The Loose-Fish

I had the privilege to see Alan Shapiro at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2006. But since I was new to his work, I was eager to read his essays on Poetry and the Ethical Imagination. He was such a jovial and light hearted person on stage that I was really surprised to learn what an intellectual and academic he really is. Of course he is a teacher of writing (besides being an award winning poet)
and that almost comes with the territory, but it still didn't gel 100% with my impressions of him It finally occurred to me that most of these essays were written up to 25 years ago, and the man has undoubtedly mellowed, changed and loosened up over time. This is not to take anything away from his essays which are worth the read--only to explain my confusion on reconciling the loftiness of the writer to the very down-to-earth, smiling poet I met. Again, I must give my usual disclaimers--this is not a book review, but merely a sharing, from a student's prospective, of how the book struck me, and small excerpts.

The overall thrust of this book is for us to embrace both formal and free verse work without the 'purity' of one being better than the other for all the reasons they give. And to study the past, that we cannot build new art without knowing the old.



Part 1

The Flexible Rule: The Ethical Imagination

From what I could glean, Shapiro sees poetry and fiction as "ethical play" -- the
most succinct definitions being:

--an activity of consciousness concerned with ethical problems as they occur in lived experience, embedded in the densely tangled web of contingent happenings, commitments, practical realities, values, needs and desires which constitute our individual and collective lives.

--an activity of consciousness which tries to turn what we are used to, what is most familiar and therefore most difficult to know, into an ethical problem which we then attempt to solve.

--thus ethical play involves a kind of paradoxical habit of mind--a tolerance for ambiguity, for the shifting and indeterminate on the one hand, and a hunger for clarity on the other.

This is a facinating chapter about one of my favorite subjects: ethics. Shapiro
uses Billy Budd's trial (the Herman Melville novel) compared to the Dan White trial (the real life murderer of Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk in San Francisco) to show how two rival worlds of values led to different and equally bad endings. In addition he brings in the Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra story to further illustrate his points. This is a must read! (it even drove me to write a misguided poem about it!) While my poem is more a warning of neutralism, Shapiro is making a case for flexibility of the consciousness to see how far afield our judgments, biases, and politics can take us. Such unconsciousness is at dire odds with ethical imagination in writers and poets.

In Praise of the Impure: Narrative Consciousness in Poetry

Not narrative as we generally think of it, storytelling in some explicit account, but a wider view of "narrative" is what Shapiro deals with in this essay.

--has to do with implicit social, psychological, and linguistic actions in which words, sentences and poetic forms...comprise part of a historic continuum in relationship to which the speaking self is defined. This kind of narrative, as Alan Grossman observes, is omnipresent in poetry; it is impure, mongrel, not confined to any one genre or style. ...it is seldom absent even from poetry that is avowedly antinarrative.

This is another good essay in which Shapiro analyzes poems by W.C. Williams, Robert Hayden, C.K. Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop in the most engaging way to support his point, that regardless of structure and form, all is narrative.

Part 2

The New Formalism

Shapiro reviews the historical revolt against rhyme and meter in favor of free verse, and the opposite movement back to formal verse. The late J.V. Cunningham was Shapiro's early teacher, mentor and lifetime friend and Cunningham was a formalist of sorts. But we are to be reminded that without knowing the history of poetry, without reading and studying what came before, free verse can be as empty as rhymed verse can be stilted.

Some Notes on Free Verse & Meter

Wonderful analytic comparison of "The Slow Pacific Swell" by Yvor Winters (metered and rhymed) to "The Cod Head" by William Carlos Williams. Further notes supporting the viewpoint that free verse and metered verse are not oppositional, but rather
engaged in the same ends. Good essay!

Part 3

"Far Lamps at Night"
The poetry of J.V. Cunningham

--In 1974...studying poetry with Galway Kinnell and J.V. Cunningham was like studying political science with Jerry Rubin (pre-Wall Street) and William F. Buckley.

LOL LOL. Another interesting essay about his mentor and the battle between metered and free verse. One is reminded again and again how Shapiro supports "the impure" and the best of both. Shapiro doesn't have much patience with exclusionary attitudes toward either school. He analyzed Cunningham's work in such a lucid manner that now I want to read Cunningham's collected essays, if I can find them. Sounds like a brilliant man.

Some Thoughts on Robert Hass

What strikes me (in this project of reading poetry theory) is how EVERY poet seems to have a chapter/essay about Robert Hass. Hass, whether they love or hate him, is apparently a giant in contemporary poetry for his uniqueness and is used as a measuring stick for all kinds of opinions. Good and bad. This is a 1980 essay. I would wonder how Mr. Shapiro feels about Mr. Hass today.

"Itinerary" by James McMichaels

1980 critical analysis of McMichaels' long historical narrative. He likes it.

--...is not only his best poem but is, I think, one of the best poems by any American poet in the postwar period.

Well, that goes on my reading list.

The Liberal Imagination of Robert Pinsky's "Explanation of America"

1980 critical analysis of Pinsky's book length poem to his daughter. He likes him and he doesn't like him.

--If he's saying that all these types, these bad dreams, embody versions of some deep desire to simplify life to wholly manageable proportions, he's really saying very little, in fact, Pinsky is committing the very act of simplification that he is trying to censor.

But perhaps this is just to say that Pinsky's enormous capacity to move emotionally and intellectually around his subject--one of his most attractive qualities--can sometimes get the better of him.

--All in all, his is an important poet. Without excluding the images and documentary details that have become the standard fare of so much recent verse, he manages to traffic in ideas with honesty, humor and intelligence. Moreover his inclusive yet controlled habit of composition is not only a much needed corrective to practices that have tended to displace poetry to the margins of life, it establishes him--despite the conventional appearance of his work--as one of the more daring and experimental poets of his generation.

1980, remember?

"a living to fail" The Case of John Berryman

1983. This is a good essay on how artists do not need to live in pain and anguish (and kill themselves) in order to be artists. A close look at Berryman's tragic
and irresponsible life and work.

--Instead of bringing or attempting to bring the whole soul into activity, he was compelled, like Savage, to tread the same steps on the same circle. And as an artist, his circle is finally too small and too mannered. And no one would want to make a model of the life.

Part 4

The Dead Alive and Busy

This is a beautiful (and sad) essay about being a 'good reader', and a tribute to a terminally-ill student of Shapiro's who read poetry (even at such a young age) with the sensibility and eye of a more mature reader (because of her cancer), his position being that you need some life experience to truly read and grasp poetry.

--Reading well is symbolic loving. If most students, still too naive to integrate their own experience into their conception of themselves and others, haven't yet discovered this, perhaps we can prepare them for this discovery by cultivating an intelligent enthusiasm for the poems that attempt to wake them, and when we can, for the poems that assume they are already awake.

Horace and the Reformation of Creative Writing

Basically, this essay questions the creative writing MFA programs and writing workshops in general because students are not required to study the history of poetry. They are focused on writing their own work without any insistence on looking to the past for the very roots and structure of the art and craft of poetry. He would have MFA programs run for five years, not two, in order to properly educate poets. He also believes that students should learn to imitate the great artists before them in order to integrate the knowledge of what came before.

All of it made perfect sense to me. Which is why, at this late date, I am beginning my study of the poets who went before me. These books of essays are my road signs to the education ahead.

The Early Seventies and J.V. Cunningham

A very short and moving tribute to his beloved professor.

--What I learned from Jim Cunningham's classes and later from his friendship and what I continue to learn from his essays and poems, is that formality and feeling are both essential to our attentions of each other. Just as, in poetry, formal conventions of one kind or another mediate between private impulse and public utterance, self and other, so in life they enable us to make our individual experience accessible to someone else's understanding and sympathy. In this sense, formality is a kind of courtesy of attentiveness, a partial revelation and partial withholding of self so as to signal our concern, at a distance, in an act of generous and mutual respect.


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