One poem in the current
New Yorker (May 20), by Ben Purkert, begins with the
sentence, "I am searching for the right verb for a dead frog" and
ends with the sentence, "I want you exploding like a bridge." The other, by John Ashbery, begins
with the sentence, "Someone said we needed a breezeway to bark down
remnants of super storm Elias jugularly" and ends with the sentence,
"Is there a Batman somewhere, who notices us and promptly looks away, at a
new catalogue, say, or another racing-car expletive coming back at Him?"
I can't quote the whole poems but
if you could fill in between those sentences I think you would see that each
poet, like Mark Twain's target, James Fenimore Cooper, "has in the
restricted space of two-thirds of a page...scored 114 offenses against literary
art out of a possible 115."
Twain was thinking of the rules of
good prose, as, I guess, will be students who once took my course in English
Composition, where they learned that a good essay was (1) unified, (2) coherent,
and (3) proportioned. Every
sentence had to "stick to the subject, stick to the one before it and
after it, and play ideas according to their importance to the subject
(emphasis)."
Furthermore, every writer had to
avoid assuming too much about his reader.
"Write not so that you may be understood but so that it's
impossible for you to be misunderstood." Freshmen had to learn to take care of their reader, to start
where he was, to lead him to the place where they wanted to go. A theme was a journey with a beginning,
middle, and end, a companionable journey where your reader always knew where
your voice was coming from (in the margin: point of view?) and who you were
(speaker?).
If the motto for writing students
was "Don't over-estimate your readers" the motto for poetry teachers
was "Don't over-estimate your students." I. A. Richards had shown us (in Practical Criticism) that so many students failed to understand the
basic communication a poet's words made, failed simply to construe the
sentences, that going right to the imaginative leap, to the daring association,
to the resonant symbol, the rich allusion, the sly suggestion, the qualifying
irony, the tingling nuance, was folly.
It would be years before some of them would be ready for those rewards. Richards was looking at Cambridge
students. I was looking at
students in a Midwest state that required its universities to accept any
graduate of its high schools.
There was a difference, but it
wasn't as great as you might imagine.
My students had lived life too ("Whatever you live is life,"
Robert Penn Warren once told an apologetic student) and, insofar as they had
dwelt on their experience, were as ready for a poem's epiphanies as any. They just had to get the verbal basics
straight.
It's hard to talk about the verbal
basics to people after they've learned them. I think they just see that that's the way the mind works, or
ought to work, in handling what it takes in. With both nature and ideas you proceed in an orderly fashion,
and slice at the joints. That's necessary,
of course (you don't want to make a mess of either one), but in poetry class,
as the freshman finds, it's a bore. "Everybody knows that,"
says the gifted sophomore. "Let's
get on to something interesting.
Like this allusion to Darwin."
But some English Comp students are
stubborn, or turn stubborn, and they're the ones I'm thinking of now. I have to. They are the ones most respectful of their text, most in awe
of what it showed them, most grateful for its difference from whatever disorder
(rural, poor, narrow) they came out of.
So here and there we had the
bright student who, in the senior seminar, was still troubled by violation of
the standards of good prose, no matter the richness of the allusion. He was the one, the newcomer, most
likely to be told confidentially by an upperclassman that if he hangs on to his
English 1 idea of violation at this level he's not going to be able to talk
about half the poems written after 1912, much less read them."
That upperclassman gave good
advice, and the prof who has taught both freshman comp and the senior seminar
will be happy with him. He has
learned the basics so well that he sees where and why they can be ignored, and
can quit thinking about them. He
is just the one the prof was hoping to produce when he taught the sophomore
poetry course. When the student
comes to those sudden, surprising lines about the women ("In the room the
women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo") in "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock" he won't be upset by their lack of coherence with those
before and after. No, he'll be
satisfied with the psychological coherence. Their unity is in their revelation of the speaker's
character. Eliot is using a different
kind of stickum.
So what kind of stickum are these New Yorker poets using? One not very different from that used
in "Prufrock." It's
psychological. Only in a different
voice. These speakers are
whimsical, playful, sensitive — extraordinarily — to the physical world. "I like a cradle/ overflowing with
baby gifts &/ stuffed-animal aliens, lime-green/to the touch," says
Purkert's speaker. Ashbery's is
going to "bark" down remnants of his storm "jugularly." We are grateful for their recitations
as we are grateful for Prufrock's: they show us an extraordinary character, and
let us enjoy his extraordinary responses (a touch is "lime green"!)
to the world. We, in the word that
still covers the whole English-department achievement, "appreciate"
them.
Retired teachers often wonder how
their students are faring in the world.
With this week's New Yorker I
can't help wondering how many of my students will have been able to appreciate
these poems. How long will it take
the once-stubborn freshmen to recover from shocks to their verbal
foundation? Will they be able to make the imaginative leaps? Forget the companionable journey from beginning through
middle to end, which you can see by the lines I have quoted is
going to be a hard one; just take Ashbery's first stanza:
Someone said we needed a breezeway
to bark down remnants of super
storm Elias jugularly.
Alas it wasn't my call.
I didn't have a call or anything
resembling one.
You see I have always been a
rather dull-spirited winch.
The days go by and I go with them.
A breeze falls from a nearby tower
finds no breezeway, goes away
along a mission to supersize red
shutters.
Some of my former students will do
pretty well with "jugularly."
They can make inferences.
"It's a storm hit in its jugular, as shown by its weakening remnants
in a breezeway." A few will
pick up the echo of "regularly" in "jugularly." In their (Midwestern) crowd "to go
for the jugular" is to take down a wild animal. "Well in this crowd it's a regular thing, like cutting
the grass."
Surely there's a tingle for them in
the extraordinary poise and sophistication that lets people speak so coolly
about super storms. I see one student
on his way to an aperçu, maybe even an epiphany. If not here then maybe toward the end, where, if the stickum
he can't see holds, he will get one of several I can't get: "existential
threads and the time of the peace beaters." In any case I see him feeling some appreciation.
And feeling gratitude. But what, I wonder, will it be gratitude for? He's not likely to say the poem gives him an insight into
life. This is too far from life as
he knows it. What it gives him, he
will more readily say, is an insight into a special kind of cool.
The question is, at what
cost? Will it be low enough for
him to still feel gratitude? There's always a cost. For the tingle from "jugularly" my now aged
freshmen sacrifice the pleasure of euphony and pay in the time it takes to
adjust to the unexpected. For the
tougher adjustments, like to "winch" and "red shutters,"
they'll pay more — more effort, more time. In a busy life you can't just wave away time and
effort.
Beyond that, almost impossible to
calculate, is the cost of injury to the orderly English Comp habits of language
and mind that got them, that still gets them, through the world outside of
poetry. When does the cost become
not worth paying?
I remember when I was eighteen and was first taken beyond my
high-school classics (John Greenleaf Whittier, all those three-named giants) to
the Imagist poets, the poets so good at showing us just what simple things
looked like. I remember one poem
that left me in awe at how accurately a bowl of sugar lumps had been
rendered. But I had too many other
sources of awe — my first really scholarly edition of the Bible, a political
science prof freshly escaped from Germany, the new physics, college-level
sports, girls — to value for long perfectly rendered sugar lumps. Life is short. Making a living takes up a lot of time
you might spend in awe. Only a
precocious youth knowing he's going to be well provided for will have the time
to stand in awe before an exact verbal picture of sugar lumps.
The shortness of days, semesters,
life, brackets all choices — of a task, a gift, a picture on a wall, a poem in
a magazine — within which we include the price paid, the sacrifices made. It's in this frame that, I would guess,
educated (but not extraordinary) people are now spending more time reading John
Greenleaf Whittier (oh that glimpse of the "Old Maid" aunt in Snowbound) than they are reading the
Imagist poets. Nobody now would
pay $6.99 for a magazine featuring
their kind of poetry.
You don't have to guess the
question I would like to hear the New
Yorker editors asking themselves:
how close are our poets to the old Imagists?
