New Work at The Cultural Society!

Great news!  The new issue of The Cultural Society is available, with work by:

Dan Beachy-Quick
Joel Bettridge
Norman Finkelstein
Michael Heller
Pam Rehm
Mary Austin Speaker
John Tipton
Mark Scroggins
Tyrone Williams

and more, including an essay on William Blake by Peter O'Leary, as well as three prose poems by the great midcentury Belgian Surrealists Gabriel & Marcel Piqueray, translated by Jean-Luc Garneau and some guy named Archambeau.

Many thanks to the redoubtable Zach Barocas for putting it all together!  Here, by the way, is Zach on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, playing the drums in his band Jawbox.  Note the Cultural Society hoodie:


Jawbox - Savory (Late Night With Jimmy Fallon) by HightowerAndJones

Moonrise Kingdom: Wes Anderson's Lost Children

Christopher Orr, writing for The Atlantic, says that Moonrise Kingdom is Wes Anderson’s best feature film since Rushmore, in no small measure because, like Rushmore, “it takes as its primary subject matter odd, precocious children, rather than the damaged and dissatisfied adults they will one day become.”  It’s an interesting claim but, I think, completely misguided, in that it misses the central fact of Anderson’s work: there is no meaningful distinction between his children and his adults.

There’s a curious equality between Anderson’s characters, regardless of age, as we see in, for example, the relation between the Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman characters in Rushmore.  The adults are lost in a world they cannot quite seem to master, and so are the children, whose precocity puts them in adult situations (seeking self-reliance, or projecting long-term plans, or yearning for romance), but who find themselves no more master of the situation than Anderson’s adults.  Indeed, Anderson’s vision of humanity is of a set of lost, gifted children, even if those children have lived long enough to appear to be adults.  Dignan with his elaborate life plans in Bottle Rocket is a figure of charm and pathos because he is clearly not entirely up to the challenge of the world; the grown-up child prodigies in The Royal Tennenbaums are still fundamentally juvenile, as is their father; the grown sons in The Darjeeling Limited never transcend their childhood; and Schwartzman’s Max in Rushmore is a boy, but his actions, ambitions, and desires are like those of an adult. When we see him on his journey what we’re really seeing is the hopeful, bewildered, and slightly sad child that Anderson sees within every adult — the situation is just made more visually explicit because of the age of the character.

Anderson’s adults are just kids who have been around a while, accumulating disappointments and trying to maintain some semblance of control.  This yearning for control appears in all of the lists, flowcharts, and plans characters come up with, as well as their maps and collections.  When Anderson shows us children as protagonists, the sense of precocity comes from the fact that they essentially undertake adult actions.  But in a way they’re not children, they’re what Anderson sees when he sees adults: people whose ambitions and plans and hopes are charming but also frail, people around whom hangs a slight aura of pathos.

We see this child/adult conflation everywhere in Moonrise Kingdom.  Many scenes we’re familiar with from war movies—the ambush of the protagonist, the uniformed scout who rallies his peers to defend one of their own, the fumbling romance between the 12 year old male and female leads on the beach—are just defamiliarized adult moments, in which the age of the characters makes us think of the vulnerability of the characters more than we would had they been played as adult scenes.  We get a sense, too, of the playing of roles, of people aspiring to be what they wish they could be, and this is something fundamental to Anderson’s characters regardless of age. 

Anderson’s much-praised visual sense is connected to his sense of the essential identity of adults and children.  Just as his treatment of children as adults allows him to show us slightly overmatched people, whose innocence and optimism come already paired with a little pathos and tarnish, Anderson’s visual sense constantly combines a kind of gee-whiz coolness with the faded, the obsolete, or the broken.

When Anderson has the budget, everything in his movies is designed deliberately.  This deliberateness is what Anderson loved about the stop-motion animation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox— every coffee cup and pencil had to be made deliberately, nothing could be taken for granted.  In Moonrise Kingdom, everything comes out of a period ethos, and is meant, says Anderson, to look like it could come out of a Norman Rockwell print.  But it’s not just a matter of period detail, or of Rockwellian Americana: everything is tweaked just a bit to make it not quite elegant or awe-inspiring.  Uniforms come with too-short trousers; the cut of a winter coat is slightly clumsy; the fabric of a dress looks a little faded.  It’s not Rockwell, strictly speaking: it’s as if Norman Rockwell had a yard sale for all the things that had become just slightly too shabby to keep.  This is significant: it shows us that what Anderson is after isn’t a kind of nostalgia for innocence; instead, he wants to show us innocence already tarnished, already touched by disappointment or pathos.  Just like his children, who are always as damaged as they are precocious, the objects with which Anderson fills the screen are always already scuffed and not quite adequate to the demands of life.

This touch of pathos is particularly present in when Anderson trots out technology.  The old record players and cameras and tape recorders in Moonrise Kingdom, like those in The Royal Tenenbaums or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, are often things that would, when they were new, have been high end gadgetry—but as an audience, we can’t help but see them as things that have been outclassed or rendered obsolete, even when we’re watching what is notionally a period piece (Moonrise Kingdom is set in the 1960s, but really exists in Anderson’s ahistorical fantasy space).  It’s that touch of pathos again, that sense that we’re all just the left-overs from some unreachable innocence.

The sense of lost innocence comes into play in the final scene of Moonrise Kingdom, where we see our romantic leads, Sam and Suzy, together again.  Sam is painting an imagined recreation of the one place where the were closest to happiness: an island inlet so insignificant it has only a number, not a name, where, on the run, they’d camped out for a moment.  It was a place where Sam put all of his scouting skills, all his little tricks to control the world, into play, but the would-be Eden they created there was doomed from the start, and destroyed twice over: first by the authority figures who capture them, then by a storm so violent it wiped the inlet away.  This is the always lost innocence, the hopeless, pathos-ridden attempt at Eden that haunts Anderson and his characters.  In Sam’s painting, he’s able to recreate the lost world that never quite was, and he’s even able to give it a name, “Moonrise Kingdom.”  But of course the real innocence never quite came into being, and is lost forever, and the painting, naïve and amateurish, is no substitute, despite Sam’s best attempts.  This sense of loss, and of our fundamental lostness and weakness, is at the core of Anderson’s art, and at the bottom of his sense of adults as lost children, and children as already-lost adults.

The Battersea Review Has Arrived!

Rejoice!  Thanks to the tireless efforts and editorial bravado of U.S. Dhuga and Ben Mazer, the inaugural issue of The Battersea Review is up online (and soon to be available in print).


Contributors include:


Marjorie Perloff on Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and Duchamp!
Adam Kirsch
Nora Delaney on Philip Larkin!
Stephen Burt
Todd Swift on poetry of the 1940s!
Ben Mazer's long, adventurous poem "The King"!
Philip Nikolayev
Stephen Sturgeon
Gerard Malanga (the original bad boy of Andy Warhol's Factory)
Jeet Thayil
John Hennessy
Joe Green
Greg Delanty
M.A. Schorr
Kathleen Rooney
Mario Murgia
Ailbhe Darcy
Previously uncollected work by the late, great Weldon Kees!
Also... Robert Archambeau (a few poems of mine have found their way into the issue).


According to the opening editorial, "The erudite Robert Archambeau is struggling in the most positive sense between the polarities of modernism and post-modernism, with a firm eye on our times" — I can't speak to my alleged erudition, but I think Dhuga and Mazer nailed it about the struggle.  Reading that sentence, I feel exposed in the same way I did when a critic wrote that my poems were haunted by a powerful father figure.  It's something I'd never noticed, and then suddenly, unnervingly,  saw to be true.


The Battersea Review has announced itself with a bang.  This will be a journal to watch, people.

T.S. Eliot Graduates from Aestheticism

I’ve been doing some research on T.S. Eliot’s brief journey through aestheticism on his way to becoming a religious poet and a moralist with a reactionary critique of modernity—and I can’t think of any clearer demonstration of the change in his poetry than the contrast between one of his most famous Christian poems, “Journey of the Magi,” and a very early untitled poem, known in Eliot circles as “At Graduation 1905.”

Eliot wrote the latter poem, an ode, when he was 16 years old, and read it at his graduation from Smith Academy.  His greatest literary influence at the time was Edward Fitzgerald’s famous translation of an 11^th century Persian work, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.  Fitzgerald’s rather free translation had attracted a cult following in certain English literary circles ever since it appeared in 1859, and had gone through several expansions and editions over the course of the late nineteenth century.  It was particularly popular in Pre-Raphaelite circles, and later among the aesthetes of the Rhymer’s Club in the 1890s.  One can see why: it was a kind of antidote to the moralistic poetry of such Victorian heavyweights as Tennyson and Matthew Arnold.  Here’s a fairly typical stanza, in which we are urged to see the world as temporary, as without any great moral meaning:

The Worldy Hope men set their Hearts upon 

Turn Ashes—or it prospers; and anon, 

Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face, 

Lighting a little hour or two—is gone.

“The Charge of the Light Brigade” it ain’t.  Instead of duty to Queen, country, and God, we find a world almost existentially absurd, a world in which the momentary fleeting impression of beauty is what matters.  Bohemians like Dante Gabriel Rossetti loved Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát, and it anticipates both Pater’s aestheticism and the whole emphasis on a poetry of fleeting impressions, loaded with imagery of transience, that we get with Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and other 1890s types.

Fitzgerald certainly came as a relief to the young T.S. Eliot, who had grown up in an oppressively strict and moralistic family milieu.  When I read his recollections of encountering the Rubáiyát, I thought immediately of John Stuart Mill’s recollections of first encountering Wordsworth and the “culture of the feelings” after his narrow, Utilitarian upbringing.  Here’s Eliot:

I can recall clearly enough the moment when, at the age of fourteen or so, I happened to pick up a copy of Fitzgerald’s Omar which was lying about, and the almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling which this poem was the occasion of giving me.  It was like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious, and painful colors.  Thereupon I took the usual adolescent course with Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, Swinburne. 

There’s reason to wonder just how Eliot found a copy “lying about,” since he grew up in a household where even Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were banned, and the Rubáiyát is both agnostic and (on occasion) just a bit racy.  But I digress.

Here’s a representative stanza of Eliot’s graduation ode.  The influence of Fitzgerald’s agnostic, aesthetic ethos is clear enough:

We go; like flitting faces in a dream;

Out of thy care and tutelage we pass

Into the unknown world—class after class,

O queen of schools—a momentary gleam,

A bubble on the surface of the stream

A drop of dew upon the morning grass.

“Graduation addresses,” says Eliot biographer James E. Miller Jr., “are generally supposed to be inspirational, saying, in effect: now go forth and live a life of great achievement and fulfillment.  Eliot, therefore, must has startled his listeners.”  Indeed!  This is a poem without moral exhortation, without homiletic reassurances.  This is a poem in which fleeting moments of beauty are the best for which we can hope—an aesthete’s poem.

Two stanzas from the poem offer an early version of one of Eliot’s recurring motifs: the return to a place long left behind, and the difference felt by those returning (the most famous instance is in “Little Gidding,” where Eliot writes “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”).  Notice the alienation felt by those who return to Smith Academy after graduation:

Standing upon the shore of all we know

We linger for a moment doubtfully

Then with a song upon our lips, sail we

Across the harbor bar—no chart to show,

No light to warn of rocks which lie below,

But let us put forth courageously

As colonists embarking on the strand

To seek their fortunes on some foreign shore

Well know they lose what time shall not restore

And when they leave they fully understand

That though again they see their fatherland

They there shall be as citizens no more.

We don’t get much by way of an explanation for this alienation—and this itself is significant.  Eliot, at 16, gives us a sense of separateness without any specific moral attached to it.  Those who return are no longer at home in the place they’ve left, but we’re not given any moral to attach to this story.  It’s not that the world has corrupted them, and they must touch base with the virtues embodied in the old school.  Nor is it that they’ve become Real Men, who must put aside childish things and get back out into the jungle where they compete with one another to push back the frontiers of darkness and spread the light of empire.  What we have is a mood, without a moral: the very stuff of impressionism and aestheticism.

Flash forward to 1927, and we find Eliot touching on his ‘return’ motif, but quite differently.  Eliot was now 39 years old, had settled in England, and had just been baptized and confirmed in the Anglican Church.  It was a move that rattled his deeply Unitarian family back in the U.S., and that puzzled his English friends, who tended to be secular intellectuals.  When Eliot went to visit I.A. Richards at Cambridge, for example, Richards and his friends were surprised to find Eliot carrying a “large, new, and to us awe-inspiring Prayer Book,” and were a bit flummoxed by the demands of Eliot’s faith, being “suddenly made much aware of our total inability to advise him on (or even discuss) the character of the various Services available on Sunday mornings.”

This was a new Eliot, and one of the poems that he published in 1927, “Journey of the Magi,” captures both his sincere Christian commitment and his sense of alienation.  After recounting the travails of the magi on their way to the nativity, and loading the poem up with imagery foreshadowing the crucifixion, the poem concludes with the return of one of the magi to the kingdom he’d left behind:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

This is the first point in the poem where we’re made aware of the speaker’s silent interlocutor, a scribe figure to whom he dictates his accounts.  And of course, since the accounts we have of the journey of the magi are scriptural and without any mention of the magi's return, there’s a suggestion that the speaker’s words, which he twice insists be recorded, have not been recorded— that they've been suppressed by someone who did not want such discouraging comments to be put in front of the faithful.  And the comments are discouraging, telling us of the pain of conversion, of how one’s rebirth as a Christian is also a death of one’s former self.  The nature of the pain is significant: it comes in the form of alienation from one’s people.  One returns, as one does in Eliot’s graduation ode, to find that one no longer belongs.  Unlike in the graduation ode, though, there’s a specific moral to the story: though conversion is difficult, and though it leads to a rift with those one loves (we may think here of Eliot’s shocked family, or of his puzzled friends at Cambridge), conversion is not to be reversed.  The speaker suffers from his sense of difference, but it’s important that he never raises the possibility of re-conversion: he’d rather have “another death”—a literal one— than that. 

Set side by side with the graduation ode, “Journey of the Magi” looks very much like a moralist’s poem.  Its ethos is one of religion, and poetry at the service of religion, rather than aestheticism, and the appreciation of the passing moment as the highest of goods.  If Eliot’s graduation ode was a poem of moments, “Journey of the Magi” aspires to be a poem of the intersection of the timeless with time.

UC-Davis Wants Joshua Clover & its Own Students In Jail For Protesting: Help Do Something About It

The University of California-Davis, an institution you may remember for how its campus police pepper sprayed seated, peaceful student protestors, is now trying to send eleven of its own students and one faculty member—poet Joshua Clover—to jail for up to eleven years, and fine them up to one million dollars, for protesting.


Here are the details.


And here's where you can say that this is wrong.


Please take the time to sign the petition.  When the university should be standing with its own students against a vindictive bank, it has chosen to continue to disregard the principles of free speech and peaceful protest.  In November the university showed contempt for the physical well-being of its students, and now it shows contempt for their financial futures and their freedom.

And the Best Poet is...: Poetry Prizes and Normative Criteria

How does one decide which poet, or which manuscript, should win any of the ever-growing number of poetry prizes?  Peter Riley, in an article in the Fortnightly Review, remarks on the obscurity of prize criteria.  Awards tend to be given out to poets who are “the best” or to collections of poems that show “excellence,” but very little is ever said by way of clarifying “the best at what?” or “excellence in terms of which criteria?”  In this, poetry competitions are quite unlike cattle shows.  As Riley points out, cattle shows have clear, objective, and normative criteria for excellence:

If at a county show you are one of the judges in the section for Aberdeen Angus cattle, you will have a comprehensive list of points which must be fulfilled. There is the carriage of the creature’s head, with even teeth and broad muzzle. It should have a long body and strong legs with the joints well set. The back should be straight with a slight dip at one end. It should be well and evenly muscled with not too much fat. Viewed from behind the rump should be rounded, the legs straight and the hooves correctly positioned. When it walks its hind hoofs should enter the marks of its front hoofs without overstepping or understepping. If it is a cow its udder should not be pendulous and the teats should be of the right size and placement. If it is a bull the testicles should be large and the sheaf firmly attached and not pendulous. But all these distinctions should be weighed against the proportions of the whole animal and the aim is to assure that both it and its progeny should fulfill their commercial function. If all these boxes are ticked, you have your winner.

For poetry prizes, though, we have no clearly articulated normative criteria — and even though Riley says “surely some version of this schemata could be devised for judging poetry competitions,” one suspects his tongue is in his cheek.  Much as one is tempted to simplify matters of judgment by simply taking the cattle competition criteria over into the literary sphere (the winning poet should be “well and evenly muscled without too much fat” and “viewed from behind the poet’s rump should be well rounded,” if male the poet’s “testicles should be large,” etc.) no version of overtly normative criteria is likely to appear in the judge’s guidelines for any competition.  Not even if the norms had to do with meter, imagery, and syntax rather than body fat, rumps, and testicles.

In fact, revulsion at the thought of normative criteria for poetry runs deep, and even manifests in our popular culture.  Consider the first two minutes of this clip from Dead Poets Society, in which the teacher played by Robin Williams offers a strongly worded condemnation of the normative criteria for poetry outlined by the fictitious critic J. Evans Pritchard:

A few critics have laid down fairly clear normative criteria for poetry. Yvor Winters, for example, comes to mind—and it is perhaps worth noting that in addition to being a poet and critic, he bred show dogs and had them evaluated by criteria much like those applied to cattle.  But the rare exceptions prove the rule: normative criteria for poetry are unusual, and generally perceived as crackpot-ish at best, philistine at worst.  Despite what Dead Poets Society would have you believe, such criteria are unlikely to appear in any textbook, except perhaps surrounded by apologetic statements, qualifiers along the lines of “this will help get you started as a poetry reader but shouldn’t be taken too seriously” and other semi-retractions.

Why is this?  I’m not asking in order to say we ought to come up with criteria for poetry.  I’m asking because a sense of the origins of our current anti-normative way of thinking may cast some light on what is actually happening when poetry contests are judged.

The notion that the things that make poems excellent can’t be defined is at least as old as the seventeenth century.  It was then that the French poet Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux put forth the idea that what distinguishes truly sublime work from lesser poetry was “a certain je ne sais quoi”— that is, a certain “I don’t know what.”  Boileau’s ideas were immensely influential, and the notion that excellence could be felt but not defined gained currency across Europe.  The nature of good writing, a believer in the je ne sais quoi says, is something I know and I can't explain.  Inherent in the idea is the notion that there's no point in trying to explain one's criteria, since it is inherently elusive.  

Boileau's ideas are connected to the reception of art, to what goes on in the mind of the reader.  In the nineteenth century, there's a new turn of mind, toward the art object itself, and thinkers like Coleridge begin to argue that the internal qualities of works of art resist normative judgement.  When Coleridge talks about organic form, for example, he tells us that poems, like all works of art, cannot be held up to some external standard.  They generate their own rules from within.  In this way Coleridge dismisses those who would criticize Shakespeare's tragedies for deviating from the formal criteria outlined in Aristotle's Poetics.  He opens up the theoretical pathways that justify a great deal of artistic innovation.  He also makes it much more difficult to offer a theoretical justification for the normative assessment of poetry.

Both Boileau, with his sensitive reader who detects the undefinable, and Coleridge, with his hyper-individualistic artist discovering his personal path in art, can be seen as symptoms of modernity, of the gradual replacement of old, collective, authoritarian ways of thinking with new, atomized, individualistic ones.  Fredric Jameson gets at the nature of the shift they represent when he writes, in "Criticism in History," of the difference between the rhetorical and the stylistic.  The former, Jameson says, is normative and conformist, while the latter is deeply bourgeois and individualistic:

Rhetoric is an older and essentially pre-capitalist mode of literary organization; it is a collective or class phenomenon in that it serves as a means of assimilating the speech of individuals to some suprapersonal oratorical paradigm, to some non- or preindividualistic standard of the beau parler, of high style and fine writing.... Style on the other hand is a middle-class phenomenon, and reflects the increasing atomization of  middle-class life.... in its emphasis on the uniquely personal, in the etymological sense of the stilus, the inimitable and wellnigh physiological specificity of my own handwriting.

So when we shy away from normative criteria for poetry, we're simply being who we are, participating in our modern or postmodern individualistic identities.  But this leaves us in a tricky spot when it comes to poetry contests, and our position is made all the trickier by virtue of the fact that poetry prizes and contests have become a bigger and bigger part of how poetry in Western countries is published and rewarded.  There was a very brief period in the middle of the nineteenth century when poets were rewarded well by the market, and after that there were a number of decades when to be a poet was almost necessarily either a bohemian (Yeats lived for most of his adult life in a two room flat) or someone with a day job (Wallace Stevens as insurance man).  Now many poets live in the publish or perish sphere of academe, and poetry publishing is often done via the contest method, with poets submitting manuscripts to prize-givers.  At the more senior end of things, the big prizes given out by foundations and (less often) government agencies play a significant role as sources of income and, more importantly, as badges that give one clearance into the more prestigious clearings in the groves of academe.  Prizes matter now, but we live in a poetic culture inimical to clearly articulated, objective, normative criteria of judgement.


What to do?  One path that's been tried, both in the past and in our own time, involves moving away from criteria for the poem to criteria for the person judging the poem.  David Hume's great essay "On the Standard of Taste" argues that we may not be able to define beauty, but we can describe the sort of person who is likely to have a good sense of beauty. Such a person must be familiar with many art objects of the kind under consideration, for example—you wouldn't want someone who'd only read fifty poems to be the judge of a poetry contest.  Such a person would also have an un-agitated mind at the time of judging, and (among many other criteria) would give due attention to the object of judgement.  


Kant's Critique of Judgment takes Hume one step further, and tells us that a true judge of beauty must, above all else, maintain disinterest.  That is, he shouldn't let personal connection to the artwork, or its maker, or its moral sentiment, get in the way of his judgement.  Good judgement of beauty, for Kant, is essentially a manner of screening out all non-aesthetic criteria and looking at what's left.  In our own time, the emphasis on high-profile expert judges for poetry competitions is, in essence, an adopting of a Humean or Kantian position: we may not be able to define what the best poems are like, but we know what sort of expert can make a good judgement.


The problem, of course, is that this solution doesn't always work.  First of all, the proliferation of different styles and schools of poetry means that the familiarity with tradition upon which Hume's good judge depends becomes difficult to attain: no one has mastery of the entire spectrum of poetic styles.  A Helen Vendler covers one corner, a Marjorie Perloff covers another, and the room has many, many corners.  In addition the criterion of "due attention to the object" is trickier than it sounds in our present context: I've been a judge for a poetry prize, and found myself with literally hundreds of manuscripts to read, all while teaching, grading papers, looking after my kid, and trying to do my own writing.  It wasn't easy.  Indeed, I don't think I was fair to every manuscript, and I don't think I could have been.  The day has too few hours, and the world too little caffeine.  And with regard to the Kantian notion of disinterest—well, it was given a good sharp kick in the teeth by multiculturalism, by the claim that so-called disinterest was simply a screen behind which certain entrenched (white, male, bourgeois, heterosexual) norms lurked.  It never really recovered.


Even more discrediting to the notion that choosing qualified judges will save us from having to articulate normative criteria was the whole unpleasant business exposed by the people at Foetry some years ago.  They looked for nepotistic patterns in the awarding of prizes, and they found them.  Far from being disinterested, many prominent contest judges proved all-too-human, awarding prizes to friends, lovers, and former students.  The score of the game, it seemed, was: self-interest 1; disinterest 0.


Another path, one worth trying, would be the one suggested by Michael Theune and Bob Broad in the November 2010 issue of College English.  Theune and Broad began with the premise that people who care about and work with poetry have internalized certain criteria of judgement, and that those criteria can be made explicit through conversation about particular poems.  Their work involved conducting sessions in which poets and critics discussed poems they admired, and gave reasons for their admiration.  From this, Theune and Broad began to tease out things that the poets themselves might have been unable to articulate before.  They moved from je ne sais quoi to mais oui, je sais quoi—a movement many more of us should follow.  In fact, it might be worthwhile for contest judges to do some long hard self-examination before agreeing to act as judges, and then make public some kind of statement about what they love in poetry and why they love it, including all of their ambivalences, their contradictions, and their openness to surprise.  It would be strange, at first, but it might begin to take us forward from our current situation, where so much rides, for so many, on such vague criteria.

BlazeVOX vs. the NEA, or: Ezra Pound's Shilling

Those of you residing in the little teacup that is the contemporary American poetry scene may have noticed something of a tempest a while ago, when the National Endowment for the Arts issued a statement saying that it would no longer consider books published by BlazeVOX legitimate items on the curricula vitae of writers seeking grants.  In the eyes of the N.E.A., BlazeVOX was nothing but a vanity press.  There's a sliver of truth to the charge, in that BlazeVOX had, in some limited instances, asked authors to fund a portion of publication costs — but this didn't apply to all books, and not all authors asked for funding ended up having to contribute in order to be published.  The situation is complicated, really, and Anis Shivani has done a service to all of us teacup-dwellers  in publishing an interview with BlazeVOX's Geoffrey Gatza at the Huffington Post.

A more energetic inquirer than I would want to ask, and answer, a number of questions arising from the situation. Should all BlazeVOX authors be tarred with the same brush?  Doesn't the now-common fee paying contest model of publication amount to a kind of subsidy publishing system, since all authors submitting to the contest pay a small fee, collectively covering the cost of publication?  Does it matter that Tennyson, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, and a host of others were first published under what amount to vanity press conditions?  Should decisions about financial matters really be taken into account when judging art, or is this just a way to make the N.E.A.'s job easier?  Should we look into the way universities sometimes subsidize the publication costs of their faculty?

I'm not the energetic inquirer we need.  But I do want to note that a simple comparison of BlazeVOX's publishing model with the model of Elkin Mathews—who published many modern greats a century ago—reveals that, technological differences aside, the models are essentially the same.  Here's BlazeVOX's Gatza describing how his press works:

I would like to make it known that in our offer to publish books with a co-operative donation, if the author did not want to participate in this we also made an offer to publish their work as an ebook in Kindle and EPUB and PDF format and have it available on Amazon.com and iBooks. And if that was still not acceptable, we could wait until our financial outlook was stable and we would then publish their book without a donation. I think that this is a fair arrangement, as do many writers. I think that this is a very successful program and we were able to promote good writers.

Compare this to the time when Ezra Pound, freshly arrived and friendless in London, took the manuscript of Personae to Elkin Mathews, whose Bodley Head had published Yeats’ The Wind Among the Reeds and the two anthologies of the Rhymer’s Club, the most important documents of British aestheticism.  Pound dramatizes a “touching little scene in Elkin Mathews’ shop” this way in one of his letters:

Mathews: “Ah, eh, ah, would you, now, be prepared to assist in the publication?”

E.P. “I’ve a shilling in my clothes, if that’s any use to you.”

Mathews: “Oh well.  I want to publish ‘em.  Anyhow.”

In both instances the publisher asks for help.  When it isn't forthcoming, he does what he can for the poems he admires anyway.

I don't think the juxtaposition of Gatza and Elkin Matthews answers any of the big questions about the BlazeVOX/N.E.A. tempest, but I do hope it gives a little perspective on what it means to be a publisher of innovative poetry, and on the importance and generosity of such people.

Lives of the Philosophers

“People always talk about Nietzsche’s childhood, about how ideas like the death of God can be explained away by the fact that his father and grandfather were ministers,” a young philosophy professor told me not long ago, “but they only do that to Nietzsche, never to someone like Hume or Kant.”  As a Nietzschean, he found this frustrating, and he continued by asking why it was his guy always being treated as if his ideas weren’t propositions that could be true or false, but symptoms of some psychological condition.  Surely, he argued, this said something unpleasant about the people willing to treat Nietzsche this way.

I found the comment fascinating, but it took me a while to understand why.  Eventually, I concluded that two things had struck me as odd. Firstly, there was the emphasis on interpretation being correct or incorrect.  I expect this sort of thing from people in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, but I was surprised to hear it from someone specializing in continental philosophy.  I’d always taken John Stuart Mill’s distinction between the kinds of questions asked by Bentham and Coleridge as a good way of distinguishing between the English-language tradition and the continentals (Coleridge was educated in philosophy in Germany, and was among the leading English continental-style thinkers of his generation, though, to steal a phrase from Mill, his prominence in that field was due in large part to the flatness of the surrounding terrain).  Bentham, said Mill, was interested in whether a text was or was not true; given the same thing to look at, Coleridge was interested in what the thing meant.  If we get a bit anachronistic, we might explain Mill’s Bentham/Coleridge distinction this way: confronted with Darwin’s theory of evolution, Bentham would want to know if that’s how things really worked, but Coleridge would want to know what it meant to think of life in terms of evolution.  Bentham’s way of thinking would take you in the direction of verification and falsifiability.  Coleridge’s way of thinking would take you in the direction of significance and, I suppose, cultural impact.  Both paths can take you to interesting places.

Anyway.  This second, Coleridgean way of looking at things allows for much greater latitude of significance, beyond the binary of true/not true, and I’d naively assumed that people emerging from a training in continental philosophy would be in sympathy with it.  But it seems I may have been wrong: perhaps American philosophy departments are an interpretive community more in line with Bentham’s norms, and we in the English departments are the interpretive community with Coleridgean norms of understanding.

Just as surprising to me was my colleague’s notion that a biographical or psychological explanation didn’t so much explain as explain away, a distinction I’ve never really been comfortable with.  I suppose the idea of the explaining away of something entails that the proffered explanation is somehow total, that it accounts for everything that needs to be accounted for, and therefore one needn’t trouble oneself with any further questions.  “Why did Nietzsche claim God was dead?  To tick off his preacher daddy.  Next question!”  That would, indeed, be an irksome attitude to encounter.  But I’ve known a few biographers, and I don’t think they see their task as being to reduce their subject’s works to symptoms of certain biographical events or psychological trauma.  Indeed, I think they see their work as adding a dimension to how we interpret writings, rather than as taking dimensions away.

My guess is that it’s the tendency toward Bentham’s, rather than Coleridge’s, way of interpreting texts that makes so many philosophers wary of looking to the life of a philosopher.  Even Ray Monk, who wrote a splendid biography of Wittgenstein, expresses a great deal of caution about the biographies of philosophers.  “Can knowing the facts of a philosopher’s life, or gaining an insight into his or her personality, somehow shed light on their work?” he asks in a recent issue of The Philosopher’s Magazine, “I think it can,” he continues, “but, in spelling out how, one has to be very careful, for otherwise one risks allying oneself with some pretty crass points of view.”  And what are these crass points of view?  Monk cribs some terms from James Conant, “reductivism” and “compartmentalism.”  The reductivist, in this view, is the explainer-away of things, the guy who thinks that once we know enough about a philosopher’s life, we’ll be able to (in Conant’s words) “see why he wrote what he did and thereby discover the real meaning of his work.”  In contrast, compartmentalists believe that the facts of a philosopher’s life have nothing whatsoever to do with the correct understanding of his work. For both reductionists and compartmentalists, there seems to be a tendency to want to reduce the pertinent frames of reference for a work, to see it as either only conditioned by the life, or as a set of contextless propositions with no connection to the life.  This is not how we read in English departments, not lately: we tend to look for a plurality of significances, some contextual, others not.  Which is not to say that we don’t come up with some loopy and imbecilic readings.  I mean, the price of our kind of freedom is an eternal lack of vigilance.

Conant himself advocates another path beyond that of the reductionist or the compartmentalist: he says we can turn to the lives of philosophers in order to avoid certain misunderstandings of their work.  One thinks, for example, of Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, which argues that the logical positivist take on Wittgenstein is misguided, and that his life (as opposed to his published texts) proves the case.  Long story short, many positivists have interpreted the last statement in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent” as meaning that mysticism is empty.  Monk points to Wittgenstein’s statements to his friends to support the view that Wittgenstein meant something quite different: that mysticism and the holy were real and powerful, but were beyond our capacity to voice, and that any attempt to paraphrase the ineffable was doomed to fall so short as to constitute a lie.  On the one hand, I find this quite convincing.  On the other hand, I find the whole debate that runs “he meant this,” “no, he meant that” sort of naïve.  Haven’t we learned enough from Freud (and, for that matter, from Marx, from Jung, from Lacan, from Surrealism, from…) to see that what we think we’re saying is only the small, visible part of a much bigger iceberg of meaning?

Biography, of course, is not an art limited to the recording of someone’s off-the-record statements, and one of the great things it can accomplish is to give a sense of the concrete situation out of which an idea or set of ideas emerge.  This needn’t be the absolute limit to the significance or meaning of those ideas, but it can provide a sense of the problems initially being addressed: both (the great) Karl Popper’s theories of tolerance in The Open Society and its Enemies and (the odious) Leo Strauss’ sense that liberalism paves the way to nihilism and eventually to fascism take on more significance when we note how they were written by men whose lives were scarred by the Holocaust. 

Or consider Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the concept of identity and difference.  Deleuze argued that we have traditionally considered difference to be something that derives from, or comes after, identity: things have essential identities in themselves, and we compare them and note how they are unalike.  This isn’t really the case, though: for Deleuze, identity is constituted by difference: something is what it is because it differs from one thing in one way, from another thing in another way, and so on: identity is negatively defined, not something with an unchanging essence.  If you read François Dosse’s excellent, exhaustive dual biography Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari: Biographie croisée, you see why the mild-mannered Deleuze hit it off with the extraverted, manic Guattari so well: the kind of thing Deleuze had been theorizing was a conceptual version of something Guattari had been putting into practice at the experimental LaBorde clinic, where he was revolutionizing French mental health care.  The French had been treating mental health problems fairly crudely, more or less keeping patients locked up in isolation.  Guattari felt that this only allowed mental health problems to continue.  Instead, he put patients into constantly shifting group environments, and into different roles, having them perform many tasks at the clinic (the same went for the medical staff, who would rotate into dishwashing or social group leadership roles or whatever).  The notion was that these patients didn’t have a set identity as ill people, but that they were who they were in relation to others, and that their identity would be different if they were in different groups.  It’s not just that you’d be person X wherever you were.  You’d be defined by your relation to those around you, and the differences constituted your (contingent, changeable) identity.  Deleuze took to this immediately, and together Deleuze and Guattari developed, from this notion of difference, the concept of identity as a desiring machine connecting to other desiring machines.  Much later, when Deleuze is interviewed by Claire Parnet, he insists that the resulting text isn’t the product of his own contextless intellect: it is the product of what he is when he is connected to Claire Parnet: hence he says the author of the book of interviews is Deleuzeparnet (something the publishers did not honor, by the way).  This is clearly something with connections, and to a degree roots, in Guattari’s clinical practice.

But why is the biographical information about what Guattari did at LaBorde important?  My historian pal LeMahieu put it better than I could when the question came up at lunch a while back.  “So,” he said, “it’s an example of that French philosophical tradition, where they take something concrete and specific and convert it into something as abstract as possible.”  He’s right, I think, and right in a way that shows us both the strength and weakness of the continental tradition in philosophy.

Aesthetics as Ethics: One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism

Great news!  You can now pre-order ReReading the New Criticism, a book edited by Miranda Hickman and John D. McIntyre, to which I contributed a chapter called "Aesthetics as Ethics: One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism."  

Other essays include:

“Eliot, The Agrarians, and the Political Subtext of New Critical Formalism” by Alastair Morrison

“Androgyny And Social Upheaval: The Gendered Pretext of John Crowe Ransom’s New Critical Approach” by Aaron Shaheen        

“The Fugitive and the Exile: Theodor W. Adorno, John Crowe Ransom, And The Kenyon Review” by James Matthew Wilson (my fellow Notre Dame alumnus)

“No Two Ways About It: William Empson’s Enabling Modernist Ambiguities” by Bradley D. Clissold

“In Pursuit Of Understanding: Louis Untermeyer, Brooks and Warren, And ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’” by Connor Byrne

“Through Fields of Cacophonous Modern Masters: James Baldwin And New Critical Modernism” by Adam Hammond

 “Disagreeable Intellectual Distance”: Theory And Politics in the Old Regionalism of The New Critics” by Alexander Macleod (fellow Canadian and Notre Dame alumnus)

“Teaching with Style: Brooks and Warren’s Literary Pedagogy” by Tara Lockhart

“A Kind Of Dual Attentiveness”: Close Reading After The New Criticism” by Cecily Devereux

        

“Toward a New Close Reading” by the volume’s editors, John Mcintyre And Miranda Hickman

Here are the first two paragraphs of my contribution:

If I had believed everything that I was told about the New Critics when I was in graduate school, I suppose I would have been more or less prepared to conclude that they were a nefarious crowd of reactionaries, yearning for the good old days of a slaveholding American South while tuning out the wailings of the oppressed in order to relish a particularly convoluted irony, paradox, or poetic ambiguity. Among other things, I was told that the New Critics disdained Romanticism in favor of the complex ironies of the Metaphysical poets; that they were aesthetes, concerned with form but not with ethics; and that they had nothing in common with Continental literary theory, which spoke to our current condition in a way the New Critics simply could not. Such representations were not without an element of truth to them, of course: Eliot’s downgrading of the Romantics in favor of Donne & Co. was real enough, as was the turn to text over context in W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon, and no one would confuse the political dreams of the Fugitives with those of the Frankfurt School (or, for that matter, the prose of Robert Penn Warren with that of Theodor Adorno).

Contrary to what I was told, though, it turns out that the New Criticism is in fact part of a long tradition of ethical thinking, a tradition that, in an apparent paradox, is ethical not despite, but because of, its insistence on aestheticism. Moreover, in an irony of a different kind than that so savored by the authors of Understanding Poetry, this tradition is fundamentally Romantic in its origins and characteristic gestures of thought. So my first thesis here is that the New Criticism, contrary to received opinion, is an ethically based criticism. My second thesis, which is really only a half a thesis, deeply provisional in recognition of how much further work needs to be done before it could be fully embraced, is that New Critical thinking may prove to be an important kind of ethical thought for our time.


*


[*I should add that while I claim in the essay that no one would confuse the political dreams of the Fugitives and the Frankfurt School, I have in fact deliberately done exactly that elsewhere.]

Blood, Guts, and the Eternal Ideal: Notes on Yeats and Blake

[This is a draft of a section of the Yeats chapter of a book I've been working on that has the working title Power and Poetics: A Social History of Aesthetic Autonomy and Poetry.  And by draft I mean draft: I haven't even gone over it for typos yet.]

                       

In February of 1891, when “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland” appeared in the National Observer, Yeats had been involved for some two years in the three-volume edition of Blake that he and Edwin Ellis would complete in 1893.  By the time the poem was republished in The Book of the Rhymers’ Club in 1892, the club itself had expelled the anti-aesthete John Davidson and his allies and fellow Scots, becoming overwhelmingly an aesthete’s concern.  Both facts are relevant to an understanding of the poem.  The context of the battle between Davidson, with his “blood and guts” ethos, and the Oxford aesthetes matters because the poem stages a debate between the life of ordinary desires and satisfactions, on the one hand, and a kind of neoplatonic, otherworldly removal from such things, on the other.  The context of Yeats’ ongoing work on Blake matters because “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland” bears such strong structural similarities to Blake’s Book of Thel that it begs to be read in the context of the earlier poem, and when read in such a context emerges as a stronger critique of the eschewal of the everyday than it would otherwise.  While Yeats sided with the aesthetes against Davidson, his poem is less sanguine about matters.

            The first three lines of the poem’s first stanza give us a man in a specifically Irish setting seeking to satisfy his yearnings for an ordinary, this-worldly love, and finding some modest satisfaction in the quest.  But a sudden supernatural encounter marks an abrupt volta in the poem, snatching away the man’s satisfaction:

He stood among a crowd at Drumahair;

His heart hung all upon a silken dress,

And he had known at last some tenderness,

Before earth took him to her stony care;

But when a man poured fish into a pile,

It seemed they raised their little silver heads,

And sang what gold morning or evening sheds

Upon a woven world-forgotten isle

Where people love beside the ravelled seas;

That Time can never mar a lover's vows

Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:

The singing shook him out of his new ease.

The conflict, here, is between the ordinary love of a man of flesh and blood and the vision of a remote ideal of timeless, eternal love.  That the fish are silver and sing of a “gold morning” is significant: Yeats had long been reading in the alchemical tradition, and knew that gold was associated with the masculine principle, silver with the feminine principle, and the two together were a form of perfection, analogous to the perfection of the soul in eternity.[1]  Knowledge of this realm of eternal love brings sorrow to the man, making him unable to enjoy the ordinary love he had finally found in this world.  The poem is by no means a simple allegory of Yeats’ cultural position.  Nevertheless, the fact that the man is associated with Ireland, combined with the fact that the poems’ ideal world is reminiscent of the neo-Platonic inclinations of Symbolist poetics, links the poem to Yeats’ concerns about the relative value of commitments to specific, worldly Irish affairs, on the one hand, and the world of the aesthetes, on the other.

            The second stanza is structured on the same principles as the first, with a three line description of the man’s quest for worldly satisfaction in a specifically Irish context, followed by a volta in which his vision of an ideal world makes him dissatisfied with his modest achievements:

He wandered by the sands of Lissadell;

His mind ran all on money cares and fears,

And he had known at last some prudent years

Before they heaped his grave under the hill;

But while he passed before a plashy place,

A lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth

Sang that somewhere to north or west or south

There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race

Under the golden or the silver skies;

That if a dancer stayed his hungry foot

It seemed the sun and moon were in the fruit:

And at that singing he was no more wise.

Here gold and silver have both literal and symbolic, alchemical properties, and the doleful effects of the encounter with the ideal world are even more severe than they were in the first stanza.  Rather than simply losing his “new ease,” the man becomes financially improvident, and we can assume that his worldly circumstances actually deteriorate after the encounter with the ideal.

            The third stanza presents a slight variation on the pattern set up by the first two stanzas:

He mused beside the well of Scanavin,

He mused upon his mockers: without fail

His sudden vengeance were a country tale,

When earthy night had drunk his body in;

But one small knot-grass growing by the pool

Sang where - unnecessary cruel voice –

Old silence bids its chosen race rejoice,

Whatever ravelled waters rise and fall

Or stormy silver fret the gold of day,

And midnight there enfold them like a fleece

And lover there by lover be at peace.

The tale drove his fine angry mood away.

Here, rather than pursuing love of fortune, the man seeks something less universally regarded as positive: vengeance.  And the post-volta encounter with the ideal world (still symbolized by gold and silver) is not a matter of encountering an idealized version of the thing he’d sought in the quotidian world.  Rather, it is an ideal of the opposite of vengeance and hatred: an ideal of peace.  That this vision of eternal peace is unnecessarily cruel isn’t just a clever paradox: it shows how different the value systems of the ordinary and the neoplatonic realms are.  It is a conflict between the world of blood and guts and a world of complacency that turns its back on earthly feuds and conflicts—in short, it is a rough parallel both to the conflict between Davidson and the aesthetes, and to the conflict between Yeats the Irish political man and Yeats the aesthete.  

            The poem’s final stanza maintains elements of the pattern we’ve seen develop, but also brings us intimations of the man’s eventual union with the eternal:

He slept under the hill of Lugnagall;

And might have known at last unhaunted sleep

Under that cold and vapour-turbaned steep,

Now that the earth had taken man and all:

Did not the worms that spired about his bones

Proclaim with that unwearied, reedy cry

That God has laid His fingers on the sky,

That from those fingers glittering summer runs

Upon the dancer by the dreamless wave.

Why should those lovers that no lovers miss

Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss?

The man has found no comfort in the grave.

The modest hope for an “unhaunted” sleep in the grave is denied by visions of holy grandeur.  Here, though, the man isn’t simply discomforted by the vision of eternity: he is given a hope of a final dream achieved, at the end of time, when God burns fallen nature away with his love.  While gold and silver do not appear in this stanza, the fire is a continuation of the alchemical imagery—indeed, it represents the purifying force that burns away dross and fuses higher elements into perfection (see Schuler 45-46).

            A criticism of idealizing turn from ordinary satisfactions (and, implicitly, a criticism of the aesthetic tendency in the Rhymers’ Club and the Symbolist and Decadent movement more broadly conceived) is clearly a strong element in the poem: the ideal torments the man and renders him incapable of satisfactions in ordinary love, ordinary pursuit of wealth, and in victory over his foes.  This criticism of the pursuit of the ideal is re-enforced when we consider the way the poem’s structure and cast of characters echo Blake’s Book of Thel, with which Yeats was intimately familiar, especially at this point in his career.  The parallels between the poems are strong.  Both poems offer us a protagonist on a quest whose encounters with interlocutors introduce them to the nature of the relation between the time-bound and the eternal, and whose speech frustrates them profoundly.  Both poems offer repetitions, with variations, of the same kind of encounter.  Moreover, both poems show the protagonist listening to humble speakers who can only be speakers in a fantastic environment: in Blake’s poem, Thel is addressed by a cloud, a lily of the valley, a worm, and a clod of clay; while in Yeats’ poem the man is addressed in turn by fish, by a lug-worm, by a knott of grass, and by coffin worms.  There is one significant difference between the poems.  While Yeats’ man lives in a very real set of Irish places, and is informed by his interlocutors about the existence of eternity and the ideal, Thel lives in Blake’s Vale of Har, a kind of Garden of Eden (Har, in Blake’s personal mythology, is a kind of Adam).  She has heretofore been sheltered from any concept of time or change, and her interlocutors try to inform her about mortality, and about how we are all subject to time and change.  While Yeats’ man is haunted by thoughts of the timeless and the eternal, Thel is haunted by the specter of time and mortality.  But this does not mean that the poems are not both critical of those who eschew the quotidian world of time and change: Yeats’ man would have been able to revel in ordinary satisfactions were it not for the intrusion of the ideal, and we see Blake’s Thel as a failure for her refusal to embrace the message of her interlocutors.  The poems, then, take alternate routes to a similar critique of the ideal and defense of the time-bound.  In a sense, Yeats’ “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland” is the masculine counterpart to the feminine figure in Blake’s Book of Thel.  This notion is re-enforced when we turn, again, to alchemical symbolism: for the alchemically-informed Yeats the melding of gold and silver represented a fusion of the masculine and the feminine leading to a perfection of beauty, wisdom, and love; and Blake’s poem begins with a motto for Thel that invokes both metals: “Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod,/Or Love in a golden bowl?”  Yeats might almost have taken it for an invitation for his own poem.

For all this, though, to say with M.L. Rosenthal that “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland” evokes “the malign seductiveness of romantic dreaming” (9) is to misunderstand the nature of the poem’s ending, which mitigates the critique of idealizing tendencies considerably.  True, the poem’s protagonist has consistently suffered through his encounters with those who point to an ideal world beyond this one.  However, the purifying fire at the end of the poem (and, in theological terms, at the end of time) promises an eventual union with the eternal and divine, a gathering of the man to the neo-platonically Christian deity.  This is not a poem that simply asserts that we should take pleasures in the quotidian and shy away from any fish or knot of grass we find speaking of an ideal world beyond our own.  The poem’s criticism of the ideal is very much in evidence, and dominates everywhere but in the penultimate line.  That line does not so much negate the rest of the poem as it exists in counterpoint to it.  Yeats’ attitude to the turn from the world to the ideal, then, could best be described as “critical but ambivalent.”  A look at the other poems of this period in Yeats’ career (if not, in most cases, of his prose) career confirms that this is his attitude toward those who turn away from worldly concerns to the realm of the visionary.

Works Cited

Rosenthal, M.L.  Running to Paradise: Yeats’ Poetic Art.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Schuler, Robert M.  “Yeats: Artist or Alchemist.”  The Review of English Studies, vol. 22 no. 85 (February 1971): 37-53.

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[1] For a long, but by no means exhaustive, list of Yeats’ reading in alchemical texts, see Schuler  37n.5.