Soldofsky, Alan

English

San Jose State University

Towards a Poetics of Narcissism

SJSU ScholarWorks

San Jose State UniversitySJSU ScholarWorksFaculty Publications English and Comparative LiteratureMarch 1979Towards a Poetics of NarcissismAlan SoldofskySan Jose State University, alan.soldofsky@sjsu.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/eng_complit_pubPart of the Poetry CommonsThis is brought to you for free and open access by the English and Comparative Literature at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion inFaculty Publications by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@sjsu.edu.Recommended CitationAlan Soldofsky. "Towards a Poetics of Narcissism" Poetry Flash (1979).TOWARDS A POETICS OF NARCISSISM Art eye is not an eye beca\188 you see it. It Is an ey.l because it eeea you . - Antonio Machado As this sad and paralyzing decade comes to a clcse. I think it biting to attempt making a lew sweepirg generaliz.abons about the poetry that has been written in it. Throughout the seventies we've erxiured a proliferation of little magazines and poe!ry presses oo an epidemic scale, both in the Bay Area and acrres the nation. A lew years ago I would no! h:tve hesitated to delend their promulgation; the mnall presses have been publishirg the work of poets hom since 1945, my · generabon, when the "establishment" litera ry magazines and corporate trade ~Ushers have not. Though a few university presses have awarded pri2Es lor first books by young poets, their tastes have largely stOOowed the trends in academic criticism. Most of the young poets they have published are also yrung university prolesoors or would be proles<.Ors. This circum<rtance is pathologically bome ool in anthologies such as The American Poetry Anthology edited by Daniel Halpern. But It is not just to the academic:; I address my criticism. ~ bttle poetry maga?.ines. most of them now suppor!ed by grants from the Na!ior><1l Endowment lor the Arts. have sprouted in large enough numbers to r>mbrM:e every concetvable Utr.l'ary "ochool". ln fact, judging from the editorial stllnd~rd.~ of rome of th<'.m. there shouldn 't be an WlpublL<N:d poet le ft in the Urotf:'d Stat~. D:-spitc the ~t 11ttack.< on them which have appearod in the r~omlliiE>rary ~ (which want~ to raire poetry to ruch a level ol ol.:«:urity that It would intimld<ite the most lomudable scholar). it l~ irx:oTJCe~vable to me how ~ !he most :;tronqly deterTT1inErlrffider could make it through the majority of pootry ""'9~ from COVP.r to cover . To do so would invite no! only !llupelying bon>ck;m hut un~ldinq hxhlity. 1'hi:s is not to say there a re not a lew good p:ll'lm ~ wntfen hy younqrr ~~ bemg publishOO in the maga?.ine!\. To say nlherwre woukl hP.untrue . But mming the periodicals for high grade material can be f:$YChically oomaging.We have the situation which res I'€0P.ntly:been testified to by David P. Young, the cu-edi~or of a rather good magam!e called Field, in a pane! at thP. Library of Corqress in 1975. Y Otll"q reporte::l1hat Field receives on the 4verage between two and three thousand unsolicited manu.=ipls a month. This figure can be given perspective when you consider that this maga2IDe gains only a small number of new subscribers in the same time . F\Jt in this hgh!, it might 11ppear thai the National Endowment is actively di=uragio:J the readin::1 of poetr y by encouraging the writioq of it. Poetry maga.?.ine for years had as its motto a line from Wall Whitman : '1'o have groal poets there must be great audiences too". The new generabon has taken this dictum to heart . We have moved towardsapoeticsol~. Weareoorown nOO.>ence, and no! a devo!ed one at that. Individually , we a re interested only in the writing that reminds us of ourselves. The situation of oor poebcs i<; inevitable. We are a narci~o;bc generation that hils grown up in what Chns!opher Lasch has called The Culture of Narcissism , the tiUe ol his recent book. W e , a~ a generation, have sought fullillment by perfecting our personalities in t.he reflection of one mirror o r another. through cor£C10USneSS expansion, eastern religions, est, movement therapies, language, or whatever is available . Lasch writes that "the narcissist sees the world as a mirror of himoolf and has no interest in external events except as they throw back. a rellecbon of his own image" . I:lesplte the numerou.~ stylistic diffe rences among the Younger poets, this is a ccmrnon Situation in our poetnes. . We have mel the void withm u.~ . We can apply to much of the writing we have produced what Blake wrote about the eighteenth century: "the languid strings do scarely move! The sound is forced, the notes a few." This might be partially acccunted lor in the fact that so many young poets were tramed in university ~tive writing programs. ThP.!'P. we learned craft - that is to write without anything to say, just to write in a way thai reflects favorably on us. As Lasch explains, "the narcissist depends upon others to validate his self -€Seem . Hecannot Uve without an admiring audience ." Writing workshOp; in 1hc universities are not b3d lor us itLo;l becau.oe pods like Ro bert Bly say they are evil. They are bad bee~ in exchange for the su!=POfl and criticism of our peers and teachers we gat wrapped up in ourselves and failed to be educated. We did not study the p:JI!try of th~ pa.<rt oro! ot!-m cultures with enough deep feelmg, and we we re not mad& to read hard enough. ConqequentJy we have gamed an easy competence DVe'J' poetic Lmguage . We may even know something about !orm. Ninety peroent o! workshop JX)etry is dead to the ear and to the feelmas. The recent httle rnaqazmes are crowed with compet~t. uninterestinq poetry. No! just the academic journals. but even thoee p.lblications that are considered to be !lvant.qarde . There is a dryness in what should be the most fluid area of Wlc;Juage and Ideas, a dryness like !ocu..~~ rubbing their wirqs together. Most of ~ experimental writing =ns:::iOIL<;!y points b:!ck to Poond . Stein, Zukofsky, Willi&ns, O'Hara. or Olson. But few experimentalists are capable of that acknowledgement. Therefore. they've CTBlled a body of work untempered by history, just by poetic sensibility. The nardsslst, in this case. does not care if the reader's eyes glaze over in fatigue or bewilderment after a few lines as long as the reder is willing to be impressed by the poet's brilliarce. Avant{Jarde poetry in New York and the Bay Area tends to be dense and ponderous. Here the style dominated the coolent. In many ways these poets. to use Laoch's words, are "overcome not by the 5eTI5e of erxiJess poosih]ity, but the renality of the social order ... They feel the~lves overwhelmed by annihilating boredom, Ukt. animals whcoo inslinctE have witrered in captivity." This same dilficulty holds true with the new surrealism. The he\ghtemd language employed in surreallS! poetry often is an attempt to disguise the !X)elll's lack of subject. Magazines suc h as Kayak have OOlped bring this poetry il')to fashion. Tho ugh Kayak has pMnted a great deal of qocd poetry over the years, il has become more and mQTe dominated by poems which CO!lS& of mechanically generated images. Though desgned togive pleasure through their great jump~of association, these poems are not grounded in emotion and are teo often immediately forgettable . The poet is CJOriOCiollsly trying to wtn the reader over by blowing his mind". These poems do not cootain even a shadow of the wild emotional energy of the uncc:nrious os it appears tl Lorca or Neruda or Omles Simic. In the United States. young surrealist poets 99elTl to dmpate early, as James Tate has lor ~. Hi<; la.'ll boolc, Viper Jazz, does not contain a single gOO:l poem, and only half a dozen or so gocYJ &-. The common quality of the narcissistic poem is the JX)el's extreme self. OClll.'riol.lsn. Younc;rer poets who write quite skillfuJJy Cdl'1 ultimately fail when their !X)eiTl is intruded upon by their ega;. This is al9o true of ]dnet Rodney's long JX)em, Crystals. just published by North Allan& Bcolcs. It claims to be revealing romething about love relaticnships , but it is decelv.ng . The subject is the poefs perception. The poem "lills one revolving shadow with love lor another." The poet altf'!' aU ha~ told us, ·r am the wo rld's bumness." The Mrci<ti.'m1 of the l~st q t:> tl<'ri'IHon of conlffilio Ml pop~ had doro youno Wtitm< no favOI" PilhE'r. The eqo· rldden works of Se-xton and Plath have OOC!Il ~rlicularly de;tructivP. to women's poetry . Woroon's poctry p!'frel1t~ polithll and aesthethic L<ates which aTP. doubtlessly beyond my ra nge of experience. Ho wever. 1 ~n.'le in much women's writing a theri'lpt>Ubc 11ensibility. There l~ a dJHerence between the priva te act ol writing as lherap)' and the public act of wMting a poem. 'T'hc r.¥JP. of Adrienne Rich ol Su.e..1:1 Griffin is energy turned outward. When le!«ler pc<>ts tum this same energy inward their narci~= tnvializes expericnoe by attachin::! a lllA'Ining to it im~ by pohtical or f:$Ychological cliche. The point t-ecomes not writing about a problem in onc'n life in order to darify a universal human sih.labon for the beoeht of others, but rather writing about a problem L'1 o rde r to beoome identified with it and to bask in Its rellected glory. In many ways JXl8lry has become one-issi.Je.politic:;, In California and elsewhere rural and wildamess areas still abound there has arisen a new generation ol nature peels. But regardirq this genre we should heed David Tgnatow's warning: 1 wish I could look at a mountain Wlthout seeing it as a comment on my lile." Poets of the younger genera~on are prone to usurping the landx.:lpe ll'1E!If and using it as an inner symbolism . We are in danger of not producing any poets wlxlre work ilC!ually speaks lor the land because we are so heavily invested in the human ego. When I read a poem about a beautilul mountain I am interested In that mountain, not in the poet's appreciation of ru.~ or her own vision ol it. When this rell-conscious appredation is evident in the 1magery, the poem beoomes one step removed lrom it.<! object, unlike dassical Chinese or Japanese nature poetry. The prtmary interest of our nature poems, it seems, is not whales or mcW11ains or redwocxi trees The world's wonderous inventory has simply been turned into grist for the poetic mill. I've given you but a lew y,iJd and probably up:eltio;r generalizations about something that has become deeply troubling What is ro painluJ to me in !'ffiding much ol 'the JXl8lry of our generation is the utter des::>lation of spirit it impba;. The last decade has seen a flourishing of mediocre wrtbnq wi!hoot respect to which school it is alfihated . It woukl seem as \houg h many of us write in order to gain the love and admiration we desire, not because something m the world deserves our scom Or praioo. OJr childhood wi<;h lor omnipoteoce seems to be returning. OJr self-consclousneffi, in La!!Ch's words, extends lrom "the waning bebef in the reality of the external world , which has b;t Its immedinr:y in a society pervaded by symbolically mediated information ." As critics, we must be held aocount.ille lor not condemning the dullness, timidif?, and lack of ~ in our poetry. We've 9eltled for what is merely interesting instO:ld of what is good. l'll comment more specilically on the.e issue$ in future arlides. _ Alan So!dolslcy MANDY AFTEL specialing in THERAPY FOR ARTISTS 8r WRITERS "Almost everything eerious is difficult" - Rillce for more liceneed i.niormation sliding scale 841-6500 

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Towards a Poetics of Narcissism

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