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[Nothing new today... thought I'd post my comment to Jack Kimball on the main part of the blog since I spent more than five minutes writing it. Look at Jack's original post on his blog if you want to see what I'm replying to. I promise to have something original to say or change the subject in the new week!]
Hi Jack,
Not sure what to say here except you make the poem sound *more*, not less, interesting to me -- was this intentional?
Practically everything I've posted on my blog has some element of the the "grotesque" (Renee French and Werner Herzog, for example) and even "drag" (Kiki & Herb, bits in Denton Welch) about it. These must be among my minor vices, but they are aesthetic strategies (if that doesn't sound too sterile and high-minded) that I care for. (Madame Sosostris is, of course, Wyndham Lewis in drag.)
I'm really not on a mission to make anybody like this poem, certainly not! But I'm amazed at how much ire it's managed to create among those who purport to *dislike* it -- has there been any single poem published by "us" in the last 20 years to so inspire such disgust? And do I need Charles Altieri to tell me when a poem is "dead"?
(The effect of symbolic castration of your last paragraph, heightened by image of three epitaph-wielding men in a triumphant circle bounding, like Matisse cut-outs, around the corpse, is itself rather "grotesque" to me -- is this the way academics have fun?)
I can think of a few books -- Harryette Mullen's Muse and Drudge, Kenny Goldsmith's work, Christian Bok's Eunoia, etc. -- and last but not least Jennifer Moxley's two books -- that always bring out strong opinions, but I can't think of a single *poem* that's done this.
In any case, your approach here is to me very interesting, much more than the approach that takes discernment of "lineage" (not to mention plays of reference and polysemeity) as the main object of critical study.
I must say, though, I also see an anxiety, not so much here but perhaps elsewhere in this discussion, to separate us from the "squares", that is similar to that shown in David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde, which had its enjoyable moments, but certainly one can see the irony of having such a *square* as Lehman himself trying to convince us that O'Hara was hip because he laughed at the earnestness of Lionel Trilling and crew. (This whole debate seems pretty "square" to me, actually, but square is, I hear, the new hip.)
Yes, I love O'Hara too, and his words about anything echo with me always -- especially about poems being "good for you" and "force feeding" causing "effete" -- but the irony here is that "we" -- this is perhaps the crux of my "lineage" critique" -- are so concerned with poems as PEDAGOGICAL TOOLS that paradoxes such as the presence of the "grotesque" and "hilarity" in the midst of a highly structured poem by a "square" are not recognized anymore.
I don't think of poems as pedagogical tools, and to say they are poison, and words are a virus (to echo William Burroughs), is something like a step in the right direction.
I don't believe anything I read in a poem -- in a way, the poet is more like a movie director, even if we are looking at an "I" -- the actor will always be imperfect and bring in whatever accidental features of his or her personality and physicality into a performance. We might imagine Kinski is to Herzog as Hopkins is to Lowell (regarding the tub-thumping of the rhymes that you mention disliking in your longer post on the blog.) These prisms can be interesting, and seem to me rarely absent.
(This is not "lineage" -- one doesn't look at Kinski's performance in Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars more as a hunchback reprobate to help determine whether Aguirre: Wrath of God is any good.)
It is always a perverse, but hopefully engaging, reflection of an author's "intentions" and "personality" -- the critical line avowed by Eliot, of course, thought the latter worth getting rid of entirely.
Posted by Brian Stefans at July 14, 2003 10:22 AM | TrackBackBrian,
Just a few minutes to get back to you.
I agree with you, poems, good poems, are poison, and I too don't believe anything I read in them. (I don't believe much of anything I read in blogs, either.)
Just to comment on that final paragraph of mine, I called up Altieri et al. as a tracery of the conflicting but positive and pointedly pedagogic bombast projected onto the Skunk. When someone like Axelrod sums up RL's poem as exemplary of a "confrontation with death," Axelrod says this soberly and, I feel, triumphantly, capping his heap of praise for RL's victory. Ditto, more or less, with Breslin's diagnosis of "cultural breakdown" Breslin wants to congratulate RL for telling it like it is or something. Altieri's suck-ass "emblem of secular communion" needs no further gloss, yes?
My lead-in phrasing, "The poem has been nicely laid to rest
" is too short-hand for the point I had for the paragraph. That Skunk attracts the morality-based critical discourse sampled above reflects RL's writing strategies and RL's hold on the consumers of same ('square' critics, say; square profs; and half-cool, maybe, high-school teachers in accelerated English classes). Again, like you, I detest the use of poetry as object-lessoning. Skunk, tho, is an odd piece to recoup when your aim is to argue against poetry as a pedagogical tool. Finally, hyper-aesthetic, grotesque, or even creepy as it may be, I hate but also admire Skunk for the reasons I previously sketched the drag queen detailing, the situationist humor, the stink of skunks and soured cream.