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Either/Orr

Posted By Christopher Guerin On In books & writing | 2 Comments

David Orr’s recent New York Times Book Review essay on greatness [1]in poetry is a bland bit of punting. I’ve read it twice and I still don’t understand what he’s trying to say. The main thesis, that defining greatness in poetry is very difficult to do, is obvious enough, but he never makes the attempt himself. 

Taking John Ashbery as his last great poet — apparently just because the Library of America has chosen to release his collected works — sets the essay off on the wrong course from the beginning. Richard Wilbur, anyone? 

He also seems to believe that quantity of work should be a necessary element in defining greatness. Though, it seems to me, Shakespeare would be great if he’d written only the sonnets; Eliot if he’d written only the Four Quartets and/or the Waste Land; Stevens if only Sunday Morning, Peter Quince at the Clavier, Anecdote of the Jar and a handful of other poems; Keats if only the odes; Rilke if only the Duino Elegies. 

Greatness in poetry has become difficult to define because we live in a time when the very notion of Quality itself is being challenged, which is a point Orr fails to stress. How, if we don’t exert judgment and taste, can we ever hope to make distinctions such as good versus great, or even good versus bad? 

Of course, it isn’t what is said, but how it is said, that’s most important in poetry. For example, this, one of Richard Wilbur’s greatest poems: 

Praise in Summer 

Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,

As sometimes summer calls us all, I said

The hills are heavens full of branching ways

Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;

I said the trees are mines in air, I said

See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!

And then I wondered why this mad instead

Perverts our praise to uncreation, why

Such savour’s in this wrenching things awry.

Does sense so stale that it must needs derange

The world to know it?  To a praiseful eye

Should it not be enough of fresh and strange

That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,

And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?  

 

I’ve never found anything in Ashbery to match it, to even come close. So, others might say, that’s your opinion. To which I answer, show me a poem of the last 50 years any better. Having that discussion just might be the only way to define greatness in our time. 

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Christopher Guerin [5]

Christopher Guerin is the author of two books each of poetry and short fiction, a novel, and more than a dozen children’s books. If he hadn’t spent 26 years as an arts administrator, including 20 years as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, perhaps he’d have worked a little harder getting them published. His consolation resides in his fiction and poems having been published in numerous small magazines, including Rosebud, AURA, Williams and Mary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Wittenberg Review, RE: Artes Liberales, DEROS, Wind, and Wind less Orchard. His blog, Zealotry of Guerin, features his fiction and poetry, including his sonnet sequence of poems after paintings, “Brushwork." He is the V.P. of Corporate Communications at Sweetwater Sound, Inc., the national music instrument retailer.
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