StormHaven

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

Herewith, our two final, main postings of the semester, by Maggie and Amy, respectively:

The Frank Insinuation of Yusef Komunyakaa

“Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It’s a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.” Yusef Komunyakaa, when asked “What is poetry?”

Not a full frontal assault, maybe, but certainly as a whole, Komunyakaa overwhelmed me with a patented brand of frank insinuation. Paradoxical, no? Well, I’ll explain. He’s frank because he explores issues of sexuality, race, identity, corrigenda with a candor that is several steps above the poetry I’m used to. In fact he does so to the extent of anatomizing certain taboos in a way that is either hyper-confessional (relative to what most people would feel comfortable implying about themselves) or indicative of a supple imagination (capable of rounding out the speakers of his poems, if indeed they are not always himself, with arresting detail.) A poem I think of specifically is “Gloria’s Cues,” a work that seems to delve into a passive and inconsequential lapse into something close to pedophilia, without any evident self-damnation or damnation of the speaker. In general, there is a lot that Komunyakaa unpacks, and sometimes I as the reader am not necessarily surprised at what is found in the suitcase, but maybe just a bit jarred by being privy to it. But he maintains the art of insinuation in his narratives by showing very little consequence following various acts and feelings. I think that this tactic is a specific strength of poetry: these are not morality tales. His isolated poems tend not to make moral arguments. Rather, Komunyakaa uses strategically placed disclaimers, corrigendas as he calls them, to advocate the power of speech that sometimes sacrifices comfort for honesty.

“Gloria’s Clues” is one poem out of many that explores sexuality and in many ways, this particular subject matter seems multiply bonded with the various other themes Komunyakaa insinuates. Rarely is sex present in his poems as a pure celebration of a good lustful romp. Often, it is woven into family relationships, race, violence, the human as an animal, all of which are concerns that pop up often in NEON VERNACULAR. In the neon framework that sex tends provide, he presents scenario after scenario that constantly ask: what is this? why does it happen in our species, in our communities? what is wrong with it or right about it? His poem SONGS FOR MY FATHER presents many of these struggling questions. He reminds us from the start that his and his brothers’ complex relationship with their father began with…sex:

I told my brothers I heard
You & mother making love,
Your low moans like a blues
Bringing them into the world.
I didn’t know if you were laughing
Or crying.

The uncertainty of those last two lines quickly turn to violence as he introduces the tension within this father/son relationship:

Sometimes I think they’re still jealous
Of our closeness, having forgotten
We had to square-off and face each other,
My fists balled & cocked by haymakers.

Thus, Komunyakaa sets up the variable nature of his relationship with his father that echoes throughout the poem. He tells of fond memories (“Sometimes you could be/ That man on a read bicycle,/ With me on the handlebars….”) and he tells of his rage at having encountered explicit family violence (“Goddamn you. Goddamn you./ If you hit her again, I’ll sail through/ That house like a dustdevil.”) But he also tells of the strange union between himself and his father, which culminates in his confession of a shared sense of sexuality with his father, represented by the fact that they slept with the same woman:

Since I sought out one of your lovers
Before you were dead
Though years had passed
& you were with someone else…
Yes, she cried out,
But she didn’t sing your name
When I planted myself in her.

Through this, Komunyakaa implies his own undeniable self that have been passed down to him from his father, turns the poem swiftly from what seems like a renunciation of what his father was capable of to a total admission of his similarities with his father. It is startling, but I find it gracious in a strange sort of way, that he establishes himself in contrast to this man whose behavior he has fought against, but offers his own behavior for inspection. It’s as if he says, “But wait a minute, now that I have your attention, don’t feel sorry for me. Examine me. What do you see? What is this? Why does it happen?”

Throughout his work, Komunyakaa periodically offers the reader a breath in poems where he explains his technique a bit, as in “Safe Subjects”:

How can love heal
the mouth shut this way?
Say something worth breath.
Let it surface, recapitulate…
Say something about pomogranates
Say something about real love.
Yes, true love—more than
parted lips, than parted legs
in sorrow’s darkroom of potash
and blues. Let the brain stumble
from its hidingplace.

These moments, in “Safe Subjects”, “Corrigenda”, and others serve to allow me to distance myself from the striking nature of his content and ask the pertinent questions that his poetry begs. How does Komunyakaa serve us, his anticipating readers, by putting this down on paper? What is particular to the experience of reading poetry that enters into a discourse that would not normally be socially acceptable? Is it because poetry is a passive art form, meaning, it moves only as the reader moves through it (and do you agree with this assertion)? In discussing in another class last week Sade’s text (one can hardly call it a novel) JUSTINE, a work saturated with radically taboo material, some grotesque to the extent that I really hesitate to discuss it in the same breathe as Komunyakaa, a few people said that they just had to close the book when it reached the upper limits of raunchy. This incited a discussion of the power that is vested in the reader: readers can stop the movement of the text they are reading. This is not necessarily true of many of our most modern media forms: many of them move on their own, and in a way that I think is more swiftly intoxicating than reading. There was never a moment when I felt like closing NEON VENACULAR; nothing Komunyakaa wrote shocked me, mostly I found his candor intriguing and his periodic disclaimers soothing and refocusing. Ultimately, I think Komunyakaa’s refusal to damn the behavior in his poetry expanded its use. I find myself much more full of questions and internal debate than I am when I’ve just read a poet whose voice I comfortably relate to.

Posted by: Margaret Poist | April 27, 2008 at 09:34 PM

Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Neon Vernacular”– the title nearly says it all. A number of the selected poems, and most of the new ones (which I liked the best, I think), attest to Komunyakaa’s “vision”  as one that deliberately invokes the past, present, and future. If Warren and his clan consistently look over their shoulders to the past (and sometimes frantically try to “keep up” with the present), Komunyakaa seamlessly moves from his childhood, to Vietnam, to the implications all past/present experiences have for the future. While it seems his identity is quite grounded in /tied to his upbringing in LA (Louisiana– not California, or “Lower Alabama”), or the “vernacular,” he is also consciously responding to how that identity fairs as (and affects) an adult who has traveled far from rural LA, into the “neon,” and then returns, altered, in some respects, but not entirely. “Salt” is illustrative of this– he cannot even remember the woman’s name (“Lisa, Leona, Loretta?”) but can give a full account of the atrocities in her family history, and she, though as children together they “played doctor & house”) responds to him by grabbing her purse and pulling at her skirt. In other words, because of the complicated history of their families (as his relationship to hers is one of “housekeepers/ & handymen”), and in spite of their personal history of interacting as children, they do not even speak when they encounter one another as adults.

Additionally, “Neon Vernacular,” in a more general rather than personal way, appears in Komunyakaa’s regular invocation of Hughes (Langston not Ted), and also of Dunbar (particularly in poems from “Copacetic” with all of its masks). This seems entirely appropriate, as Hughes set about for himself a similar (but of course different, as well) project of making the “vernacular” “neon.” I’m thinking of course of Komunyakaa’s persistent incorporation of jazz and blues into his work– evidenced by overt allusions and (obviously) by titles: “Changes; or, Reveries at a Window...,” “Elegy for Thelonious,” “Blues Chant Hoodoo Revival,” etc.– the list is entirely too long. But also of poems like “The Plea,” with its refrain of “Bop, bop, bebop, rebop”– “Montage” anyone? (Despite all of Hughes’s work, and of the “progress,” particularly economic, in the South, I think we still tend to consider any cultural product (whether produced by black or white artists) that comes out of the rural, deep South as being somehow “vernacular,” more tied to “folk” traditions (especially unwritten ones) than writing or art that is produced in NYC, for example– which makes YK’s use of such stereotypes interesting, as I’m under the impression he hasn’t lived in LA for a while.)

While Komunyakaa’s invocation of Hughes is apparent (sometimes even a little too much so, even for me), I think he also bears some similarity to Heaney and Milosz. As to Heaney, I’m sure everyone was reminded of his work when reading “Landscape for the Disappeared”– is this a conscious reference to Heaney? (“Yes, peat bogs/ in Louisiana”). And actually, the sorts of images that YK invokes are quite similar to the ones I myself was musing on when I read Heaney’s account of bogs across the big pond swallowing up/preserving disposed of bodies. The notion that the landscape literally holds our, the South’s, secrets is an eery if often invoked one (Lord only knows how many bodies the swamps in LA or the rivers throughout the Delta have held– I always think of folks dragging rivers for certain unlawfully disposed of persons and finding about 5 or 6 bodies that aren’t even the ones sought after). In other words, while Heaney’s description of the bogs as graves is more fascinating then horrifying (though perhaps I’d feel differently if I lived in European environs), Komunyakaa’s is painful, spooky, and unsettling. I think the “spookiness” of YK’s account goes back to silence (not unlike that present in “Salt”), of what we refuse to talk about/acknowledge even when we all know, and maybe also to the more recent-ness of it– it’s one thing to talk about sacrificial murders from “way back when,” but it’s an entirely different matter to find bodies disposed of within the last 50 years.

YK’s similarity to Milosz, I think, is his sense of guilt (which also could be read as similar to Heaney, though like Milosz, YK’s seems a bit more intense than Heaney’s). But like his similarity to Heaney, YK’s guilt manifests itself in radically different terms. While Milosz feels guilt over leaving the site of conflict, YK tries to come to terms with placing himself in the midst of it. I’m thinking, of course, of his Vietnam poems, from his collection, “Dien Cai Dau.” I was particularly struck by “Hanoi Hannah” and “Report from the Skull’s Diorama.” I must confess that most of the accounts of black men’s roles in Vietnam that I’ve read have not been written by those who went and, instead, are arguments against going. Not only to deal with the psychological stress of war, but also to be listening to radio announcements from back home, tauntingly asking, “‘Soul Brothers, what you dying for?’” must have been nearly unmanageable. I think it’s easy for us of the post-Vietnam generation to get caught up in the rhetoric of why someone shouldn’t have gone to Vietnam and to lose those voices that went (and may not have chosen to go). YK, in “Report” especially, expresses an awareness of the injustice at work both at home and abroad, and is yet still participating in and suffering from it simultaneously– hearing about King’s assassination while napalming villages is understandably haunting, particularly with flyers circulating that state “VC didn’t kill/ Dr. Martin Luther King”– and once again, “silence” on the matter.

(On Tuesday, I also want to chat about “Changes; or, Reveries at a Window...” as it is one of my favorites– I’ve experimented with reading it in different ways and have yet to be disappointed, and I think we’ll also have to discuss the Thorn Merchant poems, though as of now, I’m not sure what to say about them that’s not completely obvious...)

Posted by: alschmidt | April 27, 2008 at 09:45 PM

 

RPW: AN OLD MASTER NEWLY CONFIGURED

What to say about the Old Master?  The only American to win Pulitzer Prizes in poetry and fiction . . . that's a start.  Easily, with Cleanth Brooks, the most popularly influential American literary critic of the post-50's era, and only because of the utterly pervasive Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction, the two text books that taught American high school and college teachers to teach literature they way that Warren and Brooks wanted it taught . . . that's another reason.  And then, pure longevity:  Warren's writing career spans a good half-century.  He wrote a lot, and he wrote well.

But people generally don't read his poems as much as his fiction.  Understandable, particularly since All the King's Men is now a "major motion picture," which I've never seen.  But his body of poetry in some ways not only develops, but careens through its phases in a way that I've always found to be typically American, at least, and perhaps typically poetic. 

And this last statement will require a bit of elucidation.

Warren was a voracious reader, a life-long student, and a devoted amateur philosopher.  And what he read, what he studied, and what he philosophized about appeared in his poetry, varyingly digested.  I'm calling this project of synthesis--and that's what is was for Warren--an essentially poetic project because, while the poetry rises from Warren's immense preparation, it also rises in a form that hardly resembles its sources.  There is transformation here of an extraordinary kind.  That's what I'm calling poetic:  synthesis and transformation, taking a known quantity, reworking it, and giving it back in its newly resplendent form.  This, or something like it, stands at the heart of Warren's contribution to letters, and while it can be argued that all poetry does this, I would argue that Warren's poetry attempts this project in a way, and to a degree, that most poetry doesn't.

Take Audubon, for example.  Just what in the world is that poem?  A history of a Franco-American painter?  A confession?  A poetic aviary?  A depiction of the American frontier before the Civil War, the event that Warren claimed was the continental divide for the American imaginative writer?  But what is the goal of the poem?  Maybe it is this (Section IV):

To wake in some dawn and see,

As though down a rifle barrel, lined up

Like sights, the self that was, the self that is, and there,

Far off but in range, completing that alignment, your fate.

The self that was, is, and will be:  these are the parameters of story, and story is the supreme ordering device of our lives.  We tell them to our friends and to ourselves.  Perhaps this is why the last line of this poem is simply, "Tell me a story of deep delight."

One of the most effective ways of reading Warren--try this as you go through him--is to list his subjects, and then, after you've done that, star those that you'd categorize as obsessions.  His development to me is orderly and encyclopedic--there's a wealth of information here, but it's all easy to find.  Try this, and let me know what you think.

MILOSZ'S BALANCING ACT

Last week, with Heaney, we talked a lot about balance, about balancing politics with art, and seemed to be in agreement that Heaney accomplished such a balance. In that respect (not in terms of chronology), Czeslaw Milosz out-Heaneys-Heaney. I also commented last week that by describing specific “political” events or tragedies, can be a way of dealing with that specific tragedy but also with more “universal” tragedy, and Milosz accomplishes that as well. Becoming so engaged with his collection that I did not want to, nor could I, put it down, I was emotionally exhausted by the time I finished Milosz. Part of his ability to write “universally” (for lack of a better word) is his collapsing of time and space. Of course we can call this technique “postmodern” or something of the sort, but it’s much more than that (though there are also a few mentions of binaries being inadequate/constructed/etc.- particularly along the lines of gender; I’m thinking of “Table I” and another that I can’t lay my finger on just now). It is not surprising that someone who witnessed firsthand just how dangerously fluid political and geographic barriers can be (of “fictitious States” (“Fear-Dream”), and “Countries and cities that must remain without name, for how can I explain/ why and how many times they changed their banners and emblems?” (“Capri”)) would be able to transcend such (or similar) barriers in his. Nor is it surprising that someone who a) lived such a long life, but more importantly, b) saw the shifting of spatial boundaries occur so rapidly over such a short period of time due to the “forces of history” would be taken with the idea that the past is always present and that the present is always a part of the future. A sort of cyclical view of history and time so that the same sorts of tragedies repeat themselves in different places at different times. Words like “anywhere” and “nowhere” pepper Milosz’s poems as do confessions of not being able to remember precisely what year/month/day something happened (and of course it doesn’t really matter when exactly or where exactly). The most obvious illustration of this theme is “City Without a Name” in which he remembers a place from his youth but is in California (“the feast of Insubstantiality./ Under a gathering of clouds anywhere,”and “not remembering whether it happened in this or that autumn;” “there is no earlier and no later; the seasons of the year and of the day are simultaneous”) Such a view, as I’ve described it, sounds rather depressing, but I don’t get the sense that Milosz held a completely cynical or pessimistic view of humanity; there seems to be an underlying sense of hope, a faith that things can and will get better (and of course, he lived to see it, at least partially accomplished). One of Milosz’s earlier poems, “Campo Dei Fiori,” exemplifies this: at first we recoil from people going about their business while a man is publically burned (“Before the flames had died/ the taverns were full again,/ baskets of olives and lemons/ again on the vendors’ shoulders”), but towards the end of the poem, when Milosz/the speaker, “I,” responds to the event, his impulse is to be “a voice” for the forgotten (“our tongue becomes for them”– a line which absurdly reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston) with the hope that immortalizing the tragedy will perhaps prevent it from happening again (“on a new Campo dei Fiori/ rage will kin dle at a poet’s word”). The idea that words can change the world for the better recurs throughout Milosz’s collection, particularly in poems such as “Incantation” (which in his intro to the collection, Heaney seems quite taken with, especially the line about poetry being an “ally in the service of the good”). The idea that language or poetry “puts what should be above things as they are” and is also able to open “the congealed fist of the past” pervades Milosz’s writing, though in other poems, it is less explicit. (Something we may want to discuss is the tension or difference between his view of art’s purpose and the Communist regime’s view– I take it from Milosz’s obituary in the New York Times that he was dissatisfied with the latter, so I think we should ask what the difference is between art that changes the world and art as explicit propaganda.) Living long enough to see a positive change (and geographically escaping it for a time), however, seems to have produced a strong sense of grief and guilt– for example, “To Raja  Rao,” he confesses that all of the moving about leaves him not only feeling displaced (“on the border of schizophrenia”) but also with “guilt and shame” (This seems not unlike Heaney’s guilt, though Milosz seems to be more intense, nearly obsessive until the last bit of the collection). Such  guilt and grief often manifests through memorializations of folks who were not as fortunate as Milosz, who were not able to escape the political turmoil or who did not desire to. Remembering these folks, trying to immortalize them and their pain in his writing, is the impetus (or one of them) for believing that the past is always present. Again, in “City without a Name,” Milosz/the speaker keeps wondering why the places/people of his youth “keep offering itself” to him, and argues that h e must remember, must write about them, “because except for me no one else knows that they ever/ lived”). There seems to be an inability to escape memory, and this is what produces a sense of haunting (I’m thinking of “Yellow Bicycle,” “Mister Hanusevich,” “Kazia,” “Classmate,”and of “Six Lectures in Verse” which bares, I think, striking similarities to Heaney’s “Station Island”). At times this memorializing seems similar to Heaney’s appreciation for where he came from, but at others, Milosz exudes a sense of being haunted by the past, by his role, or lack of one, in it, so that the writing of people/places/events becomes cathartic– an outlet for his personal demons (which I think is probably what makes reading his poetry for a sustained period of time emotionally exhausting). Another similarity to Seamus is Milosz’s relationship with language, or language (which one you choose to use) as political. It is, I think, significant that Milosz wrote his poems (even while at Berkeley) in Polish, though he had the ability to write in what, like 6 or 7 different languages? His dedication to Polish comes up several times (in “Capri” he blesses the rivers, but pronounces their “names in the way my mother pro-/ nounced them”), but certainly in what seems to be an ode of sorts to language, “My Faithful Mother Tongue,” in which it becomes god-like, with Milosz/the speaker offering “little bowls of colors” to it even when he is “a scholar in a distant country” (and his refrain of “without you, who am I”– again, not unlike Seamus, Milosz sees language not only as political but as part of his personal identity). I’m going to stop gushing now, and gushing I’m afraid I have been, but I must confess (and this is probably painfully obvious) that I found this collection one of the most moving we’ve read this semester.

MY PROBLEM WITH 'HOWL'

I had a certain hesitancy about Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" before I had ever even read the poem, which I did not do until my fourth year as an undergraduate. I'm aware that this pre-judgment seems patently unfair, but allow to explain:

For years, going back as far as high school, I suffered through my peers talking about the brilliance of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the whole Beat movement. My fellow teens and undergrad would whimsically pontificate upon how illuminating the work was, and how it spoke to them. However, whenever I pressed them for details, they were unable to provide explanations. My theory was always that they liked the Beats because it gave them the encouragement and rationalization to take drugs.

A related anecdote: I recently had a brief conversation with my girlfriend about The Beatles. Referring to some friends who had said they didn't like the band, she asked, "How can *anyone* not like the Beatles? I mean, they're the Beatles? How can you not just automatically recognize that they're the best band ever?" I WANTED to ask her why exactly she was so positive they were "the best band ever,"--what was the criteria for making such a claim, and how did The Beatles fulfill it--but I've learned from past experiences with women that it's often best just to let those things slide. As far as I'm concerned, for every truly beautiful and timeless Beatles song, there's another borderline maudlin and conventional to match. So, I don't think it's the music itself that has made so many young people of my generation "automatically recognize" the greatest of the Beatles; I think it's because that's what they've been told since they could remember such things. And who has been telling them? Their parents, and all the other Baby Boomers--the rebels turned establishment who refuse to let go of their youth.

It's hardly surprising that the Boomers fawn over and exalt the Beatles every opportunity they can: for their generation, the Beatles really were more than just a band--they were spiritual, moral, and political guides. Unfortunately, even though the Boomers eventually cast aside their youthful ideals, they refused to cast aside their youthful obsessions. The defining characteristics of the Baby Boomer is self-absorption, and they have clung to the belief that what was important to them as youth is important to all youth. And, their indoctrination has been successful.

My impression is that most young people my age who speak of the brilliance of "Howl" weren't really moved by it; rather, they just thought they were supposed to be moved by it. Although the poem can be rightfully commended for its audaciousness, and does have genuine moments of lyrical beauty, I tend to find its self-absorption and presumptuousness frustrating. For me, the poem is an engaging, amusing, and even well-crafted artifact of the period, yet it now lacks some credibility and a legitimate contemporary relevance.

In many ways, "Howl" represents the worst the Boomer generation had to offer--though perhaps also the best. Ginsberg displays the petulant qualities of the Boomers--their smugness and self-centeredness--from the opening lines of his poem:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn / looking for an angry fix (9)

I cannot help but agree with Phillip Lopate, who--in his article, "Howl and Me"--finds it just a tad presumptuous of Ginsberg to declare himself the spokesman of "his" generation. It seems a bit unfair for someone to speak on behalf of everyone who, by mere coincidence, was born within the same fifteen year window. Not only does Ginsberg (and I will use "Ginsberg" rather than "the speaker") find it appropriate to appoint himself the representative of his generation, he manages to point out that he and his friends are "the best minds" of it. In "Footnote to 'Howl'" he goes as far as to canonize his comrades ("Holy Kerouac")! In many ways, "Howl" becomes Ginsberg's self-indulgent ode to the brilliance of his divinely-inspired clique, who speak for the less capable through idiosyncratic art and reckless behavior.

This presumption to speak for an entire generation is even more frustrating when one looks at the  behavior Ginsberg describes and, at least implicitly, endorses:

"angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly / connection to the starry dynamo in the machi / nery of night, / who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat / up smoking in the supernatural darkness of / cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities / contemplating jazz...who were expelled from the academies" (9)

Ah, the romance of dropping out and getting high! Of course, with the exception of those lucky few such as Ginsberg who could behave this way and succeed, this philosophy really is nothing more than a romance. Lopate--who does admit to enjoying the poem both as a youth and an adult--criticizes Ginsberg's romanticization. Lopate write:

What about all those working stiffs who would not end up raving lunatics, who could not afford to drop out, were we automatically judged mediocre, and condemned to a lower status than 'the best minds,' by dint of negleting or refusing to fall apart? (89)

I think Lopate helps illuminate a major problem of "Howl": in many ways, it is a spoiled teenagers fantasy. It is a shrieking cry for attention; an outburst. Tantrums are hard to ignore, and they can even be somewhat entertaining, but they're also irritating. I see "Howl" has something of a foot-stomping tantrum, even if it was borne of genuine frustration. I don't believe the legitimacy of that anger truly resonates with most young readers now, though. Perhaps they relate to the general sense of disillusionment in the poem, but I think it's more likely that teens enjoy the poem because they been told it's a teen's poem.

"Howl" is an interesting poem and not a poorly written poem. However, I do think that it has been unfairly exalted. In many ways, the Beats are a blip in the political, social, and artistic history of the United States. Yet, since it flourished during the youth of the Boomers--that period which forever defines them and they refuse to relinquish--it has been granted a prestige and importance it does not really deserve.

Posted by: Jack Ayres | February 29, 2008 at 10:51 PM

THE EAGLE FLIES: EAGLETON'S IDEAS & WHAT TO DO WITH THEM

You have to like the cover of The Ideology of the Aesthetic.  That's Terry Eagleton staring down at the rest of us.  He's wondering how he might explain those ideas of his to the masses.  But seriously--the Introduction that you read this week in conjunction with the first of half of Wallace Stevens' poetry provides an accurate example of a lot of the British/Marxist/Socio-Political criticism that was prevalent in the 80's and to a degree in the early 90's.  It's deadly serious stuff, so serious, it puts your eyes out reading some of it, and you wake up realizing you've killed your father and married your mother.

There is some complaining here about the current state of socialist criticism, and the ways in which it has effaced its roots in the grand tradition of social engagement.  Exactly how much time do I have for that?  How much time do I have for a committed academic of great gifts to scold us about our own ideas and adventures into social-service work?   Right, not much.

I assigned Eagleton because he summarizes for us an essential idea that we don't spend a lot of time talking about in graduate programs--he's right, alas, to complain--because American doesn't have a prominent and well respected tradition of socialist commentary.  Here's a fundamental idea--fundamental to Eagleton and many others--that we need to discuss:

Conceptions of the unity and integrity of the work of art, for example, are commonplaces of an 'aesthetic' discourse which stretches back to classical antiquity; but what emerges from such familiar notions in the late eighteenth century is the curious idea of the work of art as a kind of subject. (4)

It is a very big deal, this notion of the work of art as a kind of subject.  Why?  Because it speaks to the tendentious relationship between the subject and the object, the perceiver and the perceived.  Later on in the book, in the Chapter on Kant, Eagleton amplifies his idea:

That the individual subject should come to occupy centre stage, reinterpreting the world with reference to itself, follows logically enough from bourgeois economic and political practice.  But the more the world is thus sujectivized, the more this all-privileged subject begins to undermine the very objective conditions of its own preeminence.  The wider the subject extends its imperial sway over reality, the more it relativizes that terrain to its own needs and desires, dissolving the world's substance into the stuff of its own senses. (70)

One of the points that Eagleton is making here concerns, in a sense, Hirsch's notion, which we discussed in class, of "validity in  interpretation."  We begin to view the work of art as a subject the moment we begin to view it as an opportunity for each of us to interpret it.  We seize this opportunity the way we seize any opportunity for self-aggrandizement or profit:  to reinforce through our interpretations--in this case of the work of art--our own view of the world, our own set of values, our own perspective on whatever it is that falls within the expanding penumbra of our existence. 

It doesn't matter, for the time being, that our interpretations are offered up for different reasons; it doesn't matter that we might finally deem some of these reasons more defensible than others; it doesn't matter because in determining which are the more defensible ones we are, once again, extending the domain of the subject in its essential act of interpretation and amalgamation.  So, interpretation, hermeneutics, belongs essentially to the realm of the subject, and it is this subject that Eagleton identifies in the new version of art that arises in the eighteenth century and with which we are still grappling.

You're wondering what in the world would do with a poem, for example, after reading it, if we don't interpret it?  Or rather, how in the world will I make a living as an English teacher if I don't find some persuasive way of  interpreting in a public forum the poem that I have just read?  One way of beginning to understand the answer to that question is to remember what Aristotle said about catharsis.  Aristotle claimed that catharsis, the purging of pity and fear while viewing a tragedy, was the primary function of literary art and one of the most important social functions that art serves.

While there is a great deal of debate about what Aristotle meant precisely, you will notice that nowhere in that formulation does commentary make an appearance.  Aristotle is certainly dealing with what we would recognize as subjective emotions, pity and fear, but he is not enshrining that subject by recognizing their expression in an act of criticism as somehow necessary to the complete perception of the work. 

Poets, of course, are aware of this, and no one is more aware of this than Wallace Stevens.  His work has attracted some high-powered theorists because his work is powerfully theoretical on the subject of art's perception by those who are perceiving it naively, those who are perceiving it professionally, and those who are perceiving it simply   . . . to perceive it.  Once the subject is given free reign in interpretation--within those standards and limitations set by Fish's "interpretive communities"--then meaning is brokered like stocks on the stock market.

This is a concern to many writers.  It was a major concern of Wallace Stevens.  Look for it as you go through his poetry.

HUGHES, THE CANON, & THE FISH

I became acquainted with Langston Hughes's poetry when I was in high school (and largely unaware of my whiteness and of the complexity of the Harlem Renaissance), and as an avid blues and jazz fan, I immediately and unreservedly fell in love with his work. As an undergraduate, I discovered that Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston had a sort of falling out, which partially contributed to her relative obscurity for a number of years. I took (and to some extent, still take) this slight against Hurston personally, yet in spite of myself, I continued to be quite attracted to Hughes's poetry but also to begin to vaule it as more than just "good" poetry, as socially and culturally significant and as politically useful. This past week, I found myself weighing Hughes against George Schuyler by way of their discussion in the "Nation" over the existence of "Negro Art." For the first time, Schuyler's argument resonated with me more than Hughes's-- largely due to insights from postmodern feminism and the canons' possible construction/reification of difference. As usual, however, less than five minutes after picking up Hughes's collection of poetry, I was sold, ready to proclaim him the best poet of the twentieth century.

The point of relaying all of this flip-flopping is that whatever canon we include Hughes in (American, African American, etc.) and whatever his role in the Harlem Renaissance or politcal stance(s) that contributed to it, Hughes produced engaging and aesthetically pleasing poetry. In other words, at fifteen years old, I did not posess the historical/cultural knowledge (nor the political inclination) to fully appreciate the connections among the "head of vibrant hair/ Tamed down," the music's "hypodermic needle/ To his soul," and "Trouble" mellowing "to a golden note" of "Trumpet Player," but I liked the poem. Similarly, poems such as "Cross," "Silhouette," and "Dream Boogie" all spoke to me before I had (for better or worse) developed a certain "lens" through which to view literature.

Interestingly, as I think back upon that first experience with Hughes, I wonder if his poems did or did not "say" the same things to me that they do nearly ten years later-- that perhaps the only difference is that now I process his poems with a more sophisticated vocabulary or lens, that these beautifully crafted poems taught (the 15 year old) me about my world and the way it works without my even realizing it.

Of course, my current and self-conscious agenda(s), despite my love for Hurston and my fascination with Schuyler, easily fits in with that of Hughes. Yet I must confess that the last section of his "Selected Poems," "Words Like Freedom," is easily the weakest (in a lyric/literary/poetic sense). Interestingly, this section is also his most overtly political. (I think all of Hughes's poetry contains at least an implicit politics-- an assertion which may be attributed to my personal agenda for reading him). For example, "Freedom's Plow" fails to meet the standard set by "Dream Boggie" or "The Weary Blues."

What I am suggesting is, that if everyone (writers, poets, scholars, artists, etc.) possesses an agenda anyway, perhaps one measure of how "good" a poem is, or if it should be canonized, studied, is the extent to which that agenda remains subordinate to artistic, aesthetic concerns. In other words, Hughes's overall agenda is, generally, the same in "Dream Boggie" and "Freedom's Plow," but I would much rather read, study, and teach the former and believe it warrants more of our attention than the latter. However, this view, my view, of literature in general and of Hughes's poetry in particular, begs the question, with all of these agendas and lenses floating about, can we ever actually draw these distinctions with confidence that we are drawing the "right" ones? That we are acting in a responsible manner? That our distinctions will stand up to others'? Fish suggests that we cannot, and as someone who I suspect fits into his category of "leftist," I feel a bit disheartened by his suggestion.

Posted by: alschmidt | February 03, 2008 at 03:37 PM

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.