The Meeting That Saved Modernism

You're probably wondering how San Francisco streetcar consolidation in the 1890s helped make modernism happen, and speculating on how much of the legendary Paris of the 1920s would have disappeared if Michael Stein, Gertrude's older brother, hadn't shaken railroad magnate Collis Potter Huntington's hand firmly and without perspiration.  Find out in a short essay I wrote for Partisan, "The Meeting that Saved Modernism," available online!

Modernism and Decadence, or: The Modernism That Hurts

Vince Sherry mesmerizing the present humble blogger with talk of modernist decadence

Hot damn, people! Vincent Sherry, author of such books as The Great War and the Language of Modernism and Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (which really shook things up for me) has a new book out: Modernism and the Invention of Decadence.  Here he is, talking about "the modernism that hurts."  He's a good talker, by the way: he once had me so drawn in that I followed him out of a bar in Louisville, leaving my tab unpaid.

Sherry, possibly telling Joseph Donahue that whatever I'm saying to Peter O'Leary is bunk.

Richard Strauss and the March into Modernism

The composer Richard Strauss is often seen as a bridge figure, someone whose career takes us from the world of nineteenth century bourgeois culture to the difficult, dissonant world of modernism. Alex Ross, for example, begins his study of classical music in the twentieth century, The Rest is Noise, with an examination of Strauss' opera Salome, which combined crowd-pleasing showmanship with bold dissonance and even the abandonment of music, classically conceived, for something more properly described as noise.  The middle class audience lapped it up, but it also impressed the young Arnold Schoenberg, who attended an early performance and walked away with his head abuzz with new ideas.  I have an abiding affection for Strauss' Salome: it was the first opera I attended of my own free will, as neither the captive of a school field trip nor the grumbling child dragged along by my mother.  I still remember the lavish art nouveau sets, and the giant figure of Jochanaan, surrounded by the bickering theologians, repeating simply "He is nigh." In fact, the latter has become a kind of a touchstone for me, presenting as it does a powerful critique of academics—that is: of me and my kind.

For me, though, the real moment when Strauss points the way to modernism doesn't come in Salome, but in his first opera, Guntram, which premiered more than a decade earlier, in 1894. In a way, it gives away the main plot of the story of modernism even while the protagonists to that history are in their childhoods, or not yet born. When he began writing the libretto, Strauss wanted to tell the story of the young knight Guntram, who belongs to an order dedicated to the idea of the brotherhood of all mankind (and who think of song as a tool for the creation of this brotherhood). Guntram falls in love with a noble lady, though, and accidentally kills her dictatorial, oppressive husband. Even though the husband was a terrible person, Guntram sees that he has violated the laws of his order, and announces he will be penitent and make a holy pilgrimage to cleanse his soul. That, anyway, was the first draft. But it's not the libretto Strauss ended up writing. Instead, Strauss decides to have his hero renounce his order, his religion, and everything else, and to stalk off alone.

The change mattered.  Strauss' colleague Alexander Ritter saw it as immoral and as heresy against the Great God Wagner, who would never allow a hero to disown his community.  As Ross puts it, "Strauss did not repent. Guntram's order, he told Ritter in reply, had unwisely sought to launch an ethical crusade through art, to unify religion and art."  This is the interesting bit, from the perspective of modernism.  Wagner—an enormous influence on Strauss, (Strauss' father had played French horn under Wagner's direction)—was committed to art as a form of morality, as an articulation of the values of a community.  But in the final libretto of Strauss' Guntram, we have a hero who departs with just song, and no notions of committing that song to the cause of the community, or of accommodating his music to the values of the polity.

This is important stuff: it signals the separation of the individual from the values of the broad public, but it does more than that.  The separation of the individual from the community had, after all, been a major theme of early nineteenth century Romanticism: it's a huge theme in poetry and in music, although in both genres there tends to be a desire to reintegrate the alienated individual with society. Consider Coleridge's ambivalence about his pantheism, and his desire to return to the Christian community in "The Eolian Harp," or the sailor's yearning to return to community in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Or consider the "Ode to Joy" in Beethoven's ninth symphony, where all that brooding and melancholy is finally banished in the glorious collective voice of the choir preaching the brotherhood of all. Even Byron, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, sees his glamorous exile as wandering endlessly because he was incapable of holding a place in (desirable) community due to his own dark and uncontrollable passions.  These are all individuals with an uncomfortable or ruptured relation to community, but they all have some form of yearning to reintegrate themselves into community and, more importantly, none of them are exiles specifically because they want to separate art from anything other than itself. That is: they are alienated from society, but they are not alienated because they are aesthetes. 

The great mid-nineteenth century artists are often bourgeois in outlook, hoping to put art to the service of some larger and more popular cause: Tennyson's Arthurian myths and Wagner's Teutonic ones are cases in point.  When Strauss decides to disentangle art as art from art as a part of some larger, more moralistic enterprise, he's allying himself with people like Walter Pater and the aesthetes, and starting to partake of the modern culture of specialization, of discrete fields of activity operating autonomously. Art is one of these fields, and we start to see figures like James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, figures devoted to form, to experiment, and to art first and foremost as art, not as the vehicle for the expression of community values. We begin to see figures like Gertrude Stein come into focus, with language used as language and not as the medium for anything so communal as a collective mythology or ideology.  We can even glimpse, in the distance, someone like Mark Rothko, making paintings that leave subject matter behind to consider color as color, in relation to color.

When Strauss' Guntram abandons his order at the end of the opera, he marches not just offstage, but into modernism.

History, Totality, Silence

Here's the text of the paper I'll be giving at the National Poetry Foundation's conference on the poetry of the 1980s later this week.  In the event you'd like to quote from it, here's the MLA citation format:

Archambeau, Robert.  "History, Totality, Silence." National Poetry Foundation Conference on Poetry of the 1980s.  University of Maine, Orono, ME.  30 June 2012.

History, Totality, Silence

Since the title of our panel is “Gnostics, Mystics, and Heretics of the Reagan Years,” I thought I might begin by proposing a kind of parlor game, in which we take each of the three figures under discussion today—John Taggart, John Matthias, and Laurie Anderson—and ask ourselves under which of these categories they fall.  I’m not sure if my co-panelists will want to play, but I do.  And I’ve got it on good authority that the subject of my paper, John Matthias, has heretical tendencies.  Here’s what Robert Duncan said about Matthias in an undated letter from the early 1970s:

Matthias is a goliard—one of those wandering souls out of a Dark Age in our own time… carrying with him as he goes in his pack of cards certain key cards that come ever into his hand when he plays: the juggler (as he was to be portrayed later in the Tarot), the scholar whose head is filled with learning and of amorous women and the heretic remembering witch-hunts yet to come.

A goliard! Already Matthias is in trouble, the goliards being clerical students of the middle ages who affirmed the flesh and derided the corruption of Mother Church.  And not just any goliard, but a goliard Duncan associates with the juggler of the Tarot (in esoteric decks, a figure for the magus who masters dark arts) and with the heretic seeing into a future of persecutions.  We may as well call in Torquemada’s inquisition and get this heretic burning over with.  But Duncan is talking about the Matthias of the sixties and early seventies, and thinking of Matthias’ political radicalism and of his early obsessions with alchemy and witchcraft.  What of the Matthias of the 1980s?

To ask about the Matthias of the 1980s is really to ask about three long poems that form a poetic suite: “An East Anglian Dyptich,” “Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest,” and “A Compostella Diptych,” written between 1984 and 1990, and published collectively as A Gathering of Ways.  The general project of the poems indicates a turning away from the Matthias described by Duncan: they are attempts of coming to terms with what Matthias called his “post-activist consternation” and alienation from American life.  “An East Anglian Dyptich” is Matthias’ attempt to make a psychological home for himself in England, and “Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest” represents a similar home-making project in America.  This is no longer the radical wanderer, but the poet in search of stability.  Indeed, “A Compostella Diptych,” takes as its subject the ancient pilgrim routes across France and Spain to Santiago de Compostella.  It’s an attempt by the post-activist Matthias to come to terms with, and possibly make himself at home in, both the history of the West and the dominant spiritual tradition of the West, Catholicism.

But to what terms does he come? If I were to try to sum up them up, I’d say this: in “A Compostella Diptych,” Matthias attempts to present a totalized history of the West and of Catholicism.  But he fails to find a happy totality, and this drives him toward an otherworldly yearning, a yearning for a world beyond history, an eternal world of free of violence.  This is essentially a Gnostic yearning for some eternal, infinite elsewhere of light, a yearning from which he only escapes at the very end of the poem.

When I speak of a “totalized history” in “A Compostella Diptych,” I want to use the term “totality” in a vaguely Levinasian sense: as something finite, in which diverse elements are reduced to “the violently pacified empire of Same” or “the counted-as-one” (to use Dominic Fox’s glosses for Levinas’ “totality”). With regard to history, we can think of totalization as the opposite of an unending series of discrete events— the opposite, that is, of Henry Ford’s version of history as “one damn thing after another”— or perhaps we can think of it as the hammering of such discrete phenomena into something whole, in which apparently disparate parts are in fact manifestations of a single force, or repetitions of a single pattern. We’re on the same page about this if you’re thinking of one of the most famous passages in the works of Walter Benjamin, which reads:

A [Paul] Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

This is a vision of history as total, and as total disaster.  And this very much the vision of history that Matthias gives us in “A Compostella Diptych.”

It doesn’t seem that way at first, though.  “A Compostella Diptych” begins with what seems to be a happy of the many pilgrims who have trodden the various routes through France and Spain to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostella.  There’s a barrage of proper names of people and places: some 41 different proper names in the first 45 lines of the poem.  On the face of it, this doesn’t seem like the writing of a man who would present history as a totality.  Nothing, after all, insists on irreducible specificity more than a proper name.  Indeed, proper names will be very significant at the end of the poem, when Matthias shakes himself free of a totalized version of history—but I’m getting ahead of myself.  The point I want to make here doesn’t have to do with proper names, but with a collective pronoun, “they.”  Unlike proper names, collective pronouns reduce the many to the one, and what we see happen in the opening of “A Compostella Diptych” is a reduction of the people of different European nations and centuries into a single, collective, “they”—a trans-historical subject for the people of Catholic Europe.  Here we have the multitudes “counted-as-one.”  It doesn’t seem, at first, to be anything but a joyous affair, a holy journey uniting the many.  But this all changes a few pages into the poem.  After Matthias gestures toward the song of the pilgrims, he adds this:

And there was another song—song sung inwardly

to a percussion of the jangling

manacles and fetters hanging on the branded

heretics who crawled the roads

on hands and knees and slept with lepers under

dark facades of abbeys

 the west portals of cathedrals…

There is a dissonance in the happy totality of history: those who do not fit, those who are expelled, despised, oppressed. This is a vision of the violence of the totality, and soon the history his poem recounts becomes a history of crusade, jihad, and inquisition, while a small minority yearns for an escape into timeless peace.  Indeed, history becomes totalized in a new way—as Benjamin’s totality of “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”

Matthias creates a sense of this catastrophic historical totality through four main techniques. I call them coincidence in place; rhyming actions; musical refrain; and musical reprise.

Coincidence in place presents history as total catastrophe by giving us a series of almost archeological sections in which the same geography hosts similar events over time.  For example, Matthias shows us Charlemagne’s minions slaughtered during a crusade in Spain.  These events coincident in space with later massacres of the Spanish Inquisition centuries later, and with still later massacres perpetuated by Napoleon in the Peninsular War.  We dig into the history of particular places, and, like Benjamin’s angel, see only wreckage piling upon wreckage.

By “rhyming actions” I mean historical events that Matthias presents as essentially parallel.  Notable among these is the fate of the cathedral bells of Santiago.  Early in the poem we see these hauled away by the conquering armies of Islamic Spain under Almansor, who hangs them upside down in his great mosque and uses them as candelabra.  Much later in the poem, and in history we see Alfonso VI of Castile sack the mosque and take the bells back to Santiago, installing them in the cathedral for their original use. The effect of these actions, which echo one another, is to remind the reader of conflict, and of the hubris of conquerors, as the constants of history.

There are many refrains in “A Compostella Diptych,” but among the most resonant refrains is the phrase “darkness fell at noon.”  We hear it at many moments in the poem when political disaster falls.  The refrain not only serves to unite these moments—it also connects those moments to more modern disasters.  Darkness at Noon is, after all, the title of Arthur Koestler’s novel about the evils of Stalinism.

Musical reprise is a technique quite common in opera and musical drama, but unusual in poetry: the passing of the same lyrical part from one voice to another in different contexts.  A number of different passages get a reprise in “A Compostella Diptych,” but the most insistent one is Charlemagne’s dream of war, an 18-line passage lifted from the Chanson de Roland.  We’re first given it as a prophetic dream in the mind of Charlemagne, but we hear it again, in whole or in part, in the voices of other characters (notably Aimery Picaud, the chronicler of the pilgrim routes, and John Moore, the English general killed while fighting Napoleon’s armies at Corunna), or with reference to other conflicts, including modern acts of terrorism by Basque separatists.  The effect of the reprise is to make all of history into Charlemagne’s nightmare of war—a nightmare from which we seem unable to wake up.

Not that some characters in Matthias’ poem don’t try.  Accompanying the long nightmare of history recounted in “A Compostella Diptych” is another story, a story of Gnostics who long for a world beyond this broken, bruised, and evil one in which we seem perpetually imprisoned.  This group includes the historical Gnostics and heretics of the times and places covered by the poem (Cathars, Albigensians, and the like).  But Matthias interprets Gnosticism broadly, and includes in it the Eleusinian mysteries, the practioners of the medieval Trobar Clus, and the Sufi mystics of Islamic Spain.  He even includs Ezra Pound, wandering as a young man through the south of France, and dreaming of a light beyond the nightmare and wreckage of history.

There is much in “A Compostella Diptych” to indicate that Matthias would join with the Gnostic tradition, especially in the poem’s final section.  Here, Matthias presents us with a moment where we seem to leave history, and indeed this world, behind, in an intersection of the timeless with time.  The occasion for the intersection is the explosion of an enormous Spanish armory, an explosion that shakes foundations and, from many miles away, creates shockwaves that ring the Santiago cathedral bells, the same ones that had been hauled away by conquering Moors and hauled back by crusaders.  Now, we’re told

                                                Men

whose job it was to ring them stood

amazed out in the square & wondered if this thunder

and the ringing was in time for Vespers

or Nones or if it was entirely out of time…

As it turns out, it’s the latter: the explosion is followed by a stillness that Matthias identifies with the silence before the existence of time. We are taken to a place of stillness “As it was…in the silence that preceded silence” when “there were neither rights nor hopes nor sadnesses to speak of,” where “in the high and highest places everything was still.”  We’re outside of time, and certainly outside of the totalized, catastrophic history with which the poem has presented.  Indeed, inasmuch as we are in some boundless place, we have escaped totality, and encountered the infinite.

Another kind of poet would end things here.  Indeed, a properly modernist poet would end things here—gathered into the artifice of eternity (as in “Sailing to Byzantium”), or purged of worldliness by fire (as in “Little Gidding”).  But Matthias doesn’t. Instead of turning from the world of history, he returns to it—in fact, for the first time in the poem, he enters history by name, appearing with his wife Diana on the pilgrim trails.  Here’s the passage:

Towards Pamplona, long long after all Navarre

was Spain, and after the end

of the Kingdom of Aragon, & after the end of the end,

I, John, walked with my wife Diana

down the Somport Pass following the silence

that invited and received my song

It goes on, in prose saturated with more proper nouns—29 in 21 lines—to describe John and Diana “blest and besotted” in Spain, and in their moment of history.  Escape to a timeless realm would be the Gnostic’s happy ending, but the true spiritual tradition informing “A Gathering of Ways” turns out to be something rather different, the best analog for which is the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.  For Levinas, the encounter with the unbounded or infinite is not an end in itself: rather, it returns us to experience with a sense of both wonder, and an invitation to enter into dialogue with the world.  And this sort of return and invitation is what we get in “A Compostella Diptych” when Matthias appears in the historical terrain of his poem, and when the silence “invite[s] and receive[s]” his song.  The encounter with the infinite releases him from a sense that history is catastrophe and nothing more.  Moreover, by inviting Matthias' particular song, the infinite shows it welcomes proliferation, rather than the reductions of totalization: Matthias' song is just one voice in a boundless infinity, not the total summation of all things.

It’s important to note the role of proper names here, because it underlines a slight difference between Matthias and Levinas.  For Levinas, the encounter with the infinite comes about through confronting a human face, in all its particularity.  For Matthias, though, the encounter with the infinite is with something still and silent and beyond us.  But the effect of that encounter is to return us to the world of specific people and places, the world of proper names—and to show us that this world is not reducible to some totalized history of catastrophe.  Particularity trumps totalization at the end of the poem, as a litany of proper names unassimilated into a grand pattern of catastrophe leaves us blessed and besotted.  In the end, it is this return that prevents Matthias from being a Gnostic.  As much as he is fascinated with that tradition, he can’t join it: he is too much in love with all of us who can be named.

Modernism, or Talking to Dead People

Wars, the persecution of heretics, the whole centuries-long history of Spain as the Islamic realm of Al-Andalus, the Chanson de Roland: this is the stuff of John Matthias’ long, late-modernist poem “A Compostella Dipytch.  The poem came about after Matthias walked the ancient pilgrimage route from southern France to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostella, near the westernmost point of Spain.  Not long ago I was talking to an old friend of Matthias about how I love the poem, mostly because of how it opens up whole layers of history and turns them into a kind of music.  Matthias’ friend also admitted to admiring the historical nature of the poem, and then commented on how different Matthias’ experience of walking across Spain was from that of a younger poet he knew.  Where Matthias saw the past everywhere, the younger poet saw the present: the living world of German backpackers and American trust-fund kids, the world of hostels and internet cafes and casual romance and talk of high-tech hiking boots.  This, said Matthias’ friend, was how you could tell Matthias is truly a modernist: whereas the younger poet talks to the others on the trail, Matthias spends a lot of his time talking to dead people, thinking about what he’s read and what he sees left behind in old churches and in ancient pilgrim way-stations.

There’s something to the idea that modernist poetry converses with the dead as much, or more, than with the living.  It is, after all, at the core of that most significant of modernist essays, T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where Eliot tells us

…if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged.... Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want if you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense [which] involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order….

There it is: the past as something alive around us, as much present on any pilgrim route as the backpacker up ahead yakking on his iPhone and wolfing down Protein bars.  When I explain this to students, I usually begin by telling them that every time they open their mouths to speak, it's the year 1066 again.  This is actually a pretty bad pedagogical strategy, since my students are overwhelmingly American, and have generally been taught almost nothing about English history. I usually have to remind them that 1066 was the year of the Norman conquest, when a French-speaking elite displaced the Anglo-Saxon regime in England, initiating a long, slow process whereby French and Anglo-Saxon fused to create the hybrid creature we call the English language.  So when you say "the submarine went underwater" you're doing something that couldn't happen had the Normans lost the Battle of Hastings: you're using a French-derived word ("submarine," coming from the French "sous-marin") and something closer to Anglo-Saxon ("under water," linked to the Germanic "unter wasser").  The results of a battle in 1066 matter now, and in a sense that battle lives on in virtually every English sentence.  And there are implications of this presence of the past poetry.  Eliot goes on:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead... what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.… Whoever has approved this idea of order… will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past…

Of course a lot of people, my students among them, do find it preposterous that the present can modify the past (and it is preposterous, in the root meaning of that word: "preposterous" originally meant a confusing of time periods, a placing of the pre- and the post- in the wrong positions).  But there's some sense to Eliot here.  Consider Satan.  Or, at any rate, consider Satan from Milton's Paradise Lost.  Milton means for him to be a villain, but William Blake famously observed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it," meaning that Milton was more of a rebel than he thought he was, that a poem intended as a defense of obedience to God was really more in love with individualism than anything else.  And after Romanticism — after Blake's Milton and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and a thousand other poems and plays and novels that echo and reinterpret Milton — it's difficult to see Paradise Lost as one could see it before Romanticism.  Milton's initially villainous Satan now seems to have had many of the positive qualities the Romantics found in him.


By the time we get to modernism, this kind of revisiting and revising of the literature of the past has become one of the major poetic moves: Eliot scrapes together the fragments that make up his Waste Land, Pound reworks Homer in The Cantos, David Jones mines Welsh literature and legend, H.D. reworks the classics in Helen in Egypt, and so on.  (It's important to make a distinction here between modernism and the avant-garde, which often wanted to shrug off the past).

So many modernists wanted to converse with the dead poets.  But why?

A big part of the answer comes when we look at modernist poetry in relation to the larger literary culture around it.  Indeed, if we don't, we'll never fully understand why modernists wrote as they did.  And the larger literary culture around them was mass culture in its early dawn.  Andreas Huyssen has argued, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, that the two phenomena come into being in tandem, that "the twin establishment of a sphere of high autonomous art and a sphere of mass culture" only make sense in relation to one another.  Indeed, he says, since they're beginnings "modernism and mass culture have been engaged in a compulsive pas de deux."

There are a lot of reasons for the rise of mass culture, with its cheap novels, its enormous output of crime writing, its how-to and self-improvement books, but for the moment it's just important to note the incredible rise of this sort of literature from the 1880s on into the period between the two world wars (things start to change then — D.L. LeMahieu's study A Culture for Democracy explains how).  Publishers in the 1850s and 1860s could actually expect to make a reasonable, even substantial, profit from poetry, but the growth of the mass market for works appealing to a relatively low level of literacy meant that profit margins were so much higher in other genres that, by the turn of the century, poetry became a marginal commodity.  Poets were very much aware of this, and modernist poets often sought to find a justification for their work in terms other than popularity, on the grounds of which they lost decisively to more commercial works.  Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" captured the situation perfectly:

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace,

Something for the modern stage,

Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries

Of the inward gaze;

Better mendacities 

Than the classics in paraphrase!

The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster, 

Made with no loss of time, 

A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster

Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

Here we see modernism against the mass culture of its time—in fact, we see it being defined at its core as in opposition to the mass culture of its time.  Huyssen puts it this way: "modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture."

One way to oppose the mass culture of the present was to turn to the already-esteemed culture of the past: to acquire tradition by the sweat of one's brow, to start talking to dead people. It's tempting to see the whole phenomenon as a defensive turn.  You can't beat murder novels in sales?  So what!  Those tawdry writers may be reaching a lot of readers, but you're not insignificant, Mr. Modernist! You're changing the whole meaning and direction of the tradition!  You don't have a place in the market, but you've got a place in history!

Well, that makes the modernist ideal sound like a huge ego trip, and I suppose it can be.  But there are more sympathetic ways this plays out: I remember talking to the poet Joseph Donahue not long ago about the lack of audience for complex mystical poetry like his, and he told me that he derives satisfaction less from the connection with an audience now than from participation in a centuries-long tradition of mystics and poets, from continuing the conversation they began.  That's talking to dead people in the grand old modernist tradition, and it isn't a matter of seeking to slake the ego with a sense of personal historical significance.

Of course there's more substance to the modernist rejection of mass culture than simply a defensiveness about being displaced in the marketplace.  Yeats, for example, argued in his great essay "What is Popular Poetry" that for poems to be truly significant and beautiful, they must appeal to and resonate with tradition, they must look to old legends and myths and  "borrow their beauty from those that used them before," because then the emotions of the poem will be seen "moving before a half-faded curtain embroidered with kings and queens, their loves and battles and their days out hunting."  A poetry that talks to dead people, Yeats argues, will have an enormous resonance beyond what is possible for writing that doesn't allude to what has come before.  

There's a great deal of truth to this: I think, again, of the poetry of John Matthias, which often gives us arcane bits of old text, or antiquated pieces of our language.  The critic Vincent Sherry once said of the poetry of John Matthias, that, “on the one hand, the pedagogue offers from his word-hoard and reference trove the splendid alterity of unfamiliar speech; on the other, this is our familial tongue, our own language in its deeper memory and reference.”  We get to see our own language, and our own ways of experiencing the world, connected to their roots, to the words and ideas and ways of living from which we come.  This makes us more at home in the world, and more knowledgeable about ourselves: we see something of where we came from, and thus become more empowered in understanding why we are as we are.  We even become more capable of change, since we see that the things we think of as permanent have a history, and can thus be changed.  There is, at least potentially, a very liberationist politics at work in any kind of writing that leads us to understand our history.

There's also a preservationist politics to modernism of this kind, of course.  In the modern era of Schumpeter's capitalist "creative destruction," when (as Marx wrote) "all that is solid melts into air," the insistence on retaining a tradition is a kind of statement of dissent, though it's often a reactionary dissent.  That's certainly what it is in Pound, in Eliot, and in Yeats, where the present often appears as a horrible distortion and despoiling of a better, finer past, to which the poets wish we could return.

There's another issue involved, too, which we might think of as political.  When a poet talks to dead people, you're not going to understand the conversation if you, too, haven't tuned in to the past and done the (pleasurable, luxurious) work of acquiring a sense of the appropriate traditions.  Many people find this off-putting right at the start.  Many, too, find it elitist: it sets up a certain barrier to instant understanding for the reader, and, if you take it as a principle not just of reading but of writing, it sets up a very high cost of entry for anyone seeking to set up as a poet. 

When I hear the charge that modernist poetry is elitist and therefore excludes readers, I generally think of three things by way of response.  Firstly, I think of the poet Michael Anania, who pointed out that all of his allusions and historical references are simply things that one can look up, a difficulty far from insurmountable in the age of Google and Wikipedia.  Secondly, I think of the effort many people expend trying to get to the final level of a video game: they don't call those games elitist, even though they require a great deal more effort to get through than, say, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and the glosses on its allusions (and anyway, one could argue that the effort in both cases is, in fact, the main source of pleasure).  Finally, I think of something the dear, late poet Reginald Shepherd said:

It’s often said that “difficult” poems exclude potential readers. This can certainly be true, but I feel excluded by poems that give me nothing to do as a reader, that offer me no new experience and nothing I didn’t already know. It’s wearying to read such poems, and it makes me want to watch music videos instead, where at least one sometimes gets glimpses of shirtless guys with six-pack abs. Any good poem gives the reader something, what Allen Grossman calls the interest of the world: feelings, sensations, experiences. 

Reginald may have looked for different things in music videos than I do, but we have turned to poems for the same reasons.

With regard to the charge that the approach to becoming a poet that Eliot outlined in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is elitist and restrictive — one can only respond that it's true.  If you want to be the kind of poet who talks to dead people (and that's not the only kind of poet), you're going to have to spend a lot of time in conversation with old books.  There's certainly an elitism to this, in that it requires a great deal of time and effort, and there's a material and financial reality behind the opportunity to take that time and make that effort. Of course the old modernist path to becoming a poet does not propose as great a material and financial burden as the new, 21st century way of becoming a poet we have in America: the completion of an MFA program.  It's what our age demands, and in a way, the existence of these programs has shown the inexorable progress of the very forces of modernity — standardization, credentialing, commercialization, and commodification — that led so many modernists to turn against modernity itself and immerse themselves in the splendid alterity of the past.

Modernism and the Market

“He is one of those tormented spirits who seek in art the solution, not to the problem of success, but to the problem of their own being.” So said the critic Tadeuz Boy-Żeleński, writing about the great Stanizlaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. I know what you're thinking: “the great Stanizlaw Ignacy What-kee-what?” No, Witkiewicz isn't some hoax, or the latest literary persona projected by Kent Johnson's fervid imagination. Witciewicz — who also went by the name Witacky, as well as Witkas, Witkrejus, St. Witacky à la fourchette, Vitcatius, and Mahatma Witkac, among others — was a Polish modernist writer and painter, a prolific playwright, essayist, portraitist, and novelist, and a kind of eastern European Aldous Huxley, pioneering new explorations in drug-fueled consciousness (his specialization was peyote). Under-appreciated in his short lifetime, which ended with a tragic suicide while Hitler and Stalin were dividing Poland, he became an important figure to Polish intellectuals when he was rediscovered in the 1950s. If this were the 1980s, I'd say Witkiewicz was best known to American readers via Czeslaw Milosz's book The Captive Mind, which takes its premise about a magic pill that reconciled Europeans to the decline of their civilization from Witkiewicz's novel Insatiability, but since the end of the Cold War The Captive Mind seems to have slipped out of our collective consciousness. So I'm guessing Witkiewicz's works are terra incognita, even for people into the freakier forms of modernist literary and artistic expression. He was little more than a name to me until I started pawing through Daniel Gerould's Witkiewicz Reader, which has been sitting unread on my shelves for God knows how many years.


One of the best-known pieces in the book (if we can describe any of them as well-known outside of Poland) is the wonderful "Rules of the S.I. Witkiewicz Portrait-Painting Firm," a 1928 document lying somewhere in the territory between manifesto and business contract — a strange and little-visited country indeed. It's fascinating, because in it's strange, farcical way it shows the contradictory position of the modernist artist caught between two apparently irreconcilable forces: the power of the market to determine the nature of cultural production; and the assertion of the artist's necessary autonomy from all things save the dictates of his own imagination.


Even the title of the piece raises questions about the relation of art to the marketplace: a painter, after all, is meant to be an individual sensibility, but here the painter is presented as a firm, a collective business enterprise. In the text itself, we read about certain behaviors of the clients putting the firm in a bad mood, though, so there is some confusion about the nature of the business enterprise: is it a single, moody genius, or is it a business operation? It is both — because of the conflicting demands of artistic autonomy (be a genius! paint out of individual inspiration!) and of the marketplace (paint to order! produce something that sells, preferably on a large scale, and by systematic methods so as to guarantee quality and consistency!). As Witciewicz/Witacky/Witkas/Witkrejus/St. Witacky à la fourchette/Vitcatius/Mahatma Witkac knew, identity had to be plural and even contradictory under modern conditions!


The rules of the firm are quite precise, and include the following descriptions of the sorts of portraits produced:





The firm produces portraits of the following types:

1. Type A - Comparatively speaking, the most as it were, 'spruced up' type. Rather more suitable for women's faces than men's. 'Slick' execution, with a certain loss of character in the interests of beautification, or accentuation of 'prettiness'.

2. Type B - More emphasis on character but without any trace of caricature. Work making greater use of sharp line than type A, with a certain touch of character traits, which does not preclude 'prettiness' in women's portraits. Objective attitude to the model.

3. Type B + s (supplement) - Intensification of character, bordering on the caricatural. The head larger than natural size. The possibility of preserving 'prettiness' in women's portraits, and even of intensifying it in the direction of the 'demonic'.

4. Type C, C + Co, E, C + H, C + Co + E, etc. - These types, executed with the aid of CHO5 and narcotics of a superior grade, are at present ruled out. Subjective characterization of the model, caricatural intensification both formal and psychological are not ruled out. Approaches abstract composition, otherwise known as 'Pure Form'.

5. Type D - The same results without recourse to any artificial means.

6. Type E - Combinations of D with the preceding types. Spontaneous psychological interpretation at the discretion of the firm. The effect achieved may be the exact equivalent of that produced by types A and B - the manner by which it is attained different, as is the method of execution, which may take various forms but never exceeds the limit(s). A combination of E + s is likewise available on request.

Type E is not always possible to execute.

7. Children's type - (B + E) - Because children can never stand still, the purer type B is in most instances impossible - the execution rather takes the form of a sketch.

So there's the range: from Joshua Reynolds-style "prettified" idealizations, in the manner of the patron-driven world of eighteenth-century art, to the more "subjective" work of the contemporary genius, who offers us less mimesis and more of his own (sometimes drug-fueled) idiosyncratic vision. From Augustan prettiness to Romantic opium-dreams to Modern quasi-caricature, it's all there. But the important thing is that it's all a menu, a market-based system of ordering. The market makes all styles are available, even those of the self-absorbed dreamer, the figure we think of as ignoring the market. It's not the case that the producer of the paintings is totally disempowered in this system, though: in fact it is he who is dictating the terms of the contract.

Those terms include clauses designed to protect the delicate sensibility of the artist — a trait we think of as inimical to the demands of the marketplace. Here, for example, are some later clauses:

Any sort of criticism on the part of the customer is absolutely ruled out. The customer may not like the portrait, but the firm cannot permit even the most discreet comments without giving its special authorization. If the firm had allowed itself the luxury of listening to customers' opinions, it would have gone mad a long time ago. We place special emphasis on this rule, since the most difficult thing is to refrain the customer from making remarks that are entirely uncalled for. The portrait is either accepted or rejected - yes or no, without any explanations whatsoever as to why. Inadmissable criticism likewise includes remarks about whether or not it is a good likeness, observations concerning the background, covering part of the face in the portrait with one hand so as to imply that this part really isn't the way it should be, comments such as, 'I am too pretty,' 'Do I look that sad?', 'That's not me," and all opinions of that sort, whether favourable or unfavourable. After due consideration, and possibly consultation with third parties, the customer says yes (or no) and that's all there is to it - then he goes (or does not go) up to what is called the 'cashier's window', that is, he simply hands over the agreed-upon sum to the firm. Given the incredible difficulty of the profession, the firm's nerves must be spared.

Asking the firm for its opinion of a finished portrait is not permissable, nor is any discussion about a work in progress.

Inadmissable criticism likewise includes remarks about whether or not it is a good likeness, observations concerning the background, covering part of the face in the portrait with one hand so as to imply that this part really isn't the way it should be, comments such as, 'I am too pretty,' 'Do I look that sad?', 'That's not me," and all opinions of that sort, whether favourable or unfavourable.

The firm reserves the right to paint without any witnesses, if that is possible.

So we've got the isolation of the autonomous artist, alone with his genius, enshrined in the terms of a market-based contract: art is both autonomous and heteronomous (that is, based in a market system). Witkiewicz is out to have it both ways, or at least to point out how difficult the position of the artist becomes when he's supposed to be both autonomous and able to succeed in the modern marketplace.

Further clauses indicate the difficulty of the artist's circumstances under the double regime of autonomy and the market. Consider the following, and then consider how likely any client would be to agree to them, especially from a painter without great reputation:

The portrait may not be viewed until finished.

The technique used is a combination of charcoal, crayon, pencil and pastel. All remarks with regard to technical matters are ruled out, as are demands for alterations.

The firm undertakes the painting of portraits outside the firm's premises only in exceptional circumstances (sickness, advanced age, etc.) in which case the firm must be guaranteed a secret receptacle in which the unfinished work may be kept under lock and key.

The firm will, it seems, come to you. But only if you can replicate the private conditions of the autonomous genius, free from distraction, free from any input on form or medium, and any expression of desire for revision. You're the boss, Mr. Customer — just so long as we understand that the artist answers to no one.

In the end, there's an admission that the artist is not as empowered in the market as he might wish to appear: "Lacking any powers of enforcement," says Witkiewicz, "the firm counts on the tact and good will of its customers to meet the terms."

How, then, is the conundrum of autonomy and the market resolved? The artist becomes a kind of Blanche Dubois, and depends on the kindness of any stranger entering the studio with a checkbook.

Adam Kirsch's Heidegger and Modern Poetry

"Sometimes," I recall my high school art teacher saying as he looked through my sketchbook, "it's by fucking up that we get the most interesting results." I never knew whether to take that as praise or as blame, and I don't know how Adam Kirsch would take what I'm about to say about his essay on Heidegger and modern poetry from the January issue of Poetry were he to read this. (Yeah, I'm just getting around to reading it — some of us are slow, okay?). But what I want to say is this: Kirsch has his Heidegger sideways, but I think his off-base reading of "The Origin of the Work of Art" takes him to some interesting places. "Fucking up" is, by the way, not really a fair way of describing Kirsch's piece, which isn't bad at all, despite the flattening-out of some of Heidegger's philosophical mountains — but those words from my art teacher are a touchstone of mine, and they do sort of bear on Kirsch's essay, which makes all of its headway out of what I take to be a misreading of Heidegger.

Kirsch's Heidegger

The most interesting thesis of Kirsch's essay, "The Taste of Silence," is that we could write an interesting history of poetry over the last century or so by examining it as a turn away from a poetry of the world and toward a poetry of the earth. Kirsch takes the terms "earth" and "world" from Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art," where, he tells us, they have very particular meanings. In Kirsch's view, Heidegger's term "earth" refers to "the sensuous reality of the non-human, which we tend to forget when we are engaged in practical tasks" while "world" refers to "the historical human context in which we work, suffer, and hope." Both of these are inevitably present in the work of art, but for Kirsch, the poet can align himself or herself with one or the other side of "the dichotomy of earth and world."

Where the poet lines up in terms of this dichotomy will have an effect on the nature of the poetry itself. "If the poet is primarily concerned with earth—with displaying particular being and concrete reality," says Kirsch, "he will tend to conceive of poetry as a passive art, concerned with perception and preservation. The ideal of such poetry is naming..." But if the poet is "more concerned with world—with the historical, mythic, and spiritual context that the poem creates or invokes—he will tend to see poetry as an active art, and in some sense even a domineering one." In this case, the poet "wants to interpret experience for the reader. He goes beyond names to commandments." In fact, his art "imposes an order" on reality.

A Journey from the World to the Earth

After laying down this précis of Heidegger, Kirsch applies it to the history of poetry since Modernism. "The Modernists," says Kirsch,

looked to poetry to re-establish a world, in the Heideggerian sense, at a time when the world they inherited had been shattered. Modernist poetry wants to ... projec[t] new coordinates of meaning and order. In Yeats's ghosts and gyres, in Pound's sages and tyrants, in Eliot's "idea of a Christian society," we find various attempts to create a world. Yet none of these worlds is authoritative enough ... to inaugurate a new cult and a new history. Instead, they remain—like Heidegger's own work, perhaps—expressions of longing for a lost world, and nostalgia for a time when poets had the power to make a new one.

After what Kirsch sees as the Modernist failure to establish, through poetry, a system of meanings and values, poets have turned from this world-making project to a poetry with more modest, less legislative ambitions, a poetry concerned with what Kirsch thinks of as Heidegger's earth:

Yet the failure of the poetry of world has not meant the end of Heidegger's influence. On the contrary, poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are deeply in his debt, directly and indirectly. That is because the decline of the poetry of world has meant the rise of the poetry of earth. This poetry—our poetry—prefers to imagine the artist not as a creator, but as a witness.

Judging from the examples Kirsch sites, I'd say the common thread of this poetry is its emphasis on a defamiliarization of the ordinary, material world (a great image from a Heaney poem about the "Scissor-and-slap abruptness of a latch./Its coldness to the thumb" is my favorite of these examples). And Kirsch really does seem to think that this is the common denominator of contemporary poetry after modernism — he calls it "our poetry" and claims that it extends across a range of poets "as different as Seamus Heaney, Charles Simic, and Billy Collins." That range — all the way from A to B, or possibly to C — may well give one pause. But more on that later.

Heidegger without Kirsch

I actually don't think we should give everything Kirsch says the chuck, but I've got to say that the ideas he presents don't really have much of a basis in Heidegger's essay. I mean, I don't know what they told Kirsch about Heidegger up at Harvard, but at the University of Manitoba we heard something different about "The Origin of the Work of Art." (Which is not to say that I nailed Heidegger on the first take: I remember how, years later, both Gerald Bruns and Krysztof Ziarek had to go upside my head with a copy of Sein und Zeit before things Heideggerian really began to gel for me).

In fact, I think the first thing hard-core Heidegger guys like Bruns and Ziarek would say to Kirsch is something along the lines of "Dichotomy of earth and world?!? Dichotomy?!? Dichotomy you say? Surely you don't mean dichotomy but dialectic! DIALECTIC, I SAY!" And yeah, they'd have a point: if a dichotomy involves (as my second-favorite dictionary of philosophy tells me) "the division of things into two basic parts that are regarded as fundamentally and/or irreducibly different," and a dialectic involves "the process by which a thought or an existing thing leads to or changes into its opposite," then Heidegger definitely sees the manifestation of earth and world in the work of art as having a dialectical relationship. But let's not start there. Let's start with what Heidegger means by earth and by world — because what he means by those terms is rather different than what Kirsch seems to think he means.

Check it out. Contra what Kirsch implies, when Heidegger writes about earth he isn't referring to, you know, physical stuff per se — not rocks, or trees, or door-latches. Instead, he's referring to the tendency of things to resist our ability to understand, or even to notice, them. There's a whole realm of the unknown and not-understood out there, and it surrounds and contains us, even makes up a great deal of our physical self and our psyche, and this is what Heidegger has in mind when he writes about the earth (yeah, I know, it's an odd term, but it plays into a whole series of extended metaphors in Heidegger's writings, so let's let it slide). There's a famous passage, in "On the Origin of the Work of Art," in which Heidegger talks about a Van Gogh painting depicting some old, worn-looking peasant shoes. He says that shoes like this are generally things we don't notice (as opposed, one imagines, to the sort of shoes you'd buy here) — we wear them and use them as equipment, for their instrumental value, and we tend not to notice them when we do. Shoes like this, when they're actually worn, "belon[g] to the earth" says Heidegger — and they belong their not so much because they are material objects, but because they go unnoticed and un-thought-of. But we notice them in Van Gogh's painting, where they become part of something more. Here, in the painting, they get noticed or, in the standard translation of Heidegger, become "unconcealed." It's the concealedness of the shoes before they get into the painting, when they're just something around us that we don't notice, that makes them belong to the earth. The earth and the things that belong to it are self-concealing, and withdrawn from our attention and understanding.

But what about the world, in Heidegger's sense? Yeah. Okay. So it's like this. The world, for Heidegger, is the context in which and through which we apprehend, understand, or notice things — it's where things become (to use the Heideggerian term) "unconcealed." I mean, Kirsch is sort of semi-right when he says that world consists of "the historical and the mythic," but it's broader than that, and the important thing here is the fact that things like history and myth make us aware of things, they unconceal them. History, myth, etc. give us a way of noticing things, talking about them and feeling their presence. Heidegger's "world" is sort of like what a later generation would call "discourse" — the systems of thought and representation that let us notice things. As an example, let me mention how I had a pretty visceral experience of entering a different world than my habitual one when I started taking long bike rides through the woods with colleagues from the biology department — after a few months, my sense of my environment went from one where I noticed only greenery and bugs to one where I could tell my myriapods from my bryozoans. Well, on a good day I could. Anyway, you get the point: the world I'd entered, or that the bio boys led me to, made a whole lot more of the earth apparent to me. But maybe this is misleading, since it seems to imply that the earth is all a matter of material, ecosystemic stuff for Heidegger, which it isn't. I imagine that if I were to hang with my musicologist pal some more, and enter his world a bit, I would become more aware of sound patterns. That is, it would make non-biological, non-material stuff come out of earthly concealment into the unconcealment of the world. I mean, it's important not to think of the earth here as material stuff, but rather as that-which-we-don't-notice-or-understand, or that-which-conceals-itself-from-us (although that last phrase, which is closer to Heidegger's, gives the earth a weird kind of agency). This is really where Kirsch's essay distorts things most. Anyway, you get the idea, right? What? Move on, you say? Right.

So anyway, about that whole 'the relation of earth and world in Heidegger is a dialectic not a dichotomy' thing. It's true! That is, in the work of art, earth and world are always involved in a kind of struggle. If a work of art were pure world, it wouldn't be art, it'd be propaganda, or ideology: a closed system of mental coordinates that never come into contact with anything that resists it. It'd be sort of Orwellian. But the art work doesn't allow anything so easy to happen. Even as it starts to open up a whole world (or discourse, or paradigm, or way of understanding) for us, it gives us elements that resist appropriation into that world. If the work of art in question is, say, a poem, we might say that it resists paraphrase, or closure; or that parts of it remain indeterminate; or that it shoots off so many connotations that we're uneasy reducing it to a denotative meaning. Any attempt to make the art work into mere world runs up against all kinds of elements that escape that world. Robert B. Stulberg put it this way in a fantastic little article in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism back in 1973:

In the calm self-repose of the work, the world and the earth are engaged in a struggle, a struggle in which each 'opponent' attempts to assert its own self in the art work. The earth — the concealing and self-closing realm — tries to draw the world into itself. The world — the open and unhidden realm — tries to surmount the hidden earth... Heidegger ... explains that the struggle is never entirely resolved in the work of art...

Earth and world oppose one another, but they also need one another. You wouldn't exist as a conscious entity without some kind of world, or paradigm; and a work of art wouldn't function without proposing one, however partially and provisionally. At the same time, no world is absolute, no world exhausts the possibilities of earth. I mean, think like Bakhtin for a moment and it all becomes clearer — for Bakhtin, no one kind of language reveals all of the truth, in fact, each conceals a certain part of it (medical language gets at the truth of your body, but not of your personality, say; legal language gets at the truth of your rights in a given society, but not at much else). Or maybe the better analogy is with Wittgenstein, and his famous statement "the limits of my language are the limits of my world." For Heidegger, all worlds are limited, all conceal even as they reveal. And I think it's the failure to emphasize this part of Heidegger's thinking that leads Kirsch to some suspect statements about Modernism.

Meeting the Moderns

Hey. You must really be into this whole Heidegger deal if you're still with me. Either that, or you bear Adam Kirsch some strange animus, and are looking for me to really lay into him (you're out of luck if that's the case: I'm going to wheel this essay around in the next section and claim that, despite his somewhat dodgy take on Heidegger, Kirsch makes an intriguing, and quite probably true, point about contemporary poetry).

Anyway. Kirsch's take on the Modernists is that they are drawn to the idea of world-creation, to projecting systems of values and to the "domineering" act of forging "new coordinates of meaning and order." This, I have to say, I don't quite get. At least not in most cases. Kirsch argues that the Modernists wanted to present worlds in the sense of thrusting domineering, totalizing systems of knowledge upon us, but that they somehow failed to make these things come together. But come on. It isn't like Eliot wanted to say that there was a single key to all mythologies — if he did, he'd have written a book like Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance, not a deliberately fragmentary poem that riffs on that book, and refuses to settle into a smooth whole. In fact, Eliot's The Waste Land seems much more like Heidegger's idea of the work of art as a place where a world starts to open up for us, but then falls away into concealment and unmeaning. Kirsch might have a point when it comes to Pound, who seems to have wanted The Cantos to cohere into a kind of ideology, and who's confession near the end of the poem that he couldn't "make it cohere" sounds like an admission of failure. But this failure to create a coherent world wouldn't be a failure from a Heideggerian perspective: it would simply be an example of the work of art doing what it does, and ought to do: bringing world (or unconcealedness) into relation with earth (or concealedness).

[Would it be muddying these already murky waters to point out that William Carlos Williams, with his "no ideas but in things" poetic, is a Modernist who doesn't try to project value systems so much as he tries to focus our attention on material things — thus making him a poet of "earth" in Kirsch's sense, though not necessarily in Heidegger's? Yeah, you're right, it probably would. So I won't mention it. Right, then. Moving on.]

Kirsch without Heidegger

So okay. Kirsch's take on Heidegger is a bit sketchy: his notion of earth being out of whack with Heidegger's, and his sense of the relation of earth and world being different from that proposed by Heidegger, too. But let's set all that aside. I mean, does an idea really need a pedigree to be taken seriously? There's one element of Kirsch's essay I want to take seriously: his proposal that poets have become reticent about projecting "coordinates of meaning and order." I think there's something to this. I don't want to propose that "our poetry believes" that we shouldn't project coordinates of meaning. That would be a generalization (even a totalization). I mean, is this really universal? I'd say it's just prevalent. There's also a reification in Kirsch's statement ("our poetry" is an abstraction and doesn't believe anything, it's poets who believe things). I'm skittish around both the totalization and the reification, but I do think Kirsch is on to something. There are plenty of poets who do what Kirsch says "our poetry" does: they "witness" (Kirsch's word) "the sensuous reality of the non-human" things of the world, and draw our attention to them, without aiming to issue "commandments" about how we should judge, interpret, and value these things.

In fact, if we move beyond the excruciatingly narrow range of poets Kirsch discusses, we find a related phenomenon among writers of more experimental verse. Take a guy like Jeremy Prynne. He's certainly not a no-ideas-but-in-things poet, who defamiliarizes the common objects of the world for us as a way of avoiding making Big Totalizing Statements and Proposing A Dominant Ideology. But he's got a goal quite similar to poets who take that path: he's all about avoiding the kind of world-projecting, or ideology-creating that Kirsch writes about. In the polydiscursive poetry of his early period, for example, he's all about showing the limits of any particular kind of language, or ideology, or world-projection. As N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge put it in Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne, "Prynne would want a poetry neither useful to some manipulative power, nor providing musical accompaniment to a commodifying culture," and he structures his poems accordingly. In Heidegger's terms, there's a whole lot of earthly concealment going on in them, and a lot of undoing of worldly unconcealments. Prynne makes a big deal out of the idea of "rubbish" — the sort of thing we don't notice, and have no use for, and would like to exclude from our worlds. For him,

Rubbish is
pertinent; essential; the
most intricate presence in
our entire culture

(from "L'Extase de M. Poher" — the spacing is quite different in the original, but my html skills are weak, people, weak)

That is, he finds the idea of the excluded and unnoticed and unused important, because it points to the limitations of our systems of meaning. Rubbish is, by definition, something that we discard and don't want to think about. It highlights the limits of our world.

Okay. So I don't have any more empirical evidence than Kirsch does, but I do sense from my general rooting-around-in-poetry that the reticence about proposing systems of value that Kirsch sees among his range of poets exists; and my sense is that, in different ways, this reticence is shared by many members of an experimental writing community that seems to lie outside of Kirsch's range of knowledge, or maybe just outside his range of sympathy. But if this is indeed the case, one might well wonder, you know, why? Why don't many poets want to do that Dante thing and lay down The Authoritative Values of Our Culture in Unambiguous Four-Part Allegory? Ah! I think I have it! And I think I can break it down in a a single paragraph! (Well, in a provisional kind of way — the confidence is not so much me as it is the coffee. Can you tell that I've been writing this while working my way through a giant carafe of Intelligentsia Panamanian El Machete Fair Trade Goodness?).

The Culture of Critical Discourse

Yeah. So it's like this (in a provisional, non-totalizing, probably-part-of-the-answer way): much contemporary poetry, both of the Nobel-and-U.S-laureate type Kirsch describes and the freaky-experimental school I mentioned, eschews the projection of authoritative coordinates of meaning because of... (drumroll, please, Anton) ...their embrace of the Culture of Critical Discourse! [insert wild applause here]. And what's that, you ask? Ah! It's all laid down by the late, great Alvin Gouldner, sociologist-of-intellectuals extraordinaire. In The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, Gouldner argues that a common characteristic of virtually all contemporary intellectuals is their commitment to the Culture of Critical Discourse (or CCD, as he always abbreviates it). The CCD is pretty much what it sounds like: a set of received assumptions about the nature of truth; specifically, assumptions about how truth isn't a matter of authoritative revelation, but a matter an open-ended inquiry. If we buy into the CCD (and the contemporary educational system, especially at the university level, is all about the CCD), we don't expect truth to be something that can be set down once and for all. We expect truth-claims to always be subject to questioning, and we expect that our paradigms will probably have to change as new evidence comes in from our investigations. To paraphrase The Dude in The Big Lebowski, we expect new shit to come to light. Poets, as a subset of the class of intellectuals, just don't have faith in the idea of truth being something one can set down once and for all any more (there may be exceptions, but they'd be outliers, from areas of our culture beyond the mainstream. I suppose there may be poets out there belonging to one or another of the fundamentalist movements who think that the coordinates of meaning can and should be set down once and for all, but they are eccentric with regard to the dominant poetic culture of our society, which is heavily conditioned by the CCD). So, don't expect any Dantes, at least not Dantes with an MFA. People coming out of a sympathetic identification with university culture (long may it wave) just aren't likely to believe they can set down everlasting systems of value.

Oh, and Don't Miss This!

If you're in Chicago on August 22nd, and have recovered from my turgid prose, check out The Printer's Ball at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Tout le monde of Chicago poetry will be there, and the good people from Beard of Bees Press promise no one will be hurt this time when they fire up the Gnoetry Poetry Machine.