The young woman at Bard College told me, "I don't like your poems." I was hanging around, or in there, as we say, after a reading of those poems, waiting to give a talk — like this one — about modern American poetry, or about the modernity of American poetry, which would be anything but a defense pro domo — but how should she have known that? Well, she would have known had she stayed to hear my talk. The best I could manage, the retort positive, as it were, was, "I don't either, a lot of the time," but that was insufficient. "I don't like your poems," she returned to the charge with an insistence not so much surprising as disagreeable. "I don't like them because there's too much history in them." "Too much history?"

My astonishment was not altogether an affectation — though I do not wish to appear to put affectation down — rather it was a kind of stupor, in part the consequence of a certain amount of expert grilling over the years as to my inaccuracies: Mrs. Cameron had died twenty years before I made her take Lord Tennyson's portrait; Ravel was in Madagascar when Strauss conducted Salomé in Paris, not in the next box, etc. etc. Why, when a professor of English came up to me with triumph gleaming in his eyes to say, "I'm the Victorian chair," a locution peculiar to our profession, I knew what was coming. It came: "I used to be so moved by your Ruskin poem, and then I happened to be reading some Ruskin letters and I realized how much Ruskin you appropriated for your poem, and (let's give credit where credit is rated low) I was even more moved by your poem in a different way." So the Victorian chair and I have one little secret which we share already. But whether mistakes or plagiarism, such waverings with regard to ascertainable fact are invariable liabilities discerned in my work by those who regard such work as anything more than the slavish tracings of Clio's hemline; hence my astonishment with the Bard contingent.

"Too much history?" "Yes," she said, "too much. I don't like history. History is oppressive to women. There never was a woman who wasn't oppressed by history." "Never? Not even Queen Elizabeth?" "Which Queen Elizabeth?" — this she put narrowly, as if I were trying to sneak through some casuistical loophole. "Oh, you know," I weaseled out of it, "Queen Elizabeth the First, of England... in the Renaissance?" "When was the Renaissance?"

I quote this little colloquy to its appalling end to take the burden off my poems, of course — the sublimity of such ignorance, like Heidegger's rationalism, cannot be sufficiently praised or blamed. But I also think — now, after a certain amount of scar tissue has formed — that my interlocutress had something. Something more, I mean, than a vast doubt about the location of the Renaissance. She felt, if I may give her the benefit of my suspicions, of my susceptibilities, that there was, in the poetry I so much enjoyed writing, stealing, reading, performing, too much hardware, the excessive realia of lives which inevitably reminded her of just those household bonds which, like so many women, she had determined to cast off. My critic was, if I may say so, kicking against the pricks. For surely my poetry as she heard it was all clanking and clattering, scratchy and thorny with the intimation, the positive insistence, of facts, features, names of occasions and even — history indeed! — with dates, the very data of circumstance.

And was such a thing, ontologically ripped from the gossip column, the chronicle, the matrix of our records of each other which the French so wisely call commèrage — was such a thing poetry? Wasn't poetry, rather, an immediacy unencumbered, unconditioned by the circumstantial? Wasn't lyric poetry, precisely, the eternal Now, or even the immediate Then... but experienced without — literally — impedimenta, without the mere baggage of our lives?

I speak of course of American poetry, and the mere mention of baggage affords me the occasion for a little excursus — the constatation of a geography: American poetry is no better than it has ever been, for there is no improvement, no progress in what must be no more (if no less) than itself, immitigably on its own terms, those terms being what it is; the end of utterance as a term is an end, as well as the utterance itself. No, American poetry is no better than it was with Emerson or Dickinson or Melville or Whitman, but it is discrepant, there is a difference. One remarks that it comes to us, now, from every point on the continent, from every condition of social life, from every source of regional speech — and that is at least a departure from the classical locality of articulation in these states, as the four names I have just mentioned indicate. That our poets should now be inspissated in every county (almost, one has to say, in every university) of these fifty states is no argument for their being less alone — less without baggage — with America than before; rather it is an evidence of why they must be the more so, the more isolated within their so unconnected elsewheres. For the poetry of America begins only in the face of the unnameable, it begins with the giving of names to what has not been named, as Gertrude Stein once said, and such an assignment commences only upon the perception of an elsewhere alien to the very language which seeks it out. One welcomes the diversity, the difference, the discrepancy as I have called it, not because it will unite us but because it will refresh the terms of our division, our selfhood, our reality.

And here I should like to hover, to loiter a little over my declared perception of a generalized impulse in all this poetry of ours — all except mine, I mean; mine and perhaps the poetry of half a dozen contemporaries — Mr. Hecht, Mr. Hollander, and Mr. Merrill among them, fortunately. Let me say, then, that I want to brood upon the nature of something in the work of poets in the United States who are under fifty, thus exposing myself and Mr. Hollander and Mr. Hecht and Mr. Merrill completely. Something in the burden, to use an old word for subject or content when it takes a special form, the burden, then, of most of our American poets as I see them. And I see them as an editor of poetry magazines for the last twelve years, receiving about a thousand poems a month; as a teacher; and as a publisher of a series of poetry books I choose from all the clamorous manuscripts (they even come from agents!) that fill the publisher's mail room, poets who hang or fall or even lie together in their mistrust, their questioning, indeed their indictment of all the overt ceremonies which constitute — which always have constituted — the means of poetry. A burden indeed, when each poet must be his or her own devil's advocate, or rather must advocate within his or her own expression precisely the opposition to everything in that expression which constitutes its continuity as itself. The burden of our poets — and it is, I once said, speaking of one of the most touching figures among them, the first time in the history of poetry that human beings have been concerned and even compelled to write a poetry of forgetting — is to rise against the form in which they are writing; their burden is their longing to lose the gifts of order, recovery, convergence upon an end so that all might begin again; their burden is their aspiration to gainsay, to despoil the self of all that had been, merely, propriety.

No recurrence, no reversion, no verse — not the turn but the errant line. When the mind is thus released from its old subservience to repetition, when no experience is reverted to, recuperated, then we get a poetry of revelation without memory, a poetry of centripetal illumination, a poetry without any of the axiological signs and spells which served, once, to hold it in the mind — and which implied there was a mind to hold it; a poetry whose imagery, hugged close to the self, is often in that repository pulverized beyond the recognition of shared contours; a poetry without rhyme, but rather with a sonority parodied beyond belief into instances of mockery and Hellenism, a music jeering at conventional accords; a poetry without constants in rhythmical behavior, but a kind of insistent unpredictability which affords the singled-out self its final locus, an ultimate accommodation of what Shelley said was "conscious, separable, one."

Such a poetry — and my description of it here is only a provisional and polemical cast of the net, deliberately harsh to exceptions and resemblances, to hopes — has jettisoned verse, that angelic ceremonial of beginnings and endings which make up the entire justice of prosody. It bears instead the weight of a fallen angel, a Luciferian responsibility to cancel out itself (and its information); to use itself up even as it speaks, the way prose does; to write itself in water or even in rivers of fire, anyway in some inconstant element which will not allow us ever to step into it more than once. Conventions, even such conventions of memory as dates, are... conveniences, and without them, without baggage, the poet, alone with America, as I have described him or her, must draw upon the automatism of exclusion — the poet's exclusion, the poetry's exclusion, it is the same — as if on a bonus talent unimaginable in "normal social life." The poet must fall back on his unpropped nature, on the terms, merely — merely! yet how much they determine! — of a temperament, of an identity.

If I am at all correct in my characterization of American poetry, then I am correct in confirming that young woman at Bard in her scorn of history in my work — history as a kind of hardware, then, what might be said to be a trope for all those disciplines (from Lévy-Bruhl to Lévi-Strauss) which characterize our century — psychoanalysis, anthropology, comparative religion, criticism itself as practiced, as perfected by Northrop Frye, say. That such things once turned up inside certain poems is a specific consequence of modernism, or perhaps — since this is how we now consider modernism, is it not? — as a specific consequence of the high romantic tradition which leads to modernism. But in the American poetry of my juniors, in the postmodernist poetry I am called upon to examine with such exemplary thoroughness, I perceive a new courage. No longer the courage to live on everything (which requires a tradition or at least a convention, and a memory), but the courage to live on nothing. Nothing but our bodies and the weather — that is the courage of American poetry in our moment. We Americans have, and have had, a certain asceticism which renounces the past, renounces whatever is too much with us — even when it is the Word which is too much with us: our poetry renounces the Word as well. Forgetting — the blank of not knowing, of dismembering rather than remembering — is precisely the ground of our wisdom, what Geoffrey Hartman would call an apotropaic relation to language, whereby we invite or inveigle into speech itself the energies of unmaking, of forgetting, or negation, that negation which Hegel said was our task, for with it, when the plenitude of Being fails, when the Void becomes a power in itself, Man is most fully himself. Forgetting, for us, is the condition of all creative thought. In all "advanced" art of our moment, we are to forget before we confront the new work, which, as in the initiation ceremonies of the Orphic adepts, not only requires us not to know anything in advance — for the first time in three thousand years, art proceeds without habits of shared recognition, without the (often obligatory) negotiation of common awareness — but also requires us to forget anything we might happen to know. Perhaps that is our lyric poetry, the burden of the present of which I spoke: the responsibility of forgetting.

Consider the two poems I bring before you. One is by precisely that laureate of enormous repudiations and dispossessions whom I mentioned, or did not mention but alluded to just now: W. S. Merwin. In the blankly named "The Approaches" is a world of which we are, by living in it, dispossessed. That is Merwin's world, "made up of less and less," as he says, unless we can bring ourselves to forget. For in this world, it is insofar as we remember things that we are conscious of their passing from us; if we forget them, we have them forever — no strain, no sweat, as we so insufferably say these days, no problem. But there is a discipline, a constant calisthenics of oblivion here, a workout and an erasure extending from mere numbers, counting, as he says in a late poem,

going on to the alphabet
until everything is continuous again
go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire
forget fire

a characteristic process in this poetry of deprivals and effacements. Indeed it is all process: without punctuation, without predictable prosody, which is to say without prosody, without companions, "speaking another language / as the earth does," he pursues his asymptotic phenomenology of thresholds and doors and passages, "the gates about to close / that never do."

It is a man's relation to the transcendent, unknowable mode of which Merwin apostrophizes in his trance-poem: a mode of existence hinted at by the startling and violating occurrence of the word Canaan (the Promised Land), though for Merwin that is where the fighting is: there is a sacramental violence, then, in this eruption of precisely the hardware I am claiming Merwin generally chooses to elide, to elude. (For him, history exists only when the story it has to tell comes to its end, and he is left with his body and the poems of our climate.) A sacramental violence as well as an initiatory peace about the enterprise, and a terrible void. For there are no persons here, nor even personifications. There are presences, and they support processes which afford the speaking voice — not disembodied, but disenfranchised, always — an access to prophecy, as prophetics are without honor; an access to the capacity to release the present. It is the coercion of this poem and of all Merwin's later work to resist hopes and assurance ("trying to remember what the present / can bless with," as he says). The exultation must be now, it must not depend on what we have had, it must not count on what we may have.... And NOW, as all know, is never, untenable, untenantable. The exultation, therefore, will be an ecstasy of loss, the sense so different from the Proustian memory and its losses, of what Wordsworth called fallings from us, vanishings, yet experienced as a revelation of the self, a birth. There is no story here, no history, or if there is it requires us to revise our old sense of Story, of History, which in all Western culture has meant a lie: ce sont des histories, the French say of such fabrications, legends, fables, fictions, a history of departed things, a story was once what was told by a man or woman who knew what he or she was telling to an audience who knew what they were being told. It had become, by the eighteenth century (say, after the fourteen centuries between the Confessions of Augustine to the Confessions of Rousseau), what was told by a man or woman who knew what he or she was telling to an audience who did not know what they were being told. A story is now what is being told by a man or woman who does not know what he or she is telling to an audience who does not know what they are being told; nor does the man or woman telling what he or she does not know, know even if he or she has an audience who does not know what he or she is telling.

The real focus of "The Approaches," what the poem is approaching, is a quality of life which used to be called visionary and which Merwin would call, I think, provisional — hence its virtually derisive utilization of the historical category, the capitalized noun with its Biblical association. He addresses a life which must be characterized by negatives, by what it is not; for what it is cannot be remembered or known or communicated to others. A phenomenology of cold and darkness there, of loss, absence, and removal which governs this imagery, even governs the tone, for a prosody of pauses, halts and silences — if, as I say, this is a prosody at all — will let the language thicken to unaccustomed suspensions, enjambments which reveal, chiefly, weight to the ear, hasty for conclusions:

          I may never
get there but should get
closer and hear the sound

as they show disparity (on the page) to the eye, seeking recurrence:

they make off
birds
no one to guide me
afraid
to the warm ruins
Canaan
where the fighting is

The use of single words to form a line here is a use which goes against the sanctioned practice of poetry as we have understood it for three millennia. It is a counter-mnemonic device.

What Merwin gives us is an irreversible course toward an undivided, unqualified life, a life unmediated by any expectation but that of obliteration; erasure and an awareness that whatever is said of such a life, is not that life. Whence a saving tension in the poem, the tension of saying "no, not that," as we feel a tension in Chekhov's play when Nina says, "I'm a seagull — no, that's not it," and we wait for a refining elucidation: if she's not a seagull, what is she? We might call this category the symbolics of inadequate postulation, and I believe this negative poetics forms a powerful dimension of our post-modernity. The tension in Merwin is that of a continuing struggle between the cry and the crater, between the hymn and the silence. The source of Merwin's singing is the deciduous life, but its seal is elsewhere, its justification is a forbidden or unjustifiable Canaan of which the poet with characteristic asymptotic despair says: "I may never / get there but should get / closer and hear the sound."

And now, as Hamlet says, "Look here upon this picture and on this — can you on this fair mountain leave to feed, and batten on this moor?" Our second poet does not determine — even from their loss — but rather derives his terms as given. In my poem "Fra Angelico's Last Judgment," a painting is postulated — a "Last Judgment," to be seen in the world, in Florence, which is the world for its painter. This world. And the poet, compelled by something outside himself into acknowledgment, seeks to make terms with the painting. He begins in front of the painting; he writes his poem from the already created picture. The phenomenon — ekphrasis, an old convention of which such poets as Hecht and Hollander and Van Duyn provide us sublime examples — suggests a passivity, an assumption that the known, the remembered, the revisited — as Henry James would say, the visitable past, as it stands now in the picture, pledged to be there — will disclose its significance.

This passivity might elsewhere and otherwise be called trust, a confidence in what Yeats names a natural momentum in the syntax, a cumulus he said enabled a poem to carry "any amount of elaborate English." And elaborate the English is, faceted with turns and returns ("Hell, which I leave / in its own right, where it will be left"), with an alliteration struggling to become the master-principle of the meter ("Now / we go, we are leaving this garden / of colors and gowns... we walk into that / gold success"), and a playful consciousness (am I being self-indulgent in calling it playful? At least I insist that it is a consciousness) of the diversions to be made available in the difference between the language written and the language spoken ("How to behold what cannot be held? / Make believe you hold it"). The confidence shared, the saving grace, if that is what it is, is all in the capacity of language itself — compulsively qualified, idiosyncratic in address, entirely given over to conventions and observed usages and allusive reliances — to carry the impulse, the effort of the poem (the received memory, the history of Western consciousness, not to put too fine a point on it) by the energeia which words hold within themselves, by the dynamics they generate "among one another" line by line rather than one at a time — by a secret plot.

It is this plot, this conspiracy, the notion that there is a story, which our friend from Bard — and I am making her into a symbolic public now — finds so objectionable, whereupon I must adore the fact that her college's name is BARD. It is by no means my secret alone, but it is, as I practice and concoct it, sufficiently out of the way to produce a specific response. When that response is not outright, Bardic hostility, indeed when that response is in fact favor, it tends to go something like this: "I like your poems, but why don't you — since you write so many poems about the Victorians, or about pictures, or about what is already there — why don't you write a poem about Thomas Hardy after the death of his first wife? Or about Lewis Carroll taking photographs of those naked little girls in the studio? Why don't you write about what I've always wanted to read about?" Now, can you imagine anyone ever suggesting a "subject" to W. S. Merwin? Or to Mark Strand? Or to John Ashbery? to name but three of our post-modernist practitioners of the art of forgetting. No — it is only to the remembering writer, to the poet tainted by history, that the occasionally entertained public will tender such an offer — an offer which so often, when tendered to me, seems like an offer of the last straw. For oddly enough, the dramatic monologue, the apostrophe, the poem of helpless trust in remembering what is there, the poem of "derived terms," the poem of the "placed persona" appears to be the most suggestible of poems, though in actuality it is always a mystery.

Such poems have appeared in the history of literature as a genre coeval with the poet's need for secrecy. (Hence Tennyson, who knew he had secrets; hence Browning, who appears not to have known but who probably knew — I refer you to Henry James's story "The Private Life," which takes up the matter with contemporary relevance.) The poem of historical memory and of the placed person always concerns the poet's need for secrecy.

In France, great examples frame the last period in which a placed persona in verse (and even in a prose avatar like In Search of Lost Time, the longest dramatic monologue in literature) could be exploited without a maker incurring an excessive risk of giving "himself" away. This safety period, 1873-19I7, is bracketed by two huge verse monologues, Mallarmé's "Afternoon of a Faun" and Valéry's "Young Fate." Both these great poems are monologic utterances of figures without a past, without an acknowledgment of history other than that of their own flesh, figures who must consequently question the reliability of memory, of "real life" as it is filtered by consciousness, the Faun interrogating the self as to what "actually" happened ("did I love a dream?") in at least a recognizable landscape (Sicily) with the identifiable apparatus of classical mythology (faun, nymphs, volcano, grove, swamp), all of which, by the second poem, thirty-five years later, dissolves into a "no one" (what else is a Fate, even a young one?) who doesn't know where she is (is that the wind, is this a beach, is it dawn?), only that she has a body and that there is weather.

This dissolution leads poetry — emphatically our modern American poetry — toward the obsolescence of the hardware, as I like to call it, though perhaps software is the likelier term, of historical memory, and concomitantly of our ability and our need to dream forward, to hope, which makes us unique among living forms on the planet.

So that when the resentful young woman at Bard asked me, in what I took for good faith, "When was the Renaissance?" I began, in the manner of one who spends a good deal of his life moving from one classroom into another — I began to tell her about the revival of learning, the rediscovery of the old world and the discovery of the new, the invention of perspective and the concomitant inference that the world was round, thereby closing God out of the picture, and so on. Well, I did go on, as I do, and my interlocutress — you remember, she had approached me with the intelligence that she did not like my poems — in a gesture of fatigue and boredom and disgust, said (I think she felt I was patronizing her by answering her question), "Oh, fuck off." Hold that expression in your minds a moment, we shall revert to it. I have spoken of the prevailing mode of poetry in our time as a poetry of forgetting, as a poetry which posits forgetting, as in the Merwin poem, as the condition of all making.

As this little story reminds us, there is a terrible dialectic between memory and forgetting, and the entire victory of hardware would be just as disastrous as the triumph now celebrated by our contemporary Song of Myself, that generalized American epic of forgetting. Yet there is the impossibility, for us, of total forgetting as well; that is the dilemma of having a body. For the body exists according to a structure of recurrences: the body is verse. And if our poetry is nowadays largely written out of a horror of repetition, there is on the other hand the horror of a world without recurrence. Wallace Stevens once said it is the greatest poverty not to live in the physical world. But there is a greater poverty yet: to live in a world where everything happens only once. The body teaches — our breathing, our heartbeat, our periods teach us — recurrence, and the making of the circle. Joy, as Nietzsche remarked, joy has the ring's will in it, but how does this ringmaking occur? It occurs by the word, by the life of the text, by the energy of grammar. In the beginning, we are told, was the word. We are given no assurance as to the end, but I believe we see it all around us. Certainly I heard it there at Bard, the living end, an art without memory, an expression without linguistic culture, a paroxysm without grammar: Fuck off.

After all, it is the temporal structure of language which makes us insist there is a past, that is separate from the present and from what we call the future. Our capacity to articulate a future tense — in itself a metaphysical and logical scandal, as Nabokov reflects in Ada — our ability and our need to dream forward, to hope, makes us unique among living forms on the planet. Such capacity is inseparable from grammar, from the conventional power of language to exist in advance of what it designates. Analogously, our sense of the past, the past as a shaped selection of remembrance, is radically linguistic. History is language cast backward. No animal remembers. Its temporality is the eternal present tense of the speechless.

The cult of immediacy — represented and empowered by our magnificent poetry of forgetting, by the demand that each of us do his thing with complete vehemence of personal being — is actually a reverse elitism. For the very derivative nature of what we condemn as "classical culture" used to mean an equal measure of participation in apprehensions decidedly greater than those which most of us can discover for ourselves. The demand, for example, that every erotic experience be "orgasmic" and "creative" is precisely a parallel piece of blackmail against our common resources.

We are beginning — the linguists and psycholinguists tell us — to understand that certain patterns of affectlessness, of antisocial and anarchic conduct, are related to verbal inadequacy, to the inability of the grammatically underprivileged to plug into a society whose codes of communication and idiom of values are too sophisticated.

Most advanced forms of art today -— aleatory, improvisational, artifacts made only to be destroyed or abandoned or forgotten — are all strategic denials of the future tense, even as the derision of precedent, the unsaying of history, and a contemptuous indifference toward it are refusals of the past. Hatred of the past. In the grammar of the freakout, it is always now. So my Bardic Hostess rightly showed her insight when she abrogated all discussion by saying, "Fuck off."

She no longer shares the language of those she regards as her enemies. She wants nothing to do with it. She would break free from language as from her own shadow. She must stop her ears to all the ceremonious ironic voices from the past which are in books — books that will outlive if not outlast her, books that speak of death.

Yet an art without death, which is art without memory, is either autistic or else it is megaphonic. Either it is implosive, like Gertrude Stein and John Cage, or it is stadium kabbalism, like the poems of Ginsberg and Yevtushenko.

But here I hear my own voice getting shrill in the aspirations of my philippic. Let me conclude with other overtones, accents of alterity. Here are three quotations, which by collage make my point. First, from Goethe:

Who cannot give himself an accounting
for the past three thousand years
remains in darkness, without experience
living from day to day.

From Nabokov: "To be means to know one has been."

And from Northrop Frye:

The culture of the past is not only the memory of mankind but our own buried life, and study of it leads to a recognition scene, a discovery in which we see not our past lives, but the total cultural form of our present life.

The matter here, the point to take, the line to follow is not one of being on the side of memory and death and the past, or on the side of the moment and forgetting and of life, but one of recognizing and identifying the dialectic between them. That is what constitutes the tension, the irony and the interest of an authentic art, now or ever. What we want is the recognition of both energies, constituted by our assent to them. How I should like to give you an example from my own work, but I cannot, for with the exception of one poem, my work fails to give Forgetting its due, as my friend from Bard pointed out. I am too much in the pay of the past. But I can read you a poem which suggests supremely the ideal interpenetration of forgetting and remembering I am trying to locate. It is — and here I shall leave you — Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room."

[Editor's Note: Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room," from The Academy of American Poets.]

Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003
by Richard Howard

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York

Copyright © 2004 by Richard Howard.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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