Open and Closed: A Response to Adam Fieled

Adam Fieled over at Stoning the Devil is, in my humble estimation, one of the most thoughtful post-avant partisans on the Web. When I respectfully threw down a gauntlet in his comment stream, he thoughtfully took it up in a post that's useful in a number of ways, not least in its listing of poets in the post-avant ballpark (at least by Adam's lights).

Best of all, he presents two poems by Mark Young as examples of what he sees as characteristic and strong post-avant work. At the end of that post, Adam threw down a gauntlet of his own: "So, Joseph, here you have two poems that, for me, encapsulate much that is best in the post-avant spirit, in the endeavor that myself and many others are embarked upon. I will be happy to hear your response, and whether you may join me in embracing the mystery that I see here. If not, I would like to know why, and what is missing here for you."

I've thought hard about Adam's challenge, and I want to take it up in a way that doesn't dismiss "the mystery," the openness in poetry that we both value (see his newer post that wrestles with this and other issues). Because the fact is that I agree with Adam's devotion to openness, as I've mentioned many times on this blog. I'm so devoted to openness, in fact, that I generally dislike the categorization of poets and poetry.

That said, it's only fair to respond to the Mark Young poems Adam has offered, not as examples of post-avant writing, but as poems, which the title of the book they're taken from—Pelican Dreaming. Here's the first one:

BACK TO BASICS

I have forced
the clouds
apart, have
made a gap
through which
the moon appears.
Even though
it is not full
the effort
exhausts
me. I rest.

The clouds
have closed again
when I open my
eyes & the moon
has disappeared. I
try to find it
but with no
success. I leave
a sky full of holes
& torn clouds
behind me.

The appeal of this poem for Adam rests on its dominant quality: the fact that while it clearly develops an extended metaphor and may even be allegorical, the metaphor/allegory isn't defined within the poem—unlike, for example, Donne's compass metaphor in "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning." "The reader is obliged to cooperate with Young in order to generate meaning," Adam writes. In other words, he admires the poem's openness. Adam sees the poem as "a metaphor for the creative process itself," with "the sky full of holes" and the "torn clouds" standing for the poem itself. But it could easily be a metaphor for something else: the artistic quest for inspiration (symbolized by the moon), for example, or a spiritual quest for "grace" (the moon as Graves's White Goddess), etc. Adam sees this openness as a key post-avant strength.

Openness is not the exclusive property of post-avant writers, of course. Charles Simic, for example—a poet identified as a Quietist by Ron Silliman, who is generally acknowledged as the chief arbiter of these questions—has what I would call an "open poem" in his collection Austerities:

INTERLUDE

A worm
In an otherwise
Red apple
Said: I am.

It happened on a chipped
China plate,
At a table
With twelve empty chairs.

The rightful owner
Of the apple
Had gone into the kitchen
To get a knife.

She was an old woman
Who forgot things easily.
Dear me,
She whispered.

I make no claim for the poem's quality, but its miniature narrative is as metaphorical/allegorical as Young's, and as demanding of the reader's cooperation. I consider it more "open," in fact, because it's more suggestive at every stage of the poem's motion. But that's neither here nor there. What matters is that in "Interlude," Simic—a "Quietist"—has written a poem that has all the post-avant qualities Adam claims for Mark Young's poem.

The second Mark Young poem Adam quotes goes like this:

DEPOSITION

what can be
defined

should be left
untouched

what can be
touched

should be left
unspoken

what can be
spoken

should be
taken down

& used in evidence
against you

Adam concentrates on comparing this poem to poetry by Jack Gilbert, presumably the particular Gilbert poems he discussed in an earlier post. Since I don't want to muster a defense for Gilbert, whose work has grown steadily weaker over time, let me just say that Adam admires Young's poem for not containing a "portentious 'we,'" by which he means that "Young is speaking for [no one] but himself." There is no "pseudo-universalist tripe," he explains, only "the deadly personal, the one-on-one." But he backs off of that claim immediately, because it's important to him that "Young is not going to CLOSE his construct." Adam wonders who the "you" might be to whom the poem is addressed, and further wonders if "the evident influence of William Carlos Williams" is significant. (I assume he hears the cadences of "The Red Wheelbarrow" here.) He then goes on to claim that Young's poem is "compelling" because it is a "combination of elements that are intelligible with elements that must be imaginatively constructed by the reader."

Adam's take on this one puzzles me, because he seems to praise the poem for what it leaves out. What's more, he avoids dealing with the words that are actually there, in particular the poem's single-word title. "Deposition" as a verb can mean 1) the action of removing a leader from office suddenly and forcefully, especially a monarch; 2) the process if giving sworn out-of-court testimony; 3) the action of depositing objects in a particular place; 4) the taking down of Jesus's body from the Cross; as a noun it can mean the formal, usually written statement (produced by the process described in the second meaning above) to be used as evidence in court. It's tracking the title's shades of meaning through each stanza that makes the poem compelling, and what makes it "open" is the fact that we can't say definitively who is speaking to the "you," who the "you" is, and what offense that "you" has committed. In other words, we have another free-floating allegory for which the reader must supply crucial information in order for the poem to matter—to be more than a puzzle, as Adam puts it.

I agree with Adam that the creation of a compelling poem that remains open does require both mystery and mastery—and if nothing else, he's succeeded in making me want to read more of Mark Young's work. What I can't agree to is the notion that this quality doesn't exist in the work of so-called Quietist poets.

Furthermore, I don't believe that the sort of openness we're discussing—the maximal openness Lyn Hejinian famously defined in her now 25-year-old essay "The Rejection of Closure"—is the only kind of openness available to a poet; that is, there are degrees of openness, and maximal openness isn't necessarily superior to a partial openness. I also don't believe that "open" poems are necessarily better than "closed" poems. In fact, poems that are "maximally open" must sacrifice certain qualities that make "closed" poems worth reading, such as emotional expressiveness (Sylvia Plath, Yehuda Amichai), rhetorical force deployed in service of a political or philosophical point of view (Sharon Doubiago, Mark Nowak), and insights arising from a poet's unusual life experience or unique cast of mind (Derek Walcott, Bill Knott). By contrast,"open" poetry all too often strikes me as passive, hermetic, all head and no heart, and as self-indulgent in its way as the worst "closed" poetry one can find.

But let me return to the question of terminology. Here is a list, in no particular order, of poets who the imperious Mr. Silliman has identified as School of Quietude members over the past five years or so:

Robert Bly
W. S. Merwin
Adrienne Rich
James Wright
Donald Hall
Philip Levine
Sharon Olds
Billy Collins
Mark Strand
Stanley Kunitz
Robert Hass
Charles Simic
Marie Howe
Yusef Komunyakaa
Lucille Clifton
Marvin Bell
Arthur Vogelsang
Louise Glück
Evan Boland
Dan Chiasson
Elsa Cross
Michael Lind
Michael S. Harper
Molly Peacock
Stanley Plumly
William Stafford
Kay Ryan
Jack Gilbert
Linda Gregg

This is an impressive and to my mind diverse and revealing list. I would never defend all of the poems by even those listed poets I consider excellent (in the limited sense that excellence is always a provisional assessment), much less all the poems by those I consider inferior, and certainly not those by the few on this list whose work I find unreadable. But I would argue that it's no accident that Silliman's list comprises almost exclusively winners of major poetry prizes and whose work is widely anthologized. This is because "School of Quietude" is a polemical term, just as "post-avant" is a polemical term, both of which have meaning only in the realm of PoBiz; and PoBiz is a fever-dream indulged in by individuals who lack cultural validation—that is, poets; all poets. Let's not kid ourselves that even the most lauded American poets really matter to the American public. Americans have accorded more cultural importance to figures like Paris Hilton than to any American poet living or dead, and poets have responded by taking out their frustration on one another. After all, who else would care to hear about it?

In the end, none of this wrangling, none of these theoretical stances, will help to foster the "great audience" that Whitman correctly said that great poetry required. Unless poets decide to dismiss the audience altogether (the human audience, I mean; Christian Bök has already begun to write for bacteria instead of people), we would do well start thinking about how much our circular firing squad behavior is at least partially to blame for the ongoing marginalization of poetry in America. Maybe we need to take the notion of openness beyond our texts and into our lives.