EP&M
Online Essay
THE ARSENAL OF ARTIFICE
by
Joseph S.
Salemi
Near Hunter College, where I work, there is a large armory for the
storage of military supplies. In fact, New York City has several
of these forbidding, castle-like structures within its limits.
There’s the famous one on Kingsbridge Road in the Bronx, the one on
Northern Boulevard in Flushing, and another at 14th Street in Park
Slope, my residential neighborhood. They are anachronisms now;
reminders of the days when a large city needed fortified depots of arms
and munitions in the event of civil disorder.
I often think of these arsenals when I
contemplate the European literary tradition. Picture the interior
of such a place: stack upon stack and row upon row of rifles, machine
guns, bayonets, grenades, rockets, ammo cans, flamethrowers, mortars,
and land mines. Some of the equipment is new, but much of it is
old. There are armories where World War I Springfields and Korean
War BARs rest side by side with the latest high-tech weaponry.
All the arms are kept in functioning condition, for immediate use if
necessary.
Modern American arsenals are fairly
up-to-date and streamlined. But in some foreign armories Brown
Bess muskets, cavalry sabers, and Gatling guns collect dust in
forgotten corners. Walking into such a place is like entering a
time machine, and returning to the Boer War, or the Philippine
Insurrection.
That’s very much like the European
literary tradition. It’s a huge warehouse of stuff from many
centuries. Some of it is well known, some of it out of fashion,
and some in near oblivion. But it is all there, available for use when
needed. I see no reason why we shouldn’t refer to this great
tradition as the Arsenal of Artifice. Nothing can prevent a poet
from walking into the Arsenal of Artifice and appropriating for his
poetic needs anything at all. That’s what a living literary
tradition provides: choice. It gives us the freedom to explore
anything and everything from the past, and use it as a source for
models or inspiration. It is totally unlike the mentality that
governs mainstream poetry today, a frame of mind that solemnly forbids
a vast range of aesthetic possibilities on the grounds that they are
obsolete or unfashionable or not in tune with current trends.
Much contemporary thinking on aesthetics is a double-decalogue of Thou
Shalt Nots: No
adjectives! No inverted syntax! No obscure
vocabulary! No direct explication! No elevated
registers! No abstractions! And on and on the list
goes, strangling potential poets with a garrotte of Nots.
For those who use the Arsenal of
Artifice, there is only one Not. You cannot change or subvert the
tradition just for the sheer hell of it, or as a way to emphasize your
own singularity. The Arsenal is there for you to use, not to
abuse. It has an inexhaustible supply of things, all of which
have in common the word artifice.
That is, they are the sum total of all the various tools, devices,
tricks, stratagems, sleights of hand, procedures, and techniques that
past poets have found useful in weaving texts.
The metaphor of poet-as-weaver, a
craftsman who produces tightly constructed verbal web-work analogous to
fine cloth, is one of the oldest tropes in the history of our
literature. It can be traced right back to Proto-Indo-European,
where the poet was designated as the wekwom
teks, or “weaver of words.” In fact, the etymological
source for our word “text” is the Latin
textum, which quite literally means a piece of woven
cloth. This metaphor is our primordial image of the poet, and one
that antedates by many centuries the Hesiodic and Platonic picture of
the poet as divinely inspired visionary. First and foremost, we
are weavers of words.
This is why the great Pindar calls poets
“the singers of woven words” (rhapton
epeon aoidoi). And as Calvert Watkins has shown in his
magisterial essay on Greece and the art of the word, almost every line
of Greek poetry is a complex interweaving of trope, figure, wordplay,
etymological allusion, and echoes of an inherited Indo-European poetic
repertoire of formulaic practices. Those two frauds of modern
romantic delusion, “creativity” and “originality,” were for all
practical purposes absent from the poetry of our distant
forefathers. For them, being a poet meant weaving words in the
intricate patterns that their predecessors had done, and in accordance
with certain traditional linguistic habits.
This wasn’t slavish imitation, although
imitation did enjoy a much higher valuation back then than it does
today. It was rather the process of working within the parameters
of a received patrimony, and making oneself part of it.
Imbecilities like “experimentation” and “rule violation” and
“asymmetry” occurred, but they were seen as mistakes perpetrated by
less skillful practitioners of the art. Serious poets strove to
avoid such blunders, which were signs of insufficient training,
inattention to prestigious models, or lazy self-indulgence. How
highly trained, rhetorically conscious, and linguistically intricate
poets like Homer, Pindar, or Horace would have reacted to the callow
emotional exhibitionism of a modern poetry reading, with its utter
amnesia of poetic tradition, is anybody’s guess. In my opinion
they would have left early, or vomited.
The problem for us moderns is our
ignorance of the larger significance that words like “truth” and
“feeling” can have. For most contemporary people, these terms
only refer to the vicissitudes of personal emotion, and to the
expression of such emotion in as straightforward and plain a manner as
possible. We think that some kind of ethical value inheres in
having an honest feeling and describing it truthfully. And we
have predicated our aesthetics on the bizarre notion that sincerity of
this sort is a precondition of artistic success. But for the
ancients, truth and feeling were purely fictive constructions put
together by a skilled poet in accord with certain stereotyped
expectations and familiar patterns. What we call personal
feelings didn’t enter the equation at all. Feeling—like
everything else in a good poem—was artificial.
Let’s be brutally blunt: no one is
interested in your personal feelings, except for a small circle of your
family, friends, and acquaintances. Apart from these people, why
should anyone give a damn about your emotional state? Your
feelings are important to others in the world only insofar as you can
wrench, twist, hammer, or otherwise fashion those feelings into
acceptable material for poems. Those poems don’t have to be
“true.” They don’t have to be “authentic.” They don’t have
to be an honest account of what actually happened to you. All they have to be are well-crafted
linguistic artifacts.
Trying to explain this to a class of
students is for me a Herculean labor. You experience real
resistance from them. Their minds have been poisoned in the early
grades with the lie that poetry is an expression of “honest feeling,”
and for them the idea that poetry might be a form of feigned imposture
is morally shocking. They react in the same way that some
fundamentalist students do when they learn that man-boy sexual
connections in ancient Greece were not only acceptable, but considered
a higher erotic urge. I have had simple-minded undergraduates get
up and leave the classroom when that is mentioned, as if such knowledge
were traumatic to them.
Similarly, some students in poetry
classes go into shock when I say that being “true to experience” is
utterly unnecessary in poetry. Once in a poetry seminar I
suggested to a student a simple word substitution to solve a metrical
glitch in one of her verses. She replied that she couldn’t make
the change, because it would “falsify the emotional authenticity” of
her poem, or some such pretentious cant. When I retorted that she
was giving us a poem, not a legal deposition, she had that look of
doe-like incomprehension on her face that some young people get when
you question their root assumptions.
In the Arsenal of Artifice you can find
feeling, along with a lot of other things that are natural to good
poetry: intelligence, memory, order, disciplined expression, narrative,
meter, wordplay, solemnity, information, sex, invective, humor…
whatever human beings can express with the gift of language. The
Arsenal is packed with countless instances of past success.
Refusing to use the Arsenal, and insisting on writing poems in your own
idiosyncratic manner, is not a sign of daring originality and
independence, but a confession of inadequacy. It is tantamount to
saying “I can’t do it the right way, so I’ll do it my way.”
Some twenty years ago, my friend and
mentor Alfred Dorn ran a workshop and reading group for poets in the
Brooklyn-Queens area of New York City. As I recall, all the
members were adults, some of them in late middle age. Dorn had
introduced them to various fixed forms, including the ubiquitous
haiku. Now haiku are three-line syllabic poems with a syllable
count of 5-7-5 (never mind that there’s more complexity to it than that
in the original Japanese forms—in America today if you write a
seventeen-syllable poem in the manner just described, you’ve produced a
haiku).
The members of the group dutifully
composed their haiku. Then somebody piped up and complained
“Why does it have to be seventeen syllables in that particular
order?” To which Alfred Dorn replied “Because that’s what
Japanese haiku are like.” The questioner persisted: “But
why? Why can’t it be something else?”
Dorn just sighed and answered “Well, I
can’t really say… I suppose it could
be something else.” Another group member suggested the following:
“Instead of 5-7-5, what about a different number? What about
9-1-1, the police emergency number?” A cry of excited enthusiasm
went up from the group. “Yes, let’s make it 9-1-1! Let’s
write syllabic poems in that form!” And they all started plugging
away at godawful three-line squibs written with that bizarre syllable
count.
Now here were several adult Americans of
good education, supposedly dedicated to the craft of poetry, who
decided to do something stupid and pointless. You can look upon
their act in two different ways, and those two ways will tell me
something very important about your attitude vis-à-vis your art.
You can say that these group members were daring, courageous,
progressive, original, innovative, curious, and motivated types whose
enthusiasm represents the wonderful “can-do” attitude of the American
character. Or you can say that they were feckless twits with no
respect or regard for tradition, and whose unquiet spirits chafed
against any imposed restraint. I think it’s clear what my view is.
Chesterton would have found a paradox at
the heart of our literary tradition. He would have seen that it
offers a poet vast possibilities, while at the same time demanding of
him a scrupulous loyalty. When Pound said “Make it new!” he was
only presenting us a half-truth. We are also obliged to make it
old, in the sense of consciously connecting our woven words with the texta of our ancestors. The
literary tradition grants us great freedom, in the form of several
centuries of collected excellence to contemplate. But it also
constrains us from being clueless idiots by insisting that we make our
work a recognizable offshoot of that past accomplishment.
Enter the Arsenal of Artifice.
Look around. There you will learn that poetry is made, not expressed. It is a
consciously contrived human product created according to certain
established methods. When Horace ended his third Book of Odes by
saying “I have built a monument more long-lasting than bronze” (Exegi monumentum aere perennius),
he confirmed this basic truth. He didn’t say that he had
“expressed his feelings.” He didn’t say that he had “connected
with his audience.” He didn’t say that he had “faithfully
recounted his experiences.” He didn’t use any of that bogus
jargon of authenticity. He said that he had built something. When we
recapture that concept, the counterrevolution in poetry will have won a
major battle.
Joseph S. Salemi