Accepting Things Near

ACCEPTING THINGS NEAR by Jim Wayne Miller AMERICAN POETRY Whatever it is, it must have a stomach that can digest rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems. Like the shark, it contains a shoe. It must swim for miles through the desert uttering cries that are almost human. —Louis Simpson' That is what Louis Simpson says American poetry is like. Perhaps then the stomach of American poetry is spacious and strong enough to contain some of my poems. We'll open up some poems here, like opening a shark, and find maybe, not only a shoe, but some old love letters, a herd of black Angus cattle, a carpenter's level, a small farm, a red wagon, a log chain.2 And of course I will hope that, after you have "heard" these poems swimming across the sand, you'll be of the opinion that they have occasionally uttered cries that are almost human. What Simpson is suggesting in those lines, I think, is that good poetry will deal with ordinary things—a shoe—or with things we don't ordinarily consider poetic—rubber, coal, uranium—as well as with conventionally poetic things like the moon, and still manage to evoke a sense of wonder, of the miraculous. Good poetry will deal with ordinary materials in an extraordinary way. It will give us the equivalent of a shark swimming through the desert uttering cries that are almost human. 16 cl UaAktdL I accept this notion. For I am in love with the ordinary, the common place. I like to make the ordinary shine—by holding it in just the right light. Because we are direct heirs of 19th century Romanticism, and because, in this country, as Emerson pointed out, we got our culture from one place—Europe—and along with it our notion of art, but had our duties and our life from this place—the United States, "unstoried, artless, unenhanced," as Frost puts it in "The Gift Outright"3—because we have been split across the cultural brow in America into a highbrow and a lowbrow tradition, with art considered to belong to the domain of the highbrow, genteel tradition, it has often been difficult for the American artist to use the commonplace, ordinary materials he knew best and which were at his immediate disposal. This is why Emerson in his "American Scholar" address in the 183Os chided his fellow countrymen for a too-servile dependence on the Old World in cultural and artistic matters; why he asked us to consider that things distant are not more wondrous than things near.4 This is why we have had artists like Archibald Higbie, the failed artist in Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology, who was so ashamed of his commonplace background that he was alienated from his native materials to such an extent that they were only inadvertently available to him. He tells about his attitude toward Spoon River: I loathed you, Spoon River. I tried to rise above you, I was ashamed of you. I despised you as the place of my nativity. And there in Rome, among the artists, speaking Italian, speaking French, I seemed to myself at times to be free of every trace of my origin, I seemed to be reaching the heights of art and to breathe the air that the masters breathed, and to see the world with their eyes. But still they'd pass my work and say: "What are you driving at, my friend? Sometimes the face looks like Apollo's, at others it has a trace of Lincoln's." There was no culture, you know, in Spoon River. And I burned with shame and held my peace. And what could I do, all covered over and weighted down with western soil, except aspire, and pray for another 17 birth in the world, with all of Spoon River rooted out of my soul?5 Higbie thought he had to go far away—to France and Italy—to be an artist. He got out of his culture only to discover that the culture of Spoon River was still in him, and so he painted pictures that looked partly like the Greek god Apollo and...