Books have long obsessed writers.  Obsessed: besieged, taken from without. Such books compel readings, rereadings and writings and writings on: The Bible, the Torah, Peter Lombard’s Sentences, Aristotle’s De Anima, the Bhagavad Gita. Lots of sacred books. Lots of philosophical books. Lots of canonical books. To be part of the canon is in a sense to establish a book as worth both rereading and writing on, as the epitomes of Book. In quotidian terms, to serve as the book, la bible for someone or someones– like the Cook’s Bible, or the AMC Guide to the White Mountains– means to serve as the most common authority, the everyday reference point. But to become a canonical book means to be established as authoritative in the broadest sense and to demand response, commentary.  A dissertation, a disquisition, a commentary and disputation, maybe a prayer follow.

We have the collective canon – the Lombard, the Aristotle, Kant, Dickens, Joyce, Woolf – and then we have our personal canons.  Right now, I’m interested in figuring out my personal canon and its significance. A smattering: L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Tiime, Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Bridge to Terrebithia, Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Woolf’s The Waves, Plath’s Ariel, Dickinson’s shorter poems, and of course, The Bible. Who’s in your canon?

Hogan becomes suspicious of Mendelsohn just at the point where I think Mendelson is most articulate: he describes the reasons we should trust well-cultivated aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic judgment isn’t something we’re born with. We can acquire the ability to judge well by experience with particulars. Particular works of art, literature, design, craft, and so on. Exposure to a formal education is one way to cultivate that sense but not the only means; in fact, certain formal educations might veer too early into criticism — an articulation of aesthetic judgment — before grounding that judgment in particulars. In the great ven diagram of the mind, judgment and criticism are by no means coincident. Judgement is a big circle and Criticism is a little one mostly inside, with a little thumbnail into Articulation.

When I say aesthetic judgment, I mean it in its wide-ranging Kantian sense. I’m not going to re-hash the Critique of Judgment here — but honestly, how fun would that be?? it’s my favorite book of philosophy;) —  but I can’t help but invoke it. (It’s really quite good.) In Kant’s diagram of cognition, there is Reason and Imagination and when they play they activate this other faculty, Judgment. Reason takes universals and applies them to particulars; Judgment works from particulars toward universals. (Like the two branches of government: Reason legislates universal laws; Judgment works out laws on the fly from particular cases and precedents.) You can’t judge well an ethical situation or an artwork or a poem without encountering many particular situations, paintings or poems. In other words, you can’t judge well without practice. Aesthetic judgment has a history, individual and collective. Criticism articulates the role that history and the particular aesthetic features of a piece at play in coming to a good judgment. If I judge as excellent particular new poem by Jorie Graham, I would be a good critic if I can tell you what sounds, line-breaks and allusions lead to my judgment and also precisely which other poems educated my taste. When Graham alludes to Thomas Wyatt, I will tell you that, why she does it well and also why Wyatt himself is good.

In short, critics are — should be! — readers who practice. They should cultivate good taste by encountering many, many particulars, and then they–we,  I ? —  have to work on articulating the quality of new pieces in relation to that wide experience. For example — for we must use examples ! — not only has Helen Vendler read everything, but she can draw on that encyclopedia of particulars to explicate new entries. In Our Secret Discipline, she unfolds “Among School Children” line by line and shows the historical origins of each metrical choice; Vendler’s criticism explains to us poorer readers why she, and then we, judge that poem as excellent. Yeats exercised aesthetic judgement himself  in creating the poem; he did not offer a critical articulation of the particulars that informed each judgment.

I’ve been talking a long time with @johnsnavely about what makes good judgment as he works it out in his own design & technology context. In part, what assures me that Kant is right is the overlap between good judgment in literature, art, design and technology.

After dissecting Rita Dove’ editorial skill (or lack thereof), Perloff claims that the explosion of post-WWII poetry led not to a vibrant pluralism, “but to the curious closure exemplified by the Dove anthology.” As a possible counter-point to this narrow vision of lyricism, Perloff suggests “un-creative writing” or Conceptualism: borrowing, cutting and pasting your way to innovation.   She points to Susan Howe’s That This  – which I reviewed here — as exemplary “un-creative writing.”   Perloff’s “un-creative” writing sounds a lot like — precisely like?? — postmodernism.  Is Howe just the Robert Venturi of poetry?  Surely not. Venturi-like post-modernism petered out in visual art and literature because it did indeed feel meaningless to merely cut and paste the past into present reflections. I enjoyed Howe’s book , and I agree with Perloff that her work, with some others, points toward an alternative to lyricism narrowly construed.  But the cut-and-paste aspect of Howe’s work alone did not capture my attention. That This includes more that the “Frolic architecture” section cited by Perloff.  In the first half of the book, Howe allows her little lyric “I” to enter the picture.  But this lyric protagonist enters onto a vast stage of human history, deepened by the evidence curated together by Howe.

That “big picture” is key to avoiding narrow lyricism. Another alternative to narrow Dove-like lyricism is epic or dramatic poetry.  Why not write at  large scale, in the third person, or include characters?    Instead of reducing poetry to a reflection on the world “for me” or “as-experienced-by-sensitive-me,” poetry can expand itself to a stage in which the “I” appears among or via many characters and people.

Jeffery Yang’s recent book Vanishing Line, Frank Bidart’s Second Hour of the Night and several books by Anne Carson accomplish this.  These are no narrow lyricists, and they are quite successful on the American scene, despite Perloff’s concern.  (Perloff generally seems to overlook many other successful, not-narrow-lyricists … for e.g. Kay Ryan and Heather McHugh)

I want to read more books like these.  I agree with Perloff that lyricism narrowly construed is indeed narrow and overtrod… but so is a the post-modern path of cutting and pasting the past.  Joyce did not simple xerox The Odyssey, trim the edges and reprint it on different size pages.  Give me instead Big Books with wide views, many characters, and strange voices.  That’s Joycean.

Of course not all critics are going to offer that clandestine look.  But maybe they should.  Think of that the next time you pick up the NYRB or read a critique in your favorite literary journal.  Is this author allowing you to shift your position, letting you watch her read?  Is she letting you into her bedroom as she lifts the pages and smiles?

The title comes from this lovely quote, by nineteenth century artist Gabriel Von Max when he articulated his main artistic goal as …STUDYING IN PERPLEXITY THE QUESTION — THE SPIRIT, WHENCE CAME IT, WHITHER HAS IT GONE? 

“when he holds a pigeon,

when he once was a pigeon,
when he has
become, within a coop…”

The man has a pigeon, is a pigeon, is a holding place of pigeons and so on through the end of the poem until the flight of pigeons becomes the fight within the boxer’s mind and the fight out on the street, all of these at once and none in particular.  Nice.  One of those successes that comes just from breaking all the CW workshoppy-rules that suggest you pamper (and perhaps bore) your reader with clarity.

Poetry works quite differently, especially on the page.  One of the first things I do when reading a new book or a favorite one is to glance at the overall pattern that the text makes on the printed page.  Am I looking at the tidy stanzas of Emily Wilson’s recent Micrographia? Or the sprawling stanzas of Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi”?  I adjust my comprehension of each line’s significance and impact depend on on the overall scale. I consider the meaning of individual words in relation to the line break and stanza break.  And I don’t feel guilty about re-reading Browning, Wilson, Stevens, Bishop, Yeats — you name a good poet — because they are so gosh-darn-hard to understand.  The meaning of the piece hides between the line and the whole, between the individual poem and the whole context in which (and when) I read it. Were I listening to the poem, the same play would demand my attention, albeit my auditory rather than visual attention.

Too a degree, perhaps the same thing is happening with novels and I am merely too impatient to re-read them.  But I also think that the spatio-temporal structure of poems makes more demands on that secret organ of perception Nabokov imagines.  Exercising that organ is necessary to be a good reader or writer of poetry, if not of novels. And I will have become a worse reader the day I feel guilty about re-reading Yeats.  All the twitter posts in the world shouldn’t leave me with too little time to do that.

When I say “intellectual” poetry, I mean poetry informed by wide reading and listening. The intellectual omnivorously consumes information and theories about experience and uses them to refine her understanding of her own experience. That is, we can still learn something of how the world works (science, technology) or how it came to be (history) or what it might mean (philosophy) and nonetheless emotively express our relationship to it. You might mention a fact, allude to a myth, or address a philosopher in a poem because doing so allows you to be more clear about a state of affiars. That can happen in third person or first person; it can be confessional or not. (That distinction needs a discussion of its own, by I don’t see ‘intellectual’ and ‘confessional’ poetry to be opposed: think Hopkins or The Waste Land or Carl Philips.)

What I think a person might mean when she says “intellectual” poetry is writing that addresses conceptual distinctions: philosophical or political ones. For example, this kind of intellectual poet might tell you What Language Is or How to Relate To the Other. That can also happen in first person or third person.

Now, I should think of examples of each of these. In my sense of “intellectual,” I think Anne Carson and Frank Bidart write this type of work, rife with allusion and informed by historical reading… but no less able to make you cry or moan or laugh. I don’t think of any poets whom I really enjoy who fit the secondary definition, though I’m sure they exist. But I don’t like reading them! If you want to give a theory of language, then you really should study and write philosophy. If you want to show experience,then you could write poetry and use some terms from a theory merely because they are more precise that other words. (Or, you could write a letter to your mother or a personal essay… poetry involves lines, meters, imagery, etc., not just commentary on experience)

Well, now I should get back to writing some poetry, intellectual or otherwise.