John Matthias as Eminence Gris

Here at last is the long-awaited blogging of the John Matthias retirement festival at Notre Dame some weeks ago. I was invited to speak on a panel and give a reading at what turned out to be a very well-attended event to mark the retirement not only of John Matthias, but of poet/fiction-writer Sonia Gernes as well. The day marks quite a changing of the guard at Notre Dame, where Cornelius Eady will be the new resident poet come the fall (along with John Wilkinson).

Coming in from Chicago on the South Shore railroad, I remembered three years of commuting in from my then-haunts in Wrigleyville/Boy's town. Back then I could count on a daily encounter with one or another version of derangement on the train: the guy who'd stand in the aisle and read from the Bible in Spanish, say, or the two south-side sisters who'd inevitably start arguing and, about every other week, break into a low-grade catfight, or the man who wore a pocket calculator like a badge on his jumpsuit, wrote mysterious numbers on a cash-register roll all the way from Gary to Michigan City, muttered about how he'd live in the woods "like an angel" if it wasn't for how strung out he was on "Juan Valdez Coffee." But no such luck: either the early morning trains have a different clientele from the later ones I used to take, or the city's sothward gentrification has increased social order at the expense of the ragtag alienation of old. The big industrial sprawl and decay was still there, though, through Hammond and Gary and the far south side. I'd forgotten how much those scenes had gotten to me, and how they'd found their way into a number of the poems I wrote for Home and Variations, a book I shamelessly flogged later that day, and which I'll shamelessly flog now: check it out here

The event turned out to the the best sort of literary gathering: an assembly of people who know about many things, care about the same things, and want to listen to each other. This is rare, really. Most gatherings fail either by lacking any focus, or by being too parochial. The big academic conferences (the MLA and its variants) are scattered and somewhat arbitrary -- who hasn't found themselves placed on a panel that should really have been called "Papers that We Couldn't Fit Anywhere Else"? They lack any real community feeling, and a shared professional affiliation can't quite make up for it. Too much gesselschaft and not enough gemeinschaft makes for a dull day. At the other end of the spectrum are those gatherings where the usual suspects get together to talk about the same short-list of poets. What can you say about these get-togethers?

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what tenured people think;
All know the text their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did Frank O'Hara walk that way?

The best conferences I've attended have been things like Romana Huk's "Assembling Alternatives" conference on experimental poetry (almost a decade ago now), where everyone shared interests but where the parochialism was countered by a series of truly different perspectives (it was the first time I met Billy Mills and Trevor Joyce and Catherine Walsh and the other alternative Irish poetry crowd, and their take on Bernstein & Co. was new to me, and worth a hundred evenings spent listening to Ron Silliman's friends introduce one another at the group reading, hoping to have their membership in the tribe noticed and prominently blogged). Being there in Belgium when Maxine Chernoff, Paul Hoover, Joe Amato and Kass Fleisher got together with Antoine Caze and Michel Delville was just as good: everyone knew something different, everyone cared about some of the same things, and everyone cared a little differently. (Since I've just figured out how to make html links, I include a link to an account of that event: check it out here

The Matthias event was a best-case gathering: we all loved John's work, but we all knew it differently. Some of us were poets, some of us were critics, some were profs from other disciplines, some were artists, some were old friends of John's, some were relatives. Some highlights:

James Walton speaking about Matthias in terms of two types of egoism. While I've never thought of John as an egoist, Walton made an interesting case. The first kind of egoism, the bad kind, didn't apply to John, this being being the sort in which the egoist builds himself up by tearing others down. The second kind, though, was as John Matthias as any incantation of place names or any hiding of iambics in passages that pretend to be prose. The second kind of egoist enters a room and says to himself "this must be an interesting place, because I'm here!" You won't notice this egoist as an egoist, because you;ll be too busy basking in the Bloomsbury atmosphere he creates by his very presence. He enters a room, and suddenly everyone there feels that they're interesting, talented, clever, and on to something that really should be published right away. The second kind of egoist sees you as important, and wants to talk to you about the interesting thing you're doing. The second kind of egoist is the best of all possible mentors, since those around him bask in a glow of powerful approval (even your mistakes matter, though they need to be set right, since they represent a squandering of your very real, very important talent).

John kind of confirmed this later in the evening when he said that he'sspemt decades feeling like the youngest and the least intelligent person in the room, ever since his Deweyite highschool let him take classes at Ohio State. To hear that from one of the smartest people one knows, and from a man in the act of retiring from a long career is quite strange, and powerful evidence for Walton's position.

Walton, one of the most erudite people you're ever likely to run into, went on to talk of John's work as involving what Aquinas called magnanimity -- the spirit of doing things beyond the merely prudent. This, said Walton, was essential to art (although he told me later over a drink that he'd almost decided that it was ambivalence that was essential -- why make a work of art if you lack ambivalence, and can simply say what you mean?). The person who came on after Walton said something about agreeing with that, and about how poetry is always subversive. When I hear the words "poetry is subversive," I generally sigh or sneer. I mean, who do we in the little demimonde of poetry think we are? I almost choked on my chowder once when I heard someone at one of those U of Maine conferences say "the reason they're cutting funding for our magazine is that they know that in disrupting language we're disrupting power -- we're a threat." Disrupting the syntax on a page in a little magazine doesn't distrub your local arts council, let alone Dick Cheney. But what took place after this "poetry is subversive" comment changed my mind.

Here's what happened: the scene changed over from scheduled speakers to an open mike, and Jessica Maich took the stage. Jessica is a poet I knew in graduate school -- a good one, whom I hope will keep writing. She's also someone who has had a real life before graduate school (unlike me), raising a family in the midwestern community where she grew up. She came from a very different world than I did (I'm an academic brat, and my dad's an artist), so she saw the whole MFA world with different, and clearer, eyes than I did. "When I walked into that first seminar," she said at the microphone, "I thought, these people are arguing for forty minutes about where to place a comma. They're all adults, and this matters to them." This was subversive for her, and subversive in the way that Walton, thinking through Aquinas, would call magnanimous -- the actions that mattered exceeded the merely prudent. I think I was in that class, and for me at that point in my life there would have been no significance to an argument like that except as a drama in which the opinion of someone who was correct (me) and a bunch of misguided people who just didn't get it (anyone who disagreed with me) either triumphed or was thwarted (I was, as you may gather, something of a prick). But Jessica was starting to have a dialogical life in a way I hadn't, maybe haven't yet: she was seeing the logic of a world where conversations about comma placement were important, and the logic of that world was subversive of the logic of her other world, where practicality and prudence were more important than this kind of magnanimity. "They looked so normal," Jessica said of her poetry teachers John Matthias and Sonia Gernes, "they had houses and cars." But despite these signs of belonging to the world of the prudent and practical, they lived in another world, where serious adults cared for things like the comma in that stanza. So the comment about subversion meant a lot to her. Hey, I thought, wow, I get it. And I and felt like a bit of a twit for all of my internal eye-rolling at talk of subversion.

Other highlights for me include:

The Big Dinner, with hundreds in attendance. Nametag follies ensued, as Joe Doerr, Jere Odell and I handed out "Pope Pious II" and "Britney Spears" tags. I gave one labelled "eminence gris" to John Matthias, who was too graceful to take it off. My own read "Rufus T. Firefly," and I had a great moment when a group of grad student types were standing nearby and looking over at me and I overheard them talking about "whether that's him" and how "he looks like the picture on the book" but they concluded that I wasn't the poet in question because "he's Rufus someone or other." The award for best nametag goes to Joe Doerr, though, who went up to Steve Tomasula wearing a tag that read "Tom Stevasula."

Watching the big crowd in the LaFortune Center eating up Mary Hawley's poem about fourth-grade girl's basketball. The poem treats the moment of the first basket as a loss of innocence: suddenly the game mattered, and one could succeed or fail. The loss-of-innocence poem has been around forever, and yet, when one finds a convincing local habitation for it in experiences that one can render well, as Hawley did, people will always love it.

Discovering that Kevin Ducey looks a lot like Robert Duncan -- when he read his poems, all I could hear was "sometimes I am permitted to return to a meadow." Also laughing my ass off while having a smoke with Mark Mattson. Also drinking scotch with Dave Griffith, and hearing him tell me about his new book on the scandal of Abu Ghraib. Also meeting James Wilson or, as I call him, The Wintersian Kid, who read the manuscript of my book on the Stanford poets and liked it even though I'm no Wintersian. Also hearing Joe Frances Doerr talk about Ken Smith and David Jones, and then read his own poems, which sound a lot like Ken Smith-meets-David Jones. Also seeing poets Orlando Ricardo Menes and Francisco Aragon of the Latin American Studies institite -- especially since I ran into Aragon as he was buying a copy of my book (available online -- check it out here)

Many thanks to Coleen Hoover, who put the whole shindig together. Photos and (soon) transcripts are available at: this site.

Rich Twits of Chicago's North Shore: An Anthropology

Although I always thought I'd stick to the humanities in this blog (poetry, philosophy, and a bit of art), I find myself morally compelled to sully my soft humanist hands with the rough silt of the social sciences -- let me explain.

The following report was passed to me by Raskolnikov T. Firefly, Ph.D., a former colleague of mine at another university. He seemed nervous, demanding to meet in the middle of the night at the Denny's on route 41. I arrived on time, but he was late, shambling in like a twitchy fiend as I was finishing my Eggs-over-my-Hammy special. He kept looking over his shoulder and trying, fruitlessly, to light cigarettes, which he then discarded. He said I had to help him, that my blog was his only hope now that the agents of his enemies had turned the respectable journals against him. Taking his yellowed, coffee-stained manuscript from his trembling hands, I promised to do what I could. This was all some time ago, and I haven't heard from him for weeks, although my caller ID indicates that the inhabitant of a certain single room in a certain Motel 6 near the Wisconsin border calls and hangs up every couple of hours. Frankly, I'm a little concerned for Rasko, as we used to call him in the grubby little leftwing bookshops in that university town in the mountains by the seashore in another country oh so long ago.

His report follows:

A Socio-Anthropological Typology of the North Shore
by Raskolnikov T. Firefly, PhD


My decade long researches among the inhabitants of Chicago’s North Shore have, at last, yielded results. I and my crack research team (thanks, Kid V, Pravda and Jimmies B and C -- couldn’t have done it without you), have spent the better part of the last ten years lurking in such dangerous and unpalatable locales as artisanal bread shops, high-end cycling centers, national-chain arthouse movie theaters and, in a true show of courage, Starbucks outlets not yet unionized by the I.W.W. Forthwith, our conclusions.

1. Method of Study

Lurking, malingering, and harumphing in lines outside American nouvelle cuisine bistros, sneering from our Hondas and Chevy Cavaliers as we pass the Aston Martin and Land Rover dealerships, looking suspiciously around the room during late night visits to Ben & Jerry’s, drifting aimlessly through Anthropologie or Jos. A Banks, trooping out to Lake Geneva Wisconsin to observe North Shore fauna in its semi-migrational mating-and-antiquing phase, attending community theater and Suburban Fine Arts Center fundraisers, checking the license plate numbers outside Unitarian churches, noting the girlish giggles of septuagenarian matrons in the Marshall Fields’ handbag section and the boorish grunts of Dick Cheney look-alikes from the 16th hole rough. Drinking cosmopolitans and anything ending in -ini, so long as it is from the color palette present in a roll of Jolly Ranchers. Also, a lot of internet surfing and repeated viewings of Ordinary People and Risky Business, for which we have drawn elaborate location charts and alternative storyboards depicting general uprisings of the people and the creation of a service-worker’s Utopia led by Tom Cruise and Rebecca DeMornay. Oyez, oyez. Power to the people.

2. A Typology of North Shore Habitants

A. The North Shore Goof (NSG)

You know this guy. He looks like Chevy Chase, especially the Chevy Chase of Caddyshack. Good-natured, but more of less useless on account of never having had to work a day in his life. Habitats include golf courses, convertibles, east Lake Forest, and restaurants featuring club sandwiches. Harmless, except when seen objectively.

B. Predatory Corporate Status Monkeys (PCSMs)

Think thirtysomething or fortysomething. Think wire-rimmed glasses in sylishly contemporary frames. On the weekends you see him biking like Lance Armstrong and looking at you with a faint disdain for not making as much money and biking as frantically as he, or out with his wife (either a PCSM herself -- 25-30% are women -- or a Subscriber) on a powerwalk, pushing the kid in an ergonomic high performance mountaineering pram, making quality time with the nipper he’s not seen all week and won’t see again until he makes sure the guys in Acquisitions get the WEENUS report in on time. Habitats include west Lake Forest, east Highland Park, and Glencoe, also the Green Bay Trail and Miramar. American Express gave him his Blackberry as a Preferred Customer Premium.

C. The Man

He does not work. You work for him. The PCSMs work for him. In the end, one way or another, we all work for him. He neither toils nor spins: he owns. His markings include great height and a shock of white hair. Habitats include houses that cannot be seen from the road. With stunningly little variation, he looks like George Plimpton.

D. Vic Wilcox

Named after a character from David Lodge’s splendid little novel Nice Work, the Vic Wilcoxes of the world have some cash and won’t be shy about telling you that they’ve earned their pile. They’ve earned it by building up companies that plate things in nickel, or supply Styrofoam coffee cups to office parks in the western suburbs, they’ve earned it by getting the contract to sell tanning beds to Carnival Cruise Lines, they’ve earned it by keeping those union guys out, they’ve earned it and they don’t mind telling you and they almost almost don’t mind that they’ll never be The Man because they’ve earned it and they haven’t had time to get comfortable at Lyric Opera fundraisers and their picture won’t ever be in Chicago Social (sorry, “CS”), they’ve earned it and wonder if they can trade in their first wives for new ones who might have contempt for them but could tell them which charities they could give to so they could go to the parties where they won’t be comfortable -- and wouldn’t they rather watch football and eat a meatball sub anyway. Usual cause of death is angina and a quite despair that knows not how to speak its name.

E. Subscribers

These are, as you guessed, the subscribers to that esteemed and storied magazine, North Shore Bitch. Picture that title, if you will, in the elegantly curving cursives of that journal’s cover. You see them jogging with their iPods, keeping it all in shape. You see them buying tureens at Williams and Sonoma, buying sundresses at Saks, buying stylin' maternity clothes at Bellydance, buying DVDs of Martha Stewart. Basically, you see them buying, often in small gaggles of the likeminded, oblivious to those outside their braying bubble of buy-buy-buy. In their fantasies they are Princess Diana as she marries Charles, or better yet as she has that affair with the dark and brooding Saudi billionaire. “How fun!” they gush, between bites of the roasted tomato and grilled chicken salad at Southgate. Only one fear haunts the manicured lawns and magazine-ad-like, blowing-curtained, wicker-furnished sunrooms of their dreams: becoming DFWs.

F. Discarded First Wives (DFWs)

Little is known about these middle-aged women of the North Shore, seen only buying gin in the Jewel or behind the wheels of slightly aged Volvos. Little is known because one dare not meet their gaze, so bitter it is, so soaked in the tannic fluids of experience and thwarted entitlement. Fear them.

G. Evil Withered Sticks (EWSs)

If you’ve seen Nancy Reagan, you know the type. Her weight never gets into three digits, her skin has, through repeated exposure on tennis courts and seasons in Coral Gables, attained the consistency of fine Corinthian leather. She may once have been a subscriber, fearing DFWhood, but she is now a formidable feature of the landscape, braying with laughter behind her cocktail glass at a lawn party on a sunny afternoon. Try the Onwentsia club if you seek a high concentration of the species.

H. The Good People of Evanston (GPEs)

This is a subspecies of the PCSM, with the following distinction: they’re smug about their virtue. Having once written a $500 check to the Sierra Club, having once attended a book signing by Deepak Chopra or perhaps Dave Eggers, they are secure, indeed ontologically grounded in their sense of superiority to their fellow PCSMs from farther up the shore. Also, since they live near Chicago, they secretly suspect that they’re street, homes, street. Surprisingly, not all GPEs actually live in Evanston. Some live elsewhere but are members of the North Shore Unitarian Congregation.

I. Standard Academic Clowns

Not often found outside of Evanston and a small enclave established in the unlikely and infertile soil of Lake Forest, these hapless sorts are distinguished by rumpled chinos, dented upper-mid-range cars, Steve Earle CDs, good internet access and a wonderful conformity of ideas, consisting of centrist beliefs masquerading as radicalism. Often seen birding, or overheard telling their friends about how little television they watch.

Edge and Evolution: Don Reichert's Nature Morph

I'm getting around, at last, to looking at my notes from Don Reichert's Nature Morph, a show of his work at the Gallery of the Canadian Embassy in D.C. I was there at the end of March for a bit of a Canadian-Culture blow out (represent, prairie provinces, represent!), and was glad to see both work that I recognized (Reichert's wonderful, large, abstract expressionist canvases) and work that looked like a new direction (computer-manipulated images of the bridge and riverbank near Reichert's studio). Reichert's always been a very painterly painter at heart, with exquisite brush-stokes and a mastery of those drip and pour techniques we all know about from Jackson Pollack. There's even something calligraphic about him. But while he's grounded in that abstract expressionist tradition, he's always been curious about other things, and willing to tackle them seriously. I remember listenig as a kid in the 1970s to his haunting electronic music, for example, and I remember, too, a large exhibit which opened after the first Gulf War. That show came out of Reichert's travels in Mexico, where he's seen pre-Columbian art drenched in the imagery of human sacrifice. He picked this imagery up in some very powerful and disturbing pieces like Fuel for the Sun, which consisted of 100,000 individual sketches of skulls arranged into a giant wall. It looked Mayan, but represented the more conservative estimate of the number of Iraqis killed in that war (the title had to do with the Mayan belief that human sacrifices fueled the sun, but there was also something lurking in there about oil, and the connection of all those deaths to our deep addiction to fossil fuels). So he's always exploring different media, techniques and effects.

Looking at the new show, though, I began to think about what has held his work together over the decades, and I think I'm on to something. Here's my thesis: Reichert's work almost always explores the intersection of controlled, even mechanistic effects and organic-seeming effects. Like any one-size-fits-all thesis, this is not so fine as a haute couture interpretation tailored to individual works, but I think it's not bad for pret a porter. Check it out:

--Some of Reichert's early paintings look like a strange cross between abstract expressionism and color field paintings, with canvasses divided geometrically between beautiful brush-stoked areas and flat colored sections. This work came out of some time spent in Spain, looking at the elegant abstract tilework and architectural ornamentation left by the Moors, but the fascination for Reichert really seems to have been in the juxtaposition of a very controlled, cool element and a more open, warmer, more organic element.

--Many of Reichert's large canvas works, the kind for which he is best known, include beautiful, warm, organic, layered elements that look like the moss-patterns that grow over decades on the granite outcroppings of the Canadian Shield. (If you ever watch Painter in the Landscape the CBC documentary about him, you'll see Reichert painting on canvasses spread over these rocks, and you'll see how he invites happenstance into his compositons, dousing areas with water, for example, to soften the effect. You'll also see one of my favorite art-documentary moments, in which Reichert, standing near an enourmous painting of his on a museum wall, is asked by a curator how far away he stands from these while he paints them. "Oh," says Reichert, "about five foot nine.") Anyway -- along with the layered organic elements you often find a hard edge or line, something straight or with a ninety-degree angle to it, something utterly unlike the natural forms that seem to have almost grown on the canvas. These come from folding the canvas over in the process of composition, but the effect is very strange, like a specifically human or technological intrusion.

--The newest work at the Canadian Embassy combines natural imagery (photos of a the foliage along a riverbank) with very industrial imagery (big steel girders from a bridge), and it does so in a digitally-manipulated format that pulls it into almost crystaline patterns that, in their angles and symmetries, seem both geological-organic and technological.

In all of these things we see a continued obsession with edges and growing things, with the mechanical form and the organic. You know, Reichert grew up in a little farm town on the prairies, and I'm willing to bet that the place he grew up in had something to do with these obsessions. What's a farm but the combination of machines and nature? Or, to put it another way, the meshing together of that which evolves naturally and that which we impose on nature? And farm guys have a combination we don't see in the sentimental suburbs: they know about nature but they also really, really like machines.

There was more to enjoy besides the paictures at the embassy event that night, too. I ran into the art critic Robert Enright, for example, and tried to pitch an article to him about one of my favorite artists in Chicago, Jason Salavon (whose work you can see at his website) for his magazine, Border Crossings. Enright was all kinds of enthusiastic about this, and said many encouraging things to me about the article, about me being a poet, and so forth. Then he sent me over to talk to his partner and co-editor Meeka Walsh, who gave me a stern editorial look and a hundred (entirely worthwhile and defensible) criteria the article would have to meet to be right for the magazine. I saw right away why Border Crossings has been such a successful art magazine (check it out at bordercrossingsmag.com sometime) -- the Enright-Walsh dynamic of enthusiasm and judgment is exactly right for the Quixotic enterprise of art publishing.

The night ended with a bunch of us rolling out of the embassy after too much wine, holding hands in a circle beneath the big postmodern rotunda, and discovering that it had exceptional echo-chamber acoustics when we sang an off-key and intermittently lyrically-challanged version of "Oh, Canada." Even without the paintings that would have been worthwhile.

Rhizome Mannerism, or The Knight of Faith on a Thousand Plateaus

I've been thinking a bit about postmodernism and the avant-garde lately, and not just because I'm an effete and pretentious intellectual (although I'm certainly all that, oh mandarin me, oh my). Louis Armand wrote from Prague a few weeks ago, asking me to contribute to a collection of essays on the possibilities of avant-gardism under postmdern conditions. I've got a plan for that paper, and it doesn't look anything like the wierd little idea I'm going to lay down today, but today's notion is a kind of fallout from Armand's assignment.

So here's the deal: the Knight of Faith must traverse a thousand plateaus.

Cryptic, eh? It's my overly effete way of saying that the kind of postmodernism articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari needs to be challenged by a kind of thinking best symbolized by the Knight of Faith, a figure drawn from that somewhat dusty tome of Soren Kierkegaard's, Fear and Trembling.

Remember Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus? It was the sequel to their Anti-Oedipus, and is probably best known as the book in which they describe the rhizome as a form of intellectual organization appropriate to our postmodern condition. Traditionally, they maintain, we treat form as a kind of tree-root: that is, we think of good organization as unified organization, with all the various roots and branches of our discourse coming together in a single unified trunk. Think of the last class you taught or took in composition, and you've got the idea. All parts are suborinate to the whole, and the work is put together hierarchically. If we're talking about an essay, the individual sentences serve the topic sentence of the paragraph, and the topic sentences serve the overall thesis -- you know, that sort of thing. And the same goes for a traditional novel. Think of something like Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. In a book like that, the parts (fancy deconstructions notwithstanding) tend to add up to a pretty coherent whole. Sue and Arabella, the women in the very spiritual Jude's life, serve as foils for one another (one being presented in intellectual terms, the other in bodily terms). The settings (farm town, university town, cathedral town) play up the theme of body vs. mind vs. soul, and so on. A big old oak tree, that book.

But that's all old-school, as far as Deleuze and Guatarri are concerned. And so is the kind of organization they call the fascicule. This, they say with some disdain, was beloved by the modernists. Man, do I hate the casual dismissiveness in their book -- I mean, I think they've got something important to say, but that whole "people who wrote before us must have been naive because that was a long time ago" thing is a bit hard to swallow. What's next? "They're dead, ergo they couldn't have been up to much"? But I digress. Deleuze and Guatarri's image for the fascicule is a bunch of roots severed from the trunk that would have held them together. So imagine a bunch of fragments that don't seem, at first, to add up -- but then hey presto, they do, if you can infer the principle that once held them together. The big modernist works really do fit this model pretty well: T.S. Eliot's Waste Land looks like a collection of miscellenious bric-a-brac, but when you pick up Jessie Weston's book on the grail myth, you suddenly see how it all holds together. James Joyce's Ulysses is another instance of the fascicular text, maybe even of the fascicular text par excellence. I taught it for the first time this spring, and while it struck many of my students as something of a shitpile of unrelated wierdness at first, once they got their hands on the Linati Schema (a kind of secret-decoder-ring cheatsheat Joyce made for his pal Carlo Linati), everything fell into place for them. I mean, judging by their papers, they nailed that book (did I mention I really think we get some kickass students at Lake Forest? Really. I've taught at big universities and small, in Europe and America, and these kids are alright). So the fasciule is the apparently fragmentary text that can be unified by a kind of heroic act of interpretive inference.

And then there's the rhizome, the form D and G really like. They claim that the best way to think of it is as a system of roots like what you'd find in a potato field. My botanist colleague tells me that potato plants aren't rhizomes, though, indicating that French theorists are just about as in touch with potato-picking as you'd expect them to be. Luckily, Deleuze and Guatarri give another image for the rhizome: a series of interlocking tunnels, a kind of prairie-dog village of text (as a kid from the Canadian prairies, I prefer this anyway). You've got bits and pieces that intersect in all sorts of ways, and other bits that don't connect with anything. You've got modules, nodules, and overlaps, without a single unifying hermeneutic master-key. I think Pound's Cantos are kind of like this, even though Pound didn't want them to be ("I cannot make it cohere!" he laments, near the end). Kathy Acker's books always seem this way to me, too. There's cohesion here and there in all sorts of sideways fashions, but nothing like the clear order, the subordination of part to whole that you see in Thomas Hardy. D and G, I suppose I should say, don't just propose the rhizome as a strategy for literary form -- these guys are serious. They want us to reorganize all sorts of things (psychology, the various social sciences, etc.) on rhizomatic principles. But it works for literature too.

But you knew all that, right? I mean, the rhizome seems pretty well established in the hipper American poetry and litcrit circles. In fact (and this at last starts to bring me to my point) I think it's become a bit of a mannerism in some circles, and I suppose that's why I want to have a good thwhack at it, using Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling as my thwacking-implement. It is a bit unfortunate Kierkegaard's book is so slim, especially in the bantam-weight Penguin edition I own -- otherwise I could work up a cool image of squashing a rhizome-grown potato with a big weighty tome of Danish philosophy. Alas.

Anyway. The rhizome as mannerism, even as cliche -- it first occured to me at one of the Modernist Studies Association conventions, I think the one up in Wisconsin, at that great lakeside convention center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I was hanging out by a TV set up in the corridor, watching Notre Dame lose to some henious team of steroid-gulping mutants. I did this with, oddly enough, a fully-costumed, giant-shoe-wearing clown as a companion (he was there to entertain some kids who were part of a non-MSA event down the hall). Turning away in disgust from the Flounderin' Irish, I overheard a gaggle of my fellow academics on the way into a panel. "My paper's even more modular and fragmentary than usual!" one said with pride. "Ooh, mine too!" said another, not to be outdone. So there it was: more-rhizomic-than-thou was the order of the day. It was around this time, too, that I started to get a lot of student writing workshop pieces that took great pride in not adding up, in being collections of miscellaneous parts. When I would ask about the criteria of selection, or about how the various stands related I'd get pitying sighs, followed by the weary statement that "it's postmodern." Some of these were actually quite good -- especially one about an imaginary earth where the sky had been converted into a videodome projecting Disney images. But the point is that there seemed to be a climate of expectation in which ones intellectual or writerly bona fides were established by the rhizome. It was the new minor 6-4-1-5 chord progression, the go-to form for the culturally hip. And, as a new orthodoxy (or micro-orthodoxy -- a way of showing one belongs in advanced circles), it deserves a challenge. Enter, from the west gate of my imaginary Medieval Times jousting arena, Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith. Since the potato analogy turns out to be false, I suppose we'll have to imagine his rhizomic opponent as a giant prairie dog.

The Knight of Faith is Kierkegaard's figure for the person who could, against all the evidence of the world, struggle through and achieve faith in divine providence ("on the strength of the absurd" Kierkegaard says -- and you see right away why the existentialists loved him). Abraham, willing to sacrifice Isaac, is the embodiment of this kind of faith. Kierkegaard brings this up because what he sees all around him in the university coffee shops of Copenhagen is a kind of easy, breezy dismissal of faith. Everyone, he says, is talking about "getting beyond faith" -- and he's not sure we've even got to faith in the first place. Here's how he puts in in the preface to Fear and Trembling, written in the persona of Johannes de Silento: "Today nobody will stop with faith; they all go further. It would perhaps be rash to inquire where to, but surely a mark of urbanity and good breeding on my part to assume that in fact everyone does indeed have faith, otherwise it would be odd to talk of going further. In those old days it was different. For then faith was a task of a whole lifetime, not a skill thought to be acquired in either days or weeks."

Do not freak out. I am not about to lay some Christian trip on you, despite my earlier reference to Notre Dame. It isn't religious faith I'm interested in here, but the idea of trying to get beyond something that we may not even be able to achieve in the first place. Substitute "formal coherence" for "faith" in the above passage, and you'll have a sense of where we are now: we often disdain the tree-root and fascicle of textual coherence as mere modernism (D and G sure do), but there's some question as to whether we're even up to that level of achievement.

I'm not saying we should ditch the rhizome and try to write like Thomas Hardy. Hey, some of my best friends write rhizomes. But I am concerned about the idea of the rhizome being received uncritically. I don't want the prairie dog stamped out, but I think it will be stronger for having wrestled with the Knight of Faith. I mean, we should ask ourselves: is this rhizome more or less interesting than it would have been with a greater degree of coherence? I suppose my biggest concern is that the rhizome has become a kind of marker of advanced style, and that we may find poets writing rhizomatically because they come to think that that's what they're supposed to do as experimental poets (there's a contradiction for you: doing what you're supposed to do to be experimental). Just as the old saw "show me, don't tell me" became a cliche of American poetry in the writing workshops of the 70s, I think we may be in a period where the unexamined assumption in some circles is that tree-root or fascicular coherence is for chumps, and the rhizome is the only way to go.

(Picture: Catherine Daly, author of DaDaDa


Looking at some poems from Catherine Daly's DaDaDa may be one way of getting at what's at stake here. Not only is she an interesting poet with whom I share both a publisher and (oddly) a blog format and background (check it out at: http://cadaly.blogspot.com/) -- she writes in both the rhizomatic and the fascicular mode. The two extended sequences of poems near the start of DaDaDa are good examples of rhizomic and fascicular poetics, respectively. The first sequence, "Palm Anthology," is a loose collection of notes in which the language of technology -- specifically the Palm Pilot PDA -- gets twisted up with the language of a kind of kinky eros. The effect is intertesting, but unless I'm missing something Daly doesn't try to get it add up into a coherent whole. She's more interested, here, in a field of intersections and ruptures than in an overall structure. In contrast to this we have "Mistress Plot," the second sequence. Here Daly gives us fragments again, but they seem to represent a catalog of all possible (or at any rate all common) patriarchal plots about women. What looks fragmentary at first is in fact united, and you can infer the principle of coherence. This one is really good, and reminds me more than anything else of one of those old-school books of structuralist criticism, like Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, in which the author anatomizes a cultural system. Daly's got some kind of engineering background and it shows here. She knows how to break something down into parts. This is where her real genius lies, but she seems pulled by the forces of period style to write in rhizomes more than in fascicles. I can't wait for her next book (which should come soon, since she's astonishingly prolific) but I hope it has more of what is particular to her, and less of what the age seems to demand of its hipper poets.

Return to the Supermarket: Sentimentalist Poetics Then and Now

Many things to blog, including the John Matthias retirement gathering at Notre Dame and a great show of Don Reichert's new works at the Canadian Embassy, but first, a moment of astonishment. As I was thumbing through an old issue of the NYRB, I turned with a certain ghoulish pleasure to Christopher Benfey's review of Helen Vendler's latest collection of essays. Oh boy, I thought, here we go: the usual obsequious east coast praise for the Queen of Harvard. I was all set to take a kind of perverse pleasure from witnessing the act of intellectual abasement. Oh, how wrong I was. Not only did Benfey leaven his praise with some actual criticism of Vendler, but it seems she's actually made a good point -- or almost made a good point -- about Walt Whitman. Let me explain.

The book Benfey reviews, Poets Thinking, has a chapter on Whitman that looks like it may have come close to the truth about the sage of Camden. Vendler sets out to "rescue" Whitman from charges of primitivism by old-school guys like Thoreau (who said of Whitman "it is as if the beasts spoke") and Santayana (who found in Whitman a "wealth of perception without intelligence"). She observes that Whitman not only registered detail on his retinas, he also thought, and that this thought found its way into the poems in a reprise-like structure, in which a scene is presented first as a "solely transcriptive" retinal record and then as an intellectually processed record. Let's check it out, shall we? Here's the example Benfey takes from Vendler's book, Whitman's poem "Sparkles from the Wheel." It begins with a senses-only presentation of a knife grinder:

Where the city's ceaseless crowd moves on the livelong day,
Withdrawn I join a group of children watching, I pause aside with them.
By the curb toward the edge of the flagging,
A knife-grinder works at his wheel sharpening a great knife,
Bending over he carefully holds it to the stone, by foot and knee,
With measur'd tread he turns rapidly, as he presses with light but
firm hand,
Forth issue then in copious golden jets,
Sparkles from the wheel.

Right. There's the unprocessed description. But here's the follow-up:

The scene and all its belongings, how they seize and affect me,
The sad sharp-chinn'd old man with worn clothes and broad
shoulder-band of leather,
Myself effusing and fluid, a phantom curiously floating, now here
absorb'd and arrested,
The group, (an unminded point set in a vast surrounding,)
The attentive, quiet children, the loud, proud, restive base of the
streets,
The low hoarse purr of the whirling stone, the light-press'd blade,
Diffusing, dropping, sideways-darting, in tiny showers of gold,
Sparkles from the wheel.

For Vendler, this shows that Whitman is a thinker of sorts: he takes the sense-or-retinal scene and adds to it a humanizing intellect (a "human response" added to a "perceptual registration," says Vendler). He does this by presenting the man as "sad" (an interpretation) and so forth. Okay. Yeah. Vendler's right here, and she's actually done a service to poetry by pointing out that this pattern is to be found everywhere in Whitman's poetry (note, though, that this service does not come close to cancelling out Vendler's disservice to poetry in helping Jorie Graham get Seamus Heaney's old job at Harvard -- Jorie Graham! The unholy fusion of the worst of Iowa and the worst of Buffalo! The muddle-headed mistress of mediocrity! Oh, her vagueness and pretence! Her giving-of-prizes-to-friends, her writer's-retreat realpolitik! Holy Christ! But I digress...). Here are some more examples, which again I lift from Benfey's quotation of Vendler's quotation of Whitman:

The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.

The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
I peeringly view them from the top.

Okay! Yes! There it is: retina first, and then something more processed by the mind. But I'm not at all sure Vendler's gotten to the bottom of things, unless she does something important that Benfey doesn't mention (possible -- but I can't bear to read another of her books. The one on Shakespeare nearly killed me -- as did my Shakespearian colleague, when he saw me with it and called it a scandal for its historical ignorance). Here's the thing: it isn't so much that Whitman is thinking. I mean, "that guy looks sad" isn't really much of a thought -- hell, I think my neighbor's dog cogitates thusly when he sees me come home from a particularly trying faculty meeting. It is that he moves from a sense-record without any trace of his own filtering personality to a record filtered through the presence of the self. This isn't intellection so much as it is Romantic sentimentality -- as described (insert here an academic throat-clearing) -- by Schiller.

Schiller has loomed large in my intellectual life, and his essay "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry" has been big in my theory seminar (we get to Barthes “The Death of the Author” via Jung’s “On the Relation of Analytic Psychology to Poetry” and sometimes Breton’s “The Automatic Message,” and we get to those essays from Schiller). While I was googling around looking for a link to an English version of the essay (no luck, folks), I was surprised to see that the composer John Adams, who likes the essay, describes it as “a once-influential essay from 1795 which has by now been all but forgotten.” Aw, crap. It deserves to be read, if only to show grad students that sophisticated literary thinking didn’t begin in 1968. And now, since I can’t find an online copy, I’m forced to choose between running up to campus to get my copy, or quoting from Adams’ program notes, where he quotes Isaiah Berlin’s merely adequate summary of the essay (which a colleague of mine in German described as “the jewel in the crown of nineteenth century German criticism,” which is a hell of a claim). I have no desire to hit campus only a day after graduation, so here’s a paragraph of Adams/Berlin on Schiller:

“Naive” and “sentimental”: I use these two terms knowing they may at first be misunderstood. I mean them not as we commonly interpret them but rather in the sense that Schiller used them in his essay “Über Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung”... Schiller saw essentially two types of creative personalities: “those who are not conscious of any rift between themselves and their milieu, or within themselves; and those who are so conscious.” (I [that is, Adams] quote from Isaiah Berlin, who so succinctly summarizes Schiller’s point of view.) The “unconscious” artists are the naive ones. For them art is a natural form of expression, uncompromised by self-analysis or worry over its place in the historical continuum. “They see what they see directly, and seek to articulate it for its own sake, not for any ulterior purpose, however sublime.” Schiller cites Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes and his own contemporary, Goethe, as examples of the naive. Opposed to this is the sentimental poet whose art “comes about when man enters the stage of culture where the primordial, sensuous unity is gone…The harmony between sense and thinking, which in the earlier (naive) state was real, now exists only as an ideal. It is not in a man, as a fact of life, but outside him, as an ideal to be realized.” The sentimental voice arises when the unity has been broken, and the poet (or composer or painter, etc.) seeks to restore it or, going to the opposite extreme, parodies or satirizes it. In Isaiah Berlin’s words, the sentimental artist “looks for the vanished, harmonious world which some call nature, and builds it from his imagination, and his poetry is his attempt to return to it, to an imagined childhood, and he conveys his sense of the chasm which divides the day-to-day world which is no longer his home from the lost paradise which is conceived only ideally, only in reflection.” For Schiller the poet “is either himself nature (and thereby naïve), or else he seeks nature (and is thereby sentimental).” (from http://www.earbox.com/sub-html/comp-details/nsm-de.html)

Okay, that’s not so bad, really -- in fact, it is quite good. But what it leaves out is Schiller’s observation about the different relation of the self to the poem for the two different types of poet. The naive poet, feeling no alienation of self and world, presents the world without ever presenting the self. Think of Homer’s poems -- you never get any editorializing, or any sense of the man Homer, if in fact there ever was such a man, as I understand is questionable. Or think of Shakespeare -- much has been made of his aloofness from his own work (personally, I don’t see how Goethe fits the paradigm, but I’ll bow to Schiller’s superior Goethe chops any day). The sentimental poet, though, can’t help but make the self, the individual sentiment or sensibility, the core of the poem. I mean, think about Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” where the ratio of Abbey-to-Wordsworth is something like 1:20. When Wordsworth writes, in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” of “feeling giving importance to action” rather than action to feeling, he’s tipping his hand as a sentimentalist. His poems will be about his yearning self, rather than about the world in its fullness -- which is the naive poet’s selfless gesture.

So Whitman's gesture of representing first the retinal impression, and then the impression mediated by the self, is neither the barbarity seen by Thoreau and Santayana, nor the intellectualizing seen by Vendler. It is a sentimentalizing, an insertion of the individual sensibility into a world first perceived as innocent or naive. This should come as no surprise --the a Whitmanic "Song of Myself" is every bit as much a matter of Romantic self-centered sentiment as "The Prelude, or, the Growth of the Poet's Mind." You just know, too, that this sentimentalizing is somehow connected to Whitman's particular eros. He's such a perv, God bless him. A voyeur for sure (remember the "twenty-eight bathers" section of "Song of Myself"?). And a leading literary auto-eroticist of the nineteenth century (Benfey remarks on this, in a slightly creepy reading of "Sparkels from the Wheel"). His isn't the naive erotic gaze, simply taking in the other. His is an eros that requires the notion of himself as intruder or observer or creeping lingerer. I'm sure Allen Ginsberg really did find him in that supermarket in California, lurking and leering and "eyeing the grocery boys." It wouldn't just be the thought of the boys that got Whitman going. It would be the thought of himself watching the boys. Sentimental eros, not naive.

Interestingly, we still seem to be in a sentimental age for poetry, despite various alternatives (objectivism's new version of Schiller's naivete, say, or langpo's play at eliminating the self through other means). I mean, what is Jorie Graham if not a poet who spreads the sheen of a somewhat precious sensibility over the Big Ideas she likes to reference?

How Catholic is Stuart Dybek? And Other Questions from the Lake Forest Literary Festival

I spent much of last Friday evening behind a martini glass, drafting an encyclopedia article about John Matthias and deep-chilling after a week of playing host to the first annual Lake Forest Literary Festival, an invention I dreamed up with my colleague Davis Schneiderman more than a year ago. We're calling it the "first annual" festival as an expression of faith, since we're still putting together the funding and participants for next year. I'm glad I waited a few days to blog the event, since in the middle of the battle I found myself swearing never to do it again. Misplaced writers, room-booking hijinks, the wounded egos of a number of writer-wannabes and people who mistake hosting a lit fest for something glamorous -- all the usual chickenshit had me down. In the end, though, the thing went off well, as I guess I knew it would.

Some highlights for me, in the form of questions:

1. How Catholic is Stuart Dybek?

Stuart was the BMOC for this year's festival (behold my naive, indeed touching, faith that we'll get our act together for another year, and another yet...), which focused on Illinois writers. One of the many flaming hoops he had to jump through during his stay at Lake Forest was a lunchtime faculty talk in the gray box we call, not without a sense of irony, the faculty lounge. In the course of his talk he mentioned a couple of things that redlined on my "Pious II signature series Catechism 3000 Catholometer": firstly, there was a strangely fond recollection of the infant Jesus in Prague, a statue elaborately dressed each day in beaded, bejewelled and embroidered outfits by local nuns; secondly, there was his statement about the nature of imagination and the writer's craft. This isn't usually the sort of thing that sets off the Catechism 3000, but the thing started bleeping uncontrollably about fifteen seconds into the discussion. Dybek was talking about teaching creative writing, and the resistance he (like everyone who teaches writing) encounters from the type of student who heard somewhere that Jack Kerouac just got hopped up on speed and typed all night on a scroll of paper so he wouldn't have to slow down and think. "The craft of writing," said Dybek, "can feel constraining -- those techniques can feel constraining, and they are, at first." But, he continued, "that craft is the only access, the -only- access, we have to the imagination." Okay. So I wasn't sure at first why this set off the Catholometer the same way the infant of Prague did. Then it occurred to me that this was the same sort of thing I'd heard over and over (I've got three degrees from Notre Dame) about the rituals and dogmas of the Catholic Church. "Yes," a broadminded priest might concede in the grotto outside the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, "all this ritual and hierarchy and tradition and dogma can seem artificial, even repressive, but this is how we have access to religion, and we don't have anything without it." I was never willing to concede jack to any grotto-haunting dogma-peddler, but I'm down with Dybek on this. And I'll bet you a pound of Friday fishsticks that the man goes to church.

2. Where does Reginald Gibbons get his Clothes?

Reg looked sharp, as he always does. He read in an interesting kind of back-and-forth way with Ricardo Cortez Cruz (best known for inventing the rap novel with his book "Straight Outta Compton"), trading poem for poem and prose passage for prose passage, each finding a way to link his piece to the other guy's writing. A highlight for me was when both read poems with quotations from one of Chicago's best African-American poets, Sterling Plumpp. It was cool, and they hadn't planned it. But I digress: my point was Reg's clothes. I kind of thought he'd be overwhelmed in that department by Cruz. I'd met Cruz the day before, and saw right a way that he was the kind of guy who knows how to wear a big cross medallion and make it work. But Reg showed up in a slick blazer and cleverly tied scarf. One of the poems he read was about meeting a guy in a diner late at night, a man who turned out to be an old tailor from eastern Europe. The old tailor praised the speaker of the poem (who, in a post-New Critical gesture, I'm going to call "Reg") for his clothes, and then told Reg he knew where he could get some really fine stuff on the cheap. I'm going to assume that Reg's autobiographical impulse is stronger than his desire to fabricate fictions, and work up the courage to ask him where he shops.

3. What's with the Cult of the Editors?

When Davis and I were planning this shindig, we added, at the last minute, a panel made up of the editors of some of Chicago's main literary magazines. I'm not sure why we did it, unless it had to do with how both Davis and I are unrepentant serial offenders in the world of little magazines, starting our own publications up from time to time and suffering the slings and arrows that all editors inevitably suffer (ever met a writer who loved his editor? You did? I got news for you, Chet, that dude was lying). Anyway -- we put the panel in a classroom, rather than an auditorium, since we thought hardly anyone would attend. We ended up with standing room only -- in fact, I ended up standing out in the hallway, bullshitting with Dybek and Cruz, becuase there wasn't even room for us to stand at the back.

Barry Silesky came from ACM, wearing the kind of cap Jack Kerouac wears in the picture on the Burkhardt-designed T-shirt you used to be able to get at the Aspidistra Bookshop on Chicago's Clark Street (if you got yours in the early nineties, you probably bought it from me -- I was the guy with the mangy ponytail, the one who'd had slightly less Guinness than the older guy who yelled at you about how Kerouac was a drunk and a hack). Marie Hays came from Story Quarterly, with a giant box of free samples for the audience. Eirik Steinhoff came from Chicago Review (on the train home that night I missed my stop, talking with him and with the painter David Schutter). And the crowd, all students, ate it all up. Maybe they showed up because I'd billed the event as "how to get published" (always an eye-catcher), but I wish I'd been able to squeeze in and see what happened.

Other questions remain unanswered, too: Did I drink the Chicago Tribune critic Patrick Reardon's cocktail at dinner by mistake? Why didn't David Park read his Bob Odenkirk piece at the open mike? Where will the money come from to pay for next year's much larger extravaganza? Where's my copy of "The Coast of Chicago"? But I do know this: I'm glad we got our act together, and I'll try to remember that midway through next year's festival, when some jackass writer has decided he needs the red M+Ms picked out from the bowl of candy in his dressing room and I'm telling myself I'll never do it again.

Around Zukofsky Ending in Hass

Pawing through one of my notebooks I see that it's been two months since the "Around Zukofsky" conference held at the University of Chicago to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Louis Zukofsky's birth. It was an interesting event, at least the part I saw -- not only for what was said about Zukofsky, but for what the whole event said about how we academic types talk about poetry.

I was stuck in Lake Forest for the morning, and took the train down to Hyde Park late, watching the green awnings over jewelry stores and banks on the north shore give way to "Support Our Troops" signs and flag stickers on the north side of the city and down in the loop, and then change to "Bush Lies, Who Dies?" and "No War" graffitti around the university. When I finally made it to the Franke Center (an odd corner of the Regenstein Library), I'd missed some of the more formal panels, and found a roundtable discussion in progress.

Some bright things were said, but the way many of the questions from the audience were phrased was all too familiar from the conferences I'd attended in the past. It's as if admittance to graduate school forces one to say "problematic" (as a noun) or "positionality" when what one really means is "problem" or "position." Sometimes it seems as if conference speech by graduate students is governed by fear -- the fear that one might be understood, say, and questioned about what one has said. Or the fear that one will have to admit to having not read a text. Or the fear that one doesn't belong to the tribe, that one must establish one's bona fides with certain code words. Maybe this is a function of the Maslowian hierarchy of needs -- sure, your average grad student or untenured faculty person has food and shelter, the basic needs, but she's still working on safety and belonging, the next tiers up. And language reflects these anxieties, I suppose. Suppose? Hey. I've been there (grad student, untenured prof), and I'm sure I'd blanche at a tape of the kind of questions I asked at conference panels in the early 90s...

Not everything was like this, though. I remember how Bob Hass asked a question or two in perfectly clear English and how, on the way out, I heard a couple of grad school types mooning over the beauty of the poet's speech. He had simply spoken lucidly, and been unafraid to ask a question that revealed that there was something he didn't know. I imagine his ease with such a simple task had to do with the security that comes from having won all the laurels one can win in these unceremonious times.

My favorite moment came when a man in the audience raised his hand, cleared his throat, and asked a most unusual question for a context like the one in which we found ourselves. "I don't want to sound too much like I'm channeling Harold Bloom," he said, "But -- honestly -- does anyone up there think that Louis Zukofsky was really a -great- poet, whatever that may mean?" As he sat back I watched the panelists look around at each other. It was as if they had served a tennis ball over the net to their opponents, got in position for the return, but what came back over the net wasn't a ball but a bandicoot. It was a kind of violation of decorum, and revealed the limits of our discourse about poetry. We're pretty good at ideological analysis, we know what to do with questions of historical context, we're pretty happy with placing a guy like Zukovsky in some kind of affirmative relationship with fashionable poets or critical notions of our time (he anticipates language poetry, we'll say, or he links ethics and aesthetics). But we just don't -do- evaluative criticism well, or at all. We tend to find the very notion a bit embarassing. And the man who'd raised his hand had set that wild-eyed bandicoot loose in the room. How to chase it back into its cage?

The panelists finally chased the bandicoot with what struck me as some surprisingly old fashioned implements. One spoke of Zukofsky's potential greatness as a matter of his influence -- if enough people followed him, then he was, in a manner of speaking, great. Another spoke of a "diachronic cultural dynamic" that, when one thought about it, amounted to the test of time. None of this would have been alien to, say, David Hume. I'm not busting on the bandicoot-catchers here: I'm just surprised at how powerfully the question revealed a weakness of our critical discourse. We don't seem to have done a whole lot of new thinking about how to evaluate a poet. It was Jed Rasula, I think, who had the best answer of the lot, a kind of hermenutic one --he maintained that Zukofsky's greatness would be determined by how much of an interpretive community could be formed around his works.

The questioner, I later discovered, was Richard Strier, whom many of you may know as a John Donne guy. He seems to have a reputation for cutting through the clutter of academic speech, as this page by an admiring student makes clear: "Richard Strier, Destroyer of Bullshit" http://home.uchicago.edy/~nacecire/strier.html .

A brisk walk over to Classics with Strier and Hass, and then the conference's grand finale, a reading by Hass, mostly of new poems.

I didn't think it was possible to make a smooth transition from Zukofsky to Hass, but Srikanth Reddy did it, in one of the best introductions to a poetry reading I've ever seen. He read a poem of his own that he'd written for the occasion, a really lovely piece full of Hass-like lists and image-fragments, the sort of thing that reminded you of the imagist roots of some of Hass' best poems, and established the Hass-Zukofsky link through a poetry of the image. Lovely stuff.

Hass' own reading was strong, mostly of new things, most of which tread the boundary between image and statement, as many of his poems in the past have done. One new piece was different, though, consisting of a kind of breezy New York School talkiness, a story-and-dialogue based piece in which he talks to a waiter who turns out to live in a John Ashbery poem, where he'd best stay to avoid being sent off to war. Fascinating as a departure for Hass, and wonderful in all the balls it managed to juggle: campiness, admiration for a fellow poet, concern with the darker events of our time, the nature of reality in literature, and so much more.

But what I really liked was the visual that accompanied all this: Hass bent intently over his page, while Srikanth Reddy sat on one side and Oren Izenberg of Chicago's English Department on the other (Reddy was up front as the introducer, Izenberg had arrived late and sat by the door at the front of the room). Reddy, in a really exquisite green shirt, sat with his profile to the crowd, chin on his hand and elbows on his knees, rapt, beatific, with a smile like the Budhha on the cover of the New Directions edition of Siddhartha (does that sound orientalist? I'd been reading Hesse on the train down, not Siddhartha but Steppenwolf, but I guess there was some image bleedover). "Transported," I thought. "He looks transported." On Hass' other side, a kind of bookend counterpart, Izenberg stared intently over his glasses, flourished what looked like a rather expensive pen, and took notes with severe strokes on a legal pad. He didn't seem to blink more than once or twice through the whole reading, and the dome of his head radiated about 400 degrees of intellectual heat -- the critical intellect on at full blast. The two were like figures for the emotional and intellectual sides of poetry, balanced like angel and devil over the shoulders of the poet.

I wonder just how much may have been, at some level, conscious pose: Reddy comes from the creative writing wing of our poetry world, and Izenberg from the critical theory end of things. We all give off some version of the impression we want to give off, especially when at a Big Event and at the front of the room. It may be that each was in his own movie, one playing the rapt poet and one the skeptical critic. I was in the audience next to Jed Rasula, trying my damndest to play a hip version of The Last Liberal Humanist, a role I had in my high school musical one year and never quite shook.

Talking, after the reading, with Eirick Steinhoff about the Chicago Review and Jed Rasula about Auden and others about other things. For that, for the image of Reddy and Izenberg, for the question about Zukofsky's greatness, for a bit of banter with Strier and Hass between buildings, and for the chance to give Mark Scroggins a copy of my book (I'd liked his so much, I wanted to give him something back), I was grateful to the conference organizers for putting it all together, and glad I'd gotten my act together enough to come down to Hyde Park and be a part of the background noise. Academic conferences -- as an old prof once said when welcoming a new colleague, "there is life in the intersitces of the institution."

Tom Pickard Among the Virgins

Devin Johnston of Flood Editions must be the most dedicated person in a field that, by its very nature, attracts wide-eyed idealists and hardcore Quixote types: poetry publishing. Not only has he set up a trans-continental North American tour for Tom Pickard as a promotion for Pickard's new books -- a tour ranging from Boston to San Diego and back -- he's also driven Tom and his crew around for a significant portion of the tour. Devin wasn't on hand for last night's Pickard reading at Lake Forest College, but it was clear from talking to Tom that Devin had laid the groundwork for a hell of a promotional tour. And of all that tour's dates, Tom told me, he'd enjoyed last night the most. This could just be good manners on Tom's part, but I'm inclined to believe him, in no small part because of the nature of the audience.

Pickard has been reading to a lot of the poetry-crowd regulars -- the Harvard guys, the Chicago Review crowd, the Buffalo Poetics mafia, etc. You know, the usual suspects. But at Lake Forest we don't have those people: since we teach undergraduates almost exclusively, our crowds tend to have a high proportion of reading-virgins who've never seen a poet live before, except perhaps in an open mike session at the local Barnes and Noble. Many of them don't know what to expect, but have some general notion that there will be high sentiments, sincerity and more than a few long stretches of boredom. You know, like church. And Tom Pickard, whatever else he may be, isn't church.

I think this un-churchiness was most clear to the seventy or so people in the audience (a very good crowd for a small school) when Tom broke out "Hidden Agenda," a poem he'd originally written for "The New Statesman," where it was to appear next to the writing of future Prime Minister Tony Blair. For reasons I can guess, its publication was delayed until a few issues later. The poem is a long and quite funny chant consisting, in large measure, of the word "fuck." Watching the crowd watch Pickard was a pleasure. A number of my own students kept smiling, then looking over at me nervously for some cue on how to act. I think they weren't sure about whether they could go ahead and be amused, or whether they should muster some pretence of being offended. Whether anyone was actually offended remains to be seen, but I don't think it is likely. It isn't as if the students don't get an earful of "fuck" in the dorms, at their parties, and in a lot of the music they download. Only the juxtaposition of the context (lecture hall, older man at podium) and the diction (low, vulgar) would lead to a their reaction.

Bakhtin would call such a juxtapositon "transcoding" -- the mix of the high and the low (often, in his examples from Rabelais, the holy mixed somehow with bodily functions). The function of such transcoding is a kind of delight in borderline scandal -- exactly the reaction I saw when one of my students came up to me after the reading and, smiling broadly, said "oh, my virgin ears!" I don't imagine the post-everything crowd at Buffalo would have quite the same reaction as the younger and less experienced audience we had last night, and that's the reason I'm inclined to believe what Tom told me about this stop on his tour being his favorite so far.

So take note, oh Devin Johnston, when next you plan a tour for Tom Pickard: he belongs among the virgins, delighted in the scandal of their own burning ears.

Michael Donaghy, 1954-2004

(From left: a member of Donaghy's band, Donaghy, Richard Pettengill and Bob Archambeau during Donaghy's visit to Lake Forest College, one of his last American poetry readings)

Some very sad news: the poet Michael Donaghy has died, apparently of a brain aneurism. A tremendously charming poet, Donaghy had come to Lake Forest College earlier this year as our artist-in-residence, and made quite an impression, as I'm sure he did everywhere he went.

Born in the Bronx, Donaghy had worked as a doorman in a swank Central Park West building and read poetry (often concealed in his hat) surreptitiously while on the job. He told me about a very elegant Manhattan matron who caught him in the act and gave him her tickets to the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, a venue where he was eventually to give readings of his own. He was a great storyteller as well as a poet, and could turn just about any incident in his life into a narrative that had the whole room wide-eyed and fixated or roaring with laughter. He seemed, too, to have a habit of living interestingly -- I remember him telling me about spending a cold Chicago winter in an old Weather Underground safehouse in Hyde Park, hanging out with Keith Tuma and burning old, much-thumbed copies of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man for warmth.

He was a performer in so many ways: as a musician, as a teller of jokes and stories, as a speaker of his own poetry (which he recited from memory). One suspects that the phrase "the show must go on" meant something to Donaghy. He was quite ill when he came to Lake Forest for his week's visit, with kidney stones that must have been quite painful. But on the day after his surgery he insisted on pulling himself together to give one of the most successful readings I've seen at the College. I imagine he loved performing more than anything else. He certainly did it well, and he found every opportunity to do it. I remember the way he rubbed his hands together theatrically when I told him the chairman had his check ready. Everything was act, charisma, and charm by the barrel. My English publisher called Donaghy "a fab bloke," which is about right, I think.

I don't think the little world of American poetry ever quite knew what to do with Donaghy. He ran, a little, with the New Formalist crowd, but since he chose to live in London he was on the periphery of that circle. His work was often elegantly formal, but it never had the feel of rigidity that one sometimes finds in the "Rebel Angels" school of formalism. He was tremendously well-read (I remember an impromptu talk about Eliot and David Jones he gave to a Modern Poetry class of mine) but he wore his learning as lightly as you could imagine, unlike those formalists who seem to think that their familiarity with the Norton Anthology of English Literature has made them into a kind of elite elect.

Donaghy called Conjure, his most recent collection(I find it hard to say "his last") his "father book." It is certainly that: his father is present in many of the poems, and vividly realized. But the poems rise above private anecdote: the experience of his father is often filtered through cultural artefacts from Shakespeare's Tempest to Welles' Citizen Kane. Donaghy's learning was worn lightly in part, I suppose, because his learning was -lived-: it was assimilated to his own life and experience. My favorite poets are often like this (it is the fusion of the immediate and the apparently remote that attracted me, for example, to the work of John Matthias). I regret that Donaghy's work only came to my attention recently, and I deeply regret how his career has been cut so tragically short.

Dances Learned Last Night, a slim Picador collection of Donaghy's earlier poetry, is a good place to start if you have yet to meet this poet. I feel very fortunate to have met the man.

Light the Lights: Charles Cantalupo's Decolonized Knowledge

So there I was, flipping through the most recent copy of the ADE Bulletin (the MLA's publication for Department Chairs -- I'm not the chair of my department, thank god, but the chair has signed me up for the Bulletin anyway, which I take as an ominous advance rumble of an administrative chickenshit monsoon blowing in my direction). By and large, the ADE Bulletin articles are exactly as interesting and inspiring as you'd think they'd be. They're the kind of thing that makes you want a third cup of coffee. But this time there was an article by Mary Louise Pratt called "Living Change: Thoughts for Humanists in Troubled Times." This was interesting, and got me thinking about Charles Cantalupo's new book of poems, "Light the Lights," which, in a just world, would be well known and prominantly reviewed.

Pratt writes about the long slow processes by which changes in knowledge are lived out, and takes particular notice of what she calls the decolonizing of Western knowledge of the world beyond Europe. She begins by noting how Western knowledge of the rest of the world was often colonial in its assumptions. She gives different examples, but I think of a guy like the Marquis de Condorecet, a left-winger and general good guy of the Enlightenment, who nevertheless thought that all the unfortunate Africans needed was to "follow the expositions and proofs that appear in our speeches and writings" to rise from what he saw as their savagery. Talk about your Eurocentrism: African forms of knowledge had nothing to offer, in this view, and the leadership role naturally fell to the West. You can almost hear the quills being sharpened for the writing of the manifestos of the colonial "mission civilisatrice."

Understanding of the discontents of this kind of colonial discourse came slowly, Pratt says, through the lived expereinces of generations. Shakespeare gave a kind of glimpse of the problem early on, with Caliban from "The Tempest," but the understanding of Caliban as a figure of decolonization took centuries. Pratt points to Northrop Frye's introduction to the 1959 Penguin edition of the play, where the great critic's prodigious intelligence glimmers, for a moment, with insight. "It is a little puzzling," writes Frye, "why New World imagery should be so prominent in 'The Tempest,' which really hs nothing to do with the New World, beyond ... a general, if vague, resemblenace between the relation of Caliban to the other characters and that of the American Indians to the colonizers and drunken sailors who came to exterminate or enslave them." Yow! I mean, there it it: a recognition of the decolonizing element of the play, but just there, at the exact moment of vision, the lights go out, and Frye becomes blind to his own insight. If that insight now seems obvious, it is only because decades of political decolonization and post-colonial study have made it so.

I'm not at all sure we're through with the process of decolonizing knowledge, either. I remember attending a conference at Grinnell College, where I, along with other liberal arts profs who taught postcolonial literature, had assembled to pat ourselves on the back for our pedagogical and political coolness. At one of the Q&A sessions an African man (Joseph Mbele of St. Olaf College, I think) rose up and interrupted a speaker who'd been talking about race, gender and class in postcolonial studies. "my question is this," he said "when will my village matter?" This stopped us all in our tracks. What he meant, he continued, was that the terms we were so pleased to use in discussing identity (race gender and class) were western terms, and totally alien to the terms actually used in the African village where he grew up. There, he went on, everything was a matter of extended kinship relations. If we didn't incorporate those terms into our discourse, how "post" was our supposed postcolonialism. (We all applauded -- but I wonder how many of the assembled profs have gone on to learn anything about those kinship systems he mentioned?)

All of this brings me, at last, around to Charles Cantalupo. Cantalupo has -lived- decolonization more than most of us. He's spent a lot of time in Africa, and worked closely with the Eritran poet Reesom Haile (whom he has translated). He seems to have had connections to the Eritrean revolutionaries in their war of liberation against the Ethipoian government, and he organized the Asmara conference on African languages and literature (whose declaration, first published in Samizdat, has been so influential in studies of African literature). What I mean by all of this is that, unlike so many of the people I hung out with when I was involved with postcolonial studies, Cantalupo had an understanding of issues that didn't just come from the library (though he had that kind of understanding too). And Cantalupo's new book of poems, "Light the Lights," is one of the most fully realized works of decolonized knowledge that I have seen.

Okay, I'll explain. Or better yet, I'll give you some of Cantalupo's words by way of explanation. Here are some lines from "Power Figure," the incantatory poem with which he starts the book:

Mothered by a slit gong,
Fathered by a stranger,
This power is not the word
of silver gelatin
To develop a photo,
But pigment and lumen,
Mask, tools and body...

Here, the "power" of which Cantalupo writes is the power of representation, but it is not a Western power (the power of photographic mimesis). Rather, it is the mask and slit gong power of African modes of mimesis. There is a kind of reclaiming of other modes of reason and representation. So far so good. But things get more complicated later in the poem continues:

This power wears your face
And mine: a bell of double
Deals and rivet lines,
One eye an unfired bullet,
The other an old teat,
Six ridges in one brain
With green bolts, and lips barred
By the same claws that scarred
Those cheeks into fossil rocks
Obscured by feathers and fur

Okay, then. So the "power" seems to be a kind of ancestor spirit, a mask, but it is hybridized, like contemporary Africa itself. The basic mask-form is African, just as the basic knowledge patterns of most Africans remains non-Western. But the bullets and rivets that comprise parts of the mask are western, and give us too-clear of a picture of what kinds of western knowlege-goods and material-goods have become parts of the African experience. Nicely done. But wait! There's more! Check out the ending of he poem:

To trade for more tools:
Beans of no birth, small horns,
Unloosed pens and arrows
Wrapped in wet skin,
Petrified birds, stones like hips,
A mandolin, dust that bleeds,
Finger bones, gourds,
Dateless wax holding pins,
Hair twine, porcelain chips,
A grandfather's hammer,
Drop cloth and extension cord.

Here we get a jumbling together of African ancestor-totems and Western ancestor-totems (the sort of stuff you might find in the attic of your grandfather when clearing out the house after the funeral -- the drop-cloth and extension cord). The sense of a division between African forms of knowledge and Western forms of knowledge dissolves in this set of images. In a poem like this we can see the end of the idea of a Western civilization, on the one hand, and an African savagery on the other (Condorcet's idea). And we can also see an end to the well-meaning but totally Eurocentric knowledge system of the college postcolonialists (whose Western race-gender-class system totally excluded the African knowledge systems mentioned by Mbele). Here, "this power" becomes the fusion of the Western and the African.

You get a lot of this stuff in Cantalupo's book. And he's fond of dramatizing the destruction of divisions between Western and non-Western knowledges. My favorites of this kind include "Colonial/Neocolonial" and "Columba/Columbus" and "Look Again," which includes the stunning "Love Song of David Livingstone" (the Livingstone of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume" fame).

You'd think that a book like this would get a lot of play. It is formally interesting in the way that the now-powerful Langpo crowd would like, and it deals with all the important postcolonial issues. Sadly, though, I don't think either crowd will get hip to the book. The Langpo people don't seem to read much beyond the work published by their favorite expereimental presses, and "Light the Lights" is published by The Red Sea Press, a New Jersey-and-Eritrea based outfit whose books don't seem to get much notice at, say, The Electronic Poetry Center. And postcolonial studies (in which poetry has never played a leading role) is too deeply immersed in identity politics to pick up "Light the Lights" as a major text. I mean, Cantalupo is an American white guy, and I don't think he's going to get onto the syllabi of many PoCo seminars, even if what he has to show is more important than, say, a third class session on Derek Walcott (let me go on record: Walcott is overrated -- not inconsequential, but overrated. And "Omeros" is kind of a let-down).

I still have a kind of naive faith that a really good book can matter if the word gets out, no matter how badly the odds are stacked against it. We just may have to live out the decolonization of knowledge a bit more before it happens.

Anarchy by Mark Scroggins

"What does the London Punk Rock scene of the 1970s have to do with the bloody religious turmoil of seventeenth-century England?" asks Norman Finkelstein in the jacket copy of Mark Scroggins' new book, "Anarchy," now out from Spuyten Duyvil. If you, like me, admire anyone who will raise such a question, you'll probably like Scroggins' book, which kicks off with quotes from Milton and Greil Marcus. The juxtaposition is admirable -- you've got to like someone who gets away from the twin solipsisms of American poetry (confessional navel-gazing and reference-free language play) and searches for the connections between the recent and the remote. I see more and more of ths gesture in poetry lately -- I suppose it has something to do with the emergence of what Marjorie Perloff calls "the new Modernism." I suppose, too, that Scroggins' interest in this sort of thing has something to do with his having made a fan of Guy Davenport, our living link to the Hugh Kenner brand of modernism. It has certainly made a fan of me (and not just because I try to do something similar in my own "Major Thel," a kind of poetic lovechild of David Bowie and William Blake).

But what I really like about Scroggins' book are the ways it manages to be both linguistically sophisticated and emotionally expressive. In the poem "Springing," for example, he takes a kind of lyric moment, shows how it is a construct of discourse, and still retains it as legitimate. Check this out:

That it was a perfect day, fitted together fiercely
and hardly in its particulars, could scarcely
be denied; you took that sun to heart, moved
and chastened by the clarity of the branches between.

Okay, that's the first stanza, and so far we've got something that looks like a kind of neo-Romantic encounter with nature. Sure, its in the second person, and there's an ambiguity in the word "hardly" that is kind of interesting (does it mean "hardly" as in having a kind of tough cold clarity, or "hardly" as in "barely"?) but by and large this is pretty straightforward stuff. But Scroggins gets a whole other groove on as he develops the scene in the next two stanzas or so:

I rolled my troubles in an old kit bag, caught
at the last vacillations of the ancient moon, drew carefully
the lines beyond which we had no connaisance, and
felt -- "in my heart" -- a motion which again refused denial.

What more could they do? They stood in the gloom
before the screen, which slowly scrolled its credits over
their clothes and faces. The rustling of the early
frost transfused a breathy, whispered singing, echoed

through the lobby and the darkened restrooms.

I mean, hot damn! Scroggins begins with an old cliche (troubles in his kit bag), a kind of intertextual reference. This, combined with the quotation marks around "in my heart" show that the lyric emotion we saw in the first stanza is culturally conditioned, and draws on the stock of emotional responses made available and articulate through culturally specific forms. We get the point driven home when the scene becomes one in which the people have the credits of a movie projected onto them. Not only do we see the individual as inscribed by culture (the body with writing on it) but the credits are the part of the movie that bares the device, and gives a list of all the artifices of the movie, from gaffing to cinematography. So we really get a strong sense of the linguistically/culturally conditioned nature of the lyric moment. And then there are those wandering pronouns! Woo! You becomes I becomes they. There's all sorts of good stuff going on -- yet none of it takes the lyric moment away. The poem shows that what we feel doesn't become illegitimate just because it is the product of the inherited discourse speaking through us, or being projected on us. I like it. I wish there were more of this going on in poetry.

I ran into Scroggins in Maine at the Poetry of the 1940s conference this summer, and he tells me that things are looking good in alt-poetry land. He'd been to Buffalo and reported that the new students there are all into their own post-langpo things, as opposed to a few years back when he felt they all worshipped a bit too ardently at the shrines of Silliman, Bernstein and company. I can see why he'd like this development -- this book seems to me to be the best sort of post-langpo possibility, a book that understands language sceptically, but doesn't limit itself to that scepticism. The book is well worth the ten bucks they're asking for it at spuytenduyvil.net. Come on, buy the thing. Give a poet a break.

Samizdat, R.I.P.

Hear ye, hear ye: Samizdat is dead! Samizdat is dead! Long live the Samizdat Blog!

Yes, its official: I've folded up Samizdat after ten issues of poetry, reviews, interviews, letters from odd corners of the poetry planet and editorial sniping at sacred cows from the dizzying height of my ivory tower.

When we started out, I wanted to set Michael Anania's words about literary publishing in stone and mount them above the door of my office: "the secret of literary publishing is that there are no sales" he'd said, after pointing out that most literary magazine editors blow all of their money on a first issue, all of their friends' money on a second issue, and then rely on sales for the funding of the third issue. Hence the tendency for literary magazines to fail at issue three. Taking a cue from Anania, I budgeted to lose the full cost of every issue and, with this business model, always came out ahead of expectations. But after ten issues, I've discovered that I love writing more than I love editing. And the host impulses that gave me pleasure as an editor are satisfied with less sweat and more immediate payoff by throwing parties (like the retro Fondue Soultrain party with which I kicked off this latest semester). So sayonara, Samizdat.

But wait. Giving up the writing of editorials is not easy. I mean, you get the illusion that there are people out there who actually read what you write, and the short format allows for causeries and spit-takes of quick disgust or amusement. How to keep this, while giving up the magazine? Ah. Easy: the Samizdat Blog. Long may it wave.