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Panel 2: Aesthetic Lineage and Originality

Originally Published: October 24, 2007

“Emily Dickinson was one of the three most intelligent people who ever took up writing poetry.”


I’m pretty sure that’s an exact quote. It was Galway Kinnell talking. Like Simic before him, Kinnell was the lone voice of self-doubt on the panel: “I’m the last person to speak” he insisted, on his own influences. His advice, nonetheless, was: Follow a Master. That was what Emily Dickinson did, a strong mind amid weak contemporaries.
Robert Hass, who opened the panel, waxed eloquent. His guiding trope contrasted the ideas of the money economy (in which one is always accounting and balancing) and the gift economy (in which we live in voluntary obligation to those who give us gifts). Poetry is of the gift economy. You receive the “power of art that opens the world to you” and express gratitude toward those works of art that give you the feeling “this is what life is about.”
Nathaniel Mackey stressed “lineage” over “influence” then emphasized “lines don’t have to be straight.” That is, “have your own mix,” or too stiff a sense of lineage will impede originality. He quoted Robert Duncan’s “I’m a derivative poet” then echoed Olson’s idea of field composition: “We’re in a field, a field of commotion, a vibration society.”
Ellen Bryant Voigt picked up on Mackey’s statement that poetic influence should be “unanxious.” “It doesn’t have to be Freudian,” she said, contra Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. There needs to be sufficient difference and sufficient compatibility in the predecessors you choose to guide you. When Philip Larkin fell for Yeats, she recounted, what he loved was the master’s sense of “distanced emotion.” That was the last thing he needed! Voigt laughed. He needed, and eventually found, the opposite in his next great influence, Thomas Hardy. “Hardy taught one to feel rather than to write.” And after that, combining the two opposing influences, Larkin wrote his first great poems.
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Once again, what I’m struck by listening to these poets is their earnestness and generosity: Robert Hass gushing about reading Heidi as a child: the description of the grandfather and the goats and the Alps! Ellen Bryant Voigt rhapsodizing about the art of the sentence poised against the art of the line: this is what poems are made of, and—fiercely—“This is what I love!”
Poets, teachers, imparting their passion and wisdom to the next generation. What else is there? Actually, there is something else and both Hass and Mackey hinted at it when the moderator, Herbert Leibowitz, agitated against the “monotony” of younger poets who deal in fragments. Hass pointed out that the old metrical poetry invites the trance state. It signaled to the unconscious that we are about to enter a realm of enchantment, much as the phrase “once upon a time” does. But Modernism brutalized that.
I wish I could quote Hass, but my imperfect notes must suffice: Modernism’s “first move” was a call to attention, not enchantment. William Carlos Williams’s By the road to the contagious hospital is a signature Modernist first line. Rhythmic imperative develops slowly after that; the important thing is that the first line signals “a profound suspicion of enchantment.”
Mackey picked up immediately on this. Contra Leibowitz’s suspicion of the fragment, Mackey proclaimed a generation-wide “suspicion of totalization” where the sentence was concerned. Breaking the sentence, or “statement,” down into phrases was a way to combat a false sense of truth—“totalization”—thus to replace it with a sense of contingency proper to our experience in the new world order.
Of course, this is where I perked up. I’m for enchantment, and yet …. Emily, in my comment box, is right to point out that no one thus far advocates what Levertov advocated. But right here is a hint of the kind of negtivity that undergraduates can only foggily apprehend. To enchant or not to enchant? To believe or not to believe? Not only do we live in a fucked-up world, we live in a fucked-up world in which our best evidence suggests we are little more than monkeys. What say you, Rilke?
Oh, in case you were wondering? Kinnell said the other two most intelligent poets were Shakespeare and Mandelstam.

Ange Mlinko was born in Philadelphia and earned her BA from St. John's College and MFA from Brown University…

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