THE ADORATION OF ANYTHING YOU THINK YOU OWN IS FIRE

April 11, 2010 at 1:35 am (Christopher Woodman, Scarriet, William Carlos Williams)


.For a closer view of this detail click here. For the whole tryptich click here.

The Adoration of anything you think you own is idolatrous.

The Adoration of anything you think you own, even Poetry, even Baseball, is idolatrous because, like the Critic on his knees in this painting, the fire’s in your own head. You worship at the shrine but you’re looking not into it but out at us. You’re looking back at your audience to be sure they’ll know how astute and well-informed you are, and, of course, how properly dressed. In turn, your ‘readers’ have a choice — to play ball or cry FIRE!

With regard to baseball, the strange beauty and fascination of it have never been explored more deeply than in the following poem. So what is it? And why has the discussion of poetry on Scarriet becoming so ugly and savage?

Christopher Woodman

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………………………..The Crowd at the Ball Game

………………………..The crowd at the ball game
………………………..is moved uniformly

………………………..by a spirit of uselessness
………………………..which delights them —

………………………..all the exciting detail
………………………..of the chase

………………………..and the escape, the error
………………………..the flash of genius —

………………………..all to no end save beauty
………………………..the eternal –

………………………..So in detail they, the crowd,
………………………..are beautiful

………………………..for this
………………………..to be warned against

………………………..saluted and defied —
………………………..It is alive, venomous

………………………..it smiles grimly
………………………..its words cut —

………………………..The flashy female with her
………………………..mother, gets it —

………………………..The Jew gets it straight – it
………………………..is deadly, terrifying —

………………………..It is the Inquisition, the
………………………..Revolution

………………………..It is beauty itself
………………………..that lives

………………………..day by day in them
………………………..idly —

………………………..This is
………………………..the power of their faces

………………………..It is summer, it is the solstice
………………………..the crowd is

………………………..cheering, the crowd is laughing
………………………..in detail

………………………..permanently, seriously
………………………..without thought
………………………………………………………William Carlos Williams (Dial, 1923)

[This poem has been posted twice  on this site, here and here. The response has been desultory, though the themes have been crying out for discussion.]

………THE COMMENTS THAT FOLLOW DEVELOP THE THREAD

19 Comments

“MUMBO JUMBO?” — “PARADOX?” “AMBIGUITY?” “IRONY?” “SYMBOL?”

April 3, 2010 at 12:15 pm (Christopher Woodman, Cleanth Brooks, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, March Madness, Modern Poetry, Modernism, New Criticism, Ogden Nash, Robert Penn Warren, Scarriet, T.S.Eliot, Thomas Brady, Uncategorized, W.K.Wimsatt, William Blake, William Butler Yeats, Yvor Winters)

March Madness has been a study as much as it has been an intoxication; the New Critics erred in thinking the emotive and the cognitive could not be combined; of course they can, by any astute critic (Poe is a shining example, who the New Critics, from Pound to Eliot to Warren to Winters to Brooks to Wimsatt carefully ignored or played down.). The New Critics made no satisfactory criticism; they merely introduced mumbo-jumbo, mere terms, such as paradox, ambiguity, irony and symbol and nothing about it was original or coherent, it was finally nothing but mumbo-jumbo for the self-elected priesthood.

The professional priest will lord it over the mere amateur, but such religious hierarchies do not belong in poetry, not artificially, anyway; Letters is not science, but finally morality for the many, and this is the ugly, primitive secret which the sophisticated modernist Oxford erudite fop dare not face.

……………………………………………………………..………….Thomas Brady

.

………..The Lord in His wisdom made the fly
………..And then forgot to tell us why.

……………                        ………                      …………Ogden Nash

.

The paradox here lies not in the fly or in the Lord’s wisdom but in what a poem can say that ordinary language can’t. You don’t need Pound, Eliot, Warren or Winters, or anyone from Oxford for that matter, to help you out with that, or even a High School diploma. Indeed, “The Night Before Christmas” is loaded with paradox, as is Pooh’s poetry, the Beatles, nursery rhymes, limericks and gospel. You can laugh or cry as much as you like, but still you can’t say what it  is without saying what it isn’t.

The ambiguity in this poem lies in the absurdity that gets to the very heart of what bothers human beings about life, the complexities of it – how a creature so indispensable to the health of the planet should be so small, for example, yet so insistent, fickle, and in your face, so disgusting yet impossible to swat.

The irony lies in the fact that the Lord in His wisdom forgot to tell us just about everything, and even when the scientist has done his or her very best to remedy that, and even shown us photos of the fly’s eyes and cultivated its filth in a petri dish so we could actually see the link between flies and disease, and then gone on to save lives by cleansing wounds with maggots, we still can’t decide who we are. And then along comes poetry, of all crazy stuff, and tells us!

Love hurts. Grief heals. The meek inherit the earth.

As to symbols, there are none in this poem in the usual sense. Indeed, symbols are rare in poetry worth reading because the whole idea of poetry is to rewrite the comfortable shorthands, cultural icons and codes we depend on. Indeed, when poetry is most effective even the symbols come off the rails, so to speak, and wreck our understanding of everything. For a moment we just have to stop — my God, my God, what is it?

Take the Rose in William Blake’s poem, “O Rose Thou Art Sick,” for example, or the Tiger in “Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright.” Only beginners talk about either as “symbols,” because the moment you think you know what they mean you’re lost. You lose the thread, you lose the argument, you lose your soul to the facts already stuck in your head. And you can’t move on.

Symbols are for simpletons, not for Ogden Nashes!

Had Ogden Nash written a whole series of poems about flies, as Yeats did about towers, for example, then we might want to consider “why” in a broader sense, and “the fly” might even be considered a symbol in the little poem above. And hey, why not? Life’s too complex not to accept what little help we can get from the way we human beings use language!

But we don’t need a Professional Priesthood for that, though sometimes we get one, boo hoo. Then abuses do follow, and yes, we do get Reformers, Counter-reformers, New Critics, Anti-new-critics, Pound-profs or Poe-profs or Flat-earthers, you name it.

Fortunately,  most of us move on with the baby still in our arms and not lying there blue on the floor with the bathwater.

Most of us also examine our lives in privacy too, I might add, even if we also love frisbee and beer. And the best poetry, of course, remains private in public.

Christopher Woodman

29 Comments