Poetic license and poetic influence
AWARDING the Frost Medal to John Hollander earlier this year has had poets up in proverbial arms. In the New York Times Book Review Motoko Rich described both the drama of the appointment and the ethics of judging "artistic merit" against "unsavory opinions or actions of the artist". Hollander is a prolific and well-regarded poet, but he has angered many with his references to "societies without cultures", by which he means those of West Africa and Central America. His appointment has precipitated a flurry of resignations at the Poetry Society of America, including the president, William Louis-Dreyfus, who complained that the protests were reactionary, and by other board members, including Walter Mosley, a novelist who has criticised the lack of diversity among award recipients. (Only three of 38 previous winners have been not white, which is indeed disgraceful.)
Quite a bit of sturm und drang, to be sure. But let's actually consider the poetry of John Hollander.
Scanning a poet's work in search of his politics is a worse offence, in a way, than judging a poet's politics before his work. (Though judging a person who judges a poet by his politics may still rank as the worst offence.) I am not the first to say it: Hollander's poetry is of a very high quality. It is also at times thoroughly and terrifyingly Western. His enemies and influences seem to be Western philosophical greats, English literary tropes, and classic formal patterns and constructions. For me, the poems' point of interest is how they operate within these patterns, and fight against their boundaries.
Boundaries are literally explored in the poem "Policing the Yard", in which Hollander uses rhyme and repetition to create a prison of a poem:
This will return to haunt them--all the moreÂ
For its low hopelessness as well as forÂ
All their conclusions being quite unsound.Â
Picking up what they'd dropped too long before:Â
That will return to haunt them all the more.Â
The circuitry and the heavy, un-droppable burden create uneasiness, a fight aginst the heaviness of the past. Similarly, in the poem "The Night Mirror" from Selected Poetry 1993, Hollander's mirror reflects
...a horrible bit of movement
At the edge of knowledge, overhanging
The canyons of nightmare.
Something new is threatening to get out, but the stuffiness of the poem, the heaviness of the scene he has set, with grandmother in "her Windsor chair in the warm lamplight", barely constrains it.
It is a great wonder then, or no wonder at all, that his contested review of Jay Wright's collected poems in January 2001 was a positive one. Hollander proclaims Wright's poetry to "give evidence of a bookish and extremely thoughtful life while encountering the forms and rituals of cultures without literatures..." The second half of his remark is clearly nonsensical and obviously inaccurate. But the poetry of these two "extreme thoughtful" men begs comparison. Hollander called his review "Poems That Walk Anywhere", capturing Wright's fluidity, his seemingly endless movement, his ability to float in the realm of the spiritual or be grounded in the soil. In this way, his poems are all that Hollander's are not. They represent a completely different style and approach.
Wright's work moves in a way that one could be tricked into thinking it had no legacy or cultural past. But I don't believe it to be a traditionless approach. In his poem "Those who Thoroughly Bed the Estuary", Wright ends by saying
It is too soon to say
     if blindness
is the innocent gift
               of strangers. Â
Cultural blindness is rarely an "innocent gift". If there is anything to be gained from the controversy over the Frost Medal, it is an understanding that there we have much to learn when we cast a wider net.
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