Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of the Body Politic

Introduction

Introduction This is a book born of trouble: a troubled mind, a troubled art, troubled times. I am tempted to say my mind, my art, my times, but to say so would be at best a half truth, because the trouble I’m talking about was and is far from only mine. The essays assembled here were not originally written to be a book, but since they all emanate from the desk of one obsessive worrier , they are shot through with similar concerns: the soul of American poetry, the nature of the American body politic, the definition of conscience, the cost of racism, the ameliorative potential—if not actually redemptive power—of art. The oldest of these was published well over a decade ago, the newest in 2004. Some are about subjects that are persistent if not actually timeless; others concern themselves with cultural moments that, on the surface, look ephemeral— the collapse of the poet Vachel Lindsay, the Salmon Rushdie affair, a scandal at the National Endowment for the Arts. But all these matters are, as William Carlos Williams would say, in the American grain, and our current situation has reawakened me to their relevance . If I have faith in these essays at this remove, it is not because of the writing that is mine but because of the trouble that is not. 1 Still, my own trouble is my starting point; it is also my impetus. It is fair to begin there. In the late 1980s I came to a crisis point simultaneously in my mental life and in my art. A certain way of writing poems, which I had labored for years to master, suddenly played out for me, and I was struggling to reinvent myself as a poet. Years of working as a literary editor—Quarterly West, Cimarron Review, Kenyon Review, and by 1990 New England Review—had wrought in me an increasingly public awareness of the nature and role of literary writing. And things were going on in the nation—the endgame of the Reagan-Bush years—that I was finding increasingly unbearable. I was troubled, then, and so found everything else troubling. Make no mistake: I am not talking about depression—personal, clinical, chemical, situational, or however defined. No group therapy, twelve-step program, or bottle of Prozac, with all due respect to those agencies, was going to help. I am talking about cultural challenge . I am talking, too—curiously enough, since I was in my early forties—about coming to a certain kind of maturity, which maybe in our culture involves arriving at middle age, wherein I felt responsible for the world in which I found myself: part of the mechanism, not just a passenger on a speeding train. Increasingly I experienced the world as my world, in a guilty sense. Circumstance forced me to admit it: These things of darkness I acknowledge mine. Years before, in the winter of 1987, I had begun writing what I soon discovered would be a long poem. I began it with joy and in a spirit of playfulness; but it rapidly tried to take me into territory previously uncharted, at least by me, and I found that I was unequipped to go there. Always studious, I read harder, thought harder, grew older. The poem I had begun—like a hurricane with its attendant tornadoes—spawned a front of smaller poems, mostly dark and turbulent ones. The shorter poems taught me little lessons about the long one; the stormy season endured. 2 The Muse in the Machine And then, on January 16, 1991, George H. W. Bush took the nation into Iraq. My response was, in retrospect, predictable: I was in shock briefly, and then I began to write. I wrote more short poems, and the long poem that was the dark dynamo behind them took shape and finished itself: “Walt Whitman in Hell,” a mere ten pages, four years in the making. I wrote other things as well, mostly essays: editorials for New England Review, pieces for any journal that would take them. This process was as much about clarifying my own thinking as it was about making public statements, but being public was indispensable. I was haunted by a pervasive sense of culpability, which was both personal and collective. Everything I had learned about human character told me that war is with us always, but the lessons of Vietnam, and...