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Martin Lammon The End of the Age of Arrogance |
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Twenty-five years ago, I started
college. Back then, for the first time in my life, I met real live poets. Tomas
O’Leary was first. Later came Jon Silkin, Howard Nemerov, Allen Mandelbaum, Philip Schultz, and Robert Bly. I remember writing to Nemerov,
asking for a poem that I could publish in our college literary journal. A few
weeks later, I received a generous letter with the poem I’d asked for, “Elegy,”
a sweet sonnet for Nemerov’s recently dead cat. The
poem ended: …Now
what avails Your caterwauling in that sightless see? If
Death should stroke thee, Thompson, scratch Him for me. Around that same time, I was escorting Philip Schultz on
campus. He told me that he hadn’t noticed any signs for his reading, and that
his books were not for sale. He told me that he didn’t understand why a
school’s faculty would schedule a reading but not promote the poet they had
invited. I didn’t tell him about the time Allen Mandelbaum
was visiting, and I asked one of my teachers if he planned to attend the
reading. “I don’t bother with poets,” he said, “until after they’re dead.” Instead, I told Schultz that I
was sorry. I told myself that, if I ever invited writers to my campus, I’d
try to show them a little more courtesy than my teachers had. * At our annual Arts &
Letters Festival last spring, Robert Bly and I
reminisced about our first meeting at my little college in Bly
recalled that he started his journal The Fifties (later, The
Sixties) “precisely to attack Allen Tate’s and Robert Penn Warren’s view
of poetry.” He asserted that hatred wasn’t his motive. Instead, he explained
his attack by means of another analogy: …in the fifties the shade from Eliot and Pound and Tate
and William Carlos Williams was a heavy shade. It was necessary to clear some
ground, so there’d be a place for new pine trees to grow. That clearing is
not being done now. The younger poets are not attacking Even though my own background and training should have led
me to agree with Bly, I never could accept this
argument. The analogies (and the rhetorical training) were all too clear: To “attack”
meant to kill or be killed, a survival of the fittest. Two decades later, Bly and I talked about a different idea, one that
included the possibility of respecting one’s elders and peers. Such respect
really wasn’t such an old idea for him. All his life, even as he was
attacking Anglo-American poets, Bly was introducing
The most recent “elder” that Bly has given us is Ghalib, the
celebrated 19th-century Urdu poet who lived in To me
the wound an arrow makes is insufficient. Some
people call a sword-wound the opener of the heart. When
I am dead, give the killer a reward for my death. If my
tongue gets cut off, send the gift to the knife. The leap of faith demanded of a reader is rewarded in the
final three stanzas. The demands of a rational reader are characterized in
the poem’s first line: “I say this and that about myself, and you say, ‘Get
to the point.’” But the reader who is patient, who suffers those knives in
the middle of the poem, whose intelligence is in greater balance between
intuitive and discursive qualities, will reach a greater insight at the end
of the poem: Your
lover may not be faithful, but she is your lover. We
could mention the beautiful rolling way she walks. Spring
doesn’t last long but at least it is spring. It
would be good to mention the scented winds that move though the garden. Ghalib, once the boat has arrived at the other shore, Why
go on and on about the wickedness of the boatman? At our spring festival, I asked Bly if he was working on translating anyone new. “What do
you want,” he laughed, “I’ve given you Ghalib!” There
I was, already looking ahead to summer, overlooking the scented winds in the
garden. I recommend this book to our readers, and if you think you know your
mind about Bly, maybe it’s time to revisit the body
of his work. Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems (Harperperennial Library, 2000) is
a good place to start. Read his new book, The Night Abraham Called to the
Stars (HarperCollins, 2001), in which he adapts Ghalib’s
ghazal form to new poems that adapt old
themes to original images. Readers can judge these poems for themselves, but
what I admire about Bly is his willingness,
throughout his life, to try new forms and explore new ground. * In college, I met another poet I
will never forget. In 1978 or 1979, Gwendolyn Brooks visited my campus. In
the second edition (1975) of A. Poulin’s Contemporary
American Poetry, the photograph of Ms. Brooks was immense, powerful, defiant. I remember how I was surprised when I first saw
her. The woman I saw was tiny and old. At her reading, however, Brooks
was indeed the woman in the photograph, her voice a singer’s voice, her tone
rich and her volume strong. She read new poems and poems famous to us,
including “We Real Cool.” What I will never forget, however, was when she
paused and declared that the next poem she was going to read was for the
brothers and sisters in the audience. The white folk could listen in, but the
poem wasn’t for them. At the time, I was shocked that she would exclude me
from her audience that way. Back then, my friends and I argued a lot about
how poetry was for everyone. Now in hindsight, I appreciate
her gesture in ways I couldn’t when I was twenty years old. Back then,
growing up in small towns in I was sad to hear that Brooks
had died this past year, and I am pleased to have Ed Cifelli’s
excellent essay on her work and life for this issue. I hope readers will go
back and revisit her body of work. Ed’s essay will point you in the right
direction. When Brooks read “We Real Cool”
at my college, her voice exhaled the “we” at the end of each line as if
someone had struck her in the stomach and she had to catch her breath before
starting the next line. Back then, too, I knew nothing about blues or jazz. In
a Q&A with students, I asked Brooks why she had read the poem so
strangely. “Child,” she said, giving me a look that shut me, “I read the poem
just the way I wrote it.” Of course she did, and I learned
something about how to write and read a poem that did not resemble “Prufrock” or “Birches.” You can hear Brooks read the poem
just the way I remember at the * What I’ve learned from Robert Bly, Gwendolyn Brooks, and from a thousand other
experiences both momentous and small, is that there is no ur-text
from which all “proper” literary works descend. For this reason, Arts
& Letters publishes works that cover a range of literary styles and
traditions, and why the journal depends on a diverse group of readers to help
bring such a range of contributors together from issue to issue. So Peter Ho
Davies, our final judge in fiction, leads us to Rachel Pastan’s
2001 Arts & Letters prize story “Sam O’Grady.” And Ethelbert
Miller gives us Peggy Ann Tartt’s prize-winning
poems, as well as honorable mentions to K. E. Allen, Maria Elena
Caballero-Robb, and Holly Iglesias. This fall,
Davies, Pastan, Miller, and Tartt
will join us on With this issue, Gail Galloway
Adams moves to our editorial advisory board. I want to thank Gail for
steering so many fine stories our way, including those in this issue, and I
know that she will continue to recommend the journal to other talented
writers (as many other board advisors do). For a variety of reasons, however,
it was time for the fiction editor position to be firmly based here at One reason for this move is
connected to another important announcement: In June 2001, the University
System of Georgia’s Board of Regents approved our proposal for a new MFA in
Creative Writing program at GC&SU, only the second such program in the
entire state among both public and private colleges and universities. Throughout
the year, readers of Arts & Letters will notice advertisements
about the new MFA program in AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle and Poets & Writers. Information
is also available via the newly revised Arts & Letters web
site: http://al.gcsu.edu. * My junior year in college, I
knew exactly what I wanted to do. Almost 25 years later, the life I’m living
is the one I imagined back then, but it’s more, too. I could not have guessed
I’d meet a woman from In 1985, I was preparing a
critical attack against Robert Bly, just as he had
admonished younger poets to do. Something stopped me. Before I’d gained any
real maturity in my life, somehow I understood instinctively that I did not
want to follow the path that the older poet had followed. Instead, I tried to understand
how Bly’s own radical claims and critical attacks
might inform something useful to my own poetics. Bly
expanded the world for me. He offered ideas that I could chew on, and I found
both honey and vinegar in his claims. His ideas, I began to realize, were
best approached intuitively, not rationally. Whether he was talking about the
mammalian brain or Jungian archetypes or the concept of natural selection, Bly’s science was never very precise. But I learned that if
I could read Bly for what he was, and not what I
wanted him to be, he would give me plenty to think about. Then I could work
out my own ideas. This was the secret to reading Bly.
If you blindly accepted his claims, you would find yourself in the dark. But a lot of poets are still
following Bly’s old admonition to attack each other.
Some ask (both before and after Dana Gioia did) “Can
Poetry Matter?” and by extension “Can the literary arts matter?” In the July
issue of the Lind’s appreciation may be
understandable, but where he, Gioia, and other
critics of the literary world (read: academic world) go wrong are in their
tactics, which ironically resemble very much Bly’s
old rhetoric in his journal The Fifties and The Sixties. Here
is Lind at his ad hominem best, sounding a
lot like Bly in his old “Crunk”
essays: Gioia, who recently turned 50,
should not be a poet at all, by the standards of the academic world. Before
retiring in his forties to devote himself to literature, he had a successful
career in business, becoming a vice-president of General Foods; he is happily
married; he has no history of confinement in asylums, and is not a victim of
substance abuse; he does not even own a black turtleneck sweater of the kind
that authentic poets wear when posing for photographs. Here is a strange overlap, a pro hominem
argument in which Lind sets up a straw man by describing what Dana Gioia is and is not, and how strange it is for a writer
today to resort to this old caricature of the contemporary poet. A little
later, Lind proposes a conspiracy theory in which “professor poets” attack Gioia after his celebrated Atlantic Monthly essay
appeared. Lind does not say whether or not these conspirators are unhappily
married, alumni of asylums, or victims of substance abuse: For the last decade, the professor-poets have
avenged themselves by alternately pretending that he does not exist and
denouncing him. Although Gioia is one of the few
American poets whose books sell, a few years ago the MFA apparat
ensured that his name was left off the invitation list to a White House
conclave on poetry. But to the horror, no doubt, of the free-verse
establishment’s tenured representatives, the only contemporary poet whom
First Lady Hillary Clinton quoted was Dana Gioia. Like his straw man arguments, here we find intrigue and
politics, just the sort of plot that sells magazines and television broadcast
time. Finally, Lind reveals his real desire, and it’s the same as Gioia’s in “Can Poetry Matter?” Lind’s essay ends on a
24-carat note that resonates with his appreciation of Gioia’s
“successful career in business, becoming a vice-president of General Foods.” He
observes how critics “complain” that Gioia’s
poetry… is akin to popular song.
Those critics concede far more than they intend to. American popular music
has conquered the world precisely because it unites the straightforward evocation
of sentiments that our cynical intellectuals deride with the meter and rhyme
that make language dance. In the work of Dana Gioia,
American poetry dances as it has not danced for a long time. Going “Gold” or “Platinum” is how one conquers the world. Fleetwood
Mac, Linda Bloodworth- and Harry Thomason exercise
power because they entertain Presidents, and Dana Gioia
matters more than other poets because he is quoted by Hillary Rodham Clinton. These attacks do not strengthen
us, the ad hominem arguments and conspiracy
theories do not enlighten us. All this was true for Robert Bly, too, and I think he knows that now. While some
points Lind and Gioia have made may ring a little
true, finally they would evaluate contemporary literature the way Nielsen
ranks television programs. Robert Bly and Gwendolyn
Brooks have touched thousands of readers, but apparently not to the
satisfaction of Lind or Gioia (see Gioia’s “The Successful Career of Robert Bly” reprinted in Can Poetry Matter: Essays on Poetry
and American Culture). I declare an end to the Age of
Arrogance, which reached its peak in the Twentieth Century, an age that
produced the Atomic Bomb, the Berlin Wall, and Britney Spears. Enjoy this issue. Share it with
a friend. I think you’ll find works here that will fill you with inspiration
and humility. The world is too rare and mysterious. There’s room for poems by
Gioia, Bly, and Brooks. If
he writes a good poem, Lind, too. I say, let a
new age of inspired humility begin. |
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