making a gift of myself to you:
the gray field mouse
left by a stray cat
dead on the doorstep
poems & criticism
As a conversationalist, Christopher Hitchens rivaled Oscar Wilde. But as a thinker, he was dreary, dull, and unimaginative. Anyone who takes religion that seriously—believer or atheist—must have no deep sense of humor.
Wilde, of course, was the great ironist. With such scathing acuity he honed in on the foibles and hypocrisies and sins of his contemporaries. But these flaws for him were not a great source of bitterness or misery. Wilde didn’t, like Hitchens, rant and rave about the evils of the world. He didn’t waste his talents, pounding out screeds of vitriol. Instead, Wilde took up a campy double-stance, and he embraced humanity’s many problems with a profound wit.
This attitude—this ability to enjoy the Void, the Dark Side, the Devil, Death, utter Meaninglessness—is what I often think of as “metaphysical perversity.” Metaphysical perversity is a posture of taking great delight in what is most terrifying. The greatest metaphysical pervert is Emily Dickinson. Soren Kierkegaard of course also ranks high on the list. The metaphysical perverts are the ones who have the courage to ask hard, religious questions. And, hearing no answer, they appreciate this silence as reality’s great joke upon us. And then they laugh. They laugh at humanity, at our corrupt institutions, at the universe itself. They laugh with the pure joy of gods. And they make art that inspires the rest of us to laugh.
Hitchens, I think, never saw the lighter side. This was his great moral failure, his despair. He lacked the strength of mind and character to try to think through how one might be a believer. He didn’t have quite the deep sense of humor that is necessary for a thinking person to develop a spiritual relationship with the world.
Instead, he took himself too seriously. And, what’s worse, he took religion too seriously. He strictly relied upon a second-grade straw man of religion, and then he tore it down. He set up as his rhetorical opponents the George W. Bushes, the Mother Teresas, the Ayatollahs, the fundamentalists who represent everything unfortunate about religious belief. And then he proved that they were, as indeed they are, stupid. But in so doing he never gave spirituality a fair shake.
And he became precisely what he opposed. He was a blind, unthinking, immature zealot who saw the world in black-and-white, who never questioned his own most basic assumptions. What’s worse, he became a demagogue for other, unthinking zealots. He led, like a little Ayatollah, a movement of other atheists who lash out, proselytizing against believers with the same self-righteousness with which believers attack atheists.
Wilde would appreciate the irony.
“The Age of Irony”
pouring syrup of ipecac
in baby’s sippy cup,
mama never felt so good;
little foreskin, snippy-cut
breast as dry as bone;
baby is a miracle,
papa’s pride and joy;
mama laughs hysterical:
it’s just God’s little joke.
hush now baby while there’s time
to sleep before the dawn
when papa takes you up the hill
to kill his only son.
sleep is slipping over you
cradled in your crib
let mama’s singing comfort you,
her screams come down the hall;
she’s faking another orgasm
and banging on the wall
so good so good so good she screams,
what papa takes on faith
sometimes the world’s so bad it’s good
like “thou shalt not” becomes
“you should”
OVERSLEPT
SO TIRED.
IF LATE,
GET FIRED.
WHY BOTHER?
WHY THE PAIN?
JUST GO HOME
DO IT AGAIN.
I am always amused by The “Commuter’s Lament/A Close Shave,” by Norman Colp. The poem, a public sculpture in New York, gives such pleasure, and recently it has been vandalized in a way that’s just as fun.
In the subway station tunnel at Times Square — a long, otherwise drab corridor chock-full of advertisements — each line of the “Lament” is written out on a separate rafter. As one walks through the tunnel, the poem reveals itself line by line. Structurally the poem is magnificent! How witty that the poem gradually says itself, commuting and communicating, as the reader commutes along with it. It’s really a hoot that way. And I love those rhymes. The kind of thing a 6th grader would write in the margins of a textbook on algebra.
Apparently, though, not everyone shares Colp’s dreary opinion of the morning commute. Josh Botwinick and Margot Reinstein, two NYC college students, rewrote the poem to something more “optimistic.” They changed ““Overslept” to “Overexcited, ”“So Tired” to “Energized,” and “Why the pain” to “Much to gain.”
I don’t happen to think that the original poem is honestly pessimistic (even if it is bitter, it is too bitterly funny to be that sad). But I think the effort of Botwinick and Reinstein is truly admirable. If I were the mayor I would give them a prize!
Anyone who has had the privilege of hearing me blather about contemporary poetry must know that I hate imagism — not the Modernist movement with a capital “I,” but its contemporary incarnation. These are the “little i’s,” the self-obsessed MFA students whose poems are lists and lists of “images” without referents. I am maddened by those readers who say of poetry, “I really like the images.” I object to the idea that images are the sine qua non of poetry — as though the poet were meant to approximate t.v., motion pictures, René Magritte. To make of the visual a ruling principle in a verbal medium is extremely vulgar!
I want a poetry of words, ideas, and meter, with images playing their proper role as one single element of poetry, no better than the rest. And, perhaps, it looks like the long tyranny of the image may be coming to an end.
December’s Poetry opens with a clever poem by Dan Beachy-Quick titled, “In a Station of the Metro,” which is a kind of anti-imagist manifesto.
Peace fell on the dim lands a sort of abstraction
The metronome counted one petal another another
So the petals fell as or in some music
This song needs no breath just an apparition…
I’m personally always taken with phrases like “as or in some.” That’s what I want to hear! Superfluous monosyllables tinkling off of one another, abstracting themselves into pure sound as they seriously consider the apparition. Yes!
Elizabeth Bishop is one of those poets whose words are always appearing to me again — as for example when I lose the house keys: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Or when I would like a glass of wine, I always remember that lovely sonnet, “I am in need of music that would flow” — a poem that I have always thought is not at all about music but rather about Bishop’s drinking problems.
Today I am goofing around with a pastiche that I would call an “intervention” in both the A.A. sense and in the intertextual sense.
“Intervention for Elizabeth Bishop”
A night of boozing really gets you plastered;
so many people seem filled with the intent
to get drunk, though not all of them are bastards.
they’re just in need of spirits that would flow.
still, I’d rather have the drinker than the drink,
though it meant the end of drinking.
(I suppose there’s even a bit of Yeats there in line 5.)
My sister’s stepson is quite a little hell-raiser. At nine-years old he’s already committed a string of petty crimes, but at heart he’s a sweet little guy who’s going to grow up into a decent and talented young man. In the meantime, he’s still reeling from the sting of a lot of abuse and neglect. I know from my own experience, having grown up with an abusive, alcoholic father and a helpless mother, that art and literature can really be a saving grace. If I hadn’t loved reading from early on, I really think I wouldn’t have made it through.
Charles Bukowski, much as he offends me now, was a great source of strength during my teenage years. Especially Ham on Rye, in which he talks openly about his monstrous father, helped to sustain me as my own father was beating and belittling me. For that matter, I don’t know what I would have done without the Nick Adam stories, or Jack Kerouac, or any of those guys who now strike me as formally inept, spiritually bankrupt, and politically too far incorrect to be worth reading. Even though you need to grow out of that kind of literature, or end up drinking yourself to death, it does serve an important, adolescent purpose.
Still, Bukowski is too much for a kid. And I’d like to give him a Christmas present that speaks to his circumstances a bit more honestly than the standard fourth-grade fare. Tuck Everlasting or The Giver, lovely as they are, are probably not going to interest a kid who already thinks literature is dumb and boring. Does anybody have any ideas?
As a subject, Steve Jobs would seem to demand something a bit more elegant, more finely pared down, than Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2011). Isaacson definitely doesn’t share with Jobs an ability to combine sleek style with innovative content. Instead Isaacson has no imagination. What’s even worse than the stylistic tedium, is the lack of inspiration that he brings to analyzing his subject. Isaacson delivers glib, pseudo-Freudian observations. They’re as stale and unappetizing as old, cold, syrup-less pancakes, and just about as engaging.
“‘I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth,’ said one longtime colleague, Del Yocam. ‘He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself.’ Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after college, saw another effect. ‘Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain that caused,’ he said. ‘It made him independent…’” (Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson, 4-5).
I pray that no one talks about me in these tones when I’m gone.
While Isaacson’s prose is thin, the volume itself is mammoth. This is not the kind of tome you want to lug around for subway reading. For that matter, this is not the kind of tome you would even want to read at all, were it not that the subject is important. Still, no matter how influential a person is, there’s not much to be gained from reading a play-by-play account of all the mundane details of his/her life, with no sustained thought given to the subject except for second-hand arm-chair psychoanalyzing. What one wants from a biography, foremost, is a compelling story.
Meanwhile this week I am also reading Auden by Richard Davenport-Hines (Vintage, 1995), which is by far the more interesting. While this book includes more than its fair share of amateur psychoanalytic interpretation, most of this analysis is conducted by the subject himself. W.H. Auden was obsessed with Freud and his interlocutors, and Auden thought about his own personality in terms of mommy issues and incestuous desires. Davenport-Hines manages to carefully and critically engage with Auden’s own estimation of his character — an opinion that Auden pieced together not just by reading Freud but also by thinking deeply about what it means to be a Marxist, what it means to be a Christian, and what it means to be a poet. Crediting the depth and complexity of Auden’s personality, the writing benefits from being — in comparison with Isaacson — understated and impressionistic.
When Jobs passed away recently, what came to my mind were those opening lines of Auden’s “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”:
When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
When grief has been made so public, and exposed
to the critique of a whole epoch
the frailty of our conscience and anguish,
of whom shall we speak?
Today it seems that — rather differently than Auden meant the lines — there are so many that we shall have to text. Through innovations like the iPhone and Facebook, grief is indeed made so public. And, freshly dead, Jobs is already exposed to a critique that, while sympathetic, is inane to the point of being offensive.
The Occupy Wall Street movement brings to mind that Middle English poem “Wynnere and Wastoure,” written around 1350 during the alliterative verse revival. The poem was apparently quite an influence on William Langland, author of Piers Plowman and undoubtedly the most popular English poet of the 14th century (far more widely read than Chaucer).
The poem is a debate between two figures, a Winner who is rich, hard-working, and prosperous, and a Waster who is a prodigal. The extant poem is a fragment, and the conclusion of the debate is lost, but it seems that King — who arbitrates between the two W’s — tends to think that both are necessary:
The kynge lovely lokes on the ledis twayne,
Says, “Blynnes, beryns, of youre brethe and of youre brode worde,
And I schal deme yow this day where ye duelle schall,
Aythere lede in a lond ther he es loved moste…” (456-9)
The king, looking kindly on the two figures, says they need to cease arguing; he tells them to stop up their breath and their big words. He advises them each to dwell in the land where they are most loved.
In our land, do we think there is space enough for both Winners and Wasters? Is the artist in some sense always a waster? (William Langland seems to have thought so.) Should we throw out the Wasters?
