Immediately, some problems come to mind. First, the question, by itself, is devoid of a context. So, as I think about it, I would like first to provide the two contexts in which I see this as something valuable to consider. Any good analysis, I think, relies on creating these divisions and subdivisions that allow you to attempt to isolate things as a means of seeing them clearly. There's a real joy in a systematic analysis of that sort. I remember the line from Jorie Graham's poem, "Vertigo," where her speaker, watching birds in an updraft (oversimplification, much?) observes their flapping and the feathers of their wings: "Parts, she thought, free parts, watching the laws/ at work." That's as good a description of what I think I'm getting at as one is liable to find, anywhere. Another touchstone might be Fredric Jameson's system for reading, as he outlines it in the introduction to The Political Unconscious, where one "approaches" a text three times, each time with a specific goal, each goal folded into the next. In both of those metaphors, one gets the sense that a reading is something "built" of the pieces of the text, and that's seemed reasonable to me.
The problem with my question, then, as it stands, is that from our distance we're unsure of the "parts," and want, through the parts, to glean the laws. I'll pose the question again: How should we read? What's important to notice is the problematic invocation of a "we" (readership? people? citizens of the United States? The four or five poetry enthusiasts who are left?) and the uncritical deployment of what's become, I think, a rather weighted term, "read." Read what, after all, and why? So, in the first paragraph of this post, in my anecdote about my new friends at Squaw Valley, I think I'm asking you to consider how any one of us might have "read" any other of us. The superficial readings that might have kept us apart in a regular social context, wasn't good enough once we were in a position where close attention to all of the other people, and to their writing, tastes and ideas, was necessary. That's one sort of reading I want to consider, what's generally thought of as critical reading. The other sort is specific to poetry or the literary arts, and it's a question about the physical process of reading aloud, reading to an audience, reading to be heard.
I'll start with critical reading.
Being on the west coast is odd for me, because of the geniality and general kindness of people to each other. There's a sense of an accepted heterogeneity, a supposed and celebrated heterogeneity that I don't recall on the east coast. I've spoken to a few people here about how much more serious east coast poetry seems to me than west coast poetry. The geographic framework I've fitted around contemporary poetry isn't absolute, I'm sure, and probably has more to do with my ignorance about the various poetic communities in each part of the United States than it does with any real difference. But, it's impressed itself in my mind, anyhow, and is as good a way as any to illustrate the type of differences in criticism and appreciation I want to discuss, here. I guess what I want to say is that there are two different approaches an individual can take (and in truth, probably the best approach lies somewhere between these poles) when approaching a piece of literary or visual art.
Lately, as art has seemed to wain in its powers to compel, the calls for an active and critical response have become more lively, more harried and frustrated. In the New York Times, for example, critic Dwight Garner stresses:
What we need more of, now that newspaper book sections are shrinking and vanishing like glaciers, are excellent and authoritative and punishing critics — perceptive enough to single out the voices that matter for legitimate praise, abusive enough to remind us that not everyone gets, or deserves, a gold star.
Our reaction to our diminished cultural status, he suggests, should be, perhaps, to shout louder, be angrier and more "punishing." It's an interesting idea. One that finds its visual-arts counterpart in another article I read recently, by an art critic named Simon Critchley. He makes much the same case for the visual arts, and their field of critics. He worries:
I am middle-aged enough to remember when literature, especially the novel, played this role and when cultural gatekeepers were literary critics, or social critics, often from literary backgrounds. That world is gone. The novel has become a quaint, emotively life-changing, and utterly marginal phenomenon. The heroic critics of the past are no more.
Here, we have a critic in one field echoing the complaint of a critic in another field, and extending that complaint to the visual arts. Note, though, that both identify a diminished role, not for a critic, exactly, but for the cultural products available for criticism. Books are dying, "vanishing like glaciers," and though, in the past, "cultural gatekeepers were literary critics," now, "That world is gone."Visual and performance art doesn't fare much better, and Critchely explains that that "Contemporary art has become a high-end, global culture mall, which requires very little previous literacy and where the routine flatness of the gossip allows you to get up to speed very quickly." Dire indeed. Critchely goes on to explain what he thinks the proper aesthetic response to this diminished status is:
Here is my modest proposal: beyond endless video montages and the cold mannerist obsessionality of the taste for appropriation and reenactment that has become hegemonic in the art world, the heart of any artistic response to the present should perhaps be the cultivation of the monstrous and its concomitant affect, namely disgust.
And, suggests what an appropriate critical response might be, saying that, "we should become the enemies of art in order to reclaim it." Art must respond to its diminished capacity to incite a response by becoming its own enemy, and we need "authoritative" (authoritarian?) and "punishing" critics, at the same time, working to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.(p. 83)What I like about this quote is that it navigates well our situation as readers. To my mind, there is a lot of junk out there. I don't like hearing about the latest craze to find out that it was intended for children, or young adults, or that, by most accounts, the writing is terrible -- not terrible as in somehow "lowbrow," but terrible in that it isn't satisfactorily edited. There are errors, the sentence construction is poor, etc. So, while acknowledging the blandness of the available and the popular art, (you'll note that I tend to collapse literary and visual art into one undifferentiated cultural sludge) Auden is clear to ward off criticism that might promote itself by panning those poorly written products. Rather than getting more belligerent, getting louder and more frustrated, perhaps our job is to extol those rare actually praiseworthy products of authorial imagination we might stumble upon in a used bookstore, or have suggested to us by a smarter, more well-read friend. In his Poetry and the Age, Randell Jarrell provides one likely model, when he warns critics that they, "... can never be more than the staircase to the monument, the guide to the gallery, the telescope through which the children see the stars. (pg. 94)" At Squaw Valley, I encountered perhaps the best example of this attitude towards criticism, picking up a book called Orange Alert, by the poet, critic, and teacher Kazim Ali. I'll say here that his was the work that most confounded me, and that most challenges me when I read it. Hearing him speak on his work, and on his philosophy towards writing and thinking about poetry was gratifying. He's kind and strikingly intelligent. In Orange Alert, essays about poetry, about architecture, about dance and -- an important term for him -- silence, intertwine seamlessly with seething, passionate essays about his experiences as a Muslim, as a racial and sexual minority in an increasingly xenophobic, homophobic United States, post-9/11.
The capstone essay in this collection, for me, is the one titled "Ersatz Everything," probably because it represents the point in the text where all of the pieces he'd been constellating throughout -- politics, poetry, imperialism, silence, architecture -- are suddenly activated, as if a circuit has been completed, and the whole work really comes alive. What I want to note, though, for my purposes here, is Ali's giving nature as a reader, and his concessions to the complexity of art. Discussing a collection of interviews with the poet Mahmoud Darwish that isn't available in English, he talks about reading something an individual can't understand, stating:
Words like blank spaces I do not yet understand, grammatical constructions I have not yet learned, yet I read anyhow, reading the gaps and the words alternating like music. The sense of it, its emotional tone, its notions of alterity and alienation, I understand perfectly. (pg. 153)What's exciting to me, here, is the acknowledgement of a tension between things understood, and things not understood. I've got to say, on my own behalf, that I'm often so anxious about how intelligent or unintelligent I might be, that it's difficult for me to imagine acknowledging comfortably that I just don't get something. Though, I often don't get things, and I'm not sure I'll ever understand some things. So, Ali's work here seems to me to get beyond a notion of the critic as a mapmaker or tour guide for a text. Instead, he asks us, perhaps he invites us, to stand in admiration of a text that is a puzzle to him, and might likewise puzzle us.
I was really young when I first read William Burrough's Naked Lunch. I read it knowing nothing about the author, nothing about his motivations or approaches. I didn't understand a word I read. Instead I puzzled through the text, riding a rhythm, a diction, I'd never encountered before. I still don't know if there's a way "into" that book for me, I haven't reread it yet. But, I had amazingly vivid dreams when I read it. What excites me about literature, and particularly poetry, is how it can actually change you. Not in some metaphorical, hyperbolic way, but in real ways, in physical and psychological ways. I think that when Ali is writing, here, about reading "gaps and words alternating like music," he's inviting us to re-imagine the uses and reasons we might have for reading.
What Ali is seeking, I think, is the type of sincerity that Louise Gluck smartly interrogates in her Proofs and Theories. Gluck sees in attempts at sincerity a sort of meta-intentional failure to be properly sincere. What matters is the appearance of sincerity. That's a concern that isn't without it's precedent. The "Confessional" poet Robert Lowell worked hard on two fronts: first, crafting poems that seemed about him, in which the speaker stood in a one to one ratio with the poet, and secondly, in convincing people that creating those poems was craft, that the "realness" he was working with was an effect he attempted to achieve and achieved. It may in reaction to something like that, that Gluck writes in her essay "Against Sincerity":
Our present addiction to sincerity grows out of a preference for abandon, for the subjective "I" whose impassioned partiality carries the implication of flaw, whose speech sounds individual and human and falible.(pg 41)This knot is becoming a little too complicated: it seems that the concern is that the "reality effect" of a poem is fake, and therefore, somehow at a remove from the actual real. So, where, then, should reality in writing be found? We could pursue that particular back-and-forth Ad Absurdum.
Another practitioner of Ali's sort of affirmative criticism is another one of the poets I worked with at Squaw Valley, Robert Hass. I've been reading his new collection of essays, What Light Can Do, and am, as per the usual, absolutely stunned by the scope and intelligence of his work. One moment of his trademark kindness stood out to me, and I want to reproduce it here. Hass wrote an essay about poets, usually international poets, who have been, or are, confined to prison due to their work. In his listing, he says:
I know a Cuban poet who was in prison for seven years and was released on several conditions, including his refraining from reading his poems in public. He immediately read his poems in public and went back to jail for, I think, five more years. His poems, I am sorry to say, are terrible... His story belongs to the history of courage rather than to the history of literature. (pg 370)This moment in the essay gave me pause when I read it, and in pausing and considering, I found a sort of joy rising in me. I think that what I've found is that Hass has created a rhetorical framework that changes what would be a heartbreakingly sad and ironic assessment of the Cuban poet's work into, instead, an affirmation of the ties that bind poetry, reading, politics and the world. A veritable industry has come up around criticizing and dismissing history as the field of writing produced by dictators, imperialists and other powerful manipulators of human events. So, to see Hass in one turn of phrase rescue a failed poet from his own imperfect work as a poet, and supplant that individual into a register where it isn't his work, but the conditions under which he works that deserve our attention and admiration. That there might be a place for a history of courage, that is both outside of literary canonization and in opposition to history (a story like that of this poet would be suppressed by any "brand"-conscious dictatorship) as the "victors" would write it is as affirmative and as hopeful an assertion as I think I've ever seen made in an essay about poetry.
That the poet in the anecdote puts himself at risk of physical harm, and endures the incarceration and hiding away of his speaking, reading, body might be as good a segue as any to my next subject: reading as a physical act performed by a body. I'll pick that up when I write again.
No comments:
Post a Comment