My Favorite Things Pt.2

It has come to my attention that, to some members of my community, close reading has become passe and even politically incorrect. I assume that this posited ignobility of close reading has to do with an association with New Critical practices, as the Academy has, indeed, outgrown the New Critics, and they have become generally passed-over. However, a question follows from this: if we are going to gloss poems on our blogs and in our articles, what technique(s) do we use? Deconstructionist and New Historical readings are fine for scholarly journals, and for our own scholarly writing (for those of us engaged in said practice), but I would tend to think that close readings are hard to beat for immediacy and visceral impact. This is especially true because the poems (and songs) I am close reading are experimental (sometimes radically experimental) in nature, and it seems unlikely that close reading a post-avant text will turn me into Cleanth Brooks or Lionel Trilling. What I want to avoid, more than anything else, is grad student posturing, and anyone who has spent a substantial amount of time with graduate students knows what this means. Grad student posturing has everything to do with using literary theory references to bolster one's cred, to demonstrate superiority, and to prove one's intelligence. I do not feel an overwhelming need to do any of these things, and have no use for a Lacanian reading of Alex Chilton (or Mark Young, or Aaron Belz, etc.) Close reading allows me to get swiftly to the point, with no unnecessary dressings, appurtenances, or frills. This blog is meant to express the viewpoints, insights, and quandaries of an artist, not a scholar. I do not mean to suggest that artists cannot be theory-savvy, just that when theory takes the place of genuine, plain-spoken insight, what you have (often) is the work of an eager-beaver grad student, not a well-rounded, mature artist.

So, on to another poet, another poem, another gloss. I do not remember how I discovered the work of UK poet Andrew Duncan; eventually, circumstances converged and I was able to correspond, exchange books with, and publish him. I have found Andrew's work remarkable for its emotional depth. As Quietists from Hutchison to Gilbert have decried the lack of emotion in post-avant poetry, I thought it would be worthwhile to present a Duncan poem with substantial affective weight. Mark Young's poems showed us rejection of closure; Duncan's poems reject closure, while maintaining an engagement with sense and the sensual world that can be traced back to first-Gen Romantics Wordsworth and Coleridge. I have taken Jack Gilbert to task for universalizing; Wordsworth also universalizes (The world is too much with us..), yet the extreme formal rigor of his language, combined with a piercing awareness of suffering, would (for me) raise Wordsworth up above someone like Gilbert, not to mention that Wordsworth was one initiator and definitely a "Big Daddy" of this approach. He did it first; he did it best. Followed largely by two-hundred years of decay, where the collective first person plural is concerned. But back to Duncan. I have chosen a long poem from Anxiety Before Entering a Room: Selected Poems 1977-99, which was released by Salt in 2001. The poem is called The Metallic Autumn, and see if you can spot how Duncan does three things at once: rejects closure, registers the sensuous world as an objective correlative, and relates it to a personal world:

Rain silvers the slate roofs, smoke blows through the rain.
The hawthorn hedges are a red haze.
The hills above the town are blurred by mist.
Beauty is stripped away.
Light is pierced with nostalgia, slow and lax.
Decadent season.
Water forms a haze between light and rain.
Flowers and leaves decaying in the streams
Mix earth and water in slow dispersal.
Blur steals over visible forms,
Smoke and moulder stir in the ash of light.
The pools are sorrowful, the sips of flowers spilt.
I find a single apple whole after all these weeks,
Skin whole and pulp firm as sapwood.

In a slush of softness and excrescence,
Late berries languish on the tendrils,
Lush to dissolution, spoilt with juice,
Blacker than nature with a white tinge like regret.
In the shadow of the sunny fronds,
Where the dew never dries, they drink and rot.
Rain on the leaf, dew on the bine. Mites
Finger the abacus of their flesh.
Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.

Season of memory and regret.
Barrels coop up the giddy heats for recollection.
The animals grow lazier and furrier:
Search out shelter and apathy!
The heady noon is gone, the soft inner of the blossoms
And their offer. The rarer veins are frozen in their course.
We waited for the glance of the sun.
The osier of bare birch twigs seems like smoke
Against the red glow of the Apple going down.

Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.
A swirl of leaves like heavy fire
Pours through the tamping of a world on the wane.
The darkened sky withholds the weary forms.
Crepuscule, dissolution of concepts;
Seasons of case-hardening ash,
Season of ferment and thorough steeping.
Fruits infringe their brinks and streams their brims
Overlapping the thick pulp of fallen things.

The principle of ice shall come to judgment
On the lusts of Nature, searching out the flaw.
Bare branches detach pure metre from an obese rhetoric.
Blue glare shall shake out the torpid mist,
Pure axile-crystals shall affirm the morass.

Between the imagery of this poem and its sonic gorgeousness (extensive use of assonance and parallel structure), we have a construct that shares many qualities with someone like Jack Gilbert. What sets this poem apart, and allows me to affix the appellation "post-avant" to it, is the total restraint with which Duncan resists the impulse to put himself into the poem. Yet, I take all the sensual things that Duncan is seeing and registering as Eliotic objective correlatives of an interior state (of ripeness moving into decay) being described. The one universalist moment (We waited for the glance of the sun) suffices to place us in a personal world, but it is world that Duncan merely opens. This poem has a clear spiritual predecessor in Keats' To Autumn, one of the most exquisite of his odes. In a sense, we can also see Duncan exercising Negative Capability here: he is able to hold the binary tension of ripeness and decay in his poetic consciousness without choosing, proclaiming judgment, and with an affirming glance that registers both sides. There is also a clear tie to Four Quartets era Eliot, but sans philosophic discourse and temporal inquiry; this poem works on a level that is mostly sensory, and affect can be read in as something that exists both in the poet and in his perceptions.

If one were to use Iserian reader response theory in glossing this poem, one could say that the Self that Duncan opens must be constructed by us, the reader, from the poem's evidence. A valid case could also be made that, in Barthes' terms, the author has died so that we, the reader, might be born. Or we could pull a Sontag and argue against interpretation of the poem, letting its sonic gorgeousness stand for itself. You could see the poem through any of these lenses but, in the words of Herman Melville, I would prefer not to. At the risk of being tautological, close reading of the poem allows the reader to get close to the poem. I think the real problem of the New Critics was a reliance on hierarchical thinking, a white male canon, and an assumption of superiority. If you take away these foibles, close reading is as good a literary tool as any to generate meaning-creation. I have no intention of dissing theory altogether (especially as I will be using it to craft my dissertation), but I do think that this particular aspect of New Critical practice is ripe for re-integration and re-assimilation. Close reading does not have to be formalist reading; it can work in tandem with theoretical knowledge, they are not mutually exclusive. But, enough self-justification. I believe that this is a maginificent poem, and you all can judge for yourselves whether or not you agree with me.