FIDELITY AND LANGUAGE

Last time I was in Kentucky, a professor from my undergraduate school picked me up at the airport. We ate at some chain seafood restaurant and he gave me a book. Recently, I read it. The book was Standing by Words by Wendell Berry. The book is made of many overlapping metaphors, which Berry is convinced he must layer in order to evoke a new mindframe of reading.

I like one of his ideas better than the rest: simply, that fidelity of a marriage is something equated, or capable of being so, with poetic language.

Berry also wishes to dissuade against the current mainstream of poetry, which is a world of "specialization" whereby poets do not base their poetic responsibilities in thinking and writing for others with images of the world, but rather create a religious universe of their own need.

Some of this argument sounds very Transcendentalist, very Thoreau. Henry is the one who said, "Read the eternities, not the times," right? Apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson if I'm mistaken.

I can stay with Berry his belief that there is some fearful lack of hope when the landscape of poetics is shattered into "selves," and I agree that a lot of the poetry published in major journals and magazines is a singular brand of safe, well-crafted, tenure-sustaining poetics. Where Berry's metaphor starts to boggle down for me is when he tries to project on poets. He writes, "The world that once was mirrored by the poet hs become the poet's mirror. This explains, I think, the emphasis upon personal terror and suffering and the fear of death in much recent poetry." (8)

He continues, "But the difficulties are more than personal. For one thing, the subject of poetry is not words, it is the world, which poets have in common with other people."

Berry smartly quotes another poet, Mark Strand, from an interview in which Strand says, "I have the feeling that I am a metaphor for my own being." (7)

Oh, okay.

Berry also does some sophisticated work with how politicans use language--never quite saying anything, but never cornering themselves in a bad position.

Is the extended metaphor, unstated? Are contemporary (most) poets not saying anything?

There is a tremendous amount of disclipine in the art of writing for Berry; he links writing with working on a farm to till scarred soil. He is no city boy, is he?

Which brings me closer to my point.

Berry also writes about how afraid most contemporary poems are of form, of traditional forms. (I imagine Debra Kang Dean and Wendell Berry getting along.) And it's true. Many poets don't read "anything after World War I" and don't see the need to; Berry himself does a fair job jumping back into Milton, Spencer, Dante, and Shakespeare as a way to show what was right about literature and where it could be strengthened.

I have said that Berry seems like a last-generation Transcendentalist. Connected to the land, to fixations of potential, Berry makes me wonder if I'll someday write a book about how I miss cassette tapes and the Miami Vice look I am fond of but told no-longer works. I am quick to dismantle his claim that "old poets" sought the "truth" more intensely than those modern, young, "personal" poets. How can such a statement be made? For every Spencer, Shakespeare and Milton, there must have been a million hopeful poets who thought their poesy was, to borrow a modern saying, da bomb. But was it really of substance? No.

In every age, there are poets who are closer to the discovery of their era than others. You can lump poets however you desire, but doing so is always at one's disadvantage. Some of the poets Berry admires most are men who are dedicated to a place, a home--their poems seemingly flow from this place. What I suggest that Mr. Berry has failed to consider is that some men and women do not own a farm, or any land of substantial portion. It is more difficult to write about the world when the world is 24 hour Pharmacies and technology-crazed. It's only going to get worse, and may be prudent for Berry to see that its going to take a different kind of Transcendentalism to bridge the modern American back to what literature is about--healing and learning about each other. Reading about someone else's pain, even though it is theirs and not our own, is part of the movement of this greater process.