C'est presque le fin du semestre, et je suis fatiguée et très stressé. Après, je me reposerai, et ce sera bon, et je regarderai mes cours dans littérature des enfants et microéconomiques. Et, bien sur, la belle langue de français! Toujours la français, pour mon fleurir.

Beat'ing the Renaissance: Postmodern Ideals vs. Sidney's Standard of Poetry

Greetings from the middle of week two of midterms! I just received a grade and feedback on my first big paper for Introduction to English Studies, where we've spent the first half of the course studying poetry. The prompt for this paper was to investigate in 1,000 to 1,200 words whether and how it is appropriate for a literary critic or general reader to evaluate twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry according to the expectations of Sir Philip Sidney (whose  essay "Defense of Poesy" has been the focalizing text of the course thus far), hinging the argument on a close semantic reading of a modern/postmodern poem chosen from a provided list.  In hindsight I realize that I didn't address the prompt explicitly, and the material probably would have been better suited to a term paper where I'd have room to explore the connections between Beat poetry and Renaissance standards. Nevertheless, below is my hard-earned B attempt.

     The Beatnik poetry of the 1950s, particularly Gary Snyder’s “How Poetry Comes to Me,” fails to meet Sir Philip Sidney’s Renaissance standard of true poetry by embodying the postmodern ideals of reflexivity, epicureanism, fragmentation, and subjectivity regarding experience that are antithetical to that standard. In his Defense of Poesy, Sidney defines true poetry as being “an art of imitation… with this end, —to teach and delight” (Sidney 11). Postmodernism is a contemporary, cross-disciplinary movement that questions traditional objective notions of meaning, particularly within a literary context (Klages). While not then recognized under the designation of a specific title, the concepts associated with postmodernism began to materialize in the 1950s with the emergence of the Beatniks, or Beats, a counterculture of writers and poets who exhibited many of the postmodern ideals. As the movement strengthens in the twenty-first century and the notions of meaning and purpose associated with Sidney grow more and more antiquated, replaced by ambiguous concepts of literary theory (Culler 2), it is imperative to examine whether Sidney’s criteria applies to the poetry of changing generations.
     In his Defense, Sidney sets forth as the marks of true poetry a certain “teaching” and “delighting” with the ultimate intention of increasing knowledge that moves toward virtuous action (25). He claims that heroical poetry is the “best and most accomplished kind of poetry” because it not only teaches and moves to truth, but to the “most high and excellent truth; who maketh magnanimity and justice shine through all misty fearfulness and foggy desires” (29). Sidney uses the characters of Ulysses, Achilles, and Aeneas as examples of heroic figures that fashion forth the merits of virtue in their best attire. The concrete narratives and clear depictions of virtue present in heroic poetry stand in direct opposition to the characteristics of postmodern poetry.
     While specific postmodern ideologies are as difficult to nail down as a comprehensive definition of postmodernism itself, the rhetoric of the twentieth century poetry that it encompasses has a few trademark characteristics. Fragmentation, or randomness, of narratives and ideas; reflexivity, an artistic self-consciousness of art’s own production; epicureanism, a philosophy that insists the highest good is found in pleasure; and a subjectivity regarding experience are all marks of this poetry. These characteristics do not possess the same ability as heroic poetry to clearly depict virtue because they shroud their literary manifestations in obscurity and abstractions.
     The Beat generation, although associated as much with certain styles of dress and the settings of North Beach in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York City as it is with any explicit doctrine or concept, embodies this postmodern ambiguity. According to an article by Dr. F. Allen Briggs in a 1960 volume of The English Journal, the core philosophy of the Beats involves “a frenetic insistence on epicureanism, a frantic seizing of the joys of the present in the face of a persistent belief that only the present exists” (312). Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac are perhaps some of the most notable Beat writers, and their respective works “Howl” and On the Road are broadly-scoped demonstrations of the ideology that would later emerge under the banner of the postmodern movement.
     Gary Snyder’s “How Poetry Comes to Me,” reproduced below, is an exceptionally succinct case study for the application of Sidney’s criteria to Beat poetry, because it displays the qualities of postmodernism that are in opposition to his standard:

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light (Snyder 361)

The title, meter, and content of the poem present the reflexive, epicurean, fragmented, and subjective aspects of postmodernism that fall short of Sidney’s criteria for true poetry.
     The title of the poem alone is an example of the poem’s reflexivity, which extends to the epicurean tendencies of the work. Immediately, Snyder draws attention to the act of the art’s creation by titling it in a way that indicates the following words will explain his creative process, not attempt to impart any sort of meaning to the reader. This sort of self-awareness is a manifestation of the epicurean values of the Beats, dictating that the highest good is pleasure for the individual (Klages).
     The fragmented rhythm of the poem’s free verse form displays a lack of structure that is inherently postmodern. In his Defense, Sidney does make qualifications regarding verse by stating, “There have been many most excellent poets who never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets” (13). The lack of steady rhythm does not disqualify Snyder’s poetry according to Sidney’s criteria, but the fragmentation of ideas that it represents does. The mostly random meter can best be categorized as an oft-interrupted anapest applied to three complete sentences that do not adhere to the boundaries of the lines. The basic subject-predicate combinations of those sentences, “It comes,” “it stays,” and “I go,” are in no way connected to the poem’s outer form. As Ezra Pound said of rhythm: “Rhythm must have meaning. It can’t be merely a careless dash-off, with no grip and no real hold to the words and sense” (“Rhythm and Versification” 497). The rhythmic free-for-all of this poem is inherently postmodern: it provides no “grip” on the words and sense of the poem, and in turn it can be extended to the fragmented, random narratives typical to postmodern literature, specifically Ginsbergs’s “Howl” and Kerouac’s On the Road.
     The way and manner by which the poetry comes, which is the content’s primary concern, is of particular relevance, as it reveals the subjectivity of Snyder’s encounter. His choice of the words “blundering” and “frightened” to describe poetry’s course in coming to him is curious, as these are two adjectives not generally attributed to the heightened language of poetry. Further, the poetry’s location at the edge, where it hovers on the brink and stays on the outskirts of the “light,” is an example of the typical postmodern subjectivity, or its existence in reality only as the speaker perceives it. This is not Sidney’s noble rhetoric that clearly depicts virtue through all “misty fearfulness and foggy desires” (29). On the contrary, Snyder’s poem makes no effort to reveal any sort of truth at all. It concerns him and his art alone, and that encounter itself is a “blundering,” “frightened” affair. The poetry itself is as subjective as Snyder’s experience meeting it. The poem may very well delight the reader by abstractly revealing Snyder’s artistic process, and in so doing perform a kind of teaching akin to Sidney’s poetic criteria, but to what end? Along with much of the Beat literature, it is characteristically aimless.
     Where Snyder’s poem and Beat literature in general fall short of Sidney’s standard does not concern the relation of a counterculture rising in opposition to an established tradition as much as it does that counterculture’s lack of enduring purpose. Rather than to the Renaissance’s standards of virtue, truth, and justice, modern poets are called to no standard at all. Postmodernism cares naught for what one says or how one says it; it only matters that one has spoken. If the Beats have no higher purpose, no “golden world” to strive to represent and toward which to aspire (Sidney 10), their work will only ring loud until their experiences are obsolete and then fall deaf on the ears of those who long for the heightened experience of meaning. Rhetoric, after all, is useless play at games of dress up if it has not some figure such as virtue to adorn.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I haven't posted in a while, but the semester is in full swing. One of the things I'm discovering is the incalculable value of assigned readings: I am desperate to find time to get to all of them, because even if we don't discuss them in class, I glean so much from every page. It makes me glad that I have these few years to wholly devote to an education-- what a blessed life.


Below is a journal posting from my Pre-Civil War American Literature class. This is a weekly assignment for which we write a (very) short exposition of a certain aspect of one of the texts we've encountered during the week. At the time we were covering war poetry, and I was drawn to Millay's work after being snagged by an opening line of another of her poems, "I know I am but summer to your soul," several years ago. 

Apostrophe to Man

 (on reflecting that the world is ready to go to war again)

Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out.
Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build bombing airplanes;
Make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade;
Convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia and the distracted cellulose;
Convert again into putrescent matter drawing flies
The hopeful bodies of the young; exhort,
Pray, pull long faces, be earnest, be all but overcome, be photographed;
Confer, perfect your formulae, commercialize
Bacteria harmful to human tissue,
Put death on the market;
Breed, crowd, encroach, expand, expunge yourself, die out,
Homo called sapiens.

I forgot for a moment
I forgot for a moment France; I forgot England; I forgot my care:
I lived for a moment in a world where I was free tobeWith the things and people that I love, and I was happy there.
I forgot for a moment Holland, I forgot my heavy care.
I lived for a moment in a world so lovely, so inept
At twisted words and crooked deeds, it was if I slept and dreamt.
It seemed that all was well with Holland--not a tank had crushed
The tulips there.
Mile after mile the level lowlands blossomed--yellow square, white square,
Scarlet strip and mauve strip bright beneath the brightly clouded sky, the round clouds and the gentle air.
Along the straight canals between striped fields of tulips in the morning sailed
Broad ships, their hulls by tulip-beds concealed, only the sails showing.
It seemed that all was well with England--the harsh foreign voice hysterically vowing,
Once more, to keep its word, at length was disbelieved, and hushed.
It seemed that all was well with France, with her straight roads
Lined with slender poplars, and the peasants on the sky-line ploughing.

The poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay sets the feminine ideal of self sufficient domesticity at odds with the concept of war, as demonstrated in the following line from Apostrophe to Man:

“Breed, crowd, encroach…”

These are three loaded words, bearing the particular burden of war unique to women. The language she uses is decidedly bitter, indicative of the feminine ideal being infringed upon by the realities of war. “Breed, crowd, and encroach” immediately connotes the Biblical exhortation to “be fruitful and multiply,” but it places an alternatively negative spin on the traditionally positive instruction. To breed is animalistic and inexpressive, characteristics that can probably be extended to the author’s conception of war. “Breeding” and “crowding” bear no resemblance to making love, raising a family, or building community—relational ideals of femininity which are suspended in times war, when fathers, sons, and brothers are often absent from the landscape of home.

In I Forgot for a Moment, Millay delivers further glimpses of what perhaps may be construed as bitterness toward war. When she dreams that “all was well with Holland—not a tank had crushed/The tulips there,” she imparts a disturbing mental picture to the reader. The image of flowers, a distinctly female symbol, being crushed by the wartime tanks is a concept consistent with the language used in Apostrophe to Man. Like tanks upon a field of tulips, war “encroaches” upon the feminine sensibilities, and Millay’s poetry gives voice to the women whose pain is inherent in that reality.

from "The Riots"

Yesterday at my internship at the University of Georgia Press, I began proofreading a manuscript that I am really enjoying. The training I'm receiving at this internship is indispensable, no matter how the four long hours of copy comparison at a desk in a silent office may drag on. Who knew there were so many things that can go wrong on a page of a book? Widows and orphans and ladders and the like (oh, pardon my insider publishing jargon).

If this mode of work can be the tool by which I support a life of love and grace and learning and glorifying the L-RD, I think I'm alright with that. But I wanted to share an excerpt from this manuscript that I found particularly engaging. Here the narrator, a young woman who grew up in Oregon and is now living in New York, is silently addressing the proprietor of a downtown hardware store. She has just had her heart broken in a huge and awful and typical way, and she feels a paternally-imparted need to build something with her hands (her father was a carpenter). I love it for all of the parallelism it presents to me, and because when I lived in the East Village I felt that the man at the hardware store on First Avenue (where I bought screws to hang the frames I was buying at thrift stores and coolers to hold the beer for the beach) was someone who had answers.

"I want you to tell me something. I want you to explain how I might resolve my heart, or how to build a wooden box. Explain to me how I could be so blind, how I could let him twist me into this--for what? Yes, for what, exactly--and also how do I make sure the joints match up, and do you recommend glue or nails or both?"

"Song of Myself"

I am reading Walt Whitman for my post-Civil War American Literature class, the crux of which is the Whitman vs. Emily Dickinson approach to literature. Ever since I stole a beautiful copy of Leaves of Grass from my high school's library after graduation (a parting gift to myself, if you will), I have taken it up and devoured it, in pieces, from time to time.

Two years ago in New York I would stay up all night drinking wine and reading it aloud with my best friend.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the L-rd,

A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt,

Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say, Whose?

Last year in the mountains I fell in love with a man who also loved Whitman, and we would stay up late in my room taking turns reading our favorite lines.

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?  

Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?

Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems.

So much flows from the memories of those nights that I cannot possibly consider them anything but vital to my education. But this time I am alone with Whitman, up late at night in a room that I have crafted intentionally to be full of things that I love to look at, and books that I love to read, and colors that I love to feel. And Walt reads a little differently tonight. He reads a little more like me.

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

To behold the day-break!

I am resigning myself to the lack of scholasticism in this post because of the running conversation in my other English class, Intro to English Studies, for which I am reading Plato (at dinner the other night I was irreversibly convinced of my own immortality over carrots and hummus) and Sir Philip Sidney and Archibauld MacLeish. Poetry is inseparable from the study of literature, from the study of anything, but I have to say that I agree with MacLeish when he writes,

A poem should not mean/
But be.



So I will let Whitman stand as is-- alone and full of himself (and all things).

Previewing the Postmodern

Uh ohhh.

I'm sitting here reading the introductory material for my Cultural Geography class (which of course was cancelled today because of the ice), and I am struck by the blatant postmodern themes running throughout it. While I am fascinated by postmodern ways of thinking and, admittedly, sometimes attracted to them, I'm Kingsian enough to read into these as red, subjective flags. Take a look. After talking for three pages about the impossibility of defining the term "culture," the author poses what he claims to be...

"...the fundamental problem of Western metaphysics: how do we grasp or comprehend the world? How can we be sure our representations of the world are accurate? How do we test the reliability of knowledge given the role that subjectivity, perception, and representation necessarily play in the formation of that knowledge? Philosophers from Aristotle to Descartes to Kant and Heidegger have of course wrestled famously with this problem. Restated in terms of culture, the problem asks how we can recognize the ways we perceive, experience, and represent the world, symbolically and with meaning, without losing some sense of the world's 'external and objective reality'. Given the fact that our understanding of how the world actually is depends upon how we know the world in the first place, knowledge can become frustratingly circular, reflecting as much the subjectivity of knowing as the objectivity of what is known. Debates over culture are essentially debates generated by this frustration."

Actually, upon closer reading, this passage may not be so damning as I first thought. The concept of "the subjectivity of knowing" and "the objectivity of what is known" makes a lot of sense, unless the subjectivity of knowing here precludes the actual ability to know. It's something to think about, and it will be interesting as I'm sure (or rather I hope) we spend some time in the class defining the term "culture."

"Wild Trees and Giving Things"

Greetings from Athens on day four of the Big Southern Freeze. Sunday night we had a huge snow storm come in that dropped six inches of snow in about half as many hours, and as a result the first four days of classes at the University of Georgia have been cancelled due to the icy conditions.


So with cabin fever fully in place, I decided to break up my and my roommates' routine of watching nonstop episodes of Say Yes to the Dress and intermittently eating junk food and complaining about our weight with a little bit of productive reading. My dear friend Danielle Perkins, with whom I lived for three weeks this past summer as we nannied together in New York, e-mailed me her (first) senior thesis to peruse. I say first because the wonderwoman that she is is actually taking on a second senior thesis during her last semester before graduation, which I await with great anticipation.


Danielle's thesis, Wild Trees and Giving Things: Rediscovering Awe in Children's Literature, was an absolute delight from start to finish. Not only am I already invested in the subject of children's literature because of my career goals in book publishing and previous jobs as a nanny (one of my favorite things to do with my kids was discover their favorite books and introduce them to some of mine), but Danielle brought such a fresh and sincere perspective to the transformation of this genre over time.


She postulates that "[t]his branch of literature has forfeited its sense of the 'Sacred'—its sense of a metanarrative." Trading sweeping tales of valor and heroism for small, menial narratives which do not encompass a child's sense of wonder, the stories that shape our children now are robbing them of a once rich tradition. Children (and all people, for that matter) have a deep need for a sense of the divine, a concept that is larger than themselves-- slightly out of reach and a bit out of focus, always being hinted at but perhaps never fully grasped. She traces the attribution of "the sacred" from the gods of Mount Olympus to the Almighty G-d, from Lockean notions of Reason into the physical world of exploration and nature, and finally, with scientific advances, to within the human mind.

"Whether it was talking caterpillars or Cheshire cats, a new host of guides invited children into impossible adventures and nonsensical journeys. And what wonders awaited them within the human mind. Seemingly, the only thing more convenient to explore than their backyard was the human spirit. It did not require any sort of travel, and thus the notion of the sacred was diminished one again, shifting from encompassing the world to the individual."

But with the advent of postmodern ways of thinking came an aimlessness in children's literature. Overarching metanarratives were exchanged for cyclical storylines, purpose traded in for tales with no room for the wonderful. Danielle examines the ways that three modern children's authors treat the sacred in their work: Roald Dahl, author of Matilda and The Witches, who uses magic and personal will power to provide a sense of the sacred; Shel Silverstein, author of The Missing Piece, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and The Giving Tree, who espouses an ideology that "circumstances are uncontrollable, people are unpredictable, and life is uncertain,"; and Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are and Higglety, Pigglety, Pop!, or There Must Be Something More to Life, who seems to recognize the brokenness implicit in the world but points his characters and his readers to a hope beyond it.


One of my favorite passages from the paper is as follows and details the appropriate response to mystery:

"...[M]ystery helps create another side of the sacred by evoking reverence, or awe. When Corduroy Bear wandered from his shelve into the large department store, he marveled at the size of a world he never could have imagined. And when Lucy stepped through the wardrobe for the first time into Narnia, she could not help but gape at the snowy forest before her. When individuals are faced with the sacred, it is both frightening and alluring, and at times the only response offered is reverence. This is captured in the moments in literature when the narrator fails. Impotent before natural majesty, terrified before the unknown, overwhelmed by beauty or by fecund detail, everyone, at some point, fails. The lush verbiage of natural description or the blow-by-blow reportage of events invariably, at some moment, gives way to silence. (Lerer 184)"

Each of the three authors on which Danielle focuses "attempted to make beauty out of the chaos around them. And with each attempt, they learned that the human mind--while capable of many wonderful things--is not powerful enough to create a metanarrative able to satisfy the human heart."


And that, I am convinced, is a truth that applies far beyond the world of children's literature.