The bad news is that I’m
using the occasion to ruminate over the lifelong process by which the poetry
lover chooses his muses. The polysyllabic jargon for this process in the Age of
Deconstructivism is “Canon Formation.”
Oddly, for me, the first
time this verbiage hit me like a ton of rain-sodden cardboard was about 1973,
when I asked Hoffman why he wasn’t publishing his marvelous lyric, “Crossing
Walt Whitman Bridge.”
“It isn’t canonical,
Patrick,” Dan excused, not explained.
A poet picks and chooses—there
are almost 200 poems which make the cut in his “new and selected,” sort of the
beatification stage in a mature poet’s artistic life. When Dan parried that my
favorite poem of his was not canonical, I considered it something of a chide of
my judgment. “Geez, Hazard,” he seemed to imply, “don’t you know a real poem
from a mere attempt?”
So vanity prodded me to
turn first to the table of contents to see whether Hoffman had relented under
the remorseless pressure of my high opinion. (He had already given me the grace
of a splendid holograph of the poem, a private treasure.)
There is was, in the final
section V, between “Essay on Style” and “Mark Twain, 1900.” But wait. Turning
to it with joy, I found a poem many times longer and richer than the “original.”
Gadzooks, it’s a veritable short and jazzy history of American poetry,
centering on other poems written to Walt.
In my increasingly sadder
model of American culture, Americans are divided into sheep who cherish Walt
Whitman and the exponentially increasing mob who dig Walt Disney. I call it the
losing battle between the Greater and Lesser Walts. Tell me what a man knows
about Watershed Walt, and I’ll tell you where he stands on every critical moral
and intellectual issue facing our beleaguered republic.
I pause to formulate Hazard’s
Literary Law: A country that doesn’t read its great writers eventually loses
its mind. Ergo, because American literature is the greatest under-read
literature in the history of mankind, Americans are going and staying nuts in
droves.
Ronald Reagan is a prime
example. Bush is on the brink. Quayle remains unborn—in utero so to speak—intellectually.
They and their idiot peers account for the terrible phenomenon of America
having become a loose cannon on spaceship Earth. No Canon? Cannons unleashed.
To be specific, the gung-ho
patriotics of Oliver North and his State Department de-mentor Elliot Abrams
would lift as a passing fog were those gentlemen to intellectually metabolize
Hoffman poems like “Power” (about the loner King-killer phenomenon in 20th
Century America) or “The Center of Attention” (about the terrible ambivalence
of an American noontime downtown crowd over a man threatening to jump to his
death).
Ezra Pound once expostulated,
in his apodictic way, that “Literature is news that stays news.” Dan goes Ezra
one better: He turns the quotidian news story into lit that clarifies with
clarity and eloquence the cruel and crude miasmas that pass for a moral
landscape in post-imperial America.
Let me try to explain what
I mean. I was excited by Dan’s Whitman poem, which explored wittily that
paradox of paradoxes: South Jersey is full of business establishments named
after our premier pioneering poet of Demos, but it’s utterly devoid of people
who have read a single line of the man’s still luminous work.
His “uncanonical”
first-version lyric hit me where I was livid at the time. I had just returned
from Cape May, celebrating a dear girl friend’s 23rd birthday. As we whizzed
through Camden (perfect emblem of what happens to a city whose owners don’t
read Whitman), she asked me: If I loved Whitman so much, why had I never
visited his mausoleum? A telling shot.
So as soon as I could
conquer my fear of Camden and find directions to Harleigh Cemetery, there we
were, two slightly hung-over Americans eager to pay homage to the old codger.
Horrors! The 1892 structure
was a mess, slowly disintegrating from neglect. This was in 1973, the
unremarked centennial of Walt’s having moved from D.C. to his brother’s house
in Camden.
But wait. By what we
Americanists call a remarkable providence, the National Council of Teachers of
English was holding its annual convention in Philly that Thanksgiving. I asked
permission to parade with sandwich boards garnished with appeals like “A Buck
For The Bard’s Bones” or “Save Walt’s Vault.” In the Teachers’ imperial wisdom,
they ruled that I could raise the money if I abandoned the meretricious
rhetoric.
I did—in front of my
luminous chenille bedspread emblazoned (by Beaver artist Ellen Maser) “Poetry
to the People.” Ellen’s spread worked—to the tune of $738, fattened by Bucky
Fuller’s gracious $100 check.
The 1984 Graveyard Party,
celebrating the rededication, was a wonder. Carmen Gasperro and his quartet
composed a jazz suite for the occasion. We passed out nine (for the muses)
bottles of Great Western champagne to add Euro-Am elegance to the occasion. And
National Public Radio carried our joy to the winds. It was a great day for
poets.
Now comes the ugly part. That
was also the year that Rutgers creative writing honcho Frank McQuilkin
prevailed upon me to open Walt Whitman Day at the Camden Center with a $50
diatribe (for which I was stiffed! No thanks, Frank) as foreplay to Allen
Ginsburg’s $1,500 apotheosis in the late afternoon.
So there were we two—Allen
and me after the morning coffee. I offered to take him over to the Walt Whitman
House. His reply? “Are you gay, Hazard?”
“No, Ginsberg,” I answered.
“God hasn’t blessed me yet. Bad break. I guess.”
His next query really
startled me. “So how come you’re interested in Whitman?” with the astonishing
heterophobic assumption that being gay was sine qua non for affection for Walt.
“Oh, I guess it grows on
you when you’ve taught him for 20 years,” I sneered.
The Great Howler was not
making a good impression on this canon formulator. Frankly, over the years I
have come to believe that AG is not a poet at all but a media hypester whom a
corrupt press uses to disabuse itself of responsibility for real poetry, by using
his titillation at the same time that it implies that he’s a phony.
At the Modern Languages
Association convention in New Orleans, I was saddened to see that even Helen
Vendler puts Ginsberg in her Harvard University Press interim pantheon, but
excludes AG’s Columbia classmate, Daniel Hoffman. To detox MLA, I wandered form
booth to booth reading Hoffman to whoever would listen. To a person, they were
outraged that they had never even heard of Hoffman, whose work levitated them
on the spot.
One final score. Ginsberg
alleged at the height of his influence that the college poetry seminar was
destroying American verse. (A classic case of projection: It was his
bargain-basement howlers who were—and still are—diminishing the American muse.)
he might have been thinking of his Columbia classmate, Hoffman, except that no
one has ever accused Allen Ginsberg of thinking.
Hoffman’s career has been
an exemplum for our time, alternating a book of criticism (his dissertation on
the poetry of Stephen Crane) with a book of verse (his Yale Younger Poets
prize-winning An Armada of Whales, 1954), over a teaching career spent at
Swarthmore and Penn. Never in my experience has the dialectic between learning
and love been so deep and fructifying.
Let me predict: By 1998, when
we may expect DH’s culminating “collected” if fate smiles on us both, Ginsberg
will already have been dispatched to the dustbin of footnotes, and Hoffman will
give many more the pleasure of his muse, joining Harvard’s Cut List of the
Apothesizers of the Quotidien—poets like Phillip Booth (whose “Wilding” started
me on the road to poetic pleasure), Linda Pastan, William Stafford and
(greatest love of all) Seamus Heaney.
They have retrieved the
Muse from the labyrinth of modernism. No more multilingual bull. Just luminous
images and graceful cadence. Catch up, you Lesser Walt-ers.
From Welcomat: After Dark,
Hazard-at-Large, January 18, 1989
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