American Gnostic: Peter O'Leary and Norman Finkelstein

Hot news!  The latest Chicago Review is out, devoted, for the most part, to the poetry of A.R. Ammons, including previously unpublished poems, a never-before seen interview, and a host of critical essays (including work by John Wilkinson and Simon Jarvis, indicating that the Chicago Review continues to serve as the leading American venue for work by the Cambridge school of Prynne-influenced poets).

Lurking in the back, though, you'll find a little piece I wrote on another topic — the Gnostic poetry of Peter O'Leary and Norman Finkelstein.  This follows on the Chicago Review's earlier publication of what amounts to O'Leary's manifesto for Gnostic poetics, and comes between panels on Gnostic poetry at last summer's Orono conference and next February's Louisville conference (here's my contribution to the Orono conference, a paper called "History, Totality, Silence").

Here's the beginning of the piece:

Around the time Peter O’Leary’s Luminous Epinoia was published, another piece of his writing appeared in the pages of this journal, an essay called “Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry.”  Part memoir, part polemic, part literary appreciation, the essay argued that apocalypse—a sacred expression that can “unbind love from material desire, freeing it to embrace the unknown and the unspeakable”—has been erased from American poetry.  In O’Leary’s view, neither the old school of the workshop lyric nor the tradition of Language writing supports vatic or visionary poetry.  O’Leary’s own recent work, along with that of Norman Finkelstein, constitutes a strong argument for the vitality of this project. O’Leary, Finkelstein, and a number of other poets—one thinks of Pam Rehm, Michael Heller, Harriet Zinnes, and especially of Joseph Donahue and Nathaniel Mackey—make formal and conceptual links to this deeply rooted poetic tradition, which extends back through Duncan to Yeats and Blake.  In our formally diverse but overwhelmingly secular poetic moment their work represents a true counter-culture whose achievement has yet to be fully appreciated.

            Peter O’Leary’s Luminous Epinoia is a book of many things: surreal fables, reflections on sacred architecture, sermons on the meaning of love in a time of war, and the occasional jab at the policies of the Bush administration. (Its shiny, silver, jacketless cover embossed with religious symbols is also striking.) But most of all, Luminous Epinoia is a book concerned with incarnation.  Its title comes from the Apocryphon of John, a second century Gnostic gospel, where  the “luminous Epinoia” is a heterodox version of Eve, a physical extension of Adam and a helper who will restore to him the full, creative vision of religious experience. O’Leary’s book takes a strong influence from the great Catholic theologian and paleontologist Tielhard de Chardin, who reconciled his scientific and religious beliefs through imagining the physical universe as imperfectly embodying aspects of the divine, and looked at biological evolution as a teleological process bringing us ever closer to a union with God.

 And here's a later paragraph on Norman Finkelstein:

Like O’Leary, Norman Finkelstein looks back to a legacy of Gnostic American poets: his 2010 book of literary criticism, On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry is the best and most current outline we have of this tradition. Like Duncan, Finkelstein often turns to the serial poem; like Jack Spicer and Armand Schwerner, he combines spiritual impulses with comic gestures. The connection with Schwerner runs particularly deep: Finkelstein emulates Schwerner’s focus on the mediation of spiritual knowledge by oral and literary traditions prone to fragmentation, distortion, decontextualization, and creative revision. Finkelstein’s work reveals the way an unseen world presses into our own experience: in his work, revelation is immanent, just beneath the surfaces of things.

More information on the issue can be found here.  And the entire piece on O'Leary and Finkelstein can be found in pdf format here.

Peter O'Leary and Robert Archambeau and a lot of empty glasses

Orono Conference Report: The Golden Lobster Awards!

The National Poetry Foundation conference on the poetry of the 1980s has wrapped up, and the gathered poets, critics, and professors have dispersed, fleeing Orono, Maine for points south and west.  You know what this means: it's time for the post-conference Golden Lobster awards, given for distinction in conference-going.

Presenting this year's awards will be the ghost of Edwin Arlington Robinson, pride of Head Tide, Maine, author of Richard Cory, Miniver Cheevy, and Matthias at the Door, and favorite poet of Theodore Roosevelt.  Take it away, Eddy!

Robinson: Thank you, thank you, and welcome one and all to this gala event here in the Rae Armantrout Auditorium in Archambeau's Secret Backyard Writing Dojo.  A special welcome to President Obama and the first lady—sorry we couldn't get you better seats, but the tables at the front have been reserved for alumni of the Buffalo Poetics Program.  Console yourself with the thought that you aren't at the Iowa MFA table, which someone seems to have placed back by the men's room and the disused cigarette machine.  Let's not look to deeply into how that happened, and proceed without further ado to a list the winners in each category!

The Golden Lobster for the Demonstrable Power of the Word goes to... Alan Golding.  Professor Golding's talk on Armand Schwerner's poetic sequence The Tablets led to a run on copies of that title at the book fair, which sold out less than an hour after Golding's presentation.

The Golden Lobster for Professorial Gadgetry goes to...Aldon Nielson, whose array of laptops, tablets, cellular gewgaws and gizmos topped those of even the most geeked out grad students.  Some may have thought Nielson's digital watch was a disqualifying throwback to an earlier era, or perhaps a tribute to the calculator watches of the Reagan years (fitting in the context of the 1980s), but we have it on good authority that the watch actually controls the other electronic trinkets in Nielson's kit.  We look forward to seeing what Neilson brings to the next conference from what we can only imagine is a pre-conference visit to whatever equivalent Penn State has to Q's laboratory from the 007 films.

The Golden Lobster for the Clown Car Effect goes to Patrick Pritchett, who drove up from Harvard in a Honda Civic, into which he was seen wedging an unseemly mass of literary types on his return from Orono's only brew pub on Saturday night.  One portly Canadian poet-critic is still complaining about the imprint of the stick shift on his left buttock, though the bruise bears some resemblance to a patriotic maple leaf.

The Golden Lobster for Going Against Type goes to Norman Finkelstein, who was seen for the first time since childhood wearing a color other than black.  No more let it be said that he is the Johnny Cash of American poetry.

The Golden Lobster for Natty Attire goes to... oh! It's a tie!  Keith Tuma and Kathy Lou Schultz will share the award.  Tuma's floral-lined purple shirt and pork pie hat narrowly edged out another attendee's seersucker suit and cobalt blue shirt, since the panel judged the seersucker man to be wearing a few too many bangles and a mustache too overtly reminiscent of late-period Nietzsche.  Schultz's outfit, which might have come from the closet of Dorothy Parker, won extra points for matching her flapper-era high society bob haircut.  Could our schlubbish profession be undergoing a fashion renaissance?  Where are the chest-high shorts and madras shirts of yore?

The Golden Lobster for Audacity in Projected Scholarship goes to Joe Donahue, who was overheard in a local bar proclaiming that his paper at next year's Louisville conference will be called "The Gnostic Poetics of Barrett Watten."  I'll expect the ghost of Robert Duncan to be in attendance, his arms loaded with old copies of Poetry Flash.

The Golden Lobster for Stone Cold Badass Presence goes to...well, there's no surprise here, people.  It goes to Nathaniel Mackey, who, during his reading, emanated a vibe aptly described by one conference attendee as "Miles Davis with a trumpet mute."

The Golden Lobster for Breadth of Reference goes to Marjorie Perloff, whose plenary talk started out by drawing distinctions between Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein ("you don't get a lot of Cotton Mather in Bernstein") but ended up taking us from the tennis-and-martini aesthetic of the Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets to the miseducation of the young to the theory death of the avant-garde to the change in style of poets' essays since the 1980s to the differences between philosophy and critical theory to a comparative analysis of the job market for poets over the decades.  Our telegraph operator admits to having run out of ticker-tape, and was unable to send the full transcript to our headquarters, but even the partial evidence justifies the award.

The Golden Lobster for the Kavorka goes, as it goes every year, to Grant Jenkins, who was seen standing in a mustard colored corduroy jacket in the lobby of the University Inn Academic Suites hotel as he was approached by wayward members of a bachelorette party, who swarmed about him, stroking his lapels and cooing about how nice his outfit was.  The next day (and this, I must stress, is not something I am making up) his hair gel set off the airport body scanner, reading as an "anomalous substance."  It is not known if the incidents are connected.

The Golden Lobster for Cornucopia Ex Nihilo goes to Steve Evans, Ben Friedlander, Jennifer Moxley, and Carla Billitteri, for delivering an amazing conference experience for all of their guests despite brutal budget cuts and all the usual constraints that conspire against conference organizers.

And finally... the Golden Lobster for Benevolent Spirit Presence goes to the late Burton Hatlen, who meant so much to poetry and to the University of Maine.  Let's close this ceremony with a round of applause in his honor.  We will not see his like again.

Archambeau with Golden Lobster winner Joe Donahue.  Norman Finkelstein listens to Patrick Pritchett in the background (photo: Star Black)

The Academization of Avant-Garde Poetry?

           

Some come to praise, some come to bury, but all the poets and critics have come to comment on Jake Berry’s thorny, problematic, provocative little essay "Poetry Wide Open (Fragments in Motion)."  Berry’s essay appeared some time ago in The Argotist, and now we have a host of responses—some 16 in all—by poets and critics from both sides of the Atlantic and all over the spectrum of poetics.

Here are a few highlights from the commentaries:

Norman Finkestein:

Breaking away from established forms is not in and of itself a virtue: Berry does not escape the still commonly held fetishism of “make it new.”  But I do agree with Berry that most of the poetry produced in creative writing programs is indeed “a reproduction or reworking of the original works and methods.”  The development of a poet as an “individual talent,” as T. S. Eliot understood the term, is tremendously difficult, given the dialectic of tradition and originality which Eliot describes in his classic essay.  My sense is that such growth is not made any easier, and may well be stifled, in most creative programs. To be sure, there are gifted teachers in many programs who nurture their students’ talents without imposing a party line. But it is in the nature of creative writing programs, within an academic system that emphasizes professionalism and career advancement, to inculcate one or another aesthetic ideology to which students are encouraged to conform, in order to get published and secure a teaching post. Given the explosion of online publications in recent years, the former goal may be somewhat easier to reach. Given our current economic situation, the latter is far more difficult.

Marjorie Perloff:

Publishing today is extremely eclectic and—with exceptions like New Directions, which has a certain trademark--one can never tell who will publish what, where, and when. It’s a pretty open and fluid situation. Just when you label Princeton as quite conservative, they publish Andre Codrescu. Columbia has just published Kenneth Goldsmith’s critical prose Uncreative Writing. It seems that the real contrast is between “experimentalism” 1980s-90s style and that of the present. Historical change is certainly important to consider. But Berry’s dichotomy between Iowa and Language seems to me a false one. Bear in mind that some of our leading Language poets attended the Iowa Workshop: for example, Silliman, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten.  But such contemporary poets as Craig Dworkin, Uljana Wolf, Cia Rinne, Caroline Bergvall, Vanessa Place are quite outside the Iowa orbit and yet they do get published, even if, for now, at smaller presses. 

Dale Smith:

Private audiences tend to embrace the coteries and in-groups that acknowledge contexts outside the mainstream. For some, there’s a certain fierce pride in developing consumer practices outside of mainstream cultural production. Aficionados, amateurs, and those experienced and engaged in the loose affiliations of poetry often seek out art that is decisively outside the domain of mass culture. In many ways, this private concern for poetry enables an “Otherstream,” even as it is buried under an enormous veil of mass concerns stemming from commodity culture...

Henry Weinfield:

Berry will probably be criticized for oversimplifying the current situation—that is, for locating the poetry of the academic mainstream in terms of only two, diametrically opposed positions, those of the Iowa and Language Schools. I myself have no quarrel with this representation because it seems to me that contemporary poetry, cut off from its roots in the tradition, continues to oscillate between polarities of this kind, even if the Iowa and Language Schools have given way to other tendencies. Neither is capable of producing lasting poetry, in my view, because both are based on a fragmentary conception of the art. (At the end of his essay, Berry seems to abandon the very possibility of poetry lasting, and I shall have something to say about this later on.) The term “language poetry” is a tautology, as has often been said, because all poetry worthy of the name is language poetry; that is, its medium of expression is as much its message as what it conveys. The very fact that the Language School adopted this name suggests that most mainstream poetry for many years has been written as if language were not important, as if the poem could be reduced to a speech-act of some kind. Indeed, most of the poetry that comes out of the Iowa School poetry has no music and no language. This is poetry that fetishizes the “individual voice,” as Berry observes, which is ironic because most of the poets who work in this mode sound alike. Their work is based on what Jack Spicer called “the big lie of the personal.” So, the poets of the Language School were quite right to attack the Iowa mainstream, though wrong in the way they went about it, and ultimately part of the same futile enantiodromia (Jung’s term, borrowed from Heraclitus, for the violent shuttling between opposites).

Thanks to Jeffrey Side for putting together what amounts to a small symposium on the state of poetry (and apologies to him for not having the time to take part, except as an enthusiastic reader).

"It's Too Much": Norman Finkelstein and the Poetics of Contemporaneity

One of the most notable things about contemporary poetry is that there's so much of it.  If one were tempted to keep up with it all, one might say there's so damn much of it.  This is the starting point of Norman Finkelstein's "The Poetics of Contemporaneity," a long reviw of Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher's book The Monkey & the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics, a review just now out in Contemporary Literature.  It starts with reference to a little Facebook discussion in which I played a part:

In a recent post on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog entitled “It’s Too Much,” Stephen Burt declares, only half-jokingly (I think), “Every week, every day, I get email and Facebook notices and for that matter word of mouth about the latest debate or commentary or controversy or metapoetic metaconversation (sometimes it’s even attached to actual poems) on one of three dozen fine websites and active blogs and web-only or web-mostly mostly-poetry magazines… to be au courant, I should keep up. And I can’t keep up.”  Burt continues in this vein for another couple of paragraphs, and though he keeps it light, he manages to touch a nerve.  In my little corner of Facebook, Robert Archambeau linked to Burt’s post, eliciting twenty-eight more-or-less anxious comments.  Mark Scroggins picked up the post and responded at some length on his blog, Culture Industry: “Man do I sympathize. With the expansion of the internet as the primary medium of poetry, & of the endless chatter of poetry-promotion & poetry-discussion – of pobiz, in short – it feels like there's been an exponential explosion of poetic activity out there, so much being written & published & written about that no-one, but no-one, is able to grasp more than a tiny fraction of it.”

Finkelstein's review goes on to discuss how the various pieces in the book address, or fail to address, the contemporary situation.  Finkelstein has some particularly kind words for my own contribution, and I'm not above repeating them:

…the two best essays, by, as it happens, Robert Archambeau and Stephen Burt, take the longest view and are most fully informed by an acute literary historical awareness. Archambeau’s “The Discursive Situation of Poetry,” which leads off the collection, alone is worth the price of admission.  Archambeau is one of our smartest poetic sociologists, and in this essay, he tackles the biggest problem facing poetry in our time: the dwindling of its audience and the growing divide between poets and a mainstream literary readership, however the latter may be construed.  Archambeau considers an ideologically varied group of critics, including Dana Gioia, Joseph Epstein, Charles Bernstein, Thomas Disch and John Barr, all of whom complain about poetry’s loss of public attention as poets gradually migrate to academia and graduate-level creative writing programs proliferate.  A corollary to this complaint is the notion that at some time in the not too distant past (say the 1940s or 1950s), poets were more responsive to the needs and desires of a middle-class readership, editors published them more frequently in general interest magazines with wider circulations, and market forces, rather than the rarefied aesthetic views of a literary elite or bohemian coterie, determined poetic success.  Archambeau demolishes these notions, but at the same time, identifies a period further in the past—the mid-Victorian period—when the “discursive situation of poetry—that is, the conditions of writing, publishing and reception” (13) was such that poets really did speak to, of and for the values of a growing middle-class reading public.  “This class,” notes Archambeau, “growing into unprecedented political and social dominance in a rapidly changing and industrializing society, felt understandably dislocated” (15).  The British middle class found the guidance for which it sought in “men of letters” such as Ruskin, Thackery, Mill or Tennyson, “because men of letters, including poets, were drawn from, and remained a part of, the same social class as the reading public, and as such they articulated that class’s own views, anxieties and values” (15).  The preeminence of these figures, however, proved relatively short-lived, as on the one hand, literacy spread to the working class, and on the other hand, the middle class itself, intermarrying with the aristocracy, formed “a newly confident class that developed an ethos of self-interest, utilitarianism, and conspicuous consumption….They were decreasingly in need of buying what the mid-Victorian poets were selling” (19).  By the end of the nineteenth century, the poets had moved from middle-class drawing rooms to the garrets of bohemia, which they bequeathed to their modernist heirs.

  

Unfortunately, Archambeau never explicitly links the situation of Victorian England to that of the United States, where the class structure, without an aristocracy in the European sense, developed along somewhat different lines.  Concomitantly, the figure of the poet as cultural arbiter differed as well.  Perhaps the Fireside Poets played a similar role to the British men of letters, but the advent of Whitman and all he came to represent proved a definitive break.  In any case, Archambeau is still correct: when the utilitarian and consumerist values of the middle class solidified, and the poets moved first to bohemia and then to academia, the loss of a general readership for poetry was inevitable.  As Archambeau puts it, “Professionalized literary studies and bohemianized poetry were close cousins, both products of broad shifts in economics and culture that took poetry and the broad reading public in different directions” (20-21).  Furthermore, the changes that might realign poets and average readers are not particularly desirable.  Where, after all, does poetry really count in the modern world?  Basically, under conditions of political oppression.  Thus, “just as we would not wish to return to mid-Victorian levels of literacy and social development just to see the rise of a new Tennyson, we would not wish to fall victim to colonization just to have our own Celtic Revival.  Those of us who live with discursive conditions that keep poetry unpopular may count themselves lucky” (24-25).  Meanwhile, as Archambeau observes, “the encroachment of market values on the previously semi-autonomous academic system is well under way, and is probably irreversible,” a development that is bound to affect “[t]he oversupply of academically credentialed poets” (25).  How many unemployed or under-employed MFAs in creative writing do you know?  Unfortunately, I know quite a few.

Finkelstein is completely right about my failure to address the American situation in the late 19th century.  And he's onto something when he says the Fireside Poets (Longfellow, Whittier, et al) played an important role, analogous in some ways to the role of Tennyson in England.  But I haven't really done enough research in American poetry to say much more than that.

If you have access to Project Muse at a university library database, you can check out Finkelstein's article online.

There's a pretty spirited discussion of my own essay, and related issues, at John Gallaher's blog.

Norman Finkelstein and the Offending Adam

"A Scribe Turned into a Scribe,", my review of Norman Finkelstein's latest book, Scribe, is up and running at The Offending Adam. I don't know what I like more: Norman's book, or The Offending Adam itself, the brainchild of Andrew Wessels and his merry band of literary co-conspirators.

I think there's a good chance that The Offending Adam may be the model for how literary journals can make the transition to the online world. The best feature (shared with a more established online journal, Jacket) is the way writing is rolled out in front of the public a little at a time. This seems like a better use of the possibilities of electronic publication than the dropping of all the content down in a big one-shot pile every issue, which is just an imposing of the limits of print production on a medium that needn't be bound by those limits. Jacket puts parts of each new issue out on an irregular basis, adding content as the issue comes together under the guidance of the editor. The Offending Adam is a bit more disciplined, at least so far: there's a new issue every week, with a few items published every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I like this, since in the age of democratized access to publication and massive literary proliferation, the best thing an editor can do for the writers he cares about is to present them in a way that draws attention to them — just a few items at a time. Poetry Daily has been doing this, but it relies on previously published material. Wessels and company do the extra legwork of selecting new material, and they provide a forum for reviews as well.

The intimacy of the presentation of material at The Offending Adam — you meet the contributions one at a time, not among a crowd of other poems — makes for something like a community-feeling. And community is also very much at the core of Norman Finkelstein's Scribe. Here's how I try to describe the phenomenon in the opening paragraph of the review:

Michael Palmer has said that to read Norman Finkelstein’s book Scribe “is to pass through a series of gates into the paradoxical heart of the poem,” where “the communal and the solitary” come together in the music of the poetry. He’s on to something, I think: what strikes one most strongly in Scribe are the repeated invocations of communal experience, and the ways the influence on collectivity works its way into the forms, as well as the subjects, of the poetry.

The book is available from Dos Madres Press, or here.

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In other news, the latest Contemporary Literature is out, and includes "Postnational Ireland," a piece I wrote about contemporary scholarship in Irish poetry, and about the end of the old nationalist paradigm that has animated much of the thinking about Irish poetry (and some of the poetry itself) for the past century or more. Here's the table of contents. If you have access to a university library, you can probably view the piece via Project Muse or JSTOR. Otherwise, they make you pay. But you were wondering what to do with your royalty checks anyway, right?