I slept badly last night, as usual . . . this time with intermittent odd dreams about trying to take violin lessons from Elizabeth Warren, who kept telling me she doesn't play the violin. Now I'm drinking my black coffee and attempting to feel enthusiastic about cramming all of my weekend chores into a single day. Tomorrow I have to drive up to Monson for a Monday class, so I don't have the option of puttering slowly through my housework. I'm looking forward to the class, though. We're going to focus on revising the group draft that the kids wrote last time. I'm also going to have them work on identifying their own writing prompts. It seems important to train them to notice writing triggers in what they read and discuss, not just depend on a teacher to prompt them. Along the way, we'll read pieces by Leo Connellan, Tracy K. Smith, and Wislawa Symborska: all poems in which the speaker is observing young people.
Lately I've been thinking about point of view in poetry--both its delights and dangers. As I think I mentioned, I recently wrote a small essay about Longfellow for my friend Teresa's email series, an essay that did not spend much time on the problematics of Longfellow's public poetry--by which I mean large narrative poems such as "Hiawatha" and "Evangeline." To a contemporary eye, both poems romanticize (at best) and racialize (at worst) topics that don't belong to the poet: an upper-middle-class white Protestant Harvard guy. A more historical critique might argue that Longfellow was a humanist who was earnestly trying to give voice to groups that were, at that time, more or less voiceless: Native Americans and the Franco population of Atlantic Canada and northern Maine.
Parallel issues exist in current work, of course. I think of poems in which a male speaker passionately idealizes/worships/desires/instructs an often younger female entity--sometimes human, sometimes metaphoric. I'm sure you're familiar with that trope: it's been a constant for millennia, and it lies at the root of some gorgeous poetry. Some gorgeous old poetry. In contemporary work, the trope clanks and sours. I think of Roethke's "Elegy for Jane," which now makes me wince. If I were a journal editor, I would find it difficult to publish such a piece, no matter how beautifully it was written. And yet, of course, the beauty would exist, despite the poet's blindness or indifference to his own subtext.
4 comments:
I find it interesting that, not so long ago, literary criticism went through the whole "death of the author" thing, in which work needed to be looked at without consideration of the author's politics, gender, etc. Now I feel like an author (and imagination) has become bound and shackled and criticism is now often based on death TO the author! Beauty is beauty. We are all imerfect human beings struggling to express truth as we experience it, and, hopefully (if only for a moment) transcending our imperfections in the process.
The issue is complex and often deeply personal, and much is said on all sides of the argument. Should a white writer imaginatively try to enact the experiences of a person of color? Many, many people say no, while others object to any attempt to legislate imagination. This is an active and aggressive conversation in today's literary world.
The secret of life is that it's secret, and the most we can hope for is to get answers in tongues, which means in languages that other people speak but not us. For a man the secret language is often feminine, and what does a man know about women?
The answer is in some ways nothing, and in other ways more than even women do -- and vise-versa, particularly for women as strong and independent as Dawn Potter.
I say this. As a man opens himself up to the mystery of his own life he realizes that his yearning for the other has something to do with becoming whole. Everybody knows that, but fortunately it’s a very small number of people who feel so drawn to the task of deciphering the mystery that they end up as poets who actually write about it.
In Robert Frost’s "The Most of It," the huge existentialist-riddler speaks by “forcing the underbrush,” and let’s not teach our young men to do that in real life! In “Politics” and “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” the gauche, undeveloped male narrators, one very young (Joyce) and the other very old (Yeats), worship young women. Emily Dickinson, one of the strongest, most independent, most creative women who has ever lived, worships “Master.” Even Emily Dickinson – and what are we going to do about that?
Nothing in real life – everything in our hearts and souls in private, men and women alike.
Here’s what I say at 80: Don’t let political issues get involved in your poetry. Be grateful for the tensions in the world of yourself, for that is your private language and has nothing to do with Human Rights or Political Issues in your outside world.
And on the racial issue, read Sebastian Barry, Days Without End and A Thousand Moons (as soon as you can get hold of it).
Thanks as always to Dawn,
Christopher
My point, though, is that a poet's personal yearning can create discomfort in a reader who is reacting (say, in the case of "Elegy to Jane") to predatory undertones. The poet may not have intended to include them, but there they are. I don't think I could teach that poem to young people without being prepared for their strong reaction against a "creep" subtext. A male teacher referring to his dead female student as a skittery darling is not liable to make young readers feel comfortable.
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