"Here in Hell"--An Essay by Mark Doty
Mark Doty
from The Boston Review 23.3
Professor Bloom reminds us of the origins of the term aesthetic in
"perceptiveness"; what we make of his argument depends on
just what we think "perceptiveness" means. Bloom wants to place the aesthetic in
a kind of pure realm, free of social or
historical pressures--in paradise, as it were, where perennial, indelible values rule:
harmony, order, the subtle, infinitely pleasing,
endlessly varied shadings of meaning made by the artful arrangement of words.
I'm reminded of a statement of Auden's, who wrote that a poem should be "a verbal
earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure
play, which gives us delight precisely because of its contrast to our historical existence
with all its insoluble problems and
inescapable suffering. . . ."
But "perceptiveness" suggests more than an acute awareness of language and form.
It connotes an equally acute eye toward
reality, which is for all of us a social affair, a collaboration between the interior and
the external. Auden goes on to say, "At the
same time we want a poem to be true . . . and a poet cannot bring us any truth without
introducing into his poetry the
problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly." Into the paradise of euphony,
the good poet must introduce hell. Broken
paradises are the only kind worth reading.
The poets Bloom loves brilliantly inhabit this intersection of heaven and hell-earth, that
is. It is with them, I think, that his
impassioned argument goes thuddingly and misleadingly wrong. How can he suggest that Crane
or Bishop, Swenson or Merrill
developed "without being impeded by ideological demands"?
To suggest that their work has no social context or content-that it is not a response to
"the pressure of reality"-is not to elevate
them but to diminish them, to relegate poems which embody profound struggles to a kind of
mere beauty devoid of the scarring
(and deepening) intrusions of Hell. The inferno, in this case, is the arena of desire-with
all the questions of control and of (I
know, I'm tired of the word too) identity which are attendant upon it.
Here is Hart Crane's "Reply":
Thou canst read nothing except through appetite
And here we join eyes in that sanctity
Where brother passes brother without sight,
But finally knows conviviality . . .
Go then, unto thy turning and thy blame.
Seek bliss then, brother, in my moment's shame.
All this that balks delivery through words
Shall come to you through wounds prescribed by swords:
That hate is but the vengeance of a long caress,
And fame is pivotal to shame with every sun
That rises on eternity's long willingness . . .
So sleep, dear brother, in my fame, my shame undone.
The poem begins with an act of instruction about reading: Crane couldn't be more
directive in letting us know that the poem has
to do with desire. The sort of longing in question is specified in lines three and four,
which seem not just a generalized
description of men in cities but a specific evocation of the ways in which eye contact
between men (who usually avoid the direct
gaze of other men on the street)is the beginning of "conviviality . . ." That
ellipsis, like every such omission in Crane, is telling.
In the second stanza we see that one man's bliss is another's shame; we aren't on the even
terrain of pleasure between equals
here, but within a construct of sexual life which requires a top and a bottom, a user and
a used: a man, in the terms of Crane's
day, and someone who acts "like a woman." To do so is shameful, of course, yet
it is the source of bliss, and the poem yokes
the two in line six. In the final line, "shame" is answered-replied to?-by
"fame." "Fame" here is more than reputation; as in
"Lycidas," where Milton says "Fame is no plant that grows on mortal
soul." Fame is something more like spiritual triumph, the
flourishing of the soul.
The poem's title leads us to think Crane is responding here to a challenge or question; he
needs to articulate this relation
between bliss and shame, to seek some kind of resolution. The poem may be read as a
metaphysical quest, but it begins in the
body, in experience shaped by the prohibitions and possibilities with which
twentieth-century America structures the expression
of desire. The conjunction of bliss and shame is hardly unique to homosexual men, but I'd
argue that their immediate proximity,
their inseparability, is unique: the project of "Reply" is to enact the undoing
of shame, to move towards one moment of
communion, with the sleeping lover (pointedly not the waking one) when these opposing
terms may be yoked or dissolved in a
transcendent union.
Is the poem in any way lessened by reading the opening lines as a description of cruising?
By an understanding of the psychic
situation out of which it arises? Does my discussion of the poem's social/political
situation diminish it?
Crane himself has instructed us: Thou canst read nothing except through appetite.
I think he means what he says. To my
mind, reading through the lens of desire makes the poem's breadth greater, its passion
more available, its struggle to reconcile
self-loathing and joy more poignant, the final line's resolution that much more hard-won.
And if we refuse to read through the
lens the poet demands, what's left? "Pure" poetry, disembodied idea?
This poem leads me to suspect that the exact converse of Bloom's statement is true: White
Buildings wouldn't have been
possible if aesthetics were autonomous. Its hard-won beauty is indebted, paradoxically, to
the deforming forces of social
reality, of ideology.
Here is May Swenson, whom Bloom rightly identifies as underrated, opening a poem called
"Her Early Work":
No one could tell
who was addressed
or ever undressed . . .
Like Crane before her, Swenson instructs us as to how the poem is to be understood;
thinking of "her early work" requires that
we consider those poems' relation to what she's writing now. The poem is a meditation on
the closet, on the danger and allure
of veils, and if read in terms of an asocial aestheticism it is inscrutable.
Or take Bishop. I can't think of a poem which better illustrates the dialogue between the
primacy of subjective perception
(individuality) and the pressure of the external (community) than "The Moose."
The bus rider-alone, really, despite the polis of her fellow riders-loses herself in the
landscape out the window during daylight,
but in the dark she's most aware of her fellow passengers' voices. It's no accident that
there is no "I" in "The Moose"--the
presiding intelligence, the subjectivity at work here, is beautifully permeable,
imaginatively entering foxgloves and salt marshes
and, of course, the conversation going on behind her. The old couple talk in the back of
the bus, reciting a gloomy family
narrative which keeps everyone in place; they recount the ineluctable history of death and
drink and generation. The voices
claim to understand both life and death, and their certainty is both appallingly
small-minded and hugely comforting, since it
offers the safety of agreement in the face of unassimilable mystery. But it's a comfort
our speaker can't take seriously; in the
domestic landscape of such certainty everything's peaceful, even "the dog/tucked in
her shawl."
But when the moose appears, apparition of otherness, the speaker is almost as inarticulate
as her fellow passengers. She says,
"high as a church,/ homely as a house"; they say "It's awful plain."
Neither description seems to evoke the physical presence of
this big fact. She's unspeakable, finally. In the poem's central lines
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?
we meet the first use of "we" in the poem; a new community's been fused, not
one based on the false certainties of the old
people in the back of the bus. Their narrative excluded the speaker, who doesn't seem so
sure what life and death are like, who
loves the security of their story even though she can't believe in it. (Is it too much
intrusion of the biographical for us to know
that she took to drink, that she went to the bad?)
I'd argue that Bishop's parentheses indicate that it is not so much the joy that
fascinates her as the fact that all feel it; a moment
of commonality, when certainties are banished, when the mutual recognition of what can't
be said creates a fleeting unity, allows
an exile to join a group. In this way the most beautifully subjective of poems, full of
gorgeously evoked perception, is a deeply
social poem as well, a meditation on joining community, both longed-for and held at a
distance. The experience of entering into
it comes as a gift, a mystery, a not-to-be-repeated moment of strangeness and surprise.
The idea of aesthetic autonomy is a fantasy. It's like going into a flower shop and
believing that the flowers you buy have no
qualities but color and shape, that they exist only to be arranged. The flowers have a
local habitation and a name; they grew in
specific places; they have characteristics, relations, histories. In their fields and
their foliage, in their particular situations, the
flowers are elements of a world. Who named them, hybridized them, grew them, sold them?
Who owned the land? Who
decided which were desirable? The flower arrangement is pretty, but the poetry resides in
the whole complicated story, the
web of relations.
The aesthetic is not now and never has been autonomous. If it were, no poetry would be
possible but language poetry, which
denies the validity of representation and questions the very notion of subjectivity. To
represent is to enter into a pact with the
devil, with the powers of this world: it is to let the world help write the poem.
Nothing more boring than aesthetic autonomy.
Is it merely an accident that so many of the poets Bloom admires are homosexual men and
women?
I don't wish to claim what the religious Right might call "special rights," but
isn't there something suggestive here? Has
character--or aesthetic response, the depth of "perceptiveness"--been shaped by
the degree of external pressure? Consider
Ashbery's slippery refusal of a single sense of self, or Merrill's mannered surface, his
deeply significant decor.
Do these point to a poetry formed by exile, censure, by a lack of prescribed pattern, by
instability or freedom?
The grain of truth in Bloom's argument is, of course, that none of these poets avail
themselves of an easy political rhetoric-or of
a political rhetoric at all. They understood how little a public language had to offer
them. This is matter of particular
consequence to American poets, as the vocabulary of our public discourse is painfully,
endlessly dumbed down. This poor thin
lexicon seems designed not to be commensurate with the problems and questions of our
common life.
And one can't imagine any of Bloom's heroes saying, "Because I am a homosexual man .
. ." or "I am a lesbian orphan and
therefore . . ." They are concerned with embodying the texture of subjectivity. Their
poems enact the process of perception,
and therefore received language and thinking are antithetical to them;they are concerned
with how it feels to be alive, the
particular stuff of our moments in the world. In service of that project, everything
received is resisted and questioned.
But any subjectivity is inextricably implicated in context, time, place, in that social
web which these poets resist, illumine and
corroborate. You are an Elizabeth, you are one of them, why should you be one too?
Their knowledge, in other words, is historical.
Poems based on lockstep definitions of identity or simplistic politics are, by definition,
bad poems, and I don't want to read
them either. Poetry does not follows from theories or agendas; quite the opposite.
But I don't find myself reading those poems, not really. They aren't what my students are
writing, they're not what I'm seeing in
poetry competitions or literary magazines, or in strong new books of verse which are
willing to take on the difficult and taxing
marriage of private and public life. What's happening out there seems to me a good deal
more complex.
Take, for instance, a poet Bloom admires, Henri Cole. In a fine poem in The Look of
Things, Cole's speaker takes an HIV
test administered by a Hispanic nurse named Angel. I cannot reconcile this poem with
Bloom's statement that "every attempt to
socialize writing and reading fails." HIV exists in the social world, in an economy
of terms and processes defined by medicine,
money, ideas; our relationship to it is of necessity a relation to the social and
political realms. Try to put AIDS in a realm
without "ideological pressure" and the subject vanishes, becomes unwritable.
Of many possible examples of younger poets, I'll offer one. Adrienne Su, whose first book,
Middle Kingdom, was published
by Alicejamesbooks, grew up in the suburbs of central California. As a citizen of our
moment, her sense of what it means to be
Asian American isn't in the least predictable. She's a formalist, which means these smart,
funny and provocative meditations on
ethnicity and language are given an extra layer of ironic grace by virtue of their design.
The poems flash with wit , intelligence
and a "perceptiveness" tuned to the slippery and endlessly variegated stuff of
residing in multiple realms, a "middle kingdom"
between fixed identities.
Still, if I were asked to generalize about the state of the art at the moment, I'd be
inclined to say it isn't political enough. I'm
willing to read a few weaker poems in service of the struggle to represent this country's
situation on the page. So much of what
is terrifying, confusing, and inscrutable about American life is too little visible in our
poetry.
Bloom loves poetry, and wishes to defend what has brought him meaning and pleasure. I feel
this same desire to protect the art. How can I do otherwise than acknowledge it as
embattled? The stubborn individuality and privacy of reading, the quiet and
transformative conversation between reader and book, is in trouble. Everyone knows this.
But does anybody really believe we can't see Parnassus because it is being overrun by
Latina lesbians, or recent MFA
graduates, or alums of prison writing programs? Please. That noble peak's obscured by the
new megamall and multiplex, those
immense ads for Calvin Klein, the cell-phone towers and high voltage wires carrying a
million junk E-mails. Mass culture cares
about mass money, not the stubbornly unsellable exchange between individuals which reading
& writing comprises.
I don't think we can remedy this by stubbornly clinging to the difficult, noble as Bloom's
rallying cry sounds. In the face of an
increasingly homogenous, market-driven culture, we need readers. We need to sign up anyone
we can who cares about the
portrayal of human individuality, of human stories. Start anywhere, I say, read anything.
The entrances to the paradise of
aesthetics are everywhere, some of them homespun, some of them rough attempts to sketch a
self out of whatever material's at
hand. But they lead someplace: toward heightened perceptiveness. At this moment I am
grateful for poetry in any permutation,
in any form, even poetry I don't like. It is a sign of hope, a sign which marks an attempt
to blow on the coals of an old, old fire.
To man (intentionally chosen verb!) the barricades of the aesthetic order seems too slight
a gesture now. We who care about
poetry need to insist, anywhere and everywhere, on its absolute value, its
irreplaceability. And we need to acknowledge that it
is, in essence, uncontrollable: there is no center, no commissariat, no universal judge of
quality. This is not only the way it is, in
our national multiplicity, but a good thing. Let a hundred flowers bloom. No one is going
to win or lose, since we are not at
war, not with each other. It's the life of the art we need to defend.
However, if the heaven of poetry will not allow us to think about our situation in the
world, about the terrors and possibilities of
the hour, then I don't want to go there, as a writer or a reader.
Here in hell (which I gather is a ways from Yale) certainty has long since eroded.
Citizenship is tolerated, if not exactly
encouraged. You're allowed to read the papers, even if nobody especially cares what you
think. Perhaps you'll have something
interesting to say about them.
Copyright Boston Review, 1993-2000
Online Source: http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR23.3/doty.html
Reprinted with the permission of the author
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