Politics, Protest, and the Avant-Garde
Lehman, David
UST AVANT-GARDE art manifest a radical aim? Does it require a collective identity? Is it the product of an "ideological community"? To each of these questions, Harold Rosenberg—coiner of the...
...they insisted that poetry must be at least as well written as prose (as Pound put it) and that traditions were meant to be altered by the individual talent (as Eliot maintained...
...The artist's vocation required a struggle to attain "the state of spiritual clarity," Frank O'Hara wrote in his monograph on Jackson Pollock...
...Lowell has sometimes "had a bad press for silly reasons" and sometimes a good press "for reasons scarcely less silly," Josephine Jacobsen observed in 1964...
...Jealous of his or her independence, the artist may not want to heed the dictates of a cultural czar...
...They were interested in the eternal, as opposed to the merely permanent, to paraphrase an Ashbery poem...
...Possibly...
...As Charles Simic has put it, the Surrealists and Dadaists accomplished a revision of the poet from "a maker" to "someone able to detect the presence of poetry in the accidental...
...He acknowledges the private nature of his poetry: "I know that I braid too much my own / Snapped off perceptions of things as they come to me...
...A commitment...
...Lowell represented, in short, the ideal of the poet as a public figure, politically enlightened, passionately serious, and always aware of his role in History...
...Number One had no center, no perspectival depth, no illusion of mirror or window, but had such fierce energy and motion that it needed no subject other than itself...
...But if Ashbery's title announces a connection to the world historical events of 1789, one looks in vain for any reference to political upheaval in the pages themselves...
...it has merely ducked into a DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 85 POLITICS, PROTEST, AND THE AVANT-GARDE subterranean cave and stayed there, waiting to be discovered...
...The dismal history of politicized avant-garde art movements stands as a warning...
...Fame...
...These are connected to my version of America / But the juice is elsewhere," Ashbery writes...
...In 1967 Time put him on its cover, and Norman Mailer, marching beside him at a major rally at the Pentagon, gave him an honored place in his Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the event, The Armies of the Night...
...The poet must stand or fall by poetry," Wallace Stevens argued in a Partisan Review symposium in 1948...
...Notice how one of the angst-drenched symbols of the cold war is rendered as part of the decor, a purely aesthetic experience, in this stanza: Mai Lung in the new communal kitchen With the black-hammer-striped-and-red-sicklestriped wallpaper Plunks down the evening cereal...
...Is The Iliad an example of poetry that is "against war and in favor of life...
...Once avant-garde has been identified publicly as a good and rewarding thing to be, there is no stopping the hordes from invoking the gods of vanguardism to justify their productions...
...having to do with civic pride and public lives...
...The New York Poets Disciplined nonconformism meant turning a deaf ear to the siren songs of politics...
...In short, they were the avant-garde—the last avant-garde in American poetry...
...Interested in the metaphysical dimensions of a joke, they recognized the comic as part of the lyrical impulse, not its antithesis...
...As Ashbery wrote in 1968, when yippie demonstrators outside the Museum of Modern Art punctuated the opening of a Dada and Surrealist show, "while it is perfectly OK to heckle the swells descending from their rainy taxis to sip MOMA champagne from fur-lined teacups, it is also OK to be them...
...Perhaps it does...
...Does he want a fortune in gold...
...The poets who were drawn to the Club and the Cedar Tavern wanted to expand the possibilities for poetry in much the same way that the Abstract Expressionists had done for painting...
...They are private and always will be...
...That was a good joke you played on the other guests," Ashbery writes enigmatically in "The Skaters...
...In the previous September, Ashbery had eulogized the recently deceased O'Hara in Book Week, then the Sunday book supplement of the New York Herald Tribune...
...Poetry is poetry...
...These were literary developments and they are to be judged for their artistic value, which was great, not their social consequence, which was minimal...
...The abstract revolution hit New York hard in 1948 when Jackson Pollock produced the first of his "drip" paintings...
...He has a poem entitled "The One Thing That Can Save America" (1975), which doesn't divulge the answer to the query implict in the title but compounds it with other questions ("Is anything central...
...There are those who contend that Ashbery's poetry in the years since The Tennis Court Oath has continued to mount an assault on what poststructuralist critics call the hegemonic discourse...
...Ashbery's appropriation of the phrase can be seen as furthering the linguistic processes whereby meaning disintegrates...
...Khrushchev returns at the poem's conclusion, but clearly the wind and the light of this September day have stolen the show: "New York seems blinding and my tie is blowing up the street / I wish it would blow off / though it is cold and somewhat warms my neck / as the train bears Khrushchev on to Pennsylvania Station / and the light seems to be eternal / and joy seems to be inexorable / I am foolish enough always to find it in wind...
...On a handball court in Versailles, rebellious members of the Third Estate convened to take their revolutionary pledge on June 20, 1789...
...They figured out how to do it, how to write modern poetry in America in works so much in advance of the sensibility of the age that they seem freshly minted today...
...the poems are all about him and the people and images who wheel through his consciousness, and they seek no further justification: 'This is me and I'm poetry, baby,' seems to be their message, and unlike the message of committed poetry, it incites one to all the programs of commitment as well as to every other form of selfrealization: interpersonal, dionysian, occult or abstract...
...Eliot in Prufrock and Other Observations and Pound in Personae had accomplished a sort of surgical strike: they had cut away the poetry from all that was merely decorative in the inherited tradition of Victorian verse...
...Not necessarily, though it has a lot going against it...
...Or consider O'Hara's untitled poem beginning "Khrushchev is coming on the right day...
...What can we know...
...When it isn't ignored in the work of the New York poets, politics is neutralized and transformed, as if it were one more crude element in the discourse of the tribe that needed to be captured in art and thus redeemed "with unimpeded force and unveiled honesty" The poets' collective attitude toward politics may be inferred from such a poem as Kenward Elmslie's "Melodramas" (1960), which is dedicated to Kenneth Koch...
...Only when he is in this state is the artist's 'action' significant purely and simply of itself...
...Winded from your annual march to Protest the dirty sex practices of American priests, eat, o old orphans...
...In the best of times, the distinction between true artistic innovation on the one side and meretricious novelty on the other is difficult to discern and impossible to enforce...
...The book's title refers to a signal event in the French Revolution...
...Three weeks later the Bastille was stormed and the revolution was on...
...Some Surrealists went down with the ship: Louis Aragon renounced the POLITICS, PROTEST, AND THE AVANT-GARDE movement to join the Communist Party after Andre Breton criticized his "Front Rouge"—a screeching polemic written in Moscow—as "poetically regressive...
...At a moment of intense global angst, when it sometimes seemed as if every responsible poem had to have a mushroom cloud in it, they felt that the pursuit of an artistic vocation imposed 82 n DISSENT I Fall 1998 a different imperative...
...They opposed the ancien regime, the Anglo-American literary tradition as embodied in the works of T. S. Eliot and the New Critics, and they were equally against the politically committed didacticism of the Beats and the poets of political protest...
...He has told me more than once that the only time in his life that he ever suffered from writer's block was in 1950 and 1951 and that in his mind it was connected with the politics of intimidation in Washington...
...Just as the Abstract Expressionists liberated painting from the tyranny of subject matter, so the New York poets—John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and others in that band—were intent on freeing their work from the burdens of a political consciousness...
...O'Hara's cult of the artist is a Romantic notion taken to an extreme: the idea that the most crucial element in a poem is not the isolated text or its relation to either the world it describes or the reader it addresses, but rather the figure of the poet as creator, who has made a "monumental and agonizing" effort to achieve spiritual grace...
...Lowell's letter to President Johnson, duly printed on the front page of the New York Times, made him a hero of the literary wing of the antiwar movement...
...in a word, it does not attack the establishment...
...At the moment, it would appear that he can scarcely do wrong...
...Nor would I rebut the charge that, for example, the weakness of Pound's Cantos—which Pound himself consid ered a "botch''—may have something to do with the same flaws of intellect and character that can be seen in his enthusiastic embrace of Mussolini...
...In the aftermath of Number One, all the rules of decorum came tumbling down...
...it was something...
...Henceforth a work of art needed to be less concerned with the task of communicating to others than with the expression of the artist's self...
...Politics has turned benignly into wallpaper...
...it does not speak out against the war in Viet Nam or in favor of civil rights...
...This is not to excuse or deny Pound's treason or Eliot's anti-Semitism...
...Although there are honorable exceptions, the melancholy truth is that political art is usually weak art to the extent that it subordinates its energy to the purpose of making an overt statement...
...Porter himself, a magnificent realist who specialized in landscapes and still lifes and portraits at a time when pure abstraction was the height of fashion, illustrates that a contrarian impulse, a maverick strain of American independence, is a more valuable avant-garde quality than an ability to recognize and pursue the route of perceived correctness...
...The wildly experimental poems in The Tennis Court Oath, written and assembled in the city where the guillotine dispensed Jacobin justice, could be described as revolutionary and apolitical at once...
...In the same way, the European avant-garde in the first half of the century created a revolution in art, not politics...
...But it is far from political in the sense intended by poets such as Bertolt Brecht and Adrienne Rich who believe that poetry should protest injustice...
...This is a prophetic poem—and, in some attenuated sense, a political one...
...Ashbery fired off a letter to the editor in response...
...It does not advocate sex and dope as a panacea for the ills of modern society...
...In the conflict between the poet and the politician the chief honor the poet can hope for is that of remaining himself...
...Is the avant-garde, with its dedication to the art of the future, a thing of the past, hopelessly obsolete in an era of postmodernist eclecticism and parody...
...nothing can condone these things...
...According to Rosenberg, art follows from ideology...
...But it is not amusing to see a poet sneering at the conscience of others...
...There was never anything to prevent a group of artists, even or especially vanguard artists, from hitching its wagon to the wrong star...
...his imminent arrival in New York figures as one element in a collage-like composition whose other parts include blueberry blintzes, the comment of a Puerto Rican cab driver, a painting by O'Hara's friend Grace Hartigan, and the poetry of Francois Villon...
...Messages were irrelevant...
...In an application of Gresham's Law, the bad art committed in the name of the avant-garde will chase out the good...
...And art stood in need of reinvention—it was ripe for the avant-garde gesture of erasure, Something drastic was needed to combat the complacent drift of the culture toward ersatz experience: a drift that has brought us, over the years, plastic flowers, vinyl siding, the institution of public relations, canned laughter, photo opportunities, and instant spin control...
...The last stanza of the poem is a brilliant example of what Ashbery elsewhere calls "fence-sitting raised to an esthetic ideal...
...Perhaps part of the point is that "the Tennis Court Oath," that phrase familiar to legions of high school history students, is founded on a mistranslation of the French jeu du paume, literally "game of palm," which refers not to tennis but to handball...
...At such a moment, it is difficult to regard the term avant-garde as anything but an honorific, and a hollow one at that...
...In this example of O'Hara's diurnal style, Khrushchev has the weight of a name on the radio news on September 17, 1959...
...But abstraction also signaled something else: a turning inward, a repudiation of nature, a disgust with the external world, including the social and political realms...
...DAVID LEHMAN is a poet, critic, and editor...
...And his jubilant use of cliches, as in these lines from "Getting Back In" (1995), argues a skepticism that is just short of subversive: What is this "today" you speak of so incessantly...
...A poem that is nominally about the private self in the public sphere concludes in the wait for a letter that never comes, warning of danger: It is the lumps and trials That tell us whether we shall be known And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star...
...What is heaven, and how am I to achieve it...
...The book's revolutionary gestures are entirely in the realm of formAshbery does to conventional syntax what Robespierre did to the monarchy...
...Ashbery praised O'Hara as a go-your-own-way individualist unconcerned with whether or not his views were deemed correct by others...
...the experience of art could not be paraphrased...
...All the rest is waiting For a letter that never arrives, Day after day, the exasperation Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is, The two envelope halves lying on a plate...
...On the other hand, when French Surrealism put itself in the service of the MarxistLeninist revolution in 1930, disillusionment soon followed...
...The fact that something advertises itself as avant-garde art is no guarantee that it is either art or avant-garde...
...For its part, the American experiment in democracy had taken a wrong turn somewhere between the loyalty oaths of the Truman administration and the pieces of paper waved menacingly by Senator Joseph McCarthy...
...It is "not surprising," O'Hara wrote grandly, "that faced with universal destruction, as we are told, our art should at last speak with unimpeded force and unveiled honesty to a future which well may be nonexistent...
...And the spy has always been a morally and politically ambiguous character, mistrustful of authority and prone to insubordination...
...It was, he told Harry Mathews, "sort of a low point in America...
...The absence of cultural resistance gives rise to the seemingly unquenchable thirst for novelty, which leads in turn to Andy Warhol's conception of fame as an erasable interval lasting fifteen minutes...
...For that stalwart champion of avant-garde causes, Richard Kostelanetz, the term evokes the image of shock troops on the front lines of cultural battle...
...In Ashbery, however, these modes of irony are put at the service of a spiritual quest and an imaginative aspiration...
...But it can also be seen as Ashbery's disloyalty oath: a violent rebellion against the rules of language itself...
...After all, for him and for the New York school collectively any establishment has the right to exist and they have the right to ignore it...
...The whole concept is therefore in bad odor, though that is subject to change—or to redefinition...
...DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 81 POLITICS, PROTEST, AND THE AVANT-GARDE The abstract revolution was an admission that modern technology could more accurately reproduce nature than the artist can...
...Art that lacks "the will to change the world" is a "parody of vanguardism...
...Some would argue that Pound and Eliot, who brought modernism into American poetry, then turned around and arrested its development, by becoming an apologist for Mussolini in the case of Pound and a high-church monarchist in the case of Eliot...
...Well," Ashbery replied, "I'm a Democrat...
...They believed that the road of experimentation leads to the pleasure dome of poetry, and in pursuit of this goal they went, identifying the reader's pleasure with the author's happiness...
...All semblance of a narrative has been eliminated but some ghostly idea of a narrative hovers...
...Kierkegaard in Either/Or has a parable about a man who has been summoned to heaven, where the gods allow him to make a wish...
...Avant-garde art has not disappeared...
...A joke of silence...
...Democratic ideals do not guarantee artistic originality...
...Ashbery continued: "It is not surprising that critics have found him selfindulgent: his culte de moi is overpowering...
...But the question is whether these are fundamentally political gestures or whether it wouldn't be wiser to take Ashbery at his word when he maintains that poetry and protest are in two separate categories and that the former is life itself for him while the latter is an occasional extraliterary duty...
...But a more perCopyright © 1998, by David Lehman, from The Last AvantGarde, published by Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc...
...He could think of no better way to illustrate his "combative" position than with respect to the Fauves and their love of vibrant color in the early years of the twentieth century: "The politics of an avant-garde art movement might consist of nothing more rebellious than overthrowing the conviction of the middle class that color in a painting ought to correspond to that of appearances...
...Today's young artist, he wrote, "must now bear in mind that he, not it, is the avant-garde...
...But what was truly avant-garde in their poetics had nothing to do with the politics they espoused...
...This is an argument that we might test with inconclusive results...
...The poems O'Hara, Ashbery, and Koch wrote in their radical early phase approximate the experiments of the Abstract Expressionists most overtly in establishing that medium and message are mutually inextricable...
...But they did not confuse the new with the ephemeral...
...Politics had failed on both the left and the right...
...Simpson is a poet and critic with a fierce sense of moral rectitude, and he was writing at a time when the great example held up to American poets for emulation was that of the conscience-stricken Robert Lowell...
...The main theme of the poem sneaks in secretly in the poem's second line when "the cool graced light / is pushed off the enormous glass piers by hard wind / and everything is tossing, hurrying on up...
...POLITICS, PROTEST, AND THE AVANT-GARDE Preferring heterodoxy to orthodoxy, wit to solemnity, joy to melancholy, the experience or enactment of our moment in time rather than the moral castigation of it, the New York poets were aesthetes in revolt against a moralist's universe...
...In this sense, it was the camera that transformed the art of painting...
...Ashbery, Simpson wrote in the Nation, had "complimented [O'Hara] on not having written poetry about the war...
...An Infinite Laugh Ashbery's paradoxes, which approach the status of conundrums, and his logic, which proceeds by the baroque elaboration of a metaphor...
...Ashbery has spoken of his own low morale in the early 1950s and cited political factors, such as the Korean War and "the loyalty-oath mentality," as he called it...
...They don't even guarantee political wisdom...
...Rosenberg conceded, however, that the radical will in a work of art may make itself felt in an almost purely aesthetic way...
...It's . . . My system was downloaded but bogus retorts are still coming out of it...
...The imagination was a transcendent realm in which one could dwell in moments of rare refreshment, whispers out of time...
...It was in this sense that O'Hara's own work is the closest thing in poetry to Action Painting...
...The dream of a political art has always been elusive, simply because art forms tend to obey their own imperatives and would be wise to rely on their own resources...
...Here is an excerpt from the title poem: the water beetle head why of course reflecting all POLITICS , PROTEST , AND THE AVANT - GARDE then you redid you were breathing I thought going down to mail this of the kettle you jabbered as easily in the yard you come through but are incomparable the lovely tent mystery you don't want surrounded the real you dance in the spring there was clouds The odd excitement in these lines would be lost in a more conventional, less truncated telling...
...As James Schuyler wrote in "The Morning of the Poem," his masterpiece, So many lousy poets So few good ones What's the problem...
...1 AM FAMILIAR with the argument that Ashbery is politically radical on the deep syntactical level—the level of form, which precedes content...
...And now the gods begin to laugh, which is how the man knows his wish has been granted, for it would not have been in keeping with the spirit of the occasion for the gods to have intoned solemnly, "It is granted thee...
...Pound and Eliot emancipated verse from a variety of outmoded exigencies...
...The composition as a whole is meant to suggest an hour in the poet's crowded metropolitan life...
...But this 84 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 concession to an invisible debating partner turns into another question: what about the possibility that the poet's private experience may make him exemplary...
...For Rosenberg, the term avant-garde conjured up the image of an elite phalanx advancing on an enemy...
...To each of these questions, Harold Rosenberg—coiner of the term "Action Painting" for the abstract art of de Kooning, Pollock, and the rest—answered yes...
...The effort, and not the poem it yields, is what is "monumental...
...In the meanwhile, however, there is no denying the detrimental effect that indiscriminate acceptance can have on new art...
...The artist's salvation lay neither in politics, by now decisively discredited, nor in religion, which had been edging toward obsolescence from the moment Nietzsche announced the death of God, but in art itself...
...It didn't depict anything...
...Ashbery's irony, his belief that misunderstandings are inevitable, and his further belief in the power of misunderstanding as another name for the transformative work of creative intelligence—these are central to his poetry...
...DISSENT / Fall 1998 suasive reading of the military metaphor buried in the term avant-garde casts the vanguard artist in the role of the spy on an advance reconnaissance mission, a foray into unknown territory...
...The most fruitful Surrealist experiments involved methods of composition designed to liberate the unconscious, and the greatness of Surrealist works (the paintings of de Chirico, MirO, Ernst, and Magritte, the films of Buriuel, the writings of Raymond Roussel, and the prose collaborations of Breton and Eluard) has little to do with their politics but much with the way they assimilate chance, accident, humor, the anarchic id, and the irrational...
...It's the posse's new poster child...
...It's where the rubber meets the road and they discuss in one long fawning kiss...
...I tend to Fairfield Porter's view that there will always be an avant-garde "if we define the avant-garde as those people with the most energy...
...The cubists shattered the object, the expressionists tortured the model, and the masters of pure abstraction such as Mondrian pretty much discarded whatever was left of the principle of representation as the proper goal or function of painting...
...The questions Ashbery raises are not the questions of postmodernism...
...What is the difference between the merely permanent and the possibly 86 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 eternal...
...The POLITICS , PROTEST , AND THE AVANT -GARDE poem is not about the bellicose Soviet leader famous for banging his shoe at the United Nations...
...But equally I insist that the revolutionary gestures in Pound and Eliot at their strongest—the latter's collage-like appropriation of the literary past in The Waste Land, for example—are not infected by the poisonous political virus that led Eliot, on one occasion, to opine that "any large number of freethinking Jews" was unhealthy for society...
...But the absence of any overt political intent in Ashbery's poetry is conspicuous...
...I was not DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 83 POLITICS, PROTEST, AND THE AVANT-GARDE `sneering at the conscience of other poets,' but praising Frank O'Hara for giving a unique voice to his own conscience, far more effective than most of the protest 'poetry' being written today," he wrote...
...Today the task is complicated by the relentless hype that seems to accompany every new exhibition, with the effect that the intrepid gallerygoer is constantly on guard for fear of being had...
...So it has happened...
...If people like what I do, am Ito assume that what I do is bad, since public opinion has always begun by rejecting what is original and new...
...It merely ignores its right to exist, and is thus a source of annoyance to partisans of every stripe...
...From now on it was, so far as he could see, every artist for himself or herself...
...Which will it be...
...Frank O'Hara's poetry has no program and therefore it cannot be joined," Ashbery wrote...
...He found no easy way out of this dilemma, except to recommend "an attitude which neither accepts nor rejects acceptance but is independent of it...
...are two qualities that might be called postmodernist...
...At a question-and-answer session at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop in the fall of 1996, an enterprising graduate student asked the poet to describe the theoretical political dimensions of his poetry...
...He took stock of the avant-garde in the politically charged climate of 1968, the year Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated, students seized five buildings at Columbia, and protesters had their heads bashed in at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago...
...All poetry is against war and in favor of life, or else it isn't poetry, and it stops being poetry when it is forced into the mold of a particular program...
...It's pleasures and palaces...
...IN 1967, with the nation polarized by the escalation of the Vietnam War, a controversy broke out in the Nation between John Ashbery and the combative Louis Simpson on the question of politics and poetry, and it is here that Ashbery gives the definitive statement of O'Hara's (and his own) position on politics...
...The poets fulfilled the requirements of an avant-garde art movement without half trying...
...the drama rests in the interruptions and the leaps...
...I wish," he says, "to have the laugh always on my side...
...We are in danger of imperceptibly becoming an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation, and may even be drifting in our way to the last nuclear ruin," Lowell wrote...
...Are all protest poems nonpoetry, or are we free to exempt such poets as Pablo Neruda and Bertolt Brecht from this charge...
...The echo of an infinite laugh reverberates in their work...
...Does the Avant-Garde Exist...
...Spiritual grace meant that one could embrace the material world and exempt oneself from the political world at the same time...
...These gestures, so crucial to the modernist revolution, will outlive the pieties of the Four Quartets as an influence and an inspiration...
...They never forgot that the aim of a poem was to live forever...
...I would argue that it is precisely where the poetry of Eliot and Pound is continuous with their political thinking that its limitations are most in evidence...
...No matter how radical its effects, an action is not avant-garde without an ideology to characterize it," Rosenberg argued...
...The avant-garde artist, from this point of view, is the artist who is hidden among us, the exception...
...Protest is protest...
...So, too, the rebellious artist...
...All rights reserved...
...This struck me as a new concept of merit— praising a man for things he has not written...
...Because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam, Lowell had turned down an invitation to accept a medal from President Lyndon Johnson at the White House in 1965...
...History, however, seldom conforms to expectations based on "historical necessity" as revealed by an ideological crystal ball...
...0 F THE avant-garde revolution in poetry instigated by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in the years of the Great War and just after, what lasted was the literary breakthrough, not the incidental political thrust of the two poets...
...Italian Futurism, which celebrated speed and motion and modern machinery, glorified war ("our only hope, our justification for existence, our will," Marinetti wrote in 1912) at the catastrophic moment when Europe talked itself into World War I. In the twenties, the Futurists pinned their hopes on Fascism and Mussolini...
...No longer did the artist feel bound to give voice to a message, political or otherwise...
...Governments are fickle and political revolutions have unhappy endings...
...They were dedicated to the original and new, and implacably opposed to the poetry of the academy...
...it does not paint gothic vignettes of the postatomic age...
...Ashbery is unlikely to be a hard-liner on this point...
...Louis Simpson waited until the following April to take Ashbery to task for these sentiments...
...The Abstract Expressionists had a grander sense of fame and a loftier notion of time, and this is true of the New York school of poets as well...
...In this climate, Ashbery's defense of antiprogrammatic poetry was heresy...
...The artist must cultivate his own garden as the only secure field in the violence and uncertainties of our time," Meyer Schapiro wrote...
...He must choose: he has just one wish...
...The love of a beautiful woman...
...Under Stalin the Soviet experiment had regressed rapidly from tragic idealism to totalitarian terror...
...The celebration of laughter in this parable, the lone human wish for it and the celestial eruption of it in reply, make it seem peculiarly apposite to the poets of the New York school...
...When Ashbery wrote to the Nation to rebut Louis Simpson in 1967, he took the time to make it clear that he had in fact participated in antiwar protests...
...But Surrealism achieved its revolutionary importance not because but in spite of such efforts to link artistic innovation to a political cause...
...Nor did they blind themselves to the self-contradictions bedeviling their (or any) avant-garde movement as the 1960s neared their end...
...No innate love of Words, no sense of How the thing said Is in the words, how The words are themselves The thing said: love, Mistake, promise, auto Crack-up, color, petal, The color in the petal Is merely light And that's refraction: A word, that's the poem...
...Today one must fight acceptance which is much harder [than fighting neglect or hostility] because it seems that one is fighting oneself," Ashbery wrote in 1968...
...Indeed, what was most valuable in Eliot's poetry, from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (with its utter indifference to the Great War going on outside) through "The Waste Land," was precisely that which resisted a political formulation: the speaker's ironic self-consciousness of "Prufrock," the juxtaposition of resonant fragments in "The Waste Land...
...DISSENT /Fall 1998 n 87...
Vol. 45 • September 1998 • No. 4
