Reviewing the Reviewer

The main book review in The New Yorker a couple of issues ago was actually devoted to poetry! Dan Chiasson reviewed Mark Strand's New Selected Poems and Robert Hass's Time and Materials.

Despite the fact that Chiasson is, to me, that guy who thinks Buddhist meditation consists of "thought-gimmicks to rid ourselves of consciousness" (as he says in his Poetry review of Jane Hirshfield's After), I nevertheless had high hopes for this review. Even though Hass is sort of Buddhist, I figured Chiasson would be less confused here, since Hass is more thinky and self-doubting, and therefore gets closer to what Chiasson seems to mean by "consciousness." I want to better understand Hass's poetry, so this review looked promising.

Unfortunately, I'm left with the same level of bafflement regarding Hass. Chiasson starts off with a bang, making a very insightful comparision between the big American poets of the 1960s (Lowell, Plath, and Berryman) and their heirs, Strand and Hass. For those earlier poets, "the recipe for poetic power was misery mixed with braggadocio." In contrast, "Strand and Hass, more comfortable than despairing, write in [a "temperate middle"] zone." So far, so good.

I'm not familiar with Strand's work, so I'll ignore that part of the review, except to say that the poems Chiasson refers to don't exactly make me want to run out and devour Strand's new book.

On to Hass: Chiasson makes an interesting argument that Hass's project for the last few books has been "to ransack his own lyric gift." Hass, unsatisfied with the easy lyricism that comes easily to him, has sought to challenge and complicate that lyricism. A good point; so far, so good.

But Chiasson loses me when he claims that "Then Time," from the new book, is Hass's "best ever" poem. Chiasson explains that "'Then Time' shows how lyric poetry can do what novels do so well, if at excruciating length: track the paths of consciousness and counter-consciousness across plots and characters." Well, woo-freakin'-hoo. This is a good thing? My paraphrase: "Then Time" is a great poem because it's kind of like a novel, but a lot shorter.

Well, I ask more of poetry. My quest to understand why Hass is such a big deal continues. Tony Hoagland's essay "Three Tenors" (in the excellent Real Sofistikashun) has some excellent insights on Hass, and there was a good essay in a recent American Poetry Review that actually made me buy Time and Materials. (I'm about half-way through it; not ready to comment on it yet.) But I still feel I'm missing a big piece of the puzzle with Hass. I guess I just don't get the whole "I'm suspicious of language, but I'm still a poet, so I'll write poems but I'll be sure to question my own language all the time" aesthetic.

Chiasson has succeeded primarily in making Strand and Hass appear almost unbearably tedious (especially in comparison with Plath, Berryman, and Lowell). He makes a good argument about their occupying a temperate zone, but not a good argument about why they merit the description "two of our finest contemporary poets."

I Vote For Curvy Language

Here's the promotional copy for Li-Young Lee's forthcoming book, Behind My Eyes:

"Combining sensitivity and eloquence with a broad appeal, Li-Young Lee walks in the footsteps of Stanley Kunitz and Billy Collins as one of the United States' most beloved poets. Playful, erotic, at times mysterious, his work describes the immanent value of everyday experience. Straightforward language and simple narratives become gateways to the most powerful formulations of beauty, wisdom, and divine love."

This disturbs me. Lee walks in the footsteps of Billy Collins? Listen, I think Collins is enjoyable to read sometimes, but he's very different from Lee, to put it mildly. Maybe this means that, in the new book, Lee is moving closer to Collins's style? If so, given the work Lee was doing in Book of My Nights, such a shift has to be considered a huge step backward.

I'm hoping that this is simply the work of W.W. Norton's copy writers (Lee has moved from BOA to Norton). I'm hoping that this accounts for the emphasis on "straightforward language and simple narratives." Maybe Lee's usual mystical explanations of poetry don't make for effective advertising. And God forbid there should be complex narratives and -- whatever the opposite of straightforward language is. Crooked language? Curvy language?

I hope this is all on Norton; I hope Lee hasn't really moved in this direction. Though the title of the book makes me wonder.

The Hell You Say

Here's a revelation from a new report just released by the NEA: young people are not reading as much as they used to, and they are performing poorly on tests as a result.

I am glad precious arts money is being used to discover these things.

My source at the NEA has leaked the titles of their next two reports:
"What goes up must come down" and "Death is inevitable."

I know their hearts are in the right place, but did anyone not already understand this?

Note to NEA: fewer reports on the obvious, more grants.

Fortunately, I know my Jonson from my Johnson

So, yesterday I finally took the dreaded GRE subject test in Literature. I'm sure many others have analyzed this strange phenomenon, but I thought I'd throw in my two cents, anyway.

To show that I am qualified to study and teach literature at an advanced level, I showed up to a dreary little classroom at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Around me, there were about 14 or 15 other students, testing in a range of subjects, from Lit to Psychology to Biochemistry. We all had our sharpened #2 pencils, like a bunch of elementary school students, because mechanical pencils are not allowed. (Presumably, they fear that some ingenious young Sydney Bristow or Jack Bauer will smuggle in a set of test answers hidden in the mechanical pencil's inner compartment.) Then I took a 230-question multiple-choice test.

I think I did reasonably well. (Herman Melville wrote The Scarlet Letter, right?) So this is not sour grapes. (Though I may have some of them to offer in six weeks, when scores come out.)

It just depresses me how the study of Literature has been included in this bean-counting version of education. I can see how such tests would be useful for Biochemistry, but somewhere, even now in 2007, underneath many tons of dissertations and test scores, there is still a burning ember of soul left in Literature. I swear it's still in there!

I still have faith in Literature, with a big capital L. And I fear having that faith stolen by the academic mishandling of the subject.

Well, not to worry. I'll just reform the whole system from within. How hard can it be?