Interesting essay on contemporary (American) lyric poetry in APR - Best A Ira Sadoff from Trafficking in the Radiant: The Spiritualization of American Poetry "It's not possible to be sated with the world. I'm still insatiable," he said. "At my age, I'm still looking for a form, for a language to express the world." --interview with Czeslaw Milosz At one time, perhaps thanks to New Criticism and an unmediated faith in the canon, poets might have suggested more comfortably that they were exempt from, or could at least transcend, the pressures of their age, thereby aspiring to an eternal, "timeless poetry." At a time when mass culture penetrates and corrupts our Romantic notions of self and individuality, it's not difficult to recognize the effect of commerce and cheapened religiosity on our faith in truth and absolutes (other than as a "regime of truth."). In a recent New Yorker, Nicholas Lehman writes about the way commerce corrupts our news reporting: Most mainstream-media organizations, worried at being culturally and politically out of synch with many Americans, are making an effort to reach out--I frequently heard a promise to cover religion more seriously and sympathetically. For many, that's a business imperative, an attempt to broaden the audience, especially among conservatives. Neil Shapiro, the President of NBC News...said of NBC News' new anchor, Brian Williams, 'He's a great journalist, a great reporter. Having said that, he's a huge NASCAR fan, has been since his father took him to the track when he was a kid. He cares a lot about his faith. He wants to take the broadcast on the road a lot. He was on the road a whole week before the inauguration. Brian does get it. He once did a story on 'Cabela's'--the superstore chain for hunters. 1 This pandering, this compromising nexus between religiosity and cultural currency, has leaked into all our discourses. It's no surprise that "faith" has been ascendant these last several years. According to the American Religion Data archive, there's been an 8.8 percent increase in Religious adherents since 1990. 2One hears many explanations for this recent infusion into mainstream culture: the constantly promoted but failed promise of materialism to satisfy our inner-lives, well-organized fundamentalist communities (modeled and promoted by the social polices of the current administration), the increasing conservatism of the media (not only in radio talk shows, but also in the clinical gaze of "therapeutic testimonials" from the ilk of Dr. Phil and Dr. Laura), the perceived threat to western culture by other religious sects, the threat to "decency" by secular humanism and the pornography of American culture. It's not an ahistorical accident that we more often look to a "higher power" to help cope with feelings of powerlessness: our society contains no shortage of irrational darkness; our current government represents the economic interests of a very few and seems moreover committed to hegemony over other religions and cultures; lobbying dollars decide more and more of our foreign and domestic policies, rendering "one person, one vote," increasingly obsolete. Interest in religion has always--albeit obliquely--reflected an historical component: why would the critical vocabulary of contemporary poetry be exempt from these pressures? This turn to spirituality is a consequence of the historical. My contention is that using religion as a metaphorical expression of our powerlessness--when the source of that feeling may originate in social world--diminishes human agency and makes possible a hierarchical authoritarianism; that the Romantic desire to transcend materiality leads to a flight from the social and sexual; and finally, that the pandering we see in the public sphere can also corrupt the spiritual impulse in art: in this culture, spirituality sells. Mass culture, Christian fundamentalism and the cheap spirituality of the likes of Oprah Winfrey have surely made their contribution to this change. But neo-formalist critic Christian Wiman has rightly chastised secular writers--I'd have to include myself here--for the frequency with which they address God in their poems. Recent collections--some more and some less authentically--by Jorie Graham, Cal Bedient, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Li-Young Lee, Franz Wright, W. S. DiPiero, Michael Ryan, Jane Hirschfeld and Mark Jarman, just to name a few, accentuate our poets' interest in the spiritual. Even a cursory glance at the current sites of authority in poetry--that is to say, who chooses book prizes, who anthologizes, who awards grants (signs that always reflect the values of the dominant culture)--also illustrates these changing values. This shift reverberates generationally, not only through the handing down of book prizes, but in the way young artists naturally model their work after accomplished teachers (most graduate writing programs market their programs by listing their most "successful" students). Our poetic icons have also changed: in the past two decades, Rilke has replaced Neruda as one of our most influential poets (Neruda's sensual and political work saw prominence during the "New Internationalism" of the Sixties and Seventies). T. S. Eliot, whose reputation has fluctuated ever since he dominated generations of writers through the 1950s, is again garnering heightened attention. A look at the Poetry Daily website shows plenty of spiritually-centered poems: one of the most interesting includes Brad Leithauser's, Dana Gioia's and Mary Jo Salter's selection of Richard Wilbur's poems, each of which explicitly traffics in the radiant impalpable (my tone derides the ideological agenda in their choices but the reader can judge this excerpt for him or herself). "A Plain Song for Comadre" Though the unseen may vanish, though insight fails And doubter and downcast saint Join in the same complaint, What holy things were ever frightened off By a fly's buzz, or itches, or a cough? 3 --Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems: 1943-2004 And who would have thought thirty-five years ago, when Larkin was waxing nostalgically about the death of the Empire and of God ("No God any more, or sweating in the dark;//About hell and that, or having to hide;//What you think of the priest"), we'd be looking to lines like these from W. S. DiPiero's poem "The Kiss," in his 2004 Knopf collection, Brother Fire?: The mossy transom light, odors of cabbage and ancient papers, while Father Feeney polishes an apple on his tunic. I tell him I want the life priests have, not how the night sky's millions of departing stars, erased by city lights, terrify me toward God.... Where am I, Father, when I visit a life inside or outside the one I'm in? In our wronged world I see things accidentally good:.... Tell what you know now of dreadful freshness and want, our stunned world peopled by shadows solidly flesh, a silted fountain of prayer rising in our throat. 4 The worldly dissatisfactions in this sincere poem include being a spectator to racial injustice and the Cuban missile crisis; the author humanely comes to believe "...the wall's/filthy cracks, ... /held stories I'd find/and tell." Thus the speaker decides he'll give voice to the voiceless. But this poem's new critical paradoxes, its mythic reference to the fall, its yearning for the life of the Priest, the description of worldly decay in the "silted fountain" (all strategies seemingly influenced by late Eliot), still end in an ambivalent desire to defer to the Priest's authority and to "make our prayers heard." The religious impulse in this poem authorizes the lyric speaker's mission and morality, and, since he has little self-consciousness about taking dominion over other people's stories, risks moral superiority. The British poet Douglas Dunn, in an early poem called "I am a Cameraman" (the camera as a metaphor for writing) suggests the dangers of such spectatorship and representation: They suffer, and I catch only the surface. The rest is inexpressible, beyond What can be recorded. You can't be them. If they'd talk to you, you might guess What pain is like though they might spit on you. DiPiero's poem suggests the difficulty in the lyric poet's spiritual positioning: while the speaker presents himself with humility, his assertion that he can represent others suggests a more complicated self-aggrandizement. The gap between an artist's "presentation self" and his or her own complicated and uninterrogated worldly drives (here, self-justification of narrative for social action authorized by religiosity authority) complicates the spiritual declaration in art. Paolo Veronese's painting, "Il Ricco Epulone," in Venice's Galleria D'Academia (which may be found online at: http://www.wga.hu/framese.html?/html/b/bonifaci/dives.html), portrays the allegory of Lazarus and the Beggar from Luke 16:19-31. The stated subject is unchristian behavior: a wealthy patron refuses the beggar. But here the beggar's banished to the lower right corner of the canvas, he's nowhere near skeletal with hunger nor even shabbily dressed; his neutral fleshy colors, far from the painting's center of interest, almost fade from view--even the dog that's supposed to be nipping at his clothes is apparently politely sniffing him. Poverty's viewed safely from afar. The center of the painting's reserved for the courtiers portraying luxurious and joyful Venetian life. Painted during the heyday of Venice's secular and mercantile dominance over its neighbors, Veronese celebrates the figures' colorful clothes and draperies of crimson and green. A noble, wooden, statue-like Moor child holds a musical score for the mandolin player. Our eye is drawn to the laughter, to dreamy sensual pleasure--one couple holding hands, another young man admiring the back of the lutenist's neck. The true subject of this historically transposed moment (from the age of Christ to the Eighteenth Century), is lushness and privilege: how lucky some of us are to be living in this cornucopia of luxury. The moment when Lazarus receives heaven's blessing temporally resides elsewhere and is not really Veronese's project here. The viewer can righteously leave the painting thinking well of himself for his sensitivity to the religious subject and at the same time receive all the titillating pleasures of commerce. During the Inquisition, Veronese was accused of heresy for "vulgar" paintings like these, but he had plenty of patrons and, like his students and Venice itself, he prospered. The invocation of piety and the invocation of the other-worldly, while luxuriating and enacting material privilege, reside uncomfortably together in the Veronese painting. Similarly, the sensitive lyric poet, usually insulated from poverty, "humbly" invokes his or her desire for spiritual revelation or pleads for Job-like justice, while under his or her work lies either ego-display or the seduction of the fashionable; as with the Veronese, the art's an uninterrogated reflection of the dominant culture. I don't impugn the motives of any single poet, but wish to underline that in a capitalist culture like ours, the resurgence of these poems is entangled with the contradictory and corrupting fashions of commerce and culture. When the artist receives recognition for his spiritualizing vision--for consciously or unconsciously mirroring and promoting this intensifying cultural need for privatism and escape--the temptation to maintain cultural approval, to repeat those strategies--to use Dickinson's diction--"auctions" that spirituality. Furthermore, all the contradictions of bourgeois life--the desire to be seen as a good citizen, existing simultaneously with the infantile wish for safety and protection--reside in many of these poems. These poems long to tame the danger of living in this world. Alison Croggon Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com