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Martin Lammon Good Taste vs. Good Judgment |
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Is There Anyone Out There? When I was in college and
graduate school about 25 years ago, writing teachers often looked you in the
eye and talked about “finding your voice.” Back then, I spent my twenties
trying to cultivate a voice, which I took to mean my style. I searched
my poems for recurring words (night, fish, river, corn) and
themes (family, farms, death). I tried writing long elegiac poems,
then longer surreal poems, as if I were trying to choose between singing bass
or baritone. I was acutely conscious of trying not to sound too much like
James Wright, an Now, I
look back on those days and wonder who I was searching for. Over the past
dozen years or so, instead of cultivating one voice I’ve tried to allow poems
to become whatever they need to be. Some poems want to be longer, more
narrative, less attentive to music and linebreak. Others
want to be lyrical, their essence found more in the
way words sound than in what stories they might tell. But if I’d been paying
better attention when I was 25 years old, I might have noticed how James
Wright’s poem “A Blessing” (“Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my
body I would break / Into blossom”) differed significantly from his prose
piece “The Flying Eagles of Troop 62”: Ralph Neal was the scoutmaster. He was still a young man. He liked
us. I
have no doubt that he knew perfectly well we were each of us masturbating
unhappily in secret caves and shores. The
soul of patience, he waited while we smirked behind each other’s backs,
mocking and parodying the Scout Law, trying to imitate the oratorical
rotundities of Winston Churchill in a Southern Accent. “Ay
scout is trusswortha, loll, hailful,
frenly, curtchuss, kand, abaydent, chairful, thrifta, dapraved, clane, and letcherass.” Two voices, one man. These works were originally published
in The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and To a Blossoming Pear Tree
(1977), probably written about 15 years apart. Although a critical reader
could find stylistic and thematic links to the same writer, only a dogmatist
would insist that both works share one style or “voice”, let alone a style
particular to James Wright. Each work is unique, but not because one can find
a discrete “voiceprint,” as if identifying a writer’s style were a matter of
scientific calibration. Ain’t That Sweet As a writer, as an editor, and
as a teacher of writing, I’ve come to realize that searching for one’s “voice”
was really a matter of learning the difference between indulging one’s
personal taste (however good) vs. cultivating good judgment. There’s a kind
of poem (or story, or essay, or play) that I prefer to read, but if the only
works I ever read (or wrote) were of one kind, my life would be impoverished
and malnourished, as if all I ever ate were ham and cheese sandwiches, smoked
almonds, and java chip ice cream. I certainly have a taste for all
those foods! But obviously I’ve had to broaden my culinary choices and make
judgments based on more than mere taste. I’ve even learned how much I like
asparagus, grilled salmon, and yogurt—all those foods I wouldn’t go near when
I was a boy. There are limits to metaphor, of
course, but one more will help illustrate what I mean. Perhaps the most
clichéd description of the relationship between authors and their works (and
this description applies to editors and their journals, too) is the
comparison to a parent and child. This comparison also has everything to do
with taste and little to do with good judgment. Parents will love their
children to a fault, a point often overlooked in this common familial analogy
yet observed all the time in younger writers who love their poems and stories
too much. How often do teachers witness this phenomenon among their students,
who, despite insightful suggestions for revision, cannot bear to change one
line of their beautifully crafted and well-intentioned poetry.
They have a rationale or an affection for every
word, every line, every trope. (Older writers—and some are friends of
mine—are just as prone to indulge their personal tastes.) Such poets are like mothers who have
learned the very smell, taste, and texture of their adorable baby sons, who
will love them even if they grow up to become serial killers. Such authors
are like fathers who believe their sweet daughters are lovely no matter how
plain they might be. Such progenitors have imprinted themselves on their
infant poems and stories and will never willingly relinquish them. Enough of metaphor and analogy,
which will take us only so far, because those doomed
sons do deserve to be loved and those good daughters are lovely.
But poems and stories require a more disinterested judgment, and if writers
and editors make choices based only on their good taste alone, then their
work will surely suffer aesthetic consequences. Casting Stones No matter how disinterested an
individual may be, no writer or editor can make consistent good judgments
alone. Personal taste will always insinuate itself. Editors I know tell me
they read everything, judge everything, and select everything for the
journals they edit, and I wonder if they truly can temper their judgment with
humility. Writers and editors must be arbiters of writing, but such
arbitrations can and I think should depend on a process by which the
individual listens to the intelligent voices of others. That process holds
true at both the writing workshop and the editorial table. At Arts &
Letters, I know that I depend on assistant and associate editors to read
and advocate for works submitted. I defer to the better judgments of my colleagues
who serve as poetry, fiction, and drama editors. Although I may sometimes
disagree with choices our final judges make for our annual Arts &
Letters prizes, I abide happily by their choices. I do not think that I eschew
responsibility, to borrow language from the wonderful poem “Ethics” by Linda Pastan. In the poem, an ethics teacher asks the students
a philosophical question: If a museum were on fire, which would you save, a “Rembrandt
painting / or an old woman who hadn’t many / years left anyhow?” Pastan replies, “why not let the woman decide herself?”
and is chastised for “eschew[ing] the burdens of
responsibility.” The poem ends: This fall in a real museum I stand before a real Rembrandt, old woman, or nearly so, myself. The
colors within this frame are darker than autumn, darker even than winter—the browns of earth, though earth’s most radiant elements burn through the canvas. I know now
that woman and painting and season are almost one and all beyond saving by
children. Passing judgment is about deciding whether something will
happen or won’t happen, and ultimately, whether something lives or dies,
another reason why the analogy to the parental relationship becomes horrible
when applied to authors and their works, as if they faced a kind of “Sophie’s
Choice.” If I write a poem that fails, then I should let the poem lapse into
obscurity, or if personal taste overwhelms my better judgment, then other
readers—editors or publishers or good friends—will surely help the poem find
its inexorable dead end. When we are children, we are
intellectually isolated, egocentric. We pout when we don’t get our way. We
believe that the group laughing in the corner is laughing at us. We have no
idea what death is. Only an adult community of readers and writers can ensure
that mature, disinterested aesthetic judgments are possible. Individual
writers and editors will ultimately make their own decisions, but no one
should have to make such decisions alone. Higher Stakes I write about making poems,
stories, plays, and essays, about editing a journal. Yet as I write, it is
the first day of a new year, and as a country we stand at the brink of war. Since
9-11, our personal freedoms are more and more threatened by a “War on
Terrorism” that reminds me of the “Cold War” at its worst, back in the 1950’s
and 1960’s. It is the year 2003. When I was
a boy, I imagined I’d be visiting cities on the moon, that we’d have landed
on Mars, and that, just maybe, we’d have discovered there was life beyond our
world. Older now, I’d be content to imagine a society where we valued
teachers more than athletes, movie stars, and pop singers. I’d be content to
imagine a country where people in airports were not “judged by the color of
their skin but by the content of their character.” I’d be content to imagine
an I imagine that James Wright’s
piece about Ralph Neal and his boy scouts is one that the poet must have
agonized over, a work of lyrical prose that balanced precariously between
indulging his personal tastes and exercising his better judgment. Which is to say, it is like all essential writing that perseveres
before, like everything, it ultimately perishes. Perhaps what I like
best about “The Flying Eagles of Troop 62” is how Wright imagines that their
leader, Neal, loves them not because they were handsome and talented—they
were “dreadful and utterly vulnerable little bastards,” like the one who grew
up “doing life at the State Pen in Columbus,” or the man who drove “one of
those milk trucks where the driver has to stand up all day and rattle his
spine,” or Hub Snodgrass who spends “a good hour…trying to scrape the Laughlin
steel dust out of his pale skin”—but instead loves them because …he
knew damned well what would become of most of us, and it sure did, and he
knew it, and he loved us anyway. The very name of Finally, what I learn from reading Wright is how a deeper
imagination transcends rhetoric, how good judgment supercedes mere good taste.
I also learn that I cannot do this alone. I try to imagine all the Ralph Neals in my life, all the Hub Snodgrasses,
and how what I do next depends on all of them. * At Arts & Letters, we
depend on many people, and over the past two years I’ve come to depend a lot
on two assistant editors, Minal Singh and Wayne
Thomas, who will be departing this year and who have contributed so much to
the journal. In this issue, I hope you will enjoy Thomas’s interview with
John Guare, who selected Chuck Spoler’s
Blood Memory (also appearing in this issue) for the 2002 Arts &
Letters prize for drama. On the cover is a linocut image of Guare created by our former Art Editor (now a member of
our Editorial Advisory Board) Marc Snyder, who currently lives and works in http://www.fimp.net/marcart.html As I write, we are preparing for
the Associated Writing Programs national conference in Baltimore (February
26-March 1), the fifth annual Arts & Letters Festival (March
20-22), the fourth annual Arts & Letters Workshops (May 19-25),
and much more. Coming to Milledgeville this winter and spring are writers
Allison Joseph, Li-Young Lee, Rosa Shand, Natasha Trethewey, Chuck Spoler, Rodney
Jones, Phil Gerard, Anthony Grooms, and former Arts & Letters fiction
editor Kellie Wells. Our final judges for the 2003 Arts & Letters prizes
(deadline: April 30) are Bret Lott, Gerald Stern, and Arthur Kopit. Lott and Stern will award the fiction and poetry
prizes on campus in the fall of 2003. I know that I speak for my
colleagues David Muschell, Ruth Knafo
Setton, and Susan Atefat-Peckham
when I say that we all depend on such guests and friends to enhance the
journal and our programs here. For details about all these events and more,
please visit the Arts & Letters web site at http://al.gcsu.edu
or turn to the back of this issue for additional information. As I write, I don’t know what
will happen, but I know we may be at war. Even so, to you, that future
reader, I imagine a new year that brings you friendship, peace, and hope. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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