Saved from Poetry Snark: Matt Miller on Donald Revell
Welcoming Ginger, Snarking Donald Revell
First of all, let's all welcome Ginger Pennebaker to the main page. After much coaxing and cajoling, Ginger has finally skipped her way out of the comments section and joined Trochee and myself on the front line. (Speaking of Trochee, where the fuck have you been these last weeks? You there Trochee?) Now if we can only get Bill Blood out here, we could have a real cirque du snarke on our hands. On second thought, I'm not sure if the front page is ready for Blood. T'would certainly confuse first-time visitors...
Also, sometime around 1:00AM Thursday morning we had our 10,000th hit--not bad for a little over two months of blogging on a site that doesn't feature porn. Also, I added a new link to this utterly bizarre site I stumbled upon: www.absurd.org. I really don't know how to describe this beast. You have to see for yourself.
Onward to today's snark!
Any of our fair readers who have had the experience of listening to Donald Revell speak about poetry have surely heard his erudition on the subject of metaphor and simile: to whit, he thinks they should be avoided at all cost. Taking the hard-line from Adorno and Levinas (I suppose) he insinuates that to see the world through metaphor leads to barbarism. You've probably heard this before from some sanctimonious self-proclaimed expert on humanity, even if you haven't heard it from Mistah Revell--the idea is that when we don't see the world--and especially people--directly, we risk not seeing them at all, reducing them to the status of "other" and thus engendering the kind of situation that allowed the Holocaust. To which I say: what a load of shit. And then furthermore, quit exploiting the Holocaust to inflate your language--or to scare people into agreeing with you. Mr. Revell, you know that this is total bullshit. Or you should...
Exhibit a) you say that we shouldn't see the world obliquely through simile and metaphor, but your favorite 20th-Century American poet is ... John Ashbery? WTF! Oh yeah, Ashbery never uses metaphor... That "convex mirror," that "wave" that "flow chart"--those were things as they are (not played upon the blue guitar). When it comes to avoidance of metaphor, your boy should be Dr. Williams, but then again, even he succumbed to the urge, as in "The Yachts."
Exhibit b) your own poems--from Erasures: "my friends / become other animals / or fanatic labyrinths." We can let the "animals" part slide, but "labyrinths?" Smells like a metaphor to me. Does that mean you're now going to see your friends as objects and, consequently, soon kill them? From The
You get the idea. I suppose, it's really all just another example of glib misuse of half-understood theory. Here's the short version of the story: feeling impotent in a culture that ignores what they say, intellectuals use the inflated language of theory to presume profound meaning when there is none, to place enormous political consequence on things that have little-to-none (like American poetry). It makes us feel important, which I suppose we all need from time to time. But Auden got it right: poetry is that which makes nothing happen. The bad news is that the latest anthology of poems against the latest war isn't going to do a fucking thing to stop that war. The good news is that you can use metaphor and simile without worrying about it turning you into a Nazi.
posted by Jim Behrle at 22:07
12 Comments:
Clearly the small matter of empiricism seems to have eluded the focus, three hundred years premature, I gather. I confess, Bishop Berkeley et. all confound human perception at its core, indeed, but what is this of political tyranny? Metaphor stirring massacre? What's this? A poem rendering a person? Now, now, friends, mustn't a person craft a poem & as such mustn't a poem's ideology stem from its writer & not of its own somehow insurgent & self-generated agenda? Or did poems start writing thmselves sometime recently? All you need is to consult the "biggest tool" section to see the lengths to which the person touches the poem -- such dribble is as inconsequential & insufferable as the poets that crafted it in the first place. You poets, take responsibility for your own Naziism, your own idiocy, your own egregious dirth of talent, if it applies & when it applies. Such specious prestidigitation shall be revealed with the ease of finding a quadripalegic in hide & seek.
I agree w/ Snark. I'm a little tired of hearing yet another "tenured radical" of an MFA poet confuse his own solipsistic ramblings w/ genuine political action -- b/c writing a poem is just SO much more effective politically than actually getting out there and organizing people to vote or unionize or sign a petition, etc. It's not metaphor that stands at the root of genocide and war -- it's intellectual and political laziness like Revell's.
Donald Revelle's soul-patch caused the holocaust.
By "Donald Revell's soul-patch" I mean ancient near-man's jew hating cannibalism.
I mean pony.
I mean Sprite Remix.
Why does Donald Revelle have a penis for using to make penis-fun?
Let me tell you a story about sex.
One day, in a far away country, long ago in the past, a man penetrated another man's asshole just like a man penetrating a woman's vagina.
Then a stallion ate celery
Slowly and with difficulty
Like the celery was a boy
A real human jew boy
Chewy and alot like glory
I agree with Donald Revell
It's obvious
Stupid shitheads
A Donald Revell "Found" Poem:
Anything less than life is
not alive.
Because the soldiers were beautiful
ecstasy shows itself
to be
a practical
matter --
We follow to preserve
the possibility of a
delightful
contact.
The beginning bursts;
a man is meant
for bursting forth --
How it seems
the length of a sunshine day.
In the morning after a storm,
We used brooms.
Jealous lover,
Your desire
Passes the same way.
My soul wants only
The tiniest fireman.
Plenty of children in Arcady without fathers,
our friends
long before sundown.
Every spark that shoots out
Beyond this circle
will be beautiful
But is not consumed.
But in the delightful moment
looking for poetry,
we are moved to
the fathers without
their children.
Anything less than life
is not alive.
(All lines in the above were taken from the poems "Vietnam Epic Treatment," "Virgil Watched Them," and "My Mohave," appearing on The Academy of American Poets website {http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/856}, as well as an excerpt from "Invisible Green II" appearing in "American Poetry Review," March/April 2001 issue {http://www.aprweb.org/issues/mar01/revell.html}, all by Donald Revell, who, if you look carefully at his pic, has a rather distinguished butt-chin.)
Isn't metaphor sort of a dialectic thing anyway, as in it's sorta true and sorta not true at the same time? Also, cognitive linguists George Lakoff & Mark Johnson argue that language is inherently metaphorical anyway, shot thru with all kinds of massive unconscious conceptual metaphors, eg. "Knowing is seeing," as in, "I see what you mean." I mean, isn't language and thought and all that kit-n-kaboodle a pretty slippery thing all the time? So anyway - huh....Revel and his injunction against the political implications of an inescapable dialectical phenomenon that serves as the basis for human cognition. Well, you got me. Goddamit, Donald, quit fucking with my head!
right about metaphor, wrong about Auden. That "poetry makes nothing happen" line is as overused as Ryan Van Cleave's mailbox flag. Auden might have believed it when he wrote it, but it's just warmed over neo-Romantic sleight of hand:
"For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth."
Or not.
Such are the sentiments behind the founding of zines like Exquisite Corpse.
You may disagree with it, and obviously you've heard more times than you would like, but Auden's line is anything but "Neo-romantic." Quite the opposite really, since the Romantics believed poetry could change the world utterly ("unacknowledged legislators of the world"--another overused line, I know, but you get the point). Auden, in fact, was specifically refuting the Romanticism of Yeats, who in his lovely, naive way thought his poems of Irish nationalism would make a difference. They didn't. Or rather, they may have got him laid, but eventually his obsession with poetry's political efficacy also helped get him dumped -- Maude Gonne seemed to believe (rightly) that direct political action is more effective as a political tool than is poetry. Of course, her efforts ultimately folded as well. Bring on the monkey glands!
It was just Shelley. Get rid of the whole "Romantics" thing. Byron wasn't having any of it -- nor were the others.
David Orr, whom I am often not crazy about, wrote recently in the NYT: So when Auden tells us that ''poetry makes nothing happen,'' he's making a tremendous boast in the form of a dismissal. After all, any beginning comes from nothing -- from the darkness upon the face of the deep. If poetry can't change the world (or save our lives), it does mark a pause in which there's no use for usefulness, and anything can take shape. If we want to save our own lives in the wake of those moments, well, they may seem a little more worth saving. (source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/books/review/26ORRL.html?pagewanted=all)
Creation ex nihilo; indeed we are in the likeness of God. This reminds me of Frost when he says that what good is form if we are not made to fear for it, what use are the forms of life if they do not inform us? Orr and I, in rare agreement, think that Auden (forget whether something is of Romantic origin or whatever as that is a pointless categorical approach) was speaking of how making is important and that how sometimes poetry is as if out of thin air, out of nothing, and it is the shape that it takes and what we make of it that is important. There is no such thing as nothing - that which we regard as nothing is something somewhere and poetry brings these things to life, gives them form, gives us a reason to fear & love the being we are tied to. if this sounds neo-Romantic, religious, impractical &/or silly to you, then I dare say you have lost your way in the wilderness.
There is no such thing as nothing - that which we regard as nothing is something somewhere and poetry brings these things to life, gives them form, gives us a reason to fear & love the being we are tied to. if this sounds neo-Romantic, religious, impractical &/or silly to you, then I dare say you have lost your way in the wilderness.
Um, yes, it does sounds silly. There is no such thing as nothing? Isn't that a line from Pink Floyd? Shallow spiritualism leads to many "into the wilderness" of their own self-regard. And, while using categories like "Romantic" to describe Auden (who was, I must disagree, an incurable Romantic--just one clothed in the snappy dress of irony--pitting poetry against "executives" and such is exactly a Romantic move, removing art from the province of action, etc.--"unacknowledged" legislators, remember--but boy do I digress) categories like "Romantic" are simply useful boxes, a system of filing, and feel free to remove them and change them--but without categories, we end up mumbling in our own small jargons about "nothing is something somewhere." My personal filing system is very broad: pre-modern english poets, pre-Romantics, Romantics, and those who really don't fit.
you are right about a couple of things, my anonymous interlocutor.
by "nothing is something somewhere", I fell victim to the inadequacy of language, particularly English, and I failed to go the extra distance to be more clear. in this case, "nothing" might be a child crying b/c their ice cream landed on the sidewalk; sure, it is not really anything to cry about, it's nothing but to that kid, well, it is everything in that moment. to push the idea further, the far reaches of science discuss how there is really no such thing as nothingness; philosophically, "nothing" is an abstract construct equivalent to such things as "eternity", "infinity" and absolute silence, things that are essentially farts in the wind.
Auden was not quite a Romantic (and I would like to point out that I did not deny Auden's Romantic tendencies but rather asked them to be put aside; in poetry and discussion, each word counts and it counts to pay attention). Auden is one of poetry's great chameleons and was able to carry the torch of many styles, sentiments and whatnot. Fernando Pessoa would be another fine example of this ability.
at any rate, the important thing to remember is that Revell is a nothing happening in a world begging for something more than fizz pop of arid musing. Auden was right; it is just that too many people think too small. in nothing resides all things terrible and lovely.
thank you for the clarification. I agree completely about Revell, and perhaps we will argue about the ontology of nothing in a later post...
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