`Art Free of Obedience to Its Time'

On my way to work Thursday morning I listened, as usual, to Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac on KUHF, Houston’s public radio affiliate. I tend to enjoy the top of the show, the rundown of who was born and who died on this date in bookish history, like reading a small town newspaper in which the small town is literature. Yesterday, Thomas Hobbes and Charles Algernon Swinburne were born, and John Rolfe and Pocahontas got married. Keillor exercises little critical saavy. He almost invariably mentions a mediocre commercial writer, presumably because too elevated a critical standard would alienate the canaille, but I can forgive that so long as he throws us a Hobbes now and then.

It’s only when the final segment of the show begins, when Keillor reads the poem of the day, that I start tuning for Blue Öyster Cult. Years ago, I remember Keillor reading Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” and I felt spiritually lifted for the seven or eight minutes before I arrived at my office, a veritable eternity. More often, Keillor draws from current American poets of a sensitive or political or sensitive/political pedigree – what James Wood, in a different context, described as “the usual contemporary verbal mixture of journalism-and-candy.” Most of the poems, in fact, are prose, and most can be effortlessly distilled to a nugget of “message.” August Kleinzahler performed the definitive demolition of Keillor a couple of years at Poetry Daily, and while I quibble with much of his essay I agree with its thrust. You’re not likely to hear Geoffrey Hill, Basil Bunting or John Berryman's Dream Songs on Writer’s Almanac.

Thursday’s selection was predictable: “Family Reunion,” by Jeredith Merrin -- 10 unrhymed quatrains that begin as social satire, morph into amorphous moralizing, and ascend into preachy, faux-naïve sentimentality. It was awful, and it reminded me of a warning Basil Bunting issued in 1966:

“Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That is not poetry’s business.”

What I actually want to write about is not Merrin’s obvious failure as a poet, but her “message,” which we might reduce to what English teachers used to call a topic sentence: “We are alienated, and that’s a bad thing.” The last stanza and a half go like this:

“Caress your history – who else will?
Promise to come back later.

“Pay attention when it asks you
Simple questions: Where are we going?
Is it scary? What happened? Can
I have more now? Who is that?”

This reads like shopping-mall existentialism, cut with a dollop of self-help, and it doesn’t accurately describe how I, or the people I respect, relate to the world. I call it poverty of imagination. Dr. Johnson reminded his readers that to be bored of London was to be bored of life. Well, to be bored of the world early in the 21st century, when access to books, music and our fellow humans has never been so simple or rewarding, is a colossal act of ingratitude. Another great poet you probably won’t hear on Writer’s Almanac is Les Murray, whose “The Instrument” is an excellent antidote to Merrin and other noisy narcissists. Here’s a verse from the middle:

“Among the feral stanzas are many that demand your flesh
to embody themselves. Only completed art
free of obedience to its time can pirouette you
through and athwart the larger poems you are in.
Being outside all poetry is an unreachable void.”