`Like a Victorian Wedding Night'

I am a selfish reader. Except for some of the books I read to review, I read only those I expect to enjoy or have enjoyed in the past. When younger, I succumbed to pressure to read fashionable titles, or those mistakenly stamped “Classic,” but how else could I have experienced the brain-wounding awfulness of William Burroughs and Sir Walter Scott? Getting older means spending one’s remaining time prudently, so I wish merely to enjoy myself and learn something while doing so.

I have written about Geoffrey Hill with some regularity. That is a measure of the pleasure his poetry and prose have given me for decades, and how deeply his work has suffused my thinking. I believe him the greatest living writer, the only living poet we can usefully set beside the giants of Modernism -- Eliot and Yeats. His work is inexhaustible and I frequently reread it, at least as often as I reread Eliot and Yeats.

In private e-mails, two readers this week have objected to my frequent references to Hill and his work. Both claimed to be offended by Hill’s “elitism” and “difficulty.” Both, one more vehemently than the other, claimed to find his “politics” objectionable, though I know nothing about Hill’s political thinking, which would seem to be a private matter. One called him “reactionary” and described Hill as “a Dead White Male whose [sic] still alive (unfortunately).”

Hill does not write poetry one can usefully skim. He is deeply thoughtful, serious and allusive, which makes him a disturbingly alien presence in a superficial age. For a reader to say he finds Hill too difficult to read is perfectly honest and acceptable. To say the difficulty of his work is a moral or political affront is ridiculous. Extend the logic of this complaint and you’re left with a simple-minded recycling of Zhdanovism -- tractors and the courageous proletariat. Hill has often fielded such objections with forthrightness and good humor, as in the interview he gave Carl Phillips, published in the spring 2000 issue of The Paris Review. Here’s the pertinent exchange:

Phillips: “What comes up often in reviews of your work is the idea of an overly intellectual bent; in recent reviews of The Triumph of Love, often the word difficult comes up. People mention that it’s worth going through or it isn’t worth going through.”

Hill: “Like a Victorian wedding night, yes. Let’s take difficulty first. We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most `intellectual’ piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves, we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right – not an obligation – to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification….any complexity of language, any ambiguity any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualification and revelations…resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.”

There is the difficulty of a certain sort of pretentious, ego-driven art – Gertrude Stein, for instance, and the so-called Language Poets. And there is the difficulty of artists wrestling with a dense, intractable, ineffable reality. The former hold readers in contempt. The latter honor us.

From Arnold, to Dave, to Me, to You

An anonymous reader has asked for a link to an essay Matthew Arnold wrote to accompany his selection from Samuel Johnson's The Lives of the English Poets. The ever-resourceful Dave Lull supplied me with the link, but I have no e-mail address for the anonymous reader. Here, courtesy of Dave, is the link, in .pdf and .doc.

`My Writer's Road to Damascus'

I look forward to reading the fiction of Roger Boylan, an American novelist raised in Ireland and Switzerland, among other places, whose thinking is cant-free, independent and tart. His first book, Killoyle, An Irish Farce, was published 10 years ago by Dalkey Archive Press, and in the Boston Review, Boylan has published “Nabokov’s Gift,” an appreciation of the Russian-American novelist on the 30th anniversary of his death:

“His humor reflected his soul, for he occupies a rare position in the annals of literature—especially modern literature—as that oxymoronic creature, the happy writer…. He was happy mainly because he loved being Vladimir Nabokov and he knew that his genius demonstrated the near-infinite possibilities of language and life and art. He cared not a whit for the carping of critics and the sour grapes of lesser writers, and, 30 years after his death, his overall influence as a one-man mission civilisatrice is still growing. He remains the master of the art of beauty in exactitude. Unexpected yet precise words are connected in his writing like the fine, unbreakable links of a silver necklace. Lesser writers settle for second best; he never does. He finds the right word, however unexpected.”

The critical point here is “beauty in exactitude,” for precision is the soul of both art and science. Nabokov was one of the last century’s great literary pleasure givers and a lepidopterist of global repute. Boylan quotes, from Speak, Memory, a favorite Nabokovian sentence:

“How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!”

Despite the horror and perversity often on display in his fiction, Nabokov was by nature a celebrator – of life, art and the expansive imagination. In a Dalkey Archive Press interview, the wonderfully named Eamonn Wall asks Boylan, “Unlike many writers nowadays, you are not part of a university. Do you think that the LitCrit crowd, as you call them, have taken the fun out of reading? What can be done about it?” Boylan answers:

“Yes, I think they have taken the fun out of reading, just as their ideological forebears in the Politburo tried to take the fun out of life. Like all ideologues, they -- the deconstructionists, the Lacanites, the Post-Modernists -- fear the individual spirit, i.e., Art, and they condescend to those who invoke Beauty. They prefer to speak of politics, and semiotics, and symbolism. It's all a mish-mash of psychoanalysis, sociology and politics, and none of it has anything to do with literature. What can be done about it? Ignore them, if possible; oppose them, if not.”

How refreshing, especially coming on the same day I happened to read the following sentence: “It is in this way that the analyst's desire is in Lacan's words, purified - it bears upon the role the analyst must play with respect to the patient.” I have no idea what the hell that means, except it confirms my contempt for the figure Nabokov condemned as “the Viennese quack” and all his silly progeny. In fact, Boylan’s literary tastes are consistently excellent. For instance:

“The discovery of Flann O'Brien's work was my writer's road to Damascus. His near-insane precision of language, unremitting absurdity, mixing of the mundane and the supernatural: didn't Joyce himself call him `a writer with the real comic spirit?’ Burgess, too, was a devotee. I return to O'Brien (or O'Nolan, or Myles) whenever I can, especially At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, but also (in deference to my publisher) The Dalkey Archive, and even his minor Keats and Chapman pieces cheer me up when I'm low.”

And this:

“Actually, Beckett's been misrepresented. Like Dostoevsky, he's much funnier and more accessible than the LitCrit crowd would have us believe (they want to keep great writers to themselves, the way the Catholic Church traditionally kept the Bible away from the average churchgoing punter). There's great compassion in Beckett's work, and hilarity, and the same kind of questioning of God and the universe you find in the Russians, who were, as a matter of fact, my favorite reading when I was young, especially Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Goncharov (Tolstoy's great, but lacks humor). I believe there's a strong emotional and spiritual kinship between Celts and Slavs, and it comes out in their subversive, slightly crazy view of the world (Jaroslav Hasek's a good non-Russian example), as well as in their devotion to language. Nabokov was a fine example of this, and he's long been one of my favorites; in fact, he reminds me of Flann O'Brien.”

As O’Brien might have it, Boylan is your only man.

`Stirred for a Bird'

I’m a desultory bird watcher though birds often figure in my memory. I avoid the competitiveness of organized birders, their obsessive keeping of life lists that turn birding into a species of sport. Watching birds, at its most satisfactory, is solitary. Of my three most vivid memories of close encounters with birds, only one occurred in the company of another person.

First, in the woods along a railroad track south of Albany, N.Y., watching a pileated woodpecker, 10 yards away, systematically de-bark a dead elm in search of insects. Second, sitting at my kitchen table in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., looking out the glass doors to the deck, when an indigo bunting lands in a wild cherry tree in the back yard. Third, in the company of a wildlife photographer I was writing about, lying on the ground behind a fallen tree near Schenectady, N.Y., when a scarlet tanager lands among the reeds a few feet in front of us.

The latter two events happened abruptly and lasted only seconds. In both cases, the shocking colors of the birds, so rare at that latitude, lend the memories a dream-like quality. In contrast, I watched the woodpecker work for 20 minutes. What stays with me is his purposefulness. He worked with the furious focus of an intelligent child.

None of these events is exotic but all carry the charged aura of heightened experience. I couldn’t force their repetition. Their randomness and my powerlessness make them memorable. Only one poem suggests what I’m trying to describe, and it’s overtly religious, dedicated “To Christ our Lord,” unlike my secular memories. Hopkins wrote “The Windover” in 1877, the year of his ordination:

“I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird -- the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.”

The line that moves me now is rather plain compared to the pyrotechnics that surround it: “My heart in hiding/Stirred for a bird.” On the naturalistic level, “heart in hiding” is the windover’s prey – a mouse or rabbit. It also suggests a timid, perhaps humble, soul, seized by the wonder of the bird – or Christ. The windover, or windhover, is a kestrel, the smallest of falcons. Hopkins chose his species well. With the aid of a head wind, the bird hovers over a field and swoops on its prey. In the wild, they move like artillery shells. I once saw a kestrel, during a demonstration inside a nature center, get loose and dive bomb screaming children and adults. The frightened bird made a piteous sound and injured a wing before one of the naturalists recaptured it.

The Oxford English Dictionary takes its first citation of windover from the English naturalist John Ray. He wrote in 1674: “The Kestrell or Stannel, in some places the Windover.” In 1789, Gilbert White published one of my favorite books by a naturalist, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne: “The kestrel, or windhover, has a peculiar mode of hanging in the air in one place, his wings all the while being briskly agitated.” And in 1864, in “Aylmer’s Field,” Tennyson wrote: “For about as long/As the wind-hover hangs in balance.” It’s notable that both White and Tennyson focus on the same characteristic windover behavior as Hopkins, “his riding/Of the rolling level underneath him.”

Rare Words

One of the collateral pleasures of reading Geoffrey Hill’s poetry is the sheer volume of rare words he brings to us. A new word is a new world, after all, and one of the poet’s jobs is creation of worlds as yet unsuspected, or a new way of seeing the old world, which amounts to the same thing. A concordance to Hill’s work would dwarf any living poet’s, and probably rival any since – who? Crane and Hopkins are notable for dazzling word-hoards, but both left relatively small bodies of work. I’m being cautious here, and Joyce’s bounty comes largely in prose, but scholars armed with computers assure us that Shakespeare used 31,534 different words in his plays and poems, and 14,376 of them only once. Linguistic profligacy on this scale is unimaginable today, or rather imaginable only in Hill.

“Wild Clematis in Winter” is from Without Title, and written “i.m. [im memorium] William Cookson,” the English poet and longtime editor of the journal Agenda. Its eight lines contain one word new to me – probably a typical ratio for Hill:

“Old traveller’s joy appears like naked thorn blossom
as we speed citywards through blurry detail –
wild clematis’ springing false bloom of seed pods,
the earth lying shotten, the sun shrouded off-white,
wet ferns ripped bare, flat as fishes’ backbones,
with the embankment grass frost-hacked and hackled,
wastage, seepage, showing up everywhere,
in this blanched apparition.”

Poem as music, a joy on the tongue (“frost-hacked and hackled”). Shotten, the past participle of shoot, is new (to me) and old (to English). The Oxford English Dictionary gives five principal definitions, plus variants, most of them obsolete. The first reported use is 1225; the last, 1886:

1.“Of an arrow: Shot from a bow.”
2. “Of a wound: Produced by gunshot.”
3. “Of tin.”
4. “? Crystallized.”
5. “Of a fish (esp. a herring): That has spawned.”
6. “In shotten herring, applied to a person who is exhausted by sickness or destitute of strength or resources [archaic] Hence [generally], Thin, emaciated; worthless, good-for-nothing.”
7. “Blood-shot. quasi-[archaic].”
8. “[dialect] Of milk: Sour, curdled.”

Hill’s usage is closest to six, though he describes not a person but the hard winter earth. I hear an echo of Chaucer, the “Prologue,” but “aprill with his shoures soote” is far away. The landscape is grim, infertile, unforgiving, his pilgrims are aging, and there’s an other-worldly hint – “sun shrouded off-white,” “blanched apparition.” Hill spins a new use for shotten, following the lead of Shakespeare, who used it three times, all related but nuanced away from the others. In King Henry IV, Part I (Act II, Scene IV), Falstaff says: “A villainous coward! Go thy ways, old Jack; die when thou wilt, if manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, than am I a shotten herring.”

In The Taming of the Shrew (Act II, Scene II), Biondello describes Petruchio, in an extended tour de force of mockery, as “swayed in the back and shoulder-shotten.” And in King Henry V (Act III, Scene V), Bourbon rages:

“Norman, but bastard Norman, Norman bastards!
Mort de la vie! If they march along
Unfought withal, but I will sell my dukedom,
To buy a slobbery and a dirty farm
In that nook-shotten isle of Albion.”

Shotten, in Hill’s context, comes close to the American idiom shot, meaning spent, used-up, broken. It also sounds like stage-German, the sort of thing Sid Caesar used to spew: Shotten Sie, Schweinhund! I mentioned Hart Crane, and another poem from Without Title, “Improvisations for Hart Crane,” contains the unfamiliar (to me) sortilegist and sordor. The OED defines the first as “One who arranges the drawing of lots,” and cites only one use, from a newspaper in 1865: “This college sortilegist pretended to be much annoyed at the result he had taken such pains to procure.” Sortilege, however, seems fairly common, at least into the 19th century. It means: “The practice of casting lots in order to decide something or to forecast the future; divination based on this procedure or performed in some other way; sorcery, magic, witchcraft,” and “An act or instance of divining, choosing, or deciding by the drawing or casting of lots.” All of this helps deepen our understanding of Hill’s Crane:

“Slumming for rum and rhumba, dumb Rimbaud,
He the sortilegist, visionary on parole,
Floor-walker watching space, the candy man,
Artiste of neon, traffic’s orator,
Gaunt cantilevers engined by the dawn
Of prophecy.”

Later in the poem Hill writes:

“Unwise these thoughts high-spanned. A shade too much
Library of America, liberty
safe on the list, shiny-electric-gated,
sordor its new-old mansions.”

This is dense, and I’m not certain knowing the definition of sordor is helpful. Again, the OED: “Physical or moral sordidness.” Clearly, that describes some of Crane’s shenanigans. What’s more interesting are the OED citations, including Byron, Emerson (“The sordor and filths of nature.”), and T.S. Eliot from After Strange Gods: “The sordor of the half-dead mill towns of southern New Hampshire and Massachusetts.”

Most of the rare words Hill employs I’m unlikely ever to use or even see again, though I have high hopes for sordor, which sounds like the name of a character in Tolkien. So why does Hill bother? It’s no coincidence he’s obsessed equally with history and language, because etymology recapitulates history. Hill wishes to super-compress meaning into words. His poems rewritten in the manner of, say, Tony Hoagland, whose language, thought and sense of history are gruel-thin, is unthinkable. Rare words, like all words in the hands of sensitive writers, carry echoes and whispers, which are at least as important and useful as trumpet blasts of denotative meaning. Consider how in his essay “Poetry as `Menace’ and `Atonement’” (collected in The Lords of Limit) Hill glosses atonement, and how his gloss intensifies the way you listen to the word:

“…my theme would be simple; simply this: that the technical perfecting of a poem is an act of atonement, in the radical etymological sense – an act of at-one-ment, a setting at one, a bringing into concord, a reconciling, a uniting in harmony…”

Finally, just as important for this reader is language with a thick, allusive, musical texture. That’s why I return so often to Shakespeare, Donne, Hopkins and Berryman. Minimalism has its place (is J.V. Cunningham a minimalist? Samuel Beckett?) but, on balance, William Carlos Williams’ influence on American poetry has been baleful. I say that as a qualified admirer of William’s best work, but the pleasures he gives us are small. Hill sees his work in a moral context, as a corrective to the accelerating entropy of language. He summons every linguistic strength to his cause. In the Tanner lectures he delivered in 2000, Hill quoted with approval these lines from the commonplace book of Ben Jonson:

“Wheresoever, manners, and fashions are corrupted, Language is, It imitates the politicke riot. The excesse of Feasts, and apparell, are the notes of a sick State; and the wantonnesse of language, of a sick mind.”

.

`Very Excellent Company'

I spent some of Sunday afternoon reading The Incentive of the Maggot, Ron Slate’s first book of poems, and experienced the rare feeling that I was in the company of an adult American, a mature contemporary, who happened to write excellent poetry. In his work I detect no whining or preening, no confessions or gratuitous self-displays. He seems, literally, a man of the world, with interests, learning and experience beyond the cloister of self, even beyond poetry. In “Warm Canto,” named after a Mal Waldron composition, he writes:

“I don’t know how to behave
in the face of ultimate things.
It’s the kind of ignorance that creates
A sound, like a blind prehistoric fish
That hums to the passing of an ocean storm.”

I immediately memorized the first two lines, and wished I had written them. Judging from references in the poem and the book’s dedication, “Warm Canto” concerns the death of his father-in-law. Slate tactfully solves the problem always posed when a poet is moved to write an elegy: How to render one’s reaction to the loss without eclipsing the one who has died. Slate concludes: “The heat kills/the reverie that kills the real.” “Kills,” for once, doesn’t read like a metaphor.

Slate is, among other things, a business executive, moving in the tradition of Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives – American artists in disguise, in a culture that expects its artists to be conventionally bohemian. Finance and geopolitics show up in Slate’s poems, not drugs and pop-cult references. If Frederick Seidel grew up, he might write like Ron Slate. One poem, “End of the Peacock Throne,” concerns the suicide of Leilah Pahlavi, youngest daughter of the late shah of Iran. I’m tempted to share the poem with some Iranian friends, but I’m afraid it might break their hearts. Slate often ends his poems in a key of bittersweet beauty:

“Life is the keeping of a single breath.
With a final glottal gasp, Princess Leila dies
Between two annihilations:
The time before the garden
Was imagined, and the time after.”

After reading most of Slate’s poems I turned to Robert Pinsky’s foreword, where he says, “these are distinctly the poems of an adult.” I was reminded of the entry James Boswell made in his journal on May 16, 1763, the day he met Samuel Johnson in Tom Davies’ bookshop in Covent Garden. He describes Johnson as “of a most dreadful appearance,” speaking “with a most uncouth voice.” Fear overwhelms him, but admirations triumphs:

“Yet his great knowledge and strength of expression command vast respect and render him very excellent company.”

Astonishment

What are a writer’s obligations to his readers? Intelligibility seems uppermost, but some readers, baffled even by the elegance of subject-verb-object, would lose their way in denser thickets – in late James, for instance, or John Ruskin. Intelligibility and obscurity are relative qualities. Simple prose can be helpful or crashingly dull, depending on the reader – and the writer – just as complex prose can be a sublime pleasure or a bafflement.

The best writing communicates while offering both parties – writer, reader -- a measure of pleasure. In his review of Soame Jenyns’ Free Enquiry into the Nature of the Origin of Good and Evil, Samuel Johnson wrote: “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” This makes sense. Johnson assumes something is communicated in good writing, and the contents of that communication are, to use Kenneth Burke’s description of literature, “equipment for living” -- enjoyment and endurance. The danger, of course, is moralizing, presuming to write prescriptions for the lives of others. Consider these curious lines from Berryman’s Dream Song No. 366:

“These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand.
They are only meant to terrify & comfort.”

What about the writer’s obligations to himself? This is infinitely trickier, because the inward landscape is cunningly booby-trapped with vanity. Part of the solution may be found in Section 23 of The Orchards of Syon, in which Geoffrey Hill writes “I write/to astonish myself.” How astonishing this sounds. Astonishment implies surprise and openness, even vulnerability, not a hip knowingness. The hip are never surprised. The Latin root of "astonishment," tonare, means “to thunder,” and we still speak of being thunderstruck. To write well and occasionally better than well, to be gifted with surprising returns for one’s efforts, to sometimes not recognize one’s achievement, is astonishing and leaves one humble and pleased.

In 1984, the novelist Paul West suffered the first of several strokes. Eleven years later he published A Stroke of Genius about the experience. For a sensibility like West’s, even the suffering and inconvenience of severe illness are cause for study and celebration, so long as they can be rendered into language. For West, everything is worthy of attention:

“Back in the world of air conditioners, postage scales, shortwave radios, typewriters, and Touch-Tone phones, I gave thanks to nature for red things, elastic things, things that sparked and funneled; for juices, slops, pastes. I learned the discipline of pill taking and, one morning, after too much Inderal prescribed, fell over sideways, lucky not to crack my head. In warm pool water I felt overcome. If I craned my head backward, I almost fainted. I had a permanently dry mouth, numb fingers, cold toes, and a slight distortion in my speech, a Lilliputian twitch in my lower right lip. These were my secrets, between me and the Furies. I murmured my praises of all things bright and beautiful, certain that a tiny slur in enunciation from someone less than human would only earn me tolerance in the swarming yard of summer. The mood was pure Delius.”

In its blithely secular way, this echoes Hopkins. We enjoy it, it helps us endure, and it astonishes.

`The Arithmetic of Compassion'

In contemporary criticism, Helen Vendler is a reliable brand name, like Pontiac, Budweiser or Steven Spielberg. When writing about poetry, her voice is dry, unexciting, a little clumsy and quite earnest – in a word, academic -- but she has had useful things to say about Shakespeare and Keats, and nothing good to say about Charles Olson, so we can excuse her fundamental dullness. Thanks to Dave Lull for sending a link to Vendler’s review of The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert, in the Aug. 27 issue of The New Republic. The book was published more than six months ago, but Vendler seems to have spent the time living with Herbert’s flinty, reluctant poems. Her review is long and deeply meditated:

“…as the events of Herbert's era fade from memory, and as his contemporaries die, even such poems will be read as allegorical comments on recurrent human experience--human choice, human savagery, human hypocrisy. Indeed, the insistent de-specification practiced by Herbert is one of his many aesthetic choices in favor of reduction, restriction, limitation-- the techniques creating his instantly recognizable idiom.”

Vendler is a wise, prudent quoter. To prolong my enjoyment of what remains the most important book yet published in 2007, here’s an excerpt quoted by Vendler from “Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper”:

“it's no use trying to find
120 lost men on a map
a distance too remote
hides them like a jungle

"they don't speak to the imagination
there are too many of them
the numeral zero on the end
turns them into an abstraction

“a theme for further reflection:
the arithmetic of compassion”

And this, from “Mitteleuropa,” a poem Vendler doesn’t mention:

“Let it shine for a while
painted toy of a child
old man’s nostalgic dream
but between us I admit
I don’t believe any of it
(I might as well come clean)”

`The World Has Changed'

The first of John Berger’s many books that I read (26 of them stand on my shelves) was G., his Booker Prize-winning novel published in 1972. He gave his prize money to the Black Panthers, fashionable hoodlums de jour. Despite my growing revulsion with his politics -- tarted-up Marxism made palatable for dim fellow-travelers, combining savagery and coyness -- I continued to admire G. and some of his other work, especially the trilogy of novels devoted to French peasantry, known collectively as Into Their Labours. At its best Berger’s work is clear-eyed, compassionate and beautifully written. Unfortunately, he wrote his best work long ago. Toward Berger I have long felt loyalty rooted in youthful enthusiasm. The time has come to shed sentimental illusions. His just-published book is Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, which I first browsed about in, then started to read sequentially, only to stop after the sixth sentence. The first piece is “Wanting Now,” and here are those first six sentences:

“The world has changed.”

[A truism, self-evident at least since Heraclitus. Such a sentence is, in fact, saying: “Drop everything and listen to me. I have portentous news.” In other words, steel yourself for a sermon or op-ed piece of exceeding self-righteousness.]

“Information is being communicated differently.”

[Ditto.]

“Misinformation is developing its techniques.”

[Ditto. Substitute Goebbels for Heraclitus.]

“On a world scale emigration has become the principal means of survival.”

[Dubious, but let it pass.]

“The national state of those who had suffered the worst genocide in history has become, militarily speaking, fascist.”

With this libel against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, Berger identifies himself as a willing purveyor of the opiate of the contemporary Left: anti-Semitism. Particularly objectionable is the clause with which he opens the sentence, intended as a feint before he delivers his roundhouse. A mere 18 words turns everything that follows, and perhaps everything that preceded it, into a form of pornography. No surprise, I suppose, from a man who endorsed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In his book’s second piece, “Seven Levels of Despair,” written two months after the 9/11 attacks, Berger says:

“What makes a terrorist is, first, a form of despair.”

No, what makes a terrorist is, first, a willingness to commit evil acts, to kill and maim innocent people. By writing, publishing and presumably believing such inversions of morality and good sense, Berger has forsaken any aesthetic or intellectual respectability he once enjoyed. His public dissolution reminds us that politics is a powerful corrosive, dissolving everything it touches -- truth, a healthy ethical sense and, always, art. Berger’s work of a lifetime has turned into pernicious muck.

`There's Magick in the Web of It'

I envy my officemate the spectacle he witnessed a couple of weeks ago. He was driving in the country, shortly after sunrise, on a two-lane road paralleled by high-tension lines. The morning dew and the low angle of the sun illuminated the webs of thousands of orb-weaver spiders strung among the towers, poles and cables. For three miles, he estimated, they sparkled like diamonds, until the sun rose too high. Doni is a big, strong guy with an unlikely phobia for spiders, but even he, in the security of his pickup truck, admired the elegant engineering of the glistening webs – highly effective food-gathering devices, after all. Spiders rank with ladybugs, toads, dragonflies and praying mantises among nature’s most efficient and savage hunters. After Doni excitedly told me his spider story, I thought of this passage from the letter John Keats wrote to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, on Feb. 19, 1818:

“Now it appears to me that almost any Man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy Citadel -- the points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful circuiting. Man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine Web of his Soul, and weave a tapestry empyrean full of symbols for his spiritual eye, of softness for his spiritual touch, of space for his wandering, of distinctness for his luxury.”

Keats turns a trap for prey into a lovely image of poetry, connectedness and transcendence, but a web is complicated and makes a complicated metaphor. One can, like a mosquito, become snared in a web. One can, like Doni, admire its beauty. One can also experience a sense of communion with strangers – a web is sensitive to motion -- and realize the interconnectedness of creation, natural and human. Each word, each idea, each book, connects me in a grand Borgesian conceit, with humanity. Thus, the World Wide Web -- but the idea of human relations as a web flourished long ago, and not always in so happy a sense. Consider Othello’s words to Desdemona in Act III, Scene IV:

“`Tis true: there’s magick in the web of it:
A sibyl, that had number’d in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew’d the work;
The worms were hallow’d that did breed the silk;
And it was dyed in mummy which the skillful
Conserved of maidens’ hearts.”

If you know the play, the words are deeply disturbing, even lifted out of context, for Othello is trapped in the web of treachery spun by Iago, while spinning his own sticky web. Soon, Desdemona must die. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Othello is the most difficult for me to read or watch. Its horror is unbearable. Whitman gave us a more reassuring spider poem, one I memorized as a kid, that resonates with a Keatsian sense of connectedness and exultation:

“A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a promontory it stood isolated,
Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

"And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.”

`Astonishment & Pleasure'

I once thought my years as a newspaper reporter were the surrogate graduate school I had never attended. Today, I think of them as my second chance at grade school because that’s where I learned to write. Newspaper editors don’t understand sitting around, waiting for inspiration to strike. They want 15 tight, multiple-source column-inches of copy by 4 o’clock. Decades of deadlines washed away any lingering dilettantism. The only way to write is to sit down and write, even when thoughts are nebulous or absent. Concentration spawns momentum..

In fact, I have often been unable to understand an idea, to conceptualize and articulate it, until after I’ve already written about it. Here’s another way to phrase it: I can’t think my way into better writing, but I can write my way into better thinking. Act precedes thought, a formula I think William James would have endorsed. Afterwards, looking at what I’ve written, I think: I didn’t know that. Who wrote it, and how? I found an 1820 passage by Richard Woodhouse, John Keats’ devoted friend, that illuminates my experience as a writer. This comes from The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 1816-1878, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins:

“He has said, that he has often not been aware of the beauty of some thought or expression until after he has composed & written it down – It has then struck him with astonishment -- & seemed rather the production of another person than his own – He has wondered how he came to hit upon it […] – Perhaps every one in the habit of writing verse or prose, may have had a somewhat similar feeling, that of the extreme appositeness & happiness (the curiosa felicitas) of an idea, of the excellence of which he was unaware until he […] came to read it over. It seems scarcely his own; & he feels that he could never imitate it or hit upon it again: & he cannot conceive how it came to him – Such Keats said was his Sensation of astonishment & pleasure when he has produced the lines `His white melodious &c – It seemed to come by chance or magic – to be as it were something given to him.”

Woodhouse quotes from Book III of “Hyperion”:

“`Show thy heart’s secret to an ancient Power
Who hath forsaken old and sacred thrones
For prophecies of thee, and for the sake
Of loveliness new born.’ — Apollo then,
With sudden scrutiny and gloomless eyes,
Thus answer’d, while his white melodious throat
Throbb’d with the syllables.”

Keats was fortunate to have so sympathetic and attentive a friend. With the help of Woodhouse, here's how I would write the equation I stumbled over earlier: Hard Work + Mystery = "Astonishment & Pleasure."

`Like Flies to Dead Meat'

When Steven Millhauser published Enchanted Night in 1999, among its reviewers was a novelist who lambasted Steven’s alleged reliance on clichés. Steven and I were friends and neighbors in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and he fumed about the accusation – rightly, because he’s a slow-laboring writer who weighs each syllable. Among other things, he’s also a subtle parodist. If Steven uses a cliché, you can be certain he’s aware of it and having a good laugh. The reviewer missed the joke, and to compound his error and make himself look even more ridiculous, he wielded, with a straight face, the predictable arsenal of reviewing chestnuts. His wrong-headed review read, in effect, like a cliché-ridden parody of a parody of clichés, but nobody laughed. I’m being purposely vague, to protect the dim and lazy.

The distinction between mindless marshalling of clichés and reanimation of tired language by an enterprising writer is not always apparent. Neither is the distinction between kneejerk deployment of catchphrases and a relish for colorful colloquialisms. In his entry for heinous -- “this word is full of hate (haine in French)” -- in The Secret Lives of Words, Paul West skewers clichés while endorsing the genius of American slang:

“As I get older, I find myself understanding less and less of what I hear or overhear, although still raging against those who spout `during the course of that time’ to mean then, but utterly bamboozled by an announcement that goes `Her time horizon for investing was short-term,’ perhaps a posy for `she was impatient.’ This is what happens when the semi-literate cleave to jargon like flies to dead meat. Oh, as I am always saying, for the shock of American slang, from chin music to bupkiss, trim to gobsmacked, skuzzy to zone-out. That’s English.”

Television, movies, the Internet, pop psychology, advertising and political discourse conspire to turn even the fully literate -- intelligent people with expansive vocabularies – into willing automatons of drivel. Pride in articulation is rare and, in some quarters, judged shameful. This is regrettable, for a cliché is the verbal equivalent of a strip-mall – ugly, cheap, degraded. Out of laziness and self-inflation, we homogenize even pungent slang into meaninglessness. Here’s how Geoffrey Hill, a gifted re-animator of clichés, particularly in Speech! Speech!, expressed it in The Lords of Limit:

“It seems to be a modern fallacy that `living speech’ can be heard only in intimate situations; in fact the clichés and equivocations of propaganda or of `public relations’ are also part of the living speech of a society.”

On Monday, a graduate student wrote in an e-mail that his research has “high impact scientific, commercial and societal applications.” Nice kid, smart engineer, lousy writer. Not a word in that phrase corresponds to anything in cold reality, and “societal” – a refugee from sociology – deserves banishment. Clichés signal poverty of imagination and spirit, and the only thing “high impact” has any business modifying is polystyrene.

`To Be Fully Languaged'

My first knowledge of involutes came when, as a reporter, I researched a feature story about mathematics and how it was combining ancient learning, often Greek and Arab, with computer science. Go to MathWorld for a handy explanation and illustration of something you probably did as a kid with pencil and string. I remember having a toy, the name of which I no longer remember, that involved fitting a pencil into an adjustable frame over a piece of paper, selecting a setting, and turning a dial to make a veritable fractal jungle of curves. Even then I sensed the aesthetic and scientific were complimentary, not antagonistic.

The word derives from the Latin involvere, meaning to wrap or envelop, and as an adjective it means curved like a spiral. In botany, an involuted leaf is curled at the edges, as during a drought. It evolved further, as involuted, to mean intricate or abstruse, similar to its etymological cousin, convoluted. To me, involute sounds like an archaic synonym for homosexual. In The Secret Lives of Words, Paul West mostly ignores the mathematical and scientific senses of involute and concentrates on its use by Thomas De Quincey in Suspiria de Profundis (1845), a sequel of sorts to his best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822). In Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey defines involute as “a compound experience incapable of being disentangled.” West writes:

“He provided other definitions as well, none as luminous or precise…he was concerned with enigmatic experiences that just would not go away. In proposing to name such experiences, not only reproducing them and devising similar ones, he anticipated comparable tangles in the work of Ionesco, Breton, and Beckett. His extraordinary contributions to modern aesthetic theory consist in his recognition that, as Raymond Queneau said, in an absurd world you live absurdly. So De Quincey invents absurdities of his own that he adds to the absurdities already there in life, realizing that there can be no total, but that, in adding to the absurd you have made your protest even while using the enemy's weapons.”

That final point distils the sense of humor my brother and I have shared since childhood, and underlines the subversive nature of the seriously ridiculous. Don’t mistake De Quincey for a Monty Pythonesque prankster, despite the assumptions you may wish to make because of his problems with narcotics. I encourage you to read Suspiria de Profundis, especially the essay West quotes, “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain.” Here, in a voluptuously written nutshell, is Proust and De Quincey’s prescient insight into brain science:

“A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by reiterated successions . . . What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, lying amongst the other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies."

In one of his finest pieces, “The Landscape of His Dreams,” collected in An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), Oliver Sacks writes of memory:

“It may be that we need to call upon both sorts of concept – memory as dynamic, as constantly revised and represented, but also as images, still present in their original form, though written over and over again by subsequent experience, like palimpsests.”

I love the literary echo of palimpsest across a century and a half, and it sparks my own memory of the first time I saw the word, around 1971: in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, a novel that is itself a madly comic palimpsest. My university library has all 21 volumes of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, edited by Grevel Lindop and published in 2000 by Pickering & Chatto, and I plan to start poking around in it, as I have been in Paul West’s nonfiction. My digression started with a single word, involute, and I think West would endorse the effort. In his preface to The Secret Lives of Words he writes:

“To be fully languaged would entail knowing all the languages and their histories. Only a few manage that while the rest of us pick away at the feast.”

`Accosting Infinity'

I’ve known two readers, both in pre-Internet days, who were so scrupulous about tracking down allusions and following leads in footnotes that they seldom finished reading any book they started. Both read copiously, but in self-canceling spirals; deeply, not broadly. Scrupulosity turned into paralysis, a page into a volume, many volumes. I still sympathize with their plight, for a good reader is never passive, but I try prudently to balance knowledge and pleasure. Either pursued heedlessly ends in the loss of both. Borges might have turned this into a fiendish little fiction. In his preface to The Secret Lives of Words, Paul West considers a cousin of the obsessive allusion-chaser – the reader in the grips of compulsive etymologizing:

“I sometimes regale myself with an image of the hell-bent reader not content with tracking the words being read who stretches out to the etymology of the words in the definitions the etymology provides, and then to the etymology of those words, and so endlessly on, accosting infinity as if it were a parlor game.”

I endured several spells of root-digging when I was younger and my Latin was better, in the heady days when I learned new words in my first language by way of my second – celerity, remonstrance, spelunking, sylvan, lacuna. Words were dense with history. Nothing we could say was arbitrary or unconnected, if looked at intently enough. Language was never inert but bubbled with humanity, if only you had ears to hear it. Here’s West again:

“The sensation of knowing more, as miscellaneous knowledge fans out over an ever-wider area, relating your slips of the tongue to the human verbal enterprise at large, is stupendous, the kind of noble aggrandizement the great Victorians Pater, Arnold, and Ruskin said came from attachment to a great religion, or indeed any body of major thought. Chronic connectedness while babbling in the current idiom sums its up.”

Like a truly dedicated wordman, West even includes “etymology unknown” among the words whose genealogy he explores:

“Alas that this only too frequently appearing phrase’s initial letters spell EU, Greek for `pleasant,’ `agreeable.’ To be wholly confounded amid the golden terminal moraine of word history, with weird slackenings all around, as well as absurd twists and gross misunderstandings, is harsh. To come up blank only reminds us that we are lucky to know anything at all.”

While getting a haircut Saturday morning I remembered Karl Shapiro’s “Haircut,” especially this stanza:

“Scissors and comb are mowing my hair into neatness,
Now pruning my ears, now smoothing my neck like a plain;
In the harvest of hair and the chaff of powdery sweetness
My snow-covered slopes grow dark with the wooly rain.”

No exotic words there, but I tried futilely to summon the etymology of scissors, sensing it was French. I checked, and it was, ultimately from the Latin caedere, “to cut.” What have I gained by learning this? Not much but the satisfaction of having solved another minor mystery, and a renewed sense of wonder for words, our birthright as humans. West again:

“In truth, many of the words whose etymology we know turn out to be rather dull (word, for instance), quite without vicissitudes or bizarre shifts; it is then, perhaps in a mood of grateful resignation, that we marvel at any word’s very creation amid all the other noises of the planet, forever wondering why that sound, those vowels and consonants?”



.

`The Full Panoply of Speech'

Fate is cruel, sometimes with a precision that implies metaphysical sanction. Paul West is a 77-year-old English-born American novelist, author of more than 50 books, who is in love with the joyous profligacy of language. He titled an essay “In Defense of Purple Prose,” and he meant it:

“I am suggesting that purple prose, ornate and elaborate as it sometimes is, reminds us of things we do ill to forget: the arbitrary, derivative, and fictional nature of language; its unreliable relationship with phenomena; its kinship with paint and voodoo and gesture and wordless song; its sheer mystery; its enormous distance from mathematics, photography, and the mouths of its pioneers; its affinities with pleasure and luxury, its capacity for hitting the mind’s eye – the mind’s ear, the mind’s very membranes – with what isn’t there, with what is impossible and (until the very moment of its investiture in words) unthinkable.”

This word-drunk writer, who described purple prose as “the style of extreme awareness,” suffered a stroke in June of 2003 that left him with global aphasia, the loss of speech both spoken and written, its expression and comprehension. The stroke killed cells in the Broca’s area (speech production, language comprehension) and the Wernicke’s area (language comprehension) of the brain. His wife, writer Diane Ackerman, calls his condition “the curse of a perpetual tip-of-the-tongue memory hunt.” Rather than resign himself to the limbo of the language-less, West laboriously composed a memoir, The Shadow Factory, parts of which have been published in The American Scholar, and has also finished writing his first post-stroke novel. To place the accomplishment in perspective, imagine Dr. Oliver Sacks writing one of his portraits in applied epistemology from the point of view of a patient who has suffered a neurological catastrophe. Here’s a triumphant excerpt:

“The second day in the rehab unit I heard the voice of pellucid, articulate reason droning on in the absence of any sound and I knew at once that I was going to be all right even then, in spite of the evil-seeming things that had been happening to me. I mean that though I hadn’t tried to speak yet and the whole world was some kind of abstract fanfare waiting to be fed on or off, I would be all right because I could still think language even though it led to an immensely private universe decorated with the full panoply of speech.”

What has been salvaged is not a voice, some second-best expedient, but Paul West’s inimitable, sui generis voice. I’m happy for West and happy for us, for the welcome reminder of how our species, on rare occasions, excels at being human. Oddly, I thought of West earlier in the week, before reading his memoir, when quoting a passage from Emerson (who also suffered from aphasia late in life) in which he deployed nine ampersands in two paragraphs. Here, from The Secret Lives of Words, published in 2000, is West’s memorable definition of “ampersand”:

“&? An exercise for the symbolic logician? Hardly: This is the sign meaning `and per se and,’ which phrase isn’t much help even when you know it means `and by itself and.’ This sign and only this sign means `and.’ Can it mean that? Or does it hark back to old grammar books in which it was printed last at the end of the alphabet, and the name of this sign or character is `and?’ Or was it once a way of writing Latin et? With much curlicue and twist? After all, the quaint pseudo-word `ye,’ meaning `the,’ has stuck around for ever, on tea shops and old curiosity shops, and it was merely an earlier culture’s way of scrawling `the.’ In my childhood, during which my father read The Daily Express, I became accustomed to the newspaper’s own emblem: a Crusader with his shield against his side.”

This definition, so personal and effortlessly learned, signifies a life spent dwelling in language, and West generously shares his relish for words. Thanks to his definition, I can read The Dream Songs, where Berryman is a spendthrift with “&,” with more understanding. It’s symbolically fitting that West should gloss “&.” His work is an exercise in conjunction, in fusing the severed and never-joined, the way neurons in a damaged brain sometimes mend.

`The Sweep of His Reign'

An excited colleague on the first floor called Thursday morning to report a “big bird” perched on the roof of our building. My officemate grabbed his camera and we ran out in the rain to see a hawk posed like a gargoyle on the northwest corner, three stories up. He appeared disheveled, probably because of the rain, but no less fierce and stony, a reproach to prey and lesser predators alike. In profile, he made me think of a cartoonist’s caricature of Samuel Beckett.

With no ornithologist or even a well-informed bird watcher in our midst, the most confident among us identified the visitor as an osprey, Pandion haliaetus, what I’ve always called a fish hawk. About 10 years ago, in the company of an ichthyologist-turned-ornithologist (he switched mid-career when he developed a formaldehyde allergy), I watched an osprey drop out of the sky like a streamlined rock and disappear beneath the surface of Collins Lake, in Scotia, N.Y., just across the Mohawk River from Schenectady. Seconds later, concentric ripples still moving, the bird shot out of the water with a fish in its talons. I’ve never seen beauty and savagery so perfectly wedded. In “Sounds,” the fourth chapter of Walden, Thoreau witnesses a similar scene:

“As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fish hawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half-hour I have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the country.”

Thoreau, typically, downplays the drama, fitting predator and prey into a larger cycle of activity. “Dimples” makes an excellent verb. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “tantivy” as “a rapid gallop; a ride at this pace,” and cites Thoreau’s 1854 usage. For its etymology, the OED reports “origin obscure: ? echoic, representing the sound of a horse's feet.” The only echo I hear is of Oliver “Tantivy” Mucker-Maffick, a character in Gravity’s Rainbow.

I wish we had seen the hawk take off from its perch but the rain fell harder and the lens on my officemate’s camera fogged up. The three or four pictures he took are blurry and turn the bird’s brilliant white breast into a washed-out gray, though you get a sense of the cool dignity Melville described in “The Man-of-War Hawk”:

“No arrow can reach him; nor thought can attain
To the placid supreme in the sweep of his reign.”

`Alas for America'

Like an awkward adolescent, Emerson’s prose is breathless and clumsy. Its first virtue is profligacy, not grace. His mind outraces his pen. In his journal and occasionally in his essays, the grammar may fail but never the invention. When his genius boils, meaning eludes us but not the music. Emerson’s prose is the closest I know to elegant jazz improvisation. Order and chaos are held in balance. Too much order, the line is dull; too much chaos, it’s incoherent. The resulting tension creates momentum. Emerson’s unit is the sentence, not the paragraph or anything larger. Here’s a passage from his Journal, dated June 1847:

“Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! it all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.

“Eager, solicitous, hungry, rabid, busy-body America attempting many things, vain, ambitious to feel thy own existence, & convince others of thy talent, by attempting & hastily accomplishing much; yes, catch thy breath & correct thyself and failing here, prosper out there; speed & fever are never greatness; but reliance & serenity & waiting & perseverance, heed of the work & negligence of the effect.”

“Ungirt” is Whitman’s word – one he would have used that also describes him (think of this image of Walt) – and Emerson uses it eight years before Leaves of Grass is published. We might say “slovenly.” “Procumbent” I thought I knew but didn’t. Emerson draws it from botany. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first definition as “Of a plant, leaf, or stem: lying flat on the ground, especially without rooting; trailing or growing along the ground.” That leads naturally to a profusion of botanical imagery (“suckers” is a Barnumesque pun). Whitman was to write of grass: “I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.” “Poppy” concludes the plant associations, with a hint of narcotic drowsiness (and of “poppycock” – the OED dates the first use to a New York City newspaper in 1852).

In the second paragraph, Emerson addresses the nation directly, and “rabid” may be his harshest indictment. “Busy-body” dates from the 16th century, but in the American context it recalls Benjamin Franklin’s gossipy, meddlesome essays as “The Busy-Body.” The rhetoric quickens with “vain” and “ambitious,” and perhaps he alludes to the ignoble and illegal Mexican-American War. His United States is an unruly teenager, “ambitious to feel [its] own existence.” In his life of Emerson, Robert D. Richardson writes, “During the first two-thirds of 1847 Emerson was more restless and dissatisfied than he had been for many years.” His indictment of the nation seems to mirror his own uneasiness, Richardson suggests: “Emerson’s dissatisfaction extended to the country at large, to America `the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent.’” Glossing the 1847 journal entry I cited above, Joel Porte writes in Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time:

“It would be a mistake, I think, to attempt to reduce Emerson’s rambling drift here to consecutive thought; its tendencies are clear enough…America `the ungirt’ (`that great sloven continent,’ as Emerson would say in English Traits) wastes its `talent’ now seen in physiological terms, in a kind of lazy, imbecile, polymorphous pouring out of its vital energies. Instead of investing its force in the erection of strong, large, durable trees, it allows itself to be drained by `suckers’ close to the ground. He wants America to calm down, cool off, gather its forces, and invest temperately in future growth.”

Porte is mistaken when he calls the passage “rambling,” though his error helps us understand the charm and strength of Emerson’s best prose. Its energy is focused, but as momentum pushes him along he grabs like a magpie at any word or string of words that attract him and bolster his thought. In a subsequent journal entry, he writes “America is formless, has no terrible & no beautiful condensation,” and he might be describing his own method. Not “formless,” but form improvised for its momentary usefulness, its condensed beauty.

`The Great Lonely Land'

I spent four days in Cleveland and found myself trapped in the lyrics of a whiny albeit catchy rant written in 1983 by Chrissie Hynde, founder of The Pretenders and a native of Akron:

“I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride.
The farms of Ohio
Had been replaced by shopping malls
And Muzak filled the air
From Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls.”

I sympathize with the elegiac sentiment if not the self-righteousness expressed in “My City Was Gone.” It hit me last Thursday as my brother, my oldest son and I walked out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I.M. Pei’s hideous glass spectacle. A wall of black clouds moved east over Lake Erie. Captain Frank’s, a seafood restaurant we loved as kids, had stood at the end of the East Ninth Street pier, and now was long gone. So was the Terminal Tower – for a moment. Until 1967 it had been the tallest building in the world outside New York City. From where we stood on the lakefront, it was dwarfed by Key Tower, the BP Building, the Tower at Erieview and One Cleveland Center, among others, and briefly I lost sight of it in the looming architectural clutter. Pere Ubu, the great punk band from Cleveland, had named a 1985 album Terminal Tower. Consider some of its song titles: “Heart of Darkness,” “Final Solution,” “My Dark Ages,” “Not Happy.”

In The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus quotes a resonant passage from Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope:

“…street by street, block by block, step by step, door by door, all that’s left of the old America is under siege. I catch sight of it from time to time: a fleeting glimpse at the top of the stairs, or outside rustling in the bushes. This is the old America of legend and distant memory, that invested no faith in the wisdom of history and no hope in the sham of the future, the old America that invented itself all over from the ground up every single day….the America where no precaution is sufficient and nothing will protect you, no passport or traveling papers, no opportune crucifix or gas soaked torch, no sunglasses or decoder box or cyanide capsule, nor ejector seat or live wire or secret identity or reconstructed tissues or unmarked grave or faked death. It’s the America that was originally made for those who believed in nothing else, not because they believed there was nothing else but because for them, without America, nothing else was worth believing.”

This sad, wounded sentiment is nothing new. If you listen with care you’ll hear it in Melville and Philip Roth, in Dylan and The Band (“Maybe it was all in fun,/they didn't mean to ruin no one”), in the photographs of Walker Evans and Wright Morris, and in the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah and Budd Boetticher. The tone may be nostalgic or savage but always rooted in a sense of dreams betrayed, hopes squandered, promises broken. Henry James articulates this elusive sense of loss repeatedly in The American Scene, as in this passage set in Florida, though it might as well be Cleveland or Houston:

“It is of the nature of many American impressions, accepted at the time as a whole of the particular story, simply to cease to be, as soon as your back is turned — to fade, to pass away, to leave not a wreck behind. This happens not least when the image, whatever it may have been, has exacted the tribute of wonder or pleasure: it has displayed every virtue but the virtue of being able to remain with you.”

At the end of the book, heading north from Florida by train, James addresses the rhythmic rumble of his Pullman car:

“You touch the great lonely land – as one feels it still to be -- only to plant upon it some ugliness about which, never dreaming of the grace of apology or contrition, you then proceed to brag with a cynicism all your own. You convert the large and noble sanities that I see around me, you convert them one after another to crudities, to invalidities, hideous and unashamed…”

`A Momentary Homer & Milton'

Sunday morning, as we drove to Cleveland Hopkins Airport – my oldest son bound for Albany, N.Y., and I for Houston – he played songs from the Basement Tapes, recorded 40 years ago by Bob Dylan and the musicians soon to rechristen themselves The Band. In Invisible Republic (1996), later retitled The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus gave us the definitive account of these sessions, and in the process wrote his finest book. Dylan was 26 and had already recorded his best albums – Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde and Blonde. In the Basement Tapes, recorded in West Saugerties, N.Y., in the basement of the house known as Big Pink, we hear six young men channeling the history of popular music in the United States and, incidentally, American history itself, from colonial times to the Vietnam War. We also hear six young men (four of them Canadians) having a raucous and very stoned good time.

Around the same time, Dylan was writing Tarantula, published five years later as a novel. The book is nearly unreadable, like a teenager’s diary or anything committed to paper by Jack Kerouac, but in it Dylan wrote “the only thing that keeps the area going is tradition -- as you can figure out – it doesnt [sic] count very much -- everything around me rots.” Dylan is an artist – Charles Ives, William Faulkner and Philip Roth are others – who doesn’t make a move without acknowledging the traditions in which he operates, a succession of forebears who have passed along a useful set of tools. Without tradition, Dylan implies, without cultural inheritance, we’re left with entropy.

On our trip to the airport, we had time to hear “Please, Mrs. Henry,” “Apple Suckling Tree” and “Lo and Behold,” all of which display what Marcus called “the rambling, random, often obscene humor” so often present of the Basement Tapes. Earlier, Joshua, who started reading Moby-Dick for the first time last week, had challenged me to identify two Melville allusions in Dylan’s lyrics. I could only come up with “Captain Arab [sic]” from “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” He reminded me of the other, from “Lo and Behold”:

“I come into Pittsburgh
At six-thirty flat.
I found myself a vacant seat
An' I put down my hat.
`What's the matter, Molly, dear,
What's the matter with your mound?’
`What's it to ya, Moby Dick?
This is chicken town!’
Lo and behold! Lo and behold!
Lookin' for my lo and behold,
Get me outa here, my dear man!”

That a smutty, improvised reference to Moby-Dick shows up in one of his songs proves only that Dylan is a magpie, a conduit for American culture, high and low, taking what he needs wherever he finds it. Listening to the Basement Tapes, I’m simultaneously aware of musically gifted young men having a grand old time, and of an echo chamber of American history, circa 1967. It reminds me of the next album Dylan recorded, John Wesley Harding, which is saturated with an awareness of the Vietnam War (and released just two months before the Tet Offensive), though he never once makes an overt reference to the still-escalating conflict. In Dylan’s hands, music is an immense web, sensitive to the faintest and most violent of events. On April 11, 1835, Emerson wrote in his Journal:

“Glad to hear music in the village last evening under the fine yellow moon; it sounds like cultivation, domestication. In America where all are on wheels one is glad to meet with a sign of adorning our own town. It is a consecrated beautifying of our place. A bugle, clarionet [sic], & flute are to us a momentary Homer & Milton. Music is sensuous poetry.”

This passage echoes with Dylan and much else. In “If You See Her, Say Hello” (from Blood on the Tracks) he wrote: “Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past/I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast.” And this, from “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” on the Basement Tapes:

“Buy me a flute
And a gun that shoots
Tailgates and substitutes
Strap yourself
To the tree with roots
You ain't goin' nowhere."

And, of course, also from the Basement Tapes:

“This wheel's on fire,
Rolling down the road,
Best notify my next of kin,
This wheel shall explode!”

`The World Has Funked Them'

In a letter he wrote to his friend Gorham Munson on Oct. 20, 1920, Hart Crane expressed sentiments familiar to many young men from the provinces:

“I shall be glad to get back to Cleveland for a while, if only to see the copies of Vildrac, Rimbaud, and Laforgue that have arrived from Paris since my leaving.”

When we are young, culture is always elsewhere. One’s home, by definition, represents the tired, conventional way of doing things, and must be repudiated. Crane ordered precious volumes from France. In his Cleveland, 45 years later, I plundered libraries and bookstores, searching for anything, including Rimbaud, to take me elsewhere. Neither of us had learned the lesson suggested by an unlikely source, D.H. Lawrence, in Studies in Classic American Literature:

“The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it. Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them today.”

Like Crane, I later defunked Melville and Whitman.

Native Sons

I've worked hard to be a dutiful native son, an enthusiast for writers from Ohio, and some I prize highly -- Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson and Dawn Powell chief among them. When it comes to Cleveland writers, the situation is hopeless. Crane lived here as a boy, but was born in Garrettsville, a village about 50 miles southeast of the city. His grandfather, Arthur Crane, ran a cannery in Garrettsville, and by the turn of the last century, thanks largely to Arthur, the village trumpeted itself as the "maple syrup capital of the world." Arthur's son, Clarence Arthur Crane, founded Crane Candies, developed the formula for Life Savers and sold it for a pittance. At its web site, the Garrettsville Chamber of Commerce rightly makes a big deal out of the candy connection, only to dispense with Hart Crane in a single dependent clause: "who wrote poems now studied on college campuses throughout the country."

My brother has a copy of Fine Arts in Cleveland: An Illustrated History, by Holly Rarick Witchey and John Vacha. In their preface, the authors define fine arts as "visual art, music, dance, theater, and belles lettres." Their treatment of literature is dominated by theater, and they exaggerate the importance of Langston Hughes, who worked briefly with a Cleveland theater, Karamu House. They get Crane all wrong, referring to him as a "lyrically romantic poet":

"He was a passionate wanderer whose last adventure took him to Mexico in 1931. While sailing back to America to settle family affairs in 1932, Crane jumped ship and drowned. His body was never found."

In three sentences they make at least four factual errors, and "jumped ship" is a memorably awful choice of words. Elsewhere they report: "Crane's meteoric career ended abruptly, however, with his suicide at the age of thirty-three."

Last April 27 was the 75th anniversary of Crane's death by suicide. He was 32.

`The Life Excited'

My parents had friends whose property nearly adjoined the grounds of the Cuyahoga County Fair in Berea, Ohio, so we came to feel proprietary about the annual event. Even when the fair was not in session, we drove around the empty fields and barns with the grownups and felt like lords of the manor. As a result, I have always, even though a city boy, enjoyed county fairs, the more agricultural the better. They have always seemed doubly exotic -- rural (livestock, tractors, produce-judging contests) and disreputable (carnies, sideshows, white trash). Judging by our visit to the fair on Friday, the latter has thoroughly overtaken the former. The familiar smells remain -- manure, hot grease, sweat -- but more than ever the fair felt like a real-life enactment of Fox Television.

We saw an enervated Elvis impersonator in white jumpsuit perform "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You." We saw two middle-aged, ample-bellied guys in Hawaiian shirts -- one on congas, the other on steel drum -- regurgitate the Jimmy Buffet songbook. We saw corn dogs and elephant ears, onion blooms and sausage sandwiches. We saw Army recruiters using rap music to lure young men to serve their country. We saw tattoos, Mohawks, nose studs and underage girls made up like streetwalkers. The evening's big show was the Grass Roots. Remember "Midnight Confessions?"

I experienced all of this through the unlikely perspective of Henry David Thoreau. On my brother's shelves I had found a playing card-sized book, The Wisdom of Thoreau, which had once been mine. The copyright page dates it precisely -- February 1968. I had read Walden for the first time the previous year and was smitten. The pocket-sized volume -- A Little Paperback Classic -- cost 35 cents and contains excerpts from Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the Journals and essays. It's very much a late-sixties selection, emphasizing the political Thoreau over Thoreau as writer and naturalist.

The pages are brown and brittle but I can still read the familiar words, and I found myself envying Thoreau's sense of rootedness and connection -- not with his fellow men and women of Concord, or the United States, but with creation, especially as expressed through the cycle of the seasons. His solitude on the level of family and neighbors was negligible; as a discrete soul, it was absolute yet nonexistent. Thoreau would have hated the fair, of course -- the noise, the squandering of money and energy, the relentless tackiness. The Wisdom of Thoreau includes this excerpt from the Journal, dated Oct. 18, 1856:

"My work is writing, and I do not hesitate, though I know that no subject is too trivial for me, tried by ordinary standards; for ye fools, the theme is nothing, the life is everything. All that interests the reader is the depths and intensity of the life excited."

`My Giant Goes With Me'

This morning we drove to the West Side Market at West 25th Street and Lorain Avenue, in Cleveland. The market and its iconic tower were built in 1912 (Hart Crane must have seen it) and the outside is a mosaic of buff-colored bricks. Inside are butchers, bakers, fishmongers, candy makers and dealers in dairy. The scents intoxicate. The produce vendors are housed next door in the arcade. We bought baguettes, smoked Swiss cheese, Russian tea cakes, catfish, red onions, cherry-vanilla muffins, smoked turkey, Braunschweiger, green beans and lemons. One of the butcher stalls displays a photograph of the same stall, run by the same family, dated 1916. Beside it was another photo from the same era of all the butchers working in the market, posed in front of the building. All wear spotless, blindingly white coats. There must be 75 men in the picture. Some of me recognizes the West Side Market, where we spent many Saturdays in our youth, as the epicenter of the American Experiment.

The city blew up a bridge last spring, so we took a circuitous detour. On Fulton Road we passed a tavern called Frenchie's Escape. Across the street and down the block was The Ugly Broad. We saw a guy on the sidewalk who looked like a dissipated Leon Russell, until we realized it was a woman. My oldest son, who just turned 20, plugged his iPod into the rental car's sound system and handled the soundtrack -- lots of Dylan, Howlin' Wolf, Louis Jordan, Louis Armstrong, Johnny Cash, and Tom Waits, who contributed this:

"Friday's a funeral and Saturday's a bride,
Sey's got a pistol on the register side.
And the goddam delivery truck,
They make too much noise,
And we don't get butter delivered no more.
In the neighborhood.
In the neighborhood.
In the neighborhood."

Emerson was wrong, but charmingly so:

"Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places."

Not so. Some places, suffused with History or at least with our private histories, matter very much. A few sentences later in "Self-Reliance," Emerson writes:

"I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go."

`Some Boundless Contiguity of Shade'

On my brother's shelves I found a series of heavy, compact, anonymous-looking volumes published in 1966 by Readex Microprint as part of their Great Americana project. These are reprints of early volumes of discovery and exploration in North America. For instance, sitting on the table beside me are two volumes by Pierre de Charlevoix, Journal of a Voyage to North-America, published in French in 1744. He was a Jesuit who first visited Canada in 1705. The first chapter, "Preliminary Discourse on the Origin of the Americans," begins memorably:

"After reading almost every thing that has been writ on the manner in which America might have been peopled, we seem to be just where we were before this great and interesting question began to be agitated; notwithstanding, it would require a moderate volume to relate only the various opinions of the learned on this subject. For most part of them have given so much into the marvellous, almost all of them have built their conjectures on foundations so ruinous, or have had recourse to certain resemblances of names, manners, customs, religion and languages, so very frivolous, that it would, in my opinion, be as useless to refute, as it is impossible to reconcile with each other."

Not much has changed. Americans are still squabbling over who we are and what our job in the world might be. Of more interest than the Charlevoix volumes, however, especially because I'm back in my home town, Cleveland, visiting my brother and his family, is Two Years in the New Settlements of Ohio, by D. Griffiths Jr., published in London in 1835. Griffiths was English and, according to the Foreword, shipped out of Liverpool in 1832. From New York he took a steam packet up the Hudson River to Albany, caught a canal boat and traveled to Buffalo on the Erie Canal. From there he proceeded by steam boat to Cleveland, where I am now sitting.

Griffiths' book is designed as a primer on the Western Reserve, aimed at his fellow Englishmen who might be considering a move to the United States. Griffiths is eminently practical. He notes his surroundings, natural and human, with an eye for utilitarian detail. He's sympathetic to the former colonists, even finds good things to say about Mormons, and his only irritation seems to be our impertinent celebration of Independence Day, which he describes as an "annual repetition of injuries, sustained during the Revolutionary War, [that] is too well calculated to keep alive the bitter feeling of Americans towards the British Government...and on this account is to be lamented."

What I most enjoy are Griffith's descriptions of the very place where I grew up and where I am revisiting this week:

"That part of the Western Reserve lying along the shore of Lake Erie, between the rivers Cuyahoga to the east and Huron to the west, may be termed a level country properly enough, yet, strictly speaking, it is undulatory....If the house on each side of these roads are a quarter of a mile apart, the road is called a street; and those the houses be scattered so thinly, that but two or three can be seen from any given point, it is called a town..."

Only rarely does Griffith wax poetically, and even cite the work of better-known poets:

"The sound of an axe however told me at some distance that I was approaching the habitable parts of the earth;; and the musquitos [sic], which haunted me like ghosts through the wood, like ghosts also disappeared with its shades, and I arrived in safety at the log-house of my friend Mr. D. Now if you know any one who sighs with Burns for

"`A cave on some wild distant shore,
Where the winds howl to the waves dashing roar.'

"send him over here, and if he can make shift with a log-hut, instead of a cave, why I'll warrant him a situation to his mind. Or if you know any one who would rather with Cowper have

"`A lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade.'

"I can suit him to a hair."

Compared to Charlevoix's accounts, Griffith's New World was already Old, and ours in ancient, but I love his excitement. Griffith's persona is part huckster, part poet, and thus very American.

`Beauty Like a Tightened Bow'

Some critics and bloggers speak of beauty only with contempt and distaste, and seem to evince a pathological suspicion of aesthetic pleasure. They remind me of a small cadre of protesters one often saw at antiwar rallies in the late nineteen-sixties, who wore their hair short and dressed in white shirts and narrow ties, which served to make them conspicuous and a little spooky. They were a humorless bunch, armed with stacks of densely written, single-spaced tracts, and resembled nothing so much as door-to-door Mormon proselytizers. They were members of the Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist sect for whom the Communist Party USA was too soft on capitalism. These guys were so dour and bland they looked dangerous, and one can hardly imagine them pierced by the beauty of anything, whether a sonnet or an old barn. Here’s an anecdote Maxim Gorky told about Lenin, as reported by Edmund Wilson in To the Finland Station:

“`I know nothing [Lenin said] that is greater than the Appassionata; I’d like to listen to it every day. It is marvelous superhuman music. I always think with pride – perhaps it is naïve of me – what marvelous things human beings can do!’ Then screwing up his eyes and smiling, he added, rather sadly: `But I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head – you might get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them on the head, without mercy, although our ideal is not to use force against anyone. Our duty is infernally hard.”

Poor Vladimir Illych. It’s not easy being a beauty-hating sociopath, especially when an aesthetic sense is a component of our genetic makeup, one of the capacities that distinguish us from other species. Even Lenin confesses to a fondness for Beethoven, but quickly retracts his admission of bourgeois sentimentality, just as a blogger came perilously close last week to expressing love for the work of a certain poet, only to dismiss its beauty as a “social construction.” Imagine being so painfully divided against oneself and, by implication, so contemptuous of those who enjoy wallowing in beauty. Better to have no aesthetic sense at all.

I respond to the beauty of a phrase or line before I weigh its truth or any other value it may possess. That doesn’t make me a swooning aesthete. I naturally take the next step and evaluate all the meanings, all the words’ uses, available to me. Artfully arranged language is not stagnant; it vibrates with connotations and echoes, heard and unheard melodies. I can savor the passage in The Pisan Cantos beginning “What thou lovest well remains,/the rest is dross,” and promptly question its human accuracy and reject the anti-Semitic, often incoherent garbage Pound heaped around it. When Ruskin writes in The Stones of Venice – “Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.” -- my reactions are numerous, beginning with the fact that Fairfield Porter’s “October Interior,” Hopkins’ “The Windhover” and Satie’s “Gymnopédies” possess much utility in my life. And I can think of many things more beautiful than peacocks and lilies, both of which are a little too emphatically beautiful for my taste, which runs closer to what Yeats wrote in “No Second Troy”:

“…With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern.”

Oliver Hardy R.I.P.

Oliver Hardy died 50 years ago today. No actors have given me so much pleasure as Hardy and his partner Stan Laurel. Last night I watched Big Business for the 2,000th time. The boys are door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen. When Jimmy Finlayson refuses to buy a tree, they destroy his house and he destroys their car. Finis. Jim Gilchrist has a fine appreciation of "Babe" at Scotsman.com.

Keats and the Company of Books

The mortal grip of books on the hearts and minds of readers is best illustrated by the life and prolonged death of John Keats. With his friend Joseph Severn, Keats left London in the fall of 1820 and settled in Rome, in a house on the Spanish Steps, hoping the climate would help ease the tuberculosis that has already claimed his mother and one brother. As his condition worsened, the sight of books repelled him. W. Jackson Bate, in John Keats, tells us:

“Books were associated, and had been from the beginning, with all that was immortal. As such, they were now completely remote, a hopeless contrast with the way in which he was ending – an end after so little had been done. Less distressing (he was now quoting Lear for the last time) were things about him that frankly `smelled of mortality.’”

Soon, Keats changed his mind, and Severn read aloud to him from Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, Plato, Maria Edgeworth’s novels, Pilgrim’s Progress and Don Quixote. Bate reports:

“It was within another few days (January 25-26) that he could no longer `bear any books.’ But generally, from now until the end, he would turn to Severn and ask him to read for awhile from Jeremy Taylor.”

The myth of Keats as the sensitive, wraith-like soul is given the lie by the stoicism, courage and even good cheer with which he endured unendurable suffering. Two weeks before his death, his rejection of books passed – a change I find touching and encouraging. I have never felt so sick or miserable as to reject books. They represent the last worldly pleasure I would sacrifice. Here’s Bate:

“Now, on the contrary, he wanted to have books close to him – as many as possible. Severn had just become reconciled to Keats’s talk `of the quiet grave as the first rest he can ever have’ when suddenly this `great desire for books came across his mind.’ However puzzled by this changeability, Severn tried to do something as Keats kept calling for more and more books to be near him. `I got all the books on hand.’ He was of course unable to read. But hour after hour, for three full days, the mere presence of these books acted on him (to use Severn’s word) as a `charm.’”

Besides family and friends, I would ask for the company of Shakespeare, Montaigne, Boswell's Life of Johnson – and Keats, who died Feb. 23, 1821. He was 25 years old.

`Everyone Gets a Hug'

It’s not surprising that some of our best writers about poetry -- call them critics, reviewers, what have you – are so consistently funny. The bulk of artistic work in any form, from any period, and this seems especially true of poetry, is godawful, and only rarely rises to the level of the honorably mediocre. As every honest reviewer knows, it’s always easier and more efficient to be funny when the work in question is lousy, in particular when it is pretentiously lousy. Pretension, of course, is the handiest and most fashionable substitute for talent, as well as being the comic spirit’s inevitable target. We’re lucky to live in a poetic era dominated by workshops, theorists, tin ears and solipsism, because there’s so much to laugh about.

What Randall Jarrell, William Logan and Christopher Ricks have in common (though Ricks, more than the others, usually writes about what he admires) are high standards, good taste, deep learning in the poetic tradition and a gift for epigrammatic prose that can be distilled into one-liners without sacrificing critical acumen. To their company I would add Tom Disch, another critic who is no respecter of the trendy, dishonest or over-inflated. I’ve been reading The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters, and I haven’t laughed so much since I reread Flann O’Brien earlier this summer. What follows is an idiosyncratic selection of Disch’s Greatest Hits, self-contained sentences and passages that combine wit and critical tartness, often in a manner reminiscent of H.L. Mencken:

“In the poetry establishment, as presently constituted, everyone gets a hug, and expects to get a Guggenheim.”

“Intellectually I am inclined to dismiss much of [Kathleen] Raine’s paraphrasable discourse as theosophy, a branch of the tree of the perennial wisdom only a little loftier than astrology and rhabdomancy.”

“Poetry, like so much else that is beautiful, is ephemeral. A butterfly, a nightingale, a sip of wine. It slips away, the particular joining the general. How many marvelously apt haikus have been written – and lost before the sun came up? Several million at least. Any poet must be prepared to see his work arise and vanish in the same morning mists.”

“The cruel, Calvinist truth of the matter is that there is little relation between the effort exerted and the result achieved….A mediocre novelist may still find readers; a mediocre poet has only his chagrin and, if he’s lucky, tenure.”

“Readers who don’t suffer toxic reactions to [Raymond] Carver’s mixture of machismo and vulnerability may enjoy his poems for their anecdotal value…There will be some readers for whom Carver may serve as a role model (the commonest purpose of poetry in our time), but his audience is more likely to be those like myself who only imagine the honky-tonk half of the world. Charles Bukowski’s poetry has similar appeal, and indeed its voyeuristic attraction is even greater, since Bukowski is an unreformed reprobate with claims to being America’s premier dirty old man.”

“…since [Michael] Ryan writes about almost nothing except himself and his various foul moods, from self-pity to reproachfulness, it is hard to speak of his poems as though they had an existence independent of his personality as he has chosen to dramatize it. In disliking his poems I feel I am disliking a person, and this bespeaks a kind of mimetic achievement: were Ryan a worse poet, one might have to dislike the self he depicts.”

“Nothing can excuse dullness, except a critic intent on originality.”

“The English departments of the better universities these days are controlled by tailors who design clothes for the same naked emperor. One either salutes their fashion sense or perishes. Increasingly, the emperor’s wardrobe is acclaimed. Thousands of English majors who know, as [critic Marjorie] Perloff does, that such piffle is not poetry also know on which side their bread is buttered.

And why is this piffle written at all? Because the myth of the avant-garde still has enough currency to make obscurantism a profitable enterprise. If one can create a jargon sufficiently impenetrable and portentous and then refuse to speak any other language, one will be secure against most criticism. Deconstructive critics and related charlatans have been profiting from this insight for many years.”

“If deconstructive critics would only leave real literature alone and devote their entire attention to the like of the language poets, solipsism will have achieved its masterpiece, an academic ghetto that can do double duty as a quarantine ward.”

“That [Charles] Olson managed to carve out his own special place in the history of postwar American literature, despite a virtual critical consensus against his poetry, is a tribute to his knack for creating disciples.”

“His [Lawrence Raab’s] language is as flat as Kansas in August, and his spirits low as a barometer before a hurricane.”

“[Tony Hoagland’s poetry is] lazy poetry. The lines and the stanzas break only so that the page may look like a poem. Sentences are kept as simple as possible by frequent recourse to repetition. Such metaphor as the poet allows himself is Tin Pan Alley boilerplate. The interest of the poems is entirely anecdotal. Reading them is like listening in on someone who’s mastered the art of group therapy. He has some good stories to tell and he’s vulnerable to just that degree that can win the approbation of his peers. Better yet, he’s got a sense of humor and, when that fails, a winning smile.”

“…poets are regarded as handicapped writers whose work must be treated with a tender condescension, such as one accords the athletic achievements of basketball players confined to wheelchairs.”

One of the pleasures of reading Disch is the reliable supply of frissons he gives us when detonating swollen reputations, thus articulating what we have always known, in our solitude, but never ventured to express. Disch has honored Carver, Olson, Bukowski, Hoagland, Ryan, Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, W.S. Merwin and so many others with the joy and good humor of his contempt.

`The Moods of Their Own Minds'

When I say Tom Disch’s poetry is amusing, I use the adjective in its conventional sense, meaning pleasantly diverting, while hinting at its near-homonym, Muse, in particular, Erato. And recall Dr. Johnson’s definition of “amuser”: “He that amuses, as with false promises. The French word is always taken in an ill sense.” Amusement once implied fraud or deception, the artist’s modus operandi. Reading Disch consistently, I see his love of lists and unexpected rhymes, and his frequent mention of food. Here’s a fine list poem, “Garage Sale,” which turns a catalog of castoffs into a moral epiphany, a memento mori:

“Once someone thought he’d want to read this book,
And here’s a chess set minus just one rook;
A Sunbeam toaster sans its cord; the Life
Of Who’s-It by his unforgiving wife.
Como singing “Dance, Ballerina, Dance”;
The buttons off a hundred shirts and pants;
A rug unfaded where a bed had been
With traffic patterns marked in olive green.
There are few takers, though the prices cry,
`Remember, stranger, someday you must die.’”

Disch is also a fine critic of poetry, letting his taste and good sense lead him where they will. The subtitle of his first collection of reviews offers clues to his Jarrell-like sensibility: The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters (1995). In his introduction, Disch anatomizes the usual suspects – writing workshops, poetry prizes, the sense of victimization and entitlement, encroaching illiteracy, little knowledge of or interest in metrics – which he distills into three qualities: laziness, incompetence and smugness. Here’s Disch on smugness:

“Apprentice poets, once they’ve developed sufficient self-esteem, quickly graduate to self-reverence – a tendency that has its complement in the self-protective contempt that adolescents feel for the oppressive vistas of history and the intricate machineries of the world they never made.

“The most benign form of smugness is that which dotes upon family snapshots. If there’s nothing else happening in one’s life, there are always births to be celebrated, deaths to be mourned, spouses to cherish, and skeletons to be exhumed from closets.”

In a word, narcissism. And in several more words, poverty of imagination. This is not a new theme among critics of poetry. Between January and March 1818, at the Surrey Institution, William Hazlitt delivered his Lectures on the English Poets. In “On Shakespeare and Milton,” he writes of the former:

“He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it is possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become.”

And this Dischian diagnosis:

“The great fault of a modern school of poetry is, that it is an experiment to reduce poetry to a mere effusion of natural sensibility; or what is worse, to divest it both of imaginary splendour and human passion, to surround the meanest objects with the morbid feelings and devouring egotism of the writers’ own minds. Milton and Shakespeare did not so understand poetry. They gave a more liberal interpretation both to nature and art. They did not do all they could to get rid of the one and the other, to fill up the dreary void with the Moods of their own Minds.”

If these thoughts sound familiar, remember that in the audience for seven of Hazlitt’s eight weekly lectures was a 23-year-old poet and medical student, John Keats. Just three weeks before the first lecture, on Dec. 21, 1817, in a letter to his brothers George and Thomas, Keats wrote:

“At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously -- I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…”

The lectures confirmed Keats in his new way of thinking about poetry and its composition. The following October signaled the start of Keats’ annus mirabilis. On Oct. 27, 1818, he wrote to Richard Woodhouse:

“As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself - it has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character - it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated - It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body - The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute - the poet has none; no identity - he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures.”

Blasphemous words, surely, at least in a poetry workshop. Of course, none of the students and most of the instructors have never read them.