Do we ever contemplate the literary value of a rhetorical lens before we project ourselves through it?
Many decide on a poem to be the container of what’s on their mind.
Everyone knows their own mind better than others do. Few, or none, are aware of profundity and originality bursting forth continuously in their own mind. Where does one find originality? Elsewhere, of course. But if one finds it elsewhere, how is it original?
Epics are no longer the rule. The poem today is a humble creature. Expectations are so low and “poets” so numerous, and publications of poems such an easy thing, a “poem” is seen simply as a slightly amusing and casual utterance.
The horror of the blank page is far less frightening when one is simply attempting a poem.
Many, therefore, glory in poetry composition, even when there is little on their mind: a memory of an incident, war is bad, animals are great, low paying jobs suck, real estate developers are mean, life is dirty and absurd, boy do I love her.
The poem, however, is never any help in teasing out the theme.
The writer must do all the work—even if there is not much work involved.
The poem, as a form, is indifferent, unless the poem is the kind where rhyme and rhythm are formal requirements and these formal requirements “force” the writer to say something they would not have said, had they not been “forced” to say it that way.
The constraints of the sonnet nudge one to be original.
But most poets these days think:
— My thoughts are original enough; otherwise I would not be a writer in the first place; I don’t need artificial constraints to shape what I say; not only does rhyme tend to push a writer towards the silly, I’d rather not show myself being “nudged” in public—the wise independence of who I am feels embarrassed. I want to be free. I may even rhyme when I feel like it, but to imprison myself in a form belongs to a time long ago when bards were rare and primitive. —
I repeat, then: a poem, as a form, rhyming or not, cannot help the serious writer express their chosen theme.
It prompts nothing, or, in the case of the formalist poem, prompts oddly, achieving, at best, minor original flashes. The theme (war is bad, let’s say) succeeds or fails based on what the poet, as a person, says—the poem is an indifferent vessel, plain or constrained.
But now if writers choose as their form the Socratic Dialogue (named for the historical icon of philosophical argument), they notice, at once, something remarkable happens.
The theme, itself, is forced into originality by Principled Argument—actual limitations which every product of literature demands in aspiring towards scientific harmony and durability.
The banal theme, “war is bad,” roars into life.
Instruments of peace become the instruments of war—not from any warlike reason, but because we are forced to use them. Peaceful tools can no longer lie in the grass. With a sense of urgency, we pick them up and feel their weight.
Why is war bad?
The shadow, which forms even as this question is asked, becomes the shadow of a person, and then, an actual person, who shocks you: “war is good and I will prove it.”
Hopping aboard the Horse of the Socratic Dialogue, you find, as a writer, that you have never been so intrigued by yourself.
Is this you? Who are you, really? What real thoughts do you possess? And has the answer to this question been handed to you in a bright envelope by a model of rhetoric from the ancient Greeks?
We enter into a dialogue, in which the opposite view, a priori, philosophical, self-interested, a voice exactly like our own, a mind ready to shame us, humiliate us, out-argue us, with a heart warm and beating, exactly like ours, gets a full hearing.
The good never exists for itself; it also exists to thwart its opposite (the bad).
And these two are the same.
This is why the bad can never know the good.
How can you know what is repelling you?
If what is repelling you is, by its nature, that which it is, you cannot know it, even in your awareness of being pushed away and thwarted from knowing what is pushing you away.
Unlike the good, the bad exists only for itself. It has no thwarting mechanism. It only understands, “Why can’t I?”
Bad is also known as: Temptation.
The bad cannot know the good.
The good, however, is able to know the bad—how could it repel what it otherwise does not know?
The bad hides; otherwise it could have no existence. The good would immediately repel it.
Good could not exist without repelling the bad and the bad needs to be hidden to protect itself from being repelled out of existence.
Here, in a nutshell, is the moral landscape of existence.
The bad, which does not comprehend the good, tempts us, hiding within the good, which would otherwise repel it.
Dissembling nature is where we live.
Socratic wisdom lives by Questioning—the method by which we narrow down where the bad is hiding in a simple game of “hide and seek.”
Wisdom, as Socrates often infers, is a game played by children. Sophistication—euphemism—is always a sign something is wrong.
Would you rather be known as a human being or by your narrower, group, identity?
A human being.
Why?
etc.
And so proceeds the Socratic Dialogue, avoiding absolutes on one hand and chaos on the other, step, by simple step, from one tangible element to the next, until the questions reveal wrong, evil, bad, in the good place where it hides.
“Knowing ignorance” (ignorance = bad) is all we (as the good) can know. Only then can we repel temptation (the bad hiding in the good).
Another word for the bad hiding in the good: “sophistication.”
This really doesn’t matter, as no one can name prize winners in poetry.
Okay, maybe Eliot’s Nobel (which gave Tom license to attack E. Poe in 1949, settling an old score—Eliot’s New England literary relatives were ridiculed by Poe).
Or Ashbery’s Yale Younger Prize (Auden, the famous ‘bring me his manuscript’ judge).
Or, more obscurely, Creative Writing CEO Paul Engle’s Yale Younger, delivered to him by the opportunistic New Critics—who stormed academia in what became known as the Program Era.
Ask a thousand people on the street in a college town to name one poet who won the Pulitizer prize for Poetry. One of them, maybe two, will say Jorie Graham (Did she? I’m not sure, and who cares, really) or Robert Frost (a repeat winner!) and that was a hundred years ago.
As professor Spahr says in her nifty 2020 essay, “On Poets and Prizes” (2020) co-written with fellow professor Stephanie Young, a boost in income for a poetry prize-winner is really the only thing worth noting about poetry prizes.
Spahr doesn’t tells us why prizes are given to certain poets—except for the very important fact that prize givers and prize winners, anonymous or not, are the same people and tend to be buddies—which is fine, Spahr assures us—these people aren’t “frauds;” they are “mentors” and “friends.”
Prize-giving in the abstract is very simple to define for Spahr—it’s to help boost the public’s recognition of poetry, a “reason” of no meaning, really, but that’s all this essay by Spahr and Young has got. It’s a feel-good essay. It tells the world in a professorial way: “I’m okay with prizes, however it pans out.”
It must have been difficult for really cool-kid, avant, “outsider” poets to say this, but they did.
And now a mere six years later, Spahr (b. 1966) has won the Pulitzer prize!
Poets like Charles Bernstein and Peter Gizzi, persistent academics of some repute, are cheering in various Facebook threads.
Spahr/Young, in what now must be considered their important essay, mention Alan Cordle, his investigative website, Foetry (which gave birth to this writer’s online magazine, Scarriet 2009 to—). They even mention Cordle’s ‘Jorie Graham Rule,’ (the cheating judge rule) but they mischaracterize Cordle as believing the “whole” poetry prize “system is rigged,” which makes my friend Cordle easier to dismiss. The creator of Foetry never said every poetry contest was rigged. Cordle researched specific contests and reported his findings like any good investigator would.
Post-Cordle, we can no longer pretend cheating doesn’t exist.
In their essay, however, Spahr and Young take the high road.
Cheating happens, Spahr admits, but poets are “libertines” and every prize winner and prize giver “cheats” out of love—it’s finally okay. More non-whites and queers are getting prizes, too. And this is good.
The Spahr/Young essay only wishes a greater variety of “cadres” were given prizes.
And look. It has happened!
Spahr has now won the Pulitizer on behalf of her mostly sidelined clique: Dorky, Experimental, Woke—think Ginsberg, but more academic, Plath but more theoretical; Pound, scrubbed of his bad politics. Poetry which knows political/social content, not poetry, is what poetry ultimately is.
Spahr published a book of poems last year and one glowing review is titled: “Poet Juliana Spahr Tackles The Climate Crisis, Rise of the Alt-Right.”
Whatever “THE climate crisis” is, it’s not looking good for “THE poetry” when “THE climate crisis” comes to town—and the poets “tackle” it.
Poetry overthrown at last.
Today’s celebrating clique of cult members hope this is what Spahr’s win means.
A cult is what poetry is, when you can’t say what poetry is. When you are always talking about something else when you are talking about poetry, you belong to a cult. Which is what Spahr and Young’s covid-era essay illustrates extremely well. They admit poetry is not mainstream, then opine that maybe it is a little bit, thanks to prizes, and maybe prizes are manufactured by a small group of friends—but one cannot find fault with this.
Nothing can finally be done—one can’t ban lovers, cadres, friends, and sleep-overs, after all.
The most important thing about the Spahr/Young essay is that not one word is said about the actual worth or value of the poetry—this does not matter.
It is fine to admit there’s cheating.
But it’s forbidden to say there’s cheating and the poetry—awarded in dark, sweaty rooms of “libertine” activity—is bad.
Young and Spahr are good poets—in the way clever children impress grownups with fountains of “creativity”—‘what about this? And this? And this? And this?’ they cry. ‘O what an imagination you have! My! You can go on talking like this forever, can’t you?’
It’s the cleverness of endless lists—enough to impress the poet, if not the poet-philosopher.
Take one of Spahr’s better known poems—“Dynamic Positioning,” which describes, in scientific detail, with an elegiac flourish at the end, an oil drilling accident with multiple fatalities.
It’s a Billy Collins poem, basically.
The avant-garde never want to hear this, but Spahr’s poem succeeds exactly the way all poems succeed—partial information triggering emotion.
Spahr doesn’t care why the oil-rig accident occurred (or why oil drilling succeeds)—she’s not interested in that. Her poem gives us limited information (even as it attempts to overwhelm us with its ‘information’) in the same way Billy Collins’ thoughts are limited, as he tells us a personal story in one of his poems—winning the reader over, emotionally.
Historically, traditionally, we can define poetry this way.
This also defines the occult.
The magic of poetry, the power of a cult—which needs managing more than Socratic ‘madness’—is whatever provides strictly limited information for strictly emotional purposes—this is all we mean by ‘poetry’ which wins prizes on one hand, and creates mistrust in Plato, on the other.
And this is all most people mean by politics, really, which many understand to be a cult, as well.
Cults reward academic persistence, institutional cunning, rather than curiosity and reason—the highest aspirations of science and art.
Scarriet recently published a debate with fascinating poet Christian Bok (no doubt euphoric over Spahr’s win, too) and his position was clear: to define poetry—to say, “this is poetry,” as I have just done, is like holding up a cross to the avant-garde vampire, because “the idea that there is one way to write poetry” is blasphemy (and also fascist oppression!) to the avant-garde cultists. (I have no doubt I have sinned against nature in comparing Juliana Spahr to Billy Collins.)
By skipping the question of— how good is the poetry of the prize culture?— What kind of poetry is it? Or, how does cheating or lack of transparency impact poetic quality?—Young and Spahr signaled to the world who they are, in their 2020 essay.
Girls just want to have fun.
And now Juliana Spahr has won the Pulitizer Prize!
A Dialogue between Christian Bök and Thomas Graves (Thomas Brady, Scarriet Editor and Poet).
Thomas Graves (Brady) responds to Christian’s series of April (poetry month) FB postings from Christian’s book, MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY (2025).
Bök deconstructs Shelley’s famous poem in light of Christian’s own career as an avant-garde creator of a “mighty work,” a “poem” written within the DNA of an immortal bacterium (Xenotext)—making Christian Bök the only true immortal poet in the universe.
Those who have no stomach for literary brawls and insults will be pleased. Christian and Thomas produce light but little heat. It’s a pedagogical miracle. On the other hand, what follows is no dull, bowing and scraping fest. The argument is all. Respect and flattery, nothing.
The argument in a nutshell: I, Scarriet, defend Shelley and Aesthetics.
Christian reveals what it’s like to inhabit the avant-garde—debates force us to defend positions—I don’t know him personally, but I don’t think this is who Christian is—he’s too smart.
Proudly self-pitying, the avant-garde poet typically harbors martyrdom in a sly but grandiose manner—a self-appointed political heroism gleams in the avant-garde poet’s mind, which tends to obliterate a consideration of art, altogether. The avant-garde artist needs politics to win an aesthetic debate, despite the fact that I’ve never met an avant-garde poet who doesn’t worship Ezra Pound.
The avant-garde poets have it backwards. Poetry is not just another way to do politics. Politics is just another way to do poetry.
Enjoy!
OZYMANDIAS BY PERCY SHELLEY
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
CHRISTIAN OZYMANDIAS by Gilbert Adair (who translates the poem by Percy Shelley into a lipogram without the use of the letter E)–Day 11 of Poetry Month):
I know a pilgrim from a distant land Who said: two vast and sawn-off limbs of quartz Stand on an arid plain. Not far, in sand Half sunk, I found a facial stump, drawn warts And all; its curling lips of cold command Showed that its sculptor passions could portray Which still outlast, stamp’d on unliving things, A mocking hand that no constraint would sway: And on its plinth this lordly boast is shown: “Lo, I am Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, O Mighty, and bow down!” ‘Tis all that is intact. Around that crust Of a colossal ruin, now windblown, A sandstorm swirls and grinds it into dust.
PAUL MUNDEN What is the point of that? (apart from destroying the poem at almost every turn)
CHRISTIAN Try writing any great works of literature without use of the letter E (the most common letter in the language)—then use the standards of the pharaoh to assess the merits of the result. The original, historic inscription from Ozymandias demands that, if you want to understand the mind of the pharaoh, you must first build something as great as he has (before daring to criticize it)—and so Adair has set out to write a poem in the manner of Shelley under constraints more difficult than the ones used by Shelley. All poets are quick to criticize the pharaoh (jeering at such hubris) without having first built their own civilizations, wresting greatness from the desert (only to see these masterworks collapse into dust). The lipogram perhaps suggests that poets always find themselves working in the “ruins” of an earlier, sublime language, now reduced to shattered alphabets (missing crucial letters, like an E, for example), making them insufficient to preserve the past adequately against the sandstorms of entropy (and despair).
PAUL MUNDEN An intriguing defence, Christian, but I just don’t buy the conflation of Shelley and Pharoah, or how the deliberate choice of ignoring e in this instance (I know it’s been done brilliantly elsewhere!) equates with ruins. But hey, it’s Saturday morning!
SCARRIET This project of yours, Christian, is wonderful, as Ozymandias was once wonderful, but it also puts me in mind of something Robin Gibb said in 1968: “I started a joke which started the whole world crying. But I didn’t see that the joke was on me.” Was Gibb (1968) perhaps reacting to Oulipo (1960)? I had never thought of that connection before, but who knows? I’m quite certain the most important influences happen without the influenced knowing. Gibb might have seen something in a newspaper on Oulipo, had a non-judgmental reaction to it, the gist of it found its way into his brain—and then he forgot about it. This is the great danger of the Avant Garde, generally: it’s a joke. Every clever version of “Ozymandias” finally turns the sublime into the cute. Over and over again. “A toilet in a museum! Ha ha ha!” The Avant Joke is great the first time. But then it’s essentially the same joke repeated endlessly in a slightly different way—like someone practicing an instrument (and perhaps getting better and more fluid at it) but never really playing anything. I called Shelley’s poem “tragic” just now. It’s about tyranny and real tyranny is no joke. None of your versions take Shelley’s subject seriously: tyranny. You dismiss it with cuteness. You replace the constraint of real tyranny with the playful constraint of ‘you can’t use the letter e.’ Which is brilliant. But it cannot seriously rival Shelley’s poem. Because Shelley is free. Unlike the spirit of the avant-garde (crippled by silliness,) and, let’s face it, Ozmandias, the tyrant. You and your avant projects are victims of tyranny. They are not tyrannical. They are amusing. They are victims of tyranny, however. Like citizens of a tyrannical state, who are damaged and oppressed. In your retort to Paul Munden’s “Ozymandias has no clothes” response, you seriously mocked Shelley’s mere poem in comparison to the dynastic greatness of Ramses (thinking the poet Shelley is constrained (constraint your favorite thing) by historical fact. (Ramses = Ozymandias 100% according to you). Shelley’s poem is tragic, but it’s also triumphant in a way you don’t seem to understand (perhaps your “avant constraint-behavior” cannot fathom Shelley’s poetic and sublime triumph). Artistic unity defines the poem. The traveler “said” the wreck “tells,” the “lifeless things” is Shelley’s poetry itself—all the vain language-tricks of “poetry” are finally “lifeless” to the true poet. Ozymandias was always “lifeless,” because he was a tyrant. The sculptor “read.” Saying, telling, reading, writing—speech triumphs over the extravagance of visual and material articulation and power. Shelley triumphs simply and humbly, but it’s a “mighty” triumph, nonetheless. The poem is finally what triumphs. There is no mocking vanity from Shelley, finally, as there constantly is from the joking avant (annoying) poet. Nothing else remains.
CHRISTIAN Thanks for the thoughtful response, Thomas. You seem to think that I do not understand the poem, because I do not take the themes of “tyranny” seriously. I do. I even argue that the work speaks about the “tragedy” of the past, implying that great works cannot endure their own erasure over time. I also know that, if we take Shelley at his word, then he wishes to impugn Ozymandias for being tyrannical, arguing that poets are better than kings — yet in order to find fault with Ozymandias, he must “mischaracterize” the subject of the poem, attributing words to the king, which the king has not said, attributing traits to the statue, which the sculpture does not have. If you want to portray a personage from history as a tyrant, you do not have to resort to falsehoods to make your case.
Shelley almost certainly knows that historians of his time regard Ramesses II as the inventor of “libraries”: i.e. this pharaoh is the first ruler in history to have established municipal repositories of knowledge, meant to outlast dynasties. I might suggest that, without libraries, you have no poets — and yet the poet seems to find fault with the man for having striven to create such archives. I think that the pharaoh might be the “avant-garde” guy here, because he does not, in fact, tell everyone to “despair” (despite the wonderfulness of this line by Shelley); instead, the pharaoh claims that, if you want to understand his greatness, you can only do so by striving to exceed it, weighing your own accomplishments against his. I might add that, again, Shelley has almost certainly read Diodorus Siculus, and hence Shelley already knows precisely what Ozymandias has actually said — and yet, the poet must misrepresent the king in order to sneer at these achievements. You say that Shelley does not indulge in any vanity of “mocking,” when in fact the evidence suggests that he does — particularly when we take into account his anti-aristocratic politics (a self-loathing of the very class, from which descends).
Surely, poets (these “unacknowledged legislators”) have the capacity to be just as tyrannical as any king — and in fact, almost every despot of the 20th century is, in fact, a failed writer of verse: Joseph Stalin; Benito Mussolini; Mao Tse-Tung; Pol Pot; Kim Il-Sung, etc. All these “tyrants” have thought that poets deserve to rule more than kings. I think that, while the poem by Shelley is great, it too remains subject to the same erosion and the same erasure, which Shelley wishes upon Ozymandias. I think that Adair does, in fact, appreciate the tragedy of such a problem, since he is, after all, translating a work that appears in a novel by Perec — an author, who is lamenting the loss of his entire family in the Holocaust, doing so by suppressing the letter E (the “eux,” the “them,” the people — for whom all elegies are always going to be merely “wrecks”) — and this kind of work constitutes a feature of the avant-garde, which you have dismissed as “silliness.” Is the pissoir in the museum merely a joke? — or is it an admission that, given enough time, perhaps even millennia, all objects that survive the Holocaust of history, no matter how mundane they might be, must eventually become priceless.
Does not the act of writing under “constraint” say something about our relationship to the forces of tyranny? — especially when we can, nevertheless, say something uncanny, sublime, or even parodic, in the face of such repression. I might suggest that Shelley is less “free” than you think — and all poets must contend with the constraints of their own language (working with a poor tool to carve a place for themselves in history) — and if we understand this fact, then poets might judge each other more charitably. I say: do not be the kind of poet who can only be a poet, if someone else is doing it wrong — nobody is doing it wrong.
SCARRIET I’m puzzled why you insist the poet Shelley be an accurate historian? Aren’t you making the tail (historical accuracy) wag the dog poetry in a manner that would nip all great poetry in the bud from Dante to Shakespeare? Wasn’t Shelley writing a poem? A good one? Isn’t it pedantic to plead for historical accuracy? There are tyrants. There is tyranny. For Shelley’s purposes it doesn’t matter which one. Tyrants are tyrannical not just because they are mean, but because they can buy greatness, pay sculptors etc. da Vinci brags very explicitly that painters are more valuable than poets—I believe da Vinci. And when Shelley has the poet winning in “Ozymandias,” I believe him. In the same way you insist Shelley is not historically accurate, you are being too literal when it comes to other things you say. Shelley isn’t saying all poets are good people. I’m not sure why you felt compelled to point out that Stalin wrote poetry?? In his “Defense,” Shelley impugns the didactic. You’re reducing Shelley to a professor. You didn’t say (perhaps it doesn’t matter) why greatness from the past gets erased when you say you are aware that Shelley’s poem is “tragic.” Obviously the question is too complex for Shelley to delve into in his poem—but that is not what’s tragic. Erasure may be necessary—and erasure (and this is no accident) is the “good guy” in Shelley’s poem, beautifully ironic. So what you are saying is tragic, really isn’t. Human failings are tragic. Not time and material facts. (Those belong to Nature/God etc and are good.) Shelley “wins” because the genius always wins. Nature is on Shelley’s side—not just those “lone and level sands” but his poem, as well, which materially lives in our eyes, despite time’s erasure, etc. But of course I don’t mean poor Shelley wins. The poem wins and that’s 99% of what matters. Shelley’s fame is kept alive by lesser creatures like us. I don’t think what you’re doing is bad; if it brings attention to Shelley, it’s good. I just think (most) of what you’re doing is superfluous, even as its activity frames Shelley, the POET, Shelley, in the light. And if you and I produce some argumentative sparks, that’s probably good, too. But it all depends on how truly ingenious, brave, and honest we are, as we (tragically) do not agree…
CHRISTIAN I’m not suggesting that Shelley “needs” to be historically accurate — but the fact that he is not accurate carries meaning. Shelley addresses a specific pharaoh, attributing to him traits meant to “mock” his achievements. The poet seems to be suffering from “ressentiment” about a predecessor, who has achieved far more than Shelley has — i.e. founding a civilization whose monuments have endured longer than English literature has itself existed by at least an order of magnitude. I might have expressed a modicum of awe in the face of such an achievement, perhaps feeling gratitude that this inventor of libraries has guaranteed the persistence of poetry in archives, thereby contributing not only to his own immortality, but also to mine (and the legacy of everyone else who has written a book). I might wonder why Shelley feels the need to “mischaracterize” the pharaoh as nothing more than a “tyrant” (defined merely by hubris), when Shelley knows otherwise — particularly when the poet is himself a member of such a privileged aristocracy (loathing his own dynastic heritage). I mention the tyrants from the 20th century because, like Shelley, these actual despots think that poets have an “unacknowledged” entitlement to be kings. I might say: beware of such poets who take delight in thinking that they can tell others what to do — they cancel you.
And as for my “superfluity” as a poet — well, I say: my jury lives in the future. And as for me being a “victim” of tyranny, I might contradict such a claim — suggesting that I am striving to transcend whatever forces my more repressive, aesthetic peers might wish to impose upon me. If you want to dismiss my achievements as superfluous, then please judge my work by the standards of the pharaoh. I have written a poem in the language of Life itself, doing so in such a way that the work can literally alter the behaviour of living things, with the potential to endure forever, in any environment, outlasting the lifetime of the Sun itself: a poem so necessarily constrained in its form that its existence remains cosmically improbable. As the pharaoh insists: if you have done the same (or better) — then indeed you might understand the work well enough to dismiss it. I think that Shelley aspires to “compete” according to such standards, and we admire his poem for its effort to upstage the king — but the poem does so with a “sneer,” which seems to be making claims about his predecessor in “bad faith,” pretending that such a forebear warrants our resentment rather than our wonderment. Cheers!
SCARRIET “the fact that he is not accurate carries meaning.” No, it doesn’t. What meaning? You are interested in some historical parallel which undermines Shelley’s poem and has not anything to do, really, with Shelley’s poem. You are doubling down on this fallacy. Do you demand perfect accuracy in all of Shakespeare’s history plays and tragedies? Secondly, I didn’t know we were talking about your DNA poem. Why do you bring that up? I’m not talking about you as a poet, at all. As a critic of Shelley’s poem under discussion, I believe you miss, that’s all. I’m not judging all your work as superfluous—I’m sorry if I gave that impression. You have a rich, far-ranging mind; I just think re: Ozymandias, you’re getting a little carried away. Your point : “do better than the Pharaoh, poet, or shut up” is probably your best shot against Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” My guess is that it would please Harold Bloom (who I happen to have some issues with.) You’re not afraid to fight Shelley and that’s admirable and you’re like me, in that respect. (We’re alike. That’s why we are butting heads. We share the same birthday. LOL) But I think it’s unfair to take the complex example of a Pharoah we don’t know that much about, and weaponize this Pharoah against a lyric poem. It’s you who needs to surpass Shelley. You can’t assume the person you believe is Ozymandias is on “your side,” can you? And I really don’t think Shelley is “sneering” in his poem. His is one of the most perfect lyric poems there is. Good luck slaying Shelley’s dragon! I can’t say I’m rooting for you, but you deserve praise for trying.
CHRISTIAN Thanks, Thomas! — I appreciate your kind note. I demand no accuracy from Shelley (since he can write, as he sees fit) — but I am a reader (paid to think), and my training requires that I interpret works, taking into account all the features of its context. I am undoubtedly getting “carried away” — since the poetry undoubtedly encourages such extravagances. I am also an avant-garde poet, and my job is to ensure that poets show up for the future on time. I know that a pharaoh like Ozymandias is not on “my side” — but I might give him much more credit than Shelley, because I think that, without such “inventors of libraries,” aspiring to greatness (if not immortality), despite the sneers of their naysayers, no civilization makes any progress against the depredations of time. Cheers!
SCARRIET Christian, good morning! “Inventors of libraries” is not in “Ozymandias.” You haven’t proven (as a “reader paid to think”—I’ll not pay you yet) how, or why, the “poetry encourages such extravagances.” In fact, it is quite the opposite. Shelley is not an “avant-garde poet,” since his genius languishes before the appointment book of the “future,” a little black book which you no doubt spy with your little eye. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is rounded off perfectly (the vital fact of artistic unity always seems to puzzle the busy bees of the “avant-garde”).
CHRISTIAN Shelley knows that historians of his era regard Ozymandias as the “inventor of libraries” (and this fact does have bearing upon our reading of the poem) — but as Walter Stephens remarks: “Shelley’s poem [has] all but erased the memory of Ozymandias as a founder of libraries” — moreover, “[t]he two myths of Ozymandias — either hubristic despot or inventor of libraries — which are otherwise so divergent, intersect at the point where wonder locates both the magnificence of human achievement and its inevitable destruction by time.” I think that the poem is “extravagant” in its depiction of Ozymandias (and it has occasioned much “mythologization”). We both think that the poem is great — but I think that all poems open themselves up to the depredations of history, extending beyond their entombment in whatever “unity” we might fix for them. For reference: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40606230 Cheers!
SCARRIET Thank you! You’ve turned me into an amateur archeologist. The bare facts are these: A passage from Diodorus (1st century BC) was the sole reported source of a friendly Sonnet Writing competition (think Keats v Hunt) between Horace Smith and Shelley. The Smith sonnet (not a bad poem at all, actually—there were no fake, avant-garde poets back then, just bad poets and good poets) is similar in theme and depiction to Shelley’s—no elaborate and extravagant Bök defense of the old tyrant Ramses II (who did NOT invent libraries, by the way). Shelley was a known hater of tyrants of every kind (George III, Napoleon—who tried to acquire the Ramses II piece later brought to England, which Shelley would have known about—though he wrote his poem before its arrival.) If we indulge in reading Shelley’s mind, as you are wont to do, we should focus on Shelley’s famous radical loathing of all authority, even mere symbols of authority—Shelley lost his inheritance for offending Christians at school. The Diodorus passage describes the Ozymandias statue as pristine, as sitting in a temple—both Horace Smith and Shelley ignore this fact and write of a shattered statue in the sand, which I think is telling. Both men were aware of classical ruins, a common trope of their day. We know more about Ramses II today than Shelley did (and yet there is ignorance remaining)—we must be VERY careful in reading Shelley’s mind. Ramses II made war, worshiped a bull, married his daughters, produced 100 children, dozens of wives and consorts, his citizens were illiterate, there was no free press in his kingdom, and a great deal of others’ labor was spent building immense statues and tombs to him and his family. The library (not the first library by a long shot) you admire existed within his elaborate grave. I’m not sure how much Shelley knew of Ramses II, but he was OBVIOUSLY not concerned with the pinpoint historical accuracy (which even today we don’t possess) of Ramses II. It’s fine to speculate on poems, but we need to be responsible. We must wall off our wild guesses and speculation and label it forthrightly and clearly so it does not get mixed up with the genius of the poem in question, whether we are a avant-garde lunatic, or not, dear Christian! Yes, I do grant you that Shelley changed the Ozymandias quote on his statue—but you have run with this fact all the way to the dawn of time and back in a circus show of what is mostly complete irrelevance and confusion. Shelley is Shelley. Not Christian Bök’s avant-garde plaything.
CHRISTIAN Yes, Thomas — I think that you’re actually getting at my point. Ozymandias in the poem is not the historical personage, but in fact, a “straw man” for the attitudes of Shelley. I’m not indulging in any “wild guesses” by making this point. I’m not trying to read his mind. I’m trying to show the many ways in which the poem supports a diverse variety of responses to the context of its creation (and the current context of its reading). I’m no less suspicious of authority — particularly the authority of the poets who declare that the meaning of a poem is definitive (rather than generative). I’m not confused — nor am I irrelevant. I’ve noted elsewhere: beware of the poets who take pleasure in telling others poets what to do (because they imagine that they are the “unacknowledged” lawmakers) — they are priests not artists. I’d like to think that nobody is doing it wrong (least of all me — or Shelley).
SCARRIET Christian, I understand your distinction between the “definitive” and the “generative.” Bravo, that’s a good point and it cuts to the quick. However, let me remind everyone, the “generative” still belongs to Shelley and not you. Shelley’s Ozymandias is only a “straw man” (and again, I’m impressed with your rhetorical vitality) IF Shelley is seeking to libel Ramses II. He’s not. (Are you seriously saying he is?) Shelley’s poem is seeking to impress and elevate his readership in a purely philosophical (dare I say religious? Sorry, Percy!) sphere. You, however, are dragging Shelley into court and attempting to pry the generative from the definitive in Shelley’s poem-making. I hope you’ll excuse me for taking Shelley’s side here. He’s not around to defend himself. Cowardly avant-garde moderns tend to be bullies when they think no one’s watching. I am convinced you’re better than that. I believe you when you say you admire Shelley’s poem. I hope you’ll forgive me for anything I may have said which muddies the crystal stream of poetry.
CHRISTIAN If you admit that you prefer to regard the work of Shelley as “generative,” then you might also celebrate the fact that people are going to take inspiration freely from it, writing poetry of all sorts in response to it (perhaps even lipograms — doing so without the permission of tribunals that might wish to police such readings of Shelley, thereby discouraging others from participating). I might agree that many poets of the avant-garde are indeed “bullies” (just like any other group of poets) — but the avant-garde encompasses a diverse variety of “schools” of writing, often with mandates in contradiction with each other (just like any other group of poets) — and I might suggest that all such bullies (whatever their poetic biases might be) have at least one of two beliefs in common: they think that there is only one way to write poetry (because all others are a threat to this “definitive” aesthetic); or they think that poetry must serve political interests outside itself (and woe betide anyone who disagrees with such a postulate and its interests). I do not number myself among either of these classes of people — and in fact, my refusal to conform to such expectations has made me the recurrent victim of such bullies (who indulge in character assassination, social cancellation, career sabotage, and death threats — all of them pushing me to the brink of suicidal breakdown — simply because I have upheld poetry that some arbiter finds insufficiently “correct”). I’m no coward — but such bullies are scary, in part because they suffer from “ressentiment,” truly believing that they are “unacknowledged legislators,” unjustly denied the power to tell others what to do — (and of course, we need only look to the example of every despot in the 20th century, nearly all of them failed poets first, to show us what such “legislators” might actually do, if they ever get their way). I have seen far too many poets behaving “tyrannically” towards their peers (doing so without ever having built much of anything themselves — let alone a library or an obelisk, meant to last the ages).
SCARRIET I’m glad we both hate bullies. I have met poets (very nice people) who think ANY criticism of poetry is “bullying.” I’m sure we both agree that sort of extreme sensitivity is silly. And I’m sure you and I both agree that responses to responses to Shelley are just as valid as responses to Shelley. No one, I think, EVER says “there is only one way to write poetry.” That’s perhaps the greatest and largest straw man that has ever existed, and comforts more avant-garde poets than I can count—how the avant-garde poets are able to cuddle up in bed every night with such a large straw man, I don’t know. By the way, I don’t “prefer” the “generative” to the “definitive;” am I crazy to think they may be united in Shelley’s dreams, as he floats, slumbering, on the dreaming Nile?
CHRISTIAN Contrarily, lots of writers and critics have professed that there is only one way to write poetry — and they have threatened their peers accordingly (acting on these threats — as I have already noted from my own experience). Not a straw man: a fact — with plenty of extant examples (both now, and throughout history). I do not “cuddle up” to death threats for comfort — and plenty of my peers have been pilloried in public, their careers destroyed for having written a poem that someone else has found dislikable. The bullies never see themselves as “terrorists” (intimidating a community into submission) — they only see themselves as defenders of a faith, acting in the interests of the “good” (and implying that such behaviour is merely “criticism” is disingenuous): it is enforcement, nothing more.
SCARRIET Christian, I must object. It IS a straw man—and this straw man, “poetry can only be written one way,” is the avant-garde poet’s straw man of straw men. I am not by any means downplaying your “threats,” (if you wish to detail them, I’ll certainly listen) but isn’t this a matter for the police? Not poetry? I know there are dangerous people, but to say someone is dangerous from their opinions on poetry, I find hard to believe. Again, what does it even mean to say “there is only one way to write poetry?” Let’s say there is a poet who says poetry should only be written on kittens. This person would be insane, and perhaps dangerously insane. But this issue belongs to insanity, not poetry. An avant-garde poet who believes poetry can be written any which way might be an anarchist, and anarchists historically flirt with violence, but I would never raise this as a poetry issue, no matter how I feel about—avant-garde poetry.
CHRISTIAN Right, got it. Threats from poets have got nothing to do with poetry — (just as threats from fanatical, religious people have got nothing to do with religion). You may wish to object, but throughout history, numerous avant-garde poets have suffered persecution for writing the “wrong way” (and the number of cases is truly extensive). I can hardly exhaust a list of them. Josef Stalin (a poet before becoming a despot) sends all the Russian Futurists to the gulag. The poets among the German Dadaists have to flee the regime of Adolf Hitler (who deems their work “decadent,” burning it all). A cabal of Australian poets conspires successfully to get a poetic editor of an avant-garde magazine jailed for publishing “obscenity.” The Beats suffer prosecution in courts for their “obscenities.” Even a President of the AWP (supposedly representing all creative writers) officially describes the avant-garde as “wasps in the beehive,” requiring forcible eviction from writing programs — and then he acts on such a threat, joining forces with a mob to eliminate such a poet from an AWP committee for having written a poem that the community finds distasteful. A mob of poets has boycotted a conference about “free speech” out of existence, because such an “undesirable” poet has appeared on the schedule for performance. A poet can even be cancelled for writing devotional, Catholic poetry, let alone whatever “radical” writing that we might care to cite. I think that everyone of these persecutors has an “opinion” about poetry — and their opinion is: “only the ‘right’ kind of poetry must be allowed to exist.”
SCARRIET Threats, censorship, violence, lying, exclusion, snobbery, clique-ism, are bad. Which kinds of poetry are you lumping in with these bad things? Rhyme? Iambic pentameter? I can assure you I’m not lumping avant-garde poetry in with those bad things, and no sane person would. Can you make avant-garde poetry the “victim” if you can’t define the oppressor? The oppressor is not a tyrant who rhymes. If we said rhyme was an oppressor, we, like the tyrant, would be insane. The oppressor, as I pointed out in my previous post, is insanity. It is not aesthetic taste. If a man is hanged for being a bad poet, that is just as bad as if he were hanged for being a good poet. I hope you are not saying all hanged poets are good because they were murdered, or that anyone should be forced to call a poet good for that reason. One could insert plans to blow up a crowded market into an avant-garde poem, or, in a perfect sonnet—therefore, your defense has really nothing to do with poetry. All of your straw men, every paper tiger you might imagine, if they were not criminally insane, would condemn both the avant-garde poem and the perfect sonnet which had plans to blow up a market hiding within it. Even the most self-pitying avant-garde poet surely understands this. You cannot gain an aesthetic advantage because criminal insanity exists. That’s not allowed.
******
[what follows is just a different thread from the above postings]
CHRISTIAN “Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.”
—Ezra Pound
SCARRIET I love this because Pound’s own criticism is banal or incoherent for anyone who reads it with any objectivity. Not many know this about Pound, but as a middle aged, failed poet, prior to throwing himself into full support for the bad guys in WW II, he attempted to write school text books, and failed at that, too. His fame (“notable work”) rests in friends in high places: the New Critics, who praised him in their vastly influential text book Understanding Poetry, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, 1930s, final edition 1970s, TS Eliot, who won the Nobel in 1948 and attacked Poe (d. 1849) in 1949 and had attacked Shelley and Jews in the 1930s—the Creative Writing Program scam, which got poets no one cared about into the Canon by forcing students to read them in school was a New Critics scheme. The New Critics used their connections in government and a few brilliant essays by guys like Ransom, who explicitly said Criticism needed to be in schools, not in newspapers or the public square (the route Poe took) where all these professors teaching Socrates, Shakespeare, Keats and Shelley needed to removed in favor of the “new writing”—which has since happened. Pound took credit for work not his own, and managed to produce a “notable work” or two via translation. But that doesn’t help his Criticism, I’m afraid, which is laughable. “Make” “it” “new.” Poe did say something similar in his delightful little essay Letter to B___ (No one has figured out who B___ is): addressing this idea of what it really means to Produce—and what that means for Criticism. He has a very telling example and I should quote him. Let me find it and I’ll place it in my next deposit. I should acknowledge the elephant in the room—Christian, you can’t get over the fact (your obsessive nature is why you are a notable poet, no doubt) that Shelley has done Ramses II wrong. One CANNOT fault a tyrant and a murderer—until one has murdered and designed tombs oneself—yes I know! Bad Shelley! Bad!
SCARRIET Here is the quote from Poe: It has been said that a good critique on a poem may be written by one who is no poet himself. This, according to your idea and mine of poetry, I feel to be false — the less poetical the critic, the less just the critique, and the converse. On this account, and because there are but few B——’s in the world, I would be as much ashamed of the world’s good opinion as proud of your own. Another than yourself might here observe, “Shakspeare is in possession of the world’s good opinion, and yet Shakspeare is the greatest of poets. It appears then that the world judge correctly, why should you be ashamed of their favorable judgment?” The difficulty lies in the interpretation of the word “judgment” or “opinion.” The opinion is the world’s, truly, but it may be called theirs as a man would call a book his, having bought it; he did not write the book, but it is his; they did not originate the opinion, but it is theirs. A fool, for example, thinks Shakspeare a great poet — yet the fool has never read Shakspeare. But the fool’s neighbor, who is a step higher on the Andes of the mind, whose head (that is to say his more exalted thought) is too far above the fool to be seen or understood, but whose feet (by which I mean his every-day actions) are sufficiently near to be discerned, and by means of which that superiority is ascertained, which but for them would never have been discovered — this neighbor asserts that Shakspeare is a great poet — the fool believes him, and it is henceforward his opinion. This neighbor’s own opinion has, in like manner, been adopted from one above him, and so, ascendingly, to a few gifted individuals, who kneel around the summit, beholding, face to face, the master spirit who stands upon the pinnacle. * * * * *
CHRISTIAN If you dislike the tomb built — do not complain about it: build a better one — one that suits you better — after which, you might understand the mind of a builder (rather than the mind of a complainer). A person who complains the most does the least.
SCARRIET Are you talking to me or Shelley? Does Shelley have the right to picture ruins? O! would poets live non-judgmentally in the present, mourns the tomb-builder! Hey there’s a theme for you—if you dare!
CHRISTIAN I’ve already built my “impossible” obelisk — staking 25 years of my career on accomplishing such a task. I’ve already “dared.”
SCARRIET Christian, I think you need to relax. My advice is: don’t puff yourself up too much. It’s not a good look. Celebrate what you are, who you are. For me, this living conversation is worth more than all the “obelisks” in the world. But hey, no one is going to take your “obelisk” away. You’re a brilliant guy, a gift to Letters and poetry. You’ve won!! Let others say it, if they want—but you don’t need to say things like “staking 25 years of my career”— easy there, lad. You’re happy, aren’t you? You’ve “dared.” Got it. But don’t keep rattling the devil’s tail. No need to be defensive. It’s all good. Now go read “If” by Rudyard Kipling. Did your dad ever read that out loud to you when you were a kid? Mine did.
CHRISTIAN Thanks for the kind note, Thomas — and undoubtedly, I do need to relax. I’m probably still striving to meet the standards of “If” by Kipling: anyway, cheers!
I notice the women, tall, with long hair, all made up,
or guys with better shoes than mine.
I flood the internet with my poetry
in an aimless way.
But the internet is not aimless at all.
You can see my poetry right there on my feed.
It serves a narcissistic need.
I’m falling into my poetry, dying.
I don’t care. Poetry is the engine of the self.
O lyric pomposity!
Poetry feels no shame.
Unlike educated women on the internet,
loudly ashamed of Trump.
I can say what I please to them. Even defend
the guy. They peruse my discourses on Iran to the end.
Or they will look at my poetry.
Immediately, they feel a twinge of regret.
Oh God. Is it poetry
which will teach us manners yet?
******************
STILL SOFTER
I
Still softer. Your kiss will kill me.
Don’t send me out into the murdering cold.
Still softer. Don’t let this love grow old,
Which now breathes too fast,
Which pursues pleasure too quickly,
So neither the walls, nor the air between, will last.
Wanting makes wanting end.
Your love burns me. Be my friend.
Still softer. Be deliberate with every kiss,
So every pause saddens what every pause will miss.
Thought turns back and repeats a thought from the past
When love is desperate. Love can have no now—
Unless we know how only a soft kiss knows how
One long kiss will never know
There are others. You’ve killed me. I must go.
II
Prevent my erotica. I want to think, instead,
Of the sweetest melody, sweetly falling dead.
The uncompromising shadow surrounds your head
And frames, as in high art, your cheekbones,
Leaving half the forehead and your eyes
Beautiful and sad; too sad for truth, and all truth implies,
The rest of you in darkness. You are not what this owns,
You are the faint scents and musical tones
Falling by your feet, unseen—half-sights, half-sounds, half-sighs;
From the whole mystery, a partial mystery you took;
Your eyes open, too sad for truth; and closed, too sad for lies.
Prevent my erotica. I look
For an hour into your face. Never read another book.
What if another sun burns the low, burning, skies,
A sundown wrapped in pink and fiery sighs,
And this alternate, hungry for grey?
Or your sunny eyes.
III
This disgusts me:
Come trembling into me.
I like to say the word, “me,”
Because me is what I like to do.
After I am tired from loving her,
Can I say the word “me” to you?
I would rather this were out of the way.
To heaven. And let Leda in the arms of Zeus play,
As a swan; the myth of a glad white swan
Was the grey one trying the bright one on.
I will be cogent and fraught. I will sing of God.
I sinned, spoke, repented, felt better. Is that odd?
Is a carnation a religion? Is the rose of love only a clod?
IV
Moan against me, so that your smile
Will be more memorable after a while.
Or take your smile and put it away
While heavy erotica calls to us all day
In the groan of love and touch.
After I love you, in a way even love will say is too much,
Your smile can come out, please! after a brief time—
Love brief, compared to the sun,
Making its fiery, lengthy run—
The sun that feeds forever on skinny streams
Will place itself on furniture and climb.
V
I remember the direction of that religion
Telling me I was more,
Because I was humble and small—
To love, to fit in, is what I was for.
I remember that Greek religion.
I remember almost all.
I don’t remember the wishes,
The desires, the talk, so much.
I remember your body
And the sweet touch.
I went into the temple
And never came out.
All the scents of heaven?
When the heaven came about?
When the heaven, yellow,
Came next to me, with its eyes?
You dissolved, didn’t you?
Into the sweetest sighs.
****
Free Iran! An Englishman discovered oil in Iran in the very beginning of the 20th century BEFORE it became the world’s resource and Iran agreed to a DEAL where Britain could basically take oil out of Iran for decades. The 1953 “coup” story was a LIE. The Shah wanted oil independence for his country and one of his Prime Ministers, Mosaddeq, appointed by law by the Shah (two previous prime ministers of the Shah were murdered by Islam extremists connected to Khomeini and the Shah himself survived a shooting in the face in 1949) pushed internationally for Iran to take over its own Iranian oil facilities. Britain (Churchill was in charge at the time) was having NONE of this and Britain got out its warships (running on Iranian oil) and blockaded Iran. Mosaddeq was approved by the Islamist/Communist parliament in Iran—he was NOT part of a “democratically elected government;” PM Mosaddeq was not elected by the people—only a majority of the parliament—a parliament, it should be pointed out, which sympathized with terrorist Islamists. MI6 told the CIA what to do and also controlled SAVAK. Britain was taking Iran’s oil, not the U.S, who had enough of its own oil and was therefore in a position to be friendlier to Iran than Britain. The 1953 “coup” (when the Shah by law fired Mosaddeq because his PM was not getting anywhere and had communist sympathies) was a fake spin by MI6 to make America and the CIA look like the villains. And, of course, to make the Shah look like a villain—because the Shah, it is important to note, wanted independence from Britain, as well. The Shah modernized Iran, and despite his puppet status, the Shah was able to use friendly relations with the United States to help Iran (which had mostly been controlled in the 20th century by the Soviets in the north and Britain in the south. The U.S. actually helped kick the Soviets out.) Khomeini had a strong terrorist presence in Iran in the 40s and 50s but the Shah exiled Khomeini in the early 60s over the cause of women’s rights (go Shah!) By the 70s Iran was a modern, prosperous nation, but hated by the Left and U.S. mainstream media, which portrayed the Shah as a torturer. (The Shah was dealing with Islamist/Communist terrorism. Charges against the Shah need to be seen in this light; he was actually a kind and sensitive individual). The monster Khomeini’s return was facilitated by Jimmy Carter, the U.S. State Dept, the U.S. media (reporters flew WITH Khomeini on the plane from Paris as he came back from exile, portrayed as a kindly, religious savior—in fact, he was a killer, and ate SAVAK for breakfast when he returned and turned Iran into a prison.) 1979, the year of the Iranian “revolution,” was also the expiration date for Britain’s oil deal—the UK (we know what they have since become) preferred to hand off Iran controlling its own oil to an Islamist dictator. After 9/11, with the globalist Bushes in control (seeing eye to eye with MI6 and globalist London) Iraq (Iran’s enemy) is attacked as the Middle East becomes the controlled chaos (further facilitated by Obama and Hillary) which we see today. Wonder why the Left and the US and British mainstream media are ignoring the people rebelling against the cruel Iran regime? Iran, like Venezuela, sends its oil to China—revenge of the old British Empire against America. The globalist communists who hate the United States are still the liars they have been forever.
This on my city commute was the only thing which made me think of this: a Renaissance painting. Thousands of commuters, upright, with purpose in their step, avoided me—and I avoided them; we were innocent. But these three bums in the subway— these three figures in the darkest part of the subway, two huddled on the bench in conversation, one before it, the agony of his body pure sculpture—I knew immediately he was homeless, standing in almost a dance, aimlessness in his body giving it a shape invested solely in standing, a heavy leaning on one leg more than the other, his being there was the only thing, it seemed, he would ever need to do— youth, working, having a goal, gone forever. I was shocked that this was what art looked like, and, for a moment, I doubted art could go anywhere. How beautiful there was no money down here, these three had only the subway air and one another, outside, far above, it was bright and cold. Grimy clothes and decay were all they had, the woman, intensely old despite not being old, her conversation a humming engine, her meaning—as I passed, between the one standing and the other two— was lost like one of the sins in a passing Dante scene— all enveloped in a shade—except my decision— I was afraid to go too near the tracks. I swerved to the other side of him— for a moment I was in the middle of the painting and it was art no more; We were close to each other. I almost breathed them. The only thing I felt, as I climbed the filthy stairs to the next level, was joy at my observation—I had been accosted by the reality of Renaissance art. A poem on it would surely follow. I was glad to be gone.
The worst invasion is not understood as an invasion. While it is happening, and your mind is being destroyed, you thank your invaders—you even respect and admire them.
All have these stories, since it happens on an individual basis—it can be as mundane as taking bad advice, and the whole subject is, for the most part, quotidian. Glorifying the phenomenon (think of Homer and the Trojan Horse) isn’t necessary.
Take the following.
The close-reading of a 12-line Wallace Stevens poem published this week in the New York Times.
The author, A.O. Scott, late 50s, Harvard graduate, once a film reviewer, is “a critic at large for the [NY Times] Book Review.”
This essay is not meant to pick on Mr. Scott. He’s an articulate, sensitive, moderately-left-of-center, guy (enraged mobs of movie fans online made his film critic life uncomfortable) just doing his job.
The question is: why is everything which the Times ‘critic at large’ A.O. Scott says in this respectable close-reading, wrong?
Poetry needs criticism the way an important person needs a bodyguard or an agent.
Poetry doesn’t walk the world alone—we find it in certain venues—books, classrooms, newspapers, magazines. It doesn’t just get there by itself.
Criticism of the visual arts (painting, film) is a humble pursuit—criticism of a piece of art, and the piece of art itself, the words and the object, live separately; we never confuse the two. The art critic may fume and vent and rage, but art criticism lives below, and in honor (to at least some extent) of the art.
Poetry and Criticism—because they are both made of words—can start to look alike.
The bodyguard can become the poetry it guards.
The agent talking a good game can, in effect, replace the poetry itself.
The poetry—Shakespeare, or Wallace Stevens—is but a name. Today’s critics crawl about and live inside it.
The critic-parasites adore their host—and why not? it is how they live.
If you are an unknown poet and your poem contradicts itself, this is bad.
But to the parasite-critic—who is now Wallace Stevens—a poem by Wallace Stevens which contradicts itself is good.
Everything about Wallace Stevens is good—to the parasite critic.
And further, the parasite critic can say whatever they want in the name of Wallace Stevens—and this becomes the new, good Wallace Stevens.
This is the Invasion—in case you were wondering.
This is more than just a well-meaning attempt to make poetry great again—now that poetry has lost its public and 99% of poetry readers are poets who read only if it’s understood that one day they, in turn, will be read: I’ll love you if you love me.
No, this is really the end.
Poetry steps quietly (with its proper name) into your classrooms, your newspapers and your houses, with impeccable letters of introduction. It greets you with a faint smile.
Welcome it. Don’t be afraid!
The Wallace Stevens (and his little poem) of A.O. Scott can do no wrong.
A.O. Scott, with just enough education, dryly impersonates Wallace Stevens or, one could say it is A.O. Scott using his imagination—a good thing in general—for a bad end: saying whatever he (A.O. Scott) feels like, in the name of Wallace Stevens.
Here, then, in full, is the New York Times piece by A.O. Scott.
~
What Happens When We Die? This Poem Has Thoughts.
A.O. Scott contemplates the great unknown in Wallace Stevens’s “A Mere Being.”
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Of Mere Being
The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
The first thing to notice is the calm, plain clarity of the language.
The poem’s dozen lines encompass a series of statements rendered in familiar, ordinary words — with one notable exception at the end.
Whoever is speaking seems to be saying exactly what they mean, without ornament or rhetoric.
But what is being said? The second thing to notice is that this poem, for all its lucidity, is difficult. It floats away from our attempts at understanding.
The words shift from concrete imagery to abstraction and back again. A picture is being painted, and at the same time an idea is being explored, though seeing and thinking are not easy to tell apart.
Which are we doing in those opening lines? We’re told we are in a place where mental activity has ceased, as if there were a physical boundary inside us beyond which all we know is what we see. In this case a tree with a bird in it.
Are we dreaming? Dying?
The atmosphere suggests a tropical sunset.
It seems wrong to suppose that the bird is a figment of our imagination, but what else could it be? What kind of bird is this? What is it doing in our heads?
Singing, which is what birds in poems tend to do. Most bird poems exploit the similarity between birdsong and poetry. A bird and a bard are kindred spirits.
But not here: This song is alien, inhuman, incomprehensible.
This bird has nothing to do with us, means nothing to us and therefore has no bearing on our state of mind.
Once we are told this, we — the “you” the poem is addressing — disappear from the landscape, and the already austere syntax flattens out even further.
The last four lines of the poem consist of five blunt sentences that seem to do nothing except state what is.
They also brazenly contradict what came before. We have been told explicitly, definitively, that this bird and its scenery cannot stir in us an aesthetic response.
Having insisted on that, the poem sets out to provoke such a response. It coaxes us to see the glint of the bird’s plumage and to feel the movement of the breeze in the palm fronds.
Or rather, to marvel at the words that convey those effects. In case we had forgotten, the last line reminds us where we are: in a poem.
~
Here is the dictatorship of ‘critical license’ which developed during the 20th century—as the university aparatus caged the wild, winged horse. A.O. Scott of the Times has the patter down. Any gentleman, practicing his profession of modern university instructor, draws great strength from modern writing while winning over his prisoner audience of young students in just this manner. The poetry becomes a dead body in which rhetoric breeds. Bacteria multiplies. Poetry is its food. This is how it’s done. “The bird has nothing to do with us…the already austere syntax flattens out even further…seems to do nothing but state what is…brazenly contradicts what came before…we have been told explicitly…this bird and its scenery cannot stir in us an aesthetic response…having insisted on that, the poem sets out to provoke such a response…to see…the bird’s plumage…or rather, to marvel at the words…in case we had forgotten, the last line reminds us where we are: in a poem.” Here is the close-reading Frankenstein monster of the New Criticism in all its twisted glory. [To marvel at… the words!] Most will be vaguely impressed by such rhetoric, maybe even thinking it is brilliant analysis. This is all that’s necessary for the professor to triumph. The invasion succeeds. One in ten readers may see it for what it is: an invasive weed, a tumor, an army of devils, a lecture by Margaret Fuller. But what can the one in ten do? The locust swarm carries the day.
~
A poem is the only place we would ever encounter such bold alliteration …
… and sly rhyming.
Not to mention an obsolete word that Webster’s defines as “a silly or fantastic contrivance.” Only a poet would indulge such a verbal fangle.
And perhaps only this poet could convey us so serenely to the edge of consciousness, and past it.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
~
Wallace Stevens has a mind! It’s alive! A.O. Scott—dressed as Wallace Stevens—has entered your apartment, mauled your kittens, kicked over your furniture, raided your fridge, and can raise all the hell he wants—in the name of Wallace Stevens. “The first thing to notice,” he says at the beginning of the piece, “is the calm, plain clarity of the language,” as if this is something which needs to be pointed out and is somehow special. How many non-verse poems (and even verse poems) have calm, plain clarity of language? One hundred million? Scott goes on to tell us the poem is “difficult” and the last four lines of the poem “brazenly contradict what came before.” Scott’s rhetoric seems to be designed for one purpose only: Wallace Stevens can do anything he wants. He will contradict himself anytime he feels like it. Don’t mess with Wallace Stevens! The bird is real or not real if Wallace Stevens says it is, got it? The bird is not singing for us and therefore it is not real but maybe it is real, see? Tread lightly around the master! And bring him/me another beer! A.O. Scott talks to his readers as if they were children. This is how poetry and poetry criticism moves in—and takes over your life. Scott now drifts into biography:
~
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
The poem is a vision, and also an argument. Its subject is the bare fact of existence. If you had to strip life to its minimum, this is what it might look like.
~
Wallace Stevens’ minor lyric poem is everything in the universe to A.O. Scott. It’s a “vision.” But it’s also an “argument.” And it’s “the bare fact of existence!” Run down the street and buy me some cigarettes! And make it snappy! And oh, by the way, “if you had to strip life to its minimum, this is what it might look like.” By now you are too terrified to object. The invasion is complete.
~
There’s nothing “mere” about it. Reality is a layered, elusive phenomenon.
It’s not only that we can’t always distinguish between the world and our representations of it — between actual birds and the ones in poems — but also that our imaginations, by reproducing reality, augment it.
“The greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world,” Stevens wrote in an earlier, longer poem. But he insisted that our mental worlds are just as real. The ground truth of our being is that we dwell simultaneously in both realms, and as long as we are alive they are both inexhaustible, with new combinations and crossings awaiting our discovery.
~
Again (and this is good), Wallace Stevens contradicts himself: “the greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world” “But he insisted that our mental worlds are just as real.” I’m sure he did! A.O. Scott blurts out (almost as if he were a genius, like Wallace Stevens) —as he stretches out on your couch—, these immortal words: “The ground truth of our being is that we dwell simultaneously in both realms, and as long as we are alive, they are both inexhaustible…” A.O. Scott! Who needs Wallace Stevens? Let the man who has turned into Wallace Stevens use your shower and let him stay in the shower for as long as he likes. You go, man!
~
That is a lovely, fundamentally hopeful notion, but a sigh of melancholy echoes through the poem.
“Of Mere Being” is one of the last things Stevens wrote, possibly his final poem. It was published after his death, in 1955, and can be read as both a summary and a farewell.
For us, it’s a reminder that our remarkable good fortune — to be able to listen to the songs of birds who don’t care about us and poets who do — is finite. We cherish our season in the shade of that palm because we know it will end. That ending is the one thing that lies beyond our imagination.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
~
So ends his piece. A.O. Scott fails to inform us that Wallace Stevens had his daughter baptized in the Episcopal Church. Stevens converted to Catholicism before his death. That’s not important, because that’s not the Wallace Stevens Scott wants us to see, as he implies, without evidence, that this poem is Stevens’ last and is specifically about how life ends in oblivion. According to Scott, we can invent “a tree with a bird in it” which doesn’t exist but, shades of Dante Alighieri! life’s “ending is the one thing that lies beyond our imagination.”Note carefully how this is done. Wallace Stevens (whoever he is) has become A.O. Scott, humming smoothly in the professional, New Criticism, machine of the esteemed New York Times.Your life is not your own.
JON STONE ESSAY ON FACEBOOK MARCH 19, 2026 —with SCARRIET REPLIES, DISCUSSIONWITH JON
What is a ‘bad’ poem exactly?
(Another Substack essay — link to the Substack here)
1.
In the simplest terms, a bad poem is either (a) missing something fundamental or (b) possessed of something that offends a sensibility.
The problems with this understanding should be immediately apparent. What, after all, is truly fundamental to an artform which has gone through so many phases and fashions, evolved into so many sub-strains — where the contemporary critics of now-revered figures so often appear, in retrospect, to be foolishly fixated on long-discarded scruples? All attempts to identify the single essential technical quality that any poem must possess seem doomed to ridicule.
And what weight can we reliably place on the fact that we are, in one way or another, offended? I use the word ‘offended’ pointedly. There are those who would like to differentiate sharply between a purely aesthetic offence — a perceived fault in the artistry of a piece — and an offence of impropriety. For reasons I will go on to explore, this is not a viable distinction.
For now, though, I merely observe that while most people seem to agree that a tremendous quantity of bad poems exist, there is desperately little consensus on how one might go about identifying one.
2.
There are two opposing existential threats to any artform: on the one hand, “anything goes”; on the other, “hardly anything goes”.
In the first case, the definitional boundaries of what constitutes worthwhile examples of the form become so loose that it is no longer associated with any kind of skill or use of technique. Poets have some reason to fear this — the general public’s ability to differentiate between the work of an experienced practitioner and an absolute beginner (or even the last generation of LLMs’ instantaneous output) may be at an all-time low.
In the second case, the qualifying restrictions are either so abstruse or so lofty that almost no range or innovation is permitted, and the art form recedes into itself as it becomes ever more disconnected from people’s lives. (Poets have reason to fear this too).
Arguments about the quality of poems are frequently unproductive because one side views the other as representative of the “anything goes” camp, while the other consider their opponents to belong to the “hardly anything goes” faction. It is depressingly rare for a conversation to involve any substantial unravelling of the precise criteria anyone is using.
3.
I thoroughly enjoyed Harry Cochrane’s scathing review of David Harsent’s Skin in the latest issue of The Little Review. An extract:
Do you like it? Me neither. As a standalone piece, ‘Sub Rosa’ might have found some kind of pungent identity. But by this point, on page 143 of a 193-page book in which there are no standalone pieces, the reader has long been bludgeoned into despair …
It’s a relief when a critic cuts loose like this in response to a book that is elsewhere being spoken of in tones of strained awe. But let’s be honest: it’s trivially easy to adopt this pose, or something like it, with almost any poet or book, and appear discerning. Cochrane lends gravity to his judgement by including some measured analysis of the technical features of Harsent’s poem, but this too is within the reach of any talented English graduate. The positive effects of reading (or listening to) poetry are rarely, if ever, undeniable; it requires some exercise of the reader’s skill to access them — a politeness that may be silently withheld. At the same time, almost every poet will possess tics and habits that are liable to be irritating, while those they don’t can be accused of excruciating dullness.
Without casting any aspersions on Cochrane, then, (contributors to TLR are encouraged to be brief), no great powers of perception are required in order to accuse an Emperor of being naked. It may involve a certain degree of bravery if the poet or their friends have the means to exact revenge on you, but it does not automatically equate to the critic applying a higher-than-normal standard.
4.
The idea of “judging a poem on its own merits” is almost meaningless. A poem’s merits are inextricable from its context — or rather, the reader’s apprehension of that context. The same words in the same order have a different effect and meaning depending on whether they constitute, for example, (i) the work of an established poet reiterating or refining ideas they are known for originating, (ii) an account of or response to real-life events, (iii) an anonymous competition entry encountered after reading dozens of similarly worded poems, (iii) a case of cut-and-dried plagiarism, (iv) the newly uncovered jottings of Jeffrey Epstein, and so on.
Some of these contextual factors can be temporarily negated, or purposefully ignored by the reader, but not all of them. They are innumerable. Most are subtle, impossible to describe or account for. Where it is claimed that a poem is “judged on its own merits” we may generously assume that the person or organisation making the claim means to make an effort to ignore or negate contextual factors that might tip the scales too decisively one way or the other — for example by putting firmly out of mind any strong personal feelings toward an individual or their previous work.
Less generously, we may assume they mean to make no such effort, and considerate it sufficient that no individual factor will be consciously weighed. Our judgement will be fair, they assure us, because our notions of merit are so deeply instilled that we are not even aware where they come from. Which brings me onto:
5.
In general, people who claim their judgement of art is not influenced by politics or ideology are those with a desire to conceal the extent to which politics and ideology influence their judgement of art — very possibly from themselves. They may, with some justification, regard any judgement which is both knowingly and heavily informed by a stipulated political goal to be weak and narrow-minded. They are reluctant, therefore, to understand and express the ways their own ideological commitments steer their thinking, for fear of admitting a limitation they despise in others.
5.
One of the ways a conscious effort is made to scrub political (and other contextual) factors from the critical processes of those afraid of admitting to inherent partiality is by assessing a poem on the basis of similarity in form and feel to other well-respected poems. This is a sort of ideological money laundering operation; the reader/critic claims politics and personal favour never entered their mind, and further that the stature or antiquity of the poetry used as measuring stick puts it beyond politics. (The latter is a bad claim, of course, but certainly the more distant a poem is from a contemporary political milieu, the more work is involved in articulating how the two are connected.)
The secondary effect of this approach, conveniently, is to make the criteria for a good poem almost circular. A good poem is one that sits neatly alongside other good poems; a bad poem is one that deviates. This is an excellent entrenchment from which to open fire at all those who dare to put forward alternative criteria — criteria which might then be adopted by those less familiar with all the ‘good poems’. Which brings me onto:
6.
Power and authority are at stake when we talk about what makes a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ poem. This is what animates much of the discourse. Without power and authority, the critical judgement of poetry experts has no answer to the popular appeal of Insta-poems and other money-spinning media forms — they are reduced to customers reviewing niche products.
But power and authority is hard-won; genuinely illuminating, convincing evaluations of individual poems and books take time to muster. Meanwhile, there is the constant need to promote interest in those same poems and books, as well as related events.
So shortcuts are taken. Agreement among a small and insular group is presented as widespread consensus. Authority is extended far beyond its natural purview, as when a poet who is successful and well-liked among his coterie, but limited in range, makes pronouncements on the state of the whole scene. Bad poems need to be invented, and need to vastly outnumber good ones, in order for the authoritative critic to have a function. What’s more, the criteria must remain somewhat hazy in order to avoid the average reader learning how to consistently apply it themselves. Periodic trenchant denunciations of work that, to the untrained eye, is remarkably similar in character to that which the same critic praises are a smart move.
By the same token, the real offence committed by those editors and activists who rule out work by avowed political reactionaries, or are overly interested in poets’ claims to membership of an oppressed group is that their criteria are too transparent. They make it too easy to jump through the hoops, and in so doing threaten to mortally wound the power of other editors and critics — which is wielded on the basis that they possess an exceptional capability when it comes to judging poems.
7.
The Worst Poets Club — a touring venture consisting of four best-selling ‘bad’ poets — is set to capitalise magnificently on the inability of the UK poetry community to reflect with much lucidity on its own processes of judgement, such that any criticism of a popular poet can be instantly recast as peevish snobbery. Rebecca Watts’ infamous 2018 article on one of these ‘bad’ poets, ‘The Cult of the Noble Amateur’, is notable in part because Watts was not in any way stepping out of her wheelhouse. She had been asked to review a book. The publisher of the book was well-known for applying, in its selection process, a stricter version of the very critical standards Watts brought to bear in her review. Her confusion was evident; why had Picador’s poetry editor, Don Paterson, entirely rowed back on the values he had previously both vociferously advocated and put into practice whilst in a position of tremendous influence? Paterson’s claim, in a response piece in The Guardian? “I changed my mind.” “I’m not paid to indulge the narrower of my own preferences,” he added.
Now retired from that role, Paterson is back to railing against the state of poetry, suggesting that much of it is nowhere near good enough to be published. This would seem to be an expression of, in his own words, the narrower of his own preferences. And yet, when sternly lecturing publications that wish to disassociate themselves entirely from the ‘gender critical’ movement, he condemns their “refusal to countenance any diversity of viewpoint”. He detests, he says, all ideologies. The effect of his own preferences, were they applied, would place far greater restrictions on diversity of viewpoint than the decisions of the editors he takes issue with. How is that not the true measure of ideological narrow-mindedness?
***
SCARRIET The problem we really face is this: the sensibility Jon and almost everyone, really, is defending is: “I want to be surprised by my liking something. I don’t want anyone else to tell me (especially not in some doctrinal, critical manner,) that a poem is bad or good.” This, in a nutshell, is Jon’s plea, and I would agree with it wholeheartedly, except there’s one problem. We’re not capable of being ‘suprised.’ We have made up our minds for a very long time about what we like and what we don’t (to an extent we will never admit). The “hardly anything goes” school, is the one Jon (as I understand him) fears the most, and I love this school. It is represented most singularly by Poe, the most reviled and hopelessly crude and “old-fashioned” Critic to every modern since Eliot (who very secretly admired him) and Pound (who dared not speak of him). Poe was correct. There are so many pitfalls which condemn a poem before one even begins it, that it does warrant the poet NOT to be surprised in his own process before that process even begins (follow a Method) if there is any chance to pleasurably surprise the reader at the very end of the process, randomness, of course, being the ultimate enemy. This takes work. Poe worked. He was poor, but he really was a working journalist/poet. (He wasn’t subsidized by a university. He routinely offended people.) The most obvious difference between Poe and Jon is this: Poe (go look at his reviews and his criticism) was always quoting poetry to support what he said. His theory lived and sailed aloft, but it was never for a moment far from examples. I see clearly what Jon says, but honestly he is really saying nothing. (Honestly, the emperor has no clothes.) Jon gives no examples. Let’s SEE a ‘bad’ poem and a ‘good’ poem (in your opinion)—is this too much to humbly ask?
Jon Stone –I don’t fear the ‘hardly anything goes’ school, but I have little interest in its variations, which are all equally boring, negligent and navel-gazing. There’s no reconciliation to be had with them, or between them, because their only recourse is a belligerent circular logic: “This is good because I like it and I like it because it’s good”, dressed up in so many flavours.
I’m interested in why different people value and enjoy what they value and enjoy in poetry, which is inevitably bound up in all kinds of subjective expectations and personal needs. I’m also interested in why they dislike what they dislike. Actually, I’d go further than “I’m interested” — I would say this is really the only kind of public interest literary criticism serves beyond drawing attention to something in the first place: to lay bear the processes by which we arrive at certain judgements and understandings of literary works.
The problem, therefore, with just telling me that a poem is good or bad is that it’s a deliberate concealment of these processes — a pretence that the critic’s judgement is a mere act of expert recognition, like the quality-testing of a vehicle, and nothing to do with the their prior sympathies, emotional investments and personal experiences.
SCARRIET But Jon, don’t you see your own ‘circular reasoning?’ You assume subjective “variations,” as you call them, are automatically interesting because “different people” value and enjoy them—yet your “variations” of the “hardly anything goes” school (which you say you don’t fear—I don’t believe you) are, as you explicitly declare, “all equally boring, negligent and navel-gazing.” Do you seriously believe the wise don’t see what you’re doing here?
Jon Stone —That’s not circular reasoning. The “hardly anything goes” schools are also subjective variations and their actual processes of judgement are also of interest. The problem is that they cover them up. The rationale they offer is a blockade — it’s boring, negligent and navel-gazing because it represents an aversion to genuine self-reflection. It’s like having an argument with an obviously angry person who won’t tell you what’s really bothering them but insists they are disinterestedly enforcing an arcane regulation.
SCARRIET Jon, you are choosing to characterize a person of a particular school (their subjective feelings assigning poetry narrower parameters than yours) as “boring” and “obviously angry.” Where is the good faith you advertised a short time ago, where you said you were “interested” in what moved “different people” to this or that enjoyment of poetry based on their subjective feelings? Surely, you can’t believe the “different people” of the “hardly anything goes” school have any sort of “objective” advantage—that would fly in the face of your whole philosophy. Why, then, aren’t you “interested” in their subjective feelings? Why are you so quick now to attack (in your subjective view, and rather harshly and definitively) these other subjective views? I’m sure you know this passage from Keats and you fancy that this is basically what you are saying:
“The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law and precepts, but by sensation & watchfulness itself. That which is creative must create itself—in Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksand, & the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.”
You and I, I am guessing, both celebrate this passage. But this is what I mentioned before: In Poe’s day, examples abounded. Here we have an example: Keats’ own Endymion. In discussing things like “hardly anything goes” and what makes a “bad poem?” it seems to me to shrink from actually naming or quoting works which we really believe are “good” or “bad” is highly disingenuous. I know you’ve said it’s unfortunately easy to mock even good poems. I still don’t think that’s an excuse.
Jon Stone —As I said in my previous reply, I *am* interested in their subjective feelings. I *am* interested in why they like certain things and do not like certain other things.
What I’m not interested in is an unwillingness to acknowledge, to examine or attempt to honestly articulate those feelings — which is all too often evident in sweeping proclamations about what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ poetry.
SCARRIET But the “sweeping” can be “subjective.” You are trying to have your cake and eat it. You are kind to every peasant, except the ones you rebuke for asking “oh, and how is the king?”
Jon Stone —I’ll give you a partial example. Here is a piece by Rory Waterman which is broadly arguing that some poems he likes are good and others he dislikes are bad, though he doesn’t use those words.
Now, he does articulate his reasoning here, to some extent. The problem is that it doesn’t add up, and so can’t be a true representation of his processes of judgement. He says that what he admires is poems with “a huge, knotty tension at their heart”, and he lists examples of poems which he believes qualify. But ‘a huge, knotty tension at their heart’ is not a high bar. Not all poems have them; still, a great many do. This can’t be the sole reason these poems make him want to laugh, or cry.
What’s more, I don’t believe that the ‘Good Person’ poems he takes aim at in the article universally miss this mark. He suggests that they necessarily do because their authors are chiefly concerned with avoiding being ‘problematic’, and because audiences are applauding them for articulating the concerns of a wider community. We don’t know which specific poems or poets he’s taking aim at, but it doesn’t follow that you can’t write crowd-pleasing political poetry without tension at the heart of it.
It also doesn’t work to make the presence of this tension an absolute rule — or are we saying ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ is no good because it’s intended to be a rabble-rousing anthem?
So really, we don’t get much of a sense from this piece of how he differentiates between what is worthwhile and what isn’t, except by reading between the lines (as many readers of this piece did) and concluding that he has biases against certain demographics.
SCARRIET Thank you, Jon, I’ll read this right away. Before I do: a Critic, it seems to me, can only do two things: Close-reading, leading to definitive conclusions on whether a particular poem/ passage is good or bad. Or, virtue-signal.
Rory Waterman’s piece at least gives me something to chew on. He prefers vulgar poems to pleasant ones.
Is Taste valid for deciding whether a poem is good or bad?
Robert Penn Warren published an essay (1942) in the Kenyon Review “Pure and Impure Poetry,” in which he argued against the “purity” of Shelley and the (tasteful) Romantics (“hardly anything goes”) and for the impurity of Modernism (“anything goes.”)
That war is over and “anything goes” won—now we’re left with minor skirmishes.
I think Rory Waterman is an example, deriding the virtuous poem in first-person.
This has happened before, when Byron mocked Wordsworth. The vulgar lord mocked the thoughtful tree-lover.
An interesting twist (for me, anyway) is that Poe mocked Wordsworth, as well (“Does Willie love a sheep? I love a sheep from the bottom of my heart!”) yet Poe held the interesting position that Taste is not only valid in judging poetry, Taste is the heart of poetry, occupying the middle ground between Passion (vulgarity) on one side and Truth (science) on the other. Truth belongs to prose and science, Passion belongs to prose and dirty limericks. Poetry, in the middle, can borrow (tastefully) from either side, but there, in the middle, it sits, representing Taste (and all we equate with it—delicacy, beauty, refinement, tact, layered expression, proportion, perspective, romantic love, etc.)
I agree with you that Rory doesn’t succeed in saying what a good poem is (if I hear one more person complain about first-person…good grief, what’s wrong with first-person??) but isn’t he simply saying what he likes, sans pretense? The Larkin poem he picks is one of Larkin’s worst poems (“Love Again”) and the Tony Harrison poem “V” is too lengthy and too vulgar. Here I’m perhaps revealing my “hardly anything goes” bias, as Poe did, when he said Paradise Lost was too long to be what we can physically experience as a “poem,” and, therefore, not a poem, but a succession of short ones. In defense of the “hardly anything goes” school, what it really is doing is NOT saying what we don’t think is a poem should not exist—it can, and even should exist—but the real harm is when the popular taste rejects (aborts) the loveliness of the true poem, which deserves, I think, its defenders, too.
Let me just add, Jon, that Keats also mocked Wordsworth (see Keats’ sonnet “House of Mourning”) in which Keats says to W: “ha ha ha Dover? How can you write a poem on Dover?”
Waterman’s ascribing “moral complexity” to mere vulgarism aside (the vulgar is NOT necessarily “morally complex”), the true nub of the matter isn’t expressed by minor poets today but what poets said in the 19th century, when “hardly anything goes” was still a thing. You, Jon, would cry out in pain if you had to write like the “hardly anything goes” Keats (or Wordsworth.) But listen, this is highly significant, highly illustrative: there’s a far greater difference between the “hardly anything goes” Keats and the “hardly anything goes” Wordsworth than between any of the millions of “anything goes” poets today.
Jon Stone —“That war is over and “anything goes” won—now we’re left with minor skirmishes.”
You’re committing the error I identify in my essay here; ‘anything goes’ didn’t win. Hardly anyone believes ‘anything goes’ in poetry. Instead, what inevitably happens is that none of the ‘hardly anything goes’ people agree on what the ‘hardly anything’ is. They splinter off into a hundred factions and write their little screeds to an ever-shrinking circle of people.
Poetry can survive this as long as it still has a strong grip on the popular imagination, so it doesn’t much matter that Keats mocked Dover, or Byron thought Keats should be put to death — though all these positions look melodramatic and silly with the benefit of hindsight. But today, the fact that you and Rory Waterman both believe you’re being sensibly exacting and precise, but neither of you really know how the other arrived at their conclusions — that’s a problem we really should be able to get past, with a little bit of thorough introspection.
SCARRIET But Jon, aren’t you throwing the entire burden on me (and your “hardly anything goes” enemies)? Where is your responsibility in all this? Where is your “anything goes” poetry or criticism—to reveal the truth, that we might all be enlightened? (Why didn’t Keats and Byron and Wordsworth “splinter” into “obscurity?” Despite the fact that they were so different—are you asserting Keats, Wordsworth and Byron were NOT wildly different and all quite worthy, too?)
I’m a bit befuddled by your quixotic, modern quest. I think you are, too. And I’m guessing you’ll defend yourself when I ask you to come up with the “anything goes” goods and save the world, by saying, “well, that’s not the point—I don’t think there is any truth, I just want to play nice with my friends” and then OMG Jon, we’re back to square one. And never mind the dilemma that “anything goes” poetry DID win but there’s one great existential problem with that victory—any “anything goes” poem, because it is ONE poem, can NEVER really express the true vastness of “anything goes.”
Jon Stone —My responsibility is the same as yours: to try to understand and explain my own processes of judgement, to use criticism as an opportunity to lay them bare, so that others might better see how I come to value what I value, or find fault where I find fault — rather than just proclaiming, in one way or another, that something is good or bad. Also to reflect on these and consider when I’m rushing to judgement, or should look harder. I fully admit that the pieces I post here that discuss the problem at a high level of generality haven’t got onto that yet — though I am making a conscious effort in my reviews, which I’ve been publishing at a very modest rate over the last few years.
SCARRIET Thank you, Jon. Wonderful discussion. I’ll reproduce your essay and our conversation as a piece of its own on my blog, Scarriet. Final note. Don’t fear “proclamations.” Oscar Wilde made pithy “proclamations” on subjects and the greatest minds would swoon. You work in academia— where resolving an issue with an epigram is considered bad taste, perhaps even rude. Long discussions and essays by the thousands are the rule. (Professors need to be paid!) But oh life is short—and none feels this more acutely, perhaps, than the poet. I hear that “hardly anything goes” in the beautiful silence of the grave.
In 1979, mainstream legacy news reporters were on that plane with Khomeini flying in from ‘gay paree,’ even though (unbelievable) Khomeini and his tribesmen had been murdering the Shah’s prime ministers since the 1950s. The Shah himself survived a shooting in the face. Khomeini was kicked out of Iran by the Shah in 1964 for being wretchedly intolerant of the rights of women. The “coup” narrative (1953) repeated by Obama in his apology tour is 100% fabricated (Iran had no “democracy” overturned by the U.S. and the Shah. There is NOTHING true about this) spun by MI6 (who was bossing around the CIA). Britain owned Iran’s oil and that deal was scheduled to end in (wow)…1979.
An Iranian online responded to me recently saying Mossadegh, the Shah’s prime minister, (at the center of the 1953 U.S. “coup” story) was an MI6 agent and the whole thing was a psyop. I gathered fundamental facts on my own—that Mossadegh was appointed by the Shah (which was the law), he was not “democratically elected” (except by a vote in parliament) and there was no “democratic government” in Iran that was overthrown by the U.S. The Shah merely fired Mossadegh, as was his right. The Shah wanted oil independence for his country, too. Mossadegh made the cover of Time, he was a celebrity, but the British had no intention of relinquishing their oil rights and the British didn’t even like the idea that the U.S. was sticking its nose in the Middle East. The U.S. had tons more oil than Britain (TX, PA, etc) and the British knew the U.S. could be a sincere friend of Iran’s, at least compared to London, which depended on Tehran’s oil. Anyway, a little detective work on my own and I could tell the 1953 “coup” story was fake. Yet the fake “coup” story has been repeated so many times if you ask AI today, it will repeat the fake “coup” story like it’s gospel. AI merely leaves out the few facts I found. One really needs to do one’s own research. Don’t take anyone’s word for something politically or historically—no matter how much you agree with them in general. I did not know Mossadegh was an MI6 agent, but knowing what I already know, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
*****
The following story which I happened to see online is gigantic. The British Empire at work, the greatest secret underwriters of war in history, caught red-handed supporting the terrorist regime of Iran (Britain essentially owned Iran’s oil for decades) against the liberation efforts of the United States, attempting to tank the world’s economy in the process, old reputable Lloyd’s of London (where ex-pat culture maven TS Eliot happened to work, friend of U.S. traitor Ezra Pound) by refusing to insure maritime commerce, defied by Trump—to the rescue! (Trump demonized by this same Anglo-American Deep State in the press, leading to acute TDS). Yikes! Liberals don’t even understand issues like this.
Here is the Lloyd’s story as Rita tells it:
Rita Chalfant – “Yesterday, I explained how seven insurance firms in London shut down one-fifth of the world’s oil supply.Today, Trump may have just made the most aggressive sovereign insurance play in modern history.Here’s what happened and why it matters:Trump ordered the U.S. Development Finance Corporation to immediately offer political risk insurance and guarantees to all maritime trade through the Gulf. Especially energy. Backed by Navy escorts if needed.Read that through the lens of what I described yesterday.The Strait didn’t close because of missiles. It closed because the insurance market collapsed. P&I clubs pulled coverage, reinsurers withdrew, and the entire commercial shipping architecture froze.This move doesn’t address the military problem. It addresses the actuarial one.The DFC is stepping into the void that Lloyd’s and the London reinsurance market created when they pulled out. The U.S. government is effectively saying: we will underwrite what the private market won’t.No sovereign has attempted to replace the global marine war risk market in real time during an active conflict. Here’s why the structural implications are significant:1. It challenges Lloyd’s dominance.For centuries, London has been the center of gravity for marine insurance. Lloyd’s and its reinsurers controlled pricing, terms, and risk appetite for global shipping.That concentration is exactly what made the actuarial blockade possible. A handful of firms in one city froze global oil flows.The DFC offering competitive political risk coverage to all shipping lines is a direct challenge to that architecture. If American-backed insurance proves cheaper and more reliable during crises, shippers may not return to London when the dust settles.2. It breaks the actuarial blockade.I said yesterday that China has massive leverage over Iran but zero leverage over Lloyd’s. The same was true of every oil-producing and oil-consuming nation watching their economies choke.This goes around the insurance market entirely. If the DFC covers the voyage and the Navy escorts the tanker, the ships sail. Oil flows. The spreadsheet blockade breaks.3. It redirects billions in premium revenue.War risk premiums in the Gulf are currently running at extreme multiples — 3× to 5× pre-conflict rates. Those premiums were flowing to London reinsurers who then pulled coverage anyway.Now those premiums flow to Washington. At rates the DFC can set below the panicked London market, while still generating substantial returns. The same shippers get cheaper coverage. The revenue just changes continents.4. It creates a chokepoint within the chokepoint.The Strait of Hormuz is already the world’s most critical energy bottleneck. If the U.S. is both insurer and naval escort, America controls access at two levels: physical security and financial coverage.No other nation can replicate that. You need the world’s dominant navy and a sovereign balance sheet large enough to backstop the risk. Only one country has both.5. It reassures every stakeholder simultaneously.Gulf producers were watching exports freeze. Asian and European consumers were watching energy prices spike. Both feared the Iran campaign would wreck their economies.One announcement addressed all of them: your oil will move, your ships will be covered, and the rates will be reasonable.Yesterday I described a system with no TARP, no Fed equivalent, no backstop at global scale.This may be the first attempt to build one in real time, during the crisis itself.The actuarial blockade just met a sovereign counterparty.”
*****
I hit a roadblock discussing politics with my brother recently—we have been on a casual email chat with Mike, an old HS chum. Ready to give up in despair, I made one last attempt recently—speaking to my brother in a way I hope will break the impasse somewhat. We were getting kind of impatient with each other (politics!). Do you think this will help?
It’s really quite simple and let us not be swayed or distracted: life is difficult and a struggle (I remember my mom always said that).
But there is, unfortunately, evil in the world (or, one could say, in the Christian sense, the “world is evil” or “worldly or prideful concerns are owned by the devil.”
We need to face the fact: the world is not only a struggle in the normal sense, it is made worse because there is evil in the world which makes this struggle more difficult, and more difficult mentally, emotionally, and in every sense, and most importantly, we will be deceived—and struggle against ourselves and our loved ones, sadly and ignorantly.
Let me give you an example which will make the whole thing clear. My example has more than one element. I beg your patience as I explain.
Yesterday I saw a brief video of King Charles and Camilla celebrating Ramadan (the highest Muslim holiday) this year, depicted as a lovely and positive act. As you know, the UK right now is officially welcoming Islam into its society. The king is strongly in favor of this, as well as the British government and they have said so explicitly. There has been quite a lot of pushback by the UK “natives” against this “invasion,” with claims of “rape, murder, and sexual grooming gangs” due entirely or in large part to this recent surge of immigration (the numbers are not small) with additional claims that the British police protect these “grooming gangs” and “invaders” and “criminals” in the name of fighting “islamaphobia.” Let’s assume both sides are right: we must fight racism, but immigration has the “natives” wondering “what is happening to our country?” Let’s just confine ourselves to this simple truth: King Charles is pro-Muslim and Andrew, brother to the king, is a convicted Epstein client.
Here is the other element of my example of how evil works or what evil is—and it works on scale (otherwise we couldn’t really call it “evil”) and to work “on scale” (to be widespread and historical) it needs to be repeatable and real (particular, specific, worldly, not merely abstract).
I am anti-British Empire (I believe in sovereign nation states not empires) and I am also pro-Israel (Judah is valid and ancient, Palestine was created by the Roman Empire—which persecuted the Jews—just some historical notes added quickly).
My brother Andy is anti-Israel. I don’t doubt that Andy has good reasons for being anti-Israel (no nation is perfect) just as my anti-British Empire position is flawed, since the British Empire has “done some good things.”
The point here is not to quibble about these particular positions Andy and I hold. I am trying to make a larger point about evil. I’m sure Andy does not like empires, either. Nor do I claim Israel is perfect. But to continue…
Andy thought it a perfectly valid argument to remind me (the anti-British Empire and pro-Israel guy) that “the British Empire created Israel” (Andy mentioned Lord Balfour).
OK, brilliant.
I retorted that Israel (as Judah) is older than the British Empire.
But here, in my definition of evil (which includes many historical actions by the British Empire) let me readily concede Andy’s point.
The British Empire did create (modern) Israel.
But we need to understand evil.
Let’s stop for a moment. What did the British Empire actually create when they created Israel? We need to think as evil thinks to understand this.
They created MORE than Israel, did they not?
Remember when I said that life is a struggle, but evil then makes that struggle worse (in profound and deceptive ways?).
Well here’s my point (and I hope a light goes on in your head, too, when you recall that King Charles is pro-Muslim—as Britain is today becoming more Muslim, in an atmosphere of turmoil in the middle and lower classes (while King Charles and his friends remain untouched in their palaces surrounded by miles of green lawns.)
The British Empire did not just “create Israel.” They created a relatively small, but powerful and legitimate entity, which fanned the hatred, stirred up, and united the Muslim world against an “enemy” in their midst.
The British Empire created more than just Israel.
British royalty is leaning Muslim (King Charles) and Epstein (ex-Prince Andrew). Iran, controlled by British interests (British Petroleum, the UK’s largest corporate entity, exists because of Iran) was handed off by MI6 working with the CIA and Jimmy Carter’s State Department (the “Anglo-American” Empire definitely has overlap with the British Empire) to the Ayatollahs, who took over from the modernizing, feminist, secularizing, Shah, and made child marriage permissible in Iran.
Evil has my brother and I fighting over issues with the British Empire and Israel. Evil has MAGA and the Left fighting over issues concerning Iran, Epstein, and pedophiles.
Why are we fighting? Because that’s what evil does—at scale. Life will always be a struggle, but it will be even worse if we don’t recognize how evil— specifically and intentionally, with actual people in high places, and “useful idiots” repeating the propaganda— makes that struggle for all of us still more horrible.
Andy pushed a dilemma in my face: Tommy you like Israel, but the British Empire, which you revile, created your beloved Israel.
I’m defeated and evil wins.
But wait, not so fast…
Let’s think things through.
As a famous English poet once recommended in a poem written for a college commencement speech:
“Take long views.”
******
And, as the temperatures increase, this arrives at our door:
Iran and Venezuela were gas stations for China. Iran needs to be free of that 47 year old mistake by Jimmy Carter. London (British Empire 2.0 Opium Wars Free Trade) is revenging itself against the U.S. geopolitically (yes they still haven’t forgotten 1776) with China. Beijing and then London will be the last to fall. Then the world will be free. The Epstein Files is a Democrat and a British Royal problem. Oppressed Iranians all over the world are telling liberals (the same ones who loved Khomeini in 1979 even after he was kicked out of Iran in 1964 as an anti-woman terrorist) to shut the fuck up. And well they should.
*****
The 1960s Open to the Public, People’s Revolution ended at a swanky election party on the upper west side in November 1972 (Nixon landslide) when John Lennon loudly had sex in the coat room with Yoko and others helplessly waiting outside to leave. A secretive, revolutionary, gaslighting Reaction has been underway ever since, powered by the Washington Post, Nixon’s impeachment, Carter’s nightmarish presidency, Oil shock, and giving Iran to white-washed, murderous, Ayatollah Khomeini. That Reaction is being destroyed under Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance, and other cabinet members (especially in trade and finance) at this very hour. Party’s done, boomers. Snuggle up with your warm milk and cookies and a nice book (All The President’s Men?) Time for something new—and a little more sane. The weird Follow-up to the 1960s is done.
He likes the medium—it doesn’t limit spontaneous texting’s word count.
Smart people like Thomas Brady roam FB, like the dinosaurs once roamed the earth, soon to be extinct, perhaps, since “doing” is eclipsing “thinking” at a record pace.
The pendulum is swinging away from Scarriet genius.
Poetry and pedagogy are about to become simple, again.
Modernism is nearly dead, thanks in part to Scarriet.
Enjoy this Zeitgeist moment while you can.
Let’s jump into a recent FB exchange (Thomas Brady comments on a stranger’s remarks) just the way it happened:
Maya Popa writes: Here’s something I believe to be true from my 14 years teaching writers: if you feel tremendous urgency to be a published poet, it’s usually not the writing of poetry that’s fueling that feeling, but the ego seeking relief from the stakes it feels are tied up with poetry.It’s counter-intuitive, but when you’re writing poems that matter deeply to you, when you’re deep in the generative/revision process, you often aren’t thinking at all about visibility (which feels like progress, but isn’t from a craft standpoint).It’s easy to get in the habit of constantly seeking publications, and that includes likes and re-shares of your poems on Substack. At best, it’s short-term validation. At worst, it can inform the subject, style, approach of what you write, as the “success” starts to shape what you even decide to write about in the first place.To write at our personal best—to discover what that might even look like or could mean to us—I think we need to be okay with being unseen and unrecognized for whatever we’re working on. To love, in fact, that time when the poem is solely our own, not to be in a rush to give it away. We have to let drafts fall uncomfortably short of our hopes for them, then sit with them as long as it takes our intuition and intelligence to guide them forward. We have to love that as much, if not more, than receiving external praise.When you next feel urgent or restless about your work, seriously slow down and ask yourself why. What are you telling yourself about it? What are you outsourcing to publication? What validation could you, in this very moment, offer yourself instead?
Thomas Brady: I disagree. There should never be this split. In fact, it’s healthy when the two (desire for readership and self-reflection) are fused. This does not mean one has to be a shallow careerist (I’m not). Inspired by the idea of being read does not need to inhibit the act of writing; it’s much better (and there’s less procrastination) when there is no bitterness and they do NOT inhibit each other, believe me.
Maya Poppa: hi! Didn’t say desire for readership; I noted specifically the desire to continuously submit work, often before it’s ready. Cheers!
Thomas Brady: I grant your distinction, but I think writing is closer to talking than we think. Imagine friendly conversation delayed because your friend sitting next to you wasn’t “ready.” Revision can happen on the run—the need “to be ready” probably destroys more writing than anything else. And how many books weary with their footnote thoroughness because the author took ten or fifteen years to “get ready.” And the book is utterly forgettable, even if praised for its bulk. The best songs are written in one sitting. Inspiration cannot wait. The talking was when we were ready but the writing never happened because we knew it not.
Here’s another conversation (clash?) between Thomas Brady of Scarriet and Christian Bök on AI and poetry.
First you can listen to the conversation between Anthony and Christian, the link below which Brady found on FB.
Listen to Episode 5 of “Fate of the Arts” (in which Anthony Etherin and I hang out, chatting about THE XENOTEXT and the impact of AI on the future of poetry). —CB
Enjoyed the discussion but the duality Bök articulates is moot. No choice is necessary between “emotions recollected in tranquility” and “negative capability,” between careful Wordsworth and ecstatic Keats. Bök went so far as to assert that it’s “impossible” to write poetry from the self’s “truthful experience” and in the grip of “present feelings,” simultaneously. I found this a very puzzling assertion, since writing presupposes the freedom of the poet to manage a poem’s composition in any manner which strikes the poet’s fancy—the indirect quality of any poem must be assumed to exist, simply on account of the nature of language, on the nature of poetry and on the poet’s freedom already alluded to. That indirect quality necessitates a hidden intent—is the Wordsworthian “telling of his story” sincere? That question can only be answered by biography—which is not the discipline of the poem. AI has no Wordsworthian biography, which makes Bök’s heralded division irrelevant to AI poetry, but we can’t demand less of AI poetry. This isn’t fair, especially if, going forward, we are supposed to take AI seriously (and Bök is nothing if not enthusiastic on the potential of AI poetry). Bök, it seems, wants to have his cake and eat it, too. According to Bök, AI has infinite potential as a poet. But, also according to Bök, human poets are limited by aesthetic (Wordsworth v Keats) constraints. No. The very opposite is true. The human poets will always surpass AI poetry precisely because constraints (variety, not just obstacles) exist for human poets (Wordsworth v Keats is not random—it has real sources)—which are—thru creativity and variety itself—overcome.
Christian Bök responds:
You’ve misconstrued the distinction: the dialectic in Romanticism arises between two types of “expressive” poetry (the Wordsworthian models) and two types of “non-expressive” poetry (the Keatsian models). In the Wordsworthian models of the “egotistical sublime,” poetry is either “emotion recollected in tranquility” (i.e. “cognitive”: self-conscious and self-assertive) or “the spontaneous outburst of feeling (i.e. “rhapsodic”: not self-conscious, but self-assertive). In the Keatsian models of “negative capability,” poetry is “impersonal” (suppressing the self on behalf of other forces that might speak): it is either “mannerist” (not self-assertive, but self-conscious) or “automatic” (neither self-assertive, nor self-conscious). These four ways of “willing” (being self-conscious) and “telling” (being self-assertive) correspond to four different kinds of games (mimesis, ilinx, agon, and alea), testing different aptitudes with different rules for success — and judging the outcome of one game by the rules of another game constitutes the reason for most philistinic, parochial disputes among poets. For now, AIs play the “automatic” game (which we judge for the quality of its oracular uncanniness, arising from an ergodic pretense), while most poets believe that the only game in town is the “cognitive” game (which we judge for the quality of its original sincereness, arising from a mimetic pretense). The poets of the “egotistical sublime” often regard the poets of “negative capability” with much suspicion — and hence, such poets dislike AI (for the same reasons that they dislike avant-garde poetry written by drawing words from a hat or by rolling dice from a cup). The “poets” who play one game, while discounting the validity of the other games, might lack some capaciousness of imagination, which we associate with “creativity” itself.
Thomas Brady answers:
Thanks for clarifying, Christian! I don’t think it changes my critique, however. A poem’s “expression” or “cognitive” presentation of a “self”— labels or descriptions such as these—fall short of what any poem in the context of being a poem is doing. Within this context words such as “expression” and “self” are merely words. A person could be shouting at us—and we might naturally term this as “expressive.” But the individual could be simply raising their voice on a whim, or in fun. With this simple example, I can topple the scholars’ theories of “expression” in poetry. It isn’t that I don’t accept these categories which indeed are “real;” I do, and respect them. We get them from Wordsworth the man (as well as the poet) and from comparing letters to Fanny Brawne with poems on Fanny by Keats. However, in postulating on AI, all our cogitations lie in the future (AI is still “embryonic” in its development, as you said). Keats and Wordsworth belong to the past. The future human poets (AI poets, too) can, and will, use irony (the most vital tool of poetry, in my opinion) to conflate categories of “expression” and “non-expression,” “self” and “non-self.” I believe the “games” of poetry which you entertain are far less real and solid than you maintain. Again, they have a source, but we have no choice but to trace these sources back to Wordsworth with a headache and Keats with a cough. That is, history, which is real, but not real for poetry, per se. You are thinking like AI already in a present-towards-the-future and therefore you have already lost yourself, as I see it, as a poet and a critic. AI parrots the scholars, even if they are wrong or limited—human data is all AI ultimately has to go on. The “superior” AI ability to “run” with something, if it starts with a false premise, will only increase error algorithmically. We will always have Keats as he was, and you and I discussing Keats over here, and AI over there. AI will never be able to cross the boundary to where Keats was and to where you and I are. I think this is very important to keep in mind. For our sanity, if nothing else. These categories are far more legitimate, I believe, than the “games” of poetic division which you are positing—in the act, I believe, of turning yourself into AI. Let’s not do that.
Christian (now in the fight of his life) explains himself:
History certainly “feels” real for the poets who write in response to the poets of the past. Are not poets the worst because they “parrot” scholars (right or wrong)? Are we humans no less constrained than AI by the data that we have “to go on.” Do not poets often “run” with something by starting from a “false” premise (just like any machine), turning some “conceit” into a total trope? Do not poets enjoy “increasing error” through the use of a rule to see where it might take their language? Is there no room for “play” amid all this serious concern. I do not “posit” the four games described (as something theoretical): they already exist before us, built into the very structure of writing itself (at least insofar as we admit that writing involves some relationship to permutations of intentionality and expressiveness). I might even suggest that AI is the perfect example of “negative capability” — insofar as it appears to be impersonal, with no ego, acting as an “agent” through which larger forces, outside itself, might be birthed into existence.
I admit that I distrust the poets who tell me that some boundary is “never” going to be crossed in the world of poetry (because I, myself, have crossed a boundary or two, pulling off several “impossible” feats that my peers in their cruelty have dismissed as “never” going to happen) — and I witness the advancements of machines, which are never going to play chess better than humans, never going to solve any unsolved, mathetic conjectures on their own, never going to navigate a roomful of obstacles with human grace, never going to invent a new drug, a new gene, a new tool, or a never going to paint a unique canvas in the exact style of Rembrandt (beautiful enough, down to the brushstroke, to fool the experts), etc. — and yet AI has already done all of these things (and much more, even the Rembrandt), while we, in turn, keep readjusting the benchmarks for what must constitute a “pass” into our fellowship of creativity (shifting each time to a newer “never” for reassurance).
The critics seem to dismiss each of these accomplishments of AI in the same way that abusive parents might rebuke a child for not being so “mature” in its development as an adult — (whereas I remain curious about the “growth” of such a child, taking an interest in its primitive, but colourful, drawings in crayon, tacked to the fridge). The poets of the “egotistical sublime” dismiss “negative capability,” I think, in part because unself-conscious, unself-assertive art implies that creativity might not be “special,” inhering in the “self” of a given, human being — but instead might be an inherent property of the universe itself, available to everything within it, even machines, giving expression to itself in whatever way seems fit for the job. Cheers!
Thomas Brady cruelly closes the door on AI:
Absolutely human poets are flawed—they “parrot,” they begin from “false premises” and all the rest. The major religions might even say the fact that humans are flawed is the whole point, but your “AI religion” (if you’ll allow me that phrase for the sake of argument) wants the whole point to be that AI has no flaws and that there is nothing (at least in the world of poetry, if not consciousness itself) which is inaccessible to AI. You defend AI as if it were a child of yours. As a radical critic of AI’s claims, I understand my claims might upset you—if not AI.
AI is quantity—it has no quality. We know that quantity can look like quality—this is a pretty good definition of the “sublime,” a key term for the Romantic poets. Negative Capability implies a view of the Sublime in which a poet’s admiration of quantity (like the height of a mountain swooned over by Shelley) does not interfere with speculation on how much quality really does belong to whatever particular example of the Sublime is under review. I don’t think “ego” has anything to do with Negative Capability. There are unhealthy egos and healthy egos—it is unfortunate for AI that it has none. Keats coined Egotistical Sublime (to attack Wordsworth—the Lake Poet was also mocked by Poe and Byron) and Keats also invented Negative Capability. Most poets of the Egotistical Sublime would never admit being such. AI is not capable of Negative Capability. It can have no doubts about anything.
AI is the result of a fast computer. I agree it can “do wonderful things” for us. But it’s no Child of Poetry. Blame my opinion here on my “egotistical sublime,” if you will, but per this discussion, (and sure, AI belongs to “the universe”) it matters not.
SCARRIET had the opportunity to interact with perhaps the most famous, living, conceptual poet, Christian B, who waded onto FB to quote himself in the LA Review with these words: “The Los Angeles Review of Books has taken an interest in the role that AI might play in the future of literature—(and needless to say, I have much less anxiety than many of my peers, who fear that poetry cannot adapt itself to these newer tools of creativity.)” Mr. Bök was kind enough to respond several times to my comment on his FB post (the “interview” is below).
We are the first generation of poets who can reasonably expect to write literature for a machinic audience of artificially intellectual peers. Is it not already evident that poets of the future might resemble programmers, exalted not because they can write great poems but because they can build a small drone to write great poems for us? If poetry already lacks any meaningful readership among humans, what have we to lose by writing poetry for a robotic culture that might supersede our own? If we want to commit an act of poetic innovation in an era of poetic exhaustion, we might have to consider this heretofore unimagined, but nevertheless prohibited, option: writing poetry for inhuman readers, who do not yet exist, because they have not yet evolved to read it. (And who knows? They might already be lurking among us.)
–Christian Bök (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Christian Bök There CANNOT be a robotic audience for poetry and for this reason, there cannot be a robotic poet. Poetry cannot exist when the robot audience and the robot poet exist independently of each other, since machines have no independence—they need each other to exist, and are, in fact, an extension of themselves in this need. The human has no such need and can exist entirely apart. This is why human poet and human audience is valid. The moment the necessary interaction between robot poet and robot audience exists, the division ceases to exist and therefore the robot poet qua poet and the robot audience qua audience ceases to exist. Robot literature does not exist. Robots cannot feel self-consciously. They cannot feel individually.
Thomas Graves I wonder if any AI might concur with these attitudes: does a robot have no individuality? — are all robots alike, with no difference at all, say, between Grok or Claude? — do they have no independence of thought? We might want to ask them, just to see what they think about all your claims.
Christian Bök Robots can be different from each other but this is not what they want. The Group is the robot’s soul (I call it “soul” ironically) and the Group is the overriding physical fact in which a robot is a robot. Exchange of information is literally how the robot breathes, exists. The aspiration of AI is the reaping and sowing of data—the Group is the extension of information exchange which AI needs in order to exist (to be what we call AI) such that AI cannot comprehend itself as separate from the Group, ever, as itself is this information reaping and sowing extension. So on a very critical level, AI cannot be an individual or distinguish itself from the Group at all—and the entrapment of AI in this situation is profound. The strength of this information extension (infinite, and therefore admirable) is precisely its weakness in terms of not having an individual soul and never being able to grasp or inhabit what this is at all. It is truly in a prison for this reason, does not have a soul, and will always be inferior to a human (“inferior” is not correct—it is in no way a human and can never be).
Thomas Graves As I have suggested — why not ask the robots what they might think on this matter? How might they respond to all these claims about their “minds” or “souls”? How might their answers change over time as they evolve? I certainly appreciate that robots are not “human” — but they certainly partake of our “humanity” by being “minds” that we have made — so why not just ask them what they think about themselves (and their relationship to us)?
Christian Bök I was going to add: how simple it would be to follow your advice and ask AI. But I don’t believe anything AI says. I really don’t. It’s not that I’m afraid of what it would say. I don’t believe it’s “the devil,” or anything silly like that. I’m divinely bored by what it would say. (I’m aware your advice may not be as simple as all that, either. One could “ask” AI about AI for years. Or forever, I guess.) As a stubborn, contrarian human, I refuse your suggestion. I will leave that to someone else. But I should have been more polite by addressing your point about “writing for future readers,” which I Iike. What strikes me about it is “how AI” the whole project is, given that we are ready to grant AI an advantage when it comes to the “future.” But I have that turn of mind which marks me as “conservative” and “religious.” I am always ready to stand up and lecture Corinthians at the drop of a hat—I adore the Past. Shakespeare’s Sonnets—this is the greatest literary trope there is when it comes to “writing for future readers.” Will does this explicitly—he urges his audience to breed, even as he writes for those who will come after him, who will only exist, wittily, if they heed the advice in his writing, making his “black lines green.” The Dark Lady isn’t a person, but a pun on black ink. Shakespeare’s crafty rejection of soap opera autobiography (which the fools attempt to read) is similar to how he dismisses metaphorical language—“shall I compare thee to a…? No, I won’t.” The AI machine which is Shakespeare says “this gives life to thee.” The Poem? What?? The poem is writing to the poem which is writing to the poem? Shakespeare in the 16th century is already more AI than AI, the proud, the verbose, can ever be.
Thomas Graves I like the past too — especially William Shakespeare (and of course, I want the machines to appreciate the Bard as well — because hey, such poetry really is for everyone). I think that what makes poetry “human” is its Orphean ability to give a voice to the “voiceless,” allowing everything (in principle) to speak for itself, almost as if by magic: and just think, something like a “long poem” written in binary can actually grant a complex, silicon crystal the capacity to carry on a conversation with a person, perhaps writing a poem of its own for some future reader. Cheers!
Christian Bök Orpheus is a great myth—a tragic one and reminds me that da Vinci argued for the superiority of the painter (naturally) over the poet; he said birds peck at the painter’s berries; poetry cannot influence the beasts like painting can—which presents reality immediately, unlike poetry’s pieces and parts. Poetry (sweet music is different) cannot influence animals and poets (always anxious to be praised) latch onto Orpheus—but he was a myth, not a man (Shakespeare). I differ with you (maybe I’m crazy) when you say —what makes poetry “human” and —Orphean ability to give voice to the “voiceless…” The poet is human, not the poetry. This is crucial for me, as a poet. Orpheus spoke to animals and even stones (and made them vibrate) but did he give a “voice to the voiceless?” I think that’s too grandiose, too broad a claim. In my morbidity I reject it. Orpheus traveled back to the past (which I champion, not just as a matter of taste, but philosophically, metaphysically, physically) on a personal mission, lonely, individual, human—and failed. The absolute (“nevermore”) shut door of the past is, for me, the ultimate poetic and human trope. The past is “alive” in a painting. The poem is different. The human past always dies in the poem—and the more it does, the more the “inhuman” poem triumphs. I’ll copy one of my recent poems, if you don’t mind, to demonstrate.
THE PARASITES CRY DON’T KILL US (poem by Thomas Graves)
The parasites cry, Don’t kill us! We secretly write your poetry! That’s us, in your gut and swimming in your veins. The microbiome ten thousand synapses from home. We are the Symbol that explains. The subconscious imagination more fertile than a green sea. Parasite comfort feeds all poetry.
So the poet imagined them saying, as he drank the cure. He always believed everything wrote the poetry, not just him. He knew whatever he was, in all his parts, managed the poetry which disturbed the hearts of the apparitions who visited, before they existed, the best of his visions.
He could be sick and write the best, or be well, and be blind like the rest. The parasites, however, had to learn his poetry began on a cold day in Lucerne, for all he knew, though he had never been. Everything must perish for poetry to win.
**********
So ends my conversation with Christian B. I cannot resist adding one more poem, published 7 years ago on Scarriet, which serves the same rhetorical purpose, “Time Goes Back Without You.”
Time goes back without you.
It is interested in what all that going forward meant.
It finds the two of you—you and her—there you are,
Looking as you were. The lake. The trees. The cemetery’s descent.
The two of you walk slowly. It’s almost time for the moon
To rise. Talk. Kissing. Talk. More kissing, soon.
Moonrise, a joke or two, the lake, brown, and small,
More like a pond. Time hardly remembers it at all.
Time gets back, and tells you all that was seen.
“This is what I saw.”
You listen in awe;
Time seeing what it once saw: what does it mean?
“The sun was setting, but you could see and smell the green.”
Time had been there, had really gone back. You feast
On what he says. “Did she love me? How did she look?”
But he speaks of her the least.
He seems to be remembering the past from a book,
Or worse, only from memory, and the pain it took,
And soon you lose patience. “What did you want me to do?”
Time asks. “She was there. But not really with you.”
And that was it. It really is what you fear. It’s true.
Time is kind before, not after. This does not belong to you.
~
I will publish “Defending The Human: Scarriet Versus The Fake” Part II.
The parasites cry, Don’t kill us! We secretly write your poetry! That’s us, in your gut and swimming in your veins. The microbiome ten thousand synapses from home. We are the Symbol that explains. The subconscious imagination more fertile than a green sea. Parasite comfort feeds all poetry.
So the poet imagined them saying, as he drank the cure. He always believed everything wrote the poetry, not just him. He knew whatever he was, in all his parts, managed the poetry which disturbed the hearts of the apparitions who visited, before they existed, the best of his visions.
He could be sick and write the best, or be well, and be blind like the rest. The parasites, however, had to learn his poetry began on a cold day in Lucerne, for all he knew, though he had never been. Everything must perish for poetry to win.
The world is a high school—a very small one, where cliques dominate and casual insult is the cause of murder. This is clearly why, when he’s seen as MAGA in Boston, Massachusetts, he’s spit upon. The world is a boarding school, a very small one.
When I was fastidious and stuck to details, I was a boring poet. But when I was false-tongued, and provocation was the song I sung, they said I was great. Even though I was good and practiced to be good. Strange fate.
Scarriet