Yesterday, Matthew Zapruder made some comments in his email here that are worth examining in greater depth, both for what they say and what they presume. The context you will recall was some poetry by Noah Eli Gordon that was rejected from a poetry reading being staged in opposition to the impending war on Iraq. This was not a general all-purpose rally of the sort one gets in Central Park, on the Mall in DC or marching up Market Street in San Francisco – it was a poetry reading. The people coming to it were, presumably, anticipating the presence of poetry. So when the organizers of the event rejected some poetry on the grounds of difficulty, I questioned their judgment. The poem, in point of fact, was not terribly difficult, but what if it had been? Would that have made a difference? For Zapruder, whose work as a translator I’ve noted with approval here before, it does make a difference. Thus he asks:

 

Are Ashbery's "Leaving Atocha Station," or Mina Loy, or Shakespeare's sonnets for that matter, as easily apprehendible on first reading as let's say Philip Larkin or Charles Simic? I'm not talking about the further and endless levels of complexity in a good poem, regardless of its surface. Just its surface. A poem does have a surface, doesn't it?

 

I guess it just comes down to whether or not one is willing to grant that the notion of "difficulty" has any place at all in poetry. That's an interesting discussion, and one worth having here and elsewhere. But in this particular case, right or wrong, the organizers of that reading in good faith seem to believe in that distinction, and genuinely thought that Noah's poem was too difficult to work effectively in that situation.

 

It’s the belief in that distinction I want to question. Not because I want to bludgeon this particular event into the ground, but rather because a decision predicated upon that distinction stands as a metonym for a wider range of behavior that occur in & around poetry in this society.

 

It’s a distinction that underlay a decision by one post-New American writer I know over a decade ago to not recommend Robert Grenier for the short list for a teaching position at his school, a state university. This writer not only fully understood Grenier’s reputation among his peers as a poet, but also Grenier’s reputation as an innovative, engaged teacher in the classroom. “I just cannot bring myself to deal with the backlash,” is, in essence if not in words, how he explained his decision to me at the time, “if I recommend somebody whose most important work is a box.”

 

I could replicate other examples of this same sort of decision-making all across the continent with respect to jobs, to publications, to grants, the entire gamut of what constitutes the literary life. At one level, this is a type of thinking & acting with which Whitman had to contend. Certainly the growth of bureaucratic institutions in the wake of the Second World War, as the American post-secondary education system rapidly expanded toward what it is today, gave full reign to precisely the sorts of decisions that might be made around variants of this particular distinction. The first volume of Hank Lazer’s excellent critical work, Opposing Poetries, documents this phenomenon intelligently & carefully. Jed Rasula’s American Poetry Wax Museum does likewise.

 

The distinction is not about difficulty versus simplicity – although that is one form that this question can take – nor is it about surface versus depth, nor even intelligibility versus whatever the opposite of intelligibility might be. Rather it is a distinction that has to do with expectation, the expectation of what is possible. It’s a distinction between what I – or anyone – already know and what I might now confront.

 

The school of quietude is almost entirely predicated on a pathological desire to avoid just this confrontation. Indeed, as Edgar Allen Poe observed when he first coined that phrase to describe the very same tradition that persists to this day, that is why this school is so very quiet.

 

Imagine the life experiences of a person relatively unfamiliar with poetry coming to a reading in the United States the year 2003. This person lives in a society in which the Talking Heads had a hit record singing the zaum poetry of Hugo Ball in 1977. The most surreal songs of Bob Dylan were released – and not on any indy label – some 36 years ago. Eminem crams in more social observation into any given quatrain than some Pulitzer poets have managed in their entire careers. Ditto songwriters like Townes Van Zandt or Dave Carter, to pick on a completely different musical genre, or groups like Public Enemy & NWA. And Van Zandt & Carter are both dead, and those rap groups already consigned to the remainder bins of history. Or consider, for that matter, Prince, another golden oldie who managed a career without the benefit of a word for a name for several years. The most popular motion picture of the past two years had substantial portions of dialog spoken (with subtitles) in Elvish. To pick another medium altogether, television, the audience coming to this reading will have had everything from the close attention to the spoken that is Buffy, to the narrative ambiguities – including the backwards speaking dwarf* – of Twin Peaks to the multiple layers of Max Headroom, all in the range of recent references as they gather to hear somebody read a poem. This is in 2003, 172 years after the first of Aloysius Bertrand’s prose poems. Over a century after Rimbaud & Lautréamont. Forty-seven years after Allen Ginsberg published Howl, a book so obscure that it made him a millionaire. All of the above, up to & including the Vampire Slayer, require at least as much sophistication in communication skills on the part of their various audiences as the poem submitted by Noah Eli Gordon. And when we consider the number & kinds of discourses that occur simultaneously on a single screen of CNN’s Headline News channel – let alone consider the signage visible at any instant as we walk or drive down any commercial street in America – we see that it is the surface of the univocal poem (yes, Matthew, there are surfaces)  that is the deviant experience. Whether or not we approve or disapprove is entirely another matter – but the one-dimensional surface profoundly is the exception to our experience of language, not the rule.

 

In this context, which is an ordinary context for any poetry reading in the United States, would “Leaving Atocha Station” be a complex experience? Would Mina Loy? I think the answer is patently obvious: only for readers for whom the definition of poetry has somehow become so constrained that it can only mean certain things. In fact, this does not appear to be the case for ordinary readers, those who come to the experience with no prior expectation, with no need to automatically toggle between “right” & “wrong,” easy & hard. Those readers – especially those with no poetry experience whatsoever – will associate what they hear with what they already know from other experiences of language & art in their lives. And they have plenty of adequate options. To reiterate something I’ve written on this blog more than once already, this is what underlies Kit Robinson’s claim that language poetry is difficult only for certain types of graduate students. That’s not a witty rejoinder – it’s the literal truth.

 

A few years ago, my sons, who were five at the time, got into the great puzzle books of Graeme Base, and asked me if adults had puzzle books or books that were games as well. So we read together all of Tom Philips’ A Humument and then we read the first 80 or so pages of Finnegans Wake. This morning, six years later, one of my boys asked me “What was the other name of Finnegan besides Everybody?” “Humphrey Clinker Earwicker?” I asked in reply. “Yeah, that’s it,” he said. Which is not such a bad retention level that many years later. While my kids didn’t catch all (or maybe even any) of the bawdy references in either work, neither book when read aloud can honestly be said to be too difficult for kindergartners. That doesn’t mean that the Wake necessarily works as a book – I think that Joyce’s philological approach to language led him astray – but its reputed difficulty is not a difficulty of the text itself but rather of the social context into which works such as this have been integrated – or, more accurately, marginalized – in our society.

 

Another example of how people who aren’t readers read poetry. Seven years ago, I discovered a pair of siblings I had not known that I had. Both live in the Charleston area where my half-sister works as a lay counselor in a Baptist church & my half-brother tends lawns for a living. My half-brother had one semester at Clemson when he got out of high school, but gave it up to work on shrimp boats until he started to have kids – that is the bulk of their post-secondary education. In the process of getting to know these two very sweet people, I sent them some of my books. Later, when I traveled down to Charleston to actually meet them in person, I listened as my half-brother explained my poetry to his sister as reminding him of some gardening courses he had taken & that my work seemed very much to be structured like a walk on a path: “You see one thing, then you see another.” He brought what he knew of the world to this experience that was new to him, my poetry, & was perfectly able to find frameworks that suited him just fine. This is how human beings work.

 

It’s only when you know what poetry is supposed to be and you confront something that falls outside of that framework that it starts to become genuinely hard. And that knowing what poetry “is supposed to be” is taught – it’s neither natural nor integral to the poem, but rather is superimposed over it.

 

So, yes, I will admit that there is a difference between ”Leaving Atocha Station” and the work of Philip Larkin**, but it is not a question of a difficult vs. an easy surface. Larkin wrote an impoverished poetry & Ashbery respects his readers. Larkin’s work may be apprehended on some level at a single sitting – but this is invariably a sign of deprivation. Bad TV sitcoms can be apprehended at a single sitting because there is never more than a single idea to any scene. Bad poetry is not so terribly different. But even Friends & Seinfeld have strived for more than that. I have never understood why any human being would subject others to such an information-drained experience? Why would one deliberately write a poetry of sensory deprivation?

 

The presumption underneath Zapruder’s question is that univocal, one-dimensional poetry is in some way “normal,” when in fact it is radically unlike the everyday experiences of language of any human being in this society. I won’t argue the point that there isn’t a considerable amount of such poetry around, but almost invariably univocal poetics can be traced back to structural failures in the educational system, literally funneling a segment of the population into a narrow conception of poetry that is pathologically bizarre. That the school of quietude has grown into a self-reinforcing ensemble of social institutions dedicated to the preservation of this world view is something that social psychologists of the future will no doubt have lots to say about. 

 

Historically the Left has always demonstrated considerably anxiety around all issues of culture, from the faux hillbillies of the Popular Front to John Sayle’s cinematic sermonettes. In some sense, a poetry reading against the war in Iraq, noble idea that that is, almost invites these sorts of questions. Back in 1965, I helped a little in setting up the first Vietnam Day Teach-In at the University of California in Berkeley. The chief coordinator for the entire affair was a very buttoned-down newspaper reporter from, as I recall, Cincinnati by the name of Jerry Rubin – he didn’t stay all that buttoned down for long. One of the big debates among the organizing committee for that event was whether or not to invite Michael McClure to read his poetry. Rubin opposed the idea, precisely because he feared that McClure would read from his Ghost Tantras:

 

GOOOOOOR! GOOOOOOOOOO!

GOOOOOOOOOR!

GRAHHH! GRAHH! GRAHH!

Grah goooor! Ghahh! Graaarr! Greeeeeer! Grayowhr!

Greeeeee

GRAHHRR! RAHHR! GRAHHHRR! RAHR!

RAHR! RAHHR! GRAHHHR! GAHHR! HRAHR!

BE NOT SUGAR BUT BE LOVE

looking for sugar!

GAHHHHHHHH!

ROWRR!

GROOOOOOOOOOH!

 

Some time around 1970, there was a giant reading also against the Vietnam War at Glide Church in San Francisco. All the major local figures of the New American generation were there. The m.c. for the evening, or at least for the latter part of it, was Denise Levertov. Unfortunately for her, one of the people in the overwhelmingly packed auditorium dressed in a giant pink terrycloth penis costume, as he had done at numerous demonstrations around the Bay Area, earning the rubric The People’s Prick. As I recall, the room got so crowded – it was way over the fire code allotment – that Levertov sought to alleviate the problem by having members of the audience come and sit on the stage. The problem was, The People’s Prick was among those who got up on stage & the nature of the costume was such that he couldn’t sit down. He tried to stand quietly at the back of the stage, but Levertov was having none of it. If cooler heads had not prevailed, the event would have broken down into chaos.

 

These conceptions of what events like this should be have bedeviled them forever. In some sense, the organizers of this reading were only acting as links in a larger chain of fear that they share across time with Jerry Rubin & Denise Levertov. For his part, Noah Eli Gordon, like McClure & the People’s Prick before him, with his poem that read aloud slowly lasts less than two minutes, got to play the role of the barbarian at the gate, the promise or threat of a little polysemy into a world that is sworn to avoid it.

 

But Jerry Rubin, you will note, changed his mind. Within three years of putting the kibosh on McClure’s participation in the teach-in, he would show up at the New York Stock Exchange wearing only an American flag &, in Chicago, nominate a pig for the presidency, an act that helped ignite the largest police riot in decades. Perhaps Rubin noted that what got noticed – nation-wide as it turned out – from the initial Teach-In was when Norman Mailer uttered the phrase “Hot Damn! Vietnam!” and got the radio broadcast of the event over Pacifica radio instantly pulled off the air.

 

I’m not necessarily an advocate of Rubin’s politics, fun though they might have been. But it seems apparent to me that the issue of complexity is a spectre that is going to haunt poetry forever. The reason the anti-war poems of the school of quietude, well intended as they were, had so little impact in the 1960s was because, regardless of what they said about the war, the form of their work argued (sometimes, if it was well written, forcefully) precisely for all the institutions of order as they apply to language & meaning. Sam Hamill’s sad little chapbook is merely the repetition of that history, this time as farce.

 

 

 

* Not literally backwards speaking. His role was recorded with him reading his words backwards – sdrawkcab sdrow -- & the tape was then reversed so that it sounded “frontwards,” but as if spoken from Mars.

 

** There is considerably more going on in any poem by Charles Simic, so I don’t want to extend this argument to him. I have some fondness for the soft surrealists of the 1960s: Simic, James Tate, Bill Knott. There’s more to their poetry than some of their fans seem to get.