Sherry Chandler

From the NYTimes:

Wal-Mart is also trying to integrate acquisitions with more sensitivity — a process that involves issues like deciding whether to consolidate multiple foreign headquarters and how aggressively to impose Wal-Mart’s corporate culture on non-American employees.

In Germany, Wal-Mart stopped requiring sales clerks to smile at customers — a practice that some male shoppers interpreted as flirting — and scrapped the morning Wal-Mart chant by staff members.

“People found these things strange; Germans just don’t behave that way,” said Hans-Martin Poschmann, the secretary of the Verdi union, which represents 5,000 Wal-Mart employees here.

No further comment.

I wanted to put together some sort of, well, narrative I suppose in response to Tony Hoagland’s essay”Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of our Moment” in the March 2006 issue of Poetry. Not having the mental energy at the moment, I will resort to pulling some passages that seemed insightful to me.

Aesthetic shifts over time can be seen as a kind of crop rotation; the topsoil of one field is allowed to rest, while another field is plowed and cultivated. In the seventies the American poetry of image covered the Midwestern plains like wheat; in the eighties, perhaps, it was the narrative-discursive sentence which blossomed and bore anthological fruit. This shifting of the ground of convention is one aspect of cultural self-renewal. But the fruitful style and idiom becomes conventional, and then conventionally tired.

…narrative poetry in America has been tainted by its over-use in thousands of confessional poems. Not confessionalism itself, but the inadvertent sentimentality and narcissism of many such poems have imparted the odor of indulgence to narrative. Our vision of narrative possibilities has been narrowed by so many first person autobiographical stories, then drowned in a flood of pathos poems.

…

There may yet be another more hidden and less conscious anxiety behind the contemporary mistrust of narrative: a claustrophobic fear of submersion or enclosure. … The speedy conceptuality which characterizes much contemporary poetry prefers the dance of multiple perspectives to sustained participation. …It would prefer to remain skeptical, and in that sense, too, one might say that it prefers knowing to feeling.

…

Narration (and its systematic relatives) implicitly honors Memory; the dissociative mode primarily honors Invention.

…the refusal to cooperate with conventions of sense-making seems like — and is — an authentic act of political, even metaphysical protest; the refusal to conform to a grammar of experience which is being debased by all-powerful public systems. …But when we push order away…we give away one of poetry’s most fundamental reasons for existing: the individual power to locate and assert value.

This kind of treatment does great violence to Hoagland’s rather elegant essay. I recommend that you read it in its entirety, which you can do at Poetry’s website. I find him one of the most readable of poets writing about poetry.

I see also that I am worrying at the same old theme, the problem of what Hoagland calls the “pathos poem.” I am both old and old-fashioned. I don’t have much patience with the most associative of poems. I need some skeleton of narrative or structure before I can engage. Otherwise, I don’t find any motive to stay with the poem long enough to get it. On the other hand, I am chary of narrative in the ways that Hoagland suggests. So I have grabbed onto formalism lately as to a life raft. It forces me away from self-indulgent narrative while allowing me to “locate and assert value.”

Or so I hope.