The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

Instead of an Introduction

1 Instead of an Introduction Letter of Resignation i’ve never thought about resigning from poetry myself, but perhaps that’s because I haven’t had to: looking back on the changes in the kinds of writing I’ve done, I see I’ve become less and less of a poet, and more and more of a critic. One needn’t resign from a job when one has, for the most part, stopped showing up. When I first realized this, an inner dialogue broke out between my accusing superego and my ego, which stood like a guilty thing surprised. It was as if my superego had decided to play the part of Beckett’s Estragon to my ego’s defensive Vladimir: Estragon: Morpion! Vladimir: Sewer-rat! Estragon: Curate! Vladimir: Cretin! Estragon: (with finality) Crritic! Vladimir: Oh! He wilts, vanquished, and turns away. (85) When I’d recovered from this withering inner assault, I was left with a question: does writing less poetry, or no poetry at all, involve some kind of self-betrayal? Not necessarily. George Oppen was poetry’s great prodigal son, coming home to the art he’d left behind. And Rimbaud, in giving up 2 The Poet Resigns poetry, was no traitor to himself: he was honest to his own rebellious trajectory—the very fact that his actions still scandalize so manylittérateurs stands as testimony to this fact. I’m no George Oppen, still less am I any kind of Rimbaud. But, in looking back on what amounts to my de facto resignation from poetry, I think I can see it as honest, in its way, to my own trajectory. If there’s any kind of direction to the writing and thinking I’ve done since my student days, it has been guided by a compass aimed at the idea of the aesthetic, and behind that at the question of the meaning of the aesthetic in a world full of pain and troubles. One of the earliest poems I thought worth putting in my book Laureates and Heretics, “Pater and His Age,” takes up the question. It doesn’t have anything like an answer, though—just a worry: In coke fire, in kiln: accumulation. In furnace, in engine, in black iron machine. In loom-thrum, train clatter, in sulfur and mine shaft In ash from brick chimneys comes surplus, comes hoard. Percussion cap, cartridge, hard black hands of miners. Blasting of rock face, quick flash, hissing fuse; Engineer, steel wheel, white sparks from hard braking, Embankment, blue gas light, slum child, rank canal. Consumption in cough and in candelabra. Excess in the watch-chain’s long droop to the fob, Use-value in square fingered hands warmed at ashcans Whose fires light tight tangled streets without names. And would I, too, flee the moralist’s preaching To burn with the light of a hard, gem-like flame? (12) I remember being proud of the pun on “consumption,” which I now consider something of a groaner. And I was utterly oblivious to how the title already indicated an incipient literary critic at work: it sounds like the title of a book of dry scholarship more than a title for an unrhymed sonnet, doesn’t it? But the concerns that animated me in the writing of this student poem some twenty years ago continue to animate me now: 3 Poetry in a Difficult World the meaning of art and beauty and poetry in a world of power and pain and injustice. Similar concerns animate a poem written about a decade later, “Poem for a War Poet, Poem for a War,” which steals its refrain from a John Matthias poem, which in turn stole it from a poem in Serbian by Branko Miljković. Here’s part one: The lines inked on the map are railways and roads. The lines on the road are refugees, and moving. The lines inked on the page are a poem, your poem. While you are singing, who will carry your burden? The lines on the page are a poem, words that move toward the refugees, their tattered world of hurt and proper names, their lost, their staggering. While you are singing, while you are singing. The lines are helpless in this time of war. They survive, if they are a poem, in valleys of saying, they survive and reach for valleys where bodies cough, bleed, or stumble blind. They survive while you...