Ways of Seeing

What exactly is the relation between a poem and the things it describes? How deeply are poems bound to these things—not only observed objects or scenes but the entire residue of lived experience? To what extent, in contrast, do the energy and dynamism of poetry derive from its resistance to the solid, the representable, the merely material? In other words, how useful is it to read poems in terms of their thematics or purported subject matter? Two recent critical studies of contemporary American poetry consider such questions directly and conclude that things, details, and experience do matter, not so much for themselves but because they offer a way to understand how poems work rhetorically and structurally. Willard Spiegelman's How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry examines the function of "description" in a series of mostly American poets, focusing on the ways detail, abstraction, form, metaphor, and the like enable but also complicate the possibility of describing the world. Jeffrey Gray's Mastery's End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry focuses on how an overlapping but mostly different group of poets represent the experience of travel; binding a theoretical discourse drawn from postcolonial and narrative studies to lyric, Gray locates in the contradictions and instabilities of travel a model for the workings of postwar poetry itself.

In a sense, the mode of reading undertaken by both books is old-fashioned: it assumes that distinctions persist between the exterior world and the consciousness perceiving it, between self and other, and more broadly between the thematics of poetry and its form; it builds on the Romantic notion that poems chronicle a subjective response to lived experience. Contemporary poetry, like much contemporary theory, though, often unmakes exactly these distinctions. The virtue of both these books is that they permit their rubrics to alter with the poems they discuss. Although both focus on what could be called the center or mainstream of contemporary poetry, both comfortably consider the work of a range of poets, from the more "representational" (Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Amy Clampitt) to the more "experimental" (Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, and Lyn Hejinian); both discuss often-analyzed poets alongside those who have been less frequently studied. The two books, though, enact quite different modes of reading. Spiegelman shuns all but the broadest of frameworks, instead dwelling passionately in particulars, while Gray lays out, develops, and supports a unifying argument about postwar poetry through study of a smaller range of poems. Read together, then, these books serve as useful tools for those preparing to teach the work of contemporary poets, even as they raise larger questions about the practice of poetic criticism and its relation to theory.

From its subtitle on, Spiegelman's book insists on "art"; his book in broad terms attempts to reclaim "aesthetics and aestheticism" for academic study (ix). The biographical, the historical and political, the gendered or erotic sources or effects of contemporary poetry do not interest Spiegelman. Rather, he argues that description, often deprecated as merely "ornamental," superficial, or distracting, performs a crucial and double function in poems: "the art of describing . . . both reproduces (in words) a visible external provocation and adds a new item to the totality of available reality" (4). Spiegelman's focus is also double, emphasizing both "styles of describing and description itself as a style" (5). This broadness of focus makes the book's overall argument somewhat hard to grasp, a problem compounded by Spiegelman's failure to offer a general vocabulary through which to characterize the relation between the thing described and the mode of describing it or to link explicitly the chapters' quite separate arguments. But that sense of blurring and overlap also forms part of Spiegelman's central claim that language itself complicates material or sensed reality.

Throughout the book, incisive and beautifully written...