Friday, June 19, 2015

#170

—I can’t read any more of this Rich Critical Prose,
he growled, broke wind, and scratched himself & left
that fragrant area.
When the mind dies it exudes rich critical prose,
especially about Henry, particularly in Spanish, and sends it to him
from Madrid, London, New York. 

Now back on down, boys; don’t express yourself,
begged for their own sake sympathetic Henry,
his spirit full with Mark Twain
and also his memory, lest they might strain
themselves, to alter the best anecdote
that even he ever invented. 

Let the mail demain contain no pro’s or con’s,
or photographs or prose or sharp translations.
Let one-armed Henry be.
A solitaire of English, free of dons
& journalists, keeping trying in one or two nations
to put his boat back to sea.

 
The most important line of this poem is the final one, where Henry claims he’s trying to put his boat back to sea. In other words, getting his act together, being a writer and probably a sane, sober (in relative terms anyway) human being. But it’s the conflict between artist and critic that gets most of the attention. Here’s Mark Twain on critics: “The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.” Henry has his own fragrant scatological response to the problem. What’s worse is when the critics don’t get the point of what they’re criticizing or expounding on in Rich Critical Prose, with the ability to alter the best anecdotes that even Mark Twain ever invented, who was the master at anecdotes. My experience with the kind of contemporary critical prose Henry is railing against was that once you work your way through the dense thickets of jargon, meant to exclude non-initiates as much as communicate to the select, the ideas aren’t that complicated. And most people who have made their way through a graduate program in English realize there are forests of nonsense out there masquerading as scholarship. I don’t mean that as a blanket condemnation, but there is quite a lot of it. It’s something to behold.

As far as critics not getting the gist of a Dream Song, I think Henry might want to give them a break. Some of those poems, the early ones especially, are tough nuts to crack. I’ve had a few embarrassing miscues myself, and B. himself cautions that Dream Songs are not meant to be understood—which may be an admission that they don’t always make sense. (Which makes sense when you remember he wrote a bunch of them on cocktail napkins at 2 a.m., sloshed in some bar or another.) You’re just supposed to feel them, be terrified and comforted. But the critic’s mission is to make sense, (or appear to make sense of an esoteric kind to a select cadre of initiates). So take one kind of critical approach which is to use language partially to intimidate and terrify, then apply that to Berryman’s poems, some of which amount to evocative jabberwocky, and you apparently get some pretty high-falutin’ horse hockey. I think it’s hilarious. A story I heard once concerned an editor working on a collection of critical essays about a well-known and much-loved writer, and the writer asked her, “Who are you people? What is it that you do?” Well, the tension between creative and critical types, lumped together in English Departments in ways that art historians and painters don’t have to deal with, is old hat to academic insiders. B. gets to have a slap at critics here, and he farts in triumph over it. In the end, one must appreciate the necessity of valorizing Berryman’s arcane patriarchal socio-linguistic conventions while recognizing the intersections embodied syntactically between a modernist poetics and the post-modern vertigo of excess that resulted in the post-anthropocentric, quasi-anti-humanist discourses located in the quiescent spaces of his work’s lived negotiations. Pffffrrrrrtttt….

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