I’ve been an arts critic for 22 years, give or take, and one thing you learn as a critic is that nobody likes critic. “A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car,” said critic Kenneth Tynan. Teddy Roosevelt added; “It behooves every man to remember that the work of a critic is of altogether secondary importance.” And Richard Pryor put the final nail in, as he was wont to do: “I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, I wanna grow up and be a critic.”
Critics; who needs them? Who wants them? Who wouldn’t prefer to see them dropped from a height, preferably into a tank filled with Cyclopean elder fish things?
One surprising, and surprisingly obscure answer is offered by James Merrill in his sonnet “Think Tank,” published in his 1985 volume Late Settings.
Think Tank
Because our young were
drab
And slow to grow, for
Carnival we ate them,
Pennants of motley
distancing the deed
In the dechlorinated
crystal slab.
The harlequin all grace
and greed
Made glancing mincemeat
of the mirror kissed.
The scholar blotched with
ich
Sank into lonely
shudderings.
But at our best we were
of one mind,
Did our own sick or vital
things
Within a medium secured
by trick
Reflections over which,
day, night, the braille
Eraser glided of the
Snail
Our Servant, huge and
blind.
Critics (those damn critics!) have struggled with this poem. Stephen Yenser, in his book about Merrill, fastened himself to a literal interpretation of the title, declaring that the poem is about “our covert oligarchy of experts.” These experts, Yenser insisted, as he wormed himself in deeper, are “prolicidal fish” involved in “corporate censorship.”
The arch and erudite Merrill did occasionally write political poetry, but not usually from such an inside-the-Beltway perspective. And in fact, Yenser seems to have almost completely missed the point here, as critics sometimes will. The title, “Think Tank,” is not an allusion to Brookings or Cato. It’s a sly reference to Merrill’s own fish-filled, fish-tank mind, and to the fishy, conglomerate internal experience of creating a poetry out of innocent inspiration and prolicidal, ugly criticism.
The sonnet is about the process of creating the sonnet, and that process starts not with joyous inspiration, but with disillusion and a kind of lip-licking disgust. “Because our young were drab/And slow to grow,/for Carnival we ate them.” The young here are Merrill’s own first, worst thoughts, which he’s rejecting as too boring and infantile to survive.
Nodding with one bulging eye to the forestalled, foreshortened process of creation, Merrill enjambs the pentameter; the first line is only three iambs, with the final two (“And slow to grow”) pushed to the second. And that second line is also flawed—it’s 11 syllables, and the last of them, “them”, is one of the only two unrhymed end words in the poem.
The beginning of the poem about how artistic beginnings are imperfect is itself (deliberately) imperfect in rhyme and meter, flapping there like the unappetizing fish shreds, or “Pennants of motley” garishly devoured on a whim (“for Carnival.”) The last line of the stanza is a garbled metaphor; the chlorinated fish tank becomes a “dechlorinated crystal slab”, as if it’s morphing amorphously in Merrill’s own thoughts—now the tank, now his own skull, now some opaque transparent block, distanced, odorless, clumsy as a critic, and/or as those drab uncriticized thoughts.
The second stanza swims back in closer. The bright carnival colored harlequin fish, swoops around the tank all gracefully alliterative “grace and greed,” shredding the “mirror kissed”—those beloved parts of the self about which Merrill has had second (doubled) thoughts/reflections. This stanza too is a carefully calibrated formal mess, with line lengths sawing back and forth like the harlequin’s path, or the shredded “mincemeat” of the duller fish. The exclamatory “ich” may or may not rhyme with “kissed”, depending on how charitable your ravenous inner critic is feeling.
The inner critic is also in the tank, which is a mirror and therefore reversed. Thus, it’s not the poet here who is the colorful carnival harlequin, filled with inspiration; it’s the critic. And the poet on whom the critic feasts is a “scholar blotched with ich,” sinking to the bottom of the tank with “lonely shudderings.” Contrary to Tynan, it’s the critic here who seems to know how to drive (through the flesh of the poet), while the poet flails and sinks into secondary importance, providing sustenance for the toothy revisor.
After the omnivorous self-carnage of the octet, the sestet (with clearer, more audible end rhymes) moves to reintegrate, or digest, those severed bits of selves. “But at our best we were of one mind,” Merrill writes—in a line where again the pentameter is off, with nine syllables and the meter collapsing at the end. The coalescing of thought and counter thought, poet and critic, is not a transcendence or perfection, but a weird, lumpy compromise of “sick or vital things” and “trick reflections”.
The final image of the poem doesn’t celebrate unfettered creation, nor glinting destruction, but a kind of oozing, pulsing, half aware negation: “the braille/Eraser glided of the Snail/our Servant, huge and blind.” The poem starts with a colorful, exhilarating process of revision—and ends with revision ongoing, but turned into the heavy, drab, motley thing, blotched with ich, that the poem seemed initially intent on dismantling.
The Snail is a “Servant.” The capital “S,” though, suggests that the servant is sacred, and it’s hugeness makes one question who is serving who, and for what meal. “Think Tank” is a poem about the creative process and the give and take between inspiration and editing. But those processes are scrambled together and obscured in a swirl of muddy silt. The gay creator and the drab scholar are an ouroboros devouring one another and secreting, ultimately, a meticulously fashioned sonnet that is also a half-masticated mess of metrical stumbling, garbled rhyme schemes, and confused imagery banging up against the smeared and grimy walls of a half-effaced meaning.
The poem both muses on and enacts the imperfect critical process that swims within, or nearby, the perfectly imperfect and imperfectly perfect creative process. As such, a critic of the poem inevitably finds themselves not (just) looking in (with Merrill) but swimming around in Merrill’s skull, trying to avoid Merrill’s (or their own) teeth and/or snail bulk. Yenser’s amusingly wrong-footed reading makes him, perhaps, that ichy scholar righteously devoured. But he could also be the ambivalently victorious snail, erasing the poem’s thoughts and substituting his own heavy, huge trail of slime and denotation.
If what’s left after Yeser’s (or my) intervention is lumpy and incoherent—well, Merrill also refuses to fill his tank with the right number of iambs. Thoughts are messy, slimy, self-devouring things, and with all that oozing and mud and digestion in there, who can tell where the critic ends and where the artist burps? “Think Tank” is a poem for critics to drown in, right there alongside all the other confused, hungry and shining fish.
Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer. His poetry collections include Brevity (Nun Prophet Press), Meaning Is Embarrassing (Ranger Press) and Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press.) His newsletter is Everything Is Horrible. And he has a second chapbook forthcoming from above/ground.
