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Culture and Humor in Postwar American Poetry

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Culture and Humor in Postwar American Poetry Palacký University, Olomouc Culture and Humor in Postwar American Poetry Jiří Flajšar Olomouc 2014 Reviewers: doc. Mgr. Jakub Guziur, Ph.D. Mgr. Vladimíra Fonfárová “The research and publication of this book was in the years 2012–2014 financed by the Faculty of Arts, Palacký University, Olomouc from the Fund for the Research Advancement.” All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, now known or hereafter invented, without written permission by the copyright holder. © Jiří Flajšar, 2014 © Palacký University, Olomouc, 2014 First Edition ISBN 978-80-244-4158-0 This book is dedicated to my family. Contents Introduction 7 Crisis or Not: On the Situation of American Poetry and Its Audience 17 Humor as a Method in Postwar American Culture Poetry 33 Allen Ginsberg: Odyssey in the American Supermarket 43 Kenneth Koch: The Poet as Serious Comic 63 “Reality U.S.A.”: The Poetry of Mark Halliday 81 R.S. Gwynn: The New Formalist Shops at the Mall 107 Campbell McGrath: The Poet as a Representative Product of American Culture 127 Tony Hoagland: The Poetry of Ironic Self-Deprecation 185 Billy Collins: The Genteel Commentator 207 Culture, Identity, and Humor in Contemporary Chinese-American Poetry 215 Bibliography 227 Index 247 Introduction The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. —Walt Whitman Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living —Robert Frost What counted was mythology of the self, Blotched out beyond unblotching. —Wallace Stevens Where are you, Walt? The Open Road goes to the used-car lot. —Louis Simpson It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again. —Allen Ginsberg Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.” —Kenneth Koch 8 Introduction It has always been a challenge, for the critic, to find their way in the enormous diversity of trends that affect the choice of subject matter, tone, form, and language in American poetry at any given point in time. For Peter Stitt, the state of recent American poetry is “an age of muchness,” uncertainty, and a plenitude of authorial options, styles, and interpretations. There seems no simple way to make sense of “so many writers and poets, so much art, so much poetry, so much contemporary poetry.”1 The task of the scholar is not, however, futile. Stephen Burt points out that even when trying to find a compass to the very new American poets whose work betrays every possible stylistic influence of the recent and distant past, some traditional approaches and expectations in relation to their poetry may be usable, as the best of contemporary American poetry still “lets us imagine that certain arrangements of words, and nothing else—no camera, no lights, not much action—can tell us what it’s like to be other people, and (in another sense) what it’s like to be ourselves.”2 In other words, the rhetorical effect of great past and recent American poetry upon the reader and the ability of the poem to communicate its content and persuade the reader/listener to share the vision of the world as presented in the poem has been acknowledged by critics who have otherwise chosen the formalist analysis of form and content over analyzing the rhetorical effect of the poem as a visionary manifestation of the poet’s consciousness that is to be shared by the reader. As William Logan acknowledges, a good poem “works like God—in mysterious ways,”3 forcing the critic to serve the poem and not just apply a rational apparatus to it as an end in itself. A poem, C.K. Williams argues, “is composed of sensation, of image, language, a voice, perception, bodily reference, sentiment, morality, thought, 1 Peter Stitt, Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 1. 2 Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2009), 19. 3 William Logan, “Against Aesthetics,” New Criterion 32, no. 1 (2013): 20. 9 and experience.”4 The form of the poem is arbitrary in relation to its content and the resulting rhetorical effect of the poem, which Williams calls “the music of poetry,” is conditioned by “the tension between the artificially determined conventions and the necessities of language and experience.”5 Peter Swirski emphasizes the fact that any hierarchical classifi- cation of literary genres based on the elite (or highbrow) vs. popu- lar (or lowbrow) status within culture breeds unwanted evaluation of literary excellence: “Popular equals bad because if it were any good it would not be popular in the first place; and popular equals generic equals bad because it appeals to so many by virtue of being simplistic, schematic, and repetitive.”6 Yet American poets such as Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg successfully courted both the popular and highbrow audiences for their writings and saw no reason to reject one or the other. There is more to the ways in which a poem affects its audience than calling it a mere manifestation of private content through poetic language cast in a particular form. T.S. Eliot claims that the social obligation of the poet towards their audience does not exist in a causal relationship as the poet’s duty is not directly to the audi- ence, but, rather, “to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend and improve.”7 Ultimately, Eliot argues, the social function of poetry lies in its public resonance, in the ability “to affect the speech and the sensibility of the whole nation.”8 Walter Kalaidjian develops Eliot’s claim when he notes that American poetry should also be seen from a two-directional socio-aesthetic perspective as 4 C.K. Williams, Poetry and Consciousness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 8. 5 Williams, Poetry and Consciousness, 9. 6 Peter Swirski, From Lowbrow to Nobrow (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 29. 7 T.S. Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry,” in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Noonday, 1957), 9. 8 Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry,” 12. 10 Introduction at once shaped by and resisting the broader discursive forces that make up our historical moment. On the one hand, poetic language enjoys only a relative autonomy from the textual and institutional networks that mediate lyric expression. On the other hand, an author’s poetic forms and a poetic text’s linguistic techniques exist in a critical relationship to other literary and cultural discourses.9 Joseph Harrington similarly argues that American poetry has been an unrecognized public medium of literary and cultural discourse as its ability “to effect equilibrium and ordering, to preserve or transmit aesthetic and ethical values, and to (de)sacralize twentieth-century capitalist society have made it a perennial battleground in the struggle to define the subject of national culture.”10 Ultimately, in the best of American lyric poetry, from Walt Whitman to the present, the subjective content of the poet’s utterance assumes collective, public meaning and relevance when the utterance is interpreted by the reader/listener.11 Theodor W. Adorno explains that this transfer of meaning is paradoxical and yet natural to poetry as its “subjectivity turns into objectivity” of content and the subject of the poem, “with no remaining trace of mere matter, sounds forth in language until language itself acquires a voice.”12 The voice in poetry, then, is no longer the private property of the poet. Astrid Franke argues that “the assumption of poetry’s public role is an important and 9 Walter Kalaidjian, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 31–32. 10 Joseph Harrington, Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 167–68. 11 By using the reader/listener dichotomy one wishes to call attention to the poem as public performance of the poet’s voice as opposed to the private effect of the poem when it is just read. 12 Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedeman, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 43. 11 pervasive aspect throughout the history of American poetry.”13 Individual poets, from Phillis Wheatley to the 9/11 poets of the 2000s, have understood the public role of poetry as a challenge that demands that the poet practice a combination of “aesthetic innovation and public commitment” in their attempt to write poetry that has public resonance.14 This book tries to interpret the poetry produced by several important American poets who chose American culture from the 1950s to the 2000s as their subject matter. Robert von Hallberg defines culture poetry as that which “engages as well the feelings, experiences, and difficulties that are considered the irreducible center of public life.”15 Such poetry navigates between the portray- al of the private joys and woes of the poet as an individual and the public effect of these feelings when they are shared with his or her audience through the medium of poetry. Consequently, the public sphere and its effect upon the poet’s work has been a dominant thematic focus in the work of the American poets chosen for anal- ysis, which makes their reputation rest as much on their culture poems as on their introspective poems that explore the act of writ- ing about culture and the self. The poets whose work is analyzed at length include Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, Mark Halliday, R.S.
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