Educating Ezra

What thou lovest well remains,
                                  the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
              or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee

Those are probably the best-known lines of Ezra Pound's "Canto 81." The passage lodged itself in my head when I was a modernism-obsessed undergraduate, and I still sometimes wake up with those lines echoing in my ears. Canto 81 is one of the Pisan Cantos, written after Pound had been captured by the American army in Italy, and was being held in a detention cage, uncertain of his fate but fearing the worst: that his pro-Mussolini radio broadcasts would soon see him swinging from a hangman's rope. So the desperation in those lines is real enough: Pound, here, is a man looking at the end, and wondering what, when we stare into the abyss, remains for us.

If the sentiments are real, though, the diction is stilted and affected (although very much of a piece with the mixed-diction and quotation-filled texture of The Cantos and, indeed, of Pound's work as a whole). Why such a strange, non-contemporary diction? Of course there have been plenty of times and places when poetry has been written in archaic diction: Dante, for example, was considered an oddball for not writing in the archaic Latin language, and had to defend his use ofthe contemporary Italian language in De Vulgari Eloquentia — a treatise, ironically enough, written in Latin. But why this particular instance of a poet writing in such an idiom? It was by no means the only convention out there: it certainly wasn't the idiom of William Carlos Williams.

One explanation lies in Pound's education. Pound was part of the first generation of American poets in which significant numbers of poets were the products of graduate school. Of course graduate study in language and literature was different in the early years of the twentieth century than it is now: it was dominated by philology, the tracing of linguistic evolution, often in literary texts. There's a whole interesting history of how philology became the dominant mode of literary study in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Gerald Graff's Professing Literature tells the story well), much of it having to do with nationalism and with the kind of disciplinary-legitimacy anxiety that has been the fate of English and the humanities in general ever since the rise of the research university model. But none of that matters, here, I suppose: the important thing is that Pound enters into literature via a specific academic path, and gets a very particular perspective on literature: historical and linguistic-centered. It's quite a bit different than, say, William Blake's point of entry (Evangelical Protestant Bible study) or Alexander Pope's point of entry (Greek and Latin classics). If Blake's mythical, prophetic imagination can be traced to his educational roots, and Pope's neoclassicism to his, we can just as surely find in Pound's education the roots of his own polyglot, historical, found-text-obsessed poetic, and the source of his ease in feeling authorized to write in archaic-sounding language. An attachment to philology could also explain Pound's early attraction to Browning, and the faux-archaic speech of his dramatic monologues.

Pound's early investment in the cultural past can also be seen as contributing to his particular brand of modernism. He, like Eliot, wanted to preserve the past, to (as he famously put it) "make it new." It's a project of cultural rescue, quite different from, say F.T. Marinetti's Futurism, which called for the destruction of Venice and all its statuary. (Nationality has got to be significant here, too: Pound and Eliot came from a country feeling a kind of history-deficit, while Marinetti's generation felt oppressed by the enormous cultural achievement of Italy). Pound, in a way, isn't a radical, but a kind of reform conservative, looking to rejuvenate rather than eject (or, for that matter, mummify with reverence) the cultural heritage.

Of course, reform conservatism depends on a sense that the past and the present can be made to accommodate one another. When the conservative mind comes to see the present as having moved too far away from what is valued in the past, a strange mutation occurs, and he becomes what Klaus Epstien, in his monumental study The Genesis of German Conservatism, calls a "revolutionary conservative." This is a category as paradoxical as it sounds. Normally, conservatives want to preserve some elements of the past, or of the status quo (when the status quo is capitalistic, this gets weird, since capitalism depends on an ongoing process of creative destruction, but that's another story). The revolutionary conservative feels his cause is so lost he needs a radical program to wipe away the present and restore what he imagines to have been the best elements of the past (of course there really is no restoration — the thing about the past being that you can't get there from here). When Pound turned to Mussolini and Fascism, I'm pretty sure it was out of a deep-seated conservative disposition that had become terribly alienated by the present age. It's tragic stuff, really.

There's another element of Pound's characteristic means of addressing himself to the reader that isn't connected to his educational background, at least not directly: his sense of himself as our instructor. As Gertrude Stein famously, and snarkily, put it, Pound was "a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not." Stein, of course, was full-on committed to an experimental agenda, in which formal innovation was central, and instruction seemed kind of quaint. But Pound was attached to an older model of the poet. Someone like Stein didn't really expect a big audience, and she certainly didn't expect for her words to echo in the halls of power. But Pound, naively, wanted something like the Victorian relation of poet to audience. There have been a number of really fine studies on the relation of the Victorian writer to audience (the best of them, Stefan Collini's Public Moralists doesn't much deal with poetry, but the points he makes there transfer to certain Victorian poets, especially Tennyson. Believe me here: one of the main points I'm trying to make about Tennyson in the book I'm writing is really just a transposition of Collini's ideas to Tennyson's work). Long story short, Collini's argument is that, in the Victorian period, there was a kind of intimacy between important figures from realms like politics and (certain) literary people: he points out how the Athenaeum Club, founded for the power-elite, took to admitting writers on a regular basis (there's a list of prominent writers admitted to the Athenaeum, by the way, and it's well worth a look). This allowed for a kind of co-opting of writers by the power elite (think of how Tennyson became the trumpeter of Queen and Country), and allowed writers to think of their work as being heard, as having a public role, as mattering to those in power. In such a context, writers didn't emphasize form: they became moralists, seeking to ameliorate the excesses of the system (but never to challenge the system directly — this could lose them the indulgence of the power elite).

Pound certainly wanted a situation like this: even near the end, when he was locked up in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, he was fond of preaching economic policy, and once sent a visiting Senator's wife home with a copy of The Unwobbling Pivot as a guide to politics for her husband. But the discursive situation of poetry had changed: those in power were no longer rubbing shoulders with poets at the club, and poets were not often obsessed with being the kind of public moralists Collini described. If there's a way Pound's education comes into play here, it's this: the very existence of graduate programs like his on a large scale was a sign of the increasing specialization of knowledge, of the growth of a technocratic world where government goes its way and literature goes off on its own path. Pound, the product of this new world, longed for the older one, and wrote as if he were in it, becoming shriller and shriller as time went by. (I wish I could remember the name of the critic who wrote that Pound "overestimated the relevance" of his kind of literary knowledge to the political crises of his time — this critic, whoever he is, is the perfect product of our world, where knowledge is rigidly categorized). Anyway: in this instance Pound's education isn't so much an influence on him as it is a symptom of a cultural condition he didn't fully recognize, and would never fully accept. And for all the talk of poetry and politics now, and of speaking truth to power, I think by and large most poets have, at some level, accepted the new situation. I mean, I can't imagine John Ashbery or Ted Kooser or Jorie Graham actually expecting that the world of power would take their ideas on social policy seriously. It'd be delusional if they did. And would we really want them to operate as if they did expect this? It could drive them as crazy as it drove Pound, and I don't think we want to see any of them locked away in St. Elizabeth's.

The Politics of Poetry

A while ago David Orr had a very sharp piece in Poetry about the politics of poetry. He was interested in why it's such a perpetually hot topic. "We don't spend much time wondering what poetry has to do with neuroscience or television writing or college basketball," wrote Orr, "yet these are important areas of American life that involve assertions about truth, form, morality, and the nature of culture—all subjects regularly claimed as poetry's turf."

Around the same time, Lucia Perillo posted to Poetry's Harriet blog about the left-wingishness of many American poets. She speculated that "it may be that poets are aligned with the left because they tend to share the concerns of the poor, or at least the not-rich, having only moderate incomes and job stability." An interesting hypothesis, I thought, but one that doesn't really look all that true: compared to the population as a whole, American poets aren't, as a rule, particularly downtrodden (of course there are exceptions).

Anyway, reading Orr and Perillo got me thinking, and I put together an essay that tries, in its bumbling way, to shed some light on these issues from a sociological perspective. Why do so many poets think of their work as political? Does it make sense for them to do so? And what's with the prevailing left-of-center view (which I share, but which must have some sociological explanation) (which doesn't mean it isn't a valid political viewpoint). The essay I came up with is called "Poetry, Politics, and Leanings-Left" and it's in the November issue of Poetry, and also available online.

I talk about some of the same things I cover in the essay in the last half of this month's Poetry Foundation podcast, "The Savage Detective Turns to Poetry" (I'm not the savage detective: that's the much-more glamorous Roberto Bolaño, whose poetry is also featured). I thought I was groggy when we recorded the interview, but apparently the jug of java I downed just beforehand had kicked in by the time I started speaking: in contrast to the calm, controlled Don Share and Chris Wiman, I fear I may sound like some kind of jittery fiend, the kind of guy who'd grab you by the elbow on the subway and give you his nine-part theory on how the Aztecs invented the internet. (Did I ever explain how the Aztecs did that? No? Okay! A topic for my next post!).

And speaking of jittery fiends, I'm about to jump back into the fiend-friendly environment that is the blogosphere to read obsessively —nay, with maniacal zeal — about the election! Why? Because it's just like the ending of Peter Pan — you know, the part of the movie where, if we all clap hard enough, Tinkerbell will live. I mean, isn't it true that every time you read an online analysis of a swing state poll, Barack Obama gets just a little closer to the White House?

Art and Life from Aestheticism to Langpo

So check it out: Kelly Comfort, an amazing polymath who knows about Latin American modernism, Cuban writing, and German literature, has cooked up a collection of essays called Art and Life in Aestheticism: De-Humanizing and Re-Humanizing Art, the Artist, and the Aesthetic Receptor. The second part of the title may be a bit of a mouthfull, but it does its job, giving as it does a shout-out to José Ortega y Gasset's 1925 treatise The Dehumanization of Art, which examined with a skeptical (but not a dismissive) eye the emerging emphasis on formalism in the art of the twentieth century. The essays in Kelly's book tackle ideas of formalism and the aesthetic as they intersect with, or eschew, lived experience, the social, and the political. The emphasis of the book is on the aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century, but the essays reach further back in time, and forward as well, as far as the present day, with a notes in one essay (by, uh, me) on Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, and company.

Here's what Kelly came up with when the good people at Palgrave MacMillan had her sum the whole project up in a couple of sentences:

Art for art's sake addresses the relationship between art and life, between the aesthetic and the social, and promotes the former term over the latter one in each instance. Although it has long been argued that aestheticism aims to de-humanize art, this volume seeks to consider the counterclaim that such de-humanization can also lead to re-humanization, to a deepened relationship between the aesthetic sphere and the world at large and between the artistic receptor and his or her human existence.

The book gathers together essays on a surprising range of authors: Baudelaire, Rossetti, Huysmans, Wilde, Nietzsche, André Breton, Nabokov, Adorno, Barthes and many more. Here's the opening of my own contribution, an essay called "The Aesthetic Anxiety: Avant-Garde Poetics, Autonomous Aesthetics, and the Idea of Politics":

If you are personally acquainted with any significant number of poets, you will perhaps not be surprised to find that the thesis of this essay is as follows: poets want to have their cake and eat it too. The particulars of the argument, though, go beyond the intuitive and the obvious, or so I hope. What I want to say is this: since the nineteenth century, poets have faced a dilemma. On the one hand, many poets have felt the allure of the radical freedoms of an entirely autonomous art, an art not in the heteronomous service of any religious function, ideological formation, moral system, cause, or institution, an art that exists for art’s sake alone. On the other hand, poets have faced the anxieties that such autonomy seems, inevitably, to create: fears of losing their readerships, their social roles, and their political utility. Many poets of the twentieth century, especially those affiliated with avant-garde movements, have been haunted by such anxieties, and have sought to assuage them by claiming that a commitment to aesthetic autonomy can, in and of itself, be a form of political action. Such an identification does not bridge the chasm between a belief in autonomous art and a belief in the kind of heteronomous art that serves a cause. Rather, it denies the existence of such a gap, and asserts that the disinterested pursuit of art for its own sake is also, by its very nature, politically efficacious.

Positions of this kind are by their nature fraught with contradictions, and raise many a question. Can withdrawal from political engagement be anything other than quietism? What are the politics of audience, when the art speaks neither to the disempowered classes nor to a significant element of the power elite? Can a political art still be autonomous, or does it bend its craft to a political end? Indeed, the attempt to work through such questions has been the driving force behind many an avant-garde polemic. Despite the difficulty of maintaining the identity of aesthetic autonomy and political utility, though, this dream of the poets has endured for the better part of a century.

Two groups of poets who attempt to identify aesthetic autonomy with the political — the surrealists and the language poets — are of particular interest because of the different forms of politics to which they to link autonomous aesthetics. Starting in the 1920s, the surrealists, under the general guidance of André Breton, sought a link between the radical imaginative freedom of their movement and the project of Communist revolution. Later, beginning in the 1970s, the American language poets sought to identify aesthetic freedom with a kind of negative politics — a politics of critique and resistance, rather than one conducted with a specific revolutionary utopia in mind. Whatever the form of politics, though, the enduring nature of the poet’s anxiety about reconciling aesthetic autonomy and political efficacy indicates that we may have reached a point in the history of poetics in which what I am calling the aesthetic anxiety (that is, the anxiety about the apparent political and social inutility of autonomous art) isn’t so much a passing crisis as it is a lasting condition of poetic production. Whether the solution to this anxiety proposed by the avant-garde poets can survive is, of course, another question, and one to which the answer, increasingly, seems to be “no.”

Langpo fundamentalists will probably want to punch me, but I'm hoping they'll get bored by my turgid academic prose half-way through the essay, and I'll be able to sneak off to my escape while they snore.

Anyway. You can pre-order the book now from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Shop early! It makes a great gift!

Negative Legislators: Ethics of the Post-Avant

Yes, Virginia, there is a definable post-avant, and its characteristic stylistic and ethical moves come, by and large, from particular generational experiences. At least that's the conclusion I'm prepared to draw from this week's web-browsing, magazine-reading, poem-downloading, blog-skimming, and lunching-with-poets. (Today's lunch was a particularly good curry at a new Irish pub — the kind of curry that can give a guy the courage to generalize and reify at will).

Exhibit A: Who You Callin' Post-Avant?

So. For exhibit A, I point you over to the Poetry Foundation's "Harriet" blog, where the ever-incisive Reginald Shepherd has a post up called "Who You Callin' 'Post-Avant'?". Here he offers as good a short definition of the poet-avant as I've seen:

"Post-avant" (as in, "post-avant-garde"—insider groups love shorthand) poets can be described as writers who, at their best, have imbibed the lessons of the modernists and their successors in what might be called the experimental or avant-garde stream of American poets, including the Objectivists (especially Oppen and Zukofsky), what have been called the New American Poetries (from Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan to John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara), particularly the Projectivist/Black Mountain School and the New York School(s), and the Language poets (including such poets and polemicists as Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman), without feeling the need (as so many other poetic formations have) to pledge allegiance to a particular group identity (the poetry world is full of fence-building and turf wars) or a particular mode of proceeding artistically.... Though many of these poets have projects and even systems, there aren’t a lot of programs. There’s much prose writing and thinking about poetry, and many, many blogs (this is a very wired “generation”), but not many manifestoes.

Post-avants, or elliptical poets (the term used by Steve Burt, among others), or poets of “lyrical investigations” (Shepherd's own term), tend, says Shepherd,

to eschew the standard and standardized autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical anecdote which predominates in what’s called (usually pejoratively) “mainstream” poetry. Indeed, they frequently problematize and question the notions of self and of personal experience. But they don't just discard the self as an ideological illusion. As well, they tend to avoid or at least seriously complicate narrative of any variety. They incorporate fracture and disjunction without enthroning it as a ruling principle. They are interested in exploring, interrogating, and sometimes exploding language, identity, and society, without giving up on the pleasures, challenges, and resources of the traditional lyric. Their work combines the lyric’s creative impulse with the critical impulse of Language poetry. Theirs is a magpie-like eclecticism, that draws from whatever materials, traditions and techniques are of interest and of use, however seemingly incompatible, however ideologically opposed historically. They don't try to destroy the past for the sake of the future, or trumpet teleological notions (let alone grand narratives) of artistic "progress" or "advance" ...

This all seems about right to me: the eclecticism, the crossing of the lyrical with the non-lyrical (or of the expressivist with the constructivist, to dragoon Marjorie Perloff's terms into the mix), and the generally non-heroic sense of the poet's historical mission — I've seen these over and over in the works of the poets of my own generation (I was born in May of '68, which means I'm about to turn 40, buy a sports car or perhaps a sailboat, and go into full-on midlife male outfreakage. Watch this blog for signs of my impending disgrace).

That non-heroic, non-manifesto-writing ethos certainly applies to the post-avant sense of artistic progress. I mean, when you read the polemics of, say, the young Ezra Pound ("to break the pentameter, that was the first heave"), you get a sense that he really believes there's a kind of advancement taking place. It can seem a lot like one of those old-school charts of evolution, with the monkey-like Victorians at one end of things, and the proudly non-knuckle-dragging modernists at the other:

You get a similar sense from many critical accounts of what happened to poetry around the time of Robert Lowell's Life Studies: poets, it seemed, had suddenly broken through stuffy mid-century formalism and into a new, advanced form of freedom (in Modern Poetry After Modernism James Longenbach called this the "breakthrough narrative" version of American poetry). And although it's been satirized by some of the language poets themselves, there's often a heroic strain in langpo polemics, a sense of intrepidly bearing the art forward to some New Jerusalem while fighting back the undead armies of tradition. There's very little of that in the post-avant crowd. The post-avant seems to have very little interest in making grand claims of any kind: not only does it eschew a sense of heroic poetic progress, it eschews big political or spiritual claims. For better or for worse, you just don't find anyone acting the revolutionary or guru the way Allen Ginsberg did.

Exhibit B: The Negative Legislator

I suppose it is no accident, then, that George Oppen has had a kind of renaissance in our time. Consider what James Longenbach says about him in Exhibit B, a passage from his recent review of Oppen's selected prose in The Nation:

Neither before nor after his silence [a nearly three-decade hiatus from publishing poetry] was Oppen inclined toward didactic poetry; he considered the rhetorical excess of political poems--like the rhetorical excess of political meetings--to be "merely excruciating." In the early 1930s Oppen was associated with the Objectivist movement, a loose association of avant-garde poets that also included Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff and Lorine Niedecker. And while Discrete Series, his first book, is starkly elliptical, his later work combines Objectivist precision with a tender lyricism that his more staunchly experimental colleagues disdained:

Miracle of the children the brilliant
Children  the word
Liquid as woodlands  Children?

When she was a child I read Exodus
To my daughter  'The children of Israel...'

Pillar of fire
Pillar of cloud.

No other poet sounds like this. However adamant Oppen's convictions, his meticulously shaped lines embody a music of deference--a constitutional unwillingness to dominate the world by virtue of having understood it. True poetry, says Oppen in an essay collected in Selected Prose, is written in "a language that tests itself."

Here, Oppen comes across as a man with ethical qualms about making big claims. I get it: I mean, Oppen lived through that whole 1930s business of urgent-yet-mindnumbing political wranglings — the splitting of Trotskyist hairs while the world burned, starved, and suffered horribly, often under the banner of one or another totalizing ideology. Even after nearly eight years of pseudo-authoritarian rule here in the U.S., it's hard for us to imagine anything like the ideological pressure of a time when even so gentle and benevolent a soul as W.H. Auden found himself advocating political violence in the name of The Cause, as he did when he wrote of the need for "the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder" in his great-but-troubling poem "Spain."

So Oppen's not going to present himself as a prophetic figure, or a vatic poet with special insight. He's not going go all André Breton and write manifestos on how aesthetic liberation and political liberation are one and the same. And one of the ways he's going to express his qualms is at the level of form: his lyricism itself will often be checked by various elisions and distancing strategies. This isn't the poet as Shelley's "unacknowledged legislator" creating the laws of the future. This is the poet who's absorbed the same lessons as had the Adorno of Negative Dialectics: to walk in fear of totalization, especially of easy totalization. In fact, the Oppen Longenbach presents reminds me a just a little of that other saint in the post-avant poet's canon of forefathers, John Ashbery — especially the John Ashbery descibed by Stephen Stepanchev in his book Modern American Poetry Since 1945 as a poet who "seems to fear too much coherence as being a form of dishonesty or falseness" because "an orderly syntax sometimes forces the poet to lie, to say easy things that he had not intended."

In fact, this kind of reticence (often expressed at the level of form) regarding statement, didacticism, prescription, visionary experience, etc. is itself a kind of ethical imperative one infers from the post-avants and their precursors. I mean, there's an ethic to the whole "unwillingness to dominate the world" through didactic statement, and in the sense that "too much coherence [is] being a form of dishonesty or falseness." The imperative here is negative, though: make no laws, tout no truth-claims, avow no total understanding, nor anything close to it. It's a kind of Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.

Exhibit C: Some Negative Legislation

As an actual example of an actual post-avant poem actually embodying this ethic of negative legislation, let me point to what I think is a very sharp poem, hot off the pdf file I downloaded (gratis!) from Eric Elshtain's Beard of Bees Press website. It's the opening poem from Gregory Fraser's chapbook A Different Bother:

Miles

I piped the dizzy for who knows how, argued,
Without catacombs there can stand no town,
and one night slid my head through the crown
at church, then followed a river glued

to its ember. Who couldn’t predict my brass
would one day burst? That I, end-time, would stew
in a velvet folly? A bashful kid, I consented to
spoil the mildew’s nap, decapitate the grass,

haul trash to the curb in bags that were, after
transport, trash themselves. Never once did I aid
the roaches treated like thugs in black suede.
By travel, I hoped to find not heaven, but a rafter

where mind and body hang, negating one another.
No such. Wind combed back the cattails, I
turned in a circle that wouldn’t point. Why decry
the addict, who only seeks a different bother?

Someplace florid, a prince paints a topical picture.
Imagine—art about actual happenings! Of course,
of course, of course, of course,
the unathletic started in: Old world with your

lovely clarities, etc. Then I thought of the stars—
what trumpeted commotions fill their repertoires.

Did you notice the ABBA-CDDC etc. rhyme scheme in the quatrians, culminating in the rhyming couplet at the end? It's a kind of extended-play Shakespearian sonnet, which itself shows something of the historical openness of the post-avant. A hard-core avant-gardist of the early 20th century would sooner have been caught dining with a petit-bourgeois policeman than have written such a thing, but now we're more laid back about all that.

More importantly, though, the poem really shows a lot of the qualities Reginald Shepherd saw as typically post-avant. Does the poem "problematize and question the notions of self and of personal experience" without "discard[ing] the self as an ideological illusion," as Shephard suggest the post-avant poem does? Sure! I mean, "I piped the dizzy for who knows how" comes straight out of the John Berryman playbook, offering an odd bit of diction and syntax that nevertheless obliquely suggest an inner, emotional experience. And through the first few stanzas there's a strong suggestion of autobiography, albeit with a great deal of static on the channel. The post-avant poet, as Shepherd says, "incorporate[s] fracture and disjunction without enthroning it as a ruling principle" — surely that's what we have here: we see a developing self, and get a sense of its quotidian moments (taking out the trash), and its social context (a troubled figure surrounded by those who can see its impending breakdown but don't do much to stop it ("who couldn't predict my brass / would one day burst"). But there's a delicate balancing act going on between lyrical, confessional revelation on the one side and disjunction and fracture on the other.

More importantly still, the poem follows the project of the post-avant negative legislator: it refuses to judge, prescribe, or assume a position of moral authority (except, of course, inasmuch as such refusals are a kind of moral position). We get this most clearly toward the end, in lines like these:

Wind combed back the cattails, I
turned in a circle that wouldn’t point. Why decry
the addict, who only seeks a different bother?

Turning in a circle that won't point: now there's the negative legislator in his natural habitat, a kind of neo-negative-capabilty, in which all contradictory positions and directions are explored, and none taken. That question about the addict is good post-avant stuff, too: it implies a possible moral equivalence between the speaker and the junkie, each of whom is hooked into his own trip. On the one hand, the question seems to imply a kind of "who's to judge?" position. On the other hand, it is a question, not a statement such as "Don't decry the addict...", so it remains ambiguous whether we're even meant to assume the relativism of "who's to judge?" — we can turn around the circle all day, and it just won't point in a particular direction. This is the antithesis of didacticism or poetic legislation (except, again, for the possibility that a rigorous refusal to point in any particular direction is itself an ethical position, a kind of disinterestedness or even unworldliness).

And then there's the ending, where we're offered a glimpse of a different kind of art, one that does take up social positions and get all litterature engagée on us:

Someplace florid, a prince paints a topical picture.
Imagine—art about actual happenings! Of course,
of course, of course, of course,
the unathletic started in: Old world with your

lovely clarities, etc. Then I thought of the stars—
what trumpeted commotions fill their repertoires.

There you go: art about actual happenings. But how does the poem coach us to feel about it? Well, like a good post-avant poem, it doesn't coach any one position. The fact that the topical picture is painted by a prince suggests a number of possibilities, most of them negative: that such art is antiquaited; or despite any possible leftish sentiment, that it's ultimately the product of privilige; or that it's all a bit egomanaical and self-important. Then again, there's the breathless "art about actual happenings!" which can read like a statement of envy at the prince's audacity, or as the opposite of that (in which case the breathlessness makes the line read as arch, as a faux-naif faux-excitement about a social project seen as banal). Then there's the wonderful "of course, / of course, of course, of course" — which signifies what? An admission that social engagement is needed, or important, or a necessary alternative to the kind of poem we're reading? Or perhaps it suggests a kind of impatient or world-weary dismissal of socially didactic art (can't you just see the phrases accompanied with a sigh and a dismissive wave of the hand?). You get the idea: we're turning in a circle that won't let us point in any particular direction. Which is kind of the point, I suppose: to establish the poet not as a legislator, but as a negative legislator, whose one firm law is to make no other laws.

Exhibit D: Aeroflot Blue

And here's where I turn to my generational explanation of the post-avant embrace of what I'm calling negative legislation. I came to it from a recent blog entry by Ray Bianchi, in which he maintains that our generation (in this case defined as poets born between 1965 and 1975) tends to have a "sense of the world as a drawer of broken things." Bianchi goes on to say:

The one thing that defines Generation X it is that the world is a drawer of broken things. We are a generation that bridges and our poets do the same. We are trying to put back together a world and to understand what has been lost and adopting what has been found.

When I asked him to elaborate on this at lunch today, he talked about lack of any faith in big, coherent beliefs among our generation of poets. When we came of age in the 80s, we were presented with a big, smiling picture of Reagan's America, full of flags, battleships, the unqualified joy of the free market, etc. etc., but the world around us didn't look like that picture at all. There was no reason to have faith in the big narrative we were offered by Reagan's image factory. At the same time, we'd seen enough hypocrisy and enough backwash-and-burnout from the 60s that we didn't have much faith in its heroic narrative either. That wasn't all, either, Ray opined as the waitress carted our plates away and brought us coffee. All kinds of big narratives were taking a beating. Did you believe Catholicism was a force for good? Well, you got smacked upside the head with all sorts of scandals involving the clergy, creating serious cognitive dissonance. Were you a believer in Israel as a necessary haven for the victims of atrocity? Too many images of the treatment of the Palestinians were coming to light for that narrative to remain spotless. Was family the great saving force in a dark world? The boom in divorce put that belief through an enormous metaphysical Cusinart. One could of course have gone on, but the check came and we had to leave, though not before we remembered Douglas Coupland's not-so-hot-but-generation-defining novel Generation X, and how it opened with the image of a girl at a party wearing a dress in a color that could only be described as "Aeroflot blue," and how it captured the mood of the generation perfectly, with its washed-out reminder of a dead Grand Revolutionary Narrative.



Aeroflot blue, redolent of failed utopias. Where to go after that, except around in circles, refusing to point in any particular direction?

I don't think this applies to all poets of my generation. In fact, I don't think it applies to my own poetry, or at least not much of it (I'm no objective judge here, but I don't think I've ever been much for disjunction). Then again, as I look back on this blog entry and think about proofreading it (you'll have noticed that I haven't), I see in my own disclaimers, choice of tone, and in my ironizing of my own generalizations that I'm just as hesitant about big claims as the next soon-to-be-40 poet in America. For better or for worse.

In Other News

Over at Johannes Göransson's retro-revolutionary-looking Action Yes! web site, you'll find a bunch of freshly-published stuff, including some translations of the Belgian Surrealists Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray I cooked up with Jean-Luc Garneau. Check it out!