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Overview
A Boundless Field takes its title from Walt Whitman's sanguine view of the future of American poetry as he expressed it in "Democratic Vistas," a view that seems all the more pertinent today. During the later twentieth century, poetry in the United States branched out in many directions, ranging from a formalism influenced by New Criticism and a subsequent Neo-Formalism through the New York School and Language Poetry to a postmodern maximalism too diverse to categorize. The essays and reviews collected in this volume take up the work of poets writing in these different areas and writing into the twenty-first century.
Yenser's constant criteria for worthiness of attention include an alertness to the long tradition of English and American poetry, a consistent awareness of the integrity of the poetic line, a simultaneous commitment to verbal play and verbal work, and an implicit acknowledgment of two of Wallace Stevens's declarations: first that all admirable poetry is experimental poetry, and second that at first blush all good poems put up a certain resistance to the reader. Hence the usefulness of "criticism."
Stephen Yenser is Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles. His poetry has appeared in many publications and to wide acclaim, including the Walt Whitman Award of the American Academy of Poets for his book The Fire in All Things. He is also author of The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill and Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472112784 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 07/30/2002 |
| Series: | Poets On Poetry |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.38(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Boundless Field
AMERICAN POETRY AT LARGE
By Stephen Yenser
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2002
Stephen Yenser
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11278-4
Chapter One Elizabeth Bishop's Stove
Wondering how best to prepare this étoufée of essays and reviews, I find myself gazing-as I have so often gazed over the last several years-at a miniature wood-burning kitchen stove, made of tin, about 6" x 4" x 2", hand-painted to represent a stove made of bricks. Is it the means for cooking up this concoction? My miniature stove, surely sun-bleached, is now chiefly shades of orange, but it must once have been red. It stands shiftingly on legs painted metallic turquoise, and its bottom pan rises what would be (if the stove were translated into the scale of my everyday world) some two feet above the ground. Thanks to a clever, simple hinge, the oven door, the door of the stove's combustion chamber, opens and closes, opens and closes-and on each of the stove's two burners there sits a tin pot, one with real (therefore "oversize") black beans in it, the other with grains of real white rice. (Both the beans and the rice are old-the first now a dull brown, the second dun.) Above and behind the burners, on braces that run up from the stove's sides to meet in an inverted U behind the stovepipe (itself painted forest green, like the braces), hang two miniature kitchen implements, on the left a sieve and on the right a grater. Inscribed in a circle on the oven door is the brand name-presumably also the name of the first cook-"EVA."
This miniature stove, or one very like it, evidently made by a Brazilian folk artist, belonged to Elizabeth Bishop. She reproduced it as a miniature, along with what would be (if it were to scale) a giant cannikin of enormous flowers, in a painting (watercolor and gouache), done in a quasi-primitive style, known as Red Stove and Flowers. ("Home-made, home-made! But aren't we all?" her Crusoe exults-who lived so long in a world in which a "weird scale" obtained.) In the painting, in white cursive script across the top of a black backdrop behind the stove, there runs an inscription: "May the Future's Happy Hours Bring you Beans and Rice and Flowers-April 27th, 1955-Elizabeth." The antithetical rhyme of Hours with Flowers is, characteristically, discreetly suppressed. The current whereabouts of the painting is unknown, its dedicatee uncertain. Like seven other paintings by Bishop, it is now viewable, alas, only in a color photograph. (It is reproduced on the cover of and again within Exchanging Hats: Paintings, by Elizabeth Bishop, ed. William Benton.) The miniature stove itself was passed along to her friend James Merrill, after whose death it came by way of a gift into my hands.
Having hoped that this set of circumstances would be heuristic, and suddenly at the risk of particularizing precociously, I now look for further help to Bishop's "Poem" (included in her last collection, Geography III), which is itself, title notwithstanding, "about" a painting. In "Poem" a great-uncle's landscape painting has been passed along collaterally to the speaker, who, meditating on it, has a revelation:
Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it! It's behind-I can almost remember the farmer's name. His farm backed on that meadow. There it is, titanium white, one dab.
Later, the poet muses on her distant relative and his work:
I never knew him. We both knew this place, apparently, this literal small backwater, looked at it long enough to memorize it, our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved, or its memory is (it must have changed a lot). Our visions coincided-"visions" is too serious a word-our looks, two looks: art "copying from life" and life itself, life and the memory of it so compressed they've turned into each other. Which is which? Life and the memory of it cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board, dim, but how live, how touching in detail -the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
The issue raised, which is virtually Platonic, is the nature of "recognition"-and of "knowledge" in the first place. The more deeply the observer-poet has felt herself into the painting, so to speak, the more it has become her own, or the more she belongs to it, and therefore the more she "recognizes" herself and her own past in it. Mightn't the same be said of many works of art that frame our feelings and memories for us? There might be a sense, that is, in which any evocative scene, however initially "strange" to the observer, would come to seem, by virtue of its evocations, familiar. In this instance, the "literal small backwater" represented on smooth cardboard might not be in fact that of Bishop's youth but instead simply engagingly painted. In other words, the scene is not even "literal" at all until the poet makes it so, or renders it in words-which is to say, makes the painted scene, along with that scene as reported and remembered by her, all indistinguishable, from her point of view in the first instance and the reader's in the second. "Life and the memory of it so compressed / they've turned into each other. Which is which?"
If Bishop's lines work as I think they work, any reader with any autobiographical detail whatever in common with the scene as rendered might discover the seeds of his or her past therein. It figures, then, that in the poem's last lines the scene Bishop describes is in effect that of Eden, the origin we all have in common, on which she ironically superimposes the eternally alluring prospect of Milton's "fresh Woods, and pastures new." All in all, from past to future, what our lives add up to is
Not much. About the size of our abidance along with theirs: the munching cows, the iris, crisp and shivering, the water still standing from spring freshets, the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.
Bishop's last line, like the first line of her poem, and like many others in it, is in sturdy, homely iambic pentameter, her normative meter in this case, which itself might be called a means of compressing "life and the memory of it."
Let me sum up what I understand about "Poem." Any reading interprets, at her implicit invitation, Bishop's poem, which interprets her great-uncle's landscape, which interprets an "original" scene, a scene that in the poet's report of its painted version-with her paradoxical fusion of time passing and time frozen-is all but explicitly tantamount to the frieze on Keats's dreamed-up Grecian urn as he spells it out.
Now let me further suggest that as her "Poem" is to her great-uncle's painting, so her own Red Stove and Flowers is to the folk artist's stove. In each case, one art interprets another, and the interpreted object itself represents a "common" or mundane subject. In each case, that subject (the rural scene, the miniature stove) is unprepossessing, though carefully crafted in the representation of it, and each representation invites someone's further participation, tinkering, speculation. For instance, the actual miniature stove's brand name as advertised on the stove door is "EVA," whereas the name that appears on Bishop's painting of the stove is "Magú." In the gloss on the painting as it is reproduced in Exchanging Hats: Paintings, the editor implies that Magú suggests magic (which definition might indirectly connect the miniature with "the Little Marvel Stove" in Bishop's "Sestina," published in Questions of Travel). For better or worse, however, magic in Portuguese is magíca, whereas Magú is the common nickname for Mariaugusta, which (as Bishop's younger friend Ricardo Sternberg has informed me) happened to be the given name of Bishop's acquaintance, by way of the poet's longtime intimate friend Lota de Macedo Soares, Mariaugusta de Léon Costa Ribero. In all probability, then, Bishop, having wittily exchanged the brand name of the stove for the nickname of Lota's friend, gave the now missing painting to Mariaugusta in April 1955. To say so, of course, is to begin to appropriate the painting.
The preceding paragraphs will have adumbrated some approaches and biases to come. To begin with, the spirits whom I want to hover over my readings of thirty-six living poets are those of Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill, who seem to me the crucial poets of the first and second postmodern generations. (She was born in 1911, he in 1926.) In the second place, the readings in this book, most of them concerned with the three generations of postmodern poets beginning with Merrill's and especially the two succeeding his, value local color (in both senses of the phrase) and are responsive to subtly calculated effects, which is to say that they are detail oriented and word specific. Third, these readings reflect my convictions that there is no such thing as "poetic subject matter" (indeed, as soon as a subject matter is perceived as "poetic," whether it be courtly love or child abuse, it needs challenging) and that poetry qua poetry is never interesting for its "ideas" (of which there are probably only a basic two or three in the world, after all, and those discoverable in Plato). For another thing, these essays esteem poems that are conversant with aesthetic traditions and precursors, whether in the so-called Western world or elsewhere. Their art comes from art. For yet another, however, they emphasize a poetry that at once embodies, provokes, and resists tampering thought; a poetry that is resistant to both received notions and its own premises, hence innovative, hence complex; a poetry that bears witness to a processive questioning of things (phrases, propositions, categories, first thoughts). Perhaps in sum I believe with Wallace Stevens that poetry should resist the intelligence almost successfully.
But I also believe, though again with Stevens, that "poetry is the scholar's art." I have a couple of parabolic foils. I know one poet who prides herself on the accessibility of her poems. In the course of things, she wrote a poem that, while certainly not obscure, drew upon the works of Nietzsche and other philosophers. Another reader of her poem, who liked it very much, registered both his admiration and his surprise at the unexpected range of learned reference and its attendant intellectual thickness. "Oh yeah," the poet replied, "I paid a research assistant to look up the 'truth' stuff." I have another friend who was engaged in writing a sequence based on Homer's epics. When I heard of the project, I said to him, "So: you've been rereading the Iliad and the Odyssey." "Oh no," he said, scandalized, "that's the last thing I would do." It will be clear that these are the last responses that I would expect my favorite poets in their sober moments to give.
Finally, the preceding credos notwithstanding, the essays included here reflect a commitment to poems that are affectively charged-poems, that is, that implicitly value dramatic inflections. Tones of voice rather than apparently pellucid propositions or "denatured" or "deconstructed" language, undisguisedly subjective points of view rather than implicitly impersonal vantages, psychological processes and rhetorical deftness rather than philosophical or political positions, works that are essentially dramatic rather than expressive or effusive, ironic rather than ingenuous, maximalist rather than post-Imagist or minimalist: these are my prejudices, as far as I can tell them. At the same time, there are certain terms, often elsewhere used as pejoratives or honorifics, that for me are simply descriptive. They include lyric and narrative and confessional, formal prosody and free verse.
One might infer from the foregoing sentences that this collection has all too little to say about one current movement known as "neoformalism" and another known as "Language Poetry," though I have included pieces about writers associated with both. I hope that the reader will also divine a certain mute indifference to what is sometimes called-unfairly, since a majority of our best young and younger poets have roots in M.F.A. programs-"workshop poetry." In my mind, the latter term simply designates the poetry that is currently "conventional": that is written in quotidian English, or "English that cats and dogs can speak," in Marianne Moore's deathless verdict (and thus allergic to extravagant syntax and "inkhorn" terms, as they used to say); that presumes an audience of contemporaneous readers (rather than readers among the formidable shades and forthcoming generations); that depends for effect chiefly on unusual or seemingly spectacular experiences (trichotillomania, incest, dirt eating, jail time, firefights) rather than ordinary situations (kitchen stoves, cows in a field-subjects that have themselves of course been the occasions of reams of bad verse); that prizes mystery at the expense of lucidity (where mystery is not to be confused with complexity or ineffability); and that, to get to a bottom line at last, cares little for the concept of precisely the line, which I take to be the defining element of poetry. (Such carelessness in regard to lineation, by the way, is frequently manifest in fetishistic concern for regular prosody.)
So, the prose that I have included here is in search of a poetry that in its exemplary forms will be vivid and demanding but accessible, though never transparent, delicately constructed yet historically rich, emotionally loaded yet analytically undergirded, and prosodically alert withal. If (all told) I seem to forecast a predilection for certain kinds of difficulty, I have done part of my job. If, however, I seem to admire obfuscation, I have misstated my view of myself, since I hold with Frost that, while "dark sayings" are to be savored, "obscurity" is to be eschewed. Robert Lowell, reflecting some thirty years ago on "The Armadillo" and other poems by Bishop, suggested that her lines seemed to him lines composed in the next century and somehow smuggled back through time to us. That's the kind of poetry I've tried to keep in mind-poetry that seems to envision its future without losing touch with its origins and that, I think, most of the poets I've written about have tried to make.
As that last sentence suggests, most of these pieces are not adversarial. (Somewhat different is "Some Poets' Criticism and the Age," in which criticism rather than poetry is the chief subject.) Vitriol and acerbity can be fun to indulge and to witness, but those modes seek to close doors rather than to open them, and I cannot see much point these days, at the outset of a new millennium, in the closing of doors. It seems to me, as my title must have suggested, that we are in no danger of being overrun by mediocrity. While I am sharply aware of the frequent contention that much criticism of living poets is appreciative because self-serving or "politically" motivated, I am still more sensitive to W. H. Auden's admonition that even very good books are routinely ignored and that bad books need no ushering on their way to oblivion. Some of Randall Jarrell's wittier and nastier reviews, and some of Howard Nemerov's, to conjure two masters of the modern acerb, will always be perversely delightful to read, but it's hard to think that such sharply pointed but brittle palisades themselves have kept the sacred realm of poesy from being infiltrated by infidels. Poetry with integrity constitutes its own defense.
Some Poets' Criticism and the Age
American poetry is in bad shape. Our poets not only take in one another's laundry; they also do it in public. By poets I mean a coterie of enervated academics who praise and in turn practice mediocrity, shun political issues, and ignore the public at large, with the result that the public returns the favor in spades. In the old days, poets either had to work for a living or to resign themselves to an honest bohemian existence; today they have got fat and lazy, thanks to sinecures at universities, honoraria for poetry readings, and grants. The pampered, short-winded American poet rarely writes a long poem these days, or at least a really good long poem, although it is important that really good long poems be written, because-well, because they keep alive venerable structures (the narrative, the didactic exposition), and so on; and in any case, the paucity of good long poems reflects and contributes to the vexatious absence of a coherent sense of things as a whole. Even worse, our lassitudinous, laconic poets have lost touch with the true formalist impulse and have turned faute de mieux to a paradoxically prolix, "confessional," "lyric" mode notable for its homogeneity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Boundless Field by Stephen Yenser
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen Yenser . Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents Elizabeth Bishop's Stove....................1Some Poets' Criticism and the Age Dana Gioia, Mary Kinzie, Allen Grossman with Mark Halliday, Stephen Dunn, Mary Karr....................9
A Range of Affirmation Philip Levine, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Galway Kinnell....................34
Fables of Purity Louise Glück, Linda Gregg, David St. John, John Ashbery....................59
Bright Sources John Hollander, Donald Justice, Alice Fulton, Sharon Olds....................84
Versions of Maximalism Susan Mitchell, Judith Hall, Susan Prospere, Gjertrud Schnackenberg....................119
Wild Plots Harryette Mullen, Ann Lauterbach, Louise Glück, Michael Palmer....................145
Sensuous and Particular Sherod Santos, Rosanna Warren, Richard Kenney....................160
A Boundless Field Frank Bidart and C. K. Williams....................176
The Poetics of Plash and Speed Susan Wheeler and Frederick Seidel....................193
Breaking and Making Heather McHugh, Lynne McMahon, Jorie Graham....................216