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Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme—Now It's Out! Here's What's in It!

Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme—my latest book of essays—has just rolled hot off the presses at MadHat Press.  What's it all about? Well, the jacket copy gives you an overview (and a few complimentary blurbs):

What is the community for poetry? What is its fate, its future? Poet and critic Robert Archambeau begins Inventions of a Barbarous Age with these questions before ranging over the ridges and valleys of the contemporary poetry scene, pausing on the way to investigate mystic and Gnostic poetry, the norms of criticism, and the poetics of camp and the sublime. Taking in poets from W. H. Auden to Kenneth Goldsmith, and topics from poetic comedy to poetic tribalism, Archambeau is one of poetry’s great omnivores, and numbers among the leading poetry critics of his generation. 

~ 

Robert Archambeau is fascinated by the place poets stake out for their art, the claims they make about the relationship of poetry and power; and he is (sometimes uncomfortably) shrewd in ferreting out the motivations for such claims. His essays have the advantage of the best occasional writing—immediacy, a sense of responsiveness, conversationality—but Archambeau is also a “big ideas” critic, spinning his momentary interpretations of texts into penetrating insights about the place of poetry in the world.
—Mark Scroggins 

Archambeau writes prose that’s consistently welcoming, curious, and free of the anxiety that marks so much criticism.
—Jonathan Farmer, Slate Magazine

A notable poet/critic, Archambeau’s a perfect example of how one person can take on both roles.
—Barry Schwabsky, The Nation

Archambeau is one of our smartest poetic sociologists, and he tackles the biggest problems facing poetry in our time.
—Norman Finkelstein, Contemporary Literature

If you want to see someone having fun while thinking provocatively about contemporary poetry, try Archambeau. I always do.
—Stephen Burt 

Archambeau has perfect pitch.
—Marjorie Perloff 

If you really want to know about the book, though, here's the table of contents, along with a few notes on each essay:

I. The Future, The Present

            You Will Object: Four Futures for Poetry

            Poetry as ubiquitous, as commodified, as self-obsessed, as community-building. You don’t like one future? Try another!

            Who is a Contemporary Poet?

            In which I continue an old argument with Kenneth Goldsmith about what counts as contemporary. The fight is called off when Giorgia Agamben clobbers us both.

            The Future of Genius

            Does the old category of ‘genius’ have a future? The origin and destination of a category of literary analysis, with reference to Brooklyn hipsters in Warby Parker glasses.

            Invitation to the Voyage: Notes on the Trajectory of the Poetic Image

            How the literary image changed from Dante to Baudelaire, and what that says about where it has been and may be heading.

            Charmless and Interesting: The Conceptual Moment in Poetry

            What Conceptualism has going for it and what it doesn’t do very well, with reference to the old aesthetic category of “charm” and the newly-re-theorized category of the “interesting.”  As in “Conceptualism? Well, it’s… interesting…”

            Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Contemporary Rhyme in Poetry

            How has rhyme changed since it ceased being an unexamined norm in poetry? How can it be done well now? With a lot of talk about Anthony Madrid’s amazing unpublished history of rhyme and an examination of Michael Robbins’ The Second Sex, among other books.

II. Poetry and Community

            When Poetry Mattered

            Poetry matters most when things are really, really bad.  We should be so lucky that poetry matters less here than elsewhere, now than then.

            The Disinheritance of the Poets

            What happens when privileged people get kicked out of the realm of power and money and end up in the realm of poetry? More about rich white guys elbowing other people out of the way, intentionally or otherwise.

            In Solitude, In Multitude: Crowds and Poetry

            A quick trip through the 19^th and 20^th centuries of flâneurs, introverts, countercultural snobs, and poets othered for their identity, with reference to Crowds and Power.

            Between Facebook and Montparnasse: Poetry’s Lonely Time

            Long story short: we live at the moment of dialectical synthesis between bohemian enclaves and the academic dispersion of the poets across the vastness of all those rectangular states.

            Proud Men in Their Studies: On Mark Scroggins

            Wow, did Scroggins not like this.

            So a Poet Walks into a Bar: Notes on Poetry Readings

            Just what the hell is a poetry reading all about? Find out now, via rhetorical theory!

III. Mystics and Gnostics

            A Stranger from the Sky: Sun Ra as Poet and Alien

            Why haven’t we been taking Sun Ra seriously as a poet? He’s closer to T.S. Eliot than fans of either of them are likely to want to admit.

            The Open Word: An Essay and a Letter for Peter O’Leary

            The most linguistically audacious Catholic mystic in poetry since Gerard Manley Hopkins.

            A Scribe and His Ghosts: The Poetry of Norman Finkelstein

            Norman Finkelstein: because you needed proof that wit and mysticism could work together.

            “That’s a Real Angel You’re Talking To”: Robert Duncan and Mythological Consciousness

            This is really about the challenge Duncan’s insistence on the reality of myth poses to modern consciousness, and to Duncan himself. I mean, I’m not sure we really can read Duncan the way he wanted us to.

            Kenneth Rexroth’s Other Worlds

            In which I argue that Robert Hass owes a lot to Rexroth, and that Rexroth understood the sublime intuitively.

            A Strange and Quiet Fullness: The Uncanny Charles Simic

            In which I argue that despite some Cold War attitudes that don’t hold up all that well, Simic is the real deal when it comes to the uncanny in poetry.

            John Crowe Ransom’s Quarrel with God

            Long story short: a preacher’s kid starts to doubt God, has his doubts confirmed in the First World War, writes a defense of Christianity that is really an attack on Christianity, and develops a poetic based on these beliefs. It hardens into a dogma and damages the poetry, but it couldn’t really have been otherwise.

            History, Totality, Silence

            This is the most “high theory circa 1995” title of anything I’ve ever written. It brings in Walter Benjamin, John Matthias, and Levinas.

IV. Others

            An ABC of Gertrude Stein

            This is pretty much what it sounds like. G is for Genius, N is for Narcissim…

            The American Poet as European, or Egon Schiele’s Ladder

            This is mostly about aesthetic distance and what it can do for, or to, you.

            Poetry Ha Ha

            I don’t think we’re really good at talking about comedy in poetry. This is my attempt. A lot of Henri Bergson, a bit of Freud and Hobbes, and some funny stuff from Aaron Belz.

            Camping Modernism: Timothy Yu's Chinese Silences

            Why I think Tim Yu’ 100 Chinese Silences is a necessary rethinking of Modernism via pastiche and the aesthetics of camp.

            Ambiguous Pronouns are Hot: On Rae Armantrout

            In which Rae Armantrout does the voice of Paris Hilton (remember Paris Hilton?) and makes some crazy things happen with gender and power.

            If I Were A Freudian This Essay Would Be Called “The Mother’s Penis”:

                        A Note on Daisy Fried

            Another take on gender and power in poetry.

            Poetics of Embodiment

            If you don’t read Swedish, you should probably go hang out outside Jennifer Hayashida’s house and set off fireworks to praise her for translating Karl Larsson—because he knows how to explain the way embodiment comes into contact with language and power and lays open the dark disparities of our moment.  Also, there’s stuff about Joy Division.

V. On Criticism

            Hating the Other Kind of Poetry

            In which I examine what’s at stake in partisan poetry sniping, and try to understand my own sense that it’s a mug’s game.

            The Work of Criticism in the Age of Mechanical Recommendation

            What can a critic do that a recommendation algorithm can’t?

            The Avant-Garde in Babel

            What we talk about when we talk about the avant-garde, and why we’re probably all talking about different things. My attempt (with much help from Per Bäckstrom) to purify the language of the critical tribe.

            Fanaticism! Intolerance! Disinterest!

            This is really a kind of poetics of camp, along with an argument for why we need such a thing. It takes a turn through Kant and Schiller and back out via Situationist thinking about “the sepulcher of aesthetic disinterest.”

            The Abject Sublime, or: Jean Genet’s Vaseline

            Because a queering of the sublime via the abject shows us just how bad we usually are about distinguishing between different types of beauty, and because Jean Genet is the poet laureate of abjection.

VI. Afterword

            Death of a Bookseller

            This is really an elegy for a man who taught me as much as any of my professors. He ran a dusty bookshop in Chicago. Both he and the store are gone, and always with me.

You can find the book on Amazon and at the MadHat website, as well as at the more poetry-and-litcrit-friendly sort of bookstore (try the Grolier Poetry Bookshop if you're near Harvard Square).

The Kafka Sutra: On Amazon and Live at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop

Hot news! The Amazon listing for my new book of poems and literary oddities, The Kafka Sutra is now up and running.  Just in time for the launch of the book, along with two other new titles from MadHat Press, tomorrow at the Grolier  Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge, Mass.  

Here's the text from the Amazon listing:

What if Franz Kafka, that master of frustration, failure, and despair, had written the ancient Sanskrit sex manual The Kama Sutra? Robert Archambeau explores this question in the illustrated series of parables that begins his collection The Kafka Sutra. Other questions behind the pieces in this book concern glam rock, fatherhood, Afro-Caribbean and Belgian Surrealism, Conceptualism, Hiroshima, the sad lot of the English professor, and similar vital matters of these, our troubled times.

And here's my severed head, advertising the book launch.  See you there!

The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar

I think it's because he dresses like some kind of heavy metal Lord Byron, and because he's known to read his poems at a New York bar called Otto's Shrunken Head, that Quincy Lehr gets away with calling his new book of poems Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar.  I liked it when I read it in manuscript, and wrote some jacket copy, probably the only jacket copy I'll ever write that quotes Mike Tyson:

I’m not sure Quincy Lehr knows the difference between affections & addictions, punches & prayers.  His topics, or his targets, include the greatest generation, world music, special interest porn, the “billboard sea of kitsch,” Macbeth, “that prick Baudrillard,” and God.  Like Mike Tyson, Lehr says “I’ll fight any man, any animal. If Jesus were here, I’d fight him, too.”  And he blasphemes like a true believer hurt as hell.

The book is out soon from Measure Press.

The tee shirt (yes, the tee shirt) is available here.

Litscapes 2015!

Not long ago a poet I know sent me a note asking if I ever blogged about anything other than publications in which my work appears.  Last week's post about Daisy Fried must have come as a terrible disappointment to him, but this week's won't: I've just seen the proofs for Litscapes 2015, an anthology of innovative writing edited by Kass Fleisher and Caitlin M. Alvarez.  It looks terrific, and, in addition to a little thing I wrote called "The Poem That Does Not Exist," includes work by:

Charles Bernstein

Maxine Chernoff

Andrei Codrescu

Johanna Drucker

Paul Hoover

Kent Johnson

Pierre Joris

Kevin Killian

Frank Lentricchia

Laura Moriarty

Susan M. Schultz

Mark Scroggins

Stephanie Strickland

Cole Swensen

Steve Tomasula

Anne Waldman

Susan Wheeler

And many, many more.  Look for it soon from Steerage Press—and, if you run into Kass Fleisher or Caitlin Alvarez, break out the confetti and throw a parade!

There's More than Corn in Indiana: New Poetry from the Midwest

Hot news!  New Poetry from the Midwest, edited by Okla Elliott and Hannah Stephenson, is about to be unleashed on the world (the official uncaging of this tiger will be at the AWP in April, but word on the street is that you'll be able to score a copy before the convention.

The anthology includes poetry by Nin Andrews, Jason Bredle, Kwame Dawes, John Gallaher, Lyn Lifshin, Natalie Shapero, Lee Upton and many others, and includes my own contribution, a gnostic little poem called "Nag Hammadi: A Parable." Show up at the AWP with a copy tucked in your tote bag and amaze the long line of people waiting to get theirs at the New American Press booth!

The Power of Poetry in the Modern World

Rejoice! The new issue of the South Atlantic Review (vol. 77 nos. 1 & 2, for those of you compiling bibliographies) will soon find its way into print (and onto your local JSTOR server), and it's a special issue on the power of poetry in the modern world—essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how poetry interacts with the larger world.  In addition to poems and reviews, it features the following articles:

Marjorie Perloff, "John Cage as Conceptualist Poet"
Lisa K. Perdigow, "Coming Undone: Entering Jorie Graham's Poststructural Poetics"
Emily R. Rutter, "the story of being: Revising the Posthumous Legacy of Huddie Ledbetter in Tyehimba Bess' leadbelley"
Jason M. Coates, "H.D. and the Hermetic Impulse"
Ronald Schuchard, "Yeats and Olivia Revisited: A Pathway to The Winding Stair and Other Poems"
Tara D. Causey, "Stories of Survivance: The Poetry of Karenne Wood"

There's also my own essay—"The Fall and Rise of Poetry: T.S. Eliot and the Place of Poetry in the Modern World."  Here's how it starts:

T. S. Eliot was far from alone among modern poets in perceiving a crisis in the social position of poetry and in dreaming up a solution to that crisis. Yeats, for example, sought to bring poetry out of the aesthete’s garret by allying it with both mystic rites and nationalism; while Ezra Pound dreamed of a world in which “the damned and despised literati” would, through clarity of language, keep “the whole machinery of social and of individual thought” functional and therefore make themselves crucial to the legislators and governors of the world. Eliot’s particular sense of the nature of the crisis, and of its solution, was colored by the decline of his social class and of the kind of public, moralistic poetry associated with that class. Eliot had strong family connections to a Boston-based, cultivated elite that entered a phase of steep decline around the time of his birth and similarly strong connections to the poetic traditions of that class, traditions whose supporting institutions eroded rapidly in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Eliot’s reaction to the decline of public poetry was, at first, to retreat from such poetry into the aestheticism of his 1905 graduation ode and later to satirize his declining class and its culture, including its literary culture. Out of his satire, though, emerged a new theory of poetry, in which the energies to which popular culture speaks are harnessed to the civilizing power of a tradition of high culture and spiritual discipline. Eliot sees a public role for this new poetry—but not as a replacement for popular culture. Rather, he sees it as being important in the formation of a new caste of cultural leaders who will, he hopes, have a broad influence in society. When a new class of educated professionals takes up Eliot’s poetry (and humanistic culture more generally) in the postwar era, this class partially fulfills Eliot’s ambition. Unlike Yeats or Pound, Eliot sees his dream for a revivified poetry, with a kind of power in the modern world, come to some measure of fruition.

I'm especially happy to have my essay on Eliot—really a kind of social class analysis of aesthetics in poetry—appear in an issue guest edited by Nancy D. Hargrove, a distinguished Eliot scholar.  The South Atlantic Review is under new and dynamic editorship, and promised great things in the years ahead.  Excelsior!  Now, if only they could do something about cover art...

John Berryman at 100

John Berryman's centenary is just a few weeks behind us, and it has occasioned a renewal of interest in this troubled, troubling, and undeniably great American poet.  There's a new edition of his selected poems, his publisher has re-issued his best books, including The Dream Songs, and there's a new version of Poets in their Youth, a memoir by Berryman's first wife, Eileen Simpson.  The national and international press has taken notice—so it's no surprise that the poets have joined in and made their own contribution to the Berryman revival.

Philip Coleman's Berryman's Fate is a major document of the renewed interest in Berryman among poets.  It collects tributes to Berryman from a host of poets including Paul Muldoon, Timothy Donnelly, John Matthias, Isobel Dixon, Jane Robinson, George Szirtes, John Montague, and me, among many distinguished others.

My own contribution takes its title from a line in "Dream Song 14," but it's really a riff on Berryman's wonderful meditation on loss, "The Ball Poem."  It goes like this:


We Must Not Say So 

Sadness was he ever. Teacher, taught 
my teacher, taught me too (his being not 
in body but in book). “What is the boy now 
who has lost his ball?” he’d ask. The question’s flawed. 
“What, what” he’d ask “is he to do?” A haughty Henry’d 
huff his loss, a stone his daily broken bread. 
And yours and mine? Is what he wrought? 
Sadness we are ever, teacher taught. 

“No use,” he’s say, to say “O there 
are other balls,” the ball gone harbor-wise, 
and out, the tidal-tugging way. 
No use to whistle “I am not a little boy.” 
For him a hurting. Us, maybe a sigh. 
No laws against our Henry but “Beware.”

Berryman's Fate is available here.