Oppositional Poetry vs. Oppositional Poetry

So, while Sunday morning isn't exactly a matter of Wallace Stevens' "complacencies of the peignoir" chez Archambeau, I do generally manage to sprawl around with a few cups of freshly-ground-Sumatra coffee and the New York Times while I let the Saturday night haze drift out of my mind on the gently floating caffeine breeeze. Today I added the latest issue of Pleiades to the mix, which helped jazz me out of my torpor, including as it did John Matthias' new poem "Poetics," my own piece on poetic difficulty (which I scanned for typos, spotting one humiliating one, left in due to my own proofreaderly negligence), and Reginald Shepherd's very sharp essay "One State of the Art." It was Shepherd's essay that mixed itself into a heady brew with a piece by Jim Harrison in the Times Book Review, and that, with truly first rate coffee as a catalyst, had me thinking about the beast that hulks wherever poets gather nowadays: the idea of oppositional poetry.

Long story short, I suppose my thesis here is this: a lot of poets are driven by the idea that they should be in opposition to both the dominant aesthetic ideas and the dominant political forces of their time — but when you open the hood and poke around among its innards, this idea doesn't turn out to have much to do with politics at all. And its relation to aesthetics turns out to be of secondary importance: if you were feeling generous you could call the real driving force community; if you were feeling ungenerous, you could call it conformity. (I'm sure there are exceptions). Let me explain...


Jim Harrison's piece in the New York Times, "Don't Feed the Poets," was occasioned by Harrison's rediscovery of Karl Shapiro's 1964 book of prose poems, Bourgeois Poet lying around his study. Here's what Harrison says about the genesis of Shapiro's book:

Shapiro (1913-2000) had gotten the title for his book at a party, after giving a reading in Seattle, when Theodore Roethke called him a "bourgeois poet." The question is why it caused Shapiro such severe unrest that he poured heart and soul into what is really one very long poem?

The answer, says Harrison, lies in Shapiro's not-unusual "heroic notion of the poet," a notion formed early on and persistenting throughout his life. And when Shapiro wrote Bourgeois Poet, he was obsessed with the French Symbolists. "This explains a lot," says Harrison,

...since Shapiro's notion of what a poet was implies the outsider, the outcast, the outlier, one who purposefully deranges his mind to write poems like Rimbaud, or one who could not walk, so borne down was he by his giant wings, to paraphrase Baudelaire.

So this was the image of the poet, but how do you maintain it if, like Shapiro, you're tenured and respectable, and your concerns revolve (as Kenneth Koch used to say of the poet-professor) around "the myth, the midterms, and the missus"? As Harrison puts it, "How can you be raffiné ... on a campus in Nebraska?" What's interesting here isn't really the answer to that conundrum (if in fact there is one), but the persistence of the question, and the way Shapiro experienced it with a terrible urgency. It really ate him up, this charge of respectabilty. To be a poet, he had learned from the Symbolist tradition, meant to be an outsider — or better yet, to be part of a brotherhood of outsiders — or even better still, to be a part of a brotherhood of outsiders intent on defying the aesthetics and politics of the establishment. But all of this inherited sense of What A Poet Ought To Be was very different from the reality of what Shapiro was (and, I suppose, most poets in America since Shapiro's day, actually are). So it tore Shapiro up, as a perusal of the self-hating pages of Bourgeois Poet makes clear.

What's extrordinary here is this: it somehow isn't enough for the poet to embrace oppositional politics. To conform to the norms of the oppositional poet he actually has to assert some kind of equation between his formal practice and his oppositional politics. Consider Yvor Winters: as Reginald Shepherd recently pointed out in his blog, Winters is almost always dismissed as a reactionary, even though his political positions throughout his life were impressively progressive, and even courageus. He was a member of the ACLU in the McCarthy era, and joined the NAACP before civil rights became a respectable position among white guys. But he never drew an equation between an oppositional politics and formal experiment in poetry, and, having avoided this equation, he doesn't fit the inherited idea of an oppositional poet, who must combine the two, and see them as somehow the same thing. (Why does a commitment to old-school metrical poetry trump the whole anti-McCarthy, anti-Jim Crow business? It's an interesting question worth investigating properly sometime...)

Just as important to the sense of Winters as reactionary is another factor: Winters' refusal to be identified with a band of brother-outsiders. I always knew Winters was a loner-curmudgeon type, but I never got to see the stubborness with which he protected his solitude until the latest issue of the Chicago Review clunked into my mailbox a month or so ago. The issue features an astonishingly cool and very large selection of Kenneth Rexroth's correspondence (edited by John Beer and Max Blechman, who totally deserve a shout-out for this). There's a fascinating exchange between Rexroth and Winters, in which Rexroth tries to wrangle Winters into attending the 1936 Western Writers Conference, which was to be a big oppositional-writers love fest. Winters voices some radical opinions (especially about Communism), and hints at his political activities, but is absolutely averse to the "let's get together and speak truth, not to power, but to ourselves" ethos of the radical writers congress. So Winters wasn't one of the boys, and he didn't write in the approved style of the bien-pensants, and, as far as his reputation goes, that seems to have meant more than the gutsy stands for the left that he actually did take. (Lest we think this kind of thinking dead, I might mention a big argument I got into after the Chicago MSA a few years ago, in which some people ganged up on Stephen Burt in his absence, calling him a right-winger. Some of Steve's poems rhyme, and he hangs with Helen Vendler, but I'm not inclined to the belief that this makes for right-wingery in politics — Steve was out there knocking on doors and holding placards for the good guys during the '04 elections, I recall, while I was curled up with my Mallarmé and my self-righteousness).

So this idea of the oppositional poet isn't entirely about political beliefs: it's about belonging as much as it is about believing. And one belongs, in no small measure, by displaying the appropriate formal plumage. Politics takes a back seat.

Anyway. Reginald Shepherd's Pleiades piece gets to the core of these issues by pointing out that there's kind of a disconnect between the things we think we mean when we speak of "oppositional poetry" and the what we actually mean. Shepherd begins by smacking both the poetry of "earnestly mundane anecdote" and the poetry of "blank-eyed, knee-jerk irony" upside their respective heads. He then goes on to say:

I am particularly disturbed by the self-righteous complacency of what Ron Slate calls the avant-gardeners, so smugly convinced that the grass on their side of the fence is not only greener but more virtuous. Their willful blindness to work by anyone who isn't a member of their club is especially problematic in light of their project's justification by its spirit of exploration and openness to the unknown. When it comes to the work of anyone they label a member of the "School of Quietude," all is already known, and there is never any doubt as to who is a member of this so-called school. If you're not one of us, you're one of them, and it is you who (by definition) are guilty of complacency and self-satisfaction. Such unnuanced either/or thinking is the opposite of openness and exploration, though it could be termed "oppositional" in a pejorative sense.

Zing! I mean, there it is: a lot of poets who think they're "oppositional" in the sense of opposing the (mysteriously linked) dominant aesthetic and political forces, are really "oppositional" in a very different sense: their most cherished belief is that there are two opposing forces in the world, and they yearn to be clearly identified with one side, and to condemn the other side. Much more than actual politics, this will to brand-identity motivates the thinking of such poets. (Memo to those who think formal experiment is political opposition: maybe it is, sometimes, but Dick Cheney does not fear your disjunction). Shepherd drives the point home with a great quote from Anne Lauterbach:

The aspiring young poet begins to write in such a way as to invite a certain critical attention, to 'fit' her work into one or another critical category. This is the main function of being identified with a group or school, to draw critical attention that individual poets, not affiliated with a movement or group, cannot easily attract. "New York School" or "Language Poetry" are given brand-name status, commidifying and homogenizing, so that critics (and poets) can make general identifications and totalizing critiques without having to actually contend with the specific differences between so-called members of the group.

I don't think it's really any coincidence that the biggest pusher of the us-vs-them version of oppositionality, Ron Silliman, is also the biggest pusher of the catchphrase "poetry is community." Yeah, I know, Ron says he likes some non-langpo types, like Robert Hass (whom everyone has always liked, by the way, all through the theory wars of the 80s and 90s — for reasons I tried to investigate in the Hass chapter in Laureates and Heretics which I am promising not to talk about any more, though it is coming out this fall and will make an excellent gift for the whole family...). But unless Ron drops the whole "School of Quietude vs. Post-Avant" distinction, his protestations of bipartisanship ring about as hollow as George W. Bush's. The "oppositional" thing seems less about politics than about belonging (or, if you're in a bad mood, you could say conforming) to a community. Remember that old Who movie Quadrophenia? You can only tell you're a rocker by showing that you're not a mod. And the ruthless class structure goes on unperturbed while the two groups bash away at each other. I demand someone remake this movie, setting it at the 2006 MLA and casting Charles Bernstein in the lead!

Anyway. This bourgeois poet needs to get back to his fabulous Sumatran coffee. And to his poetic community: Stephen Collis just sent me his new chapbook, which is formally audacious in all kinds of ways. I'm hoping to blog about it later this week...

Blogging the MSA Part Two: The Two Cultures

Hey y'all (I'm trying to blend in with the good people of Oklahoma, so I hope you'll bear with my affected "y'all," which I think may be indigineous to these climes). So y'all remember C.P. Snow's classic essay The Two Cultures, right? The one about how the sciences and the humanities had become two very different animals, incapable of communicating with one another except through a rudimentary system of grunts and mewlings? Well, I'm not going to say anything much about all that, but Snow's title seems like a good jumping-off point for the second installment of my ongoing chronicle of the eighth annual Modernist Studies Association. And I report from the field, folks: live from the 14th floor of the Doubletree Hotel in Tulsa, just down the hall from Michael Bibby, with whom I (and Grant Jenkins and George Hart and Tenley Bank) tore up certain parts of Route 66 last night. If by tearing up we mean having a beer or two and talking about teaching, his new book, my old book, and the horrifying truth about parenthood. Yep. Anyway. A lone ant from a tweedy anthill, ego scriptor.

So what's the "two cultures" angle on the MSA? It goes something like this:

Yesterday I was moaning and whining about the culture of ordinary academe, wringing my hands about how so many profs feel pressure from their higher-ups to write on certain prescribed topics in certain prescribed ways. I cringed and blanched at the administered nature of it all, the harnessing of the life of the mind into narrow specialities and narrowly-conceived genres of writing (I refer to how our genres of writing about literature are narrow — at least if they're going to be considered legit by the thesis committees, hiring committees, tenure committees, promotions committees, not to mention the hiring and promotions committees at the institutions where one hopes to encounter that great mirage, The Better Gig). I also bemoaned what I thought was a decline of participation by the less conventional academic conventioneers, the actual living poets and their devoted critics. Such types — especially the Legions of Langpo — once roamed the great savannahs of MSAs past with impunity, but this year the herd seemed rather thinned.

That was yesterday. Today, after retiring to my base camp and consulting my carefully compiled field notes, I've decided that there are two distinct cultures of literary study here at the MSA. The dominant one is the beast I described with such dismay yesterday: an administered and regulated and prescribed and sort of nervous creature. The counter-culture, though, is a stronger-than-I'd thought language poetry scene of sorts. This creature takes a very different form, but one that is not necessarily any more benign. Let me fumble through my safari gear and see what conclusions I can draw from my notes. Ah yes. Here's the stuff. Let's start with the dominant culture of the convention:


Name of Creature: Homo Academicus Modicus
Form of Discourse about Literature: Standardized (genres: peer-reviewed article, peer-reviewed book, nervous and defensive conference paper, generally comparing two writers in terms derived from a Revered Theorist)
Motivations: self-preservation, career security in a climate of relative scarcity
Relation to Others: professional, after the gestation period in grad school, where collective misery makes for a feeling of ritual belonging.
Notes: See my post from yesterday for observations on the inner life and outer behavior of the creature.

And now for the counter-culture of the convention:

Name of Creature: Vates Lingua Auto-Laudatius
Form of Discourse about Literature: Various, but with particular emphasis on the following:

A. Complimentary remarks about fellow language poets and a narrow canon of approved others.
B. Obfuscatory verbiage about European theorists from the Prescribed List, often combined with A, above.
C. General remarks about the political evils of the world, and the redemptive power of the kinds of poets mentioned in A., above.
D. Catalogs of the names of other members of the tribe, uttered ritualistically in order to consolidate the sense of belonging, and the sense of the specialness of the tribe.
E. Shout-outs to their homies in the room, all of whom are, to judge from the content of the shout-outs, well above average.

Motivations: The Advancement of the Cause of the Group. Lauditory commentary on one another's work, the creation of panels and publications about one's comerades, the propagation of the species via one's disciple-grad students, and similiar activities are the means to this end.
Relation to Others:Unlike the administered, professional, distant, Weberian world of Homo Academicus Modicus, Vates Lingua Auto-Laudatius lives in a world rich in face-to-face tribal interaction, a warm community of the likeminded. What might be taken as conflicts of interest in a culture that aspired to the (impossible) ideal of disinterest are here celebrated. "As I was having dinner with [name of specific Vates Lingua Auto-Laudatius on whose work one is about to speak during a panel], I was thinking about how important our work together has been..." What might be taken as indecorous actions by Homo Academicus Modicus are here considered quite acceptable -- working a mention of a book about oneself and one's friends that one has co-authored with one's friends into a panel on one's friends given with one's friends, say.
NotesThere is a powerful appeal to all this, especially when set against the background of the colder, less supportive world of Homo Academicus Modicus. There is less fear in this world, and no sense of administrative surveillance, though the unspoken codes of conduct are as real and as restrictive as in any small, premodern village (one doesn't speak ill of the tribe in front of the tribe, one venerates the appropriate gods and only the appropriate gods, one walks in suspicion of outsiders, and considers most of what outsiders have to say about the village to be pernicious lies told by the hostile). There is an apparently — and perhaps actually —greater variety of forms in which one may write or speak about literature, though the canon of texts is, perhaps, somewhat narrow, and public feuding is as discouraged as it is among Homo Academicus Modicus.

So. How to choose between the dominant culture and the counter-culture? One needn't run with either crowd, I suppose. And I admit I get a certain no-doubt-illegitimate frisson from telling myself I can keep my distance from both species, bestriding the MSA like some Byronic collossus as I shout out lines from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage like:

But soon he knew himself the most unfit
Of men to herd with Man; with whom he held
Little in common; untaught to submit
His thoughts to others, though his soul was quell'd
In youth by his own thoughts; still uncompell'd,
He would not yield dominion of his mind
To spirits against whom his own rebell'd...

Oh yeah. Like a rebel without a cause. Like a rolling stone. Born to be wild! Death before dishonor! Unchained to the mere thoughts of man, I rise in glorious and splendid isolation above the ... what's that? I've got to get my annual self-evaluation in to the department chair this week? But there's no time! I've got to update my vita, and put the bibliography of my paper into MLA format. And it's cold out and I can't find my tweed jacket... (cut to shot of Archambeau wandering off through the groves of academe, the tail end of his knit tie flopping into his styrofoam cup of coffee as he mutters about committee meetings and the grading of essays).

Coda Concerning Adorno

I unearthed this bit about Adorno on Barret Watten's Site. It's a pretty sharp (if dubiously syntaxed) take on how the autonomous artwork is both a critique and a symptom of the conditions in the world from which it comes:

At the heart of the aesthetic, for Adorno, was precisely a relation to necessity, directly connected to the determination of necessity by nature, that can be found in the hybrid aesthetics of market socialism. The "windowless monad" of the artwork still conveys its social constructedness through the critical distance from the relations of production it demands to be a work of art; the artwork is critical precisely insofar as it escapes from mere necessity (of production and consumption) as its fundamental determinant.

The Word From Tulsa: Blogging the MSA 8, Part One

You know, the last time I attached the phrase "part one" to a post, I never quite got around to creating a "part two," so I know I'm on thin ice in labeling this, my dispatch from the eighth annual Modernist Studies Association conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma the first part of a series. But I intend to write daily dispatches from the trenches of the Doubletree Hotel. Honest.

Eric Hertz, an old pal from grad school, jumped me at O'Hare, and at the Tulsa luggage rack I ran into Jim Hansen, another old Notre Dame guy. Together we trucked it in to the hotel, where we hooked up with Grant Jenkins, last seen dancing samba with Cate Ramsden at the Miramar bar after the &NOW Festival.

Despite the cameraderie, though, I feel a little foreboding about the conference, which gets underway in earnest today (actually, the 8:30 a.m. sessions are well underway, but the unshaven and otherwise unpresentable Archambeau still lingers over his crappy room-service coffee, so enfeebled hath old age rendered him etc.). Why foreboding, you ask? Well, for one thing, it looks like the poets have largely abandoned the MSA. The conference used to get a healthy dose of the language poetry crowd and their poetic and critical fellow-travellers: you'd find yourself in the elevator with Bob Perelman, Barret Watten, Susan Howe and Charles Altieri. Watten's still here (we'll be reading together along with illustrious others tomorrow night), and so is Benjamin Friedlander, but by and large the actual living writers and the people who hang with/write about them seem to have given up on the conference. I'm not sure why, but I think the trend is real: my colleague the freakstream novelist, used to come to the MSA but has given it up, saying "I just don't like those people..." So that's evidence for foreboding point number one: fewer poets, plus more people who define themselves by having a specific field of study, equals Bob wondering whether this may be turning into another big standard academic gesselschaft festival, along the lines of the MLA and its regional offshoots.

Foreboding point number two has to do with the conversation at the expensively catered, big-ass opening reception last night. Don't get me wrong: I talked to some cool people, yukked it up happily, and learned a few things, most notably from Jim Hansen, who knows a lot about Adorno, and who may start up a blog to get in on the red-hot prof-on-Adorno action on Culture Industry, Pravda Kid and my own humble blog. I nattered away to him about things various, including my new work on the conundrum of the poet since the advent of full-scale aesthetic autonomy, and he pointed out that much of Beckett's work is a kind of dramatization, even a burlesque, of the idea of the autonomous artist's predicament (being free but isolated and possibly, just possibly, useless to the world). All those verbal artists of Beckett's, buried up to their neck in sand or living in trash cans, yearning, from their isolation, for some connection to the world or some definite purpose. Great! I'm going to have to riff on this for a few pages in my next book. But intriguing talk of Beckett aside, I heard, and overheard, and took part in, a distressingly large number of conversations of the genre I suppose we could call "l'anxiété d'académie."

What's this anxiety all about? Well, I suppose I use the French terms to draw a kind of parallel between academe today and the French academic painting establishment of the late nineteenth century. I mean, I kept running into people who were fretting about pleasing the powers-that-be in their particular institutions: they expressed their anxieties variously. Examples include:

A yearning to blog, balanced by a fear that senior colleagues would find out about it and consider it a waste of time.

An expression of frustration at how they "have to" write things they don't want to write in order to please their senior colleagues (this is not always an "I don't want to write but just teach really well" sentiment -- sometimes it was followed by an expression of hope that someday they'll really be able to write the book they really want to write.

An anxiety that their book won't be published by one of the dozen or so presses their senior colleagues consider legitimate.

Ay yi yi. I mean, the sense of a mighty set of graybeards dictating what one may or may not do, and limiting the weirdness and waywardness of one's intellectual and creative impulses -- this is a nigthmare version of academe, and puts it into too-close a comparison with the nineteenth century French art establishment, with its disdain for Impressionism, Fauvism, and all the rest. You know, the academy that kicked Manet's "Dejuner Sur L'Herbe" out of the Salon.

What we need is the spirit of the Salon Des Refuses, the Salon that embraced with pride the work kicked out of the Salon. And we have it, too, in the world of oddball small presses, freaky journals, and of course in the Mighty Mighty Blogosphere. Of course, like the Salon Des Refuses and Rodney Dangerfield, it can't get no respect. But neither could punk rock, long may it wave its shredded and safety-pin pierced banner.

Anyway, I'm hoping all my foreboding is for misguided: in a few minutes I'm going to hit my first real panel. With any luck, my crotchety old associate prof fog of pessimistic funk will be blown away by some powerful grad-student fireball of intellectual freedom. Vive les jeunes!