[Wgcp-whc] reminder/Whitman WG/Poetics

[Ken Chen]

Apropos our discussion: an article from the American Academy of Poets 
using Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass as a hammer with which to bop the 
avant garde (i.e. LANGUAGE poetry)! While I have strongly ambivalent 
feelings about LANGUAGE poetry, it's curious how this guy uses our 
same general textual citations to make an opposite point. (I'm with 
Richard in the "Whitman = WTF is he doing = wow!" camp).
Best,
Ken


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http://www.poets.org/almanac/index.cfm?
45442B782B5F425D047262414658185620310D740873741140315B7D574809770D

January 28: Back Down to Earth

Richard Tayson on Walt Whitman’s Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass  

Walt Whitman’s Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, now 
celebrating its sesquicentennial, is the strongest advice I know 
against Language Poetry, now exerting a force unequal to its 
achievement in current American poetry. For all it virtues, including 
a radical emphasis on sonic qualities of ever-various, orgiastic and 
intoxicating American language, and what Paul Hoover terms 
its "challenge to the male-dominant hierarchy" and its "actuality in 
words," Language Poetry’s denunciation of the human behind the words 
is its dangerous (and, likely for its practitioners, enticing) 
legacy.1 As Jorie Graham states, one often sees in language poets "the 
dismantling of articulate speech," the goal of which appears 
(distressingly) to be " a language free of its user."2 If any poet 
ever wished to be irrefutably associated, inseparably married to his 
use of language, it was the body and soul of Walt Whitman.

Since perhaps the mid-eighties, language poetry has gained influence 
over younger poets, especially those graduating from creative writing 
programs and publishing in literary journals. The direction that 
influence has taken has been to focus these youthful works on a lack 
of narrative, a rejection of closure, an emphasis on textuality, and 
extreme attention to the material physicality of the shape and sound 
of words (or even letters) at the expense of what Muriel Rukeyser, a 
quintessential Whitmanian, terms "a triadic relation" of "the poet, 
the poem, and the audience."3 Many of our literary magazines now (and 
increasingly so) contain work that is divorced from daily life, from 
politics, and—most distressing of all—from the reader whom one 
presumes is the reason for publishing it in the first place. The 
result is an onanism that threatens to rob air from the fire of the 
creative process. Language poetry, which takes its genesis from 
Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, with links perhaps to Ezra Pound (and 
James Joyce’s linguistic creations?), may also be seen as having ties 
to surrealism and other mostly European innovations, such as Dadaism 
and, in its experimentation with typography, Concrete Poetry à la 
Apollinaire. Perhaps, though this is a stretch, it may reach as far 
back as George Herbert’s "Easter-wings." Our poets, who Whitman 
describes as those able to "make every word he speaks draw blood," 
appear to be dangerously close to creating a bloodless enterprise.

Our poetry, like our culture in general, suffers from obsession with 
the new. Though of course all poets should work toward the unsaid, the 
undepicted, innovative form and subject matter, it doesn’t mean that 
we lose sight of the meaning embodied in the language. "Go west young 
man,"4 "Make it new,"5 "[N]o ideas but in things"6—are all verbal 
imperatives to deliberately turn from tired European forms and genteel 
composition. Yet we now have in our popular music, in our sports, in 
our nightly sitcoms and staple reality hate-fests and, alas, in what 
passes for remarkable poetry in today’s climate of crash-and-burn-as-
you-publish-or-perish academia, a myopia of the contemporary. 
Ironically, in the highly sophisticated techno world of global 
communication, we have lost sight of global, humanitarian vision. It’s 
as if our memories contain information only as far back as 1950 (or is 
it 2001?). We focus, for example, on contributions by the living and 
thereby give less credence to the dead who built the roads we walk on, 
the houses we live in. In saying that "American poets are to enclose 
old and new" Whitman perceived (and early on refuted) our current 
short-sighted practice. For the American poet must "enter the essences 
of the real things and past and present events." Yes to 
experimentation (Leaves of Grass being, especially in its earliest 
incarnations, one of the great poetic experiments in American 
literature, in both form, with long-lined lyric masquerading as epic, 
and content, the inclusion of the dispossessed, such as forthright 
treatment of homosexual emotional bonds, women and blacks). Yes to the 
things of the world (and Whitman’s copious lists provide us with ample 
indications of what he meant by things). No to cleverness, surface 
luminosity, trickery, language for its own sake—attributes disdained 
by America’s least ironic poet but now often touted as the next "new" 
thing. 

I had a bitter taste of language poetry in the first literary magazine 
I bought, the November/December 1985 issue of American Poetry Review. 
Leslie Scalapino was on the cover, but it was the Sharon Olds poems 
that I craved. It was misfortunate for my sense of language poetry 
that I came to Scalapino’s "that they were at the beach—aeolotropic 
series" after I’d read Olds’ frighteningly powerful "I Go Back to May 
1937" and early scalp-raising versions of poems that would appear in 
The Father (1992). Scalapino’s work, by comparison, was emotionally 
flat, unengaging, uneventfully bland, as in the following excerpt: 

taking a cab, the driver seems frightened, seen by him not speaking to 
me—
stemming from his job—unfamiliar because of the streets"7

This wasn’t my idea of any poetry I wanted to live by—so I packed my 
bags and moved to New York to study with Sharon Olds. At NYU, I found 
that Olds, along with her colleague Galway Kinnell, was enamoured of 
Whitman, precisely because he advocated exploration of the minute. "If 
[the poet] breathes into any thing that was before thought small it 
dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe," Whitman says in 
his preface. This must have been sheer miracle to read for Olds, who 
told us that she once went to Russia, got out of her plane and into 
her hotel room where she sat at a window sill, believing that if she 
stared long enough at a single speck of dust, she would know Russia. 
Think of Olds' use of the single moment in "The Exact Moment of My 
Father's Death" and "The Moment the Two Worlds Meet." Think of 
Kinnell's "Daybreak," Audre Lorde's "To My Daughter the Junkie on a 
Train," Rukeyser's great love poem "Looking at Each Other," 
Ginsberg's "Sphincter," Essex Hemphill's "Black Beans," Alicia 
Ostriker's remarkable series of harrowing and hopeful moments in "The 
Mastectomy Poems," the luminous moments of Marilyn Hacker’s sonnet 
sequence, "Cancer Winter." Think of the barely contained rage of 
Lucille Clifton’s "Jasper, Texas, 1998" and Paul Monette's brilliant 
Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog, which led forward a whole 
generation of AIDS love poems. These poems take their inception from 
Whitman's admonition to make the small large "with the grandeur of 
life of the universe." Thus Whitman conceived (in both senses of that 
word) the best that American poetry has to offer.

And yet there has been a sense in the magazines, prizes, and writing 
programs since I bought that first APR, that Whitman’s bold program 
for American poets is to be disparaged. He is, the argument goes, 
passé, too forthright, doesn’t use language that glimmers on the page, 
is (God forbid) narrative, unformed as new-dug clay. Whitman’s poetry 
of the body politic, a poetry of particular importance to gay 
Americans and feminists alike (despite the very white, heterosexual, 
privileged opinion of some critics who believe that the soul, and not 
the body, is the exclusive poetic domain), is at odds with the 
aesthetics of language poets. Whitman’s promiscuous "phallic 
procession," his "climax of my love grip" and "manly affection" 
and "long-dwelling kiss," his "bright juice suffus[ing] heaven" and 
his desire to give voice to the voiceless and to suffer with the 
wounded, his gender swaps and constant desire to connect, body to body 
and soul to soul with all persons who pass in his wake is the 
essential kernel of Whitman’s preface and poetry.8

Whitman is interested in surface beauty only insofar as it encompasses 
his principle goal of connecting human to human. "The poetic quality 
is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to 
things," Whitman declares. ". . . the gaggery and gilt of a million 
years will not prevail. . . . The great poets are also to be known by 
the absence in them of tricks and by the justification of perfect 
personal candor." No matter how beautiful, ornate, delicate, 
industrious, alluring or colorful a surface, no matter the 
sophistication of clever forms neat as parlor puzzles, if the poem 
does not connect with soul through body it cannot link person to 
person, and is therefore in Whitman’s eyes utter failure. "Who 
troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost," Whitman 
warns. And to contrast "ornaments" Whitman immediately gives 
the "poets of the kosmos" advice: get thee to the world of 
experience. "Love the earth," Whitman writes, "and sun and 
animals. . . stand up for the stupid and crazy. . . reexamine all you 
have been told at school, or church or in any book [including 
presumably his own], . . . dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and 
your very flesh shall be a great poem."

Whitman requires that the poet be no better than the common man. O, 
how far we are from that ideal! Often when I read the literary 
journals of today, I have a sense of the writer placing her- or 
himself above the fray, in a position of superiority. Look how smart I 
am, the poems declare, how clever and crafty, and how I can make you 
feel baffled and disengaged. This is the exact antithesis of what 
Whitman required of poetry. I think if he were here today he would 
boldly state that we are pursuing the wrong course and would bow his 
head in perplexity, not only at the state of our art and what passes 
for superior poems, but also because of our current political state 
(something that language poets, arguing that their use of language in 
baffling ways is their politics, ignore or approach so obliquely as 
not to be discernable.)

In an increasingly unstable world out of control on many fronts—from 
war to global warming to human rights—it is now clear that we need a 
poetry of supreme engagement, a poetry of the mind, body and soul. 
Experimentation is key, and there are many modes of experiment, 
Language Poetry being merely one. Whitman’s advice may still—150 years 
after this preface was first published—influence us with the best 
example of a manifesto opposed to beauty for its own sake, art in 
genuflection to its own solipsistic tendencies.


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1Hoover, Paul, Ed. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. New 
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994, xxxiv, xxxvi.
2Graham, Jorie, Ed. & Lehman, David, Series Ed. The Best American 
Poetry 1990. New York: Macmillan, 1990, xxi.
3Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. Ashfield, Massachusetts: Paris 
Press, 1996, 174.
4A favorite saying of Horace Greeley (1811-72) 
5Ezra Pound’s slogan
6Williams, William Carlos. Paterson, bk. 1, "The Delineaments of the 
Giants," sct. 1, l. 14.
7Scalapino, Leslie. "that they were at the beach—aeolotropic series." 
American Poetry Review, November/December, 1985, 25.
8Whitman, Walt. Selected Poems 1855-1892. Ed. Gary Schmidgall. New 
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.


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Richard Tayson’s first book of poetry, The Apprentice of Fever won the 
Wick Poetry Prize. Other awards include a 2003 New York Foundation of 
the Arts Fellowship, Prairie Schooner’s Edward Stanley Award (2004) 
and a Pushcart Prize (1996). His poems appear in Paris Review; Kenyon 
Review; Bloom; Washington Square; The World in Us: Lesbian and Gay 
Poetry of the Next Wave. His essay regarding the poems of Marilyn 
Hacker, Frank Bidart and a brief history of lesbian and gay poetry 
publishing appears in the November/December 2004 Gay and Lesbian 
Review. His essay about Walt Whitman’s love poem, "Live-Oak, with 
Moss" is forthcoming from Virginia Quarterly. Tayson’s second 
collection of poems, The World Underneath, is currently under review.