Poetry and the University: Very Long Entry

Rather out of the blue, I took down a volume of Philip Larkin's from the shelf, and almost immediately stumbled upon these familiar but long-forgotten (by me, anyway) words:

If literature is a good thing, then exegesis and analysis can only demonstrate its goodness, and lead to fresh and deeper ways of enjoying it. But if the poet engages in this exegesis and analysis by becoming a university teacher, the danger is that he will begin to asssume unconsciously that the more a poem can be analysed-- and therefore the more it needs to be analysed-- the better the poem it is, and he may in consequence, again unconsciously, start to write the kind of poem that is earning him a living. But a worse danger than this for the campus poet is that by acting like a critic he may come to think like a critic; he may insensibly come to embrace what I think of as the American, or Ford-car, view of literature, which holds that every new poem somehow incorporates all poems that have gone before it and takes them a step further. Now I can see that to earn one's living by weighing one poem against another may well make one imagine a kind of ideal poetry that gathers up what is best from all ages and all languages and asserts it in a new way, but the drawback of such a notion is that it suggests that poems are born of other poems, rather than from personal non-literary experience, and for a poet this is disastrous. He will become obsessed with poems that are already in existence instead of those it is his business to bring into being by externalizing and eternalizing his own perceptions in unique and verbal form. In fact, I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written-- once, in short, he has learnt his trade-- that he should bother with literature at all. Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied: every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again. --- Philip Larkin, "Subsidizing Poetry" [1977], Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (1983)

I like Larkin. His best poetry has a kind of fluidity and simplicity about it that is relatively rare, and in many ways he's the anti-Eliot: he deliberately resists dense allusiveness, he rails against the pretentious in the poetic, and there is even an air of what one might call 'the common man' in Larkin's verse, evidenced perhaps most plainly in his casual invocation of profanities. (Aside: Dr J is more than a bit frustrated that his copy of Larkin's Collected Poems, pictured above, has mysteriously disappeared from his shelves.) But aside from the fact of stumbling upon the above words and recalling my own liking for Larkin, I wanted to address some of the issues raised by him. The words above are taken from a speech he gave after receiving the Shakespeare Prize in 1976 in which he discusses the notion of subsidizing poetry in England, especially considering that Shakespeare himself was a poet 'as populist,' so to speak; that is, a poet who had to please audiences to find financial support, rather than depending on handouts from the government or like-minded benefactors. There are quite a few issues I want to discuss here, especially those raised in the words forequoted, but not least of which is this very awkward relationship between the poet and the university, a relationship that is more than a little bit close to my own heart.

{Grrrrr....  Problems with Blogger have meant that the Dr is now rewriting this entry for the third time.  So what you're seeing now is truncated version of what was originally meant to be before exhaustion and exasperation got the better of him.}

For better or for worse, we live in an age of criticism, not an age of poetry.  As recently as sixty years ago, it was still possible to speak of then contemporary poets with significant public influence, to speak of 'major' poets like Yeats or Eliot, or to speak of poets whose works were well-known by both the public and the academy, like Kipling or Frost.  Contemporary (and still writing) poets like, say, Mark Strand and Seamus Heaney, fine as they are, do not exert the same influence on the public or on poetry that many of their predecessors did.  

These days, poetry is something of an endangered species, propped up primarily by governmental grants and subsidies, or by the occasional publication of poets who subsist primarily by their publications in other fields, mostly in criticism (though some do write prose fiction for their living).  The result is that poetry has become bound up with the world of the university, with the world of the academy.  In Canada, for example, only a very few writers of poetry can afford to focus on poetry, for financial reasons:  Leonard Cohen is an exception here, subsisting off the proceeds of his music career and a substantial family inheritance, but his productive output has been negligible in the past twenty years; others, like Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood, despite the profits and royalties from their fiction, still teach occasionally at the university level, with Ondaatje tenured at Glendon College at York University, and Atwood taking up various visiting professorships at mostly American universities.  So, our poets are almost invariably critics, and more specifically scholars, members of an academic institution concerned with theories and ideas about poetry and its history; they are concerned, shall we say, with a body of knowledge, and a series of concerns, that may be antithetical, or at least abrasive, to the process of poetry.  It's worth noting, too, that most of the poetry published these days is done through university-based (and university-aimed) publications, whether through journals or university-based publication houses.  Of the major publishing houses, only Faber and Knopf continue to invest significantly in the publication of poetry, and both do so at some financial loss, buttressed by their sales of other materials.  (Contrast this with the publication of Eliot's Four Quartets during the Second World War, when rations were broken to meet the public demand to purchase them.)  Like an endangered species, poetry is kept in a kind of seclusion, isolated to and dependent upon the world of the university for its own survival.  There is no world out there, so to speak, for poetry; or the world that is out there is one in which poetry cannot survive for long.

And so most poets have found their places in the academy, and so too has poetry, even if the conditions of this cohabitation are more complex, and more fraught with conflicts, than one might initially assume.

Larkin is right:  the academy can have a stultifying influence on poetry, rather like a parent can have on a child, nourishing it to an extent, perhaps, but also exerting its own expectations and assumptions and values upon it, even when the child's impulses may be fundamentally different than those of the parent.  The result, more than one might expect, is a poetry that is relatively insular, and often self-important; it is also very often a poetry of appeasement, of appealing to the governing (or then-accepted) notions of what poetry is and seeking approval thereby.  A poem, for example, is always part of a series of cultural and linguistic codes, of various operating ideologies and social frameworks, of a history of poetry that is larger than the individual, and to whit the individual voice is not really an individual at all.  A poem ends up carrying with it far more than the weight of itself and the weight of the matters its composition:  it carries with it the responsibilities of representing what poetry ought to be at any given period, which, in this period, means that poetry should be politicised, materialised, historicised; it should be cannily self-aware, ironic, even cynical-- or, it should speak to the 'personal issues' deemed significant by current modes of thinking, such as gender articulation and exploration, decentred identities, historical dislocation, societal guilt, and so forth.  This, ultimately, is poetry of the university for the university: it is not only the nourisher of the child, it is also the judge of its success and its value.  Seen more insidiously, the result is a kind of aesthetic and cultural nepotism (or even incestuousness); seen more innocently, the result is a kind of aesthetic and cultural obedience to predetermined notions of what is right and wrong about poetry. 

Still have some doubt?  Glance through some recent collections or volumes of poetry, and ask yourself where the love poems are.  You might find the odd one here and there, and more than likely the ones you do find will be heavily ironised, heavily capital-L literary pieces, and more than likely they will be about 'unconventional' relationships-- gay love, lesbian love, interracial love, and so forth.  Such poems are still valued and 'acceptable' because they are unconventional:  they reframe our notions of desire, they subvert our expectations of the love poem, they have social functions (e.g., challenging homophobia or racism or whatever).  A simple old-fashioned (so to speak) love poem -- that is love pem qua love poem, with no other pretensions than an expression of romantic desire-- is a cliché; we've been there and done that, and there's no real value assigned to the expression of the once so-called 'universals.'  Such a love poem is seen as naive, as unaware of its own supposed derivativeness of a large tradition of such poetry; it is seen as unaware of the tenuousness and temporality of love (we are, after all, a society that is doggedly anti-romantic); it is seen as yet another performance of long-standing notions of sexual identity and the performances thereof, whether in terms of the 'framing of male sexual desire' or the 'reprostration of the female as the object of desire' or the 're-enactment of sexual stereotypes' (such poems, if written by females, are sometimes dismissed on the same grounds, but less certainly so than those written by men).  The love poem is seen as a personal exercise, a work of the poetic amateur or juvenile, of the poet as a young man or woman who hadn't grown up yet.  And, yes, a lot of such poetry would indeed be such youthful exercises-- but the love poem itself is now stigmatized to the point that even the most skilled poetic practitioners dare not touch it for fear of being dismissed by their most significant audience, the academy.  We haven't had a significant writer of love poetry since Edna St. Vincent Millay, and there seems to be no one interested in vying for the title any time soon.

The academy has made a lot of awkward assignations with which the poet must now struggle.  The love poem is an awkward beast, something to write in youth but not in maturity, thoroughly wrapped in now-contested notions of sexual and/or romantic relation; it belongs to an ethos that is now supposedly out-dated, replaced by more ostensibly 'realistic' and 'democratic' notions, that love is usually illusory and fleeting, that love is usually about the idea of being in love rather than love itself, that desire always says more of the speaker than the desired, or even desire itself; and so on and so forth.  The love poem has become an antique we dare not reproduce, because the only old are valuable, and because we dare not write such things in our more self-aware and socially-aware time.  Oddly enough, it's okay to write about some forms of sexual desire, but not others, because they are seen as 'innovative' and 'subversive,' but this too is significant:  while innovation is, in some ways to be respected, so too is convention, and in earlier periods, like the Renaissance, adherence to convention was far more important than being a pioneer.  We are of a different sensibility; our ironic sensibility does not want to see the familiar, we want to see 'the new' or 'the challenging.'  Translation:  what is past was fine then, but is not fine now; it has been 'disproven,' or proven as a misconception or an error, and we 'know better than that now.'  Look at the academy's response to its own history:  the more it aligned itself with purportedly 'scientific' modes of analysis and criticism, the more it became able to dismiss and discredit previous critics, as they have done with the New Critics. This 'scientific' impulse is profoundly un-pluralistic:  it is based on assumptions of right and wrong, of historical error and contemporary correctness, on the premise of 20/20 hindsight.  It's the same way of thinking most of us fall into when we see pictures of ourselves from more than a decade ago:  what were we thinking, we might say, chuckling in embarassment about the past, while moving forward convinced that our current tastes are right, unaware the cycle will more than likely repeat itself when, once again, we know better. 

There's another point worth making about the love poem and the academy, and it is this, that the love poem seldom has anything to 'tell us' per se that we do not already know going into it.  The love poem is often deeply personal, but it seldom sheds new light, it makes social commentary, it seldom instructs or critiques, and it seldom rewrites or reinvents language.  The university, on the other hand, is deeply impersonal (by its own pretense, away), but longs to shed new light, to make social commentary (and assert its own relevance), it longs to instruct and to critique, and it is obsessed with revising and reinventing language.  And in this comparison, the university has the upper-hand, just as the parent does, telling its child about the dangers of falling in love:  yes, the desire may be to express, but things will change, the child will know better sooner or later, and its values will become more mature, more informed by practical 'factual' experience.  As much as the child may want to be in love, to diverge from the wishes of the parent and submit to the will of the immediate desire, the parent doesn't want to deal with it, and certainly doesn't want to encourage what will in this entropic perspective eventually just fall apart.  Yes, I'm beating the hell out of this metaphor, but there's something very telling to this analogy, because it contains with it the issues at work in the poetic process, the ideas of development, of the quest for approval, of the tension between the eternizing and the immediate, of the situation of the poet-child within an environment that is not entirely its own, and the poet-child must adhere, for its temporary well-being, to the judgment of its parent-academy. 

The movements away from metaphor and towards metonym have been primarily based on critical issues with metaphoric association.  The movements away from the 'power of the word' (often called logocentrism) notions have been concomitant with academic tendencies toward deconstruction and decentering.  This could go on ad nauseum.  But there are so many things, once devices of poetry, once part of its basic construction, that are now dismissed as 'trite' or 'conventional' or 'naive' (insert your own adjective here):  free verse is the mode of choice, echoing the critical tendencies toward instability and metrical disruption; apostrophe ("O, my love...") is seen as an antiquated form of address, removed from normal speech, and so it is a sign of (unacceptable) verbal artifice; pastoral poems are to be deemed less aware because they are of a tree-hugging Romantic tradition (not quite, in fact, but suffice it as so for now) and they do not deal with the challenges of human understanding of the environment in our moder/postmodern society; and on and on. 

The point of all this is rather lugubrious discussion is that the values of the university now all but dictate what contemporary poetry should be-- referential, largely ironic, historically and culturally aware, intellectual-- and what it should not be. It should be poetry that is always (self-)conscious that it is poetry.  It should be new and different, it should break new ground.  It should have some sort of social point to make.  Da de da de da.  Hence, we have a poetry that tends not to be heard beyond the ivory tower of the academy, and we have a poetry that is more and more removed from the world at large. 

The poet has, in part, to be able to negotiate his or her own voice, and whatever that entails-- whether the fulfillment of his/her metaphorical upbringing, or the exiling of oneself from it.  The poet has negotiate his or her own understanding of the relationship between time past, present, and future.  The poet has to be able to both personal and impersonal, subjective and objective, intelligectual and emotional, to be able, in short, to do what the poetry deems necessary.  There has always been something deeply mystical about poetry, as there has been about music, though both have incredibly mathematical aspects to them.  Poetry, in sum, has its own rules of accord and harmony that are not always in line with contemporary ways of thinking, either critically or poetically, about poetry.  Whitman is a good case in point here:  he was a poet who had to reject most of the notions of poetry prominent at the time, and to build his own music; he was, in part his disobedience.  He was, however, obedient to other ideas, albeit selectively and often capriciously-- he indebted, for example, to Blake and the fourteener more than most people tend to think.  Like any individual child forming into adulthood, a genuine poet has to determine his own allegiances and disobediences, has to negotiate his own relationships. 

The academy, one might say, is more about ideas about the thing than the thing itself.  It is more about speculations, histories, conceptions.  It is significantly less concerned with the 'practical' issues of artistic composition.  The poet in writing will learn nothing from the academy about why one word works better in a given situation than another, why one dactyl is not the same as every other.  The poet will learn nothing of where to break a line, or why perhaps the rose actually is the best symbol of his love at a certain point, despite its preponderent use in ages of love poems.  And on and on and on.  Poetry is about doing things, making things, over and over again that are both new and old at the same time.  Poetry is about speaking to the point of song, but just short of it.  And it is always human and not scientific:  it always exists in time before it exists beyond time. 

I promised a personal note here.  One of my own realizations over the years is that my experience in the academy has taught me different things about aspects of poetry, but not about poetry itself.  One can hear too many voices pulling at you as you write, a phrase suddenly stirring up not only memories of one or two precent texts, but perhaps nine or ten or twenty.  Once can hear too well the criticism one will receive even before one sets pen to paper-- why, for example, a love poem is just another one on the pile, why you can't use apostrophe seriously, why representing something one way will inevitably gather responses very different from what one desires.  In short, it can pull the poet in far too many directions, just as the numerous voices of family can pull a child in far too many directions, and each is pinned by ideas of what is expected rather than what needs be.  The result, more often than not, is one of two things:  either conformity, doing as one is expected, or shutting oneself to silence, for what one writes is never good enough in obedience or disobedience.  I know the latter all too well.  Outright disobedience is also, in theory, an option, but as I noted above, the bills have to be paid, and food has to be put on the table. 

The poet has to believe, if only for the length of writing a poem, that he or she is the only person who can write that poem, that he or she is alone in the world in hearing the words and the sounds running through his or her mind.  The poet has to be able to surrender to his or her instincts of measure and diction and imagery and emotion and drama and so forth, and to do so unfettered from the weighty responsibilities of originality and audience approval and so forth.  The poet then has to test those things against his own judgment, against the ears of and eyes of others, against all of what he knows of poetry-- but those are essentially secondary considerations.  The poet has to be impulsive in his deliberations and deliberate in his impulses.  The poet has to speak to everyone and no one at the same time. 

The poet, the true poet, is -- and must be-- a living bundle of paradoxes:  the imaginative realist, and the real imaginer; the voiceless singer, and the songless voice; the exiled insider and the involved exile; the agnostic mystic and the mystical agnostic; the person who is and who is not.  And this, this must be understood before we can truly understand poetry or the poet.  But, this basic fact, is one to which the academy is least tolerant.  They are uncomfortable bedfellows, indeed.

Post-script: I know, I know... So much for 'truncated.' Shakes head in embarassment