“When we poets believe that we are thinkers, moralists, or preachers, that we're going to give you the word -- now this is wisdom, kid -- we reveal more terribly than others how stupid we are.”
That’s
Howard Nemerov in a 1975 public interview at Skidmore College (my dear ol’ alma
mater). Robert Boyars asks him to “say something about the poet and politics,”
and Nemerov replies with memories of President Kennedy’s assassination and how,
“like a great many other poets I went right home and spent all day writing a poem.”
He published it in The New Leader and
never permitted it to be reprinted. “When things had calmed down,” he says, “I
recognized sadly that it was a terribly bad poem . . .” Off hand, I can’t
remember reading any good poems about the assassination. Momentous public events
tend to bring out the flatulent in all of us, poets most of all. Unless
your name is Dryden or Swift, you probably ought to stay away from such things.
Two years
earlier, in Gnomes and Occasions,
Nemerov included “On Being Asked for a Peace Poem,” which begins:
“Here is Joe
Blow the poet
Sitting
before the console of the giant instrument
That
mediates his spirit to the world.
He flexes his
fingers nervously,
He ripples
off a few scale passages
(Shall I
compare thee to a summer’s day?)
And
resolutely readies himself to begin
His poem
about the War in Vietnam.”
Those who
remember the war will perhaps remember the bales of bad poetry it inspired,
when self-righteous purity of heart was mistaken for deathless verse. The war
years coincide roughly with the final ascendancy of free verse among American
poets. Could there be a connection? Nemerov continues:
“This poem,
he figures, is
A sacred
obligation: all by himself,
Applying the
immense leverage of art,
He is about
to stop this senseless war.”
In
World War II, Nemerov served as a fighter pilot, flying more than one-hundred combat missions with the
Royal Canadian Air Force and the Eighth U.S. Army Air
Force. Anything
potentially can be the matter, the pretext or subject, of poetry and the other
arts, but that's the operative word: art.
Poets are not “thinkers, moralists, or preachers,” at least while writing poems.
Screeds and screams are not poetry. Nemerov goes on in his interview:
“I like to think
I've succeeded in writing poems that try to say what the world is, instead of
what it ought to be, though I'm sure as I age I make my moralizing sententiae
as nobly and with as grand a gesture as anybody else. But I don't think I've
lately committed the sin on the scale I achieved in the Kennedy poem -- that
was awful slop.”
2 comments:
Richard Eberhart (an uneven poet anyway) wrote a poem about the assassination (which he did allow to be reprinted), and it's godawful.
Per contra, I think a poet does well to suppose his name belongs in a bracket with Dryden and Swift [and Pindar, Marvell, Walt Whitman, Yeats...], and emulate them to the extent of writing poems on momentous public occasions. Not every poet, absolutely, but to those who feel the twitch I say: go for it; if the impulse is quashed at the starting line you'll never know what might have come of it. Genuine panegyric, elegiac, or funerary verse -- of wider address than the poet's circle -- a public speaking that honors the public -- might at least be a professional skill worth cultivating, as we say of crafting an ode or a limerick. Only our poet should also, like Nemerov, recognize his failures for what they are when they occur, and blush and bury the things.
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