Lit from Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing

Litany, Gamesmanship, and Representation: Charting the Old to the New Poetry

139 Litany, Gamesmanship, and Representation Charting the Old to the New Poetry T O N Y H O A G L A N D The old poetry can be about willows; Haiku requires crows picking snails in a rice paddy. —Basho, announcing the new aesthetics, circa AD 700 Epistemology and theories of language—how we know what we know, how we say it—have become as central to contemporary lyric as psychoanalysis in the late 50s, myth and politics in the late 60s. —Stephen Burt, “The Elliptical Poets,” American Letters and Commentary A S A M E R I C A N P O E T S A N D poetry readers, we find ourselves in the midst of the third wave of poetic modernism, when American poetry is exploding into a galaxy of formal experiment and innovation.All manner of things drift under the poetic sun,from diction-saturated abcdarium poems to fragmentary metaphysical minimalism. Because we are in its midst, we aren’t sure yet of its nature, its meanings, its idioms, or how to assign value to its productions. Is it camp? 140 ◆ T O N Y H O A G L A N D Is it absurdist? Is it defiantly detached,self-preoccupiedly mannerist clever coterie poetry? Is it self-defeatingly sophisticated? Is it the inauguration of an amazing new physics of representation ? We just can’t tell yet. One place to begin is to consider the evolution, in the last sixty years,of the poet’s relationship to the word.This essay will review and explore the course of those changes by considering a series of examples of the litany.Because the litany,by definition ,is a poetic form dedicated to the act of naming,it provides a useful source for sampling the changing perspective of the poet upon language itself. In his ninth Duino Elegy, Rilke hypothesizes that the cosmic purpose of human beings on earth, surprisingly enough, might not be procreation, but speech: Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House, Bridge, Fountain, Jug, OliveTree,Window,— possibly: Pillar,Tower? . . . but for saying, remember, oh for such saying as never the things themselves hoped so intensely to be. Rilke suggests a vocation for poets: a kind of stewardship. The poet names, and her/his speech vivifies reality (olive tree, window) by pronouncing it. To name is to recognize and endorse material reality,to encourage it,and at the same time to illuminate and spiritualize it.The Biblical resonance—toAdam’s act of assigning the first names—is evident, and like that story, Rilke’s scenario suggests a sacred relationship, which places into transaction three elements: the poet, the word, and the thing. Man is redeemed by the unique usefulness of his speech; matter is elevated by recognition; speech holds unique value for its precision and responsiveness. Here, there is no hint of misfit between words and things—no inaccuracy, and no misrepresentation . Rilke implies that the cosmic breach between spirit and matter can be healed when we embrace,through our speech, the whole world of creation. This confidence about the functional harmony between speech, things, and humans has not remained constant. In the twentieth century, our faith in the adequacy of language has Litany, Gamesmanship, and Representation ◆ 141 shifted nervously around again and again, as has our belief in the reliability of knowledge, perception, and human nature. If we want to see how poetry has changed in the last sixty years, we can learn a lot by looking at how the poet’s relationship to the word has continued to change.The literary form of the litany, because it engages in a kind of ceremonial naming, like the one proposed by Rilke’s poem, offers an ideal poetical prototype from which to draw examples of how naming changes. Rilke’s poem proposes an almost premodern model for poetry ’s relationship to the word:perception,recognition,endorsement .We poet-humans are allowed to frolic in the naming of the world. Something like what the British poet Christopher Smart might have been feeling when he sang a pre-Whitman ode to his housecat. For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him. For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way. For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with...