An Imperial Message At North Farm; or, Kafka, Ashbery and The Fear of Emoting

Everyone who knows me knows how I feel about poetry.  I rarely read it and when I do I become frustrated by the ambiguity others rejoice.  So it may sound strange when I say that the only book of poetry I find compelling is John Ashbery's The Wave.  According to Robert Mazzocco, his

ability to go on and on has always struck me as the signal characteristic of the work of John Ashbery. Many of Ashbery's poems are really improvisations on the theme of flux.

That sounds terrible.  And as I learned today as I skimmed his collected works, the experience of reading improvisations on the theme of flux is akin to the experience of grading undergraduate composition essays.  You never can tell what they mean or why they're saying what they're saying but you get the distinct impression that they desperately desire you suss it out.  Then I hit selections from The Waves again and I remembered why I bought the book in the first place: it feels like Kafka to me.  Another way to say that is I spent the summer after I graduated reading nothing but Kafka.  In The Waves, Ashbery taps the same vein of alienation.  For example, here's Kafka's parable "An Imperial Message":

The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his death bed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun. He ordered the herald to kneel down beside his bed and whispered the message in his ear. He thought it was so important that he had the herald speak it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of verbal message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those witnessing his death—all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs—in front of all of them he dispatched his herald. The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistence, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forwards easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvellous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. Never will he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards through the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, through stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.

Compare that to Ashbery's "At North Farm":

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

I would explain in detail the similarites I see between the parable and the poem, but I'd like to experiment, see if someone else could suss out what I saw without me having to say it in too much detail.  Why?  Because sometimes when you spend the whole day writing you wonder whether your work explicates or merely emotes.  I like to think I explicate.  I suppose we'll see.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

There really isn't any way to predict exactly what you would have explicated, Scott. I could explain the similarities that I see, but what would that really prove? It would be just another undergraduate essay, tiresomely drawing out various more-or-less obvious features... I mean, the Kafka parable like all Kafka encourages a religious reading, or a historicized one about the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or one about Kafka's personal Jewish marginality or his relationship with his father. The bit of Ashbery poem is a bit easier for an offhand grab-bag because I know less about him, and features a slightly different form of alienation: mysterious plenty in a land where hardly anything grows, the dish of milk set out (for faeries, in implication, if not in reality for the cat, therefore for the mysterious, the enlivening element of a dead world), the thinking of "him" at the end in which him could easily be God or the father. Given the common emphasis on the power of the messenger, the maleness, the dream of a message particularly for you, and the doubt about whether the message will ever arrive, I'd guess at a common theme of alienation from God. But, you know -- knowing what I do about you, perhaps you are attracted to this mode of alienation because the message that never arrives is a metaphor for deafness.

I have difficulty figuring out your exact attitude towards poetry, actually. You say that you don't like poetry because of its ambiguity, yet you didn't like Pinter's non-ambiguous obvious-message poetry either. Wouldn't it be simpler to say that you just generally don't like poetry? But you have probably posted more about poetry than most of the people who post on the Valve.

Here's a link to an obvious poem of mine, chosen for vague similarity to the barrenness-amidst-plenty implication of the Ashbery poem. ("We live in a petri dish / A thin film of nutrient slime over the desert"). I would guess that, if you get past its clear problems with execution and technique and imagine that these distracting realities were not present, most people would reject it as having any artistic quality because it is too obvious, too lecturing, not ambiguous enough. (I've never kept my own knowledge of how lame my poetry is keep me from writing it or posting it; all poetry is lame at this historical moment, so the futility is general.) It is very difficult to hit the target of writing a poem that is about something yet preserves sufficient ambiguity. For a reader that does not like ambiguity, it seems almost impossible.

Here's a silly metaphor for you, since you bring up _The Waves_ and information theory: a poem is supposed to be like a quantum mechanical entity. It has a probability distribution of meanings that it more or less encourages, but you can never pin it down as existing in one particular point within the probability cloud. When you write the poem, you're to some extent designing the outward shape of how this cloud will appear under reasonable interpretations by your likely readers, so it's not like your poem is spreading out into a thin layer of structureless fog. At the same time, those who really want particles instead of waves will find themselves hunting in vain.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Rich, thank you for doubting my predictability. I see these stories as opposing perspectives on the same situation: Kafka on the futility of delivering the message, Ashbery on the possibility of receiving it. Like you, I had the impulse to historicize it: Kafka's China is a land whose resources are only outstripped by its bureaucrats (as in "The Great Wall of China," &c., so I noticed the power of images of unavailable abundance. I actually hadn't caught the reference to the sidhe which, given all the Yeats I've read and Irish Modernism courses I've T.A.'d for, I should have. Also, I think the poem far more frightening if God isn't involved, if both, in fact, refer to the possibility of meaning in materialistic world. The long and short of it, however, is that you've proven I'm not simply grafting my own issues onto these disparate works. As I write this dissertation, I'm occasionally struck by the "voice in the wilderness" quality of what I'm writing; no one else has tackled this, I think, and there are many people out there far more intelligent than I, so there must be a reason and that reason is . . . I'm more wrong about this than anyone else has ever been wrong about anything. (Dissertation-induced melodrama is unavoidable.)

As for my attitude toward poetry, well, I still wrestle with it myself. I find most poetry I read needlessly personal; like the work of the New York School, all of whom insert coterie-specific allusions into their poems. I can't stand poems so personal that knowing the poet's biography's essential to understanding the poem. (I have a feeling this comment may appear, in slightly revised form, on the Valve in an hour or so.) If you compare the work of say, James Schuyler, to something like Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat," you'll see what I mean: both are intensely personal, but instead of masking meaning in a poetic performance of maximal insularity, Cohen focuses on communication with his audience. The turn toward an inscrutability best understood via biography infuriates me as a reader; I don't like feeling that I have to know a scene to enjoy a work, and most contemporary poetry is saturated in that. So it's not the ambiguity that bothers me so much as the insularity . . . and I can prove as much by saying that most of the novels I love are, to put it bluntly, poetic. Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, what have you, all contain the dense imagery and ambiguous language more commonly associated with poetry; the difference, of course, is that they provide enough context to allow Joe Anonymous to pick up their books and understand the stakes behind of that ambiguity. (For the record, I'd consider Pinter's poetry like I would a realist novel.)

I think there may be some confusion given the fact that I chose to work not on the books I love but on the ones I don't; that was, in part, a conscious decision, as I didn't want to ruin my experience of Joyce or Faulkner by turning either into a chore. I foresee this pattern defining my career: work not on what I love but what I find interesting, and evolutionary theory is what I find more interesting than anything else. (I also love archival work, the sense of discovery, that I'm beginning from the beginning; all of this factors into why I chose to work on novels I find interesting instead of the ones I love.)

As for your poem, it's not the sort that's made me turn my back on contemporary poetry. It doesn't partake of that confessional allusiveness which irks me to the core. (That said, Deborah Nelson's Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America is so compelling a read I'm almost inclined to read the poets she talks about. Then I remember my Anne Sexton phase in high school, you know, when you listen to Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Street" over and over and sit on your bed ostentatiously groaning? No? Well, neither do I.)

[Rich Puchalsky]

"As for your poem, it's not the sort that's made me turn my back on contemporary poetry."

If I ever do start a blog, I should put that quote up on a sidebar or something.

I vaguely seem to remember that you live somewhere near L.A., right? You should go to a few open-mike poetry readings, the kind where each person gets five minutes -- here's a list of venues. I used to like the better ones. Complete mix of different, clashing styles; most of the people completely untalented; occasionally someone good, if only for a few moments. Once you listen to this kind of thing for a while, poetry becomes less something where you say I like this poet, I hate that one, and more the kind of multitudinous, all-American, and vaguely unskilled activity that Whitman would rhapsodize about. Like cutting down trees. Or you'll treat it like one long session of MST3K, in which case it's good to bring someone else to whom you can pass derisive notes, since actually pointing and laughing is a faux pas. Ah, but I forget that you probably have to grade undergraduate poetry -- in which case amateur open-mike spoken word might cause some kind of instant homicidal impulse.

[Adam Roberts]

all poetry is lame at this historical moment, so the futility is general ... um?

Anne Carson? David Harsent? Les Murray? Muldoon? Craig Raine? Even, when he reins in his sweet-tooth, Derek Walcott?

I don't think your poem is lame, Rich. Its problem, I'd say, is that the imagery (petri dish, bacteria, bees and so on) is too small-scale and trivialising to connect effectively with the idea of the city as an arena of fear. But maybe that's just me.

Scott: I keep reading Ashbery waiting for the lightning strike, but as yet I just don't get him. I don't hear the music in his wibble-wobble of verbiage. I see how I'm supposed to get him, I think, but he doesn't do it for me. To pick a stanza at random:

To be someone else’s. Because there’s too much to
Be done that doesn’t fit, and the parts that get lost
Are the reasonable ones, just because they got lost
And were forced to suffer transmigration by finding their way home.

It all reads, to me, that way: which is to say, flabby, unevocative, prosodically clumsy (that second line? The flailing shift from the end of that first line to that second line? That way the choppy monosyllables awkwardly lurch into polysyllabic eyesores like 'transmigration'?). I suppose I find Ashbery curiously unable to capture the heft and inadvertent eloquence and sparkle of actual jammed-together human speechifying that DeLillo (say) is rather good at capturing, or even, I don’t know, the vernacular bits in The Waste Land.

(At a tangent -- Yesterday, at about 10am -- me to my daughter: ‘would you like an orange, Lily?’ She: ‘I’m always after an orange.’ [And on receiving the orange] ‘I like oranges. Oh [little sigh] I’ve had such a long day.’)

[Rich Puchalsky]

Adam, I really meant my comment to be about the historical moment, not about the undoubted merits of some individual poets. Normally I wouldn't get into yet another What's The Matter With Poetry Today discussion -- but hey, we're already here. What's the matter with poetry today is, to be pseudo-Marxist about it, the relations of production. This will be long, so feel free to ignore it.

Let's assume that there is some subset of the people in any contemporary more or less Western society who would produce art if they could. I don't think it's important for this argument to know whether this is some kind of innate human drive, or something particular to our culture; it's enough to know that it's there. What is the most well-known art form that requires no equipment, not much time, and (sadly) is reknowned as a method of self-expression? Poetry. All you really need is literacy (assuming that you're going to write your poetry down), so you have an art form where a wide swath of the population owns the means of production. OK, therefore lots of poetry is produced. The effect is abetted by the general decline in critical gatekeeping and High Culture snobbery, which would otherwise discourage most of the people who write from writing.

Are there "consumers" for this surge in production accompanying more widespread education? No. It appears that for some cultural or other reason only a very small percentage of people ever want to read poetry. So, outside of academic contexts where people are forced to read things, essentially the universe of poetry readers equals the universe of poetry writers.

Wonderful, you'd think, the more writers, the more readers. Yes, but the more poetry there is to read. I can't read more than a few poems a day before my critical faculties are dulled enough so that I can't really give the next ones the same attention, and I don't know but suspect that most people find themselves in a similar situation. So who are you going to read -- some barely-known (because critical gatekeeping and consequent star-poet formation is pretty much defunct, as I'll get to later) but supposedly world-class contempory poet, an old standard, or your friends? I don't know about you, but I spend most of my poetry-reading time on my friends. I could say something cynical about how everyone does this because if you don't read, you don't get read, but I really do think that most people find the aesthetic value of reading a good contemporary doubtful in comparison to actual engagement with other people whose art you influence and whose art influences yours. (Scott, take note; this is why the groups of poets that you dislike seem so insular, I'd guess.) And if you really do want something better, poetry has accumulated such a mass of old standards by now that seeking out a contemporary is really in most cases degrading the aesthetic value of what you might be reading. The only compelling reason to do it is so you can be in touch with the contempory scene -- but your friends or poetry group *are* your contemporary scene.

So why is critical gatekeeping defunct? Well, I could get all anti-Theory I suppose and talk about the decline of evaluative criticism, but I don't think that really has much to do with it. All those amateur poets want to become better poets, and how do you do that? Well, it's vaguely felt that taking a course must help. And all the slightly better people writing would love to be able to make money off of poetry somehow. So: courses, workshops, MFA degrees. Universities have long since picked up on this as a moneymaker, along with everyone else.

But, you know, when you have someone at a university teaching people how to write poetry, they are after all a professor, and they need some form of publication in order to measure professional status. Which takes the form of, you guessed it, poetry. So now you have more-or-less academic poetry magazines ever growing in order to handle the increasing output of the ranks of professional teaching poets. Which means that criticism is dead, I think. No one can read even a small subset of everything that must get published, and if you could, the most capable critics are also the people least likely to want to anger their colleagues, so everything is dully praised. The majority of those who could or would say who the good contemporary poets are are the people, like yourself and Scott, who are more or less paid to know, and who don't specialize in writing poetry themselves.

I could add more, about the general replacement of reading with other forms of entertainment and consequent reduction in poetry published in magazines that are not bought only by poets and their relatives, or about the multitude of poetry competitions paid for by the fees of entrants. But I think you get the picture.

Poetry has not adjusted to this, well, "wealth" let's say. Sooner or later someone's going to figure out something. Are things different across the water?

[Luther Blissett]

I suggest you all keep regular track of Ron Silliman's blog at silliman.blogspot.com. It's not about singling out great poets even in the midst of a State of Poetry that is amiss, nor is it about going after (once again!) the MFA programs. Silliman has a lot to say about both topics, but he's brilliant (if at times infuriating) in tracing a totally alternative literary history of American poetry. Poetry is alive and well and living in America, if you know where to look for it. And it has a pretty large audience and a well-developed set of community institutions beyond Official Verse Culture -- I've seen huge turn-outs for Harryette Mullen, for example.

Scott: Regarding the personal in the New York School, I think this reveals a certain tendency in your reading practice, one that turns many of us into scholars -- and particularly, scholars of fiction. This is the desire to know. Now, I'm not gonna get all Zen or Blanchot or whatever, but I think poetry, at its best, is not approached head-on in search of meaning, themes, drama, and so on.

A stupid anecdote: in high school, I fell in love with four poets, among others: Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, and Jorie Graham. What I liked about each was that I *didn't* understand their poems in the same way I easily grasped, say, Lowell's "Skunk Hour" or *The Great Gatsby*. I had no vocabulary for my interest in their work -- an interest that was intellectual, not simply about some vague aesthetic pleasure -- but Olson's essay on Projective Verse helped me a bit. Olson focuses us on the breath, the line as sound/concept unit, the poem as a field of shifting rhythms, voices, angles of attack. This is basically what that critic was trying to get at by calling Ashberry's work improvisations on the theme of flux -- but he goes wrong in bringing flux to the level of theme. All poems, in their shifts of language, would qualify as representations of flux. The real goal would be to learn from Ashberry's particular moves -- the way a good ear distinguishes between the moves of Coltrane and Parker, Braxton and Coleman.

I've written before about Suzanne Langer's adaptation of Clive Bell's concept of significant form. For Langer, art isn't about discursive content but about formal rhythms. A poem doesn't give us thoughts as much as it parallels the mind in motion. The moves of a poem by, say, Ashberry or O'Hara, needn't be understood at the level of content -- which is to say, who cares about O'Hara's proper name dropping or his scene? What matters is following an amazing and playful mind move. I'd like to say I've learned more about how to think from Olson than from even the smartest books on any given subject. (Then again, I'd say the same thing about a great essay or novel: what interests me about Baldwin's essays or *Moby Dick* is not the particular content or ideas but the structures and rhythms and "formal energy" we see in these works.)

I don't think I'm actually responding to anything anyone actually wrote, but hey, why not click on "post" anyway???

[Rich Puchalsky]

Really it's not just about Official Verse Culture, Luthor, the spoken word constellation has the same features. Harryette Mullen is a professor who teaches poetry, _Sleeping with the Dictionary_ was published by a university press, she does workshops, and I would guess that her huge audience is composed just as much of amateur poets as other audiences. (I didn't mean to imply that huge audiences are never possible; it's just that there are many, many different huge audiences around local favorites.) Poetry is most definitely alive in America, no doubt about that.

[Rich Puchalsky]

A random side note:

Adam: "I don't think your poem is lame, Rich. Its problem, I'd say, is that the imagery (petri dish, bacteria, bees and so on) is too small-scale and trivialising to connect effectively with the idea of the city as an arena of fear. But maybe that's just me."

A deliberate choice, unfortunately, for a poem that was supposed to be about the failure of self-focussed individual concern in confronting a disfunctional system like L.A.'s. But I was amused to read Mike Davis' _Ecology of Fear_ shortly after writing it, which pointed out that L.A. isn't really a desert, it's a fine Mediterranean landscape, and made me realize that I had unknowingly replicated the same fascination with L.A.-linked disaster that Davis went into so thoroughly. I highly recommend that book if you get the chance.

[Adam Roberts]

So, outside of academic contexts where people are forced to read things, essentially the universe of poetry readers equals the universe of poetry writers. I think this is spot on. Indeed, given the fact that so many people go through at least a phase of writing poetry (during their anguished teens, perhaps) before graduating to reading only Tom Clancy or whatever, it may be that there are many more writers of poetry than readers. Which, if true, is a sobering thought.

But having said that, I'm much more sanguine than Rich is, I think, about the state of poetry today. To talk broadly of the two camps of poetry that interest me -- roughly the 'intellectual' or 'abstruse' on the one hand, and the 'primitive' or 'fauvist' on the other [I despise people who bracket the world into two types, yes, but I ask you to bear with me for a mo]: then there is at least the academy to keep the former kind of poetry alive -- and alive in a real sense; many of the students I teach find themselves genuinely excited and animated by it. As for the latter kind, it needs no academy to keep it vital, since it flourishes to the point of hectic overproduction in pop music. And I do think (regarding Rich's anxiety re: the gatekeepers) that pop is a properly critical culture. Writing pop lyrics that work is not as easy as it looks, and criticising them because they lack Wallace Stevens’ level of oblique sophistication is as misapplied as criticising Van Gogh because he lacks the painterly finish of Raphael. But at the same time it’s monstrously easy to write really really bad poetry in this idiom, and when that happens it is noticed. Case in point: the latest Coldplay album, musically nice enough, lyrically dear! god! no!.

But, ah-—to talk of the prosodic and lyric perfection of a text such as [and here I start to show my age] Randy Newman’s ‘Louisiana 1927’; or the Smiths ‘Reel Around the Fountain’, or Elvis Costello’s ‘Strict Time’, or anything, pretty much, by Elvis Costello. And … what? What’s that? You mean they’re still doing pop music, even today? You mean it didn’t stop in 1990? That’s absurd. Bah.

But having said that, I'm much more sanguine than Rich is, I think. Talking broadly of the two camps of poetry that interest me ... roughly the 'intellectual' or 'abstruse' on the one hand, and the 'primitive' or 'fauvist' on the other [I despise people who bracket the world into two types, yes, but bear with me) then there is at least the academy to keep the former kind of poetry alive -- and alive in a real sense; many of the students I teach it to genuinely get turned on to it. As for the latter kind, it needs no academy to keep it vital, since it flourishes to the point of hectic overproduction and overconsumption in pop music. And I do think (regarding Rich's anxiety re: the gatekeepers) that pop is a properly

[Adam Roberts]

How did that last half-paragraph get itself cloned there? Can somebody put their hand into the machine and wipe it clean away, please? (I mean, is that possible?)

[Rich Puchalsky]

Looking at Adam's remark about my anxiety about gatekeeping above, I see that I've given the wrong impression. It's not that I want a return to a Church of Poetry that never existed, creating a canon and a banned list so that everyone knew just what to read. On the contrary, as I indicated above, my attitude towards poetry is a basically Whitmanesque love of it as a mass activity. I do think that it would be pleasant if in addition to this, we could have some kind of reliable long-distance evaluative criticism, but that will probably come eventually. Basically, what we're in right now is a situation similar to what pop music might drift into if the music industry dies due to widespread unenforceability of intellectual property, with some differences becuase many people like to listen to music who don't make it: garage bands are almost as popular locally as "worldwide stars" would have been in the era when there was an industry creating them, music is general, musicians are not driven to perfect themselves by lifelong economic concerns, the only professional compositional musicians are professors. That's not a bad fate, really. It would balance less reliably good music against more general participation in production of music.

Followup note to my side note on the breakdown of cities: my recent poem about Katrina is here.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Now that we're getting hundreds of commenters all drawn here by s-e-x, maybe someone can continue this poetry thread which had not reached anywhere near its everything-has-been-talked-about point. Hey, look over here! Poetry, people, it's much more interesting then ... oh, never mind.

[nnyhav]

Thanks for the jump-off point for much leaping about (gonna hafta figure out trackbacks someday).

[Rich Puchalsky]

Interesting post, nnyhav. I'm glad that you thought the particles vs waves thing was worth mentioning.

Meanwhile, I see that the last prediction made in my linked poem above (the only one that was actually a prediction when I wrote it) is coming true. Predictably enough.