The NY Times has run an excellent article on greatness in poetry. It's always interesting to read NY Times on poetry -- there was a fascinating one about Jorie Graham's entrance to Harvard (Valhalla?) -- because NY Times believes in poetry, but is egoistic enough to be upset when it's confronted with something it doesn't understand. That's a very useful quality, because it respectfully/hesitantly calls a pear a pear, instead of some helium-filled blather. Maybe because of it, the article anointed only one great post-Eliot poet: Elizabeth Bishop. I'm pleased and agree. (There was some noise about Ashbery, but we'll see what happens 20 years after he's dead, which means in roughly 10 years. I mean, 21.)
The criterion that article settled on for greatness is: “demonstrating the qualities that make poetry seem interesting and worthwhile to such a degree that subsequent practitioners of the art form have found her work a more useful resource than the work of most if not all of her peers.” I agree, although this caveats that a poet's greatness can only be evaluated post-mortem; more distressingly, that a poet's greatness is measured by other peoples' response, and not in some inherent quality (although of course this inherent quality engenders everyone else's response). The question is: how can that inherent quality be discerned? What is it?
I think I know what it is. I won't try articulating it, because I'm trying to be a poet, and I'd rather not ramble on in miserable incoherence. But I think one can only be a great poet if one lives such that an indominitable part of oneself can't be expressed in any way but poetry. I think that sort of forced muteness gives the speaking an extra fire, of putting oneself entirely in each utterance -- but no more. Bishop had it, as did Yeats, Dickinson. I think Vallejo had it, as did Eliot, Stevens, Li Bai, Du Fu, and Plath.
I also have fiction. And mesenchymal stem cells.
The criterion that article settled on for greatness is: “demonstrating the qualities that make poetry seem interesting and worthwhile to such a degree that subsequent practitioners of the art form have found her work a more useful resource than the work of most if not all of her peers.” I agree, although this caveats that a poet's greatness can only be evaluated post-mortem; more distressingly, that a poet's greatness is measured by other peoples' response, and not in some inherent quality (although of course this inherent quality engenders everyone else's response). The question is: how can that inherent quality be discerned? What is it?
I think I know what it is. I won't try articulating it, because I'm trying to be a poet, and I'd rather not ramble on in miserable incoherence. But I think one can only be a great poet if one lives such that an indominitable part of oneself can't be expressed in any way but poetry. I think that sort of forced muteness gives the speaking an extra fire, of putting oneself entirely in each utterance -- but no more. Bishop had it, as did Yeats, Dickinson. I think Vallejo had it, as did Eliot, Stevens, Li Bai, Du Fu, and Plath.
I also have fiction. And mesenchymal stem cells.
Yeah, I don't want your work to be like Stevens's either, but -- well, I'm sure I haven't read enough by him. Or something.
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't think you're expressing the same things in fiction as you are in poetry, so that shouldn't interfere with your greatness -- dunno about the stem cells though, they might.