I found myself in the unusual position of defending a piece written by a young college-bound woman who was new to the group. It’s not unusual that I was defending a young woman, but that I was defending her Cubist aesthetic. As you know, I’m not preferential to the avant-garde schools, and particularly Cubism, but I’m a firm believer in critiquing a poem toward a poet’s intent and not toward my own preferences.

The regulars of the group are a rather diverse crowd. We met in Michael Hoover’s home. Mike is the current poet laureate of Hanover, Pa. He is a poet’s poet, a sort of John Donne among a cast and crew of rather colorful characters. My friend Gary is the Beat poet, protege of Jack Kerouac. Anna is an older woman, a traditionalist who is rather rigid in her poetics. Janet is another older woman who is quiet most of the time, but who writes strictly in form and meter, almost always. Tonight she presented a sonnet, complete with the obligatory and obvious end rhymes. Katie is much more contemporary and Millennial-thinking in her approach than the others, tipping toward the postmodern without falling into it. Then there is me and I’m all over the poetic map. Some of the other regulars weren’t there.

At any rate, the young college-bound lady is a former student of Mike’s. Her poem was firmly entrenched in the avant garde. Her poem consisted of several hyphenated adjectives, a handful of colons followed by short bouts of terse pith, imagery that would make Ezra Pound stand up and sing “Holy Moses”, uncanny indentations, and an all-around creative visual and thought-provoking piece. It was quite imaginative and I was blessed to have read the poem. At her age, to have pulled that kind of poem off without the use of the most overused word in any language – the confabulated “I” – was incredible. I think it may have been the best, and certainly was the most creative, poem of the evening.

I defended her because everyone else in the group seemed to want to change the strophe in the poem that I thought was the heart and soul. In the midst of all this imagery surrounding that verse, the poet committed the cardinal sin of “author intrusion”, only it wasn’t so much an author intrusion as it was an addition of “self” in a family portrait. The poem’s title, you see, was “Cubism Family Portrait.”

What Is Cubism?
Anyone who has seen a Cubist painting will have one of two reactions. They’ll either love it or hate. I hate them. Pablo Picasso, heralded a genius by many art lovers in the 20th century, was a crazed, maniacal canvas abuser. I don’t like his Cubist art and I much less like his Blue Period paintings. But a thing is what it is.

When a poet presents a poem that is titled “Cubism Family Portrait”, it is pretty obvious what she is attempting. As a critique group participant, it is my duty to help her achieve her goal in creating the poem that is true to her aesthetic and reaches the point of perfection according to the principles of that aesthetic and not to infuse her poetry with my own aesthetic preferences or attempt to turn her into a miniature me. But that, unfortunately, is the approach of many critique group participants.

The Cubists attempted to present their subjects as geometric lines and shapes rather than the way we would normally see them. Cubist paintings are like stick figures on steroids. They are, in a certain sense, simplistic, but then they are also quite complex in other senses. The idea is to turn reality into an abstraction and the Cubists did that quite well.

I thought the young lady’s poem captured that sense of abstraction that can be found in Cubist art quite well. There was no mention of “I” in the poem, which I thought was a marvelous absence, yet the poet, or narrator, was definitely present. The poem attempted to describe the family in a very imagistic sense, including the dog, and even included two thoughts, spelled out explicitly, of the narrator regarding two imaginary events based on the movement of a chair in the scene. I thought the scene was spelled out quite well. Others didn’t think so. I didn’t have a problem with their inability to visualize it so much as I did with their attempt to fix the problem.

The suggestions had more to do with changing the way the poem was presented rather than improving it in the direction that it was moving. Group members didn’t like that she numbered her thoughts; well, it was unconventional, sure, but I thought it worked for her poem. The “author intrusion” as it was called was a necessary component to the poem because how can you have a family portrait without the painter, who is also a part of the family? The painter has to draw herself in too, doesn’t she?

So what we had was a poem that was primarily based on images, but which took a short excursion in two ways:

1. The painter, who was also a member of the family, entered the poem with thoughts and feelings (well, she is human, isn’t she?)
2. And the form of the poem changed, including a numbered sequence of the intruding author’s thoughts along with double indentions and italics

I thought the author intrusion was appropriate, but I was in the minority.

That’s not to say I thought the poem was perfect. I had my issues with parts of it, but I thought the one verse that everyone seemed to fixate on and wanted to fix was the part that needed the least work. Michael was the only one who saw my point, though I could see that Katie also agreed with me in at least one sense. While Michael could see my point, he still insisted the verse needed to be fixed.

I never try to fix someone else’s aesthetic while in a critique group. I don’t think it’s appropriate. I may not like their approach to writing, but it’s not my place to say it there in that setting. The best influence I can be is to help them improve their poem in the direction that they want it to go. If the aesthetic they have chosen doesn’t work for their poem, I think they’ll discover that on their own in due time. If they don’t then it will just have to be a bad poem. I’m not there to put a clay roof on a steel building.

The one defining characteristic of Realism is its attempt to portray life “as it is.” In other words, to present an objective view of the realities of life, people, existence, things, etc. Such a notion is actually a myth for there is no possible way any human being can capture reality “as it is.” What would be required to have such knowledge?

Reality is based on fact. It isn’t imagination. It isn’t opinion. It is cold, hard fact. And no human has a monopoly on it. In fact, no human has ever held the key to the vault that contains all fact of living – even if we consider that such a feat of human knowledge were possible for any period of time, let alone for all periods of time. Scientific discovery itself precludes any possibility of any human being having such a capability.

It could be said that the possibility of realism is an act of God. That’s not a statement proclaiming the existence of God. It’s a rhetorical fact. For if such a being as God exists then by definition he must know all things about all things. No human can know all that. If any human could then that human would have the mind of God, which is a stark impossibility of the nature and character of man.

These abstractions are proven by universal experience. Show me any human being who has ever been wrong on any fact and I’ll show you a failure with regard to Realism. Case closed.

All aesthetics, by definition, are presented from a particular point of view. It may be the creator’s point of view or the point of view of a fictive voice, but it is a point of view nonetheless. Even if the point of view succeeds at portraying reality in some sense, it can never capture all reality in every sense. And that is why Realism, as an aesthetic movement, was a failure. It wasn’t based on any logical possibilities.

There are still things that bother me about them, but I am beginning to understand his method. Turner’s aesthetic, and his war experience, are unique. When I read the simple portrayals of violence he lived through and witnessed I sense that there is as much poetry in what is left out as what is put in. He does tell, in some interesting ways, but does also show in some rather powerful ways what it was like to be a soldier in Iraq in 2003 as things began to fall apart. What amazes me about his poetry is the level of control he has over his emotions as he brings to light the disaster that is Bush’s legacy. But these aren’t political poems. These are war poems in the real sense of the word.

I will be reviewing Here, Bullet more fully in a few days. For now, I’d like to offer this observation: Turner’s poetry is an attempt to show a surreal experience through the crafting of a realist aesthetic, the basis of his uniqueness. Typically, it is the other way around. Poets who deal with the surreal more often attempt to get to heart of the real through an aesthetic of surrealism. I’m not going to say which is better. There are challenges, disappointments, and triumphs with both methods. But I will be reading Here, Bullet one more time before I have anything more to say on it.

Rather than say I agree, or disagree, with the whole post, I’d rather simply take a few snippets from the post – highlights, if you will – and respond to those. Some of them are rather harsh and striking. Whether they ring true or not, you can be the judge.

Silliman started off with this paragraph, a finely written thesis that set me up right away with anxious anticipation:

If you set a Google Alert for the name Robert Creeley, one thing you will discover fairly quickly is that there are quite a few blogs and a growing number of Flickr! pages that tend to post snippets of literature as daily words to live by, rather in the manner of homilies on page-a-day calendars. And that Robert Creeley is becoming something of a favorite for this kind of use. I have no idea how long these sites stay up, nor how many of the upwards of 180,000 websites that mention Creeley they might account for. But there do seem to be a couple of new ones every single day.

Creeley has become somewhat of a hero for many poets of my generation, and Silliman’s as well (I’d like to point out that Ron Silliman is a Baby Boomer; I’m one of the oldest of Generation X), though I think he may have had more direct influence on Silliman’s generation. Creeley was a seminal member of the Black Mountain Poets, who were heavily influenced by the Beats, and who in turn influenced later avant-garde movements including Silliman’s own L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School. I’ve said before that I’m not a big fan of the avant-garde, though I believe Creeley to be among the best poets of that tradition.

Silliman wasted no time getting right to the meat of his argument, a skill that I admire. Why waste time? In his second paragraph he launched into the “setting of the stage” for what is to come. If paragraph one was “Lights!”, paragraph two was “Camera!” Get ready for action; it’s coming!

Lights, Camera, Silliman!
Here are the opening sentences of “Camera!”:

This is, of course, a traditional use of literature, not so far removed in its historical context from the sort of use implied in the idea that high school students memorizing & reciting poetry is a “good thing.” Both are a far cry from the conception of poetry as “news” advocated by William Carlos Williams, and are in fact profoundly pre- if not outright anti-modern (let alone postmodern) notions. They recreate a world prior to the invasion of technology (or, for that matter, electricity) into the home. They’re one step removed from using the Bible for these exact same purposes,

Nice jibe. In one breath he gut punches high school students, pre-modern humans (if you wish to call them that; maybe “Neanderthals” would be a better term?), and Bible quoters. For the record, I like quoting the Bible; to me, it’s one of the best reads of ancient literature still extant. Nevertheless, Silliman is quite clear that he doesn’t like the use of poetry as “daily words to live by.” Well, quite frankly, I can think of worse.

Ready for “Action!”? Here we go:

(Paragraph 3) I tend to think of such literary projects as the true flarf of our time, since both public recitation and the idea of poetry as homily seem deeply committed to the most sentimental notion of writing one could imagine.

Well, there you go. That could have been Silliman’s thesis statement right there, except that it was finding Creeley in a Google Alert that sparked it. Still, he has a point. As far as “literary” projects go, taking words of out context as a means to daily inspiration is rather sentimental. It’s the same kind of sentimentalism that the majority of Christians adhere to when they clip Bible verses to chains and hang them around their necks. It’s good to look down and be reminded of all the things we should be doing before we forget to do them. “Poetry as homily” as Silliman calls it is the secular version of this practice.

Reductio ad Hitlerum
A little further down Silliman pops a big boner and blackens the eye of his readers with a paragraph so striking in its imagery as well as its truth that many of his readers (as you can tell by their comments) totally missed the point:

Whenever we see poetry being equated with sentiment and sentiment equated with responses to military intervention, as with the Richeys, it’s hard, frankly, not to remember that schmaltz was the aesthetic preference & sentimentality the preferred emotion of the Nazis. Or, for that matter, how these same phenomena contributed also to Stalinist social realism. This isn’t a left/right question so much as one of totalitarian psychology per se. Sentimentality is the quintessential totalitarian emotion.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. As one reader put it, “Reductio ad Hitlerum.” Only it isn’t.

Usually, when someone plays the Nazi card, they have a political agenda. A left-winger hurls it at a Republican, or a Christian fundamentalist screams it at a Yellow Dog. In this case, quintessential liberal Ron Silliman is using it as a statement of literary aesthetic aimed at those who would take literature out of its context to be used for other purposes. Aside from the fact that he misused the word “sentiment” for the more preferable “sentimentalism”, I think he’s right.

He isn’t saying, of course, that the Nazis were wont to lay around reciting pretty verses of love poetry to inspire them in their quest for the Ubermensch. Rather, what he is referring to is the underlying philosophy that led the Nazis to their political statements of superiority. What is underneath it all is the Romantic notion of art. The Romantic aesthetic, which Silliman is criticizing, is the bedrock of the Nazi weltenschauung.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, was an aspiring novelist whose doctoral thesis was on 18th century Romantic drama. Hitler’s favorite classical composer was Richard Wagner, one of the best classical composers of the Romantic era who is well known for his fascist beliefs. Indeed, the entire Nazi philosophy is based on the idea, propounded by Wagner and his philosophical cousin Friedrich Nietzsche, of the leader as a man of vision and the superiority of The Will over intellect and reason. Likewise, the Romantic aesthetic is based on heightened emotion to create within the reader, or viewer, a cathartic experience rather than to appeal to reason and intellect as the Modernists attempted to do. This is what Silliman is criticizing when he says “Sentimentality is the quintessential totalitarian emotion.”

And, he’s correct.

True blue liberals know this. That’s why the extremists on that wing of American politics are so quick to judge their conservative counterparts when the latter approache that end of the philosophical spectrum. Unfortunately, they seldom see the same tendency in the extremists standing next to them. And this is why Silliman is so careful not to draw a line between political right/left and to instead draw the line at the aesthetic door. The Stalinists were just as guilty.

Can Poetry Save The World?
In his penultimate paragraph, Ron Silliman follows his loaded guilt trips on the psychological extremes with this final sentence:

But no amount of poetry is going to solve the problems of Iraq.

This is a hard pill to swallow for some because poets are largely an “anti-war” crowd. I’ve said it before – I wouldn’t go to a peace rally organized by poets because it would generally consist of sentimentalism with regard to peace, love, and flower pots. There would be little, if any, intelligent discussion on when it’s right to fight, what makes a war just, and how a strong defense can curtail conflict and make the prospects of war less threatening. Instead, all one would hear is a bunch of ranting about those “Nazi-like warmongers.”

The problem with Iraq is not that it is war – it really isn’t. The problem, rather, (or one of it’s many problems) is that it is an unnecessary and unjust police-like action that could set a precedent for how future presidents, and Congresses, deal with foreign nations. This Administration’s shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later policies have established our nation, both in the minds of our enemies and our friends around the world, as bullies and unenlightened militarists. If we can’t get what we want through diplomatic means then we’ll just bomb the hell out of them and take it by force. That’s not a principle upon which this nation was founded.

Politics aside, poetry cannot solve the problems of the world. We’ll do well if we don’t create any new ones. And when Silliman makes these sweeping statements that appear to be non-logical, one must understand them in terms of historical context and the underlying philosophical principles that this context stands upon.

So far, I’ve agreed with Silliman’s insights. It is uncanny, I know, but I was with him all the way up to his last paragraph in which he wrote:

The question I have isn’t about Frances Richey or Robert Creeley or Ron Padgett, who are being used for the agendas of others, so much as it is why are we seeing this resurgence, right now, of totalitarian framing on the part of NPR, PBS and the National Endowment of the Arts? And why do we see it burbling up like so many toadstools along the riverbanks of the Web?

Well, I can answer that last question – it’s because the Web in all of its “democratic” glory is the last bastion of sentimental freedom. Since anyone can get online and start a blog, everyone does. And the same level of sentiment that they bring to their daily lives will undoubtedly be taken to their online lives. People’s natures and characters don’t change on the Internet. If anything, they only shed themselves more light – like a drunk’s at an all-night party.

But I do take issue with the statement previous to that last. I don’t take issue with the philosophical underpinning, but rather the timing. Why “right now?” Well, quite frankly, I think Silliman has already answered his own question, in the previous eight paragraphs.

I think the “totalitarian reframing” may be a bit harsh, but remember that these programs, for the most part, were invented by Silliman’s generation. They are the outpouring of the Baby Boomer sentimentality that has followed in the wake of the New Deal and the Kennedy/Johnson years. It his Silliman’s own generation, and the one before it, that has been the most adamant about using the government and public funding to promote the arts. I am against this.

I believe that literature and the arts should be subject to the same market forces as all other products, but if you want to see the essence of authoritarian philosophy, one need not look beyond the hallowed walls of our own institutions, one need not glance across the great pond to a small nation with big ideas or a larger nation with a dwindling economy. If one wants to be confronted with totalitarian ideas, you don’t have to listen to the radio or turn on the TV, you can just drive by Pennsylvania Avenue on any day of the week during any month of any year and pay homage to the two legs of the body politic that hold up and support the arms of our warfare. And by arms I’m not referring to arsenals, but to literary artists who survive on grants and fellowships.