Are we watching another poetry revolution?

by Klaus Martens (Copyright 2010)

 

In 1991, the poet and BBC critic Dana Gioia issued a rousing call to poets, poetry, poetry lovers and teachers to “restore a vulgar vitality to poetry” (Gioia 14), i.e. to have it rise from the ashes of its own precious and isolated subcultures, then supposedly found mostly in academia, where it languished both in abundance and impotence, and to use its own strengths to open out new vistas for and of itself. The call did not remain unheard in the English speaking countries, particularly in the United States of America. Since then, many efforts have been made to remedy the deficit articulated by Gioia. In the following paragraphs, I shall attempt to trace some of the more recent developments in the world of English language poetry. A small case study based on a poem, as short as it is intriguing, will be at the core of my discussion.

i

In the decades since the iconic poets of High Modernism wrote, until about the late 1970s – a turning-point, marked for me by the death of Elizabeth Bishop (1979] -, and in spite of a quite astonishing and still ongoing flowering of prolific poets notably in the United States and Canada, the role of poetry or the lyric as a significant cultural indicator, even as literary advance guard, has lost most, if not all, of its former small, but rarely overlooked importance. While, in spite of this, its presence in North American educational institutions has increased, its presence in the public eye has markedly decreased or shifted to different forms. Elsewhere – for instance in France and Germany – the role of poetry in both the university and the public has become almost negligible. Whatever memorable verse of note are being remembered in North America or Europe are in English and were written by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and the pop singers of today.

Of course, like the Latin language for over two-thousand years, English has become, more or less recently, the “lingua franca et jocundissima.” This development, incidentally, parallels what Wallace Stevens once envisioned for poetry itself, a poetic lingua franca of the imagination poets could be sure would be understood (Stevens 343). Although English language poetry has not attained to that status, it does, in fact, dominate, if not by its quality then certainly by its sheer volume, poetry in other languages – both within the English speaking world and outside of it. In short, the dominant language also dominates international literature and supersedes indigenous poetic growths. In order to find out about poetry’s state or states, English language poetry, notably from North America, must again be examined. This is not to mean that such an effort – a rethinking of the role of poetry in our public and private lives that has taken place in America in recent years – is not overdue in Europe. Perhaps the situation here it is yot yet past redemption. Analyses of the state of the art of poetry in America here are many. I read this as a good sign. Diagnosis, after all, precedes treatment. Thus Dana Gioia’s influential article of 1991 – “Can Poetry Matter?” – which followed upon the heels of Joseph Epstein’s 1988 essay aptly entitled “Who Killed Poetry?” is merely part of a string of similar articles reaching a long way back into the past. Poetry has been pronounced dead several times before, although not much did happen to revive the corpse. In contrast to all earlier pronouncements, though, Gioia’s article actually incited to action.

To be sure, things have not progressed so far that recitation of the occasional well-known poem penned by a contemporary may be overheard in a country club (though I may be mistaken there). John Barr, the former Wall Street executive turned chairman of Chicago’s recently potent Poetry Foundation (funded by a large amount of money deriving from Lilly Pharmaceuticals) however, may be striving for such broad and popular appeal when he calls for “a change of mood.” That is, he calls for poetry to emerge from the full-time poet’s usual economic and temperamental depression and to inject itself back into the mainstream of the workaday world. He points to T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams as examples of poetry writing professionals – a banker-turned-editor, an insurance executive, and a country doctor. Teaching apparently does not count as a full-time job in the real world. Barr accordingly calls for a broadening of experience available to the poet whose work then, I suppose, becomes accessible to a broader audience. This also makes for many more occasional poets.

There is another factor one may want to consider. In North America, it strikes a European, the present situation regarding the writing and publication of poetry at first sight seems enviable, a poet’s paradise. Undoubtedly there are many, often vastly different, poetic voices from many parts of the American country making themselves heard or read. Poets do read at the YMCA and lesser public institutions – and not only in New York. They read on many public occasions, as, famously, Robert Frost did at the Kennedy inauguration in 1961. They receive presidential medals of honor. In that democracy, there has been in existence, for some time now, the post of poet laureate. Poets read on National Public Radio. Robert Pinsky, then the Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress (1997-2000), founded his Favorite Poems Project which involved people from all walks of life reading, discussing and recording “thousands of favorite poems”, including a reading at the White House” by President and Mrs. Clinton (Pinsky 31). Many universities and colleges hire poets-in-residence to teach writing classes, do readings, invite other poets, travel to poetry conferences, are able to write in some peace and security and to broaden the minds of their students and enrich the curricula. Not so here in Europe, sad to say. Poet-professors are not the pride of German universities. They tend to be looked at askance from among the sere ranks of staid, sober, and right-thinking academics. Believe me, I know.

“The art of verbal creation” (Perloff 749) in English, the written traces of an “act of the mind” (Stevens 1997, 219) – today, to some extent, seems to have moved beyond linguistically sensitively rendered self-reference and subjectivity of the lyric of Romantic and post-Romantic traditions (Perloff 750). When we consider the many well-publicized poems by poets from all parts of the United States, rural and urban, in, say, the globally available online publications of the ALP, the American Poetry Foundation’s “American Life in Poetry” series, that change becomes obvious. It is a change in persons, method and subject matter reflecting Poetry magazine’s and John Barr’s – its president’s - new orientation. Here’s an example.

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On September 4, 2008 Ted Kooser, former Poet Laureate (2004-2006), featured a new poet in column number 180 of the ALP online series. The laureate always introduces the poets and poems presented, providing some biographical detail, commentary and reading aid to the general audience. Kooser wrote:

What’s in a name? All of us have thought at one time or another about our names, perhaps asking why they were given to us, or finding meanings in them. Here, Emmett Tenorio Melendez, an eleven-year-old poet from San Antonio, Texas, proudly presents us with his name and his meaning. Melendez calls his poem “My name came from.”

My name came from my great-great-grandfather.

He was an Indian from the Choctaw tribe.

His name was Dark Ant.

When he went to get a job out in a city

He changed it to Emmett.

And his whole name was Emmett Perez Tenorio.

And my name means: Ant; Strong; Carry twice its size.

What’s in a name? Clearly, this eleven-year-old poet’s name was not well known to readers of poetry. What’s in the poem? We might discuss the native pride reflected here, or talk broadly about native history and the American Indian past, particularly about the history of the Choctaws of Oklahoma. This would include some reflections about the need of these people to live on or off the reservation; about deracination spelled by the adoption of names of Irish (Emmett) and Spanish (Perez Tenorio) provenance. One could discuss the almost iconic American theme of name-changing and what it means in a native American context. This would be the usual Cultural Studies approach, often preferred, in class, to actual literary analysis in both Europe and America. It is a legitimate approach, one of many possible. In a more literary context, we might then talk about changes, with some reference to Ovid and metamorphosis. This, today, may perhaps be too heavy a burden to bear by this poem of short declarative sentences telling a personal story about changing one’s name in the past and changing it back now. It is also a poem about repetitions, employing a repetitive structure, making its linguistic point by dramatically abandoning an assumed name and destroying the syntactic structure of the dominant culture, reasserting its powers of smallness.

How did the young poet arrive at writing poetry? To me, Tenorio’s not-so-simple poem appears to be the result of a poetry teaching method at first, I believe, initiated in the late 1960s by Kenneth Koch, one of the, too some, terribly complicated-seeming poets of the so-called New York School of Poetry. John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara were among his classmates, as it were. His methods and the result Koch published in two volumes, Wishes, Lies and Dreams (1970 and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (1971). Koch, and this is remarkable, successfully developed methods, actually: strategies of teaching poetry to grade-school children by relying on some tried and tested more or less sure-fire formulas to help jog the youngster’s poetic muse. Koch’s was an important first step on the way to popularizing Do-It-Yourself approaches to writing verse at a time when poetry teaching still consisted of first teaching formal aspects, e.g. the intricacies of sonnet, and ode, counting metrical feet and in naming the means to be mastered in order to achieve meaning – as Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (1938), Louis Untermeyer (1942), and, later, John Ciardi (1959) had done in their well-known and influential new critical anthologies and prescriptive handbooks for students, later abetted (but reduced in scope) by Helen Vendler’s several anthologies (with extensive commentaries) and extended and methodically updated by Paul Hoover (1994) in his anthology as well as X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia (1994) in their fine introduction to poetry. In Koch (and some of these others), in short, reduced to certain formulas, the arcane-seeming poetic devices of – especially modernist – poets became more easily available, i.e. seemingly easy to achieve.

From Kenneth Koch’s didactic experiments to Poetry Magazine’s recent muscular undertakings, a kind of – perhaps in some instances: studied - poetic down-dressing has become the norm. John Barr of Poetry Foundation makes manifest his aspiration “to reunite poetry with the current of popular entertainment” (Goodyear 2). Join in, is the call, you, too, can do – and they could and still can, in astonishing numbers. Kenneth Koch’s Brooklyn pupils, some of them probably of about the same age-group as young poet Tenorio-Dark Ant, learned to question appearances and the names of things, shaking them loose from their cemented contexts, thus releasing their potentiality, including their own. They learned that, creatively, they might be strong, yea, even carry a literary load twice their size. This is exactly what John Barr characterizes as poetry’s new and much needed “robustness,” aye, and the hope he has been said to have for the return of the “nineteen-century poet-orator” (Goodyear 6). Of course, if we look at what looks and sounds at first sight as an outrageous statement by Barr, has much in common with Wallace Stevens’s demand (though not his actual poetic practice) as spelled out programmatically (echoing Wordsworth’s reference to the “common life,” and his “selection of language really used by men” in his 1800 “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads”) in the often quoted poetological poem of 1942, “Of Modern Poetry”:

It [the poem] has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

It has to face the men of the time and to meet

The women of the time. It has to think about war

And it has to find what will suffice. (Stevens 1997, 218-219)

Perhaps, poetry since modernism has not produced what is sufficient to assure its place in, broadly speaking, contemporary culture. Perhaps only by a slight deviation from previous esoteric heights and arcane language use and the use of “the speech of the [contemporary] place”, by situating itself centrally in the contemporary scene as an index and measure of contemporary civilization – now that might be something for poetry and poets to strive for. Perhaps Barr and his supporters are right – poetry need a beginning again, a new start unafraid of simplifications.

 

The Waste Land gave the time’s most accurate data,

It seemed, and Eliot was the Great Dictator

Of literature. One hardly dared to wink

Or fool around in any way in poems,

And critics poured out awful jereboams

To irony, ambiguity, and tension –

And other things I do not wish to mention. (Koch 1987)

In Kenneth Koch’s pragmatic advice to children and their teachers of poetry, this becomes a reduction to rudiments of thought and language, a shaking up of both everyday linguistic devices frozen in everyday immutability and the arcana of university-directed poetry for an elite. It is, in short – and in part - he return to the didactic. At mid-twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, this was not heresy anymore but a reassertion. The didactic reasserts itself after having been proscribed by the modernist revolution which, in its turn, had tried to destabilize what seemed frozen into cliché and had aged to meaninglessness, by the poetic revolution of the nineteen-twenties and ‘thirties, with Poetry as its flagship and its editors and contributors at the helm. But is also more than that. There is a new playfulness and place for a new innocence and self-assertion. Now, one “dares to wink” and “fool around in any way in poems” and use any contemporary variant of Wordsworth’s “language really used by men.”

iii

In fact, Poetry Magazine and its well-financed and well-publicized efforts clearly take up Kenneth Koch’s didactic directions of thirty years or so earlier and develop them further, offering, in addition a comprehensive didactic program and teaching aids. Now, Poetry has a “Poetry Everywhere Collection on Teacher’s Domain.” Readers online are asked to “Explore poetry and language with free online multimedia teaching tools” (Ad at back of the September 2008 issue). At teachersdomain.org, in addition to contemporary voices known and unknown, there is also on offer a quite a large selection of poems by poets from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Mark Strand, Seamus Heaney, and, of course, Billy Collins (2001-2003) – another recent poet laureate whose oeuvre partakes of both poetic worlds I am talking about, the one dying and the other being (re-)born. Clearly, the didactic intent encompasses a wide range of English language poetry, and is not limited to American poets. In short, the intention seems to be to broaden the appeal of poetry, lead it out of its supposedly elitist corner back into the world of many different talents and readers. We are told: “The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.” What an admirable undertaking! Poetry, formerly the doddery old aunt of poetry, predictable in its choices, has become Emmett Perez Tenorio’s “Dark Ant” indeed.

Are we going through a revolution in poetry perhaps equal to that which eliminated H.W. Longfellow and his fellow poets from the fashionable anthologies and the must-have modernist curricula? Well, not quite. First, in spite of the stir Poetry Foundation's manifold activities in America are still causing – witness, for instance, Dana Goodyear’s recent long essay in the New Yorker about it – it is not a revolution from the heights of Parnassus, as the modernist intellectual poets brought it about (Goodyear passim). It is a revolution resembling the corporate takeover of a staid and soberly reputable firm by moneyed upstarts. It amounts to a coup d’état dans le royaume de l’art poètique moderne. It would be-all-too easy a task to rustle up a thick sheaf of poems of decidedly mixed quality from among those now included in Poetry or on the web sites of the Poetry Foundation. Here, business methods are used to broaden the appeal of the firm and sell the product to as many people as possible. Many others, though, are not buying it. Witness, for instance, an excerpt from a letter-to-the-editor in the October 2008 issue of Poetry:

"I will NOT renew my subscription. […] The poems that were published in your last issue […] were the worst yet. Our tastes are evidently no compatible. I am a poet, and most of my friends in the Poetry Society of Oklahoma agree that the selections in Poetry have deteriorated over the past few years. I think Harriet Monroe would be quite embarrassed if she read them. How did you ever find that many poets who write such trash? (October 2008: 73)."

Well, surely one person’s trash represents another’s precious find, as every Dadaist knows. But who says that Harriet Monroe’s standards would help the poetry she’d edit today to find an audience, today?

iv

No, the supposedly good “olden times” have not quite (yet) returned, for sure. I do not solely mean the times of the nineteenth-century Romantics and their successors, the Symbolists, say. They, too, were becoming ever more removed from a reading public that had once been enamored, yes, enchanted by the popular magic of Longfellow in his narrative long poems and hearty verse addressed to the young. Many of the other so-called Fireside Poets enjoyed similar popularity.

Their language of poetry was artful but it was not overwhelmingly self-referential. It wanted to mean, elegantly, informed, and conscious of tradition, but also to express concerns and ideas middlebrow contemporaries could share. And their poetry tried to be memorable. It was, in fact, memorized by readers well into the twentieth century, in schools – however reluctantly – well until past mid-twentieth century. One read a poem to enjoy its rhythm, its accents and melody, its sound, in short the musicality of it. This service, in the meantimime, is being provided by iTunes and others. Or if not, and here the Poetry Foundation is quite right, it has not been “sold” effectively enough as the poetry available, corresponding to what not merely the few but the many feel and can, feet-tappingly, create themselves – and recognize it in those who are even better at it than they are. Perhaps the Poetry Foundation is attempting the impossible: to democratize what, rightly or wrongly, has become elitist, and lost much of poetry’s audience, both the reading elite and the lovers of more ordinary verse. But, then, perhaps we must admit that poetry as literature simply cannot have the broad appeal envisioned by its recent champions with the linguistic and historic background it has usually required from its aficionados and creators. As part of popular culture, on the other hand, its appeal is a different one. Here the question is if it can compete on a more primitive level with the verse set to sound / music we have come to call lyrics (cf. Perloff 750).

This, of course, is related to the phenomenon observed by Jonathan Culler and others in the U.S. (and by me and many colleagues here) that in university literary studies, i.e. in English literature as taught in schools and the universities, poetry has rapidly been losing much ground to narrative as a professionally taught discipline (Culler 201). To close the gap between the elitist and the popular academic critics of the art of poetry may have to re-examine, revise and, perhaps, set up new professional standards. This task is a happy one, I like to think, in the face of such an illustrious pantheon of poets and of so many new poems and poets to choose from, so many amateurs, so many earnest beginners, so many lovers of their art of different backgrounds, competence, and intent.

References

Barr, John. “American Poetry in the New Century.” Poetry (September 2006). http://www.poetrymagazine.org./magazine/0906/comment_178560.html (June 26, 2007): 1-8.

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren, eds. Understanding Poetry. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1938.

Ciardi, John. How Does a Poem Mean? Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959.

Culler, Jonathan. “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123.1 (2008): 201-206.

Gioia, Dana. “Can Poetry Matter?” The Atlantic Monthly 267.5 (May 1991): 94-106. "

http://www.danagioai.net/essays/ecpm.htm

Goodyear, Dana. “The Moneyed Muse.” The New Yorker (February 19 & 26, 2007).

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact.

Johnson, Marie. “Letter to the Editor.” Poetry (October 2008): 73.

Kennedy, X.J. and Dana Gioia. An Introduction to Poetry. New York: Harper-Collins, 1994.

Koch, Kenneth. Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? New York: Vintage, 1971.

---. Wishes Lies, and Dreams. New York: Vintage, 1970

---. “Seasons on Earth.” New York: Penguin, 1987.

Kooser, Ted, ed. “American Life in Poetry Columns, published by The Poetry Foundation. www.americanlifeinpoetry.org. 001- (2007-2008).

Lewis, Michael. “How to Make a Killing from Poetry: A Six Point Plan of Attack.” Poetry (July 2005): 1-3.

Martens, Klaus, Paul Morris, Arlette Warken, eds. A World of Local Voices: Poetry in English Today.” Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003.

Martens, Klaus. „Introduction.” Klaus Martens, Paul Morris, Arlette Warken, eds. A World of Local Voices: Poetry in English Today.” Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003: 9-12.

Melendez, Emmett Tenorio. “My Name Came From . . . “ American Life in Poetry: Column 180, ed. Ted Kooser. [HYPERLINK “http://www.poetryfoundation.org”] Last accessed September 4, 2008.

Perloff. Marjorie. “Presidential Address 2006: It Must Change.” PMLA 122.3 ((2007): 652-662.

--- and Craig Dworkin. “The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound: The 2006 MLA Presidential Forum.” PMLA 123.3 (May 2008): 749-761.

Pinsky, Robert. Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry. Oxford and Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002.

Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous. New York: Knopf, 1957.

--. “Of Modern Poetry.” Collected Poems and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode, Joan Richardson. New York: The Library of America, 1997: 218-219.

---. “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” Collected Poems and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode, Joan Richardson. New York: The Library of America, 1997: 329-352.

Untermeyer, Louis. Modern American and British Poetry, 2 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942.

Vendler, Helen, ed.. The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard, 1985.

Wordsworth, William. “Preface.” William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems”. Second edition [1800]. Wordsworth Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. E. de Selincourt [1904]. London-New York: Oxford University Press, repr. 1975: 734-751.

Note: This paper appears in slightly different form in a collection of papers from the 2008 Saarbrücken Poetry Conference: Klaus Martens, ed., States of the Art: Considering Poetry Today. Würzburg: Königshausen & neumann, 2010.

 

Dichtungssprache und der unbequeme Frager in der Lyrik. Eine kurze Erörterung  

von Klaus Martens (Copyright 2010)

Die Grenzen der Sprache werden täglich mit ungeheurem Einfallsreichtum im Sinne einer progressiven Universal-Innovation weiter verschoben. Zugleich wird eine schwer zu beziffernde Zahl von Ideolekten erkennbar, die im raschen Entstehen und Verfallen begriffen sind. Es sind gruppenspezifische Sprachen, die keineswegs Einsehbarkeit wollen – eine Art neues Rot- oder Schwarzwelsch. Dem ist schwer zu folgen.

Kurz, wir befinden uns in einem Spiel von Transparenzforderung und Einblickserschwerung als Tendenz und Strategie. Das gilt für den Gebrauch von Materialien, wie etwa das Glas, aber auch für die Sprache und die Sprache der Literatur, hier besonders der Sprache der Lyrik. Damit befinden wir uns in guter Gesellschaft derjenigen, die seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, durch Anklage und Preis zugleich, sich mit sprachlicher Durchsicht und Blendung befasst haben.

Der Missbrauch der „normalen“ Sprache, wie Thukydides und auch Hugo von Hofmannsthal (im Lord Chandos Brief) wussten, ruft einen exklusiveren Gebrauch von Sprache hervor oder, im Extremfall, das Schweigen. Im 20. Jh., aber nicht nur dort, war daher das Schweigen eines der Mittel der künstlerischen Sprache (übrigens auch der Musik, etwa bei John Cage). Das Aufhören-zu-Sprechen, wie etwa Arthur Rimbauds frühes Schweigen, gibt auch Auskunft. Die von Paul Valéry so genannte „absence présente“, das Anwesen im Abwesenden, die Rede im und durch das Schweigen, ist modernistisches, strategisches dichterisches Mittel. Im öffentlichen Bereich stellen Stille und Schweigen Verweigerung da. Dies ist ganz im Sinne des Schreibers Bartleby in Herman Melvilles gleichnamiger Erzählung, der stereotyp einen Satz wiederholt: „I prefer not to”. Das Gegenteil dieser Verweigerung, an dem teilzunehmen, was alltägliche Kommunikation ist, ist die Verweigerung herkömmlicher Sinngebung. Nonsense statt sense, Unsinn statt Sinn. Oder anders gesagt, die Verweigerung oder auch das einfallsreiche (und Einfälle produzierende) Spiel mit herkömmlicher Denotation.

Falls die Sprache das Instrument ist, mit dem wir uns durch die vermeintlich verstehbare Welt außer uns tasten, ein Schlüssel, der in das äußere und familiäre Konstrukt passt, das wir und anderen uns in schönem Solipsismus aus der Welt gemacht haben, dann ist die Sprachverwirrung durch das fortwährende Auf- und Verwerfen neuer Ideolekte ein Mittel, dem aus Erwartung geborenen Verstehen anderer zu entkommen. Der Schlüssel aus Wörtern passt dann nicht oder doch nicht sogleich. Er öffnet nicht glatt und widerstandslos eine Tür in unsere Welt. Denn auch wir bestehen ja aus unseren Wörtern, nicht irgendwelchen Ideen. Das wußten viele Dichter des 20. Jhs. (Duran).

Und wie kann man sich literarisch schutzimpfen gegen verbrauchte Sprache, die aus dem Hals riecht (Tucholsky), gegen permanente und geradezu obszön plappernde Öffentlichkeit, gegen sogenannte „Literatur“ (im sogenannten „erweiterten“ Begriff davon), als ob ein gewaltiges Feigenblatt vor dem Mund entfernt worden wäre, die nackten, ungewaschenen Sprachk örper und Gedanken? Wo beginnen? Beginnen wir mit der Romantik, schließlich leben wir noch in ihr.

Vielleicht hilft zuerst ein Satz des englischen Visionärs, Dichters und Druckers William Blake (1757-1827): "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." " Wenn die Tore der Wahrnehmung gesäubert würden, dann erschiene dem Menschen alles so, wie es ist, unendlich.“ Die „Tore der Wahrnehmung“, das sind nicht allein unsere Augen, das sind alle unsere Sinne, die bestimmen, wie und was wir sehen, hören, schmecken, tasten und fühlen. Sie beruhen zu einem guten Teil auf dem Wissen und Vorwissen von anderen – den Eltern, den Geschwistern und Freunden, den Lehrern, der weiteren Gesellschaft und damit den weiteren Annahmen, Überzeugungen und Ideologien, die sich uns mitteilen. Wir messen unsere Perzeption daran. Wir messen aus – und werden selbst daran gemessen –, bis zu welchem Grade das, was wir erfahren und uns widerfährt, mit dem Früheren und Gleichzeitigen übereinstimmt. Wir stützen uns auf unsere eigenen und auf die Erfahrungswerte anderer. Wir nehmen also auch mit der Sprache wahr. Wir erwarten, wie der hoch geschätzte englische Literatur- und Kulturkritiker Frank Kermode es in seinem Werk The Sense of an Ending (1967) formulierte: wir erwarten Konsonanz, Übereinstimmung, eine Gleichschwingung und Gleichstimmung.

Diese „expectation of consonance“ (Kermode 58-59), so lautet der Begriff, ermöglicht z.B. unser alltägliches Leben. Wir erwarten, dass wir wissen, was Dinge bedeuten, wie sie funktionieren, wie sie waren und, vor allem, wie wir sie bis auf weiteres zu bleiben erhoffen – die Konsonanzerwartung ermöglicht, wie wir heute sagen würden: intuitives Verständnis und intutitives Handeln. So wie ich mich in ein mir fremdes Fahrzeug setze und zuversichtlich starte und losfahre, weil ich zu wissen glaube, wie und womit zu starten, steuern, und anzuhalten ist. Und in diesem Allerweltsbereich klappt das auch mit dem konsonanzerwartendem Automatismus. Sonst könnten wir nicht – wir Automaten, wir Roboter – funktionieren, sprechen und schreiben.

William Blake, ein zeit seines Lebens oft verspotteter Einzelgänger, war auch – im Zeitalter Immanuel Kants – ein Selbstdenker, Selbstdichter und Mythologe mit seinen eigenen Methoden als Drucker, Maler, Zeichner, Dichter, Mythenerfinder. Blakes Wort von der notwendigen Reinigung der Wahrnehmungsinstrumente steht am dichterisch- und denkerischen Anfang der neuesten Zeit auf der Schwelle von der Aufklärung zur Romantik. Das Ablegen ungeprüfter, überkommener, auch eschatologischer Vorstellungen von der Welt, der Umsturz bekannter Denk- und Sprachmodelle, das immer wieder fällige Abstreifen im Gebrauch besudelter sprachlicher Kleider, der Reinigung der – im täglichen Umgang oftmals unvermeidlich scheinenden – Klischees, der toten Metaphern, der blassen Sprachbilder, der müden Vergleiche, der erstarrten Sprach- und Denkfiguren – diese Hinausführung aus selbstverschuldeter, sprachlich bedingter Unmündigkeit durch das Abtragen der Patina, dem Schlüpfen des schimmernden Neuen aus alter, rissiger, schuppiger Haut, das ist gemeint. Und dies ist ein wichtiger Teil des noch andauernden Projektes der Romantik. Es besteht, könnte man vielleicht sagen, ganz grundsätzlich im Prozess des unausgesetzten Infragestellens, in dem mutigen Abschalten der Konsonanzerwartung, des insistenten, des nie ermüdenden, des die intuitiv konsonanzerwartenden Mitmenschen zur Weißglut treibenden Fragestellens, so scheinbar kindlich und kindlich beharrlich allem Etablierten entfliehend. Hier liefert Blake ein wunderbares, ein berühmtes Beispiel, sein Gedicht vom Tiger (1794).

 

The Tyger

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes!
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? What the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? (Blake 24-25)

Zu diesem Leittext der englischen Romantik sind viele Dinge gesagt worden. Hier interessiert, dass es unbequem und verstörend ist. Es trifft einen Nerv. Also noch einmal: Wer hinterfragt denn da so schrecklich insistent? Sogar Glaubensdinge. Was masst der Fragende sich an! Wer oder Was fragt denn – das Kind natürlich, wie mehrfach bei Blake. Die Unschuld. Das Kind, wenn man ihm nicht den Mund verbietet, das Kind, das die akzeptierten Antworten, die konsonanten Sprachregelungen nicht kennt. Der willentlich kindgleiche Mensch, dem nichts vertraut sein soll. Der fragende Idiot in dem Gedicht, wie Harold Bloom als junger Yale-Kritiker ihn einmal nannte, der „idiot questioner“, bezeigt durch sein Fragen die Widersprüche zwischen der Unschuld des kindlich, gnadenlos Wissensbegierigen und den peinlichen Problemen mit möglichen Antworten: – Sind denn Tiger und Lamm von demselben erschaffen worden? Die Erfahrung fataler Konsonanz gegen die Unschuld, die den Widerspruch aufzeigt und die Einverständnisgemeinschaft aufbricht – vielleicht den zwischen der vermeintlichen Güte eines Himmels, eines Gottes, einer Obrigkeit, eines geliebten Führers, eines schnauzbärtigen Väterchens irgendwo, eines Orwellschen Großen Bruders und der entsetzlichen Grausamkeit, ja, schlimmer noch: ihrer furchtbaren Gleichgültigkeit denen gegenüber, die nicht erlöst werden, sondern selbst ein Leben am Kreuz, in den Fängen eines Unholds verbringen.

„Tyger, Tyger burning bright – warum wird ein flammender Tiger befragt, ein strahlendes animal, ein Raubtier mit Augenlichtern, die glühen im Dunkel der Nacht, die die schaurige Waldwildnis erleuchten? Vielleicht sind sie, die brennenden Augen, die „Tore der Wahrnehmung“ und die gefährlichen Lichter, die leuchten und erleuchten. Das Erkennen und Erkanntwerden ist ein gefährliches Geschäft im Lebensdschungel, so gefährlich wie das Fragen, das Licht in das Dunkel bringen könnte. Wir fragen im Gedicht, befragen die Wirklichkeit, den uns angreifenden Tiger (den Leviathan,den Drachen, den Moby-Dick), nach dem, was wirklich ist. Das Gedicht stellt die Frage an die Wirklichkeit. Die Antwort – liegt sie im Leser, der das Gedicht lesend mitschreibt? Das Fragen kann bereits die Antwort sein. Das ist schon in Rumpelstilzchen so.

 

Nachweise

 Blake, William. “The Tyger”. 1794. Songs of Experience. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Hg. David V. Erdmann, Commentary by Harold Bloom. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Duran, Manuel. "Inside the Glass Cage: Poetry and Normal Language." NLH 4:1 (Autumn 1972): 65-74.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Martens, Klaus. "Der Mensch aus Millionen Diamanten." magazin forschung 1 (2008): 37-43. Der obenstehende Aufsatz ist eine stark gekürzte und umgearbeitete Fasssung dieses Artikels, der ursprünglich im Dezember 2007 als Vortrag im Rahmen einer Ringvorlesung der Philosophischen Fakultäten der Universität des Saarlandes im Festsaal des Rathauses der Stadt Saarbrücken gehalten wurde.