Monthly Archives: October 2007

Not Sentimental?

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Here’s another poem — John Crowe Ransom’s “Dead Boy” — I have loved a long time & though I now find Ransom’s celebration of the “dynastic” families of the Agrarian South pretty offensive, the language of this poem is not sentimental. Ransom does not ask the reader to produce an emotional response for which he has not provided an occasion in language. The subject lends itself to sentimental excess, which the specificity of the language avoids:

The little cousin is dead, by foul subtraction,
A green bough from Virginia’s aged tree,
And none of the county kin like the transaction,
Nor some of the world of outer dark, like me.

A boy not beautiful, nor good, nor clever,
A black cloud full of storms too hot for keeping,
A sword beneath his mother’s heart—yet never
Woman bewept her babe as this is weeping.

A pig with a pasty face, so I had said,
Squealing for cookies, kinned by poor pretense
With a noble house. But the little man quite dead,
I see the forbears’ antique lineaments.

The elder men have strode by the box of death
To the wide flag porch, and muttering low send round
The bruit of the day. O friendly waste of breath!
Their hearts are hurt with a deep dynastic wound.

He was pale and little, the foolish neighbors say;
The first-fruits, saith the Preacher, the Lord hath taken;
But this was the old tree’s late branch wrenched away,
Grieving the sapless limbs, the shorn and shaken.

In thinking about this a bit more, it occurs to me that we might accuse Ransom of sentimentality toward the idea of a “noble” family even as he writes an unsentimental elegy for an individual little boy. Or is this splitting heirs? It is the (self-deprecating) position of the speaker of this poem in relation to the subject that I find convincing in this poem, but not in Wright’s “A Blessing.” On the one hand, Ransom seems utterly unaware of his (sentimental?) attachment to the idea of the noble souther family, but on the other hand he acknowledges his critical but reconciled (by death) attitude toward the dead boy.

Baseball’s Christianist Assholes; Or: Go Boston!

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I was getting ready to root for the Rockies in the World Series, partly because I love a newcomer / underdog & partly because I think more than one championship a century would be bad for Boston’s soul. And then Michael O’Hare at the RBC blog had to ruin my (admittedly superficial) fan-affiliation by linking to this story. Full disclosure: I loved baseball when I was a boy & followed it with considerable attention into my thirties, losing interest as the game became increasingly corportatized. (When I was in grad school in Iowa in the 1980s I had a Ford Pinto with an AM radio, which meant that I listened to country music & White Sox games. This was during the Sox dark night of the soul. And my own, but that’s another story.) These days, I pay attention to baseball only at World Series time. So I was going to root for the Rockies. West versus East, Inexperience versus Experience — all the stuff I like.

Until, that is, I learned that a large proportion of the team apparently believes that God has taken a personal interest in them. Athletes ar, as a group, notable for their solipsism, but their sheer ignorance of the tradition these bozos claim to belong to marks the Rockies as something special, something spectacularly ignorant in a uniquely American way. If this were only the solipsism of baseball players, you could just chalk it up to the celebrity bubble these boys live in, but if you pay attention to the news & the general cultural vibe, you know that a lot of successful Americans feel this way about their lives, “success” in this case being fairly narrowly defined. They deserve what they’ve got because God has “blessed” them. Actual Christianity, of course, understands this blessing as (undeserved) Grace; but these millionaire suburbanites with their shallow sensibilities chalk it all up to their own good character, which is the current code word for being one of the Elect.

The problem with taking one’s own good luck as the metaphysical order of things, as the Rockies apparently do, is that luck has a funny way of coming around to balance things out. Luck’s logic is the logic of karma, ultimately. The Rockies may win the series, of course, though I am rooting for Boston, but whatever the outcome, I’ll take comfort in the fact that karma has all the time in the world. Still, a Boston sweep would be a fine, fine thing.

Reevaluating James Wright’s “A Blessing”

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There is a poem in my second book that channels Wright’s voice so effectively that even someone who knew Wright’s work fairly well might mistake it for the real thing. James Wright’s poetry was once tremendously important to me, but these days, when I go back to it, the work feels sentimental to me. I’m teaching Intro to Creative Writing this semester & the anthology I’m using includes what is probably Wright’s second most famous poem, “A Blessing.”

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

As I was reading this poem to my creative writing students a couple of weeks ago, about a third of the way through the thought occurred to me — actually articulated itself as a silent editorial comment — This is really pretty awful. The thing that bothers me the most is a kind of self-congratulatory celebration of the speaker’s own sensitivity. I guess, to be honest, the last couple of times I’d read the poem it had fallen a little flat for me, but as in a dying love affair, I had used my powers of self-deception in order to speak the lines with something like conviction. This last time, though, it was all over between us. The piece seems to ask a great deal more than it gives back, which is the standard definition of sentimentality, formulated admirably here in a Wikipedia entry:

Sentimentality is on one hand a literary device that is used to induce an emotional response disproportionate to the situation, and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments, and on the other it is a heightened reader response that is willing to invest previously prepared emotions to respond disproportionately to a literary situation.

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This is probably Wright’s most famous poem. I like it better than “A Blessing,” but not as much as I used to. Golden stones? My favorite Wright poem is probably “The Old WPA Swimming Pool in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio.”

Some further comments of mine regarding Wright on Robert Peake’s weblog.

Hesse as Individualist

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Via Wood s Lot, this thought from Hermann Hesse:

My instinct as an individualist and artist has always warned me most urgently against this capacity of men for becoming drunk on collective suffering, collective pride, collective hatred, and collective honour. When this morbid exaltation becomes perceptible in a room, a hall, a village, a city, or a country, I grow cold and distrustful; a shudder comes over me, for already, while most of my fellow men are still weeping with rapture and enthusiasm, still cheering and venting protestations of brotherhood, I see blood flowing and cities going up in flames.

Perhaps a good thing to keep in mind during Islamofascism Awareness Week.

“Dangerous” Dog Breeds

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Someone pretending to knowledge & authority trotting out the tired idea that some breeds of dog are inherently more dangerous than others. There are no “dangerous dog breeds,” just dangerous dog owners. (Inbreeding & maltreatment can produce psychosis in dogs, which can make individual animals dangerous.) Every generalization about a breed in the blog entry is belied by actual experience. I know a pug, for example, who bosses around the neighbor’s 140 lb pit bull. Some dogs are larger and stronger than others and especially when badly raised / trained, those dogs can do real damage to other dogs or humans when provoked.