Poets on Poets: Kirsch on Graham and Ashbery

Art by Elliot Skow

Free verse often leaves me cold: my dirty little secret. But when the going gets tough—the saying goes—read criticism, so I opened The Modern Element, a book of criticism by Adam Kirsch. Kirsch’s own poetry is written in strict iambic pentameter, but as a reader he seems to have an infinite patience for the freer kind. Among the subjects treated in his book is the poetry of Jorie Graham. Here are the opening lines of her poem “The Guardian Angel of Point-of-View”:

A mourning dove. And again what you suffer
seems, ah, as if yet unlived through.
The bird keeps calling. You are in the middle
of the call.
There is thirsting in this work.
I must uphold—faultless—each outline—up—
each sloughing-off of meaning
into form. Ah . . . the bird keeps calling.
Behold—says my headless swording-in—this.
A gibbering, then a surprising fastness, then the opulence of
the stilled thing, seen.
[...]

Kirsch is able to locate meaning in the poem: it seems to make

a theoretical statement about perception—in particular, the desire for perfect, unlimited perception, which is impossible to satisfy.

But that does not mean he likes it. Appreciating such a poem is less like enjoying a pop song on the radio, than it is (in Kirsch’s metaphor) like working out an algebraic equation. Only a scattered few pieces of a thought are on the page, and the reader must constantly look away, and work things out on scratch paper, before they can “solve for X” and grasp a complete idea. But no one likes homework, so why make one’s poems so difficult? One motive, Kirsch writes,

is that the poet knows that much of what she writes is unintelligible...and consciously makes the reader’s experience of frustration part of the theoretical burden of the poem. Many facets of Graham’s work do seem deliberately intended to frustrate the reader.

But there is also another possible motive: Graham

wants poetry to serve as an evocative transcript of mental processes, rather than a finished and self-subsistent object. Instead of finding objective correlatives for inner experience, Graham attempts to reproduce that experience in shorthand, a private idiom, which the reader is left to translate.

In view of this, Kirsch thinks, Graham’s poetry, or its obscurity, is a “failure.”

One way to appreciate poetry is to imagine the words of the poem spoken by a fictional persona, the “speaker.” Another mode is more intimate: when poetry is “thoughtwriting,” one uses the poem as a script, and imagines oneself saying or thinking the thoughts expressed. Graham’s poetry defeats both of these approaches. If one must pause over every third word, and each dash and ellipsis, to wrinkle one’s brown over its significance, then extended imaginative engagement with the poem becomes impossible.

This aspect is not unique to Graham’s poetry. How did it become so common? Purely internal causes are one possibility. If, for whatever reason, one commits to writing free verse, one will feel pressure to make it sound “poetic,” but will lack the most time-tested means—the use of meter—of doing so. The result will be a hypertrophy of other poetic devices: grammatical license; elusiveness; the unexplained juxtaposition of images.

External causes are another possibility. Kirsch blames changed views about the aims of poetry. In his account, it was not the Modernists, and their arguments for free verse, but the Romantic generation, that committed the original sin. A strange-sounding accusation, at first: the Romantics never abandoned metric poetry, they even loved Milton, probably the greatest metricist English has ever seen. But look more closely, and Kirsch’s claims gain plausibility. The Romantics’ poetic theory shifted the definitional priority of poet and poem. A poet, it used to be, was someone who wrote poems; and poems were defined independently, through their formal features: meter, often rhyme, and so on. The Romantics flipped this around. For them, a poem is whatever a poet writes with poetic purpose. Who then is then a poet? Someone with a special “spiritual excellence,” or an unusual access to transcendental reality. What they wrote was poetry in virtue of communicating that reality to us ordinary people with our myopic souls, stumbling about in the dust:

Poetry, it seems, is not poems; it is not a skill practiced by the poet;...it has become a name for a mystical experience that can never be more than approximately described.

If you’ve gone that far, it’s a small step to say that a poem’s form should be whatever best coveys that mystical experience. And imposing the requirements of meter “from the outside” could only harm this enterprise. The Romantics may not themselves have abandoned meter, but they did give up on it as something with independent value.

The situation only got worse with Modernism and Postmodernism. Mystical reality, one must admit, sounds like a pretty cool thing to experience, if only second-hand, through a poem darkly. But the Modernists didn’t believe in any of that, and replaced transcendence with authenticity. The poet cannot channel an Ultimate Reality Beyond Appearances, but he can channel his own Unfiltered Subjective Experience. This pursuit of authenticity is even more in conflict with the use meter, than is the communication of mysticism:

Not to falsify one’s personal experience, even or especially in the name of art, is their [the Modernist’s] great principle. The poem, it follows, is only a means of synchronizing the reader’s experience with the writer’s.

Iambic pentameter will only get in the way of this; no writer’s experience proceeds according to a regular rhythm at the pace of ten-syllable lines.

Kirsch reads John Ashbery’s often impenetrable poems as just this kind of attempt at “synchronization.” This is from Flow Chart:

Only that one told me a
new-laid owl’s egg
is sovereign
against the gripes, and
now I find you here too.
I have found you out.
You seem
convinced the killer is
one of us. Why? Did
a drowned virgin
tell you that, or Tim the
ostler, or the one-eyed
hay-baler
with a hook for a hand?

Such “refusal[s] to follow a train of thought for very long” do have, Kirsch says, an “intelligibly poetic purpose”:

It is a way of indicating, by imitating, the poet’s sense of the constant flux of thought. Large amounts of junk flow through the mind, Ashbery seems to say...The sensation of lucidity is rare and fleeting.

But is it really worth it, tediously re-experiencing the “junk” flowing through someone else’s mind? On this question Kirsch is a firm no: the “poetics of authenticity” “has thoroughly failed.”

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See also: On Free Verse, with Applications to Walt Whitman; Timothy Steele on Free Verse.