First of all, I want to comment that in the articles on Gertrude Stein in the Language book (excuse lack of capital letters & equal signs), I found it strange that nobody seemed to know that Stein's title Tender Buttons was a reference to women's nipples (or perhaps to the clitoris).

An issue I've brought up in previous classes is the question of substance versus craft as the focus in creative writing. One approach to teaching writing is that one primarily needs to help the students find the things within him/herself that are really important to be said; then the student can work to discover a form that suits the subject matter. This is a common approach in many courses for beginning writers given outside the academic environment.

On the other hand, there's the approach Pound takes which focuses totally on craft. And craft, for Pound, is something that occurs on the level of the word, the line, the sentence, and perhaps the stanza or paragraph.

Everyone obviously thought thought I was being totally bizarre when in our discussion of Pound I suggested that it makes sense for a writer to set about learning craft as systematically as a painter or musician does. And that one can learn craft not only by studying literary writing, but also genre fiction, as well as other art forms, especially the art forms that are new to our century: film and popular music.

In Charles Altieri's article, he focuses on the issue of a certain sort of craft. Not Pound's sort of craft, but rather craft on the structural level. Craft on the level of content, really. Thematic craft, one might almost say.

Contradictory though this may seem, what Altieri is talking about is taking content and theme and making a craft of them. The poet, we are to take for granted, does not start out by having anything worthwhile to say. But he goes about manufacturing subject matter for his poem in what becomes an almost formulaic manner. On the middle of p. 10, Altieri gives a recipe for writing a contemporary poem in the ``dominant mode" (which he disapproves of). There must be (1) a natural voice; (2) a sense of urgency and immediacy; (3) a ``studied artlessness'' creating a sense of spontaneous natural sincerity; and (4) a strong movement toward emphatic closure, obtained primarily through manipulation of narrative structure.

I'm not very familiar with contemporary poetry, but I can see that this is a recipe that could produce a lot of quite crappy poetry. ``Workshop poetry,'' I would imagine it being called. (Of course the recipe given is something that exists in Altieri's perception and not, as far as I known, something ever taught explicitly in poetry workshops.)

It seems to me that this formula produces poems in a lot of ways like Imagism, only more pretentious.

Hearing academics talk about sincerity, in any case, reminds me of a cartoon from the New Yorker in the early Sixties: a group of New Yorkers are sitting around in elegant clothes in a fancy living room holding a guitar and singing, ``John Henry'' and Leadbelly songs in fake Negro accents.

One is reminded of Samuel Johnson's all too familiar comment. Sincerity in an academic is like a dog walking on its hind legs: one doesn't expect him to do it well; the accomplishment lies in the fact that he can manage to do it at all.

Altieri's attitude is that the problem with the dominant mode is that the recipe given above is no good. And then he goes about, with great difficulty, exploring the problem of figuring out a better recipe.

Altieri's attitude is that poetry, regardless of its particular subject matter, is an expression of some meta-theme, and the important thing is what meta-theme a particular mode of poetry is centered around: lucidity versus lyricism, or whatever.

Oddly enough, while working my way through all this, I'm also reading some poetry of Stevie Smith, along with some critical writings on her, so that I can do a short presentation on her for Steve Curry's class. And while it's easy to see Stevie Smith as a lightweight (and also on the other hand it's not all that hard to take her much more seriously than she ever took herself), I can't help but notice that she managed to write a whole lot of moderately successful poetry while being quite unconcerned with the thorny problems that trouble Charles Altieri.

The thing is: Stevie Smith started a poem by having something that she thought was worthwhile to say, and then saying it very cleverly. One might find the poem amusing or one might find it profound. Apparently she didn't give a damn, except that if one found it profound, one really ought to also find it amusing.

Or the case of Adrienne Rich, who (to my dismay!) Altieri calls one of the two strongest poets of the end of the century. As Altieri points out, despite the fact that her craft is in many places deplorably weak (I'm glad to see that he agrees with me about this!), her poetry has value because she has something important to say. (Not that I agree with what she has to say, though.)

I don't see it as mostly an issue of substance versus craft, though. I think one can go a long way primarily on craft, Pound being an example. Pound's lifelong struggle was trying to find something worthwhile to say with his craft, and I guess by the time he got to the end of the Cantos, some people (but by no means all) did agree that he'd managed to say something worthwhile. Still, we read him mostly for craft.

A musician like Eric Clapton can develop a following on the basis of his craft. On the other hand, someone like Lou Reed will always be remembered because he had something important to say, even though, especially at the beginning of his career, he didn't give a damn for craft.

Or take the case of two cubists: Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Picasso was like Pound in that he didn't have any strong sense of anything he needed to say. But Picasso succeeded because he was no only an incredibly good craftsman, but also an incredibly good charlatan. He saw himself as an entertainer. Even when I was growing up in the Fifties, the people I knew laughed at Picasso (and I grew up in a moderately affluent suburb of Washington, D.C.), but what we didn't understand then was that Picasso was always in on the joke. And what made the joke the funnier for him was the people were willing to pay large amounts of money for what he created.

Gertrude Stein never quite understood how to be an entertainer. Of course she also had the problem that the market for literature functions in a very different way from the market for paintings. Picasso only needed to con a small number of people into paying large amounts of money for his paintings, whereas to be successful, Stein would have had to convince a large number of people to pay small amounts for copies of her books.

But Joyce did it. Joyce was primarily interested in craft, but he wrote a book (Ulysses) that is in places quite entertaining. (In fact, the whole thing is entertaining if read aloud.) It's not a mere tour de force, but a pretty good story.

Altieri sees that problem with the dominant mode being that the formula it uses isn't any good any more. And certainly one gets tired of poem after poem all trying to climax with some moment of grand profound ``resonant silence.'' (I'm reminded of an essay called ``Against Epiphanies'' in a book by Charles Baxter called Burning Down the House, although his comment's are directed at short stories rather than poetry. And his writing is much more readable than Altieri's and much more useful to a writer.) It's bad enough reading a book of short stories and having a dozen different epiphanies inflicted on one. But reading a book of thirty poems and being offered thirty different profound resonant silences goes way beyond the limits of credibility.

But I see the main problem as the fact that whether one is focusing on craft or on substance, it's not good enough to follow some formula, whether dominant or not. One has to have something really worth saying and one's craft has to be above the mere workshop level.

I would challenge the poets who publish in literary magazines to write something as compelling as a feature film or a popular song. (In fact, I think most poets could learn a lot about their craft by writing a few country and western songs.)

--Lee
-----
The object in writing poetry is to make all poems as different as possible from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, and meter are not enough. We need the help of meaning: subject matter. That is the greatest help towards variety.    --- Robert Frost