Sunday, January 29, 2012

A Review of a Review

Philip Nikolayev on Henry Gould on Ben Mazer's Poetry

What follows is Philip Nikolayev's comment on Henry Gould's January 2012 review of Ben Mazer's collections POEMS (among other texts) for The Critical Flame. on Friday, January 27, 2012. Nikolayev has given his permission for this reposting of his thoughts. -- ZWB
At long last, a thoughtful, sustained endeavor -- the first of its kind and scope, and by no less a person than Henry Gould, himself a poet whom I hold in high esteem -- to figure out and come to terms with the poetry of Ben Mazer, who in my biased and partial view is one of our times' very finest poets.

Gould, by dint of his particular sensitivity, taste and learning, is better equipped than most poets today to review this work, and the limitations of his honest effort, which I feel succeeds only partially, highlight the peculiar challenges of the task. The essay wins my applause in spite of these limitations.

I find much in this review to be off the mark, e.g. the overemphasis on Ashbery (who -- did I spell him right? I am not American! -- will yet serve for some decades as the catchall digestive pill to process anything that is perceived as opaque in current American verse; that said, Mazer himself alludes to Ashbery) and on John Beer (whom I have not read, but the discussion here did not pique my curiosity); or the naïve remark in passing that Mazer "doesn't care for exactitude; his olympian indifference even extends to spelling and syntax" (Henry, that’s precisely exactitude, those things you mention are *exactly* as Mazer wants them, and every comma in the writing is carefully decided upon). I wish the ostensible difficulty –- the complexity -– of the verse had met with a more technical discussion than its dismissal as mere "sea-washed vagueness" (though I am strangely grateful that the N +1 "types of ambiguity" are not invoked for the school children).

Nevertheless, there are many true, nuanced reflections here, and the general take on things has many merits. There is the true admission that Mazer's poetry  is "full of beauty and pleasure," even if the essay, possibly somewhat against its own intention, paradoxically fails to reveal a genuine excitement. In spite of all this, Gould's review is groundbreaking and will certainly influence further critical analyses of Mazer's work.
*

Henry Gould left a few comments in gracious response:
Thanks, Philip. Just a couple points : "sea-washed vagueness" was not intended as a dismissal (I like sea-washed vagueness). And, 2nd, the poet's playing fast & loose sometimes with spelling and syntax certainly may have been exact & purposeful : but if so it's a purposeful indifference. Nevertheless I really don't want to over-emphasize this aspect in Mazer's POEMS: it plays a very minor role in a few poems, I think.

Ben Mazer certainly warrants a full-scale stand-alone review, where his work is front & center (as does John Beer to some extent). But what I was trying to do in this essay was map out a dynamic, a larger context, a "way of reading". I don't think this happens often enough - in the roar of chit-chat & PR we tend to lose our bearings...

11 comments:

Henry Gould said...

Yet one more (& final) review of PN's review of my review :

The only passage above that I would really take issue with is the part about the "overemphasis on Ashbery". The main focus of my review is not on Mazer's presumed difficulty. Rather it is to outline a thread connecting Eliot-Ashbery-Mazer to a defense of poetry as a mode of sane & "integrated" humanity (under threat since the 17th century). Ashbery plays a role in my schema here, which it would be inaccurate to reduce to the typical cliches about his "opaqueness" etc.

Ben Mazer said...

It might be worth pointing out that Ashbery's work is not even an influence on my work.

Henry Gould said...

Oh, but it is now!

Henry Gould said...

We may not agree on everything, Ben & Philip... but at least it feels like we're talking about something real (in poetry). & I would say again : in this essay I'm not attempting to paint your portrait, Ben, but to sketch some notes toward a literary-history play - a play in which you step onstage.

Ben Mazer said...

The realest thing in poetry is that which has nothing to do with influence. When people see what that is in my work, they will begin writing about my poetry.

Henry Gould said...

Yet... "no man is an island..."

I grant - again - that your poetry deserves a deeper, more sustained reading. But I stand by what I've written. I was responding to your poetry, and John Beer's, as I see it (in my limited way). And I read it within the context of a more general situation, which I tried to describe.

It's interesting to me that Gabriel Gudding, in a similar way, also resisted the "role" for which I cast him, in an earlier Critical Flame essay. I guess either I'm totally off the mark, or poets have a natural antipathy toward being "framed" in a picture not of their making. Or something else. The soup thickens!

Henry Gould said...

.. and now I believe I will let it rest, for my part....

Unknown said...

A close reading of one poem wd help. I get lost in what's been said here.

Ben Mazer said...

It is my experience that poets are islands (visited islands perhaps); maybe it is a sign that they are inhuman. Henry I love what you wrote even if I don't entirely believe I've been fully "got". Eliot (the first one) said (I paraphrase) that those of his works which seemed most successful to him were those which induced the greatest number of surprising responses in readers other than the poet. Perhaps subjectivity is to a large degree the human condition. I myself feel that the poet occasionally gets at something that is objective. The one thing I do notice about so much of contemporary reviewery (and this is very apparent to me in the reviews of my own work) is a surprising lack of interest in close analysis, which is where a lot of the work gets done in seeing what a poet is really saying, meaning, seeing, or feeling. Christopher (Ricks) tells me I write in heroic verse, not blank verse. I don't know. Philip would disagree with that. I don't think my play is boring. I may be an Eliot Redivivus (you are not the first to say so) but the real point for me is that I saw in Eliot something that reminded of myself. So with Crane. (There's an ambiguity there.) I have never tried to write anything (tried seems too forceful a word) that wasn't entirely an expression of myself. But I gotta use words when I talk to you. And I will use them any way I can to say what I need to say. But, oh, there is nothing I care for more than exactitude. Mark that. Another thing. There is all too much (and this is not directed at you, Henry) comparing poets with other poets, and trying to fit them into traditions and schools. There is probably nothing less relevant to the true undertaking. Influence is just the trappings (as it turns out) and the putty, the substance that the poet undermines and distorts to say what it is that the poet has to say. The inherited world is the medium, that which the poet must use to get at something which is possibly not entirely of that world (or something which gets at a reordering of the world, finding it perhaps a bit subjective). Yet the poet may occasionally wish to comment upon the world.

Henry Gould said...

... can't resist another thought.... I think our old friend TSE the seagull would say that every poet takes part in the conversation of literary history & tradition, whether s/he knows it or not, or acknowledges it or not.

Ben Mazer said...

It's not really different from what I'm saying.

Post a Comment