Educating Ezra

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just One Book

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

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

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

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

JUST ONE BOOK

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

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

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


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

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

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

We Got a Yeats, You Got a Wallace Stevens

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

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

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

Marginality, Manifesto, and Poetry's New Thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Scholar Escapes (For Now)

I've done it: I've watched the students troop off from campus, to whatever beach or internship awaits. Much to the dismay of the sensitive observer, I've gone sockless, kitted-out in sandals and shorts and Mexican short-sleeved shirt. I've hauled the bicycle out and had at it with oil and wrenches, readying it for the dusty trail. I've laid in a supply of frosty beverages, and piled the appropriate books out by the adirondack chairs. Summer, people, is on the way, and I'm hauling out one more thing, for all the academics who are experiencing the end of the teaching term — an old poem by Austin Clarke. If he hadn't lived in the considerable shade generated by Yeats' monumental stature, he'd have been the most musical Irish poet of his generation. Check out the crazy consonance, assonance, half-rhymes and scansion here, and the (to my mind) devastating turn at the end, when the easy flow of pastoral escapism comes to a screeching halt, and the scholar once again finds himself, as we all do, working for The Man. I'm going to have to scare up a slim volume of Clarke's to cart around on the bike trails while the summer lasts...

The Scholar

Summer delights the scholar
With knowledge and reason.
Who is happy in hedgerow
Or meadow as he is?

Paying no dues to the parish,
He argues in logic
And has no care of cattle
But a satchel and stick.

The showery airs grow softer,
He profits from his ploughland
For the share of the schoolmen
Is a pen in hand.

When mid-day hides the reaping,
He sleeps by a river
Or comes to the stone plain
Where the saints live.

But in winter by the big fires,
The ignorant hear his fiddle,
And he battles on the chessboard,
As the land lords bid him.

—Austin Clarke

**UPDATE MAY 7** Mike Begnal has posted some comments about this to his blog, noting that Clarke is actually reworking an old Gaelic poem, reversing the earlier poem's point even as he honors its sound patterns. Good stuff!

Mayday!

The premiere issue of Mayday is up online, featuring (among other things) Kent Johnson's "Some Darker Bouquets," an open letter responding to Jason Guriel's Poetry magazine defense of negative reviewing. The good people at Mayday invited a host of people who review poetry to respond, and there's a big, here-comes-everybody set of responses to Johnson (including, for what it's worth, my own). It's a real debate, people, and despite my contribution, an intelligent one!

Frank Zappa, Commodity Logic, and the Dawn of Postmodernism

So there I was, puffing away on the treadmill, preparing for bicycle season (Team Slow Ride, the crew with which I so inelegantly ride, will be doing a Milwaukee-to-Chicago run this summer, and believe me, I'm in no kind of shape for anything more than a downhill roll to the local ice-cream truck). I'd wedged Frank Zappa's autobiography into the treadmill's little magazine-holder thing, and was a chapter or two into it when I ran across the following passage from Zappa's account of his blue collar, small town teenage years in the 1950s:

One day I happened across an article about Sam Goody's record store in Look magazine which raved about what a wonderful merchandiser he was. The writer said that Mr. Goody could sell anything—and as an example he mentioned that he had even managed to sell an album called Ionization. The article went on to say something like "This album is nothing but drums—it's dissonant and terrible; the worst music in the world." Ahh! Yes! That's for me! I wondered where I could get my hands on a record like that, because I was living in El Cajon, California—a little cowboy kind of town near San Diego.

Zappa couldn't find a copy in El Cajon, but one day, when visiting a friend in nearby La Mesa, he hit the record store and paydirt, in that order:

After shuffling through the rack and finding a couple of Joe Huston Records, I made my way toward the cash register and happened to glance at the LP bin. I noticed a strange looking black-and-white album cover with a guy on it who had frizzy gray hair and looked like a mad scientist [Zappa, whose father worked in a metallurgy shop, had a kind of mad science vibe to him at the time, and made of the mixing of chemicals and the blowing up of shit the main non-musical activities of his youth]. I thought it was great that a mad scientist had finally made a record, so I picked it up—and there it was the record with "Ionization" on it. The author of the Look article had gotten it slightly wrong—the correct title was The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume I...

The LP cost a princely $5.95, and Zappa had only $3.75 to his name. He made an offer, and, since the record seemed unsellable, the clerk let him buy it. The record was an ear-opener, and soon Zappa was laying in a supply of Stravinsky, Webern, and the like, along with the usual teeny-bopper stuff, and used blues records from old jukeboxes. "Since I didn't have any formal training," writes Zappa, "it didn't make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightnin' Slim, or a vocal group called The Jewels... or Webern, or Varèse, or Stravinsky. To me it was all good music."

Anyone who's spent time listening to Zappa's music can tell you it's the result of the collapse of the high culture/popular culture distinction — a collapse typical of what we think of as postmodernism. But what's interesting here is how Zappa starts on the road to being a postmodern musician: it has everything to do with the dominance of commodity logic in American culture. Firstly, there's the article in Look, which presents us with what, in historical terms, is a very strange kind of heroism: Sam Goody is no knight in shining armor, nor is he a holy man or a martyr. He's a hero because he can, Midas-like, convert anything he touches into a commodity to be sold (even something so resolutely non-commodifiable as Varèse's experimental music). It is only because the tale of the triumph of the Knight of Commodification over the Dragon of Aesthetic Innovation was being sung in the pages of Look that Zappa heard of Varèse in the first place. Secondly, there's the actual triumph of markets and commodities in midcentury America: the country was well on its way to being the everything-all-the-time-if-you-can-pay-for-it nation it is today, and you could even find a Varèse album in a shitkicker county if you traveled a town or two over. Also, there's the sense that the only value is the market or commodity value. What's the value of Varèse? Only what the market will bear, by the logic of commodities. And, since the market in La Mesa wouldn't bear $5.95, Zappa was actually able to afford the album.

Moreover, since young Zappa wasn't exposed to any system of cultural hierarchy other than the commodity, he encountered all music as equal (all commodities are in some sense exchangeable -- lead, feathers, fighter jets, bassoons, church windows, first folios of Shakespeare, truck tires, Van Gogh paintings, whatever: pile them up high enough and you can trade one for another). In another time and place he'd probably have learned one or another kind of snobbery. I mean, if you read old issues of Gramophone from the 1920s, the world of music is pretty clearly split into classical, on the one hand, and everything else, which was seen as worthless crap, on the other). So: the logic of commodities, where everything is curiously the same, was the only logic by which music was sorted for young Zappa, pure product of America that he was. And it was, I suppose, from a million little actions like Zappa's purchase of Varèse that the collapse of cultural hierarchies, of Webern-good, Lightinin' Slim-bad, followed. It's been said that with the triumph of market forces, all that is solid melts into air. It turns out that includes aesthetic hierarchy.


By the way: I'm ashamed to admit I didn't know, until reading Frank Zappa's book, that he and Captain Beefheart hung out together in high school. And thinking about them together reminds me that the guy who first turned me on to Belgian Surrealism, Michel Delville, is not only the editor of a book on Captain Beefheart: he plays in a band called Trank Zappa Grappa in Varese, which is well worth checking out.

Rimbaud Notebook

I've been working on an essay about Rimbaud and, as always, taking more notes than necessary. Here are a few of them...


*

The hagiographic quality of the French commentaries on Rimbaud can be overwhelming. If the French ever found the bullet with which Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist, they'd put it in Lourdes and use it to heal the lame.

*

In 1901 a Belgian book-lover discovered all 500 copies of Une Saison en Enfer in the storeroom of the printer Rimbaud had hired 28 years earlier. Rimbaud, it seems, had never paid the man.

Rimbaud never tried to publish Illuminations: it was his former lover Verlaine who got it into print, long after Rimbaud departed for Africa. At the time, Verlaine thought it was a posthumous publication.

Whatever else you can say about Rimbaud, he was not a careerist.

*

Mallarmé said that Rimbaud "amputated himself" from poetry. It makes you wonder: what did Mallarmé amputate himself from by staying a poet?

*

I, like everyone else, really want the "Adieu" at the end of Une Saison en Enfer to be the last bit of poetry Rimbaud wrote, but the chronology remains muddled. It's probable some of the Illuminations came afterwards. Rimbaud is as inconsiderate of others in chronology as he was in everything else.

*

I don't think we can underestimate the role France's national humiliation in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 played in setting the mood for Rimbaud's poetry. The "Mauvais Sang" or "Bad Blood" section of Une Saison en Enfer revels in the idea of the French as a debased people. The self-doubt of a defeated nation becomes an opportunity for Rimbaud to undermine one of the pillars of bourgeois morality: pride in nation.

*

Everyone who writes about Rimbaud has an opinion about the statement "Je est un autre" ("I is another"), But for me the real interest lies in a related statement, "C'est faut de dire: Je pense: on devrait dire on me pense" ("It's wrong to say I think: one should say I am thought").

I could find only one truly first-rate gloss on the passage, by the great Geneva-school phenomenologist Georges Poulet. For him, "I am thought" (meaning something like "something thinks me," not "I am composed of thought") can be paraphrased as an undoing of the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am." Poulet: "I am, I do not doubt my existence, nor do I doubt that it is personal, or that the way in which I apprehend it is not equally personal. I am, and feel myself to be, living. But this being that I am and of which I am conscious, is dependent upon a power I cannot reasonably attribute to myself. My effort to think myself can only lead me to situate, somewhere back of me, a determining power of which I am the passive subject and about which I am at a loss to speak."

It's in the context of these ideas that "Je est un autre" takes on fuller resonance. Against this powerful sense of being formed by forces beyond one's control, "Je est un autre" can mean (again, in Poulet's words) "I can think myself other than I am or was."

*

It's freedom Rimbaud is after, but he's always after it the way a prisoner is, when he dreams of escape. Rimbaud feels the constraints of family, school, career, and religion, and satirizes them brutally in his earliest poetry. But what does escape look like? Sometimes it's a dream of a return to childhood (think of "Le Bateau Ivre," in which the only boat he cares for is the toy one launched by a child in a cold black puddle) and sometimes it's a dream of dissolving, and being swept away into nothingness (think of another part of "Le Bateau Ivre," where he dreams of the storms tearing his ship apart). Sometimes, too, it's a desire to transcend the limits of existence by having more than one life ("It seems to me we are owed other lives," he wrote in Une Saison en Enfer).

Robert Baker, in his wonderful study The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Philosophy gets at the nature of Rimbaud's escapism when he writes "At one extreme of his experience, Rimbaud explores theatrical, expressive, metaphoric multiplications of himself... while at another extreme he evokes a kind of translation of the self into the sweep of light."

What to Make of the NDR?

Back in the fall of '97 I opened my mailbox to find a free promotional CD from Naxos Records, a label specializing in inexpensive recordings of the more obscure corners of the classical music repertoire, often performed by fairly low-profile orchestras and ensembles. The CD was called Naxos: Ten Years of Success, and I suppose the bravado was merited. The good people at Naxos had succeeded by at least two criteria: they'd made a financial success for themselves, and they'd brought a vastly expanded range of music into broad circulation. The commemorative disk was a success, too, at least for me: I still listen to some of the tracks, long since scanned into my laptop and ported over to my various pods, phones, gizmos, and devices.

Today I opened my mailbox to find another collection commemorating a decade's worth of putting art in front of the public, only this time it wasn't music, it was writing: an anthology of poetry and fiction called Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years. The title's got none of the fine bragadocio of Ten Years of Success, although I suppose the implied existence of a second decade ahead is a bit of an expression of confidence, given the lifespan of most literary ventures. Still, one is tempted to ask: in what ways, if any, could the journal's first decade be described as "ten years of success"?

I've been reading the Notre Dame Review since its first issue, and have written for it more times than I can remember (there's a poem of mine, "Victory Over the Sun," in the anthology, too). There's generally been something I've been impressed by in every issue, and on occasion something I've disliked, but generally I've disliked it with a grudging respect. So even though I've only had the anthology in my hands for something like two hours, and read only bits and pieces, I feel like I've got a pretty good sense of the journal and what it has tried to accomplish.

The anthology has two introductions, one by each of the editors, John Matthias and William O'Rourke. Reading over Matthias' introduction helps clarify what has been best about the journal, as well as its shortcomings. Let's start with the main shortcoming. "All issues since the second," writes Matthias, "have an an umbrella-like theme — 'Dangerous Times,' 'Work,' 'Signs and Surfaces,' 'Body and Soul'..." This is true, in that each issue has a title, and several of the pieces inside relate to the title. But one senses some bad faith on the part of the editors: the themes tend to be quite general ("Signs and Surfaces" is hardly a theme in the way that, say, "New Cuban Poets" would be), and if you can write a convincing defense of how each piece connects even to the general theme, I'll come over and paint your house for you. There are exceptions: I remember one issue devoted to writing from the &NOW Conference of Innovative Writing. But overall I rather suspect that the idea of themes was part of the proposal written for the NDR early on, and that the editors experience it as a burden more often than not.

Other statements from Matthias' introduction really do clarify what has been best about NDR's editorial policy. "One distrusts a reader of Pound who cannot admire Auden, a reader of Elizabeth Bishop who will not open a book by Susan Howe," writes Matthias, and this broadmindedness informs both the journal as a whole and the present anthology, in which Caroline Bergvall and Derek Mahon rub shoulders. The presence of Bergvall and Mahon doesn't just indicate open-mindedness about form, either: it also indicates a sensitivity to writing from outside the United States, in translation and in English. Until the Chicago Review became a kind of American outpost of Cambridge School poetry, the Notre Dame Review was your best bet for finding exciting British poetry in an American literary review. Outside of a particular range of experimental work, it still is.

Matthias proudly points out that the first issue of the journal contained, along with much else, work by two Nobel Laureates and two poets publishing their first poems. One suspects the Nobelists were there as the result of some arm-twisting and some calling-in of favors, but I take Matthias' point: NDR has been neither hierarchical nor in-groupish, and this, too, is something in which its editors can take pride. There's a kind of centripetal force that afflicts some journals once they've become established, and it can result in a narrowing down of the range of contributors. Notre Dame Review has kept itself admirably open. This isn't to say that there's a lack of personality to the journal, though. There are, in fact, editorial preferences, best summed up by Matthias' observation that he and O'Rourke "notice that, among the selections, there is not a lot of first person hyper-subjectivity or narrow manifestations of identity poetics; when the self appears, it seems to be fully conditioned by history, and conscious of that." This seems entirely right to me in two senses: it's right in that it's an accurate description of the editorial preferences at work for the past ten years; and it's right in that it's a good policy to follow. We are, after all, always involved in a dialectical interaction with the past in one way or another (literary, social, political, etc.), and there aren't enough journals devoted to publishing writing that begins by acknowledging this. The idea that the writer should engage the past is as old as T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and as fresh as Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation. We need more of this, and the NDR is one of the places where we can count on getting it.

The anthology includes both fiction and poetry, but none of the critical writing that makes up a substantial portion of each issue, and this really is a shame, because NDR has been one of only a handful of journals (like Pleiades, Chicago Review, and of course Parnassus, among a few others) where reviewing habitually stretches its wings and becomes something more than publicity. When someone like John Peck writes a few thousand words worth of criticism, it's well worth anthologizing, and I wish some of that had been done. Still and all: I think the editors could, if they'd been less modest, have taken Naxos' route when titling the volume. Try it for size: Notre Dame Review: Ten Years of Success. Yeah, that fits.

Planets on Tables

A short review I wrote of Bonnie Costello's new book of criticism, Planets on Tables is now up on the Boston Review site. Costello's put together an interesting book of lit crit, tackling the big question of the role poetry plays in mediating between public events and private life. She treats the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wilbur, and (surprisingly) the works of artist Joseph Cornell.

Death of a Surrealist: Franklin Rosemont, R.I.P.

Some very sad news: Franklin Rosemont has died at the age of 65.

Rosemont was the kind of man for whom the epithet "American original" was made. He was the real, true, independent bohemian, through and through: the son of a labor activist father and a jazz musician mother, he was a scholar, an activist, a poet, a publisher, a Surrealist, and a historian, and he was all of these things on his own terms, all the time. I only met him a few times, but every time I did I got a taste of what genuine independence was all about. He didn't hold an academic post, and, since he and his wife Penelope ran the old I.W.W.-affiliated press Charles H. Kerr and Co. together, he didn't have to write with an eye to what a publisher would accept.

A couple of years ago the artist Tom Denlinger and I were teaching a seminar on the artistic and literary institutions of Chicago, and Franklin and Penelope Rosemont were kind enough to drop in. Tom and I had been teaching the history of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Poetry, and the Chicago Review, among other institutions, but the Rosemonts came to tell us about an all-but-forgotten counter-culture, the bohemian world of Chicago's Towertown in the early twentieth century. It was a world where Kenneth Rexroth and Carl Sandburg rubbed shoulders with hobos and Wobblies and all manner of political, sexual, and social dissidents. Rosemont's collection of documents pertaining to that world's central venue, The Rise and Fall of the Dil Pickle is still the best place to get the flavor of a lost world where home-style Dada met midwestern labor radicalism.

Rosemont's commitment to Surrealism ran deep. He met André Breton in Paris in 1966, and later became a leading light of the Chicago Surrealist Group, which published an irregular journal called Arsenal, held international exhibits, and upheld the idea that Surrealism shouldn't be the prisoner of the very artworld institutions it initially protested. Rosemont's edition of Breton's selected writings in English translation, What is Surrealism?, remains unsurpassed.

For me, Rosemont represented a somewhat paradoxical position: classical Surrealism. He was always true to his sense of what Surrealism was about, and for some this seemed like a too-rigid adherence to the ideas of Breton. There may be something to that charge, but let's remember the best side of Breton's Surrealism: the insistence on Surrealism as life, not just as art, the sense of a continuity between labor-centered politics and Surrealist activity, and a conviction that (to use the title of one of Rosemont's books) there must be a "revolution in the service of the marvelous."

Pierre Joris has a fine tribute to Rosemont up at his blog, and the Chicago Tribune has a detailed obituary.

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I think it's fitting to bring something else up here, since it's very much in line with the kind of thing Franklin Rosemont believed in, and the kind of commitments he lived out. Zena Sakowski (with whom I went to high school, and whose father was a colleague of my dad at the University of Manitoba's School of Art) has continued a long string of Situationist-style radical art/life actions by opening the Chicago Free Store, which she describes as "a nomadic, temporary free store that irregularly visits a variety of Chicago neighborhoods." If you're in the Chicago area, be sure to check it out.

Don Share and Chris Wiman Channel The Piqueray Twins!

No! Go away! I've had it with you lot, always banging on my door and demanding that I blog about Belgian surrealist poetry of the 40s and 50s. Haven't you had enough? Can't you leave me to my humble task, building a 3/4 scale model of Kurt Schwitter's Merz Palace? No? Well. I can't help you now. But the good people at Poetry magazine should be able to throw a steak or two to the howling wolf of your curiosity. Yep. They've got the new issue up online, and it includes "A Pedal-Pusher Said to Me," one of the nuttier of the Piqueray twins' poems, translated by Jean-Luc Garneau and the current humble blogger. And if that's not enough for you, check out the first five minutes of the Poetry podcast, where editors Chris Wiman and Don Share read the poem and comment on its various oddities (the rest of the podcast is good, too).

Now, where'd I leave my blowtorch and floral-print wallpaper? Let's get this Merz house built!