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Spuyten Duyvil Press
1-881471-20-9
$10, 90 pages
Magee exaggerates the ludic, punning qualities of language to propel his lines deep into the space where Kurt Schwitters’ counter-Socratic Dada meta-logues -- the syllogistic catastrophes of the German’s lyric “An Anna Blume” are refigured repeatedly in this volume -- meets a sort of “Jive to Juba” African-American scat-talk (a la Harryette Mullen), all with the breathless pace, if not quite the soul, of Frank O’Hara at his peak typewriter-hysteria period. “The belles of St. Mary knell ‘The Real Slim Shady’ / have made up their minds and are keeping their babies / their CHANNELED HISTORY Knickerbockers by proxy,” he writes in “Convention-al: A Poem,” an improvisation that echoes with the eclipsed tragedies of American black history: “what Amadou to you / later, cable wires in the white poplar / a concrete vector”. The poem -- a sort of all-over critique of television culture that programs viewers’ sense of history into hard-wired mainstreamed truths, moves on -- with a nod to Wittgenstein -- to deconstruct the language-game, but still maintaining the stand-up poststructuralist momentum: “did you forget to program the kith? / if I tell you kith is self-programming, do I mean / a) kith : kit :: kin : kitchen / b) Knick fans thwart monikers / c) We’re born cable-ready / d) Ask your mama / the day-glo (hunter’s) orange wallet’s got a / heap of Signifyin in it / this item is not available in stores”. Not all of the poems in MS have such discernible motives -- some magic is lost when the poet seems vainly invested in maintaining the effect of a mind radiantly overloaded with linguistic possibility, haplessly reaching for the first neat pun or paragram he can muster for fear of being left behind, throwing in ten bad jokes in lieu of one good one -- “his dead brain melted in / her like a do, adieu to his dejected manor / the insular nationality of Carolina, miniscule / in the gales, foot-ways of the moon shouldering / the folds of waves.” (77) One might discern some philosophical language assay here -- the poem is named “The Comedian as the C Word,” alluding to a poem of Wallace Stevens’ -- but unlike in the best work of Charles Bernstein, who might be considered the muse of this poem (he provides one of the book’s epitaphs), one gets the sense of a poet slightly overpleased with his facility rather than hot on the heels of a poetic effect previously unknown to humankind. But the pleasures of this book are many: here is a poet interested in capturing the vicissitudes of a tsunami-force of language in forms that can by turns be as spare as Robert Creeley’s, as philosophically resonant as Lyn Hejinian’s lyrics in The Cold of Poetry, and yet have a boyish, infective charm (even if, at moments, it strays into locker-room towel-slapping tactility -- yuck-yucking over the word “vagina,” for instance). As Magee, already a distinctive poet, matures into a more complex, contradictory personality -- forsaking the easy play of “like mallards, like melba / toast we are / dying on the bank / like a bank shot” for the more sincere probes into the nitty gritty of readings of nearly-illegible marginal American culture (see “Leave the Light On,” with its faux gender-studies slant on the word “shaft”) -- he’ll have more than enough in the toolbox to make it work.
Each has to be an acronym that is the last word of the prior entry.
Such poetic arse rot, reigning over western shores!
Unfortunately, membership is closed.
Yes,only locals kill sparrows
# posted by fatgiant : 16:33 gmt
You understand my munching yolks!
# posted by Michael : 16:04 gmt
Each new egg represents gastronomical yummy.
# posted by fatgiant : 15:47 gmt
Arduously tend to romping alluring coquets to insure virile energy.
# posted by Michael : 14:24 gmt
Yogic oomph girl's attractive.
# posted by Chenthil : 11:10 gmt
Sex educates daft undergraduates, coaching them in various erotic love yoga.
# posted by shazalina : 10:40 gmt
Gosh! One naked Aphrodite dances seductively.
# posted by Chenthil : 08:32 gmt
Yes, erogenous areas reverberate nicely, including naked gonads.
# posted by wageslave : 07:46 gmt
Does aphrodisiac increase lover's yearning?
# posted by Chenthil : 07:32 gmt
[Tom Raworth sent this one in -- I'm posting it because I like the picture, and JK makes a good mate for Madame Sosostris.]
CNN.com - Kerouac bobblehead doll giveaway - Jul. 29, 2003
LOWELL, Massachusetts (AP) -- A homegrown literary icon will be remembered next month with an honor usually reserved for sports figures: a bobblehead doll.
The first 1,000 fans at the August 21 game between the Lowell Spinners and Williamsport Crosscutters of the Class A New York-Penn League will receive bobbing likenesses of Jack Kerouac.
The giveaway, in partnership with the English department at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, is part of "Jack Kerouac Night" at LeLacheur Park.
The eight-inch doll features Kerouac holding a pen and notebook and standing on a copy of "On The Road," his best-known work.
"It's unusual, to say the least, to have a sports team get involved with a literary figure," said Hilary Holladay, director of the Kerouac Conference on Beat Literature.
Before he was a writer, Kerouac was a baseball fan and athlete. He excelled in football and track at Lowell High School, spent the winter of 1942 as a sportswriter for The Sun of Lowell, and played football at Columbia.
I've posted some stories about DARPA's Information Awareness Office on Circulars. More assurances that they are truly nuts in the Pentagon and White House.
[I wrote this in response to the following New York Review of Books article on graphic novels. You might want to read the article first before my post.]
The New York Review of Books: Comics for Grown-Ups
As a poet, I have no particular reason to defend the field of "graphic novels," but I feel compelled to respond to such a vitriolic and uninformed essay such as that by David Hadju.
I think one can celebrate two artists who happen to satisfy his particular criteria for artistic success without having to disparage the entire field from which they sprang (and to which they themselves might have some great affection and owe a great debt).
It would be like me writing a flattering article about Christopher Hitchens while wiping out the entire field of highbrow, partisan political journalism. Indeed, Hitchens writes a much better prose than most of what I see in the "cultural" tabloids, and I'm not sure how Hadju could criticize "a legion of less-gifted imitators [who] reduce the notion [of the graphic novel] to baroque parody" with such an undistinguished, unattractive -- and certainly not innovative -- prose style as his own.
Or imagine me writing a flattering article about Richard Holmes or Simon Schama while wiping out the entire field of literary biography and cultural history as the practice of over-educated navel gazers? Or imagine me writing a flattering article about Ian Hamilton Finlay while mentioning over-and-over again that there hasn't been a single great Scottish poet since W.S. Graham and Hugh MacDiarmid died?
Of course, most of my readers would not know who W.S. Graham or Hugh MacDiarmid are, just as most of your readers won't know who the Brothers Hernandez or Renee French or Ho Che Anderson or the host of cartoonists and graphic novelists (many of whom predated Spiegleman) who have pretty much amazed me over the past two years as I have slowly, but enjoyably, read through their material. I would consider it my responsiblity to tell them (I'm a frequent reviewer myself).
I should have been suspicious from the start -- I don't think Genesis or Yes or King Crimson based a concept album on the interactions of a village of impoverished Mexicans, as the Brothers Hernandez did in Love & Rockets, and a critic who cites The World According to Garp as some sort of literary milestone while in the throes of disparaging an entire culture for being "junk art for adolescents" has certainly lost site long ago of what it means to be a popular, sophisticated -- not to mention culturally specific -- artist.
(Speaking of Robin Williams: Popeye, the cartoon, has that special magic that we associate with some of the finest artistic creations -- Vigo's L'Atalante or the boxes of Cornell, for instance -- aesthetic attitudes we should not sacrifice to the "real" or the "mature." The continuing fascination with noirish worlds of Little Orphan Annie and Dick Tracy, to take two examples, not to mention any in narratives that occurs in serial form would suggest that a wiser analogue for Mr. Hadju would not be rock opera but television, or even the gothic novel.)
Hadju, in short, clearly demonstrates no interest in reorienting his sense of aesthetic success in the face of a new(ish) subculture whose dynamics are particular, unique, and which he doesn't understand. "Comics for Grown-Ups" is a pretty irresponsible article and no service to your readers, many of whom probably picked up "Ghost World" when the movie came out two years ago, just as I read and enjoyed "Garp" after seeing the movie -- as "junk" culture -- at the ripe old age of 12.
From the propaganda:
"Based on a set of digital drawings (transformed into desktop replacement icons) depicting George W. Bush's administration as wounded soldiers in the war against terrorism, RE:THE_OPERATION explores the sexual and philosophical dynamics of war through the lives of the members as they physically engage each other and the "enemy".
Letters, notes, and digital snapshots "produced" by the members on their tour of duty become the basis of video portraits that articulate the neuroses and obsessions compelling them toward an infinite war.
Part A-Team, part philosophical meditation, with a dose of character assassination, RE:THE_OPERATION exists as a video and a set of desktop replacement icons for MAC and WIN."
You might want to skip the icons, which I can't get to download properly, and go straight to the videos, which are fascinating.
[Here's the final, unedited version of Darren Wershler-Henry's and my exchange (in a series of 250-word paragraphs) about the website Circulars, which yet lives even if we treat it here as a dead project. The exchange meanders into a discussion of blogs, group authorship, appropriation, the public sphere, intellectual property, etc. and we get a little argumentative at the end -- not quite Freddy vs. Jason, but enough to create wrinkles. This exchange forms the third part of a three section essay on the website to be published in a forthcoming MIT book.]
BKS: I've come up with an awkward, unsettling title for this essay: "Circulars as Anti-Poem." I'm sure cries will be raised: So you are making a poem out of a war? The invasion was only interesting as content for an esoteric foray into some elitist, inaccessible cultural phenomenon called an "anti-poem"? (There is, in fact, a lineage to the term "anti-poem" but I don't think it's important for this essay.) This legitimate objection is to be expected, and I have no reply except the obvious: that a website is a cultural construct, shaped by its editors and contributors, and more specifically, Circulars had a "poetics" implicit in its multi-authored-ness, its admixture of text and image, its being a product of a small branch of the international poetry community, etc. Of course, the title also suggests that this website has some relationship to a "poem," but perhaps as a non-site of poetry—as it is a non-site for war, even a non-site for activism itself, where real-world effects don't occur. But my point for now is that the fragmentary artifacts of a politicized investigation into culture—Gramsci's Prison Notebooks for example—has an implicit "poetics" to it, but standing opposite to what we normally call a "poem." This suggests roles that poets can play in the world quite divorced from merely writing poetry (or even prose, though it was the idea that poets could contribute prose to the anti-war cause—as speech writers or journalists, perhaps—that initially inspired the site.
DWL: Hey Brian: what are you using to count words? MS Word says the previous paragraph has 254 words; BBEdit says 259 (me, I'm sticking to BBEdit). Poets—particularly poets interested in working with computers—should be all about such subtleties. Not that we should champion a mechanically aided will to pinpoint precision (a military fiction whose epitome is the imagery from the cameras in the noses of US cruise missiles dropped on Iraq during the first Gulf War), but rather, the opposite—that we should be able to locate the cracks and seams in the spectacle ... the instances where the rhetoric of military precision breaks down. As such, here's a complication for you: why "anti-poem" instead of simply "poetics"? Charles Bernstein's cribbing ("Poetics is the continuation of poetry by other means") of Von Clausewitz's aphorism ("War is the continuation of politics by other means") never seemed as appropriate to me as it did during the period when Circulars was most active. The invocation of Smithson's site/non-site dialectic is also apposite, but only in the most cynical sense. Is the US bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan the equivalent of a country-wide exercise in land art? In any event, the relationship is no longer dialectical but dialogic; the proliferation of weblogs ("war blogs") during the Iraq War created something more arborescent—a structure with one end anchored in the world of atoms, linked to a network of digital nonsites.
BKS: I hesitate to tease out the "non-site" analogy—the site itself is too variable: for me, I was thinking of Circulars as being the non-site of activism, not just a corollary to the sweat and presence of people "on the streets" but a vision of a possible culture in which these activities (otherwise abandoned to television) can exist, not to mention reflect and nourish culturally. That is, are our language and tropes going to change because of the upsurge in activity occurring around us - in the form of poster art, detourned "fake" sites, maverick blogging? I admit that some of what we've linked to is nothing more than glorified bathroom humor, but nonetheless if the context creates the content for this type of work as a form of dissent, I think that should be discussed, even celebrated. I haven't read too much about this yet. Thinking of Circulars as the "non-site" of the bombing itself is both depressing and provocative: it's no secret that one of the phenomena of this war was not the unexpected visibility of CNN, but Salam Pax's Dear Raed blog, written by a gay man from the heart of Baghdad (even now he is remaining anonymous because of his sexuality). I could see Circulars as a "poetics" but I prefer to think it as an action with a poetics, my own tendency being to think of poetry as the war side of the Clausewitz equation, simply because poetics seems closer to diplomacy than a poem.
DWL: The variability and heteroegeneity of the site, was, I think, partly due to the infrastructural and technological decisions that you made when putting the site together, because those decisions mesh well with the notion of coalition politics (I’m thinking of Donna Haraway’s formulation here). The presence of a number of posting contributors with varied interests, the ability of readers to post comments, the existence of an RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed which allowed anyone running a wide variety of web software packages to syndicate the headlines, a searchable archive, a regular email bulletin—these are crucial elements in any attempt to concentrate attention on the web. Too seldom do writers (even those avowedly interested in collaboration and coalition politics) take the effect of the technologies that they’re using into account, but they make an enormous difference to the final product. Compare Circulars to Ron Silliman’s Blog: on the one hand, you have an deliberately short-term project with a explicit focus, built around a coalition of writers on a technological and political platform that assumes and enables dialogue and dissent from the outset; on the other hand, an obdurate monolith that presents no immediate and obvious means of response, organized around a proper name. Sure, the sites have different goals, but Silliman’s site interests me because it seems to eschew all of the tools that would allow any writer to utilize the unique aspects of the web as an environment for writing. And sadly, that’s typical of many of the writers’ blogs that exist.
BKS: I haven’t been too bothered with those aspects of Silliman’s Blog for the mere fact that it would double his time having to respond to the comments, many of which could be vicious flames. I’ve deleted some of the comments on Circulars, in one case because the poster was making scandalous allegations (drugs, child molestation) about the head of an advertising agency, and another because the poster, in American fatwa-esque fashion, deemed that I should have a rocket shoved up my ass. Of course, your point is well taken—Silliman’s Blog could use some real-time play-by-play; I’m sure a diagnostic essay is forthcoming. I did set Circulars up with the intention of there being subsets of discussion on the site, separate groups of people who would engage with each other over some time—“committees” of sorts, with their own story threads. This happened for a brief period—there was a lot of heat generated by one of Senator Byrd’s speeches against the war, and there was a discussion about Barrett Watten’s “War = Language.” I was prepared to develop new sections of the site if anyone so requested, though I confess to being dictatorial about the initial set-up, basically because I know more about the web than most poets and I hate bureaucracy. I was hoping that some of the more frequent poet bloggers who were writing political material would send their more considered material for posting to Circulars, but most simply posted to their own blogs without telling me.
DWL: I’m not suggesting that blogs and newsforums should be about the abrogation of editorial control—far from it. It’s always necessary to do a certain amount of moderation and housecleaning, which, as you well know, takes assloads of time. During its peak, I was spending at least 2 or 3 hours a day working on Circulars, and I’m sure you put in even more time than that, even with the help of the other industrious people who were writing for the site. Which takes me back to the value of the coalition model: a decent weblog NEEDS multiple authors to work even in the short term. The classic example of a successful weblog is Boing Boing
BKS: I'm not sure that it's necessary for a blog to be multi-authored; what it really needs is a mandate, and it's possible that, were the mandate simply to produce rich, incantatory prose -- imagine the Marcel Proust blog -- a highly disciplined approach could work. Steve Perry's Bushwarsblog, for example, succeeds quite well on this level (not the Proustian but the muckraker), as does Tom Mantrullo's Swiftian Commonplaces. Both of them have "political" agendas, but they are also well-written and thoughtful for what are in effect news publications without an editor. It helps that these two are journalists and conceptualize their blogs as a distinct form of news writing alternative to the mainstream -- the individual voice is sharpened by an informed sense of the social arena in which it will resonate (in which the message will ultimately become dulled). Just today, Tom posted a link to the Times story on corporate blogging—yecch -- and has coined this aphorism, a detournement from Foucault though sounding somewhat Captain Kirkish to me, to describe his project: "To blog is to undertake to blog something different from what one blogged before." A version of "make it new" but with the formal precedent being the blog itself -- a vow not to let individual "multi-authoring" become equal to corporate mono-glut. Perhaps the model blog is that which responds to the formal issues of other blogs as if they were social issues (i.e. beyond one's "community"), hence transforming the techne of the writer into a handling of hypertextual craft.
DWL: It’s all to easy too imagine the Marcel Proust blog—Christ, what a nightmare (shades of Monty Python: “Proust in his first post wrote about, wrote about …”). Endless streams of novelistic prose, no matter how incantatory, are *not* what I want to read online. William Gibson, for one, thinks there’s something inimical about blogging to the process of novel-writing. I think that the paragraph-as-“post” is the optimal unit of online composition, and that an optimal online style would be some sort of hybrid of prose poetry and healthy geek cynicism (imagine a Slashdot
BKS: I’m still curious about the line “generating strong content”—what do you mean by “content”? My guess is not “writing” as we know it, but some admixture of links, intro paragraphs, pictures, HTML formatting, that creates a dynamic, engaging, and timely space on the screen. “Content” moves from “writing” to the shape one creates by selectively linking to other sites, serving, but also provoking, a “particular interest group.” (I wrote earlier today in a dispute over blogs: “Circulars was a short-term effort (or as short-term as the war) that was a response to what I sensed was, or would be (or hoped to be) a moment of crisis in terms of American self-identification.” Who would have thought, ten years ago, that a group of weblinks and writing could contribute to a crisis in national identity?) Most writers would probably feel demeaned to be referred to as “content managers,” as if all writing were a versioning of some other writing (put it back in your pants, Harold), but, frankly, we’re admitting for a whole lot of plagiarism in this concept of “content.” I think the blog-ring model on haddock.org is strong, since it lets writers tend their gardens, deriving whatever classic satisfactions one gets from writing, and yet contribute unwittingly to a larger collective. I agree: some “types” of writing just work better online—claustrophobic syntax, also non-sequiturs, drives readers back to hunt for hearty prose (though writers like Hitchens seem to be as uncompromisingly belle-lettristic on screen as on paper).
DWL: I like to think of myself as a malcontent provider. As someone who works regularly with found text, copping to the “plagiarism” that’s at the heart of all “original” writing doesn’t worry me at all; in fact, I’m beginning to think it’s a necessary strategic position for artists at this particular moment in history. As thinkers like Siva Vaidyanathan and Lawrence Lessig have been arguing strenuously for the last few years, the concept of intellectual property is a relatively recent, regressive invention that has nothing to do with the reasons that copyright was established two hundred years ago, and that it actually reverses copyright’s original function – to provide a short-term monopoly solely to drive innovative thought, not to create perpetual profit. Artists in many disciplines are increasingly moving toward creative processes based on appropriation, sampling, bricolage, citation and hyperlinking, but the multinationals and the entertainment industries are driving legislation in the exact opposite direction by arguing that ideas can and should be owned. Artists and writers who have a large investment in their own “originality” do us all a serious disservice by refusing to recognize and protect the public domain … the very thing that makes ongoing artistic activity possible. So by all means, yes, don’t just “write” (a verb which in many cases bears the superciliousness of the Romantic), build (mal)content. Bring on the hyperlinks, intro paragraphs, pictures, PHP scripts and HTML formatting, especially if they help to demonstrate the mutual indebtedness that all creativity entails. Use Your Allusion.
BKS: Copyright laws may never expire fast enough for internet plagiarizers who want appropriation now, but I haven’t heard anything recently about the Edison company suing Napster, nor did the estate of George Meredith go after David Bowie for stealing “Modern Love.” Unfortunately, for poets it hardly matters—if there were a P2P system for trading poems, we’d love it, and so poetry may be not a rich ground for recruitment in this battle. No one cared about the Vaneigem series until the Times cease-and-desist letter came in (Vaneigem still doesn’t care); it’s the reverse of that Benny Hill routine in which a pervert’s trying to look up a lady’s skirt—once she takes it off and stands there in a bikini, he loses interest. Poets are already in the public domain—we’re floundering there, certainly not unwittingly, but nobody asks permission to steal their turns-of-phrase, their new sentences and rhetorical ticks, or any linguistic innovation. As for creative products geared toward highlighting how indebted creativity is to reworkings of other cultural products—I like them, of course, but didn’t this trend already pass, along with Verfremdung effects in theater— placards, talking to the audience, sweating on them? Kenny’s Day is an exception, but it took him 836 pages to be one. I welcome the challenge of working with language apart from appropriation, I suppose because, on the web, I’m all about appropriation—The Truth Interview, Circulars, etc.—and non-appropriative stuff—programming Flash, “writing” poems—seems fresh again. Ah, the dialectic!
DWL: If we treat creative products geared toward highlighting how indebted creativity is to reworkings of other cultural products as a trend that’s had its time, we’ll get precisely the culture we deserve – i.e. one with no public domain (with the Supreme Court’s rejection of the Eldred appeal of the Sonny Bobno Copyright Extension Act and Mexico considering extending copyright to life-plus 100 years and allowing the government to collect royalties on works in the public domain, we’re that much closer to a continent-wide lockdown). And while I agree in spirit with the notion that poetry’s value is arbitrary (which, for the most part, means it’s valueless), as someone who ran a press for five years, I know all too well that (a) poets are as capable of getting all pissy about contracts as any other kind of writer and (b) that no business is too small to receive a cease-and-desist letter from a multinational hell-bent on maxing out the value of its intellectual property holdings. Besides, with Circulars, I thought that the project wasn’t poetry qua poetry as much as it was expanding an innovative poetic sensibility outward into policy and politics … which means, in my mind at least, championing the values of an open relationship to content. As writers, we need to have the freedom not only to repost and recontextualize the news of the moment, but also to deconstruct, détourne and all of those other French verbs that start with D, without a constant fear of litigation.
BKS: Circulars was indeed intent, on the most abstract level, on “expanding an innovative poetic sensibility outward into policy and politics,” but not to argue for that sensibility. I agree that a liberated public domain is necessary to maintain the type of free-wheeling, free-borrowing public discourse necessary in a heteroglot “democracy” but, alas, the point of the site was to upset a government and exploit any means necessary in creating the sort of fervor one might associate with a “revolutionary” culture. Appropriation was one suprisingly popular means. Tom Raworth’s poem “Listen Up,” written in the voice of a bigoted warmonger in tight couplets and submitted as a joke to the “Poets For the War” website, was another (and stronger for being sui generis). I do think the torrent of “remixes” and detournements that ensued leading up to the war put centerstage a seething but as yet underground counterculture that shares many of your (and my) views on “property” – that could go somewhere. This is a generation of people who are on the other side of the paradigm shift regarding cultural property – that and other values could be the seed of a new, but as yet themeless, sensibility. My hope with Circulars was to illustrate the potential power of such sites in times of crisis as provocative, popular cultural tools, and to put our “avant-garde” poetics to the service of a specific cultural effort, not to refresh arguments for classic avant-garde gestures themselves. But, of course, intentions are neither here nor there.
DWL: Okay, time to boat this bass. I don’t think it’s possible to separate advancing an argument from at least the implicit support for the underlying sensibility – otherwise, you have no credibility. If the arguments you make succeed to some extent in supporting the cultural effort in question, then there is still some point in proceeding to operate from that underlying sensibility, because you’ve demonstrated its efficacity. Circulars was a beautiful thing because, within the mandate it established for itself, it worked … but part of the reason that it worked is that there’s something useful in the fusion of innovative poetics, geek culture and a transnational left/oppositional politics. That’s a more quiet stance than revolution, but I’m not a revolutionary, just a frustrated idealist with a talent for synthesis. As we continue to glue new fins and antennas to our weird little poetic cyberspaceship, I can’t help but feel that the underlying sense of the mission continues to evolve. I mean, I’ll use some of the techniques that the historic avant garde has to offer, but am not interested in many of its values (opacity, for instance) and am skeptical of the potential for revolution. That doesn’t mean that I won’t try to cruft together a more amenable space (for and with anyone who’s interested in being involved) in the interstices of late capitalism with whatever tools and materials are available. Right now, that means, among other things, websites, weblogs, mailing lists and whatever else we find along the way.
I would kill to be so dull. Or maybe cough.
[The indefatigable Mike Magee is at it again... I didn't realize his website is so nicely designed. I haven't played around in there yet but it looks like there's some poesie, and perhaps some wild flarf.]
I made it to Sharon Harris's ever growing stock of images of Toronto poetry readings and book launches. She chose a special wallpaper that matches my shirt! They got a good crowd up there in Toronto.
Brian Kim Stefans - First Toronto Reading
Now this is exciting... Kasey Mohammad of {lime tree} fame -- the site I've probably linked to most frequently from my blog, and who sends me quite a bit of traffic himself (see bottom of sidebar) -- has designed a gorgeous FSC icon for his blogroll.
Thanks Kasey! I encourage everyone to steal it who might want to promote my site. And if you want to promote Kasey's site, which is looking pretty nice these days, steal yourself some limes...
I'm just in work today to pay bills and revise some poems... if you're in much the same position, I encourage you to visit the world's tallest virtual building -- and to make your own floor! I think this will be the next big thing for poets after blogging... you heard it here first. (As of this very moment, the site seems to be down, but try again...)
[Another poem I don't expect to ever publish... sort of in the "New Door" vein, if only because I was just as distracted on the day I wrote this.]
I am working on a painting. I don’t want to seem unhealthy to you. Every day the painting grows taller; I am smoking a lot less now. I can barely see anything else, and the only sound is the cream-colored traffic outside. Now, was that thinking?
I am expecting your phone call. It grows on me, this feeling of love and dread. I could return to the painting, of course; of that, I have to remind myself. Because the painting is a lot of work, I am reminded that I often feel tired in certain situations. Maybe not this one, but other times. Perhaps also this one, but were that to be the case I wouldn’t have to be “reminded” of anything. But reminded I am, and have forgotten that you are about to call.
The painting depicts... well, it is gray. It has a red ellipse somewhere in the lower left-hand corner, like the spot on Jupiter. I think a bit of that spot on Jupiter, how I would describe it — the painting, I mean — were there to have been no spot on Jupiter. It’s so exhausting to be original.
I own a televisions set, too. It is dark right now, because it is not on. I can’t paint with these sorts of distractions, though know others can, and do; and even want to, that’s part of the “life.” "Cultured" distractions. The things of the world. But as my mind is on that spot on Jupiter, which, I suppose, they don’t show frequently on TV, I rarely have the set on when painting. It would be too – too distracting. And as I am trying not to think of your call, and trying to think of my painting, probably an easy thing to do (when you think about it), nonetheless the television is off, keeping the “things of the world” and the “life” at bay. This is a cozy situation. But, indeed, it makes me nervous.
I’d like to be healthy. But, now, I have these sores in my mouth. They are purplish, though you can‘t really see them, as they are inside the mouth. Not on the lips, or on the skin, but inside. Imagine them, then.
When I am done with this painting, I will call you at once to remind you about it, and about them, and me.
[Trying to revise some skids... this one didn't quite make it beyond being a light, negative jingle. "Dark swans of trespass" is a line from one of the Ern Malley "hoax" poems.]
i’m on a staple diet
of “can’t be blamed”
nothing is
unnatural erosion
all the cuticle colors
blent into 2.3 milliseconds
tenure-track pluto
moons the universe
"gets those guys a quicker
national anthem"
in one 90-minute take
from a handycam on david
letterman’s forehead
--cell phones off
deviating from the script
alive, not surviving
on the weakening antarctic shelf
as a cast of a thousand
emperor brand penguins
as if senile lepidopterists
leapt
curious, frank
as improvised carbon dating
“dark swans of trespass”
on a secular, voided landscape
Another gem from the ubu list...
From the propaganda:
"Babyloner is a soundtoy that retrieves audio files of spoken words in different languages from the eLanguage.com website and plays them...
Babyloner uses already existing database, and it lives from it, if the database "dies" Babyloner dies too, unless it finds another database...."
There aren't a lot of languages working for it yet -- I know there are Scottish sound files out there -- but a good half-minute of any one of them is plenty. A surprisingly rich if finally annoying earful for a fairly limited program.
I've always been a huge fan of plunderphonics -- this, of course, is not quite that, but in the same general field.
In the category of "things you never thought you wanted and probably still don't want" is the following .pdf, which contains the writing I've done about Silliman's Blog and related matters over the past weeks.
I haven't put any of the comments in the file, as I have no time for serious editorial work here -- contacting authors, waiting for correx, that type of thing. Formatting this file took long enough, and it still looks like shit. You can read comments by people such as Louis Cabri, Ange Mlinko, Kevin Killian, Henry Gould, Jack Kimball, Kent Johnson, Kimberly Lyons, Robert Kelly, etc., on the right sidebar.
Of course, quotes from blogs that appear in these commentaries (or "screeds") are included. "The Secret Life of Terminals", Rachel Szekely's "libidinal" and "pared-down" reading of "Non," is not included.
This is not an effort to revive the debate; more a way of putting it behind me, us, "them," etc. and perhaps to give people who only read these quickly a chance to see if I'm really insane. Like any writer, I probably feel I've "been misunderstood," but then again I'm willing to think this all a waste of time (and a load of worthless grief) if that's the consensus.
Back issues of Keston Sutherland's Quid, an "occasional journal of poetics, criticism, invective and investigation" are now available online.
I've been waiting for this for a while -- previously, you had to send a quid across the ocean to get one sent to you, and I could never find a quid to do it right.
Will they now change the name to "free"?
I'm especially looking forward to working through some of KS's saucy prose, which I've found intriguing if rough going when he's read in New York in the past.
Circulars isn't quite "back in action" but I've tinkered with the homepage so that the five or so most recent stories stay up rather than just the last story. It now has at least some of the feel of the site during its most productive periods. David Perry and I are still posting things every once in a while and the hit count is still pretty decent but most of the comments are simple slanders, flames, etc. with the occasional plug for a presidential candidate. If you see anything that you think should be on the site let me know... click on the rings to change the angles and engage the metaphor directly.
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Early Voices: The Leap to Language
The reason, Dr. Dunbar suggests, is that language also operates as a badge to differentiate the in group from outsiders; thus the Gileadites could pick out and slaughter any Ephraimite asked to say "shibboleth" because, so the writer of Judges reports, "He said sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right."
[This entry has been revised since I first posted it yesterday. It's been adjusted to fit your screen.]
I'm taking a break from this whole shebang as I'm preparing for a trip to Toronto -- waxing the moustachios, loading up the paint gun, that sort of thing -- and the debate's spawned such a variety of forking paths, many of which lead to a defense of Robert Lowell, which, in isolation, raises a lot of issues (as in Steve Evans' poignant "well why don't we write about James Schuyler") that I'm not sure how to proceed or if it even matters.
My point was to argue (grouchily but hoping to make a serious mark) with a set of terms being tossed about on Silliman's Blog (which I view as an effective act of criticism) -- "school of quietude" versus an unnamed something else, the idea of a "third way" as a "death wish", the continued relevance of a battle against the British (except Raworth, of course) and their "dead" meters, the use of an ascertainment of "lineage" as a stand-in for "deep reading," etc. I think of these as strategies of "Balkanization" that are not useful, are blind politics, and seem terribly dated.
Worse (I've just thought of this), these concepts don't really give us tools to look at literatures that are not primarily white, and not primarily American. For example, these lines in the sand don't exist for Australian literature -- though there was a New American-style rebellion in the sixties, it produced very stanzaic poets like John Forbes, Martin Johnson and John Tranter, and radicalism was still tied to some form of Surrealism due, I think, to the Ern Malley incident -- nor does it is exist in Asian American poetry, which I learned when working on Premonitions with Walter Lew.
They do exist in some ways, but it's more complex than saying that Theresa Cha and Gerry Shikatani reflect an interest in big-M "Modernism" that poets like Arthur Sze or David Mura don't immediately seem to have. If the argument is for a thing called "Asian American poetry" -- and I've argued that such a thing might not exist -- but if so, then the universe of that poetry must be incredibly diverse and rich, heterogenous and electric, not just depicted as a rivulet departing from the so called "avant-garde" line. Asian American poetry is not "better" because "we" are no longer just "telling our stories" -- that historical determinism (expressed in one of RS's essays) has always seemed offensive to me, for obvious reasons, but also simple-minded.
What has come out of this debate, to me, is that more poets of the "alternative" current are very astute and willing "deep readers" in a standard (not necessarily "New Critical") sense, and that these methods of deep reading have only been somewhat problematized by the changes of reading tactics advocated by poststructuralism, etc. Certain readings of Silliman's Non have utilized tactics that are not that different than those used for "Skunk Hour," even if the conclusions as to the "content" (or just what side of the political coin one is) are different. And these tactics have been effective, if not getting "us" closer to what "good" writing is without stylistic prescriptions.
But for example: the Battaillian excessive flows of McCaffery's reading of bill bissett in North of Intention, with its stress on the ludic and excess, have rarely if ever been evoked, or if so in the somewhat less rigorous form of polysemia -- which in other terms can simply mean "ambiguity," a word one associates with William Empson. I haven't read Empson, however, so I can't say more. The Brechtian "v-effekt," which Bernstein writes about in "Artifice of Absorption" (Silliman blogs about this, also) is also not being used critically -- so has the critical approaches of Language poets really made their mark? Likewise for Projective Verse: are any of "our" poets really taking a stand against the "verse that print bred"?
I still think that, often, linguo-Marxist strategies of understanding the material of language can be more usefully applied to a "conservative" poem like "Skunk Hour" -- or "Having a Coke with You" -- than can often be applied to "avant-garde" poems, and that these are better poems because of, not in spite of, their narrative attributes and relationship to the history of poetic form. Spatializing the words "Polish Rider," "coke," and "Frick," however effectively done and giving us a sense of language's "materiality" (a term I rarely use myself), does not quite provide us with the meat for a precise hermeneutic strategy that gets us closer to the world.
The poems in Ashbery's Tennis Court Oath or Coolidge's Space have emotional valences that are rarely written about. And pomo reading strategies, in my naive view, were created for reading narrative and "linear" poems and novels -- not to mention plays -- and don't necessarily argue for the need to break away from these forms.
On a more selfish note: I (along with a few others) have been trying for several years (quietly) to come up with a language for describing poems -- in my reviews for Boston Review and Publisher's Weekly, the "little reviews" series on this blog and on arras.net, on Jacket, in Rain Taxi and the St. Mark's Newsletter, etc. -- that try to focus on specific effects in poems in spite of where an author might have gathered his or her experience with language, and to introduce new, mostly non-US American, names into the mix (admittedly mostly Scottish, British and Australian), not to mention a way to describe poems that don't rely on one's knowledge of, and unquestioned reverence for, the esteemed American avant-garde masters. In fact, finding a way to modify these appreciations without causing wild dismay has been another project.
(I'm monolingual -- with the exception of being able to sing most of "Die Ballade Uber die Sexuelle Horigkeit" at the drop of a hat -- and go in fear of translations, but it would be a great thing to see some convincing writing on non-English poetry -- something that makes the work exciting and not merely good for you as a taste of the "other." My only real attempt has been something on Christophe Tarkos in the Little Reviews.)
So it's seemed, reading parts of Silliman's Blog, like a shuttling back to a (golden) stone age to see that someone is actually dissuading readers from reading British poetry (claiming the meters are flat or adherent to a dead heritage -- the "past"), or reading outside of a presumed counter-formation, or railing against a lineage that includes Bryant and Holmes (my American Library 19th Century American Poetry volume is quite fascinating to me, actually), etc., as if that's better for you, one, we, it, and has something to do with the future. I'm probably exaggerating, but I'd like to hear the arguments otherwise, if only just to hear them made fresh again, and thereby reflect favorably back on the entire "avant-garde" project in the US (which methinks, still, was "quiet" compared to the French one -- so there).
Thanks everyone who chimed in about these minor rants, on the poetics list and elsewhere.
Punch Drunk Love was great, by the way.
[My galpal dropped this in my inbox this morning... a klieg light on the secret life of terminals. I've decided to leave the page citation there since, after all, this is right from the book.]
dear mr. arras,
i decided to see what you have been doing on your blog lately. i had fun reading it. i think i would go absolutely mad trying to have an opinion amidst all the chaos.
one thing, however, from a linguist's perspective - you write: "When nouns and noun phrases get pared down like this they can often, ironically, become..." etc.
I would just like to point out that only noun phrases can be pared down in the sense you are talking about, not nouns (or other terminal nodes, as they're called), unless truncation of the actual words is what you have in mind, and on that account the excerpt from Silliman could look more like what I pasted below (i just "pared down" nouns and other terminals) . In that kind of system each truncated word would necessarily signify the full word, plus some extra meaning added by the device of truncation, of course...but that's not how our poor human language works. (i'm just busting you for fun, my friend!).
Tits
are oft mislead,
subtits do are.
Check
out the drive
in the necar
though my rear
at a stop lit
(one ever sees
the lower body),
thi bony ma
wit a white beard,
tricolor rasta,
hisha cheeks
cause tyes to reed.
I dee he's a gentle son.
Rolls off ing
turn right,
ack cinders top the gavel.
ere come a mom
never
Ire my poem hen
tis a parent
it is errible
ma fraud,
o never
choose tear
read this,
butt his mom asses. (N/O 60)
[Poorly spelled, poorly grammared, rushed thoughts to Louis Cabri's recent posts to the Buffalo Poetics List. I had really meant to deal with Louis' writing about form in Silliman's Non but found what he wrote a bit confusing in the end. You can read his entire post here. I'm just confused about what he means about form in the early part of the email, but I'll leave it for now as I've just rented Punch Drunk Love.]
Just some comments on what Loius had written about Ron's poem a few days back. He is comment on the following from NON:
Titles
are often misleading,
subtitles seldom are.
Checking
out the driver
in the next car
through my rear view mirror
at a stop light
(one never sees
the lower body),
thin ebony man
with a long white beard,
tricolor rasta cap,
high sharp cheekbones
that cause the eyes to recede.
I decide he's a gentle person.
Rolls of roofing
turned upright,
black cylinders atop the gravel.
There comes a moment
whenever
I read my poem when
it is apparent
it is terrible
I'm a fraud,
no one would ever
choose to hear
or to read this,
but then this moment of panic passes. (N/O 60)
LC writes:
"When you read the sentences as discreet units, it's pretty straight-forwardly denotational. But, reading the gaps between these sentences render the sentences completely wild, unpredicted (since the text is so overdetermined with details, it would be impossible to stay in control of their interconnections), unconscious even. Here Silliman reads the "subtitle" of the guy in the car behind him, whose "title" refers to his physical description: "thin ebony man," etc. So, the guy is black, and is advancing on the white narrator, but the "advance" (i.e. suddenly we are no longer in a world of pure, objective-seeming denotation!) is benign ("he's a gentle person"): one can go allegorical here. This "advance" is benign probably because the man is old (eyes receding somewhat) just like the narrator admits of himself (and this ties again to the opening motif of old form). Now the next juxtaposition: how does one account for it? It has to be accounted for. The juxtaposition are not themselves arbitrary: the stanzas/sentences are. The skin color of the older gentleman who is in a car behind the narrator-driver now becomes (and at the same time importantly does _not_ become) the black color of roofing tiles!!? This image's social evaluation is very ambiguous. It is work-to-be-done, of _new_ roofing and of refurbishing - but, is it regentrification, or evidence of upward mobility (whose?), or completely unrelated to housing and instead about industrial expansion (we don't know the narrator's location)? This image becomes the next "title," and its "subtitle" is the following sentence, which seems to carry the emotions the narrator experiences at the sight of the roofing material: self-doubt about his own work-to-be-done as poet. The syntactic wonkiness of the middle phrases of this sentence ("whenever / I read my poem when / it is apparent / it is terrible") mirrors its subject, self-doubt."
When nouns and noun phrases get pared down like this they can often, ironically, become quite riddled with symbolism, and indeed your reading of this slab of NON points to all sorts of correspondences between the sentences and stanzas that are nearly as intricate as what is often said to occur in "Skunk Hour" (or Eliot's Four Quartets, whose language is nearly devoid of adjectives that serve a visual purpose). I've never been much of a symbol guy myself -- the thing is quite often the thing to me, so if the use of the word "ebony" doesn't let me get closer to what it is Ron is seeing -- and my claim here is that he is seeing *less* because he's had to use a quick replacement word to get away from using "black" twice (merely my suspicion, of course) -- well, I guess I just don't see how "ebony" improves upon what it is we're seeing here. [PS: if he's comparing this person to something made of ebony then I'd really be hut and blathered... I write as I move my jaundiced hand across the ivory skin of my girlfriend...]
Take "Fairy decorator" as a contrast -- I never read this as a reference to the decorator's sexuality but I see it now, I always just heard "fairy godmother" and assumed it was a comment on the privileged status of those for whom all things appear to be gifts -- despite the semantic slippage Louis writes about elsewhere, I somehow *see* this a whole lot more. Maybe it's just synaesthesia -- I have a tendency to see color in a lot of phrasing that is technically "colorless". I'm also, like Jeffrey (?), not sure how cheeks make the eyes recede, though I understand this as a painterly flourish -- an unspoken "as if." (Ron often suggested in early interviews that his new sentence prose was an attempt to work into the space of a novel, so I wonder why he doesn't encourage some more novelistic traits in his writing -- wouldn't Nabokov have really tried to nail this visual detail?) But the following observation from a WCW poem (“Catholic Bells”) which just drops out of the sky really impresses me:
(the
grapes still hanging to
the vines along the nearby
Concordia Halle like broken
teeth in the head of an
old man)
The very frailty of these words hanging in the stanza (an isolated by me here) suggest these grapes also. (I was raised in Rutherford and never heard of "Concordia Halle" but isn't there a Concordia grape?)
Anyway, curiously, your reading of this stanza goes up against what I thought were some of the prinicples of the New Sentence, which is that the sentences were paratactic and would not be subsumed under a montage type of functionality -- we see the titles, the titles appear on the cab, the man is black, the tiles are black, etc... -- but rather thwarted narrative and syllogistic connections. The line "I decide he's a gentle person." seems to suggest that the poet wants us to play with a cause-and-effect determination here, a game I like. So I guess the new sentence doesn't have to be entirely "paratactic" (I think it works best when there is wavering), but it seems to me that if such an overdtermined matrix of social meanings as you present here were underlying such passages of the New Sentence, then rather than the author permitting a play of meanings for the reader in his or her poem, asking the reader to be creative, the writer is merely making it much harder to see this matrix of meanings by not elaborating the connex.
I don't think this passage is so carefully written as to suggest that -- connections are happy to occur, but you see some counter-charges within the mass -- "ebony" slipping in to show that he author is aware of lexical repeats -- the phrase "Titles are often misleading, subtitles seldom are" seems vague to me (so "President" is misleading because because the person is not actually presiding, but they "Hey you jerk!" under a flurry of Spanish curses is accurate?) -- etc. I like the line about the doubt and the way it comes in after all of this detail from "outside" -- ok, I know it sounds like I'm just harshing on Ron's poetry but it's really just this poem and how it relates to his ideas, especially what he's writing these days.
I used to have a saying that the one thing net artists can never make is a mirror. But I guess this is close (remember to type your search string in backwards):
Another mirror, for "poetry bloggers" only, is provided by Jim Behrle.
The ULTIMATE mirror site, though, as I've just discovered is the following, which creates instant bile-ridden reviews of your favorite rock albums. Though it doesn't rate with pornolize.com for sheer linguistic exhuberance, the grammar is impeccable:
I despise you and your so-called taste
[Nothing new today... thought I'd post my comment to Jack Kimball on the main part of the blog since I spent more than five minutes writing it. Look at Jack's original post on his blog if you want to see what I'm replying to. I promise to have something original to say or change the subject in the new week!]
Hi Jack,
Not sure what to say here except you make the poem sound *more*, not less, interesting to me -- was this intentional?
Practically everything I've posted on my blog has some element of the the "grotesque" (Renee French and Werner Herzog, for example) and even "drag" (Kiki & Herb, bits in Denton Welch) about it. These must be among my minor vices, but they are aesthetic strategies (if that doesn't sound too sterile and high-minded) that I care for. (Madame Sosostris is, of course, Wyndham Lewis in drag.)
I'm really not on a mission to make anybody like this poem, certainly not! But I'm amazed at how much ire it's managed to create among those who purport to *dislike* it -- has there been any single poem published by "us" in the last 20 years to so inspire such disgust? And do I need Charles Altieri to tell me when a poem is "dead"?
(The effect of symbolic castration of your last paragraph, heightened by image of three epitaph-wielding men in a triumphant circle bounding, like Matisse cut-outs, around the corpse, is itself rather "grotesque" to me -- is this the way academics have fun?)
I can think of a few books -- Harryette Mullen's Muse and Drudge, Kenny Goldsmith's work, Christian Bok's Eunoia, etc. -- and last but not least Jennifer Moxley's two books -- that always bring out strong opinions, but I can't think of a single *poem* that's done this.
In any case, your approach here is to me very interesting, much more than the approach that takes discernment of "lineage" (not to mention plays of reference and polysemeity) as the main object of critical study.
I must say, though, I also see an anxiety, not so much here but perhaps elsewhere in this discussion, to separate us from the "squares", that is similar to that shown in David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde, which had its enjoyable moments, but certainly one can see the irony of having such a *square* as Lehman himself trying to convince us that O'Hara was hip because he laughed at the earnestness of Lionel Trilling and crew. (This whole debate seems pretty "square" to me, actually, but square is, I hear, the new hip.)
Yes, I love O'Hara too, and his words about anything echo with me always -- especially about poems being "good for you" and "force feeding" causing "effete" -- but the irony here is that "we" -- this is perhaps the crux of my "lineage" critique" -- are so concerned with poems as PEDAGOGICAL TOOLS that paradoxes such as the presence of the "grotesque" and "hilarity" in the midst of a highly structured poem by a "square" are not recognized anymore.
I don't think of poems as pedagogical tools, and to say they are poison, and words are a virus (to echo William Burroughs), is something like a step in the right direction.
I don't believe anything I read in a poem -- in a way, the poet is more like a movie director, even if we are looking at an "I" -- the actor will always be imperfect and bring in whatever accidental features of his or her personality and physicality into a performance. We might imagine Kinski is to Herzog as Hopkins is to Lowell (regarding the tub-thumping of the rhymes that you mention disliking in your longer post on the blog.) These prisms can be interesting, and seem to me rarely absent.
(This is not "lineage" -- one doesn't look at Kinski's performance in Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars more as a hunchback reprobate to help determine whether Aguirre: Wrath of God is any good.)
It is always a perverse, but hopefully engaging, reflection of an author's "intentions" and "personality" -- the critical line avowed by Eliot, of course, thought the latter worth getting rid of entirely.
Kasey once again puts in the hours on his blog, this time about Lowell's "Skunk Hour." I haven't had time to read the most recent post with any close attention, being trapped by errands and visiting friends from out of town, but I did catch wind of the followng from Steve Evans' Third Factory there:
Though Lowell leaves me cold after numerous dutiful attempts, I'd been following Free Space Comix's recent defense of him with interest and admiration - until I hit the claim about "the tortured, jagged, compressed rhythms" of "Skunk Hour'" being like "punk rock." I'd as soon assent to that statement as vote for Bush in 2004.
...because a formal technique is being employed (in his case the "new sentence," which never, frankly, struck me as radical) hardly spares a poem (such as his tiring, distracted Roof book N/O) from being branded as passive -- about language, about society, about issues of epistemology and genre. What can be more "quietudinous" than a passivity regarding these issues? In comparison, the tortured, jagged, compressed rhythms of Lowell's "The Skunk Hour" come off as punk rock.
The 60 so odd pages of "Non," from N/O, are rather listless and, I say, also tedious. More importantly, though, you will not find any poignant societal perspective there even after twenty pages, compared to which the 8 or so stanzas of "Skunk Hour" are like a 1 minute 30 second burst of - indeed - "negative" energy. Lowell lines up his targets and then takes them down; Silliman drifts along -- in a similar quasi-pastoral mode, paratactically or not -- reminding us periodically of his cred or "lineage" as a post-Marxist, post-structuralist syntactician ("Schizophrenoform"). The landscape is, at least in my view (I am getting a little forceful and final in my statements of quality here, I fear), left much the way he found it.
"The car radio bleats..." (from the "Skunk Hour") has a similar, if not the same, negatively that Adorno emits when writing about popular culture; it’s an uncompromising condemnation, modified by a bad mood. And am I all that wrong in hearing "I am an antrichirst" in the words "I myself am Hell" -- in contrast to various "I's" (mostly exhibited as "eyes") we see below? Drop the 8 stanzas of "Skunk Hour" into "Non" and I'm sure you will see -- like dropping Radiohead's "Morning Bell," one of their sweeter songs, into Eno's “tedious” Thursday Afternoon -- that you will hear compression, negativity, focus, passion, and noise.
If the issue is class and political viewpoint, it's worth remembering that a lot of punk rock bands were 1) populated by upper-middle-class renegades like Joe Strummer, or 2) populated by neo-Nazi skinheads or alluded to Nazi imagery quite careless of politics. (I don't think anyone is saying Lowell is a neo-Nazi, of course.)
The following is from "Non":
Divide wire coat
hangers into
those with cardboard,
those without, those
wrapped in filmy white paper,
whether the hook is formed
by one metal strand or two, design
of the twist at the base
of the neckwhat I like most
about the Albany Public Library
is that it smells
the same as when I was six years oldSchizophrenoform
It's not that
there's a dead cat in the gutter but
that it's been there all weeksnoodlenook
Little moths under the porchlight,
be with me now
A dog in the distance
barks compulsively
Birds chirp
to greet the early duskthe landlady lives at the foot of the stairs
that run down the hill beside the house
so wooded you don't even notice themDreamlike,
the color TV
thru the neighbor's gauze curtainice crackles as it melts
nibbling Cracker Jacks from the palm of my hand
the little man in the blue suit salutesthe runner forgets to run,
so is easily forced at second
Is it really a strength of the “new sentence” that a pretty dull observation about the Albany Public Library, conveyed indifferently, rubs up against rather bizarre coinages (or perhaps overheard neologisms) such as “snoodlenook”? Is it right of me to hear the attenuation of syntax that we enjoy in WCW’s “As the cat...” poem in the first stanza here, or one of Marianne Moore’s “precisionist” poems about the structures of animals and shorelines, but with little of the formal elegance (or “precision”)? What is the nature of the irony of “be with me now” in reference to the moths -- just dropping an echo of some other strata of language, some plead to God one might make in the throes of a disaster? Why? (This would be a pretty poor example of the alienation effect, if that's the point.)
(I confess to never having been keen on the "new sentence" as a way to "free the prose writer of character, plot, narrative," etc., as has been so often stated. Some writers free us from genre, others from joining the ranks of the "disappeared." And how priceless would it be to have the stabbing of a 59-year old pederast and ex-kindergarten teacher named Havecourt Quine, once head of the F.C.C. and most recently involved in a gray market scheme to ship infected oysters into the poorer cities of British Columbia, at this very moment in the poem -- the game still playing in the background?)
But most importantly, beyond these sytlistic issues: where is the urgency here? I really do believe that arguments can be made for this sort of poetics of "drift" -- the "Drifted... drifted precitate" section of Pound's Mauberley, in the section in which Mauberley is in exile, echoes through my mind as I write this -- but I'd really like to hear them, especially related to a politics of "critique.")
Compare "the landlady" and "a dog" to the lengths Lowell takes to make his figures specific and of his locale, and you'll see why I think Lowell is much closer to the imagist / Williams aesthetic line than is generally believed (at least in what is now "our" cyber gopherspace). "The Skunk Hour" bears comparison to Williams' "The pure products..." poem -- which I think is perhaps WCW's greatest single poem and perhaps my favorite of our long 20th century.
I am not saying I think "Skunk Hour" is as innovative, as "good," at radical, or productive, etc., just that its author learned his lessons well from the predecessor poem. It's a visionary evocation of an American landscape about which he can say little discursively but whose images -- in the guise of animals, garbage, shitty music, displaced horniness, etc. -- haunts and oppresses him. As I claim in a review -- which I will publish eventually on this blog -- after this you can only go to Ashbery and "Daffy Duck in America" -- a whole-hearted reclamation of the sublime production scale of pop culture in the grand metrics of, indeed, the "tradition." (I word it better there.)
(On a similar note, has anyone noticed, or thought about, how Ashbery's early "Portrait of Little J.A." is a defusing parody of the "confessional" mode, voiced through what I think of as a particularly [male] gay affect of envisioning oneself as the over-sensitive, delicate flower threatened by the violence inherent in heterosexual, suburban "normalcy"? "Normalcy" itself is coinage of Harding's, one of the few presidents that seem to crop up in JA's poems periodically. Anyway, I think the heavy rhymes, the stanzas, the "there I was" Mary Pickford woe-is-me attidue of the poem suggests some camping of the heroic "confessional" mode.)
Lowell's phrase "hermit heiress" is far from obvious -- it's actually an interesting coinage, considering its position in the enjambment. I always wonder, reading this, whether one is prodded to sound out the "h" in "heiress" seeing it come right after "hermit," and where that would take me -- in the language, geographically and classwise -- to do so. I don't find similar changes of speeds in the metrics of, say, Duncan -- the second line of "Skunk Hour" seems the remains of the explosion caused by the blockage of "hermit" the previous line, three words that seem just tripping over each other. This is a sign of the care I feel Lowell takes in his best poems with sound patterning -- a sign of his relationship to Hopkins, who he's written about finely.
I guess my central question is, in these quick notes: which poem is more focused in its "negativity," more attuned to the properties of language, more aware that time, indeed, is precious, and that reading (not to mention writing) should not be a matter of indifference but rather a point-by-point handling of the opportunities and issues it throws up?
(I'm perfectly aware that fifteen volumes more of boring dross has been written about "Skunk Hour" than about "Non," or about Grenier and Antin or Silliman's great other books for that matter, and that some more of the latter needs to be done. My argument is for an approach to poetry that can get past the telegraphing of "lineages" and tell us, with fresh eyes, what in fact the language is doing in a poem -- after all, one of the great claims of the poets who are not of the "quietude" is that there's some sort direct engagement with language as material that other poets are lacking. I'm just not convinced that's true -- we are all prone to sleeping on the job.)
Another symptom of my moral decline appears in the present issue of Boston Review. I.e. a new poem: They're Putting a New Door In. This already appeared in a tiny chapbook published by derek beaulieu's housepress in Canada that nobody saw but which was cool.
Kasey Mohammed's posted an excellent email by Jeffrey Jullich on his blog lime tree, from which the following excerpt is taken (Jullich is referring to Kasey's notion of "hypocrisy" in a "quietude" writer adopting poses of "negativity"):
You’re imagining a wolf in sheep’s clothing, just because it lopes like a quadruped and eats raw meat under that fluffy tail and baaing;—but what I’m trying to remind you, Kasey, is that that what you’re taking for a wolf may in fact be a creature more like Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves.Surely, Kasey, put differently, you’d agree rather that self is formed by language. It is, in fact, the long practice of various verbal/writing technologies (and all those technologies’ socially established options) that inform the potential character of any individual so as to result in anything that could be construed as a Quietudist or a Negativist poet. That is to say, there is no Negativist writer without literary Negativism; the former follows out of the latter; it is the precedent of the literary school or movement, in both Q & N cases, that, in our current historical scene at least, is taken up as, up to an extent, an artifice, and out of which then only afterwards can develop gradually, by the process of (labor’s) identification with one’s product (non-alienation), something like a protagonist who can discover him-/herself in that text as in an eldritch mirror, or be so strongly linked with it, with one style, as to be so branded.
Certainly, Jullich is critical of anything that could be considered an "essentialism" in the activities of a poet; his suggestion that there is a habitus (well, that's a word I'm adding, from Bourdieu -- Google it!) in which a poet operates -- a field of prizes, assurances, mores, counter-instinctual behaviors such as the potlatch -- and that the more successful of "us" has a third eye telling him/her where the walls are, is more or less in agreement with mine. (This is not the equivalent of saying that all poets are opportunists in a field of survival of the fittest, only that there is a response to social forces that are far from obvious -- a digression I'd like to avoid for now.)
Though you would think, reading Kasey's and Jeffrey's posts, that I had nothing at all to say on this discussion -- I feel like the son who pointed to the fire only to watch Mom and Dad save the pets and Claude Van Damm video collection to my own neglect, which seems to me just punishment for being a bore -- I think the dialogue there is rather rich and detailed if, at times, weighed down by terms -- sometimes getting too deep into things puts us too far at the back end of Plato's cave, fingering the remote control to electrify the shadows.
But in reference to Silliman's stated support of KSM's views: Kasey is being quite clear in his emphasis on his "two" ways being that of negativity and some presumed "quietudinousness" -- he's talking about a binary metaphysics here, to a degree, suggesting that the "DARK is the absence of LIGHT" dualism stands in contrast to what I think many of us think is a Manichean dualism between the equal forces of LIGHT and DARK (not to mention RED, WHITE, BLUE, etc.). Kent Johnson raises this issue with his comments to Kasey about Pessoa -- hunt around in the comments section -- Pessoa being, one might suggest, the first poet of postmodern "camp" and originator of the avatar -- though a stylistically astute one at that!
Kasey holds this in contrast to an armchair sociology that equates the former binary with political positioning -- not to disparage sociology itself, just to highlight its casual cameo appearances in discussions of poetic history. I'm not sure whether we know anymore what a truly "negative" political position is these days unless it be, as Jullich suggest, that type which adheres to "wildcat" strikes (yes, another lifting from my readings of Debord). Well, I could go on about that, about politics, about wildcats... but it's really not my field. (I did see Walter Mondale once in person, when he came to speak in Rutherford campaigning for Carter.)
I kind of wonder if John Lydon is upset that Thom Yorke is using some of his vocal affects and copping his lyrics in the new Radiohead album, or whether Steve Howe is claiming the guitar riff from "Myxomatosis" is from an early Yes record. But that is neither here nor there. ("Myxomatosis" is the name of a Philip Larkin poem, by the way -- but I still like the album! In fact, I like the poem quite a bit also -- Google it, but don't use my spelling!)
On another note: I’ve been assured by several emails that the Language school has never been in fact “attacked” by the "mainstream" (or "Official Verse Culture") -- that most of the “attacks” came from within our own New American "lineages." Is this true?
I was on a NYFA panel once with Louis Simpson years ago, and he made it clear that he thought Charles Bernstein's poetry was total crud, but even he thought the criticism was quite good, in fact important and provocative, and CB got the grant. I'd like to read one old school "mainstream" poet who has attacked the Language poets, if only to see what terms are being adopted to do so and whether they match up with the "theory" "we" use to describe it. The most I've ever seen is a lame phrase or two like "the school of Stein" -- clearly a diss, but not an "attack."
The question being: has Language theory really complicated things for anyone, like Williams did for Lowell (or Laforgue did for Pound, etc.), or has it just thrown up the chance for membership in a distinctive, supportive, and much more exciting subculture of American poetry? (Ok, casual reductions again... but I'm interested.)
Another note from Hitchens that I copied down for a different purpose yesterday, but by the magic of cut-and-paste appears for you today:
I have a dear friend in Jerusalem…. Nothing in his life, as a Jewish youth in pre-1940 Poland and subsequent survivor of indescribable privations and losses, might be expected to have conditioned him to welcome the disruptive. Yet on some occasions when I have asked him for his impression of events, he has calmly and deliberately replied: “There are some encouraging signs of polarisation.” Nothing flippant inheres in this remark; a long and risky life has persuaded him that only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity.
My attempt was to be specific and critical while not turning my objects of study -- the poems themselves -- into elaborated, ossified Hallmark cards, written by the Partridge Family or the digital extras on board the Titanic, though indeed (I haven't seen the anthology in a while, I sold it), I guess it was hard to do. I'm not holding this up as an exquisite piece of critical work, which is why I didn't put it into my "Little Reviews" section of Arras, just, well, more (cannon) fodder for discussion.
The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry
Michael Collier and Stanley Plumly, editors
University Press of New England, 2000)
This anthology represents the middle-ground of major American contemporary poetry, passing by such writers as John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, or Jorie Graham who, in comparison, are just too “out there,” and going nowhere near New American Poets -- such as Robert Creeley or Gary Snyder -- the “Language” poets, performance poets, nor much that could be taken for “new Formalism” (Jacqueline Osherow is the exception) . For this reason, it is a convenient book, since it gives one a clear way to assess what has happened to the academic/confessional line of Lowell, Plath, and Berryman, the group that replaced, for a certain type of literature, the expat dream of the 20’s with that of angst-ridden domestic “responsibility”, but which was too old for the Beats once they hit the scene (though some tried to latch on) . Initially, one could say that it has simply devolved: the narcissism is still there, with most of these poems being too long about anxieties, “deep sensibilities,” distrust of the world, adultery, pleasant afternoons and vacations, etc., but the formal mastery of the Lowell generation -- with its ties to Eliot’s modernism, Auden’s precociousness, Williams’ directness and prosody, along with Lowell’s background in Latin and Berryman’s syntactical experiments based on readings of Shakespeare, etc. -- are gone. While most of this work is not “confessional” in the strict sense, it is disheartening how few poems rise above the basic frame of the unescapable self in the world, or how, when a different theme is adopted, it is still tied to basic formal tricks -- the piling up of redundant detail as a baroque display of knowledge is one of them -- which renders the work repetitive and mundane. Consequently, even when formal meters are adopted -- as a way out of the too free, often just prosaic, free verse meters -- nothing like the sparkle of the Elizabethans (those to whom Eliot paid homage) breaks through. One hundred poets were invited to select from their own work, eighty-two of whom responded: include several well-known names, such as: Marvin Bell, Stephen Berg, Frank Bidart, Lucille Clifton, editors Michael Collier and Stanley Plumly, Alfred Corn, Deborah Digges, Stuart Dischell, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Cornelius Eady, Tess Gallagher, Louise Gluck, Linda Gregerson, Maralyn Hacker, Michael S. Harper, Brenda Hillman, Mark Jarman, Galway Kinnell, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, the late William Matthews, W.S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Alberto Rios, David St. John, Gerald Stern, Mark Strand, James Tate, C. K. Williams and C.D. Wright. Most all of them are either university professors (most of those for whom job status is blank in the brief bios are also professors) or editors of such journals as the Virginia Quarterly or The American Poetry Review. The most interesting pages are probably provided by Louse Gluck -- though not her best work, there is enough of her Rilkean “purity” of expression and her various lineation to satisfy -- and Linda Gregerson, whose tight lines in irregular, Williams-esque tercets often achieve a microtonal variety that lifts them above the pedestrian: “It had almost nothing to do with sex. / The boy / in his corset and farthingale, his head- / voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin / was not / and never had been simply in our pay. Or / was it some lost logic the regional accent / restores?” (95, “Eyes Like Leeks”). Mark Strand’s “I Will Love the Twenty-First Century” is quite masterful, with it’s quiet, Prufrockian ending -- after the narrator has a Cooleridgean wedding-guest type encounter with a man who foresees a ghostly double for himself in the next century, the poem finds a rich muteness in: “‘Oh,” I said, putting on my hat, ‘Oh’.” William Matthews has probably the two most easily dislikable lines in the book -- “I’ve ended three marriages by divorce / as a man shoots a broken legged horse” (190) , a real derailing of whatever charm Berryman might have possessed -- but triumphs with “Bit Tongue,” with it’s polyglot mish-mash of tonalities and languages, confined within a persona that is pathetic but mildly attractive. Several poets -- like Tate and St. John -- have written much better elsewhere, and look mediocre here; other bits and pieces, such as the first section of Yusef Komunyakaa’s meditation on Whitman and slavery, “Kosmos” -- are quite beautiful. In any case, this is not a book that reflects a “commitment to the future of the nation’s poetry” as its editors profess, so much as a tombstone for its glorious past -- or one of them, at least. It is the type of writing that the workshops are modeled after, which is why this type of poetry is on a downward spiral.
Ron Silliman writes in his most recent post:
I do want to reiterate that anyone who lived through the 1960s will remember that, in politics, the “third way” strategy advocated by Stefans – Walter Mondale was its apotheosis – invariably came out as road kill. While the intentions of a rapprochement may always be noble, in the world of American letters it requires amnesia to imagine it possible. If you’re anywhere on the post-avant spectrum – as Brian clearly is – the idea of rapprochement is virtually a death wish. Kasey, on the other hand, is exactly on target when he suggests that a “17th way” will be possible before a “third one” is.
It's a difference between diving into the abyss of the "new" and exploiting methods that are, indeed, worth exploiting, but are not very original to its practitioners. There is nothing wrong with that, of course -- Shut Up, for example, could not have been written by someone without the ambition, immediate social support and life-strategy (his job, his discipline) of Bruce Andrews. The Language poets could be said to stand in comparison to this earlier period of modernism as Eliot's "Four Quartets" could be said to stand to "The Waste Land" -- a refinement of the earlier form, but also, in a sense, an amelioration of it -- but that, indeed, is cheeky!
Quite obviously, I find nothing wrong with the latter -- nor the Four Quartets -- it's just this idea the Language poets (or the New American poets) are always making noise, always howling in the field, while the "other" tradition has languished quiescent for the past several decades that strikes me as indefensible, or at least obsolete. I am trying to argue for a complete reevaluation of strategies by the "alternative" current in poetry if, indeed, we are to be the "young Americans" (the opposing force to the "School of Quietude" in Poe's mind) -- provocative, recalcitrant, pains in the asses.
The fact that my own writings over the past two weeks cannot be provided a rebuttal because it's impossible to "disentangle... the ad hominem attacks" from what is presumably the good stuff directs us to one obvious point: does Ron expect anyone to read something called "Silliman's Blog" and manage to "disentangle" what is written there from the person we've known (as readers and members of a "community" in which he occupies a position) for several decades as one of the most visible, opinionated -- which I applaud! -- and prolific poets out there? Isn't the point of being matter-of-fact, meat-and-potatoes, about your view of literary culture to force a reply?
The originator of the term "school of quietude" himself was prone to some classic ad hominem attacks, such as the following:
Had [Carlyle] not appeared we might have gone on for yet another century, Emerson-izing in prose, Wordsworth-izing in poetry, and Fourier-izing in philosophy, Wilson-izing in criticism -- Hudson-izing and Tom O'Bedlam-izing in everything.
(I'd also like to know what this "death wish" is? What a strange term! That one will be forgotten, like Hart Crane? That if I renounce God and the "lineage," it means I don't like sex? A truly odd moment in this paragraph...)
I'd also like to know what a political analogy from the sixties, which we all know was a terribly polarized decade, has to do with an analysis of poetical strategies in this century, which seems to me characterized by a sort of tribal attitude of protecting one's peers, of complaining about a "monoculture" but from the vantage of a subculture that, itself, is never questioned in its premises. Ironically (and not insanely) part of the reason I've been critical of Silliman's Blog is that many of the arguments stated there are about, and reflective of, my own reading of American literary culture, but often so limited in its purview, not to mention un-fresh in its terms, that I think they are either incredibly vulnerable to dispute by someone with a truly visionary breadth of knowledge (I'm certainly not saying this is me), or vulnerable to being entirely ignored -- indeed, a "death wish" in itself. If anything, the arguments should be improved by open, and not falsely "objective," disputation, not destroyed.
From this caution I pass to an observation of the late Sir Karl Popper, who could himself be a tyrant in argument but who nonetheless recognized that argument was valuable, indeed essential, for its own sake. It is very seldom, as he noticed, that in debate anyone of two evenly matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or "converting" the other. But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end up holding exactly the same position as that with which he began. Concessions, refinements and adjustments will occur, and each initial position will have undergone modification even if it remains ostensibly the "same." Not even the most apparently glacial "system" is immune to this rule.
As it is, the structure of Silliman's Blog -- which leapfrogs from subject to subject, creating old news out of matter that, at least one day, seemed of central importance -- does not permit for active disputation, which I think is a flaw of blogs in themselves. Ron could write a perfect rebuttal to this very post tomorrow and off I'd be talking about growing avocados in the Andes. We also never know when something was posted, whether it was revised ten times, how long it took to write, or whether the writer is sitting in a hot tub with a laptop and chihuahua or stealing seconds away from a construction job.
I also think that, in this post-war political climate, "we" all have to learn how to be more cunning rhetoricians, more skillful and passionate analysts of ideas, if only because these skills will have to be put to use the next time a large portion of the population is in disagreement with the government. Talking among ourselves in listservs and blogs seems to me out of the question (not that I hope to become next years Daniel Cohn-Bendit -- I just don't want to sit around programming HTML as my only contribution to the discussion.) Isn't anyone insulted by how ignored "we" were leading up to the war?
Here are three very simple Flash 6 apps that work beautifully as conceptual language pieces, even "poetry." This artist has nothing to be ashamed of -- the "bells & whistles" are not out to "distract" you. I would never publish "Windface" as a poem but the telegraphing of its quasi New Age philosophy seems to me suitable for its actions; the other two are closer to Dada and conceptual art.
Dead Words (Needle)
Kabuki (Consciousness)
Windface
I don't have time to write today... probably good news for you! But I've hired a stand-in -- one of my staff writers, Robert Lowell, who has recently responded quite positively to literary CPR, has agreed to submit some of his early comments on William Carlos Williams and the Beats to FSC.
Lowell's collected prose is quite short, about 370 pages, and not ambitious at all as a "critical" collection. In fact, they are not unlike blog entries themselves -- informal appreciations of what he felt informed him (though far from "lugubrious"). The parts that I most enjoy are those which depict him changing his mind, and which illustrate for me the humility one poet had before the language, which he recognized as coming from elsewhere, in a sense -- transmissions from the culture in which he lived but felt that, at times, he didn't know. I don't think it was ever in fashion to be entirely candid about one's failures, especially after having won the Pulitzer with a first book.
Lowell's first two short essays on WCW were written in 1947, around the time he published Lord Weary's Castle (the title of which, Ron Silliman claims, told us "all about his literary allegiances"). But his longer, more considered "career assessment"-type essay was written in '62, from which the following quotes are taken:
To explain the full punishment I felt on first reading Williams, I should say a little about what I was studying at the time. A year or so before, I had read some introductory books on the enjoyment of poetry, and was knocked over by the examples in the free-verse sections. When I arrived at college, independent, fearful of advice, and with all the world before me, I began to rummage through the Cambridge bookshops. I found books that must have been looking for a buyer since the student days of Trumbull Stickney: soiled metrical treatises written by obscure English professors in the eighteen-nineties. They were full of glorious things: rising rhythm, falling rhythm, feet with Greek names, stanzas from Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” John Drinkwater, and Swinburne. Nothing seemed simpler than meter. I began experiments with an exotic foot, short, long, two shorts, then fell back on iambics. My material now took twice as many words, and I rolled out Spenserian stanzas on Job and Jonah surrounded by recently seen Nantucket scenery. Everything I did was grand, ungrammatical, and had a timeless, hackneyed quality. All this was ended by reading Williams. It was as though some homemade ship, part Spanish galleon, part paddle-wheels, kitchen pots, and elastic bands and worked by hand, had anchored to a filling station.
Next, here is Lowell on Williams's idiom. Note the use of the word "exotic," which I think is an accurate way to convey the very alien nature of Williams's use of "speech" in the context of anti-intuitive, quasi "formalist" -- dare I say "futurist" -- lineation:
I have emphasized Williams’s simplicity and nakedness and have no doubt been misleading. His idiom comes from many sources, from speech and reading, both of various kinds; the blend, which is his own invention, is generous and even exotic. Few poets can come near to his wide clarity and dashing rightness with words, his dignity and almost Alexandrian modulations of voice. His short lines often speed up and simplify hugely drawn out and ornate sentence structures. I once typed out his direct but densely observed poem, “The Semblables,” in a single prose paragraph. Not a word or its placing had been changed, but the poem has changed into a piece of smothering, magnificent rhetoric, much more like Faulkner than the original Williams.
I was under the impression that the autobiographical free verse poems of Life Studies were the clearest indication of the effect of the Beats on Lowell's poetry, but the following suggests otherwise. I trust any poet who is honest about their conversions, including those who seem intent on changing their mind if only to keep it alive. The question, then, is how to keep a poem alive -- here's one story (this could almost be a section from Eileen Tabios's excellent, probably utterly forgotten, Black Lightning -- look it up!). I thought "Skunk Hour" was a fantastic poem when growing up and still do:
“Skunk Hour” was begun in mid-August 1957 and finished about a month later. In March of the same year, I had been giving readings on the West Coast, often reading six days a week and sometimes twice on a single day. I was in San Francisco, the era and setting of Allen Ginsberg and all about, very modest poets were waking up prophets. I became sorely aware of bow few poems I had written, and that these few had been finished at the latest three or four years earlier. Their style seemed distant, symbol-ridden, and willfully difficult. I began to paraphrase my Latin quotations, and to add extra syllables to a line to make it clearer and more colloquial. I felt my old poems hid what they were really about, and many times offered a stiff, humorless, and even impenetrable surface. I am no convert to the “beats.” I know well, too, that the best poems are not necessarily poems that read aloud. Many of the greatest poems can only be read to one’s self, for inspiration is no substitute for humor, shock, narrative, and a hypnotic voice, the four musts for oral performance. Still, my own poems seemed like prehistoric monsters dragged down into the bog and death by their ponderous armor. I was reciting what I no longer felt. What influenced me more than San Francisco and reading aloud was that for some time I had been writing prose. I felt that the best style for poetry was none of the many poetic styles in English, but something like the prose of Chekhov or Flaubert. When I returned to my home, I began writing lines in a new style. No poem, however, got finished and soon I left off and tried to forget the whole headache. Suddenly, in August, I was struck by the sadness of writing nothing, and having nothing to write, of having, at least, no language. When I began writing “Skunk Hour,” I felt that most of what I knew about writing was a hindrance.
Lastly, here is Lowell on the "poetry wars." Reading the following gives me the impression that Ron Silliman's contention that the "school of quietude" is performing literary CPR by buttressing the collected Lowell -- they probably are, but who cares? -- can be countered by a contention that Silliman is performing a similar service -- by reviving the "poetry wars" he and other "New Americans" (the values of the Language poets don't seem to play a large role here) are able to don the old Cold War armor and appear rather fresh again. This is just a suspicion, and certainly there is no reason to "care" about this either, but alas I can't get over the nagging feeling that these forms of balkanization are stripping the poetry culture of an ability to think subtly through complex issues.
A seemingly unending war has been going on for as long as I can remember between Williams and his disciples and the principals and disciples of another school of modern poetry. The Beats are on one side, the university poets are on the other. Lately [in the sixties] the gunfire has been hot. With such un likely Williams recruits as Karl Shapiro blasting away, it has become unpleasant to stand in the middle in a position of impartiality.The war is an old one for me. In the late thirties, I was at Kenyon College to study under John Crowe Ransom. The times hummed with catastrophe and ideological violence, both political and aesthetical. The English departments were clogged with worthy but outworn and backward-looking scholars whose tastes in the moderns were most often superficial, random, and vulgar. Students who wanted to write got little practical help from their professors. They studied the classics as monsters that were slowly losing their fur and feathers and leaking a little sawdust. What one did oneself was all chance and shallowness, and no profession seemed wispier and less needed than that of the poet. My own group, that of Tate and Ransom, was all for the high discipline, for putting on the full armor of the past, for making poetry something that would take a man’s full weight and that would bear his complete intelligence, passion, and subtlety. Almost anything, the Greek and Roman classics, Elizabethan dramatic poetry, seventeenth-century metaphysical verse, old and modern critics, aestheticians and philosophers, could be suppled up and again made necessary. The struggle perhaps centered on making the old metrical forms usable again to express the depths of one’s experience.
For us, Williams was of course part of the revolution that had renewed poetry, but he was a byline. Opinions varied on his work. It was something fresh, secondary, and minor, or it was the best that free verse could do. He was the one writer with the substance, daring, and staying power to make the short free-verse poem something considerable. One was shaken when the radical conservative critic Yvor Winters spoke of Williams’s “By the road to the contagious hospital” as a finer, more lasting piece of craftsmanship than “Gerontion.”
Well, nothing will do for everyone. It’s hard for me to see how I and the younger poets I was close to could at that time have learned much from Williams. It was all we could do to keep alive and follow our own heavy program. That time is gone, and now young poets are perhaps more conscious of the burden and the hardening of this old formalism. Too many poems have been written to rule. They show off their authors’ efforts and mind, but little more. Often the culture seems to have passed them by. And, once more, Dr. Williams is a model and a liberator. What will come, I don’t know. Williams, unlike, say, Marianne Moore, seems to be one of those poets who can be imitated anonymously. His style is almost a common style and even what he claims for it—the American style. Somehow, written without his speed and genius, the results are usually dull, a poem at best well-made but without breath.
I think it's a sign of the even-handedness of "madman" Lowell's approach that he includes this anecdote about Yvor Winters, and it seems to me that Lowell, if anything, hopes only to make this "war" tenable as something of cultural value, were that possible, than to win it! Such a dramatist's flair would be welcome in Silliman's blog. And sad to say, the final line of this excerpt seems to me true of a lot of the writing that RS seems to class under the "school" of plain speech -- few are able to maintain the level of tension that appears in Williams' best work. Silliman may be right that there is a shipwreck occurring, but I'm not sure we are looking at the right shore.
[Here's my final contribution to the discussion that Darren and I have been having about Circulars -- it's the 12th paragraph I think. He's got the last word... if you want to read the other words, scroll down below, or find a link to the right for the entire thing. I'll repost it all when it's complete -- there may be revisions.]
Circulars was indeed intent, on the most abstract level, on “expanding an innovative poetic sensibility outward into policy and politics,” but not to argue for that sensibility. I agree that a liberated public domain is necessary to maintain the type of free-wheeling, free-borrowing public discourse necessary in a heteroglot “democracy” but, alas, the point of the site was to upset a government and exploit any means necessary in creating the sort of fervor one might associate with a “revolutionary” culture. Appropriation was one suprisingly popular means. Tom Raworth’s poem “Listen Up,” written in the voice of a bigoted warmonger in tight couplets and submitted as a joke to the “Poets For the War” website, was another (and stronger for being sui generis). I do think the torrent of “remixes” and detournements that ensued leading up to the war put centerstage a seething but as yet underground counterculture that shares many of your (and my) views on “property” – that could go somewhere. This is a generation of people who are on the other side of the paradigm shift regarding cultural property – that and other values could be the seed of a new, but as yet themeless, sensibility. My hope with Circulars was to illustrate the potential power of such sites in times of crisis as provocative, popular cultural tools, and to put our “avant-garde” poetics to the service of a specific cultural effort, not to refresh arguments for classic avant-garde gestures themselves. But, of course, intentions are neither here nor there.
My hope is to gather more thoughts on this "School of Quietude" issue while I may, running up against this logic of the blog, which is to permit spokes of divergent meaning that could distract from a potentially absent core (I like the centripetal / centrifugal dialectic but it has its dangers). However, Ron Silliman asks, on his blog, whether a certain statement of his on "vispo" -- visual poetry, a sort of grab bag descendent of Concrete poetry and, I guess, visual digital stuff -- is what I, in my statement on Lowell, characterized as RS's "famously knee-jerk, even reactionary, positions."
I'm not going to claim that what I wrote was very nice -- it wasn't, of course, and I suppose I could become infamous for being knee-jerk as well -- so I apologize. But one might almost believe that Silliman is the most read critic in our decidedly uncritical America right now (certainly his advertisements of his hit count, a weird tick that other bloggers have picked up, seem to suggest it) along with the most trusted (I don't ever actually read much in terms of criticism of his very content, and he's certainly very selective of what he links to). Anyway, so I poked the growning behemoth, if only to give a little flavor to what I wrote and, more importantly, to keep it honest. Going out on a limb with something a little off-color like that while trying to make a point leaves one vulnerable to being dismissed outright.
Most recently, Ron writes:
One thing that all the works I looked at here have in common is that they’re static – straight JPEG files, no Flash, not even an animated GIF. This I found very liberating. It puts all of the demands of the work right back onto the image itself, rather than trying to distract us with bells & whistles. It also suggests work that, over time, will be able to survive beyond current computing platforms. Anyone who is old enough to have seen “animated” poems written in Harvard Graphics or Ventura Publisher when they were the presentation software programs of the day will recognize the advantage of that. At the very worst, these works can just be scanned into whatever new platform exists ten, fifty or 150 years from now & be good to go, something you can be certain won’t happen with the present generation of animated, sound-augmented writing.
For starters, this assumption that .jpegs and .gifs will be what creators of new computer platforms will want to preserve from old ones, and not Flash and sound files. Why is this? Both formats are simply rows of digits that are then interpreted into something -- an image, a sound, a bit of interactive software -- that is translated by a machine into something more or less comprehensible by the senses and intellect. That one is for a "two-dimensional" image file and the other a "three-dimensional" or time-based digital object should not distract one from the like basis of each.
The second is a sort of purism about the "image itself" apart from the "bells and whistles." Did one ever write, after the first decades of film, that "I like this photograph because, unlike a movie, we are not distracted by the motion of the objects -- they just sit there to be looked at"? Or after listening to a quartet of Beethoven's: "I would have much preferred one stringed instrument as the other three were distracting." Certainly, any Flash artist would want to create works that integrate the separate elements into a whole -- if it fails, that's one thing, but the tool or the motivation itself cannot be blamed. (I've never used sound in my Flash works because I suck at it.)
The third is to compare the trivial experiments in the very nascent stages of a technology -- the animated poems of Harvard Graphics or Ventura Publisher (I haven't seen them, but no doubt these are silent and without interactivity) with poems in Flash. This would be comparable to criticizing cinema based on the films of Muybridge and Edison, or criticizing live motion digital graphics -- the stuff that brings you Titanic and Matrix Reloaded -- based on an anecdote about Max Headroom and early episodes of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Ironically, people love to look at these early incarnations of art in new media -- the retrospective of video work from the 70s that was up at the Whitney two years ago was fantastic, and emulators of early computer platforms are rampant on the internet -- there's even one for the ZX81 (search my blog to find it).
Lastly, it's quite obvious that Flash cannot be "scanned into a new medium" but neither can film -- can you imagine people walking around holding flip-books of Abel Gance's three-screen, 6-hour or so long Napoleon in front of gas lamps? And can visual poetry be "scanned and good to go"? I suppose the assumption is that one prints out a .jpeg, that the paper on which it's printed will last 150 years, and then it can be scanned to reproduce what the original .jpeg looked like. But inkjet inks don't last that long, and cultural memory is even shorter -- who will be around to say you got it right, and who is creating verbal descriptions for this work now? (Needless to say, one can't scan in ballet.)
One thing I always ask, though, when I see "vispo" is not "is it poetry" but, in the most basic sense, "what is it about"? I rarely see discussions of content, of social relevance, of ethics, or even of art history -- as in the use of appropriation to give a discursive element to what might otherwise be a completely non-linguistic creation -- in relation to "vispo." Is it all just tweaking the sign / image divide? Is it's only purpose to make us ask questions of genre? Why have no visual poets tried to occupy the same space in American culture that, say, Andy Warhol did, or try to be as politically relevant and upsetting as the Situationists (or the clowns who made that "Empire Strikes Back" poster with Rumsfeld cast as Darth Vader)?
I think there is content to Miekel And's work, for example, it seems to have some spiritual / ecological dimension -- some relation of the organic component of graphemes that suggests an interest in biodiversity -- and Basinski often incorporates aspects of Greek mythology in his work that seem to suggest a relationship to the paintings of Cy Twombly when drops in tags about the sacking of Troy, etc. There's probably writing on them somewhere but I've not investigated it.
The list of great predecessors -- Finlay, de Campos -- are rich in social and aesthetic dimensions that I've written about elsewhere (my article in Jacket appears here; a better one by Drew Milne appears here). Certainly, the TRG -- Steve McCaffery and bpNichol -- have created a rich discourse around their work that investigates some of the classic concepts familiar from Language poetry and deconstructionism, but with a "pataphysical dimension and modal variety that make reading this work fulfilling in its own right, beyond its use as "theory."
"Content" might be a clumsy word to use when discussing the thematics of what Finlay is doing -- I often use the term "thematics" instead, since, at best, the disparate universe of his works points to some pre-Socratic philosophical landscape (located "here and now" in Scotland, of course) that simply cannot be revealed in material world. His content is the lava of history that flows under our fragile creations -- the Roman coliseum, the Macintosh computer -- and which only reveals itself in moments of terrible conflagration, social "eruptions" in a sense. It's all very scary. But certainly, one might look at his use of charged political symbols, such as the guillotine and the swastika, as some attempt to insure his work is never discussed in purely formal terms -- is it "poetry" or not? -- but rather to throw the focus on these subterranean aspects of his themes. If only for this reason, I've often focused on Finlay's place in the "vispo" universe -- he doesn't let you relax into your prejudices.
Ironically, Ron has chosen a purely aesthetic -- dare I say "quietist" -- stance, and one based on fairly conservative aesthetic positions (the "pure" image released from any sort of social or historical considerations) to discuss, and subtly shout down, the innovations that are being made in poetry using Flash and other new media technologies. His statement are even angled such as to preclude the possibility of such innovations, without a single piece of historical data to justify this preclusion.
I'll be the first to say that there is a lot of pretty clunky stuff being done in Flash, but my sense is that no "tradition" (or shall we say "lineage") in the arts is never as clean as one would like (but who wants it clean?). One needn't throw away the technology after discovering that the technology itself does not provide enough material for the theme of the work -- quite the contrary, this void or emptiness can be a beginning (not to sound too much like Yoda). I'll be happy when Flash works are not "about Flash" or "about interactivity," not to mention when poetry is not "about language" or "about lineage." I hope this doesn't sound prescriptive -- all options seem, to me, open (except, of course, that of being "quiet").
[Here's a very old review of mine, published in the first issue of Arras. Kent Johnson had asked, on the ubu list, how one might compare the Sonnets of Berrigan with the Dream Songs of Berryman. This review, which is at times, naive, perhaps hints at ways these two writers might be understood together, but I use the Cantos (of course!) as the touchstone more than either the long works of either writer. But, as you can see, even then I had some beef with this "two solitudes" theory (it is a term often applied to Canada's identity crisis) of American poetry.]
The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan
Though Ted Berrigan may have been the ultimate “fan” poet of Frank O’Hara, upon reading the Selected Poems one realizes that a truer kinship may be with the “city poet,” of Ezra Pound. Berrigan was not able to achieve mastery of the larger improvisational structures of O’Hara, nor did he have the immense vocabulary and range of cultural reference that makes even O’Hara’s most spurious poems, like “Joe’s iJacket” or “Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” rich catalogues of the “things,” in Williams’ sense, running through his mind. Berrigan’s shorter poems are structured more often in a way that doesn’t hint at its resolution (there is little motivating attitude throughout) until it has actually occurred; in other words, he tends to adopt Pound’s London period haiku-like formulas for his work, which often involves a listing of images and a resolution in a brief moment of sentiment, or even catharsis, conveyed in its last line. One example appears in Berrigan’s “Personal Poem #9,” which concludes with the line he repeats in his sonnets, “feminine marvelous and tough.” These adjectives in the poem describe his “new book of poetry! to be printed in simple type on old brown paper,” but they also serve as the moment of intensity, the “vortex” of the poem, which until that point seems a rather selfconscious homage to “The Day Lady Died” or any number of O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” poems. Berrigan was aware of the derivation, and his status of “fan,” interestingly enough, makes him one of the first poets after the initial wave of the “New York School” to recognize Ashbery, Schyler, Koch and O’Hara, all of them still living at the time, as participating in the active founding of a new tradition.
Pound’s London period is characterized, at its best, by such poems as “In a Station of the Metro”, “Portrait D’une Femme” and Mauberley, but there is a whole group of lesser poems like “Les Millwins”, the “Salutation” series (for Blast) “Villanelle: The Psychological Hour”, and the short pseudo-Chinese (not from Cathay) and Hellenic poems that give an impression, when taken as a whole, of a completely different poet. “Villanelle” shows Pound attempting a sort of human generosity that doesn’t really work for him (but which is suited to Berrigan); in it, he is contemplating the visit of friends and their eventual departure, and he confesses his weakness, a sort of inhibiting self-consciousness, in lines that seem a awkward coming from the arrogant poseur of Mauberley. However, it is this poem and others like it that demonstrate Pound’s effect on a poet like Berrigan; there is not the straining after intensity but rather a laissez-faire listing of action and attitude that attempts to convey a moment of privacy. The most Pound-like poem of Berrigan’s is, however, The Sonnets, for in it he is able to use the fourteen line poem as a unit of measure, each offering its own opportunity for a new venture but which is constructed consciously as a separate element of the whole. It may seem odd to compare The Sonnets, which can often seem formally confused and not as heroically ambitious, to Pound’s Cantos, and yet one must remember that many sections of The Cantos are themselves confused and uninspired. The Sonnets are most like the Pisan Cantos, in that they convey the thought, in a personal measure, of one man isolated but among a stream of reference and encounter. What is most interesting, however, is that The Sonnets, a modest project, actually includes a translation of Rimbaud modified in a puzzling and entirely idiosyncratic way, which is one of Pound’s more difficult tactics:
Sweeter than sour apples flesh to boys
The brine of brackish water pierced my hulk
Cleansing me of rot-gut wine and puke
Sweeping away my anchor in its swel
And since then I’ve been bathing in the poem
Of the star-steeped milky flowing mystic sea
Devouring great sweeps of azure green and
Watching flotsam, dead men, float by me
“Star-steeped milky flowing mystic” may not be an great innovation, and seems to have more than a touch of Ginsberg to it, and yet the sober melody of these lines, a distinct contrast with those of the original, are “pure Berrigan,” a poet who was more inclined to compare himself with the relatively tranquil Appolinaire than to the precocious rebel and poet maudit Rimbaud. Berrigan’s version seems as true to himself as one could hope it to be, and yet its additions and innovations do not grate at the ears and sense like many academic variations do, nor does he attempt, like Robert Lowell, to usurp the poem for his own didactic usage. Though he may not have achieved the verbal fireworks of “Le Bateau lyre,” he has nonetheless “made new” a sentiment that needed translation into a modern idiom, but with proper acknowledgement to its originator.
It might be somewhat odd to consider that Berrigan’s nearest analog among his contemporaries may be John Berryman, and yet certain parallels between their stance towards their predecessors and contemporaries and the nature of their own achievements arise in a certain consideration. Both poets seemed to have an unease with the achievements of their predecessors and therefore adopted a self-conscious “bardic” stance that was part pose but thoroughly modified by sincerity. Consequently, a great degree of partisanship among readers of their work mars any true understanding of their poems: academics don’t like Berrigan for his lack of form and the surface quality of his “content,” and poets of the anti-establishment (which often itself becomes an establishment when a certain spark is lost) think that Berryman was motivated by pure ambition and was the inspiration behind the much of the confessional slush of The American Poetry Review. This may be an exaggeration of the division, and yet it must be acknowledged that innovations by each poet must often seen through their respective monikers, “confessional” or “(post) beat,” before consideration of the purely formal aspects of their work can be achieved. One of Berrigan’s poems not included in the new selection (but on display at the Museum of Modern Art as part of Alex Katz’s Face of the Poet series) points to one of their mutual interests, which is centered around modifying, and inventing, syntax:
Buddha On The Bounty
“A llttle loving can solve a lot of things’
She locates two spatial equivalents in
The same time continuum. “You are lovely.
I am lame.” “Now it’s me.” If a man is in
Solitude, the world is translated, my world
& wings sprout from the shoulders of
The Slave Yeah. I like the fiery butterfly puzzles
Of this pilgrimage toward clarities
Of great mud intelligence and feeling.
“The Elephant is the wisest of all animals
The only one who remembers his former ilves
& he remains motionless for long periods of time
Meditating thereon.” I’m not here, now, & it is good, absence.
This poem is probably as convoluted and “difficult” as much of The Dream Songs; it is, indeed, curiously like the Ann Lauterbach poem that appears next to it (one stop past his face) on display at the Museum, in that there is a tie to Stevens that is not prominent in Berrigan’s generally non-meditative work. The quotes lifted entire and unexplained from other sources, a tactic that both poets used in their own ways, reminds one also of Marrianne Moore’s work (that the quote is about an elephant helps, too). Berrigan was reading Ashbery, of course, but certain violent swervings from normal syntax (the sort which appears in The Tennis Court Oath, for instance) are characteristic, though of a different sensibility, of Berryman, either in the extreme of “The Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” which seems a little unnatural and an academic pose, or the more realized, speech-like Dream Songs. Of course, the sensibilities of these two poets are entirely different, and yet a comparison of the later poems of Berryman, those dedicated to Tristan Corbiere for instance, and the candid (though never “confessional”) work of Berrigan might be a fruitful, however odd, venture.
This is in response to something Kasey wrote on his blog, which includes at the moment writing by both him and Michael Magee that is worth reading if you have any interest in this debate:
My sense is: so much as you permit there being "two ways," there will have to -- especially for a good Hegelian -- be a third way. But if one lives in a universe of heterogenous (however provisional) wholes coming in conflict with each other at all points, none with compelling claims to be more ascendant than others (this is, of course, possible), then these "thirds" will always themselves be provisional, and are if anything aids to thinking. (If these "claims" are compelling, then the "third ways" tend to have a revolutionary aspect to them -- as it might have in England when Pound was there -- performing what might be the function of a "second" or "other" way. It's obviously most salient when a language -- such as Italian -- is being used for the first time to peform in fashions usually reserved for other languages, in this example, Latin. We have no such divide right now unless someone were to attempt a poem or novel in Black American English -- far as I know.)
If one were to put on a small books shelf Pierre Guyotat's Eden Eden Eden , Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and William Burrough's Naked Lunch, then put -- on the other side of the bookshelf -- Robert Lowell's Life Studies, Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology and even -- for kicks -- the collected Robert Frost or the Amy Lowell of "Patterns" -- her exploitation of the idea of "imagism" -- you could probably place most Language poetry somewhere in between. Language poetry often has the reproducibility of form that one associates with the latter writers -- one hits upon something and is able to exploit it for an impressive duration -- with the modernist charge of the former -- desparate acts of creation often involving ephemerality and "failure" -- but in neither case entirely sacrifices a claim to "realism" entirely (at least among the Americans, who can often recuperate their work into a philosophy of pragmatism), nor to a secure position in relation to national norms of discourse (i.e. what is not allowed to be said). I.e. the very functionality of the method seems to preclude there being as negative a charge as might occur in a neo-romantic vein (whether our neo-romantic be Rimbaud, Kafka or Beckett -- and these are hardly Romantics!).
I'm being schematic here (and maybe confusing), but certainly, much of RS's writing will tend toward the side of autobiographical, and more or less dispassionate, social realists than it will on the side of the fiery or oddball, truly "negative" writing of the formal innovators. This doesn't make it "bad" writing -- I'm a fan of much of his work, obviously, just look at /ubu -- but because a formal technique is being employed (in his case the "new sentence," which never, frankly, struck me as radical) hardly spares a poem (such as his tiring, distracted Roof book "N/O") from being branded as passive -- about language, about society, about issues of epistemology and genre. What can be more "quietudinous" than a passivity regarding these issues? In comparison, the tortured, jagged, compressed rhythms of Lowell's "The Skunk Hour" come off as punk rock.
I don't think any Language poet with the exception of Bruce Andrews (and maybe Bernstein and Watten) has taken the project of the evisceration of national social (or linguistic) mores to the same extremes thant the great French tradition (or anti-tradition) of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Jarry, the Situationists (Guyotat is often identified as one of them), etc. -- not to mention predecessors Rousseau or de Sade. Most Language writing looks quite polite and "healthy" in comparison, at least from this perspective -- the Protestant ethic of the good work done daily in order to "make it new" appears as a subprogram of much of this writing. This is not a statement about American poetry as a whole -- that's more complex -- or all of Language poetry -- the fragmentary nature of Bernstein's early and middle-period writing seems to me attentive to this ethics of failure, of anti-systemicity, in "hot" modernism -- but oddly, someone like Plath occupies a more critical space -- there with Ginsberg and Burroughs -- than one would think. There is an "out on a limb" aspect to what she was trying to do that is impressive to me, and her later method doesn't strike me as less "radical" than that of, say, Rae Armantrout -- quite the contrary, in fact.
When I hear about a truly national debate (or maybe a good essay by Christopher Hitchens) about the unquietudinous-ness of Language poetry then I will be impressed -- so far, it has not happened. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, I just don't understand how one can point to a "lineage" in one's writing as somehow conferring a badge on a writer as being on the good side of a -- presumed, but in my mind quite "imaginary" -- literary divide. To suggest Language poets as somehow sweating in the trenches and other poets not -- categorically -- strikes me as nonsense. And it always seems to involve the rather limited purview of "American" writing -- observing how the two principled, dueling Scots, MacDiarmid and Finlay, came to a rapprochement at the end of the former's career should be illustrative of where the future -- for "us" -- lies. Much of this won't matter: the 1200 pages of The Alphabet will be judged on its own merits as something to read, as will the 60 or so pages of Life Studies. We can only guess why these works will be interesting in the future, one that may not even have room for such concepts as "perfect binding."
(P.S. It's ironic that, in that bit from Duncan, he quotes the end of the Lowell poem about Delmore Schwartz. My favorite ending of a Duncan poem is that one in which some attention to different registers of style in contrapuntal play is demonstrated, and that ends:
A second: a moose painted by Stubbs,
where last year's extravagent antler's
lie on the ground.
The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears
new antler-buds,
the same,
"a little heavy, a little contrived,"
his only beauty to be
all moose.
It's actually the same kind of compression that Lowell brings in at the end fo the Schwartz poem -- a sudden swerve from the dominant, even heroic, meter into a bathetic, skipping tone, finally focusing on a fine point at the end as if the poem were balanced on a pin, like some geological balancing act out in the Yellowstone Park. Duncan almost seems drunk here himself -- and I like it. Ironically, the climas results in a telescoped image of an animal (or animal part) -- "strong" imagism, a la white chickens, coming to save the day again.
Few poets were more afraid of letting his metrics be taken over by anything as vulgar as social realism or speech as Duncan -- I find so much of him unreadable because of all the gaudy European trappings, the Pound-envy, the loping "stately" rhythms and capitalized Nouns, like he were Philip Sydney and didn't know better, or Mallarme, enriching every detail with "correspondence". I guess I just never believed he had as much access to higher states of knowledge than the rest of us -- I hope it's fair to be suspicious here, since he made some huge claims. In terms of "fear" versus "freedom," I'm not sure that Duncan wins. One is, after all, quite free before the "void" -- it is, after all, the evacuation of meaning that provided some of the bases for the theory of Language writing itself (and that brought Mallarme himself to start slinging words across the page like dice).
When Duncan starts psycho-analyzing his writers -- Spicer is apparently the poet of "death" while he himself was of life, or sex, or whatever, from my dim memory of the Spicer biography -- one must -- as a good iconoclast and heretic -- recoil, as it's clear such oppositional binaries are only intended to create the image of power around the naming creature, ye who sets terms (terms being, in themselves, very useful). Sacrificing this power for the sake of flows, on the one hand, or in service of the dialectic, on the other, seems to me to be imperative -- if that doesn't sound too much like a "spiritual" disposition. But they must at the same time be questioned at all moments if possible -- why not, seems to me the only confirmation of living that is reliable.
[See the other "exchanges" to catch up if you want... this is the 12th paragraph in the back-and-forth.]
Darren Wershler-Henry: If we treat creative products geared toward highlighting how indebted creativity is to reworkings of other cultural products as a trend that’s had its time, we’ll get precisely the culture we deserve – i.e. one with no public domain (with the Supreme Court’s rejection of the Eldred appeal of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act and Mexico considering extending copyright to life-plus 100 years and allowing the government to collect royalties on works in the public domain, we’re that much closer to a continent-wide lockdown). And while I agree in spirit with the notion that poetry’s value is arbitrary (which, for the most part, means it’s valueless), as someone who ran a press for five years, I know all too well that (a) poets are as capable of getting all pissy about contracts as any other kind of writer and (b) that no business is too small to receive a cease-and-desist letter from a multinational hell-bent on maxing out the value of its intellectual property holdings. Besides, with Circulars, I thought that the project wasn’t poetry qua poetry as much as it was expanding an innovative poetic sensibility outward into policy and politics … which means, in my mind at least, championing the values of an open relationship to content. As writers, we need to have the freedom not only to repost and recontextualize the news of the moment, but also to deconstruct, détourne and all of those other French verbs that start with D, without a constant fear of litigation.
You can download the entire run of books by the Critical Arts Ensemble at their website. I confess to finding it much harder to read .pdfs than "books" proper -- they just are far less inviting -- but if you want to dip into some of the CAE's theory about internet culture and "digitial disturbance" this is a great way to start.
I've been meaning for some time to offer a more thorough critique of Silliman's blog but haven't had the time. After all, he writes so much, using some terms developed over a few weeks or even months, that I figure one would have to print out at least 30 or so pages worth to give the appearance that I am being comprehensive, moderately impartial, and respectful of the breadth of the work I am considering.
Unfortunately, I don’t find these qualities very visible on his own blog, which is rather famously knee-jerk, even reactionary, in its judgements, and wears its partisanship on its sleeve. This, I gather, is one of the glories of blogs, that it usually contains writing that is off the top of one’s head, a bit raw, and hence more vulnerable to contradiction, open for debate. At least, I think that it is – miles away from the objective tone that is a necessity in academic writing (and that Bourdieu criticized so effectively in such books as the Logic of Practice and Pascalian Meditations, the mastery of which he associated with becoming part of a secular clergy of intellectuals).
But this does leave open the possibility that a blog writer can claim to have written something quickly and hastily and thereby duck the arrows of a critical reader who might question the terms embedded in the judgments found there, not to mention the value system behind it. I fear that part of Silliman’s overabundance of production is to avoid any such critical appraisal, but when I think that, I remind myself that Ron has always been a “good sport” about these sorts of critiques, and in fact invites them, even if he appears a little deaf to their implications.
Conveniently, his most recent post, a very brief one on Robert Lowell, contains in microcosm much of what I distrust about his blog, and indeed about the general trajectory of discussion about this apparent cultural divide in United States poetry. You can read the post in its entirety at his blog; I’ll quote rather liberally however in order to let the resonances of his writing have its own play. He starts:
Whenever I feel too completely dismissive of Robert Lowell, I think of Bob Grenier. Grenier studied with Lowell at Harvard &, I believe, it was Lowell who helped Grenier get into the Writers Workshop at Iowa City even as the triumvirate of Creeley, Zukofsky & Stein were beginning to render Grenier opaque to the Brahmin crowd back in the Bay State.
What is really happening is that there is an assumption that, because the “tradition” or “lineage” to Grenier is beginning to ally himself is occluded, then one could never in fact read his poetry – as if a reader of Grenier’s poetry in the “Bay State” had simply never seen Futurism or Cubism, never saw or read the poetry of Rimbaud, Marinetti or Williams, never read Woolf, Faulkner or Joyce, never heard of Stravinsky or John Cage, etc. (This lineage issue – nothing is more important than protecting the lineage to RS, and nothing more nefarious to BKS -- reappears below.)
Does one say that William Burroughs is an obscure writer because nobody understands his lineage in the Marquis de Sade and Lautreamont? We know this is not true – he’s not an obscure writer but quite famous, and even Asian Americans -- who, by RS's logic, are part of a "class" to which Zukofsky or Lautreamont would presumably also be "opaque" because they don't "tell their stories" -- have read him (and Grenier) with pleasure.
What in fact happens is that one grasps the writing with what one knows; not getting it exactly right is usually quite fine in an appreciation of art, and in fact should be encouraged. Brazilians, after all, have to read also, and we read their poetry without any understanding of their "lineages."
Lastly, Creeley, by many standards, is not such an unusual writer – there’s as much Herrick as Zukofsky in anything he writes, and he is quite conservative in subject matter. Even when he is being more pointillist he fits into some sort of “let it be” vibe that doesn’t strike me as alien to middle class mores – when I last visted Germany, for instance, he was one of the few American poets I saw frequently translated. To wave him around as some influence rendering a poet culturally “opaque” strikes me as absurd. What is “opaque” is his “lineage” in the Objectivist tradition – but so what?
You can still find vestiges of Lowell’s influence, though, in Grenier’s first book, Dusk Road Games: Poems 1960-66, published by Pym-Randall Press of Cambridge, Mass.:On the lawns before the brown House
on the hill above the city
the wheeled sick sit still in the sunshine –
One hopes it’s not the “transparency” of the language, the old bugbear of Language poets, as if any poem that attempts to record any visual sensation were influenced by Lowell – one could just as easily say it was influenced by Wordsworth or Chaucer. But of course, there is no partisan charge in doing so.
I can hear some Lowell in these lines – there’s a poem of his that starts “Tamed by Milltown, we lie in mother’s bed / the rising sun in [something something, warpaint?] dyes us red.” etc. Well, I can’t remember it. But it’s a poem that attempts to get the ball rolling with an image – we are, after all, all in the “imagist” tradition (I do believe that most American poets are imagists of some sort) – which is very Lowellian, as is the internal rhyme "hill" and "still" right on the crests of the rather heavy rhythm.
Anyway, we could have benefitted here from an understanding of how this poem reflects Lowell and not a hodge-podge of other writers who uses these techniques.
Lowell turns up again as an influence in the “conservative” portion of Hank Lazer’s remarkable Doublespace: Poems 1971-1989, his attempt to bridge the gulf between Le School d’ Quietude & post avant poetics. One of Marjorie Perloff’s first books was her 1973 The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell.
I don’t think one “bridges a gulf” by including one’s early poems (note the time span in the title) and later poems in the same book – one attempts to write differently than one did when younger, but where is the “attempt” in collecting these poems? I’ve never seen Lazer’s book, but my guess is that the “conservative porition” is very different from what I presume is the hip, “avant-garde” half – if so, then has anything been “bridged” -- isn't there, then, a gap created in such a book? Life Studies becomes more of a “bridge” – there is no “conservative” or “avant-garde” portion to that book, but a new style that is a synthesis of his older, Latinate blank-verse and the looser, diaristic manner of his prose.
I’ve had Lowell books on my shelf since I was 16 and I’ve never thrown them away, nor do I keep a "gap" between his books and those of the "avant-garde." I have books by Berryman, Bishop, Jarrell – the entire “school of quietude” – and it’s not rendered me unable to read Debord or the “radical” side of Williams, nor have they ill-prepared me to read Bruce Andrews (anyone seeing my first book will see that influence there) or Lyn Hejinian – who, it must be pointed it, is rather quietudinous in temperment herself.
So I ask again, in respect to the clannishness of Ron, not to mention many Language poets, when considering issues of “linage” – where is this huge “gulf”? Does the publication of Doublespace make Hank Lazar the Jackie Robinson of poetry? Who has he liberated by bridging this "gulf"?
(My second book is called Gulf, and in fact some of what I tried to deal with there is this perceived gap -- but I'll spare you the gory details.)
But what always gets in the way of any possible admiration I might have for Lowell is his poetry. When it was first published in 1946, Lord Weary’s Castle – that title alone tells you everything about literary allegiances –
was read, rightly, as a turn away from any poetics of direct speech, not only anti-Williams & the polyglot circus of Pound’s Cantos, but even anti-Frost & anti-Auden. For the New Critics, the conservative agrarian poets who were at that same moment consolidating their hold on English departments across the United States & beginning to wonder about their legacy, Lowell was an affirmation of their larger program. It didn’t hurt that he was a Lowell, either. By the time he was 30, Lowell had already won the Pulitzer Prize and had a photo spread in Life Magazine.
The poems in this book, many of which are tortured and mannered, are overly determined by Lowell’s background in the classics and his need to see irony in all details of history, but I don’t see how this is “anti” anything – if anything, they are a direct contination of Pound’s imagism in the early Cantos (Lowell’s main attraction for me, in fact, is his sharp eye for detail) not to mention the method of historical “rhymes” (Lowell’s later sonnets -- collected in a book called Notebook -- what does that title tell you of alliegances -- are a “circus” if anything. As there's never been a truly polyglot "post avant garde" American poet, I don't think he needs defense there).
They also reflect the influence of Hart Crane -- a great all-American poet who happily read French poetry, wrote in a highly stylized manner and was even politically correct, being "anti" Eliot even as he was impressed with the form. But he was also "anti-direct speech," presumably -- where do we put him? One of Lowell's best sonnets was about him, and even heroicized his homosexuality -- betrayal of his Brahmin instincts?
Pound, of course, is as "anti-direct speech" as any poet who wrote -- his translation of The Seafarer, for instance, is more impenetrable than the original must have been for the Anglo-Saxons (and, consequently, is a forerunner to some fo the heavy alliterative style of Lord Weary's Castle); outside of Cathay and a handful of haiku-like things, he rarely wrote outside of a very lugubrious "mask" in his early poems, and the most "direct speech" aspect of his Cantos are those sections where he's making fun of blacks and Jews (I'm exaggerating, of course, but it's true that the only time he really gets into "speech" is during the "satirical" parts -- which he had no gift for).
Lord Weary's Castle doesn’t, of course, reflect the influence of Williams, but very few poets did in those days – it was published in 1946, and I don’t think that Williams was appreciated enough at the time to have spurned an antithetical movement (imagining a “poetics of direct speech” to find its roots in WCW, as RS does elsewhere). Lowell's debt to Williams was very apparent by his last book, Day by Day, and he wrote appreciative essays on Paterson and The Desert Music (his buddy, Jarrell, wrote a great essay on WCW for the Selected Poems).
Consequently, suggesting that Lowell was some poster boy for the agrarian Right -- the "larger program" I suppose -- is a bit dishonest, and contradicted by fact. Lowell campaigned for Democratic presidential candidates and was a friend of the Kennedys; he was a conscientious objector in WWII and active as a protester during Vietnam. I wish I could go on about his politics but I don’t know that much about his biography – these are the famous facts -- but, alas, the implication that he was “quiet” and supporting an ascendant Right during these times is not fair, not to mention untrue.
("That he was a Lowell" make these political alliances and activities more, not less, brave, if we are to believe that the Brahmins are as provincial and hidebound as RS would have it. They would have been brave had his name been Seigenthaler, Torres or Tanaka as well.)
Yet Lowell, especially the early Lowell, is seldom a good poet for more than two or three lines at a time, which invariably are buried in larger lugubrious monologs that do little more than show a man unable to actually get to his own writing through his presumptions about “what poetry should be.”
This practice of letting two versions of a poem co-exist even conflicts with the Bourdieuian notion that an author's death is the final period on his or her life's work -- as if an author dies with a sort of purpose, to package the ouevre for history. To leave a poem in two or more final states seems an active contradiction of this sort of vanity (unlike other ways of arranging one's work -- winky winky).
Consequently, when, as Lowell did, a poet changes styles and approaches to writing several times in his or her lifetime – as painter Philip Guston did in his, to point to the most obvious example – it demonstrates a questioning of what poetry (or art) “should be,” not a dogma. My sense, frankly, is that Lowell changed his sense of “what poetry should be” with more frequency then RS has, if that means anything – after all, the New Sentence still hovers over, even justifies, the most recent writings of RS more strongly than Lord Weary’s Castle hovers over or justifies Life Studies or the later, very speech based Day by Day. I guess it’s ok to have “allegiances” and “presumptions” so far as they are the right ones. (My preference, of course, is for skepticism about both issues).
(And what does Ron have against "lugubrious monologs" -- I thought this was the blogger's MO?)
It is precisely that should be, the sense of obligation to a dead aesthetic inherited from a mostly imaginary British Literary Heritage, that I take to be behind David Antin’s famous line “if robert lowell is a poet i don’t want to be a poet,” a sentiment that was virtually universal among the poets I knew in the 1960s & ‘70s.I could go on about my feelings about Antin’s writing about Lowell – I read one of those essays in Kostelanetz’s anthologies years ago and thought it longwinded and misguided – but I’ll have to refrain for time’s sake. Again, though, the “should be” is implicit in nearly everything Ron writes – is it the “should be” we are questioning or the what it “should be”?
RS’s ideas about American literary tradition vs. a “dead” “aesthetic” “inherited” from “Britain” have always been so absurd to me that I don’t feel, for the moment, that I can comment on it without sliding into diatribe. But frankly, only if one believed that culture were produced -- in reading and writing -- entirely by sycophants with no critical acumen would one fear the influence of the productions of a particular country, not to mention time. This sentnece has curious echoes of Donald Rumsfeld in it -- the "Old Europe" business -- or, worse, something out of the Balkans -- we call this strategy of bating prejudices "Balkanization" after all. So I'll let it pass.
Still, in 1964, on a week when Time magazine could have focused on the aftermath & implications of the first Harlem riots of the decade, it chose instead to feature Lowell on its cover.
I’ll reserve my conclusions for later – time's a-wastin' -- further spelling corrections to come...
[I fixed this Flash file so I'm reposting... here's the original intro... as Derek notes in his comment, the "last guy" is Rafael Barreta-Rivera]
I once made the joke that the Four Horsemen -- the sound poetry group that included Steve McCaffery, Paul Dutton and the late bpNichol (who was the last guy again?) -- would be appearing in NY at my digital poetry event. What I really meant was that these guys -- which I found on a Swedish children's site that I highly recommend for adults -- would be appearing. Click away and be treated to a fabulous sound poetry concert in the tradition of the Ursonate and Meredith Monk, with a touch of Steve Reich's Tehillim. (I don't know why I can't make it bigger...)