The Valve - A Literary Organ

<< Mise-en-Abyme | Front Page | Folk Cohesion, the Anti-Intellectualism of Identitarian Politics, and Theoretical Empires >>

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Poetry Machines

Posted by Daniel Green on 06/28/05 at 02:11 PM

David Orr, in the June 26 issue of the New York Times Book Review:

. . .Auden may have claimed that “poetry makes nothing happen,’’ but dedicated consumers that we are, we’re not buying anything so pointless. Instead, we prefer to believe that poems are like machines—you pay your money, you press the right buttons, and they work their magic. If you aim them at a bad guy, they’re almost as good as a can of Mace.

It’s an unrealistic perception, of course, but it’s a hard one to avoid in a culture that equates worth with utility. And it causes even longtime poetry readers to find themselves justifying the art in terms of other, more practical disciplines—politics, for instance. Often, the claimed connection is one of cause and effect, as when a critic argues that a poem in an obscure journal has “subverted a dominant discourse’’ or “undermined a social construct’’ (presumably for the benefit of the author’s girlfriend, his mom and four readers who probably already agreed with him). Other times, poetry is leveraged in more subtle ways. In “The Government of the Tongue,’’ for example, Seamus Heaney tells an anecdote about deciding not to record a tape of poems on a day in which several bombs exploded in Belfast; as he puts it, he had “a feeling that song constituted a betrayal of suffering.’’ Heaney’s dismay is so eloquently expressed that it’s easy to forget that his reaction is based on a fallacy—after all, if Heaney had been planning to do something equally unrelated to exploding bombs (like, say, mowing the lawn), would he have written a long, anxious essay about it? Why should poetry be weighed against political life, instead of alongside it? At least in part, this preoccupation with politics seems driven by a barely controlled fear that poetry isn’t quite sturdy enough on its own, and could therefore do with a little propping up. . . .

Comments

The “mowing the lawn” comparison makes the NYT guy look really dumb. “Unrelated” is the wrong word too.

By John Emerson on 06/28/05 at 06:26 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Yeah, I don’t have a strong opinion on the essayist’s take, but surely something like opening a favorite bottle of wine would be a better analogy than cutting the grass.

By on 06/28/05 at 08:19 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Nonetheless he has a point to make about Heaney which was relevant in the seventies when I was first introduced to his work and it was somehow communicated to us that Heaney was something of a wuss.
Heaney has been rather nastily discredited for some time for being overly discerning about involving politics with poetry - it’s unfair in my opinion, nobody takes the same gun to Colm Toibin’s creative work, though he tends to cast a dispassionate eye on politics and did not grow up in the North like Heaney.
It’s also worth remembering there is a tradition of agitation through literature in Ireland which Heaney is openly concerned about in a way which others perhaps were not - Yeats for example.
Anyway I’ll read the whole article now...!

By genevieve on 06/28/05 at 10:01 PM | Permanent link to this comment

I think poetry has a similar stance to that of music.

By on 10/04/08 at 05:25 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Name:
Email:
Location:
URL:

Valve Links

Current Authors

Past Authors

Most recent articles

Most recent comments

Search:

Archives

Syndication

Validation

Credits

Blogroll

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Poetry Machines

Comments

Add a comment: