Tony Hoagland

from Three Tenors: Gluck, Hass, Pinsky, and the Deployment of Talent

The artistic life begins in instinct and moves towards calculation; or maybe, it begins in blind obsession and ends in self-possession. Or does it begin in play, and end in ambition? Or, some say, it begins in inspiration, and moves towards repetition. Whichever version you subscribe to, the loss of innocence is inevitable, and it is indeed a loss--but one that has its compensations. Some of the names of that compensation are skill, perspective and choice.

The stories of poetic change are the legends of the craft: Yeats's renunciation of romance in his fifties; Adrienne Rich's defiant rejection of the polished patriarchal conventions of her apprenticeship; C. K. Williams's poetical conversion from the 70s idiom of quasi-surrealism to the complex, discursive sentences of With Ignorance and Tar. The case histories of repetition are also well known: poets who seem caught, anchored to a subject or style from which they cannot depart.

As a contemporary reader, to be delivered a good poet book-by-book is an enthralling drama. One comes to recognize the athleticism and resilience required of the serious poet, the physical and spiritual resourcefulness, the ways in which fixity of character and self-invention are sometimes at odds, the way obsession struggles against and then suddenly, sometimes, collaborates with discovery. "Professional poet" is a laughable expression, but perhaps it is in the throes of self-alteration that a poet proves herself or himself most professional.

Yet the resources required to reconfigure a talent are quite distinct from the ones required to discover a first way of writing. The veteran artist knows so much more than the apprentice, has so much more craft at his/her disposal, better understands the panorama of possibility. But she also knows more about mere competence, and about the elusiveness of the radiant thing itself. To revise artistic direction requires not the lunging, half-ignorant zeal of the beginner, but a knowledgeable unmaking, a cold self-assessment and slow reconception. Strategic intelligence is one of those essential, rarely mentioned dimensions of talent, unromantic as a T-square, but without it, change is a guessing game. Everyone has a nose, said Auden, but not everyone knows where to point it.

Helen Vendler, in her book The Breaking of Style, draws an analogy which underscores the drama of such changes:

When a poet puts off an old style (to speak for a moment as if this was a deliberate undertaking), he or she perpetrates an act of violence...on the self. It is not too much to say that the old body must be dematerialized if the poet is to assume a new one....One is repelled by one's present body and cannot inhabit it any longer....The fears and regrets attending the act of permanent stylistic change can be understood by analogy to divorce, expatriation, and other such painful spiritual or imaginative departures. It is hoped, of course, that the new body--like the new spouse or the new country--will be more satisfactory than the old, but it is a hope, not a certainty.

The three poets discussed here--Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, and Louise Gluck--are among the most resilient of American writers. Prominent members of their generation, all three have fashioned sizeable, rich bodies of work. Their material success--publication, prizes and status--is the stuff of book jackets, but on a more impressive level, their significance has been registered by readers. Each of these poets has written touchstone poems, whose appearance has rippled through our poetry culture: Hass's "Meditation at Lagunitas," Pinsky's "Shirt," and Gluck's "Mock Orange" are some easily named examples.

Each of these three careers also displays an intense, ongoing meditation about form and subject matter. One feels that each, in different ways, has confronted the fixedness of a poetic identity and managed to break it open, to begin again. Hass and Pinsky, in very distinct ways, have explored the limits of conversational meditation, and gone beyond them. Gluck, after succeeding brilliantly at dramatic monologue in its received forms, has extended and deepened its range. Their evolutions tell us something about the dogged, wrangling journey of the artist.

Robert Pinsky: Glittering Appetite
Robert Pinsky is a much stranger poet than is generally acknowledged. As the U.S. Poet Laureate, he was such a skilled diplomat that people, perhaps unconsciously, assumed his poetry to be also civic or democratic. His public articulateness, the communal role he has argued for American poetry, and his personal charisma likewise seem to have cast a spell on the reading public, convincing them that Pinsky the poet is some sort of Horace or Whitman. The truth is more complicated. True, Pinsky eloquently argues for the synthetic, integrative function of poetry in a culture. But Pinsky the poet has been an innovative, deeply eccentric, and anomalous presence in American poetry. Restlessness has been a large part of his story: his own poetry embodies dramatic shifts of style, from the fluent discursive values of his first several books to the highly compacted, intensely lyrical, sometimes hermetic fabrications of his later work.

In the long discursive poem of his second book, An Explanation of America, and in his essays in The Situation of Poetry, Pinsky was an authoritative exponent of the sense-making, essayistic conversational aspect of poetry. Here, in his own words, are the values Pinsky advocated in The Situation of Poetry, his 1976 ars poetica:

Discursive....The word signifies going through or going over one's subject. Whether digressively or directly, at a walk or at a run, the motion is on the ground and by foot, putting its weight part by part onto the terrain to be covered. Such a method tends to be inclusive; it also tends to be the opposite of intuitive. It even tends to be earnest ...it is primarily neither ironic nor ecstatic. The idea is to have all of the virtues of prose, in addition to those qualities and degrees of precision which can be called poetic.

Even in this description of an aesthetic he advocates, Pinsky seems to be acknowledging its limitations, what it is not--not intuitive, but reasoned; not "fancy," but earnest; not emphatically witty, but plain. Neither ironic nor ecstatic. Possibly even, his metaphor acknowledges, pedestrian.

Modesty aside, Pinsky's own discursive work is swift and protean--here is a passage from the long inventive poem An Explanation of America, in which the poet tries to name what a culture, in particular, what American culture, is:

A country is the things it wants to see.
If so, some part of me, though I do not,
Must want to see these things--as if to say
"I want to see the calf with two heads suckle
I want to see the image of a woman
in rapid sequence of transparencies
projected on a flat bright surface, conveying
the full illusion and effect of motion
in vast varying scale, with varying focus
swallow the image of her partner's penis.
I want to see enormous colored pictures
of people with impossible complexions...
I want to see men playing with balls.

Not without wit (the droll contrast between diction and subject in the description of pornography), or speed, or surprise, or manifold catalogues of tactile data, An Explanation of America is nonetheless certainly essayistic, governed by the patient, capacious rationality of a speaker who knows and declares his own intentions. As he says later in the same passage, "I want our country like a common dream / to be between us in what we want to see." That notion of commonality, of the poet as tribal sense-maker, persists in Pinsky's work, though the terms of the poems transform substantially.

What would, for example, the earlier Pinsky have made of the terse, incantatory, somewhat hermetic style of "Hut," which, like many of Pinsky's later poems, plunges into a clipped, dense set of vocables without much explanatory preparation?

Hut
Nothing only
what it was--

Slates, burls, rims

Their names like the circus
lettering on a van: Bros. and Movers,
symmetrical buds of
meaning in the spurs and serifs
of scarlet with gold outlines.

Transport and Salvage,
Moving and Storage

The house by the truck yard:
Flag walk. Shake siding. The frontyard spruce
A hilt of shadows

This brief passage shows the same investigative spirit about the world which motivates and animates Pinsky's early work, but the poet's style of presentation has changed: from a reader-friendly style of casual explication to a more incantatory, impersonal form of enunciation. The discursive lubrication with which the earlier Pinsky presented the poem has been replaced by a love of abruptness, collision and collage. Grammatically, this transformation is manifested in a shift from long unwinding sentences to short units of lyric fragment which don't explain themselves, often not even formalized by an article. He has gone, one might say, from explicator to gnostic namer, from the secular, discursive Horatian thinker-poet to a more compressed priest-like voice, intent on Mystery. Pinsky's poems, some of them at least, have assumed the very characteristics he once enumerated as non-discursive: they are intuitive and ecstatic.

The particular province of Pinsky's vision, his great topic, is the project of Culture: its manifold forms and origins, its encoded heritages and layerings. He is fascinated by the way the physical and the spiritual shape each other in joists and pottery, typographical fonts and dentures. His visionary contribution to that topic is to represent how Culture is continuous with Nature--continuous, in fact, with Creation: how language itself, as an inspired embodiment of culture, is deep and numinous. In "The Haunted Ruin," for example, he posits the continuity of biology and technology; how the warmth of the human hand enters the plastic of the computer keyboard, how the circuitry of microchip and coded information are continuous with blood and history:

Even your computer is a haunted ruin, as your
Blood leaves something of itself, warming
The tool in your hand.

From far off, down the billion corridors
of the semiconductor, military
Pipes grieve at the junctures.

This too smells of the body, its heated
Polymers smell of breast milk
and worry sweat.

Hum of so many cycles in current, voltage
of the past. Sing, wires. Feel, hand. Eyes,
Watch and form.

This effort to look everywhere, to survey and handle, is a central characteristic of Pinsky's ambition as a poet. The kaleidoscope of experience entrances him, and he wishes to render it and praise it, to invoke it and to provoke us to wonder. The drama of his stylistic transformation, from explainer to invoker, says something about the oddity and confidence of this poet. That lyric, shamanic impulse can be heard again in "Jersey Rain," the title poem from Pinsky's most recent book, which ends, "Original milk, replenisher of grief, / descending destroyer, arrowed source of passion / silver and black, executioner, source of life." In moments like this, both ornamental and emotional, Pinsky has made himself a true anomaly: a modern poet of sacramental oratory. One can't help but think of the famous credo in Rilke's "Ninth Elegy":

    Are we perhaps, here just for saying:
House, Bridge, Gate, Fountain, Gate, Jug, 
   Olive Tree, Window--
        ...but for saying, remember,
oh for such saying as never the things 
    themselves
hoped so intensely to be.

One side-effect of Pinsky's rhetorical intensity is its occasionally intimidating affect. Pinsky's poetic intelligence is so substantial that anything that he writes has enormous authority, but it can seem a kind of made strength, daunting and impersonal. In their tensile, high-powered radiance, their modernist made-ness and velocity, his verbal surfaces can sometimes seem armor-like, gleaming but hard. Some relaxed qualities of the human voice, deliberately or inadvertently, are forged out of the mix. One looks admiringly at the variety and temerity of his work, the adventurousness of his vision, and yet one sometimes feels buffeted by the glittering intellect of the song.

Despite that somewhat formidable quality, in many ways Pinsky is the least-alienated of the poets considered here and perhaps the widest-ranging in his celebration of life. Where Hass finds emotional refuge in the world of nature, and Gluck lodges her sense of self within the logical fortresses of self-argument, Pinsky roams through the realms of data and modernity, multiculturalism and technology and artifact, with gusto and appetite. He has an uncommon, uncontemporary enthusiasm for the created.

Likewise, his relationship with language is strikingly unalienated. In an age which mistrusts language as never before, in which many poets take the inadequacy of speech as a central preoccupation, he is that rarity: the contemporary poet who has found language endlessly adequate, deep, fruitful, and entertaining. For him the activity of naming is both sacred and pleasurable, numinous as anything else in creation. Those who take Pinsky for an academic are mistaken; it is more true to say that he is a brazen polyglot, who loves to fuse different materials and styles into his fabric. In this sense, it's not wrong to describe him as a poet of archaic mission and postmodern manners.

Pinsky can still be seen as a poet trying to balance comprehensiveness with compression, braininess with accessibility. In the recent work, many poems seem to have adjusted themselves into the mode of the ode, a song of praise in which resourcefulness, not closure or persuasion, is important. Here is a passage from "To Television":

Terrarium of dreams and wonders.
Coffer of shades, ordained
Cotillion of phosphers
Or liquid crystal

Homey miracle, tub
Of acquiescence, vein of defiance.
Your patron in the pantheon would be Hermes

Raster dance,
Quick one, little thief, escort
Of the dying and comfort of the sick,

In a blue glow my father and little sister sat
Snuggled in one chair watching you
Their wife and mother was sick in the head
I scorned you then as I scorned so much.

This shows something, perhaps, of how Pinsky has deployed his intellectual and verbal facility: to venerate a popular cultural experience despised by high culture, employing a language which is itself complex and variably elevated, but not exactly academic. "Vein of defiance"? What that means, I haven't a clue. But "little thief, escort / of the dying" is beautiful, exact, complex in resonance, and bold. Pinsky the mature poet seems willing to be difficult, or even intermittently obscure, for the sake of his cobbled poem. At the same time, the brief personal story of the fourth stanza above also shows how well Pinsky understands the necessary counterpoint of high and low, the shiny filigreed and the warmly homespun. Most of his poems wisely make a point, like this, of quilting a narrative window into their lapidary surfaces. (Such moments show, perhaps, something of what he learned from Marianne Moore.) Likewise in his audacious "Ode to Meaning" (also in Jersey Rain) he free-associates on meaning itself:

Untrusting I court you. Wavering
I seek your face. I read
That Crusoe's knife
Reeked of you, that to defile you
The soldier makes the rabbi spit on the Torah.
"I'll drown my book," says Shakespeare.

but later in the poem arrives at the passionate declaration:

Absence,
Or presence ever at play:
Let those scorn you who never
Starved in your dearth. If I
Dare to disparage
Your harp of shadows I taste
Wormwood and motor oil, I pour
Ashes on my head. You are the wound. You
Be the medicine.

This seems powerful, daring and authentic, at once old and new; also, it is unlike anything else contemporary.

Truly, Pinsky seems to have invented his own form and style in this confident shamanic eccentricity, something fashioned from the past and the present, a poetry both sound- and intellect-intensive. These poems accommodate feeling and intellect, they survey the human enterprise, they almost always touch on (like Milosz, another notable influence) the history of human consciousness, and its place in nature. His rhetorical capacity and cultural acumen suggest at least one possibility for the future: the potential to engage social-political matter in a more partisan manner. Pinsky's poetic gifts are better suited than almost anyone's to represent the postmodern situation--its wonders, duplicities, and estrangements. From the start of his career, in various ways, he has been thinking creatively for the We. In his muscular, inventive way, he could go in any direction.

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Tony Hoagland's third collection of poems, What Narcissism Means to Me, will be published by Graywolf in October. In January 2004 he joins the faculty of the University of Houston. He also teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA program. contents | previous