The Poet Dreams of Power: Part One

The critic Robert von Hallberg has retired from the faculty at the University of Chicago, and the editors of the Chicago Review have marked the occasion by running a series of essays on poetry and poetics in his honor.  In true, inimitable Hyde Park style, they honor von Hallberg by beginning the feature with a short essay picking him to pieces, saying the claims of his book Lyric Powers "are extraordinary, even irresponsible."  I like this, mostly because it embodies the best spirit of the Chicago Review: serious about the life of the mind, and a bit unworldly and impolitic.  I think this must have something to do with the fact that the journal has always been edited by graduate students: they're not in charge long enough to become too complacent, and they're not hooked into networks of mutual academic or literary obligation that might keep them from saying what they mean when they disagree with someone.


One of the essays dedicated to von Hallberg, Keith Tuma's "After the Bubble," speculates on the fate of poetry after the financial crisis, and its inevitable effect on the university creative writing programs where so many American poets currently find themselves employed.  In the course of pursuing some larger points, he makes a comment about Robert Pinsky that got me thinking about the relationship between poets and power — or, more precisely, that got me thinking about how poets have dreamed about how they would like to relate to those in positions of power.  Here's Tuma's remark:

In Robert von Hallberg's recent book Lyric Powers (2008), Pinsky's poetry, which is rooted, von Hallberg thinks, in "imitation of speech," is linked to "the premise that civil, secular values properly govern cultural life." While von Hallberg admits that some readers find Pinsky's poetry boring, he views Pinsky's "patient hypotactic style" as a credible and considered alternative to modernist juxtaposition and speed.  To take on a claim like that would make for serious debate.  Von Hallberg is not shy about identifying Pinsky with power.  But without a critical discourse about poetry and power and these other matters, criticism of Pinsky will continue to operate like gossip...

I'm in agreement with Tuma that we need some kind of a deep, non-anecdotal understanding of the relationship between poetry and power, something that gets beyond claiming that one or another poet is resistant to, or complicit with, the powers-that-be.  I hope the book I've been working on, formerly called The Aesthetic Anxiety, now called Poetics and Power — a social history of the idea of aesthetic autonomy in poetry — will be a contribution to such an understanding, but I'm only about halfway done, and by no means assured that the outcome will be of interest to anyone.  So, in the absence of an understanding of the actual relations between poetry and power, let me offer instead a brief, highly selective history of the way some poets writing in English over the past two centuries have dreamed about how they would like to relate to power.  Robert Pinsky certainly appears from some perspectives (von Hallberg's and, I think, Tuma's) to have a somewhat cozy relationship with power.  But seen in historical perspective, things change a bit: compared to some poets, Pinsky is neither close to power, nor desirous of such proximity.  Compared to others, he just appears more successful in realizing his dreams.


It's tough to know where to begin a discussion of the poets and their dreams of how they might relate to power.  I suppose some small gesture to an era when the differentiation of literary elites and power elites had not yet occurred is in order.  Consider the Elizabethans: Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Edward Dyer, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakespeare, Thomas Campion, Sir Henry Wotton, John Hoskins, Edmund Spenser.  All those "sirs" give a pretty clear picture of the situation: for the most part, the literary elite and the power elite were one and the same.  Of the non-knighted and non-nobel, Spenser was a big landowner in Ireland, and Hoskins was a member of parliament, so they too were members of a power elite.  Campion was a successful physician, and therefore an exception to the power elite rule, as were the two playwrights Marlowe and Shakespeare, who were part of the fledgling world of commercial writing.  As for how they dreamed of their relations to power: well, it varied.  But for the most part they saw their roles as poets as subordinate to their roles as movers-and-shakers, and poems as either pastoral escapism or as the jewels on the pommels of the weapons they used in the cut-and-thrust of courtly life.  Spenser did try to convert The Faerie Queen into a big cash payment from the sovereign (the idea was nixed by Lord Burghley, with the famous comment "all of that for a song?"), but even here it was less a matter of trying to influence power with poetry than of trying to put poetry at the service of power (huge, now-unread, tracts of The Faerie Queen are dedicated to Church politics, and propagandizing against Catholicism).


There's a long, slow differentiation of elites in the centuries that follow.  But let's fast-forward to Alexander Pope in the Augustan eighteenth century.  Pope's interesting for all sorts of reasons, not just for the snazzy hats he wore.  For one thing, he was among the first English poets to make a lot of money by selling poetry in the marketplace.  He lived at a kind of liminal period, when the system of relying on aristocratic patronage hadn't yet died off, and the market system was just kicking into gear.  The relation he had with power may, in fact, have been as a kind of housecat (one noble patron liked to stop Pope during readings and revise lines, such being the patron's prerogative).  But he dreamed of himself as a kind of spirtitual and moral advisor, not speaking so much on matters of immediate political urgency, but offering general principles that might inform the decisions of the powerful at a more abstract level.  Consider the opening of "An Essay on Man":

Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things
To low ambition, and the pride of kings.
Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
Exatiate free o'er all the scene of man;
A mighty maze! but not without a plan;
A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot,
Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.
Together let us beat this ample field...

The "St. John" is Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, and one of Pope's most powerful friends.  Pope envisions himself as a companion of the good Viscount Bolingbroke, and envisions the two of them engaged in aristocratic activities together (to beat the field was to send runners out into it with sticks to scare the birds, who would then fly up to be shot by the noble hunter and his companions).  The tone is friendly, if a bit deferential, and the relationship to his Lordship is as philosophical guide: the word's a maze, but not without a plan — a plan the poet will explain to the Great Man in ways that will enable him to carry out his duties of state in a philosophically informed manner.  If the deference might make some of us cringe, now, the proximity to power would make more than a few poets blanche with envy.


We start to get closer to a recognizably modern relationship of poetry and power with the Romantics — if only because the Romantics were often either radical bohemians with no direct influence on power (think Shelley) or government-sponsored former radicals whose views now seemed less threatening (think Wordsworth).  The document of the time that seems most representative of the poet's dream of his relation to power is Shelley's "Defense of Poetry." It was never published in his lifetime, but has had a huge allure for generations of poets since — and why wouldn't it?  It really lets you have your cake and eat it too.  On the one hand, the poet is responsible only to his private vision, not the demands of the market or the audience of any kind of patron, none of which were much available to Shelley anyway.  On the other hand, the poet has enormous influence: his ideas shape the consciousness of the ages to come.  All of this has its origins in Shelley's arguments with his father in law, the philosopher William Godwin: Godwin said philosophers were the primary thinkers of society, and poets should serve as publicists for philosophical ideas.  Shelley turned the relationship around, saying that poets inspire everyone, including philosophers, to think in new ways.  The process is gradual, spreading bit by bit through readers of the poet to those who are influenced at second or third or fourth hand — the original viral marketing.  Hence the unacknowledged legislator: sure, no one knows you influenced the world, but that's not important: what's important is that the influence happens.  Of course there's no proof that the influence really takes place.  As Lou Reed might put it, you need a busload of faith to believe in this sort of thing.  But poets tend to have a lot of faith in poetry: when I was arguing about the political impact of poetry with Andrea Brady in the pages of The Cambridge Literary Review last year, I couldn't help but think she was a bit of a Shelleyan, and that I was a bit of a nay-saying grinch.  Anyway, the point is this: Shelley's dream of enormous influence is the product of a kind of alienation of the poet from power: Sir Walter Raleigh didn't look for such indirect influence on politics.  When he wanted to make things happen politically, he schemed with other courtiers.  Nor did Alexander Pope look for some secret, long-term, possible-but-unprovable political influence: if he wanted political influence, he buttered Lord Bolingbroke's toast and made some subtle, inoffensive suggestions.  You have to be pretty removed from actual legislators to pin your hopes on small scale, but just possibly viral, influence on public opinion.


It's not quite a straight line from Shelley to us, though.  I mean, think about Tennyson.

“Tennyson,” Eliot once wrote, was “the saddest of all English poets, among the Great in Limbo, the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the perfect conformist.” Eliot is certainly right to sense a conflict at the heart of Tennyson.  But to explain the dissonance in Tennyson in psychological terms — as a matter of rebellious instincts and the urge to conform — is to miss the way those very instincts were conditioned by Tennyson’s peculiar moment in the history of English society and the history of poetry.  His was a time when social disorder and growing middle-class power — both products of industrial development — weighed on every thinker’s mind.  It was also a time when ideas of the autonomy from power, fully developed by the Shelley and other Romantics, were bequeathed to new generations of writers.

Tennyson, in ways more instinctive than calculated, came to embrace a role on offer to many writers of his time: that of public moralist.  Literary public moralists both propagated the values of the middle class and urged the amelioration of those values in an effort that, collectively, made a major contribution to the cementing of a social order beneficial to the middle class.  This public moralist is the Tennyson most famous in his own day, the teacher of domestic order in The Princess and Idylls of the King, the prophet of self-denial in Maud and Enoch Arden, the instiller of faith in progress in “Locksley Hall,” and the obedient servant of empire in “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”  The public moralist acting on behalf of the bourgeois order did not, and could not, sit at ease with another side of Tennyson, the late-Romantic poet who’d loved Keats’ poetry, and who had carved “Byron is dead” into stone when, as a youth, he’d heard of the great Romantic’s passing.  Part of Tennyson was always loyal to one of the big Romantic ideas of the poet — as an alienated outsider creating works that sought not so much to speak to the world but to form themselves into mysterious symbolic wholes, or to hover in the delicious indecisiveness of negative capability (this isn’t the Shelleyan idea — it’s more Coleridge and Keats).  Tennyson spent a lifetime at war with himself, his intellectual and aesthetic inheritance ever at odds with the social role he was asked to play, and was so richly rewarded — in sales, in status, in honors — for playing.  His path is that of the poet divided.

Tennyson was, I should stress, far from insincere in his moralism, however much at odds it may have been with his equally sincere aestheticism.  He was, after all, connected to the powerful class on whose behalf he wrote, and he had seen enough of the social disorder of the 1830s and 40s to understand the value of an orderly society.  The authentic Tennyson, then, is not a figure on one side of the aesthete/moralist rift: the authentic Tennyson is the rift, and the product of very specific, and quite contradictory, socio-aesthetic conditions.  So: on the one hand, he was close to, and spoke for, power.  But that was only part of his dream, the fulfilled part.  The other part of his dream was to be withdrawn from the world of power, and to exist in a world of art for its own sake.

That's probably more on Tennyson than anyone wants to read, but I spent all of last summer writing about him, and you know how it goes: anything shorter than three paragraphs seems like too little of an explanation when you think you really know what you're talking about.

Anyway.  The coziness between Tennyson and some other Victorian poets and the newly-powerful middle classes ends, for a whole host of reasons  — the economics of publishing in the era of mass literacy, the relative growth in authority of the social sciences at the expense of the authority of the man of letters, the lessening sense of social crisis in England after the 1850s, the slow loosening of bonds between social, economic, and cultural elites, and other things, most of them dealt with very well in T.W. Heyck's astonishingly informative The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, which is indispensable in understanding what happens to poetry between Tennyson and the modernists.  So we end up with poets once again alienated from power and dreaming of ways that their work might have importance or influence.


Ezra Pound makes for an interesting case in point.  He was always concerned with the social role of the poet: in the essay "The Wisdom of Poetry" he said "in former ages, poets were historians, genealogists, religious functionaries."  But in his own day the role seemed rather more unclear.  Mass culture, Pound intuited, had something to do with the change.  "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" expresses the alienation of the poet in the age of mass communications, incipient mass consumption, and the economic importance of the masses whose tastes were so different from the elites poets had once served:

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;


Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!


The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

That was from 1920.  A year later, Pound offered his dream of a solution to the problem of the poet's role in modern times.  As it turned out, it was a remarkably Shelleyan dream of indirect influence.  Here's a passage from the article I'm thinking of, "How to Read," which — perhaps ironically — ran in the very kind of mass media vehicle that was so dislocating poets: The New York Herald Tribune:

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

In this dream of poetic influence on power, the "governor or legislator" probably has no idea that his language, and, by implication, his mental framework has been conditioned by the poet.  But in controlling the meanings of words, poets have an enormous power as unacknowledged legislators.  One might well argue that it isn't the literati who control the meaning of words, since their contribution to these matters is quantitatively minimal in relation to the products of mass culture.  But arguments are for reasoners, and Pound isn't reasoning here so much as he's dreaming of a way for the things he loves to be important not just to him, but to the polity at large.  There's will-to-power here, for sure, and a compensatory gesture — the sort of thing Seamus Heaney, in a very different context, would call "pap for the dispossessed."  The dispossessed here being poets in modernity.

Egad.  It's time for me to hop a train, and I haven't talked about Eliot, Pinsky, some comments by Larry Sawyer, or Jeremy Prynne.  I'll try to pick up where I left off with my next post, probably tomorrow.  I mean, the new semester is about to begin, and I've got some print writing deadlines coming right up — conditions that always seem to drive me to blog instead of doing any kind writing or thinking that feels like an obligation.


{Here's part two}


{Update Jan. 11: The good people at the Poetry Foundation raise a crucial point about this discussion}

For Whom and To Whom: Poetics of National Identity -- Or: What We Talked About in Hyde Park

What's that you say? You couldn't make it to the symposium on my "The Poet as American in the Age of Identity Politics" paper at the University of Chicago, and you're going to hold your breath until I tell you all about what happened? Really? Get outta here. No, really? Well, if you insist. It went something like this:

I took the train down to Hyde Park early, to lurk in the wonderfully comprehensive and architecturally ghastly Regenstein library and scoop up a few books and articles on Swinburne (don't ask -- that's a whole different project). After a few hours of late-Victorian poetry and poetics and some serious caffination, I legged it over to Rosenwald hall, where Lee Glidewell took me up to the seminar room. The event, he explained, would be sort of like a creative writing workshop, only it would be my critical writing under discussion. And so it was -- their exagmination round my fructification, to wax Joycean about it (though I should probably be waxing Poundian, as I spent the whole ninety minutes with a larger-than-life bust of Ezra Pound looking on from just behind my right shoulder).

I'd sent about 40 pages on the cultural situation and critical reception of Robert Pinsky's An Explanation of America to the participants about a week earlier, in which I'd argued something like this:

1. The movement toward identity politics in the 1970s was coincident with (and to a degree causal of) the development of various kinds of identity-poetics movements, in which editors, publishers, critics, poets, and readers established new poetries and new communities for poetry based on various previously disempowered identity affiliations (notably in versions of gender, sexuality and race).

I don't suppose this is a particularly original or surprising point, or a controversial one, but I could be wrong about the latter. One thing the blogosphere has taught me is that everything is controversial to someone, and that the someone in question can find my email address faster than his or her blood pressure can return to normal. But I digress.

2. This development did a number on those white heterosexual male poets who weren't so complacent as to be unable to really register what was going on. For such poets, certain questions came to the fore in ways they had not done before the rise of identity politics. "To whom do I speak?" was one such question. "For whom do I speak?" was another.

There were all kinds of fascinating developments here. In my paper I mentioned two of them, both examined by Peter Middleton in his whip-smart essay "1973," which you can find in Mechanics of the Mirage. Middleton maintains that the decline of Robert Lowell had a lot to do with his inability to navigate a discursive environment in which it was no longer easy for a white male member of the American ruling class to assume he spoke for, and to, the nation. Middleton also maintains that Language Poetry, with its examination of the means of communication and the creation of reading publics, came about in no small measure due to the shattering of assumptions about audiences by 70s identity politics. (Oren Izenberg, one of the profs at the seminar, disagreed with Middleton about both of these theses, especially the Lowell thesis. I'd like to hear more from him in this regard sometime).

One idea I've been toying with, but didn't mention in the material I sent to the symposium, is that some of the signature stylisitic devices of the New York School poets of the seventies could be explained with reference to identity politics' disruption of the poetic field in the seventies. The New York School conflation of public and private spheres, for example, could be seen as a very productive attempt to answer the question of who one speaks to/for, by reconfiguring the public sphere as the local scene (of course the second law of social science would apply to this, that law being "it's more complicated than you think, bub"). But I digress.

3. Robert Pinsky offers a response to the discursive situation wrought by identity politics in many poems, most notably the book-length An Explanation of America. Here, he defines American identity in a way that isn't too rigidly essentialist. In fact, he defines it as something that looks very much like the self of modernity as defined by Jonathan Freidman in his “Cultural Logics of the Global System” (Theory, Culture and Society 5, 1988: 447-60).

For those of you who haven't yet committed the late-80s issues of Theory, Culture and Society to memory (that is, everyone except for Joshua Clover), Friedman's piece says something like this: there are four fundamental orientations toward subjectivity possible under the current system of global capitalism. I'm too lazy to type them out this afternoon, so here's a chunk of the paper I gave -- a bit longwinded, but what the hell:

What is this idea of a ‘self of modernity’ that informs Pinsky’s work? We can come to an understanding of it best through the cultural anthropology of Jonathan Friedman. In Friedman’s model of cultural logic, there are four kinds of selves: the selves of modernity, primitivism, tradition, and postmodernity. The self of modernity is a self addicted to the idea of more, and cannot allow itself a moment of restful wholeness. It is self as bildung, self as continuous accumulation of all things: wealth, knowledge, experience, what have you. It is, in Friedman’s words, “an identity without fixed content other than the capacity to develop itself, movement and growth as a principle of selfhood.” .... It is a notion of self necessarily opposed to the primitive, which Friedman defines as the kingdom of infantile desire. Primitivism “harbors all that is uncontrolled: the confusion of eating, sexuality, aggression and pleasure…but also the impulsive and compulsively superstitious relation to reality; [and] religious fetishism…” .... Traditionalism, which the self of modernity also disowns, consists of a culture that is “defined as a system of rules and etiquette pegged to a totalistic cosmology that provides an ultimate meaning to existence” and defines humanity’s “place in the universe as well as the significance of all activities.” .... The self of modernity must also reject postmodernity which, in Friedman’s definition, consists of a kind of return of both the primitivism and the traditionalism repressed by modernity. This celebration of primitivism in this sort of postmodernism involves “the confusion of the sexes, the liberation of infantile desire and its capacity for merging with the other, the expression of immediate feeling.” ....

While the self of modernity is also “the dominant or ‘normal’ identity of capitalist civilization,” it is vulnerable to crises. It is a version of selfhood that “depends on expanding horizons, the possibility of individual development, mobility and liberation from the fixed and concrete structures of surviving non-capitalist forms” such as “family, community, religion.” This expansiveness, in turn, depends on an expanding modern sector of the whole global system, a growing “hegemonic center.” When the center goes into decline, modern selfhood becomes difficult to maintain, and other types of self — the primitive, the traditional, and the postmodern — rise to fill the gap. “Modernist identity,” writes Friedman, “dominates in periods of hegemonic expansion and trifurcates in periods of contraction or crisis.” The European crises of the first part of the twentieth century can, in this view, be seen as the decline of the self of modernity and the rise of traditionalism and primitivism in forms particularly virulent and deadly.

The late sixties and early seventies certainly presented a similar crisis for the self of modernity. 1968, for example, was the year of the rise of a traditionalist threat to modernity in the form of George Wallace’s populist presidential campaign, a campaign popular not only in the south, but in those areas of the rust belt where the ever-expanding economic horizons of modernity had seemed, suddenly, to contract. And examples of the self of primitivism challenging modernity in the late 1960s are legion, ranging from the Yippies hurling handfuls of dollar bills down onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (a reversal of modernity’s accumulative imperative), to Country Joe leading the crowd at Woodstock in a chant that went “Give me an F, give me a U, give me a C, give me a K, what’s that spell!” (a public unleashing of the infantile and sexual impulses sublimated by the self of modernity) (documented in Michael Wadleigh’s film Woodstock). French Prime Minister Georges Pompidou even described the student/worker uprisings in his capital as a moment in which “our civilization is being questioned — not the government, not the institutions, not even France, but the materialistic and soulless modern society.” To Pompidou this was no mere workingman’s agitation or student demonstration. It was a world-historical event, one that threatened to put an end to modernity itself...

In this contextt, Pinsky affirmed the embattled self of modernity, and makes it central to what American identity is all about. In a way, he became the consoling poet of the threatened self of modernity.

4. I put together a demonstration of this vision in Pinsky's poems, and rounded out the paper with some claims about Pinsky's rise to national prominence having a lot to do with offering this vision. And don't go doubting his prominence in the 1990s, folks. Not only was he a three-time poet laureate: he was the only living poet ever to appear as a character on The Simpsons.



So that's the gist of the essay. The assembled scholars weighed in with all kinds of good points, the highlights of which (for me) include the following:


Liesl Olson pointed out that Pinsky's emphasis on a shared national identity had its corollary in his reading style, the affect of which tends to be very regular-guy, and very oriented toward an identification with the audience, or an invitation for them to identify with him. She also pointed out that it was hard to tell if I was advocating Pinsky's view, criticizing it, or had no opinion. This last bit was particularly astute: I'd written the essay as part of a book on the last generation of Yvor Winters' students, and had tried very hard to seem disinterested for two reasons: firstly, Yvor Winters' readers tend to be very partisan, and I didn't want the book to get reduced to a footnote in the little bush war (can a bush war have footnotes?) between Winters' acolytes and his detractors; and secondly, because his students represent a range of poetries (Pinsky to John Peck), and I wanted to treat them all as social phenomena, as actions in a field of possibilities, rather than as teams for which one might root.

Robert Von Hallberg made a host of contributions, not the least of them being his recommendation of a really good soul food restaurant nearby for post-seminar hanging-out. Of more direct pertinence to Pinsky was his demonstration that Pinsky loves surprising juxtapositions for their own sake, and that my paper, if not read carefully, seemed to imply that Pinsky advocated an ironing-out of these differences that he in fact did not advocate.

In response to some comments about how Pinsky's view of American identity didn't address issues such as the redistribution of wealth (I didn't catch this guy's name), Von Hallberg pointed out that there's an interesting class angle on Pinsky, in that Pinsky has made what seems like a very deliberate decision to distance himself from the ideologies most prominent in English departments (variable forms of tenured radicalism) and affiliate himself with the kind of cultured liberalism prevalent among the American professional classes. Pinsky's move away from university presses, Von Hallberg pointed out, could be seen as part and parcel of this distancing. I was instantly convinced: Pinsky's long poem "Essay on Psychologists," for example, is in many ways a poem of affiliation with the liberal, urbane professional classes. The guy who'd grumbled about redistribution argued that Pinsky's views were determined by this class position, and Von Hallberg pointed out that it seemed quite likely that the grumbler's views had also been determined by class position. It was an interesting moment, and handled tactfully by Von Hallberg and deftly by Lee Gidewell, who chaired the discussion.

Oren Izenberg introduced another line of inquiry, in which he raised the crucial question of whether, in Pinsky's view of American identity as a matter of modernity (in Friedman's sense), one could actually go around believing what one believes. That is: if Pinsky postulates that to be American is to be an open parabola of subjectivity, always taking in and accreting new cultural influences, can he accommodate people who have particular beliefs that they don't want to see absorbed into some other tradition.

The question is important, not just for Pinsky but for navigating through a pluralistic culture: while Oren described the problem, I thought of a converation with a Muslim student here at Lake Forest College a few years ago. She was upset because the College's interfaith center, where she'd been invited to pray, had the emblems and icons of many religions on display. While she was a very broad-minded and tolerant person, she didn't want to pray in a room that represented her tradition as a part of some generalized spirituality: she wanted to pray in a space devoted to her particular tradition, in which she belived. Oren made some good points about how one accomodates such things institutionally, and raised some good questions about whether one can accommodate them in poetic enunciation.

This raised all sorts of good questions, and led me to see that I'd failed to make a crucial distinction in Pinsky's treatment of American identity: that between an idealized American Self and particular American selves. What I mean is this: in many of Pinsky's poems, the individuals he presents don't think of themselves as part of an ongoing process of cultural synthesis. They don't experience themeslves as modern selves in Friedman's sense of the word. They may even think in the sort of essentialist terms of Friedman's traditionalist selves. But despite their inability to cognize their modernity, they embody it.

I admit that the second half of that last paragraph was not my most glittering prose, so let's try an example by way of clarification. Consider "Memoir," a poem from Pinsky's book The Want Bone. Here Pinsky gives us an image of traditionalism first as a prison, then as a kind of false-consciousness for those who are actually living through a kind of modernity. The poem begins with an image of religious orthodoxy of the kind Pinsky grew up with as a version of traditionalism, defining one’s place in the cosmos and the significance of all activities. It’s rigidities are presented as confining rather than comforting:

The iron cape of the Law, the gray
Thumb of the Word:
Careless of the mere spirit, careless
Of the body…

The “sealed words” of traditional religion make an unequivocal assertion in the poem: “It was like saying: I am this, and not that.” But the absolutism and exclusivity of traditionalism are, at the end of the poem, doomed to failure, where we return to a synagogue changed beyond recognition:

The sandstone building converted now
To a Puerto Rican Baptist church,
Clerestory and minaret.
A few blocks away, an immense blue
Pagan, an ocean, muttering, swollen:
That, and not this.

Not only has traditionalism been displaced; it has been displaced by the syncretic culture of modernity, where traditions mix and accrete. The building now combines its original synagogue architecture with a Baptist service, a congregation of converted Catholics, and an Islamic minaret. The final line — “That, and not this” — undoes traditionalism’s emphasis on eternal sameness, and revels in modernity’s xenophilia. But the crucial thing is this: the people attending the church aren't going there for some kind of modern Catholic-Protestant-Jewish-Muslim fusion spirituality. They're going there for the Baptist version of traditionalism. So they falsely conceive of themselves as traditionalists, but what their actual experience, lived rather than cognized, is of the kind of accretive, syncretic, open-and-evolving modernity that Pinsky so loves and celebrates. The individual selves they experience cognitively are one thing, but the collective self they embody is another.

Dustin Simpson, a comp lit guy working on a thesis on modern French poetry, observed that time plays a crucial role here, even a redemptive one. Narrow traditionalisms melt away in the ongoing, fruitful processes of modernity. That they do so at a level beyond the consciousness of those experiencing them is interesting -- that the processes can only be seen by the poet is doubly interesting, at least for me. I mean, I'd always thought of Pinsky as a kind of modern-day Augustan poet, committed to plainspokenness, essayistic verse, and an Augustan reasonableness, all learned from Yvor Winters during Pinsky's grad school years at Stanford. But suddenly here was a Romantic Pinsky, a poet-visionary with a specially disclosed prophetic sense of the nation. I suppose I should have grasped this side of Pinsky earlier, when I read an interview in which he said he “was conscious of Whitman as he wrote every page, sometimes every line, of An Explanation of America."

The guy whose name I didn't catch (he who grumbled about Pinsky not addressing the redistribution of wealth) was a bit upset by this line of discussion. He didn't like the idea of someone proposing a telos to history, and said a few words about the "laughable" historical vision of Karl Marx. Von Hallberg countered by saying that anyone who wants to rise above the level of particular observation to speak of trends has to do something of this kind. Oren Izenberg weighed in by saying some interesting things about the limitations of any line of thought that prohibited positive affirmation or teleological assertion, causing my ears to prick up a bit. It all seemed very much like what Robert Baker had to say about the limits of language poetry in The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy, a fascinating book of criticism that came out last year and that I'd only just got round to reading. "Have you had a look at Robert Baker's..." I began, but before I could finish, Oren gave a quick nodd, and finished for me: "The Extravagant. Right." He carried on, while I felt the warm glow of connection -- the two of us almost represented a quorum of that book's readers in the Chicago metropolitan region.

The pertinent business from Baker's book, which Izenberg used as a kind of refutation of the guy whose name I didn't catch's rejection of Pinsky, is probably best encapsulated in this passage (bear with Baker -- the quote is torn a bit roughly out of context but comes around in the end):

...the feature of this history [of modern poetry and philosophy and their critiques of instrumental reason] that I believe has been insufficiently thematized is the emergence over time of an increasing emphasis on the force of a disclosive negativity.... [M]odern poetry and philosophy ... at certain moments come to trace an indirect return to those 'de-ontologizing' discourses developed in the margins of religious orthodoxies. At any rate, many adventures in modern poetry and philosophy, in blowing open wooden conceptual idols and fixed representational schemes, begin to sound like ghostly versions of some vanished negative theology... Indeed, the languages of unmaking and undoing, of dislodging and decentering, of negativity and indeterminacy seem to have become important languages in a broad range of artistic and philosophical discussions over the last century. This is a significant long-term tendency that I would like to thematize and interrogate throughout this book in part because it is my sense that this curiously expanded reverence for the negative may have backed us into a predicament in which we devote our energy to celebrating our fear of our own constructive and transformative powers.

Baker's got a good chapter devoted to these issues, and he gives real depth to the critique of poetic indeterminacy so many people have been interested in lately.

Anyway, the pitting of Pinsky's bardic-romantic-positive-teleological vision against the sort of negative-dialectics vision of the guy-whose-name-I-did-not-catch was particularly interesting, in that it proved to be yet another iteration of a kind of class-oriented difference of opinion, pitting the professional class view (Pinsky's) against the postmodern-professorial class view.

One of Oren Izenberg's questions still haunts me from the seminar: "is Pinsky a serious poet?" He raised this in conjunction with the question of how Pinsky reconciles the syncretic, modern view of culture with the views of those who cling exclusively to particular traditions and beliefs. Inasmuch as Pinsky's poetry raises the issue (which, one could argue, is central to modern culture, from Locke to the whole interest-vs-disinterest debate of the 18th century, to postmodernism), one can at the very least say that Pinsky is a poet deeply concerned with serious things, and that he takes them up from a perspective outside those most readily celebrated in English departments.