Something the English Do: Desirable Discursive Community and Its Origins

Anglophiles present, for the American professor of English, an occupational hazard. One inevitably has colleagues who've spent so many summers in London that you start to let their references to ringing you up or going to the loo go by unremarked. I've never quite been one of these West End-haunting, Guardian reading, BBC4-lovers myself. It's not that I haven't found plenty to love about England (the cheese, the London tube map, Manchester music from the Factory Records era, the perfect shape of the pint glass, etc.). It's just that the countries that have mattered most in my life have all been, in one way or another, less important than England: Belgium, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Iceland. But today's topic is neither Belgian nor Icelandic, boys and girls. It's English. Specifically, it's Something the English Do Way Better then We Do.

I suppose, if I had to give a name to that something, it'd be "the creation of a sense of desirable discursive community." Bear with me, and I think I can explain both what that means, and why the English do it better than we do.

The Sense of Desirable Discursive Community, or: James Campbell and the TLS

Every time I pluck the TLS from my mailbox, I turn immediately to the back page, an assortment of short literary items written by "J.C.," or James Campbell, one of the editors (while he's a Scot, everything about the TLS is profoundly English). It's an odd little assortment, and never fails to charm. In this week's issue, Campbell begins (as he often does) by following up on an earlier entry, this week presenting some answers people had mailed in to a question he'd asked about whether Graham Greene had ever written any of the biography of Robert Louis Stevenson Greene had mentioned in his correspondence. Next, Campbell quotes some snarky comments by authors about the terrible conditions they face in the brutal publishing marketplace — the big reveal coming when he notes that these aren't comments from this week, but from 1909. Campbell then includes an item about T.S. Eliot manuscripts up for sale, a clever note about an old paperback cover of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and ends with a collection of trivia from a recent book on the origins of familiar phrases. In all, it's a pretty typical week at the back page of the TLS. But what's really important aren't any particular entries: what's important is the way one feels while reading Campbell's little anthology. One feels very much a part of a group, a participant in a conversation, even if that participation remains potential rather than actual. That is, when Campbell throws a question (like the one about Greene and Stevenson) out there, you feel "oh, I might've known that." Or at least you feel addressed. And when Campbell makes a wry point about writers as grumblers, the TLS reader (fairly likely to know, if not in fact be, some sort of writer) will feel a sense of connection, of "oh, yes, you and I, Campbell, we understand how these people are." And when he touches on Eliot or Joyce, he touches on something close to the common canon, the texts all English majors of a certain age know, or know of. And so on. The main function of the back page of the TLS is to make you feel welcome, as if you were a member of Joseph Addison's Spectator Club back in the Eighteenth Century, a learned fellow of the world among other learned fellows of the world. You're part of a community. In fact, you're part of a rather distinguished community, a desirable community. Or so it feels.

In fact, of course, the TLS isn't a classic public sphere publication, where the reader is also often the writer, and where there's a real sense of active community. Scale alone prohibits this: the TLS readership survey of 2000 estimated 100,000 weekly readers. You have about as much chance of participating in a conversation with the other readers as you'd have of getting to know everyone at the Superbowl, which tends to get 70,000-100,000 attendees. But that's not the point: a guy like Campbell (whose talent is tremendous) can really make you feel like you're on the inside, sitting at one of the comfortable leather club chairs with the other bookish gentlemen. For all of the very-real insider-centrism of The New York Review of Books (sometimes called The New York Review of One Another's Books), there's nothing like this cultivation of the reader as a (potential, or pretend, or fictional) member of the desirable discursive community. The English do it better than we do.

Further Evidence: The Economist

It's not just the TLS where we find this strong sense of discursive community, either. It happens in a lot of their magazines, especially the tonier ones. Consider The Economist, or, rather, an article from the July/August issue of The Atlantic, in which you can almost see the waves of envy for the British magazine's ability to create discursive community rising like steam from the pages of the American magazine.

In The Atlantic article, "The Newsweekly's Last Stand," Michael Hirschorn reflects on the ongoing success of The Economist at a time when other weekly news magazines (especially American ones) are heading for extinction:

Given that [American news magazines] are faltering, how is it that a notionally similar weekly news digest—The Economist—is not only surviving, but thriving? Virtually alone among magazines, The Economist saw its advertising revenues increase last year by double digits—a remarkable 25 percent, according to the Publisher’s Information Bureau. Newsweek’s and Time’s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively.... Indeed, The Economist has been growing consistently and powerfully for years, tracking in near mirror-image reverse the decline of its U.S. rivals. Despite being positioned as a niche product, its U.S. circulation is nearing 800,000, and it will inevitably overtake Newsweek on that front soon enough.

Hirschorn is further flabbergasted when he considers that the growth of online reading hasn't put a dent in subscriptions to The Economist, nor has it slowed down the sale of famously-expensive newstand copies:

It is a general-interest magazine for an ever-increasing audience, the self-styled global elite, at a time when general-interest anything is having a hard time interesting anybody. And it sells more than 75,000 copies a week on U.S. newsstands for $6.99 (!) at a time when we’re told information wants to be free and newsstands are disappearing.

So how is it done? It isn't the strength of the writing, which, says Hirschorn, "can be shoddy, thin research supporting smug hypotheses." Nor is it the "leaders," or short lead-off editorials, which "tend to 'urge' politicians to solve complex problems, as if the key to, say, reconstituting the global banking system were but a simple act of cogitation away." In the end, Hirschorn has very little to offer by way of an explanation for the success of The Economist at a time when similar news digests struggle:

...the American newsweeklies are going away from precisely the thing that has propelled The Economist’s rise: its status as a humble digest, with a consistent authorial voice, that covers absolutely everything that you need to be informed about.... The writing in Time and Newsweek may be every bit as smart, as assured, as the writing in The Economist. But neither one feels like the only magazine you need to read. You may like the new Time and Newsweek. But you must—or at least, brilliant marketing has convinced you that you must—subscribe to The Economist.

So, in this view, The Economist is just like the American news digests, but with some kind of magic pixie dust attached, attributed to the vague genie of "marketing." And here's where I think Hirschorn misses the mark. I think it's pretty clear that what The Economist has, and Time and Newsweek lack, is a sense of desirable discursive community. I mean, think about it: those "leader" articles may be a bit ridiculous, with their urging of actions on Prime Ministers. But in the end, they help create the feeling that this magazine speaks to elites, and that, if we're reading it, and understanding it, and paying seven bucks for it, we must in some sense be part of that same elite. Hirschorn was close to getting this when he made note of the way the magazine was purchased by a "self-styled global elite." I think the important fact is this: the magazine, with its unexcitable, urbane, eminently non-folksy tone, invites its readers to think of themselves as such an elite. When you shell out your seven bucks, it's better than getting the magazine for free online, because you're showing yourself (or, at any rate, expensively convincing yourself) that you're part of the elite to which the magazine seems to speak.

Rule 2, or: The Historical Why

So: why are the English good at creating this sense of a desirable discursive community, while we here in America aren't? I think the answer lies in the different way intellectual and social elites interacted in the industrial era in the two countries. Consider, for example, Rule Two of The Athenaeum Club of London.

What? You don't know Rule Two? Sigh. Well, okay. It's like this. The Athenaeum Club was one of those private, members-only hotels/cafes/restaurants/lounges/libraries spawned in such number in Victorian London. It was, like many of the clubs, a place for the social, financial, and governing elite to mingle. But it wasn't just for them. Rule Two provided for admittance to distinguished intellectuals, and the list of intellectuals who were admitted is impressive: John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, name your eminent Victorian. So such people came into close contact with the ruling elite, and, in a way, were co-opted by them (this is the subject of Stefan Collini's fine study Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930). The intellectuals, says Collini, were a special, junior part of the community of power. They didn't exactly "form a socially excluded intellectual class" in clubs like the Athenaeum, but "they were conscious that belonging to the fraternity of the reflective and the articulate set them apart from those more immediately involved in life's tasks and life's pleasures." They were members, but members of a special "Rule Two" sort, there just a little bit on the sufferance of the power elite. You could speak truth to power, with power actually being there in the room, but you also had to watch just how far you went in what you said. In the end, a kind of urbane, non-offensive, discourse became second nature. You spoke as a gentleman speaking to gentlemen: you spoke, in short, as a member of a desirable discursive community.

Even with the growth of intellectual professionalism, the sense of being a member of an intellectual community, one that might meet and overlap with a social elite, continued. The British Academy, a symbol of professionalizing knowledge, came about when clubbable intellectual men still suggested one another for membership. "The sense of a knowable community," says Collini of the early British Academy, "is very strong."

So modern British intellectual life came about in conditions of discursive community, and not only that, but in conditions of slightly glamorous, socially high-tone, community. Those conditions set the tone for modern institutions, and when we read the TLS or The Economist, we're reading the weight of this tradition inflecting every phrase. Conditions have changed in England, for sure, but in the pages of those magazines it's still us meeting for drinks with the cabinet ministers at the Athenaeum.

America, of course, has less of a tradition of this sort of thing. Sure, there are clubs that aspire, at least in theory, to bring the artsy types and the power types together. Hell, I'm a member of one (though I rarely end up talking to the power types when I'm there). But geographic dispersion (no American city combines all the leadership functions of London), the lack of a landed aristocracy, money-obsessed philistinism, and other factors have conspired to keep us from ever having quite the sense of a power/culture establishment that there was in England. So, for better or for worse, our magazines can't peddle that special sense of desirable discursive community with any sense of authenticity. Their particular history gave the English the magic pixie dust, and left us without it.

Not Baryshnikov

Ow! My leg!

Last Monday a suddenly-opened car door had a disagreement with my bicycle about the nature of my forward trajectory. "Slow and steady, okay?" said my bike. "No! Rapid, airborne, and ending with a thump!" said the car door. The car door won. I'm alive, but spent some time in hospital, where I overheard one of the doctors looking at my x-rays say "it looks less like a bone than a box of rocks." So, long story short, it'll be a number of weeks before I'm putting any weight on my leg at all, and I won't be back to leaping-and-tumbling form until late November or thereabouts.

What, you ask, are you going to do to get your Archambeau fix, since you can't lurk outside my house to see me doing my usual ballet and acrobatics routine as I go out to pick the newspaper off the driveway (full disclosure: I actually look more like a staggering Tony Soprano when I do this, but let's imagine a Baryshnikov-Archambeau, for maximum contrast).

Well, there are a couple of options. You could pick up the latest Boston Review, which contains, among much else, "Double Gesture," a big review I wrote about the evolution of Swedish poetry over the generations (long story short: it goes from existentialism to a kind of post-structuralist linguistics inflected style, and Fredrik Nyberg is really, really good).

Alternately, you could tune in to the June 25th broadcast of American Public Media's show "Speaking of Faith." If your time machine is low on batteries, you can get to the show as a podcast and accompanying web site. The theme of this particular episode is fragility, and I translated an old French poem on the theme, "The Broken Vase" by Parnassian poet Sully Prudhomme. I'm not normally keen on the anti-Romantic, Neoclassical Parnassians — I've always agreed with Gerard Manley Hopkins about Parnassian poems being "spoken on and from the level of the poet's mind" rather than from those strange moments when "the gift of genius raises him above himself." So I took the Prudhomme translation as an opportunity to try to inhabit a very different kind of poetry than the sort I'm usually drawn to. And it was an interesting challenge, trying to maintain the rhyme scheme and something of the rhythm of the original. Audio files of the poem in French and in my translation are up, read in the fabulous, tobacco-cured voice of Jean-Luc Garneau.

Interrogated by the Fun Sherpa!

Yes, it's true. I've been abducted by Anton Dy Buncio, official Chicago-area fun sherpa, and interrogated about poetry, teaching, what it means to root for Notre Dame in a losing season, and where to drink in Chicago. It's all here. And don't worry: the good sherpa eventually let me go. Now if only I can make it back home without being jacked up by a yeti...

Paris Blues: The Aesthetic and the Oppressed in 1961

Ever since my daughter, Lila, was born four months ago I've been spending most mornings hanging out with her. She's good company but she sleeps a lot, which has led me — with the assistance of my faithful TiVo — to instigate the "Lila's Sleeping Film Festival," during which I lounge on the sofa sipping coffee and gawking at movies, mostly old ones. Today the featured presentation was Paris Blues, a 1961 flick with Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as American jazz men living in Paris, and Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll as tourists with whom they get involved. It's better than the early luke-warm reviews said it was, and not just because Louis Armstrong cameos and lays down some fine music. It's got a lot to say about the relationship of the aesthetic and the socially and culturally oppressed.

Newman plays Ram Bowen, a slightly too-clever reference to Rimbaud. He's a trombonist and club owner who wants to write ambitious music. Poiter's character is also a musician, and the arranger for his pal Ram Bowen. They hang, they play, they sweat the details of their music. Then some strangers come to town: Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll. Paris Blues actually starts out looking politcally bolder than it turns out to be. At first, it seems that Paul Newman's character is going to hook up with Diahann Carroll, but the inter-racial romance is just a tease: Newman soon pairs off with Joanne Woodward, while Sidney Poitier moves in on the achingly beautiful Carroll. We then get a lot of good jazz, a sub-plot with a gypsy junkie, and some nice montages of romance in Paris. Each of the musicians ends up having to choose between music in Paris and a return to the U.S. with the woman he loves.

What makes Paris Blues interesting are the asymmetries between the two men's dilemmas, asymmetries having everything to do with race. Newman's character faces a well-established choice between art, on the one hand, and love, domesticity, and respectability, on the other. The idea that these are incompatible things dates back to Romanticism: it was in the Romantic era that the idea of the isolated artist, driven by a demon within, came to the fore — in conjunction, one might add, with the disruption of the old aristocratic social order and the system of artistic patronage it supported. We came to the idea of the isolated artist when artists were without a clear social role. I suppose the idea that the artist needs to eschew domesticity in order to single-mindedly pursue art also has something to do with one of the roles art came to play over the course of the nineteenth century, a role once played by religion: the space for the unworldly. I mean, the celibate priest and the isolated hermit are cousins of the garret-dwelling poet and the anti-social genius artist. Each is in some way set apart from the merely worldly. (Was it Matthew Arnold who called art "spilt religion"? There's something to that, or there was in Arnold's time, though I've never liked the phrase: it implies that religion is the proper place for certain sentiments, rather than one place those sentiments happened to have resided. But I digress). (*UPDATE, July 3: Alex Davis writes in from Cork to point out that "spilt religion" is T E Hulme’s phrase, from “Romanticism and Classicism”).

Anyway. Ram Bowen must choose his art or love, in the form of Joanne Woodward, her two kids, and her big house back in small-town America. It's an agonizing choice for him, but he chooses art, saying "I gotta find out how far I can go. And I guess that means alone." The movie doesn't judge his choice: it seems neither good nor bad, but ambiguous. I'm glad for this: too often we see a kind of Bullets Over Broadway or even Mr. Holland's Opus moralism, in which good ole domesticity is, in the end, better than art, which is presented as self-indulgent. I always think of that sort of thing as audience-flattering, which is kind of a sin of cinema.

Poitier's character seems at first to face a similar choice, but race — specifically, the oppressed position of African-Americans, and the challenges they were making to that oppression in 1961 — changes everything. In an instance of psychological skin-privilege, the white guy, Newman, doesn't have to think about his whiteness, but the black guy sure as hell has to think about his blackness. Poitier's character tries hard not to think about race: in fact, he's gone to Paris to avoid thinking about race (or, as he puts it, "to be able to sit down to lunch without getting clubbed"). He's mostly made it work, too: the crowd shots in the jazz club where he plays show an integrated crowd of Caucasians, Arabs, Gypsies, Africans, and others, and Poitier's character almost never encounters any racist sentiment in Paris (significantly, though, at one point a French boy refers to him as "Monsieur Noir," which does indicate that he is perceived as other, even if he is not visibly oppressed). Diahann Carroll's character is having none of this avoidance, though. She insists that Poitier's place is back in the states, with his people, fighting for change. She sees his life in Paris as pure escapism. So while Newman's character is choosing only between art and domesticity, Poitier's character has to choose between art, on the one hand, and a heady cocktail of respectable domesticity (Carroll's character is a schoolteacher and wants six kids), group loyalty, and social reform. He doesn't have the luxury of a mere art/life dichotomy: his dichotomy is art/life-race-reform-justice. The scales tip him toward the latter, and he heads back to the U.S.

It's sort of unusual to find social reform connected with domesticity and fertility and respectability, as they are for Poitier and Carroll. I mean, much of the literature of social change shows us how domesticity and respectability must be sacrificed for The Cause. Here, though, the cause is thoroughly respectable, indicating how, by the early sixites, Civil Rights had become a middle-class cause, and those who objected to it were seen as disreputable slugs. It was, among other things, a bourgeois reform movement at this point.

All this in itself would make for a complex enough pattern: the white guy free to pursue his own lonely genius, the black guy caught in a thicker web of conflicting desires. But there's more! Just as Poitier's oppressed or subaltern position in the race hierarchy complicates matters for him, so also does jazz's oppressed or subaltern position in the midcentury hierarchy of musical genres complicate Newman's situation.

It's easy to forget, from the vantage of postmodernism, how rigid and seemingly permanent the popular-culture/high-culture division once was — my students are often surprised by it when we do the history of literary theory. It's also possible, I suppose, to forget that jazz was, in fact, popular culture. I mean, it's thought of as art-music now, mostly. Anyway, Newman's character wants to become a serious artist, and for him this means winning the recognition of classical music mavens. While the movie takes the side of the oppressed in the race hierarchy, and makes the opposition to that hierarchy look comfortingly domestic and respectable, the movie doesn't question the hierarchy of music at all. When Newman meets with The Great Composer, he's told that he's gifted, and that a record company would be happy to release his music on a jazz album. But if he wants to be truly great — which he may or may not be capable of doing — he's got to ditch jazz and study classical composition, if only to incorporate it into jazz. So Newman's choice isn't just between art and love: it's also between loyalty to his jazz band, and to his own lonely quest for musical greatness. Again, he chooses the lonely genius of art.

In the end, Paris Blues is representative of a very particular moment in cultural history, a moment both radical and conservative. It was the moment when the Civil Rights movement became respectable, but when respectability was conceived as a kind of hetero-normative domesticity; a moment when the Romantic Genius stalked the earth in all his isolated, anti-social splendor, but also a moment when even such geniuses submitted without question to established cultural hierarchies. It couldn't be more 1961.

Word Salad meets the Kafka Sutra

Bruce Andrews!
Juliana Spahr!
Leslie Scalapino!
Allen Ginsberg!
Ezra Pound!

and, uh...me!

Yep. Once again, I'm part of the WSUM Word Salad show, available in mp3 format. This time I read parts of The Kafka Sutra, which was published with illustrations by Sarah Conner in The Cultural Society. I'm thinking I might drag it out for my appearance in the Literary Death Match reading at this year's Chicago Printers' Ball. I hope they're going to have a medic standing by.

David Bromige, R.I.P.

Sad news: the poet David Bromige has died. I only met him once or twice, but I admired his work, his wit, his sense of play and style. He loved to take another poet's line and turn it around, making something new and surprising out of it. For me, this small passage from an interview in Jacket magazine captures much of his spontaneity and humor. He will be missed:

Doug Powell: People mention they have discerned a ‘Stevens’ quality in your poetry. The rhyme with his ‘Credences of Summer’ tipped me off. Is your sequence [‘Credences of Winter’], to your mind, antithetical to his?

David Bromige: A poorly-paid college teacher, a weed-using shadow of a man, whose humble dwelling was pit-stop to all and sundry, in antithetical relation to a roly-poly, barrel-chested, manicured, well-shod, imposing Yalie who got plastered with other late-in-life Yalies and had fisticuffs with Hemingway but never invited anyone home? Perhaps. I should never have taken Hemingway on. It was my Yalies who urged me to do it. Let me say there are no rousing assurances in my poems. Let the rich bury the rich. All I can do is destroy their language. I think the pill is wearing off. Got more?

Storming the Museum of Irrelevance

"Storming the Museum of Irrelevance", the web version of an essay I wrote for the current issue of Poetry, is now online. If you can't hear enough about the fate of the poetic manifesto, check it out. It opens like this:

Can the manifesto matter? Or is it an outdated weapon in the arsenal of the poets, a rusted blunderbuss only to be displayed under glass in the museum of cultural oddities? Questions like these seem to lurk just below the surface in “Eight Manifestos,” a special section of the February 2009 issue of Poetry, introduced by Mary Ann Caws, the unquestioned dean of manifesto studies. On the one hand, the section gestures toward the idea of the manifesto as a museum piece, both figuratively and literally: a note tells us that the section commemorates the centennial of F.T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto,” and if we read all the fine print we find that several of the poets who wrote items for the section presented them at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. On the other hand, what we have aren’t essays on the nature and history of the manifesto (with the exception of Caws’s informative introduction): they’re manifestos proper, or seem to be. If the manifesto is indeed an old blunderbuss, the poets seem to have pried it out of its display case and fired off a few live rounds.

Even a cursory look at the nature of the manifestos collected in the section, though, raises some doubts about how much faith poets place in the manifesto nowadays.

Word Salad Radio

"You know when a communications medium is obsolete?" my media theorist collegaue Dave Park likes to ask, before answering himself by saying "when they start using it for art." I think what Dave means is that, when a medium is in its commercial and technological prime, it becomes a money-making machine, and artists get squeezed to the margins by more mercenary figures. But when a medium is brand new, or when, later on, it begins to lose its commericial mojo, there's a chance for art to move in. It's certainly how the movie industry has worked: the best era for American art film came in the early 70s, when television had killed off the old studio system and Hollywood started making movies like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. Of course Spielberg and Lucas found a way to beat T.V., by emphasizing special effects and big-screen spectacle, but for a while it was directors, not producers, who seemed to be calling the shots (both Lucas and Spielberg have, of course, long since become producers themselves).

Radio, of course, is venerable, and has gone through many phases, from being a place for serial drama (another victim of television) to being all about music. And now the good people at WSUM have turned to poetry, with the weekly broadcast of "Word Salad," a kind of melding-together of poems in a big, luxuirous sound collage. They've been deluded enough to feature a few of my poems in recent weeks, and you can listen to them online.

"Two Short Films," a couple of older poems from Home and Variations were included in the May 28 broadcast, which also features work by Tom Raworth, Lisa Jarnot, Louis Zukofsky, and Anne Sexton, as well as music by Tristan Murail.

"Glam Rock: The Poem," which originally appeared in Absent, was aired on the May 21 show, along with John Ashbery, Crag Hill, Hanet Kuypers, Stu Hatton, and some Merzbow music, along with much more.

"Sheena is a Punk Rocker," which appeared in The Cultural Society, was part of the May 14 broadcast, along with poems by Nico Vassilakis, Andrea Brady, and Amanda Stewart, and music by John Adams (played by the Kronos Quartet), along with other things.

The Word Salad blog has a complete set of playlists, and links to all their shows. You could spend a long time listening to this stuff: consider yourself warned!

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.

Just One Book

There are only a few presses that have changed poetry publishing. New Directions in its heyday helped bring Modernism to the bookstores. City Lights fostered the Beat movement. More recently, Neil Astley's Bloodaxe ushered in a new generation of British poets. And Salt publishing changed the whole game: international in scope, broad in aesthetics, interested in the avant-garde, writings of indigenous peoples, and criticism as well as poetry, Salt has been on top of new technologies in publishing and distribution as well as new movements in poetry, and they've been great about being loyal to their authors. In many ways, they've been the most living thing in poetry publishing for almost a decade. Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery (seen above with their Independent Publishing Prize), and their partner John Kinsella, deserve nothing but praise as promoters of poetry. And they've done well as a business, too — until quite recently, when fallout from the economic meltdown (thanks, Milton Friedman, thanks, gospel of unregulated greed, thanks, University of Chicago Econ Department!) put them in a tight spot. Here's a recent note Chris has sent out over the internet, announcing the situation and proposing a solution to the current quandary:

Saving Salt Publishing: Just One Book
Wednesday, May 20, 2009

As many of you will know, Jen and I have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect our press. Our three year funding ends this year: we've £4,000 due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt's operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April's much improved trading, the past twelve months has left us with a budget deficit of over £55,000. It's proving to be a very big hole and we're having to take some drastic measures to save our business.

Here's how you can help us to save Salt and all our work with hundreds of authors around the world.

JUST ONE BOOK

1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.

UK and International
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/index.php

USA
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop-us/index.php


2. Share this note on your Facebook or MySpace profile. Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember it's just one book, that's all it takes to save us. Please do it now.

With my best wishes to everyone
Chris Hamilton-Emery
Director
Salt Publishing
http://www.saltpublishing.com

Things have started to work — Chris even compares what's happened to the end of It's A Wonderful Life— but Salt needs us. And poetry needs Salt. Let's see what we can do. If you don't want to use the Salt website, you can get a list of their books on Amazon.com by going to "books," then "advanced search" and searching for "Salt Publishing" under "publisher."

We Got a Yeats, You Got a Wallace Stevens

"We got a Yeats, you got a Wallace Stevens." That's what Eavan Boland told me, more than a decade ago, when I interviewed her for the Notre Dame Review. Boland had recently started teaching at Stanford, and we were talking about some of the differences between American poetry and the poetry of her native Ireland. The point she was making had to do with the public status of poetry in the two countries: in Ireland, poets have had a much more public role than poets in America, and this is reflected in the nature of the poetry itself: Ireland ended up with W.B. Yeats as a major figure, while the United States ended up with Wallace Stevens. While Yeats was capable of intense obscurity (in both his early, symboliste-inflected work and his later period of personal mythology), a substantial portion of what he wrote was deliberately public, even news-editorial-ish. Poems like "Easter 1916" or "September 1913" took on public events, and offered opinions about them in langauge that was both beautiful and accessible. A surprising number of Yeats' mid-period poems actually appeared in newspapers. Stevens, of course, is a different animal. In a country in which poetry has had very little public role, Stevens was a very private poet. Hell, most of the guys at the insurance office where he worked didn't even know he was a poet. And while I'm sure one can tease references to public events out of damn near anything with the application of sufficient quantities of Dr. Adorno's Magic Ointment, it's tougher to make a case for the author of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" as a political poet than it is to do the same for the author of "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death."

There's much truth to what Boland said. But the reason it comes to mind today is that I'm doing the final read-through of a review I just wrote of some books of recent scholarship on Irish poetry, and I'm sensitive not only of the truth of what Boland said, but of the falsehood. That is: while she's right about the visible Irish tradition, the scholarship I've been reviewing has made me acutely aware of how much Irish poetry lies outside this tradition. The discourse that has developed around Irish poetry over the last two centuries has been a nationalist one: it expects, even demands, that the poet speak on national themes to a national audience. There are good historical reasons for this: in a colonized society, there's very little in public life in which one can place one's trust. All the institutions are dominated by the colonizer. But poetry, at least, remains relatively free, and can become a medium for nationalist consciousness to form in opposition to the colonizer. All well and good, but like so many things, such a discourse can be as oppressive as it is enabling. The demand for a nationalist poetry means the poet is meant to write about some themes, not others, and to do so in a language that is accessible to a broad audience — hence the anti-Modernist style of much Irish Revival poetry. So in Ireland, a publicly-lauded tradition of the nationalist poet came into being. They had a Yeats, while we had a Stevens (we've had aspirants to national poet status, but Walt Whitman, who yearned to be a national figure, never became one until many decades after his death). But along with this visible tradition, there's been a long tradition of Irish poetry that falls outside of the nationalist paradigm. The Irish may have had their Yeatses, but they've had their Stevenses, too. They just didn't fit the paradigm for what an Irish poet was meant to be, and therefore didn't get much attention.

Who are these guys? Well, in the mid-twentieth century, there are people like Brian Coffey and Dennis Devlin. And in the current generation, there are people like Billy Mills, Randolph Healy, and Catherine Walsh. They haven't had their due, living in the shadow of the nationalist tradition. But in an Ireland long since emerged from colonialism, and now a kind of prosperous province of the European Union, nationalism is fading as a paradigm for poetry. Seamus Heaney may well be the last figure to be consumed by it. And the Irish Stevenses may yet have their day.

Marginality, Manifesto, and Poetry's New Thing

No, no, I'm not dead or otherwise incapacitated: it's just that I've been busy tapping out some reviews and plugging away on a chapter about Tennyson for The Big Boring Book of Aesthetics, Politics, and Poetics, which, if my current pace continues, promises to be a posthumous work.

But that's not why you stopped by. You wanted to ask "what have you published lately, chump?" Ah! Glad you asked. Well, the June issue of Poetry just arrived, and it includes "Marginality and Manifesto," an essay I wrote about poetry manifestos. Specifically, the essay responds to the collection of manifestos from the February issue of Poetry.

Long story short, what I say in the essay is this: when one looks over the February collection of essays, one wonders whether the manifesto form might be, for the moment, exhausted. Not that the manifestos were bad: they were, without exception, interesting, clever, and engaging. But they tended to be anti-manifestos of one sort or another. Some parodied the will-to-power aspect of the genre, others were deliberately provisional where manifestos have traditionally been bold, others were defenses of tradition where manifestos have tended to be avant-garde, still others were nostalgic for a lost era when manifestos seemed to matter. Why, I wondered, this sense of exhaustion?

To answer the question, I had a look at what I took to be the two main motivations of manifestos in the early 20th century: to challenge the marginality of poetry in society, and to challenge the established poetic style from the margins of the art. The first of these goals still seems to motivate poets across a wide stylistic spectrum (it's the impetus behind both Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter? and Charles Bernstein's "Warning Poetry Area: Publics Under Construction"). But the second, which always produced more manifestos, doesn't seem to pertain: we don't, I argued, really have an establishment style in any meaningful way. Which is not to say we don't have a poetic establishment (Jed Rasula's book The American Poetry Wax Museum is a great study of just how that establishment works). But the establishment isn't predicated on style so much as on institutional access and support, on big name journals, grants agencies, and prestigious university posts. One could rail against this, as one's instinct is to rail against all privilege. But in a way, we're lucky to have grants and university posts: in the early 20th century, poets were, by and large, without any kind of market or patronage, having lost the old aristocratic system of support over the nineteenth century. One could even see the flurry of manifestos in the modernist era as a symptom of a climate of scarcity: when people are well fed, they're less inclined to fight. Or so I argued.

Of course the movement away from prescriptive, declarative manifestos doesn't mean there aren't broad shifts in style, and attempts to describe them: in fact, the latest Boston Review contains a very interesting essay by Stephen Burt on just such a stylistic shift. The essay, "Poetry's New Thing," argues that emerging poets (emerging, I suppose, to broader visibility) like Graham Foust, Devin Johnsoton, Zach Barocas, and Elizabeth Treadwell have moved away from the elliptical style that became one of the more prominent modes of poetry in the 1990s. These poets, Burt claims, are more interested in documentary, mimesis, and things in the world than were the elliptical crowd. He's certainly right to see the influence of Objectivism on many of these poets, and I'm happy to see him single out The Cultural Society as an important venue for the work of many poets in this crowd: I think it's one of the best poetry things going on the web.

Steve, who gave elliptical poetry its name a decade ago, is out to name the new thing, too. In fact, given this kind of poetry's emphasis on things (as opposed to linguistic disruption), he offers "The New Thing" as a name. I kind of like the minimalism of it. We'll know it's taken off as a term if people start arguing about it. I'll start now: Steve argues for Rae Armantrout as a major precursor to The New Thing. Fair enough, but since The New Thing includes, along with neo-objectivists, an emphasis on documentary, I'd argue for John Matthias and Michael Anania as precursors, and point to their influence on a number of the poets Burt names, such as Devin Johnston and Michael O'Leary. And while I'm glad Steve points to the University of Chicago as a breeding-ground for The New Thing, I wish he'd mentioned Garin Cycholl, currently teaching there, as an important documentary-style poet. Anyway: it's an exciting essay. Sadly, it's not on the Boston Review website, at least not yet. But you can scoop up a copy at the bookstore when you're picking up the latest Poetry.

UPDATE MAY 26: Will Fertman, the self-described "P.R. goon" for the Boston Review dropped me a line to say that Steve's piece is now up online. Check it out!