Sustainable attitudes / sustainable aesthetics

From an egotistical perspective, poets often think that poetry or "real" poetry or "good" poetry belongs to an elect few, an elite that is highly evolved and well educated. Sadly, often such poets will become aggressive and hostile to other forms of poetry that do not support their own particular aesthetic views. This is how many poets in the poetry world view the life of poetry, a highly competitive arena in which millions try but only a minuscule number will ultimately survive for future generations. The individual poet’s talent matters more than anything else in this schematic. The cult of genius has no shortage of followers.


From an aesthetics of sustainability perspective, poets belong to poetry, and not vice versa. This is the actual, the ego-crushing, reality. Individual poets, including the greatest ones, almost never matter very much or for very long except to other poets. And even to other poets the odds of mattering much or for long are tiny.


As Pound observed long ago, what matters is that great poetry continues to be written, and it really does not matter to poetry which individuals get to write the great work. (At the same time, however, the idea of greatness in art is necessary to inspire enough poets to be able to create the handful of greatest works for every generation.)


So what is poetry from a sustainable aesthetics point of view? It is like a large ecosystem in which there are many kinds of animals that are interdependent and which interact like different species, some as herds, some as apex predators, some as scavengers, some in symbiotic relationship to other species, some as leeches, some as highly evolved social groups, some as scum-sucking bottom feeders, some as alpine tundra foragers, some as imitative parasites, some as highly evolved groundbreakers into new environments etc. (You know who you are....)


What this translates into in human terms is that every small press and every literary magazine has its own peculiar sociology and hierarchy, or even multiple sociologies and hierarchies. So what does that mean, practically speaking? It means that the people who run the presses and the journals all write their own rules of aesthetics, and this comes largely from who they are, what they are, where they are, and when they are at work. It also comes from what they hope to be, their aspirations toward greater things. Or their aspirations toward television, mass media, and other things, which may or may not be greater things. Some merely aspire to make money and acquire fame without even trying to write great work. Some think they are trying to do great work but are lying to themselves etc. Some just want to keep their jobs, etc.


Many, many times, a press or journal or a movement is created out of a handful of friendships formed in college of at an MFA program or through a circle that forms around a particularly powerful figure like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Light bookstore gave a foundation to the City Lights Press. A lot of times, these groups form because they are unhappy with what they see around them, and they are tired of being rejected by the established presses. It’s a natural evolution for every succeeding generation.


Out of one generation, it is true that very few groups and even fewer individuals will produce work that will have enduring value for many people. What is interesting about the greatest works is that they do not happen in isolation. No great work is an island, entire of itself, etc. Even the works of William Wordsworth, called by Keats one of the most egotistical poets in all of English poetry, was deeply influenced by his sister Dorothy and his dear friend Coleridge. Their works on close reading turn out to be completely interwoven. There were lasting and profound textual interconnections that are still being excavated by scholars today. When we read a poet like Wordsworth in isolation, it’s like hearing half of a phone conversation, as one critics observed. And even the entire Wordsworth circle is just one conversation within a very powerful literary community that included many others who attained some measures of greatness. Not many remember Charles and Mary Lamb, William Hazlitt, John Thelwall, John Clare, Thomas DeQuincey et al. Many people who are not well remembered actually contributed in various ways to the works of the one who is remembered.


It’s ironic that Pound would be the guy who espoused a profound understanding of the reality of the situation of poetry, i.e. we belong to it and not the other way around. Pound was notoriously egotistical and sublimely ambitious etc. But from being so passionately involved in the poetry world, Pound realized that true inspiration is rare and precious, and the writers who can provide works that are inspiring are likewise. He supported and helped engender the works of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot quite selflessly. Some critics think Modernism as we know it would have been impossible without him. So here again one sees that there may be a lot more social support and social interaction that is integral to the greatest individual works. Before Pound was a great writer, he was a great reader. He never stopped being a great reader. If he had not been so open to Joyce and Eliot, their careers may not have happened at all. Or their careers may have been very small without his help. Pound as a literary friend may have been more important to literary history than Pound himself as a poet.


So if you want to get published and “survive” in the poetry world, it is good to try to see the big picture and not waste a lot of energy feeling jealous or like this is a competition among individuals. You could also waste a lot of time by trying to become included in a group that will never let you in. You could also waste a lot of energy by trying to promote one particular brand of aesthetics that goes nowhere.


Whether we like it or not, and whether we like each other or not, we are in this “ecosystem” or big unhappy family together. You could say that poets of any generation are sort of like a very large, extended, and unhappy family.


(Incidentally, I am sure that it was with this or something like this family metaphor in mind that Sharon Olds once told me at the end of my time at the MFA program at NYU, "Welcome to the family." It was a warm and funny moment.)


But just being aware of the common ground and the common purpose of poetry can prevent a lot of wasted energy, time and talent. We all have our parts to play, and all of them may matter in ways no one can foresee.


In the poetry world especially, a little sanity goes very far. And even a handful of literary friendships can help an aesthetic revolution to be born.


I think John Ashbery was both kidding and serious when he wrote in "Hotel Lautreamont," a pantoum, that:


Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society
working as a team. They didn't just happen. There was no guesswork.
The people, then, knew what they wanted and they got it.
We see the results in works as diverse as "Windsor Forest" and "The Wife of Usher's Well."


Yes, he is making fun of academics who have deconstructed individual geniuses and stressed socio-cultural-political-cultural-historical contexts ad nauseum etc. But by the end of the pantoum, he seems to be quite serious when he reiterates this theme and what it means to a poetic genius:


You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.
Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society;
Only night knows for sure. The secret is safe with her:
the people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.


In the end of the sixty-four line poem, Ashbery as a great and acknowledged genius himself, seems less and less sure of his position in relation to the people. He is no longer mocking the idea that society got out of any genius what it needed, almost regardless of a genius like him. This is a great recognition, an awakening out of the nightmare of self-obsessed and ego-driven consciousness. It represents a significant ego-surrender, and a coming into the fullness of the reality of our situation in poetry. It's so much bigger than any one could be.

A re-post from the northern Colorado years | poetic influences/influenzas

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[January 22, 2005]

It is Saturday January 22nd right now, but I am going to go backward to Sunday the 16th of January at 6 p.m. when I got to do the Poetry Show on the radio at KRFC 88.9 FM with Dona Stein, who has been a wonderful friend to my work as both a poet and a teacher of poetry. The idea was to have poets who teach poetry talk about the why and how of teaching poetry. My good friends Bob King (UNC colleague) and Donna Salemink (UNC alum) were on the air with me. I was very happy to see them and wished we could have talked much longer, but we were going on the air in a few minutes. KRFC is in the process of being renovated, so it was kind of half put together and half falling apart. Our host wanted to know why we taught...



I said it must be the fabulous wealth and the gold-plated Rolls Royces and the oil wells they give us at UNC because they place such tremendous value on poetry and the humanities etc. (I pictured in my imagination a four-foot tall oil well stuck in the asphalt of one of the vast university parking lots, and it was dry.)



To be perfectly honest, I do not really have any explanation for why I love to teach. It's just always been a strong compulsion that has been there almost as long as that even stronger compulsion to write and create. What made me swear solemnly at the age of eighteen to devote my life to writing? What made me think it was worth more than anything else in the world? That no sacrifice was too great etc?



(If my novel-writing buddy Simone Zelitch were here now eavesdropping, she would say, "Ah, you are bragging.")



In the spirit of avoiding bragging and slipping into exaggerations etc., I will make a few simple rules for this blog before I forget them: (i) only write about things about which I can be completely honest, (ii) tell the whole truth whenever practical or possible.



Of course, this means I am going to just have to simply not say anything at all about a lot of contemporary issues due to the way things are around me here. But I will make this promise for myself (and for anyone else who dives into this experiment) that I will be faithful to the truth in this blog.



I imagine that the ideal reader of this blog is a young writer, someone who probably knows my work and is curious about it and/or me. I wish that when I had started out in "Po Biz" that there had been more older writers who were genuinely truthful about the writing life and its strangeness. I think I owe it to the next generation to not make it seem easier or better than it is. But I also think I owe it to them to relate what makes it still worthwhile.



For one thing, I hear from some readers occasionally, including people I've never met or heard of who saw my work somewhere online or in print. Sometimes I even get things that seem like "fanmail." Sometimes I get a phone call from someone who saw my work online and loved it, and I am invited to read here or there.



Some of my readers have even told me that they don't just read my work; they re-read and re-read it. Of course, I am happy about this. But I also worry about the influence my work may have on them because influence is often a double-edged phenomenon. I have had in the past some poet friends who sort of fell in love with my work and could not help but start to imitate it in some ways. I was always flattered by this, but it was not just that simple. There was a sense of struggle....



When I first fell in love with the works of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or Hart Crane, for example, it was quite overpowering and I went through imitative phases in relation to each of them. Eliot was by far the most deleterious influence (which is a kind of a compliment to his powers), but it took years to sort out for myself how I could find a stance in relation to his work that would enable me to go forward and not merely reiterate anything he had done. It was really torture, though, until that breakthrough in 1984 when I wrote "The Sylf." The influence of Pound, on the other hand, was much more beneficial and uncomplicated. No matter what terrible things you say about Pound as neo-troubadour, as fascist, as elitist, as anti-semite etc., there is still the self-sacrificing, compulsively and extravagantly generous friend that Pound was. Somehow this aspect of Pound pervades his greatest poetry, and it makes it a more giving field to wander in than Eliot. When you imitate Eliot, you always sound like a derivative, watery version of Eliot. But imitating Pound somehow throws you back out to your own voice, and you can come away from Pound as a better, more skillful writer than you were before. It is much harder to pick up any tricks from Eliot because his stylistic innovations are so peculiarly integral to his voice that they remind the reader of him (and how much better he is than you are). He is astonishingly subversive as an influence. I've seen lots of talented poets pretty much wrecked by Eliot, and so have lots of other poets. I think that subversive influence of Eliot's may have even fueled some of the backlash against his work.



So even though I still love Eliot's work, I recognize its hazards. It should almost have a warning label specifically written for young poets: CAUTION: reading Eliot may cause severe subversions and birth-of-genius-defects. Consult a metaphysician or a doctorate before digesting.



(Analogously, many poets have observed that Milton is a subversive influence whereas Shakespeare is a very generous influence. William Wordsworth is a potentially subversive influence while his sister Dorothy is a very generous influence. Poe and DeQuincey are both subversive influences, but Poe is much worse. Sylvia Plath is a subversive influence while her friend Anne Sexton is a relatively generous influence. Ginsberg is more of a subversive influence and Ferlinghetti is more of a generous influence. Etheridge Knight, Galway Kinnell and Sharon Olds, my first great poet-mentor/friend and two of my past poet-teachers, are all great and generous influences.)



Throughout my teaching career, I have tried very hard to not overexpose my students to my work even though it may be the reason they are there in the first place. I'd feel terrible if my work inadvertently had undesireable side-effects. I hope that my work may be more of a generous reading experience. It seems to work this way for some of my students. But no one can ever predict this for sure. You can only find out the hard way by seeing what happens, and by then it may be too late.



But with all that said, I have skirted the real issue: what makes the writing life worthwhile? It's those moments when the gift comes and you are ready for it, those moments when you are fully conscious in the artwork and alive to all the possibilities of its truth, its sensuous and sinuous beauty. Those moments when the writing is more involving than anything else you could ever do in your existence, they bring you back to your true reason to live. They do more than make writing worthwhile, they make life worthwhile. Nothing can destroy those moments, and nothing can replace them. In those moments there is this "marvelous joy of being sure...."