"The swordmaster is as unself-conscious as the beginner. The nonchalance which he forfeited at the beginning of his instruction he wins back again at the end as an indestructible characteristic."
from Zen Sword, by Phillipe Martory

The apprenticeship of an artist, if she/he is lucky, and honest, never stops. One joy of a craft as demanding and ancient as poem making is that it has no finish line, no summit, no diploma. Naturally enough, this fact is also a source of recurrent pain for us. We look at the pages we have written, we look at the poems of others, of those who have gone before us, and we ask the usual questions: Who am I, and who do I want to be? How does one continue artistically becoming? To learn more of the art is, with diligence, almost inevitable. To learn enough is impossible. As we internalize more and more of the tradition, (and become progressively less shielded by our ignorance) we realize how local our upbringing has been, how rural our assumptions are.

Self-consciousness is an inevitable phase of artistic development. When you take the step towards learning more of artifice, more of craft and its history
-- when, for example, you cross the threshold of an MFA program -- you choose to end your childhood in artlessness. You are giving up your virginity, your original joyful innocent infatuation, your naiveté, your adolescent grandiosity, your ability to pull a charming poem out of your sleeve fifty minutes before class for your poetry teacher, Amanda, who coos over it as if you had given birth to a baby squirrel; you are bending the knee of your narcissism at the door of the monastery. Like Eve, you’re trading innocence for knowledge, and, mouth full of apple, you discover you’re naked. Plus, you’ve got an audience.

What happens as a result of that step is that you become self-conscious. Your writing becomes stiff, clumsy, overly-complex, or horribly, horribly simplistic. Your poems become choked, dumb, stupid, wooden. As if you had once known instinctively how to juggle, had been born to circus jugglers, had grown up juggling, but now, your grace and balance had disappeared. Now the plates and saucers shatter around you. This is painful. Yet you volunteered for it, you ninny. “They are good poets because they don’t know yet how hard it is to write a poem” I have heard another teacher say of her beginning poetry class.

Self-consciousness, the hinderedness of trying too hard, can afflict even a poet as superb as Robert Hass. Look at the opening of his poem “Spring Drawing,” from that signature, seminal collection, Human Wishes:

A man thinks lilacs against white houses, having seen them in the farm country south of Tacoma in April, and can’t find his way to a sentence, a brushstroke carrying the energy of brush and stroke

-- as if he were stranded on the aureole of the memory of a woman’s breast, and she, after the drive from the airport and a chat with her mother and a shower, which is ritual cleansing and a passage through water to mark transition,

had walked up the mountain on a summer evening...

“Spring Drawing” is, admittedly, about the difficulty of writing, but one can feel the labor of hyper-intellection behind it, the lack of naturalness, the forced ingenuity: “. . . as if he were stranded on the aureole of the memory of a woman’s breast”? The faint aroma of critical theory exudes from a layer cake like that.

When self-consciousness (which is the only road to sophistication) doesn’t make a writer awkward, when it is internalized and integrated into an existing talent, it becomes eloquence, sophistication, grandeur, grace, acrobatic art. It fertilizes and enriches individual poems in ways that are impossible for the “natural” poet to imagine:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’

John Berryman published his 77 Dream Songs in 1964; he was 50. All his life, he had labored towards becoming a good poet (he would have said “great”), but the achievement of real poetry arguably had eluded him. Much of what he wrote was forced, affected, deformed by his experiments in style. In Dream Songs he found the idiom and grammar that finally allowed him to sing. He was, among his various eruditions, a Shakespeare scholar.

Berryman is actually a terrible role model -- and not just because he was a suicide. When self-consciousness is enthroned as an aesthetic, when it seduces the artist (as it often seduced Berryman), it can result in performances of baroque mugging, of highly specialized self-entertainment. Here’s the beginning of a poem called “Rose Makers’s Fever” from a recent collection of poems published by Verse Press.

Monstrosities of two minds regulate the Rose
parallel circumstance with human kind,
and their particular vision of Holy Dread.

No species of thinking seems worthy of Since.
since--no trellis is wretched...
no trellis begins by waxing a plan.

Never descends below the consultation of pleasure,
Nor, the embattled ark of your illness --
where the garment gapes the body ignites....

Not that hermetic, private, “coded” poetry can’t have power -- Dickinson and Trakl are two examples. There are lots of worse examples than the above in contemporary verse, poems in which self-consciousness as an enthroned aesthetic seems not just superficial but dishonest, because such poetry hints at its own intellectual sophistication, without delivering on any promise. The pages of magazines now are full of “postmodern” intellectual fraud, self-deceivers, grandiosity, and unpaid-for piety. The danger of sophistication has always been thus: it is possible to learn the manners without the substance. There is another kind of sophistication and self-consciousness, too. Think of Adrienne Rich, who has publically said that she cares little for the craft of a poem, but everything for its content. It would be fair to say that Rich has committed her life not towards poetry as an end, but as a means: the study and rearticulation of social and political perceptions, trying to penetrate the ideological illusions of capitalism, sexism, and narcissism in order to reach a degree of perceptual savvy that she can write something like this excerpt from “Architect,” a parable about artistic corruption:

. . . You could say he spread himself too thin a plasterer’s term
you could say he was then
skating thin ice his stake in white colonnades against the thinness of
ice itself a slickened ground
Could say he did not then love
his art enough to love anything more
Could say he wanted the commission so
badly betrayed those who hired him an artist
who in dreams followed
the crowds who followed him

Imagine commandeering those oversize those prized
hardwood columns to be hoisted and hung
by hands expert and steady on powerful machines
his knowledge using theirs as the one kind does the
other (as it did in Egypt)

-- while devising the little fountain to run all night
outside the master bedroom

(from the collection Fox)