#177

Am tame now. You may touch me, who had thrilled

(before) your tips, twitcht from your breast, your heart,

& burnt your willing brain.

I am tame now. Undead, I was not killed

by Henry’s viewers but maimed. It is my art

to buzz the spotlight in vain, 

flighting ‘at random’ while Addison wins.

I would not war with Addison. I love him

and Addison so loves me back

me backsides, I may perish in his grins

& grip. I would he liked me less, less grim.

But he has helpt me, slack 

& sick & hopeful, anew to know what man—

scrubbing the multiverse with dazzled thought—

still has in store for man:

a doghouse or a cave, is all we could,

according to my dreams. I stand in doubt,

surrounded by holy wood.

Joseph Addison was a writer from the 17^th century, one of the leading proponents in his day of genteel manners and taste. Here’s a typical quote from Addison: “What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.” B. would of course have a full measure of snide contempt for this kind of sentiment. The poem isn’t about Addison, though, who is used as a stand-in for the poet, Robert Lowell. It’s about the response of Lowell to the Dream Songs, which came out in The New York Review of Books in 1964, and which was mixed in its assessment of the poems. He thought they were all the things Dream Songs are noted for—funny, horrifying, inventive, but he also found them befuddling and obscure and claimed he couldn’t understand many of them. (Especially regarding the early ones, this isn’t such an extravagant claim.) B. was terribly wounded, and wrote DS 177 in response.

In a year-long sequence of three basic drawing classes I took in college, along with a couple of my architecture major roommates, we were asked to draw a large self-portrait. My first attempt was fairly wooden. It was a profile of a large guy crouched in a set of track-sprinter’s starting blocks, the idea that he hadn’t started running yet. Meh. I didn’t like it, thought it was forced, uninteresting, obvious, wooden. I sat through the classroom critique, which only made it through half the work, and mine was overlooked for that day. I saw this other amazing work, from really talented artists. (U. of Cincinnati has a top-tier design, art and architecture school. I was out of my league. But I do think, looking back, that I grew rapidly.) Then I turned the page over—the paper given us for the assignment was three feet wide and six feet long, with ragged edges on the ends from where it had been torn off of a huge roll—and did another one. In the image, I was seated at a table, with a book in front of me that was blank. My glasses were blank, and I had my fist against my cheek in a classic pose of utter boredom. Around my head was a kind of energetic aura. I didn’t have Van Gogh’s similar self-portrait in mind because I hadn’t seen it yet, but the effect was close. The rays of energy around my head were pretty solid, with shading and form. I also put a bug on the front of the table, I don’t know why, but I’ve since learned that this bug has some kind of psychological significance, and not a good one. The effect, though, I thought, was striking. Blank and hard to read from the outside, but with all this passion and energy inside, that wasn’t going to be contained. I was satisfied enough with it that I was actually looking forward to putting it up on the wall next to the other self-portraits done by art students with genuine talent. Since the drawings were too big to take home easily, we left them in a locked closet in the classroom. Sometime in the days between classes, before the next crit, some budding art critic opened the closet and wrote “sucks” on my piece. In pencil, I erased it, but the damage was done.

This piece was good, genuine, and its image made an effective statement about who I was and how I saw myself. The graffiti that defaced it didn’t change my assessment of the drawing—I know darn well that it was the best thing I had done yet, that it was not only good, but inspired, and that it stacked up quite well against anything done in that class. But it was different, it was unorthodox within that class’s context, and I paid a price for my small departure from artistic orthodoxy. My self-esteem took a hit. This defacement had been the work of one of conservatism’s blockheaded henchmen, probably too stupid to know the role he or she was playing in the world of art and creativity. It changed my view of the world, and it hurt. I didn’t whine about it, but I do understand B.’s wounded fee-fee—up to a point. We want to be loved, always, unconditionally, and we want our work to receive the same unconditional admiration and love. Maybe success in B.’s case made him thin-skinned. Try sitting through an MFA workshop some time, that toughens you up quick, and if that doesn’t do it, then the first hundred printed rejection slips from editors so unimpressed (or busy, to be fair) that they can’t be bothered to comment should do the trick. But he had more invested in his legacy by this time than any student, and he was sensitive. With his life a shambles, his legacy had to have legs to make his very existence mean anything. I have to say that I still like The Dream Songs for the most part, their inventiveness, their appalled take on the world’s injustice, their manic humor. B. himself, he’s getting like some distant cousin’s uncle who shows up at a family Thanksgiving gathering, won’t take off his NRA cap, saying one incorrect thing after another without the slightest notion that he’s gone past offensive into the realm of pathetic. Somebody needs to tell him… Lowell might have been trying.