The Poverty of Poetry
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers&Writing THE POVERTY OF POETRY BY PEARL K. BELL If some of the poets I've been reading in the past few weeks could switch off their tape recorders long enough to examine Paul Goodman's...
...Most of the time this angry young woman's poetic statements have the metaphoric sophistication and self-critical control of teenyboppers on the telephone: "I like men who ride motorcycles./I like the way his levis fit./I am an old Californian./The beach turns me on./I decide he is someone I would like to interest...
...What Goodman knows better than most is the price a poet can pay for his blind allegiance to the colloquial????a crippling impoverishment of perspective and possibility...
...Enough of the poems survived, however, for this huge gathering????a strenuous labor of homage and friendship on the part of Donald Allen, who hunted down all the vagrant letters and lunch-napkin scribbles...
...As a poet, O'Hara thought himself daringly unconventional, provocative, shocking, antiacademic and even, in the tradition of Apollinaire and the Dadaists, antiartistic...
...The elegance, wit and cultivated intelligence of the older modern masters are in bad odor...
...But in practice . .. this comes to not questioning slogans that are convenient for an immediate tactic or transient alliance...
...For the reader, the cumulative effect of this colossally self-absorbed journal of happenings is numbness, not pleasure...
...Only in rare moments is she capable of scrutinizing and defining her rage, as in this burst of sardonic hyperbole at an indifferent lover: "I count the times your shoulders writhe/and you topple over/after I've shot you with my Thompson Contender/ (using the .38-caliber barrel/or else the one they recommend for shooting rattlesnakes...
...and he is staying here until he can get it fixed...
...That is, the process of literature is not used in its natural power to find meaning and make sense...
...But the literary process expands these limits by historical memory, international culture, and welcoming the dark unconscious...
...He asks me if I live here and I say no...
...The names may glitter, but O'Hara's poems to and about them do not...
...Instead of a brilliantly individual ordering of his frenetic reality, his poems are a garrulous, pseudo-Surrealist, and often incoherent potpourri of his giddy life in New York...
...I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S/CORNER____" The British critic A. Alvarez recently wrole: "The more directly an artist confronts the confusions of experience, the greater the demands on intelligence, control and a certain watchfulness...
...Colloquial this indubitably is, but poetry...
...there is little pleasure to be found in reading most American poets today????W...
...When he spat out these je m'en jou words, the attitude was already old hat...
...Goodman came to write his deceptively casual exploration of literature and language out of acute distress at the damage that contemporary linguists, pop "multimedia" philosophers like Marshall McLuhan, and radical activists are doing to our id;as of what literature is, how it works, and what value it has in the life of men...
...Writers&Writing THE POVERTY OF POETRY BY PEARL K. BELL If some of the poets I've been reading in the past few weeks could switch off their tape recorders long enough to examine Paul Goodman's Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry (Random House, 242 pp., $6.95)????and listen to what he is saying about their craft ????We would have fewer books of poetry, fewer soi-disant poets, and better poems...
...And this at a time when poetry is being more widely published, bought and declaimed in lecture halls than ever before...
...The poems of The Motorcycle Betrayal begin with resentment and develop as tantrums????neither their reach nor their grasp amounts to much more than self-pitying shouts, grunts and snarls...
...After all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies...
...A deliberate, almost surly flatness of rhetoric is fashionable among contemporary poets, many of whom confuse colloquial casualness with literary simplicity (Richard Brautigan), or an eccentric lifestyle with genius (Gary Snyder), or political indignation with rhetorical vigor (Denise Levertov et al...
...More seriously, literature itself is noisily condemned as irrelevant, and Paul Goodman nails this vulgarity superbly: ". . . the irrelevance of literature has gotten to mean that the right use of literary speech is political action...
...Common speech can be pretty empty and aimless, whereas to write you must know at least something and try to be clear—it is a profession...
...This marvelously lucid description of the poet's tools and devices should be a chastening object lesson to those readers of Diane Wakoski's The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems (Simon & Schuster, 160 pp., $5.95) who mistake her confessional ranting and vengeful sexual scolding for poetry...
...there is too much suffering and injustice...
...But how you can really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them...
...S. Merwin, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop being towering exceptions...
...Yet as soon as the poet begins to tell his individual occasion and to live it in language...
...If Diane Wakoski's experience seems too monotonously narrow for poetic force and variety, the dazzling richness of people, places, and interests the late Frank O'Hara crammed into his 40 years proves no guarantee of poetic achievement...
...O'Hara was a compulsive reporter of his daily rounds, not a chooser and shaper...
...How many poets today would care to assume the responsibilities of that awesome adult word...
...The beginnings of modern poetry, of course, go back to Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and his revolutionary defense at the end of the 18th century "of language really used by men," rather than "what is usually called poetic diction...
...Action' becomes idiotic activism...
...His career stands as an unrevised work-in-progress...
...Indeed, he is likely to diminish the colloquial elements . . . because they are not clear...
...This has much in common with Goodman's profound reminder that the freedom of the colloquial "is limited to where the speakers have initiative, eye-witnessing, and trust...
...he deviates from common speech...
...Mainly, he drew upon his vast collection of celebrated friends, in an extended family album of Larry Rivers, John Cage, Edwin Denby, Virgil Thomson, Jackson Pollock, and a lesser cast of thousands...
...Though Miss Wakoski decorates these daytime-television troubles with the fake-tough artifacts of the roaring easy riders, she is not clever or gifted enough to disguise her narcissistic banality...
...His phrases close back on themselves and reinforce one another...
...A Time survey of collegiate poets and critics last summer found that Eliot is considered "irrelevant," Dylan Thomas "a phony Welshman," and W. H. Auden "a poet for the middle-aged...
...Indeed...
...The immediacy of experience was his only guide and touchstone: "What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems...
...Life is unfair, men are cruelly unfeeling, why did God give her such a plain face...
...Yet even when he began to publish poetry, in the '40s, there was certainly nothing new or shocking about his irreverent disdain for poetry's traditional significances, forms and diction, and the pomp of its solemnity...
...Precisely these exacting sobrieties are missing in O'Hara's work...
...Rather, he draws on a bigger vocabulary than is common, revives old-fashioned expressions, neologizes, and becomes nice about grammar...
...Yet he also stressed the need "to throw over [this ordinary language] a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect...
...O'Hara was the Henry Geldzahler of the New York high-fashion art world in the '50s, a whimsically charming gadfly, sometime play-wright and art critic, full-time curator at the Museum of Modern Art, indefatigable partygoer, and drumbeater for the Abstract Expressionist painters...
...It is claimed there is no time for this...
...I ask him if he lives here and he says no, his bike is broken...
...As one would expect from Knopf, O'Hara's Collected Poems (586 pp., $17.50) is a beautiful, meticulous, and painstakingly ornate job of book-making, but the splendor of the vessel only accentuates the triviality of its contents...
...Improves them for what...
...For death...
...But for our purposes his account of the way a poet uses language is of special interest: "Poetry starts from good colloquial speech," Goodman observes...
...The word becomes a thing...
...He wanted to be the impudent laureate of the metropolis, but frequently rendered its assault on the senses only in humdrum incantation: "It's my lunch hour, so I go/for a walk among the hum-colored/cabs...
...Yet her poems are taken seriously by critics who should know better...
...He forms a complex word...
...He was theatrically insouciant about his poetry, as John Ashbery tells us in his introduction: "Dashing the poems off at lunchtime or even in a room full of people????he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them...
...For the occasional arresting passage ("I love this hairy city/It's wrinkled like a detective story/and noisy and getting fat and smudged/lids hood the sharp black eyes"), one must endure huge trash-heaps of what he called his "I do this I do that" poems, full of campy gossip, silly jokes, travel notes, subway rides, newspaper headlines, movie stars, sentimentalized shadows of anxiety...
...First, down the sidewalk/where laborers feed their dirty/glistening torsos sandwiches/ and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on...
...But I wonder if, in the end, Allen's diligence has been worth the effort...
Vol. 55 • January 1972 • No. 1
