![]() C.R. Nº 4: "A Habit of Mind,
- Who is this unmasked man?
The careful indeterminacy of that background and the general sentiment
of the line somehow justified the enforced idleness which lay ahead of
me: a seven hour flight, followed by a three hour layover, another three
hour flight, and finally a two hour train from Lisbon north to Coimbra.
Next morning in the central dining room of Frankfurt International
(where I seem to have been breakfasting since I was twenty) I listened
to Janácek on my Discman, while reading an article about Bach in the
English version of the Frankfurt Zeitung that comes bundled with the
Herald Tribune. I sipped my Dortmund, and enjoyed - after the general
antisepsis of America - a truly international bouquet comprised of at
least three different (that I could identify) state monopolized tobacco
products. My wurst and sauerkraut would arrive presently. I love to eat
alone and read, and I had purposely saved Remnick’s "Into The Clear" to
read over my favorite meal of the day, breakfast, in one of my favorite
airports in Europe, Frankfurt.
At one point in his article Remnick draws Roth out on the subject of
readers, specifically the dwindling supply of serious ones: "Every
year, seventy readers die and only two are replaced." His conclusion
nicely damns us all. "Literature takes a habit of mind that has
disappeared." * Following my own habit of mind, I came upon www.richmondreview.co.uk
(The Richmond Review) via one its featured authors, the novelist and
essayist Tim Parks, whose work in The New Yorker, and The New York
Review of Books has been a challenging consolation over the last two
years. In a recent essay on Leopardi ( http://www.nybooks.com ) Parks is not only excellent on the life of the poet, and on the cultural
history of Italy, but his insight into the manner in which art is born
of disaffection is profound.
The Richmond Review, the editors inform us on their "Who We Are" page,
is "the UK's first literary magazine to be published exclusively on the
World Wide Web". It was established in 1995, half a decade ago, which in
web-years makes it middle aged, say fifty. Indeed, a fifties-something
sobriety (or is it simply Englishness?) marks everything about RR, from
its graphical cast to its eloquently modest number of monthly
selections. (I’ve come to admire lit-zines that steer away from the
muddle of inclusiveness, and strive to resurrect that sense of
discrimination that characterized the small magazines of the earlier
half of the last century). At RR editorial restraint is matched by the
sheer quality of writers like Tim Parks, John Kinsella and the
formidable James Wood. Compared to the down under day-glow of Jacket (C.R. 1) RR’s
presentation is distinctly anti-Edwardian. With its cobalt blue and gold
frame it looks more like a package of Rothmans than a zine. On the day
that I first came across it, leading selections included "Five Poems by
John Kinsella"; "The Punch Lives" an article by Susan Shapiro from the
VLS about literary nastiness; and a review of Charles Fernybough’s The
Auctioneer, by James Wood. I thought, this is exactly what a lit-zine
should do, give us the best poets and fictionalists, a look at (and
instant access to) the best of what other zines are publishing, and book
reviewers of discrimination who are impelling that irritated art into
the new century. Richmond Review sets these options off in three easily
navigable columns, and keeps an excellent library of their own features
just behind the arras. If it was Tim Parks who drew me to the Review, John Kinsella was the
surprise of the day. My habit of mind had already failed to notice
Kinsella, or his work, on two separate occasions. The first was when he
was in attendance at the Encontros Internacionais de Poesia at the
Faculty of Letters in Coimbra, where I have toiled away as a lecturer in
English for the last fourteen years, and the second was when I reviewed
The Cortland Review in Cyber Rambler 4, where he must have
gotten buried beneath the prevailing weather of the site. Compliments
then to the RR for keeping out of the way of its own good works!
*
Our initial impression of John Kinsella’s poetry must come from its
densely textured music. However, scratching the surface a bit, even in
this short selection of five poems, convinces us that he is engaged with
the world more directly and politically than the majority of his
contemporaries. Dig a little deeper and you become aware that issues are
at stake: big awkward issues! Should we eat meat? Why do we pollute?
Which gods do we implicate with our money? What is the nature of power?
If it is often the case that what impels a poet ideologically is of less
consequence finally than the resulting music, Kinsella’s politics exert
a more essential pressure on the taut poetic surfaces that they
sponsor. There is a tense symbiosis between the political rage which
urges his poems toward directness, and his classical word sense. By
"classical" I mean there is less abstraction per stress, per line, per
poem than there is in poets writing in what we have come to identify as
a post-modernist mode. Kinsella simply sidesteps the gratuitous with
more efficiency than most.
But it is the music which, as it should, first excites. It is carved as
much out of poetic tradition as the Australian outback. Kinsella’s
literary antecedents seem to be everywhere, but are grounded in the
English pastoral tradition. His diction - in the raspy clutter of bush and
paddock. One might almost be reminded of Seamus Heaney, but Kinsella’s
poems are cast on a larger and more rugged scale, their sky is more
open, their landscapes less tamed, and their politics far less
concentrated. Yet like the political Heaney, Kinsella’s agendas seem
spiraled genetically into the musical code. He is that rare poet of the
Left who has sidestepped the dominant postmodern nihilisms, whose poems
are still about things, and who, in fact, proposes a revalidation of the
power of poetry’s utile and worldly side. One feels a kinship with
Clare, although a more knowing Clare, and with Wordsworth in his
"Resolution and Independence" in which the transforming potential of
landscape - both spiritual and political - become the principle source of
lyric figuration. "Firebox", one of the five poems published currently at The Richmond
Review, is to my mind a minor masterpiece. The author himself (in the
wonderfully intense interview with Michael Bradshaw that accompanies the
selection of poems) refers to it as "a radical pastoral". It is
certainly Frost whose spirit underlines the poem’s matte lyricism. It
reads like something between "Mending Wall" and "Home Burial", the
latter for its austere portrait of domestic drama, the former for its
hell bent attempt to draw dialogue, like fire, out of the "other".
"Firebox" begins with that great formula of all disgruntled Romantics:
anger contemplated in tranquility.
The exquisitely calibrated flatness of this music, the dead-pan
delineation of the hurt male placed outside articulation, his angers and
frustrations masterfully inflected through his harping on the names of
things: these aural and thematic motifs echo Frost. Indeed, the
following lines from "Home Burial" would almost seem to flow right out of
Kinsella’s first stanza.
Frost's themes will be picked up and elaborated upon in the rest of the
poem. But they are all there incipiently in this first stanza: the
pacing; the monotonic lines; the way the stanzaic structure is designed
to encase the dialogue (which causes the prosaic immediacies of the
drama to burst against the containing poetic); man and wife reduced to
thrusting pronouns; and most of all the abrupt almost callous entry into
the knit of the argument: "It angered him that she would call it a
'firebox'". Likewise are the central themes of the poem: male isolation
in the misnomered world of women; male recourse to the physical world,
to life and order, to obsessional repetition; the female to the
spiritual, the mythical and to death. Frost’s major themes are replayed
in Kinsella’s tight parable of male brutality. Somewhere Vermont, is
replaced by Somewhere Outback. The child’s grave by the firebox. The
only difference is that Kinsella’s disgruntled male gets away with
murder, literally.
If, as Kinsella says in his interview with Bradshaw, this is a "radical
pastoral", or "anti-pastoral" poem, it is so in the way that finally
Randall Jarrell was to point out that Frost’s best poems were. "Besides
the Frost that everyone knows there is one whom no one even talks
about". Jarrell went on in his now notorious essay, "The Other Frost",
to declare that the attitude expressed by this poetry "at its most
extreme, makes pessimism seem a hopeful evasion; they begin with a flat
and terrible reproduction of the evil in the world and end by saying:
It’s so; and there’s nothing you can do about it"
Just as Jarrell needed to dislodge Frost from his own, at times,
self-created Longfellowianism, Kinsella might be tugged out of the
Derridian niche American language poets - and perhaps the poet
himself - have liked to put him in. The point is that Kinsella is doing
nothing new in "Firebox", nothing that Frost didn’t do, or Hardy before
him, or Wordsworth. In fact he is doing something quite old. The poem’s
heterodoxy - its radicalism, in the author’s words - is in the fact that
neither the workshop-trained poet, nor the poet of deconstruction would
likely manage it. William Empson spoke of "the pastoral process of
putting the complex into the simple." This "poison pastoral" does just
that, locating the complexity in so-called ordinary lives. Likewise, the
simplicity of the narrative itself belies the complexity of the extended
figuration of "firebox" and "snake". The whole of the poem is saturated
with the flat resiliency of evil. A keen eye and an insight into
character fuse in a language grounded in a composure and knowledge
beyond mere control or technique.
Lyn Hejinian has referred to Kinsella’s two bodies of work, one
narrative and meditative, the other experimental. "Untitled", also from
the RR selection, would seem to present a third mode, that of a directly
engaged poetry which questions the presumptions of the right as well as
of the left, and which formulates an ethics which Hejinian herself, and
most "Language Poets" (perhaps with the exclusion of Bob Perleman) would
perhaps imply, but never articulate so forcefully.
"Untitled" The radicalism of "Untitled" - a poem which addresses a work by Damien
Hirst - is of a different, more explicit type than that which Hejinian has
in mind. The long note (contextualizing the poem) imposingly set between
its title and its body, acts as a barrier, or rather an entrance gate to
the poem. The note is divided into two subtitles, the second indicating
that the poem itself will analyze the first subtitle, which reads, in
the language of art-crit, like a caption to Hirst’s infamous shark. This
rather extra-poetic wager to establish a priori the poem’s point of view
goes against inherited notions of the lyric poem’s inbuilt discretion.
Topicality is foisted upon us, and that foisting is part of the poem’s
essential trope. Kinsella doesn’t mince words. In his interview he says:
"As a vegan, I think Hirst’s art stinks."
There are many precedents for this kind of deliberateness. 18th Century
satire thrives on biting directness as much as it does on ludic
topicality. Since then poetry not written in English, especially that
which has been written under the pall of oppression, has been oft
employed as a weapon of political conviction, and as a means of
criticism. However, from the Romantics our tradition has seen a rise - as,
generally, traditional religion weakens - in the religious
aestheticization of poetry, and the consequential attenuation of that
notion of poetry as écriture that drove the likes of Pope and Dryden.
This "spiritualizing" of poetry reaches its apotheosis in Wallace
Stevens who was quite open about his conception of poetry as a
substitute for religion, a supreme fiction. Since the Romantic period
English speaking readers, of poetry written in English, have always
wondered if baldly political poetry doesn’t somehow beg the question. Is
it easier for us to stomach foreign poets of engagement like Neruda, or
Vallejo, Nazim Hikmet, or Vladimir Mayakovsky, simply because we are
protected from their brash topicalities by the mollifying effects of
translation? Why should we require of poets writing in English to work
harder at that age old separation of art and politics anyway? There is no doubt that John Kinsella lets politics seep into his poetry,
and poetry back into his politics. The short audience he grants the
Richmond Review overflows with the need to get things said that could
only be registered obliquely in even the most transparent lyric. But
there are indications of modesty merely in the fact that such a good
poet would sport himself so vigorously in the vulnerable forms of
interview and web list. His argument with Hirst is essentially that the
poète maudit of conceptual art can’t have his cake and eat it too. But
his charge that there is no ethical content in Hirst’s art is
misdirected. Conceptual art, like political art, needs an ethical rudder
to steer with. It’s content is moral rather than, strictly speaking,
aesthetical. Without the steering device of "the issue", it becomes - and
much of it is - pointless. Hirst’s ethics may be outmoded, but they still
remark on our fraught relationship with the animal world. A cow in a
bath of formaldehyde comments so obviously on questions of vivisection
as to beggar Kinsella’s thesis on the spot.
More interestingly, Kinsella’s gripe with Damien Hirst signals a new
type of left-wing thinker. (One is unsure whether the old left/right
dichotomy still applies.) This thinker, be he or she artist,
intellectual or activist, is evolving away from philosophical
materialism, and lines of critique which run from Hegel and Marx through
French "Deconstruction", and all the way to Durham, North Carolina,
erstwhile redoubt of Stanley Fish. Indeed, Fish’s work, more than, say,
Fredric Jameson’s (which preserves a tone of Marxian orthodoxy) has
fueled Deconstruction’s American denouement.
In fact, why this irrepressibly French discours - embodied variously in
the mandarin trilogy of Foucault, Barthes and Derrida - should have ended
up as the Academic version of corporate English remains the million
dollar question. It’s as though Fish had come along to complete the
fourth drama of the tetralogy with the required satire. As Terry
Eagleton points out in a recent article in The London Review of Books on
Fish’s latest, The Trouble with Principle, it "is one of the minor
symptoms of mental decline of the United States that Stanley Fish is
thought to be on the left. What Fish has in fact done is to hijack an
apparently radical epistemology for tamely conservative ends." Eagleton
himself embarks in his latest work, The Idea of Culture, on a
thoroughgoing reevaluation of the evolving uses of culture. And what he
has to say - while vigorously outlining the fragmentizing descent into
theory on the part of the academic left - suitably foregrounds the work of
John Kinsella.
The issues Kinsella takes up in his poetry are very similar to the ones
which Eagleton concludes will neither be resolved in the theory barns,
nor by "the arts". What is new about Kinsella’s work is not only - as
Harold Bloom loudly proclaims - its "astonishing fecundity and splendor",
but the way it codifies a shift in our thinking generally. Kinsella has
managed to dovetail broader social concerns with an acute and ambitious
sense of the aesthetic. This new radicalism is founded on a deft
blending of linguistic experiment with a return to a feeling for the
communicative powers of poetry and its capacity to affect the social
body. Kinsella’s willingness to take on the question of poetry’s irrelevance
is all too apparent. In his discussion with Bradshaw he seems to address
Eagleton’s rather Audenesque reluctance to include "the arts" in a
solution. In the interview he directly contradicts Auden´s by now
sacrosanct reckoning that the aesthetic is essentially autonomous, and
that genuine art is sublimely useless, that, in sum, "poetry makes
nothing happen: it survives/ In the valley of its saying". Kinsella’s
retort to this is that "it does still make things happen - both on the
fugitive and the direct levels." By this I take Kinsella to mean that
poetry is capable of influencing its readers in Arnoldian fashion, in
the sense that culture moralizes generally to produce better citizens;
its effects are not direct but "fugitive"; they somehow get in through
the back door. More of a challenge to our still prevailing "new
critical" notion that the aesthetic is sublimely useless and therefore
absolutely necessary is Kinsella’s idea that art can have a "direct"
influence, that it can mobilize us to do things, that poetry can be an
exalted means to a crucial end. The context of Kinsella’s wager for the utile aesthetic must be seen
against a tradition of "l’art pour l’art" , Benjamin Constant’s 1804
expression from his Journal intime, which was derived from Kant’s view
of art as "purposiveness without purpose" and which became the battle
cry for 19th Century French Aestheticism. The tradition in English
runs from Oscar Wilde to John Ashbery, and finds its later day
theoreticians in the new critics. In 1938, a year before Auden’s famous
lines were penned, the twenty-five year old Delmore Schwartz would
declare in a letter to Allen Tate that it seemed to him "that one must
begin by taking as incontrovertible and inescapable and absolutely
necessary Eliot’s remark in the Dante essay that there is no such thing
as literature or poetry, both disappear, if for a moment we permit
ourselves to judge a poem in terms of the validity of its beliefs (qua
beliefs)." The imperatives of youth aside, Schwartz is simply restating
what would become untouchable orthodoxy for three generations of poets
to follow. Eliot in his essay on Dante is of course a degree more
subtle. What is remarkable about Eliot’s pronouncements, which predate
Scwhartz’s letter by a decade, is their degree of hedging. His stress is
on not the validity of beliefs but the reader’s capacity to suspend both
belief and disbelief. "What is necessary to appreciate the poetry of the
Purgatorio is not belief, but suspension of belief." This is perhaps
refined in a previous statement: "You are not called upon to believe
what Dante believed, for your belief will not give you a groat’s worth
more of understanding and appreciation; but you are called upon more and
more to understand it. If you read poetry as poetry, you will 'believe'
in Dante’s theology exactly as you believe in the physical reality of
his journey; that is you suspend both belief and disbelief." If so much of Eliot’s poetic was grounded in the "willing suspension of
disbelief" why is it that it is has taken critics and readers so long to
produce an alternative response which might derive from the quieter plea
to "more and more understand it" - that is, to see that the suspension of
disbelief is separated by the merest shade from the willing provision of
belief, something akin to Keats' negative capability raised to a
systematic sympathy, to a level of "understanding" in Eliot’s words.
Eliot’s own "Quartets" require such a response if we are to get beyond
characteristic dismissals of the poem and of his late career in general.
Helen Vendler’s early 1970’s conclusion that the poetry got "feebler
and feebler through the tracts of the Quartets" and that Eliot’s "career
tailed off more disastrously than any other in living memory, with only
sporadic lines reminding a reader of what Eliot once had been" seems
impatient and dated. It has, at any rate, little to do with my own
attachment to "the roses" that had "the look of flowers that are looked
at" or to the "bedded axle-tree" and even, as the belief of reading
takes hold, to "the still point of the turning world."
In a secular age politics is a continuation of religion by other means.
Kinsella is dead serious when he says that "as a vegan" he thinks
Hirst’s art STINKS. Can we properly call such forthrightness religious,
even if it rings with the categorical imperatives of religious belief?
What was it that Thomas Merton said about the great communist poet César
Vallejo? - that he was "the greatest catholic poet since Dante - by
catholic, I mean universal." This is not the place to sort out the
conundrum which leads from religion to the Arnoldian faith in culture,
and thereupon to the religiously aggressive defense of that faith in the
letters of Delmore Schwartz. Eliot was already a deeply Anglican poet by
the time Delmore was defending poetry against the incursion of "beliefs
(qua beliefs)". Kinsella, the deeply political poet, is perhaps closer
to the later religious Eliot than he is to early Auden, and Schwartz.
Poems like the haunting and politically challenging "Of" (Poems
1980-1994, Bloodaxe, p231), a kind of epode of vegan pieties, do as
much to invalidate Auden’s dictum as anything I have seen in a long
while.
Kinsella is both a pure joy to read, and well on his way to confounding
our inherited proscriptions that poetry can be as highly realized
aesthetically, as it is profoundly modern and pertinent ethically. But
will readers - what readers there are and who still read poetry - know this?
And if they see something different in Kinsella, something like a
lesson, a poetry which is not only fine to read, but which has real
things to say about a world in trouble, will they - who have been trained
in the more expensive rarefactions of much of twentieth century
poetry - allow it to change their lives? *
Philip Roth - to return to where we started: over breakfast in Frankfurt,
or with Koethe’s strangeness in ordinary moments at Logan
airport - Philip Roth assumes that it is all over. "Literature takes a
habit of mind that has disappeared," he says. And so, by implication, he
assumes that John Kinsella has come too late; that the marvelous
selection of authors on line at the Richmond Review will be "hit" but
not read; that the background against which Koethe would place his
ordinary moments is gone; that "some great shift [has] occurred - been
going on for a while" How much of what Roth says is the literary
posturing of the aging writer, and how much the bitter pill serious
writers and readers must swallow daily?
As I attempted to doctor the almost immediate indigestion my breakfast
of wurst and sauerkraut provoked in me with a second bottle of Dortmund,
I paused from my reading and looked around. It was easy to see that no
one else in the dining room was presently engaged in the svelte
clarities of David Remnick’s prose; nor were they considering a habit of
mind that had already disappeared; and there looked to be precious few
vegans among the lot of them. Martin Earl lives with
his wife Luísa in Coimbra, a small city about two hundred kilometers north
of Lisbon. He was raised in Duxbury Massachusetts and lived in New York City during
the early eighties before moving to Paris in 1984. In 1986 he left Paris to live in
Portugal, and has been there ever since. His book, Stundenglas, was published in 1992 in East Berlin by Edition Maldoror. His poems have been published in magazines in America and the U.K. Some of these include Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, Metre and PN Review. His work has been translated into French, German, Portugese, and Swedish. |