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Friday, July 22, 2005
The Caterpillar and The Men From Cambridge
Weldon Kees once wrote a poem about I.A. Richards and C.K. Ogden’s The Meaning of Meaning. Then he vanished. (Click on the link to read Anthony Lane’s recent New Yorker profile of Kees.) While I’m sure “poetic responses to prominent literary critics” isn’t the most popular mode, curiosity compels me to ask if anyone knows of other contemporary examples. (Kees’ poem lurks below the fold.)
"The Caterpillar and the Men from Cambridge”
“The most celebrated of all caterpillars, whose history is in part recorded
in Professor Lloyd Morgan’s Habit and Instinct, page 41, was striped yellow
and black and was seized by one of the professor’s chickens. Being offensive
in taste to the chicken he was rejected. Henceforth the chicken refrained
from seizing similar caterpillars. Why? Because the sight of such a
caterpillar, a part that is of the whole sight-seize-taste context of the
original experience, now excites the chicken in a way sufficiently like that
in which the whole context did, for the seizing at least not to occur,
whether the tasting (in images) does or not.”---THE MEANING OF MEANING
Professor Lloyd Morgan’s chicken dropped
The proffered caterpillar with irritable haste.
It made no attempt to seize similar larvae
Because of the creature’s objectionable taste.
This simple example, say Ogden and Richards,
Explains how some writing, once studied, does more.
For merely a part of the context will cause us
To react in the way we reacted before.
But what of the chicken? Is Lloyd Morgan living?
More important than that is the unpleasant fate
Of the worm. Did it suffer? Is anything heard
Of this martyr to science, this pitiful bait?
From The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Revised edition): Edited by Donald
Justice (1975), University of Nebraska Press.
Comments
C’mon people! Poetry is awesome! Surely you’ve read some. Surely some of it is appropos. I mean, sure, I excluded the entire romantic tradition, but still, some flake out there has to have taken on Derrida mano-e-frencho.
(And yes, when it’s boiled to the bone, I will resort to insult for comments. I mean, really, not even a close reading in fifteen hours. This is a wonderful poem people!)
As Curly Howard said in similar circumstances, “I’m trying to think but nothin’s happening!” I can find poets who refer to philosophers—but to literary critics? Nope.
On the other hand, I can pretty easily find reasons for not finding them. As twentieth century Anglo-American poetry continued to sheer away from the great middlebrow of “mainstream literature”, it became its own set of communities, each holding its own local conversations, and so the most influential contemporary criticism tends to come from those who are normally classified as poets themselves—even though Hugh Kenner couldn’t have gotten away with talking about a “Pound Era” solely on the influence of the Cantos as a role model.
The only exceptions I can think of right off-hand are the great (& rarely seen) reviewer Kenneth Cox, and Jerome McGann, who’s tried so heroically to draw his studies of nineteenth-century English poetry into conversation with contemporary experimental schools. But so far I haven’t found any poetry that shouts either out.
Louis Untermeyer doesn’t quite qualify, but this is great:
mr u will not be missed
who as an anthologist
sold the many on the few
not excluding mr u
(Cummings)
OK, Scott, you want attention—here you go:
Cyborg Youth
“By utilizing Donna Harraway’s all-inclusive conception of cyborg identity I will investigate the realities Pynchon imposes on his characters’ bodies without limiting the factual information provided about those realities to the demands on a system I impose on the text.”—Scott Eric Kaufman
tap the fingers, keys,
the mouse runs
each click a heaping of coal
burned, somewhere the ice cap shudders
the CRT glow
imposing on the body
every reality in monochrome
The rockets go up, you see
Are they acts? What if
if
they never came down?
Hung, sparklelike, webs in air
Is that system?
Does it demand
A fall?
Looking back
(the cyborg runs, headless)
the debris lies there,
smells of gunpowder
in the green-glow
Looking back, tapping,
For one last unfired
Vance, I don’t know why Untermeyer wouldn’t qualify; he wrote criticism as well as the anthologies. That makes two.
Rich, to paraphrase Meatwad: I don’t want attention, I need attention.
And bubblegum.
And taffy.
By which I mean: that’s the first poem anyone’s ever written about me, and I’m flattered; but I was hoping there was some work out there on important literary critics and Theorists, like Howe or Brooks or Derrida. I’m a nobody, or at least I’m currently one. A couple more years of jumping up and down and shouting should rectify that.
Ray, I meant to reply earlier, but now will suffice: the idea of a poet first, critic second writing about literary criticism (even if it is by a poet) works for me. I’m interested in, or am becoming interested, the implicit refutation of the work of a critic in a poem that defies the validity of that critic’s assumptions (or dismisses it entirely qua Kees). The practice-what-you-preach mode of poetic theory in poetry--I’m looking at you, Mr. Pope--isn’t as immeidately interesting to me as the don’t-practice-what-he-preaches noodling Kees attempts.
Well, I can’t help you there; if I bothered to write something about Derrida it wouldn’t count because of my own degree of prominence. Besides, it would be boring, and wouldn’t supply the opportunity for combined Pynchon/Crowley references. If you want poems on Theorists by unprominent poets, Google will turn up any amount; for example, try:
http://www.geocities.com/paideusis/e1n2ch.html
Scott, due to your pressure, I’m hearby bending the rules just to submit a poem: Jack Spicer’s “Two Poems for *The Nation*.” If poet-critics can count, maybe magazine editorial boards can sort of count as critics? In any case, the poem is excellent.
**************
Two Poems for *The Nation*
(Jack Spicer)
1
Pieces of the past arising out of the rubble.
Which evokes Eliot and then evokes
Suspicion. Ghosts all of them. Doers of
no good.
The past around us is deeper than.
Present events defy us, the past
Has no such scruples. No funeral processions for
him. He died in agony. The cock under the
thumb.
Rest us as corpses
We poets
Vain words.
For a funeral (as I live and breathe and speak)
Of good
And impossible
Dimensions.
2
These big trucks drive and in each one
There is a captain of poetry or a captain of love
or a captain of sex. A company
In which there is no vice-president.
You see them first as a kid when you’re hitch-
hiking and they were not as big or as final.
They sometimes stopped for a hitch-hiker
although you had to run.
Now they move down the freeway in some mocking
kind of order. The
First truck is going to be passed by the seventh.
The distance
Between where they are going and where you are
standing cannot be measured.
The road-captains, heartless and fast-moving
Know
The spacing of the Spicer got screwed up. Sorry.
My pressure? From now on, you all live under my thrall. If it’s pressure you want, it’s pressure you’ll get...in the form of gratitude!
(Also: Rich, were I still anonymous, I’d comment on those poems. But as I’m now known by the three names yelled by my mother at regular intervals throughout my childhood--and since I’m deaf, when I say “yelled,” I mean YELLED--I will be the gentleman and refuse to comment on them. They are. That’s all I will say. They were written and they exist. Bravo to them for their ontological boldness.)
Ah hah, I thought there was a reason why I wasn’t using any noise-words. Perhaps it was from reading your essay, from which the quote came. (Mostly this is an excuse to link to it, since I forgot to in the original.)
You don’t want to criticize the poems I linked to? OK, I can understand that, and even admit that when I Googled for “poetry Judith Butler”, my motives were not necessarily spotless.
Oh, and I should add that if anyone wants to criticize or even scorn my poem, I’m not going to reply with the de rigueur “But it was only a joke—you mean you took it *seriously*?” etc etc rejoinder. It was a serious poem, insofar as about half an hour’s work will make one so.