Kafka Sutra World Tour, Spring 2016!

The jets are waiting on the runways, the engines of the motorcade hum in readiness: the Kafka Sutra world tour, 2016 edition, is about to begin!

The first stop: Louisville, Kentucky where, by popular request (okay, by arrangement with the conference organizers) I won't be reading from The Kafka Sutra, but delivering a paper called "Ransom Revised: John Crowe Ransom's Journey from Dialogism to Dogma."  YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO BE THERE! It's at the University of Louisville, Humanities 108, at 2:45 on Saturday, February 20th.  Also on the bill: Mark Scroggins, talking about Geoffrey Hill, and Sally Connolly, discussing elegies written for Ezra Pound.

Then the tour loops back home to Chicago, Illinois, where I'll be reading from The Kafka Sutra side by side with Larry Sawyer and Nathan Hoks, who will read from their new work.  This will be at the Uptown Arts Center (941 West Lawrence Avenue), Friday, February 26, at 8 pm.  If you are one of those deeply hip sorts who only navigates with reference to legendary jazz hangouts, that's a block east of the Green Mill.

Next, the traveling circus heads to Concord, New Hampshire, for a Poetry Month spectacular reading on April 4th at NHTI (details to follow).  

Those who attend all three events will be given a hug of sympathy and a quizzical look.

What Rhymes with Wallace?: Wallace Stevens and Rhyme

One of the unexpected pleasures of the recent Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, for me, was running across Anthony Madrid in the corridors between sessions.  I hadn’t seen him for months, not since he pressed a collection of Edward Lear’s verse into my hands in a tiny used bookstore under the Metra tracks in Evanston, and was glad to let him pull me into a nearby room where he was about to join other members of the Wallace Stevens Society in a panel on Stevens and rhyme.

Madrid spoke first, beginning with a general précis of his argument about the trajectory of rhyme in English verse.  I’d heard this before, when Madrid joined Don Share and Lea Graham on a panel on the poetry of Michael Robbins I chaired at the Midwest MLA a year ago, but it’s such an intriguing argument I was happy to hear it rehearsed again.  The gist of it is that after the Elizabethan period, whole categories of rhyme are, essentially, decommissioned from English verse, or become far less common (critics of Madrid’s theory love to find exceptions, but a full reading of his doctoral work in The Warrant for Rhyme reveals a strong case for a general trend of the kind he describes).  Rhymes that involve strong semantic links—semantic similarities, or opposites, or rhymes from the same semantic category—greatly diminish over the course of the seventeenth century.  So me/thee, mine/thine, he/she, berry/cherry, and the like become far less common.  Madrid makes much of this: the link between rhymes becomes less rational, he says, and more a matter of mystery, as if the poet wills the rhyming words to belong together for reasons unknowable to the intellect.

The anti-semantic nature of rhyme becomes a norm in the eighteenth century, and it is only with Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, an antiquarian’s selection of old ballads and other poems, that the older style of rhyme begins to return for the Romantic era.  A Romantic like Byron, when he is serious, as in Childe Harold, rhymes like an eighteenth century poet, but when he’s comic, as in Don Juan or Beppo, he makes rhymes that go out of their way to draw attention to themselves, and appear as stunts (as Butler’s comic rhymes in Hubridas did).  The rhyme becomes something deliberately original, frame-breaking and winking.  And this sounds the death-knell for rhyme, since over the nineteenth century rhyme becomes less a holistic part of poems and more of an attention-grabbing device, until in the modern era it is all-but abandoned.

This brings us to Wallace Stevens, whose poetry only rarely rhymes—11 early poems are consistently rhymed, and after that rhyme occurs as an occasional grace, like alliteration.  When it does rhyme, it almost always uses the classical rhyme of the eighteenth century, which does not seek to draw attention to its cleverness (an exception being “übermenschlichkeit/ word soon come right”).  There is rarely a semantic quality to the rhyme, and Madrid argues that this is aligned with Stevens’ belief in the mysterious powers of the imagination—the rhymes are convened only by the power of imagination, not on some rationally apprehensible basis.  Stevens rhymes less and less over time, too, as the poetry becomes less overtly musically-driven and more liturgical.

After Madrid, Eugene Vydrin of NYU took the stage to speak about rhyme and the adherence of the poem to reality in Stevens, and was followed by Joon Soo-Bong of Seoul National University, who spoke about schematic rhyme as essentially antithetical to Stevens’ aesthetic of flow.  All very interesting, but I was particularly fascinated by Roi Tartakovsky, who turned to empirical linguistic research to explain rhymes and other sonic effects in Stevens’ poetry. 

Tartakovsky noted that one of the most important recurring patterns in Stevens’ poetry is that of the recurrent pair of sonically similar words—as in the “sea” and “she” that come up at the start of the first and second stanzas of “The Idea of Order at Key West.”  Linguists have told us that acoustically similar words are actually less well reproduced in the memory than other words, and tend to become confused—but that rhyme words are, in fact, remembered well.  So Stevens works with a combination of words that aid in the recollection of argument or thesis, and words that actually blur rational or argumentative distinctions.  I’d be very interested in seeing a fully-worked out analysis of Stevens drawing on this insight.

Of course there was much more to see and hear (and eat and drink and argue over) at the conference, but I’m glad I was pulled into the little demimonde of the Stevensians, and I’m glad to see rhyme returning as a category of serious critical analysis.

John Ashbery and the Poetics of the Art World

You're probably feeling something like despair if you know you can't make it to the University of Louisville for the 1:00 pm session of the The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 (Humanities room 111).  You'll miss Andrew Epstein talking about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and their relationship to the New York poetry scene of their day, and you'll miss John Gallaher talking about Michael Benedikt as a nexus figure of the New York School.  You'll also miss me giving a paper called "John Ashbery and the Poetics of the Art World," but don't fret about that. The text—minus any tweaking it may receive as I sit among the nervous grad students in the lobby of the Brown Hotel or among the Gnostic poets at the Mayan Cafe, where they hang out and summon mystic wisdom over bourbon and tamales—is here:

John Ashbery and the Poetics of the Art World 

 …I had to find a way out of the woods.
Now, in some cases, this is easy—you just walk straight along a road and pretty soon
you're out of the woods and there are suburban backlots. In my case,
though, it wasn't that simple, though it wasn't extraordinarily demanding either—I
just lay down in a boat and slept, Lady-of-Shalott style. Soon I was gliding among you
taking notes on your conversations and otherwise making a pest of myself. 
I pretended to be angry when onlookers jeered and cows mooed and even the heralds told me to shut up, 
yet at bottom I was indifferent. I knew my oracles
for what they were—right about 50% of the time—and I also knew their accuracy wasn't 
an issue.

 In these lines, from John Ashbery's Flow Chart, the poet presents himself as Tennyson's Lady of Shalott—and the comparison is apt. Consider the plot of Tennyson's poem. The lady is confined to her tower, isolated from the thriving world of business and love beyond the walls. She weaves a tapestry of what she sees, and in so doing becomes a symbol for many things. Firstly, she is a woman in a world profoundly masculine in its institutions and structures of power. Moreover, she is a laborer in a time when labor conditions—particularly in textiles—are becoming more and more rationalized and alienating. Finally, as a tapestry weaver she is a figure for the artist. All of these things, Tennyson implies, are alienated, confined, set off from the world where barges ply their trade on the river and young lovers meet to wed. We can think of Tennyson’s poem almost as an allegory of John Ashbery's situation, in that three kinds of alienation—having to do with his sexuality, his relation to conventionally productive labor, and his status as a certain kind of poet in midcentury America—led him to a peripatetic life and what me might call a poetics of wandering or drift.

If you want to think about Ashbery and queerness, John Shoptaw, in On the Outside Looking Out has done a better job of it than I could ever do. If you want to think about Ashbery and alienation from labor, read his poem “The Instruction Manual” and write the article about that poem that still needs to be written. If you want to hear about Ashbery and the importance of the art world he entered as a young man in New York at the end of the 1940s, I hope I can help. 

Drawn into the orbit of precocious literary friends at Harvard, John Ashbery joined an artistic milieu in New York City that was intensely aestheticist and that emphasized the autonomy of the art object and the primacy of the medium itself. Ashbery's poetry, too, has been, non-dogmatic and intensely concerned with the medium of language. His particular form of aesthetic expression involves aleatory techniques and linguistic disruptions, and, especially, a kind of narrative drift. Characteristically, his form of narrative, or pseudo-narrative, drifts and observes, and Ashbery does not expect his oracles to change the world: the poetry that comes from them will exist for itself, not—as in the hopes of modernist greats like Yeats, Pound, or Eliot—for the renovation of the culture. Unlike those poets, Ashbery is as pure an aesthete as any poet of the 1890s. This is not to say that he cannot be read politically—he has been, and has welcomed it—but the characteristic qualities of his work stem from early formative experiences in a very particular moment of the New York art world of the late 40s and early 50s, a moment perhaps more extreme in its commitment to aesthetic autonomy than any other in the American 20th century. 

The New York to which Ashbery moved in 1949, when he began his graduate studies at Columbia, was the epicenter of America's visual art scene, but it is easy, given the later lionization of the abstract expressionists, to misremember the situation of American art in 1949. The art world then was small and isolated. When John Bernard Myers, a founder of the Tibor de Nagy gallery, was putting together artists for his early shows, he found the art world tiny indeed: "it should be stressed that… almost everyone knew everyone else" and "all of them lived in Manhattan." The possibility of connecting with the world beyond the art scene, let alone influencing it, seemed extremely remote: during her 1947 visit to New York Simone de Beauvoir came to the conclusion that "there is no informed public" for the arts—hyperbole, to be sure, but a good indicator of how America in the late 40s appeared from a European intellectual's position. And native intellectuals tended to concur, even in the use of hyperbole.

The alienation that permeated the art world did not manifest in political radicalism, but rather in an emphasis on the isolated artist's authenticity, and on the autonomy of the work of art. This was, after all, the era of The God That Failed, with its documentation of the left's painful disillusionment with Communism, as well as the time of the blacklist and the general suppression of the American left. Even the once-radical Partisan Review crowd had largely retreated from politics by 1947, and, having abandoned first Stalin, then Trotsky, they now bent their knees to art. The depoliticization left many artists adrift, a condition Robert Motherwell expressed in in 1944 when he said "The artist's problem is with what to identify himself…. Hence the tendency of modern painters to paint for each other."

The preservation of individual authenticity and autonomy, rather than any movement on behalf of class or faction, was the artist's mode of opposition—and the means of opposition was the autonomy of the work of art. As Thomas B. Hess put it in ARTnews, “There was nothing to do but paint. The self-directed community became self-oriented. Art replaced revolution in its eschatology…. Never before in painting had art itself so preoccupied the artist.” Ad Reinhardt was more extreme in his formulations than most, but he was not out of step with the general temper of the art world when he declared that art "should have no connection with anything, not God, Morals, Politics, Movements, Aesthetics, Philosophy, Science." Even that soberest of academic art critics, Meyer Shapiro, declared that the artist must now "cultivate his own garden."

But poets came to the garden of the postwar art world, too: a phenomenon, we may be surprised to note, unprecedented in American history. John Ashbery offers two statements about what that felt like in 1949:

I hadn't realized it, but my arrival in New York coincided with the cresting of the 'heroic' period of Abstract Expressionism, as it was later to be known, and somehow we all seemed to benefit from this strong moment… We were in awe of de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell and not too sure of exactly what they were doing. But there were other things to attend to: concerts of John Cage's music, Merce Cunningham's dances, the Living Theatre, but also talking and going to the movies and getting ripped and hanging out and then discussing it all over the phone.

And

This is not the place to wonder why the poets Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler, Guest and myself gravitated toward painters, probably it was merely because the particular painters we knew happened to be more fun than the poets… 

If we look beyond the flippant assertion that the poets entered the world of the painters because the painters had more fun, we will not only find a more substantial explanation for the melding of the poetic and artistic scenes—we will also understand more about how the poets "seemed to benefit" from the fervent experimentalism of the art world.

The first thing to acknowledge is that in the years after the war it was by no means an obvious thing that poets should become involved in the world of art. Although there had been exceptions, like Wallace Stevens, who frequented artist's studios and studded his prose with references to painting, the French-style alliance of poets and painters was rare in early 20th century America. As Dore Ashton puts it in her seminal study of the New York School painters, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, "One of the peculiar aspects of traditional American culture had been the total isolation of the different arts. American artists noted early in the century that, unlike artists on the Continent, they had no literary companions." This only began to change after the war, when "well-developed suspicion on both sides" faded, and there were "attempts to bring about a rapprochement."

These attempts were certainly successful, if we are to judge by the reception Ashbery and his peers received among the artists and, even more importantly, the gallerists. Indeed, it is in part through the schemes of gallerists operating in difficult commercial circumstances that the rapprochement of different creative worlds in postwar New York came about.

New American art, in the postwar years, did not generally find patrons among the upper class, but among a small part of the professional middle class, and among other artists. Sensing an opportunity to expand the market beyond visual artists, Myers intuited that "more interaction among all the arts might speed us on our way." At a time when there was no off-Broadway theater as we know it in New York, Myers learned from a friend of Parisian theater in which plays by poets were given sets by contemporary artists and featured music by avant-garde composers. So Myers worked with Frank O'Hara, James Merrill, and others to found the Artists' Theater in 1953. Soon, poets, composers, and visual artists were working together on a variety of productions—including John Ashbery's play The Heroes, with sets by the artist Nellie Blaine. The Artists' Theater, and projects like it, became the crucible in which was forged a multi-arts creative scene, an audience composed of people concerned with, or practicing, different arts, and a culture of collaboration. Born of a desire to survive the indifference of the general public, such a scene, centered on aesthetics and artistic production for artistic producers, was a far cry from the political movements in which artists of the 1930s tended to come together and collaborate. It was a scene in which Theseus, in Ashbery's play, could deliver the line "I now possessed the only weapon with which the Minotaur might be vanquished—the indifference of the true aesthete" and have it received by an audience with approving laughter.

One way to think about the presence of the poets in the postwar art world is to see it as the natural path for experimentally-minded poets, given the aesthetic ferment of American painting and the relative conservatism of American poetry under the rising sign of the New Criticism. But to see the experiment-oriented art world as a draw for experiment-oriented young poets is to see only one part of a dialectical process: it is just as true to say that the art world encouraged and emboldened the poets who entered it to become more experimental. The poems Ashbery wrote at Harvard are not terribly outré by the literary standards of the time. But much of the work he wrote in postwar New York went much further afield.

The sociologist Howard S. Becker notes that "art works always bear the marks of the system which distributes them," and that and poets depend on the audiences reached by their publishers for "shared traditions" and "background against which their work makes sense." When we consider where much of Ashbery's early writing was being published, and to whom it was being distributed, we see that it was going to a sharply defined audience, one rooted in the art world and accustomed to a degree of abstraction and experiment alien to the literary establishment of the times—to sensibilites more attuned to Willem de Kooning than to de Kooning's literary contemporary Cleanth Brooks. Much of Ashbery’s early writing appeared in Semicolon, a journal published by art curators and distributed at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the Artists' Club, and the Cedar Bar—all art world institutions. Moreover, the small collections of poems that precede and follow Yale's publication of Some Trees are both art world productions: 1953's Turandot, with four drawings by Jane Freilicher, was published by Tibor de Nagy gallery in 1953; and The Poems, with silk screen work by Joan Mitchell, published in 1960 by Tiber Press (a publisher of the visual arts). It should come as no surprise that Ashbery came to see the poetry of the literary establishment as too conservative: he and his early audience were immersed in a milieu that accepted and encouraged experimentalism far more than did the established literary institutions of the time.

Within this restricted sphere of reception, there was an even smaller sphere: the little coterie of the poets themselves, a hyper-aesthetic demimonde within the New York aesthetic demimonde. As James Schuyler put it, "John and Frank and I were almost like a mutual admiration society," affirming and enabling one another. Glossing Schuyler's comment, David Lehman underlines the sense of a small world removed from both the literary establishment and the general reading public: "since acceptance or rejection of [their] works was an indication of neither success nor failure, the poets looked to themselves as ultimate arbiters." Tennyson's friends rejected poems like “The Lady of Shalott” and urged him to be a moralist for the broad reading public—the poet of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the laureate; Ashbery's were satisfied if he delighted them and them alone.

The situation reminds one of a remark made by Pierre Bourdieu in his examination of the rise of autonomous art. In the absence of pressures to conform to religious, political, or market forces, or to otherwise conform to the norms of a public, artists find themselves "in a position to rebuff every external constraint or demand, are able to affirm their mastery over that which defines them and which properly belongs to them, that is, the form." If we understand this, we understand Ashbery.

"Where's It Coming From?": Barrett Watten, Robert Duncan, and the New Gnosticism in Poetry

Barrett Watten and Joan Retallack, in murky light at the Mayan Cafe

One of the advantages of living in a city whose airport is a major transportation hub is that there’s a good chance, when on the way to a conference, one will run into others going to the same place.  Last time I set out for the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, I ran across Rae Armantrout in the departure lounge.  This year I was nearly knocked over by Patrick Pritchett, the chair of my panel, whose route to Louisville from Harvard took him through O’Hare Airport.  When we arrived in Kentucky, we were promptly met by Mark Scroggins—another participant in our double-barreled pair of sessions on the New Gnosticism in American Poetry.  We piled into a small yellow Ford Scroggins had rented, and were off to what was, for me, one of the stronger iterations of the Louisville conference.

Much of what I love about conferences takes place outside the official venues, and, indeed, on my first day I didn’t attend a single panel, but shuffled from bar to restaurant to bar, hanging with the usual suspects (Pritchett & Scroggins, conference organizer Alan Golding, Joe Donahue, David Need, Norman Finkelstein, Barrett Watten, Aldon Nielson, Vincent Sherry), and many more, including Ed Foster and Joan Retallack, neither of whom I’ve seen in Louisville before.

All of the above were present at one or both of the New Gnosticism panels, where I also saw Ben Friedlander, Linda Kinnahan, and other Worthies of Poetry.  In fact, there was a full house when Peter O’Leary, fresh out of his car after a blizzard-hampered drive from Chicago, stepped to the lectern to deliver his manifesto, “Seven Tenets of the New Gnosticism.”  These tenets (according to the hasty notes I took during Peter’s fiery delivery) were:

1.  The New Gnosticism is incarnational, where the body is hidden knowledge.
2.  The world into which we are thrown is a broken world.
3. The New Gnosticism is incendiary.
4.  You are initiated into the New Gnosticism whenever you contribute to its incantations.
5.  The New Gnosticism is epistemologically nonplussed.
6.  The coherence of the New Gnosticism is the apocryphon of the fallen… [at this point my notes are unreadable — perhaps  I was unconsciously imitating the fragmentary nature of many surviving Gnostic texts]
7.  The missing tenant [here O’Leary gave a parable of a missing book, underlining the fallen or broken nature of the world in gnostic thought].

After O’Leary’s manifesto (which will, along with the other papers from the two Gnostic panels, be published soon), Ed Foster took the stage to discuss how Harold Bloom’s version of Gnosticism in The American Religion is a terrible misunderstanding, in which Emersonian self-reliance is mistakenly put in the place of gnosis, which relies on reliance not on oneself, but on attentiveness to the world beyond the self.  This was followed by Joe Donahue’s analysis of Gnosticism in the culture—popular and literary— of the 1980s and 1990s.  This was a follow-up on his work for a panel called “Mystics, Gnostics, and Heretics of the Reagan Years” that I organized for the National Poetry Foundation conference last year at the University of Maine, and provided the best reading I’ve yet heard of the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime” as a gnostic text.   Not that Donahue saw David Byrne and company as members of a self-consciously gnostic sect: in Donahue’s view, “Gnosticism is not an event in religious history, but a way of thinking that springs up everywhere,” particularly in times of political despair.  Mark Scroggins closed out the first panel with a revisiting of Charles Olson’s old essay “Against Wisdom as Such,” which was an attack on Robert Duncan as mystic, and occultist.  Duncan denied belonging to these categories, but Scroggins was quite convincing in showing that Duncan’s protest rings false.  He also made a case for formal innovation as linked to the uncovering of occulted knowledge, and introduced the term “The Da Vinci Code Theory of Modernism.”  The latter applies to an over-emphasis on Ezra Pound’s statement that he felt a light from Eleusis (that is, the gnosis of the Eleusinian mysteries) was preserved in the work of the troubadours and others, and through them passed into modern poetry.

In the second panel, I spoke on neologism and linguistic revivals in O’Leary’s poetry, David Need spoke of anomalous experiences and gnosis in the work of H.D., Alan Ginsberg, Philip K. Dick (the most relentlessly gnostic writer in American literature) and Alice Notley; Patrick Pritchett discussed Fanny Howe’s poetry as something that, in its gnostic complexities, “teaches us how to build a home in homelessness”; and Norman Finkelstein introduced the whole room to the virtually unknown poetry of Paul Brey, whose Terrible Woods is that rarest of things: a collection of poetry both gnostic and comic.

The papers gave rise to all manner of questions, both at the panels and elsewhere—a good sign, I think.  Here are just a few of my favorites:

From Alan Golding, who noted that all eight of the speakers on the panels were men: “what are the gender stakes of the New Gnosticism?”  The answers were various.  Many people referred to H.D., Fanny Howe, and Alice Notley as gnostic poets (and their works were discussed in the panels), and I thought of Pam Rehm.  It was also pointed out that gnostic theology does away with one of the primary pillars of Judeo-Christian misogyny: the idea of Eve as the corruptor of humanity.  In gnostic thought, Eve is a figure of salvation, and her plucking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge is the first step on our journey to release ourselves from the illusion that the material world and the world of God-the-father are the horizons of all possibility.

Also from Alan Golding (who always asks at least one of my favorite conference questions, and who, indeed, seems to make an art of them): “where is the comedy in the New Gnosticism?”  People answered variously, often with reference to Jack Spicer, who was surely both comic and gnostic.  I kept silent, but rankled a little at what I thought might be an assumption behind the question—that wit and play are the highest or most worthwhile forms of poetry.  Golding is a great fan, for instance, of Charles Bernstein, and I wondered if the question weren’t loaded a little, and didn’t seek to accuse the New Gnostics of failing to produce work that would succeed by the criteria that value Bernstein.  Was the Cathedral of Notre Dame funny, I wondered?  Was the Pietà a barrel of laughs?  And, if not, were they somehow of inferior value?  But, much as I disliked the spectacle of the panelists saying “no, our stuff is funny, too, sometimes” rather than defending the gnostic work on terms more its own, I didn’t want to start wrangling with Alan on an assumption about his question that may well have been false.

From Ben Friedlander, who cornered me in the corridors, came a question to which I really do have to give more thought: “what’s a materialist like you doing with these mystics?”  He’s got a point about my materialism.  It’s not the materialism of a guy who likes expensive watches and sailboats, but it’s real enough: my book Laureates and Heretics offered a kind of culturalist, and maybe softly materialist, explanation for the contours of American poetic history, and my new book The Poet Resigns begins with an essay that’s all about publishing conditions, economic relations, and the like as an explanation for why American poetry is the way it is.  My next book, Making Nothing Happen: Poetry, Autonomy, Society, is pretty close to dialectical materialism, at least by the standards of a bourgeois like myself.  So why am I hanging with the mystic poets?  Part of me thinks the question indicates that I’m on to something.  I mean, when I heard the question “why are you doing this” from both pro-Prynne and anti-Prynne parties when I was writing about J.H. Prynne and Cambridge poetry, I felt pretty sure I had found a way to discuss things that broke through existing paradigms.  I hope I’m at the beginning of an inquiry into gnostic poetry that will give us something new, too.  Or at the very least, something that will make the dichotomy between historical materialism and mysticism seem less firm.

It was Barrett Watten, though, who asked what was, in my opinion, the most revealing question of the conference.  A bunch of us were sitting at a big round table in the old Seelbach Bar, working our way through the Bourbon list, when Barrett cast a steely glance over at Norman Finkelstein and asked “This New Gnosticism — where’s it coming from?”  It wasn’t a question, I thought, so much as a challenge, and Norman seemed to feel that way too, choosing a beatific smile and amused, raised eyebrows rather than a more direct answer.  It took me a while to work out why Watten would put the question as he did, with more than idle curiosity to it, in fact, with a bit of steel behind it.

Here's what I think was at stake: the return of the repressed, or the revisiting of trauma.  

The best way to get at this may be to come back to a moment, now legendary in certain poetry circles, when a young Watten had a very public run-in with Robert Duncan, a kind of godfather of the New Gnosticism (and the primary subject of Peter O'Leary's study Gnostic Contagion).  The late David Bromige told the story well, maintaining, in an interview, that  Watten was “the arch villain” of poetry in Duncan's eyes, because Watten and the Language poets were, for him, “the New Criticism come again. It was everything he, Robert and his gang, had defeated… and now it was going to come back again.”  For Duncan, Watten represented “poetry written by critics, and a very buttoned down kind of poetry too...”  Matters came to a head, says Bromige, at a conference in 1979, when Watten and Duncan were going to speak about Louis Zukofsky.

It was a full house in there, and Robert appeared in his full, Romantic poet regalia, the Spanish cape, the Spanish hat…. He had his manna when he was in that garb. He could fight off evil magic…. Anyway, he spoke about Zukofsky, and of course it was Robert Duncan's Zukofsky. It was a lyrical and mystical Zukofsky, not impossible to find.… And now it was Barrett Watten's turn. And Barrett got up, and Barrett was wearing, maybe a sports coat, and maybe khaki pants, maybe sensible shoes…. He could have been a junior professor somewhere…. Barrett did almost immediately make use of the blackboard. And he diagrammed a stanza of Zukofsky's. And although I have seen Robert do equally painstaking work at other times, on this occasion, he took exception to it. It was making him impatient. He jumped up and he said, ‘Oh for Pete's sake, we might at least have a little fun.’ And Barrett, quite unphased, said, ‘but Robert, this is the way I get my fun.’ It seemed to me unanswerable. And quite unforgivable of Robert to try to swan it like that, and lord it over. And he did form a deep—maybe a shallow anti-thesis is a better phrase—to the Language Poets. He tended to reject them out of hand. 

So, for Watten, gnostic poetry comes with a dubious pedigree, or at least with a trace of a very unpleasant moment, when an old gnostic guard had sought to discredit Language poetry at the outset (I've heard, more than once, that Watten has said that the dispute with Duncan "set us [the Language poets] back ten years").  And now, at a time when Language poetry has become an academic fixture, an established part of literary history, and one of the most powerful influences on American poetry, what did Watten encounter at the Louisville conference, arguably one of the most important venues through which Language poetry entered into academic respectability?  To hijack a phrase from Bromige, it was everything he, Barrett and his gang, had defeated… and now it was going to come back again.  That's just the sort of thing that will put a little steel into your gaze.  I'm glad Barrett handled the situation with more grace than Duncan did.  But the tension did make me think that this wasn't just another pair of panels at a conference: this may have been something of an event.

*

Some links:

"History, Totality, Silence" a paper on John Matthias' gnostic poetry I gave at the National Poetry Foundation conference in Orono last year.

A review of Peter O'Learly's Luminous Epinoia and Norman Finkelstein's Inside the Ghost Factory I wrote for Chicago Review.

Peter O'Leary's essay "Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry," also in Chicago Review.

"The Open Word," a paper on O'Leary's poetics I gave at the Louisville conference this year.

The present humble blogger receiving gnostic wisdom from Vincent Sherry.  Rembrandt-esque photo by Mark Scroggins

Louisville Notebook

Peter O'Leary, Robert Archambeau, Vincent Sherry and Joe Donahue, Louisville, Feb. 2012 (photo credit Mark Scroggins)

Yesterday, in a journey that seems in some strange, anachronistic way to have been the true story upon which the 1987 movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles was based, I returned from the 40th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, an event everyone seems, understandably, to call "the Louisville conference."  I've been going there on and off for something close to 20 of those 40 years, and always find it congenial. With some 400 attendees, it's a manageable size: next week's AWP Convention here in Chicago will have more than 20 times as many people crowding its panels and workshops.  And it's not just scale that makes the Louisville conference a more palatable event than the AWP.  In Louisville, there's an actual aura of intellectual engagement, whereas the AWP is little different than a boat show: it's all about sales and glad-handing.  At least it can seem that way.


Anyway.  Here, in no particular order, are a few or my personal highlights and lowlights of this year's conference.


Highlight: Louisville as a foodie city.  


When I first started going to the conference in the early '90s, you couldn't eat in Louisville, unless you wanted deep-fried battered whatnots or a well-done hamburger.  I suppose that's an overstatement: the Seelbach Hotel had a decent restaurant, though I could never quite get comfortable in the place, having as it did an ambiance I'd call "white tablecloth Republican."  But every year Louisville seems to get better and better in terms of food.  Proof, the restaurant attached to the 21st Century Museum, is a good place with a hip, but not oppressively hip, vibe to it.  And the Mayan Cafe on Market Street is fantastic, and would stand up to any comparable place in Chicago.  Also, I enjoy the attitude of the staff.  Fourteen of us were gabbing and drinking away when the waitress stepped up and asked if we were from the university.  We said no, but almost: we were with the literature conference.  She told us they'd been trying to guess who we were back in the kitchen, and had concluded we were philosophers.  "Why?" I asked.  "You know," she said, "the beards, the glasses, the lack of women."


Highlight: Conversation in the interstices of things


This is really the reason I come to the conference.  It's hard to pick one bit of conversation as the best.  I had a great time swapping memories of John Matthias with Vincent Sherry, and talking smack about contemporary poetry with Mark Scroggins, and hearing Norman Finkelstein describe the bottle-green corduroy suits of yore, but I think the real winner for me this year was talking St. Augustine with Peter O'Leary.  O'Leary, who used to look like a young Robert Lowell, is now rocking a John Berryman beard (I assume the next midcentury poetry great whose look he'll adopt will be Elizabeth Bishop).  We were talking about his book of poems Luminous Epinoia, a real Teilhard de Chardin-style work of Catholic mysticism, when I mentioned I'd never been able to get a real feel for God-the-Father in the Trinity.  Even as an atheist, I've long had a strong, even a visceral sense of the the relation of the holy spirit to God incarnate as Christ — seeing in it something important about the way one can be both completely beyond an individual or particularized experience, and at the same time embedded in it, suffering and yearning.  But the paternal God never did much for me, at least not until Peter pulled me back to Augustine's book on the Trinity, where the spirit is understanding, the son is will, and the father is something completely unlike the judging, alien authority figure I'd always seen in William Blake's terms as "Nobodaddy" (a jealous figure of secretive laws and arbitrary authority).  In Augustine's view, the father is a kind of memory, a way of thinking of ourselves as inevitably coming into the world interpolated into an existing story.  He's a reminder that whenever we examine things, we're already bound up in particular traditions and histories.  I like that.


Lowlight: Simon Critchley's missing keynote lecture


I admire Simon Critchley's writing — his little introduction to continental philosophy is about as good a short book on the subject for Anglo-American readers as you're going to find, and elsewhere he manages to shed light on Heidegger without uprooting the man from his dark Teutonic forest.  Maybe my admiration for Critchely contributed to my sense of being let down by his plenary lecture.  He was meant to talk about Hamlet but, he told the crowd packing the auditorium, he hadn't gotten round to writing the lecture, so he was going to read us an old piece he'd written about the writer Tom McCarthy, who was present at the conference.  I despise this kind of move, and despise it all the more when it's played as blithely as Critchley played it.  Firstly, there's an enormous egotism to it: "I'm in too much demand to fulfill all my commitments," he might as well have said, "but, of course, I shit gold, so eat this instead."  It wasn't just the A-lister entitlement that rankled, but the discourtesy to the audience, since the piece he read was a fairly close reading of a work of fiction few in the audience had read.


The let-down was kept palpable by the little bits and pieces of the unfinished lecture that Critchley dropped into his talk as asides.  "I see Hamlet as the hero of inauthenticity," he said, intriguingly, and later he defined authenticity as "when the self corresponds with itself, and when the self corresponds with the world."  I wanted to hear more of this, and more of what he meant by inauthenticity, especially when he spoke of the "illegitimate authenticity" of the old regimes of the Cold War eastern bloc, where authenticity was based "on the fake will of the people," and where Havel was right to insist on "living in truth" as an antidote to this.


The most offensive part of Critchley's presentation came in one of his asides, in which he spoke of the art world (or, I should say, of what people in Manhattan mistake for the art world, which is to say, a small and particularly commercialized corner of a larger art world that is largely invisible from that island).  "Artists now are all about appropriation," he said, "they want to come out of grad school, claim a particular site of appropriation and, as quickly as possible, turn it into material gain."  He paused for a moment, then added "of course that's what's so great about the art world: in a way it's so much more honest than what we're doing here, where we act as if there's no money changing hands."


I should perhaps mention that I have no kind of poker face, and that I'm rarely able to restrain myself from expressing derision when I'm moved to do so.  I mean, at the last wedding I attended, a priest described Pope Benedict II as "God's only true representative on earth," and I involuntarily emitted a scornful snort audible throughout the chapel.  Something similar happened after Critchley's art comment: I instinctively gave him the finger.  I don't think he saw, though Mark Scroggins, seated next to me, did, and gave me a grave nod of assent.


My problems with Critchely's remark may be ennumerated thusly:


1.  It was not an analytic statement, it was a gesture toward worldly sophistication and the creation of a glamourous, bad-boyish persona.


2. It was the kind of  frisson seeking reversal of the audience's values with which Oscar Wilde used to play ("seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow," say, or "a man can be happy with any woman, so long as he doesn't love her").  But Wilde did this with charm and wit, and Critchley did it with neither.


3. With regard to the "as if no money were changing hands" bit, I wanted to say: "maybe you're getting paid tonight, Critchley, but not the rest of us so, you know, fuck you."  In fact, Critchley may have had a something of a point here, in that money does change hands at these events.  But since the conference was financed almost entirely by our fees, some of which went to pay him for the plenary address on Hamlet he didn't bother to write, this would argue against his implication that we are all running the kind of scam he sees New York artists running. The situation, instead, indicts him and leaves the audience to whom he says "j'accuse!" blameless.


Highlight: Joe Donahue, Robert Zamsky, and Peter O'Leary talk about John Taggart


The panel on which these three spoke was the best discussion of John Taggart's poetry I'm ever likely to hear.  O'Leary broke Taggart's career down into three phases (a phase concerned with objectivist experiences; a phase concerned with minimalist incantation, and a phase concerned with meditative plaint) and did so with the unalloyed enthusiasm that makes for a wonderfully non-professorial break with academic norms, a kind of amateurism in the best possible sense of the word.  Zamsky spoke of Taggart's "Drum Thing" as the moment when the poet found his own voice, because in connecting his work to John Coltrane's song of the same name Taggart released himself from expressive lyricism and entered an imaginative world of pre-existing aesthetic objects out of which he could fashion an art that didn't rely so heavily on the self.  Joe Donahue spoke of Taggart's poems for the Rothko chapel, and made some intriguing remarks about Taggart's characteristic linguistic repetitions-with-variations.  These are, said Donahue, an allegorizing of the relation of the individual to the group: the variant lines harmonize with one another while retaining difference and even dissonance, much as a church choir harmonizes voices even as members participating in this group practice may maintain differences of conscience from the words of the hymn being sung.  Later, Donahue spoke of how Taggart would establish a pattern of repetition, and then drop some completely incongruous element into the verbal structure.  He wouldn't leave it as an anomaly, though: out of a kind of horror at unmeaningness, Taggart would somehow incorporate the anomaly into a newer, more encompassing pattern.  In the Q & A session after the panel Coleridge's idea of organic form came up, and it seemed to me a perfect fit for Taggart's process as described by Donahue, since with organic form nothing can be pre-ordained, but nothing can be accidental.  This locates Taggart as a kind of Romantic (an idea that disturbed the poet Norman Finkelstein: later, while driving me back to the Brown Hotel, he looked over at me and said "think of what that means, to have a horror of the unmeaning!").


Highlight: Mark Scroggins on Pound, Vince Sherry on Decadence


I spoke on a panel with two of my heroes among contemporary critics, Mark Scroggins and Vince Sherry.  Mark unpacked the meaning of the phrase "yeux glacques" in Pound's "Mauberley," tracing in the various meanings of the term an implicit etymological argument, on Pound's part, for the decline of a brilliant classical culture into a dull and ennui-ridden modernity (Scroggins also offered an argument for reading Pound etymologically, which involved a look at Ruskin as an under-acknowledged influence on Pound).  Vince Sherry took on the matter of the rechristening of the Decadence of the 1890s as "Symbolism," and pointed out what was lost in the transition.  Vince managed to talk me out of my admiration for Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle, which had argued for the basis of the symbolist aesthetic in American transcendentalism, and therefore made symbolism into a kind of aesthetic of the new.  This, Sherry pointed out, was a falsification of the sources of the aesthetic we associate with Mallarmé and company, and hid the association of the aesthetic with a declining social order.


Lowlight: Louisville as a microcosm of our nation


When I'm at a conference for any length of time, I tend to need a break from the listening, the talking, and the heavy drinking, so I usually find some time to walk around the host city for a couple of hours.  At the Louisville conference I did this late at night, and have to say the flâneur experience was a bit depressing.  If downtown Louisville has added a lot of galleries and microbrew bars and hip restaurants over the years, it also seems to have accumulated ever more street people, wandering in ones and twos through the night, or lying stretched out on the sidewalk, asleep next to a paper cup used for begging.  The trend of the city seems to have been to grow at the top and the bottom of the wealth & privilege scale.  In this, it's not unlike Chicago, or America.  And it's just not fucking right.