historical context #1

8/2/2019 Historical Context #1

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Terrencees PrsSelFLandscape/Grid

Miller owns thisfield, Locke hat, and Manning the woodlandbeyond.Butnone of them owns the landscape.Thereis a property n the horizon which noman has but he whoseeyecan integrate all theparts, that is, thepoet.- EmersonEvery appearance n nature correspondso somestate of mind. . . .

^ - EmersonJL live in upstate New York,ruralcountryside and lovely hills, a place my neighborslike to call "the village." It's small, quiet, great for raising kids. Forty miles to thenorth, however, lies GriffissAirforce Base, known locally as Rome, because Rome isthe town the base uses. Out of there fly the B-52S hat control our part of the sky.There too the Pentagon keeps its brood of cruise missiles. So nobody doubts, in thispartof the country,that Rome (when it happens) will be the spot where the warheadshit. At one time we thought that the Russians had size but no technical finesse. Thatgave us a stupid sort of hope. An overshot might land on our heads, but if incomingmissiles fell short, they would come down way north, maybe on Edmund Wilson'sold stone house in Talcottville, and we, at least, would be well out of range. Now weare told that the Soviets have refined their delivery. Their guidance systems are ontarget, not least because the Russians have used American technology, computers,microchips,ball-bearings,made and sold by American firms. That, no matter how welook at it, is ugly news. And with Rome at the nub of a nucleararc, we are resignedin our knowledge that things will startexactly forty miles away.How far the firestormwill reach is what we mainly wonder. We don't know, but we are counting on theseupstate hills to block the worst of the blast. If the horizon works in our favor, weshall then have time to consider the wind. In the meantime, B-52Scross and recrossabove us. They gleam with their nuclear payload. Two or three are up there always,and once I counted thirteen. The airis creased with vaportrails,and in the afternoons,when the sun startsdown, the sky looks welted with scars.That, anyway, is the prospect I share with my neighbors, our part of the nucleargrid. Not a landscapeof the mind, no inner weather sort of scene, it'sjust life's naturalplace for those who live here. Even so, the bombers overhead keep me reminded thatthis landscape possesses, or is possessed by, some other will, some demonic granddesign or purpose not at all my own. Nor would that kind of death be mine. An all-at-once affairfor almost everyone is how that death would come, impersonalbut stillno accident.That way of dying would be the ultimate instance of political intrusion,for that is what has brought us to this pass, politics, and by political intrusion I meanthe increasingunsettlement and rending of our private lives by public force. We dowhat we can as citizens, but when it comes to nuclear war we can't do much. Thehazard is before us and won't budge. How to live with it is our problem, and some

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of us, at least, resort to magic. We turn to words which give the spirit breathing spaceand strength to endure. As in any time of ultimate concern, we call on poetry.I can read Ecdesiastesor King Lear for a language equal to extremity, but suchlanguage isn't of my time, not of my landscape perhaps I should say. I find a little ofwhat I need in poets like Akhmatova or Mandelstam or Milosz, but Americanpoetry?and among poets of the present generation? Not much, in fact hardly anything. I'mwriting in early February(1983)and I've just gone through the recent issue of Amer-ican PoetryReview, which offers forty-eight poems by twenty-one poets. Some fewgood poems, but only two touch upon our nuclear fate, which leaves forty-six inworlds elsewhere. In "Against Stuff" Marvin Bell follows the possibility this is anight-thoughts poem- that all our forms and habits, including those of poetry itself,may have been wrong, wrong enough to bring us to "the coming instantaneousflam-ing^of all creaturesand things "which could not suffer/ that much light at one time."The poem spreads disquiet and resists reply, and in the following lines the pun on"not right"keeps the poet honestly uncertain:

and, f we areshortly o find ourselveswithoutbeast, ield or flower,is it not rightthat we now prepareby removinghem fromourpoetry?Under nuclear pressure, should poetry contract its domain? The other poem inAPR, Maxine Kumin's "You Are In Bear Country," moves with wit and nice inevi-

tability to the imagined moment when the grizzly attacks and then jumps to thisquestion in italics:

Is deathbybearto bepreferredto deathbybomb?The question seems to intrude out of nowhere, and the poet closes by answering yes.The point, I presume, is that any thought of death, even one so unlikely, recalls thenuclear alternative. And grotesque though it would be, death "by bear" does seem

preferable,one's own at least, and natural, part of the order of things and an order,too, as timeless as the wilderness. Bizarreconsolations, but once the nuclear elementintrudes, these are the sorts of ludicrous lengths to which we feel pushed. And theeither/or is not even a choice, but only a preference.The absence of a and the beforebear and bombsuggests two categories of death, only one of which is humanlyacceptable.

After APR I went on to Poetry,where there was nothing relevant,and after that Irummagedrandomlythrough the library's tock of recentjournalsand magazines, allI could manage in two afternoons. I am sure I read more than two hundred poems,most of them quite short, some very good, but none informed by nuclearawareness.I realize,of course, that anysuccessfulpoem must authorize itself, must utter its worldwith self-certainity,but even so, reading so many poems one after the other left merathershocked by the completeness, the sealed-up way these poems deny the knowl-

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edge or nearnessof nuclear threat.The other striking thing about most of these poemswas their sameness, and especially the meagerness.These observations are not origi-nal, of course. Lots of poetry gets written and published in Americajust now, and ifone reads even a small but steady portion of it, one starts to see that the current talkabout a "crisis" n our poetry is not unfounded. The trivialization,the huddled stance,the seemingly deliberatelittleness of so much poetry in the last few years how shallwe account for it?Perhapsthe rise of the "workshop" poem has had something to do with it. Maybealso the new careerismamong younger poets bent on bureaucraticpower in the uni-versities; those who, as Marx would say, have gone over to the management. And

surelythe kind of literarycriticism now in vogue, hostile to the integrity of language,doesn'thelp. But these are as much symptoms ascauses,and the largersituation comesdown to this: In a time of nuclear threat, with absolutely everything at stake, ourpoetry grows increasingly claustrophilicand small-themed, it contracts its domain, itretires still further into the narrow chamber of the self; and we see in this not onlythe exhaustion of a mode and a tradition, but also the spectacle of spirit cowed andretreating.The retreathas been swift because American practiceinvites it. Founded on Emer-sonian principles,our poetry has drawn much of its strength from an almost exclusiveattention to self and nature.Typicallywe have conceived of the self as a world ratherthan of the self in the world. Things beyond the self either yield to imagination orelse they don't matter, and the world becomes a store of metaphor to be raided asone can. The "strong" poet turns any landscape to private use, and solipsism winspraiseas the sign of success. Emerson didn't invent these attitudes, but he was goodat summing them up. "Everynatural fact is a symbol of some spiritualfact,"he wrote,and "the Universe is the externization [sic] of the soul." Thus the road was open forWhitman and poets to come, and thus Emerson delivered his mandate: "Know thenthat the world exists for you," and "Build therefore your own world." Partly,this isthe mythology of our national experience, with its determination to deny social-politicallimits and focus instead on individualdestiny. Partly,too, this is the Americanbrand of Romanticism, partof a largermovement that on the continent peakedin itsinfluential French example. Baudelaire called the world a "forest of symbols," andMallarmthought that everything external, la city esgouvernements,e code,could bedismissed as le miragebrutal.Stated thus, the whole business seems outlandish but not really.The Emersonianmandate supports maximum belief in the poet's potency, not in itself a bad thing.Then, too, poets in our century have held some very odd convictions, Yeats for ex-ample, or for that matter,Merrill. But in one respectthere is no doubting: Americanpoetry has rejected history and politics on principle. Despite Lowell's example andmore recentexceptions like Rich and Forch, our poets in the main have been satisfiedto stick with Emerson, and few would find anything to take exception with in thefollowing lines from Emerson's Ode:I cannot eave

My honeyed hought

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Forthepriest's ant,Or statesman'sant.If I refuseMystudy ortheirpolitique,Whichat the bestis trick,TheangryMusePutsconfusion n mybrain.Americancontempt for politicians runs deep. As a sort of common-sense cynicismit allows us to go untroubledby crimein high placesand, more to the point, it bolstersour belief that personallife exists apartfrom, and is superiorto, political force and its

agencies. But also, as Gunnar Myrdal demonstrated in An American Dilemma, oursort of political cynicism goes hand in hand with a remarkablydurable idealism. Wetake for grantedthat governments arecorrupt, then feel that some other power, prov-idential and beyond the meddling of men, governs our destiny finally.Where there'sa will there's a way, and everything comes right in the end. But does it? Even withoutthe Bomb to put such faith into question, Emerson's example Poland, for God'ssake! invites skepticism:

TheCossack atsPoland,Likestolenfruit;Her lastnobleis ruined,Her lastpoetmute:Straight,nto doublebandThevictorsdivide;Half forfreedom trikeandstand:The astonishedMuse finds thousands t her side.The Muse might well be befuddled, given the logic of Emerson's syntax. But ofcourse, Emerson'sfaith in the future disastercompensated by renewal can't meanmuch to us. With the advent of the nuclear age there is no assurance that anythingwill remain for the phoenix to rise from.We have fallen from the Garden, and the Garden itself- nature conceived as aninviolate wilderness is pocked with nuclear waste and toxic dumps, at the mercy ofindustryand Watt, all of it open to nuclear defilement. Generationscome and go, butthat the earth abidethforever s something we need to feel, one of the foundations ofpoetry and humanness, and now we are not sure. That is the problem with nuclearthreat, simply as threat;it undermines allcertainty,and things once absolute are nowcontingent. To feel that one's private life was in the hands of God, or Fate, or evenHistory, allowed the self a margin of transcendence;the dignity of personal life waspartof a great if mysterious Order. But now our lives are in the hands of a few menin the Pentagon and the Kremlin, men who, having affirmedthat they would destroyus to save us, have certified their madness and yet their will determines our livesand our deaths. We are, then, quite literallyenslaved, and assuming that this botherspoets no less than the rest of us, why do they so seldom speak of it? It is not toomuch to say that most poetry in America is written against experience, against first

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feelings and needs. Whether the Emersonian tradition is a trapor a last-ditch defenseis perhapsa moot point. But the poetry of self still predominates, with nature as itscornerstone, despite Los Alamos, a lovely spot in the mountains.Nuclear wipe-out is possible, perhaps probable, and every day I talk with peoplewho are convinced it will happen. No soul is free of that terror, nor of that knowl-edge; and simply as a state of mind or way of knowing, it drasticallyalters how wereceive and value our experience. Birth, for example, or one's own death; surely hav-ing children troubles us in ways not known before, and we need to feel that each ofus shall have a death of his or her own, simply in order to feel fully possessed of ourlives. These arecommon feelings, and it's clearer than it used to be that no man (no,nor woman neither) is an island. Our surface lives are individual and unique, buthuman existence itself- the being that all of us share and feel threatened gives usour most importantsense of ourselves and, I should also think, gives poetry its mostsignificant themes. Can it be, then, that the shallowness of recent poetry reveals adesperate clinging to the surface?I do not ask for poems directly about the Bomb or the end of the world, althoughwith the Bell poem in APR as evidence, a theme of this kind can be as legitimate asanyother. I don't expect poems of protestor outrage or horroreither, although again,I can't see that they would hurt. I do, however, try to keep in mind that some subjectsare more human, and more humanly exigent than others Forch on Salvador com-paredto Leithauseron dandelions and also that poets are often scared off by subjectswhich, precisely because of the fear, signal a challenge worth the risk. But what I'dmainly hope to see, in this case, is poetry that probes the impact of nuclear threat,poetry informed by nuclearknowing, poems that issue from the vantage of a self thatacceptsits larger andscape,a poetic diction testing itself againstthe magnitude of ourpresent plight, or finally just poems which survive their own awareness of the waysnuclear holocaust threatens not only humankind but the life of poetry itself.Nature, for example, remains the mainstay of our poetry. Natural imagery makesus trust the poem, suggests a permanenceat the root of things, and every poem aboutnature bears somewhere within it the myth of renewal and rebirth. But from thenuclear perspective, these ministrations falter. Permanence? Rebirth? Emerson's re-sponse to nature was genuinely poetic, and the measure of our present loss may bejudged by the degree of nostalgia rather than assent we feel when he says: "In thewoods, we return to reason and faith.There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,no disgrace,no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair."Well, hisnotion of calamity isn't ours. And nature, for all its proven renovative power, couldnever repairthe worst that might befall us. Nature suffers the same division we ob-serve in ourselves and in the landscape generally.We arewhat we are, yet some deeppart of selfhood has been invaded by forces wholly alien to personal being, politicalforces of which the worst is nuclear threat. In the same way, the landscapebelongs tous and yet it does not. This concrete place we share is also a site on the nucleargrid.And when, therefore,Emerson tells us that "Everyappearance n naturecorrespondsto some state of mind,"we must inquirenot only What state of mind? but also Whosemind?

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No doubt the crews in the bombers are bored. And no doubt bureaucratichagglingkeepsthe commander of the base in Rome bogged down in mindless detail.The chiefsin the Pentagon, on the other hand, definitely share a state of mind which must, nowand then, get ratherdizzy with the glamour of their global strategy.What the Rus-sians have in mind we don't know. But for all of them, we and the landscape areexpendable; to think that way, after all, is their job. We cannot say, then, that thelandscape corresponds to their minds and to ours in the same way. Rather, whatexpresses their state of mind, provokes and negates our own. In a traditional land-scape, points of correspondencefor us would be, among other things, the sky'sinfin-ity and the sense of permanence arising from the land itself. But exactly this kind ofmetaphor-makinghas been undermined by the transformationof the landscapeintoa sector on the grid. Or we might look at it this way: the military state of mindbecomes an alien element in the landscape as we behold it, the B-52S, he proximityof the missile site, the grid and its planners.These forces have broken into our world,they have defiled its integrity, and the new points of correspondence between our-selves and the landscapeare the condition of vulnerabilityand the threat of terminaldefacement. Self and world, nature and landscape, everything exists in itself and asacceptableloss on the nucleargrid.I've gone on at length about the landscape in my part of the country to suggestwhat Emerson'spoetic principle "Every appearance n naturecorresponds to somestate of mind" might mean in the nuclear age. Every person has his or her ownplace, of course, and in a country as vast as ours the variety of landscape must benearly infinite. The kinds of personal vision to which a landscape corresponds mustalso, then, be fairlylimitless. But all vision converges in the fact that every landscapeis partof the nucleargrid. I have the air base in Rome to remind me of this, whereaspeople living in, say, New York City are reminded by the city itself- its status as aprime target; the difficulty of maintaining life-support systems, water, energy, evenin normal times; traffic'sfive o'clock entrapmentevery afternoon, not to mention theway the city is mocked by officials in Washington who suggest that in the event ofan alert, nine million people will please evacuate the area. Then too, there are thenuclearpower plants nearby;these are also targets, and when hit will spout radiationlike the fourth of July. The citizenry can always avail itself of shovels, as anotherWashington wit has proposed, but no, there'sno realhope. So that landscapetoo hasits message.Meanwhile, poets write about "marshes,lakes and woods, Sweet Emma of Pres-ervation Hall, a Greek lover, an alchemist, actresses, fairy tales, canning peaches inNorth Carolina,"stuff like that, to quote from the ad for a recent anthology. Theapology for poems of this kind (trivialityaside) is that by celebratingmodest momentsof the human spectacle little snapsof wonder, bliss, or pain poetry implicitly takesits stand againstnuclearnegation. To say Yes to life, this argumentgoes, automaticallysays No to the Bomb. And yes, a grain of truth sprouts here. I expect many amongus read poetry that way in any case. The upshot, however, is that poets can go onproducing their vignettes of self, pleasedto be fighting the good fight without undue

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costs except the cost, which is the enforced superficiality,the requiredavoidance ofour deeper dismay.Nuclear threat engenders cynicism, despair, allegiance to a mystique of physicalforce, and to say No to such destructivepowers requiresan enormously vehement Yesto life and human value. What's calledfor, in fact, is the kind of poetry we once named"great,"and my suspicion is that today the will to greatness is absent. Great poems,Wordsworth'sor Whitman's for example, confront their times; they face and containtheir own negation. The human spirit draws its strength from adversity,and so dopoems. Examples like The Prelude and Song of Myself ncorporate and thereby tran-scend that which, if they ignored it, would surelycancel their capacity for final affir-mation. And having mentioned poems of this calibre, I might also add that the"Americansublime,"as critics call it, has been missing in our poetry at least since lateStevens. The sublime, as observers like Burke and Kant and Schopenhauer insist,arisesfrom terror,terror beheld and resisted,the terrorof revolution for Wordsworth,of the abyssfor Whitman, of nuclear annihilation for any poet today who would makea language to match our extremity.I can see, though, why we try to avoid what we know. Terrorwill flareup suddenly,a burst of flame in the chest, and then there is simply no strength. Other times themind goes blank in disbelief. The temptation to retreatis alwayswith us, but wherecan we go, where finally?Sometimes I let it all recede, let silence be enough, and gofor a walk through the fields and apple hedge above my house. The horizon then isremarkably lear, the sky is still its oldest blue. Overhead, the planes are half a hemi-sphereaheadof their thunder. It's hard not to think of them as beautiful, sometimes;humankind took so long to get up there. I wind my way through milkweed in themeadow and remember how Emerson, crossing an empty field, felt glad to the brinkof fear. We know what he means, the elation that sweeps through us at such moments.And then I think of Osip Mandelstam and an old Russian proverb; life, he wrote, isnot a walk across a field. We know what he means too, the inhuman hardship ofcenturies, the modern horror of being stalkedto death. But it's all of this, isn't it? thegrimness and the glory. Why should we think to keep them apart?We fear, maybe,that dread will undermine our joy, and often it does. To keep them wed is poetry'sjob. And now that the big salvations have failed us, the one clearthing is that we liveby words.

- Summer 1983

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