Strange Things Poets Say

In response to a question about fact and fiction in one of his poems over at How A Poem Happens, J. Michael Martinez says:

I don’t see the difference between the terms ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’: both are methods of description of this world. As a child I was raised to see the material world as a manifestation of a spiritual reality: the interior world is in constant dialogue with the world of manifestation, positing signs and symbols in answer/response to the deepest interior questions. The duality of fact/fiction seems to debase and reduce the provocation and re-creation that metaphor can offer to life. All this is to say, I navigate the world with a sense that a particular grace is always speaking itself outward, whether that is in a scientific study about global warming, watching a bird pivot, or with my grandmother describing her experience with spirits. Something Adorno said in his Aesthetic Theory resonates: “By their presence art works signal the possibility of the non-existent; their realities testify to the feasibility of the unreal, the possible.”

Since I don’t think Mr. Martinez is a Rortyan pragmatist doubting the value of the term “truth” to philosophical inquiry, I’m not sure what to make of this statement. That fact and fiction “both are methods of description of this world” is trivially true; it’s obvious that both describe the world. The question is what kind of descriptions are they? Lumping together scientific studies about global warming and watching a bird pivot erases any meaningful distinction between naturally occurring events (and how they’re mediated by human consciousness and language) and human endeavors (does grace resonate through a scientist writing the global warming study? What about climate change deniers?). 

The claim that “[t]he duality of fact/fiction seems to debase and reduce the provocation and re-creation that metaphor can offer to life” is a creative—if opaque—way of avoiding the question and saying, again, either something that is trivially true or non-sensical. This isn’t a truth/fiction distinction Martinez is dismissing, it’s a fact/fiction distinction.  This makes a mess of meaningful discussion about things that happen that we can measure (or attempt to measure) like global warming, and things that someone made up, but are convinced reflect a spiritual reality. I think there’s any easier way discussing how poems blur the distinction between fact and fiction (and what that might mean for poems that ring true to us, but are not factual), but offering up a heap of obscurantist mysticism is another way to go, I suppose.

Against a Poetry of Decline

I like epic things and ideas, but big things are unwieldy. Where to put Truth and can you plug the Spirit into some notion of the Cosmos? And why in Zeus’s name would you want that in pentameter? You can only concern yourself (or your poetic self) so much with thoughts and other ephemera before you get yourself into trouble, or brought up on charges of Being Silly, Over-Important, or Anachronistic. Also, anti-poetic, which is an especially bad one when trying to write poetry.

In The Triggering Town, the poet Richard Hugo counsels against making music conform to Truth; you can get yourself into a lot of trouble that way. And good advice it is—if the silo is white and not silver (Hugo’s example)—damnit, make it silver. Literary truth is different than factual truth is different from spiritual truth, etc., ad infinitum. There, bases covered. But the further away you get from trivial description, the tougher the questions get about representation and truth, and art and abstract concepts that begin with capital letters. Pretty soon you’re having to consult philosophers and mystics, which is a problem considering Heidegger makes you nervous, you’re not sure how to scan “hermeneutics,” and why would you put equals signs in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E anyway? And now we’re taxing the little poems to their limit, trying to stuff a lot of nonsense and things that won’t fit into our modest verse machines: we’re in danger of voiding the warranty.

Ok, so let’s cut Poetry a break and just stick with poetry. Let capital P poetry = the practice of poetry and little p poetry = the art of writing a poem. The distinction is vague at best, but for the purposes of the argument there aren’t any good rules. Certainly, I’d object to that too—there are rules, but perhaps just not any good ones. Which metric will we measure the work by? And now we slip down the anti-rational slide, giggling all the way. This is fun. But we can’t get too carried away.

So let’s say this: modernity is a motherfucker. Consequently, all the other things that go along with being a poet (eating, sleeping, growing food to eat, buying food and cars and houses and pencils, and voting, and crying, and persecution, and money, and newspapers, and falling in love) are complicated. Many of these things show up in poems. In my poems, I am reacting to things and arguing for things, and trying not to break the damn things while getting them to do something novel / fancy /amusing. It would also be nice if they were true. True in some Platonic sense? I am not even sure that I know what Plato meant by true, or what brand of true I mean—I would like it to mean “true enough without beating out everything that makes poems poetry and not something else.” And literature alone can’t be my guide: there is too much to see.

But I’m also tired of a poetry that loves poetry for the sake of poetry, or the games we play, or irony because the world is confusing and mean and we’ve just got to something with our time besides watch TV. "Have you seen what they’re putting on TV these days?" They ask in a desperate tone, "The inmates are running the asylum." Poetry as distraction written by Declinists. The world is terrible, and strange, and unjust, but the art we make against it has to hold fast. To paraphrase Adam Zagajewski, yes, there’s always someone as harried as Job to show up and point out it’s only poetry. But it’s all we’ve got. The good news, of course, is that there are multiple poetries, that verse slipped away while we were otherwise engaged and now shows up in all sorts of places, its children varied and legion. So for the rest of us still playing with the page and publication there’s a struggle (as the Talking Heads would put it, “Same as it ever was”) to “make it new” in spite of the fact that Ezra Pound was out of his gourd. Good poet? Sometimes. But frankly bonkers, and it shows up in his poetry. I think it’s good to say that too.

All the Sad Young Hegelians

At least when they read this:

Not to play up neocon/Marxist consonance more than absolutely necessary[...]

Like Francis Fukuyama, I always thought of the necons as more Leninist than Marxist. Somewhere, a lonely analytical Marxist in a Cultural Studies department shakes his head in disgust.

On Modernity

I don't understand why artists disdain modernity so much, especially given that quite a few of them subscribe to some form of economic or material determinism.  Shouldn't modernity provide better standards of living for the least well-off?  No, no--of course not.  Modernity takes their resources and yolks them to an oppressive system.  Perhaps we should all be yeoman farmers.

Some of this makes sense if you're a traditionalist or have strong desire for a clearly defined moral order.  So an aversion to modernity makes sense if you're T.S. Eliot (I think--I have yet to read his Christianity and Culture).  You want to keep the insititutions and cultural norms that preserve the status-quo.  

Everybody say, "Heyyyyy Ooooh!"