Hopless Romantics

One could easily make nasty comments about the language poets that we were assigned to read. People have and will probably continue to do so, not necessarily because some of these poems defy expectations, but because some are outright alienating. Ranting and raving are not enough, however. Perloff encourages us to historicize our reception of poems, and Gelpi’s short history of Modernism and Postmodernism helps me understand my reaction to a poem like Words nd Ends from Ez. Gelpi’s thesis is that Romanticism, although it has changed significantly throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, did not die. Thus, when I expect to find some kind of human connection in poetry—with myself, with the writer, with others—I expose my latent Romanticism. In short, I do not want to feel alienated. This is the way MacLow’s poem makes me feel. For instance, how am I supposed to read a line like “aZe luRs”? Is this the word “azure,” which appears elsewhere in the poem, broken into two syllables? Probably. What is the point of making the word appear unfamiliar? To make me understand its meaning differently, or to gain a fresh perspective? It, like the rest of the poem, is probably meant to show me that language is unstable and arbitrary. That’s alienating. I do not feel totally alone in my alienation. Bernstein’s “Thank You for Saying Thank You” shows that language poets can be alienated by the public reception of their poems.
Gelpi also helps me understand why I like MacLow’s “15TH LIGHT POEM: FOR SUSAN WITLIN -- 11 AUGUST 1962.” It begins with a translation of the first line of the Divine Comedy. Intertextuality is a familiar Modernist characteristic. Also, the source itself is a Modernist favorite, likely because the Divine Comedy, in both content and form, reflects the Modernist’s “desperate insistence on coherence . . . amidst the ravages of time: the instability of nature, the unreliability of perception, and the tragedy of human history.” MacLow’s poem is also brief, about as short an imagist poem. Poe (an American Romantic?) thought brevity is an important aspect of lyric poetry. It is the appropriate length for the epiphanies and “visionary insights,” to borrow Gelpi’s term, that I find in Romantic, Symbolist, and Imagist poetry. MacLow even seems to be making a Romantic gesture in the poem when he suggests that middle-aged people can still find the intuitive child within. Finally, the poem features the evolution from metered verse to free verse that Perloff outlines in her article. The beginning of the poem can measured in anapests, and the end can be measured in lines.According to Gelpi, MacLow is a “trickster,” whereas Bernstein and Hejinian are “serious poets.’” I am not sure that I totally agree with distinction, but I do see how Bernstein and Hejinian address public issues, which I guess would make them more serious poets. In My Life, Hejinian does not overlook the political and cultural context of her childhood. For example, she comments on the Civil Rights movement and the race riots in the paragraph headed “Yet We Insist That Life Is Full Of Happy Chance.” However, I do not see how her formal decisions enhance her political statements. As in Bernstein’s “The Ballad of the Girlie Man,” the most potent lines could have come from almost any contemporary American poet who cares about politics. In “The Bricklayer’s Arms,” Bernstein effectively uses a catalogue to celebrate the tradesman and mourn his deferred dreams. Yet, I would guess that most readers are familiar with the association and juxtaposition that poets generate through a catalogue. We saw this technique in Pinsky, the popular poet laureate. In fact, “The Bricklayer’s Arms” is NeoRomantic. It is a Wordsworthian celebration of a common tradesman in a Whitmanesque catalogue.