Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Contemporary Rhyme in Poetry

The latest issue of the Spoon River Poetry Review is out, and contains my essay "Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Rhyme in Contemporary Poetry."  Some very talented people have been writing in rhyme lately, both in and well outside the old 'New Formalist' movement.  And they've been rhyming in vastly different ways (I look at Michael Robbins, Amanda Smletz, R.S. Gwynn, and Ben Mazer).  Moreover, some very bright people have been thinking about the meaning and history of rhyme.  The essay begins by examining what two of these people—Stephen Burt and Anthony Madrid—have to say.  Here's how the essay opens:


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Rhyme, argues Milton, defending the blank verse of Paradise Lost, is "no necessary adjunct or true ornament of a poem… but the invention of a barbarous age," and the poet's freedom from rhyme is "an ancient liberty recovered… from the troublesome modern bondage of rhyming." Times have changed: try thinking of a contemporary poet who has felt the need to defend the lack of rhyme in his or her poetry and odds are pretty strong you'll come up blank. Indeed, it's the rhymers who are more likely to feel the need for a defense. The best defense, of course, is a good poem in rhyme—and if we look, we begin to find these in many different quadrants of the poetry world.

But there are rhymes and there are rhymes, and it's worthwhile considering what some of the recent scholarship has to say about the differences between them, especially if we hope to understand the various ends to which contemporary poets have put rhyme. Perhaps it's not coincidental that the most provocative critical thoughts about rhyme in recent years have come from poets, notably Stephen Burt and Anthony Madrid.

Burt looks at rhyme primarily in terms of its function, making a general distinction between what he calls “background” and “foreground” rhymes. For most of the history of rhymed poetry in English, Burt writes in his essay “Cornucopia, or Contemporary American Rhyme,” rhymes were not meant to pull focus away from other elements of the poem. Rhyme was one element in the “metrical contract,” an agreement between poets and readers that poems would be more tightly organized and musical than prose. Individual rhymes, though, “would not usually draw more attention than other aspects of the verse.” Indeed: they were part of a norm—a background—against which deviations became more visible. They were the settings in which verbal gems were placed, not the gems themselves. When they were too ingenious—or, alternately, too worn and cloying—they pulled focus and failed to serve their vital if unglamorous function. Burt cites Robert Graves’ analogy between good rhymes and good servants as an example of this theory of rhyme’s function: good rhymes, says Graves, “are the good servants whose presence at the dinner-table gives the guest a sense of opulent security; never awkward or over-clever… You can trust them not to interrupt the conversation.” Rhyming “moon” with “June,” in this view, is much like spilling a bowl of soup in a diner’s lap; while rhyming “intellectual” with “hen-pecked you all” is more a matter of spending far too long explaining the choice of appetizer, or making an unctuous compliment about the diner’s choice of necktie.

When rhyme forces itself onto our attention, it pushes itself into the foreground. The move may be propelled by all sorts of different fuel: rhymes may jump forward “because they are polysyllabic, because they employ proper nouns… because the words they use are the oddest in their respective lines” or for any number of other reasons. What matters is that it demands attention: rather than being part of an accepted contract, it comes across as a violation of some kind, making the verse seem “consciously artificial—ornamental, or antiquary, or ironic (even sarcastic), or willed, or faux-naïve.” Most of you wouldn’t want this kind of rhyme serving you dinner on a big night out, though you’d probably enjoy it as a cabaret performer.

A contract, of course, has two parties, and Burt’s theory of rhyme isn’t so much about the qualities of rhymes in isolation, but about the way they interact with readerships. The percentage of published American poems that rhyme is smaller than it was even a few decades ago —fewer and fewer readers take rhyme as a norm—with the result that it is harder and harder for rhyme to fulfill a background function. Foreground rhyme, therefore, “has become, for most American poets now, the only kind that we can use: its possibilities have expanded immensely, while background rhyme has become, though not unheard of, scarce, and extremely hard to use well.”

While Burt focuses on the function of rhyme in a shifting context, Anthony Madrid gives us a bold, broad history of English rhyme. In “Warrant for Rhyme” he tells a story of rhyme’s transformation from the Renaissance to the present day, centering on a “rhyme shift” that quietly remade English poetry over the course of the seventeenth century. Before this shift, we find a much greater emphasis on rhymes that bear a sematic resemblance as well as a sonic one: “cherry” and “berry,” for example, or “mother” and “brother.” After the shift, though, such rhymes occur with greatly reduced frequency. By 1660 or so, Madrid argues,

 …serious poets unconsciously resisted using rhyme pairs wherein the two words bore to each other any strong and essential semantic link. This resistance sometimes reached a pitch of utter exclusion in cases where the words in the rhyme pair were perceived on some level as participating in a semantic algebra of equivalence or opposition… whole categories of rhyme were decommissioned. In particular, rhyme pairs wherein the words are near-synonyms or near-antonyms were to be avoided. Thus, {moan | groan} would have been counterintuitive to an Augustan poet, because the two terms are near-synonyms. {Sad | glad} would have seemed undesirable because the words are opposites.

Since the move away from semantic/sonic combinations in rhyme happens in poetic practice without ever becoming the subject of a manifesto-like polemical essay in the period, the rationale remains evasive, although Madrid advances a hypothesis that we might take as a description of the birth of what Burt calls background rhyme. “[T]he implied purpose of rhyme” after the shift, says Madrid, “was to affect the audience in the same way that music does: not by encoding information, but by manipulating the sensual apparatus of the body." The hypothesis, then, is that poets sought “ to exclude rhymes they expected would call attention to themselves, thus disturbing the operation of the music.”

For Madrid, this system began to break down in the nineteenth century, beginning with the comic masterpieces of Lord Byron. In Byron we see the first poet to work, not intermittently or marginally, but in his great works quite consistently, with rhymes that willfully violate the norms of decorum. He does so not by turning back the clock to the Renaissance emphasis on semantically significant rhymes, but by turning to a kind of rhyme that insistently “demonstrates inventiveness and originality.”

This turn to eccentricity prepared the ground for the diminished role of rhyme in modern poetry. The flashy virtuosity of Byronic rhyme inevitably led the reader to ask, “Are not all these crazy rhymes a joke on poetry itself?” The ultimate effect of Byron and those he influenced was to help undermine the old contract about rhyme between poet and reader, giving us a “demotion of rhyme from an effect that characterized a given poem as a whole to a local and unpredictable effect whose pretensions to power were sharply limited.” We find ourselves in the world of Burt’s foreground rhymers, with rhyme coming across as artificial, ornamental, willed, ironic, or faux-naïve. Madrid laments this situation, claiming that while rhyme culture never disappeared among songwriters, in literary poetry rhyme will, in the absence of some champion, “languish in a perpetual catarrh, and students of English poetry will have to strain hard to lend half of our greatest poets the sympathetic ear they deserve.” “When, oh when,” Madrid seems to call out in the wilderness, “will the covenant be revived?”

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Well, it goes on, with readings of recent work by of R.S. Gwynn, Michael Robbins, Amanda Smeltz, and Ben Mazer, who employ different types of rhymes to different ends for different audiences.  At the moment, the essay is only available in the print version of the Spoon River Poetry Review (39.2, winter 2014) but the online version should be available soon.

The Poets' Prize: Notes on Finalists Michael Collier and Albert Goldbarth

The Roerich Museum, where the ceremony took place.

I'm back from New York, where I was very happy to play a small part in this year's Poets' Prize ceremony.  Among other things, it was very good to finally meet R.S. Gwynn face to face—he's the poet I'd known longest online without actually meeting, and I'm hoping to write something about his fine, witty new book Dog Watch soon.

Although I was under the weather and presented a somewhat muted, sweaty, trembly figure, I managed to make my way to the lectern at the Roerich Museum and deliver a few remarks on two of the finalists for the award, Michael Collier and Albert Goldbarth.  Here's what I had to say.

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It falls to me to say a few words about two of this year's finalists for the Poets' Prize, Michael Collier and Albert Goldbarth.  Both are so distinguished that I feel I could only do them justice by reciting their titles and honors, in the manner of a bard of the dark ages singing out the praises of a King of Wessex.

Michael Collier – director of the Bread Loaf Conference, Professor at the University of Maryland and former poet laureate of that state, Guggenheim Fellow, N.E.A. fellow, Pushcart Prize winner, recipient of other honors too numerous to list, and author of a half dozen books of poetry, one of which, The Ledge, from 2000, was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award!  Michael Collier, author of Make Us Wave Back: Essays on Poetry and Influence, and author of a translation of Euripedes' Medea — a translation that puts the force and horror back into the language of the old Greek master.  When the critic James Longenbach described Collier's imagination as populated with a "sinister and yet oddly comic cast of misfits, ogres and giants" he was speaking of Collier's poetry, but the statement could just as well apply to Collier's choice of translation project or, for that matter, his essays on poetic influence, a subject rife with ogres and giants.

Many have described Collier's poems in terms of their loving, careful, and sometimes uncanny description of physical things, and there is a sense in which Collier follows the great dictum of William Carlos Williams, "no ideas but in things."  Indeed, Collier's own comment about the great, mad Romantic John Clare pertains as much to his own poetry as to Clare's: "Clare pays kind of scrupulous attention to the world, that the world itself kept him alive and whole, the particularity of the world… there's no one who's described a nest or a burrow the way that Clare has. And then also the other thing about Clare, and this goes along with the sort of purity of response in him, is the humility you feel and the way in which he praises the world for its beauty and powerful simplicity."

But we mustn't let the truth of this cloud out the range of Collier's achievement.  One of his most important accomplishments is the way he gracefully interweaves personal experience or family connections with a larger, less private world—a world of history and, in a subtle way, politics.  Nowhere does he manage this more deftly than in the title poem of the volume that made him a finalist for the Poets' Prize, An Individual History:

This was before the time of lithium and Zoloft

before mood stabilizers and anxiolytics

and almost all the psychotropic drugs, but not before thorazine,

which the suicide O'Laughlin called "handcuffs for the mind."

It was before, during, and after the time of atomic fallout,

Auschwitz, the Nakba, DDT, and you could take water cures,

find solace in quarantines, participate in shunnings,

or stand at Lourdes among the canes and crutches.

It was when the March of Time kept taking off its boots.

Fridays when families prayed the Living Rosary

to neutralize communists with prayer.

When electroshock was electrocution

and hammers recognized the purpose of a nail.

And so, if you were as crazy as my maternal grandmother was then

you might make the pilgrimage she did through the wards

of state and private institutions,

and make of your own body a nail for pounding, its head

sunk past quagmires, coups d'etat, and disappearances

and in this way find a place in history

among the detained and unparoled, an individual like her,

though hidden by an epoch of lean notation -- "Marked

Parkinsonian tremor," "Chronic paranoid type" --

a time when the animal slowed by its fate

was excited to catch a glimpse of its tail

or feel through her skin the dulled-over joy

when for a moment her hands were still.

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Albert Goldbarth, too, weaves the personal and the historical together—along with the scientific, the mystical, the demotic, the mythological, the quotidian, the remote, the comic, and (to hijack the title of one of Goldbarth's books) the kitchen sink. Despite, or perhaps because, of all this variety, Goldbarth's voice remains singular and eminently recognizable.  Eric McHenry, writing for Slate magazine, understood the nature of Goldbarth's singularity when he wrote that "What distinguishes most contemporary poetry from prose isn't meter or rhyme or even line breaks, but a self-conscious spareness and a slightly arch or elevated diction.  An Albert Goldbarth poem, by contrast, is wacky, talky, and fat."  Corpulence, in an age of bulimia, is no vice, and readers have been appreciative: Goldbarth has won the Theodore Roethke prize, an N.E.A. fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Mark Twain Award for Humorous Poetry, and he is the only poet to receive the National Book Critics Cricle Prize twice.  Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the University of Wichita, he has written 25 full-length books of poetry as well as many chapbooks, a novel, and five collections of essays, one of which, Many Circles, won the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Prize.

For all of its wide-ranging talkiness and its elegant leaping from astronomy to zoology, Goldbarth's poetry, like Collier's, maintains a loving attention to the particular, an attention best explained by Goldbarth himself, when he says "It's not my place to define the job of poetry, but a lot of my poems do try to serve as memorials, as segments of frozen time that save people or cultural moments that have otherwise passed away or are in danger of passing away."  We get a taste of this love, even reverence, for the transient and particular in an uncharacteristically short poem of Goldbarth's called "How Simile Works," which I offer not because it is new, but because it is one of the first poems of Goldbarth's with which I fell in love:

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys

of some city;

             and the brickwork back

of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise

they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo"....

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth

 the next day;

            and the brackish puddles sectioning

 the street one morning after a storm....

So poetry configures its comparisons.

My wife and I have been arguing; now

I'm telling her a childhood reminiscence,

stroking her back, her naked back that was

the particles in the heart of a star and will be

again, and is hers, and is like nothing

else, and is like the components of everything.

Michael Collier and Albert Goldbarth are fine poets, and it is an honor to name them here tonight.

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Naomi Replansky was the other runner-up for the prize.  At age 94, she attended and read wonderfully and in strong voice.  This year's prize went to George Green.

Tragicomedy and the Politics of Poetry

Of all the responses I've received to "Poetry, Politics, and Leanings-Left", Mark Yakich's has been the most interesting. Mark's been kind enough to let me post it here:

I just read your essay in Poetry and you raise some important points. I think there are two that you don't mention, however, and they are the two responses (to my mind) contemporary poets favor: 1) using essentially nonfiction or oral history as witness; 2) using comedy or tragicomedy to subvert/engage the otherwise overly earnest dialogue of politics in "the world"/"society." There is the third way, the one [Joshua] Clover takes, though as you rightly point out it doesn't seem to engage in any overtly political way to the politic processes of the day, and (again to my mind) is much the same as the ole LANGUAGE poetry strategy which sought, as you know, to subvert syntax and grammar as as way of subverting the hegemony in the culture at large (a project, I would argue, that sounds nice but does little on the actual political stage).

To get back to my two points. The historical example of #1 above is Reznikoff's Holocaust, or his Testimony. A recent example of #1 is Ray McDaniel's series "Convention Centers of the World" (in Saltwater Empire) in which he uses the actual language of people who were in the Convention Center and Superdome in New Orleans. In talking with Ray, he told me that this was the only way he had of engaging the events — through the witnesses. Now, I think #1 is fine and of course reasonable and worthwhile; the problem I have is that nonfiction can do more in this regard (a good report on TV's 60 Minutes, say, or a film by Spike Lee) than poetry of oral reporting. The other problem, as Primo Levi pointed out, is that the only true witness is the dead witness — the ones who survive are one step removed from witnessing the horror of a tragedy. Levi takes an extreme position, one might argue, but he did live through a concentration camp, so who's going to argue with him?

To my main point: I believe that #2 above is an area that contemporary poets have largely failed to explore and exploit. Comedy and tragicomedy (as in Waiting for Godot, Slaughterhouse Five, Life is Beautiful, etc.) is doable in poetry, not just in film or fiction or stage). Again for me, outside of documentaries, I've always been most moved by tragicomic works, ever since first seeing Groucho Marx in Duck Soup and reading Slaughterhouse Five. There are a few poets who have worked in this vein, though they mostly get tossed off into some kind of "surrealistic" [sic] camp, and are mostly of the Latin American of East European variety. Tragicomedy (absurdity, if you like) in Central and Eastern Europe, as you well know, was the main strategy of subversion for decades. In the US, we didn't need as much of it of course because of our "free speech," and yet in the last eight years I feel that the only person pointing out the absurdity and engaging the politicos is Jon Stewart, with his Daily Show. This isn't news to anyone, I realize, but how come poets have been sitting around with their thumbs in their pieholes, debating "Oh, is poetry political or not? Should I or Shouldn't I? Oh, I'm so uncomfortable." For my bit, I tried in The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine, to play the tragicomic card — perhaps a weak card to many poets or readers who take all humor to be patently unserious, but to me humor is the only thing to take seriously. In the words of Gabe Gudding, humor and comedy are not here to make you suffer better or more (as a great deal of earnest, protest, or memorial poems are meant to do) but they are to help you endure.

In other news, over at Able Muse R.S. Gwynn's crowd are having quite a discussion of my post about him. Mostly they're not too happy about what I have to say (I understand). Gwynn got in touch too, first threatening to kick my ass at the AWP (I'd mentioned that, given the content of the post, he more-or-less had the right to take a swing at me), and then letting on that he was joking about the impending ass-whupping, saying that he had enjoyed the discussion. A hell of a good sport, really.

This Post is Not Called "R.S. Gwynn, or the Absence of Genius"

*DISCLAIMER: I woke up this morning with the urge to take this post down, because I think it may be taken the wrong way. But instead of getting rid of it, I'm just going to say this: I don't mean that Gwynn is a bad poet. In fact, as I say below, he's quite good at what he does. But I react very poorly to the kind of thing he does in poetry. It's not the rhyme and meter I have a problem with, it's something larger, something like the sensibleness of the New Formalism, or its containment, that bothers me. And I don't mean to say that I'm objectively right in disliking this, just that I'm a product of a tradition of thought and a structure of feeling that are at odds with the kind of work Gwynn does. In the end, I suppose this post is shamelessly self-indulgent: it's a long, drawn out examination of the basis of my own taste. Or perhaps I should say it's a long, drawn-out examination of my taste this week, since I've found myself defending plenty of formal, paraphrasable poems in print and in conversation. But if you can't be self-indulgent in your blog, where can you be? So I'm leaving this up. I've got a bad feeling, though, that R.S. Gwynn's going to gut-punch me someday. He's an old football player and probably knows how to knock a guy down, too!*

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Sometimes, when I find myself utterly out of sympathy with a piece of writing, I wonder: is it the writing, or is it me? There are certainly instances where the answer is "It's you, Archambeau." Jane Austen, for example, is a writer whom I understand to be deeply insigntful, entirely excellent in a thousand ways, perceptive, historically significant, and full of a kind of charm to which I am utterly impervious. I think I'd rather eat a rat than read Emma again. And Emma is a great book. Maybe gender has something to do with it, although it's not that I can't get into classic British women's novels: I'm a big fan of Virginia Woolf, and I read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre at least once a year, always finding it both tremendously well-made and, you know, smokin' hot.

So, when I ran across a perfectly respectable, competent sonnet by R.S. Gwynn called "God's Secretary," while leafing through the latest issue of Poetry and found myself recoiling, I had to step back and ask myself: is it Gwynn's poem, or is it me? Deciding to give myself the benefit of the doubt (after all, if I don't, who will?) I began listing my reasons for disliking the poem. At first I found them pretty compelling, jotted down there on the back of my phone bill envelope. Soon, though, I noticed a pattern to the list of complaints — a pattern that revealed to me some of my own biases in taste. So: I'm going to list what I take to be the literary offenses of R.S. Gwynn, but bear in mind that in the end I think that the list of perceived offenses says more about my own limitations than it says about Gwynn.

Here's the beginning of Gwynn's sonnet, an octave set off as its own stanza (to emphasize, I suppose, the correctness of the author's use of the Petrarchan version of the form):

Her e-mail inbox always overflows.
Her outbox doesn't get much use at all.
She puts on hold the umpteen-billionth call
As music oozes forth to placate those
Who wait, then disconnect. Outside, wind blows,
Scything pale leaves. She sees a sparrow fall
Fluttering to a claw-catch on the wall.
Will He be in today? God only knows.

From a craft position, you really can't fault Gwynn: he knows what he's doing. If the rhymes are a bit full-on for some ears (mine, say), they are where they are supposed to be, and there's just enough enjambment to soften the effect a bit. The same goes for the scansion: it's regular iambic, with just enough thrown in by way of variation to keep it from sounding like a metronome (I'm a sucker for a spondee). You've got some variation of longer and shorter syntactical units, you've got an interrogative thrown in to mixup the declaratives a bit. And there's a fine balance in the combination of the mundane (email) and the highfalutin' (that allusion to Pope, who wrote that God "sees with equal eye, as God of all, a hero perish or a sparrow fall" — and beyond Pope, to the Bible). And "scything" is nice, with its conjuring up of mortality. So the poem is certainly succeeding on its own terms -- except maybe for the phrase, "God only knows," which seems a bit self-satisfied, this playing off of literal and idiomatic senses.

She hasn't seen His face — He's so aloof.
She's long resigned He'll never know or love her
But still can wish there were some call, some proof
That he requires a greater service of her.
Fingers of rain now drum upon the roof,
Coming from somewhere, somewhere far above her.

Okay. The sestet is actually a little less slick than the octave: I mean, that "of her" really, really wants to be read with the stress on the word "of," (echoing the stress-pattern of the line's rhyme-mate, which has a feminine ending). And that's a bit iffy. But the larger elements are all in order: the shift from external description to an examination of the secretary's inner state of mind comes exactly where it should in a straight-up traditional Petrarchan sonnet, at the volta or turn between the octave and the sestet. And the rhyme-scheme shifts, as the form demands. Again, there's a lot of full rhyme for some ears, but when it ticks over into actual repetition of the same word, it takes on a different kind of music, and we can appreciate it the way we appreciate the returning words of a sestina. So don't let anyone knock Gwynn's chops: he does what he sets out to do, and by and large succeeds on his own terms.

There's something about those terms of success that bothers me, though. The first thing I jotted down on my envelope-back of compaints was this: "utter lack of genius!" A bit churlish of me, no? But there's at least one sense in which I'm pretty sure I was right — the Kantian sense. If you'll all kindly turn to the 46th subsection of part two of the Critique of Judgement, you'll find the following passage, under the heading "The Faculties of Mind which Constitute Genius" (bear with the old sage of Königsberg here: like everything he writes, it makes your eyeballs feel like they're going to bleed, but it pays off in the end):

Of certain products which are expected, partly at least, to stand on the footing of fine art, we say they are soulless; although we find nothing to censure in them as far as taste goes. A poem may be very pretty and elegant, but is soulless. A narrative has precision and method, but is soulless. A speech on some festive occasion may be good in substance and ornate, but still may be soulless. Conversation frequently is not entirely devoid of entertainment, but remains soulless.... Now what do we here mean by "soul"? .... Now my proposition is that this principle is nothing else than the faculty of presenting aesthetic ideas. But by an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which induces much thought, without the possibility of any definite thought whatever. That is, without a particular concept being adequate to it, and which language, consequently, can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible.

So: genius, in the Kantian sense, involves the possibility of presenting us with a work that animates a thousand ideas, but isn't reducible to any one idea. It's like a conversation that takes on a life of its own, sparking ideas and arabesques of wit, rather than plodding dutifully along. Picture yourself on a barstool, listening to Oscar Wilde jawing with Quentin Crisp on your left, and a kind elderly couple having a discussion of the "How's your whiskey sour, dear?" "Fine, dear" on the other, and you'll have a fair sense of the genius/non-genius distinction. If you want more on this, consider what Douglad Burnham has to say in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Kant argues that art can be tasteful (that is, agree with aesthetic judgment) and yet be 'soulless'... What provides soul in fine art is an aesthetic idea. An aesthetic idea is a counterpart to a rational idea: where the latter is a concept that could never adequately be exhibited sensibly, the former is a set of sensible presentations to which no concept is adequate. An aesthetic idea, then, is as successful an attempt as possible to 'exhibit' the rational idea. It is the talent of genius to generate aesthetic ideas...

The Kantian idea of genius connects, then, with such post-structuralist darlings as indeterminacy and polyvalence. But it also connects to that dusty old New Critical term of praise, unparaphrasability. Which is not to say that indeterminacy is sufficient for genius in and of itself — I've read plenty of indeterminate, sub-Ashbery, semi-Jorie Grahamified poems that didn't set ideas alive in the least. The journals are full of them.

But I digress. To return to Gwynn. If there are three things that are in short supply in Gwynn's poem, they are precisely indeterminacy, polyvalence, and unparaphrasability. I mean, I think we could paraphrase the poem thusly: "there may or may not be a God, and sometimes we yearn for one. Signs of his existence remain ambiguous, although many of us dutifully go on trying to serve him." I mean, that gets most, if not all, of the conceptual content right there, no? The poem says what it says, we get it, and we're done. Was it Yeats who talked about a poem closing shut with a satisfying click, like a small box? (Strange that he'd say that, since such a clicking-shut would only apply to his mid-period verse, not the the early Mallarme-influenced stuff, still less to the late prophetic work, but I digress. Pedantically.) Anyway, looked at in positive terms, Gwynn's poem does just that sort of clicking-shut that Yeats, if I remember correctly, would like. Looked at in negative terms, it fails to manifest much by way of genius.

Another thing that bothered me about the poem made it onto my envelope as "cute when dealing with the uncute." That is, it's cute with a subject it shouldn't get cute with. I mean, we're talking about divinity here. Brahman. The Abgrund of Being. The First Mover. All that. And we do it by picturing the doings of the divine as a matter of answering the emails sent by the pleading souls of this mortal coil (the whole concept of God having a secretary is a bit cutesy). I mean, that's cool if what you're aiming at is comedy (the same trope is used in the Jim Carrey movie Bruce Almighty), but that's not Gwynn's trip, here. The gesture toward the infinite in the final couplet indicates that we're aiming for profundity. So what's called for is a brand of beauty at a pretty far remove from the cute — something more like the sublime, maybe. Beauty with a sense of awe at the impossibility of our mind grasping the infinite particulars of the totality before us, or of awe at the magnitude of a force we would be helpless to resist, but which leaves us undestroyed. This is more of Kant, by the way — rough and ready versions of his mathematical and dynamic sublimes, respectively. I'd quote another big chunk of his work, but fear I've exhausted the patience of all moderately sane readers already.

I suppose the fact that I'm bothered by the use of cuteness where sublimity is called for means that I'm outraged by a breach of decorum. Which makes me feel like I should look like Colonel Mustard, standing at the door to the conservatory, appalled that someone's left a revolver and a coil of rope among the candlesticks. It's got to be one of the most unhip things imaginable, being outraged at a breach of decorum. But there are breaches of decorum and breaches of decorum, and I can get down with a lot of them. The good kind, I think, is the kind outlined by Schiller in his truly great essay "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry." Here, he tells us that one of the ways our nature asserts itself is by welling up as a strong feeling that must come forth, no matter how socially inappropriate it may be. When I think of this idea, I always think of the great scene in the movie Mrs. Brown, in which Judi Dench's Queen Victoria is moping around in an interminable funk after the death of Prince Albert. Her groom, played by Billy Connolly, sees that the Queen is going to let herself die, and that none of her fawning hangers-on has the guts to step up and tell her to snap out of it. Finally, despite his lowly status as a servant, he can't stand it anymore, and his feelings burst out of him in a thick, Scottish burr: "Honest tae God woman, I never thought I'd see you in such a state." All are appalled, decorum lies in ruins. And the outraged Queen is suddenly in love. That's a breach of decorum in which a trivial set of rules is violated by a powerful and deep emotion. In Gwynn's poem, the breach runs the other way: a powerful and deep topic — the divine — is treated in a trivial mode, the cute. If disliking that makes me into some kind of fusty Colonel Mustard, meet me in the conservatory.

Finally, my list of complaints ended with this: "God = Dude? Again?" I mean, if there's any image calling out for some kind of Victor Schlovsky style defamiliarization treatment, it's the notion of the divine as a personality, specifically a male, patriarchal personality. Gwynn gives us that old image, and the goes further, picturing divinity as an administrative personality, a kind of celestial bureaucrat. We've seen a lot of this, and probably should have stopped with the implied celestial bureaucracy of It's a Wonderful Life.

So those were my criticisms. In a way, they aren't really criticisms of Gwynn's poem, so much as they're criticisms of the whole movement he's a part of, the New Formalism. And they're criticisms made from a very particular standpoint. Consider the ideas I've been knocking around: Kant's notions of genius and sublimity, (the parts of his thought most loved by the Romantics, especially Coleridge), Schiller on breaching decorum, and the nineteenth-century-lovin' Victor Schlovsky's idea of defamiliarization. Somewhere along the line I seem to have ended up interpolated into Romanticism. And Romanticism's exactly the sort of thing from which the New Formalists turned away in reaction. Asking Gwynn to appeal to a Romantic sensibility is like asking a vegan to sit down and eat Thanksgiving turkey with the rest of us. And asking someone immersed in Romanticism to like Gwynn is asking for trouble — it'd be like asking him to put down Brontë in favor of Austen.