Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey

I’m enjoying the new book by Mary Ruefle, titled Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures.  It’s from Wave Books.  Here’s a snippet of one of the chapters to give you a feel for it:

from On Theme

The call for poems is astounding.  Anthologies want poems from you and they want poems from me.  This is only a partial listing of some of the themes that are in demand, like certain toys at Christmas, and this is not invented by me for my own purposes of persuasion, but extracted verbatim: AIDS, California expatriates, quilts, victims of child abuse, dogs, automobiles, sailing, incest, condoms, those who have known and loved African American men who have been incarcerated, childbirth, spiritual experiences among lesbians, New Jersey, poems by women in response to poems by men, and, my favorite, a call for poems for the “Unique Anthology”—they  want “any theme, but especially interested in Sweet Revenge, Fish Out of Water, Narrow Escape, Reversal of Fortune.”

Something is terribly, terribly, terribly wrong here.  Isn’t AIDS trivialized by being on this list?  Isn’t childbirth?  African American men who have been incarcerated?  Aren’t dogs?  Isn’t sailing?  What’s being trivialized here is poetry.  When the New Critics emphasized “reading as thematizing” little did they know to what extent their thrust would be extrapolated by poets in the twenty-first century.  Although the dictionaries define theme as subject or topic, the new critical definition of theme—and I take this from a glossary of literary terms continuously in print from 1941 to 1971—and now out of print—is that theme is “the basic idea or attitude behind a work.”  The key word here, I think, is behind, because to an ironist—and all postmoderns are ironists—there is no behind.  Of course Shakespeare was an ironist, since Timon of Athens lifts the silver lid off the banquet platter and—lo and behold—nothing’s there, and Melville was an ironist, since he wrote: “By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and no body is there!”  Today we mine many poems with similar results—the themes on the surface pass as admirably deep embodiments of the human condition, but once we get inside we discover something worse than nothing: we discover a mess of wires, we discover the android that theme has become.  Is it any surprise to discover that poets themselves are becoming androids?

Androids are supposed to imitate human beings.  The best thing about the best androids is that they are indistinguishable from human beings.  When a poet is said to imitate his or her self it implies that his or her signature—a repeated, recognizable style—has grown too familiar; the instantly recognizable personality is not a personality, it is a commodified cult.  Having such a thought, one is seized with a gripping fear: Is this going to happen to me?  Has this already happened to me?  Young poets are always talking about voice: Do I have a voice?  How can I get a voice?  What is a voice?  How long will getting a voice take?  And then, voila: Now that I have a voice, I am terribly depressed by my voice, having a voice has kinda made me a robot, hasn’t it?  The fear is amplified not out of personal paranoia but out of a collective one: we live in a culture where no one can escape being instantly recognizable.  No purdah for us!  In a culture based on the proliferation of choice, even one’s outward appearance, whether or not you are conscious of it, whether or not you care, is interpreted by the public as a decision.  Please do not misunderstand me: you may not have had a choice, but the public is going to assume you made one.  The political implications of this are many, and would be best discussed by a political, which I am not.  What I am equipped to discuss is Polartec.  I recently acquired my first article of clothing made out of Polartec.  I like the fabric for its texture, that it’s soft, warm, light, and washable.  But to me it carries with it connotations of an outdoorsy, athletic lifestyle—since it was originally developed for these activities—and I am not an outdoorsy, athletic type, because I believe, stupidly, that this will disenhance whatever intellectual qualities I may possess.  I choose not to be associated with L.L. Bean, the clothing manufacturer whose first appearance in American poetry was, by the way, in a poem by Robert Lowell.  So I found myself in a quandary I finally resolved by choosing a bathrobe made out of Polartec; I could enjoy the qualities of the fabric I liked without having to be seen wearing it in public.  While wearing my new robe I was given a copy of the October 2, 1995, New Yorker—a magazine I refuse to subscribe to but secretly read—and there, in an article by Susan Orlean on the difficulty of dressing in a seasonless urban society, exacerbated by temperature control in the forms of air-conditioning and central heating, was my synthetic bathrobe and the synthetic person wearing it:

Take polar fleece for instance.  Polar fleece is a plush, spongy, totally artificial material that weighs nothing and conveys no quality of warmth or coolness; in fact, you can wear it in the most bitter weather or in the hottest heat.  Polar fleece looks neither flimsy and light nor hearty and warm.  It has no historical, cultural, or physical association with a place, a season, a society, or any living thing.  It is the first existential fabric—eminently useful, meaningless, dissociated and weird. 

My god, I thought, it could be Dean Young talking about poetry!  I recognized the same themes everywhere, as they overlapped and cross-referenced themselves ad nauseam. 

[. . .]

Everyone is self-conscious of having a signature; so what if there aren’t an infinite number of hard-won styles; the next best thing is to join the camp closest to you. . . .  I’m lucky enough to occasionally be able to do something I love—write poems—and unlucky enough that what I love confuses and overwhelmes me. 

[ . . . ]

Louise Bogan, in 1969, nearing the end of her life, after reviewing poetry for the New Yorker for thirty-eight years . . . . wrote in confidence to a friend, “But really . . . I’ve had it.  No more pronouncements on lousy verse. . . .  No more struggling not to be square.”  Poetry is, in so many ways—and I am not the first to say it—a young person’s genre. 

[ . . . ]

As Roland Barthes reminds us, Maupassant often ate lunch at the Eiffel Tower, because it was the only place in Paris from which the Eiffel Tower could not be seen.  Where is the Eiffel Tower of poetry, and could we have lunch there?