"Fallen Western Star" Wars (Part VIII)

Jack Foley

CONCLUSION IN WHICH NOTHING IS CONCLUDED

Richard Silberg responded to my piece, but before printing his response I want to include still another letter--this one written by poet/critic/teacher David Mason:

24 May 2000

To the Editors of Poetry Flash:

I read (in your May/June 2000 issue) Richard Silberg's long blast against Dana Gioia's criticism with increasing dismay. As a Westerner (writing from Colorado), I found Gioia's analysis in "Fallen Western Star" calmly objective and helpful. As he did in his earlier essay, "Can Poetry Matter?", Gioia took a sociological view of an aspect of literary life and illuminated it in useful ways. The earlier essay offered criticisms of creative writing programs; rather than acknowledging the truth in these criticisms (I say this as a creative writing teacher), many readers reacted in print as if they had been personally attacked. The same has happened in a few responses to "Fallen Western Star." Howard Junker wrote an incoherent denunciation of Gioia that was published in The Ruminator, and now Mr. Silberg has written his own misguided response.

The problem is that he doesn't approach what Gioia actually wrote in his essay, but raises some of Gioia's questions only to respond with obliquely-related data and his own prejudicial statements. Gioia criticizes the lack of West Coast journals that print criticism as well as poetry and fiction, and Silberg responds by saying that criticism isn't really needed because poetry lives in performance. This is not an argument, and it ignores the fact that virtually all of the poets he extols have benefited not only from criticism printed in journals outside the Bay Area, but also from publishers outside the state. Silberg's essay is full of contradictory claims; he has difficulty sustaining his argument in one area without defeating it in another. He accuses Gioia of being programmatic in choosing two poets, Thom Gunn and Kay Ryan, as exemplars--this is supposed to arise from Gioia's New Formalist bias because Gunn occasionally writes in rhyme and meter, and Ryan uses rhyme. But Mr. Silberg seems utterly programmatic in his opposition to what he calls New Formalism, though he continually claims that he has nothing personal against anyone. He has nothing against Gunn and Ryan, but when Gioia praises them it must be tainted.

As a Westerner I find Gioia's description of western cities and the influence of sprawl on cultural life utterly convincing. Silberg responds that it can't be valid because he has schmoozed with Gioia at lots of literary events. Again, he's not really responding to a thoughtful argument, just dismissing it out of hand. I think we in the West had better ask ourselves why so much of our cultural energy is spent in or sustained by the East. I also believe Gioia was right years ago to make us think critically about Creative Writing programs; whatever their benefits to our lives, they've done nothing whatsoever, as far as I can see, to improve the quality of American literature. In short, Gioia's sociological critiques, well researched and cogently argued, are helpful challenges to us. They should inspire serious discussion, not defensiveness.

Sincerely,

David Mason

Mason's letter extends the question beyond the limits of California.

And now, Richard Silberg's response to my article. It is forthcoming, along with my article, in the next issue of Poetry Flash. Richard writes,

Maybe we can make a little progress by separating the questions.

Is the Bay Area a vital, influential poetry scene? I think the answer to that question has got to be yes. I'd guess Jack would agree, if he could unhook his response from his zeal to defend Dana. There's no center of influence today in American poetry, geographically, as the Northeast was, for instance, among Modernists at the beginning of the twentieth century, or critically, as in the reign of the New Criticism into mid-century. Today, influence is multi-centered; poets are highly mobile; different poetries are highly interactive. But if you could take an infra-red photograph from the first reaches of space, high above the fray, the two major hot spots in America-virtually beyond question-would be New York and the Bay Area.

"The presence of Kenneth Rexroth Place and Jack Kerouac Street hardly compensate for the absence of current literary vitality." "Today San Francisco is no longer an active literary center, merely a geographical one for the dozens of important writers living in and around it." Those two separate quotes from "Fallen Western Star" sum up Dana's answer, and that was the bone in my throat when I read his essay. His voice is an important one; there are literary stakes, particularly among young poets deciding where they want to put their fire. So I felt he had to be answered.

Now, is there a dearth of criticism in the Bay Area? Should we welcome new journals onto the set? The answer to that question clearly ought to be yes as well.

But, for me, with two provisos.

First of all, it's axiomatic to Dana that the health of a literary region rests upon the health of its literary milieu, with a special emphasis on major literary journals. His assessment of the Bay Area is virtually a deduction from that principle. So I took pains to refute it.

One would never guess from Jack's response that I'd made any substantive arguments--he seems to be tiptoeing around the central points--but, actually, I made several. For the sake of space, let's distill them to one: the last two revolutions in American poetry, its profound quakes and shakes at mid-century and the narrower but still crucially important advent of Language poetry in the seventies and eighties, rolled forth without input from, in fact, against the grain of the literary establishments of their respective days. We're talking about what are certainly among the most influential, most powerful poetries of the later twentieth century, Beat, Black Mountain, New York School, Language, and the magnificent mavericks swarming in and thereabouts. Q.E.D.: There's no calculation of major journals, editors, agents that adds up to the life of a poetry.

My second proviso is more wide-ranging, and so it has the advantage of opening out our discussion-because I'm acutely conscious that for many of our readers, in LA, for instance, or Seattle, or New Mexico, this fine tooth back and forth on the merits or demerits of Bay Area poetry is just a local dustup. I'm sensing that Dana and I have rather different ideas of the function of criticism, with Jack seeming to side with Dana--although, actually, while he's under the impression that he's arguing Dana's point of view, on at least one point I think he's wangling way out on his own. So I'd like, briefly, to ponder one more question: just what is it we're expecting criticism to do for us?

Dana says quite a few things about criticism in "Fallen Western Star," but let me focus on two. "Cities create artistic excellence by setting up standards to recognize and acclaim it." And just before that, "Lacking a vital critical milieu, well-intentioned regional literati usually practice boosterism--the uncritical praise of all things local." Together, those two statements set up separate realms, criticism and poetry, with criticism demanding, refining, forming what seems to be an impulsive but ignorant--again, just above the last quote he speaks of "The informed and demanding discussion fostered by quarterlies and other serious journals"---poetry. It's an attitude that gives critics a lot of credit and poets rather little, criticism as trainer and poetry as dog, so to speak.

Jack's ideas about criticism feel more duplex---in great part, I think, because of his contortions as self-appointed defender of Dana. There's a certain echoing of Dana's formative criticism idea, particularly in the sentence with which he ends that section of his response: "Surely out of all this mish-mash something must be coming right? But is it?" implying, it would seem, that the mere activities of poets, the "readings, residencies, workshops, festivals, and conferences" to which his word "mish-mash" refers could hardly be shapely, could hardly be defining themselves in any important way without the above "informed and demanding discussion"---and I feel an uncharacteristic disdain radiating in Jack's "mish-mash" word choice.

The main idea his section puts forth, though, I would say, is the following: "His [Dana's] point, however, is that they don't talk to one another...Does Richard believe that Barbara Guest phones up June Jordan to talk about her latest poem?" I'm much more friendly to that idea of criticism as a medium for poets' mutually informing discussion. The only problem is that it isn't Dana's---it's Jack's, either a previous good idea, or one born out of his strained argumentative necessities.

Dana does say in his essay that Western writers don't talk to each other, but he's not referring to ‘talk' through essays back and forth in ‘major literary journals,' nor to a kind of indirect discourse in which perceptive critics argue or synthesize widely differing poetics so that poets can understand each others' positions better. Weirdly, Dana means actual talk, itself. "Western literary life...tends to be private and individualistic...Writers live far apart, and there are few occasions that bring them together in significant numbers." Jack quotes Dana in his response, deadpan, although he knows perfectly well it ain't remotely so---he, himself, has starred in inimitable person at quite a few of those "readings...festivals...conferences." Thence Dana's inexplicable misperception of Bay Area poetry, solitary, forest and freeway, transmutes to a rich, strange Habermasian idea of criticism.

Perhaps disingenuous, too, for all its sparkle. Very likely none of us besides Guest and Jordan knows what they've actually said to each other about poetry. But, of course, Jack's speaking metonymically, taking them as representative of writers with widely separated poetics. And he suggests this idea that criticism can cross the gap, help them to poetic discussion. I think he knows, though, that poets are not that different from other people when it comes to differences, political, say, or religious: poets tend to break into groups according to poetics and to do most of their talking with their own. Just where, I wonder, does Jack think this kind of cross-poetic dialogue is taking place? In New York, with all its journals and literary infrastructure? Is there, for instance, a lively colloquy between the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and the Poetry Society of America? Is it happening on the pages of the Hudson Review, Sewanee Review, the New York Review of Books? No, it's not, and I'm guessing that he knows that. It is happening in some places, though. I think the American Poetry Review in recent years has tried to become more of a bridging journal. And it's happening, to a certain extent in these pages--as Jack, himself, says--and very much with his help as one of our contributing editors. Poetry Flash, without any undue horn tooting, is a journal right here in the Bay Area, but serving a much wider area, that tries to bring poetries together.

We could talk a lot more about interaction between poetic schools, about places like Naropa and New College of California, for instance, but I want to get back to Dana's actual criticism, which is, as I've said, formative, disciplinary, one summed up for me by a phrase that critics often use, a phrase that's always irritated me, the book "under review."

Let me suggest another possibility, really another pole of the critical sphere. Poetry is inherently shapely, and shape-making; further, in its developing, changing "nature"--a problematic, essentialist word, but I'm trying to be brief--it's sublimely wise. As I suggested in my response to Dana, poets are usually also critics, and if we stop to think about it, most of what we really know, core knowledge in the sense of pithy ideas about poetry, comes not from critics but from poets. Think of Coleridge, Arnold, of Pound and Eliot, Surrealist and Futurist manifestos and elaborations, Olson and Creeley, Language critics, so many others. Think of "organic form"; composing not according to the "metronome" but in the cadence of the "musical phrase"; "objective correlative"; "lower limit speech, upper limit music"; "open field composition"; obviously, this could go pages and pages.

On the other hand, when I think of criticism that's really meant something to me, it tends to work either "above" or "below" this core knowledge formulated by poets, and, of course, the poetry itself. Above, we have the work of critics like Kenneth Burke, say, Northrop Frye, even Harold Bloom or Paul de Man, although his deconstructionist ideas also deeply irritate me. These men are writing a meta-criticism, reflections on literature in planes that really parallel philosophy or religion. Below, there's a mode of criticism exemplified by Hugh Kenner in his great books on Pound, on Eliot and Beckett. Kenner's books don't stand in judgment over their subjects; instead, they breathe forth these writers' spirits; they are profound appreciations. Many of Jack's fine essays are criticism of this type.

So, what about criticism of books "above review"? What about criticism that learns from poetry, that approaches it in a loving openness? And I don't mean by that a ga-ga servility, critics with something mushy or worshipful to say about everything they read. I don't mean not having standards; I'm talking about the attitude that poetry knows more than the critic does, so that one's standards are in flux as poetry is in flux. That's not very different, really, from the way scientists approach their material: they don't prejudge their data; they're informed by it.

There's some unfairness in what I'm saying. I've learned a good deal from reading Dana, and I think he's often perceptive. To finish the sentence about "informed and demanding discussion" that I cut off above, he thinks it "helps readers understand and evaluate new literary work." I'm all for that. I want good poets and their publishers to find good readers. I want us all to boogie. But, as I've already said, I'm troubled by the section in "Fallen Western Star" where Dana tries to type Bay Area poetry on "The Man with the Hoe." I'm bugged by pronouncements like, "Poetry was not conceived as a self-enclosed text for private meditation but as a direct address to an audience." There are a lot of fine poets around here with a very different take on that. I feel somewhat pinched by the way Dana and Jack harp on "regional" writing and the West. I'm not at all sure that that concept carries much water anymore in these fast traveling, electronic times.

My second proviso, then: let's have new critical journals; let's have "major" journals, but let them be open to the heavenly buzz, to the boogie profusion. Let them appreciate poetry that they love, or meditate on it, rather than pronounce upon it or train it to be the good poetry dog they pre-desire.

Those, I think, are the central issues. The questions from Jack's response are still hanging, though, his various skirmishing points. But my feeling is that we've already devoted enough precious print space to this debate, maybe too much. Is "The Man with the Hoe" in fact a bit cliched and sentimental, or not? Does poetry have a special relationship with public readings, a central relationship intrinsic to poetic practice, that fiction really doesn't, or not? Was Dana's choice of Thom Gunn and Kay Ryan as the two star poets of the Bay Area rather narrow and programmatic in its taste, or not? These essays are available, Dana's, mine, Jack's---to the extent that they're of interest, a good thing. Why not let interested readers make up their minds on it all for themselves?

--Richard Silberg

*

CODA BY JACK FOLEY

It seems to me that there is something genuinely new in Dana Gioia's perceptions about the San Francisco Bay Area literary scene. But perhaps the new never manifests without someone complaining that it is not the old. Thus this debate!

I want to end this piece about a literary quarrel with two quotations.

The first is from the much-debated Charles Edwin Markham: lines from a poem, "A Lyric of the Dawn," which scarcely anyone reads anymore. The poem appeared in Markham's first book, The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (1899). I find the lines odd, old-fashioned, Shelleyan, gorgeous, mournful:

Alone I list
In the leafy tryst;
Silent the woodlands in their starry sleep--
Silent the phantom wood in waters deep:
No footfall of a wind along the pass
Startles a harebell--stirs a blade of grass.
Yonder the wandering weeds,
Enchanted in the light, Stand in the gusty hollows, still and white...

*

Sing out, O throstle, sing:
I follow on, my king:
Lead me forever through the crimson dawn--
Till the world ends, lead me on!
Ho there! He shouts again--he sways--and now,
Upspringing from the bough,
Flashing a glint of dew upon the ground,
Without a sound
He drops into a valley and is gone!

It is sometimes forgotten that Markham did not remain in California after the success of "The Man with the Hoe." Like many a Californian, he packed his bags and headed for New York, where, in 1940, he died. The Encyclopaedia Britannica remarks that Markham's later volumes "have the commanding rhetoric but lack the passion of the early works."

The second quotation is from W.H. Auden. Auden was writing in 1949 about California native (born in Oakland) Rosalie Moore; Moore was a member of a now almost entirely forgotten California group called "The Activists," which at the time was in competition with and then eclipsed by the Beats. "In conclusion," writes Auden,

May I suggest to the reader, whatever his preferences in poetry, not that he should be tolerant of opposing views in the sense of ceasing to hold any, but that, as a lover of poetry, he should be glad that oppositions exist, for poetry flourishes when the opponents are determined and evenly matched but, if any party gains too complete a victory and succeeds in suppressing its rivals, poetry invariably declines.

Soit!

Jack Foley