Sheena and the Sugar Book

Sheena, the Ramones inform us, is a punk rocker.  She wasn't always, though—I once tried to combine the history and prehistory of the various Sheenas and proto-Sheenas of pop culture, and the poem, "Sheena is a Punk Rocker," appears in my book The Kafka Sutra.  It's also been reproduced online here, by E-Verse Radio.

In other news: Johannes Goransson! Or, more specifically: Johannes Goransson's The Sugar Book! Or, more specifically still: my short review of The Sugar Book in The Boston Review is now online as part of their "Summer Poetry Reading" feature. (It's also in the print magazine, if that's more your thing).

Finally, I'm now the Associate Editor of The Battersea Review, which has been going strong and staying eclectic since 2012, with contributors like Charles Bernstein, William Logan, A.E. Stallings, Adam Kirsch, Marjorie Perloff, Stephen Burt, and many more.  The fall issue will focus on Spain, and the issue after that on British Modernism.  You know you love the stuff!

So You’re a Critic—Now What? A Note on Barry Schwabsky and Critical Distance

What is a critic supposed to do? If I know anything about critics, you could put a dozen of them around a café table and at the end of the evening have at least two dozen opinions, and as many excuses for not picking up the tab for all those bottles of Pinot Gris that disappeared in the interim.  So let’s skip the big gathering, and go straight to Barry Schwabsky, who not too terribly long ago wrote a piece called “A Critic’s Job of Work” for The Nation, where he raises a tremendously important question about the role of the critic, and the very idea of critical distance.

Schwabsky begins by saying how much he’s always admired Marcel Duchamp’s dictum about the viewer completing the work of art—“the creative act is not performed by the artist alone,” declared Duchamp, “the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”  It merits attention, this notion of the audience participating in, rather than passively receiving, the creative act.  For one thing, it sets art apart from something like science.  There are, Schwabsky points out, no science critics.  There’s peer review, of course—that’s central to the whole scientific enterprise.  But scientists review each other’s work as fellow practitioners.  Although some art critics are also art makers, the relation of the two activities is accidental, rather than of the essence. The art critic, in his or her role as critic, doesn’t identify as a fellow art maker, but keeps a certain distance, and identifies as a spectator.  Indeed, the critic is, according to Schwabsky, “the self-appointed representative of the audience.” And despite the audience’s creative role, this means being something other than being an artist.

Schwabsky points to how, back in the 1960s, Allan Kaprow (godfather of the “happening” as artform) called for an art that had only participants, and no passive observers—he wanted what he called “the elimination of the audience,” if what was meant by the audience were people whose involvement with the artwork was to be nothing more than “empathic response.”  Everyone involved in a Kaprow happening was to be a co-creator, and the distance between artist and audience was to be collapsed entirely.  This is not where Schwabsky wants to be.  If Kaprow wants to recruit the spectator as a fellow artist, Schwabsky envisions the critical spectator as someone who isn’t caught in the binary of creative artist/passive spectator.  Instead, the critic maintains a degree of distance, but from this perspective adds something new to the work, in part by virtue of maintaining that sense of distance.  “I still prefer Duchamp’s model of the spectator who, through his or her distance from the artist’s creative act, nonetheless makes an independent contribution to it,” says Schwabsky, “and my experience tells me that a great deal of art is still being made with this kind of viewer in mind.”  One could make an analogy to a good relationship between a baseball catcher and a pitcher—it’s not that they’re both pitchers, but it’s not that the catcher is entirely passive, either.  He watches what’s going on and makes a real, if largely invisible and certainly unglamourous, contribution to the team, largely through analysis of what he sees.  He needs a bit of distance to do this—he’s not preparing a pitch, he’s watching the batter and the pitcher interact, and communicating what he sees.

I found Schwabsky’s article fascinating because it enters into a very long conversation about the nature and meaning of spectatorship, and does a great deal to redeem the conceptual respectability of the spectator.  Western aesthetics, after all, begins with contempt for the spectator—or perhaps not so much contempt as fear, specifically fear of the spectator’s passivity.  Plato argues in the “Ion” that the spectator is as easily moved by the poet as iron filings are moved by a magnet, and in The Republic he condemns the audience of poetry as ignorant, emotional, and dominated by the worst part of the soul.  The history of aesthetic thought largely continues in this suspicious mode, although sometimes we find someone who is optimistic about the audience’s presumed passivity.  Sir Philip Sidney, for example, thinks of the audience as every bit as passive as Plato does—he just sees the effects of art as salutary rather than deleterious.  But by and large the audience is seen as dangerously passive, and many thinkers seek ways to eliminate it (Kaprow is no innovator here, but a latecomer).  Rousseau, in his “Letter to D’Alembert,” condemned theater, and called for participatory entertainments that looked, for all the world, like a cross between a North Korean stadium rally and the Iowa State Fair.  Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, spoke of the pallid, tepid weakness of the Apollonian observer, who kept distant from that which he observed, and yearned to bring us closer to the condition of the Dionysian reveler who lost himself in the revels, becoming not an observer but part of the art—a gesture repeated at a higher pitch by Antonin Artaud.

It’s been difficult to find defenders of the kind of spectatorial distance Schwabsky upholds, although there is, of course, Duchamp—and one thinker of our time, Jacques Ranciere, gives, in The Emancipated Spectator, a powerful case for the spectator as making, from the position of distance, an interpretation of the work of that is also a kind of participation, analogous to the creative contribution made by a translator.

Schwabsky’s article occasioned a fair bit of controversy, samples of which appear (along with my own short note of appreciation andhistorical context) in a later issue of TheNation.  They’re well worth checking out, and not just for the kind words Schwabsky has for me—which I’m planning on plucking out of their present context and using on the jacket of my next book of essays, Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme (out this fall! makes a great gift!).

*

In addition to a few humble words in The Nation, I’ve written a few humble words in the May/June issueof The Boston Review about Johannes Göransson’s collection of poems The Sugar Book.  If, in the manner outlined by Schwabsky, I’ve made any contribution to the thing, I hope it’s been by linking it to a tradition that runs back through film noir to the novels of An Radcliffe.  Göransson’s  book is gothic, immoderate, and very good.  The review begins like this:

The Swedish word lagom, meaning something like “just right” or “perfect moderation,” might well describe or even encapsulate Swedish culture.  But it is not a word that applies to the poems of Johannes Göransson’s The Sugar Book, which seems to have been cooked up to create antibodies to inoculate us against a creeping case of lagom.  Göransson— Swede by birth, a Minnesotan by background, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—writes as if he were on a mission to destroy our preconceptions about all three places.

W.H. Auden and Ecopoetry

A little article I wrote on W.H. Auden and ecopoetics for the good people at Boston Review can now be found on their web site.  It begins like this:

W.H. Auden is a Greek poet, at least when it comes to nature. No, I don’t mean that he is all about olive trees and white sand beaches: I mean there is something fundamentally classical in his attitude toward the natural world, something that puts him at odds with the two dominant modes of nature poetry of our time—something that, indeed, casts light on the outlines of those norms.

The two most common attitudes toward non-human nature in contemporary poetry are the Romantic (or sentimental—if we can use that word without condescension) and the ecopoetic. The first of these dates back more than two centuries, and receives its most powerful theoretical articulation in Friedrich Schiller’s great essay of 1795, “On Simple and Sentimental Poetry.” Here, Schiller begins by describing the longing for the realm of nature among self-conscious and sophisticated people:

There are moments in our life, when we dedicate a kind of love and touching respect to nature in its plants, minerals, animals, landscapes . . . not because it is pleasing to our senses, not even because it satisfies our understanding or taste . . . but rather merely because it is nature.Every fine man, who does not altogether lack feeling, experiences this, when he walks in the open, when he lives upon the land . . . in short, when he is surprised in artificial relations and situations with the sight of simple nature.

The important thing here is how an encounter with the natural world catches us off-guard, and makes us feel the artificiality of our selves and our ways of going about things. We see how our will and our nature are out of sync, how our social relations and ambitions cause us to do things at odds with our inner nature. When we see the simplicity of a stone simply being a stone, or of water flowing downwards to the sea in accordance with its nature, it has a strong effect on us. We are drawn toward it. This urge to leave our own twisted, self-conscious way of being, to ditch our convolutions and artifices, is what Schiller calls sentimentality: an urge for the simplicity of nature. Such sentimentality, Schiller tells us, “is especially strongly and most universally expressed at the instigation of such objects, which stand in a close connection with us and bring nearer to us the retrospective view of ourselves and the unnatural in us.”

This attitude may well give the 21st-century reader pause...

Us vs. Them: Poetry and the Limits of Binary Thinking

Experimental vs. formalist; formalist vs. free verse; post-avant vs. quietude; lyric vs. language-based — you know the old binaries that people drag around when they write and talk about poetry.  They're like the weather as described by Mark Twain: everybody talks about them, but nobody does anything about them.  Until now! The good people at Boston Review (Timothy Donnelly, B.K. Fischer, and David Johnson) have put together a great forum on binary thinking in contemporary poetics, now available online.

Back in May, Boston Review ran a Marjorie Perloff essay called "Poetry on the Brink," which sparked some lively and contentious conversation.  Since much of the conversation involved the question of just how useful (or harmful) our old critical binaries were, the editors asked a group of poets and critics to write short essays addressing the question "what is the most significant, troubling, relevant, recalcitrant, misunderstood, or egregious set of opposing terms in discussions about poetics today, and, by extension, what are the limits of binary thinking about poetry?"

Responses came in various forms.

Maureen McLane and Ange Mlinko replied with poems, Mlinko's consisting of a series of rhyming couplets, beginning with: "M.P. is right: much free verse exists to give a pass/to naïfs who only learned of poems from a glass..."

Annie Finch waved the proud banner of poetic meter.

Stephen Burt struck the note of the expert overwhelmed by the plenitude of poetry and poetry-talk (which you may remember from an earlier essay of his).  This time he tells us "So many binaries circulate in and around contemporary poems that I find myself running out of Ibuprofen as I pursue the most useful."

DeSales Harrison comes out swinging, saying that Perloff's essay is at times mired in "self-regarding sludge" (I would advise Harrison to shy away from Orono, Buffalo, Louisville, and other stomping grounds of the Perloff enthusiasts for a while).  

Matthew Zapruder and Lytton Smith stand up for music, with Zapruder defending song lyrics as poetry and Smith taking issue with the visual/auditory divide.

Sandra Lim reminds us of Matvei Yankelevich's contribution to this discussion.

Katie Degentesh wins the Wicked Wit award for the line "If it’s not a legitimate poem, your body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Dan Beachy-Quick seeks a middle ground between lyricism and the dissolved self; while Noah Eli Gordon notes the conundrum of the poet-professor, drawn to both indeterminacy and clarities more readily adaptable to a pedagogical context.  Dorothea Lasky works with a similar division, claiming that "a young poet today, finding his or her own way, must decide to be either a mystic or a scientist."

Samuel Amadon notes that labels tend to be imposed on poets from without, saying "American poetry is littered with schools and movements that no one claims to be a member of."


Cathy Park Hong accuses Perloff of being "disingenuous" in her treatment of poets of color (look out!).


Anthony Madrid, who has a strong claim as the possessor of Best Head of Hair in American Poetry (men's division) decries the insistence that irony and feeling must be at odds with one another.

Rebecca Wolff notes that her journal, Fence, has been interested in the binary question for years.

Evie Shockley dislikes the very idea of binaries, while some guy named Archambeau doesn't want to go without them even though he advises treating them with suspicion and getting promiscuous with the things.

Marjorie Perloff writes a reply in which she addresses various contributions, and manages an answer to DeSales Harrison that deftly sidesteps the issue of sludge.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Swedish Poetry But Were Afraid to Ask

What now? Can't you see I'm trying to fix the knackebrod on my Volvo with an Ikea catalog while the Swedish Chef socializes some lutefisk in the kitchen? Oh, fine. If you must come in, put some ABBA on in the sauna and busy yourself with "Double Gesture," the piece I wrote about the evolution of Swedish poetry over the past two generations. The good people at The Boston Review have, at last, added it to their website.

Hej då, pojke och flikarna!

Not Baryshnikov

Ow! My leg!

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

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

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

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

Marginality, Manifesto, and Poetry's New Thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Planets on Tables

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

Spatial Anxieties

There's a short review of The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century in the Boston Review, in which you may read of my "spatial anxieties." I knew I was afraid of heights, but apparently it's worse than I thought!