What is the community for poetry? What is its fate, its future? Poet and critic Robert Archambeau begins Inventions of a Barbarous Age with these questions before ranging over the ridges and valleys of the contemporary poetry scene, pausing on the way to investigate mystic and Gnostic poetry, the norms of criticism, and the poetics of camp and the sublime. Taking in poets from W. H. Auden to Kenneth Goldsmith, and topics from poetic comedy to poetic tribalism, Archambeau is one of poetry’s great omnivores, and numbers among the leading poetry critics of his generation.
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Robert Archambeau is fascinated by the place poets stake out for their art, the claims they make about the relationship of poetry and power; and he is (sometimes uncomfortably) shrewd in ferreting out the motivations for such claims. His essays have the advantage of the best occasional writing—immediacy, a sense of responsiveness, conversationality—but Archambeau is also a “big ideas” critic, spinning his momentary interpretations of texts into penetrating insights about the place of poetry in the world.
—Mark Scroggins
Archambeau writes prose that’s consistently welcoming, curious, and free of the anxiety that marks so much criticism.
—Jonathan Farmer, Slate Magazine
A notable poet/critic, Archambeau’s a perfect example of how one person can take on both roles.
—Barry Schwabsky, The Nation
Archambeau is one of our smartest poetic sociologists, and he tackles the biggest problems facing poetry in our time.
—Norman Finkelstein, Contemporary Literature
If you want to see someone having fun while thinking provocatively about contemporary poetry, try Archambeau. I always do.
—Stephen Burt
Archambeau has perfect pitch.
—Marjorie Perloff
I. The Future, The
Present
You Will Object: Four Futures for
Poetry
Poetry as ubiquitous, as
commodified, as self-obsessed, as community-building. You don’t like one
future? Try another!
Who is a Contemporary Poet?
In which I continue an old
argument with Kenneth Goldsmith about what counts as contemporary. The fight is
called off when Giorgia Agamben clobbers us both.
The Future of Genius
Does the old category of
‘genius’ have a future? The origin and destination of a category of literary
analysis, with reference to Brooklyn hipsters in Warby Parker glasses.
Invitation
to the Voyage: Notes on the Trajectory of the Poetic Image
How the literary image changed
from Dante to Baudelaire, and what that says about where it has been and may be
heading.
Charmless and Interesting: The
Conceptual Moment in Poetry
What Conceptualism has going for
it and what it doesn’t do very well, with reference to the old aesthetic
category of “charm” and the newly-re-theorized category of the
“interesting.” As in “Conceptualism?
Well, it’s… interesting…”
Inventions of a Barbarous Age:
Contemporary Rhyme in Poetry
How has rhyme changed since it
ceased being an unexamined norm in poetry? How can it be done well now? With a
lot of talk about Anthony Madrid’s amazing unpublished history of rhyme and an
examination of Michael Robbins’ The
Second Sex, among other books.
II. Poetry and
Community
When Poetry Mattered
Poetry
matters most when things are really, really bad. We should be so lucky that poetry matters
less here than elsewhere, now than then.
The Disinheritance of the Poets
What happens when privileged
people get kicked out of the realm of power and money and end up in the realm
of poetry? More about rich white guys elbowing other people out of the way,
intentionally or otherwise.
In Solitude, In Multitude: Crowds
and Poetry
A quick trip through the 19th
and 20th centuries of flâneurs, introverts, countercultural snobs,
and poets othered for their identity, with reference to Crowds and Power.
Between Facebook and Montparnasse:
Poetry’s Lonely Time
Long story short: we live at the
moment of dialectical synthesis between bohemian enclaves and the academic
dispersion of the poets across the vastness of all those rectangular states.
Proud Men in Their Studies: On Mark
Scroggins
Wow, did Scroggins not like
this.
So a Poet Walks into a Bar: Notes on
Poetry Readings
Just what the hell is a poetry reading all about? Find out
now, via rhetorical theory!
III. Mystics and
Gnostics
A Stranger from the
Sky: Sun Ra as Poet and Alien
Why haven’t we been taking Sun Ra
seriously as a poet? He’s closer to T.S. Eliot than fans of either of them are
likely to want to admit.
The
Open Word: An Essay and a Letter for Peter O’Leary
The most linguistically audacious
Catholic mystic in poetry since Gerard Manley Hopkins.
A Scribe and His Ghosts: The Poetry
of Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein: because you needed
proof that wit and mysticism could work together.
“That’s a Real Angel You’re Talking
To”: Robert Duncan and Mythological
Consciousness
This is really about the
challenge Duncan’s insistence on the reality of myth poses to modern
consciousness, and to Duncan himself. I mean, I’m not sure we really can read
Duncan the way he wanted us to.
Kenneth Rexroth’s Other Worlds
In which I argue that Robert
Hass owes a lot to Rexroth, and that Rexroth understood the sublime
intuitively.
A
Strange and Quiet Fullness: The Uncanny Charles Simic
In which I argue that despite some Cold War
attitudes that don’t hold up all that well, Simic is the real deal when it
comes to the uncanny in poetry.
John
Crowe Ransom’s Quarrel with God
Long story short: a preacher’s kid starts to doubt
God, has his doubts confirmed in the First World War, writes a defense of
Christianity that is really an attack on Christianity, and develops a poetic
based on these beliefs. It hardens into a dogma and damages the poetry, but it
couldn’t really have been otherwise.
History, Totality, Silence
This is the most “high theory
circa 1995” title of anything I’ve ever written. It brings in Walter Benjamin,
John Matthias, and Levinas.
IV. Others
An ABC of Gertrude Stein
This is pretty much what it
sounds like. G is for Genius, N is for Narcissim…
The American Poet as European, or
Egon Schiele’s Ladder
This is mostly about aesthetic
distance and what it can do for, or to, you.
Poetry Ha Ha
I don’t think we’re really good
at talking about comedy in poetry. This is my attempt. A lot of Henri Bergson,
a bit of Freud and Hobbes, and some funny stuff from Aaron Belz.
Camping Modernism: Timothy Yu's Chinese Silences
Why I think Tim Yu’ 100 Chinese Silences is a necessary
rethinking of Modernism via pastiche and the aesthetics of camp.
Ambiguous Pronouns are Hot: On Rae
Armantrout
In which Rae Armantrout does the
voice of Paris Hilton (remember Paris Hilton?) and makes some crazy things
happen with gender and power.
If
I Were A Freudian This Essay Would Be Called “The Mother’s Penis”:
A
Note on Daisy Fried
Another take on gender and power in
poetry.
Poetics of Embodiment
If you don’t read Swedish, you
should probably go hang out outside Jennifer Hayashida’s house and set off
fireworks to praise her for translating Karl Larsson—because he knows how to
explain the way embodiment comes into contact with language and power and lays
open the dark disparities of our moment.
Also, there’s stuff about Joy Division.
V. On Criticism
Hating the Other Kind of Poetry
In which I examine what’s at
stake in partisan poetry sniping, and try to understand my own sense that it’s
a mug’s game.
The Work of Criticism in the Age of
Mechanical Recommendation
What can a critic do that a
recommendation algorithm can’t?
The Avant-Garde in Babel
What we talk about when we talk
about the avant-garde, and why we’re probably all talking about different
things. My attempt (with much help from Per Bäckstrom) to purify the language
of the critical tribe.
Fanaticism! Intolerance!
Disinterest!
This is really a kind of poetics
of camp, along with an argument for why we need such a thing. It takes a turn
through Kant and Schiller and back out via Situationist thinking about “the
sepulcher of aesthetic disinterest.”
The Abject Sublime, or: Jean Genet’s
Vaseline
Because a queering of the sublime
via the abject shows us just how bad we usually are about distinguishing
between different types of beauty, and because Jean Genet is the poet laureate
of abjection.
VI. Afterword
Death of a Bookseller
This is
really an elegy for a man who taught me as much as any of my professors. He ran
a dusty bookshop in Chicago. Both he and the store are gone, and always with
me.
You can find the book on Amazon and at the MadHat website, as well as at the more poetry-and-litcrit-friendly sort of bookstore (try the Grolier Poetry Bookshop if you're near Harvard Square).
