It
is impossible to separate poetry, and art generally, from questions of
morality, no matter how hard you try. And people have tried, and tried hard,
for a very long time. When Oscar Wilde, at the end of the 19th
century, famously stated “there is no such thing as moral or immoral books.
Books are well written or badly written,” he staked out a post-Pater aesthetic
territory that attempted to redefine the parameters of most of the thinking
about the question that preceded him. It’s one of three possible relations that
Tzvetan Todorov points out have held true over 2000 years of arguments: 1)
poetry should be in the service of moral principles that exist beyond it; 2)
poetry, art, should define morality, since beauty is the highest form of human
activity; and 3) poetry and morality are autonomous from one another, and never
the twain etc. Wilde weighed in after a very long time of art and morality
being wed in a restrictive bond, with art cinctured by moral codes. Starting
with Plato’s expulsion of the poets from the city and continuing pretty much
until the mid-19th century, that first relation dominated thinking
in the West. Wilde makes the case that the two categories—Art/Beauty and
Morality/the Good—are mutually exclusive. But Todorov goes on to argue that even
though they are autonomous, Beauty and the Good are connected by three
inescapable links—the immoral but necessary cruelty of the artist, the beauty
poetry contributes to the world, and the increase of intelligibility it adds.
Even at its most disconnected, art, it seems, is still connected to a moral
discourse.
Poetry always speaks from the world, or
just speaks the world (not to be confused with The World), formed in its
particular originating energies, even as it resonates with its source in
eternity. Drenched in the sense of our world, poetry utters the wild logos of
our condition here at the end of some time we know that is also the beginning
of some time we don’t yet know, or only have an inkling of. And in that
speaking, that ordering/uttering of the tumult of the world, poetry
necessarily touches on realities that are subject to moral judgement, though
what that means will depend on how you think morality, or in philosophy’s
lingo, the Good, which flows from your imagination of the world, your cosmology.
Wilde’s words invoke the frightening spectre of a world in which extraneous
moral codes determine what art can and can’t do, regardless of the world art
finds itself in and that speaks through it. And the agents of those codes, the
censors, are never far away, animated by some frenzied idea of enforced
obedience as a remedy for the historical disintegration of the social imaginary
significations of the old world. It wasn’t very long ago that every film in
North America had to be approved by an official Censorship Board, that D.H.
Lawrence and James Joyce were banned from North American bookstores, and all
married couples on TV slept in twin beds (although that’s honestly beginning to
look preferable to the constant stream of soft core pornography on the telly
today).
Censorship is never old news. In so far as
there is always a Party of Return, the thinking of further will meet
resistance, and censorship is one of the main tools for attempting to hold time
back, subject to a purified imagination of an untroubled past of real,
recoverable value. A massive wave of censorship is currently sweeping across
the U.S. A record number of attempts were made in 2021 to censor books in
libraries, and schools, mostly by right-wing religious groups opposed, for instance,
to “immoral” (realistic) representations of sexuality, or historical narratives
that acknowledge the centrality of slavery to the development of USAmerican
culture. And the political/religious right is not alone in this outbreak of
censoriousness. A whole new totalitarian movement haunts the post-Wall “left”
dedicated to imposing a moralistic view of gender, race, and sexuality in the
determination of acceptable art and language. Should you disagree with, or even
question, their position, you will likely find yourself blackballed in some
hellish social media madness for not toeing the line.
But questions about morality and art are
never simple, never limited to black and white, and as with many issues, much
of the complexity (and confusion) arises from differing definitions of the same
word, in this case what’s meant by “morality.” In the most general sense, it is
the knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, the acknowledgement
and acceptance of The Good. But depending on how you understand “knowledge,”
not mention “right” and “wrong,” the sense can shift radically. In the
Judeo-Christian tradition, moral law was literally writ in stone, an immutable
code bestowed on humans directly from God. Emerson challenged that idea of
morality, recognizing the loss of a foundational ground on which to establish
it. “Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand,” he wrote, at a time when science, technology,
and business were rapidly replacing the authority of religion and the spiritual
knowledge that founded moral knowledge with their own authority to determine
what is true. Emerson proposed instead that morality is relational and arises
in the necessity, the necessary struggle, to make ourselves intelligible to
those we are addressed to, and in that sense to be committed to a further,
better self. Stanley Cavell calls this moral perfectionism, where the
perfection is not an achievement but a commitment to a process.
In Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn,
Huck is the embodiment of Emerson’s self-reliance. He faces a dilemma that
arises from the moralist code written in stone (as well as various legal
statutes) that states categorically, Thou shalt not steal. According to
the law of the United States, since Huck’s friend, accomplice, and occasional
saviour, Jim, is an escaped slave, he is the literal “property” of Miss Polly.
The code holds Huck morally obligated to return her stolen property, and since
he is struggling to be a moral person, that’s what he decides to do.
But when he starts to think about it, when
he looks in Jim’s face and recalls the times Jim has helped him, and saved him,
and comforted him, Huck sees a friend, and that friendship is implicated in a
moral sense of loyalty, love, and the recognition of a debt. Which will
prevail? A code that demands Huck return his friend to a condition of slavery
regardless of who he is and what he has done? Or Huck’s knowledge of his
obligation to his friend, his commitment to a world of the value of actual
relation? Morality for Emerson is a deep experience of right and wrong that
arises out of a relation between people. Moralism is not morality.
Founded on a code, an immutable set of laws etched in stone, utterly divorced
from any human interaction, it is also grounded in a deep structural binarism
that divides the world into mutually exclusive categories, beginning with good
and evil.
Think of it as a Compulsive Paralytic
Binary Syndrome (CPBS). Because questions of morality necessarily involve
considerations of the Good, they also invoke its antithesis, the Bad. And since
a moralist code is fixed, so are the values of the Good and the Bad which
divide the world in half. The code then leads into a perpetual state of
proliferating binary-ism where the world divides endlessly into
exclusionary categories—good/bad, moral/immoral, masculine/feminine—that
spread, fractal-like, into every aspect of your thinking of the
world—white/black, strong/weak, sentiment/intellect, male/female, mind/heart,
reason/imagination, feeling/thinking—each component a purity. William Blake
pictured it as a man and woman tied together back-to-back—a marriage of
perpetual isolations, of impossible (sexual) union. He called it a state of
Generation.
Emerson confronted it in his reckoning as
a minister with the emptiness of church rituals, and especially the ritual of
The Last Supper. He became disillusioned seeing people mouth Christian words in
church but make no place for them in their workaday lives. It was form
bereft of content. Once you separate the ritual act from the content of
the act in the most sacred of gestures, the world becomes emptied, unoriginal,
a place in which the thinking of truth loses
orientation along with a point of origin that guarantees the honesty and virtue
of the acts that arise from it or out of it. When general equivalence
determines the World, exchange value overwhelms all other modes of value, especially
spiritual values that mediate between the human and the divine. Then those
values—virtue, honesty, valour, integrity—are degraded and eventually lose
meaning. Morality, the moral life, becomes an empty form, much like the ritual
of The Last Supper that motivated Emerson’s exit from a religious vocation.
Authentic is a word
relevant to this thinking, though it is currently out of favour, even slightly
scandalous, in sociological circles, especially in so far as it is associated
with the troubled thinking of subject or self. That address, following Theodor Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity, defines authentic as an autonomous subject in accord with it’s innermost,
“true feelings.” Since in those sociological circles subjective autonomy is
seen as an ideological construct, authenticity, according to the Adorno view,
is a delusion, an ideological manipulation, designed to facilitate the
operation of a free market economy.
But what if we think “self” not as an
abstract subject deluded by ideology,
but as a process of relational worlded
authoritative finitude with the potential to make grow, to create, to author and
authorize. This is close to Emerson’s sense of authenticity, out of the Greek
root, authentes, self-doer. In that
case, authenticity is not about the identity between an abstraction called a
“subject” and another abstraction called its “inner feelings.” Authenticity is
not about identity at all. It is about difference, the commitment to a further
self. It is a measure of the self’s ability to authorize its own address to the
furtherness of the world—as Emerson (and Cavell) would say, to make itself intelligible.
Then rather than some “subject”’s “voice,” the authenticity of a poem has to do
with the manifest struggle within the poem’s language to make the world’s
furtherness intelligible. Arguably, to do that is a moral gesture.
As Todorov pointed out, however, morality
is sneaky and given half a chance, it will find a way to insinuate itself in
some form even into otherwise seemingly anti-moralist stances. Art is
vulnerable and finds itself moralized in different ways, even in discourses
that claim to reject moralism. Judging work morally objectionable and banning
or burning it is only the most obvious mode of attack. Moralism also sneaks in
through assumptions about value that seem natural. A perfect example is the opposition
between “virtuous sentiment” and the “virtue of intellectual imagination,” two
mutually opposed modes of “poetics” recently proposed as part of a critique of the
“moralism” of popular poetry that positions itself in line with social justice
issues and identity politics. The opposition is presented as a technical
distinction with no moral judgment involved. In this anti-moralist aesthetic,
virtuous sentiment is moralist in its outlook, which produces inferior poetry,
while (the virtue of) intellectual imagination, free of morality, is
paradoxically moral in its amoral stance which produces superior poetry.
The option presented here (sentiment vs.
intellect) is old and narrow, notwithstanding the updated vocabulary and clever
word play. Something called “virtue” plays a role in both categories, though somewhat
sneakily. Virtuous is an adjective, virtue a noun, and as the
grammatical function shifts in the opposition, so does meaning. In the 13th
century, virtue was the quality of a first-class Knight and had to do with
strength, even manliness, which makes sense given that the Indo-European root
of the word, *wi-ro, means man. By the
end of the 14th century what constituted “moral qualities” had begun
to shift as the last remnants of Feudalism and courtly culture faded away and
the new market order replaced it. Religious values replaced courtly values, and
virtuousness came to signify the possession of excellent moral qualities as
defined by religious authorities, especially chastity. And although chastity
supposedly applied to both genders, it became feminized in its focus on
controlling female sexuality, including the notorious belts which never existed
for men. Even today, while someone might speak of a virtuous woman, it’s
unlikely they would describe a man that way.
For the Euro American radical
intelligentsia who embraced intoxication and sexuality in the 19th
century as a tonic for the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of bourgeois
culture, “virtue” was a sign of duplicity and shallowness as they witnessed
“upstanding” citizens claim to be virtuous by day, while indulging in
drunkenness and lechery (and killing the occasional streetwalker) at night.
Robert Louis Stevenson nailed it in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That sense
of duplicity remains, while the issue has shifted. Whereas 75 years ago
virtue had to do with sexual purity, these days it more often refers to
political positions involving identity, race and gender, i.e., what is called
“virtue signalling,” a negative label for a self-righteous social media
behaviour, which, it seems to me, is the sense that informs the phrase,
“virtuous sentiment.” On the other hand, and this is definitely an
on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand moment, as a noun in the phrase, the
virtue of imaginative intellect, it signifies something different,
harkening back to the original sense of valour, something noble, even . . .
manly.
Once the binary division is established,
moral value (good versus bad) immediately slips in to locate one half of the
division in the superior position as The Good. It introduces a valuation of two
opposed modes of human knowledge, say “sentiment” and “intellect” (or to use an
old literary recognition, heart and head, or even behind that, feminine and
masculine) finding one wanting in relation to the other, at least as far as
poetics are concerned, and poetics are a big deal these days, arguably bigger
even than poetry. Partly that’s because poetics sounds kind of
scientific, which is good if you want to be taken seriously by people who like
measurable, scientific sounding stuff. It’s the ics at the end. ICS. It’s hard and precise, like mathematics,
semiotics, axiomatics, probiotics, or athletics. You know something is there
when you hear that. It’s serious.
The focus on what’s called poetics is
relatively recent. It started around 1960 with Donald Allen’s anthology, The
New American Poetry. Given the oppositional nature of his anthology,
Allen knew he was in for some critical turbulence, that the Authorized Poetic
Authorities would dismiss the poetry in his anthology as unworthy of serious
attention because of its rejection of preconceived form and traditional
conventions, and its embrace of improvisational techniques that were congruent
with a shift in world view. In an era when the Poetry Professoriate made its
living analysing how many kinds of ambiguity it could discern in a lyric poem,
when the metaphor for poetic excellence was a “well-wrought urn,” and poets
were expected to fit their “content” into some “form” that pre-existed it as
proof of their expertise, the poetry Allen gathered was labelled “uncooked” at
best, and at worst mere prose broken into lines. Unworthy of serious
consideration as poetry, in any case.
Allen sought to head that off by including
a section by poets on their modes of composition. In a final section of his
anthology called “Statements on Poetics,” he located the poetry in relation to
serious thinking about method and form that arose from and with the poetry. It
was meant as support for the poetry. Most of the contributions are short
excerpts from poets’ journals or previously written statements where they
thought through and articulated the process of their work. Charles Olson’s
“Projective Verse,” a major statement about poetic composition and cosmology
that became a rallying point in the poetry wars that followed, was an
exception.
First published in Poetry New York
in October 1955, and then as a pamphlet by Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones) Totem
Press in 1959, “Projective Verse” fused Olson’s thinking about poetry,
philosophy, cosmology, mathematics, geometry, and history into a wild
exploration of our postmodern condition and poetry’s entanglement in it. He
begins by displacing the “human” from the centre of the poem’s attention in
order to allow in the world and prepare the ground for his emerging vision of
the absolute immanence of the divine in the specificities of the mundane,
“secular” world. His notion of the “projective” energy of the poem resonated
with the same spirit that animated the improvisational work of contemporary
jazz musicians. In an academic arena dominated by intricate analyses of formal
elements, Olson’s liberating essay dropped like a bomb—a stink bomb, maybe, but
a bomb nevertheless.
While Olson posed his open field poetics
against the poetics of what he called “closed verse,” he did so to clarify
poetry’s response to the profound historical changes we are caught up in. He
did not locate it in a moral framework of right versus wrong, nor in a
linguistic crisis of referential versus non-referential, but in an historical
framework of temporal process (nowpast). And in a necessary cosmology.
He did not attempt to make a moral judgement, because he had no theory to
measure truth against, no wrong to his right, only a stance which he enacted in
his work. All the effort he had put into getting to the place where he could
write the projective was part of a transformative spiritual ordeal
rather than the development of a theory.
Olson’s trip to Yucatan in 1950 was central
to his struggle as he sought a deep somatic relation to meaning specific to the
actual space of “America” and outside the box of European modernity. Look, he
said, digging his hands in the soil, this is where we are now. This is how Time
is moving, this is the turbulence we are all swept up in, this is what it means
to our lives and their relations. What forces are in play? What can poetry do
to measure that? In this cosmological process, poets need to transform, to
become the transforming voice of transformation, that process of emergence.
Olson’s friend and companion, Robert Duncan, underwent a similar process of
spiritual ordeal in quest for a “poetics,” though in his case the ordeal
involved undertaking the epic work that became The H.D. Book. For both
poets, achieving a “poetics” involved an actual struggle, and a change, a
transformation that led to a new stance or mode of being. Poetry flowed from
that. Poetics, from that perspective, is not a “theory” but a transformative
struggle alive in every word.
Following Allen’s introduction of poetics
as support for poetry, it quickly became an independent focus of energy and
attention. Poetics really came to its own in the mid-70s with the ascendence in
the U.S. of what’s called generally Language Poetry. As has often been
pointed out, Language Poetry was an ambiguous descriptor covering many
different writers and modes of writing. Some things, though, they shared, among
them a rejection of “representationalism,” a sociological critique of the
traditional lyric “I”, and an attention to the thickness of language. They
began by creating an exclusive binary division between the thought of language
as representation and language as coded difference within a system of signs.
Then, not unlike Richard Nixon’s contemporaneous suspension of the gold
standard in 1971, they divorced language from a referential ground, cutting
signification loose. Quickly colonizing a literary territory called avant-garde,
Language Poetry thrived by taking up Olson’s practice of poetry based on
scholarship, substituting Adorno and Saussure for Homer and Melville, and
sociology for mythology. Their post-Wall post-Marxist Marxism was grounded in
materialism and found theoretical support in the post-structuralist European
address to language and signification that they buttressed with reference to
linguistic critics such as George Lakoff.
In so far as poetics becomes more and more
closely identified with theory, which can be studied and learned in classrooms,
it opens itself to bursts of moralist judgement. Theory operates within a world
of competing ideas that explain phenomena, and based on that explanation
propose further practice, say, one ought to write poetry of imaginative
intellect rather than poetry of virtuous sentiment. Unlike a spiritual ordeal
that yields a stance in-formed by knowledge, theory yields an idea that
competes with other ideas.
The rejection of theories of the
autonomous subject in control of representational language (meaning as the
identity of word and object) gave rise to theories of a socially constructed
self informed by ideology, and of language as self-referential (meaning as a
result of difference within the system), as if this binary consisted of the
only two legitimate ways of understanding how language works. If self is
ideology at work, then sentiment is ideology’s net, it’s honey trap.
“Imaginative intellect” is another story. There is no sloppy, sentimental self
there. By joining imagination and intellect, two pure, abstracted modes of
mind, the phrase implicitly rules out the impure “not-mind” of Western
thinking: emotion, also known as heart, and in a “degraded” form, as sentiment,
or, in Adorno-speak, true feelings, those nasty, ideologically
conditioned modes of being of a socially constructed self.
Based on that division, this new poetics
proposes a correct way of composing poetry, one that is free of the unconscious
domination of ideology’s formation and manipulation of desire. Like all such
abstract value systems, the category overwhelms the particulars that make it
up. What individual poems do beyond signalling virtue or being imaginatively
intellectual is lost. The specificity of judgement in relation to the actual
work of this poem or that poem disappears in the face of a categorical moralist
judgement which identifies a degraded mode of writing —“virtuous sentiment”—to
be rejected in all cases. But while the judgement might superficially seem
avant-garde, a deeper examination uncovers an age-old misogyny which identifies
and rejects sloppy feelings and sentimental schlock because it is linked to the
feminine (heart, feeling, sentiment). I doubt that the author of this critical
binary had any such sexist point in mind, but such is the power of the
Compulsive Paralytic Binary Syndrome to sweep us into moralist lockdowns
without our even knowing.
The issue is poiesis, or the
relation to poiesis, the event of the making of the poem. Poiesis, from
whence our word “poetry,” etymologically “to make,” names the entangled process
of the emergence of form/meaning. The question is, as a poet, what is your
relation to that process? In a way, when it comes to poetry (which, given its
name, has a special relation to poiesis) the difference between poiesis and
poetics echoes Aristotle’s distinction between poiesis and praxis but
reversed. For Aristotle, if poiesis is “to make,” its goal is oriented
toward something beyond itself—a pot, a ship, a painting, a poem—unlike praxis
which for Aristotle is action undertaken strictly for itself, for the value
implicit in it—returning money you found, helping someone who fell get up. That
distinction was made in a world in which poetry had a recognized value and a
significant status. Given the minor status of poetry in our culture of general
equivalence and spectacle, poiesis, the making of the poem, is an act,
generally speaking, undertaken for its own sake.
That’s not always true. Some writers find
ways to use poetry for personal advancement: a limited kind of fame, prize
money, status positions, departmental promotions, even, occasionally if they
are lucky, sex. But for every one of those Players, a thousand other poets write
neither for gold nor glory but simply because they must, even in the currently
degraded world of poetry competitions and low-level prizes. They write because
they know on some level poetry matters. Poetry calls them into its orders of
language and attention. Some do it spontaneously and sporadically out of a deep
impulse. Others do it studiously and regularly responding to and fitting into
the centuries of poetry that precedes them. Some write from deep feelings of
anger over injustice or the ever-astonishing joy of love. Some write out of
intellectual excitement. Some write in a scholarly frenzy. Some write for fun.
Some are possessed. Some do it badly. Some do it exquisitely. Some bore you.
Some excite you. Some teach you. The difference has to do with the nature of
their poetearmind, the way the poet’s
sounding of the poem thinks. That’s poetry--thinkingsounding.
The issue is not this theory or that
theory, this poetics or that poetics, virtuous sentiment or the virtue of
imaginative intellect. Poetics has a goal in mind. It’s relation to poiesis is
disciplinary, the production of a specific mode of composition. That can
produce interesting poetry given the poetearmind of the writer, a
necessity even for imaginative intellectuals. It also produces a lot of dreck
given the rarity of the poetearmind. The kinds of composition I am
thinking of here engage poiesis as an ordeal, an action, a struggle to achieve
unprecedented truths in language events, say even, authentic language events,
specific events that have no goal beyond their own transformative articulation.
I read somewhere that I have now forgotten
that poiesis, to make, was first an action that
transforms and continues the world. That makes sense. Morality enters in so far
as the maker, through a spiritual ordeal, comes in touch with actual energies
that she transforms into language events that continue those energies. It is
not a question of technical production. Nor is it a question of linguistic
theory. It is not even a question of creation in some romantic sense. Poetry
gives voice to thinking reconciled with matter, time, and spirit, locating
person in their actual world. The poet’s soul is tuned to frequencies most people
are unaware of and her job is to transform those energies into language that
remains true to them. Morality haunts poetry just here, because there is no
greater good than the virtue of truth.
Michael Boughn is the author of
numerous books of poetry including Cosmographia, A Post-Lucretian Faux
Micro-Epic which was short listed for the Governor General’s Award for
Poetry, and Hermetic Divagations—After H.D. He co-edited Robert Duncan’s The
H.D. Book with Victor Coleman, and from 2016-2020 he and Kent Johnson
edited and produced the notorious online journal, Dispatches from the Poetry
Wars. His most recent books are The Book of Uncertain—A
Hyperbiographical User’s Manual (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022) and Uncertain
Remains (BlazeVox, 2022). Measure’s Measures, a selection of essays,
is due out from Station Hill Press in 2022.
