The Best American Poetry

Anti-Confessional

What it was like, I don't recall, or care to;

believe me, you should be grateful I spare you.

I'm Not Clowning, I'm Raving [by Jim Cummins]

I took a couple days off to check my humor levels.  When one speaks of MFA World one must make sure one's humor levels are up.  Most people, teachers or students, are pretty solemn about their position in MFA World; and the teachers especially don't like to have someone poke fun at their livelihoods, the source of their paychecks and ease, travel funds and professional develop-ment expenses. 

I was musing the other day about what a poet's learning curve was like maybe fifty years ago, in the 60s; I remembered the notion (actually, I remembered Robert Mezey telling me about it) of the poet's education, his or her "Grand Tour," that was prevalent then.  You lived in New York for a couple of years, soaking up the Village literary life especially, perhaps taking a master's at Columbia, as Larry Ferlinghetti and John Ashbery did, among others.  Then you spent a couple of years in the heart of the country, in Iowa City, taking an MFA there from the Writers' Workshop.  And then you completed your poetic education by spending another couple of years in Palo Alto and San Francisco, preferably on a Stegner fellowship, and studying with Yvor Winters (Thom Gunn famously did this).  As a working class kid, I found this leisure impossible to conceive of personally, but it did seem like a wonderful idea.  And not only were there fewer people vying for spots at these places, but there was also the sense (especially following WW II) that a writer existed prior to a writing program--that the writer came from somewhere else in society, already formed in a basic way, if needful of feedback and technical advice. 

Nowadays, maybe the biggest change from the old days is linked to the exponential growth of writing programs: writers are produced by the system.  They are born in undergrad creative writing classes taught by an older product of the system; they graduate with majors or minors in creative writing; they go immediately into graduate writing programs, then into jobs teaching creative writing; their writing lives are then lived in the maturity of networks, conferences, trips to friends' campuses for readings, management of their university resources in order to be able to invite the friends back to their own campuses, sabbaticals and leaves of absence funded by their universities, expenditure of travel and research funds, editing of journals and anthologies that include their friends within the system (and to show integrity, sometimes their enemies), service on panels and awards committees that give money and prizes to writers, almost all of whom reside inside the system, and service on search committees to hire other younger writers the system has produced.   

In his excellent book, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, David Myers quotes Don Justice, arguably the preeminent and most beloved teacher of poets, calling in 1984 the growth of writing programs a "pyramid scheme"--a Ponzi game, like Bernie Madoff's house of cards.  Myers lists 25 programs started by Iowa grads; these include: Skidmore, Eastern Washington, Colorado State, Western Michigan, Arkansas, Oregon, Montana, Massachusetts, Bowling Green, Penn State, Alabama, University of Chicago, Vanderbilt, and others.  I could add: Indiana, Arizona, Utah, and Florida, where Iowa grads either started the program or were instrumental at the beginning; and of course there's venerable old Stanford, whose program was started by Wallace Stegner (an Iowa native) after his sojourn in the Workshop in the early 1940s.  (This last sentence is my own doing; any error in fact is mine, not Myers, though I think I'm in the ballpark.)

Myers also points out that the rise of writing programs parallels the availability of money.  State legislatures were willing to fund these new programs (the growth period I'm talking about is mainly late-60s through early 80s).  Why?  Partly, I'm sure, because the country still supported higher education somewhat back then, but mostly because their customers--potential students--were willing to pay for such a course of study.  So Iowa grads were seminal in the proliferation of writing programs, and they were motivated to do this because they wanted cushy jobs like the ones Marvin and Don had--believe me, I know, I was there: "cushy" was an oft-used adjective.  To feed these positions--like Audrey, the plant in The Little Shop of Horrors--we need students, whom we grow, or "enable," within the system, from their birth at 18 or 19 through a graduate program, each one a ten- or fifteen-year harvesting.  And what we're "teaching" them first and foremost is not to be writers, but to be academics (shudder)--bureaucratic careerists.

So you assume I think this is all terrible; not so.  I'm just saying it's a system, and we're all gaming it--teachers, students, administrators, legislators.  When we lose sight of that fact--for example, when we claim for ourselves the sanctity of positing literature as a higher calling--we depress the inclination to be aware of our manipulations, as well as our abilities for gaming.  We are all products of a saved vs. damned culture built on a schizoid faultline.  Our ancestors claimed piety and chosenness, as well as the right to operate a slave trade, install the institution of slavery, and commit genocide on the Indians.  It's practically in our genes to tend toward extremism, toward absolutism; four hundred years of our existence tells us it's in our best interests to lie to ourselves.  Now the poet down the block isn't just a Language poet or a New Formalist, he's a devil; our own position has to be defended in an extreme way.  Obviously, this decreases chances for a reasoned criticism of his work.  The poetry economy is almost entirely an artificial one; poetry generates almost no economic interest in the country outside the ten or twenty thousand people in the general poetic community.  There's enough money in the system to attract gamers, but the money isn't generated by poetry itself: it's artificially pumped into the system via universities, arts foundations, gifts (the Lilly gift to Poetry is a recent notorious example), etc.  This lends an aura of unreality to the poetry side of MFA World.

I kid the Language Poets on occasion (I know they can take it; they're good sports), but on one level theirs was an entreprenurial agenda meant to match well-educated middle- and upper-middle class white kids with academic jobs.  They hooked up with some theorists--Marjorie Perloff among the most prominent--who were pushing their own theory-driven agendas in academia during the 80s and 90s; and the theorists helped the poets establish academic creds and an academic audience.  More power to them; and this didn't prevent a number of really good writers to emerge from the Language chrysallis: I'm thinking of Lynn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, and Michael Davidson, in particular, as far as ones I myself admire.  The problem with any powerful movement, though, is what is spawns.  Like the ten percent of interesting theorists who spawned the ninety percent of forlorn academics wandering through their dark night of the soul, while they teach Derrida at Lake Oswego State at Onomatopoeia, the Language group spawned a middlebrow "movement" in our MFA programs.  These students call themselves "experimental" writers--as if all language-use isn't experiment--and they seem to offer watered-down versions of Language poetry.  A friend of mine calls it "language display" poetry; another calls a subset of it "the narcissism of filigree."  They lack the rigor and vision of their predecessors, but have settled on their metier, I think, because it's perfect for gaming the current version of the system. 

Now here's the wonderful irony: the "current version of the system" is, of course, ourselves.  Our desire for the cushy has come full circle.  I think we all assumed the best and the brightest would inherit our mantles.  When one system battles another, real energy is unleashed: think of the late 50s, the Battle of the Anthologies, the Raw versus the Cooked.  What we've got now is just one system; there is no rival system.  The battle to supplant us is tepid, and from the inside: hothouse ideologues we've grown ourselves.  From the Cooked to the Raw to the Half-Baked.  Again, I aspire only to be the messenger here; I've opted out, which makes me a loser.  I no longer teach writing classes.  I don't want to know these people anymore; and from where I sit, they don't want to know me.  But I could be completely wrong; maybe what I think I'm witnessing from outside is really a "movement," an effort to cleanse the system from the inside, a peristalsis.  Now there's a thought. 

In Over My Head, Pt 1 [by Jim Cummins]

I wanted to make some observations about why our criticism is so bitter and vindictive, instead of respectfully serious, even if sometimes harshly so; and offer some comments about teaching creative writing and the poetry these programs are producing nowadays.  But there's so much to say along those lines (not to mention that so much has been said, and much better than I can offer), that I feel a need to respond to a few comments, from Laura and Mitch, and go from there. 

Auden was famously kind and, as John Ashbery says, "notedly" ethical.  But "negative" writing/ reviewing means different things to different folkses.  The exact quote is "One cannot review a bad book without showing off."  Not only does that speak to a personal evaluation writ large to include, perhaps less accurately, all others; but Auden also famously refused to select a winner for the Yale contest in 1955, and would have done so in 1956--with Anthony Hecht's full support--had he not been able to request O'Hara's and Ashbery's manuscripts from the reject pile (at Yale). So he was perfectly capable of the strongest "negative" criticism in fact, though he didn't see fit to write an essay addressing the flaws in the works of the 24 or so finalists (12 each year, presumably). He obviously saw a "system-wide" failure of some sort, but it didn't bother him; I wonder why not. Certainly, he had no obligation to (would Randall Jarrell have felt such an obligation?); but an awful outcome of this showed up in the TLS last year, in the form of a horrible homophobic letter from Jascha Kessler, one of the finalists in 1956, who had simmered bitterly over this rejection for more than fifty years!  Maybe criticism (again, honestly and seriously rendered, no matter how harsh; that is, rooted in instances and examples one can point to, that gives a reader the possibility of making up his or her own mind) is a kind of (meta)fiscal accounting: pay as you go, critic/reader and poet both knowing what the p(l)aying field is. 

This begs the question, are there any critics around like this, or is everyone a bitter partisan? Three terrific and measured critics come to mind immediately: James Longenbach, Mark Ford, and Angie Mlinko. But the kind of criticism -- or maybe I should say delivery system -- I'm talking about is personal and professional both: it can show up in print, but it functions on a day-to-day basis among our friends and students who are writers. To address each other in this way is, practically speaking, very possibly the only serious response the vast majority of writers out there is going to receive.  Which makes it all the more important, and brings me to a consideration of the type of criticism one receives in a creative writing program. Laura makes the good point -- and DL implies this, too, in a recent statement about the new ascendancy of writing programs -- that there can't be anything wrong with the proliferation of these programs, as they foster good writing and sophisticated readers. The implication is that all programs broaden students, turn them into good citizens of the creative writing republic. Maybe that's so; but the institutionalization of writing has had some curious results, which I would like to explore, preferably after I read to my daughter so she goes to sleep.

Save Vs. Damned Redux

While she and DL are traveling, Stacey has asked me to blog for a week; I jumped at the chance.  The past month on BAP has been pretty fertile; I've particularly liked recent posts by T. R. Hummer, Katha Pollitt, and Elena Karina Byrne, along with DL's quote from W. S. DiPiero's notebooks, and his own teaser first paragraph from his intro to the new BAP anthology.  The quality of the writing has been high, thus rather intimidating, but I'll plunge ahead bravely and add some thoughts in various posts about poetry criticism, teaching creative writing, and random thoughts about contemporary poetry/poems. 

The thing that intrigues me about our poetry criticism is that we are so extreme, although when you think about it, why shouldn't our criticism reflect the cultural moment, one of the most divisive in our history?  I've long thought that Calvinism's basic tenet, that we are either saved or damned, not only outfitted us to be perfect little individual engines of capitalism, but also gave us our deepest sense of identity.  I'm no sociologist, but I'm guessing that most or all humans have a built-in sense that we're better than the guy or tribe down the block; still, they have things we like, so we trade with them, maybe we fall in love once in a while, or have festivals where we get drunk together.  We never let go our suspicions of them, nor the feeling that in some essential way we're a little bit better than they are; but we get along, make deals, coexist.  It's only in the three great monotheisms that the people down the block are traitors to the human, and absolute emanations of evil; and as Americans, our legacy is we're the most saved of all; chosen, in fact. 

It seems as if we're forgetting how to coexist; I'm not taking a high road here: I'm as bruised and bitter as anyone else.  But I was struck the responses to Shaindel Beers's poem posted here on 9/1, both in support of the poem and lambasting it. 

First things first: we can all choose to like or dislike this or any poem; the crux is, what will be our standard of praise or blame?  An email friend of mine--I won't reveal her name--wrote to me that the poem was "dull sentimental prose" and that the "two sane responses are shouted down in the town meeting."  That's strong, of course, but it holds the seed of discourse; it brings up aspects of the poem that can be discussed: perhaps the imagery is trite or unclear; perhaps the rhythms are too prose-like for some sensibilities; perhaps the manipulations of sentimentality are present.  What about the contributions of the "two sane voices"?  They declare the poem "babble," "not sufficiently literate," "adolescent," "hackneyed and vapid," "trite."  I think the difference here--the reason that these responses don't admit of discourse--is that they are of a convinced other side; there's no room for argument, discussion, here.  Beers is obviously damned, without recourse, let alone discourse.

And that very well might be, but the jury is still out if this kind of sneering is all we have as a rebuttal witness.  I think my comments here are mild, but real--that is, honestly offered; but someone reading this might demand that I take a stand on the poem.  I find merit in the poem, but I question some things.  For example, is the word "geniuses" in the first line ironic or not?  Much depends on that.  It might seem obvious that it is, but absolutely nothing in the poem indicates that the parents are even smart.  They seem utterly devoid of self-awareness, generosity, or entry-level skills of parenting.  Yet "smartness" seems a lynchpin of the poem; and the reverse--that's everybody here is stupid--doesn't carry the whole weight of the poem, either.  The word "But" at the beginning of the eighth line seems to take at face value the praise they offered to each other in letters; and the penultimate line seems to want the reader to supply an image of Richard Burton drunkenly quoting Shakespeare as he hurls his imprecations at the Helen Mirren mother staggering through a Plath-litany of disgust as she's handcuffed off to jail.  Too much of this poem has to be supplied by the reader; and if you invoke a meta-argument, and say it's a piece of damaged work emanating from a damaged consciousness, I just don't buy it.  This leads me to feel that the last line is, in fact, sentimental and manipulative.  On the other hand, I applaud Beers for trying to talk about important subject matter; and I suspect that that's the chord, or one of them, she touches in readers who are just as dogmatic as the naysayers in the comments column.  So much of our poetry these days seems "faked"--in the sense that W. S. DiPiero means, or I assume he means--that readers are hungry for language that addresses their real lives.   

"The Newer Critics" [by Jim Cummins]

The Newer Critics

They arrived at doubt
through an excess of certainty.
“Avuncular” was a dish
of humble pie for them.

They were the first generation
of new critics taught
by the first generation of new critics.
Their smiles were pointed.

They called a place like this
“Harvard on the Ohio”
and tried to get Hardy’s novels
into every conversation you had.

I’d say I liked Hardy’s poems
better, watch them flatten
their hands on their cheeks,
and swoon, like they’d wandered

into a painting by Munch.
They didn’t like Munch,
but recommended The Monk,
if you needed a trashy read.

-- Jim Cummins

On First Looking into Pretty Boy's Basho

On First Looking Into Pretty Boy’s Basho

Now ’e don’t get into
the wife’s cups anymore,
’e’s in ’is own, like that poet,
Basho — wasn’t he always
getting drunk and falling into
the river, or was that
the Chinese guy?  Who

knows, who remembers,
cares?  The new technologies
make it so simple to place
oneself next to a name
that does one honor: gilt
by association.  Stories
open into the past,

and the teller gets
the credit, not the dead
heroes, if heroic
they were.  (Though what’s
heroic about falling
drunk into a river?)

I drove a young poet
to the airport once; he
said, Chekhov, out of the blue.
Just Chekhov, and it lay
there like a dime on a table.
When you’re in a good
mood, moves like this you

see through, and I felt good:
it was power, a play, a
way of distancing himself
from one with whom
he’d shared a few too
many the night before.

I looked at that big head
trying to lower itself
into its jacket.  And said,
unable to keep from giggling,
“I wonder what you say
to a woman the next
day?  Mansfield.  Lollobrigida.

Or if she too has an MFA.:
Doolittle …”

-- James Cummins

"He Wouldn't Hurt a Fly ..."

In responding to the posting of a Donald Justice poem last week, I mentioned the story Charles Wright tells of a conference with DJ when Wright was a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.  During the conference Don swallowed a fly. Here's the whole tale, as CW tells it.
<<
As I say, this [Don's] concentration was much in evidence in his teaching as well [as his tennis].  I shall never forget my first conference with Don to go over my poems.  It was, in fact, my first conference with anyone about my poems, and I was anxious, to say the least.  The subject matter of our conversation--Don's conversation--escapes me now.  Some ineptitude I was trying to suggest was a poem.  Something, no doubt, about goddesses and the Aegean Sea.  But Don, as was his manner, was taking it seriously, very seriously.  Certainly more serious than I, having already seen in a couple of workshop sessions what the level of performance was, a level far above what I was doing.  In any case, Don was patiently going over the poem.  At the same time, a fly was going over it, too.  And over us, circling our heads, circling the page, circling Don's face as he kept his concentration ardently on the poem and on what he was saying.  I, of course, was mesmerized by the fly as it got closer and closer to Don's face, and, abruptly, as Don inhaled to say something, flew into his mouth.  His mouth!  Don gulped.  Bye fly.  He actually swallowed the damn thing, so intent was he on the poem at hand.  "Did I swallow that fly?" he asked, astonished.  I allowed as to how he had.  "Jesus," he said.  Amazing!  Then he actually went back to the poem.  From that moment, he had me in the palm of his hand."
>>
This comes from an essay, "Improvisations on Donald Justice," in a volume of Workshop reminiscences, A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, edited by Robert Dana (University of Iowa Press, 1999).

The Integrity of Poets [by Jim Cummins]

In the Times a few weeks back (April 25) an article by Edward Rothstein, "The Sorrow, the Pity, the Celebration: France Under the Nazis," reviewed an exhibition at the New York Public Library (the exhibition runs through July 25), "Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation," organized by Robert Paxton.  It was originally shown in Caen, France, in 1980 "as a display of a growing archive of war material," presented by Olivier Corpet and Claire Paulhan, and has been "reshaped" by Paxton, "whose 1972 book, Vichy France, outlined how avidly collaborationist that regime really was."

The show sounds terrific, brimming with material, much or most of it unfamiliar.  Rothstein says, "A sense of disorder is partly the welcome price of seeing so much." He tries to give some sense of the enormous amount of information in the exhibit, such as the fact that the avant-garde writer Jacques Audiberti, because of paper rationing that benefited collaborationist French writers, "wrote his novel, Monorail, on wallpaper supplied by his father, a builder." He also shows how muddled and/or self-serving the majority of French writers were in the face of German oppression. Some, like Sartre and Cocteau, "went along with the dominant power for the ride," whereas others, like Irene Nemirovsky (Suite Francaise), remained ignorant until it was too late. (Nemirovsky, a Jew, converted to Catholicism, or tried to, but was sold out by the French police.) All in all, a pretty sad tale of authorial cowardice -- no wonder we teach our students that the author does not exist anymore -- with few exceptions. Rothstein says, "... very few [writers]... like Andre Malraux joined the underground armed forces to fight the Germans."

Here is the last paragraph of Rothstein's article. "This is not ... a tale of heroism or far-ranging insight.  Though Mr. Paxton shows that poets were, as a group, particularly resistant to the collaborationist lure [italics mine], for the most part, the touted visionary powers of writers left all too much in the darkness."

So my question is, how come the poets were so much less willing to go down the road that led, eventually, to Derrida and Paul de Man, and beyond?

-- Jim Cummins

Hot Off The Presses!

InCreduLit.com, a scholarly service I use frequently when teaching literature, has expanded its focus to include cable television (more on that later) and a 24/7 news bureau, through which it monitors other news-invention services such as itself.  This item is just in--hot off the press, as it were; I send it along in the interests of full disclosure.

"The New York Fabricator, an imaginary tabloid that invents news it thinks people want to hear, has reported today that the State Department is about to deploy a new weapon in the war on terror: Mary Qaeda Counterterrorist Ensemble and Cosmetics, Inc.  Soon a fleet of pink Cadillacs will descend on the Middle East as "Mary Qay" representatives target Muslim women with a unique product line that includes eyeliners, mascara, forehead exfoliators, and lively new burqa styles.  Under its new Secretary, former senator Hillary Clinton, the Department seeks to implement its controversial "Lysistrata" policy, which encourages Muslim women to withhold sex from their terrorist husbands in an attempt to shorten jihad.  By making the top halves of Muslim women's faces 'irresistible,' Mary Qay reps hope to entice Muslim men to 'lay their guns and their women down at the same time'--winning  the coveted pink Cadillacs for the reps in the process.  Republicans were quick to attack the new policy.  Former Representative Tom DeLay, in an interview on Fox News, expressed contempt for the plan.  'Give me a break,' he sneered.  'A Cadillac's a powerful lot of car for a woman ...'  And former Vice President Dick Cheney bitterly called the program a 'pathetic half-measure,' compared to the one he tried to implement in 2004, which involved turning the Mary Qay Cadillacs into powerful car bombs; this initiative was narrowly defeated after Democrats and others pointed out that the main victims of the blasts would be women and children.  In a related pilot program, 'Mary Qay Without Borders,' Mary Qay doctors will offer prosthetic limbs to replace those lost after amputations due to adultery, while Mary Qay plastic surgeons will treat survivors of 'honor killing' attacks whose faces have been  disfigured by acid."

A Great Larkin Story (Not Mine)

David Yezzi's post and David Lehman's comment following bring up the basic issues all Larkin lovers (I don't think there ARE any Larkin haters, except maybe Czeslaw Milosz) mull over frequently.  When you read Andrew Motion's biography you see what a controlling, often obnoxious personality he was; the compartmentalizing of his love/emotional life is particularly repellant.  My favorite index to this side of his character is the spanking; he found spanking young girls very titillating and belonged to at least one circle of fellow spanking-lovers, the members (!) of which traded spanking magazines among themselves.  Thus assuring a spanking good time was had by all!  (I love the word 'spanking.'  Perhaps I'm a closet spanker.  Wanker, more likely.)  And of course, as both Davids imply, this control-freak aspect permeates his work and career, along with his great erudition, love of jazz, amazing intelligence, and all the other qualities that blend to give us these fabulous poems which I personally have loved since I was fortunate enough to discover them.

But my story is only indirectly about this stuff; and it comes to me from Phil Levine, another great admirer of Larkin, who was visiting England with his wife, Franny--this would be sometime in the late 60s or early 70s--and who wangled an extraordinarily rare and precious appointment with Larkin for dinner.  I don't have the details as to how this came about, but I know Phil relates it as an event that was so rare--a visiting American poet granted an audience with the Bath librarian--that he regarded it with awe and gratitude.  He and Franny were tremendously excited and felt greatly privileged; they showed up at the restaurant and eagerly awaited the poet.  Phil was particularly keen on talking to him about jazz: Artie Shaw, Coltrane.  Phil was friends with guitarist Kenny Burrell in Detroit.  Larkin was about a half hour late, or more; and when he showed up he was exceedingly shy.  Conversation was imposingly difficult; and about 15 minutes into it, Larkin contrived to spill a pitcher--not a glass, a pitcher--of water all over his stomach and lap.  He jumped up, made apologies about going to get towel--and never came back!  Phil and Franny never saw him again.

I love this story for many reasons, not least of which is Levine's ingenuousness and enthusiasm, though the joke is on him: as he tells it, he's completely on Larkin's side.  And of course it's a quick look into the personality of maybe the best British poet of the last half-century; certainly one of them.