On the New Cultural Conservatism

Some years ago an elder friend was much disturbed by "campus unrest," although any instance of its literal effects was very unlikely to reach her. It seemed her fears were really the fact of her being increasingly unable, physically, to defend herself or to "get out of the way," should some "violence" occur in her environment. There must be a large number of people indeed who, biologically, one wants to say, find themselves unable to respond to any change of this order and who want it "as it was," just that that stasis, they feel, secures them in their own increasing limits of possible activity.

I find that attitude deeply human. I remember Pound's saying somewhere, that "after fifty one can't keep one's eye on all the sprouting corn," that one has to get one's own work done if it ever is to be got done. Hopefully, one learns something about the possibilities of an art, be it sewing or singing, and having done so, one wants the center of that information and the possibilities of working with it to stay put.

Perhaps even more to the point, art is by nature conservative—which is to say, it pays a strict and constant attention to the materials and modalities wherewith it comes to make a thing. In that sense I remember Charles Olson's insistence that "we are the last conservatives," those who were given to care, in John Winthrop's phrase, about the kind of world we live in.

Politics, sadly, does not seem to care about that world except in small, preferential segments of its existence. The only political

group I find myself consistently attracted to is, paradoxically, that of the black community. They would seem to be engaged in both gaining and saving the possibilities of distinct human life. That their actions are often "radical" only emphasizes for me the precise conservatism of their intent. They are not fooling, so to speak, and their action tends to follow the literal pattern of their commitment. The farm workers are another, if smaller, instance of the same nature of action.

As a poet I will do anything to secure my own realization of what the possibilities of imagination are. Obviously such a commitment can be at times a destructive and isolating phenomenon. But the conservatism of my own nature—that endlessly insistent "save the baby" demand I feel—will not let me act otherwise. I am a literalist. I am confused by what seems to be, yet when actually approached or met with, proves not to be at all. To recognize that another artist is painfully and arbitrarily limited in what he or she feels possible because some group "doesn't like it" strikes me as outrageous. In that sense I have tended to be far more open to other artists in their work than I have been to their critics, radical or conservative.