Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008

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Spiegelman, Willard.  How Poets See the World:  The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005.  238 pages, ISBN 0195174917, $60.00 (hardback).

 

Reviewed by

Julie Kane

Northwestern State University of Louisiana

 

           

            Set amidst other works of postmodern poetry criticism on a bookstore or library shelf, and judged by its cover alone, this book must seem as incongruous to the viewer as a gilt-framed landscape painting hanging on the wall of a trendy gallery.  As far back as 1936, Yeats, in his preface to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, attacked “irrelevant descriptions of nature” as one of the remnants of Victorian verse to be rebelled against by contemporary poets.  Spiegelman himself laments that descriptive passages in writing tend to strike the modern reader as a “superfluous or extraneous interruption of the . . . literary adventure.”

 

            Yet, as Buddhism advises, If you want to see something, look at something else.  And by focusing his critical eye on the neglected subject of description in contemporary poetry, Spiegelman succeeds in unearthing a trove of buried philosophical writings from our own age, embodied in the language poets use to relate conscious subject to nonconscious world.  In an earlier study of Romantic poetry, Spiegelman “argued for a Kantian realm of the ‘aesthetic’ as an antidote to those trends in contemporary literary criticism that examine art through one of several political, sociological, or ideological lenses,” and in this work he continues and complicates the argument. 

 

            Two chapters, in particular, should interest even readers who do not follow contemporary poetry.  The first is Spiegelman’s introductory chapter, “The Way Things Look Each Day:  Poetry, Description, Nature.”  In it he defines his terms and reviews the history of attitudes toward his subject—many of them entertainingly negative.  He goes on to pose sticky questions about the purposes and functions of descriptive writing, the ways in which observers alter what is seen and described, and the capacity of language to convey (and to construct) poetic meaning.  Description is never really neutral, he warns—there is always a value or a motive lurking behind it.  Drawing upon Emerson and Gary Snyder, in particular, he includes a meditation upon the features that make landscape description in American poetry so distinctively “American.”

 

            Spiegelman’s chapter on ekphrastic description in poetry should also engage nonpoetry specialists.  He offers a convincing explanation for the recent explosion of interest in poetic descriptions of existing works of art.  From Spiegelman’s perspective, while a poet can no longer assume that a reading audience will share any values or life experiences, the artwork exists as “an eternal, unchanging field to which we can return for verification,” normally located in a publicly accessible space.  Thus, it provides a patch of common cultural ground about which a poem can be written and shared with a general audience.  Spiegelman also breaks new ground in examining poems about nonrepresentational art, despite the tendency of most ekphrastic poets (and thus, their critics) to focus upon landscapes, portraits, and still lifes.

 

            Five of Spiegelman’s seven chapters take up individual poets:  Charles Tomlinson, Amy Clampitt, Charles Wright, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham.  Here one might quibble with some of his choices and wish that he had trained the sun of his attention upon others.  Why the atypical Southern poet Wright and not another Southerner with a ferocious sense of place, such as Dave Smith or Natasha Trethewey?  Why the painfully academic Clampitt over other poets whose nature description is, well, more “natural”:  Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Glück, Mary Oliver?  (Though, in fairness, he does compare his chosen poets to Bishop with some frequency.)  Given that Spiegelman’s choices of individual poets are no more quirky than his choice to write a book about description, one can hardly argue with him; he plows new ground even in his chapters on Ashbery and Graham, who have been written about exhaustively.  “Landscape and syntax are, for him, the same,” he declares of Ashbery; of Graham, that she “refuses to look evenly and patiently” at her subjects, preferring “a flickering glance” that partially obscures what is seen.  Readers of either poet should seek out these two essays for a fresh approach to each subject. 

 

            “Words like ‘beautiful’ and ‘pleasure’ need to be brought back into discussions of literature,” Spiegelman declares at one point; fittingly so, for his book is both beautifully written and a pleasure to read.