WILD IS THE WIND
WILD IS THE WIND: THE LYRIC POET IN AN AGE OF LANGUAGE
Recently I read a blog piece on the Harriet Blog about ‘amateur’ poets. The author, an academic and professional poet, meant to be respectful. In fact, he seems to intend it to be a promotion of, or shining a spotlight on, a realm of poetry invisible to the academic world. I came across the piece on Silliman’s site. It was within days of the death of Lou Reed. This triangle is bugging me, it won’t let me go, and yet my various thoughts do not cohere into a single thesis, rather, I feel a repugnance, and gathering aggression. So I want to put these two visceral feelings aside and try to state some of the actual thoughts I’ve had around these three points.
First of all, the article. The author defines an amateur poet as one who does not teach, publish or give readings for money. His poets (all from Ohio) have published chapbooks and are relatively successful in regional reading circuits. They don’t care what the professional judgment of their poetry is, but rather write for themselves and their small audience of fellow amateurs. I think everyone who has attended or participated in a local poetry reading series with featured readers and an open mike know who these people are. Two features are picked out as defining the amateur poets: they are in the lyric tradition, and they are highly concerned with the sound of their poetry. By sound I assume he means these poets want to write beautiful sounding poetry. Not necessarily poems in rhyme, but euphonious poetry. The sound of the poetry should reflect, should be integrally fused with the subject matter, which will be the individual consciousness of a human being observing and participating in a world of sense and sensation, rendered in imaginative language. What I think of is, what does the world feel, look and sound like to the soul? For this is poetry explicitly of the eye and soul. It might also be wisdom poetry. It is in the old tradition. It doesn’t radically address the opacity of language or take socially constructed identity apart. It is not abstract or theoretical. It does not contest the dominant ideology in a sophisticated way. The artists are not PhD intellectuals with a strong interest in theory. It is about emotion and life experience. The struggle is with god and the work is Eliot’s ‘raid on the inarticulate’.
Lou Reed is considered to be the great voice of the rock’n’roll avant-garde. He did what all great artistic revolutionaries have done. He radically altered the art as he found it. His songs, the lyrics, the sound, the circumstances of recording and performance, the instruments, the clothing and the career were all radically at odds with what was on the ground when he arrived in the mid-sixties. Incredibly, he kept it up in one way or another for his entire life. True, he stopped being a radical innovator, but he continued to work in venues and produce art that was challenging and interesting. He was brutally honest with the world and ever contemptuous and distrustful of authority. He was also politically incorrect. I have eulogized him recently and don’t need to rehearse those sentiments here, except to establish that in the world of pop music he is the real thing. Lou Reed would also, in any other age, be considered an important lyric poet. So would Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Not all of Lou Reed’s songs read well without the music. But the best lines are in the best lyric tradition, and his work always, from the beginning, alternated powerful emotions of love and attraction with the more mundane matters of sado-masochism, anal sex and shooting up heroin. Reed’s work harkens back to the mid 19th century to early 20th century works by people like Whitman, Rimbaud, Zola, Norris, Crane, and other chroniclers of low life. He continues with the Beats, Malcolm Cowley and crucially, Nelson Algren.
Silliman is the great advocate of avant-garde poetry, of theory, of political engagement. He comes out of the Zukofsky side of things, descending ultimately from Whitman, Pound and the Objectivists. In the mid 20th century, responding to creeping academic formalism and bardic pretention, Olson, Creeley, Cid Corman, Robert Duncan and some older poets launched a revolution through small independent journals and poetry readings. Black Mountain, New York and the Beat schools of poetry formed and mutated. The Black Arts Movement arose. And, eventually, the high abstraction and political left movement of Language Poetry was born. San Francisco saw poet wars. The Language Poets were fierce fighters and virulently anti-academic. But today, they control the field, despite the commercial success of Silliman’s bogey, ‘the school of quietude’. Dismissed was lyric poetry as retrograde, regressive, paleo-conservative. Academic poetry is seen as intellectually serious, unsentimental. It is guarded by a phalanx of young men who have taken the rules of post-modern poetry to heart and enforce them with ruthless efficiency, unleashing sneering, condescending attacks on any work they disapprove of. They are the institutional revolutionaries of our day, and the doors of the academy are locked to the lyric tradition.
Lou Reed is a radical revolutionary artist who asserts that simple words put together create powerful emotions. TS Eliot and Ezra Pound could have and did say as much. Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane were powerful lyrical poets. So were William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, and Amiri Baraka. As are John Ashbury, Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara. Ditto Ruth Stone. Robert Creeley.Â
The fact is the avant-garde in poetry started out as a coterie of like-minded individuals and evolved into a movement that has become so successful it can no longer recognize itself or the world around it for what it is. All of the other arts have undergone transformation after transformation in the past 30-40 years. Only poetry has driven itself deeper and deeper into dogmatic abstraction and philosophical aestheticism. Aestheticism you say? But current poetry is radically opposed to aestheticism! Not really. A uniform aesthetic that has sheered poetry away from the imagination, from the sound of words, from reference has rooted itself so deeply its adherents take it for granted. But when you get down to it, how is one to privilege the underlying thoughts, ideology and theories of Language and Post Language poetries over those of the lyrical tradition? It’s impossible to say the obscurely phrased but relatively simple pronouncements about language and politics that dominate avant-garde poetic discourse are anything but time worn clichés, that do nothing to address the wound that art opens, touches and heals. Just because you say it hard doesn’t make it so.
The lyric tradition of poetry is alive, well and relevant to anyone who cares about poetry. It is not static. It changes. Pleasure in craft, pleasure in thought, pleasure in the tactile aspects of language and the ability of language to create narratives, to seduce, transport and transcend, exist. This is real. It doesn’t go away if you cease to believe in it.
The radical artist is born, looks around at the world and decides it can be different, and is willing to suffer. Or is happy enough to work a day job and travel a circuit of regional poetry readings, not giving a damn what some MFAs think at a conference in San Francisco. Or, for that matter, what passes for poetry on PBS, among the American Poet Laureates, or the Harriet Blog. If you read Andrew Marvell, or John Donne, or William Blake, or Emily Dickinson, or Rimbaud, or Thomas Hardy or Mayakovsky or Whitman you are reading in the lyric tradition. It is often but not always revolutionary and contrary. But what it is opposing is the individual artistic consciousness against the mass idea, mass thinking, mass beliefs, of WHATEVER character. It is a contrary impulse, not one that embraces certainties, even so called radical ones. It doesn’t give a damn for dogma: religious, political, philosophical or aesthetic. It pitches itself across the one true void, the abyss of meaning rich with meaning, with all forms of existence coming and going. It is love and death. Cliché? Shopworn? Haven’t you been in love? Aren’t you going to die?
