The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions

by Robert Pinsky

In this book Robert Pinsky writes about contemporary poetry as it reflects its modernist and Romantic past. He isolates certain persistent ideas about poetry's situation relative to life and focuses on the conflict the poet faces between the nature of words and poetic forms on one side, and the nature of experience on the other.



The author ranges for his often surprising examples from Keats to the great modernists such as Stevens and Williams, to the contents of recent magazines. He considers work by Ammons, Ashbery, Bogan, Ginsberg, Lowell, Merwin, O'Hara, and younger writers, offering judgments and enthusiasms from a viewpoint that is consistent but unstereotyped.



Like his poetry, Robert Pinsky's criticism joins the traditional and the innovative in ways that are thoughtful and unmistakably his own. His book is a bold essay on the contemporary situation in poetry, on the dazzling achievements of modernism, and on the nature or "situation" of poetry itself.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism

200 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including The Inferno of Dante Alighieri and The Separate Notebooks by Czesław Miłosz. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate.
wikipedia

Reviews

[H]

"In more successful and commandingly original work, matters of conception demand more attention than derived bits of style like the flash of descriptive analogy." (13)

"Strictly speaking, the ultimate goal of the nominalist poem is logically impossible. Language is absolutely abstract, a web of concepts and patterns; and if one believes experience to consist of unique, ungeneralizable moments, then the gap between language and experience is absolute. But the pursuit of the goal, or the effort to make the gap seem less than absolute, has produced some of the most remarkable and moving poetry in the language. Naturally, it has produced much dross, too. My proposition is that the difference between the dross and vulgarization on the one hand, and genuine work on the other, is a sense of cost, misgiving, difficulty. .... a hallmark of the worst writing is to underestimate the problem, or to deny it." (59, 62)

"[The discussion on Keats' "Nightingale"] is meant to suggest a particular, somewhat cautious approach to certain familiar slogans of modernism: Williams' "No ideas but in things"; Stevens' "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing itself"; or Pound's "Go in fear of abstractions" and "The proper and perfect symbol is the natural object." And there is Williams' famous red wheelbarrow, upon which "so much depends." These emblems and phrases, perhaps too often separated from their various contexts, suggest something like an extreme nominalist position. They suggest, in other words, an intellectual and poetic devotion to the utterly particular moment, the unique instant caught by the senses as in one flash of the retina.

"But as I understand Keats, he tells us that to give oneself over utterly to the unreflecting "thing" is to become a sod. It is to die. ... The two kinds of death at stake in the "Ode," physical and intellectual, are finally one, because words and the human soul are both conceptual, they are both continuous projects in time. Words and the human soul btoh generalize, connecting moments of time, and organizing the particulars of experience." (61)

"The poem, new or old, should be able to help us, if only to help us by delivering the relief that something has been understood, or even seen well." (118)

"His [Ammons's] work is based upon a clear, concentrated meditation of the problem which I have made central to this book. The result is a difficult marriage of poetics or epistemology with natural description: the fluid landscape and the poet's repeated definition of his own role in relation to that flux." (150)

"What happens to poetry when it gets too far from prose, and the prose virtues? If the plural is analyzed, the virtues turn out to be a drab, unglamorous group, including perhaps Clarity, Flexibility, Efficiency, Cohesiveness . . . a puritanical assortment of shrews. They do not as a rule appear in blurbs. And yet when they are courted by those who understand them--William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop would be examples--the Prose Virtues are transformed from a supporting chorus to the performers of virtuoso marvels. They can become not merely the poem's minimum requirement, but the poetic essence." (162)

[Anders · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked Pinsky's poetry and found this at a used book store so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Pretty good commentary on contemporary poetry. As another reviewer mentioned, there are bits prone to go over your head, unless you were/are reading the same poetry Pinsky read and talked about in the book, but it's not overly hard to follow if you haven't. For the most part, Pinsky is clear and gives examples of what he comments on. On the other hand, he has a very specific idea about how poetry works and what it does and it mostly involves sticking to a certain style. For example, in the earlier chapters he sets about to explain how contemporary poetry has inherited the focuses of traditional poetry and how it has approached those same problems differently. One of those is the seriousness with which the poet approaches their poem-from there he creates a dichotomy, those who use irony to be folksy or dandy and those who use irony to undercut their own poetic voice. Another way to put this is whether the poet takes metaphors seriously or uses them ironically (potentially out of a mistrust for language itself) to invalidate the force of the metaphor as a whole. Or, "Monumental and familiar, the conflicts are between conscious and unconscious forces within the mind: between the idea of experience as unreflective, a flow of absolutely particular moments, and the reality of language as reflective, an arrangement of perfectly abstract categories."

If I could accuse Pinsky's poetry of anything, I might say that he takes it too seriously, but most of the time that attitude works out really well for him (I'm looking at you "Samurai Song"). I think I would be a lot more dissatisfied with this book if he didn't aver on more than one occasion that he is dealing with conventions-either widely held or those he prefers-which pulls the punch out of any good/bad judgments upon poetry (of course I suppose it is reasonable to make such assertions to some degree. But let's not have a discussion about what good poetry is right now, eh?). In that vein, another reviewer has said, "I hate the pompous earnestness of this book" but for me it was more like "I appreciate the earnest pompousness of this book." So basically what I'd say is that he goes about setting up some useful criteria for interpreting/analyzing poetry and he provides lots of examples that work well together.

Here's something: "I suspect that when a contemporary poem is a good one, then one can describe the poem's success by showing how the poet either understood his received ideas, recovering them from the area of mere mannerism, or else worked away from them altogether."

I really liked what he had to say about Ashbery and he said some interesting enough things about Berryman to make me want to pick up a book of his sonnets. Overall a fun, interesting read, if at times pompous or even boring because of too much theory or too much commitment to poetic standards I didn't necessarily agree with.

[Amy Sawyer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not so much "didn't like it" as "so over my head." I will be honest, I couldn't even finish it because it was so far past my knowledge of poetry theory. I just stopped reading it and I don't think I could tell you one about what I read. Unless you have a very detailed understanding of poetry and poets throughout history, stay away.

[Jonathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate the pompous earnestness of this book.