Response to Menand on poetry

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

William Butler Yeats

First, it is necessary to acknowledge that Louis Menand was on assignment when he wrote “The Defense of Poetry: Can a poem change your life?”  It is a responsible review of three books about poetry, that is, about poetry and other things, but still, under this title, I expected more, a lot more.

Menand says he “doesn’t completely agree” with Michael Robbins who writes, “No one has ever changed his life because of a poem or song . . . (we need poetry and music) . . . because they provide the illusion that we are changing, or have changed, or will change, or even want to change our lives.”

Menand critiques Robbins’ view of the fading impact of once beloved poetry and music. He acknowledges that none of us can be the fifteen-year-old first reading Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” or the “shining from shook foil” that Hopkins shared. But we can, according to Menand, “remember with respect and longing that time of life . . .when, as Georg Lukacs once put it, “the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars.”  That fire never grows old!

The necessity to review pop music criticism along with poetry was unfortunate.  Perhaps we are a generation (we boomers) who grew up with both, but we are a particular slice and not everyone in our generation experienced one with the same intensity as the other.

About a quarter of the way through the review, Menand takes up the title of Robbins’ book, “Equipment for Life.” Robbins makes contradictory statements about the efficacy of poetry for life. Menand quotes the “can” and the “can’t,” referring (as though every reader is equally familiar) to Auden’s line “poetry makes nothing happen.” In February, 1939, Auden had the courage to say that poetry “survives, a way of happening, a mouth.”  Robbins instead takes capitalism, not Hitler, as a target, according to Menand, but holds that “when capitalism is dead . . . we might not need poetry anymore.” Menand gently steps away in disdain, and then details how poetry was alive and well around the wars of the 20^th century and is alive and well even now: “Every crisis is an opportunity for poetry.” 

On his way out of Robbins’ world and on the way to Matthew Zapruder’s question, “Why Poetry?” Menand stops briefly at Ben Lerner’s publication, “The Hatred of Poetry.”   With this pivot point I’m beginning to think the title of this review should be something like, “Why Poets Hate Poetry.” And I’m beginning to see that Menand took on a quite impossible task in reviewing these books, or this topic! He sums up Lerner’s argument as “Poetry is a paradigm example of human inadequacy.”  Rather than take on what he seems to believe are fundamental errors in reasoning, Menand mostly just moves on.  How might he have given a compelling argument to Lerner at this point?  Perhaps, at the very least, turn to the adequacy of Archibald MacLeish: “A poem should be wordless as the flight of birds . . . a poem should not mean, but be”?  I was looking for Menand to give a good joust, and found thus far, a slightly sardonic reportage.

Menand lastly turns to Zapruder with at least a third of the review to come.  He also shifts tone at this juncture, and begins to respond in a more feisty spirit to all three of the authors under review. Their fundamental position according to Menand, is based on the distinction between nonfiction and fiction, and which of these is more meaningful, practical, and effective. All three find poetry lacking. Menand does take a firm glove to the three, and directly, too, with examples from Basho to Brodsky to Trump and September 11^th.

On first reading this long, involved review essay, I was disappointed that Menand didn’t do more to not just list evidence, but to be the evidence to the contrary. On this more careful and analytic reading, I see that he marshalls history, titles, names, and arguments in addition to sarcasm and overall contrariness.  Possibly, the authors might even say that he does NOT even fairly represent their books.

Menand concludes his essay with some very personal remarks (that might even have been placed first). He, and the three authors (and I as well) found poetry in youth, “and it changed their lives.”  My experience was mediated by animated teachers and by the guidance of Laurence Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry.  My expectations of Menand are shaped by Perrine, too.  “Poetry . . . is a kind of . . . multi-dimensional language . . . a gear for stepping up the intensity and increasing the range of our experience, and as a glass for clarifying it.”

Robert Pinsky is another interlocutor whose voice on poetry might have added to Menand’s range and decisiveness.  Nowhere in this essay do we feel the force of poetry as “a vocal, which is to say, a bodily art.” For Pinsky, poetry contains “intricate patterns of sound, in great measure intuitively heard and intuitively perceived . . . its unique expressive structure. . .”

In my world, poetry starts young and sinks deep.  It operates at the level of cellular motion, mitochondria, synapses, amygdala.  Learning poetry by heart is a deep pleasure and also an efficacious defense against pain. Just try it at the dentist’s office: words written hundreds or dozens of years ago are anodyne better than novocaine.  Poetry IS “shining from shook foil” in exactly the way that Hopkins meant, and “trepidation of the spheres” as Donne reveals.  It is the “frigate” (ED) and the eagle that “clasps the crag” (ALT) and it makes visceral “the old lie” (WO).  And if “life is more true than reason will deceive . . . beauty is more each than living’s all.” (EEC)  (Full poem by ee cummings below)

life is more true than reason will deceive
(more secret or than madness did reveal)
deeper is life than lose: higher than have
–but beauty is more each than living’s all

multiplied with infinity sans if
the mightiest meditations of mankind
canceled are by one merely opening leaf
(beyond whose nearness there is no beyond)

or does some littler bird than eyes can learn
look up to silence and completely sing?
futures are obsolete: pasts are unborn
(here less than nothing’s more than everything)

death, as men call him, ends what they call men
-but beauty is more now than dying’s when