202. New Yorker poems

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?