Poetry and the Alphabet

Years ago, Ron Silliman wrote an essay called "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World," where he claimed that popular fiction sought to make language disappear, putting words together so innocuously that they disappeared, letting a kind of movie play in the head of the viewer (his example for this, if I recall correctly, was a novelization of the movie Jaws).  There's something to this line of thinking, and I tried to push it a bit further in an essay on the use of letters (alphabetical letters, not epistolary ones) in poetry. It's called "Immigrants and Kings: The Letter in the Empire of Poetry." Here's how it starts:

The writing of letters is an art as old as any other, and came to us, if Berossus, Priest of Marduk in Babylon is to be believed, when Oannes, a great fish with the head and feet of a man emerged, speaking, from the Erythraean Sea. Oannes taught the ignorant people of Chaldea not only how to write, but how to build houses, found temples, compose laws, collect fruits, and distinguish between the seeds of many different plants.

As venerable as writing was in the tale told by Berossus, it is more venerable still as described in the pages of the Sefer Yetzirah, the first great work of Jewish esoterism. Reading this ancient work we find that God created nothing—not mankind, not the seraphim, neither the earth nor the heavens nor seas—until he first created the alphabet. “Twenty-two letters did he engrave and carve,” we read, “he weighed them and moved them around into different combinations. Through them, he created the soul of every living being and the soul of every word.” The letters, fixed on a wheel of 231 gateways, precede and give birth to all else in creation.

We don’t know exactly when poetry began, though we have, from a few surviving totems and similar relics, a sense of when symbolic thinking came about—some 70,000 years ago—and we can surmise that poetry, in the form of ritual incantations, funeral rites, and tales of tribal origins, emerged around the same time. Writing, even in its most primitive forms, came about many thousands of years later, after the agricultural revolution created a need for contracts and tally-sheets for merchants in grain and cattle. Only later still did writing become sophisticated enough to record poetry.

All of this is by way of saying that letters come late to the great and ancient kingdom of poetry, a kingdom that accepted them begrudgingly. 

The whole essay is in the Ilanot Review, and you can read it online here. 

Twilight of the Comments Streams

The poetry blogosphere has been wearing a black armband lately, as it mourns the demise of the comments stream at Ron Silliman's blog, and remembers the recent loss of another comments stream, over at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog. Much buzz has been generated about the whys and whences of it all. I have no deep insight to offer, but I do think that a recent post at the Pathologos blog offers a clue as to what's afoot.

In the middle of the post, the blogger offers a little confession about his own contribution to what many see as the hostile culture of poetry snarkiness:

i'm embarrassed to admit that on at least 2 occasions i inserted insults into blog posts that i wouldn't have otherwise included because i knew that, as a completely unknown commentator, i'm more likely to be taken seriously (or at least engaged with) the more insulting i am.

This is interesting, in that it indicates where we might lay the blame for the current state of affairs. No, not on the now-reformed blogger at Pathologos, nor even on his eschewal of capital letters — but on the attention-economy of poetry, in which people want to be noticed any way they can.

I think this attention-seeking condition is endemic to the whole American poetry culture now, and at root the issue is the surplus of supply (of poems, of opinions) compared to the demand. It is with poets as it is with aspiring Hollywood starlets: there are a multitude of them on the scene, hoping to be noticed, and few stunts are too low for someone to stoop down to them. I haven't seen any poets doing the "exposing underwear while getting out of a limo" trick, but I'm sure it can't be too far off — I just pray it isn't Silliman who goes there.

It's not that I want to impose a moratorium on poetry, or on the discourse about poetry — far from it. I just wish people didn't yearn, so much, for the few rays of limelight that do penetrate the fog.

I suppose, in the end, what we have is a failure to adjust our expectations to the new conditions under which we write poetry, and write about poetry. When the dissemination of poems and commentary was limited by the technology of print, relatively few people were able to disseminate their work, and they could imagine that the audience for what they had to say was larger than the number of other publishing writers. Now everyone with a laptop can get their work out there, but getting it noticed amid the crowd is an issue.

Everyone is famous, now, to fifteen people. We can get upset about this and hurl insults in an attempt to get noticed. Or we can roll with it. Accepting it may not be easy for the ego that yearns for recognition, but there really is no going back. And, I might add, we'd be foolish to want to go back. I am (I hate to say it) old enough to remember the curious silence that surrounded most poetry in America before the internet took off. What we have now is better in just about every way, if only we'd let go of the fantasy of recognition.

*

UPDATE: Bobby Baird has some good things to say on this topic.

There is No Such Thing as Poetry, or: Lightbulbs of Quietude

"How many poets does it take to screw in a light bulb?" asked a well-respected New York poet in a recent Facebook update. "There are no light bulbs, only kinds of light bulbs" replied the much-beloved editor of a prominent, and therefore often-maligned, literary journal [update: the editor in question, Don Share, has informed me I may name him by name]. I nearly sneezed my fourth coffee of the day out of my over-caffinated nostrils in mirth. To laugh at the editor's response, though, you'd have to know one of the most-repeated phrases of that éminence grise of poetry bloggers, Ron Silliman. "There is no such thing as poetry," Silliman often intones, "only kinds of poetry."

I've always had a mixed reaction to Silliman's mantra. On the one hand, I think I get what he's trying to say, and I agree with it. I suppose he means that there's no such thing as normal poetry, no entity that is the natural state of the art, from which other kinds of poetry are deviations. In his view, it is with poetry as it is with language. Just as there's no such thing as a version of English that has no accent, there's no kind of poetry that is simply "poetry" in an unqualified state. Those people who blithely say "I don't have an accent" do, in fact, have accents — it's just that their accents are the dominant ones in their countries, so they think of their speach as normal, natural, pure, and uninflected by class or region. Speakers of the dominant accent have the privilege of thinking of themselves as normal, and of others as deviants, but this is simply the ignorance and insensitivity that so often comes with power. And those people who might think of themselves as poets, pure and simple, are actually writers of a particular kind of poetry, members of some kind of school of poetry, every bit as much as are the writers of less dominant kinds of poetry. It's just that the dominant group doesn't have to give itself an -ism (imagism, surrealism, dadaism, postmodernism, what have you)

What Silliman objects to is that some people go around thinking that their poetry has no accent. I'm with him on this.

It's at this point that Ron, in a gesture both helpful and, I think, spiteful, provides a label for this kind of poetry — his infamous "School of Quietude." I like the idea of a label, just as I like the idea of people with the dominant accent realizing that they have accents. But labels always seem to cause trouble, since there are always people who feel that the level of generalization is too high (this is a problem with accent labels, too, since few people speak in exactly the same accent). People used to carp about being called language poets (I remember Steve Evans making some remarks about how poets outside the mainstream seemed to either have to accept that label or be ignored). And not long ago, when I wrote about "Cambridge Poetry," I set off a small-time internet shit-storm, in which a number of poets objected to the category as too general. Ron's term is particularly bad, though, because it comes laden with a negative judgement from the start, implying that those poets who write this kind of poetry are somehow complicit with the bad guys, quiescent in the face of situations of moral urgency. Also, it has even less buy-in from those whom it is meant to label than terms like "language poetry" and "Cambridge poetry" have had. After all, unlike the "School of Quietude," both "Cambridge poetry" and "language poetry" have at times been used by some of the poets they designate. To make things worse, I've seen Silliman create versions of literary history that essentially project his model of the current American poetic situation (the School of Quietude on one side, the Post-Avant on the other) back in time, claiming a history that extends from Whitman and Dickinson to the Post-Avant, over against a history that extends from Longfellow to the School of Quietude. I don't even know where to begin discussing how messed up this is — it betrays a kind of ignorance of the complex ways literary history and influence work, and it betrays a weird kind of will-to-power, a wish to grab the currently respected names from the past and label them "mine, not yours."

But my real problem with Silliman's phrase "there is no such thing as poetry, only kinds of poetry" doesn't come from the whole lamentable "School of Quietude" thing. It comes from the blatant logical fallacy of the statement itself. To say "there is no such thing as poetry, only kinds of poetry" is analogous to saying "There is no box, only compartments inside a box." That is: the second part of the statement asserts the existence of the category (poetry, or boxes) that the first part denies. To say that there are "kinds of poetry" is to posit the overall category of "poetry" as something that exists. I actually think Ron does believe there is such a thing of poetry — he just means no one writes "poetry" without writing a kind of poetry. Again, the analogy with language might help: it's not that there is no such thing as a "Romance language," it's just that it's an overall category into which particular languages like French and Spanish and Italian fit. No one goes around speaking "the Romance language," but this doesn't mean the term is empty or represents nothing. The analogy could be extended, of course — there's really no one who simply speaks "Spanish" pure and simple, only people who speak the Spanish of Barcelona or Uruguay or East L.A. or whatever — which doesn't mean that there's no such thing as "Spanish." It's an overarching category that exists but that manifests only in particular versions.

I'd like to continue, but the light bulb here in my secret backyard writing dojo seems to have burnt out. I'm going to cruise around to the corner shop to see if they have any Lightbulbs of Quietude. Last time they were out, and I had to use a 300 watt Avant-Bulb. My eyes are still hurting.

Innovation as Supreme Value?

The zeitgeist is nothing if not promiscuous, and apparently she's been two-timing me with Ron Silliman, whose post today has to do with continuity and change in poetry. I'd been tapping away at my laptop about how there are continuities and samenesses within poetry, which we tend not to notice in our quest to define newness, change, and different schools of writing (if you want to check it out, and have some semi-serious time on your hands, see the post just prior to this one).

Today, Ron weighs in, and I honestly can't tell from what he's written whether we're mostly in agreement, or mostly not. Consider this, his general thesis:

The history of poetry is the history of change in poetry, an account not of best works, but of shifts in direction, new devices, new forms, as Williams once put it, “as additions to nature.” The cruder writing & rougher edges of the first to do X, whatever it might be, invariably are preferable.

For Ron, innovation is what gets noticed and recorded. Poets may come along in the wake of an innovator and actually do more refined work in the new idiom than the innovator did, but these people don't get a place in history: history, in this view, is reserved for the inventors. In some sense, I think Ron and I are in agreement: we both believe that this is how the history of poetry (and, indeed, the history of any art) gets written nowadays. What I can't tell is whether Ron thinks this is a good thing. In fact, he seems to argue both that it is and that it isn't.

For the record, I think that the story of change and difference, while sexy, is only half the story, and if we're interested in really understanding the course of poetic history, we have to look for both change and continuity, both similarity and difference. As for Ron, it's hard to say. There are moments when he seems to celebrate history-as-the-story-of-invention-and-difference. Here, for example, when he's thinking about the recent Zukofsky blow-out, he even seems to gloat a bit about history celebrating newness:

Does anyone think you could fill up an auditorium at Columbia for a weekend, for example, to celebrate the centenary of Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, Robert Francis or Richard Eberhart, the SoQ poets closest in age to Louis Zukofsky?

I think the emotional content of this is something like "Woooh-hah! No one reads you no more, Eberhardt! Suck one, fool! My team beat your team till you all cried like little crying crybabies, so go cry, why don't you! History celebrates the winners! Nyaaaaaaaah!" Well, okay, maybe it's just a little like that. But there's certainly a sense that history is right to celebrate the new, rather than any other quality.

Then again, there are also moments when Ron seems to think it's sad that the dominant way we write aesthetic history — by emphasizing newness — winnows things down so much, and puts too much pressure on people to try to force innovation. "[O]ne could argue that the visual arts world," says Ron, "at least in New York & London, has become self-trivializing by thrusting change into warp drive because of the market needs of the gallery system." When he talks about poetry (where the lack of a big-money incentive insulates us from some of the art-world pressures), Ron also seems to see this "history is the story of changes" as problematic. Here, for example, Silliman laments the disappearance of Ron Loewinsohn from the historical record:

In The New American Poetry, Ron Loewinsohn – just 23 when the book was first published – demonstrated an uncanny ability to channel the style of William Carlos Williams.... Yet Against the Silences to Come, Loewinsohn’s 1965 chapbook from Four Seasons Foundation, arguably is the best work ever written “in the Williams mode” of stepped free verse. Who (but me) celebrates that?

So on the one hand, Ron revels in the idea of innovation as the main criterion for inclusion in the history of poetry. On the other hand, he sees how this can create a limited view of the shape of poetic history, a view that can make us blind to many fine books of poetry (I, for example, had never read Loewinsohn's book, and I'm going internet-up a copy ASAP) (for all of my disagreements with Ron, I've got to say, I'm glad he's got his particular form of erudition).

In the end, I think the reason I can't pin Ron down is that he's feeling contradictory things, as we all do at times. Since I'm feeling Manichean this morning, I'll lay down the following theory: Bad Ron likes the idea that history selects on the criterion of newness, because it makes all of the investments he made in innovation pay off. But Good Ron is less selfish, and more generous: Good Ron loves the celebration of Zukovfky, but laments the invisibility of Loewinsohn's Against the Silences to Come.

Tag! (puff puff) You're (wheeze wheeze) It!

Good Lord — I'm it! I've been tagged as a "thinking blogger" by Steve Burt.

It was Ron Silliman who tagged the unsuspecting Professor Burt while Steve was sweating innocently away in an attempt to wedge his 40-volume set of the letters of Randall Jarrell (vaorium edition, with annotations both explicatory and exculpatory) into an old Tivo box in preparation for his upcoming Steinbeck-like trek from the central plains to Harvard (or am I misremembering The Grapes of Wrath?). Silliman himself was tagged in turn by Ashraf Osman, who was tagged (I think) by Wallace Stevens, who was in his turn tagged by Alfred Lord Tennyson, who was tagged by the zombified hand of an undead Homer while giving a poetry reading at Heinrich Schliemann's archeological digs. Since Homer was tagged by poets of the early Sumerian oral tradition, the ultimate origin of the tag-chain lies lost in the mists of literary prehistory, although I suspect a time-traveling Frank O'Hara may be behind it all in the end. I won't know for sure unless and until the grant money comes in for further research.

Anyway.

Part of me thinks this whole blog-tag phenom is just a schoolyard game. The other part thinks so too. But neither part minds. Who doesn't miss the schoolyard, where one could whip a big red dodgeball at one's peers with impunity, aiming for face or crotch with velocities approaching mach one? I mean, what wouldn't you give to make that sort of thing a regular part of all faculty meetings? (Imagine here Archambeau supine upon the floor, mercilessly pelted by his colleagues, who wield a mace-like untethered tether-ball).

So. It looks like I'm supposed to tag five others. So here's who I'd chase down across the asphalt-and-wood chip landscape of the virtual schoolyard. Only in the virtual world would I, puffing like the bookworm/hedonist I am, be able to catch even one of them and shout "Tag! You're it — a thinking blogger!"

Mark Scroggins. I know Mark has already been tagged by Silliman, but since Mark objects to Ron's description of him as "a scrupulous literary scholar who doesn’t take short cuts even in his blog" I thought I'd tag Mark again in terms with which he'd be happier. It isn't that Ron's wrong — Mark oozes legitimacy: he once delivered a scholarly ass-whupping of epic proportions to a manuscript of mine, ridding it of half its pages and two-thirds of its many flaws in the process. Rather, it's that Mark feels Ron's description lays waste to his "cherished self-image of jaunty, effervescent bons mots, of quicksilver connections & startling juxtapositions" and depicts him as "Professor Microscope Drudge." (One could say Mark is over-reading things, but who doesn't fret over representations of themselves? I once blew a nearly John Edwards-level sum of cash on a new haircut after looking in horror at my photo on the cover of an alumni magazine). So here, for the record, is my characterization of Mark (cribbed from P.B. Shelley's Alastor):

By solemn vision and bright silver dream
His infancy was nurtured. Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient air
Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.
The fountains of divine philosophy
Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great,
Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past
In truth or fable consecrates, he felt
And knew. When early youth had passed, he left
His cold fireside and alienated home
To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.

Ron Silliman. Is it banal to tag the most popular blogging poet in the world? Probably. But I've been so relentlessly ready to fly off the handle at his worst qualities (his insistence that there's such a thing as a "school of quietude," his calling of Geoffrey Hill a fascist) that I feel a need to tap him on the shoulder and tell him I admire him for his alt-poetry-erudition ("altudition"?). Nobody knows more about the books nobody knows about.

Reginald Shepherd. Holy crap he's smart. Some of his recent blog entries are adapted from a forthcoming book of essays — a great preview of coming attractions. He also wins the Congressional Medal of Clarity for that rarest of feats, discussing people like Adorno in graceful English sentences.

Mairead Byrne. While the three guys I've already mentioned write essayistic blogs, Mairead Byrne's is a kind of diary-in-poetry. She's a thinking blogger, for sure, but her dialogue with the world takes place in poetry, not prose.

Simon DeDeo. Simon writes about individual poems with an energy and insight that leave me as slack-jawed as any roadside yokel watching a UFO suck up his Chevette with some kind of space-hose. And DeDeo should know about space-hose-having UFOs: he's a physicist at Fermilab, where (if memory serves) they invented both the tractor beam and the shamrock shake.

Probably the Dumbest Thing Silliman Has Ever Said...

Sometimes — not always, but sometimes — rebutting Ron Silliman's more extreme versions of his characteristic us-vs.-them poetic manichaenism is like playing checkers with a monkey: you can win, but it isn't really worth the trouble (No — Mr. Pickles, no! Don't gnaw on the checkerboard! And for god's sake, don't fling that at the wall! Noo-ooooo-ooooooo!). But this time out I've got to say something, since Ron has committed at least two affronts to intelligence at once. They are as follows:

1. A false assertion that Geoffrey Hill and Gjertrud Schnackenberg have "fascist" aesthetic projects.
2. A false assertion that Hill and Schnackenberg have a shared aesthetic project.

Some Background

So there I was, checking out Reginald Shepherd's brand spanking new blog, when I caught his reference to a new comment by Ron Silliman. I blinked. I did a double take. I resisted, with great effort, doing a spit-take with my Dr. Brown's Diet Cherry Soda. Then I went over to Rantin' Ron's site to make sure this was really what Ron said.

For the record, here's what I now consider Ron's dumbest comment ever. The context is Ron brooding about Bill Knott. Mid-brood, Ron picks up on Knott's discussion of some other poets, including

...the likes of Geoffrey Hill & Gjertrud Schnackenberg (whose aesthetic program Knott characterizes, not incorrectly, as fascist).

This is the passage that redlined my bullshit detector.

Getting to the Source

To track down the arguments about Hill and Schnackenberg's allegedly fascist aesthetics I surfed over to a post on Knott's blog. There, I found that the ideas came originally from an essay in Magma by Laurie Smith. Since Smith's essay, "Subduing the Reader" is up online, it was easy enough to check out. Smith actually has some interesting things to say about the differences between Anne Carson and Geoffrey Hill, though he's a bit dismissive of Carson. Smith actually seems to admire Hill's chops, but he's actively angry at Hill for reasons that seem to me entirely wrong.

There are two things about Hill that enrage Smith, and Smith links both of them to what he calls fascism: Hill's allusions to high culture, and Hill's juxtaposition of past and present to the advantage of the former. Let's check these out.

Unbelievably Lousy Argument Number One: Dense Allusions Are Fascistic

Here's Smith taking both Hill and Carson to task for making allusions that most readers wouldn't be able to catch without footnotes:

...Carson and Hill share a common aim which is achieved by a common method. It is to interweave their material with such a frequency of cultural reference that the reader loses confidence in her ability to understand, therefore to judge, what she is reading. Faced with a plethora of references to 'high' culture which she feels she ought to know but does not, the reader feels increasingly ignorant and unworthy. She is forced to accept the poem on the poet's terms or not at all; her critical faculty is subdued.

and later:

[Hill believes] that 'high' culture should be accessible only to a small educated elite (kept especially small in this case by oblique references and a lack of notes), leaving the majority in vacuous ignorance, strong because obedient.

There's no ambiguity to Smith's condemnation of this as an aesthetic — at the end of his essay, he comes right out and calls it "fascist."

There are all kinds of things one could criticize in Smith's contention. For starters, there's the idea that the subduing of the reader to a state of vacuous ignorance is the "aim" of Hill and Carson. Smith does nothing to prove that inducing this state is the goal of either poet. I rather think that including arcane allusions challenges the reader to be active, to seek out some things outside of his or her current range of knowledge. Far from being passive and ignorant, the reader has to be both active and, eventually, informed.

Smith's argument is so strange I have to put it in capital letters just to fix it in my mind as something someone actually said:

SMITH (AND KNOTT AND SILLIMAN) ACTUALLY SEEM TO BELIEVE THAT GEOFFREY HILL'S POEMS SOMEHOW BATTER PEOPLE'S MINDS INTO SUBMISSION AND LEAVE THEM SO EMPTY, SO FREE OF THE CRITICAL FACULTY, THAT THEY ARE GOING TO BECOME ZOMBIES OBEDIENT TO AUTHORITARIAN POWER.

Okay. There it is. But I'm going to need, say, one piece of empirical evidence that Hill's Mercian Hymns has created a group of fascist zombies. Come on, guys, just one?

Unbelievably Lousy Argument Number Two: Preferring the Past to the Present is a Fascist Thing

Here's Smith on Hill's preference for the past over the present:

Hill's aim is that of Pound of the Cantos, his acknowledged master - to expound a view of culture in which the past is held up as admirable and the present dismissed as worthless. It is a view that brooks no argument, no discussion, and is, in the sense that Pound respectfully used the word, fascist.

Leaving aside the hyperbole (does Hill really see a "worthless" present?) there are three things that I can think of that are problematic (by which I mean "wrong") here:

1. To present the past as superior to the present is not to "brook no argument" any more than any other artistic or poetic position does.

2. To prefer the past isn't always to prefer fascism. It all depends on what version of what past one prefers to what version of what present. Raymond Williams has a really good chapter on this in The Country and the City. The chapter is called "Golden Ages," and its main contention is that there are aristocratic, bourgeois, and radical-worker versions of the past, all of which can be held up as criticisms of the present. The English folk rhyme (recited by the rebel priest John Ball during the peasant's revolt of 1340) "When Adam delve and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman" is just one very brief example of the radical-worker version of preferring past to present.

3. While Pound may have looked to the past, the poets most clearly identifiable with fascism were the Italian Futurists (Marinetti and company). As the name of their movement implies, they preferred the modern to the ancient — even going so far as to assert that "past-loving Venice" should be destroyed.

A Weird Assertion

Smith's essay concludes with yet another weird assertion: that the problem of fascism in poetry isn't limited to Hill, but extends to Gjertrud Schnackenberg "who is much admired by the New Republican Right."

Schnackenberg isn't a challenging poet of allusions like Hill (she's a New Formalist, more akin to Dana Gioia than to Hill or anyone in the Poundian tradition). So Smith must mean that a preference for the past to the present alone leads to, or equals, fascism. I think I've already given my reasons for why I think this is a lousy argument.

I'd also add that I think it is false to say that Schnackenberg is the darling of "New Republican Right." I mean, most of those people don't read poetry. And the Republicans who do read poetry don't tend to come from the wacko wing of that venerable political party. But even granting Smith this point, one could argue that to judge a work of art by the politics of those who like it is a dicey business. Hitler, after all, loved the art of ancient Greece. That's ancient Greece, folks — the culture that gave us democracy (early, flawed, limited, but real democracy).

Coda

Ooosh. That's enough for now. Anyway, my cherry soda's warm, so it's off to the fridge for a fresh one. But first two quick points by way of a coda:

A. I suppose I'm focusing on Silliman's endorsement of Smith's arguments (rather than on Knott or Smith himself) because Silliman looms larger than the others in the small corner of the poetry world of which this blog is a part. If you're reading this, you're more likely to read Silliman than Knott or Smith.

B. There's a good article over at Salon on the perils of throwing the word "fascist" around lightly. It is especially worth reading in these our troubled times, when there are real authoritarians out there.

Mohammad vs. Silliman (No, Not That Mohammad)

K. Silem Mohammad is onto something over at his blog, with his Sept. 1 post, Notes on (Dis)quietude and the "Post-Avant". So onto something is he that gladly would I have cornered him after his reading here in Chicago last Friday — had I not been entering the second week of my annual the-students-are-back-and-breathing-exotic-germs-on-me illness.

Anyway: here's what Kasey's onto: Silliman's Big Manichean Dichotomy of Poetry, (in which the world is divided into a mere two camps, the so-called School of Quietude and the so-called Post-Avant) depends on an untenable assumption. The assumption being that aesthetic radicalism = political radicalism, and aesthetic conservatism = political conservatism. Here's how he puts it:

I am sympathetic in some ways to Ron Silliman's (in)famous classification of "School of Quietude" vs. "Post-Avant"*, at least within limited historical parameters. I have used the terms myself from time to time, effectively as synonyms for "mainstream" and "experimental" (labels that are admittedly problematic in themselves). But a central problem with Ron's binary is that it attempts to conflate two separate (though often coinciding) realms of distinction: the aesthetic or formal, and the social or political. At one point, perhaps, such markers pointed to a tangible divide, but that divide has itself become divided so many times over that it has become increasingly less possible to maintain the dichotomy. What kinds of conceptual violence have to be committed in order to make, say, Adrienne Rich fit into a quietudist pigeonhole, or in order to think of Jorie Graham as post-avant in Ron's sense?

Sharp, eh? And entirely right.

I've been thinking a lot about this sort of thing lately — this summer I finally got the first parts of a new book of litcrit, The Aesthetic Anxiety, off the ground, and one of the things I want to do in that book is describe the history of exactly the kind of conflation of aesthetic and political radicalism that Kasey is onto in Silliman.

Long story short: this sort of thing has been going on since at least the late nineteenth century. You find the assertion of an identity between aesthetic radicalism and political radicalism in all sorts of unlikely places (like Swinburne's prose, for example). By the time you get to the twentieth century, this has become kind of a reflexive position for avant-garde movements: it's one of the recurring themes of Andre Breton, for example. And it lives on today.

Why, you ask, did this conflation occur? I mean, Kasey's mention of Adrienne Rich would seem, by itself, to blow a great gaping whole in the side of the argument, through which would seep a sea of other examples, drowning the good ship S.S. Avant-Smug beneath the waves. An excellent question! I try to answer it in the first essay from the book, which will come out (oh glacial pace of academic publishing) sometime next year. But the gist of it, I think, is this: once art becomes something done for its own sake (not for the Church, not for the Noble Patron, not for the bourgeois market) (and of course much art continues to be made for all of those things) (but some isn't) — once art becomes something done for it's own sake, a lot of artists who love the freedoms of this autonomy become haunted by the idea of uselessness, irrelevance, etc. How to be both free and useful? Believe that freedom is a kind of radical political utility! Shazam! Problem solved.

Well, it's all a little more complicated than that, but the record really does seem to bear this out to some degree (Oh, hours in the archive! Oh mildew and lousy light! Frolic did the nymphs and swains this summer, while Archambeau did moulder in the tower of fusty learning, oh!).

As a guy who has been trying to get a grip on these things through looking at the history of the ideas involved, I'm especially glad to see the historicizing note at the end of Kasey's piece:

The error of distinctions like "quietude vs. post-avant," or for that matter "quietude vs. disquietude," is that they attempt to abstract outward from specific discontents and insufficiencies to general judgments about larger formations, and to maintain those judgments across time. It is harder than it ever was before to argue that there is a consistent "mainstream" whose adherents uniformly subscribe to dominant ideologies of literature and culture--just as it is increasingly hard to argue that anything like a consistently "resistant" avant-garde is comprised by the totality of writers who adopt "experimental" aesthetics.

*****

In other news, Natalia kicks some poetic butt.