I read Jack Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven over the weekend. The book came out a year ago and you may remember blog talk about the poem with the woman wiping barbecued chicken grease on her breasts. It’s an understatement to say Gilbert is controversial. He represents everything the “post-avant” despise in poetry, and everything the “romantics” wish that poetry would return to being—poetry’s “true business.”
Most of the reviews I read on Refusing Heaven took one side or another in this controversy. Unfortunately, this does not tell us very much about the poetry itself. I am tired of reviews that point out the differences between, say, Jack Gilbert and John Ashbery, and then take sides. This is no way to shed light! What’s enlightening is to point out the differences between a good Gilbert poem and a bad one, a good Ashbery poem and a bad one.
I loved Gilbert’s 1994 book The Great Fires, even though I am not generally in love with that “type” of poetry. Often Gilbert is too direct and “sincere” for my more decadent taste. I have little patience for lines like “The man slices / tomatoes and lemons. Takes out the fish / and scrambles eggs,” and am similarly impatient with abstract generalities like (opening the book at random) “Grief makes the heart / apparent as much as sudden happiness can.”
Nevertheless, anyone who doesn’t recognize the greatness of The Great Fires seems stubbornly blind to me. Gilbert reminds me of Hemingway more than anyone else, and of course a lot of us are tired of that sort of writing, but like Hemingway, Gilbert’s best work has an undeniable greatness. Read “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” and other poems on Scoplaw’s blog.
So why was I so disappointed by Refusing Heaven? I like the opening poem, “A Brief for the Defense,” very much. But the book pretty much went downhill from there for me. Perhaps the concrete and the abstract don’t come together the way they do in the earlier book. So many of the poems end in abstractions that don’t quite work: “The soul is ambitious / for what is invisible. Hungers for a sacrament / that is both spirit and flesh. And neither.” There is also the question of Gilbert’s attitude toward women, which some readers find offensive partly because of his excessive “romanticization” of women. I am about as romantic as anyone can be, but I do cringe when a line begins “The reason we cannot enter the same woman twice is . . . .”
Still, there are lines I love in Refusing Heaven, and some of the best are about Pittsburgh, as in “A Taste for Grit and Whatever”:
. . . Is it because
Pittsburgh is still tangled in him that he
has the picture on his wall of God’s head
torn apart by jungle roots? Maybe
growing up in that brutal city left him
with a taste for grit and whatever it was
he saw in the titanic rusting steels mills.
Gilbert makes great discriminations, like “the quiet that is the music of that place, / which is the difference between silence and windlessness” from “Music Is in the Piano Only When It Is Played.” But while there are wonderful lines, it’s hard to find wonderful poems in this book. The poem about Pittsburgh, for example, goes on to a conclusion that I just don’t find credible: “Why the erotic matters so much. Not as / pleasure but a way to get to something darker.” One could come up with a dozen adjectives to describe Gilbert’s poetry, and they would apply equally to Refusing Heaven and The Great Fires. I find it fascinating that poems so alike in their style and form and voice can be so different in quality.
Gotta go: Y Tu Mamá También is on TV and I feel a need to see something great.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
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13 comments:
Can't comment on Gilbert's books as I've read neither, although I remember you recommending The Great Fires. But I do appreciate the way you talk about these books. I, too, am tired of people talking about one type of poetry vs. another type of poetry instead of looking how a poem (or book) works or does not within the poet's aesthetics.
Thanks for your comments, Louise! I'll try to find that webcast of Gilbert and Linda Gregg. I think you're bringing up a really important subject that doesn't get talked about much--how "objectification" is fundamental to so much of art. I've heard people define sentimentality as the substitution of objects for emotions--e.g., giving someone flowers rather than articulating your feelings in words, which is so much harder to do--but so much of poetry is exactly that, especially, as you say, any poetry using images (which is most poetry!). It necessarily risks sentimentality, but we do it for just the reason Gilbert says: that images ("amber, archers, cinnamon ...") seem to evoke those complex feelings so much better than mere words.
The webcast you're talking about must be the one available here Definitely worth watching!
Another definition of sentimentality I recall was Salinger's (who had his own bent toward the sentimental). I found it after a Google search along with this apt comment (from a Donald Johnson who seems to be a professor at UCSB):
One of Salinger's characters, I believe, did define sentimentality as "when you care more about a thing than God cares about it," which is a useful and clever definition as long as God doesn't resemble Salinger too closely. Certainly it's easy to make the case that Salinger cared more about the Glass family than God would have cared about them.
I remember hearing that Salinger quote, Beverly. Caring more about a thing than God cares about it" may be a good definition of love itself!
Robert, wouldn't that also be an inversion of Emily Dickinson's definition?
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus'--
These lines have always astounded me. For me, Gilbert's style is the opposite of Dickinson's own circuitousness. I liked The Great Fires very much.
Thanks for the webcast link.
That Dickinson quote IS an interesting twist. That's what makes Dickinson so great!
Mary Rueffle has an essay on sentimentality in the current issue of West Branch. I read as much of it as I could, standing up in Diesel Books while my daughter got a quick haircut at Alexander Pope (hairsalon, not poet). I enjoyed it but didn't buy the issue, so I have to go back and finish it at some point.
Beverly, can you summarize what she is saying about sentimentality?
d-
Yeah, we want to know! I'll have to go into Fog City News when I'm in downtown SF on Tuesday and see if they've got West Branch.
I read Ruefle. What a great essay! Hard to summarize but thought-provoking. Here are some excerpts:
“During the last residency, it was my privilege and pleasure to share the company of the other poet-teachers one evening, and I thought you might be interested in what they talk about when they get together informally. They talk about cats.”
“I’d been using Gardner’s definition of sentimentality—causeless emotion, that is, indulgence of more emotion than seems warranted by the stimulus—for many years in teaching students why their sentimental poems don’t work, and in explaining to myself why my own sentimental poems don’t work. Until one day I realized that ‘causeless emotion’ was an even better definition of poetry.”
“Keats said only one thing was necessary to write good poetry: a feeling for light and shade. I like that he had the sense to call it one thing, and not two things.”
“As I speak, blood is coursing through our bodies. As it moves away from the heart it marches to a 2/4 or 4/4 beat and it’s arterial blood, reoxygenated, assertive, active, progressive, optimistic. When it reaches our extremities and turns toward home—the heart—well, it’s nostalgic, it’s venous blood (as in veins), it’s tired, . . . homesick now, and full of longing. When we first write our poems, how arterial they seem! And when we go back to them, how venous they seem!”
“In his manifesto ‘Toward an Impure Poetry,’ Pablo Neruda warns us, ‘We must not overlook melancholy, the sentimentalism of another age, the perfect impure fruit whose marvels have been cast aside by the mania for pedantry: moonlight, the swan at dusk, “my beloved” are, beyond question, the elemental and essential matter of poetry. He who would flee from bad taste is riding for a fall.’”
“Though fear of freedom is an entanglement in increasingly unimportant decisions—should I use chiasma in my work?—fear of security also retards.”
“We are human beings. Our expressions are always inadequate, often pitiful. Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.”
Thanks Robert for that great summary. I could never have attempted one without the essay in front of me because I don't think it's summarizable. Your strategy of selected quotes hit the hight spots.
nice thread, although salenger's quote (offered through the voice of one of his characters) has been misrepresented throughout.
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