more academic fundamentalism?
JAS Carter
Attempted controversy from Michael Lind of Prospect Magazine. I agree
with some small part of what he says, but find much of it rather
silly:
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/highlights/artsandbooks_july01/index.html
A few excerpts: "In the US, by contrast, almost all of the prestige
poetry is written in the early 20th-century mode of "free verse"--that
is to say, lines of prose chopped up at arbitrary points...."
"The feuding MFAs are probably no more vicious than the court poets
around Maecenas or Elizabeth I, and rivalry among artists can produce
great art. Not, alas, in this case. The reason is that the MFA
programmes were founded at the moment that the most prestigious
American poets completely abandoned writing metrical verse (that is to
say, verse) in favour of free verse (that is to say, prose)."
"But then in the 1960s, Robert Lowell, the most famous though not the
best American poet of the day, told the Paris Review: "I couldn't get
any experience into tight metrical forms... Prose is in many ways
better off than poetry." It is difficult to imagine Frost, or
Tennyson, declaring that, gosh, writing good verse is just too hard,
or being taken seriously if he had. But Lowell's abandonment of verse
for chopped-up prose at the height of his ephemeral fame legitimated
free verse for countless American poets who had never mastered the
difficult craft of prosody. Thanks to their influence, several
generations of American poets who cannot tell the difference between a
heroic quatrain and an Alcaic stanza have convinced themselves that
they are poets."
--
Julie Carter
Michael Snider
people are incensed. There are some factual errors in the history, and
it appeared in what is apparently a very right-wing publication, many
have used that fact to dismiss it as political propaganda. It's
actually very anti-academic -- much of the response has been of the
nature "Hey, the professors don't run poetry here!"
I think parts of it are silly, too, but the take on Lowell is dead right.
In article <3b49b12d...@news.supernews.com>, jsgo...@yahoo.com
wrote:
Kenny Chaffin
And why should they have to knwo the difference (in quatrains and alcaic
stanzas). You yourself said free verse was harder to learn than formal
verse, so what's the problem?
KAC
--
Kenny A. Chaffin
KAC Website Design - http://www.kacweb.com
Custom/Contract Programming, Graphics, Design
Poetry Page: http://www.kacweb.com/poems/
Kenny Chaffin
msn...@mindspring.com says...
Well, there's no excuse for factual errors in an article, but there's
also no excuse for what the academics did/have done/are still doing to
poetry either.
Joshua P. Hill
wrote:
>Attempted controversy from Michael Lind of Prospect Magazine. I agree
>with some small part of what he says, but find much of it rather
>silly:
>
>http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/highlights/artsandbooks_july01/index.html
Hmmm -- I think it's rather polemical, and I disagree as you do with
some of the details. I revere the poetry of Eliot and Pound, and I
attribute the state of contemporary verse not to solely American
pheonomena, but to modernism in general. But I've been saying pretty
much the same thing for many years now.
Something I wrote about a year ago (and which remains as hastily
written, porrly organized, and largely unedited as it was when I
posted it):
Alan,
I apologize in advance for submitting a reply that will no doubt be
hastily written, poorly organized, and largely unedited, but it's late
and as usual I don't have time to do your question justice. It really
merits a book.
The history of art suggests that form become more complex or entropic
with time, that is, it becomes less stylized, allow more possibilities
and greater realism. Certainly that was true of the overall
progression of Western art from the its primitive beginnings until the
time of the Impressionists.
Seen in that context, it seems inevitable that today's art sould have
looser formal constraints than its predecessors, e.g., that literature
would take on the loose (but still present) rhythms and unfettered
possibilities of prose.
But in fact, I don't think that the ongoing transition to complex form
has been the primary influence on 20th Century art. There are other
cultural factors at work, that are apprent not just in poetry, but in
every art and craft. The modern building is simple and undecorated;
modern clothing is functional and utilitarian; modernist music dropped
the intricate artifice of tonality, modern painting moved form
representation to abstraction, and so for every form.
These changes have been largely limited to the art of the elite. The
lyrics of popular songs and rap still employ meter and rhyme. Popular
music never stopped drawing on the structures of Western harmony.
Popular illustrators continue to draw landscapes and people rather
than splotches of color and geometric forms, popular novels and movies
continue to tell affecting stories with exciting plots.
For me, the question has always been not why these things were
retained by popular art, as why they were discarded by elite art, in
the great shift to modernism that began in the late 19th Century with
the revolt against the academic art of David. It was long a great
puzzle to me that we would supplant something like tonal music, with
its great glories, with music that, quite frankly, nobody who hasn't
been brainwashed would want to listen to, and an even greater puzzle
that artists would actually be embarassed to employ or develop the
older forms. After all, I've always been of a rational and scientific
bent, and when something artistic works for me, I want to use it.
My thought over the years suggests that this seeming paradox is the
result of several intertwined cultural factors that have had the
ultimate effect of producing a, well, great mistake.
Not just the stuff of art, but its form as well, depend intimately on
the social and economic trends of a group. Eighteenth Century art
reflected the ostentatious wealth of the artisocracy and the new faith
in rationality that came with the conquest of Newtonian dynamics. If
the Renaissance had believed that man could rationally understand his
own affairs, the enlightenment believed that man could rationally
understand God's.
In the 19th Century, the flamboyantly decorated display of the
aristocrat was replaced by the large scale but less decorous display
that characterized middle class prosperity and the availablity of
manufactured goods. At the same time, art took on both an increasingly
academic and floridly emotional or sentimental tone; both again were
middle class characteristics, the former reflecting the middle class
desire for cultural uplift, the latter its attempt to find a moral and
emotional framework within a callous economic system. As a result,
much that we see in romantic art represents an attempt to look
backwards, to reclaim and remake the perceived virtues of the earlier
age for the new industrial one. Shepherds and nymphs and flowers and
knights recreated in an ideal way ways of life that were rapidly
disappearing from contemporary life.
Just as the transition from baroque or enlightenment to romantic art
reflected the technical, economic, and social changes that came with
the beginning of industrialization and the shift in power from the
aristocracy to the middle class, the transition from Romanticism to
modernism corresponded to the next phase of industrialization, which
gave us in a few years the electric light, automobile, radio,
telephone, telegraph, airplane, refrigerator, and the other remarkable
advances that gave us what we consider the modern way of life. It was
a period characterized by the fastest change in recorded history. The
19th Century man could contemplate a Faustian future; the 20th Century
man lived in a Faustian present, one in which he not only understood
God but began to take on his role, to remake his environment, to
supplant, as he saw it, nature.
At the same time, social changes led to an increase in real and
nominal economic and political power for the working man. By the time
of the great depression, the upper middle class had gone underground,
much as the aristocracy had years earlier. In America first and then
around the world, the focus shifted. The middle class had to maintain
its position while dealing with the reality of electoral power. The
democratic urge to elevate the working class that had begun in the
19th Century became ever more prevalent, and with it the ideal of a
classless society.
Elite art became increasingly academic, intended to uplift rather than
(as they would have seen it) amuse, and the notion evolved that the
audience had to make the effort to understand difficult works. It lost
touch with the economic, supply-and-demand relationship between artist
and audience at the same time as popular art was commercialized, mass
produced, and received the lion's share of economic resources from the
newly prosperous working class. This led to the two classes of
modernism, what I call the academic-pretentious, epitomized by the
work of Eliot with its quotations in ancient Greek and obscure
references, and the proletarian-pretentious, of whom Frost was a major
proponent. Ultimately, of course, there is a great deal in common
between the two, far more than its progenitors were willing to admit.
It seeks to minister to a classless society, one which eschews
displays of economic rank and makes distinctions on the basis of
accomplishment; so it demands a great deal of education on the part of
the reader, while at the same time shifting its focus to the everyday
man and, in the proletarian-pretentious strain which prevailed over
the overt academic-pretentious, masking its elitism behind a facade of
short sentences and plain words, much as today's old money displays
its wealth through a coded system of expensive mock-proletarian
clothes.
To these social underpinnings were added what I call (having just made
it up) the Great Rejection. The modernists looked at the changes
around them, and concluded that the self-conscious archaisms of
romantic art were specious. They saw about them the culmination of
Promethean hubris, and recognized that there was no limit on what man
could do to alter his environment and himself, and that as a result we
had to look forward rather than backward. The Darwinian revolution,
which decoupled for the thinking man the relationship between religion
and fact, contributed to that perception. Gone was the pretense that
social changes reflected a better understanding of God. Instead,
social change reflected man's better understanding of man. The
medieval king had obtained his authority on the basis of divine right,
but the modern official was elected. Great social movements--the
bourgeouis capitalism of Adam Smith, the communism of Marx, the
fascism of Mussolini--were designed by man for man, on the basis of
dialectical and science. In short, man could and was in the process of
rejecting the old and remaking himself according to the best and
latest knowledge.
The serious artist's task was therefore this: just as man was remaking
his world and himself, he had to remake art, rejecting stodgy
tradition and inventing, like an artistic Edison, new forms. If an art
had been representational, it would become abstract; tonal, atonal;
metrical and rhymed, unmetrical and blank. And so, from social
pressure and the perception that art could and should be remade, came
the great period of modernist experimentation.
Here I think is where we went wrong. The academic-pretentious strain
of elite art combined with the experimentation in an unholy alliance,
one that combined rapid change with disavowal of the audience.
Theoretical developments in art were divorced from experimental
testing. The Galenical lack of empiricism that had afflicted science
before Galileo and led the great philosophers into egregious error now
afflicted art. The artist himself ignored the evidence of his ears, as
Schonberg did in his desperate struggle to stay on the path of
atonality when his every instinct told him to return to harmony.
And audiences hated the new art. In its hubris, it had made a
fundamental mistake. Technology builds on a long tradition of
objective scientific advancement. Geometry, the laws of motion or of
optics or of electricity and magnetism are as true today as they were
when they described, reduced in the cases of physical law to special
instances, but never to be supplanted. Economic organization, though
it may have changed, is also the culmination of a long period of
dialectical development that began with the introduction of
agriculture and owes its efficacy to basic principles that can be
traced back to evolution and fundamental mathematical law. And so it
is with other human advances.
The artist rejected the past unthinkingly, and because he had
convinced himself that the audience needed uplifting, failed to check
his results empirically. When the audience didn't like his work, he
blamed them audience for being uneducated, never pausing to wonder
whether theirs was the rejection of misunderstanding that had
afflicted a few towering geniuses, or the justified rejection of
failed or bad form. At the same time, he didn't have the theoretical
understandstanding, the knowledge of aesthetics, that would have
allowed him to catch his own mistakes. Even today, when advances in
aesthetics and psychology allow us to posit as never before the
general principles of art, most artists are unaware of those
developments.
And so serious art retreated to the realm of the academic, became
increasingly an art for initiates who had received and accepted a
self-referential dogma. We see that process of initation happening all
the time in these groups, as neophytes are trained not only in the
fundaments, as they should be, but in the rejection of the pleasures
of form, and learn instead to appreciate the fashionably-mannered,
infinitely forgettable vacuity of contemporary poetry.
And that vacuity, that mediocrity, is profound. The early modernists
built on form as they rejected it; theirs was a recombination and
modification of the techniques that had come before; but with time,
those basics of craft were forgotten, and the pleasures and challenges
of innovation were forgotten. The early modernists may have made
mistakes, but what they did was excitingly hubristic and, at its best,
brilliant. What remains now is erroneous ritual, a few rules that say,
in effect, one cannot do what was done before 1900 or so, and that one
must affect a ritual iconoclasm, a mock innovativeness that consists
of inserting a dumb enjambment, puncturing a noble sentiment or
engaging in some other form of shtick to stand in for the creativity
that no longer occurs. In the final analysis, Modernism has become as
decadent and unfree as the academic art it replaced, but it includes,
in its stultifying lack of effectiveness, errors far worse than the
late Romantics ever committed.
Josh
Joshua P. Hill
wrote:
>And why should they have to knwo the difference (in quatrains and alcaic
>stanzas). You yourself said free verse was harder to learn than formal
>verse, so what's the problem?
No, free verse is easier to learn, because there's no entry level.
It's harder to do *well*. Anyone can stick line breaks into prose, and
call it a poem, and many do.
I don't think very many who *have* done it well haven't mastered
formal poetry first.
And I wouldn't confuse the academicism of current American poetry with
the notion that skill and craft do not count, or that the scrawlings
of the unlettered are meritorious.
Josh
Jim Sheard
wrote:
<snip>
> the early 20th-century mode of "free verse"--that
>is to say, lines of prose chopped up at arbitrary points...."
<snip>
> metrical verse (that is to
>say, verse) in favour of free verse (that is to say, prose)."
Hm. If he were posting here, I would be crying 'troll!' by now.
I'm puzzled by the following:
>"But then in the 1960s, Robert Lowell, the most famous though not the
>best American poet of the day, told the Paris Review: "I couldn't get
>any experience into tight metrical forms... Prose is in many ways
>better off than poetry." It is difficult to imagine Frost, or
>Tennyson, declaring that, gosh, writing good verse is just too hard,
>or being taken seriously if he had.
Far from being the smoking gun, the experience vs. unbroken form
discussion was already 40 years old in the 60s. The conclusion he
draws (that Lowell was claiming that writing verse was too difficult)
is either disingenous or ignorant - and, in the latter case, ignorant
not only of poetics, but the development of 20th Century Art.
On the other hand, I'm not a great fan of Lowell, and agree that his
particular approach to the question of *material* opened some doors
which have proved difficult to shut.
> But Lowell's abandonment of verse
>for chopped-up prose at the height of his ephemeral fame legitimated
>free verse for countless American poets who had never mastered the
>difficult craft of prosody. Thanks to their influence, several
>generations of American poets who cannot tell the difference between a
>heroic quatrain and an Alcaic stanza have convinced themselves that
>they are poets."
Heh. He really wants to force a crowbar into that schism and tear it
open, doesn't he? And there we all were, discussing it with courtesy
and tact. Don't let him whip you up, is my advice - there are a few
of you who champ at the bit on this topic in any case, but you have
done so with decorum thus far.
Jim
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Kenny Chaffin
XXjos...@mindspring.com says...
> On Sun, 8 Jul 2001 17:53:09 -0600, Kenny Chaffin <ke...@kacweb.com>
> wrote:
>
> >And why should they have to knwo the difference (in quatrains and alcaic
> >stanzas). You yourself said free verse was harder to learn than formal
> >verse, so what's the problem?
>
> No, free verse is easier to learn, because there's no entry level.
> It's harder to do *well*. Anyone can stick line breaks into prose, and
> call it a poem, and many do.
That's not poetry.
>
> I don't think very many who *have* done it well haven't mastered
> formal poetry first.
I think you're wrong about that.
>
> And I wouldn't confuse the academicism of current American poetry with
> the notion that skill and craft do not count, or that the scrawlings
> of the unlettered are meritorious.
>
> Josh
>
Right, but I distinguish between Academia and craft, they are very
different things.