Pinksy's American Milton

This morning I read in Slate Pinksly’s “The American John Milton: The Poet and the Power of Extraordinary Speech” with qualified pleasure. In this essay, Pinsky argues for greater appreciation of what I see as the most significant quality of poesis, the ability to make language strange or new. But I’m a bit amused by his choice of vehicle for that: iambic pentameter and inverted or convoluted syntax.

First citing lines of Milton that are indeed powerful, he moves to Ginsberg and to Dickinson, both poets who can be read from some angles, and with blinkers on, as formalists in the sense that neo-formalists would like to apply. He mentions Williams and discuss Pound as poets pushing for a “plain speech” form that betrays the remarkable abilities to make language new.

But the picture is much more complex. Granted, I think Robert Duncan is correct in The HD Book when he suggests that Williams and Pound down-played the strangeness of poetic language in order to appear manly. But both poets wrote verse that was very odd, very much not “plain speech.” I would even argue that the plain speech efforts of Williams like “The Red Wheelbarrow” are in themselves extremely strange:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Even if that were rendered as a single prose sentence, it would still be remarkably odd. But the line breaks make it even more so, make a point about poesis. That “depends / upon” points up the meaning of word depend, to hang down from, as all the other words in that formal slot similarly hang down from the conditions modifying them: a barrow that is red with a wheel, water from rain, chickens that are white—all dependencies in both senses.

Further, as Ron Silliman has recently remarked, this poem occurs in a prose matrix in Spring and All that is at times very strange, but which also offers clear statements contradicting both Williams’s statements about the necessity of the American vernacular to a poet and Pinksy’s generalizations about Williams’s poetry, as for example: “poetry: new form dealt with as reality itself.”

Still, Pinksy’s essay offers a useful corrective to freshman students who bemoan the difficulty or peculiarity of poetic language. But still more I think do these students’ own efforts at poetry belie such concerns, for I often find them pushing their own language toward oddness and eccentricity in an effort to make it clear that they are capable of creating a reality of their own.

Despite what I say, or Pinksy, or even Williams and Pound, the pleasure of language play will remain fundamental to the use of language. And this will always emerge even in the dullest bodies of poetry.