The World in the Earth: A Response to “The Taste of Silence”

This response is a bit late in coming. It took me quite a while to figure out just what it is that I disagreed with about the essay in question, and for a while I gave up on actually putting it in readable, coherent form; but given some time, I think I see now more clearly what it is I take umbrage with. I was initially simply rooting for the underdog, because I was appalled that something I find myself so concerned with (the tenets of what the author calls ‘poetry of world’) should be implicitly linked with imperialism, racism, and other assorted evils. But I began rereading Heaney’s Seeing Things for pleasure after having my interest piqued by the article, and Heaney became my guide back to an underlying disagreement. Anyway, I ought not preface my thoughts on the article with themselves, so off you go. I tried to include the relevant quotes within, so one need not have read the article before reading this, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to have done so.

Adam Kirsch has an essay in a recent issue of Poetry magazine that uses Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” to establish a dichotomy of poetry, that “of the earth” and that “of the world.” I admit at the start that my understanding of Heidegger is limited to the discussions of his work I’ve read by Rorty and Derrida, and I am ill-equipped to make judgments about Kirsch’s interpretation of him. My problem, however, is with the judgment Kirsch makes by employing Heidegger’s distinction in the present tense. By claiming that only poetry “of the earth” is “our poetry,” and that we have turned away from poetry “of the world” because of its seeming impossibility, Kirsch (not-so-)subtly imbricates “poetry of the world,” now or whenever, between Naziism and Imperialism— a move I would find offensive did I not first find it misled and based on a contradiction of which Kirsch’s essay seems marginally aware. “And that [contradiction, Kirsch] reveals in spite of himself, can have sinister implications.”

Filed under: Heaney, Heidegger, Kirsch, Poetry

On Stevens’ “Add This to Rhetoric”

After a little over-indulgence on my part in wide-ranging and free-flowing rants for the past couple of posts, I’ll stick to a specific subject this time. This is one of my favorite poems by Wallace Stevens that, if not one of his most polished or succesfully ‘artful,’ is still an unbelievably powerful example of the man’s skill and intellect.

Add This to Rhetoric

It is posed and it is posed.
But in nature it merely grows.
Stones pose in the falling night;
And beggars dropping to sleep,
They pose themselves and their rags.
Shucks . . . lavender moonlight falls.
The buildings pose in the sky
And, as you paint, the clouds,
Grisaille, impearled, profound,
Pftt . . . In the way you speak
You arrange, the thing is posed,
What in nature merely grows.

To-morrow when the sun,
For all your images,
Comes up as the sun, bull fire,
Your images will have left
No shadow of themselves.
The poses of speech, of paint,
Of music—Her body lies
Worn out, her arm falls down,
Her fingers touch the ground.
Above her, to the left,
A brush of white, the obscure,
The moon without a shape,
A fringed eye in a crypt.
The sense creates the pose.
In this it moves and speaks.
This is the figure and not
An evading metaphor.

Add this. It is to add.

Though Harold Bloom is probably correct on both points when he says that “Add This to Rhetoric” is “a kind of footnote to the greater poem, ['The Poems of Our Climate'],” I still find it to be one of my favorite of Stevens’ poems. “The Poems of Our Climate” seems to belie the imperfection which it claim is “our paradise.” Admittedly, it does this beautifully; but that is part of why I prefer “Add This…,” which, instead, eschews beautiful, meditative images for simplistic ones that depict their subjects while demonstrating the poem’s premise, and which uses a grammar that demonstratively appropriates “…of Our Climate”’s paradisiac imperfection for its own purpose.

Filed under: Analysis, Poetry, Stevens, Writing , Add This to Rhetoric, Analysis, Poetry, Stevens, Writing

Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith is an itch I can’t scratch. That’s probably exactly what he wants to be, too. So I think I’ll try to figure out why he itches me and what about his work I need to unpack to scratch. I don’t remember where I encountered him first, whether it was UBUweb, PennSound, the Poetry Foundation’s blog, or heaven knows where else, but he’s an artist I haven’t been able to shake.

The issue, see, is that Goldsmith really does for language, for speaking, and for writing the exact same thing that Cage did with the audience in 4′33′, Eno did with a broken leg and a too-quiet record player, and Warhol did with Marilyn; and this is a very conscious effort for him. He’s reiterating what Duchamp did with the infamous urinal, Magritte did with “The Treachery of Images,” etc. The examples are countless. What I find conflicting about this is that Goldsmith isn’t really catching us up to what’s happening now. Thus, it annoys me that Goldsmith is considered so profoundly avant-garde, and not in the sense of the “anyone can do it” dilemma. Because yes, anybody can transcribe all the text of one day’s New York Times. Authenticity is not the issue, a tenet Goldsmith so conveniently founds his ideas on. He’s being blatantly unoriginal, not only in the fact that his works are direct requisitions of other texts, but that his ideas are nothing more than the past century’s theories of visual and musical art applied to text.

On the other hand, I think Goldsmith’s work is fascinating and necessary.

Filed under: Goldsmith, Poetry, Tangents, Writing , avant-garde, Goldsmith, Kenneth Goldsmith, Poetry

Loosely Organized Thoughts on Oppen’s “Return”

“In the flow of traffic
The family cars, in the dim
Sound of the living
The noise of increase to which we owe
What we possess. We cannot reconcile ourselves.
No one is reconciled, tho we spring
From the ground together-”

from “Return“

This particular passage of “Return” by Oppen is for me a wonderful depiction of a conflict I am beginning to recognize in a new light. I’ll get back to the poem momentarily to explore how this is related, hopefully, but the passage is particularly moving because it dovetails nicely with a new understanding of what “atheism” implies, though I hesitate to use the word with all its connotations, but that’s for another time. The juxtaposition of humanity (a term I am, yet again, antsy about using in this context because it has to me a connotation of placing humans somehow above or outside of “nature” and thus in turn unwittingly invokes something (e.g. god) to do the elevating) with the beautiful image of the tree that appears in the next stanza struck me strongly. Oppen preempts the next image of the tree a bit and tells us that “we spring/ From the ground together” which is a newly fascinating idea, one I’d always grasped and indeed believed, but to which I now hold firmly and with a new touch.

This first stanza’s natural hum of life, this “dim sound” which you hear in time-lapse shots of rain forrest foliage growing, or on the parkway, with which Oppen and I cannot reconcile ourselves is itself (though I believe the inability to achieve reconciliation in this poem is twofold, both between the individual and society as well as and man and nature), or at least points directly towards in its own synthetic nature-ness, a contradiction. It is both entirely natural, in the sense of its being indirect, feedback, the remainder of unintentional overabundance, the “noise of increase;” as well as entirely synthetic, man-made, man-made yet appearing between the edges of what is “man-made” and what is “of nature.”

This passage is juxtaposed against, first, the opening lines which declare ownership and possession of the earth (“But we drive” implying the problematic response to this ownership), and second, the next stanza’s passionate description of a sequoia seed’s imagined growth. The grand declarations of a king are likened to such now-common claims on the earth as laying a road or sod, and then the imag(in)e(d) of the tree bursting forth even though it is in a “room without soil” next to “the tremendous slab/Of the tree.”

Filed under: Oppen, Poetry