On sentimentality

The Pleiades symposium, led by Joy Katz, on "sentimentality" (PDF of the forum here) occasions a reprieve of the following various reflections on the subject from an earlier post on this blog.

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- from Oscar Wilde,"The Critic as Artist":

the real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion. He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, 'I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines,' but, realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is to fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete. From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has 'nothing to say.' But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he has no new message, that he can do beautiful work. He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

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Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world (click link for details).

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Because of the growth of entropy, we have a very different epistemic access to the past than to the future. In retrodicting the past, we have recourse to “memories” and “records,” which we can take as mostly-reliable indicators of events that actually happened. But when it comes to the future, the best we can do is extrapolate, without nearly the reliability that we have in reconstructing the past... -- via 3 Quarks Daily

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Even for the one — before all for the one — for whom the encounter with the poem belongs to the quotidian and self-evident, this encounter has to begin with the darkness of the self-evident, [that which] makes every encounter with a stranger strange.: “Camarado, this is no book, who touches this, touches a human.”

Only from this touch — which is not a “making contact” — comes the way to intimacy. Aisthesis is not enough here, man is more than his sensorium. It is a question of conversation, as it is a question of language: (noesis does not suffice; it is a question of the angle of inclination under which one came together; it is a question of fate, as is the case with every real encounter, of the Here and Now, this place and this hour. -- Paul Celan, via Pierre Joris

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Our reaction against the sentimentality embodied in Victorian and post-Victorian writing was so resolute writers came to believe that the further from sentimentality we got, the truer the art. That was a mistake. -- Richard Hugo

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Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. -- G. K. Chesterton

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It is therefore plain that the culture of transgression achieves nothing save the loss that it revels in: the loss of beauty as a value and a goal. But why is beauty a value? It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction. That is the message of such early modernists as Eliot, Barber, and Stevens, and it is a message that we need to listen to.

To mount a full riposte to the habit of desecration, we need to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized. This is no easy task. If we look at the true apostles of beauty in our time—I think of composers like Henri Dutilleux and Olivier Messiaen, of poets like Derek Walcott and Charles Tomlinson, of prose writers like Italo Calvino and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—we are immediately struck by the immense hard work, the studious isolation, and the attention to detail that characterizes their craft. In art, beauty has to be won, but the work becomes harder as the sheer noise of desecration—amplified now by the Internet—drowns out the quiet voices murmuring in the heart of things.

One response is to look for beauty in its other and more everyday forms—the beauty of settled streets and cheerful faces, of natural objects and genial landscapes. It is possible to throw dirt on these things, too, and it is the mark of a second-rate artist to take such a path to our attention—the via negativa of desecration. But it is also possible to return to ordinary things in the spirit of Wallace Stevens and Samuel Barber—to show that we are at home with them and that they magnify and vindicate our life. Such is the overgrown path that the early modernists once cleared for us—the via positiva of beauty. There is no reason yet to think that we must abandon it. -- Roger Scruton on "Beauty"

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And here's a link to Kevin Prufer on "Sentimentality & Complexity."

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FINE PRINT RE ASISTHESIS (Via Preceptaustin):

Cf. Philippians 1:9 in the New Testament:
kai touto proseuchomai, hina e agape humon eti mallon kai mallon perisseue en epignosei kai pase aisthesei
(And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment) aisthesis from aisthánomai = to apprehend by the senses, to perceive and in NT speaks primarily of spiritual perception; our English = aesthetic; the root verb is aio = to perceive) refers to the capacity to understand referring not so much to an intellectual acuteness but to a moral sensitiveness. It thus speaks of moral perception, insight, and the practical application of knowledge--the deep knowledge Paul had already mentioned. Aisthesis therefore is more of an immediate knowledge than that arrived at by reasoning. It describes the capacity to perceive clearly and hence to understand the real nature of something. It is the capacity to discern and therefore understand what is not readily comprehensible. It refers to a moral action of recognizing distinctions and making a decision about behavior.

It is interesting to note that the meaning of aisthesis is almost the opposite of the English word “aesthetic” which is derived from the Greek word. Aesthetic speaks of one who is appreciative of, responsive to, or zealous about the beautiful. It has largely to do with personal taste and preference. Paul calls believers to put aside personal tastes and preferences and to focus instead on achieving mature insight and understanding.

The English dictionary states that discernment is the power to see what is not evident to the average mind and stresses accuracy as in reading character or motives.

What Do Poets Laureate Do?

What, exactly, does a U.S. Poet Laureate do? 

You may think you know, but the real answer may surprise some folks. Fortunately, the Library of Congress has decided to clear up all the confusion in time for the title's current holder, Philip Levine (pictured above looking quite certain of his duties), to give his inaugural reading.

Howard Nemerov, we're told, was only half joking in 1963 when he wrote, “The Consultant in Poetry is a very busy man, chiefly because he spends so much time talking with people who want to know what the Consultant in Poetry does.”

And this advice was given to Allen Tate:

He should be warned that some of the questions referred to his attention will be trifling. They will emanate from school girls as well as from scholars, from poetry “groups”, and women’s clubs, and program makers, and catch-penny anthologists, and talent testers, and moon-struck (perhaps moon-stricken) novices too ponderous to be raised by Pegasus. Such work is part of the job; but it can be rather instructive and amusing.

I'll soon have the chance to ask both Levine and his UK counterpart, Carol Ann Duffy, more about what Poets Laureate do; here's your change to provide me with your own questions.  I've already received a few from Anthony Madrid, viz -

* What poet, living or dead, are you devoted to, but nobody would guess from reading your work?

* Name a poem that's crap, but you love, anyway.

From Jim Sitar, one for Levine in particular:

*What is WORK?

Keep 'em coming!

Neglectorino or Underratino?

To say that a writer is neglected is not the same as saying that he is underrated, though the evidence for the assertion is the same in both cases, namely that he is not read. An underrated writer suffers from current fashions in taste, and the critic who would promote him must first change the fashion; a neglected writer suffers merely from public ignorance, and, to rescue him from neglect, it should be sufficient to make his work available to the public and draw attention to its existence. 

-- W.H. Auden

Pictured: - inos.

Sources we tide from

Like the others I attached no particular value to the idea of a group, much less a school.

. . .

We were all very much concerned with poetic form, and form not merely as texture, but as the shape that makes a poem possible to grasp.  (Would we all have thought that a satisfactory way to put it?)  'Objectivist' meant, not an objective viewpoint, but to objectify the poem, to make the poem an object.  Meant form.  Louis' essay discussed sincerity on the one hand and objectification on the other.  And sincerity - very brilliantly, it seems to me - as the epic quality.

Tradition?  I don't remember discussing it.  But who would write poetry if a poem had never been written?  Beyond that, the members of this group had a very strong sense of their own histories.  Rezi's awareness of the Jewish past, Williams' sense of America and its roots, Louis' relation to Bach and other 'sources we tide from,' -----  I am sort of short-winded historically, but not blind.  I remember my father and grandfather: I think of my daughter.  I'm aware that the subways are old (did you notice) and that the Queen Mary is fairly new.  The ground seems very old to me.  I write about nothing else.  But I thought of Eliot as a sort of enemy at the time; I don't remember discussing 'tradition.'  If we had, Williams would have spoken as in The American Grain, Louis might have used the word in a more classic sense, Rezi might have thought we were all talking about the day before yesterday.

And I would have been.  I was twenty-four.

-- George Oppen, letter to Mary Ellen Solt about the Objectivists, February 15, 1961

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N.B. Cf. this piece, re W.C.W. and "theories, schools, and doctrines..."

Not with a bang but a whisper

- from "The Book From Which Our Literature Springs," by Robert Pogue Harrison in the New York Review of Books, February 9, 2012:

If Bloom is right that "a test for great poetry and prose is an aura of inevitability in the phrasing," then the King James Bible passes that test brilliantly, thanks in part to the way it ends most of its verses with emphatic metrical stresses or resounding words, be they nouns, verbs, pronouns, or other parts of speech.  Here are a few samples that I choose more or less at random from Yahweh's series of rhetorical questions to Job in chapters 38 and 39 of the Book of Job:

Who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? (38:8)

Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place? (38:12)

Who provideth for the raven his food? when his young ones cry unto God, they wander for lack of meat. (38:41)

Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve? (39:1)

Canst thou number the months that they fulfill? or knowest thou the time when they bring forth? (39:2)

Compared to the strong lineaments of verses such as these, most of the poetry written in English today shows precious little "inevitability" in its phrasing.  Some of the factors that have contributed to the drastic decline of the art of bringing phrases to closure are clear enough.  They include the wholesale de-formalization of poetry in our time and the consequent premium placed on enjambment; our dogmatic insistence on open-endedness and the bland tones of everyday language; our predilection for understatement and uneasiness about rhetorical display; our aversion to affirmation and our cult of the whisper.

However: see this "Poetry Pairing," featuring Thomas Sayers Ellis, who is quoted therein as saying, “I don’t think the end of the word is more important than the beginning of the word. I don’t think the end of the line is more important than the beginning of the line.”

Pictured: Job Mocked by his Wife, Georges de la Tour

Rules for Poetry Radicals

(with apologies to Saul Alinsky)

Rule #1: Poetry is not only what you have, but what people from other schools of poetry think you have.

Rule #2. Never go outside the expertise of your own poetry people.

Rule #3. Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of your poetry enemies. Look for ways to increase their insecurity, anxiety, and uncertainty, e.g., on blogs, Facebook, Twitter.

Rule #4. Make your poetry enemies live up to their own book of rules. You can score points over them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than all that glisters can possibly be gold.

Rule #5. Ridicule is a poetry blogger's or comment box inhabitant’s most potent weapon.

Rule #6. A good style is one that your own poetry people enjoy.

Rule #7. A poetry horse that you flog too long becomes a dead poetry horse.

Rule #8. Keep writing poems.  Never let them think you've quit like, say, Empson or Chatterton.

Rule #9. The internet is usually more terrifying than poetry itself.

Rule #10. If you dislike a kind of poetry long enough, it will push through and become a kind of poetry you grudgingly admire... or even like a whole bunch.

Rule #11. The price of a negative review is a constructive alternative.  Sorry.

Rule #12. Pick your poetry target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it. One acts decisively only in the conviction that posterity is on one's side - and that the dustbin of poetry history awaits the other side.

Don't read the other fellows...

From Edward Mendelson's introduction to Volume IV, Prose, 1956-1962 by W.H. Auden:

Auden waited until halfway through his [first Oxford] lecture before he claimed any merit for poets and critics, and when he did so, he claimed mostly the virtues of modesty. "Whatever his defects, a poet at least thinks a poem more important than anything which can be said about it;" furthermore, when reading a poem by another poet, "he would rather it were good than bad," and "the last thing he wants is that it should be like one of his own."  A poet's general statements about poetry are less likely to be valuable than his appreciations of individual poems, but they may be illuminating about the poet who makes them:

I am always interested in hearing what a poet has to say about the nature of poetry, though I do not take it too seriously.  As objective statements his definitions are never accurate, never complete and always one-sided.  Not one would stand up under a rigorous analysis.  In unkind moments one is almost tempted to think that all they are really saying is: "Read me.  Don't read the other fellows."  But taken as critical admonitions addressed by his [internal] Censor to the poet himself, there is generally something to be learned from them.

You can read Auden's entertaining essay on Sydney Smith from this book here, thanks to the publisher. Some of Auden's aphorisms on writing are here.

Soon you'll have all of New York clamoring for your work!

Charles Bernstein famously has asked whether art criticism is fifty years behind poetry, concluding that "indeed, pernicious is the cliché that poetry is fifty years behind visual art." 

Yet in a recent review of Alice Goldfarb Marquis's The Pop Revolution, Adam Bresnick says this:

What Pop [Art] had done, to the annoyance of the proponents of Modernism, was to undo the essential European distinction between high and low art.  Whereas for the Romantic tradition, of which Abstract Expressionism is a late variant, works of art were artifacts supposedly in touch with the sublime, Pop artists understood art in an anthropological and commercial sense, as an activity more or less like any other.  Marquis quotes Dave Hickey, who suggests that the real blasphemy of the Pop artists "derives from the crisp analogy they draw between our appetite for 'fine art' and our appetite for food, sex, and glamour."  To paraphrase [Jasper] Johns, Pop artists took objects from daily experience, did something to them, and then did something else to them.

[...]

In the new world of image reproduction, words no longer carried their former prestige, and the great intellectual authorities of yesteryear could no longer pretend to control the discussion of art.

Now, can we not, for the sake of discussion, replace in this quotation "Pop," that half-century-old phenomenon, with "contemporary American poetry?"

If so, what explains our belatedness?

Poetry and the Joy of Community: The Four Monologues Project

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