At some point in mid-adolescence, it is suddenly chic to be intelligent. Until then, usually, it hasn’t been. But at about sixteen, the adolescent, torn between anxiety for the future and immediate satisfaction, compromises on anxiety for the immediate future. Which is to say, college. It may not be chic to stay in college but it is poignant to be rejected. And so the atrophied adolescent brain is urgently spotlit, and the manner, if not the substance, of intelligence either sought or simulated.
When I was growing up, the word we used was smart. It was used to suggest social retardation; it was somehow the opposite of sexy. And then, suddenly, it was everything desirable. I was unusually alert to such vicissitudes because these judgments shaped my nonexistent social life. In any case, I watched my peers begin to look at me (and others like me) more closely: it is a problem, when one has avoided intellectual matters, to somehow apprehend them quickly. I passed for intelligent not because my thinking was actually assessed but because my appearance was assessed. For the adolescent, intelligence, like everything else, was a matter of style; it was communicated in two ways, through affect and focus. A certain bearing, a certain gloomy inwardness, would do. But principally, the issue was focus: it was no good to be intelligent about the wrong (for example, the too pragmatic) matters; one had to be intelligent about intelligent matters, which is to say, one had to be visibly preoccupied with subjects already dignified; ideally, one was having thoughts already thought (so that they had made it to the trot, the answer book).
It is interesting, in a grim way, to see how brilliantly these behaviors survive into later life, how cleverly they adapt. A whole literature is being fashioned under our eyes, rather along these same lines.
Central to this art is appearance: less crucial to think than to appear to think, to be beheld thinking. Important, crucial, to be beheld. Crucial, therefore, to be actively thinking (or appearing to think) uninterruptedly, to behave, in regard to one’s thought, like the actress who never leaves her house without full makeup. And thought itself is defined here along deeply conservative lines despite contradictory assertion. One has to be thinking about the great subjects of the time, which is to say the subjects whose merit and distinction and propriety are no longer open to doubt. One can appear (one is expected to appear) to be querying, to be turning around and examining the idea, but this little dance is a dance of appeasement, designed to silence any feeling that one’s thinking is pat. The querying and dancing are meticulously ritualized, practiced in a defined stylistic field. To be outside that field, to turn the gaze from the determined philosophic toward, say, the comic is to be outside the essential category: the artist who thinks. This means that certain brilliantly intellectual writers are not treated as intellectual writers because they don’t observe the correct forms: their poetry may be deeply learned and sophisticated, informed by quite radical rethinking of philosophical issues, but if the style of the poems is too lively, too grammatically clear, if it is not, on the surface, difficult, it does not conform to established definitions of intellectual daring.
Let me define the stipulations of such daring in the present moment.
But first, a historical fragment, a digression: early in the century, Pound, poet of the unsurpassable ear, declared war on the iamb. What followed, and indeed surrounded this act, was a period of enormous and profound linguistic discovery, not all of it directly related to Pound’s imperative, but all of it in some manner a shucking of constraints, all confident authority and easy bravura, as though the past were being dared to stop this inspired future. And certain of the tastes of the present moment can be traced to what we now call the Moderns, with that ominous upper case, principally our bias toward the incomplete, a taste that seems to treat the grammatical sentence as Pound treated the iamb: a soporific, a constriction, dangerously automatic and therefore unexamined.
Let me dispose of the analogy, introduced to suggest the manner in which the present moment (so fastidiously studying itself being itself) glorifies its preferences. The grammatical sentence is not the iamb. The latter, as a fixed rhythmic unit, is not elastic: one iamb more closely resembles another iamb than does one sentence resemble all other sentences. Iambic pentameter can be hummed (poets often hear rhythmic structures before they hear words); a stanza of sentences can’t be, or can’t be before it exists. The sentence deploys emphasis to create readings complementary to, or at variance with, the logical. It works magically, electrically; its reaches, in combination with the ways in which, and points at which, the line breaks create profound dramas: all by itself, the sentence is the Bible and the Talmudic commentary. If the sentence is to be forfeited, incompleteness must be able to match, or augment, its resources, must infuse the poem (or fiction) with equivalent depth and variety. And the same demand must be answered by related tactics: non sequitur, for example.
The gesture, the protest aren’t in themselves dangerous. Merely: their fertility has been miscalculated.
Contemporary poetry affords two main types of incomplete sentences: the aborted whole and the sentence with gaps. In each case, the nonexistent, the unspoken, becomes a focus; ideally, a whirling concentration of questions. A kind of scale (in the realm of intention) is suggested: language has faltered (language, which has done so well for so many centuries), overwhelmed by the poet’s urgencies or by the magnitude of the subject or by the impossible and unprecedented complexity of the present moment. What’s curious is how quickly this gesture turns rote, how little (apparently) there is to explore here. Certainly, on the level of grammar, the strategies of incompleteness seem to be limited: repetition, accumulation, invocation of the void through ellipsis, dash, etc. The problem is that though the void is great the effect of its being invoked is narrow. So the ambience of incompleteness becomes (after the first rush) peculiarly static. The charged moment is always charged in the same way: hovering, tentative, incipient. For variety, the poet must depend exclusively on duration. The uniquely extended dense fragments toward which this aesthetic tends begin to seem like swimmers competing to see how long they can stay underwater without breathing: unlike, say, high diving, this makes dull watching.
A more just comparison might be the bel canto line. More just and, philosophically, more accurate: how long can one linger in, elaborate, the moment, as though the length of the sojourn had direct relation to the depth of the exploration. Which is not, in fact, true. Great bel canto comments, through embellishments and elaboration, on musical structure; seductive and powerful poetry has been written along the lines I’m describing. But so has a quite terrifying rush of very bad, and very self-congratulatory, poetry. Too often the gesture becomes, like the swimmers underwater, a breathing trick; the idea behind it never develops. Its failure to do so suggests the extent to which such gestures are willed or constructed, despite the regularity with which this art suggests a psychological, as well as epistemological, imperative.
The dilemma can be put another way. The sentence suggests variety through its concreteness, its presentness, through meaning (or being); it initiates and organizes fields of associations which (in the manner of the void) may continue to circulate indefinitely, notwithstanding the sentence’s definite (and presumably inert) closure. In the fragment, on the other hand, variety is suggested through non-being, through unspecified (because not articulate) meaning, or through deliberate non-meaning. The paradox is that the named generates far more complex and powerful associations than does the unnamed.
The unfinished alludes to the infinite, which it refuses to abridge or describe. It can hardly afford to do either: the infinite no longer answers to that term if it acquires limits or characteristics. The absence of both, the sense of the perpetually becoming, is conceived as a source of energy, also a fit subject for intellectual speculation. The problem is that there is nothing to say once the subject has been raised. Variety rests in the means by which the infinite (or the void, the vacuum) is summoned and the intensity with which its presence is recognized. The void itself, the tremulous incipience of the ellipsis notwithstanding, has a strangely burgher-like stolidity.
Non sequitur seems to me a more complicated maneuver. Or, more precisely, more various. Whereas the abyss of the unwritten, however conceptually alluring, seems oddly shallow, and ultimately simplifying, reductive, non sequitur in many of its forms complicates. It is lively, volatile, skirmishing, suggesting (at its best) simultaneity or multiplicity, loosing a flurry of questions. It is a system of tangents, not the open cornucopia of the ah. In its variousness, it seems earthly, whereas the lacuna is recalcitrantly soulful, alternating predictably between the intended-profound and the intended-elevated.
These unlike strategies do, sometimes, coexist (though not with marked frequency, as far as I can tell). More likely, they reflect differing temperaments, and their common basis in, dislike for, or discontent with completion may be misleading.
Non sequitur has, I think, two primary (and quite different) uses. The first, to which I will return, is true non-relation; the second, more dramatic or psychological use makes of non sequitur a code, and of the poem a diagram of systematic evasion. The mind skids from one thing to the next, anecdote to epiphany, with no visible or logical thread connecting its movement. The task of the reader, in poems of this sort, resembles the task of the psychoanalyst: listen closely enough to narrate the gaps, the unsaid, the center around which the said whirls, from and to which it departs and returns. The said, in this usage, is a shield; as the poem develops, the reader begins to piece together the deleted material: to the degree that the evasions and digressions compel in their resourcefulness (to the degree that the mind generating them interests us), the unsaid intensifies and quivers. And—the essential point—becomes increasingly specific. As in a murder inquiry: more and more possible subjects are ruled out. In this movement from the general to the implied specific, dramatic non sequitur differs markedly from the void and its invocations. The difficulty is duration: How long can we pay attention to non sequitur, attention focused enough to break the code? That there needs to be duration is plain: pattern is at the heart of the tactic and pattern isn’t established in two lines.
Implicit in this poetry is the role of the other, the concept (however intentionally distorted) of dialogue, or at least response. The mind of the speaker is far too purposeful to seem playful or darting (in the manner, say, of O’Hara); rather, it ricochets, glancing off particulars, touching on them and veering wildly away, alternating between excitement (frenzy) and anxiety (or sense of peril). The poems often move as though their speakers were being pursued. As indeed they are, with the reader playing the role of the pursuer. The intensity of this sort of art arises from the conflicted desires it manifests: the speaker here wants not to be caught; at the same time, he wants to be stopped. Or, to put it another way, wishes simultaneously to flee and to be apprehended (in both senses).
Always an other is present or implicated: a force, a danger; sometimes, too, a hope of rescue.
Not all non sequitur is this sort of diagram. To treat a poem of calculated non-relation as though it were a code is to sentimentalize it. Sentimentalize because, in poems of this second type, the only binding rationale one can devise is so vague, so inclusive, so elastic as to be banal. That this is the case intends to direct reading away from such psychological probing (since it inevitably makes the poem more superficial, not deeper). Non sequitur is not, in these poems, burning revelation begging to be understood. Nor is it a private system of logic.
What, then, is it? Deep objection to the templates, the pattern-making impulses, the glib correspondences. I think non sequitur, in this use, has two major sources: delight in mobility and profound intellectual contempt for easy emotion (one might speculate that, in this branch of the aesthetic, emotion is by definition easy). I spoke earlier of O’Hara: his poems seem to me to belong to that group founded on delight. The poems have the liveliness of good talk; they are animated by the wish to be diverted, amused; their abundance reflects O’Hara’s gift for, and readiness in, finding such pleasure in the world, a pleasure imitated for, offered to, the reader. This isn’t simply preference for the temporal over the eternal, the momentary and fleeting over the fixed. This is, rather, an art in which the eternal has ceased to exist except as an analogue for human memory. In its place we have joy: a mind impressionable, malicious, curious, nervously and eagerly taking in unrelated bits of data. Whereas poems of psychological preoccupation assimilate (seeking in data resemblance or symbolic weight), O’Hara simply notes; he records not to infer relation but to feed on variety, the genial spaciousness of formlessness.
Ideally a poem of this type is a replica of life, but a modest replica: it makes life (of the quotidian variety) infinitely entertaining, sweetly or sadly pointless, and infinitely rich (not withstanding little patches of boredom). Because life is never called upon (for the sake of art) to make some sort of point, the reader is afforded a world utterly free of earnest moralizing, free of the elephantine heroic. And in O’Hara’s work, at least, bravado and carelessness for grandeur come to seem a kind of philosophic statement, an effortless (apparently) preference for the material and present over the non-material divine (which is inevitably also the speculative). As in the talk that, to me, such art resembles and prizes, this poetry is never bland, never general, always deeply idiosyncratic: in its essence, therefore, not a leaden policy concerning the irreplaceable present moment but rather the present moment itself, unadorned, and not idealized out of its being.
But most contemporary practice seems to me to depart from this sort of pleasure, to propose alternatives for non sequitur that are neither code nor conversation; these alternatives are not in themselves necessarily problematic, but their inherent opacities and elusiveness accommodate intellectual fraud. A model for the difference might be the difference between O’Hara and Ashbery, a shifting of interest from the moment to the idea of the moment, from speech to abstraction of speech, from the dinner table to the philosopher’s study (hence, from the companionable to the absorbed solitary), from the palpable to the disembodied. It can be pulled off, this gesture; its dangers, however, resemble those of the abyss. Like the abyss, it has a tendency to flatter the reader, who projects himself, by invitation, into the unintelligible, and reads in what he chooses.
The danger, I think, begins in an extension, apparently logical. What is, in O’Hara, the evanescent concreteness of present time mutates into something seemingly larger: the poet comes first to be included in that evanescence and then, easily, to be the center of it.
As this aesthetic has developed, philosophical profundity (or what stands on the page as proof of it) is that which is most removed from the psychological, that realm in which the plight of self, of individual human consciousness, is most explicit. Fueling this move away from the psychological is an inescapable awareness, the awareness that drives much of our art, and has for some time: the self is limited, a construct, not a fate. But it does not follow that to excise the self is to annex limitlessness. In its most common manifestations (those most remote from the poles represented by Eliot and O’Hara), non sequitur resembles the strategies of grammatical omission in its prizing of the nonexistent (in this case, tone or point of view), its complacent notion that, if the highest art is without agenda, the shortest route to it is the eradication of sustained individuality, that hotbed of agenda, as it might be revealed through language-as-voice, language saturated in self.
Mind, in these poems, systematically refuses to impose or infer meaning. An admirable and promising intention with a curious result: the action of refusing meaning (i.e., the substance or body of the poem) is unvaried, regardless of particulars.
It is eerie to watch this art develop; to see, on one hand, its immense security as to its scale and groundbreaking importance, and, on the other, the dazzling ease of its fabrication, once the principal tropes are in place. And to see the rigorously incoherent claim for itself the stature of thought.
We have made of the infinite a topic. But there isn’t, it turns out, much to say about it. Which leaves only the style of the saying. A fact that makes the strategies under discussion, these attempts to enlarge the poem’s formal and ideological scope, oddly poignant: style of saying hardly leaves behind the self.
Certainly the art of incompleteness makes that self startlingly present. The silenced abandon of the gasp or dash, the dramatized insufficiency of self, of language, the premonition of or visitation by immanence: in these homages to the void, the void’s majesty is reflected in the resourcefulness and intensity with which the poet is overwhelmed.
The aspect of infinity meant to be invoked is grandeur. Whereas in advanced non sequitur, infinity is enacted as fatigue: though form is not apparent, and will never become apparent, energy does not cease. Nor does anything appear to generate it: not, certainly, the trajectories of search that inform earlier shape-riddled verse, not even any atmosphere of the unappeasable. Non sequitur, in this use, is not driven; it is the idleness of the alert brain, repose not among its options. The problem to the reader is that the experience of reading a stanza is not different from the experience of reading forty stanzas. With the result that, endless activity notwithstanding, our impression is stasis (a reaction not to energy but to repetitiousness).
What the re-created void ignores or disdains is the obvious literalness of the page, its palpability, its four sides. (Technology, I suppose, may eliminate this problem, but the disposition to ignore the obvious seems likely, then, to manifest itself in some other way: what is at issue is the prevailing of will over nature.) Thought, at the moment, rails against limits (which, in very concrete ways, it simultaneously overlooks). Limits seem somehow dull, politically aligned with fetters and chains, spiritually aligned with a too-terrestrial imagination. The poet who allies himself with the abyss intends to acquire its mystery and scope. What this loses for poetry, potentially, is genuine earthly ignorance and its attendant craving to be relieved of ignorance, salient properties of the human mind; this ignorance and this craving, when conjoined to do their utmost with the world as presented, can more persuasively allude to the void, the that-which-is-missing, and more profoundly represent the drama of human insufficiency than can most stylistic gestures.
As for endlessness versus closure: read Milton’s sonnet on his blindness, with its cycle of instigating actions. The poem, you will see, never ends, only begins again: “When I consider…” For proof, set it in the past, changing the verbs. Then, indeed, it ends. And yet it is, as Milton wrote it, in its turning and turning, a closed form.
I came to this subject because I am, myself, drawn to the unfinished, to sentences that falter. I dislike poems that feel too complete, the seal too tight; I dislike being herded into certainty. And I have sought and admired (and tried to write) poems in which questions outnumber answers.
But this question remains: How much looseness, or omission, or non-relation, is exciting? And when do these devices become problematic, or, worse, mannered? My preference for the not-perfectly-coherent makes it particularly troubling to observe the degree to which lacunae and the improbable transitions of non sequitur have come to seem less thrilling than they used to seem. And I am somewhat more alert to the fact that, in practice, we tend to infuse these gaps with a vast range of feelings not actually suggested but rather not ruled out. Such diffuseness of response is at odds with what I want of art: helplessness, the sense of the poem as inescapable trajectory.
And yet, and yet. The fervent approbation that continues to greet poems of the sort described here reflects a sense, building in both poets and serious readers, that form is in danger of atrophy or stagnation. I mean here not simply the closed, certain forms of sonnet and sestina, but form in the largest sense, as a shape made by perception: shape conferred, sometimes, but always, ultimately, shape that makes thought visible or comprehensible. Our too-eager welcoming of the facile experimental, the derivative experimental (if that is not an oxymoron), suggests that a gulf has been widening between the world as it has been perceived in poems (mysteriously ready to yield insight) and the world as we live it. As feelings about being change, whether that change is willed or not, the stately and noble sounds of concluded perception, all the well-made boxes, seem in their solidity weirdly nostalgic. If Ashbery appears to be for so many readers the poet of our time, it may be because he is (as O’Hara wasn’t particularly) alert to, absorbed by, the problems raised in this discrepancy, and because (unlike Eliot, who aspired to be annexed by the sublime) he is willing to disappear, to dissolve in the void—or, more accurately, to exist in particles, piecemeal: not “voice” as we know it, but strands of consciousness woven through the densely incomprehensible.
As a nation, we identify ourselves with, pride ourselves on, discovery. And so are ready, always, to anticipate, to make assumptions: to experience setting out as arrival, to mistake ceremonious announcement of entrapment for escape from entrapment, to conflate the reiteration of dilemma with creation of a new thing.
I prize (as writers are prone to prizing) instinct, guesswork, nerve. But it may be that certain forms and choices need to be reviewed more closely than others, particularly those forms in which theory and intention displace scrutiny. I think we should question these choices a bit more, in the cold dawn.
1999