Our Savage Art Page 2

  Coleridge’s own career gives the lie to his statement; but a critic is often a snarler when young. By the time he turns thirty, someone has usually taken him aside and explained the way things work in the land of Cockaigne that is poetry; and soon he has muffled his barks and muzzled his bites. In most arts, indeed, there is a guild rule against writing criticism. One looks in vain for the ballet reviews of Twyla Tharp and the film reviews of Angelina Jolie. In poetry, as in few other arts (fiction is a partial exception), the critics are the artists themselves—even though many poets, and wise poets they are, have sworn an oath of omertà never to breathe a word of criticism against a fellow of the guild.

  When R. P. Blackmur called criticism the “formal discourse of an amateur,” he flattered those of us who like the amateurishness of criticism, the implied distrust of professionals, even if a professional is sometimes just an amateur who has hung around too long. (Still, professional critic ought to be an oxymoron, like military intelligence or friendly fire). Poets grumble that there are too many critics, while editors complain all the time that there aren’t enough of them, that if only a few pale young poets could be convinced to write criticism the world of poetry would be a better place. Should we have camps for critics, then, the way we have music camps? (I’m sure some wit will think I mean prison camps.) Should a rising generation of critics sit at the feet of aging veterans, with their brutal scars and war stories? Is criticism something to be encouraged at all?

  Part of me says we should leave things as they are, though that unhappily implies that once upon a time someone left things as they were so they could become things as they are now—and who is satisfied with the way criticism is now? Perhaps criticism ought to remain a private vice, unmentioned in polite company, quite possibly illegal in Georgia, and written for reasons obscure, because the critic can’t help but write it. I turned to criticism myself, not out of messianic instinct or the will to martyrdom, but out of the terrible knowledge that I was a better reader when I read for hire, that I read more intently when driven by necessity. I teach poetry for the same reasons—I don’t really know a poem until I scribble all over it.

  I started writing book reviews thirty years ago, at the end of the great age of newspaper criticism. Poetry was still covered in major papers and even in quite a few smaller ones. My first book of poetry, published in the early eighties, was reviewed in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Worcester Sunday Telegram, and—in a review spread over half a page, with a large photograph of the long-haired, pasty-faced poet—Winston-Salem Journal. The list reads like an elegy; today a book of poetry reviewed in one or two papers is fortunate. My students, when they take up criticism, publish their reviews on the Web, which is no doubt the future. It’s like the earlier swashbuckling era of newspaper publishing (in 1876 the tiny village of Plattsmouth, Nebraska, had three newspapers, one of them in German; Fargo, a city of only ten thousand in 1883, boasted eight). The problem with the Web is that everyone and his sister has a poetry blog, and you need a critic to tell you which critics to read.

  I won’t presume to ask what the benefits of criticism are for the reader, though there may be few beyond being provoked to sympathy or Schadenfreude. Devoted readers often feel, not that criticism drives them toward reading books, but that it drives them away. For every review that has led me to pick up a book, a hundred have convinced me not to bother—and, worse, I’ve been grateful. Even glowing reviews sooner or later end up quoting from a poem or two, presumably something that glows; the curious thing is, the quotes so rarely deserve the praise. Being a critic has meant, for more years than I care to count, reading a hundred books of new poetry a year and leafing through the pages of at least twice that number. When poetry books arrive at my door, they come singly like spies or in droves like petitioners. I look at them as I can, somewhat lazily and haphazardly, and sometimes after ten or twenty pages I put one down with a sigh and turn to another—there are so many waiting and so few I can review. In truth, if a poet doesn’t catch your eye in twenty pages, he probably never will. Life is too short, and poetry books, however short, are too many.

  What are the benefits of criticism for the critic? (The critic must derive some benefit from his vice.) First, criticism has forced me to read books I would otherwise have ignored. I’ve read far more contemporary poetry than most people and far more than I would have, left to my own devices. I’ve probably read more dreary and ordinary books of verse than is healthy; and I have learned more, speaking selfishly, speaking artistically, reading the sermons of John Donne. Yet, on rare occasions, I’ve felt like Balboa staring out across an unknown sea or Herschel seeing Uranus swim before his telescope (or the Japanese marine biologists who recently saw a living giant squid): I’ve found a book that reminds me, not just why I write criticism, but why I write poetry. The second benefit of criticism is that it has taught me, more often than I care to admit, how to think about this minor art.

  There are often subsidiary comedies to amuse the critic as he works. I’ve been threatened by a few poets and told by two newspapers never to darken their doorways again. Years ago the editor of Poetry, rejecting a review he had commissioned, warned me never to publish it, because it would harm my reputation. I published it elsewhere, of course; but during his tenure the magazine never asked for another review. A well-known journal recently asked me to review any poet I chose, as long as I chose only a poet I liked. A poet I’d ever whispered a critical word against—no, that would never do. Why? Because I might be prejudiced against him.

  When Plato banished the poets from his Republic, did he banish poetry critics, too? As he was himself a poetry critic in a big way, he’d have been forced to banish himself. His idea of utopia must have been, instead, a place where all the poetry critics stood inside the walls and all the poets outside. (Even the poets might have appreciated that.) Let us imagine a different world, the opposite of the Republic. Let us imagine a world where poetry critics are forbidden. Bad poets would continue to publish and be read, good ones to publish and be ignored, and occasionally vice versa. In that utopia without critics, authors would go about comfortable in the rich cloth of their illusions. I’m sure poets would think that a very good thing, for who does not like to be alone with his illusions, except those who want everyone else to share them?

  Is there a place, then, for criticism? A critic looking for a classical hero usually thinks, all too flatteringly, of Hercules cleaning the Augean stables. I have cleaned a few stables in my time, but I’ve never felt like Hercules. Let me propose a different model. Diogenes, famed for his austerity, lived for a time in a terra-cotta tub in the Athens marketplace. (“What can I do for you?” asked Alexander, having come a distance to see this unusual philosopher, something dictators and presidents do all too rarely these days. Diogenes looked at him and said, “You can get the hell out of my light.”) In his frugality, the cynic reduced his possessions one by one, until he owned only the cloak he wore, a pouch, and a drinking bowl. One day he saw a boy drinking from a stream with his hands, and threw away the bowl. Diogenes here is the reader. The bowl is criticism. And the water … the water is poetry.

  “For I am nothing, if not critical,” said Iago, the patron saint of modern critics. Every now and then, I try to throw away my bowl and stop writing criticism (then I can drink the pure waters of poetry from my bare hands). But something happens, like that publisher’s letter, and I’m dragged back again. There are even now publishers and readers and even poets who think poetry far too obscure, who think poetry ought to be so simple it hardly needs to be read at all. I won’t castigate the poets who exemplify this age of prose. Their publishers say such poets open the door to poetry; but readers who go through that door don’t want poetry any less wooden than the door itself.

  The best poetry has often been difficult, has often been so obscure readers have fought passionately over it. The King James Bible comes closer to poetry than faith u
sually dares: I Corinthians used to say, “For now we see through a glass, darkly,” and then along came someone to improve it. Until a century ago, a mirror was called a glass, so the meaning is not as obscure as it seems, though the Jacobeans were already updating their source—the literal meaning of the Greek is to see one’s face in the haze of a bronze mirror (Corinth specialized in bronze mirrors). One recent translation reads, instead, “For we see now through a dim window obscurely,” which is far from the literal sense and lousy prose as well. (What the hell is a “dim window”?) In bowing to the prose literacies of our day, the translators have scrubbed out the rhythm and the poetry, leaving little for the ear and less for the eye. If they’d wanted to translate I Corinthians into modern English, they should have said, “For now we see ourselves as in a tinted windshield.”

  For two centuries, well-meaning vandals have been trying to dumb down Shakespeare, wanting to make him common enough for the common reader, in the doltish belief that, introduced to poetry this way, the common reader will turn to the original. Yet the reader almost never does. He’s satisfied with a poor simulacrum of poetry, never realizing that Shakespeare without the poetry isn’t Shakespeare at all. The beauty of poetry is in the difficulty, in the refusal of the words to make the plain sense immediately plain, in the dark magic and profound mistrust of words themselves. Does it surprise anyone that there is a Web site, Shakespeare Online, that translates the Bard’s sonnets into modern English? Or that “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” the opening of sonnet 29, is rendered, “When I’ve run out of luck and people look down on me”?

  Surely we read poetry because it gives us a sense of the depths of language, meaning nudging meaning, then darting away, down to the unfathomed and muddy bottom. Critics, generations of critics, have devoted themselves to revealing how those words work, to showing that each sense depends on other senses. Not every poem has to be as devious and shimmering as Shakespeare (there is room for plain speaking, too); but the best poetry depends on the subtlety and suggestiveness of its language. If we demand that poetry be so plain that plain readers can drink it the whole plain day, we will have lost whatever makes poetry poetry. (This plainest of plain poetry often goes, “Once upon a time, blah, blah, blah … ha! ha! ha!”) It’s curious that complex or difficult poets of the previous generation, Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur, are still praised for the elegance and intransigence of their words, while young poets are told, in not so many words, that subtlety is old fashioned.

  It is notoriously difficult to define poetry, because any definition leaves out something (it’s almost a definition of definition that it leaves something out); but I like Michael Oakeshott’s idea that the poet “does one thing only, he imagines poetically.” And the critic? The critic is someone who imagines critically, for what is good about good criticism is that it imagines with the same sympathies as the poet—and then, of course, decides whether he is worth a damn. If critics, all of them, threw away their bowls, it might be a very good thing—for the critics, that is. (Artists are said to suffer for their art, but I don’t recall anyone saying a critic ought to suffer for his criticism—no one except the poets he criticizes.) If it is too much to believe that criticism can alter the taste of the age, a critic may at least whisper to the future that not everyone agreed with the taste of the age.

  The critic, if he is to be a critic, must risk being wrong, must say what seems right to him, though it makes him a laughingstock for generations afterward. A critic who does his job must be a good hater if he’s to be a good lover, because if he likes everything he reads he likes nothing well enough—and the critic lives for the moment when he discovers a book so rare his first instinct is to cast such a pearl before readers (some of whom will be swine who ignore it; others, the real readers, simply people with a taste for pearls). The daily job of the critic, what he does in the meanwhile, is to explore the difficulty of poetry, not for other readers, but for himself, because who is the critic critical for, if not himself? This may seem to make a minor craft more a moral virtue than a moral failing; but a critic needs no deeper philosophy or impulse than that criticism is what he does—it is, in Blackmur’s phrase, his “job of work.” When Diogenes threw away his bowl, in other words, he made a mistake.

  Verse Chronicle

  Out on the Lawn

  Billy Collins

  I should have reviewed Billy Collins’s Nine Horses months ago, but I couldn’t stand the excitement. Collins is that rarity, a poet with popular appeal, easy to read as a billboard, genial as a Sunday golfer, and not so awful you want to cut your throat after reading him. Many readers complain that poetry is difficult to understand, the way they grumble when an opera is sung in Italian or resent a Czech film with subtitles. Art isn’t supposed to be such hard work, is it? Billy Collins writes poetry for those people, and they appreciate it.

  Collins specializes in goofy, slightly offbeat subjects. If you want a poem about mice who play with matches, or about that song incessantly repeating in your head, or about feeling sorry for Whistler’s mother, he’s your man. Angst is not a word he’s learned, or Weltschmerz (he may have learned Schadenfreude, but he’s forgotten it). What he loves is the cheesy sentiment of the everyday: “I peered in at the lobsters // lying on the bottom of an illuminated / tank which was filled to the brim / with their copious tears.” To the brim! Or worse, if anything could be worse than weeping lobsters, he loves everything—he’s got a heart big as all outdoors:

  This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,

  I fell in love with a wren

  and later in the day with a mouse

  the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

  In the shadows of an autumn evening,

  I fell for a seamstress

  still at her machine in the tailor’s window,

  and later for a bowl of broth,

  steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

  You want to stop him before he becomes a public hazard. It’s tough to read a poet who has overdosed on some mood elevator, who is every goddamned minute “cockeyed with gratitude.”

  Collins has been called a philistine; but you can read a lot of contemporary poetry without coming across references to William Carlos Williams, Coventry Patmore, Walter Pater, or Clarissa—they’re all in Collins, and more. He’s something worse, a poet who doesn’t respect his art enough to take it seriously. Once or twice an image makes you stop: a dead groundhog, say, like “a small Roman citizen, / with his prosperous belly, // his faint smile, / and his one stiff forearm raised / as if he were still alive, still hailing Caesar.” Then it’s back to a kind of NPR commentary on contemporary mores, like the use of trompe l’oeil in your kitchen. Collins makes cheap art for the masses, like posters of a Monet. Once you’ve seen a real Monet, posters can’t compare.

  The best poem here is about the afterlife. The skies there are sulphurous, the dead souls crowded into boats, bent over writing tablets, under the gaze of hellish boatmen. What are the dead working on? Poetry assignments.

  how could anyone have guessed

  that as soon as we arrived

  we would be asked to describe this place

  and to include as much detail as possible—

  not just the water, he insists,

  rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,

  not simply the shackles, but the rusty,

  iron, ankle-shredding shackles—

  and that our next assignment would be

  to jot down, off the tops of our heads,

  our thoughts and feelings about being dead.

  In Collins’s last book, the best poem was also about a poetry assignment—why can he be hilarious about them and merely droll about everything else?

  Collins never gets worked up over things—even faced with death, he makes winsome jokes, the kind morticians tell at undertaking conventions. He’s the Caspar Milquetoast of contemporary poetry, never a word used in earnest, never a
memorable phrase. The moral revelation toward which his poems saunter always seems to be “See? I’m human, too.” I read this as not joy but contempt. If such poems look embarrassing now, what are they going to look like in twenty years?

  Yet readers adore Billy Collins, and it feels almost un-American not to like him. Try to explain to his readers what “The Steeple-Jack” or “The River Merchant’s Wife” or “The Snow Man” is up to, and they’ll look at you as if you’d asked them to hand-pump a ship through the locks of the Panama Canal. Most contemporary poetry isn’t any more difficult to understand than Collins—it’s written in prose, good oaken American prose, and then chopped into lines. Perhaps it’s self-absorbed, downbeat, even self-pitying, where Collins every morning throws open the drapes to greet the dawn, taking a deep breath of good suburban air. (You can imagine him hosting a health and fitness show.) If once in a coon’s age there’s a dark cloud on the horizon, if he gets a trifle gloomy or down in the mouth, then, well, he’s rueful with a twinkle, damn it, the way a poet ought to be.