I've always liked Philip Levine

because of who he writes about.  No, strike that.  I like him because of *how* he write about who he writes about.  There is, after all, a long tradition of writing about the working man/woman--usually the pastoral working man/woman, and usually from the remove of a different, non-working class altogether.  Philip Levine uses no such remove.

My first taste of Levine was his collection What Work Is.  The poem "Fear and Fame" is the first work in this collection, and I think it illustrates the difference between Levine and other poets writing about the working class.  It is the speaker himself descending into the grit and slime, the speaker who can't rid himself of the taste of the work, the speaker in the alien suit, the speaker who'll descend into the pit again because that's what work is--the poet's work as well as the person's work. Levine refuses to write in the tradition of the outsider looking at the workers.  He is the worker, and there is no shame in that.

This is the Dirty Jobs approach to poetry.  Or not.  Mike Rowe always maintains a careful degree of separation from the work he's doing--we're constantly reminded that he's foreign to the work.  Levine does the opposite--he dives into the job and claims it as his own, as something that *should* be part of the poet's world.  There is no shame in working hard in inhospitable environments--or if there is, the shame is ours, we who enjoy the fruits of this work while refusing to get our own hands dirty.

Lucille Clifton died yesterday

She was amazing. Check out her work on pages 1029-35 or at poem hunter.

Admonitions

boys
i don't promise you nothing
but this
what you pawn
i will redeem
what you steal
i will conceal
my private silence to
your public guilt
is all i got

girls
first time a white man
opens his fly
like a good thing
we'll just laugh
laugh real loud my
black women

children
when they ask you
why is your mama so funny
say
she is a poet
she don't have no sense

John Ashbery

I went to see Matt Rohrer give a poetry reading a few years back at UGA, and in his remarks, he mentioned Ashbery--specifically, how much he hated reading him as an undergraduate and how much he loved him now.  The remark struck me not because it was new but because it echoed what I'd heard in so many workshops.  Poet after poet admitted early frustration with John Ashbery but grew to love his work and see him as a primary influence.

I think the difference in reception has much more to do with the readers' purpose than with Ashbery himself.  When we read works in a literature class, we read to comprehend.  We feel pressured to be able to translate some demonstrable point out of the verbal chaos.  It's one of the real failings of the traditional English class, and one I'm still struggling to confront.

Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins also noted this problem and wrote about it in the following poem, which can be found at the Poetry 180 website (I HIGHLY recommend this site for all future teachers, for whom it was expressly designed):

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.


My hope is that by structuring an English class around teaching poems rather than around tests and written arguments, we've somehow let go of the need to torture out the meanings of poetry and can explore, instead, the ways they provoke our thinking and tickle our ears.  This hasn't *entirely* happened yet (the author is still front and center rather than left on a distant shore), but I think we've made some degree of progress, and I'm proud of us.

Back to Ashbery. 

If ever there was a poet bound to frustrate his readers with his slipperiness, it's him.  I begin "They Only Dream of America" feeling confidently in the land of Whitman with his leaves--no, pillars here (a significant change!)--of grass, which meshes so nicely with the title that I stride on boldly into stanza 3 where I'm immediately mired.  By the time I get to cigars (Freud?) and keys which are signs (Saussure?  Semiotics?), I'm totally adrift.  The question is, can I bear the drift, or must I fight for meaning?  Am I bothered by the total lack of pronoun referents, or am I content to consider the possible referents?

Over and over, I fall in love with his language.  Example:

There is nothing to do
For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it.  ("They Only Dream..." 23-4)

I've re-read that line about ten times over this morning, and still it hits me on a gut level with both its music and its accuracy.

"Street Musicians" is much clearer in terms of the picture it conveys (the title helps, but the poem itself keeps referring back to the musicians and feeling consistent in a way that "They Only Dream" does not.  (Perhaps this is the influence of the dream itself on the first poem.)  Still, Ashbery doesn't stay squarely and only on the topic but allows it to trigger larger reflection.  By the time we hit the final lines, he's into hardcore questions about the human race in general, its origins, and its relationship to the Earth itself:

Our question of a place of origin hangs
Like smoke: how we picnicked in the pine forests,
In coves with water always seeping up, and left
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.  (19-24)

Which takes me back to another favorite line earlier in the poem, in which he describes the way one is "wrapped in identity like a coat" (3).  Individuality isn't innate here but acquired and worn.  I wonder if there's an implied connection here to original sin, the banishment from place, and the putting on of clothes to hide shame...

But this post is over-long.  We'll see where this takes us all in class Wednesday.  Suffice it to say that I fully understand why those who are willing to let go of their need to "understand" a poem come to love Ashbery.  After all, the world itself is incomprehensible.  His poems capture that but still give us space to reflect without descending into utter hopelessness.

...and what do we do with you, John Berryman?

John Berryman is said to be one of the fore-fathers of the confessional movement, and yet so many of his poems--like those of confessional poets in general--employ a persona and stray widely from strict autobiography.  The term "confessional" has always been a difficult one for me.  In the Catholic tradition, the confessional is a place for absolute honesty where one owns one's sins and repents, yet in most of their work, the confessional poets are neither honest nor humble nor do they seek forgiveness.  I'm glad they don't.  The brutality and hyperbole of these poems are one of their strengths.  They're not trying to tell us what actually happened; they're making us feel an emotion beyond those which reality contained.

Thus, the Dream Songs don't contain us to events.  They go beyond day-to-day, they invent.  Berryman gives us a dream that is uniquely ours as much as it is uniquely his.  "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand," he writes in song #366 [not included in our text, unfortunately], "They are only meant to terrify & comfort."

And Henry?  Oh Henry.  The confessional only has room for one.  Henry gets collapsed into Mr. Bones and into Berryman himself, but is this fair?  Any more fair than the way the "confessional poet" is used as a mud in the sling we use to disparage the modern lyricist who, like Wordsworth and Whitman, see themselves as poetic subjects?

I tend to read the "confessionals" as a group of poets launching a critic of the traditional lyric speaker by calling attention to just how absurd it is to think the poet could ever put his self onto the page.


(I choose this picture in particular because I imagine him having a conversation with, say, Harold Bloom and really taking him to task.  I like to think of him cross-examining the critical body, saying something like, "have you read the work you're calling 'confessional' or have you looked up a definition for the word lately?")

Lowell

Is it me, or are these poems elegies?  Not "For the Union Dead" so much as for the type of life they stood for.  Of Shaw he writes, " He is out of bounds now.  He rejoices in man's lovely/ peculiar power to choose life and die--"  It reminds me of Tennyson's "How dull it is to pause, to make an end,/ To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!/ As though to breathe were life."

The landscape described in both the Lowell poems we read for today is pervasively sad, as if its inhabitants had become so absorbed in stuff (finned cars, summer houses--as if these things were life) that they betrayed those who once stood against something, who at last embodied the American tradition of rebellion against tyranny, though that tyrant had become America itself.

What a different feel his poem has than Glory.  Against the backdrop of contemporary America, does the upright statue of Shaw mean in the way we expect?

Barthelme

I had tied the balloon to Oliver's wrist, but I did not double knot.  The problem begins in that I wanted to be able to remove it when the time came.  Time does comes.  This is uncontrollable.

Balloons have a propensity to untie themselves, and as he struggled to climb a plaster bulldog and ride it nowhere, the balloon knot unraveled.  He didn't notice it go.  It was me who jumped at the string and tried to catch the uncatchable.

"My balloon!" he said, the helium could be owned, and he sobbed dolefully as it sailed.  We watched it for minutes.  I held him.  As if a mother could provide some meager consolation for the loss of such an object as a balloon.

When Daddy came, the purple speck was no longer visible in the sky.  We walked to the car.  Oliver, clomping along, suddenly says in a most pitiful voice: "If I had my rocket boots I could get my balloon."

-------------

Different kinds of balloons:
helium, hot air, thought

I vary my perception of Barthelme's, but the cartoon image of language hovering above in a balloon strikes me most forcefully, all references to helium aside.

I vacillated between these three possibilities (helium, hot air, thought) until the ending, in which the balloon becomes a personal construction, in which we are reminded that the author authored the balloon and that there never was such a material construct.

Of course there wasn't.  We already know it.  The balloon still was fully real for a minute there.  What a tricky devil language is.

The thought balloons hover still.  Language always was a bunch of hot air, was it not?  But hot air can carry a man nevertheless, if he builds his basket carefully and casts aside the sand.

A & P

Female nakedness seems to be the theme of the day for me; I blogged about it in Plath, it's in Sexton as well ("waved my nude arms" ["Her Kind" 16]), and now, we have the semi-naked bikini girls of John Updike's classic story, "A & P."

In all cases, the nakedness seems to be related to power.  In "A & P," the leader of the bikini-clad trio is consistently referred to as a queen, and the discussion between her and the store manager at the end is nothing if not a power play.  The narrator's feeble/misguided attempt to "save" this girl by quitting his job seems motivated by chivalry--and yet, we know, too, that his interest in these girls has everything to do with their sexuality.

I kept thinking about this story as a commentary on the ways men watch and conceive women.  Because the story is filtered through this narrator, we are locked into his view, and yet at the same time we're looking through his eyes, the voice of the character is so distinct that it continually reminds me of the distance between me and the way I see the world comparative to him the way he sees the world. 

Did anyone else notice that at the end, when the girls have gone and his manager states that the girls have embarrassed the store, the narrator writes:

I started to say something that came out "Fiddle-de-doo." It's a saying of my grand-mother's, and I know she would have been pleased.

Right smack dab in the moment of his chivalrous, super-male act, he quotes his grandmother.  Did this strike anyone else as odd?  What did you make of it?  Or of the fact that his father has put him into this position (job) in the first place--is this a statement about the legacy of previous generations on how men and women relate to one another?  Isn't convention being put smack up against a younger, more flexible (if still deeply sexist) world view?

Coming back to the idea of nakedness, when is it OK for women to be in swimsuits?  Why is partial nakedness acceptable in one location and absurd in another?  What social conventions dictate this and should we reconsider them?

So many questions to ponder...