In a weary land

Wisdom from one unwise man to another:

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.
There as a king reigned in the east:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.

Inaugural poem

Elizabeth Alexander's poem could hardly have been worse, except by being longer. The response to it explains how poetry has become a personal hobby, like knitting. In Samuel Johnson's day, a poem that bad would be mocked savagely; today, the expected response is to ignore the poem itself in favor of congratulating the poet for the sincerity of her emotion. It is like complimenting the knitter on the color of the yarn. Well, poetry used to aspire to more than keeping you warm. It is not just the lack of any meter or rhyme, though that loss hurts, but the wandering diction and vague thoughts that make it such a bad poem.

Alexander is deaf to all sense of words; how else can this highly unfortunate evocation of the chicken crossing the road be explained?

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

Yes, others did say that: they were chickens.

John Derbyshire and the Asia Times complained about these lines especially:

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

I might have an explanation for the wretched confusion in the last line. One of the difficulties for racial activists in the U.S. is that nearly everyone wants to help and to see disadvantaged people get on, which I think is what she means by love here, but most people expect that in return the people who are helped will stop feeling so aggrieved. Since in African-American studies existential grievance exceeds honest affection for black American and African history, Alexander as a professor of African-American Studies would intuitively feel that grievance is not a negative term and that love might threaten it.

It is of course also a mistake to think that someone with a grievance will be happier and less aggrieved after being helped. Charity itself is a grievance.

The well-deserved death of poetry

Why do editors permit such idiocy as this?

Although Plato didn't quite sink the art of poetry, he cast suspicion on the craft, and poets since then have rarely been comfortable with their place in society. Even the popular Romantic poets — Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others — lived on the edge of the social whirl, not quite respectable. More recently figures like Allen Ginsberg have derided their country. Poets have an unruly streak in them, and have not been the most welcome guests at the table of society.

That is both cliched and ignorant. Plato may have banned poets in his ideal society, but he did so because the status of Greek poets in reality was very high; he would not have bothered to ban today's poets. Just off the top of my head, poets have been the "most welcome guests at the table of society" in these periods: Greece, 8th century BC - 15th century AD; Rome, 1st century BC - 5th century AD; England, 16th - 19th century. Similar ranges could be produced for Italy, France, Russia, Japan, China, and India, though I would have to look up the dates. The truth is, poets and poetry have been highly welcome "guests at the table of society" in almost every place and time, except for our godforsaken wasteland. What a damned insulting fool Parini is.

Anyone whose world of poetry starts with Shelley and Byron, counts T.S. Eliot highly, and explains itself through Emerson, is himself the best explanation for poetry's death. Parini also quotes from Hopkins exactly the kind of line I despise: "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed." No-man-fathomed. Parini's supposed lamentation of poetry's decline from popularity is really that disgusting oleaginous genre of self-congratulation that runs, "O! Alas, we are such bold thinkers and so deep, that few can value what we do!"

Modern poetry

I hate it so much. But to start with, something I somewhat like. Last night I read some more poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is clearly an important person because he always goes by all three names. I think I admire at most one in three so far and like maybe half of those. His frequent hyphenated phrases drive me nuts, and priest or not it is a little ridiculous how he can scarcely keep his poems from claiming to find Christ in something. Or as he might say, his happy-hyphen-harbor sparking-pains the gray-grim inward am of holy Christ. That is, it hurts me. I mean this sort of thing, this hallmarkian opening line:

CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Yuck. This one is worse yet, if you can stand to look. I also am not bowled over by "sprung rhythm," which is altogether too close to the modern idea that poetry is text arranged in a strange fashion by someone who names himself a poet. Still, his good poems are such pleasure they make me read and re-read them out loud. There is a poem of quintessence, a borderline gnostic poem, and my favorite so far, grief over the self's autumn.

So that is praise, more or less; by comparison, I hate Billy Collins' poetry. Apparently he was our poet laureate for a couple of years, confirming my impression that poet laureate means "wretched affliction on the language." His WSJ article from Saturday has several examples of his work. I think I would like him personally, since he seems unaffected and, if not actually funny, at least humorous. It would no doubt wear on him, however, when I started and closed every conversation with "Please stop writing poems."

I did read more of the Life of Johnson this weekend, as well as the Adventurer 85, an essay on reading that I really want to talk about. But I was out of town at my uncle's memorial so I will have to work out the backlog today and tomorrow.