The Problem with Poetry

 The history of a Movement, it is said, begins as tragedy and ends as farce. The GOP these days seems to epitomize that. It began with the Abolitionist Movement, a noble effort to deal with the tragedy of Slavery, and the first President from the Grand Old Party was Abraham Lincoln, one of America’s greatest; now it seems closing in on its end with the truly farcical competition among clownish politicians for the party nomination in 2016. When I hear yet another Trumpism, like his statement that an enacted Constitutional Amendment was unconstitutional, I can’t help but recall the comment of Everett Dirksen (a great Republican in his day), about another politician that, “like Samson,  he seeks to destroy his enemies with the jawbone of an ass.” . The Democratic Party candidates also seem so far at least lacking in the luster one associates with candidates for President. The same lack of seriousness applies to policy debate in the Congress (neither side excepted.) Real public and foreign policy debate has been discarded for slapstick. So, recognizing the futility of serious political discussion in the face of that, and in part to protect my stomach, I plan to shift the focus of my postings for the next few months away from policy and politics to other, more serious topics that interest me. I shall get back to policy eventually.

I start by angering many contemporary poets – at least those few who might read this. Poetry is an area I dearly love but I have mixed feelings about poets.  My belief is that much, not all, currently published poetry suffers a malaise similar to that of modern Jazz in late 20^th century, though Jazz seems to be recovering now. Mary Oliver, Billy Collins and Mark Doty are notable exceptions, but like the later “cool” jazz of Miles Davis, et al., poetry in the hands of some of its practitioners has become hermetic, contemptuous of the audience and possessed of “a problem with communication.” Notable non-exceptions to that are much recent poetry published in the New Yorker. I hardly bother with much of their poetry these days because it so obviously is not intended for the little old lady in Dubuque.

Poetry has entered a period of over- emphasis on prose poetry, a mess in the hands of unskilled practitioners, but that is not its problem. Prose poetry was out of fashion in the 20^th century, but its history, from scriptural psalms to the prose poetry of John Donne, runs long before that. The malaise stems from two causes. First, some poets have forgotten that great poems are great because they communicate to a wide audience of all varieties of readers. If the sonnets of Shakespeare had been written only for the appreciation of a knowledgeable crowd of insiders they would not be with us today. Contemporary poets such as Doty, Collins and Oliver are in tune with that. A new poem of Oliver’s about her dog playing in a new fallen snow was like a breath of fresh air. Second, too many poets seem unaware of or have forgotten that great poetry, in the words of Shelley, involves a search for the transcendent in the ordinary. Too many poems today are personal and psychological rather than transcendent. Transcendence is just not there in them. Robert Frost riding along a country road at night found far more that spoke to the human condition than such contemporary poets.

 I plead for poets to resume their search for that elusive transcendence in each of us. In the words of Mark Doty, “Imagine breathing surrounded by the brilliant rinse of summer's firmament. What color is the underside of skin? Not so bad, to die, if  we could be opened into this— If the smallest chambers of ourselves, similarly, revealed some sky.”

Profitable Virtue and the Clash of Cultures

One of the odd moments of the U.S. Constitutional Convention was when, at the opening session, Benjamin Franklin rose to propose that each session be opened with a prayer, and the delegates, over half of whom were ministers of various faiths, voted to table his motion, effectively killing it. The clergy could be understood: most of them were dissenters from the Church of England fearful of a return to its religious autocracy and aiming to create a purely secular Constitution – which they did. But what was Franklin, whom we think of today as a liberal skeptic, thinking when he made the motion in the first place?  It turns out, from reading his Autobiography, that Franklin - a relative of the great New England preacher Cotton Mather - began as a devout young man who attended church regularly until he heard a minister he had respected preaching that “the fruits of the Holy Spirit” passage in the scriptures referred not to Love, Mercy, Kindness, etc., as it clearly says, but to tithing, regular church attendance, etc. Franklin, who knew better, was outraged and walked out, never to return. Today we would commend him for showing real virtue. He knew that virtue consisted of more than just obeying rules of good behavior. And at the Convention, both Franklin and the clergy who opposed him were acting virtuously.

I thought of that while reading a fascinating article in the August 3 New Yorker about the Greek Finance Minister and the European financial crisis. The article demonstrated that the crisis is becoming every day more openly and obviously not an economic crisis only but a clash of cultures. In fact, at one point the article reports that the German representatives commented about the Greek that he was only an economist and couldn’t possibly understand the politics. It so happens that a whole cadre of distinguished economists including Stiglitz, Galbraith, Sachs, etc., and staff of the IMF, support the Greek need for debt restructuring, and even the conservative Economist sees it as necessary and laments the lack of a “risk sharing” mechanism in the EU. Where the economists differ is whether Greece, somewhat like Franklin, should storm out of the EU never to return or hang in there for the sake of Europe. Stiglitz says leave; Galbraith says stay. Then the Germans were appalled when Greece actually held a referendum, saying “How could you possibly put an issue such as this before the Electorate?” Funny, I thought electorates were what politics is all about. And of course, Greece basically invented elections. But throughout the whole ordeal the Germans have maintained the Greeks knew the rules and didn’t follow them and austerity is their necessary consequence even if they are destroyed by it.  In Germany, following the rules is a primary virtue and a contract is a contract. Years before when discussing the initial crisis with a friend who had been born and raised in Germany but had lived in the U.S. for over fifty years, I saw that response deeply engraved, almost as a reflex. To the German ministers, Greeks were wild creatures who must be tamed.

Which brings to mind Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, a recent book by Yuval Harari.  One of Harari’s themes is that each civilization has embedded in it a hierarchy the chiefs of which profit from a code of behavior that is taught and enforced to the point of becoming a cultural norm. Greek democracy –group decision with maximum laissez faire for individual citizens, even idiots, the old Greek word for those who refused to be involved in group decision, were derided but accepted -  dates back to Solon and the Constitution of Athens and is indeed a cultural norm. A signed contract does not end negotiation; it begins it. That has enabled the growth of many wonderful things from which we all profit every day; and it creates massive traffic jams in Athens each day and makes Greek houses sometimes take two years to build. Germany’s pressure for order and obedience began with the military hierarchy of the Germanic tribes and it too is a cultural norm.  But Europe is seeking a unified voice in a 21^st century world.

The solution may lie in that system of “risk sharing” mentioned by the Economist. That is essentially what Alexander Hamilton invented for the United States when it began.  The thirteen colonies had widely varying cultures and economies and widely varying debt loads. There was a quiet little border war between North Carolina and Georgia going on about that time you never hear about. The U.S. treasury assumed the debts of the individual former colonies in exchange for a uniform tax code administered by the Treasury, a financial code, enabling contracts to be valid wherever made, and the problems of each state to be addressed by all through the federal system. It wasn’t easy, but it worked. The EU lacks that risk sharing, so when Greece got in over its head in the manipulations of the financial corporations, Germany felt no obligation to help them out. And the strength of the Euro from which Germany’s export driven economy benefited devastated Greece’s tourism based economy. Both cultures have to bend to enable such risk sharing to happen, but it can. It really depends on how much each wants Europe to emerge.