Our Savage Art Read online

  I can’t resist quoting some of the blurbs, which take a kinder view: an “uncanny mixture of peace, beauty, and cruelty. If you ask, ‘Which country is it?’ the answer is, ‘This country called earth’”; a “masterwork for the twenty-first century”; “wise beyond any possible taint of a false or assumed innocence”; “Carolyn Forche, my hero.” Even in this country called blurbdom, these have drunk too long at the bar. Forche wants to write a wisdom book, gilded by all the misery that is the world. I had complaints about her early poems, chiefly that they were sentimental; but I have more complaints about poems that aren’t poems, just do-it-yourself kits of New Age gnosticism, some assembly required, batteries not included.

  James Fenton

  James Fenton, the best poet of his generation in Britain, is still too little known in our country. He has spent long periods of his life not writing poetry at all, having been, at various times, a foreign correspondent in Europe and on the Pacific rim, a London theater critic, an explorer in Borneo, and the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He grew rich, it is said, writing the lyrics for Les Misérables, though his songs were never used (this suggests the importance in life of having a good agent). If Fenton wrote a novel on the back of cereal cartons or made a model of St. Paul’s from matchbooks, the results would be worth seeing; but, if a man does some work brilliantly and the rest half-heartedly (his Oxford lectures on poetry, for instance), shouldn’t he do only what he does well? The same question hovered over the late career of a greater poet, T. S. Eliot.

  The Love Bomb consists of two libretti and an oratorio, all commissioned, labored and fretted over, but only the last performed. Fenton has a witty introduction lamenting the librettist’s life (“Nobody would believe that the dog ate my homework. But that the dog ate my opera house—twice—might well be believed”). The Love Bomb starts with a terrible handicap: to enjoy a libretto properly, the reader ought to have a recording of the music—or, better, at an appointed hour a tenor, a soprano, and a man with a boom box should show up on your doorstep. On the bare page, words are stripped of much that would have made them interesting on stage—costume and voice, gesture, the emotive color of music, all the things that clothe the naked word. Without them the emperor is often, well, naked.

  In “The Love Bomb,” a young man tries to rescue his former girlfriend from a religious cult. The cult plots to recruit him, as well as—here’s the twist—his boyfriend. This began in a reading of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and soon enough you wish it had stayed there. Even the most awful opera plot can be rescued by words and music, but the words here aren’t doing a very good job:

  Don’t go down the towpath, Anna.

  Don’t go along the canal.

  That’s where all the accidents happen.

  Treat me to an accident. Be my pal.

  ’Cos one door opens on love

  And one door opens on death.

  And one door opens on the lift shaft.

  Turn the handle. Hold your breath.

  The Audenesque strain isn’t nearly strong enough. Where Auden was clever, Fenton is callow and cliché-ridden—it would be hard to sit through a performance without snickering. The first act is much worse than the two that follow; yet the whole is leaden, not because it has ideas (as Auden’s work so often did), but because it lacks them. Everything about colloquial language that Fenton has turned to advantage in his poetry has turned against him here.

  The second libretto tries to make an opera from Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the children’s book by Salman Rushdie. A storyteller loses his wife and, with her, his ability to tell tales—without his stories, soon he may lose his tongue. His son must journey to the Sea of Stories to set things right. (Rushdie was working some typically inventive if irritating turns on Eastern folktales.) It’s hard to imagine this as opera, and not just because the tale has such sentimental notions of storytelling—it’s a fantastic childlike adventure with Arabian Nights effects, including water genies and floating gardeners and talking hoopoes, as well as a kidnapped princess about to be sacrificed by the Prince of Darkness and Arch-Enemy of All Stories.

  The poetry is no better than before (it’s a pity Fenton didn’t take more delight in names like Snooty Buttoo, Prince Bolo, and the Shah of Blah). There’s a moment, late in this silly business, when W. S. Gilbert seems to come to the rescue. It’s only one song, and wouldn’t seem much if quoted; but, after eighty or so pages of chewing shoe-leather, it tastes like caviar. You realize then that Gilbert took sillier ideas and made genius of them.

  All that can be said for Fenton’s oratorio, “The Fall of Jerusalem,” is that it contains some passable light verse and some awful free verse: “God it was who gave us our minds, / Minds that scorn death, / Scorn to live in slavery / Under a Roman yoke.” Fenton was once able to handle both with dexterity and wit—he has written some of the most sensitive war poems of the last half century. In this long and wearying book, I felt his talent engaged by a single couplet: “Something better than those nefarious gymnastics / With coked-up blokes in various elastics.” Cole Porter and W. S. Gilbert and even Auden might have smiled over such lines, but there’s nothing else like them. Readers who want to know what this remarkable poet can do should read his early collection of poems, Children in Exile; his book of theater criticism, You Were; his essays on art, Leonardo’s Nephew; or his book of reportage, All the Wrong Places—and then send Fenton a postcard pleading with him to get back to work.

  Verse Chronicle

  Stouthearted Men

  George Oppen

  George Oppen was one of the minor literary figures of the thirties. Friend of Pound, employer of Zukofsky, collaborator with Williams and Reznikoff, an animating spirit of the objectivist movement, he was a young man with ideals and a little money who with more money or fewer ideals might have become as useful as James Laughlin. In 1935 Oppen joined the Communist Party, concealing his bourgeois past as a poet (this might have told him something about the party, if Stalin’s purges did not). For the next twenty years or more, Oppen swore off poetry; when not training for party leadership, he organized the poor, fomented strikes, and protested against monopolies, though the aim of any union is to exploit a monopoly of labor. During World War II, he was wounded while serving in an antitank unit in Europe. After the war he built furniture, attended art school in Mexico on the GI Bill, and added to his swollen FBI file.

  In the late fifties, Oppen began writing again, in the starved, cruelly compressed style abandoned decades before. This resurrection of a poet so long out of touch, and even out of date, proved irresistible to young writers influenced by William Carlos Williams. The minor figure of the thirties became a minor figure of the sixties. Before the decade was over, he had won the Pulitzer Prize.

  Oppen’s spareness was like that of a Zen master with a migraine:

  Never to forget her naked eyes

  Beautiful and brave

  Her naked eyes

  Turn inward

  Feminine light

  The unimagined

  Feminine light

  Feminine ardor

  Paring away his poems until they were nearly skeletons, he was often left with just a few ribs and some knucklebones. His critics, who have frequently been his disciples, have made high claims for Oppen’s minimalism, which he pursued more aggressively than Williams, though it could seem pinched and hectoring, a telegram from Moscow instructing you that everything you thought yesterday is wrong. (When Oppen confused his poetry with his politics, the results were disastrous.) In Pound or Williams, you see details refined until they glow with the spectral light of imagism; but in Oppen you seem to get farther, down to the sludge at the bottom of the glass.

  Oppen’s poems are plain as a brown paper bag, slightly depressing, maudlin about people in a thirties way (which was also a sixties way), often tone-deaf to the virtues of language (that is his virtue, say his critics).

  We want to say

  “Common sense”

  And can
not. We stand on

  That denial

  Of death that paved the cities,

  Paved the cities

  Generation

  For generation and the pavement

  Is filthy as the corridors

  Of the police.

  The world of Oppen’s poems has removed all that might qualify or enrich it, all that might make it more various than some shopworn Platonic form. Michelangelo chiseled away the marble until he freed the figure—but what made him a genius was knowing when he’d reached the figure. In other words, he knew when to stop.

  Oppen’s ambition often seems in excess of the words he left behind. At best his sketchy, expressionist method pays homage to the shudders and hesitations of thought; but this is fiendishly difficult to do well—otherwise H.D. and Edith Sitwell would be geniuses (the attempt to compare Oppen to Paul Celan is ludicrous). Oppen lived for pretentious observation and barnyard wisdom—” How much of the earth’s / Crust has lived / The seed’s violence!” His reviewers have used phrases like “stunning, elliptical,” “one of the twentieth century’s most dazzling makers of lines,” “verse that sparkles like broken glass.” Such opinions seem quaint as antimacassars.

  Oppen offered an alternative to bland academic verse, as well as to the garrulous and self-absorbed Beats (the disorganized long essay included in this edition of Selected Poems comments drily on the difference), though his minimalism couldn’t conceal how desolately inward his poems became, like clippings from a freshman philosophy textbook or the empty thoughts of mannequins. You can’t wholly dislike a poet whose main villains are Romans and shoppers; but, when a poet writing of poetry invokes Gethsemane, you wonder if his mind doesn’t turn to betrayal a little too easily. How much more telling about the lives of the poor are the photographs of Helen Levitt or Walker Evans. You wonder what Oppen would have written about that antitank company, but the lines he devoted to the war were gauzy and general.

  This poet stopped writing for reasons as noble and laughable as Laura Riding’s. Once a man has quit poetry to show class solidarity or his despair at the tragedy that is the world, how does he start again without seeming a hypocrite? Yet Oppen ground on at his minor craft until the dry rot set in, a man at odds with his art, which ought to have benefited the art more than it did (art often thrives on contraries or arrested impulse). His poems wanted to be a poem, which wanted to be a line, which wanted to be a word, which at last wanted to be just a single letter, perhaps “I” or “O!”

  Franz Wright

  Americans are suckers for self-pity—they order their mawkishness by the yard. We’re still at heart a Puritan country: since we can’t throw sinners in the stocks any more (unless it’s done on prime time), we’ll settle for the humiliating public apology followed by the spectacular relapse. Franz Wright’s poems may be rancid and repetitive, but he’s perfected a confessional tone angry and apologetic at once. Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize, is the latest installment of this fragile, self-obsessed author’s stony path to grace.

  Most of Wright’s poems are nasty, brutish, and short—it’s an old joke, but Wright really is Hobbesian man, consoling himself with secondhand religious formulae and the salve of salvation:

  Oh build a special city

  for everyone who wishes

  to die, where

  they might help one another out

  and never feel ashamed

  maybe make a friend,

  etc.

  Maybe make a friend! (This is how Mr. Rogers would talk, if he were an ex-junkie.) Yet for all the tabloid-style anguish, Wright’s minimalism is deft and effective, with the emotional pressure of Louise Gluck. These damaged and tormented poets (if they were to collaborate on Passive-Aggression for Dummies, I’d hardly be surprised) have refined the poetic act into short prosaic sentences, brimful with resentment, seething with a rage for which words are inadequate. Behind every poem stands an entourage of nurses, shrinks, and self-help counselors.

  Like few other poets in our pulse-taking age, Wright has solved the problem of how to reclaim the confessions of Lowell and Plath without falling victim to the tableaux vivants of a Sharon Olds (whose poems look, next to Wright’s austerity, like the wildest fin de siecle dandyism). The pain is so raw, it’s like watching documentary footage; but, if you make a competition of suffering by having nails driven through your wrists, one day someone will tear out his own tongue, pluck out his eyeballs, and call it art. Wright has a gift for sneered gratitude, for invoking God with the wheedling piety of a three-time loser before a parole board:

  Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the

  sane; thank You for letting me know what this is

  like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening

  blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without

  terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly

  lost

  with this love

  Wright clings to his newfound religion the way men cling to the raft in Gericault’s “The Wreck of the Medusa.” He’s so self-abasing, he reminds us that con artists are usually conning themselves along with everyone else. I see why some poets like his work—he’s a sad-sack punk, a fifty-year-old who pisses and moans like a depressive teenager. Hell, you want to adopt him.

  When Wright offers the crude, unprocessed sewage of suffering, it’s nasty stuff. Yet this poet is surprisingly vague about the specifics of his torment (most of his poems are shouts and curses in the dark). He was cruelly affected by the divorce of his parents, though perhaps after forty years a statute of limitations should be invoked. His father was the poet James Wright, which seems to make the son twice damned—his poems whisper about an abandoned son of his own and hint repeatedly at attempted suicide. Just when I decide to dislike him for his truculent theatrics, his prima-donna moroseness (when have we had a poet more devoted to Our Lady of the Eternal Victim?), he’ll write something so ruefully funny it’s hard not to forgive him: “Now she is going to put on some / nice cut-your-wrists music” or “What an evil potato goes through / we can never know, but / I’m beginning to resemble one.” (And it’s true—he does resemble one.) We need a modern Beddoes, and I wish Wright would apply for the job.

  A few such lines are not enough, however, and soon he’s back to the drudgery of self-loathing. Self-loathing is a meager thing for a poet to offer as his only medium, even if here and there he’s able to turn his brutishness to account. “The Only Animal,” the most accomplished poem in the book, collapses into the same kitschy sanctimoniousness that puts nodding Jesus dolls on car dashboards. Wright’s religious angst, just the right stuff for our shallow, shopping-mall culture, makes his poems the Hallmark cards of the damned.

  Tony Hoagland

  You meet a lot of Tony Hoagland’s friends in Tony Hoagland’s poems. What Narcissism Means to Me names more names than you can shake a stick at—there’s Alex and Greg and Boz and Rus, Susan and Margaret, Kath and Peter and Mary, Neal and Sylvia and Ann and Ethan, Carla and Jerry and Peter, and these just in the first half-dozen poems (it would be easier if they were all named George, like George Foreman’s sons). Frank O’Hara used to give his friends walk-on roles, and many a young poet now stuffs his acknowledgments with what seems to be his entire address book. Hoagland’s friends merely slouch around the house making smart remarks, which their Boswell dutifully records.

  Alex said, I wish they made a shooting gallery

  using people like that.

  Greg said, That woman has a Ph.D. in Face.

  Then we saw a preview for a movie

  about a movie star who is

  having a movie made about her,

  and Boz said, This country is getting stupider every year.

  Then Greg said that things were better in the sixties

  and Rus said that Harold Bloom said

  that Nietzsche said Nostalgia

  is the blank check issued to a weak mind,


  and Greg said …

  But enough! This is all very agreeable, as far as it goes—the lines suggest that Americans have become couch potatoes who get their Nietzsche second- or thirdhand. Yet when poem succeeds poem of these nattering chums, you realize how little you care about them—if the poet stopped hanging out with them, he might have something more interesting to write about. They come and go with all the anonymity of Eliot’s women talking of Michelangelo—except, four generations later, they’re no longer talking of Michelangelo.

  It’s no secret that America is overrun with “RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes,” that we have supersized our egos with our appetites—Hoagland isn’t improving here on the wit and wisdom of Thorstein Veblen. What’s peculiar is that the poet has chosen, not to analyze the condition, but to embody it; and his poems are full of droll banalities—they reduce everything to the lowest common denominator and smirk about it. If Dante’s Inferno were populated by Hoagland’s buddies, they’d look around and not be able to think of a single complaint.

  O’Hara wrote his I-do-this, I-do-that poems half a century ago. These days they seem, most of them, pretty trivial; but Hoagland aspires to go him one better, or one worse. The poems here are cozy but forgettable, no harder to swallow than a dose of aspirin. If the younger poet ever feels any unease—and he does, sometimes, for a minute or two—it’s best to assuage it with a wisecrack and drift back to that waking dream we call television (he spends a lot of time watching television and wants the privilege of whining about it).

  How did I come to believe in a government called Tony Hoagland?