Phenomenal Reading: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetics

by Brian M. Reed

Overview

The essays in Phenomenal Reading entice readers to cross accepted barriers, and highlight the work of poets who challenge language-as-usual in academia and the culture at large.
 
Phenomenal Reading is comprised of essays that are central to how best to read poetry. This book examines individually and collectively poets widely recognized as formal and linguistic innovators. Why do their words appear in unconventional orders? What end do these arrangements serve? Why are they striking? Brian Reed focuses on poetic form as a persistent puzzle, using historical fact and the views of other key critics to clarify how particular literary works are constructed and how those constructions lead to specific effects.
 
Understanding that explication and contextualization do not always sufficiently harness the power of poetry, Reed pursues phenomenological methods that take into account each reader’s unique perception of the world. This collection of twelve essays values narrative as a tool for conveying the intricacy, contingency, and richness of poetic experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817356941
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	04/04/2012
Series:	Modern and Contemporary Poetics
Edition description:	First Edition, First Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Brian M. Reed is the author of Hart Crane: After His Lights and coeditor of Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow.

Read an Excerpt

Phenomenal Reading

Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetics

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By Brian M. Reed

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5694-1

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Chapter One

Carl Sandburg and the Problem of Bad Political Poetry

In September 1936, Archibald MacLeish published a review of Carl Sandburg's book-length poem The People, Yes in the leftist journal New Masses. MacLeish praises Sandburg as a political visionary:

The People, Yes ought to be required reading for every man in every American metropolis who thinks of himself as a radical.... It will teach him that the tradition of the people is not dead in this republic. It will teach him, further, that that tradition is the tradition upon which he must build if he wishes to build a social revolution which will succeed. (25)

The American masses, MacLeish explains, will not rise up until they are persuaded that revolutionary socialism has indigenous roots traceable back to 1776:

We hold in our hands the growing thing, the true shelter for a great people, and yet it will neither grow nor shelter until it is grafted to the green wood of the people's lives.... What [Sandburg] says to those who have attempted to spell the name of their own cause out of the cracked letters of the Liberty Bell is this: Why turn back? Why say the people were right then? Why not say the people are right still? ... He points out the one great tradition in American life strong enough and live enough to carry the revolution of the oppressed. That tradition is the belief in the people. (26; his emphasis)

MacLeish concludes his review with the ringing assertion that "the revolutionary party which can offer to restore the government to the people and which can convince the people of its sincerity in so offering ... will inherit the history of this country and change it into truth" (27).

Not once does MacLeish comment on Sandburg's poetry qua poetry. He includes five long quotations from The People, Yes, but he neither praises nor analyzes them. They serve simply to illustrate or advance his argument. A case in point: while discussing the perennial fear of the masses that American politicians have exhibited, he turns to Sandburg for a civics lesson:

Into the Constitution of the United States they wrote a fear In the form of "checks and balances," "proper restraints" On the people so whimsical and changeable, So variable in mood and weather (52; quoted in MacLeish 26)

Relying on Sandburg solely as an expert in politics, MacLeish evades the awkward duty of evaluating his technique. He does not have to draw attention, for instance, to the clumsy initial inversion ("Into the Constitution ... they wrote a fear"), nor to the quick, clotted accumulation of four nonparallel prepositional phrases ("Into ... In ... On ... in"). He overlooks both the verbiage (why use both "changeable" and "variable"?) and the stale metaphors (of course "weather" and "mood" are "variable"!). In short, MacLeish is guilty of a grievous sin judged by the standards of such contemporary poetry reviewers as Stephen Burt, Nicholas Jenkins, Marjorie Perloff, and Helen Vendler. He lauds Sandburg's content while disregarding its form.

What Explains MacLeish's Crassness?

MacLeish and Sandburg were writing at a moment when, as Cary Nelson has illustrated, the nature and function of modern poetry, and by extension the role of the literary critic, were still greatly contested. When the famous Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren textbook Understanding Poetry first appeared in 1938, its disparagement of the "poetry of social protest" was far from an opinion universally shared among intellectuals (Revolutionary 64-65). Not until after World War II did it become accepted wisdom that technique, structure, diction, tone, and other formal aspects are crucial to judging the value of a poem, whereas its overt political and ethical commitments are of secondary importance. For those contemporary literary critics who wish to recover and celebrate the revolutionary leftist tradition in modern American poetry—scholars such as Nelson, Edward Brunner, Joseph Harrington, Walter Kalaidjian, and Michael Thurston—this 1940s and '50s academic consensus on what constitutes poetic merit represents the victory of an ostensibly apolitical formalism that in practice served to bolster a conservative, surveillance-mad Cold War regime. The diverse, vibrant radical poetries of the 1930s, which once flourished in such publications as New Masses, Daily Worker, Contempo, and Anvil, disappeared almost completely from view, unable to measure up to newly orthodox standards to which they never sought to adhere in the first place.

Nelson and his colleagues have devised a two-prong strategy to convince skeptical modern poetry specialists that the Old Left produced more than "formally conservative, thematically monochromatic, and theoretically wooden" verse rightfully consigned to oblivion (Nelson, Repression 102). On the one hand, this school holds that it is patently unjust for today's readers to judge 1930s politically radical art according to purportedly disinterested aesthetic criteria that were in fact originally and expressly instituted to devalue it. To "read noncanon-ical modern poetry fairly" means that one must "relearn how to read modern poetry" as well as rethink "the social meaning of a commitment to studying and disseminating literature" (Nelson, Revolutionary 64; his emphasis). On the other hand, these critics are unwilling to do away with the aesthetic as a category altogether. They wish to argue that poetry from the 1930s by the likes of Sol Fu-naroff, Tillie Olsen, Lola Ridge, Edwin Rolfe, and Genevieve Taggard deserves study because it offers different, differently grounded poetic virtues. As Nelson puts it, "understanding and evaluating noncanonical poems often requires a new and unfamiliar aesthetic vocabulary." One has to learn, for instance, to perceive value not in a poem's originality or autonomy but in its "contribution to a wider field of discourse," as when it "complicates or enhances a larger literary or historical dialogue" (164).

This two-front critical battle—disparaging one slate of evaluative criteria while advocating another—has been met with stiff resistance. After all, there are numerous twentieth-century poems with overt political content—among them W. B. Yeats's "September 1913," W. H. Auden's "September 1, 1939," Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage," Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck," and Thom Gunn's "The Man with Night Sweats"—that have stood up reasonably well to present-day, post-New Critical demands for formal sophistication. Furthermore, when Nelson attentively, lovingly analyzes Langston Hughes's "Christ in America" or Michael Thurston Edwin Rolfe's "First Love," they demonstrate how steeped they are in the tradition of close reading that they wish to call into question. Yes, elsewhere they discuss and defend a range of noncanonical and ephemeral verse, much of which would never reward explication de texte, but their residual faith in the usefulness of the aesthetic as a rubric—however qualified or rearticulated—and their periodic deployment of the very interpretive tools that they wish to historicize and problematize leaves them open to repeated, unwelcome objections that they perversely defend poetry that they couldn't really like all that much. Harvey Teres, for example, accuses Walter Kalaidjian of a "betrayal of his own skills as a reader honed over the course of many years" when he labels "inflated doggerel" such as Jack Haynes's "Scottsboro Boys Chant" "elegant and witty" (181).

When studying or discussing politicized poetry from the 1930s the problem of evaluation does almost inevitably arise, but it does not have to take the form of a struggle over its relative merits vis-à-vis canonical, mainline modernism. Such disputes have been productive, but they also tend to tilt over into sterile exchanges of the epithets "elitist" and "propagandist." This article proposes a different approach to the problem of evaluation: an inquiry into (overt, covert, or unintended) reasons why a 1930s poet might depart from standards for poetic accomplishment current then and now. The verse in Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes is, it must be confessed, rather egregious. Egregious, though, not only when held up to the standards of, say, Seamus Heaney or Jorie Graham, but also, crucially, when measured by a pre–World War II audience's sense of what lyric poetry should be. Yes, Sandburg's language is degraded, demotic, and clunky. So too, he would reply, is public language itself. Fighting for a subjective space apart from the pervasive, invasive discourses of the media and the market is a pyrrhic battle. Poetry, if it is to be modern, progressive, and redemptive, must first immerse itself in the tawdry discourse of industrial capitalism's cultural correlatives, Hollywood, the radio serial, and Madison Avenue.

Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes is a prime candidate for illustrating this dynamic, not least because it lacks the romantic allure of much 1930s political poetry. Sandburg was a national celebrity, a New Dealer, and a friend to presidents. Recovering his participation in the "rich cultural moment" of the 1930s may add to the "narrative depth and alternative meaning" that are lacking in treatments of the period in most "major surveys of modern poetry," but one does not come away with the thrill of championing a forgotten yet ideologically pure martyr to the cause of labor (Nelson, Revolutionary 61). Hence, there are fewer sentimental and political barriers to conceding the thoroughgoing badness of Sandburg's book. Poetry critics, whatever their party affiliations, can agree that The People, Yes is eerily mediocre—relentlessly so, over several hundred pages. This agreement permits one to see that the text solicits such an evaluation, only then to teach that such evaluative thinking is misguided. What matters is not taste per se but rather the structuration of thought that precedes and governs it, a patterning that in turn depends upon on an economic substrate. The "people" will only free themselves once they cease thinking of themselves as individuals, set aside their arbitrary personal preferences, and take reification to an extreme by uniting as a faceless mass. The people, empowered as a collective, will then "march." Sandburg reveals to us the hard—potentially repellent—truth that successful socialist revolution would require a paradoxical embrace of our alienated condition. Until we are just cogs in the machine, he ambivalently informs us, there can be no machine with the traction and power to overturn the present unjust order.

Who Was Carl Sandburg?

Carl Sandburg occupies a curious position in American literary history. He enjoys a celebrity status in American culture comparable to the likes of Robert Frost and Norman Rockwell. His prize-winning biographies of Abraham Lincoln, his earnest portrayals of Midwestern life, and his Rootabaga stories for children have combined in the popular imagination to grant him the image of a benign, plainspoken, apple-pie-wholesome sage. His picture appeared on the covers of Life (1938) and Time (1939); Bette Davis starred in a stage show celebrating his life and works; and he was a friend and correspondent of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and John F. Kennedy. Poems such as "Chicago" and "Fog" remain fixtures in high school English classes, and Con-nemara, his two hundred and sixty-four acre North Carolina ranch, is a National Historic Site that has become a national place of pilgrimage. According to the federal government, 34,617 people visited it in fiscal year 2001.

Sandburg's popular appeal has not translated into enduring academic respect. The last twenty years have seen a surprising paucity of work on his writing. There has been one comprehensive biography—Penelope Niven's Carl Sandburg (1991)—one substantial book length study—Philip Yannella's The Other Carl Sandburg (1996)—a recent study of Sandburg's literary milieu—Lisa Wool-ley's American Voices of the Chicago Renaissance (2000)—and a handful of articles. This meager showing cannot begin to compare to the literary-critical industries that have grown up around other American modernists such as Hart Crane, H.D., T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.

This list of secondary materials also displays a pronounced bias toward a single phase in Sandburg's long career, the years 1915–20. During that short span Sandburg published his best-known volumes of verse: Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). He was also more conspicuously involved in radical leftist politics than afterward. From 1915–18 he published forty-one pieces in the Chicago-based International Socialist Review that showed his ardent support for "the direct-action revolutionary tactics of the Industrials Workers of the World (IWW)" (Yannella xiv). Moreover, as a foreign correspondent based out of Sweden, he avidly supported the Bolshevik cause during and after the October Revolution of 1917 (123). With only one prominent exception—Sally Greene's "'Things money cannot buy': Carl Sandburg's Tribute to Virginia Woolf"—critics have not inquired at length into Sandburg's post-1920 writings or politics. No one has wrestled with The People, Yes and its particular, Depression Era take on revolutionary politics. There appears to be an unspoken agreement among professors of modern literature that Sandburg peaked early as a poet and agitator.

Like most unspoken agreements, this one merits reconsideration. As Nelson never tires of reminding us, literary reputations of politically progressive writers rarely take shape neutrally or naturally. In those rare cases—like Sandburg's—in which they do manage to gain admittance to the American literary canon, their politics are almost always forgotten or misconstrued. And as Thurston's Making Something Happen and Nelson's Revolutionary Memory suggest, the present-day literary-critical unanimity on Sandburg's literary merit can be traced back to the immediate post-World War II era, when the equation "political poetry is bad poetry" was fast becoming orthodoxy. Revisiting this moment of revisionism can help explain why subsequent literary critical attention typically focuses on only one, restricted moment in the poet's career.

How Did Sandburg's Academic Reputation Collapse?

The 1948 publication of Sandburg's autobiographical novel Remembrance Rock both confirmed his stature as one of America's most beloved authors and hinted that his reputation was about to decline precipitously among literary critics and East Coast tastemakers. Although the book was short listed for a Pulitzer Prize and occasioned a triumphant author tour of the Midwest, The New Yorker and other influential journals roundly panned it. Perry Miller, in a lead review in The New York Times Book Review, savaged Sandburg's "maudlin devices" and vulgarly "technicolor" imagination. His "blind assurance" in moral platitudes, Miller asserted, is no substitute for the fine craft necessary to "construct a novel" (qtd. in Niven 588–89).

This pattern—public acclamation on one hand and critical dismissiveness on the other—would repeat itself three years later in even more emphatic fashion. In May 1951 Sandburg's Complete Poems won a Pulitzer. In September, Poetry, the Chicago-based journal that had launched the poet's career in 1914, unexpectedly published a long, devastating review of the book by William Carlos Williams. Williams, an old friend of Sandburg's, followed Perry Miller's lead and blasted Complete Poems for its unforgivable technical failings. After this public dressing-down by a fellow modernist, the remainder of the 1950s saw a swift decline in Sandburg's representation in anthologies and textbooks. He virtually ceased to receive extended critical commentary (Niven 611). This fall from grace was so dramatic, so final, that its inaugural shove is worth examining in some detail.

"Chicago, his first brilliantly successful poem," Williams proclaims, "should have been his last" (346). Instead, he settled into a "sort of reporting" in a flat, formless delivery that is "just talk." Williams states:

For twenty years he has kept this up with diminishing force, book after book.... It goes on and on from the Swede in the flat below, through railroad men, the farmer reaping his acres, the Texas ranger, slum dwellers, women, pimps playing the piano in whore houses, back to the sales girls in department stores in the big cities. In the end he sums it up, The People, Yes, and lets it go at that. (347)

Sandburg's career lacks development and direction, Williams argues, because he never sought to find or forge a new formal sensibility. Instead, he rested content with his initial innovations, heaving the pentameter and embracing the vernacular. Afterwards "technically the poems reveal no initiative whatever other than their formlessness" (345). His poetry over time "faded off ... for lack of structural interest on his part, nothing to inform it, nothing to drive it forward" (346).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Phenomenal Reading by Brian M. Reed Copyright © 2012 by The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Preface: How Reed Wrote Certain of His Essays—-ix

 
I. Political Reading

1. Carl Sandburg and the Problem of Bad Political Poetry—-3

2. Tom Raworth and Poetic Intuition—-32

 
II. Sight and Sound

3. Ezra Pound's Utopia of the Eye—-61

4. Gertrude Stein Speaks—-69

5. The Baseness of Robert Grenier's Visual Poetics—-78

6. Caroline Bergvall Begins Again—-83

 
III. Writers Reading
7. Hart Crane and the Challenge of Akron—-93

8. Robert Duncan and Gertrude Stein—-110

9. Reginald Shepherd at Hart Crane's Grave—-155

 
IV. Associative Reading
10. Rosmarie Waldrop Renews Collage—-155
11. John Ashbery After All These Years—-176
12. The ABCs of Substitutional Poetics—-191
 
Notes—-215
Works Cited—-231
Index—-243
 
 

Editorial Reviews

 “Offering a diverse and lively conversation around some of the key topics in innovative poetry, Phenomenal Reading confirms Reed’s authority on the subjects of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics.”—Craig Dworkin, author of Reading the Illegible and coeditor of The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound

From the Publisher