Dead Reckoning: mapping some contemporary poetry
Atlantic Crossing by David Helwig, Coach House Press, no date; The Middle Passage by Paul Metcalf, Jargon Society, 1976; and Passage, selected poems 1943-1978 by Louis Coxe, U. of Missouri Press, 1979.
The facts are in. More than 40,000,000 blacks were removed from Africa for the slave trade. More than. And this too is as much a fact: is "more than" 60 or 100 million? Sheer quantity is the given. And rather than ask why three poets need to write with this material it is more instructive to ask how they can deal with this enormity. They propose to face this thing of a size greater than the Holocaust. Three white poets standing before more than 40,000,000 blacks? Before their ghosts! How does the black slave trade become the white poetman's burden? The issue of course is both larger and smaller than race. But race is also central to the problem. And the problem is always there, always here. How does the poet record the real? It is not enough to be "true to experience." Being true means also revealing what is the experience. Taking apart means taking a part. The act itself is the experience. And this act depends on the poet's stance. And with these three poets, given their choice of materials it is a question of how they can stand the poetry to face the overwhelming quantity. How can they themselves stand? How can they stand themselves? It is especially a problem of gravity.
You fee, my dear friend, how powerful is the effect of habit and prejudice; that with ideas and principles founded in reafon and truth, fufficient to demonftrate that flavery deftroys the energy of the human mind, and with a heart which does honour to Mr. Jefferfon as a man, his mind is of warped by education and the habit of thinking, that he has attempted to make it appear the African is a being between the human fpecies and the oragoutang; and ridiculoufly fuffered his imagination to be carried away with the idel tales of that animal's embracing the negro women, in preference to the females of its own fpecies.
--Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, London: 1797, refuting the racist views of Thomas Jefferson.
The academic poet is a poet of distance. Of necessity he stands away from his subject. He does not thereby objectify experience, but tends instead to destroy the subject. For the distancing of the academic stance --think now of the MLA "style," its pretense of objectivity-- is of necessity pernicious. Pernicious because it goes unrecognized and unexamined. After Love Canal and Three Mile Island it is becoming more apparent that even the scientist cannot hide his self behind this pose. The academic poet, however, is sensitive to the limits of his position as an observer rather than actor. And, if he is to avoid writing solipsistic imitations of Wallace Stevens, attempting to make the act of writing a fit subject, and if he is to avoid the false heroics of a Berryman, attempting to make a tragedy out of the academic experience itself, then he must attain a shared meaning within the poem --a meaning that touches the reader where the reader touches the real. And the usual ploy --the traditional novelists' ploy-- is to make a fiction of the experience, forcing the reader onto the weakest part of her imagination, by adopting the person of the poem (not persona, "speaking through" but the false "eye" seeing "as if"). The poet becomes thereby something else than himself. He loses his place, the place where his strengths come. He is ungrounded, a displaced person.
Louis Coxe is a poet who seems to find comfort in the academic stance. He is a teacher and critic, recipient of numerous awards. It is not surprising, then, that the subject of his poem "The Middle Passage" is the slaver Theodore Cannot and not Coxe himself as he reacts to the material. And not the slave trade itself. Coxe has accustomed himself to the academic position. Its pose. So instead of a weak, non-dramatic picture of Coxe the academic poet we get a portrait of Cannot. But it is a Cannot unrecognizable from history, it is a fiction --a "dramatized" portrait. As if the poet must add to his "subject" to fill his own emptiness.
The poem "The Middle Passage" makes up about two-thirds of Coxe's book, and it is revealing how Coxe has practiced his art of the inauthentic voice. The poem called "Hannah Dustin" where he exhibits his fascination with terror, a terror mixed with racial hatred: "Drunken he pressed me where he heaped / The bed of boughs. When lust gripped hard / I felt his knife, unmanned him, reaped / And sickled through his groin like lard...." And in "Marsh Hawk" he projects his limited understanding of the carnivore, not "diluted" with ecology, with any sense of reciprocity between hunter and hunted (think of how a master observer did it, Moby Dick turns to chase the Pequod), but only this fascination with terror --and importantly with distance, being above: "Curved now like space as the cove curves to the water / His talons creep with hunger, while the cruel / Madibles shudder...." This is as if in prelude to "The Middle Passage," for here the narrator is a mixture --a mess-- of a former shipmate on Canot's supposed first voyage and of Canot's real biographer Brantz Mayer. The narrator (and the poet) tries to engage the reader by fabricating a story between himself and a crony --this then is the setting, the intimacy the poet desires --"Ames was below / With the owners --you remember Bliss and Crane? / I thought so! Well, they made their pile, perhaps / In ways that you and I --well, who's to say?" This falseness, (think of larger vision of Whitman, Pound, Olson --"Whosoever touches this book touches a man"), this attempt at a shared complicity has not any of even the muted power of that invoked by Eliot's use of Baudelaire: hypocrite lecteur!--mon semblable, --mon frere!
Coxe has tried to elevate Cannot, tried to make of him a Romantic hero --Rimbaud, gun-runner and slaver? "Whatever Cannot was, / It wasn't seafaring, seamanlike or --able, / Spoiled beans, or live on air / And keep that dancing, mincing, sidelong gait,j / That air that was a boy's --no age at all." Compare this to Malcolm Cowley's straight talking assessment in his introduction to Adventures of an African Slaver:
However, his character was that of an Italian condittiero, born four centuries out of his time. Like his great proto-types, he was wily, suave, ambitious, politic, and unforgiving. He had no religion, many vices, and few weaknesses. His feeling, usually repressed, broke forth in terrible rages. The natives called him Mr. Gunpowder.
The natives called him Mr. Gunpowder. Rather than accept this accurate metaphor Coxe would have Cannot be a mix of Shelley and Mike Fink. Coxe cannot accept the native's assessment, just as he cannot accept the natives: "Of middle-passage vessels when all hands / Went mad at the touch of alien flesh and blood...." Or the crew: "You're dockside scum / Not fit to live ashore." There is, in fact, very little that Coxe can accept. Like most liberals he would like to accept his own suffering, but he has dispersed his own self through Cannot and the narrator. He is bound in by his humanism. So much so that evil must enter from outside --Dark Africa-- and it is not surprising that this evil equals woman: "Nature conspired with a Yankee trader ' And even Africa, secret under dark, / Lay open, willing, while the ship bore down." Willing. Why didn't you just lay back and enjoy it, Mam?
Coxe misses most of what is most essential. No single figure can carry the burden of the slave trade. It is too much weight. And it is no help, in fact it becomes a damnable lie, to pretend that a fictionized Cannot is a suitable vehicle. No truth is served by distorting history. Reality can not square to suit the poet's design, and even Coxe knows this: "Funny how you can lose the rights and wrongs / Of anything in pure technique." But Coxe must impose. The "darkness" of Africa, the "mystery" of Asia, have justified the efficiency of the intruders. Order the chaos. Coxe made his choice. He could have shown us the fact of the slave trade, instead of telling us of the terror surround one insignificant participant. One detail could have revealed more than this false music. And he should have heeded his own words, he knows this: "Tropical storms, disturbances, typhoons. / You meet the smallest and guess the largest."
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