Warning: The following post contains a confession of naive sentiments and deep ignorance. For those of you with real appreciation and a critical eye for poetry, prepare to be horrified.
Almost one year ago, Evan posted that Stevens' "poetry is invulnerable to theory. If he decides to hit one of his concepts on the head with an anvil, it gets right back up again, unhurt." Since I've just finished reading Harmonium, this statement caught my attention. I'd like to think that Stevens' eye for a certain, rough-hewn America and his collections of jangling nouns that comprise a quirky sensuousness have definite bearing on my interests, but I remain unsure how to proceed.
So you know that I've always resented the theory-literature and novel-poetics divide that refuses to die, despite efforts to kill it off dating back to Marx-Shakespeare-Freud-The Bible. But as I make my way through my Generals lists, every time I get to a collection of poetry, I become overwhelmed with a distinct feeling of helplessness. I turn through the pages, most often thinking something along the lines of "Oh, that's beautiful/unusual/obscure/interesting." But the minute I try to think beyond my initial impressions, the poetry seems to turn to sand and runs through my fingers. How can I make the poetry cohere with the vast majority of my list, which is composed of novels and theory? Since I tend to move between these two categories with some ease and fluidity, what is it about poetry that might make such an exchange more difficult? Am I just too novice, or too resistant?
So there it is: the crudest of questions. Can you enlighten me, dear bloggers?
4 comments:
Baudelaire might be a way to start to connect, given his centrality for Benjamin and his influence on the Symbolist-influenced line charted by Edmund Wilson in his study Axel's Castle (1931). Not that you need to have Baudelaire on your list; more that you might put what Benjamin argues about him alongside the visions of the city, the crowd, the subject that get articulated in Eliot and Pound, or see Stevens's rococo ornament as a sort of poetic arcade in a country that has none.
Considerations of "voice" would be another worthwhile starting point, and Michael North's excellent book The Dialect of Modernism (1994) seems like it would be right up your alley. Racial masquerade and mimicry of dialect. That's also to say that there's nothing wrong with focusing your efforts on whatever narrative and perspectival aspects you can find (possibly as traces) in the poetry on your list, as you would with novels.
You might also consider where and what poetry pops up in the theory on yr list (e.g. Jameson's slightly controversial use of Perelman's "China" in the opening Postmodernism).
I also found this site a _great_ help:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets.htm
It's especially useful because of how it excerpts and chronologically presents criticisms and close-readings of individual poems, which can help to square what you have to say about particular lyrics (and which occasionally gives a sense of how theory-friendly a given poet has seemed). For me, the big question hanging over Generals was whether I should be talking about the collection, the lyrics, the author or what. There's no real answer to that, other than to say that if "Anecdote of the Jar" is all that does it for you, just talk about "Anecdote of the Jar." I find Stevens particularly hard to discuss, and specifically avoided talking about him during the exam (with the exception of two lines that I forced myself to memorize and blurted out, apropos nothing, after my exam was finished).
What other poets are on yr list? Individual cases might yield better suggestions. And I'm happy to have a reading-group-type chat about any given poet when yr back around! That was what I found most useful for studying overall.
(Also, I'm sure you're actually doing _fine_, and thinking up amazing connections left and right -- maybe august gets to everyone)
Hi Sarah,
I've encountered a similar problem, having hastily listed the _Selected/Collected Poems_ of a number of authors. The MAPS site Greg mentions is really helpful. I've also found reading book reviews of recent critical statements to be a quick and dirty way to get a handle on the debates and key issues. Once you get to that level of critical abstraction, the connections to prose texts come more easily.
Hope you're enjoying the reading,
John
Hi Sarah,
I also felt a similar frustration during my generals, but in reverse — I couldn't fit the novels I had on my list into my poetry-oriented framework. So I basically just cut them. That's one thing to keep in mind: on a practical level, I think it's probably OK if you just tell your advisors you want to focus on narrative, or that you're still working out how poetry fits into the general scheme you're elaborating. Nobody expects you to be authoritative about everything; subjects for further research are to be expected.
Also, I think maybe some of your frustration is less with "poetry" as a whole than *modernist* poetry, which tends to be more anti-narrative and anti-theory (in the sense of willfully ambiguous). You might have an easier time going back to some 19th century examples and then advancing from there. I enthusiastically second Greg's suggestion of Baudelaire, who is basically taken as the model for the modern poet by all kinds of critics, theorists and poets in the 20th century. On the American side, maybe you could take a look at Whitman?
Stevens is a particularly tricky case: what I meant by my whole "cartoon" thing was that he uses philosophical terms and concepts very much to his own purposes (though more in the later work). One thing that's struck me in the past about "Harmonium," though: its material contents are really interesting, all the weird bric-à-brac (much of it imported from overseas) that Stevens shoves into those poems. This kind of cosmopolitan collecting mania largely disappears from his later, more metaphysical (also maybe more American) work. So that might be something to consider?
On the bigger question of uniting theory and literary history, I'd also like to recommend Pascale Casanova's "The World Republic of Letters," a recent book which (I think) opens up lots of exciting possibilities for connection between traditional theories of modernism (which, I think, are what mostly inform poet's understanding of their own practice) and current concerns about globalization and postcolonialism (particularly those deriving from Bourdieu, Said and Benedict Anderson). It's not a perfect book, and she doesn't actually focus on poetry specifically, but I think it suggests interesting ways to synthesize different historical/theoretical approaches.
Hope this helps -- sorry if it's a little scattered. I'd also love to hear about who else is on your list, and would be happy to talk about them as you get closer to G-Day.
Sarah,
I've been having a somewhat similar problem, in that the only things I feel like I know how to read lately are theories of ecclesiastical governance--novels & poetry both seem equally unanalyzable. But I am trying to get past this with a sort of remedial, half-invented structuralism--because, I suppose, it's one of the few schools that has about equal amounts to say about narrative & lyric. I've been trying to think about this in terms of structures of expectation, especially with reference to tense (the English future tense is amazing!), repetition, and simultaneity. I know this is incredibly vague, but the comments section strikes me as not quite the place to go into what are, in any case, very indefinitely formulated attempts. I'm back in town next week, and if anyone wants to get coffee & talk literary nonsense, please let me know.
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