Trafficking in the Radiant: The Spiritualization of American Poetry

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2005 by Sadoff, Ira

APz A Column

"It's not possible to be sated with the world. I'm still insatiable," he said. "At my age, I'm still looking for a form, for a language to express the world."

-interview with Czeslaw Milosz

AT ONE TIME, PERHAPS THANKS TO NEW Criticism and an unmediated faith in the canon, poets might have suggested more comfortably that they were exempt from, or could at least transcend, the pressures of their age, thereby aspiring to an eternal, "timeless poetry." At a time when mass culture penetrates and corrupts our Romantic notions of self and individuality, it's not difficult to recognize the effect of commerce and cheapened religiosity on our faith in truth and absolutes (other than as a "regime of truth."). In a recent New Yorker, Nicholas Lehman writes about the way commerce corrupts our news reporting:

Most mainstream-media organizations, worried at being culturally and politically out of synch with many Americans, are making an effort to reach out-I frequently heard a promise to cover religion more seriously and sympathetically. For many, that's a business imperative, an attempt to broaden the audience, especially among conservatives. Neil Shapiro, the President of NBC News . . . said of NBC News' new anchor, Brian Williams, 'He's a great journalist, a great reporter. Having said that, he's a huge NASCAR fan, has been since his father took him to the track when he was a kid. He cares a lot about his faith. He wants to take the broadcast on the road a lot. He was on the road a whole week before the inauguration. Brian does get it. He once did a story on 'Cabela's'-the superstore chain for hunters.1

This pandering, this compromising nexus between religiosity and cultural currency, has leaked into all our discourses. It's no surprise that "faith" has been ascendant these last several years. According to the American Religion Data archive, there's been an 8.8 percent increase in Religious adherents since 1990.2 One hears many explanations for this recent infusion into mainstream culture: the constantly promoted but failed promise of materialism to satisfy our inner-lives, well-organized fundamentalist communities (modeled and promoted by the social polices of the current administration), the increasing conservatism of the media (not only in radio talk shows, but also in the clinical gaze of "therapeutic testimonials" from the ilk of Dr. Phil and Dr. Laura), the perceived threat to western culture by other religious sects, the threat to "decency" by secular humanism and the pornography of American culture. It's not an ahistorical accident that we more often look to a "higher power" to help cope with feelings of powerlessness: our society contains no shortage of irrational darkness; our current government represents the economic interests of a very few and seems moreover committed to hegemony over other religions and cultures; lobbying dollars decide more and more of our foreign and domestic policies, rendering "one person, one vote," increasingly obsolete. Interest in religion has always-albeit obliquely-reflected an historical component: why would the critical vocabulary of contemporary poetry be exempt from these pressures? This turn to spirituality is a consequence of the historical. My contention is that using religion as a metaphorical expression of our powerlessness-when the source of that feeling may originate in social world-diminishes human agency and makes possible a hierarchical authoritarianism; that the Romantic desire to transcend materiality leads to a flight from the social and sexual; and finally, that the pandering we see in the public sphere can also corrupt the spiritual impulse in art: in this culture, spirituality sells.

Mass culture, Christian fundamentalism and the cheap spirituality of the likes of Oprah Winfrey have surely made their contribution to this change. But neo-formalist critic Christian Wiman has rightly chastised secular writers-I'd have to include myself here-for the frequency with which they address God in their poems. Recent collections-some more and some less authentically-by Jorie Graham, Cal Bedient, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Li-Young Lee, Franz Wright, W. S. DiPiero, Michael Ryan, Jane Hirschfeld and Mark Jarman, just to name a few, accentuate our poets' interest in the spiritual. Even a cursory glance at the current sites of authority in poetry-that is to say, who chooses book prizes, who anthologizes, who awards grants (signs that always reflect the values of the dominant culture)-also illustrates these changing values. This shift reverberates generationally, not only through the handing down of book prizes, but in the way young artists naturally model their work after accomplished teachers (most graduate writing programs market their programs by listing their most "successful" students). Our poetic icons have also changed: in the past two decades, Rilke has replaced Neruda as one of our most influential poets (Neruda's sensual and political work saw prominence during the "New Internationalism" of the Sixties and Seventies). T. S. Eliot, whose reputation has fluctuated ever since he dominated generations of writers through the 1950s, is again garnering heightened attention.