When Buffalo Became Buffalo

When did Buffalo become Buffalo? If you're at all interested in the little demimonde of American poetry, you know that the unlikely city of Buffalo, New York has long been a kind of Emerald City of experimental poetry. But how did it all begin? Michael Anania knows: he was there. And he tells all in the latest installment in the "Essays & Comment" section I edit for Plume. Here's the beginning of his essay:

There are several issues embedded in my title, I suppose, not only when Buffalo, the private University (after 1962 the State University of New York at Buffalo), became Buffalo but how and why Buffalo became a center, perhaps the center, of American poetry. For me, “when” is easy. Buffalo became Buffalo on August 5, 1963. That afternoon, the poet David Posner, then the Director of the Lockwood Library Poetry Collection, gave a party in his apartment on Main Street, just across from the old campus, one floor above the Chicken Delight take-out shop, for the incoming chair of the Buffalo English Department, Albert S. Cook. Posner was a collector, and his shotgun-style apartment, with windows on Main Street at one end and above the rear alley at the other, was a dense clutter of camelback couches, old, velvet-seated chairs and a soft, forest-floor matting of oriental rugs. The effect was a kind of worn luridness, aged Persian reds and Victorian blues. Books were stuffed into glass-fronted oak cases, and there were paintings and prints, mostly 19th century English landscapes, though above the weighty dining room table, there was a small Derain, nude dancers in a circle. 

I don’t remember everyone at the party. Al Cook was there, of course, so were Mac Hammond, who had followed Cook from Western Reserve in Cleveland, Aaron Rosen, who had been on the Buffalo English faculty for some time, the poet Saul Touster, who taught in the law school, Charles Doria, Irving Feldman perhaps, and towering above everyone, Charles Olson. Al introduced me. “Michael is writing on William Carlos Williams.” Charles took my hand, pulled me toward him and draped his left arm over my shoulder. “Bill Williams,” he said in what started out and ended as a rumbling kind of laugh. “He got us part way there. We’ll manage the rest.” Us. We’ll. A part of Olson’s genius was pure politics, LBJ or Tip O’Neill rounding up votes. 

The rest, including a remarkable account of Olson's seminar, is available here. 

The Apt Emblem of Robert Duncan

There is a photograph of Robert Duncan touches on something central to the man and his poetics.  Two things, actually.  When Michael Anania showed me the photo, taken by David Lenfest when Duncan was reading to Anania’s students at the University of Illinois—Chicago, he described the movements of Duncan’s arms, which made Duncan appear almost as if he were in flight.  “One hand played the rhythmic beat,” said Anania, “the other kept the longer cadence.”  And here, already, is the first fact of interest: the fact that Duncan was not only a strongly rhythmic poet, but that he thought of his poems in polyrhythmic terms, so much so that he enacted those rhythms for his audiences.

Just as interesting as the figure of Duncan ‘conducting’ his own reading, though, is the contrast of the figure with its ground.  The background does not, at first, seem particularly promising, and from a visual standpoint, it isn’t striking, although those two long blackboards do provide a nice dark field against which Duncan’s light shirt can pop.  What’s interesting about the background are less the visuals than what they represent—if we taken them as metonymic, as parts representing a larger whole.  What are blackboards, after all, but nearly universally recognized signs of the educational system of which they are instruments? They show us that this is a university, an event sponsored by an English department, by the rationally organized, administered, modern institution that has become the major venue for American poetry’s reception and, increasingly, its creation.  Many poets and lovers of poetry cringe a little at the word “academic,” even though (or perhaps because) so many of them bear advanced academic credentials, and have, at the end of their email addresses, the letters “edu.”

Duncan, too, was uneasy with the academic institution as a venue for poetry—and, indeed, with the much broader cultural and historical movement of which the university is but one minor emanation.  He was uneasy with—no, that doesn’t go far enough—he waged war against modernity itself, inasmuch as modernity can be defined as the triumph of the rational over the irrational, the positivist over the mystical, and the disenchanted over the magical.  The university lecture hall hardly seems a fitting place the broad, dramatic gestures caught in Lenfest’s photograph of Duncan.  Don’t they belong elsewhere? Perhaps in a sacred grove, a temple, or a catacomb where the members of a sect have gathered for their rites.

Duncan’s mysticism and irrationalism are, of course, in his blood: his adoptive parents were Theosophists, believers in the occult, who selected him as their child based on astrological projections.  He was raised with a deep respect for the mystical, and we find this background very much alive in his conception of the poet as magus, as the sorcerer-priest of a heterodox spiritual tradition. 

"There is a natural mystery in poetry," wrote Duncan in one of his notebooks, "a poem, mine or another's, is an occult document."  Metaphors matter: any reader of poetry knows that.  And Duncan's metaphor is a far cry from, say, William Carlos Williams' when he writes that a poem is a machine made out of words.  Come to think of it, though, Duncan doesn't intend this notion of the occult document as a metaphor.  He means it, earnestly, seriously, literally.

Duncan’s war with modernity was deadly serious, a matter of passion, even rage.  In one of the many documents collected as The H.D. Book, Duncan tells us of his own incipient attachment to poetry, first to the Romantic poets and then to the tradition of the troubadours.  “There has been a fire,” he writes, “ a fire of anger that rose, as I found the Romantic spirit and back of that the Spirit of Romance and back of that the cult of life as a romance of the spirit belonged to an order that was under attack or under boycott.” The world of scientism and rational disenchantment—the world of modernity—was for Duncan what it was for William Blake: an iron age, a cage confining us, a set of mind-forged manacles.  Poetry was a counter-attack upon our enemies, a tunnel dug beneath the walls of reason in which our wardens confined us, a weapon in the only war that mattered.

And make no mistake, it was a war, to Duncan.  Here’s what he says in the essay “Man’s Fulfillment in Order and Strife”:

For men who declare themselves partisans of the rational mind at war with all other possibilities of being, the pre-rational or the irrational appears as an enemy within…. In the extreme of the rationalist presumption, the nursery is not the nursery of an eternal child but of a grown-up, a rational man. Common sense and good sense exist in an armed citadel surrounded by the threatening country-side of phantasy, childishness, madness, irrationality, irresponsibility... In that city where Reason has preserved itself by retreating from the totality of the self, infants must play not with things of the imagination nor entertain the lies of the poets but play house, government, business, philosophy or war.

The theory is grand, even grandiose—imagination, irrationalism, and innocence putted against reason, materialism, and war—and the poetry that is both explained and fuelled by the theory is some of the most powerful in the American poetic canon.  But the actual manifestations of this great historical struggle in the events of Duncan’s life are, as one might expect, rather less Titanic in scale.  One thinks of an event in front of another blackboard, in 1978.

It was at a gathering to celebrate the poetry of Louis Zukofsky.  Duncan spoke first, and, by all accounts, manifested very much as the poet-magus, in a broad-brimmed Spanish hat and cape, praising the mystical side of Zukofsky and looking, as David Bromige recollected, like he was there to “ward off evil magic.”  Then another speaker took the stage—Barrett Watten, then just 30 years of age, looking every inch the junior professor in his sport coat, khakis, and buck shoes.  He began by drawing a diagram of a Zukofsky stanza on the blackboard, and proceeded with a clear, rational analysis, to which Duncan took immediate, vocal exception.  He heckled, he cajoled, and ultimately he pushed Watten from the stage.  The moment was many things: an older poet worried about the Oedipal drama of rebellion, and a generational conflict, Black Mountain vs. Language Poetry, among other things.  But it was also, and definitively, a moment in which the magus of the irrational turned against the Apollonian representative of reason.  The breach of decorum and the incivility are entirely explicable, if not necessarily excusable.  Here, at a celebration of poetry from beyond the mainstream—in what to Duncan’s mind must be a center of resistance to modern rationality—was a representative of our enemy, rationality.  Indeed, from where Duncan stood, the breach of etiquette was all Watten’s, and “breach of etiquette” hardly touches the seriousness of the offense.  Poetry, charted, mapped, and analyzed theoretically? We murder to dissect! It was heresy, blasphemy, a desecration of the temple. The great and domineering enemy has found us in our catacombs, and must be cast out!

Greer Mansfield once observed that for Duncan, the study of poetry was a version of a lost, primitive religion—how could he react to the young Watten with anything but a sense of outrage? And how could his gestures when reading in a university, in front of a blackboard and behind a lectern, be anything but incongruous? The incongruity, though, is its own explanation. Duncan’s mysticism, like that of his Theosophical parents, is very much a product of modernity—the modern theosophical movement, which draws on many ancient traditions, was founded in New York in 1875.  Duncan’s beliefs—his poetics and his mysticism—are fundamentally reactive, attempts to correct a culture gone too far in the direction of positivism, materialism, utilitarianism. 

So when we see Duncan in a gesture like that in which Lenfest’s camera caught him, against a background so out of keeping with the grand drama of the physical movement, the jarring juxtaposition is in fact quite revealing.  It shows not only Duncan’s sense of himself as magus, but the rationalized, institutionalized social environment that gave birth to that sense.  The photo, then, is an apt emblem of Duncan as a counter-cultural figure, a man in rebellion against his world.  And where else would we encounter a mystical poet of Duncan’s time but in a university, the modern institution that is so frequently, but with such fragility, the site of modernity’s self-critique—as well as modernity's preservation, and perhaps co-optation, of its others?

The Poet Resigns: Now It's Out—Here's What's In It

Since I've already done an official book signing at the AWP conference in Boston, I imagine it's time to officially announce the publication of The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World, a collection of my essays on poetry, poetics, and related matters.  It's out now, available on Amazon and elsewhere, and weighs in at 323 pages.  And it's on sale right now for a mere fourteen bucks, four dollars off the regular retail price.

Here's a general guide through the table of contents, with the main sections in boldface and the individual essays briefly described:


Instead of an Introduction: Letter of Resignation

In which I discuss my evolution from poet to critic, and the issues—mostly a love of beauty in a world of troubles—that animate both my poetry and my critical writing.


Situations of Poetry

The Discursive Situation of Poetry

In this essay I go through the various arguments people have made about the decline of poetry's readership, and conclude that, despite claims for a mid-century importance of poetry, the conditions most of the people who write about poetry's decline in popularity relative to other genres yearn for are really Victorian conditions.  To restore poetry to that level of popularity, one would have to rebuild a lot of Victorian conditions of literacy, social elitism, primitive science, and expensive publishing—conditions we should be glad we don't have.

Poetry and Politics, or: Why are the Poets on the Left?

Although most of us like to think we hold our views because those views are true, there are some good reasons to believe that the place we hold in society conditions those views—and when we look at where most American poets fit in American society, some pretty solid social theory (Alvin Gouldner, Pierre Bourdieu) give us social reasons for the leftish views of most American poets.  I mean, we're no more immune to politics that go with our jobs than are most Wall Streeters.

The Aesthetic Anxiety: Avant-Garde Poetics and the Idea of Politics

This essay looks at the poetics of Surrealism, and of Language Poetry, in terms of the equation often drawn in both movements between aesthetic and political radicalism.  I suppose you could say that the essay finds the arguments for an inherent relation between these kinds of things wanting.

Public Faces in Private Places: Notes on Cambridge Poetry

This essay kicked up a lot of dust when it came out in the Cambridge Literary Review a few years ago. It argues that the social claims made by some backers of the avant-garde British poets associated with J.H. Prynne don't hold as much water as those backers might wish, and looks for explanations why such large claims get made.

Negative Legislators: Exhibiting the Post-Avant

In which I take a stab at defining the post-avant, and look at the meaning of its politics, which are largely a matter of refusing large claims and totalizing statements.  In the end, I try out a generational explanation for why the post-avant is as it is.

When Poets Dream of Power

A fast survey of the relation between poets and power over the course of several centuries, leading up to the present moment.

Can Poems Communicate?

Not the way they used to!  This essay examines what happens to poetry when there is no shared frame of symbolic reference between poet and readers.  There's a fair bit about Yeats, who worried endlessly over the issue.

The Poet in the University: Charles Bernstein's Academic Anxiety

The essay takes a look at how Bernstein defined poetic thought and academic thought as opposites, and at a huge problem with his argument: all of his poetic thinkers are academics, and big-time, much-cited ones at that.  I seek a psychological/sociological explanation for why Bernstein would make such an argument, and claim that it has to do with joining academe late in his career.

The State of the Art

I examine the meaning of "the state of the art" at various points in the history of British and American poetry, up to the present day, when I make some perhaps dangerous claims about the current state.

To Criticize the Poetry Critic

Seeing the New Criticism Again

In which it turns out that everything we've been told about the New Critics is wrong.

Poetry/Not Poetry

An examination of where the poetry-not poetry line has been drawn since the late 18th century, with reflections on the meaning of our contemporary definition of what makes a poem a poem.

The Death of the Critic

In which I ask what it means to write avant-garde literary criticism.

Marginality and Manifesto

This was a piece commissioned by Poetry as a response to a selection of manifestoes they ran on the 100th anniversary of the Futurist manifesto.  I conclude that the manifesto doesn't have much of a function under current socio-aesthetic conditions.

Poets and Poetry

A Portrait of Reginald Shepherd as Philoctetes

This surveys the entire body of Reginald Shepherd's poetry.  I predicted that he was on the verge of emerging as one of the major poets of his time.  Sadly, we'll never know if I was right: he died a few months after the essay ran in Pleiades. 

True Wit, False Wit: Harryette Mullen in the Eighteenth Century

Wow, were they mad at me when I first gave a version of this essay as a conference paper down in Louisville.  I think the crowd thought I was saying Mullen was no good.  What I meant was that the kind of wit she plays with, and that we love, is exactly the kind of wit that eighteenth century critics condemned.  I add to this some thoughts about what the difference in taste regarding wit can tell us about the role and situation of poetry in different times and places, and under different institutional conditions.

Emancipation of the Dissonance: The Poetry of C.S. Giscombe

A survey of the whole of his poetic career, in which he evolves from a kind of Black Mountain poet into something else.  I trot out some music theory from Stockhausen, Schoenberg, and Duke Ellington to get at the meaning of avant-garde form and the interrogation of race in Giscombe's poetry.

In the Haze of Pondered Vision: Yvor Winters as Poet

Where Winters is remembered at all as a poet, he's seen as an arch-formalist.  But he started off as an Imagist, publishing alongside Gertrude Stein and the like.  I try understand what happened.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Poetry

Since Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, there's been this sense that poets need to break through inhibition into something more open and genuine.  This essay examines a tradition of reticent poets that runs counter to all that.

Power and the Poetics of Play

John Matthias has interrogated the meaning of play, and its relation to a world of power and danger, more than anyone.  It's one of the reasons I've remained drawn to his poetry for decades.  This essay introduces his work from the aspect of power and play.

Neruda's Earth, Heidegger's Earth

It turns out there are strong parallels between Neruda's poetry and poetics and some of Heidegger's darker moments.  I worry the issue a bit here.

The Decadent of Moyvane

The sad fate of the Irish nationalist poetic tradition in post-nationalist times.

Modernist Current: On Michael Anania

James Joyce was born in Omaha in 1939.  At least that's what I say here.  And I'm pretty sure I'm right, despite what you may have read on the internet.

Laforgue/Bolaño: The Poet as Bohemian

What does it mean for poetry when the poet lives as a bohemian, as opposed to a professor of creative writing?  The editor of an earlier version of this essay found the conclusion so irksome he had it changed.  But it's back to its original form here.

Oppen/Rimbaud: The Poet as Quitter

The question of the poet who leaves poetry means something to me.  Looking at Oppen and Rimbaud helped me feel better about the whole issue.

Remembering Robert Kroetsch

Robert Kroetsch was one of the grand old men of Canadian poetry, and one of the progenitors of a movement virtually unknown outside his country.

Myself I Sing

Nothing in this Life

A meditation on Nick Cave, which is really about what it means to come from the provinces and to care about literary culture.

My Laureates

What poets have meant to me, and how they've helped me live.

*

I'm very glad to see this book come out.  I hope you'll check it out.

Intention & Accident, Authenticity & Artifice

Whenever Valerie comes in with the mail and tells me there's a new issue of the Notre Dame Review, I always ask "am I in this one?" and then, even though I write for the journal often enough, I feel like a complete an ass for asking (I get the same feeling when I Google my own name). As it turns out, I didn't write for the current issue, but there's work by plenty of people more interesting than I am: a series of poems by John Peck (for the few, the proud, the serious poetry readers), a couple of pieces by Andrea Brady (who is becoming one of my favorite Cambridge-school, Jeremy Prynne-ified poets), new stuff by Joe Doerr, some crazy-looking work by Kevin Ducey, and — the first thing I turned to — a new poem by Michael Anania. It's a bit uncharacteristic in voice, being more talky than lyrical, but you don't just go to Michael for lyricism, nor for his uncanny ability to capture qualities of light in a poem: you also go to Michael because he's one of the smart guys, and whatever he's up to will be interesting. I mean, he's read everything, and read it all deeply. Whenever I have an intellectual conundrum and can't figure out who, among my habitual panel of experts, might be able to help me, I call Michael. And his poems, in addition to everything else they can be, are often places to get the kind of news that stays news.

The new poem, "This Cup," takes, as its occasion, the placing of a coffee cup on a piece of newspaper, but in the end it becomes a meditation on the roles of intention and accident in the creation of literature, as well as an inquiry into the relation of artificiality to authenticity in literary works. Since my trusty mechanical pencil was all out of lead when I read the poem in the magazine, and since this broken leg makes it inconvenient to hobble across the room to get another pencil, I took notes on the poem down on my laptop. Here, I just brush them up and insert them between Michael's stanzas. Forgive me if the effect of reading them in the middle of the poem is a bit like sitting next to a guy who keeps pausing the Cubs game on Tivo and giving his insufferable opinions about left-handed pitchers and the state of the ivy at Wrigley Field.

This Cup
Michael Anania (Notre Dame Review #28)

I placed a coffee cup
on Jhumpa Lahiri's
sweater set (NY Times
Book Review, 4/6/08)
and round it was, the stain

Okay! "and round it was" gives us our first bit of allusion: to Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar," which can be taken, among other things, as a poem about the act of creation (it's often read as being specifically about poetic creation). Here's the whole poem:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

So: Anania's comparing the placing of his cup to the placing of the jar, which means there's some pretty powerful stuff at work. The jar, after all, is an artifact that imposes order on the world which, in its presence, ceases to be wild. In Stevens' version of things, the order-giving artifact is austere, and unlike the birdy, bushy, world of sprawl and messiness to which it gives a center and an order. Is the cup going to have a similar function? Or, put another way, does Anania share Stevens' old, high modernist view of art as an austere and deliberate order-making? Put still another way, does Anania share with Stevens a sense of the banishing of mere accidental relations by the intentional act of the order-giving artist? We'll get to some answers, but not for a while. Anania's still laying all his cards on the table. Here's how his poem continues:

of it, that is, and dark,
and despite her bright eyes,
her modest, round earring
and stern but endearing
refusal to smile, thought

of William Gass' Willie
Masters' Lonesome Wife,
the first edition where
coffee cup rings mark
the text and margins

(Tri-Quarterly, 1968)
at random, as though some
careless reader had put
his cup down here or there
willy-nilly, though the text

begins to gather itself into
the rings and eventually
comments on them, so it's
the writer not the reader
or the writer as reader

who was careless or perhaps
deliberate and careless
or deliberately careless
with his cup; "this is
the moon of daylight"

one says; another speaks
in fragments of coffee,
in fact — "in early morning coffee
down the little sterling ide of" —
as calculated as such things

inevitably are in fiction,
even, or especially, when
their beginnings seem simple
and more or less accidental —
"the muddy ring you see

just before you and below
you represents the ring
left on a leaf of the manuscript
by my coffee cup," a reminder
(sometimes we need one) that there

was a time of composition
that preceded the book,

Here's something interesting: we add another dichotomy to intention/accident. This time it's a authenticity/artifice, and it comes about via the juxtaposition of Jhumpa Lahiri and William Gass' weird, fascinating little novella Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife. Lahiri and Gass are very different kinds of writers: Lahiri writes in a plain, clear, lucid language, and tends to base her fiction on autobiography, or on the experiences of people she's known. Gass, of course, is a first-rate metafictional experimentalist, and about as far from plainspoken as you're likely to get. He's fascinated, too, with the visual surfaces of his books, and is always doing something to draw attention to shake you out of your sense of book-as-representing-authentic-experience and make you think of the book-as-book. (He told me, once, that he wanted his publisher to print his magnum opus, The Tunnel, in the kind of Germanic script that looks like barbed wire, and that he wanted obscene pop-ups to be interspersed with the text. Sadly, the economics of publishing trumped the extravagance of the imagination).

Anyway. So: it's Lahiri vs. Gass, and therefore authentic representation vs. the foregrounding of artifice, right? Well, no. Or only sort of. Because Gass plays a clever game with the images of coffee rings printed throughout Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife. I mean, on the one hand he's reminding us that the book is artifice, something he imagined and typed. On the other hand, he's saying "these coffee rings are authentic representations of real events: they're on the same passages of the printed book as the actual coffee rings did." So he's telling us that texts are artifice, but he's also telling us, in a different, less conventional way, that authentic representation does take place. So it's Lahiri representing one kind of authenticity, and Gass representing both artifice and an alternate kind of authenticity. Or so it seems so far. (By the way: don't the bibliographic details the poem brings up also insist on some kind of authenticity?) Back to Anania:

its duration different
in so many ways from the duration
of reading, though each, reading

and writing, can be put aside,
each ringed by its own
neglected cup, the circles
left there imposing an order
of their own, ungrammatical

and asyntactic, something
the text seems to rise up toward,
the urgent way that messages
rise through the inky black of
an eight ball to tell the future,

advise the love sick, heart-
weary and lonely, letters, words
pressed against the ball's small,
dark window so briefly
it is often hard to be sure

what you read there — "Outlook
good," "Signs point to yes,"
"Most Likely," "As I see it,
yes." "It is decidedly so,"
"Reply hazy, try again."

Here we have something like an answer to the question of intention and accident initially raised by the allusion to Wallace Stevens: both reading and writing are order-giving activities, but for Anania there's much more aleatory wiggle-room than there was for Stevens. Order comes into being, but it isn't austere and authoritative. It doesn't, "take dominion everywhere," the way Stevens' jar does. In fact, the order is " ungrammatical and asyntactic," and it is never fully achieved. It is only "something the text seems to rise up toward." And then there's the whole Magic 8-Ball bit, which Anania uses to address both the creation/writing of things and the consumption/reading of them. The creators of the Magic 8-ball did, after all, impose a kind of limited matrix of possibilities on the answers the ball will give. "Signs point to yes" can come up, but "She's going to leave you tomorrow" or "You're a lying sack of shit" can't. Then again, the users can impose order too. Anania stresses their neediness — "the love sick, heart-weary and lonely" — and it's when we're needy that we're likely to take a vague, random phrase like "Signs point to yes" and take it to mean whatever we need it to mean. So: Anania's got a looser, more reader-centered sense of the order-generating qualities of poetry than does Stevens. But what about the question of authenticity and artifice? (By the way, I know those are loaded terms. I don't mean "authenticity good, artifice bad, nor do I think authenticity comes unmediated in literature. But I'm covering my ass like a nervous grad student giving his first conference paper). Back to Anania:

The book's last coffee stain
encircles the navel of the nude
who has been posing (hard
to imagine these days) or as
the author might say, representing,

page after page, the title's,
if not his own, lonesome wife.

So! Ha! It looks like Gass may have been having us on with the whole coffee-stain-as-authentic routine. After all, the stain coming around the woman's navel just as the book is coming to a close looks like a deliberate gesture of artistry, a bit of artifice. It's like that moment right in the middle of that most symmetrical of novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Joyce, for no reason, has the Jesuit pull out his watch and mark the time. It's a gesture of authorial knowingness: I mark this point in my text, because it is formally significant (for Joyce, a middle, for Gass, an end). What had seemed authentic is now revealed as artifice. (All this in a novel where photos of a woman try to suggest that the woman of the narrative was real — "here she is, in photos!" — Gass is all about playing with the idea of authenticity). Anyway: let's get to the end of the poem, which returns us to Anania's own coffee ring, on the New York Times photo of Jhumpa Lahiri:

And the stained sweater set,
not the sweater itself
or Jhumpa Lahiri, the alluring

author with the sideways glance,
but the artifact in black and white
on newsprint wicking coffee
along its random strands of fiber,
occurs as fiction might occur

amid a tangle of causes at once
intended and accidental.
The coffee's damp expands
its ring of paper, which in turn
rises like a blister of cashmere

at once fictive and tangible,
two mother of pearl or plastic
replica mother of pearl buttons
catch the ambient light, twin
crescent moons in their own daylight.

At first I didn't like the ending: I thought the buttons-as-moons echoing Gass' statement about the coffee ring as the moon of daylight was merely a formal echo, with no real significance. A lot of poems end that way, like comedy routines do — they echo a previous comment for a sense of closure and fullness, then bow out to applause. But Michael's always been better than that. And he is here, too, though it took me a moment to see it. But think about it: the button-moons get tied up with the questions of authenticity and artifice, and those questions are every bit as tangled as they are in Gass' novella. The blister of paper left by the coffee is real enough, tangible and authentic, but the cashmere is artifice, representation: a mere image, an illusion rather than a reality. And even the buttons within that representation of a sweater may be (in the context of artifice and representation) authentic or artificial.

I suppose there's a sense of Anania choosing sides here: questions about artifice and authenticity don't come up in Lahiri's kind of writing (powerful as it can be). And for the Stevens of "Anecdote of the Jar," artifice is in its place (the jar, so isolated from the world to which it gives order) and reality sprawls around in its own birdy, bushy place. For Anania, as for Gass, there's no easy separation of artifice and authentic actuality: they're woven together.

Another way to think of "The Cup" — a poem committed to order but open to chance, and fascinated with the interpenetration of art and experience — is as anars poetica, played in the key of late modernism, Anania's kind of music.

Chicago Poetry Symposium 08

Ring the bells and sound the trumpets! Fire up the timpani and sackbutts in celebration: the University of Chicago has finally made a full-on commitment to the poetry of its own city! Yes, it's true. The U of C has, of course, supported poetry in many ways, and the Chicago Review has rarely been as strong as it is now, but the university has often seemed to function as a kind of Island of Laputa out of Gulliver's Travels, floating serenely through the air, wreathed in abstraction, and bound to no place in particular. The institution of a new annual symposium on Chicago Poetry, though, seems to indicate that things have changed, with the university catching a whiff of what's been cooking in the local scene. David Pavelich, who works with the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library, put together the first symposium, bringing Devin Johnston, Michael O'Leary, and Michael Anania to campus to celebrate the library's acquisition of the papers from Anania's Swallow Press years and the archives from Johnston and O'Leary's Flood Editions. The symposium, an afternoon-long series of discussions with a full house in attendance, provided a good occasion to look back on what lies behind the current flurry of poetic activity in our city — and a good occasion, it turned out, for debating the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of the city's evolving poetic scene.

The Autonomous Life

Pavelich kicked things off by quoting Kevin Killian's comment about how, when young poets ask him where to go, he tells them "Chicago is the most exciting scene around. Years from now we'll be looking back at the early 21st century and wishing we'd all relocated there at this time in poetry history." Ruminating on whether the current scene is an unprecedented flowering, or the latest of a series of periodic renaissances, Pavelich seemed to take the latter position, mentioning the Modernist era of Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay; the Henry Rago-Karl Shapiro years, the era of Michael Anania, Ralph Mills, Sterling Plumpp, Lisel Mueller, Haki Madhubuti, and above all Gwendolyn Brooks; the Paul Hoover-Maxine Chernoff-Yellow Press scene, the Paul Carroll circle, the birth of Slam, and much else besides. He then quoted Basil Buntings' observations about Chicago poetry, including the interesting claim that poetry in Chicago had "an autonomous life," unlike the European-inflected literary scene in New York. "If it's an autonomous life," said Pavelich, "it's an autonomy with a history," and with this he introduced Devin Johnston and Michael O'Leary, who took the podium to talk about one of the more recent chapters in that history, the rise of Flood Editions.

The Poetry Adventure

Michael and Devin talked about the conditions necessary for Flood to thrive, reflecting on the immensely empowering lack of authority or hierarchy in Chicago's literary scene. But the more I listened to them, the more it seemed to me that the most enabling and empowering thing in the Flood story was the shared sense of friendship and adventure among the core group of poets — Devin, Michael, Michael's brother Peter, John Tipton, and others — affiliated with the press. When Michael talked about the road-trip over a flooded Mississippi River to visit Ronald Johnson in San Francisco, and when Devin talked about a later trip with Michael and Joel Felix to see the aging Johnson and put his papers in order, everything they said (and, most especially, the way they said it) indicated that this wasn't some dry editorial collective, these were the boys and the boys were having a fantastic time, racing around the country on pilgrimages to see forgotten poets, arguing about how to set up a press and make it break even over their plates of cabbage at Scruffy's Irish Diner, and looking to old issues of BLAST, old copies of City Lights books, and to the publications of the Jargon Society for inspiration. "When I read those City Lights books," said Michael at one point, "I had some vague sense that the poets all knew each other, and wrote for each other." When Michael ended with the exhortation to "find a friend and start a press," the thing that came through, more than anything else, was the romance of group endeavor, and specifically of young, male group endeavor, with all its wayward, road-trippy, cocky splendors (long may it wave). Which isn't to say Flood is all about the guys (Lisa Jarnot and Pam Rehm are important for Flood, for example), but the energy seemed very much of a piece with the Guy Debord Situationist crew, say, or with the pile-in-the-car-guys Beat vibe. Or that's the way it sounded at the symposium.

Objection!

Perhaps it shouldn't have come as a surprise, then, that one of the first questions to follow Devin and Michael's talk came from a woman who seemed concerned about what she took to be the exclusivity of the vision of Chicago poetry being presented. She spoke a kind of grad-student-ese, but presented herself as an outsider, and expressed dissatisfaction with the "particular face" being put on Chicago poetry in the privileged context of a University of Chicago symposium. Though she didn't specify the nature of that particular face, I'm pretty sure she meant the white, male face: perhaps she'd taken her cue from Ron Silliman, who'd pointed out on his blog that none of the three speakers were women. It's not like she was wrong: almost all of the do-it-yourself, entrepreneurial, by-the-bootstraps anecdotage about Flood had been about a group of guys making something great happen on their own, out of the love of the group and the task (and make no mistake: Flood has been a great thing). And this first symposium did feature only white guys as speakers. When David Pavelich assured her that this first symposium wasn't to be the last word on Chicago poetry, she said she found the answer "unsatisfactory." I wish I'd had a chance to talk to her after Michael Anania's talk, though, since the picture he painted of Chicago poetry over the last few decades was one of the greatest possible diversity, in both aesthetic and social terms.

The Scene's Big Shoulders

"The thing about poetry in Chicago," said Michael Anania, "is that it's never where you think it is." With this, he introduced an anecdote about how he, as a promising student poet, was sent up to Chicago from Omaha in 1960 to attend a gala fund-raiser hosted by Poetry magazine. Michael approached W.H. Auden at the black-tie affair, saying "I owe it to the guy I borrowed this suit from to introduce myself." "Poet?" asked Auden. "Yes," replied Michael. "Then why don't you steal some champagne and we'll sneak off," suggested the great man, and sneak off they did, to talk for hours at the Allerton Hotel while the Great Poetry Establishment (consisting then of John Ciardi, X.J. Kennedy, and the anthology editors Louis Untermeyer and Oscar Williams) droned on at the gala. Unknown to both the gala's attendees and escapees, a far more interesting group of relatively unknown poets was meeting downtown under the tutelage of John Logan, a Notre Dame prof who'd come in to teach informal poetry seminars — a group including Bill Knott, Paul Carroll, and Charles Simic, among others.

This sense of multiple scenes, and a city big and broad enough to embrace them, pervaded Michael's story of his years in Chicago. As I listened to Michael talk about A.K. Ramanujan, Ralph Mills, and Lisel Mueller; and about Jennifer Moyer's invention of the Poetry in the Schools Program that supported Angela Jackson; and about the Obasi Workshop that launched the careers of so many African-American poets (notably Carolyn Rogers and Haki Madhubuti); and about the founding of Tia Chucha Press; and about the night Robert Bly was pelted with eggs by Evanston-based Trotskyite Surrealists (who were then counter-attacked by the Stone Soup crowd), and about Gwendolyn Brooks' integration of the white and black reading scenes, I got a real sense of the complexity, diversity, and depth of the scene over the decades.

Maybe it was the rarefied air of Hyde Park, but I left with a head full of Hegelianism, thinking about how the symposium I'd just left was not only a continuation of the city's poetic tradition, but also a kind of rising to self-consciousness of a scene that too often has had too little of a sense of its own history.

Between Baudelaire and the Catholic Left: An Open Letter to Ray Bianchi about César Vallejo

Ray Bianchi's got an interesting post up about César Vallejo, the great Peruvian poet, revolutionary, and denizen of Parisian bohemia (it was in his capacity as Parisian deminondaine character that Vallejo got his portrait sketched by Picasso, as seen to the left). Ray makes some good pints about the Andes as a cultural region (and he ought to know: he lived in Boliva) and mentions, with some frustration, the relative obscurity of Vallejo in the United States. Despite his less-bulky output, Vallejo ought to be the peer of Neruda, but comparatively few have read him. I confess to having been one of the ignorami until a few weeks ago, when Ray turned me on to Vallejo's work. By way, perhaps, of starting a bit of a dialogue, here's a letter I sent to Ray after reading Vallejo for the first time:

Hey Ray,

Just read Vallejo's first book, Los Heraldos Negros. I can see why you like him. I remember you writing,a propos our meeting about Celan, about how Celan didn't appeal to you, in part because of his rootlessness. On a first reading, I'd say that Los Heraldos Negros is a profoundly rooted book, even though it is by a man who is soon to go into a kind of exile.

What strikes me most is the strange combination two things: on the one hand, there's a strong, socially-concerned, Catholicism-and-Familia element to the poems; on the other hand there's an almost equally strong Baudelairian sense of the poet as accursed and isolated.

My touchstone poem for the first side of Vallejo is "El Pan Nuestro." I think James Wright really gets at what's important in this side of Vallejo when he writes:

"His home town was small and provincial, with an ancient and living tradition of large, affectionate families who were of necessity mobilized, as it were, against the physical and spiritual onslaughts of death in its ancient and modern forms: disease, undernourishment, and cold on one hand; the officials of the tungsten mines on the other..."

And for the late Baudelairian (or very late Byronic) sense of the poet (something akin to what Baudelaire gives us in his poem "The Albatross" -- do you know that one?) there's Vallejo's "Espergesia," with its refrain "Yo nací un día / que Dios estuvo enfermo."

Anyway, thanks for turning me on to Vallejo. I'm looking forward to reading the more surreal stuff from Trilce, and to what I'm told are the strongest poems, in Poemas Humanos.

All best,

Bob

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

In other news, Michael Anania will be reading at Danny's in Chicago on the 21st. As the famous father of one of my former students would put it, "I pity the fool who misses this."