June 29, 2004
Vulgar Poetry
PZ Myers is out of his considerable depth. He suggests that poetry has a habit of avoiding the coarse, preferring instead to describe the clever and inspiring. Of course, his intelligent readers have already disabused him of this notion (I suspect PZ didn’t really think this was altogether the case anyway), but I thought I’d mention it in this space for some more discussion. My first thoughts were of Poe, Simic, and even Whitman—that sagacious old tapette. I’m sure anyone, even readers of Pennywise, could offer a swarm of poets that write censurable stuff, but I’m thinking more of the nature of poetry. As a spoken art form, isn’t poetry vulgarity itself? Poetry has never been written by kings, but by beggars—it is the expression of the people. That’s why Galway Kinnell gets to write things like this:
I have heard you tell the sun, don't go down, I have stood by as you told the flower, don't grow old, don't die. Little Maud,I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,
I would suck the rot from your fingernail,
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever,until washerwomen
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,
and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades,
and rats walk away from the cultures of the plague,
and iron twists weapons toward the true north,
and grease refuses to slide in the machinery of progress,
and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,
and lovers no longer whisper to the presence beside them in the
dark, O corpse-to-be ...And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,
this the nightmare you wake screaming from:
being forever
in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.
You're very right that there's plenty of vulgar poetry. It's in the nature of many poets to try and break both social and artistic norms; vulgar subject matter can be a good way to do that. However, I think Myers's impression of poetry as airy, urbane, tame stuff is probably common among those with only a passing knowledge of poetry. Consider what is primarily taught in high school and many college English courses—namely inoffensive, canonized works from the likes of Dickinson, Keats, Dante, and Shakespeare. Contemporary poetry is completely neglected as are the more ribald aspects of poets like Whitman or Baudelaire. My knee-jerk response is to say this is yet another example of schools failing to teach literature well. Combine that with the entirely reasonable fear many teachers have of their students' ignorant yet self-righteous parents and it's completely unsurprising that someone with a hard science education like Myers has a skewed view of poetry's nature. To close, a short poem from Simic that is unlikely to ever be read in a classroom:
Summer in the CountryOne shows me how to lie down in a field of clover.
Another how to slip my hand under her Sunday skirt.
Another how to kiss with a mouth full of blackberries.
Another how to catch fireflies in a jar after dark.Here is a stable with a single black mare
And the proof of God's existence riding in a red nightgown.
Devil's child--or whatever she was?
Having the nerve to ask me to go get her a whip.
It's not terribly risque, but enough so that it's unlikely to be taught, beautiful though it is.
Well said, m. I like the Simic poem, but I think we can find something better. If we plot a graph, with the Y-axis as "stature of poet" and the X-axis as "vulgarity of poem," I think this one would rate higher on the Y than the X. When I get home, I'll look through my library (how many books does one have to own before it qualifies as a library?) and try and find the best one that I can.
No, it's not terribly vulgar, but I like it. For maximum vulgarity and stature, I would recommend either Ginsburg's "Kaddish" or some of Whitman's more erotic verse. I don't consider Ginsburg up there with the other poets we've mentioned, but he certainly does have stature. Of course, I'm sure there are better choices; those are just two off the top of my head.
In retrospect, my last post reminds me of that scene from Dead Poets Society. I quote at length:
KEATING Gentlemen, open your text to page twenty-one of the introduction. Mr. Perry, will you read the opening paragraph of the preface, entitled "Understanding Poetry"?NEIL
Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans
Pritchard, Ph.D. To fully understand
poetry, we must first be fluent with
its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech.
Then ask two questions: One, how artfully
has the objective of the poem been
rendered, and two, how important is that
objective. Question one rates the poem's
perfection, question two rates its
importance. And once these questions have
been answered, determining a poem's
greatest becomes a relatively simple
matter.Keating gets up from his desk and prepares to draw on the chalk board.
NEIL
If the poem's score for perfection is
plotted along the horizontal of a graph,
and its importance is plotted on the
vertical, then calculating the total
area of the poem yields the measure of
its greatness.Keating draws a corresponding graph on the board and the students
dutifully copy it down.NEIL
A sonnet by Byron may score high on the
vertical, but only average on the
horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on
the other hand, would score high both
horizontally and vertically, yielding a
massive total area, thereby revealing the
poem to be truly great. As you proceed
through the poetry in this book, practice
this rating method. As your ability to
evaluate poems in this matter grows, so
will - so will your enjoyment and
understanding of poetry.Neil sets the book down and takes off his glasses. The student sitting
across from him is discretely trying to eat. Keating turns away from
the chalkboard with a smile.KEATING
Excrement. That's what I think of Mr. J.
Evans Pritchard. We're not laying pipe,
we're talking about poetry.Cameron looks down at the graph he copied into his notes and quickly
scribbles it out.KEATING
I mean, how can you describe poetry like
American Bandstand? I like Byron, I give
him a 42, but I can't dance to it.Charlie suddenly appear to become interested in the class.
KEATING
Now I want you to rip out that page.The students look at Keating as if he has just gone mad.
KEATING
Go on, rip out the entire page. You heard
me, rip it out. Rip it out!
I had a somewhat similar—though not nearly as "inspiring"—moment in a French poetry course I took. The book we used was an anthology compiled by either an Englishman or an American who claimed, in the introduction, that French was an inferior language to English for poetry, but that there were still some worthwhile poems written in it. The professor and I* roundly mocked him for that.
*I was the only student in that class