The Citizen

Editor's Note:
This is the third installment in a three-part essay. To read the first two installments visit these links: Part I and Part II.

The ice caps are melting: criticism has failed. This thought has been nagging me lately. It may not be entirely rational or fair. But as humans roast away the glaciers, as the sea rises around us, it’s clear there’s been some cultural failure—which must be, in part, a failure of language.                                                    

Not of poetry, necessarily. Poems don’t have to galvanize anyone or save anything. In the face of disaster, they can simply rage or mourn. And poems with the power to galvanize an audience may never find one. But what about criticism, with its claim to divide true words from false, to elucidate the poets’ private testimony in the public square? Couldn’t it have helped somehow? Shouldn’t it have?

I’m guessing most people would shrug and say no: literature is too minor to count for much. Karl Kraus—the Austrian journalist, satirist, and poet—would have glared over his spectacles and disagreed. The composer Ernst Krenek recalled meeting him in 1932, as the world barreled toward war:

At a time when people were generally decrying the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai, I met Karl Kraus struggling over one of his famous comma problems. He said something like: “I know that everything is futile when the house is burning. But I have to do this, as long as it is at all possible; for if those who were supposed to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, Shanghai would not be burning.”

At first, this sounds like the Butterfly Effect for narcissistic writers. What delusion, what imperial arrogance, to think that punctuation in Europe might sway events in Asia! But don’t all writers think this way sometimes? Don’t poets and critics especially? Why obsess over every little mark on the page unless you feel the weight of the world bearing down? Oscar Wilde (the story goes) spent a whole morning’s work dropping a comma from a poem, then restoring it again. Isaac Babel said that “no iron can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.” If Kraus was delusional, his delusion lies at the heart of the discipline.

Everyone seems to agree on this much: if poetry changes the world, it does so very slowly. Once again, I’m thinking of W. H. Auden and Adrienne Rich. After sighing that “poetry makes nothing happen”—the sigh of a disappointed believer—Auden added that it was “a way of happening, a mouth.” He had in mind the mouth of a river, “flow[ing] on south” from obscure origins. Decades later, Rich (whose first book, A Change of World, Auden picked as the 1950 Yale Series of Younger Poets winner) declared that poetry had become “more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.” I’m struck by how these writers, expressing opposite views of the poet-as-changemaker, reached for such similar metaphors. Both imagined poetry as a hidden stream, taking its gradual course beyond the purview of the powerful. Only, where Auden came to see it as a self-contained process, Rich insisted that it could erode the “stone” of entrenched systems. One lost a kind of faith; the other gained it.

Should poets hope for worldly influence in the first place? Should they have sociopolitical commitments, or wander forever in the forest of ambivalence? Mulling over these questions in a late lecture, Rich quoted South Africa’s Dennis Brutus:

I believe that the poet—as a poet—has no obligation to be committed, but the man—as a man—has an obligation to be committed. What I’m saying is that I think everybody ought to be committed and the poet is just one of the many “everybodies.”

Grace Paley said something similar when asked if writers should “be socially active.” She answered, “Writers? I advocate plumbers should also do something, everybody should do something.” Paley herself spent many hours, over many years, passing out anti-war leaflets on the streets of New York. Every so often, she’d take a break and devote some spare time to writing a poem, or an article, or one of the great short stories of the twentieth century. (And no one would ever accuse those stories of being leaflets: they’re as warm and witty and richly conflicted as you could wish.) This has always struck me as an admirable career.

Having done some digital leafleting in recent years, I find that it overlaps with my poetry only at the margins. Like narrative and drama, poetry needs internal tension: it slackens when it knows exactly where it stands. Criticism, too, works best as exploration. So my “literary” writing lacks the certainty of the leafleteer: rather than Here’s what I believe, it might say, This is what I fear, or Here’s what’s funny about this, or This is how I’ve failed.

Whether it’s socially relevant or politically insightful is for readers to judge. All I can say is that it’s careful. Not careful as in risk-averse, I hope, but as in painstaking. I fuss over each piece incessantly, taking shameless advantage of editors’ patience. Whatever statement the work makes, that care becomes a part of it.

Poetry and criticism are more careful about language than most genres. As torrents of sloppy discourse flood our screens each day—another rising sea—poetry, at its best, remains a separate, trenchant, subterranean stream. Criticism, at its best, surfaces and clarifies those waters.

Meanwhile: the ice is melting, the house is burning. Writers are a tiny coalition among “the many ‘everybodies’” forced to confront the mess. I have no practical advice except what I tell myself: combine the passion of the amateur, the savvy of the professional, and the commitment of the citizen. Play each role genuinely. And watch those commas.