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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Dancing at the Devil's Party : Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic
"'Poetry makes nothing happen,' said W.H. Auden, but there are those of us who disagree." So begins Alicia Ostriker's Dancing at the Devil's Party. The nod to Auden is respectful, but it's clear that Ostriker is not in Auden's camp. Poetry "can tear at the heart with its claws, make the neural nets shiver, flood us with hope, despair, longing, ecstasy, love, anger, terror," she writes. For Ostriker, poems are both crucial and relevant. She respects poems, the way one respects magic or religion or anything that smacks of the ineffable. The essays collected in Dancing at the Devil's Party focus on various aspects of the poetry universe: contemporary American women's poetry, the Civil War poems of Whitman, the nature poems of Maxine Kumin. Ostriker approaches these subjects with passion and precision. The book's title, also the title of its first essay, comes from Blake, commenting on Milton in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it," Blake wrote. This isn't an intentional misreading, Ostriker argues, nor is it hyperbole: Blake is serious. Milton's poetry is "better, more exciting, more energetic," in the sections dominated by Satan, and "worse, duller, less poetic" in the sections dominated by God. Art, Blake implicitly argues, depends on opposition between God and the devil, reason and energy; a good ("true") poet is necessarily on the side of "energy, rebellion and desire." Ostriker takes the idea further: for her, a good poet (and hence good poetry) goes beyond duality, including the duality of good and evil. "[W]e and the world are neither single nor double but multiple," she writes. This emphasis on a complexity that transcends binary opposition provides the book's underpinning. "I prefer the word 'love' to the word 'evaluate'," Ostriker explains. "First I see what I love, then I try to understand it. In this way it seems I can love one thing and another, each for different reasons, rather than the same thing over and over and smaller and smaller." This is an unsubtle jab at critics who divorce aesthetics from emotion: a good reader of poetry, for Ostriker, is one who approaches poetry with both head and heart. Once Blake and the question of evaluation have been dealt with, Ostriker spends the remainder of the book's first essay discussing contemporary American women's poetry. A realization of women's place in contemporary American culture leads to "the discovery that marginality, however painful, may be artistically useful." The fact that this poetry questions language's dualisms (male vs. female, sacred vs. profane, mind vs. body, logos vs. eros) points to a truth beyond dualism. "Not surprisingly, the strongest women poets tend to oppose hierarchy; they like boundary-breaking, duality-dissolving and authority-needling." We and the world are neither single nor double but multiple: here we are again. Ostriker's passion for contemporary American women's poetry could be written off as identity politics. To my pleasure, she writes with equal fervor about other subjects: the different kinds of love in Whitman; artificial opposition, on the subject of eros, between Sharon Olds and Elizabeth Bishop; how a white reader can find resonance in the work of black poet Lucille Clifton; the Jewishness of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." It is this last essay that resonates most with me. "Howl Revisited: The Poet as Jew" is filled with fascinating comparisons and explanations. It is the one part of the book I felt compelled to mark up while reading, creating my own marginalia, Talmud-style. Ostriker's observations range from the obvious to the startling. Ginsberg's low-dialect locution is both uniquely American and a tribute to his Yiddish-speaking ancestors. "Howl" borrows from Lamentations, the book of Scripture that deals with the aftermath of Jerusalem's destruction in 587 B.C.E. The contradictions in "Howl" echo both the contradictions in Lamentations and the contradictions inherent in Jewishness itself. But despite the low Yiddish and high Hebraic elements of "Howl," Ostriker admits, Ginsberg was "a Jew in flight from Judaism." She addresses this at some length, as she must. The tragicomic tone of "Howl" may be as Jewish as Sholom Aleichem, but what to do with Ginsberg's own renunciation of his Jewishness? Just as I was beginning to fear that Ostriker would relegate Ginsberg to some not-Jewish, not-Gentile wasteland comes her glorious save: "Yet ambivalence toward Jewishness, like pepper in the stew, is a key ingredient of post-Enlightenment Jewish writing." Bingo. Ostriker wins again. She could not be more right. Ostriker's criticism is grounded in her impressive knowledge of American literary traditions and their adherents, from Walt Whitman to Maxine Kumin and everyone in between. Quotations and explanations give this book root; Ostriker's passion for "the poetics of ardor" gives it flight. This is a strong, compelling and beautiful collection of essays. I recommend it highly. Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Want Pif to review your book? Rachel Barenblat is co-founder of Inkberry, a literary organization in the Berkshires. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. A chapbook of her poems, the skies here, was published by Pecan Grove Press (San Antonio) in 1995. Learn more at www.rachelbarenblat.com |
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