2 Cents

It's been a hoot catching the almost one-sided debate betweenJim Behrle and Ron Silliman (Jim, last I checked, cannot post comments at Silliman's Blog), not to mention the small feud between Behrle and Tony Tost's web space. I'd like to offer some thoughts while ignoring the inner workings of the small feuds and remaining a (relatively) non-partisan voice.

Whenever I hear or read about people's lists of essential poets--which commonly list poets who lived in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century--I think of the essay "Mine Own John Berryman" in Philip Levine's The Bread Of Time, where Levine recounts Berryman's list of influences and vital poets, which included Dylan Thomas, John Keats, William Shakespeare (specifically The Tempest), and, in Berryman's words, "Milton! Our beloved Milton!"

(Another account in Levine's own words can be found here.)

He demanded much more reading from us than what we were doing. Pushing us back farther and farther toward Elizabethan poetry and didn't want us just preoccupying ourselves with the moderns. For me, he was constantly pushing me to poets like Hardy for example, and Yeats. And to leave Hart Crane and Lowell alone.

(FYI: Levine's class mates included included W.D. Snodgrass and Donald Justice, who have made their marks. And Lowell had been their teacher early on--though he's more fondly remembered as a writer than a teacher).

Now, out of the authors Berryman mentioned, how many of them do you think I learned in a typical writing/poetry class during the early nineties about without having to take a specialized course? And in those specialized courses, how many of those authors do you think were covered for more than a week, with more than one piece of writing?

Were T.S. Eliot and Ezra pound mentioned in Berryman's class? Not by Levine's account. But neither is there a written record where Berryman dismisses Pound or Eliot as a poor man's Milton. Good thing, too, 'cause that would've been kinda dumb. (Levine, however, did admit he was copying Yeats elsewhere in The Bread of Time.)

It's irritating when a reviewer does something silly like lecture on a poet's narcissism in a book entitled What Narcissism Means To Me, but when Silliman praises the critic for wanting "the real thing," well, I just don't know what the holy hell that means.

One or two bloggers have made the point of the need to be aware of certain poets like Pound and Eliot. I agree, and I think Jim does too, though it's not neccessary to completely absorb yourself in an author's work especially if you're not connected to it. And anyway, if you're looking for The Real Thing, it most likely is not Pound or Elliot, and it probably isn't even Thomas or Keats. Who were Pound and Elliot's influences, their heroes? I don't even know that, and that's a little scarry, given that I have a poetry MFA. Would my old teachers even be able to answer that? In fact, I don't even have the balls or know how to guess what or who The Real Thing is. The best thing to do is keep searching and hope you find at least traces of the source material. If you're not actively searching before your era, beyond modern influences, you're nowhere. But the origins of modern poetry are before Pound and go further, I suspect, than any blogger of late has proposed. If what you find works, go for it.

Is Whitman a dirty word? Seemed to be during my education, where the focus was Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Pound? Well, Jim, I doubt he's a "safe poet" for people to like and read. In school, he was nonexistant. I remember reading one Chinese translation by him. That's it. Is it because of his views? Well, maybe. But if we were to exclude poets due to attitude, Lowell could have been excluded from some lists at one point. I think it's due partly to Lowell being an inspiration to many modern poets (certainly in boston) and partly due to poetry teachers wanting to prepare us for the modern publishing world a little too much. I have books by Lowell, O'Hara, Simic and Levine, very little by Whitman or Milton outside of old school texts. that's pretty sad, when you think about it.

So don't try to propose a bible of the Real Thing. The list of Real Things have changed more than the ingredients of Coke. Your inspirations may be unique to you only or to many, but by all means look for them!