|
The
Black Hole of Criticism:
Richard Silberg on Dana Gioia's "Fallen Western
Star"
JACK FOLEY
Copyright
© 2000 Poetry Flash
"I'm teaching
my students to publish in New York."
---A teacher at New College of
California
Richard Silberg
and I are friends who often disagree on esthetic
matters. Usually we let it go at that---different
strokes for different folks. We respect and admire
each other's work, and that's usually enough. I
think Richard Silberg is a brilliant poet and
critic, and I enjoy reading his work whether I
agree with it or not. In this case, however, I felt
impelled to write back.
Dana Gioia has
referred to himself as a "contrarian." His "Fallen
Western Star" (Ruminator Review, formerly
Hungry Mind Review, Winter 1999--2000) seems
to me an enormously challenging article with
historical implications of considerable interest.
Thank the lord that somebody has finally said
something about this problem. Gioia's piece is a
breath of fresh air.
Like the
earlier responses of Jonah Raskin ("Local Literary
Scene Is Worth Celebrating," The Press
Democrat, 12/15/99) and ZYZZYVA's Howard
Junker, whose letter to Ruminator Review is
both hilarious and substanceless ("I don't publish
criticism, because I don't want to"), Richard
Silberg's article misses both the point and the
challenge of "Fallen Western Star": what he sees is
a dark star, even---to make the metaphor a little
more accurate---a black hole.
There's a
personal element here as well. "Fallen Western
Star" begins with a reference to my book, O
Powerful Western Star and to the line in
Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom'd" which gave me my title. Dana's
introduction to O Powerful Western
Star---written despite the fact of our being in
very different esthetic camp---is generous to me
personally and begins to raise some of the issues
which show up in "Fallen Western Star":
Richard's opening sentence,
"After twenty years in New York, most of them
building a career as a businessman to support an
impressive second career as a poet, translator, and
critic, Dana Gioia returned with his family to
California, his native state, to live in 1996,"
suggests that Dana has been out of touch with
California. Later, Silberg writes, "I'd advise Dana
Gioia to settle in, open up his eyes and ears,
because he really doesn't get it." Doesn't he,
though.
During his stay
on the east coast, Dana made many trips to
California, where he has family. Indeed, all
his family lives in California. In addition, he is
not exactly a newcomer: he has been here for
nearly five years. (He arrived in
January 1996.) Isn't that enough time to get
a sense of what's going on? Certainly Boise State
University's Western Writers Series (which includes
monographs on people such as John Muir, Bret Harte,
Zane Grey, Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder and Simon
Ortiz) regards Dana as a Western writer: April
Lindner, the author of the monograph on Dana, has
much to say about him as a Westerner. For Raskin,
Junker and Silberg, the fact that Dana doesn't
agree with them means that he must be
missing something. If he weren't missing something,
he would agree with them! That is an indication of
their tolerance for genuine disagreement: he's just
an outsider, don't listen to him, he's been in New
York for twenty years. As it happens, Dana phoned
me to read passages from "Fallen Western Star" as
he was writing it---and to ask my opinion about
certain points. He phoned others as well, such as
Kevin Berger, the senior editor of San Francisco
Magazine and a lifelong Bay Area resident.
Whatever Silberg thinks about Dana's qualifications
to be writing about the West, I don't believe he
would describe Berger or me as outsiders. He knows
very well that I have been in the midst of the
poetry scene for the past fifteen years or so. And
I agree with Dana's essay.
Richard
attempts to discredit Dana by asserting that "he
has a penchant for provocative half-truths, and in
driving those home he sometimes misses what's right
before his eyes." Again the implication is that if
Dana understood the whole truth he would
agree with Richard. Richard then goes on to a long
and not very compelling discussion of the
difference between fiction and poetry. "Fiction and
poetry don't differ just economically," he
writes,
There is much to object to in
this confused passage. Does Richard really mean to
imply that narrative, characterization exposition
and action exist in a novel apart from its
language? Has he never read narrative poems like
The Iliad or Paradise Lost or Yeats'
The Wandering of Oisin---some of the works
currently being produced by Neo-Formalists? What I
find most obtuse in the passage, however, is
Richard's bland assertion that "There are fiction
readings, certainly, but their audiences don't
really 'learn' much from the reading that they
wouldn't experience by reading the book at home." I
suggest that Richard listen to Jack Kerouac reading
from On the Road on a recently released
Rykodisc CD or hunt up the marvelous recording of
James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake. One
can learn a great deal from those renditions, and
the last I heard, both On the Road and
Finnegans Wake were novels. Talk about
half-truths!
Another example
of half-truth in Richard's article is the moment
when he complains about Dana's choice of Thom
Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats and Kay
Ryan's Flamingo Watching as among the "Ten
San Francisco Literary Classics." Gioia, writes
Silberg, is "a New Formalist, himself, and these
two poets, Gunn and Ryan, both do a lot of their
work in closed forms." Well, Keats and Shelley did
a lot of their work in closed forms, too. But,
apart from that, Gunn's poetry is activated by a
tension between closed and open forms, which
exist in an uneasy relationship in his work---as
they do in Gioia's. A lot of what Gunn writes is
free verse. As for Ryan, she does not write in
closed forms at all: Richard is simply wrong about
this. This is Ryan's "Half a Loaf." It is one of
the poems in Flamingo Watching, and its
technique is no different from that of other poems
in the book or from Ryan's work
generally:
The whole
loaf's loft
is halved in profile,
like the standing side
of a bombed cathedral
The cut
face
of half a loaf
puckers a little.
The bread
cells
are open and brittle
like touching coral.
It is nothing
like the middle
of an uncut loaf,
nothing like a conceptual half
which stays moist.
I say do not
adjust to half
unless you must.
There is some
interesting and subtle rhyming in Ryan's poem (My
favorite is "moist" and "must.") Perhaps that's why
Richard considered it to be a closed form. But it
is not a closed form. It is free verse: it is not
metrically consistent, and it is not trying to be.
I would suggest that Richard consult Lewis Turco's
The Book of Forms to find out what a closed
form is. What is it he says about Dana? That "he
sometimes misses what's right before his
eyes"?
Like Raskin and
Junker before him, Richard indulges in cheerleading
for his team: "How about Robert Hass, our Laureate
from the 'hood, generally recognized as one of the
key poets of these last several decades in America?
How about the radiant Brenda Hillman with her sweet
blending of lyric and postmoderism? How about June
Jordan or Diane di Prima? Barbara
Guest?"
How about it,
guys. Let's hear it for all of them. Gioia's essay
asserts that there are many, many fine
writers in the Bay Area. He is extremely explicit
about this. His point, however, is that they don't
talk to one another, that there is no means
by which they can discuss issues of vital
importance to their work. Does Richard believe that
Barbara Guest phones up June Jordan to talk about
her latest poem? Poetry Flash is virtually
the only outlet for local criticism. "Western
literary life…tends to be private and
individualistic," writes Gioia. "Writers live far
apart, and there are few occasions that bring them
together in significant numbers." How does Richard
handle this? The Bay Area, he says,
The fact of writers
"streaming across country" from New York to teach
us how to write is hardly an example of the
vitality of local culture. Nor are visiting
professors or people on book tours who stop at the
Bay Area among other places. More of Silberg's
cheerleading. But you will notice that, here and
elsewhere in the article, Richard doesn't name any
of the intellectual issues that arise out of all
this activity. If there is all this exchange going
on---"readings, residencies, workshops, festivals,
and conferences"---what are the people attending
them talking about? What are the issues that
define us as Westerners? Richard is silent on that
because, evidently, he doesn't know. Surely out of
an this mishmash something must be coming, right?
But is it?
Richard's
ignorance of a genuine Western tradition is
particularly striking in his remarks about Edwin
Markham and about Gioia's discussion of Markham's
poem, "The Man with the Hoe." "Well, I'm sorry,
folks," Richard writes,
But Gioia is not the only
person to find Markham, and particularly that poem,
to be quintessentially Western. First published in
1976, William Everson's Archetype West: The
Pacific Coast as a Literary Region is a
brilliant examination of the coinciding of
literature and region. "Markham," writes Everson,
"is no longer highly regarded. He was, however, the
first poet of the West to produce a poem that has
entered world literature. Seventy years after its
composition 'The Man with the Hoe' is still read
and believed around the world." Everson even cites
a connection---though not a direct, literary
one---between "The Man with the Hoe" and Ginsberg's
"Howl." Everson is writing of the forties:
Surely a poem to which
Everson devotes so much of his book deserves better
than Richard's curt dismissal of it as "wonderfully
suited for political sloganeering." In his remarks
about Markham, Dana Gioia attempts to recreate
something of the consciousness with which the
poem---which galvanized people world-wide---was
received at the time of its initial appearance. He
shows ways in which the poem might still interest
contemporary readers. Richard treats "The Man with
the Hoe" as if it were written last Friday; his
dismissal of it is fairly well-written and somewhat
amusing---as is the article generally---but it is
also woefully ignorant and wildly
unfair.
There are many
other things to quarrel with in Richard's article,
but I want to conclude with a wonderful passage of
Dana's about his experience of being a Western
writer. Much of the passage appears in "Fallen
Western Star," so Richard has read a good deal of
it. He may even have read it when it first appeared
in Heyday Books' The Geography of Home. What
I am quoting here is the form in which I first
encountered it. Despite its length, I immediately
included it in O Powerful Western Star. It
seemed to me like something that needed to be said
but had not been said. It seemed as well to arise
out of a powerful understanding of what it means to
live in the West, "I am Latin (Italian, Mexican,
and American Indian)," writes Gioia,
I find that statement to be
not only true but of an unmatched lyricism and
eloquence. We ought to be trying to respond to the
questions Dana Gioia's eloquent and enlightening
essay gives rise to. Instead, we make fools of
ourselves by pretending what he is telling us
doesn't exist---and, like Richard Silberg, we see
little but darkness.
Return to
Top
of Page
• Archive
Index
|
|
Richard
Silberg Responds:
Copyright
© 2000 Poetry Flash
Maybe we can make a little
progress by separating the questions.
Is the Bay Area a vital,
influential poetry scene? I think the answer to
that question has got to be yes. I'd guess Jack
would agree, if he could unhook his response from
his zeal to defend Dana. There's no center of
influence today in American poetry, geographically,
as the Northeast was, for instance, among
Modernists at the beginning of the twentieth
century, or critically, as in the reign of the New
Criticism into mid-century. Today, influence is
multi-centered; poets are highly mobile; different
poetries are highly interactive. But if you could
take an infra-red photograph from the first reaches
of space, high above the fray, the two major hot
spots in America---virtually beyond
question---would be New York and the Bay
Area.
"The presence of Kenneth
Rexroth Place and Jack Kerouac Street hardly
compensate for the absence of current literary
vitality." "Today San Francisco is no longer an
active literary center, merely a geographical one
for the dozens of important writers living in and
around it." Those two separate quotes from "Fallen
Western Star" sum up Dana's answer, and that was
the bone in my throat when I read his essay. His
voice is an important one; there are literary
stakes, particularly among young poets deciding
where they want to put their fire. So I felt he had
to be answered. Now, is there a dearth of criticism
in the Bay Area? Should we welcome new journals
onto the set? The answer to that question clearly
ought to be yes as well.
But, for me, with two
provisos.
First of all, it's
axiomatic to Dana that the health of a literary
region rests upon the health of its literary
milieu, with a special emphasis on major literary
journals. His assessment of the Bay Area is
virtually a deduction from that principle. So I
took pains to refute it.
One would never guess from
Jack's response that I'd made any substantive
arguments---he seems to be tiptoeing around the
central point---but, actually, I made several. For
the sake of space, let's distill them to one: the
last two revolutions in American poetry, its
profound quakes and shakes at mid-century and the
narrower but still crucially important advent of
Language poetry in the seventies and eighties,
rolled forth without input from, in fact, against
the grain of the literary establishments of their
respective days. We're talking about what are
certainly among the most influential, most powerful
poetries of the later twentieth century, Beat,
Black Mountain, New York School, Language, and the
magnificent mavericks swarming in and thereabouts.
Q.E.D.: There's no calculation of major journals,
editors, agents that adds up to the life of a
poetry.
My second proviso is more
wide-ranging, and so it has the advantage of
opening out our discussion---because I'm acutely
conscious that for many of our readers, in LA, for
instance, or Seattle, or New Mexico, this fine
tooth back and forth on the merits or demerits of
Bay Area poetry is just a local dustup. I'm sensing
that Dana and I have rather different ideas of the
function of criticism, with Jack seeming to side
with Dana---although, actually, while he's under
the impression that he's arguing Dana's point of
view, on at least one point I think he's wangling
way out on his own. So I'd like, briefly, to ponder
one more question: just what is it we're expecting
criticism to do for us?
Dana says quite a few
things about criticism in "Fallen Western Star,"
but let me focus on two. "Cities create artistic
excellence by setting up standards to recognize and
acclaim it." And just before that, "Lacking a vital
critical milieu, well-intentioned regional literati
usually practice boosterism---the uncritical praise
of all things local." Together, those two
statements set up separate realms, criticism and
poetry, with criticism demanding, refining, forming
what seems to be an impulsive but ignorant---again,
just above the last quote he speaks of "The
informed and demanding discussion fostered by
quarterlies and other serious journals"---poetry.
It's an attitude that gives critics a lot of credit
and poets rather little, criticism as trainer and
poetry as dog, so to speak.
Jack's ideas about
criticism feel more duplex---in great part, I
think, because of his contortions as self-appointed
defender of Dana. There's a certain echoing of
Dana's formative criticism idea, particularly in
the sentence with which he ends that section of his
response: "Surely out of all this mish-mash
something must be coming right? But is it?"
implying, it would seem, that the mere activities
of poets, the "readings, residencies, workshops,
festivals, and conferences" to which his word
"mish-mash" refers could hardly be shapely, could
hardly be defining themselves in any important way
without the above "informed and demanding
discussion"---and I feel an uncharacteristic
disdain radiating in Jack's "mish-mash" word
choice.
The main idea his section
puts forth, though, I would say, is the following:
"His [Dana's] point, however, is that they
don't talk to one another…Does Richard
believe that Barbara Guest phones up June Jordan to
talk about her latest poem?" I'm much more friendly
to that idea of criticism as a medium for poets'
mutually informing discussion. The only problem is
that it isn't Dana's---it's Jack's, either a
previous good idea, or one born out of his strained
argumentative necessities.
Dana does say in his essay
that Western writers don't talk to each other, but
he's not referring to 'talk' through essays back
and forth in 'major literary journals', nor to a
kind of indirect discourse in which perceptive
critics argue or synthesize widely differing
poetics so that poets can understand each others'
positions better. Weirdly, Dana means actual talk,
itself. "Western literary life…tends to be
private and individualistic…Writers live far
apart, and there are few occasions that bring them
together in significant numbers." Jack quotes Dana
in his response, deadpan, although he knows
perfectly well it ain't remotely so---he, himself,
has starred in inimitable person at quite a few of
those "readings...festivals...conferences." Thence
Dana's inexplicable misperception of Bay Area
poetry, solitary, forest and freeway, transmutes to
a rich, strange Habermasian idea of
criticism.
Perhaps disingenuous, too,
for all its sparkle. Very likely none of us besides
Guest and Jordan knows what they've actually said
to each other about poetry. But, of course, Jack's
speaking metonymically, taking them as
representative of writers with widely separated
poetics. And he suggests this idea that criticism
can cross the gap, help them to poetic discussion.
I think he knows, though, that poets are not that
different from other people when it comes to
differences, political, say, or religious: poets
tend to break into groups according to poetics and
to do most of their talking with their own. Just
where, I wonder, does Jack think this kind of
cross-poetic dialogue is taking place? In New York,
with all its journals and literary infrastructure?
Is there, for instance, a lively colloquy between
the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and the Poetry Society of
America? Is it happening on the pages of the
Hudson Review, Sewanee Review, the
New York Review of Books? No, it's not, and
I'm guessing that he knows that. It is happening in
some places, though. I think the American Poetry
Review in recent years has tried to become more
of a bridging journal. And it's happening, to a
certain extent in these pages---as Jack, himself,
says---and very much with his help as one of our
contributing editors. Poetry Flash, without
any undue horn tooting, is a journal right here in
the Bay Area, but serving a much wider area, that
tries to bring poetries together.
We could talk a lot more
about interaction between poetic schools, about
places like Naropa and New College of California,
for instance, but I want to get back to Dana's
actual criticism, which is, as I've said,
formative, disciplinary, one summed up for me by a
phrase that critics often use, a phrase that's
always irritated me, the book 'under
review'.
Let me suggest another
possibility, really another pole of the critical
sphere. Poetry is inherently shapely, and
shape-making; further, in its developing, changing
'nature'---a problematic, essentialist word, but
I'm trying to be brief---it's sublimely wise. As I
suggested in my response to Dana, poets are usually
also critics, and if we stop to think about it,
most of what we really know, core knowledge in the
sense of pithy ideas about poetry, comes not from
critics but from poets. Think of Coleridge, Arnold,
of Pound and Eliot, Surrealist and Futurist
manifestos and elaborations, Olson and Creeley,
Language critics, so many others. Think of 'organic
form'; composing not according to the 'metronome'
but in the cadence of the 'musical phrase';
'objective correlative'; 'lower limit speech, upper
limit music'; 'open field composition'; obviously,
this could go pages and pages.
On the other hand, when I
think of criticism that's really meant something to
me, it tends to work either 'above' or 'below' this
core knowledge formulated by poets, and, of course,
the poetry itself. Above, we have the work of
critics like Kenneth Burke, say, Northrop Frye,
even Harold Bloom or Paul de Man, although his
deconstructionist ideas also deeply irritate me.
These men are writing a meta-criticism, reflections
on literature in planes that really parallel
philosophy or religion. Below, there's a mode of
criticism exemplified by Hugh Kenner in his great
books on Pound, on Eliot and Beckett. Kenner's
books don't stand in judgment over their subjects;
instead, they breathe forth these writers' spirits;
they are profound appreciations. Many of Jack's
fine essays are criticism of this type.
So, what about criticism
of books 'above review'? What about criticism that
learns from poetry, that approaches it in a loving
openness? And I don't mean by that a ga-ga
servility, critics with something mushy or
worshipful to say about everything they read. I
don't mean not having standards; I'm talking about
the attitude that poetry knows more than the critic
does, so that one's standards are in flux as poetry
is in flux. That's not very different, really, from
the way scientists approach their material: they
don't prejudge their data; they're informed by
it.
There's some unfairness in
what I'm saying. I've learned a good deal from
reading Dana, and I think he's often perceptive. To
finish the sentence about "informed and demanding
discussion" that I cut off above, he thinks it
"helps readers understand and evaluate new literary
work." I'm all for that. I want good poets and
their publishers to find good readers. I want us
all to boogie. But, as I've already said, I'm
troubled by the section in "Fallen Western Star"
where Dana tries to type Bay Area poetry on "The
Man with the Hoe." I'm bugged by pronouncements
like, "Poetry was not conceived as a self-enclosed
text for private meditation but as a direct address
to an audience." There are a lot of fine poets
around here with a very different take on that. I
feel somewhat pinched by the way Dana and Jack harp
on 'regional' writing and the West. I'm not at all
sure that that concept carries much water anymore
in these fast traveling, electronic
times.
My second proviso, then:
let's have new critical journals; let's have
'major' journals, but let them be open to the
heavenly buzz, to the boogie profusion. Let them
appreciate poetry that they love, or meditate on
it, rather than pronounce upon it or train it to be
the good poetry dog they pre-desire.
Those, I think, are the
central issues. The questions from Jack's response
are still hanging, though, his various skirmishing
points. But my feeling is that we've already
devoted enough precious print space to this debate,
maybe too much. Is "The Man with the Hoe" in fact a
bit clichéd and sentimental, or not? Does
poetry have a special relationship with public
readings, a central relationship intrinsic to
poetic practice, that fiction really doesn't, or
not? Was Dana's choice of Thom Gunn and Kay Ryan as
the two star poets of the Bay Area rather narrow
and programmatic in its taste, or not? These essays
are available, Dana's, mine, Jack's---to the extent
that they're of interest, a good thing. Why not let
interested readers make up their minds on it all
for themselves?
Return to
Top
of Page
• Archive
Index
|
