Jim Harrison: Don’t Feed the Poets

Photo by John Schulz/source NYT

Jim Harrison published an essay called Don’t Feed the Poets in the NYT Book Review (012807). He re-considers Karl Shapiro’s long prose poem, The Bourgeois Poet, musing on the lean and the fat in academic poetry careers. Harrison recalls salad days in the 60s when he necessarily fell into the lean camp, evidenced by the 1969 photo from his Michigan farm. Reading Shapiro’s kvetching then about the daily travails of the existential; university professor “sounded like a man who had had a huge porterhouse and half a cheesecake for dinner and was complaining about indigestion.” With age and sustained literary success, Harrison has now moved on to the more august side of the career/calorie continuum.

Two succulent quotes:

I suspect Shapiro’s evident misery started early in his life with a heroic notion of the poet. Any poet knows that to become immortal all you have to do is write a single great poem. This is unlikely indeed. Perhaps there are tens of thousands of mules and draft horses across the countryside who dream of winning the Kentucky Derby. Better yet, a bartender in Seville told me last March, “We have thousands of aspiring Lorcas but only one Lorca.” Very early on a poet is struck by the cruelty and lack of democracy in the arts — so few get it all, and the hordes receive nothing but the pleasure and pain of an overdeveloped consciousness. Ted Kooser, the former United States poet laureate and a friend of Shapiro’s at the time “The Bourgeois Poet” was written, told me Shapiro was obsessed with the French symbolist poets. This explains a lot, since Shapiro’s notion of what a poet was implies the outsider, the outcast, the outlier, one who purposefully deranges his mind to write poems like Rimbaud, or one who could not walk, so borne down was he by his giant wings, to paraphrase Baudelaire. I must here imagine myself an English department chairman, who has to deal with these troublesome creatures, and say that a poet is hubris through and through in the same manner that an unruly pig is solid pork.

Perhaps as a corrective and a cautionary, “The Bourgeois Poet” should be taught to the thousands taking M.F.A.’s in creative writing who wish to become poet-professors. As I said I tried it myself but found the work too hard. There’s a subdued but relentless hurly-burly in academia that swallows up discretionary time. It’s like living with a slight backache, not fatal but enervating. Besides, academic salaries are falling behind and it’s become questionable if poet-professors have truly achieved bourgeois status. Maybe lumpen bourgeois.

“Into each life some rain must fall…”

Today is the 200^th birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, scion of poets everywhere with three-part names. In the 19^th century you couldn’t get a union card in the Literary Lions Guild without a name scanned in iambic pentameter. Think Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Sarah Orne Jewett. The most perfectly metered, onomatopoeic name actually had four parts: Edna St. Vincent Millay. How’s that for burning the candle on both ends?

To celebrate, the HWL bicentennial committee sent snippets of weather-drenched verse to 1,800 meteorologists around the country. The Longfellow Poetry Forecast includes old chestnuts like “Into each life some rain must fall/Some days must be dark and dreary.” And there are more obscure couplets like “She heard the birds sing, she saw the sun shine,/The air of summer was sweeter than wine.” Beware callow youth who try to couple with that line.

Where Are You, Walter Lowenfels?

Major Jacksonan’s line about a community of readers/believers (what poets want) reminded me of a line from Walter Lowenfels’ little book, The Revolution Is To Be Human. I quote this line often enough to make it a credo:

One reader is a miracle. Two readers are a movement.

So I went looking for an Internet image of Walter Lowenfels just now and found very little about him. There is a Wikipedia page with almost nothing on it. The first Google search result points to Washington University Libraries, which provides a decent short biography along with documentation on their collection of Lowenfels papers related to the protest anthology Where is Vietnam? Bloggers make it into the top 10 Google searchs with Walter Lowenfels posts by A Burning Patience and Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, a Henry Miller blog.

Search for Jabberwhorl Cronstadt, the fictional name Henry Miller gave to his portrait of Lowenfels in Black Spring, and the top 10 reveals a scary number of myspace pages. Maybe a punk band adopted the name. Whatever you do, don’t click on one of these links unless you’re prepared to hear some awful onomatopoeic music inspired by Jabberwhorl Cronstadt! Could there be a punk band called Edgar Varese?

“A car, a girl, a community of believers” – Part 3

POEM: “Some Kind of Crazy” by Major Jackson, Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press, 2002)

When I do writing workshops I structure my responses to other writers this way. First, respond from life. Next, say what works. Then, and only then, comment on what doesn’t work. “Respond from life” means expressing a memory evoked by the writing. There’s no need to fake or embellish this memory. It’s the authenticity that counts. What a writer needs to hear to keep on going is how her/his work touches a reader’s life. All that other critique of craft is just writing workshop babble.

So here is my response from life to Major Jackson’s poem “Some Kind of Crazy.” The poem reminded me immediately of Joey Ramsey, a kid in the neighborhood where I grew up. He was a year older than me. He lived across the street and two houses down. Like Steve in Jackson’s poem, everyone knew Joe. He definitely added to the “texture of the neighborhood.” Joe could walk uninvited into half the houses on the block. He’d sit down at the kitchen table and join the conversation or start one if necessary. He was the only person, kid or adult, who could pull that off with bravura. The fact he could do that made us feel like we were a neighborhood. A community of believers. We admired Joe for that.

Joe had Downs syndrome. In the 1950s and 60s we used the euphemism “birth defect” to describe his condition. Or we said he was “retarded.” This was a socially acceptable diagnostic label and, simultaneously, a mean-hearted street-slang epithet, depending on the tone with which it was uttered. More reprehensible was the word “Mongoloid,” which conflated prejudiced misconceptions about both race and disability. Thankfully – and this may be the mercy of memoir at work – the labels dropped away when you knew him. Joe was Joe.

On our block of Penn Avenue there were other handicapped kids. Tim had cerebral palsy. Norman had a speech impediment. Mike survived a car crash that killed his girlfriend when he was a freshman in college. His head injury eclipsed a promising math education and resulted in his untimely death from a stroke several years later. Although we didn’t understand at the time, my sister and I shared a twist in our genes that evolved into our degenerative eye disease. It, too, could have been called a birth defect. That twist in the language troubled my mother deeply. My sister and I were fortunate to grow into our disabilities in the 1970s, when it was an act of political commitment, not the stigmatization of a label, to accept the identity of “person with a disability.”

That was the population of Baby Boom kids with disabilities on one neighborhood block when I was growing up. Remembering the neighborhood now reminds me that a fundamental belief in my personal disability ethic can be traced back to Joe. Disability is a common part of everyday life; there is nothing very “special” about it, despite all the euphemisms that suggest otherwise. Like Steve in Major Jackson’s poem, it takes all kinds of people, some kind of crazy, to make a community of believers.

When I was about nine years old, a new bicycle fad swept the neighborhood. The bike had a curved, banana-shaped seat with deep, U-shaped handlebars called “ape-hangers.” In a kid’s imagination the bike looked like a Harley chopper. If you scooted to the rear of the seat and pulled back on the handlebars, you could pop a wheelie as you pedaled down the street. Cashing in on the cache of a Corvette brand name, one popular bike was called The Stingray. It could be customized with a noisemaker that looked like a disk brake and sounded like the purr of a motorcycle. The coolest kids got Stingrays. Other kids chopped their old bikes with banana seats and ape-hangers. And you could always emulate the click of pistons in cylinders with a rubber band and playing card thwacking spokes on a spinning wheel.

I didn’t get a Stingray. Neither did Joe. It bothered me a lot more than it bothered him. The same insouciance that led Joe to half the kitchen tables on the block also buffered him from the slings and arrows of social status. Whenever he pumped his old fat-tire bike up Penn Avenue, he stood as he pedaled and sang out lustily. You couldn’t stop him.

One summer day Joe did something that amazed everyone who saw it. After pedaling up the hill to the top of the block, he paused for dramatic effect and surveyed the scene that fell away below him. Then he kicked off, pedaling twice to pick up speed. Coasting now, he tucked into a tight crouch and leaned left, then right, as the bike glided down the hill in long, graceful arcs. If any mothers saw the spectacle from their houses, they didn’t come out to stop him. AS he swept past me, I heard Joe making triumphal sound effects. Not the vroom, vroom, vroom of an imaginary motorcycle. He was swooshing and slishing like Jean-Claude Killy’s skis as he won the giant slalom at Grenoble.

No one on Penn Avenue ever thought of doing that before. Joe was riffing. He was riffing with what he had. He was riffing on who he was. I call it riffing on the genome.

After supper that night I pumped my own bike up the hill. As the fireflies came out, a breeze began to blow along the street. I waited till there were no cars in sight, then I launched on my giant slalom. I felt what Joe had discovered. Instead of plunging downhill in a straight line, you could stretch out and savor the glory by curving patiently from curb to curb. It wasn’t defying gravity, or submitting to it, but using it to make the ride last a little longer. I felt cool wind rush past my face. I knew it didn’t matter whether I could pop a wheelie. I was doing a Joey. That’s what the stunt became in local legend.

Joe was almost twenty the last time I saw him. He came into my mother’s kitchen, greeting her with his customary “Lou, howya doin’?” We had become coffee-drinkers by then. We loaded up the Folgers with enough sugar to leave a syrupy rime at the bottom of the cups. That’s the way our mothers did it. I don’t remember what we talked about. When we’d drained our cups, we scooped up the sugar with our fingers, licking and nodding as if to say, “It’s good. It’s all good.”

Within a year I moved away, and Joe died of a congenital heart problem. The old neighborhood was never the same.

“A car, a girl, a community of believers” – Part 2

Portrait of Major Jackson by Marion Ettinge
Source: majorjackson.com

“A car, a girl, a community of believers” – Part 1

POEM: “Some Kind of Crazy” by Major Jackson, Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press, 2002)

I am enchanted by this line of poetry. It wormed its way into my memory, and now and then it floats to the top of inner speech when I should be using my words to transact one or another dreary task. It’s the final line of a poem by Major Jackson. I heard him read it on an excellent edition of Open Source with Christopher Lydon on January 23.

“Some Kind of Crazy” tells a story about a street person from the Philadelphia neighborhood where Jackson grew up. As he walked around the neighborhood he pretended he was a car. “He was definitely someone who gave texture to my neighborhood,” the poet explains before reading the poem. “Everyone knew who he was. A number of the girls would ask for a ride, and he would pretend like he was parking the car and get out and act as if he was opening the passenger door for them.”

“It doesn’t matter if you can’t see/Steve’s 1985 Corvette,” the poem begins

Like a Baptist
Preacher stroking the dark underside
Of God’s wet tongue, he can make you

Believe.

The poem ends:

We, the faithful, never call
Him crazy, crackbrained, just a little
Touched. It’s all he ever wants:
A car, a girl, a community of believers.

Amen.

“That’s all any of us want, maybe. That’ll do,” Chris Lydon says in that awkward moment after a poem is recited and the silence waits for a response. “A ‘community of believers’ is interesting. That’s what a poet wants, right?”

“A community of readers,” Jackson answers, “– and believers.”

All of this – the conversational setup, the poem itself, the response – happens between 35:20 and 38:00 on the podcast. It works perfectly, poem and context. Every poem, when recited aloud, exists in an aural context. At poetry readings the nervous patter preceding a poem can be longer than the poem itself, and after the last line is uttered… few poets are brave enough to let the silence linger. And few listeners loosen their character armor enough to allow an audible response.

It’s paradoxical: more poets are writing and publishing poems today than ever before, but few poems really find an audience, a community of believers. We need to work on creating more contexts where poetry can be experienced. That’s a creative project as necessary as the work of writing poems. This edition of Open Source does the job well.

I have more to say about “Some Kind of Crazy” which I’ll pursue in subsequent posts. For now, I am grateful that hearing one poem and remembering just one of its lines has returned me like a prose-prodigal son to the visionary linguistic space of poetry.

This is just the first of many paeans to Open Source with Christopher Lydon. To my mind, it is the most intelligent conversation anywhere on radio. I get it as a podcast, the only one I listen to on a daily basis. It’s where I expect to find depth, nuance, perspective on issues like Iraq and global warming. Interspersed among the current affairs topics are gems like this show with Major Jackson which remind you that there is more to life than the daily news. Need a break? A little inspiration? Listen to Chris Lydon with Philip Roth, Daniel Barenboim, and Emerson biographer Robert D. Richardson.