Félix Fénéon, or: Modernity is Flat

Félix Fénéon, in Signac's painting

Skepticism about morality is what is decisive.  The ending of the moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some metaphysical beyond, leads to nihilism.  'Everything lacks meaning' (the untenability of [the Christian] interpretation of the world, upon which a huge amount of energy has been lavished, awakens a suspicion that all intepretations of the world are false.

            —Nietzsche, from The Will to Power.

I'd been poking away at Félix Fénéon's Nouvelles en trois lignes on and off for what must have been weeks when it hit me: modernity is flat!  Let me explain.

Fénéon is a fascinating figure.  An art critic, an anarchist, quite probably a one-time terrorist, and the man who invented the term "neo-impressionism," he was never really famous, but he was ubiquitous on the Parisian art and literature scenes of the 1880s and 90s.  He edited Rimbaud and Lautréamont, championed pointillism, and he's the figure near the center of the spirals in what is probably Paul Signac's best known painting.  An odd man, his Nouvelles en trois lignes is an odd book: it's a compendium of more than 1,200 little narratives, most three lines long, originally written for the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906.  The narratives tell compressed stories of miscellaneous news events of no great significance.  We don't get history book stuff here, but what the French call "faits-divers"—mostly true crime stuff from the provinces, or weird little events that don't fit in any more formal context.  It's a minor form, to be sure, but Fénéon is a genius with it: his delivery is deadpan, and even within the restrictions of a few sentences he often manages to be wry, or to give an ironic twist to the events.  The title given to the collection of these faits-divers, Nouvelles en trois lignes, is sort of perfect: it can mean "the news in three lines," but also "novels in three lines."  The English translation goes with the latter, and it is a shame there was no way to keep the double sense of the French original.

Despite the elegant simplicity of the individual items in Nouvelles en trois lignes, I had a hard time getting through the whole thing, because the pieces, read in mass, become enervating.  Even with the often-sensational subject matter, they become, en masse, an endurance test: there's no development, virtually no judgment of events, no direction to them.  There's a clear tone—removed, objective, yet ever so slightly ironic—but it never changes, so the narrator becomes difficult company to keep.  Everything is seen from the same perspective.  Horrors and trivialities come to us in the same voice, with little or no difference in judgment.

Maybe a few examples, chosen at random, will make the point (these, which occur consecutively in the book, are in Luc Sante's excellent translation):

At Menzeldjémil, Tunisia, Mme Chassoux, an officer's wife, would have been murdered had her corset not stopped the blade.

Fearless boys of 13 and 11, Deligne and Julien were going off "to hunt in the desert."  They were brought back to Paris from Le Havre.

A virgin of Djiqjelli, 13, subject to lewd advances by a 10-year old, killed him with three thrusts of her knife.

In the heat of argument, Palambo, an Italian of Bausset, Var, was mortally wounded by his chum Genvolino.

Some people, believed to be the same ones who attempted a derailment on Tuesday, tried to set fire to the Labat house in Saint-Mars, Finistère.

Eugène Périchot, of Pailles, near Saint-Maixent, entertained at his home Mme Lemartier.  Eugène Dupuis came to fetch her.  They killed him.  Love.

You get the idea.  There's a flatness of delivery here, re-enforced by the accumulation of examples.  The narrator is almost transparent in his objectivity: only in the word "fearless," attached to the two naïve boys, and "love" attached to the murder of Eugène Dupuis do we get something like analysis or opinion.  And it is the opinion of someone a little removed, a little world-weary, a little like our American stereotype of a certain kind of jaded Parisian.

It is in this very flatness, the thing that makes Nouvelles en trois lignes difficult to read through, that its significance lies.  The worldwide gathering of information, and the availability of specifics about names and places represents an impressive, and distinctly modern, information regime.  You couldn't assemble a daily paper featuring these kind of events before the late nineteenth century, with its telegraph cables and cheap newsprint and centralized police bureaucracies keeping records.  This kind of communication is native to modernity.  As Nietzche knew, modernity gives us an impressive machinery for information delivery "The entire apparatus of knowledge," he wrote in The Will to Power, "is an apparatus for abstraction and simplification."  But Nietzsche also knew something else: that modernity was largely emptied of systematically articulated values.  After what he saw as Christianity's self-destruction, we had no established moral framework.  Dante was able to articulate an intricate, multi-leveled, continuous moral universe—a vertical universe extending from the deepest circles of the inferno to the highest celestial haunts of truth and beauty.  But modernity is stripped of that condition.  In a way, Fénéon's Nouvelles en trois lignes  can be seen as our Divine Comedy: it gives us a universe full of fast communication, and lurid sensations, a world flattened out and shorn of any vertical scale of vice and virtue. Fénéon's moral universe, like his tone, is flat.  And, for many, it is our home.

The Worst of Teachers, & How Not To Be Him

My teacher was not Satan, but he shared some qualities with Donald Sutherland's character in "Animal House."

I was just reading some advice on teaching that asked me to think about the worst teacher I ever had, and consider what he or she had done wrong.  There was a fifth grade teacher who was authoritarian because she was insecure, and who kept getting factual things wrong. She did not appreciate being corrected by her charges (often by me, precocious in intellect, deficient in tact).  But now that I look back I’d put all that down to what I imagine to have been her inexperience.  It is quite probable that she became better.

No, the worst teacher I ever had—a man for whom I feel only compassion—was an English professor from whom I took a Brit lit survey, the kind of course I often teach now.  I don’t think I’m alone in having caught the whiff of failure rising from him: his career was far from stellar.  Poking around on the internet just now I see he left his first job at a branch of a big state university after six years: likely from failing to make tenure (this despite his impeccable ivy league pedigree).  He landed at the undistinguished, provincial university where I studied and, after more than thirty years of service, retired as an associate professor, never having made the top rank.  Moreover, he was denied emeritus status upon retirement: a sign that the department may have held him in less than high esteem.  As an academic, his name was writ on water.

I was too young and too involved in what we might call "amateur pharmaceuticals" in my freshman year to have much of a sense of what was going on around me, but I knew something was wrong when the professor in question grew angry with the class and demanded we split into a front section of those who wanted to participate and a back section that didn’t.  Two people moved to the front on the first day of this new policy, but by the second they’d crept back into the great mass of the unwilling.  Clearly the professor felt things were going badly, and just as clearly his remedy had failed.

But just what did he do wrong?  Well, that confrontational attitude toward the students was a part of it. I think a larger part was his failure to give us a sense of what we were doing, of how any part of the course related to the whole.  He titled each class section – “The Last Romantics,” say, or “The Victorian City”—but no one I knew ever seemed to pick up the thread.

And that’s not all.  Larger even than the directionlessness was the sense he gave of no longer caring much for what he was doing.  He seemed like a man who knew he’d failed to convey an enthusiasm for literature, and failed for so long his initial enthusiasm had, itself, begun to fade.  Indeed, he had the air of a man in whom all the appetites of life had failed.  Later, when I became friends with a student who had known the professor’s son, I heard that the professor used to take his family for drives in the country every Sunday.  The son had asked why, and the prof had replied “because there has to be something to do, even if there’s nowhere to go.”  It seemed like quiet desperation, and quiet desperation rarely inspires the young.

Since we're discussing teachers, I feel I should look for a lesson.  I suppose the lesson here for teachers, if there is one, is to be a little bit in love with things.  The students will notice.

On the Air and at the Poetry Foundation!

John Matthias, the present humble blogger, and Steve Halle

Last week Larry Sawyer launched America's only live poetry radio show, Other Voices, on Chicago's Q4 radio, 1680 on the AM dial.  It was heavy with goodness, including Michael Gregory Stephens in the studio talking about his days on the Lower East Side poetry scene and his run-ins with Thelonious Monk, along with call-ins from Timothy Yu, Nick Twemlow, and others.  The show airs every Saturday from 3:00-5:00 p.m.

Next Saturday, the 17th, I'll be joining Larry in the studio.  You can listen on the radio in Chicago, or hear it streaming on que4.org.

Then, on Tuesday the 20th, I'll be reading at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago (61 W. Superior, 7:00 p.m.) with my great mentor John Matthias and my former student Steve Halle.  I'm thinking I'll bust out "The Kafka Sutra" for the first time in years, but don't let that deter you!  John and Steve are fabulous readers.

Michael Gregory Stevens in the studio for Other Voices (photo: Larry Sawyer)

New Notes on the New Gnosticism

"The infinite starry realm of scribbing, scrambling poets every now and then produces a new galaxy, that is a new movement or school"— so writes Henry Gould in an excellent essay on the New Gnosticism in poetry up at Coldfront.  It's a great introduction for anyone who hasn't been following this intriguing bunch of poets, a group in which we might number the great Nathaniel Mackey (recently-honored by the Poetry Foundation), Pam Rehm, Peter O'Leary, Norman Finkelstein, Joseph Donahue, Mark Scroggins, Ed Roberson, Ed Foster, and Alice Notley.  John Matthias has similar concerns, and I have been described as the materialist among all these mystics, a kind of pickle fork in the silverware set of Gnosticism.

Gould characterizes the New Gnosticism as a rejection of Language Poetry poetics.  His description, necessarily compressed and simplified, goes like this:

In sum, the Language movement can be characterized as : 1) analytical — a critique of styles it aimed to challenge (mainstream, NY School); 2) materialist — a (post)rationalist approach which subsumes the spiritual or psychological to “objective” historical forces; and 3) relativist — suspicious of claims of individualism or textual autonomy, of any absolute which might deny the inherent mutuality of writer/reader, the collective “production of meaning.”

This is the constellation, in my reductive sketch, with which the New Gnostics find themselves at odds.  Joseph Donahue offers his own take on that incipient event at the Poetry Project, when Ed Foster was called out by Charles Bernstein: "Foster’s dispute is not with an emerging theological orthodoxy, but an academic one."  The critics, a triumvirate composed of Stanley Fish, Cary Nelson and the Russian theorist V.N. Volosinov, who himself may have been a disguised Mikhail Bakhtin, and appear here to be a covert Charles Bernstein, argue that the text is nothing, the critical community decides what the poem is and what it means.  Foster counters: critics are nothing.  Not even readers are needed.  Readers die, but the text lives on.  "The poem is an otherworldly presence, an icon, discernible to the senses but ultimately unknowable.  In encountering this unknowability, we experience our true origin." 

One way to think of the New Gnosticism, then, might be as the overturning of an analytical negation (Language Poetry).  It includes, also, a reversal of the “old” Gnosticism : which was itself a sort of skeptical deconstruction of canonical Biblical texts.

There's a lot more in the article itself, available here.   Talisman has a special issue on the New Gnostics, and here's a little something from the Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog.

It's Not What's in the Picture, It's Where the Picture Puts You: Cubism in Focus

Cubist painting puts a lot of people off, and, in a way, that's the point—but not in some sophomoric "let's shock our parents" way.  One of the main accomplishments of cubism is the way it dislocates the viewer, but to understand just how this works it's probably best to take a look at the highly developed mode of painting that cubism rejects—the kind of representational painting that relies on single point perspective.

It's not really a coincidence that this sort of painting comes into being in the Renaissance, reaches a zenith in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and only really begins to be challenged in the nineteenth century.  Consider how the dates co-ordinate so well with what  Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, calls "the classical episteme."  This episteme, or way of organizing knowledge —incipient in the Renaissance, dominant around the mid-seventeenth century, and continuing on through late eighteenth century—reflects the ideology of absolutist monarchies.  The stress is on order, centralization, and sovereignty in all things: in politics, in theology, in economics.

Aesthetics is no exception: the Palace of Versailles and its gardens give architectural and spatial expression to the notion of a grand and centralized scheme, and order based on the location and prestige of the sovereign.  The king's inner chamber, and, in the final analysis, the king's body are the center of a world that points toward, and radiates out from, his presence.  The single point perspective that dominates representational painting during the classical era also reflects the values of centralization and sovereignty.  We see this not only in grand portraits that assert the power of absolute monarchs, such as Hyacinthe Rigaud's famous portraits of Louis XIV, but in the formal underpinnings common to so many paintings of the classical episteme.

As Christopher Kul-Want puts it, "In painting during this period (especially in southern Europe), the subject stands literally and metaphorically before the pictured world like an omnipotent God.  In Raphael's School of Athens, for example, a central space is reserved for the subject, who is both viewer and addressee of the painting." As a viewer, you know where you stand in relation to the image, and it's a place of command and access: everything opens up, available to you and directed at you.  In a sense, you complete the scene, and stand at the point that gives it order.  In the case ofThe School of Athens, you stand directly before the greatest and most central of philosophers, as if to command their conversation and interrogate them about whatever subject you wish.

In The Order of Things Foucault discusses Velázquez's Las Meninas as a culmination of the classical episteme in painting.  Here, we take the position of the sovereign: the mirror in the back reflects the images of King Philip IV and Queen Maria Anna — and we, as viewers, soon realize that we stand, quite literally, in the place of the sovereign.  We command the creation of pictorial space, since Velázquez paints himself here as someone who is in the process of painting a commissioned portrait of us (the little girl is visiting us while we sit for this portrait).  We are also, by virtue of the mirror with our reflections in it, at the center of pictorial space.  And, most importantly, we are in the privileged place of the spectator for whom all of the visual elements are ordered and displayed.  There's a lot going on in Velázquez's painting but, among other things, Las Meninas is a comment on the nature of pictorial space, and on the privilege granted to the viewer of single-point perspective representational paintings.  In this kind of painting, we, the viewers, are kings, and gaze with mastery over all we survey.

There's a long, slow breakdown of the classical episteme, and many of our cultural landmarks are both symptoms and causes, of that breakdown.  Consider Isaac Newton's Principia: Newtonian space is a far more potent challenge to the classical episteme than Galileo's decentering of the earth in favor of the sun ever was.  If space is the neutral, ever-extending field Newton theorized, it lacks a center, and therefore is impossible to hierarchize: every point is as significant as every other point.  Or consider Voltaire's "Micromégas," a story in which a centuries-old, 20,000 foot tall creature from an enormous planet orbiting Sirius visits the earth, along with his 6,000 foot companion from Saturn.  Their contempt for the tiny inhabitants of our planet, and the philosophical reflections that stem from differences of scale in space and time serve to displace our sense of our own centrality and sovereignty.  A more familiar example of the relativizing of our perspectives and values comes in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which helps spell the death knell for the theology and political thought of the classical episteme—even though Swift himself was none too happy about the decline of the old values.

But I digress.  This is about Cubism.  And one thing that Cubism does is to displace the viewer from the privileged space he occupied during the classical episteme.  Whether it's a matter of presenting a profile view with both eyes visible as if in a frontal view, or a matter of representing the many different planes that might form the entry point into a painting, Cubist paintings find ways of not letting you assume a steady place from which the represented objects can be seen clearly.  In the Cubist world, we're no longer able to see from a position of sovereignty and command: we're no longer that important.  What is more, we're forced to confront the fact that it is not possible to survey the world from a vantage point that makes everything available to us.  Every imaginable perspective is partial, every perspective leaves something out.  Things in themselves are visible to us only in bits and pieces, in stolen glances.  Cubism denies Matthew Arnold's old ideal "to see life steadily and see it whole," and asserts something more like what E.M. Forster asserts when, in Howards End, he tells us "it is impossible to see modern life steadily and see it whole."  We can, like Forster's Mr. Wilcox, see it steadily but in a very limited fashion, or we can, like Forster's Margaret, see it whole.  Cubism is a kind of Margaret, offering the whole only by shaking it up into bits, and placing us in an unsteady position.

To understand painting of the classical episteme, we could stand in a position of sovereignty and command a view of the objects before us.  To understand Cubism, we have to stop asking what's been put into the picture, and start asking where the picture puts us.  ​

The Poets' Prize: Notes on Finalists Michael Collier and Albert Goldbarth

The Roerich Museum, where the ceremony took place.

I'm back from New York, where I was very happy to play a small part in this year's Poets' Prize ceremony.  Among other things, it was very good to finally meet R.S. Gwynn face to face—he's the poet I'd known longest online without actually meeting, and I'm hoping to write something about his fine, witty new book Dog Watch soon.

Although I was under the weather and presented a somewhat muted, sweaty, trembly figure, I managed to make my way to the lectern at the Roerich Museum and deliver a few remarks on two of the finalists for the award, Michael Collier and Albert Goldbarth.  Here's what I had to say.

*

It falls to me to say a few words about two of this year's finalists for the Poets' Prize, Michael Collier and Albert Goldbarth.  Both are so distinguished that I feel I could only do them justice by reciting their titles and honors, in the manner of a bard of the dark ages singing out the praises of a King of Wessex.

Michael Collier – director of the Bread Loaf Conference, Professor at the University of Maryland and former poet laureate of that state, Guggenheim Fellow, N.E.A. fellow, Pushcart Prize winner, recipient of other honors too numerous to list, and author of a half dozen books of poetry, one of which, The Ledge, from 2000, was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award!  Michael Collier, author of Make Us Wave Back: Essays on Poetry and Influence, and author of a translation of Euripedes' Medea — a translation that puts the force and horror back into the language of the old Greek master.  When the critic James Longenbach described Collier's imagination as populated with a "sinister and yet oddly comic cast of misfits, ogres and giants" he was speaking of Collier's poetry, but the statement could just as well apply to Collier's choice of translation project or, for that matter, his essays on poetic influence, a subject rife with ogres and giants.

Many have described Collier's poems in terms of their loving, careful, and sometimes uncanny description of physical things, and there is a sense in which Collier follows the great dictum of William Carlos Williams, "no ideas but in things."  Indeed, Collier's own comment about the great, mad Romantic John Clare pertains as much to his own poetry as to Clare's: "Clare pays kind of scrupulous attention to the world, that the world itself kept him alive and whole, the particularity of the world… there's no one who's described a nest or a burrow the way that Clare has. And then also the other thing about Clare, and this goes along with the sort of purity of response in him, is the humility you feel and the way in which he praises the world for its beauty and powerful simplicity."

But we mustn't let the truth of this cloud out the range of Collier's achievement.  One of his most important accomplishments is the way he gracefully interweaves personal experience or family connections with a larger, less private world—a world of history and, in a subtle way, politics.  Nowhere does he manage this more deftly than in the title poem of the volume that made him a finalist for the Poets' Prize, An Individual History:

This was before the time of lithium and Zoloft

before mood stabilizers and anxiolytics

and almost all the psychotropic drugs, but not before thorazine,

which the suicide O'Laughlin called "handcuffs for the mind."

It was before, during, and after the time of atomic fallout,

Auschwitz, the Nakba, DDT, and you could take water cures,

find solace in quarantines, participate in shunnings,

or stand at Lourdes among the canes and crutches.

It was when the March of Time kept taking off its boots.

Fridays when families prayed the Living Rosary

to neutralize communists with prayer.

When electroshock was electrocution

and hammers recognized the purpose of a nail.

And so, if you were as crazy as my maternal grandmother was then

you might make the pilgrimage she did through the wards

of state and private institutions,

and make of your own body a nail for pounding, its head

sunk past quagmires, coups d'etat, and disappearances

and in this way find a place in history

among the detained and unparoled, an individual like her,

though hidden by an epoch of lean notation -- "Marked

Parkinsonian tremor," "Chronic paranoid type" --

a time when the animal slowed by its fate

was excited to catch a glimpse of its tail

or feel through her skin the dulled-over joy

when for a moment her hands were still.

*

Albert Goldbarth, too, weaves the personal and the historical together—along with the scientific, the mystical, the demotic, the mythological, the quotidian, the remote, the comic, and (to hijack the title of one of Goldbarth's books) the kitchen sink. Despite, or perhaps because, of all this variety, Goldbarth's voice remains singular and eminently recognizable.  Eric McHenry, writing for Slate magazine, understood the nature of Goldbarth's singularity when he wrote that "What distinguishes most contemporary poetry from prose isn't meter or rhyme or even line breaks, but a self-conscious spareness and a slightly arch or elevated diction.  An Albert Goldbarth poem, by contrast, is wacky, talky, and fat."  Corpulence, in an age of bulimia, is no vice, and readers have been appreciative: Goldbarth has won the Theodore Roethke prize, an N.E.A. fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Mark Twain Award for Humorous Poetry, and he is the only poet to receive the National Book Critics Cricle Prize twice.  Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the University of Wichita, he has written 25 full-length books of poetry as well as many chapbooks, a novel, and five collections of essays, one of which, Many Circles, won the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Prize.

For all of its wide-ranging talkiness and its elegant leaping from astronomy to zoology, Goldbarth's poetry, like Collier's, maintains a loving attention to the particular, an attention best explained by Goldbarth himself, when he says "It's not my place to define the job of poetry, but a lot of my poems do try to serve as memorials, as segments of frozen time that save people or cultural moments that have otherwise passed away or are in danger of passing away."  We get a taste of this love, even reverence, for the transient and particular in an uncharacteristically short poem of Goldbarth's called "How Simile Works," which I offer not because it is new, but because it is one of the first poems of Goldbarth's with which I fell in love:

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys

of some city;

             and the brickwork back

of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise

they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo"....

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth

 the next day;

            and the brackish puddles sectioning

 the street one morning after a storm....

So poetry configures its comparisons.

My wife and I have been arguing; now

I'm telling her a childhood reminiscence,

stroking her back, her naked back that was

the particles in the heart of a star and will be

again, and is hers, and is like nothing

else, and is like the components of everything.

Michael Collier and Albert Goldbarth are fine poets, and it is an honor to name them here tonight.

*

Naomi Replansky was the other runner-up for the prize.  At age 94, she attended and read wonderfully and in strong voice.  This year's prize went to George Green.

Afro-Caribbean Women's Surrelism Update: New Translations of Lucie Thésée!

So you're looking for the latest in midcentury Afro-Caribbean women's surrealism?  You've come to the right place!  Well, almost.  You'll need to click over to Circumference: Poetry in Translation to see two new translations of Lucie Thésée's work, "Poem" and "Rapture: The Depths," by Jean-Luc Garneau and the present humble blogger.

More of the translations Jean-Luc and I have been working on appear here and here in Poetry.  There's a little essay about them here, and the New York Times did a little feature on one here.

W.H. Auden and Campiness

If you want to appreciate W.H. Auden, you’ve got to come at him with a good grasp of camp.  At least that's what I say at the start of a brief essay just out in the wonderful At Length magazine, which runs a feature unlike any I've ever seen called "Short Takes on Long Poems."  I've adapted some remarks from the Auden chapter of the book I've been working on, Making Nothing Happen: Poetry in Society, Poetry for Itself and turned them into an analysis of camp in Auden's early, hilarious, weird charade "Paid on Both Sides," where he camps Freudianism, in no small measure as a means of coming to terms with his own homosexuality (something about which Freud held views that, while not without their redeeming sides, are hardly those that enlightened people in our own time would endorse). Here's how the essay begins:

If you want to appreciate W.H. Auden, you’ve got to come at him with a good grasp of camp, that hard-to-define quality that combines exaggeration, pastiche, transgression, and so many other things (the origins of the term probably lie in the French word camper, and refer to the exaggerated formalities and prescribed behaviors of a 19th century military camp, with all those big salutes, high stepping marches, and all of those epaulets, gold braid, and brass buttons). Camp is essential, for example, to Auden’s first large-scale achievement in verse, the play—or, more precisely, the charade—Paid on Both Sides. Completed in 1928, it appeared first in T.S. Eliot’s Criterion in January 1930, and later that same year became the longest piece in Auden’s Poems, a volume published by Faber under Eliot’s aegis. One can see much in Auden’s play that would recommend it to the author of The Waste Land: like that poem, it gives a clearly modern landscape, and it depicts a struggle between a faltering life-wish and the forces of sterility and death, and even includes a depiction of spring’s life-force faltering, in the manner of the famous opening of Eliot’s poem. One wonders whether Eliot was sensitive to the differences between the two poems, though. There are, after all, reasons to doubt how thoroughly Auden embraced the world-view that seems to pervade his poem. 

That world-view is distinctly Freudian. In 1920, at the age of 13, Auden had discovered Freud via his father’s library, and Auden consumed his works eagerly, along with those of others associated with psychology and psychoanalysis, in the years that followed. His attitude toward psychological theory tended toward the camp—taking the ideas seriously, but at the same time making fun out of them, an activity (as Auden’s friend Christopher Isherwood liked to point out) quite distinct from making fun of them. Auden enjoyed the theories and made much art out of them but self-consciously presented himself as giving them greater credence than he truly did, striking the pose of the dogmatist.

The rest is available here. The issue also includes essays on Alice Notley, John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Randall Jarrell, and others!

When Poetry Matters: This Tuesday in Poughkeepsie!

Like all right-thinking people, you're wondering what's going on Tuesday night in Poughkeepsie.  An excellent question!  And I have the answer: I'll be giving the George L. Sommer Lecture on Literature at Marist College at 7:30 in the Nelly Goletti Theater.  It's called "When Poetry Matters," and it will begin something like this:

The title of this talk, which I hope will only detain you for 45 or 50 minutes, is "When Poetry Matters," but since, like most people who've written poems, all I really want to talk about is myself, I've given it a subtitle, so the full, double-barreled name for what follows is "Why Poetry Matters, or: My Slide Down the Slopes of Parnassus."  I think I can get away with this, because one way to talk about the conditions under which poetry matters (whatever "mattering" may mean") is to talk about how I became less of a poet and more of a literary critic — how I slid off the slopes of Mount Parnassus, where poets commune with the true, the good, the eternal, and the beautiful, and landed in a research library, where critics push little carts of footnotes and citations around under the dim and flickering light cast by fluorescent tubes, refreshing themselves only with little plastic wrapped sandwiches and paper cups of terrible coffee from the commissary.  It was better on Parnassus, where we poets lived only on the nectar of the gods. 

Don't get me wrong: I haven't given up on poetry.  Far from it.  It's just that, back when I was writing poetry full time, without the shadow of scholarship looming over me, I began to wonder whether, and how, and to whom, and under what circumstances, poetry actually mattered.  So I decided to investigate the question from a historical, and to some degree sociological, perspective.  Well, the muses are intolerant of this sort of thing, and kicked me down the mountainside.  A decade passed, and here I am with my report...

Hope to see you there!  I mean, a bunch of you.  It's a big theater.

Simon Jarvis as W.H. Auden

A young English poet, fostered by an ancient and glorious university, starts writing startling, experimental verses, which find their first audience among a talented, radicalized coterie of other young writers.  He’s got amazing chops, especially when it comes to his metrics.  He travels.  He writes.  He is appreciated, especially in the left-leaning quarters of the literary world.  He moves to America, grows increasingly religious and perhaps less radical.  He turns toward more traditional forms, shows a great aptness for rhyme, and embraces the Anglican Church.

The poet is, of course, W.H. Auden.  Unless you add “…but moves back” after “He moves to America.”  In that case, we’re no longer talking about Auden, we’re talking about Simon Jarvis.

I don’t know whether I should be surprised that the two careers bear such similarity, but they do.  Auden’s career is generally seen as splitting into two phases, with 1939 being the crux—and I don’t think I’m alone in believing that 2014 is Jarvis’ 1939.  Consider the words of William Wooten from the February 28^th issue of the TLS:

When a devotee of the astringent ‘difficulty’ of J.H. Prynne and de facto member of the Cambridge School publishes a 7,000 line Anglican poem in formal rhyming verse, it is safe to conclude he has had something of a change of heart.  Not total, perhaps.  Simon Jarvis’ Night Office, the poem in question, echoes and alludes to Prynne and foregrounds the sort of Adorno-inspired theorizing Jarvis and others have used to justify Prynnian poetics.  Even the way Jarvis writes as if no one had produced a rhyming couplet since 1908 may be more a result of subscription to modernist orthodoxy than evidence of its renunciation.  Still, there is no pretending Night Office is your standard Cambridge fare.

There are grounds to be less sanguine when it comes to generalities about “standard Cambridge fare” than is Wooten, but one takes his point.  There’s a departure here, even as there is continuity, and the departure leads Jarvis down the Auden highway, toward long, formal verse and the consolations of the Anglican Communion.

Auden claimed that he left England because he feared that, had he stayed, he’d have become a part of the Establishment.  It’s a likely enough counterfactual: one could easily imagine the aging Wystan, or perhaps the aging Sir Wystan, hobnobbing with the English elite in town and country, rather than crouching in his filthy New York apartment, taking Benzedrine to keep up with his book reviewing assignments.  Auden’s fear of ending up an English establishment figure does make one wonder about Jarvis’ fate.  As the Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Cambridge University, Jarvis is well positioned, should he wish it, to slide into the kind of fate Auden dreaded.  Perhaps that's why, in a letter appearing in a later issue of the TLS, Jarvis emphasized his (very real, very much ongoing) connection to radical Cambridge poetry figures like Keston Sutherland.  If Jarvis is the Auden of the group, Sutherland is the P.B. Shelley.  But that's another topic.

You Will Object: Notes on the Future of Poetry

Archambeau, Burt & Mazer before "Poetry: What's Next" at the Grolier

Here, courtesy of Mark Schorr, is an audio recording of "You Will Object," my talk on the future of poetry at the Grolier poetry bookshop.

Mark made my day afterwards when he compared my talk to something Kenneth Burke might have said.

Poetry: What’s Next? Find out on Harvard Square.

“Poetry: What’s Next?” That’s the title of the first in a new series of critical talks to take place at the legendary Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts (6 Plympton Street, to be precise).  I’ll have the good fortune to be a part of it, speaking alongside Ben Mazer of Boston University and Stephen Burt of Harvard.

 The event kicks off at 7:00 pm on Friday March 14^th.  Hope you can come by—but if you can’t, fret not: the proceedings will be published by the Battersea Review, and then in a new series of critical chapbooks put out by the book shop.

A day before the Grolier event I’ll be speaking on related topics at the New England Conservatory, but you’ll have to pull strings to get in: it’s a students-only event.  Buying me a drink afterward, however, is a proposition open to the public.