Being, Becoming, and Fatherhood

[Warning: this post is much more about me and my life than my usual posts are. I don't blame you if you want to go read something else.]

Back when I was in grad school, I used to carpool from Chicago to my teaching gig at Notre Dame with a lanky guy who got his news from Fox, his opinions from Rush, and his general outlook from a hybrid of Nietzsche and Pentecostalism. It made for some interesting rides, as we argued our way through the post-industrial wasteland of northern Indiana, especially since he had little patience for the commute and an uncanny ability to talk his way out of speeding tickets, drawling long, slow explanations to the cops from behind his aviator shades. He was in his thirties, about a decade older than I was, and, when we would reach a particularly impassible point of fundamental disagreement, he'd sigh, lower those shades, look over at me from behind a speedometer that hovered up near the triple digits, and say "Well, Archambeau, you're young. You'll see it my way when that women is fool enough to marry you and you have kids." I've had to wait a long time to see for myself whether his dire prediction would come to pass, but nine months into this fatherhood gig I'm willing to crawl out on a limb and say he was just fucking wrong.

Generally, I've found the predictions about fatherhood to be kind of off-base. It hasn't been as hard as some people told me it would be. One colleague — a man predisposed by my bitching and moaning visits to his office to see of me as rather thin-skinned, or as something of a delicate orchid — was particularly stern in his warnings about the implications of having a child. "Look," he said, "right now you live in a pleasure dome, a palace of pleasant breezes, but when the little one comes, all that will change," here he would sigh, and look out the window in the general direction of his dilapidated Victorian house, his three kids, and a wife best described as "difficult." "When the little one comes," he'd continue, "the pleasure dome will be forever destroyed, and life becomes a desperate holding action, carried on against superior force." He wrote a lot about the literature of the Vietnam war, and I think it crept into his metaphors. Anyway, fatherhood hasn't felt that way for me, maybe because I'm now at a point when Valerie and I can afford to have some help raising the kid, and maybe because we got very, very lucky in the nanny-hiring lottery.

Other predictions have proven false, too. Apparently you can still go out to the movies, and you can still discover new music while doing the parent thing. Again, this may have something to do with not being a penniless twenty-something itinerant poetry teacher at this point in my life.

But there is one significant way that fatherhood has changed things for me. It's not just that I've had different experiences (a closer acquaintance with baby feces than had heretofore been the case, say, or a different relation to sleep, or a constant astonishment at the stream of firsts — waves, smiles, rollings-across-the-floor, etc.). I think there's a different orientation to experience. I don't mean that this is better or worse than my non-kid-having orientation to experience —I hate the smugness of some parents I've met, who seem to think that the only path to complete humanity lies through the raising of urchins. I thought that was wrong during my long childless period, and I think it's wrong now. But I do think that, at least for me, there's a different relation to the world now.

Maybe I've spent too much time reading Hegel (in fact, scratch the "maybe" there) but I think the best way to get at the nature of this different way of experiencing the world is through the contrast between the idea of being and the idea of becoming. Here's the deal: by the time my daughter was born this past February, I'd pretty much reached a point of stability in my life. I mean, I'd finished grad school, landed a teaching job, made tenure, and been promoted to full professor. I'd found the one woman on earth capable of dealing with my bullshit in a loving and affirming way, married her, and we'd been together in wedded bliss for sixteen years. We were settled into a house, into our sets of friends, and our careers (she's the one with the Big Deal job, by the way). I'd had a book or two published, and felt about as professionally established as I'd care to feel. All that was done, and didn't loom before me with the kind of urgency I feel when I get emails from former students hungering for the dream job, the back yard, the right guy, or whatever. It didn't feel like a rut — it felt a lot like fulfillment. And there was always something new happening in terms of whatever I was intellectually engaged with. But I was more or less who I was going to become, and the texture of life from one season to the next, one year to the next, was sort of the same. It was easy, too, which is both good and bad, I suppose.

All this was a matter of being, not becoming. Think about it: the protagonists of folklore or mythology don't change: they are what they are, they have the traits they're going to have. They have new adventures, but they don't experience fundamental changes. It's true for modern folklore, too: whenever I try to explain this stuff to students, I say that James Bond is the a creature of pure being, rather than becoming. Sure, we often see him doing some training exercise at the beginning of the movies, but he's not striving to become something he's not: he's maintaining his general awesomeness. He is what he is: a hyper-resourceful adventurer and ladies' man. He couldn't be more different from, say, the protagonist of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman. The lead characters in those books are all about change and growth. The reason so many of those novels are named after the protagonist (Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, etc.) is that the protagonist is where the action is: he or she will grow, evolve, and learn. By contrast, Bond movies are often named after villains (Dr. No) or love interests (Octopussy) or whatever. In the world of becoming, you don't have a stable, ordinary world that you venture out from to have your adventures (the way 007 had headquarters with M and Moneypenny, or the way pre-kid-havin' Archambeau had the comfortable little bubble from which he'd make forays into weird books of poetry and obscure works of theory). In the world of becoming, you don't have a stable place or a stable identity: you're on the road, in motion, and evolving all the time.

The thing about having a kid (and I imagine many of you know this better than I do) is that it throws you straight into the whirlwind of becoming. I mean, a kid is all change, all becoming, all the time: it seems Little Lila has a new paradigm of behavior and a new set of skills every week, a new emotional climate every two weeks, and a new wardrobe every month. And she's plugged directly into my life, so I'm always adapting to this, and becoming different along with her. I mean, take something as simple and straightforward as the way the house is arranged. Before Lila came along, the only real changes in the house came about for aesthetic purposes ("let's re-arrange the ceramics on the mantlepiece, or find a place for the new thingy we scored while antiquing, or let's figure a way to get that pile of books off the floor," that sort of thing). Now, the house is in a constant flux: bassinets and baby swings came and went, followed by bouncy-chairs and play-pens, which were followed in turn by a wholesale revamping of the sunroom into a colorful, rubber-tiled, toy-strewn Zone du Kid. It's not a house in a state of being, it's a house in a state of becoming. And that's just the surface: the three-character dynamic of mom, dad, and kid is in constant flux to accommodate Lila's ongoing miraculous transformations. It's different from the old two-character act, which we had down, people, down. Now it's more like improv comedy. All becoming, all the time.

But that doesn't catch everything about the nature of the change in how one relates to experience. There's something different, which we might be able to get at with Nietzsche rather than Hegel. Remember Wim Wenders' wonderful movie Wings of Desire? I always thought it had a lot to do with Nietzche's ideas of Apollonian and Dionysian experience. In the beginning, we follow some angels through Berlin: they look like regular people, but drift unseen through the city, standing near people and hearing their thoughts. There's a great scene where the angels do this in a library, walking past readers and hearing their reflections on what they're reading. The angels feel deeply, and understand, but have no other connection to the world or the people they see. They're distant, understanding and appreciating the world but not really being engaged with it. They have nothing at stake in the struggles of the world, no self-interest or group-interest to protect. This is Apollonian stuff, all self-possession and aesthetic distance. I think of my pre-Lila life like this. But when she was born, I felt like the angel in the Wenders film who chooses to become human, to enter the world of time and change and to lose the distance of the Apollonian, angelic perspective. Suddenly, the angel finds himself a part of what he had observed, with something at stake, with things to protect and with the urgent need to shelter those for whom he cared most. The collapse of Apollonian distance was complete, and he'd been absorbed into the world — a good portion of the Dionysian experience, really.

I don't mean to place one mode of experience above the other (Wenders doesn't, nor does Nietzsche, though Nietzsche did seem to think that the fusion of the two modes of experience in Greek tragedy was a higher form of experience). But I do think there's a sense of engagement that comes with having a kid that's different from the generally aesthetic, semi-disinterested way of experiencing things I had going on before. Maybe it was an awareness of this that made my old carpool partner think I'd change my politics when I became a father. Though how you could get from the world of becoming and the anti-Apollonian stance to Rush Limbaugh is as much beyond me as is the secret of making cops back off when they nab you for speeding.

Letter to Andrea Brady

Andrea Brady has left a string of comments by way of response to my article “Public Faces in Private Places: Messianic Privacy in Cambridge Poetry.” There’s much of interest in them, including this statement about what it felt like to be in Cambridge in the late 90s, around the Prynne circle:

Throughout the time I did spend in Cambridge I felt distinctly female and distinctly American. I guess it was no accident that I ended up writing a chapter of my thesis on the way that 17th century literary coteries preserved the authority of patriarchal poets through agonistic self-definition and fantasies of all-male reproduction. But I didn’t see the resemblance at the time.

That says a lot, really. I wish I’d been able to incorporate it into the article! Anyway, Andrea’s comments merit a proper response. In lieu of that, I’ve written this. It probably belongs down in the comments stream of the post announcing the publication of the article, but it’s bulky, so it’s here instead.


Hey Andrea,

Thanks for the long, thoughtful response to the essay. I’ve written about a pretty wide range of poets over the years, and one of the things I like most about poets from the more experimental end of things is that they so often write back after one writes about their work. Most of the more formally conservative people don’t seem to want that sort of back-and-forth, though I did have a great exchange with R.S. Gwynn after I wrote about one of his sonnets a while ago.

Anyway. I understand your wariness about the term “Cambridge Poetry,” even when it comes with a string of disclaimers attached. I mean, it was the same way back when people started talking about Language Poetry — lots of people objected to it, and some felt oppressed by it. I remember Steve Evans talking about this back in the late 90s at a conference in Belgium. Here’s what I noted about it in a post-conference wrap-up report for Jacket:

Steve Evans made some good points afterward about the way poets have reacted to being labeled with the 'L= word' — nobody thinks it is quite right for them, but then again they see some parallels, and in the discourse about avant-garde poetry, one seems to be either a language poet or not to count at all, so poets seem to ultimately accept the label, albeit with reservations.

There were, and are, all sorts of problems with the term “Language Poetry,” which (as your local schoolmarm will tell you) started life as “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry,” referencing the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (I remember Jeff Derkson giving a paper called “Where have all the equals signs gone” around the time people gave up on typing them out). I suppose the two main reasons people stopped typing all those equals signs were 1. It was tedious as all hell, and 2. Whether a poem had been published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or not became incidental: the movement or tendency had become larger than that.

When you write that you’re “forever being labelled ‘Cambridge School’, even though I’ve lived in London for nearly twice as long as I was a gownie,” and when you ask “would we say that Dell Olsen is now Cambridge School, because she lives in the episcopacy,” I suppose you’re objecting to the geographic nature of the term. I get it. But I suppose what’s happened is that geography has become incidental, just as publication in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E became incidental to what was meant by Language Poetry. I use the term because that’s the term that seems to be coming into use.

One might — one should, I suppose — ask whether the term is, in the end, a good thing. I’m inclined to think that, like most words, it both reveals and conceals. Everything you say about differences between individual poets is true, and everything you say about periodization sounds right, too. I mean, I your idea of that the period “between the years of the publications of the English Intelligencer and A Various Art” may constitute a distinct moment — but even making this distinction would probably bring down a rain of bile on your head if you made it loudly enough. Someone would come along and quite rightly insist on the variety of poetic activity in the Cambridge orbit at that time. Still and all, I don’t think all generalization is always bad. If any of us really thought that, we’d be left with nothing to say but proper names, if those. And I do think there are a cluster of techniques, ideas, publication and reading venues, influences, and the like that we can speak of as related phenomena. I, too, don’t think Prynne is the only center of gravity in the constellation (Peter Riley was very keen on making sure I didn’t make that mistake, back when I first started taking an interest in things Cambridge). I suppose one could imagine a series of partially overlapping Venn Diagrams, or a cluster of vectors, many of which converge for a time, but each of which follows its own line of flight away from the moments of convergence. Anyway. I suppose I’m interested, for now, in what the term can reveal; while you seem more concerned with what it conceals.

The other thing I take from your response, beyond the questioning of the term “Cambridge Poetry,” is the question of the political claims made for the poetry, and the relationship between public presence and political ambition. My contention in the article was that the large political claims made for the poetry seemed out of whack with the actual potential effect of the poetry. And some of the claims really have been large.

The claims I cited included one from David Shepard, who described a Prynne poem as an attempt to “recombine a language fragmented into technical jargons,” incorporating the vocabulary of specialized discourses into his poetry and thereby “return[ing] this knowledge to the public sphere from its sequestration in the ivory tower.” This would be a hell of a feat, and hugely politically important. The logistics of it, though, would require a huge effort at outreach, at actually bringing alienating kinds of language into public discourse. Shepherd either didn’t quite mean what he said, or, like a lot of us, he substituted a political wish for a political reality — which would be a kind of sentimentality, really.

Another claim I mentioned came from N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge (whose book Nearly Too Much is, I think, essential stuff for anyone wanting to get started on reading Prynne). According to Reeve and Kerridge, the kind of poetry they discuss can “collide with the powerful instrumental discourses of the culture" with the effect of "smashing them into pieces.” Poetry can certainly depict such a smashing. But the gulf between depiction and actuality gets glossed over here. The instruments of power continue on their way, despite the poets’ interventions (I think Bob Perelman’s poem “The Game” is about as good an examination of this situation as I’ve seen — anyway, it’s worth a look, if you haven’t seen it).

John Wilkinson makes some big claims, too — I know you found it a bit objectionable that I wrote more about his claims than about particular poems, but what I was interested in was the gulf between the large claims made for the poems and the actuality of the extent of their presence in the culture. Anyway, he has a high opinion of your work, and of Keston Sutherland’s. So do I, but not for the same reason Wilkinson presents — he says that you and Keston are writing at “a point of historical convergence” where your poetry might exercise “political potency.” Either Wilkinson’s sense of what political potency looks like is very different from mine, or he’s making claims that are quite unlikely to be supported by events.

I’m actually much more inclined to agree with your own sense of the political reach of poetry (or at least the political reach of poetry at this point, and in the first world), when you write that you “see a problem with any poetry’s (‘messianic’) claim to change the world, to smash instrumental reason to bits with the hammer of détournement.” And I’m in sympathy with you when you say you are:

…perfectly aware that my poetry isn’t going to change the world because it is ‘far from a mass movement’, as I wrote somewhere: it’s not part of the class struggle, energized by direction action or likely to inspire it. I can carry on writing it simply by thinking it will go down in history for future readers as a record of a peculiar dissidence…. At my most optimistic, I hope it encourages its readers – who, as readers seeking out this kind of work, aren’t likely to require encouragement – to think critically about politics, or perhaps to be inspired by such thinking to participate in collective efforts to overcome the tyrannies of capitalism.

This isn’t the sort of claim I was taking issue with in the article. The type of claim I took issue with was the type that implied that the poetry was smashing the discourses of power, and returning specialist discourses to the public.

The tack I took in the article was to focus on the gulf between these big public claims and the relatively limited reach of the poetry. I found it particularly ironic that so many of these claims centered on Prynne, who really has turned his back on opportunities to have a wider public presence (not that he’s wrong to have done so).

I think you’re right to say that my article implies a “rather crude equation between publication in the larger academic and commercial presses and the authenticity of a poetry’s claims to political efficacy.” Some of this implication comes from the way I framed the article — between the words “public” and “private.” I suppose it’s no excuse to point to the original context of the article, as a paper at a conference on “The Public/Private Divide in British Poetry” at the Sorbonne. Anyway, I’m not at all convinced that publication and readership on the scale reached, and to the constituencies served by, any contemporary Western poetry press would lead to political change on a large scale.

Did you get a chance to know Reginald Shepherd? He died not too long ago, a terrible loss. In addition to being a fine poet, he was a clear-eyed thinker about poetry, and I learned a lot from our correspondence (not least because he’d mastered the Frankfurt school better than I). As a gay black man from the Bronx, he knew a thing or two about the need for political change. Here’s something he wrote about politics and poetry:

Those who wish to change society might better turn their energies toward society itself, to the real areas of oppression and suffering, economic, political, racial, and sexual. (Identity politics can be a useful organizing tool of social activism, though it can also lend itself to a group solipsism that blinds people to structural, systemic issues.) To blame literature, or culture as a whole, for social, economic, and political woes (or even to see it as central to their perpetuation) is evasive at best, dishonest at worst, a kind of posing as politics, in social commentator Adolph Reed’s trenchant phrase. But such posturing is much easier than doing the hard work of trying to change the world. “Cultural activism” is a poor substitute for real political activity, although we live in an era in which cultural matters are up for debate while fundamental economic and political questions are not, except on the often loud but frequently incoherent and usually ignored fringes.

George Oppen gave up writing poetry for several years in favor of political activism, because he believed neither that poetry could change society nor that it should be subordinated to an agenda. In Oppen’s words, “If you decide to do something politically, you do something with political efficacy. And if you write poetry, you write poetry, not something you hope, or deceive yourself into believing, can save people who are suffering.” Several years ago, I was asked by someone I had just met whether my poetry was Afrocentric. I told him that I didn’t know what he meant by that term, and he said, “You know, dedicated to the liberation of black people everywhere.” My only answer was, “I don’t think that poems can do that.”

I found that convincing when he wrote it. I find it convincing now.

Thanks, by the way, for adding this, at the end of your comments:

I don’t mean any of this to sound like an attack. I hope you don’t feel it is. This poetry does need intelligent readers and critics; I’d even go so far as to say that it is written in expectation of them. I’ve seen critics from beyond the Trumpington perimeter stick their heads above the parapet, only to be shouted down by the incredibly entrenched defence forces – and so decide to stop caring. I don’t want you or anyone who reads this to stop caring.

I really don’t think of anything you’ve said as an attack — and I’ve found the response to the article so far to be generally positive, or to be critical in interesting and enlightening ways. I do wonder if people who have invested themselves in the poetry I discussed see the article as an attack. I don’t think it is, though I suppose it is an attempt to deflate some of the more inflated political claims made on behalf of the poetry. I doubt I’ll stop being interested — I also doubt I’ll ever be convinced by the kinds of claims I discussed, nor do I think it likely that I’ll ever be convinced that, because this kind of poetry is interesting and important, other kinds are not (this isn’t a claim you make at all, but Keston seems to take something of that Manichean view, setting the saved of Cambridge against the evils of the Culture Industry).

All best,

Bob

The Blogger on Blogging

Oh, sure. I understand: you've had it with my blogging. Who hasn't! And you'd like something new. Well, how about my opinions about blogging? They're up in a short interview conducted by Steve Halle for the creative writing course he teaches at Illinois State University. Behold the blogger as he navel-gazes.

"Its Chief Weapon is Excess": Chris Hamilton-Emery on Cambridge Poetry

Many a keyboard has been tapped, and many an email sent zipping across the Atlantic, inspired by the recent one-two punch combo of the Cambridge Literary Review's special feature on Cambridge Poetry and Kent Johnson's post on the "New British School" over at Digital Emunction (a site directed by Bobby Baird and others affiliated with the Chicago Review, the American journal most closely associated with experimental British poetry from the Cambridge-connected crowd).

One of the more interesting and informed comments I've seen comes from Chris Hamilton-Emery who, as the head of Salt publishing, has been well-positioned to watch developments in this kind of poetry, especially over the past couple of decades. His comment, from a discussion list I don't normally follow, came to my attention via Kent Johnson, and Chris was kind enough to let me reproduce it here. I've wedged my own comments in here and there. Here's Chris:

I think there is a need for a more general assessment of the poetries emerging from the British avant-​garde scene. I’ve published a great deal of course, and there’s certainly enough evidence for a reassesment of what was going on Cambridge in the 90s. It’s too highly coloured with Divisionist ideology to get a clear picture from outside.

I'm not quite sure how to feel about this.

Chris is certainly right that the time has come to try to get a handle on just what has been happening. The British experimental crowd for whom Cambridge serves as a center of gravity has been one of the most vital and interesting things going on in the U.K. for some time, and it hasn't really had much of an assessment. Even the degree to which it is correct to call it Cambridge Poetry hasn't been determined, although I've got a feeling the name will stick, despite how unhappy everyone is going to be with it. I mean, that's what happened with Language Poetry, and with New Criticism, and with Dada, and with just about everything: the borders of the movement, the essential features or debates, the list of who's who — these things are never defined to anyone's satisfaction, but the alternative ("let us not speak of this, lest we exclude someone or misrepresent the truth") seems unsatisfactory, too. I, for one, am going to stick with the monicker unless and until something better emerges, though I'm cognizant that there are people connected to the aesthetic and community in question who have no Cambridge affiliation (to the town or to the gown), and that there are several overlapping kinds of poetry involved. Anyway, to reiterate: I'm sure Chris is right: now is a good time to try to assess just what it is that's been happening.

I'm not entirely sure Chris is right about the place from which a clear picture is going to emerge, though. When Cambridge poetry has been described, it's usually been from either a position of hostility, or from a position of advocacy, with the advocacy emerging from inside the movement (actually, some of the hostility has come from within, too). People on the inside have the advantage of knowing the terrain intimately, but often there is something like a kind of true-believer's apologetics at work in their descriptions. I suppose I'm not speaking without a little apologetic of my own here: I'm very much outside the Cambridge scene, and I've tried to describe and understand it as neither an enemy nor an advocate. So maybe my sense that what's needed is an attempt at disinterest or objectivity (perspectives never entirely obtainable, but approachable by degrees) is itself self-interested. But I do hope for a better critic than I to step in from outside and survey the terrain as dispassionately and comprehensively as possible. Which would probably just tick off some people, who would find such a survey either insufficiently for, or insufficiently against, the poetry in question. Anyway, back to Chris:

It [the poetry] is properly underground but has really very striking uptake with US universities, certainly Buffalo, Miami (OH), UPenn, but much much wider than this.

Very true! A few key personalities are important at the institutions Chris mentions (Steve McCaffery and others at Buffalo, Keith Tuma at Miami of Ohio, Al Filreis at Penn). I'd add the University of Chicago to the list, primarily because of the graduate students who run the Chicago Review (Bobby Baird, Josh Kotin, others). But in the end I don't think it's just a matter of personal interests: the same logic that brought Language Poetry into the American academy seem to be at play: the poetry demands the kind of interpretive effort academe encourages, and the poetry has affinities with poststructural and Frankfurt School cultural theory — things that have found an American home in the university English departments. It's also good dissertation fodder: you can prove your sophistication by digging into the arcane and the difficult. Also, the poetry often has a kind of anti-marketplace ideology (Chris will mention this soon), an ideology flattering to the penniless graduate student learning the unmarketable skills of literary analysis. I mean, it's all very affirming to the kind of person you'll find studying poetry and theory in a literature department. Which is neither here nor there, in terms of the importance of the work. Once again, back to Chris:

But those US allegiances are misleading as I think the British avant-​garde have to be read from the peculiar social and cultural framework of the British 60s. We never had a 1968 moment. The political content of much 90s British avant-​garde writing has its origins in a liberation from post-​War thrift and limitation, it derives its thrust from a cultural exuberance not a political fracture or civil rights revolution. It’s politics are received. You can’t of course have a politics with out a polity.

This is the part of Chris' post I find most confusing. I mean, I do think it would make sense for exuberance to emerge after a climate of scarcity — but the fuse on this exuberance bomb seems too long. Can we really see the developments of the 90s as a delayed reaction to the scarcity of the British 50s? Or perhaps I'm misreading Chris. Perhaps he means that the work by Jeremy Prynne and Tom Raworth and others back in the 60s came about as part of the liberation from postwar scarcity, and that this work inspired what was done in the 90s. I can get behind that.

I find the final sentence intriguing — "You can't of course have a politics without a polity." This raises the issue that has most fascinated me about some strands of Cambridge Poetry: the question of political ambition and lack of political effect. But Chris touches on all this soon, so I'll shut up and let him get on with things:

There are two aspects I find fascinating, the first is nostalgia. A great deal of British avant-​garde writing is deeply nostalgic and utopian, and that’s partly I suspect a feature that it has yet to be properly assessed, digested, positioned, it’s been locked out of cultural debate and a history of poetics in the UK due in part to the Poetry Wars and their legacy. It’s almost as if we can imagine a poetry purgatory, not Dante’s but a kind of limbo where much of this writing has not been assimilated into a wider history of British poetry. It’s stuck but not of its own accord.

I, too, am waiting for someone to lay out the exact nature of the nostalgia and utopianism at work in the poetry, though I suspect it's a kind of negative utopia, like Adorno's, one that can't be named, or that would disintigrate if named (a kind of "if you see the Buddha in the road, kill him" ideal, in which the utopian can't be embodied without being desecrated, but in which the utopian aspiration must nevertheless be maintained).

With regard to Chris' second point above, that the poetry has been left outside of the wider history of British poetry against its will, I'm ambivalent. There sure are editors, scholars, and academics who want nothing to do with the stuff, don't like it, and suspect that it's all a matter of the emperor's new clothes (as some small percentage of it surely is). But I think there's been a reciprocal rejection: just as the many have decided to ignore this kind of writing, there has been a rejection of mainstream publication and even critical attention by some people inside the movement. The history of Prynne's publishing career is the most prominent example: he deliberately left major presses behind, and chose not to accept offers of prominent journal publication (Peter Barry's study Poetry Wars documents some of this). I suppose much of this is a matter of Prynne's very private personality, and some of it is a matter of anti-market ideology, which Chris is about to describe:

And the second thing I find fascinating is what I call Liberation Poetics, the idea that poetry has been enslaved in some consumerist conspiracy, and that leads to a kind of messianic quality in some work, and, as I’ve remarked before, a lot in Keston [Sutherland]’s. This kind of poetry needs to be outside, needs to be oppressed and needs to be secret. It can’t accommodate or mediate as it relies on an extreme position and in many respects requires converts and acolytes, neophytes and indeed some Grand Masters. It’s religious in effect. One has to believe. Though a key feature of the dogma is to express doubt, uncertainty and incompleteness, just as it embraces process over product, openness over closure and radicalism over restraint. Its chief weapon is excess. And of course it is oppositional.

All of this makes for a fascinating landscape. But it’s one that can feel like entering a sect, even for an afternoon of mysterious indoctrination. It is however, filled with great and yes, serious, art.

I'd hate to reduce the Cambridge phenomenon, in all its diversity, to a cult. But there is something of that about it: Prynne, like F.R. Leavis, (or, at the other end of the poetic spectrum, like Yvor Winters) does seem to have a taste for disciples, a weakness that should not reduce our sense of his achievement. And we shouldn't ignore this, nor the role it has played in Cambridge poetry's status as a poetic counter-culture, rather than a position in more open engagement with the broader poetic culture. Of course it'd be nice if more critics who took Seamus Heaney seriously also took Tom Raworth seriously. Such figures seem in particularly short supply.

The &NOW Awards: Shop Early!

What, you ask, are the &NOW Awards, and what has this new anthology got to do with them? Excellent questions! I'm glad you asked!

The awards were the brain-child of members of the board of the &NOW Festival of Innovative Writing, soon to kick-off its fouth iteration, this time at the University at Buffalo. Essentially, they were conceived as a kind of anti-Pushcart Prize, meant to recognize poetry, prose, and cross-genre writing from outside the mainstream. The first of a planned series of biannual anthologies (edited by Steve Tomasula, Davis Schneiderman, and the present humble blogger) will be launched at this year's festival, but I know you can't wait that long. Don't fret! You can pre-order it now from Amazon.com. It makes a great gift! And the cover of this first one is particularly appropriate for the coming Halloween season.

Raymond Federman, R.I.P.

Very sad news: Raymond Federman died this morning, after a long battle with cancer. I first met him when he came to the Lake Forest Literary Festival as our keynote speaker in 2007, and I can't overstate the man's energy, verve, and joie de vivre: at twice my age he wore me out, rushing around campus, putting on performance pieces, boiling and sawing books with my colleague Davis Schneiderman, supervising dramatic productions, and being the grand raconteur.

Federman's friendship with Samuel Beckett was truly formative, making Federman into the kind of writer, and the kind of man, he became. It's not surprising, then, that as Federman neared the end of his life, he turned to Beckett once again. Here's a poem about reading Beckett Federman wrote about five months ago, when he saw all too clearly how close he was to death:

A Matter of Enthusiasm

I am rereading Malone Dies
just to mock death a little
and boost my cancerous spirit.

I shall soon be quite dead at last
Malone tells us at the beginning
of his story.

What a superb opening
what a fabulous sentence.

With such a sentence
Malone announces his death
and at the same time delays it.

In fact all of Malone’s story
is but an adjournment.

Malone even manages
to defer his death
until the end of eternity.

That
soon is such a vague word.

How much time is soon?
How does one measure soon?

Normal people say
I’ll be dead in ten years
or I’ll be dead before I’m eighty
or I’ll be dead by the end of this week
Quite dead at last
Malone specifies.

Unlike Malone prone in bed
scribbling the story of his death
with his little pencil stub
normal standing people
like to be precise
concerning their death.

Oh how they would love
to know in advance
the exact date and time
of their death.

How relieved they would be
to know exactly when
they would depart from
the great cunt of existence
in Malone’s own words
to plunge into the great lie
of the afterlife.

How happy they would be
if when they emerge into life
the good doctor
or the one responsible
for having expelled them
into existence
would tell them you will die at 15:30
on December 22, 1989.

Could Sam have written
I shall soon be quite dead at last
had he known in advance
when he would change tense?

Certainly not
because as Malone tells us
a bit further in his story

I shall die tepid
without enthusiasm.

Does that mean on the contrary
of those idiots on this bitch of an earth
who explode themselves with fervor
to reach the illusion of paradise
while taking with them other mortals
that Malone’s lack of enthusiasm
towards his own death is a clever way
of delaying the act of dying?

A lack of enthusiasm for something
is always a way of postponing
the terms of that something.

The soon of Malone mocks
the permanence of death
and his lack of enthusiasm
ridicules the expression at last.

And so before he reaches the end
of the first page of his story
Malone has already succeeded
in postponing his death to
Saint John the Baptist’s Day
and even the Fourteenth of July.
Malone even believes he might be able
to resist until the
Transfiguration
not to speak of the Assumption
which certainly throws some doubt
as to what really happened
on that mythical day
or what will happen to Malone
if he manages to hang on until then.

In fact Malone defies his own death
by giving himself
birth into death
as he explains at the end of his story.

All is ready. Except me. I am being
given, if I may venture the expression,
birth to into death, such is my impression.
The feet are clear already,
of the great cunt of existence.
Favorable presentation I trust.
My head will be the last to die.
Haul in your hands. I can’t.
The render rents, My story ended
I’ll be living yet. Promising lag.
That is the end of me. I shall say I no more.

Nothing more to add this evening.
Malone said it all for me.
I can go to sleep calmly now.
Good night everybody.

Do something strange and playful today. That's how Federman would have wanted to be remembered.

Big News about Cambridge Poetry

Look out! The inaugural issue of the Cambridge Literary Review has just been unleashed. It contains (among much more) an essay by Stefan Collini, new poetry by John Kinsella, J.H. Prynne, Keston Sutherland, and John Matthias, as well as a big feature on Cambridge Poetry — a feature marred only by my own contribution, "Public Faces In Private Places: Messianic Privacy in Cambridge Poetry."

"Public Faces" is a much-expanded version of a paper I gave at the Sorbonne last year (the proceedings of the conference will be published this fall by McFarland, and will be well worth a look). I suppose it's really based on the experience of seeing a bunch of the Cambridge poets read at the Elastic Arts Center in Chicago, right around the time Cambpo heavyweights John Wilkinson and Peter Riley were slugging it out in a battle royale about the political value of poetry in the back pages of the Chicago Review.

The essay starts like this:

My title comes from some lines of W.H. Auden’s in The Orators: “Private faces in public places / Are wiser and nicer / Than public faces in private places.” Often, modern poets have presented their work as a matter of private faces in public places—that is, as the voice of private, authentic individual conscience entering the public sphere. Such a vision of poetry is, no doubt, fraught with its own problems and contradictions, but none of those concern me here. When we look at what has come to be known in some circles as Cambridge School poetry—the experimental poetry of Tom Raworth, John Wilkinson, Jeremy Prynne as well as Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady, and Simon Jarvis, to name a few poets of the younger generation—we’re faced with a very different conception of poetry. We find ourselves asking a question something like this: what ought we to make of a school of poetry that has a strong public concern, but no appreciable public presence? In Auden’s terms, it is a poetry of public faces in private places.

The gathering of poetry and critical writing about Cambridge poetry in CLR looks strong. I hope the issue gets some play on this side of the Atlantic. The issue is available for $20, a bit steep sounding, I know, but it's a big brick of a thing, and worth the cash.

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In other news, it seems that the redoubtable Jacob Knabb of ACM took one look at Granta's recent special issue on Chicago, did a spit-take with his Old Style beer, nearly dropped his slice of sausage-stuffed deep-dish pizza, and declared the next ACM "Another Chicago Issue." If you're from the greater Chicago metropolitan area, send some work his way.

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UPDATE OCTOBER 7: Kent Johnson's got some interesting things to say about the Cambridge crowd.

Walks with Paul Celan

Posterity deals some strange cards to the dead poets. Consider e.e. cummings — someone as lighthearted and playful as he was would probably cringe at having become the poet most often used to torment reluctant students in ninth-grade classrooms across America. Or, at the other end of the light-hearted/heavy-hearted continuum, consider Paul Celan. His gnomic, cryptic poetry and his status as a Holocaust survivor color our interpretations of his 1970 suicide by drowning, often making it into a statement about the inadequacies of language to the horrors of experience. Celan becomes a kind of larger-than-life figure, less a man who lived and suffered in dark times than an icon, a kind of literary saint, or a marble statue in the soft and saddened shadows of a hushed and somber shrine. You get some of the flavor of this from the title of John Felstiner's (generally excellent) biography of Celan: Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. Here, Celan the individual fades, and he becomes a representative, standing for all poets, all survivors, all Jews. It's a heavy load to lay on Celan's shoulders, and it's a load that the French poet Jean Daive does his best to lighten in Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, originally published in 1996 and newly translated into English by Rosmarie Waldrop.

Daive's book is one of those genre-defying works the world needs more of: part notebook, part memoir, part literary essay, it gives us Daive's experience of Celan's works, and of Celan's company, often during the walks the two took together in the St. Germain and Latin Quarter districts of Paris — the dome of the title must, I think, be the dome of the Panthéon that towers on a hilltop over these neighborhoods. I'm not even halfway through it (I received a copy in the mail yesterday, and started reading it this morning), but I'm enthusiastic enough I feel the need to say something about it right away, and I think I see what Daive is up to. He's trying to give us an intimate portrait of Celan the man, not a hagiographic image of Celan as the triply-iconic "Poet, Survivor, Jew" we get in Felstiner's book. This is not to say that Daive doesn't see Celan in all of these roles, just that he's out to honor the memory of an individual he knew as an individual, rather than to burnish the statue we've placed in the shrine of Celan.

Much of Under the Dome is written in the form of short observations, juxtaposed without any seeming order. But this notebook quality is a bit deceptive, and as one reads one begins to see the highly composed nature of Daive's book: passages repeat, with variations, certain images come up again and again in different contexts, and sometimes two passages are spliced together, creating a new resonance between the two observations. Here, for example, is one of the images that Daive uses to humanize Celan:

Avenue Emile-Zola: the empty apartment he has occupied for a week now. In the bathroom he bends over the tub, dips his left hand in the water: underwear floats up. Laundry. "You'll excuse my finishing the laundry?" With his smile.

We need an image of Celan like this one, I think, to remind us that the legend was also someone who lived day to day. But the genius of Daive's approach is to bring images like this back later, and combine them with the mythic moments in Celan's life, as he does a few pages after the laundry episode:

The brutal shock of his disappearance. I "see" the jump into the Seine. I can see it. And I see again his laundry soaking in the tub Avenue Emile-Zola, his hands stirring the soapy water. With elegance and determination.

We get the legend, and we get the man, and the two images are bound together by the visual rhyme of the body lost in the Seine and the water immersed in the tub. As the reference to Celan's everyday elegance and determination makes plain, this isn't simply a matter of deflation, of bringing the icon down. It's a matter of respecting the reality of the man, and not losing him in the bright glare of legend.

Celan's work is much-mystified, but Daive, who knows the Celan canon better than almost anyone, offers what seems to me like very good common-sense advice about reading Celan. Here, for example, is a passage I wish I'd read before going to a gathering of Chicago poets intent on reading Celan together a couple of years back:

Apropos Windgalle and Treckschutenzeit
        Wind gall         Bargetrekking time

    All the words are composites. The second term always the most important. The verb is tied to the second term. There is a vertical sense.

    Paul Celan chews a word like a stone. All day long. It produces word-energy. It all goes into the energy of his composite words. Here we have his biography.

    Paul Celan invites the reader to travel inside the word (voyage, labyrinth).

    On the on hand, the composite noun — on the other, no verb is given. Paul Celan does not give the verb.

....

    Absence of the verb: the verb is absorbed into the energy of the composite noun.

I can't really think of a better introduction to Celan's poetry than that. And I can't think of a better introduction to the hauntedness of the man, the constant sense of loss that he endured, than the following brief paragraph, and the even shorter section that follows:

To recollect a Sunday we spent together. Took the bus as far as the Opéra. The Saint-Lazarre area. The theater. Then went into a café where Paul notices a woman sitting among the crowd. Her face drawn. Pale. He falls back, as if frightened. Pushes me. We rush out. In the street he tells me "Her face reminded me of a friend who died."

High alert during all our encounters.

One could imagine a different kind of poet offering a very different reason for rushing out of a café at the sight of a woman (indeed, I've been with such a poet more than once, fleeing a bar or coffee joint to avoid the fallout from his ill-advised romantic entanglements). But Celan is not a poet haunted by eros: he's a poet haunted by ghosts, by the voices of the dead, and here we see how this has left him permanently on-edge and raw-nerved in a world that too-constantly reminds him of the enormity of his losses. Literary criticism often approaches Celan's sufferings in terms of the debate with Adorno about whether there can be poetry after Auschwitz. Daive gives us a much less abstract, much more palpable sense of the damage that had been done to Celan. We don't get Celan as a chapter in the history of literary thought, here. Daive's gift to us is the presence of the man himself.

Being There: Facebook vs. Danny's Tavern

Robert Archambeau: I was all set to blog about Nicanor Parra and Roberto Bolaño, but talked my ideas out late last night after too much coffee at my favorite breakfast-for-dinner joint. Signs now point to no bloggery today: consider yourselves spared, people of earth!

That, people of earth, was my Facebook update this morning, but it seems I'm not much of a prophet: I'm blogging after all. Not about Parra and Bolaño, though: rather, I'm posting a Facebook exchange I had with Seth Abramson shortly after posting my update about the two Latin American poets and the late-night breakfast. Strangely enough, given my recent talking-out-live those comments that might have gone into a blog post, the exchange with Seth was about the relative importance of live and virtual discussions of poetry.

As I was scrolling around on Facebook, I ran across this, a provocative update of Seth's, apparently intended as a response to the developments in Chicago-area poetry that Kent Johnson, the present humble blogger, and others had been blogging about, as well as to Steve Burt's Chicago-heavy roster of "New Thing" poets. Those of you who don't waste hours in online social networking might be surprised by Seth's use of the third-person to describe himself. Rest assured he's not emulating Caesar's Gallic Wars: Facebook's format sort of encourages you to write this way:

Seth Abramson: thinks one can't apply pre-internet school-creation models to the Internet Age. Proximity is no longer a prerequisite for an aesthetic school. There is no New Thing or New Chicago School. Poets are inspiring each other from great distances, and to think it requires sharing a bar with someone to be like-minded/mutually-inspired is to take a literal view of how art moves that hasn't been relevant since 1980.

Seth, a veteran of many internet conversations, followed this up almost immediately with the following comment, designed to prevent people from jumpily assuming he was out to attack anyone's poetry:

Seth Abramson This is not to, in any way, denigrate the poets now being associated with those schools, who are (many of them) extraordinarily talented. Their work simply cannot be aligned, however, merely on the basis of either Flood Editions (The New Thing) or Danny's (NCS), etcetera. The world's a lot bigger than that now. Bigger than Chicago. Bigger than a single excellent independent publisher. We need to think about schools in new ways, and not listen to those who would have us trying to re-create cultural artifacts from the 50s and 60s.

Ah! I thought. This is interesting! And it's made all the more interesting in that it's a comment being made at exactly the same point in time that a bunch of Chicago's poetry people have gathered at the Hyde Park Art Center for a day-long conference on the poetry of our fair city (a conference I'd have been part of if I hadn't dinged up my leg in a cycling accident that still has me stuck with limited mobility for several more weeks).

The question of the relation of virtual networking and actual face-to-face contact became more vexed when I received, via Facebook, a Blackberry-sent note from Larry Sawyer, saying he was down at the conference. I messaged back, asking him to tell Ray Bianchi and Bill Allegrezza that I wished I could have been there. I was sure there were interesting conversations taking place down at the Art Center (and due to take place at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap or some nearby taco dive later) of which I simply wouldn't be a part. At the same time, I was privy to Seth's online comments, and semi-involved in the Hyde Park event via Larry's trusty Blackberry and the good graces of Facebook. Which kind of proximity, real or virtual, mattered most? I typed out a reply to Seth:

Robert Archambeau: I agree that proximity is less important than ever, but I don't think it's completely over with yet. Let's call it residual and declining rather than obsolete. Like CDs.

The other big factor that remains, even in the internet age, is the whole old-school tie thing: networks of people who went to grad school together seem to be pretty important. The campus could be the new unit of literary history for a while.

Things got a little muddled after that, as Seth and I cross-posted (not that live encounters lack such confusion: had Seth and I met live, in, say, that favorite hang of Chicago poets, Danny's Tavern, we probably would have had to repeat ourselves over the din of the assembled literati, hipsters, and assorted bar barnacles):

Seth Abramson: Robert, I'm glad you mentioned this--I was about to add a comment about Kent Johnson's reference to Iowa. It's odd to think I would be more influenced by (say) Iowa classmates I never, in many instances, workshopped with or socialized with than--great example--Ron Silliman, whose work I first discovered through his blog. I am, without a doubt, an Iowa poet more influenced (now) by Silliman than any student I studied with at Iowa. MFA programs don't really traffic in influence in that way; my classmates all had their own visions. And Peter Gizzi affected me the most of any professor I had--and he teaches at UMass.

Seth Abramson: To add to my above comment, Robert: I mean to say that what happens between MFA students happens primarily, I think, post-graduation, not on campus. Those networks b/t peers who also become lifelong friends and cooperative readers. Brown--not Iowa--is actually the very best example of this.

Robert Archambeau: What I mean is this: people are likely to be in contact with the poets they met in grad school, likely to bear some relation to their prof's work (even if it is rejection), likely to stay in some kind of touch, likely to publish one another over the years, etc.

I take your point about you and Silliman. But I also think that even now, our face-to-face contacts still exert some influence. I think about the people I knew at Notre Dame, who almost all think of John Matthias as a hugely important poet. Very few people who went elsewhere seem to feel that way. And this is true even in a time when physical proximity is in decline.

Robert Archambeau: Looks like we cross-posted, Seth, and are more or less in agreement about all this.

Seth Abramson: I do agree--we must "meet" those who will influence us. Many of those "meetings" take place online or via books we read (i.e., often it is a unilateral "meeting" whose other half may never know it's even occurred). MFA programs allow some of these meetings to happen, even if the actual influence will exert itself over many off-campus years of contact through phone, e-mail, blog, or book publications. Kent's essay about the New Chicago School was so literal about "place" that he required all members of a school to be within not just driving distance of one another, but reasonable driving distance. Does this mean Peter Gizzi (Brown) is no longer influenced by Lisa Jarnot (Brown), because they both went there but then moved off to their own lives and pursuits (while remaining friends)?

When I left for more coffee, the conversation was still going on, with contributions from Angela Genusa, David Groff, and others. I'm hoping to check in on it later: I'm as interesting in hearing what went on there as I am in finding out what happened in Hyde Park. For now, at least, both kinds of conversations matter.

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In other news, Johannes Goransson makes some important points about "Double Gesture," an essay I wrote for Boston Review about Lars Gustafsson and Frederik Nyberg, Swedish poets of different generations.

Also, Henry Gould continues his meditation on manifestos, which began as a letter about an essay I wrote for Poetry about the future of manifestoes.

Chicago Poetry Conference, plus What George Oppen Means to Me

This just in from the "I Wish I Could Make It But I Still Have Mobility Issues After That Bike Accident" desk: Bill Allegrezza, who puts on the ever-interesting "Series A" events at the Hyde Park Art Center, has outdone himself, putting together a mini-conference on Chicago poetry. Here's the schedule:

Series A Conversations: Mini-Conference on Chicago Poetry

Saturday, Sept 19 in Chicago at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, Chicago. All events take place in the 4833 studio room.

New Media Poetics—Film and Poetry
10:00-11:15
(with a film screening)
Francesco Levato, Moderator
Kurt Heintz, Julia Miller, Eric Gelehrter, and Nate Slawson

Other People's Poetry
11:30-12:30
Tim Yu
Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy and Judith Goldman

Poetry and Place
12:45-1:45
Raymond Bianchi and Garin Cycholl,

Poetry Publication--Founding, Editing, and Distributing a Print Journal
2:00-3:00
Chad Heltzel, Moderator
Jennie Berner, Garrett Brown, Tasha Fouts, Jennifer Moore, Sara Tracey, and Snezana Zabic

Rapid Poetry Reading
3:15-4:45
Bill Allegrezza, Moderator

Larry O'Dean
Tim Yu
Kristy Bowen
Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy
Quraysh Ali Lansana
Ray Bianchi
Kristy Odelius
Garin Cycholl
Chad Heltzel
Dan Godston
Simone Muench
Nick Demske
and many others!

In the great tradition of our bootlegger city, you're invited to BYOB.

"The conference is not associated with any university or organization except for Series A (which is not really an organization at all)," says Bill Allegrezza, "feel free to come and throw your voice into the conversation and perhaps join us afterward for food and drink." That attitude captures a lot of what I think makes the local scene special just now.

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In other news, the new issue of Mimesis is out (with some content also online). It includes an essay of mine, which begins like this:

Writing the Impossibility, or What George Oppen Means to Me

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. But in his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
— W.H. Auden

When, as a student with vague ambitions in the direction of poetry, I ran across those words from The Dyer’s Hand, I underlined them with unusual care and paused for a moment, pencil poised to make some kind of significant comment in the margin of the book. In the end, all I could write was “yes.” I’ve never really gone beyond simple agreement in my thoughts on the passage, but Auden’s statement has stayed with me for two decades, during which time I’ve accumulated the usual small hoard of indicators that one is, in fact, a poet: graduate degrees, journal publications, book, teaching job, a modest prize or two. But all along I’ve been haunted by doubts about just what we’re doing when we write poems. Why do we do it? I’ve seen the piles of submissions surrounding editors’ desks, and know for a fact the world is suffering no shortage of the things. We no longer live in an age when aristocrats commission poems to celebrate battles the way they commissioned painters to line their halls with flattering portraits. Rarely do we find a poet who, like Milton, sees poetry as a way to justify the ways of God to man. The bourgeois reader no longer turns her yearning eyes to bearded, sad-eyed sages like Tennyson to learn How to Live. And, with the possible exception of a few hacks employed by the greeting card industry, the market takes no real interest in poems. Their raison d’être is far from obvious. On a bad day, I think poetry is (at least for me) impossible.

I’m not alone, either. Recently I heard that an American poet I admire, Gabriel Gudding, was thinking of giving up poetry. The author of two well-received books, Gudding certainly wasn’t failing as a poet, but for some reason he seemed to feel that poetry was failing him. He’s part of a long tradition of poets who’ve concluded that going on in poetry was simply impossible: there’s Matthew Arnold, for example, who gave up poetry for criticism, as did Paul Valéry for a time. There’s Basil Bunting, who took a long hiatus from the art, and there’s Laura Riding Jackson, who left poetry behind to concentrate on her prose. William Empson quit writing poetry. So did Arthur Rimbaud — probably the most famous defector from poetry — when he concluded that poetry was a weak way to rebel against his parents, and took to running guns instead.

It may well be that poetry is, at this late date, an impossible art. But even if that’s true, it’s no reason to give it up. That’s what I learned from one of poetry’s great prodigal sons, the Objectivist poet George Oppen, who gave up poetry for decades before finding his way back. For Oppen, the problem was one of isolation. He yearned to connect to the world, but at the same time saw poetry as an isolating activity, setting him apart from others. The surprising thing is that he never really let go of the doubts that drove him away from poetry. Instead, he found a way to make art out of them.

Subscription and ordering information for Mimesis is available here.

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And finally, in news from the "probably of no interest to anyone," I've finally joined the 21st century and turned the comments feature on for this blog. I think the decision had something to do with Bill Allegrezza's comment above about people adding their own voices to the conversation.

The New Chicago School

So there I was, leafing through some of my old notes on Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, and Nelson Algren, pulling together a plan for the next installment of the seminar I'm teaching on the literature of Chicago, when an email from Kent Johnson dropped out of the sky, announcing his post on what he's calling The New Chicago School of poetry. Dragging myself out of the past is never easy: it's like answering the call of the alarm clock and pulling myself out of dreamy reverie and into a world where things are actually happening, and I'm called on to play my own part. But Kent's post is worth shaking yourself awake: he spells out, more convincingly than anyone I've seen yet, just what it is that's been happening (and something has definitely been happening) in the literary life of our city.

A couple of years ago Kevin Killian's quipped that, when young poets ask him where to go, he says "Chicago is the most exciting scene around. Years from now we'll be looking back at the early 21st century and wishing we'd all relocated there at this time in poetry history," and I think he was on to something, although just what it was that was happening remained a bit obscure. Around the same time, Bill Allegrezza and Ray Bianchi released their anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Millennium , putting forth a range of poets and groping toward a sense of what is most vital in the city's poetry at this point. Two younger poets, Adam Fieled and Steve Halle, also made attempts at defining the city's new poetic scene. Fieled ventured the term "Chicago Eliotics" for a group of formal-yet-experimental types including Allegrezza, Bianchi, Eric Elshtain, Simone Muench, Larry Sawyer, Jordan Stempleman and myself. Halle edited (and still edits) Seven Corners a blog-journal devoted to showcasing the work he finds most exciting from Chicago and environs. Attempts at definition came from the realm of Respectable Authority, with the University of Chicago launching an annual symposium on Chicago poetry, and Harvard's Steve Burt giving a special tip of the hat to Chicago-based poets in his Boston Review article "The New Thing," which put neo-objectivism at the heart of what is new and vital in American poetry.

Noble attempts! But Kent has, I think, come closer to getting at just what has been most characteristic (and, to me, most fascinating) about the poetic vortex that's been gathering around Chicago for the past few years. Here's how Johnson begins his piece, called "The New Chicago School::

My proposal: That the closest thing we presently have to a “School” of younger, rigorously innovative poets in the U.S. (one that stands closest chance of being retrospectively seen as akin in significance to the NY School in its first-​generation, proto-​formation years ... is what I’ll call the New Chicago School. It’s a list of accomplished, experimental writers, more poetically focused as a collective, per­haps, than the contents list of the City Visible anthology of a couple years back, and more geographically focused, too, inasmuch as all the poets have roots in the city...

He then names names, including (out at the edge of things, in an uncertain netherworld between poet, critic, and scholar) that of the current humble blogger:

William Fuller, Ed Roberson (these first two the elder fig ures of the group), Anthony Madrid, John Tipton, Devin Johnston, Peter O’Leary, Robyn Schiff, Bill Allegrezza, Dan Beachy-​Quick, Michael Robbins, John Beer, Arielle Greenberg, Lisa Fishman, Jesse Seldess, Nick Twemlow, Suzanne Buffam, Srikanth Reddy, Jennifer Scappettone, Francesco Levato, Eric Elshtain, Jennifer Karmin, Leila Wilson, Nathalie Stephens, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Garin Cyncholl, Joel Felix, Chris Glomski, Erica Bernheim, Larry Sawyer, Patrick Durgin, Joshua Corey out in the suburbs, Tony Trigilio, Daniel Borzutzky (though some thing of a separate case, the work of these last two, perhaps)… and a gaggle of brilliant scholar-​editors associated, past or present, with the Chicago Review, along with Robert Archambeau, on the outskirts of town at Lake Forest.

He lists other groups (especially of younger poets) before asking "From a poetic standpoint, what would justify the set?" After making the obligatory gesture toward the limits of any broad definition, he offers the following idea of what connects this group:

....it’s held together by a vibrant, active scene and certain broad affinities of poetic predisposition and — quite often, and with the necessary exceptions — affect. The tilt is towards a “scholarly,” brainy, less “pop-cultural” and more self-​consciously “critical” mode than tends to be the case around St. Mark’s, for example. And, I’d argue, the work by and large tends to be more thematically ambitious, more novel and challeng ing in its registers and forms, more earnestly in tune with the international than the work of the younger NY scene, still largely caught, the latter, within tonal frames of the hip, the pop, the vernacular, the anecdotal, the flarf.

Kent's on to something here: his thesis is certainly true to my own, previously inarticulate, sense of what makes Chicago poetry more than just poetry written in the greater metropolitan area. Kent's article is up online, courtesy of Bobby Baird at Digital Emunction. It's got big shoulders.

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In other news, John Matthias (along with Michael Anania an intellectual and artistic godfather to untold numbers of Chicago poets) seems to be ramping up for a full-scale prose memoir, with autobiographically-based pieces appearing in the recent issues of Harvard Review, Parnassus, and Chicago Review. Be the first on your block to collect the set!

Shamans of the G.O.P.: Health Care and Hysteria

As the tide of frothing-at-the-mouth anti-health-care-reform whack-jobs begins to recede a bit, many of us in the not-entirely-irrational community find ourselves asking questions that are, in one way or another, versions of "What the hell was that?" How, after all, could so many people have so much passionate intensity about a reform bill about which they clearly know next to nothing?

The answer, I think, lies less in the realm of ordinary political analysis, and more in the realm of anthropology. To get a sense of how the kind of mass hysteria we've seen at dozens of town-hall meetings can be conjured into existence, we need look no farther than Claude Lévi-Strauss' classic Structural Anthropology — specifically, the passage in which he explains the function of shamanism in tribal cultures.

Here, Lévi-Strauss makes a distinction between normal thinking and pathological thinking, and describes the traditional shaman’s role as a socially necessary intermediary between the two modes of thought:

In a universe which it strives to understand but whose dynamics it cannot fully control, normal thought continually seeks the meaning of things which refuse to reveal their significance. So-called pathological thought, on the other hand, overflows with emotional interpretations and overtones, in order to supplement an otherwise deficient reality….We might borrow from linguistics and say that so-called normal thought always suffers from a deficit of meaning, whereas so-called pathological thought (in at least some of its manifestations) disposes of a plethora of meaning. Through collective participation in shamanistic curing, a balance is established between these two complementary situations.

So, when we're thinking "normally," we face a world in which there's a surplus of phenomena and a lack of understood significance. We see things, we don't quite understand how they work or what explains them, and we try to fill in the blanks. We try to figure things out, and spread light into those obscure and darkened corners of the map labeled "here dragons be." When, however, we're thinking "pathologically," things go differently. We begin with a surplus of emotions — fear, say, or anger, or aggrievement — and we look for something to which we can attach those emotions. One of the more important functions of the tribal shaman, for Lévi-Strauss, is to offer an explanation of the world that A) satisfies our "normal thought" desire for an understanding of how things work, and B) that takes our free-floating "pathological thought" emotions and attaches them to a definite object.

If you're thinking this sounds a lot like the finding of scapegoats, you're on to something. Consider the situation in Germany leading up to the Second World War: a defeated and impoverished people wanted to know how they fell so low (a "normal thought" desire for an explanation); at the same time they harbored a lot of anger, resentment, and fear, the proper causes of which were complex and difficult to locate. A talented but completely unscrupulous and immoral group of politicians could go far by offering both an explanation for German defeat, and group of people upon whom to focus anger and fear. Of course those politicians did go far, coming to power while blaming Communists, Jews, Gypsies, and others for the state of affairs. That this explanation wasn't valid wasn't really relevant: it allowed people, as long as they didn't think too hard, to satisfy the desire for an explanation of things (normal thought), and it allowed them to project their anger and fear on conveniently vulnerable scapegoats (pathological thought). The propagandists of the new regime were, in effect, performing a particularly evil version of the shaman function. That they performed this shamanic function with modern media and technology contributes to the particularly uncanny combination of the technological and the atavistic that was so characteristic of the horrors of the holocaust (as Martin Amis so memorably put it, the German political powers “found the core of the reptile brain, and built an Autobahn that went there").

While the current situation differs greatly in scale and in general evilness from the German example, both represent moments when the shamanistic function comes to the fore in modern politics. I mean, think about it: there's an awful lot of free-floating anxiety out there now, in post-9/11, post-economic meltdown America, especially among some Republican constituencies, who until recently have had a harder time finding a focus for their negative emotions than Democrats have had. (The issue for Dems is easy: Bush is the bad guy. Focus of negative emotions found, explanaiton of our woes located). Where are people who don't want to blame Bush & Co. to locate their negative emotions? How are they to explain the sad state of affairs in our country? The G.O.P., and their allies in the insurance corporations, have some very sharp people handling their publicity, and they seem to have made a deliberate decision to direct people's anxieties toward a particular objects: the federal government and the idea of socialism in connection with health care. Both the federal government and socialism seem remote to most Republicans (familiarity with someone or something makes it harder to turn that person or thing into a scapegoat), and both come pre-equipped with negative connotations, connotations manufactured or magnified by decades of public relations efforts.

"Why do you feel uneasy? Why are you afraid?" ask the shamans of the G.O.P. "Because the socialists and the federal government have been out to get you! And before you know it they'll haul you before a death panel!" The fact that this is false doesn't rate: it's satisfying to both the normal and the pathological thought-processes. It doesn't have to be true: it works. Or so you might think if you're unscrupulous, and don't mind the fact that millions of people in this country go uninsured.

Frank Luntz, for my money the most powerful Republican shaman (or, in more conventional terms, "political consultant") is the great architect of this strategy. He's quite bright, and his book Words that Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear is depressingly on-point most of the time. He's the one who said, of the idea of expanding access to health care, "we have to turn this into a government takeover." It's his strategy that we see when those red-face, screaming people pop up at town-hall meetings. They're angry, they're afraid, they're insecure. And, ironically, their insecurities have been quite successfully attached to a reform bill that would, objectively, make them a hell of a lot less economically and medically insecure.

I wish I knew what to do about this, but really, I'm pessimistic. After all, we live in a country where scapegoating has a tradition going back to the Salem witch trials, and that in modern times has manifested in the Palmer Raids, the House Un-American Activities Committee, Reagan's talk of welfare queens, Lou Dobbs' anti-immigrant screeds, and the big scare around gay marriage. It's hard to fight this sort of thing with reason and evidence, since so much of what's involved is pathological rather than rational. And, perhaps foolishly, one hesitates to put on face-paint pick up the shamanistic rattles and snake-charms and work shamanistic strategies for one's own side. I mean, most of us just don't look good in wolfskin robes and ancestral totem masks.

**

In other news, the good people at Poetry are running a bit of a debate about my piece on the (temporary) obsolescence of the manifesto in the back pages of the current issue, with contributions by Henry Gould, Ange Mlinko, Michael Marcinkowski, as well as my own weak and fumbling response.