Economics

Prices are low because spirits are, to make them high again we have to raise spirits by raising prices.

The bankers lost all our money buying worthless things for trillions, so the economy's shrinking and we're all upset. To fix the problem we as a state have to borrow our future money (and print money) to give the banks (and to ourselves directly) so we don't lose all our money and so we exchange it with one another. We can afford to borrow our future money because in the future the economy will be growing, so we will have more money, because we will have exchanged with one another our future money, therefore will be happy.

When, because we're feeling better, we have money again, we will all feel better, perhaps as good as before, when we felt so good we lost our money, and became sad.

Celan, some versions

IRIE

That I have time to walk
across the crop stair,
that I have time, into your sleep
to walk the sleepscree,
time to cut grass
low on the land of the heart,
in the morning


YOU WERE my life:
you I could let go of
when everything swam here


AT THE rained-on waymark
little silence soapbox-hoarse:

as if you’d remembered, 
as if I knew that you had

re William Logan responds: (December)

Editor:

I write with regard to William Logan’s letter of Vol. 193.3, and with no stake in the controversy, since I have never seriously read Hart Crane. In fact I found the letter accidentally—I was browsing the magazine shelves—and without the internet would not have been able to read the writings of which it is a defence.

The letter, it seems to me, confirms Marjorie Perloff’s accusation that ‘Logan’s method consists of giving a few quotes […] and then declaring the poem in question a “dreadful mess.”’ I thought I should communicate my reasons for this judgement.

Logan takes fragments of Crane’s poetry and applies to them adjectives of disapproval: he does not make arguments for his descriptions’ validity. Here is an example, a random one from Adam Kirsch (The Modern Element, pp. 162–3), of evaluation backed by argument. Kirsch quotes Anthony Hecht in ‘The Man Who Married Magdalene’:

I have been in this bar
For close to seven days.
The dark girl over there,
For a modest dollar, lays.

And you can get a blow-job
Where other men have pissed
In the little room that’s sacred
To the Evangelist.

And responds:

While there is a moment of genuine scabrousness in these lines—the fleeting suggestion that the prostitute’s mouth is ‘where other men have pissed’—the poem’s other elements work against the potential shock. There is the odd use of the word ‘lays’, which is usually not transitive; there is the far-fetched joke about the Evangelist (the ‘John’). These things conspire to separate the author of the poem—ill at ease with slang, but familiar with the Bible—from its degraded speaker.

Note that Kirsch explains his description ‘odd’ with reference to grammar.

Logan refuses to make arguments like this. Instead, part of ‘Chaplinesque’ is ‘hapless and tone deaf’ and other parts are ‘schmaltz’. The Bridge’s ‘Proem’ is ‘stuffed with excesses of detail’: ‘inviolate’ is ‘religious’ (Logan dislikes it), ‘flailing’ is ‘empty rhetoric’ (if it is empty, is it ‘detail’ too?), ‘silver-paced’ is over-rich, ‘shrill’ and ‘cloud-flown’ are ‘melodrama’, ‘speechless’ falsely pious and ‘A jest falls from the speechless caravan’ ‘slightly nonsensical’; ‘scuttle’ and ‘white rings of tumult’ are overegged, ‘rip-tooth’ and ‘acetylene’ exaggerated and ‘bedlamite’ ‘wretched’.

In the following paragraph, Crane’s ‘Dirigible’ is an ‘ungainly symbol’, ‘ludicrously addressed’. The terms of this description (‘Cetus-like’ etc.) are not ‘exactly’ ‘obscure’, but are ‘childish and extravagant’ ‘rhetoric’ and ‘romantic goofiness’. Logan closes with the news that—where before he did ‘like’ ‘chained bay waters’—he is ‘not even keen’ on Crane’s symbol of the bridge. No justification for either feeling is attempted.

My objection is twofold. One, Logan never once argues the case for an adjective’s application to a phrase: he just puts them in apposition. The result is that we could swap them around without much damage to his sense. We could even apply them to his own writing. (What if I said that ‘stuffed’ is over-rich rhetoric, or that ‘wretched’ is a false exaggeration?) Two, Logan never argues why the fact that an adjective is, say, religious, means it is excess, or why any of these overeggings and exaggerations (which redundantly-varied terms beg his question) are in excess. There is no argument for his ‘stuffed with […] excesses’ point, only, in proximity, assertion, quotation and name-calling. A single Kirsch-like explanation would have been worth the whole list; indeed, to humiliate me here, all that Logan needs to do is provide one.

Logan may be right that ‘Criticism is the exercise of taste under the guise of objectivity’ (his response to Crane is certainly that of a critic-poet, and betrays experience with a poet’s drafting-process in its inexplicitly reasoned, aestheticised elections and rejections). The performance of this letter shows that, in shedding this guise, Logan has also neglected the work of persuasion. Logan is therefore ‘solipsistic’ in the weak sense of the word.


Two further points. Logan should know that when he states, ‘I could not find that two critics I admire, Christopher Ricks and Geoffrey Hill, had written much or anything about Crane’, this can prove nothing, as it would prove nothing for me to state that, although I am a fascinated reader of Hill, I do not understand his poem well enough to extract an opinion from it or to know that ‘you screwed us’ is not the speaker’s phrase. I could quote a different phrase, one that seems to say that Crane is a ‘prodigal who reclaimed us’, with as much justice.

Last, Logan’s moralising Wintersian subtext should not go unmentioned. He says: ‘Crane was the architect of his own grand disaster. The disaster of the life didn’t ennoble the art—it was responsible for the failure of the art.’ The question is, could no ‘disaster of the life’ (as Logan, under or out of ‘the guise of objectivity’, defines it) have been ‘responsible for the’ success ‘of the art’ (as Logan, out of ‘the guise of objectivity’, defines it)? The answer is unknowable: ‘disaster’ could have been a condition of the art’s possibility; it could, success or failure, have fed into it. To me, it’s evident that Logan is reasoning, whether or not he realises it, from a general premise along something like these lines: ‘Unvoracious sexual appetites, no self-indulgence, no alcoholism and no mental illness—plus maybe decongestants—are generally “responsible for” success “of the art”, that is success in art.’ It remains only to wonder, recognising duly and again that Logan is a poet and critic, whether this formula for success has worked for Logan himself.

Ps. Two relevant links.