Rimbaud Notebook: The Sequel

John Ashbery is such a perfect translator of Rimbaud, so thoroughly plugged in to the right kind of French sensibility, that one really wonders why his version of Illuminations didn't come into being earlier.  In fact, the nature of Rimbaud as the eternal enfant terrible leads one to wish a translation of Illuminations came at the start of Ashbery's career, not in that career's final movement.  But it's a wonderful translation, and it offers the occasion to think, once again, about the miraculous and monstrous phenomenon that was Rimbaud.

I posted a few thoughts on Rimbaud back in 2009 — outtakes from a more formal piece of writing.  So I suppose what follows here is really my second Rimbaud notebook.  I'm amazed and humbled to think the two year span between that post and this constitutes a period equal to one half the duration Rimbaud's entire writing career.

*

Thesis: Rimbaud is Tracy Flick.

Tracy Flick—Reese Witherspoon's character from the 1999 film Election—is uncannily similar to Rimbaud.  Consider:

Both Rimbaud and Tracy Flick come from households fraught with bitterness and anger caused by an absconding father.  Rimbaud's father, a Captain in the French army, was often away, and at one point went off to Algeria for good.  His mother was quietly furious, calling herself the "Widow Rimbaud."  When we see Tracy Flick's house in Election, it becomes clear that she is a child of divorce.  Like Rimbaud's mother, who converted her own frustrations into academic ambition for her son (she was a little league parent avant la lettre, with ambitions for her son compensating for her own thwarted life; he was a star student, even a prodigy), Tracy Flick's mother has created, out of personal frustration, an over-acheiving child, bent on winning all honors the school has to offer.

Both Rimbaud and Tracy Flick aim to escape the confines of provincial life and make good in the capital.  Both court their mentors sexually (Rimbaud goes after Verlaine, Tracy Flick after a hapless teacher), and both bring ruin onto the lives of mentor figures.  Both Rimbaud and Flick attain versions of their dreams, and destroy other lives to do it.  Only one left us extraordinary poetry, and if one is the sort who thinks that poetry is more important than kindness, one can make excuses for Rimbaud.

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Thesis: Rimbaud's revenge on his family is more twisted than the pages of The New Yorker have portrayed it to be.

Daniel Mendelsohn, in a very good article in a recent issue of The New Yorker, says "It's tempting to see, in the wild divergence between his parents' natures, the origins of Rimbaud's eccentric seesawing between literature and commerce."  It's a nice thesis in that it's clean and clear, and makes sense of the abandonment of poetry for the life of a merchant (in guns, among other things) in Africa.  Rimbaud's father, in addition to being an army officer, was something of a literary man, translating the Koran and compiling a humorous anthology, while Rimbaud's mother was much more concerned with material advancement.  But there's surely more to the Rimbaud family romance than a rebellion against the pragmatic mother through emulation of the literary father, followed by a rebellion of a literary father through the embrace of the mother's profit motive.  Consider:

—Writing may have been an emulation of the father, but so was running off to Africa, so we can see the African venture as an emulation of the father and a rebellion against the mother.

—Selling guns to Africans, when one's father worked to colonize Africa for France, can also be seen as a rebellion against the father.

—Rimbaud's mother was certainly a materialist, but in a dour, conservative, provincial way.  Not for her the longshot, not for her the risking-it-all-for-one-big-score.  She was more the type to die with a small fortune, slowly hoarded over the years, stuffed in a sock behind the vanity.  So the African capers of Rimbaud's later years, astonishingly risky and ultimately fatal, were also a rebellion against the mother.

Many critics have seen Rimbaud's abandonment of poetry for gun-running in Africa as a betrayal of his true self.  But this is to mistake poetry for the essence of Rimbaud.  And Rimbaud, astonishing though he may be as a poet, wasn't a poet first.  He was a rebel.  He was a universal rebel.  He didn't just rebel against his mother for a while, then against his father.  He rebelled against everyone, everywhere, always.

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Thesis: Pater and Rimbaud take different trains to the same station.

In 1871 Rimbaud wrote some of his most famous letters, including the famous "Seer's Letter," in which he told his old teacher Izambard "I'm now making myself as scummy as I can.  Why?  I want to be a poet, and I'm training myself to be a Seer..."  He also came up with his famous assertions "Je est un autre" ("I is another") and "I am present at the hatching of my thought."

What's happened here is that Rimbaud has tapped into some of the same things that Walter Pater would get at two years later in his study The Renaissance.  That is, Pater was about to offer us his sense of aesthetic experience (and, by implication, the poet's vocation) as something for-the-moment, something almost utterly asocial, without utility, without commercial or ideological aims: as a matter of letting one's sensations come to one brightly and clearly, so that one burns "with the light of a hard, gemlike flame."  Rimbaud, too, intuited that the poet no longer had a clear social position—had no meaningful role in the market, no role to speak of in making public opinion.  The poet is a dropout from society's main values (hence "scummy") and he perceives powerfully and afresh (hence "a seer").  Both men arrived at the truth of the poet's condition in the West as the nineteenth century entered its final decades.  The one came to his conclusions by scholarship, the other by a kind of preternatural feat of adolescent intuition.  They were both right.

In addition, Rimbaud has grasped another truth of the nineteenth century apprehended by Pater: the truth of the determination of the self by forces larger than that self.  It was the era of the Naturalist novel, with its protagonists formed by heredity and environment (Zola began publishing his magnum opus, the Rougon-Macquart saga, the same year Rimbaud wrote his "Seer's Letter").  It was also the era of early economically deterministic social theory (the first volume of Das Kapital came out in 1865, the second posthumously in 1885).  Like these other thinkers, Pater and Rimbaud came to see the self as the product of forces beyond the self.  But unlike Zola or Marx, they both put emphasis on how one can become subjectively aware of one's own determination by large forces.  Pater's famous Gioconda passage in The Renaissance (which first came out in the Fortnightly Review in 1869) depicts the Mona Lisa as the product of centuries of Greek, Roman, and medieval Christian forms of beauty and perception—a kind of palimpsest of the entire cultural experience of Europe from classical times to the moment Leonardo painted.  He also, in a clever fit of style, portrays the lady in the painting as someone who has lived all of this experience, and whose smile is the smile of knowingness: she knows she is the product of a long past and many forces, she knows that values and notions of the absolute, the good, and the beautiful come and go, she experiences all this as a kind of music of history.  Hers is the smile of detachment, of the consciousness of a historical relativist who knows that even her own relativism is the product of specific historical circumstances.  Rimbaud lacks Pater's learning, but he's got, much more immediately, the gist of the situation: I is another.  I am made by things that are not me, but I can watch this, I can see my own thoughts hatch ("hatch" is significant: the thoughts are the products of others who are absent).  In both Pater and Rimbaud there's a wonderful doubleness of consciousness: one is the thing that has been constituted by large forces; one is also the thing that knows this about itself.

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A tradition:

With the emphasis on observing the self as it experiences things (watching one's own thoughts hatch) Rimbaud takes us away from the objective world and into the world of experience as filtered through subjectivity.  Hence the strangeness and the distortions of Illuminations.


One can see him holding a place in the great movement inward that is such an important part of the European long nineteenth century (from around the time of the French Revolution to around the time of the first World War).  Consider:

—Romanticism in the "Tintern Abbey" mode: that poem is 5% Abbey, 95% how-I-experienced-the-Abbey-then-vs.-how-I-experience-it-now.  We're on a road to the subjective, the interior.

—Modern fiction as Virginia Woolf defined it in her 1919 essay of the same name.  Modern fiction wouldn't be concerned with externals, claimed Woolf, but with the "halo" of subjectivity that surrounds each of us, and through which the world must be filtered.  We've arrived at an apotheosis of subjectivity.

Rimbaud fits, here, right in the middle.  He may be a rebel, but as he intuited, he's the product of forces larger than himself, including the tide of literary history.  Knowing this may have been part of what made him such a total rebel.  It may even have been a part of his abandonment of the literary for the very real, very material world of the African gun-runner.  His first heart of darkness was, like Conrad's, figurative. His second journey to an unknown interior was much more literal.

The Monkey, The Wrench, The Salt Companion

My first book, published back in 1998, was Word Play Place, a collection of essays I edited about the poetry of John Matthias.  I'm happy to report a new book of essays, picking up where Word Play Place left off, is about to appear: The Salt Companion to John Matthias, edited by Joe Francis Doerr.  Contributors include Gerald Bruns, Keith Tuma, Linda Kinnahan, Mark Scroggins, Joyelle McSweeney,  Peter Robinson, Christopher Merrill, Herb Leibowitz, John Peck, John Wilkinson, and others, including the present humble blogger.  Here is what the Salt website has to say about the book:


"The years 1995-2010 were particularly fertile for John Matthias. In that time, he published five critically acclaimed books of poetry, two pamphlets, two collaborations (a translation and an anthology); and some two dozen poems in various international print and online journals. With such additions to an already remarkable bibliography, Matthias, long-time co-editor of the Notre Dame Review, has confirmed his status as a major American poet — albeit one that many anthologists, critics, and readers tend to overlook. His poetic modes are wide-ranging: the anecdotal, the wryly subversive, and the experimental find purchase in the familial, the historical, and the lyrical. Working in a variety of styles unified by their sources in modernism, Matthias engages the arts, politics, and (primarily) Western culture while acknowledging a past that continues to unfold in the present. In this book, eighteen fine contemporary writers working in essay, interview, and poetic form offer penetrating insight into Matthias’ work — work that is sometimes allusive and difficult, sometimes transparent and clear. This volume begins where the previous selection of essays on Matthias’s work, Robert Archambeau’sWord Play Place, left off in 1998. It will be an invaluable companion to the poetry of an important American author."


In other news, Choice has reviewed another book to which I contributed, The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics, edited by Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher.  Here's what the reviewer had to say:


"…Biddinger and Gallaher have compiled an exceptionally fine sampling of reflections on contemporary American poetry. The first selections are playful, pithy examinations of noteworthy trends; the last section is devoted to ongoing debate in the field on attempts to classify American poets and their work into distinct schools—a debate to some degree launched in Cole Swenson's "American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry"… Less experienced audiences, including lay readers, will find the essays refreshingly clear and the threads of discussion easy to follow, and they will appreciate the wealth of illustrations and suggested further reading. At the same time, practicing poets and instructors in MFA programs will find the critique of such programs invaluable. Delightful in terms of style, broad and perceptive in subject and treatment, this book is a must-read for those interested in writing poetry. Though not exhaustive in coverage, it represents the current conversations of some of the most prominent writers and critics publishing today."


In still other news, I'll be speaking at the conference of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW) in Boston this October.  The full schedule is up online.  The seminar with which I am involved will take place at 9:30 on the morning of October 16th.

"American Poetry Has Entered Its Big Hair Phase"

Daniel Nester interviews Micah Robbins.


Nester: My latest shibboleth—I’d like to run it up the pole here for you and see what you think, and I am sure I am wrong, because I usually am and I’m, like old now—is that we have reached a period of late style, where the already bankrupt aesthetic battles of yore—lyric versus narrative, Ron Silliman’s Post-Avant versus School of Quietude, subjective versus written-for-the-ages—have all been decided on. We’re all to be lyric, subjective, post-avant poets now, and that’s that. Baudelaire used the term “Rococo Romanticism,” and I think American Poetry has entered its Big Hair Phase.

Robbins: I find this both depressing and hilarious! And I don’t disagree with your assessment. I’m imagining Charles Bernstein, Kenny Goldsmith, Christian Bök, and Ron Silliman in leopard print spandex and frilly boas dancing around to “Rock You Like A Hurricane”! Ahhhhh. No! Someone make them stop!

OK. So what do we do about it?

Read more here.

When Poetry Mattered: Notes on Andrei Voznesensky

Although it's been over a year since the death of Andrei Voznesensky, I've only just heard the news.  Voznesensky was one of the best-loved Russian poets of a generation called "the children of the 60s."  These were poets who came of age in the late 50s and early 1960s, the most famous of whom was Yevgeny Yevtushenko.  Both Voznesenksy and Yevtushenko were born in 1933, a good year for a Russian poet to be born.  Not only were they too young to be sent to the horrible slaughter that was the Second World War in Russia, they began to come into their own as poets just in time for the Khrushchev Thaw, a relaxing of repression following the death of Stalin and the removal of much of the apparatus of the Stalinist police state.  The period is also known as the False Spring, since it came to an abrupt end in 1963 and 1964, as Krushchev was replaced by that icon of dreary stagnation, Leonid Brezhnev.


During the brief thaw, though, it was good to be a poet in Russia, at least if you were the kind of poet who wanted attention.  Readings in stadiums were commonplace, in a way they never have been in the United States.  T.S. Eliot may once have delivered a lecture in a mid-sized university basketball arena, but these were actual poetry readings, in for-real stadiums: by 1962 Voznesensky was drawing crowds of 14,000 or more, and more than half a million people signed up to buy copies of his collection An Achilles Heart before it was published.  Other poets saw high levels of interest, too, and Yevtushenko was even more popular than Voznesensky.


What accounted for this enormous interest, even mania, for poetry?  I'm reminded of one of my critical touchstones, a passage from Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland where he speaks of the relative popularity of poetry in conditions of colonization and repression: when the national institutions don't represent the broadly-held values of a people, the people often turn to poetry as a vehicle for the articulation of those values. One can see why: if the theaters and newspapers and educational institutions are in the grip of oppressors, one can still take up a pen and write poems that say things unpalatable to the powers that be. And for a brief time in the Krushchev Thaw, poetry and other arts were liberated from the kinds of restrictions that still bound cultural institutions like museums and universities.  You could go to a poetry reading—as so many did—and hear a version of things that rang truer than the official accounts.  As my father, who studied Russian literature before becoming an artist, put it, "those readings in stadiums were the only place a Russian could go and not feel he was being bullshitted."


And what was it that Voznesensky had to say that didn't sound like bullshit to those crowds?  Well, a lot of it was an affirmation of the individual conscience.  In the 1959 poem "Who Are We?" for example, Voznesensky answers the title question by saying :


Under the cold stars, I wander alive
With you Vera, Vega, I am myself
Among the avalanches, like the Abominable
Snowman, absolutely elusive.


Against all the big, overwhelming forces, the little self remains, free and authentic to itself: there's a kind of individualistic sublime at work here.  The poem wouldn't be a Big Statement in the United States of the 1950s, even though Senator McCarthy's reign of terror over the intellectuals had come to an end only two years earlier: the level of repression just wasn't comparable to what Russians had seen, and Cold War America always defined itself against Russia by emphasizing the ideology of individualism.  But in Russia, where collectivism was an official ideology and individualism had been actively, and violently, discouraged, people heard in words like these a message of liberation.  


It's no wonder that Voznesensky wrote the kind of individualistic poems for which people were thirsting: as a young man he was a disciple of Pasternak, having moved out to Peredelkino to be near the grand old man in his last days.  Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, the great testament of the individual conscience against Czar and Commissar, was a kind of sacred text for Voznesensky. 


I sometimes wonder whether Voznesensky's individualism was made more palatable to the authorities by virtue of its being tempered with doses of nationalism.  Voznesensky's most famous poem, "I am Goya," with which he used to begin all of his readings, is many things: a harrowing picture of Russia during the Nazi invasion, a great piece of anaphoristic verse, a veiled remembrance of his father going off to war with a book of Goya reproductions in his backpack, an ekphrastic poem dealing with Goya's paintings of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, and a testament to the achievement of the Russian people in throwing back the better-armed, better-fed, better-organized forces of Hitler's Germany.  It ends like this:


I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
tolled over a blank square
I am Goya


O grapes of wrath!
I have hurled westward
          the ashes of the uninvited guest!
and hammered stars into the unforgetting sky—like nails
I am Goya


That last bit, about sending the Germans packing, or scattering their dead ashes on a wind that will take them back to whence they came: that's some hard-core Russian patriotism that no General or Commissar could condemn, and no Russian of the war years could hear without a deep, heart-felt response.  And the victory is portrayed as being as great, and as unlikely, as the hammering of stars into the sky.  Great stuff!


Even his patriotism couldn't really save Voznesensky when the False Spring came to an end.  He was subjected to the fate of so many Russian liberals, from the Decemberists on, and sent into a kind of internal exile, wandering in the remoter provinces of the Soviet Union.  His poems from this era take on a slightly different tone, emphasizing hope in the form of a kind of small, saving remnant of Russian society.  Here's one I particularly like, "To B. Akhmadulina."  It gives us a small group, on the move:


We are many.  Four, perhaps, altogether,
spinning along in our car devil-may-care.
The girl at the wheel flaunts her orange hair,
the sleeves of her jacket yanked up to the elbow.


Ah, Bela, though your driving leaves me limp,
you look angelic, out of this world;
your marvelous porcelain profile
glows like a white lamp...


In hell they bang their frying pans
and send scouts up to the gate to watch,
when you, as the speedometer runs wild,
lift both hands off the wheel to strike a match.


How I love it, when stepping on the gas
in your transparent tones you say,
"What a mess!
they've taken my license away...


"I swear they've got me wrong!
     You'd think I was a reckless driver!
            Why! I was just poking along..."


Forget it, Bela.  To argue with a cop,
you know, is a losing proposition.
He can't appreciate your lyric speed—
it's past the power of his transmission.


A poet owes it to himself
not to be trapped in miles-per-hour;
let him resound at the speed of light
like angels choiring in the stratosphere.


No matter, taking light-years as our measure,
if we should vanish like a radiant star,
with not a creature left behind to earn the prize.
We were the first to crack the sound-barrier.


Step on it, Bela, heavenly friend!
Who cares if we're smashed to bits in the end?
Long live the speed of poetry,
the most lethal of all speeds!


What if the maps ahead are enigmatical?
We are only a few.  Four, perhaps, altogether;
hurtling along—and you are a Goddess!
That makes a majority, after all.


We've got the exile's self-affirmation (no one will ever give us any recognition for breaking the sound barrier, but we recognize ourselves), and we've got a nice turn on the old trope of describing a woman as a goddess: here, her divinity makes the small group more than equal to any forces that oppose it.  This would be mere sentimentality if it weren't balanced against the earlier assertion that there's no use arguing with a cop.  Voznesensky is well aware that, in the realm of real power, he and his friends are no match for the authorities.  But in the realm of art, they maintain a kind of freedom, where the police can't match their speed.


There are a lot of things to admire in Voznesensky, including his revival of the Mayakovsky era breeziness and confidence that fell out of Russian poetry in the 30s and 40s.  One of my favorite moments of this kind comes at the end of "Fire in the Architectural Institute."  The poem is based on one of Voznesensky's experiences: he'd been an architecture student, and just before he was to defend his thesis the institute burned down, destroying all of his work.  But like Mayakovsky, he's got a seemingly unlimited, irrepressible buoyancy: "Everything's gone up in smoke/and there's no end of people sighing," he writes, "It's the end?/It's only the beginning./Let's go to the movies!"


But whatever his fine qualities as a poet may be, the reason Voznesensky mattered to most of his readers was that he spoke back to them their own values when those values weren't affirmed anywhere else.  I think about this when I hear people say, of one or another contemporary American poet, "he deserves more readers," or "she deserves an audience."  I think about it, too, when I hear suggestions about how to get more people interested in poetry (by adding music to readings, by putting little placards with stanzas on them in the subway, etc.)  These are supply-side solutions to a demand-side problem.  They try to make something available, in hopes that this availability will create demand.  But if we really want giant audiences, stadium-filling audiences, we'd need social conditions that drive people to need what is on offer in poetry, and conditions that prevent it from being offered in other venues.  History has been a bit too kind to us for that.

An Impossible Position

So there's this, an account in the Chicago Tribune of how people feel about what's been going on at the Poetry Foundation.  If you click through to the third page, you'll find that the last of the people is me.

Robert Kroetsch, R.I.P.

Robert Kroetsch—one of the most important Canadian writers of his generation—has died in a car accident at the age of 84.  I had the privilege of knowing him a little when I was an undergraduate.  Though I never took a course with him, he was a presence on the campus and on the local literary scene, and a few times I found myself having a drink with him after Dennis Cooley’s evening seminars on contemporary literature let out.

He was a novelist, and something of a critic, and one of the founders of the journal boundary 2, but for me he’ll always be two things: a poet, and a benign godfather of a movement in Canadian literature that suffers the fate of all movements in Canadian literature: utter invisibility in the non-Canadian world.  But it was a real movement, with its own journals and presses and contretemps and aspirations, and it made a difference where it wanted to make a difference, in the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.  One might think of it as a prairie school, and of Kroetsch as its éminence grise.

As a poet, Kroetsch was many things.  Sometimes he was a proceduralist, foregrounding the artificiality of writing, and the agility of the poet, by adopting an arbitrary restriction, Oulipo-style, and forcing himself to work within its constraints.  In The Sad Phoenician, for example, Kroetsch writes a long meditation in which new lines of poetry begin, alternately, with “and” and “but,” making for an ode-like snaking-through of strophe and antistrophe.  At other times Kroetsch was a master of found texts, writing through his family’s account books in The Ledger and through a ubiquitous document of the Canadian prairies in Seed Catalog.  In both cases, he was concerned with the way written documents were the binding agents of a collective, of family and of region.  The best way I can describe the effects of reading these poems is to say that it’s like encountering a secularized version of scribal commentary on religious texts.  What a poet like Norman Finkelstein does with the Jewish textual tradition in a book like Scribe, Kroetsch did with the ordinary found texts that bound together his family and the rural communities of the Canadian prairies.

Kroetsch was also a serialist poet, who kept a long project called Field Notes simmering for years, adding and inserting sections in the manner of Olson’s Maximus Poems or Duncan’s Passages.  There was none of the history and grandeur of Olson, and none of the mysticism of Duncan, though.  Instead, there was a kind of constant, amused intellectual probing of the everyday.  And Kroetsch was always ready to surprise his long-time readers.  After developing a theory of the ever-incomplete, constantly-ongoing poem, and inspiring a host of other Canadian poets to begin ambitious serial projects, he suddenly called his poem to a halt, issuing his Completed Field Notes in 1989.  I remember the arguments in the student pub about whether that word, “completed,” represented a transcendence or a betrayal of Kroetsch’s project: I left in a huff, consoled by a young woman who wore even more eyeliner than I did back then.  She gave me a peck on the cheek and one of her earrings before ditching me over cappuccino.

Kroetsch was also a postmodernist.  For me, he’ll always belong to that generation of poet-professors whose natural habitat was the brutalist concrete campus office lined with books by Robert Scholes and Jonathan Culler.  I picture him now as he appeared on the cover of a 1987 issue of Border Crossings magazine: tweed jacket, beard, Remington typewriter on the desk in front of him, ready for a fresh sheet of paper and a new page of poetry composed by field in the manner of the Olsonite wing of Black Mountain.

One reason to think of Kroetsch as a postmodernist was what I can only call his loving suspicion of language and of the apparent coherence of narrative truth.  Jean-François Lyotard’s distinction between the grand récit and the petit récit, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, gets at the kind of thinking that informed Kroetch’s writing.  For Lyotard, the grand récit was a kind of authoritative story that purported to offer a comprehensive explanation of the world.  When, for example, a certain right-wing imbecile who happens to be a Cardinal of the Catholic Church maintained “the Church is neither left nor right, the Church is true,” he was offering the story of Catholicism as a (or, to his mind, the) grand récit, just as certain hard-core vulgar Marxists might see Marxism as a grand récit, or how the overconfident Victorian bourgeoisie took “progress” as their grand récit.  In postmodern conditions, Lyotard claims, such comprehensive stories become unsustainable, and instead we have a proliferation of smaller, more fragmentary, more localized, more tentative explanatory stories.  In postmodernism, one lets a thousand petit récits bloom.

Kroetsch was very much a man of the petit récit.  He would write paratactic, self-reflective works like those collected in his Field Notes, bend the conventions of narrative in his fiction, or hesitate at the brink of narrative, as in his first book of poetry, The Stone Hammer Poems.  Here, he begins with an artifact, a stone hammer found on the prairies.  The poem starts this way:

This stone

becomes a hammer

of stone

….

The rawhide loops

are gone, the

hand is gone, the buffalo’s skull

is gone;

the stone is

shaped like the skull

of a child.

We begin with the sense that the explanation of the artifact is a matter of framing: the stone, when literally framed with an apparatus of wood and rawhide, becomes a hammer.  It has since been many things, entering other narrative frames.  But the literal history of the stone, speculative and ultimately unknowable, isn’t the only frame.  As the last stanza above indicates, the stone can also enter a metaphorical frame: its shape and size allows it to become a metaphor for a child’s skull, for birth and for death.

The poem goes on, trying to locate the stone in a narrative, and failing to find much authoritative purchase on the truth of things.  A few sections later in the poem, for example, we find this:

Grey, two-headed

the pemmican maul

fell from the travois or

a boy playing    lost it in

the prairie wool or

a woman     left it in

the brain of a buffalo or

it is a million years older than

the hand that

chipped stone or

raised slough

water (or blood) or

The section ends there, with “or,” a gesture much like Olson’s opening of a parenthesis that never closes: it’s a sign of indetermination, of the impossibility of grand récit.  The poem goes on to trace the losing and finding of the stone in many histories, some imagined (Kroetsch imagines it moved in the last ice age by “the retreating ice,” then moved much later by “the retreating buffalo” and later still by “the retreating Indians”) some grounded in family stories of how this same stone was lost by his grandfather and found again by his father plowing in a field.

There’s another reason to think of Kroetsch as a postmodern poet, rather than a modern one, a reason having to do with tone.  While the generalization I’m about to make has the flaw of all generalizations (i.e., that it is full of holes and therefore untrue), I’m still making it: modernism is more serious and less funny than postmodernism.  I grant all your objections regarding specific texts, and yet I return to the generalization.  Wry as he can be, T.S. Eliot is more grave and less funny than Frank O’Hara.  While he’s not above jokes, Ezra Pound is more often dead serious than is John Ashbery.  And when Robert Kroetsch is meditating on the perspectival nature of truth, he’s less sublime, and funnier, than Wallace Stevens when he does something similar.  I’m sure the model for Kroetsch’s “Sketches of a Lemon” is Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but the tone is entirely different.  Here’s Stevens’ opening stanza:

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Is the eye of a blackbird.

This is straight-up Kantian sublimity: the little living eye comprehends the huge, rugged world that so exceeds it in scale and in grandeur that it renders the bird’s eye insignificant—except for the fact that the little eye comprehends the vastness.  Here, by contrast, is the opening of Kroetsch’s series of lemon sketches:

A lemon is almost round.

Some lemons are almost round.

A lemon is not round.

So much for that.

There’s a skepticism about our ability to intellectually frame the world here (it’s The Stone Hammer Poems again, or The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge), but there’s also a kind of philosophical pratfall.  The poem is full of this sort of thing: it's a self-deflating comic text that also has something serious to say about how intellectual frames fail, or about how narratives and descriptions end up mutating into something other than what they were initially meant to be.  Something like that happens in the following passage (“Smaro” is the name of the poet’s wife):

Sketches, I reminded myself,

not of a pear,

nor of an apple,

nor of a peach,

nor of a banana

(though the colour

raises questions)

nor of a nectarine,

nor, for that matter,

of a pomegranate,

nor of three cherries,

their stems joined,

nor of a plum,

nor of an apricot,

nor of the usual

bunch of grapes,

fresh from the vine,

just harvested,

glistening with dew—

Smaro, I called,

I’m hungry.

What began as a kind of attempt at negative definition (doomed to a seemingly infinite series of specifications) warps, suddenly, and we see that all along, without our knowledge, the list or catalog had been functioning in ways we hadn’t suspected, inciting the appetites rather than providing definition.  A hidden subordinate function becomes, suddenly, the dominant function of the list, and the sentence lurches jarringly in a new direction.  I like that: I remember reading this poem to the woman who would become my wife, and how she liked it too.  But it wasn’t her favorite section.  This was:

poem for a child who has just bit into

a halved lemon that has just been squeezed

see, what did I tell you, see,

what did I tell you, see, what

did I tell you, see, what did

I tell you, see, what did I

tell you, see, what did I tell

you, see, what did I tell you,

see, what did I tell you, see,

what did I tell you, see, what

did I tell you, see, what did

I tell you, see, what did I

tell you, see, what did I tell

you, see, what did I tell you

One could, of course, go on.

If straight-up sublimity lies a bit beyond Kroetsch’s range, something like this lies a bit beyond Wallace Stevens, and I think the difference is generational, modern vs. postmodern.

It’s poems like “Sketches of a Lemon” that first attracted me to Kroetsch’s work, but I knew of him in his capacity as the godfather of a literary movement before I’d read him.  He was a kind of benevolent, presiding presence for whole generations of aspiring writers in the Canadian west, and a great intellectual sponsor for a regionalist/postmodernist movement in the poetry produced on the Canadian prairies.  The point of the movement, I think, was a kind of mild intellectual and literary decolonization.  The western provinces have, in the minds of many of their inhabitants and more of their intellectuals, always been the resentful pseudo-colonies of the bankers and politicians of Toronto and Ottawa.  Ignored by a Canadian cultural establishment that was itself marginal and barely visible in the wider world, many of the writers of the west needed a good, strong dose of William Carlos Williams-style local pride, and Kroetsch, by writing out of western experience, provided exactly that.  And he was one of a group of writers and academics who built a regional literary infrastructure where none had been.  The journal Prairie Fire, Turnstone Press, Grain, Open Letter, a number of critical books, a bunch of reading venues: Kroetsch was one of the leaders in building something outside of the established literary networks.  I remember, in particular, one moment of Kroetschian direct action in the establishing of local literary institutions: a group of student poets were trying to launch a magazine called Ca(n)non (it was the eighties, and journal titles were filled with parentheses, backslashes, and other signs that the language was plural and unstable and self-deconstructing, etc.).  They approached Kroetsch as he was heading for the elevator outside his office, and asked if he could help them out.  He opened his wallet, hauled out a wad of bills, including a couple of the old red Canadian fifties with their Mounties on horseback, and handed it over.  “Wait,” he said, taking back a ten, “I need this for lunch.”  Not a lot of professors would have been so unhesitating with a crowd of scruffy and callow young poets.  It’s an image that’s stayed with me, and the image with which I’d like to end on the sad occasion of Kroetsch’s passing.