Sex, Literary Criticism, William Logan and Sharon Olds, Part Two

Here is William Logan writing about Sharon Olds, who is one of America’s most popular headliners at poetry conferences and other readings. 

. . . part of the hypnotic fascination of Olds’s poetry is its headlong, hell-bent hubris.

She trades in shameless prose chopped up into lines of poetry, lurid as a tabloid, returning to the primal scene more often than a therapist: her cold, sadistic father; her cold, masochistic mother . . .

If someone is raped in her apartment building, we never hear about the victim. We’re told instead about Olds having sex the next day . . .

Everywhere brute shock is taken as a sign of honesty.

Olds has as many teases as a strip show, and the psychology that drives her poetry is dourly exhibitionist.

‘Look at me! Look at me!’ the poems say, poems of someone never loved enough.

She loves to rub your nose in it: if you look away, you’re a coward; if you keep looking, you’re complicit.

Olds is sometimes mistaken for a confessional poet, but she has nothing to confess: she never feels anything as subtle or scouring as guilt, and it’s hard to believe she’d recognize a sin if it bit her.

. . . for all her radical pretense, she’s a homely Redbook moralist, believing in motherhood, family, and honey on her nipples.

Well, that ought to offer some of the flavor of both William Logan and Sharon Olds, whose poetry has provoked almost identical reactions from me. I’m particularly concerned with the question of whether it’s prose or poetry (as I am with many of the celebrated poets out there), and it’s comforting to have an aggressive intelligence like Logan on my side.

Although I'm a blogger, I’m also impatient (to put it nicely) with narcissism and exhibitionism (if there’s a difference), whether in blogs or poetry or conversation. I’ve often recoiled from Sharon Olds’ recurring exposure of her body, others’ bodies, others' vulnerabilities, her sexuality, and some other inglorious concerns, like her obsessive, repetitive hatred toward her father and her invasion of her children’s privacy (which is the way I see some of her poems about them).



However, there’s a counter-argument that Logan has not mentioned. Americans and other humans are slow to see their own flaws. Without an honest, humble reckoning of how disappointing or downright disgusting we are—cosmetically, , domestically, politically, morally—how can we begin doing better as sharers of the planet? If everyone looked at himself in the mirror as frankly as Sharon Olds does, no matter how uncomfortable the sights there, we’d surely be prompted to behave better—or at least more humbly.  Or maybe we could simply get out of the paths of others who have found a better way to be.


Or would we? And that is one of Logan’s most important points:  Olds may be willing to examine herself and her loved ones in full view of us, but the flaws she sees tend strongly to be minor, brief, or attached to other people. I rarely hear her reprimanding herself or feeling a need to change.

As Logan says, she’s not really a confessional poet because she doesn’t own up to any sins or guilt, without which she is simply demanding attention: “Look at me,” says Sharon Olds (and that’s undeniable).  Logan replies, “Why should I? The only insights you offer are centered, microscopically, on your body, your psyche, and your very individual biography.” 

However, I’m not comfortable thinking that’s the end of the discussion, whereas Logan might be finished. Ever the moderate, caught in the complex middle, I think there might be value in Sharon Olds’ invitation to think about what makes us uncomfortable and why.  For one thing, it’s worth wondering about the undeniable centrality of sex in human lives. From burqas to strip joints to wondering whether less is more and bigger is better, we don’t seem to know what to do about this troublesome feature within us. Shall we try to smother it completely or give it free reign? How wide is the middle ground in between?

In any case, sex, along with war, will win out, however grotesquely we may twist and turn it in an attempt to wring out the hormones, control the thoughts and desires. Maybe Sharon Olds’ poetry is one small step toward getting the genie more happily out of the bottle. Logan himself makes an unconvincing attempt to state that he’s on the sex team:  “Poetry in our prudent hour needs more sex, not less . . . .” But that’s one drop of honey in a bucket of vitriol he’s hurled across the distance between himself and Sharon Olds.

Still, William Logan’s challenge is essential:  if we must be made uncomfortable by our intimate knowledge of Sharon Olds, and the part of her that's a part of us, what’s in it for us and the rest of the world? If we are not elevated by poetry, why not go straight to Hustler or petty Cosmo blurbs about starlets and their troubled lives?

Notice, by the way, all this presumes that the details of Olds’ life are factual. For a variety of reasons, I still insist on the traditional, valid distinction between poet and speaker. Olds’ poems certainly seem autobiographical, but we don’t know that, and we shouldn’t care.

I think you should love my fish, and I'm going to keep posting him until you do.

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Dean Young, "Scarecrow on Fire"

Scarecrow on Fire | American Poetry Review, The | Find Articles at BNET

Like Sharon Olds (March 4, March 9 and back on Sept. 17, 2009), Dean Young is one of those poets whose style is conversational (see the discussions here on January 14 or January 31, for example), but his trains of thought are more unusual than other poets we call conversational or "accessible." Young is also an example of a poet who lays a gift or challenge upon us in just about any two- or three-line passage, whether or not we feel we've followed the whole of his argument.

I won't pretend that I always follow his train of thought or emotion, or the trails through layers of subconscious association, but almost always, I'm intrigued by the journey. Most importantly, in today’s “Scarecrow on Fire,” I rarely or never feel that Dean Young is intentionally yanking me around, being narcissistically avante-garde, a mind unveiling itself like a melon full of ellipses.

"Scarecrow on Fire" offers the very kind of gifts as a poem that it talks about in life; it puts "something small / into your hand, a button or river stone or / key to I don't know what." And "I don't know what” is Young’s honest admission that he’s wondering much more than he’s making declarations.

The title's “Scarecrow on Fire” is an image of a fake man, on fire, dying. So the poem might be a farewell from a man who's recognizing the mortality of his flesh and bones, his sticks and stones.

The speaker wonders "What counts for a proper / goodbye." Maybe the poem itself "counts," with its tentative statement at the end, concerning souls. The images of stones, black angels, and ladybugs lead magically to the conclusion that poems are like boiling water that "cajoles" souls into freedom, agitates them out of their comfort with the "solidity of the boards, the steadiness / coming into the legs."

How many lesser imaginations have linked the "breath" of poems to the vapor coming off boiling water—and then that breath and vapor to the human soul? Notice that, with appropriate modesty, Young introduces that whole chain of images and thoughts with "Maybe."

Maybe our bodies, our mortal selves amount to the inert physicality of a stick-man. It's humbling to think of ourselves as that lone bundle out in a field, trying to scare away crows (like ravens, a bird often associated with death). Yet in the end we have souls that can be "cajoled" into freedom.

That's enough for one day; my latest posts have been too long. But I have more about "Scarecrow on Fire" and related matters, might add it tomorrow.

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Poetry: What Is It?

We Real Cool - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More




the singer








the stand-up






















a scene





Dadgummit, Brenda, in your comments last time, you've steered me completely off course. My response to you got so long that I'm turning it into today's post.

So the Richard Wilbur poem waits at least another day, and the shorter, but not simple Gwendolyn Brooks poem goes up today. It's famous enough that many might already know it, but it's poetry, it's rock-hard, it's musical, and it has something to say, maybe something quite daring.

But first, here again is "The Ineffable" by Bilgere or "Brenda's guy”:

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/01/25

What I find, as I do with so much of the "School of Accessibility," is that most of the poem could just as reasonably have been prose. Why has the poet chosen to break his writing into lines, chosen to call them verse? In Bilgere’s “The Ineffable,” I think the piece became poetry about 70% of the way into itself. Or, let’s say it becomes a poem somewhere in the last stanza.

That endless set-up, in language that’s actually prose, is true of many poems out there today. Some, of course, never do become poetry. Maybe that's OK; it's certainly popular. But if I go to poetry, I want frequent nuggets that will stand up to examination by a competent, demanding gemologist—let's say at least a nugget every three lines (this mathifying is absurd, I realize, but bear with me).

What do I mean by a nugget? As Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Bilgere’s lines have appealing, witty images, and I like its overall theme about fantasy. I've been the victim of that kind of self-deception, and I know others who have. But I see no reason that the piece could not, should not, be a prose short story.

In fact, we now have additional categories: flash fiction, sudden fiction, prose poem, ultra-talk. So why forcibly break one’s words and sentences into lines trying to be, claiming to be, poetry? Does the writer have that much contempt for prose? It can be as deep and as moving as poetry, and it pays better, by a lot.

Let me repeat: I enjoyed “The Ineffable.” I have some respect for its way of couching important psychology in humor. But I doubt that I’ll ever admire it the way I do so much of Dickinson, Hopkins, Yeats, Keats, Frost, Plath, Dylan Thomas, or more recently, Seamus Heany, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Theodore Roethke, Richard Wilbur, Kay Ryan, and on and on. In their work I find a gift in almost every line, the kind that Emily Dickinson said would blow off the top of your head--that's when you know you're in the presence of poetry--not at the end of a long, prosy build-up, which can resemble a joke on Comedy Central.

Let’s go there. As I’ve said before, I respect a lot of stand-up comics. I’ve recently realized how much they have in common with poets, alone on a stage, risking everything in what they say and the way they say it. But should we call them poets? Of course, in their case, “comedian” doesn’t have the clout of “poet” (or “physician,” or “philosopher” or “taxidermist”); but let’s then get a new word for stand-ups rather than stealing “poet” from the poets.

In the same light, why not write fiction and call yourself a fiction writer or novelist? I don’t get it.

Can we have narrative poetry? Yes, of course. But remember, Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is narrative. Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a story. Surely there's no doubt that they are poems. Ditto Browning's "My Last Duchess," since Brenda mentioned it.

Also, I did refer to vast shades of grey, where Frost might be at times (but that's most likely to happen only if we don't hear his rhythms, which is most likely to happen in his blank verse poems). Even Whitman’s bombastic chanting and repetition are closer to what we usually mean by “poetry” than many of today’s poem-chats.

The whole matter is treacherously subjective. One person's music is another person's drone; one person's verbal gem is another's piece of gravel. But I’m not sure the issue of conversation and prose, on the one hand, compared to poetry on the other is sufficiently prominent and honest. There was a flurry of commentary and challenge a few years ago, when Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland and others were rising to prominence, but the topic seems to have evaporated.

It’s understandable that poets don’t want to challenge each other much on such debatable grounds; their status in our culture is too precarious for them to fight among themselves. But I think the talk—dare I say the “conversation”— could be more thorough and probing than it is, at least as far as I know.

Of course, the flip side of that coin would be universities that fire their writers-in-residence because they don't belong to this or that school of verbal aesthetics. There's no winning. That's why we turn to poems like "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks:

We Real Cool - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

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