John Barr

Reginald posted this poem by John Barr—anti-barbarian poetry defender guy, President of the Poetry Foundation, memorably described by Steve Evans—on his website. I don’t know if Reginald really thinks this is lovely or interesting, or if he’s just being nice. But I had a strong allergy to it. I was going to post this to his comments box but I’ll just do it here. (I should say: Reginald is my friend. It’s probably OK to mention now that he was the only creative writing professor—literature profs. Roger Gilbert and Debby Fried were great too—at Cornell who gave a damn about poetry, mine or anyone else’s, or who had anything relevant to say about it. The others were nice people, but. He’s taught me a great deal as a poet and a critic. Other than Reginald it was Karl Parker and Gabe and Gina who taught me the most. Josh and Karen Anderson and Theo and the whole, now-vibrant scene in Ithaca didn’t arrive until much later.)

But anyway, I couldn’t not say something about this poem.

Restoration (from Poetry Daily)

I love to recover the quality
of things in decline.
To scour stone, scale paint from brick,
to compel, with wire brush,
the flourish wrought by iron.
To refinish wood, solving for
forgotten grain.
To give, by weeding, our stone wall
back its dignity.
To left and right the borders of our lot,
to square the corners of our keep.

I have even dreamed: pushing a pushcart,
I stop anywhere and start
doing what needs to be done.The first building takes time:
replacing windows, curing the roof.
I know compromises must be made
and make none, a floor at a time.*

I work along an interstate
a century after Johnny Appleseed.
A modest people makes me chief.
(They, too, enjoy the hazy shine
of finished work by last light.)
Storm drains relieved, brick walks relaid,
a heritage of dust and wrappers
is renounced. The square square,
trim trim, the town for once
is like an artist's conception of the town.



I don't know, Reginald. It's a fine enough poem if you don’t read it too carefully, no worse than many a mild turn of phrase you could find in any magazine, on any side of rhetorical divide(s). But could anyone come up with a better statement of the ethics of conservatism, of nostalgiac preservation of values that never really existed anywhere anyway? What's this ironwork he's polishing? And these modest people who appointed him chief? Seen next to the kinds of things he says in his addresses to the Lillys of the Field, and it's impossible not to, the poem makes me a bit queasy. I take your point about the wrongmindedness of equating political and aesthetic conservatism--no doubt, avantgarde or modernist poetics do not necessarily an anti-capitalism or a liberalism or even a Hillary Rodham Clinton make. Modernist experimentation is fissured by, and probably even constituted by, all sorts of political violence. But all of the pieces of a nostalgiac, sentimental and, yes, reactionary attachment to a narrow notion of "people" and the connection of this to a traditional stance--and these are the philosophical and aesthetic undercurrents of political fascism--are here. I'm not making the facile comparison between form and politics; he is. No doubt, when coupled to an erudite classicism and an admission of the necessity for change, and a recognition of the fact that modernism and modernity exist, like it or not, you get Pound, who I can't really avoid. This, though, strikes me as a pale imitation of Frost's “Mending Wall”, without the menacing ambiguity. Good fences, yeah, but no neighbors.

*These are the best lines in the poem. Bush’s new motto anyone? How better to say “change the course” and mean “stay the course”? I’m going to remember this rhetorical move—a sort of intra-sentence non-sequitur--the next time I need to change the subject.