 As
Reviewed By: |
Tom Disch: Work Ethicist of American Poetry |
As
Reviewed By: |
Tom Disch: Work Ethicist of American Poetry |
“A
spiritual life doesn’t require taking Holy Orders, only a decision to
submit to a lifelong discipline.” -- Thomas M. Disch, 1940-2008 Few
American poet-critics since Edgar Allan Poe have brought a
practitioner’s knowledge of writing genre fiction to the service of
poetry reviewing. It is a commonplace and, like most truisms, only a
half-truth, that poets make the best poetry critics. But what about poets
who also trade on historical novels, science fiction, detective tales, or
horror stories? Even in Britain, where poetry criticism far outdates Poe,
the record is slim. Robert Graves, C. Day Lewis, C.S. Lewis, and Kingsley
Amis are four that spring to mind, though there are plenty of British and
American poet-novelists who did not tackle serious criticism on the one
hand or genre fiction on the other. In
America today, one can point to Stephen Dobyns, whose single volume of
poetry essays, Best Words, Best Order, appeared more than a decade ago. Until Independence Day, 2008, only Thomas M. Disch held Poe’s mantle, and it is a loss to poetry as much as to criticism (not to speak of science fiction or fiction itself) that he died in circumstances as macabre as those of his forebear. Did Disch have within him an essay as prescriptive or influential as Poe’s “The Poetic Principle”? It does seem unlikely, for one of the hallmarks of Disch’s criticism is its freedom from dogma, its allowance for the limits of personal taste. He can turn on a dime, as when he warns against conflating the genius of poetry with grand schemes about how it should be regulated. It’s a crapshoot. And none of this has
much relation to the experience
of poetry. Keats was knocked out when he came upon (of all things)
Chapman’s Homer. I have a sincere regard for the antigenius of the
Scottish bard MacGonaghal. We both might be wrong. This passage occurs near the end of the first and title essay in The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters (1995). Disch has just been pondering the strained relationship between poetry and academic employment. A few pages earlier, he had concluded that workshops indeed have a viable role in college education, “one not unlike university sports departments: they promote a sense of confidence and self-esteem.” The workshops can’t make Miltons out of the tin-eared, but they can instill those simple skills of impassioned self-expression that once we learned in classes of Rhetoric and Elocution—skills that should be cultivated by anyone with a sense that a gift of gab might be his or her meal ticket: teachers, ministers, salesmen, anchormen . . . Yet, with the concession, “We both might be wrong,” the critic does a volte face: But I equivocate. For I do believe there is a remedy, and that is the disestablishment of poetry workshops as an academic institution. (Yes, I know, I said just the opposite above, but I was wrong.) The art of poetry is poorly served by its bureaucratization, and only the trade is advanced. I will even venture a prophecy (which is the prerogative of poets, if not of critics)—that they will, in my own lifetime, self-destruct. “The
prerogative of poets, if not of critics.” Disch’s disarming ability to
engage with both sides of a proposition—even if he comes out resolutely
on one side, as a good critic should, or on a third or fourth side—is
all too scarce in today’s ping-pong controversies between academic
theorists and practical critics, between formalists and free-verse poets.
I have referred to Disch’s non-fiction writings as criticism, but
a better term would be Christopher Ricks’ “reviewery,” which implies
goods assessed for workmanship. The word also assumes an audience or
customer base, whose expectations Disch regularly strove to meet in his
surrogate life as a fiction-writer. His reviews and essays about poetry
are collected in two books, The
Castle of Indolence and The
Castle of Perseverance: Job Opportunities in Contemporary Poetry
(2002). Those titles, inspired by the 17th-century poet James
Thomson and by a medieval morality play, respectively, hint at a severe
outlook. Indeed, as a reviewer, he can dish out with the best of them, Poe
included (one feels little compunction for gross punning with reference to
an author who went in for titles such as “A Nashional
Institution”—an appraisal of Ogden Nash—and “Sound of the Raine,
Prophetic Wind,” an appreciation of Kathleen Raine). To cite one example: Disch once referred to Stanley Kunitz as “the master of the meaningless encomium.” This judgment, devastatingly delivered in a parenthetical clause, captures Disch’s broader disdain for the vacuity of some poetry-book blurbs. (Stanley Plumly also draws Disch’s ire in this respect.) “‘Risk-taking’ is my favorite blurb-writing maneuver,” he writes, “since rarely is the risk being taken ever specified. The suggestion is that the poet is somehow a member of that international band of persecuted geniuses on whose behalf PEN sends off protests to the dictatorial regimes of third-world countries.” The essay, “Reviewing Poetry: A Retrospect,” features a rare instance of Disch supporting an argument with mock-verse: All that’s needed after all is a way of breaking the line so as to create a slight syncopation in the underlying flow of what is really ordinary prose. Look at any grocery list long enough & a sonic pattern begins to emerge. Erase some of the connecting lines, throw in a metaphor or two, and bake. That’s what we call
taking a risk. One imagines Disch going on to create, in this mode, an inverse version of John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason, a manual he must have appreciated. Disch’s cautionary models could have illustrated the worst clichés of contemporary poetry, as in this sample, representing what he calls the fulfillment of Whitman’s prophecy that poetry would become “the most democratic of the arts”: Take any piece of prose you like and snap it into lines of verse like this, using the end of the line
as a kind of comma. You can create a further sense of shapeliness by grouping the snapped prose in stanzas, so. That
specimen appears in a round-up review entitled “Snapped Prose in Slim
Volumes.” The Castle of
Perseverance provides many more glimpses of Disch’s versifying, all
on a more sublimely humorous order. An entire section of that book, issued
in The University of Michigan Press’s “Poets on Poetry” series,
contains 13 pages of witty lyrics—a couple in the vein of Max
Beerbohm’s parody-poems from A
Christmas Garland. The essay, “On the Rondeau” (a survey of the
form spanning four centuries), ends with Disch’s twinkling “Rondeau
for Emporio Armani.”
By now it should be apparent that Disch does not suffer slouches
gladly. Laziness in poets is one of the besetting vices he enumerates in The
Castle of Indolence, along with incompetence, smugness, and
entitlement. What prevents Disch from sounding churlish, however, is his
acknowledgement that indolence has a place in poetry. He might have been
thinking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic essay, “An Apology for
Idlers,” in the following paragraph: Laziness is, on the
whole, not a bad thing for poets. Some of the best—Emerson,
Whitman—have gloried in their indolence, from a Zenlike sense that good
poems as often have their source in a chance encounter with a songbird as
from the diligent pursuit of epic significance. Idle hands can be the
Muse’s workshop, as well as the Devil’s. The pillowy borderland
between our dreams and our daily routines can be a marvelously fertile
soil for poetry. But for
laziness to be passable in poetry, “the soil must have been prepared,
the harp tuned, the fingers schooled,” Disch writes. “Then careless
raptures may sound more like Liszt than listlessness. It should also be
noted that the laziness of genius may seem, at lower altitudes, a great
deal like exertion.” The elderly George Eliot enjoyed reading aloud from
Dante. In his youth, Auden cribbed Icelandic for a lark. “For such
spirits, schools are superfluous,” Disch remarks. A famous by-product of Auden’s Icelandic immersion is his Letter to Lord Byron, which carries these stanzas: . . . I don’t know whether You will agree, but novel writing is A higher art than poetry altogether In my opinion, and success implies Both finer character and faculties Perhaps that’s why real novels are as rare As winter thunder or a polar bear.
The average poet by comparison Is unobservant, immature, and lazy. You must admit, when all is said and done, His sense of other people’s very hazy, His moral judgements are too often crazy, A slick and easy generalisation Appeals too well to his imagination. In
his writings about poetry, Disch is constantly on guard against these
weaknesses. He views them not as failures of poetry in general, but of bad
poetry and bad poets. (“Good poets tend to be hard workers, because both
good poetry and hard work are manifestations of high energy.”) All the
same, he insists that poets and novelists have vastly dissimilar work
habits and metrics for achievement. These factors undermine any
comparisons of time and labor, but they do not make such scorekeeping
irrelevant. Nowhere does Disch argue more strenuously for this idea than
in “The Difference,” an essay from The
Castle of Indolence. “The Difference” arose from a genial row Disch had with Marilyn Hacker over a poem he had written, mocking the delusions of some poets who believe that the world owes them a living. In the essay, he rather defensively summons “the authority of a Tiresias, with personal experience on both sides of the existential divide [between poets and novelists], having published over twenty volumes of fiction and eight of poetry; having, as well, noted the working habits of hundreds of poets and novelists.” An anthology of quotations from this essay will prove more effective than paraphrasing it. Novelists put more hours in. They have to. It’s simple arithmetic. My latest novel, The Priest, is 310 pages in its English edition; 500 manuscript pages; 114,000 words. It took me a year and a half to write, a rate of production that translates to a meager page of manuscript per day, or 250 words. Usually, I write at least two pages once I get going; on a good day four or five pages. That the book took as long as it did reflects the fact that it was often interrupted by time taken off to write reviews, short stories, and poetry . . . . Novelists who produce a new book every year or two are probably spending fifteen to thirty hours a week at the typewriter, writing. And poets? High-productivity poets were once not that uncommon. One can imagine Tennyson, Browning, or Longfellow spending as much time at their desks as Honoré de Balzac or Ouida, but nowadays workaholic poets are rarer, and regarded with suspicion by their less hardworking peers . . . . [F]or most poets a thin volume every two or three years seems to be the norm. I have one here, by a well-approved poet, who observes that norm. There are thirty-six poems, covering eighty pages (not counting pages that are blank). That would represent one poem, or more than sixty lines of verse, every three weeks, if the poet were to publish a book biennially; or, three lines of verse a day. Poems, however, do not get written in such a fashion. Once a poet attains liftoff a first draft tends to get written in a day or two (especially poems less than a page long, which constitute a third of the poems in the collection at hand) with varying degrees of excision and revision thereafter. My rough estimate would be that the poet may have worked on these poems for some 125 days in the course of two years; or, one out of every six days. Even then, I doubt that many stints of poetic labor exceeded a couple of hours . . . . Poets may object that the work of poetry is not one that time clocks can measure, that they live with their poems twenty-four hours a day . . . . This is true, and just as true for novelists as for poets. Indeed, perhaps the hardest part of any novelist’s job is keeping in mind all those elements of his work-in-progress that have already been written and that remain to be done, the latter a protean flux of possibilities that will not stop shape-shifting until it has been pinned down by the act of writing. So, in this respect, no less than with the matter of what the time clock registers, the novelist must make the larger exertion. And now
we begin to understand why Disch’s genre fiction-writing is so germane
to his reviewing of poets and poetry. Novels for him are a full-time deal;
other literary appointments take him off schedule. This much is implied by
his defense of the 18 months it took him to finish The
Priest. He is not an intermittent novelist, one who can get by on a
teaching career or creative writing program directorship. His genre
writings are undertaken with a publisher and audience in steady view. He
has to satisfy the deadlines of one and the conventions of the other (or
justify his decisions not to do so). From this orientation, Disch takes
his bearings when it comes time to judge his fellow poets.
Ironically, this vantage is also responsible for Disch’s
appreciation of poetry as the purer art form—purer in motive and
sensibility. It is as though the addictive properties of the Muse are so
potent, unadulterated, that they cannot be indulged in regularly. “And
truly, there is no other form of writing that feels so good as a lyric
poem when it gushes forth in a steady flow,” he confesses in “The
Castle of Indolence.” Yet, in the next sentence, he reveals that poetry
may be “a luxury product for intellectual sybarites.” The luxury of
bliss, then.[i]
It is this refusal to take poetry seriously as careerism—this playful
detachment—that gives Disch the integrity of his observations. We value
them more highly because, like an expert craftsman in matters of plot and
suspense, Disch is at home with the implements of poetic line, rhyme, and
meter. The
lengthy excerpts from his essay “The Difference” are not meant to
portray Disch as a compulsive clock-watcher who is quick to blame and
chary with praise. Far from it: many essays in these two books celebrate
hard-working poets who manage to achieve such buoyancy or lightness of
touch that their best poems levitate: Albert Goldbarth, John Updike,
Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, C.K. Williams, and Kenneth Koch (“In the
ideal Tonight Show of my
imagination,” one review begins, “Kenneth Koch has always been the
host, a performer more durable than Duracell, ageless as Johnny Carson, an
emcee for all occasions, guests, and seasons . . .”) are among those
earning Disch’s raves. Others are poets who succeed in narrative or
dramatic form: e.g., Christopher Fry, Craig Raine, Frederick Turner, and
Vikram Seth.[ii]
Disch prizes a capacious poetry and the “inspiring but, alas, almost
inimitable manner” he detects in John Ashbery, the “ability to change
the subject quickly, at high speed, without even really stating it . . . .
It is the illusion that knack induces . . . of almost limitless profusions
of poetic statement that puts Ashbery into contention with the
immortals.”[iii] Alongside
such paeans, Disch’s pans are more in the nature of dismissals than
disavowals. Others may enjoy the “sheer amiability” of Galway Kinnell;
Disch is indifferent: “If ever a poet had to be found to endorse a new
brand of bran flakes, here is the man.” James Tate is “an underground
cartoonist without portfolio.” Reading Tony Hoagland’s initial volume
of “lazy poetry” is “like listening in on someone who has mastered
the art of group therapy”—and yet, with something like generosity,
Disch allows that “one can look forward to his next book of poetry in
much the same way that one follows the life history of a distant relative
whom one visits at intervals of five or ten years.” Because
his heart would appear to be in the right place, Disch is genuinely
surprised that people take his opinions so seriously. Child-like, he is
closed to the possibility that words can hurt. In one review, he pans a
book by David Wojahn, and then, in a later essay, as if writing from
personal experience, calls him “terminally humorless.” Responding to
Marjorie Perloff’s counter-punch upon receiving an unfavorable
review—she writes: “I have never so much as noticed” [Disch’s
poetry]—he coolly states:: “[U]ntil I was asked to review her book,
I’d never heard of Marjorie Perloff and so could not take great umbrage
that she’d not heard of me.”[iv] But
the crowning tempest in this teapot involves Brad Leithauser. Narrative
poet, novelist, and critic, he would seem to have been a natural
ally—but after Disch described him in print as “the prom king of
American poetry,” all bets were off. Leithauser “invented a character,
little Tommy Disch, in his novel Hence,
who commits suicide by drowning himself in a toilet bowl.”
Characteristically, Disch boasts: “I understand that a first edition of Hence,
with my signature, commands a fair price in the rare book market.” Of Disch’s two critical volumes, The Castle of Indolence and The Castle of Perseverance, the first is superior. On the cover he stands, wearing what looks like a black sweater, the sleeves rolled up, exposing tattooed forearms folded across his chest. Inside, his essays stand with those of William Logan and the early Adam Kirsch as the most inspired and iconoclastic writing about American poetry at the end of the twentieth century. [i] “Poetry, like salvation, is an absolute gift. When it is happening to the poet, when the Muse is there, what bliss. Whether the poem is any good, what bliss anyhow.” [ii] Reviewing Seth’s The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse, Disch concludes that “life, however messy it may get from time to time, is really, pretty much, a bowl of cherries”—a reflection almost unbearably poignant after his suicide. [iii] Elsewhere he writes: “Once a poet has mastered his instrument, once he is a poet, he is judged—cherished, respected, or ignored—chiefly for his sense of poetic opportunity, for the ways he welcomes or courts his Muse; for availability, as a poet, to the plenum of experience.” And again: “[T]hose poets fortunate enough to possess a dramatic gift . . . live in a larger and more blessed universe, a fact reflected in the largeness, psychological complexity, and variety of their oeuvres.” [iv] Similarly, Disch confides about a question that “undid him once, the one time I met May Swenson and told her how much I liked her work. She smiled politely and asked what poem I particularly admired. I failed the test, but so, in a way, did she. If the answer to that question isn’t ready to hand, both parties must blush.”
|
E-mail