A new essay-blog about the poet Tony Hoagland - his essay "Towards a Post Modern Humanism" - appears in The ICONOCLAST (#115). It's about consciousness as well as literature, society as well as poetry, with a little Zen thrown in.
Why I Love Tony Hoagland:
A Review of “Toward a Postmodern Humanism”
and “Twenty Poems That Could Save America”
by Dane Cervine
I love Tony Hoagland, poet and essayist extraordinaire. Not because he chose a poem of mine, Accordions & Shotguns, for Honorable Mention in the first Wabash Poetry Prize (he won’t remember). Nor because he has some of the best book titles in the ‘biz (Donkey Gospel; Why I Love Narcissism; Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty).
It’s not because he uses the first names of friends in his poems as though they were just regular people (which they are) and not Homer (unless his last name is “Simpson”); nor because he manages to sound hip and contemporary with his jabbing left while setting you up for the knockout punch: a sledgehammer-right of depth and existential, cynical, almost mystical, poignancy.
I love Tony because he knows where we’re heading: towards a Post Modern Humanism. At least, he says as much in the essay “Toward a Postmodern Humanism”, published in The American Poetry Review, March/April 2014. Following this thread, he unravels then weaves this wonderful conceit even further in his new book, entitled, Twenty Poems That Could Save America.
It is great art and criticism all rolled into one, a must-read. But amid the focus on poetic forms and voices conducive to a postmodern humanism, there is a bent that speaks, perhaps, even more deeply about the human condition at this juncture of history.
Towards the end of Tony’s essay, he writes:
Where we are, if we are paying attention, is always on the edge of the unarticulated, in the terrain of the new life.
This new life has something to do with the old life that we’re still in, this edge of a post-modern sensibility as wild and fragmented as the old chess board was orderly, with its queen and king, knights and pawns of elegant lyrical symmetries.
But it’s not just literature we speak of. It is consciousness, human consciousness. Consciousness that is evolving. Literature follows consciousness. It also creates consciousness: sensibilities that were not there before. Tony says that poetry “actually trains our cognition, instructing us in how to perceive the world in a very particular way”. And in that perceiving perhaps discover, or invent, a new world of both literature and consciousness.
It is akin, perhaps, to the debate in the great field of Mathematics: whether it is invented by humans, or discovered. Which manifests the other? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Scientists will tell you it’s both—much like light, appearing now as a point, now again as a wave. So in literature, in culture: are we discovering in ourselves a-priori knowledge imbedded somehow in our DNA, our Freudian Id’s…or inventing ourselves as we go along, creators in the Void? The great ones say it’s both. The mind, with its great cargo of heart dragged behind it, is changing, again. Moving, again. But where? How?
Tony enlightens us:
In contemporary poetry, despite all of our post-modern skepticisms about the self, the poetic emphasis on personal subjectivity remains strong—as well it should. After all, who will stand up for the nobility of inner life, if not poetry? Not reality TV.
…if contemporary poetry is to claim the status of ongoing relevance, it must interest itself in the stuff of mortgage crisis, insurgency sponsorship, and lithium batteries. In seclusion, American poetry is ever liable to become the production of psycho-biography and wisdom statements. Or, on the other hand, to become a private salon of insular aesthetics and hyper-intellectual jargons, wielded by poetry-nerds.
I don’t want to be a poetry-nerd, had enough trouble with that in high school. I want to stand up for the nobility of the inner life, but I too want to support an insurgency in poetry that includes lithium batteries right along with flowers, and windows, and wistfully looking out the window at the flowers, like Billy Collins. Pre-industrial life had so many flowers, and trees, was still obsessed with classicism and romanticism and the way that life was before it became so complex. Exponentially so. Tony describes Modernism, in part, as a revolution designed to handle the “surfeit and swirl of the twentieth century”, including literary techniques such as fracture, collage, sampling and randomness; craft “attempting to keep up with the Information Problem—to accommodate a reality in which more data, more speed, and less fixity have been evident”.
But are we not fractured then too? In breaking the stained glass of Poetry’s old cathedral, with Picasso’s distorted figures and Gertrude Stein’s tortured language, the glass prison has been cracked, and we live now in its mirror: innumerable shards glinting partial portraits of the human. A collage of techniques. But also an immense freedom that could not have existed without this Modern deconstructionism, and all that has followed. Like Tony, I want to haul a world larger than that of my personal experience into a poem, right on into my life: but how can I get that ship into this bottle? The true subject, Tony says, is: our ongoing, as yet unsuccessful attempt to find a postmodern humanism.
Yes, “the true subject” is how we, as human beings, are evolving. Being a creature of multiple fields—poet, therapist, meditator—I always look to these adjacent lots to figure out what’s happening across the whole terrain of this grand search for a postmodern humanism. While Tony concentrates in his essay on specific poetic forms (such as the “composite poem”), and particular poets (such as Tomas Transtromer, Robert Hass, Anne Carson) to explore this movement in literature, I am restlessly drawn to nosing over my own fences into the parallel endeavors of psychology, and consciousness studies, for clues to the way poetry may wander next.
Tony describes the “composite poem” in a manner that sounds like the very process of consciousness itself, how it “approaches the real through an aesthetic process of sampling, counterpoint, and dialectic”. Blake’s contraries, without which there is no progression. In fact, there is much in our histories that supports this perspective of an inclusivity searching to incorporate our fractured experiences into a human wholeness.
When Tony titles an essay section “The Self Also Can Be Portrayed as a Composite” it harkens toward ancient Buddhist thought which postulates that fragmented mental percepts arise, in tandem, to create the seemingly single identity construct of the fluid “self” (anatta, the Pali word in Theravadin Buddhism for “no fixed self”). Or in Western psychology, Roberto Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis (a contemporary of Freud; sorry Sigmund, there is more at work here than the penis) articulating the many parts of ourselves we continually identify with, then dis-identify, then identify with again as a way of enfolding, integrating, all that we are. In modern psychology, Richard Schwartz’ Internal Family Systems theory posits, in essence, a composite self populated by innumerable “parts” we must learn to give voice to by first differentiating, then integrating this legion chorus.
And when Tony describes “The Composite Poem as a Reprieve from Narcissism”, he is echoing the ancient “Ox-Herding Pictures” from Zen, where in the final painting in the series of ten by the 12th century Chinese Zen master Kajuan, a human figure is depicted as riding the Ox (as stand in for the Mind) back into the village (real life) to participate, to be in the mud and mystery of living in its heartbreaking, gorgeous Suchness—and to help others. This entanglement with the world—in witness, but not as separate-from—is perhaps as much a part of this movement towards a humanism in poetry as it is in psychological growth, in spiritual development. Perhaps. Maybe so. If it includes not just a self-reflecting-on-itself solipsism, but also, as Tony says: reggae music coming out of the perforated speakers on the gas pump, while a block away, a twenty-nine-year old paralegal reads the result of her pregnancy test and rolls her eyes in disbelief.
So is Buddha…rolling his eyes that is; and Carl Jung if he were still alive. Rolling their eyes at the fractured sensibilities too often espoused today, an approach keen on keeping the world in pieces. Or keeping the world out. Or keeping out the inner world. Poetry is the whole Unconscious enchilada, all of it. A Poetry in and of the World, infused with a Self that is Not-Separate. Can you dig it?
I also resonate with Tony’s “Caveat About New Forms”, when he says:
Speaking for myself, I don’t want to be disoriented except for a worthy cause. I’ve experienced plenty of disorder in my life, and labored hard to achieve basic survival skills in my inner and outer worlds. Even so, my mental state never feels less than precarious. I love art that undertakes the work of framing experience. Orientation, to me, is a pearl of great price.
To make even a small amount of sense, to represent the world in a coherent, resonant manner that is not reductive, seems to be a great athletic achievement.
Perhaps this is the signature of a new postmodern humanism: new symmetries, not as static as the old stained glass in Poetry’s former cathedral, but neither the heap of broken mirrors reflecting no shared human form or perspective other than randomness and dissonance. A new human ethos, a language, a sensibility that is integral—inclusive of many voices, tonalities, meanings, but ultimately recognizable as human.
A pearl of great price. A stunning athletic achievement indeed.
*
Speaking of stunning athletic achievements, Tony Hoagland is something of a jock. His new book, Twenty Poems That Could Save America - and other essays, is a precise javelin thrown at the heart of poetry’s current zeitgeist. Early chapters elucidate the genius of American diction, the slippery role of idiom, enlightened uses of language’s game, the poetic housing of shifting parts and changing wholes, the composite poem, and a call for poetry’s passionate worldliness rather than a removed fatalism. Later chapters highlight the genius of Dean Young’s avant-garde language, where “words never stop escaping back into meaning”; the New York school of poetics and their mixed legacy; the “unarrestable” Sharon Olds; the “soul radio” of Marie Howe, Jane Hirshfield, and Linda Gregg; and a retrospective of Robert Bly’s strange and broad contribution to American poetry and culture. His last chapter, which shares the book’s title, Twenty Poems That Could Save America, begins with the premise that something went very wrong, that “we never quite got poetry inside the American school system and thus never quite inside the culture.” He suggests a new canon of possible core poems “that could be smuggled into twenty-first-century life as amulets and beatitudes to guide, map, empower, and console.”
So what might poetry look like, besides the composite poem, in this new humanist century? Perhaps words like cornucopia, feast, legion, the infinite star clusters of a rapidly expanding universe (which is a kind of word). A living literature akin to a map we both discover and create as we go along. The wide varieties of poetries are expanding like the universe we find ourselves in. Literature will follow consciousness, and shape it in return. Just hop on the internet, see what’s happening.
Sometimes a postmodern humanism will be as simple as the human voice, finding that edge between subjectivity and the world. Like Ellen Bass, the fierce and fearless poet of the human, whose new book Like A Beggar (Copper Canyon Press – 2014) combines, as Tony enjoins us to do, the world and the person in unerring relationship. From her new book:
PRAYER
Once I wore a dress liquid as vodka.
My lover watched me ascend
from the subway.
like I was an underground spring
breaking through.
I want to stop wanting to be wanted like that.
I’m tired of the song the rain sings in June,
the chorus of hope, the ravenous green,
the earth, her ornate crown of trees
spiking up from her loamy head.
There are things I wanted, like everyone.
But to this angel of wishes I’ve worshipped
so long, I ask now to admit
the world as it is.
Which brings me full circle back to Tony, a man I have never met, but almost did when he came to Santa Cruz a few years back to give a workshop in Ellen Bass’ living room. I was out of town, but was so enamored with one of his poems, The Divine Plan—about the gods giving us perfectly equal measures of pain and pleasure because it’s “the most effective way to keep a human being awake”—that I told a fellow poet how much I loved this odd, quirky poem, and she repeated the conversation to Tony in Ellen’s living room, and he stared at her blankly, with poetic pause for effect, or the kind of genuine stunned slow orgasmic realization poets have that even one anonymous person, somewhere, even bothers to read our little poems placed like tiny advertisements in the personal sections of a magazine we know no one is even going to respond to, but then they do. Language can do this. It is, in the words of my Zen teacher, John Tarrant, “our greatest communal art form”.
I love Tony because even though he doesn’t, like, totally know where we’re heading as a titanic literary vessel (excuse the allusion), he’s at least looking. Like my Zen teacher’s grandfather, squinting his eye through the old sextant John brought to our last retreat, as he navigated the vast South Pacific seas near Tasmania where John was born. And like John, like his grandfather, Tony sees something, twinkling in the heavens, and he’s navigating there:
Where we are, if we are paying attention, is always on the edge of the unarticulated, in the terrain of the new life….We wish to stay awake, and art is our chosen instrument for the attempt. It is only right that we keep looking.
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