say "Oh, they sold out." You'd start despising them. I've been reading Forrest Gander lately ? such an intriguing, puzzling poet ? and twice in doing so I've had the sort of experience I'm talking about. The first time was when I came across Gander's essay about the singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt, and the second was when I found that one of his books was dedicated to the Canadian poet Christopher Dewdney. Both Chesnutt and Dewdney are cult figures of a sort ? as is Gander, really; and to discover that I am joined in cult figure fandom to this cult figure does give a pleasant little spark. • I wrote in yesterday's post that if Hemingway had never published his books, "Not only our literature, but our very ways of thinking would be different, in ways that it is impossible to know or describe in detail precisely because he did exist, he did publish his novels, and as a result our minds and perceptions are in part shaped by his work." Someone suggested to me that perhaps I was overstating the case. I don't think I was. One thing studying philosophy teaches you is that ideas are not the abstract, insubstantial entities they are often pictured as being. Every action anyone performs is shaped by what that person thinks; and every thought a person thinks had to come from somewhere ? even the ones that strike us as the most obvious. The ideas that we are all created with equal rights and moral standing, for instance, or that the government gets its authority to governed from the people it governs, who may therefore take it back, tend to strike us as commonplaces obvious to anyone who just opens their eyes. But we have them in large part because individual thinkers ? most particularly, in this case, the philosopher John Locke ? came up with them and formulated them in ways that made them seem attractive and plausible. Even the idea of self-interested materialism, which many people assume to be a natural, instinctive human trait, is really a complex worldview with a long, traceable history. The ancient Greeks, for example, would have found it impossible to understand the pursuit of the accumulation of wealth that so many people today take entirely for granted. • "Be the change you want to see in the world." When I hear this I want to say: you must be joking! I can't even manage to be the change I want to see in
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Guests
by Troy Jollimore, October 2, 2007 10:33 AM
"Marie and Carol Met in Paris Only as Mother and Son." "Clyde Martin Found Dead in Yale Squash Room; End Came Suddenly to Noted Squash Player." "Butler Makes Vote a Test of Coolidge as National Leader." "Smith Mocks Rival's Hunt for Issue, Mills Calls Tammany Vital Question, As Huge Mass Meetings End Campaign." Stop the presses! These are, indeed, the New York Times headlines ? from the New York Times of October 31, 1926. And what a gripping set of stories do they advertise! The first ? in case you hadn't guessed it ? concerned "the intimate, inside story of how Queen Marie of Rumania and her son, Carol, the ex-Crown prince, met in Paris previous to the Queen's departure for America" ? a story which "set at rest the recurring interpretations that in her good-bye kiss to Prince Carol at the boat train in Paris the Queen was announcing to the world that the disowned heir would be restored to the royal succession. The reconciliation was personal, this official said, and did not change in the least the political situation in Rumania." And what of Clyde Martin, "considered one of the greatest squash players that ever took a racquet for Yale University"? Unsurprisingly, members of the club, some of whom had seen the apparently healthy 36-year-old as recently as the previous Friday, were "shocked" by the news. And the culprit? According to the initial diagnosis of "Dr. James Ross of the Roosevelt Hotel," Clyde Martin "died of a sudden attack of acute indigestion" ? suggesting that either medicine or cooking has come a long way since 1926. And these are only the top-of-the-page stories ? the ones that are truly consequential. I haven't even mentioned what you find if you let your eyes drift downward. "Mrs. Hall Invokes Aid of Portraiture." "National Leaders Express Optimism." And my favorite: "Warn Banks of Man With Nitroglycerin," in which the public is warned to be "on the lookout for a shabbily dressed, unshaven man of middle age, who is on the loose in the city with what police believe to be a bottle of nitroglycerin in his pocket. He is trying to obtain a large sum of money in order to 'have a good time' before he dies." Entertaining? Sure. Front page news of lasting importance? From our historical perspective it may not appear so. Perhaps, had the man the shabby individual succeeded in blowing up a bank; or had Clyde Martin's death been revealed as an assassination that touched off a global conflict ? but no. Nothing came of these stories, and, as the very, very large proportion of events that make the front page of the Times or any other newspaper will do, they faded into obscurity. And one must ask: how many of the stories that decorate the front page of today's Times will fare any better? To find the real story in this issue ? I will pretend that you are holding a copy in your hands ? I ask that you turn to page BR7. "BR," that is, as in Book Review. There you will find an article titled "Marital Tragedy" that begins as follows: "Ernest Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises, treats of certain of those younger Americans concerning whom Gertrude Stein has remarked: 'You are all a lost generation....'" And there you go. Something of great consequence ? something that helped to change our culture and the world we live in ? did happen during October 1926 after all. For what would the world be like, had Hemingway never published his novels? Not only our literature, but our very ways of thinking would be different, in ways that it is impossible to know or describe in detail precisely because he did exist, he did publish his novels, and our minds and perceptions are, as a result, partly shaped by his work. Of course, one can't blame the Times editors for not putting the story on the front page ? even though we can say, from our historical perspective, that that is precisely where it belonged. How were they to know? But one can commend them for covering the story. And the reviewer gets it exactly right in the review's last line, writing that the book is "unquestionably one of the events of an unusually rich year in literature." That's right, and it's just the point I want to stress today: a book is an event. I emphasize this because today's newspaper editors ? editors of papers like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and a great many others ? seem not to realize that the publication of a book is a newsworthy item, that a book is an event. They think, instead, that books are products, which is a wholly different way of looking at them. You see this if you listen to their justifications for why they have, in recent years, been devoting substantially less newspaper space to book reviews. The explanation is always pretty much the same: the books section is essentially an advertising section, and if only publishers would buy more advertising, they could give us larger, more thorough book review sections. But this way of thinking is utterly, entirely wrongheaded. Book review sections are not advertising sections any more than the international news section is. (Imagine them saying: if only international governments would buy more advertising, we could cover what's going on in their countries.) Books are events. Books are news. Indeed the Hemingway example shows that literature is, to use Ezra Pound's famous phrase, "news that stays news." Go to the library and get hold of a New York Times Book Review from three or four decades back: compare the Charles Atlas they used to bestow on us with the 98-pound literary weakling they put out today. Then check out the National Book Critics Circle's "Campaign to Save Book Reviews" for more information. (I also recommend Steve Wasserman's excellent recent essay in the Columbia Journalism Review, "Goodbye to All That.") And most importantly, write to the editors of the papers you read and tell them how important books are to you, and how important they are to the culture. Tell them they're making a terrible mistake in thinking of books as products. Tell them that if they don't treat books as important, fewer young people will learn to regard them as important, which means fewer readers, which is (duh) bad for newspapers. Tell them ? a bit more diplomatically, perhaps, than I'm about to put it ? that if they are going to make their careers in the news business, they had better develop a bit more insight into what news really
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Guests
by Troy Jollimore, October 1, 2007 10:15 AM
One of the questions I get asked a lot, for the fairly obvious reason that I am a professional philosopher who publishes poetry, is "What's it like being a poet and a philosopher?" (Or some variant thereof, including my favorite, the deeply concerned "How, exactly, did this happen to you?") I think there are some very interesting things to say, by the way, about the relation between poetry and philosophy, but I'm not going to plunge into those deep waters in my first blog. I'll start, instead, with a few observations, not as much about poetry and philosophy, as about poets and philosophers. Obviously poets and philosophers have a lot in common, if we think about their place in society. There is the sense that both were once at the center of culture and have now been relegated to the sidelines: that both poetry and philosophy have become highly specialized pursuits engaged in by, to be blunt, nostalgic or maladjusted weirdos. The anxiety or "poetry gloom" that Brian Phillips speaks about in his recent article in Poetry magazine has its philosophical correlate: there's hardly a meeting of the American Philosophical Association that doesn't feature a session with a title like "Does Philosophy Have a Future?" or "Where, If Anywhere, Is Our Beloved Discipline Going?" Typically, answering the question "What do you do?" with either "I'm a philosopher" or "I'm a poet" will get you a pretty similar look. A look which, if it could be rendered in English, would go something like this: "How peculiar ? I mean interesting ? I just remembered something quite important I have to do somewhere rather far away from here ? please don't ask me who my favorite philosopher/poet is or anything like that ? nice meeting you, I'm going to back away slowly now, smiling awkwardly the whole time." Then of course there are those who think that "philosophy" is a synonym for "psychology" and respond to "I'm a philosopher" by asking for relationship advice. This, at least, doesn't happen with "I'm a poet." People don't tend to ask poets for advice on anything at all except, occasionally, advice on what to do about their children who have shown an interest in poetry. And "what to do about" here translates as, roughly, "How do I make sure this starry-eyed idiot stays on course to get his MBA and doesn't wreck his life by switching his major to Creative Writing?" Which brings up another, related similarity between philosophy and poetry, which is that you're not likely to make much money at either one. You can make a living, of course, by teaching, though the salary is pretty modest (there are, fortunately, compensating factors); but it's almost certain you won't be substantially supplementing your income by hawking your wares in the literary marketplace. Of course, there are exceptions to every statement. Poets like Billy Collins or Mary Oliver sell books in numbers that would make Walmart executives happy. And among philosophers there is Harry Frankfurt, who somehow managed to take a fairly short philosophical paper written a couple decades ago (On Bullshit) and turn it into a wildly successful bestseller. (Harry happens to have been my Ph.D. advisor, and I've been a fan of that paper for some years, but if someone had told me back then that he and it would one day give Nicholas Sparks a run for his money, I would have, well, cried, well, bullshit.) But these, of course, are the exceptions. Nobody goes into either poetry or philosophy to get rich. And this has helped, at least to a degree, to keep the ranks of would-be philosophers and poets filled mostly with people who are there because they actually care about the work. It's not all that hard to find would-be screenwriters, or even novelists, who don't really care a white for screenplays or novels but who have been led to the table by what they take to be the enticing smell of a potential financial payoff. (The expectation may be highly unrealistic, particularly in the case of the novel; but it is there.) But few poets, and even fewer philosophers, have this motivation. This is not to say that all the motivations are pure. For while it's true, as I said above, that poets are perceived by many as weirdos, it's also true that at least some people see that weirdness as, well, kind of cool. This has diminished over time (in his day, Byron was more or less a rock star). But to some degree the romantic image of the wild-haired poet, muttering verses, striding across the heath, persists. Or the mad self-destructive heroic existentialist poet, drinking anything that meets his lips and sleeping with anyone who will meet his eyes. Actual poets, of course, only rarely live up to these images, and this is surely a good thing. But the images remain, exerting a certain magnetic pull on susceptible people. You know the type: they are the ones who enroll in poetry workshops but can't be bothered to read their fellow students' work, let alone the work of the published poets that have preceded them. The ones who think that poetry exists only as a vehicle for their self-expression. The ones who think they care about poetry, when what really moves them is not poetry, but rather the thought of ‘being a poet.' (I suppose the idea of ‘being a philosopher' might exercise a comparable influence on a few impressionable souls ? maybe those who have wanted to emulate Patrick Swayze's pugilistic cogitator in Road House ? but it seems far less common.) Still, most people who practice either poetry or philosophy do so because, at least to some extent, they genuinely care about poetry or philosophy. Which brings up a further question: why don't more people care about poetry AND philosophy? In particular, why don't more poets read philosophy, and why don't more philosophers read poetry? But the answer to that question is surely a very long story; if I'm going to try to answer it at all ? and I'm not making any promises! ? it will have to wait for later in the
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