Another thing I liked--

a Pegasus for poetry

If you write poetry or love to read poetry, you might like to read this Paris Review interview with the late Peter Levi (1931-2000), poet and writer and classics scholar, a Jesuit priest for 29 years, and one of those lucky souls elected Oxford Professor of Poetry. I read it last night (hat tip to A. M. Juster) and then again this morning. It is long and crammed with interesting talk about his life and poetry, and it's opinionated enough that a reader finds points of disagreement--that's part of what makes it so interesting. Now I think that I would like to read something of his. (Via twitter, editor John Wilson tells me that the Brigid Allen biography of Peter Levi is quite good.) Here are a few samples that by no means exhaust what is curious or compelling in the interview (The Art of Poetry, no. 24):

ON LIFE WITHOUT WRITING POEMS

George Seferis in a diary speaks of life, without writing poems, as a disorder. I remember thinking when I read that first, it’s the opposite. Poems are a disorder. However necessary and desirable, however protecting the survival of the brute life of childhood, a disorder. But now after a long time of not writing poems, I see he’s right. Without writing one just piles up like heaps of leaves. One doesn’t know what is happening or who one is. And soon one will not dare ask, perhaps, any honest question. Or worse, one may stumble unguarded on some honest answer. Because there is no way of knowing the implications of feeling, except of precise feeling, of something quite exact, as happens in a poem. It is as if poetry were a continual whale spouting or breathing. And yet this is not why one writes poetry. One writes it because of the things themselves, and the words themselves, and the people themselves.

ON YEATS AND THE SERIOUS

He makes a kind of compelling noise, doesn’t he? He’s the ancient mariner all right. Yeats worked from notes too. One of the most impressive things that I know about him comes from his notebooks. He writes out in prose several times, beginnings for a poem. He starts out by saying: “I have often taken off my clothes, both fast and slowly, for this or that woman.” He goes on in that boring, silly old man’s way. Very embarrassing. And then, do you know what the first lines of that poem are?

That is no country for old men. The young 
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

It makes me cry it’s so beautiful. If you’re a poet, when you start to write, then you are serious. Or you’d better be. None of us can be serious all the time. To be serious in that sense requires a lot of things, such as being relaxed beforehand, things like love and generosity, and discipline, and a sufficient degree of venom. Self-hatred, love of others, hatred of others . . . all these things you need . . . whatever is the right mixture for you.

ON READERS

You can drive out bad writing by good writing only because the public reads your works and not the other works. Therefore it’s the readers who do it, not the writer. Language lives in the mouth.

At play in the fields of the word--

What is the front of the jacket of Glimmerglass
doing here? Because the book is now in
pre-order, and I have a duty to thrust
it in front of noses! So here,
I have done my duty by my publisher,
and I hope you'll read it. If you do,
let me know what you think. It's
very, very different from my 2012 novel,
A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage.
Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt.

OPENING THE MATRESHKAS

Today I feel like exploring Dan Piepenbring's article in The Daily Paris Review about Cory Arcangel's little book (Working on My Novel) of other people's tweets. The tweets are things like this: "Currently working on my novel and listen [sic] to music. Yeah I'm a writer deal with it." Examining the essay is a bit like exploring the outermost box in an array of puzzle boxes (tweeters inside Archangel inside Piepenbring), but I think the effort may reveal something about the state of things. What things? Oh, art, literature, writers.

CULTURAL BOX OR MULTIVERSE?

Dan Piepenbring is fairly severe on the book:

it’s the story of what it means to live in a cultural climate that stifles almost every creative impulse, and why it so often seems we should stop trying. Arcangel suggests there’s something inherently ennobling in trying to write, but his book is an aggregate of delusion, narcissism, procrastination, boredom, self-congratulation, confusion—every stumbling block, in other words, between here and art. Working captures the worrisome extent to which creative writing has been synonymized with therapy; nearly everyone quoted in it pursues novel writing as a kind of exercise regimen.

Well, that is a sad assessment, isn't it? To counter it, I'd say that a good many of us have managed to build our own little world inhabited by fellow artists near and far, and that there are many worlds inside this one. It really is a multiverse, even when you don't leave the planet. I have plenty of friends in the arts who feel some sort of struggle with invisibility, but I don't see their attitudes in that depressing, sour list of adjectives. Nor do I find "exercise regimen" as a good description of novel-making by my friends, though I know exactly what Piepenbring means. Those of us who pursue the arts don't have to live in that kind of atmosphere. We can shape our own world within this world. We can choose.

PROVING GROUND OR JOYFUL PLAY?

Even as fewer people read novels, we’re made to feel that writing one is a worthy, rigorous enterprise for serious thinking people, a means of proving that we have reservoirs of mindfulness and discipline deeper than our peers’.

Really? Could this be a sincere statement? I am not made to feel such things. Making a piece of art does demand a certain amount of focus and persistence, but I'm bemused about why anybody would write one simply to prove him- or herself better than others. That's certainly not my experience. I write a novel when I have a whopping desire to tell a story, to thrust words around in wonderful patterns, and to revel in truth and beauty. I want to frolic in language.

And also I want to write a novel or story or poem because of that old-fashioned word, inspiration. I may feel a rush of inspiration; it's heady; it's joyous; it's wondrous. I want to make something because life is bigger and more satisfying when I make things. (Reading, I should say, is also a participation in making a world and is an experience made by writer and reader together.) For a writer, there's little better than what Tom Disch called the lyric gush, and once experienced, a writer tends to want that sensation again and again. It's found more in poetry, but also at times in the novel.

NEED TO? WANT TO?

And so we try to write fiction, though certainly we don’t need to, and, as this book attests, we often don’t especially want to, even if we greet the task steeled by a perfect cup of coffee, a glass of red wine and a hot bath, or an Eminem song.

Nah, we don't "need to"; the human race got along just fine without novels. But hey, some of us want to write novels and stories and poems and long-poems. We just do. We feel the desire bubbling up like a spring--like pent joy. We don't need the right pen or the right drink or the right background sound because we have the rush of desire, the onset of high playfulness, and the pleasure in pouring words into new shapes.

FAILING / BETTERING 

Indeed, if you hope to Fail Better—and if you hold up literature, as a writer or reader, as a form of bettering yourself, warts and all—you risk ensnaring yourself in a paradox that Jonathan Franzen wrote about in 1996, more than a decade before Twitter even existed:
You ask yourself, why am I bothering to write these books? ... I can’t stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don’t believe that everything that’s wrong with the world has a cure, and even if I did, what business would I, who feel like the sick one, have in offering it? It’s hard to consider literature a medicine, in any case, when reading it serves mainly to deepen your depressing estrangement from the mainstream; sooner or later the therapeutically minded reader will end up fingering reading itself as the sickness.

The Glimmerglass minotaur is here
because I thought he went well
with Beckett. Didn't Beckett
advise young writers to despair?
And youth was sacrificed to
 the original minotaur...

Okay, we're back to Beckett once again and the recent converting of a literary phrase into a fashionable buzzword for the business and sports world. Fail better. Failbetter. Really? Is that a workable goal? Did anybody ever continue reading and find out what came next? As, "Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good." Etcetera.

This "better yourself" business is a peculiar way to look at art. Piepenbring and Franzen are both right about that. But the idea is not wholly wrong because art is one of the things that makes you bigger on the inside. It just is. There's no way to avoid that change. Pursue truth and beauty (rather that bestsellerdom and fame), and you will live a larger life. Period. Maybe that's not something you can take to the bank, but it is wonderful. It's silly to reduce everything to dollars.

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL

Hawthorne's Artist of the Beautiful, Owen Warland, looked very strange to his American materialist friends, but the art he made and shared with them--whether they appreciated it or not--did indeed change the world. Pursuing beauty and mystery and the truth of nature changed him. It enlarged his being. It changed his life. It changed his discernment. It added to the sum of beauty and truth in the world, even if his perfect work of art lasted only a little while.

ESTRANGEMENT

Moreover, what's wrong with being estranged from the mainstream? I grasp the whole passage and its tone, but I still don't like it. Being "estranged" from the mainstream tends to be a positive good for that unfashionable substance, the soul--or if you don't like the idea of a soul, well, it's a positive good for the mind and heart. I think both writers probably know this, but it's not fashionable to talk about heart or soul except in an ironic way; that's part of why the reader ends up "fingering" literature itself as sickness-causing and estranging. He's already estranged from parts of himself...

UNTRAMMELED JOY IN CREATION

And so Working on My Novel is a brilliant litmus test—there are those who will read it as a paean to the fortitude of the creative spirit, and those who will read it as a confirmation of the novel’s increasing impotence. A form that should provide a “radical critique of the therapeutic society,” as Franzen writes, has instead been co-opted by that society. It’s failing better than the best Fail Better adherent could hope.

"Paean to the fortitude of the creative spirit" is deliberate jargon, a glass of liquid horse manure with a twist of lime, as the writer of the article meant it to be. The tweets chosen don't seem inspiring to him, so the writer may well be leaning toward "increasing impotence" in his judgment of culture and the novel. But you know what? Writing or making art generally is not about "fortitude" of "the creative spirit." It's about the unfailing energy of Creation; it's about a person longing to catch some of that waterfall energy in a net of words, in sub-creation. It's about the sheer, raging joy of playing with words. It's about having more life. It's about trying to make something live--to capture the feeling of life and energy in words.

THE LIVING NOVEL

There's more than one way to make "radical critique of the therapeutic society." A truly radical turn away from current-day culture could well be a book that looks nothing like the "realistic social novel" to those who like to categorize types of novels and romances. (I don't, and I don't believe in realism. As I've said many times, if we could reach realism, we could replace reality. Novels are all on a spectrum, and they are all fantastic in nature, being worlds made out of words.) In fact, any truly living novel would automatically be a critique of an ailing culture simply because it held life and energy.

You know, it doesn't matter if somebody thinks the novel increasingly impotent. Because the novel will either be replaced by other forms better suited to the age, or else people will come along and show us that everything we thought about the novel has to be considered anew. Why? Because they will take the form and do something irresistible with it. It's that simple.