Camping Modernism: Timothy Yu's "Chinese Silence #92"

"Hot damn!" I thought, when I finally cleared some time to pick up my June issue of Poetry, "It's Tim Yu!"  Timothy Yu—snappy dresser, pavement-pounding political firebrand, and the other North Shore Chicagoan/Canadian hybrid stomping around on the slopes of Parnassus.  Back when he lived in Chicago, it seemed like he and I were always giving readings together in some grimy bar or sterile white box of an art center.  This is the first time I've seen his work in Poetry, though, and I'm glad to see the editors have chosen one of Yu's Chinese Silences.  This is a series Yu's been working on for some time, and, judging by "Chinese Silence #92," Poetry's selection, it's strong stuff.  But it's also hard to say just what kind of stuff it is.  My first thought was that it was a kind of pastiche, but that wasn't it.  Then I thought it was parody.  But the more I look at the poem, the clearer it becomes: this is a kind of camp.

Exile's Letter

"Chinese Silence #92" is, stem to stern, an overt rewriting of Ezra Pound's "Exile's Letter."  Pound's poem, along with others in the collection Cathay, was adapted from the Chinese poetry manuscripts that came to Pound from the scholar Ernest Fenollosa.  And like many other poems in Cathay, its dominant theme is loneliness—the loneliness of the scholar-poet whose audience consists of his scattered friends, strewn throughout an empire by powerful elites they serve but do not love.  It's easy enough to see why Pound was attracted to the Fenollosa manuscripts: he could find, in the circumstances of ancient Chinese literati, enough parallels with his own situation and that of his friends, to sense, or perhaps to manufacture, a kind of kinship.  Modernist poets, after all, tended to be peripatetic, often expatriated, figures, meeting and parting with their few sympathetic peers, and existing on either on crumbs of subsidy and hackwork from the literary establishment or (like Stevens and Eliot) working in some capacity for the materialist financial elites they quietly resented.

One of the things the Fenollosa manuscripts allowed Pound to do was to wax deeply sentimental about his own circumstances as a marginal literary figure far from home, loving art and beauty, meeting and parting from an international and constantly wandering group of the likeminded.  He'd been trying to find a way out of the strictures of Imagism, which seemed to have taken him about as far as they could travel.  But how to make broad, sentimental gestures when one has preached austerity, when one has made commitments to the hard, cold, world of the image?  One way that he'd already explored was the poetic persona, speaking in the voice of another, and the Fenollosa manuscripts gave him the freedom to break his own rules, just like the masks worn at carnivals allow us to break with the restraints of social propriety.  So we get an opening like this:

So-Kin of Rakuho, ancient friend, I now remember
That you built me a special tavern,
By the south side of the bridge at Ten-Shin.
With yellow gold and white jewels
                    we paid for the songs and laughter,
And we were drunk for month after month,
                    forgetting the kings and princes.
Intelligent men came drifting in, from the sea
                    and from the west border,
And with them, and with you especially,
                    there was nothing at cross-purpose;
And they made nothing of sea-crossing
                    or of mountain-crossing,
If only they could be of that fellowship.
And we all spoke out our hearts and minds...
                    and without regret.
And then I was sent off to South Wei,
                    smothered in laurel groves,
And you to the north of Raku-hoku,
Till we had nothing but thoughts and memories between us.

There's a gushing of sentiment here that would have embarrassed the man who wrote something as terse as "The apparition of these faces in a crowd/Petals on a wet, black bough." In the parts that follow there's also a celebration of both friendship and aesthetic delight that certainly resonated with Pound's lived experience, but rarely found straightforward expression:

And when separation had come to its worst
We met, and travelled together into Sen-Go
Through all the thirty-six folds of the turning and twisting waters;
Into a valley of a thousand bright flowers …
                    that was the first valley,
And on into ten thousand valleys
                    full of voices and pine-winds.
With silver harness and reins of gold,
                    prostrating themselves on the ground,
Out came the East-of-Kan foreman and his company;
And there came also the “True-man” of Shi-yo to meet me,
Playing on a jewelled mouth-organ.
In the storied houses of San-Ko they gave us
                    more Sennin music;
Many instruments, like the sound of young phœnix broods.
And the foreman of Kan-Chu, drunk,
Danced because his long sleeves
Wouldn’t keep still, with that music playing.
And I, wrapped in brocade, went to sleep with my head on his lap,

And my spirit so high that it was all over the heavens.

In addition to granting Pound license to be publicly sentimental about the things he really was sentimental about, the Chinese persona allowed Pound to defamiliarize the experience of the scholar-poet, the world in which he lived.  He could clothe it all in unfamiliar names and places and exotic garb.  The kind of experience may have been familiar to those for whom Pound wrote (other modernist poets, a few artists and connoisseurs) but the Chinese context allowed Pound to filter the known through the unknown, and have it come back in a shimmering aura—we could, to paraphrase Pound's pal Eliot, know our circumstances again, as if for the first time.

Timothy Yu Defamiliarizes the Defamiliarization

 To Tom S. of Missouri, possum friend, clerk at Lloyd’s.
Now I remember that you rang a silent bell
By the foot of the bridge at the River “Thames.”
With dull roots and dried tubers, you wrote poems and laments
And grew more English month on month, bowing to kings and princes.
Americans came drifting in from the sea and from the west border,
And with them, and with me especially
Everything was pig-headed,
And I made hay from poppycock and painted adjectives,
Just so we could start a new fellowship,
And we all escaped our personalities, without expressing them.
And then I was sent off to Rapallo,
               trailed by children,
And you to your desk at Faber-Faber,
Till we had nothing but China and silence in common.
And then, when modernism had come to its worst,
We wrote, and published in Po-Etry,
Through all the one hundred kinds of shy and whispering silence,
Into a poem of a thousand blank pages,
That was the first heave...

So begins Timothy Yu's "Chinese Silence #92."  What Yu has done, of course, is to transpose Pound's poem, written in the persona of a Chinese scholar-poet, onto Pound's life.  So-Kin of Rakuho, the imperial official, becomes T.S. Eliot of Lloyd's bank, Ten-Shin becomes the Thames, and so on. But it's all much more interesting than that.  Firstly, there's the matter of the original context from which Pound's poem came.  Since "Exile's Letter" was already a transposing of the experiences of Pound and his expat poet friends onto ancient China, Yu's poem isn't just a turning of the text to a new context, it's a returning of the text to it's original context.  What had been an indirect treatment of Pound's life filtered through the exotic glamor of orientalism becomes, in Yu's poem, a direct treatment of Pound's life, with the orientalism still intact.  But the orientalism now seems alien to its subject matter.  In leaving the glamorous orientalist style intact while taking away the premise that what we're talking about are ancient Chinese poets, Yu draws attention to the style, to the defamiliarizing moves of "Exile's Letter."  He shows us that the poem really is a take on Pound's own life, but a specific kind of take, and he directs our attention to the artifice of glamor.  

Yu's spellings "Po-Etry" for Poetry, "Faber-Faber" for "Faber and Faber," and later "Ben-it-to" for "Benito Mussolini" emphasize the orientalist artifice of Pound's poem.  The names, after all, didn't matter too much to Pound's audience as specific places—few if any of his readers could find them on a map, let alone tell you the history and associations of the places.  In "Exile's Letter" the names are there as local color, as a kind of heightener of the artificial Chinese-ness of the poem: they're the literary equivalent of MSG.  And when Yu spells Poetry's name "Po-Etry," he's not really defamiliarizing the grand old literary magazine: he's defamiliarizing Pound's act of defamiliarization. "Chinse Silences #92" is a way of showing us, as if for the first time, the way Pound showed himself and his peers their own circumstances as if for the first time.

But what to make of what Yu hath wrought?  What, even, to call this thing called "Chinese Silence #92"?

Pastiche, Parody, and Camp

The easiest label to hang on "Chinese Silence #92" is that of pastiche.  It is, after all, a brilliant move-for-move replay of the kind of orientalist-modernist persona poem Pound perfected in Cathay.  If we look at Fredric Jameson's famous definition of pastiche in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, we seem at first to be dealing with exactly the sort of thing represented by Yu's poem: "pastiche," writes Jameson, "is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language."  So far so good—but then there's this, Jameson's critique of pastiche as apolitical: "But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter."  Indeed, for Jameson the proliferation of pastiche in the postmodern period represents nothing more than "the play of random stylistic allusion." 

If pastiche is devoid of laughter, if its choice of old styles is random, and if pastiche is devoid of ulterior motives, especially political ones,  then Timothy Yu's poem is no kind of pastiche.  Laughter? I can't speak to your experience, but the poem got laughs chez Archambeau, at exactly the points where it wanted to.  A random choice of style?  I refuse to believe that when a Chinese-American scholar-poet trained in the modernist and experimental traditions of American poetry chooses to write in the style of an orientalist poem by a modernist American scholar-poet from a prior period, the choice is arbitrary.  And political motive? Yu's got that, too, in that he exposes Pound's representation of Chineseness as a projection of entirely local, western needs and emotions.  Clearly, what we're dealing with in Yu's poem are issues, and politics, of identity and representation.

So this is no pastiche.  But should we, then, call it parody?  Not in the simplest sense of that word, as a mocking imitation intended to undermine or delegitimate something.  But perhaps in the subtler sense outlined by Yu's former colleague Linda Hutcheon in The Politics of Postmodernism.  There, Hutcheon tells us that a certain kind of postmodern parody "both legitimizes and subverts that which it parodies."  This captures much of what Yu's poem attempts.  The subversion we understand—but what about the legitimation? Consider this: Yu's poem doesn't set out to re-ground Chinese-American writing in a tradition untainted by orientalism.  It isn't an Asian-American version of, say, négritude, the African and African-diasporic movement to build a culture based not on Eurocentric models but on African traditions.  Instead, Yu attacks the orientalism of modernism from within, reworking a modernist poem until we see it from a different angle.  The poem doesn't set out to dislodge Pound and Eliot from the canon—if anything, "Chinese Silence #92's" focus on the minutia of the lives and works of those poets re-enforces the reader's sense that he or she ought to know about them, if only to be in on the joke.  When Hutcheon wrote that postmodern parody "manages to install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and presuppositions it appears to challenge" she might as well have been writing about Yu.  And when Hutcheon tells us that a primary trope of postmodernism is to "de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as 'natural'... are in fact 'cultural'" her words could describe Yu's goal in foregrounding the way Pound invents a kind of sentimental Chinese identity as a way of expressing his own circumstances with an aura of exotic glamor—Yu won't let us forget that Pound hadn't tapped into the essence of Chinese writing so much as he'd concocted a formula useful for his own (western) purposes.

I don't think, though, that Hutcheon's notion of postmodern parody fully captures the relation to Pound's modernism that we find in "Chinese Silence #92."  One thing the dynamic of reinforcing/undermining she outlines doesn't really address, for example, is the question of affection. And as powerful as Yu's poem is in unmasking the artifice or orientalism, it is also a poem with a great deal of overt affection for modernism (an affection, needless to say, intertwined with critique).

Consider the loving piling up of modernist minutia.  Yu's poem shows a tremendous intimacy, even an obsession, with the lives, the poetry, the prose, and the milieu of Pound and Eliot—and the intimacy isn't motivated by malice.  The two are shown as capable of the virtue of friendship, for example, and while Yu is rightly unsparing about Pound's politics, the Pound that emerges in "Chinese Silence #92" is not so much a demon as a figure of pathos, even when being judged for his actions in the war:

And our Roosevelt, who was brave as a rodent,
Was president in Washing Town, and let in the usurious rabble.
And one May he sent the soldiers for me,
               despite the long distance.
And what with broken idols and so on, I won’t say it wasn’t hard going,
Over roads twisted like my brain’s folds.
And I was still going, late in the war,
               with defeat blowing in from the North,
Not guessing how little I knew of the cost,
               and how soon I would be paying it.
And what a reception:
Steel cages, two books set on a packing-crate table,
And I was caught, and had no hope of escaping.

The image of Pound's twisted brain gives us a figure driven mad by events and ambient cultural hatreds, a lost and damaged figure caught and caged—and the poem ends with a similarly pathetic figure:

I went up to the court for prosecution,
Tried standing mute, offered a madman’s song,
And got no conviction,
               and went back to Saint Elizabeths
               Committed.
And once again, later, you stood at the foot of my bed,
And then the visit ended, you went back to Bloomsbury,
And if you ask if I recall that parting:
It is like the hair falling from my hieratic head,
               Confused ... Whirl! Centripetal! Mate!
What is the use of talking, until I end my song,
I end my song in the dark.
I call in the nurse,
Hold the pill in my hand
               As she says, “Take this,”

And swallow it down, silent.

It's not an endorsement of Pound,  far from it—but the gaze with which Yu looks at Pound and Eliot is as much affectionate as it is distanced and judging.  And that kind of combination is best described not so much as parodic but as camp—especially when, as in Yu's poem, it is accompanied by a foregrounding of mannered style.

Christopher Isherwood's The World in the Evening is the locus classicus for the theory of camp, and the attitude it describes seems to coincide exactly with Yu's attitude toward modernism:

High camp always has an underlying seriousness.  You can't camp about something you don't take seriously.  You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it.  You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. 

Yu isn't mocking Pound in the sense of making fun of him—the poem is too humane for that, and the pathos of some of the passages indicates that something other than simple mockery is at play.  But the poem is certainly making fun out of Pound and his poem.  Camp's classic queer form, drag, allows people to both participate in an identity and distance themselves from it, to have affection for that identity while also drawing attention to the artifice involved in creating the identity, and Yu's poem can be seen as a camp take on modernist orientalism—taking part in, but also drawing attention to the artifice of, its style and discursive movements.

I suppose it's no wonder that Timothy Yu has a complex relationship to Pound's "Exile's Letter."  His identity as Chinese American (and as a professor of Asian-American studies) puts him at an odd angle to the poem's presentation of Chinese identity, and draws his attention to the artifice by which Pound constructs, rather than discovers, that identity.  At the same time, though, Yu is himself a poet-scholar, one who has led a peripatetic life in several countries, one who travels for reunions with likeminded scholar-poets and reaches out to them by correspondence.  He is certainly someone who, as a state employee in Scott Walker's Wisconsin, feels at odds with the power elites with whom he is nevertheless connected in complex and subordinated ways.  He is, in short, both distanced from and intimately close to the attitudes and experiences embodied in "Exile's Letter."  What else to do with that old modernist poem, then, but to camp it up—as Yu does brilliantly?

If I Were A Freudian this Post Would Be Called "The Mother's Penis": A Note On Daisy Fried

"Hot damn!" I thought, "it's Daisy Fried!"  I was paging through the May issue of Poetry, and there, on page 138, was Fried's poem "The Girl Grew and Grew, Her Mother Couldn't Stop It."  I've never actually met Daisy Fried, but I've been reading her forever, and we both spend too much time hanging out on Facebook.  One reason I feel closer to her than I do to many of the poets I read is that we both have small daughters, and post about them with some frequency (actually, the fact that we're both on Facebook a lot, rather than dizzily pouring ourselves off some barstool somewhere, is also probably a parent thing).  Anyway, I was happy to see a new poem by her, and doubly happy to see that it was on a topic close to my own experience.  The poem's first line nails something very true about being a parent:"The girl grew and grew," writes Fried,  "her mother couldn't stop it; it terrorized."  The phrasing seems like something out of a horror story—where some kind of Frankenstein's monster grows too strong for its master and runs amok.  But the terror here is subtler than that: its primarily the terror of losing one's small child, the inevitable result of successful parenting: they grow up, these children, they grow away from you, and you, acutely aware of their vulnerability, let them go.

What follows is, for a time, a nicely-drawn and keenly observed catalog of children's experience, a world of play and crafts and school projects, behind which we sense the child's ravenous acquisition of skills and symbolic codes—geometry, biology, systems of writing, fine motor skills, and the like: 

     What would the finger-dance do?  Kindergarten art a buffet of markers
gluings of stuffs to seasonally-keyed paper, Elmer's pools drying clear.
     A stapling and testing of cylinders versus spheres versus cubes
for kinetic and entropic possibilities, stuffing balled newspaper
     into paper dragons, two sweet silver elephants with heads too small
and trunks too long, situated off-center, snuffling flowers.  And silver rain.
     And 16 silver hearts stacked vertically and strips of masking tape, colored
in reverse rainbow.  Unnamable tendrils diffusing to scribbles.  A bird.
     Another bird, more rain, peace signs, a horse with sideways-flowing mane,

I enjoyed this as I read it, but wondered where it might go, how (if at all) the poem would turn.  And then there was this:

and knowledge: that the sky's full of blackstruck Ms and Ws, drifting
     clouds; that her kitty cats watch sunsets; sky doesn't reach
down to meet the earth;

Okay, I thought: we're getting a bit of a generalization, after all those particulars ("knowledge"), and we're getting a sense of the child's difference from the adult, the way the sky isn't represented according to the canons of adult realism.  But then something really interesting happened: the final half of the final line comes along, with an end-word that turns the poem so sharply in a new direction that I'm surprised the page doesn't emit an audible shriek of squealing tires:

                                     mother shrinks to the size of a penis.

What to do with this?  Well, okay, there's the literal to consider: we're talking about a kid drawing something, and in that drawing the mother could indeed be the size of a penis.  And we are invited to think about the diminishing importance mothers play in a child's life as that child grows up—the same diminishment that was so terrorizing at the beginning of the poem.  But one could have said "doll" or "crayon" or, for that matter, "vagina."  Why say penis?  It's such an incongruously masculine word to apply to the diminishing role of the mother.

One thing that's in play is simply surprise and novelty: it's an incongruous image, by being so masculine in a poem about motherhood, but there's a rightness in it too, in scale and in having to do with reproduction and therefore parenthood.  And then there's a real sense of disempowerment that you wouldn't really get, at least not in the same way, with another image: the penis is so connected to connotations of power that whole schools of psychology, from Freud to Lacan, use the term "phallus" to mean something like "empowerment" and "castration" to mean "disempowerment." We get a sense of the mother's disempowerment as the child, through all of the innocent and sweet seeming play and craft-making detailed in the poem, grows beyond the mother's control—and putting the word "shrinks" near the word "penis" gives us a sense of the detumescent loss of power or potency.

There's more than this, too, I think: there's also the simple fact that the penis, here, becomes not just another iteration of the traditional symbol of power and potency: it becomes an image of smallness and disempowerment.  There's something feminist in this, a reversal of the old Freudian model of masculinity as power and femininity as disempowerment.  In a way, then, the poem isn't just a mother's lament for her loss of authority in the life of her growing child. It's that same mother's intervention in the realm of symbolism, aiming to undo some of the patriarchal imagery that still contributes to the disempowerment of women.  It's a mother's attempt—as her daughter gains independence—to make the world that daughter will enter into a place less hostile to her.  The mother works hard to help the daughter grow into strength and knowledge and independence—and, in the end, she also works to make the world itself a place better fit to receive that daughter.

An Impossible Position

So there's this, an account in the Chicago Tribune of how people feel about what's been going on at the Poetry Foundation.  If you click through to the third page, you'll find that the last of the people is me.

Because You Wanted Your Martiniquais Surrealist Négritude Poetry Online

Since you asked: yes, two poems by Lucie Thésée, the Surrealist/Négritude poet from Martinique I've been translating, are now not only in the latest issue of Poetry, but also available on the Poetry Foundation's website. They're called "Sarabande" and "Poem," and they're accompanied by a few notes I wrote about this remarkable, little-known poet.

Where Are All the Afro-Caribbean Surrealist Women Poets When You Need Them?

You're probably wondering where all the Afro-Caribbean francophone surrealist women poets of the mid-twentieth century are when you need them.  Well, at least one of them, Lucie Thésée, appears in the pages of the June issue of Poetry, in my translation.  She's a bit of an enigma, but what we do know about her is fascinating, and the poems are very strong in the original French.  I only hope I've done justice to her.


Here's part of a brief note I wrote about her, which is included along with the poems:

In 1941, his writings banned by the Vichy government and looking for any safe harbor, André Breton found himself in Martinique.  Fine weather notwithstanding, he might almost have been at home in Paris: the place was buzzing with Surrealist activity. Aimé Césaire and his circle were just launching Tropiques, a literary review dedicated to Surrealism, Négritude, and anti-colonialism.  Martiniquean Surrealism was primarily a game for men, despite Suzanne Césaire's theoretical contributions to the journal. But the poetry of an almost completely unknown schoolteacher, Lucie Thésée, appeared in many issues of Tropiques, and eventually made its way into the larger Francophone world.

Despite the anthologizing of her work in various collections devoted to writing from the French colonies, and praise from the critic Léon Damas, we still know surprisingly little about Thésée. Certainly this has nothing to do with any shrinking-violet quality on her part: Thésée was a courageous woman, even to the point of recklessness. With Martinique under Vichy rule, Tropiques was singled out for persecution. The military government accused the journal of being "racial and sectarian," a vehicle of hatred and division. A letter was sent back to the military officials, saying:

"Racists," "sectarians," "revolutionaries," "ingrates and traitors to the country," "poisoners of souls," none of these epithets really repulses us. "Poisoners of Souls," like Racine…"Ingrates and traitors to our good Country," like Zola... "Revolutionaries," like the Hugo of "Chatiments." "Sectarians," passionately, like Rimbaud and Lautreamont. Racists, yes. Of the racism of Toussaint Louverture, of Claude McKay and Langston Hughes against that of Drumont and Hitler. As to the rest of it, don't expect for us to plead our case, nor make recriminations, nor hold discussion. We do not speak the same language.

Lucie Thésée's name appears beneath these courageous phrases, near Aimé Césaire's.


*


In other news, there's a new review of The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing (a book I co-edited with Steve Tomasula and Davis Schneiderman) in the American Book Review.

Laureates, Poetry Aversion Therapy, and a Note on Progress vs. Pluralism

A couple of evenings ago I found myself hanging around the big modernist caverns of the Arts Club of Chicago, munching on scallops wrapped in bacon, eyeballing the Kandinskys and Motherwells, and jawing with some of the local literati — Calvin Forbes, Simone Muench, Mike Puican, Chicu Reddy, Suzanne Buffam, Fred Sasaki, and others, including my colleague Josh Corey.  We’d been summoned down to see Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Awards, a ceremonial giving-out of glory and cash in the form of the Children’s Poet Laureateship and the Ruth Lilly Award.  For me, the big attraction was getting to hear David Ferry (the Ruth Lilly winner) read.  Well, that and the hors d’oeuvres: the Arts Club food is always credible. 

Having inflicted a book called Laureates and Heretics on the world, I’ve probably spent more time thinking about the meaning of laureateships than anybody should, and I certainly have my share of preconceptions about what such laurels mean.  The roots of laureateships lie in societies quite different from our own, and the idea of such an award certainly sits more easily in times and places that are more formally hierarchical and less culturally diverse than the United States in the early 21^st century.  In England, the poet laureate used to have to swear an oath of loyalty to the monarch, since his words were in some sense the official verse of the nation — John Dryden, the only English laureate ever to be kicked out of office, was so booted because of his refusal to take an oath to the protestant William of Orange (Dryden had converted to Catholicism some years earlier).  But the notion of the laureate as the official literary spokesman of the realm was already wobbling in the Romantic era, when the winds of democratic reform and social leveling were blowing across the Channel from France: Byron was clearly joking when he wrote that the laureate Robert Southey was “representative of all the race.”  In our own time, the laureateship of the U.K. has seen a reduction in status, with the former life appointment done away with in favor of ten-year terms.  Britain may still knight people for life, but the laureateship now rotates, albeit slowly, so as to accommodate a greater variety of aesthetic and social constituencies: a typically British moderate adaptation of old institutions to newer, more diverse and democratic times.

But what about the laureateship in the United States?  It's sort of like a Palladian villa in the hills above Los Angeles: it pretends to be older than it is, and fools nobody.  That is, we’ve only really had American poets laureate for 25 years, after Ronald Reagan signed off on a law changing the older position of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, which has been around since the 1930s, into a laureateship.  Some poets bemoaned the development (the poet Michael Anania told me his first thought was “well, now no one interesting will ever get the job").  Others gnashed their teeth at the idea of hierarchy and official culture.  Many more began polishing their resumes, hoping for a shot at the illusory immortality one gains from being enshrined in a footnote to literary history. 

Right from the start the position was a sort of weird mish-mash of various American impulses.  There was, of course, a dash of England-envy, a desire for the sexy otherness of titles, pomp, and an archaic past.  It was, after all, the 80s, and all the wannabe princesses of America still turned their yearning eyes to Charles and Diana.  But that was really just a veneer behind which lay both a populism — at odds with the yearning for titles and pomp — and a strong dose of Rotarian style boosterism, or even hucksterism.  When the American laureateship came into being, the Brits were still appointing laureates for life.  But in the U.S., the job was conceived of as a one-year gig, so that it would rotate among representatives of different social and aesthetic groups, a principle observed more in the breach than in actual practice.  Additionally, the laureate was given a charge to promote poetry — a kind of glorified sales job, really.  Some poets ignored that part of the role, or went at it impractically: Joseph Brodsky, for example, would issue demands that anthologies of poetry be placed in all hotel rooms, like Gideon Bibles, but do so without any follow-up in terms of fund-raising, editing, or schmoozing with hotel tycoons.  Others took to the role as if they’d been born for it.  Robert Pinsky spent three terms barnstorming the country, delivering speeches and readings and launching the “favorite poem” project, which sought to promote the poetry that non-poets knew and loved.

You’d think the biggest problem with an American laureateship would be the inherent contradiction between an office with a title that links it to hierarchy and official culture, on the one hand, and a non-hierarchical country without a unified cultural tradition, on the other (of course we have all kinds of hierarchies in America, but officially we don’t — and when you leave the world of the super-rich, who know where they stand in relation to the populace, and the world of the righteously irate intellectual, where you and I live, damn near everyone insists that they are middle class).  But the complaints I hear about the institution tend to echo that of Anania: that the poets selected for the job aren’t aesthetically interesting or challenging.  Maybe that speaks about the crowd with whom I hang.  I think, though, that it says something about the way the populist demands of the position — that it be given to someone willing to promote poetry to a large public — are at odds with the socio-cultural position of most American poets.  Most poets, now, produce for other producers: they live in a world of academic specialization, and write for other specialists.  I don’t think of this as a good or a bad thing: it’s simply something that has come to pass, for reasons larger than the whims of any poet, critic, or any single cultural institution (my short version of how and why this came about is in an essay called “The Discursive Situation of Poetry” in Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher’s book The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics; I’m still working on the long version, a book called Power and Poetics).  Anyway: it’s hardly surprising that an office that comes with a populist mandate would end up disappointing a group of people whose tastes are formed by non-populist principles.

My own sense of laureateships, for what it’s worth, has been not to take them particularly seriously, except as cultural phenomenon that can reveal a bit about the social position of poetry, in all its contradictions and complexities.  At a gut level, I’ve generally been kind of against the things, in part because of my general Jacobinism: I don’t like titles or hierarchies of any kind.  I even wince when my colleagues call themselves “doctor” or put bumper stickers indicating attendance at prestige universities on their cars.  I mean, it’s just a short step from that to wearing little lapel ribbons indicating membership in the legion d’honneur.  And I’ve also thought that laureateships encourage poets in the direction of the wrong kind of ambition: the desire for prominence and recognition.  Isn’t that kind of ego-gluttony exactly the sort of thing that the best parts of every religious tradition from Catholicism to Buddhism, and every philosophy from Stoicism to (pre-Nietzschean) German Idealism tells us will make us into unhappy, envious wretches? 

So those were my preconceptions when I walked into the Arts Club.  But a funny thing happened midway through the speech by J. Patrick Lewis, the newly-anointed Children’s Laureate.  Lewis, who seemed a very sincere man, and was quite clearly a guy who would appeal to children, talked about how much he enjoyed the many visits he’d made to schools to read from his books and talk about poetry.  “Children,” he said, “approach poetry as they approach people: with no preconceptions whatsoever.”  Fair enough, I thought, from my seat in the back row of the auditorium, where the local poets had clustered.  And it was a point to which I could relate, not only as the father of a two-year-old daughter, but as a person with no knowledge, let alone preconceptions, about children’s poetry.  I’ve got plenty of opinions about poetry for adults — sometimes those opinions are even strong enough and weird enough and wrong enough to get people angry with me.  But I couldn’t name a half dozen contemporary poets writing primarily for children.  And here’s where the value of an institution like a laureateship — even a foundation-sponsored, non-federal laureateship like the one bestowed upon Lewis — dawned on me.  I mean, think of it: it won’t be long before I’ll want to get some children’s poetry into my daughter’s hands, and I really don’t know where to begin at all.  Now, at least, I know a name: J. Patrick Lewis.  I may not know his work, I may not know exactly how strong or interesting it is in comparison to the work of his peers, but I do know that some people who care about children’s poetry thought he was worthwhile.  It’s not exactly a divine guarantee of absolute and timeless awesomeness, but it’s not nothing either.  It’s sort of like the kind of movie criticism Siskel and Ebert used to do back in the 80s, when they’d get together and give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to movies: it’s hardly the be all and end all of film criticism, but for an otherwise uninformed audience, it’s something, a place to start.  In a sense, the official United States laureateship has a similar value: not for poetry professionals, but for people in the wider world.  For all of my general griping about laureateships, I can recognize that.

*

Several of Chris Wiman’s remarks, as he introduced David Ferry, touched on the condition of the poetry professional.  Chris mentioned that he and Don Share have been editing an anthology of poems drawn from the last century of Poetry magazine, which meant he’d recently read some 300,000 poems, a task, he told us, that might just make him start banging his head against his podium like a woodpecker at any moment.  I sympathize: if Chris and Don split that number of poems up, each taking on half of the reading, and spent, say, five minutes with each poem, that would still mean more than 200 hours each of reading: five solid work weeks each, nine to five, assuming they kept the pace up all day and skipped lunch — all this on top of regular jobs consisting, in large measure, of… reading large numbers of poems.  This, I thought, would be a good way to learn to despise poetry, at least temporarily: the process resembles nothing so much as the kind of aversion therapy parents used to practice on children caught smoking, when they’d make the child smoke cigarette after cigarette until the poor kids turned green and couldn’t stand to anywhere near tobacco smoke anymore.  Chris seems, somehow, not to have succumbed to his particular round of poetry-aversion therapy, but his patience with the most common kind of poetry written by younger poets — which he described as “willed eccentricity, even willed grotesqueness” — seems to have become a bit strained, his attitude seeming to have become, at least for the moment, a version of “not that there’s anything wrong with that sort of thing, but…”

*

The evening closed with David Ferry reading from his works, including, much to my delight, his translations, which I’m not alone in seeing as his best work — though history may disagree with me: as Chris Wiman pointed out, “for many years Ezra Pound was best known as a translator.”  When it was over, Calvin Forbes and I agreed that, if either of us give a reading like Ferry’s when we’re pushing 90, we’ll be damned proud of ourselves.  We also both noted that everything, even the translations (which featured a fine version of the journey to the underworld in The Iliad), was about death.  “When I heard Archibald MacLeish read as an old man,” said Calvin, “it was all about looking at pretty girls.”  So often poetry at old age seems to get down to sex and death: Yeats’ “Politics” or his "Cuchulain Comforted.”  You know, the fundamentals.

*

In other Poetry-related news, Marjorie Perloff and I have been in touch regarding my review of her study Unoriginal Genius.  I stand by what I wrote — especially what I said about Perloff being the best and most prominent spokesperson for a whole range of poetries — but after we’d corresponded a little, I asked if I might reproduce this note, since it allows Perloff to clarify her sense of things:

Dear Robert:

I wanted to thank you for your long detailed review and say that I think you’re right that there’s no ‘progress’ in poetry; if I gave that impression, I’m surely wrong. The fact is, I don't believe in a progress model but that poetry, like furniture or clothing, cannot ignore its own time.  "A

mythology reflects its region."  Not that poetry gets better —far from it — it just gets different.  My own preference as you must sense is for the Moderns, no one can beat Yeats or Eliot or Pound in my lexicon!  And by the way, I start with Eliot and his citations so where did you get the idea that I ignore TSE and EP?

But I should have made my own view of literary history clearer and as a result of criticisms of Unoriginal Genius, I am doing that in various new things I¹ve been writing‹specifically a long essay ‘corrective’ on Duchamp that I hope you¹ll see some time.

You make many salient points and I hope we can discuss them some day before too long.  I'm a big admirer of your writing!

Thanks, Robert and all the very best,

Marjorie

The Great Debate: Progress vs. Pluralism

If you check out the latest issue of Poetry, you'll find a splendid array of features, from Fanny Howe's poems to Clive James' thoughts on product placement in poetry.  Marring  this smorgasbord is my own contribution, a piece about Marjorie Perloff's Unoriginal Genius and the late Reginald Shepherd's A Martian Muse (edited by Robert Philen).  It begins like this:

**


Imagine yourself settling into a seat at the back of a crowded auditorium to attend a debate between two speakers, each known for his wit, intellect, and the striking novelty of his argumentation. They will debate the nature of poetic history. On the stage stand two lecterns, and behind them hangs a banner with the title of the evening’s events: “Poetic History: Progress or Pluralism?” The first speaker takes up his position behind the lectern to the right, taps the microphone, and makes his opening salvo:

Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry.

This, you think, must be the “progress” side of the debate. The speaker has boldly dismissed the disjunctive kind of poetry we’ve come to think of as cutting edge, declaring it passé. It has waddled out of the forum of relevance like a jump-suited, late-period Elvis, and the next phase of poetry is upon us, in the form of a new kind of intertextualism. This all seems very exciting, but you make a mental note to sell your copies of In the American Tree and American Hybrid on eBay before the price drops too far. The next new thing has already arrived. Or has it? The other speaker has stepped to his lectern and has already begun to speak. You’ve missed the speaker’s opening sentences, but you catch this:

Compared to the art world where, after Duchamp, anything can be art, there’s a sense that in poetry world—even within more innovative camps—that certain things are poetry and that certain things are not. Coming from the art world, this strikes me as an untenable & unsustainable stance, both aesthetically and historically and one that is bound to implode any moment.

He makes a good point, this art world refugee. The notion that some things (like disjunction) can stop counting as poetry when something else (intertextualism, say) starts counting does seem unsustainable, both aesthetically and historically. Maybe it’s not the price of your anthologies of disjunctive poetry that’s about to implode, but the notion of poetic history as a kind of progression, with new forms rendering old forms obsolete.
At this point, you notice something funny. The two speakers look like identical twins. And they both seem remarkably familiar to you, longtime reader of Poetry that you are. And then it hits you: they’re both Kenneth Goldsmith.

**

The whole piece can be read online here.