I think Kay Ryan and her poetry are magnificent. Uncompromising and wise, Ryan seems to wear her later-life success (Guggenheim fellowship, Poet Laureate of the United States, etc.) very easily. Perhaps her mastery of fame derives from having her priorities in order. Her poetry, at least, always jolts my priorities into place: "Turtle" brings me succor on my worst days, reaches me when more personal entreaties can't or won't.
With such feelings, I am not an objective reader of reviews of Ryan's work. Indeed, I am possibly a mite overprotective of her, the way fans of Jane Austen, with their "peculiar affection," won't tolerate an unkind word against her. Disclaimers out of the way, I can now say that Helen Vendler's New York Review of Booksreview of Ryan's new collection, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, pissed me off.
Some of the offense arose from Vendler's distinctively condescending tone, insistent refusal to like Ryan's poems, and begrudging praise:
And what sort of poetry has issued from this unusual personal trajectory? . . . . But such [rhymes], aside from being defensible, should by their sound please or alert or warn the ear, and these, to my mind, don't always succeed in doing so. . . . . Over the past fifteen years, Ryan's poems, resolutely impersonal versions of the personal, have varied in quality. . . . . Her departure leaves only "the chap of/abandonment." And if nothing clever, in Ryan's earlier manner, can be said about that, something better than cleverness takes its place, a "polish and balm" in the simplicity of the poet's lines.
These remarks are all of scant bearing on Ryan's new collection. That her personal trajectory is, in Vendler's opinion, "unusual" is either obvious or irrelevant; any interesting personal trajectory is unusual, yet plenty of fine poems have emerged from dull lives (pace Wallace Stevens). That Ryan doesn't always succeed (in her rhymes or anything else) is a readily-grasped observation about humankind and, situated in nothing sturdier than Vendler's personal taste, the comment sounds simply bitchy. All artists' work varies over a decade and a half, but Vendler doesn't clarify that the variance is reflected in Ryan's new collection. And the toss-off insult about Ryan's lack of cleverness is so gratuitous as to appear mean.
But my biggest gripe pertains to Vendler's insistence on casting Ryan as an uncultivated outsider who, late in life, was embraced by the inside - a sort of Grandma Moses of poetry:
Ryan's work might be considered outside the mainstream, and she (as someone who began outside the realm of privilege) feels she ought to stand up, as a matter of principle, for "outsider art." . . . . Ryan occupies the uneasy, and frequent, rank of the self-made American writer, growing up with no "background" that could help with the rise to mastery of language, with no money to buy select education from kindergarten on, doing an ill-paid job not offering much public recognition. . . . From a life that has not been easy, she has mined nuggets that add to American poetic wealth.
This narrative of Vendler's is sheer idiocy. What can she possibly mean by calling Ryan's work outside the "mainstream"? What's the "mainstream" of poetry? Ryan's style is more accessible than that of poetry paragon, John Ashbery, and every bit as accessible as the "popular" work of Billy Collins and Mary Oliver. And in any event, isn't the point of poetry to eviscerate a "mainstream"?
Moreover, what the hell is the "uneasy, and frequent, rank of the self-made American writer"? What else is there? Writers, unlike lawyers (and I should know, I'm both), don't come out of cookie cutters. Law can be taught; writing cannot. Lawyers pass the bar and are licensed to practice; no test exists that can certify a writer's quality. A writer can attempt to fool him or herself with MFA degrees and fellowships, with creative writing professorships and publishing contracts, but all those credentials will make you a writer as much as a regime of regular colonics will protect you from mortality. All writers (and artists) are self-made. Otherwise they're hacks.
As for mining a difficult life for nuggets to contribute to the wealth of American poetry, snooze. What poet doesn't have a difficult life? Byron was born with a club foot; Coleridge had issues with opium. Hart Crane was an openly-gay alcoholic, at a time when the former was socially unacceptable. Robert Lowell was a manic-depressive. Anne Sexton: suicide. Jack Gilbert has dementia.
Does Helen Vendler have something to say? What's with all the useless, irrelevant, obvious, general statements? Is she hiding something? Or merely without anything to contribute?
If The New York Review of Books decides to send a third rate critical capacity to assess a first rate poet, the error reflects only on it. But Kay Ryan deserves better, although she knows better than to expect what she's owed. As Ryan wrote in concluding her poem, "Spiderweb": "It/isn't ever/delicate/to live."
In the last four days, I've seen Israeli videographer Yael Bartana's show, "and Europe will be stunned," at the Moderna Museet Malmö in Sweden and Anselm Kiefer's self-titled show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Between those two exhibits, I've been taken with the impression that contemporary art privileges ideas over artistic skills to its detriment.
Yael Bartana has great ideas, but from a film-making perspective much of her work looks rough and amateurish. Anselm Kiefer also has great ideas (I laughed out loud at "Martin Heidegger," a book depicting a brain partially black with rot), but neither his drawing, sculpture, composition or use of color strikes me as particularly exemplary.
I can't help thinking, having recently been in Italy, that Renaissance painters and sculptors wouldn't have countenanced this divorce of concepts from skilled execution. Of course, during the Renaissance, the ideas animating the paintings were less varied (e.g., mostly related to religion and patrons), and the importance of a human's artistic capacity was paramount: the glory of human capabilities was the point of the Renaissance.
Now, however, when photographs can render life more exactingly than a painter, and film can capture life even in movement and over time, viewing a human's artistic capacity as superfluous is tempting: why not use the technology? Similarly, now that art has been unshackled from religion and (for the most part) from private patronage, why not prize the ideas over the the execution?
The reason is that ideas without aesthetics aren't art. Art (when it's good) operates on an intellectual and visceral level simultaneously. It presents ideas that activate the mind, but it also - through aesthetics - engages the viscera. (The effectiveness with which Renaissance art accomplishes these twin
objectives contributes to its overwhelming beauty; contemporary art's
ignoring of the visceral is surely a cause of its often
numbing ugliness.)
This visceral engagement is neither fanciful nor a luxury: it is necessary. Without it, a work is not art, but argument. Without the visceral engagement, artworks communicate not intuitively, but rationally.
Moreover, much of the rational communication must be conveyed, not visually, but through verbal texts that explain the ideas undergirding the work. But explanatory texts, be they on the wall of museums, or published in exhibition catalogs, ought to be unnecessary. Works should speak for themselves.
Nonetheless, very little contemporary art speaks for itself. Without textual explanation, the circumstances of Bartana's works, "Summer Camp," and "Wild Seeds," are opaque. Kiefer takes the trouble to write words (often the title of the work) on his canvases; Louisiana provided a "Kiefer dictionary" to explain Kiefer's common references. Going to these contemporary art exhibitions requires an awful lot of reading; so much reading, in fact, that a visceral (that is to say, irrational) response is practically suppressed.
Moreover, the tone of the text is exhortatory: viewers will be questioned about . . .; viewers will confront . . . ; viewers are made to feel / think . . . . When I read what I'm supposed to be thinking and feeling, all I can think is: bullshit. The text is telling me what to think and feel because extracting that experience from the art itself is too difficult. Often, the work is too boring to hold my attention. I have to exert my will to stay and look at it. Aesthetically engaging work doesn't encounter this problem.
I am struck, as well, by the difference between contemporary visual art and literary art. While visual art seems to be losing its aesthetic capacities, literary art is refining them. In fiction and poetry, the way an idea is expressed is often more important than the idea. "Half of a Yellow Sun," Chimimanda Ngozi Adeche's novel about the Biafra war, is hampered by dull ideas; but it's well written. Kay Ryan doesn't tell me anything I didn't know in her poem, "Turtle"; but the poetry is transporting.
Good ideas presented in bad writing is only acceptable (and only unofficially so) in non-ficton (and explanatory texts for art exhibits); in the realm of fiction or poetry, scintillating ideas encased in bad writing isn't called art. It might be a guilty pleasure; it might be a commercial success; but it's not art.
I don't see anything wrong in expression of rational argument in broad varieties of media, be they films, performances or paintings. I'm not suggesting that Yael Bartana or Anselm Kiefer are unworthy of their audiences.
But humans need art as well as argument, aesthetics as well as ideas, visceral as well as cerebral engagement. The systematic preference for ideas to the detriment of aesthetics in contemporary art reflects a painful imbalance in our modern lives. While this message may correspond to reality, humankind has known eras when art was more than a cry for help.
(Image of Anselm Kiefer's statue, "Das Sonnenschiff," from White Cube)
Shakespeare's Sonnet XX confounds me. It praises a person whose gorgeous face, heart and personality - with its absence of womanly faults - captures the narrator's passion . . . though this same person's cock checks the narrator's impulse for sexual consummation of his love. Here's the poem:
A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.
I first encountered Sonnet XX at a vulnerable moment, just before bed time, and I naturally assumed that in my exhaustion, I'd lost track of some critical explanatory phrase in the poem. But an immediate reread suggested that the eyebrow-raising implications weren't a function of my readiness for slumberland. Indeed, a basic Google search revealed countless others with raised eyebrows. So provocative is Sonnet XX that Prince might have done well to set its verses to music instead of expending effort to write "Controversy."
Interestingly, more than one commentator seems to think that the poem is an admission of Shakespeare's homosexuality. Personally, I find that theory absurd. For starters, such speculation superimposes a patina of modern norms on Shakespeare's Elizabethan consciousness (e.g., that loving another man makes a man gay). We barely understand how gender and sexually are socially constructed today; to project our incomplete understanding backwards 400 years is at best arrogant and at worst idiotic.
But more importantly, Sonnet XX isn't so much homosexual as it is weird. For gay men, the love object isn't womanly; a gay male pin-up is hot because he's masculine. Sonnet XX, on the other hand, idolizes a man with a womanly appearance - or, at a minimum, an Orlando-style androgynous appearance that appeals to men and women ("Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth").
Moreover, unlike a homosexual man, the narrator of Sonnet XX is decidedly against sex with his beloved: the narrator is "defeated" by his adored's prick; it brings the narrator's purpose "to nothing." Instead, the narrator urges his beloved to make love with women, while giving his heart to the narrator.
This model of love isn't homosexual; rather, it seems to lack a modern analogy. Same-sex love affairs in modern society aren't typically sexless. Nor do we usually idolize the looks of one gender when they appear on the other; quite the opposite, especially in the case of men. From Boy George, to Michael Jackson, to Jaye Davidson (who played Dil in The Crying Game), men who look like women tend to make folks uncomfortable nowadays.
In fact, the very eagerness of modern readers to class Sonnet XX with homosexual literature reflects a variety of discomfort or insecurity with the prospect of a same-sex love relationship beyond our comprehension or experience. But while the impulse to tame the scary, irrational potentialities of sex by naming, categorizing and analyzing is a positive one, we lose the chance to recognize, explore and appreciate the breadth of human experience if we insist on incorrect classification.
Human love is vaster, more capricious and more irrepressible than Harlequin romance. And our capacities for loving in multi-faceted and bizarre ways is among our species' the most remarkable and admirable traits. As G.W. Bowerstock observes in a New York Review of Booksreview of two books exploring Greek pederasty:
The sexual life of the ancient Greeks was as variegated and inventive
as its resplendent culture. It was neither consistent nor uniform. To
this day it stubbornly resists all modern ideologies and prejudices,
and yet it had its own principles of decency. In sex, as in so much
else, the ancient Greeks were unique.
Sonnet XX tantalizes with its glimpse of a variegated and inventive sexual life, one neither consistent nor uniform, one that resists modern ideologies and prejudices, for Shakespeare and his Elizabethan brethren. We might consider to what extent their sexual openness made the Greeks and the Elizabethan not merely unique, but also great.
(Image of Tilda Swinton playing Orlando from Sally Potter's website)
Who will believe my verse in time to come, If it were fill'd with your most high deserts?
Bubbalah, you're so beautiful, nobody would ever believe it without seeing you!
Though yet, Heaven knows, it is but as a tomb Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.
Not that your gorgeousness is as anything to your intelligence and wit, so what's the point in talking about it anyway?
If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, this poet lies, Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.
I say anything even a little bit accurate about you, and Masha Finklebaum accuses me of exaggerating your merits, but what can you expect of a woman whose own daughter has been on J-Date for a decade without meeting anyone?
So should my papers, yellow'd with their age, Be scorn'd, like old men of less truth than tongue;
It's not that I mind the gossip mill at the Maazel-Tovel You're Rich Enough for Assisted Living facility in Short Hills . . .
And your true rights be term'd a poet's rage, And stretched metre of an antique song:
. . . but when Masha says there's as much truth in what I say about you as in an Isaac Babel story, it gives me tzuris.
But were some child of yours alive that time, You should live twice;-in it, and in my rhyme.
So, nu? When are you going to give me grandchildren?
To my knowledge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge never heard of climate change. Yet his brilliant, influential Rime of the Ancient Mariner - written apparently to illustrate the power of unknowable invisible forces - functions effortlessly as a warning about the suffering wrought by environmental degradation.
In Rime, the Ancient Mariner stops a man on a way to a wedding party and regales him with the story of the Ancient Mariner's last sea voyage. He describes how his ship became trapped in South Pole ice. The appearance of an albatross coincided with a fissure in the ice that permitted the helmsman to steer the ship to safety. Thereafter, the albatross followed the boat.
Then the Ancient Mariner took his crossbow and killed the albatross. This crucial event is rendered in a mere line-and-a-half, a scant seven words (one hyphenated), in the context of a verse dominated by the wedding guest's exclamations:
"God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus! - Why look'st though so?" - With my cross-bow I shot the Albatross.
No motivation for this act of violence is ever requested or offered. As Barbara Everett, writing in the London Review of Books observed, "It is still often asked why the Mariner shoots the albatross. The only answer is that Mariners did: these heroic New World discoverers killed and culled everywhere they went." As she colorfully expands, "There is a taste of rottenness, a dead albatross, underneath the history of discovery." One might add, under the history of development as well.
This example of environmental plunder - as convenient, unthinking and reckless as our current interface with the environment - generates some unpleasant consequences. Returning to England, the ship hits a dead spot in the Pacific and is stuck without a wind, "As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean." The sailors become parched for lack of water; some are afflicted with fevered dreams of a spirit "[n]ine fathom deep" that has followed them from the South Pole.
A skeleton ship emerges from the sky. This ghost ship's crew consists of Death and his female companion, Life-in-Death. They are playing dice for the lives of the men aboard the Ancient Mariner's ship. Death wins the crew; Life-in-Death gets the Ancient Mariner. The ship's crew - 200 men strong - drops dead on the deck.
Seven days elapse, during which the Ancient Mariner is stuck on the boat with 200 corpses. He finally spies some water snakes
Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware.
Because of the Ancient Mariner's connection with these "living things," his condition improves. He is able to pray and sleep and, when he awakes, rain pours onto the ship's deck, saving him from dying of thirst. Even more extraordinarily, angels embody the corpses of the 200 crew men, raising the dead and getting to work sailing the ship.
But the Ancient Mariner still belongs to Life-in-Death. He learns that, although he will be returned to his homeland, his life will not be his own. He will serve a terrible penance, which is the vengeance of the spirit "nine fathom deep"
. . . who bideth by himself In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shot him with his bow.
Were it that every endangered species had a guardian spirit to avenge its killing! We'd be in a much stronger position, biodiversity-wise, if this kind of incentive structure were in place. But it's not. Poachers and real estate developers (among others) whose actions cause the destruction of countless animals find themselves richer and unrepentant; Life-in-Death has yet to call.
Instead, we're left with the Ancient Mariner's lesson. Returning to England, the Ancient Mariner experiences periodic "agony" that compels him to recount his tale. Such agony had possessed him when he saw the wedding guest. Now he warns
He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.
The wedding guest is understandably shaken by this dark tale of the consequences of wanton environmental destruction, and he turns away from the wedding party:
A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn.
At this historic moment, with oil poisoning the Gulf of Mexico, and myriad other environmental catastrophes unfolding, an environmental reading of Rime of the Ancient Mariner is especially poignant. Given the difficulty of conveying through traditional journalistic and public information channels the consequences of climate change, perhaps Coleridge can impress upon a denying public that Life-in-Death (or Death itself) awaits environmental degraders and their cohorts.
That Coleridge was a religious man, the son of vicar, might make him especially persuasive to climate change doubters. As Everett emphasized, "Coleridge was an 'anima naturaliter Christiana', a mind born Christian, who said that the 'strongest argument' for Christianity is that it 'fits the human heart'. It fitted his, at any rate."
Nonetheless, as exegesis of Rime makes clear, Coleridge did not believe (as present-day Christians often espouse) that God made humans the caretakers of animals such that they might dispose of animals as they pleased. Coleridge's pro-environmental Christianity is a powerful refutation to arguments like, "let's wreck the planet to bring on the rapture."
I am not, of course, idealistically optimistic that the 176-years-dead Coleridge will enjoy a resurrection as an environmentalist of note. Not on the Al Gore scale, anyway; certainly Coleridge won't be winning any Nobel prizes. Whatever potential long form Romantic poetry has as an instrument to influence world-wide climate change policy, that potential is deeply buried.
"Lines Written in Early Spring" is a poem that's meant to make the reader ponder human depravity. Sitting in a grove, the poet notices
Through the primrose tufts, in that green bower, The periwinkle trailed its wreaths; And 't is my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes.
The birds around me hopped and played, Their thoughts I cannot measure: - But the least motion which they made It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
And, because the poet is "[i]n that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts/Bring sad thoughts to the mind," he concludes, on the basis of all this natural hedonism - of air-loving flowers and pleasure-hopping birds
If this belief from heaven be sent, If such be Nature's holy plan, Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man?
To which I can only reply: Will, you got it all wrong.
Like anyone living in Kenya, I am absolutely swamped by nature, and none of it is chirpy hoppy happy. The acacia trees do not give me the impression that they enjoy the air they breathe; they have long, spiky thorns that embed themselves in the soles of my Crocs and poke through to pain my feet. The maribou storks do not seem to thrill with pleasure at every motion; they're carrion birds on the look-out for something dead to eat. On safari with my mother, we saw the carcass of a camel that had been killed by a lion: it was missing a hind leg and its face was being eaten by vultures.
Well, one might sigh, what can you expect from the Romantics? The poetry is lovely, but their politics could never be taken seriously.
But the irony is that reflecting on nature can reveal some very romantic notions about humanity. What lion has done charitable deeds? What maribou stork has made a heroic sacrifice? What acacia tree has died for love?
When the Romantics argued that we should be more like nature, they misperceived nature: nature is very practical. What is romantic about human nature is precisely what distinguishes us from the rest of nature: our unique capacity to be motivated by ideas, instead of needs.
Every time we stand up for justice, strive for self-improvement or create something because it's beautiful, we're acting romantically. (So, of course, were British religious inquisitors who burned heretics at the stake, and Red Guards kicking elderly "intellectuals" in the stomach: romantics all.) And, despite the invariable excesses of this modus operandi, the highest of human achievements have resulted from acting on ideas.
That said, "what man has made of man" is nothing to be proud of. Given our potential, humans writ large are obviously more depraved than is tolerable. But if I were sitting in a grove in early spring, what I'd reflect is that it could be so much worse.
(Benjamin Robert Haydon's portrait of William Wordsworth from The Telegraph)
