Revolutions in Manchester!

I am, apparently, at the height of my powers—at least according to Ian Pople at The Manchester Review, where he discusses several books by John Matthias, including Revolutions: A Collaboration, in which my commentaries mingle with Matthias' poems and artwork by Jean Dibble. I'm kind of hoping being at this dizzying height doesn't mean it's all downhill from here...

Here are a few remarks on Revolutions from near the end of Pople's review:

If the methods of composing the poems are semi-aleatory, Archambeau goes on to remark that a central influence on Matthias’ poetry is Modernism, ‘Not only is his work written in accord with a thousand Modernist techniques…it constantly invokes the Modernists themselves: the poets, the artists and especially the composers.’ One particular Modernist spirit invoked throughout the poetry is that of the Russian Modernists, not only Mandestam , but also the others in Akhmatova’s ‘four’; Akhmatova, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva. Archambeau claims that another Modernist spirit for Matthias’ is his refusal to compromise. 

In part, that invocation of Russian modernism occurs from the moment you pick up the book with its rather Soviet-style cover of hammers swung in the pattern of sickles, and the book’s title. The collaborative nature of the book might also be seen as ‘revolutionary’. Matthias’ poems hint at a subdued ‘Russian’ narrative; they contain lexical gestures towards that narrative: ‘hussars’, ‘steppe’, ‘vodka’, ‘tsar’ all occur in the first two poems. The poems also contain ‘characters’ who are engaged in an often surreal narrative in which the lexical gestures help to both pin down the action and also move it centrifugally away from possible narrow concerns.   Archambeau riffs off all this with his own centrifugal commentaries. ‘Onomastic’, for instance, stimulates Archambeau to mention the ‘Oulipo’ movement and George Perec’s La disparition, a novel length book written without the use of ‘e’. Archambeau also mentions another modernist ancestor, in Gertrude Stein. 

Overall, what this book offers is something which is not quite revolutionary. There have, after all, been many books of poems with illustrations, and Archambeau’s lively, focussed criticism is not the only time such poems as Matthias’ have been put under the microscope. But what this book offers, that is new, is a sense that these are three artists who, each in their own way, are operating at the height of their powers, to bring this collaboration to a uniquely satisfying whole.

The whole review can be found here.

Revolutions Reviewed!

The always-interesting journal Galatea Resurrects has been kind enough to run a review of my recent book written with John Matthias and Jean Dibble, Revolutions: A Collaboration.  Ralph La Charity says some kind things.  He understands the relationship between the historical source in Mandalstam's poetry, Matthias' reworking and riffing on those poems, Dibble's prints reaction to Matthias, and my own commentary, and concludes by saying:

Throughout REVOLUTIONS the beholder is treated to a many-angled banquet of effects.  As elusive as any one effect might be, it is in the mixing of all those effects that the book achieves itself.  The poet achieves grace for his terrorized forebear, the visual artist achieves a poetics of sighted sound, and the critic takes us into an orientation we receive as grandly utile in its breadth and particularity both.  And yes, the book manifestly rewards re-reading and re-apprehending, since I have managed to give but a teasing hint as to how its complexities meld into a variegated whole that is, truly, sublime. 

La Charity also calls me a "a speculative unraveler par excellence," which may be my favorite epithet ever.

The review can be read online here.

Laureate Poets and Heretic Poets in the TLS

I've always romanticized the Grand Old Literary Newsprint Journals—the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and, best of all, the Times Literary Supplement. It's not often I've encountered references to my own work when flipping through the TLS (three times, not that I'm counting), so I was delighted to run across Stephen Burt's "Laureates and Heretics" in the May 3 issue—an article that takes its name from a book of mine that came out several years ago.

Burt's essay isn't about my book: it's a review of two books of essays by contemporary poets, Alan Shapiro's The Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration and John Matthias' At Large.  But—noting that both Shapiro and Matthias studied in the considerable shadow Yvor Winters cast at Stanford (Matthias under the man himself, Shapiro under his disciples)—Burt chose to use Laureates and Heretics as a means of understanding the two poets.  My book, after all, was about Winters' last generation of students, and the poetic careers they went on to have.  Burt gives a good, quick sense of the book in his introductory paragraph:

In 2010 the Illinois-based poet and critic Robert Archambeau published Laureates and Heretics, about “six careers in American poetry”: those of Yvor Winters (1900–68) and five of Winters’s last graduate students at Stanford University. Of those, Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass became US Poet Laureates, while John Peck, John Matthias and James McMichael (the heretics) found small, loyal, contrarian audiences for their drier and more obviously learned poetry. Archambeau showed that Winters’s astringent yet charismatic pedagogy, his early modernist experiments and the severe doctrines of his later years – against raw emotion and modernist uncertainty, in favour of reason, control and inherited rules – could generate sharply divergent poetic programmes. He also showed how a particular way of reading, indebted to Winters’s poetic tastes and touchstones (including Ben Jonson, J. V. Cunningham and George Herbert’s “Church Monuments”), could persist for generations, even as its acolytes diverged.

Burt goes on to use the notion of "laureate" and "heretic" poetics to describe Shapiro and Matthias, respectively:

Shapiro’s fourth volume of prose. Most of its nine essays recommend, persuasively and movingly, what Archambeau might call a laureate programme: personal but guarded, never opaque, fiercely committed to the double notion that poetry can be read by everyone, and that it requires hard work to write. Shapiro may never become US Poet Laureate, but his moderate, democratic, inviting prescriptions fit Archambeau’s laureate frame.... John Matthias remains one of Archambeau’s heretics, and he writes for readers who have already read a great deal, or in some cases for readers who have read every issue of Notre Dame Review, the literary journal that Matthias co-edited in the 1990s and 2000s.

There's something in that critical distinction.  And there's something special in it for me: it's always good to encounter one's own paradigm put to use.

The article is available in print, and online, here, to subscribers.

Revolutions: A Collaboration — Or How to Write in the Age of Trump and Putin

How to write in the time of Trump and Putin? In words and images, John Matthias, Jean Dibble, and Robert Archambeau give you an answer to consider: find the muse of amusement and the reality of facts and twin them: you will arrive at "Revolutions," which instructs us on the possible meanings and uses of poetry in an Age of Emergency. These collaborators sing of methods of representation and ways to make new. Visually stimulating, linguistically innovative, this is work of invention and innovation to help us survive. From eidolon to Eisenhower, from Eiffel to Eichmann, the leaps keep us on our toes. There is much consolation in the anxiety of forms.—Maxine Chernoff

That's the jacket copy got Revolutions: A Collaboration, a book I co-wrote with John Matthias, with images by Jean Dibble. It's just out from Dos Madres Press and looks great. But what's it about? There's no easy way to say, but I'd start with this: it takes scenes from the life and works of the great Russian poet Mandelstam, crosses them with events from the life of John Matthias, and bends everything toward a fictive realm, all the while commenting on the nature of cognition, memory, and the (possibly redemptive) imagination.  Here's an example of one of John's poems with my commentary (the "HIJ" is a fictive character based on the three consecutive letters of the alphabet H, I and J, and the poem uses words from the entry for those letters in the dictionary based on a kind of Oulipo-derived formula):

From THE HIJOFIT

 

Poems by John Matthias, commenatry by Robert Archambeau     

1. Haphazard

            is the method of the new hussars;

the tsar’s unhappy; bless him

and applause aplenty bring to his tsarina.

All bells toll this inauspicious hour.

Peasant absentee shuns orthodoxy of

the Bishop of Pah. It reigns down from clouds

O hallelujah crowd and ever after: Winds blow

across the steppe, the messenger

caught up in mass and mission

fails in the individual soul: Everything’s for sale,

especially oil, soil.  Ahph!  Our brother’s pipeline

sabotaged by cabbage claims.  Borsht!

Poetics is no longer worth a pension

even for a splaygirl in from Budapest. Anapests –

the three red accents on her breasts.

Hazard me a guess, dauntless guest of hap-

penstance drinking vodka at our happy hour.

That was the moment. That was the power.

Hapax Legoman was his love, who

drove a nine and twenty for her dower.

-->

H is for Haslam’s History

            Who are they, then, these new hussars? And who’s the windblown messenger caught up in mass and mission? Who, also, is our brother, and who the splaygirl come from Budapest? “Hazard me a guess,” we hear. I’ll hazard this: they’re all from Haslam’s History, or close enough. Dull critic that I am, I won’t mimic Matthias, no. No, I’ll explain.

            Silas Haslam’s History of the Land Called Uqbar exists only in one place—or three, depending how you count the reality of immaterial things.  For the most puritanical of enumerators, it exists only in a story by Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” The hero of that story comes across a mention of Haslam’s History in the bibliography appended to the last article of a stray volume of the fictitious 1917 Anglo-American Encyclopedia, an imaginary illegal reprint of the eminently real Encyclopedia Brittanica of 1903. This imagined version of a real book is, in fact, the second place, other than Borges’ story itself, where Haslam’s book stakes its tenuous claim to reality. But the encyclopedia article that mentions Haslam faces great challenges in its claim to existence: besides being a construct of Borges’ imagination, it is apocryphal even within the story born of that imagination. There, it exists only in the possibly unreliable testimony of a secondary character—some copies of the encyclopedia lack the article, and we have only the testimony of this character to indicate that at least one copy does indeed contain four extra pages describing Uqbar.

            Strangely, Haslam’s History has a greater claim to existence than the encyclopedia article in which it is mentioned, as characters in the story discover it mentioned in the catalog (the third place of its existence) of a bookshop. To be precise, they discover it in the catalog of Bernard Quartich’s bookshop—a real shop, opened in London in 1847 and open there still. Whether Haslam’s book ever existed in the catalog of the venerable Quartich’s, I cannot say. Doubts abound, but scholars have yet to assemble the catalogs of Quartich, dispersed as they have been over the globe for a hundred and sixty years and more. So we just don’t know for sure.

            But H is not just for Haslam’s History, nor for “Haphazard,” or “Hij,” or “Hijofit.” H is also for “Hermeneutic code.” Of the five communicative codes described in Roland Barthes’ S/Z, this is the one that most frustrates and satisfies readers. It refers to those elements of narrative that are not explained, that raise enigmas and set us hunting for answers. Sometimes, as in the detective story, we find those answers, our hermeneutic hunger satisfied with a great “aha!” But sometimes an author—wily, sly, or incompetent—frustrates us in our search. Sometimes they make us fall into what Barthes calls a “snare”—an enigma refusing to be resolved.

            We might say that the reality of Haslam’s History in Borges’ story is a snare. Except that Borges is more wily still. His story isn’t just about the dubious existence of things–it is about the influence of nonexistent things, their propensity to multiply and become real. Through machinations too arcane to articulate here, artifacts not of Uqbar, but of Tlön—a fictitious realm from the literature of Uqbar—begin to manifest as actual objects in the real world of Borges’ story. What was caught in the hermeneutic snare is unleashed in the world itself.  If you don’t believe it, try Googling “Uqbar” or “Haslam’s History.” You’ll find they’re mentioned, now, not in one place, or three, but many thousands. Borges sent them from the narrow valley of the unsubstantial to the broad fields of ubiquity.

            Who, then, are Matthias’ hussars? And who’s the windblown messenger? We don’t know who they are. But we know where they are: they’re in three places. They’re caught in the poet’s snare–from which none of them shall escape to make a horseman’s charge, or deliver a messenger’s missive. And they’re in an artist’s image, in colors they never knew or wore. And they’re in this commentary, now. They are snared and stuck forever, and they begin to travel.

The book can be ordered at the Dos Madres Press site, at Amazon, or at SPD.

Danny Devito Explains "The Poet Resigns"

Just in time for the new year, the latest issue of Pleiades has arrived.  The current issue put me in a bit of a dilemma, since I didn't know where to turn first.  Should I plunge into the teeming multitude of promising looking poems?  Grab onto my colleague Rebecca Makkai's short story?  Or rush ahead to the virtuosic, and sure to be controversial, Mark Halliday take-down of Traci Brimhall's Our Lady of the Ruins (I have not read Brimhall's book, so I don't know if Halliday is right, only that he writes a hell of a take down).  Should I begin at the beginning and race on to the end?  These, I'm a little abashed to say, weren't the questions. Rather, I was stuck between wanting to read my own contribution—an essay on John Matthias' poetry, to see if the typesetters had changed innocent words into vile profanities—or to read Amish Trivedi's review of a collection of my own essays, The Poet Resigns.  Anxiety warred with vanity!  I won't tell you which won out, but veil the embarrassing result by quoting, instead, from both pieces.

My essay on Matthias is called "Indirections," and takes as its occasion the publication of his collected poems.  But it's really out to make a general statement of Matthias' poetics.  It begins like this:

John Matthias is so thoroughly a European poet he could only be American. That is, his poetry, now collected in three volumes from Shearsman Books, is so saturated with European geography, history, and, most importantly, personages from the history of high culture, that a reader coming to it for the first time would see at once an affiliation with Europhile American poets like Pound and Eliot. Like those poets, Matthias spent a considerable period of his life in Europe (mostly England), and like them he has read widely in the poetry of the continent. Like them, too, he takes Europe as a kind of whole, and as a single living tradition—very much an American thing to do, and not at all English, or Spanish, or Lithuanian. Every inch of Europe seems to open out into a richly storied past, and one senses that at least part of his attraction to Europe is that it offers an escape from a perceived American historical shallowness, the sort of thing Harold Rosenberg described when he said that America “builds and acts on a thin time crust—its constructions reach upward rather than down, its politics take account of the immediate future rather than the past.” 

One thing that the opportunity these three volumes—some 900 pages in all—offers is the chance to see the consistent appeal of Europe to Matthias, and to recognize a fundamental pattern in the way Europe plays into the poetry. Despite the serious religious concerns of poems like the 45-page “A Compostella Diptych” (which traces ancient pilgrim routes across France and Spain), Matthias does not seek in Europe a path back to a meaningful religious communion, as did Eliot. Nor does he use the European past as a way to cudgel Americanized modernity, with its preference for mass produced plaster over artisanal alabaster, as did Pound. Instead, Europe, and especially Europe’s past, provides a kind of Archimedean point outside of Matthias’ immediate experiences from which he can re-imagine them. From his earliest poems to his most recent, we find Matthias changing his perspective on experiences—often difficult or painful ones—by placing them in the context of distant geographies, remote pasts, or foreign lives.

Even the erotic poetry of Matthias’ youth works this way. Consider “What They Say,” a short poem written when Matthias was twenty and published for the first time in volume one of the Collected Shorter Poems. Grouped with other erotic poems like “Female Nude, Young” and “Swimming at Midnight,” it describes the Viennese painter Egon Schiele in his studio, posing his models and friends as “onanistic nudes,” then climbing a ladder to a loft to get the odd angle he desired. “And it’s the perspective that distorts,” writes Matthias, “The ladder and the beds/were Egon Schiele’s.” while “The postures and/the gestures/were all theirs.” It’s a simple poem, and very much juvenilia, but in a way it contains the poetic career that will to follow for another half century and more. It’s not just that Matthias’ erotic imagination, here, runs toward the visions of long-dead artists in faraway Europe rather than the proximate body of a lover: it’s that the important thing, the thing that makes Schiele more than a pornographer, is his distancing himself from his material, his climbing of a ladder to gain exactly the right point of distance and perspective.

Amish Trivedi's review of my book The Poet Resigns begins by explaining the book with reference to some lines spoken by Danny Devito's character in the move Other People's Money—a gambit that I never would have thought would work, but does:

"We're dead alright.  We're just not broke. And do you know the surest way to go broke? Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market.  Down the tubes.  Slow but sure" (Other People's Money, 1991).  In The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World Robert Archambeau confronts Danny Devito's point: no matter how successful a poet may become, it is a success limited by poetry's ever-diminishing position within the world. While there are plenty of poets who wish that poetry were as marketable as popular fiction or Miley Cyrus, the central question Archambeau asks is whether or not poetry can successfully return to some imagined high point of a golden past...

Trivedi cuts to the core of the book when he says that its central question is "What is the role of poetry in contemporary society?"  Trivedi says some kind things about the book, but personally, I feel The Poet Resigns only starts to answer that question.  I'm hoping the critical book I'm resolving to finish in the year ahead, Making Nothing Happen: Poetry in Society, Poetry for Itself takes things further.  And in a way I'm kind of hoping a future reviewer will find a way to link that book to the Danny Devito oeuvre, too.

*

Pleiades 35.1 is currently available in print—online selections from the issue will appear soon.

John Berryman at 100

John Berryman's centenary is just a few weeks behind us, and it has occasioned a renewal of interest in this troubled, troubling, and undeniably great American poet.  There's a new edition of his selected poems, his publisher has re-issued his best books, including The Dream Songs, and there's a new version of Poets in their Youth, a memoir by Berryman's first wife, Eileen Simpson.  The national and international press has taken notice—so it's no surprise that the poets have joined in and made their own contribution to the Berryman revival.

Philip Coleman's Berryman's Fate is a major document of the renewed interest in Berryman among poets.  It collects tributes to Berryman from a host of poets including Paul Muldoon, Timothy Donnelly, John Matthias, Isobel Dixon, Jane Robinson, George Szirtes, John Montague, and me, among many distinguished others.

My own contribution takes its title from a line in "Dream Song 14," but it's really a riff on Berryman's wonderful meditation on loss, "The Ball Poem."  It goes like this:


We Must Not Say So 

Sadness was he ever. Teacher, taught 
my teacher, taught me too (his being not 
in body but in book). “What is the boy now 
who has lost his ball?” he’d ask. The question’s flawed. 
“What, what” he’d ask “is he to do?” A haughty Henry’d 
huff his loss, a stone his daily broken bread. 
And yours and mine? Is what he wrought? 
Sadness we are ever, teacher taught. 

“No use,” he’s say, to say “O there 
are other balls,” the ball gone harbor-wise, 
and out, the tidal-tugging way. 
No use to whistle “I am not a little boy.” 
For him a hurting. Us, maybe a sigh. 
No laws against our Henry but “Beware.”

Berryman's Fate is available here.

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)

An Elegy for Seamus Heaney

Yesterday we heard the sad news of the death of Seamus Heaney. Today we have this, an elegy for Heaney by my friend and mentor John Matthias, which appears here with his kind permission. It takes its form—in meter and in rhyme—from the third section of W.H. Auden's great elegy for W.B. Yeats, which Heaney also used in his poem "Audenesque," an elegy for his friend, the poet Joseph Brodsky. Ultimately, this form of elegy, its iambic tetrameter truncated by the omission of the initial unstressed syllable, goes back to Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle," a kind of elegy for the death of love. But this is no occasion for my pedantry—so let's have Matthias' poetry instead:


Elegy for Seamus Heaney Seamus felt it in his feet, Clods of fuel in the peat. In the peat a fire to warm Children not yet even born. Joseph Brodsky was his friend. Wystan Auden would amend Dances William Blake would like, Tigers lurking in the night. Metric feet and feet in boots – Robert Lowell was shown his roots Welcomed in an Irish town Where the sky was falling down. Mister Yeats was dead by then Honored by some mortal men Heaney his example took, Brooding sky and flying rook. Even Possum shares the beat In Joseph’s poem for Thomas Stearns. Heaney’s poem for Brodsky, dead, Lives in turns, not Grecian urns. What dread turning plow or spade Having dug up things well made Digs now to inter a shade. World poets learn your trade!

The AWP and the Literary Stock Market

I’ve been back from the Boston AWP for more than a day, but I’m still not fully recovered from all that talking, listening, and drinking.  But mostly talking: it was great to get a chance to talk Belgian surrealism and Tom Raworth with Pierre Joris; Romanticism with Mary Biddinger; Canadian poetry with Lea Graham; C.S. Giscombe with Don Bogen; various literary schemes with John Gallaher; people who thank their drug dealers in the acknowledgment pages of their books with Grant Jenkins; ceramics and Montana with Sloan Davis; AWP haters with Steve Halle; poetry politics with Don Share; dumpy hotels with Jacquelyn Pope; book reviewing with Amish Trivedi; taxicab stories with David Caplan; hitchhiking stories with Kevin Prufer; Gnosticism and Judaism with Yehoshua November; small town mayoral campaigns with Fred Cartwright; Malört shots and small press publishing with Jacob Knabb; Charles Bernstein with Keith Tuma, Lee Ann Brown, and Chris Cheek; and so much more with so many others—and to finally shake Charles Bernstein’s hand, to tell Rae Armantrout about not quite recognizing her in the airport, to (literally) bump into Derek Walcott, and to see my former sophomore student Alexandra Diaz on her way to a panel on her writing.  Also, it was good to have a damn good bowl of chowder at Brasserie Jo.  But mostly it was about talk.

So now that I’m back in Chicago, it’s time to give the vocal chords a rest and get back to reading—and I’m in luck in that department.  As if on cure, the new issue of Salmagundi has dropped from the sky, people, loaded with good stuff from William Logan (on Lowell and Heaney), Allan Gurganus (in conversation), Mary Gordon (on enmity), and Tzetvan Todorov (reporting from Paris).  The issue also contains “Cousin Alice Through the Looking Glass,” a wonderful essay on John Matthias by Terence Diggory, which makes mention of my book Laureates and Heretics and its take on the making of poetic reputations.  Here’s a passage:

In an essay on John Berryman, another of his teachers, Matthias observes: “It took me a long time to realize that Berryman’s reputation had been slipping on the literary stock market. As a teacher, I made his work central to my syllabus and continued on my enthusiastic way only half-aware that Elizabeth Bishop had overtaken not only Berryman but even Lowell.’ 

The gender politics implied in this observation can be explained in terms of “the literary stock market.”  Robert Archambeau has attempted to do just that in Laureates and Heretics (2010), a study of [Yvor] Winters and his “sons” (James McMichael and John Peck in addition to Hass, Pinsky and Matthias).  In this account, Matthias, along with the other “sons,” was a straight white male—i.e., heavily invested in “blue chips,” to continue the stock market metaphor, when the market became segmented by the emergence of niche audiences “based on historical grievances”: African-American civil rights, feminism, gay rights.  Under these conditions, the straight white male who could define an alternative “American” identity that transcended identity politics had a chance, like Pinsky, to become poet laureate.

Part of me wants to shout “Wait! It’s all more complicated than that!” but I’d be wrong to do so: Diggory gets the gist of the argument down in just a few sentences.  I do argue in Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry that one way for a straight white guy like Pinsky to make a reputation for himself in the age of identity poetics was to articulate an idea of a common national identity (as he does in An Explanation of America), something that would appeal to people who felt nudged toward the margin by the new challenges to notions of American identity.  I do think it had something to do with Pinsky's multi-term appointment as Poet Laureate, and his comfort in that role.  But my sense of how poetry finds a public (or not) has evolved: I think that's one reason I had to write the essays in the first part of The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World, the book I was signing at the AWP this year.

Anyway:  back to reading Salmagundi, and to soothing the throat.  I’ll need my voice back for whatever bar-room conversation comes up at the next conference.