Ron Silliman’s latest post, a praise-song to Geoffrey Young’s The Riot Act, begins—as do so many of Silliman’s posts—with a sneer.
“In one sense, Geoffrey Young is the poet Billy Collins & Ted Kooser both would like to be, writing self-contained works that are narrative marvels and accessible to just about any reader of English.” This fatuous statement is followed by this lucid introduction to one of Young’s poems. “Dig:”, he instructs us from under his cocked beret, the epitome of avant-schmavant cool.
Now, I don’t want to sneer at Geoffrey Young. The poems of his that Silliman quotes—especially the one entitled “Down the Garden Pathology”—are nervy, prickly and appealing á là Linh Dinh, and I look forward to reading his book. But the idea that Billy Collins and Ted Kooser (yoked here … uh, why? Perhaps because both have been U.S. Poet Laureates? Or because they have an audience beyond their own family and the indentured admiration of their students?) would care to write like Young is condescending at best.
I’m no fan of Collins’s work, but over the years Ted Kooser has written poems that are powerful in an understated way, authentic, resonant, accessible, and useful. (By useful, I mean, for example, the way Kooser’s oncologist framed and displayed his poem “At the Cancer Ward” on a wall near the nurse’s station, presumably because it provides insights into the lives of their patients.) Now, Silliman would like his readers to think that Kooser was born in a cracker barrel and that his concern for making poems that ordinary readers can understand and enjoy is some kind of betrayal. For this betrayal, Silliman has consigned Kooser to his infamous “School of Quietude.”
What surprises me about Silliman’s latest post is his admission that Geoffrey Young’s poems are “accessible,” a quality Silliman typically brands as Quietudinal on his way toward dismissing the work of whatever poet has committed this particular atrocity. Is Ron going soft? Is he influenced by his personal history as a poet whose work was published by Young’s press, The Figures? (In my own case, I can’t pretend to ignore the affection I feel for Kooser, who published some of my earliest poems in his New Salt Creek Reader.) Or can it be that accessibility has ceased to be a negative value for Silliman? Can it be that linguistic opacity, the shunning of content, and the almost puritanical efforts to suppress the self are no longer artistic prerequisites for this hoary “langpo”?
News at 11:00….
Thanks for the Felstiner recommendation. I loved his <I>Translating Neruda</I>….
May I recommend my mentor John Felstiner’s Celan translations. I recently read those of Pierre Joris, and I found them deeply problematic. Michael Hamburger’s are fine, but he does not capture Celan’s conciseness. There are others, of course, but those are the ones I am familiar with.<BR/><BR/>"Cryptic but not difficult": perfect.
Excellent observation! All critics, I think, want to control the bag; poets prefer life outside the bag for sure.<BR/><BR/>I confess that I’m familiar with Celan mostly through anthology selections, but you are the second correspondent to recommend him <I>this week</I>, so in fealty to serendipity I’ll have to heed the call.<BR/><BR/>What I <I>have</I> read of Celan has impressed me as cryptic
The Poetry-Critical Complex: allow me to refer to you a post of mine from over a year ago, in which I relate a favorite anecdote about the Swiss critic Peter von Matt, and how a standard gesture of his helps establish his authority as "the one who knows":<BR/><BR/>http://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2007/01/beauty-and-immortality.html<BR/><BR/>Poetry as experience: For me, a key poet in helping me
Reginald, your post here is—as always—eloquent and forceful throughout. So let me respond paragraph by paragraph….<BR/><BR/>"I don’t believe that poems should be complicated, but I do believe that they should be complex, in the sense that life is complex, and poems should at least live up to life."<BR/><BR/>I agree with "simple surfaces but complex depths." What I detest are complex surfaces
Dear Joseph,<BR/><BR/>Thanks for your eloquent response and your eloquent post relating to it. It’s too late for me to do them full justice, but I did want to make a few remarks.<BR/><BR/>I don’t believe that poems should be complicated, but I do believe that they should be complex, in the sense that life is complex, and poems should at least live up to life. Again, that doesn’t mean that the
Reginald, I think you oversimplify Kooser’s approach. His touchstone idea is that readers matter—but that each poet <I>chooses</I> his or her ideal reader by choosing a particular range of poetic strategies. I think this is indisputable. Aram Saroyan’s ideal readers, for example, are unlikely to appreciate Carl Sandburg. Drawing attention to this fact is a good thing because it can help a
I do think Reginald is right to complain about Silliman’s sense of grievance.<BR/><BR/>No snow-covered mountains visible from Basel! Not even much snow in the city. But of course the snow-covered mountains are an hour away by train.
Dear Joseph,<BR/><BR/>I’m glad that I discovered your blog (through your comment on my Howard Nemerov post on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog).<BR/><BR/>I would have more respect for Silliman’s judgments, even if I disagreed with them (which I usually do), if there _were_ a consistent theory behind them, and if they were not so hyperbolic, dismissive, and mean-spirited. One thing that
I do follow Silliman’s pronouncements, of course—and I value him enough to link his blog to mine. But I wonder if there isn’t more than likes and dislikes involved. He portrays himself as a theorist, after all, which means he pretends that his likes and dislikes have some kind of non-personal value. I’m enough of an Emersonian to feel constricted by any theory, which leads me to distrust the
Push your point further: here, Silliman accidentally makes clear that "post-avant" means "I like it" and "SoQ" means "I don’t." <BR/><BR/>Since he is an articulate and productive critic of poetry, his likes and dislikes are worth considering carefully.<BR/><BR/>But that does not mean we have to accept his unfortunate terminology.