That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration

Alan Shapiro

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226417004
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

More than a gathering of essays, That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration is part memoir, part literary criticism, and an artful fusion of the two. It is an intimate portrait of a life in poetry that only Alan Shapiro could have written.In this book, Shapiro brings his characteristic warmth, humor, and many years as both poet and teacher to bear on questions surrounding two preoccupations: the role of conventions—of literary and social norms—in how we fashion our identities on and off the page, and how suffering both requires and resists self-expression. He sketches affectionate portraits of his early teachers, revisits the deaths of his brother and sister, and examines poems that have helped him navigate troubled times. Integrating storytelling and literary analysis so seamlessly that art and life become extensions of each other, Shapiro embodies in his lively prose the very qualities he celebrates in the poems he loves.Brimming with wit and insight, this is a book for poets, students and scholars of poetry, teachers of literature, and everyone who cares about the literary arts and how they illuminate our personal and public lives.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Decorum

1

Oh I can picture all manner of yawns, groans, teeth gnashing, and rolling of eyes at the very mention of the word decorum, never mind my sense of it as an animating indispensable principle of all good poems and stories. I realize that to talk about decorum in this day and age of gender bending, cultural relativism, and ever-accelerating social change and technological innovation is to risk a kind of fusty, uptight moralism. Like Marxism, in America anyway at this particular moment, it’s a tough sell for sure, a little like arguing that Elizabethan collars, farthingales, frock coats, and iron chastity belts are hot and trending. Along with the romantics, most of us associate decorum, if we think of it at all, with repressive neoclassical rules of taste, that is, with overrefined, anachronistic vestiges of a more stable and hierarchical culture. I mean, consider its definition and etymology: “noun, meaning appropriate behavior. Before 1568, borrowing of Latin decorum, that which is proper or seemly, noun use of the neuter singular of the adjective decorus, related to decere, meaning, be proper; see DECENT.” As if this weren’t bad enough, out of its Latin root by way of French we can thank decorum for words like décor and decoration. When we think of the literary virtues (virtues, another boring word) we look for in our favorite stories and poems, decorum, decor, ornament, good behavior, decency aren’t exactly in anybody’s top-ten list of desired qualities (“This is a really well behaved poem!” “Wow, this poem is so, so very decent!”). The very notion of decorum runs counter to prevailing taste; it embodies everything we hate in art: normality, conventionality, conformity, niceness—it is, in short, the opposite of self-expression, surprise, excitement, the dangerous and thrilling, the disjunctive, the fresh and new.

If my subject here were pattern, not decorum, I’d have an easier time of it. We talk incessantly, as we should, about sonic and semantic pattern, about the inescapable role of pattern in our experience of art, knowing that without the expectation of something repeated, there’s no chance of surprise and variation. We’re told by neuroscience and evolutionary biology that our avidity for pattern is a human universal—that our minds are pattern junkies. “Pattern recognition,” Brian Boyd argues in On the Origin of Stories, “lets us distinguish animate from inanimate, human from nonhuman, this individual from all others, this attitude or expression from another. The capacity to identify not only individuals but higher order tendencies in behavior, personality and powers allows for invaluably precise prediction.” Negative connotations haven’t stuck to the word or idea of pattern, even though it has a similar etymological history to decorum’s—deriving from the medieval Latin word patronus, or patron. The transfer of sense from patron to repeatable form or example developed from the idea of a patron, a boss, a rich guy, the personification of masculinity, as a model to be imitated; only in the late-sixteenth century was the meaning of pattern extended to decorative or artistic design, for things like china, carpets, and wallpaper, not exactly what we think about when we think about great art. Why pattern isn’t tainted by its history while decorum continues to be is not a question I can answer, at least not here. What I aim to do is disentangle decorum from its association with predetermined rules of behavior fit only for a drawing room, and show how it’s an open-ended form of thinking and feeling more closely aligned with imagination than with any repressive moral code or stifling moralism.

2

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that hunger for information is a universal appetite, a design feature of all minds, human and nonhuman alike. Ability to predict the future based on the regularities we see around us has been a key element in our survival as a species. From past experience, I know that that disturbance in the tall grass over there may be a lion. That loud noise beyond that hill up ahead may be a rival tribe. I’m more likely to mistake a garden hose for a snake than a snake for a garden hose. These lightning-fast inferences arise from encounters with past situations, some reaching back to our primate past. But no two situations are ever the same, so the application of past experience to present circumstance (otherwise known as memory) has to be made flexibly and loosely. But here’s a complication. If pattern is, so to speak, the PATRON saint of information, isn’t it also true that when a pattern becomes too expected, too predictable, it ceases to inform? It grows invisible through habituation. It turns into white noise, a uniform chaos insofar as it no longer offers any knowledge for the mind to extract, and so the mind just stops attending, which, from a survival standpoint, can be potentially dangerous. Think in this respect of method-driven forms of poetry, poetry either embodying a monolithic concept or idea, which it repeats without variation ad infinitum, or that refuses any and all pattern in favor of unvarying disjunction. Or at the opposite end of the poetry spectrum, think of metrical verse that’s merely metrical, merely a zombielike march of iambs with no rhythmical variation, no sonic responsiveness to changes in tone or feeling. The totally patterned and the total absence of pattern amount to the same thing. The mind shuts off in the presence of both. So if the detection of information in literature arises from an interplay of pattern and variation, or from new patterns emerging from old patterns, then maybe we can think of decorum as the mental agility and emotional alertness that does the detecting.

Akin to Shelley’s definition of imagination as a kind of muscle of attention, decorum can be thought of as a keen and sensitive awareness that is ever open to and on the lookout for new patterns, while testing old ones against an ever-changing world. “Frogs react,” Boyd tells us, “with an automatic flick of the tongue to small objects flying across their field of vision. That makes them swifter than you or I at catching insects, but they cannot respond to new kinds of patterns.” Decorum is that capacity for responsiveness, that mental and emotional poise that knows that each encounter, each moment of experience, on the page or in the world, may or may not conform to expectation—decorum in this respect requires a readiness to improvise. It requires both a knowledge of pattern and regularity and an existential improvisatory openness to the unforeseen, the unanticipated, in order to make the richest, most inclusive inferences from the situation at hand.

3

The little-known seventeenth-century colonial poet Philip Pain drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of New England when he was twenty-two years old. Shortly before his death, he wrote the following prophetic poem, a short, meditative epigram on the difference between the general idea of the inevitability of death and the realization that you yourself will someday die:

Scarce do I pass a day but that I hear

Someone or other’s dead, and to my ear

Methinks it is no news. But Oh! Did I

Think deeply on it, what it is to die,

My pulses all would beat, I should not be

Drowned in this deluge of security.

After the first sentence, the poem turns from dispassionate knowing, something the self registers only with the ear, to knowing with the entire body—knowledge carried from ear and mind to heart to the speaker’s very nerve ends. The lack of emotional engagement that comes with knowing something merely with the mind or ear, mind’s metonymic figure, is nicely suggested by the blandly regular cadence of lines 1 and 2. The sentence glides as easily from first couplet to second couplet as the news of death passes into and out of the ear that hears it. The second sentence signals the turn to a fuller response not just by “But,” the adversative conjunction, but also by the heavily stressed syllables of the last two feet of line 3 and the relatively unstable line break after “I”—the rhythm weighted down with stress gets weightier and slower from the heavily stressed first foot of line four (“Think deeply . . .”) and by where the pause falls in the line, in the middle of the third foot, which alters by muting the iambic cadence even further. Compare that pause with the pause in line 2, which falls after, not in the middle of, the third foot.

When the metrical unit and the grammatical clause coincide, there’s little or no disruption, the cadence is not disturbed to the degree it is when the grammar and meter fall out of phase as they do here. The shift in focus from death as general phenomenon to death as personal (if imagined) experience is further reinforced by the rhyme of “I” and “die” and the comma after “die,” which stops us from sailing past the word (as we sail past “ear” and “hear” in the first couplet). We can’t help but feel viscerally to our very core what it means to die.

One last point. The conditional verb tense of the final sentence suggests that the very thought experiment the poem is conducting would be too terrifying, too overwhelming, to carry out. We’re given instead a thought experiment of a thought experiment, an imagining of what would happen if the speaker were to imagine what no one can really imagine. And then there’s a last turn in the final line, where what the poet’s drowning in is not a deluge of death itself but a deluge of security, the false security of not thinking deeply, which he implies is like a death in life, just as to imagine thinking deeply about death is to arouse the body to an almost unbearable terrifying vitality. The powerful trochaic substitution in the first foot is like a terrible awakening. And the way the d of “deluge” pulls after it the d of “drowned” quickens the fall into the word security, which comprises the last two feet of the poem—a paradox in and of itself, inasmuch as these feet as iambs aren’t terribly emphatic, stable, or secure—and yet they coincide with a synonym for “stability.”

What enables Pain to dramatize the difference between knowing and realizing, the way he makes the language embody the realization it performs, is a measure of what I would like to call poetic decorum—decorum as sensitive and tactful management of sound and sense to make the fullest, most inclusive rendering of an experience. The poem derives from a truism: all living things die. “Methinks it is no news.” But what distinguishes the poem from the truism, what is news that stays news, is the extent to which the poem discovers the truth of the truism, as Yvor Winters once remarked in relation to the plain style, in and through the particulars of experience.

4

I was first introduced to decorum as a literary term in the early 1970s at Brandeis University, on the first day of my undergraduate poetry workshop with Galway Kinnell. Kinnell invoked decorum negatively while explaining why he wouldn’t allow anyone in the class to write in rhyme and meter. The forms and styles we write in, he told us, are inescapably tied to and expressions of our historical moment. The metrical poetry of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, and their concept of genres and levels of style corresponding to those genres, reflected a more traditional, more stable society (well, tell that to Anne Boleyn, King Charles, or John Tyndall). Theirs was a universe whose core myth was the great chain of being—every form of life and every individual and every human faculty within each individual existed in predetermined, God-appointed mutually reinforcing hierarchies—from peasant to yeoman, nobility to king in the body politic, from animal appetite to will to reason in the self, and from plain style for low subjects, middle or sweet style for pastoral and romance, to high style for epic in the practice of the literary arts.

Our twenty-first-century universe, on the other hand, has no such foundational myth and thus no such rigidly determined sense of what kinds of language, forms, and styles are appropriate for what kinds of occasion, character, and action. According to Kinnell, the classical idea of decorum ratified the forms of Elizabethan poetry. But since our world possesses no mutually agreed-upon concept of what should go with what, decorum as an organizing concept is no longer relevant. It is as antiquated as the forms it once legitimized. “Our world,” Kinnell movingly said—and now I’m quoting from what I’d written down that day in class—“is not so neat and small. We don’t believe we’re at the center of anything. We live on a dying inconspicuous planet in a corner of an infinitely expanding universe. Our social order, driven by money and power, is fragmented, heterogeneous, mobile, and vast. The old forms and canons of taste no longer apply.”

Kinnell’s deterministic vision of the Elizabethan world and its literary practices and of literary practice in general seems now, if it didn’t back in the 1970s, a bit reductive. It’s a narrative that for me personally as well as for many poets of my generation and the generation after mine became a kind of gospel, an ironclad orthodoxy, which self-servingly justified historical ignorance, even though that’s not at all what Kinnell intended. Because our world had changed so dramatically from the older, whiter, more patriarchal world of earlier poets, we no longer needed to learn about poetry written before the present moment. Those older poets were, as we used to say, no longer relevant. But what even a cursory survey of English poetry before the nineteenth century will show is that there’s nothing inherently old-fashioned or new-fashioned about the forms one writes in. And while the concept of decorum was important in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it had not, as it had to some degree by the eighteenth century, ossified into a rigid set of rules and tenets, into what Wordsworth would contemptuously refer to as false refinement and poetic diction. Yes, language was adjusted to occasion: grand themes and subjects were treated in an elevated epic style, while humble and trivial subjects were treated in a low and/or vulgar manner—see George Gascoigne’s “Woodmanship” or John Skelton’s “The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng”—but the rules weren’t hard and fast; many of these poets often violate the very ...