I haven’t written for awhile because things happened, and things happening have a way of interfering with writing. First, my apartment, which had seemed too good to be true, proved too good to be true. One day I noticed the telltale marks of bedbug bites. Triplicate red bumps — breakfast, lunch, dinner. I’ve suffered them before on other literary pilgrimages, most memorably in an inn in the Lake District, where they so ravenously fed upon me that that very night I was awoken by them and had to step out into the rain after leaving an indignant note on the front desk that must have been smiled at. I walked for hours in the predawn darkness along Windermere, looking in at the windows of dark hotels, hoping for coffee, secretly glad to be suffering for my heroine, Dorothy Wordsworth. And then there was the hostel (hostile?) in Berkeley where, dimly aware that they were at me, I swaddled myself in the blankets, thereby warming for them my delectable blood. This time I was in Assisi when I had to accept that there were bedbugs in Rome. So I texted my landlady, who left me on “seen” for a concerning minute or two before responding that she wasn’t surprised, she’d had this problem last summer, too, they were in her place as well, etc. Could I call her? I called her.
“Austeen, za little-ah animals, they-ah like-ah you.”
Yes, it seemed they did. They lived in the books, she said. I would have to move to her daughter’s apartment while we fumigated the place.
More recently, I came down with Covid. Turns out it’s difficult to care very much about Caravaggio when one is sick. Yesterday I walked past the open doors of Santa Maria del Popolo on my way to buy painkillers, not especially caring about the crucifixion of Peter, the conversion of Paul. I had just been through the Sistine Chapel, and was feeling bad about infecting some unknown number of openmouthed tourists before learning that I was positive for Covid. I thought I just had a cold because Venice had been blissfully cool, even cold, at night, and I couldn’t get my head around wearing a jacket. In the Sistine Chapel, feeling quite horrible, I had stood listening to William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops,” staring at “The Final Judgment,” and beginning to seriously question whether we really are evolved from apes. Because, yes, apes can do some amazing things, use pieces of grass to eat ants, and so on, but not only did we conceive of a story that includes the very beginning and the very end of time, we were able to build an amazing structure that we then painted with this story (because, like all great art, Michelangelo’s achievement feels like all of ours). That morning I had spent some time hating a particularly awful poem written by a former professor of mine, and the difference between his poem and Michelangelo’s painting, considered within a single hour’s span, was making me feel nauseous and enfeebled.
In Venice, before beginning to feel sick, I had a similar experience of loving and hating art within a particular span of time. I had spent an hour staring ravenously at Titian’s Pietà, only to go to the Guggenheim and get very grouchy about Modernist art. In the Guggenheim I felt the same morose atmosphere one feels at a poetry reading. I overheard someone say, “I guess I just don’t get it.” I don’t imagine anyone would say that about Titian’s Pietà, painted at the end of his life, when the plague was spreading through Venice (it would eventually kill him and his son). Titian intended for the painting to be placed above his tomb, meaning it was a kind of epitaph, like that of Rilke or Keats, or a Japanese death poem.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that what matters in art is necessity. This has been flipped around now, though. What is necessary, people seem to believe, is that art have a tangible effect upon the world in the realm of political and social action, or that it constitute some personal expression of the artist’s identity. I took a workshop with a very famous novelist who argued that any novelist not writing about climate change is forfeiting their moral obligation as an artist. As if to write about anything but climate change in the time of climate change is to give up some sort of token we’ve been offered, which we should slip into the “climate change” slot, and to slip it into any other slot is to waste it.
I mean a different kind of necessity. Titian painting the dead Christ with the plague at his door.
Bad poetry, such as the one by my former professor, feels indulgent. There is no real reason for it to be here, and yet it’s here. In this way, it’s like anything you’d just as soon go without (bedbugs, Covid). If you’re unfortunate enough to put yourself in the way of such poems (or paintings), you have no choice but to let them foist themselves upon you. One goes under them as if under a wave of vertigo. We talk of being underwhelmed by mediocre art — I have the opposite reaction. I’m overwhelmed by it. It’s like I have an allergy to something everyone else can eat without a second thought. So when my mom innocently sent me the poem, it was like someone being innocently handed an allergen at a cocktail party. But I’m glad she sent it to me, because it made my experience of the Sistine Chapel all the more powerful.
I know, it’s unfair to compare a random poem to the most famous work of art. But is it? Isn’t this the standard by which artists should be measured? My brother is a surgeon. As a surgeon, he tries to do every surgery at least as well as any surgery has ever been done for the sake of his patient. Why should artists not feel the same about their art?
Bad poems are unnatural. There is no such thing as a bad tree, but there are bad poems. They should be uprooted so they can’t spread.
The professor who wrote this poem that I dislike so heartily identifies as “a poet and communist.” This in itself is concerning. Not that he’s a communist, of course, but that he feels the need to identify as one. He was my first poetry professor in graduate school, unluckily, it turned out, because he spewed a lot of nonsense about how, since language had been corrupted by the state, no one can write a pure poem without using the language of oppression. He never talked about a poem, only about what a poem meant or didn’t mean. I got the sense that, for him, poetry just happened to be the thing he’d chosen to train his critical and political eye upon. He would go on to write a lot about music, too. He was one of those people who clearly disdain what they profess to love. We hated one another almost giddily. I saw him as the enemy of everything I believed poetry to be, and he likely saw me as a holdover from a time that he was trying to do away with with alacrity lest he have to face someone who still believed in the craft he was pretending to teach. He hated William Stafford’s poem, “Traveling Through the Dark,” which, though it is a little cringe now, suggests that the poet can play a moral role in the world, taking an action on behalf of all of us. He also hated, inexplicably, Elizabeth Bishop, so, naturally, when it came time to present on a poem of our choice, I gave a probably unnecessarily strident defense of “At the Fishhouses.”
Mostly this professor talked about Marxism. It was clear that politics was his real interest, and poetry was merely a means to that end. But for all his talk about the working class, I doubt he’d ever done any actual work in his life. When Bishop writes of the old man she meets by the shore, this professor must have seen her description of him as mawkish. He would be more comfortable talking about the proletariat than the old man who:
accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
That’s the key phrase: “the principal beauty.” People like the professor would never be caught dead using a phrase like that. It would be too embarrassing, and would mean accepting something beyond themselves. Because even the ideal political system is manmade. I’m not saying that the professor needed to believe in god, only that he needed to believe that we can reach something via art that has nothing to do with ourselves.
When this professor gave me a C, I responded by challenging him to a duel. It was in good fun. I told him to meet me on the Quad at dawn, to bring a second, and to choose a weapon from the world of writing implements — quill pen, typewriter, ream of paper. He didn’t show.
After I left that school, this professor became very active in the Occupy Movement, apparently smashing an ATM on campus, as if, by destroying this symbol of money, he was doing something tangible to undermine the capitalist state. But when he and friends of mine were arrested at a protest, he alone couldn’t recite a poem in the paddy wagon. My friends were confused. Wasn’t he a poetry professor? And yet they were the ones reciting Lorca, reciting Brecht. He had none at heart.
Is it surprising then that his poems feel unnecessary? How can we practice an art that at heart we disdain?
Maybe to make art that we need, we need to need art in the first place.
So is making generalizations.