Pollock Replies

Immensely gratified as I am by Stewart Cole's thoughtful and sensitive review, I'm puzzled by his critique on these points. On "the work of art per se": the whole thrust of the essay he quotes that phrase from ("The Art of Poetry") is to greatly expand the reach of my own thinking about poetry to include pragmatic, mimetic and performative values. Early in the essay I write that "to ignore all other values besides the aesthetic would be to miss a great deal of what a lot of poetry does." And by the end of the essay I say things like this: "[The] object [of truly great poetry] is ultimately the formation, and transformation, of the human self and community." Granted, I argue that aesthetic value must be central to any good theory of poetry. But my position is much broader than Cole gives me credit for here.

On the matter of our aesthetic sensitivities being affected by our material conditions: of course they are, but I'd argue that we shouldn't merely surrender to our own social conditioning; we should strive to overcome it. That's what it means to be a true cosmopolitan. As I say later in the same essay, "particular aesthetic values change over time: some eras and readers will especially value classical clarity and restraint, others romantic passion or intellectual challenge; but in our time it should be possible to value a wide range of aesthetic qualities, because we have the benefit of a vast literary history. I can value Lorca's fierce rhetorical passion and surreal imagery, and also Cavafy's classical restraint and clarity; nevertheless I can also value Lorca over some minor French surrealist and Cavafy over some dull author of versified history. It is not the poet's particular aesthetic values that should determine the critic's estimation of the poem, but the quality of the art."—James Pollock

You Are Here

Stewart Cole is impressed by James Pollock's essays ("an erudite accounting of Canadian poetic identity in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries") and poems ("an agile command of prosody and rhetoric") but he pushes back against Pollock's notion of the “work of art per se”:

Let me make my position on this clear: there is no “work of art per se,” in the sense that “per se” means in itself and so implies that a work of art that can in any way be isolated from the social conditions of its creation and/or reception. Such a notion—also embodied in Pollock’s conception of poetry as “an autonomous technology for producing aesthetic pleasure”—is a bourgeois chimera.

Cole continues:

In other words, what qualifies for us as “delight, originality, and imagination,” or which aspects of “verbal sensitivity and dexterity” we are most attuned to as any given person in any given time is significantly shaped by the political, social, and otherwise material conditions that produce both us and the art we encounter. This is why the best argument in favour of formalist practice remains a social one: that such practice does justice to poetry’s social origins and orientation, linking us rhythmically and rhetorically to a shared past and giving shape to our aspirations for communal futures. This is also why the most compelling argument advanced by the ‘innovative’ school against such formalisms is also precisely social: that the old forms stand at odds with our modern social formations, that we must seek out new forms to reflect our societal disorientation. These two positions might best be thought of as the two ends of a continuum, somewhere along which—whether they know it or not—most poets today situate their practice.

Who Do You Think You Are?

James Pollock interviews himself on the nature of literary criticism:

Does the critic have an ethical responsibility?

The critic must be honest. He must say what he thinks. He must ignore the poet’s reputation, her relationship to himself or his friends, the prizes and honours she has won, her status in the literary establishment, not to mention his own career advancement, and anything else that threatens to dissuade him, and tell the truth about the poems. He has a responsibility to his readers, to the poet, to his self-respect, to the field of criticism and the art of poetry, to be an honest judge. Otherwise, he deceives his readers and the poet both, corrupts himself, and damages criticism and poetry within publishing range of his words. It is no trivial transgression. If he hasn’t the courage to be honest he should give up now before anyone else gets hurt.

(Illustration 'Two Heads" by Pierre Piech.)

James Pollock

James Pollock has what one of my uncles would have called, with a laughing shake of his head, a "horseshoe up his ass." With the ink barely dry on its pages, Sailing to Babylon—his debut—nabs a nomination for this year's Govenor General's Award for Poetry. It then catches the attention of Michael Lista (no mean feat) who, in the National Post, praises its "vision of an old world, freighted with history, and still able to astonish itself with the novelty of its recurrence." Next month, James will publish You Are Here, a fearless, brilliant book of criticism on Canadian poetry that will help drag the whole sorry spectacle into the 21st century. He reads for the Atwater Poetry Project this Thursday. Don't miss it.