Spain in the Battersea Review! Amish Trivedi on Poetry Contests in Plume!

Rejoice! This troubled world has been blessed with two new lights in the darkness—the latest issues of The Battersea Review and Plume.

The sixth issue of The Battersea Review (proud Associate Editor: me)  is a special Spanish number, edited by Mario Murgia and Flamminia Ocampo. The contents are almost too substantial for the internet to bear:

POETRY 

"Introduction" by Mario Murgia and Flaminia Ocampo"Three Poems" by Héctor Abad, translated by Zachary Bos"Poems in Translation" by Samuel Beckett, translated by Juan Carlos Calvillo"Six Poems" by León Felipe, translated by Walter Smelt"Five Poems" by Andrés García Cerdán, translated by Jorge Rodríguez-Miralles"Three Poems" by David Huerta, translated by Mario Murgia"En Tren (“By Train”)" by Antonio Machado, translated by Walter Smelt"Three Poems" by Fernando Noy, translated by Geoffrey O’Brien

CRITICAL PROSE 

"Spain on the Horizon: Some Notes on Astronomy and Medieval England" by Raúl Ariza-Barile"Juan Rodolfo Wilcock’s Two Phases" by Horacio Armani"Clarice: Woman, Body, and Voice" by Gabriella Burnham"Ferdinand’s Renunciation" (from The Constant Prince) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, translated by Geoffrey O’Brien"An Appreciation of Pedro Páramo" by Nicholas Christopher"Milton in Puebla, Mexico" by Angelica Duran"Xavier Icaza’s Untimely Avant-Garde" by Christian Gerzso"Writing and Translation" by Alejandro Manara"Remembering Alejandra Pizarnik" by Flaminia Ocampo"The Goddess Coatlicue: Environmental Renewal and Femicide in Homero Aridjis’ La leyenda de los soles" by Adela Ramos"Polyphony and Portable Identities: The niuyorriqueña poetry of Tato Laviera" by Salvador San Juan"The Slingshot (A Parable)" by Luisa Valenzuela, translated by Geoffrey O'Brien"When Borges was Director of the National Library" by María Esther Vázquez"Erotica in the Rio Grande: Thoughts on Sandra Cisneros’s Loose Woman" by Gwendolyn Díaz-Ridgeway"Pilgrim Tales: Luisa Josefina Hernández’s Medieval Fiction" by Ana Elena González-Treviño"Cernuda" by Gabriel Linares"Survey: Fifteen Favorite Latin American Writers" by Flaminia Ocampo"Black Surrealism and Rooting in the Literature of the Antilles" by Salvador San Juan"From the Feather to the Poncho: A New Yorker Vicuña" by Lila Zemborain

In the "Essays and Comments" section I edit for Plume, you'll find "Confessions of a Contest Junkie," in which Amish Trivedi takes us through his travails and triumphs as a recidivist participant in the world of poetry contests.  It begins like this:

If you have any vice or addiction in your life – and we all have something – you probably already know that what you are hooked on is bad for you. You already know how you justify your fix. You know how you feed your high. And yet, you cling to your degeneracy, denying it is a problem. Your enablers support your actions and claims.

            My vice? Poetry contests. And the system itself is my enabler— a system which has encouraged me and so many others through the hope that maybe something will work

            In the poetry contest system there are winners. Judges whittle submissions down to a select few, a single one of whom sees a poem, a chapbook, or an entire book lauded. The winners add another publication to their record. The press or journal heralds the winner and their own selection skills. The win takes on a life of its own, serving as the launch pad for a career or a stepping stone on the path to tenure. Pierre Bourdieu points out that perhaps this initial social capital gain is accidental before it leads to other things, but that’s for another time.

The rest is available here. 

Sheena and the Sugar Book

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

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

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

W.H. Auden Camps Up Fascism: Notes on "The Orators"

"Springtime for Hitler," from The Producers

Hooray!  After much delay, it looks like the new issue of The Battersea Review will soon be unleashed upon the world, to stalk and hoot among the waiting literati (i.e., you).  As a preview of things to come, they've posted an essay of mine called "Camping the Fascists: W.H. Auden's The Orators," in which I describe Auden's camp sensibility, and how it infuses his early poetry.  Camp's a tricky thing to define, but essential to grasping what Auden's doing in much of his work.

Here's how the essay begins:

I described him [Auden] seeing his friends one by one in his rooms at hours he had fixed and interviewing, cross-examining them, laying down the law about the poets of whom he approved, the way poetry should be written, the personality of the poet, being very dogmatic about everything. I did insist that he was not a 'leader' or authoritarian and that he brought a touch of absurdity to his pronouncements which made them seem jokes. He did not wish to be taken altogether seriously. But this would mean nothing to a member of the audience without a sense of humor. In fact to the American who thinks that when one is serious one should be serious, and when funny, un-serious, this would make Auden seem even more unsympathetic. (Spender, Journals 335)

W.H. Auden is many things—political poet, aesthete, Christian, Stakhanovite manufacturer of critical prose, English pariah, New York literary lion—but at the very core, his sensibility is always camp. Camp, in the sense I intend it, is a kind of playful and aestheticizing attitude. Christopher Isherwood, the first to use it in this sense, puts a good description of it into the mouth of a character in his novel The World in the Evening:

High camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. (110)

Camp, seen this way, is a cousin of aesthetic autonomy, since it elevates play and beauty over utility and morality—an elevation well understood by Susan Sontag in her seminal “Notes on Camp” where she writes:

1. To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical. (277)

And later:

38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content, ’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality’…
…
56. Camp taste is a kind of love… Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. (287, 291-292).

Camp is a quality that informs the work of W.H. Auden throughout his career, most powerfully in his early poetry, and in a complex, fraught way in his more overtly political poetry of the middle and later 1930s (as one might expect, given the depoliticizing tendency of camp). It remains a vital force in Auden’s American period, too: in 1948, for example, he writes “what makes it difficult for a poet not to tell lies is that, in poetry, all facts and beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities” the poet need not believe in the idea, but “it is certainly necessary that his emotions be deeply involved, and this they can never be unless, as a man, he takes it more seriously than as a mere poetic convenience” (Dyer’s Hand 19). Here Auden expresses both the distance and the affection that the camp sensibility has toward its material. Auden’s camp, it is important to add, is particularly intellectual: it is ideas that he camps. Indeed, for reasons that his youthful experiences make clear, Auden comes early on to love systems of thought—be they scientific, psychological, political, or even religious—from a camp perspective.

When Stephen Spender described Auden holding forth at Oxford in a slightly absurd, mock-authoritarian manner, he got at exactly the kind of camp exhibition of systems and dogmas that informs much of Auden's writing. Spender also touches on the possibility of the campiness being missed, and of Auden being taken as simply serious about what he says, rather than as embodying a much subtler and more complex attitude along the lines of what we read about in Isherwood's The World in the Evening. This was, quite often, exactly what happened, not only to the undergraduate opining extravagantly in his rooms, but to the poet whose works appeared, and were discussed, in slim volumes and little journals throughout the thirties. Indeed, it was the nature of many of those publications that contributed to the diminished understanding of Auden's camp. The political and economic crisis of the decade led not only to intense pressure on writers of all kinds to take ideological positions, but to the creation of a politicized, left-wing alternative to more mainstream publications, a kind of radical counter-public-sphere. The pressure of this context of publication upon Auden’s writings frequently led to an earnestness in reception, a truncation of the playful and the aesthetic, and to a specifically political hermeneutics. That a poem like Auden’s “A Communist to Others,” say, could be something quite different than an earnest address by a communist poet, and that the views expressed in the poem were not only those of a character, but in fact quite different from those of Karl Marx, were things too easily missed when the poem appeared in the Left Book Club anthology Poems of Freedom.

The whole essay is available here.

T.S. Eliot and the Vanishing Brahmin

Hot news -- the new issue of the Battersea Review is out, and available online!

It's got poetry by John Tranter, Alfred Corn, Peter Robinson, Katia Kapovich, and many others, as well as new translations of Georg Trakl, Sophocles, Pushkin, and Mandelshtam.

You'll also find essays on Harvard & Yale poetry culture, Wallace Stevens, Federico Garcia Lorca, Romanticism, and more -- including my essay "T.S. Eliot and the Vanishing Brahmin."  Check it out!

Many thanks to U.S. Dhuga and Ben Mazer for putting it all together, and for running the most intelligent and eclectic literary journal of the decade.

*

Here's the first paragraph of my essay:

"Noblesse oblige," wrote E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post, "sounds bad until you don't have it any more." Dionne's point was that the American elite no longer seems much interested in legitimating its position by undertaking the kind of social and cultural leadership to which earlier elites had devoted themselves. Dionne's sentiment is apt for our times, but it would have been equally germane to the America in which T.S. Eliot came of age, an America in which an old elite headquartered in Boston found itself shunted aside by a rougher sort altogether: the Carnegies and Fricks and Morgans and Rockefellers, and the equally ruthless men whose stories Lincoln Steffens told in The Shame of the Cities, men who made an art of turning public resources into private profit in the burgeoning metropolises of the nation. Eliot's class, the old Boston Brahmins, with their patrician scruples about fair dealing and community leadership and responsibility, didn't stand a chance, and their decline mattered immensely to Eliot. Indeed, the decay of Eliot's class of origin would prove crucial to his Anglophilia, his poetics, and even to his love of etymology.

The Battersea Review and the Failure of Yeats!

Hot soup, people—the  much-anticipated new issue of the Battersea Review is finally here!

Marjorie Perloff on John Cage!

Adam Kirsch on superfluity and anxiety!

William Logan!

Charles Bernstein!

William Logan and Charles Bernstein together!

Translations of Rilke’s Russian poems!

Saskia Hamilton!

Unearthed poetry by J. Robert Oppenheimer!

Robert Archambeau! Me! On W.B. Yeats and poetry as minority culture!

More! Much more!

My own contribution begins this way:

It was June in the year 1311 when the people of Siena walked in a great procession bearing Duccio's Maestà—his altarpiece depicting the Virgin Mary in the glorious golden Italo-Byzantine style—to the cathedral that would become its home. It was a momentous occasion for the entire city: Duccio's painting was to replace the fabled "Madonna of the Large Eyes," to which the Sienese had appealed a half-century earlier, when the fate of their soldiers hung in the balance in the war with Siena's bitter rivals, the Florentines. The Madonna, it was said, had worked miracles that assured the Sienese victory, and it was the intercession of Mary on behalf of Siena in that battle that led the Sienese to make her their patron saint. Now they wished to commemorate her in a suitably grand sacred image. The event involved the entire city, from the highest grandees to the lowest beggars. One contemporary describes the procession of the Maestà this way:

And on that day when it was brought into the cathedral, all workshops remained closed, and the bishop commanded a great host of devoted priests and monks to file past in solemn procession. This was accompanied by all the high officers of the Commune and by all the people; all honorable citizens of Siena surrounded said panel with candles held in their hands, and women and children followed humbly behind. They accompanied the panel amidst the glorious pealing of bells after a solemn procession on the Piazza del Campo into the very cathedral; and all this out of reverence for the costly panel… The poor received many alms, and we prayed to the Holy Mother of God, our patron saint, that she might in her infinite mercy preserve this our city of Siena from every misfortune, traitor or enemy. 

The occasion of the installation of the Maestà was an aesthetic event, of course, but it was a religious event too. It was also a civic event, connected to the city's military past and to its prestige in the future. And, as the distribution of alms indicates, it was also an economic event, an opportunity to redistribute wealth so as to maintain the social fabric, legitimate the civic rulers, and perform the religious duty of charity. We could not be further from the way artworks are unveiled in our own time, in the pristine white cube of the gallery space, where artists and art-lovers have gathered for an event far more specialized, and far narrower in appeal and intention, than the Sienese procession of the Maestà.

William Butler Yeats, that most vacillating and self-reinventive of poets, imagined many different roles for art in society—but if there is one dream he dreams most passionately, it is one along the lines of the installation of Duccio's Maestà. That is, he yearned for a world where art was integrated into the culture at large, and where all social institutions were woven into each other, in the manner of medieval Sienese society. But why would he have this dream? The short answer is that he had seen the limits of aesthetic autonomy—of art for its own sake—and felt pinched by the boundaries of the self-exiled minority culture in which so many poets of the fin de siècle lived. Having helped found that bastion of the aesthetes, the Rhymer's Club, he grew disillusioned with the small scope of interests expressed in the group's meetings at the Cheshire Cheese pub, and even more disillusioned at the limited public impact of the group.

*

All honor to U.S. Dhuga, Ben Mazer, and the Battersea crew for putting together a 300-pound per square inch pressurized tank of literary splendor!

The Battersea Review Has Arrived!

Rejoice!  Thanks to the tireless efforts and editorial bravado of U.S. Dhuga and Ben Mazer, the inaugural issue of The Battersea Review is up online (and soon to be available in print).


Contributors include:


Marjorie Perloff on Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and Duchamp!
Adam Kirsch
Nora Delaney on Philip Larkin!
Stephen Burt
Todd Swift on poetry of the 1940s!
Ben Mazer's long, adventurous poem "The King"!
Philip Nikolayev
Stephen Sturgeon
Gerard Malanga (the original bad boy of Andy Warhol's Factory)
Jeet Thayil
John Hennessy
Joe Green
Greg Delanty
M.A. Schorr
Kathleen Rooney
Mario Murgia
Ailbhe Darcy
Previously uncollected work by the late, great Weldon Kees!
Also... Robert Archambeau (a few poems of mine have found their way into the issue).


According to the opening editorial, "The erudite Robert Archambeau is struggling in the most positive sense between the polarities of modernism and post-modernism, with a firm eye on our times" — I can't speak to my alleged erudition, but I think Dhuga and Mazer nailed it about the struggle.  Reading that sentence, I feel exposed in the same way I did when a critic wrote that my poems were haunted by a powerful father figure.  It's something I'd never noticed, and then suddenly, unnervingly,  saw to be true.


The Battersea Review has announced itself with a bang.  This will be a journal to watch, people.