US POETS LAUREATE TO THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS:
A LITERARY AND CULTURAL HISTORY
by
TONI M HOLLAND
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON
December 2011
Copyright © by Toni M. Holland 2011
All Rights Reserved
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am tremendously grateful for the support of my dissertation committee. The reviews
contributed to key developments in the writing process of this project. I am particularly thankful
for the support of my dissertation director, Tim Morris. My interest in this project began in a
graduate course I took with him; he has encouraged my work on poets laureate from that first
seminar discussion and through subsequent semesters and chapter drafts. In addition to being
a fine director, he has supported my passion for poetry since I began my MA studies here at
UTA. It means quite a lot to me that we have held so many discussions about poetry and that
we have observed so many poems together. I am also thankful for the mentorship of Dr. Kevin
Gustafson; although he was not on my committee, he has been another talented role model for
emerging scholars in our English Department and has impacted my intellectual growth during
graduate studies.
Lastly, I would like to thank the English Department at UTA.
Its English graduate
program resulted in my having opportunities to study abroad in England, France, and Canada; I
have been able to present my work at numerous conferences; the quality of instruction has
resulted in my having been awarded many awards, fellowships, grants, and poet’s residencies; I
have also been trained and nurtured as a teacher. All of this together reflects an education that
I will continue to cherish.
September 2, 2011
iii
ABSTRACT
US POETS LAUREATE TO THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS:
A LITERARY AND CULTURAL HISTORY
Toni M. Holland, PhD
The University of Texas at Arlington, 2011
Supervising Professor: Tim Morris
In 1985 the US Congress changed the title of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of
Congress,which was created in 1937, to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. The significance in
thechange is a signal to enhance awareness of American poetry to the general reading public.
Thisdissertation is an initial look at these poets who from a government-sponsored platform
represent American letters. The high profile of the position allows for a means by which the role
of the poet is performed as an ambassador of poetry. Who is selected to represent the nation,
how each laureate’s work is situated within contemporary poetry, and the ways in which each
executes tenure of the appointment reflects how Congress has positioned the post as the
“nation’s lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans.” There are three ways by which the
dissertation critiques this appointment. Chapter One examines announcements of the
appointments made by the Librarian of Congress and responses to them by journalists and
poets. It shows an overall portrait of who has been chosen and why and addresses some of the
ways in which the appointments have eclipsed particular demographics. Common themes that
emerged in reviews of laureate’s work grouped laureates within distinctive discussions of
contemporary poetics. Chapter Two addresses how Robert Penn Warren, Howard Nemerov,
iv
Richard Wilbur, Mona VanDuyn, and Donald Hall wrote metrical verse in decades that deemed
non-metrical composition more fashionable. Their continuity of a more traditional formalism
influences New Formalism and Expansionist poetics. The case of VanDuyn indicates that a
gendering of metrical verse that took place in the 1960s and 70s has been particularly
challenging to the woman writer who sought to critique culture from within the more traditionally
received poetic forms. Chapter Three addresses the ways in which the work of Charles Simic,
Joseph Brodsky, Ted Kooser, Mark Strand, Stanley Kunitz, and Robert Hass informs
relationships between self and place. The laureateship reflects aesthetics from a sense of
regional to international place. Chapter Four addresses the ways in which Rita Dove, Robert
Pinsky, Billy Collins, Louise Glück, and Kay Ryan forge poetic identities and signatures. Chapter
Five investigates poetry programs laureates have founded either before or during tenure: Kunitz
(Poets House, Fine Arts Work Center), Brodsky (free mass distribution of poetry books), Kooser
(American Life in Poetry), Hass (River of Words/Watershed Project), Rita Dove (the town hall
meeting), Robert Pinsky (Favorite Poem Project), and Billy Collins (Poetry 180). The Poet
Laureate Consultant in Poetry has culled preeminent women and men of American letters. This
project requires sustained attention as there are newly appointed laureates every year or two.
Continued critique of the appointments will document the ways in which the Library of Congress
identifies the “poetic impulse” of Americans as well as the ways in which poetry programming
reaches diverse communities.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................... ……………..iii
ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... iv
PREFACE ...................................................................................................................................... viii
TIMELINE ....................................................................................................................................... xx
Chapter
Page
1. A PORTRAIT OF THE US POETS LAUREATE TO THE LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS……………………………………..………..….. ......................................... .1
2
AN AMERICAN MOVEMENT: A METER-MAKING ARGUMENT .............................. 24
3. GEOGRAPHY AND US LAUREATESHIP ................................................................... 52
4. POETS LAUREATE: FORGING SIGNATURES ........................................................ 110
5. PROJECTS OF THE US LAUREATES ..................................................................... 132
6 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 155
WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................ 157
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ................................................................................................ 172
vii
PREFACE
There are only a few texts on the institution of laureateship.
historical overview of the national poet in the United Kingdom.
Two books offer a
Walter Hamilton’s 1879
publication of The Poets Laureate of England acknowledges that it is “somewhat remarkable
that so little should hitherto have been written about the office of Poet Laureate” (viiii). One
possibility he saw for the lack of scholarship is that these poets do not necessarily represent
England’s prominent poets and that some “might have been dismissed in one line of literary
criticism” (xi). Because the US has had less than thirty years to build a tradition of laureateship,
we will need greater historical remove in order to estimate how individual poets will compare to
their peers. For the UK tradition, “Davenant, Cibber, Southey” are examples of poets chosen
for the appointment over the likes of “Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Byron” (xi). In the long
history of the UK position, political affiliation trumped poetic merit. The UK history carries a
tenuous reputation. On one hand it is a designation by the royal family purporting the highest
achievement for a poet. On the other, the benefits attached to the position such as salary and
proximity to court opens up attacks on the poet as a paid sycophant. Hamilton positioned Ben
Johnson as the first official laureate because he was the first to receive a salary. Hamilton
covered the position up to Alfred Tennyson, offering one chapter on those who served a similar
function, but preceded creation of an official status, referring to them as “Volunteer Laureates.”
These include poets such as Chaucer, John Skelton, and Edmund Spencer. Hamilton offered
biographical sketches pertaining to laureates’ tenure and summaries of their works composed
during their tenures.
Quite a few years later, in 1921, Edmond Kemper Broudus published The Laureateship:
A Study of the Office of Poet Laureate in England. He claimed that laureateship is “unique
viii
among national institutions” and that it deserves “a serious study of the usages, precedents,
and traditions which contributed to the establishment of the office, and of the history of the office
itself […] As far as [he knew], this attempt has not been made hitherto” (iiv). He held this claim
in light of literary historian Edward Gibbon’s 1788 attack of laureateship in Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire: Gibbon thought that that historical moment was “the best time for abolishing
this ridiculous custom” (155). Broudus attributes a lack of scholarship on laureates to the times
it “hovered on the verge of ridiculous” (iiv). He begins the historical account of laureates with
John Dryden because he received a more frequent “pension from the crown” (iv). Broudus
traces a long history of how the idea of laureateship developed in England, beginning with the
“Anglo-Saxon scop” who wrote for the King and whose poetical works resulted in his
advancement or banishment at court (1). The idea of laureateship developed into ceremonies
at Oxford in the 1260s during which time completion of the baccalaureate resulted in bestowing
to graduating students of “grammar, rhetoric, and poetry” the “laurel wreath,” a custom most
likely abandoned in the late 1500s (14). The “laureate” shifted from being mostly a title of
academic distinction when the king appointed Bernard Andreas in court and requested that he
write poems to celebrate events of court and the royal family. Broudus claimed that this early
selection of court poet set an example that was long followed in English history: “[t]he contrast
between the dignified but uninspired work of Bernard Andreas and Skelton’s mad mixture of
genius and knavery serves to fix at the very outset of the laureate tradition the standards of
respectable conservatism by which the appointments were later to be determined” (32). Since
the death of Andreas, there had not been an official appointment by a king until Ben Johnson,
but some poets were considered laureates because of the functions that they filled in court.
The tradition of having a poet play a role in court life ultimately led to an official establishment of
the laureateship with Johnson.
From Johnson to Robert Bridges, Broudus focused on the
duties prescribed to poets and the occasional verse they wrote during their lifetime tenures.
ix
There is only one book that addresses the American appropriation of the “laureate”;
however, it covers the history of a position that precedes the official creation of laureateship.
William McGuire’s Poetry’s Catbird Seat, published in 1988, covers the years of the US
Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. McGuire insists that since the inception of this
position, “the Consultant was not meant to be the Poet Laureate of the United States of
America” (24). He or she fulfilled the role of a custodian of poetry, primarily to oversee the
Library of Congress’s poetry collection with the Librarian of Congress and to organize its poetry
readings.
McGuire attributes some of this confusion to journalists who “over the past half
century […] have liked the flourish” of referring to these custodians as laureates (24). Perhaps
the reason for this confusion is that “poet laureate” has swifter public appeal and recognition
than “custodian of poetry.” Reviewing some of McGuire’s commentary on the distinction
between these two terms shows that the US did not have an official laureate until 1986.
Archibald MacLeish, “ninth Librarian of Congress,” stated at a 1941 poetry reading
entitled “The Poet in a Democracy” that “there ‘never has been and perhaps never should be a
Poet Laureate’” (57). While McGuire does not analyze this remark of MacLeish, McGuire’s
reiteration of the distinction between the two suggests that poetry and politics may not be a
healthy pairing for poetics. One example of discomfort arising of pairing the two is known as the
“Bollingen Prize crisis” (113). In 1948 Allen Tate established an annual poetry prize to be
awarded by the Library of Congress and secured funding from the Bollingen Foundation (105).
The current Consultant and a jury of poets awarded this prize to Ezra Pound for his Pisan
Cantos, despite his having been charged with treason. When the US Justice Department
objected, the jury of poets responded by proceeding with this nomination because “to permit
other considerations than poetic achievement” would devalue the prize (114).
The
consequences of giving this award to Pound were twofold: the US Department of Justice
pushed to have the award nullified, which it was; and literary awards could no longer be
confirred by the Library of Congress. Yale University has since confirred the Bollingen Prize.
x
In 1956 a laureateship, to be chosen by the US President, was proposed in the House
of Representatives. Librarians at the LOC co-authored a reply:
For the Government to make a choice from among the practitionsers of one or another
school would, I believe, tend to discourage rather than encourage experimentation and
artistic development by putting Government’s imprimatur on one style as opposed to
another […] Here at the Library of Congress we have had an unfortunate experience in
the making of awards. (197)
The proposal for a US Poet Laureate was dropped at the first committee meeting.
The
“Bollingen crisis” revealed the uncomfortable conjunctions that sometimes arise between poetry
and politics.
During
Robert
Hayden’s
consultantship
(1976-1978),
consultantship with poet laureateship raised another concern.
the
confusion
of
the
While his tenure in no way
confronted controversy, the persistant misrepresentation of the naming of the position created
the association between poet and president. Hayden’s 1977 participation in former President
Jimmy Carter’s inaguration ceremonies was presented as “Poet Laureate of the Carter
Administration” (359).
Nothing controversial marked this occasion, but the event of conflating
the titles is representative of a former time when a poet speaking for the hearts of Amerians is
now an embarrasement.
Robert Frost was a consultant from 1958-1959, two years prior to
reading the inagural poem for J.F. Kennedy. Frost’s performance of not being able to read the
poem he wrote for the occasion resulted in his reciting “The Gift Outright,” a sonnet that begins,
“The land was ours before we were the land’s.” MacGuire presents only the title of this poem;
the embarrasement stemming from this sonnet as representative of the American people should
be obvious to contemporary sensibilities. The poem was presented in the Boston Sunday
Globe as
the most nationalistic poem [Frost] had ever written, a favorite of him, as it is with
President Kennedy.
The words […] reverberated, not only over the heads of a
xi
spellbound audience but in their hearts.
The faces of two Presidents and Vice-
President Nixon caught by the television camera were the faces of men who were
deeply touched. (226)
The narrative of this inaugural poem needs clarification between the naming of Frost’s position
at the Library of Congress: he was not a laureate, but a custodian of poetry for one year. Poets
who read inagural poems are not poets laureate; and such poems do not necessarily resonate
with the American people. McGuire does not analyze this performance of Frost. It is arguable
that Frost did not intend to write or read the occasional verse he supposedly wrote for this
event, but instead took this opportunity to present his singular position toward American
patriotism. It is also arguable that the journalist covering the inagural ceremony misinterpreted
the facial response of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. It is within the contexts of the
“Bollingen crisis” and Frost’s inagural poem that MacLeish’s caution against the US holding an
official laureateship becomes clearer. MacLeish could have preferred a healthier pretense of
poetry, an aesthetics that is not constrained by politics.
It is curious that Congress passed an act creating the US Poet Laureate position in light
of these literary events. The creation of laureateship is in large part due to the passion of one
man.
Charting the path toward creating a new national heritage is “Senator Spark M.
Matsunaga of Hawaii, Democrat [who] was responsible for the creation of the Laureateship”
(425). He introduced the Act to Congress in 1963 and “every succeeding Congress [which
became] a 22-year effort” (425, 426). He ultimately succeeded by incorporating this change “in
1985, while legislation was under consideration to reauthorize the National Foundation on the
Arts and Humanities Act (the aegis of the NEA and NEH)” (426). His motivation for the change
is fairly naïve: “Talented young American poets are now provided with an incentive to aspire for
the highest position of the art, just as the young politically inclined aspire to the office of the
President of the United States” (428).
This remark is akin to the long-history of the UK
laureateship: the highest achievement of a poet was the degree to which he advanced in court.
xii
The greatest concern with which McGuire ends his historical account of the reconfiguration of
the consultantship is for “poetry [to be] in the service of the state [and that] it should be used as
a vehicle for patriotic sentiment and celebration by a high-class booster for the American spirit”
(432). The consequences of such a function of poetry hold several plausible outcomes. The
term “poet laureate” is fairly recognizable because of its history.
It connotes a closer
approximation between poet and politician whereby it may be easier for people to presume that
a laureate’s work represents the state. As an example of the history of the consultantship, the
same government convicting a poet of treason is the same government that had initially
bestowed literary honor upon him. Conversely, literary composition written to please the state
devalues poetic invention. Another example is that a poet can misconstrue American sentiment
such as “The Gift Outright,” thereby alienating a people such as Native Americans; and from a
global perspective, projecting an impulse of American colonialism. From another perspective,
politicians soliciting ideologies from poets for personal advancement in a democracy would
devalue poetry to pandering.
The most recent book on the US laureateship is The Poets Laureate Anthology
published by Knoph in October 2011. Its release date coincides in the late stages of this
dissertation. The scope of the anthology ranges from the creation of the consultantship up to
the most recent laureate, W.S. Merwin (2011). The anthology covers both positions in the
Library of Congress, perpetuating the confusion that McGuire attempted to clarify.
The
anthology will be used here in the introduction to contextualize the phenomenon of the
laureateship, but it will not factor into the chapters because of the newness of the release. Billy
Collins states his confusion of the laureateship in the Forward, “I had hoped that this heavy
book [Poetry’s Catbird Seat] might explain the meaning of the laureateship and make it clear
what I now was supposed to do, but this was not the case” (xxxiii). McGuire indeed covers the
history of the consultantship and deftly distinguishes it from the laureateship. Collins is clear in
pointing out that the poems are to be understood as written without the US Laureateship in
xiii
mind: “each of these poems began as smaller things” (xliii).
This statement is an
acknowledgement to the public not to read them as patriotic poems, but as individual poems
emerging from other myriad contexts. Elizabeth Hun Schmidt, the editor of the anthology, does
not offer a method that she followed for selecting poems. In the book’s acknowledgements she
references collaborations with universities and colleges, and colleagues, but she does not
describe what the guiding selection criteria had been.
One comment that she makes on the overall selection of consultants and laureates is
that “the list of laureates could reflect a fuller span of North American identity” (xlix). What she
means by identity is that most consultants and laureates have been white; she counts “few
poets of Native American descent […] no Latino-American or Asian-American laureates. There
have only been three African-American poets selected by the Library of Congress” (xlix). She
does not give reasons why there has been such underrepresentation of ethnicities and races.
The significance of her commentary is that there will be a recognizable flaw in having a national
poet until this role represents the fuller span of American identity.
This dissertation maintains McGuire’s stance that US Poet Laureateship only begins in
1985, when Congress passed an act that changed the title to “laureate.” It is a first look at the
US Poets Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. It gives a literary and
cultural history of the post from 1986-2010, from Robert Penn Warren (1986) to Kay Ryan
(2010). Lists of poets who have held both positions are provided after the introduction for
reference.
This dissertation takes a historical approach to the laureateship different from
McGuire whose work is based largely on archival work at the Library of Congress.
This
dissertation offers a cultural document that defines different aspects of the laureateship. It
traces a cultural history of the post by examining how the laureateship has been presented to
the public. It situates laureates’ work within discussions of contemporary American poetry. It
also traces the trend in laureateship toward those who have become activists in poetry by
devising projects intended to bring poetry to a wider reading public. It does not intend to create
xiv
a cultural theory of laureateship or to present a literary history for the specialist in contemporary
poetry and criticism. The dissertation is intended to appeal to a generalist who appreciates
poetry.
I argue that the US Laureateship was not formed until 1985 and that as a new
institution, it is a tradition-in-the-making. One third of the laureates are second-wave formalists,
which is a tradition of poetry holding strong appeal for popular culture; the disparate geographic
histories of poets both influence their poetics and build local and international reputations of the
laureateship. Poetic signatures of laureates show that different laureates have the potential to
appeal to audiences with different aesthetics. Lastly, I argue that the laureateship defined its
cultural history by a tendency of many poets to become cultural ambassadors by designing
projects that would raise awareness of the reading and writing of poetry.
Chapter One produces a cultural document of how the Library of Congress positioned
the laureateship in the first twenty-five years of its emergent tradition of national laureateship.
The succession of announcements by the Librarians of Congress determined which
demographics of poets were included. It also demonstrated that the laureateship continued to
position itself as a vehicle for raising awareness of the reading and writing of poetry.
A
predominant trend in selecting poets who would create projects for the American public formed
an activist role for poetry appreciation.
Another major trend in the laureateship was the
selection of poets who held international reputations. Responses by poets upon accepting the
laureateship also informs this cultural document. Laureates grappled with how they envisioned
themselves in a role that had not previously existed in the United States.
Journalists’ and
critics’ responses to the appointments likewise defined what it meant for America to have a new
tradition in poetry.
The succession of laureates determined how the laureateship continually
repositioned itself as a tradition-in-the-making.
Chapter Two addresses formalism. Formalism in American poetry has a continuity in
literary history spanning the past 100 years. Three generations of poets form first (modern),
second (post war), and third (contemporary) waves of formalism. Robert Penn Warren, Richard
xv
Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, Donald Hall, and Mona Van Duyn are positioned as post-war, second
wave poets. These poets continued to write in traditional forms during the 1960s and 1970s,
decades that esteemed non-metrical verse forms more fashionable. The majority of their peers
composed in non-metrical “free verse.”
Prominent critics also praised the shift away from
metrical verse. There are several reasons for this. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound promoted an
aesthetics intended to loosen the poetic line. They were trying to break from “the metronome”
of iambic pentameter, mostly as a reaction to Victorian verse forms. The loosening of the poetic
line was supposed to be far shorter lived than they had anticipated. The trend they formed
away from metrical form persists to this day. During the 1960s and 1970s, emerging poets
were breaking from many cultural manifestations of the status quo, or institutions of power that
they found oppressive. For many poets, meter became synonymous with the status quo. Nonmetrical verse forms started to signify liberation, politically and poetically. Those who continued
writing in metrical forms were considered conservatives who would not break from oppressive
ideologies. They were also seen as displaying a Victorian sentimentality. From this literary
aesthetics, meter also became gendered. Poets and critics drew connections between meter
and sentimentality. Metrical forms were considered effeminate and sentimental; non-metrical
forms were considered masculine and honest. Works from these poets laureate do not display
these assumptions. Rather, their work is marked more by experimentations within metrical
composition. Many of them loosened their poetic lines in subsequent decades. Nonetheless,
they are situated as middle-generation formalists who in the 1960s and 1970s did not follow the
trends in “free verse,” even despite the rise of non-metrical verse as it solidly became the status
quo. One third of US Poets Laureate are second-wave formalists. Since so many laureates are
second-generation formalists, it is possible that these poets were chosen because they
represented displays of an older contract between poetry and audience, an older connection to
a general public whereby readers could identify poems through a shared understanding of
reading expectations.
xvi
Chapter Three explores the relationship between geography and poetics. The selection
of six laureates from disparate geographic regions indicates that the Library of Congress
wanted to establish a local, national, and international reputation in the early years of this new
tradition in American poetry. Three poets hold strong reputations in major cross-sections of the
US: Robert Hass from the West Coast, Ted Kooser from the Great Plains, Stanley Kunitz from
New England. These appointments bring to the national laureateship an awareness from each
major geographic section of America: West, Midwest, East. Three other poets hold strong
international backgrounds: Joseph Brodsky from Russia; Charles Simic from the former
Yugoslavia; and Mark Strand, who was born in Canada and raised in South America. This
array of poets had the potential to appeal to audiences from different geographic backgrounds.
This diversity sheds light on the different ways in which geography influences literary
composition and culture. The West Coast landscape grounds the work of Hass because he is
also an environmentalist. Geography informs both his poetics and his activism. Understanding
his work necessitates understanding this fusion. Kooser’s poems reflect life in the Great Plains.
He was hailed a regional poet; many of his earlier books were championed and published by
small presses in Nebraska. Kunitz’s reputation is firmly rooted in New England, connecting him
with poets in that region. As he grew up in an area with a long-established literary history, he
had access to major literary centers. What has puzzled critics is that the infrequency of his
book publications has made it difficult to trace his development as a poet. The international
poets represent quite different aspects of the connections between geography and poetry.
Joseph Brodsky imported Russian poetics into English-language poems, which at times clashed
with trends in American fashions of style. Simic’s poems are infused with the violence he
witnessed in war-torn Eastern Europe, differentiating his presentation of surrealism from other
Americans writing in this mode. Strand is also situated as a surrealist poet, influenced instead
by South American poetics. Critics differentiate his style from other surrealists. His mode of
surrealism works more through negation of place and tends toward an ahistoric poetics.
xvii
Chapter Four groups together five poets laureate because they have forged strong
poetic signatures.
A poetic signature is a recognizable attribute of composition that holds
similarities across poems and or books. This chapter defines and characterizes the signatures
of Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, and Kay Ryan. Pinsky’s signature is
notable for resisting categorizations.
Dove’s work is notable for the range she creates in
personae. Both of these poets are known to preserve historic events in poetry. The signatures
of Glück and Collins could not be more different. Their works are presentations of tragedy
(Glück) and comedy (Collins). A challenge brought about by looking at these poets closely
together is the degree to which tragedy is the preferred, “serious” style for poetry. Even though
Collin’s work became bestsellers, he is considered a “minor” poet while she is considered a
“major” poet because comedy in poetry is not valued as much.
Ryan’s signature is quite
recognizable from the form that her poems take: short poems in short lines. Her work is also
known for presenting morals or lessons. Perhaps the intention of the laureateship to reach the
general reading public is one reason why there are laureates who appeal to different poetic
tastes. The difference in criticism on these poets to those in Chapter Two suggests a shift in
criticism as well. Contemporary critics tend to focus less on discussions of metrical form as
they did in the 1960s and 1970s. For the case of grouping a majority of the current poets
laureate together, defining their signatures yields an understanding of the poetic identities in the
early years of the laureateship.
Chapter Five evaluates poetry programming devised by US laureates. The position of
US Poet Laureate does not carry official, required duties. They do carry out the roles of the
former position by overseeing investments in poetry and organizing poetry readings. Other than
this, laureates are allowed to fashion this role to their liking. Some chose not to provide any
other service.
However, Joseph Brodksy started a trend of activism.
He envisioned free
distribution of poetry books in places that have a high influx of people. The succession of other
laureates that have produced projects to raise awareness of the reading and writing of poetry
xviii
suggests that poets are selected in part by the potential and desire that they may have for
taking on this additional service. This Chapter defines each project and evaluates the success
of each. Success is determined by the degree of connection with communities as well as the
project’s sustainability. Robert Hass’s Watershed Project encourages K-12 grade students to
fuse the study of language arts with science. Robert Pinsky created the Favorite Poem Project,
a poetry reading that forms communities of readers celebrating their most cherished poems.
Kunitz had created projects before his laureate tenure. The Poet’s House in New York City
provides workshops, lectures, and anually showcases all poetry books published within the
year. He also co-founded the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachussettes. Ted
Kooser brought poetry back to newspaper print through his American Life in Poetry. Other
laureates have designed projects and envisioned creative ways to raise awareness of the
reading and writing of poetry, but they have far less potential in their projects being sustained or
implemented by a community.
Chapter Six looks ahead to possible comparisons of who has not been chosen laureate
and wh. It also anticipates transnational comparisons. Comparing laureates from the US,
Canada, England, and Australia allows this project to explore global perspectives.
xix
TIMELINE
Consultants in Poetry to the Library of Congress
1937-1941
Joseph Auslander
1943-1944
Allen Tate
1944-1945
Robert Penn Warren
1945-1946
Louise Bogan
1946-1947
Karl Shapiro
1947-1948
Robert Lowell
1948-1949
Leonie Adams
1949-1950
Elizabeth Bishop
1950-1952
Conrad Aiken
1952
William Carlos Williams
1956-1958
Randall Jarrell
1958-1959
Robert Frost
1959-1961
Richard Eberhart
1961-1963
Louise Untermeyer
1963-1964
Howard Nemerov
1964-1965
Reed Whittemore
1965-1966
Stephen Spender
1966-1968
James Dickey
1968-1970
William Jay Smith
1970-1971
William Stafford
xx
1971-1973
JosephineJacobsen
1973-1974
Daniel Hoffman
1974-1976
Stanley Kunitz
1976-1978
Robert Hayden
1978-1980
William Meredith
1981-1982
Maxine Kumin
1982-1984
Anthony Hecht
1984-1985
Robert Fitzgerald
1984-1985
Reed Whittemore
1985-1986
Gwendolyn Brooks
Poets Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress
1986-1987
Robert Penn Warren
1987-1988
Richard Wilbur
1988-1990
Howard Nemerov
1990-1991
Mark Strand
1991-1992
Joseph Brodsky
1992-1993
Mona Van Duyn
1993-1995
Rita Dove
1995-1997
Robert Hass
1997-2000
Robert Pinsky
1999-2000
Robert Pinsky, (W.S. Merwin, Rita Dove, Louise Glück)
2000-2001
Stanley Kunitz
2001-2003
Billy Collins
2003-2004
Louise Glück
xxi
2004-2006
Ted Kooser
2006-2007
Donald Hall
2007-2008
Charles Simic
2008-2010
Kay Ryan
xxii
CHAPTER 1
A PORTRAIT OF US POETS LAUREATE TO THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In 1985 the US Congress passed Senator Spark M. Matsunaga’s proposal to alter the
naming of a poet’s position at the Library of Congress. Between the years 1937-1986 the
library had a role for poets to act as custodians for poetry. This position was called Consultants
in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Primary roles of a custodial position included overseeing
the library’s poetry collection and organizing poetry readings.
William McGuire's Poetry's
Catbird Seat notes Matsunaga’s motivation for the change: to “add greater visibility and prestige
to the art of poetry” in the hope that future generations of poets would aspire to become US
Poets Laureate (428). The Library of Congress has a website focused solely on the newly
formed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and claims that this role
“serves as the nation’s official lightening rod for the poetic impulse of Americans […] The Poet
Laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation to the reading and
writing of poetry” (“About the Position”). The change in title marks a newly emerged tradition of
American poetry. Before the change, the poet’s role was to maintain investments in poetry at
the Library of Congress; after the change, the poet’s role was to engage broadly with the
American public.
England.
The term “poet laureate” pulls from a literary history long established in
This term might have been chosen because it had potential for greater popular
appeal. Prior to 1985, the US had not had a national laureate. McGuire’s historical account of
the 1937-1986 consultantship clearly distinguishes between the two roles and concludes that
the creation of the laureateship is the consequence of Matsunaga’s 1985 proposal.
The US laureateship is a new phenomenon, and as a new institution, it is a tradition-inthe-making. This Chapter chronologically charts who had been appointed and the reception of
the appointments. This review of laureates constructs a narrative of how the tradition defined
1
itself. It defined itself through each appointment announced by the Librarian of Congress, firsthand accounts by poets’ acceptances, and responses to laureates by journalists and other
poets. The succession of laureates reflects that Matsunaga’s and the Library of Congress’s
vision for an increased visibility for poetry were met in different ways. Announcements by
librarians revealed that each appointment repositioned what it meant for the US to have a
national laureateship. National laureateship was a new institution continually shifting in the
process of forming a tradition. The range in the selection of poets brings forth different takes of
individuals grappling with a role the US had not formerly had. Public reception to the poets calls
forth different discussions as each poet’s reputation, identity, and literary works highlights
particular angles of contemporary American poetry.
This Chapter constructs a cultural
document of an emerging American tradition. As a cultural document, an overall portrait of US
laureateship is defined.
Poets laureate are chosen by the Librarian of Congress, the current laureate and a
committee that does not disclose individual member’s names to the public. There is no public
record of the pool of poets considered for each appointment or of the guidelines established for
the selection process.
A major drawback of this newly formed tradition is that it has thus far failed to reflect a
range of race and ethnicity among American poets. There have been sixteen laureates, two
small a number to reflect the vibrancy of contemporary American poetry.
This particular
problem—for the laureateship to reflect the cultural diversity of America—has been mocked as
impossible.
The New York Times mocked the laureateship’s potential to reflect an American portrait:
The Economist of London, a bit concerned at the idea that as disparate a county as the
United States should speak with only one official poetic voice, put its doubts into verse not long
ago:
2
'Sing for white men, sing for black ones, sing for redneck, sing for laid-back, sing in
English, Spanish, Yiddish, One voice only? Land of Frost, of e. e. cummings, E. A. Poe,
O Land of Cronkite, Land of Carson, Gertrude Stein and Hammer-ditto, Dorothy Parker,
Dolly Parton, Land of Lowell, of Howl, of Whitman! (Apple)
The challenge of choosing an American voice to represent the nation is evident, but one of the
benefits of the US laureateship is the quick turnover of appointments. The UK has had a poet
laureate for hundreds of years, each serving a life tenure, which was reduced to ten years after
the passing of Ted Hughes in 1998.
The UK laureateship had predominantly been a life
appointment, officially approved by the king or queen. Life appointment was a secure position,
requiring what must have been incredible vetting for the investment of one poet to represent
England for potentially quite a long time. The American adaptation is for a new appointment
every year, with the possibility of a second-year renewal.
It is the quick-succession of laureates by which the Library of Congress had the
potential to better represent a range of poets. This turn-over had greater potential to represent
a fuller span of American identity. Because the appointments were created with such short
tenures, poet had significantly less time to appeal to the American public.
Each laureate
represented more of a gesture of an individual poet’s mark on poetry and less of the historical
role of what laureateship has meant in England. The reduction of the UK post after its historical
lifetime tenure registered a need to alter the course of its tradition. Its change to a ten-year
appointment can be viewed either as a lessening of the investment in one poet, or as an
opportunity to increase potential for different poets to represent the UK.
Robert Penn Warren, first US Poet Laureate (1986-1987), declared he “would never
have agreed to serve if he ‘had been required to compose an ode on the death of someone's
kitten” (Apple). He elaborates why: “That belongs to the old system of things [...] It's part of the
trappings of the monarchy—a kind of hired applauder, and I couldn't have any of that” (Apple).
The history of the UK laureate required the writing of occasional verse up to the appointment of
3
Wordsworth. The reputation of this history is reflected in critiques on the history of the UK
laureateship: “[s]ome of the official [UK] bards turned out inspired work, but others have been
viewed by posterity as self-important hacks” (Apple). Neither the UK nor the US poets laureate
are required to write occasional verse. The skepticism that this statement provoked suggested
that the UK’s historical requirement of such verse devalued poetics because poets could have
been writing less for the advancement of the art, and more for popular appeal or for seeking the
approval of particular members of the royal family. Similar skepticism had been raised about
American state laureates: “A number of American states, including Connecticut, Florida, and
Illinois, have poets laureate, and they are frequently ridiculed by critics for their output” (Apple).
The ridicule that they have received was that they write simple encomium to advance the
reputation of the state for which they are laureate.
Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin announced Robert Penn Warren as the best
voice for addressing the conditions of American life:
Robert Penn Warren is a characteristically American man of letters in the range and
versatility of his writings and in his feelings for the promise and the frustration of
American life. He has
high attainments in poetry, fiction, criticism, and social
commentary. He has been a serious though not a solemn surveyor of our America. His
materials have included the comic, the violent, and the tawdry as well as the grand and
the heroic. He has depicted and dramatized the problems of good and evil and the
historic divisions within American society. His works in prose and poetry have been
widely read, enjoyed, and reread in the five decades of his fruitful career. If there is any
person today whose work unites our America in its splendid variety, that person
is
Robert Penn Warren. With his advice and guidance we look forward to a great year.
(“Robert Penn Warren”)
Warren certainly did not reflect the problems in laureateship critics found on the state level. His
literary works tended toward historical accounts of America; and as Boorstin pointed out, they
4
represent “frustration,” “the comic, the violent, and the tawdry.” As the first national laureate, he
would not start a tradition of what McGuire had feared: for “poetry [to be] in the service of the
state [or] a high-class booster for the American spirit” (432). Warren represented an aspect of a
national-laureate tradition that has been carried on through subsequent appointments. The
intellectual tone of the laureateship was that these writers are not poets only; they were women
and men of American letters.
References to versatility echoed throughout most of the
announcements of national laureates. Choosing Warren as a first laureate also registered a
possible large American reading public. He had the notoriety of his Understanding Poetry,
which has educated generations of American students. He was widely known to critics for his
central position within New Criticism. His influence continues to impact poetry appreciation
today. He had the potential to garner the attention of a large American reading public in another
way.
He held wide recognition for his novels; they were so well circulated, reviewed and
received that they inadvertently drew attention away from his poetry.
Librarian Boorstin introduced Richard Wilbur (1987-1988) as “a poet for us all, whose
elegant words brim with wit and paradox. He is also a poet's poet, at home in the long tradition
and the traveled ways of the great poets of our language. And he is a cosmopolitan citizen of
the world of letters” (“Richard Wilbur”). A “poet's poet” is a phrase used to describe those poets
who are most emulated, such as Horace, Sidney and Auden. The political implication of this
“poet's poet” was that the US laureate became an intended model for aspiring writers, one of
Matsunaga’s goals.
It is most unlikely that a poet would aspire to become a laureate.
Boorstin’s presentation of Wilber’s work to the American public was as an exemplary model for
writing poetry. The announcement also positioned the laureateship firmly as an international
phenomenon. Wilbur was not just a man of American letters; he was deemed a man of world
letters. The move from Warren to Wilbur repositioned the tradition of laureateship to reflect the
“cosmopolitan citizen of the world.”
5
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington built upon Boorstin's two declarations of
laureates. The definition of the laureate shifted from being not only a cosmopolitan citizen of
the world, but also a cultural ambassador:
Howard Nemerov [1988-1990] has given America a remarkable range of poetry, from
the profound to the poignant to the comic. He is also an outstanding critic, essayist,
fiction writer, and teacher. It is a happy moment for poetry that Howard Nemerov will
become our new ambassador of the 'republic of letters' (“Howard Nemerov”).
The laureate was now in the role of an ambassador. These first three announcements showed
that the position of laureateship defined itself in the process of a tradition emerging. Warren set
the intellectual tone; he was followed by two eminent men of letters. The terminology of what
exactly it meant for the US to have a national laureate developed from American literary
historian to cosmopolitan citizen to ambassador of the republic of letters—world letters.
Billington gave an announcement for Mark Strand (1990-1991) that had a different
focus on the position: “We are pleased that a poet of the versatility and inventiveness of Mark
Strand will bring his creative energy to the position of poet laureate” (“Mark Strand”). The
implication was that “creative energy” was needed and that the tradition had thus far lacked
ways in which to engage with the American public. The US laureate held minimal requirements
as did the consultantship. The change in focus revealed that there was a desire at the Library
of Congress for some kind of poetry programming that had not yet been established. The
choice in Strand also built upon the tradition defining itself as an international phenomenon.
The Washington Post noted that “Mr. Strand is considered one of the leading poets of his
generation and is especially popular abroad” (Hickey).
The announcements disclosed the
desire that the poet have both “creative energy” and international appeal. The choice of Strand
was a move toward forming an international reputation of laureateship at the Library of
Congress
6
The subsequent appointment built even more upon international recognition. Karen De
Witt, journalist for the New York Times, quoted Billington’s announcement of Joseph Brodsky’s
(1991-1992) potential for “bring[ing] to the post the 'penetrating observations of the outsider
while exploring with increasing versatility his own and poetry's Americaness'” (De Witt). The
selection of an exiled poet added a different voice for the nation, a voice representing the
experience of those who have come to the US seeking refuge. Brodsky wrote about a Russia
to which he could never return. She attested to his background of the outsider:
Born in 1940 in Leningrad, he worked as a laborer mill worker and merchant seaman
while writing poetry. He taught himself English by translating metaphysical poetry word
by word. Though his work became popular with underground Soviet literary circles,
Soviet authorities considered his work 'social parasitism.' As a result he was sentenced
to hard labor at a work camp in the Arctic near Archangel. (De Witt)
An international man of letters, Brodsky was a “cosmopolitan citizen” who was also an
“ambassador” of a “republic of letters” and whose work in the US was far from being considered
“social parasitism.”
The tradition continued to solidify its distinction of laureateship as an
international phenomenon as it widened its representatives to include the “outsider's penetrating
observations” of an expatriate. It was not until the laureateship realized itself in an international
role that it began to include women.
Mona Van Duyn (1992-1993) was the sixth US Poet Laureate. Billington said, “I look
forward to welcoming [Mona] Van Duyn to the Library and I am particularly pleased to have a
distinguished poet of such wide range joining us to promote public awareness of poetry and
literature” (“LC Names”).
He defended his choice by stating that “'the Library's first
responsibility was to select outstanding Laureates,' and that he 'hoped to see improvements in
attracting more attention to the post through increased use of media and more cross-country
visits” (Sullivan). The “creative energy” that had been sought in the selection of Strand signaled
that the laureateship reached for a tradition that would engage the American public. The desire
7
for this outreach began to make clearer contours in that the Library of Congress had targeted a
method: the manipulation of media. Billington articulated a strategy that could reflect part of the
Library of Congress’s mission of laureateship.
At the same time, a problem of gender
representation became visible in public discourse between the changes in laureateship from
Brodsky to Van Duyn.
Part of the problem arose in the difference in introduction of the laureates to the public.
Brodksy was introduced as having a literary “penetrating observation”; Van Duyn was
introduced more as a public relations coordinator. The difference in introductions took focus
away from her literary work.
During his tenure, Brodksy instigated creative methods for
promoting awareness of poetry, but his work had first been duly noted. This is not the case with
Van Duyn. The presentation of the first woman laureate overlooked her literary merit. The main
description for Van Duyn's work was that it was “distinguished”; emphasis was placed not on
her poetry, but on her role of promoting poetry.
The difference in the two is also striking in that Brodsky was introduced as the
“outsider” brought in, while women have tended to be the “outsider” to mainstream literary
history. The Library of Congress Gazette announced that she was “The first woman in the post
since 'poet laureate' was added in 1985 to the title” (“LC Names”). The public reception of her
appointment brought great attention to the place of women in this newly-formed tradition.
Gender had before been mentioned in the public discourse surrounding the laureateship.
In an interview for The Washington Post Van Duyn said, “I search my feelings, and I
swear I can't find any significance [in being chosen as the first woman poet laureate]. I'm so
used to there being so few women in anthologies and places of power in the poetry world that I
didn't find it odd that the Library of Congress should wait seven years to get a woman”
(Streitfeld). Women have been far underrepresented. From 1986 to 2010, we have had sixteen
poets laureate, four of whom have been women. In the history of the UK laureateship, it took
several hundreds of years before Carol Ann Duffy was appointed the first English woman
8
laureate in 1999. The New York Times quoted Van Duyn’s views on the underrepresentation of
women in poetry:
Women [...] have been neglected in American poetry for many years despite their
achievements. Before the laureateship was created in 1985, she said, the forerunner
position of poetry consultant at the Library of Congress was held by few women. In
fact, 25 men held the title, compared with 6 women. Furthermore, she said, a typical
poetry anthology might include 10 women and 90 men. (Molotsky)
The statistics of four out of sixteen laureates representing women is alarming; and if Van Duy’s
count holds true, that a “typical anthology” represents 10 for every 90 men, then clearly women
have been grossly underrepresented in the US laureateship and contemporary American poetry
at large.
Part of this discrepancy could be that appointment to laureate and inclusion in
anthologies involved a similar selection process. Such committees have the ultimate decision
on who to represent. A more equal representation is less viable if such committees have been
following long-standing practices of privileging the selection of men over women. Until the
committee that appoints laureates realizes the discrepancy in gender representation and values
a more fair inclusion, these statistics are likely to remain the same. Warren had noted the
“trappings of the monarchy” in the history of UK laureates having to write occasional verse. In
the process of adapting a tradition from another country, Congress chose which aspects of the
UK’s history to reflect in its own sense of a national laureate. The proposal that it accepted did
not mandate the writing of occasional verse. It reduced tenure from life to one to two years.
What the proposal maintained was the sense that a laureate should be chosen through a
process of appointment. The proposal could have envisioned the selection process in the way
that Canada had in 2001. Its national laureates apply. A committee reviews and selects its
laureate from a pool of applicants. This is one way for there to be better representation of
women and Elizabeth Schmidt’s notion for a “fuller span of North American identity.” However,
changing the appointment process is unlikely as it would require Congress to review another
9
proposal on the laureateship.
The only solution in the time being is to make visible the
demographics that have been eclipsed in the appointment process.
The appointment of Van Duyn brought forth discussions of women’s poetry. Billington
stated that the “first responsibility” of the Library of Congress was the selection of “outstanding
Laureates.” The primary selection criteria must have been other than poetic merit alone. David
Lehman, series editor of Best American Poetry, and Dana Gioia, former NEA Chair, discussed
the state of women’s poetry: “The best living American women poet, Lehman and Gioia said
independently, is probably Adrienne Rich. The odds of the controversial Rich being made poet
laureate, they said, were about as good as Jesse Helms pinning up a Mapplethorpe nude in his
Senate office” (Streitfeld). Brodsky’s envisioned activism to raise awareness of poetry was
acceptable, a woman, a lesbian woman with a background in political activism, was considered
a liability. Lehmann further added, “In a climate in which the arts have increasingly come under
close scrutiny and in some cases even vicious attack, I have a theory that the people making
the choice of poet laureate want to avoid selecting a homosexual poet, even if that person may
be a great poet” (Streitfeld). Sexual identification skewed selection of “outstanding” poetry with
women like Rich being discriminated against on two fronts. One implication was that women
should not be too outspoken on women's issues; another was that women should follow
heterosexual models either in personal life or in literary themes.
In addition, the
underrepresentation of women poets would make it less likely for poets like Rich to be taken
seriously for national laureateship. Responding to the discussion of women's poetry that the
selection of Van Duyn's appointment brought, poet and scholar Alicia Ostriker responded, “the
selection of Ms. Van Duyn as laureate was important in making the presence of women visible
among the major poet's in the United States and in recognizing the 'renaissance, the
tremendous explosion of powerful women poets writing in this country'” (Molotsky). Other than
a first move to represent women's writing in the laureateship, the Library of Congress minimally
included women. From 1986-2010 there have only been four women out of sixteen laureates.
10
Certainly the one-to-four ratio did not reflect the gift and talents of contemporary women poets.
The tradition by far favored men in the laureateship.
The second woman laureate directly succeeded Van Duyn. At 40 Rita Dove (19931995) was the youngest to have been chosen. She has also been the only black laureate.
Billington stated,
I take much pleasure in announcing the selection of a younger poet of distinction and
versatility. Having had a number of Poet Laureates who have accumulated multiple
distinctions from lengthy and distinguished careers, we will be pleased to have an
outstanding representative of a new and richly variegated generation of American
poets. Rita Dove is an accomplished and already widely recognized poet in mid-career
whose work gives special promise to explore and enrich contemporary American
poetry. (“Library of Congress Appoints Rita Dove”)
The library brought in Dove as the “ambassador” of a new generation. The only distinction in
this notice from the others was that Dove was a “younger” poet in “mid-career”; Billington did not
elaborate on what he meant by a “new and richly variegated generation of American poets.” Of
which generation in American literary history can this statement not be made? Perhaps “richly
variegated generation” is Billington's quiet manner of recasting the term “multicultural”; and yet
again, any previous generation could be potentially moving toward a greater representation of
multicultural poetics.
The Times reported that Dove
is further evidence of the success of black American poetry. The choice of Maya
Angelou to write an inaugural poem for President Clinton was described yesterday by
Ms Dove as a
breakthrough for black poetry. 'I really did feel this shiver of hope,' she
said, 'Finally after many, many, many years, the poet is being recognized.' (Macintyre)
The poet laureateship envisioned a greater representative national voice in the appointment of
Van Duyn, interpreted by Ostriker as the visibility of the “renaissance” in women's poetry. The
11
presence of black poets in the laureateship was far less determined than the representation of
women. The ratio was one to sixteen, as compared to four to sixteen. Van Duyn and Dove
brought into public discourse elements of identity that had not previously attended responses to
the laureateship.
The racial and ethnic underrepresentation spanning a twenty-five year
tradition is strikingly evident.
The Library of Congress excluded all other races from the
laureateship. It is unlikely that the committee determining laureates knowingly discriminates
against women and racial groups. A possible reason for overlooking particular demographics
could be that it by default was not accustomed to considering a broader range of inclusivity.
Similar underrepresentation is probably going to continue in the tradition of laureateship until the
committee itself values the voices ranging American ethnic demographics. The early proposal
for the laureateship was designed to be determined through a process of appointment, rather
than through a pool of applicants. Because of this design, the tradition of laureateship solely
rests on the predilections of the committee.
After Dove's appointment, the committee repositioned the tradition to reflect regional
difference. Billington stated of Robert Hass (1995-1997),
I am pleased to announce the selection of Robert Hass, a first-rate poet from the
American West and a gifted poetic translator as Poet Laureate for 1995-96. His poetry
explores our connectedness with the ancient world and its reverberations in the
emotions of our usual lives. Using both art and nature as starting points, he leads us
into the depths of everyday existence.
He looks to Central Europe in his close
collaboration with Czeslaw Milosz and to Japan in his translations of classic haiku. He
is a worthy successor to Rita Dove as poet laureate. He will design some programs
with the poets and poetry of the West, adding a further dimension to our national
outreach. (“Another Verse”)
Mentioning the American West twice indicated that the committee wanted to appeal to particular
12
regions, indicating, too, that it recognized the potential in region as part of the identity of the
tradition. The compositional framing of the announcement opens and ends with an emphasis
on place. In the appointment of Hass, place became a primary aspect of the laureateship's
“national outreach.”
Hass is a poet and an ecological political activist.
His role to raise
awareness of American poetry was more clearly stated than in the announcement of Van Duyn,
the hope that she would use media as a method of outreach. Billington already knew that Hass
envisioned to “design some programs with the poets and poetry of the West.” As an activist, he
designed an ecological program in 1996, The River of Words/Watershed Project, which
activated poetry toward environmental preservation.
In addition to the focus on regional
America, Hass as poet signaled to Europe and Asia. The combination of regional and global
literature positioned the laureateship as building and reflecting a globalized American tradition.
A globalised American poetry and activism became trends in the tradition of laureateship. The
Washington Post responded to the succession of Dove to Hass:
Hass has a hard act to follow. His predecessor, Rita Dove, who served for two years,
not only fulfilled her requisite duties, but she also led a crusade to make poetry more
visible and more vital. She showed up on “Sesame Street” and on Garrison Keillor's
radio program. (Weeks, “Something Ode”)
The role of the national poet was no longer to reflect merely a woman or man of American
letters, but to also take on an activist role in bringing poetry to the general public.
The appointment of Robert Pinsky (1997-2000) underscored the trend of blending high
merit in poetry and versatility of writing with community outreach. Billington stated, “We are
fortunate to have a poet of Robert Pinsky's versatility and wide interests as Poet Laureate [...]
His accomplishments in translation, his interest in making poetry accessible through digital
technology on the Internet, and his own probing poetry promise an exciting year for us in
Washington” (“Librarian of Congress Appoints Robert Pinsky”). With the launching and success
of Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project, two more poets were brought in during the US Centennial
13
birthday to celebrate poetry. After serving his second term, Rita Dove was brought back to join
Pinsky for this special event; Louise Glück and W. S. Merwin (both future poets laureate) joined
Dove and Pinsky. Billington noted,
Robert Pinsky [is] to serve an unprecedented third term as Poet Laureate Consultant in
Poetry. In addition, the Librarian has named three Special Consultants to assist with
the poetry programs of the Bicentennial Year.
The three Special Consultants are
former Poet Laureate Rita Dove, Louise Glück, and W.S. Merwin.
They will be
compensated by privately raised Bicentennial [1999-2000] funds.
(“Librarian of
Congress Makes”)
These three poets joined together so that Pinsky could bring to fruition his project and others
could work on the maintenance of other poetry programs. Details of why these three poets
were chosen were not disclosed to the public.. The Library of Congress “want[ed] to create a
th
once-in-a-century arrangement, not only to celebrate poetry during the 200 birthday, but also
to significantly increase support for the national outreach of the Poetry Office and the Poet
Laureate” (“Librarian of Congress Makes”). The significance of this event was that the role of
laureateship became another vehicle by which to celebrate a national birthday.
At the turn of the century, the Library of Congress chose a poet who was close to a
century old, Stanley Kunitz.
He served from 2000-2001.
Symbolically, his appointment
referenced the laureateship’s origin because he shared a birth year with Warren, 1905. These
poets mark the same generation. Highlighted was Kunitz’s role as a literary mentor:
Stanley Kunitz is a creative poet in his 95th year, having published his first volume of
poetry in 1930. He continues to be a mentor and model for several generations of
poets, and he brings to the office of Poet Laureate a lifetime of commitment to poetry
that is a source of inspiration and admiration for us all. We derive enormous pleasure
from his willingness to serve as the nation's 10th Poet Laureate, bringing to bear his
14
unparalleled knowledge of 20th century poetry as we enter the 21st century. (“Librarian
of Congress Appoints Stanley Kunitz”)
While he may not have done much activism during his tenure, his activism preceded his
appointment. He co-founded the Poet's House in NYC as well as the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, MA.
He was a well-known mentor and inspirational presence in American
poetry; one of his close mentees was Louise Glück.
The next appointment struck yet another repositioning of the tradition in that the choice
was for a poet's popular appeal. On announcing Billy Collins (2001-2003), Billington stated,
“Collins's poetry is widely accessible. He writes in an original way about all manner of ordinary
things and situations with both humor and a surprising contemplative twist. We look forward to
his energizing presence next year” (“Librarian of Congress Appoints Billy Collins”). As the
laureateship had been developing a relationship with the media and bringing awareness to
poetry, the Library of Congress increasingly intended to reach the general public. For those
who may have had perceptions of poetry as being mysterious or difficult, Collins was a poet
whose poems are distinctively approachable.
Moreover, he already had an established
relationship with the general reading public. Others such as Warren, Nemerov, and Wilbur had
been embraced by critics as “academic” poets, a term indicating a more exclusive readership.
Collins stated in The Washington Post another way in which he differed from his
colleagues: “I'm probably the only poet laureate who's never read at the Library of Congress [...]
I'm probably the only poet laureate who has never met any of his predecessors” (Weeks). He
differed from his predecessors in another way: “Billy Collins believes he's an outsider because
he's never played the Poetry Game. 'I've never taken a workshop. [...] 'I don't send poems to
other poets'” (Weeks, “The Bard”). What Collins referred to here is that one of the duties
laureates held was to bring in a series of poets to read at The Library of Congress; former
laureates had been brought to DC in a circuit to give readings, but in a way perhaps to interview
for the laureateship. The poets who were appointed laureate, the projects they designed, the
15
kinds of identities they represented, and the region from which they came contributed to the
ways the laureateship revealed itself as a tradition-in-the-making.
Collins resembled his predecessors in that he held an international reputation. The
Irish Times touted Collins as “[o]ne of the best-selling poets in the world [His] popular success
has rendered him the American media's first port of call whenever poetry-related soundbites are
required” (“Keep it Simple”). Even though a poet may achieve momentous acclaim and awards,
it is rare for a poet's work to become a bestseller, whether in the US or abroad. Collins's
popular appeal could have been one of the reasons he was appointed. His bestselling poetry
books in the international market had the potential to bring international recognition to the
Library of Congress.
It was one thing for the library to position the laureateship as an
international phenomenon. It was another to select a poet whose success in the literary market
could bring international attention to the tradition of laureateship in the US.
“Poet laureate” is
printed on the front covers of his books, thus bringing attention to the position.
The Washington Post pointed out the difference between Collins and the next
appointed, Louise Glück (2003-2004) : “Glück may prove to be a different kind of laureate from
those of recent years. Outgoing laureate Billy Collins was well, outgoing. [Collins states,]
'Some of us have chosen to spend a lot of time running around the country lighting poetry
bonfires [...] The job can be tailored to each individual's personality” (Weeks, , “Glück”). Her
response to accepting the post in The New York Times reflected the difference: “I feel honored,
but I have not sought public life, so that piece of it is unnerving” (Olson). In addition to being
one of Stanley Kunitz's long-term mentees, “[o]ne of her best friends is former poet laureate
Robert Pinsky, whom she talks to nearly every day” (Weeks, “Glück”).
Glück was well within
the poetry circles at the Library of Congress and far from the feeling Collins had of being an
outsider.
What she brought to the laureateship was the spark and influence of Kunitz's
dedication to craft as well as mentorship.
Glück 's emphasis while in the Poetry Office was to
bring attention to the work of young writers. Billington stated of her, “Louise Glück will bring to
16
the Library of Congress a strong, vivid, deep poetic voice, accomplished in a series of booklength poetic cycles. Her prize-winning poetry and her great interest in young poets will enliven
the Poet Laureate's office during the next year” (“Librarian of Congress Appoints Louise Glück”).
From her interest in young poets, she carried on the vision of others who have shared this
sense of mentorship: Nemerov and Dove.
After an appeal to popular poetry and a return to “serious” poetry, the laureateship
appealed again to regionalism. As Hass represented the poet of the West, Ted Kooser (20042006) represented the poet from rural, Great Plains America. The Washington Times noted
Billington's focus on the Great Plains: “Ted Kooser is a major poetic voice for the rural and small
town American and the first Poet Laureate chosen from the Great Plains. His verse reaches
beyond his native region to touch on universal themes in accessible ways” (Weeks, “Nebraska's
Ted Kooser”). The popular appeal of Collins was reiterated in the selection of an “accessible”
poetry, indicating that while poetic merit was one quality for laureateship, so too was the appeal
to a general readership. Collins claimed, “Kooser's appointment is 'an international pick' [...]
The middle section of the country needed greater poetic representation” (Weeks, “Nebraska's
Ted Kooser”). What Collins could have been reiterating in this statement is that universal
themes in regional poetry appeal beyond local and national borders. The definition of US
laureateship continued to strive for the balance of being or becoming both regional and
international. Kooser obtained particular national recognition when he won the Pulitzer Prize.
His astonishment of the laureateship and the award was captured in the Library of Congress
Information Bulletin. Kooser had not expected such recognition:
I was idly reading e-mails and found one from a woman in the public relations
department of
the University of Nebraska, saying she needed a quote from me about
winning the Pulitzer. That was the first I'd heard of it. I was flabbergasted. I thought
that being appointed poet laureate was a miracle, and now this! (Urschel)
17
He was first notified by the University of Nebraska about the Pulitzer. Before the Pulitzer and
laureateship, Kooser figured like Collins more outside of the literary establishment, although in a
different way. While Collins did not play the “Poetry Game,” he is a professor at Lehman
College. Kooser represented a literary tradition of poets who came from non-academic careers.
The Washington Post brought attention to the position of his career; he was “a retired vice
president of Lincoln Benefit Life insurance company in Nebraska” (Weeks, “Nebraska's Ted
Kooser”). In response to being compared to Wallace Stevens for working as a lawyer, Kooser
humorously pointed out the difference. He does not write on the job like Stevens; he “got in the
habit of getting up at 4:30 or 5 every morning to write before I went to work [...] Wallace Stevens
[...] did not have to rise so early. 'Stevens had a better job than I did. I believe he had plenty of
time to write in his office'” (Weeks, “Nebraska's Ted Kooser”). The selection of a poet outside of
academia brought in the literary tradition of modernist poets who likewise held different careers:
Eliot was a banker and then worked for Faber and Faber; William Carlos Williams was a
pediatrician.
After representing a poet “outside” of academia, the next selection was Donald Hall
(2006-2007), a poet who after significant success as a man of letters in academia left the
University of Michigan to move to rural New England in order to live by his pen. These two
distinct phases of Donald Hall's career placed him within both of these traditions—the academic
and the independent poet. He left academia in order to have more command over his time and
writing.
Billington noted Hall's reputation within the field of poetry: “Donald Hall is one of
America's most distinguished and respected literary figures. For more than 50 years, he has
written beautiful poetry on a wide variety of subjects that are often distinctly American and
conveyed with passion” (“Librarian of Congress Appoints Donald Hall”). Sven Birkerts, editor of
the literary magazine AGNI, claimed “He's one of the last people around living the full life of the
man of letters,” which suggests that academia is no longer producing scholars who write across
a range of genres (Thompson, “Set to Verse”).
18
Hall was the first laureate to which Billington publicly prescribed limitations on the poet's
role. Hall was not a poet to hold his tongue concerning tensions between poetry and politics.
Early on in accepting the appointment, he reflected on the time he served for another
government position: “It was a time of bitter political controversy over NEA grants to art projects,
especially those involving homosexual themes, and Hall argued strongly that the NEA should
not act from the 'fear of bigots'” (Thompson, “Set to Verse”). Hall has voiced what is usually
disclosed only to the ears of NEA committee members, making public the government's
discrimination in grant funding. The New York Times brought his prior experience into public
discourse: “[Hall had been] a harsh critic of the religious right's influence on government arts
policy. And as a member of the advisory council for the National Endowment for the Arts during
the administration of George H. W. Bush, he referred to those he thought were interfering with
arts grants as ‘bullies and art bashers’'' (Smith). Billington responded that poets laureate “are
chosen for their poetry, not chosen to make a statement about anything else” (Smith). Rich and
political activists like her had certainly been discriminated against by the government. The
implication was that while it was alright to be activists for the reading and writing of poetry, it
was not alright to be vocal about discrimination against homosexuals in government grant
funding.
The difference between Hall and Rich is the degree to which they approached
activism. Hall pointed out discrimination. Rich's activism was part of the feminist movement in
the 1970s. As a US Poet Laureate, if she were to raise awareness to discrimination in grant
funding, it is possible that she would garner a following that would lead the instigation of political
change. Hall's activism had not been that far reaching. Hall responded with humor to his civic
role of laureateship; he “didn't see the poet laureateship as a bully pulpit. 'But it's a pulpit
anyway [...] If I see First Amendment violations, I will speak up'” (Smith).
Following Donald Hall, Charles Simic (2007-2008) represented a poet who has always
been aware of the pressures of politics and language.
Release, Billington announced Simic's upcoming tenure:
19
In The Library of Congress News
The range of Charles Simic's imagination is evident in his stunning and unusual
imagery. He handles language with the skill of a master craftsman, yet his poems are
easily accessible, often meditative and surprising.
He has given us a rich body of
highly organized poetry with shades of darkness and flashes of ironic humor. (“Librarian
of Congress Appoints Charles Simic”)
Much of this statement could have been made of any of the laureates thus far appointed.
Perhaps such blanket statements avoided possible controversy over who was chosen and
exactly why. What was different in this notice were the words “shades of darkness.” His
appointment hearkened back to the selection of Brodsky in that he learned the English
language later in life. Simic said: “I am especially touched and honored to be selected because
I am an immigrant boy who didn't speak English until I was 15” (“Librarian of Congress Appoints
Charles Simic”). He told The New York Times about his Belgrade upbringing:
I'm sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents [...] If they
weren't around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born. My
family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go, so that has always interested me
tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity (Rich).
He was a “cosmopolitan citizen of the world” like Wilbur, but Simic's passage to becoming a
cosmopolitan citizen was forced. The reception of choosing Simic focused on the startling
violence of his background. The Boston Globe noted the “vileness” that Simic depicts in his
work:
Simic was born in Belgrade in 1938. His family was caught in the maelstrom of war
among Germans, Russians, communists, fascists, and other warring armies and
factions. They lived first through German bombing and, later in the war, American
bombing. He was twice blown out of bed by bombs that fell nearby. Near the end of
the war, arrests, killings, and hunger increased, and bodies appeared in rivers and the
20
streets. Playing with other boys in a cemetery, Simic came across two dead German
soldiers. (Mehegan)
Another similarity that Simic and Brodsky shared was that this appointment again positioned the
laureateship in the view of a globalized America. Hass and Kooser at times wrote of regional
America; Simic and Brodsky at times wrote of war-torn Eastern Europe. Taken together, the
appointments of these poets indicated that the Library of Congress defined the geographic
landscape for contemporary American poetry as emerging across multiple borders. Which
borders could be crossed and represented in the laureateship remained selective. Refugees
from Eastern Europe were appointed, but a similar openness had not been extended across
contiguous US borders: all of North, Central and South America.
The subsequent appointment was another poet from the American West, Kay Ryan
(2008-2010). One of the ways in which she responded to her new role was to point out how her
career differed from the poet-scholar. She taught part-time at a community college in order to
have more time devoted to writing. Library of Congress Information Bulletin stated that this may
be a touchstone of inspiration to others:
Patricia Gray, coordinator of the Library's Poetry and Literature Center, noted that
although Ryan's appointment as Laureate may disrupt her quiet life temporarily, her
career path is likely to inspire poets everywhere who work independently, forgoing timeconsuming career tracks and more remunerative positions so they can lead lives that
nourish their writing. (“Librarian of Congress Appoints Kay Ryan”)
Like Collins, Ryan did not play the “Poetry Game”; she was a model to aspiring writers in
several ways. Foremost, Like Hall who resigned from academia and Kooser who woke up
before sunrise to write, she placed writing as her first priority.
Rather than following the
academic path of specializing in creative writing, and rather than following degrees that would
lead to a tenure-track position at a university, she independently honed her craft.
She
apprenticed herself to the art of poetry. Before “[h]er poems [had] been widely reprinted and
21
internationally anthologized [and became] a Chancellor of the Academy of American poets,” she
learned to develop her craft alone (Thompson, “Verse of the Turtle”). The Washington Post
noted that she had been rejected from the poetry club while attending UCLA: “At UCLA, the
poems she submitted were judged not to meet the poetry club's standards. She 'lept away,
mortally stung' and afterward 'stayed pretty remote from the joining business” (Thompson,
“Verse of the Turtle”). Her ultimate success as a poet revealed that pursuing a specialized
degree in creative writing was not necessary. During the first year of her laureateship in 2009,
she attributed the inspiration to continue developing her art to her partner who had just passed
away:
It took her eight years to get a poem accepted at a serious poetry magazine and 10
more to get into the New Yorker. Ryan says she doesn't know how she could have
endured the rejection without Carol Adair, the woman with whom she's shared her life
for close to 30 years. They met when both were teaching classes at San Quentin State
Prison. (Thompson, “Verse of the Turtle”)
Ryan was the third laureate chosen by the Library of Congress that placed the discipline and
inspiration of writing first and chose careers that would sustain focused attention on poetry.
Hall, Kooser, and Ryan chose more untraditional lifestyles that most benefited their creativewriting process. This account of Ryan also reflected the mission of the laureateship: to increase
awareness of not only the reading, but also the writing of poetry. The Library of Congress
presented a model for writing poetry that did not resemble the university creative-writing
workshop. Billington gave a summary of her self-styled poetics. He claimed, “[s]he writes easily
understandable short poems on improbable subjects. Within her compact compositions there
are many surprises in rhyme and rhythm in sly wit pointing to subtle wisdom” (“Library of
Congress Appoints Kay Ryan”). Ryan's poems interrogate the everyday in understandable
poetic logic that revels in mystery and wisdom.
She was chosen for a second term for the energy she brought to the laureateship:
22
Kay has been an uplifting presence as Laureate during the past year, and her poetry
continues to awe and delight readers. In her appearances at the Library, Kay has
captivated audiences with her fresh insights into the beauty, power and importance of
poetry. We are looking forward to her announcement this fall of a project she hopes to
establish. (“Librarian of Congress Appoints Kay Ryan to Second Term”)
The trend of activism in the laureateship was one of the most frequent aspects this newly
emerged tradition. These first US Poets Laureate represented key ways in which the nation
formed a tradition for contemporary American poetry. Many laureates were presented to the
public as models for both the reading and writing of poetry. Equal gender and racial
representation was the most neglected aspect of the laureateship's early formation. Even while
the Library of Congress vastly narrowed this aspect of identity in the laureateship, it clearly
viewed and positioned itself as taking part in an international exchange of poetry, both from the
identities and the works of particular individuals.
The literary production of laureates defined what the Library of Congress meant by
representing the “nation’s official lightening rod for the poetic impulse of Americans.” Its choice
in laureates defined what it most valued in contemporary American poetry. Common threads of
poetics are found in the grouping of US Poets Laureate. While they can be clustered according
to an approximating poetics, each poet's work brings in particular issues within these common
themes or practices. Chapter Two focuses on poets that maintained a more traditional-verse
technique in decades that deemed non-metrical composition more fashionable.
Literary
criticism proves that while the works of Mona Van Duyn, Donald Hall, Howard Nemerov,
Richard Wilbur, and Robert Penn Warren were undercut for pursuing a more traditional poetics,
the gendering of meter that took place in the 1960s and 1970s thrust the harshest impact on the
woman writer who did not break from tradition.
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CHAPTER 2
AN AMERICAN MOVEMENT: A METER-MAKING ARGUMENT
Out of the poetry “anthology wars” of the 1950s and 1960s, a reaction to modernism
resulted in a divide of perceptions and attitudes about the formal properties of poetry. Culling a
phrase from Claude Lévi Strauss, Robert Lowell claimed in 1960 that there were two forms of
poetry: the cooked and the raw. Cooked poetry was a versification whereby poets worked
within received forms of tradition such as the sonnet, ballad, villanelle; raw poetry was a
versification whereby poets worked toward capturing the process of how forms unfold in “free
verse.” The predominant trends of the literary market have privileged the raw, non-metrical
verse.
And yet prominent poets have continued working within elaborate closed forms of
versification, rather than following the more fashionable poetic trends of these decades.
Christopher Beach’s Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry
traces three generations of formalism: “the first of these moments was associated with the New
Criticism of the 1920s and 1930s; the second included formalists of the generation who
emerged in the 1940s and 1950s […] A third wave of formalist poetry, identified as ‘New
Formalism,’ began in the 1980s” (139). Debates about metrical and non-metrical versification
have persisted for close to a hundred years. Beach clearly sides with “raw” poetry.
Beach locates formalism as a transatlantic movement and places W.H. Auden and the
New Critics such as Robert Penn Warren as major influences on other formalist, post-war poets
such as Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov and Donald Hall. In addressing contemporary
American poetry, Beach makes clear that his selection of poems and critiques are to make
wider sweeps for his claims. He chooses one poem from Richard Wilbur to represent formalist,
post-war poets.
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He says of Wilbur’s “A Simile for her Smile,” “[d]espite all of the ways the poem is
successful […] we cannot consider it an important poem” (146). He does not see the poem
transforming through complexities as with poems by New Critics; primarily, all Beach finds in
Wilbur’s work is technical proficiency. He goes on to say that “[t]he poems that made the
greatest impact on the development of American poetry during the 1950s and 1960s were not
those written in the formal style” (148). Robert Lowell and Robert Creeley are the poets Beach
most values as developing American poetry.
On the rise of the third generation of formalism,
Beach gives praise for New Formalists writing “competent” verse, claiming the complexity of
work from the New Critics has been lost. He claims that “the poetry [of New Formalism] has
developed no new critical or theoretical apparatus to support it” by comparing it with
LANGUAGE poetry that developed its own poetics (153). He claims that New Critics developed
American poetry because they wrote poems reflecting extensions from a theoretical base.
Thus, by development he means that there a movement develops across both poetry and a
poetics. His claim for second and third-wave formalists implies that “raw” poetry still reigns in
contemporary American poetry.
While Beach shows the transatlantic connection between post-war formalists and
Auden, he does not elaborate on the deeper connection to American and English poetics. The
third edition of the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry’s discussion of The
Movement and New Formalism indicates a closely approximating poetics. The Movement “tried
to reclaim a native English line of civil, rational, and accessible poetry that bypassed the
complexities of a supposedly imported modernism” (Iv). New Formalist poets’ work aimed to
“have the potential to restore the tattered social contract between poet and the common reader”
(Ixi).
This transatlantic connection indicates that formalist, post-war poets are the middle
generation from modernist to contemporary American poetry who maintained a common thread
of a “civil, rational, and accessible poetry.” One third of US laureates are from this second wave
25
of formalists, indicating that laureates may have been chosen for a poetics that could reach “the
common reader.”
Beach’s summation of contemporary American poetry plays out in the reviews of
Warren, Wilber, Hall, Nemerov and Mona Van Duyn. The reign of “raw” poetry becomes more
problematic when discussion of gender and meter intertwine. The grouping of these laureates
shows that not only have formal poets’ work been devalued, not following the more fashionable
trends in the 50s and 60s also discloses gender politics emerging in poetics. He concludes that
“as feminist critics have argued, the invention of modernist form by male authors was in part an
attempt to ‘rescue’ literary writing from what they saw as the ‘effeminacy’ of late-nineteenth
century literature” and that women writers of the first two waves “have been rediscovered by
readers and critics less under the sway of high modernist tastes” (72). The problem of a
reigning “raw” poetry and Beach’s recognition that “women poets of the modernist era have not
fared well” and “were often neglected by anthologists and critics” becomes evident in his own
omission of Van Duyn in his discussion of second-wave formalists (72). Grouping the post-war
formalist laureates together more fully defines the ways in which critics positioned assumptions
about formalism as an effeminate poetics.
Maintaining formalism during the post-war years has had an impact on their reputations.
In addition to their appointments as US Poets Laureate, Warren, Nemerov, Wilbur, and Van
Duyn are Triple Crown poets, meaning that they have received the Bollingen Prize for Poetry,
National Book Award for Poetry, and Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Despite earning some of the
highest achievements in American letters, resistance to their work becomes visible by the
exclusion, or limited inclusion, in major anthologies. Reviewing a few major anthologies shows
the degree to which these poets are anthologized in relation to one another: Norton Anthology
of Modern Poetry, second edition (Warren, eight poems; Wilbur twelve poems); The Poetry
Anthology (Warren two poems; Wilbur four poems; Nemerov three poems; Hall three poems);
Top 500 Poems (Wilbur one). This review shows inequity in gender representation. Their
26
awards indicate that they approximate each other in terms of poetic merit. Part of the reason for
this inequity is that meter itself became gendered as effeminate.
Critics did not respond
favorably to poets who primarily wrote in traditional form. As women historically have been
published less than men, a formalist woman would be far less likely to be anthologized. The
case of Van Duyn discloses assumptions held both about formalism and the woman poet.
Mona Van Duyn (1992-1993)
Van Duyn’s minimal inclusion in anthologies may indicate that resistance to formalism
can be particularly silencing to the woman poet. Continuing to write traditional verse and not
assimilating to the status quo of non-metrical verse could have had particularly damaging
consequences to her establishment in American letters. That Van Duyn is a Triple Crown poet
like her contemporaries included in this chapter, it becomes evident that her work has been
established as holding equal merit by those bestowing the highest accolades in poetry. The
omission of her work in major anthologies stands as a representative factor of gender politics.
Despite several nominating committees bestowing her with major literary awards, she still does
not figure well in major anthologies. The difference could be that Beach’s claim that women
were disregarded by critics and anthologists implies that formalist women writers had a harder
time being anthologized than women poets writing in non-metrical verse.
Contemporary poet-critic Annie Finch addresses woman formalists in A Formal Feeling
Comes, an anthology of verse by first-wave modernists to New Formalist women writers. In this
anthology, poems are gathered to “contradict the popular assumption that formal poetics
correspond to reactionary politics and elitist aesthetics” (1). The purpose of this specialized
anthology is to show how for “serious twentieth-century women poets, traditional poetic form is
a troubled legacy” (1) and that “almost all of the women poets of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries had fallen out of print—and most certainly out of fashion” (2).
Rather than
write in the more fashionable non-metrical verse forms, Van Duyn frequently wrote “in the
27
historically powerful poetic forms in order to transform them and claim some of their strength”
(5). The neglect of literary representation and criticism on formalist women writers reinforces
the gender discrimination these writers faced; and this neglect denies the power women writers
have found in traditional verse forms, by working within the very forms that have historically
positioned women poets outside of literary traditions.
A formalist poetics does not necessarily import conservative values. During the 1960s
and 1970s, the predominant trend of “free verse” was a reaction against conservative values;
those that did not follow the tenet of an assumed “liberated” verse were seen as holding onto
forms of poetry and institutions that connoted oppression.
In her 1970 collection of poetry To See, To Take, Van Duyn writes a series of stanzaic
mock-singles’ ads found in the back pages of a free-standing city newspaper entitled “‘Billings
and Cooings from the Berkeley Barb’ (Want Ad Section).” In this poem, she captures the spirit
of the sexual revolution. The poem begins, “…Couples sought (enclose photograph please) /
by couple who’ve expeditiously run through / (and are eager for permutations de quatre, de
seize) / all known modes of the sweet conjunction of two” (67). The ad runs from Van Duyn
voicing swingers to relationships among different sexualities (“Gay guy needs, for a few
conventional / dances and such, fem Lez to pose as date, / in return for which she can really
have a ball / with her butch friend at parties he’ll give in private”) to commentary on campus
“enlightenment” (“How bright the scholars who use a previous schooling / to get the further
enlightenment they want! / rounded girl will do it hung from the ceiling / by ropes in exchange for
a used copy of Kant”) to commenting on explicitly stated desires and enthusiasm of the sexual
revolution (“How dazzling love’s infinite variety! / How fertile is nature in her forms of joy! /
seeks, in the area around Berkeley, / another male whose fetish is corduroy” (68). As she has
other poems warmly addressing homosexuality, this poem comes across as a celebratory
inclusiveness extending to genders, sexualities, and sexual expressions; the ads and the
speaker’s commentaries on the ads reflect a delight and humorous witness to the sexual
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revolution. Some of her other poems address a similar, liberal political leaning. In the 1990s
she wrote “Addendum to ‘The Block,’” a poem addressing the civil right of abortion. Such poems
show that assumptions about form can be generalized to poets’ subject matter. Just because
Van Duyn is known for her mastery of the ballad does not mean that she is a poet who holds
neo-conservative views. Instead, she experiments with form within the modernist tradition of
formalism in order to express gender politics.
Van Duyn produced work in decades of a “troubled legacy” for women formalist writers.
Yet this is only one possible pressure against her work. Another influence is from a broader
gender politics: the position of the woman writer. A collection of critical essays on her work,
Discovery and Reminiscence, brings some of these biases into view.
Sidney Burris attests that her social role, gender and class have contributed to her
having been eclipsed by other poets in the earlier decades in which she wrote. Carolyn Kizer
stresses the social gender divide: “long before most poets begun writing about domestic
matters—‘relationships’ in the most inclusive meaning of that overused term; friendship, which
only the T’ang poets had truly dealt with; life in suburbia, a subject which wasn’t ‘poetic’
according to the careful, elegant male poets fashionable then—Ms. Van Duyn was mistress of
the world as we actually lived it” (7). This statement implies that critics were not impressed with
poems addressing the domestic sphere. An emergent tradition of the suburban housewife’s
relationship with nature was harder for some to value. Van Duyn’s work was thus in a double
bind of writing formalist verse with content that critics disregarded.
“The Creation” (1970) is a poem of a speaker mourning the loss of a close friend. While
erasing a drawing of the deceased, this speaker reminisces about the times they spent
together. Moments of friendship are captured: “The hours we had to drink / before you put the
dinner on!” is amplified by the speaker’s slipping into a reverie: “we were all so drunk / it didn’t
matter, or should you strain / the Mornay sauce” (100). By directly addressing the deceased,
the speaker in a way tries to defy death. The speaker continues to conjure up shared moments
29
while erasing the portrait: “When our repartee would run / too fast, or someone’s anecdote / run
long, or someone mention / a book you hadn’t read, / that smile meant you were hidden” (102).
This is an intimate friendship; the speaker holds onto moments of small gestures that only close
friends could know. Grief and the loss of friendship are accepted once the portrait is fully
erased and blown from the page. Van Duyn addresses domestic matters, including friendships
entering that sphere.
Burris suggests why she may have been chosen Poet Laureate of the United States:
the psychological integrity of Van Duyn’s ‘inwardness’—which, as I have indicated,
might well be one of the privileges of living in a liberal democracy—is not compromised
by its lack of engagement with institutional or organized oppression.
In fact, the
meditational privacy that the poems so deeply depend upon for their genesis and
development indicates that in a suburban neighborhood in St. Louis, her inwardly
profound and private relationship with humanity and nature reveal that in St. Louis, the
most egregious forms of tyranny are being held in abeyance. Perhaps such moments,
free of oppression, idyllic, privileged, will always be essentially private ones. Such a
fecund privacy we now take for granted in this country and it is one of the important
accomplishments of Van Duyn (71).
Burris contrasts this position to poets of witness such as Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz,
claiming, “how well can a poem fare whose subject concerns the travails of resisting a suburban
winter in St. Louis?” Van Duyn’s poems generally attend to matters close to home. Further,
unlike Wilbur and Nemerov, she never experienced military life. The crises in her poems are
located in safer, day-to-day experiences.
Many of her titles immediately situate such
experiences: “Notes from a Suburban Heart,” “Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri,” “Relationships,”
“That Was My Grandfather,” “Evening Stroll in the Suburbs.” Her treatment of subjects also
employs the literary quality of the plain style.
Steven Yenser defines Van Duyn’s use of idiom as comparable to “Wordsworth’s
30
notorious demand for “‘a language really used by men,’ not to mention women, and for a
‘plainer and more emphatic’ poetic mode [which] is also answered in her poems” (18). Van
Duyn’s “Letters from a Father” (1982) is written as a series of six letters to a daughter, which
reveal her character. They well represents Van Duyn’s poetic idiom. With this piece, it is
through the connection with his daughter that the father’s attention is drawn from the
enfeeblement of his body to the vim of life. In the first letter, he is prepared to die: “Have made
my peace / because am just plain done for and have no doubt / that the Lord will come any day
with my release” (131). He yearns for release from pain:
Ulcerated tooth keeps me awake, there is
such pain, would have to go to the hospital to have
it pulled or would bleed to death from the blood thinners,
but can’t leave Mother, she falls and forgets her salve
and her tranquilizers, her ankles swell so and her bowels
are so bad, she almost had a stoppage and sometimes
what she passes is green as grass (131)
This is clearly the plain style. In addition to being responsible for another while he has an
ulcerated tooth, the father is simultaneously enduring ill health from prostate, high blood
pressure. He has a leg brace and is given to falls, has heart failure, and feels isolated in his
home life. He transfers this pain onto chastening what he sees as his daughter’s hapless thrift.
She spends her “good money” on “grain for birds,” which not only is a waste of resources, but
also encourages “disease and turds” (131).
Van Duyn acutely and directly expresses the
physical pain of the dying process. On Van Duyn’s poems of death and dying, Ann Townsend
notes that “[s]he has a keen ear for the ironies of medical jargon, charting the indignities of
scientific procedures and the callous dehumanizing of patients by the medical staff. And she
explores the ways in which the sick are isolated from every concern but that of the body” (80).
Contrasting from deaths in hospitals, this poem humanizes the process of dying at home; but
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even though the dying process is at home, Van Duyn urges the reader to see death, to see the
pain and the importance of family during life’s last rite of passage.
The father writes that he and his wife “won’t be living / more than a few weeks longer”
and thanks her for the feeder and feed that she gave them when she last visited (132). The
loving gesture of this gift transforms the focus of pain into joy: “The birds are eating and fighting:
HA! HA!” (132). The speaker’s parents enjoy bird watching so much that the mother asks for a
book on birds. Joy heightens with jokes about a few birds flying into their window. He ends one
letter, “P.S. The book just came in the mail” (133).
As the climax of the narrative, the
description of birds shifts from genera to species: “Fox Sparrows, Song Sparrows, Vesper
Sparrows, Pine Woods and Tree and Chipping and White Throat and White Crowned Sparrows”
(133). The fifth letter describes 24 species of birds, several by specific behavior. Van Duyn has
humanized dying; medical codification and hospital diction has been replaced with
classifications of birds. The couple spends the day reading about birds and watching them. In
the last letter, the father discloses that he has gotten someone to go to the library for him and
check out books on bird behavior and notes that he “will need thistle seed” (134). While there
are health updates in the letters, the tone of the father erupts in jubilation.
His character
transforms from having felt isolated to inviting other bird watchers from church to join them.
Donald Hall (2006-2007)
One reason that Hall’s work is not well represented in anthologies may be that it is an
aesthetics closely approximating Van Duyn’s: employment of an everyday idiom set in a more
predictable meter concerning domestic subjects and with an intense sense of inwardness.
Critics address his work as such. And yet there are other layers contributing to the complexity
of evaluating Hall’s work. Critics are conflicted about his work because of shifting debates on
what is considered proper poetic decorum.
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A historical review of critics’ reception to Hall’s work reveals an arc of aesthetics
developing from the 1950s to 1980s that favors metrical precision, a slackening of form, and a
return to metrical dexterity: “Mr. Hall nowhere experiments or takes risks with his form, being
evidently content to work with the given, except for a little roughening here and there” in 1955
(206); “the traditional formal patterns of verse favoured ten years ago have now been
abandoned largely by younger poets in preference for free and syllabic forms so self-effacing
that their expressive function is in doubt” in 1963 (215); “Alas, Mr. Hall has perhaps improved;
alas, he has not improved enough to matter” in 1971 (231); “[w]hatever talent or promise there
was in Hall’s early books has almost entirely given way to a formulaic pandering to the basest
kind of popular taste” in 1975 (233); Hall “suffered especially in the 1960s when forms loosened
up” in 1986 (256); “[g]reat craft informs this poem, the sort of employment of techniques and
devices one scarcely hopes to find in anyone’s work anymore” in 1988 (279). While there are
numerous accounts of each age searching for a way to freshen its poetic language, Timothy
Steele contends that never before had meter been abandoned in that pursuit. What began as a
modern project to experiment in older forms resulted in free verse becoming a fashion in and of
itself, a non-metrical ideology that was “reinforced by the iconoclasms of the sixties” and “the
burgeoning of creative writing programs” that “[emphasized] contemporary literature” (281).
Hall is also precariously placed by critics between his dual role as a poet-critic. W.D.
Snodgrass asserted that Hall “was the arbiter of poetic taste here; his appraisal, more than
anyone’s determined your place in the literary world” (42). Snodgrass differentiated between
Hall’s early and later standing as a poet-critic, claiming that in the early years his poems lagged
far behind his assessment as a critic. His later years reversed this standing as, according to
Snodgrass, his poems outshot his criticism. Snodgrass had a complicated relationship with
Hall: “Don’s rigid metrics […] helped me sour on his early poems. I didn’t want to lose a
friend—certainly not one who liked my work” (45). While Hall as a critic helped the young poet,
Snodgrass “resorted to the lie” that he hadn’t read his poems (43). His personal testimony of
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working with Hall disclosed a double bind of writing poems to please a critic while avoiding
addressing Hall’s metrical verse, which was then perceived as an outdated verse form. As a
critic, Hall had more of a diversified interest in poetry; however, his dual role did not influence
his literary composition. As “the arbiter of poetic taste,” Snodgrass’s comment suggests Hall’s
openness of selecting from a range of emerging poetics while editor of the Paris Review (19531961). As a poet, his adherence to metric verse ran counter to some of his closest friends’
poetic interests.
Hall is a poet, Robert McDowell states, of rural New England: “Apples” and “Mount
Kearsarge” (1969) are poems that “work because a personal, localized sense of history—and
by extension the history of our country—is alive in them” (156). He praises “Kicking the Leaves”
(1978) as a “perfect synthesis of formal and free verse” (160). It is the title poem for the
collection that he sees as Hall’s breakthrough.
On a walk home, the speaker recounts
“Octobers walking to school in Connecticut, / wearing corduroy knickers that swished / with a
sound like leaves,” and other journeys home and to school as he bought “a cup of cider at a
roadside stand / on a dirt road in New Hampshire; and kicking the leaves, autumn 1955 in
Massachusetts, knowing / my father would die when the leaves were gone” (79). He associates
the clothing surrounding his flesh with the sounds of leaves swishing underfoot.
This sense of comfort and identification with leaves transforms into comprehension of
how seasons mark time and labor. He turns to the work involved with fall as he reminisces
about his mother’s parent’s home: “canning, storing roots and apples / in the cellar,” a place
where “we cut spruce boughs / and laid them across the leaves” (80). The work exerted from
youth has been deeply internalized.
On his walk home in Ann Arbor, the speaker’s attention alters between past memories
and the present until his imagination is struck and held by the sheer brilliance of leaves:
This year the poems came back, when the leaves fell.
Kicking the leaves, I heard the leaves tell stories,
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remembering, and therefore looking ahead, and building
the house of dying. I looked up into the maples
and found them, the vowels of bright desire.
I thought they had gone forever
while the birds sang, I love you, I love you
and shook its black head
from side to side, and its red eye with no lid,
through the years of winter, cold
as the taste of chickenwire, the music of cinderblock. (81)
Like Wordsworth and Emerson, the poet fosters imagination by the relationship between human
and nature. Like Wordsworth, it is the kinetic energy of walking through and with nature that
releases stored-up memories. Sound and sense fuse from the recollection of his flesh touching
the swishing of his corduroy pants to his observation of a singing bird bobbling its head, which
translates as the speaker’s devotion of nature. The speaker feels the bird expressing this
devotion back to him. At this titillating moment, nature takes on a full sensuousness: the
barrenness of winter and remembrance of death are tasted in the mouth; the rhythms of nature
culminate in the music heard by having listened to cinder blocks, that deep scrape.
Many critics note a discernable divergence of Hall’s work before and after 1958. This
divergence mirrors shifting aesthetics of proper poetic decorum. Liam Rector notes that while at
Harvard, Hall’s classmates were “Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbury, and
Kenneth Koch (Rector). Lawrence Joseph defines him as “one of the best of a prodigiously
talented generation, [his work has] qualities measure[ing] American poetry at the end of the
Modernist century” (Joseph).
Hall has been both praised and blamed for maintaining and
diverging from formalism, owing to his metrical dexterity. Lewis Turco, author of The Book of
Forms, discusses the differences between Hall and Bly: a spark of divergences came from
these two influential poet-critics as the latter began publishing in 1958 an anthology that
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promoted Bly’s proclamations for the “deep image” poem, an aesthetics countering Hall’s
anthology, The New Poets of England and America. These combating aesthetics resulted in
the ‘anthology wars’ of the 1960s:
Deep Imagism began to envelop the college graduate writing workshops, of which there
began to be a great many throughout America during the late 1960s and 1970s. During
this period many formal poets were persuaded to the new view that formalism was no
longer relevant to the times which were becoming oriented to social activism, reform
and to ‘self expression’; i.e. ‘egopoetry’ and ‘confession.’ (Turco)
According to Turco, there are two counts on which the “deep image” poem diverges from
“Imagism.” One is the use of the first person pronoun; another is “reliance on the pathetic
fallacy” (Turco). In Imagism, the object stands alone; in deep image, the subjectivity of the
speaker emerges and objects are frequently personified.
Because of his position as critic and the role Bly played in the “anthology wars,” another
element of contemporary American history emerges. Critics’ responses to poet’s early work
persist even while poet’s work may change, which is why Hall’s overall achievements continue
to place him in the realm of the formalist poets
It is the subject of poetic decorum over which critics are split on Hall’s work. While
Turco upholds primarily only Hall’s first two books, Joseph praises Halls’ response to
modernism and claims that his work continually improves:
in the poems after 1958 […] something altogether aesthetically happens: Hall pretty
much
abandons
predictable
metrical
lineation
and
compressing his language with ‘open’ verbal structures.
end-rhymes,
aggressively
His focus shifts to visual,
musical, and psychological expressions of image. As the aesthetic expands, so do
Hall’s probing into the relationship between form and emotion […] The ‘new’ poems are
distinguished by an astonishing mix between ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ forms. (Joseph)
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He addressed the 1990 publication Old and New Poems in which Hall contextualized his poems
within three sections of the book through dates: 1947-1953, 1979-1986, and 1987-1980. The
contextualization of poems written through these decades showcased his formal dexterity.
Joseph gave “The Alligator Bride” and “The Town Hill” as examples of his achievements in this
“new” poetics. He quotes the latter as an example:
Back of the dam, under
A flat pad
of water, church
bells ring
in the ears of lilies, (708)
The discursive lineation of the syntax and the heavy enjambment is what Joseph means by a
compressed and open, “new” structure for Hall. He attributes the discursive presentation of
subject, as in this poem, to the success of Kicking the Leaves. In The Happy Man in 1986, he
returned to his former classicism. It was composed simultaneously with his next published
book, The One Day which has “multiple voices, rhetorics and subject matter written in ten-line
stanzas” (Joseph).
The reach in Hall’s formal dexterity between modern and classic
compositions is a key to what Joseph locates as the success of Old and New Poems.
Without—a book on the death and dying of Hall’s wife Jane Kenyan—is noted by
numerous critics as his best work. What is at stake in this collection is his control over emotion.
Poetic decorum concerns not only form, but also the acceptable limits of expressed emotion.
Too much open emotion can be marked by critics as sentimentality, another term implying an
effeminate verse.
Reliance on irony, a more masculine trope, is more in line with what is
acceptable in a first and second-generation modern poet.
Leslie Ullman claimed that “caught
up in facts and feelings vastly beyond his control, Hall has managed in this collection to make
[emotions] shapely and sharable. His grief, so keenly and elegantly sustained, provides a map
37
for others to follow if they risk, as he has, loving what they may well lose” (Ullman). Liam Rector
marked this work as superior elegy: “Without rivals Hardy’s poems to his wife as one of the
finest, even practical enactments of elegy in English-speaking poetry. The fact that Hall is
producing some of his best writing in his later years makes him a patron saint to all poets.
Where there’s this kind of long life in the art, there’s hope” (Rector). He stated that Hall is “[o]ld
without sentimentality” (Rector). Dan Chiasson praised the book for being “reassuring: art and
love are compatible, genius is companionable, and people stand together in the end. (This
story neatly revises that other pair of married poets, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes),” but found
fault with the book for “[feeling] like a conduct lesson” (Chiasson). Chiasson, like Turko, was
put off by the emotional quality of Hall’s poems. Turco saw this as a fault continuing past Hall’s
experimentation with deep image and on into his later work. Upon reading Without, he stated, “I
dreaded opening the book” (Turco). Turco admired the distance created by the third-person
narration in the opening book and then is taken aback when “Hall dives into what he had
avoided for the most part throughout this dismal performance: He is swallowed by the sickening
pool of self-pity and switches point of view to the first person” (Turco). Critics like Turco are still
holding onto the modernist notion of Imagism—that the poem’s end is to uphold only the object.
Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack welcome the divergence from a modernist sensitivity: “Hall
shifts from the first to the third person throughout the volume, speaking of himself exclusively in
the third person […] In this manner Hall the poet and Hall the grieving husband who ‘acts’
within the margins of the poem effects a kind of narrative separation” (Davis and Womack). The
interplay between the two points of view discloses the speaker’s ability to approach and
withdraw from the death of the protagonist.
Hall has been both praised and blamed for employing regular and irregular meter; he
has been praised and blamed for his steps into and out of deep image and regional poetics; and
he has been praised and blamed for presentations of subjectivity. The reaction to the evolution
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of his work reveals critic’s lingering apprehension as to the best decorum by which to respond to
modernism.
Richard Wilbur (1987-1998)
Richard Wilbur is known as quite the master of form whose treatment of subjects exhibit
control and moderation. The second and third editions of the Norton Anthology of Modern
Poetry situate him as a main influence on New Formalists. While his work is considerably more
anthologized than Van Duyn and Hall, it has received similar derision from critics. Male poets
like Wilbur who continue to work in traditional metrical forms have appeared “feminized” to
readers who accept the terms of poetic fashions uncritically. Once again, During the 60's and
70s, performances of a masculine poetics were those that abandoned tradition and strove
toward writing in a supposedly liberated "free verse." Longenbach contends that "a lingering
mistrust of conventional form” has created a historical focus on establishing a separation
between traditional and modernist literary techniques when he would align poets such as
Bishop in both camps (9).
His claim indicates that the historic atmosphere in criticism
articulated a fragmentation in poetics. In other words, this trend in criticism relegated poets as
emerging out of competing poetics, resulting in stereotypes of form and content. Poets like
Wilbur were considered "'ladylike,' especially in a poetic climate that valued the transgression of
all decorum" (74).
“Transgression” here included breaking from conventional form.
The
consequences of Wilber's poetry has been, according to Longenbach, "deeply misunderstood:
the plain content of his poems is often overlooked because of associations readers bring to his
formal dexterity" (75).
Wilbur's discussions of poetic form in no way align with emerging stereotypes between
metrical and non-metrical forms.
James Longenbach claims, "Wilbur himself has rightly
rejected the attribution 'of a kind of intrinsic sanity and goodness and even moral quality to
received forms ... There's nothing essentially good about a meter in itself" (8).
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Even while
Wilbur held firm that there were no direct correlations between form and content, demarcations
between “raw” and “cooked” poetry persisted.
Associations of both liberalism vs. neo-
conservatism and masculinity vs. femininity in relation to verse forms emerged alongside these
demarcations. Wilbur’s work reflected “cooked” poetry and the associations attendant to this
verse form.
Another aspect of his reputation was that he was a poet of control, which greatly
differed from the confessional, “raw” movement in American poetry. His treatment of subjects
exhibit control and moderation.
He was far removed from the emerging confessional mode.
Bruce Michelson notes how "Wilbur has run counter to the thread of British, Irish, and American
poetry [that for the last seventy years] has stressed the breakdown of the form, failures of the
words, the poet's self-validating sigh of giving up, stoic defeat in battles in conventional forms"
(35). As the American confessional poets explored the darkest corners of their psyche and
exposed its fissures, Wilbur did not follow the "conventional wisdom" that "language is
supposed to break down" and that "poems are expected to fail" (14). He is known as one of the
"poets of his generation who has actually endured" (201). While the confessional poets wrote
about and lived tragic lives, Wilbur's oeuvre suggests an alternative.
His 1970 poem “For the Student Strikers,” a historical poem recounting Kent State
students gunned down by the Ohio National Guard, instantiates this perspective of composure
and moderation. The poem neither reflects the outrage of the public toward the students, nor
the radicalization following the incident of the students against authorities. As the poem
progresses, rather than bolster the heroism of the students or situate them as victims, it
encourages the students to not see themselves as further alienated from their neighbors. The
poem encourages moderation: “It is not yet time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt / Slogan that
fuddles the mind with force”; instead, it is time for “the new sound in our streets [to be] the
patient sound of your discourse” (148). Several times in the poem, Wilbur encourages the
students to see their neighbors not as alienating others, but as “the people [who] are not unlike
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you”; the poem encourages a humanitarian engagement that is constructed by mediation rather
than violence (148). This is a view of practical moderation, a view of accepting that mistakes
were made on many sides. In order to quell the chaos, the speaker in this poem urges the
students to develop a sense of common humanity with their neighbors. The poem in no way
breaks down to lament, or forms a litany of the travails of modern life. There is also no trace of
the speaker’s tone portraying he or she is ill-equipped to live in modern society. The poem
addresses the subject directly and with compassion for all individuals involved.
In Wilbur’s 1976 “The Writer,” which addresses the relationship between the speaker
and a daughter who is “writing a story,” there is no family chaos as developed in Plath’s poems
centering on the family (128). The speaker recognizes that “Young as she is, the stuff / Of her
life is great cargo, and some of it heavy: / I wish her a lucky passage” (128). There is no
evidence of a crisis that would bring either the father or the daughter to a breaking point. This in
no way de-values the daughter’s struggle. The climax of the narrative makes a grand statement
of the impact of her labor to write her story: “It is always a matter, my darling / Of life and death,
as I had forgotten. I wish / What I wished you before, but harder” (129). The crisis in her
struggle to write is recognized and valued with compassion.
In no way does the poem
approach any form of hysteria as in Plath’s “Daddy.”
The concept of a “feminized” poetics emerged as one that did not delve deeply into the
abyss. Bruce Michelson notes Ian Hamilton's assessment on Wilber’s difference from the
confessionals: Wilbur “knows very well that the decline of his reputation since the mid 1960s
has been in large part a consequence of Plath's posthumous appeal" (155). Phyllis Rose's
analysis of "Cottage Street 1953," a poem on Wilbur's encounter with Plath after her
penultimate suicide attempt, addresses Wilbur's sense of control and moderation. Rose
contends, "Wilbur knows exactly how wimpy he will seem to the eye of history compared to the
tempestuous, raging young suicide. The last stanza contrasts his feat in 'outliving Sylvia' to her
own achievement in stating 'her brilliant negative / In poems free and helpless and unjust.'
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Neither accomplishment is underrated" (Rose). Longenbach quotes James Dickey's testament
to Wilbur's temperament: "Wilbur's is not essentially a tragic mind, and the lack of this one
quality will probably keep him, the estimates of literary historians and other fossils, from being
called a ‘major poet’" (71). His claim illustrates the persistent debates between “cooked” and
“raw” poetry.
Poets who followed the latter such as Plath were considered writing in the
stronger, more “masculine” line.
Poets whose work performed a more rational, moderate
perspective of the modern world were overshadowed.
Bruce Bawer assesses Wilbur's placement in American letters:
[for] all his prominence […] Wilbur seems nearly marginal. We do not, after all live in the
Age of Wilbur. He began his career as one of his generation's two most celebrated
American poets, along with his fellow formalist Robert Lowell (who was four years his
senior); but while Lowell transformed himself into a confessional poet [...] Wilbur
continued to write the sort of formal verse [...] that came to seem old hat. (Bawer)
Wilbur has in fact been interpreted as a poet of lightness and happiness. "Love Calls Us to the
Things of This World” (1956) is a poem where the spiritual world is transfigured into the most
everyday object: laundry. The poem begins with “eyes open[ing] to a cry of pulleys” holding up
garments that at the poem’s end are transfigured into dispirited people—thieves, lovers, nuns—
are uplifted, keeping a “difficult balance” as they are exposed to the spirituality of an impersonal
god: “The soul shrinks // From all that is about to remember / From the punctual rape of every
blessed day and cries, / ‘Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry’” (307). For Wilbur what
remains is the shared bond in love.
Howard Nemerov (1988-1990)
One of the aspects emphasized with Nemerov’s work is that he is an “academic poet.”
This term is usually used in the pejorative sense and is another way in which “cooked” poetry
has been defined. Bowie Duncan's 1971 preface to the critical reception of Nemerov’s work
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points out that Nemerov detractors have charged him with "writing over intellectual, mannered
poetry [of being] cold and therefore unpoetic, of being so intensely concerned with structure and
form that his poetry becomes lifeless analysis, not poetic creation [... ] Form controls and stifles
the reality or experience he seeks to present, reducing his poetry to discourse and the
experience it reveals to superficiality" (ix). Here again we see the assumptions and attitudes
given to metrical forms, that they are insincere, not capable of authentic expressions of human
experience. Peter Meinke tries to dislocate these associations: Nemerov is "often attacked for
being too 'cold' or 'cerebral.' Nemerov's poetry is actually quite the opposite: a passion
disciplined, but passionate and humanitarian nonetheless, with cries of anguish constantly
breaking though" (35).
Nemerov’s 1958 “The Town Dump” treats human consumption, waste, and the effect of
waste on the environment. Nemerov constructs a landfill as a particular city and makes it
analogous to cemeteries. Refuse reflects our relationships with economy and labor: “oyster,
crab, and mussel shells / Lie here in heaps, savage as money hurled / Away at the gate of hell”
(142). Hell is perceived as the savage effects reflected in waste, what is cast off from disuse
and greed. Landfills are peopled with scavenge hunters, with “dealers in antiques” in the hopes
of happening upon treasures. Much like determining the difference between a weed and a
flower, waste for one person may be valuable to another: “in any sty / Someone’s heaven may
open” (143). The heaven found on earth is also coupled with a multitude of swarming flies, in
such a magnitude that they have a “hum becoming / a high whine” (143). Heaven and hell
coexist in the landfill, although not in balance. The speaker claims that “There should be ratios”
of consumption between value and waste. And the state between this disharmony is articulated
by the “wild birds, drawn to the carrion and flies” and sing: “their music marvelous, though sad,
and strange” (144).
In 1989 Willard Spiegelman addressed the evolution of "lecture hall" language in
Nernerov's poems, stating that his speakers frequently self-reference instruction. He gives
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examples from Nemerov's Collected Poems: “‘This morning we shall spend a few minutes /
Upon the study of symbolism, which is basic / To the nature of money' ('Money: an introductory
lecture,')” in 1967; “'Today we shall explain the mystery / Of points and lines moving over the
void—/ We call it paper—to imitate the world' ('Drawing Lessons,' )” in 1979; and “‘Prepare for
Death. But how can you prepare / For death? Suppose it isn't an exam, / But more like the
Tavern Scene in Henry IV' ('Speculation,')” in 1979. Nemerov was indeed an academic by
profession; Speigelman shows that in the case of Nemerov, his poems also reflect the subject
of an academic. D.G. Myer discusses the professionalization of the poet a bit further. He notes
that Nemerov's "career is also a reminder [...] of the way in which such public recognition has all
but replaced the actual reading of poetry. It suggests that the prizes and academies and
laureateships—an institutionalized belief in poetry—may stand only as monuments of a passing
art" (Myers). William Logan's commentary on the standing of Nemerov's work aligns with Myers:
Nemerov "never enjoyed a commanding critical reputation—sometimes as the honors pile up a
poet's reputation withers" (87). In this context, "academic poet" is also reflective of a teacherly
poetics whereby the accomplished career of the poet has influenced his poetry.
Several critics have also noted that Nemerov's poems address a general public.
Monroe Spears notes that "[b]oth Nemerov and Auden address the ordinary reader, and both
range easily from popular culture to the most difficult and esoteric matters" (Spears). The first
stance toward the public counters what is assumed of an "academic" poetics: far flung
references couched in an "elitist" style intended for a specialist audience. Sidney Burris' review
of Nemerov's last published book, Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, notes the
disjunction between modernist poetry and the reading public and claims that this collection just
may be suitable for the "ordinary" reader. He notes that Nemerov described it "as a simple
respect for an audience who has—or at least ought to have [...] more pressing things to do than
read his poems"; Burris continues, "[t]he pose here is important. Austerity, obscurity,
ambiguity—the harried reader has little time for these delicacies, however lofty their ultimate
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purpose, and their intolerance of these things, indeed their intolerance of modem poetry, makes
a further point" (Burris). Nemerov here is noted to have responded to modernism by pointedly
straying from its principles to cultivate readers.
Some poets and critics value poetry as a rare and refined commodity and do not care
whether or not it can be appreciated by those outside of a "specialized" readership. Burris notes
the correlation between rarity, value, and presumption: "[t]hat such an obscurity as
contemporary poetry could be labeled public is a vanity that makes all other vanities totter"
(Burris). The labeling of Nermerov as an "academic poet” and the negative, assumption of
elitism that that term holds, does not fit with a collection of poems composed in a manner to
foster a connection with the “ordinary” reader. Implicit in Burris's statement is that there is a
poetry that could engage all people, and that all people should or ought to read poetry. That is
the vanity he finds in presuming a “public” poetry.
Nemerov's regard for poetry comes from the line of an Arnoldian poetics. Robert D.
Harvey quotes Nemerov's definition of poetry:
Poetry is a kind of spiritual exercise, a (generally doomed but stoical) attempt to pray
one's humanity back into the universe; and conversely an attempt to read, to derive
anew, one's humanity from nature, nature considered as a book, dictionary and bible at
once. Poetry is a doctrine of signatures, or presupposes that the universe is such a
doctrine whether well written or ill ... Poetry is an art of combination, or discovering the
secret valences which the most widely differing things have for one another. In the
darkness of this search, patience and good humor are useful qualities. Also: The
serious and the funny are one. The purpose of poetry is to persuade, fool, or compel
God into speaking" (49).
“On Being Asked for a Peace Poem” (1973) performs the union of humor with the serious. The
poem conjoins the political with the spiritual, the serious with the funny.
The poem begins, “Here is Joe Blow the poet / Sitting before the console of the giant
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instrument / that mediates his spirit to the world” (95). After “Flex[ing] his fingers nervously,” he
practices writing by writing out scales such as ‘(Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?)’”
(Selected, 95). He prepares to write a peace poem on the Vietnam War and throughout the
poem discusses how he can’t come up with a first line—the humor is that the first line is about
Joe Blow writing a poem: “this poem, he figures, is / a sacred obligation” (Selected, 95). After
wondering how to “stop this senseless war,” he positions the assertiveness between the serious
and funny in that he gives historical allusions of the social role of war-time poets: “Homer
stopped that dreadful thing at Troy / By giving the troops the Illiad to read instead; / So
Wordsworth stopped the Revolution when / He felt that Robespierre had gone to far” (Selected,
95). It is comical to think that these poets and their works stopped wars. But the position
becomes serious when we think of nature as a book, a dictionary, and the instruction that is
received from nature.
His poem ends on a light note; after stating that he could speak about the Creative
Process at the General Assembly and the Security Council, he imagines that he could end up
on TV, at which point, “Poetry might suddenly be the in thing” (Selected, 95).
While the
contexts he mentions are exaggerations, poets do hold positions of authority that gives them
points of influence. Ideas arise in poems, and instruct readers; poets engage in social events;
more poets write poems; poets boycott and pass on ideas. So while it may be funny that Homer
and Wordsworth put ends to wars, the process of ideological dissemination is significant. Such
a regard for poetry would not limit access or exposure to poetry by crafting it solely into
"austerity, obscurity, ambiguity." Nemerov responded to modernism by widening an audience
for poetry. Burris says of Trying Conclusions,
if poetry is ever to make wishing [to reach a public audience] credible, and if credibility
is ever a standard of aesthetic judgment, then the deepest wish of Nemerov's poetry [...]
is that his poems aim ultimately to dignify the world of our recognizably common
experience. Perhaps this constitutes public poetry. Perhaps not. [...] Readers now have
46
in their possession some of the most approachable and intelligent verse written in the
last decade. (Burris)
Nemerov's "approachable" poems are not always in the teacherly mode; his speakers also
address the most common experiences in which we find ourselves. Myers characterizes
Nemerov's work as "brief poems in which [speakers wonder] about the things of the world which
are least wondered about: “waiting rooms [...] people driving fast cars [...] pockets [...] and the
fall of leaves" (Myers). Such content of poems certainly cannot be marked as "academic"; these
are experiences most all have. Perhaps what has made the label “academic” stick is that his
work had early on been defined as “cooked.”
Spears compares Nemerov to Auden in another aspect: "Like Auden, Nemerov is
classical in his acceptance of limitations, his belief in the intellect, in clarity, in the importance of
form" (Spears). Stephen Metcalf outlines the development of his formalism: Nemerov is a poet
who "started out as a would-be modernist, in the school of Eliot and Pound, and ended up a
cherished godfather to the New Formalists [...] He pulled off the hardest trick of all: he made
blank verse-unrhymed iambic pentameter feel like a product of the tongue, not a chisel"
(Metcalf). While he makes a direct link between his use of form and the New Formalists, he and
others such as William Pratt note that he failed to create a formal signature: "[h]e did not […]
create a distinctive line of his own" (Pratt); "he never happened upon a signature line" (Metcalf).
A difference to modernism for Nemerov was his engagement with the "ordinary reader" with
poems cast in forms he is esteemed for having mastered, influencing generations of formalists.
In addition to claims that he did nothing to create a signature, he has also been scorned
for straying from another aspect of modernism: the humor infused in some of his poems
"exposed him to one of the most feared charges of our serious century—the composition of light
verse" (Burris). The preference for a "serious" poetics certainly lingers. Billy Collins's poems
incur the same response. Many critics are skeptical about poets who are humorous, accessible,
and perhaps too popular with a general audience. Such skepticism counters the role of a poet
47
laureate in general. The mission of the post is to engage with a wider, public audience.
Robert Penn Warren (1986-1987)
The fugitive poets with whom Robert Penn Warren started his career at Vanderbilt
questioned the validity of Imagism. William Pratt distinguishes between the imagists and
fugitives in terms of one "hav[ing] its counterpart in the other. The Imagists were above all
internationalists. Individualists; and experimentalists; the Fugitaives, were above all
regionalists, traditionalists, and classicists" (13). According to John Gould Fletcher, "the sole
poet who participated in both groups," (14) who wrote in "Two Elements in Poetry," "'free verse'
school of poetry under Ezra Pound had run its course, and that a new "Classical" school had
been formed in the Twenties, under the general leadership of T. S. Eliot, but [was] best
represented as a school by the Southern Fugitives" (15). Warren’s work is representative of
first-generation formalism and the South. His early work was greatly driven by narrative
technique. “The Ballad of Billy Potts” is a folktale Warren grew up with and re-cast into poetic
form which begins,
Big Billie Potts was big and stout
In the land between the rivers.
His shoulders were wide and his gut stuck out
Like a croker of nubbins and his holler and shout
Made the bob-cat shiver and the black-jack leaves shake
In the section between the rivers.
He would slap you on the back and laugh (41).
This 462-line poem continues with a language rooted in the American south and in
representations of Western Kentucky.
Warren's poetics is firmly rooted in regionalism, traditionalism, and classicism. Morton
Dauwen Zabel notes that "[t]o belong to the Fugitives was one of the best fortunes that could
48
befall, in America at that moment, any poet interested in craft and its uses" (23); and William
Bedford Clark notes that "Zabel's favorable review of Warren's first book of poetry in Poetry
landed on Warren's "'exacting craftsmanship' [...] and noted that he had obviously profited from
his association with the Fugitives without being circumscribed by the biases peculiar to that
school'" (2).
Several critics are put off by the degree to which Warren addresses the moral and a
didactic presentation of lessons. Original sin is one of Warren's recurring thematic concerns. In
1944 John Crowe Ransom embedded this theme with concurrent debates in evolution: "the
present account of Original Sin seems to be nearly related to the Origin of Species—of that
species at least which is most self-determining of its behavior" (35). Critics have continued to
note Warren’s obsession with original sin.
Harold Bloom is one such critic who reacted
negatively by Warren's sense of moralizing and is more compelled to Warren's work in the
1980s, a time when his poetics shifted to explore the theme of time. Bloom also responded
better to the play Brother to Dragons once Warren revised it thematically. In 1978 he declared
that "the burden of Warren's prophecy is morally very harsh, because his vision of God, though
personal and undogmatic, is uniquely devoted to an unforgiving spirit, who sees and knows all
and is incapable of pity or pardon" (75). Delmore Schwartz noted in 1953 that Brother to
Dragons represents "obsession with guilt and innocence"; and Victor Strandberg in 1968 noted
that the theme of original sin is why "Mr. Warren expressed misgivings about Whitman's work
because of its undue optimism—its lack of a sense of sin such as Hawthorn and Melville often
expressed" (134).
In the foreword to Warren's 1998 collected poems, Bloom claims that his evaluation of
an "ideal anthology of American poetry would begin with Warren's 'Leaf' and then include
poems at a minimum: 'Birth of Love,' 'Evening Hawk, 'Heart of Autumn,' 'Red Tail Hawk’ and
‘Pyre of Youth,' 'Myth of Mountain Sunrise,' 'Mortal Limit,' and, of the earlier poems, 'Mortmain,'
'Revelation,' and 'Bearded Oaks" (xxv), Bloom sees Warren's later work as the strongest:
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"Warren's characteristic mode had been the dramatic lyric; but after the poet turned sixty he
internalized drama, in a great contest with time, with cultural and family history, and above all,
with himself" (xxiii).
Warren was multi-talented. He was well-known for storytelling, whether in the novel or
narrative poetry. He was also central to the New Critic movement. His Understanding Poetry is
one of the most historically taught textbooks on how generations have learned how to read
poetry. The second edition of the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry defines Warren as
"a kind of national treasure, a live-and kicking monument" (752).
While critics have not
responded well to Warren’s incorporation of the moral, he is a literary figure whose reputation
arose from success in writing multiple genres.
Few writers have such facility of language
across so many modes of writing.
Bloom finds Warren’s later work aspired to the conditions of the lyric. Warren's "There's
a Grandfather's Clock in the Hall" (1968-1974) represents Warren in the lyric mode. The
opening lines contemplate time: "There's a grandfather's clock in the hall, watch it closely. The
minute / hand stands still, then it jumps, and in between jumps and there is no Time" (309).
This contemplation of time reaches for the objective measure of a clock as well as the
subjective experience of time.
He also abstracts time into the element of “no Time.” The
speaker makes analogies of intensified experiences that occur within the time of one minute:
"Or perhaps you are fifteen feet under water and holding your breath as you / struggle with a
rock-snagged anchor, or holding your breath just / long enough for one more long, slow thrust to
make the orgasm / really intolerable" (309). This extended metaphor of the minute is resolved in
the last stanza: "But, in any case, watch the clock closely. Hold your breath and wait. / Nothing
happens, nothing happens, then suddenly, quick as a wink, and slick as / a mink's prick, Time
thrusts through the time of no-Time" (310). As an observation on time, the speaker collapses
the distance of the minute into a more intensified and shortened time of a wink as the speaker
instructs its reader to watch the clock.
50
The focus on these post-war US Poets Laureate allows us to encounter specific
reactions critics have held against the persistence of “cooked” poetry. Each poet addressed in
this chapter represents slightly different manifestations critics have held for the more
fashionable “raw” poetry. Assumptions about “cooked” poetry are that it is effeminate, neoconservative, academic, elitist, and ill-fitted to address modern concerns. One third of the total
poets laureate have been distinguished as being a part of an approximating similar American
movement (formalism), an indication that the position of laureateship itself values more
traditional forms, perhaps because a general audience may recognize poetry through
formalism.
Another cross-section of laureates can be determined by geography, how the
laureateship has been designed to represent geographic inclusiveness. Their works also offer
particular attitudes toward the relationship between self and region.
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CHAPTER 3
GEOGRAPHY AND US LAUREATESHIP
Appointment to US Poet Laureate does not require that the person be a native citizen.
Several poets laureate—Joseph Brodsky, Charles Simic, Mark Strand—were born in other
countries. A focus on the relationship between laureates and geography brings into view the
ways in which geography impacts poetry and poetics.
Brodsky’s primary difficulty has been
with his own translation of poems from the Russian to English language.
Simic’s work more
closely reflected trends in American surrealism; and yet his poems show the influence of
Eastern-European war. Strand’s work shows less of a direct influence from specific geography.
Although he has lived in North and South America, his poems do not reflect a definite sense of
place; rather, his poems function more by negation of place. In addition to these international
poets, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Hass, and Ted Kooser have been hailed during their
announcements to the American public as representing specific geographic regions. Kunitz had
long been established as an influential New England poet.
Billington introduced Hass's
relationship with the West Coast and Kooser's from the Great Plains as important elements of
their appointments. A perspective of laureates from the vantage point of geography compellingly
portrays how international and national backgrounds influence poetry and poetics.
Joseph Brodsky (1991-1992)
Curiously, Brodsky is the only poet laureate to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature,
and is one of the laureates that has received some of the harshest critiques for poetry. There
are several reasons that critics have responded so strongly against his work. His RussianAmerican background formed a rupture of a poet navigating two regions, cultures, and
languages. As noted in Chapter One, his poems were critiqued by Soviet police as “social
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parasitism” and he was sentenced to a labor camp. He has since translated most of his own
poems and continued to write in Russian and English after he immigrated to the US. Critics
have been disinclined to include him centrally either into Russian or American literature.
Smith addresses the problems Brodsky faced with Russian audiences.
G.S.
John Taylor, F.D.
Reeve, William Logan, and Derek Walcott locate the difficulties in Brodsky’s translations of his
own poems as a major hindrance to American audiences. In 2001 John Taylor unequivocally
placed him outside of American literature: “In any event, we must always remember that
Brodsky remained a Russian poet (despite his increasing forays into English) and that only a
third of his Russian poems were translated during his lifetime—an arrestingly small amount of
work that is available to us” (596). One issue with Brodsky is that he simply does not have
enough of his work available to the English-reading American public. From this standpoint, the
public does not have access to his work because of the rift caused by a poet navigating two
languages. Taylor gives additional causes for Brodsky's problems of English-language poems.
The region in which a poet lives affects language, which in turn affects style and form. The
expatriate poet runs the risk of ineffectual poetics that results from working in a non-native
region: “Long years in a foreign country can diminish the spontaneity with which the expatriate
conjures up his mother tongue, as well as strip a native vocabulary of its [deposited] slang; yet
no writer or poet experiences this evolution in the same ways” (599). In addition to being
critiqued as a poor translator, Brodsky is charged for having lost the intensity and numinous
qualities of his native language since he has been uprooted to another region. The implication
is that for some poets, regionalism and native language significantly inform a private poetics.
He compares Brodsky's plight with other emigrant poets: “In contrast to other exiled writers who
lock themselves up inside their mother tongue so as to protect their creativity, Brodsky delved
headlong into the enticements of his second language, while continuing to write in Russian”
(600). The effects of Brodsky's navigating two regions resulted in poor translations as well as a
watered-down poetics. William Logan is harsher in his 2001 critique: “When Brodsky translated
53
himself it sounded as if he'd been translated by committee—a committee of refrigerators”
(Logan). Logan does not give an example of lines that he finds having supposedly grumbling
noises. But he does quote a poem that he calls “doggerel” with “ludicrous allusion to Frost”:
And staring up where no cloud drifts
because your sock’s devoid of gifts
you’ll understand this thrift; it fits
your age; it’s not a slight.
It is too late for some breakthrough,
for miracles, for Santa’s crew.
And suddenly you’ll realize that you
yourself are a gift outright. (Logan)
He does not give the title of this poem, but it is taken from Brodsky’s 2001 Nativity Poems.
Logan does not elaborate or define what he finds as “doggerel.” However, the closely placed
rhymes of “drifts,” “gifts,” “thrift,” “fits,” and “it’s” is closer to a song lyric than a lyric. There are
problems of idiom such as “sock’s devoid of gifts” because this phrase does not conjure up the
more colloquial usage of “Christmas stockings.” “Santa’s crew” is another problem of idiom; the
more common phrase is “Santa’s helpers.” The allusion to Frost comes across as an oddity
because “The Gift Outright” concerns such a different context.
It is a poem celebrating
American heritage; it is also a misguided poem that promotes colonial land conquest. This
allusion does not make sense in the context of Christmas.
In 2001, F. D. Reeve, like Taylor, aligned Brodsky's genius instead with the Russian
language: “he is remembered for his place in Russian literary history [...] in 1987 he received
the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1991-1992 he served as the American Poet Laureate. Despite
these honors and achievements, he never became an English-language poet” (31). Like Taylor,
Reeve notes the problems of Brodsky’s skill in translating his own work. Reeve also notes how
the region to which Brodsky immigrated differed in terms of Russian style and form: “His dictum
54
that 'verse meters in themselves are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be
substituted' succinctly illustrates how out of touch he was with the postmodern world around him
and why his English-language poetry has no influence” (32). Here Brodsky ran into similar
problems of the poets addressed in Chapter One. During the 1970s, it was far less fashionable
to write in metrical, rather than non-metrical, forms. While American poets were shirking longheld traditional forms (and other conventions), Brodsky maintained close affinities for metrical
form. Meter to Brodsky was a mainstay of poetry. He did not want to shirk the poetic traditions
of the Russia he loved; he simply did not follow Soviet communism. Maintaining metrical form
in the 1970s was a way in which to preserve tradition; it was also a decade in which American
poetry was predominantly non-metrical.
Derek Walcott in 1998 exposed another problem, not only on Brodsky's facility as a
translator, but also on the problem of translating Russian to English metrical poetry:
The translated Russian risks, in its usually hexametrical rhyming design, a meter which
English associates with the comic, the parodic, or the ironic.
There is no modern
English or American poet who will take such risks—being utterly serious with the
feminine endings, of attempting to reach the sublime and noble without the pseudohumility of the dying fall, the retractable conceit. Double rhymes and long lines threaten
contemporary poets in English with the bespectacled shade of Ogden Nash, not to
mention the garrulous precision of Byron.” (Walcott)
It is a given that the music from one language will be lost in the process of translation.
Maintaining the poetics of one language imports cultural assumptions about form and meaning.
For example, while the hexametrical line may be powerful in one language, the usage of this
line in English can come across as comic, lessening the impact of powerful statements.
Brodsky's belief in the “spiritual magnitude” of meter did not convey the noble aim for which he
reached in English. Cultural differences in English such as between the iambic pentameter and
the hexametrical line carry different nuances of meaning themselves; the magnitude of meter,
55
too, in the 1960s and 1970s was itself in question for poetic style. The layers of style in meter
such as with feminine endings and double rhymes compound cultural differences of a poet
navigating two geographic regions.
Reeve noted that the influences with which Brodsky held sway were also out of line with
literary fashion: “Brodsky's Anglo-American favorites were Auden and Frost, hardly poets 'on
the cutting edge' in the Sixties when Brodsky was beginning his career” (34). If critics have
placed his genius in the Russian language, how does he fare with Russian audiences? His
status of a poet who left for America was looked down upon in relation to the poets who
remained in Russia. G. S. Smith noted in 2005, “By the end, Brodsky had attained a level of
international celebrity that has come to no other Russian poet even posthumously, let alone
during his own lifetime. The most regrettable effect of this has been a good deal of sneering
resentment, especially among Russians who stayed at home” (G.S. Smith). So even while
critics place his genius in the Russian language, the rift created by navigating two soils finds
him cast out from the cultures of two national literatures, American and Russian.
If critics have so disparaged Brodsky’s facility with the English language in his poetry,
what then has been his allure in the US? G.S. Smith suggests that it is Brodsky's personality
and the views he espoused about the power of poetry. Smith states, “[t]he canonization of
Brodsky preceded the detailed and specific discussions of his poetry, especially among
Russians who stayed at home.
This is perfectly normal; people everywhere prefer to
concentrate on the personality than the poem” (G. S. Smith). It is possible that what Brodsky
had to say to the American public about poetry overshot his ability to write poems in the English
language. What message could have been so powerful to establish such high reverence for
this poet? We know that he believed that meter had a “spiritual magnitude,” which is in part why
he maintained Russian poetics. Part of what is quite moving about Brodsky is his belief in the
transformative power of poetry: his “belief in the supremacy of poetry among the arts and the
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Poet among the artists, is the element in Brodsky's attitudes that most impressed the Western
literary world after he emigrated” (G. S. Smith).
The Nobel address that he gave before he became a poet laureate reveals the degree
of his conviction that literature is socially transformative and a means by which a society
safeguards against political oppression. He contended in 1995,
Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable
of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material
suppression of literature—the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of
books—we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: the neglect of books, the
nonreading of them. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is
a nation, it pays with its history (53).
The seriousness that may not come across in his poems from the intricacies of two poetics is
evident in his prose.
As US Poet Laureate, he had a platform for which to promote the
importance of reading literature. Reading literature for Brodsky saves both the individual and
the society in which the individual lives. When literature is neglected, political oppression can
sweep down upon a nation. Preserving the literary imagination of history protects liberty by
safeguarding it from an abuse in the form of a historical amnesia.
Translated in 1971 by George L. Kline, “Natre Morte” is a poem by Brodsky that
expresses the power and beauty of his work when it is well presented to an American audience.
The poem is from A Part of Speech, published in 1980. The poem is a meditation on modern
life and religion. Section six captures the melancholy resulting from isolation so intense that it
feels like a hovering presence of death. The section begins,
Lately I often sleep
during the daytime. My
death, it would seem, is now
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trying and testing me,
placing a mirror close
to my still-breathing lips,
seeing if I can stand
non-being in daylight.
I do not move. These two
thighs are like blocks of ice.
Branched veins show blue against
skin that is marble white. (45)
There is no evidence of distracting sounds as the poem Logan addressed. There is no problem
with idiom. The lineation of the poem—the force of syntax against enjambment—highlights the
crisis of isolation. “[D]eath, it would seem, is now” speaks of the intensity of the speaker’s
isolation from not only society, but from the self.
“Seeing if I can stand” represents the
speaker’s doubt of man’s compatibility with modern life. The image of the last two lines implies
that this doubt has become so internalized that death has visibly manifested itself in the
speaker. This existential crisis is resolved in the last section of the poem as Mary speaks to
Jesus: “Can I pass through my gate / not having understood: / Are you dead?—or alive? / Are
you my son—or God […] Christ now speaks to her in turn: / Whether dead or alive, / woman, it’s
all the same— / son or God, I am thine” (46). The Jesus figure does nothing to bring comfort to
this impasse of Mary, which alludes back to the impasse of the speaker. This reply gestures
back to the title of the poem, which means “dead nature.” What has been affirmed is the
continuation of the impasse itself in his ultimate reply, “I am thine.” “Natre Morte” represents the
genius of Brodsky’s work to which Reeve and Smith allude.
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Charles Simic (2007-2008)
Charles Simic is another poet laureate who has been exiled from his native land. He
remembers early from his youth in Yugoslavia having a bomb blast him out of bed. The form of
political oppression that he witnessed before he became an expatriate informs the speakers and
situations that he creates. As noted by Taylor, no two poets evolve the same way in how
regionalism can affect language and poetics. Brodsky maintained Russian poetics while writing
in English; Simic's early English-language poems were closer in line to the poetic fashions of
American poetry written in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1992 Steven Cramer located Simic’s work
both within and outside of 1970s surrealism, noting the difference among his work and his
peers:
Though often associated with the 'new surrealists' of the 1970s—American poets
influenced by
'deep imagist' elders like Bly, Wright, Merwin, Kinnell et al.—Simic
deserves to be distinguished from this group on at least two counts. First as a native of
Yugoslavia, his attachment to riddles, proverbs, magic formulas, and nursery rhymes
has a bona fide regional pedigree [...] Simic has rarely settled for the Jungian
ahistoricity typical of American period surrealism.
Instead, Simic's images—pre-
industrial and archetypal at first, distinctly urban and modern later on—bear the scars of
historical witness. (Cramer)
Many titles of Simic’s Selected Poems: 1963-1983 reflect a direct address on “riddles, proverbs,
magic formulas, and nursery rhymes”: “Two Riddles” and “Solving the Riddle” in 1974, “Nursery
Rhyme” in 1977, and “Austerities” in 1982. “Butcher Shop” (1971) and “The Soup” (1974) are
both poems expressing what Cramer finds as “scars of historical witness.” The former begins
with the speaker stopping in front of a butcher shop and the sight of blood triggers visions of
bloodshed mingling between the secular and sacred:
An apron hangs on the hook:
The blood on it smeared into a map
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Of the great continents of blood,
The great rivers and oceans of blood.
There are knives that glitter like altars. (15)
As visions of violence and blood pour through the poem, horrors are discovered from even from
the viewpoint of an altar, suggesting that the very place usually intended for sanctuary and
refuge, is tainted with war. Here is a violence that is inescapable: it spills across both land and
water. There is no respite from the horror. “The Soup” is a poem expressing the historical
witness that Cramer finds in his work. It starts with an imperative, “Take the lump in your
throat,” which immediately situates a crisis (80).
The unreal quality of the poem promptly
follows: a “clock that goes to 13. / The bare room, the iron cot. / The cockroach of history
running up the wall” (80). Within this eerie setting, the speaker specifies horrors of history by
mockingly asking, “On what shall we cook [the soup]? […] On the moustache of Joseph Stalin. /
The fires of Treblinka. / The fires of Hiroshima. / The head of the condemned / The head
swarming with memories” (81).
Like most poets who have been labeled within an American literary movement, Simic
frequently dismisses the connection between his work and surrealism.
And yet there are
qualities of his work that come across to American readers as dreamlike and horrific. His
experiences in Yugoslavia have shaped the content of his poems. In 2003 Benjamen Paloff
examined why “like so many poets of his caliber, Simic has accumulated a set of journalistic
cliches [...] Words like 'inimitable,' 'surreal,' and 'nightmarish' have followed him around in
countless reviews and articles” (Paloff). While Cramer notes what Simic has imported into his
poems that sets him apart from surrealist writers, Paloff adds another layer as to why Simic has
been lumped together with other writers in this movement: “[i]f our world seems unfamiliar in his
writing, it may be because most American readers cannot easily relate to the experiences that
have shaped Simic's vision” (Paloff). Part of the assessment of Simic as a surrealist writer
60
stems from how unfamiliar his poems could come across to American readers because these
readers do not have the experience of growing up in a war-torn state and with social destruction
taking place on native soil such as expressed in “The Butcher Shop.”
Paloff also notes that Simic developed a natural American style: “Born in Belgrade in
1938, Simic occupies an unusual place in American letters in that, on the one hand, he writes in
a natural American idiom and, on the other, knows what historical cataclysm looks like on the
ground, not as a combatant or sympathizer might see it, but as a sustained, everyday reality in
his own neighborhood” (Paloff).
Helen Vendler noted in 1995 that Simic, “in the cunning
strategies of his forms,[...] has brought the allegorical subversiveness of eastern European
poetry into our native practice (Vendler). Brodsky and Simic share the experience of becoming
expatriates and having such experiences comprise their poetics as they learned to navigate the
differences of two regions. They also share a similar backlash to their expatriation. In 2005
Belinda McKeon quoted Simic's view on the reception of his work in Belgrade: “They regard me
as a foreigner [...] they don't think my poetry has anything to do with them. So, you know,
there's nothing there for me.
I mean, they translate my work, and they're happy to have
someone in America...but during the nationalist days, I read it again and again, 'he's a complete
foreigner,' said in a very pejorative way. An alien. That was their view” (McKeon). Yet while
they share the state of being outcast from their native soil, Simic, unlike Brodsky, has not been
received by American critics as an outcast of two nations. The literary success of his English
language is what differentiates him from the reception of Brodsky. On a literary landscape, they
have both been exiled by native lands, but from critics’ reception to their works, only Brodsky
had been exiled twice because of his importation of poetics into a nation that did not value his
style as Simic's style was valued.
This is not to say that Simic is without criticism for his poetics. A reaction against his
work tends to be that while his idiom matched the accepted fashion of the time, he developed a
literary signature that for some critics became too recognizable. One aspect of the familiarity of
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his work is that it moved too far from the metrical line. Hayden Carruth lamented that the
predominant trend in the 1960s and 1970s was symptomatic of an American poetic line having
become too lose. In other words, it had veered too far from the metrical line. His appraisal of
Simic as a poet’s poet meant that Simic was one of the poets in the 1970s influencing much of
the poetry written at that time.
His work became one of the most modeled.
Carruth’s
assessment of the poetic line indicated that the popularity of Simic’s line had become so
replicated that many poet’s works’ were becoming derivatives of this signature, saturating the
style of contemporary-American poetry. Several other critics have also focused on defining
Simic’s poetic line, perhaps because his line had become so standard. Vendler outlined its
formula. In assessing Simic’s line, Brian Henry (in 1999), Edward Byrne (in 2007), and Paul
Breslin (in 1997) represent a kind of critic who valued and expected poets to change their poetic
line over the course of time. They claim that Simic never altered his signature from his earlier
work and that this is what holds back his achievement in poetry.
Carruth addressed the degree to which the American poetic line had loosened. He
claimed that the state of poetry had reached the same risk of mundanity that had been
countered by the first Imagists. The Imagists broke with the metrical line in order to reinvigorate
poetry. Carruth attests that the break from metrical verse had gone too far to the other side and
that non-metrical verse had become as blunt as in the era the Imagists worked.
He saw the overproduction of non-metrical verse as resulting from the abundance of
poets learning poetic craft in creative writing courses: “It is [the loose line] being turned out
virtually by rote at tens of thousands of writing tables all over North America, and given to us,
thrown at us, in poems which are interchangeable, in books whose authors, relentless egotripping solipsists though they are, remain as indistinguishable as the obit-writers of the Times”
(Carruth). In order to explain this phenomenon, he analyzed one poem of Simic's by removing
the line breaks and reorganizing it into paragraph form. He declared that nothing was lost from
this experiment and that the piece of writing actually improved. Carruth mused further: “When
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poems gain in fluency and intelligibility, and hence in meaning, from being printed as prose, it is
because the line has ceased to function, as I have already said, and when the line has ceased
to function it is because the language has become too dull to sustain measure” (Carruth).
Pound had disavowed Imagism soon after it first emerged because the break from metered
verse was long-enough practiced to have revitalized poetry. Eliot also anticipated a more rapid
return to metered verse. Carruth’s discussion is a recapitulation of these two modernist’s
concern for the development of poetry.
Vendler focuses less on the metrical quality of Simic’s work and more on the rhetorical
formula of his poems. She defined his signature that had been pervasive up through his Hotel
Insomnia (1992): It “exhibits all the hallmarks of the Simic style: an apparently speakerless
scene; an indefinite article establishing the vagueness of place and time [...] then a menacing
definite article focusing our gaze [...] then a late entrance of the personal pronoun engaging the
speaker's life with ours” (Soul Says, 102).
She gives “War” from Hotel Insomnia as a
prototypical Simic poetic formula: “The Trembling finger of a woman / Goes down the list of
casualties / on the evening of the first snow. // The house is cold and the list is long. // All our
names are included” (Soul Says, 102).
Critics point out the effects of what happens when a poet develops too strong of a
signature: the poet is henceforth held to evaluation by that signature. Brian Henry contended,
“critics, who know what to expect of Simic [...] either praise or blame him for it [...]. Readers
looking for formal ingenuity, lushness, or lyrical experimentation probably will find Simic's style
disappointing” (Henry).
He asks, “At what point [...] does the poet start to coast, become
entrenched, depleted?” (Henry). Edward Byrne noted that Simic's poems “are easily known by
sight” (Byrne). Paul Breslin's account of Simic's work was on par with these critics: “I have a
sense of a style running on automatic pilot, the urgencies that once called it into existence
largely forgotten. Strange events do not erupt, but saunter lazily into view, voiced in such inert
syntax and blasé affect as to seem oddly comfortable” (Breslin). While critics contend that his
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signature may be too identifiable, that does not mean that those newly exposed to his poems
will not appreciate his work. As noted in Chapter One, US laureateship was created to bring
poetry to a greater audience.
For readers who become initiated into the reading of poetry
because of the visibility brought to the post, they may find Brodsky and Simic on their own terms
and build their own affiliations to poetry without following cautionary tales in criticism.
Stanley Kunitz (2000-2001)
Kunitz is a native-born poet, a poet who has not had to navigate two nations’ poetics.
Kunitz is known as a regional poet of New England and is championed as particularly American.
A main difficulty critics find with his work is that he published relatively few books over the
course of his life, making it harder to assess his poetic development. In this regard, Kunitz
greatly differs from poets who overproduce poems. Some poets are criticized for having overwritten, resulting in having written what can be the same poem recast time and again.
Some
critics see such production as devaluing a poet’s oeuvre; however, there is one main benefit.
The overproduction of poems allows such poets to keep presence within the American literary
landscape. This is where critics fault Kunitz’s work; between the publications of his books, his
name and work did not circulate as much in book reviews. Other poet’s publications circulated
without him, which gave rise to a silence of criticism on his work. That he published fewer
books brings to the forefront a particular aspect of contemporary American poetry: how a poet’s
oeuvre functions within the literary market.
David Orr stated in 2002, “Kunitz writes sparingly―on the average his books have
appeared in fourteen-year intervals. In his words, he writes 'only those poems that must be
written, that force themselves into being.' As a result, the transitional poems don't get written,
and each poem can represent, or appear to represent departure” (Orr). By “transitional poems”
Orr suggests that there is no way to determine a closer development of how Kunitz’s poetic
thinking progressed from one book to another. Kunitz is aware of how the literary market
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shapes a poet’s reputation; Marie Hénault notes that Kunitz said that he “realize[d] that
reputations are made by volume as much as by anything else. Most of the big reputations in
Modern American poetry have been made on the basis of a large body of work” (25). This
aspect of the literary market encourages poets to overproduce books because it keeps their
names circulating in print. More poetry book publications lead to a steadier output of book
reviews. As the reviews accumulate, critics have more evidence of how a poet is situated within
American literary history. This practice creates more discourse around poets’ works. As a
result, this aspect of Kunitz’s participation in the literary market led to a greater silence on his
oeuvre. Several critics find this silence unfortunate because they esteem him as one of the
most influential American poets. Hénault noted in 1980 that John Ciardi once stated, “Kunitz is
certainly the most neglected good poets of the last quarter-century,” and that Robert Lowell
commented on how Kunitz had “been one of the masters for years, and yet so unrecognized
that his Selected Poems make him the poet of the hour” (24). However, the longevity of his
writing career has formed a fascinating continuum of one poet’s response to American poetry.
In a book review of Kunitz’s Collected Poems (2001), Roger Gilbert declared that much of the
fascination of [this book] comes from observing the interplay of personal and period styles over
the course of seven decades” (30).
Gilbert's addresses why Kunitz’s work makes him an extraordinary candidate for US
Poet Laureate: “Perhaps a Laureate's job is not to address all the nation's issues and
occasions, but simply to show it what a poet does” (455). A long-established New England
poet, Kunitz, like Brodsky, held powerful convictions on the transformative qualities of poetry.
Ian Tromp noted in 2001, “Kunitz has said that poetry 'is a redemptive art form, a way of being
in and positively changing the world. We have to make our living and dying important again [...]
and the living and dying of others'” (23). Kunitz dedicated much of his life to poetry and was an
influential figure in New England: he mentored numerous poets such as Glück, co-founded a
literary center, The Poets House in New York City, co-founded a poets and writers residency in
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Provincetown, MA, and was the final judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets from 19691977. Tromp’s address on the role of the poet suggests that for the laureateship the role of a
poet is as important as his or her literary work: “It is not just the work that makes Kunitz such a
significant figure in North American Poetry, but the life he has led and the lives he has touched”
(23). His appointment affirms that the US laureateship values the poet who is an ambassador
for poetry.
His early work created quite a stir: David Orr stated in 1985 that “it was hailed by Robert
Lowell on the front page of The New York Times” (Orr). Intellectual Things (1930), Passport to
War (1944) and The Testing Tree (1971) in turn incited exceptional praise from critics from one
publication to the next. Kunitz’s reputation and 1971 publication raptly caught the attention of
Lowell. Other prominent poet-critics echo Lowell's championing of Kunitz’s work: David Yezzi
stated in 1996 that the first few books “are among the poems Yvor Winters recommended to his
students at Stanford.
For many of that generation, Intellectual Things, by the precocious
twenty-five-year-old, with its fluent formalism and lush syntax, was a manual on how to write
verse” (Yezzi). Kunitz gained status as the “poet's poet”; the trajectory of his work shows that
he developed from a metrical, to a more non-metrical line. The content of his poems
approximated the confessional.
Gilbert notes how Kunitz's work does and does not evolve with the confessional
movement of poetry:
Kuntz's relationship to the emerging style that eventually came to be known as
Confessional poetry is especially interesting for its mix of resistance and assimilation.
While Kunitz was slightly older than the leading Confessional poets, he clearly admired
and learned from several of them, most notably perhaps Roethke and Lowell. The
influence did not go away, however; indeed it was arguably Kunitz himself who first
opened up the primary subject matter for Confessional poetry. (453)
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From one perspective, he is the metrical “poet's poet” for writers like Winters and the Stanford
School; from another perspective, his content has been argued to have given birth to the early
movement of confessional poetry.
However, Hénault argues against placing him in this
movement because he lacks the outwardly directed, public or occasional verse, or the inwardlydirected anguish of Sexton or Plath (29-30). Hénault claims, “Kunitz is not at all a confessional
poet, and most likely he would himself, too, as he said about Roethke, 'vomit [...] at the thought'
of being called one (30). It is common for poets to not want to be, or tire of being, associated
with a particular American movement in poetry.
His 1971 poem “The Portrait” feels
confessional because of the direct observation of family drama. It begins, “My mother never
forgave my father / for killing himself, / especially at such an awkward time / and in a public
park, / that spring / when I was waiting to be born” (142). The tension between syntax and
enjambment heighten the family drama: the lingering pain of the mother; the direct focus on the
suicide; lingering disgrace from the public and impersonal viewing of the husband’s corpse; and
the difficulty this placed on a grieving and expecting widow. The pain is evident, too, from the
son never having met his father.
The trauma here is direct and is highlighted as shorter
phrases stand alone as poignant phrases. Even the ending of the poem, “In my sixty-fourth
year / I can feel my cheek / still burning” (142). The family trauma of the son having not only
lost a father, but also having been slapped by his mother by showing her the portrait of him he
discovered stays with him far into adulthood.
Even though this poem presents a painful
memory, there is no evidence in the poem of “internal anguish”; the speaker does not turn this
pain in upon the self. Rather, the poem is an expression of a horrific family drama that has
been endured.
The poem in no way suggests that this memory has ravaged an internal-
downward spiral within the self. While Kunitz indeed uses the first-person pronoun in poems,
he also casts poems into a peculiar sense of place.
An address of Kunitz as a regional poet broadens what can be examined by the term
“place.” The backgrounds of Brodsky and Simic inform their poetics and signal to specific
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geographic regions: Russia, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States. Critics address the
relationship between geography and Kunitz’s poetics as more of a metaphorical sense of place.
Gilbert situates his poetics of place as an internal landscape:
Kunitz's characteristic poetry acknowledges the world's presence, but keeps it at a
distance.
His primary concern is with the metaphysical geography of the soul, a
landscape he charts in all its multiple layers of desire, experience, vision, and memory.
The inwardness of his attention shows itself in his preference for short, strongly
accented lines and concentrated syntax. (452)
His 1978 poem “The Layers” displays such a metaphysical geography. It opens, “I have
walked through many lives, / some of them my own” (217). The poem is an inwardly guided
journey: “I look behind, / as I am compelled to look / before I can gather strength / to proceed on
my journey” (217). The speaker looks outward toward the world, which is also a turning back to
the speaker’s experiences. This form of journey values all aspects of experience: “every stone
on the road is precious to me” (218). It is through this connection with the world that leads him:
he “roamed through wreckage, / a nimbus-clouded voice / directed me: ‘Live in the layers, / not
on the litter’” (218). The speaker had internalized the world around him (the stone, the road, the
clouds), which leads him to find a personal philosophy. The poem ends with his proclamation: “I
am not done with my changes” (218). His journey is a life of continual transformation through
the intersections of the “world’s presence” and “multiple layers” of an internal “metaphorical
geography.”
His internal landscape, quite different from the landscapes of Brodsky and Simic,
effects the formal property of his poems. While Brodsky and Simic's poetics are shaped by
shifts in regionalism due to social forces, Kunitz's geography is shaped by an internal force. Ian
Tromp argued in a review of Kunitz’s 2001 Collected Poems that he “begins now to write in the
signature three-beat lines of much of his later work, a form he relates to the rhythms of his own
breathing” (Tromp). Regionalism, whether outwardly or inwardly perceived, shapes the formal
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property of poems. Brodsky found inspiration from the Russian tradition of meter and received
forms; Kunitz found inspiration in the English language through the rhythm of his own breath.
Hénault comments on the evolution of Kunitz's style from his early to later works. She recounts
Lowell’s argument that an important mark for poets is to develop their presentation of the poetic
lines over time toward a more “free verse.” Hénault quotes Lowell on Kunitz's 1970s work: “call
no man old who can grow”; Lowell considered growth having such formal properties as
“syntactic relaxation [...] elimination of punctuation [...] the dropping of conventional line
capitalization [...] and often the lack of stanzaic structure and rhyme” (86). These sentiments
reflect the fashionable tenants of a “free verse” evolving from the metrical line. “The Portrait”
and “The Layers” are poems that display aspects of a “free verse” and are quite different from
poems in his first published book. The first stanza of “Particular Lullaby” (1930) indicates the
difference between his early and later work:
Decline at evening from your eyes,
Like summer-slipping down a tree,
Your noon-high pride: but not your wise,
Your sensitive pleased beauty. (20)
The capital letters signal that this is a formal poem. The stanza is set in ABAB rhyme scheme,
set at each line’s end. The first three lines establish a predictable four-beat iambic line, which
returns throughout the poem. This presentation of a poem is quite different from his later work.
The infrequency of Kunitz’s book publication indicates sharp turns in style. The difference
between styles are the “transitional” poems, as Orr concludes, that have not been offered to the
reader because Kunitz wrote and published only the poems that he felt most compelled to write.
Mark Strand (1990-1991)
While Kunitz published his works fairly infrequently, Mark Strand's intervals of
publication are closer to Simic's.
Strand’s work is particularly interesting to address in a
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discussion of regionalism because he is the only other poet laureate besides Brodsky and Simic
who was not born in the US. He was born in Canada and grew up in both North and South
America. While he has the experience of having lived in several countries, his poems give little
indication of an outwardly-directed sense of place. Like Simic, he has been associated with
surrealists, with the difference being that his poems do not explore any particular history. Like
Kunitz, his sense of place is more of a metaphoric geography.
And yet an approximate
placement of his literary style is a poetics of negation.
Richard Howard's 1974 review of Strand's Story of Our Lives has formed the framework
by which future critics echo or extend his claims on Strand's work. Outlining the process of
Strand's poetics, Howard claims that Strand “begins in ecstasy, the astonishment, the stupor,
and seeks to empty it out, to put it behind him, to silence it in order that the story may occur [...]
The only way for the poet who seeks an issue out of Being into Becoming is by negation”
(Howard). The speakers of Kunitz and Strand both have a self developed from an inward focus,
an inward geography; the difference between them is that while Kunitz's speakers build identity
from an inner landscape, Strand empties out the identity as it forms, leaving instead the story of
a “non-self.”
Howard states that Strand has reformed “the prosody of erasure.
These
astounding poems remind us that originally the word verse and the word prose come from the
same Latin word, provertere, which in its prose past-participle means to have moved on, but
which in its poetic infinitive means to roll around again” (Howard). Strand’s poems do not have
a secure ground referencing a beginning or ending. This is how his work difference from the
historical impulses of Simic.
Sven Birkerts stated in 1990, “For Strand, it is thus: we have been hurled into being and
there is no immanent or transcendent ground for the self” (Birkerts). His 1964 poem “Keeping
Things Whole” exhibits the same kind of negation as in his later work. The speaker states, “In a
field I am the absence of field. / This is always the case. / Wherever I am / I am what is
missing” (10). Displacement pervades the poem, which ends, “I move / to keep things whole”
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(10). While the poem closes with a connection between self and world, there is still the sense of
displacement as the line break separates the speaker (“I move”) from the world (“to keep things
whole”). This placement of enjambment reinforces the pervasiveness of distance, a continual
negation.
“My Life by Somebody Else,” from his 1970 collection Darker, shows a similar
negation: there is a continued displacement from the title to the poem’s conclusion.
It
concludes, “Must I write My Life by somebody else? / My Death by somebody else? / Are you
listening? / Somebody else has arrived. Somebody else is writing” (63).
By referencing both
life and death, the speaker is disallowing a personal relationship to emerge with either. From
this displacement, the self is further distanced by the encroachment of another. This other is
impersonal; the speaker is not even sure that this other is interested or listening. And yet the
poem leaves with the speaker giving way to this impersonal other as a kind of ars poetica (a
poem focused on the art of writing)—not of being, but of a becoming, an emptying out of the
self, a negation. Birkerts continues, “Reading Strand, we are apt to realize just how much most
other poetry―most other writing―makes an assumption of telos, is premised on a confidence
in events tending toward meaningful ends. But in this poet's world, as in the worlds of Beckett
and Kafka, there is no place to which movement leads, except extinction” (Birkets). Strand's
poems do not assume a ground, a geography, a telos.
In 2006 Dave Lucas referenced Linda Gregerson's take on Strand's poetics: “When
Mark Strand reinvented the poem, he began by leaving out the world” (Lucas). Brodsky and
Simic are poets of exile due to political force. Strand, too, has a condition of exile in his poetics,
but the difference is that his is self-imposed. Elizabeth Lund noted in 1991 that Strand “reminds
readers that the physical world has currents and urges of its own. But more than that, Strand
struggles with the questions of the self: “How does it intersect with time and space? [...] Implied
is a search for spirituality” (Lund). His poetics do not impose a view that humans dominate the
earth and are its custodians. Conversely, they do not impose a view that humans are of the
earth and are reflections of its creation. His poetics is positioned in a mysterious place outside
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both of these constructs, in a place that is more of a “nowhere.” The physical world gives
impetus to emerging forces completely outside the realm of the human. Time and space is
conceptualized for Strand outside the perception of any particular geography. Without borders,
ground, or telos, the self has a hovering plane of exploration.
If there is an “implied search for spirituality,” as Dave Lucas attests, it is an impersonal
one. Birkerts appropriately defines Strand's poetics:
[o]ver the past three decades Strand has perfected a chill-inducing poetry of
nothingness.
The poems are not about life―the inscrutable forward moving, time-
contending process―but about the emptying out of life [...] where the self thinks about
itself thinking and finds that its thoughts, like the wind, have nothing to adhere to.
(Birkerts).
In 2007 Alexander Nemser defined Strand’s poetics in similar terms. For Strand, it is “not the
thunderstorm itself, but how it reminds him of dying” (Nemser). If there is geography for this
poet, it moves speakers not toward a ground, but toward a further, hovering rumination.
William Logan commented on the place of Strand in American poetry in 2006: “Had
Sylvia Plath never written a line, Strand would have been the most gifted American poet born in
the Thirties” (61). Logan is a poet-critic hesitant to give the slightest praise as he tends more
toward discussing faults and mocking those faults; praise from him in any fashion is quite rare.
Strand has early secured and maintained a place within contemporary poetry. Like Simic, he
also has a strong signature; Birkerts attests, Strand “is unique among poets in that he has not
grown or changed very much over the course of his career. That is not a slight” (Birkets). He
stands out as a Poet Laureate in another way: he has celebrity status. Lucas questioned, “After
all, how many poets are reviewed in the pages of Elle?” Few poets reach the public through
such popular forms of media.
Robert Hass (1995-1997)
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While Robert Hass may not be reviewed in the pages of Elle, his poetry and
environmental activism has placed him in the public spotlight―for those who follow trends in the
relationships between poetry and environmentalism. There are several ways his work can be
discussed as more traditionally a regional poetics. Much of his poetic work pertains to the
Californian landscape; and his work has been associated with the influence of the Beats in
terms of some West Coast poets having been influenced by Asian aesthetics. Billington praised
the appointment of Hass for having a representative from the West Coast. What is different
from Hass's treatment of place is his interplay between region, art, and activism. In 2008 Tony
Roberts traced the movement in Hass's early career: “His poetry had a sense of responsibility
[...] from the shady history of the Pacific settlement, to the continuous rape of the land, and
outwards to the cultural deprivation of the Polish community in New York State (where Hass
was taught) to student activism and the Vietnam War”; and as his career progressed, he
continually developed “further meditation on language” (59). Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas”
(1979) exemplifies musing on language. It opens, “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it
resembles all the old thinking.
/ The idea, for example, that each particular erases / the
luminous clarity of the general idea” (Lehman, 967). The speaker muses on a woodpecker and
emphasizes the inability of language to capture the world. There is a conflicted response to this
loss. The speaker accepts this proposition: “because there is in this world no one thing / to
which the bramble of blackberry corresponds / a word is elegy to what it signifies” (967). The
conclusion of the poem protests this acceptance through attempts to call forth the world: “Such
tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, / saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry” (967).
The speaker both accepts and protests the capacity of language. Taking the poem alone, if the
speaker cannot call forth the world, a literary implication is closer to Auden’s tenet “poetry
makes nothing happen.” However, the effect of the elegy can give rise to a stronger sense to
respond. This is an occasion where the author as activist adds a different layering to a literary
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text.
If the tenet of a poem is that nothing can be done, the frustration of this inability of
language can give rise to engage with the world socially.
While Roberts discusses the change in his literary work from a felt responsibility of
social responsibility and toward meditations on language, he and other critics fail to address
Hass’s dual role as poet and activist. They take into account only his poetry. Separating the
poet’s literary works from the role of the poet leads to an incomplete and misguided
understanding of Hass’s work because for him the two are intertwined. As such, critics have
missed the mark on what they see as a passive view of the landscape because they do not take
into account the poet as author and the poet as environmental activist. Hass has a direct
connection between poetry and the role of poetry in society, which draws attention to the author.
In other words, because there is interplay between the literary text and a social function of
poetry, the “death of the author” is not helpful in interpreting this poet’s works. Instead, the
literary and the social should be addressed together in order to create a different layering of
interpretation. Hass composes literary-regional landscapes; and he works to preserve those
landscapes.
Some critics have not been pleased with a trend in Hass’s literary work from what was
an engaged relationship and social concern in his earlier poems to what later is perceived to be
an abject passivity of his speakers. Peter Davidson asserted in 1997 that “his poems began to
blur into a haze of contemplative passivity [reflective of contemporary American poetry] in which
states of mind and feeling were rendered reflexively with passive, copulative, or auxiliary verbs
and the present tense” (Davidson). Some find the move toward meditation on language a move
away from lyricism. In 2003 Logan considered the trend of Hass’s ruminations as a move away
from the lyric: “it's a pity Hass has become a lyric poet with a conscience, because he can't
make the conscience shut up” (Logan).
What these critics have missed is that for Hass,
aesthetics and political activism substantiate one another. While his early work may have
suggested speakers engaged with social issues with its author an activist, it is telling that the
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speakers have become less engaged. The “passivity” that these critics note can instead be
Hass’s commentary on a general passivity of American citizens to engage in environmental
preservation. Even while his poems may have speakers that seem less, as Roberts terms it,
“responsible,” Hass has remained responsible as an activist. His activism is an example to
counter the passivity displayed in his poems. He is a poet whose work addresses particular
regional concerns; and he is a poet that directly engages with his region in order to preserve its
ecosystem. In 2001 Barbara Berman asserted the differences Hass has made as an activist:
“there is also Hass the active citizen, founder of River of Words, a nonprofit that helps young
people channel creative energy as they develop environmental awareness, and founder of the
annual Watershed readings, which features appearances of River of Words participants with
well-known poets and performers” (Berman).
Hass and Strand are both poets who have a ruminative poetics. A significant difference
is that while Strand's is one of groundlessness, Hass's incorporation of activism explicitly unites
poetry with a geographic and social ground as an inextricable bond. While Strand's poetics is
outside the conception of humans as custodians of the earth, as well as humans as reflections
of earth's creation, Hass's poetics and environmental activism fuses both perceptions. His work
springs from and returns to the earth. The Watershed Project, which is discussed in detail in
Chapter Five, has an outreach component whereby public school age students from all United
States regions fuse the study of science with language arts. Students investigate their own
watersheds through scientific inquiry as well as through writing poems and representing their
ecosystem through visual arts. The project lends directly to the preservation of watersheds and
ecosystems because this interdisciplinary approach sparks awareness, empathy and social
engagement with particular regions. Readers influenced by Hass can be moved to join in
activism.
For some, the inability for language alone to transform the world can lead to
transformation through actions. In other words, poetry, like rhetoric, can give rise to action.
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Critics respond differently to his poems that directly address the state of environmental
destruction. For instance, Logan assessed in 2007 that “[‘State of the Planet’] starts with one of
his gorgeous pastoral set pieces [that turns toward a] droning on about chlorofluorocarbons; by
the time he's done preaching about the destruction of the ozone layer, you're counting the tiles
on the floor” (68). The second section of a ten-section poem begins, “Poetry should be able to
comprehend the earth”; and declares, “Topsoil: going fast. Rivers dammed and fouled. / Cod:
about fished out. Haddock: about fished out” (50). Logan's assessment signals that Hass’s
literary display of environmental concern does not move him in any way. He does not find that
Hass has the capability to enchant through poems with such a concern about the earth.
Instead, he finds such a direct address too didactic; section eight of the poem asserts,
“Chlorofluorocarbons react with ozone, the gas / That makes air tingle on a sparking day” (53).
This to Logan is not poetic. It is possible that Logan holds a historical demarcation between
poetry and rhetoric. From this vantage point, poetry should give pleasure. Rhetoric is what
gives rise to action. This precludes interpreting Hass’s work as both a literary and socially
engaged mixture. This poem indicates Hass’s passion for the state of the environment; his
Watershed Project acts to preserve the environment, which combines the literary with a social
function of poetry. In other words, for Hass, the literary and the social function of poetry co-exist
as a layered commentary, one influences the other. Logan’s assessment is from a perception
that deftly divorces the lyric in particular from social action.
For Logan, a poem exists on the
page; he does not see the poem as means of inspiration leading to social engagement.
Chlorofluorocarbons to Logan are not poetic. He shows an utter lack of the connection
between poetry and possible social and environmental engagement. And yet there are some
critics who appreciate connections between poetry and the function of poetry. Nick Powell
asserts, “'State of the Planet' –an eight page masterstroke that is both elegy and plea, because,
as he puts it, 'the earth needs a dream of restoration'” (Powell).
Powell perceives the
regionalism of Hass: “language and landscape have always dovetailed with a rare
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effortlessness in Hass's best work”; “State of the Planet” is “a kind of lyricism which enables
didactics to rest along [with] aesthetics” (Powell).
Unlike Logan, Powell does not mind that
Hass's consciousness of ecological preservation tips into poetics.
Peter Davidson observes a thread in American poetry: “Since Frost's death, in 1963,
the strongest currents in American poetry may well have pushed westward, away from our
European heritage and toward a more nativist outlook. No practicing poet has more talent than
Robert Hass, who is, to our good fortune, the present and deserving United States Poet
Laureate” (Davidson). Davidson's comment alludes to the history of American literature’s desire
to stand distinctly from other traditions, such as British literature. The appointment of Hass, who
lives and teaches in Berkeley, CA, clearly delineates the scope and transformation of American
literature. Hass's poetics have been noted as particularly East Asian. In 2008 Tess Taylor
noted the creative and destructive forces in his work: for “Hass, the consummate Berkeley
Buddhist [...] the two are often one” (Taylor). He is known as an antiwar activist; he is known as
an environmental activist; and he is known as a monumental poet of the West Coast.
Ted Kooser (2004-2006)
Ted Kooser is a poet from the Midwest Great Plains; responses to his work directly
reflect geography in terms of the content of his poems and the social aspect of the literary
market. He is a poet living in and writing about his Nebraska, a state to which he has long
naturalized. He differs from Kunitz and Hass because he does not live and work within an
urban center. In 1992 Dana Gioia addressed the problem of regionalism in relation to Kooser:
his “poetic career reveals some of the problems faced by a regional writer who does not either
immigrate to a major literary center or join the university network” (102). Brodsky and Simic are
kinds of “outsiders” from their native regions. Kooser’s position of outsider is closer to that
discussed in Chapter One on Collins and Ryan. But while they claim to be the “outsider” due to
not playing “the poetry game,” Kooser does not live in the literary centers to which these two
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poets have access. Participating in a local, rather than national literary center, the nexus for
Kooser’s audience tended to cluster around Lincoln, Nebraska. Gioia states that after his first
book, he “disappeared into the gulag of small regional presses [cultivating] a small local
audience” (103). Many states provide funding to support local artists in terms of grants, artist
colonies, and presses for its residents. Kooser’s work before Sure Signs: New and Selected
Poems found homes in regional presses. The publication of this book “brought Kooser national
attention for the first time. It also established him as one of the few openly regional young poets
whose work had broad appeal beyond the Midwest” (110). Gioia’s claim that Kooser is “openly
regional” suggests that Kooser is comfortable living and working without access to larger literary
centers. R.S. Gwynn’s 2005 response to the choice in the appointment of Kooser provided a
telling assumption critics hold about regions outside of such centers: “Kooser is, after all, a
regional poet (from Nebraska, of all places) who has been elevated to the heights, or dunked to
the depths” (Gwynn). Why would critics consider Kansas, or any other state, to be less likely to
produce a poet than New York or California? The implication is that poets ought to migrate to
larger urban areas and cannot thrive outside of them.
Many critics note Kooser’s attention to the everyday life. “Dishwasher,” for instance,
captures moments of the ordinary:
Slap of the screen door, flat knock
of my grandmother's boxy black shoes
on the wooden stoop, the hush and sweep
of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned stride
out to the edge and then, toed in
with a furious twist and heave,
a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands
and hangs there shining for fifty years
over the mystified chickens,
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over the swaying nettles, the ragweed,
the clay slope down to the creek,
over the redwing blackbirds in the tops
of the willows, a glorious rainbow
with an empty dishpan swinging at one end. (“Dishwater,” Academy)
Images of farm life infuse the poem through appeals to everyday sound: doors, sweeping,
lugging.
The setting is rural: chickens, nettles, ragweed, creek, birds, and trees.
The
relationship between humans and nature situates itself with the speaker’s pleasant disposition
toward labor: the rainbow reflecting in the dishpan.
In 2005 Craig Challender noted the benefits of Kooser’s regionalism by explaining a
kind of innate, inspired muse: Sure Signs is “an understanding Plains people, especially, take
from the rhythms of earth and weather” (Challender). However, it is this very sentiment of an
essential regionalism that aggravates critics like Brian Phillips, a Midwest native, who claimed in
2005,
If there is something maddening about Ted Kooser’s success [...] it has to do with the
way he has been received by critics as with the work itself. [Edward Hirsch champions
that] ‘Something about the Great Plains seems to foster a plain, homemade style, a
sturdy forth-rightness with hidden depths, a hard-won clarity chastened by experience.
It is unadorned, pragmatic, quintessentially American poetry of empty places, of
farmland and low-slung cities. The open spaces stimulate and challenge people. One’s
mettle is tested. (396)
Phillips balks at comments like Hirsch’s on inherent claims about poets from the Great Plains
and notes that it’s Kooser’s temperament alone that crafts his work, regardless of geographic
region. He ultimately evaluates Sure Signs as “placid stasis” among some “lovely images”
(396).
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R. S. Gwynn finds other issues with regionalism, which he sees Kooser transcending.
He is bored with poems about the rural everyday setting: “There are, naturally, some drawbacks
[with too many] suburban meditations on cleaning out gutters or lighting the pilots of furnaces
[because they come] from poets whose days are spent in departmental offices or stuffy seminar
rooms [which is] the academic’s attempt to show that he can get his fingernails dirty, too”
(Gwynn). Kooser’s move from regional to national acclaim has left critics in a quandary of
where to locate him within contemporary American poetry.
In 1992 Jeffrey Galbraith stated, “The beauty of this landscape carries just the right
pitch to connect to the wider public that Kooser’s tenure as laureate will certainly draw” (184).
Kooser’s “Porch Swing in September” represents another speaker’s pleasant disposition toward
the everyday found in nature. A spider has built a web from the porch swing to the wall as
though to indicate that summer days of swinging on the porch has ended. Instead it’s “time now
for the soft vibrations of moths” and time for “the wasp [to tap] each board for an entrance”
(“Porch,” Academy).
The poem meditates on the subtle ways nature announces seasonal
shifts. Galbraith mused on his success as a laureate: his “appointment as Poet Laureate of the
United States bodes well for efforts to improve relations between American poetry and the
general public” (183). R. S. Gwynn questions the desire for poetry to have a closer connection
with the general public: “is the desire to reach a common reader; one that Kooser has iterated in
interviews, a noble aim or just a pipe dream?” (Gwynn). Whether noble or pipe dream, Kooser’s
poems are quite accessible because they touch upon aspects everyday life: dishwater, porch
swings and spiders.
The poets in this Chapter indicate the different ways in which some of the US Poets’
Laureate work has been influenced by geography. Another grouping of laureates showcases
how a poet develops style. Much in the way that visual artists’ works can be identified at once,
poets, too, establish identifiable styles. Strong identifiable styles become poetic signatures.
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poets, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Hass, and Ted Kooser have been hailed during their
announcements to the American public as representing specific geographic regions. Kunitz had
long been established as an influential New England poet.
Billington introduced Hass's
relationship with the West Coast and Kooser's from the Great Plains as important elements of
their appointments. A perspective of laureates from the vantage point of geography compellingly
portrays how international and national backgrounds influence poetry and poetics.
Joseph Brodsky (1991-1992)
Curiously, Brodsky is the only poet laureate to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature,
and is one of the laureates that has received some of the harshest critiques for poetry. There
are several reasons that critics have responded so strongly against his work. His RussianAmerican background formed a rupture of a poet navigating two regions, cultures, and
languages. As noted in Chapter One, his poems were critiqued by Soviet police as “social
parasitism” and he was sentenced to a labor camp. He has since translated most of his own
poems and continued to write in Russian and English after he immigrated to the US. Critics
have been disinclined to include him centrally either into Russian or American literature.
Smith addresses the problems Brodsky faced with Russian audiences.
G.S.
John Taylor, F.D.
Reeve, William Logan, and Derek Walcott locate the difficulties in Brodsky’s translations of his
own poems as a major hindrance to American audiences. In 2001 John Taylor unequivocally
placed him outside of American literature: “In any event, we must always remember that
Brodsky remained a Russian poet (despite his increasing forays into English) and that only a
third of his Russian poems were translated during his lifetime—an arrestingly small amount of
work that is available to us” (596). One issue with Brodsky is that he simply does not have
enough of his work available to the English-reading American public. From this standpoint, the
public does not have access to his work because of the rift caused by a poet navigating two
languages. Taylor gives additional causes for Brodsky's problems of English-language poems.
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The region in which a poet lives affects language, which in turn affects style and form. The
expatriate poet runs the risk of ineffectual poetics that results from working in a non-native
region: “Long years in a foreign country can diminish the spontaneity with which the expatriate
conjures up his mother tongue, as well as strip a native vocabulary of its [deposited] slang; yet
no writer or poet experiences this evolution in the same ways” (599). In addition to being
critiqued as a poor translator, Brodsky is charged for having lost the intensity and numinous
qualities of his native language since he has been uprooted to another region. The implication
is that for some poets, regionalism and native language significantly inform a private poetics.
He compares Brodsky's plight with other emigrant poets: “In contrast to other exiled writers who
lock themselves up inside their mother tongue so as to protect their creativity, Brodsky delved
headlong into the enticements of his second language, while continuing to write in Russian”
(600). The effects of Brodsky's navigating two regions resulted in poor translations as well as a
watered-down poetics. William Logan is harsher in his 2001 critique: “When Brodsky translated
himself it sounded as if he'd been translated by committee—a committee of refrigerators”
(Logan). Logan does not give an example of lines that he finds having supposedly grumbling
noises. But he does quote a poem that he calls “doggerel” with “ludicrous allusion to Frost”:
And staring up where no cloud drifts
because your sock’s devoid of gifts
you’ll understand this thrift; it fits
your age; it’s not a slight.
It is too late for some breakthrough,
for miracles, for Santa’s crew.
And suddenly you’ll realize that you
yourself are a gift outright. (Logan)
He does not give the title of this poem, but it is taken from Brodsky’s 2001 Nativity Poems.
Logan does not elaborate or define what he finds as “doggerel.” However, the closely placed
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rhymes of “drifts,” “gifts,” “thrift,” “fits,” and “it’s” is closer to a song lyric than a lyric. There are
problems of idiom such as “sock’s devoid of gifts” because this phrase does not conjure up the
more colloquial usage of “Christmas stockings.” “Santa’s crew” is another problem of idiom; the
more common phrase is “Santa’s helpers.” The allusion to Frost comes across as an oddity
because “The Gift Outright” concerns such a different context.
It is a poem celebrating
American heritage; it is also a misguided poem that promotes colonial land conquest. This
allusion does not make sense in the context of Christmas.
In 2001, F. D. Reeve, like Taylor, aligned Brodsky's genius instead with the Russian
language: “he is remembered for his place in Russian literary history [...] in 1987 he received
the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1991-1992 he served as the American Poet Laureate. Despite
these honors and achievements, he never became an English-language poet” (31). Like Taylor,
Reeve notes the problems of Brodsky’s skill in translating his own work. Reeve also notes how
the region to which Brodsky immigrated differed in terms of Russian style and form: “His dictum
that 'verse meters in themselves are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be
substituted' succinctly illustrates how out of touch he was with the postmodern world around him
and why his English-language poetry has no influence” (32). Here Brodsky ran into similar
problems of the poets addressed in Chapter One. During the 1970s, it was far less fashionable
to write in metrical, rather than non-metrical, forms. While American poets were shirking longheld traditional forms (and other conventions), Brodsky maintained close affinities for metrical
form. Meter to Brodsky was a mainstay of poetry. He did not want to shirk the poetic traditions
of the Russia he loved; he simply did not follow Soviet communism. Maintaining metrical form
in the 1970s was a way in which to preserve tradition; it was also a decade in which American
poetry was predominantly non-metrical.
Derek Walcott in 1998 exposed another problem, not only on Brodsky's facility as a
translator, but also on the problem of translating Russian to English metrical poetry:
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The translated Russian risks, in its usually hexametrical rhyming design, a meter which
English associates with the comic, the parodic, or the ironic.
There is no modern
English or American poet who will take such risks—being utterly serious with the
feminine endings, of attempting to reach the sublime and noble without the pseudohumility of the dying fall, the retractable conceit. Double rhymes and long lines threaten
contemporary poets in English with the bespectacled shade of Ogden Nash, not to
mention the garrulous precision of Byron.” (Walcott)
It is a given that the music from one language will be lost in the process of translation.
Maintaining the poetics of one language imports cultural assumptions about form and meaning.
For example, while the hexametrical line may be powerful in one language, the usage of this
line in English can come across as comic, lessening the impact of powerful statements.
Brodsky's belief in the “spiritual magnitude” of meter did not convey the noble aim for which he
reached in English. Cultural differences in English such as between the iambic pentameter and
the hexametrical line carry different nuances of meaning themselves; the magnitude of meter,
too, in the 1960s and 1970s was itself in question for poetic style. The layers of style in meter
such as with feminine endings and double rhymes compound cultural differences of a poet
navigating two geographic regions.
Reeve noted that the influences with which Brodsky held sway were also out of line with
literary fashion: “Brodsky's Anglo-American favorites were Auden and Frost, hardly poets 'on
the cutting edge' in the Sixties when Brodsky was beginning his career” (34). If critics have
placed his genius in the Russian language, how does he fare with Russian audiences? His
status of a poet who left for America was looked down upon in relation to the poets who
remained in Russia. G. S. Smith noted in 2005, “By the end, Brodsky had attained a level of
international celebrity that has come to no other Russian poet even posthumously, let alone
during his own lifetime. The most regrettable effect of this has been a good deal of sneering
resentment, especially among Russians who stayed at home” (G.S. Smith). So even while
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critics place his genius in the Russian language, the rift created by navigating two soils finds
him cast out from the cultures of two national literatures, American and Russian.
If critics have so disparaged Brodsky’s facility with the English language in his poetry,
what then has been his allure in the US? G.S. Smith suggests that it is Brodsky's personality
and the views he espoused about the power of poetry. Smith states, “[t]he canonization of
Brodsky preceded the detailed and specific discussions of his poetry, especially among
Russians who stayed at home.
This is perfectly normal; people everywhere prefer to
concentrate on the personality than the poem” (G. S. Smith). It is possible that what Brodsky
had to say to the American public about poetry overshot his ability to write poems in the English
language. What message could have been so powerful to establish such high reverence for
this poet? We know that he believed that meter had a “spiritual magnitude,” which is in part why
he maintained Russian poetics. Part of what is quite moving about Brodsky is his belief in the
transformative power of poetry: his “belief in the supremacy of poetry among the arts and the
Poet among the artists, is the element in Brodsky's attitudes that most impressed the Western
literary world after he emigrated” (G. S. Smith).
The Nobel address that he gave before he became a poet laureate reveals the degree
of his conviction that literature is socially transformative and a means by which a society
safeguards against political oppression. He contended in 1995,
Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable
of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material
suppression of literature—the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of
books—we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: the neglect of books, the
nonreading of them. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is
a nation, it pays with its history (53).
The seriousness that may not come across in his poems from the intricacies of two poetics is
evident in his prose.
As US Poet Laureate, he had a platform for which to promote the
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importance of reading literature. Reading literature for Brodsky saves both the individual and
the society in which the individual lives. When literature is neglected, political oppression can
sweep down upon a nation. Preserving the literary imagination of history protects liberty by
safeguarding it from an abuse in the form of a historical amnesia.
Translated in 1971 by George L. Kline, “Natre Morte” is a poem by Brodsky that
expresses the power and beauty of his work when it is well presented to an American audience.
The poem is from A Part of Speech, published in 1980. The poem is a meditation on modern
life and religion. Section six captures the melancholy resulting from isolation so intense that it
feels like a hovering presence of death. The section begins,
Lately I often sleep
during the daytime. My
death, it would seem, is now
trying and testing me,
placing a mirror close
to my still-breathing lips,
seeing if I can stand
non-being in daylight.
I do not move. These two
thighs are like blocks of ice.
Branched veins show blue against
skin that is marble white. (45)
There is no evidence of distracting sounds as the poem Logan addressed. There is no problem
with idiom. The lineation of the poem—the force of syntax against enjambment—highlights the
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crisis of isolation. “[D]eath, it would seem, is now” speaks of the intensity of the speaker’s
isolation from not only society, but from the self.
“Seeing if I can stand” represents the
speaker’s doubt of man’s compatibility with modern life. The image of the last two lines implies
that this doubt has become so internalized that death has visibly manifested itself in the
speaker. This existential crisis is resolved in the last section of the poem as Mary speaks to
Jesus: “Can I pass through my gate / not having understood: / Are you dead?—or alive? / Are
you my son—or God […] Christ now speaks to her in turn: / Whether dead or alive, / woman, it’s
all the same— / son or God, I am thine” (46). The Jesus figure does nothing to bring comfort to
this impasse of Mary, which alludes back to the impasse of the speaker. This reply gestures
back to the title of the poem, which means “dead nature.” What has been affirmed is the
continuation of the impasse itself in his ultimate reply, “I am thine.” “Natre Morte” represents the
genius of Brodsky’s work to which Reeve and Smith allude.
Charles Simic (2007-2008)
Charles Simic is another poet laureate who has been exiled from his native land. He
remembers early from his youth in Yugoslavia having a bomb blast him out of bed. The form of
political oppression that he witnessed before he became an expatriate informs the speakers and
situations that he creates. As noted by Taylor, no two poets evolve the same way in how
regionalism can affect language and poetics. Brodsky maintained Russian poetics while writing
in English; Simic's early English-language poems were closer in line to the poetic fashions of
American poetry written in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1992 Steven Cramer located Simic’s work
both within and outside of 1970s surrealism, noting the difference among his work and his
peers:
Though often associated with the 'new surrealists' of the 1970s—American poets
influenced by
'deep imagist' elders like Bly, Wright, Merwin, Kinnell et al.—Simic
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deserves to be distinguished from this group on at least two counts. First as a native of
Yugoslavia, his attachment to riddles, proverbs, magic formulas, and nursery rhymes
has a bona fide regional pedigree [...] Simic has rarely settled for the Jungian
ahistoricity typical of American period surrealism.
Instead, Simic's images—pre-
industrial and archetypal at first, distinctly urban and modern later on—bear the scars of
historical witness. (Cramer)
Many titles of Simic’s Selected Poems: 1963-1983 reflect a direct address on “riddles, proverbs,
magic formulas, and nursery rhymes”: “Two Riddles” and “Solving the Riddle” in 1974, “Nursery
Rhyme” in 1977, and “Austerities” in 1982. “Butcher Shop” (1971) and “The Soup” (1974) are
both poems expressing what Cramer finds as “scars of historical witness.” The former begins
with the speaker stopping in front of a butcher shop and the sight of blood triggers visions of
bloodshed mingling between the secular and sacred:
An apron hangs on the hook:
The blood on it smeared into a map
Of the great continents of blood,
The great rivers and oceans of blood.
There are knives that glitter like altars. (15)
As visions of violence and blood pour through the poem, horrors are discovered from even from
the viewpoint of an altar, suggesting that the very place usually intended for sanctuary and
refuge, is tainted with war. Here is a violence that is inescapable: it spills across both land and
water. There is no respite from the horror. “The Soup” is a poem expressing the historical
witness that Cramer finds in his work. It starts with an imperative, “Take the lump in your
throat,” which immediately situates a crisis (80).
The unreal quality of the poem promptly
follows: a “clock that goes to 13. / The bare room, the iron cot. / The cockroach of history
running up the wall” (80). Within this eerie setting, the speaker specifies horrors of history by
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mockingly asking, “On what shall we cook [the soup]? […] On the moustache of Joseph Stalin. /
The fires of Treblinka. / The fires of Hiroshima. / The head of the condemned / The head
swarming with memories” (81).
Like most poets who have been labeled within an American literary movement, Simic
frequently dismisses the connection between his work and surrealism.
And yet there are
qualities of his work that come across to American readers as dreamlike and horrific. His
experiences in Yugoslavia have shaped the content of his poems. In 2003 Benjamen Paloff
examined why “like so many poets of his caliber, Simic has accumulated a set of journalistic
cliches [...] Words like 'inimitable,' 'surreal,' and 'nightmarish' have followed him around in
countless reviews and articles” (Paloff). While Cramer notes what Simic has imported into his
poems that sets him apart from surrealist writers, Paloff adds another layer as to why Simic has
been lumped together with other writers in this movement: “[i]f our world seems unfamiliar in his
writing, it may be because most American readers cannot easily relate to the experiences that
have shaped Simic's vision” (Paloff). Part of the assessment of Simic as a surrealist writer
stems from how unfamiliar his poems could come across to American readers because these
readers do not have the experience of growing up in a war-torn state and with social destruction
taking place on native soil such as expressed in “The Butcher Shop.”
Paloff also notes that Simic developed a natural American style: “Born in Belgrade in
1938, Simic occupies an unusual place in American letters in that, on the one hand, he writes in
a natural American idiom and, on the other, knows what historical cataclysm looks like on the
ground, not as a combatant or sympathizer might see it, but as a sustained, everyday reality in
his own neighborhood” (Paloff).
Helen Vendler noted in 1995 that Simic, “in the cunning
strategies of his forms,[...] has brought the allegorical subversiveness of eastern European
poetry into our native practice (Vendler). Brodsky and Simic share the experience of becoming
expatriates and having such experiences comprise their poetics as they learned to navigate the
differences of two regions. They also share a similar backlash to their expatriation. In 2005
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Belinda McKeon quoted Simic's view on the reception of his work in Belgrade: “They regard me
as a foreigner [...] they don't think my poetry has anything to do with them. So, you know,
there's nothing there for me.
I mean, they translate my work, and they're happy to have
someone in America...but during the nationalist days, I read it again and again, 'he's a complete
foreigner,' said in a very pejorative way. An alien. That was their view” (McKeon). Yet while
they share the state of being outcast from their native soil, Simic, unlike Brodsky, has not been
received by American critics as an outcast of two nations. The literary success of his English
language is what differentiates him from the reception of Brodsky. On a literary landscape, they
have both been exiled by native lands, but from critics’ reception to their works, only Brodsky
had been exiled twice because of his importation of poetics into a nation that did not value his
style as Simic's style was valued.
This is not to say that Simic is without criticism for his poetics. A reaction against his
work tends to be that while his idiom matched the accepted fashion of the time, he developed a
literary signature that for some critics became too recognizable. One aspect of the familiarity of
his work is that it moved too far from the metrical line. Hayden Carruth lamented that the
predominant trend in the 1960s and 1970s was symptomatic of an American poetic line having
become too lose. In other words, it had veered too far from the metrical line. His appraisal of
Simic as a poet’s poet meant that Simic was one of the poets in the 1970s influencing much of
the poetry written at that time.
His work became one of the most modeled.
Carruth’s
assessment of the poetic line indicated that the popularity of Simic’s line had become so
replicated that many poet’s works’ were becoming derivatives of this signature, saturating the
style of contemporary-American poetry. Several other critics have also focused on defining
Simic’s poetic line, perhaps because his line had become so standard. Vendler outlined its
formula. In assessing Simic’s line, Brian Henry (in 1999), Edward Byrne (in 2007), and Paul
Breslin (in 1997) represent a kind of critic who valued and expected poets to change their poetic
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line over the course of time. They claim that Simic never altered his signature from his earlier
work and that this is what holds back his achievement in poetry.
Carruth addressed the degree to which the American poetic line had loosened. He
claimed that the state of poetry had reached the same risk of mundanity that had been
countered by the first Imagists. The Imagists broke with the metrical line in order to reinvigorate
poetry. Carruth attests that the break from metrical verse had gone too far to the other side and
that non-metrical verse had become as blunt as in the era the Imagists worked.
He saw the overproduction of non-metrical verse as resulting from the abundance of
poets learning poetic craft in creative writing courses: “It is [the loose line] being turned out
virtually by rote at tens of thousands of writing tables all over North America, and given to us,
thrown at us, in poems which are interchangeable, in books whose authors, relentless egotripping solipsists though they are, remain as indistinguishable as the obit-writers of the Times”
(Carruth). In order to explain this phenomenon, he analyzed one poem of Simic's by removing
the line breaks and reorganizing it into paragraph form. He declared that nothing was lost from
this experiment and that the piece of writing actually improved. Carruth mused further: “When
poems gain in fluency and intelligibility, and hence in meaning, from being printed as prose, it is
because the line has ceased to function, as I have already said, and when the line has ceased
to function it is because the language has become too dull to sustain measure” (Carruth).
Pound had disavowed Imagism soon after it first emerged because the break from metered
verse was long-enough practiced to have revitalized poetry. Eliot also anticipated a more rapid
return to metered verse. Carruth’s discussion is a recapitulation of these two modernist’s
concern for the development of poetry.
Vendler focuses less on the metrical quality of Simic’s work and more on the rhetorical
formula of his poems. She defined his signature that had been pervasive up through his Hotel
Insomnia (1992): It “exhibits all the hallmarks of the Simic style: an apparently speakerless
scene; an indefinite article establishing the vagueness of place and time [...] then a menacing
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definite article focusing our gaze [...] then a late entrance of the personal pronoun engaging the
speaker's life with ours” (Soul Says, 102).
She gives “War” from Hotel Insomnia as a
prototypical Simic poetic formula: “The Trembling finger of a woman / Goes down the list of
casualties / on the evening of the first snow. // The house is cold and the list is long. // All our
names are included” (Soul Says, 102).
Critics point out the effects of what happens when a poet develops too strong of a
signature: the poet is henceforth held to evaluation by that signature. Brian Henry contended,
“critics, who know what to expect of Simic [...] either praise or blame him for it [...]. Readers
looking for formal ingenuity, lushness, or lyrical experimentation probably will find Simic's style
disappointing” (Henry).
He asks, “At what point [...] does the poet start to coast, become
entrenched, depleted?” (Henry). Edward Byrne noted that Simic's poems “are easily known by
sight” (Byrne). Paul Breslin's account of Simic's work was on par with these critics: “I have a
sense of a style running on automatic pilot, the urgencies that once called it into existence
largely forgotten. Strange events do not erupt, but saunter lazily into view, voiced in such inert
syntax and blasé affect as to seem oddly comfortable” (Breslin). While critics contend that his
signature may be too identifiable, that does not mean that those newly exposed to his poems
will not appreciate his work. As noted in Chapter One, US laureateship was created to bring
poetry to a greater audience.
For readers who become initiated into the reading of poetry
because of the visibility brought to the post, they may find Brodsky and Simic on their own terms
and build their own affiliations to poetry without following cautionary tales in criticism.
Stanley Kunitz (2000-2001)
Kunitz is a native-born poet, a poet who has not had to navigate two nations’ poetics.
Kunitz is known as a regional poet of New England and is championed as particularly American.
A main difficulty critics find with his work is that he published relatively few books over the
course of his life, making it harder to assess his poetic development. In this regard, Kunitz
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greatly differs from poets who overproduce poems. Some poets are criticized for having overwritten, resulting in having written what can be the same poem recast time and again.
Some
critics see such production as devaluing a poet’s oeuvre; however, there is one main benefit.
The overproduction of poems allows such poets to keep presence within the American literary
landscape. This is where critics fault Kunitz’s work; between the publications of his books, his
name and work did not circulate as much in book reviews. Other poet’s publications circulated
without him, which gave rise to a silence of criticism on his work. That he published fewer
books brings to the forefront a particular aspect of contemporary American poetry: how a poet’s
oeuvre functions within the literary market.
David Orr stated in 2002, “Kunitz writes sparingly―on the average his books have
appeared in fourteen-year intervals. In his words, he writes 'only those poems that must be
written, that force themselves into being.' As a result, the transitional poems don't get written,
and each poem can represent, or appear to represent departure” (Orr). By “transitional poems”
Orr suggests that there is no way to determine a closer development of how Kunitz’s poetic
thinking progressed from one book to another. Kunitz is aware of how the literary market
shapes a poet’s reputation; Marie Hénault notes that Kunitz said that he “realize[d] that
reputations are made by volume as much as by anything else. Most of the big reputations in
Modern American poetry have been made on the basis of a large body of work” (25). This
aspect of the literary market encourages poets to overproduce books because it keeps their
names circulating in print. More poetry book publications lead to a steadier output of book
reviews. As the reviews accumulate, critics have more evidence of how a poet is situated within
American literary history. This practice creates more discourse around poets’ works. As a
result, this aspect of Kunitz’s participation in the literary market led to a greater silence on his
oeuvre. Several critics find this silence unfortunate because they esteem him as one of the
most influential American poets. Hénault noted in 1980 that John Ciardi once stated, “Kunitz is
certainly the most neglected good poets of the last quarter-century,” and that Robert Lowell
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commented on how Kunitz had “been one of the masters for years, and yet so unrecognized
that his Selected Poems make him the poet of the hour” (24). However, the longevity of his
writing career has formed a fascinating continuum of one poet’s response to American poetry.
In a book review of Kunitz’s Collected Poems (2001), Roger Gilbert declared that much of the
fascination of [this book] comes from observing the interplay of personal and period styles over
the course of seven decades” (30).
Gilbert's addresses why Kunitz’s work makes him an extraordinary candidate for US
Poet Laureate: “Perhaps a Laureate's job is not to address all the nation's issues and
occasions, but simply to show it what a poet does” (455). A long-established New England
poet, Kunitz, like Brodsky, held powerful convictions on the transformative qualities of poetry.
Ian Tromp noted in 2001, “Kunitz has said that poetry 'is a redemptive art form, a way of being
in and positively changing the world. We have to make our living and dying important again [...]
and the living and dying of others'” (23). Kunitz dedicated much of his life to poetry and was an
influential figure in New England: he mentored numerous poets such as Glück, co-founded a
literary center, The Poets House in New York City, co-founded a poets and writers residency in
Provincetown, MA, and was the final judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets from 19691977. Tromp’s address on the role of the poet suggests that for the laureateship the role of a
poet is as important as his or her literary work: “It is not just the work that makes Kunitz such a
significant figure in North American Poetry, but the life he has led and the lives he has touched”
(23). His appointment affirms that the US laureateship values the poet who is an ambassador
for poetry.
His early work created quite a stir: David Orr stated in 1985 that “it was hailed by Robert
Lowell on the front page of The New York Times” (Orr). Intellectual Things (1930), Passport to
War (1944) and The Testing Tree (1971) in turn incited exceptional praise from critics from one
publication to the next. Kunitz’s reputation and 1971 publication raptly caught the attention of
Lowell. Other prominent poet-critics echo Lowell's championing of Kunitz’s work: David Yezzi
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stated in 1996 that the first few books “are among the poems Yvor Winters recommended to his
students at Stanford.
For many of that generation, Intellectual Things, by the precocious
twenty-five-year-old, with its fluent formalism and lush syntax, was a manual on how to write
verse” (Yezzi). Kunitz gained status as the “poet's poet”; the trajectory of his work shows that
he developed from a metrical, to a more non-metrical line. The content of his poems
approximated the confessional.
Gilbert notes how Kunitz's work does and does not evolve with the confessional
movement of poetry:
Kuntz's relationship to the emerging style that eventually came to be known as
Confessional poetry is especially interesting for its mix of resistance and assimilation.
While Kunitz was slightly older than the leading Confessional poets, he clearly admired
and learned from several of them, most notably perhaps Roethke and Lowell. The
influence did not go away, however; indeed it was arguably Kunitz himself who first
opened up the primary subject matter for Confessional poetry. (453)
From one perspective, he is the metrical “poet's poet” for writers like Winters and the Stanford
School; from another perspective, his content has been argued to have given birth to the early
movement of confessional poetry.
However, Hénault argues against placing him in this
movement because he lacks the outwardly directed, public or occasional verse, or the inwardlydirected anguish of Sexton or Plath (29-30). Hénault claims, “Kunitz is not at all a confessional
poet, and most likely he would himself, too, as he said about Roethke, 'vomit [...] at the thought'
of being called one (30). It is common for poets to not want to be, or tire of being, associated
with a particular American movement in poetry.
His 1971 poem “The Portrait” feels
confessional because of the direct observation of family drama. It begins, “My mother never
forgave my father / for killing himself, / especially at such an awkward time / and in a public
park, / that spring / when I was waiting to be born” (142). The tension between syntax and
enjambment heighten the family drama: the lingering pain of the mother; the direct focus on the
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suicide; lingering disgrace from the public and impersonal viewing of the husband’s corpse; and
the difficulty this placed on a grieving and expecting widow. The pain is evident, too, from the
son never having met his father.
The trauma here is direct and is highlighted as shorter
phrases stand alone as poignant phrases. Even the ending of the poem, “In my sixty-fourth
year / I can feel my cheek / still burning” (142). The family trauma of the son having not only
lost a father, but also having been slapped by his mother by showing her the portrait of him he
discovered stays with him far into adulthood.
Even though this poem presents a painful
memory, there is no evidence in the poem of “internal anguish”; the speaker does not turn this
pain in upon the self. Rather, the poem is an expression of a horrific family drama that has
been endured.
The poem in no way suggests that this memory has ravaged an internal-
downward spiral within the self. While Kunitz indeed uses the first-person pronoun in poems,
he also casts poems into a peculiar sense of place.
An address of Kunitz as a regional poet broadens what can be examined by the term
“place.” The backgrounds of Brodsky and Simic inform their poetics and signal to specific
geographic regions: Russia, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States. Critics address the
relationship between geography and Kunitz’s poetics as more of a metaphorical sense of place.
Gilbert situates his poetics of place as an internal landscape:
Kunitz's characteristic poetry acknowledges the world's presence, but keeps it at a
distance.
His primary concern is with the metaphysical geography of the soul, a
landscape he charts in all its multiple layers of desire, experience, vision, and memory.
The inwardness of his attention shows itself in his preference for short, strongly
accented lines and concentrated syntax. (452)
His 1978 poem “The Layers” displays such a metaphysical geography. It opens, “I have
walked through many lives, / some of them my own” (217). The poem is an inwardly guided
journey: “I look behind, / as I am compelled to look / before I can gather strength / to proceed on
my journey” (217). The speaker looks outward toward the world, which is also a turning back to
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the speaker’s experiences. This form of journey values all aspects of experience: “every stone
on the road is precious to me” (218). It is through this connection with the world that leads him:
he “roamed through wreckage, / a nimbus-clouded voice / directed me: ‘Live in the layers, / not
on the litter’” (218). The speaker had internalized the world around him (the stone, the road, the
clouds), which leads him to find a personal philosophy. The poem ends with his proclamation: “I
am not done with my changes” (218). His journey is a life of continual transformation through
the intersections of the “world’s presence” and “multiple layers” of an internal “metaphorical
geography.”
His internal landscape, quite different from the landscapes of Brodsky and Simic,
effects the formal property of his poems. While Brodsky and Simic's poetics are shaped by
shifts in regionalism due to social forces, Kunitz's geography is shaped by an internal force. Ian
Tromp argued in a review of Kunitz’s 2001 Collected Poems that he “begins now to write in the
signature three-beat lines of much of his later work, a form he relates to the rhythms of his own
breathing” (Tromp). Regionalism, whether outwardly or inwardly perceived, shapes the formal
property of poems. Brodsky found inspiration from the Russian tradition of meter and received
forms; Kunitz found inspiration in the English language through the rhythm of his own breath.
Hénault comments on the evolution of Kunitz's style from his early to later works. She recounts
Lowell’s argument that an important mark for poets is to develop their presentation of the poetic
lines over time toward a more “free verse.” Hénault quotes Lowell on Kunitz's 1970s work: “call
no man old who can grow”; Lowell considered growth having such formal properties as
“syntactic relaxation [...] elimination of punctuation [...] the dropping of conventional line
capitalization [...] and often the lack of stanzaic structure and rhyme” (86). These sentiments
reflect the fashionable tenants of a “free verse” evolving from the metrical line. “The Portrait”
and “The Layers” are poems that display aspects of a “free verse” and are quite different from
poems in his first published book. The first stanza of “Particular Lullaby” (1930) indicates the
difference between his early and later work:
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Decline at evening from your eyes,
Like summer-slipping down a tree,
Your noon-high pride: but not your wise,
Your sensitive pleased beauty. (20)
The capital letters signal that this is a formal poem. The stanza is set in ABAB rhyme scheme,
set at each line’s end. The first three lines establish a predictable four-beat iambic line, which
returns throughout the poem. This presentation of a poem is quite different from his later work.
The infrequency of Kunitz’s book publication indicates sharp turns in style. The difference
between styles are the “transitional” poems, as Orr concludes, that have not been offered to the
reader because Kunitz wrote and published only the poems that he felt most compelled to write.
Mark Strand (1990-1991)
While Kunitz published his works fairly infrequently, Mark Strand's intervals of
publication are closer to Simic's.
Strand’s work is particularly interesting to address in a
discussion of regionalism because he is the only other poet laureate besides Brodsky and Simic
who was not born in the US. He was born in Canada and grew up in both North and South
America. While he has the experience of having lived in several countries, his poems give little
indication of an outwardly-directed sense of place. Like Simic, he has been associated with
surrealists, with the difference being that his poems do not explore any particular history. Like
Kunitz, his sense of place is more of a metaphoric geography.
And yet an approximate
placement of his literary style is a poetics of negation.
Richard Howard's 1974 review of Strand's Story of Our Lives has formed the framework
by which future critics echo or extend his claims on Strand's work. Outlining the process of
Strand's poetics, Howard claims that Strand “begins in ecstasy, the astonishment, the stupor,
and seeks to empty it out, to put it behind him, to silence it in order that the story may occur [...]
The only way for the poet who seeks an issue out of Being into Becoming is by negation”
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(Howard). The speakers of Kunitz and Strand both have a self developed from an inward focus,
an inward geography; the difference between them is that while Kunitz's speakers build identity
from an inner landscape, Strand empties out the identity as it forms, leaving instead the story of
a “non-self.”
Howard states that Strand has reformed “the prosody of erasure.
These
astounding poems remind us that originally the word verse and the word prose come from the
same Latin word, provertere, which in its prose past-participle means to have moved on, but
which in its poetic infinitive means to roll around again” (Howard). Strand’s poems do not have
a secure ground referencing a beginning or ending. This is how his work difference from the
historical impulses of Simic.
Sven Birkerts stated in 1990, “For Strand, it is thus: we have been hurled into being and
there is no immanent or transcendent ground for the self” (Birkerts). His 1964 poem “Keeping
Things Whole” exhibits the same kind of negation as in his later work. The speaker states, “In a
field I am the absence of field. / This is always the case. / Wherever I am / I am what is
missing” (10). Displacement pervades the poem, which ends, “I move / to keep things whole”
(10). While the poem closes with a connection between self and world, there is still the sense of
displacement as the line break separates the speaker (“I move”) from the world (“to keep things
whole”). This placement of enjambment reinforces the pervasiveness of distance, a continual
negation.
“My Life by Somebody Else,” from his 1970 collection Darker, shows a similar
negation: there is a continued displacement from the title to the poem’s conclusion.
It
concludes, “Must I write My Life by somebody else? / My Death by somebody else? / Are you
listening? / Somebody else has arrived. Somebody else is writing” (63).
By referencing both
life and death, the speaker is disallowing a personal relationship to emerge with either. From
this displacement, the self is further distanced by the encroachment of another. This other is
impersonal; the speaker is not even sure that this other is interested or listening. And yet the
poem leaves with the speaker giving way to this impersonal other as a kind of ars poetica (a
poem focused on the art of writing)—not of being, but of a becoming, an emptying out of the
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self, a negation. Birkerts continues, “Reading Strand, we are apt to realize just how much most
other poetry―most other writing―makes an assumption of telos, is premised on a confidence
in events tending toward meaningful ends. But in this poet's world, as in the worlds of Beckett
and Kafka, there is no place to which movement leads, except extinction” (Birkets). Strand's
poems do not assume a ground, a geography, a telos.
In 2006 Dave Lucas referenced Linda Gregerson's take on Strand's poetics: “When
Mark Strand reinvented the poem, he began by leaving out the world” (Lucas). Brodsky and
Simic are poets of exile due to political force. Strand, too, has a condition of exile in his poetics,
but the difference is that his is self-imposed. Elizabeth Lund noted in 1991 that Strand “reminds
readers that the physical world has currents and urges of its own. But more than that, Strand
struggles with the questions of the self: “How does it intersect with time and space? [...] Implied
is a search for spirituality” (Lund). His poetics do not impose a view that humans dominate the
earth and are its custodians. Conversely, they do not impose a view that humans are of the
earth and are reflections of its creation. His poetics is positioned in a mysterious place outside
both of these constructs, in a place that is more of a “nowhere.” The physical world gives
impetus to emerging forces completely outside the realm of the human. Time and space is
conceptualized for Strand outside the perception of any particular geography. Without borders,
ground, or telos, the self has a hovering plane of exploration.
If there is an “implied search for spirituality,” as Dave Lucas attests, it is an impersonal
one. Birkerts appropriately defines Strand's poetics:
[o]ver the past three decades Strand has perfected a chill-inducing poetry of
nothingness.
The poems are not about life―the inscrutable forward moving, time-
contending process―but about the emptying out of life [...] where the self thinks about
itself thinking and finds that its thoughts, like the wind, have nothing to adhere to.
(Birkerts).
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In 2007 Alexander Nemser defined Strand’s poetics in similar terms. For Strand, it is “not the
thunderstorm itself, but how it reminds him of dying” (Nemser). If there is geography for this
poet, it moves speakers not toward a ground, but toward a further, hovering rumination.
William Logan commented on the place of Strand in American poetry in 2006: “Had
Sylvia Plath never written a line, Strand would have been the most gifted American poet born in
the Thirties” (61). Logan is a poet-critic hesitant to give the slightest praise as he tends more
toward discussing faults and mocking those faults; praise from him in any fashion is quite rare.
Strand has early secured and maintained a place within contemporary poetry. Like Simic, he
also has a strong signature; Birkerts attests, Strand “is unique among poets in that he has not
grown or changed very much over the course of his career. That is not a slight” (Birkets). He
stands out as a Poet Laureate in another way: he has celebrity status. Lucas questioned, “After
all, how many poets are reviewed in the pages of Elle?” Few poets reach the public through
such popular forms of media.
Robert Hass (1995-1997)
While Robert Hass may not be reviewed in the pages of Elle, his poetry and
environmental activism has placed him in the public spotlight―for those who follow trends in the
relationships between poetry and environmentalism. There are several ways his work can be
discussed as more traditionally a regional poetics. Much of his poetic work pertains to the
Californian landscape; and his work has been associated with the influence of the Beats in
terms of some West Coast poets having been influenced by Asian aesthetics. Billington praised
the appointment of Hass for having a representative from the West Coast. What is different
from Hass's treatment of place is his interplay between region, art, and activism. In 2008 Tony
Roberts traced the movement in Hass's early career: “His poetry had a sense of responsibility
[...] from the shady history of the Pacific settlement, to the continuous rape of the land, and
outwards to the cultural deprivation of the Polish community in New York State (where Hass
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was taught) to student activism and the Vietnam War”; and as his career progressed, he
continually developed “further meditation on language” (59). Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas”
(1979) exemplifies musing on language. It opens, “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it
resembles all the old thinking.
/ The idea, for example, that each particular erases / the
luminous clarity of the general idea” (Lehman, 967). The speaker muses on a woodpecker and
emphasizes the inability of language to capture the world. There is a conflicted response to this
loss. The speaker accepts this proposition: “because there is in this world no one thing / to
which the bramble of blackberry corresponds / a word is elegy to what it signifies” (967). The
conclusion of the poem protests this acceptance through attempts to call forth the world: “Such
tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, / saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry” (967).
The speaker both accepts and protests the capacity of language. Taking the poem alone, if the
speaker cannot call forth the world, a literary implication is closer to Auden’s tenet “poetry
makes nothing happen.” However, the effect of the elegy can give rise to a stronger sense to
respond. This is an occasion where the author as activist adds a different layering to a literary
text.
If the tenet of a poem is that nothing can be done, the frustration of this inability of
language can give rise to engage with the world socially.
While Roberts discusses the change in his literary work from a felt responsibility of
social responsibility and toward meditations on language, he and other critics fail to address
Hass’s dual role as poet and activist. They take into account only his poetry. Separating the
poet’s literary works from the role of the poet leads to an incomplete and misguided
understanding of Hass’s work because for him the two are intertwined. As such, critics have
missed the mark on what they see as a passive view of the landscape because they do not take
into account the poet as author and the poet as environmental activist. Hass has a direct
connection between poetry and the role of poetry in society, which draws attention to the author.
In other words, because there is interplay between the literary text and a social function of
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poetry, the “death of the author” is not helpful in interpreting this poet’s works. Instead, the
literary and the social should be addressed together in order to create a different layering of
interpretation. Hass composes literary-regional landscapes; and he works to preserve those
landscapes.
Some critics have not been pleased with a trend in Hass’s literary work from what was
an engaged relationship and social concern in his earlier poems to what later is perceived to be
an abject passivity of his speakers. Peter Davidson asserted in 1997 that “his poems began to
blur into a haze of contemplative passivity [reflective of contemporary American poetry] in which
states of mind and feeling were rendered reflexively with passive, copulative, or auxiliary verbs
and the present tense” (Davidson). Some find the move toward meditation on language a move
away from lyricism. In 2003 Logan considered the trend of Hass’s ruminations as a move away
from the lyric: “it's a pity Hass has become a lyric poet with a conscience, because he can't
make the conscience shut up” (Logan).
What these critics have missed is that for Hass,
aesthetics and political activism substantiate one another. While his early work may have
suggested speakers engaged with social issues with its author an activist, it is telling that the
speakers have become less engaged. The “passivity” that these critics note can instead be
Hass’s commentary on a general passivity of American citizens to engage in environmental
preservation. Even while his poems may have speakers that seem less, as Roberts terms it,
“responsible,” Hass has remained responsible as an activist. His activism is an example to
counter the passivity displayed in his poems. He is a poet whose work addresses particular
regional concerns; and he is a poet that directly engages with his region in order to preserve its
ecosystem. In 2001 Barbara Berman asserted the differences Hass has made as an activist:
“there is also Hass the active citizen, founder of River of Words, a nonprofit that helps young
people channel creative energy as they develop environmental awareness, and founder of the
annual Watershed readings, which features appearances of River of Words participants with
well-known poets and performers” (Berman).
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Hass and Strand are both poets who have a ruminative poetics. A significant difference
is that while Strand's is one of groundlessness, Hass's incorporation of activism explicitly unites
poetry with a geographic and social ground as an inextricable bond. While Strand's poetics is
outside the conception of humans as custodians of the earth, as well as humans as reflections
of earth's creation, Hass's poetics and environmental activism fuses both perceptions. His work
springs from and returns to the earth. The Watershed Project, which is discussed in detail in
Chapter Five, has an outreach component whereby public school age students from all United
States regions fuse the study of science with language arts. Students investigate their own
watersheds through scientific inquiry as well as through writing poems and representing their
ecosystem through visual arts. The project lends directly to the preservation of watersheds and
ecosystems because this interdisciplinary approach sparks awareness, empathy and social
engagement with particular regions. Readers influenced by Hass can be moved to join in
activism.
For some, the inability for language alone to transform the world can lead to
transformation through actions. In other words, poetry, like rhetoric, can give rise to action.
Critics respond differently to his poems that directly address the state of environmental
destruction. For instance, Logan assessed in 2007 that “[‘State of the Planet’] starts with one of
his gorgeous pastoral set pieces [that turns toward a] droning on about chlorofluorocarbons; by
the time he's done preaching about the destruction of the ozone layer, you're counting the tiles
on the floor” (68). The second section of a ten-section poem begins, “Poetry should be able to
comprehend the earth”; and declares, “Topsoil: going fast. Rivers dammed and fouled. / Cod:
about fished out. Haddock: about fished out” (50). Logan's assessment signals that Hass’s
literary display of environmental concern does not move him in any way. He does not find that
Hass has the capability to enchant through poems with such a concern about the earth.
Instead, he finds such a direct address too didactic; section eight of the poem asserts,
“Chlorofluorocarbons react with ozone, the gas / That makes air tingle on a sparking day” (53).
This to Logan is not poetic. It is possible that Logan holds a historical demarcation between
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poetry and rhetoric. From this vantage point, poetry should give pleasure. Rhetoric is what
gives rise to action. This precludes interpreting Hass’s work as both a literary and socially
engaged mixture. This poem indicates Hass’s passion for the state of the environment; his
Watershed Project acts to preserve the environment, which combines the literary with a social
function of poetry. In other words, for Hass, the literary and the social function of poetry co-exist
as a layered commentary, one influences the other. Logan’s assessment is from a perception
that deftly divorces the lyric in particular from social action.
For Logan, a poem exists on the
page; he does not see the poem as means of inspiration leading to social engagement.
Chlorofluorocarbons to Logan are not poetic. He shows an utter lack of the connection
between poetry and possible social and environmental engagement. And yet there are some
critics who appreciate connections between poetry and the function of poetry. Nick Powell
asserts, “'State of the Planet' –an eight page masterstroke that is both elegy and plea, because,
as he puts it, 'the earth needs a dream of restoration'” (Powell).
Powell perceives the
regionalism of Hass: “language and landscape have always dovetailed with a rare
effortlessness in Hass's best work”; “State of the Planet” is “a kind of lyricism which enables
didactics to rest along [with] aesthetics” (Powell).
Unlike Logan, Powell does not mind that
Hass's consciousness of ecological preservation tips into poetics.
Peter Davidson observes a thread in American poetry: “Since Frost's death, in 1963,
the strongest currents in American poetry may well have pushed westward, away from our
European heritage and toward a more nativist outlook. No practicing poet has more talent than
Robert Hass, who is, to our good fortune, the present and deserving United States Poet
Laureate” (Davidson). Davidson's comment alludes to the history of American literature’s desire
to stand distinctly from other traditions, such as British literature. The appointment of Hass, who
lives and teaches in Berkeley, CA, clearly delineates the scope and transformation of American
literature. Hass's poetics have been noted as particularly East Asian. In 2008 Tess Taylor
noted the creative and destructive forces in his work: for “Hass, the consummate Berkeley
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Buddhist [...] the two are often one” (Taylor). He is known as an antiwar activist; he is known as
an environmental activist; and he is known as a monumental poet of the West Coast.
Ted Kooser (2004-2006)
Ted Kooser is a poet from the Midwest Great Plains; responses to his work directly
reflect geography in terms of the content of his poems and the social aspect of the literary
market. He is a poet living in and writing about his Nebraska, a state to which he has long
naturalized. He differs from Kunitz and Hass because he does not live and work within an
urban center. In 1992 Dana Gioia addressed the problem of regionalism in relation to Kooser:
his “poetic career reveals some of the problems faced by a regional writer who does not either
immigrate to a major literary center or join the university network” (102). Brodsky and Simic are
kinds of “outsiders” from their native regions. Kooser’s position of outsider is closer to that
discussed in Chapter One on Collins and Ryan. But while they claim to be the “outsider” due to
not playing “the poetry game,” Kooser does not live in the literary centers to which these two
poets have access. Participating in a local, rather than national literary center, the nexus for
Kooser’s audience tended to cluster around Lincoln, Nebraska. Gioia states that after his first
book, he “disappeared into the gulag of small regional presses [cultivating] a small local
audience” (103). Many states provide funding to support local artists in terms of grants, artist
colonies, and presses for its residents. Kooser’s work before Sure Signs: New and Selected
Poems found homes in regional presses. The publication of this book “brought Kooser national
attention for the first time. It also established him as one of the few openly regional young poets
whose work had broad appeal beyond the Midwest” (110). Gioia’s claim that Kooser is “openly
regional” suggests that Kooser is comfortable living and working without access to larger literary
centers. R.S. Gwynn’s 2005 response to the choice in the appointment of Kooser provided a
telling assumption critics hold about regions outside of such centers: “Kooser is, after all, a
regional poet (from Nebraska, of all places) who has been elevated to the heights, or dunked to
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the depths” (Gwynn). Why would critics consider Kansas, or any other state, to be less likely to
produce a poet than New York or California? The implication is that poets ought to migrate to
larger urban areas and cannot thrive outside of them.
Many critics note Kooser’s attention to the everyday life. “Dishwasher,” for instance,
captures moments of the ordinary:
Slap of the screen door, flat knock
of my grandmother's boxy black shoes
on the wooden stoop, the hush and sweep
of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned stride
out to the edge and then, toed in
with a furious twist and heave,
a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands
and hangs there shining for fifty years
over the mystified chickens,
over the swaying nettles, the ragweed,
the clay slope down to the creek,
over the redwing blackbirds in the tops
of the willows, a glorious rainbow
with an empty dishpan swinging at one end. (“Dishwater,” Academy)
Images of farm life infuse the poem through appeals to everyday sound: doors, sweeping,
lugging.
The setting is rural: chickens, nettles, ragweed, creek, birds, and trees.
The
relationship between humans and nature situates itself with the speaker’s pleasant disposition
toward labor: the rainbow reflecting in the dishpan.
In 2005 Craig Challender noted the benefits of Kooser’s regionalism by explaining a
kind of innate, inspired muse: Sure Signs is “an understanding Plains people, especially, take
from the rhythms of earth and weather” (Challender). However, it is this very sentiment of an
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essential regionalism that aggravates critics like Brian Phillips, a Midwest native, who claimed in
2005,
If there is something maddening about Ted Kooser’s success [...] it has to do with the
way he has been received by critics as with the work itself. [Edward Hirsch champions
that] ‘Something about the Great Plains seems to foster a plain, homemade style, a
sturdy forth-rightness with hidden depths, a hard-won clarity chastened by experience.
It is unadorned, pragmatic, quintessentially American poetry of empty places, of
farmland and low-slung cities. The open spaces stimulate and challenge people. One’s
mettle is tested. (396)
Phillips balks at comments like Hirsch’s on inherent claims about poets from the Great Plains
and notes that it’s Kooser’s temperament alone that crafts his work, regardless of geographic
region. He ultimately evaluates Sure Signs as “placid stasis” among some “lovely images”
(396).
R. S. Gwynn finds other issues with regionalism, which he sees Kooser transcending.
He is bored with poems about the rural everyday setting: “There are, naturally, some drawbacks
[with too many] suburban meditations on cleaning out gutters or lighting the pilots of furnaces
[because they come] from poets whose days are spent in departmental offices or stuffy seminar
rooms [which is] the academic’s attempt to show that he can get his fingernails dirty, too”
(Gwynn). Kooser’s move from regional to national acclaim has left critics in a quandary of
where to locate him within contemporary American poetry.
In 1992 Jeffrey Galbraith stated, “The beauty of this landscape carries just the right
pitch to connect to the wider public that Kooser’s tenure as laureate will certainly draw” (184).
Kooser’s “Porch Swing in September” represents another speaker’s pleasant disposition toward
the everyday found in nature. A spider has built a web from the porch swing to the wall as
though to indicate that summer days of swinging on the porch has ended. Instead it’s “time now
for the soft vibrations of moths” and time for “the wasp [to tap] each board for an entrance”
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(“Porch,” Academy).
The poem meditates on the subtle ways nature announces seasonal
shifts. Galbraith mused on his success as a laureate: his “appointment as Poet Laureate of the
United States bodes well for efforts to improve relations between American poetry and the
general public” (183). R. S. Gwynn questions the desire for poetry to have a closer connection
with the general public: “is the desire to reach a common reader; one that Kooser has iterated in
interviews, a noble aim or just a pipe dream?” (Gwynn). Whether noble or pipe dream, Kooser’s
poems are quite accessible because they touch upon aspects everyday life: dishwater, porch
swings and spiders.
The poets in this Chapter indicate the different ways in which some of the US Poets’
Laureate work has been influenced by geography. Another grouping of laureates showcases
how a poet develops style. Much in the way that visual artists’ works can be identified at once,
poets, too, establish identifiable styles. Strong identifiable styles become poetic signatures.
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CHAPTER 4
POETS LAUREATE: FORGING SIGNATURES
The poets gathered in this chapter—Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Louise
Glück, Kay Ryan—have less of a thematic unity than the poets addressed in Chapters One and
Two. What these poets have in common is that criticism on their works directs a discussion of
how poetic styles are forged. All of these poets have been noted to avoid the “confessional,”
even when work leans toward the autobiographical. Pinsky and Dove create poetic signatures
by appealing to history. Pinsky’s work concerns the ways in which the poet and history
intertwine, how each informs and constructs one other. His formal dexterity pulls from a whole
of poetic history. Dove’s work concerns history, but she infuses her imagination into personae
to capture contemporary understandings of history. Collins, Glück, and Ryan have stark poetic
signatures. Collins and Glück could not be more contrasting in their language; one appeals to
comedy, the other, to tragedy. Collins has stronger appeal to the general public, but since it is
harder for comedy to be legitimized by notable critics, he is defined as a “minor” poet. Glück—
more aligned as a “major” poet—has an intense sense of the tragic, of pain and isolation and is
known for distancing herself from her subjects. Her work is in an autobiographic mode that is
an alternative to the “confessional.” Ryan’s signature is a short-lined, nuanced minimalism.
Taken together, these are all highly established poets who show different responses to first and
second-generation moderns. Criticism of their work is newer and in-the-making. It will take
criticism of the generation of poets following them to more keenly see how they are positioned
in literary history.
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Rita Dove (1993-1995)
Dove is well known for infusing poems with history. She has wide-ranging personae.
Her speakers represent different genders, ages, nationalities, mythologies, and historical
epochs.
One of the aspects critics focus on is the degree to which her poems address
blackness. Of the US Poets Laureate, she is a minority in terms of race and gender. Gender
minority in this instance means that so few women have been appointed US Poets Laureate.
Since some of her work represents black experience, it is necessary to reiterate the discussion
of race in Chapter One. The “shimmer of hope” she stated feeling for greater visibility of black
poets when she accepted the post has not materialized in the laureateship. Thus far, she
remains the only black poet. Thus far, all of the other poets laureate have been white. From
1986 to 2010 there has been no representation of any other racial minority.
Such
underrepresentation of racial minorities indicates that at present the post of US Poet
Laureateship does not reflect a true portrait of American poets. The lack of racial diversity
within US laureateship should alarm the nominating committee, the Librarian of Congress, as
well as the journalists and critics reviewing appointments. Discussion of racial diversity among
critics following her appointment dropped out of public discourse once she left the post. Dove’s
work is the only case thus far in the history of US Poet Laureateship in which critics focus on the
relationship between poetry and race. Critics address how her work has broken from a literary
history (The Black Arts Movement) that made race a primary subject.
Helen Vendler claimed in 1995, “[a]ny black writer in America must confront, as an
adult, the enraging truth that the inescapable social accusations of blackness becomes, too
early for the child to resist it, a strong element of inner self-definition. A black writer thus
composes both with and against racial identity” (61). Therese Steffen also noted in 2001 this
tension for Dove’s poetic identity:
Hers is a double reaction to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s: Dove picks up the
political impetus, a sense of politics as giving the starting point […] but refuses and
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ironizes the clichéd political discourse and aesthetic dilettantism […].
Instead she
seeks to link up with the strong modernist imagism of William Carlos Williams […] or
Wallace Stevens […]. Hence her aesthetic and thematic departure serves as a critique
of the 1960s and offers a ‘politicalization of the modernist tradition’ (7).
Even while Dove departed from the Black Arts Movement, she gave tribute to the
foundation that has been built by it because writers of her generation have a wider range of
possible subjects other than what Steffen says was limited to “traditional formalism and
autobiographical writing with a confessional touch” (7). She quotes an interview Dove gave
Patricia Kirpatrick: Sometimes I feel like getting down on my knees and saying thank you
because these battles have already been fought. And these are not easy battles—between
confessionalism and beat poetry and formalism, or whether poetry adheres to gender or not, or
whether it adheres to whatever black aesthetics. These discussions have been on the table.
We haven’t had to clear the path first before writing. (7)
She is here discussing a poetics transcending many categories of poetry as well as
identity poetics. In 2006 Pat Righelato addressed Dove’s international experiences as informing
such a poetics: Dove “is not looking for supportive habitats in either black or feminist conclaves
but shaking off parochialism by [her experience of] living and writing in Europe” (2). Her 1980
poem “Back” presents a persona with an international education: “I’m scholarshipped / to
th
Europe and back. / Four years later, a language later, and / your 39 jet lands in Kuwait” (26).
Dove had studied in Germany on a student Fulbright; many of her poems appeal to international
experiences.
Righelato and Cynthia Hogue position On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999) as historical
recovery, a recovery that gives voice to those who have been silenced by history. Righelato
claimed in 2008, “Dove reaffirms her commitment to [what she calls] the ‘underside of history
[…] what my American history books had reported and what they had chosen to ignore’” (766).
“Rosa” is a poem powerful in its historical situation:
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How she sat there,
the time right inside a place
so wrong it was ready.
That trim name with
its dream of a bench
to rest on. Her sensible coat.
Doing nothing was the doing:
the clean flame of her gaze
carved by a camera flash.
How she stood up
when they bent down to retrieve
her purse. That courtesy (83)
Not only is the poem powerful for its historical context, it is also powerful by its formal
presentation. The poem is short. The sentences are conversational: “doing nothing was the
doing.” The simpler presentation of form heightens the tension of the situation: a common
person committing a courageous act.
Hogue addressed these poems in 2000 as “[t]he
dominant society’s often silenced others [who] are given a voice” (Hogue).
Dove gives voice
not only to this historical icon, but also to ordinary people who lead courageous lives.
This book opens with the section “Cameos,” depictions of relationships among
courageous and ordinary people. Lucile in “July 1925” and Joe in “Night” reveal a couple
expecting a baby during oppressive economic times leading up to the Depression. Lucile bears
the burden of pregnancy, fearing that Joe will not support her. He “knows somewhere / he had
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a father / who would have told him / how to act” (14). Having endured growing up fatherless,
the speaker speculates, “no wonder whenever she began to show / he packed a fifth and split”
(15). Both mother and father endure the pain of strained relationships while expecting their
daughter Pearl. However, even in “The Depression Years,” each found their own paths to
survival. Love sustains them through challenging times. The father overcomes his fears in
order to support the family. Their daughter Pearl endearingly nurtures the child that they had
after her: “She gives him of her own / ham hock, plies him with / sweetened yams. Unravels /
ratted sweaters, reworks them / into socks. In the lean years / lines his shoes / with newspaper
Main / thing is, you don’t / miss school” (20). Rosa Parks is only one of the courageous people
in this book. Opening the book with struggles of ordinary people shows how the ability to
endure stark economic oppression is just as courageous. The section of the book does not end
in sentimentality. On the contrary, it ends with its own claim to historical recovery. The son
concludes: “I am a witness. […] I watch. / I float and grieve” (24). Righelato asserts that
“Dove’s primary interest […] is historicist recovery, in giving voice and idiom to the feelings of
ordinary individuals under conditions very different from her own” (770).
This is the very strategy that she used for the poem “Parsley” from Museum (1983), a
poem about the 1937 Haitian genocide: “El General has found his word: perejil. / Who says it,
lives” (133). The poem is a historical presentation of how Rafael Trujillo killed “20,000 blacks” in
order to reduce the Haitian population to those of Spanish heritage (136). Trujillo lined up
Haitians and asked them to pronounce “parsley.”
Those who could not roll the “r” were
executed on the spot. In the poem, the general listens with disgust to the “Haitians [who] sing
without R’s / as they swing their great machetes” in the sugarcane fields (134).
This reminds
him of the passing of his Spanish mother. Her parrot sings and reminds him of this loss.
Subsequently, he redirects grief into racial hatred.
The parrot provokes the memory of her
when it mimics language: “God knows / his mother was no stupid woman; she / could roll her R
like a queen. Even / a parrot can roll an R” (135). At this comparison, the black Haitians to the
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General possess no human quality. He does not see them as human; he sees them less even
of an animal, as with this parrot, and closer to the sugarcane plants that can be cut down. Each
worker pronounced “parsley”; those who could not give a Spanish pronunciation were
slaughtered with a machete. The poem ends, “He will / order many, this time, to be killed // for a
single, beautiful word” (135). Vendler states that “Dove’s penetratingly imaginative mind took
on the task of trying to conjuncture why [he] ordered […] Haitian cane cutters killed” (161).
In addition to historical imaginative interrogations and giving the silenced a voice, she
appropriates mythology such as the Greek myths of Persephone, Demeter, and Hades in
Mother Love (1995) and interrogates nuances of familial relationships. Weaving in and out of
voices across so many categories (gender, historical epochs, mythology), she has developed a
symphony of personae from the trajectory of her literary career. This symphony of personae is
what has become her poetic signature. In developing a repertoire of voice, she writes about
blackness, but not as a focusing subject.
Vendler notes that Dove’s work reflects a poetics
whereby “blackness need not be one’s central subject, but equally need not be omitted” (83).
Steffen is concerned about the lack of criticism on Dove’s work.
She states, “Dove is
represented in major anthologies and is widely taught. Yet critical investigation of her work,
apart from short articles, reviews, and interviews, has been scarce in relation to her high public
acclaim” (17). The lack of critical attention is curious. One possibility is that it simply takes
longer for contemporary poets to amass sustained critique. Another is that as articulated by
Van Duyn, it is harder for women poets to enter the literary canon.
Robert Pinsky (1997-2000)
Much criticism surrounding Pinsky’s work centers on how his poetic language falls
between categories, how it does not reflect an allegiance to particular threads of argument
responding to modernism, but rather how it reflects inclusive, wide-ranging registers. Charles
Molesworth, James Longenbach, and Elizabeth Mehren situate his language as coming to
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terms with the abundance of possibilities within language, rather than reflecting a mode or
literary school.
In 1994 Longenbach traced Pinsky’s linguistic range to his education by Ivor Winters.
While he did not see Pinsky as a Winters-like poet, he saw the mark of Winter’s instruction in
literary history on Pinsky: “Winters was important to him as a poet-critic who stressed the
necessity of coming to terms with the entire history of poetry. [He] stressed in usable terms what
Pinsky probably knew intuitively: that the reading and writing of poetry was a moral act”
(Longenbach). Longenbach asserted how
Pinsky has always stood apart from the various schisms used to map the world of
American poetry. […] Formal and free, open and closed […] however the twentiethcentury American poetry is divided; Pinsky remains unplaceable in the best sense of
the word. […] If he is a postmodern poet it is not because he opposes modernism in
the way that some modern poets rejected their Romantic forebears; the label sticks
because he has understood that opposition itself is what holds other poets down
(Longenbach).
“Moral” in this case informs a poetics that neither excludes nor adheres to schools of poetry
such as delineated by R.S. Gwen, editor of the anthology Twentieth Century American Poetry,
who assigns poets to “academic,” “confessional,” “new formalist,” “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,” “deep
image” and so on. Pinsky’s work represents an inclusive poetics, a poetics that draws on a
multitude of possibilities and poetic schools. “Moral” can also be seen in his stance of poetry’s
function in society.
Pinsky’s poetics does not reflect an “art for art’s sake,” elitist and
exclusionary role of poetry and poets from the reading public. Poetry for Pinsky, as defined by
Mehren in 1997, has unlimited potential in the social field:
‘It’s a truly popular art, an art everybody can enjoy,’ declared Pinsky, champion of odes
on the Internet, advocate of everyday lyricism, believer in the simple certainty that a
sonnet may dwell anywhere—for example, on the label of a catsup bottle. In Pinsky’s
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view; poetry is the people’s art form, and Pinsky, in turn, clearly is content to bear the
mantle of the people’s poet. (Mehren).
He values the possibilities of poetry being presented in various public venues and links
availability of the art form to the increasing popularity of poetry. As an ambassador of poetry,
Pinsky is involved in many online adventures into presentations of poetry: his appearance on
The Colbert Report, recitation of his and other poet’s work on Youtube, cartoon appearance on
The Simpsons, and his contributions to Slate magazine are some examples of Pinsky’s
methods of bringing poetry to the public. Resources from the Library of Congress reflect his
engagement with exposing poetry through online media: 13 radio shows, 10 “other audio”
offerings, and “9 videos ([including] television programs, readings, and animated poetry)”
(Library of Congress). His enthusiasm for engaging with technology at times informs subject
matter for his poems.
In 2003 Tony Hoagland described Pinsky’s range in subject matter. Hoagland stated
that while some contemporary poets are living “in an age that mistrusts language,” Pinsky has
“a relationship with language […] strikingly unalienated” (Hoagland). He “roams through the
realms of data and modernity, multiculturalism and technology and artifact, with gusto and
appetite” finding “language adequate, deep, fruitful, and entertaining. For him the act of naming
is both sacred and pleasurable, numinous as anything else in creation” (Hoagland) For
instance, Pinsky penned an ode “To Television” (Jersey Rain, 2000) that praises a “Terrarium of
dreams and wonders. / Coffers of shades, ordained” (Hoagland).
The poem traces the
speaker’s relationship with television: “a blue glow my father and litter sister sat / Snuggled in
one chair watching you / Their wife and mother was sick in the head / I scorned you” (31, Jersey
Rain). While there is intimacy of the cuddling sister and father, the speaker acknowledges how
technology can also create distance among people. As an adult, the speaker “like[s] you best in
a hotel room, / Maybe minutes / Before I have to face an audience: behind / The doors of the
armoire, box / Within a box—Tom and Jerry, or also brilliant / And reassuring Oprah Winfrey”
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(31). Television brings comfort and builds a cultural community: “Thank you, I watched live /
Jackie Robinson stealing // Home” (32). The “box” provides and holds “words we / Remember
in” (32).
Pinsky’s openness to wide-ranging poetic subjects and registers of language is what
Longenbach saw as his “poet’s mark”: the ability and extent to which the poet can “expand the
language.” Pinsky is also a poet that ranges between the historical and the personal.
Molesworth and Tony Whedon note another aspect of his language: he “manages to be
personal without being confessional, sophisticated without being glib, and knowledgeable
without being world-weary or cutely playful” (Whedon). Pinsky’s historical poems appeal to a
general public: “[t]hough much of Pinsky’s poetry suggests a classical erudition, we don’t find in
him that cosmopolitan urbanity in his elders Merrill and Wilbur” (Molesworth). “The Shirt” (The
Want Bone, 1990) is a poem historicizing the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York
City.
The poem is historical witness: “At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. / One
hundred and forty six died in the flames / On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes” (84).
These historical facts are interwoven with personal empathy: “This armpiece with its overseam
to the band / Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, / The wringer, the mangle.
The needle, the union, / The treadle, the bobbin. The code” (84). The speaker refers to a
historical account through a most ordinary object: a shirt. The historical reference is universal:
everyone can relate to a shirt. Pinsky further builds upon this empathy by making clear the
labor that is evident in the shirt’s presence. The various objects that make the shirt are built into
a rhythm of language that mirrors their mechanical use. He humanizes the labor that goes into
the making of a shirt by also composing words referencing work that sounds like the working of
sewing machines: “The loader, / The docker, the navy. The planter, the picker, the sorter, /
Sweating at her machine” (85). A powerful moment in the poem is when he individualizes the
violence of this historic event by presenting one worker: “her name is Irma / And she inspected
my shirt” (85). It is simpler to empathize with an individual than the abstraction of a number:
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“One hundred and fifty six” (85). The identification of one person vivifies the deaths of each
involved in this tragic event: “The witness in a building across the street / Who watched how a
young man helped a girl to step / up to the windowsill, then held her out / / Away from the
masonry wall and let her drop. // And then another. As if he were holding them up / to a
streetcar, and not eternity” (84). The poem presents this event in a manner that preserves
history for a general public. The poem is not “glib” because it explains the historical situation
without assuming erudition. In other words, it is not a poem alluding to historical events in a
manner that would mainly appeal to specialized educations. Even the allusion to Hart Crane is
followed through with a visual explanation: “Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers— // Like
Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning’” (84). A reader does not need to know this
reference in order to capture the image of people’s clothing billowing out as they fell nine stories
from a building. The poem fully examines a painful moment in American history.
As criticism on Pinsky places his work between so many categories, he cannot be
solely all-encompassing, either. Hoagland claimed,
Robert Pinsky is a much stranger poet than is generally acknowledged. As the U.S.
Poet Laureate, he was such a skilled diplomat that people, perhaps unconsciously,
assumed his poetry to be also civic or democratic.
His public articulateness, the
communal role he has argued for American poetry, and his personal charisma likewise
seem to have cast a spell on the reading public, convincing them that Pinsky the poet is
some sort of Horace or Whitman. The truth is more complicated […] Restlessness has
been a large part of his story: his own poetry embodies dramatic shifts of style, from the
fluent discursive values of his first several books to the highly compacted, intensely
lyrical, sometimes hermetic fabrications of his later work. (Hoagland)
There are several factors playing out in Hoagland’s assertion. What can be “strange” about
Pinsky is the reading public’s conflation with Pinsky the spokesperson for poetry and his early
work, and Pinsky the poet whose poetics has evolved over the years. While it is true that he
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has an inclusive poetics, it is also true that once a poet develops a signature and reputation, it
can be hard to break. Luise Glück notes that “[i]t is a standard misfortune of poets (and artists
in general) that their work continues to be read according to whatever impressions or verdicts
attended its debut. In consequence Robert Pinsky is often regarded as a poet of extensive
dispassionate curiosity and wide learning, ethical by disposition, rational in bias” (Glück). What
is “strange” then is that Pinsky’s poetics have evolved while his stance toward the function of
poetry has remained the same.
As a “skilled diplomat” with “personal charisma,” he was
influential in promoting a general cause for poetry; at the same time, his poetics changed.
Hoagland saw Pinsky’s late work shifting
from a reader-friendly style of casual explication to a more incantatory, impersonal form
of enunciation. The discursive lubrication with which the earlier Pinsky […] has been
replaced by a love of abruptness, collision and collage. […] He has gone, one might
say, from explicator to Gnostic namer, from the secular, discursive Horation thinkerpoet to a more compressed priest-like voice, intent on Mystery. (Hoagland)
The reputation of his signature in his early poetic language—that of a language accessible to
the reading public—has carried over to his later work. His shifting presentation of language
continues to make it difficult to place his work among contemporary poets, particularly those
who follow particular poetic fashions. In 1996 Andrew Rathmann defined Pinsky’s contribution
to American letters: “Pinsky’s great importance for contemporary poetry lies in the fact that he
does not demand […] absolute nonconformity with established methods of writing, but instead
shows how refreshing a poetry can be which seeks to use, rather than jettison, the social
conventions which make language what it is” (Rathmann).
Billy Collins (2001-2003)
The tremendous popular appeal around both Billy Collins the poet and his poems
causes critics to clash words. He is known for being a circuit-reading crowd pleaser; however,
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when it comes to literary critics, his popularity divides. Jeredith Merrin claimed in 2002 that
Collins has the
[g]enuine popular appeal and critical praise from the right places: this is one variety of
writer’s heaven, and it is any marketing department’s dream.
No recent American
poetry book has been surrounded by anything like the publishing brouhaha that has
surrounded Sailing Around the Room: New and Selected Poems [2001, for which
Collins] accepted a six-figure offer from Random House. (Merrin)
Few contemporary poets achieve anywhere near this level of distribution of their work. “In the
poetry world,” Dwight Garner stated in 2001 “those are Harry Potter numbers” (Garner).
Elizabeth Lund referred to him in 2005 as the “literary pied piper”; in a review of Nine Horses
(2002); Mary Jo Salter stated in the year of this book’s publication, “[t]housands of Americans
are walking around right now with Billy Collins poems in their heads. Or at least that’s my
guess” (Lund, Salter). Collin’s “Introduction to Poetry” (The Apple That Astonished Paris, 1988)
exemplifies the appeal of his work. The poem plays with the idea that poetry has become
estranged from readers. It responds to anxieties readers may have learned about poetry and
encourages readers to relax and enjoy a poem. The speaker entices readers to let the poem
unfold in surprise: “I say drop a mouse into a poem / and watch him probe his way out” (58).
This statement is countered with an assumed training and disposition readers have toward
poetry: “But all they want to do / is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession
out of it,” implying that teachers have taken the joy out of reading (58). Readers “begin beating
it with a hose / to find out what it really means” (58).
The poem also assesses poetry’s
reputation: it requires excruciating focus in order to arrive at some hard-won meaning.
“Introduction to Poetry” suggests an alternative: poetry can also be lighter and read for
enjoyment.
What is appealing to those purchasing his books is that he is a poet of light, or lighter,
verse, rather than a “serious” poet, or whose work is more difficult to read. Garner claimed that
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Collins “presents a different kind of problem” and asks “[w]hat are we to make of a poet who’s
funny almost all of the time?” (Garner). This is a necessary question in the case of Collins’s
work because it receives such passionate responses:
So divided—indeed polarized—are American reviewers of Billy Collins’s work that one
can imagine his poetry providing a similar critical brawl in some university English
Department (now no doubt being renamed the Department of English, Literary Theory,
and Media Studies) where it has proved contentious (O’Driscoll).
A part of what is at stake in Collins’s work is the legitimacy of humor mixed with a texture of
language that is simpler to enter and comprehend. “The Lanyard” (The Trouble with Poetry,
2005) is representative of Collins’s humor. An adult reminisces about summer camp.
The
poem’s opening presents the temperament of an unsettled mind: “The other day I was
ricocheting slowly / off the blue walls of this room, / moving as if underwater from typewriter to
piano, / from bookshelf to envelope lying on the floor, / when I found myself in the L section of
the dictionary / where my eyes fell upon the word “Lanyard” (45). The speaker remembers
making one at camp for his mother. The poem then compares this gift to the gifts of the mother:
“She gave me life and milk from her breasts, / and I gave her a lanyard”; Collin’s builds this
motif by repeating “lanyard” four times, building expectation of the comparison. The poem is
quite conversational: “Here are thousands of meals, she said, / and here is clothing and a good
education. / And here is your lanyard, I replied” (46). The construction of conversation sets up
predictability: the comparison will never be equal and can only be humorously absurd. The
resolution at the end of the poem adequately defines a healthy love and bond between mother
and son: “when she took / the two-toned lanyard from my hand / I was as sure as a boy could
be / that this useless, worthless thing I wove / out of boredom could be enough to make us
even” (46). The implied love that the mother gave while accepting this gift is what has assured
the boy. A mischievous note of his temperament enters the last line as there is a playful
resistance to the relationship between mother and son. That the situation of the poem is so
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universal—everyone has a mother—the poem is a celebration of mother-son love.
The
universality of this theme has wide appeal.
From the sales of his books, it is evident that the reading public appreciates a lighter
side of poetry.
Collin’s poems work against what Dennis O’Driscoll claimed in 2002
predominated in “the university writing programs [whereby] difficulty and obscurity seem more
like literary fashion accessories than manifestations of an ineluctable struggle toward lucidity”
(O’Driscoll). Upon hearing of his appointment of poet laureate, Richard Alleva commented in
2002 on his first reaction: “They’ve actually had the guts to honor someone who writes light
verse? Ogden Nash should have been so lucky!” (Alleva).
For those who do not follow the reading public’s passion for his work, the main
argument against his work is that there’s not too much literary craft under the surface of the
humor. The responses of Garner, Salter, and Merrin are representative of critics who do not
see literary merit in his work. Garner quipped, “Collins’s saving grace—and the reason, one
suspects, the poetry world’s lions haven’t eaten him for lunch—is his casual self-deprecation;
he’s the first to blow good-natured raspberries at his own performances” (Garner). Collins’s
casual, down-to-earth temperament is part of the humor. Salter appealed to literary craft to
justify ambivalence to his work:
you don’t go to Billy Collins for complex metrical effects or rhyme schemes, either of
which might be usefully mnemonic. His pacing and sense of proportion are rhythmic
and graceful, but their effect feels as tossed off and elusive as conversation. Nor can
you turn to Collins for much in the way of assonance, alliteration, wordplay, or even for
a venturesome vocabulary.
It’s fair to say that you wouldn’t want most poets to
disregard so many tools of versification. (Salter)
Despite what some find lacking, the reading public turns to his work in huge crowds. He is
turned to for the joy that he brings to his readings, which are in as much of demand as his
books. “Schoolsville” (1988) is a typical Collin’s poem: narrative, conversational, and humorous
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with a slight touch of the absurd.
The opening of the poem easily appeals to teachers:
“Glancing over my shoulder of the past, / I realize the number of students I have taught / is
enough to populate a small town […] The population ages but never graduates” (7). The poem
kindly jokes about students: “Their grades are sewn into their clothes / like references to
Hawthorne. / The A’s stroll along with other A’s. / The D’s honk whenever they pass another D.
// All the creative writing students recline / on the courthouse lawn and play the lute. / Wherever
they go, they form a big circle. // Needless to say, I am the Mayor.” (8).
Louise Glück (2003-2004)
Criticism
of
Glück’s
work
predominantly
centers
on
her
approximation
to
confessionalism, her themes of intimate relationships, and the degree to which she distances
herself from her subjects. While her works can oftentimes be autobiographical, Helen Vendler,
Robert Miklitsch, Edward Hirsch, Calvin Bedient, James Longenbach, and David Wohan
address the ways in which it differs from the confessional poets. Frequently noted to be filled
with pain, it lacks the directly intimate, emotional attachment to her pain expressed by the
confessionals.
One of the ways that her work differs from the confessions is its marked
distance to the pain displayed. Another difference from a confessional mode of writing is that
her personae are perceived as having endured and survived.
In 1978, Vendler was the first to contrast Glück’s work to the confessionals. Vendler
noted on The House on Marshland (1971), “She sees experience from very far off, almost
through the wrong end of a telescope, transparently removed in space or time. It is this removal
which gives such mythical power” (Vendler).
The sense of removal and distance is one
common thread critics return to in Glück’s work. Vendler saw her work as “far removed from the
more circumstantial poetry written by women poets in the last 10 years even though they have
common themes of familial subjects” (Vendler). Her “obliquity and reserve [offers] an alternative
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to the first-person ‘confession,’ while remaining indisputably personal” (Vendler). “Love Poem”
(1971) describes troubled marriages:
There is always something to be made of pain.
Your mother knits.
She turns out scarves in every shade of red.
They were for Christmas, and they kept you warm
while she married over and over, taking you
along. How could it work,
when all those years she stored her widowed heart
as though the dead came back.
No wonder you are the way you are,
afraid of blood, your women
like one brick wall after another. (33)
This poem addresses a darker side of love: love fails. Love for one person can repeatedly fail.
The narrator speaks directly to an addressee, recounting the challenges of a childhood that
witnessed a series of untenable relationships. This exposure to the darker side of love has
made current life unbearable: learned barriers to intimacy have resulted in the inability to bond.
The addressee has lost the capacity for the vulnerability required to love; in place of
vulnerability, the addressee has become too hardened against the potential to love.
In 1986 Hirsch described the transformation of her work in The Triumph of Achilles
(1985): “Critics like Bedient and Vendler have praised her work for its difficult intensity [and the]
“unswerving imaginative severity and harsh impatience” (Hirsch). While he had once agreed
with these critics, he is now “compelled by Glück’s more open and intimate style and manner”
(Hirsch). In 1991 Bruce Bond found in her subsequent book that “Ararat […] marks a new and
sustained intimacy in her work” (Bond). Also in 1991, Bedient referred to Ararat as “articulated
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depression [although it] doesn’t occur to the language to be anything other than plain and
truthful” (Bedient).
In 1999 James Longenbach noted two continuities of her work. He sees transformation
from book to book: “[c]hange is Louise Glück’s highest value. Each of her books has begun,
she admits, in a ‘conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off’ of the work preceding it’”
(Logenbach). While he notes the formal ingenuity between works, he picks up on what others
have found to be a graduated intimacy in her work: “Glück has railed in her essays against
narcissism in poetry; she has rejected the automatic prestige of forbidden subject matter. And
by exploring the aftermath of a broken marriage in Vita Nova [1999], Glück runs the risk—
knowingly—of seeming merely sincere” (Longenbach). The implication of Longenbach’s note
on her “seemingly sincere” poems is that while closing in on her autobiographical subject, she
lacks emotional range. By his account of her work, her distancing stance toward her subject
lingers in her later work. In 2001 Wohan said of her work,
[a]lthough Glück can often seem disarmingly frank, the writing steers clear of the
garrulousness and confessional self-display. The stance of her work has always [been]
one of stoical candor, a position which has grown even more pronounced since The
Seven Ages [2001] Her pet themes are Larkinesque: Mum and Dad will fuck you up;
love will wither; death will arrive all too quickly, and the solaces of aging will be difficult
to learn. (Wohan)
Tony Hoagland asserted in 2003, “[t]he danger for Glück has always been, and
continues to be, barrenness of texture, a sort of aridity of argument” (Hoagland). For a poet
writing in the age after the confessionals, her work serves as one way in to write the
autobiographical poem: intensely, directly and factually, but from a remove of the personal “I.”
In this remove, Vendler positioned Glück apart from the rest of her peers writing in the
autobiographical mode.
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Kay Ryan (2009-2010)
Dana Gioia gave the first critical look at Ryan’s work. As noted in Chapter One, she
had been outside main literary institutions.
When he came across her work, he noticed
powerful nuances and gave favorable review because of the deftness he found. Since this
initial praise in 1999, attention to her work has culminated in transforming her standing within
contemporary literary institutions more centrally. He claimed, “In order to see how good her
poetry was, a critic would have had to read her unheralded small press books carefully—an
unlikely thing in a country that annually publishes nearly two thousand new collections of poetry”
(“Discovering Kay Ryan,” Gioia). Adam Kirsch described in 2010 the way in which manifold
acclaim followed Gioia’s initial review: “Kay Ryan became a famous poet in much the same way
Ernest Hemmingway described a man going broke: ‘gradually and then suddenly’” (Kirsch).
The degree to which she received attention is evident in Bob Thompson’s 2008 account of her
awards: “Ryan became seriously visible in 2004, when she won both a Guggenheim fellowship
and the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. All this, and now the poet laureateship.” (“Verse,”
Thompson). Paul Lake, Gioia, Thompson and Langdon Hammer attend to the poetic signature
that has given rise to Ryan’s standing in contemporary American poetry.
The poetic signature is one aspect by which poets are measured over the course of
their careers.
As noted by Glück on Pinsky, an early debut of a poet’s work can persist,
perhaps haunt, the evolution of a poet’s oeuvre. Many poets laureate have strong signatures
and are reviewed in light of them—by a continual measure with or against the signature.
Glück’s reputation holds that she continually recreates the presentation of her poetic language
from one book to another. Thus far, Ryan’s signature remains fairly the same and it is her
signature that critics most address. Lake claimed in 2008 that she “developed a poetic voice as
clear and distinctive as the landscapes of California’s San Joaquin Valley and Mojave Desert,
where she was raised” (Lake). While he compares her language to a distinctive geographical
landscape, he does not position her as a landscape artist: she “is not a conventional nature
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poet, but, rather, that all-but extinct species of the literary artist, an allegorist” who has a mix of
“hermetic religiosity” and “a vision permeated by Darwinism” (Lake).
In “Turtle” (Flamingo
Watching, 1994), the speaker asks, “Who would be a turtle who could help it?” The depiction of
a turtle’s life is a metaphor to describe aspects of human behavior, primarily claiming that
humans look to find the easiest solutions to life’s problems. The life of a turtle is harder: “She
can ill afford the chances that she must take” (“Turtle,” Poetry 180). Moving from one condition
of life to another—represented by the awkwardness of a turtle’s body moving from one place to
another—is “graceless” (“Turtle,” 180). Life is difficult: “almost any slope / Defeats her modest
hopes” (“Turtle,” Poetry 180).
The implication here is that humans try to avoid difficult
circumstances in order to give an appearance of aplomb. Further still, the turtle “lives / Below
luck-level, never imagining some lottery” (“Turtle,” Poetry 180). The speaker’s comment on this
aspect of the turtle reveals a human characteristic to avoid a practical life by developing a
fantasy that an outside force will intercede and fulfill dreams. The poem ends with a moral: “Her
only levity is patience / The sport of truly chastened things” (“Turtle,” Poetry 180). Human
behavior can be impulsive and impatient. The lesson is that patience is what raises human
character.
She is far from a confessional poet. Thompson says of her poem “Turtle” that it is “as
personal as a Kay Ryan poem ever gets” (Thompson). Lake defines her style:
The lyrics of her mature style marry the trimeter and tetrameter lines of English lyric
tradition to the more syncopated free verse line of the Pound-Williams-Black Mountain
school. Combining occasional end rhyme and regular meter with the free verse, the
poet compensates for the increased irregularity of her method of formalizing and
enriching the poem’s aural texture with internal rhyme and assonance, to achieve her
signature style.
(Lake)
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The trimeter and tetrameter measures of the line are one of the predominant aspects of her
work. She writes short, compressed lines. “Patience” (Say Uncle, 2000) is formally typical for
much of Ryan’s poems. It is two sentences long and is in twenty-nine lines. The compression
of thought into shorter lines gives the poem a quickened visual rhythm: “Patience is / wider than
one / once envisioned, / with ribbons / of rivers / and distant / ranges and / tasks undertaken /
and finished / with modest / relish by / natives in their / native dress” (12). The quality of sound
is dense: the “n” repeats at the ends of words “one,” “once,” and “envisioned”; the short vowel “i”
echoes among the words “envisioned,” “ribbons,” “rivers” “distant”; the liquid “r” carries over
from “ribbons” to “rivers.” Highly textured aural patterns govern the poem.
A lesson is
eloquently provided with wit: “Who would / have guessed / it possible / that waiting / is
sustainable—” (12). Ryan gives justification of what she finds productive in the shortness of her
work: “I like a lot of exposure. A word on either end of a line has exposure. I like the danger of
that […] [S]hort lines cause the rhyme to bounce around” (Thompson). In 2008 Hammer noted
that “[c]ritics compare her poems to those of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson—Frost because
of their moral seriousness and playful skepticism, and Dickinson because of their small-scale
lyric intensity,” so compact that she rereads her poems to audiences: “they are that intricate and
quick” (Hammer).
The compression of her poems captivates critics. Gioia was “immediately struck” by the
“evident delight she took in playing extravagant games with small units of language [and] by the
[g]enuine wit [that is] rare in contemporary poetry but rarer still combined with brevity”
(“Discovering Kay Ryan,” Gioia). He finds “Dickinson […] the genius loci of her poetry. Like
Dickinson, Ryan has found a way of exploring ideas without losing either the musical impulse or
imaginative intensity necessary to lyric poetry” (Gioia).
As Ryan’s entrance into critical
discussions is relatively new—2004—it will take sustained attention to see the long-term effects
of having such a distinctive style. Reviews by David Yezzi and D.H. Tracy voice possible
drawbacks to her future works.
In 2001 Yezzi lauded her: “Ryan packs more coherent
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argument into two dozen lines of verse than some poets manage in an entire book, but with no
sacrifice to feeling of poetic invention” (“Review,” Yezzi). An issue at hand is whether or not a
poet needs to alter style; and with the favorable reviews of Ryan’s work, perhaps it does not
matter if a poet changes form over the course of her career. In 2006 Tracy poses the issue
another way: “The poems in Niagara River are identical to those of several years ago, and
although I wouldn’t advocate innovation for its own sake, it would be a shame to see her settle
into the role of monotonous original like Dickinson or Ashbery” (Tracy). “Shame” is an odd term
to mention in reference to holding a strong poetic style. Both of these poets have distinctive
signatures, to say the least.
Dickinson and Ashbery are American classics, historical and
contemporary.
A poet’s literary signature is as recognizable as artistic signatures in the visual arts.
Works of Picasso, Mondrian, and Pollock, for instance, are immediately identifiable and
distinguishable. Poet’s signatures are just as immediately identifiable. A current debate on
signatures centers on the degree to which a poet should transform a personal style over time.
These poets are still composing and publishing poems. Future publications will indicate the
degree to which their signature changes. Reviews of their works will continue to position them
within contemporary poetry. Sustained attention of their works will build upon a literary history
of national laureateship. Literary history is only one aspect of the laureateship. A primary
reason each has been appointed is merit of their work. The trend in the laureateship continues
to shift to those who will take more of an activist stance toward promoting the reading and
writing of poetry. Even though each is only given one to two years of tenure, many have
devised projects that bring poetry to the reading public, primarily outside of the university.
Some have chosen not to devise a project. There have been varying degrees of success with
each project. The following Chapter outlines the trend of activism in laureateship and evaluates
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the potential of each to reach the public and raise awareness of the reading and writing of
poetry.
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CHAPTER 5
PROJECTS OF THE US LAUREATES
Each US laureate has the freedom to sculpt their roles according to his or her own
desire. Each appointed laureate has had varying degrees of involvement in promoting poetry
through projects intended to raise awareness of the reading and writing of poetry. Some have
chosen not to create a project at all. But for those who designed projects, they offered different
ways to engage the American public.
One aspect needed to sustain them is interest by
individuals to implement and adapt them to local needs. Such attention to promoting laureates’
projects is a middle position required to execute public awareness in poetry as created by
national laureates. Without individual interest to materialize the projects locally, they stand
merely as offerings or conceptual attitudes toward a public outreach for creating poetry
communities.
Poetry teachers are in positions to adapt programs as a social poetry pedagogy. Such
adaptation would allow for students to see how poetry functions not only in the classroom, but
also in society. One function poetry has in society is to form literary communities. A viable
option for these programs is for them to become part of classroom curriculum. Adapting the
programs as methods of poetry pedagogy would result in several outcomes.
One visible
outcome is for students to experience how literature lives in society and how different
individuals and communities respond to poetry. Another outcome is to observe and evaluate the
effectiveness of each project.
As to date, there is not a systematic way to assess the
effectiveness of these programs. Stated another way, there is minimal visibility of where the
programs have been established, who has participated in them, and the successes and
obstacles of each. Individual projects offer varying degrees in the plausibility that they can be
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sustained into the future. This Chapter reviews the activist trend of the laureateship. It argues
that the trend in the laureateship established an activist approach to enhancing poetry
appreciation for the American public and that each project has varying degrees of potential to
sustain itself into the future. Several laureates responded to this trend by designing a social
poetry pedagogy that could potentially enhance experiences of reading and writing; however,
most projects currently lack an evaluation process that could determine the effectiveness of
each.
The Role of Laureate Heightens Interest in Poetry
Warren saw his role as that of a figurehead. His dry humor about the position brims at
the press conference held for his appointment. The Christian Science Monitor recounts his
reply when asked if the laureateship would help bring awareness to poetry. Warren said, “I
don’t know. I can tell you that it’s not going to reduce it” (Sweeney). Louise Sweeney stated
that Warren talked with the press “as if to a class consisting of some extremely bright and some
extremely backward students” (Sweeney). Sweeney did not account for the role that Warren
had already held for poetry. As a young man at Vanderbilt, he was a crucial and active member
of the Fugitives. Warren, Tate and Brooks formulated a relationship with poetry based on close
reading. He could have been responding not so much to the question, but to a rudimentary lack
of knowing his literary and scholarly achievements. At this time in the laureateship, the trend
toward activism in raising awareness had not established.
The earliest laureates brought
interest to the newly formed poetry position at the Library of Congress.
Wilbur’s comments on his appointment indicated public interest in the laureateship as
well as to poetry. He claimed, “Frankly, I’ve found it both delightful and harassing to get as
much attention [...] but what I’m really grateful for is not all the attention to me, but to poetry
(Kastor). He held particular opinions about the agency of poetic language. He correlated the
elevation of language with the elevation of the soul. The effects of an un-elevated language
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concerned him: “He bemoans the need to convey information quickly in a classroom, a pressure
that compels professors to ‘settle for second-rate language all day. You settle for whichever
words come to you. That erodes the soul’” (Kastor). For Wilbur poetic language nurtured the
soul. He saw his laureateship as the opportunity to curate poetry readings: he “[hoped] his work
[would] be limited largely to selecting poets to read their works at the Library of Congress”
(Molotsky). In placing his focus on poetry readings, he maintained the role of the Consultant in
Poetry to the Library of Congress. His take on laureateship did not differ much from the position
that preceded it.
Interestingly and humorously, Nemerov viewed himself in the role of laureateship before
the position was even created. In an interview with The New York Times, Nemerov says, “Look
up some of my collected poems, [...] There’s a poem there titled ‘From the Desk of the
Laureate: For Immediate Release’ [...] I was figuring myself in the position of the English poet
laureate. We didn’t have one in this country” (Mitgang). A poet assuming the position of
laureateship, humorously or seriously, came from the tradition of it holding the dual role of poet
and statesman. Such sentiment comes from pronouncements made by Sidney and Shelley that
“poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
While some poets and critics
reference Auden’s line “poetry makes nothing happen,” there is an established tradition
recognizing the connection between poetry and politics. Nemerov’s comment plays off of the
historical tension between the two perceptions: that the role of the poet politically does and does
not matter. Nemerov is known for using humor. While he publically drew connections between
poetry and politics, he did not engage in the role of poet acting as statesman. He did not form a
program for poetry. Rather, he executed his role as a mentor to youth.
He began mentoring youth, catching the eye of journalists. The Library of Congress’
Gazette memorializes Nemerov’s teaching style in an obituary for him. It described his zest for
humor and teaching. During one of his lectures to high school students, Nemerov personified a
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quote from James Madison, a quote he found in the Madison Building of the Library of
Congress:
What spectacle can be more edifying than that of liberty and learning, each leaning on
the other for their mutual and surest support? [Picture] two old cronies, Liberty and
Learning, staggering down the street together, laughing and talking and leaning on
each other. (Fineberg)
As with overseeing the reading series for the Library of Congress, mentoring youth became a
part of the tradition of the laureateship.
Mass Distribution of Books
Joseph Brodsky was the first to create a national project: The American Poetry and
Literacy Project.
He “championed the idea that poetry should be made accessible to all
Americans (“American Poetry and Literacy Project”).
This project intended for a mass
distribution of poetry books. The success of the APL was that it dispersed a tremendous
number of books:
Since it was created in 1993, the APL Project has distributed more than 1,000,000 free,
brand new poetry books in schools, hotels, subway and train stations, hospitals, jury
waiting rooms, supermarkets, truck stops, day-care centers, airports, zoos, and other
public venues nationwide. (“American Poetry and Literacy Project”)
The choices of these wide-ranging communities are impressive.
Before the ability of the
Internet to distribute poetry to an unprecedented number of people, Brodsky’s project sought to
reach a visionary and compelling number of readers. This far reach to different communities
also indicated the passion by which Brodsky wanted to bring poetry to the public. Since the
inception of the APL Project, there have been other contributions to execute his vision. They
are highly creative: “In 1999, the APL Project placed more than 40,000 copies of Songs for the
Open Road: Poems of Travel & Adventure in Volkswagen Bugs” (“American Poetry and Literacy
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Project”). The thematic play added to the idea of distributing poetry potentially gave an extra
element of delight. Other takes on his project have been equally creative: in 2000, “100,000
[books were distributed] to American Airlines”; an international book of poetry was distributed at
the 2002 Olympics; the APL “has also collaborated with Yellow Pages publishers to feature
poetry in their directories” (“American Poetry and Literacy Project”).
There are a few drawbacks to this project.
The first problem is evident in the
description of this project’s activity. The American Poetry and Literacy Project is a featured
website of the Academy of American Poets. Documented activity ranges from the project’s
inception in 1993 to the last description of a book giveaway at the 2002 Olympics. If there have
been more recent activity, it is not documented, suggesting that the APL Project is a sporadic
event. Another problem is that it does not have a clear method for continued funding, other
than one line written at the bottom of the website page encouraging “individuals or corporations
[to underwrite] a giveaway of books” (“American Poetry and Literacy Project”).
It lacks a
statement for a capitol campaign; continuing to give away the number of books it has indicated
would incur a significant amount of financial need over ten, twenty or thirty years. The project
as presented on the website is not financially solvent. Another drawback is that it is run by
volunteers, so these events are subject to the waxing and waning of individual interest in
carrying forth the APL Project.
The poetry teacher could take on the role of sustaining this project by requesting books
for giveaway. The requirement of the APL Project is that books are only sent to non-profit
organizations. This requirement would thus form a literary community between the institution in
which the teacher works and one of its local, non-profit organizations. This community would
allow for a common interest in improving literacy on local levels. The problem of this form of
social poetry pedagogy is that there are no outcomes stated for what the book giveaway attends
to achieve.
For instance, there is no method to track who receives the books or verbal
testimony of what the person does with the book. It is commendable to make books more
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accessible to the general reading public.
Accessible in this context means connecting the
physical book to readers: “[f]ormer Poet Laureate and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodksy has
long dreamed of making poetry easily accessible to persons in all walks of life. He came closer
to reaching his goal with the distribution of [an anthology of poetry]” (Ohnemus).
Brodsky had
long been ardently devoted to poetry and wanted to share this devotion with others.
He
believed that “[poetry books] should be as ubiquitous as the nature that surrounds you...This is,
after all, a country of mass production, and I don’t see why what’s been done for cars can’t be
done for books of poetry which can take you quite a bit farther” (Ohnemus). People happening
upon a free book may greatly benefit from having done so. However, there is no evidence that
those who happen upon a free book will read or even keep it. If the mission of a laureateship is
to raise the appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry, there is little value of implementing
this project as a method for social poetry pedagogy. After the event of a book giveaway, there
is little for students to learn about how a free book functions in society, how it is read, or the
impact that it has on the individual or community. “Poetry” and “literacy” are two terms in the
project’s name. The problem is that there is no method provided for improving poetry literacy.
The implied method, if this is a method for literacy education, is that a person has the
opportunity to read should he or she happen upon a free poetry book.
One way in which this project could be improved would be to create some form of
communication venue in which readers could share personal testimony. This would create a
method for determining who received a poetry book, what the experience of happening upon a
free poetry book was like, and what happened to the book after the event of the book giveaway.
Without personal stories of how the book giveaway impacts the individual or community, this
project remains a good intention with little poetry pedagogy value.
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Calling All Citizens: Town Meetings
Dove built on a momentum initiated by Brodsky: to reach a wider audience. Upon her
appointment, she stated, “It’s exciting to think about what I can do to make a difference in the
Washington area and throughout the country” (Molotsky, “Rita Dove Named”). The Washington
Post explained why she valued this goal:
[she] believes that poetry brings to the nation something that all history books, statistics
and public documents cannot capture, something the Germans call Zeitgeist: the heart,
the spirit and soul of the times [...] ‘In this age of pop personality and fleeting celebrity, I
believe that the poet laureate has the duty to try and reclaim lost public ground for
serious literature.’” (Larson)
That poetry itself is uniquely tied to the soul is a widely established literary tradition held by
poets from many ages and across many cultures. Warren, Brodsky and Dove are laureates that
believed poetry elevates, enlightens, and restores the soul. Not only did Dove follow this line of
aesthetics, she viewed the role of the poet—and the national poet—as one who was obligated
to share the gift of poetry with others. Dove looked to media to recapture an audience for
serious literature, a literature that Wilbur would say elevates the soul.
She held
“teleconferences with schools and other institutions, as well as ‘poetry videos’ to reach
members of the MTV generation (Larson). Her method of activism brought mentorship to not
only individuals, but also to communities. She claimed that “[w]e live in a global village, but it’s
a very public global village. It gives us a lot of information, but it neglects what we can’t see and
hear [...] Poetry makes us aware of the interior life all of us share” (Larson). While we may not
be able to “see” and “hear” the workings of this inner life, Dove believed that poetry gave eye
and ear to facilitate our awareness of this interior life to what we otherwise may not be attuned
to: the interconnectedness of all things, that which makes us most human.
Dove was appointed for a second term for a couple of reasons. Billington noted that
she had “more ideas for elevating poetry in the nation’s consciousness than there is time to
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carry out in one year” (“Poet Laureate”).
The Library of Congress championed her for
enhancing “diversity”: “She has made many public appearances, given countless interviews,
and greatly increased the diversity of poets and writers” (“Poet Laureate”). The other purpose
of her reappointment for a second term stemmed from the scope of her 1994 plans for poetry
activism:
I had some fairly large ideas of things I wanted to get done. One year just wasn’t
enough. We are planning an environmental symposium for Earth Day. We’ll get all
types of people together, not just writers: scientists, artists, maybe even politicians. I
also have some plans for a ‘Poetry Town Meeting’ using television to reach children in
schools and rural areas. We need to show that the audience for poetry is not just
people who study it all their lives. (Poet Laureate)
For Dove, the poet is the nexus for bringing together different communities. The “Poetry Town
Meeting” is indicative that she also followed the historical view that the poet is an
“unacknowledged legislator of the world.” By fusing ideas of activism such as for Earth Day with
a Town Meeting, she is also aiming for an audience that is intergenerational.
Lobbying for Poetry and Earth
While Dove planned environmental symposium for Earth Day; Hass created poetry
programming centrally figuring sustainability. He designed a project that “brought together [...] a
week long series of events titled ‘Watershed: Writers, Nature, and Community,’ a large group of
notable nature writers [...] to participate in dialogs and panel discussions, and to give readings
in the week leading up to Earth Day (Librarian of Congress). Hass, like Dove, valued the “duty”
that the role of poet laureate holds. He stated “I get to lobby for mind and heart. I don’t think
they’re in danger, but I think the country is in danger in relation to them” (Weeks).
This
sentiment echoes all poets who value the restorative aspect of poetry. For Hass, what is linked
in his form of community outreach is a personal connection to environmental education. As
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many of his poems focus on environmental themes, what he made visible was the connection
between our internal worlds and the environment. The caveat underlying his statement is that
our country is in danger if the connection between ourselves, country, and environmental justice
is not made. As Hass is an acclaimed translator, he made a metaphor for what he would do
during his laureateship: “[I] hoped as poet laureate to do some more translation, to translate the
excitement of American literature into something everyone can understand” (Weeks). Hass’s
endeavor was to demystify the relationship between self and poem, between self and world.
He created two national environmental projects that are based in Berkeley, California.
They can be integrated into any community. River of Words and Watershed are two initiatives
pairing poetry with environmentalism. ROW offers many services for youth K-12 and hosts an
annual “international poetry and art contest for youth on the theme of watersheds (River of
Words).
Workshops are available to schedule in any locale; ROW provides numerous
resources for youth to research science from the tracking of birds and ocean creatures via
NASA to navigating an online EPA site in order to find their own watershed. In addition to the
workshops, ROV works to connect schools with its local environmental organizations. The
purpose of this national project is “to help youth explore the natural and cultural history of the
place they live, and to express, through poetry and art, what they discover” (River of Words). A
th
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grade English teacher who implemented this curriculum in South Carolina began
collaborating with a science teacher. Students fused learning nature poetry alongside studying
their watershed. They took a field study in their national park while they wrote poems on site:
they were instructed to “drink in your surroundings as a scientist and as a poet” (River of
Words). The workshops for teachers enable them to help students “incorporate observationbased nature exploration and the arts” (River of Words). Conjoining science with the production
of art allows students to develop creative-thinking skills while studies in science inform their
expression in the visual arts and poetry. There is an annual contest for different age groups;
the winners are published and given the opportunity to share their work in Washington, DC.
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Other outcomes of this initiative show the strength of this literary national project. Some of the
outcomes include “community partnerships in support of education and watersheds, creek
clean-ups and restorations, student poetry clubs and art exhibitions, oral history projects, school
gardens and Girl Scout Watershed patches, developed in conjunction with the US EPA” (River
of Words).
The Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival was created as a “project to inspire and
heal with poetry and community” (Watershed). The connection between poem and reader,
readers and communities establishes how poetry makes contexts out of communities—that
poetry is a social event, not just intended for an isolated reading and a discussion in the
classroom. From these contexts, fusing the value between poetry and environment can give
rise to sustainability. Taken together, ROV and the Watershed project make the connection
between literature and science. This connection helps people build caring relationships for the
environment, starting at an early age, and lasting beyond high school.
The range of
communities that Watershed brings together reflects models and initiatives of communities that
could be made elsewhere in the US:
Poetry Flash, Ecology Center/Berkeley Farmer’s Market, EcoCity Builders, California
Poets in the Schools. Local poets of Mariposa/Earth Native Environmental Witness
Campaign [...] poets, musicians, and environmentalists [come together] to celebrate
mindfulness of nature on this small, rolling earth. (Watershed)
Hass says of this collaborative project, “We started the Watershed Festival because we believe
that there is profound work of healing to do in this next century” (Watershed). Watershed
educates through poetry and encourages activism for both literacy and environment
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Gathering Readers
Right away Pinsky took on his laureateship with an energetic thrust for poetry
programming that effectively gathered readers. This energy resulted in his re-appointment of
second and third terms so that he could complete his ambitious vision:
In his first term, Robert Pinsky has actively encouraged a national renaissance of
spoken poetry [...] His vision of recording a broad cross section of Americans reading
their favorite poems has met with heartfelt enthusiasm throughout the country. The
Library looks forward to enriching its unique poetry archives with the recordings he
selects in his second term. (French)
He sparked a renaissance and poetry programming that has become most well known from all
laureates thus far, the Favorite Poem Project. People from all over the nation replied by sending
in copies of their favorite poems; he composed videos of a “broad cross-section of Americans”
by having them recite their poem and relate the poem to their lives. The Favorite Poem Project
also has a community outreach component in that anyone can establish a FPP reading; the
organization has guidelines for those interested in holding this event. The video project also
highlights such readers as former laureates and political leaders such as former President
Clinton and current Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton:
Mr. Pinsky also initiated what he hopes will become a tradition among the Laureates,
the printing of a poem by a former Laureate in decorative broadside form. At the White
House on April 22, President and Mrs. Clinton each read a poem and announced that
the Favorite Poem Project would be a part of the nation’s Millennium Celebration.
(French)
This renaissance both visibly established a tradition of honoring poets laureate and the literary
history of the involvement of politicians with poetry and poets. Politicians have a long history of
incorporating poetry into speeches. Pinsky saw this project as particularly democratic because
it is the individual voice enacting a communal—shared—poem whereby intonation and inflection
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sing through the person’s favorite poem; the person then draws from how the poem actively
instructs life. Pinsky says, “To see many Americans of various ages, accents and professions
each saying a poem aloud clarifies the power of poetry and enhances a communal spirit [...] to
some degree, it helps remind us of who we are (French). The effect of such diversity is a
measure by which the London Economist, mentioned in Chapter One, can hear what it means
to have American voices representing a nation of poetry. Pinsky’s voice in his position gave
rise to a plethora of voices and made a resurgence and a public forum for celebrating poetry.
Pinsky was a charismatic presence not only in the Poetry Office, but in person. His playful
personality shines through an anecdote: “Who is this man who has been Poet Laureate for the
past year? He revealed some things about himself at the reading, including his sense of humor.
He related how he sometimes leaves all but the punch line of a joke on immediate past Poet
Laureate Robert Hass’s answering machine in order to ensure a call back” (French). He was a
laureate with great humor and seriousness about preserving poetry.
One of the assumptions that his charisma and dedication to poetry dispelled is the
poet’s role in society:
Because of our nature as a people, poetry lacks a true social or cultural cachet. It’s
vaguely aristocratic and associated with class and grand airs and institutions, things we
tend to distrust as Americans.
An interest in poetry doesn’t affiliate one with the
national culture (as it does in Poland, say) since we don’t have a true national culture.
In some ways that’s bad. Yet it’s also part of our nature as Americans to have summer
writing conferences, creative writing programs, poetry slams, rap music—an array of
things that are indigenous, synthesized, improvised nonce customs to accommodate
that art that surprisingly many Americans have in common. (Feeney)
It can be the case that some bristle at poetry because it has sometimes associated with elitism,
a phenomenon that stems from a need for more to demystify the art of poetry for others
because poetry is for all, and it is certainly not a reading practice for the “elite,” whoever they
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are. And yet poetry finds ways of reaching across these assumptions by turning up, as Pinsky
notes, in indigenous ways, indicating an impulse toward poetry that we all share.
Ralph
Blumenthal addressed why some may hold presuppositions against poetry: “Although poetry
seems to be in some vogue, cropping up in movies and ever more popular public readings, Mr.
Pinsky said it was still widely manhandled in schools” (Blumenthal). Many have had early
exposure to poetry that did not fully address Arnold’s perception that poetry both instructs and
delights. It seems as though some value poetry for the instruction and leave out the joy it gives.
Pinsky noted,
Teachers have pedagogically treated poems as an occasion to say something smart
[...] But poetry [...] is as simple as art on an individual scale, its medium a single human
voice. That [...] is the secret of poetry’s immense power in an age of arts dominated by
mechanical reproduction. (Blumenthal).
One of the elements that Pinsky’s renaissance addressed is the inculcation of joy with poetry: it
instructs the individual’s life as lived and is individuated through her or his distinct voice. Each
person’s voice individualizes and gives testimony to the power of poetry. Pinsky, like Brodksy,
followed a particular trajectory of an attitude toward poetry that verged on both the spiritual and
the material: “Where Brodsky had been a tribune to poetry, Dove and Hass were the
evangelists, keeping up a hectic pace of speaking engagements and readings [...] Pinsky has
continued the post’s evangelical tradition” (Feeney).
The evangelical tradition that he
perpetuated is part of the energy behind his project’s initiatives, and part of his belief in the
power of poetry. Pinsky claimed, “The longer I live [...] the more I see there’s something about
reciting rhythmical words aloud—it’s almost biological—that comforts and enlivens human
beings” (Feeney).
Brodsky publically made the connection between poetry and biology:
elevated locution is our “genetic goal.” Should one not see the connection between poetry,
rhythm, and the restorative power of poetry, one need only reflect on some religions’
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incorporation of poetry’s healing attributes such as realized in Native American ceremonies like
the Navajo Night Chants.
The role of the laureate from figurehead to activist has come a long way from Warren to
Pinsky.
The early appointments of laureateship did not see its role as that of an activist.
Warren said,
‘Life will go on exactly as before’ [when he was first appointed.] Joseph Brodsky, who
held the post in 1991 and 1992, changed all that [...] Few people have had a keener
firsthand knowledge of the power of poetry: how it can both sustain the individual and
harry the state. Brodsky saw the position ‘as an advocacy position.’ (Feeney)
It makes sense that someone who was forced to work in a labor camp understood the
transcendent power of poetry. In order for Pinsky to fully envision the Favorite Poem Project, a
special year of poet laureateship held four poets at once so that he could devote his time to this
project while Dove, Glück and Merwin took on other duties: holding readings, bringing poets to
DC, and giving lectures.
Boston University, where Pinsky teaches, helped him materialize his project. There are
several components of this project, one of which is a video series of individuals reading or
reciting a poem and then commenting on how the poem is personally meaningful. Readers are
filmed within a meaningful context that brings in textures and layers to the video that give visual
nuances to the poem. Pinsky believes that poetry is the most bodily of all art forms. He
describes this art form in his book that addresses the FPP: Democracy, Culture, and the Voice
of Poetry: “it is deeply embedded in the single human voice, in the solitary state that hears the
other and sometimes re-creates that other. Poetry is a vocal imagining, ultimately social but
essentially individual and inward” (39). The body is the instrument, is the medium for poetry.
He goes so far as to claim that “[t]he stylized, mimetic component, interacting with the
discursive component, resembles the kind of cognition athletes call 'body knowledge' or
musicians refer to 'getting it under your fingers'” (48).
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Beyond recognizing that sounds form
bodily experience, he offers a speculation on the effects of having such 'body knowledge': “Why
and how might a professional soldier like Ulysses S. Grant come to write so well? Could it
reflect the fact that nineteenth-century Americans recited a lot of poetry, so that the mimesis of
meaning came into the region we designate as in our bones or under our skin?” (49). While this
statement is only a speculation, the possible consequences of recitation are profound. It makes
a certain sense that as a mode of memory, recitation would embed systems of logic and
rhetorical structures of language.
The Favorite Poem Project website offers 50 videos of individuals reciting or reading
poems and commenting on why a selected poem is personally meaningful. One film is of John
Ulrich reading Gwendolyn Brooks's “We Real Cool.” The film shows him walking in his south
Boston neighborhood and smoking a cigarette before showing him inside his kitchen with his
mother who is chopping vegetables. Photographs of his family are shown while he discusses
how their “unconditional love” is what saved him from his high school experience in south
Boston. He first read “We Real Cool” in the midst of what he calls a “cluster of despair”: six
suicides and five heroin overdoses. He said that the poem simply made a lot of sense during
this time of despair. Inspired to make a difference to this destruction of his peers, he cofounded South Boston Survivors, a program that creates programs for youth by turning the
focus away from despair and toward creativity and art. He recites the poem on a rooftop, which
exposes the neighborhood of south Boston. His recitation of this poem relays a particular
Bostonian accent, infusing this poem with the individual's experience of this poem both vocally
and in a particular context. One difference that can be brought out is the difference in quality of
vocal color from Brooks. His recitation pace is fairly equally measured within the distinction of
his accent. When Brooks reads this poem, she half sings and elongates the first word “real”
and she shortly clips the word “we” that ends the lines, which sounds like a rhyme of “with.”
In addition to the videos, The Favorite Poem Project has other programming. One
encourages teachers to develop methods of teaching by attending Summer Poetry Institutes,
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which are taught by leading American poets-scholars.
Some of its past participates have
provided online lesson plans. On the importance of poetry, Pinsky states, “[p]oetry connects us
with our deep roots [...] our evolution as an animal that created rhythmic language as a means
of transmitting information across the generations” (Favorite Poem Project). Another is to hold
a poetry reading, following the premise of the poem film: a reading that stresses the relationship
between articulating the connections between poem and the reader. The poetry reading should
have great diversity among readers. As the overall portrait of readers from the poem films is
intergenerational with great difference in profession and other backgrounds, the same diversity
in the selection of readers is the aim of the poetry reading:
A broad range of readers, from school children to elected officials, makes for a lively
event. You may solicit readers from schools, religious and civic organizations, programs
such as Poets-in-the-Schools, etc. A variety of backgrounds, languages other than
English, different kinds of education and profession, all add variety and interest.
(Favorite Poem Project)
The interest that is brought to such a diversity of readers is not merely for those that specialize
in poetry and poetics. Poetry is for all.
Housing Poets and Poems
Kunitz applauded Pinsky's activism and noted that he will not take up such an active
role: "It was a remarkable performance, and nobody will ever duplicate it," Kunitz said.
"Naturally, I don't intend to be - how shall I phrase it? - sedentary, though I have no intention of
being as much of an activist as Robert has been” (Feeney). As a former Poetry Consultant to
the Library of Congress, he shared the view stated in The London Economist, that there cannot
be one voice representing the nation: "[m]y initial reaction when Congress passed the law [...]
was that no one can be poet laureate. . . We are such a diversified culture that to assume one is
actually the poet laureate of the American people is vainglorious [...] But one does the best one
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can” (Feeney).
His role, like Warren's, was more of a literary symbol: he represents a lifetime
of dedication to poetry. Peter Davison said, “Stanley is going to hold the office as a symbol of
dedication to a life in poetry. He has been a symbol, and a guide, to a couple of generations of
poets already” (Feeney). Kunitz had long been dedicated to the craft of poetry and has long
been a part of the community of poets early on in his career:
Just out of college, Kunitz sent a sheaf of his poems to Marianne Moore at The Dial, the
most distinguished American literary magazine of the '20s. She wrote back, 'We shall
be delighted to publish them.' Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke were two of his
best friends. Allen Ginsberg sought out Kunitz to read a pre-publication version of
"Howl." His students and protégés include such well-known poets as Carolyn Kizer,
James Wright, Louise Glück, and Robert Hass. (Feeney)
Not only has he viewed the role of the poet as that of a mentor, he like several former poets
laureate, understood the connection between poetry and politics. Although he had declared
conscientious objection to WW2 and was nonetheless drafted, he continued to protest the war:
“He got his revenge on the military 20 years later when he and Lowell organized the protest
against the Vietnam War in 1965 that turned the White House Arts Festival into what he once
proudly termed 'a passionate fiasco'” (Feeney). As laureate he returned to DC to represent the
nation in a symbolic gesture.
Kunitz was known for living the life of a poet; and in doing so, he created several
environments for poets and poetry. His activism preceded his appointment to laureateship and
is notable here because it vivifies the life of the poet who is deeply engaged in fostering proper
conditions under which poets and poetry may flourish. He is the founder of The Poet's House in
New York City and The Fine Arts Work Center in Providence. Taken together, they are outlets
that nurture poets as well as venues to bring poetry to the general public. He had a calling for
both writing poems and for sustaining it in society. Pinsky said of Kunitz, “There is no doubt or
irony about the central importance of poetry for the human spirit. [Kunitz] manifests that loftiness
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of calling in every line and sentence” (Feeney). It is through Kunitz responding to his calling to
poetry that he influenced so many poets and readers from early publication in Dial, personal
mentorship of eminent poets, political activism in DC, and creating spaces in which poets could
develop their talent and bring the light of poetry to the general public. So while he may not have
held an activist role during his tenure, his symbolic role is that of an advocate for poetry.
Kunitz split his time between NYC and Providence, RI, where he established institutions
in both locations. In 1985 he established The Poets House in NYC, which has tremendous
programming for fostering communities. As a poet laureate, he represents the role of the poet
whose activism several poets laureate reflect: “Kunitz was instrumental in shaping the poetry
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communities of the 20 century, inspiring younger poets through his writing, activism, teaching
and special projects” (Poets House). The Poets House holds 50,000 poetry books and has
several key programs that benefit the general public. One is The Showcase, which is an exhibit
of all poetry books published within the year, providing “writers, readers and publishers with a
fascinating vantage point from which to assess publishing and design trends and linguistic,
aesthetic and philosophical shifts” in poetry (Poets House). Part of the difficulty of assessing
contemporary poetry is that it is neither readily sold in bookstores, nor readily available in
libraries. Further, too few bookstores and libraries offer a wide range in literary magazines.
Throughout the year, The Poets House presents 200 programs for the public, which
covers single-author analysis, explorations of poetry in languages other than English, lectures
on the craft of poetry, conversations on poetic theory, and creative writing workshops. Taken
together, these programs are models other literary centers can adopt and develop. In addition
to extensive programming, The Poets House has a national outreach, which focuses on
enhancing poetry communities through libraries: “We are committed to working with librarians
across the country to encourage familiarity with the diversity of contemporary poetry, and
understanding of poetry's unique ability to engage young people, bring together communities
and transform individual lives” (Poets House). Through its training of librarians, poetry becomes
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more prominently and perpetually visible in the library, while offering numerous events for the
public.
Well before the creation of The Poets House, Kunitz was a part of a group of writers
and artists, such as Robert Motherwell, who established “the country's oldest continuous arts
colony” in 1968 (Fine Arts Work Center). The founders understood the inspirational spark
created by community: they “believed that the freedom to pursue creative work within a
community of peers was the best catalyst for artistic growth” (Fine Arts Work Center). One of
the attractions of the colony is that it is a community of not only poets and writers, but also
painters, and other artists. Conversations across the arts deliver an inspiration and vantage
point that cannot be reached if the community is solely poets. The FAWC has a tremendous
impact locally. Throughout the year, studio openings and poetry readings are shared with the
local community; artists and poets also spend time teaching in public schools. Some of the
poets are from its low-residency MFA program that is awarded from the Massachusetts College
of Art. From these projects, the activities and artistic growth from the colony extend this growth
to its local community.
Poetry in High Schools
Collins certainly valued the connection between the laureateship and public outreach.
He
claimed,
The news of the laureateship is still very new and I haven't done a spreadsheet. I hope
to put my own spin on it, to add my touch to the laureateship. How that is going to be
done except for activism and engagement in Washington I'm not sure yet. I'm all for a
wide number of people reading poetry and I've tried to make that clear in every poem
I've ever written (Sciolino).
Once he settled into the laureateship, he devised a project that targets high school readers.
Poetry 180, a project of now two poetry anthologies, are intended to be read aloud each day
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over high-school intercoms. The poems are as approachable as the ones he writes and have
been attacked for being too popular, too “accessible.” The ambivalent reception of his poems
centers on having an “accessible” poetry: “Many poets and critics consider him one of the
greatest living American poets.
Others find his poetry too cute by half” (Weeks).
Collins
defends his poetics: “Anyone can be hard to understand—a 3-year old or a drunk. What is rare
and difficult is the ability to be clear and mysterious at the same time” (Weeks). The balance
between simplicity and art may be a difficult balance to hold. This appraisal of Collins’s works,
expressed again by Dwight Garner, an editor at the New York Times Book Review [is that]
'Collins writes like a man with a pile of those poetry refrigerator magnet sets who happened to
get pretty handy with them,” which reveals the anxiety that popular appeal to the general public
threatens “serious art” (Weeks). Collins's poems teeter between the two and critics' appraisal
fall on either side, debasing the popular and praising his craft. There is also an implication here
that some critics resist a poetry designated for a general public, for a public to hold more
“ownership” of poetry than the critic. There is resistance of a popular appeal of poetry
Collins believed that sentiments against poetry are learned through poor teaching.
Collins's project was to work against poor poetry pedagogy: “The fault, then lies partly with the
way poetry is taught, and partly with the way it is read; but for Collins, a large degree of the
blame falls also on the shoulders of poetry itself—at least of poetry, which, as he sees it, courts
pompous fantasies of abstruseness and of erudition” (Keep it Simple). Collins's project aims to
demystify poetry for a young readership. He also suggested that the poems be read over the
intercom for enjoyment and that teachers should resist analyzing them. He wanted youth to be
exposed to poems that are readily approachable: I use the term “approachable” because
“accessible” is a term frequently used to define such a poetics. “Accessible” is a term that
Collins rails against: “Collins doesn't like the word 'accessible', preferring the warmer
'hospitable'—the notion of accessibility makes him think [...] of a ramp for people challenged by
poetry—but it is slung at him regularly all the time, along with less kind designations” (Keep it
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Simple). He does not want to have people thinking of themselves as “challenged by poetry”; his
project is one of demystification: poetry can be both instructive and readily enjoyable. For
poetry pedagogy, he aligns more with Pinsky who states that teachers tend to resort to poetry in
order to say something intelligent.
Collins states, “A great time for the readings would be following the end of daily
announcements over the public address system” (Poetry 180). The meaning of the title is a […]
turning back—in this case, to poetry. The idea behind Poetry 180 is simple: to have a poem
read each day to the students of American high schools across the country” (Poetry 180). Much
like Pinsky, he encouraged the selection of readers to be as diverse as possible—all those who
are associated with the school: students, teachers, librarians, janitors, administrators.
He
suggested that the poems be posted on a bulletin board, and archived in the library. Research
on the poem remains a possibility, but only at the request of individual students. He drew a fine
line on how teachers should handle the poems during the day. He wanted teachers to resist
discussing them, resist analysis. The goal was that it would become natural for poetry to a part
of a daily routine—that its presence would be expected. The website poses the question, “Why
Poetry 180,” to which the reply is that “hearing a poem every day, especially well-written
contemporary poems that students do not have to analyze, might convince students that poetry
can be understandable, painless and even an eye-opening part of their everyday experience”
(Poetry 180).
There are two other aspects of Poetry 180 for bringing poetry back into public schools.
One aspect is that it offers strategies for recitation: “a poem will live or die depending how it is
read” (Poetry 180). Collins advised teachers to resist analyzing the poems; however he did
suggest that the poems be handed out ahead of the time so that the readers could look up
words in a dictionary and practice recitation with the teacher. He believed that “a poem cannot
be read too slowly” (Poetry 180). Another aspect is that Poetry 180 features the Poetry and
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Literature online resources at The Library of Congress. This center features numerous angles
on poetry and literature with research already gathered by librarians.
A possible detraction of Poetry 180 is the content of some of the poems. Poems are
offered online for free; there are also two anthologies that accompany the online selection.
While high school students should be exposed to literary content on sensitive issues, there are
many poems that may not get chosen because they are controversial. One example is George
Bilgere's “What I Want.” On a litany of what this speaker wants, one is “I want to spark a bowl
of Maui Wowie / And spend the entire afternoon in my dorm room / With Corrine Spellman,
trying to remember / What we were talking about, wondering / Whether, in fact, we had had sex
yet.” (42). Anther poem by Jim Daniels, “What I did,” raises similar problems of being chosen
to be read over a high school intercom. The poem begins, “What are you going to do / when
you girlfriend's pregnant / neither of you have health / insurance or a decent job / and you've
both been taking enough / drugs to kill a horse / or two?” (37). The final stanza answers the
question, the male pays for half of the abortion—the couple will split the cost. While these are
the kind of poems that should be read in high school, there will be challenges against reading
some them over the public address system following the day’s announcements.
Returning Poetry to the News
Kooser wished to return poetry to newspaper magazines. In doing so, he hoped to
cultivate earlier presentations of poetry.
Poetry used to have coverage in numerous
newspapers. Kooser claimed, “Poetry was long a popular staple in the daily press. […] Readers
enjoyed it. They would clip verses, stick them in their diaries end enclose them in letters. They
even took the time to memorize some of the poems they discovered” (Urschel). Kooser created
American Life in Poetry, a free newspaper syndication. This project focuses on gaining a venue
for a poetry readership that had previously existed, but has lost ground as more and more
newspapers have dropped poetry book reviews. Kooser claimed,
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In recent years, poetry all has but disappeared from newsprint. Yet the attraction to it is
still strong [...] Poetry has remained a perennial expression of our emotional, spiritual
and intellectual lives, as witnessed by the tens of thousands of poems written about the
tragedy of Sept 11 that circulated on the Internet. Now I'm hoping to convince editors
that there could be a small place in their papers for poetry, that poetry could add a spot
of value in the eyes of readers. Best of all, it won't cost a penny (Urschel).
In his role of valuing activism and the inexplicably interconnectedness of the “emotional,
spiritual, and intellectual lives” that we lead, his role is close to the public “evangelical” role of
Brodsky, Dove, Pinsky and Collins.
As there are journalists in his family, his outreach was through newspapers. The sole
mission of this project is to promote poetry: “[It] seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry
in our culture” (American Life in Poetry). This project is funded by The Poetry Foundation, The
Library of Congress, and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
President of the Poetry
Foundation claimed that it was “an honor to be allied with the Library of Congress. Through the
office of the Poet Laureate, the library has done much to celebrate the best poetry and enlarge
its audience. We are natural partners in the American Life in Poetry project, which will help to
get good poetry back into the mainstream” (American Life in Poetry).
Kooser intentionally
selects poems that are brief; his commentary on them is also brief. All that newspapers need to
do to syndicate this column is to subscribe to this free service.
The major trend of US laureate has been to create national poetry projects. What has
not been compiled is how far their projects have taken root in the mainstream. There needs to
be a way to track the adoption of these projects. Being able to keep up with the state of the
projects will enable the programs to be better adopted, developed, evaluated, and historically
documented.
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CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION
The high profile of having a national laureate makes it curious that no previous
scholarship has accounted for this tradition-in-the making. Sustained attention to this tradition
will foster several understandings of the contemporary American laureate.
Addressing
laureates together brings out a particular perspective of literary history, a perspective defining
contemporary American poetry in the interest of the Library of Congress.
Each has been
selected to “serve as the nation’s official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans.”
They are strong leaders in both the production of art and as activists working to raise
awareness of the reading and writing of poetry. And yet it is doubtful that some of the strongest
poets and leaders in American poetry have been chosen. There has yet to be a US Poet
Laureate approximating the political engagements of Amiri Baraka, Denise Levertov, Adrienne
Rich, and Sharon Olds. The laureates that have been chosen are leaders in devising projects
that bring poetry to the public, but they tend to largely reflect Librarian Billington’s assertion that
they are chosen to speak about poetry, not on political matters. Investigating who has not been
chosen and why will more fully define this tradition-in-the-making.
Another avenue of investigation that would more fully define this tradition would be the
phenomenon of laureateship itself.
Numerous institutions continue to create positions of
laureateship. Each of these institutions should be critiqued and compared. Most US states
have a laureate, some resist creating the position, and New Jersey abolished the position
because of the political activism of Baraka. This area alone could produce a significant body of
scholarship.
We should keep note of who represents us from positions endorsed by
government: how they are chosen, their poetic styles, and engagement or lack of engagement
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with communities.
More and more cities and counties are adopting the position of poet
laureate. Moreover, private or NGO organizations create special interests for laureate such as
The Poetry Foundation, which has created a Children’s Poet Laureate. It is possible that the
United Nations will form this position as well. The US is not the only country experiencing a
proliferation of this position.
There is much potential for transnational scholarship.
For
instance, Canada created the position in 2001. Australia has entertained the idea, but there is
high resistance to adopting a British tradition.
The project of this dissertation has been awarded a Fulbright to study the Canadian
Parliamentary Poets Laureate. Extending this project to include Canadian Parliamentary Poets
Laureate will create a North American perspective. Which Canadian poets have been chosen
and why? How does the selection process differ from the US? What are the similarities and
differences between national laureates? What is the make-up of its literary history? Does the
Canadian laureate have a similar trend of activism to bring poetry to a general readership? The
next stage of this project will be to investigate these questions for a transnational perspective.
I hope that this dissertation sparks and sustains a discussion of US poets laureate; I
hope, too, that various levels of local, national, and international laureates are investigated in
order to arrive at a contemporary understanding of “Laureate.”
156
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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Toni M. Holland received her BA in English at the University of Texas in 2000, her MA from the
University of Texas at Arlington in 2002, and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Arlington
in 2011. She has held poet’s residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Vermont Studio
Center, and Shakespeare and Company in Paris, France. She was a Fulbright Student-Junior
Professional at the University of Alberta during 2009-2010.
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