11. The river ran red: poetry wars

early skirmishes at Rockford College

Almost from the beginning, poetry for me was a matter of contention.  The fight began before I had shown a poem to anyone.  I had read poetry seriously for several years in solitude, then thought to give my reading some structure and weight with a year or two of formal education.  So it was that in my mid-twenties, after dropping our of high school, spending several years in factories and a year in the wilderness, I made my way to college, not for the degree but for poetry and philosophy.

The literature in which I immersed myself was largely Romantic and Victorian.  As my choice of schools was predetermined by geography and economy, I spent no time in searching for a school where nineteenth-century literature was emphasised.  I simply enrolled in the college of my hometown and took what was on offer.  As it happened, the college turned out to be a first-rate liberal arts college, with both exceptional professors and many exceptional students.  In that respect I was altogether fortunate.  However, if I had hoped for professors sympathetic to my literary heroes: the Romantics, the Transcendentalists, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Symbolists, I was to be disappointed.    (see ~~ early years III: the college above Keith Creek, defending the Romantics.)

Nonetheless, it was a most excellent and entertaining education, and I would not trade it for anything.  I puttered along in the halls of academe for a number of years, taking every course of literature and philosophy on offer, and as much history as I could find time for.  When finally I left toward the end of my twenties, I was nowhere close to earning a degree but was beginning to feel tolerably assured in my views.  I still esteemed my original heroes as highly as ever, but the breadth of my enthusiasms now extended back several centuries, into the eighteenth, seventeenth and sixteenth, as well as forward into the twentieth.   

 
after eight years, return to college

After an absence of seven or eight years of hardscrabble subsistence in rural Colorado and Minnesota, fate again landed me in northern Illinois and I was able to resume my college studies on a part-time basis.  Much had changed in my absence, but most of my former professors were still at their posts and with a little effort I was able to rekindle many of our old arguments.  I was now in my mid-thirties and just beginning to publish, and was finding myself in a whole new arena of literary disputes

a new landscape, dominated by theory

In my absence, literary studies seemed to have been usurped by theory.  As I understood them, the fundamentals of post-structuralism embodied ideas which were familiar to me from my study of Kant: that the individual cannot escape the cage of his own conditioning, that he can perceive nothing truly, but only through the limited and distorted lens of his own senses and culture.  That the thing-in-itself, if it exists at all, is unknowable.  That there are no facts, but only our interpretations of them, and that these interpretations are necessarily in a state of continual flux and revision.   These were not new ideas.  I had encountered similar notions years before in Zen Buddhism, William Blake and even Carlos Casteneda.  And I continued to encounter them as I read Heraclitus, Berkeley, Hume and Nietsche

It was in the application of these ideas to language that I retained doubts: the idea that language can have no direct relation to reality and can thus refer only to itself, that language is tautological; that all any text can convey are its intrinsic cultural biases and presuppositions which are relative and temporal.

skepticism

I felt this was overstating the case.  While language may be incapable of direct reference to a noumenal realm, which by definition is unnameable and indescribable, it most certainly can refer to and accurately describe shared human experience.  The rise of human technology and culture over some thirty thousand years attests to this.  In its assertion, arrived at by a species of relentless, overly literal reasoning, that language not only can refer to nothing universal, or even commonly true, but only to other texts, I felt that post-structuralism had itself lost touch with reality

I also remained skeptical that we as humans could only posit a noumenal realm, a realm of universals, but could have no direct apprehension of it.  The experience of shamans and mystics suggested otherwise, as did the psychology of Carl Jung.   There are, to be sure, human limitations to our perception and our language, but I did not believe the extent of those limitations was a settled matter.  Post-structualists, like the logical positivists before them, were prepared to shut and bolt the door at a certain point and declare everything on the other side of it off limits, once and for all.  But I couldn’t help but wonder, who had appointed them the gate-keepers

a return to origins

Somewhere in the midst of working all this out for myself, I undertook what I thought to be an essentially modest task: the writing of a body of narrative poems about the rural Illinois region where I had grown up, along the upper Spoon River and its tributaries .  Whatever the ultimate nature of language and reality, I was writing about what I knew, as simply and directly as was able.  It was this undertaking which was to entangle me in one of the minor literary

From the beginning, the narratives I wrote tended to take the form of blank verse iambic pentameter.  There were three masters of rural blank verse narratives and I immersed myself in each of them over a period of several years, beginning with Wordsworth  (whose Prelude I read through twice, with care, and all his other blank verse narratives, especially The Ruined Cottage) –  Robinson (all of his middle-length and book-length blank verse narratives, a few of them, such as Issac and Archibald, repeatedly) –  and Frost (especially North of Boston) .  I also read and reread most of Jeffers’ long narratives, which influenced me greatly, though not in regards to form

resistance on all fronts to my use of traditional forms

It may be that if a young poet today were to start out writing narrative poems in traditional forms, no eyebrows would be raised, but in the late 1970s and early 80s it was very different.  None of the advice I received from editors, critics and other poets addressed the quality of my writing, but only on my choice of form.  It was as if I had walked stark naked into a Baptist church and everyone from the minister to the smallest toddler rushed at me with some article of clothing with which to cover myself, saying: Here, quick, put this on before you embarrass yourself and everyone else.   No matter to whom I showed my poems, the response was always: Get rid of the rhyme, get rid of the meter.  No one writes like that anymore.

isolation

Before long I stopped showing my poetry to anyone but Virginia and occasional friend.  We were living an isolated life at the time, on twenty acres of forest in rural Minnesota, surrounded by books, with no radio or television, for about seven years.

loss and solitude

Then in late 1986 everything was swept away.  Virginia was killed and for a long time I all but lost my ability to function.  I lost our home and virtually all possessions except for some clothes and a small collection of books, mostly poetry.  I remained in Minnesota for the rest of the winter, living in a small trailer in the woods, then returned to my parents’ home in northern Illinois in the spring and began slowly to put myself back together.  I found some clerical work, returned to college part-time, but for the better part of each day, for about a year, I kept to myself.  I had a favorite park, where Virginia and I had often gone, where I could be alone in the woods and write, and I spent several hours a day in a monastery of the Poor Clares where the Sisters generously allowed me access to the dark silence of a closed chapel for an hour or two each afternoon and sometimes permitted me to work alone in their cloistered garden

a new life in the arts

After a year of relative solitude and silence I met my present wife, Marian, and a new phase of my life began, a life of immersion in the arts to an extent that was new to me.  Virginia and I had spent as much time as we could in galleries and museums and the occasional concert hall, but we were desperately poor and frequently cut off from the city. 

Marian was a professor of art history, languages and medieval studies, had performed and taught ballet, been an actress in musicals, a jazz singer in supper clubs, and had for many years been married to a professional classical musician, with whom she was still very close.  My life of nearly hermetic solitude for the previous fifteen years had come to an end and gradually my days and evenings became filled with visits to galleries, plays and performances, openings and concerts, dinners and conversation with artists from every field.

return to Spoon River

In such a setting, surrounded by so much unaccustomed artistic energy, I began writing with a new conviction and depth of focus.  It proved the perfect time to resume my writing of narrative poems about my family. The loss of Virginia and everything else had impelled me to cast as far back into my  life as possible in search of some sort of bedrock, for something so indisputably my own that could could not be taken from me.  I sought it in my earliest memories and in particular in the stories I had grown up with about the lives  of my maternal grandparents whose origins, when I was a child, had seemed almost mythic. My grandmother, America Swango, was born and raised in poverty (she suffered all her life from the effects of childhood malnutrition) in a one-room log cabin in the mountains of eastern Kentucky on land her family had settled in the 1780s.  My grandfather, Alpheus Appenheimer, sprang literally from the earth itself, being born in a one-room sod dugout on the Kansas frontier in the early 1890s, during one of the severest blizzards on record.  He was kept from freezing by the warmth of his mother, who huddled with him under a pile of quilts.  After several years his parents, with three small children, beaten down by years of drought and low prices, returned to Illinois where they had earlier lost a farm to hog cholera.  They made the journey from Kansas to Spoon River by covered wagon, with one cow tied behind.  Before leaving, they had dug the still-unsprouted seeds from the parched fields, collecting them in a sack, so as to have something to start with when reached Illinois.

For the next several years I returned repeatedly to the farms of my family near Spoon River, collecting every story, photograph, letter and document of my grandparents’ lives, reconstructing them as completely as possible, with attendent stories and histories of the surrounding region as well — rediscovering, perhaps recreating myself in the process.  From this familial bedrock then, over a period of years, a book of narrative poems gradually emerged.

By the early 1990s, now in my early 40s, as my book was taking shape, I submitted a few poems to  journals.  Earlier I had examined the editorial policies of a great many journals, and read copies of them in college libraries, and could as a result make a realistic guess which journals would send my poems back unread simply because they were in rhyme and meter. Some stated a bias against traditional form bluntly in their editorial guidelines, though most didn’t address the issue directly.  If I had access to a several-years run of a journal, I would look through the issues systematically, looking for anything other than short free-verse lyrics, but in journal after journal, that is all I found. After eliminating these, there weren’t many left.   Some journals stated in their guidelines that any form or style was acceptable, provided the quality was high.  Even in these I rarely found poems that were not short, free-verse lyrics, but I decided to give them a try.  Poems went into envelopes and off through the mail and eventually a few were accepted and published.

The “New Formalism”

It was about this time that I first heard of the New Formalism (now more generally known by the term ‘Expansive Poetry’).  Many things about this movement caught my attention, and my response to them was both positive and negative.  That there were a significant number of poets my age who wrote in traditional forms was a great surprise.  For over a decade, writing in relative isolation in rural Colorado and Minnesota, I had encountered only two other poets who wrote in rhyme and meter, and they were as obscure and isolated as myself. I never dreamed that significant numbers of poets across the country were writing in traditional forms. I had yet to stumble across any of them in the literary journals. That such poets almost all turned out to be professors was a disappointment, but hardly a surprise.  That, as a movement, they were associated with political conservativism caught me rather off-guard.  The use of language, like the use of any medium, involves epistomological assumptions about the nature of that medium, but any given artisitic technique can be used to any political end.  As I encountered characterizations of the New Formalists as political conservatives, I never knew whether the descriptions were factual or merely suppositional. In all my correspondence and conversations with the poets themselves over several years, the subject simply never came up.

aristocracy of the avant-garde

In any case, historically, activists of the left have tended to favor social realism to reach the widest possible audience as opposed to experimental techniques which narrow one’s audience drastically.   In Paris, in the 1890s, among the numerous anarchist enclaves which were flourishing at the time, there was a considerable amount of debate on just this point.  Though attempting to make common cause, the emphasis of many artists on experimental technique was viewed by other activists and artists, such as Peter Kropotkin and Emile Verhaeren, as self-centered and politically regressive. 

When leftist poets and critics today assert that experimental poetry such as “language poetry”  is best suited to progressive or revolutionary causes, while more traditional uses of meter and narrative are intrinsically reactionary, they betray an ignorance of their own history.  There is nothing progressive about an art which alienates or bewilders its audience.  There is nothing wrong with such art — far from it – but it can hardly claim to be the voice of the proletariat.  Such an art is for the select few only and, as such, is anti-populist and aristocratic.

Tolstoy on the avant-garde

Tolstoy believed that art which was incomprehensible to most people was inferior as art.  In his view the greatest art was comprehensible to anyone, its general accessibility being one prerequisite of greatness.  Tolstoy went so far as to express this idea in economic terms: art for the few, exclusive art, was created for and enjoyed by the wealthy elite who owed their wealth and leisure to the labor of the working classes. 

I would propose a slight adjustment of this idea for the current situation: that art of the avant garde, exclusive art, is created by and for the educated elite, who have completely lost touch with the working classes in this country.  Tolstoy complained that the art being created in his own time was incomprehensible to all but a tiny minority, and faulted the art rather than the unschooled masses.  We are in essentially the same situation today in America, where most of the “cutting-edge” art, in all media, but especially in poetry, is created in, published by and disseminated within universities for a university audience.  (It might be argued that, in our democratic society, higher education is the privilege of all, but the truth of course is that a university education is increasingly available only to the wealthy, the connected, or the gifted.  For the rest it is available only at the cost of incurring enormous personal debt).     

Avant-garde art is, by its own definition, exclusive.  That historically the avant-garde has been associated with the Left, who have always expressed solidarity with the working classes (who generally find avant-garde art incomprehensible), is a contradiction that the avant-garde in all periods has never cared to face.  That the New Formalists (associated with Conservatives who have never given a damn about the working classes) have, on the other hand, held up as a guiding light the principal of accessibility to the widest possible range of readers, including the working classes, is ironic to say the least.  The cultural left, with its allegiance to experimentation and its emphasis on “shocking the bourgeoisie”, has lost all contact with the middle class and working class alike, and would not know how to begin communicating with such people if it wanted to.   The cultural principal it adheres to is a kind of “trickle-down aesthetics” — that by ignoring the cultural life of the under-educated majority, and concentrating solely on its own involuted cultural milleu, it can somehow positively affect the whole.    Such condescension is staggering.

The “Poetry Wars” of the early 90s: I enter the fray

For a period of time during the early 1990s I engaged in an extended correspondence with a number of poets associated with New Formalism. I still have these letters, which deal with the poetical issues of the day, and as I find time to reread them, I will summarize some of their main points here. I also published two contentious essays on New Formalism during this time, which grew out of an exchange of ideas with Dana Gioia, David Mason, RS Gwynn and others.

My first publication was a response to an essay by Jonathan Holden, “The Old Formalism”, which appeared in the literary journal Verse, in which he accused the New Formalists of dishonesty and asserted, among other things, that the use of metered verse, by its nature, results in conventional language, a lack of subjectivity or “individual voice”, a public rather than personal tone, and an awkward joining of syntax to line. My response to Professor Holden, which the editors of Verse characterized as “lively”, was published in the subsequent issue. It can be read here.

My second foray into the “Poetry Wars” was an essay published in Sparrow 61: A Yearbook of the Sonnet, under the title “Breaking the Linear Deadlock”, later retitled: “Breaking into the Dragon’s Lair: The Death of Modernism & the Re-opening of the Past”. In this essay I answered certain critics of the New Formalism (Dianne Wakoski, Vernon Shetley, Joseph Conte and Ira Sadoff), called into question their linear, progressive view of literary history, and suggested that the literary past be viewed not as burden or baggage, but as treasure-trove. The essay can be read in its entirety here.

 literary nationalism

One charge in particular which was leveled against the use of traditional forms which I found especially galling was that it was unAmerican.  Their argument, as I understood it, was that traditional forms were of European origin; therefore to employ them was to remain indentured to European, specifically British, standards.  The truest American strain in poetry was identified with the ideas  of Emerson and the technique of Whitman, both of which departed radically from British ideas and prosody.

This is a not unreasonable argument, but I have never liked having my options narrowed by anyone else, for whatever reason.  Besides, a pluralistic society will always have numerous artisitic traditions, each with a valid claim on being considered “American”: the Whitman poetic tradition is but one of many. 

Among American poets of the twentieth century it was Robinson, Frost and Jeffers which most interested me, and each of them, with such deeply engrained regional characteristics, seemed more natively American than any other poets I had encountered.  Yet all three had roots which drew deeply from European sources, and this made complete sense to me.  America was for several centuries a colony of Europe; it was settled chiefly by Europeans who maintained an intimate connection with Europe, especially England, throughout its history. 

Artisitically, to distinguish oneself from Europe and to realize oneself fully as American, it is first necessary to come to terms, as much as possible, with the full breadth and depth of one’s pre-American heritage.  For Americans today, as pluralistic as we have become, this heritage could be from virtually anywhere on the planet, but in my own case it is entirely from Europe.  But it is not so much our blood heritage that I refer to, as the heritage of our language and its literature: thus my emphasis on England and Europe.

We can’t depart from something until we know what we are departing from.  Before Robert Frost could become a major American poet he first went to England and became one of the greatest of the Georgian poets.  EA Robinson came to terms with the heritage of England by writing a cycle of Arthurian poems greater in scope and depth than the Arthurian cycle of his great predecessor, Tennyson.  Jeffers lay claim to his European heritage by mastering the classics, writing a significant translation of Medea, and then imbuing his own highly original and uniquely American narratives with the themes and motifs of Greek tragedy. 

I had always viewed the English heritage in literature as my own.  My English ancestors first came to the New World in 1637 and for the next 139 years saw themselves as Englishmen.  How many centuries prior to that they dwelt in England and ancient Britain is anyone’s guess, but as they were primarily of Welsh stock who had moved into Yorkshire in the 14th century, they were probably Britons since the time of Stonehenge.  As for their American identity, my English ancestors, along with other of my forebears from elsewhere in Europe, earned it fighting the British in two wars. 

But, as I mentioned above, quite apart from the historical claim, I counted the English tradition in literature as my own by right of simply speaking and writing the language.  The literary inheritance of England belongs to any writer who masters the English language.  The implication that an American poet somehow betrays his native soil when he chooses to write in traditional English forms struck me as pure hokum.   I suspected that those who raised such an objection did so less for reasons of national loyalty than that they hadn’t mastered such forms themselves and were seeking an easy excuse not to do so.

The Americans I most admired in this regard were artists such as Frost who met the British on their own ground and excelled by British standards while sacrificing nothing of their American identity.  Such a performance cannot be ignored or dismissed by American or British artists.  The actor Richard Chamberlain was another such, who faced the British lion head-on by joining the Royal Shakespearean Company and earning their respect in a way that he could have achieved by no other means.

An American poet seeking his lost muse in the English countryside

As it happened, when I was most caught up in this whole question, it chanced, thanks to a research grant awarded to my wife Marian, that I was able to visit England for the first time and to spend nearly two weeks in the libraries, bookstores, pubs and outlying pastures of Oxford.  My time of reckoning had come, and I met the situation by launching into a long rambling poem with no plan whatsoever, fueled by a continual stream of sturdy English ale and long walks through the English countryside.   I was naturally re-reading Arnold’s “Thyrsis” and “The Scholar-Gipsy”, old favorites, and began writing in that stanza.  It was a serious effort, but the tone was more along the line of fed-up and who gives a damn.  I was fed-up with the whole business of 1990s American poetry, leftist & conservative, post-modern & reactionary, and the whole prospect of attending some MFA program or other making a “career” of poetry.  Sick of it all.  I completed a number of stanzas while still in Oxford and completed the first section shortly after my return to the States.  Most of the first section was situated in a pub and at the end, the protagonist, sick of too much whiskey and ale and particularly sick of the state of American letters, casts off both as he picks up his rucksack and heads out of town, determined to track down the ghost of the Scholar Gypsy, which is to say the spirit of Romanticism and the English countryside, and come face to face with his own muse.

There were many issues raised by the New Formalists and their critics, and I wrestled with most of them in my correspondence with several of them, in my own poetry,  and especially in two contentious essays on the New Formalists which I published in Sparrow and Verse.   What I discovered most of all was that the more I involved myself with contemporary issues, the less actual poetry I wrote.  In the end I broke off all contact with other poets, stopped submitting poems for publication, turned down two offers to attend MFA programs, threw out all my copies of literary journals and stopped reading poetry altogether for over a year.  When I started reading again, it was only poetry from before about 1930, and most of what I read was from the nineteenth-century.  This state of affairs continued for a couple of years and slowly I once more began to write.  With one small exception (a local student journal) I have not submitted work since the early 90s, have read no contemporary criticism, and have given not a thought to contemporary poetics until I started to write this piece.  Some of the issues from fifteen years ago are still unresolved.

In my Oxford poem, as the protagonist strikes out for the countryside in an alcoholic fog, he enumerates his gripes about the state of American poetry as it was at the time, and his churlish mutterings make a suitable coda to this brief history of my role in the “literary wars” of the early 1990s.

        And how many poets, the well gone dry,
              disguise the absence by turning critic,
                  baring incisors, playing aggressor,
              spewing pronouncments barbed and acidic?
                  And how many cash in, turn professor,
                          submit to a tie,
              equivocate always, play it secure,
                  hedge their assertions, keep to their places,
                  admit to nothing, cover their bases,
              sing the old anthem and snag a tenure?
             

         Ugh, how I sicken — the whiskey at last
              exacts its toll, though what sickens me more
                  is the sight of muses adrift at sea,
              clinging to wreckage of metaphor,
                  to overturned hulls of simile,
                          to rigging and masts–
              a vision of muses drowning in seas
                  of polemics and essays, articles, tracts,
                  manifestos, journals, mouldering stacks
              of old theses and M.F.A. degrees…

         What’s needed is air and rain on my head!
              I’m away, out the door, knocking aside
                  some poor old professor, glasses askew…
              Move along! Gangway! I am sorely tried,
                  What is the holdup? Look out, plowing through!
                          At last . . . liberated!
              Lungsful of air! The rain on my upcast
                  face is like admonishment of Grace.
                  I am off for some paradisal place
              of shadowy water and swirling mist . . .