Anecdotal Evidence: `The Momentary Beauty is Attendant'

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Momentary Beauty is Attendant'
Excerpt:
Poetry has been euthanized by its practitioners, with assistance from critics, professors and readers, and few have the will to point out the stinking corpse.

“If they do so inquire, that will be a very good thing—and for two reasons. It will mean, of course, that poetry has survived the complicated (not to say sophisticated) nihilism and materialistic hedonism of our literary and artistic culture during the last century, despite all the odds. Furthermore, it will be in that light that [Helen] Pinkerton’s work shows to its best advantage. Too quiet and rational to attract the attention of the loquacious emotivists crowned evanescent monarchs in our media age, Pinkerton’s work holds up well in a higher standard of judgment with a longer historical sense. She compares well with John Donne and George Herbert, while between her work and that of the likes of Lynn Hejinian, David Antin, John Ashbery, or Mebdh McGuckian there is no intelligible comparison at all.”

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Insert from The Book Haven:

Winters described Pinkerton’s poetry as “profoundly philosophical and religious,” and she discusses how  Ben Jonson scholar William Dinsmore Briggs led her in that direction, though she never met him – his teaching on medieval and Renaissance learning “permeated” the work of (Yvor)Winters and Cunningham, she said.  Helen became preoccupied with the Thomistic notion of esse, and sees “nothingness” as the primary temptation of humankind.  Hence, her poem, “Good Friday” (included in her book Taken in Faith), which claims:
Nothingness is our need:
Insatiable the guilt
For which in thought and deed
We break what we have built.
But more than temptation – it is delusion.  “The chief aspect of the drive is the metaphysical assertion that nothingness is the real reality – that there is no real being.”
She links this drive with the thinking of the 19th and 20th century, particularly romanticism, which she sees as a drive toward annihilation.  “Real love is the love of being. Eros is the love of non-being”:


I found my way out of it by grasping the Thomistic idea of God as self-existent being. There is no nothingness in reality. It is a kind of figment of the imagination. To believe that there is is a verbal trick – a snare and a delusion. Much of modern philosophy (Hegel, the Existentialists, et al.) are caught up in this delusive state of consciousness.
I do scorn and critique (always) “romantic religion” – or the religion of eros … as I call it – and I did see in others, as well as in myself – a pervasive “unavowed guilt” in our culture – based on an unavowed longing for “nothingness.” This is a kind of obsession of mine in my early thinking (and consequently in my poems) after I came to a realization of the nature of my consciousness. What was driving me to be dissatisfied with everything and everyone, including myself, was this “eros,” this craving for extremes of feeling, for a kind of perfection in things and in others.
Patrick Kurp has written some lovely stuff about Helen at Anecdotal Evidence – here, and here, and here … oh, just type “Pinkerton” into his search engine.  There’s lots.  I’m proud to have introduced them.
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“She has written some of the best poems of her generation,” says poet and scholar Timothy Steele, ’70. Pinkerton’s mentor, Yvor Winters, deemed her “a master of poetic style and of her material. No poet in English writes with more authority.” 
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Pinkerton is passionate and, she fears, controversial as she decries today’s “breakdown in the notion of what a poem can be.” She deplores the tendency to call any kind of lineated self-expression a poem.
“I think the kids today aren’t learning the art of poetry. They’re told that everybody can be a poet,” she says. “Not everybody is capable of being a poet —just like everybody isn’t capable of being a fine ballet dancer or a fine pianist.”
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Pinkerton was born in Butte, Mont. Her father was a copper miner; her mother had been raised in an orphanage—“or whatever is the politically correct term nowadays,” she qualifies. When Pinkerton was 11, her father was killed in a mining accident, leaving her mother to rear four children, including two teenage boys and a 6-year-old girl. The death created a decade-long crisis of faith for Pinkerton, whose parents were Catholics. Perhaps this is one reason faith is a running theme of her poems. She describes her central concerns as Thomistic—focused on St. Thomas Aquinas’s “questions of being and existence.”
Pinkerton came to Stanford determined to be a journalist, after working a two-year after-school stint for a Mt. Vernon, Wash., weekly paper, as well as editing her high school newspaper and yearbook. Her colleagues at the Stanford Daily raved about Winters and encouraged her to take a class with the outspoken maestro.
Meeting Winters turned her aspirations upside-down. “I discovered a whole new world, which was the serious writing of poetry,” she says. She decided she’d rather be a mediocre poet than a first-rate journalist. For Pinkerton, poetry “was a better thing to do—it was more interesting and more valuable. It was a funny choice to make, I must say,” she adds wryly.

 

~Cynthia Haven
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