the difficult and the impossible
John Yau, “The Poet as Art Critic,” American Poetry Review, May/June 2005
I liked this article a lot. I had to underline a boatload of sentences, sentences that struck me with extreme validity:
Often, after summing up the subject he is reviewing, he steps back and argues eloquently for both the difficult and the impossible.
…a worthy aesthetic goal as doing “what can’t be done,” which is “to create a counterfeit reality more real than reality.”
All too often, these states of illuminated insight are familiar and border on cliché. The revelation is not something the poet discovers in the process of writing, but is something he or she already possesses, and must figure out how to package. Such poems are full of detachable symbols and images, triggers that set off the reader’s sympathetic Pavlovian response.
Reminds me of a lot of buck-up poetry I’ve encountered, poetry therapy poetry, do this-do that poetry.
We live in a quandary… a question of deciding how much the outer reality is our reality, how far we can advance into it and still keep a toe-hold on the inner, private one. [JA]
Has me wondering if I’ve gone too far into the outer reality. I’ve less than a bare toe-hold on the inner, private one.
Their [Ashbery’s and O’Hara’s] criticism isn’t theory driven, but object driven. … both pay close attention to what is in front of them, which is not all that easy or simple to do.
I’d like to apply this to poetry criticism. Just take a look at the poem in front of you (not all that easy or simple to do).
He wasn’t a trained art historian, which is why his work at MoMA was so refreshing and has never been duplicated: Innocence and joy cannot be duplicated. [Hilton Als, on O’Hara]
His [O’Hara’s] non-hierarchical approach to art, to what he called “the living situation” is what distinguishes him from other critics.
“it is not an abstraction, but an object made by and for the senses.” [Ashbery reviewing Brice Marden’s paintings]
Love thinking about a poem as an object made by and for the senses
In other words, he isn’t interested in abstraction as an idealized state, but in something messier and closer to life.
Ashbery’s use of “I” is unlike that of any other poet. Ashbery’s “I” is porous and changing, and the reader doesn’t sense that it is connected to a fixed personality, as it is in the writing of James Tate, Charles Simic, or Jorie Graham, just to name three obvious examples.
Ashbery has submerged his personality in favor of something that is seemingly objective and distanced.
I relate very much to this submerging of personality. This quote mistakenly implies that he worked to submerge his personality. I don’t think he does it that intentionally. It’s just what his introversion demands. And some of the constructions made to explain it are just for convenience. Putting “his personality” in his poems would be along the lines of a lie for Ashbery. I understand that very well.
This understanding feels very freeing, like wanting to jump around and play all day in the fields of introversion.
Within this situation of absence, particularly of moral authority, the writer has two choices: write poems as if there still exists a collective language or try to write poems that achieve complete autonomy. Ashbery chose the latter.
Very exciting comment. What is going on here? Are we trying to build a new collective language? Or just throwing everything to the winds in completely disparate alternative realities? What the hell is complete autonomy in view of a lack of moral authority? I can make a comparison with religion. In the absence of my Catholicism, do I create my own religion? What good is a one-person religion? There is still some project to do with the group. What is it?
Edwin Dickinson – eeriness and vivacity
Jean Hélion, They Shall Not Have Me
Look these guys up.
I realize today that it is the abstract which is reasonable and possible. And that it is the pursuit of reality which is madness, the ideal, the impossible. [Hélion]