On First Looking into Chapman's Boner

The end message of Danielle Chapman's review of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries in Poetry is that we poets should stop playing with our thingies (words, sounds, meanings) and grow up and start "seducing" respectable readers like Chapman. Procreate, don't dial your own phone number! I shall try not to make too much of the extended metaphor of her review, which seems somewhat arbritrarily chosen, and intended to get a rise out of me (no pun intended) but the "giggles" and condescencion which mastubation elicits here seem better suited to a 'fifties hygiene handbook than a poetry review. The title of the review is "Bad Habits." Get your hand out of those dungarees, Mr. Whitman! (Curiously, Whitman, despite his virtuousic descriptions of poetic masturbation, seems to have a hang-up--perhaps his only hang-up--on this issue. He subscribed, as did Proust, to the spermatic economy model, whereby the less orgasms you have the smarter you get; reading through his prose, you can often come across phrases like "the gray drained faces of onanists.")

But infelicities of metaphor aside, let us move on to the marshmallowy substance of her argument. She quotes Reginald writing, in his introduction, that "They are all poets for whom . . . experience is not prior to the poem but something we undergo with and within the poem, for whom the poem itself is an experience." Her response is that "since this experience rarely requires the author to reach beyond himself"--as opposed to into his/her own pants, note her consistently male-gendered pronouns--"our role as readers is limited to watching." Now there are websites where people pay good money to watch others masturbate, but Chapman completely misreads and misunderstands Reginald. When Reginalds writes that the poem is an experience we undergo with and within the poem, he's pointing to the way that these poems discourage precisely the kind of passive reading/voyeurism that she decries. That's the point to process-oriented as opposed to product-oriented poetry; its slippages of syntax, grammar, semantics and form encourage an active process of assembly and head-scratching by the reader. For Chapman, any encounter between poet and reader seems entirely the responsibility of the former; but it's a two-way street, this one, and hers is a rather lazy theory of reading, if you ask me. I bet she never gets on top.

Poetic onanism, for Chapman, is the behavioral manifestation of narcissism (yes, I always fantasize about myself when masturbating!), and my contemporaries and I "find [ourselves] infinitely fascinating, and the tricks of our memory and sense the best possible material." But if Reginald's description of these poets is right, and both Chapman and I seem to agree that it is, it is the experience of writing a poem and being a person-in-language that is fascinating, not the bio-pic details of our lives. You will find hardly any poems in here which apply, or must apply, to one-life-and-one-life-only; if there is autobiography here, it is of the one-size-fits-all variety of which Ashbery talks--meant, in fact, to encourage precisely this point of intersection between reader and writer. You won't hear any of these poets saying "this poem goes out to all of the people who can really, like, dig what I've been through, man. The rest of you, if you want, feel free to either a)pity me b)admire me." I guess she missed the first sentence of my Artistic Statement, in which I talk about how uninterested I am in the facts and details of my own life. I'm saving that for the $$$$-memoir.

In fact, poets in here are remarkably selfless and un-self-interested. They may write about inner life, or psychic experience, or thought, but not in a proprietary "stand-back-and-watch-me-think" kind of way. They purposely invite the reader to experience the poem; I'm opening pretty much at random and avoiding the names to whom Chapman concedes some talent:

do you know how it feels
to pull hair like a sibling

to break the bird to spare
its awful speech this is

relapse another intrusion
a day to sing a hole

in the ground
sister on the roof weapon
near her face

a shovel to pray
for something like proof
they do adult things
with no words ("Of Children on Wood," Malinda Markham)

You get the sense that if this poem were rewritten around an I, in rhyming quatrains, Chapman just might like it. Or,

Beneath any common belief
lies the unspoken, occluded, torn
way we proceed ("Night Blindness," Jocelyn Emerson)

Perhaps the above would have been OK had it been delivered as the epiphanic ending to a quaint, largely narrative poem about a breakup. It seems that Chapman's problem with such poetry is that the poet has let "thought master feeling." "Philosophy, not poetry, is the best vehicle for abstract thought," she writes. One could write a small tract on the problems with these two claims; in fact, people have. First off, the distinction between thought and feeling is a problematic one, and I wonder what a feeling unmastered by thought would "feel" like. How do you feel in words without thinking? And isn't that precisely what the attempt by many of these poets to cast off the onus of denotative language is doing? Much of what we call feeling is, in other places, a kind of thinking; unless we're talking about very primal feeling-states, there is probably a good deal of thought involved; notice the interchangeability of "I feel" and "I think." If an emotion has on object, there is a thought to it. That's part of the process of psychoanalysis, making the thoughts that subtend an emotion visible; and that's part of the work that good poetry, like lucid dreaming, can do for us. As for the second claim, she may be right that philosophy is the best vehicle for abstract thought, but is abstract thought the best vehicle for philosophy? Poetry can body and sensualize philosophical abstractions (does she like Stevens? Dickinson?), which is precisely what the Jocelyn Emerson poem proceeds to do. Using imagery and metaphor. This is, like, Poetry 101, and it's Philosophy 101, too. Kierkegaard, Nietschze and Wittgenstein all employ poetic techniques to convey their ideas; they are often pretty good poets, too. And while, certainly, there's a Kant or a Hegel for every Nietsczhe, there is more than one way to skin a philosophical problem. Boy, I sound like a real pedant. I'd rather be a sophist than a pedant when I grow up, but pedantism is called for sometimes.

Is there anything to commend Chapman's review? Yes, she gets some things right, but she gets them wrongly right. For her, the "poems are explanatory tracts about what 'the big hunger' would be if they [the poets] did experience it, not examples of it." Now, aside from the pejorative "explanatory tracts," I find this description compelling. Yes, the hunger is in fact so big that its object cannot be named; it is sublime, is outside of language. If it is truly an existential hunger, then to give an example of it would necessarily diminish it--any example will be a metonymic displacement, a la Lacan. An objectless hunger, a lack without a name, without dogtags or a barcode. Maybe not unexperienced--but at least incapable of being directly experienced in language. It can only be performed, shown, like the rules of Wittgenstein's language. It can be pointed at, and it is the reader's job to see where the arrows are pointing. We're not talking about a Big Mac here, are we? We're talking about something akin to God or justice or the freeedom from the prison-house of language, however you choose to frame it, toward which all the petty desiderata and shopping lists of bourgeois desire point. But Chapman's big desire is to be "seduced." She knows what she wants. God bless her. I, on the other hand, always feel a bit let down afterward, a bit used, like I might have been better off just playing by/with myself in my own little sandbox. Because seduction is dishonest, isn't it? It's never quite all I expected.