EP&M Online
Essay
So Much For Truth and Beauty
very short essay by
Arthur Mortensen
Season
of mists and yellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing
sun,
Conspiring with him how to load and
bless
With leaves the vines that ‘round the
thatch-eaves run,
To bend with apples the moss’d
cottage trees,
To fill all fruit with ripeness to the core,
To plump the gourd, swell the
hazel shells
With a sweet kernel, to set breeding
more,
And still more, later flowers for the
bees…
Reading Keats, one can’t help but think how nice it would be use
language like that, with its graceful sound, its light touch of
metaphor, its metrical and rhyming intricacies, and with a sensibility
that suggests the writer not only enjoyed his subject but was able to
present his view as a polished work of art. Of course, hardly
anyone does that today. It just isn’t done. When we write a
poem about such a subject, we must then take it out and throw it in the
dog shit left carelessly in the street, rough it up a bit, and expose it to
reality. What's real
here?
Though Keats’s nature, like Shakespeare’s, was the English
garden, and cultivated as much by human beings as by evolution, hardly
anyone thinks of gardens or nature in those terms today. Nature
today is a victim, as are so many groups and individuals. Everybody knows that.
And such language would be considered naïve at best, an exercise
in preciousness, and politically null.
If you expect a contract in today's game, better stop acting like a
free agent and say something like this:
Season
of smog and force-fed fruitfulness,
Jack-booted brute with a fluorescent
grow lamp,
Conspiring with it to overload the
trees
And strangle vines that wrap
intruding houses,
With apples picked too soon and dyed,
Until the fruit is rotten to the core,
Exploiting Mexicans until they swell
With imperialism's sick kernel, breeding more,
And still more, later corpses for the flies...
Hey, that's modern. It sounds just like real life,
yes? Just like a discussion at Starbucks over a syrupy
latte, yes? Or, it sounds as real as a report on NPR,
which we might listen to while sitting in an urban apartment in south
Brooklyn, looking at a landscape made dismal by windows we haven't
cleaned in two years, yes? Or is it borrowed (with humility of
course) from the West Sider's newspaper of record, a front page report
of the ghastly scandal of orchards providing hundreds of millions of
Americans with apples that aren't quite perfect, not quite as good as
French produce, and with -- gasp -- labor imported from Mexico (as
opposed to Algeria or Albania)? My God, have another latte before
it's too late.
It doesn't really matter what it seems like. We all know
that. Seeming is debatable, a subject for theorists. The
real issue is how it seems to be a sort
of poem. After all, us dumb poets are just the humble workers
doing theory's proofs, are we not? And how well have we succeeded
here? The broken meter and lack of any other distinguishing
"poetic" qualities would probably make it a contender at a
contest. And it's politically oriented in the right direction --
or perhaps one should say the left
direction. And it has that special panache of
modernity, that quality of "saw it on CNN, heard it on NPR,
read it in the Times," the
ultimate in politically vetted second-hand experience, sort of like a
white teenager from Scarsdale who writes with conviction about being a black female rape victim
in 1956 in Johannesburg, or a Marxist-Leninist professor at Yale who
finds no contradiction in maintaining a million dollar stock portfolio
or taking trips to China with money from his father's
trust.
Isn't that what we're all working toward?
I hope not.
Arthur Mortensen