Sheena and the Sugar Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry, Politics, Obscurity

Despite what the picture may lead you to believe, I haven't been interviewed by Ed Murrow.  No, people, it was Johannes Göransson who did the interviewing.  Johannes is an interesting guy, and I think we're the only two people concerned with contemporary poetry who have lived in both Lund, Sweden and South Bend, Indiana.  He asked me about poetry, the public sphere, and the politics of obscurity, among other things.  Anyone fool enough to want to read my answers can do so over at The Argotist. They also have more interesting interviews, with Charles Bernstein, Iain Sinclair, Marjorie Perloff, and Andrea Brady, among others.

What Decadence Means to Me

When I recently posted a few comments complaining about the clichés of contemporary poetry and calling the poetry that uses them decadent, I thought I might catch some flack. But I thought the flack from people who admire the qualities I (following — indeed, quoting from — Jason Guriel in a recent article in Poetry) saw as clichéd: "reliance on buzzwords"; "distrust of order"; "distrust of linearity and having a point"; "anxiety over what words mean"; "romantic bluster"; "imprecision"; "sympathy for small critters." Instead, I caught flack from a different direction: a couple guys whose opinions carry a lot of weight chéz Archambeau (Johannes Göransson and Gabriel Alexander) objected to the use of the term decadent. They've got a point.

Johannes reacted, I think, primarily to a passage where, after listing the clichéd qualities, I said that "the point isn't that these are bad things, just that they've become a kind of decadent tradition in poetry, a set of gestures often made less because they have importance but because they are taken to signal 'poeticness.'" Here's Johannes, from his blog Exoskeleton:

I've seen this term [decadence] used very strangely around the Internet as of late. Here is Archambeau using it to mean the use of empty manners. So does CK Williams in the little article that made me so irate the other day.

This seems like a strange use of the term.

I'm totally for Decadence.

(But I think Archambeau is largely right about "poeticky" features.)

So in part Johannes and I are on the same page: we both think some elements of poetry are used more to declare poeticality than for any other reason. But he dislikes the use of the word "decadence" here, because it refers (with a capital "D") to the artistic and literary movement of the late 19th century that stressed a dissent from banal bourgeois ideas of 'progress,' that reveled in l'art pour l'art, that celebrated sexual and moral actions and positions beyond the accepted norms, etc. (you know: Gustave Mirbeau, Huysmans, Nerval, Beardsley, Rops, Symons — those guys). Johannes, with whom I share a distrust of anyone who uses "avant-garde" as a transhistorical term, rather than with reference to a particular moment, objects to my ham-handed abduction of the term from its context. Fair enough.

Gabriel Alexanderg, whom Johannes quotes in another post over at Exoskeleton, makes the criticism more explicit:

>I'm interested in the decadent, too. But, I think, less as an adjective that implies self-indulgence or as a platitude. I believe I bristle at its invocation in the same way I do when "avant-garde" is dehistoricized and implemented as a place-holder for any number of aesthetic possibilities. I'm all for the transformation of meaning and the mutation of words, so I'm not generally frustrated with [sic] But I do think that to use *decadent* as an indictment actually mirrors much of the Victorian backlash against the French Decadents and their off-spring (and predecessors) [*Note from Archambeau: I don't entirely buy the chronology of backlash here, but I also don't think that's too important for the present context]. It's much more fruitful for me to think of the decadent as deeply involved, as décéder implies, in death, disintegration, and the dissolution of boundaries. More provocative to think of the decadent as a coda with a Hydra head.

To which Johannes adds this comment: "I think the critique reflects a similar notion: the idea that there is a natural, strong poetry and a weak, artificial poetry."

In response, all I can say is "this isn't what I meant!" I don't think there is a single, transhistorically valid style, one that is naturally good and strong and that we fall away from at our peril. But I can see, given what I said, why Gabriel and Johannes would think that's what I was on about.

So, that mea culpa behind me, I suppose I should address the question of just what I did mean.

I suppose what I wanted to say was this: there are good things that can be done in any style, but style is at its best when it comes out of a deeply-felt engagement with current norms of thought, feeling, and art-making. This engagement may take the form of an affirmation of the current, a criticism of it, or even a total negation of it. It may even be an attempt at a negation of all norms. But a style tends to be less interesting when it is accepted uncritically, when it is taken up simply because it seems to be the way things are done. If we accept a style or a tradition because it is there, it's being taught, it's being published, not because it speaks to some more fundamental need, I think there's a strong chance that we'll produce work that's clichéd. The clichés may be those of clarity (think Augustan poetry), or they may be clichés of (to quote Gabriel) "disintegration, and the dissolution of boundaries." For me, it's not a matter of one style being the transhistorically good, and deviations being degenerations. It's a matter of a style being taken up uncritically and unimaginatively.

I'm not sure which C.K. Williams article Johannes was frustrated with, but it might have been the one in the same issue of Poetry that contained the article where Guriel listed his seven clichés. If so, it's an article in which Williams proposes that styles have an instrinsic entropy to them. He also makes sloppy use of the term "decadence," saying:

Another characteristic of creative systems, what is usually called style, is that they have a terrifically conservative tendency. Styles are always striving to perfect themselves, by which I mean that styles have inherent in them the potential for enactments that no longer depend on anything but the demands of the style itself: neither matter, content, nor, in other words, world. Stylistically, art is always moving from the transparent to the opaque, from trying to make encompassing and as comprehensive as possible its relations with reality, to a state in which its formal dexterity comes to be its most essential requirement. When this happens, usually during the late moments of an artistic era, the execution of style becomes an end in itself, the end in itself: art becomes style displaying itself, preening, showing off.

This is when an artistic style becomes decadent. Decadence in itself isn’t intrinsically bad, it’s unavoidable, and some of the very greatest art is created at the end of the innovation-decadence cycle. What happens then, though, is that some subtle line is crossed, and the gloriously decadent becomes the offensively empty, sterile, and, with no longer any portion of the quest of the artist’s blundering soul a part of it, produces work that is lifeless, stillborn.

I remember being frustrated with this article, not because I thought it was entirely wrong, but because I thought it presented a half-truth. I mean, obviously I agree that styles can become clichéd, but I disagree that self-reference necessarily pairs up with lifelessness, and (more importantly) I disagree about changes of the sort Williams describes being an intrinsic quality of any style. I think that when a style becomes a cliché, it usually has to do with particular historical conditions, rather than being simply something that happens when a style ages. I don't think there's a cycle to styles, separate from their intersection with events, institutions, and the like.

In our current moment, I rather imagine that the increasingly clichéd status (and I agree that cliché is the better word, not decadence) of the qualities Guriel names is connected with what Ron Silliman once called the 400-pound gorilla of our poetic scene: the academy. I mean, if Victorian doggerel came about because the book market of the time called for easy moralism and stylistic clarity, our own kind of institutional conditions influence what becomes clichéd in our own time. In fact, it was a post Johannes put up on Exoskeleton about his experiences in the Iowa MFA program that got me thinking about this some months ago. He described his fellow classmates thusly:

Lots of people bantered around the phrase "post-language poet" - as in "I am a..." This means that they - like Jorie [Graham] - used some of the textures of langpo to recreate high modernism, elegance, high learning - as opposed to ... "Images" which were vulgar and had to be controlled against their natural tendency toward excess; "confessional poetry" was ridiculed; "indeterminacy" was important... because it was "complex" and thus more "realistic." I remember a debate I got in because someone called something (not mine) "pornographic" because it wasn't complex...

The conformism was striking: everyone wanted to do what the charismatic, professionally successful teacher had done. It had the sheen of sophistication (academe loves this), it had pedigree (academe loves this), it seemed current (academe loves this). It wasn't for the casually-interested and uninitiated (acadme loves this). It's not that the style these guys were turning to was in any sense intrinsically 'decadent' — it's that the style was being adapted in what seems like a kind of herd-move, for what seem like professional reasons more than anything else (and for reasons very different from those that led to the genesis of langpo, from which much of the style derives). This is the sort of thing that leads to cliché, which is what I was trying to get at when I talked too loosely about decadence. Maybe a better way to discuss it is as suboptimal centrality, but that was a different blog post.

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In news from the stuff-I-wrote-now-in-print desk, I've got a very short piece on Bonnie Costello's Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World in the latest Boston Review.

{Errata: in an earlier version of this post, I said "Gabriel Gudding" when I meant "Gabriel Alexander." More mea culpas!}

Map of the Hydrogen World

Steve Halle's new book, Map of the Hydrogen World, is just out from Chicago's own Cracked Slab books, and you're out of your mind if you're not already on your way to order a copy. Halle's got pretty much everything you'd hope to find in a younger poet: a sense of urgency, an easy grasp of tradition, and an adventurous sense of experiment.

I want to dwell on this last bit just a little, because I think Halle is truly experimental, at a time when the idea of experiment has become muddied. It's sad, and ultimately ironic, that words like "experimental," "complex," "difficult", and "indeterminate" are, in some quadrants of the poetry demimonde, not so much a shorthand for idiosyncratic adventure, but more a brand-name, a sign of membership and even conformity. Johannes Goransson gives us an image of the time and place where this started to happen in his reflections on his experience at the Iowa writing program:

Lots of people bantered around the phrase "post-language poet" - as in "I am a..." This means that they - like Jorie [Graham] - used some of the textures of langpo to recreate high modernism, elegance, high learning - as opposed to ... "Images" which were vulgar and had to be controlled against their natural tendency toward excess; "confessional poetry" was ridiculed; "indeterminacy" was important... because it was "complex" and thus more "realistic." I remember a debate I got in because someone called something (not mine) "pornographic" because it wasn't complex...

Yikes. I mean, there's the sad logic of competitiveness/conformity that you get when people study at the feet of some charismatic teacher, with hopes of finding a respectable post in a semi-regulated profession. There's actually a pretty good book about how the best outburts of artistic creation take place among groups of peers without charismatic masters or hope of professional placement. It's called Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work by Michael P. Farrell, and someday, in the unlikely event that I get my act together and clear the decks of other writing commitments, I'm going to read the big Langpo group autobiography Grand Piano and see whether the experiences recounted there confirm Farrell's various hypotheses, one of which is that the charismatic master, or group of masters, can end up establishing a style that the students don't really understand, or feel compelled to use for any reason other than that it is what they think they're supposed to use. It's a problem that can afflict even the most groundbreaking of creative figures in their early years: I remember reading about Andy Warhol's first soup-can works, which were spattered with paint drippings in the Jackson Pollock mode. When someone asked him why he added the paint-spatters, he told the man that he thought that's what you were supposed to do to make it a work of art. The things that Pollock struggled for, and that meant everything to him, were to the young Warhol just a kind of credential, a sign that he wasn't just a kid from the benighted side of Pittsburgh, but a Member of the New York Art World in Full and Good Standing. Tradition does tend to be govered by entropy.

Anyway: my point is that Steve Halle's not one of these "I'm experimenting the same way everyone's experimenting because that's what you're supposed to do, right?" guys. Perhaps it was to his advantage that he didn't really have a particularly charismatic teacher in his undergrad days (when he studied with, um, me), and now that he's plugging away at grad school after a stint teaching, he seems to have a pretty firm sense of himself (besides, Gabe Gudding, his prof now at Illinois State, seems laudibly eclectic, and not in quest of disciples). So Steve's work doesn't really look like period style, and there's an interesting combination of techniques and influences at play in Map of the Hydrogen World. The jacket copy provided by the publisher gets at some of this:

Map of the Hydrogen World, Steve Halle’s first collection of poems, shuns the so-called divide between post-avant and Official Verse Culture poetics by embracing traditional forms and themes while simultaneously developing new ways of knowing and working through poetry. From traditional lyric and narrative poems to formal experiments, investigations and cuttings, Halle attempts to find his own way through place, history, art, politics, faith and self, mapping particulars as small as an atom and universalities as big as a world.

I try to drive a similar point home in my own bit of jacket copy:

Ginsbergian incantation, high modernist allusion, the post-avant rhizome and the documentary collage — these are the weapons in Steve Halle’s arsenal. Joyce, Eliot, Emerson, Whitman and Keats shoot through the static of text-messaging, global positioning systems, surveillance culture, and an urgent sense of the world’s victims. Halle carries a humanistic heritage into an inhuman world. It comes out shredded, torn into the bandages we need even more than we know.

Okay, so I kind of let that extended metaphor have its way with me a bit. And I failed to work in any reference to the strong Dada strain in Halle's work. So let's move on to another bit of copy, this one by Steve's most charismatic teacher, Anne Waldman:

Delightful voices and moves play out in the latitudes & longitudes of Steve Halle's Map of the Hydrogen World. Edgy with savvy and brio. It's one wonderful exciting romp.

I'm not sure I'd have said "romp" — Halle's book seems a bit more... what? A bit more somber than that, a bit too concerned with the morally urgent world to be called a romp. But don't take my word for it: see for yourself.