Tag Archives: poems

Chiasson on Pinsky: Meeting Poetry with More Poetry

Reviews of poets and poetry can often be tedious: the poet is sometimes trampled by the reviewer’s exegesis and analysis; sometimes we wish merely to be pointed toward the poem. But sometimes the reviewer can, in his responses, show his own poetic instinct. In his review of Robert Pinsky‘s Selected Poems (New York Review of Books, January 12 2012, Volume LIX, Number 1), Dan Chiasson pulls off this rather neat trick. He writes sympathetically on Pinsky, and in his responses finds a poetic register of his own.

In writing on Pinsky’s “The Green Piano” which includes the line “Ivory and umber, so you stood half done, a throbbing mistreated noble”, Chiasson responds:

This thing is doomed, a sacrificial beast; but also poignant, precisely because it is so cruelly and excessively disembodied. Its body gets budged, bonged, dinged, cracked, swabbed, antiqued, painted green, painted pink, and finally junked. It then goes out of existence, until Pinsky writes a poem named for it, that replaces it, the “iron and brass, ten kinds of hardwood and felt” reconstituted by, and therefore trumped by, language. You can memorize “The Green Piano”; to carry the green piano with you would be a much more cumbersome proposition.

Then, writing of Pinsky’s “Rhyme”, whichconcludes with the stanza:

In a room, a rhyme, a song.
In the box, in books: each element
An instrument, the body
Still straining to parrot
The spirit, a being of air.

Chiasson responds:

 The crucial moment here is when the word “parrot” becomes a verb; by “parroting” we become stuffed parrots, taxidermy versions of ourselves, suspended forever in the art we leave behind. It’s a brilliant trick, used to deliver the news, both good and bad, that our artifacts…outlast us. New, future souls, assemble inside them.

Later, Chiasson continues, in speaking more generally of Pinsky’s work:

The vision of poetry as a cross-temporal congregation of souls is something Pinsky wants his poems to represent, rather than just imply. It is not easy in poetry–a medium that favors compression and symbolic substitution–to devise a style that honors the actuality of individual persons while also suggesting their cosmic inconsequence, as well as one’s own. This problem impels all of Pinsky’s writing; his imagination toggles constantly between panorama and detail, big picture and individual pixel. Both scales have a moral justification; both imply one sort of truth; but neither one is in itself a complete assessment of human reality and the one tends to negate the other.

Chiasson’s essay is a good example of how to find the right sort of pitch in responding critically to a poem; show us the poems; let us read them; and make your responses poetic as well. Stay away from theory; if it is the power of language that is to be gloried in, then do so not by burying it in stultifying, exegetical indulgences, but rather, by providing, in the critical response. ever more examples of poetic skill and facility. In his essay, Chiasson comes close to seizing on a truth we often feel but rarely articulate: we  approach the poetic heart only by the poem.

Lorin Stein on Ben Lerner’s Adam: An Aspiring Poet’s Worries

In reviewing Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station (“The White Machine of Life”, New York Review of Books, December 8 2011, Vol 58, Number 19), Lorin Stein notes that Adam, the novel’s central character, is “a poet who doesn’t have much feeling for poetry, for art in general.” And this poet is confronted a by profound and–for him, crucial–worry: that he was “incapable of having a profound experience of art” and as such,

I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and could register no change. Although I claimed to be a poet…I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professor had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.

My interest in this excerpt is not so much in the conclusion of our budding poet’s anxiety-ridden thought, but in its initial prompt: that he might be blocked from a particular sort of relationship with art, evidence for which, as the excerpt shows, lies in his being incapable of constructing his own personal relationship with poetry, and finding himself reliant instead on having expert guides do all the heavy lifting.

Adam’s worry, of course, only seems peculiar because he aspires to be a poet; it is a common enough source of angst. Reading poems requires the ability to move past its bare surface, past the barriers of sometimes sparse and spare description, a challenge that can sometimes defeat even those with an acute poetic sensibility; we cannot keep our poetry receptors switched on at all times, and on those occasions, we stare blankly at verse, wondering why this seemingly banal, opaquely phrased assemblage of words, lines and paragraphs has evoked so much literary and philosophical exegesis and reflection. At those moments we can experience the kind of panic that is Adam’s constant companion: Have I been condemned to exclusion from the sphere of aesthetic appreciation, from the ranks of those for whom art can function as passage to the sublime? Will I spend this life with my nose pressed up against the glass panes, looking on enviously at those who do not suffer so? And it is then that we entertain the unkind, yet self-validating and reassuring, doubt that racks Adam: perhaps it’s all a giant sham, merely the latest instance of the Cosmos’ New Clothes.

The antidote for this anxiety can be, as in the case of Adam, a gentle guidance, some hand-holding and accompaniment. Some of us will never move beyond this stage. Others will find that perhaps the ‘secret’ of experiencing poetry is that we must continue ‘reading’ even when not confronted by the written word, that our task of having a ‘poetic experience’ extends to our experience of the world, the source of the poet’s imagination. In the enrichment of that lies perhaps our best chances of enriching our relationship with the poem and the poet.

Milton’s Satan, Heaven and Hell, And The Mind

A few posts ago, in writing about the detritus that can be found on professor’s office doors, I had recounted a little self-indulgent story about first finding Cavafy’s The City. Today, I want to point you to another ‘found’ poem–more accurately, a fragment–located, not on an office door but rather, in a budding poet’s workspace. My discovery and reading of the fragment were notable because a) to date, it remains my central point of contact with its larger whole; b) because I ascribed a meaning to the fragment without reading the poem itself, and c) because my imagined narrator turned out to be very different from the one who actually speaks the line.

Circa 1995, as I slogged through my coursework at the CUNY Graduate Center, I found myself drawn, through a variety of circumstances, into a circle of ‘friends’–the quotemarks are an attempt to indicate the ambiguity of the relationship–that included a young graduate of a writing program at Emerson College, who lived, as befitted those New Yorkers that aspired to a Bohemian life, in a shared loft space in Brooklyn. I think it was Williamsburg, but it might well have been Bushwick. My memory fails me and not just because it was a long time ago: I was almost always inebriated when I visited that ‘space.’

One night, while stumbling around our poet’s loft in the midst of yet another episode of beer-drinking, I noticed a line from John Milton‘s Paradise Lost, printed out on a piece of paper and stuck above a desk. It read–as I remembered it, and quoted it for years:

What Matter Heaven or Hell, If I Remain the Same?

That line as I read it, and cited it, had a simple moralizing function. I used it to argue against escapism, and for the need for self-reconfiguration in psychological crisis; it made subjectivity central to any project of change, whether external or internal. I had not read Paradise Lost (confession: I have still not read it in its entirety), and knew little of this line’s location in its narrative and thus, remained oblivious of the identity of its narrator.

The actual line is a little different:

A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven
What matter where, if I be still the same

And these lines, of course, are spoken by the ‘fallen Archangel,’ Satan himself. And for him, they become part of the defenses he erects to protect himself against the Fall and the loss of Heaven: the displacement is permanent, but so long as his spirit and his consciousness are as ever before, all is not lost. They are an assertion of what persists, endures, survives, and is the key to flourishing in the midst of such terrible loss. I had used the line to indicate the locus of desired change; Milton has Satan employ it to indicate his resilience and fortitude in the face of adversity.

In doing so, in making Satan proclaim his ability to traverse Heaven and Hell with equal facility, to employ his mind to transcend the particularity of both, Milton made Satan almost heroic.

Things You Could Find On A Professor’s Office Door: Cavafy’s City

Professors put the darndest things on their office doors: I’ll-be-back-in-five-minutes notices, announcements of conferences, descriptions of new classes, suitably anonymized student grades, political posters, stickers. And then it gets wierd: vacation photos, children’s drawings, cartoons (a perennial faculty favorite in New York appears to be New Yorker cartoons), and of course, jokes culled from the ‘Net.

I’ve been looking at faculty doors for too long now: first as graduate student, then as post-doc, and now, as faculty member myself. My door in my new office in the Philosophy department is relatively pristine compared to the messy, overworked shambles of my last office door, which included everything detailed on the list above other than vacation photos. My new office door showcases two pieces of self-promotion: a flyer for my 2007 book Decoding Liberation, and a flyer for a book-release event for A Legal Theory of Autonomous Artificial Agents. (Note how mention of self-promotion works as a piece of self-promotion itself; it is only the rare talent that can artfully exploit modesty for aggrandizement).

The occasional gem that turns up on an office door can make this sort of stand-outside-someone’s-office voyeurism worthwhile. For me, that moment came some fifteen years ago, when I was embroiled in coursework for my doctorate, and found myself taking classes at New York University (through the New York City Consortium; my doctorate was based at the CUNY Graduate Center). I spent most of my time at the Bobst and Courant Institute Libraries, cut off from my cohort at CUNY, and afflicted by those most common of graduate student afflictions: loneliness, boredom, disenchantment, and anxiety. Being stuck in a rut seemed like a rather mild description of my waking hours.

One rather aimless, if typical, night, I wandered through the corridors of the Courant Institute, seeking distraction and relief. By reading the billboards of office doors, of course; in the days before a full-blown ‘Net provide instantaneous escape, reading was quite a common method of procastination. On one door, I spotted the following:

The City

You said, “I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, better than this.
Every effort of mine is condemned by fate;
and my heart is — like a corpse — buried.
How long in this wasteland will my mind remain.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see the black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years, and ruined and wasted.”

New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
in these same houses you will grow gray.
Always you will arrive in this city. To another land — do not hope –
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have ruined your life here
in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1910)

I don’t think anything I’ve ever put up on my office door (yet) has been as instructive as that poem was for that graduate student that night (it was the first I had heard of Cavafy). But it is something to aspire to when I find myself standing in front of the blank canvas of my office door, seeking something that will simultaneously entertain and edify. (And occasionally self-aggrandize.)