2O I rHs HUMAMTIEs RgvIEw spRrNG z0r I t AwREt{cE JOSFH A FEW REruECTIONS ON POETRY AI{D LANGUAGE I 2 l

feeling, entering the stream of consciousness, spawning, schools of art rightly

A Few Reflections on Poetry and called expressionist, whilg at the same time, decentering the subject, displacing
the center of interest onto language, or on to poetic transmutation itsell or even

Language dissolving the self as usually conceived in favor of some new constellation. The
paradox, aestheti-cally, is this: Although the subject is dissolved into the text's lan-
guage-into the formal process itself, onto a new and separate aesthetic plane-
modernism does not eliminate subjectivity.

ln "subjective Authenticity"-a 1976 interview with Hans Kaufman-

Christa Wolf remarked that the "reservoir writers draw on in their writing is ex-
Lawrence Joseph, St, John's Universrty perience, which mediates between objec-tive reality and the authorial subjectJ'
Quoting Anna Seghert who said that the writer "is the curious crossing point
n "When was Modernism?"-which appeared in New where object becomes subject and turns back into object," Wolf continues in a
I
Left Review in 1989-Raymond Williams defined what passage worth quoting at length:
I
Imodernism is by asking when it was. As a classification Ttrs Hwilities Rwiew
Vdwe I, Issue I
for a whole cultural movement and moment, "modernism"- To my mind it is much more useful to look at writing, not as an end prod-
spdng 201 I 20-29.PP
Williams pointed out*did not appear untilthe 1950s; until St. University uct, but as a process which continuously runs alongside life, helping to shape and
John's
then, the meaning of "modern" in literature was roughly the interpret it writing can be seen as a way of being more intensely involved in the
same as'tontemporary." Modernism is, therefore, a critical Lawrence Joseph world, as the concentration and focusing of thought, word and deed. This mode of
is a poet and a
construct; modernist writers "are applauded for their denatu- writing is not'subjectivist,'but'interventionist.' lt does require subjectivity, and a
professor of Law at
ralizing of language, their break with the allegedly prior view
St. John's Universrty.
subject who is prepared to undergo unrelenting exposure-that is easy to say, of
that language is either a clear, transparent glass or a mirror, He is the recipient course, but I really do mean as unrelenting as possible-to the material at hand,
and for their making abruptly apparent in the texture of narra- of several awards to accept the burden ofthe tensions that inexorably arise, and to be curious about
tive the problematic status of the author and his authority." As and fellowships. the changes that both material and the author undergo. The new reality you see is
including the Agnes
the author appears in the text, the "self-reflexive text assumes different from the one you saw before. Suddenly, everything is interconnected and
Lynch Starrelt
the centre of the public and aesthetic stagg and in doing so fluid. Things formerly taken as given'start to dissolve, revealing the reified social
Prize for poetry,
declaratively repudiates the fixed formsi' the Guggenheim relations they contain and no longer that hierarchically arranged social cosmos
Foundation and the in which the human particle travels along the paths pre-ordained by sociology or
Or, as Peter Burger writes in an essay, ?porias of Natronal Endowment ideology, or deviates from them. lt becomes more and more difficult to say'1,'and
ior the Arts
Modern Aesthetics-published in New Left Review a year yet at the same time often imperative to do so. I can only hope I have made it clear
feilowships, and the
after "When was Modernism"-after modernism "art is itself that this method not only does not dispute the existence of objective reality, but
New York County
dragged into the process of alienation that separates sub- Lawyers Associatioo's is precisely an attempt to engage with bbjective reality'in a productive manner.
ject and object." ln the context of a crisis first imagined by Law and Literature
Nietzsche, the romantic writer's belief in the self's power to Award. Some of his ll
poetry works are
shape reality through language, and the re-alist's sense of
Shouting at No One
language as an accurate expression of factitious reality, are Theories of language appear throughout modernist poetics. As Sigurd
(i983) and tnto It
shattered. Modernist writing-as Charles Taylor observes in (2005). Burckhardt noted in his still worth reading 1 956 essay "The Poet as Fool and Priest,
Sources of the Self-turns more inward, tending to explore, the "first purpose of poetic language is the very opposite of making language more
even to celebrate, subjectivity, exploring new recesses of transparent." lf a language pure enough to transmit human experience without
221rnt HUMANITTEs REVTEw spRrNG 2011 LAWRENCE JOSEPH A FEW RETLECTIONS ON pOErRy AND LANGUAGE I 23

distortion existed, there would be no need for poetry. Not only does such a lan- Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that detracts from
guage not exist, it cannot; language, by its very nature, is a social instrument, and ones enjoyment.
must be a convention, arbitrarily ordering the chaos of experiences, denying ex- It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved triumph easily
pression to some, allowing it to others. Language must provide common denomi- be honoured-
nators, and so it necessarily falsifies. These falsifications are more dangerous the that which is great because something else is small.
more transparent language becomes-the more unquestioningly it is accepted It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,
as an undistorting medium. Language itself-as Michael Hamburger puts it in it must be "lit with piercing glances into the life of things";
his 1969 critical magnus opus, The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.
Baudelaire to the 1960s-'guarantees that no poetry will be totally dehumanizedi
regardless whether a poet attempts to project pure inwardness outwards or to lose Note how Moore immediately decenters the poem's self. The simple
and find himself in animals, plants and inanimate thingsJ' Words never can be to- opening declaration, "When I buy pictures," is transformed into a more complicated
tally severed from the ideas and meanings that exist in external reality. One needn't statement, "when I look at that of which I may re-gard myself as the imaginary pos-
be a Marxist to recognize that all poetry has political, social and moral implications, sessor,"which the self sees as'tloser to the truth." This long, dense line-thickened
regardless whether the intention behind it is didactic and "activist" or not. by the accentu-ated jostling of its opening nine monosyllables-enmeshes the "l"
in its language. lt also relocates the "l"outside the seli in an aesthetic realm. Then,
Poets-always the most astute theoreticians and critics of their art-rec- in a long and complicated sentence-syntactically refracted by closures demar-
ognized the complicated refraction of the self in a poem by the early 1 920s. Poetry, cated by a colon, a dash, and a series of semicolons-the "l" is fixed (in the sense of
William Carlos Williams writes in 1923 in Spring and All, expresses "new form dealt adjusted?) to the imagined object. The effect is to make the self doubly removed
with as a reality in itself...with the dynamization of emotion into a separate form." from the actual act of buying, in a kind of perceptual reality that is no more "than
Take, for example, from Marianne Moore's Abservations, published in 1924, the intensity of the mood" or (continuing the process of decentering) 'euite the
opposite-the old thingi'which is first described, and then shifted back through
WHEN I BUY PICTURES layers of meaning into subjectivity, "literal biography perhapsl' At this point, the
reader already has felt the poem as an imaginary object; the poem has assumed rhe
or what is closer to the truth, center of attention and aesthetic focus, beyond "Too stern an intellectual quality.'
when I look atthatof which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor, The imagined object-the picture turned into the poem-"must not wish to dis-
lfix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments: arm anything." A poem includes wishes; it must be human; it cannot escape social
the satire upon curiosity in which no more is discernible or economic realities (those subtextually suggested by buying pictures, purchasing
than the intensity of the mood; imagined enjoyment); it cannot ("perhaps") escape"literal biographyJ'The poem in
or quite the opposite-the old thing, the mediaeval decorated hat-box, which the self chooses to imagine buying a picture'bf whatever sort" has its ovun
in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the waist of the necessity. lt must see "'into the life of thingsi" yet must also "acknowledge" {a word
hour-glass, con-noting objectivity) its subjectivity, "the spiritual forces" which (both separare
and deer and birds and seated people; and part of it) make the poem what it must be. "Moore"-William Carlos Williarns
it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal biography wrote in an essay on her work in 1925-"undertakes in her work to separate the
perhaps, poetry from the subject entirely-like all the moderns. ln this she has been rarely
in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse; successful and this is important. There is no compromise. Moore never falls from
an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged hieroglyphic in three the place inhabited by poems. lt is hard to give an illustration of this from her work
parts; because it is everywhere."
the silver fence protracting Adam's grave, or Michael taking Adam by the
wrist, ilt
24 I rns HuMArvrrES REVTEW spRtNc Zot 1 LAWRn{CE JOSEPH A FEW RETECTrONS ON pOEl"Ry A}ID LANGUAGE I 25

conversion of perception or emotion into ... something? And how are those con-
ln part XXll of "The Man with the Blue Guitar"-written during the Great versions determined by the history of the mind that's performing the transmuta-
Depression (in 1935 or 1936), quite purposely with the title of the Pablo Picassg tion-by what it's read and done before?... But what is poetry that isn't tied to a
painting-Wallace Stvens writes: "Poetry is the subject of the poem, / From this tradition, which is, after all what a language is?" On Friday, March 24,2006-con-
the poem issues..." Or-to restate Stevens-every poem reflects what the poet cluding his week of blogging-Galassi notes:"1 went to see a performance of Mark
believes poetry is; every poem composes its own poetics. Morris's company last week which included his version of the Gertrude Steinl/irgil
Thompson opera, FOUR SAINTS lN THREE ACTS. I was captivated again, as I always
Stevens was the first American poet to make the issues of a poem his ex- am, by the magic of Stein's words:'pigeons on the grass, alasi etc. ls she not the
plicit subject. A poet's critical sense of a poem, of poetry, is reflected in the issues orginal'language'poet? Sheunpackssyntaxandexpectedmeaningsoconstantly
of the poet's poems. "The subject matter of poetry is not thattollection of solid, and surprisingly, with beautiful, witty, moving results"but"always works in reaction
static objects extended in space"'-stevens writes several years later, in his 1941 to expectation.'
essay"The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"(written after completing his book
of poems, Partsof aWorld)-"but thelifethatislivedinthescenethatitcomposes." Terry Eagleton addresses the issue of the autonomy of the poem in a 1 989
interview,'Action in the Present,"in Polygraph:Versions of the Present: Modernism /
IV Postmodernism. "There is a sensei'Eagleton says, "that style in writing resists com-
modification, in a world where it is part of the effect of the commodity to desensu-
One issue of poetry is a poem's existence as an object. As Octavio Paz alize.... I think we have to find a way to resist that form of commodification in the
writes in his essay, "Jose Ortega y Gasset: The Why and the Wherefore" (translated letter of the text... a way of resisting commodification by sensuousness, by a kind
by Michael Schmidt): "The poem is a verbal object, and though it is made of signs of... overlaying of the language."
(words), its ultimate reality unfolds beyond those signs: it is the presentation of a
form." Paz echoes what Eugenio Montale, in "Let's Talk About Hermeticism"-trans- V
lated by Jonathan Galassi-wrote:That a poem is a "poetic-painterly-musical pro-
ductioni'that"the tendency"of a poem,"among all the infinite variations"is toward The issue of how language is used in a poem creates, of course, further
the object, toward art invested, incarnated in the means of expression, toward issues. ln A Novellette, written in the late twenties, William Carlos Williams writesr
emotion which has become thing. "Understand here," Montale adds, "that by thing "Conversation as design"; conversation expressed in a written text-Williarns con-
we don't mean the external metaphor, the description, but simply the resistance tinues-is "actual to the extent that it would be pure design... of which there is
of the word within its syntactical nexus, the objective finished... sense of form sui none in novels." Fifteen years or so later, T.5. Eliot, in "The Music of Poetryi'writes: "lt
generis, to be judged case by case." may be strange, that when I profess to be talking about the'music'of poetry, I put
such emphasis upon conversation... While poetry attempts to convery something
On Wednesday, March 21 , 2006, in "Dispatches: Journalsi' a Poetry beyond what can be conveyed in prose rhythms, it remains, all the same, one per-
Foundation website and blog, Jonathan Galassi updates the issue. "l'm afraid"- son talking to another."
Galassiwrites-"|'m unavoidably wedded to the notion that a poem is a made thing
that aims to be an autonomous object-a thing, with a life of its own... I guess l'm How does a poet converse in a poem? By"voices," Eliot says, in 'l 953,
the learn-by-doing-type-poetics to me seem mainly ex post facto, derived from in "The Three Voices of Poetry.""The first voice is the voice of the poet talking to
what one has already made out of what one has felt." On Thursday, March 23 2006, himself-or to nobody." "The second," according to Eliot, "is the voice of the poet
Galassi writes: "l keep obsessing about my sense of a poem as a made thing-feel- addressing an audience, whether large or small. The third is the voice of the poet
ing kneaded and shaped into ideas, or is it conditioned by ideas, pressed through when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse; when he is
the mold of mental forms to become an autonmous object that somehow reca- saying, not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within
pitualtes the process? Or should we think of the poem as the process itself, the the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character. . .. I
26 I rne HUMANTTTES REVTEW spRiNG 20r l IJAWRENCE IOSEPH A FEW REFLECTIONS ON POETRYAND I,ANGUAGE I 2Z

think"-Eliot concludes-"that in every poem, from the private meditation to the own bias, backtrack skeptically on its own assumptions, interrogate its own percep-
epic or the drama, there is more than one voice to be heard." tions in the very act of communicating them. "The political force of Brecht's poetry,
therefore, "is not in the first place a question of 'passionate commitment,'moral in-
What is conveyed within the compostion (or design) of a poem's voices dignation or satiric denunciation though few modern poets have equalled him in
beyond what can be conveyed in prose? Still the best answer to the question is Ezra these capacities," but, instead, "a matter of dramatizing, in the very forms of fiction,
Pound's declaration in 1934. in ABC of Readlng: "Great literature is simply language that the social reality under which we live in merely one possibility, a particular
charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree'... lbegin with poetry"- 'fictional'construction which may be transformed. This"-Eagleton summarizes-
Pound writes-"because it is the most concentrated form of verbal expressionJ' "is indeed a question of form rather than (in the first place) of content, and it is
for this reason that formalism must be opposed: it trivialises an issue of supreme
Or-to restate Pound-poetry is allthat language is, expressed in its most importance."
compressed, concentrated forms.
Adrienne Rich, in the epigraph of her book Telephone Ringing in the
VI Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006, presents the issue simply like this: "poetry is not self-
expression, the I is a dramatic 1," she writes, quoting Michael S. Harper, who quotes
The issue of a poem's language also creates issues of who the speaking (or Sterling A. Brown.
conversing) self in a poem is. Michael Hamburger, inTheTruth of Poetry's"APeriod
Loose at All Ends" chapter, observes that in Eugenio Montale's poetry "private and vil
public experiences are interwoven into the texture" of the poems "exactly as they
are interwoven in the texture of human lifel' Montale's "poetic'l'functions as a me- ln the October 4, 2007 Guardian, John Freeman writes an article en-
dium rather than as a subject (in either sense of the word)"; the poet "belongs to titled "Verse-slinging." Freeman begins with an anectdote about stopping by ,,a
his poems, and his poems belong to any reader prepared to entrust himself to their Greenwich Village bookstore recently" where, on the store's front table, ,,a hand-
exploratory coursesj' "The first person in a lyrical poem should never be identi- some batik-print covered paperback,'Co ntemporory Americqn poetry, selected and
fied, in any case, with the poet's empirical selfi'Hamburger writes in the The Truth introduced by Donald Hall, caught his eye. As he looked through what he thoughr
of Poetry's "Masks" chapter, discussing Yeats's poetry. Yeats, Hamburger says, "de- looked like"a dignified little booki the bookseller-in a tone of voice Freeman de-
mands to be read with the kind of adjustments that we make for dramatic poetry. . . scribes "as if I were picking up a bullet casing"-interjected, ",Oh, the old poetry
Whether primarily confessional or primarily dramatic, the first person in lyrical po- anthology wars... Now that was fun to watch from the sidelines.,',
etry serves to convey a gesture, not to document identity or establish biographical
facts." Yeats's "multiple selves ... convey a great many different gestures, of a great "l hadn't stumbled on an old gunslinger, or a man drenched in nostalgia-
many different ordersi' just a bookseller with a long memory," Freeman continues. ,,During the 1950s and
early 60s, what the Beats didn't accomplish in coffee houses and on city Lights
ln a 1982 review in Stan d of Bertolt Brecht's Poems 1913-l956,Terry Eagleton Press, anthologists hammered home in the pages of pocket-sized books that sold
writes that Brecht's aesthetic objective "was to float language free of the object for a dollar. They feel today like field manuals, complete with marshalling introduc-
so that it became, not its mirrot but its critique." Language for Brecht was not a tions. 'For thirty years'-Freeman quotes from Hall's introduction to Contemporary
'reflection'or'symbolic embodiment'of reality, but a "historical intervention, shat- Americon Poetry-"'an old orthodoxy ruled American poetry..., American poetry,
tering established representations in the name of alternative ways of construct- Hall wrote, has been "'derived from the orthodoxy of T.s. Eliot and the New critics/"
ing the world. The paradigm of such reconstructions for Brecht was"-Eagleton who "'asked for a poetry of symmetry, intellect, irony, and wit. The last few years
continues-'bf course socialism, but there is a sense in which it was also writing. have broken the control of this orthodoxy."'
For any piece of writing constructs reality in partial, questionable, exclusive ways. . .
The most revolutionary gesture for Brecht was... for a poem to demonstrate its Freeman doesn't elaborate how the control of the orthodoxy that Hall
 28 I tnn HUMANITIES REVIEW SPRING 2011
t AwRH{cE JosEpH A FEw REFI EcTIoNS oN poETRy AND LANGUAGE I 29

mentions-which, in part, was what the post world-warTwo "wars,,over American its own omnipotence in the allure of its simulated reality... self-reflection is the key
poetry were about ("wars"that absorbed the critical attention of poets writing
dur_ term in modernist poetry's delicate balancing act. lt must of necessity constitute
ing the late fifties and sixties, even through to the end of the century)-was crti-
itself and even strive to achieve an impossible unity. This is, as Adorno reminds us,
cally broken. lnstead, he simply observes that "lt's hard to imagine this sentence
"the inheritance of myth an an attempt to master the chaos of nature."
being written today. lt's not," Freeman says, "that there isn,t an orthodoxyi, but
"rather that there are too many of them. There are lyric poets and language poets,
slam poets and funny poets. There are poets who identify by ethnicity, gender, and
sex,"and-even among these-"many who could claim the mantle of such identity
politics and refuse. But mostly, it should be said, there's a lot of poetry... No longer
do Americans have to read a prevailing kind of poetry, or even within their own
borders."

Yet, Freeman asks,',in this mishmash,,has something gotten lost? ,,What

is apoem, anymore? Let alone a good one, or even a beautiful one? who sets
this
taste? These," Freeman adds, "are not idle questions. " ln "an environment where
poetry is as marginalised as it's ever been....despite the volume of stuff that,s be-
ing produced," how do we "figure out what is good, and why it should matter," and
then, how, do we "make those judgments heard?,,when, today,,,the taste_making
power of anthologies has been replaced by MFA programs" and ,,a staggering pro-
liferation of prizes."

vilt

5o, what is a poem, anymore (in an environment in which poetry is as mar-

ginalized as ever, and this marginalization is discussed and anlyzed by poets
far
more than the critical issues of the art itself)? The self-reflective text that assume
the center of the public and aesthetic stage. . . new form dealt with as a reality in
itself... the most concentrated form of verbal expression, of composed vocal con-
versation. . . the notion of a made thing that aims to be an autonomous object, a
thing with a life of its own, in which a life is lived in, in which a voice or voices func-
tion as a medium or as media, rather than as subjects: "poetry is the subject of the
poem, / From this the poem issues..." The issues of a poem-a poem,s issues-are
what a poem is.

ln "Defying Conclusions: Opening Up Modernismi,the final chapter of

his i 995 book Modernism in poetry: Motivations, structures and Limits, Ranier Emig
writes:"ln order to fulfill itself, modernist poetry must keep a precarious balance. lt
must pursue modernity's tendency.. . of transforming reality into an aesthetic con-
struct. Yet it must not give in to a complete aestheticisation of reality, to the idea of