One-eyed poetry

Al Filreis

The poets who founded the Berkeley Review were deliberate moderates. They admitted that they were one-eyed poets, although the ideal is the poet with both eyes open. Political poets had been one eyed, too, but it's the other eye, so the two — the Berkeley moderates and the old rads — share the fate of the half-done not-great, and yet they can be said to be opposites. Such a classic (and typically confused) metaphor of the post-political moment.

More than political

They felt that the artist's encounter "with the cosmos" was a real thing and shouldn't be avoided or ridiculed in poetry. It was real and so "is our desire for its expression — not to create another conformity but to encourage those who feel the discomfort of our modern existences [sic] in more than topical, political and material terms."

Poetry is going to be okay

The editorial statement — I've quoted from it just above — launching this poetry magazine in the late 1950s made these points:

[] poetry is alive and well; don't worry so much about its fate or future;
[] the political periods are over and no longer affect poetics;
[] we need a verse that is more subtle - an accepting and tolerant verse
[] nature poetry is okay;
[] "partisans of the pure" are okay but there are many kinds and all are fine.

Pure politicoes, pure lovers...what's the diff?

Here are a portion of this centrist manifesto:

"We do not contemn the pure nature poets; we greet them as compatriots of another eye, as, too, with pure politicoes and pure lovers — or any other partisans of the pure — but we have chosen to close the one eye, and they the other. Yet, in our half-blindness, we still search for a two-eyed king; we pray for a three-eyed god.

"We welcome the nihilist and the zealot equally, and those struggling to account for themselves at points between. We open to those who celebrate man's existence and man's end: to those who, either having or lacking it, pursue a faith and a meaning; to those who, under the dipolar pull of the scientist and the ad man, have seen the bottoms bared and, torn away, find themselves lost — or have found themselves.

"We feel that this is a need, too clearly marked in our society today, and that many of the one-eye poets have fixed their single beams upon this point. If this magazine can become a rallying point for these, then our major function is served."

December 22, 2007

< previous post next post >

RSS feed | subscribe by email

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.