Today I feature a letter I wrote over three months ago to Charles Murray.  I should be pretty self-explanatory.  I really wanted to hear back from him because I thought we could have a mutually helpful conversation.  Obviously, he did not, for he never wrote back.  Which means I’m either too far under his level for him to bother at all with me, or that I’m too far above him which he either realizes sufficiently to fear to discuss anything with me or that he interprets as inferiority, as most mediocrities do in such situations.  Or maybe as a conservative, he figures he has too little in common with an avant garde poet to take the time to find out more about me.  I’m disappointed, though, that he didn’t acknowledge receipt of my letter and simply plead being too busy to get into a correspondence with me.

It’s also possible that the letter, which I sent him care of National Review never got to him.  Which reminds me that I e.mailed a proposal for an article to National Review a week or so ago.  They’re to let me know in 11 days (I think) if they’re interested.  Otherwise I won’t hear back from them.  I’ll probably post that letter here when I don’t hear back from them.

On rereading my letter, I see that I could have expressed those of my opinions I could expect Murray to disagree with less caustically.  Aside from that, I’m not sure what I did wrong–except go up some chain of command I don’t know about to contact him.  If he needed credentials, I couldn’t have supplied any, and I’m too bourgeois to be able easily to lie.  Oh, and he very possibly failed to get the Grumman irony of “honored” in my opening sentence.  I suppose the letter is good evidence of how disconnected from the Real World someone like me can be.  In any case, it’s an excellent example of how not to write someone like Murray.  The letter follows:

6 May 2012

Dear Charles Murray,

During my 71 years I’ve four or five times honored established cultural figures like yourself with letters out of the blue.  Always because I’ve enjoyed things they’ve written, much of which I’ve agreed with, but even more so because of some portion of which I disagreed with, usually fairly vehemently.  The most recent, possible longer ago than ten years, was Howard Gardner, whose idea of multiple intelligences I had long gone along with but some of the details of which gave me problems.  He wrote me back twice, the second time telling me he’d be glad to read anything I got published–meaning anything I got into a peer-reviewed journal.  No chance of that happening.

I’ve thought of writing you several times before this, first because of your book on IQs, which I mostly agreed with but am more of a genetic determinist than you (believe it or not) and rather contemptuous of the value of IQ tests for rating intelligence, then because of your intriguing ideas as to why Jews seem superior to Gentiles in most cultural fields, which made sense to me but didn’t seem to me the whole story (as a Gentile too intellectually competitive to accept Jewish superiority, I’d worked out my own theory).  And now because of your piece in the latest issue of The New Criterion, “Out of the Wilderness.”

I may agree with more of it than I disagree with, but as an extreme individualist, I can’t go along with your belief that “The best single predictor of a stream of accomplishment in the current generation is the presence of great models in the previous generation.”  What really makes me sputter with indignation–well, it would if I were a sputtering type, which I’m not–is your belief that America “does not have a generation of great models for the next generation to emulate.”  While I don’t believe we need one, as a serious poet/critic for some 45 years incapable of accepting that neither he and nor any of his friends in poetry have been for our generation what Lowell, Berryman, Roethke and others were for theirs, and–more unarguably, Stevens, Cummings, Pound, Frost and others were for the generation before them.

This brings me to where I think you’ve gone wrong–at least so far as poetry is concerned: you’ve gone along with the entrenched mediocrities making up the American poetry establishment as to who our important poets are–actually as to who claiming to be poets genuinely are.  Wilshberia.  That is, I strongly suspect that the only contemporary poets you’re familiar with operate out of a locale I’ve named “Wilshberia” because it covers all current conventional American poems from the usually very formal ones of Richard Wilbur to the seemingly unconventional but, in truth, standardly jump-cut poems of John Ashbery.  The poetry establishment makes it highly difficult for the public to learn of any non-Wilshberian poetry by dictating the contents of all anthologies of wide circulation, making sure grants and other prizes go only to same kinds of conventional poets–to the very same poets  most often, in fact; teaching the mediocrities who become English professors what to teach in the classes they go on to teach; and writing criticism like William Logan’s than may briefly mention visual or language poetry but never discuss it.  Not that there’s any organized conspiracy involved–it’s just natural for mediocrities to band together for protection from their superiors and set up trade guilds.

I think a large failing of your essay is its not saying anything (really) about the way establishments like the one I’ve been describing are Egyptifying our culture.  I’m not familiar enough with music and painting to know whether composers and painters are having the trouble innovative poets are, but see many signs that scientists are, particularly in the soft sciences.

Oh, I haven’t said anything about the poetry I consider neglected, and you seem to know little or nothing about: it’s mainly what I call “pluraesthetic poetry” for poetry that makes significant interactive use of more than one expressive modality.  The prime kind of such poetry is visual poetry–verbal and graphic expression.  There’s also sound poetry which does non-verbally expressive things with sound, my own forte of mathematical poetry which combines mathematics (simple long division, mostly) with words, performance poetry which can be simply described as oral poetry which goes significantly beyond mere recitation, and even poems using chemical symbols and equations.

Other forms of innovative poetry ignored by the establishment include various forms of minimalist poetry; a kind of poetry I call “infraverbal poetry” because what is aesthetically important in it goes on inside words–below the level of sentence, phrase and even word, that is; and genuine language poetry, which is concerned with what syntax and inflection can be used aesthetically to do.  (Note: most of what is called “language poetry,” isn’t–it’s just jump-cut poetry, like “The Wasteland.”)

You’re in luck: I’ve run out of gas.  I hope you can find time to make some sort of reply to what I’ve said.  I’m definitely a crank, by the way–but not an aggressive one–in other words, I’m easy to get rid of.  Whatever happens, I will continue reading–and disagreeing, with you.

all best, Bob Grumman

* * *

Academics writing about geniuses just about never recognize contemporary geniuses as such.

.

Today I feature a letter I wrote over three months ago to Charles Murray.  I should be pretty self-explanatory.  I really wanted to hear back from him because I thought we could have a mutually helpful conversation.  Obviously, he did not, for he never wrote back.  Which means I’m either too far under his level for him to bother at all with me, or that I’m too far above him which he either realizes sufficiently to fear to discuss anything with me or that he interprets as inferiority, as most mediocrities do in such situations.  Or maybe as a conservative, he figures he has too little in common with an avant garde poet to take the time to find out more about me.  I’m disappointed, though, that he didn’t acknowledge receipt of my letter and simply plead being too busy to get into a correspondence with me.

It’s also possible that the letter, which I sent him care of National Review never got to him.  Which reminds me that I e.mailed a proposal for an article to National Review a week or so ago.  They’re to let me know in 11 days (I think) if they’re interested.  Otherwise I won’t hear back from them.  I’ll probably post that letter here when I don’t hear back from them.

On rereading my letter, I see that I could have expressed those of my opinions I could expect Murray to disagree with less caustically.  Aside from that, I’m not sure what I did wrong–except go up some chain of command I don’t know about to contact him.  If he needed credentials, I couldn’t have supplied any, and I’m too bourgeois to be able easily to lie.  Oh, and he very possibly failed to get the Grumman irony of “honored” in my opening sentence.  I suppose the letter is good evidence of how disconnected from the Real World someone like me can be.  In any case, it’s an excellent example of how not to write someone like Murray.  The letter follows:

6 May 2012

Dear Charles Murray,

During my 71 years I’ve four or five times honored established cultural figures like yourself with letters out of the blue.  Always because I’ve enjoyed things they’ve written, much of which I’ve agreed with, but even more so because of some portion of which I disagreed with, usually fairly vehemently.  The most recent, possible longer ago than ten years, was Howard Gardner, whose idea of multiple intelligences I had long gone along with but some of the details of which gave me problems.  He wrote me back twice, the second time telling me he’d be glad to read anything I got published–meaning anything I got into a peer-reviewed journal.  No chance of that happening.

I’ve thought of writing you several times before this, first because of your book on IQs, which I mostly agreed with but am more of a genetic determinist than you (believe it or not) and rather contemptuous of the value of IQ tests for rating intelligence, then because of your intriguing ideas as to why Jews seem superior to Gentiles in most cultural fields, which made sense to me but didn’t seem to me the whole story (as a Gentile too intellectually competitive to accept Jewish superiority, I’d worked out my own theory).  And now because of your piece in the latest issue of The New Criterion, “Out of the Wilderness.”

I may agree with more of it than I disagree with, but as an extreme individualist, I can’t go along with your belief that “The best single predictor of a stream of accomplishment in the current generation is the presence of great models in the previous generation.”  What really makes me sputter with indignation–well, it would if I were a sputtering type, which I’m not–is your belief that America “does not have a generation of great models for the next generation to emulate.”  While I don’t believe we need one, as a serious poet/critic for some 45 years incapable of accepting that neither he and nor any of his friends in poetry have been for our generation what Lowell, Berryman, Roethke and others were for theirs, and–more unarguably, Stevens, Cummings, Pound, Frost and others were for the generation before them.

This brings me to where I think you’ve gone wrong–at least so far as poetry is concerned: you’ve gone along with the entrenched mediocrities making up the American poetry establishment as to who our important poets are–actually as to who claiming to be poets genuinely are.  Wilshberia.  That is, I strongly suspect that the only contemporary poets you’re familiar with operate out of a locale I’ve named “Wilshberia” because it covers all current conventional American poems from the usually very formal ones of Richard Wilbur to the seemingly unconventional but, in truth, standardly jump-cut poems of John Ashbery.  The poetry establishment makes it highly difficult for the public to learn of any non-Wilshberian poetry by dictating the contents of all anthologies of wide circulation, making sure grants and other prizes go only to same kinds of conventional poets–to the very same poets  most often, in fact; teaching the mediocrities who become English professors what to teach in the classes they go on to teach; and writing criticism like William Logan’s than may briefly mention visual or language poetry but never discuss it.  Not that there’s any organized conspiracy involved–it’s just natural for mediocrities to band together for protection from their superiors and set up trade guilds.

I think a large failing of your essay is its not saying anything (really) about the way establishments like the one I’ve been describing are Egyptifying our culture.  I’m not familiar enough with music and painting to know whether composers and painters are having the trouble innovative poets are, but see many signs that scientists are, particularly in the soft sciences.

Oh, I haven’t said anything about the poetry I consider neglected, and you seem to know little or nothing about: it’s mainly what I call “pluraesthetic poetry” for poetry that makes significant interactive use of more than one expressive modality.  The prime kind of such poetry is visual poetry–verbal and graphic expression.  There’s also sound poetry which does non-verbally expressive things with sound, my own forte of mathematical poetry which combines mathematics (simple long division, mostly) with words, performance poetry which can be simply described as oral poetry which goes significantly beyond mere recitation, and even poems using chemical symbols and equations.

Other forms of innovative poetry ignored by the establishment include various forms of minimalist poetry; a kind of poetry I call “infraverbal poetry” because what is aesthetically important in it goes on inside words–below the level of sentence, phrase and even word, that is; and genuine language poetry, which is concerned with what syntax and inflection can be used aesthetically to do.  (Note: most of what is called “language poetry,” isn’t–it’s just jump-cut poetry, like “The Wasteland.”)

You’re in luck: I’ve run out of gas.  I hope you can find time to make some sort of reply to what I’ve said.  I’m definitely a crank, by the way–but not an aggressive one–in other words, I’m easy to get rid of.  Whatever happens, I will continue reading–and disagreeing, with you.

all best, Bob Grumman

* * *

Academics writing about geniuses just about never recognize contemporary geniuses as such.

.