Samizdat Blog

"Every Playboy Centerfold: The Decades" and Why it Matters (To Me)

2012-01-28T10:45:00.002-06:00

Secret revealed: I was almost an unemployed art historian. I was also almost an unemployed philosopher, and an unemployed historian. That is, back when I was a student I went through the same kind of little crisis most students go through, wondering about the subject in which I should major. It was a near thing, but I ended up an English major and, for better or worse, fell in with a crowd of poets. I also ended up employed as a poet and critic, but I think that was mere chance — unemployment is the default position for humanists of all kinds. Anyway, the kind of poetry and literary criticism I write tends to have a lot to do with history, and to flirt a little with philosophy. But art history has always been a kind of road-not-taken for me, and lately I've been spending some time watching a lecture series on the history of European art, a course solid and old-fashioned enough to remind me of the introductory art history class I took so long ago, when I'd sit in the back of a giant auditorium and listen to the professor in those educational interludes between bouts of futzing around with a recalcitrant slide projector.

The lecture series I'm watching comes with an accompanying textbook, and, in keeping with the para-academic nature of the enterprise, it includes little summaries, paradigms, and even study questions. It's basic stuff ("we can understand what we're looking at better if we think in terms of subject, interpretation, style, context, and emotion") but good stuff, in an introductory way, and I've decided to think through all of the study questions. The first of these was almost too easy — it asked us to describe the difference between interpretation and style, style being something like a visual language (Renaissance single-point perspective, say, or Cubism) and interpretation being more like the particular statement about the subject being made within that style. But the second question I encountered was more intriguing: it simply asked for an analysis, in terms of the five categories of understanding in the course's paradigm, of an artwork one has cared about. Here's what I did with that question earlier this morning, while munching a croissant, drinking coffee, and staring into space.

The artwork that came to mind was a four panel, digitally rendered, set of photographs created by Jason Salavon, a Chicago-based artist with whom I've hung out on a few occasions, and whom I brought up to Lake Forest once as a speaker for the &NOW Festival. Salavon's piece is called "Every Playboy Centerfold: The Decades." Here's the description from Salavon's website:

From a broader series begun in 1997, the photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture.

That's it above, by the way — the image at the top of this post. But what can we say about it if we somewhat mechanically apply the categories of subject, interpretation, style, context, emotion? And why do I, personally, find it appealing?

The subject is pretty clear: through a process of digital averaging of visual elements, the piece manages to include 40 years of Playboy centerfolds. But what's the take, the interpretation? It has to do with history, and this is the first thing that appeals to me: I've got a fundamentally historical imagination. When I teach a literature course, it's always in some way about the evolution of civilization, and how the literature of the time plays into that evolution. When I write a critical essay about contemporary poetry, it tends to situate that poetry in a context going back at least to the Romantic era of the early nineteenth century (I do this even when it isn't necessary, and many's the editor who has trimmed the historical limbs from the overgrown shrubbery of my prose). Salavon's interpretation of the history of the Playboy centerfold over the years seems clear enough: the women get thinner, and they get blonder. What's really interesting about this is how the point, which in the hands of another kind of artist could be made rather heavy-handedly, is made without a lot of rhetorical bombast. The piece has a lot to say about beauty, and about the ways men objectify (and women are taught to objectify) the female body. It even implies an increasingly brutal body image regime (Barbie über alles!). But it makes the point with coolness and quiet, like a scientist presenting data and letting the data speak for itself.

In terms of style, the piece combines something decades-old with something only recently possible. That is, it certainly owes a lot to Pop Art, to the whole Andy Warhol/Roy Lichtenstein manner of taking the forms of popular culture (publicity photos for Warhol, comic books for Lichtenstein, pornography for Salavon) and reworking them. But the numerical averaging of image components is something only really made possible by information technology, of which Salavon is a master: he's holds a joint position in art and computer science at the University of Chicago, and used to be a video game programmer. (Salavon explores the poetry of statistics elsewhere, in images averaging out two generations of yearbook photos, or abstractions containing every frame of a particular movie, or in images of the statistically average house in any given market — it's no wonder that he was chosen to create the artwork at the U.S. Census Bureau headquarters).

As for context — well, it's not a piece that could have been made before artists turned to media critique. There's been some of that since the rise of mass media in the late nineteenth century, but it really took off after the second world war, with Situationism and its cousins. And I think it's also a feminist, or post-feminist, work, in that it isn't a piece that takes the female nude for granted as a subject for art. It foregrounds the mediation and social construction of beauty ideals, and in that regard it's utterly unlike something like, say François Boucher's "Nude on a Sofa," which I find mesmerizing for entirely different reasons than those that compel me to look at Salavon's work:

This brings us, at last, to the quality of emotion. There's a certain coolness to Salavon's four images, stemming from their partial abstraction. But this coolness plays off against the way the heterosexual male gaze is meant to interact with the original images, which, after all, were made to provoke the heat of desire. Those blurred, abstracted figures are haunting because they're uncannily both figurative and abstract, provocative and etherial. And they present images of desire at a kind of Apollonian remove, making us see them with a kind of historicizing, quantifying gaze at odds with the simple lustful gaze the original images imply and create. In the end, this gives us (or, at any rate, me) a kind of doubled emotion: a bass note of Dionysian abandonment to desire, and another note that resonates high above, in the realm of the self-conscious intellect. And that's the emotional note that sings its siren song directly into my ears.

Our Literary Moment: Kenny Goldsmith, meet Willie Yeats

2012-01-22T16:28:00.005-06:00

Keith Tuma, debonair man of letters

Sometimes, when you're reading a couple of seemingly unrelated books simultaneously, there's a strange overlap of some kind. I experienced just such a moment of serendipity today.

For the last few mornings I've been reading a couple of chapters from Keith Tuma's new book On Leave with my morning coffee. It's a book that combines literary anecdotes with reflections on the meaning of anecdotes, all shot through with bits of the headlines and scenes from Keith's life as he writes the book. It's been a slightly strange experience, since Keith's life and mine have had a lot of overlap without actually colliding very often: we lived, at different times, in the same Chicago neighborhood; we've both been pulled into the orbit of former students of Yvor Winters,; and we both take an interest in British poetry, with an eye open to the experimental wing (he much more than I). We have friends in common. We were both plenary speakers at the Assembling Alternatives poetry conference in New Hampshire years ago, an event to which his book returns again and again. We both go to the annual literary conference in Louisville, though except for a dinner with Geoffrey Hill in South Bend, that's been the only place we've talked. So for me there's a kind of uncanniness to the book: in both Tuma's literary anecdotes and his autobiographical sections, I see into worlds that are sort of mine and sort of not.

But that's not what struck me today. The bit that struck me today was something I'd read a while back, a comment of Kenneth Goldsmith's that Keith recorded: "Kenneth Goldsmith," writes Tuma, "says that what defines our moment is knowing that it has all been done in poetry, in writing, and art..." I didn't spend much time on thinking about the passage (I'd barely touched my coffee), except to note Goldsmith's typical concern with what it means to be up to date, what it means to be engaged with things specific to our own time.

Then, this afternoon, I was plugging away re-reading Yeats' autobiographies, taking notes for a chapter about his work I hope to write for a book of criticism I've been working on. And there, in a passage about his association with the poets of the Rhymer's Club of the 1890s, I found Yeats describing himself and his peers as "men who spoke their opinions in low voices... and timidly as though they knew that all subjects had long since been explored, all questions long since decided in books whereon the dust settled..." Yeats and the Rhymers came to this belief after reading Walter Pater's Renaissance, particularly the chapter on Michelangelo, where similar sentiments of belatedness were expressed. Pater's book appeared in the 1870s.

If we think of the thing that "defines our moment" as something that makes it different than other moments — as I believe most people do — then Goldsmith's notion that our certainty about belatedness being what defines us rings false. But that's neither here nor there, really. When something is objectively false, the thing that becomes interesting is the subjective need that allows us to believe it. So maybe what makes our moment special isn't that we feel it's all been done (people have been feeling that way for better than a century). Maybe one of the things makes our moment distinct is our need to think that we're distinct from a past with which we actually have a great deal in common — our compulsion to find differences and distinctness at any cost, even historical accuracy.

The Absurd and How To Deal With It

2012-01-21T18:14:00.005-06:00

Why should anyone care about the theater of the absurd? I found myself arguing about this with a colleague a while back. We’ been thinking about a graduate seminar on the culture of the first half of the 20^th century, and arguing about what to include in the impossibly ambitious syllabus. I’d made a case for including Beckett, and my colleague, a historian, had argued against including him. When pressed, I found I had little to say about the historical significance of Beckett’s work or, indeed, about the significance of any works in the theater of the absurd. And yet I felt, and still feel, that there’s something important about Arrabal and Beckett and Ionesco and all the rest, something of social significance, not limited to the particulars of any particular play. It’s just such a strange thing to have happened, the theater of the absurd. But what’s important about it? I know the issue’s been eating at me, since I dreamed, the other night, about Foursome, one of Ionesco’s short plays. I went back and read it yesterday, and somewhere about halfway through the things I wished I could have said to my colleague started to become clear to me. In the end, I think the flourishing of the theater of the absurd in the 1940s and 50s tells us a great deal about the position of the arts in society during that time, and about the alienation of artists from the larger culture around them.

My personal touchstone for the idea of absurdity comes from a passage in Camus in which we’re told about a man talking on a telephone in one of those old-fashioned glassed-in phone booths. The man talks but, says Camus, “we cannot hear him beyond the glass partition, but we can see his senseless mimicry. We wonder why he is alive.” The man’s expressions and gestures have the form of an emotionally engaged person, but from our position beyond the glass we are deprived of any meaningful context for those gestures. We have the forms of life without any meanings or values attached to them — and that is the world of the absurd, of a universe that refuses to give us any transcendent values. The theater of the absurd works this way, giving us the elements of meaningful drama without much by way of a specific meaning attaching to them. It’s important, for example, that the Godot of Waiting for Godot is never specified: is Godot God, or the Revolution, or the bearer of wealth or significant messages? No. He’s an empty signifier, and so his arrival or non-arrival become deprived of specific meaning. The hijinks and pratfalls and yearning speeches of Vladimir and Estragon have the form of meaningful yearning and frustration, but they’re not attached to any specific object, so in the end they are difficult to judge, or sympathize with. They are the gestures of the man on the other side of the phone booth’s glass.

Consider Ionesco’s Fourplay (or Scène a quatre). Already the title indicates that we’re dealing with the form of drama more than the content. It refers to the four characters in the one act — de-emphasizing content for form, just as the sight of the man on the phone behind glass emphasizes the form of his gestures, not the content of his conversation. It’s as if Shakespeare, instead of calling his greatest play King Lear, chose to call it One Bad Decision and its Consequences.

The play opens with a scene that is a kind of abstract, version of the core of drama: we have two characters in conflict. But the conflict is without any content. Two characters pace around, going in circles in opposite directions. When they collide, they speak and reverse direction:

DUPONT: …No…

DURAND: Yes…

DUPONT: No…

DURAND: Yes…

DUPONT: No…

DURAND: Yes…

It’s primal dramatic stuff to begin with a conflict, but here the conflict is without any kind of content, at least not that we know about, nor do we find out about it as the conflict elaborates. There is no way to pick sides, no one with whom to sympathize. The two characters are even costume identically, so it is impossible to find some value system based on visual cues (a landlord vs. a proletarian, for example). In Lear Shakespeare gave us the selfish, scheming modern individualism of Edmund vs. the traditional feudal loyalty of Edgar, so there was something emotional, political, and ethical at stake in their conflict. Ionesco’s giving us nothing — he keeps the glass wall up between us and these characters, allowing us to see their gestures and their conflict without letting us attach value to that conflict. The absurd, indeed!

Later, when we’ve seen some variations of this “yes!” “no!” conflict, Ionesco changes things up a bit:

DURAND: You don’t need to keep on saying yes to me, it’s no, no…NO.

DUPONT: You are pigheaded, you can see very well that you’re pigheaded…

DURAND: You’re reversing our roles, my friend…

The “yes” man Durand has become the “no” man, and Dupont calls him on it. It’s a classic dramatic move to have the nature of a conflict reverse. Think of David Mamet’s Oleanna: the professor, John, begins as the empowered one on the offensive, abusing his privilege; later the formerly disempowered student Carol goes on the offensive, abusing her newfound empowerment every bit as much as John had abused his power. But in Mamet’s play, something’s at stake: the complex gender and generational power dynamics of life in the late 20^th century university, where a highly localized, limited empowerment of women was challenging an institutionally fading, if socially prevalent, empowerment of men. The characters stand for something, and their conflict means something, and connects to the issues faced by real people in the real world. Ionesco’s done away with all that, leaving us with the form of a reversal in conflict detached from any values we can identify or about which we can care. It’s a pretty radical gesture. There’s a kind of themelessness in place of theme, and a kind of characterlessness in place of character. It’s like getting the sketch or blueprint of a play without any concession to the particular values or interests we associate with content.

Of course we’ve only met two characters so far, and the title promises us four. At this point we meet a third character, Martin, costumed (significantly) identically to Durand and Dupont. When he enters, we may think we’re in for some meaningful intervention in this empty conflict. But at first what we get, instead, is some meta-dramatic comedy. “Oh…stop being so stupid…” says Martin, “Characters in a play don’t always have to be more stupid than in real life.” But this meta-dramatic comedy leads no where: there’s no revelation about the meaning of drama. And soon enough Martin becomes a part of another classic dramatic device, the triangular conflict. We see moments when Martin is at odds with Dupont who is at odds with Durand who is at odds with Martin, and go through various permutations and combinations, with two characters at odds with one, followed by realignments. I haven’t checked, but it’s possible Ionesco puts us through all the possible options of alliance and conflict, all the while keeping the nature of the conflict as empty as it was in the initial conflict of “yes” vs. “no.” In essence, we still see only Camus’ man behind glass, full of gestures that, for us, have no content. No specific values seem to be at stake in this absurd universe of ignorant nitwits clashing by night.

It’s at this point that a fourth character enters, along with the hope that we may be delivered from absurdity. This character is different: a well-dressed woman with a fashionable handbag. She enters the conflict, but not in the same way: she’s the object of desire, with Durand, Dupont, and Martin each claiming that she is his fiancée. They struggle over her, and gradually she becomes disheveled, losing her handbag, her gloves, and other pieces of clothing as they pull her this way and that. It’s significant that no one character seems to have a greater claim on her than any other: this isn’t a matter of true love and the virtuous suitor winning out over villains. It’s a group of three ham-handed stumblebums, between which there is nothing to choose.

But if we can’t choose, the woman can, and she does, in the play’s abrupt conclusion:

THE LADY [to the three men]: Leave me alone, all of you.

DURAND, DUPONT, MARTIN [astonished]: Me? Me? Me?

[All movement stops. The LADY, rumpled, unhooked, winded, half undressed, moves down to the footlights.]

THE LADY: Ladies and gentlemen, I agree with you entirely. This is completely idiotic.

[Curtain]

This is the really interesting point, and the payoff for sitting through a short play that, despite some wonderful business involving potted plants being handed around, threatened, by virtue of it’s very refusal of specific values in conflict, to be utterly boring. But what’s it all about? Is Ionesco condemning the meaninglessness of an absurd world? Is he bemoaning the fate of a world without values? I almost want to say yes. But not so fast: the world isn’t condemned, here: the play is. And it isn’t Ionesco doing the condemning: it’s the audience, or at least the audience as he’s written it into the play. And then the real question arises: what’s the significance of Ionesco’s sense that this play, so caught up in the forms of drama, and so cut off from an ordinary audience’s concern with values in which it can feel a stake? Is the play (prior to the ending) in the right? Or is the implied audience of the play’s ending correct?

One way to understand what’s at stake in the ending of “Fourplay” is to look at the claims made for the theater of the absurd by Martin Esslin (the man who coined the very term “theater of the absurd”) and to run them against the ideas of one of modernist art’s most articulate opponents, José Ortega y Gasset.

Esslin, in his 1961 study The Theater of the Absurd, tells us that theater has suffered an “apparent eclipse” with the rise of mass culture forms like television and film. Theater has become an art for the few, and it’s forms and values reflect that, becoming less sentimental, more cerebral, more challenging. This, though, is not to be taken as a sign of marginality or obsolescence. In a move as old as that of P.B. Shelley in “Defense of Poetry,” Esslin claims an enormous importance for an apparently marginal art. The mass media, he says, are “too ponderous and costly to indulge in much experiment and innovation,” so true innovation will come from the stage, especially the stage of absurdist playwrights like Ionesco. “The avant-garde of the theater today is, more likely than not, the main influence on the mass media of tomorrow, and the mass media, in turn, shape a great deal of the thought and feeling of people throughout the Western world.” The absurdist playwright may not appeal to many people initially — indeed, they may, like Ionesco’s implied audience, find avant-garde productions “completely idiotic.” But fret not! Such initial unpopularity is only initial: in the long game, absurdist playwrights will be the unacknowledged legislators of the world. “Thus,” says Esslin, “the type of theater discussed in this book is by no means of concern only to a narrow circle of intellectuals. It may provide a new language, new ideas, new approaches, and a new, vitalized philosophy to transform the modes of thought and feeling of the public at large in a not too distant future.”

If we look at Ionesco’s play from something like Esslin’s point of view, the joke, at the end, is on the audience. They’ve been given a play stripped of all sentimentality, a play that shows us a truly absurd world, where there’s nothing to choose between the sides on major conflicts, where there’s no coaching about what to value, where we’re very much out on our existential own with regard to the question of values. King Lear chooses for us, holding up the hierarchical Edgar over the individualistic Edmund (a position we might not, if we really looked at the play critically, find all that sympathetic). Foursome refuses to do that thinking for us. In this view, the woman at the end, when she invites the audience to share her views, is offering a kind of cop-out, a chance to be inauthentic, and to accept her views because they’re easy, and articulated for us. The implied audience that condemns the play is like Esslin’s mass media audience. But fret not! The absurdist truths will strike some of the crowd, and their views will be the influential and important ones, spreading slowly out. It’ll be the most creative and clever audience members who see past the cop-out ending, and they’ll let the absurdist view enter their work in the cultural sectors, and slowly, slowly, the ordinary schmucks will catch on to the new, unsentimental worldview.

That’s one way of seeing things. But consider another perspective, one that opens up to us when we think about modern drama from the point of view of Ortega y Gasset. In The Dehumanization of Art (which predates Ionesco’s play). If Esslin’s view of the audience for works of art like Foursome is that the challenging nature of the work will eventually win out, first appealing to the most independent-minded intellectuals and eventually seeping out into society in that vauge, Shelleyan way, Ortega takes quite the opposite view. Modern art, he says, “will always have the masses against it. It is essentially unpopular; moreover, it is antipopular.”

Ortega’s argument runs like this: the majority of people do not admire art for its specifically artistic or formal qualities. Rather, the man on the street “likes a play when he has become interested in the human destinies presented to him, when the love and hatred, the joys and sorrows of the personages so move his heart that he participates in it as though it were happening in real life.” The masses want emotional participation when they see a dramatic conflict — exactly the sort of thing that Ionesco denies them in the conflicts of Fourplay. Ortega continues describing the masses, saying “by art they understand a means though which they are brought into contact with interesting human affairs. Artistic forms proper — figments, fantasy — are tolerated only if they do not interfere with the perception of human forms and fates. As soon as purely aesthetic elements predominate and the story of John and Mary grows elusive, most people feel out of their depth and are at a loss what to make of the scene…”

Now comes the really interesting part of Ortega’s argument. “Pirandello’s drama,” he says (naming a favorite precursor of absurdism) has “the sociological effect of compelling the people to recognize itself for what it is: a component among others of the social structure… On the other hand, the new art also helps the elite to recognize themselves and one another in the drab mass of society and to learn their mission which consists in being few and holding their own against the many.” It all sounds very Pierre Bourdieu, doesn’t it? Art that foregrounds form (as does Ionesco’s), and that doesn’t allow for easy emotional identification with characters and their values (as Ionesco’s doesn’t) forces the majority of people to see that they are not the whole of society. They may be great in numbers, but they and their tastes aren’t the only game in town. And such art shows the intellectual or cultural elite that they, too, are a class of sorts. It helps them find one another, and gives them courage to represent their (minority) values against the majority.

Looking at the ending of Ionesco’s Foresome from an Ortegan point of view, we see a special challenge for the audience: the lady, leaving the stage and joining the audience, offers to speak for that audience, and condemn the rest of the play. Those who’ve been alienated by what they’ve seen may applaud happily at her action. But those who find themselves with a kind of wry, knowing smile will see that Ionesco has set up a complex conflict—a conflict between an absurdist play that refuses to dictate values to us, and a non-absurdist ending, that offers to dismiss the play. Between these two elements of the audience there will be no agreement. Indeed, the function of the play is not what it would be for Esslin (the beginning of a slow process of the conversion of the many by the few). Rather, it would be the spark that creates an awareness that there is a real division between the few and the many.

To my mind, the real value of putting an absurdist playwright like Beckett or Ionesco on the syllabus of a seminar on modern culture would be to open up a discussion about the question of elite or minority tastes and mass audience. Clearly, such theater poses the question starkly. And whether we take Esslin’s view, or Ortega’s, or some other perspective, any discussion of modern culture in the early twentieth century needs to address the deliberate unpopularity of the kinds of art so many of the greatest geniuses of the period produced.

Going to Innisfree

2012-01-12T12:19:00.003-06:00

Are we autonomous individuals, or inextricably bound to our communities? Is art created in freedom, for its own sake, or does it come into being to support a cause larger than itself? I've been having a look at these questions lately in relation to the poetry of W.B. Yeats, as part of the research for a Yeats & Eliot chapter of a book that now has the unfortunate working title Power and Poetics: A Social History of Aesthetic Autonomy and Poetry. The questions certainly haunted Yeats: as any study of his work will tell you, he came of age as a poet divided between the l'art pour l'art symbolism of the Rhymer's Club of the 1890s and the anti-colonial nationalism of the Irish Literary Revival.

The question of autonomy and community goes deeper than this, though: in fact, Yeats grew up in a household where the question was actively debated, and his father, the painter John Butler Yeats, was deeply interested in the question.

Reading JBY's letters, one frequently runs across statements that embrace the notion of the artist as a proudly isolated figure, disdaining the demands of the audience: "the artist must always be an aristocrat and disdain the street," he writes, or—echoing his favorite poet Keats, in Keats' rebuke of Shelley for putting politics, community, and philosophy before aesthetics—"if the lark were to bother itself about the 'Collective Soul'... it would not sing at all. Elsewhere he argues that "the chief thing to know and never forget is that art is dreamland and that the moment a poet meddles with ethics and moral uplift he leaves dreamland, loses his music, and ceases to be a poet."

JBY was the furthest thing from a systematic thinker, though, and like a true negative capabilty-having lover of Keats, he often presented contradictory opinions without any irritable reaching after some final resolution. "Art for art's sake," he writes at one point, "is for those who hate life... the great artist is also a man like ourselves." Moreover, he argues on behalf of "democratic art" in a letter to his son, saying that WBY should aim at art "that unites a whole audience" because the art for art's sake crowd is just "a coterie of discontented artists" lacking worldly experience and relevance and amounting to nothing more than "a tea-party of old maids discussing marriage and large families."

Sometimes JBY pulls off a kind of having-it-both ways move, in which the moral and political problems of Ireland are best served by artists who do not aim at addressing those problems, but at a totally autonomous art. This is a move one sees from time to time in the late nineteenth century, and it becomes an important principle of some avant-garde movements in the twentieth century: in fact, it's a major principle of Surrealist thought. Here's an example of JBY making the autonomous artist politically engaged despite himself: "Ireland is to be rescued neither by Belfast nor by England, neither by priest nor by parson, but by its artists," because they, with their independence and apparent unconcern for the orthodoxies of political faction or ideological battle, provide what no one else can, "freedom of thought and the intoxication of truth... an unshackled intellect." It's all very Matthew Arnold, isn't it? So very like Arnold's hope that a disinterested group of intellectuals, with their "free and fresh play" of ideas, will save the world from bitter partisan struggle. JBY was 30 when Arnold's Culture and Anarchy appeared, and it seems to have had an influence on his thought.

Anyway. If we want to see how these issues play out in Yeats' poetry, we can look in any number of places. But "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is a particularly good poem with which to start, since here the question of autonomy vs. community is linked to filial loyalty, to both father and fatherland, in ways often overlooked.

Here's the poem:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, and a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

At first glance, it's just a nice bit of pastoralism, a yearning for a rural retreat from the busy modern world. It is that, certainly. And Yeats' statement about the poem's genesis re-enforces this pastoralism: he famously wrote that the idea came to him when he saw an artificial fountain in a London shop window, and remembered the peaceful waters of Sligo. But what to make of the specific kind of pastoral retreat the poem proposes?

It's worth considering the phrasing of the first line, "I will arise and go now." It's an allusion to the King James Bible, to Luke 15:18, and the story of the prodigal son. "I will arise and go to my father" are the words of the prodigal son, just as he resolves to return to his father and confess his sins. So this isn't just a retreat to a quiet place: it is a son's return to the things from which he has guiltily strayed. The place to which he the speaker resolves to return is overtly Irish (the place name alone establishes that), and the world of gray pavements is most likely London (it was where Yeats had lived, it was the place where the inspiration for the poem struck him, and it is the great metropolis most readily identified with "pavements grey"). So the poem presents us not just with pastoral retreat, but with a kind of re-affiliation of the poet and his nation, and with the implication that his removal from that nation was as wrong as the prodigal son's straying away from his family duties.

But if the poem contains a kind of nationalism, and an implicit statement that the poet's place and duty lie back among his own people, it's a funny kind of nationalism. The plan for life at Innisfree, after all, is a plan of isolation — or more than that: of an almost Robinson Crusoe-like self-sufficiency, with the poet building his own dwelling and raising his own food in autonomous isolation. Is this nationalism or individualism? Political commitment or individual withdrawal?

The issue is further complicated when we consider another allusion, one so buried that it was probably not intended to be found, but that is mentioned in Yeats' autobiographical writings. As the critic Michael North has pointed out in The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, the bean rows of the first stanza of Yeats' poem come from the "Bean Field" chapter of Henry David Thoreau's Walden. And not only that: they come from Yeats' father reading passages of Walden aloud to the poet. As Yeats says in Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, "my father had read to me some passage out of Walden, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree... I thought that having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind toward women and love, I should live, as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom."

So just as the Biblical allusion to the story of the prodigal son signals that there is a communal or nationalist urge at work, this other allusion signals that there is a Thoreauvian individualist urge at work, re-enforcing the poem's Crusoe-like images of autonomy and self-reliance. The nationalist story comes with the authority of fatherhood behind it (the poet away in the great metropolis is the nation's prodigal son), but so does the individualist story, since the poet is reminded of his father in the individualist mode JBY so often (but so inconsistently) struck. Without Yeats' autobiographical writings this latter paternal-filial relation would remain invisible, but we have the autobiographical writings, and we aren't hung-up on sticking to the internal evidence of the text itself, are we? I mean, my name's not W.K. Wimsatt, and yours isn't Monroe C. Beardsley.

What to make of the poem, then? Clearly it isn't a simple pastoral, but neither is it simply a Celticist poem of national affiliation. Nor is it simply a poem of individual autonomy. Instead, it is a poem that tries to have things both ways, but offers no easy fusion of the competing urges, along the lines of what JBY had offered in his comment about autonomous writers saving the nation by virtue of their autonomy. Despite the poem's apparently placid surface, the fusion is incomplete, or perhaps we should say dynamic, with the nationalist urge and the autonomous urge oscillating endlessly. The poem, in the end, is a dog chasing its own tail, or an attempt to square the circle. It attempts something not quite possible, which will, after all, be the ambition of Yeats throughout his career.

"The Return of the Prodigal Son," by Pompeo Batoni

Michael Leddy’s Brooklyn

2011-12-31T19:17:00.000-06:00

Brooklyn

The prettiest girl I ever saw
was sipping Hoffman's through a straw, give or take
a word. Right from the can.

A tree grows from that can, in the nervous house
I live in, it's transparent as soda.

In a nearby city,
make that nearly. Kids, it's nearly dinner.

That’s a poem by Michael Leddy, which we published in the old Samizdat magazine a dozen years go. I really liked it then, and I really like it now. I think I know why: you can read this one as casually or as intently as you want, and be happy with it either way. Read intently, it makes for a very interesting set of propositions — about language, about poetic tradition, about the association of ideas in the stream of consciousness, and about the passage of time.

If you are the sort who thinks, with Wordsworth, that “we murder to dissect,” or who wants interpretive certainty, rather than the exploration of a set of interpretive possibilities invited by the text, you might want to go do something else instead of reading the rest of this post, which will just make you want to type an angry comment, perhaps in capital letters.

Okay then. Let’s start at the beginning, which is to say, let’s start with some very traditional poetry, since the poem begins with rhyming iambics, slightly disguised because the second rhyme word isn’t at the end of a line, and because the metrics invite a little play in how one performs them:

The prettiest girl I ever saw
was sipping Hoffman's through a straw

We’ve got the full rhymes, and a scansion which is almost:

u/u/u/u/
u/u/u/u/

“Prettiest” is three syllables, of course, but depending on where you’re from, it’s likely to elide either a little or a lot, “prit-yest” being sort of clipped and Britsy, and “prit-ee-est” being flat-footed Nebraskan. Take it any way that makes you happy. I like to take it as a little stutter in the smoothness, thrown in there to make us conscious of what’s going on, and maybe to show us that Leddy doesn’t take the iambic line for granted.

Already there’s a lot here: the whole long tradition of iambic rhyming poetry about women, and about innocence, and about nostalgia, is all sort of packed in there, evoked suddenly and quickly. And then something really cool happens.

With “give or take/a word” we move from talking about the girl with the soda to talking about the representation of her in language. She was sipping Hoffman’s soda “give or take a word,” a very odd statement, difficult, even impossible, to take literally. I take this turn in the sentence, in all of it’s casualness, to make a statement something like “my poetic representation of the girl is close, but words distort, you know it and I know it — but let’s not make a big deal out of that, we can make communication work.” I like the statement about language, and I really like the sudden elision from the girl to language, from memory to medium. The enjambed nature of the sentence, which leaves us hanging for a moment between “give or take” and “a word,” helps the shift from scene-painting to metalanguage come as a nice little surprise, I think. And since the opening is so thoroughly, yet subtly, traditional, I like to take this little elision as making a kind of statement about the tradition of lyric poetry: that it distorts, but that, for the moment, we’re going to be okay with that. This is what I’d call an interpretive possibility, held open by the text, but not as anything firmer than that.

And then suddenly, with “Right from the can,” we’re back in the little memory-scene, as if nothing had happened. Except that we might not be. That is, we might be back to seeing the girl sip from a straw that’s in a can, but the language is ambiguous, and possibly contradictory — we can take it to mean “the straw went into the can,” (though why would we need to hear that?) but we can also take it to mean “she was drinking from the can,” which would contradict the earlier statement about how she was drinking her soda from a straw. Everything that seemed so accurate, right down to the obsolete, mid-Atlantic-specific brand of soda, is thrown into a bit of doubt. But it doesn’t really cause any huge interpretive crisis, since so little is at stake, this being just a little memory. We’re in the realm of “language is wobbly, but workable,” the realm of “give or take a word.”

In the next stanza, we get something that looks a little surreal: “a tree grows in that can.” It’s here that the title becomes important, because in a poem called “Brooklyn,” the phrase “a tree grows” brings to mind A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the 1943 novel turned into a move by Elia Kazan two years later. But so what? So this, I think: firstly, we get a kind of Proust’s madeleine effect: Hoffman’s soda becomes evocative of a whole world of early 20^th century New York immigrant struggle and perseverance (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn deals with Irish immigrants in the then-squalid tenements of Williamsburg), so there’s a kind of sense to the bizarre phrase “a tree grows in that can.” But there’s more than that. One of the main themes of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the importance of bending the truth: the protagonists can succeed only if they lie about where they live to get a child into a better school. So the poem’s theme of the distortable nature of language is re-enforced here.

Another thing I like about the poem is how rapidly it starts to accumulate a little catalog of all the kinds of things a poem can do: it gives us meter and rhyme, and the tradition of the poem about the glimpsed but distant female, it gives us the tradition of nostalgia for innocence, it gives us metalanguage, and now it gives us intertextual allusion. I especially like that the text to which it alludes is never named, and that it’s impossible to know if it is the movie or the book that is being invoked: this, again, adds to the “give or take a word” theme of language that distorts, but that’s good enough to work. I mean, the allusion works whether it’s the movie or the book that comes to mind.

What about the whole couplet, though, beyond the subtle, oblique allusion?

A tree grows in that can, in the nervous house
I live in, it's transparent as soda.

A tree, it seems, grows in the nervous house in which the speaker lives. It’s not an image that demands to be taken literally, especially not after the image of the tree growing in the can. So let’s not take it literally. Me, I like the notion of the tree being like the tree in Elia Kazan’s movie, which is a symbol of endurance despite travail. Taking things this way, we move from the innocent world of the speaker’s memory, where he saw a girl drinking soda, to a more difficult, tense present world — but it’s not a desperate world, not entirely, there’s hope if, like the characters in the novel, one holds on and does one’s best.

This takes us as far as “the nervous house I live in,” but then there’s “it’s transparent as soda.” Here again we’re in the realm of ambiguous or distorting language, the world of “give or take a word,” since the referent for the pronoun “it” is unclear: does it point us to the tree, or to the house? If it’s the tree, then we could say that the hope that redeems the nervousness is invisible, is something not readily apparent. But if “it” refers to the house, we’ve got a special kind of “nervous house,” one in which all of the nervous unhappinesses are on display to the world — as they would be in the tightly-packed tenement world of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The issue is undecidable, as the old deconstructionists would say, and I like having it that way, which really means having it both ways, since both possibilities are suggested. And, of course, the soda image brings us back to the girl and her world of innocence, so distant in tone from the fallen world in which the speaker now lives.

“In a nearby city” starts to launch us on a new narrative, moving us in space, but then there’s a little slip, moving from “nearby” to “nearly.” I like that the speaker is correcting himself: he puts us once again into the world of approximation, the world of “give or take a word.” And what follows shows us that we aren’t going to move in space, we’re going to move in time: to dinner time, in fact. But the fact that the speaker now is clearly a father shows us that the real movement in time has been through decades, as the speaker grows up. Hoffman’s soda hasn’t been around since the 60s, and this poem was written in early 2000, so we’ve gone from the childhood of the speaker to his adulthood. His role has changed, and now he’s looking after his own children. Which is wonderful for the poem, since when we begin with a memory of lost beauty and innocence and end with an adult who is accompanied by those who still experience the world innocently we’ve walked right into the heart of Romanticism, into Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”

What I really like about the poem is that it doesn’t just give us the life-cycle of the speaker, from youth to age. It also gives us something like the poetic history from Romanticism to now: it gives us the rhyming, iambic, nostalgic invocation of innocence gone by — but then it gives us everything since Romanticism. It gives us interpretive suggestion, rather than definiteness, such as we had in late nineteenth century symbolist poetry (“to suggest, that is the dream,” said Mallarmé), it gives us complex allusion, as the modernists did, and it gives us postmodern-style metalinguistic playfulness. It’s a hell of a lot to put into an old soda can, but it fits.

You can find the poem, along with another little piece by Leddy, over at the still-incomplete Samizdat archive.

10,000 Poets: The Problem of the Multitude in American Poetry

2011-12-23T16:24:00.007-06:00

Not long ago the poet Alfred Corn noted that “Year’s Best lists are strewn all over the print and electronic media. One publication I saw asked three perfectly plausible deciders to list the top ten poetry books of 2011. They did. And there was not a single overlap. The same thing happened to me years ago when myself and two other poets more or less in the same ballpark were asked to judge an annual prize. We each submitted ten names. There were no overlaps.” Corn then went on to ask a deceptively simple question: “What to make of this?” It’s tempting to answer by saying something about the infinite variability of taste, to sort of shrug and mutter "de gustibus non est disputandum." It’s even more tempting, if one is in a foul mood, to say that the differences probably have their root in the different tribal loyalties of the poetry demimonde, to shrug and mutter something about the folks at Foetry, with their documentation of poets giving prizes to their students and lovers, having been right all along. But neither shrugging-off of the question really takes it seriously enough. What are we to make of the lack of consensus about the best books of poetry? What does it say about the conditions under which American poetry is produced and consumed?

The dissensus about poetry is linked to another phenomenon people have been talking about lately: the sheer bulk of American poetry. Two of the most voracious poetry readers I know, Stephen Burt and Mark Scroggins, have both noted the enormous bulk of contemporary American poetry and the chatter—promotional, critical, gossipy—that surrounds it. “Every week, every day, I get email and Facebook notices and for that matter word of mouth about the latest debate or commentary or controversy or metapoetic metaconversation (sometimes it’s even attached to actual poems) on one of three dozen fine websites and active blogs and web-only or web-mostly mostly-poetry magazines… to be au courant, I should keep up. And I can’t keep up” says Burt on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog. “It feels like there’s been an exponential explosion of poetic activity out there, so much being written & published & written about that no-one, but no-one, is able to grasp more than a tiny fraction of it,” says Scroggins on Facebook. And it’s not just people I know who’ve been feeling the enormous weight of America’s poetic output. When I attended the ALSCW conference in Boston this fall, Mark Halliday gave one of the best-attended talks, a lecture called “10,000 Poets,” in which he addressed what we might call American poetry’s problem of the multitude. The term (mine, not Halliday’s) shouldn’t be taken to imply that it is a bad thing that so many poets are writing and finding their way to publication—only that this particular cultural situation, like all others, presents its own unique set of challenges and conundrums, along with its positive qualities. And I believe some of the problems Halliday outlined give us a way to answer Alfred Corn’s question.

Halliday began his address to the crowd in a big, dark Boston University auditorium by noting that Alexander Pope’s England had some five million inhabitants, while the United States of our own day has some 300 million people, half of whom had MFAs in creative writing. He was joking, of course, but the point was made: those of us concerned with American poetry today must deal with gigantism of scale in both population and education. Defining a poet as someone who has published a book, or aspires to do so, continued Halliday, we might conservatively estimate the number of American poets at 10,000 (“or,” he added, “30,000 — when I’m in a bad mood”). But is the number of poets really a bad thing? Isn’t it an embarrassment of riches? So what if no one person could possibly read all of the worthwhile poetry? From one point of view, this isn’t bad at all—and what would one do to change it? Repress poets? “But this isn’t an ambitious poet’s point of view,” said Halliday, “and I have been ambitious since 1971.”

Ambitious poets, according to Halliday, are bothered by the multitude of poets, and those who say they are not are merely pretending to a serenity they do not in fact possess. But what is the response of the ambitious poet to the problem of the multitude? What do poets do with their agitation and frustration? According to Halliday, the situation generates five behaviors among ambitious poets:

1. A Proclivity for Ignoring. If there are too many poets with whom to keep up, one response is simply to rule out whole swathes of the poetry landscape. Online poetry? One can tell oneself it’s not serious stuff. Journals with small readerships? Not worth reading. Alternately, one might tell oneself that journals with large readerships are compromised and unworthy of attention. Or one could simply label whole schools of poetry as unworthy of attention, kicking them into the dustbin with a hostile label (“School of Quietude,” anyone?). It’s not just poets who do this: when Helen Vendler recently opined that there can’t possibly have been 175 American poets worth reading in the entire 20th century, she was revealing a fairly strong proclivity for ignoring. [The examples here, I should note, are mine and not Halliday’s—I was taking notes quickly in a small notebook in a dark room, and didn’t manage to get all of his explanatory detail down].

2. Dependence on Mutual Praise Networks. Whether it’s the crowd with whom one went to graduate school, or a group with stylistic affinities, or just a set of people with a habit of blurbing one another’s books, there’s a strong tendency for poets in the age of the multitude to seek not safety, but recognition, in numbers. People in the tribe are bound to end up editing a decent journal, or a magazine review section, or heading a writing program, or handing out prize money, or editing an anthology. Best, thinks the ambitious poet, to stay on their good sides, and praise the other poets proleptically and profusely. If you’ve ever been at the AWP convention, you’ve actually seen these networks in their re-enforcement phase, like some primitive mating ritual. And if one combines this network-oriented way of operating with a good dose of ignoring whole swathes of American poetry (see item one, above), one can begin to think that recognition from one’s tribe is the recognition of the world. “Corruption of the soul,” said Halliday, “lurks for the writer of blurbs.”

3. Buzz Susceptibility. In the great deluge of poetry, one comes to passively accept the importance of some other poet simply because of the publicity buzz his or her work has generated. “Jorie Graham, Donald Hall, Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney—even if you don’t care, or have ceased caring, for their work, we desperately want someone to be famous,” said Halliday, and we’re willing to take it on faith—faith in publicity buzz, rather than our own judgement, since judgment implies comparison, and there’s no way of comparing any one poet with the whole of the enormous poetic field.

4. Quickie Responses. When confronted with new poetry, one relies on email or brief conversations to make a judgment: there’s no time, in the great deluge, to give any broad selection of new work our serious consideration. Under these conditions much bad work gets praised, much good work ignored, and much subtle work misunderstood.

5. Self-Mythologizing. “If you love the idea of greatness and are ignored,” said Halliday, “self-mythologize. Suppress any sense of humor about yourself. You may imitate self-deprecation, but you may not mean it in earnest. Act like someone whose greatness is about to be recognized. This will create an aura for you and, much more importantly, for your favorite students, who will be young enough to believe it.” These students will then bear your name out into the world and onto the syllabus, where others among the young and naive will come to see you as a great poet. [In the margin of my notes to Halliday’s talk I have scribbled something that looks like “Warhol’s ‘famous for 15 minutes’ is now ‘famous to 15 people.’”]

So, to return to Alfred Corn’s question about dissensus: “what to make of this?” With the exception of buzz susceptibility, the behaviors Halliday describes can all be seen as contributing to the critical dissensus Alfred Corn noted on prize committees and “best books” lists. When there is so much to read, many people will simply tune out certain presses, journals, styles, schools, forms, or even generations. With no way to keep track of the multitude of new books, many will come to rely on their own closed networks for advice. Fast responses will lead to a failure to appreciate complex or subtle work outside one’s own network, further reinforcing closure to voices outside one’s own idiosyncratic network. The self-mythologizing process, which sends acolytes into the world to create more acolytes—in the manner of the critic F.R. Leavis, who literally kept a map with pins indicating where he’d planted disciples—creates little cults of personality, invisible from the outside. All of this adds up to individual insularity, to a world of top-ten lists without overlap.

Of course many things have led us to this place. Technological changes make publishing more accessible and books more affordable; the spread of education has created a huge number of people who want to write poems, and can (we are only a few decades beyond a time when the big disputes in American poetry were disputes among Harvard classmates). I believe that overall, the scale of American poetry is a good thing. But it does create certain problems for the kind of poet who wishes for recognition. Such poets (the ones Halliday calls “ambitious”) react to the situation with a set of defensive behaviors that have as a side-effect the sort of critical dissensus described by Corn. We see this across the poetic spectrum. If Helen Vendler, with her refusal to believe there could possibly be 175 poets worth reading out of the untold thousands of 20th century American poets, suffers from a kind of “proclivity for ignoring,” so also does Kenneth Goldsmith, who has argued that his kind of poetry is more “relevant” (to what, one wonders?) than other forms, which presumably no longer have any claim on our attention.

The multitude is the condition of American poetry in our time. The problem of the multitude, though, exists only for poets ambitious for recognition, and readers who wish to feel they can read everything worth reading.

*Update December 28: D.G. Meyers at Commentary magazine takes a different view of the issue.

*Update January 3: Johannes Göransson takes yet another view of the issue.

The Rita Dove Anthology Dust-Up Continues!

2011-12-22T11:08:00.005-06:00

Rita Dove's Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry continues to generate controversy.

Here are a couple of articles that mention my own contribution to the contretemps: one from The Chronicle of Higher Education and one from The Guardian.

*Update, Dec. 23:

Michael Leong has some interesting thoughts on the anthology at Big Other.

My original post is here.

"It's Too Much": Norman Finkelstein and the Poetics of Contemporaneity

2011-12-17T14:38:00.000-06:00

One of the most notable things about contemporary poetry is that there's so much of it. If one were tempted to keep up with it all, one might say there's so damn much of it. This is the starting point of Norman Finkelstein's "The Poetics of Contemporaneity," a long reviw of Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher's book The Monkey & the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics, a review just now out in Contemporary Literature. It starts with reference to a little Facebook discussion in which I played a part:

In a recent post on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog entitled “It’s Too Much,” Stephen Burt declares, only half-jokingly (I think), “Every week, every day, I get email and Facebook notices and for that matter word of mouth about the latest debate or commentary or controversy or metapoetic metaconversation (sometimes it’s even attached to actual poems) on one of three dozen fine websites and active blogs and web-only or web-mostly mostly-poetry magazines… to be au courant, I should keep up. And I can’t keep up.” Burt continues in this vein for another couple of paragraphs, and though he keeps it light, he manages to touch a nerve. In my little corner of Facebook, Robert Archambeau linked to Burt’s post, eliciting twenty-eight more-or-less anxious comments. Mark Scroggins picked up the post and responded at some length on his blog, Culture Industry: “Man do I sympathize. With the expansion of the internet as the primary medium of poetry, & of the endless chatter of poetry-promotion & poetry-discussion – of pobiz, in short – it feels like there's been an exponential explosion of poetic activity out there, so much being written & published & written about that no-one, but no-one, is able to grasp more than a tiny fraction of it.”

Finkelstein's review goes on to discuss how the various pieces in the book address, or fail to address, the contemporary situation. Finkelstein has some particularly kind words for my own contribution, and I'm not above repeating them:

…the two best essays, by, as it happens, Robert Archambeau and Stephen Burt, take the longest view and are most fully informed by an acute literary historical awareness. Archambeau’s “The Discursive Situation of Poetry,” which leads off the collection, alone is worth the price of admission. Archambeau is one of our smartest poetic sociologists, and in this essay, he tackles the biggest problem facing poetry in our time: the dwindling of its audience and the growing divide between poets and a mainstream literary readership, however the latter may be construed. Archambeau considers an ideologically varied group of critics, including Dana Gioia, Joseph Epstein, Charles Bernstein, Thomas Disch and John Barr, all of whom complain about poetry’s loss of public attention as poets gradually migrate to academia and graduate-level creative writing programs proliferate. A corollary to this complaint is the notion that at some time in the not too distant past (say the 1940s or 1950s), poets were more responsive to the needs and desires of a middle-class readership, editors published them more frequently in general interest magazines with wider circulations, and market forces, rather than the rarefied aesthetic views of a literary elite or bohemian coterie, determined poetic success. Archambeau demolishes these notions, but at the same time, identifies a period further in the past—the mid-Victorian period—when the “discursive situation of poetry—that is, the conditions of writing, publishing and reception” (13) was such that poets really did speak to, of and for the values of a growing middle-class reading public. “This class,” notes Archambeau, “growing into unprecedented political and social dominance in a rapidly changing and industrializing society, felt understandably dislocated” (15). The British middle class found the guidance for which it sought in “men of letters” such as Ruskin, Thackery, Mill or Tennyson, “because men of letters, including poets, were drawn from, and remained a part of, the same social class as the reading public, and as such they articulated that class’s own views, anxieties and values” (15). The preeminence of these figures, however, proved relatively short-lived, as on the one hand, literacy spread to the working class, and on the other hand, the middle class itself, intermarrying with the aristocracy, formed “a newly confident class that developed an ethos of self-interest, utilitarianism, and conspicuous consumption….They were decreasingly in need of buying what the mid-Victorian poets were selling” (19). By the end of the nineteenth century, the poets had moved from middle-class drawing rooms to the garrets of bohemia, which they bequeathed to their modernist heirs.

Unfortunately, Archambeau never explicitly links the situation of Victorian England to that of the United States, where the class structure, without an aristocracy in the European sense, developed along somewhat different lines. Concomitantly, the figure of the poet as cultural arbiter differed as well. Perhaps the Fireside Poets played a similar role to the British men of letters, but the advent of Whitman and all he came to represent proved a definitive break. In any case, Archambeau is still correct: when the utilitarian and consumerist values of the middle class solidified, and the poets moved first to bohemia and then to academia, the loss of a general readership for poetry was inevitable. As Archambeau puts it, “Professionalized literary studies and bohemianized poetry were close cousins, both products of broad shifts in economics and culture that took poetry and the broad reading public in different directions” (20-21). Furthermore, the changes that might realign poets and average readers are not particularly desirable. Where, after all, does poetry really count in the modern world? Basically, under conditions of political oppression. Thus, “just as we would not wish to return to mid-Victorian levels of literacy and social development just to see the rise of a new Tennyson, we would not wish to fall victim to colonization just to have our own Celtic Revival. Those of us who live with discursive conditions that keep poetry unpopular may count themselves lucky” (24-25). Meanwhile, as Archambeau observes, “the encroachment of market values on the previously semi-autonomous academic system is well under way, and is probably irreversible,” a development that is bound to affect “[t]he oversupply of academically credentialed poets” (25). How many unemployed or under-employed MFAs in creative writing do you know? Unfortunately, I know quite a few.

Finkelstein is completely right about my failure to address the American situation in the late 19th century. And he's onto something when he says the Fireside Poets (Longfellow, Whittier, et al) played an important role, analogous in some ways to the role of Tennyson in England. But I haven't really done enough research in American poetry to say much more than that.

If you have access to Project Muse at a university library database, you can check out Finkelstein's article online.

There's a pretty spirited discussion of my own essay, and related issues, at John Gallaher's blog.

"La Transhumance du Verbe, Incanted René Char": John Matthias' Shorter Poems

2011-11-27T18:36:00.001-06:00

Rejoice! John Matthias' Collected Shorter Poems, vol.2, is now available from Shearsman Books. Covering Matthias' work in shorter forms from 1995 to 2011, it showcases both the breadth and the consistency of Matthias' achievement. No small part of that achievement is the wedding of the lyric self to the historical world beyond that self. Matthias has a term for this, and uses it as the title of one of the poems, “Kedging. ” “Kedging’s all you’re good for,” he writes here, in an address to himself that invokes his image for the kind of poetry that reaches out beyond the self into historical and literary allusion. The image is nautical in origin: to kedge is to move a ship forward by sending out a launch to drop an anchor at a distance, then winding in the anchor line to pull the ship forward. For Matthias, this most strenuous form of locomotion mirrors the process by which a certain kind of poet writes. “Poets, too, may cast an anchor well before them, “ he writes in a modified dictionary definition of kedging, “pulling forward when attached to something solid, only then to cast their anchor once again.” It’s the “something solid” that’s important here: for Matthias, the poet needs to latch on to something beyond himself to make any progress, catching his anchor in a solid mass of history or literature before he can make any headway.

This casting out for an anchorage figures in even the most personal and anecdotal poems of this collection. Consider “Francophiles, 1958,” a memoir of a high school senior year in Ohio. “La transhumance du Verbe, incanted René Char,” it begins. Right away we know there’s going to be precious little Norman Rockwell Ohioiana to this Buckeye childhood. Instead, the anchor’s been flung out far, catching in the solid mass of midcentury French history and culture:

Hell was other people

we’d proclaim, pointing out each other’s mauvaise foi.

What was not absurd was certainly surreal, essence rushing

headlong at existence all the way from Paris to Vauclause.

Or again:

We went to bed with both Bardot

and de Beauvoir. Fantastic volunteers of Le Maquis, we

knew about Algeria, about

Dien Bien Phu...

What comes across most strongly here is the power of our connection to world beyond self: to wars, poems, philosophical ideas, to the spectacle of mass-media, to history as it (often tragically) unfolds. So strong are the connections one begins to wonder if there really is a separation between the self and the world beyond. Would those Ohio boys have become who they became without French intellectual chic? Would their daydreams have been the same without Brigitte Bardot? Certainly Dien Bien Phu would come to mean a great deal for the class of ’58 in the turbulent decade ahead. The culture that seemed so attractively remote and exotic turns out to be the very stuff of who we are, or who we become.

One of the points of a poetry like this is to show our interpellation or situatedness in history and culture. This certainly seems to be what Matthias is getting at in some lines from the poetic sequence that closes the book, “Kedging in Time,” where he writes:

kedging’s all you’re good for

with a foot of water under you, the tide gone out, the fog so thick

you can’t see the lights at Norderney but enter history in spite

of that by sounding in its shallows with an oar

To enter history — or, at any rate, to see that one has always already been a part of history, and that the self and the historical other are in some sense one — that’s the gist of any ars poetica Matthiasiensis.

How Did We Get Here? Politics in the Age of the Koch Brothers and #OWS

2011-11-19T15:37:00.008-06:00

Here’s a video shot at the University of California-Davis. It shows Lt. John Pike of the UC-Davis police sauntering up to students associated with the Occupy movement and pepper spraying them, before backing slowly away in a heavily armed phalanx while demonstrators and onlookers chant “shame on you”:

I take this moment as emblematic of our current political situation. It is a situation in which about 2/3 of Americans sympathize with the Occupy movement's call for greater economic equality, but only half that number approve of the protests themselves, and no political party does anything to address the growing inequality. It's a situation, too, in which administrative leaders at all levels seem happy to tolerate police violence, which the right-wing media, led as ever by Fox News, presents as necessary and even heroic. The people are angry, but they're wary of those who demonstrate on behalf of their interests, and the political elites prefer to address the situation with violence rather than reforms. How did we get to this sad state of affairs?

The answer, I think, has to do with changes in the attitudes of our various elites over the past few decades.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when elites from various fields — politics, business, finance, labor, journalism, religion, academe — would gather together and attempt to ameliorate whatever social and economic problems seemed of pressing importance. And they would gather in something like a spirit of enlightened self-interest, if not exactly of disinterest, trying to take a look at problems from a point of view other than that of immediate self-advancement. This, anyway, is what George Packer claims in a recent article in Foreign Affairs. Knowing a little bit about the history of social elites and their relation to the notion of disinterest or impartiality, I’m inclined to agree with him. Here’s what Packer says about the various American elites in the postwar era:

…the country’s elites were playing a role that today is almost unrecognizable. They actually saw themselves as custodians of national institutions and interests. The heads of banks, corporations, universities, law firms, foundations, and media companies were neither more nor less venal, meretricious, and greedy than their counterparts today. But they rose to the top in a culture that put a brake on these traits and certainly did not glorify them. Organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Committee for Economic Development, and the Ford Foundation did not act on behalf of a single, highly privileged point of view — that of the rich. Rather, they rose above the country’s conflicting interests and tried to unite them into an overarching idea of the national interest. Business leaders who had fought the New Deal as vehemently as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is now fighting health-care and financial reform later came to accept Social Security and labor unions, did not stand in the way of Medicare, and supported other pieces of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. They saw this legislation as contributing to the social peace that ensured a productive economy. In 1964, Johnson created the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress to study the effects of these coming changes on the work force. The commission included two labor leaders, two corporate leaders, the civil rights activist Whitney Young, and the sociologist Daniel Bell. Two years later, they came out with their recommendations: a guaranteed annual income and a massive job-training program. This is how elites once behaved: as if they had actual responsibilities.

This establishment really does represent an accommodation of different elites to one another: business and finance came together with leaders of what Chris Hedges has called “the liberal class”: a group consisting of “the media, the church, the university, the Democratic party, the arts, and labor unions” (his book on the fate of these elites, The Death of the Liberal Class, makes chilling reading). Together, the moneyed elite and the liberal class worked out ways of sharing wealth and solving social problems that, however imperfect, kept the fabric of society together. The liberal class could feel it had delivered some justice to the disempowered, and the moneyed interest could rest assured that, with enough soup in every bowl, radicalism had been headed off. Indeed, as Hedges notes, one function of the liberal class has been to “discredi[t] radicals within American society who have defied corporate capitalism and continued to speak the language of class warfare.” With the great mass of people placated, radicals discredited, and the position of business and finance secured (at a moderate cost) a social compact was maintained. This is not to be sneered at: the years prior to the war had shown the world (especially Europe) what the failure of social compacts, and the legitimization of certain kinds of radicals, looked like. No one wanted to go back to those days.

The postwar arrangement, Packer notes in passing, didn’t deliver for everyone: if you were African-American, or a woman, you’d probably find those postwar years something less than Edenic. I’d add other groups to Packer’s list, especially gay people, who are only now beginning to gain something like equality and something like a public voice. But for many people, the establishment seemed to deliver a decent life, with relatively secure employment and relative egalitarianism, with inexpensive public universities, and wealth far less polarized than it is today (we’ve gone from a postwar 40:1 CEO-to-worker pay ratio to a ratio of more than 400:1).

(If you are interested in the first modern instance of an amalgamation of different elites and their cultivation of an ethos of relative disinterestedness, you might want to read the bits about Addison, The Spectator, and the class dynamics of eighteenth century England in this post).

In Packer's view, the old establishment, with its alliance between moneyed and liberal elites, came to an end for two reasons: the "youth rebellion and revolution of the 1960s" and the economic troubles of the 1970s, brought about by "stagflation and the oil shock." Here, I think, he's only partially right, and very light on detail. It's certainly true that the student and New Left movements of the 60s (and, I would add, the 70s) challenged the old establishment. But Packer neglects to say why: it was the draft and the war, certainly, but it was also the coming into the public sphere of all the social groups the old establishment had left out: African-Americans, women, gay people, and others. They rightly questioned the representativeness of the old elites, and they rightly saw that, whatever degree of disinterest informed elite decisions, it masked a preference for whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality. The demands of repressed groups for representation, though, led to a backlash, as the established elites, and many of the non-elites benefitting from the old social compact, felt threatened. The moneyed elites that already felt they'd been asked to share a great deal resented being asked to share with even more people ("What! First the G.I. bill and now urban renewal on top of that?!"), and the hard-working white male non-elites sensed that their small privileges were under threat. This, I think, is the nature of the undermining of the old establishment during the 60s and 70s. When the oil shock came along, further undermining confidence in the old compact, it simply presented an opportunity for already existing cracks to widen.

As the fissures in the old compact widened, elites lost faith in the process of working together in relative disinterest for the good of all, and America began to resemble something more like the Hobbesian state of nature, with the war of all against all. Here's how Packer describes the oil-shock era and the subsequent end of a relatively disinterested establishment:

[The oil shock] eroded Americans’ paychecks and what was left of their confidence in the federal government after Vietnam, Watergate, and the disorder of the 1960s. It also alarmed the country’s business leaders, and they turned their alarm into action. They became convinced that capitalism itself was under attack by the likes of Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader, and they organized themselves into lobbying groups and think tanks that quickly became familiar and powerful players in U.S. politics: the Business Roundtable, the Heritage Foundation, and others. Their budgets and influence soon rivaled those of the older, consensus-minded groups, such as the Brookings Institution. By the mid-1970s, chief executives had stopped believing that they had an obligation to act as disinterested stewards of the national economy. They became a special interest; the interest they represented was their own. The neoconservative writer Irving Kristol played a key role in focusing executives’ minds on this narrower and more urgent agenda. He told them, “Corporate philanthropy should not be, and cannot be, disinterested.”

Among the non-disinterested spending that corporations began to engage in, none was more interested than lobbying. Lobbying has existed since the beginning of the republic, but it was a sleepy, bourbon-and-cigars practice until the mid- to late 1970s. In 1971, there were only 145 businesses represented by registered lobbyists in Washington; by 1982, there were 2,445. In 1974, there were just over 600 registered political action committees, which raised $12.5 million that year; in 1982, there were 3,371, which raised $83 million. In 1974, a total of $77 million was spent on the midterm elections; in 1982, it was $343 million. Not all this lobbying and campaign spending was done by corporations, but they did more and did it better than anyone else. And they got results.

If you remember the Carter administration, you remember what the end of the establishment looked like: bipartisanship came to an standstill in Washington, and it remains stuck in that mode today. And the moneyed elites ceased to see their well-being tied to that of the nation as a whole: their interest was self-interest plain and simple, without the amelioration of any enlightenment. There's a sad irony to all of this, in that the break-up of the old elites, and the airing out of their smoke-filled rooms, didn't lead to greater egalitarianism. "Getting rid of elites..." says Packer, "did not necessarily empower ordinary people." Indeed, when "Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and Walter Wriston of Citicorp stopped sitting together on Commissions to Make the World a Better Place" and began "paying lobbyists to fight for their separate interests in Congress," says Packer, "the balance of power tilted heavily toward business." And there it has stayed, as indexes of wealth distribution and worker productivity and tax policy make plainer and plainer every day.

The massive, well-organized deployment of enormous sums of money by the business and (especially) the financial elites have in large measure made American politicians, regardless of party, into the tools of the wealthy elites: Bush cut taxes on the very rich to near-historic lows, and the right-wing Roberts court more or less legalized political bribery in the Citizens United decision, but it was Bill Clinton who began the deregulation of Wall Street that led first to massive profits for the few, then to an terrible crisis for the many, and it was Democrat Chuck Schumer who kept capital gains taxes so low that most hedge fund managers pay taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries. The Koch brothers and those of their ilk don't consider themselves stewards of national well-being, not really: they consider themselves people who have a right to buy the means to rig the system ever-further in their favor. For them, this is simply their prerogative. Acting on this presumed prerogative has made them very wealthy, but it has also made their whole class less and less legitimate in the eyes of the public, despite the constant drumbeat of political advertisements and the far-from-disinterested vision of events presented on Fox News and other corporate media platforms.

The liberal elites — mainline churches, universities, elements of the media, labor leaders — have been complicit in these sad developments. Unable to ameliorate the naked self-interest of financial and corporate elites, they have clung to their own small privileges while no longer serving a useful role. They simply do not deliver for the broad population as they used to do, and in failing to do so they have become despised by many in the working and middle classes. As Chris Hedges puts it,

The liberal class has become a useless and despised appendage of corporate power. And as corporate power pollutes and poisons the ecosystem and propels us into a world where there will be only masters and serfs, the liberal class, which serves no purpose in the new configuration, is being abandoned and discarded. The death of the liberal class means there is no check to a corporate apparatus designed to enrich a tiny elite and plunder a nation.... It ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and middle classes will find expression outside the confines of democratic institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy.

That's a difficult pill for many of us to swallow, but it does explain some of the most notable political developments of our time. It explains the urges behind the Tea Party (which saw itself as an outsider movement, at odds with all elites, but was co-opted almost from the start by the moneyed elites). And it explains what's been happening these past two months in New York, in Oakland, in Chicago, and in towns and cities across the country. The Occupy Wall Street movement can be seen as several things. It can be seen as a desperate move for political expression by those who see the failure of all elites to even try to stop the erosion of the social and economic position of the vast majority of Americans. It can also be seen as an attempt to wrest the old liberal classes away from their complicity with the now-completely-dominant moneyed elites — to revitalize a liberal class on its deathbed. It can also be seen in a less charitable light: I recently saw a nephew of mine and his friends disparage the Occupy movement as "a hipster convention" of people who looked like they were "in line for the latest iPhone." I think this is wrong, but I see where it comes from: it comes from the correct perception that the old liberal elites ("a hipster convention" signifies this class) have been more concerned with their petty privileges ("the latest iPhone") than with delivering for the millions of Americans whose relative position has been steadily degrading for decades. I like to hope that the Occupy movement can both give expression to the political needs of the many, and can give the old liberal class the backbone it needs to stand up to the ever-expanding domination of American life by a tiny financial elite.

If we don't have this hope, what's left?

Letters of Blood

2011-11-13T15:34:00.003-06:00

Letters of Blood and Other English Works, by the late, great Swedish poet and critic Göran Printz-Påhlson is just about to hit the presses, and you can now pre-order the book at the publisher's website.

Printz-Påhlson is not as well known in the English-speaking world as one might expect, given the scope of his achievement and his distinguished career at Harvard and Cambridge. But he will, according to the English newspaper the Independent, "...go down in history as the author of some classic poems… and one of Sweden's most learned, innovative and sharp-witted literary critics.” He was a prodigy, introducing a generation of Swedish writers to European modernism in his early study The Sun in the Mirror, and was one of the founders of the Lund school of poetry, a movement based in the ancient university town of Lund in the very southern tip of Sweden. He was a scholar of enormous range, and the current volume includes a series of important lectures, "The Words of the Tribe," on the nature of poetic language (he treats linguistic primitivism, linguistic reductionism, the materiality of language, and the political elements of diction in detail). He was also a prolific translator, and managed to put the works of John Ashbery into Swedish, a task for which he had exactly the right sensibility: erudite, attuned to pop-culture, musical, and wry. You can learn more about him here, in the Guardian.

Here's the publisher's statement about the book:

This collection brings together for the first time works in English by the major Swedish modernist poet and critic Göran Printz-Påhlson. It was Printz-Påhlson who introduced poetic modernism to Scandinavia, and his essays and poems delve deeply into English, American, and continental modernist traditions.

As well as Letters of Blood, the collection includes the full text of "The Words of the Tribe", a major statement on modern poetics, in which Printz-Påhlson explores the significance of primitivism in Romanticism and Modernism, and the nature of metaphor and literary materialism. The collection also includes essays on style, irony, realism, and the relationship between historical drama and historical fiction, as well as studies of American poetry. Printz-Påhlson’s poetry in English continues to explore these themes by different, often surprisingly innovative, means.

It was an honor to meet the man a few years before his death, and a privilege edit this book of his works in English. I hope it will bring Printz-Påhlson's poetry and critical writing to an Anglo-American audience, for whom his concerns are startlingly relevant.

Sous les Pavés, les Poèts

2011-11-13T08:55:00.001-06:00

Oh hey. The new issue of Sous les Pavés is out, featuring work by Susan Howe, Mairéad Byrne, Amiri Baraka, Kent Johnson, and a host of others, including some guy called Archambeau. You can read an online version by stopping in at the SLP blog and clicking on the link to SLP #5/6.

Why You Are Not a Gentleman

2011-11-12T18:51:00.003-06:00

I'm giving a talk to a gathering of some of the faculty of Lake Forest College this Wednesday. It's called "Why You are Not a Gentleman," and it goes like this.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for coming here today for the last faculty luncheon discussion of the semester. Could we begin with a little of what our friends in administration call "self-assessment"? Could we have a show of hands from those who consider themselves ladies or gentlemen? Perhaps we can come back to the reasons (legitimate or otherwise) why you consider, or don't consider, yourselves as falling within those categories. But for now I'd like to confess that I am no gentleman. I know because I've read Faulkner, and his greatest novel, The Sound and the Fury, contains this exchange:

"You're not a gentleman," Spoade said…
"No, I'm Canadian," Shreve said.

Having confessed to my own low and provincial status, I should begin with the low and academic moves of providing definitions and hedging one's bets.

Up until the 14th century, gentil homme meant "nobleman," and nobleman meant "a man of aristocratic birth." Certain behaviors and attitudes, including the martial virtues, were associated with gentlemanly status, of course, as we know from many records, including Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," where we read:

Loke who that is most vertuous alway

Prive and apert, and most entendeth ay

To do the gentil dedes that he can

And take him for the gretest gentilman

But this didn't generally pertain for those of low status: the fine deeds of the swineherd did not, in most cases, result in social elevation. So, while the borders of the term "gentleman" have always been a bit contested, and seem to blur whenever there is social mobility, it is birth — legitimate, high-status birth — is near the center of things gentlemanly for a very long time. Even when Shakespeare wrote, it is clear that Edmund, in King Lear, who dressed, spoke, and behaved as well as his legitimate brother Edgar, was no gentleman, or at best a gentleman with an asterisk after his name, in the manner of baseball's Roger Maris.

Gradually, cultivation increasingly supplemented birth, and in some measure nudged it aside, cozying up next to it at the center of what gentlemanliness was about. We can see this begin to happen when, in the 16th century, the clergyman William Harrison claimed that "gentlemen be those whom their race and blood, or at least their virtues, do make noble." The phrase "or at least" is interesting, isn't it? Without high birth one can be a gentleman, of sorts, at least of a junior varsity kind. This relative liberalism was picked up in the 17th century by the English public schools (what we in America would call private schools), which emphasized the idea that cultivation makes the gentleman—but then again, they would. I mean, those of us who work for expensive private educational institutions are not without an awareness of how such institutions make the strongest possible claims for the value of the services they peddle.

I should also mention that definitions vary not only over time, but by locale. Americans make much of the idea of the southern gentleman, but I won't speak of Americans. Even after 20 years in this country, I do not understand their mysteries.

Anyway. When and where the notion of the gentleman as a creature of cultivation, with certain behaviors and attitudes, came to displace the notion of the gentleman as a creature of high birth (who might well also be cultivated, but wasn't necessarily so) is a debatable matter, and of course there is no single defining watershed. But let me follow a true gentleman in locating the largest shift in the 18th century. Here is how Thomas Babington Macaulay (that's Lord Macaulay to you), looked back on the English gentry of the 17th century from the vantage of the 1848. The English gentleman before the 18th century, says Macaulay,

…was compounded of two elements which we seldom or never find united. His ignorance and uncouthness, his low tastes and gross phrases, would, in our time, be considered as indicating a nature, and a breeding, thoroughly plebeian. Yet he was essentially a patrician, and had, in large measure both the virtues and the vices which flourish among men set from their birth in high place, and used to respect themselves and to be respected by others. It is not easy for a generation accustomed to find chivalrous sentiments only in company with liberal studies and polished manners to imagine to itself a man with the deportment, the vocabulary, and the accent of a carter, yet punctilious on matters of genealogy and precedence, and ready to risk his life rather than see a stain cast on the honor of his house. It is however only by thus joining together things seldom or never found together in our own experience, that we can form a just idea of that rustic aristocracy...

Perhaps we could visualize such a character thusly:

This is not, of course, an actual photograph of a boorish 17th century gentleman. This is Johnny Rotten, formerly of the Sex Pistols, in fancy clothes, but I hope it makes the point.

So what happened in England in the 18th century to make the idea of cultivation essential, rather than accidental, to gentlemanly status? The shortest possible answer is this: the rise of the financially-oriented bourgeoisie and their assimilation into the existing, landowning elite. Well, perhaps that's not the shortest possible answer. Perhaps the shortest answer is: lowborn people getting rich.

I know what you're thinking: "poor Archambeau, he's gone native in America after all, confusing money with class." Not so! Bear with me, while I, a humble poet, seek to take you into the murky waters of the late 17th century English financial revolution, and its consequences for gentlemen.

At the end of the 17th century England was developing a mercantile society as vibrant as any in Europe, with fortunes being made in the trade of textiles, paper, and metals, but it was the Financial Revolution of the 1690s that really allowed a new elite group, based on trade and finance rather than land, to emerge. The 1690s saw the founding of the stock market, the Bank of England, and the national debt, the last of which gave unprecedented power and influence to investors in public credit. Unlike some other countries in which a moneyed faction arose, though, England did not see a direct clash between moneyed and landed interests. This relatively peaceful accommodation of the rising bourgeois wasn’t due to innate English virtue so much as it was made possible by the England’s lack, of formal legal privileges for the gentry (there were privileges, certainly, but in typical English fashion these were more matters of tradition than of law).

Looking back on England’s early and relatively peaceful amalgamation of moneyed and landed classes from the far side of the French Revolution’s gore, Alexis de Tocqueville declared that England had been unique in “the ease with which it had opened its ranks,” and in how this merging of landed and moneyed classes created a more powerful, amalgamated elite: "With great riches, anybody could hope to enter into the rank..." of gentleman, or above. As the historian David Castronovo puts it when comparing England to another country with a more bloody history of class conflict, “The Russian merchant was a merchant in law, forbidden to buy land; the English merchant was the man who could become an eminently respectable man ... a gentleman.”

But how could it be done? England began the century as a country of rough squires proud of their pedigrees, on the one hand, and grasping, penny-counting London moneybags, on the other. What would bring them together as a single elite of cultivated ladies and gentlemen? Those of us in the English department can take great pride in saying that a good part of what did it was reading.

Consider the great flowering of magazines in the English 18th century.

At first glance, conditions in England at the dawn of the eighteenth century might not seem propitious for the founding of journals, particularly journals devoted in large measure to literary discussion. Rates of literacy had actually fallen since the period of the Civil War and the Commonwealth in the prior century. But if the country did not yet clamor with avid readers, it soon would: censorship and the taxing of periodicals was relaxed, periodicals blossomed. Daniel Defoe started his Weekly Review in 1704, and in 1709 Richard Steele founded the more literary Tatler. Two years later Steele joined with Addison in launching another literary/cultural journal, the Spectator. The last two publications were widely imitated, and both the number of journals published and the reach of their total circulation rose dramatically throughout the century. As the former editor of a cultural journal, I must emphasize that this phenomenon, the actual popularity of a cultural journal, you bears investigating. Why, we may wonder, would such notoriously difficult-to-market commodities as cultural journals become viable in the marketplace at this particular place and time?

The answer lies in the way these journals provided a way to redefine gentlemanly status, decoupling it from birth and linking it more strongly to cultivation. People wanted to form a new elite, bringing old prestige and new money together, and these journals, the Spectator in particular, presented them with a model for a new kind of gentleman, and also provided an arena in which to perfect one's new, gentlemanly cultivation.

Let's look, first, at how the Spectator offered a model for the new kind of gentleman. The most famous issue of the journal presents us with an imagined "Mr. Spectator," the fictitious "author" of the various articles in the magazine, and his friends in the imagined "Spectator Club." Here they are in the frontespiece to a collected edition of the journal:

Mr. Spectator, the model of the new kind of gentleman, embodies a combination of the social types that went into forming the new elite. His origin, as he tells us in the first issue of the Spectator, lay among the landed gentry:

I was born to a small hereditary estate, which, according to the tradition of the village where it lies, was bounded by the same hedges and ditches in William the Conqueror's time that it is at present, and has been delivered down from father to son whole and entire, without the loss or acquisition of a single field or meadow, during the space of six hundred years.

Despite Mr. Spectator’s mother’s early hope that he take up the profession of law and become a respected judge, he has instead taken to habituating London’s coffee houses, where, if he has not exactly joined the bureaucratic and financial classes, he has become indistinguishable from them in their various haunts:

There is no place of general resort, wherein I do not often make my appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my head into a round of politicians at Will’s, and listening with great attention to the narratives that are made in those little circular audiences. Sometimes I smoke a pipe at Child’s, and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the Postman [a newspaper], overhear the conversation of every table in the room. I appear on Sunday nights at St. James’s Coffee-house, and sometimes join the little committee of politics in the inner room, as one who comes there to hear and improve. My face is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa-Tree, and in the theaters both of Drury Lane and the haymarket. I have been taken for a merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten years, and sometimes pass for a Jew in the assembly of stock-jobbers at Jonathan’s...

So this new kind of gentleman was ubiquitous, and could be a creature of the country gentry or of the newer worlds of city finance and politics, at home with gentry, clergy, and merchants alike, watching the world but—and this is crucial—not pushing for his own interests, not out for his own gain, at least not in any overt way. The gentleman, suddenly, isn't someone passionate about pedigree and the vengeful cleansing of blots from the family escutcheon. He has become a man of what we have come to think of as typically English reserve, of dispassionateness, of impartiality and disinterest. This ideal runs throughout the cast of characters we see in the Spectator. Indeed, the attitude of disinterested reserve is the common thread uniting the characters, and is, really the essence of this new kind of gentleman. What this has to do with cultivation and the liberal arts lies ahead of us—first, lets put some flesh on the bones of Addison's fictional gentlemen.

The cast of characters in Addison and Steele’s fictitious Spectator Club — in many ways an idealized version of the audience for their journal, and for the amalgamating English elite — is something of a showcase of polite disinterest. Here is the first of them, a country gentleman of the old school named Sir Roger DeCoverly. He's important, because we're told he has changed, after a disappointing love affair. Take note of the differences between his youthful behavior and his present behavior, and you'll get at a great deal of how the idea of the gentleman is being redefined:

The first of our society is a gentleman of Worcestershire, of an ancient descent, a baronet, his name Sir Roger de Coverley. His great-grandfather was inventor of that famous country-dance which is called after him. All who know that shire are very well acquainted with the parts and merits of Sir Roger…. It is said he keeps himself a bachelor by reason he was crossed in love by a perverse beautiful widow of the next county to him. Before this disappointment, Sir Roger was what you call a fine gentleman, had often supped with my Lord Rochester and Sir George Etherege, fought a duel upon his first coming to town, and kicked bully Dawson in a public coffee-house for calling him youngster. But being ill-used by the above-mentioned widow, he was very serious for a year and a half; and though, his temper being naturally jovial, he at last got over it, he grew careless of himself and never dressed afterwards. He continues to wear a coat and doublet of the same cut that were in fashion at the time of his repulse, which, in his merry humors, he tells us, has been in and out twelve times since he first wore it. It is said Sir Roger grew humble in his desires after he had forgot his cruel beauty... He is now in his fifty-sixth year, cheerful, gay, and hearty; keeps a good house both in town and country; a great lover of mankind; but there is such a mirthful cast in his behavior, that he is rather beloved than esteemed. His tenants grow rich, his servants look satisfied, all the young women profess love to him, and the young men are glad of his company. When he comes into a house, he calls the servants by their names... I must not omit that Sir Roger is a justice of the quorum; that he fills the chair at a quarter-session with great abilities, and three months ago gained universal applause, by explaining a passage in the Game Act.

What was this man in the past? Passionate, a dueler, proud of his ancient family, and reader to avenge any insult with violence. But what is he now, reformed? Indifferent to impressing others by his appearance, sociable with all, more-or-less without selfish desire, and (unlike so many judges in his time and ours) without much by way of a judicial axe to grind. He has stepped back from passionate family honor as an ideal, and become much more reserved, disinterested, and detached: qualities important to the new gentleman — and qualities, it should be noted, less of bloodline than of attitude.

After Sir Roger, we meet another gentleman of the Spectator Club, an unnamed lawyer. Reading his description, I wonder: would you want him as your attorney? In what context would it be good to know him?

The gentleman next in esteem and authority among us is another bachelor, who is a member of the Inner Temple, a man of great probity, wit, and understanding; but he has chosen his place of residence rather to obey the direction of an old humorsome father than in pursuit of his own inclinations. He was placed there to study the laws of the land, and is the most learned of any of the house in those of the stage. Aristotle and Longinus are much better understood by him than Littleton or Coke. The father sends up every post questions relating to marriage-articles, leases, and tenures, in the neighborhood; all which questions he agrees with an attorney to answer and take care of in the lump. He is studying the passions themselves, when he should be inquiring into the debates among men which arise from them. He knows the argument of each of the orations of Demosthenes and Tully, but not one case in the reports of our own courts. No one ever took him for a fool; but none, except his intimate friends, know he has a great deal of wit. This turn makes him at once both disinterested and agreeable. As few of his thoughts are drawn from business, they are most of them fit for conversation. …. He is an excellent critic, and the time of the play is his hour of business; exactly at five he passes through New-inn, crosses through Russell-court, and … has his shoes rubbed and his periwig powdered at the barber’s as you go into the Rose. It is for the good of the audience when he is at the play, for the actors have an ambition to please him.

What do we notice about him? About what does he care? Although this gentleman plays in the high-stakes world of London law, he also shows a remarkable degree of emotional distance from the world of power-interests. More inclined to connoisseurship than the fray of the law, he spurns legal matters for his true love, the theater, and devotes himself not just to literary theory, but to most formalistic literary theory: to questions of genre and aesthetics, rather than to the political or social or religious aspects of literature. One might not trust the man to protect one’s money or land in court, but it is his very removal from such practical matters that makes him so eminently “disinterested and agreeable” to Mr. Spectator and his friends, for “as few of his thoughts are drawn from business, they are most of them fit for conversation.”

The next member of the Spectator Club is Captain Sentry, a representative of the military officer class. What virtues does he have that we have seen in the other gentlemen?

Next to Sir Andrew in the clubroom sits Captain Sentry, a gentleman of great courage, good understanding, but invincible modesty. He is one of those that deserve very well, but are very awkward at putting their talents within the observation of such as should take notice of them. He was some years a captain, and behaved himself with great gallantry in several engagements and at several sieges; but having a small estate of his own, and being next heir to Sir Roger, he has quitted a way of life in which no man can rise suitably to his merit, who is not something of a courtier as well as a soldier. I have heard him often lament that, in a profession where merit is placed in so conspicuous a view, impudence should get the better of modesty. When he has talked to this purpose, I never heard him make a sour expression, but frankly confess that he left the world because he was not fit for it. A strict honesty and an even regular behavior are in themselves obstacles to him that must press through crowds, who endeavor at the same end with himself, the favor of a commander….The military part of his life has furnished him with many adventures, in the relation of which he is very agreeable to the company; for he is never overbearing, though accustomed to command men in the utmost degree below him; nor ever too obsequious, from an habit of obeying men highly above him.

Again, reticence, a lack of concern with overt self-interest, and a kind of self-possessed reserve are the attitudes of the new gentleman. We hear much the same about a clergyman, and about an old rake named Will Honeycomb, who is also a disinterested an honest man, "where women are not concerned."

If disinterest is the defining ideal of the new gentleman, then another kind of member of the arising elite presents particular difficulties: the merchant. Merchants, after all, are by definition creatures of self-interest, their individual greed leading (if Adam Smith is to be believed) to a general improvement for all. How can they be assimilated to this new gentlemanly ideal? Here is Addison's example of the merchant gentleman, Sir Andrew Freeport:

The person of next consideration is Sir Andrew Freeport, a merchant of great eminence in the city of London; a person of indefatigable industry, strong reason, and great experience. His notions of trade are noble and generous, and (as every rich man has usually some sly way of jesting, which would make no great figure were he not a rich man) he calls the sea the British Common. He is acquainted with commerce in all its parts, and will tell you that it is a stupid and barbarous way to extend dominion by arms; for true power is to be got by arts and industry. He will often argue that, if this part of our trade were well cultivated, we should gain from one nation; and if another, from another. I have heard him prove that diligence makes more lasting acquisitions than valor, and that sloth has ruined more nations than the sword. He abounds in several frugal maxims, amongst which the greatest favorite is, “A penny saved is a penny got.” A general trader of good sense is pleasanter company than a general scholar; and Sir Andrew having a natural unaffected eloquence, the perspicuity of his discourse gives the same pleasure that wit would in another man. He has made his fortune himself; and says that England may be richer than other kingdoms by as plain methods as he himself is richer than other men; though at the same time I can say this of him, that there is not a point in the compass but blows home a ship in which he is an owner.

He's different, isn't he? Do we see in him any disinterest or reserve? Perhaps his nationalism makes him seem less selfish, and his “natural and unaffected eloquence” makes him strong in his conversation at the club. But, as any acquaintance with English history shows, the assimilation of those in trade to the ideal of the gentleman remained, and in some quarters remains, imperfect.

If the fictional characters of the Spectator were representative of the emerging elite, so too were its very real readers. When Spectator #269 announced that prior issues were to be republished in a somewhat expensive octavo edition, buyers, both male and female, came forth in droves from the aristocracy, the professions, and the mercantile world. So strong was the response that a somewhat less expensive duodecimo edition was announced almost immediately, in Spectator #278, for a readership composed of those aspiring to membership in the elite. When the name of Addison was heard in the bookseller’s shop, both the actual elites and their striving emulators reached for their wallets.

But what does cultivation have to do with this new kind of disinterested gentleman? Long story short, it's this: one gains these attitudes of disinterest and dispassionateness (according to Addison) from the contemplation of art and literature. Although Kant had yet to batter the German language into the spikes and sharp edges of his unreadable, ponderous, and wonderful aesthetic theory, Addison had learned from such English philosophers as Shaftesbury to think of art and literature as things contemplated for their own sake, and to see such contemplation as a kind of training ground for attitude toward life in which one steps back from the pursuit of one's self-interest. It's fascinating to read the literary criticism in the Spectator, because it asks you to look on literature as a purely formal matter of beauty, and of the decorum of part to whole. When the Spectator discusses Milton's Paradise Lost, for example, it's all about whether the language is appropriate to the sentiment, and about what kind of beauties the poem holds. The fact that the poem was a political and religious statement—and a particularly wrathful and bitter one, to boot—goes unremarked. We're not concerned, here, with partisanship: we're concerned with developing an attitude that will help potentially clashing factions of an elite get beyond partisanship, and club together. It worked. England's old elite, unlike that of France, did not end up on the wrong side of a guillotine blade at the century's end. And in no small measure their survival had to do with the redefinition of the gentleman as a creature of reserved impartiality. (I should stress that this was an ideal, not an actuality).

The notion of the cultivated, disinterested gentleman morphs and mutates and changes in any number of ways over the course of the 19th century, but there's one version of the gentlemanly ideal I'd like to mention, because it has some bearing on who we are and what we, as educators, do. This is the ideal of the educated gentleman as a kind of impartial figure mediating between, and being an honest broker among, the various classes of society as they come into conflict with one another. Think of the critic, poet, and educational administrator, Matthew Arnold, and what he said in his 1869 book Culture and Anarchy. Writing at a time of serious social conflict, he outlined a special position for cultivated individuals. These people, whose origin could lie in any class, would by virtue of the disinterest they developed through liberal education become "aliens" to any class: impartial, and open to reason and "the free and fresh play" of ideas. In a world of people seeking their conflicting self-interests, these people would be above the fray and, in Lionel Trilling's phrase, serve as a kind of "umpire class." They would make sure the others played fair.

This Arnoldian notion—of the most educated taking on the kind of virtues associated with the 18th century gentleman—is still with us. It is often present when we hear that liberal study will make one a better citizen, or give one the ability for critical thought. It is certainly present in some of the theories of what intellectuals and teachers are for. As Alvin Gouldner, the greatest sociologist of intellectuals ever to have treaded through the stacks of a research library, put it, "As teachers, intellectuals come to be defined, and to define themselves, as responsible for and 'representative' of society as a whole." Rather than representing their self-interest, such creatures, in this view, try to adjudicate matters with disinterest, approaching the gentlemanly ideal, albeit without the good tailoring, and with an aesthetically dismaying number of PBS tote-bags on display.

Why, then, are you—educators, devoted to the liberal arts—not necessarily all gentlemen (or ladies, although I confess to knowing remarkably little about the historical evolution of the idea of the lady)?

Long story short, it's because of these people:

The damn dirty hippies. Well, not exactly. But it is something did happen, beginning in the 1960s, to challenge the idea of the higher education as a redoubt of gentlemanly disinterest. Perhaps the best way to begin is with a little anecdote that our former poet laureate, Robert Hass, gives in a memoir of his days at SUNY-Buffalo. Here we see a gathering in which the younger generation confronts an educational establishment that clearly sees itself as representing the Arnoldian ideal of disinterest, impartiality, and the free and fresh play of ideas:

The year must have been 1969; the room was packed with students and faculty dressed, as the style was, to their archetypes: Indians, buffalo hunters, yogis, metaphysical hoboes, rednecks, lumberjacks, Mandingo princes, lions, tigers, hawks, and bears. Everything the American middle class had repressed lounged in that room listening to speaker after speaker with beatific attention. Which took some doing. I remember in particular a graduate student from the Progressive Labor Party who read an exceedingly long essay on the parallels between Bob Dylan's career and the growth of political theory in the New Left….When he finished, Edgar Friedenburg, the sociologist, rose to speak. He is a dapper man and he wore a light gray suit with a striped broadcloth Brooks Brothers shirt. His glasses sat low on his nose, his hair was tousled, and he looked amused. He only managed one sentence: "I have been reflecting this afternoon that we are patient beings, and that, though popular culture deserves our most urgent attention, it requires from us a good deal less credence and more clearwater." Some of the audience laughed; and a student in the front stood up, jabbed a finger forward, and said, "Friedenburg, it took twenty fucking years of repressive fucking education for you to learn to talk like that."

It's a standoff , isn't it? And a standoff, specifically, between a representative of Arnoldian, gentlemanly disinterest (more clear water, the free and fresh play of ideas; less credence, the simple acceptance of ideas most appealing to our self-interest), and someone who clearly believes that ideal to be deeply flawed. But flawed how? Flawed, I'd venture to say, by being both smug and a sham, by pretending to an impossible objectivity, rather than admitting to one's own self-interested agenda and fighting it out fair and square in the public sphere. It's a New Left idea—that the pretext of disinterest is only that, a pretext—that has in decades since become a neo-conservative idea. It's an idea that underlies the notion that public affairs should be discussed by representatives of "both sides" of a debate, even when the debates (such as that over the existence of climate change) don't have what disinterested people would see as two rational sides. It's also an idea that, as the children of the sixties undertook the long march through the academic institutions became, a large part of how some academic disciplines, particularly in the humanities, operated.

This is not the time to rehearse the theoretical and methodological disputes in the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, having lived through those disputes, I don't think I could bring myself to revisit them in all their acrimonious tedium ever again. But I will point to one article, quite influential in my field, by the scholar William Spanos: an enormous 1985 effort called “The Apollonian Investment of Modern Humanist Education.” Here Spanos maintains that inquiry aiming at disinterest is, necessarily, going to serve as a screen for received prejudices. Advocates of disinterest, says Spanos, merely reaffirm “the abiding ‘touchstones’ of the logocentric humanistic mind - ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ (by which, as the omission of reference to any other makes clear ... means the Western world).” With language echoing that of Culture and Anarchy, this is very much a shot across the bow of the H.M.S. Matthew Arnold. According to Spanos, the Arnoldian ideal is bankrupt, and thinkers committed to disinterested inquiry will always end up seeking a cultural “re-centering,” a “restoration of a common body of knowledge” based on old ideas and unexamined biases. In its stead, Spanos offered an ideal of “understanding as antagonistic dialogue”—the kind of public clash that the student from Hass' anecdote called for in a rather less articulate way.

If this combative, interest-group-specific model of inquiry is what you believe in—if, that is, you consider self- or interest-group advocacy a part of what you, as an academic, may or may not be right. But (and perhaps this is something you will hear with pride) you are no gentleman.

Slight Return: Remix and Ekphrasis

2011-11-12T11:31:00.002-06:00

Jeffrey Side has been doing good things for poetry for a long time via his organization The Argotist. My favorite Argotist project has been the collection of interviews with various poets and critics, including Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Ron Silliman, Amiri Baraka, Rae Armantrout, and some guy named Archambeau.

Side has also edited a series of Argotist ebooks. They're downloadable free in pdf format, and my favorites include: Maxine Chernoff's A House in Summer, Jerome Rothenberg's The Jigoku Zoshi Hells: A Book of Variations, and Don Share's Harmonia.

Joining them now is a small collection of my own work, Slight Return: Remix and Ekphrasis. Here's the promotional blurb:

What if Kafka had written the Kama Sutra? What if the rhetoric of manifest destiny were mashed up with the destruction of Hiroshima? What if the icons of punk and glam found themselves curled up with Sheena of the Jungle? What happens when a poet draws a lucky card in the Mexican lotteria? What if poems were made from the flotsam and jetsam of culture, high and low? What if the author really has died, as Roland Barthes told us he would, and been replaced by the scriptor, whose sole power is to mingle texts? What if Jimi Hendryx had only given us the last two words of ‘Voodoo Child (slight return)’? The questions, if not all the answers, are in the poems in Slight Return: Remix and Ekphrasis.

Hope you like it.

Your BlackBerry is a Poem

2011-11-04T18:17:00.001-05:00

A post I wrote about the appropriation of the symbolist poetics of Mallarmé and company by contemporary advertising and branding is up on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog. Check it out.

Fifty Cult Books, Some of Which I've Read

2011-11-03T12:31:00.011-05:00

I'm as skeptical of "top 50" or "top 100" lists as you are, chain-smoking over-caffeinated neurotic cynics that you are. So when an English friend recently sent me the Telegraph's list of the "Fifty Best Cult Books," I was all set to start complaining about it. Then I read my friend's note, appended to the URL: "here's something to attack." If there's a real value to lists of this kind, it's that you can attack them, as my friend suggested. Such lists, like the contents of anthologies, provide wonderful opportunities for arguing and howling with derision—pleasures not to be disdained! They also allow one to remember one's own encounters with the listed books. And by encounters I don't just mean reading experiences: books are (for the moment—we hover on the cusp of an electronic era) physical artifacts, things one runs across in particular times and places. So here are my off-the-cuff notes on my experiences of the books on the Telegraph list. I reckon I've read about two thirds of the fifty.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

I read the bejesus out of Vonnegut when I was a teenager. I even read God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. I wrote a blog post once about how Vonneget comes by his absurdism honestly, unlike most of the young guys who read him, who are only going through a brief phase of junior-varsity level absurdism, as I was.

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

My mom likes the books of Durrell's brother, Gerald, who writes about exotic animals. When I was in junior high I got mixed up about this, and bought a copy of Lawrence Durrell's Black Book as a gift for her. Do not repeat this mistake.

A Rebours by JK Huysmans

It gets dull as hell in the middle, but there are some really good bits, like the part where the protagonist holds a funeral for his libido, and the chapter about how he builds a kind of pipe organ for making combinations of perfumed scents—after which, when he catches a breath of fresh country air, he passes out. But beware: reading this will diminish Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray for you, since you'll see how totally derivative it is. If this book is the Beatles, Wilde's is Badfinger. Or maybe ELO.

Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock

About three years ago, just before my daughter was born, my wife and I loaded up on books about babies and parenting. It's sort of our approach to things to research the hell out of them ahead of time (you can take the happy couple out of grad school, but…). Never read the books. Turns out this parenting thing is experiential. Who knew?

The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf

Never read it.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I teach Plath's poems to freshmen, because the early ones are technically very fine, and therefore a good way to show students what technique is good for. The later poems are shrieky and over-the-top, but they tend to like that. As for The Bell Jar: I dunno. Maybe I went out with too many girls who read it. I keep my distance from the thing.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Telegraph says "literary history would be entirely different if Heller had followed his original intention and called it Catch-18: it was changed to avoid confusion with a Leon Uris book." Too true! It'd be as if Shelley has called his sonnet "User-ma'ra" instead of "Ozymandias," which was just a Greek garbling of the Egyptian original.

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

I hate Salinger. I hate everything about Salinger. Pretentious, precious, and unaccountably over-rated. But this is all probably the result of having read it for the first time when I was in my late 20s.

The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield

If you ever see me reading this, rip it from my hands and use it to slap me upside the head.

The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

Never heard of it.

Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken

My parents were a bit too old to be hippies, though my dad had been a kind of beatnik. But they had hippie friends in the 70s, hangers-on at the university art department where my dad taught. One of them had a house where the doorways were hung with dozens of little hand-made brass bells, and all the toys were unpainted wood. They had a copy of this book, and they were very keen on talking to their plants.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

I wanted to like this book, because I love walking around New Orleans. But I did not find the protagonist charming. I wanted him to pull an Edna Pontellier and just swim out into the Gulf and be done with it.

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I love this book. Not only do I love the full candor about the contradictory nature of the soul, I like the way Rousseau confesses both his crimes (he probably got a servant fired and thrown into prostitution) and his misdemeanors (pissing in the teapot when he was a boy). He's a sexual oddball too: likes to be smacked on the butt by a girl pretending to be his teacher. So if that's your thing, he's your guy.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

I've had a copy of this somewhere since the mid-90s, but despite the great narrative gap in the title ("Justified sin, you say? Do tell!) I'm just not motivated enough to crack it open.

Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard

I read part of this as research when I was writing the John Matthias chapter of my book Laureates & Heretics. Matthias' poem "Bucyrus" is based, in part, on the lunatic teachings of Hubbard. I thought the poem was bizarre, but it's got nothing on its source.

The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley

This is better than people think it is. I keep coming back to Huxley's description of the mind as a "reducing valve" that filters out the "irrelevant" parts of experience, unless we derange it a bit and see things anew: it's actually helped me explain Kant a few times, and I think it's a useful concept for discussing not only LSD experiences, but the disinterested perception of art.

Dune by Frank Herbert

Back in high school I lent my paperback of this to a friend. I was very insistent that he return it in good shape, since he was known for being a bit of a barbarian. He read it and got it back to me, but instead of talking about it with him I started to give him a big lecture about how it was important to handle things with respect. Just then my grip faltered and the book slipped, the cover tearing in half. He laughed and I deserved it.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Everything I had to say about adolescent absurdism in that post about Vonnegut (link above) applies here. But I don't think Adams has a profound experience of absurdity: his is absurdity more the mild, suburban, youthful kind that you and I experienced.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Whenever I read Wolfe I think there's no need for sociologists: Wolfe does it better.

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

Never read it, never going to read it.

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

See my note on Fear of Flying.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

I actually did start reading Atlas Shrugged once, just to see what the asshats were on about. I don't think they're on about much. And don't think Rand ever got over the Soviets taking her father's small business away.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter

The Telegraph says this is  "about what it means to think, and how that happens, this is written in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. Pattern recognition in the work of geniuses. Loved by maths geeks and anybody with Asperger's syndrome and anyone with sense. But at root a chess textbook." That's about right, I think.

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

I think I missed the window to read this. It's a Cold War book, right?

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln

Never heard of it. But the Telegraph says it's like The Da Vinci Code, so I don't think I'll be getting a copy.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Knew a young woman who thought highly of it. Told her I'd read it. Hadn't. That was a long time ago.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

Along with the passages of The Prelude in which Wordsworth talks about how he can't pick a topic, this is one of the great literary stuttering sessions: a whole set of beginnings, left hanging.

Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly

I'm just not going to go in the woods and beat drums with you guys. Sorry. But good luck with that.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
 Odious treacle. But I was happy to read this, from the Telegraph: "Richard Nixon's FBI director, L Patrick Gray, ordered all his staff to read it. Later, he resigned for gross corruption, a fitting punishment for his dreadful taste."

The Magus by John Fowles

Go see Anthony Quinn in the movie version instead. The book isn't bad, butAnthony Quinn is notably absent.

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

Erudition both real and imagined, fun-house mirrors reflecting other fun-house mirrors: what's not to like? The only problem is that if you get truly hooked on Borges and are of a completist disposition, you'll end up reading the sonnets he wrote late in life, and Borges will be much reduced for you.

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

The jacket of the paperback I've owned for something like 15 years boasts that this is one of the greatest novels ever written. I begin to wonder whether I'll ever get around to finding out. I mean, I even left it on a side table for a while, but it just ended up being used as a coaster.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

I was on a thesis committee for a young man writing about this book. Read both the thesis and the book, liked them, but the thesis defense turned out to be all about Russian social history. I listened and nodded before voting to approve the project.

No Logo by Naomi Klein

I'm on her side. But this thing would have been much better if it were, say, 15 pages long.

On The Road by Jack Kerouac

Back in my undergraduate days I had a big orange Viking Critical Edition of this. I read it in the apartment of the guy from whom I used to buy pot (he's now a radio D.J. in Montreal). One day his brother came in from the benighted small town where he lived and borrowed it. He played drums in a band, and lent it to the bass player, who lent it to the bass player in another band that went on tour in a crappy van. I lost track of that band somewhere on the Canadian prairies and the book with them. It was exactly the right way to part from that particular book.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson

I devoured this thing one weekend around 1990 instead of reading whatever I was supposed to read for class.

The Outsider by Colin Wilson

If it had been the fifties, and I had been twenty, I think I'd have liked this. But it was a couple of years ago, and I was forty, and it wasn't doing much for me. Some books are too much the product of their time and place to mean much outside of those co-ordinates. Others (like Catcher in the Rye) seem keyed to a certain age group. This one, I think, is tied to both time and generation. I wonder if its moment will ever come round again.

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

"Where does one find other books like this?" asked a short, squat, vaguely street-person like Latin American man in a sky blue suit and dark glasses who had cornered me in the old Aspidistra Bookshop where I worked. "Where," he continued "are the books on how one lives?" I sent him to the self-help section, which I consider a failure on my part.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

I really want to read this someday, since it seems like the good ole left-wing religion. But when I say "I really want to read this," the statement needs to be measured against my continued inaction. Maybe I don't really want to read it that badly.

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald

When I'm feeling sentimental, I kind of like this. When I'm feeling cynical, it seems like kitsch.

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

Never read it. I think I only ever read travel writing when it appears in Granta. I've loved old issues of Granta ever since I read the one called "While Waiting for a War" back when I was a freshman. That's the issue where I fist encountered Hanif Kureishi's work. I still love The Buddha of Suburbia, My Beautiful Laundrette, and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Back in grad school I shared a house with a biologist doing a postdoc. A German colleague of his dropped by once looking for him, but he was out. The German saw my complete set of Hesse on the shelf and, in an Arnold Schwarzenegger accent, asked "do you like Herman Hesse?" I've always been a bit ambivalent about Hesse, thinking him good but didactic. But I didn't want to insult a German writer in the presence of a German, so I said "yes, yes I do, very much." "Ach," said the German biologist, "I hate Herman Hesse."

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I put this on the syllabus of a graduate seminar I and a senior historian colleague were teaching. I taught it as a kind of statement about the turn to morbid emotion brought about when the middle-class protagonist is shut out of the position he deserves by aristocratic snobbery. "Nice little Marxist reading," said my historian colleague, before demolishing it with the great snowplow of German romanticism.

Story of O by Pauline Réage
"A guaranteed detumescent," says The Telegraph. Opinions vary.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Apparently a lot of books on this list make me think of my post on Vonnegut and absurdism.

The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda

I know a guy who keeps saying he's going to write a book about this. Somehow that seems wrong. It just feels like this book should have been abandoned after Jimmy Carter lost to Reagan.

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

Never read it.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

I really don't think Nietzsche should have attempted this. Except for The Birth of Tragedy, all of his best work is in the epigram and the fragment.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Do you wish she'd written more? Not me. I think it's kind of perfect just to have this by itself.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig

When I was 14 I objected to my English teacher about the books we were reading, saying they were juvenile. She said I could write an essay on something else if I wanted to. I declared I would write on Zen and the Art of Motorcylce Maintenance, which seemed to my young self to be both sophisticated (zen) and badass (motorcycle maintenance). When I got the essay back, her sole comment was "did you read anything beyond the jacket?" I had not.

What’s the Matter with American Poetry? Rita Dove’s Revisionist Canon

2011-10-29T16:46:00.014-05:00

What’s the matter with American poetry? Apparently, the problem is Allen Ginsberg. And Sylvia Plath. And Susan Howe, and Alice Notley, and James Schuyler. Also Louise Glück. Also Louis Zukofsky, and all of the other Objectivists. That, at least, is the conclusion one might draw from Rita Dove’s new Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry, which bills itself as “an unparalleled survey of the best poems of the last century,” and includes none of the poets named above.

I’ve done just enough editing myself to know that standing up and saying you’re editing an anthology is a bit like standing up and saying you’re a target—and the larger the scope of the anthology, the larger the target. It’s worse, too, when you’re editing a book that includes living poets: at this point you might as well consider yourself a walking bull's eye, and be prepared to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged poets everywhere. In any anthology, there will be grounds for disagreement: the poor editor has a limited amount of space, and in the end will find that he or she has to select one poet out of dozens with valid claims for inclusion.

Dove’s anthology does a good job in some respects, especially in being attentive to the claims of poets of color. In other respects, it takes positions over which reasonable people might disagree. I’d have argued for Notley and Schuyler, but I can understand that other people might find their work to have been in some way—aesthetically, socially, in terms of influence—less worthy of inclusion than other poets of their respective generations. Other people will have their own list of poets they’d have wished to see: one friend of mine lists Kenneth Rexroth, Barbara Guest, Robert Kelly, Jerome Rothenberg, Clark Coolidge, Ed Roberson, Bernadette Meyer, John Taggart, and Eileen Myles, among others. The street runs the other way, too: I imagine most people who thumb through the table of contents will think some of the poets listed ought not to be there, especially if it meant excluding someone else: me, I find it difficult to believe that Laurie Sheck and B.H. Fairchild should have precedence over some of the excluded poets. But again, I can see that there’d be room to argue, and both Sheck and Fairchild have written fine poems.

When it comes to excluding both Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg from an anthology purporting to represent 20th century American poetry, though, we’re not really in the territory of ordinary disagreement. We’ve entered a place where some sort of explanation is required, because what’s being proposed is a radical redrawing of the map of American poetry. I’m open to such a redrawing, but I need to know why it’s being done.

Speculation runs wild. Some take a fairly charitable view: one reviewer sees the exclusion of Plath and Ginsberg as proof that Dove “is her own woman,” bravely going off in her own direction. Facebook has lit up with chatter on the anthology, very little of it positive, at least from what I've seen. It’s been noted that many of the excluded poets publish under HarperCollins imprints, and one source claims that HarperCollins wanted some very steep reprint fees. If this is the case, one wonders whether it might have been a deliberate attempt to torpedo a rival press’ anthology. Some of these issues are touched on in Dove’s introduction, in which she complains about permissions fees. One wonders if this can be the whole story: Penguin is by no means an under-capitalized venture, and people at the press must have known that glaring exclusions like this would seriously hurt the academic market for the book. But what else could explain the exclusions?

I’ve heard from someone in the publishing industry that Dove may harbor some particular animosity for Plath, based on the perception that Plath could be deeply insensitive about other people's suffering. There's the appropriation of Holocaust imagery to discuss family unhappiness in "Daddy," for example, or the use of Hiroshima imagery, and of course there's the very charged language in one of Plath’s better-known poems, “Ariel.” Here’s a passage:

God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.

There’s no denying the presence of unsettling language, and there’s not much in the context to mitigate against a feeling that this is offensive to our 21st century sensibilities. I am acutely aware that I will never know how it feels to be African-American and come across that offending word in an anthology of poetry. But I do know that it’s the sort of thing I cringe at reading in a classroom setting, and for which I provide a lot of commentary, without making excuses (the same thing happens when I teach Heart of Darkness, or Hemingway’s “The Battler”). I’m told—and I want to emphasize that I do not have this at first hand—that this sort of racially charged language, in combination with Plath's cavalier use of imagery drawn from some of the great atrocities of the 20th century, might lie at the root of Dove’s problem with Plath. It might be a matter of a disdain for Plath's real or perceived insensitivity that led to her exclusion from Penguin's version of "the best poems of the last century."

I wonder, though, if this can be true, because Dove does include John Berryman in her anthology. I think it’s correct to include his work: to my mind, Berryman is the greatest American poet of his generation, greater than Lowell (in whose shadow he once stood), greater even than Bishop (in whose shadow he stands now). But if you’re looking for wince-inducing, culturally insensitive language, you’ll find it in Berryman’s Dream Songs, which make extensive use of a blackface minstrel show motif. I think it was right to include him in the anthology. But if Berryman’s in, why not Plath?

In the end, I don’t know the reason for the exclusion of Plath. If (and I emphasize this is an if) it has to do with real or perceived insensitivity in her work, I think Rita Dove is well positioned to make explain the point. Indeed, I can think of few people who could do it better (how I wish Reginald Shepherd had lived to write about this!). As my friend in publishing suggests, it would be far better for Dove to provide a full, in-depth explanation for the exclusion than to simply edit Plath out of this representation of American poetry. One might say Dove owes the world this explanation, not only to defend her editorial choices, but to inform us about how Plath looks from where Dove stands.

Of course there's a sense in which arguments about anthology contents may soon look a lot like arguments about what channel to watch on television. Just as the DVR has made it possible for each of us to have things our own way—watching the football game while recording the movie for later, then getting the reality show on demand— technology promises to make most of the arguments about anthologies disappear. Limited page space and editorial variance from our own preferences become less and less pressing as more and more American poetry finds its way onto the internet, thanks in no small measure to the Poetry Foundation. As one Facebook friend of mine put it during a discussing of Dove's exclusion of Ginsberg and Plath:

Howl and Kaddish are both on the Poetry Foundation website, along with 39 poems by Plath. Has anyone tried teaching entirely from their online anthology yet? Glad to let Ruth Lily's endowment pay HarperCollins's fees, rather than my students.... I may have to try this experiment in the spring.

We should all be interested in how that experiment turns out.

Occupy Arcadia: Mythos of an Emerging Movement

2011-10-28T16:42:00.007-05:00

“What,” ask the pundits, “do the Occupy Wall Street people want?” When they deign to answer their own question, they tend, if they are uncharitable, to say that the protestors don’t know what they want, that any real message is lost in a miasma of different agendas. The more charitable type of pundit tends to say something more along the lines of “the protestors know what they’re against — economic inequality and the power of money — but they don’t know what they’re for.” I’ve spent enough time at the Chicago manifestation of the movement to see the iota of truth in both the charitable and the uncharitable analysis, but in the end both analyses miss the significance of what’s happening. To get at that significance, it’s important to drop the usual categories of analysis — left and right, cultural and economic, idealist and realist — and come at matters from an angle where things appear less familiar. Otherwise, we risk reducing something truly new into one or another version of what we find familiar. So bear with me while I propose a means of analysis that might seem quite strange: it’s the strangeness that we’re after, here, since the familiar categories of understanding have proved remarkably ineffective.

Mythos and Movement

As the scholar Malcolm Bull argued in New Left Review (March-April 2010), Greek mythology presents a coherent typology for understanding the relations of power, production, and knowledge. In his view, the Greek mythos can be mapped out on a pair of axes thusly:

Olympus is the realm of pure power, in its various manifestations. It is the dwelling-place of Zeus, the figure of pure executive power, and of Hercules, the figure of physical strength. It deals with realities, and does so by ruling over them, by authority, by influence and manipulation, or by sheer force. It is the realm of mastery.

Hades also deals with realities, but does so differently. It is the realm of production, where Hephaestus works at his forge: his realities are those of existing materials, of the strengths and limits of bronze and silver and gold. Many people who know their myths have been puzzled about why Aphrodite is married to the lame, ugly, Hephaestus — but at a symbolic level, it makes perfect sense: while he is the figure of artisanal, or even industrial production, she is a figure of sexual reproduction. Together they cover the realms of inorganic and organic production. If Olympus is the realm of mastery, Hades is a subordinate realm, the world of labor set against the Olympian world of command.

Parnassus deals less with existing realities than with the free play of speculation: it is the realm of Athena and the life of the mind, and of Apollo and the poetic. The muses dwell here, and it is to Parnassus that scholars and intellectuals repair. Like Olympus, it is a privileged realm, but unlike Olympus, it is not a world of power. To put it in modern terms, one might think of Olympus as the realm of executives, and Parnassus as the world of tenure, think tanks, and foundation grants.

And then there’s Arcadia. This, too, is a realm of free play rather than of existing realities with all of their limitations. But unlike Parnassus, this isn’t a world of concepts or philosophies or epic poems: it’s a wild realm, a realm of potential energies. It’s the world of Pan, who dwells in forests and open meadows that have not been brought under cultivation. It’s the world of Diana the huntress, another forest-dweller defined in terms of potential: she is, after all, the virgin goddess. Everything about Arcadia is about the primitive state of things, from which other things might emerge.

Hermes, the messenger god, is a special case: he inhabits the very center of the map, at the intersection of the axes: this is central to his function as the messenger god, and to his function as the god of boundaries and those who cross them.

Once one grasps the general structure of mythological relations, a lot of things become clear about the significance of the myths: when Apollo and the faun Marysas (a figure of Arcadia) have a musical duel, won by Apollo who then flays Marysas, we have a kind of martyring of naïve or potential artistry by the established forces of Parnassus. One can see its relevance to, say, aristocratic culture’s disdain for folk culture, or the sophisticated formalist’s soul-crushing dismissal of emergent talent.

But we’re a long way from talking about Occupy Wall Street. What happens when we try to view the movement through a conceptual framework as defamiliarizing as the Greek mythos?

Occupying Olympus, Occupying Hades, Occupying Parnassus

The first thing that should be clear about Occupy Wall Street is that it isn’t a movement based in Olympus. Unlike the Tea Party, which was bankrolled by the enormous fortunes of the Koch Brothers and for which Fox News served as something like an advertising and P.R. firm, Occupy Wall Street has little or no connection with the realm of worldly power. Even when those in powerful positions, such as President Obama, make gestures of sympathy to the movement, they do so in ways both unconvincing and uncomfortable. Michael Gerson of the Washington Post put it clearly enough:

President Obama’s awkward, unreturned embrace of Occupy Wall Street is among the strangest developments of the 2012 campaign…. Obama has been the unrivaled leader in fundraising from the financial sector in recent years. Senior staffers with Wall Street connections have occupied the White House for some time now. Banks and financial-service firms have been some of the main direct beneficiaries of Obama’s economic policies. And Obama himself has often sought to defuse public criticism of Wall Street.… Last year, he went out of his way to defend large bonuses for the chief executives of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs: “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen. I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth.”

A stronger case can be made for Occupy Wall Street as a movement based in Hades, under the protection of Hephastus (if that sentence doesn’t defamiliarize the political categories, I don’t know what will). Unions, for example, have intermittently swelled the ranks of the protestors in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. But the key word here is “intermittently”: the Occupy protests are not union-centered rallies, like those we saw in Wisconsin earlier this year. Union leaders don’t call the shots. If they did, we probably wouldn’t hear the punditocracy’s complaints about the lack of a clear message: instead, they’d be writing about how the demands of workers for decent wages and benefits are unreasonable in a globalized economy.

What about Parnassus? Is this where the real center of the movement rests? There are certainly plenty of students to be found at the demonstrations, and a few professors (full disclosure: my tenured feet have occupied a few sidewalks and parks in Chicago). But the disproportionate representation of students is certainly a matter of greater opportunity to show up, rather than of significantly greater motive. As one man said at a recent demonstration, “you students, you’re my voice: I work 60 hours a week to keep my house, and I look after my kids, and I just can’t get out here often.” Some polls suggest that the majority of Americans support for the movement: this isn’t an ivory tower thing, not in its essence. Veterans, working stiffs, union guys, moms with kids in tow, office jockeys, street people, and others are all in evidence, and though they applaud when Cornell West speaks, they’re not lining up behind him: they’re standing beside him.

Et in Arcadia Occupy

This leaves us with Arcadia. But what exactly is Arcadia, anyway? In the Greek mythos, it’s all about what might-yet-be. It’s where Paris stands when he judges who has the greatest beauty: Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite. This is significant: he’s choosing between representatives of Olympus (power), Parnassus (knowledge) and Hades (production), and as he makes the choice from the only position outside of their realms: in Arcadia, the world of the not-yet, the potential.

This, I think, is the proper location of the Occupy movement in the Greek mythos, at least at the moment.

A few days ago I was arguing with the historian D.L. LeMahieu about the nature and meaning of the Occupy movement, and I’d begun with the proposition that what we were seeing was a resurgence of the now-old New Left paradigm: the language of class, anti-capitalism, and economic justice returning after a long eclipse. LeMahieu refuted all that, claiming that what we were seeing wasn’t a return to something old, but the birth of something new. Sure, there were old left-wing slogans. But this was part of the mulch out of which something very new was being born. We weren’t going to see a new socialism, because socialism was the countervailing force that tried to civilize 19^th and early 20^th century capitalism: it was a response to a kind of economics that doesn’t really exist anymore. We’re in a new phase of economic development, with transformative technological forces and the entry two billion of new workers into a global marketplace. We had an unprecedented economics (which developed out of our old economics), and it would create an unprecedented politics (which would also develop out of our old politics). I’m convinced LeMahieu was right: we’re not going to get a return to something old, even if the new thing we get takes up and transforms the old political paradigms.

In a way, the very fact that the pundits have had a hard time grasping what the protestors want is a sign that what’s coming together is something truly new. It doesn’t fit easily into our paradigms. It’s not a student protest, it’s not a labor protest, it’s not a rally orchestrated by one or another of the political parties. Slavoj Žižek got at the nature of things in his address to the protestors in Zuccotti Park:

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink.

…. Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?….We are not Communists if Communism means a system which collapsed in 1990. Remember that today those Communists are the most efficient, ruthless Capitalists. In China today, we have Capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American Capitalism, but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize Capitalism, don’t allow yourself to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over. The change is possible.

I’ve only felt the political ground shift beneath my feet twice in my life. The first time was in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when one could feel a horrible lurch toward authoritarianism and fear. The other time is now. I don’t know where it’s all going any more than you do. But unlike last time, I have faith that it’s moving in the direction of hope.

So a Poet Walks Into a Bar: The Poetry Reading as Rhetorical Situation

2011-10-17T11:06:00.002-05:00

Here’s the full text of “So a Poet Walks into a Bar: The Poetry Reading as Rhetorical Situation,” my contribution to this year’s ALSCW conference. If you want to cite it, the format would be:

Archambeau, Robert. "So a Poet Walks into a Bar: The Poetry Reading as Rhetorical Situation." Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers Conference. Boston University, Boston MA. 16 October 2011. Conference Presentation.

So a Poet Walks into a Bar: The Poetry Reading as Rhetorical Situation

So a poet walks into a bar to read his work to an audience. But what if it isn't a bar? What if it's a university auditorium, or a bookshop specializing in, say, works by women writers? What if it's a conference room at the A.W.P. Convention, where the creative writing professors slap one another on the back and try to 'place' grad students and manuscripts with English departments and their journals? What if it's the 92nd Street Y, or a presidential inauguration, or a funeral? What if it's not a bar the poet walks into, but a recording studio, where he'll make a podcast or mp3 for an audience he's unlikely to meet? What if it isn't a poet who walks into a bar to read poetry to an audience, but a reader who walks into her study to read aloud to herself from a favorite poet's work?

Venue matters, when poetry is read aloud: indeed, in few situations does Walter J. Ong's assertion that “a writer's audience is always a fiction,” seem less convincing than in a poetry reading, where the poets stand in the presence of the bodies of their listeners (9). Who speaks, where, to whom, and to what end? — answering these questions can tell us a great deal about the nature and meaning of performed poetry. One way to explore these questions is to adapt rhetorical theory—which has long been concerned with the specific relations of speaker, venue, and audience—to the study of poetry readings. There are obvious limits to such an approach. For example, it can tell us little of interest, perhaps nothing at all, about reading poetry aloud when one is alone, which may well be the most common form of spoken poetry. What is more, there are those who would argue that whatever situation a poetry reading creates, it is not in any meaningful sense a rhetorical situation. I'd disagree with this last criticism, but only because I'm willing to define what counts as a rhetorical situation marginally more broadly than does that most expansive of rhetorical theorists, Lloyd Bitzer.

Bitzer, an emeritus professor of the University of Wisconsin, is generally regarded as one of the most respected rhetorical theorists of his generation, and is best known for introducing the notion of the "rhetorical situation" in an essay of that name in the inaugural issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric. For Bitzer, there are several components to a rhetorical situation. Firstly, and most importantly, there must be “an exigence” — a problem to be solved— “which strongly invites utterance” (5). Situations are rhetorical when the exigence, or problem calling out to be addressed, can be altered by the “bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change” (4). The exigence, which may or may not be consciously perceived by the speaker and the audience, is “an imperfection marked by urgency” (6); while an audience, to truly be a rhetorical audience, must consist “of those persons who are capable of being influenced by the discourse” (8): the obdurate and the obtuse alike may be an audience, but stuck in their views, or incapable of growing through engaging with discourse, they aren’t an audience susceptible to change. As Bitzer puts it, the situation is rhetorical if "an actual or potential exigence… can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence" (6).

In addition, a rhetorical situation contains two types of constraints. The first are those inherent in the pre-existing situation, such as the audience’s beliefs and attitudes, as well as pertinent pre-existing “documents, facts, traditions, images, interests” (8). The second type of constraints originate with the speaker: personal character, established style, and the like. (Those of you with a background in rhetoric will recognize these as Aristotle’s “inartistic proofs” and “artistic proofs”). So when a speaker enters a rhetorical situation, he or she enters a situation where some kind of change is wanted, a change that can conceivably be affected by discourse. The speaker faces people capable of being changed, if their beliefs and ideas, and the character and style of the speaker, come together in some perfect discursive storm.

Of course rhetoric doesn’t take place under test-lab conditions of purity. Some rhetorical situations are simple, others much more complicated, even muddy. There may be multiple exigences in any situation, some incompatible, and an audience may consist of multiple constituencies, concerned with different exigences and with different constraints regarding the kind of discourse that will appeal to them.

Bitzer allows fairly broad latitude when defining what sort of situations count as rhetorical. While his examples include political debates and Socrates’ “Apology,” he also includes situations where the simple need for information is rhetorical, if the providing of that information will have an effect in the world: the need for reporters to give details about the assassination of President Kennedy in order to calm a panicked population, for example, counts as a rhetorical situation for Bitzer, one that he seems to have struck him quite powerfully. The exigence, in this case, is a lack of information that could lead to panic; the audience is capable of receiving information and being calmed by it, if only because they are no longer bewildered. The speaker, knowing that he faces a worried population, and capable of projecting a certain gravitas in reporting the facts, will be successful in solving the exigence.

As broad as Bitzer's definition of a rhetorical situation is, it doesn't extend to poetry: in fact, he specifically excludes poetry from his scheme, apparently out of a belief that poetry (as Auden so famously put it) "makes nothing happen." It's my contention that Bitzer is too modest about the scope of his own theory, and that poetry readings tend to have some sort of raison d'être, that they tend, in one way or another, to ameliorate some kind of situation. In fact, one way to understand the significance of poetry readings is to look for what sort of exigence a reading seeks to address, what imperfection in the world they seek to remedy through addressing an open-minded audience.

So a poet walks into a bar. Let's say it's the Green Mill in Chicago, where (according the PBS documentary The United States of Poetry), "a strand of new poetry began… in 1987 when Marc Smith found a home for the poetry slam." For Smith, there was certainly an exigence behind the slams, with their Dionysian audience participation, ad hoc systems of judging poetic value, liberally-flowing booze, and general informality. The exigence was the perceived dryness and audience-unfriendliness of more formal poetry readings, and a resulting alienation of poetry from potential enthusiasts. As Smith put it, the slam was to be an "up yours" to poorly attended, more effete poetry readings. Smith wanted to change the culture of poetry by holding these readings, "because no one was listening to the poets" (see Wiltz). In the end, the exigence was the perceived removal of poetry from informal, non-academic contexts, and the resulting marginalization of poetry. Poetry may or may not make "nothing happen," but the poetry slam certainly attempted to make something happen. In addressing a perceived exigence, it created a rhetorical situation. The audience-based constraints (resistance to the idea of spending an evening sitting quietly in an uncomfortable chair listening to someone read) are addressed by physical comfort, alcohol, and a whole series of methods (foot stomping, hissing, woofing, and finger snapping are all encouraged, and have specific meanings) by which the audience is invited to participate in the performances as they happen, and in judging them when they're done. Certainly poets performing in these circumstances may face certain constraints of their own: in order to succeed they must not consider themselves or their work above spur-of-the-moment criticism, and they tend to need either a quick wit or the ability to emote convincingly in order to ameliorate the exigence. Poetry slams, of course, have evolved and changed, and can address many different exigences—my point here is simply to assert, contra Bitzer, that the poetry reading can indeed present a rhetorical situation.

The poetry readings associated with the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s present what may be the clearest case of the poetry reading as a rhetorical situation in modern American literary history. The defining characteristic of the Black Arts Movement was its African-American nationalism, which in the early years manifested as a form of separatism. Such separatism was spurred on by events of 1965 on the national level—the assassination of Malcom X—as well as on the local level—the destruction of the relative racial harmony of the Lower East Side poetry scene of the sixties through racially-motivated violence at key reading venues (see Kane, 54-55). Although the movement quickly became national, the founding of the Black Arts Repertory Theater and School (BARTS) was of central importance, as was the move to Harlem by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Poetry in the Black Arts Movement was linked with, even subordinated to, the large exigence of creating a radical culture for African-Americans outside the institutions and norms of the nation at large. As Kaluma ya Salaam has argued, the Black Arts Movement is "the only American literary movement to advance social engagement as a sine qua non of its aesthetic…. The two hallmarks of Black Arts activity were the development of Black theater groups and Black poetry performances… and both had close ties to community organizations and issues" (Salaam). Community formation was a central goal of the movement—its primary exigence—and ideas of individualist art or art for it's own sake were anathema. "Black art," wrote Ron Karenga in his manifesto "On Black Art," "must be for the people, by the people and from the people. That is to say, it must be functional, collective  and committing." "All art is collective," he continued, "there is no such thing as art for art's sake" (Karenga). Larry Neal, another founder of the Black Arts Movement, echoed these sentiments when he proclaimed, in 1968, "the Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept" (28).

So the exigence of Black Arts poetry readings was radical consciousness-raising and separatist community-creation. Audiences were potentially resistant for a number of reasons, not the least being that many in the potential audience were white liberals, and others were African-Americans committed to social and cultural integration, like the writer Ishmael Reed, who was never permitted to be a member of the movement for this reason. One controversial technique to render the crowd a "rhetorical audience" was simply to forbid white people from attending the readings. As the critic Daphne S. Reed points out,

…this very policy was endorsed by both the original Harlem venture and a number of other black arts theatres established later in several major cities. The rationale was that the presence of whites would be potentially inhibitive… and in any case whites should not be permitted to occupy seats needed for black people for whom the performance was intended and, allegedly, exclusively relevant. (54)

Beyond such extreme (and short-lived) measures, other steps were taken to overcome audience resistance in pursuit of ameliorating the exigence. These included bringing the readings to places where the communities gathered, as well as adopting a mode of address that evoked the most respected institution of African-American life. Lorenzo Thomas describes both in a passage from his essay "Neon Griot":

With self-appointed missionary fervor, Black Arts poets extended the venues for their performances beyond storefront theaters to neighborhood community centers, church basements, taverns, and to the streets. Not surprisingly, the dominant mode of poetry that proved effective in such settings drew upon the rhetorical conventions of the black church, which is the matrix of African-American culture. (312)

The church-based conventions, which work with what Thomas calls "…the speaking voice that trespasses into song; and an antiphonal interaction with the congregation" (314) invoked cultural authority and stressed the link between performer and audience. So important did the specifics of the speaking voice of the Black Arts poet become that at least two poets of the movement, Sonia Sanchez and Johari Amini, came to see the written text of the poem as a performance score, akin to sheet music, with the printed poem indicating exactly how the poet wanted it to be read (see Kane, 85).

Nowhere do we see the exigence of separatist community-creation more clearly than in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's short poem "S.O.S." Here, in a poem clearly written for oral delivery to a racially specific audience, we begin with a strong sense of the phatic function of language, with the poet seeking, apparently desperately, to connect to his community:

Calling black people 

Calling all black people, man woman child 

Wherever you are, calling you, urgent, come in 

Black People, come in, wherever you are, urgent, calling 

You, calling all black people 

The voice is like that of a lost radio operator seeking to connect to home base. But the radio-operator's voice changes, in the final lines, to something else: rather than a voice in the wilderness, trying to find contact, we suddenly get something like a host's voice, or a carnival barker's, welcoming people into whatever desirable location he inhabits:

Calling all black people, come in, black people, come 

on in.

From "come in" to "come on in" is a big step: the outsider becomes the insider, and the audience, at first sought desperately, is now welcomed warmly. It is a rhetorical performance of the creation of a specifically African-American community, and when Jones/Baraka read it, he showed that the poetry reading could indeed be a rhetorical situation.

As Bitzer pointed out, rhetorical situations can be complex things, and may involve multiple exigences, and multiple audiences, in a single occasion. I'd like to end by gesturing toward one such complex rhetorical situation: the situation of the contemporary African-American poet in the most prominent form of contemporary poetry reading: the academically-sponsored poetry event.

The exigences of university poetry readings vary considerably, of course; and I've been privy to more than one conversation in which it became clear that the sponsoring poet-academic and the visiting poet saw the main rationale for the reading in terms of personal career logrolling, a matter of "I'll help you put an item on your vita by hosting your reading if you help me in much the same way." But the more legitimate exigence of the university poetry reading, the reason generally given to the deans and chairs who hold the purse-strings, tends to be pedagogical. That is, the imperfection the reading seeks to ameliorate is some combination of a lack of student knowledge about poetry, and a lack of student sympathy for poetry, which the presence of a (charismatic, one hopes) poet will change.

When an African-American poet walks into a university reading situation, though, we tend to enter one of Bitzer's complex rhetorical situations, with multiple exigences and multiple audiences. To some degree, the exigence is the same as in most university poetry readings: there's a need for the audience to learn about poetry-as-poetry. But the complex web of American social history, including one of the main legacies of the Black Arts movement — identity politics — means that there's another exigence, having to do with the politics of representation. As anyone who has ever tapped an academic cultural diversity fund as a means of bringing an African-American poet to a campus knows, universities tend to recognize two real or perceived exigences related to cultural diversity: the need to show African-American students that their community is represented in university cultural programming, and the need to expose non-African-American students to African-American culture, as part of the mission of spreading appreciation for cultural diversity. So an African-American poet walks into a university auditorium. He or she is there for a multiple exigence: to increase knowledge of, and sympathy for, poetry, and to represent African-American culture for African-American students, and to non-African American students. It's a kind of palimpsest, with a more moderate, pluralist version of the Black Arts exigence of cultural representation overlaid with the discipline-specific logic of the modern university, in which poetry readings are held for the advancement of knowledge of poetry.

As we've seen with slam poetry and Black Arts poetry, the rhetorical situation of the poetry reading matters for how poetry is performed. Consider Harryette Mullen, whose success in both academic and identity politics-centered poetic contexts is rarely paralleled (she has won an award from the Black Arts Academy and taught in an ivy league university). Her work sends out signals to a number of communities, referencing the classical canon, the modernist and avant-garde forebears of contemporary experimental work, and iconic elements of African-American culture: Mullen has described her work as a textual confluence of Gertrude Stein, Sappho, and the blues, in which "Sappho meets the blues at the crossroads" (see Bedient 654). The work combines these influences in such a way that allows her, in performance, to emphasize any one of these elements in a single poem. This is accomplished largely through the polyvalent nature of her language.

The critic Kate Pearcy has described Mullen's poems as involving a great deal of "homophonic punning and word play," and noted that "reading possibilities are therefore highly provisional" (2): one may perform the poems with varying degrees of ambiguity or clarity. Here, for example, is the prose poem "Of a girl, in white," which I and others experienced, when we heard it performed, as a poem about eros and about word play—a poem, that is, in the traditions of Sappho and of Gertrude Stein:

Of a girl, in white, between the lines, in the spaces where nothing is written. Her starched petticoats, giving him the slip. Loose lips, a telltale spot, where she was kissed, and told. Who would believe her, lying still between the sheets. The pillow cases, the dirty laundry laundered. Pillow talk-show on a leather couch, slips in and out of dreams. Without permission, slips out the door. A name adores a Freudian slip.

Once, after I spoke on Mullen's work, the African-American poet Tyrone Williams approached me to say that he'd attended a reading by Mullen in which the African-American audience, coming with their own expectations and interpretive norms (with, to use Bitzer's terms, different external constraints than I and my group brought when we heard the poem) received the poem as primarily about racial 'passing.' The fact that Mullen's work admits of such interpretations, and makes itself so readily available to different emphases in performance, gives an indication of one reason why Mullen's work has been so successful in the complex rhetorical situations where it is so often performed.

We get a clear sense of the possibilities for different emphases in performance in Mullen's work from this stanza of an untitled poem in her 1995 collection Muse & Drudge:

you can sing their songs

with words your way

put it over to the people

know what you are doing

Is singing "their songs" with "words your way" a matter of the contemporary, postmodern poet appropriating tradition (of Stein riffing on Sappho)? Or is it a matter of the African-American poet appropriating white or Eurocentric traditions (the blues meeting Stein and Sappho at the crossroads)? It's all in how the pronouns (which lack specific referents in the poem) are performed, how the poet chooses to perform them with the audience in the room. Contrast these lines to Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka's "S.O.S.," and the importance of the rhetorical situation for the poetry and its performance becomes clear: Mullen, who habitually enters complex rhetorical situations with multiple audiences, is ambiguous and flexible, where Jones/Baraka, entering clearly defined rhetorical situations, is emphatic, community-oriented, and identity-group specific.

I don't mean to suggest that I've done anything like perform a proper taxonomy of types of poetry readings here, nor do I want to claim I've covered all of the possibilities for slam poetry, Black Arts poetry, or the contemporary academic poetry reading (for poets African-American or otherwise). Rather, I've hoped to indicate, in what can only be a preliminary manner, that we will enrich our interpretations of the performance of poetry by understanding the rhetorical situation of those readings, and that we have much to gain by bringing the tradition of rhetorical theory to bear on poetic performance.

Works Cited

Bedient, Calvin. "The Solo Mysterioso Blues." Callaloo 19.3 (Autumn 1996): 651-669.

Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1.1 (January 1968): 1-14.

Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.

Karenga, Ron. "On Black Art." Modern American Poetry, the University of Illinois. .

Neal, Larry. "The Black Arts Movement." The Drama Review. 12.4 (Summer 1968): 28-39).

Ong, Walter J. “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 1975 90:1 (1975): 9-21.

Pearcy, Kate. "A Poetics of Opposition? Race and the Avant-Garde." Paper read at the Conference on Contemporary Poetry: Poetry and the Public Sphere, Rutgers University: April 24-27, 1997.

Reed, Daphne S. "LeRoi Jones: High Priest of the Black Arts Movement." Educational Theater Journal. 22.1 (March 1970): 53-59.

Salaam, Kaluma ya. "Historical Overview of the Black Arts Movement." Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois.

Thomas, Lorenzo. "Neon Griot: The Functional Role of Poetry Readings in the Black Arts Movement." In Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998: 300-324.

The United States of Poetry. Dir. Joshua Blum and Bob Holman. Washington Square Films/PBS, 1995.

Wiltz, Teresa. "Slam Dunked: Poets Duke it Out in Chicago." The Washington Post (August 18, 1999): C1.

The English Opium Eater and Others

2011-10-11T12:18:00.003-05:00

Here's the beginning of a longish review I wrote of Robert Morrison's The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey (by Robert Morrison) and Susan Wolfson's Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action. It appears in the latest issue of Essays in Criticism:

The Romantics were famous inventors of themselves: a hosier's son could become a prophet dreaming up his own mythology and marrying Heaven to Hell; a club-footed boy from Aberdeenshire could turn himself into the mad, bad heart-throb of Europe; and the provincial son of an obscure lawyer could proclaim himself the universal ‘man speaking to men’ in a new kind of poetry. None of this invention, of course, was ex nihilo, and in different ways two new studies, Robert Morrison's The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey and Susan J. Wolfson's Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action, trace the manner in which Romantics wove their identities out of the cultural strands around them.For the young Thomas De Quincey, out to invent himself, almost any social milieu would do so long as it wasn't the one he knew growing up in the house of a bullying older brother and a mother whose friendship with the Evangelical writer Hannah More drove her ever deeper into an austere and censorious piety. De Quincey's father, who died when De Quincey was quite young, had been a prosperous merchant in Manchester, but the worlds that attracted De Quincey lay both above and below a merchant's station. He was taken up as a protégé by Lady Carbery, who sought to turn the talkative lad into a proper country gentleman who could ride and shoot with the best of them. The diminutive De Quincey didn't excel in gentlemanly acts of physical prowess, but he did enjoy the idea of aristocracy: the ‘De’ was something his mother tacked on to the family name one season at Bath, an affectation of Norman lineage the son kept long after the mother abandoned it. He kept, too, an aristocratic disdain for mercantile Manchester. ‘In this place trade is the religion, and money is the god’, De Quincey wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘Every object I see reminds me of those occupations which run counter to the bent of my own nature … I cannot stir out of doors but I am nosed by a factory, a cotton-bag, a cotton-dealer, or something else allied to that most detestable commerce’. His escape from the mercantile world took him to London, where he pioneered the role that would be played so well by such luminaries as Poe and Baudelaire: the drug-addled, convention-flaunting literary bohemian. He became a kind of low-rent flâneur, falling in with dodgy characters and taking up with prostitutes. De Quincey claimed that one of these, a timid girl of 15 he calls ‘Ann of Oxford Street’, saved his life. He writes that he wanted to save her too, but missed a crucial rendezvous and lost track of her for ever. Morrison makes a good case that we may doubt the veracity of the whole episode. Indeed, Ann seems very much an amalgam of Mary Magdalene and the female vagrants from the pages of Lyrical Ballads: it is probable that De Quincey not only invented a bohemian role for himself, but created his own supporting cast.London life also led De Quincey deep into the arms of that deadliest species of false friend, the moneylender. It was a fatal moment...

The rest of the article is available here.

After Miłosz: Simic, Levine, and Zagajewski Talk Poetry in Chicago

2011-10-07T14:17:00.009-05:00

So two American poets laureate, a Polish poet, and a Harvard professor walk into an emergency room. It sounds like the set-up for some kind of literary joke, but in actuality it was how things began last weekend when Philip Levine, Charles Simic, and Adam Zagajewski sat down for a discussion moderated by Steve Burt downstairs at Chicago's Chopin Theater (for reasons I never discovered, the downstairs part of the Chopin is called "The Emergency Room," and looks the part: painted bright white with teal accents, it features a harshly-lit stage with a gurney in the background). I wanted to make some joke about the gurney and the advanced age of the laureates, but would have had to tear Chicu Reddy, who was seated next to me, away from his discussion with Oren Izenberg and others from the University of Chicago English department, so I let it pass.

The gathering was part of a two-day event called "After Miłosz," one of about 200 celebrations of the Miłosz centenary worldwide—Adam Zagajewski mentioned that this was the tenth such event at which he had spoken this year. There were three parts to the evening's events: readings of Miłosz's works by the participants, an open discussion among the panelists, and then a brief period in which Simic, Levine, and Zagajewski reading from their own works. Here's what I took note of in my battered Moleskine (direct quotes are approximate, from memory and quickly-taken notes—I regret any inaccuracies).

The Priest and the Jester

Philip Levine began by speaking of Miłosz as a great lyric poet of landscapes, and of water, reading poems that demonstrated this. Charles Simic then read Miłosz's poem "Encounter":

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

One of the great achievements of Miłosz, said Simic, was to make us more conscious of the world around us, this being "the essence of the lyric poem," which comes to us trying to be disinterested, hoping (perhaps impossibly) to gaze at the world as it really is, making us see it again as if for the first time. This was not the Miłosz of The Captive Mind, the anti-communist writer welcomed by Americans during the Cold War. This was Miłosz as a someone both simpler and more profound than the writer of ideological works.

Adam Zagajewski's recollections of how he first came to Miłosz soon complicated the emerging picture of the Miłosz the lyricist. Zagajewski read the first stanza of "Throughout Our Land," which he'd had been very hard to find when he was a student in Poland. He'd had to lie to a Dean about being a graduate student writing a thesis on Miłosz to be admitted to a special reading room where he was allowed to see the poem: whatever the lyrical qualities of the poems may have been, they didn't prevent the Polish authorities from seeing them as potentially ideological, and they were kept out of general circulation.

Despite the allure inherent in all things forbidden, Zagajewski confessed to not having much liked Miłosz, at least initially. "There was an essay by Leszek Kolakowski, quite famous in Poland," said Zagajewski, "called 'The Priest and the Jester.'" In this essay, he went on to say, Kolakowski distinguishes between two different types of writer: the priest, who is a guardian of tradition and absolutes, and the jester, who doubts all things. "It was then not popular to be a priest in Poland," said Zagajewski. "We liked Zbigniew Herbert, who was a jester. I wanted to be a jester. Wisława Szymborska was a jester. To us, Miłosz seemed like a priest. But we were wrong." Instead of a priest, Miłosz was a poet in which the priest and the jester wrestled. There was a constant dialogue, sometimes a war, between the two, and this made for a rich and complex body of work. It also made Miłosz a more difficult poet to love than most others. “We love a poet for his voice,” said Zagajewski, “but Miłosz had two voices, always.” After a brief scuffle among the poets on stage about whether Miłosz had two voices, or one voice with different modes, or simply offered different points of view, things settled down. The room, I thought, had taken Zagajewski’s point.

Truth, Beauty, and Exile

After the initial readings, Steve Burt led a wide-ranging conversation, which kept circling back to the question of the poet as craftsman (Levine’s statement that “craft may not be enough, but it’s presumptuous to say that it’s somehow secondary” drew a great deal of applause). At one point Burt began to reframe the question by saying “there’s a difference between being a bricklayer, which is an applied art, and being an arranger of Japanese cherry blossoms…” but before he could finish, someone (I think it was Simic) was quoting Miłosz’s poem “What Once Was Great”:

What once was great, now appeared small.
Kingdoms were fading like snow-covered bronze.

What once could smite, now smites no more.
Celestial earths roll on and shine.

Streched on the grass by the bank of a river,
As long, long ago, I launch my boats of bark.

I’m not sure where Simic was going to go with this, because Zagajewski jumped in, sparks flying in his mind between “What Once Was Great” and the image of the Japanese cherry blossoms. “Once Miłosz chose exile,” said Zagajewski, “he became a Japanese poet, an arranger of cherry blossoms, because exile was so different from the environment in which he read his poems in Poland under the Nazis, and then under Stalin.” There was an underground poetry scene even under Hitler, he explained, and people gathered, at some risk, in private apartments to hear Miłosz read. His poems spoke to their condition as occupied and oppressed people, offering a truth not available in public places. “His poems helped people to live under Stalinism,” said Zagajewski, “they needed and adored him, and he liked it, because, like all poets, he was a little vain.” When he read in Poland there was an echo, a resonance of the poem with the needs of the broad public. “But in exile, that echo went away. Now in exile there was silence, and he became increasingly a self-deprecating craftsman.” Where he had written poems devoted to speaking truths that people needed to hear (“What Once Was Great” to be a poem in this mode), he became more a poet of beauty and spiritual yearning (I take “Encounter” to be closer to this sort of thing).

I see what Zagajewski means. It’s common for people in oppressive situations to turn to poetry as a source for the articulation of values and needs that go unarticulated elsewhere. And in most contemporary Western societies, much of poetry’s marginality relative to other modes of expression has to do with our good fortune in having a great deal of freedom to express our views and needs through other means. A recent article in the satirical newspaper The Onion made some comic mileage out of the notion that Americans were turning to the works of one of the panel’s participants, Philip Levine, to see them through our current economic crisis: there was no similar opportunity for humor when Miłosz read in occupied Poland. And if Americans truly hungered for poetry en masse, would a reading in which a current laureate, a former laureate, and one of Europe’s most prominent poets, draw a crowd of about 75, the number present in the Chopin theater?

American History, American Landscapes

Toward the end of the evening’s events, readings and discussions flowed into one another more-or-less seamlessly, and the readings of works by Simic, Levine, and Zagajewski turned into something of a discussion of the role of history and landscape for American poets. “History,” Levine remarked, “should only be read in a funeral home, next to a coffin, preferably the poet’s own,” since the nature of the material is so very often dire. But still, one ought not to write without a sense of history, he maintained. “I was just talking to Robert Hass and Jane Hirschfield, and they told me American poets have no sense of history. Well: Simic was born in Belgrade, my parents fled from Europe: we know history.” As, of course, did Miłosz—how could it be otherwise for him, the Polish twentieth century being what it was?

Talk then ranged to the topic of landscape, particularly the Californian landscapes of Miłosz’s poetry. “You can love California landscapes, and be ecstatic in them” said Simic, “but I’ve lived in New Hampshire for decades, which is more of a Robert Frost country—dark, cold, suspicious, miserable: of course Miłosz hated Robert Frost.” Levine chimed in to say that he, too, had become a Californian poet, but his California was the inland valley, not a wild landscape, nor even an agricultural landscape. “It’s an agribusiness landscape, in which whole classes of people are sub-people, and the few have got everything sewn up so tight they’ll never share.” In this, it reminded him of the Detroit of his youth, he said. “But don’t get me wrong—I loved Detroit. I’d probably still love it… if it were still there.”

As the things wound down, I noticed they’d run longer than I expected, and I was unable to stick around and see if I could drag Steve Burt or any of the poets a few blocks uptown to the tiny upstairs room at Myopic Books, where Larry Sawyer was hosting readings by Ann Shaw and Roger Reeves. I’m sure those reading went well, though: if there’s one thing the current American poetry scene makes clear, it’s that you don’t need huge crowds to have an excellent event.