The Reading Experience

The Ways That Poetry Gets Taught

In a debate about the efficacy of "teaching poetry" as a way of increasing the audience for it (with, among others, Josh Corey), Eric Selinger asserts:

I would say that some poets don't have many readers because of the sorts of poems they write, but that the reason most poets don't have many readers is because of the ways that poetry gets taught in this country--or not taught, as the case may be--from grade school onward. If poetry were taught, for example, as part of the national patrimony, with the assumption that elementary students should know their Whitman and Dickinson, Hayden and Hughes, because these are our great national poets, just as French students and Italian students learn Baudelaire or Petrarch early on, there would probably end up a wider audience for poetry.

I'm continually surprised by how thoroughly the idea that literature is ulimately something to be taught in schools has become unexamined wisdom. At best, works of poetry or fiction might be useful in building vocabulary or learning the role of figurative language, or as supplements to other courses such as history or social studies, but in these instances literature itself is not really the "subject" at hand. (Which itself is problematic. If literature is finally pedagogically helpful only as something that can be added for illustrative purposes to other areas of study, most students are likely to view it in their future lives as nonessential, purely as the means to another, more important, end.) To study poetry as poetry requires a sensitivity to language and to the possibilities and purposes of aesthetic form that, frankly, most teachers lack and most students have no interest in developing. But I'm not sure why either should be expected to possess such sensitivity. A taste for poetry is a minority taste, has always been a minority taste, and, despite all the efforts to make poetry "relevant" to readers who otherwise couldn't care less (perhaps because of them), will always be a minority taste. And I don't understand why this is considered to be a problem. Physics is a minority taste as well, but physicists don't seem to spend much time brooding over the fact that most people don't read physics journals..

Thus the only really feasible argument on behalf of teaching poetry in school is the one Selinger advances here--"as part of the national patrimony, with the assumption that elementary students should know their Whitman and Dickinson, Hayden and Hughes, because these are our great national poets." But this "national greatness" approach is probably the very worst way of convincing young readers to give a poetry a chance. Whitman and Dickinson get elevated (or, more accurately, reduced) to the level of all the other "great" historic figures whose achievements are duly recited but otherwise ignored. To tell these young readers that such poets are part of their "patrimony" is only another way of saying they should read poetry because it's good for them, a strategy that will only make it certain they'll never want to read a line of verse ever again.

I favor the opposite strategy: take literature out of the schools altogther, even out of college (at least as a required course). Those who might realistically develop an interest in poetry or serious fiction will come to it not because it's been forced on them but because it's been freed of all taints of the "academic," of something one learns in school and then forgets. Emphasize the way poetry embodies values and practices that are precisely at odds with the conformist attitudes enforced by "school." Take it out of the classroom and let it breathe.

Instrumentalities

In an essay reporting on William Safire's speech before Americans for the Arts, Philip Kennicott observes:

Safire's speech was evidence of how thoroughly the instrumental viewpoint, and the conservative one, now dominate in public discussions of art. In a speech that pointed prominently to Richard Nixon's early support for the NEA, Safire all but said that the best hope for arts advocates is to line up behind the conservative consensus. If you want arts traction in Republican Washington, it makes sense to stick to Shakespeare and education initiatives (a path the NEA has taken, productively, and is now being followed all too predictably by the Kennedy Center, which has announced the last thing we really need: a six-month Shakespeare "festival").

Safire used the word "classic" repeatedly. He spoke of the hope that "cognitive science today can help illuminate classic art." He even referred to the creation of "new classics," an odd locution for an expert on speech.

Arts advocates are no doubt very happy to have allies such as Safire and may not notice the subtle shift in vocabulary toward the dominance of words like "classic" -- which suggests art that is widely admired, consensus-building and essentially noncontroversial. And Safire's devotion to the arts is certainly genuine. But walk outside, onto the terrace above the Potomac, and read what's written on the walls of the Kennedy Center. The president for which it is named once said, "I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty."

That kind of thinking has been fundamental to the thought of arts advocates for generations now. They defined the challenge facing them as a public that fears art, or is simply ignorant of art, or can't get access to art. If only arts lovers had the right arguments in their quiver (art can improve cognition, for example), then the arts might take on a central place in American life.

And then asks:

But what if the problem is more fundamental than that? What if the real problem is that some significant portion of the U.S. population simply hates art? Not fear. Not ignorance. Not even indifference. But loathing.

What would that look like? If you don't like to listen, or observe, if you don't like ambiguity or complexity, if you prefer to shout your opinion (even if you openly acknowledge you know nothing about what you're saying), you are, perhaps, someone inclined to hate art. It's possible that for years now, arts advocates have been wasting their breath, arguing into a black hole, with opponents who will never happily yield an inch to art.

My answer: What that would "look like" is precisely the situation that already obtains in the United States, despite the efforts of the NEA and the Kennedy Center. (In my opinion, if both of these entities were to disappear tomorrow, the arts in America would not be in discernibly worse shape, and their situation might even improve to the extent that the very definition of "the arts" would be less under the control of bureaucrats.) Every proposal "to make the arts, especially the classic masterpieces, accessible and relevant to today's audience," as Safire puts it, is just another step in the process by which art will ultimately disappear, replaced by the kind of safe, bloodless diversion of which Richard Nixon would have indeed been proud.

"Arts advocates" ought simply to say "no thanks" to Safire's advice. If art needs to accept the "conservative consensus" (or the "liberal consensus," for that matter--the instrumental view is equally obnoxious whether originating on the left or the right) to receive public support, then better there be no public support. Which do we want, art that pursues its own agendas, implicit in the work itself, or art that helps out the politicians in "consensus-building"?

Although I do disagree with Kennicott that what is needed is a willingness "to confront openly what H.L. Mencken called 'the booboisie' rather than persuade soccer moms and uber-parents that art will help Junior ace his SATs." Just leave the booboisie--if that's what you want to call them--alone. They have every right to hate or ignore art. Confronting them--especially within the work of art itself in an empty gesture of "rebellion"--will accomplish nothing, since they'll never know you've done it. Kennicott is correct, however, in suggesting that the argument art is good for you--at least if it helps you pass the test--is equally useless. Perhaps Junior will come to see the value of real art on his own, but one way to insure he never will is to make it just another checked-off item on the list of things to study for the SATs.

Thanks to Kevin Holtsberry for forwarding me the essay.

Labels

I certainly agree with Matt Cheney:

. . .my problem is I don't particularly care what something is labelled, and I especially don't like issuing proclamations that all writers should or should not write in some specific way. What I desire as a reader and a writer has little to do with whether something fits anyone's definition of realist or not, and even less to do with how it fits into a marketing category. As a reader and writer, I find work compelling when it aims to push the possibilities of language and structure, of emotion and character, of ideas and effects. I grow bored with books that are a lot like other books and with stories that don't strive toward being something more than simple entertainment. These qualities can be found in works that fit just about any definition of realist or nonrealist. . . .

Although I'm not sure I would agree that the relevant opposition is between "realism" and "nonrealism" (Matt wants to speak up for the latter among those who would privilege the former) so much as between notions of the "well-made story" or of "craft" and, as Matt puts it, of fiction that pushes "the possibilities of language and structure." Historically, ideas about "the craft of fiction" certainly did arise along with the rise of realism, and even modernist experimentation tended to be along the lines of providing greater verisimilitude, conceived of as psychological depth, internal rather than external realism, rather than a rejection of realism as an ultimate goal. But writers who provide rather too much realism (e.g., Stephen Dixon or Harold Jaffe) without the accompanying comforts of conventional storytelling are as likely to be neglected by mainstream critics and readers of "literary fiction" as the most thoroughgoing fantasist.

It is also true that "realism" as a practice (if not necessarily the term itself) came to prominence as a more or less deliberate rejection of the kind of fiction Hawthorne called "romance" in describing his own work. According to Hawthorne, what we would now call realism "is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience," while romance, althought "it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows, of the picture." Writers from James to Hemingway and beyond foreswore the managing of "atmospherical medium" in order to emphasize fidelity to the "probable" (partly, it must also be said, to bring fiction a perceived respectability that the Romantic dabbling in what Hawthorne also called the "marvellous" did not), and perhaps some of their influence does linger on.

One would think, however, that the work of writers like Beckett, Heller, Pynchon, and Sorrentino (among writers not classified as "genre" writers) would have demonstrated that "nonrealism" (I suppose that at this late date "romance" would sound too antique) is just as serious, just as "literary," as realism, psychological and otherwise. Even the relatively recent appearance of a variety of surrealism in the work of writers such as Aimee Bender and George Saunders finally suggests that "realism" as the attempt to depict "the probable and ordinary course of man's experience" is not really the sine qua non of acceptable literary judgment (although to some extent an indirect appeal to ordinary experience is still manifest in this fiction). As long as such fiction does not unsettle established conventions of craft and decorum too severely (as long as they still recognizably seem "like other books"), it can still be praised for its "imagination" and "invention." But Beckett and Sorrentino wrote books utterly singular in both content (the possibilities of "emotion and character" are strenuously pushed) and form, and it is this refusal to rely on mere formulaic craft, more than their rejection of realism, that keeps them on the margins of respectable opinion.

Taking Risks

In a review of Aimee Bender's Willful Creatures, CL Bledsoe concludes that "Bender is that most daring of writers, who will take any risk, regardless of the consequences." I couldn't disagree more. I've read The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures, and I don't think she takes any risks at all. Her stories display only a kind of surrealistic whimsy that I, for one, find mostly cloying.

Take, for example, "Ironhead," a story from Willful Creatures that Bledsoe singles out for discussion, claiming it is a story in which Bender "portray[s] even the oddest characters not simply as running gags, but with emotional depth." It is hard for me to find the "emotional depth" in passages like this, which to the contrary exhibit only a cartoon-like sentimentality: "The ironhead turned out to be a very gentle boy. He played quietly on the his own in the daytime with clay and dirt, and contrary to expectations, he preferred wearing ragged messy clothes with wrinkles. His mother tried once to smooth down his outfits with her own, separated iron, but when the child saw what was his head, standing by itself, with steam exhaling from the flat silver base just like his breath, he shrieked a tinny scream and matching steam streamed from his chin as it did when he was particularly upset. The pumpkinhead mother quickly put the iron away; she understood; she imagined it was much the way she felt when one of her humanhead friends offered her a piece of seaonal pie on Thanksgiving." This is as much "emotional" portrayal of these characters as we get; the rest of the story continues to wring equally asinine changes on an already dopy idea. Once we've registered the unbeguiling notion that a boy has been born with an iron for a head, the story has little to offer. It continues to rely on faux-naive phrasing ("a very gently boy," "played quietly") and an altogther formulaic plot--the iron-headed boy dies, of course, leaving everyone very sad. I suppose one could characterize the story as a "running gag," but then the gag would need to be funny in the first place.

Or take "The End of the Line," in which a "big man" goes to a pet store "to buy himself a little man to keep him company." Nothing in this story (Bledsoe calls it a "surreal parable") is other than predictable and smarmy, once one allows for its tepidly surrealistic premise. "After about the third week. . .the big man took to torturing the little man." The little man contemplates his escape but is unable to accomplish it. The big man sets the little man free, but decides to follow the little man as he drives away in a "small blue bus"--he "just wanted to see where they lived." A (literally) little girl looks up at the "giant" who has found them and wonders at the "size of the pity that kept unbuckling in her heart."

For a "parable" like this to work, in my opinion, it either has to implicitly examine the structural and thematic assumptions of the parable itself (in the process reconfiguring the possibilities of the form) or it has to manifest some stylistic vigor to compensate for the formulaic nature of parables and fables. Kafka, Borges, Calvino, and Barthleme, for example, are writers able to carry out such tasks, but Bender's stories do neither. Plot exists to reveal the mawkishly cute characters and situations (cute even in their occasional freakishness), but is otherwise so conventional as to be simply perfunctory. And her style is even less interesting, usually just an excuse to "shock" the reader with a seemingly outlandish situation that is really just silly:

The motherfucker arrived at the West Coast from the Midwest. He took a train, and met women of every size and shape in different cities--Tina with the straight-ahead knees in Milwaukee, Annie with the caustic laugh in Chicage, Betsy's lopsided cleavage in Bismark, crazy Heddie in Butte, that lion tamer in Vegas, the smart farm girl from Bakersfield. Finally, he dismounted for good at Union Station in Lost Angeles.

"I fuck mothers," he said to anyone who asked him. "And I do it well."

One could imagine a writer like, say, Stanley Elkin, taking this set-up and running with it, transforming it through his inimitable style and comic imagination into an extended fiction full of narrative ingenuity and aesthetic delight. But in Bender's rendering it becomes an utterly straight-faced account of a man with a quaintly unconventional sexual proclivity who is given to such statements as "Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can't fit under the sky, too large."

I do not mean to single out CL Bledsoe's review for criticism. It has become common for reviewers to identify Bender as a risk-taker, her fiction as an example of what passes for "innovative" writing among the graduates of the better MFA programs. (Bledsoe even comes close to accurately describing Bender's fiction when she calls it "like a rich dessert," except that, for me at least, it is more like sugar overload.) But calling such work innovative or experimental simply because it distorts ordinary reality in some fairy tale-ish sort of way doesn't really do the cause of experimental fiction much good. Experimental fiction challenges the formal constraints imposed by past practices; it does not seek out alternative methods in order, finally, to just tell the same old stories in only superficially different ways. Bender's fiction accepts those constraints and relates decidedly familiar stories dressed up in gaudy but cheap disguises.

How Is It Going to Sell?

According to Justine Larbalestier:

. . .Accusations of being too self promotery make me a bit jittery. Promoting your books is part of a writer’s job. If no one knows the book exists how is it going to sell? A writer should be out there lining up bookshop appearances, sending out postcards/business cards/tshoshkas of some kind. You should be attending cons/trade shows/schools/libraries or whatever will help get the word out about your work. . . .

I continue to resist the idea that, at least in the context of "mainstream" publishing (small presses have a limited ability to promote what they publish, but all parties understand this from the beginning), "promoting your books is part of a writer's job." Is writing your book part of a publisher's job? If not, why let publishers off the hook and agree to do their actual work for them? There really was a time when the writer's job was to write and the publisher's job was to get it into readers' hands. Clearly that day has passed, and, like so many other businesses, publishers are "outsourcing" work they used to do themselves--in this case, to authors themselves.

Given the way current publishing seems to operate--books are published without any realistic plan to get them noticed, floating on a fragile bubble of hope one or two of them might, through some mysterious means, catch on and become blockbusters--it isn't surprising that this practice now predominates. Writers are indeed left to fend for themselves. But if the publisher's only real job is to print your book, why the continuing reluctance to turn to self-publishing? By Justine's own account, this seems to be what book publishing has come down to anyway. If the author is going to engage in the kind of labor she describes, of what practical utility is it to have the publisher's name on the spine? Just a residual sense that your book has been officially pronounced fit by people who know good writing when they see it? Does anyone any longer believe that they do?

Perhaps it is now true that writers must both write and promote. In which case, what good are publishers?

What May Lie Hidden

In an essay defending experimental fiction, Marc Lowe writes:

. . .the majority of popular critics and readers the world over, ultimately, still seem to crave the same thing they always have when it comes right down to it: entertainment. Is it not true that most individuals are primarily, if not exclusively, interested in believable characters with memorable names and realistically portrayed attributes (e.g. Samuel Sellers, the rotund jeweler with a tic in his left eye who picks his flat nose with the end of his pipe holder; Linda Lacy, the woman with the sequined stockings who sucks on peeled carrot sticks in order to satiate her oral fixation), plots that resolve themselves in a decisive, if blandly predictable, manner (too many loose ends make for angry readers, despite the public’s ubiquitous cry—which still resounds in chain bookstores around the English-speaking world—for “realistic” and “believable” characters and situations), and, most of all, a clear and understandable (i.e. linear and tidy) storyline with a consistent style of narration (no abrupt shifts in tense/time, no blurring of who’s who or what’s what, etc.), so that there is little or no need to have to stop and think for even a single moment about what may lie hidden beneath the surface of the words written on the page?. . . .

Although I am myself an advocate on behalf of experimental fiction, I think this analysis goes a little too far. More precisely, it doesn't accurately describe the situation as it exists among serious readers of fiction in the early 21st century.

The question isn't really whether "popular critics and readers" accept or reject experimental fiction. The mass audience rejects "literary fiction" of even the most conventional, most character-driven kind. The challenge for experimental writers and sympathetic critics is to convince readers who might be looking for more than "entertainment" to move beyond what now passes for "literary" fiction to consider alternatives that are just as literary, if not as immediately recognizable as variations on an established form. With these readers, the situation is not as dire as Lowe suggests.

Most such readers have surely assimilated the innovations of modernist/postmodernist fiction to the extent they do not expect characters like "Samuel Sellers" and "Linda Lacy." If anything, the norm is now what I have in previous posts called "psychological realism," a technique pioneered by writers such as James, Joyce, and Woolf that seeks to portray the world as it is experienced by the characters in a given novel or story, not necessarily to emphasize those characters' "realistically portrayed attributes" if those attributes are external to consciousness. And I really do believe readers are more tolerant of stories that do not "resolve themselves in a decisive. . .manner" than Lowe gives them credit for (unless the stories are themselves decisively situated in a generic framework that more or less demands resolution of plot details). Indeed, what has variously been called "minimalism" or "dirty realism" is more or less predicated on the assumption that in the end nothing much will happen--on the surface at least. Finally, it seems to me especially true that readers of literary fiction are open to narratives that are structured as something other than "a clear and understandable (i.e. linear and tidy) storyline with a consistent style of narration." Fragmentation, chronological displacement, shifts in point of view, and other forms of non-linear storytelling are quite common in contemporary literary fiction, so common that I would say the sort of naively realistic, unswervingly linear narrative Lowe describes is in a distinct minority among the books that appeal to today's literary reader.

I don't think it does much of a service to experimental fiction to offer as rhetorical straw men either the mass audience who would be just as impatient with John Updike as with Gilbert Sorrentino, or the "anachronistic 19th century model" Lowe complains of. (Aspiring experimental writers could in fact learn quite a lot, about character creation and narrative development, from writers like Dickens and Hardy.) Serious writers will never attract a "popular" audience (I don't see why they would want to), and contemporary fiction for the most part does not proceed according to the 19th-century model. (It is especially mistaken to conclude that 19th-century writers were both relentless storytellers and "realist" in their approach to representation; in many cases the one is in conflict with the other, and these writers can be illustrative of the ways the two impulses can or can't be reconciled.) Better to seek out those readers who may already be at least half-interested in what experimental fiction might accomplish and convince them to risk the other half as well.