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    The Lyric Now
    The Lyric Now
    The Lyric Now
    Ebook154 pages1 hour

    The Lyric Now

    By James Longenbach

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    A poet and scholar explores how lyric poetry works by examining the lives and works of thirteen twentieth- and twenty-first–century American poets and musicians.

    For more than a century, American poets have heeded the siren song of Ezra Pound’s make it new, staking a claim for the next poem on the supposed obsolescence of the last. But great poems are forever rehearsing their own present, inviting readers into a nowness that makes itself new each time we read or reread them. They create the present moment as we enter it, their language relying on the long history of lyric poetry while at the same time creating a feeling of unprecedented experience.

    In poet and critic James Longenbach’s title, the word “now” does double duty, evoking both a lyric sense of the present and twentieth-century writers’ assertion of “nowness” as they crafted their poetry in the wake of Modernism. Longenbach examines the fruitfulness of poetic repetition and indecision, of naming and renaming, and of the evolving search for newness in the construction, history, and life of lyrics. Looking to the work of thirteen poets, from Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot through George Oppen and Jorie Graham to Carl Phillips and Sally Keith, and several musicians, including Virgil Thomson and Patti Smith, he shows how immediacy is constructed through language. Longenbach also considers the life and times of these poets, taking a close look at the syntax and diction of poetry, and offers an original look at the nowness of lyrics.

    Praise for The Lyric Now

    “Longenbach is a lyric poet, practical critic, and literary scholar. These are distinct roles, and there are vanishingly few people good, let alone so distinguished, in all three. In The Lyric Now, he brings a career’s worth of wisdom to bear while writing with élan and urgency for both the specialist and nonspecialist reader. No one is better at explaining how poems work, how literary history happens, and why we should care about both.” —Langdon Hammer, author of James Merrill: Life and Art

    “[Longenbach] does prove—with stylistic wit and epigrammatic verve—that close reading can be a literary art in its own right. . . . Taken together, these essays . . . make an implicit case for the importance of syntax to lyric poetry. This is particularly evident in Longenbach’s reading of Moore’s “The Octopus,” and in masterful readings of poems by Jorie Graham and Carl Philips. When he contrasts Patti Smith’s prose and John Ashbery’s poetry with the songs of Bob Dylan, his skill as an expert close reader proves his point about the power of syntax. This volume proves a simple yet fundamental truth: “a lyric works particularly, sentence by sentence, line by line”. . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended.” —Choice
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 7, 2020
    ISBN9780226716183
    The Lyric Now

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      Book preview

      The Lyric Now - James Longenbach

      The Lyric Now

      Also by James Longenbach

      Prose

      How Poems Get Made

      The Virtues of Poetry

      The Art of the Poetic Line

      The Resistance to Poetry

      Modern Poetry after Modernism

      Wallace Stevens

      Stone Cottage

      Poetry

      Earthling

      The Iron Key

      Draft of a Letter

      Fleet River

      Threshold

      The Lyric Now

      James Longenbach

      The University of Chicago Press    Chicago and London

      The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

      The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

      © 2020 by The University of Chicago

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

      Published 2020

      Printed in the United States of America

      29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20    1 2 3 4 5

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-71599-5 (cloth)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-71604-6 (paper)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-71618-3 (e-book)

      DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226716183.001.0001

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Longenbach, James, author.

      Title: The lyric now / James Longenbach.

      Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2020007542 | ISBN 9780226715995 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226716046 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226716183 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—20th century—History and criticism.

      Classification: LCC PS323.5 .L66 2020 | DDC 811/.040905—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007542

      This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

      For Joanna

      Contents

      Preface

      I · Poet of Argument

      II · Home Thoughts

      III · Visions and Revisions

      IV · Drawing a Frame

      V · A Test of Poetry

      VI · Life after Death

      VII · Very Rich Hours

      VIII · Potential Space

      IX · Moving On

      X · Disliking It

      XI · The Lyric Now

      Acknowledgments

      Bibliography

      Index

      Preface

      Who knows what a poem is? For the person beginning to write the poem as well as the person beginning to read it, the poem doesn’t exist yet: the pleasure is an act of discovery, even if the writer has written a thousand poems preceding this one—even if the reader has read the poem at hand a hundred times. The title of this book may be read in two ways, but I mean the word now to function primarily as a noun, modified by an adjective—the lyric now: whether written in 1920 or 2020, a poem creates the moment as we enter it. The poem is happening now.

      Like anyone who writes poems, I learned to do so by reading them; but more precisely, I learned to write poems by writing about them—often by writing about them again and again, since at different times the same poems have revealed themselves to me in different ways. Sometimes the appearance of new poems has forced me to reconsider a poet I thought I knew well; other times a new edition of old poems has seemed to reconfigure an entire career. The American poets I’ve written about here—Moore, Pound, Eliot, Stein, Williams, Oppen, Lowell, Bishop, Ashbery, Bidart, Graham, Phillips, Keith—have been acutely aware of one another’s poems, and I have needed to inhabit that awareness myself. When one feels the need to read Marianne Moore or T. S. Eliot, do their poems feel any less present, less relevant, than those of Carl Phillips or Sally Keith?

      Each of these poets has been in some way invested in the effort to make it new, in Pound’s famous phrase; for poets who came of age in the wake of modernism, novelty often became notoriety, though never for very long. Until it did not, Lowell’s early embrace of meter and rhyme seemed radically new; and until it did not, Oppen’s embrace of modernist strategies of fragmentation seemed old hat. In the 1950s or the 1990s, the fashionable young poet wrote rhymed quatrains; in the 1960s or the 2000s the same poet wrote disjunctive prose poems. And yet, like every decade preceding them, these decades produced poems whose authenticity does not depend on a resistance to another poem’s power—poems that do not postulate an immortality contingent on another poet’s obsolescence, as if mortality were for other people. A poem is the future, even if it exists in the past.

      Over the past several decades, academic literary critics have debated the nature of the lyric poem with a fervor unseen since the heyday of the New Criticism, when the lyric lay at the center of our critical enterprise. This fervor has invigorated me almost as much as the ongoing project of lyric poetry, but my attention remains focused less on what the lyric is generally than on how a lyric works particularly, sentence by sentence, line by line: whatever else it may be, a poem is a work of art made of words, and the way in which a particular poem’s language creates the repeatable event of itself is my preoccupation.

      If the lives of the poets have sometimes proved to me as telling as their poems, it is nonetheless the event of the particular poem to which these tales attest. Equally telling has been the language of American musicians: the writings of Virgil Thomson and Patti Smith, musicians uncommonly involved with words, have offered me unexpected ways to describe what’s happening in the poem that’s happening now. We’re used to listening to songs we love repeatedly, and poems we love, even poems long loved by other people, may assert their claim on our attention with similar persistence, often against our will.

      Does the poem that’s happening now make anything happen? As I write, near the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, many poets consider poems to be a form of political intervention; there are very good reasons for wanting poems to function in this way, and there are equally good reasons, though less heartening ones, for wanting to know if poems can bear the weight of their maker’s desires. Is a work of art made of words that meets the moment a lesser work when the moment passes? Why, having read such a poem by Virgil or Oppen, do we keep reading it?

      Virgil flourished in the first century BCE. The earliest American poet I’ve written about here, William Carlos Williams, flourished more than one hundred years ago. One hundred years is a long time, longer than the life of most any poet; but within the ongoing history of lyric poetry, it’s almost nothing. Once, to readers intent on evaluation, Williams seemed like an affront to available notions of both poetic and social decorum, and so did Wordsworth. But already the enthusiasms and antagonisms that preoccupied poets over the last several decades, much less the last century, have fallen away. What’s left is the poetry: I’ve experienced some of its makers as contemporaries, each of them engaged in the act of arranging the raw material of language into art.

      The Lyric Now

      I

      Poet of Argument

      On February 19, 1988, John Ashbery gave a poetry reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Coincidentally, the Folger had mounted Marianne Moore: Vision into Verse, an exhibition that included an array of clippings and photographs Marianne Moore references in her poems—most prominently in An Octopus, the longest poem in her 1924 volume Observations. Speaking extemporaneously, Ashbery called An Octopus the most important poem of the twentieth century, and when the remark provoked a few titters, he looked surprised: in his own mind he was reiterating a conviction neither novel nor idiosyncratic. Despite the obvious grandeur of her chief competitors, he’d written two decades earlier, in a 1967 review of Moore’s Complete Poems, I am tempted simply to call her our greatest modern poet.

      By chief competitors Ashbery meant the usual American modernist culprits—Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Frost, Williams—all of whom maintain a permanent claim on our attentions; with the notion that Moore belongs among this company no twenty-first-century reader could plausibly disagree. Not only the freewheeling Ashbery but also the fastidious Richard Wilbur revered Moore’s poems and, depending on how one approaches them, the poems themselves seem both freewheeling and fastidious. She gives us, said Ashbery, the feeling that life is softly exploding around us, within easy reach.

      Moore was born near St. Louis, Missouri, in 1887. Her parents separated before her birth, and subsequently her father, already institutionalized, severed his hand, taking literally the injunction of Matthew 5:30 (if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off). To her mother and to her brother Warner, who became a Presbyterian minister, Moore remained fiercely, sometimes pathologically, close. She attended Bryn Mawr College, became a suffragette, moved to a tiny Greenwich Village apartment in 1918, and edited the legendary magazine The Dial from 1925 until its demise in 1929 (an achievement that would insure our interest in Moore, even if she had written no poems), but she lived with her mother until her mother’s death in 1947. It’s hard to imagine Marianne Moore sharing a bed with her mother while also composing her fiercely syntax-driven poems—

      the spiked hand

      that has an affection for one

      and proves it to the bone,

      impatient to assure you

      that impatience is the mark of independence

      not of bondage

      —in which domestic relations often seem pointedly nightmarish.

      Moore began publishing these poems around 1915, and immediately they were noticed by the modernist poets who became her peers, poets who would in turn write admiring essays about her work. Yet Moore remained mysterious. Does your stuff ‘appear’ in America, asked Pound, after first encountering her poems in England. Dear Mr. Pound, wrote Moore, I do not appear. In 1921, her friend H. D. helped to arrange for the printing of a small

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