Liam Rectorfrom Elitism, Populism, Laureates, and Free Speech
Towards the end of the heat-waved, smarmy summer of 2002 (Is it global warming? Could This Be The End?), two literary events took place that are worth noting. One was the gathering of many recipients of the Bollingen Prize in poetry, at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and the other was the Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo, New Jersey. Both events focused solely on poetry, but in important ways these events could not otherwise have been less alike.Fifty-three years ago, in 1949, the first Bollingen Prize went somewhat infamously to Ezra Pound. Since our Library of Congress first administered the Bollingen Prize, this amounted to a public funding of the arts, an issue that would later come to shape and define the so-called American culture wars by the late 1980s. Paul Mellon, "the patrician art collector who tenaciously turned philanthropy into his personal art form," as Mellon's obituary in the New York Times put it, was the benefactor of the Bollingen Prize, named after Carl Jung's home in Switzerland. I'm not sure Mellon, whose family made their money in banking and other businesses, knew what he was in for, having his money admin-istered through a government entity, though his private capital had indeed commingled before with government in forming our National Gallery of Art. In for a penny, as they say, in for a pound. (Pound's father worked in Philadelphia as an assayer at the U.S. Mint, and son Ezra went on to become one of our poets of money.) Awarding the Bollingen Prize to Pound became so controversial that all subsequent Bollingen awards were removed from the Library of Congress and administered privately by Yale University.
Pound, at the time he received the Bollingen, was incarcerated at St. Elizabeth's, a mental hospital in Washington, where he was sent after -being -declared mentally incompetent to stand trial on nineteen charges of treason, occasioned by Pound's radio broadcasts in Italy in support of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in World War II. A headline from the New York Times proclaimed, "Pound, in -Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Treason Cell."
The panel that awarded the Bollingen to Pound, the Fellows of the Library of Congress at that time, included W. H. Auden, Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Louise Bogan, Robert Penn Warren, Willard Thorpe, Paul Green, Katherine Anne Porter, Karl Shapiro, Katherine Garrison Chapin, Theodore Spenser, and Leonie Adams, then the resident Consultant in Poetry to the -Library of Congress, a position that eventually morphed into our current national Poet Laureateship. The only dissenters in awarding the prize to Pound were Karl Shapiro and Katherine Garrison Chapin. Chapin considered it "unwise for the Library of Congress to single out a traitor for recognition; the traitor could not be separated from the poet--his anti-democratic, anti-Semitic fulminations ran through his whole work."
The main issue that ran through the debate that ensued was whether a poet or any artist could be judged purely on aesthetic principles and merits alone, without regard to the "content" of the art or the politics, virtues, and vices of the poet his or her self. That is a debate still raging, I'd argue, and when its context involves public funding most everyone has an opinion and certainly everyone has a stake in it. For privately funded awards, one has the model of laissez-faire capitalism, an unfettered exchange in the free marketplace of ideas, but where public funds are expended we have a power and reality of the purse that comes, some would argue, with decidedly different strings attached.
The Bollingen debate about public funds -traveled mainly along the lines of treason, anti-democratic values, and anti-Semitism where Pound was concerned, but that debate has also since been known to travel along lines from McCarthyism and communism to blasphemy, obscenity, racism, sexism, homophobia, "promotion of the homosexual lifestyle," and other "contents" that red-flag funding from left to right, politically and morally. All of these "contents," with the exceptions of treason, obscenity, and a few others, such as libel, are protected by the vicissitudes of jurisprudence in our freedoms of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This Constitution and its First Amendment guarantee our rights to be controversial in speech and expression--to be, even, an asshole, right or left--until we pass from the contents of speech and artistic expression to the behaviors of illegal harm. Some argue that certain speech and expression are and cause harm, but so far the line between speech and behavior has been upheld by our courts, judged in often boring detail by a jury of our peers, yet that line does not necessarily hold in the sometimes thoughtless, atti-tudinizing court of public opinion.
Into this history this summer marched some of the subsequent Bollingen Prize recipients. The Bollingen since Pound has gone to many of the major poets of our time, including Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, Robert Frost, John Berryman, A. R. Ammons, and to many poets still alive, most of whom were honored in New Haven this summer, including John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Louise GlŸck, Anthony Hecht, John -Hollander, Donald Justice, Stanley Kunitz, W. S. Merwin, Gary Snyder, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur.
One of the most obvious things about the Bollingen recipients there gathered at Yale was the conspicuous absence of women. Aside from Gluck, these were all guys, and white guys, to boot. (Mona Van Duyn, it was announced, was unable to -attend.) One didn't have to vet the event through multicultural lens or quotas nor subject these choices to the postmodern American trinity of race, region, and gender to note that there were some very conspicuous absences, even if (even especially if) the award is based on aesthetic principles and achievements alone, as it seemingly has been from its very get-go. Indulging in the sport of second-guessing awards recipients, anthological, or canonical choices aside, the broad spectrum of literary merit was not really represented in New Haven, by practically anyone's lights. But the award is private and in some sense it is nobody else's business.
In fact many of these poets and their particular poems are favorites of mine, but the combined effect of these Bollingen poets gathered at Yale was largely an atmosphere of smug self-satisfaction and the kind of snobbery that gives elitism, which I take to be the honoring of the best in a given field of endeavor, a bad name. As something of an unreconstructed elitist, I was a bit ashamed by what I witnessed. Elitism without due access to achieving and recognizing excellence is nothing more than snobbery and clubbishness.
The panels of Bollingen recipients on traditions in American poetry and the craft of poetry today were largely intellectually vacuous, exhausted, narcissistic, and self-congratulatory. On one panel J. D. McClatchy as moderator tried to lead the panel beyond the private ruminations of those gathered to the public dimensions and prospects of American aesthetics, but that rope could not be got to rise. W. S. Merwin gave a reasonable account of -himself, and (shades of academic vs. beat!) Gary -Snyder and Robert Creeley were smart, historically informed, ranging, and articulate, but the panels by and large were a vast disappointment. John Hollan-der was so busy fighting crazed paper tigers that he should be issued some award for being our current reactionary extraordinaire. The barbarians at the gate seem to be a kind of solution for Mr. Hollander.
Mark Strand did raise one interesting and critical point: that when he is judging awards or prizes he tends to do so with two minds: one that issues forth from his subjective tastes and judgments and one that views things through the lens of democratic principles and responsibilities, and there's the not quite age-old American rub.
I left New Haven thinking how this was all built, in its first world, upon olde Ezra Pound. Would I have judged the first Bollingen Prize along the lines solely of aesthetic principles and artistic achievement? Indeed I would have, but then I'm an east coast elitist aesthete in love with freedom of speech, the unfettered marketplace of ideas, the access to excellence which America promises (ponder for a moment the poignance of "community" colleges and the stepping stones they provide to "higher" education), and I'm self-sworn to abiding with all these, however much trouble or contradictions these -values create for me in the current atmospheres.
At the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey, days later, a more populist beast was much on the prowl. Thousands were in attendance, and the headlining poets included Amiri Baraka, Coleman Barks, Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Edward Hirsch, Marie Howe, Stanley Kunitz, Li-Young Lee, Heather McHugh, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Grace Paley, Robert Pinsky, Gerald Stern, and several others. People roamed about from the main tent to smaller tents, attending scheduled -readings, open readings, talks, an enormous bookstall, musi-cal performances, the booths of literary service organi-zations, and a basic Woodstockian gathering of many literary tribes. In this somewhat -rural idyll in the Garden State, there was a sense of the polis, of the choir, of raised voices in the choir, and all writers and readers of poetry owe a debt of grati-tude to James Haba, the founder and director of such a festival.The reason poets cannot directly make a living off their art is one thing and one thing only: the dearth of readers of poetry. Attendance at Haba's festival points the way whereby the demand might some day come at least to approach the supply. Shakespeare had it right when he asked what is the virtue of numbers, and the number of readers is surely only one aspect in the life of poetry, but more readers would go a long way towards curing the pandemic bitterness and whining among poets, along with providing not only a life but a livelihood beyond the one to be found by teaching.
A talk among former U.S. poet laureates Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, and the current laureate, Billy Collins, was especially telling. Amidst the obligatory deriding of state, institutions, Anglophilia, and anything other than The Rugged Individual, these laureates got around to flushing out what the role of the American laureate has been and might be in the nation, in the states, and at more local levels. Following somewhat the lead of Joseph Brodsky, Rita Dove was aptly credited with having made the laureateship an up & at 'em post, practicing a kind of Star Trek approach in taking poetry to places it had never been before, and Hass, Pinsky, and Collins have followed her lead into projects and presences of their own.
Particularly notable, I think, has been Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project, a project that has produced two anthologies and is an example of where popu-lism might ably lie down with elitism and have no condescension, patronizing, nor derision on either end. The people who chose the poems for Pinsky's anthologies were by and large civilians, not poets or literary critics, but their choices of poems were based on the poems they thought best. (And these choices were vetted, elite-style, by those who decided which poems and which articulations about the poems were The Best and merited inclusion.) Much of the populace at large, by the way, has little problem with elitism, in poetry or in such things as sports or cabinet-making, and it's primarily anti-intellectual jerks and educated members of the chattering class who so deride the pursuit and honoring of excellence.
Robert Pinsky, it should also be noted, has recently done more for poetry and for public funding of the arts than any other single individual by appearing regularly and articulately as a poet on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the public television news program that is devoutly (and I mean devoutly) watched by public and private decision-makers, empowered wonks of all stripes, elite or no.
But the largest news to come out of the Dodge Festival this summer was the poem read by Amiri Baraka, which caused some flap within the festival itself but fanned out quickly in the ensuing months into a national debate. The gist of it was this: Baraka, the recently appointed poet laureate of New Jersey, a position that carries with it a $10,000 stipend, read a poem called "Somebody Blew Up America," a poem he'd written and published on the Internet and read at readings months before his appointment as laureate, a poem that included the following lines:
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?And also these lines:
Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notionThe entire five-page or so poem is a litany and list-ing, an interrogation and j'accuse of many powers-that-be, real and perceived, full of equal--opportunity denunciation and invective. The lines above were incessantly singled out, but even within the -context of the entire poem the meaning is not significantly changed by their being excerpted, and the lines must be come to terms with on their own. (In terms of raw literary merit, a criterion by which poems truly can be judged, I'd judge "Somebody Blew Up Amer-ica" to be a painfully second-rate and deriva-tive "Howl.")
In any case, "coming to terms" in the media first involved a piece in The Jewish Standard, a north Jersey paper, which alerted the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. The governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey, then called for Baraka's resignation. A spokesperson for McGreevey noted that the gover-nor strongly condemned any racist or anti-Semitic behavior, and said, "The language used in Mr. Baraka's recent poem should be interpreted as stating that Israelis were forewarned of the -September 11th terrorist attacks. Mr. Baraka should clarify the intent of his language, apologize for any potential misinterpretation of his language, and resign." Baraka refused to apologize or resign.
The matter was then picked up by the New York Times, with coverage soon afterwards in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, all over the country through Associated Press, and in many other venues, including "The Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker and the conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, with an editorial soon cropping up in the New York Times. Op-ed columnists also weighed in, from Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune, Richard Cohen of theWashington Post, Michael Judge of the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe, Lloyd Williams of The Black World Today, Ward Connerly in the Washington Times, and others, and by then the matter was then truly off to the national races.
At least poetry wasn't being ignored. (The opposite of love is not hate; the opposite of love is indifference.) It's been acknowledged that in some countries poets are thrown in jail for what they say, and that's their punishment. In the U.S. what poets say is ignored, and that's their punishment. A poet wasn't being thrown in jail or being ignored, but in between fell the shadow of being asked to resign.
Myrna Shinbaum, a spokesperson for the Anti-Defamation League, said, "Clearly, the poet laureate has bought into the big lie that Jews are respon-sible for 9/11. While he has every right to write poetry as he chooses, to represent the state of New Jersey, we find that extremely offensive. We -applaud the governor for trying to do what he can in this instance."
Baraka denied that the poem is anti-Semitic and said he saw the lines as a criticism of Israel as an imperialist state who indeed did have foreknowledge of September 11th. Baraka said he got his information from the Internet and that not only did Israel and Bush know about the bombing in advance but so too did other countries. Baraka apparently, as columnist Clarence Page pointed out, "is probably one of those people who disbelieves what he hears in the major media but believes everything he sees on the Internet." Baraka released a five-page statement that ranted so ineloquently and was so basically incomprehensible that it did little to further his position.
As a long-time defender of freedom of speech, I agreed to appear on The O'Reilly Factor, a right-wing food-fight of a television program that is comparable to Rush Limbaugh's program on the radio. Defending the role of laureateships, opposing the firing of Baraka, and espousing Voltaire's classical free speech position--I disagree with what you have said but will defend unto the death your right to say it--I was patronizingly called "Professor" and all but shouted down, but I was glad to make my points on enemy turf rather than preaching to the presumably converted. When it came up that I would appoint someone like Allen Ginsberg as poet laureate of New Jersey, I was denounced for encouraging the appointment of someone who favored man/boy relations. Bill O'Reilly's brand of populism--anti-intellectual, anti-elitism, and quick to hurl the accusation of moral turpitude at anyone, by way of mere association--is the kind of populism that gives populism its bad name.
I find Allen Ginsberg's questioning of the age of consent credible, but I find advocating unfettered sexual relations between adults and children abhorrent. I detest what I take to be Baraka's lie about Israel in his poem and I find the poem's implications irresponsible and despicable. But there is a line between speech and harmful behavior that our First Amendment honors, and I do feel (as do our courts) that once the state has provided public funding or position to an artist, their speech and expression is still protected by that First Amendment. (A New Jersey politician even stated that he would not stand for Baraka's kind of speech from other state employees, and that kind of unconstitutional intolerance for the speech of state workers is a place surely none among us wants to go.)
On an episode of last season's West Wing, Laura Dern played a national poet laureate (shocking, shocking, to see such a creature on prime-time network television fare!). The laureate said she felt some apprehension about being chosen laureate because she thought that controversial poets like Allen Ginsberg and Adrienne Rich would never be appointed, that whoever was chosen as poet laureate would always be too "safe." Sadly, I'd agree with her assessment, though I'm not yet ready to throw the baby of the poet laureateship out with the bathwater of prospective "safe" appointments. (If public funding for the arts or appointments to the laureateship comes to be more censorious or dubious, I may yet be.)
The right response to free speech, however hateful, however much it gores one's own ox, is more free speech, more debate--even censure, if warranted, but not censorship. I realize that there are many who disagree with me on this, and I realize moreover that abiding with the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment is one of the most counter--intuitive fidelities ever rehearsed. Of course we want to punch someone in the nose or fire them when we're offended, but the logic and the sophis-tication of the First Amendment, among other things, rightly prevents us from doing just that. Attempts to encode and enforce "hate speech" strictures at American universities have rightly been turned back as unconstitutional, however well--intended their original motives might have been. We have every reason and most of the means to punish hateful and harmful behavior, but if the classical distinction between behavior and speech is eroded we would all have to live with a riot of political correctness from both the right and the left that few of us, I have to believe, would really want to live with. It might be said that tolerance of hate speech (or tolerance of anything) makes us weak and feckless, as a nation. In fact it is our greatest tensile strength.There is no constitutional imperative for the U.S. government or any state to fund the arts nor appoint poet laureates, but once such a wise investment in our arts and our poetry has come into -being, those funded do and should enjoy constitutional protections, whatever the power of the purse otherwise. Whatever one might think otherwise, that is the law.
As the New York Times editorial stated, "Any -notion that Baraka's offensiveness should be a -reason to fire or silence him is in itself offensive. Mr. Baraka is not the state's spokesperson. He is a poet and he was chosen, at least partly, because of the way he seeks to give voice to the minority community. Like Mr. Baraka, that community can often be angry. Allowing him the freedom to express that anger seems part of the point of the exercise."
I was once invited to be part of an international writer's festival in what was then called Yugoslavia, before it was blown apart by its factions, in a visit sponsored by the U.S. State Department. When I asked a person at the State Department if there were any limits on what I might say, given the federal money that was sending me (the old Whose-Bread-I-Eat, Their-Song-I'll-Sing quandary), I was told I was free to say anything I chose, but that where my views departed from official U.S. policy I should identify my remarks as being my own opinion. Fair enough, I judged. Part of what I was advertising, as an American participant in such a festival, was American freedom of speech. Whether any appointed poet laureate is a spokesperson in all circumstances for federal or state government is an argument worth having, and here we will probably be breaking new ground, legally.
Liam Rector's books of poems are American Prodigal and The Sorrow of Architecture. He directs the Writing Seminars at Bennington College and is this fall also teaching at Columbia University.
