The Whitman Tradition

By the summer of 1986 it was becoming clear that things were changing in American poetry. What I was calling "neoformalism" in a series of annual overview poetry reviews titled "The Year in Poetry" in the yearbooks of The Dictionary of Literary Biography was becoming apparent as a poetry movement with the publication of anthologies and collections of formal poetry and handbooks of poetics. Such things had not been happening in American literature for at least two decades. Diane Wakoski, with whom I had been skirmishing for some years, wrote me a letter and with it enclosed her just-published essay titled "The New Conservatism in American Poetry," in which she launched an ad hominem attack on "John Hollander as Satan" and on Robert Pinsky, "a nice man, even a good writer, but NOT one of the searchers for a new American voice." These two poets, Wakoski maintained, were representative of conservative literary legions who were making an assault upon "the free verse revolution, denouncing the poetry which is the fulfillment of the Whitman heritage, making defensive jokes about the ill-educated, slovenly writers of poetry who have been teaching college poetry classes for the past decade, allowing their students to write drivel and go out into the world, illiterate of poetry."

The last time the Beat poets and critics had attacked what was then called "academic poetry" and equated it with "Fascism" and the "military-industrial complex" their ploy had worked. Rather than be perceived by their students as members of the American Nazi Party or the Ku Klux Klan, poets on college faculties everywhere during the activist 1960s abdicated their responsibility to provide their pupils with substance and became a caste of "nurturers" rather than teachers: the pedagogical philosophy of William Stafford became the rule, and students tended to become imitators of their teachers, many of whom were themselves imitating Stafford and, especially, Robert Bly. A quarter-century later Wakoski was unable to perceive that her generation of anti-intellectuals was the "conservative" generation and that the consideration of craft and structure was new, even revolutionary, to the younger poets.

I always enjoy reading Diane's essays, so as soon as it came I sat down and read "The New Conservatism in American Poetry." Throughout, she kept posing questions and giving answers with which I agree, only her points of view about how horrible the answers are were not the same.

For instance, she asked, "Formalists? Experimenters? Are they not in the same camp? Both care more about the way a poem is written than the subject matter or content" (p. 21). Exactly right. I personally am as interested in formally experimental poetry as in traditionally formal poetry, only that isn't a terrible thing, in my book.

She, on the other hand, had a program: "The poets then who are on the true Left of the fulcrum are the poets of myth; and as contemporary poets use autobiography to some degree in the creation of personal mythology embedded in cultural myth, then the poets move toward the Left of the scale to the degree that they immerse themselves in a kind of autobiography that is meant to be read with mythic interpretation."

But what is all this "left" and "right" business? Is it politics she is talking about? If I am a "serious traditionalist," as she put it in her accompanying letter, does that make me a "conservative" politically? If that's the case, how come I'm actually a flaming liberal and always have been? How come I participated in the first "Poets for Peace" reading in Cleveland in 1962? How come I belonged to the ACLU until that organization protected the neo-Nazi parade in Skokie? How come I worked for Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 election? How come I took a leading part in the faculty strike at SUNY Oswego during the Spring Strike of 1970 (my speech in faculty meeting is on videotape in the College archives)? How come I belonged to Greenpeace?

She has no idea how deeply I and other liberals who are also formalists resent her calling us conservatives, even by implication. I'm pro-choice, pro-women's rights, anti-bias. I believe all Americans have a right to a decent livelihood, to medical coverage, to the protection of the courts, to shelter and clothing and food, and the government is responsible for seeing to it (one way or another) that these things are provided. What does that make me? What would she call it? Would she say that, because I've written The Book of Forms, all these positions and attitudes are obviated and I'm really a closet Bush Leaguer? How I write my poems has nothing at all to do with my politics, and I seriously doubt it has much to do with anyone else's politics, either. I was a liberal in high school, long before I understood what the term meant. I was simultaneously a formal-experimentalist. I was born that way, I think.

In other words, I'm democratic to a fault when it comes to politics. When it comes to poetry I have just two criteria: does it keep my interest throughout, and is it well-written? I have no program. Poetry is not in and of itself "democratic," though the subject of a poem may certainly be democracy. Poetry is, indeed, "literature" —what else can it be, since it is written down in words?

I consider that poetry is the genre of language art. The poet concentrates upon language as substance, in much the same manner as the sculptor concentrates upon stone as shape or the dancer upon the body as motion. Like writers in the other literary genres, the poet may use either of the two modes, prose, which is unmetered language, or verse, which is metered language (according to the O. E. D.). Any of the genres may be written in either of the modes; that is to say, there may be prose or verse fiction, prose or verse drama; prose or verse essay; prose or verse poetry.

These distinctions between genre and mode, it seems to me, ought to be obvious, but that people continue to confuse the two is evident in their continued use of the contradiction-in-terms, "free verse," and in the often-asked question, "What is the difference between prose and poetry?" There is only one logical answer to the latter: "Prose is a mode, and poetry is a genre." And of course verse cannot be free if it is metered language.

It is always my intention to know as much as I possibly can about all the genres, and about both the modes, so that I may write whatever I please, however I please, shaping the language as well as I am capable of doing for any purposes I wish. I am not interested in a style, I am interested in all styles; not in one form, but in every form, including the experimental. I do not care to inhabit a conceptual or artistic prison by limiting myself to techniques agonists approve for some reason of literary theory or manifesto of poetics. I will throw nothing away before I discover what I may do with it. But these are pragmatics and rationalities. All worthwhile writing has emotional and irrational imponderables as well.

Wakoski wrote, "It has long been my claim that the central focus of uniquely American poetry is Dionysian [a Greek term; the Greeks also invented democracy] and based in earth mythology." I know exactly what she is saying; she is claiming that real American poetry is what I call "priest poetry." There have always been two kinds of poetry: Aristotelian/Apollonian and Platonic/Dionysian. Platonic poetry was written by the priests whose job it was to control the environment during those eons when the system of sympathetic magic ran the world —I've written about this, too, at great length in my book Satan's Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697 (2009). The two laws of sympathetic magic (see Frazer's The Golden Bough) were those of similarity and association. Similarity said, "like begets like," so to make it rain, you sprinkled water on the ground. Association said, "once things are associated, they are always associated with one another, no matter the distance in time and space between them." In order to kill your enemy, make a wax image of him (similarity), insert into the wax figure hair and nail-parings belonging to your enemy (association), and stick pin-daggers into the figure (similarity) while you raise the demon who will do your bidding by invoking that spirit's "secret name" (association). This worked until the omnipotent Jewish god came along: he could not be controlled by using his Secret Name which, if spoken aloud, was a blasphemy taken "in vain."

The Priests were in control of the gods and spirits that controlled the world. It was their job to write and recite the magic formulas (prayers, incantations, imprecations, litanies, hymns, etc., etc.) that would bring the rain, good harvests, cures, love —you name it. Priest-poetry was a serious business...until the system of science came along. Science works better, so now what the priests have left is the poetry and none of the power.

While the priests were "controlling" mankind's environment with poetry, the women were trying to control their children while they washed clothes or hoed or made meals or ground the grain with stones, all rhythmic exercises. So they sang songs and told stories to keep the kids entertained and within sight, and "art" poetry was born.

Do the "Dionysian" priest poets appreciate the women's art poetry? Certainly not —it's trivial and beneath them. Do the Apollonian art poets appreciate priest poetry? Certainly...as long as the chants or curses or whatever are interesting and entertaining, and well-done.

And that's where it's at for Diane Wakoski. She is a priest poet, and she doesn't like art poetry. She is a missionary with a religious program for "American" poetry, just like Emerson. Since my dad was a Baptist minister, I had all that zeal buzzed out of me before I was twelve years old. Poetry is literature, it's not particularly prayers or prophecies or visions, though it may be that, too.

Wakoski is a missionary for "democracy" in poetry; however, there is a deep inconsistency that runs throughout her argument. On the one hand she says, "...it is now useful to look at American poets who are attempting to work with the so-called [by her] Whitman tradition, and its attendant earth mythology. The self that Whitman sings of is the new pure man/woman who democratically is everyone, white or black, slave or free, woman or man" (pp. 23-4). Wakoski is interpolating her own vision into Whitman's, I'm afraid, because he never mentioned the possibility that there might be a great woman poet. Whitman's true poets were always men.

Wakoski went on to say things like, "Now we have to ask ourselves, is this poem here [in a contemporary anthology] because it is a good poem or because a Chicano poet wrote it? Surely our aesthetics are changing, and we have some new ideas about what a good poem is? Yet, that question, which should be at the center of the expanding canon, gets obscured almost totally in worrying about the biographical credentials of the poet. Gender, race, surely we have excluded more for aesthetic reasons than political ones?" (p. 37).

One understands that Wakoski believes that "Each man/woman is free to make him/herself into a god/goddess/hero of the American culture. Each one must break new ground to do it" (p. 24). But in a democracy, how many people are capable of a) becoming poets in the first place? b) capable of breaking new ground? c) making himself or herself into a hero or heroine? Which brings her argument back down to where I can agree with her again: we both want "good" poems. The difference is, Wakoski wants good priest poems, and I don't care what kind of poem it is, so long as it holds my interest and is well-written. I don't care whether it's a prayer or an ode; a curse or a blessing; a myth or a story; a chant or a song.

Which of these positions is more "democratic"? Which of us is more "liberal"? Which of us applies more strictures to what a poet may or may not write? Which of us is the conservative here, the person who will read anything and praise it if it's good, or the person who insists that everyone has to write in a particular "tradition," that tradition being our "Whitman heritage"?

Whether one is an innovator or a traditionalist in poetry has nothing to do with one's politics. Wakoski was so intent upon scoring rhetorical points in her essay that she went so far as to equate the Modernist T. S. Eliot with the traditionalist Robert Frost, but two more different poets can hardly be imagined. If Eliot was a closet Fascist, as some have claimed, and an arch-traditionalist in religion, he was nevertheless one of the most innovative and experimental poets of the early twentieth century, like his friend Ezra Pound who was in many ways responsible for the revival of that "Whitman heritage" whose imminent demise Wakoski seemed to be lamenting. Pound —wild man of the Modernist literary world, first to cry "make it new!" and to make it stick —far from being a liberal of any kind, was an outright Mussolini Fascist who narrowly escaped execution as a traitor following World War II because he had broadcast Fascist propaganda on Italian radio.

Furthermore, if Frost was both a New England farmer and a traditional poet, it is equally true that party-line socialist poetry throughout the world is generally at least as "formal," "traditional," and "rhetorical" as any that Wakoski might have named. As to Wakoski's complaint regarding "American" as distinguished from "European-style" poetry: the work of Frost is as identifiably "American," for all its formalism, as anything that the Modernist "Imagist" poet William Carlos Williams ever wrote. No perceptive American or European reader would or could confuse Frost's voice and style with those of any British poet.

As though any of this had any importance at all. What is the difference whether a poem is American or English or Canadian or Australian if it is a good poem? What is the difference whether it is a rhymed and metered poem or a prose poem, so long as it is well done? None whatever, except that if people know how to handle the language well in every way possible, perhaps they will stand a better chance of writing a good poem, and that surely is what teachers of craft and technique attempt to give their students. Wakoski herself was a college teacher, though to read her harangue one would never suspect it.

Wakoski is a member of the conspiracy that has existed in the United States since Walt Whitman to glorify effusive or simply bad writing as quintessentially "American" "literature." American it may be, but it isn't necessarily literature in the sense that someone might want to read it again for pleasure. Because the United States is a democracy, it is decided that everybody ought to be able to write, and when it is discovered that not everyone can, a corpus of bad writing is developed and praised so that those who can't write won't feel bad. Unfortunately, those people who do know how to write or who enjoy reading literature feel worse than bad when they read such material. They want to throw up...their hands in despair.

Rather than stemming the tide of The New Formalism, the Whitman-Wakoski product merely displays the poverty and bankruptcy of the old antiformalism. Wakoski's own book, The Rings of Saturn (1986) may stand as an example. Here is the beginning of a perfectly representative effort titled "Braised Leeks & Framboise":

"The ocean
this morning
has tossed someone's garbage
over its surface,
half oranges
that make my mouth pucker for
fresh juice,
lettuce leaves
looking fragile, decorative, like
scarves
for the white curling locks
of old water."

Why are "the ocean," "this morning," "half oranges," "fresh juice" and "orange leaves" arranged on the page as lines? What is linear about them? Are they attempts to make this flat prose look as though they were written in some sort of "verse," "free" or otherwise? One understands the concept of "lineating" or, in William Carlos Williams' terminology, using the "breath pause" to line-phrase clauses and phrases, as Wakoski does here in the lines, "over its surface," "for the white curling locks," and "of old water," which are prepositional phrases standing as lines, but why does this following line end with the beginning of a prepositional phrase: "that make my mouth pucker for"? [emphasis added].

Would this sight depicted here make the mouth of anyone other than Diane Wakoski "...pucker for / fresh juice"? If something said well is something well said, and something said superbly is a poem, then what is this? And what in "The Whitman Tradition" "would" tend to make it memorable in any attractive way? Is it somehow a better poem written this way than it would have been if written in rhyme and meter? I don't think so.

WORKS CITED

Ekleksographia:
Wave Two

November, 2009

Poems

Lewis Turco

Lewis Turco is the author of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, known to three generations of poets and students of poetry as "the poet's Bible." He was founding director of both the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1962 and the Creative Writing Program at the State University of New York College at Oswego in 1968 from which he retired as Emeritus Professor of English in 1996. He took his B. A. from the University of Connecticut in 1959 and his M. A. from the University of Iowa in 1962. In 2000 he received a first honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, from Ashland University, and a second in 2009 from the University of Maine at Fort Kent. His poems, essays, stories and plays have appeared in most of the major literary periodicals over more than a half-century, and in over one hundred books and anthologies. Of his fifty books, chapbooks and monographs, his volume of criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry won the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1986, and his A Book of Fears: Poems, with Italian translations by Joseph Alessia, won the first annual Bordighera Bi-Lingual Poetry Prize in 1998. His most recent volumes are The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004; Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems, 1959-2007; The Museum of Ordinary People and Other Stories 2008; Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697, and La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, both published in 2009. In 1999 he received the John Ciardi Award for lifetime achievement in poetry sponsored by the periodical Italian Americana and the National Italian American Foundation., and in 2007 the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award given by the West Chester University Poetry Conference.