Bong Hits 4 Jesus

Or: "who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull...."

As reported here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/washington/18scotus.html?ex=1331870400&en=29ab231ec7765f0c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Those of you not registered at the NYT, here is the story in brief:

As the Olympic torch was carried through the streets of Juneau on its way to the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City, students were allowed to leave the school grounds to watch. The school band and cheerleaders performed. With television cameras focused on the scene, Mr. Frederick [a senior at the school] and some friends unfurled a 14-foot-long banner with the inscription: 'Bong Hits 4 Jesus.'

Mr. Frederick later testified that he designed the banner, using a slogan he had seen on a snowboard, “to be meaningless and funny, in order to get on television.” Ms. Morse [the principal of the school] found no humor but plenty of meaning in the sign, recognizing “bong hits” as a slang reference to using marijuana. She demanded that he take the banner down. When he refused, she tore it down, ordered him to her office, and gave him a 10-day suspension.

Mr. Frederick is now suing Ms. Morse and the school district for violating his first amendment rights. The case, like a soul from a dead body, has risen from the vulgar depths of the lower courts to the heavenly sphere of the Supreme Court, which will soon pronounce judgement on its righteousness or villainy.

The case is fascinating for any number of reasons, perhaps not least because Ms. Morse apparently had to stop to decipher that the inscription was some kind of "slang reference to using marijuana." Principals are so lame. But the case is also fascinating because, as the New York Times plays it up, it has temporarily aligned the Felix religious right with the Oscar American Civil Liberties Union (odd couples indeed), and (again, a series of firsts) because it pits the religious right against the Bush Administration, which can't look past its hatred of drugs and its apple-polishing respect for authority long enough to see that if students are not allowed to hold up a banner that says "Bong Hits 4 Jesus," then they may not be able to hold up a banner that says "John 3:16."

I tend to be a first-amendment absolutist, willing to protect all speech, even the most hateful, so long as it does not threaten or seek to incite violence or physical harm against a group or individual. So I think the kids are alright here, as Pete Townsend might put it. At the same time, though, I recognize that schools must silence some speech part of the time just in order to function. I silence my students all the time. How else would I get them to listen to or think about poetry? But a prank banner at an already campy torch-passing ceremony does not seem to disrupt the function or purpose of schooling. It's a kid with a bong sign.

And, truth be told, I'm inclined to believe that Jesus does in fact deserve bong hits. Even if I'm wrong, though, and he doesn't, people still have the right to say so.

Not worthless

I cannot believe that it has been three weeks or so since I have updated this commonplace book. Even more unbelievable is that I have left that Frank O'Hara ploop poem up in the interval. Fortunately, though, we have no readers to disappoint or offend.

But it is a sign of how low we have fallen if our criteria is whether something had some, however miniscule, value.

And then, just because, and turning to a poem at random...

POEM

Wouldn't it be funny
if The Finger had designed us
to shit just once a week?

all week long we'd get fatter
and fatter and then on Sunday morning
while everyone's in church

ploop!

--Frank O'Hara (1959)

Amen!

"But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them."

Frank O'Hara, "Personism: A Manifesto" (1962)

How to Read a Modern Poem

In 1913, Ezra Pound advised
poets to go in fear of abstraction;
one should find the image that symbolized
the age’s usurious malefaction.

Eliot, finding Hamlet deficient,
wanted an object that could correlate
with a given emotion, an efficient
formula traditioned readers could translate.

William Carlos Williams had his version
“Say it!” he said, “no ideas but in things”:
Things like Elsie, wheelbarrows, an excursion
to the contagious hospital in spring.

Modern poems are a junk yard, a heap
of broken images, but strip the paint,
or glue the pieces, and you find the cheap,
naked, lovely, poetry of complaint.

Can Poetry Matter? Part II

Despite Gioia’s sound proposals for saving poetry from itself, his justly-famous essay nevertheless falters on a couple of points. First, he seems too conservative in imagining the audience poetry might have. He wants poetry to speak again to the “2 percent of the U.S. population” that represents our “cultural intelligentsia,” “the people who support the arts—who buy classical and jazz records; who attend foreign films, serious theatre, opera, symphony and dance; who read quality fiction and biographies; who listen to public radio and subscribe to the best journals.” Given how small poetry’s audience has become, Gioia can perhaps be forgiven his realistic hopes about the audience poetry might plausibly win back. Still, as the editor of an anthology of poems written in the 1930s by workers and organizers and published in their various union newspapers, and as a critic who reveres the public role poetry played in various political movements of the twentieth century, I would prefer not to limit poetry’s imagined audience from the outset to the “cultural intelligentsia.” It has had a more democratic audience in the past, and we shouldn’t rule out from the start it having another one again.

More serious, though, is the—to be brutally honest about it—the lame case Gioia makes for why poetry should matter. His first reason concerns the relation between poetry and language. Because poetry forces us to pay attention to language, readers of poetry may be less taken in by “intellectual leaders”—politicians, preachers, copywriters, newscasters—who seek to enslave us through their manipulations of language. Poetry can thus help to keep “the nation’s language clear and honest.”

I like that reason a lot, actually, but it is almost spoiled by the second one Gioia offers, which is that as the fate of poetry goes, so goes the fate of other forms of American high culture. In other words, if we can rescue poetry from its marginal position, we can rescue serious drama, jazz, and classical music as well. And while that sounds nice in principle, it also seems hopelessly circular. Indeed, it tells us nothing about what poetry can do for us—unlike Gioia’s lesson about poetry and language—only about what it might do for the other arts. What those other arts could do for us, though, remains unclear.

To be fair, no one is asking Gioia to also justify these other forms of American high culture; but at the same time he cannot rest half of his defense of poetry on them either. If my spouse asks me why I’m tearing up the fence in our backyard, and I answer that because otherwise the shovel wouldn’t get used, she is not likely to find my answer very persuasive.

After all, it could well be that a culture does not truly need poetry or any of these other forms of American high culture. Surely there are other, even more democratic ways, to teach people how to keep our language—and our politics—honest and clear. Nor can one necessarily appeal to our desire for beauty or aesthetics to justify poetry since people already seem to be fulfilling that desire quite nicely, and doing so through genres, modes, and forms of culture—fiction, popular music, film, sports—that have nothing to do with poetry.

So “Can Poetry Matter” is a slightly different and, indeed, easier question to ask than “Should Poetry Matter?” and, if so, “Matter for What?”

Can Poetry Matter? Part I

“Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around—not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition’s sake.”

Dana Gioia, “Can Poetry Matter?” (1992)

Poetry, as we concluded last Monday, qua Auden, “makes nothing happen.” Instead, it “survives/ In the valley of its saying, where executives/ Would never want to tamper,” providing us solace in the “raw towns” of “isolation” and “busy griefs” that “we believe and die in.” If Dana Gioia is right, though, poetry is providing that solace to fewer and fewer people, surviving, if that description is still even apt, on the life support of creative writing programs and English Departments.

But let’s first pause and note the irony that Gioia, a well-known American poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was also a former corporate executive at General Foods. So whereas Auden celebrated that poetry would remain beyond the grasp of executives, for Gioia, the problem is that all too few executives can be bothered to tamper with it.

In his influential essay, “Can Poetry Matter,” which originally appeared in the April 1991 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Gioia lamented the marginal space poetry occupied in the contemporary art and intellectual world. This was intended to be a surprising claim since poetry appeared to be anything but marginal. Indeed, from a certain perspective, it appeared to be thriving. Just under a thousand new volumes of poetry appeared every year, and anthologies and literary magazines published still more poetry. Moreover, roughly 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the United States and more than 1,000 undergraduate ones provided several thousand jobs for poets and several tens of thousands of homes for aspiring poets. What’s more, poets and aspiring poets alike were supported by grants and fellowships offered by federal, state, and local arts programs as well as by private foundations. In short, given the number of resources devoted to it, “an observer might easily conclude that we live in a golden age of American poetry.”

Not so, Gioia charges, because despite all the resources devoted to it, American poetry is “no longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life.” It has become, instead, “the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group.” Indeed, Gioai elsewhere compares the poetry world to “subsidized farming,” which “grows food no one wants.”

It shouldn’t take you more than one, at most two guesses to determine who makes up that “relatively small and isolated group” poetry now feeds: other poets. “Over the past half century,” Gioia writes, “as American poetry’s specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined.” It cannot come close to matching the audience for literary fiction, and it is rarely if ever reviewed in daily newspapers. “The New York Times,” Gioia observes, “only reflects the opinion that although there is a great deal of poetry around, none of it matters very much to readers, publishers, or advertisers—to anyone, that is, except to other poets.”

Gioia blames poetry’s retreat on a number of figures: poets, who at public readings celebrate and sing themselves (that is, read only their own work) rather than the genre of poetry as a whole; anthologists, whose editorial principles seem driven less by poetic quality than by collegial clubbiness; reviewers of poetry, who are almost always “overwhelmingly positive” and therefore neglect their role as evaluators and guides; academics, who base their decisions about employment on quantity of publications and not necessarily on quality, which floods the market with bad or only hastily-assembled poems; and finally poets themselves, who have isolated themselves from the public by taking up residency on campuses. This last, of course, is in contrast to poets from the first half of the twentieth century, who were either professionals (Wallace Stevens the insurance executive, William Carlos Williams the doctor), literary journalists (either editors or reviewers), or unemployed ne’er do wells hanging on in bohemian genteel poverty. The result, Gioia argues, was an audience made up of “artists and intellectuals, including scientists, clergymen, educators, lawyers, and, of course, writers,” a “group of nonspecialists who took poetry as seriously as fiction and drama”—exactly the audience poetry is so grossly missing today.

At the conclusion of his essay, Gioia offers a number of proposals for restoring poetry’s nonspecialist audience. They are, for the most part, unobjectionable. I especially like three: “When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people’s work”; “Poetry teachers, especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more time on performance”; and, finally, “Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively.” Number three—poets writing prose about poetry—has come to pass to some degree as David Orr is writing honest, incisive, and even occasionally humorous poetry reviews for The New York Times and other journals. Not surprisingly, Gioia would point out, Orr is a lawyer, not an academic.

But as much as there is to applaud in Gioia’s diagnosis of poetry’s ills and his prescriptions for them, the doctor also has some rather strange things to say about the patient. We’ll take these up in Part II.