Dale Smith

A Measure of Poetry

This was originally presented for an AWP Conference panel in Austin, Texas, on March 11, 2006. Participants included Joshua Clover (moderator), Charles Altieri, Jeanne Heuving, and Jennifer Moxley. The occasion of this conversation was to discuss “where the poet-critics are.” Duncan McNaughton’s letter is reproduced ere with permission.  — D.S.

It is possible to be misled by the complex presence of a poem — from its beauty, ecstasy, delight, and potential for knowledge. Often there is achieved only a limited recognition of forms as they are allowed to function socially. In this way it is possible to approach the poem in error of its proof — of thinking it can be understood outside of its strict purposes and relations. What I want to talk about here is how through conversation we can recognize and recover from certain personal errors, and that poet-critics can be anyone, anywhere, and their words can arrive when you most need them.

Poets are urged to write critically about their craft because often the beauty of the poem resists social comprehension — and social relations dominate much of our current situation as writers. This has been the case particularly since the 1802 publication of the Lyrical Ballads, which arrived with Wordsworth’s famous preface. I would argue that the complex relationship between poetry and criticism as we receive it began with this romantic self-consciousness of the poem’s fragile relationship to shifting social paradigms. I don’t want to address that historical shift here today, but to simply note it as a significant influence on the present. Instead, I’d rather speak of relationships in poetry that are personal and that exist alongside the absorbing demands of the social. For through certain personal compulsions we often are driven to engage a work in order to pass it into our own metabolic systems of analysis and registration. In this way the poem’s mystery extends through us too, and goes into our writing, for in our origins as symbol-bearing creatures we fundamentally seek relation in words to others as well as to other aspects of ourselves. More negatively, and this is predominately an action of social analysis and inquiry, it can seem as though we appropriate texts like parasites consuming the body of their hosts. That is why I believe in the importance of intimate correspondence between poets more than in the formal occasions of the poet-critic’s public engagement. In the end, the poem is an achievement of some magnitude if in its complex balance of forces we discover in ourselves something that had been previously undisclosed, and social measure does not often lead to such intimate disclosure.

Mystery has two senses, one that is based in nature and predicated by the complex force of the personal as it is imposed on the limits of the known. Another social sense of mystery recognizes persuading circumstances in the revelation of a shared situation. As Kenneth Burke brilliantly notes in A Rhetoric of Motives, “Persuasion is ‘spiritual,’ in contrast with the producing of change by purely material agencies. For if it is ‘bodily’ to move a man from here to there by pushing him, then by antithesis it is ‘spiritual’ to produce the same movement in pleading, ‘Come hither.’ But such ‘spiritual’ communication is abstract” (177).

Pardon these digressions. What I want to say is really quite simple. But the terms that interest me maintain a certain magnitude. I don’t want to cheapen words like “beauty” and “mystery” or “knowledge,” for they deserve adequate reflection and relation as complex entities around which we organize our poetic inquiries. The poet-critic then is someone who stops over these mysterious relations to art and words in order to confront the formal apparatus of the poem. And since I am supposed to talk about poet-critics — where they are — as the description of this talk says, let me relate something that happened recently to show you a way in which poet-critics work in our world outside the usual markets of publication and formal presentation. By so doing I hope too to resolve my own anxiety over an article I wrote for a recent issue of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter. That piece entitled “The Romantic-Modern Lyric: Poetry for the Non-Poet,” was written in response to a book by Jeffrey Walker called Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, a solid and informative re-evaluation of ancient language transmissions. I wrote a review of this book last fall and had not tried to publish it because of a busy work schedule. Brendan Lorber at the PPN, however, asked me to write a feature for that lively and socially engaging newsletter. I complied by dusting off my review of Walker’s book and rephrasing it as an argument about problems of audience in romantic-modern poetry. I don’t want to dwell on that particular piece, but to note a response I received about it quite recently from San Francisco poet Duncan McNaughton.

I met Duncan more than ten years ago. He is a poet whose work has been significant to me for that much time. His insight and instruction were helpful to me as a student at New College of California, where I studied in the mid 1990s. He did not teach there at the time, but his conversation kept me thinking hard about he poem and its many manifestations. His is in many ways, though I refuse to totally reduce it to such, a romantic approach. Beauty and knowledge for him are words of concrete significance — actualized entities of sorts by which we measure ourselves — particularly as these elements are revealed in a poem to which we are as much mystery as any form it reveals.

The point of my piece was in part to look at Walker’s book and to offer some of its thought on rhetoric and poetics as material for reflection to a broader audience of poets. Duncan, however, sent a sharp and accurate letter recently that pointed out certain things I had neglected. He accused me of making errors of perception and relation. Not public errors, so much, as private ones that relate to poetry, its mysteries and beauty, which I do believe in.

Here is what he said:

The reason I’m bringing this out for you today is because I wanted to show you where the poet-critics are, and how such intimate exchanges can influence a writer more than broader, public kinds. Poetry excites ongoing conversations in many formats, including personal “talk” or correspondence, like mine with Duncan, as well as book reviews, public essays, and that sort of thing. But I want to stress how with Duncan our conversation is about the poem, registered at that level, regarding it and what it will reveal of itself through us, however awkward and difficult this can be, my own wide grasp of it often holding nothing but air.

Currently, I am in a graduate program working on a PhD where the urge to examine the poem as a social artifact is highly stressed, and I understand the reasons behind such approaches. But Duncan’s letter reminded me too that other measurements are to be made and it’s my job to recognize and keep in mind what I am dealing with. I don’t know how this sounds to you. But if we don’t accept the poem and our talk around it with personal care, realizing our errors for what they are and trusting those around us to show us when we have failed to meet a measure — the measure — of ourselves, then what’s the point? The poet-critics are everywhere, in that sense, and are those we trust, and to whom we owe a debt of love.

Notes

[1] Walker’s etymological argument re: Aristotle’s term enthymeme does just this, deriving it “from en and thymos, ‘in heart’” (171). See his Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity. Oxford University Press, 2000.

[2] it is not “a poem that contains history” until or unless the term “history” is rinsed clean, drained of all but itself.” (McNaughton’s note)

[3] and vice versa. (MN)

[4] He suggests several books for me to read in his letter too, including Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter and Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play.