Johnson & Klein on "Poetry/Not Poetry"

I've been surprised by the amount of feedback I've been getting back-channel about the Poetry/Not Poetry Post (I suppose back-channel is the only way to get feedback, since I'm the only blogger in the world who hasn't turned the "comments" section on). Anyway, here are two comments I thought were particularly interesting, pointing as they do to some of the shortcomings of the post. I think both Kent and Lucas are dead right.

*From Kent Johnson:

Just wanted to say I really liked the last blog post on Poetry/Not Poetry. A collection of these clear, instructive pieces would make for a book that could attract some attention, I think. I've sent the link out to a few folks, already, today.

Just a couple comments, if you don't mind: There seems to be a slight weakness in the essay, inasmuch as your case of the Augustans as exemplary model of Pre-Romantic notions of poetry gets contradicted a bit when you quote Coleridge on Shakespeare as exemplary model of organic form! In other words, I'm not sure Pope and Dryden so neatly stand as representative of some unbroken attitude towards poetry's nature (prose with versification added, as you have it) dominant before Romanticism. In their conjoining of the poetic and didactically discursive, the Augustans themselves represent a historical break and turn, really. I know that your point is a general one, and the essay does a great job of putting forward a helpful, broad, heuristic frame. But I wonder if a couple sentences of qualification there might be good: Systems of patronage aside, there are important differences of poetic attitude and belief, surely, between the Elizabethans and the Metaphysical poets, for example, vis a vis the 18th century masters...

The other thing I was thinking you could qualify/clarify is that you are speaking about the *Western tradition*. It's very interesting that Chinese poets in the late Tang, for instance, or Japanese renga poets for centuries--and long before the Romantics--were practicing a very elliptical, even "postmodern," "discontinuous language" kind of poetry (Renga is the prototype of the New Sentence!). Of course, some of this classical work has helped make our own modern and "post" period in English-language poetics what it is, starting with Pound, and so on, so it's not like it's new. But in other ways, we're just beginning to appreciate how ahead of "us" (by something like 1000 years!) the Chinese, for example, were.

Anyway, and really, excellent stuff. It's refreshing to see, frankly, complex ideas put into clear and even entertaining prose. So just quickly sending you these comments, for what they're worth.

*From Lucas Klein:

I found myself really responding to your blog entry. I think it helps me clear up a number of things I've been thinking about recently. One quibbly question, though: when you say "Suddenly, poetry wasn't more-or-less continuous with prose, or prose-plus-special-effects," I wonder if this shouldn't actually mean that prose wasn't poetry-minus-special-effects. Isn't poetry older than prose?

Poetry/Not Poetry

Where do we draw the line between what is poetry and what isn't poetry? Or, more specifically, what makes a poem a poem? Ask a poet like Howard Nemerov, and you'll get a beautiful answer, in the form of a poem called "Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry":

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

It's nice (especially since it compliments poetry, making it fly, while prose merely falls), but in the end Nemerov's answer about the nature of poetry is evasive, offering little more than the "I'll know it when I see it" argument that people used to invoke in debates about pornography.

I don't really have a better way to answer the question, except to say that the only real way to answer anything is to quit looking for trans-historical, absolute truths and start rooting around in contexts, in the history of how a question has been answered, and the reasons those old answers made sense at the time. If we do this, I think we can say that something changed in the way we answered the question "how is poetry different from prose" right around the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that, with some small modification, the new answer poets came up with at that time is still with us. This is Romanticism, people, nor are we out of it.

One of my touchstones, when I want to think about pre-Romantic poetry in French or in English is a statement by Roland Barthes in his great, early study Writing Degree Zero. Here, he argues that for poets of the pre-Romantic period, there was a fundamental similarity between good poetry and good prose. “Poetry is always different from prose,” writes Barthes, but in the classical period “this difference is not one of essence, it is one of quantity. It does not, therefore, jeopardize the unity of language, which is an article of classical dogma.” In other words, the classical or Augustan writer doesn’t grant poetry one of the rights that we moderns and postmoderns grant it: the right to follow rules significantly different from those governing discursive prose. It is more or less the same stuff, but with the added use of particular literary devices such as rhyme and meter. Think about it: Alexander Pope's poem Essay on Man is more or less what it sounds like — a discursive, explanatory essay — it just happens to add versification. Even the title indicates a fundamental continuity between prose and poetry. Prose and poetry are more or less up to the same sort of things: explaining, talking, arguing, narrating.

And why did people write poems? Many reasons, of course: but they tended to be the same sorts of reasons one writes prose: utilitarian ones. Often poetry was a courtly game, but all games have some purpose. In this case, it was to show one's wit and cleverness — sort of a peacock's tail thing, in that verse may have seemed useless, but it was a sign of health and desirability, therefore useful in securing a mate or some sort of payoff or privilege. Not that there weren't critics of the rewarding of such displays, like Lord Burleigh, who objected to Queen Elizabeth giving Edmund Spenser a hundred pounds in recognition of a poem, shouting "All for a song?!?" Sometimes there were market motives (remember Johnson's comment that no one but a blockhead ever wrote for any reason other than money?). Sometimes there were more elevated, socially concerned ideas — think of Sir Philip Sidney's argument that poetry presents us with ideal worlds and characters we can try to emulate, since the poet "goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done... Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden." The old John Donne wrote to save souls ("batter my heart, three-personed God!"), the young John Donne wrote to get laid ("For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love!"). So: personal advancement, money, getting the girl, social improvement, didacticism: there were a host of good, utilitarian, reasons to write a poem, just as there were a host of good, utilitarian reasons to write a piece of prose. Prose and poetry were close cousins formally (one just had extra verse elements), and close cousins in terms of their telos or purpose.

Then things got weird.

They got weird right around the time the Romantics hit the stage (not that this is a bad thing: indeed, it's the beginning of everything I most love in poetry). Suddenly, poetry wasn't more-or-less continuous with prose, or prose-plus-special-effects: there was what Barthes calls a "discontinuity of language." Poetry was reborn as something very different from prose, and different from verse, too.


Consider Coleridge's famous definition of poetry in the Biographia Literaria. Here, we learn that poetry, unlike prose, generates its own rules. We learn that the poem, unlike prose, looks inward upon itself, seeking a co-ordination of all parts to the whole. And we learn that the statement or use-value or telos of the poem is secondary to its formal composition. Poetry is strangely autonomous, being all about its formal wholeness, rather than any specific external purpose. Poetry, says Coleridge, is a kind of communication “opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species… it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part." The organic harmony of the “legitimate poem,” Coleridge continues, necessitates that the parts

… support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distiches, each of which, absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself, becomes disjoined from its context, and forms a separate whole, instead of a harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component parts.

It is the fusing of all elements that is essential to the poetic work— so much so that Coleridge comes to include within the category of poetry all works, including those in prose, that reconcile all their diverse elements.

It almost doesn’t matter to Coleridge how such fusing is accomplished. Or, rather, it does matter, in that a particular form of the fusing must not be prescribed: “could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry” says Coleridge. This does not mean the work is arbitrary, though, merely that it must generate its own rules from within. Coleridge’s most elegant formulation of this principle comes in the essay “Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to His Genius,” where we read that “No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither is there any danger of this,” because “genius cannot be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes genius — the power of acting creatively under laws of its own creation." Such self-generated rules are, in fact, Coleridge’s famous “organic form,” arising from within each true aesthetic or poetic work.

This business of the poem’s autonomy, its inner, organic wholeness, and its fusing of disparate elements is familiar enough stuff to students of Romanticism. But it’s worth rehearsing in the present context because of what it implies for the meaning of poetry. Because of its intense organic fusing-together of all of its parts, the poem has what Coleridge, in his essay on Shakespeare’s genius, calls “untranslatableness.” In a true poem, the meaning cannot be paraphrased: “it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand,” says Coleridge, “than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare… without making the author say something else, or something worse." Indeed, the meaning, in the sense we usually reserve for that word as something comprehensible and cognizable, is irrelevant to the work’s status as a poem: the poem’s deepest meaning lies in its activity of bringing together apparently disparate elements.

One refraction of all this is the idea of the symbol. “Symbol” is a term that Coleridge uses inconsistently over the course of his career, but the important sense for the present context comes in a passage of The Statesman’s Manual where Coleridge tells us that, unlike the allegorical figure, the symbol is characterized “above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal." Unlike the allegory, with its one-to-one relation of sign and meaning, the symbol offers polyvalence and endless suggestive possibilities. Interpreting the symbolic work is an ongoing coming-toward and escaping-of full apprehension (think of Coleridge's own "Kubla Khan" here: it is pregnant with meaning, but you can't pin it down to any particular meaning). The symbolic work is certainly at a far remove from the simple, discursive statement of a particular meaning. As Coleridge states in an appendix to The Statesman’s Manual, “discursive understanding, which forms for itself general notions and terms of classification” can only give us “Clearness without Depth." Poetry, when it is symbolic, gives us depth without clarity. We can never quite say what it means, or what it proposes to accomplish in the world.

So poetry becomes a bit of an embarasment in a utilitarian society (and nineteenth century society was getting more and more utilitarian by the day). Poets were meant to chase mysterious symbols, and create organic wholes. The old laureate job or writing odes to the monarch became something of a joke, out of step with the new notion of what poems were all about. The poet isn't supposed to answer to any patron, or, for that matter, to try to make things happen (there were exceptions — consider Shelley's political rabble-rousing poems, but the general trend was toward organic form, symbol, autonomy of imagination, and all the rest). The poet became, in some sense, a figure outside of society. The poet's work was either a quiet withdrawal from bourgeois utilitarian society, or an angry rejection of it. Take your pick. Either way, poetry was different from prose in two respects: it played by different rules, and it was written for different reasons. All of this was new with Romanticism.

While these things may have started with Romanticism, they continued after the Romantic movement in new permutations and combinations. The French Symboliste movement (Mallarmé and company) was in some ways an intensification of the idea that the poem was beyond paraphrase (it should be like music), beyond utility, beyond the logic of means-and-ends. And, despite some of their anti-Romantic rhetoric, the American New Critics in the 20th century made huge intellectual investments in Coleridge's ideas: "The Heresy of Paraphrase" is a rehashing of Coleridge, and the New Critical ideas of irony and balance are just Coleridge's organic form revisited. The poem was about itself, about form, and not subordinate to anything else. (If the Romantics turned to the autonomy of art because they were critical of utilitarian values, the New Critics were a bit different: there's a real story to be told about how they saw the autonomous poem as an essential component of the autonomy of English as an academic discipline: if poems were essentially different from prose statements, they needed a special academic department. If they were like prose, they could be absorbed into history or sociology or whatever — this actually comes up in their correspondence with one another).

But we're past all that now, right? Well, no. In many ways, I think some of the most thoughtful poets of the last few decades have been practicing a kind of modified or inverted version of Romanticism. Think about elliptical poetry: so much of it is all about the lack of formal coherence that you think it'd be the farthest thing from Coleridge's organic form or its New Critical offshoot, the well-wrought urn. But the deliberate incoherence of elliptical poetry is really out to accomplish the same sorts of things Coleridge outlined. First of all, elliptical techniques are all about differentiating poetry from prose, about upholding what Barthes called "the discontinuity of lanuage." Poetry is different, we see, because it doesn't try for prose coherence. And in the deep ambiguities and incoherencies of elliptical verse, we're looking at effects similar to those Coleridge saw as belonging to the symbol: we avoid paraphrasable meaning, we escape the utilitatian logic of means-and-ends. Some see this as purely a matter of beauty, some see it as a critique of a society that relies on a logic of language to support its logic of power. Again, all of this is vey much in line with the general trend of thinking that runs from Coleridge through Mallarmé, and even through the New Critics.

So: where do we draw the line between poetry and not-poetry? Well, it seems that we've been doing it by insisting on poetry's autonomy, its freedom from use-value, its freedom from specific meaning. Poetry is poetry because it is unlike prose: it is more free, and stands somehow (we like to think) outside of the utilitarian world. That seems to be the best answer we've come up with in the two centuries since the poets left off praising popes and princes in exchange for patronage. I wonder: how long it will last? For now the old answer flies, but someday it, too, will fall.

Something the English Do: Desirable Discursive Community and Its Origins

Anglophiles present, for the American professor of English, an occupational hazard. One inevitably has colleagues who've spent so many summers in London that you start to let their references to ringing you up or going to the loo go by unremarked. I've never quite been one of these West End-haunting, Guardian reading, BBC4-lovers myself. It's not that I haven't found plenty to love about England (the cheese, the London tube map, Manchester music from the Factory Records era, the perfect shape of the pint glass, etc.). It's just that the countries that have mattered most in my life have all been, in one way or another, less important than England: Belgium, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Iceland. But today's topic is neither Belgian nor Icelandic, boys and girls. It's English. Specifically, it's Something the English Do Way Better then We Do.

I suppose, if I had to give a name to that something, it'd be "the creation of a sense of desirable discursive community." Bear with me, and I think I can explain both what that means, and why the English do it better than we do.

The Sense of Desirable Discursive Community, or: James Campbell and the TLS

Every time I pluck the TLS from my mailbox, I turn immediately to the back page, an assortment of short literary items written by "J.C.," or James Campbell, one of the editors (while he's a Scot, everything about the TLS is profoundly English). It's an odd little assortment, and never fails to charm. In this week's issue, Campbell begins (as he often does) by following up on an earlier entry, this week presenting some answers people had mailed in to a question he'd asked about whether Graham Greene had ever written any of the biography of Robert Louis Stevenson Greene had mentioned in his correspondence. Next, Campbell quotes some snarky comments by authors about the terrible conditions they face in the brutal publishing marketplace — the big reveal coming when he notes that these aren't comments from this week, but from 1909. Campbell then includes an item about T.S. Eliot manuscripts up for sale, a clever note about an old paperback cover of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and ends with a collection of trivia from a recent book on the origins of familiar phrases. In all, it's a pretty typical week at the back page of the TLS. But what's really important aren't any particular entries: what's important is the way one feels while reading Campbell's little anthology. One feels very much a part of a group, a participant in a conversation, even if that participation remains potential rather than actual. That is, when Campbell throws a question (like the one about Greene and Stevenson) out there, you feel "oh, I might've known that." Or at least you feel addressed. And when Campbell makes a wry point about writers as grumblers, the TLS reader (fairly likely to know, if not in fact be, some sort of writer) will feel a sense of connection, of "oh, yes, you and I, Campbell, we understand how these people are." And when he touches on Eliot or Joyce, he touches on something close to the common canon, the texts all English majors of a certain age know, or know of. And so on. The main function of the back page of the TLS is to make you feel welcome, as if you were a member of Joseph Addison's Spectator Club back in the Eighteenth Century, a learned fellow of the world among other learned fellows of the world. You're part of a community. In fact, you're part of a rather distinguished community, a desirable community. Or so it feels.

In fact, of course, the TLS isn't a classic public sphere publication, where the reader is also often the writer, and where there's a real sense of active community. Scale alone prohibits this: the TLS readership survey of 2000 estimated 100,000 weekly readers. You have about as much chance of participating in a conversation with the other readers as you'd have of getting to know everyone at the Superbowl, which tends to get 70,000-100,000 attendees. But that's not the point: a guy like Campbell (whose talent is tremendous) can really make you feel like you're on the inside, sitting at one of the comfortable leather club chairs with the other bookish gentlemen. For all of the very-real insider-centrism of The New York Review of Books (sometimes called The New York Review of One Another's Books), there's nothing like this cultivation of the reader as a (potential, or pretend, or fictional) member of the desirable discursive community. The English do it better than we do.

Further Evidence: The Economist

It's not just the TLS where we find this strong sense of discursive community, either. It happens in a lot of their magazines, especially the tonier ones. Consider The Economist, or, rather, an article from the July/August issue of The Atlantic, in which you can almost see the waves of envy for the British magazine's ability to create discursive community rising like steam from the pages of the American magazine.

In The Atlantic article, "The Newsweekly's Last Stand," Michael Hirschorn reflects on the ongoing success of The Economist at a time when other weekly news magazines (especially American ones) are heading for extinction:

Given that [American news magazines] are faltering, how is it that a notionally similar weekly news digest—The Economist—is not only surviving, but thriving? Virtually alone among magazines, The Economist saw its advertising revenues increase last year by double digits—a remarkable 25 percent, according to the Publisher’s Information Bureau. Newsweek’s and Time’s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively.... Indeed, The Economist has been growing consistently and powerfully for years, tracking in near mirror-image reverse the decline of its U.S. rivals. Despite being positioned as a niche product, its U.S. circulation is nearing 800,000, and it will inevitably overtake Newsweek on that front soon enough.

Hirschorn is further flabbergasted when he considers that the growth of online reading hasn't put a dent in subscriptions to The Economist, nor has it slowed down the sale of famously-expensive newstand copies:

It is a general-interest magazine for an ever-increasing audience, the self-styled global elite, at a time when general-interest anything is having a hard time interesting anybody. And it sells more than 75,000 copies a week on U.S. newsstands for $6.99 (!) at a time when we’re told information wants to be free and newsstands are disappearing.

So how is it done? It isn't the strength of the writing, which, says Hirschorn, "can be shoddy, thin research supporting smug hypotheses." Nor is it the "leaders," or short lead-off editorials, which "tend to 'urge' politicians to solve complex problems, as if the key to, say, reconstituting the global banking system were but a simple act of cogitation away." In the end, Hirschorn has very little to offer by way of an explanation for the success of The Economist at a time when similar news digests struggle:

...the American newsweeklies are going away from precisely the thing that has propelled The Economist’s rise: its status as a humble digest, with a consistent authorial voice, that covers absolutely everything that you need to be informed about.... The writing in Time and Newsweek may be every bit as smart, as assured, as the writing in The Economist. But neither one feels like the only magazine you need to read. You may like the new Time and Newsweek. But you must—or at least, brilliant marketing has convinced you that you must—subscribe to The Economist.

So, in this view, The Economist is just like the American news digests, but with some kind of magic pixie dust attached, attributed to the vague genie of "marketing." And here's where I think Hirschorn misses the mark. I think it's pretty clear that what The Economist has, and Time and Newsweek lack, is a sense of desirable discursive community. I mean, think about it: those "leader" articles may be a bit ridiculous, with their urging of actions on Prime Ministers. But in the end, they help create the feeling that this magazine speaks to elites, and that, if we're reading it, and understanding it, and paying seven bucks for it, we must in some sense be part of that same elite. Hirschorn was close to getting this when he made note of the way the magazine was purchased by a "self-styled global elite." I think the important fact is this: the magazine, with its unexcitable, urbane, eminently non-folksy tone, invites its readers to think of themselves as such an elite. When you shell out your seven bucks, it's better than getting the magazine for free online, because you're showing yourself (or, at any rate, expensively convincing yourself) that you're part of the elite to which the magazine seems to speak.

Rule 2, or: The Historical Why

So: why are the English good at creating this sense of a desirable discursive community, while we here in America aren't? I think the answer lies in the different way intellectual and social elites interacted in the industrial era in the two countries. Consider, for example, Rule Two of The Athenaeum Club of London.

What? You don't know Rule Two? Sigh. Well, okay. It's like this. The Athenaeum Club was one of those private, members-only hotels/cafes/restaurants/lounges/libraries spawned in such number in Victorian London. It was, like many of the clubs, a place for the social, financial, and governing elite to mingle. But it wasn't just for them. Rule Two provided for admittance to distinguished intellectuals, and the list of intellectuals who were admitted is impressive: John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, name your eminent Victorian. So such people came into close contact with the ruling elite, and, in a way, were co-opted by them (this is the subject of Stefan Collini's fine study Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930). The intellectuals, says Collini, were a special, junior part of the community of power. They didn't exactly "form a socially excluded intellectual class" in clubs like the Athenaeum, but "they were conscious that belonging to the fraternity of the reflective and the articulate set them apart from those more immediately involved in life's tasks and life's pleasures." They were members, but members of a special "Rule Two" sort, there just a little bit on the sufferance of the power elite. You could speak truth to power, with power actually being there in the room, but you also had to watch just how far you went in what you said. In the end, a kind of urbane, non-offensive, discourse became second nature. You spoke as a gentleman speaking to gentlemen: you spoke, in short, as a member of a desirable discursive community.

Even with the growth of intellectual professionalism, the sense of being a member of an intellectual community, one that might meet and overlap with a social elite, continued. The British Academy, a symbol of professionalizing knowledge, came about when clubbable intellectual men still suggested one another for membership. "The sense of a knowable community," says Collini of the early British Academy, "is very strong."

So modern British intellectual life came about in conditions of discursive community, and not only that, but in conditions of slightly glamorous, socially high-tone, community. Those conditions set the tone for modern institutions, and when we read the TLS or The Economist, we're reading the weight of this tradition inflecting every phrase. Conditions have changed in England, for sure, but in the pages of those magazines it's still us meeting for drinks with the cabinet ministers at the Athenaeum.

America, of course, has less of a tradition of this sort of thing. Sure, there are clubs that aspire, at least in theory, to bring the artsy types and the power types together. Hell, I'm a member of one (though I rarely end up talking to the power types when I'm there). But geographic dispersion (no American city combines all the leadership functions of London), the lack of a landed aristocracy, money-obsessed philistinism, and other factors have conspired to keep us from ever having quite the sense of a power/culture establishment that there was in England. So, for better or for worse, our magazines can't peddle that special sense of desirable discursive community with any sense of authenticity. Their particular history gave the English the magic pixie dust, and left us without it.

Not Baryshnikov

Ow! My leg!

Last Monday a suddenly-opened car door had a disagreement with my bicycle about the nature of my forward trajectory. "Slow and steady, okay?" said my bike. "No! Rapid, airborne, and ending with a thump!" said the car door. The car door won. I'm alive, but spent some time in hospital, where I overheard one of the doctors looking at my x-rays say "it looks less like a bone than a box of rocks." So, long story short, it'll be a number of weeks before I'm putting any weight on my leg at all, and I won't be back to leaping-and-tumbling form until late November or thereabouts.

What, you ask, are you going to do to get your Archambeau fix, since you can't lurk outside my house to see me doing my usual ballet and acrobatics routine as I go out to pick the newspaper off the driveway (full disclosure: I actually look more like a staggering Tony Soprano when I do this, but let's imagine a Baryshnikov-Archambeau, for maximum contrast).

Well, there are a couple of options. You could pick up the latest Boston Review, which contains, among much else, "Double Gesture," a big review I wrote about the evolution of Swedish poetry over the generations (long story short: it goes from existentialism to a kind of post-structuralist linguistics inflected style, and Fredrik Nyberg is really, really good).

Alternately, you could tune in to the June 25th broadcast of American Public Media's show "Speaking of Faith." If your time machine is low on batteries, you can get to the show as a podcast and accompanying web site. The theme of this particular episode is fragility, and I translated an old French poem on the theme, "The Broken Vase" by Parnassian poet Sully Prudhomme. I'm not normally keen on the anti-Romantic, Neoclassical Parnassians — I've always agreed with Gerard Manley Hopkins about Parnassian poems being "spoken on and from the level of the poet's mind" rather than from those strange moments when "the gift of genius raises him above himself." So I took the Prudhomme translation as an opportunity to try to inhabit a very different kind of poetry than the sort I'm usually drawn to. And it was an interesting challenge, trying to maintain the rhyme scheme and something of the rhythm of the original. Audio files of the poem in French and in my translation are up, read in the fabulous, tobacco-cured voice of Jean-Luc Garneau.

Interrogated by the Fun Sherpa!

Yes, it's true. I've been abducted by Anton Dy Buncio, official Chicago-area fun sherpa, and interrogated about poetry, teaching, what it means to root for Notre Dame in a losing season, and where to drink in Chicago. It's all here. And don't worry: the good sherpa eventually let me go. Now if only I can make it back home without being jacked up by a yeti...

Paris Blues: The Aesthetic and the Oppressed in 1961

Ever since my daughter, Lila, was born four months ago I've been spending most mornings hanging out with her. She's good company but she sleeps a lot, which has led me — with the assistance of my faithful TiVo — to instigate the "Lila's Sleeping Film Festival," during which I lounge on the sofa sipping coffee and gawking at movies, mostly old ones. Today the featured presentation was Paris Blues, a 1961 flick with Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as American jazz men living in Paris, and Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll as tourists with whom they get involved. It's better than the early luke-warm reviews said it was, and not just because Louis Armstrong cameos and lays down some fine music. It's got a lot to say about the relationship of the aesthetic and the socially and culturally oppressed.

Newman plays Ram Bowen, a slightly too-clever reference to Rimbaud. He's a trombonist and club owner who wants to write ambitious music. Poiter's character is also a musician, and the arranger for his pal Ram Bowen. They hang, they play, they sweat the details of their music. Then some strangers come to town: Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll. Paris Blues actually starts out looking politcally bolder than it turns out to be. At first, it seems that Paul Newman's character is going to hook up with Diahann Carroll, but the inter-racial romance is just a tease: Newman soon pairs off with Joanne Woodward, while Sidney Poitier moves in on the achingly beautiful Carroll. We then get a lot of good jazz, a sub-plot with a gypsy junkie, and some nice montages of romance in Paris. Each of the musicians ends up having to choose between music in Paris and a return to the U.S. with the woman he loves.

What makes Paris Blues interesting are the asymmetries between the two men's dilemmas, asymmetries having everything to do with race. Newman's character faces a well-established choice between art, on the one hand, and love, domesticity, and respectability, on the other. The idea that these are incompatible things dates back to Romanticism: it was in the Romantic era that the idea of the isolated artist, driven by a demon within, came to the fore — in conjunction, one might add, with the disruption of the old aristocratic social order and the system of artistic patronage it supported. We came to the idea of the isolated artist when artists were without a clear social role. I suppose the idea that the artist needs to eschew domesticity in order to single-mindedly pursue art also has something to do with one of the roles art came to play over the course of the nineteenth century, a role once played by religion: the space for the unworldly. I mean, the celibate priest and the isolated hermit are cousins of the garret-dwelling poet and the anti-social genius artist. Each is in some way set apart from the merely worldly. (Was it Matthew Arnold who called art "spilt religion"? There's something to that, or there was in Arnold's time, though I've never liked the phrase: it implies that religion is the proper place for certain sentiments, rather than one place those sentiments happened to have resided. But I digress). (*UPDATE, July 3: Alex Davis writes in from Cork to point out that "spilt religion" is T E Hulme’s phrase, from “Romanticism and Classicism”).

Anyway. Ram Bowen must choose his art or love, in the form of Joanne Woodward, her two kids, and her big house back in small-town America. It's an agonizing choice for him, but he chooses art, saying "I gotta find out how far I can go. And I guess that means alone." The movie doesn't judge his choice: it seems neither good nor bad, but ambiguous. I'm glad for this: too often we see a kind of Bullets Over Broadway or even Mr. Holland's Opus moralism, in which good ole domesticity is, in the end, better than art, which is presented as self-indulgent. I always think of that sort of thing as audience-flattering, which is kind of a sin of cinema.

Poitier's character seems at first to face a similar choice, but race — specifically, the oppressed position of African-Americans, and the challenges they were making to that oppression in 1961 — changes everything. In an instance of psychological skin-privilege, the white guy, Newman, doesn't have to think about his whiteness, but the black guy sure as hell has to think about his blackness. Poitier's character tries hard not to think about race: in fact, he's gone to Paris to avoid thinking about race (or, as he puts it, "to be able to sit down to lunch without getting clubbed"). He's mostly made it work, too: the crowd shots in the jazz club where he plays show an integrated crowd of Caucasians, Arabs, Gypsies, Africans, and others, and Poitier's character almost never encounters any racist sentiment in Paris (significantly, though, at one point a French boy refers to him as "Monsieur Noir," which does indicate that he is perceived as other, even if he is not visibly oppressed). Diahann Carroll's character is having none of this avoidance, though. She insists that Poitier's place is back in the states, with his people, fighting for change. She sees his life in Paris as pure escapism. So while Newman's character is choosing only between art and domesticity, Poitier's character has to choose between art, on the one hand, and a heady cocktail of respectable domesticity (Carroll's character is a schoolteacher and wants six kids), group loyalty, and social reform. He doesn't have the luxury of a mere art/life dichotomy: his dichotomy is art/life-race-reform-justice. The scales tip him toward the latter, and he heads back to the U.S.

It's sort of unusual to find social reform connected with domesticity and fertility and respectability, as they are for Poitier and Carroll. I mean, much of the literature of social change shows us how domesticity and respectability must be sacrificed for The Cause. Here, though, the cause is thoroughly respectable, indicating how, by the early sixites, Civil Rights had become a middle-class cause, and those who objected to it were seen as disreputable slugs. It was, among other things, a bourgeois reform movement at this point.

All this in itself would make for a complex enough pattern: the white guy free to pursue his own lonely genius, the black guy caught in a thicker web of conflicting desires. But there's more! Just as Poitier's oppressed or subaltern position in the race hierarchy complicates matters for him, so also does jazz's oppressed or subaltern position in the midcentury hierarchy of musical genres complicate Newman's situation.

It's easy to forget, from the vantage of postmodernism, how rigid and seemingly permanent the popular-culture/high-culture division once was — my students are often surprised by it when we do the history of literary theory. It's also possible, I suppose, to forget that jazz was, in fact, popular culture. I mean, it's thought of as art-music now, mostly. Anyway, Newman's character wants to become a serious artist, and for him this means winning the recognition of classical music mavens. While the movie takes the side of the oppressed in the race hierarchy, and makes the opposition to that hierarchy look comfortingly domestic and respectable, the movie doesn't question the hierarchy of music at all. When Newman meets with The Great Composer, he's told that he's gifted, and that a record company would be happy to release his music on a jazz album. But if he wants to be truly great — which he may or may not be capable of doing — he's got to ditch jazz and study classical composition, if only to incorporate it into jazz. So Newman's choice isn't just between art and love: it's also between loyalty to his jazz band, and to his own lonely quest for musical greatness. Again, he chooses the lonely genius of art.

In the end, Paris Blues is representative of a very particular moment in cultural history, a moment both radical and conservative. It was the moment when the Civil Rights movement became respectable, but when respectability was conceived as a kind of hetero-normative domesticity; a moment when the Romantic Genius stalked the earth in all his isolated, anti-social splendor, but also a moment when even such geniuses submitted without question to established cultural hierarchies. It couldn't be more 1961.

Word Salad meets the Kafka Sutra

Bruce Andrews!
Juliana Spahr!
Leslie Scalapino!
Allen Ginsberg!
Ezra Pound!

and, uh...me!

Yep. Once again, I'm part of the WSUM Word Salad show, available in mp3 format. This time I read parts of The Kafka Sutra, which was published with illustrations by Sarah Conner in The Cultural Society. I'm thinking I might drag it out for my appearance in the Literary Death Match reading at this year's Chicago Printers' Ball. I hope they're going to have a medic standing by.

David Bromige, R.I.P.

Sad news: the poet David Bromige has died. I only met him once or twice, but I admired his work, his wit, his sense of play and style. He loved to take another poet's line and turn it around, making something new and surprising out of it. For me, this small passage from an interview in Jacket magazine captures much of his spontaneity and humor. He will be missed:

Doug Powell: People mention they have discerned a ‘Stevens’ quality in your poetry. The rhyme with his ‘Credences of Summer’ tipped me off. Is your sequence [‘Credences of Winter’], to your mind, antithetical to his?

David Bromige: A poorly-paid college teacher, a weed-using shadow of a man, whose humble dwelling was pit-stop to all and sundry, in antithetical relation to a roly-poly, barrel-chested, manicured, well-shod, imposing Yalie who got plastered with other late-in-life Yalies and had fisticuffs with Hemingway but never invited anyone home? Perhaps. I should never have taken Hemingway on. It was my Yalies who urged me to do it. Let me say there are no rousing assurances in my poems. Let the rich bury the rich. All I can do is destroy their language. I think the pill is wearing off. Got more?

Storming the Museum of Irrelevance

"Storming the Museum of Irrelevance", the web version of an essay I wrote for the current issue of Poetry, is now online. If you can't hear enough about the fate of the poetic manifesto, check it out. It opens like this:

Can the manifesto matter? Or is it an outdated weapon in the arsenal of the poets, a rusted blunderbuss only to be displayed under glass in the museum of cultural oddities? Questions like these seem to lurk just below the surface in “Eight Manifestos,” a special section of the February 2009 issue of Poetry, introduced by Mary Ann Caws, the unquestioned dean of manifesto studies. On the one hand, the section gestures toward the idea of the manifesto as a museum piece, both figuratively and literally: a note tells us that the section commemorates the centennial of F.T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto,” and if we read all the fine print we find that several of the poets who wrote items for the section presented them at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. On the other hand, what we have aren’t essays on the nature and history of the manifesto (with the exception of Caws’s informative introduction): they’re manifestos proper, or seem to be. If the manifesto is indeed an old blunderbuss, the poets seem to have pried it out of its display case and fired off a few live rounds.

Even a cursory look at the nature of the manifestos collected in the section, though, raises some doubts about how much faith poets place in the manifesto nowadays.

Word Salad Radio

"You know when a communications medium is obsolete?" my media theorist collegaue Dave Park likes to ask, before answering himself by saying "when they start using it for art." I think what Dave means is that, when a medium is in its commercial and technological prime, it becomes a money-making machine, and artists get squeezed to the margins by more mercenary figures. But when a medium is brand new, or when, later on, it begins to lose its commericial mojo, there's a chance for art to move in. It's certainly how the movie industry has worked: the best era for American art film came in the early 70s, when television had killed off the old studio system and Hollywood started making movies like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. Of course Spielberg and Lucas found a way to beat T.V., by emphasizing special effects and big-screen spectacle, but for a while it was directors, not producers, who seemed to be calling the shots (both Lucas and Spielberg have, of course, long since become producers themselves).

Radio, of course, is venerable, and has gone through many phases, from being a place for serial drama (another victim of television) to being all about music. And now the good people at WSUM have turned to poetry, with the weekly broadcast of "Word Salad," a kind of melding-together of poems in a big, luxuirous sound collage. They've been deluded enough to feature a few of my poems in recent weeks, and you can listen to them online.

"Two Short Films," a couple of older poems from Home and Variations were included in the May 28 broadcast, which also features work by Tom Raworth, Lisa Jarnot, Louis Zukofsky, and Anne Sexton, as well as music by Tristan Murail.

"Glam Rock: The Poem," which originally appeared in Absent, was aired on the May 21 show, along with John Ashbery, Crag Hill, Hanet Kuypers, Stu Hatton, and some Merzbow music, along with much more.

"Sheena is a Punk Rocker," which appeared in The Cultural Society, was part of the May 14 broadcast, along with poems by Nico Vassilakis, Andrea Brady, and Amanda Stewart, and music by John Adams (played by the Kronos Quartet), along with other things.

The Word Salad blog has a complete set of playlists, and links to all their shows. You could spend a long time listening to this stuff: consider yourself warned!

Educating Ezra

What thou lovest well remains,
                                  the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
              or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee

Those are probably the best-known lines of Ezra Pound's "Canto 81." The passage lodged itself in my head when I was a modernism-obsessed undergraduate, and I still sometimes wake up with those lines echoing in my ears. Canto 81 is one of the Pisan Cantos, written after Pound had been captured by the American army in Italy, and was being held in a detention cage, uncertain of his fate but fearing the worst: that his pro-Mussolini radio broadcasts would soon see him swinging from a hangman's rope. So the desperation in those lines is real enough: Pound, here, is a man looking at the end, and wondering what, when we stare into the abyss, remains for us.

If the sentiments are real, though, the diction is stilted and affected (although very much of a piece with the mixed-diction and quotation-filled texture of The Cantos and, indeed, of Pound's work as a whole). Why such a strange, non-contemporary diction? Of course there have been plenty of times and places when poetry has been written in archaic diction: Dante, for example, was considered an oddball for not writing in the archaic Latin language, and had to defend his use ofthe contemporary Italian language in De Vulgari Eloquentia — a treatise, ironically enough, written in Latin. But why this particular instance of a poet writing in such an idiom? It was by no means the only convention out there: it certainly wasn't the idiom of William Carlos Williams.

One explanation lies in Pound's education. Pound was part of the first generation of American poets in which significant numbers of poets were the products of graduate school. Of course graduate study in language and literature was different in the early years of the twentieth century than it is now: it was dominated by philology, the tracing of linguistic evolution, often in literary texts. There's a whole interesting history of how philology became the dominant mode of literary study in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Gerald Graff's Professing Literature tells the story well), much of it having to do with nationalism and with the kind of disciplinary-legitimacy anxiety that has been the fate of English and the humanities in general ever since the rise of the research university model. But none of that matters, here, I suppose: the important thing is that Pound enters into literature via a specific academic path, and gets a very particular perspective on literature: historical and linguistic-centered. It's quite a bit different than, say, William Blake's point of entry (Evangelical Protestant Bible study) or Alexander Pope's point of entry (Greek and Latin classics). If Blake's mythical, prophetic imagination can be traced to his educational roots, and Pope's neoclassicism to his, we can just as surely find in Pound's education the roots of his own polyglot, historical, found-text-obsessed poetic, and the source of his ease in feeling authorized to write in archaic-sounding language. An attachment to philology could also explain Pound's early attraction to Browning, and the faux-archaic speech of his dramatic monologues.

Pound's early investment in the cultural past can also be seen as contributing to his particular brand of modernism. He, like Eliot, wanted to preserve the past, to (as he famously put it) "make it new." It's a project of cultural rescue, quite different from, say F.T. Marinetti's Futurism, which called for the destruction of Venice and all its statuary. (Nationality has got to be significant here, too: Pound and Eliot came from a country feeling a kind of history-deficit, while Marinetti's generation felt oppressed by the enormous cultural achievement of Italy). Pound, in a way, isn't a radical, but a kind of reform conservative, looking to rejuvenate rather than eject (or, for that matter, mummify with reverence) the cultural heritage.

Of course, reform conservatism depends on a sense that the past and the present can be made to accommodate one another. When the conservative mind comes to see the present as having moved too far away from what is valued in the past, a strange mutation occurs, and he becomes what Klaus Epstien, in his monumental study The Genesis of German Conservatism, calls a "revolutionary conservative." This is a category as paradoxical as it sounds. Normally, conservatives want to preserve some elements of the past, or of the status quo (when the status quo is capitalistic, this gets weird, since capitalism depends on an ongoing process of creative destruction, but that's another story). The revolutionary conservative feels his cause is so lost he needs a radical program to wipe away the present and restore what he imagines to have been the best elements of the past (of course there really is no restoration — the thing about the past being that you can't get there from here). When Pound turned to Mussolini and Fascism, I'm pretty sure it was out of a deep-seated conservative disposition that had become terribly alienated by the present age. It's tragic stuff, really.

There's another element of Pound's characteristic means of addressing himself to the reader that isn't connected to his educational background, at least not directly: his sense of himself as our instructor. As Gertrude Stein famously, and snarkily, put it, Pound was "a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not." Stein, of course, was full-on committed to an experimental agenda, in which formal innovation was central, and instruction seemed kind of quaint. But Pound was attached to an older model of the poet. Someone like Stein didn't really expect a big audience, and she certainly didn't expect for her words to echo in the halls of power. But Pound, naively, wanted something like the Victorian relation of poet to audience. There have been a number of really fine studies on the relation of the Victorian writer to audience (the best of them, Stefan Collini's Public Moralists doesn't much deal with poetry, but the points he makes there transfer to certain Victorian poets, especially Tennyson. Believe me here: one of the main points I'm trying to make about Tennyson in the book I'm writing is really just a transposition of Collini's ideas to Tennyson's work). Long story short, Collini's argument is that, in the Victorian period, there was a kind of intimacy between important figures from realms like politics and (certain) literary people: he points out how the Athenaeum Club, founded for the power-elite, took to admitting writers on a regular basis (there's a list of prominent writers admitted to the Athenaeum, by the way, and it's well worth a look). This allowed for a kind of co-opting of writers by the power elite (think of how Tennyson became the trumpeter of Queen and Country), and allowed writers to think of their work as being heard, as having a public role, as mattering to those in power. In such a context, writers didn't emphasize form: they became moralists, seeking to ameliorate the excesses of the system (but never to challenge the system directly — this could lose them the indulgence of the power elite).

Pound certainly wanted a situation like this: even near the end, when he was locked up in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, he was fond of preaching economic policy, and once sent a visiting Senator's wife home with a copy of The Unwobbling Pivot as a guide to politics for her husband. But the discursive situation of poetry had changed: those in power were no longer rubbing shoulders with poets at the club, and poets were not often obsessed with being the kind of public moralists Collini described. If there's a way Pound's education comes into play here, it's this: the very existence of graduate programs like his on a large scale was a sign of the increasing specialization of knowledge, of the growth of a technocratic world where government goes its way and literature goes off on its own path. Pound, the product of this new world, longed for the older one, and wrote as if he were in it, becoming shriller and shriller as time went by. (I wish I could remember the name of the critic who wrote that Pound "overestimated the relevance" of his kind of literary knowledge to the political crises of his time — this critic, whoever he is, is the perfect product of our world, where knowledge is rigidly categorized). Anyway: in this instance Pound's education isn't so much an influence on him as it is a symptom of a cultural condition he didn't fully recognize, and would never fully accept. And for all the talk of poetry and politics now, and of speaking truth to power, I think by and large most poets have, at some level, accepted. I mean, I can't imagine John Ashbery or Ted Kooser or Jorie Graham actually expecting that the world of power would take their ideas on social policy seriously. It'd be delusional if they did. And would we really want them to operate as if they did expect this? It could drive them as crazy as it drove Pound, and I don't think we want to see any of them locked away in St. Elizabeth's.

Just One Book

There are only a few presses that have changed poetry publishing. New Directions in its heyday helped bring Modernism to the bookstores. City Lights fostered the Beat movement. More recently, Neil Astley's Bloodaxe ushered in a new generation of British poets. And Salt publishing changed the whole game: international in scope, broad in aesthetics, interested in the avant-garde, writings of indigenous peoples, and criticism as well as poetry, Salt has been on top of new technologies in publishing and distribution as well as new movements in poetry, and they've been great about being loyal to their authors. In many ways, they've been the most living thing in poetry publishing for almost a decade. Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery (seen above with their Independent Publishing Prize), and their partner John Kinsella, deserve nothing but praise as promoters of poetry. And they've done well as a business, too — until quite recently, when fallout from the economic meltdown (thanks, Milton Friedman, thanks, gospel of unregulated greed, thanks, University of Chicago Econ Department!) put them in a tight spot. Here's a recent note Chris has sent out over the internet, announcing the situation and proposing a solution to the current quandary:

Saving Salt Publishing: Just One Book
Wednesday, May 20, 2009

As many of you will know, Jen and I have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect our press. Our three year funding ends this year: we've £4,000 due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt's operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April's much improved trading, the past twelve months has left us with a budget deficit of over £55,000. It's proving to be a very big hole and we're having to take some drastic measures to save our business.

Here's how you can help us to save Salt and all our work with hundreds of authors around the world.

JUST ONE BOOK

1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.

UK and International
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/index.php

USA
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop-us/index.php


2. Share this note on your Facebook or MySpace profile. Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember it's just one book, that's all it takes to save us. Please do it now.

With my best wishes to everyone
Chris Hamilton-Emery
Director
Salt Publishing
http://www.saltpublishing.com

Things have started to work — Chris even compares what's happened to the end of It's A Wonderful Life— but Salt needs us. And poetry needs Salt. Let's see what we can do. If you don't want to use the Salt website, you can get a list of their books on Amazon.com by going to "books," then "advanced search" and searching for "Salt Publishing" under "publisher."

We Got a Yeats, You Got a Wallace Stevens

"We got a Yeats, you got a Wallace Stevens." That's what Eavan Boland told me, more than a decade ago, when I interviewed her for the Notre Dame Review. Boland had recently started teaching at Stanford, and we were talking about some of the differences between American poetry and the poetry of her native Ireland. The point she was making had to do with the public status of poetry in the two countries: in Ireland, poets have had a much more public role than poets in America, and this is reflected in the nature of the poetry itself: Ireland ended up with W.B. Yeats as a major figure, while the United States ended up with Wallace Stevens. While Yeats was capable of intense obscurity (in both his early, symboliste-inflected work and his later period of personal mythology), a substantial portion of what he wrote was deliberately public, even news-editorial-ish. Poems like "Easter 1916" or "September 1913" took on public events, and offered opinions about them in langauge that was both beautiful and accessible. A surprising number of Yeats' mid-period poems actually appeared in newspapers. Stevens, of course, is a different animal. In a country in which poetry has had very little public role, Stevens was a very private poet. Hell, most of the guys at the insurance office where he worked didn't even know he was a poet. And while I'm sure one can tease references to public events out of damn near anything with the application of sufficient quantities of Dr. Adorno's Magic Ointment, it's tougher to make a case for the author of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" as a political poet than it is to do the same for the author of "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death."

There's much truth to what Boland said. But the reason it comes to mind today is that I'm doing the final read-through of a review I just wrote of some books of recent scholarship on Irish poetry, and I'm sensitive not only of the truth of what Boland said, but of the falsehood. That is: while she's right about the visible Irish tradition, the scholarship I've been reviewing has made me acutely aware of how much Irish poetry lies outside this tradition. The discourse that has developed around Irish poetry over the last two centuries has been a nationalist one: it expects, even demands, that the poet speak on national themes to a national audience. There are good historical reasons for this: in a colonized society, there's very little in public life in which one can place one's trust. All the institutions are dominated by the colonizer. But poetry, at least, remains relatively free, and can become a medium for nationalist consciousness to form in opposition to the colonizer. All well and good, but like so many things, such a discourse can be as oppressive as it is enabling. The demand for a nationalist poetry means the poet is meant to write about some themes, not others, and to do so in a language that is accessible to a broad audience — hence the anti-Modernist style of much Irish Revival poetry. So in Ireland, a publicly-lauded tradition of the nationalist poet came into being. They had a Yeats, while we had a Stevens (we've had aspirants to national poet status, but Walt Whitman, who yearned to be a national figure, never became one until many decades after his death). But along with this visible tradition, there's been a long tradition of Irish poetry that falls outside of the nationalist paradigm. The Irish may have had their Yeatses, but they've had their Stevenses, too. They just didn't fit the paradigm for what an Irish poet was meant to be, and therefore didn't get much attention.

Who are these guys? Well, in the mid-twentieth century, there are people like Brian Coffey and Dennis Devlin. And in the current generation, there are people like Billy Mills, Randolph Healy, and Catherine Walsh. They haven't had their due, living in the shadow of the nationalist tradition. But in an Ireland long since emerged from colonialism, and now a kind of prosperous province of the European Union, nationalism is fading as a paradigm for poetry. Seamus Heaney may well be the last figure to be consumed by it. And the Irish Stevenses may yet have their day.

Marginality, Manifesto, and Poetry's New Thing

No, no, I'm not dead or otherwise incapacitated: it's just that I've been busy tapping out some reviews and plugging away on a chapter about Tennyson for The Big Boring Book of Aesthetics, Politics, and Poetics, which, if my current pace continues, promises to be a posthumous work.

But that's not why you stopped by. You wanted to ask "what have you published lately, chump?" Ah! Glad you asked. Well, the June issue of Poetry just arrived, and it includes "Marginality and Manifesto," an essay I wrote about poetry manifestos. Specifically, the essay responds to the collection of manifestos from the February issue of Poetry.

Long story short, what I say in the essay is this: when one looks over the February collection of essays, one wonders whether the manifesto form might be, for the moment, exhausted. Not that the manifestos were bad: they were, without exception, interesting, clever, and engaging. But they tended to be anti-manifestos of one sort or another. Some parodied the will-to-power aspect of the genre, others were deliberately provisional where manifestos have traditionally been bold, others were defenses of tradition where manifestos have tended to be avant-garde, still others were nostalgic for a lost era when manifestos seemed to matter. Why, I wondered, this sense of exhaustion?

To answer the question, I had a look at what I took to be the two main motivations of manifestos in the early 20th century: to challenge the marginality of poetry in society, and to challenge the established poetic style from the margins of the art. The first of these goals still seems to motivate poets across a wide stylistic spectrum (it's the impetus behind both Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter? and Charles Bernstein's "Warning Poetry Area: Publics Under Construction"). But the second, which always produced more manifestos, doesn't seem to pertain: we don't, I argued, really have an establishment style in any meaningful way. Which is not to say we don't have a poetic establishment (Jed Rasula's book The American Poetry Wax Museum is a great study of just how that establishment works). But the establishment isn't predicated on style so much as on institutional access and support, on big name journals, grants agencies, and prestigious university posts. One could rail against this, as one's instinct is to rail against all privilege. But in a way, we're lucky to have grants and university posts: in the early 20th century, poets were, by and large, without any kind of market or patronage, having lost the old aristocratic system of support over the nineteenth century. One could even see the flurry of manifestos in the modernist era as a symptom of a climate of scarcity: when people are well fed, they're less inclined to fight. Or so I argued.

Of course the movement away from prescriptive, declarative manifestos doesn't mean there aren't broad shifts in style, and attempts to describe them: in fact, the latest Boston Review contains a very interesting essay by Stephen Burt on just such a stylistic shift. The essay, "Poetry's New Thing," argues that emerging poets (emerging, I suppose, to broader visibility) like Graham Foust, Devin Johnsoton, Zach Barocas, and Elizabeth Treadwell have moved away from the elliptical style that became one of the more prominent modes of poetry in the 1990s. These poets, Burt claims, are more interested in documentary, mimesis, and things in the world than were the elliptical crowd. He's certainly right to see the influence of Objectivism on many of these poets, and I'm happy to see him single out The Cultural Society as an important venue for the work of many poets in this crowd: I think it's one of the best poetry things going on the web.

Steve, who gave elliptical poetry its name a decade ago, is out to name the new thing, too. In fact, given this kind of poetry's emphasis on things (as opposed to linguistic disruption), he offers "The New Thing" as a name. I kind of like the minimalism of it. We'll know it's taken off as a term if people start arguing about it. I'll start now: Steve argues for Rae Armantrout as a major precursor to The New Thing. Fair enough, but since The New Thing includes, along with neo-objectivists, an emphasis on documentary, I'd argue for John Matthias and Michael Anania as precursors, and point to their influence on a number of the poets Burt names, such as Devin Johnston and Michael O'Leary. And while I'm glad Steve points to the University of Chicago as a breeding-ground for The New Thing, I wish he'd mentioned Garin Cycholl, currently teaching there, as an important documentary-style poet. Anyway: it's an exciting essay. Sadly, it's not on the Boston Review website, at least not yet. But you can scoop up a copy at the bookstore when you're picking up the latest Poetry.

UPDATE MAY 26: Will Fertman, the self-described "P.R. goon" for the Boston Review dropped me a line to say that Steve's piece is now up online. Check it out!

The Scholar Escapes (For Now)

I've done it: I've watched the students troop off from campus, to whatever beach or internship awaits. Much to the dismay of the sensitive observer, I've gone sockless, kitted-out in sandals and shorts and Mexican short-sleeved shirt. I've hauled the bicycle out and had at it with oil and wrenches, readying it for the dusty trail. I've laid in a supply of frosty beverages, and piled the appropriate books out by the adirondack chairs. Summer, people, is on the way, and I'm hauling out one more thing, for all the academics who are experiencing the end of the teaching term — an old poem by Austin Clarke. If he hadn't lived in the considerable shade generated by Yeats' monumental stature, he'd have been the most musical Irish poet of his generation. Check out the crazy consonance, assonance, half-rhymes and scansion here, and the (to my mind) devastating turn at the end, when the easy flow of pastoral escapism comes to a screeching halt, and the scholar once again finds himself, as we all do, working for The Man. I'm going to have to scare up a slim volume of Clarke's to cart around on the bike trails while the summer lasts...

The Scholar

Summer delights the scholar
With knowledge and reason.
Who is happy in hedgerow
Or meadow as he is?

Paying no dues to the parish,
He argues in logic
And has no care of cattle
But a satchel and stick.

The showery airs grow softer,
He profits from his ploughland
For the share of the schoolmen
Is a pen in hand.

When mid-day hides the reaping,
He sleeps by a river
Or comes to the stone plain
Where the saints live.

But in winter by the big fires,
The ignorant hear his fiddle,
And he battles on the chessboard,
As the land lords bid him.

—Austin Clarke

**UPDATE MAY 7** Mike Begnal has posted some comments about this to his blog, noting that Clarke is actually reworking an old Gaelic poem, reversing the earlier poem's point even as he honors its sound patterns. Good stuff!

Mayday!

The premiere issue of Mayday is up online, featuring (among other things) Kent Johnson's "Some Darker Bouquets," an open letter responding to Jason Guriel's Poetry magazine defense of negative reviewing. The good people at Mayday invited a host of people who review poetry to respond, and there's a big, here-comes-everybody set of responses to Johnson (including, for what it's worth, my own). It's a real debate, people, and despite my contribution, an intelligent one!

Frank Zappa, Commodity Logic, and the Dawn of Postmodernism

So there I was, puffing away on the treadmill, preparing for bicycle season (Team Slow Ride, the crew with which I so inelegantly ride, will be doing a Milwaukee-to-Chicago run this summer, and believe me, I'm in no kind of shape for anything more than a downhill roll to the local ice-cream truck). I'd wedged Frank Zappa's autobiography into the treadmill's little magazine-holder thing, and was a chapter or two into it when I ran across the following passage from Zappa's account of his blue collar, small town teenage years in the 1950s:

One day I happened across an article about Sam Goody's record store in Look magazine which raved about what a wonderful merchandiser he was. The writer said that Mr. Goody could sell anything—and as an example he mentioned that he had even managed to sell an album called Ionization. The article went on to say something like "This album is nothing but drums—it's dissonant and terrible; the worst music in the world." Ahh! Yes! That's for me! I wondered where I could get my hands on a record like that, because I was living in El Cajon, California—a little cowboy kind of town near San Diego.

Zappa couldn't find a copy in El Cajon, but one day, when visiting a friend in nearby La Mesa, he hit the record store and paydirt, in that order:

After shuffling through the rack and finding a couple of Joe Huston Records, I made my way toward the cash register and happened to glance at the LP bin. I noticed a strange looking black-and-white album cover with a guy on it who had frizzy gray hair and looked like a mad scientist [Zappa, whose father worked in a metallurgy shop, had a kind of mad science vibe to him at the time, and made of the mixing of chemicals and the blowing up of shit the main non-musical activities of his youth]. I thought it was great that a mad scientist had finally made a record, so I picked it up—and there it was the record with "Ionization" on it. The author of the Look article had gotten it slightly wrong—the correct title was The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume I...

The LP cost a princely $5.95, and Zappa had only $3.75 to his name. He made an offer, and, since the record seemed unsellable, the clerk let him buy it. The record was an ear-opener, and soon Zappa was laying in a supply of Stravinsky, Webern, and the like, along with the usual teeny-bopper stuff, and used blues records from old jukeboxes. "Since I didn't have any formal training," writes Zappa, "it didn't make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightnin' Slim, or a vocal group called The Jewels... or Webern, or Varèse, or Stravinsky. To me it was all good music."

Anyone who's spent time listening to Zappa's music can tell you it's the result of the collapse of the high culture/popular culture distinction — a collapse typical of what we think of as postmodernism. But what's interesting here is how Zappa starts on the road to being a postmodern musician: it has everything to do with the dominance of commodity logic in American culture. Firstly, there's the article in Look, which presents us with what, in historical terms, is a very strange kind of heroism: Sam Goody is no knight in shining armor, nor is he a holy man or a martyr. He's a hero because he can, Midas-like, convert anything he touches into a commodity to be sold (even something so resolutely non-commodifiable as Varèse's experimental music). It is only because the tale of the triumph of the Knight of Commodification over the Dragon of Aesthetic Innovation was being sung in the pages of Look that Zappa heard of Varèse in the first place. Secondly, there's the actual triumph of markets and commodities in midcentury America: the country was well on its way to being the everything-all-the-time-if-you-can-pay-for-it nation it is today, and you could even find a Varèse album in a shitkicker county if you traveled a town or two over. Also, there's the sense that the only value is the market or commodity value. What's the value of Varèse? Only what the market will bear, by the logic of commodities. And, since the market in La Mesa wouldn't bear $5.95, Zappa was actually able to afford the album.

Moreover, since young Zappa wasn't exposed to any system of cultural hierarchy other than the commodity, he encountered all music as equal (all commodities are in some sense exchangeable -- lead, feathers, fighter jets, bassoons, church windows, first folios of Shakespeare, truck tires, Van Gogh paintings, whatever: pile them up high enough and you can trade one for another). In another time and place he'd probably have learned one or another kind of snobbery. I mean, if you read old issues of Gramophone from the 1920s, the world of music is pretty clearly split into classical, on the one hand, and everything else, which was seen as worthless crap, on the other). So: the logic of commodities, where everything is curiously the same, was the only logic by which music was sorted for young Zappa, pure product of America that he was. And it was, I suppose, from a million little actions like Zappa's purchase of Varèse that the collapse of cultural hierarchies, of Webern-good, Lightinin' Slim-bad, followed. It's been said that with the triumph of market forces, all that is solid melts into air. It turns out that includes aesthetic hierarchy.


By the way: I'm ashamed to admit I didn't know, until reading Frank Zappa's book, that he and Captain Beefheart hung out together in high school. And thinking about them together reminds me that the guy who first turned me on to Belgian Surrealism, Michel Delville, is not only the editor of a book on Captain Beefheart: he plays in a band called Trank Zappa Grappa in Varese, which is well worth checking out.

Rimbaud Notebook

I've been working on an essay about Rimbaud and, as always, taking more notes than necessary. Here are a few of them...


*

The hagiographic quality of the French commentaries on Rimbaud can be overwhelming. If the French ever found the bullet with which Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist, they'd put it in Lourdes and use it to heal the lame.

*

In 1901 a Belgian book-lover discovered all 500 copies of Une Saison en Enfer in the storeroom of the printer Rimbaud had hired 28 years earlier. Rimbaud, it seems, had never paid the man.

Rimbaud never tried to publish Illuminations: it was his former lover Verlaine who got it into print, long after Rimbaud departed for Africa. At the time, Verlaine thought it was a posthumous publication.

Whatever else you can say about Rimbaud, he was not a careerist.

*

Mallarmé said that Rimbaud "amputated himself" from poetry. It makes you wonder: what did Mallarmé amputate himself from by staying a poet?

*

I, like everyone else, really want the "Adieu" at the end of Une Saison en Enfer to be the last bit of poetry Rimbaud wrote, but the chronology remains muddled. It's probable some of the Illuminations came afterwards. Rimbaud is as inconsiderate of others in chronology as he was in everything else.

*

I don't think we can underestimate the role France's national humiliation in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 played in setting the mood for Rimbaud's poetry. The "Mauvais Sang" or "Bad Blood" section of Une Saison en Enfer revels in the idea of the French as a debased people. The self-doubt of a defeated nation becomes an opportunity for Rimbaud to undermine one of the pillars of bourgeois morality: pride in nation.

*

Everyone who writes about Rimbaud has an opinion about the statement "Je est un autre" ("I is another"), But for me the real interest lies in a related statement, "C'est faut de dire: Je pense: on devrait dire on me pense" ("It's wrong to say I think: one should say I am thought").

I could find only one truly first-rate gloss on the passage, by the great Geneva-school phenomenologist Georges Poulet. For him, "I am thought" (meaning something like "something thinks me," not "I am composed of thought") can be paraphrased as an undoing of the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am." Poulet: "I am, I do not doubt my existence, nor do I doubt that it is personal, or that the way in which I apprehend it is not equally personal. I am, and feel myself to be, living. But this being that I am and of which I am conscious, is dependent upon a power I cannot reasonably attribute to myself. My effort to think myself can only lead me to situate, somewhere back of me, a determining power of which I am the passive subject and about which I am at a loss to speak."

It's in the context of these ideas that "Je est un autre" takes on fuller resonance. Against this powerful sense of being formed by forces beyond one's control, "Je est un autre" can mean (again, in Poulet's words) "I can think myself other than I am or was."

*

It's freedom Rimbaud is after, but he's always after it the way a prisoner is, when he dreams of escape. Rimbaud feels the constraints of family, school, career, and religion, and satirizes them brutally in his earliest poetry. But what does escape look like? Sometimes it's a dream of a return to childhood (think of "Le Bateau Ivre," in which the only boat he cares for is the toy one launched by a child in a cold black puddle) and sometimes it's a dream of dissolving, and being swept away into nothingness (think of another part of "Le Bateau Ivre," where he dreams of the storms tearing his ship apart). Sometimes, too, it's a desire to transcend the limits of existence by having more than one life ("It seems to me we are owed other lives," he wrote in Une Saison en Enfer).

Robert Baker, in his wonderful study The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Philosophy gets at the nature of Rimbaud's escapism when he writes "At one extreme of his experience, Rimbaud explores theatrical, expressive, metaphoric multiplications of himself... while at another extreme he evokes a kind of translation of the self into the sweep of light."

What to Make of the NDR?

Back in the fall of '97 I opened my mailbox to find a free promotional CD from Naxos Records, a label specializing in inexpensive recordings of the more obscure corners of the classical music repertoire, often performed by fairly low-profile orchestras and ensembles. The CD was called Naxos: Ten Years of Success, and I suppose the bravado was merited. The good people at Naxos had succeeded by at least two criteria: they'd made a financial success for themselves, and they'd brought a vastly expanded range of music into broad circulation. The commemorative disk was a success, too, at least for me: I still listen to some of the tracks, long since scanned into my laptop and ported over to my various pods, phones, gizmos, and devices.

Today I opened my mailbox to find another collection commemorating a decade's worth of putting art in front of the public, only this time it wasn't music, it was writing: an anthology of poetry and fiction called Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years. The title's got none of the fine bragadocio of Ten Years of Success, although I suppose the implied existence of a second decade ahead is a bit of an expression of confidence, given the lifespan of most literary ventures. Still, one is tempted to ask: in what ways, if any, could the journal's first decade be described as "ten years of success"?

I've been reading the Notre Dame Review since its first issue, and have written for it more times than I can remember (there's a poem of mine, "Victory Over the Sun," in the anthology, too). There's generally been something I've been impressed by in every issue, and on occasion something I've disliked, but generally I've disliked it with a grudging respect. So even though I've only had the anthology in my hands for something like two hours, and read only bits and pieces, I feel like I've got a pretty good sense of the journal and what it has tried to accomplish.

The anthology has two introductions, one by each of the editors, John Matthias and William O'Rourke. Reading over Matthias' introduction helps clarify what has been best about the journal, as well as its shortcomings. Let's start with the main shortcoming. "All issues since the second," writes Matthias, "have an an umbrella-like theme — 'Dangerous Times,' 'Work,' 'Signs and Surfaces,' 'Body and Soul'..." This is true, in that each issue has a title, and several of the pieces inside relate to the title. But one senses some bad faith on the part of the editors: the themes tend to be quite general ("Signs and Surfaces" is hardly a theme in the way that, say, "New Cuban Poets" would be), and if you can write a convincing defense of how each piece connects even to the general theme, I'll come over and paint your house for you. There are exceptions: I remember one issue devoted to writing from the &NOW Conference of Innovative Writing. But overall I rather suspect that the idea of themes was part of the proposal written for the NDR early on, and that the editors experience it as a burden more often than not.

Other statements from Matthias' introduction really do clarify what has been best about NDR's editorial policy. "One distrusts a reader of Pound who cannot admire Auden, a reader of Elizabeth Bishop who will not open a book by Susan Howe," writes Matthias, and this broadmindedness informs both the journal as a whole and the present anthology, in which Caroline Bergvall and Derek Mahon rub shoulders. The presence of Bergvall and Mahon doesn't just indicate open-mindedness about form, either: it also indicates a sensitivity to writing from outside the United States, in translation and in English. Until the Chicago Review became a kind of American outpost of Cambridge School poetry, the Notre Dame Review was your best bet for finding exciting British poetry in an American literary review. Outside of a particular range of experimental work, it still is.

Matthias proudly points out that the first issue of the journal contained, along with much else, work by two Nobel Laureates and two poets publishing their first poems. One suspects the Nobelists were there as the result of some arm-twisting and some calling-in of favors, but I take Matthias' point: NDR has been neither hierarchical nor in-groupish, and this, too, is something in which its editors can take pride. There's a kind of centripetal force that afflicts some journals once they've become established, and it can result in a narrowing down of the range of contributors. Notre Dame Review has kept itself admirably open. This isn't to say that there's a lack of personality to the journal, though. There are, in fact, editorial preferences, best summed up by Matthias' observation that he and O'Rourke "notice that, among the selections, there is not a lot of first person hyper-subjectivity or narrow manifestations of identity poetics; when the self appears, it seems to be fully conditioned by history, and conscious of that." This seems entirely right to me in two senses: it's right in that it's an accurate description of the editorial preferences at work for the past ten years; and it's right in that it's a good policy to follow. We are, after all, always involved in a dialectical interaction with the past in one way or another (literary, social, political, etc.), and there aren't enough journals devoted to publishing writing that begins by acknowledging this. The idea that the writer should engage the past is as old as T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and as fresh as Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation. We need more of this, and the NDR is one of the places where we can count on getting it.

The anthology includes both fiction and poetry, but none of the critical writing that makes up a substantial portion of each issue, and this really is a shame, because NDR has been one of only a handful of journals (like Pleiades, Chicago Review, and of course Parnassus, among a few others) where reviewing habitually stretches its wings and becomes something more than publicity. When someone like John Peck writes a few thousand words worth of criticism, it's well worth anthologizing, and I wish some of that had been done. Still and all: I think the editors could, if they'd been less modest, have taken Naxos' route when titling the volume. Try it for size: Notre Dame Review: Ten Years of Success. Yeah, that fits.

Planets on Tables

A short review I wrote of Bonnie Costello's new book of criticism, Planets on Tables is now up on the Boston Review site. Costello's put together an interesting book of lit crit, tackling the big question of the role poetry plays in mediating between public events and private life. She treats the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wilbur, and (surprisingly) the works of artist Joseph Cornell.