Library of Congress lectures; Karl Shapiro, part two

Part of Jor-El long to be accepted by the medium but the thought of that depressed him. He asked. Is the influence of what I have called the medium likely to lead us to any good life to make us love and try to attain any real excellence beauty magnanimity. The answer has to be No. A middle aged woman in the supermarket who buys all and cheer and enjoy for her gleaming washing machines sees only the image of death staring at her in her rearview mirror. Let me read this poem which in my mind is already a famous poem. It's called next day. Because a woman has been to a funeral of her friend the day before. Moving from cheer to joy from joy to all. I take a box and add it to my wild rice. My Cornish game hens the slack or shortage basket did identical food gathering flocks ourselves I overlook. Wisdom said William James is learning

what to overlook. And I am wise if that is wisdom. Yet somehow as I buy all from the shelves and the boy takes it to my station wagon what I've become troubles me even if I shut my eyes. When I was young and miserable and pretty and poor. I'd wish what all girls wish to have a husband a house and children. Now that I'm old. My wish is woman ish that the boy putting groceries in my car see me. It bewilders me he doesn't see me for so many years I was going to enough to eat. The world looked at me and its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me. The eyes of strangers and holding their flesh within my flesh their violent magine ings within my imagining. I too have taken the chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog and we start home. Now I am good. The last mistake an ecstatic accidental bliss the blind happiness that bursting leaves upon the palm some soap and water.

It was so long ago. Back in some gay 20s and 90s I don't know. Today I miss my lovely daughter away at school. My son's away at school my husband away at work. I wish for them the dog the maid and I go through the sure unvarying days at home in them. As I look at my life I'm afraid only that it will change as I am changing. I am afraid this morning of my face. It looks at me from the rear view mirror with eyes I hate the smile I hate. It's plain lined look of grey discovery repeats to me. You're all that's all I'm old. And yet I'm afraid as I was at the funeral I went to yesterday my friends cold made up face. Granted among its flowers her undressed operated on dressed body where my face and body as I think of her I hear her telling me how young I seem I am exceptional. I think of all I

have. But really no one is exceptional. No one has anything I'm anybody. I stand beside my grave confused with my life that is commonplace and solitary. So in that life which is our way there is no excellence but one wonders to use Jor-El's pun on the great word all if that is really all. When the prophets of high culture I called it high culture in one of my own essays all died out leaving only Dwight Macdonald to rave against the medium and kids and camp and all those once fashionable diseases of the age. When Elliot fell in love and died and pound discovered silence in short in the 20s and 30s and it was already the 60s and it had become hard to say where the medium ended and the isolate poet began. How could a specialized study of the intellectual say Hertzog be a bestseller. What mass audience was

it that picked that up. Even the woman in the supermarket quoted William James. The question with us with your L was a probability of accepting the supermarket and its brightly packaged values. Or must one be an Allen Ginsburg and situate Walt Whitman in the supermarket only to say See I told you so. America has to start over from scratch. In poetry and the age one of the best hand books of anti criticism criticism we have there is an essay on the obscurity of the poet. My edition of the book is dated 1955 a fatal year for pronounce your Mentos about the audience. A year when some giant beast slouching toward the city lights bookshop gave birth to howl. Tomorrow morning Gerard was saying some poet may like Byron wake up to find himself famous for having written a novel for having killed his wife.

It will not be for having written a poem. You're always wrong. The whole generation was wrong about the audience and the poet Howell gave us the lie. For myself I was delighted and immediately sent in my resignation to my generation. That accepted it gingerly but with inquisitorial silence. In the same lecture Jor-El had said that the general public has set up a criterion of its own one by which every form of contemporary art is condemned. In this statement to which had for so long been so widely accepted was already obsolete. A decade after hollow and I see that poem as a symptom rather than a cause. The general public itself has become the contemporary art audience. There are very few places in our geography anymore which resemble a Nebraska of the Spirit and in any case philistinism today is no longer spontaneous but organized. Political. Condemnation

of the artist today is no longer mere provincialism. It is to use a not very old fashioned term a form of fascism. And the general public whatever that is is choosing up sides. The medium still dominates the sensory experience of the masses of people but the medium itself has become an initiate and high culture. The medium has also had courses in modern poetry and electronic music. So. The Berkeley or California rebellion like the Whiskey Rebellion was a protest against the central culture. The California rebellion struck out every form of institutionalism it could clap eyes on. This too was a generational revolt and continues to be worldwide. It is as most writers about it have noticed more social logical upheaval than a new motion in the arts. There is no innovation in beat R.. The poetry stems from traditional

rebel poets Rambo pound Whitman are told and the counter revolt against pietism stemmed from what was left over from the old guard elite and also from members of Jor-El's generation. General would not I believe commit himself to the new barbarians as some writers call them. He could not he was too are being too civilised too much a lover of The Perfect. I cannot imagine him favoring for any reason. The later phase of beat art the jazz poetry of Bob Dylan and all those electric guitarists who carry their echo chambers with him wherever they go. Portable Iole and wins and whose motto. Whose motto seems to be death by motorcycle. Perhaps finally General recognized how much of an institution our generation had become how much an institution he had become. I was in more of a position to face the music the music of the electric guitar because of my

resignation. It was no surprise to me when I published a collection of essays called In Defense of ignorance. To receive a letter from a prominent member of our generation that complimented me highly on the book and said how much it was needed. A letter which ended but I would appreciate it if you didn't tell anybody. It was of course not your rel who penned this Robert Lowell question my adherence to William Carlos Williams Williams being the godfather of how the. Urals beautiful fable called the bat poet is like all true fables open to various readings. A child can read it as well as a philosopher as well as a poet. Each with the same comprehension a little light brown bat leaves the pack to go out into the world of daylight. To quote hang there and think. The real bats don't understand the back poet who uses such things as colors in his poems. Busy working night batch don't care for color and have no truck with poems. After trying out his

poems on such creatures as a Mockingbird who criticises the back poets prosody and complains how hard it is to be a Mockingbird. After failing to write a poem about the cardinal who is perhaps too beautiful even for a poem. After bargaining with the chipmunk who is the bad poet's most sympathetic critic although naturally a poem about the owl gives the chipmunk the primordial angst. The bat poet writes his best poem about of all things a mother bat is zig zagging through the night with her baby clinging to her body. The chicken the the chipmunk decides that everything the bat does is upside down. At last the bad poet decides to go and read his back poem to the bats themselves. But when he gets to the barn where the bats collect he has curiously forgotten his most important poem and just hangs upside down and goes to sleep like all the other bands. Whether to be a backer or a poet is the question. Maybe the poets of Jor-El's and my generation were all hybrid back poets

going back to the institutional barm and then lighting off in broad daylight to write poems about the righteous and dyspeptic Mockingbird the rich bitch cardinal the kindly and X's stench all chipmunk the owl who gets us all indiscriminately in his claws. When I got my first copy of the bat poet I couldn't read it. The title in the drawing was bothering me. It was the only thing of Jor-El's I didn't leap to read and I gave my copy to a student when I went to find a copy later I found that my library at the University of Nebraska had never heard of it that no bookstore in my part of the world had ever heard of it that nobody I knew within hailing distance had ever heard of it except that there was a mint copy in the state capitol building of all places. The basic assumption the basic critical theorem of our generation was that poetry didn't really go in this age that the age demanded everything of the artist except his art and that the poet was still the class. And so far as there was any truth in the

assumption it was a minor truth. When Geraldo defended Robert Frost in calling attention to the other Frost he was reminding his intellectual contemporaries that even a popular poet could make the grade. But you're always really saying about frost that he was a poet whose popularity was perhaps accidental. Conversely Dylan Thomas What was your all thought correctly. One of the most obscure poets of the age was popular by default. It might be truer to say that frost and Thomas were not only creative but also performing artists not only performing artists but artists in action. Frost and Thomas live their poetry on stage and off they were wanted with it. While our generation tended to hide or to collect and small conspiratorial groups we barely learned to read poetry because as we said a little wearily we wrote it. And because we wrote poetry that we were not necessarily committed to read because we held of the cold North American

Delivery. We could seldom muster more than a token audience. Even Robert Frost finally one of our great readers insisted on the verb save for his recitation of your relative back poet picked up the idiom. He says he is going to say a poem to the Mockingbird. The opposite of to say is the saying. And even tone deaf and Yeats chanted his works. LB revived a chant for the cantos. It's one of the qualities that attracted him to the beat poets. But the classroom voice and the High Church voice were dominant in the generation of Jor-El and yet what else were we to do in America we argued and our language which is inflected only in moments of violence. We shift between the nasal monotone and the double spondee Darrelle is the one poet of my generation who made an art of American speech as it is. Who advanced beyond frost and using not only a contemporary idiom although unfrosted is necessarily fictitious but the actual rhythms of our

speech here to rally as unique and technically radical. No other poet of our time has embalmed the common dialogue of Americans with such mastery and because he caught our bourgeois speech. He caught our meaning. Here is part of the marvelous essay poem about a ball uncatchable things woman. This poem is called Woman I'm reading only a part of it it's quite good. I think one of one of the rails. Masterly poems. All things become the being nine. I think sometimes as I think of you I think how many faults in me have seen the virtue while your taste is on my time. The years return blessings numerable as the breaths that you have quickened gild my flesh. Live there in majesty. When like Disraeli I murmur that you are more like a mistress than a wife. More like an angel than a mistress. When like Satan I hissed in your ear

some vile suggestion some delectable abomination. You smile at me indulgently man. Man. You smile at mankind recognizing in it the absurd occasion of your fall for man as your soap operas as your home journals as your heart's whisper. Men are only children and you believe them. Truly you are children. Should i love you so dearly if you weren't. If I weren't. All morning star each morning my doll heart goes out to you and rises with the sun but with the sun sets not but all the long night. Nash within your eyes. A. Man's share of the grace of Allah can make bearable lovable almost the apparition man has fallen to you erect extraordinary as a polar bear on roller skates. He passes on into the eternal. From your pedestal you watch admiringly when you remember to cry. Let us form as Freud has said a

group of two. You are the best thing that this world can offer. He said so for I remember that he said so. If I'm mistaken it's a fraud in error. An error nothing but a man would make women can't bear women cunningly engraved on many an old wife's dead heart as women beware women. And yet it was a man I'm sick of too much sweetness of a life rich with a mother wife three daughters a wife sister and a best 7 hours sans who wrote I cannot escape the notion though I hesitate to give it expression that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in man. Their super ego he goes on without hesitation is never so an extra ball so impersonal so independent of its emotional Arjun's as we require it in a man. Now this poem goes on for a couple of hundred lines just as good as that such as you call to me come and when I come say

go smiling your soft contrary smile. I think of two lines packed with as much meaning as the death of the ball turret gunner. And age is poetry does not purify the dialect or any of that nonsense which aesthetic Marla's believe. But in ages poetry fixes the age for those who care to gaze upon it in another age. Most of the poets of Jor-El's generation when they were not simply describing the setting up the landscape of the city dump or suburbia or attacking the gleaming machinery of our brilliant kitchens. Most of our poets dealt in minor points of ideology lives of the saints or of boxers or of the symbolism of automobiles. Our technique was irony and nothing but irony more kinds of irony than the Arabs have words for camel. But Jor-El for all his indirections spoke directly to the theme and in the direct

idiom of our semi literate educated classes. He listened like a novelist. I have already alluded to his ear. He heard the worst of us as well as the best things like I am big pentameter hypnotized me I'm not. He used it as one sits in a Victorian chair in a friend's house. But how well he knew a Victorian chair when he saw one. No one is ever called a French writer or a German writer or an English or Irish or Scotch writer as a lot of French German English Irish or Scotch writer is. But American writers ask practically nothing but what is an American writer. It's the great theme of American literature and in a sense the only one Ural says for instance about Walt Whitman. If some day a tourist notices among the ruins of New York. A copy of Leaves of Grass and stops and picks it up and read some lines in it she will be able to say to yourself How very

American. If he and his country had not existed it would have been impossible to imagine them. Ural is almost as pro-American as Whitman himself. He applauds Marion more saying about America that it's not Niagara Falls. The calico horses in the war canoe that matter nor the resources nor the know how. It's not that hard to me it's not the plunder but accessibility to experience. He praises her Americanness and makes more famous the famed lines about our language. Gracilis links less language less country in which letters are written not in Spanish not in Greek not in Latin not in shorthand but in plain American which cats and dogs can read. For a Patterson book one Jor-El reserve greater praise predicting because it was a most American poem ever that it might become the best very long poem that

any American has written. Patterson didn't pan out that way. Ford's irrelevant for anyone else but Williams did. Well humans revealed America New York on its horizon a pillar of smoke by days as your rail a pillar of fire by night. Williams in general play with the remark of Henry James that America has no ruins. America is full of ruins as Darrelle the ruins of hopes. And MBB Tolson the great and practically I'm some negro poet. He too is dead says somewhere in Harlem gallery that the dilemma of the negro between the white and the blackboard was he is to be or not to be a Negro. The negro has a choice is what Olson argues and he and I would rather the negro became a negro. But this dilemma does not exist for the pale face American. There is no choice of To Be or Not to be an American.

Once an American once an American poet one can only ask. I am an American or an American writer. Is there anything I can do about it. American poets even as late as Jor-El's generation tried to do something about it by remaining only as American as their passports demanded. A few of us follow in William's War Of The Stars and Stripes in secret like The Man Without A Country. Ural and I were two of these the generation of our fathers wore the flag with the Cross of St George or the flag of the stars and bars. And some of them sported the ribbon of the Legion of Honor and one or two of the red white and black. None of my generation sported the Iron Cross which one sees nowadays in dime stores in America for little boys to play Nazi. But almost all a generation of Jor-El at one time or another played red or pink. The value in the quality of poetry unfortunately or fortunately have nothing to do with

marl or political contents. The Divine Comedy is banned in Pakistan or used to be for religious reasons. Modern art and poetry are used to be banned in Red Russia. Also for religious reasons sad to say many poets are political or moral idiots even among the great. In our own time we have to fight the tendencies which threaten what is dear to our own lives and ideologies. But in general as generation we were almost to a man humane humanist and unlike our predecessors were Democratic in politics. Agnostic in religion and baroque in literature. Among Us only Robert Lowell and myself could be described as extremists. And our extremism had different derivations and opposite goals. If your L suffered deeply through the Stalinist Franco was muscling the Hitler years hoping against hope for a betterment of the human condition his first book was called Blood for a stranger and was printed in one thousand forty two. A war book he

retained only a few of these poems when Thirteen years later he published his selected poems. But the themes of war and fascism war as fascism were always in his mind. You're always written more good poems about the wars and about Jews in Germany. The good Germany perhaps than anyone else. He has written also the most famous and the best warbling of anyone in the 20th century in five lines. The volume called Little Friend little friend though it has some of his best made single poems as a thematic book a war book in which the poet is personally absent. The title page carries a penetrating explanation of the poems the pathos of modern war in the code language of fliers. Then I heard the bomber call me any little friend little friend I got two engines on fire. Can you see me little friend. I said I'm crossing right over you. Let's go home. The anguish of the soldier is shown last and his

anonymity in his exile from the human race then and his emotional sentimental desperation. The chief symbols of those are relative not right to manipulate symbols as symbols are the mother and the cat. It's no boater Larry and Cat Woman the destroyer. No TS Eliot cat kindly figure from the best Yairi zero's cat is the object of love. It's not a love object. A cat who listens. The mother is pure mother who thinks heavily. My son is grown. That's all he's grown therefore he is a soldier. The pilot falling from his plane sees the smoking carrier and its guns as children's toys for it's true that in the elemental iconography of war everything is stripped down to a child's arithmetic. Mother sold your cat a gun. There is a salient difference between our war poetry such as your rails and that first great war poetry written in our father's war by Wilfred Owen and Saskatoon and Rosenberg and blonde and so on.

The British war poets who showed everyone how to write anti-war poetry were themselves all outstanding warriors and heroes. They cried out against war but were as conversant with blood as alarms of Arabia. None of my generation World War heroes that I remember or even outstanding soldiers. It says in a note to one of the rails books that he washed out as a combat pilot and became a celestial Navigator a much more suitable title for a poet. In a sense we waited out the war in uniform derails Balt Haer a governor is also washed out of the terrorist with a hose. I'm like the poets of the First World War who never recovered from the experience our generation did. We inherited an historical perspective which was denied our fathers. We foresaw and witnessed the whole world turning into the state. The war was of secondary

importance to us even while we were part of it. When we came home there was grass growing on all the highways of the 48 states. But not for long. Our army went from to mobilization to college or to Television School. Our poets became the university poets. But the tragedy of our generation and I believe it is the tragedy was that our army never melted away. It remained it grew bigger. It was more and more all over the world. It became the way of life a state if not the garrison state itself then something resembling it mightily. The war never came to a stop. All of the protocols of armistice were suspended. Our poetry from the 40s on records the helplessness we felt in the face of the impersonal organism of the age the impersonal itself which is always death to poetry. There is a literary commonplace in American literature as essentially a child literature that Moby Dick is a

boy's book. I was given a copy when I was seven. That every American hero was Huckleberry Finn in disguise. That poets are really little girls in mufti. That the artist has to prove his masculinity and so on. A culture without myth those is forced into ideology. Whitman is an idealogue. His negation of mythology is 100 percent American. Our poets when they deal in the myths to do as euro did following the real key and the other modern Arthurs we analyze and psychologize Orestes are off us. We understand without belief. This is the opposite of using comparative mythology in order to revive an enforced belief as alue did our poetry studies behavior and leads us back to the child with your relative who the child becomes the critic and the center of value of our mythology is the first impression. Their earliest consciousness all the big people are giants out of Grimm and most of them are bad. When a little girl is moving to a new

house she thinks the broody hand squawks upside down. Her eggs are boiled. The cat is dragged from the limb. She thinks we are going to live in a new pumpkin under a gold star.