`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.