Stinky treats from a poetry reading and talk about the Iraq War at the Miller Auditorium of Columbia University, NYC. Partial notes.
Robert Pinsky and several other poets were schedued to talk about War and Poetry at the Miller Theater in NYC. A long overdue colloquy, I thought, but one destined to be trite. There has been a strong strain of testy insincerity on the matter in the states for the last four years.
What is this world we share but a place for brotherly disagreement, the wreckage of sisters bickering? Much seems the same, each to each, and much will not pass person to person unsullied by an imposed trope. Two eyewitnesses to the same crime will pin a panoply of suspects; this is one of the first lessons of law school. The law is more of a mediated moment between mortals than some unstoppered god or endless good. So, too, poetry uses our bones for its sounding board. We are the medium of the message of the muse; but the mediator is not the message, he is the instrument. Let us remember that distinction as we call our witnesses to the bible and the box to vomit up their trumpeting tales.
Now, the Miller Theater is a lovely venue--about 500 seats with almost 200 attending. There was a marvelous maroon New Yorker banner hanging over the stage, with the distinctive New Yorker typeface in a marmelade yellow. On the stage, which perches about four feet up from the floor, there were six seats. One wrong, small red and black chair sat among the taller others. As in that catchy Sesame Street song, one of these chairs was not like the others, one of these chairs just didn't belong; it had a slightly different shape from the others, and no arms. Adam Gopnick, the narrartor, or moderator for the evening, made charming reference to this difference as the evening started, noting that his status was of a lower order than that granted to the exalted poets whose good company he was graced to keep on this fine evening. A podium on rollers was brought out a-la-cart, a diminutive mike thin as a lily poised above it. The whole effect was like "Firing Line," but with New Yorker sponsership.
A pair of cute French birds landed to my left--twittering impeccably their smart Parisian. I felt like asking them if they had any Paul Valery or Mallarme by heart. They informed me that Jacques Prevert and La Fontaine are their favorite French poets as I asked for a treasured bunch of their candied peanuts. I sat front-and-center (always an open seat in a gathering of poetry lovers)--but I was determined to ask no questions of our erstwhile witnesses--for either the defense or the prosecution. I'm sick of getting slapped.
To my right was the elderly Jerry Oscar, a wiseass. We got into a little chat about the New Yorker, famous last words, and Groucho Marx. Jerry mentioned the Ritz Brothers as some of the best of the old slapstick crowd, and I'm anxious to check them out, having never heard of them. Evidently, Jerry is a fan of Adam Gopnick, as are the two French ladies. I had already picked up Gopnick's book in the foyer, a memoir of living in Paris entitled "Paris to the Moon." A wonderful read, by all reports. I think I'll give it to Carrie, who can't be here this evening, and who has her own love-affair with the city of lights.
If poetry is as inherently subversive as poets perrenially proclaim, then it would be as spurned and marginalized by the very educational institutions that have co-opted the presumed virtue of its vision. Even poets, in today's tight higher-ed market must "publish or perish." Many times, this simply means "pander or perish." And this is just what our songbirds have done. Or so, at least, I was thinking as the curtain rose on our row of poets.
The Evening Proper
Pinsky was the first reader, reciting the Oxford Dictionary's definition of war aloud. And how charmingly harmonious the sounds of words meant to define the chaos of combat, the confusion of living amidst omnipresent destruction and death.
His writing shows evidence of a wide reading, traces of rapture induced by a pro. What exactly do I mean by that? That he's influenced and derivative. But that's not a bad thing, not entirely, not at all. Here is evidence of an interest sparked that will burn for a lifetime. Here is someone who reads for that aesthetic recompense only literature can offer.
The Debate About the Shield of Achillies
Vijay Seshadri brought up the Iliad first, making large mention of the shield of Achilles passage where Homer draws in small the picture of a society at war. He mentions that one of the first poets to interest him in poetry was Robert Lowell because of Lowell's involvement in war protesting during the Vietnam conflict in the 1960s. He read off a bit of the poem, pointing out that Achilles only gets re-involved in fighting on the side of the Trojans for purely personal reasons--to revenge his pal Patroclus. Vijay found the movement of this part of the Iliad heroic because of Achilles' engaged humanity. Others on the panel basically found Achilles' violent response to his friend's killing to be unheroic, a bad model to follow, and proof that Western culture nurtures a homicidal insanity in its ideas of maleness. Seshadri argued for the completeness of the picture of society put forth by the description of the shield, which the god Hephaestus hammers out with enviable skill to help Achilles win back his armor and Patroclus' body from the vengeful, victorious Hector. He splits the panel in the discussion. Persons of the present era are willing to back-date their political concerns of the hour to vilify even the greatest poetry of their own culture if it disagrees with their wonted results. It was a bit pitiable, in my opinion.
Soldier-Poet as Protester
The detestable C. K. Williams came out, trailing a few poems by Wilfred Owen. This was his ideal poet of war, disillusioned and marginalized by the big war machine. The poems are terrific, but C. K.'s points are not the poniards of a poet's inevitable line, but the slap-dash of a lawn mower whirring through swaths. He begins his analysis with the "victim knows best" nonsense of much contemporary debate, and emanating fetid puffs of conspiracy theory. He basically blames Richard Perle for the whole "Iraq mess," saying that he doesn't think that Perle has any real sense of what war is at all--only wild diagrams to send the soldiers on to their flag-draped canisters. The people who cause wars are never those who fight them. The old men are at war with the young men, and that whole line of irrefutable, because nonsensical, non-argument. The burden is on you to prove his insane assertions wrong, rather than on him to hold up his tendentious argument. Pure diatribe, fake dialectic, unsubtle lies. He came off, in his long grey suit, as ignorant and snobby at once. He spoke with the assurance of an ass.
Only the outsider has the privileged viewpoint which can make a war poem. No one actively engaged in a cause can do so. He mentions the scores of jingoistic poems being currently composed to prove his point. He also fails to quote even a single poem. That's because he's talking pure balderdash! He attended the Dodge Poetry Festival during the presidential election season, as did I. I heard not one single pro-war poem, or for that matter, even one pro-war sentiment expressed by the entire caucus during 4-5 days of intensive poetry reading and discussion. If there was any "outsider" point of view at the Dodge Poetry Festival, it would have been Donald Rumsfeld's. Why C. K. thinks a lie makes for a good argument is a question which he'll have to ask himself.
Poets may only define themselves in opposition to the establishment--whatever that establishment is. There is a radical "equality of effect" enforced with this sort of thinking. Death stinks, therefore those who inflict death stink. Therefore, there is no honor in war, in conflict that results in blood. All are condemned unequivocally. And because our government is the source of war-making in our place and time, and because the poet's voice can only legitimately define itself in opposition to the powers that be as an "outsider," criticizing the war is every poet's duty. No need to think it through or weigh the issues. Your government is a killing machine; killing is wrong; ergo, you must oppose the government. How simple! How mendacious! "One wound is the next and the next." There are no sides, no right or wrong. No causes, no allegiances worth the snap of your fingers, let alone your life. Except that, of course, you must protest your side as the more woefully powerfuller, if you care to keep your legit street creds as part of the "outsiders" club. Freedom and all that, as long as you see things just their way.
Pinsky and the Mighty Dead
The nearer we approach their condition, the wiser they appear, while at the same time we are less and less impressed by the poses they adopted in life. All a man may accomplish, or think to accomplish as the dream guides or goads, is written out perforce in the days and nights of his life; a script written in disappearing ink, perhaps, but whatever the nature of the life and its acts, the bottle is not bottomless. Habit and superstition guide the gullible or forgetful who wish to do the best the may without their own wits' willingness. Indeed, what is a formula, be it so great as E=MC squared, but a stone perpetualy dropped in the mind to remind the well of images that we contain to keep some rippling shape a moment longer than mere accident would allow?
Pinsky made mention that his ambition, as far as his remaining ink would allow, was to write for the dead. Whether his personal dead or the dead of all the world, those great stones gone into the well of the anima mundi, and repeating their circles in the dreams of all born after them, he did not say. Perhaps it does not matter, for the poet's line is reeled in only to be thrown out again into unfished stillnesses.
I thought this transformation of a man's living imagination into a trumpet to the dead, and still think it, a sign of morality in an artist. To have a goal that none can deny or effect, and that must appear continually before you as Hamlet's father on the high walk of Elsinore, gives the poet a wedge between himself and the world. Whether this distance is mere phantasm or vivid vision, none may say who share the same air as the pursuer. Only when the work of the writer is wholly absorbed into that other realm of its own death can the world judge if it had lived. And so the poet's, the pursuer's life begins to resemble the tremulous outline of a dream--where nothing touches the poet but the internal driftings of his wish, where all desire is forever objectless--for nothing exists there but the dream of desire. In this insistless mist, in this dream, as Yeats has said, begin responsibilities.
Pinsky hoped to forge what Homer said of the Shield of Achilles, "a masterpiece too terrible to behold." ust as one cannot behold life without a correspondingly intense desire to escape from life, one cannot look at beauty without an equally strong wish to escape the demands that beauty imposes. Between the rose and the rood we abide and blaspheme. The rose of the dream, soft, and forever better than ourselves, gives release to the imagination but without relief, for instantly another dream is summoned, and we march on with its banner before us as in Shelley's "Triumph of Life," where the great parade marches on leaderless into eternity. The rood of life, with its lashes and its tears, tempts us no less than the dream, but not with impossible perfection of the soul's desire, but with the equal cheat of being defeated, of failure and the rest of a permanent death, desire gone to ground, seedless among the weeds.
The Victorians were better than the Moderns. It's a little sad to know that. They were charaterized by the cultured mind at war with circumstance. The more cutured the mind, the more one sees how things ought to be, and the more one understands why they cannot be other than as they are. The result of this outrageous friction? Poetry. And a small, stalwart determination to push the Sisyphean peanut an inch higher up the hill, narrowing the horizon at the end of your beezer out of a holy obligation to work and duty. Only in the mind behind the nose, and only by a sort of alchemical poetry, does the sunrise blaze green, infantile and eternal beyond our chosen focus.
And our contemporary partizans of verse have left even the nominal dawn of "make it new" behind with the beats. Soldiers of a culture war, a rebellion of the part aginst the whole--as when Snoopy's stomache holds hostage his legs and ears--where the only acceptable victory is to aspire the be slandered as a rebel, an outsider, even if there is nothing inside the rebel worth saving. The preciousness of the pose is immeadiately viewable as transparent, but the precariousness that such poses impress on those who adopt it will-nilly and en masse remained hidden by the improbability of it ever happening. But today, to vogue, however vaguely, is considered the only genuine attitude to adopt in response to reality's paradoxes, to the challenge of self-definiton and genuine accomplishment. The stage divides the actors from the audience, but now the actors of a faking-it culture fill the seats on the "stage," while the speakers before the footlights rehearse the dialog the ancient dreams; a dream more real than they themselves even pretend to wish to be.
The After- Talk
Originally, I wasn't going to ask any questions or make any statements during the talkback segment of the evening, but the audience was so quiescent and quelled that I almost wound up going first of all. Nature, evidently, isn't the only actor that abhors a vacum. Of course, my initial instincts were right on the money, and my comments were the only ones that elicited zero response from the panel beyond bewilderment.
The previous guest had mentioned how protest songs seemed to have more impact than poetry ever could, and how it was non-rational, but effective. Pinsky fielded the response with disdain, saying basically that he wasn't interested in any kind of mass anything, but was moved by the inherent individual appeal of poetry. On her heels, I mentioned the old Thomas Mann saw about how music was "politically suspect" because it lacks semantic content and ideational context. Then I followed with a general comment-question that all the things everyone on the stage seemed to be discussing revolved around the "persistence of pattern at the edge of chaos." Beauty, form, the shapedness of poetry versus the confounded chaos of any wartime scenario had been part of every answer of the evening thus far.
PInsky had to go on with his tirade against popular culture a bit more, and against the entire idea of popularity, saying that he writes for the dead. I found that cheering, since to face your models, even hopelessly, is a sign of morality in an artist. He spoke of the blood-bond between the living and the dead, conjuring the scene from the Illiad where there is a blood sacrifice, and the dead come tip-toeing up to sip at the "bloody beaver," and so gain strength enough to chat with the living. And so, I asked if any of the panelists had read "Report to Greco" by Kazanstakis. The famous painter El Greco was one of Kazanstakis' ancestors, and during the Greek civil war, Kazanstakis returns to the graveyard and yells down the hole, which is provided for communication with the spirits of your ancestors, and waits expectantly. The whole panel as one, led by the terrible C. K. Williams said "waited for what?" not seeing the apropos nature of my story.
Overall, I was impressed with the variety and interestingness of the panelists' responses to the topics that came up. Many mention a change in poetry from a focus of the heroic warrior of the ancient world to the conflicted contestant in the 20th century when warfare had been ground down to an anonymous killing field where the side with the best lawn-mower wins. I though this had a general validity, and was descriptiove of many of the tales in poetry extant. It also made me think that the mechanization of poetry had occurred several centuries before the mechanization of warfare, and yet the essential character of poetry had not gone up the waterspout to anonymity. And then the wretched C. K. Williams pitched in about how there are no heroes anymore, nor were there ever heores in a way, they was only useless killing. Butchery was the central human activity and there was perhaps no escape from the slaughterhouse--either as victim or carver.
Pinsky thought that the basic movement from heroism by the warrior (or, in his example, of the 911 firefighters), sacrifice of the self for the group, to praise of that sacrifice by the poet was one of the basic activities of a culture--any culture. And the panel seemed to be giving up on that jo b. The poet's role is as a outsider, questioning the validity of society's reasons. And here Kate Pollet was a parochial and prescriptive as any two-bit witch doctor. She didn't berate all of past poetry, but she said the certainly, the poet shouldn't endorse killing--not ever. She went on to proclaim, despite her sensitive "different cultures" sensibility, that Emperor Augustus had gotten gypped by Vergil when he turned in The Aeneid. She sounded quite sure that Augustus had simply wanted some flat propaganda to glorify his cause in bold, bland colors. She certainly seemed to squeeze a lot of simplifications into her statement, telescoping her ideas of the inherent corruptness of power and money back almost two-thousand years into an alien culture. Her point was that poetry, if it is good poetry CANNOT by nature support war, because it will tell the terrible truth--and truth will always be that war is horrible and therefore not worth doing. This certainly doesn't give people much credit for being able to make tough decisions--to make the best of a bad hash. Or to pursue a course of action that may well include disaster and death, but feel honor-bound to the cause.
Vergil's portrait of war is bloody, horrible, and complex. So is every single depiction of war in great literature. To say, as Pollett seemed to imply, that because there are no unadulterated, glory-thumping pictures of war as a grand daisy-picking pastime that therefore no real poet can endorse war is a logical fallicy of the first order.
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In the book-signing line, there is an almost phosphorescent sense of wait. One young lady, who looks to be first up, touches her long raven hair like a bird at its bath. Se nervously eyes an author receiving kudos from a gang of friends nearby, who let her know that her new haircut "looked really great on stage." "Your hair looks really great too," I assure the girl at the front of the line. She smiles widely and shoos me to the head of the line, in front of her; she is too nervous to go first. I accept mildly and await my chosen author.
4/11/2006