Something About Wendell Berry and William Carlos Williams
The first chapter, or prologue, to Wendell Berry’s The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford, led me to expect a profound meditation upon the virtues of “locality” in poetry. Despite my lack of acquaintance, in any depth, with the poetry either of Williams or of Berry, yet Berry—whose political activism I admire—must be able to help me better appreciate the poetry of Williams, I expected. Alas, with the second chapter, Berry quoted in full a poem by Williams that I had not read, “A Negro Woman,” as “an example of what, at his best, [Williams] made himself capable of writing.” For me it was all downhill from there, if that represented his best.
Subsequently, “to give an example that by its brevity and modesty may display his technical competence and confidence more clearly than something more ambitious,” Berry quotes some other lines by Williams:
Subsequently, “to give an example that by its brevity and modesty may display his technical competence and confidence more clearly than something more ambitious,” Berry quotes some other lines by Williams:
She sits with
tears on
her cheek
her cheek on
her hand
the child
in her lap
his nose
pressed
to the glass[.]
But this makes me long for something more ambitious! (Paterson, presumably Williams’ most ambitious work, is hard going.) It is hard to see the “technical competence” here lauded. The whole setup seems more suited to a Vermeer painting or a photograph than to words. Or, to quote Helen Vendler from another context, “Printing something in short lines doesn’t make the writer a poet; it only makes him a person with a book of short lines.” The techniques of versification are obscurant to say the least. Berry makes no attempt to explain what is good here, but expects the reader to share his judgement.
Still, knowing of Williams’ decades-long grudge against T.S. Eliot, I felt Berry, self-styled as something of an acolyte of Williams, might enable me to appreciate Williams’ point of view. He quotes from Williams’ autobiography, “Our work staggered to a halt for a moment under the blast of Eliot’s genius which gave the poem back to the academics. We did not know how to answer him.” Decrying Williams’ stance as “confusing” (and born of “confusion”), Berry then rather perplexingly asks, “Who besides Williams was so resentful?”
To quote Edmund Wilson, writing to the poet John Peale Bishop, in 1936, “The Waste Landhad just appeared during those first years when you were abroad and it had a strange sterilizing effect on everybody…. I think it was all the worse for you, because you are certainly intended, it seems to me, to be a poet of sensuous delight” and “not [of] self-torture and wistfulness like Eliot.” Even Berry would probably agree with Wilson, that “Eliot gave utterance to emotions which ran pretty deep in everybody’s life and revealed a central social situation which was beginning to affect everybody.”
As early as 1922, Wilson had adjured Bishop (“for heaven’s sake”!) to “read somebody besides Eliot for a little while—he is enslaving your style and your imagination.” Eliot had permanently impacted the literary milieu, and it was impossible to stop reading him. Berry, who counts himself amongst “those of us who came to literary consciousness in English departments still quaking from the publication of The Waste Land,” makes “clear [his] own appreciation of the difficulty of Williams’ predicament as a poet of Rutherford in his time, and also… respect for his perseverance and for what he accomplished.” Williams struggled—valiantly, courageously—to free his style and imagination from the influence of Eliot, and succeeded, to use Berry’s phrase, in asserting “a practicable local patriotism.” The degree to which he failed is measured by his acrimony.
Never disposed toward Williams’ poetry, yet I have to acknowledge the power of his anthology pieces, especially as I encountered them as a young novice—“so much depends/upon//a red wheel/barrow” and so forth—the verbal tricks of which are, or can be, riveting. “No ideas but in things” has become taken for his mantra.
However, in a sense, in a poem such as the afore-quoted “The Red Wheelbarrow” the opposite obtains. The objects mentioned only gain validity due to the odd or somewhat jarring juxtaposition of ideas. So much depends upon the verb depends, a rather abstract verb at that, and one is inclined to respond, “What?” Williams doesn’t tell. His withholding of an answer could be interpreted as portending of an unfathomable depth, with the reader expected to “riff” a thousand variable possibilities in his mind. It is clear, however, at least from an analytic standpoint, that any answer Williams himself might have provided, must of necessity be a shallow one. Is it profundity or rather a canny laziness on Williams’ part?
The image is a striking one, parsed into slow-motion syllabics by the line breaks and the “enjambment”. (Berry quite rightly notes with disapproval that “Donald Davie took [Williams] to task for never using the word ‘enjambment’”, the word referring to an overused academic taxonomy of little intrinsic value—however dependent upon it Williams’ poem, with all its broken compounds, happens to be.) One is inclined to wish for a rendition by Salvador Dali, once the words have begun to wear thin: delightful though it may be, the poem seems again not ambitious enough.
Berry devotes his penultimate and concluding chapters to laying in contrast the two poets, William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot.
Eliot is drawn as a man (as with so many poets of his generation) driven to seek redemption abroad. Williams, as has been pointed out recently, one of the most cosmopolitan of the writers of his generation, owing to his mixed heritage and early time spent abroad, retreated—quite opposite to Eliot and his ilk—into a strenuous and self-imposed provincialism. Another contrast Berry notes—already alluded to in the quotation from Williams’ autobiography—was that “[t]he academic industry of literary explanation gained a new life and stature by feasting upon The Waste Land, thus helping to define poetry-reading as work for specialists”, whereas the poetry of Williams, if anything, tended towards an insular atomism.
Berry absolves Eliot of blame in this; and yet the charge is just. Eliot, particularly with his notes appended to The Waste Land, alluded to a multiplicity of thoughts and realms of erudition, from mythology to clairvoyance of the tarot deck to bits of international poetry seamlessly patched into a comprehensive (if not to say intimidating) whole. That Williams did not buckle is testament to his strength.
Berry professes an equal admiration for Williams and for Eliot, despite their differences (which he does much to elucidate), speaking, most subjectively, in the sense of “what they mean to me” (I am alluding to the title of an essay by Eliot, “What Dante Means to Me”) and how they influenced his work, rather than attempting some hierarchical ranking, “as if the art of poetry were a sort of contest.” He draws his distinction:
Still, knowing of Williams’ decades-long grudge against T.S. Eliot, I felt Berry, self-styled as something of an acolyte of Williams, might enable me to appreciate Williams’ point of view. He quotes from Williams’ autobiography, “Our work staggered to a halt for a moment under the blast of Eliot’s genius which gave the poem back to the academics. We did not know how to answer him.” Decrying Williams’ stance as “confusing” (and born of “confusion”), Berry then rather perplexingly asks, “Who besides Williams was so resentful?”
To quote Edmund Wilson, writing to the poet John Peale Bishop, in 1936, “The Waste Landhad just appeared during those first years when you were abroad and it had a strange sterilizing effect on everybody…. I think it was all the worse for you, because you are certainly intended, it seems to me, to be a poet of sensuous delight” and “not [of] self-torture and wistfulness like Eliot.” Even Berry would probably agree with Wilson, that “Eliot gave utterance to emotions which ran pretty deep in everybody’s life and revealed a central social situation which was beginning to affect everybody.”
As early as 1922, Wilson had adjured Bishop (“for heaven’s sake”!) to “read somebody besides Eliot for a little while—he is enslaving your style and your imagination.” Eliot had permanently impacted the literary milieu, and it was impossible to stop reading him. Berry, who counts himself amongst “those of us who came to literary consciousness in English departments still quaking from the publication of The Waste Land,” makes “clear [his] own appreciation of the difficulty of Williams’ predicament as a poet of Rutherford in his time, and also… respect for his perseverance and for what he accomplished.” Williams struggled—valiantly, courageously—to free his style and imagination from the influence of Eliot, and succeeded, to use Berry’s phrase, in asserting “a practicable local patriotism.” The degree to which he failed is measured by his acrimony.
Never disposed toward Williams’ poetry, yet I have to acknowledge the power of his anthology pieces, especially as I encountered them as a young novice—“so much depends/upon//a red wheel/barrow” and so forth—the verbal tricks of which are, or can be, riveting. “No ideas but in things” has become taken for his mantra.
However, in a sense, in a poem such as the afore-quoted “The Red Wheelbarrow” the opposite obtains. The objects mentioned only gain validity due to the odd or somewhat jarring juxtaposition of ideas. So much depends upon the verb depends, a rather abstract verb at that, and one is inclined to respond, “What?” Williams doesn’t tell. His withholding of an answer could be interpreted as portending of an unfathomable depth, with the reader expected to “riff” a thousand variable possibilities in his mind. It is clear, however, at least from an analytic standpoint, that any answer Williams himself might have provided, must of necessity be a shallow one. Is it profundity or rather a canny laziness on Williams’ part?
The image is a striking one, parsed into slow-motion syllabics by the line breaks and the “enjambment”. (Berry quite rightly notes with disapproval that “Donald Davie took [Williams] to task for never using the word ‘enjambment’”, the word referring to an overused academic taxonomy of little intrinsic value—however dependent upon it Williams’ poem, with all its broken compounds, happens to be.) One is inclined to wish for a rendition by Salvador Dali, once the words have begun to wear thin: delightful though it may be, the poem seems again not ambitious enough.
Berry devotes his penultimate and concluding chapters to laying in contrast the two poets, William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot.
Eliot is drawn as a man (as with so many poets of his generation) driven to seek redemption abroad. Williams, as has been pointed out recently, one of the most cosmopolitan of the writers of his generation, owing to his mixed heritage and early time spent abroad, retreated—quite opposite to Eliot and his ilk—into a strenuous and self-imposed provincialism. Another contrast Berry notes—already alluded to in the quotation from Williams’ autobiography—was that “[t]he academic industry of literary explanation gained a new life and stature by feasting upon The Waste Land, thus helping to define poetry-reading as work for specialists”, whereas the poetry of Williams, if anything, tended towards an insular atomism.
Berry absolves Eliot of blame in this; and yet the charge is just. Eliot, particularly with his notes appended to The Waste Land, alluded to a multiplicity of thoughts and realms of erudition, from mythology to clairvoyance of the tarot deck to bits of international poetry seamlessly patched into a comprehensive (if not to say intimidating) whole. That Williams did not buckle is testament to his strength.
Berry professes an equal admiration for Williams and for Eliot, despite their differences (which he does much to elucidate), speaking, most subjectively, in the sense of “what they mean to me” (I am alluding to the title of an essay by Eliot, “What Dante Means to Me”) and how they influenced his work, rather than attempting some hierarchical ranking, “as if the art of poetry were a sort of contest.” He draws his distinction:
To use a metaphor I am unable to resist, Eliot in his work has the stance of a man showing a fine horse in a “halter class,” in which the exhibitor, using a lead rein, presents the horse as a “finished” exemplar of its breed. Williams, by contrast, is always on the back of his horse, sometimes gracefully at one with it, sometimes not, but always at risk—which to the last he seems, young-mannishly, to enjoy.
One wishes he had been able to resist that metaphor, as it reveals a misconception of Eliot’s poetry. The risk embodied in The Waste Land is well known historically. Biography should not be necessary to the understanding of a good poem, but everybody by now knows the story of Eliot’s mental breakdown concomitant with his writing of it. In a sense, Ezra Pound’s editing represents his putting himself back together.
Despite its erudition, and regardless his biographical crisis, the poem relies upon no thin conceit, but evinces a soul in turmoil. In Wilson’s phrase, examining the poem, “Eliot is dying of drought.” Williams’ poetry is not without pathos, certainly, but not of the sort resonant to a generation.
Berry, in his failure to recognize in Eliot’s poetry more than a showpiece (or assemblage of showpieces?), tells us something about his own “literary consciousness” already remarked as the kind originating in “English departments” instead of the true grit of lived experience. This is intended as no slight against Berry, whose poetry and criticism I hardly know. He is known for his earthiness, connection to the land, work as a farmer, and depth of experience (and interpretation) of the natural world. This is not in question. However, as it translates to literary concerns, he presents poetry as a sort of postcard from some local region, be it Williams’ Rutherford, New Jersey, or Robert Frost’s New England. It is more a description than a happening or an experience.
John Keats famously wrote to his brother: “You speak of Lord Byron and me—There is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees—I describe what I imagine—Mine is the hardest task.” The distinction stands, and reveals a fine discrimination. But I think even the least ardent critic of Byron, would be hard pressed not to find more evidence of technique in Byron’s poetry than in the lines reproduced from Williams. For all its bombast, for all its shallowness of idea, it is clear—speaking technically at least—that Byron usually assays in his verse something ambitious, however facile the versification. When he fails, the lines lie dull and insipid; when he succeeds, they are classic.
This is the 90th year since the publication of The Waste Land, and the “tremors” that were caused “have ceased”—at least in the English departments of Berry’s acquaintance. The thrust of Berry’s argument for William Carlos Williams, if I may speak pedantically, is summed up in his exposition of today’s literary landscape, or the infamous “poetry establishment”:
Despite its erudition, and regardless his biographical crisis, the poem relies upon no thin conceit, but evinces a soul in turmoil. In Wilson’s phrase, examining the poem, “Eliot is dying of drought.” Williams’ poetry is not without pathos, certainly, but not of the sort resonant to a generation.
Berry, in his failure to recognize in Eliot’s poetry more than a showpiece (or assemblage of showpieces?), tells us something about his own “literary consciousness” already remarked as the kind originating in “English departments” instead of the true grit of lived experience. This is intended as no slight against Berry, whose poetry and criticism I hardly know. He is known for his earthiness, connection to the land, work as a farmer, and depth of experience (and interpretation) of the natural world. This is not in question. However, as it translates to literary concerns, he presents poetry as a sort of postcard from some local region, be it Williams’ Rutherford, New Jersey, or Robert Frost’s New England. It is more a description than a happening or an experience.
John Keats famously wrote to his brother: “You speak of Lord Byron and me—There is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees—I describe what I imagine—Mine is the hardest task.” The distinction stands, and reveals a fine discrimination. But I think even the least ardent critic of Byron, would be hard pressed not to find more evidence of technique in Byron’s poetry than in the lines reproduced from Williams. For all its bombast, for all its shallowness of idea, it is clear—speaking technically at least—that Byron usually assays in his verse something ambitious, however facile the versification. When he fails, the lines lie dull and insipid; when he succeeds, they are classic.
This is the 90th year since the publication of The Waste Land, and the “tremors” that were caused “have ceased”—at least in the English departments of Berry’s acquaintance. The thrust of Berry’s argument for William Carlos Williams, if I may speak pedantically, is summed up in his exposition of today’s literary landscape, or the infamous “poetry establishment”:
Increasingly… poets are attached to universities and are dependent upon them for a living. I have been at times so attached and so dependent myself, and thus I know something of what is involved. Unless university poets are actually from some place in particular, and unless they have the good fortune to be employed somewhere near their homes, they tend to be careerists and migrants, without local knowledge or affection or loyalty, like their professional and specialist colleagues. They are therefore under pressure to conform to, and they have no immediate reason to resist, the industrialist order represented by their university.
Berry’s depiction depends upon something of a tautology: all poets, whether affiliated with a university or not, and indeed all men—persons, creatures, etc.—can be said to have originated “from some place in particular”. What really counts for him is the “local knowledge or affection or loyalty”. Migrancy has never been a bar to writing good poetry, though the careerism he refers to is more problematic. What matters to Berry is that when Williams writes a poem titled “The Negro Woman,” he is referring to a negro woman in his own neighborhood.
The “industrial order represented by [the] university”—indeed the whole workshop system of which Berry himself is a product—is closely associated with the careerism Berry intimates as reprehensible. Williams was a practicing physician, not dependent upon a university stipend, and so “was a poet determinedly and conscientiously local.”
The great virtue Berry ascribes to Williams’ poetry happens to be the one both poets share, locale (to use the word W. Somerset Maugham detested), even absent “a central social situation… affect[ing] everybody.” The poetry is more about wheelbarrows and chickens, the iconography of place. I imagine that Berry writes against a rural landscape, even as Williams (I gather) wrote against a suburban one—albeit a rapidly changing suburban one. Williams was able to report the transformations he was witness to, and indeed liked to couch his own poetry in terms of its reportage. Did he not say, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there”?
William Carlos Williams died in 1963, a couple of years before T.S. Eliot. Wendell Berry had already completed his MA and participated in Stanford University’s creative writing program. The ascendency of the university-centric, workshop-driven system of poetic apprenticeship was beginning. Whereas Williams and Eliot represented two of the doyens of modern American poetry’s “greatest generation”, Berry stands in the fore of a movement which was just getting underway, and from which, in some measure—through actions as well as words—he has taken pains to disassociate himself. He has set down roots—most pointedly outside of the academia.
“The truth about American poetry is that it is in very bad shape,” begins one of the more recent and prominent jeremiads (in a long succession of them) railing against that system:
The “industrial order represented by [the] university”—indeed the whole workshop system of which Berry himself is a product—is closely associated with the careerism Berry intimates as reprehensible. Williams was a practicing physician, not dependent upon a university stipend, and so “was a poet determinedly and conscientiously local.”
The great virtue Berry ascribes to Williams’ poetry happens to be the one both poets share, locale (to use the word W. Somerset Maugham detested), even absent “a central social situation… affect[ing] everybody.” The poetry is more about wheelbarrows and chickens, the iconography of place. I imagine that Berry writes against a rural landscape, even as Williams (I gather) wrote against a suburban one—albeit a rapidly changing suburban one. Williams was able to report the transformations he was witness to, and indeed liked to couch his own poetry in terms of its reportage. Did he not say, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there”?
William Carlos Williams died in 1963, a couple of years before T.S. Eliot. Wendell Berry had already completed his MA and participated in Stanford University’s creative writing program. The ascendency of the university-centric, workshop-driven system of poetic apprenticeship was beginning. Whereas Williams and Eliot represented two of the doyens of modern American poetry’s “greatest generation”, Berry stands in the fore of a movement which was just getting underway, and from which, in some measure—through actions as well as words—he has taken pains to disassociate himself. He has set down roots—most pointedly outside of the academia.
“The truth about American poetry is that it is in very bad shape,” begins one of the more recent and prominent jeremiads (in a long succession of them) railing against that system:
The professional poetry establishment has taken care to mark serious criticism coming its way as sour grapes, but the quality of poetry being produced by American poets regularly awarded the highest prizes in the land and recognized as the equals of past masters is not meant to [out]last this pathetic moment of self-absorption and lassitude.
The writer, Anis Shivani of The Huffington Post, briefly discounts a plethora of some of the most popular and successful writers in that establishment, calling them “the front guard of a regressive political elite” aiming to annihilate “common decency at all levels. Their poetry is garish, troublingly content-free, indecorous, and emotionless.” Petty bourgeois concerns comprise their absorption, “straining for cheap epiphanies” often in a “flat tone barely qualifying as good prose”. Obviously this is meant to be provocative.
Shivani identifies himself as a Jungian when he asserts: “The prompting for art is always inner turbulence.” By that standard, The Waste Land demonstrates artistry in a way that Williams’ poems fail to do—though many of Williams’ poems display an underlying tension or unease. (Again I speak of those I have seen in anthology.) Car wheels crushing through leaves while an unnamed woman stands watching from the doorway to her suburban bungalow imply something ominous, even if we do not quite know what it is. Similarly, the red wheelbarrow, with its curious absence of human bystander, may hint at something unsettled and unsettling. It is for the reader to speculate.
The standard of “inner turbulence” may be false. Yet Shivani (and those who preceded him) may be onto something when they point to what appears to be a stifling uniformity to much of what passes as university-sanctioned contemporary poetry. The workshop—Shivani elsewhere implies—operates via a program of “improvement by subtraction”: removal of anything individual or idiosyncratic (anything seeming too stupid), with nothing so ridiculed as the notion that poetry comes in an inspired state when one is visited by “genius”.
Yet oddly enough, according to Wilson, “We are always being dismayed, in our general reading, to discover that lines among those which we had believed to represent Eliot’s residuum of original invention had been taken over or adapted from other writers.” Conversely, Eliot “succeeds in conveying his meaning, in communicating his emotion, in spite of all his learned or mysterious allusions, and whether we understand them or not.”
In reference to this, Clive James has written: “[Wilson] said something about Eliot that forty years of theses and learned articles have done their best to bury, something which we are only now capable of seeing as criticism rather than conversation, the intervening hubbub of academic industry having revealed itself as conversation rather than criticism”. The question is, Why?
Prior to the ascendency of the professional poetry establishment, a specialized class of literary interpreters was not necessary. Enough of poetry had percolated to enough of the masses to be, if not ubiquitous, at least prevalent. Perhaps by sheer force of numbers, and careerism, specialists have taken over what was once a common market, and driven out any but those linked to what Berry has referred to as “the industrialist order”. That universities have become handmaidens to commerce and the military industrial complex is a commonplace. Yet, with some notable exceptions, poets, and most especially the poetic art, have always existed at the margins of society.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, a “genius” if there ever was one, was requested by his order to cease and desist from the practice. Under different circumstances and by vastly differing means, Wilfred Owen succumbed to the war state. Universities only embrace writers like these when they cease to be a threat (to the industrial order), or when, with the passage of forty years maybe, truths that lie buried find their way to the surface: “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,/Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”
In a very necessary article a few years back, Joan Houlihan pinpointed the problem: “We have reached the point we are being asked to believe that a text block, chopped randomly into flat, declarative lines, is a poem.” She lay the blame right at the doorstep of William Carlos Williams. Yet,
Shivani identifies himself as a Jungian when he asserts: “The prompting for art is always inner turbulence.” By that standard, The Waste Land demonstrates artistry in a way that Williams’ poems fail to do—though many of Williams’ poems display an underlying tension or unease. (Again I speak of those I have seen in anthology.) Car wheels crushing through leaves while an unnamed woman stands watching from the doorway to her suburban bungalow imply something ominous, even if we do not quite know what it is. Similarly, the red wheelbarrow, with its curious absence of human bystander, may hint at something unsettled and unsettling. It is for the reader to speculate.
The standard of “inner turbulence” may be false. Yet Shivani (and those who preceded him) may be onto something when they point to what appears to be a stifling uniformity to much of what passes as university-sanctioned contemporary poetry. The workshop—Shivani elsewhere implies—operates via a program of “improvement by subtraction”: removal of anything individual or idiosyncratic (anything seeming too stupid), with nothing so ridiculed as the notion that poetry comes in an inspired state when one is visited by “genius”.
Yet oddly enough, according to Wilson, “We are always being dismayed, in our general reading, to discover that lines among those which we had believed to represent Eliot’s residuum of original invention had been taken over or adapted from other writers.” Conversely, Eliot “succeeds in conveying his meaning, in communicating his emotion, in spite of all his learned or mysterious allusions, and whether we understand them or not.”
In reference to this, Clive James has written: “[Wilson] said something about Eliot that forty years of theses and learned articles have done their best to bury, something which we are only now capable of seeing as criticism rather than conversation, the intervening hubbub of academic industry having revealed itself as conversation rather than criticism”. The question is, Why?
Prior to the ascendency of the professional poetry establishment, a specialized class of literary interpreters was not necessary. Enough of poetry had percolated to enough of the masses to be, if not ubiquitous, at least prevalent. Perhaps by sheer force of numbers, and careerism, specialists have taken over what was once a common market, and driven out any but those linked to what Berry has referred to as “the industrialist order”. That universities have become handmaidens to commerce and the military industrial complex is a commonplace. Yet, with some notable exceptions, poets, and most especially the poetic art, have always existed at the margins of society.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, a “genius” if there ever was one, was requested by his order to cease and desist from the practice. Under different circumstances and by vastly differing means, Wilfred Owen succumbed to the war state. Universities only embrace writers like these when they cease to be a threat (to the industrial order), or when, with the passage of forty years maybe, truths that lie buried find their way to the surface: “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,/Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”
In a very necessary article a few years back, Joan Houlihan pinpointed the problem: “We have reached the point we are being asked to believe that a text block, chopped randomly into flat, declarative lines, is a poem.” She lay the blame right at the doorstep of William Carlos Williams. Yet,
How we got here—to a lack of distinction between poetry and prose—by way of William Carlos Williams, and continuing on through hundreds and hundreds of imitators and hundreds and hundreds of imitators of imitators, all long ignorant of their origin is not now so important, as the question: how do we start making the distinction again between poetry and prose? Poets continue to write chopped-up prose and call it poetry, making it the model for newer poets, who then continue the cycle.
Though subsequent rabble-rousers such as Shivani have taken up her torch, Joan Houlihan’s central question remains unanswered, even by Houlihan herself. If much of what passes for poetry today is really something else—Houlihan calls it “a grand renaming”—how do we distinguish between what is poetry and what is not, or even, to use Clive James’ fanciful terminology, between criticism and conversation?
My aim is no prescriptive. However, let us be clear: Prose anecdotes with enjambment (or “line breaks”) are not poetry. Houlihan’s formulation, I think, provides a litmus test—no further experts should be necessary.
Just as today’s critics (by and large) lack any criteria, so today’s university-bred scholars lack any coherent scholasticism. The point was driven home painfully when Helen Vendler reviewed The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove, now winner of the “trifecta” of major American humanities awards available to a poet: the Medal of Arts, the Humanities Medal, and the title Poet Laureate of the United States.
To summarize Vendler’s critique in brief: Dove’s selection standards “don’t immediately declare themselves.”
This of course is putting it mildly. However I don’t wish to enter into a discussion about the anthology, which I have not seen, or rehash topics which Vendler already has addressed adequately: one gets the impression of Dove flailing in the dark, trying to accomplish a task well beyond her capabilities, without any guiding lights (or principles) beyond a careless abandon to “subconscious obsessions and quirks as well as the inevitable lacunae resulting from buried antipathies and inadvertent ignorance”—whatever this highfalutin equivocation is supposed to mean.
However there is one part of Vendler’s review, which as a Chicagoan, I feel compelled to address, though Vendler’s implications can be taken to be much broader than the merely local. It is worth quoting in full:
My aim is no prescriptive. However, let us be clear: Prose anecdotes with enjambment (or “line breaks”) are not poetry. Houlihan’s formulation, I think, provides a litmus test—no further experts should be necessary.
Just as today’s critics (by and large) lack any criteria, so today’s university-bred scholars lack any coherent scholasticism. The point was driven home painfully when Helen Vendler reviewed The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove, now winner of the “trifecta” of major American humanities awards available to a poet: the Medal of Arts, the Humanities Medal, and the title Poet Laureate of the United States.
To summarize Vendler’s critique in brief: Dove’s selection standards “don’t immediately declare themselves.”
This of course is putting it mildly. However I don’t wish to enter into a discussion about the anthology, which I have not seen, or rehash topics which Vendler already has addressed adequately: one gets the impression of Dove flailing in the dark, trying to accomplish a task well beyond her capabilities, without any guiding lights (or principles) beyond a careless abandon to “subconscious obsessions and quirks as well as the inevitable lacunae resulting from buried antipathies and inadvertent ignorance”—whatever this highfalutin equivocation is supposed to mean.
However there is one part of Vendler’s review, which as a Chicagoan, I feel compelled to address, though Vendler’s implications can be taken to be much broader than the merely local. It is worth quoting in full:
Dove feels obliged to defend the black poets with hyperbole. It is legitimate to recognize the pioneering role of Gwendolyn Brooks, just as it is moving to observe her self-questioning as she reacted to the new aggressiveness in black poetry. But doesn’t it weaken Dove’s case when she says that in her first book Brooks “confirmed that black women can express themselves in poems as richly innovative as the best male poets of any race”? As richly innovative as Shakespeare? Dante? Wordsworth? A just estimate is always more convincing than an exaggerated one.
In Chicago we are obliged to genuflect at the mere mention of Gwendolyn Brooks (“Miss Brooks” in the local parlance). Her “We real cool” thing is good, and may even stand head to head with something by Williams (or a little higher, I would grant), but her true accomplishment is only diminished by the egregious hyperbole with which her work is incessantly praised. Vendler has hit upon the correct word. Dove seems drawn to exaggeration because she doesn’t really know what else to say.
Dove’s academic background did not prepare her with much of a riposte: “Assuredly, many acclaimed poets are no match to Shakespeare—probably... not even Walt Whitman.” Probably? If Dove isn’t sure on this front, what the hell does she know? The only legitimate response to that would be: What a buffoon! Vendler puts it more kindly: “I have written the review and I stand by it.”
The question is not merely one of, how do we tell poetry from prose, or criticism from conversation, but are any critical standards applicable at all?
Ensconced—one might say entrenched—in his self-imposed and assiduously-cultivated provincialism, Williams was no buffoon. Berry makes this clear:
Dove’s academic background did not prepare her with much of a riposte: “Assuredly, many acclaimed poets are no match to Shakespeare—probably... not even Walt Whitman.” Probably? If Dove isn’t sure on this front, what the hell does she know? The only legitimate response to that would be: What a buffoon! Vendler puts it more kindly: “I have written the review and I stand by it.”
The question is not merely one of, how do we tell poetry from prose, or criticism from conversation, but are any critical standards applicable at all?
Ensconced—one might say entrenched—in his self-imposed and assiduously-cultivated provincialism, Williams was no buffoon. Berry makes this clear:
[W]e have always needed distinctly local arts of poetry, storytelling, painting, and music in America, just as we have always needed distinctly local arts of agriculture, fishing, and forestry. Without such rootedness in locality, considerately adapted to local conditions, we get what we now have got: a country half destroyed, toxic, eroded, and in every way abused; a deluded people tricked out in gauds without traditions of any kind to give them character; a politics of expediency dictated by the wealthy; a disintegrating economy founded upon fantasy, fraud, and ecological ruin. Williams saw all of this, grieved over it, and accused rightly “this featureless tribe that has the money now[.]”
The value in Berry’s book comes in its advocacy: “Our great centers of wealth and power—and, yes, of culture—live by the destruction of landscapes and communities that they consider ‘provincial,’ of which they know nothing, and for which they have taken no responsibility.”
In such, poetry as reportage is vindicated, without the grand statement.
Eliot and Williams remain, in some sense archetypal to their period, complementary—the knowledge and understanding of one but helps with the knowledge and understanding of the other. Literary historians may piece it together more nicely. Dissertations may get written upon it. The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford, despite its title, attempts a synthesis. Wendell Berry does justice to Williams, whose poetry does not seem quite ready for the ashes heap yet. By addressing his faults plainly, Berry has made Williams a more fully human figure in my mental landscape—and tied it to a subject dear to me, the destruction of the environment.
The reams and reams of cruelly enjambed unpoetry (as I say in homage to e.e.cummings) that is perpetuated by the university system, have contributed to that destruction, but overall not so much I think. It is the dishonesty which grandly misnames “prose anecdotes with enjambment” as poetry that is the greater culprit.
In such, poetry as reportage is vindicated, without the grand statement.
Eliot and Williams remain, in some sense archetypal to their period, complementary—the knowledge and understanding of one but helps with the knowledge and understanding of the other. Literary historians may piece it together more nicely. Dissertations may get written upon it. The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford, despite its title, attempts a synthesis. Wendell Berry does justice to Williams, whose poetry does not seem quite ready for the ashes heap yet. By addressing his faults plainly, Berry has made Williams a more fully human figure in my mental landscape—and tied it to a subject dear to me, the destruction of the environment.
The reams and reams of cruelly enjambed unpoetry (as I say in homage to e.e.cummings) that is perpetuated by the university system, have contributed to that destruction, but overall not so much I think. It is the dishonesty which grandly misnames “prose anecdotes with enjambment” as poetry that is the greater culprit.