topic/literary-theory

I should say that, at the time and for many years after, I received almost nothing from this class. I remembered almost nothing, consciously, that Bloom said about all the poems we’d read. My marginalia is incomprehensible and almost worthless; the notebook long since lost in an attic. Only when I’d completely freed myself from academia and abandoned all hope of an academic career, even an academic life, did I return to those poems, again not even consciously, and find not just pleasure in them but meaning, which is also too earnest and defined a word to say what I discovered. And then in those moments I don’t hear Bloom’s voice at all, but I’m aware that the — pleasure is too soft a word — insight I receive from, say, Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” or John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended” takes place in a Bloomian universe: gnostic, agonistic, a beauty with terror in it, clashing structures and strange cohabitations, a poem as a play in as many acts as the poet needs.

If you got the Bloom experience at the right time of your life, as a poet or a person who loves poetry, then he could be perfect. At a crisis moment for such a person, he might also be terrible. There is something to be said for teaching that has no “deliverables,” for which the only answer to the evaluator’s question about what was learned is: “Ask me in five years, then again in ten, then in twenty.” In 1998, I had vague feelings for poetry that I didn’t know were at odds with the academic persona I was trying to cultivate. I put poems into meaning machines linked to my ambition and ground them into dust. Years later, once I’d relinquished the need to definitively interpret anything in such a way that it could be professionally recognized and circulated, in ways that credited the originality and rigor of my interpretations, the poems came back to me as poetry and I could hear them: sometimes as poems that did not transcend themselves; sometimes as individuals marked, as we are, by others living and dead.

Free verse and rhyming poetry are often said to be in opposition. But, really, they are just different versions of what poetry does. Just as a rhyming poem is built up out of a pattern of repeating end sounds, in some pattern or even irregularly, a poem can rhyme conceptually: that is, through ideas that relate in some way, obvious or hidden. Through their redness, “rose” and “fire truck” rhyme conceptually, as do “deconstruction” and “deep sea diving” (Jacques Derrida and Jacques Cousteau). It can not only be fun to conceptually rhyme, but also be good practice to write formal poems that use conceptual, as opposed to sonic, rhymes. A poem that seems too static because it is locked into a single idea, or a rigid expository framework, can often become both looser and also more true when the poet allows ideas to rhyme conceptually. Conceptual rhyme is not merely a pleasure for poets, but very close to the purpose of poetry, to provide a place for associative thinking.

Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening.

That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence. Gogol’s contribution was to perform this throwing of himself against the fence in the part of town where the little men live, the sputtering, inarticulate men whose language can’t rise to the occasion but who still feel everything the big men (articulate, educated, at ease) feel.

The result is awkward, funny, and true, touched with the spirit of the (odd) person doing the telling.

One model of writing is that we strive upward to express ourselves precisely, at the highest levels of language (think Henry James). Another is that we surrender to our natural mode of expression, flawed though it may be, and, by way of concentrated work within that mode, raise it up, so to speak, creating a poetic rarefication of that (inefficient) form of expression.

When a corporate person says, “The stress being felt by some is, in terms of how we might view it is, we did not meet or exceed our goals that we all will remember Mark from Corporate communicated so clear last month in his critical missive,” that is a poem, because it is not right. There’s a true statement inside it (“We failed and are fucked”), but there’s also something true about its not-rightness, the flavor of which tells us things about the speaker and his culture that aren’t conveyed by “We failed and are fucked.”

So, it’s a poem: a machine for conveying bonus meaning.

[...] I, too, dislike it: That “too” in the Moore is important—poet and reader of poetry are united in a suspicion of the song of any “earthly poet,” and that suspicion is the ground for an intuition of the ideal. The hatred of poetry is internal to the art, because it is the task of the poet and poetry reader to use the heat of that hatred to burn the actual off the virtual like fog.

Great poets as different as Keats and Dickinson express their contempt for merely actual poems by developing techniques for virtualizing their own compositions—by dissolving the actual poem into an image of the Poem literary form cannot achieve. [...]

Second, and perhaps most important, to be an NYC writer means to submit to an unconscious yet powerful pressure toward readability. Such pressure has always existed, of course, but in recent years it has achieved a fearsome intensity. On the one hand, a weakened market for literary fiction makes publishing houses less likely than ever to devote resources to work that doesn’t, like a pop song, “hook” the reader right away. On the other, the MFA-driven shift in the academic canon has altered the approach of writers outside the university as well as those within. Throughout the latter half of the last century, many of our most talented novelists—Nabokov, Gaddis, Bellow, Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace—carved out for themselves a cultural position that depended precisely on a combination of public and academic acclaim. Such writers were readable enough to become famous yet large and knotty enough to require professional explanation—thus securing an afterlife, and an aftermarket, for their lives’ work. Syntactic intricacy, narrative ambiguity, formal innovation, and even length were aids to canonization, feeding the university’s need for books against which students and professors could test and prove their interpretive skills. Canonization, in turn, contributed to public renown. Thus the ambitious novelist, writing with one eye on the academy and the other on New York, could hope to secure a durable readership without succumbing (at least not fully) to the logic of the blockbuster. It was a strategy shaped by, and suited to, the era of the English department, which valued scholarly interpretation over writerly imitation, the long novel over the short story. (And when it came to white males imagining themselves into the canon, it helped that the canon was still composed mostly of white males.)