Dear Katha,
This morning as I stood, flush with democratic enthusiasm (note the small “d”), exercising my franchise in the mobbed, cavernous P.S. 282 gym, I stumbled on a metaphor for the current state of poetry. On Election Day, in addition to choosing the president, senators, and representatives, you’re invited to vote for people seeking offices you’ve never heard of, or whose functions you don’t understand. Here in New York we’re always being asked to elect judges to a bunch of different courts, and I doubt I’m the only citizen who wonders just what all those different judges actually do. In other states, citizens elect insurance commissioners, registrars of deeds, and county clerks, voting–if they vote at all–without any real idea of why these offices exist. But people nonetheless probably have an obscure, slightly guilty sense that these offices are in some way important–they must be there for a reason–and would probably be nervous if someone proposed their abolition. “Gee,” I think to myself, “I really should know more about the surrogate court,” which is another way of saying, “You know, I really don’t care about the surrogate court.”
In the current cultural landscape, poetry is a bit like the surrogate court, or the registry of deeds. People don’t think much about it, don’t understand why they should care about it, but in the back of their minds may lurk a scintilla of shame at their ignorance and indifference–a shame that naturally mutates into the kind of defensive, intimidated dismissal you allude to.
And I agree that the schools are largely to blame, though I also think that the appreciation of poetry is something that can and should be taught. The problem is that it’s hard to do, it’s extremely time-consuming, and it’s almost never done well. On one hand, you want to allow students access to the sensuous and intellectual pleasures that excite you in particular poems, but at the same time that access is only possible with the help of a certain amount of information, both historical and technical. I’m reminded of your earlier exchange on painting with Sarah–you discussed the tension between the desire for a fresh and immediate experience of art and the knowledge that such experience is often intensified, even enabled, by background knowledge. When I used to teach a poetry-heavy version of freshman English, I would be confronted by this dilemma every day and find myself caught between opposed and equally unsatisfactory pedagogical approaches. Here were Brooks and Warren, blithely assuming that an 18-year-old engineering major could suss out the meanings, and apprehend the beauty, of “Lycidas” or “The Waste Land,” just by contemplating the words on the pages. And there was the Norton Anthology, decking out the same poems with marginal glosses of unfamiliar words and copious footnotes. But “Lycidas” usually stayed dead, and “The Waste Land” bred no lilacs out its dead ground–unless both teacher and pupils were willing to work long and hard over both the music and the sense.
Reading poetry is often work, but so is yoga or cooking or playing the piano. And like those undertakings, enjoyment is enhanced by habit. The problem is how to acquire and promote the habit. One of the obstacles to poetry’s wider acceptance, I think, is its own carefully guarded prestige, which seals it off from the rest of the culture into a self-satisfied, self-perpetuating, and not especially welcoming museum world.
But enough about “poetry.” On to the poets and the poems. “To generalize is to be an Idiot,” said Blake, and I’ve been enough of one today for both of us. Onward with the discrimination of particulars. One of the things that struck me about Kizer, Komunyakaa, and Kunitz is how much–though how differently–they depend on classical literature and mythology. This was much in vogue in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, and I was a little surprised to find Kizer’s later poems and Komonyakaa’s new ones saturated with references to Persephone, Hesiod, Helen of Troy, and the like. One explanation for the reliance on antique sources is that these old stories continue to be a deep well-spring of archetypes and ideas, a thematic tool-kit that has been passed down since the Renaissance and that still proves useful. Another, to my mind more plausible if not entirely opposed explanation is that Greek and Roman myths provide an easy default setting of poetic seriousness. One way to shore up poetry against its slide into anecdote and ordinary speech is, as Komunyakaa does, to link quotidian happenings and ordinary insights to the intimation of something deep and old. For instance, a poem called “Or, God in Godzilla”:
The Captain from Psyops says,
“Tydeus, if we have a mind, the body
Runs to keep up. When tail
Marries head, a beast rises,
& the battle’s won without CS
Grenade, rocket or laser beam.”
In a luminous room of mock-ups
& boxy ad cameras, they sip
Bloody Marys. An icon stolen
From a pyramid grows in ice cubes
& on cereal boxes. Cartoons
& dream machines. The Captain
Sketches King Kong on a napkin
& holds it up to the towering
Light of an overhead projector
Peering into Polyphemus’s cave.
What do you make of this? Like many of the poems in “Talking Dirty to the Gods,” this poem carefully arranges a number of surreal juxtapositions in the service of a rather attenuated version of wit. The heterogeneous images yoked together come from modern pop culture, the military (Komunyakaa is a Vietnam vet, and his earlier books contain some scary, hallucinatory verses about the war), and technology and then also from the Odyssey. But I don’t come away with any strong or surprising sense of either the distance between our modern situation and the world Homer described, just a sense that the poet is aware of, and in some vague way attuned to, both.
I’ve outrun the allotted space, and our readers’ patience, but I’d like to ask what you thought of Kizer’s poem–too long to quote in full–called “Persephone Pauses.” Or, not to put you on the spot, what you made of her attempts to mine classical sources for news of the present, in particular the present (i.e., the decades between 1960 and now) condition of women? I liked “Persephone Pauses” a lot, because it endowed a mythic figure with a modern psychology and imagined what a real woman with doubts, desires, and ambivalences would make of a situation in which she had to spend half the year living underground.
All best,
Tony