The Local Chinoiserie

...And the comrades ought to show some awareness that it is quite against the dignity of the Revolution to announce continuous performances...

...a very fair diagnosis...

...it is called "In the Cold House...

...I'm not in this to slang Wright, or even to review his book, but to describe a problem which arises in connection with reviewing poetry, not to mention the related businesses of writing the stuff and teaching it...

...Some collections in this area give the impression that the original of something like that might be read in several different arrangements of the characters and contain dozens of meanings...

...The hypothesis had to be abandoned, but the notion of it remains, and I value Hsu's book not only for the comforting information that things are pretty tough all over, but also for the view it opens up of things nearer home...

...the rate of dam construction and production increase must be made proportionate to the increase in literary output...

...but translations may be used for information only, not criticism...

...I mention the matter only because Wright is a fine poet (right tense...

...ON POETRY The Local Chinoiserie Bv Howard Nemerov The lesson for today is suggested by some things said in the Introduction to Twentieth Century Chinese Poetry, an anthology translated and edited by Kai-Yu Hsu (Doubleday, 434 pp., $5.95...

...they turned at tremendous speed, and more prayers could be accomplished in a day than formerly in many years...

...This medium dispenses with argument and rhetoric, and presents the pure substance of poetry, images which are 'the objective correlative' of emotion and feeling...

...I am growing old...

...The ruler of a small, backward nation used Point Four aid to electrify all the prayer wheels in the realm...

...Po Chu-i, balding old politician, What's the use...

...But if the poetic object be to produce poems about which nothing can be said—and that is a fair enough object—let us acknowledge this change in our situation, and drop the farce of reviewing, teaching, writing about, poetry...

...And since what revolutions do is revolve, probably the Imagist Manifesto will be here again in a few minutes...

...and a criticism developed, which, being unable to say anything about the poems, talked largely and rather mysteriously and extremely often about a "new idiom"—an epithet whose frequent iteration on dust jackets and in reviews leads me to say that if poems are written by poets, then idioms must be written by —? well, never mind...

...On reading that, I supposed for one wild instant that I had solved a literary mystery...

...I had supposed, and continue to suppose, that the "medium" of poetry is the language in which it is written...

...But, speaking now as a reluctant reviewer, I should like to say something about the situation produced in poetry by the meeting of several circumstances which make incompatible demands...

...But it is one effect of so much making explicit, so much making conscious, to turn poetry into the appearance of a series of devices easily mastered by intellectual means alone...

...Our teams of cultural workers went into the colleges, not the countryside, and they went in with the object largely of propagating critical methods which for a time made poems look extremely interesting because of the number of things that could be said about them...

...is the way James Wright begins his new book, The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan, 59 pp., paper $1.45, cloth $4.00...

...in some sense, the progressive deepening of that response is the poem's value, or excellence...

...But it seems that many poets nowadays resemble the Surrealist that Francis Golffing tells of, who when asked what he was doing these days replied, O, the same new thing...

...He has absorbed the work of modern Spanish and continental poets and evolved a medium of his own...

...But at the end of a relatively short time the sun and the moon and the stars went out, for all that was to be done had been done...

...The rhymes are then recorded, and, after various degrees of polishing, are published...

...It would be unbecoming in this old buffalo herder to criticize here, since if our current project is to paper the world with poetry it is clear that I am in there papering with the rest, and teaching into the bargain: the worst sinner of us all...

...One word more about the sinister object of increasing poetry production...

...Teams of cultural workers . . . have been visiting the countryside, the factories, the farms, and the frontier areas...

...The arts perhaps always have latent in their power of imitating life a desire to replace it...

...Simple truth is now the thing, though not the only thing, for there is also quantity: "The new leaders in China seem determined to see every front 'blossom' at the same rate in the same direction...

...That is not all there is to modern Chinese poetry, there are other schools—the Metaphysicals, the Symbolists—and the list of influences upon them is oddly familiar: Verlaine, Mallarmé, Valéry, Rilke...

...Now it is characteristic of this situation that poetry today has vastly more writers than readers...

...Here is a sample of what he is doing now...

...With every drive to increase the production of steel there has been a comparable effort to increase the production of poems...

...But I gather from Hsu's Introduction that Chinese poetry has largely abandoned the scholarly imperial tradition with its language of learned allusion in which "even a collection of platitudes might be considered a poem...

...Of the poetry in this anthology I can't say much: I found almost all of it very dreary, and the worst of it both Red and dead...

...But it has been a by-product of that industry to bring forth upon the free world a fair equivalent of what Kai-Yu Hsu calls "the literally millions of verses being composed today by bus drivers, lathe operators, buffalo herders, foot soldiers, and, of course, men of letters...

...Like their counterparts in technological fields, these cultural workers encourage the farmers and laborers to learn reading and writing, and urge them to tell their stories and compose or recite their folk rhymes...

...That is a fair illustration of the unwritten law which says that Americans are perfectly free to do exactly what the Russians and Chinese are compelled to do by their rulers, just so long as we get it done...

...Was Kai-Yu Hsu perhaps Harold Rosenberg, corralling his herd of independent minds...

...A reviewer unhappily indifferent to the poem might observe that the idea of "stripped austerity" comes from the words "bare" and "cold" as much as from anything in this already familiar style, and he might add in the spirit of the revolution that for the poet to grow old in a setting of elder trees represents a backsliding into modern poetry, or bourgeois formalism, and introduces metaphysical considerations already condemned in the people's poetics...

...any number can play, and a very large number does...

...It is of this kind of work, presumably, that Michael Hamburger is quoted on the jacket as saying: "Wright has completely changed his idiom and style between his last collection and the new one, and it is the new one that is most remarkable...

...slept a jew minutes ago, Even though the stove has been out for hours...

...The motto of this criticism might have been, That poem is best that teacheth best, and in its shabbier aspects it tended to make of the art work, as someone neatly said, an empty space entirely surrounded by opinions...

...But there remains a good deal of sense to its contention that a poem, whatever else it may be, is something you can use your wits on and get response from...

...Nor do I see any particular objection to that...

...Probably the poets could have been taught how to do it by Arthur Waley, but just as probably they were taught by Ezra Pound that it was worth doing, and modern (about 1910...

...A reviewer who liked Wright's four-line poem might call attention to "the stripped austerity of the notation," and speak of "a new idiom...

...For this reason the poets naturally began to cast around for something else, which has often taken the form of a simplicity, or intelligence-defying opacity, of which little or nothing need be said...

...Literally thousands upon thousands of these verses have appeared in recent years...

...The local chinoiserie has been with us for some time now...

...who is quoted on the jacket as having renounced himself and all his works after his last book: "Whatever I write from now on will be entirely different...

...And there is a fable so apposite that I include it although, unhappily, I cannot remember whose it is...

...A bird cries in bare elder trees...

...Hsu wasn't writing about them, he was writing about us, and his book was not an anthology of Chinese poetry, but a desperate parody designed to bring us to our senses...

...Schopenhauer's beautiful saying about music, that it is "the world over again," has an unhappy way of being understood literally in the enormities of Richard Wagner, and it may be that something similar happens to painting with abstract expressionism and Action Painting...

...When Mao Tsc-tung writes: He who fails to reach the Great Wail is not a man, We have, as I count on my fingers, traveled 20,000 li, my response is a simple un hunh...

...Consequently, with every drive to increase the production of steel there has been a comparable effort in the publication of poems...

...For the poetry business, Kenneth Koch, in his new book Thank You and Other Poems (Grove, 96 pp., $1.95), has a character called the Artist, who responds to his first view of the Pacific by ordering 16 million tons of blue paint...

...These circumstances are: the proliferation of supposed "new idioms," the greatly increased production of verses, and the problematic existence of a criticism based on "analysis" and "explication...

...We cannot return, nor should we wish to return, to periods in which the mere possession of literacy conferred magical powers and the land of enchantment was called Gramarye...

...And there are some poets, writes Hsu, "who have created their own worlds that do not quite fit any of the identified schools," adding with a bland absence of comment which I find very telling, "Some critics refer to these poets as the Independent Group...

...You cannot, or at least I cannot, review an idiom...