CHRISTINE KITANO Ars Poetica 2020 The Utility of

CHRISTINE KITANO Ars Poetica 2020: The Utility of Poetry in the Contemporary Moment

Ars Poetica 2020 The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College Christine Kitano July 9, 2020 Lecture Outline: I. Introduction II. Values III. Inheritance IV. Practice V. Conclusion

I. Introduction Edward Hopper’s “House at Dusk, ” 1935 “. . . And the world, like a beast, impatient and quick, Waits only for those that are dead. No death for you. You are involved. ” -Weldon Kees, “The Smiles of the Bathers”

II. Values “That 1996 anthology is one of the provocations for this essay, since it seems to me a monumental representation of the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us. It is of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet. I ardently wish I were being hyperbolical, but in fact I am exercising restraint, very difficult for a lifelong aesthete at the age of sixty-seven. One cannot expect every attempt at poetry to rival Chaucer and Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, Whitman and Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. But those poets, and their peers, set the measure: any who aspire to poetry must keep such exemplars always in mind. ” -Harold Bloom, intro to his selections for The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988 -1997

II. Values Back cover and first page of T. O. C. for The Best American Poetry 1996, ed. Adrienne Rich

II. Values “Literature is a paradoxical institution because to create literature is to write according to existing formulas—to produce something that looks like a sonnet or that follows the conventions of the novel—but it is also to flout those conventions, to go beyond them. Literature is an institution that lives by exposing and criticizing its own limits, by testing what will happen if one writes differently. ” -Jonathan Culler My Poem is life, and not finished. It shall never be finished. My Poem is life and can grow. I am not a tight-faced Poet. I am tired of little tight-faced poets sitting down to shape perfect unimportant pieces. Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can. I give you what I have. You don’t get all your questions answered in this world. How many answers shall be found in the developing world of my Poem? I don’t know. Nevertheless I put my Poem, which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can. -Gwendolyn Brooks, from “Song of Winnie”

II. Values “Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae. … Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, lectorem delectando pariterque monendo…” -Horace, Ars Poetica, lines 333— 344, ~10 B. C. E. “Poets aim to either do good or to give pleasure—or, thirdly, to say things which are both pleasing and serviceable for life…The man who combines pleasure with usefulness wins every suffrage, delighting the reader and also giving him advice…” (trans. D. A. Russell)

III. Inheritance 1 st row L to R: June Jordan, T. S. Eliot, Countee Cullen 2 nd row L to R: Amy Tan, John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman

III. Inheritance “Indeed Whitman and the traceable descendants of Walt Whitman, those who follow his democratic faith into obviously New World forms of experience and art, they suffer from establishment rejection and contempt the same as forced this archetypal American genius to publish, distribute, and review his own work, by himself…the only peoples who can test or verify the meaning of the United States as a democratic state, as a pluralistic culture, these are the very peoples whose contribution to a national vision and discovery meets with steadfast ridicule and disregard. ” -June Jordan, “For the Sake of People’s Poetry, ” 1984

III. Inheritance I, too, sing America. I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. - Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1855 Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes. ) - Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1855 I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen, ” Then. Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed— I, too, am America. Langston Hughes, “I, Too, ” 1925

III. Inheritance “Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. ” -T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent, ” 1919

III. Inheritance “One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, “I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet, ” meaning, I believe, “I want to write like a white poet”; meaning subconsciously, “I would like to be a white poet”; meaning behind that, ‘I would like to be white. ’ And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. … And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country, with their innumerable overtones and undertones, surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand. To these the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears. ” -Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, ” 1926 Yet Do I Marvel I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind, And did He stoop to quibble could tell why The little buried mole continues blind, Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die, Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus To struggle up a never-ending stair. Inscrutable His ways are, and immune To catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understand What awful brain compels His awful hand. Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing! -Countee Cullen, 1925

IV. Practice A poem can: A) Reflect and reinforce dominant ideologies B) Critique and challenge dominant ideologies C) Imagine alternate ways of being Chiura Obata, “Moonlight Over Topaz, ” 1942

IV. Practice MOONLIGHT OVER TOPAZ, after the painting by Chiura Obata I Will Explain Hope (revision) This evening, at the edge of camp, a man props an easel against the fence to paint the last of the geese before they pass over But not today, not when the wind carries for good. For all we know, forever. Above the clouds, they float like fish. He mumbles to himself about stars, about how starlight arrives far above our human heads. Down here from stars already long dead. I make no reply, and the geese cry out in their bird-language. He’s painting the landscape: topaz mountains, on its slow travel around a distant sun. white dust, low, yellow moon. Barrack, guard-tower, fence. No people. Elsewhere, lives go on, but here he paints only the moon, the pale birds, the mountains awash in ghost-light. Elsewhere, lives go on, but here we are timeless, almost immortal, and surrounded by light that fails and fails to reach us. His hand is steady. The brush captures the birds before they disappear beyond the edge of our small circle. The fields go silent. Once again, it is night. Alone I stumble home through the widening dark. only the voices of geese crying but sailing I’d swear I feel the earth’s subtle tug But I’d also believe time stopped within this patch of desert. That elsewhere, lives go on making marked progress but we remain stranded within a stalled circle, surrounded by a light that fails and fails to reach us. How far and fast it travels, this light that is already dead. How far and fast it must journey, the prayer whispered in the dark. What choice but to forgive such a brave failure?

V. Conclusion “…reflected in this collection—both by what’s here and by what is not—are the circumstances of North America…in the century’s final decade: a decade which began with Gulf War and has witnessed accelerated social disintegration, the lived effects of an economic system out of control and antihuman at its core. Contempt for language, the evisceration of meaning from words, are cultural signs that should not surprise us. Material profit finally has no use for other values, in fact reaps benefits from social incoherence and atomization, and from the erosion of human bonds of trust—in language or anything else. And so rapid has been the coming-apart during the years of the 1990 s in which these poems were being written, so stunned are so many at the violence of the dismantling (of laws, protections, opportunities, due process, mere civilities) that some of us easily forget how the history of this republic has been a double history, of selective and unequal arrangements regarding property, human bodies, opportunity, due process, freedom of expression, civility, and much else. ” -Adrienne Rich, introduction to The Best American Poetry 1996

V. Conclusion “We turn to literature to find expressions of our reality and our consciousness that are more complex and accurate, that expand our understanding of ourselves and our world. In this way, literature involves a struggle against the cliché, the stereotypical, against untruth and facile assumptions. Such a struggle often possesses political implications; as John Berger puts it in an essay in Portraits: “Reality, however one interprets it, lies beyond a screen of clichés. Every culture produces such a screen, partly to facilitate its own practices (to establish habits) and partly to consolidate its own power. Reality is inimical to those with power. ’” -David Mura, “Tradition and the Individual Talent Revisited”