The Poet Resigns: Now It's Out—Here's What's In It

Since I've already done an official book signing at the AWP conference in Boston, I imagine it's time to officially announce the publication of The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World, a collection of my essays on poetry, poetics, and related matters.  It's out now, available on Amazon and elsewhere, and weighs in at 323 pages.  And it's on sale right now for a mere fourteen bucks, four dollars off the regular retail price.

Here's a general guide through the table of contents, with the main sections in boldface and the individual essays briefly described:


Instead of an Introduction: Letter of Resignation

In which I discuss my evolution from poet to critic, and the issues—mostly a love of beauty in a world of troubles—that animate both my poetry and my critical writing.


Situations of Poetry

The Discursive Situation of Poetry

In this essay I go through the various arguments people have made about the decline of poetry's readership, and conclude that, despite claims for a mid-century importance of poetry, the conditions most of the people who write about poetry's decline in popularity relative to other genres yearn for are really Victorian conditions.  To restore poetry to that level of popularity, one would have to rebuild a lot of Victorian conditions of literacy, social elitism, primitive science, and expensive publishing—conditions we should be glad we don't have.

Poetry and Politics, or: Why are the Poets on the Left?

Although most of us like to think we hold our views because those views are true, there are some good reasons to believe that the place we hold in society conditions those views—and when we look at where most American poets fit in American society, some pretty solid social theory (Alvin Gouldner, Pierre Bourdieu) give us social reasons for the leftish views of most American poets.  I mean, we're no more immune to politics that go with our jobs than are most Wall Streeters.

The Aesthetic Anxiety: Avant-Garde Poetics and the Idea of Politics

This essay looks at the poetics of Surrealism, and of Language Poetry, in terms of the equation often drawn in both movements between aesthetic and political radicalism.  I suppose you could say that the essay finds the arguments for an inherent relation between these kinds of things wanting.

Public Faces in Private Places: Notes on Cambridge Poetry

This essay kicked up a lot of dust when it came out in the Cambridge Literary Review a few years ago. It argues that the social claims made by some backers of the avant-garde British poets associated with J.H. Prynne don't hold as much water as those backers might wish, and looks for explanations why such large claims get made.

Negative Legislators: Exhibiting the Post-Avant

In which I take a stab at defining the post-avant, and look at the meaning of its politics, which are largely a matter of refusing large claims and totalizing statements.  In the end, I try out a generational explanation for why the post-avant is as it is.

When Poets Dream of Power

A fast survey of the relation between poets and power over the course of several centuries, leading up to the present moment.

Can Poems Communicate?

Not the way they used to!  This essay examines what happens to poetry when there is no shared frame of symbolic reference between poet and readers.  There's a fair bit about Yeats, who worried endlessly over the issue.

The Poet in the University: Charles Bernstein's Academic Anxiety

The essay takes a look at how Bernstein defined poetic thought and academic thought as opposites, and at a huge problem with his argument: all of his poetic thinkers are academics, and big-time, much-cited ones at that.  I seek a psychological/sociological explanation for why Bernstein would make such an argument, and claim that it has to do with joining academe late in his career.

The State of the Art

I examine the meaning of "the state of the art" at various points in the history of British and American poetry, up to the present day, when I make some perhaps dangerous claims about the current state.

To Criticize the Poetry Critic

Seeing the New Criticism Again

In which it turns out that everything we've been told about the New Critics is wrong.

Poetry/Not Poetry

An examination of where the poetry-not poetry line has been drawn since the late 18th century, with reflections on the meaning of our contemporary definition of what makes a poem a poem.

The Death of the Critic

In which I ask what it means to write avant-garde literary criticism.

Marginality and Manifesto

This was a piece commissioned by Poetry as a response to a selection of manifestoes they ran on the 100th anniversary of the Futurist manifesto.  I conclude that the manifesto doesn't have much of a function under current socio-aesthetic conditions.

Poets and Poetry

A Portrait of Reginald Shepherd as Philoctetes

This surveys the entire body of Reginald Shepherd's poetry.  I predicted that he was on the verge of emerging as one of the major poets of his time.  Sadly, we'll never know if I was right: he died a few months after the essay ran in Pleiades. 

True Wit, False Wit: Harryette Mullen in the Eighteenth Century

Wow, were they mad at me when I first gave a version of this essay as a conference paper down in Louisville.  I think the crowd thought I was saying Mullen was no good.  What I meant was that the kind of wit she plays with, and that we love, is exactly the kind of wit that eighteenth century critics condemned.  I add to this some thoughts about what the difference in taste regarding wit can tell us about the role and situation of poetry in different times and places, and under different institutional conditions.

Emancipation of the Dissonance: The Poetry of C.S. Giscombe

A survey of the whole of his poetic career, in which he evolves from a kind of Black Mountain poet into something else.  I trot out some music theory from Stockhausen, Schoenberg, and Duke Ellington to get at the meaning of avant-garde form and the interrogation of race in Giscombe's poetry.

In the Haze of Pondered Vision: Yvor Winters as Poet

Where Winters is remembered at all as a poet, he's seen as an arch-formalist.  But he started off as an Imagist, publishing alongside Gertrude Stein and the like.  I try understand what happened.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Poetry

Since Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, there's been this sense that poets need to break through inhibition into something more open and genuine.  This essay examines a tradition of reticent poets that runs counter to all that.

Power and the Poetics of Play

John Matthias has interrogated the meaning of play, and its relation to a world of power and danger, more than anyone.  It's one of the reasons I've remained drawn to his poetry for decades.  This essay introduces his work from the aspect of power and play.

Neruda's Earth, Heidegger's Earth

It turns out there are strong parallels between Neruda's poetry and poetics and some of Heidegger's darker moments.  I worry the issue a bit here.

The Decadent of Moyvane

The sad fate of the Irish nationalist poetic tradition in post-nationalist times.

Modernist Current: On Michael Anania

James Joyce was born in Omaha in 1939.  At least that's what I say here.  And I'm pretty sure I'm right, despite what you may have read on the internet.

Laforgue/Bolaño: The Poet as Bohemian

What does it mean for poetry when the poet lives as a bohemian, as opposed to a professor of creative writing?  The editor of an earlier version of this essay found the conclusion so irksome he had it changed.  But it's back to its original form here.

Oppen/Rimbaud: The Poet as Quitter

The question of the poet who leaves poetry means something to me.  Looking at Oppen and Rimbaud helped me feel better about the whole issue.

Remembering Robert Kroetsch

Robert Kroetsch was one of the grand old men of Canadian poetry, and one of the progenitors of a movement virtually unknown outside his country.

Myself I Sing

Nothing in this Life

A meditation on Nick Cave, which is really about what it means to come from the provinces and to care about literary culture.

My Laureates

What poets have meant to me, and how they've helped me live.

*

I'm very glad to see this book come out.  I hope you'll check it out.

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

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.

Facebook Live: Talking Wit in Louisville

I've been back in Chicago for five days, but I'm only now getting caught-up enough to pull together my thoughts about the latest Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 — a terrible name for a great conference.  The consensus among the crowd with whom I hang seems to be that this was one of the best iterations of the conference yet, and that was certainly my experience.  There were the usual charms: interesting panels, good readings, a good party, and meeting face-to-face with people one is generally only in virtual contact with for much of the year ("it's Facebook live," said Robert Zamsky at one point, when he and I found ourselves sitting with Mark Scroggins and Joe Donoghue in the lobby, talking about the same stuff we talk about online).


One of the advantages of living in a big airport hub city like Chicago is that, when one sets out for a conference, there's a good chance of running into someone else on the way to the conference, an old grad school friend, a colleague from a hinterland university, or even the Big Cheese main speaker herself.  This time out it was all a but uncanny, though, as I found myself seated in a departure lounge next to a woman who looked, for all the world, like a tired and uncharacteristically grumpy Rae Armantrout.  I thought about introducing myself, but I've got godawful facial recognition skills, so I second-guessed my identification of her.  Besides, what would Armantrout, who lives in San Diego, be doing on a 7:00 a.m. flight out of Chicago?  It didn't add up.  As it turned out, though, it was Armantrout, who'd been through some kind of hellish system of delays and reroutings.  So I missed my chance to get my seat reassigned next to hers and bore her for an hour with My Fine Insights into Matters Poetic after telling her how much I like the new book, Money Shot.


Anyway.  I can report that Louisville's eating-and-drinking scene has improved since I started going to the conference in the early 90s.  While the Persian joint everyone was so keen to get to was just okay (seriously: I've had kebabs that good served up in styrofoam with a soda on the side for, like, six bucks), the Mayan Cafe was tremendous and not-to-be-missed, especially if you like your rabbit with mole sauce.  The place is down on Market Street, which seems to have gentrified lately.  There's a microbrew bar out that way called The Beer Store that I'd definitely hit again, supplementing my favorite Louisville dive bar (Freddie's) with a tonier drink or two.


But you wanted to know about the conference, not the places where I jabbered the night away with the usual villainous collection of poets, critics, and scholars.  It began auspiciously for me: no sooner had I stepped in the door and started sniffing out a coffee urn than I was waylaid by Norman Finkelstein, Jane Augustine, Michael Heller, and Henry Weinfield (who gracefully endured me over-enthusiastically reciting his poem "Song for the In-Itself and For-Itself" while we were introduced).  From there it was a blur of panels and conversations until Rae Armantrout's big reading, which went very well.  She reads unostentatiously, and does a lot of the things you're not supposed to do when performing (such as apologizing for the imposition of the performance -- "I'll just read three more, I know people are tired").  But the whole thing worked, I think in large part due to the way she just sort of radiates benevolence.  I've seen some very slick poetic acts that were undone by the clear and present fact that the reader was some kind of arrogant, self-absorbed shit-heel.  Armantrout's reading was very much the opposite sort of affair.  And it has me all hot and bothered to blog about her poetry soon.


My own panel, on contemporary poetry and wit, began with a disappointment and ended with the kind of controversy for which I'd kind of hoped.  The disappointment was the absence of Joyelle McSweeney, who couldn't make it due to a brood of sick kids at home.  But this was offset by the extra time Mike Theune could take in his talk on the paradelle — an allegedly historic poetic form invented by Billy Collins, who successfully hoaxed quite a few people, who took to writing paradelles as if they were the long-lost cousins of sestinas and villanelles.  This is a thankless task, in that the parameters of the paradelle are, in fact, such as to pretty much doom the poem to dire, flat-footed failure.  Here's the definition Collins cooked up, and many others swallowed whole:

The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d'oc love poetry of the eleventh century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only these words.

The sincere paradelles written in the wake of Collins are, it seems, all-but-universally horrible.  Try one at home sometime and see how it comes out.


It was my own paper, though, that provoked a bit of controversy, though much of it can, I think, be explained by my failure to make myself clear.  Long story short, my paper took up a topic I blogged about a while ago — the difference between the predominant forms of wit in eighteenth-century England and in contemporary American poetry, and what those differences tell us about the social and institutional norms determining the nature of poetry then and now.

Here it is.  Much of it is verbatim from this very blog, some of it is new.  At a couple of places I’ve indicated big tracts of stuff that I deleted from the too-long version I cut down to conference-paper size.

*

True Wit, False Wit, and the Situation of Poetry

We live in an age of false wit in poetry, but that’s not a bad thing.  And “false” should not be taken to mean “bad” here, any more than “minor” should be taken to mean “insignificant” when Deleuze and Guattari use the term to describe Kafka’s oeuvre.  But if we look at the dominant mode of wit in contemporary American poetry, and describe it in terms of the classical categories of poetic wit, it is indeed a “false” wit that dominates.  Of course this tells us as much about the values underlying the classical categories of wit, and the eighteenth-century England in which they were developed, as it tells us about our own poetry of wit, and the environment in which that poetry is produced and received.  Both the old categories of wit, and the dominant contemporary mode of wit are, after all, products of their social and institutional contexts.  Social being determines consciousness, as Marx said — and not just other people’s consciousness.  If there’s any excuse for what I’m about to do (that is, to spend half of a paper at a conference on “literature and culture since 1900” on eighteenth century matters) it’s that the task of understanding the assumptions underlying our own values and aesthetics requires a kind of echo-location, a contrast of where we are with some other time and place.

So.  The word “wit” has meant many things since it tumbled out of old German into the English language, but it begins to take on something like the contemporary sense when John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, drew a distinction between judgment and wit: judgment was the capacity for discerning fine differences, whereas wit was a capacity for finding similarities, such as the similarities upon which metaphors are founded.  Hence, Locke concluded, the snickering wits of London were unlikely to have much good judgment; while sage, sober, men of judgment were unlikely to crack a smile at a bon mot (a prospect we might rightly regard with terror).  But it took the eighteenth century to really codify wit, and it was Joseph Addison who popularized an elaboration of Locke’s idea of wit and made it into something like a norm for poetry.

Addison first sketched out his schema of the varieties of wit in a 1711 issue of The Spectator.  Following Locke, he defines wit as the capacity to find similarities, but he goes on to claim there’s more to it than just noticing that one’s mistresses’ eyes, being bright, are like the sun:

[Locke’s] is, I think, the best and most philosophical account that I have ever met with of wit, which generally, though not always, consists in such a resemblance and congruity of ideas as this author mentions. I shall only add to it, by way of explanation, that every resemblance of ideas is not that which we call wit, unless it be such an one that gives delight and surprise to the reader. …. Thus when a poet tells us, the bosom of his mistress is as white as snow, there is no wit in the comparison; but when he adds, with a sigh, that it is as cold too, it then grows into wit.

It’s a decent working definition, as Addison himself isn’t too shy to mention, saying it “comprehends most of the species of wit, [such] as metaphors, similitudes, allegories, enigmas… dramatic writings, burlesque, and all the methods of allusion...”  John Donne’s famous comparison of two separated lovers as the two arms of a compass, in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” certainly fits the bill as a poem of wit.  There, the central, unmoving arm of the compass represents the woman left behind, and the other arm represents the man who returns.  The surprising resemblance is the one between the compass and (shall we say) a certain physiological effect of the prospect of a romantic reunion on the returning, male lover:

And though it in the center sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as it comes home.

This isn’t just wit, by Addison’s definition: more precisely, it is a poem of “true wit,” since wit, for Addison, can be either true or false.

True wit, in this view, involves a substantial resemblance of things in the world, or referents (the upright drawn-in compass really does have a similarity to the man’s anatomy), while false wit involves only a resemblance of words.  False wit, says Addison, takes many forms: “sometimes of single letters, as in anagrams, chronograms, lipograms, and acrostics; sometimes of syllables, as in echoes… sometimes of words, as in puns...”

[Post-conference addendum: I tried to do a bit of Addisonian “true wit” myself on Facebook after the conference, saying: “Giving a midterm today, which means all I have to do is sit silently, try to look serious, and zone out while everyone else in the room works nervously and worries about the outcome. It's kind of like being Clarence Thomas.”  I don’t know if I carried off any surprise or delight, but the resemblance is between two portly, zoned out idiots, me and Justice Thomas, rather than between two syllables or words, so in at least that one respect it fits Addison’s model.]

Why, one wonders, does Addison hold up a wit based on the resemblance of things in the world over a wit based on verbal or phonetic cleverness without reference to the truth of the resemblance in world?  Why value wit that says something about things rather than wit that plays with linguistic resemblance — the wit of puns or zeugmas or other verbal elements?

One finds the explanation in the social role of journals like The Spectator in eighteenth century England.  More so than in any other European nation (with the possible exception of the Dutch), the English of the early eighteenth century were seeing a rise in commerce and finance, and a consequent rise of a bourgeois class without ties to the old aristocratic families.  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.  There was a new branch of the elite, a sober bunch of people who’d clawed their way up through prudence and calculation.  In this, they were unlike the bon-vivant aristocrats, inheritors of privilege and lovers of wit as a form of sophisticated play. The role of Addison’s journal here was, essentially, to find a cultural ground in which these different elites could forge something like a common identity.  In this context, the idea of true wit can be seen as a kind of compromise between the rational, hard-nosed, distrusting-of-mere-play viewpoint of the early commercial and financial bourgeoisie, and the more playful and aesthetic world of the hereditary landed classes.  [You might imagine here extensive quotation from The Spectator, and huge tracts of tedious social analysis drawn from Raymond Williams and Stefan Collini.]

Having spent the first part of this presentation in the eighteenth century, I find I’m going to have to a rather bold synecdoche, taking one contemporary poet to stand for the dominant form of poetry in the dominant institution of poetry of our time — the university (which Ron Silliman famously described as “the 500 pound gorilla at the party of poets”).  The poet is Harryette Mullen, the form of poetry a broadly-conceived set of genres generally described as “linguistically innovative,” “formally experimental,” or “elliptical” — and these are the dominant, though by no means the only, forms within the university in terms of several criteria: amount of critical discussion, prominence at prestige institutions like Brown, Harvard, Iowa, and UCLA, where Mullen herself teaches, etc.  And, I might add, prominence at this conference over the years.  I don’t mean that this dominance is or isn’t justified, merely that it exists.  I refer you to Keith Tuma’s wonderful article “After the Boom” in the most recent Chicago Review for an analysis of the situation. 

Mullen is often described as both experimental and as witty (by, among others, me).  But what would Addison think?  Surely he’d look at many of her lines as examples of false wit, as based primarily of the resemblance of words or phonemes or other linguistic elements rather than on the resemblance of things in the world.  The line “as silverware as it were,” say, from the poem “Wipe that Simile Off Your Aphasia” gives a witty phonetic resemblance between “silverware” and “as it were,” but doesn’t make much of a statement about the resemblance of objects in the world.  And what about the verbally playful prose-poems for which she is best known?  Here’s one, called “Of a girl, in white,”:

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.

So what have we got, wit-wise?  Well, there’s the pun on petticoats “giving him the slip” — where slip refers to lingerie and to a kind of escape.  This is followed right away by the reference to “loose lips,” which is bound to the previous statement loosely, with only the similarity in sound between “slip” and “ship” (“ship” being an absent but implied word here, as it is loose lips that sink ships).  We then get another bit of verbal play in the reference to the place “where she was kissed, and told,” in which we can hear a reference to the old saying “don’t kiss and tell.”  This is reinforced by the notion of the “Pillow talk-show,” a kind of portmanteau-ing of “pillow talk” and “talk show.”  We’ve got quite a lot of verbal resemblance between phrases in the poem and other verbal structures such as familiar platitudes.  But is there anything that Addison would see as a resemblance between things in the world?  There’s some sort of implied statement lurking in the poem, something about the making public of private eros, but the poem isn’t really referential enough to deal in those resemblances of referents that Addison thought of as essential to true wit.

Another one of Mullen’s prose poems, “Denigration,” takes on weightier issues, and certainly does so with wit.  But what kind of wit?  Here it is:

Did we surprise our teachers who had niggling doubts about the picayune brains of small black children who reminded them of clean pickaninnies on a box of laundry soap? How muddy is the Mississippi compared to the third longest river of the darkest continent? In the land of the Ibo, the Hausa and the Yoruba, what is the price per barrel of nigrescence?

The verbal resemblance between “niggling” and “nigrescence” (and, for that matter, of the title word “denigration”) and the most offensive of terms for for “African-American” is clear enough, and there’s the play on “picayune” and “pickaninny” — so we’re reminded, by analogy with the resemblance of words, of how racism manifests itself even in those places where we least expect it.  The comparison of the Mississippi to the Niger River (the river near which the tribal groups Mullen mentions reside) is important in this context, in that it reminds us that there are places where Africans are identified by tribe, not by race, and are certainly not identified by the denigrating American term for their race.  There is certainly a politics to the poem, but the wit of the piece is based entirely on verbal resemblances, not resemblances of objects in the world of referents (such as bright eyes and the sun, say, or a raised compass and the tumid male appendage).  In Addisonian terms, we’re still operating in the world of false wit.

I want to stress here that I am making a description, not a judgment — though Addison’s classifications of wit as true or false is inherently judgmental, and were he able to decipher such a resolutely postmodern poems he would surely judge them an inferior form of wit.  But we need not accept the literary values of Addison’s age.  Indeed, it is unlikely that we would, since we are not the products of his circumstances. 

To understand why Mullen’s kind of wit has become so prominent (and it is with of this kind that we find most prominently in most branches of linguistically innovative poetry), we need to look to our own circumstances.  

I suppose the briefest way to describe our circumstances is to say this: we live better than a century into an era of relative aesthetic autonomy in poetry (one could and should qualify this in any number of ways, but, caveats aside, to say otherwise is to misrepresent the history of Western poetry).  What I mean is this: for reasons that I bore people with in another article, poetry has long-since turned against a feeling of responsibility toward the dominant logic of modernity — the logic of the market.  Hollywood screenwriters and writers of genre fiction tend to write first and foremost with an eye to serving the market.  At least since the days of Pater and Mallarmé, though, poets have not: they turn their backs on the market that has turned its back on them.  This turning-of-backs is a feature of the bohemian environment in which poetry, like many arts, operated throughout the early twentieth century, and in which it, to some extent, operates in our own time.  It is also a deep, underlying principle of the institutionalization of literary study and literary creativity in university departments of English [Imagine here a great deal of quotation from César Graña’s work on bohemia, as well as Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature, along with some amusing quotes from the correspondence of the New Critics about how to establish literary studies as an autonomous field, and similar quotes from debates during the rise, and eventual containment, of cultural studies as a possible new paradigm in English departments].

One of the things this century of relative aestheric autonomy has meant is an increasing emphasis on form and medium (in poetry’s case, on language).  Pierre Bourdieu has, in both The Field of Cultural Production and The Rules of Art, charted the social dynamics of this, showing that as fields of artistic endeavor become more autonomous from the market, they become increasingly interested in their inner workings — in poetry’s case, this means linguistic innovation, a movement against the transparency of language and toward its foregrounding (one might think here of Charles Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption,” with its militant rejection of poetry in which language tries to disappear to make way for its referents — or one might think of Ron Silliman’s argument in the essay “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” which argues powerfully for the foregrounding of language).

This institutionalizing of aesthetic autonomy (in bohemian and academic form) is an enormous underlying force in how poets operate, a force that runs deeper than we are generally aware.  What was the old Buffalo poetics scene if not a confluence of bohemian and university environments?  Such a confluence is central to the formation of many poets, and it was central to Harryette Mullen’s formation, too: she began writing in an Austin-based community of writers, artists, and musicians, and has taught at Cornell and UCLA. (She’s also been connected to the Black Arts movement, which adds a community-oriented dimension to her writing, along with the prominence of form).  But she, like most of us, is oriented toward language itself to an extent that prior eras, such as Addison’s eighteenth century, would find shocking, and false.  I don’t think this is a bad thing: it is, in fact, strong evidence that we can use in understanding where we are in the social and aesthetic history of poetry.  And I think any understanding of poetry that means to get beyond the polemical expression of current norms would do well to look to this kind of historically comparative evidence.

*

When I looked up after mumbling my way through all that, I was afraid I’d see what one often sees at conferences: a bunch of tired looking people making their way for the exit.  Instead, it seemed that almost everyone in the room had a hand in the air. I particularly noticed Bill Howe who, in the back, extended a Conan-the-Barbarian like limb high, as if to smite down upon his opponent with great force and mighty vengeance.  

A number of the comments were positive, but let's not bother with those: it's the negative ones from which one really learns.  The first thing I learned was that I'd somehow fucked up, and failed to make it clear that I didn't think Mullen's poetry was non-referential.  Several people wanted very much to make the point that her poems do refer to things in the world, and have all sorts of social and political things to say.  I agree!  I'd meant merely that the center of gravity in her wit had to do with the resemblance phonetic elements: she, like a lot of langpo/post-avant types, riffs off of phonetic resemblances in words ("as silverware as it were"), and much of the surprise and delight in her poetry depends on that kind of technique, as opposed, say, to the kind of resemblance between objects that I tried to work on in my own clumsy "I am like Clarence Thomas" comment. Mullen does compare things in the world, like the Mississippi and Niger rivers, but that particular comparison doesn't seem to aim at surprise and delight.  Anyway, I don't deny that there are instances of what Addison would call true wit in Mullen: I just mean that the center of gravity in her wit is more on the phonetics side. Later, a couple of bottles of wine into the evening Grant Jenkins demanded that I give the percentage, which I couldn't do. He proposed something like 60/40 true to false wit, and a big-ass balloon glass of Cabernet later I proposed 80/20 — but neither of us really knows.  Maybe we need a research assistant to check it out.

Some other comments took us into a discussion of degrees of falseness in wit (with the reminder that the term "false," while a judgmental one for Addison, was only a descriptive term for us).  My own contender for "instance of falsest wit" was a brilliant bit of spontaneous comic performance by Charles Bernstein, as reported by Daisy Fried in the New York Times.  Here's what she wrote:

At a reading I attended in the Smith College science lecture hall a few years ago, Charles Bernstein, famous as a poet and anti-poet, pointed to the giant poster on the wall behind him and said, “I want to thank the Poetry Center for putting up my poem ‘The Periodic Table of the Elements.’ ” He then proceeded to give a mock-dramatic rendition of the symbols, left to right, down the page. “H, He, Li, Be!” he panted, growled and spluttered. “Why!?” he complained when he got to yttrium (Y). “I!” he declared solemnly for iodine, as if toasting his own ego. He slowed down, sped up. “No!” he bellowed for nobelium, then finally whispered “Lr,” the last chemical symbol. He turned to face the audience. “I’ve always wondered if I should have ended with ‘No’ rather than putting that ‘Lr’ on the end. I think it was a mistake. I think it would have been more emphatic with the negation.” This was the funniest, most impromptu-­brilliant, serious moment I’ve ever witnessed at a poetry reading — and very much about sound, language, expression and communication.

Fantastic! Brilliant! Wonderful!  And, in Addisonian terms, utterly false as wit!  I mean, think about it.  First of all, part of the conceit here is to strip the periodic table of its reference to actual chemical elements, and to treat it as a kind of sound poem.  In fact, the act of comparison is between the periodic table and a zaum-like kind of poetry based purely on sounds (like Alexei Kruchenykh's work).  So we've got the verbal resemblance between the periodic table as sound and a kind of poetry based only on sound.  It's the phonetic resemblance of the chart to a purely phonetic kind of poetry that creates the surprise and delight.  Reference to things outside of language is minimal (there's no "a compass is like a penis" or "I am like Clarence Thomas" move operating at all).  And the fact that both the reading and our discussion of it took place in academic rooms was just sort of perfect, given the historical connection between a foregrounding of language and the academic institutionalization of literature.


This little discussion of Bernstein generated it's own objections ("It's not just false wit! It's performance! It's Charles being Charles!") all of which I grant — there are a lot of different things happening in that bravado performance.  Among those things, though, is a kind of word play that the Addisonian eighteenth century, being for various socio-historical reasons more uptight about these matters than we are, would condemn.  Which is interesting, I think.  I also think that not everyone in the room got past the accusatory sound of the word "false."  Maybe I should have said "Addison calls this false, but we'll call it language-based."  But I wanted to keep present the sense that Addison's time and our own had very different aesthetic values, so that we could think about how and why those differences came about.


One really good question came from Alan Golding, who asked what was to be gained from reviving "wit" as a category of critical analysis.  While I actually think it would be interesting to go through contemporary poetry with a whole set of aesthetic categories from other cultural moments (wit, the beautiful, the dynamic sublime, the mathematical sublime, the picturesque, etc. — as opposed to the terms we use now, like innovative, the gurlesque, the abject, and so forth).  But that's not the exercise I was trying to engage in.  I talked about wit, but I could have talked about something else, so long as there was a point of comparison and contrast between different cultural moments.  Any such point is interesting, because it is through points of contrast that we can understand the differences between contemporary and earlier aesthetic values, and through examining the factors that gave rise to those different values we can understand a lot.  Specifically, we can understand why the past was as it was, and we can understand things about ourselves that are concealed to us if we only ever examine our values on our own terms.  Self-reflexivity is tricky: you need to bounce your observations off something culturally remote in a kind of echo-location.  Or maybe the better analogy is to say that trying to understand ourselves is like trying to look at the back of one's own head: you can't do it directly. You need some reflective surfaces to do it.  So the game, for me, isn't "let's revive wit!" — it's "what are we doing and why?"  And we need to understand ourselves on terms other than our own if we're really going to be able to play that game.  So: let's let the past interrogate us, and listen to what it says.  That sort of thing doesn't really get done much in the academic humanities, where the game is so often "let's expose the assumptions of other times and places" or even "let's judge the past on our terms, and find it morally appalling for believing things we don't believe."  


There were other really good comments: Tyrone Williams telling me that many African-American interpreters of Mullen read "A Girl, in white" not as a poem about eros, but as a poem about passing.  I really hadn't seen that angle before (talk about being blind to our own assumptions!).  And Scott Pound discovered, from the paper, that he and I have been working on similar projects in the history of aesthetic autonomy.  We've been emailing each other files of our work ever since.  But my favorite comment came from Keith Tuma, later, at a party.  I was a bit glassy-eyed by that point, but I think his words were  "I admire you, Bob, because there's no foxhole you won't blunder into, and do it with good humor." He then said something about me criticizing the Cambridge poets in The Cambridge Literary Review, and calling Mullen, a beloved African-American experimental poet, a "false wit" in a room full of her friends.  I think Tuma might have been saying something about my ham-fisted, bull-in-a-china-shop naïveté, but I don't get a lot of people coming up to me and starting a sentence with "I admire you," so I'll take what I can get.  And I think I'll head back to Louisville next year.