Tony the Tiger says they’re GRRRRRReat!

This NYTimes article on poetry by David Orr, The Great(ness) Game, is going on a week old but poetry is, after all, the news that stays new so I thought I’d point you toward it.

The article sets up a straw man (yes, man) of a great poet but knocking him down is fun:

What, then, do we assume greatness looks like? There is no one true answer to that question, no neat test or rule, since our unconscious assumptions are by nature unsystematic and occasionally contradictory. Generally speaking, though, the style we have in mind tends to be grand, sober, sweeping � unapologetically authoritative and often overtly rhetorical. It�s less likely to involve words like �canary� and �sniffle� and �widget� and more likely to involve words like �nation� and �soul� and �language.� And the persona we associate with greatness is something, you know, exceptional � an aristocrat, a rebel, a statesman, an apostate, a mad-eyed genius who has drunk from the Fountain of Truth and tasted the Fruit of Knowledge and donned the Beret of. . . . Well, anyway, it�s somebody who takes himself very seriously and demands that we do so as well. Greatness implies scale, and a great poet is a big sensibility writing about big things in a big way.

In many ways, in fact, the article is a lot of amusing words to no great (ahem) point. But this passage is fun and telling:

It�s risky, then, to write poems about the tiny objects on your desk. But that�s exactly what Bishop did � and that choice helps explain why she was for a long time considered obviously less �great� than her close friend Robert Lowell. As the poet David Wojahn noted in a letter in response to Poetry�s panel, Lowell was �probably the last American poet to aspire to Greatness in the old-�fashioned, capital-G sense.� Lowell had the style: his poetry is bursting with vast claims, sparkling abstractions and vehement denunciations of the servility of the age. And Lowell had the persona: he was a thunderbolt-�chucking wild man from one of America�s most famous Bostonian lineages. Bishop, on the other hand, had neither. Her poems open with lines like �I caught a tremendous fish,� and she�s invariably described by critics as �shy,� �modest,� �charming� and so forth. Yet it�s Bishop�s writing, not Lowell�s, that matters more in the poetry world today. �What is strange,� the poet-critic J. D. McClatchy writes, �is how her influence . . . has been felt in the literary culture. John Ashbery, James Merrill and Mark Strand, for instance, have each claimed Bishop as his favorite poet. . . . Since each of them couldn�t be more different from one another, how is it possible?�

It�s possible, one might answer, because Bishop was a great poet, if we take �great� to mean something like �demonstrating the qualities that make poetry seem interesting and worthwhile to such a degree that subsequent practitioners of the art form have found her work a more useful resource than the work of most if not all of her peers.� But our assumptions about how greatness should look, like our assumptions about how people should look, are more subtle and stubborn than we realize. So in certain segments of the poetry world, the solution has been to make Bishop what you might call �great with an asterisk.� In particular, there has been a persistent effort to pair her with the less-talented but greater-looking Lowell, a ploy that resembles the old high school date movie tactic of sending the bookish plain Jane to the prom with the quarterback. (When her glasses are slowly removed by the right man, she�s revealed to have been, all along, totally hot!) In reviewing �Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell� for the Book Review recently, William Logan carried this tendency to its logical if nutty conclusion, depicting the two poets as star-crossed lovers despite the fact that (a) Bishop was a lesbian; and (b) Lowell�s only romantic overture to Bishop in their 30-year friendship � and this was a man who would�ve made a pass at a fire hydrant � was met with polite silence by its intended recipient. Yet while this flight of fancy is almost comically unfair to both writers, it does give us a workable if unwieldy model of greatness. Bishop wrote the poems, Lowell acted the part, and if you simply look back and forth fast enough between the two while squinting, it�s possible to see a single Great Poet staring back at you.

Speaking of our image of the Great Poet, Lance Manning has been making his way through Words in Air, and earlier this month left us with his image of a great poet, or at least, of Robert Lowell:

My feelings about [Jean] Stafford and Lowell were based entirely on a photograph of the two them with their friend Peter Taylor. At the time I hadn’t read any of Taylor’s short stories either. Amazingly, I was considered very well-read by other members of the Writers’ Workshop. The photograph of Lowell and Stafford and Taylor reminded me of the picture of Robert Redford, Katherine Ross, and Paul Newman as Sundance, Etta, and Butch. I don’t know what I was wishing for. A life of robbing banks and trains and coming home at night to write for a while and then stay up late arguing about literature? I’ve never had a romance that included either bank robbery or poetry, mine or hers. I dated actresses and dancers and one painter, but no poets or fiction writers, and none of the girls I was serious about, including the one I married, was very bohemian. I’m not much of a bohemian myself.

Maybe that about wraps it up — what we all want the Grrreat poet to be: a combination of Sundance, Etta, and Butch.

__________
Postscript: Damn those postmodern poststructuralists who refuse to believe any writer can be Great!

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