It is my great pleasure to welcome our own Paul Lake, distinguished poet, novelist, essayist and teacher, to the Lariat Board. Paul’s poetry collections include Another Kind Of Travel, University of Chicago Press, and Walking Backward from Story Line. His novel Among The Immortals is also a Story Line book, now, alas, out of print but well worth the hunt. To get things rolling I asked Paul some questions which I expected would generate controversial answers, and I was not disappointed.
Murphy: Paul, you are a charter member of the West Chester Gun and Couplet Club, as are fellow Spherians Gwynn, Sullivan and Murphy. Do you think there’s any connection between the resurgence of formal verse and Newt Gingrich’s takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994?
Lake: Well, there have been conspiracy theories about the resurgence of New Formalism over the years so we may as well give the Newt Gingrich theory some credence, too. Most of those theories have pretty long pedigrees by now. My favorite charge, and one I addressed in an early essay called “Toward A Liberal Poetics,” was one made by Wayne Dodd--that the resurgence of poetic formalism was related to the rise of Ronald Reagan. He even termed the poetics of New Formalism “Reaganetics.” In that old essay of mine, I tried to refute charges that there was any connection between New Formalism and political conservatism by citing poems by people like Charles Martin, Tim Steele, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg that espoused politically liberal ideas. My thesis was that a truly liberal poetry establishment would welcome formalism as one of many options, in an open-minded , liberal way, and that students especially should be made aware of the formal possibilities offered by meter and form. As uncontroversial as such an idea now seems, it was attacked by the free verse establishment as heresy back then.
In fact, I’m now more conservative than I was when I wrote that essay. Rather, I’ve discovered that people who call themselves “liberal” are usually anything but—like those free-versifiers who attacked my very reasonable proposition about teaching students how to write in meter.
I also now see that writing in meter and rhyme is an innately conservative act, whatever the politics of the poet or the poem. The American left in its desire to remain forever in a state of sinless, Adamic innocence must attack and abolish every vestige of the tainted past, including our history, language, and poetic traditions. Writing in meter and rhyme really is politically incorrect. It shows a conservative allegiance to our traditions, our language, even our bodily pleasures. Good Puritanical leftists, on the other hand, know that we are marching forward to a multicultural utopia and can’t afford to be seduced by such subversive pleasures as rhyming poems that may cause us to stumble on our way.
I have to confess, though, that my membership may have expired since it’s been a long time since I’ve fired a gun.
Murphy: One of the things which so fascinates me about you is your versatility, essayist, novelist, poet, all round man of letters. What does your fiction bring to your verse and visa versa?
Lake: I don’t really consider myself a fiction writer, though I have published one novel and have dabbled with fiction a bit. After I finished my first poetry collection and had it accepted by the University of Chicago Press, I found myself toying with an idea for a short story. I wrote a little fantasy horror story called “Rat Boy” and published it in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. That was my first real attempt to write fiction. Sometime later, while teaching a course on Romantic Literature for a colleague on leave, I discovered some fascinating stuff about the Romantic poets and started developing a weird mythology and plot for a story about poets and vampires. After studying a few novels to learn technique, I wrote Among the Immortals in a wild delirium over a period of about six months, then revised it for a couple more months. My lack of experience and limited revising time show in the published novel, alas. But the story—a satirical thriller—was exhilarating fun to write.
My poetry has gotten more cross-fertilization from my literary criticism than from my fiction. Most of my narrative impulse gets absorbed by narrative verse. But I had the good luck to study under a great poet-critic at Stanford—Donald Davie, who served as a mentor for many years. I like to think that some of my best essays, such as “The Shape of Poetry” or my just-accepted “The Enchanted Loom,” have some enduring value. And occasionally it’s nice to write about or review poetry I admire. I don’t think I’ll ever write fiction again.
However, I have decided to write verse drama—an absurd, quixotic decision. Almost as impractical as writing lyric poetry. I’ve even started my first play, a little one-act comedy. I expect to write a full- length verse drama before too long.
Murphy: I thought the Vampire Novel was an absolute hoot, a page-turning romp, and so did Alan. Please answer the same question with regard to Thomas Hardy.
Lake: I vaguely remember reading that Hardy took up fiction writing as a practical alternative to a career in poetry or architecture—as a means of making a living. Although he’s an indispensable novelist, I’ve always had the sense that he wrote novels for the money, coming back to poetry in earnest again when he’d established some financial security. We wouldn’t want to lose his novels, in any case. Hardy was a rare bird—a genuine, first-rate novelist as well as a first-rate poet. I admire his poetry more with each passing year.
Murphy: How do you assess the current health of verse? I’d appreciate your comments on the new books by Hecht and Wilbur. Then tell me what you think of our generation, and then your thoughts on some of the upcoming kids, who are pretty dazzling, don’t you think?
Lake: It’s hard to assess the current health of verse because, first of all, there’s so damned much of it. In addition, there are almost no reliable guides as to what has value and what doesn’t. To further complicate matters, the contemporary literary establishment is joined like a Siamese twin to the academic creative writing establishment, which , like the rest of academia, is intellectually in thrall to postmodern critical theory and political correctness. A poet’s ethnicity, gender, orientation, or politics plays at least as big a part in the development and marketing of a poet’s career as talent and craft. Sadly, there’s almost a law of inverse proportions governing the relationship between a poet’s talent and public reputation.
Since there is very little money involved in writing and publishing poetry, poets are rewarded with academic positions, editorships, grants, fellowships, public readings, and prizes. Since only colleges and foundations have the money to reward poets substantially, the poets who garner the best positions, grants, and prizes tend to be those favored by the academic establishment. A poet is not taken seriously these days unless she or he hold s an endowed chair. Farmer poets like you, Murphy, are a rarity, far outside the establishment. Getting a book published or reviewed is almost impossible in such a position.
To get a feeling for how formal poets fare today, look where they teach. It’s a scandal that Charles Martin teaches at a community college in New York, Tim Steele at a minor state university in L. A, and Sam Gwynn at Lamar in humid Beaumont, Texas, while Jorie Graham holds a chair at Harvard. Note, too, that formalists rarely get grants, fellowships, and prizes. It’s hard for any poet, young or old, to break into print in such a climate, but it’s a good deal harder for writers of formal verse. Think how little formal verse would have been published in the last decade without Story Line Press, a publisher outside the mainstream.
Like universities, foundations are run by do-good left-liberals with a hankering to reform the world. Since the grant givers often have a clear political or aesthetic agenda, you can bet that the last person these days to get a so-called “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation would be an actual genius. More likely you’ll get a politically correct mediocrity or worse who does experimental work or writes “out of” whatever their ethnicity happens to be.
As to the new books by Hecht and Wilbur, I’m ashamed to say that I don’t own them yet and have only seen the new poems in reviews and on websites like The Able Muse. The poems I’ve seen have been excellent. Part of the problem is that I live 80 miles from the nearest city and don’t get to decent bookstores often enough to browse and come home broke and burdened. I’ve got Wilbur and Hecht’s other books, of course, and will track down the new ones soon.
As to new young poets, I can only think of the usual suspects like Greg Williamson, Deborah Warren, Alicia Stallings, and people like that whose work I’ve been seeing around .
It’s hard to make judgments about our generation—we both turned fifty this year—but I think our generation has produced quite a bit of good poetry. People like Rachel Hadas and Timothy Steele have produced pretty large bodies of good work . There’s also a great deal of variety in the poetry of our generation, from Sam Gwynn’s secular satires to Mark Jarman’s religious sonnets, from Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s meditative lyrics to Dana Gioia’s and Robert McDowell’s dramatic monologues. Our generation has made it almost respectable to write in meter. I’m often amused to see formal poems in magazines by poets who throughout the first half of their career wouldn’t have been caught dead writing a villanelle or sonnet.
Murphy: In your forthcoming essay on Gwynn and Murphy in Chronicles, you describe Gwynn as a satirist and moralist. (Was it Eliot or Dr. Johnson who used the phrase “that rarest man of genius, the true satirist?”) I would apply the same description to you (though you both have strong lyric streaks.) Isn’t this swimming against an “ungovernable tide?”
Lake: The short answer is yes, it’s swimming against the tide in several senses. If you satirize hypocrisy or dishonesty, you’ll offend hypocrites and people who can’t face the truth. Furthermore, the old hierarchy of genres has been inverted, and the once lowly lyric is now considered the highest, and perhaps only, genuine poetic form. Satire is considered a form of light verse, and thus unworthy of serious attention. When people say that a poem displays wit or, worse, is “witty,” they use the words disparagingly. A great poet like Pope is dismissed out of hand as a writer of rhymed prose by twerps incapable of writing a decent couplet.
Satire endears a poet to no one. To complicate things, it also relies on a shared set of values to which the writer can appeal, however indirectly. Today, the dominant intellectual paradigm is multiculturalism, which holds that all values are relative, subject to the cultural and political position of the person who holds them. Of course, multiculturalism is incoherent and self-contradictory as an ideology. First, because although all other valued are deemed relative, multiculturalism itself is treated as eternally and self-evidently right and true . And second, because multiculturalism doesn’t really respect other, non-Western cultures. Practices like clitoridectomy, the immolation of widows, second-class citizenship for women, etc., are condemned by people who call themselves multiculturalists one moment and feminists the next. Political correctness is a system of suppressing inconvenient questions and silencing criticism, to keep the incoherencies out of sight . And so writing satires about contemporary issues invariably brings a writer into conflict with powerful political factions.
As you know, a couple of years ago, I read a poem at the West Chester Poetry conference that had a lot of feminists up in arms because the poem satirized a hypocritical intellectual who happened to be a woman. I’ve written far more scathing satires, some downright Swiftian in their savagery, about male intellectuals, but no one would utter a word if I read five of them in a row while wearing a sandwich board emblazoned with “Death to the Patriarchy.” In fact, I’d probably be cheered. The only person at the conference with enough courage and honesty to confront me personally about the poem told me in the course of our brief discussion that it is simply impermissible for anyone to write satire directed at women or minorities--ever. I asked her if it would be okay if I wrote satires about white males and she merely glared , unwilling to concede the absurdity of her view.
So, in short, yes, if you write satire, you go against the tide in discomfiting ways. That’s what makes it fun. On the other hand, I haven’t yet succeeded in publishing a book full of satires , though I’ve placed individual poems in magazines. Writing for me, even at fifty, remains an ongoing experiment.
Murphy: Paul, I thought the reaction to your poem was scandalous, and thank heavens we have a guy as politically incorrect as Tom Fleming, who had the guts to publish it. To be fair, your frightening poem about the Professor intimidating his raped female student is far more scathing. I have been looking forward to this interview because I knew you’d pull no punches. Let’s see what kind of conflagration it ignites.
|
Linear Mode
