MM: I’d like to start things off with a rather large question, but one that I think you, as much as anyone, are particularly well suited to address. Based on your experience as a poet, a critic, one of our most prolific reviewers of poetry, co-editor of VOLT and of the New California Poetry Series, and — with your recent experience at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — a teacher of workshops, how do you regard the present condition of American poetry?

CB: In most of the new poetry I see, unexceptional declarative sentences succeed one another like steps, when not like stomps, on the surface of a fairly limited experience — a method of domination, even when the tone is elegiac. True interiority is perplexed and dramatic — the phrases, the form, the tone, register disturbance. Honest disturbance, insofar as anything in language can be honest.

For my taste, most contemporary poets are excessively in their heads (and that’s where most magazine editors and poetry judges like to find them). And this despite and long after the example of the T. S. Eliot of “Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” and The Waste Land. In his time, Eliot was arguably the oldest poet in the world, on the analogy of Gertrude Stein’s contention that the United States was “the oldest country in the world, ... she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization.” By contrast, almost all the major prize winners in this country in recent decades are pre-Eliot in their poetics, younger than he was because of their conformity to what is old (principally, a hardly savage discursivity). Another major problem in contemporary poetry is (I think) smallness of scope. (And here again Eliot’s example has been abandoned.) A poet who would be in any way equal to the world today can ignore neither the horror of history (the dangerousness of mankind), nor the atrociously beautiful scheme of the exploding galaxies (the spectacular inhumanity of the cosmos), nor the cedar waxwing bobbing on a slender branch in order to reach the farthest huckleberry, nor the homeless children sniffing industrial shoe glue in Central America so as to numb their senses and survive the cold nights on the streets, nor the possibility that new grammars, new forms, might still be summoned out of the air, grammars and forms equal to our craziness, our desperation, and our need for the hope (the hope, not the solace) that lies in the more benign and strenuous species of invention. All this in addition to the most inescapable, personal, and humanly universal of truths, namely that, as conscious creatures in a not conscious world, we’re fucked, and we know we’re dying.

Of course I’ve overstated everything. I haven’t allowed for the pleasure I take in even the smallest felicities of expression and acts of poetic intelligence. The country is currently full of brilliant poetic talent, especially among the young. But I've tried to account for my frequent feeling as a reader of contemporary work: “Yes, but what more? This parched autobiographical garden, this apparently automatic practice of irony — are these now poetry’s best efforts?” All those silver caps, like those that come down on the clarinet valves and make them sound — the tragic cap, the funny cap, the psychological cap, the perverse cap, the ethical cap, the lyrical cap, the dramatic cap, the philosophical cap, the fifth dimension of connotation cap, the primordial cap, the (almost) direct jangle on the nerves cap, the will dance for work cap, the thinking cap, the I run the gamut of feelings cap, etc., etc. — how many are playing enough of them, now, to feed the instrument? Do poets need to start writing in teams? I think reality is being let down: its hugeness, its variety, its beauty, its painfulness.

MM: It seems to me that the narrowness you describe in much American poetry right now is to a large degree due to the various forms of skepticism that inform so much of today’s writing. For example, the parched autobiographical gardens you mention — I take you to mean the tediously literal responses of some current poets to the confessional writing in the fifties and sixties — strike me as expressions of skepticism toward the same encompassing poetic vision that modernists like Eliot, at their best, achieved. The ironic practice of others reflects a skepticism in the opposite direction: toward deep and personal emotional response. I would be curious to know your thoughts on how skepticism informs or plays into our current scene.

CB: Yes, a blend of a defensive distrust of glowing ideas, revenge against all that has meant personal derailment (what Hegel called “vexation,” a modern disease), political pessimism, even the positive love of the clear, dear, costly ring of the hammer against the sheer undeceiving hard surface of history and fact) — skepticism can easily account for an autobiographical emphasis in poetry.

Of course, autobiography is one of the standard (and potentially great) ingredients of literature. But the investigation of oneself as material for a “story” easily settles into a nursing of wounded narcissism (even if by irritation) and becomes an excuse to ignore almost everything else.

To respond to the other fork of your question: skepticism can certainly be genuine — a “deep and personal emotional response.” What has entered poetry with formidable force is not only the fear that humanity is monstrous and in the process of destroying the earth, which in both senses bears it, by always putting itself first, but also the suspicion that the positive of the image, or say the sovereignty of the symbol, has at its base precisely “nothing” (and here I echo Sartre): the nothing of a misalliance of the conscious mind with biological immanence. How respect the imagination if you see its genesis as a revolt against abjection and its persistence as a practice of denial — denial of its own emptiness as an arbitrary, merely self-authorized form of transcendence?

Whatever the causes, there is an epidemic of disillusionment and irony in contemporary poetry — poetry after, say, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and Robert Penn Warren. An often humorous, helpless perversity of self-disgust and self-alienation that for good reason we identify with John Ashbery, who, however, made major poetry out of it, pre-empting much of what has followed. But it has become an oddly self-comforting groove into which to fit one’s imaginative needle. It is now being delivered over, even by Ashbery himself, as an expected product.

The playfulnesss in some of this work nonetheless speaks of our animal inheritance of biological exuberance. The divorce papers can’t finally be served to the tailless animal in ourselves. Of course, biology is from famine and is rage as well as a capacity for pleasure. But, either way, it's alive — without apology. Whitman is still our greatest example of a poet of natural exuberance. And Stein our example of a certain biological and emotional equanimity.

The jump of vitality seems to enter imaginative consciousness not only as rhythm and gay sonic harmonies, but also as images or strong vocal accents (Sylvia Plath had a great genius for both), not to mention unexpected syntax or thrills of immanent revelation, to stop there — elements that, commanding our attention, lift us out of the morbidity of distraction. If Wallace Stevens never ceased to emphasize the imagination's ambiguous relation to reality, he found in that circumstance an invitation to investigative play. In “The American Sublime,” somewhat as in “Sunday Morning,” he places it in a comic, not tragic, context. So you’re in the midst of a great emptiness? Very well, then, get some style.

So, skepticism can be less than the whole story. Why respect a No unless it’s been bloodied by a Yes? And vice versa. There’s a Trader Joe version of Jimmy Dean pork sausage called Slimmy Lean. A good deal of current despondency is just that, skinny. It doesn’t hurt. It imitates or creates slight variations on what has already been done. Of course, so did most Renaissance love poetry. A significant originality is famously rare. There isn’t anything any of us can do but try not to follow fashion unthinkingly.

MM: When I think about recent American poetry, it seems to me that there is a decreasing emphasis on development of ideas, by which I mean content outside the aesthetic territory of the poem itself. Discursiveness seems to be losing ground to dramatic enactment or, in the case of more experimental poetries, non-or-tweaked-linear investigations of small units of structure. There are some readily available po-mo scripts to explain this. I would be curious to know your thoughts.

CB: I am not up to date on the po-mo scripts you speak of. Since the heyday and hay-thrashing days of “language writing,” there have of course been many experiments in this country with a poetics of interruption, splintering, and dismantling. In the main a negative, critical activity, this artistic research, this polemical practice, has been importantly liberating. But, although done in the interest of complexifying discourse, it hasn’t held itself responsible to the full complexity of experience. Finally, this work just wasn’t perplexed or unhappy enough. “Investigations of small units of structure” could only be a further retreat.

To my mind, it would be a great pity if ideas were to become negligible in poetry. Together with emotional intelligence, visual description, narrative arcs and flashes, sonic magic, tonal inflection, and still more, they are part of a ply and fusion that make poetry a richer experience for me than music is, if less immediately moving.

As for discursiveness, the obvious vehicle for the development of ideas, I find (as I said) that there is still all too much of it being produced today. Not that some discursiveness isn’t healthy and right. Consciousness is, after all, inevitably thetic — propositional. Discursiveness is how we separate from mama.

The crisis of validity that has afflicted both thetic and imaginative consciousness has certainly bred a culture of tweaked discursiveness. Chiefly a literature of the fragment and of surrealism. What is the fragment a fragment of? Discursiveness. We recognize it by what it has pulled away from or dropped out of — namely, narrative or, in the smaller unit, the sentence as a complete and “sensible” ordering of words and world.

Surrealism and nonsequitur are the real challenges to the mental law of discursiveness. Yet, as a method, nonsequitur can barely sustain interest. Its effectiveness lies in its aspect of irreverent, passing sport, its rattling of logical chains. A counter-revolt against the revolt formed by consciousness itself (its origin in negation and repulsion, as Kristeva emphasizes) is best staged in immediate relation to it. Nonsense by itself has no firing power. It can be generated as literature only as the shadow of what it is not. In any case, I’ve encountered very little of it in its pure, would-be-outrageous state in recent and current poetry.

As for surrealism, perhaps it was never what it was cracked up to be. The painters who wrote poetry came closest to new a-regimens for language, to the abundance and explosion of words that Tristan Tzara spoke of. For instance, Picasso’s “the paper is singing the canaries in the white almost pink shade a river” is plural writing of a qualitatively new kind. One can parse the syntax variously as

the paper is singing and the canaries are in the white almost pink shade
the paper is singing the canaries and in the white almost pink shade is a river
the paper is singing the canaries in the white almost pink shade and a river

The syntax keeps pulling more of itself out of itself, like taffy. What at first seems to be a terminus becomes the middle passage to something else. Discursiveness gets entangled and all but lost in its own multiple possibilities. Other than a self-renewing and self-recycled syntax, the secret in such writing is metaphor (“the paper is singing”). Metaphor is surrealism. Nondiscursive.

Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is at first a straightforward piece of thinking. But it is already strange with metaphorization, and gradually the thinking itself seems to shade into a dream state. To me what is most interesting about discursiveness in poetry (leaving out instances of stunning thinking, such as we often find in Louise Glück) is not the discursiveness itself but the mischief the poet does to it. In what ways does the writer get it out of its masculine power suit? At what turns of the corridor do you see a mad person quickly disappearing out a window? Where do you glimpse what Agamben opposes to the sterility of “taste” — namely, the primordial?

MM: I’d like to talk now about your recent book of poetry, The Violence of the Morning. In it, you advance the project you began in Candy Necklace, writing poems that vigorously assert themselves in the democratic and Whitmanian tradition of inclusive subjectivity. By that I mean that these poems express a selfhood which, while not eschewing psychological depth, permit themselves a wide-ranging, eclectic involvement with an almost dizzying multitude of surfaces (linguistic, imagistic, erotic, historical...) Could you talk for a while about this inclusive urge in your new poems? And if you agree with this description, would you be willing to speculate what underlies this urge toward allowance and variety?

CB: The impulse to include — the positive of the wish not to exclude — may come from the feeling that it takes absolutely everything to form a defense against nothing. The hunger for everything-together may bear within it the desire for plenipotentiary being — for immortality. What is a little more certain is that the shock and pleasure given by this “spectacle of matter” creates a need to revisit everything, as if in the after-tremblings of trauma, and also to befriend other beings and even to love phenomena, as if to save them, too, from further shock, violence, and destruction.

The “democracy” in or of my poems is a would-be islanded togetherness of things in an appalling universe where there really are no islands. In the Venetian physics of the poems, every atom is always already busting its brains out to be as many-directed and extended as it can be. And I celebrate that, despite the costs, and even urge whatever is “like a bug upside down on twanging ground... [to] get up now and see / the well in the welcome, etc.” It’s a tragic paradox that the more open, interactive, and multiply relational things are — the fuller and more vibrant — the greater their exposure to destruction. As is well known, Whitman solved the dilemma by believing that everything is recuperated in an evolutionary process of transformation. A grand speculation, but perhaps over-consolatory.

MM: It seems to me that most poets who embrace an “open, interactive, and multiply relational” vision of poetry and the phenomenon it points toward turn away from personal and psychological depth. There are exceptions — Ashbery, in some of his forms, comes to my mind first — but many poets moving in this direction are involved with projects that are more social and linguistic in scope. Your poems in Candy Necklace — and even more so in The Violence of the Morning — fan out into what many would consider dangerously personal emotional (and often erotic) terrain — at the same time as the atoms that compose them seem to be bursting at their seams “to be as many-directed and extended as [they] can be.” This strikes me as a rare combination. In my mind, the emotional registers that you explore, especially the erotic and the elegiac, are generally associated with a less plastic approach to language and expressiveness. I’d enjoy hearing your response to these descriptions, and to the extent that you might agree with them, I’d like to know what informs this particular combination of effects.

CB: In literature relationality without Eros is on the dry side — not poetical. Bataille’s definition probably can’t be bettered: eroticism is essential continuity, whether between sperm and ovum or soul and God. Only Eros is all-relational. That is its glory as well as the very thing that makes it monstrous — greedy and unsatisfiable.

To me, the erotic, in this Bataillean sense, is an instinctual response to — everything, from unsatisfiable desire in bodies to landscapes to the death of a loved one. In childhood, you see a flotilla of steamboat clouds over Steamboat Rock and you feel (rather than think) Go! Stay! Go! You don't know what wonderful terrible thing is happening in your soul. But it stays with you; to all such moments, your sensibility is helplessly and fiercely loyal. Or you live at the center of a wide horizon — delicious — which nonetheless, depending on your mood, threatens to garrote you. The individual life is famously but imperfectly discontinuous — but there is a flapping tarpaper window in its room. A death occurs, painfully demonstrating discontinuity: but the dead one becomes larger than before, strangely ubiquitous, a ghostly lining, a parody of Eros — and a reflection of it.

So to me violently personal feeling is instantly and automatically continuous with the vast Impersonal. Of course, poems about specific loves are often constricted things, unrocked by the complex jumble of possibles and impossibles that human existence is, untouched by the primordial. All the more reason to favor collections in which the whole range of feeling is investigated — in which “love poems” are mixed with several other kinds, so as to insure the widest and deepest possible view, or, rather, views. As both a reader and a writer, I resist the recent trend to base books on a particular theme or a uniform method. A collection will have a deep coherency if it comes from the reaches of a single (even if it had better be a self-contradictory) sensibility. More and more poets are becoming temporary specialists of a topic, now this one, now that. Fortunately, the stronger ones make of their ostensible, easily labeled subject something large and elastic. But the model behind this movement is scientific, or academic, or devout: the tract, the monogram, the prayer. It has no necessary value for poetry.

As for a “plastic approach to language and expressiveness,” it can show the same impulse toward (an impossible) total inclusiveness that goads a philosophical Eros. Hopkins everywhere illustrates it. Dickinson, also, not least in “small” matters of lexicon. For instance, in the surprise of “heft” in her famous phrase “the heft of cathedral tunes.” Dickinson moves the word into a fresh place in the world, larger than and different from the one it had enjoyed before. So does Whitman in his ravishing description of sunrise, “Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols, silently rising, freshly exuding/” even if he gives an exactly opposite feel to “heft.” Both uses are new things in the world. As everyone knows, inventiveness (a serious novelty) is potentially infinite. Eros sniffs out that possibility and fans with its wings the numerous little fires of resemblance and association in language.

Of course, invention can also serve a sense of things gone profoundly askew, of dreadful disconnection. In The Violence of the Morning, you can see touches of that kind of expressiveness in, say, “Nice little a, your pearly tiles,” with its hurt allusion to the Lacanian “objet (petite) a.” And it’s still more marked in some of the poems I’m writing now. Perhaps I should try to dispel any impression I may have given to the contrary and state that I'm not opposed to a poetics of negativity — only to rote, narcissistic performances of it. Frederick Seidel, for one, keeps it real; he’s driven.

Let me say, too, that, in any case, most of my “English” seems to me more or less plain. Can I be wrong about this? With very few exceptions, the sentences parse. “The cross swells and froths, we know it arisen. / The teat swells; foams: / meadow of the damned.” That’s a long cry from Stein’s “Why should wet be the time to class" (which avoids saying that liquidity is incompatible with classification, yet says it), let alone from “This is hum with him, believe hit believe hit page it.” By comparison, my sentences are hopelessly well-behaved. (Not that most of Stein’s work isn't plain, in its way — even, at times, with a vengeance. She loved the baggage of ordinary conversation. When looking back on innovative styles, we tend to remember the flash-points and to forget the dun.)

MM: I would add that when looking back on innovative styles, we tend to focus on language surfaces rather than their conceptual underpinnings. With Stein, we recall her grammatical and syntactic wildness without seeing the why and how that drives it. It’s interesting to me that you describe an erotics of landscapes in your last response, because the connection that I see between your poems and Stein’s is not so much with her innovations in grammar and syntax as with her fascination with the idea of language as landscape. For Stein, of course, these ideas were worked out mostly in her plays and, somewhat more rhetorically, in The Geographical History of America. Your concept of landscape seems different but related. Its presence is suggested immediately by your choice of the Monet for your cover — especially in relation to your collection’s title. Could you go a little deeper into the question of how ideas of landscape have affected your poetry?

CB: World space is the first reality. The mother’s breast is a small moon that gives milk. Then it goes away and it doesn't miss you — not unduly, as you might wish. Diana killed Actaean because she didn’t want to share her breasts. To share them is to have them eaten away. She was smart. The Actaean body hankers. Why can’t the landscape hanker back? Landscape is the body first offered to us then refused. It’s smart.

In The Geographical History of America, as you know, the American landscape is kept at a mollifying, if not an almost self-erasing, distance. Sparsely settled, all but abstract — at least as seen from a planet where Stein preferred to view it — it obtrudes few clumps of social fact to clot the imagination. It is thus the ideal landscape for what Stein called “human mind,” which is creative, as opposed to “human nature,” which is customary. There is also, of course, the Stein of flashing fragments of place and action: “Battle creek. I was wet. All the doors showed light.” But despite the uncharacteristic glimpse of elemental strife in this excerpt, she almost entirely eliminates death from the horizon. Mortality was not really in her lexicon. Her chief use of landscape was to stage language in relation to it, as that which has the good fortune not to have its foot stuck in bedrock or in its mouth.

By contrast, my landscapes are often doused in death and reek of the wilderness — one might say of the cosmos. For me, the American scene is still sublime (much as Stevens saw it)— disturbingly if also gratefully aloof from us. “These Burger Kings will never gather / the hems of the mountains about them”; and in the same poem, with its title from Stein, “They Liked It Because the Wind Blew, and Blew the Birds About,” there’s my Cormac McCarthy take off: “this American loneliness — tastes right bitter, don’t it? / ‘I’m going to have to kill the sumbitch stole my horse.’”

Even apart from the thrilling terror of the original and lingering American wilderness, modern physics tells us that the cosmos is a paradox of the imaginable maximum of two contraries, order and chaos. Largely invisible, it is the new and greatest wilderness. Its essence is vibration. Like the small figure of a mountain climber on an Alp, Rilke held on to a shaking invisible cosmic rope for the length of The Duino Elegies. And even if a thing is in the matrix of visibility, as Luce Irigaray says, it is “already... many in its superabundance.... The tearing away of the one from the whole does not yet exist” (This notion of a deep sourcing of everything, of an inescapable violent and subtle interactivity, is of course pure Nietzsche, the poet-philosopher of invisible force.) Several of my poems touch on this ambiguity of object and source, of visibility and invisibility, and the scandal of form. As I put it in “Taller by the Non-Thinglike,” “my words practice tiny displacements / Like everything that would accomplish / The messianic world.” A narrative instance of the same thing: the protagonist in “Take me to the Godfish” is scandalized at how belated his human existence is, he is so belatedly here, he feels like the only flagellum among the beauties. He climbs into his Unimog and tries to rip through the fabric of things.

As for Monet, I “get” him, as we all do, beautifully, but my world feeling isn’t like his. Whereas his is predominantly lyrical, mine has only a sniper’s lyricism, quick reports then deadly silence. His paintings illustrate the Romantic penchant for vaporization; my world is unyieldingly solid, at least out front. But I decided against my original choice for cover art, Jack Yeats’s The Violence of the Dawn, partly because its detonative style of representation isn’t like my world feeling, either. Actually, that didn't bother me much; I, too, gravitate toward pops and whistlings that harsh past the ears. But the woman waving her hat at the explosion of light was far to the left of the canvas, and, if the image were not to be shrunk way down and so look too safe and contained, she would have had to be swung round to the back cover, a lonely place for her. And when I saw the Monet in an art book, the greens were more nearly turgid than they are in the pastel version decorating my book. But Betty McDaniel’s design is, I think, lovely. Of course someday I must go to Paris again and see the original.

On the other hand, like many Americans, I veer toward huge spaces or, second best, toward an intricate and varied greenery that argues for immense fecundity. I’ve been a lookout for the forest service, and I summer in a rented cabin beside a white water river in the Cascades. Often landscape comes to us as incomparably beautiful, there is nothing so open and generous as the land and its sky, sometimes nothing so unspoiled. So my feelings go back and forth. The drives are, after all, notoriously contradictory. Life, death — they want it all. Moreover, not unlike Stein, I sometimes find myself pushing off from description so as to give language a chance to imitate, as if in a sparkler’s hissy-fit, nature’s example of exuberant and prolific creativity.

MM: In what I take to be a conscious nod to Whitman in the book’s final poem, you repeat the phrase “leaf of fog” three times in one line, riffing off the title Leaves of Grass, in a gesture that suggests the more pluralistic and indeterminate character of our place in time. This relation to Whitman — filtered through a Steinian sense of plasticity in syntax and grammar — strikes me as more sophisticated and conceptually rich than the more literal and frequently rigid relations defined by other American poets. I would be curious to know your thoughts on how these poems relate to these and any other antecedents you may want to discuss.

CB: The sophistication you speak of may well be more yours than mine. Of course, in the midst of writing I don’t want to know what my immediate dialogue with previous — or contemporary — poets is, or might be, at least not exactly, for fear that I’ll write with too transparently “historical” or “critical” or even companionable an intention. A “conscious nod” to the title Leaves of Grass, no. But perhaps an unaware one. Certainly most books of an honorable complexity no longer even appear to contain leaves of “real” grass (whereas “Song of Myself” can just about make you smell and taste the stuff).

Nonetheless, the impulse of that last poem, “Here’s a Development,” is to fight skepticism (“fog,” “Nam,” etc.) with inventiveness, the free and generous actuality of a created novelty. This is where Steinian plasticity comes in. When Gertrude Stein writes, for instance, the wholly unexpectable phrase “Not more cloud that most of the members of the breathing place,” she momentarily makes her readers (those who are open to a new experience) cloud-beings, atmospherically rarefied — which has its truth, as, again, the Romantics perceived (witness Baudelaire’s vaporisation du Moi). Whitman’s great generosity of attention to and affection for phenomena and Stein’s great willingness to make of language a gift of continual refreshment of grammar, syntax, and imaginings (for her, an advisement of and accompaniment to process-ontology, its ever-new singularities and novelties) — this is a potentially potent, if complicated, combination. In fact, it promises the utmost amplitude and adventure. And the utmost tension: the tension of language when it both cooperates and competes with one of its own traditional functions, namely description. World-word, word-world, each side tugging to keep from being dragged by the other into the mud pond.

MM: I’d like to end with another rather large question. For a while now the gap between creative writers and critics has been widening into a seemingly insurmountable gulf. Where I was educated — at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — there were almost no relations whatsoever between teachers of literature (if they even teach literature) and writing. As English departments continue to embrace the trend toward cultural studies, poetry is often one of the first things to go. As both a critic and poet, I’m wondering what you think of the situation. What kind of a “defense of poetry” would you make now at the beginning of the millenium?

CB: Rather than launch into a pumped defense of poetry, going beyond or deeper into what I’ve already stated and implied, I’d like to respond to the whole field of your question, though first adding the following: Poetry is the ultimate form of intimacy with two things, language and feeling (if sharing this last with music) — feeling that floods from the world in the body and the body in the world and from there out to the rest of the world, returning like the courtly lady in ripped but gorgeous glad rags in Jack Yeats’s great painting Entrance of a Lady with Attendant, who steps in measure through a smoking post-holocaust waste land, arm in arm with a squat beast of a courtier, an image, shall we say, of prose. And if poetry isn’t as simperingly vain as she is, it can be just as dauntless.

Poetry is the eroticization of thought — psychic vitality. If it isn’t spending a sexless night in the Abstract Reasoning Motel, if it isn’t mere calculation or joyless analysis, thinking is an aesthetico-sensual activity, vivified and incarnate in the desiring body. Even when it is mournful, which is often, it’s a form of love. Almost especially when it is mournful.

There are many who can’t bear and even more who can’t “get” such intimacy between thought and the body, thought and feeling — though, however obscurely, they must suffer from it. And there are almost as many who don’t want to or can’t spare it the time of day. A hollowing ignorance, an ill if not missing soul, may be the consequence. Poetic intimacy requires not only a rigorous elimination of distraction but a self-expanding putting by of will and ego.

However disguised they may be in its precincts, academe rewards both ego and will, more and more so, especially in its graduate programs, which have become hyperprofessionalized. Furthermore, as you know, a wave of democratic concern has swept through the humanities, a rage for justice to be done to the previously “humiliated” and “offended” — certain kinds of recognition having long been overdue to the culturally overshadowed. It amounts to social work and political reform, but of an indirect, book- and classroom-bound kind, most of it restricted to an academic bubble. Importantly, it may trickle down and liberalize undergraduates, but it also encourages them to read with a political agenda, to grade poems for their social content, as opposed to letting the poem, whether it’s about the goddess Melancholy or a carriage in Sweden, invade, permeate, and change them. Nowadays literature is processed by socially geared “ism”-machines. As a result, poetry, which was once at the top of the academic hierarchy, is now at the bottom. Even the poetry of the late-comers to “visibility” is reduced to holding out a hat in front of the hastily erected establishments of ethnic, queer, and women’s prose.

Is poetry, as such, indifferent to issues of rights and social suffering? This is a difficult question. Certainly, its principal value lies not in modestly addressing or assessing the “external world,” including its social ills (and what are the hundreds of thousands of prose writers failing to do, in this regard, that poetry’s help should be urgently required?), but in its inherent violence, its psychic revitalizations. (Remember Lautreamont’s statement: “Every time I read Shakespeare I feel like I’m tearing apart the brain of a jaguar.”) But this aesthetic electricity means that poetry can shape an attitude towards reality with the quickest and most intense of means. And if the attitude concerns humanitarian crises, that may be all to the good (it depends on the attitude).

Yet if ethics is capable of pragmatic (not to mention absolute) definition (and how compelling would it be otherwise?), poetry is constitutionally indifferent to everything that has already been said definitively — more, to what can be said definitively. Its ethics, if you will, consists in entering into perplexities in a spirit of urgent and courageous investigation, not of legislation. (Hence the demand for an “attitude” can betray it.) It wishes more to live perplexities than to solve them. More, it knows that the truth is equivocal, elusive, and complex.

The ethics of poetry thus agrees with the ethics of psychoanalysis, which, at least in Lacan’s view, has the task of saying “no” (or “that’s not all,” if not “that’s not it at all”) to pre-cut patterns of desire. The two practices converge in the liberation of desire and the consequent liberalization of judgment.

For this reason, much of the mid- and late-twentieth-century French and German theory still popular in English departments resonates sympathetically in the house of poetry. Contemporary poets can find allies there, though the latter may not always recognize the brotherhood, the common aim of a radical questioning. Truly contemporary poets risk destroying “the latest solid ground on which art builds” (to echo Lyotard’s description of the “postmodern”). For me, the richest new development in the criticism of poetry is the intermixture of poststructuralist theory (stripped of most of its abstract and arcane lexicon) and a passionately particular attention to poems.

Yet what I would like to see more readers and critics of contemporary poetry engaged in may be somewhat resistant to academic “disciplines” — namely, the detection of what is significantly new in the art and hence at some level part of the general leftist task of “relentlessly questioning all values, powers, and identitites” (to quote from Julia Kristeva's Revolt, She Said). I’ll add to that the need to discriminate between not only good and not so good poetry, but also great and good poetry, if only to keep alive a vision of what great poetry might be.

In his essay on style, Pater distinguished great from good literature as follows: if the latter can be identified by “the absolute correspondence of the term to its import,” the former has, in addition, “something of the soul of humanity in it,” has “compass,” “variety,” “depth of the note of revolt,” “largeness of hope,” and so on. Contra Milosz, this distinction may now be somewhat out of date for poetry, if less so for fiction. (But would I be so convinced of this if I had come from Poland? Probably not.) I would reformulate the difference in this way: whereas good poetry has easily recognizable truth and beauty, great poetry strains at the limits of both thought and expression — it doesn’t stop at the usual safe terminals. (Compared to most of the writers around them, as everyone knows, Whitman, Dickinson, and Stein were freaks.)

Of the good poem one may finally ask: “Are you as happy with being complacently well made as you seem”? And of the great poem, “What and where are you, exactly, and where are you off to?” To turn again for illustration to Jack Yeats, the great poem comes bearing down on you like the riderless runaway horses in his little painting in the Sligo museum, radiating out like a still-tight but furious bouquet of power. On the other hand, for it is nothing if not a paradox, the great poem rests before you like a still thing, nodding only with each slap of its own rain, while its underside remains dry and sequestered.

This is one of my fantasies, unreal even to me, and too real, compelling.

Denver Quarterly
Volume 39, Number 2

University of Denver

Editor: Bin Ramke
Associate Editor: Karla Kelsey
Assistant Editor, Fiction: Danielle Dutton


© 2004 by the University of Denver,
Denver Colorado, 80208.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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