David Matthews

Ah, National Poetry Month.

Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April, when schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets throughout the United States band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture. Thousands of organizations participate through readings, festivals, book displays, workshops, and other events.

By all means let us celebrate poetry—and the arts generally, and beyond that the intellectual adventure and life of the spirit of which they are a part. Let us celebrate poetry and poets for what they are and steer clear of overblown rhetoric that trivalizes what it would praise. There is an aggrandizing and self-congratulatory air to all this public display of the thrall in which poetry holds us, exemplified by the good, earnest folk at National Public Radio and their featured poets as they gush all over themselves about the glories of poetry with every metaphor that rears its head. Alas, too, NPR’s infatuation with social media extends to poetry when as might be predicted, or feared, the tweet takes its place in the pantheon of poetic forms alongside ballad, sestina, sonnet, villanelle, and the ever popular haiku. Poet as noble twitterer.

For those of us to whom poetry matters, it matters a great deal. Beyond that, though, it is a bit of a reach, a dicey proposition at best, to claim that poetry has a vital place in American culture, and by extension in the lives of most Americans. Yet we are treated to heartfelt disquisitions such as a recent essay by Danny Heitman titled What poetry could teach a divided America (Christian Science Monitor, 5 April 2013), where the author supposes that good poems offer an exercise in empathy that “can strengthen our capacity for compassion and compromise, the central virtues of civil society. America would probably be a better place if more of us read poetry this April – and throughout the rest of 2013, too.” Heitman notes the place of poetry in ancient Greece, where it “was more than a mere pastime…. For the Greeks of antiquity, poetry stood at the center of civic life, helping to sustain the thinking that conceived representative government.”

These sentiments are fairly typical, and less effusive than some, of the highfalutin claims for poetry batted around this month. In this context it might behoove us to recall that the Greek city-states were a fractious and warring bunch. Democracies among them knew all too well flaws and shortcomings that are no stranger to the present day, among them a susceptibility to demagoguery and aversion to critical thinking. As for the role of poets, Plato had his reasons to be wary of poets and poetry and they were not altogether goofy.

Poetry in and of itself does not make us better people or citizens. No more than a cursory look at the lives of poets is needed to question whether the coupling of poetry and common decency, much less exemplariness, is anything more than happenstance. The catalog of poets who left more than a smidgen to be desired as human beings is long and in its own fashion illustrious. Byron enjoyed sex with quite youthful partners of both genders and was not much bothered when the other was not as game for the act as he, though in Byron’s defense his father, “Mad Jack” Byron, was a dissolute womanizer and spendthrift, while his mother did not exactly epitomize the maternal ideal, for instance, referring to her son as “a lame brat.” With those role models the poet probably turned out as well as might be expected. Rilke, a poet of quite different aspect, made devotion to art a rationale for neglect of parental and spousal responsibilities in a marriage one biographer described as epistolary. Jack Kerouac went to considerable effort to avoid paying child support, quite shamelessly, to judge by his correspondence with Allen Ginsberg, who seemed not to be bothered by it. Ginsberg himself used his fame and in later years position as a teacher to indulge his taste for attractive younger men, celebrated in poems for which it is difficult to imagine he would not have been pilloried instead of celebrated, at least in some circles, had he been of a heterosexual inclination.

There was more to each of these poets. As Ginsberg was dying he spent some of his last hours writing checks to friends he knew could use the money. Byron provided financial support for the Shelleys in Italy and met his death in Greece where he went to join the struggle for independence. There is also the poetry. While the poetry cannot be neatly and cleanly pared away from the poet’s life, its aesthetic qualities and artistic merit are not contingent on the author’s character and personal virtue. As Pound put it, “the beauty is not the madness” (Canto CXVI).

Yes, poetry enriches and enhances our lives, nourishes the spirit, imbues our world with elements of beauty and grace. The best poetry may also unsettle us, knock us loose from our moorings, bring us near the uncanny and eerie in those moments of heightened intensity where we think in terms of the transcendent and sublime. Poetry did not save Sergei Yesenin, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman. It will not save us, nor will it lift the cloak of mystery, before which our responses are always provisional.

I close without further conclusion by turning again, as I so often do, to John Keats, that astounding young man and poet, dead at twenty-five:

Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself—Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, and yet want confidence to put down his halfseeing…. We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.—How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, “admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose!”—Keats, letter to J.H. Reynolds, 3 February 1818

I have an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner—let him on any certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it—untill (sic) it becomes stale—but when will it do so? Never…—Keats, letter to J.H. Reynolds, 9 February 1818

Keats also said, in a dedication and preface to “Hyperion” that was rejected by his publisher: “I have written to please myself, and in hopes to please others, and for a love of fame….” To please ourselves, to pass a pleasant life, or some pleasant moments in this life, seems to me pretty good reason to read and celebrate poetry.

memo from the editors desk, 2 May 2013

Notes for this essay were inadvertently included at the end when it was originally posted. Those notes have been deleted.

David :: Apr.14.2013 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »

This is the advice he [painter Constant Troyon (1810–1865)] gave me: I showed him two of my still lifes; his comment was “Well, my dear chap, your color will be all right; the effect is correct. However, you must get down to some serious study, for this is all very fine but it comes very easily to you: that’s something you’ll never lose. If you want my advice and want to go in for art seriously, begin by joining a studio which specializes in figure painting, académies: learn to draw: that’s where most of you are falling down today. Take heed and you’ll see I’m not wrong, but draw with all your might; you can never learn too much. However, don’t neglect painting: go to the country from time to time and make studies and above all develop them. Do some copying at the Louvre. Come and see me often: show me what you’re doing and with enough courage you’ll make it.—Claude Monet, age nineteen, letter to Eugène Boudin, a landscape painter in Le Havre, 19 May 1859

As I read this passage from a collection of Claude Monet’s letters, I found myself wondering what might have happened if I had received similar advice as a young man first coming to think himself a poet. The principle is sound. There is a sense in which it has guided me. My study of poetry has been serious and lifelong. It has also been haphazard and not as disciplined as might be wished. Much was missed.

Where might I have sought advice of this kind? I knew no one to approach about poetry. While in college I gravitated toward philosophy and history of ideas, with only two classes that took up poetry. The first was a course in contemporary poetry the second semester of my freshman year, in the spring of 1971. I was beginning to read poetry and to write a little but did not yet think of poet as something I might be. To the best of my recollection, we read T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Theodore Roethke. I believe that was it. The Beats were not touched on. When the professor devoted a class to poetry and popular music, he talked about the Beatles, with no mention of Bob Dylan. Two years later a class on the English Romantics provided a foundation that served me well when I took up them again some twenty years later. While I have no complaints about either professor, neither was particularly memorable. It never occurred to me to approach either about the craft of poetry.

Even less was there an established poet of whatever rank. James Dickey held the official position of poet in residence at the University of South Carolina while I was a student there. If Dickey was approachable, and he may have been for all I know, I had no clue how to go about it. That may be just as well because I can think of almost no poet with whom I feel less affinity. That coupled with my youthful naïveté and utter lack of self-confidence would not have boded well for a fruitful encounter. More likely I would have been crushed. There must have been other students writing poetry whom I might have found as a matter of course had I been an English major. I do not know why I failed to make an effort to seek them out. Absent teacher and peer group, I wrote and read in isolation and never learned the technical aspects of the craft at much beyond a rudimentary acquaintance with meters, forms, and tropes.

From time to time I made a pass at study of these things. Take meter. Iambic is easy enough, a pair of syllables with a stress on the second one. On a good day I can remember that the word iamb is a trochee (two syllables with stress on the first), and anapest a dactyl (three syllables, one stressed followed by two unstressed), whereupon it follows reasonably that an anapestic foot (or sequence) comprises two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one. My grasp goes not much further than knowing these terms, more or less, which I can always look up if need be, as I did while writing this essay, just to be on the safe side.

I have on occasion tried my hand at strict forms, varieties of sonnets, Spenserian stanzas, rhyme royal, and so on, along with blank verse, dutifully counting syllables in lines that come out more or less to iambic pentameter. A few decent poems have come from these exercises. There is a generative aspect to the practice as the poem is led on by the requirement to come up with words, phrases, and lines to fit meter and form. Even where it is to a degree successful, however, the feel is artificial and I wonder how much, if anything, my rough-hewn iambic pentameters really contribute to the poem. The process seems artificial and contrived even when in some sense fruitful.

Perhaps someday I will translate these poems into free verse to see what comes of it. It may be that certain poems would be stronger with lines playing out in accord with dictates other than the metrical. Robert Frost famously remarked that writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. The proposition is one of those that seem reasonable at first glance until a bit of reflection leads to a different conclusion, in this instance, that Frost’s observation is well off base, grounded in the presumption that free verse is simply tossed off without regard to rhythm and structure, and maybe this is how much free verse is written and why it might strike a reader as pedestrian and of little significance or interest to anyone beyond the author’s immediate circle of kindred and friends. Free verse presents it own challenge to write poetry that is interesting, meangingful, and memorable without relying on traditional techniques of meter and form.

Does this stuff matter, should it matter, to anyone whose pointy head is not so far up his pedantic intellect…? From a practical standpoint, I draw on Keats from “The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream”:

…Who alive can say,
‘Thou are no Poet—mayst not tell they dreams’?
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved,
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.

In principle knowing is better than not knowing. We can never study or learn too much. There is a distinction, though, between merely knowing things, such as the names of meters and poetic forms, and understanding them, as there is distinction between pedantry and genuine love of learning. The rhythm of phrases and lines as they play out on the page or through spoken sounds is at the heart of poetry whether there is a formal metrical structure or not. I like to think I have a fairly well developed sense of rhythm born of extensive reading of a wide range of good writing, a sense that has over time become internalized, almost instinctive. It strikes me as plausible that a similar internalization of formal metrics might be attained through disciplined study, thus providing another tool the poet may use to flesh out a vision that readers and listeners might find moving and memorable. That is what it is all about.

David :: Mar.17.2013 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »

The Body Beautiful In Ancient Greece features more than 120 priceless objects from the British Museum’s famed collection of Greek and Roman art. Iconic marble and bronze sculptures, vessels, funerary objects, and jewelry are among the treasures that explore the human form, some dating back to the second millennium BC.

At the Portland Art Museum through 6 January 2013.

 “Woot!” as a young friend might put it.

 Beyond that I am at something of a loss for words to describe this breathtaking exhibition that opened last month at its first venue in the US. Through the summer I looked forward to The Body Beautiful, yet could not help but wonder if any show could live up to the ballyhoo that accompanied its opening. I was also a tad apprehensive because there can be a down side to blockbuster exhibits when the large crowds they draw make it difficult to fully appreciate the art.

Such were my thoughts as I approached the Hoffman Entrance to the museum ten minutes before opening on Thursday morning of the exhibit’s inaugural week. Only a few people were waiting outside when I arrived. By the time I checked my bag and got my ticket squared away, the line behind me stretched out through the door.

Attendance on that first visit and again the next day when I made a second run-through after my Friday morning volunteer stint at the Discovery Center was at a comfortable level. There was an unspoken camaraderie among visitors as we deferentially made way for one another and took our turns reading descriptions of the art before stepping back to take in the works themselves, those wonderful sculptures, black- and red-figure amphorae, an erotic scene painted on the bottom of a drinking bowl for the amusement of a party guest when he finished his wine, a woman about to sit on the lap of a reclining gentleman quite ready, so to speak, for her to join him.

I lose myself in a way beyond words as I gaze on these figures of Apollo, Aphrodite, the head of Herakles, Dionysos, Sokrates the philosopher, famous for a body that was anything but beautiful, and the rest. Much as I love museums, and I seek them out in every city I visit, after an hour or ninety minutes I find myself walking past the art without really taking it in. On that Thursday I read every plaque and looked at every piece in the show. When I came to the end about an hour and a half after my entrance, I found that I did not want to leave. I walked back upstairs and took in again Apollo, Aphrodite, Herakles, especially Herakles, something about his expression, in stone yet human and lifelike, something that goes beyond words. I thought of these lines from John Keats’ poem “Endymion”: “…in spite of all / Some shape of beauty moves away the pall / From our dark spirits.”  For a few precious moments, I lost myself again.

The exhibit is accompanied by a lecture series and various collaborative events and workshops. I reserved a ticket for “The Wardrobe Malfunction that Shook the World: Nudity, The Body Beautiful, and Greek Self-Fashioning,” a lecture by Andrew Stewart, PhD, Professor of Greek Art, University of California Berkeley, but missed that one because laid low by a cold still in the lingering-on stage  two weeks later. Last Sunday I was sufficiently recovered to venture out and had the pleasure to catch  Ian Morris’s ”Did the Ancient World Decide the Fate of the Modern World?”

The title is somewhat misleading, as the lecture centered on an examination of the question of Greek and Roman exceptionalism, viz., whether Greece and Rome were qualitatively different from other agrarian civilizations of the first millennium BC and if this difference accounts for the subsequent rise of the West. Or were Greece and Rome instead fundamentally similar in terms of emergence of state bureaucracy and organization, methods of agriculture, and modes of warfare to other civilizations of the time in eastern China, India, the Middle East, and North and East Africa? Or as a third option, included it seemed more to serve as a punchline for the audience’s amusement than a serious thesis, it does not matter because nothing happened in history until the 18th century and the industrial revolution. Morris in conclusion clearly leaned toward the middle thesis that classical Greco-Roman civilization was in its essential aspects more like others of the time than different, while acknowledging that neither option can be maintained without considerable qualification.

In the Q&A session that followed, a member of the audience asked about the influence of cultural and intellectual developments, philosophy, political thought, art and literature, and so on, which was conspicuously absent from the lecture. Morris explained that he did not include these things in the benchmarks he used for comparison because they are not quantifiable. He made a pass at contending that this exclusion is legitimate because cultural and intellectual manifestations derive from social and economic factors, an arguable point, but he came a bit close for my taste to the position that what cannot be quantified does not need to be considered. In fairness, Morris may well have hedged on this point had the discussion been pursued in depth. Be that as it may, the lecture was enjoyable, entertaining, and learned, perhaps not profound but certainly thought provoking. A good way to pass an hour and a half on an otherwise dreary Sunday afternoon while a big storm bore down on the Oregon coast.

Ian Morris, PhD, is Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor in Classics and Professor in History, Stanford University, and the author Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future.

David :: Nov.24.2012 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »

Some friends from the office recently convened at Noble Rot for drinks and conversation in celebration of my sixtieth birthday. One of them asked if I plan to retire at sixty-two, to which I replied that I would love to do that, but it is not financially feasible. I will likely have to put in time at whatever workplace will have me until I keel over from a work-related heart attack or stroke, that or take up residence under a bridge somewhere, options born of failure to find a suitable mode of existence whereby I might devote myself to a life of study and creative pursuits, thinking here of existence as E.R. Curtius put it in a short chapter on the mode of existence of the medieval poet, “not in the sense of contemporary ‘existentialism’ but in the old-fashioned (but always up-to-date) one of ‘living conditions and making ends meet.’” (Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages).

How the poet fits into society, the poet’s function, and how to earn a living, were dilemmas for medieval poets no less than for those who take up the pen today. “One could become a teacher, a clergyman, a doctor, an artisan…There was a road to every occupation in the world…a school…Only for the poet there was none! It was permissible, even considered an honor, to be a poet. But to become a poet was impossible; to want to become one was absurd and shameful.” (Hermann Hesse, quoted by Curtius).

In the Middle Ages there was a school for poets—or rather, poetry itself was a school subject. To that extent the poet’s “vocational problem” was simpler. But finding economic security could be a tormenting preoccupation to the poet in those days too. He was thrown back on gifts from his patrons, and he often begs in moving tones for the necessities of life. (Curtius)

Walter of Châtillon (twelfth-century French writer and theologian) wrote a poem asking the pope for a benefice, reminding him that Virgil and Lucan were wealthy. Walter refuses to write for money in a passage paraphrased in Curtius: “Many fools want to play the Juvenal; shall I, who have Pallas for my patroness, be silent? They make begging poems, which can be likened to the lowing of cattle, while I command the delicate tones of a various art.” In another poem Walter writes that “To strive after wisdom and virtue is a very fine thing, but the man who does it ends up in the gutter…What help is all learning if, having it, one goes hungry?”

Writes Curtius, “Study, learning and poetry bring nothing in. Then is it not better to renounce academic education and throw oneself into practical life? This is a favorite theme for discussion among the school poets.” He adds, “A standing complaint is that mimes and buffoons are better rewarded and cared for by the powerful than are poets.” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The poet’s place in society and relationship with gainful employment have long been problematic and more or less accepted as such. Yet we all must earn, beg, borrow, or steal a living, unless we choose our parents wisely enough to inherit. One need not be a philistine or Republican to note that poets are no different from anyone else in this regard. A counterargument might have it that the poet’s mode of existence is an issue because it goes beyond paying the rent or mortgage, the grocery bill, the booze bill, and on to the need to find a way of life wherein the poet can flourish qua poet. To which might be offered by way of rejoinder, that is all well and good, but life is what it is. The bills come due. We pay them, or we pay the price exacted for defying them.

There is a long and after its fashion honored tradition of the poète maudit, the poet as outcast existing on the fringes of society, denizen of the demimonde, defiant of bourgeois values and work ethic, devotion to the muse accompanied by devotion to alcohol, drugs, and sexual relationships unconstrained by convention. François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, and Alfred Jarry come to mind. Bob Kaufman (1925–1986) and Gregory Corso (1930–2001) are more contemporary examples. Exactly how Kaufman and Corso survived is not altogether clear to me, yet they made it, Kaufman his three score years, Corso three score and ten, carving out niches for themselves as minor though highly original poets.

Corso’s résumé is sketchy by any standard:

Writer. Manual laborer in New York, NY, 1950-51; employee of Los Angeles Examiner, Los Angeles, CA, 1951-52; merchant seaman on Norwegian vessels, 1952-53. English department, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1965-70. (Gregory Corso Biography, The Poetry Foundation)

His youth was spent in foster homes, on the streets of New York, and in prison, not a background where job skills are apt to be cultivated. As a young fellow, good looking and no doubt possessed of a certain bohemian charm, Corso had a knack for connecting with women from well-to-do families. William Burroughs offered this account on Corso’s mode of existence in Paris some fifty years ago:

Gregory had no visible means of support and managed to live in Paris [circa 1958-63] on his wits, able to cadge a drink here, a meal there, to sell something or be given gifts, usually by women. My dear, he always had girls. Always had girls. He had one there called April, or was she November or September or something?… He always came up with something. He was always writing big manuscripts and annotating them and selling them as first drafts. Somebody else would find they had one too. He wrote a great deal when he was there… Of course Gregory was always in and out. I remember someone saying, “Gregory is difficult.” Well he’s a poor Italian thief. He went to reform school. He was brought up in that whole atmosphere of being a thief. He had sense enough to get out…. Gregory decided he was a poet and he just stuck with it. (Barry Miles, The Beat Hotel)

It is not just for bohemians that employment and means of survival present challenges. Dana Gioia offers an amusing anecdote about Allen Tate, who fared no better than Corso might have in his stab at a career in business.

Allen Tate’s brother, Benjamin Nathan Tate, was a self-made tycoon who had formed two coal companies in Cincinnati and sat on the board of directors of several large corporations including Western Union. When Allen left Vanderbilt in 1922, Benjamin decided to start his brother on a business career by securing him a job in one of his coal offices. “In one day I lost the company $700 [a considerably more substantial sum at that time than at present] by shipping some coal to Duluth that should have gone to Cleveland,” Tate later explained. Benjamin soon agreed that Allen should seek a literary career.

Gioia’s theme  in the essay Business and Poetry is American poetry’s silence on the topic of business:

American poetry has defined business mainly by excluding it. Business does not exist in the world of poetry, and therefore by implication it has become everything that poetry is not—a world without imagination, enlightenment, or perception. It is the universe from which poetry is trying to escape.

T.S. Eliot’s decade in the international department of Lloyd’s Bank of London merits only scant reference in his poetry. Wallace Stevens coupled a career as a corporate lawyer and insurance company executive with a rigorously compartmentalized literary career for which he is recognized as a major American poet of the twentieth century.

Gioia notes that A.R. Ammons was a salesman for a scientific glass manufacturer when his first book appeared and spent ten years in business before leaving to teach at Cornell, James Dickey made a career in advertising before a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to devote his major energies to writing, and Richard Hugo worked at Boeing for thirteen years before nailing an academic position. Ammons, Dickey, and Hugo appear to have functioned capably in the business world, yet they all left jumped ship when opportunity presented itself, Ammons and Hugo straightaway, Dickey with a slight detour that included a stint at Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress.

William Carlos Williams and Frank O’Hara, two poets not taken up by Gioia, enjoyed successful careers outside the univesity. Williams was a physician in Rutherford, New Jersey, for more than forty years. O’Hara landed a job at the front desk at the Museum of Modern Art after he obtained an M.A. at the University of Michigan, where he studied comparative literature, and went on to be a curator at the museum.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919) and Gary Snyder (b. 1930) are poets of undeniable accomplishment and character who also flourished outside the literary-university establishment before being recognized by it. They were prominent members of a loose network of poets associated with the bohemian, countercultural scene of the 1950s and 1960s whose lives and careers took a different trajectory than did those of Corso and Kaufman. They staked out their ground as dissenting voices, progressive in their social and political views, sharp critics of corporate capitalism and multiple establishments, while serving as exemplary models for what it is to be an engaged citizen, serious writer, and generally decent human being in a troubled time.

Ferlinghetti earned an M.A. from Columbia University (1948) and a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne (1951). After discovering that he was not cut out for teaching, he became a bookseller and publisher as cofounder of City Lights Books in 1953. In addition to poems Ferlinghetti has written, fiction, plays, art criticism, and essays. He is also a painter whose whose has appeared in galleries throughout the world.

Snyder is sui generis, a remarkable figure who found a way to balance and affirm physical labor, intellectual pursuits, community responsibility,  environmental stewardship, and a spiritual sensibility rooted in Buddhist practice. A graduate school dropout (if memory serves, he attended grad school for one semester at University of Indiana, where he set out to study anthropology), he worked as a seaman, lumberjack, firewatcher, on trail crews, lived in Japan, studied in a Zen monastery, translated Japanese and Chinese poetry, while producing a distinctive body of his own work, poems and essays, for which he is rightly recognized as one of the most distinguished literary figures of his generation. Snyder is an American poet for whom work is a recurring theme, but it is generally physical labor, not business, that is his topic. He served as a lecturer at numerous universities and writing workshops and is an emeritus professor of English at the University of California, Davis, where he became a faculty member in 1985.

So what are we to make of this cursory and somewhat haphazard examination of the poet’s mode of existence? The first thing that jumps out is the ease with which we can find examples of poets who make ends meet by way of some accommodation with the necessity of gainful employment. Teaching in the university, or better, a university position with as light a teaching load as can be gotten away with, is probably preferable. Poets often land faculty appointments only after gaining some recognition for their work rather than via the conventional route whereby accumulation of graduate degrees segues directly into a teaching career. The poète maudit can cut a romantic and in some sense inspiring figure as one who lives for art, but those who take this path tend not to leave behind the strongest body of work.

Competition for university positions has always been fierce. I would imagine it has not diminished in today’s university where the business model and its bottomline calculations reign, with emphasis on technical education, job skills, and business study, to the neglect of the traditional liberal arts and humanistic values. The writer-workshop racket seems to be going great guns, but I doubt we can all support ourselves teaching each other about writing.

Cleaving to the vision while doing what one must to make end’s meet is no less nor more a challenge and struggle for American poets than for poets in other times and places. We do not have to look too far to find models who meet this challenge with integrity and honor. How we meet it today comes down, as does much else, to the individual, a person’s makeup, existential choices whose wisdom or folly is apparent only in hindsight, and to some extent fortune or fate, not in the sense of something preordained but how things play out that hinges in part on talent and character and in part on chance and luck, for good or ill.

The Whole of the Poet’s Existence, Part I

David :: Sep.16.2012 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 2 Comments »

The latest incarnation of the bio note I use for publications and readings includes the phrase “poet, runner, unaffiliated intellectual,” along with a smattering of relevant biographical details and mention of literary traditions that inform my work. My hope is to provide a bit more insight into myself and the poems than might be gleaned from a standard type of author’s bio that consists mostly of a list of publication credits.

“Poet, runner, unaffiliated intellectual” sums up much of how I see myself. Yet I must ask where I get off claiming these mantles. Poet is up there with king, emperor, pope, as Gregory Corso put it. Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson are poets. Mo Farah, Meb Keflezighi, Desiree Davila, Shalane Flanagan, Paula Radcliffe are runners. My brother is a runner (marathon PR 3:12:02 at Boston 2011). Grete Waitz, now there was a runner. By what measure or vanity do I place myself in this company?

A colleague at the office who recently took up running told me she cannot think of herself as a runner until she gets her pace down to ten minutes per mile. I understand that line of thought but do not see things quite that way. You are a runner when being a runner is part of how you think of yourself, something internalized, who you are. Being a poet entails more than writing verses, as being a runner entails more than jogging. Poet and runner are ways of being in a world that we shape and are shaped by, existential stances, from one perspective choice, from another compulsion, perhaps not equivalent to stances taken for justice, for freedom, for the powerless against power, but no less aspects of who we are.

Then there is intellectual, unaffiliated in that I have no connection with any university, foundation, or other institution, such as, for example, The New York Review of Books, apart from being a subscriber and reader of that indispensable publication for most of my adult life. I am less comfortable terming myself an intellectual in any sense than I am calling myself poet or runner. This has nothing to do with an American disdain for intellectuals that goes back to the colonial era and spans the political spectrum. The hesitance comes rather from a sense of inadequacy that dwarfs any inadequacy I feel as poet or runner. There is so much to know, and I know so little, something about a fair number of things, not nearly enough about any of them. Like Ezra Pound, my knowing is fairly broad but not at all deep. Like Socrates I know only that I do not know, yet value knowing above almost all else.

This train of thought left the station as I made my way through Ernst Robert Curtius’ monumental European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, a veritable tome, as they say, of literary history and literary criticism whose theme is the unity of European literature from antiquity to the present. Within the book’s covers lies an imposing wealth of scholarship and learning. Not that the author’s treatment of his subject is always riveting. One illustrative citation is seldom sufficient when half a dozen or more can be laid out one after another. Curtius typically makes his case by quoting extensively from authors of antiquity and the Middle Ages, for the most part in Greek and Latin, occasionally other languages, often unaccompanied by translation into English. There is nothing for those of us who lack those languages to do but skip over the untranslated passages, which at least enables the reader to flip a few pages in rapid succession and get a sense that some headway is being made.

Curtius is a wonderful resource as he addresses subjects ranging from the antique system of rhetoric topics, stock ideas and themes that could be used in every kind of writing, to the curriculum of the medieval school, formation of church and medieval canons, and history and meaning of critical terms such as metonymy, synecdoche, and litotes. There is a technical term for pretty much every aspect of grammar and rhetoric. “Not a few” (instead of “many”) is a litotes. Athletes from the world over hope to win laurels at the Olympics. “To win laurels,” by which is meant fame and glory, is a metonymy. Some of us, perhaps pedants at heart, find these tidbits fascinating.

Of what worth is this kind of study? There is no immediate quid pro quo. Prospect of economic benefit is laughable, not worth bringing up. It is certainly not a measure of character. Scholars and artists run the gamut of human behavior from admirable to abominable with all station stops in between, pretty much like everyone else. Study of a tradition can add to a poet’s stock of tools and resources for writing, but it will not necessarily lead one to write or understand poetry better and love it more, though it could. Perhaps something of it will be applicable to my literary efforts, perhaps not. Beyond all that there is pleasure to be had in study and learning for their own sake, not only literature and history of ideas, as it is for me, but more generally as well. For some it is how things work on a practical level, automobile engines, computers, and so on. For others it might be Darwin and evolution, genetics, or the mathematics of string theory.

The immediate challenge when reading Curtius lies in the daunting range and depth of his scholarship. How could I possibly know enough to follow his argument and assess its validity? Can I hope to do more than scratch the surface and try to get some sense of it all? I believe it was Bill Rodgers who said, “No one with a full-time job will ever beat me in a race.” Rodgers’ remark was made not to disparage people with full-time jobs but in recognition that no one with a full-time job has the time required to put in the training necessary to compete at an elite level. It is not a question of talent, dedication, discipline, hard work, will, desire, none of that. It comes down to time.

Does the same principle apply to intellectual and creative endeavors? Is it possible for someone with a full-time job to be anything more than a dilettante of scholarship and writing? There lies the appeal of an academic career in the humanities, where one might hope to pass the days reading, studying, teaching, in the company of others who care passionately about these things. Whether this idyllic life was once possible is debatable and anyway hardly relevant in the era of the university as technical or trade school operated on a business model. Where that leaves your oft humbled scribe and would-be scholar will be taken up in Part II of this essay, whose point of departure is Curtius’ chapter “The Mode of Existence of the Medieval Poet,” for the question of living conditions and making ends meet, as Curtius puts it, is far from unique to the present day. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

David :: Aug.12.2012 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »

The plan to run the Twin Cities Marathon in Minneapolis in October was short-circuited by foot and ankle woes that go back to a flukish injury in November when my right foot hit off the edge of the sidewalk as I ducked to avoid low-hanging branches some Portland hippie liberal anarchist property owner neglected to trim. The sidewalk was not flush to the ground. When the ankle rolled, I fell and hit the sidewalk with my face. The ankle was the least of my concerns as I checked that my nose and teeth were where they should be and gingerly tested the left knee that banged the sidewalk hard. I got lucky. My profile emerged no more goofy looking than it was before. The knee suffered only the bang, no damage done. I walked a few blocks, then jogged half a mile or so home, thinking I escaped the mishap with nothing but a scare and some inconsequential scrapes.

The ankle and foot turned out not to be okay, with only minor swelling but enough discomfort to force a six -week layoff with only three short test runs in the interim, after each of which I knew I had made a mistake. The injury responded to rest and a therapy regimen of exercises, a focus on light stretching for the Achilles and calf, and regular icing. By middle of December I could run regularly, and my mileage approached a decent level as we moved into the late January heart of winter. The ankle and foot recovered sufficiently for me to dismiss the remaining modest discomfort, which came more after running than during runs, but it never really got right. Even so I had a good spring and was where I wanted to be to begin formal marathon training the first week of June when in mid-May, about nine miles into a fourteen-mile run, I came down on my right foot and the ankle just hurt. I do no recall anything untoward, no misstep or twist. I was running along the river on the stretch between OMSI and Hawthorne Bridge where there is some loose gravel and rock. Perhaps I stepped on a pebble, and the ankle was cranky and unstable enough to be thrown off by that. Whatever the proximate cause, I paused for a few minutes and did some ankle rotations. The pain went away and I finished the run. Later that day I felt some real discomfort in assorted areas around the ankle and foot. I took a few days off, road-tested the ankle with a short run, found that was a mistake, and extended down time to three weeks.

I could run four miles with no ill effect when I took up running again the second week in June, but the one shot extending the distance to eight miles was another mistake—and yes, I know I should not have jumped from four to eight in one swoop coming back from injury. Be that as it may, I could run low mileage, but the ankle was still not right. I ran all this by my primary care provider at the annual checkup last month and got a referral to a physical therapist/sports medicine guy. The PT session was encouraging. The young fellow thinks there are no serious issues. He prescribed some exercises and gave the okay for low-mileage runs as long as there is no pain, though he did advise that the guideline to increase mileage by no more than ten percent a week when coming back from an injury is a rule for me right now. I can live with that.

Ah, the things we runners do to run. Now I have incorporated the six PT exercises into my routine with the straight-leg lifts with ankle weights to ward off runner’s-knee pain, what passes for core work with the medicine ball, and some half-baked yoga for flexibility. Two of the PT exercises I do daily, the others five days a week, the core work and lifts three days a week, and the half-baked yoga at least three days a week. The full routine runs to about thirty-five minutes, making for a pretty fair workout even on days I do not run. The time put into it is no issue while I am underemployed. However, if I get the wage work back up over thirty hours a week, much less the conventional level of forty, which alas is desirable from the standpoint of personal finances, managing time to get in workouts, study, some pretense at the creative life, and perhaps the occasional excursion for a semblance of social activity could present a challenge.

Yesterday I ran a whopping 4.7 miles. To put that in perspective, my marathon-training schedule called for a sixteen-mile run. Bagging the fall marathon leaves me a little dejected. I looked forward to running it with Trani, my brother, who has run Twin Cities before and testifies that race promotion as the most beautiful urban marathon in America is not just hype. Beyond that, my nephew Dan lives in Minneapolis, and he and Trani both think I would like the city. I may still check out Minneapolis, in a best-case scenario coordinating a visit there with Trani to take Dan up on his offer to give us a tour. My nephew claims to see good beer and an awesome Midwestern arts scene in the future for his dad and uncle.

Many people run races to entice themselves to do the training. While I generally enjoy the few races I run, I am not crazy about the hassle and logistics that go with it, rising at the crack of dawn to get to the start, the lines at the portable toilets, the general herd of people. It is all good but not something I relish. I was, however, looking forward to losing myself for a couple of months in the grind of training that takes over one’s life to an extent, but in a good way, during marathon training. Run, recover, sleep, mild panic at the thought of an upcoming twenty-mile run. Twenty miles? Do I really want to run twenty miles? Daunting at the outset, the run seems endless with fifteen, ten, even five miles to go. Then comes the end of the run and it seems barely to have started. Over already? That is kind of a letdown, wacky as that may sound to a nonrunner.

Surely there is a theme here, a thread, however tenuous, running through this somewhere. Has to be, right? Albert Camus would not write with an eye to commercial success because he regarded writing as one of the few pure things in his life and refused to compromise it. Writing and running are two pure things in my life, as are family and a few dear friendships, so perhaps I have four pure things. Okay, art too, the intellectual adventure, life of the spirit generally, of which the writing is a part. So more pure things than I might at first think. I must be pretty fortunate.

Let’s focus on writing and running. There was a time when writing was just what I do. Not always well, too often not particularly well or to any deep satisfaction. Yet it was simply a matter of going to my desk or wherever else I might habitually write, some café or coffee joint or library table, sometimes with paper and pen in hand, others straight to the typewriter in my youth and latterly to the computer. At some time, precisely when I cannot pinpoint, that changed a bit. I came to think more in terms of making myself go to the desk and sometimes rather resisting the call by finding trivial distractions to take me away from it. When I do sit down and something actually comes of it, as opposed to the times when the page remains blank after fifteen minutes, half an hour, more, I still lose myself in the work, whether it is an essay, a poem, or an attempt at fiction, as happened on a recent morning when I put in about an hour going through my notebooks and typed up six little poems, all minor efforts, all works in progress, nothing too exciting, before I headed in to the office. That was fun, pleasurable in that broad sense of which Jacques Derrida spoke when he said that deconstruction is in some sense a pleasurable experience, just as grinding out an eighteen-mile run for marathon training is in some sense a pleasurable experience.

There is a parallel with running in the way I make myself go to my desk. I walk home from the bus stop, dispirited after a day at the office, thinking I just want to flop down on the sofa and close my eyes. Or it is winter, cold and wet, and I am far from eager to step out into it. Yet almost invariably once I get out, putting one foot in front of the other, even those days when weather is crummy and I have old man legs, just lifeless, I soon remember why I do this, as at this moment, typing these words, sentences, paragraphs, thinking it out, I know something of why I do this. It is who I am. An office colleague who recently took up running remarked that someone told her she cannot think of herself as a runner until she gets her pace down to ten minutes per mile or better. I understand the reasoning but do not quite see it that way. One is a runner when running is so much a part of one’s life that it has become internalized to the extent that it is an essential aspect of one’s sense of self.

That this little essay, that poem, the abandoned novel in the file cabinet, is of no great import is itself of no great import. It does not have to shake the world like Mayakovsky’s thundering voice. That the work should reach an audience, that it should find at least a few to whom it matters, is to be hoped for, but if that does not happen, well it does not happen. I have in recent years found there is an audience for the poems. It is a small audience, though there might be a larger one out there if only I knew how to reach it. Ah, but as I have often noted, there is not an entrepreneurial bone in my body. To think that even a few people might be touched by the poems is gratifying. For someone to say, as someone did after a recent reading, that my poems give him hope is no small thing. A poet should never take for granted anyone who might expend time and effort to read a poem or attend a reading. To those people are owed one’s best effort and seriousness to put forth writing of value and worth, somethig with aesthetic and intellectual heft. How any of this might be measured remains tenuous, perhaps defiant of measure.

David :: Jul.15.2012 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual, House Red: Running :: No Comments »

I cannot say exactly what possessed me to take up Ulysses as the fall project. It would be too easy to claim simply that this is a book I feel I should read, or would like to have read, at any rate, though there is something to that. Maybe foolish pride and inner need push me to such books as a way to cling to the belief that I continue to pursue the intellectual adventure and life of the spirit, however much circumstances may suggest that is just another illusion with which I stubbornly refuse to part.

I have picked up Ulysses on a number of occasions, several anyway, over the years without ever making much headway, invariably finding myself soon lost, appreciative of this soaring passage or that bon mot, but too often unsure who said what, or where, or what exactly is happening here, there, or when, in what must be the longest day in the history of the world. The impulse to take another crack at Joyce’s grand work was just that, impulse, whim, and perhaps symptomatic of a trend to aimlessness and lack of focus that marks the past few years, a kind of entropy of intellect and spirit.

The curiosity that served me in good stead from my first discovery of books and reading is still with me. The discipline to follow through is what has eroded. Thus my reading bounces from a bit of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics to fascinating chapters about Proudhon the anarchist and John Stuart Mill in Alexander Herzen’s great memoir My Past and Thoughts to yet another perfunctory stab at Hegel for maybe no better reason than because he’s there and I’ve made little more headway with him than with Joyce, all of this highfalutin fare punctuated by a slew of contemporary novels, among them The Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell, The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Tragedy of Arthur and Prague by Arthur Phillips. Sylvia loaned the Mankell. The redoubtable Neil Anderson’s recommendation of The Tragedy of Arthur led to Phillips. I happened on The Club Dumas while searching for vacation reading, having previously enjoyed several other Pérez-Reverte novels. This is typical of how one comes on books: recommendations, reviews, one book leads to another, all well and good, except another among my illusions is that I might yet make something of my life, late in the day as it is for that, and that calls for a bit more discipline, a bit less of being easily diverted from serious projects by books and escapades even when they offer their own rewards.

That Ulysses has its rewards is evident from the beginning in Joyce’s wonderful capacity to describe the most ordinary things and everyday events with grace, elegance, and assurance, even at his most wildly, wordmadly inventive, in language that is never, ever pedestrian, however commonplace that which is being described. The novel’s opening—”Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather, on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air”—may not be up there with “Call me Ishmael”; “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”; or “I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never go there alone”; but there is something of it caught in my mind on first reading and remains.

Harold Bloom avers that “Ulysses is a pleasure, difficult but available, for the common reader of intelligence and goodwill.” I buy that it is available for the reader of intelligence and goodwill but balk at the unalloyed claim to pleasure. There are moments of pleasure, to be sure, passing at times almost to sublimity, when after a long slog one comes to a passage that is just special, as when old Leo Bloom waxes rhapsodic on the topic of Gerty McDowell’s undergarments espied from a distance as she, provocatively posed, leans back for a better view of fireworks, full aware of the view on offer, her face “suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. . . .” Such wonders are worth hacking through the wordy undergrowth for, half lost half the time, more than half, fighting the impulse to skim whole pages for a passage that might tender intimations of some sublime, even settle for lower pleasures but pleasures still, born of Joyce’s genius to let fly great tsunamis of words that in lesser hands would soon degenerate into sophomoric excess, show-offy twaddle to no good end.

The experience of reading Ulysses is akin to that of reading poems such as Keats’ “The Fall of Hyperion” or Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” where the challenge is to focus through lengthy stretches that may not enchant in and of themselves but are nonetheless integral to the whole, for a good poem’s meaning comes to more than just those special passages that lift us up out of ourselves and linger in our minds even when we do not formally commit them to memory. At present, barely halfway through Ulysses, I face the prospect of giving myself an incomplete if I do not go at it like a fury for the next few weeks. Yet there is the daunting but undeniable conviction that I would do well to go back to page one and begin anew with stately, plump Buck Milligan making the scene, yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, sustained gently behind him by the morning air, and take it up again with all the patience I can muster, enriched by the experience of what was absorbed on the first go around, having learned for instance that for me Joyce is best read aloud, at least moving my lips as I read, and in this sense too Ulysses is akin to those poems that mean most to me. This is where I stand with it for the nonce, with more, much more, to come.

David :: Dec.03.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 1 Comment »

With The Anatomy of Influence, Harold Bloom has promised us his “swan song” as a critic. Fat chance. After some thirty original books and hundreds of edited volumes; after more than fifty years of brilliance, boldness, bombast, bathos, and bullshit; after Shelley, Blake, Yeats, and Stevens; anxiety, misreading, repression, and revision; Orphism, gnosis, Lucretius, and the Kabbalah; Shakespeare, genius, the canon, and the Book of J; after evidence of a logorrhea so Niagaran even death will be hard-put to shut it off, there is little possibility that Bloom has given us his “final reflection upon the influence process”—which in Bloomspeak means his final reflection full stop, since everything he writes is wrapped around that fixed idea. (William Deresiewicz, The Shaman, The New Republic, September 14, 2011)

Bloom is nothing if not loyal to the authors of his choice. His chosen ones (they are many, yet they are select) could not ask for more devotion or in-depth consideration than Bloom has given them over the decades. The unfeigned awe, wonder, and reverence he still feels before the likes of Shakespeare, Shelley, Emerson, Whitman, Browning, Yeats, and Stevens speak loudly for the faith that pervades these pages. I mean the faith in literature’s inexhaustible depths and endless capacity to reward the reader who descends into its Orphic underworld. If Bloom is right—and I believe he is–that “literary criticism . . . ought to consist in acts of appreciation,” he has fulfilled that mandate once again in The Anatomy of Influence. (Robert Pogue Harrison, The Faith of Harold Bloom, The New York Review of Books, October 13, 2011)

Harold Boom is among the foremost literary critics of our time, an impassioned scholar, champion of the best that has been thought and said, to borrow yet again Matthew Arnold’s expression, which I first encountered in Bloom. He has read much and deeply and seems to remember all of it. A love for books and reading comes through on every page he writes.

Bloom can also be arrogant, imperious, full of himself, given to ex cathedra pronouncements that upon close reading dissolve into near gibberish, providing ample fodder for critics, of which there are plenty, for his detractors may well outnumber his defenders. Publication of The Anatomy of Influence, subtitled “Literature as a Way of Life,” presents an occasion for those on both sides of the Bloomian divide to blow hard about his merits and flaws. Of the essays cited here, Harrison’s is the more balanced, critical without being hostile, taking Bloom to task where appropriate while generous in giving him his due.

Deresiewicz  and Harrison lead me to reflect on Bloom and why I find reading him on the whole a pleasurable and rewarding experience. I have not yet read The Anatomy of Illness. My remarks here draw on earlier reading, which though partial is reasonably extensive.

In the prologue to How to Read and Why, Bloom writes of turning to reading “as a solitary praxis, rather than as an educational enterprise. . . . Ultimately we read–as Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson agree–in order to strengthen the self.”

. . . the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure. I am not exactly an erotics-of-reading purveyor, and a pleasurable difficulty seems to me a plausible definition of the Sublime, but a higher pleasure remains the reader’s quest. There is a reader’s Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain, except for the even more precarious transcendence we call “falling in love.” I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

The last two sentences echo earlier references to critics who mean much to Bloom: Samuel Johnson, whose prime concern is with “what comes near to ourself, what we can put to use”; Sir Francis Bacon, who gave the advice “[r]ead not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider”; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who remarked that the best books “impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads.”

We turn to teachers and critics, and what is a good critic but a good teacher, not to learn the “true,” the “real,” the “right” meaning of a poem or novel but rather to open ourselves up to ways of thinking about what we read that might not have occurred to us left to our own devices, unanticipated insights and perspectives that may yield the higher pleasure we seek. We also read criticism because there will never be time enough to read all that we wish to read, and our choices about what to read within the limits of our time must too often be made on the basis of insufficient evidence or outright chance. A critic with whom we find ourselves in tune can point us to authors who matter whom we would not have read otherwise. It might not be necessary that a critic’s account be strictly speaking accurate to serve this function. An imaginative enthusiasm ingeniously conveyed could do the trick. Conversely, one might also be led to a writer by negative criticism when it reveals something that strikes the reader’s fancy.

The acts of appreciation that mark the best of Bloom’s criticism throw off sparks that have kindled my imagination and enthusiasms. For this I am more than willing to make allowance for his flaws and excesses. We read criticism in ways analogous, if not exactly alike, to the ways we read poems and novels. Criticism is strong or weak, creative and imaginative or not, speaks to us or leaves us cold, and at its best gives us what we can put to use, leaves us with the conviction that the one nature wrote and the same reads. I suspect that Bloom has this in mind when he writes, that strong and creative criticism is his conscious aim. I would not go far as to claim that Bloom’s nature that writes is the same as my nature that reads, any more than I would say that of Keats or Dickinson. What I would say is that there is something in that nature we share, a kinship, a sensibility, an intimation of that secular transcendence for which we thirst, something once referred to as the Sublime, along with our conviction that there is something of worth to us in the quest for it.

David :: Oct.12.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New Philosophy,  NY Times Magazine, 9 December 2007

Joshua Knobe, Experiments in Philosophy, NY Times, 7 September 2010

David Menconi, Putting Philosophy to the Test, Stanford Magazine, September/October 2011

Philosophy’s New Take on Old Problems, NY Times Room for Debate, 20 August 2010

I.

Josh Knobe has comfortable seating in his philosophy department office at Yale University—a small couch somewhere between a love seat and a sofa in size. It is most decidedly not, however, an armchair, which might seem a trivial distinction. But in Knobe’s world, one’s position on armchairs can be a matter of grave import.

“Yeah, it’s a couch rather than an armchair,” says Knobe, [Stanford] ’96. “So there’s room for two, and that’s important. You don’t just sit there alone and think about something. You sit and talk to someone about it.”

For the past century or so, philosophy has primarily entailed solitary ruminations to puzzle out deep truths about the nature of human existence—questions about reason, knowledge, values, free will. Philosophy can seem like a lonely ivory-tower vigil, but the old school holds that sitting and thinking is still the best way to do it. As one prominent philosopher put it a few years back, “If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can.” (Menconi)

For me, it was that an enormous amount of work had been done using one particular tool, sitting in an armchair thinking hard about the problem. How much more progress could we make with that one method was unclear to me, whereas it seemed like there was an enormous amount of untapped potential in trying to understand the processes that generate these judgments. It’s not so much that the old armchair techniques were bad; we’ve just been using them for 2,000 years. We might get more insight by trying a new tool. More than anything else, the difference really is in methodology. (Knobe quoted in Menconi)

Experimental philosophy, called x-phi for short, is a new philosophical movement that supplements the traditional tools of analytic philosophy with the scientific methods of cognitive science. So experimental philosophers actually go out and run systematic experiments aimed at understanding how people ordinarily think about the issues at the foundation of the philosophical discussion.(The Experimental Philosophy page on the Yale University website)

Aha, a new movement is afoot to bring philosophy down from its ivory tower and into the real world, depose those doddering professors gibber-jabbering away about Platonic Forms, the Cartesian dubito, and Ockham’s razor, overturn their armchairs and wake them from their dogmatic slumbers, take it to the streets, again. To the things themselves! Wait, that was a battle cry of another era, another overturning of the old order to put philosophy once again on a firm footing that will, depending on the perspective of the revolutionaries, return her to her ancient, exalted status or put her in her place as handmaiden of the sciences, the kind of thing that plays out every generation or several and has for centuries.

Perhaps Josh Knobe intends his characterization of the traditional technique of philosophy as sitting in an armchair thinking hard about a problem to be taken as a deliberate exaggeration, hyperbole, for the sake of making a point, although there is no indication in the articles cited here that this is what he has in mind. Rather, the assertion is made seriously and without qualification, as if meant to be taken at face value, in which case he is either guilty of some sloppy thinking or he is deliberately engaging in willful misrepresentation of the old order to lay the groundwork for the radically new approach he proposes.

My earliest professors took some pains to hammer into the heads of undergraduates—and grad students, for matter–that philosophy is not just a matter of an individual thinking about problems in isolation, no more than poetry is just writing down whatever thoughts come into one’s head. Dr. Matsen was fond of pointing out that we stand on the shoulders of giants, by whom he had in mind the likes of Heraclitus and Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroës), Duns Scotus, and so on. Philosophy begins not with one’s own thoughts, or not just one’s own thoughts, but with study of, to borrow Matthew Arnold’s term, the best that has been thought and said. Precisely what “the best that has been thought and said” comprises is up for debate, all well and good, for that debate is itself part of the philosophical enterprise.

Study entails a personal encounter with the giants on whose shoulders we stand, an attempt to engage them first on their own terms to the extent this is possible, acknowledging the outcome is always problematic, before taking them on from personal and contemporary perspective, rooted in subjectivity, experience, and the conventional thinking of the culture and age into which one was born. Reading and study of primary sources, discussion and dialogue with fellow students and teachers, consultation with secondary sources, all this is part of the deal, as is what I suppose Knobe has in mind with the armchair metaphor, those solitary moments alone, in the armchair, perhaps, or at the desk or on a long walk, when one attempts to digest and assimilate the material and from there to think contemplatively, reflectively, critically of the issue at hand. The metaphor of the armchair to represent this latter part of the process is fine as long as we remember that it is only a metaphor and only one aspect of an array of activity.

II.

Aristotle begins Nicomachean Ethics with an account how people think about what is good, how most of us lead our lives, and how we think we ought to live. The ordinary, everyday, common-sense way of looking at things is a point of setting out, not a conclusion. One thrust of philosophical inquiry historically has been to think critically about the everyday way of looking on things, reflected in the Socratic principle that the unexamined life is not worth living. The data gathered through an x-phi investigation are not an end in themselves. It is not just a matter of getting a show of hands on this or that issue.

The Knobe Effect is the conclusion derived from what seems to be a paradigmatic x-phi investigation, recounted by both Appiah and Menconi.

In many ways,[Joshua] Knobe is the closest thing experimental philosophy has to a rock star. Since last year, he’s been an essay contributor to the New York Times. An admirer from Australia maintains a Joshua Knobe fan page on Facebook. And a phenomenon bears his name: The Knobe Effect, derived from an experiment of his, is frequently cited to explain the effectiveness of negative political advertising.

Conducted in 2003, the experiment examined people’s perception of intentionality based on their opinions about two scenarios. In the first scenario, a business executive is told that a new product will increase profits but harm the environment. He responds that he doesn’t care about the environment, just profits. The program is implemented, profits go up and the environment suffers. When asked if the executive intentionally harmed the environment, 82 percent of respondents answered yes.

Scenario No. 2 is the same except for one key detail: The word “hurt” is replaced with “help.” Again, the executive says he doesn’t care about the environment. The program goes on, profits rise, and this time the environment benefits. But when asked if the executive intentionally helped the environment, only 23 percent of respondents said yes. So the Knobe Effect holds that people are more likely to assign blame for things that go wrong than to give credit for things that go right, a gap Knobe has spent the past eight years working to explain.

Why should the results of an action have a bearing on intentionality? And when it comes to questions of character, why do we tend to give more weight to negativity? Why does it sometimes happen that a single misdeed in a lifetime of otherwise exemplary behavior can destroy a reputation? (Think of how one racial slur can get someone branded a racist.) (Menconi)

The two scenarios are presented as if the only difference were that the outcome of one set of actions is harmful while the other is beneficial. Is the Knobe Effect the only, or even the best, interpretation of what is going on here? Might something else be at work other than a human tendency to assign blame when things go wrong but not give credit for things that go right? Are there methodological gremlins lurking about to confound Knobe’s conclusion?

Let us begin with scenario 2, where benefit to the environment is an unintended consequence of the executive’s program to increase profits. There is a tradition of moral thought that holds intentionality paramount. From the moral perspective, it is not sufficient that good result as an unintended consequence of action taken out of self-interest. One acts rightly in a moral sense only when doing the right thing because it is the right thing. Thus, the executive does not get moral credit for having benefited the environment. We might all be happy that the environment benefited from the executive’s action, and no doubt capitalists would be equally delighted that she or he profited, but morality has nothing to do with it. Intentionality is a necessary condition for one to be credited with moral responsibility for doing good.

On the other scenario, however, where a bad outcome results, intentionality and responsibility come into play in a different fashion. The executive is not setting out to harm the environment. The scenario would be trivial if that were the intention. Rather, the executive embarks on a course of action knowing it will do harm, though the explicit aim is to maximize profits, not to do harm. The executive’s moral culpability might be mitigated were she or he ignorant that the action undertaken for the sake of profit would be harmful. Here the executive bears moral responsibility for harm done because she or he knows these actions will be harmful and, acting from self-interest, forges ahead in callous disregard of that knowledge.

The sense of what it means to bear moral responsibility is not identical in the two scenarios. Might the responses recorded in the experiment be driven not, or not entirely, by a psychological inclination to more readily give blame for the bad than credit for the good, but by a sense, perhaps unarticulated but I think fairly conventional, that the relationship between intentionality and responsibility might reasonably be viewed differently depending on whether the outcome is beneficial or harmful? But, one might point out, have you perhaps subtly shifted the topic? You are talking about the nature of moral action and responsibility. The survey asks if the executive intentionally benefited or harmed the environment. Are these the same things or different things? Survey participants might have responded differently if the question had been explicitly couched in terms of moral action and responsibility, just as, conversely, responses to the question of intentionality could plausibly have been shaped by notions of the relationship between intentionality and responsibility and how that relationship might differ in the two scenarios.

An investigation such as the one presented here is useful insofar as it can open new avenues of discussion and ways of thinking about an issue. The real work lies in the discussion and thinking that ensues. Some of that work, not all of it by a longshot, but some, is a matter of solitary reflection, trying to think critically and well about the matter at hand, and for some of us the best place for that just might be an armchair.

David :: Oct.03.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »

Semi-Ambivalent Middle-Aged Male Lament #25
by Ric Vrana
Edited and with drawings by Ceylon Anderson
Published at the Independent Publishing Resource Center, Portland, Oregon, April 2011. 34 pp.
Available for purchase at St Johns Booksellers, Portland, Oregon

I should state at the outset that I bear no animus toward Ric Vrana for that little incident at the film festival last February when while waiting for the film to begin I found myself engaged in delightful conversation with a Czech woman seated next to me until he arrived, whereupon she graciously insisted on finding another seat in the crowded theater so I could sit with my friend. No, nothing could be further from my thoughts as I consider the merits of the poems that make up this little collection. She said she knew the film’s director.

The cover illustration for Ric Vrana’s Semi-Ambivalent Middle-Aged Male Lament #25 is a drawing of a smiling, naked, Buddha-ish figure brandishing a six-pack of PBR. The back cover has another drawing of the same laughing figure in the midst either of a backward tumble or a drunken sprawl. Together they call to mind the story of the eighth-century Chinese poet Meng Hau-ran.

Meng Hau-ran was a famous drinker. A government official once offered to introduce him at court, where he might get a position as a court poet.

But when the time came for him to go, a friend happened by, and they fell to drinking and talking. “Hadn’t you better be on your way?” asked the friend after a while.

“Oh, why bother,” replied Meng. “My job is to drink and enjoy myself.” (Greg Whincup, The Heart of Chinese Poetry, Doubleday (1987), p. 53).

I can scarcely imagine Ric Vrana as the court poet at any court, although I have seen him hold court many a night at open mics in basement bars, his poems marked by humor he directs as readily at himself as at others and the moral conviction of one for whom the idealism of his youth was never a thing to be left behind as he somehow balanced professional career, devoted parenthood, and a creative drive that has not flagged with the passing years. From “On My Terms”:

squandered innocence
maintained integrity
(not that anyone believes me anyway)
burned wood, money, time, the flag,
walked against the light
decided to hell with a god
that demands worship
to hell with a state
that demands allegiance

Drank a noon cocktail
took a long lunch
wrote one and a third
poems.

Vrana’s style is generally conversational, at times imagistic, accessible, and prosaic, in the manner of much contemporary American poetry. The style relies heavily on the poet’s capacity for wit, humor, and a keen eye to lift it from the realm of the mundane to be something we call poetry and not just prose with a ragged right margin. Vrana has these qualities in abundance. He is a maestro of humor who takes dead aim at our quirks, foibles, and general human foolishness.

Gregory Corso liked to say that humor is a kind of butcher with which you can get rid of a lot of garbage, a concept that Vrana grasps with a sure instinct. In “Cell Phone” he delivers ironic commentary on our abject servitude to technological toys, while in “Need a Dawg, Man” he is a bemused raconteur wryly describing an encounter in a bar with a young woman whose greeting, “You’re the man,” turns out to be a come-on to get him to take her uptight border collie off her hands.

His observations are honest, sharp, and never merely casual, as in the description of a poetry reading in  ”You Know Who You Are”:

Here we all are subversively
gathered in a group without being paid,
without getting college credits,
digging the poetry scene,
living in a country that stays inside the lines.

Culture is mostly Entertainment here.
We mainline it electronically,
consuming it at home because,
after all,
parking is just so hard to find
. . .

There follows a brief digression, which the poet acknowledges, along with acknowledging that he has lost his audience:

sitting there waiting your turn to speak,
to speak outside the lines.
But now I could say anything.
Even drop a Greek or Biblical reference,
or just leave the vague impression I did.

There’s that old guy up there again, going on . . .
What’s he talking about, protest?
Is this the sixties or something?
Love?
What’s that rat fucker got to tell me about love?

“Part of the Poem” is a poem whose subject is a clever analysis of itself, or maybe just an amusing parody of an analysis.

This is the part of the poem
that begins with a punch, some
line or two with rhythm, some
vivid imagery to draw you into a
Venus Fly Trap opening.

The next few lines initially rush
on to some metaphor or other
but it’s likely I’ll
axe it in the first revision so
it could start out being anything like
wind chimes crashing in a storm
—scratch that!

In the next stanza the narrator contemplates imposing a certain structure by breaking the poem into stanzas with the same number of lines in each.

I used to think this helped me think
but now it’s mostly to please my favorite critic
who loves to attack my “slavish devotion to form”.

All of which is prelude to

ramp up to the big finish
insert a fucking gratuitous
swear word or maybe pull
some non-sequitor surprise
out of my ass.
You may now applaud.

Indeed.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that the biographical note, penned I presume by Ceylon Anderson, contains an item that, if not a typo, leads us to wonder if this might be a somewhat embellished account of the poet’s life, perhaps the product of the prodigious and irreverent, prodigiously irreverent, if you will, imagination for which Anderson is justly notorious and much beloved.  ”Mr. Vrana was expelled from Dartmouth University in 1959 for involvement with a prostitution ring. The university has sealed their report of the incident until 2020, leaving it open to speculation for another 9 years whether Mr. Vrana was expelled for soliciting or purchasing.” I believe that in 1959 Ric Vrana would have been about seven years of age, thus quite the prodigy, in all sorts of ways.

Be that as it may, the bottom line is that Ric Vrana’s poems are a delight to read. They give pleasure and convey a sense of how life is and how things are in this world. We are grateful to Ceylon Anderson for his role in bringing these poems to print.

postscript 17 July 2011: memo from the editorial desk

I should note that I did not approach this review without bias. Ric Vrana is a friend of several years standing with whom I have had the  pleasure of sharing the stage for some of the most enjoyable poetry readings in which I have participated. A video of Ric Vrana reading his poems can be found at Oregon Literary Review First Wednesday 2009.

David :: Jul.12.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »