Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  Surely the lucid and vivacious Marianne Moore, so hugely popular in her day, would have produced many poems to appeal to the general reader. However, while I was charmed by Moore’s ingenious variety of formats, I became uncomfortable and impatient with her reflex jokiness, which began to seem like an avoidance of emotion. Nothing went very deep. Because I was so eager to get a good sports poem into Break, Blow, Burn (I never found one), I had high hopes for Moore’s beloved odes to baseball. Alas, compared to today’s high-impact, around-the-clock sports talk on radio and TV, Moore’s baseball lingo came across as fussy and corny.

  Elizabeth Bishop presented an opposite problem. Bishop is truly a poet’s poet, a refined craftsman whose discreet, shapely poems carry a potent emotional charge beneath their transparent surface. I had expected a wealth of Bishop poems to choose from. With my eye on the general reader, I was keenly anticipating a cascade of sensuous tropical imagery drawn from Bishop’s life in Brazil. But when I returned to her collected poems, the observed details to my surprise seemed oppressively clouded with sentimental self-projection. For example, I found Bishop’s much-anthologized poem “The Fish” nearly unbearable due to her obtrusively simmering self-pity. (Wounded animal poems, typifying the anthropomorphic fallacy, have become an exasperating cliché over the past sixty years.) Even splendid, monumental Brazil evidently couldn’t break into Bishop’s weary bubble, which traveled with her wherever she went. It may be time to jettison depressiveness as a fashionable badge of creativity.

  Charles Bukowski was another poet slated from the start to be prominently featured in Break, Blow, Burn. (Indeed, he proved to be the writer I was most asked about on my book tours.) I had planned to make the dissolute Bukowski a crown jewel, demonstrating the scornful rejection by my rowdy, raucous 1960s generation of the genteel proprieties of 1950s literary criticism, still faithfully practiced by the erudite but terminally prim Helen Vendler. I was looking for a funny, squalid street or barroom poem, preferably with boorish knockdown brawling and half-clad shady ladies. But as with Elizabeth Bishop, I could not find a single poem to endorse in good faith for the general reader. And Bukowski was staggeringly prolific: I ransacked shelf upon shelf of his work. But he obviously had little interest in disciplining or consolidating his garrulous, meandering poems. Frustrated, I fantasized about scissoring out juicy excerpts and taping together my own ideal Platonic form of a Bukowski poem. The missing Bukowski may be the surly Banquo’s ghost of Break, Blow, Burn.

  Feminist poetry proved a dispiriting dead end. Grimly ideological and message-driven, it preaches to the choir and has little crossover relevance for a general audience. Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” a big anthology favorite, is symptomatic of the intractable artistic problem. A tremendously promising master metaphor—Rich uses deep-sea diving to dramatize modern women’s confrontation with a declining patriarchal civilization—collapses into monotonous sermonizing and embarrassing bathos. The poem’s clumsiness and redundancy are excruciating (risible “flippers,” for example, loom large). I was more optimistic about finding a good feminist poem by Marge Piercy, who treats her woman-centric themes with spunky humor. Piercy’s work is full of smart perceptions and sparkling turns of phrase, but her poems too often seem like casual venting—notes or first drafts rather than considered artifacts. I finally chose for Break, Blow, Burn two forceful, lively poems by Wanda Coleman and Rochelle Kraut that are not explicitly feminist but that express a mature and complex perspective on women’s lives.

  I had glowing memories of dozens of poets whom I had avidly read (or seen read in person) after my introduction to contemporary poetry in college in the mid-1960s: Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Duncan, John Berryman, W. D. Snodgrass, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, and Galway Kinnell, among many others. But when I returned to their work to find material for Break, Blow, Burn, I was mortified by my inability to identify a single important short poem to set before the general reader. Live readings seem to have beguiled and distracted too many writers from the more rigorous demands of the printed page—the medium that lasts and that speaks to posterity. All of the above poets deserve our great respect for their talent, skill, versatility, and commitment, but I would question how long their reputations will last in the absence of strong freestanding poems. Beyond that, I was puzzled and repelled by the stratospheric elevation in the critical canon given to John Ashbery in recent decades. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1974), Ashbery’s most famous poem, is a florid exercise in strained significance that could and should have been compressed and radically reduced by two-thirds. Can there be any wonder that poetry has lost the cultural status it once enjoyed in the United States when an ingrown, overwrought, and pseudo-philosophical style such as Ashbery’s is so universally praised and promoted?

  Given my distaste for Ashbery’s affectations, it would come as no surprise how much I detest the precious grandiloquence of marquee poets like Jorie Graham, who mirrors back to elite academics their own pedantic preoccupations and inflated sense of self. That Graham, with her fey locutions and tedious self-interrogations, is considered a “difficult” or intellectual poet is simply preposterous. Anointing by the Ivy League, of course, may be the kiss of death: Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, another academic star, enjoys an exaggerated reputation for energetically well-crafted but middling poems that strike me as second- or third-hand Yeats. As for the so-called language poets, with their postmodernist game-playing, they are co-conspirators in the murder and marginalization of poetry in the United States.

  For the contemporary poems in Break, Blow, Burn, my decisions were based solely on the quality of the poem and never on the fame of the poet. As I stumbled on a promising poem in my search, I photocopied it for later consideration. Once the finalists were assembled, I pored over them again and again to see if they could hold up to sequential re-reading. Did a poem retain its freshness and surprise? Some of my finds were soon dropped when I noted how a powerful opening was not sustained by the rest of the text. It was highly distressing to see what might have been a remarkable poem self-destruct or wither away, as if the poet failed to keep pressure on his or her own imagination—or perhaps to hold the poem back long enough to let it develop and ripen on its own.

  An example of this latter problem is William Stafford’s “The Color That Really Is.” The poem begins stunningly: “The color that really is comes over a desert / after the sun goes down: blue, lavender, / purple…What if you saw all this in the day?” Stafford sees the rays of the sun as swords that “slice—life, death, disguise—through space!” These amazing, even shamanistic perceptions about existence are followed by an arresting second stanza sketching a stark scene of chilling specificity: the poet glimpses a woman’s “terrible face” under the light of a casino table in Reno. That ravaged face reveals “what a desert was / if you lived there the way it is.” The juxtaposition of sublime, visionary images with a gritty slice-of-life portrait is brilliant and daring. But then Stafford attaches a jarring finale—a stanza awkwardly inserting himself in a posture of mawkish piety: “Since then I pause every day to bow my head.” What a waste!

  Again and again, there were poems that had provocative or inspired first lines but that then fell flat, as if the poet were baffled about how to proceed. For example, Bill Knott’s “More Best Jokes of the Delphic Oracle” (wonderfully sly title) begins, “I vow to live always at trash point.” What satiric pleasures that bold line promises, but the poem never delivers. Sometimes an ambitious poem would find its natural architecture but then neglect smaller details of workmanship or tone. An example is Bob Kaufman’s “To My Son Parker, Asleep in the Next Room.” An African-American Beat poet, Kaufman, like his colleague Allen Ginsberg, was directly influenced by Walt Whitman. This memorable poem is an epic chant that surveys human history from “shaggy Neanderthals” marking “ochre walls in ice-formed caves” to artists and priests in far-flung cultures from Eg
ypt and Assyria to China, Melanesia, and Peru. The rhythms are forceful and insistent and the images compellingly visual or visceral. The poem ends in an exalted if uneven coda celebrating freedom.

  After working with Kaufman’s poem, however, I became disillusioned by its needlessly simplistic politics: India is “holy,” while Greece is “bloody”—as if India’s soil has not been equally drenched in blood. And there are rote hits at “degenerate Rome” and “slave Europe.” These angry value judgments, exalting all non-Caucasians over Europeans, have become so hackneyed through political correctness since the 1960s that they undermine the poem, whose ultimate theme is human aspiration and artistic achievement. The poet would have served his poem better with a more expansive, forgiving, and authentically Whitmanian vision. As is, it is too close to a rant. Kaufman’s sadly self-limiting poem demonstrates how progressive American poetry began to isolate itself from general society in the last half of the twentieth century. When poets defensively cluster in a ghetto of homogeneous opinion, they lose contact with their larger audience. Great poetry never requires a political litmus test.

  A poem that emerged from a quite different social milieu is Morris Bishop’s “The Witch of East Seventy-Second Street,” which was published in The New Yorker in 1953. Though my primary critical sympathy remains with the rude, rebellious Beat style, I find Bishop’s poem far more effective than Kaufman’s in reaching its artistic goal:

  “I will put upon you the Telephone Curse,” said the witch.

  “The telephone will call when you are standing on a chair with a Chinese vase in either hand,

  And when you answer, you will hear only the derisive popping of corks.”

  But I was armed so strong in honesty

  Her threats passed by me like the idle wind.

  “And I will put upon you the Curse of Dropping,” said the witch.

  “The dropping of tiny tacks, the dropping of food gobbets,

  The escape of wet dishes from the eager-grasping hand,

  The dropping of spectacles, stitches, final consonants, the abdomen.”

  I sneered, jeered, fleered; I flouted, scouted; I pooh-pooh-poohed.

  “I will put upon you the Curse of Forgetting!” screamed the witch.

  “Names, numbers, faces, old songs, old joy,

  Words that once were magic, love, upward ways, the way home.”

  “No doubt the forgotten is well forgotten,” said I.

  “And I will put upon you the Curse of Remembering,” bubbled the witch.

  Terror struck my eyes, knees, heart;

  And I took her charred contract

  And signed in triplicate.

  Catering with its chic uptown address, well-appointed decor, and sophisticated whimsy to the affluent readers of the glossy New Yorker, “The Witch of East Seventy-Second Street” nevertheless manages to tap archetypal imagery for eerily unsettling effect. Poet and witch have an odd intimacy: she breaks into his ordered routine like an ambassador from elemental nature. Is she a malign proxy for mother or wife, as in fairy tales? She speaks in ominous parallelism, like the witches of Macbeth—four curses in four stanzas, culminating in the parodic “triplicate” business contract, “charred” by hellfire and signed by the defeated poet.

  As with Jaques’ melancholy speech about the seven ages of man in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, human life is mapped as a series of losses, with the elderly regressing to an infantile state. The witch’s “Curse of Dropping” attacks the body (fingers and hands stiffen; the belly sags), while her “Curse of Forgetting” attacks the mind (memory lapses, especially costly to poets with their bardic mission). Everything valuable in life—emotion as well as sensation—seems to recede. But the worst is the “Curse of Remembering,” which overwhelms the mind with regrets. Remembering is too crushing a burden. Better to remain in the fenced preserve of quaint connoisseurship (the Chinese vases), into which modern technology can barely penetrate (the sputtering telephone). The poem presents the poet as isolated, refined, and removed from collective joys (the “popping of corks” at unattended parties), but open to attack from mythic forces. It’s as if, with their active imagination, poets are the vulnerable point in modern civilization, where the archaic can invade and retake spiritual territory.

  Bishop’s poem, for all its virtues, finally seemed too arch or pat for Break, Blow, Burn. A poem that came very close to inclusion, however, was Gary Snyder’s “Strategic Air Command.” (I decided to use Snyder’s “Old Pond” instead.)

  The hiss and flashing lights of a jet

  Pass near Jupiter in Virgo.

  He asks, how many satellites in the sky?

  Does anyone know where they all are?

  What are they doing, who watches them?

  Frost settles on the sleeping bags.

  The last embers of fire,

  One more cup of tea,

  At the edge of a high lake rimmed with snow.

  These cliffs and the stars

  Belong to the same universe.

  This little air in between

  Belongs to the twentieth century and its wars.

  VIII, 82, Koip Peak, Sierra Nevada

  Snyder’s opposition of serene nature to ethically distorted society is classically High Romantic. The two men camping out in the Sierra Nevada mountains hear the “hiss” of a military jet, the serpent in the garden as well as an avatar of impersonal industrial mechanization. The jet’s passage near the planet Jupiter in the constellation and astrological sign of Virgo suggests that male authority figures (as in William Blake) have become cruel or sterile. God’s periodic encounter with a virgin (as in Yeats) can lead to a destructive new birth. The rogue satellites are the all-seeing eyes of government surveillance, agents of a global system of mutual hostility and fear.

  The visitors seek a spartan simplicity. They have stripped down to essentials in order to purify themselves, like tea-drinking Buddhist monks at the “high lake rimmed with snow.” The fading fire (as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73) represents an elemental reality, like the frost settling on the sleeping bags, prefiguring the beds of the dead. The men’s humble comforts, with their tactile immediacy, contrast with the jet’s dehumanized perfection and arrogance. Earth, air, water, and fire: these endure, while political events flare up and disappear, like the jet. The poet contemplates the largeness of the universe, compared to the narrow band of the earth’s atmosphere, where the jet, representing the war-torn twentieth century, cruises. Skeptical questions could certainly be asked: would Snyder return society to the preliterate nomadic era, when humans lived desperately hand to mouth and were helplessly vulnerable to accident and disease? But that does not invalidate his protest. The poem is prophetic: machines, dazzling artifices of the mind, may gradually be robbing humanity of free will, but nature is ultimately unreachable, unperturbed by human folly. Wars, like the jet’s “flashing lights,” are mere dying sparks in nature’s harmony.

  Because Allen Ginsberg had made such a huge impact on me in college, I confidently expected him to play a prominent role in Break, Blow, Burn. But Howl, my favorite Ginsberg poem, proved thornily difficult to excerpt: the notorious opening section (starting “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”) seemed too strident and unsupported on its own. Ginsberg’s oft-anthologized “A Supermarket in California” was a possibility, but I found its prosy humor a bit too blatant. There was an obscure early Ginsberg poem, however, that obsessed me—“The Blue Angel.” But its traditional format (six four-line stanzas) is so unrepresentative of Ginsberg’s work as a whole that I felt it would mislead a general audience. Furthermore, because the theme is Marlene Dietrich, it might seem as if I had chosen the poem merely because it’s about a movie star—a charge that might well have been true! (My first book, Sexual Personae, argued that
cinema, prefigured in Plato, is the master principle of Western culture.)

  The title refers to Dietrich’s breakthrough 1930 film, The Blue Angel, where she plays a cabaret femme fatale. The poem begins: “Marlene Dietrich is singing a lament / for mechanical love.” Ginsberg portrays Dietrich as “a life-sized toy, / the doll of eternity.” She is a streamlined objet d’art: her hair is “shaped like an abstract hat / made out of white steel.” But her face is ghoulishly “whitewashed and / immobile like a robot,” with a “little white key” protruding from the temple. Her eyes, with their “dull blue pupils,” are “blank / like a statue’s in a museum.”

  Ginsberg’s poem works on multiple levels—cultural, biological, and psychological. First of all, the Dietrich doll, like a surreal construction by Salvador Dalí (who did mock-ups of Mae West and Shirley Temple), represents the artificial projections of Hollywood, the studio-created stars whose machine-made images infatuated audiences around the globe. White-blonde Dietrich is a modernist abstraction, an idea of sex removed from the sensory. She is eternal because her celluloid image will never age.

  More disturbingly, Ginsberg also portrays female sexuality as a brute, fascist imperative. That there is personal projection here seems proved first by a tagline identifying the poem as a dream that Ginsberg had in Paterson in 1950, and second by the despairing coda, introduced by a hasty dash: “—you’d think I would have thought a plan / to end the inner grind, / but not till I have found a man / to occupy my mind.” A startlingly frank gay revelation for that repressed period. But after so vividly hallucinatory a poem, what strangely bland language. Here Ginsberg plainly suggests that his homosexuality was a route of escape from the drearily grinding occupation of his mental space by demanding, domineering women—above all his mother, whose mental breakdown and institutionalization he would memorialize in Kaddish. Walt Whitman’s longings for a male comrade were couched in far more effusive and tender language. But in Ginsberg’s poem, all of the drama and glamour belong to a pitiless female automaton.