ABlog

Do you know about Poetry Daily’s poem-a-day service during April? It’s a great idea, a concierge service for the poetry-minded, delivering one oldie-but-goodie per day to your in-box together with a comment from the rotating poet-"curator." On April 17, the poem was Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” chosen and commented on by Susan Hahn. (To subscribe to the service, go to: http://www.poems.com/about_newsletter.php)

Susan Hahn reads “The Lady of Shalott” as a poem about the relationship of the artist’s calling to his/her possible place in the human world of action and interaction. Hahn characterizes this theme by saying that the poem evokes the “singular question” as to “How much can a writer participate in the stir of society without compromising her art?”

It’s safe to say that never have I had such a strongly indignant reaction to a poet's reading of a Poetry Daily pick! First off, I thought, how can one comment on this poem without remarking on the gender theme, the not so subtle eroticism of the event that causes the Lady to abandon her post? It is certainly an intriguing suggestion that Tennyson may have chosen to incarnate the Artist in the person of the Lady (she passive, contemplative in relation to bold Sir Lancelot’s phallic assertiveness)—but is her Penelope-like craft of mirror-weaving—apparently the faithful reproduction of the “shadows” of real worldly activity reproduced in her mirror—really meant to be taken as the prototype of artistic creation? And what of the suggestion that it is her acting on desire, not simple participation in the “stir of society,” that proves fatal to the Lady? Could one substitute a male weaver for the Lady in Tennyson’s scheme and have the poem work more or less as it does? Not bloody likely.

The poem (perhaps) says that art is passive and feminine in relationship to the “bold” activity of the military men, the war-horse riding, bugle-bearing, tirra lirra singing Sir Lancelots; but it surely suggests, as well, that femininity faces a choice between remaining a virgin object, immortal among shadows (“tis the fairy/Lady of Shalott”) and acknowledging desire for the real only to be cursed with the taint of mortality. (It is Woman who gives birth as a result of sexual activity and is therefore blamed for bringing Death into the world.) And this is not a problem faced by the male artist, for whom art is often seen as a different mode of participation in the “real” world, as opposed to a monastic withdrawal from it.

Enough of the Lady, Sir Lancelot, and Susan Hahn. (Still, I encourage you to give the poem a lingering read. The pathetic and humorous gap between the Lady’s longing and Sir Lancelot’s uncomprehending benediction is, by itself, well worth the admission fee. And the music is simply divine.) What I’m really exercised about here is the dilemma that Susan Hahn identifies, which is a real one, and the seemingly reductive way in which she phrases it, which I see as representative of a common attitude “out there.” The “stir of society” (I especially appreciate the ambiguity of “society” in its connotations of, on the one hand, a world of trouble, and on the other, high society, social climbing, social intercourse, socializing—-in short, the more frivolous end of things) is, if not so easy to resist, at least easy to look down on when it is conceived of as a contaminant of Art. But what about society as urgency, what about the artist as citizen, what of an art that does not clearly distinguish between “shadow” and “act”?

When I am asked to provide a bio for a reading or a panel, and I purposely include, alongside the expected publications, awards, and teaching resume, the information that I am an officer of my faculty union or a neighborhood activist with Prospect Lefferts Voices for Peace and Justice, I’m aware of engaging in a particular kind of “coming out.” The unspoken assumption is that the really dedicated writers, the professionals, don’t pitch themselves that way. (If they do serve on committees,those are PEN committees, or AWP committees, or the board of the Academy of American Poets. For everyone knows the really talented folks focused on their careers, developed a following, kept their books in print, and now perform at benefits that actually bring in real money.) Time and again, in my teaching, I wrestle with the split between the wonderful students who approach activist texts as Art, close reading and craft analysis skills firmly in hand, and the wonderful students who approach activist texts as testimony, as stump speech and blueprint for action—political theory firmly in hand. [Examples of “activist texts” from my current syllabus include Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Audre Lorde’s Zami, David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives—all books written by artists who tried to change the world and who saw their writing as a part of that complicated effort, one that could never be reduced to the correct-line simplicity of the slogan, “Art is a weapon.”]

And here I stand, minding the gap, wondering when and why the aesthetic moment can be so neatly separated from the political moment. Knowing that cultivation of the split is yet another strategy to keep us from doing anything effective to challenge intolerable, indefensible, and unsustainable forms of “social stir.”

To hold off as long as possible, through the twin temptations of a mirror-art and a wan participation in the “stir of society,” the stirring of society in its depths that will come, whether we want it to or not—“whether through fire or love,” I put it once.

By ballots, bullets, collapse of the biosphere.

That we dread and yearn to live long enough to see.