Rhyme and reason

(Filed: 10/03/2005)

A veteran of the vibrant 1960s poetry scene, Camille Paglia argues that critics can no longer read, poets can no longer write, and the unacknowledged legislators of our age are writing advertising jingles for peanuts

Poetry was at a height of prestige in the 1960s. American college students were listening to rock music, but also writing poetry. There were packed readings by poets on campuses and at political demonstrations. In 1966, for example, I attended an anti-war "poetry read-in" staged by visiting poets Galway Kinnell, James Wright and Robert Bly at Harpur College (my alma mater at the State University of New York at Binghamton). Harpur was then a hotbed of anti-academic poetry. During graduate school at Yale University, I attended readings by W H Auden, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and many others. In 1969, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso appeared at the Yale Law School, in an event significantly not sponsored by the English department, where there was open disdain for Beat poetry (one of my primary influences).
At that magic moment, professors specialising in poetry criticism had stratospheric reputations at the major universities. But over the following decades, poetry and poetry study were steadily marginalised by pretentious "theory" - which claims to analyse language but atrociously abuses it. Poststructuralism and crusading identity politics led to the gradual sinking in reputation of the premiere literature departments, so that by the turn of the millennium they were no longer seen, even by the undergraduates themselves, to be where the excitement was on campus. One result of this triumph of ideology over art is that, on the basis of their publications, few literature professors know how to "read" any more - and thus can scarcely be trusted to teach that skill to their students.
My attraction to poetry has always been driven by my love of English, which my family acquired relatively recently. (My mother and all four of my grandparents were born in Italy.) While my parents spoke English at home, my early childhood in the small factory town of Endicott in upstate New York was spent among speakers of sometimes mutually unintelligible Italian dialects. Unlike melodious Tuscan or literary Italian, rural Italian from the central and southern provinces is brusque, assertive, and consonant-laden, with guttural accents and dropped final vowels. What fascinated me about English was what I later recognised as its hybrid etymology: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects, is invigorating, richly entertaining and often funny, as it is to Shakespeare, who gets tremendous effects out of their interplay. The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry. It's why the pragmatic Anglo-American tradition (unlike effete French rationalism) doesn't need poststructuralism: in English, usage depends upon context; the words jostle and provoke one another and mischievously shift their meanings over time.
English has evolved over the past century because of mass media and advertising, but the shadowy literary establishment in America, in and outside academe, has failed to adjust. From the start, like Andy Warhol (another product of an immigrant family in an isolated north-eastern industrial town), I recognised commercial popular culture as the authentic native voice of America. Burned into my memory, for example, is a late-1950s TV commercial for M&M's chocolate candies. A sultry cartoon peanut, sunbathing on a chaise longue, said in a twanging Southern drawl: "I'm an M&M peanut / Toasted to a golden brown / Dipped in creamy milk chocolate / And covered in a thin candy shell!" Illustrating each line, she prettily dove into a swimming pool of melted chocolate and popped out on the other side to strike a pose and be instantly towelled in her monogrammed candy wrap. I felt then, and still do, that the M&M peanut's jingle was a vivacious poem and that the creative team who produced that ad were folk artists, anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals.
My attentiveness to the American vernacular - through commercials, screwball comedies, hit songs, and talk radio (which I listen to around the clock) - has made me restive with the current state of poetry. I find too much work by the most acclaimed poets laboured, affected and verbose, intended not to communicate with the general audience but to impress their fellow poets. Poetic language has become stale and derivative, even when it makes all-too-familiar avant garde or ethnic gestures. Those who turn their backs on media (or overdose on postmodernism) have no gauge for monitoring the metamorphosis of English. Any poetry removed from popular diction will inevitably become as esoteric as 18th-century satire (perfected by Alexander Pope), whose dense allusiveness and preciosity drove the early Romantic poets into the countryside to find living speech again. Poetry's declining status has made its embattled practitioners insular and self-protective: personal friendships have spawned cliques and coteries in book and magazine publishing, prize committees and grants organisations. I have no such friendships and am a propagandist for no poet or group of poets.
In my new book, Break, Blow, Burn, I offer line-by-line close readings of 43 poems, from canonical Renaissance verse to Joni Mitchell's Woodstock, which became an anthem for my conflicted generation. In gathering material, I was shocked at how weak individual poems have become over the past 40 years. Our most honoured poets are gifted and prolific, but we have come to respect them for their intelligence, commitment and the body of their work. They ceased focusing long ago on production of the powerful, distinctive, self-contained poem. They have lost ambition and no longer believe they can or should speak for their era. Elevating process over form, they treat their poems like meandering diary entries and craft them for effect in live readings rather than on the page. Arresting themes or images are proposed, then dropped or left to dribble away. Or, in a sign of lack of confidence in the reader or material, suggestive points are prosaically rephrased and hammered into obviousness. Rote formulas are rampant - a lugubrious victimology of accident, disease, and depression or a simplistic, ranting politics (people good, government bad) that looks naive next to the incisive writing about politics on today's op-ed pages. To be included in this book, a poem had to be strong enough, as an artefact, to stand up to all the great poems that precede it. One of my aims is to challenge contemporary poets to reassess their assumptions and modus operandi.
In the 1990s, poetry as performance art revived among young people in slams recalling the hipster clubs of the Beat era. As always, the return of oral tradition had folk roots - in this case the incantatory rhyming of African-American urban hip-hop. But it's poetry on the page - a visual construct - that lasts. The eye, too, is involved. The shapeliness and symmetry of the four-line ballad stanza once structured the best lyrics of rhythm and blues, gospel, Country and Western music, and rock'n'roll. But with the immense commercial success of rock music, those folk roots have receded, and popular songwriting has grown weaker and weaker.
My title comes from a poem in this book, John Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV": "That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend / Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new." Donne is appealing to God to overwhelm him and compel his redemption from sin. My secular but semi-mystical view of art is that it taps primal energies, breaks down barriers and imperiously remakes our settled way of seeing. Animated by the breath force (the original meaning of "spirit" and "inspiration"), poetry brings exhilarating spiritual renewal. A good poem is iridescent and incandescent, catching the light at unexpected angles and illuminating human universals - whose very existence is denied by today's parochial theorists. Among those looming universals are time and mortality, to which we all are subject. Like philosophy, poetry is a contemplative form, but unlike philosophy, poetry subliminally manipulates the body and triggers its nerve impulses, the muscle tremors of sensation and speech.
The sacred remains latent in poetry, which was born in ancient ritual and cult. Poetry's persistent theme of the sublime - the awesome vastness of the universe - is a religious perspective, even in atheists like Shelley. Despite the cosmic vision of the radical, psychedelic 1960s, the sublime is precisely what poststructuralism, with its blindness to nature, cannot see. Metaphor is based on analogy: art is a revelation of the interconnectedness of the universe. The concentrated attention demanded by poetry is close to meditation.
Commentary on poetry is a kind of divination, resembling the practice of oracles, sibyls, augurs, and interpreters of dreams. Poets speak even when they know their words will be swept away by the wind. In college Greek class, I was amazed by the fragments of Archaic poetry - sometimes just a surviving phrase or line - that vividly conveyed the personalities of their authors, figures like Archilochus, Alcman and Ibycus, about whom little is known. The continuity of Western culture is demonstrated by lyric poetry.
Another of my unfashionable precepts is that I revere the artist and the poet, who are so ruthlessly "exposed" by the sneering poststructuralists with their political agenda. There is no "death of the author" (that Parisian cliché) in my world view. Authors strive and create against every impediment, including their doubters and detractors. Despite breaks, losses and revivals, artistic tradition has a transhistorical flow that I have elsewhere compared to a mighty river. Poems give birth to other poems. Yet poetry is not just about itself: it does point to something out there, however dimly we can know it. The modernist doctrine of the work's self-reflexiveness once empowered art but has ended by strangling it in gimmickry.
Artists are makers, not just mouthers of slippery discourse. Poets are fabricators and engineers, pursuing a craft analogous to cabinetry or bridge building. I maintain that the text emphatically exists as an object; it is not just a mist of ephemeral subjectivities. Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species. In writing about a poem, I try to listen to it and find a language and tone that mesh with its own idiom. We live in a time increasingly indifferent to literary style, from the slack prose of once august newspapers to pedestrian translations of the Bible. The internet (which I champion and to which I have extensively contributed) has increased verbal fluency but not quality, at least in its rushed, patchy genres of e-mail and blog. Good writing comes from good reading. All literary criticism should be accessible to the general reader. Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing. Technical analysis of a poem is like breaking down a car engine, which has to be reassembled to run again. Theorists childishly smash up their subjects and leave the disjecta membra like litter.
For me, poetry is speech-based and is not just an arbitrary pattern of signs that can be slid around like a jigsaw puzzle. I sound out poems silently, as others pray. Poetry, which began as song, is music-drama: I value emotional expressiveness, musical phrasings, and choreographic assertion, the speaker's theatrical self-positioning toward other persons or implacable external forces. I am not that concerned with prosody except to compare strict metre (drilled by my Greek and Latin teachers) to the standard songs that jazz musicians transform: I prefer irregularity, syncopation, bending the note.
My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape. Many critics counsel memorising poetry, but that has never been my habit. To commit a poem to memory is to make the act of reading superfluous. But I believe in immersion in and saturation by the poem, so that the next time we meet it, we have the thrill of recognition.
We feel (to quote singer Stevie Nicks) the hauntingly familiar. It's akin to addiction or to the euphoria of being in love.
This is an edited version of the introduction to 'Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems', published by Pantheon Books