Poetry is the soul of invention, not execution. If poetry is the means to invent, this speaks very highly of it, indeed. And here to help us understand is an 18th century German critic:
In art [painting and sculpture] the difficulty appears to lie more in the execution than in the invention, while with poetry the contrary is the case. There the execution seems easy in comparison with the invention. Had Virgil copied the twining of the serpents about Laocoon and his sons from the marble, then his description would lose its chief merit; for what we consider the more difficult part had been done for him. The first conception of this grouping in the imagination is a far greater achievement than the expression of it in words. But if the sculptor have borrowed the grouping from the poet, we still consider him deserving of great praise, although he have not the merit of the first great conception. For to give expression in marble is incalculably more difficult than to give it in words.
(G.E. Lessing, Laocoon, An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry)
Lessing reminds us that poetry is not truly defined against prose—but against painting or sculpture. Poetry (broadly speaking) is the invention which Art (broadly speaking) is then inspired to execute.So poetry, as invention, adds to what prose does in terms of sound, and poetry as invention finds its limit in the pictorial. To write is to invent. Poetry is not about form, but invention. To write inventively is poetry. Prose can do this, too. But poetry (see Shelley's “Defense”) is defined as inventive (imaginative) writing.
Can we define poetry as such? An inventive spark of words/ideas that demands art's execution?
Oscar Wilde: “Saying something is more difficult than doing it.” Wilde's surprising assertion makes more sense in Lessing's context: inventing it is more difficult than building it. The poet does not do something which is difficult. Building the Great Wall of China is difficult. The poet succeeds in a completely different sphere: original creation.
So as we read the poet, we are not inspecting a monument—though poetry can have, in its very structure and duration, a kind of monumental quality—with poetry, we are getting ideas for the monumental.
To introduce the Neo-Romantic poet Ben Mazer, who embodies the 19th century flying through the 20th by way of the Elizabethans, to arrive in the 21st century as something both new and old.
Romanticism defined as: a marriage of poetry and painting; the heroic attempt of sound to depict.
Ben Mazer:
Landis came back from the dead.
In an empty swimming pool we saw his grave,
a museum display of radiant glowing jade.
He admired it long. “In life I was
too filled with self-loathing to perfect my art
until you found me at the very end.”
And I: “You were the same man that you were then,
but never knowing it, till the time was ripe.”
“You conquered the world. So little as it meant
when Cinderella was Cinderella again.
I had to take my life. I couldn't understand
the poems I wrote, Ben, not at all.”
And I: “Tell me, are you happy where you are?”
“Oh, yes. Everyone is very friendly here.
I am well taken care of,
though I haven't begun to write.”
Then, turning, his face in darkness in the sharp light,
“Call Robin,” then turning, then he disappeared.
For the better, I hoped. “Call Robin.” Then I awoke,
but didn't. Two days later Robin was dead.
(from “Martha's Vineyard”)
The immense success of painting and music occurring all around the 19th century, Romantic poets threatened to overwhelm poetry entirely: Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven created a heaven of sound; the painters during this same period were sublimely telling every story that had to be told.
Lessing's influential 18th century essay hammers home the idea: temporal poetry and spatial painting are at odds; their similarities trifling, their differences, crucial. A painter captures sublime moments in famous stories—famous stories already written by the ancient epic poets—who Alexander Pope said were “nature” itself—what was left for the 19th century poet to do?
The answer, in a word: everything.
We need to re-examine Lessing's emphasis on spatial versus temporal art—da Vinci made strong and wonderful arguments on why painting was fundamentally superior to poetry, but da Vinci was attempting to give visual arts a much-needed boost, just in terms of public reception—a vocational, not an aesthetic, one—Lessing ran with the aesthetic. The Renaissance was a revolution in engineering: the uniting principle of poetry, art, oratory, music, social science, diplomacy, architecture, philosophy, politics, and war.
In their early formalism, and in later PR campaigns, all the arts seek to build an identity based on what they do best—poetry, as it emerged as what we think of today as poetry—Dante, most significantly, from Latin's learned prose—burns in splendorous rhyme and meter, establishing herself, dangerously, as excessively entertaining—alienating herself from sober prose and its educational, professional, practical, and grounded modes of behavior. Poetry defied the gravity of prose with God-like excess in Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare—the English Renaissance playwright the most splendid example of all: drama, oratory, metrics, and story came together in an engineering tour de force of Anglo-Saxon glory.
Beginning in the 18th century, however, cultural difference gain the upper hand; a rebellion occurs globally and politically; French lacks meter, English lacks rhyme, England loses its American jewel, oratory dies in prose, religious identity dwindles into utilitarian protest, the mechanical is resented by the cruder aspects of Romanticism, the finest engineering impulses falter as the assimilating, cooperating, and engineering genius of Shakespeare is broken into modern components and niche-specialization of increasingly self-conscious divisions, a “division of labor” fragmenting into Modernism—weaknesses and neuroses making Nietzschean sounds in a self-interested heap of bad art and poetry.
Ben Mazer is crawling out of this heap into universal feeling, guided by exceptional metrical engineering—adept rhythm, assonance, rhyme. It is not easy to put Humpty Dumpty back together again (“you can't write like the great old poets anymore!”) but Mazer is a poet of continuity and synthesis, not irritable analysis; he's the man for the job.
This historical picture, in its sweep, tends to go unnoticed for that very reason. Yes, many artists and writers find in the modernist agenda a solution or inevitable fragmented response to fragmented life—rather than seeing that the very pedagogical and material manifestation of fragmented modernism is the disease itself.
The Romantic poets, lacking material for poetry, painted. And, since they were poets, they had to be impossibly good poets to do the impossible: paint, and compete with the glory of painting. Sing and harmonize and compete with the glory of music.This is what Romanticism was: the sincere attempt to compete with the other arts in a boundless, heroic, almost reckless, manner. In that strange bit of advice, Keats urges Shelley, to “curb your magnanimity, be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.”
Keats knew. Keats knew what he and his friends—today known as the Romantic poets—were doing, and had to do.Magnanimity implies high-toned speech; but no, Keats warned Shelley to “load every rift of your subject with ore...” Have “a subject,” yes, (this wasn't fragmented Modernism yet) but be an “artist” (painter, sculptor) and make your poem thickly depict, like great painting and sculpture—do not be a magnanimous chatterer; “load every rift with ore.”
Modernist poets defined themselves, too, as the First World War got under way, as painters ( Imagistes ) but in a far less ambitious manner; the Romantics used Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton as models: depicting heaven and hell, forests or castles—not merely a wheel barrow.
The holy grail for the Romantics was the sublime, and the sublime for them wasn't some misty, “magnanimous” ideal: actual “artists,” the composers and painters they were competing with, had shown the way, as had actual poets, such as Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton.
The process of “discovery” which occurs as we compose poetry would only make a fine mess of what pragmatic prose attempts to do—but if painting, not prose, is what poetry defines itself against, we begin, as poets, to challenge ourselves, not in the manifesto-limitation of “woe-is-me” Modernism—in which prose presents image prosaically—but rather in Keats' “fine excess,” in which poetry is a whole number of excellent things expressed by an unlimited mind.
Modernist poetry is “prosaic” next to Romantic poetry, but for different reasons than we suppose. It is the painterly sublime that defines Keats, as well as his rhyme. Keats's metrics illustrated a principle: poetry invokes richer perspective and space, the richer in measured sound the poetry is. Sound-waves correspond to light-waves in the sound/image produced by language.
Define poetry as prose which attempts to paint. We usually think of poetry as prose which attempts to sing.
Attempt is the key word here.
Prose cannot paint. This failure becomes its poetry.
Prose cannot sing. This failure become its poetry.
Prose cannot talk. This failure becomes its poetry (or drama).
Poetry succeeds in doing with prose what prose cannot do.
The radical act of seeing in which we comprehend all that matters in a three-dimensional reality is not the same thing as symbolism, word, or cartoon. Dynamic reality presents a million bits of information for every one in a sentence or a photograph.
But we all know by now that more information is not necessarily better—a reduction in order to focus is the basis of all knowing.
Prose versus poetry is actually far less important than Lessing's more time-honored dichotomy: poetry versus painting.
Poetry “versus” painting begins with invention versus doing: Wilde's aphorism favors the former in Lessing's dichotomy.
Lessing's pairing involves physics, geometry, mathematics, time, space; poetry versus prose is mostly a matter of style and taste; and, if there are crucial differences between poetry and prose, they are found already in poetry versus painting.
Poetry is not “not-prose.” Poetry is prose + n.
And we are fortunate to witness in Ben Mazer the painting aspect of poetry which defines perfectly the New Romanticism, of which Mazer is the living example par excellence.
This is painterly skill:
In an empty swimming pool we saw his grave
A museum display of radiant glowing jade
and
Then, turning, his face in darkness in the sharp light,
“Call Robin,” then turning, then he disappeared.
Ben Mazer's Romanticism is all the more interesting because one can see him finding it, and coming to it, in his poetry's memories of himself, scientifically autobiographical, in the impulse of his poetry as a whole—organically, inevitably, despite the anti-Romantic Modernist suffocation in which all poets breathe: the textbook-interesting, yet sometimes breathtakingly bad stench of rotten, self-indulgent prose-poetry, spilling and oozing like garbage: Pound and Ammons and Olson and all that colossal, spewing, achievement.
In his blurb for Mazer's New Poems, “meta-modernist” Seth Abramson, writing in Huffington Post, says:
The unit of measure in many of these poems is the sentence; the unit of knowledge—in all of them—is consistently, and astoundingly so, the universe. Mazer is a talented and enormously ambitious poet whose primary medium is nothing less than the sum total of all our collective memories.
Abramson gets the spirit right, not the letter: stuck in the forward pitch of his Modernism, Abramson is able to see Mazer's monumental achievement; but the “sentence” is not the unit of Romantic poetry, and neither is it the unit of Mazer's. We don't really see how “the sentence” could be the “unit” for any poet.
This is to deeply misread Mazer—who is one of those poets talented enough to be deeply misread—it is accurate to say “the sentence” is the newest “unit” in poetry's devolution within Modernism's “progress.” Certainly we can pick out fine “sentences” in Mazer's work—but Mazer's progress has nothing to do with the “sentence.”
To watch the growth of a poet today, embracing, against all odds, Romanticism, in a Modernist universe, is a profound pleasure.
Of course we should ask: how could a “serious” poet, in this age, after “The Waste Land” and “the Cantos” and “the Red Wheel Barrow,” aspire to this :
Romance, who loves to nod and sing,
With drowsy head and folded wing,
Among the green leaves as they shake
Far down within some shadowy lake,
To me a painted paroquet
Hath been—a most familiar bird—
Taught me my alphabet to say,
To lisp my very earliest word
While in the wild wood I did lie,
A child, with a most knowing eye.
This is the template of Romanticism, of Romantic Poetry; one can actually point to it, in this stanza. It contains all Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. It is missing only the wit of Byron and the boyish excitement of Shelley, but it basically contains these writers as well: here is British Romanticism, the flower of English-speaking Empire literature, re-fashioned in both quickly-drawn homage and parody by an upstart Raven, this is to be American: to pay homage and parody, at the same time, the world.
Mazer's work is full of exactly this kind of homage and parody (it is making fun, but too good to be merely making fun)—the quiet, but smartest talents cultivate it while no one is looking: the corrupt rulers accept it as homage only—until it is too late, and the floor, because of the parody, disappears beneath them; yet, the homage was real, the intention was kind, even as the parody was rich—as it utterly conquered.
Here, with homage and parody, is Mazer, in “The King,” his long poem (a series of short ones—as Poe correctly identified the “epic” intention, for the sake of all youthful impetuosity in thrall to the sages) from his 2013 book, New Poems :
Why should the aged eagle spread his wing?
I'll tell you why. Because to watch Santa bring
a billion presents from the frozen pole
all by himself is less than heartening.
He brings them door to door
with Hyperborean speed. You who are converted
are harnessed to his creed though you have skirted
the issue. Who is that dark stranger?
That sickly twisted dying frozen ranger
who captivates the grove where you, too, rove.
I think he is myself! The least sure elf
mixes these patterns and brings them to the slatterns
who place them in dust till Easter on the shelf.
They call him Stetson, I have sure four bets on.
This is very passable Byron. That is to say, Byron could have written it. It is new poetry by Mazer, but poetry in no way diminished by saying, “Byron could have written it.”
It will go a long way towards furthering poetry's contemporary aims, to assert these two can exist together independent of each other:
- New poetry by Mazer.
- It could have written by Byron.
One can assert both.
In the passage from “The King” just quoted, Mazer's quotation of “Ash Wednesday” (parody plus homage was Eliot's method, too) flies directly into a Santa Claus reference, but not simply for humor.
It is the rare clever poet who would compare the Romantic trope used by Eliot of an “aged eagle stretching his wings” to the “jolly old elf” sailing the world to deliver gifts—but Mazer does not merely dilute a topic into yucks, a fast moving reference a la Ashbery; Mazer is doing more than mere Modernist parody, with perhaps, a tinge of Modernist despair; Mazer is re-asserting poetry's strengths in the Romantic mode: “Who is that dark stranger? that captivates the grove where you, too, rove. I think he is myself! The least sure elf...”
The trope Mazer deftly revives is this Romantic one: “while in the wild wood I did lie with a most knowing eye.” The Romantic self is passive, Socratic (“least sure”), all-recording, all-reflecting, in its very passivity. Ben Mazer's poetry, and all sublime, Romantic poetry. Our writer does not flinch from portraying himself—why, after all, should lyric poetry not do this? Why should the lyric poet hide behind his lyre?
Mazer patiently discovered the mode of the Romantic/observant-but-out-of-sight-passive-self as his method—one can see the discovery of the method in the poetry, which is the method of the method, and why it delights the self-conscious poetic intelligence to read Mazer. We could say this rhetoric fits him, but that would be to state a truism; the knowing knows its knowing; it has little to do with who he is. One thinks of Keats's remark that the poet himself is the least poetical creature. Poe described: “A child, with a most knowing eye.” The eye (I) is key—not any objective performance or personality.
The Romantic poet does not write to express himself. He develops himself, and that is the subject of his writing.
The demands are none; especially not on some showy, pre-fabricated “type” of personality; the Romantic personality tends to be how Keats described it—the aloof non-personality which bespeaks a certain shadowy, imitative, morbidly comic wisdom which makes settled personalities uncomfortable. Eliot, in claiming “an escape from personality” for poetry, was himself surrendering to this Romantic trope—the great irony of Eliot (a powerful influence on Mazer) is that Eliot the Metaphysical Modernist publicly reviled Romanticism in many respects—but kept it alive and extended it—and so Eliot is a good and complex influence on the Mazer I am revealing here.
The trope crystallized for Mazer as an ambitious poet, in a despairing time in his life, as Mazer himself describes it, after the death of his friend, Landis Everson.
In Mazer's poem, “Martha's Vineyard,” we get a picture of the passive poet describing his life in the lyric mode, similar to the autobiographical novel—but in a far more concentrated manner.
The novel, which the Romantic poets did not, for the most part write, is—in 99 cases out of a hundred—merely a highly diluted and inferior lyric poem—at least it seems so, put beside a poet as skilled as Mazer.
The novelists, in fact, who pride themselves on their lengthy works, could perhaps have an interest in holding Mazer back—truly good poetry humbles the proudly inferior novelist. The short story is the “poem” of fiction, but it still remains the fact that Romantic poetry does not aspire to fiction (or the “sentence”)—and to understand this is to begin to arrive at a true understanding of poetry—and perhaps life itself. This is from “Martha's Vineyard” part 6:
I started middle school in ‘76,
around the corner from where Robert Lowell lived,
on Sparks Street, white haired poet about to die
at 59. Perhaps we walked by each other.
It was my introduction to Harvard Square—
* * *
repetitive images seeming to rise to heaven,
the stark black outlines of trees, my friends' houses were weird—
enormous high Victorian affairs
with dormers and bay windows and huge doorframes,
attic rooms you could bump your head on—
their single parents never seemed to be at home
* * *
Through all of it, the feeling of something I missed,
some way the other kids were more together,
little Peanuts of the ancient-recent past.
The cool kids were jocks, or girls whose hair was feathered.
The first party that I went to we smoked grass
and listened to my copy of Blonde on Blonde—
Mark Kierstead in full Nazi uniform on the stairway
to Audrey Stone, the girl I had a crush on:
“I'd like to machine-gun you up the ass.”
Matt was so hip he liked the New York Dolls
and Iggy Pop, and stood for hours in train-yards
recording the serial numbers and the times
of every train that entered or left the yard.
His English father took us to the Newton mall.
Now no one has heard from him in thirty years.
This is lyric poetry of a nostalgic-yet-steely, superior kind, and though no one would call it “Romantic,” we do find the trope of which I spoke: the sensitive, afflicted, passive observer: he has a crush on Audrey Stone but we are introduced to her by way of someone else—who occupies center stage: a “Nazi” with an English father.
Everyone knows the American Empire is an extension of the British one; the old 20th century English Major (are there any left in our colleges today?) who studied British Romanticism with all the inherited tropes of the Greeks and the Romans, the “Nazi” mad scientist Frankenstein Monster trope of Mary Shelley, the Alexander Pope-admiring Byron, the Opium exoticism of Coleridge's Orient trade, the Middle East intrigue, the “friendly” domination of India, the environmentalism of Wordsworth, the Pym and Dupin of colonized yet Promethean Poe are all extremely relevant, but increasingly hidden by a vast array of politically correct and vocationally sharpened -isms, in which the ideal Empire citizen is now expected to mechanically “act” in a highly material manner, without the luxury of peering deeply into the realness of things.
It is wonderful to see Mazer, in 2017, with the cunning knowledge of Romanticism, watching with the poet's “knowing eye.”
The poet observes, but does not act; the poet is the Shellyean lyre who receives the ephemeral wind. The section from “Martha's Vineyard” quoted does resemble the sensitive, autobiographical novel, reeling before the abyss of the past. Mazer uses the novel's bank of years as a passive, yet moral device: the poet “kills off” the “Nazi” and his offensive “machine gun” remark with a stark and simple: “Now no one has heard from him in thirty years.”
Cambridge Middle School hurt Ben Mazer into poetry.
Mazer is as modern as Ashbery, and comparisons between the two poets will always simmer, but Mazer's poetry is generally more coherent—and why not? Why get drunk if sobriety soars, too? Romanticism may be mad, but it is always coherent, for morality is coherent, or consistent (Poe's word for the abstractly and aesthetically moral) and morality lives in the “child, with knowing eye,” trope; it is moral because, it has a child's innocence and, (recall how Poe attacked the didactic) its moral tone is “suppressed”—due to its purely aesthetic “eye.”
Because of the Romantic's non-personality, the poet, chameleon-like, can give us any type of poetry. The Romantic poet does not belong to any moving forward of the “Modern.”
He does different voices, if he feels like it, and they can all be sincere—or not, but the thing is, if he's good, they probably are sincere. He makes them so. He doesn't have to listen to Ransom, self-conscious Modernist, who advised everyone in the dawn of the Program Era in the 30s that we cannot write like Byron, anymore. (“Criticism, Inc”) Ransom was believed. Even A.E. Stallings is not writing like Byron. Joe Green, the non-academic, perhaps gives it a tongue-in-cheek whirl, but every serious circle frowns upon it—and the non-serious simply cannot pull Byron off. The whole trope is dead, or hangs by a thread, and that thread is not Ashbery. It is Mazer.
Perhaps it is because we are now, in 2017, further from Ransom than Ransom was from Byron, that Mazer can now say, fuck it, I'll write like Byron, if I want to. But it's not that easy. For I don't mean: write ironically, like Byron, as a spoof, for the amusement of post-modern school officials. I mean really write like Byron. Which, if impossible, is only so because it is difficult to do. Byron himself was only a guy who challenged himself to “write like Byron.”
There is not even any irony in the irony. There is none. There is no ought and no irony. There is only: writing like Byron if you are up to it. Mazer, of course, will get push-back for writing like Byron—because there is nothing open-minded about modernism and its “rules” of “progress.” Not that Mazer is always writing like Bryon; but Mazer, because of his quiet persistence and skill, is making good things happen.
Persistence and skill, however, is not a phrase that does Mazer justice. Parody-plus-homage springs from pure joy.
After the “aged eagle” section of “The King,” we get the following:
The chair she sits in like a burnished throne
happens to be the King's, and is my own.
Maybe I too descend into parody
but not without esoteric clarity.
The least sure elf
is pining to be made into his self,
but I have already explained myself.
Pure tragedy must needs be humourless
and poetry will not be cured unless
its certain tragedy is made refined.
I too among that Harbour Dawn have pined
for quintessential pure lucidity,
perceived the cortex of the trinity,
and each emotion to its word assigned.
The sonnet sequence in “The King” is unparalleled, and it is safe to say, critically speaking, the intention and aim, the vector, of Mazer's poetry is without equal in this century.
The play on words (the word is Mazer's weapon, not the “sentence”) is remarkable, not just for its fun, but also for its cogency: the “elf” is a Romantic term: the diminished individual of affectionate trouble-making—Mazer owns the term, and delightfully, by turning it into his elf—his self— himself— myself: it is better than Whitman, better than anything, the way Mazer stands both entirely outside and entirely inside the elf (self). It is breathtaking, and the end “ascends” into High Church magnificently; what poet today is writing, classically, like this: “and each emotion to its word assigned.” (!)
The Critic is past judging at a feast like this. The desire is to eat.
The Modernist caution—“We can't write that way anymore!”—is over.
At least with Mazer.
|
