A piece of work by John Thompson (1938-1976) characterizes the condition that the contemporary poet is in. That work is something called, Two Ghazals. Patrick Lane’s commentary on these twin poems reveals the miserable condition even more. Patrick Lane, it is useful to note, is an award-winning poet of the governor general’s rank. I hope to serve a moral purpose by volunteering some general remarks on the poems and their commentary; my purpose, to be precise, is to communicate something worthwhile and helpful about the condition of a postmodern poet.
The only literary criticism that is worth something is the kind that passes judgment in order to distinguish quality from rubbish. I have listened to our state broadcaster, the CBC, on a regular basis for over twenty years. The CBC, through a variety of programs, invariably greets authors on its platform in a manner meant to signal that these authors and the books they write are beyond reproach. Our national newspaper—The Globe and Mail—exhibits the same flattering behavior in its reviews. A book, poem, or song that is placed above criticism by the medium that it is featured or reviewed on, however, is usually unworthy of respect.
Two Ghazals
xiv
All night the moon is a lamp on a post;
things move from hooks to beautiful bodies. Drunk.
I think I hear the sound of my own grief:
I’m wrong: just someone playing the piano; just.
Bread of heaven.
In close.
In dark rooms I lose the sun:
what do I find?
Poetry: desire that remains desire. Love?
The poet: a cinder never quite burned out.
xvi
The barn roof bangs a tin wing in the wind;
I’m quite mad: never see the sun;
you like sad, sad songs that tell a story;
how far down on whiskey row am I?
I believe in unspoken words, unseen gods:
where will I prove those?
If I wash my hands will I disappear?
I’ll suck oil from Tobin’s steel and walnut.
If one more damn fool talks to me about
sweetness and light...
I’m looking for the darkest place;
then, only then, I’ll raise my arm;
someone really must have socked it to you:
were the lips made to hold a pen or kiss?
If there were enough women I wouldn’t write poetry;
if there were enough poetry
(The Globe and Mail, June 10th, 2000.)
What is even that? On a speculative level, though on no other, a person with no time to redeem might spend a minute or so trying to make sense of a line or two of this while sitting in the corner of a coffee house reading a discarded section of a newspaper. I do know what the ‘sound of my own grief’ means, at least. It is the sound that a gullet makes when a gag is triggered by fake poetry. This fragmented mess of words, I contend, cannot bring pleasure to anyone who reads it. Some fancy people would say that they are regularly blessed by clutter like this. We shouldn’t believe them. For the sake of appearing wise in the eyes of pontifical trendsetters, many persons among us will twist their opinions into conformity with what is ugly. No amount of peer pressure should suffice to make the saner sort of humanity join that self-pretzeling community, however. What ingratiating critics really think about the dopey work they eulogize is usually ‘hiding in plain sight,’ as they say. For example, it is an oblique tribute to call the work of Henri Matisse ‘stripped and pared down,’ which is the kind of compliment that Matisse commonly receives from critics who profess to adore his paintings. His work is so arid and uninspiring that no more than ‘stripped and pared down’ can be said about it without lying. What does ‘stripped and pared down’ mean but emptied of meaning and beauty? Postmodern poetry is even emptier than the latter paintings of Matisse.
Postmodern poetry structure is nothing else than lack of structure. It is borderless and it is not regulated by metrical beat. And it is utterly absurd. It is the worst of the worst of free verse. Not all postmodern poets write as nonsensically as Mr. Thompson does, even while conforming to the visual anti-structure of postmodern poetry, which is frequently distinguished by lowercase letters and sentences that do not end in periods. A postmodern poet, even without structural components, can still say something that makes a bit of sense. Aural and visual patterns, however, do say something about the late model poet. He is sterile, spiritless, out of harmony, and borderless. Not only is he lost to truth and beauty, he does not search for either one, which aimlessness approximates what postmodernism means. This kind of poet is of the same family as liberal theorists; he is a direct descendent of that school. Liberal literary theory, morally considered, is literary theory according to anti-traditional libertines. The worst libertines, these days, are socialist ideologues, though sometimes the ‘socialist’ moniker is too embarrassing for them to openly profess. Libertine literary theory—that which practically all universities teach nowadays—is iconoclastic vis-à-vis truth, goodness, and beauty. I even read that today’s ‘literary theory aims at…a Newspeak,’ an assertion that shocked me as I read it. This opinion was by a man named Holcombe, whose work I have misplaced. The statement is obviously and certainly correct, for what is Newspeak? Newspeak is the official language of socialist Ingsoc (English Socialism) in George Orwell’s 1984. It is the use of politically acceptable speech—valueless speech that has been approved by the ruling party: muddling talking-point speech. Politicians perform it best. When asked prickly questions about policy or practices, they, as if by the press of a button, utter their memorized bullet points in android fashion. The perfection of Newspeak, though, is Duckspeak. “It was not the man’s brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck” (George Orwell, 1984, pp. 138, 373, 382.) Duckspeak includes, but is not limited to, speaking or writing in a style that can best be described as educated blah blah blah—speech that, had she become a gender studies university professor, Charlie Brown’s teacher would have uttered. Leftist literary theory has spun offshoots that, like tentacles in a horror movie, reach out to strangle right thinking wherever it can be found. As these tentacles go about choking cogent thought, they continue down their dozens of intersecting corridors leading to nowhere and to no more purpose than mindless, endless quacking. From a book that I haven’t read and never will, this is what leftist literary theory sounds like: “To expose the contingent acts that create the appearance of a naturalistic necessity, a move which has been a part of cultural critique at least since Marx, is a task that now takes on the added burden of showing how the very notion of the subject, intelligible only through its appearance as gendered, admits of possibilities that have been forcibly foreclosed by the various reifications of gender that have constituted its contingent ontologies” (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 44.) Quack, quack, quack. But these theorists really believe that their words, on some level, though I do not know on what level, are both relevant and revealing. This is why, I suppose, whoever read this book highlighted the part that I just quoted. These faddish theorists and their fellow poets have gone deeper into black holes than Jules Verne’s twenty thousand leagues, and yet they profess to be able to see something. No matter what the latest literary theories are, and even if someone can be found who understands them, their poems will remain impenetrable everlastingly. What they think is deep, we know is dumb; what they say is lit, we see as dung. What they write is no more intelligible than the ‘Post-Modern Gibberish Essay Generator’ randomly spits out. Indeed, this generator (look it up on the internet) was created, I think, to show exactly that. Is this sentence from the gibberish generator not as educational as the sentence quoted above from Butler’s book? “If one examines dialectic libertarianism, one is faced with a choice: either accept deconstructivist desituationism or conclude that the establishment is fundamentally unobtainable.” This (Judith Butler might as well have written it) is philosophical quackery. Crackpot poetry is its handicapped child. You have to understand the ‘background discourse’ in order to understand postmodern poetry, says a radio host on the CBC’s Radio Canada. The background discourse is high fashion gobbledygook, the kind of stuff that Judith Butler’s book contains.
