Wrong Poets Society

Of all of the sins in the English canon, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” remains a primary scene of crime. Its first line balances the eponymous urn—“thou still unravish’d bride of quietness”—on a precipice of Ovidian violation: “what mad pursuit? what struggle to escape?” Its narrative lines are arrested just before rape can convert locus amoenus to locus horribilis. As in modern museums, in which galleries are deoxygenated to save art imperiled by fire, Keats saves the maiden, swain, heifer, and priest on the urn from being devoured by assault, age, death, and the prime mover of each, narrative time, by pumping the air out of the gallery of spectation and speculation in which the urn rests. It is rendered deathless because lifeless, a “Cold Pastoral!”—an association Cleanth Brooks Jr. drew in his 1944 essay “History without Footnotes: An Account of Keats's Urn.” The killer chiasmus of the final couplet—“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—knotted again via the enjambed final line—“that is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know”—serves as a syntactic garrote that snuffs out the ode (and the urn) for good. Denotatively, the urn itself speaks these lines and addresses the mortal viewer, but, connotatively, Keats-the-assassin seems to speak to the urn he is regarding before he exits the reverie gallery and returns to a real life of “[a]ll breathing human passion.” Back in the mortal world of compulsory breathing with his tubercular lungs, he will grow, in two years, “pale, and spectre-thin, and die,” at 25.

Keats's “Ode” is a meditation on, and intervention in, Ovidian plotting and scenography, on the uncompleted life and the uncompleted crime. Its final lines have elicited aggravated responses from two centuries of readers. The claim that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” persists as an epitome of wrongness. In Keats's Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (2021), the scholar and critic Anahid Nersessian calls the lines “ghastly” and quotes Kenneth Burke's rewriting of them as “body is turd, turd body” before adding this herself: “The Urn is full of shit.” She saves the poem while damning these lines by presenting Keats’s “Ode” as an ethics test: “It is a critique, not a catechism: it does not want you to buy what its speaker is selling. It gives him a platform and waits, like the urn, to see how we will respond.”

But the most instructive negative take on this couplet comes from T.S. Eliot, who calls it a “serious blemish on a beautiful poem” and suggests “the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue.” There is a relationship, it seems, between the beauty of the poem and its wrongness, and, more important, between the wrongness of the poem and the feelings of failure and uncertainty this wrongness engenders in readers. This relationship between beauty and wrongness is not a binary that separates but an entanglement that binds.

Rachel Zucker opens her new book, The Poetics of Wrongness (Wave Books, 2023), which collects four talks that grew out of lectures she delivered in 2016 as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series, with a consideration of this most wrong of poems—or at least its final lines. “John Keats,” she asserts, “is wrong.” For Zucker, the problem with Keats’s couplet lies primarily in its elevation of capital-B Beauty and its simplistic equivalence with capital-T Truth because “the relationship between beauty and truth is wildly complicated, complex, and impossible to define.”

Keats’s long-denigrated couplet is an easy mark, of course, but this opening gesture makes for a zesty invitation to the book’s manifesto energy. Zucker adopts her key term—wrong—as a vivid, flexible descriptor: “Here’s my current definition of a poet: ‘I am wrong and you are wrong and I’m willing to say it, therefore I am a poet.’” She then uses the word wrong to describe a whole universe of pluses and minuses, likes and dislikes, starting with Keats. The foundational texts of Futurism (Italian and Russian), Vorticism, Dada, and Surrealism all power their juggernaut movements with this dynamism of yes and no, name and shame, blast and bless. Following that model, Zucker casts Keats’s vexing couplet as the clarion call of a regime of beauty supremacy, which she sees as coextensive with the beauty industry, patriarchy, eugenics, racism, and, the ne plus ultra, Nazism.

This hyperbolic escalation is so contestable that it is an example of wrongness. One suspects that may be the point—or that stamping Keats as wrong is a way to eventually construe him as an exemplar of the poetics of wrongness. But that doesn't come to pass. Instead, though Zucker insists that “a poet is one who feels wrong in a wrong world and is willing to speak even when doing so proves her wrong, ugly, broken, and complicit,” Keats and his Beauty are the wrong kind of wrong. From here, Zucker embarks on a rapid-fire rejection of six key poetry shibboleths—poetry should be beautiful, slant, brief, timeless, universal, and “close to godliness.” There's a farcical quality to proposing a poetics of wrongness while charging an array of poets and poetries with employing the wrong kind of wrongness, but it all goes by so fast that, like Alice, one can scarcely formulate an objection before being swept along to the next seat at the table. And, like the Mad Hatter's tea party, it’s all engaging and fun. The brio of Zucker’s introduction fits the conventions of a manifesto; it makes claims so broad they cannot possibly be “true.” Such claims are ripe for rebuttal, as Zucker's conclusion suggests: “Of course, I would love to be proven wrong.” In a manifesto, contradiction can open vertiginous, intoxicating spaces of speculation, what Keats might call “wild surmise,” which brings visionary sightlines into view.

After this zingy introduction, however, the energy of the book disperses through three more lectures, a lengthy author’s note, and a somewhat miscellaneous appendix. Along the way, Zucker takes up the history and ethics of confessional poetry, motherhood, teaching, and her own writing, oaring alternately closer to and further from the topic of wrongness. One of the most persuasive of these circuits, which runs through a lecture Michel Foucault delivered at UC Berkeley in 1983, arrives at an ethic of “saying everything” in poetry, which Zucker characterizes as speaking truth to power, punching up not down, being community-oriented, assuming responsibility, and taking risks. “Saying everything” is the method of the book itself, then, and everything also describes the kitchen-sink variety of its formal gestures, which leap intuitively among personal essay, academic lecture, lecture notes not yet digested into lecture, manifesto, vignette, and artist's statement.

An openness to “saying everything” has long defined Zucker’s work as both a poet and a builder of broad digital platforms for the discussion of poetry. Her own poetry might be considered an inheritor of the confessional mode, as it deploys a radical first-person frankness about, as she puts it, “birthing, nursing, maternal ambivalence, a long marriage, restlessness, sex, lack of sex, desire, aging and disappointment,” depicting seemingly identifiable figures, such as her husband, children, students, and fellow writers. However, at times her work is more expansive than the lyrics associated with the early confessionals, especially her most recent volumes, The Pedestrians (2014) and SoundMachine (2019). These books contain poems that read like lyric essays, combining memoir, poetics, and even discussion of the confessional itself and thus make a charged, resonant companion to The Poetics of Wrongness. Alongside her many books, Zucker also founded and hosts the Commonplace podcast, a series of in-depth conversations with poets. The present volume is a variously explicit and implicit meditation on Zucker’s work as she continually interrogates it through the framework of confessionalism and through the lenses of signal poets, such as Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell.

Olds and Lowell are the positive and negative nodes of a spectrum of confessionalism on which Zucker struggles to place herself. In the book’s third lecture, “A Very Large Charge,” which explores the ethics of writing about one's family or even one’s life in the context of confessional poetry, she adopts Olds as her ethical model while rejecting Lowell:

I find Olds’s work permission-giving, risky, glorious, and enduring. I find Lowell’s work, save for a few truly heartbreakingly moving poems, to be mostly “bullshit eloquence” and “not worth” the harm they caused. What does this mean about my own transgressions? As Lowell wrote, “[M]y eyes have seen what my hand did.” How can I, by reading the work of these recent masters, determine the nature of what my hand did? How can I forget a path forward? Is there any path forward that does not involve great, unforgivable harm?

This passage typifies both the pleasures and frustrations of The Poetics of Wrongness. It’s punchy and knowledgeable and takes a frank tone toward the authors under discussion and Zucker’s own readers. Yet, despite her declarations of faith in wrongness, she is not entirely comfortable being wrong, and this ambivalence creates a kind of hecticness in the book, winding up some arguments prematurely in a volley of rhetorical questions, as above, or interrupting her train of thought to anticipate ethical objections. Zucker’s work is most compelling when she drills into the history of confessional poetry, its inception as a term, which poets are included or excluded, and the discomfort derived from the persistence of this affiliation. This discomfort could be an engine for laying out new terrain, but for that, Zucker would have to dwell longer in what being "wrong, ugly, broken, and complicit” rather than ethical might mean. But Zucker doesn’t seem to actually want that. She wants to find an ethical vantage, and this search causes her to veer away from her apparent subject before she truly gets going or to abandon angles that might shed new light.

One such new vantage presents itself toward the end of “What We Talk About When We Talk About the Confessional,” when Zucker moves away from the word confessional and tries out a new term: disobedience poetry. Disobedience poetry, Zucker posits, runs parallel to confessional poetry but finds its origins in Allen Ginsberg rather than Lowell. The advantage of this adjustment, to Zucker’s eyes, is to move away from a WASP lineage of ultra privilege and shed the term confessional, with its problematic Catholic associations of patriarchy and shame—a shame that is then tautologically reinforced by critics wishing to denigrate confessional poetry. As she speculates,

I don't know if poetry or the world would have been any different if I were now writing about a movement or a movement called “disobedience poetry” rather than “confessional poetry,” but in my fantasy, Allen Ginsberg, Etheridge Knight, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Alice Notley, C.D. Wright, Bernadette Mayer, Claudia Rankine, D.A. Powell, Brenda Hillman, Sharon Olds, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Alicia Ostriker, Sonia Sanchez, Eileen Myles, Langston Hughes, Morgan Parker, Danez Smith, Arielle Greenberg, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Ronaldo Wilson, Anne Waldman, Molly Peacock, Shane McCrae, Ross Gay, and so many others are all in it. No one wastes time accusing these poets of narcissism, hysteria, directness, accessibility, or for being strident or difficult, because these poems run on the engine of risk, which is different from the engine of shame.

The reorientation from shame to risk is afforded by rooting this hypothetical disobedience poetry not with a WASP poet but with a Jewish one. Unlike the Christian association with shame that perfuses confessional poetry’s inception and reception, Judaism, by Zucker’s calculation, does not prioritize shame. To reroute confessionality through a figure such as Ginsberg alleviates the burden of shame and runs it instead on a circuit of risk, a riskiness embodied by Ginsberg’s own outsized prophetic persona.

Twice in The Poetics of Wrongness, Zucker briefly evokes the Jewish tenet of “lashon hara, speaking ill of (or badmouthing) someone, which is considered a grave misdeed.” Her grounding of her thinking in this ethic is riveting and provides a glimpse of a possible orientation she could have laid out in this book:

I was raised to believe that lashon hara (gossip) is a serious injury and that honoring your parents is so important it supersedes “thou shalt not kill” in the ten commandments, but I was not raised with the sacrament of confession, the notion of original sin, or the Christian view that my thoughts were sins for which I should repent. Instead, Talmudic argument, midrash, and storytelling were at the heart of my upbringing, and openly expressing my feelings and ideas, even if these thoughts and emotions were difficult or unsavory, was encouraged.

Here, then, is another version of “saying everything,” one that could potentially provide Zucker with firmer footholds for laying out her poetics. In “A Very Large Charge,” she posits lashon hara as at the ethical degree zero for the kind of poetry she wishes to advocate:

According to Jewish law, however, one is allowed to break any commandment, including lashon hara, in order to save a life. I do feel that Olds is often writing to save her own life and has saved and enriched the lives of so many others with her poems. I believe poems have social value.

Having introduced lashon hara as a point from which to reevaluate the ethics of confessionalism, Zucker, in just three sentences, reduces her claims from lifesaving to merely enriching to, neutrally, having “social value.” But if lashon hara establishes for transgression the capacity to save lives, then it provides a nexus or crucible in which poetry touches on the intensity of death, intervenes in the flow of time from life to death, causing a preponderance of possible consequences. Rather than a term to treat in passing, lashon hara should be a potential neutron star at the center of Zucker’s poetics.

To ask a larger question: why should this vision of disobedience poetry, as outlined above, remain hypothetical? Why should it remain, as Zucker calls it, a “fantasy”? Rather than sketching this remarkable roll call toward the end of a lecture chiefly grappling with Lowell, Plath, and Sexton, why not write this book? Or why not make this the business of the remainder of the present book? After laying out her vivid and spiky path, Zucker jettisons it, as she habitually and bafflingly does in Poetics of Wrongness. In the lecture’s final lines, she zooms out far enough that her final paragraph could be about any kind of poetry at all, which is, apparently, her point:

I am not advocating any one kind of poetry. I want neither a prohibition of lived experience nor a tyranny of lived experience. … I want a poetry that is catholic only in its lowercase sense: diverse, inclusive, and all-embracing.

Well, yes. But when Zucker zooms out to the widest, most unproblematically ethical horizon, readers are hardly in the precincts of the “wrong” anymore. Her work loses its focus on what is most distinctly hers and what she has to bring to contemporary poetics: a reinvention and redress of confessionalism, be it called disobedience poetics, “say everything” poetry, or, yes, “wrongness”—an insistence on, and closer consideration of, new lineages, an articulation of new possibilities that stays focused, specific, and challenging enough to provide footholds for poets and readers to clamber alongside her. This hypothetical book might also look outside the lineages of Anglo-American poetry to see what other literatures have taught about the political and domestic contexts for transgression; in the present book, Keats and Seamus Heaney seem to be the only non-American poets who receive more than passing mention. Poets writing outside yet under the regime of English have a wealth to contribute to any poetics of wrongness, transgression, or disobedience. Two recent publications, the queer Colombian poet Raúl Gómez Jattin’s Almost Obscene (2022), translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott, and Mexican poet Luis Felipe Fabre’s Writing with Caca (2021), translated by JD Pluecker, itself an occult inhabiting of the life of the outrageous 20th-century Mexican poet Salvador Novo, might make insolent and instructive comparison.

Finally, it must be said that although Zucker has made a career of extension and conversation, of making room for "saying everything,” she has real power as an epigrammatist. Two-hundred years later, Keats’s beauty/truth couplet is available to kick around because its epigrammatic power is undeniable, even if its truth power is debatable. Similarly, having read the following poem one time in Zucker's collection The Pedestrians, I find I have committed it to rueful memory:

real poem (infanticide)
 
In poems, some poets do bad things
to babies. This is called imagination.
I have babies and no imagination.

As a mother to both live and dead babies and as a committed literary extremophile, I could not disagree more with this compact little poem. In fact, if called upon to write a response, I might write its polar opposite. But this poem engrained itself in my brain because of its clarity and epigrammatic force. Throughout Poetics of Wrongness, I came across many moments of eloquent concision, and these were almost always statements with which I vehemently disagreed. For example:

The poetics of wrongness is anthropocentric: It is written by human beings for human beings and about human beings. It is interested in the divine and nature as seen and experienced through the human senses and intellect.

This is a shocking claim in the age of the Anthropocene, when the human viewpoint in the form of asset-hoarding billionaires or the corporate depredations hidden from view behind the ethical blind of the individual consumer is laying waste to the planet. Yet, like her infanticide poem, it is a snippet of language that stuck in my brain matter as I went about my daily tasks.

I think a lot about the title of Leonard Cohen’s song “One of Us Cannot be Wrong." But I think Leonard was wrong on that one. We might both be wrong. We might all be wrong. Eliot's response to Keats shows that wrongness can be mutual, destabilizing, entangling. Though difficult to tolerate, it might even bind us to the beautiful. It might even be a route to the truth.