Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry

One State of the Art

One State of the Art What I value most in poetr y is passion, a passion that manifests itself most immediately in the words that are the poem’ s body and its soul. I find this passionate intensity in the verbal a gosies of Har t Crane’s “Voyages,” in the sly obliquity and exuberant surprise of Dickinson’s “I would not paint a picture,” or in the chilly intimacies of Stevens’s “The Snow Man.” It was the passion that I found there, including ver y prominently the passion in, for, and of language, which first drew me to poet y, which made poetry essential to me, and which made me want to become a poet myself. Dominated by the twin poles of earnestly mundane anecdote and blank-eyed, knee-jerk irony, much contemporary American poetry is embar rassed by passion, by lar ge gestures, and by major aspirations, as if they were immodest at best, dishonest at worst. As Jorie Graham has said in an inter view with critic Thomas Gardner, “we have been handed down by much of the generation after the moder nists—by their strictly secular sense of reality (domestic, confessional), as well as by their unquestioned relationship to the act of representation—an almost untenably narrow notion of what [poetr y] is capable of.” This inheritance still dominates the poetic mainstream, despite the many and diverse openings of the field since then. America poetry still tends to dismiss or ignore those possibilities which cannot be neatly packaged and contained. Among poets who reject the mainstream mode, including those who see themselves as experimental or even “oppositional,” too many retreat into easy, evasive sarcasm and tidy , self-congratulatory ironies (what poet Joshua Corey calls “phrases meeting cute”). T. S. Eliot wrote that the poet must be as intelligent as possible ; Wallace Stevens wrote that the poem must resist the intel70 ligence almost successfully. Poetry occurs in the play between the intelligence of language and language’ s resistance to intelligence . What matters is not what a poem cansay but what a poem can do. As W. H. Auden wrote, poetr y is “a way of happening.” I look to poetr y for what only poems can do, or what poems can do best, to treat language as an end rather than a means: to communication , expression, or even tr uth. This moment of apprehension of language as an in-itself and a for -itself is both a model of the possibility and a palpable instance, however fleeting, o nonalienated existence. Poetry’s resistance to facile communication (which is not to say that poetr y does not and cannot communicate ) is the promise of happiness it embodies, a promise continually broken by society , but kept alive by ar t, which thus becomes a standing reproach to society. To imagine language as something that one simply “uses,” either well or badly , is to imagine a world that is merely a collection of objects of use. It is away from this instr umental reason that poetr y leads us. I treasure such lines as these by Alvin Feinman not because of any statement they make, however interesting, about the problematics of knowledge and perception, but because something is happening in them that happens nowhere else: . . . More bold, The discrepant mind will break The centrum of its loss, now Sudden and again, Mistake its signature, as though Snow were its poem out of snow. As Adorno reminds us, ar t is the enemy of culture, and culture tries constantly to kill ar t by mummifying it, whether in terms of “taste” or in terms of “political” responsibility. To quote Jean-François L yotard in a dif ferent context, poetr y is “that which denies itself the solace of good for ms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations , not in order to enjoy them, but in order to impar t a stronger sense of the unpresentable.” When I began writing poetr y in the late 1970s and early 71 1980s, I felt ver y alone in my aims and ambitions; much of the modernist poetry that inspired me to become a poet was either dismissed or actively rejected by the prevailing aesthetic of transparency and unrectified feeling, what Charles Altieri ha called the scenic style. In the early and mid...