All the things you are (manifesto 6)

Suppose a singer gives a moving performance of "All the things you are." "You are the promised kiss of springtime / that makes the lonely winter seem long. / You are the breathless hush of evening / that lingers on the brink of a lovely song..." The singer could be male or female, but the singer did not write the words. The lyrics are by Oscar Hammerstein II, the music by Jerome Kern. The implied recipient of the lyric could also be male or female, and this does not depend on the gender of the performer or the gender of Oscar Hammerstein.

To find the meaning or emotional truth of the lyric or of the performance of the lyric, we don't go look at the biography of Hammerstein. He wrote it for a failed Broadway show, and we don't especially care about what he was thinking about when he wrote it. At least I don't. We could say it's conventional sentimentality, but is it? Its conventionality, after all, is what make it work for any performer in any decade. Sometimes I feel that the melodies of these songs are superior to the lyrics, which can become dated, or too specific to their time and place: Gotta get my old tuxedo pressed / gotta sew a button on my vest." Yet not really... The lyrics come alive again in a great performance, and even instrumentalists might be thinking of the lyric when they interpret the melody or chord changes. This song became a jazz standard and was beloved by beboppers.

I suppose we could go back to that Broadway Show and find out who the characters were, and interpret the song in its dramatic context. Nyah. Nobody cares anymore. Not only was the show, "Very Warm for May" (1939) a failure, but the song has achieved independence from those origins.

We could also find meaning or emotional truth in the performer's biography. This, also, might matter to us, or not. We don't have access to the performer's inner life to know whether he (or she) is thinking about as the performance or recording was taking place. We can invent a story about it, but that story is not essential, or will not be significant to those who don't know or care to know.

I don't even know if I have to finish this thought: the conclusion should be obvious. The meaning is in its repeatability and in its immanence, not in its origins or circumstances. Its meaning in one immanent circumstance might be that it is sung at a wedding, and its meaning specific to that occasion, but it will be sung at other weddings as well.

Viva voce (manifesto 5)

Research is attested to in writing. Yet teaching is quintessentially oral. The living presence of the voice is what matters. I spoke at my Friend Ken Irby's memorial service today. I started out by saying that the world was a less literate place without Ken, a gifted and acclaimed poet and teacher. This literacy, though, (I continued) was transmitted to me orally rather than in writing. In Ken's teaching, in his conversation, it was a particular mastery of cadence and intonation that carried the day. I said that I couldn't imagine him trying to convey information through a power-point slide (laughter). Later someone told me they couldn't even imagine him knowing how to work power-point at all. I can't imagine him working from lecture notes. Of course, he was a professor of poetry and of Shakespeare and Melville, of sonorous words. It is not accidental that he taught beat and black mountain poetry. He himself is perhaps one of the last poets directly involved with this kind of poetics.

This does not exclude the love of the written work. He would bring many books to martini night to show us, and had a keen appreciation of a book in its physical form. In his teaching I'm sure he brought in the physical text to consult as well. (I found myself yesterday in the engineering building, a third of a mile from my office, about to teach a class but without a copy of the novel we were reading. I still did fine, even referring to specific words and passages. Essentially I was teaching naked, though clothed in suit and tie,)

Some students complained about a lack of linearity in Irby's teaching: his was an aggregation of evocations rather than a straightforward account. Others figured out that they could learn more from Irby than from almost any else, since he had read more and knew more. He is the only person I have ever known that knew more about jazz than I do. Devoted students of his call themselves the company, or members of the company, perhaps using the word that Creeley used in a similar tenor.

You should be able to teach viva voce. If you need specific formats for information, such as tables of statistics, in your field, that's fine. In poetry we depend on the written text too, and typographical details of the text can be extremely significant. But you shouldn't have to look at notes to be able to teach something that you know well.

Composition (manifesto 4)

In poetry every word, every punctuation mark, counts. Even the typeface matters. That a noun is masculine or feminine has no particular importance as an inert linguistic fact, but in a poem a masculine and a feminine noun cannot be interchangeable. If you are a scholar of poetry, then you know how to pay close attention to every word and every space. You have, then, a certain prose responsibility to poetry. You must write well and accurately. You don't have to be a poet, but pretty close.

Everything I regret in my own work is the result of failure to live up to this ideal. I realize others don't share it, and I won't worry about them for the time being. I remember being outrage when a doctoral student used the word "thusly" in a chapter. That was an exaggerated response, but I still would never use that word.

Manifesto (3)

Reading poetry is a ruminative activity. Instead of being absorbed for hours in the reading of a continuous narrative, you read very short texts over and over again and then think about them for a long time. To read (really read) vast quantities of poetry is guaranteed to make you somewhat insane, since it invites solitary rumination. In my case, I am often reading three or four books of poetry at a time. Sometimes I read through a book in one sitting, or a few sittings. At other times, I'll read a few poems a day from a book. There seems to be a contradiction between the concentration required to even read a few poems well, and my desire to have read and to be constantly re-reading every significant poet in great depth. I am now the only poetry specialist in my department, so the effects of isolation are even greater.

Another manifesto

There is a puzzling dichotomy in twentieth century poetics. Let us call it the division between aesthetics and the anti-aesthetic. It manifests itself in the debate between art itself (on the one hand) and socio-political uses of art. We are all familiar with it, on both sides of the debate. Poetry has to do something important and socially useful to be justified; poetry that does not do this should be condemned. On the other side of the debate, there is an "art for art's sake" position that claims that doing this, sacrificing aesthetics, will ruin poetry.

Both sides of the debate are actually in complete agreement with each other, deploying the exact same dichotomy without questioning it. In other words, everyone agrees that making poetry or art politically useful ruins it, and that politically useful art will have to subscribe to anti-aesthetic principles. You can try to make it work, by saying that some people have managed to make poetry come out politically correct without ruining it, but within this conceptual frame we pretty much know that these will be seen as exceptions.

So the puzzle is that this dichotomy would have not been comprehensible 100 years earlier. If you asked Shelley about this, he would not have understood what you meant. Or Milton or Spenser. The terms were not yet in opposition; the debate was not framed in that way in the least.

So there had to be a moment in which the debate got framed like that. It had to be in the Victorian era, in the debate between moral earnestness and aestheticism, because I don't see it before that. Spenser would not have seen a dichotomy between expressing his particular point of view and writing good poetry.

***

Now we could see the separation of the aesthetic as such earlier, in the 18th century, but without all these implications in play. This separation of the aesthetic is the original sin, since it leads to dire consequences. In particular, it seem both to exalt the aesthetic and to diminish it as merely aesthetic. To say that the aesthetic was not distinguishable as such from other considerations is not to say that it did not exist, but rather that everything was aesthetic in the broader sense. In other words, there was a total ethos that encompassed the entire creative enterprise, but this entire enterprise remained a creative one: there could be no tension or dichotomy between writing a great epic like the Iliad and doing something else that would diminish the value of the work in order to achieve some other end.

***

When that total ethos is broken, then we can ask whether we can still appreciate poetry that tells us the opposite of what we believe. From the hermeneutic perspective, we get the problem of belief. The aesthetic now serves as a way of expressing enthusiasm for works that don't allow us to identify with ideologically. This is easy to see, since we don't have deploy aesthetics separately if we already like what the work is telling us. We can simply embrace the work enthusiastically, in its total ethos. There is no turning back at this point, because we realize that this embrace is going to be rare occurrence.

Manifesto

I am very sick today so came up with a manifesto of what is really important to me:

1. Nobody knows what poetry is for. I think it is for something of great importance; that it is not trivial. The best formulation I've come up with is that it is supposed to "kick you in the ass with its transformative power." The motto for my other blog was: ""The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is it all about? What is it for?" (Kenneth Koch). Another formulation would be just as good as mine, but I won't budge on the idea that it is something transcendent. Koch's aphorism allows us to fill in the blanks.

2. It follows that the reading of poetry is a spiritual exercise. For me, what poetry is about is the experience of awe. I only really care about poetry, or music, or art, that offers this sense of wonder about being alive in the first place. If you've never felt this reading a poem then you need to read someone else's blog and leave me alone.

3. This should simplify things, but it doesn't, because mystic poetry might not do this. Or other poetry, that is not mystic, might lead this way as well. Even a poetry that seems to set itself off from awe might lead there anyway. There are no road maps, no system of correspondences that allow for the "translation" to occur. You still have to learn about poetry in all the conventional ways, even in the ways that are clearly idiotic but that others have found useful.

4. A lot of things that we think are important about poetry, though, might not be. The things that make a poem acceptable according to an institutional requirement; the arguments that academics might want to make about a poetic practice in relation to other social formations. These things might be important, or not, but we can tell if they are important by whether they have to do with the purpose we think poetry has.

5. All the prosody, the style, everything to do with the language of the poem, is part of the awesomeness of poetry; it is not unimportant. But we can care about it in unimportant ways if we give it the wrong emphasis. The awe of poetry comes from the poetry itself, not from its awesome subject matter.

6. There are poets who write poems, and have a decent, acceptable, style, but don't seem connected at all to anything related to the awesomeness of poetry. There are critics who make nice arguments about which poetry belongs in which category. I have done that myself. A lot of this has nothing to do with poetry and can be safely ignored.

7. The style of the poem is really a weakness: I mean the grab-bag of things that the poet knows how to do, and depends on to get through the writing of the poem. A good poet should be able to write without a style at all, responding to the situation without using anything used before. This is not possible, of course, but it is desirable. We wouldn't need poetry set off from anything else if this were happening more. We would still need a word to point to the poem and say: "this is it."