VRZHU bullets of pure love: Last NaPoWriMo, analysis, and news from the Vrzhu Research Bureau

{Gone in 60 seconds]

AND: congratulations to all NaPoWriMo particpants, special thanks to Maureen Thorson for inventing this particular instrument of torture, and very special thanks to Zelda at Hyacinth Girls (isn't hyacinth a weird- looking word?) for her kind words and to Matt for his and for being the voting member of the abortive Which Poem Sucks Less? game.

All the precincts have not yet reported in, but exit polls indicate I'm worse at writing poetry this year than last. Go Obama!

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The current issue of Poetry has a review by Carmine Starnino of two books by Adam Kirsch. At first I thought I would highlight all the suspect rhetorical moves in the piece, but that seemed both unfair and also like too much work. It would be wrong to hold prose to the rigor we require of poetry, where everything must be justified.

But I do want to point out a statement that seems to me just plain wrong, and also make a connection between two statements, a connection that perhaps Mr. Starnino did not intend.

Since I will be viewing Adam Kirsch through the lens that Mr. Starnino holds up, I will qualify my statements at the end.

Mr. Starnino writes about Kirsch’s criticism:

“Having wasted no time finding his stride, Kirsch remains focused. He continues to place his poet-critic multitasking at the service of a profoundly unfashionable “premodernist” vision that emphasizes form, discipline, and tradition.”

Later, he writes about Adam Kirsch’s (AK’s) own poetry:

“But as with his first book, continued attempts at a more colloquial phrasing can’t escape an ever-so-slight drift toward antiquarianism”

First, let me point out that Carmine Starnino (CS) here equates modernism with an emphasis on formlessness, permissiveness, and—well, what’s the opposite of tradition?—innovation. Though perhaps for that last term “disrespect for tradition” might be nearer his intent. Does this strike y’all as true, or a reasonable statement?

But the real point I want to make is the connection between AK’s critical writing in the service of “a profoundly unfashionable “premodernist” vision” and his poetic “ever-so-slight drift toward antiquarianism.” I appreciate here that CS lashes AK with the wet noodle of “ever-so-slight-drift,” but take away the mitigating qualifiers and you can see AK’s writing, both poetry and criticism, whole.

He longs to restore the real or imagined conditions of the poetic Ancien Régime. He wants the king back on the throne, the hegemony back in control. In short, his goal of reform masks a desire for a kind of poetic recidivism, a return to a prelapsarian literary period.

By my lights, this differs from taking a conservative position regarding poetry. The word “conservative” has taken on a lot of negative (to me, anyway) connotations because of its misuse, in general, as a euphemism for reactionary. Maybe conservationist would be an uglier but less fraught word. As a writer, Tommaso Landolfi was conservative, though most people reading “Gogol’s Wife” would have a hard time seeing that. Off the top of my head, I would add Orson Welles and John Clare to that list.

Also, well, maybe I’m torquing that word too much. But there’s a difference between the desire to preserve something valuable from loss or harm, and the charge towards the status quo ante (“forward into the past”). For one, the former is at least possible.

And this position takes as a premise the same belief as its opponents, though turned on its head. The avants (for lack of better term) believe that poetry progresses, moves forward as Spirit does in Hegel, or economic conditions in Marx. The longing to return to a pre-modern poetry culture also believes there is an arrow, a direction. But rather than moving upward, poetry has decayed over time, or in modern times.

Does poetry change? Yes, though something is still centered there, I believe. But this change is neither progress nor decay. It’s speciation.

Not that I’m not sympathetic. I was reading some collected and various posts around the “School of Quietude” vs. “Post-avant” buttons earlier this week. It’s probably an indication of something wrong with me that I’m reading old blog entries, but there it is. I kept thinking: “Boys and girls, the fire’s been out for some time. Why are you fighting over the ashes? No matter how you or others value them, cold cinders will not keep you warm."

And, being old, I feel that things were better formerly than now, though I acknowledge this is not objectively true (vaccines!). I guess, being old, I find a fitting response to this to be not trying to wrench the present back to the past but to grieve and to mourn, like Priam.

So CS’s AK is in a pretty untenable position, no matter how stylish his prose, or how devout his zeal. In earlier times the resurrection of older modes could be a (partially) successful way of moving forward (Coleridge), or a charming cul de sac (Chatterton). But never an end in itself.

QUALIFICATION: I’ve read, unsystematically, at least some of AK’s essays, at least the ones I can download or get for a small outlay of funds. I enjoy AK’s essays. I rarely agree with them. But there have been some that I have agreed with more than others.

Part Two.

Mr. Starnino quotes one of Adam Kirsch’s poems (which he calls "sonnet-like sixteen-liners," which is like saying a fish-like dog. Maybe it makes sense. Maybe.) and then says this about the last line of the poem: “’Things were not wrong inside, but all around’ is as memorable as language gets.”

I’m sorry but this is untrue. Or, if true, I'm joining Kojeve in reveling in the future of language devolving into the animality of birdsong and cricket chirps ("animals of the species Homo sapiens would react by conditioned reflexes to vocal signals or sign "language," and thus their so called discourses would be like what is supposed to be the language of bees").

Here are the first five memorable lines of poetry that jump into my head:

“Nature’s first green is gold”
“She sang beyond the genius of the sea”
"When I have fears that I may cease to be”
“When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose”
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”

Now these may have jumped into my head not because they are as memorable as language gets. That presumes too much about my abilities and way too much about the functioning of memory. But having remembered them in my debilitated mental state, I assert they qualify as memorable. Shall we compare these to the AK line?

[pause]

Having done so, I’m afraid Mr. Starnino’s assertion dies a quick death. What led him to say it I can’t guess, perhaps his overall enthusiasm for AK in general, or being carried away by his own rhetoric. But it can’t be the result of any functioning critical faculty. In the line "Things were not wrong inside, but all around" the words are vague, the rhythm bland, the sentiment unremarkable. This isn’t as memorable as language gets. It doesn’t even make the minors.

Side note: I notice that all but one of the lines I remember is the first line of the poem. Do y’all out there find that to be true? Actually, you probably have whole swathes of The Prelude ready to hand, or could jump up and recite the whole of Lycidas in the vocal manner of W.C. Fields. So never mind.

Finally, I am grateful to the Starnino article for the indirect Valery quote: "I can’t help but feel that the best explanation for his choices in Invasions is provided by Paul Valéry, who said that the chief pleasure of rhyme is the rage it inspires in its opponents." Although when I googled for it all that came up was this slightly different version: "Paul Valery said that one of the most mysterious things about rhyme 'is the rage it inspires in those who fail to see its function.'" I got to read me some more Valery -- I have a bunch of him in those old Bollingen books versions.

And, post-finally, the same issue of Poetry has a couple of cool poems by Cathy Park Hong, upon who I am seriously crushing in a poetry related kind of way.

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Meanwhile at the Vrzhu Research Bureau, people write to us and say:

Dear Vrzhu Research Bureau,

Is there a surfeit of poetry?

Sincerely,
Concerned and Unpublished

To which we (the VRB) reply:

Dear C & U,

As long as you haven't been published, there's no surfeit of poetry!

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