Peter Campion CHESTERTOWN, MD My heroes include Dolly Parton and Elmo. Wednesday: 02.07.07 | Permalink | Comments (10)

POETRY JOURNAL, DAY ONE: THE LOST GOOGAPLITZ
Elmo and Zoe are wearing capes. Elmo has what looks like a mesh fruit container tied to his head, and Zoe wears a metal colander on hers. The little red and orange monsters swivel and pop in excitement. The scene is Sesame Street, but these two are pretending to be “explorer friends” arriving in the land of Lilliputty (no apologies to Jonathan Swift):

Zoe asks Elmo what it could be they’re looking for.

ELMO: We’re searching for the lost . . . [straining here as his imagination gropes for the words] for the lost . . . [eyes circling in their sockets] the lost . . . ahhh . . . Googaplitz!

ZOE: The Lost Googaplitz? What is the lost Googaplitz?

ELMO: Nobody knows. It’s lost.

Jack, our 20-one-month-old monster connoisseur, holds his oatmeal spoon in mid-air, considering. But I’m practically electric. I need to scribble this down. Can I find this on You Tube? Do we have a VHS tape anywhere, those boxy anachronisms? If I play it back on Tivo, could I somehow . . . ?

My eruption of Elmo mania has to do with the “Modernist Poetry” class I’m teaching this semester at Washington College. I want the students to understand the way that poets of that movement had to construct their own imaginative worlds, their own myths. I was planning this week to give the students the following quote from R.P. Blackmur: “So it is with most of our serious poets. It is almost the mark of the genuine poet of merit in our time . . . that he performs his work in the light of an insight, a group of ideas, and a faith, which together form a view of life most readers cannot share.” But this Sesame Street scene would be much better.

Like Blackmur’s poets, Elmo and Zoe have a group of ideas and a faith that few around them can share. Each time they encounter other characters, caught in the routines of quotidian and commercial life, they have to insist upon their new identities. Like the famous modernists, they seem aware of the temptation of escapism in this project: although “explorer friend” sounds like an elite title, nevertheless, far from cloistering themselves away, Elmo and Zoe ply their way down the thoroughfare. And they exhibit prime aspects of modernism that Blackmur doesn’t touch on in that passage. They envision their work as a journey vexed with difficulties, something like Pound’s “periplum.” Even their costumes (which could be garbage assemblages by Mina Loy!) suggest that, while their endeavor might be driven by the imagination, they’re not after Romantic transcendence so much as a reconstruction of the given.

Okay, okay. Maybe it’s a good thing I won’t be showing that clip to the students after all. But one of my convictions in coming to teach this class is that we can’t avoid modernism: it’s everywhere. For example, it was all over the ads during last night’s Super Bowl (don’t get me started.) A provisional definition of modernism could be: any reaction to what the great social critic Marshall Berman has called “the experience of modernity.” Often this reaction takes an adversarial form. If you hate the consumerist glut of the Super Bowl, chances are you’re taking a modernist position too.

I want to use this five day journal to ask how modernism still suffuses our lives and our poems. I don’t have any big plans for this, and will probably stray from the topic. But I hope the journal helps at least to explore some fundamental questions about art and modernity. As T.S. Eliot once didn’t write, “Young monsters should be explorers.”

POETRY JOURNAL, DAY TWO: ANTINOMIES
Last night in a dream: the image of a painting by my friend, Kim Frohsin. It was the one I fell in love with in December, when, preparing to write an essay for her art book, I visited Kim’s San Francisco studio. The picture shows a nude model with her back turned to the viewer and her calves resting on a sheet of jagged aquamarine stripes. Kim and I arranged a trade: the painting for the essay. It’s at the frame shop now. But in the dream it had arrived. It was much smaller than in real life, small as a scarab. When I peered down into it, the figure’s arms undulated in the air and multiplied like Shiva’s. Then she was standing up, as if to walk away from the tedium of letting me view her. The picture started splicing between the curves and gestures of bodies and the waves and vertiginous dunes of some oceanscape, but splicing so fast it was impossible to follow. Soon white cataracts gauzed the picture, and the dream dissolved.

Playing it back now, I feel the dual sensation again. There was disappointment in seeing the shrunken, unfastened image. Its diminished, weird proteanism buckled my desire for ownership, my desire to have a piece to show to the guests: my inner Martha Stewart was pissed! On a deeper frequency, the frustration spoke of the way that art escapes intention. I believe that art, if it’s any good, resists our attempts to frame it in discourse. And yet that insight won’t, for a moment, pull the serious artist away from her need to frame. She needs to be a critic not just of her work but of the urges behind it. She needs not to be a marionette of her own limits and habits, or of conventions received from the culture. Even precious inspiration can become a kind of narcotic injection unless intention holds beneath its propulsive drub.

All this hits home for me now. I’ve just put a binder clip on an early draft of a new book. I know I need to spruce and sharpen. But I also wonder if the poems, taken together, reveal a genuine effort to forge a poetics. I need to think on some basic questions. What is poetic intelligence itself in this body of work? In what kind of situation does it exist? What does it say about imaginative agency in general? How do its affective energies work? What are the poems doing as those energies course from start to finish? I know that the book is in many ways about the crazy endeavor of making a life for one’s self in America. Is this theme clear enough, varied enough, too obviously billboarded in places?

At the same time as I ask these questions, I resist them. The other feeling that came in the dream, my wonder at the elusiveness of art work, my awe at those images morphing like shapes on the beryl stone: doesn’t this sensation suggest a need for faith in the poem on its own, apart from a “poetics?” Don’t I loathe books that seem to have traffic cops planted at every corner, to point the way around the “projects” as if the poets were working for H.U.D.? Shouldn’t poems, with their sheer animal cunning, shape shift past our planning?
**
The effort to forge a poetics? Shape shifters? Beryl stone? I must have Yeats on the brain again. In fact, in my “Modernist Poetry” class, we’re in our second week with WBY. I want the students to get a sense of how Yeats’s famous statement in Per Amica Silentiae Lunae, his claim that we make poetry “out of arguments with ourselves” finds embodiment in actual textures and structures of the verse. I want them to see how Yeats hammered his way out of his Romantic and Symbolist beginnings, and found his conclusions not in the resolutions of doctrine or set method, but in the grappling of linked contraries, what he calls in A Vision “antinomies.” When John Berryman met Yeats at the London Athenaeum in April of 1937, the 22-year-old had “an impression of tremendous but querulous force.” That would be a fine description of many of Yeats’s poems as well. Take, for instance, the appearance of the swan in “Coole and Ballylee, 1931”:

Another emblem there! The stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, I child might think
It can be murdered with a spot of ink.

I love the way, to use Berryman’s words, that the tremendous, vatic force of the emblem gets undercut, and oddly strengthened, by the querulous tone of the final couplet. At such moments it almost feels as if there are two Yeatses writing the poem. There’s the Yeats of the transporting imagination, the Yeats who at times seemed to live inside a menagerie of poetic figures, who would end arguments by throwing out some cryptic exclamation like “Ah, but that was before the peacock screamed!” Then there’s the Yeats of the will, the Yeats who during periods of greatest industry, according to his friends, rationed himself one cigarette per line of verse, until he realized (so much for “a line will take us hours maybe”!) that he could write faster, and began breaking the cigarettes in half. Somehow in the best poems, these competing selves come to a tensed draw.

And they manage to bring two different senses of modernity to bear upon the same poems. There’s the poet who responds to his era by upbraiding it, by valorizing a feudalistic past “Before merchant and clerk / Breathed on the world with feeble breath.” Then there’s the Yeats who is in the here and now as “the finished man among his enemies,” the cultural operator fighting for his theatre, for his friend Synge, and for the paintings of Hugh Lane. And this is one reason that so many Modernist Poetry syllabi start with Yeats (though ours at Washington College begins with Hardy, in fact.) He not only wedges a hinge between modernity and its past, but he suggests that every modern poet has to create his or her past and carry it into the now.

P.S. Any one in San Francisco this month owes his or herself the pleasure of seeing Kim Frohsin’s show at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.

POETRY JOURNAL, DAY THREE: “IT’S ALWAYS THE POETS WHO FALL IN THE RIVER”
At the Writers Festival in South Korea we visit a Confucian monastery. It’s a five hours train ride, south from Seoul. Evening has settled by the time we get there and a tent has been set up with tables for dinner. Soju circles around in green bottles and shot glasses, and soon the chatter grows louder, our digital photos, streakier. The Romanian poet ends a garbled but brilliant story about Count Dracula’s castle, and lumbers into the night to find the toilet. A long time afterwards, he shuffles back in, clutching his ribs, and slogs one arm around me. He’s soaking. In a groaned whisper: “Peter, please help me, I… have… fallen in the river.” The next morning as the story snakes its way around the breakfast tables, the chic young British poet gazes up from beneath her straw hat: “I’ve been on a few of these writers’ junkets. And it’s always the poets who fall in the river.”

**

Consciousness and time, most often, move at very different speeds. The urge behind the familiar injunction to “live in the present” collides with other, usually stronger ones. There’s the need to imagine backwards, to locate reality in some pleasure dome of past experience. Its twin is the desire to poke at old bruises, to see the deepest truth as past trauma, personal wounds that our lives stem from. And then there’s that yearning for the future, for escape into some high noon of experience. All of these can be wrong, I guess, and they can all be valid. Something that good poems do is, if not to reconcile these forces, at least to set them in interesting relation, at least for the time of the poem. This seems particularly true of poems that respond to “the experience of modernity.” In Don DeLillo’s Mao II, the recluse novelist Bill Gray gives this idea severe turn. He speaks into the answering machine of Brita, the photographer who has just captured his image, and with whom he’s becoming enthralled: “The machine makes everything a message,” he says, “which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They’re either picking up or not picking up.”

**

The famous poetry scholar (if there can be such a thing) ends up in the same row as us on the flight to the conference. Thankfully, he spends the short ride not talking, but shuffling the papers to which he’s supposed to respond. Around the time the pilot announces “our initial descent,” the scholar looks up from the printouts, elated, and proclaims with the perfect sincerity he would never value in a poem: “At last! I’ve figured out how to make it all about me!”

**

In Terry St. John’s studio in Oakland he showed me a shoe box stacked with the Polaroids he uses to track the progress of his paintings. It was staggering to see those forms of his, those forms that have such sculptural heft, such a solid impress of labor, moving. Sometimes whole figures, large as life, shifted across the canvases. I remember the odd shock of it, the enabling thought that this is what a master does too: he wakes up each morning and enters his uncertainty.

**

Yesterday morning, at the beginning of “Modernist Poetry,” a student cuts right to the chase and asks the crucial question. “Even when Yeats resisted the public,” she says, “he still saw himself at the center of Irish culture and politics. But these days things are so different. What could the role of the poet be now?” I spiral into my spiel about how the poet goes underground, how poetry has a long half life, how so many “classic” poets we read now were obscure during their time. Somehow my practiced response feels like evasion. So I’m surprised at what happens next. Another student raises her hand. She tells about reading Adrienne Rich. She’s convinced that poetry does have power in public. And the rest of the class seems to agree. Suddenly I’m turned around: instead of tempering the students’ skepticism, I’m now faced with the task of addressing their ideals. Incredible: they trust art.

**

The papier mache we used as kids to make animal masks. Those slippery bands. What consciousness is like, when it not only cuts through experience but pulls it in, sculpting forms in the mind. Ply on ply, attempting to neaten the shapes, sluicing the moisture away between pinched fingers: the effort itself becomes the ridged and buckled surface of the whole.

POETRY JOURNAL, DAY FOUR: “THE TROUTS NOSE”

From the newly published Notebooks of Robert Frost edited by Robert Faggen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) comes this diss on Yeats:

WBY says… the artist has a choice of seven poses. One of them
he must assume. Don’t believe it children. There is such a thing
as sincerity. It is hard to define, but it is probably nothing more
than your highest liveliness escaping from a succession of dead
selves. Miraculously. It is the same with illusions. Any belief
you sink into when you should be leaving it behind is an
illusion. Reality is the cold feeling on the end of the trouts nose….
W.B.Y. and G. S. anta. are two false souls.

There’s a lot more to this than ancient literary gossip. And I think it tells more about Frost than about Yeats, or George Santayana (whose call for a “philosophical poem,” that would extend beyond the world of isolated facts which Santayana found so unsatisfactory in Whitman, Frost came to reject during his short time at Harvard, where Santayana was then teaching.) Frost may seem the naturalistic realist, the almost anti-intellectual deflator of idealist balloons. But if you look carefully at that notebook entry, his ideas about “Sincerity” and “Reality” start to look more nuanced.

Sincerity for Frost is not simply “being yourself.” No such ordinary event, it happens “miraculously.” The self who breaks through the “succession of dead selves” is not a set identity or a state so much as an action, discernable precisely because of its kinetic movement: “liveliness.” And illusion is not wrong because it fails to measure up to some eternal Platonic ideal, but simply because it happens not to work.

Frost’s definition of reality is the most cunning of all. “The cold feeling on the trouts nose” is hardly the whole river. That elusive speckled creature, that beautiful sliver of bio-mass, confers reality upon the world around it. Not in the sense of that idealist philosopher Yeats so admired, Bishop Berkeley, who believed esse es percipi, “to be is to be perceived.” No, Frost’s claim resembles William James’ belief that “the human contribution cannot be weeded out,” though I guess Frost would include trout along with humans. This means that our perceptions animate the world, and give it truth, and yet we still run into impasses: that rock is still there and if you kick it, your foot will hurt.

It may seem a little pedantic to pick apart what reads like a straightforward statement. But that’s the thing about Frost. He tends to stipple his sincerity with an undercurrent of insinuation. That’s one reason I love giving his poem “Hyla Brook” to students. Here it is:

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.

Last semester, we looked at this poem in a writing workshop at Washington College. As soon as I finished reading the last line aloud, one student exclaimed, “That’s so true! We love the things we love for what they are!” So I had to become Mephistopheles. The poem is more complex than simple praise, isn’t it? I pointed out the sneaky allusion to Tennyson’s “The Brook.” Some of the students talked about the strange, allegorical references to reading and writing. Maybe most importantly, one of them asked, isn’t it weird that Frost praises “things for what they are” when the whole time he’s described the disappearance of the brook?

And yet I think that student was still right to admire the last line, and to feel its sincerity. The poem radically questions what a thing really is. At the same time, the center holds. Those “who remember long” do have a power to confer reality. Frost’s affective thrust maintains its force, even against the way his undercurrents went.

POETRY JOURNAL, DAY FIVE: ANIMAL PORTRAITS

Getting ready to write an essay on the paintings of Siddharth Parasnis, I’m struggling to articulate the vivacity I admire in his work. How fasten it to words? He’s certainly learned from Diebenkorn: there’s a similar love of the architectural line, a similar brightness in the palette, and an ability to use those often saturated hues to elicit oddly subtle moods. But Sid has transmuted that influence into something wholly his own.

In an e-mail to me, he writes of traveling in the American South and in his native India: “I find some odd places such as patios, corridors, thresholds, backyards, barns, a small alley or even a stairway supported by a broken old wall or it could be just a simple window. These places are often overlooked and quite mundane but they have something sooo emotional about them that I think we all relate to them in a very unique way. To me they are like… Grand Ma or Grand Pa… We love them but we don’t really understand their importance… take them for granted. One day they pass away and we realize what we have missed.”

Reading this description, I think I know one way that Sid is entirely unique. The emotions and mysteries of place which he writes of certainly suffuse his work. And yet there’s something almost the opposite, a speed and sharpness of line, that makes for the immediacy of the paintings. The crispness of presentation contrasts with the lingering feeling tones, and that heightens those feeling tones to their full potential. The speed conveys the thrust and exhilaration of travel, and also the risk of taking for granted the very beauty and depth to which it offers us arrival.

**

Arnold Schopenhauer claimed that only people can be the subjects of portraits. According to the philosopher, the human image has a unique ability to induce “purely aesthetic contemplation.”

But is this really true? Animals have distinct features. And if we’re looking for purity in paintings or poems, wouldn’t animals actually make better subjects? They arrive in our field of vision untangled from so many contingencies, like race and class. Animals come much closer than we do to being purely formal creatures.

But still, Schopenhauer must have been right. It is identification which gives portraiture its unique energy. This is especially true when a portrait, or for that matter a poem about another person, conveys the surprise of otherness. The sixteenth century paintings of Arcimboldo, for instance, those composites of human heads made from the shapes of vegetables, derive their force from respecting the lineaments of our species. Seeing a bosc pear approximate the nose of Rudolph II, we’re made to laugh about the very creation of the resemblance. That laughter betrays an uneasiness, a confusion that comes from seeing how our attempts at representation, those skills with symbols which help to make us humans, can be absurd and miraculous at the same time.

Arcimboldo’s paintings are more than virtuosic gimmicks because their humor opens a space for the viewer, a space where humans not only appear to one another as both alien and alike, but also where they can communicate this odd duality. As with all successful portraits, his paintings offer a reciprocal circuit between the artist, the subject and the viewer. This may not involve “communication” as we usually know it, but the process of exchange is crucial.

Schopenhauer will be proven wrong not when animals can paint portraits, or write poems, but when they can show them to one another.

**

After the movers came and went, and Jack and Amy flew east, I lived in the empty cube of our apartment for a week, to finish up my classes. Before I left, I drove to the Sierras. At Donner Pass it was snowing. When I came down into Truckee, flakes were still blowing in the late May sun. I remember standing in the middle of the Truckee River, the water a rapid, muddied emerald as I casted back to the bank and the snow drifted in wisps. It felt as if winter and summer had somehow collided. It felt as if the whole of our five years in California were distilled into something I could carry in my hands. Across from me, a vacant job site with a blue tarp snapping in the wind, the crisp outlines of Douglas firs, the sheer sweep of the mountains: there was a clarity so strong it was almost burning. I remember that feeling now when I look at a printed manuscript, my own or one by a friend, or when I see a painter friend’s work in the light of a gallery show. To be finished: it has less to do for me with reaching some mysterious level of achievement, much less with making everything fit perfectly. It happens when the work becomes its own thing, sharpened, creaturely, inhuman.