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