No. 5 - October 2016
Tygers of Wrath
by David Graham
In his quietly brilliant anthology The Book of Luminous Things Czeslaw Milosz speculates: “It is not certain whether good poetry can arise from hatred.” When I posted this quotation on the Verse-Virtual Facebook page, reactions were highly varied and spirited. Here I’d like to offer some of my own speculations and provisional leanings on this admittedly vast topic.
One possible response would be baffled skepticism. Whatever could Milosz be thinking? Has he forgotten the Biblical Book of Jeremiah? Surely that erudite Nobel Prize winner is well aware of the long tradition, in many cultures, of poems of “hate, anger, and invective”—which happens to be the subtitle of X. J. Kennedy’s equally memorable anthology, The Tygers of Wrath. Kennedy’s book collects lively and inventive poetic curses, kiss-offs, insults, and hexes spanning many centuries. The pissed-off poets include notables such as Shakespeare, Swift, Blake, Dickinson, Eliot, Ginsberg, Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, whose scorched-earth “Daddy” is of course included.
Kennedy’s title comes from William Blake, whose “Proverbs of Hell” he cites: “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” So are we to believe there is a certain intelligence only found in anger or hate?
Sidebar: Are hate and anger the same thing? No, but surely they are close cousins, at least. I don’t want to nitpick definitions all day; so for my purposes here I will link these cousins through their common parentage in things like distaste, repulsion, indignation, and other negative emotions.
I think of Yeats praising the “savage indignation” of Jonathan Swift’s acid satire; he was quite familiar, also, with the figure of the wandering Irish bard, whose verses were credited with fearsome power. A good Irish poet could rid house or pasture of rats by insulting them in rhyme, as Ben Jonson noted. Who says poetry makes nothing happen?
It’s undeniable that distaste and wrath can be spunky and unforgettable. In Kennedy’s book, who could resist reading a poem with a title as enticing as Colette Inez’s “Better to Spit on the Whip than Stutter Your Love Like a Worm”? Moreover, often there’s a moral imperative claimed for poetry that airs its grievances openly, pointedly, and vividly. Whatever else it may be, isn’t Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” a howl of anger at a culture that has destroyed its “best minds”? (During George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, I visited City Lights Books in San Francisco, original publishers of Howl, and was greeted by a huge banner across the front of the store. It read “Where’s the rage?”) So we recall the long history of protest poetry, which includes, along with lesser works, pieces as sharply moving as Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again” or Walt Whitman’s disgusted outburst against the politicians of 1860, “To the States.” “What deepening twilight,” he muses, seeing little but “scum floating atop the waters” that flow by our nation’s capitol:
Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?
What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your arctic freezings!)
Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? Is that the President?
But really, is Whitman expressing hatred here? His language is etched in acid, yes. He’s exasperated, even bitter. But it can easily be argued that the poem expresses unrequited love, not hatred at all. It’s more a poem of great disappointment than rage or hate.
This topic remains, as my friend Kate Sontag reminded me, most complicated. She suggested a look at Patricia Smith’s harrowing masterpiece, “Skinhead,” which is unfortunately too long to quote in full here. But it is a poem brimming with both anger and hate. The key, though, is that it’s written in persona. Smith, an African American woman, explores her theme of raw racist anger by writing in the voice of a young White supremacist man. She gets inside his head, lets him vent his hatred and never steps in as author to editorialize. The poem makes any decent reader uncomfortable, in large part because Smith maneuvers things so that readers can see things, at least briefly, through racist eyes. I would even say she provokes in us a sliver of empathy with this confused and angry man spewing his vile feelings with such cutting force:
I look in the mirror and hold up my mangled hand,
only the baby finger left, sticking straight up,
I know it’s the wrong goddamned finger,
but fuck you all anyway.
I’m riding the top rung of the perfect race,
my face scraped pink and brilliant.
I’m your baby, America, your boy,
drunk on my own spit, I am goddamned fuckin’ beautiful.
The subject is far from exhausted, I know. But very tentatively, I will venture the opinion that, seen from the right angle, Milosz may be right, in that pure hatred is unlikely to produce a good poem. Any unadulterated emotion—including anger or hatred—tends to strip away nuance, intelligence, generosity, and humility, all traits I associate with the greatest poetry. Tell all the truth, Dickinson advised, but tell it slant. Writing in persona is one way to tell it slant. There are others. But maybe a poem of hatred only works when we can find within it some touch of generosity, empathy, or other contrasting tone.
Love untempered by realism we term sentimental, and call that a poetic flaw. Likewise, I think unmitigated hatred is sentimental, which is to say oversimplified. The strongest poems almost always are more realistic, more faceted and shaded. And here’s my current confession: the older I get, the less interested I am in Swift’s sort of savage indignation. I am weary to death of snark and cynicism, and alas, see it everywhere I look, in the mass media as well as all too many poems aiming to be clever and superior to their readers. I say that intelligent praise and gratitude are just as difficult to write as a curse or an insult, as well as being more satisfying to my soul.
Poems of gratitude and praise, though—that’s a subject for a later column or two, as I hope you might agree.
One possible response would be baffled skepticism. Whatever could Milosz be thinking? Has he forgotten the Biblical Book of Jeremiah? Surely that erudite Nobel Prize winner is well aware of the long tradition, in many cultures, of poems of “hate, anger, and invective”—which happens to be the subtitle of X. J. Kennedy’s equally memorable anthology, The Tygers of Wrath. Kennedy’s book collects lively and inventive poetic curses, kiss-offs, insults, and hexes spanning many centuries. The pissed-off poets include notables such as Shakespeare, Swift, Blake, Dickinson, Eliot, Ginsberg, Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, whose scorched-earth “Daddy” is of course included.
Kennedy’s title comes from William Blake, whose “Proverbs of Hell” he cites: “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” So are we to believe there is a certain intelligence only found in anger or hate?
Sidebar: Are hate and anger the same thing? No, but surely they are close cousins, at least. I don’t want to nitpick definitions all day; so for my purposes here I will link these cousins through their common parentage in things like distaste, repulsion, indignation, and other negative emotions.
I think of Yeats praising the “savage indignation” of Jonathan Swift’s acid satire; he was quite familiar, also, with the figure of the wandering Irish bard, whose verses were credited with fearsome power. A good Irish poet could rid house or pasture of rats by insulting them in rhyme, as Ben Jonson noted. Who says poetry makes nothing happen?
It’s undeniable that distaste and wrath can be spunky and unforgettable. In Kennedy’s book, who could resist reading a poem with a title as enticing as Colette Inez’s “Better to Spit on the Whip than Stutter Your Love Like a Worm”? Moreover, often there’s a moral imperative claimed for poetry that airs its grievances openly, pointedly, and vividly. Whatever else it may be, isn’t Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” a howl of anger at a culture that has destroyed its “best minds”? (During George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, I visited City Lights Books in San Francisco, original publishers of Howl, and was greeted by a huge banner across the front of the store. It read “Where’s the rage?”) So we recall the long history of protest poetry, which includes, along with lesser works, pieces as sharply moving as Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again” or Walt Whitman’s disgusted outburst against the politicians of 1860, “To the States.” “What deepening twilight,” he muses, seeing little but “scum floating atop the waters” that flow by our nation’s capitol:
Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?
What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your arctic freezings!)
Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? Is that the President?
But really, is Whitman expressing hatred here? His language is etched in acid, yes. He’s exasperated, even bitter. But it can easily be argued that the poem expresses unrequited love, not hatred at all. It’s more a poem of great disappointment than rage or hate.
This topic remains, as my friend Kate Sontag reminded me, most complicated. She suggested a look at Patricia Smith’s harrowing masterpiece, “Skinhead,” which is unfortunately too long to quote in full here. But it is a poem brimming with both anger and hate. The key, though, is that it’s written in persona. Smith, an African American woman, explores her theme of raw racist anger by writing in the voice of a young White supremacist man. She gets inside his head, lets him vent his hatred and never steps in as author to editorialize. The poem makes any decent reader uncomfortable, in large part because Smith maneuvers things so that readers can see things, at least briefly, through racist eyes. I would even say she provokes in us a sliver of empathy with this confused and angry man spewing his vile feelings with such cutting force:
I look in the mirror and hold up my mangled hand,
only the baby finger left, sticking straight up,
I know it’s the wrong goddamned finger,
but fuck you all anyway.
I’m riding the top rung of the perfect race,
my face scraped pink and brilliant.
I’m your baby, America, your boy,
drunk on my own spit, I am goddamned fuckin’ beautiful.
The subject is far from exhausted, I know. But very tentatively, I will venture the opinion that, seen from the right angle, Milosz may be right, in that pure hatred is unlikely to produce a good poem. Any unadulterated emotion—including anger or hatred—tends to strip away nuance, intelligence, generosity, and humility, all traits I associate with the greatest poetry. Tell all the truth, Dickinson advised, but tell it slant. Writing in persona is one way to tell it slant. There are others. But maybe a poem of hatred only works when we can find within it some touch of generosity, empathy, or other contrasting tone.
Love untempered by realism we term sentimental, and call that a poetic flaw. Likewise, I think unmitigated hatred is sentimental, which is to say oversimplified. The strongest poems almost always are more realistic, more faceted and shaded. And here’s my current confession: the older I get, the less interested I am in Swift’s sort of savage indignation. I am weary to death of snark and cynicism, and alas, see it everywhere I look, in the mass media as well as all too many poems aiming to be clever and superior to their readers. I say that intelligent praise and gratitude are just as difficult to write as a curse or an insult, as well as being more satisfying to my soul.
Poems of gratitude and praise, though—that’s a subject for a later column or two, as I hope you might agree.
©2016 David Graham