Archambeau World Tour, Summer 2006

Okay, fans, you're in luck: this summer's Robert Archambeau World Tour is concentrated (so far) in the greater Chicago area, so you can catch both dates without having to put too many miles on the VW microbus you and your hippie pals had planned to use as both vehicle and residence as you followed me from town to town.

The tour begins with a May 22 gig at the University of Chicago, as part of the Council of Advanced Studies' Poetry and Poetics Workshop Series. The talk is, at the moment, called "The Aesthetic Anxiety."

After a brief hiatus, during which I'll be trashing hotel rooms, chasing supermodels, and dodging paparazzi, I'll emerge from my hiding place at the Chateau Marmot to speak on July 29th, at Northwestern University's Art and Craft Summer Writer's Conference, where I'll be talking about blogging on a panel with Bust magazine writer Wendy McClure and noted novelist/New Republic guy Kevin Guilfoile.

What a long, strange trip it will be.*

*Errata

For "long", read "short."
For "strange", read "somewhat placid and academic."

The Acronym of Evil

Note: This panderometer seems to be set about a decibel too high, but it is the best I could find, what with the heavy demand these last few months. The guys at Radio Shack tell me the new, improved models won't be in until next week, which means I can pick one up when I go in to get the parts for the giant robot I'm building. The robot's going to look like Theodor Adorno. Well, like Theodor Adorno if he were thirty feet tall, had laser eyes, and the ability to crush cars with his magneto-grip (which he didn't have -- everybody knows that was Herbert Marcuse).

But what, you ask, prompted me to fire up the panderometer in the first place? An excellent question! I mean, whenever I plug that sucker in I risk blowing a fuse, especially if I do so while running the hair dryer. So I use it only under dire circumstances. But circumstances are, of late, somehwat dire.

(Consumer Warning: You know, I think I've been doing a good job of repressing my occasional urges to rant about politics here. But this latest news gets the better of me, so be forewarned: a rant follows.)

Newsweek's Howard Fineman tells us George Bush has a new story to tell, now that his old talking points are looking a little threadbare. The new White House talking points can be encapsulated, Fineman says, with a handy acroynm, WATITH -- the War Against Terrorists Inside The Homeland. And who are these enemies in the homeland? As Fineman puts it, they are "not just the terrorists themselves, but also wussie lovers of legalistic niceties that get in the way of investigations..." In this new story, it seems that those who don't toe the line and agree that Bush's law-breaking acts of surveillance on American citizens are both hunky and dorey are no better than terrorists.

Okay. Let us put aside the deep irony of a president who calls himself a lover of freedom who fights terror trying to intimidate those who would protect their constitutional freedoms. Let us concentrate on the creepiness of the tactic. Where have we heard words like this before? Where have we heard that war can be sustained in this manner? How about in the following passage:

...the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

That was from an interview with Herman Goering. No, I'm not making this up. Nor am I saying that Bush is a Nazi. But it is fact, not opinion, that he's not above considering a tactic Goering embraced, nor above using it for similar ends. And we're not wrong to be appalled.

If this keeps up, I suppose I'll be seeing you all in Gitmo. But don't worry: my giant robot will set us free.

The Schmoozie: Criteria Revealed!

Since the Schmoozie award for most egregious self-promotion at or near the AWP was awarded a week ago (see my post of March 12), there's been a huge (okay, a moderate) outpouring of interest. Among the various emails asking me to reveal the full name of the winner, and the others guessing (mostly correctly) his full identity, there were a few asking about the criteria for the award. Since we at the Academy of Literary Conference and Festival Arts and Sciences stand for full disclosure and transparency, I here reveal the scoring system of that venerable award, The Schmoozie.

Feel free to print up score cards to use at any MLA, MMLA, AWP, MSA, or other acronym-bearing conference. The system can also be used at poetry readings, such is its versatility.

Minor afftonts to decency have a low point value:

• Conspicuous nodding during a presentation: 1 point


• Laughing loudly to prove one is in on the joke: 1 point


• Name-tag gawking: 1 point


• Carrying around a copy of your own book: 1 point


• Offering to sign your book when you have not been asked to so do: 2 points

The following phrases all have point value:

• "Loved your book": 3 points


• "I admire your work": 3 points


• "I'm a big fan": 5 points

Name dropping also has point value:

• Naming This Year's Theorist: 2 points (note: in 2006, Franco Moretti holds the title of This Year's Theorist)


• Referring to Helen Vendler, Marjorie Perloff, or John Ashbery by first-name only: 2 points


• Referring to Ron Silliman by first-name only: 1 point

Major affronts have point value appropriate to their egregiousness:

• Hovering at the edge of a conversation where the famous have gathered: 3 points


• Crashing a table at the hotel bar where the famous have gathered: 5 points


• Giving your book to one of the luminous few, saying "I thought you should have one....": 10 points


• Inviting yourself to dinner with the big dogs, when you have not been asked: 15 points


• Inviting yourself onstage to read or speak when you are not in the program: 20 points

Finally, there is a variable point value to be awarded for anyone who rises, after a presentation, to ask a question that is not in fact a question, but rather a rambling speech, the primary purpose of which is to hear the melodious sound of one's own voice echoing through the hallowed air of the lecture hall.

• 1 point per sentence.

The Academy of Literary Conference and Festival Arts and Sciences perpetually strives to improve its system of ratings, so please do not hesitate to add new categories based on observations of conference affrontery. We count on your field research!

Robert Archambeau
Provost and Dean of Affontery Studies
Academy of Literary Conference and Festival Arts and Sciences

Under the Pecan Trees and in the Academy

Back from Austin, covered in glory. Or maybe that's barbecue sauce. Be that as it may, I bring you the following observations about the AWP fringes, along with an added bonus in the form of a note on the University of Chicago's recent conference on poetry criticism.

1. There is no finer venue for a group poetry reading than the lawn behind the Bouldin Creek Coffeehouse on a warm spring evening.

You're guided in from the road by a fantastic neon sign featuring a reclining frog cradling a coffee cup and looking philosophically into the distance. You walk into the bar area, read the chalked-up specials, ponder for a moment whether to go with coffee or beer, then let your adoring fans put your drinks on their tab for the evening (thanks, Grant). The kid selling you your microbrew organic ale looks a lot like Rory Cochrane's character Slater in the Richard Linklater classic Dazed and Confused. You hang for a while with the poets and local scenesters, then head through a hang-out room, a big screened porch, and down a gentle slope. You stand outside at a microphone flanked by two Peavy amps and a 70s-era lamp, all beneath spreading limbs of a giant pecan tree. You turn to face the big crowd and feel like this is where you belong.

2. The changing of the guard is always underway.

The last time I was in the same room with Kass Fleisher, her husband Joe Amato, Maxine Chernoff and her husband Paul Hoover was in 1999, at a bar called the Cirque Divers in Liege, Belgium. We'd all been speaking at a literary conference for which Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop had been the eminences gris. At the Austin reading, though, it was Paul and Maxine who were the presiding literary couple, the locus of all gravitas. They sat together in the front row, Paul looking tall and distinguished in the American poet's black uniform, Maxine sitting sideways on her chair and emitting a sort of aura of kind benevolence. All the time I couldn't help thinking that, in an unspecified but no doubt shockingly brief-seeming span of years, I'll probably be at another such poet's hang (what's the progression after Belgian bar -- Austin coffeehouse? Nepalese used book store?), and see that Joe and Kass have become the iconic literary couple, presiding over the poets at play. Not a bad fate, really.

3. Brett Eugene Ralph is the real deal.

When I first saw Brett Ralph walk up to the mike in his trucker hat, biker boots, and general biker/redneck mien, I suspected he was going to be a mere garden variety prof-poet masquerading in a kind of western Kentucky drag as a way of distinguishing himself from the rest of us. But no! He's the real deal: former punk-zine editor, current poet and member of the band Rising Shotgun (which, mentioned as it is on my old pal Doug Shawhan's crackrabbit.com, must be good), and poet of the western Kentucky punk rock experience. "The Donkey," he said between poems, "always reminds me of punk. It's a docile, gentle, kindly creature, but when it opens its mouth it's just fuckin' awful..."

4. The Chicago poetry mafia is everywhere

Bill Allegreza, Ray Bianchi and Simone Muench were the venerable outfit's ambassadors to the reading.

5. L'affair Fence lives on.

I've admired Joanna Fuhrman's poems for a while, so I was glad to have a chance to talk to her after the reading, when she joined me and a few others over some of Bouldin Creek's finest tofu tacos. Fence came up, since they'd hosted a reading of their own across town. It turns out the Quinne cover still incites heated argument, in this case between an anti-Quinne faction (Joanna) and a pro-Quinne faction (me). Joanna didn't like that the image of Quinne wasn't in any meaningful way an attempt to ironize or deconstruct the kind of image of conventionally attractive women we see on so many glossy magazines. I maintained that the use of exactly this kind of undeconstructed image on a poetry magazine was a kind of shaking up of norms, precisely because we'd expect poetry magazines to have covers that are either A) blandly arty or B) deconstructive. Somewhat hyperbolically, I claimed that the publication of that cover was a kind of minor-league version of Duchamp submitting a urinal to an art exhibit that claimed it was open to anything: it exposed the limits of our alleged tolerance. Joanna and I clashed even more when she claimed the things Rebecca Wolff wrote about the cover were even more offensive than the cover itself. Joanna didn't like the idea of a poetry magazine as a commodity. I (as a guy who ran an independent magazine for a few years) maintained that magazines are all the things we want them to be (the public sphere, the area of aesthetic free play, etc.) and market commodities at the same time. (I shouldn't be surprised that this bothered Joanna: I once wrote a bit about how this idea was scandalous to our received opinions). All of this raises the question: what other poetry journal cover last year was interesting enough to cause an argument about aesthetics, the marketplace, gender and objectification?Anyway. Joanna handled my response to her attack on the paintings of John Currin as unironic objectifications of women ("that is such bullshit") with a whole lot more grace than it deserved. And I still like her poems.

6. AWP contagion, and the heroic defense against it

I think I'm going to invent a new award (call it The Schmoozie) for the most offensive example of literary networking and self-promotion at or near the AWP Convention. Like many people at the reading, I avoided the real convention this year, but the AWP ethos came after us, in the person of a certain fiction writer, whose full name will be disclosed only to those approaching me in person and buying the next round. This fellow spent the reading jumping up and down out of his chair to introduce himself to people. I first noticed him when a hand thrust itself between me and Joe Amato, and a voice barked "Joe? John -- loved your book." At the end of the evening he invited himself on-stage as a reader, compelling the MC to summon the dispersing crowd back to their chairs.

But my other new award, the Medal of Meritorious Merit in the Face of Overwhelming Clouds of Self-Congratulation (anyone got a better name?) goes to Kass Fleisher, for her statement earlier in the day to the assembled heads of MFA programs. She told them she thought the AWP was too anti-intellectual, and withstood many minutes of heavy shelling afterwards. Represent, Kass!



ADDED BONUS: A BRIEF REPORT ON "HOW TO READ, WHAT TO DO: THE FUTURE OF POETRY CRITICISM"



Before heading down to Austin, I trekked down to Hyde Park for a few hours of a small conference on the future of poetry criticism. After munching on the entirely convincing falafel (which seems to have replaced the cracker with awful cheese as the conference food of choice), I settled down for a panel featuring Jeff Dolven's “Communities of Style,” Oren Izenberg's “We Are Reading: Collective Intentions Toward Poetry,” and Maureen McLane's “Romanticism, or, Now: Learning to Read in Postmodern.” The format of the conference is a good one, worth emulating elsewhere: papers were made available ahead of time online, so the presenters didn't have to read from them. Rather, each speaker would rise in turn to summarize another speaker's paper and pose some questions about it. This made for lively discussion among panelists and audience members. (Izenberg seems to have honed the business of dealing with slightly nutty questions into an art. "I'm afraid I don't see the force of the question" is a phrase worth remembering).

Dolven's paper was of particular interest to me, in that it addressed the question of a poet's signature style. Dolven's interested in careful stylistic analysis, but he's more interested in the immediacy with which we are struck by a poet's style. When we read we experience a moment of recognition, not a slow accumulation of facts, and this is his object of study. McClane's paper (which I didn't get a chance to read beforehand) seemed to be a riotous thing, more dialogue or closet drama than essay. Izenberg, who's written about literary community before, riffed on John Searle's idea of intention in an examination of how reading is changed if we think of ourselves as reading in common with others (who may or may not actually exist as readers of commonly-read texts). This paper had particular resonance, as I sensed that these three were friends, and that they must have been reading together, one way or another, for some time. (McLane teaches at Harvard, where Izenberg used to teach, and Dolven, who alluded to how he used to hang out with McLane, used to teach nearby, at Brandeis). In a way I think this panel must be the gessellschaft ghost of an old gemeinschaft practice of reading in common.

I'd planned for my own upcoming talk at the University of Chicago to be a version of one of the chapters of Laureates and Heretics, in part as a shout-out to the editors of the Chicago Review, who were kind enough to publish part of the manuscript. But now I'm thinking of working up something else, a kind of response to McLane, Dolchen, and Izenberg. Theirs is too good a conversation to ignore.

Innovailers and Outsliders in Austin

Click the image to read the fine print!

Those Southern Profs With the Way They Talk Knock Me Out When I'm Down There

"What," you eagerly inquire, "was your favorite moment from the 20th Century Literature Conference in Louisville, Archambeau?" Ah! I'm so glad you asked. I take so many modest pleasures in my annual attendance at that much-storied gathering of the professoriate. The less-respecatable delights always include looking down upon my profession for its sartorial shortcomings, although I have to say the nature of that particular pleasure has changed over the past decade. Where once I could look forward to seeing the middle-aged men of letters comporting themselves in an unholy combination of pastel madras shirts and tweed blazers, that particular subspecies seems to have died out (or, more likely, retired emeritus). When I look around, now, I see a heavy preponderance of dark suits. It isn't that the conference was ever particularly rock-n-roll
to begin with, but these last few years have seen us all looking a bit more like a convention of actuaries or insurance brokers than I'd like. (Not that my corduroy-jacket, red chinos and Che t-shirt is the sort of thing a self-respecting human would wear in public. No, indeed. My look was recently described by the long-suffering Valerie (pictured here with rakish chapeau) as "artist-outpatient".

This year, though, I have to say that my favorite moment came right after I'd cadged a few drinks at the big Seelbach Hotel reception. Grant Jenkins had just regaled a small group with his "the time I crashed Emmanuel Levinas' apartment" anecdotes, when he and I decided to lead a small group away from the Official-Name-Tag-Wearing-Deluxe-Rubber-Chicken-Death-in-Life-Conference-Dinner down to the funky Afro-Caribbean restaurant and dance bar three blocks to the south. As we poured out of the hotel I saw that we'd gathered quite a crowd -- maybe 15 in total -- who trailed behind us like geese in flight. I felt like the pied piper, or at least the co-pied-piper. The real life of these events, I thought, as I talked merrily away with Jenkins, Mark Scroggins, Cate Ramsden, Piotr Gwiazda (with whom I'll be reading in Austin) and a crowd of grad students (mostly, I think, from IU-Bloomington), always seems to happen in the interstices of the official events.

But sentimentality aside, there was some good stuff at the conference itself. I started off at a panel with on "Forms of the Spiritual in American Poetry." Philip Beard kicked it off with a good paper on Robert Lowell. Instead of going back to the well-travelled territory of Lowell's early flirtation with Catholicism, Beard talked about Notebook as an exploration of negative theology -- the exploration of the nature of the divinity through a series of cancellations of what it is not. For the most part, the things Lowell chooses to cancel are the ideas of the divine that connect with the idea of the Big Bearded Father, and what he's left with is a more general sense of caritas. As with any discussion of Lowell that gets to the heart of things, the talk touched on the idea of Oedipal struggle. Lowell always seems to be caught in that matrix — he can't stand the idea of submission to powerful authority figures (which is why "a savage servility slides by on grease" is probably his most memorable line -- he just can't stand the sight of those smug conformists). But then again, he's always on the verge of sliding over from rebel to overbearing alpha male, an irony best caught, I think, in the image of Lowell in Buenos Aires, hopped up on one of his manic sprees, mounting the various equestrian statues of the city. Is this an ironic deflation of heroic figures? Is it a weird, misguided attempt to supplant or emulate them? Both, I suppose. I ran the idea by Beard after the panel, and he didn't object, so I'm hanging on to it for the time being.

After Beard, Norman Finkelstein took the stage. He'd sent me a copy of his book of criticism, Lyrical Interference, which I'd read at O'Hare while waiting for my flight. I think I see why he wanted me to read the book: he covers a lot of my recent blog-topics, but in much greater depth and detail. He makes especially good points about the intersection of poesis and critical writing, a topic I'd just been writing about for Avant-Post. His paper was on the somewhat unlikely topic of Michael Palmer and spirituality. He managed to make the link between Palmer and spirituality via an interesting quote from the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart, who held that poesis was always heresy, that literary form was inevitably a matter of scandal to orthodoxies. I'm not up on my Eckhart enough to know the exact context or import of his ideas, although it certainly made the inclusion of Palmer into a panel like this one possible.

I was very glad to see a panel on Harryette Mullen, then a little befuddled when I noticed it wasn't just on Mullen, but on Mullen and Julia Alvarez. An odd combo, I thought, before remembering that the American academy still operates on somewhat crude categories of identity-politics ("two women of color! put them on the same panel!"). What the hell, I thought: what could the Oulipo-inspired work of Mullen really have to do with Alvarez's sonneteering? As I listened to the papers, though, I began to think that the connections were stronger than I'd realized. Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary and Alvarez's sonnets both take up form as a generative formal restriction as a means of getting beyond habitual perceptions. Oulipo is, in the end, a formalism. And long may it wave. (NOTE: although I've complained about the prevalence of suits at this year's conference, Grant Jenkins, who gave a very sharp paper on Mullen, upped the rock-n-roll quotient considerably with his new hairstyle).

My favorite panel, though, was one with only two papers: Mark Cantrell on Christian Bok's Eunoia and Mark Scroggins on the San Francisco poetry wars of '78. Cantell did a good job of contrasting the different kinds of reading required by the paper version of the book and by the rather fabulous electronic version. (As a guy with a lot of lamentable ebay purchases, though, I've got to say that I found entirely false Cantrell's assertion that the stakes of online experience are low because everything can be reset).

Scroggins covered the Barret Watten/Robert Duncan fracas with amazing detail, which I'd planned to recount, but I find that the job has been done for me.

I'd hoped to stick around to the end of the whole shindig, especially for Piotr Gwiazda's paper, but events arrayed themselves in such a way that I had to leg it back to Chicago early Sunday morning, without coffee, nudged in line by a pair of blue-haired women with aggressively mid-Atlantic accents and a strong desire to make it through the metal detectors before me.

Louisville Haiku

Back (earlier than planned) from the Louisville conference, to which I've been going for a decade or more. Distilled from those many years of experience at the estimable shindig, the following lines about its admirable and industrious leader:

It's Alan Golding --
Every year I am surprised
He wears an ear-cuff.

(More to come -- let a fella recover from the conference before you start making demands on him already. I mean, sheesh...)

Points South

I'm escaping from Chicago and heading south, first to get my literary groove on in Louisville at the 20th Century Lit Conference, and then down to Austin, where I'll be giving a reading at what seems to be on the verge of becoming an institution in its own right: the fringe-events surrounding the generally gawdawful, resolutely anti-intellectual, networkers-in-full-on-self-promotion AWP Convention. (Do I sound bitter? Sorry. I mean, I'm sure your panel will be good, but look around in the corridors at the hotel sometime. Doesn't the posturing, posing, and pussyfooting sort of creep you out, just a little? I mean, even more than at the MLA?)

Prophetic Statment of the Day: Someday, far in the future, the AWP fringe will devour the core events, as happened with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival so long ago.

Anyway. The Austin reading, which will be MC'd by G. Matthew Jenkins, will be held on Thursday, March 9 at 8pm at The Bouldin Creek Cafe in what Jenkins (an actual Texan) tells me is the low-key hipster "So-Co" neighborhood.

On the off chance that you want to buy me a drink in Louisville, you can look me up at the Seelbach.

Trojan Horses in the Republic of Theory

Back when I was an obnoxious, dismissive, egomanaical dipshit of a grad student, I used to love hanging out in the O'Shaughnessy Hall coffee shop at Notre Dame (where I was once brushed aside by John Favreau during the filming of Rudy). Somewhere between my third cup of coffee and my second or third rant about [insert name of whatever guys with ponytails were ranting about in the mid nineties] [no, I don't have the ponytail anymore], I'd probably opine thusly about whatever poet had recently visited campus: "Oh sure, [insert name of poet] is good at what he attempts, but the poems, you have to admit..." (here I would pause portentiously, and gaze at whoever hadn't quietly slipped away from the table) "...the poems are inadequately researched." At this point I would lean back in the smoky air and feel smugly superior for a moment before steering myself toward the sandwich tray.

Oyez. Already I was a big fan of contingent difficulty in poetry, of the notion that the poet who isn't trafficking in the long ago or far away or arcane or weird was missing out on everything important. I've mellowed in my premature dotage, no doubt, and one feature of this mellowing is to note that I was (rightly or wrongly) out of step with the times. The movement that was already gestating back then, and that has since come to fruition, wasn't toward the researched poem, but the theorized poem.

A number of people have been talking about this new state of affairs, in which the poet is almost expected to write a kind of poetics. The phenomenon is interesting and can, I think, be explained as the result of several trends converging. It has all sorts of implications for poets, but also for poetics. In fact, I think it has a chance of changing the way the theory of literature is written.

Joshua Clover has turned his gaze onto this state of affairs, writing that there is now a kind of presumption out there that:

...poets should have theorized their own work explicitly and completely as a necessary supplement to the poetry, without which it can't be trusted or read as such .... the relative success and insight of recent poetics in making theoretical accounts of itself that are at once persuasive, and relevant to poetics in general, has perhaps produced a certain set of expectations. Certainly there is a rise in general in the sense that poetry is well-accompanied by the author's "poetics," as seen in, for example ... the increasing footage given over to critical writing by the poets in the back of the Norton Anthologies.

Mark Scroggins picks up the discussion and notes that there's an institutional dimesion to it:

I'm interested in how this has been institutionalized, how the writing of poetics – often quite apart from any engagement with "theory" in the sense that the term is most often used in the academy, but nonetheless drawing on the etymological sense of "theory," to look at with detachment – is being written into the requirements for creative writing programs. One can see this in the web pages of various CW programs around the country, which have begun requiring "theory" and "poetics" courses, and some sort of "poetics" component to their theses & dissertations. Even Our University has instituted a self-reflexive "poetics" moment into the requirements for the MFA .... I'd agree with Joshua that this is straight-up "academicization," the final downfall of the old "workshop"/"atelier" model of teaching writing, which can now look only wistfully back on its origins as an artificial imitation of the buzzing café or the intense mardi, where the young gathered – voluntarily, with no grades assigned, no registrar involved...

There's a lot of evidence for the Clover-Scroggins hypothesis -- from immediate personal experience, I offer the following:

Consider Catherine Daly. I've been reading her lately, since she's coming to the &NOW Festival here at Lake Forest in April, and since I'm teaching her book DaDaDa in my poetry seminar. One of her web sitesincludes a brief page on "poetics" that starts with the statement: "In certain circles, one is continually asked to codify one’s poetics in a written statement." We get a real sense that Daly experiences the writing of poetics as a kind of obligation.

Or consider Steve Halle,, whose MFA thesis I read a few weeks ago. He's written about 70 pages on the theory of contingent difficulty and investigative poetics as part of his creative writing program. It's good stuff (and will also feature at the &NOW Festival, to which you really should come). But it is very different from the kind of thing I was asked to do when I was working on an MFA. I remember being considered eccentric when I included a few pages of semi-theoretical statement at the end of my thesis. It was nothing more, really, than a rip-off of T.S. Eliot's observation that "immature poets imitate, mature poets steal," and was meant a kind of self-protective gesture, since my poems stole a hell of a lot. But such a statement now wouldn't be considered eccentric, except for its relative minimalism.

Or consider Gabriel Gudding, about whose recent reading in Chicago I'd intended to blog as a sequel to the Gudding post below (I don't have to, now, because Steve has covered it). His first book, A Defense of Poetry, takes its title from Shelley's famous essay on poetics, and his forthcoming book includes a long, comic, prose defense of his first book, "Dung in an Age of Empire: An [sic] Defense of A Defense of Poetry.". Sunday, at Myopic Books, he read from it exactly as he would from a poem.

So. The poets are, increasingly, writing poetics -- not just personal statements or bits of autobiography, but theoretically informed and engaged stuff. This, I hasten to say, beats the hell out of the kind of thing many poets who came of age in the seventies still say when asked to comment about their poetry. I mean, it's all just a little embarrassing when one of the old-school Iowa-style crowd says something like:

I write, I work, I do with a pencil. I like how the words come out of my head and travel down my arm to that sharp point. I like holding a pencil. Also a baseball, a smooth stone fresh from the river, a walking stick, my daughter's hand. So I write everything in pencil first.

(No, I am not making this up.)

But why is this happening? What has propelled the poets into theorizing? Forthwith, the Four Explanations, with all their limitations and lacunae:

1. Explanation: Stylistic

We live in an time without any single, received notion of poetic style. We have no generally-accepted set of conventions or genres in poetry, and as a result we find that we can't rely on people to anticipate what our projects will be. We can't rely on an audience prepared to be in sympathy with us. Like modernism and avant-gardism, with their raft of maniestos, pluralism means always having to introduce yourself, and make explicit the theoretical underpinings of your art.

I used to believe this was, on its own, a sufficient explanation for the increase in poets writing poetics. Back in 2001 I began my intro to Vectors: New Poetics by riffing on a quote from Wallace Stevens' "Of Modern Poetry," which really needs no riffing:

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what was in the script.
Then the theater was changed
To something else. Its past was souvenir.

In the absence a repeatable script for poetry, we find each poet writing his or her own poetics. I'm still convinced there's some truth to this explanation.



2. Explanation: Institutional

Academe lionizes theory. Poetry now lives, for the most part, in the orbit of academe. Need we say more?

3. Explanation: Marxian-Materialist

When the poet turneth his pen to prose about poetry, he faces the same market conditions faced by the ordinary, sublunary literary critic: you cannot sell a single-author study. You can barely sell studies of groups of writers. The specific moveth not the heart of the press director, only the general promises to move copies, so only the general (that is: the theoretical -- poetics rather than litcrit) will do. Until we finally relenquish our insistence on the prestige of wood-pulp pages bound between covers and give prestige to the electronic publication, this will be a factor in what kinds of things get published.

Actual conversation overheard in the lobby of the Inn at Penn during the Modernist Studies Convention in back in 2000 (scrawled on the back of my coffee-stained program, and found in the back of my desk drawer last fall):

Cast of characters:

Guy who seems to have Just Completed his Dissertation (JCD)

Guy who seems to be the Director of a University Press (DUP)

JCD: So, since we're being candid, how should I pitch it?
DUP: Just don't say it's a just book about Forster. I mean, maybe, maybe you could mention A Passage to India as a kind of postcolonial text, push that angle.
JCD: But...
DUP: Just don't do it that way. No single-author studies. But if it's postcolonialism...
JCD: That's a part of a chapter, but...
DUP: If it's the theory of the novel, the theory...do you work with his Aspects of the Novel?
JCD: Not really, but if you want me to revise?
DUP: No. Maybe. How about as queer theory?
JCD: Oh. Yeah. I could totally change it.

Oosh. It leaves me feeling clammy and vaguely violated to remember it, though I'm not exactly sure why.

Oh wait, I think I do know why: the eager self-abasement of the life of the mind before the idol of the marketplace. Yeah, that's probably it. I'm mandarin enough to get queasy when I see it.

4. Explanation: Dialectical

I think this would run something like this:

Thesis: The English Departments of the 1980s and 1990s (high theory by theorists)
Antithesis: The MFA Programs of the same period ("craft"-oriented workshop model for poets)
Synthesis: Us, now (poetics by poets)

Now that's Aufgehoben, baby.

*

Okay, right. So what happens to poetics when it is taken out of the hands of, say, Aristotle or more contemporary straight-up theorist types and put in the hands of poets? Lots of things. But one of the more interesting is this: we start to more of the formal techniques we associate with "creative" or "literary" writing in the theory. I mean, when guys like Benjamin Friedlander write extended pastiches and present them as criticism, or when Gabriel Gudding writes highly-wrought, deadpan-funny, alliterative, Jakobson's poetic-function having essays on poetics, something interesting is going on. Poetics are getting (forgive me for this) poetic (Brooke Bergan rates a mention here: her "How MiMi Got (Presque Ou Peut-Etre) Postmodern" in Vectors is a tour de force of poetic technique in the creation of poetics).

If form signifies (as it does), all this will change theory. After Plato chucked the poets out of the ideal republic for their emotional appeal and their freewheeling approach to the word, he said he'd be glad to let them back in if they could write a proper defense of poetry — in prose. In writing poetics that employ the literary techniques we associate more with poetry than with discursive prose, there's a kind of smuggling of the poetic back inside the walls of the republic of theory.

Allrighty, then. Having spent the afternoon expounding on the contradictions of feminine desire in the Victorian novel, I'm off to see if I can scare up the ingredients for one of these.

I'd like to thank the Academy...

Having seen this very blog and the old Samizdat site singled out for praise, I wish to state that while I am not worthy, I'm not turning anything down.

Theremin at Seven Corners

You remember the theremin, right? The musical instrument developed by electronic music pioneer Léon Theremin in the 1920s? Most of us know it as a maker of weird, spooky sounds in the sci-fi flicks of the fifties, or perhaps from the beginning of The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations." The thermin works through an electromagnetic field, so you don't even have to touch it to play it — you just wave your hands in the air like a conductor. It was orginally developed as part of Theremin's grand scheme for a purely electronic symphonic orchestra, but it took a few odd turns in its development, as did Theremin's life ( which involved Paris and New York in the jazz age, marrying the African-American ballet dancer Lavinia Williams way before the civil rights movement, being kidnapped by the KGB and forced to develop the electronic eavesdropping device known as the bug, and other things that won't happen to you or to me).

I'd been thinking about writing a poem about Theremin for years, and had originally intended to contrast the utopian future he'd dreamed of in the twenties (a sort of Fritz-Lang's Metropolis-looking world of wireless orchestras) with the very different utopia he saw at the end of his life, when he went to California and heard "Good Vibrations." Fritz Lang vs. Michael Lang, really.

But that poem, which I may still write someday, took some odd turns of its own. Originally called "Theremin in California" it has morphed (via all the discussion about names over the past monts, among other things) into "Called Léon, a Leonardo" and it is up at Seven Corners, a new site with some great stuff by Kristy Odelius up as well.

Oh yeah. The poem has links that help make the looking-up of contingent details a little easier, as well as a link to a tremendous little film clip in which a nonegenarian Theremin demonstrates his invention.

The Eccentric, the Repellent, the Abject: Enjoying Gabriel Gudding, Part One

Since I'm planning on heading down to Myopic Books for Gabriel Gudding's reading on the 12th, I thought I'd have a look at his 2002 book of poems, A Defense of Poetry, which I haven't read since it came out. Coming back to it after having spent a lot more time with Surrealism, and a little more time with poets like Ted Berrigan, I'm a lot more sympathetic to the project now than I was then when, moody and deep-deep-deep into Geoffrey Hill, I saw that Gudding was on to something, but didn't really get into it (to paraphrase George Steiner, I got it, but I didn't dig it at the time).

Having recovered from my 2002 bout of gravitas (watching your country ramp-up for a needless, devastating war will do that to you), I'm in a better position to get down with Gudding's poems. His New York School influences are clear enough: there's the breezy, sometimes goofy, talkiness of the poems, sometimes combined with a faux- or semi-faux- naif attitude (oh, how changed is the world, when the New York School lives and breathes in Bloomington, Illinois). There's also a touch of (forgive me, poetry hipsters) Billy Collins in the humor, although usually with a darker edge.

As for Surrealism — well, there's nothing really by way of direct influence, although Gudding's world, like his sentences, does tend to operate in accord with a set of rules different from that which governs the square community. But before I made it a half dozen pages into this year's reading of A Defense of Poetry, I had to abandon my enormous red chair and run upstairs to dig my way into the back of the closet that consitutes the official home of the Samizdat archives in search of Michel Delville's punchy little article, "A Secret History of Belgian Surrealism." (Delville's piece is in Samizdat #8, which isn't on the website yet, but anyone who wants one can email me at the address on my profile page and I'll see if I can't hook you up with a copy). Here's what Delville had to say back then aboutGabriel and Marcel Piqueray, Surrealist poets active in Belgium in the 1950s:

As for the irreverant, scatalogical aesthetics of the Uninhibited Poems, it is typical of the work of Marcel and Gabriel Piqueray. To me, the "Sproks" poems have always resembled a cross between Satie, Beckett, Buñel, and Laurel and Hardy. The proximity of food, garbage and shit in the poetry of the Piqueray brothers points to a poetics that does not shy away from describing fantasies of infantile regression and puts them to the service of a popular art that delights in imagining how the most banal situations can degenerate into absurdist extremes. Such manifestations of the eccentric, the repellent, and the abject create a space where the shock aesthetics of the revolutionary avant-garde meet the verbal games of the poèt-farceur, who considers poetry a form of slapstick comedy.

Gudding is certainly more poèt-farceur than revolutionary avant-gardist, but a lot of what Delville has to say about the Piquerays pertains to Gudding's poems. I mean, check sections seven through nine, and their footnote, of the book's 26 section title poem (these are right and left justified text blocks, but I'm feeling an html-deficit today, so you'll just have to imagine, class):

7. Is your butt driving through
traffic

that it should toot so at the
world? I am averse to urine,
yet I shake your hand upon
occasion;

8. I have made a whiskey of your
tears—and Joe-Bob made a
flu-liquor of your night-
mucus;

9. That some of your gas has
been banging around the
market like a small soldier
carrying a table. God-booby1

---------------------------------------------------
1Just as the fog is shackled to the
dirty valley stream and cannot go
out loosely to join the loopy clouds
who contain hollering eagles and
whooshing falcons but must stand
low and bound and suffer the
scratch of a bush and the round
poop of deer and the odd black
spore of the American black bear or
the bump of a car on a road or the
sick crashes of paintings thrown
from a rural porch, so also is your
mind bound to the low reach of
trash and the wet wan game of
worms and the dripping dick of a
torpid dog—and unlike the clouds
above you you do not feel swell but
clammy and pokey and sweaty: a
leaf-smell follows you, odd breezes
juke your brook-chaff, lambs and
rachel-bugs go up and forth in you,
and when a car passes through you,
windows down, the car-pillows in
that car get puffy, absorbing water in
the air, and those pillows become
bosoms, gaseous moving bosoms,
and that is the nearest you come to
bosoms.

Okay! Right! I imagine you can see why the transition from Geoffrey Hill's sombre and powerful work to this sort of thing was a bit tough for me. But only a year earlier I'd been translating the Piqueray bros., and I should have seen the parallels. I mean, you've got the eccentric, the repellent, and the abject front-and-center with the elaborate treatment of flatulence, and the claiming of this sort of thing for poetry gives the same kind of transgressive frisson now as it did decades ago — good taste gets jumped and roughed-up by the abject elements of the body.

But wait! There's more! Not only does Gudding bring the abject into the poem, he attacks two kinds of discursive pretentiousness at once in his footnote. Here, he pulls a classic act of Bakhtinian transcoding (the mix of high and low for comic effect) by writing about "poop" and the weirdly quaint "bosoms" in an overly-long, overly-elaborate epic simile ("just as blah-de-blah-de-blahdeeblah, so blahdeblah-de-bah"). But just as the epic simile gets skewered here, so also does that other form of high-discourse writing, the footnote, signifier of scholarly earnestness.

If I weren't out the door to catch a movie I'd try my hand at a critical pastiche (see "Pastiche as Criticism," two posts back), adapting bits of Delville's piece on the Piquerays into a brief discussion of Gudding. But this will have to do: the projectionist waits for no man.

Steve Halle will be at the Gudding reading. Let's hope he brings cigars for everyone!