StormHaven

A DEATH IN THE FAMILY: THE POETRY & PROSE OF LAURA (RIDING) JACKSON

Two weeks ago at the age of 97, my grandmother died peacefully. For the first week after her death, I was here in Arkansas, not having seen her for three months, during which time our relationship had consisted of frequent, short conversations on the phone and letters I would write to her. Though she and I have always been close, she has been relatively absent from my life recently and thus her ultimate absence has been difficult to comprehend. In the midst of a lot of family occasions in my grandmother’s memorial, I have tried to steal time with Laura (Riding) Jackson’s poetry and prose. I must confess, I entertained the notion that perhaps Jackson would lend some meaning to the context of death I found myself in and reach a hand through time to mine. This failed attempt at trying to turn poetry for school into poetry that I needed illuminates for me some of the shortcomings of the art form, of course a favored subject of Jackson herself.

“How did I make the mistake of assuming that, from the art of poetry, the reality of live, personal truth could be precipitated?” Jackson asks in “Introduction for a Broadcast,” which was her first explanation of her renunciation of poetry. She goes on to state of her poetry that “because they are poems, they can provide only one kind of satisfaction, poetical satisfaction. But the very evocation of the other kind provides something extra, a bonus” and that bonus “is a fictive spiritual feat, a beguilement of the soul.” For Jackson, the experience of being moved by a poem is an aesthetic experience, not a spiritual one.

For my part, my failure to shake relevance out of Jackson’s poetry sheds light on a few aspects of the relationship between a poem and its reader. I toiled mightily to actualize my grandmother’s absence through poems such as “Mortal,” “Death as Death,” and “Respect for the Dead,” and found moments of simple intellectual connection, but none that grounded me in reality. I came into this enterprise with very simple questions, questions I can’t ask artfully: my grandmother no longer exists, what does that mean? Jackson’s poetry cynically riffs on her own feelings of inadequacy, suicide, and her notion that only the dead are truthful. Her answers don’t even cross paths with my questions.

And so it is, I think for many scholastic readers: the books they are made to read do not answer their most pressing questions. They receive books for class that are passed down a chain of power. Some grand person somewhere decides that some poem or book best approaches answers to the questions he or she deems most important. Then that person assesses himself or herself as important enough that everyone should be asking the same questions and should therefore read the same poems. I don’t particularly relate to this situation; I chose this class out of many others, with a full understanding of the reading list. Also, I am a convinced reader: I am not going to lose interest in reading at this point because I couldn’t relate to one poet. But I think it is possible that many students, on the cusp of deciding that they do or do not like reading, have the definitive experience of not finding the material relatable. Sometimes the poem or book simply does not fit a particular reader, and this can be an embittering experience for someone who earnestly seeks insight.

In the context of the academic system, people are told they will receive the reward of good grades if they read what they have been told is important for them to read. And school encourages them to order their reading experience into papers for which they will be rewarded if their writing is good enough and their thoughts matter enough to someone other than themselves. The act of reading becomes one in which readers are coerced into convincing themselves and others that what they have been told to read matters to them. They are given very little opportunity to embark on their own search for material that they find truthful. These are the rudiments of English education as it has been for years. In the ever pluralizing world, the challenges of presenting literature in the classroom that will be meaningful to the majority of students are obvious.

I think that for Jackson to state that poetry has no real truth to it is an exaggeration and an oversimplification. I think her renunciation of poetry is one more example of the way individual opinion can be believed and stated as the answer to everyone else’s questions. Who is she to generalize the experience of encountering a poem for everyone else? What does she know of the insight a poem might bring to a reader, regardless of whether its poet was too caught up in the poem’s structure to genuinely mean her words? Furthermore, at the basest level, the very existence of a poem speaks a truth that is often comforting to a reader: that someone else has gone through what that reader might be going through. But I do think that Jackson is right to question poetry’s inerrancy, because a poem’s truth will never be truth to everyone that reads it. And I do think that there are limitations to words. There are some experiences and meanings that words cannot fully contain, as I have experienced in the past few days as I recited prayers and hymns in memorial services, listened to condolences in receiving lines, and read poems in my Laura Riding Jackson Reader.

Two days after my grandmother died she was cremated. I was at home, in Arkansas, having not been in her presence for months, having not witnessed the actuality of her physical existence for so long that now its absence was too abstract for me to mourn. Then I sliced my hand open on a nail and sat staring at the small wound on my hand: a small, ambivalent mouth on my palm, whose parted lips neither smiled nor frowned but within moments began gushing blood. Several nights later in Virginia, the evening after my grandmother’s ashes had been committed to the ground, my mother stepped on a mouse in the living room. A little stunned at the odds that my mother’s foot and a tiny mouse had crossed paths, we all stood and looked at the mouse for a moment, wondering if it would live. It lay in the carpet, twisting its limbs and face in an expression of pain as eloquent as any human’s, and then we picked it up and dealt with it as compassionately as we could. I will spare you the details of what these two experiences meant to me; any words I would come up with would do them little justice, and might not mean anything to you. The truth is that they were experiences and try as I might, I don’t think I could thoroughly render into words the small amount of understanding that they helped me gain about the presence of my mortal body, the fragility of its structure, and the nature of pain. And somewhere in the midst of it, my hand and the mouse helped me comprehend the aging, the stopping, and the disappearance of my grandmother’s earthly remains. Sometimes poetry can help a person understand such things, and sometimes it cannot. The extent of its meaningfulness changes from situation to situation, and person to person, and sometimes life itself intervenes, in bizarre little vignettes, and offers the sought after moments of clarity.

WHY I DON'T LIKE THE POETRY & PROSE OF LAURA (RIDING) JACKSON

Let's be clear and honest about one thing:  I read Laura (Riding) Jackson years ago when I felt it my business to read everything in English that remotely resembled poetry.  I found, as I recall, a line or two that I admired ("I stood once at the tip of the earth, / Feeling myself no longer still, / But tossed with it about the sun / In an exquisite insecurity," from "Makeshift," which has a kind of Dickinsonian slant to it that does productive things with the tradition), and I wasn't concerned with the prose. 

Now years later, I reread her poetry and her prose with one of the worst sinus infections I've ever had, so it has been literally--and figuratively, as I hope to show--painful to sit through the several hours that reading her required.  I don't mean to criticize her as a person, nor do I mean to denigrate the life that she authored for herself.  But at times it is difficult to refrain from doing so because like Byron, her life at times became her work.  Her menage a trois with Robert Graves and his wife Nancy Nicholson finally came to a shattering end when Riding jumped from a fourth floor window and survived to tell the tale.  Graves was impressed, and the two passed a fairly intense decade together.  Jackson wrote about its conclusion:

After I terminated the association that had existed between Robert Graves and myself, he released himself first into a rampant desperation, of one interrupted in a secure status as a literary modern of enviously sophisticated authority, the role, in verity, a sinecure, by virtue of its dependence on the grace of what I had given him, and allowed him to take, of my values, knowledges, laborings towards basic definitions of the nature of the human experience, and of human existence itself.

I don't doubt it.  Graves probably did steal from Riding.  After all, he was a professional, not an amateur.  It gets worse.  Riding continued:

The White Goddess . . . is a personal infliction, an act of revenge committed with the kind of gruesome emission of sounds of triumph that large hawks, scouting over an area, loose on high, even before they have made their kill.

This is unfair to hawks and unflattering to Riding.  Of course I am aware of how small-minded accomplished artists can be; I tend to see the artistic talent as a useful deformation of sorts, a parasite, however,  that has nothing to do with the moral and ethical strengths of its host.  Typically, we read a collection of poems that impresses us, and we expect to be impressed by its author when we ask her to sign the book for us.  But we are talking here about two kinds of impressions, and sadly they will often enough have little to do with one another.  If strength of verse happens to be coupled with strength of character, then that is a happy coincidence, but the one does not generate the other.

That her life played a very large role in her own estimation of her art is obvious from the fact that she made a great deal out of her renunciation of poetry.  She didn't simply stop writing verse; she renounced it, a rather different story.   Helen Vendler has put the matter succinctly.  Referring to Paul Auster's assessment in 1975 that "[Riding] had reached her own limit in poetry," Vendler writes that "this was perhaps a polite way of saying, while Riding was still alive, what I can now, after her death, put more directly--that poetry had renounced her."  Poetry is like that; credit Riding that she was sensitive enough, intelligent enough, to see that she had been rejected and then to fall silent.  Most of the poetry I encounter today is written, as has always been the case, by those who have long been rejected by poetry, but haven't yet understood this simple fact.

So we have her prose.  Vendler argues that if her work survives, it will be things like Progress of Stories, A Trojan Ending--in short, the work of the storyteller.  While she was still writing poetry, Riding herself felt that she belonged to philosophy:

Poets have attributed the compulsion of poetry to forces outside themselves--to divinities, muses, and, finally, even to such humanistic muses as Politics.  Thus W.H. Auden, unwilling to conceive that a large-scale compulsion may originate in the poet, has told me that I am 'the only living philosophical poet'--my muse is, presumably, Philosophy, as his is Politics.

Philosophy of course is not the same as philosophical poetry.  And even if we think we recognize the  former when we see it, we will certainly be less confident in recognizing the latter.  When I think of philosophical poetry, I think of Lucretius (De Rerum Natura), and when I think of Lucretius, I do not, as a rule, think of Laura Riding.  Philosophers wouldn't recognize her philosophical prose as philosophy; they might find something in it very much like aesthetics, and they might even speak of "poetics," however they might define it.  I suspect that she herself saw her work as a kind of ontological linguistics, and in this capacity her work anticipates the language-based theoretical work of everyone from Sapir and Whorf to Derrida.  She had, in fact, identified what would become an obsession to many in the field of literary theory, and she had done it in her own way. 

My point is that her way lacked clarity and strength of argument, and so while it is instructive to read through, for example, "A Prophecy or a Plea," and find the first sentence of that essay to be "The most moving and at once distressing event in the life of a human being is his discovery that he is alive," it is equally instructive to read the sentence that follows it:  "From that moment to his death, the fact of life is a constant white glare over him, an unsettling and shadowless sun."  The first sentence is one of inspired observation because it is both obvious and profound; the second sentence is neither obvious nor profound because it is clearly an intensely individual experience, an intensely individual reaction to the common truth that preceded it, and this process of narrowing is hostile to the essential spirit of philosophy.

Moving from the one sentence to the next, I am struck by a feeling of deflation.

As I read steadily through The L(R)J Reader, I became gradually aware of the fact that, for me, Jackson's work is evidentiary in nature, by which I mean simply that for those who might be interested in prowling the 20th century for bits and traces of Modernism, aesthetics, philosophical rumination--but then Pascal ruminated philosophically, so how can I use the same phrase for Jackson?--and for those who might, in an attempt better to understand Allen Tate or W.H. Auden, wish to discover in Jackson's work what Tate and Auden at times claimed to have seen in it, then the hours spent going through this reader would have been well spent.

But I was not that person.  I was a late middle-aged reader, suffering with aching jaws, who was concerned to understand how best to address the literacy problems identified by the reports that had been recently forthcoming from the NEA.  Because if they were not addressed, I reasoned in my pain, then it didn't matter if anyone had ever heard of L(R)J.  And so I wanted to know if the work of Laura Riding Jackson would help me address those problems. 

Her work did not do that for me.

I am sure that Jackson herself wouldn't be concerned to address those problems, and I imagine that she would find them entirely predictable.  After all, a person who renounces poetry can't be too happy with the way things are going in the literary world. 

CAUSES, CORRELATIONS, AND COMPLICATIONS

From May to August of 2005—during the summer before I began work on my Master’s in English—I worked in a screening factory in Lawrence, Kansas.  I’d spent the previous four and a half years as an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, earning a Bachelor’s degree (double-major in Film Studies and Western Civilization, and a minor in English).  It was depressingly difficult for someone with a liberal arts degree to find rewarding work, and so I ultimately chose manual labor over retail—I’d much rather be paid to exercise than be forced to act friendly to rude strangers.  At this job I helped put decals and labels on sportswear and glassware, boxed the product, labeled it, and then wheeled out the stacked boxes on a shipping pallet for delivery.

This job was not the first time that I had done blue-collar(ish) work, or worked primarily with people who lacked college (and often high school) educations.  However, since my other experiences had been in telemarketing—where a certain level of reading proficiency is required—the factory job was the first time I’d really encountered functional illiteracy.  There was one co-worker in particular, a young high-school dropout, who would mark boxes before he sealed them, so he could look at the label on the glass and slowly copy the letters.  When I told my boss that I suspected this employee could not read he simply shrugged.  After that incident, I slowly began to realize that many of my co-workers (most of whom had children) could not read.  During my last week, another co-worker, who knew that I was returning to school and would be teaching for the first time, said to me, “Make sure you tell those kids to stay in school and to learn to read good, so they don’t have to work in a fucking factory for their entire lives.” (Incidentally, this co-worked was a 20-year old who had been at the factory for four years, since dropping out of high school at age 16.)

I thought of this experience and these people as I read the National Endowment for the Arts’ “To Read or Not to Read.”  Specifically, I remembered these people as I saw the NEA acknowledge that “the data in this report do not necessarily show cause and effect.  The statistics merely indicate correlations.”  Now, that qualifying statement should really be considered.  After all, just because there the height of a child over time correlates to the height of a tree in her backyard over time does not mean that they are “connected” in any way.  I mention this because the NEA study indicates a correlation between reading and civic participation, and (at least implicitly) argues that if a person were to simply read more he would be a better and more active citizen.  I can’t help but find this a gross simplification, for two interrelated reasons: first, “reading” is being used as a euphemism for “education,” and second, the acknowledged reality that reading or other arts participation is a leisure activity is largely ignored.

Even if my former co-workers read at an average proficiency and used breaks and lunch to get absorbed in literature, I find it unlikely that they would be volunteering, attending arts events, working on their own creative projects, exercising, or getting involved in political campaigns.  I have that doubt because all of those activities—valuable as they may be—are (expensive) luxuries that people with kids, who work multiple jobs, and who are classified as “working poor” have neither the time nor financial resources to enjoy.  It seems unfair to suggest that “reading more” is a cure-all for civic apathy when ticket prices for exhibitions and performances are simply out of reach for many (not to mention the unwelcome glances a factory worker would receive at an art gallery—as much as NEA spokespeople may deny, the cultural elite like keeping their world private).  In the end, for a person to be able to participate in the types of activities the NEA endorses, she must have available time and money, which generally means that she must have a good job, and that means she also must probably be well-educated.  So, we are talking about much more than just the inclination to read a story every once in a while, we are talking about the strong educational background that allows a person the freedom to read.

I should quickly backtrack: I do not want to downplay the importance of reading, especially the value of reading in gaining a strong educational background.  Certainly, reading is truly fundamental in order to be educated—even if one wants to be a mathematician, he must be able to read and comprehend complex instructions.  Reading is invaluable, and I do believe that the act of reading can stimulate the self-awareness and impulse to participate that the NEA report suggests.  However, it seems strange to treat reading as if it is an activity that exists in a vacuum.  The NEA report, whether its authors realize it or not, is talking about more than just the physical act of picking up a book and moving eyes across the page.  To really address the problems the report raises, we should consider how many people have the resources to attend cultural events—perhaps the NEA pollsters should have also asked their participants if they would like to attend such cultural events, rather than simply if they did.  Another factor that should be considered is the quality of literacy training people receive, so that they can properly grapple with literature, if and when they do so.  This point additionally raises the issue of content: does the reading material matter, or simply the at of reading.  How do the positive effects of reading differ for a person who reads online gossip for three hours a day versus someone who reads a chapter of Rushdie before he or she goes to bed?  After all, even though the NEA study shows that rates of reading were higher in the 1950s, the cultural elites of the time complained that the literature of the masses—detective, romance, and science-fiction novels—did more harm than good.

Once one asks if it is the mere act of reading that is important, or the interpretive and disseminating act of reading Literature that is important, other complicating questions arise.  For instance, why does it matter if the reading is done for pleasure?  The NEA disqualifies any reading that is mandated by school or work.  Why?  If reading literature provides the impulse for greater civic engagement, why does it matter if it is done in one’s spare time?  If just reading is paramount, wouldn’t a student who reads, discusses, and writes about several novels in a span of eighteen weeks more likely to participate in cultural events than an attorney who enjoys reclining with a good book in his spare time?  Other questions that could complicate the NEA study: how does functional (everyday) reading differ from reading literature?  What impact does a “community of readers” have on civic engagement?  What have been the various criteria for determining and measuring reading “proficiency” throughout the years?  The NEA findings are intriguing and could possibly be the foundation for a deeper understanding of the purposes and effects of reading, but without addressing the lattice of myriad factors that complicate and overlap with “reading for pleasure,” it reads a bit like the same-old lamentation for an activity that, in many ways, has always been something of a privilege.

RADIOS, TV'S, VCR'S, CD'S, iPODS, VIDEO-GAME PLATFORMS, COMPUTERS & AMERICAN LITERACY

You want to talk about a video eyeball?  "Reading at Risk" opines that in 1999, a study showed that the average American child lives in a household with 2.9 televisions (I have 4), 1.8 VCR's (I have none; 9 years later who needs them?), 3.1 radios (maybe I have one, but I don't know where it is), 1.4 video game players (that's sooo nineties; I have an XBox 360, PS3, and am regularly visited by my son's Wii), and 2 computers (we have 2 laptops, and are dreaming about one for the kitchen, and a gaming computer for my son's room.) 

My Utopian video-vision is straight from Any Given Sunday, where Al Pacino's house is crowded with huge flatscreens playing Ben Hur all the time (I'd play The Sopranos on a loop, and if Cameron Diaz wanted to hang around, that would be fine as well, and if I could just be Al Pacino for one day that would be even better).   My point is fairly mundane, but fairly important:  we are irrevocably a video culture.  I use "irrevocably" with some hesitation, but I don't see American business calling a halt to yearly more affordable, massive flat screens that now appear in McMansions over the mantel in the living room--now called the "great room"--where oil paintings used to appear.  The danger for us in the education business, particularly in the English education business, is that we tend to extrapolate from our own lives, lives that are perhaps not quite as techno-philic as they could be.  This might be a matter of taste and preference or it might be a matter of salary.  For me, it's pretty clear that it's a matter of salary. 

But what we do to make a living--read books, talk about them, and write about them--occupies a far different place in the daily lives of Americans than it did when English departments were created in the early twentieth century.  English Departments can change, but most often they do so at a snail's pace, and do so initially by "offering a course" that tries to wrestle with the new interests that are showing up on the horizon, courses like "The Language of Situational Comedy in the 1980's" or "Seinfeld Redivivus:  "Friends" and the Tevevisual Comic Tradition."  Nothing wrong with these courses, but they are vaguely troubling, an ill-fit, slightly embarassing both for the departments that offer them and the shows they attempt discuss.

"To Read or Not to Read" offers the usual battery of statistics to show us that reading is declining, the sky is falling, and we--readers and teachers of reading--need to do something to stop the decline.  If you look at page 8, you see that the older you get, the more time you spend each week reading.  And you see that the young people are multi-tasking, using other "media" to help them through a session with a book:  iPods, TV, whatever it takes to break up the monotony of holding and staring at a book.  And of course we're not spending the money on books that we used to spend in 1985, during the Reagan years.  But that's partly because of Reaganomics, which hit the middle class hard, and adjusting for inflation, as the report claims to do, will not fix this problem.  Fewer dollars today to spend, and hardbacks now costing $25.00 . . . that's one very real aspect of the problem.  Book-buying has moved out of some people's lives financially.

Our younger readers are not reading as well either.  Or so we are told.  From 1992 to 2005 the percentage of 12-th graders reading at or above the proficient level has declined 5 percentage points.  The gap between males and females is growing as well.  Young men are falling behind young women.  This is troubling not only for teachers, but for employers as well who understandably prefer that their employees be able to read proficiently, particularly at the management level.  Employers report, however, that increasingly they confront applicants who don't read proficiently.  Less advanced readers aren't promoted.  Those who aren't promoted don't perfrom as well as those who do, and so with more unskilled readers arriving in the job market, the problem of performance on the job is magnified. 

The report ends by stating, flatly, that "no attempt has been made . . . to delve into income traits of voluntary readers," and therein lies a problem.  Particularly when we arrive at the third publication, "The Arts and Civic Engagement."  Let me offer one in-depth response to the first of the "10 Key Findings:"  Literary readers and classical or jazz radio listeners attend arts events at higher rates than non-readers and non-listeners. 

In-depth response:  Checked out the tickets prices at the Walton Art Center lately?

So, we're trying to teach English literature to a group of readers who are increasingly becoming less readerly, year by year.  And we're doing this within a culture that is becoming equally more video-centric.  Who is to blame?  The young reader?  The culture in which the young reader comes of age?  Both?  Neither?

We can poke holes in the NEA's findings, as I've done, here and there.  We can agree with their findings in traditional ways, as many did.  We can vilify the technology.  We can vilify literary theory, as many conservative journals did when the NEA findings came out several years ago.  And we can take a middle path as well.

But what we have to do, as toilers in the vineyard, as the only real toilers in the real vineyard, is come to terms with what is happening to our students and to our potential students who might wish to undertake the advanced study of English and American literature. 

How do we teach the study of texts in a visually oriented culture?

And by the way, there are definitive responses to the NEA's report in the February Harper's by Ursula K. Leguinn (available to subscribers online) and The New Yorker (December 24 & 31 2007) by Caleb Crain, available to all here.

READ POETRY, TALK POETRY, WRITE ABOUT POETRY

We're not going to do a whole lot more at this site than read poetry, talk poetry, and write about poetry.  And we're going to write a lot about poetry.  But we're not going to do it conventionally.  We're not going to do the end-of-semester mega-paper because you have plenty of opportunities in school to do this particular kind of magnum opus.  For a lot of reasons that will become apparent as this blog develops, I think there are other ways of fashioning responses to the things we read.  And I think these other ways are equally important in fashioning a literary sensibility, whatever that is, and wherever it exists within us.

So--all of our writing will be done on this blog site.  Each week, I will designate a guest author, and I will set posting deadlines.  Of course, in true blog fashion, I would hope that comments are offered on the previous week's material.  And I would hope equally that as the weeks roll by, the individual postings ride the cumulative wisdom of the previous submissions.  I'll suggest topics, general assignments, each week that have a kind of end-game in mind, but like every good scientist, while I might expect certain results from these topics, I'll honestly read the results each week and go from there.

So . . . is this vaguely experimental?  You bet it is.  What are the purposes of this experiment?  Good question.  First, to help us fashion a sense of audience (this will be, after all, a public blog site), both among your peers and among the larger reading public.  Second, to move the process of writing from the study into the newsroom, as it were, helping you to nurture a more productive, hassle-free writing style.  (Academics must envy the journalists their "process," particularly now when the trade presses are offering contracts almost exclusively to those trained in journalism and creative non-fiction.)  And finally, I want our understanding of poetry (which finally comes through writing about it) to occupy a more public arena than it typically does in traditional academic settings.

So, I'll post the readings here as soon as they're done, and I'll be telling you more in the near future about how each of you can become a guest author--which means simply that you will be able to post as the owner of the blog instead of simply commenting on a post.