Joseph Auslander, Consultant in Poetry, 1937-1941

Joseph Auslander wore the laurel of Consultant in Poetry from 1937 to 1941. He spent four years in the hot seat, published a dozen-something books, including a couple of novels, and was a regular contributor of poetry to the Saturday Evening Post, and for all his tapping at the national consciousness, for all the marks he made on our common cultural wall, Auslander has been almost entirely forgotten.

I wanted to correct this error, but I have been unable to produce much of a reason for recalling the man or his work. If anything can be gleaned from sifting through Auslander’s poetry it may be that writing to and from a conservative present hastens one's induction into the unfossilized past.

Auslander’s work can be generally characterized as starchy verse expressing inflexible sentiments. Cliches, in Auslander's poetic cornucopia, are treated as finished dishes to be served under silver bells rather than the over-boiled vegetables that they are. In 1936 he was the last poet to use "unshriven" in a poem without smirking.

Auslander contributed poetry to the Saturday Evening Post over the course of three decades, his poems often buried between columns in the center of the page. The poems that appeared in the SEP were generally short, formal homilies which generally addressed patriotic, military, or religious themes. His broadly circulated poetry is short on sentiment, but long on wind, as demonstrated by these later lines in his poem "Christmas Catechism:"

Can the bells of Christmas banish
Horror camp, inhuman lust?
Can the scars of hatred vanish?
Can Faith quiet our distrust?
Can the Dove of Christendom
Dwell with the Atomic Bomb?

It is difficult to discuss his work without being snide. But Auslander was at least sincere and purposed, and his causes, such as religious tolerance and human rights, were generally noble, though occasionally jingoistic. Of course, his work is also pompous and clinking, but this is made, perhaps, forgivable by the fact that Auslander was interested in neither lyricism nor the ambiguity of metaphor. Rather, he created instructive verse which employed simple rhymes because they would adhere to one’s memory most firmly. The imperativeness of his writing reflects his profession; he was a teacher for much of his career, filling lecterns at both Harvard and Columbia.

The poems that appeared in the SEP were populist and occasional, patriotic and religious, and Auslander's longevity at the post suggests that they were favorably received by the readership. By comparison, the poems in the book More Than Bread (1936) were by and large preoccupied with the dullest of poetic subjects: poetry. Over a dozen of the poems in the collection reference poetry, poets, and/or the poetic tradition directly, including the poems “Poet and Spider,” “To The New Poets,” “To the Poets Who Fly Left,” “The Poet Purses His dreams” and the catastrophic free verse poem, “I Am Poetry.” In every case, Auslander is sermonic in his insistence that 1.) Poetry is form, and 2.) Poetry is being ruined by a new generation of poets who don’t understand that poetry is form. Auslander laments “our raucous time,” “our restless hour,” and “these amorphous days,” as being incapable of producing or appreciating formal verse. He touts the genius Keats, Coleridge, and Heraclitus, and often worries about the lack of music in the new generation's poetry.

The poem, “I Am Poetry” deserves a little more attention if for no other reason than it seems unique to Auslander’s work, being written in free verse. It is also arguably insane.

Each of the seventeen stanzas begin with the phrase, “I am Poetry,” and each stanza proceeds to catalog the ubiquity and grandeur of poetry, which is apparently a snake-oil cure-all. Complicating this exuberance is the question of the speaker. The “I” here seems to be Poetry personified. Of course, it may also be read as the personification of the poem (a very postmodern move on Auslander’s part).

Or the “I,” most troublingly, may be Auslander himself. This reading is supported by the lines, “I confront you with Keats,” which seems to come directly from the poet’s mouth, but is then complicated by the line, “I am Poetry/And I am the vision/Without which the people perish,” which seems a little extreme, and “I am taller than the Empire State Building,” which seems hysterical. A careful reader will notice that the poem references several tropes from earlier poems in the collection, suggesting that either Auslander is flattering himself or that he is an unimaginative poet who believes there is some poetic weight left to the phrase, “I lift the heavy heart/With a rainbow or a leaf,” which is, coincidentally, how he concludes this six page poem.

To call Auslander’s poetry “light verse” would be misleading because it is so often leaden, sermonic and bleak. But when he veers into lighter subjects, such as love, the result is so awkward and feckless that it seems self-mocking.

Love will never be found
By searching here and there;
Love is all around,
Nowhere, and everywhere,
And nowhere abound.

One year after publishing this poem Auslander was appointed Consultant in Poetry.

On the Laurels of the Laureates

A few years ago, I opened my literature classes with the question, "Who is the current Poet Laureate of the United States?" Almost uniformly, I was answered with, "What's a Poet Laureate?" A few enterprising students responded with the names of poets they knew, Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost. It was easy for me to supply the correct who to my question because I'd cheated and looked it up, but it was much more difficult for me to answer the what of their response.

The Poet Laureate is chosen by the Librarian of the Congress, presumably after consulting a few back issues of the New Yorker. The Laureate collects a modest annual salary of $35,000 and for this wage, is required to present their lyrical mastery once over the course of the year. The Laureate often elects to do some civic laboring to promote the value and humanity of Capital-P-Poetry, but they aren't required to do much more than pursue their work, and that at their leisure.

The first Poet Laureate wasn't called a laureate but a "Consultant in Poetry," a post that was first filled in 1937 by Joseph "Saturday Evening Post" Auslander. "Consultant" sounds both bureaucratic and inconsequential, sort of like the "Assistant Producer" designation of movies, but it was a title held by some lauded poets; Bishop, Williams, Frost, and Lowell all sported the modest "Consultant" moniker. This fame of personage, however, has not always been the norm for the post. Most of the Consultants appear to have been elected by a process of spinning a bottle at a New York party. I'm looking at you, Leonie.

Then in 1986 the Consultant became the "Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress," a title which not even a Laureate's mother could deliver without smirking. For means of comparison, the first British Poet Laureate was appointed in the late fifteenth century by Henry VII, and he, Bernard Andre, wrote mostly in Latin. I don't mean to suggest that we Yanks should feel insecure about the length of our laurels.

It's hard to argue that the Laureate is the most prestigious or gifted or productive of poets. It's hard to argue for their cultural relevance as poetry continues to be a kind of cultural charity supported by grants, prizes, benefactors, and academies. The Laureate isn't required to write poems for inaugurations or ceremonies, though they sometimes have, so it's hard to argue that they act as a formal poetic voice to the country. What, then, is the Laureate? How are they chosen? Do we need one? Does having a Laureate do poets any favors, or are we performing an autocoronation without a kingdom? Why is our current Laureate an 82 year old who lives on top of a dead volcano in Hawaii?

Quick now: who is it? Who is the Laureate?

I have many questions, many suspicions, and one or two prejudices, but only piddling experience on the subject of Laureates. So I'm going to look into it. I'm going to read every one of the Laureates, starting at the beginning with Joseph "Precious Moments" Auslander, and I'm going to log my findings here as crooked proof. I have no intention of producing a fair or entire portrait of these men and women, but I will give them a reasonable read, and I will place all of my remarks in the cowardly brackets of irony to stave off any earnest or academic discourse.

Clique to Enlarge

Pretentiousness is the religion of cliques; it is forceful and insensitive, formal and slow to change. The closer we cling to a clique, the more we must denounce our own proclivities, our strangeness, our tastes.

Pretension allows for many sins but few virtues. We denounce ourselves, and the denouncement makes us fierce advocates of the church of our clique. A shared pretension gives distinction and security to clique members, but it is a uniform distinction and a restrictive security. No one in a clique has any real respect for anyone else in the clique because it is well known that all players are frauds to some degree, and besides, membership doesn't rid anyone of the competitive urge. We still crave distinction within our sphere of distinction. This is the nature of the Pharisee: to be alone at the center of devotion, to ascend upon a faith that is shared but not real.

The common element of all cliques is that from even a modest distance they seem absurd to an outside observer. The observer will see a delirious mob of people all pretending to be unique and alone.

The Music in the Skipping Record

I’m not a fan of biographies, especially when the subject of such navel unravelling is a poet. I am not interested in being the article that eclipses the noun. And that is what a poet is: an article. A particle. The poem on the other hand, if it’s any good and fantastically lucky, is the immortal spirit. It is not, after all, the thought of Keats coughing blood onto his pillow that make me buzz. It is his poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Much as I have never taken to biographies, I often shudder at the autobiographical poem. For me, a poem which explicitly makes the author known has always had a waft of advertisement to it. Autobiography is exaggeration, and a poem that exaggerates only ever wins half the reader’s confidence.

There is nothing wrong with writing about yourself, but it is so much more interesting when you don’t. When we write about ourselves slantways, we entice folks nearer to our little campfires. We have to write about the world and strangers directly because we are more responsible when we do. We exaggerate the lives of others less because telling their story requires imagination, and imagination has an evener hand than confession.

Though I do not think of Keats very often, his poems have put their fingerprints all over me. I think of his poems because they are helpful: their order, their language, their sentiment, their humanity. They help me think straight and feel straight. His poems are little preserves of his way of thinking, the connections he drew, the preferences he held. Preservation is, of course, the soul of autobiography; the poem is a kind of syntactical autobiography.

Some folks think in the forms, rhythms, and language of a poem. We call it poetry because if we called it, “pretty thoughts that I organized for others,” who would be interested? We act like poetry is a calling; we treat our poets like priests or we hope to be treated like priests. But it isn’t a calling; it is the residue of internal patterns. Which I find endlessly more charming and encouraging than any mystical mutterance.

All biographies are autobiographies. It is the biographer’s ethic and penchant and history that is the final revelation. Biographical criticism, in particular, would be improved if critics included in their works pictures of their father and mother. If they want to play Freud, let them play Freud nudely.

Poetica Exotica

Sometime in the last century, poetic language changed. It went from being sermonic, florid, and familiar, to being obscure, petty, and obtuse. Poets, especially those serving the canon, shifted meaning from the poem to the individual words.

Chalk it up to the Modernists, if you like; I tend to point the finger at Yeats because he made language a religious experience, but the esoteric poetic has lost little of its prestige in recent decades.

The result of this shift has been a homogenization of lyric, a messy divorce from readers, and an explosion of crossword puzzles posing as poems. And still, ask a poet to define poetry, and almost uniformly they will begin by ruminating on the distillation of language and the righteousness of every word. The pompousness of this definition is infectious: young poet logophiles pour out erudite absurdities, while established poets seek out unused and unusual words to make turgid sentiments seem new.

The subtext of this preference for exotic language is that poetry does not exist in the vernacular, the cultural, the relational. Rather, poetry lives in the academy, the Hermetic, the dead. The chief amusement that poetry offers readers now is a linguistic faddism. Observing the vogue-cycles of poetic words is good sport. "Sepulcher" is out, "moxibustion" is in.

When a sophomore writes an essay that is furious with arcane synonyms and academic jargon but which signifies nothing, I am sad because they have mistaken intellectualism for thought. When an amateur guitarist buys a $3,000 Les Paul so he can play a three-chord Eagles song for his girlfriend, I am sad because he has mistaken the tool for the effort. When parents name their child Archibald Marzipan Dewlap the Third, I am sad because the kid is going to be kicked around the playground.

Poets worry that a critique of the current poetic will necessitate a dumbing-down of their work, but let me be the first to assure you that the current poetic can't get much dumber.

The How-To Cult of the Wroter

I would really appreciate a how-to-write book which begins with the following disclaimer: “More than likely, you don’t like to write; you just want to be a writer.”

The authors of these how-to-write books generally omit the following disquieting points:

1. Feeling like a writer has nothing to do with being a writer. Self-esteem is the product of repeated failure, self-doubt, honest assessment, and repetition of the proceeding steps. Any direction as to how you should prepare yourself emotionally for the creative moment is irrelevant because the authors of such directions are probably not psychologists or behaviorists and certainly do not know you. How-tos that tell you how to become inspired is as ridiculous as me telling you how to feel on your birthday and then you trying to feel that way. Feelings are your business, figuratively and, if you are a writer of even rudimentary ability, literally.

2. Most of us are not an expert, not even on the subject of our own lives. The relative homogeny of our experience, which is generally articulated by media cliches, gives each of us a false sense of expertise. Most of us, with only a glancing understanding, may feel like an expert on an impossibly broad spectrum of subjects, from the superiority of the American version of The Office, to the presence of life on Mars. Writing what you know is not the same as having something to say.

3. Understanding other writers and their process does little to improve our understanding of ourselves or the world. Unless our aim is to impersonate, we would be better served reading the United States Tax Code than any how-to-write treatise. A writer writes a book about the mystical process of writing for the very pragmatic reason that they need money and are out of ideas for writing anything else. Except Rilke. He gets a pass on his charm alone.

4. We are told that writers must play all of the following parts: writers, editors, agents, publishing consultants, marketers, networkers, and spokespeople. Many how-to books will outline the process of publication and success with breezy simplicity, when in truth the process of publication and success is absurd, capricious, and often unique. Getting published is much like losing your virginity: many people have very specific ideas about how it should go but the moment itself follows no script. Writers must be writers. The market is glutted with great networkers and expert marketers, but there are very few writers anywhere on the bookstore shelves.

Tellingly, many writing how-tos often share a common tone and idiom that is reminiscent of a devotional. It is common for the authors of writing-instruction-books to adopt the idiom of religion (especially Eastern religions which still smack of exoticism to Americans) in their efforts to mystify a relatively simple compulsion which has been learned for generations through the still-simpler process of: 1. Reading great works and 2. Writing copious amounts of mediocre crap.

Based on the evidence of the how-tos, I can only assume that would-be writers are incapable, uninspired, and uncommitted to the task. Apparently, would-be writers must be goaded into the ritual of work, reassured as to their writerly purpose, and cajoled into creativity and inventiveness.

I recognize that all of the above is hypocritical given the frequent content of this blog. I sometimes extoll a process; I sometimes explicate the deed. Don’t listen to me. And don’t buy any more books that tell you how to be a writer. They’re essentially pornography for unmotivated wroters.

The Uncanny Canyon, Part 2

I've been trying to figure out why increasingly I get more enjoyment from watching a B-movie than the latest Scorsese, why "production value" sounds more and more like a euphemism for "inhuman," why reality television continues to be popular despite the glut of elegies sung by a host of cultural critics. The same critics might explain the persisting popularity of actor-free TV as a failure of taste or evidence of cultural collapse: the coming Second Dark Ages.

The mistake that many cultural critics make is arguing that reality television is inferior because it is obviously fake; it is artificial. The "actors" are just amateurs emoting under the "direction" of producers, working through crisis after crisis in the stead of a plot. It is a mockery of writing, direction, production, and acting. It is dishonest.

But reality television is popular for precisely the opposite reason. It is popular because it is more human than the staid sit-coms, more honest than the morbid and cynical cop shows, more relatable than the Cheshire-hearted anchors. Reality television, like community theater, has no reverence for the illusion or the artifice; reality television is drunk on the goofy and inconsistent, the insecure and petty humanity of its characters. The artificial elements are obvious, and seem, if anything, the butt of a joke. More important than story, or production, or direction is emotion: that elusive, irrational, and utterly human quality.

The "uncanny valley" creeps us out because we are being shown artificial structures which are trying to approximate humanness. Reality television, on the other hand, delights (and sometimes frustrates) because it shows us humans playing with artificiality, with fraud, with pretension. By doing so, they forefront their humanity.

B-movies are delightful not because of their story or staging. I don't laugh and grin while I watch because I am superior to these "amateurs," these deluded auteurs and their cast of bumbling, unpaid friends and colleagues. I'm not laughing at their obvious humanity, but rather I heehaw because the B-movie is one long poke at artificiality, a jab at the tidy perfection of the shadows we're used to seeing on the wall. The greatest B-movies are more human and inspiring than anything that's ever won Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Or put another way, most studio movies are advertisements posing as art. A B-movie is humanity posing as an advertisement. It is wonderfully subversive, an uncanny zenith.