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.

Neruda's Earth, Heidegger's Earth

It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things – all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

That's a quote from "Sobre una Poesía sin Pureza” ("Towards an Impure Poetry"), the editorial Pablo Neruda wrote for the first issue of the short-lived and fabulously-named Spanish journal Caballo Verde para la Poesía ("Green Horse for Poetry") in 1935. The editorial was really an act of poetic self-defense: ever since the Chilean poet had arrived in Spain, Neruda had been under withering attack from the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, who considered Neruda's work vulgar. Calling Neruda's imagination a sewer and a scrap heap, Jiménez objected to the world Neruda depicted. Stoked by the Mallarméan notion of poesie pur, with its ideal of a language as music, Jiménez wished Neruda would purge his poetry of all of the chunks of coal and shoe soles that, in his opinion, cluttered the verse with ugliness.

Neruda had been reading and translating Whitman, so he'd invested pretty heavily in a very different poetic enterprise than had Jiménez, but he was young and provincial and felt persecuted by the older, more established Jiménez, who seemed, said Neruda, to be “publishing tortuous commentaries against me every week." "Sobre una Poesía sin Pureza" is certainly intended as a riposte to Jiménez. But I think its important goes further than its immediate occasion in the debate between the two poets. I think the passage offers a key to understanding one of the things Neruda's up to in Alturas de Macchu Picchu (The Heights of Macchu Picchu) one of the most acclaimed sections of his great, sprawling Canto General, and a book-length poem cycle in its own right.

Alturas de Macchu Picchu was published a decade after the essay on impure poetry, and is often seen as somewhat discontinuous with his work of a decade earlier. After all, the intervening years saw the Spanish Civil War, which politicized Neruda's poetry, and his time in Mexico, when he took inspiration from Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralist tradition and turned toward broad depictions of history and society. John Felstiner, for example, claims in Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu that Alturas de Macchu Picchu is simply “inconceivable” without the events of civil war. This is certainly true. But it's also true that there's a continuity with the project outlined in "Sobre una Poesía sin Pureza." To understand the nature of the continuity, we need to understand a little more about "Sobre una Poesía sin Pureza," which has much more to it than a simple defense of the Whitmanic depiction of ordinary objects in poetry.

The most powerful idea in "Sobre una Poesía sin Pureza" — an idea Neruda acts on in the composition of Alturas de Macchu Picchu, is the idea of the earth. It's something very much akin to what Heidegger was articulating in his lectures on art in Zurich and Frankfurt right around the time Neruda composed his essay. These lectures would later see publication as "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" ("The Origin of the Work of Art"), but not until 1950. I'm not sure that Neruda knew about the lectures. It seems possible but unlikely — the main conduit bringing German philosophical ideas into Spanish intellectual life was Miguel de Unamuno, who was near the end of his life in 1935, and I'm not at all sure he had any contact with Neruda (someone surely knows, but not the present humble blogger). The similarity between Neruda's idea, and Heidegger's more deeply-thought-through idea, were probably coincidental, a matter of intellectual zeitgeist rather than direct influence. But the similarities of both idea and terminology are certainly very real.

When Neruda writes about the important of looking at objects at rest, he's talking about an interestingly non-utilitarian, disinterested kind of perception, in which we become aware of the reality of things we'd been taking for granted. "Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest" — these are all things that, generally, we instrumentalize, that we treat as equipment, and that we take for granted. When we're driving a vehicle, we don't think of the wheels. We depend on them, but (unless they're malfunctioning as equipment) we take them for granted, and they go unnoticed, even though our activities could only go on with their presence. The same goes for the handles of carpenter's tools. They're essential to our tasks, and we're very intimate with them. Often, the handles are even discolored by, or worn to the shape of, our hands. But when we're building something, we tend not to be thinking about the handle of our hammer. We're concentrating on a utilitarian action, concentrating on not hitting our thumbs while we go about our business. So whole swathes of the world go unnoticed by us, even though we depend on them.

For Neruda, looking at these objects the right way, when they and we are at rest, reconnects us to the world we take for granted during all our utilitarian to-and-fro-ing. From the perception of these things, says Neruda, "flow the contacts of man with the earth." When we notice them, we realize we aren't isolated, Cartesian intelligences: we're rooted in the world, surrounded at all times by things that make our lives possible. Indeed, we come to realized our interconnectedness with these, and, ultimately, with all things. It's a big idea Neruda has in his little essay. It's also an idea uncannily similar to Heidegger's.

In "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" Heidegger makes an important distinction between "the earth" and "the world." [If, for some bizarre reason, you've actually read my big post about Adam Kirsch's misreading of Heidegger, you'll find this and the next paragraph eerily familiar — they're just compressed versions of things I said in that post]. When Heidegger writes about earth he isn't referring to physical stuff — not rocks, or trees, or door-latches. Instead, he's referring to the tendency of things to resist our ability to understand, or even to notice, them. There's a whole realm of the unknown and not-understood out there, and it surrounds and contains us, even makes up a great deal of our physical self and our psyche, and this is what Heidegger has in mind when he writes about the earth. There's a famous passage, in "On the Origin of the Work of Art," in which Heidegger talks about a Van Gogh painting depicting some old, worn-looking peasant shoes. He says that shoes like this are generally things we don't notice — we wear them and use them as equipment, for their instrumental value, and we tend not to notice them when we do. Shoes like this, when they're actually worn, "belon[g] to the earth" says Heidegger — and they belong their not so much because they are material objects, but because they go unnoticed and un-thought-of. But we notice them in Van Gogh's painting, where they become part of something more. Here, in the painting, they get noticed or, in the standard translation of Heidegger, become "unconcealed." It's the concealedness of the shoes before they get into the painting, when they're just something around us that we don't notice, that makes them belong to the earth. The earth and the things that belong to it are self-concealing, and withdrawn from our attention and understanding. But what about the world, in Heidegger's sense? The world, for Heidegger, is the context in which and through which we apprehend, understand, or notice things — it's where things become (to use the Heideggerian term) "unconcealed." History, myths, and the like give us a way of noticing things, talking about them and feeling their presence. Heidegger's "world" is sort of like what a later generation would call "discourse" — the systems of thought and representation that let us notice things.

The work of art gives us a special kind of relation of earth and world — a dialectic. That is, in the work of art, earth and world are always involved in a kind of struggle. If a work of art were pure world, it wouldn't be art, it'd be propaganda, or ideology: a closed system of mental coordinates that never come into contact with anything that resists it. But the art work doesn't allow anything so easy to happen. Even as it starts to open up a whole world (or discourse, or paradigm, or way of understanding) for us, it gives us elements that resist appropriation into that world. If the work of art in question is, say, a poem, we might say that it resists paraphrase, or closure; or that parts of it remain indeterminate; or that it shoots off so many connotations that we're uneasy reducing it to a denotative meaning. Any attempt to make the art work into mere world runs up against all kinds of elements that escape that world. So the work of art has the power not only to bring elements of the earth into the world — it has an kind of inexhaustibility, in that even as it brings the earth into the world, it also conceals other elements of the world.

Neruda doesn't go into the dialectic of the earth and the world, of unconcealing and concealing, the way Heidegger does, but he certainly gives us a part of the idea: that the necessary but unnoticed things of the earth can, and should, enter into our consciousness, under the right conditions of perception. This is the idea that, I'm convinced, informs the writing of Alturas de Macchu Picchu.

Some of the early sections of Alturas de Macchu Picchu depict a kind the kind of modern death-in-life we're familiar with from, say, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Here are some lines from section three, in Nathaniel Tarn's translation:

Being like maize grains fell
in the inexhaustible store of lost deeds, shoddy
occurrences, from nine to five, to six,
and not one death but many came to each,
each day a little death: dust, maggot, lamp,
drenched in the mire of subsurbs, a little death with fat wings
entered into each man like a short blade
and siege was laid to him by bread or knife:
the drover, the son of harbors, the dark captain of plows,
the rodent wanderer through dense streets:

all of them weakened waiting for their death, their brief
and daily death...

This is the nightmare of the life that goes by without our noticing it. Our very being falls away from us like so many grains, and our lives consist of "lost deeds" — things we don't notice doing, and don't remember having done. This sad condition is, in the poem, the curse of modern, regimented life, the world of "nine to five," in which our instrumental, utilitarian activities, our quest for our daily bread, is a mere matter of going through the motions, a "brief and daily death." We use things and keep ourselves alive among them, but we don't notice them. The earth (to use Heidegger's term, which is also Neruda's) retreats from us into the unnoticed, the concealed.

Eliot's remedy for this sad, afflicted state involved an attempt to reconstruct the myths and religious traditions that had become discredited or obscure. But Neruda's remedy is less mythic, and more a matter of existential perception, or restoring our connection to the concealed wonder of the world in all its dasein, its here-and-nowness. He wants to bring the unnoticed earth back into our perceptual world.

There seem to be three main techniques by which Neruda tries to accomplish this retrieval of the earth in Alturas de Macchu Picchu. First, there's an invocation of the unnoticed earth, such as we find in some lines from the poem's opening section:

Someone waiting for me among the violins
met with a world like a buried tower
sinking its spiral below the layered leaves
color of raucus sulfur:
and lower yet, in a vein of gold,
like a sword in a scabbard of meteors,
I plunged a turbulent and tender hand
into the most secret organs of the earth.

This eroticizing of a landscape is familiar stuff in Neruda's poetry (it's the whole charm of "Cuerpo de Mujer," the most famous poem of his best-loved book, Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada). Here, though, the technique is at the service of reminding us of the very nature of the ground we stand on, showing us the gold-veined rock beneath the Andes. Such gold is literally concealed, and literally of the earth, but it is also concealed from our consciousness, and therefore a part of the Heideggerian earth, the unnoticed. We walk on brilliant wonders, but we're so disconnetded from them in our daily grind we need the poem to reveal them to us, to bring them into our world. Whole sections of Alturas de Macchu Picchu aim at reminding us of the forgotten wonders of the earth, often in sweeping, incantatory fashion (check out section nine sometime, for a good example of this kind of incantation).

A second way Neruda tries to bring the forgotten earth to our attention is through an insistence on how, despite our inattention, we are always already connected to it. Consider these lines from section ten:

Stone within stone, and man, where was he?
Air within air, and man, where was he?
Time within time, and man, where was he?
Were you also the shattered fragment
of indecision, of hollow eagle
which, through the streets of today, in the old tracks
through the leaves of accumulated autumns,
goes pounding at the soul into the tomb?
Poor hand, poor foot, and poor, dear life...
The days of unravelled light
in you, familiar rain
falling on feast-day banderillas,
did they grant, petal by petal, their dark nourishment
to such an empty mouth?

Those first three questions are hard to answer. Things exist within themselves, independently of us. And where are we? Are we in any kind of relationship with stone, air, and time? On the one hand, the benighted nine-to-fivers Neruda described earlier don't have any kind of conscious relationship to these things. They don't stop to think of themselves in relation to air, stone, and time. On the other hand, we always have an intimate relation to these things: we stand on stone, breath air, make our way through time. Normally, though, they're like the wheels or carpenter's tools of Sobre una Poesía sin Pureza” — we depend on them, but don't notice them. Our perceptual world, in which we think only of getting by, has shrunk away from the things of the earth. But by the end of the passage, we're reminded that things like time and light are in us, and when we're asked if the "familiar" (that is, unnoticed) rain nourishes us, the only answer is "yes." We are reminded that we aren't just the "poor life" of forlorn little isolated subjectivities, but really we are manifestations of the larger earth, connected to it in our very bodies when they take it in. We are of the earth, and the poem tries to make us notice this.

Finally, Neruda invokes the idea of ancestry to connect the reader (especially the Latin American reader with native ancestry) with ranges of time that usually lie outside of our perceptual world. "Arise to birth with me, my brother," begins section twelve. The brother here is one of the pre-Incan inhabitants of Macchu Picchu, a member of the civilization that built the city. "Look at me from the depths of the earth," says Neruda to this figure, before telling him to "Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth / Speak through my speech, and through my blood." Neruda insists on how present-day Chileans are deeply, and intrinsically, bound to a past that they have let slip from consciousness. Their blood is, after all, the blood of the ancestors who build Macchu Picchu. They are connected to the past, even when they don't know it. Again, it is through the poem that these unthought-of things enter the world of our thought, and help save us from the forlorn death-in-life of the modern daily nine-to-five.

Of course, this think-of-your-blood business is a bit unnerving to we bourgeois liberals. And the importance the poem puts on blood ancestry raises a question about whether the coincidence between Heidegger's thinking and Neruda's goes beyond the mutual interest in bringing the unnoticed earth to our perceptual worlds in the work of art. Both Heidegger and Neruda were undeniably brilliant writers, but both were also drawn to brutal dictators (Heidegger to Hitler, Neruda to Stalin). One wonders whether there’s an intrinsic connection between concerns with existential depth and attraction to ambitious, destructive absolutist rulers. Put another way, one might ask if ordinary bourgeois decency, with its aversion to the concentration of power and it’s general you-do-your-thing, I’ll-do-mine indifference to others comes at the price of such depth. It’s worth considering – the English political tradition is certainly the European tradition most powerfully immune to dictatorships, and England is also the home to the European philosophical tradition most averse to existentialism and all the related traditions it dismisses as “continental philosophy” — something they do over there, across the channel, where they get up to God-knows-what kinds of politics. But here we begin to swim in waters too deep for me.

The Michael Jordans of Philosophy

"John Stuart Mill," Karl Marx is said to have opined, "owes his prominence in English philosophy entirely to the flatness of the surrounding terrain." I've been reading Mill's essays on Coleridge and Bentham, and am inclined to think that Marx was being a little unfair. But only a little, and it's understandable: to someone who rose from the churning depths of nineteenth-century German thought, the little pool of English philosophy must certainly have seemed like a backwater.

I mean, German philosophers, from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, were the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls of philosophy: dominant, confident, and effortlessly superior to the competition. I imagine a sense of this proud tradition informed Heidegger's infamous fulminations about how Frenchmen could only think seriously if they switched languages, true philosophy only being possible in Ancient Greek and in German (there is, said Heidegger in a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, a "special inner relationship between the German language and the language and thinking of the Greeks. This has been confirmed to me again and again today by the French. When they begin to think they speak German. They insist that they could not get through with their own language." He says more about the alleged special philosophical nature of Greek and German in Introduction to Metaphysics, and in his Rector's address — sorry to belabor the bibliography, but a gentleman in a little newsgroup discussion of this post has alleged that this claim about Heidegger's views is "crap," and I wish to prove otherwise). Anyway, it's an odd, and kind of bigoted way of explaining the very real phenomenon of the comparative German excellence in philosophy. It's kind of like explaining the dominance of the Jordan-era Bulls as product of Chicago's superior hot dogs and deep dish pizza. But if we discard this kind of chauvinism, in which a rich tradition is explained with reference to some kind of bullshitty essential local superiority, how can we explain the tremendous power and depth of the German philosophical tradition? Why did the German-speaking parts of Europe give us Kant, Hegel, Schlegel, Schiller, Schelling, Schleirmacher, Schopenhauer, Herder, Fichte, Lessing, Feuerbach, Frege, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Dilthey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, Jaspers, Popper, Benjamin, Arendt, Habermas, etc., while England gave us Bentham, Mill, Bertrand Russell, and, uh... Alfred North Whitehead? I mean, you have to go to the B-list pretty quickly when naming English philosophers. And it goes for the whole continent: while there are individual stars (Kierkegaard, say), no national tradition racks up the points like the Germans. Why?

I think I've got this.

I mean, when we consider the different historical origins and institutional contexts of the French, English, and German Enlightenments, the differences in the character of the different national philosophical traditions becomes clear.

The French Enlightenment was famously anti-clerical. "Écrasez l'infâme!" shouted Voltaire, and the infamy he wished to see crushed was that of the Catholic church. Voltaire's slogan is not, I think, unconnected with another remark of his, about how he found himself spending his time traveling from one chateau to another. That is: I don't think it's coincidental that Voltaire, who spoke against the church, was sponsored by aristocratic patrons (most notably the Marquis Florent-Claude du Chatelet). Sure, Voltaire had his run-ins with aristos (especially that odious knucklehead, the Chevalier de Rohan), but by and large it was they who buttered his toast, and one understands why: the French aristocratic and clerical powers were constantly at one another's throats. And this held true for the French Enlightenment in general: it was a culture sponsored by aristocrats, and it took place in their salons. It owed little or nothing to the church, and directed much of its energy into anti-clericism. (I'm sure the style of French philosophy, so prone to the cutting remark and startling observation, owes much to its origin in the witty salons — I mean, a guy like Roland Barthes is all glitter and quick-jab, whereas a guy like Habermas is all earnest thoroughness — this has got to be connected to the aristocratic salon origins of French philosophy and the earnest, bourgeois scholarly origins of the German tradition).

Then there's the Enlightenment in England. Which is really as Scottish as it is English, since so many of the big-league players hailed from Scotland (David Hume being the real marquee name). The Enlightenment here was notably less anti-clerical than the movement in France, and one understands why: church and state, like bourgeois and aristocrat, had found ways to get along in England, largely by not talking about the things they disagreed on (it's true! Addison's imaginary Spectator Club, for example, served as a model for how members of different kinds of elites could work together by leaving one another alone much of the time, and sticking to topics of common interest, or to what were seen as disinterested matters like taste. Don't get me started on this, or I'll cut-and-paste fifteen pages from the manuscript of the book I'm working on into this blog post and we'll never get to the Germans...). The English system had, and maybe still has, a tremendous capacity for getting along and letting-things-be. A big part of it seems to involve not talking about anything more interesting or controversial than terriers and the weather.

And then there's Germany, or, more accurately (since we're talking for the most part about the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries), the German-speaking lands. There were plenty of courts, but they were small compared to the French court, and historically the church had provided a high proportion of the administrative brain-power (and, along the way, accumulated much wealth, autonomy, and political power). The university system had developed in no small measure as a system for generating all this ecclesiastical administrative human capital, and it was here, rather than in the little courts, that the German Enlightenment's most important developments took place (eventually the university in Jena alone ended up contributing more to philosophy in the nineteenth century than, say, Spain) (please don't send me hate mail from Spain — I mean, I like Miguel de Unamuno, too, but that guy was totally channelling the Germans). So while philosophy in England during the period we're discussing often developed without too much of an orientation toward the church (positive or negative), and the French were generally anti-clerical, the Germans found themselves in an interesting position. They took up enlightenment philosophy in an overtly religious institutional context, and had a strong incentive to find some way of reconciling the old traditions of religious thought with the emerging forms of knowledge.

The challenge proved fruitful. For one thing, it led the Germans to develop historicism and hermeneutics and all the other things you need when you want to take a set of texts and understand them as true, but not literally true, or at any rate as having had a kind of truth in their time but not the kind of truth we have today. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is probably the most obvious case in point. But it's not just that the Germans had a particularly difficult task, and built up their muscles to handle it: they had the university-bred culture of thoroughness and systematic thought behind them (and this makes all the difference: Hume is much, much more readable than Kant, but Kant's systematic method gives his work a power that Hume, every bit Kant's mental equal, can't match). Also, the Germans were able to draw on two traditions: secular Enlightenment thought and the long tradition of Judeo-Christian thinking. This is probably why a guy like Bertrand Russell is constantly dismissing the German philosophers as "mystics." I suppose many people will think Russell's got a point, but I always feel this lack of sympathy for half of what the Germans are up to is one of Russell's main limitations.

Anyway. If you want to get pseudo-Hegelian here, you could say that it was in Germany that the synthesis of Judeo-Christian traditions and Enlightenment secular thought came about. And this had everything to do with the institutional context in which the modern German philosophical tradition emerged.

As to how the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls came to be such a dominant force — well, that much simpler: Jordan was a basketball-optimized android, Scotty Pippin was a robot, and Dennis Rodman was clearly from another planet.

Adam Kirsch's Heidegger and Modern Poetry

"Sometimes," I recall my high school art teacher saying as he looked through my sketchbook, "it's by fucking up that we get the most interesting results." I never knew whether to take that as praise or as blame, and I don't know how Adam Kirsch would take what I'm about to say about his essay on Heidegger and modern poetry from the January issue of Poetry were he to read this. (Yeah, I'm just getting around to reading it — some of us are slow, okay?). But what I want to say is this: Kirsch has his Heidegger sideways, but I think his off-base reading of "The Origin of the Work of Art" takes him to some interesting places. "Fucking up" is, by the way, not really a fair way of describing Kirsch's piece, which isn't bad at all, despite the flattening-out of some of Heidegger's philosophical mountains — but those words from my art teacher are a touchstone of mine, and they do sort of bear on Kirsch's essay, which makes all of its headway out of what I take to be a misreading of Heidegger.

Kirsch's Heidegger

The most interesting thesis of Kirsch's essay, "The Taste of Silence," is that we could write an interesting history of poetry over the last century or so by examining it as a turn away from a poetry of the world and toward a poetry of the earth. Kirsch takes the terms "earth" and "world" from Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art," where, he tells us, they have very particular meanings. In Kirsch's view, Heidegger's term "earth" refers to "the sensuous reality of the non-human, which we tend to forget when we are engaged in practical tasks" while "world" refers to "the historical human context in which we work, suffer, and hope." Both of these are inevitably present in the work of art, but for Kirsch, the poet can align himself or herself with one or the other side of "the dichotomy of earth and world."

Where the poet lines up in terms of this dichotomy will have an effect on the nature of the poetry itself. "If the poet is primarily concerned with earth—with displaying particular being and concrete reality," says Kirsch, "he will tend to conceive of poetry as a passive art, concerned with perception and preservation. The ideal of such poetry is naming..." But if the poet is "more concerned with world—with the historical, mythic, and spiritual context that the poem creates or invokes—he will tend to see poetry as an active art, and in some sense even a domineering one." In this case, the poet "wants to interpret experience for the reader. He goes beyond names to commandments." In fact, his art "imposes an order" on reality.

A Journey from the World to the Earth

After laying down this précis of Heidegger, Kirsch applies it to the history of poetry since Modernism. "The Modernists," says Kirsch,

looked to poetry to re-establish a world, in the Heideggerian sense, at a time when the world they inherited had been shattered. Modernist poetry wants to ... projec[t] new coordinates of meaning and order. In Yeats's ghosts and gyres, in Pound's sages and tyrants, in Eliot's "idea of a Christian society," we find various attempts to create a world. Yet none of these worlds is authoritative enough ... to inaugurate a new cult and a new history. Instead, they remain—like Heidegger's own work, perhaps—expressions of longing for a lost world, and nostalgia for a time when poets had the power to make a new one.

After what Kirsch sees as the Modernist failure to establish, through poetry, a system of meanings and values, poets have turned from this world-making project to a poetry with more modest, less legislative ambitions, a poetry concerned with what Kirsch thinks of as Heidegger's earth:

Yet the failure of the poetry of world has not meant the end of Heidegger's influence. On the contrary, poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are deeply in his debt, directly and indirectly. That is because the decline of the poetry of world has meant the rise of the poetry of earth. This poetry—our poetry—prefers to imagine the artist not as a creator, but as a witness.

Judging from the examples Kirsch sites, I'd say the common thread of this poetry is its emphasis on a defamiliarization of the ordinary, material world (a great image from a Heaney poem about the "Scissor-and-slap abruptness of a latch./Its coldness to the thumb" is my favorite of these examples). And Kirsch really does seem to think that this is the common denominator of contemporary poetry after modernism — he calls it "our poetry" and claims that it extends across a range of poets "as different as Seamus Heaney, Charles Simic, and Billy Collins." That range — all the way from A to B, or possibly to C — may well give one pause. But more on that later.

Heidegger without Kirsch

I actually don't think we should give everything Kirsch says the chuck, but I've got to say that the ideas he presents don't really have much of a basis in Heidegger's essay. I mean, I don't know what they told Kirsch about Heidegger up at Harvard, but at the University of Manitoba we heard something different about "The Origin of the Work of Art." (Which is not to say that I nailed Heidegger on the first take: I remember how, years later, both Gerald Bruns and Krysztof Ziarek had to go upside my head with a copy of Sein und Zeit before things Heideggerian really began to gel for me).

In fact, I think the first thing hard-core Heidegger guys like Bruns and Ziarek would say to Kirsch is something along the lines of "Dichotomy of earth and world?!? Dichotomy?!? Dichotomy you say? Surely you don't mean dichotomy but dialectic! DIALECTIC, I SAY!" And yeah, they'd have a point: if a dichotomy involves (as my second-favorite dictionary of philosophy tells me) "the division of things into two basic parts that are regarded as fundamentally and/or irreducibly different," and a dialectic involves "the process by which a thought or an existing thing leads to or changes into its opposite," then Heidegger definitely sees the manifestation of earth and world in the work of art as having a dialectical relationship. But let's not start there. Let's start with what Heidegger means by earth and by world — because what he means by those terms is rather different than what Kirsch seems to think he means.

Check it out. Contra what Kirsch implies, when Heidegger writes about earth he isn't referring to, you know, physical stuff per se — not rocks, or trees, or door-latches. Instead, he's referring to the tendency of things to resist our ability to understand, or even to notice, them. There's a whole realm of the unknown and not-understood out there, and it surrounds and contains us, even makes up a great deal of our physical self and our psyche, and this is what Heidegger has in mind when he writes about the earth (yeah, I know, it's an odd term, but it plays into a whole series of extended metaphors in Heidegger's writings, so let's let it slide). There's a famous passage, in "On the Origin of the Work of Art," in which Heidegger talks about a Van Gogh painting depicting some old, worn-looking peasant shoes. He says that shoes like this are generally things we don't notice (as opposed, one imagines, to the sort of shoes you'd buy here) — we wear them and use them as equipment, for their instrumental value, and we tend not to notice them when we do. Shoes like this, when they're actually worn, "belon[g] to the earth" says Heidegger — and they belong their not so much because they are material objects, but because they go unnoticed and un-thought-of. But we notice them in Van Gogh's painting, where they become part of something more. Here, in the painting, they get noticed or, in the standard translation of Heidegger, become "unconcealed." It's the concealedness of the shoes before they get into the painting, when they're just something around us that we don't notice, that makes them belong to the earth. The earth and the things that belong to it are self-concealing, and withdrawn from our attention and understanding.

But what about the world, in Heidegger's sense? Yeah. Okay. So it's like this. The world, for Heidegger, is the context in which and through which we apprehend, understand, or notice things — it's where things become (to use the Heideggerian term) "unconcealed." I mean, Kirsch is sort of semi-right when he says that world consists of "the historical and the mythic," but it's broader than that, and the important thing here is the fact that things like history and myth make us aware of things, they unconceal them. History, myth, etc. give us a way of noticing things, talking about them and feeling their presence. Heidegger's "world" is sort of like what a later generation would call "discourse" — the systems of thought and representation that let us notice things. As an example, let me mention how I had a pretty visceral experience of entering a different world than my habitual one when I started taking long bike rides through the woods with colleagues from the biology department — after a few months, my sense of my environment went from one where I noticed only greenery and bugs to one where I could tell my myriapods from my bryozoans. Well, on a good day I could. Anyway, you get the point: the world I'd entered, or that the bio boys led me to, made a whole lot more of the earth apparent to me. But maybe this is misleading, since it seems to imply that the earth is all a matter of material, ecosystemic stuff for Heidegger, which it isn't. I imagine that if I were to hang with my musicologist pal some more, and enter his world a bit, I would become more aware of sound patterns. That is, it would make non-biological, non-material stuff come out of earthly concealment into the unconcealment of the world. I mean, it's important not to think of the earth here as material stuff, but rather as that-which-we-don't-notice-or-understand, or that-which-conceals-itself-from-us (although that last phrase, which is closer to Heidegger's, gives the earth a weird kind of agency). This is really where Kirsch's essay distorts things most. Anyway, you get the idea, right? What? Move on, you say? Right.

So anyway, about that whole 'the relation of earth and world in Heidegger is a dialectic not a dichotomy' thing. It's true! That is, in the work of art, earth and world are always involved in a kind of struggle. If a work of art were pure world, it wouldn't be art, it'd be propaganda, or ideology: a closed system of mental coordinates that never come into contact with anything that resists it. It'd be sort of Orwellian. But the art work doesn't allow anything so easy to happen. Even as it starts to open up a whole world (or discourse, or paradigm, or way of understanding) for us, it gives us elements that resist appropriation into that world. If the work of art in question is, say, a poem, we might say that it resists paraphrase, or closure; or that parts of it remain indeterminate; or that it shoots off so many connotations that we're uneasy reducing it to a denotative meaning. Any attempt to make the art work into mere world runs up against all kinds of elements that escape that world. Robert B. Stulberg put it this way in a fantastic little article in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism back in 1973:

In the calm self-repose of the work, the world and the earth are engaged in a struggle, a struggle in which each 'opponent' attempts to assert its own self in the art work. The earth — the concealing and self-closing realm — tries to draw the world into itself. The world — the open and unhidden realm — tries to surmount the hidden earth... Heidegger ... explains that the struggle is never entirely resolved in the work of art...

Earth and world oppose one another, but they also need one another. You wouldn't exist as a conscious entity without some kind of world, or paradigm; and a work of art wouldn't function without proposing one, however partially and provisionally. At the same time, no world is absolute, no world exhausts the possibilities of earth. I mean, think like Bakhtin for a moment and it all becomes clearer — for Bakhtin, no one kind of language reveals all of the truth, in fact, each conceals a certain part of it (medical language gets at the truth of your body, but not of your personality, say; legal language gets at the truth of your rights in a given society, but not at much else). Or maybe the better analogy is with Wittgenstein, and his famous statement "the limits of my language are the limits of my world." For Heidegger, all worlds are limited, all conceal even as they reveal. And I think it's the failure to emphasize this part of Heidegger's thinking that leads Kirsch to some suspect statements about Modernism.

Meeting the Moderns

Hey. You must really be into this whole Heidegger deal if you're still with me. Either that, or you bear Adam Kirsch some strange animus, and are looking for me to really lay into him (you're out of luck if that's the case: I'm going to wheel this essay around in the next section and claim that, despite his somewhat dodgy take on Heidegger, Kirsch makes an intriguing, and quite probably true, point about contemporary poetry).

Anyway. Kirsch's take on the Modernists is that they are drawn to the idea of world-creation, to projecting systems of values and to the "domineering" act of forging "new coordinates of meaning and order." This, I have to say, I don't quite get. At least not in most cases. Kirsch argues that the Modernists wanted to present worlds in the sense of thrusting domineering, totalizing systems of knowledge upon us, but that they somehow failed to make these things come together. But come on. It isn't like Eliot wanted to say that there was a single key to all mythologies — if he did, he'd have written a book like Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance, not a deliberately fragmentary poem that riffs on that book, and refuses to settle into a smooth whole. In fact, Eliot's The Waste Land seems much more like Heidegger's idea of the work of art as a place where a world starts to open up for us, but then falls away into concealment and unmeaning. Kirsch might have a point when it comes to Pound, who seems to have wanted The Cantos to cohere into a kind of ideology, and who's confession near the end of the poem that he couldn't "make it cohere" sounds like an admission of failure. But this failure to create a coherent world wouldn't be a failure from a Heideggerian perspective: it would simply be an example of the work of art doing what it does, and ought to do: bringing world (or unconcealedness) into relation with earth (or concealedness).

[Would it be muddying these already murky waters to point out that William Carlos Williams, with his "no ideas but in things" poetic, is a Modernist who doesn't try to project value systems so much as he tries to focus our attention on material things — thus making him a poet of "earth" in Kirsch's sense, though not necessarily in Heidegger's? Yeah, you're right, it probably would. So I won't mention it. Right, then. Moving on.]

Kirsch without Heidegger

So okay. Kirsch's take on Heidegger is a bit sketchy: his notion of earth being out of whack with Heidegger's, and his sense of the relation of earth and world being different from that proposed by Heidegger, too. But let's set all that aside. I mean, does an idea really need a pedigree to be taken seriously? There's one element of Kirsch's essay I want to take seriously: his proposal that poets have become reticent about projecting "coordinates of meaning and order." I think there's something to this. I don't want to propose that "our poetry believes" that we shouldn't project coordinates of meaning. That would be a generalization (even a totalization). I mean, is this really universal? I'd say it's just prevalent. There's also a reification in Kirsch's statement ("our poetry" is an abstraction and doesn't believe anything, it's poets who believe things). I'm skittish around both the totalization and the reification, but I do think Kirsch is on to something. There are plenty of poets who do what Kirsch says "our poetry" does: they "witness" (Kirsch's word) "the sensuous reality of the non-human" things of the world, and draw our attention to them, without aiming to issue "commandments" about how we should judge, interpret, and value these things.

In fact, if we move beyond the excruciatingly narrow range of poets Kirsch discusses, we find a related phenomenon among writers of more experimental verse. Take a guy like Jeremy Prynne. He's certainly not a no-ideas-but-in-things poet, who defamiliarizes the common objects of the world for us as a way of avoiding making Big Totalizing Statements and Proposing A Dominant Ideology. But he's got a goal quite similar to poets who take that path: he's all about avoiding the kind of world-projecting, or ideology-creating that Kirsch writes about. In the polydiscursive poetry of his early period, for example, he's all about showing the limits of any particular kind of language, or ideology, or world-projection. As N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge put it in Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne, "Prynne would want a poetry neither useful to some manipulative power, nor providing musical accompaniment to a commodifying culture," and he structures his poems accordingly. In Heidegger's terms, there's a whole lot of earthly concealment going on in them, and a lot of undoing of worldly unconcealments. Prynne makes a big deal out of the idea of "rubbish" — the sort of thing we don't notice, and have no use for, and would like to exclude from our worlds. For him,

Rubbish is
pertinent; essential; the
most intricate presence in
our entire culture

(from "L'Extase de M. Poher" — the spacing is quite different in the original, but my html skills are weak, people, weak)

That is, he finds the idea of the excluded and unnoticed and unused important, because it points to the limitations of our systems of meaning. Rubbish is, by definition, something that we discard and don't want to think about. It highlights the limits of our world.

Okay. So I don't have any more empirical evidence than Kirsch does, but I do sense from my general rooting-around-in-poetry that the reticence about proposing systems of value that Kirsch sees among his range of poets exists; and my sense is that, in different ways, this reticence is shared by many members of an experimental writing community that seems to lie outside of Kirsch's range of knowledge, or maybe just outside his range of sympathy. But if this is indeed the case, one might well wonder, you know, why? Why don't many poets want to do that Dante thing and lay down The Authoritative Values of Our Culture in Unambiguous Four-Part Allegory? Ah! I think I have it! And I think I can break it down in a a single paragraph! (Well, in a provisional kind of way — the confidence is not so much me as it is the coffee. Can you tell that I've been writing this while working my way through a giant carafe of Intelligentsia Panamanian El Machete Fair Trade Goodness?).

The Culture of Critical Discourse

Yeah. So it's like this (in a provisional, non-totalizing, probably-part-of-the-answer way): much contemporary poetry, both of the Nobel-and-U.S-laureate type Kirsch describes and the freaky-experimental school I mentioned, eschews the projection of authoritative coordinates of meaning because of... (drumroll, please, Anton) ...their embrace of the Culture of Critical Discourse! [insert wild applause here]. And what's that, you ask? Ah! It's all laid down by the late, great Alvin Gouldner, sociologist-of-intellectuals extraordinaire. In The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, Gouldner argues that a common characteristic of virtually all contemporary intellectuals is their commitment to the Culture of Critical Discourse (or CCD, as he always abbreviates it). The CCD is pretty much what it sounds like: a set of received assumptions about the nature of truth; specifically, assumptions about how truth isn't a matter of authoritative revelation, but a matter an open-ended inquiry. If we buy into the CCD (and the contemporary educational system, especially at the university level, is all about the CCD), we don't expect truth to be something that can be set down once and for all. We expect truth-claims to always be subject to questioning, and we expect that our paradigms will probably have to change as new evidence comes in from our investigations. To paraphrase The Dude in The Big Lebowski, we expect new shit to come to light. Poets, as a subset of the class of intellectuals, just don't have faith in the idea of truth being something one can set down once and for all any more (there may be exceptions, but they'd be outliers, from areas of our culture beyond the mainstream. I suppose there may be poets out there belonging to one or another of the fundamentalist movements who think that the coordinates of meaning can and should be set down once and for all, but they are eccentric with regard to the dominant poetic culture of our society, which is heavily conditioned by the CCD). So, don't expect any Dantes, at least not Dantes with an MFA. People coming out of a sympathetic identification with university culture (long may it wave) just aren't likely to believe they can set down everlasting systems of value.

Oh, and Don't Miss This!

If you're in Chicago on August 22nd, and have recovered from my turgid prose, check out The Printer's Ball at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Tout le monde of Chicago poetry will be there, and the good people from Beard of Bees Press promise no one will be hurt this time when they fire up the Gnoetry Poetry Machine.