Sunday, March 9, 2008

Robert Duncan and Me

I have always had a fondness for verbal extravagance in poetry, for rhetorical splendor and a fine excess. One should be suspicious of such excess to a certain extent (Eliot wrote that a poet should always be suspicious of language), lest it descend into mere self-indulgence. But ours is, in French novelist Nathalie Sarraute’s phrase, an age of suspicion, in which intensity of feeling and expression is an embarrassment, at best an admission of lack of discipline and self-control, at worst an invalidation of whatever one may have to say. “You’re being so emotional,” people say, as if to feel strongly cancels out the worth of one’s thoughts, arguments, or positions.

As Lani Guinier, Clinton’s failed nominee for attorney general, said in a 1994 interview in the magazine Vibe, “if you show too much emotion of whatever kind, that then defines you forever, and you don’t have the opportunity to present yourself in any nuanced or multifaceted way.” It sometimes seems that to express emotion, let alone passion, is to be marked as de trop by definition. Emotion is only allowed vicarious (and stereotyped) emotional expression by means of music, movies, and television, which offer up reified, commodified (and sterilized) versions of feeling. As Roland Barthes, as quoted in the Financial Times, of all places, once said, “What the public wants is not passion but the appearance of passion.”

Robert Duncan is a passionate poet and a poet of passion, verbal, emotional, and intellectual. His work is sometimes dismissed as sentimental. Critic M.L. Rosenthal so dismissed the opening lines of “A Sequence of Poems for H.D.’s 73rd Birthday,” from Roots and Branches [Rosenthal mis-cites the poem’s title], in his 1967 book The New Poets:

The young Japanese son was in love with a servant boy.
To be in love! Dont you remember how the whole world is governed
by a fact that embraces
everything that happens?

The passage goes in this vein for several more lines, concluding with “And youth in love with youth!” before veering off in a more mystical direction. Rosenthal’s discussion, in which “I will not say that such a passage is an imposition on the heterosexual reader” (as if homosexual readers have not been imposed upon for centuries), and in which he denigrates the passage’s emotional exuberance as a “girlish outcry,” has more than a whiff of homophobia—the expression of homosexual passion or desire is by definition “too much,” “excessive.” Rosenthal is more approving when Duncan writes of the pain and shame of homosexual desire, as in “Sonnet 1”:

Now there is a Love of which Dante does not speak unkindly,
Tho it grieves his heart to think upon men
who lust after men and run.

Sometimes Duncan’s poetry is sentimental. That is to say, sometimes the excess feels gross rather than fine, willful rather than felt, like a performance. As Wallace Stevens noted, sentimentality is not a surplus of feeling but a failure of feeling. But that is not Duncan at his best.

I am impressed by the unabashed and unembarrassed lyrical and emotional exuberance of Duncan’s poetry, the utter absence of irony or defensive self-consciousness. Not that Duncan is unself-consciousness (far from it), but self-awareness is not used as a shield or a weapon. As poet Brian Teare writes in his essay “A Drama of Truth”, “it’s Duncan’s lack of irony about his vocation, as well as [about] the possibilities and functions of both imagination and language, that makes him most vulnerable to our postmodern distrust.” On his web log, The Rest Is Noise, music critic Alex Ross writes in similar terms about Italian opera composer Giacomo Puccini that, “despite his popularity, [Puccini] creates discomfort in this hyper-stylized, ironic age, because he deals in direct emotion, [and] avoids ideology and moralism.”

Long ago an undergraduate poetry professor told us not to let irony become a pet, which too many poets these days have done: that is, when they haven’t in fact become irony’s pets. Irony is too often used as an evasion, a way to disclaim responsibility for one’s statements and one’s feelings, or even for pretending one doesn’t have feelings, which can be so disruptive, even disturbing, so messy and uncool. As Louise Glück has written from a more generous-minded viewpoint, “Too often distaste for sentiment, anxiety at the limitations of the self, create contempt for feeling, as though feeling were what was left over after the great work of the mind was finished” (“Foreword” to Frail-Craft by Jessica Fisher, xv).

While Eliot wrote that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,” he also pointed out that “only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, 43). Too many younger American poets want not just to escape from emotions but to have none. Flippancy and sarcasm can be a way of dealing with emotional pain, of distancing it and making it easier to handle, in the way that one dons protective gear to handle volatile materials. They’re very popular in American poetry today. But there are more challenging and interesting ways to engage emotion while avoiding sentimentality. Being cool doesn’t leave much room for depth or exploration, for risk or for surprising oneself. As Marianne Moore writes in her essay “Idiosyncrasy and Technique,” “We are suffering from too much sarcasm, I feel. Any touch of unfeigned gusto in our smart press is accompanied by an arch word implying, ‘Now to me, of course, this is a bit asinine.’... Blessed is the man who does not sit in the seat of the scoffer.” Irony and sarcasm aren’t the same thing, though they’re often confused. Irony always takes what it addresses seriously.

In Duncan’s poetry, one affected not so much by the feeling per se (anyone can feel, or almost anyone), but by the willingness to be seen to feel, the open performance of feeling (the poem, after all, is not a person—it feels nothing, though at its best it embodies and enacts emotion and thought and their interactions), a feeling that may appear excessive or inappropriate from a less sympathetic point of view. But Duncan, at his best, makes his excesses artful, his inappropriateness movingly defiant rather than embarrassing, as it so easily could be.

When I wrote “You, Therefore,” which I reproduce below, and which is included in my book Fata Morgana, I was reading a great deal of early Duncan, specifically The Years as Catches: First Poems (1939-1946), published in 1966 by Oyez and now out of print, and The First Decade: Selected Poems 1940-1950, published by Fulcrum Press in 1968 and now also out of print. Duncan always remains open to the immediacy of the moment of composition—“I sought to liberate in language natural powers of the poem itself…in the excitement of the music, I was transported beyond the model into the presence of the poetic intention itself”—even if that transport sometimes leads him astray, into what could be considered poetic error: “It is all wrong my intelligence protests, but it is a commanding confession of my true state.”

The “crisis of truth and permission” of which Duncan writes is one with which I have struggled all my life as a writer, though I have usually taken care (perhaps too much care) not to let permission permit error. But nonetheless, reading these early poems of Duncan’s gave me a permission, allowed me (in poet John Gallaher’s phrase) to write “You, Therefore,” a more open, less careful, and less guarded poem than I usually allowed myself:

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.

That, and the security of a real-life interlocutor to my words, the knowledge that I was no longer speaking to and into an absence, or at best a phantom presence I had myself to conjure up. I was no longer writing simulacra of feelings I imagined having about men I’d never met or men who never existed, mourning lost loves I’d never had. This real presence provides the possibility of the poetic projection of male homoeroticism as a mode of transcendence and even salvation in the company of a beloved other rather than of abjection and self-abnegation before unattainable figures of a real but too highly figured, and always blocked, desire.


You, Therefore

For Robert Philen


You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
when there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

You've put forward, as usual, a rich and thoughtful meditation. I'm not sure if it goes far enough, though, or works out its tensions explicitly enough.

You quote Eliot, it seems approvingly, but the main drift of your essay argues against him; or maybe I'm reading my own dissatisfaction into it: Eliot's formulation seems wrong to me and always has. If poetry does not "turn loose" emotion, it is worthless, in my view, and the idea that a poet can "escape from emotion" by writing poems is at best a sleight of hand (sleight of mind?); the whole doctrine of impersonality is a con, in fact, and leads inevitably to the post-modern productions which offer almost nothing but a dance of ironies. This is my take, of course; I'd love to see where you'd end up if you were to follow that thread.

One more small dissent: I really object when you parry Rosenthal's homophobic reading of Duncan by arguing that "homosexual readers have been imposed upon for centuries." No genuine poem can "force or require" or "exert control" over a reader, much less impose "an unfair or resented demand or burden." (Oxford American Dictionary definitions.) A poem that attempts to do so is simply propaganda. More often than not, the fault lies in the reader's imposition upon the poem of expectations that are antithetical to every creative impulse.

Kudos, by the way, for "You, Therefore." It's a brave and beautiful poem.

Anthony Robinson said...

Reginald,

I won't object or approve here. I will say, however, that "You, Therefore" is wonderful.

T

A.H. said...

The sentimental? I am struggling to locate this memory, but I recall a wonderful essay on Sterne and the sentimental sublime...it could have been Kermode. It is the best defence I have heard of sentiment as point of crisis and enlightenment. There is a sentimental vein in Duncan, but not a failure. It was HD and Duncan's poetry that first taught me to feel without boundaries. I agree wholeheartedly with your aside to Rosenthal: Duncan understood the nature of that imposition; and academia preserves it. Any student of English Literature has to undergo centuries of heterosexual love novels, poems, dramas. I think often of Marechera's objection to Eliot--what if there is no correlative for some emotions, if extremes are swept aside as sentiment without verbal manifestation? Your poem here has a wonderful, authentic voice-- it has that unabashed, longing for human interaction that Sterne called a "sentimental journey." Music.

Hope you are well.

Alan Contreras said...

This is one of your best commentaries, and "You, Therefore" is one of the poems I like best from Fata Morgana.

There are so many different emotions and ways to convey emotion that I wonder at anyone, including Eliot, who thinks that emotion, in life or in poetry, is one thing.

Emotion is a genus, not a species. Consider the different expressions of emotion of just a few living poets whose work I enjoy: the descriptive scrollwork of J. D. McClatchy, the high church pointillism of Carl Phillips, the mythic immersions of Cameron La Follette, the whisper-forest of Merwin and your own work, which I once described in a review as "intense volcanic roiling."

Poetry without emotion? We might as well describe life without emotion. A few churches seem to think this is the right idea; most of us know better.

Alan Contreras
Eugene, Oregon
oregonreview.blogspot.com

brian (baj) salchert said...

Took the link to Brian Teare's
Duncan essay, which I read. Also
read Brian's poem. Have read your
poem several times. Necessarily,
his is rougher; but my sense is
both are representative of that
lyric postmodernism your anthology
(which I have not read, although I
did find and read poems by Bruce
Beasley) presents. What first
caught my attention is how you
avert expectations with poignant
disjunctions:
"therefore the hours shine:"
and
"strawberries spread through your name"
and
"(I dreamed the snow was you,"
being three.
The final line is more mysterious,
and rightly so. Also, which I did
notice initially but did not make
much of until just before this
comment, the absence of a period
befits the tone and structure of
your lyric in that--and I had to
go back and check/ to make sure--
no period appears anywhere in it,
giving the feeling of a kind of
endlessness that counters the
recognition of death in the
opening line.

I'm starting to sound like that
other R. S. or some New Crit guy.


Thank you for your persistence,
your energy.

Reginald Shepherd said...

Hello, all, and thanks for your comments. Mine will be brief, as I am exhausted today with chemo fatigue, and it's very tiring to sit at the computer for very long.

With regard to eshuneutic's comment (I wish I knew your name!), the question of the relationship of sentiment, sentimentality, and expression is one in which I'm very interested, and am pursuing in a longer and so far totally amorphous piece of which this is an extract. I would love to read the essay you refer to, if you could provide the reference.

With regard to Joseph Hutchison's comment, and echoing eshuneutic's comment, we are all imposed upon by heterosexual norms, assumptions, and expectations from the second we're born until the moment we die, and literature, though at its best it provides openings to possibilities society doesn't offer, isn't exempt from that. The Anglophone literary tradition is, by and large, a heterosexual tradition, or a tradition in which homosexuality appears as a mutism, the present-but-unsaid "love that dares not speak its name." Rosenthal's comment expresses the heterosexual reader's expectation to see himself (I emphasize the male pronoun in this case) reflected and reaffirmed in everything he sees and reads. I agree that this is a limitation on the potentialities of literature, but it's not one I have imposed (to use that word again).

With regard to Brian Salchert's comment, I love your reading of the poem, which is just what I was aiming at. I wanted the lack of periods in the poem both to convey a tumbling, breathless excitement and to embody exactly the feeling of endlessness, of love as a stay against the inevitable fact of death, that you describe. Thank you for reading the poem so well.

Thanks again to all for your heartening responses.

peace and poetry,

Reginald

Jonathan said...

I think it was a romantic age in poetry: O'Hara's homages to Rachmaninoff, Ginsberg, Duncan, James Wright, Bly, Levertov... Koch's Shelleyean Romantic exuberance. That's the conclusion I've reached in my book on Lorca in U.S. poetry of the 1950s and beyond. No accident that Lorca was loved by Duncan, Ginsberg, and Koch.

Wasn't the "academic" poetry of the period ironical and distrustful of emotion? Look at the low reputation of Whitman in the English departments of the time.

Don Share said...

There's an interesting take on Duncan by Tom Sleigh in the brand-new Parnassus, if you can get your hands on a copy, that goes well with what Reginald is saying here. I wish I could paraphrase it.. but Tom's hard to paraphrase! One thing he points out is the difference between what Duncan advocates in his prose and what he actually does in his poems; and another thing T.S. comments on is the effect of Duncan's illness on his last work - which, I realized, is a subject Tom knows about firsthand.

Gratefully, - Don

It seems like such a good time to reappraise and reread Duncn

Jim said...

awesome blog.

Alice C. Linsley said...

Reginald, you are so gifted! The poem is lovely, evocative.

You write, "Irony is too often used as an evasion, a way to disclaim responsibility for one’s statements and one’s feelings, or even for pretending one doesn’t have feelings, which can be so disruptive, even disturbing, so messy and uncool." This is very true, at least in my experience. On the other hand, much of the real irony in our present existence seems to be missed by writers.

Rest! And May God bless you.

A.H. said...

Hi, hope you are feeling well. I had to track down a distant memory: the sentimental sublime reference was from Richard A Lanham's work on Sterne: "Tristram Shandy, Games of Pleasure". He propsed that the sentimental, for Sterne, operated in an Existential manner, an intense emotional "leap into the dark". In Duncan, this becomes Gnostic, I suspect, a jumping off into the darkness of not-Knowing. Best wishes.