Perloff, Eagleton, and the Contradictions of the Avant-Garde, with a Totally Unrelated Response to Mark Scroggins

Fret not, gentle reader: I'm not here to lay some heavy, heady theory on you. Instead of wrenching hefty notions down from the Olympian heights of 21st Century Modernism or The Ideology of the Aesthetic, I've been thinking about lesser works by Marjorie Perloff and Terry Eagleton. "Lesser" might not even be the word. My texts du jour are among the least hefty and durable of works: specifically, I've been thinking about the 200 word or so pieces Perloff and Eagleton contributed (along with a few dozen other notable writers) to the new "Books of the Year" issue of the TLS. These pieces are pretty much what you'd think they'd be — contributors are asked for quick descriptions of a couple of books from 2007 they think worth noting. There's not much elbow-room for analysis or contextualization, but even so, the nature of what each writer chooses, and the quick comments they lay down on the broad, oyster-gray pages of Britain's most venerable book-rag can be telling. And here's what the picks of Eagleton and Perloff tell me: those of us into formally adventurous literature are still trying to square the same old circle. Like our modernist grandparents down on the old avant-farmstead, we still long for both form-turning-in-upon form in limitless innovation, and, at the same time, for a broad public reach, even a political presence.

Eagleton picks two books, one an semi-experimental novel by Joseph O'Conner called Redemption Falls. "Stuffed with ads, documents, news reports and narratives-within-narratives," writes Eagleton, "this sprawling carnival of a historical novel has a proper indifference to the demands of organic form, and is all the richer for it." I haven't read the book, but it sounds for all the word like a kind of Dos Passos trip, a broad historical narrative cut through with all of the mediating uh, media through which we experience history. Eagleton's other pick is Paul Mason's Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global, an analysis of working class struggle through the industrial and post-industrial era. For me, Eagleton's two choices represent in miniature the dual loyalties held by so many of the people I know, loyalty to formal innovation on the one hand, and to leftist political ideals on the other. Trying to put those two loyalties together can be exhausting. Here, Eagleton simply lays them side by side, the twin badges of his (and your, and my) disposition.

Perloff's picks are Daniil Kharms' Today I did Nothing — a selection of poetry and prose by the unpublished-in-his-lifetime Russian absurdist written while cooped up in a psych ward in Leningrad — and Susan Howe's latest collection of poems, Souls of the Labadie Tract. What's really interesting to me here, though, aren't the picks per se but the hope Perloff attaches to them. The books, says Perloff, give her "hope for an avant-garde writing that speaks to a larger audience." Most of us have had moments of yearning for bigger sales and bigger reading audiences for the books we write/care about. But there's a strange contradiction in wishing for such things for avant-garde writing. I mean, writing that constantly challenges the normative methods or reading, and the logic of the literary marketplace, and even the media of writing and the dissemination of writing, is often thrilling stuff. But you can hardly ask for it to succeed on the terms of those markets and media it eschews. I don't mean to say that the experimental writing club should put up a velvet rope and station someone to act as a bouncer to keep the undesirables out (chris cheek seems like the right sort of guy — I can imagine him tossing Billy Collins out into a snowbank). I just don't know if it's possible, barring some strange alignment in the heavens, to be both pop and avant at the same time. If you know how, good luck to you! I hope you'll invite me to the after-parties in Hollywood: I've always wanted to hang with Snoop Dogg in his Hummer limousine.

***

My man Mark Scroggins has tagged me to write up seven previously unknown facts about myself. I find it a bit disconcerting. I mean, while I do a lot of blustery me-oriented stuff on this blog, I'm pretty choosy about which sides of myself I put out in public, and I imagine that most of what I want known is out there somewhere, online or in obscure journals or in the occasional book. But okay. Here goes (anyone with anything better to do is hereby excused from class, and those of you without something better to do have my pity: you're obviously sitting out a slow and oppressive day at the office. Or maybe you're in grad school, which amounts to the same thing).

1. Mark begins with a musical revelation, about seeing Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck in Florence, so I'll start with an image of myself as a junior in high school, armed with fake ID and down in the all-but-unbelievably skanky punk club in Winnipeg called (check this out for the whiff of the Commonweath) The Royal Albert Arms. Bob Mould and his band Husker Dü are up on stage, Bob's got a 12-string guitar and wants to play acoustic. The punked-out fans are spitting and yelling and throwing beer around and demanding a harder sound and Bob shouts back "fuck you, I wrote those songs on this guitar!" I liked that, I think because it showed me A) that alterno-conformity could be as stifling as the turned-up collar on a 1980s preppy polo shirt and B) that you didn't have to let that bother you.

2. Mark goes medical in his next revelation, commenting on his crappy dental work, so I'll mention the freakish lack of toenails on my big toes. Yep.
No, this wasn't some Archambeau-as-Elephant-Man weirdness at birth. The nails were perpetually becoming ingrown, and I finally went to the guy who keeps the feet of the Chicago Bears in working order. He pulled the nails out with what seemed to me like a pair of medieval torture implements and told me I had a remarkable tolerance for pain. Not true! I just have a remarkable ability to hold a scream in until I can release it in private. Later, he performed surgery to remove whatever it is that causes nails to grow in the first place. Pumped full of space-age pain relievers I overrode the objections of the medical professionals and checked myself out of Northwestern University Hospital, and hoofed it home to my apartment in what looked like giant, hospital-logo-havin' clown shoes, feeling no pain. Until the wonder-drugs wore off. Oy.

3 & 4 (Special double issue!). For his third and fourth revelation, Mark tells us about his obsessive habits with books. So I'll mention my own book habits. Firstly, until grad school, I treated books as if they were all rare and fragile manuscripts from the bowels of the Bodleian, even, at one point, doing up a card catalog of my precious archives. Secondly: during grad school I worked in Chicago's old Aspidistra Bookshop, where used books were piled in great post-apocalyptic heaps. I remember them as smoking heaps, but that can't be right. Anyway, I unlearned all of my careful habits, and now when I read a book I practically consume it, bending the cover backwards, writing copious notes, dog-earing it at will, and otherwise behaving like the Cookie Monster, only, you know, with books.

5. Mark next confesses to singing poems in ballad meter to himself to the tune of Joan Baez's "Mary Hamilton." I'd like to say I always sing Ezra Pound's "The Seafarer" as if I were Geddy Lee of Rush, or perhaps System of a Down's Serj Tankian, but it just ain't true. I do, however, mentally sing the words of Emily Dickinson's poems to the tune of both "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and the theme to Gilligan's Island. But I think everyone does that.

6. Mark goes next to religion, confessing that, while a black-hearted atheist, he does own nine Bibles. When people ask me about religion, though, I get deeply reticent and vaguely pretentious, quoting Wittgenstein's quip "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." I then tend to look for a polite way to leave the room.

7. Mark ends by saying he wishes he'd had the perserverence to stick with music as a career. I'll admit that, when my degenerate friends signed up for the percussion section in ninth grade band, I took a different route. Much to their initial mirth at my apparent emasculation, I took up the flute. I theorized that sitting in a section of girls would prove convenient for meeting, and therefore potentially hooking up with, said girls. Music, sadly, didn't really enter into it.



Those of you who sat through all that are entitled to the same kind of lollipop you get on the way out of the dentist's office. Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope and I'll try to get round to sending one your way.

British Poetry Wars: The Battle of Chicago

It shouldn't surprise us that the latest round of internecine British cultural warfare has occurred on American soil. I mean, this country was founded by a bunch of disgruntled refugee British cultural dissidents with funny hats and a lot to learn about growing corn and trading beads for turkeys and real estate. So the Brits have a distinguished tradition of exporting their squabbles. They also have another distinguished tradition: one of arguing bitterly about the nature and value of avant-garde poetry over the last three decades or so (if you want to read about a particularly savage episode, check out Peter Barry's new book Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court, out last summer from the good people at Salt Publishing). And the last few weeks have seen the two traditions collide, with the carnage splattered across the pages of the Chicago Review, and on the walls of Chicago's Elastic Arts Center.

Let me explain.

It all started quietly enough, with a review of a new book by the younger British poet Simon Jarvis by John Wilkinson, a fellow Brit recently transplanted to (God help him) South Bend, Indiana. The review itself begins with the not-all-that-hyperbolic assertion that Jarvis is an odd kind of poet. "It would defeat rhetoric to overstate the peculiarity of Simon Jarivis' book The Unconditional: A Lyric," writes Wilkinson, claiming that it "must be among the most unusual books ever published." How's that, you ask? Well, Wilkinson continues: "imagine if you can... a continuous poem of 237 pages mainly in iambic pentameter, in which whole pages pass without a full stop," a poem "dedicated to a high level of discourse on prosody, critical theory, and phenomenology; all this conducted in a philosophical language drawing on Adorno's negative dialectics" and "a narrative language that is the unnatural offspring of Wyndham Lewis and P.B. Shelley." Moreover, the book is filled with a particularly unusual cast of characters, a group resembling nothing so much as "refugees from an Iain Sinclair novel finally fed up with walking" with names like "=x" "Agramant" "Qnuxmuxkyl" and "Jobless," a group who start out on a Canturbury Tales-like trip, but wind up in a dingy pub displaying unlikely degrees of alienation and erudition.

(I can't be the only one to rush to Amazon.com immediately after reading that description, can I? Amazon's note on the status of the book, then and now — "currently unavailable" — indicates that Jarvis' American fan base is either so large that the book flies off the shelves like the latest Harry Potter, or so small that Amazon can't be bothered to keep the book around. I dream of a world where the former case prevails, but suspect otherwise...).

Anyway, after outlining the oddball parameters of Jarvis' book, Wilkinson lays down some heady lines about the goals of Jarvis' project, saying that Jarvis wants to invoke Adorno's notion of a negative utopianism, that is, "a redemptive utopianism that is understood to be impossible" but is nevertheless "the necessary horizon for art, philosophy, and political struggle." What Jarvis fears, says Wilkinson, is that "the extinction of a utopian horizon for the left leads necessarily to the installation of capitalism as an historical terminus." Instead of getting his Thomas More mojo on and laying out a specific utopia, though, Jarvis (in the story Wilkinson tells about him) refuses such a temptation (which could only lead to violence and dystopia). Instead, says Wilkinson, Jarvis wants to use difficult form, full of things that can't be glossed over or assimilated to our usual patterns of understanding, to set the reader "on edge" so he or she will not "float into a complacent sphere beyond all struggle." You know, the usual Frankfurt School, Langpo-ish stuff you learned from the local school marm while working on your M.F.A. Ah, how fondly I look back on those days, taking a crayon to the image of Max Horkheimer in my coloring book, and nervously standing before the class, my hair slicked down, my Hush Puppies freshly shined, as I recited Charles Bernstein's poems at prize day in the quaint old chapel by the soccer pitch. Oh, the fun we had in those salad days! But I digress.

So. When I first read Wilkinson's review, I admired his specific and clear description of Jarvis' book, which sounds unlike anything I've read. But I sort of blew off the big ideological claims Wilkinson made, since claims of that kind I have read before, in, I think, about every third review of experimental poetry I've come by over the past 15 years.


But Peter Riley did not stand by so idly and complacently in the face of these familiar claims for the political value of experimental poetry. Gird, did he, his loins for serious battle. Tap, did he, most vehemently into his laptop. Publish, did he, an open letter, in the next issue of the Chicago Review. And, judging by Wilkinson's response, wound, did Riley, his formidable foe. Check it out.

Riley begins with a genteel moment, praising the Cambridge/Prynne tradition embodied by Jarvis and polemically upheld by Wilkinson. But this feels sort of like the moment when two boxers "shake hands" by thumping their gloves together at the start of a match, and soon the blows begin to fall heavily. Riley's main target is the identification of formal innovation with political utopianism. As the first sentence in this paragraph of Riley's makes plain, he's going after Wilkinson here, for sure, but he's also going after all those other Frankfurterized reviews of avant-poetry:

For Wilkinson as for most other commentators on the forward side of things, to speak of poetical virtue is to speak of political virtue, there is no distinction. Poems and poetical thinking are politically good or they have no good in them. I guess we are used to that these days. The one big claim left to the poem, that it (rather “somehow”) holds the answer or counter to political harm by occulted inference. It’s more alarming to notice that in this particularly fervent British version the contrary also holds: political virtue can only be poetical virtue. “Aesthetically-founded politics” (which involves more than poetry of course, but): only the (poet) is qualified to be a politician. It is not just that the poet “knows better” than the working politician, indeed I don’t think that claim is made, but that only the poet has the spirit to inhabit the sphere of total oppositional negation which is the only political register to be tolerated. Doesn’t this mean that in a sense there is actually a withdrawal from politics, from the politics that happens and can happen into one that can’t possibly? An understanding of how politics works and how amelioration can be wrought through the science of it, of what the mechanisms are and so of what could be done – all this would be beneath us? To assume that you can go straight from aesthetics to ethics is worrying enough, but aren’t the two here fused into one substance?

Yow. Didja see where Riley landed that blow? Right smack on two of the Big Assumptions of avant-poetry: that formal radicalism is special because it is political radicalism; and that the total negation of current political reality is the only responsible position, and the rest is all complicity, all the time. Such assumptions, says Riley, leave "the entire non-poet population of the world (and most of the poets), condemned as criminals." Come on, admit it: you've encountered the very thing Riley's on about: the insistence that only a certain kind of poetry can be ethical, and the rest of the poets may as well all run off in their giant SUVs on their way to Dick Cheney fundraising events, spouting clouds of carcinogens from their tailpipes and tossing non-biodegradable burger wrappers out the window as they go.

Anyway, after this comes my favorite part of the piece, Riley's powerful cri de coeur directed toward the avant-garde community in which he himself has much standing: "How do we get to be so haughty?" It kind of hits home, really. I think of some of the haughty-ass theoretico-jive that's come out of my mouth at various conferences and coffeehouse readings over the years, and I shudder.

I think Wilkinson must have shuddered a bit, too, judging by his (not yet published) response. He begins with what seems like a kind of conciliatory statement, saying that he didn't mean to imply that Prynnite, Langpo-ish avant-postery was the only good or ethical kind of writing:

I reject the idea in Peter Riley’s letter that referring to a relatively small number of poets must imply an exclusivity in taste or could be used to impute an aesthetic or political programme. It is a mistake to assume that anyone necessarily worries away publicly at what he most loves; and this is especially misleading where writers rather than scholars are concerned, since generally writers write about two kinds of writer – those whom they feel fail to receive their due, to some extent a covert special pleading for their own work; and those whose work seems whether successfully or not to tackle ideas or technical problems which trouble them. But we all have different ways of reading in different circumstances, as musicians do of listening and painters of looking; what need to argue why merely to glance at certain poems by John Donne or Thomas Hardy or James Schuyler can bring tears to my eyes, any more than I have to justify to myself a preference for Lee Konitz over John Coltrane or for sea pinks over daffodils. It is typical that working life has left me too dependent on early-established taste, but teaching now shows me much to enjoy and admire in writers I once dismissed with youth’s arbitrariness.

(Many thanks to Wilkinson for letting me quote from this — you've got to admire I guy who'll let you quote unpublished material that you find intelligent but not always entirely convincing).

I'm not too keen on the "don't expect me to be fair, I'm a writer" argument. And I'm not sure how to feel about the "hey, I didn't get the chance to read around enough to have a broad taste because I had to work at a real job" line (Wilkinson was a mental health professional for many years). Had he directed the comment at me, I'd have assessed my career path so far in life (brief and inglorious military service, used bookstore clerk while a student, and standard-issue academic since), felt some kind of prof-caste guilt, and cut Wilkinson some slack. But he's directing this at Peter Riley, who scrambled to make a living as a rare book dealer for years (and may so scramble still, for all I know). So the ethical high ground falls away from beneath the Wilkinsonian sandals. That said, the embrace of ecumenical pluralism is encouraging.

Wilkinson goes on for a few pages, and, being both bright and combative, lands a few good blows of his own. But as I was watching the critical fisticuffs fly, I couldn't help thinking that what gets lost in his exchange with Riley about exclusive taste and pseudo-political haughtiness is the poetry itself. Then, as if on cue from whatever goddess reigns on Parnassus these days, a group of stangers appeared at the edge of town. They were Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady, and Peter Manson, and if you wanted an actual exhibit of the kind of post-Prynne, Jarvis-y poetry Riley and Wilkinson were arguing about, you couldn't have asked for anything better. All three poets have work in the Spring '07 issue of the Chicago Review. But the poets themselves were making a Chicago stop on their trans-continental American tour, courtesy of Kerri Sonnenberg and her ever-amazing Discrete Reading Series at the Elastic Arts Center, so I hightailed it down to the city, disgracefully wolfed down enchilladas at El Cid with Kristy Odelius, Bill Allegrezza, and Jennifer & Chris Glomski, then made the scene. Which was really two scenes in one, since the usual Discreet crowd had been joined by tout le monde du Hyde Park, especially the Chicago Review crowd. I ran into Josh Kotin, Bobby Baird, Eirik Steinhoff, as well as Dustin Simpson and Josh Adams (who seem to be engaged in a Surrealism-versus-Oulipo debate of the sort that can only rage with such intensity in the rarified air of Hyde Park). Also Joel Craig. And I saw Chicu Reddy and Suzanne Buffam from across a much-crowded room of black turtlenecks and Amstel Light bottles. If Ray Bianchi hadn't been in Istanbul, and if Albert Goldbarth had descended upon us from his secret mountain fortress, we'd have had almost all of the main speakers from this year's Lake Forest Literary Festival on hand.

But I digress. I wanted to talk about the poetry, not the audience. For my money Keston Sutherland gave the strongest performance, and I've got to say this about his work: it was all the things Wilkinson said Jarvis' work was: formally strange, intriguingly metrical, and very much in the Prynne tradition. It even had a strong social component, addressing anxieties about capitalism (particularly incipient Chinese capitalism) and the ways it enters into our most intimate psychic spaces. Sutherland's work tries to get a handle on these anxieties not through making a statement about them (the mimetic and statement-oriented elements of language are only intermittently in operation in his work), but by casting them in oddly familiar forms (his work is strangely ode-like, and intriguingly metered — formalist, I want to say, but nothing at all like Dana Gioia). He registers all kinds of things that are going on out there politically. But there's nothing messianic about it. There's nothing in the work (at least in what I saw that night) that claims "because I do this, my politics are pure" or "because I do this, the Empire of Media-Saturated Capitalism quakes" or even "because I do this, Philip Larkin was a bad poet." And it was a hell of a show, too.

In the end, I'm inclined to agree with a comment Eirik Steinhoff made between readers at the Elastic Arts Center that night: "the problem isn't the Prynne tradition — the problem is the messianism attached to it." If Keston Sutherland represents the Prynne tradition in its current iteration, I'm inclined to think it's the most vital part of British poetry today. If we could only find some way of talking about it that didn't imply it was a way — no, the way — to save the world...


*****
LATE-BREAKING NEWS: THE SENTIMENTALITY OF EXEMPTION

This just in from Eirik Steinhoff:

Did I really say that about Prynne the Messiah? ....Can we correct that quote to read "print" for "Prynne" and "Masala Dosai" for "Messianism"? That sounds more like something I might have said that exciting evening.

That sd, the Wilkinson/Riley colloquy does usefully illuminate the issues that crop up when promises are made that poetry is often hard pressed to keep. Keston's keenly alive to this problem, speaking of the "sentimentality of exemption" avant-gardes fall prey to.

*****
MORE LATE-BREAKING NEWS: HENRY GOULD WEIGHS IN

I'm not sure how to feel about being called "chipper." Then again, I've been called a lot worse, generally with justification.

Situationism: The Smackdown

Imagine if you will your humble blogger seated at his study table, surrounded by ghostly spirits. As they swirl in their disembodied way about his head, each calls out in thin-voiced dismay, urging the seated man to a course of necessary action. "Revise your old manuscript! The press wants it reformatted, and cannot wait!" urges one wispy and ectoplasmic entity. "Heed not those words," urges another "for you owe the editor of a book some notes on your contribution!" A third spirit whirls feverishly through the air, gibbering insistently about an omnibus review of an under-appreciated poet for which the immutable deadline looms. Then another ghastly apparition arises, sending the previous speakers off to cower in the corners of the room, by the unread stacks NYRBs. "Grade your students' papers!" it commands, its hollow eyes offering vistas of the abyss. What to do when confronted with such poltergeists? The humble blogger rolls up his sleeves, and, turning to his age-old strategies of semi-industrious avoidance, undertakes some research for a new book, a project for which no deadline exists.


No doubt this will lead to terrible regrets later. But I gotta tell ya, I'm glad I did things this way today, because the research involved reading an exchange between two scholars of Situationism, and watching the first scholar smack down the second was at least as exciting as watching Roger Federer crush the will of yet another hapless opponent. (I was actually watching both smackdowns at once, reading with tennis on in the background. God knows how I stood the excitement).

The exchange on Situationism took place in the pages of Social Justice's special issue on "Art, Power and Social Change" (that's vol. 33 #2, 2006, for those of you running to your archives or rooting around on the coffee table to find it under the remote control and that bag of Funyuns on which you've been secretly gorging). It began with a piece by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen of Copenhagen University, to which Simeon Hunter of Loyala (New Orleans) replied. It ended with the resounding thud, as Rasmussen threw Hunter down in a devastating-yet-politely-professional riposte.

Before filling you in on the specifics, a few words on Why This Matters, beyond the base thrills of the gladiatorial arena. What's important about the exchange, I think, is this: it shows us two important things that can happen when we equate aesthetic actions with political actions (as so many on the avant and post-avant tracks seem to do). Firstly, the exchange shows us how this can lead to the overt subordination of aesthetics to politics, which can be deadly to art (this is one of the conclusions Rasmussen draws about Situationism); secondly, the exchange shows us how easy it is for those of us immersed in aesthetic activity to think of aesthetic gestures toward politics as much more grand and powerfully subversive than they actually are (this is the conclusion I draw from watching Hunter try to form a coherent reply to Rasmussen).

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen on the Situationists

The story Rasmussen tells about Situationism comes, for the most parts, from his thinking about Guy Debord. If I had to paraphrase it in narrative form, I'd say it goes something like this:

Back in 1957 Guy Debord and his crew looked around and saw nothing but the ruins of old avant-garde movements. The old avant-garde had been killed off, or suppressed, or marginalized, or had their radicalism domesticated and commodified and reduced to mere style. But Guy and the others were young enough and idealistic enough to think they could revive all that was best about the interwar avant-garde. They told themselves that, like the heroes of Dada, they could mock and undermine bourgeois norms and art and values; and like the heroes of Dada, they could liberate art from the institutions that had separated it from life, reducing it to useless decor and toothless aestheticism. They also told themselves that, like the heroes of Surrealism, they could break down the barriers between life and art and revolution. They turned for inspiration to the Surrealist notion that the unleashing of the unconscious and the repressed would bring us freedom, since the unconscious is not controlled by the social powers that be.

But soon enough Guy Debord and his crew looked around again and saw that they hadn't managed to accomplish much, and they decided that art was not the solution they had hoped it would be. Debord came to the conclusion that our social order had evolved to the point where it was dominated by spectacle — by a system of images that colonize our minds and reduce us to passive consumers and obedient producers, and that dissolve all social associations that don't serve the dominant order. Art was simply appropriated by this system, and the spectacle even managed to colonize our unconscious. Debord looked down at the two six-guns he held in his hands, the one called Dada and the one called Surrealism, then looked up at the towering Godzilla that was the spectacle, then he looked over his shoulder to his companions shouting "our weapons are useless against it!" and ran for cover. [Rasmussen, who looks like a very serious man with serious glasses, didn't put it this way, and might not be too happy with me for so doing, but I believe I'm not too far off, really, in paraphrasing his position].

When Guy and his band of outlaws reassembled in their secret caves, they gathererd round the fire they'd built from the only available materials (a couple of old chair legs and a dozen copies of Dialectic of Enlightenment, if I remember correctly), and asked themselves a question: in a situation like this, with Dadaist and Surrealist techniques rendered useless, how can we remain true to the spirit of the avant-garde? The answer came from Guy himself, from where he'd ensconced himself behind a protective wall of film-canisters containing the complete cinematic works of Jean Cocteau. In a voice not untinged with sorrow (indeed, in a voice not unlike that of Milton's Satan, as he addressed the defeated army of rebel angels), Guy told his companions that the only way to stay true to the revolutionary ideals of the avant-garde in an age when art was co-opted by the spectacle was to abandon art. Hear the voiceover to this sad scene, as narrated by Rasmussen himself:

There was no doubt in Debord's mind: it was time to affirm the historical necessity and transcend the obsolete pseudo-communication of art.... Art had to be negated and realized in revolutionary practice even if that meant losing art. The Situationists had to abandon art; historical development necessitated this dramatic move.

And so the Situationists were through, theoretically, with the production and criticism of such obsolete entities as literature and visual art per se, and set about a path of radical refusal: they "restained themselves from making artworks out of fear of commercial integration and institutional cooptation." The attempt to form a politics fused with aesthetics led, in the end, to the abandonment of aesthetic activity. Art died, that ideology could live.

Simeon Hunter's Reply

Simeon Hunter's attempt at rebuttal begins promisingly enough: he asks us to look not at Debord's philosophical positions, but at the actual practice of a multitude of artists who follow in the Situationists' footsteps:

I do not propose to object to Rasmussen's exposition. Rather, I wish to suggest that his account is overly pessimistic and that the value of Debord's text lies less in its argument and more in the possibilities that it opens despite itself. If we are to measure these possibilities, we need to focus our attention on those tangential visual practices and evidences that Debord seeks to close off, but which his thinking nevertheless propagated and indeed continues to propagate.

What's that? Yes, I know, I know, Hunter's verb tense choices are a bit iffy, but quit being such a language nerd, why don'tcha, and listen to what the man has to say. Jeez! What Hunter means is that, despite Debord's sense that art could not significantly contribute to the big historical revolution of which Debord and his cronies collectively dreamed, there is still a lot of art that came out of the Situationist tradition, and such art is in fact politically efficacious. Debord may have thought such art futile, but, according to Hunter, it came into being anyway.

Most of what follows in Hunter's essay is a list of various Situationist-inflected art projects (I say "inflected" rather than "influenced" because it isn't always clear that there is a direct line of influence). The examples include, among others, works by Andy Warhol and the Guerrilla Girls. I'd like to look at these in particular, because I think the distance between Hunter's claims for what the works accomplish politically, and the actual effects of the works, is huge. And the vastness of that gulf between claim and effect speaks stongly about the sentimentality of those whose interest in the aesthetic is justified by politics.

1. Warhol. Hunter tells us that Warhol's work was, among other things, an example of art that worked to subvert the spectacle-driven social order Debord described. "The really clever part," says Hunter, "was that [Warhol] managed to make his critique so close to its subject that the system unquestioningly distributed the work for him.... It was reproduced, celebrated, and distributed by a commercial media unable to spot the subversion." Sigh. I mean, do I really have to say this? Well, okay: a subversion so subtle that it goes unnoticed as a subversion doesn't subvert much at all. It is reasoning of this kind that maketh one shudder when one hears one's fellow poets and professors speak blithely of the subversive nature of their favorite art. The question of tangible results has to be swept under the faculty-lounge carpet (probably by non-unionized immigrant labor, too).

Several of Hunter's examples are roughly analogous to the Warhol example in terms of the question of tangible results. My favorite is that of the Lettrists, text artists who, according to Hunter, "sought to unify sign systems into a single politico-poetic voice designed to ameliorate the conditions of living for all by disrupting those specializations that the Enlightenment had imposed..." One yearns to grab a Lettrist by the lapel and ask "Say, that project of ameliorating the living conditions of all by getting jiggy with fonts? How's that, you know, working out for you?" Round the colossal lack of impact of such projects the lone and level sands stretch far away...

2. The Guerrilla Girls

Some of Hunter's examples involve work that does, in fact, have plausible claims to having had tangible effects. But a look at the most convincing of these examples, the Guerrilla Girls, shows us the limits of the kind of effect they have, and the overblown nature of the claim that they fulfill the Situationists' massive goals of social transformation. [Full disclosure: I think I was in some weak way connected to the committee that brought the Guerrilla Girls to visit Lake Forest College a few years back, but memory fades...]. I mean, consider the following statement, drawn from a Guerrilla Girls' piece consisting of a parodic recreation of the Ten Commandments:

Thou Shalt Admit to the Public that words such as Genius, Masterpiece, Seminal, Potent, Tough, Gritty, and Powerful are used Solely to Prop Up the Myth and Inflate the Market Value of White Male Artists.

The politics of the piece are pretty typical of the GGs. I actually think they've got valid points, and I think they've had an impact on the art world. But these are very limited politics — the politics of art institutions. While such things do have an eventual broader impact, this isn't exactly the revolutionary liberation of society for which the Situationists longed. It isn't revolution at all: it is an urging of the reform of some institutions that serve the privileged classes. And it is first and foremost about modifying the way we talk about art. If this is Situationism, it is a greatly diminished thing, in terms of social goals. (Was it Dwight MacDonald of the old Partisan Review crowd who used to look at the shrinking goals of his radical friends, and speak of an imaginary species of bird that went extinct because it could only fly in smaller and smaller circles, until eventually it disappeared up its own ass? Anatomically dubious, but one takes his point...)

Rasmussen's Smackdown of Hunter

It was at this point that Rasmussen, who had been quietly positioning himself high up on the ropes of the ring, leapt down and slammed Hunter to the mat. And as he took Hunter down, he twisted the poor guy's body in two directions. First, he wrenched Hunter over to the corner to our left, and banged the hapless art-historian's head on the turnbuckle while uttering through gritted teeth that there has been "a widespread effort — visible in Simeon Hunter's reply, too — to turn the Situationist project into an art movement," despite the Situationist rejection of art. Having knocked his opponent around sufficiently at that end of the ring, Rasmussen the Dangerous Dane pulled the staggering Hunter to the center of the ring, cast him down, and delivered the coup de grâce, saying:

We must still come to terms with the proliferation of images, but without repeating the damned grandiose themes of the Situationists, for whom it is a question of all or nothing, requiring the destruction of images to liberate the imagination.

It is at this point that the bell rang, and the referee mercifully intervened, raising Rasmussen's arm in a spectaclular display of victory.

The Poets as Professors

Maybe it's because I've been hanging out with Ray Bianchi lately that I've been thinking a bit about the en masse movement of the poets into professorial robes. Ray's a poet but not an academic, which makes him two things at once: A. the historical norm for poets; and B. an aberration among the poets of early 21st century America, for whom "professor" is almost certainly the single most common job-description. Ray's been ruminating over this situation, and I suppose listening to him do this over lunch the other day at a local joint has got me chewing things over a bit, too.

It's not that I've got a Romantic sense of the poet as glamorous outsider. In fact, one of the things being a prof has done for me is to give me enough of a historical sense to know that the poet as outsider, free from any attachment to institutions, is only a brief chapter in the history of poetry. For most of the history of poetry in English, the bulk of poets have been affiliated with one or another kind of institution. It could be courtly (Edmund Spenser, say, or Wyatt) or eccesiastical (the later Donne, or George Herbert), or it could be a matter of sub-courtly aristocratic patronage, or the odd, eighteenth century combination of patronage and incipient market-oriented publishing (Pope and Johnson). To a degree, the Romantics really were knocked loose from institutional support by the disruption of the old patronage system and the rapid development of forms of writing more commercially viable than poetry. The situation continued for much of the nineteenth century, despite prominent exceptions. But by the early decades of the twentieth century a lot of poets had found support through affiliation with journalism, and after World War Two the migration into academe was on. Now, with the MFA mills running into overtime shifts, we're probably close to the zenith of the poet-as-professor era. With the huge overproduction of credentialled poets, after all, we're going to have more of them than can possibly find academic, or even para-academic, work. The whole process feels vaguely dialectical, but I've descended too far down the declining side of my caffeine curve to follow up on all that just now (no doubt to the relief of all concerned).

Anyway, I think I've found an angle from which to approach the question of what the migration into academe may mean for poetry. It comes from an essay called "The Review: Culture's Medium" in the very-academic sounding collectionThe Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. The essay was written by my favorite Romanticist this side of Jerome McGann, Marilyn Butler. Butler's essay is, essentially, an examination of the role of the various cultural reviews of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in influencing the way poets and novelists saw themselves. Because Butler is fiendishly clever, she blows right on by the commonplace notion that the reviewers for these journals were in a position to praise or blame various kinds of poets. Her topic, she says, is "Reviews rather than reviewing." That is, she's interested in how the format of journals, and the kind of discourse they represent, influence literature. It isn't individual book reviews she cares about, it's the conditions of communication that the journals created that matter to her. (I believe my colleagues in Communications have a term for this, but Dave Park hasn't returned my phone message yet, damn him, so I'm going to have to do without it).

Long story short, Butler's argument goes something like this:

1. The important journals of the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century (Butler is far too sophisticated to write as if there were firm start-and-stop traits for these things, but I'm not above a rough handling of delicate materials) treated literature in the context of various social and political ideas and events. The journals reviewed literature along with works on other issues, and often treated works of literature from a socio-political standpoint. Importantly, writers responded to this treatment, and tended to see themselves as part of a general public sphere in which large social and political issues were discussed in generally accessible terms. My favorite example here involves not poetry but the novels of Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth. Butler tells us "most late eighteenth-century novels were viewed as entertainments and as fodder for the female reader," but journals like The Edinburgh Review and The Quarterly Review, in treating literature along with Adam Smith-ish political economy, created new horizons of literary expectation. Butler writes:

The Edgeworth family took both quarterlies, Scott wrote for both of them: between 1809 and 1914 Maria Edgeworth and Scott "turned" novels to documentation and social realism and into that discourse of contemporary history and social analysis to which the serious nineteenth-century novel belongs. Edgeworth's Ennui (1809) and The Absentee (1812), the best-received of her Irish tales, appeared at just the right time to win accolades from both quarterlies. Naturally so, for these tales mirror the qualites and contents of the higher journalism. Firmly grounded in the science of society, they are composed in vivid, accurately observed scenes that seem to invite selection as quotations — that is, virtually to anticipate a second career in the columns of either quarterly....[T]he nonfictional elements that make ... Edgeworth so newsworthy, so much at home in these periodicals devoted to the public scene, repeat themselves in Scott. Both novelists echo the quarterlies' commitment to social order and government.

So the journals in which literature was reviewed created a climate to which the writers responded. Writers, seeing their works treated in the context of social debate, came to see themselves as participants in that debate, and wrote accordingly.

2. As the nineteenth century rumbled along, many journals that reviewed literature became more specifically literary. That is, they became more interested in literature, and less interested in the broader issues of political economy that had formed the main concerns of the earlier journals. 1820 seems to be the watershed date: "An ordered separation between literature, especially poetry, and independent or reformist or scientific thinking was in train by 1820" writes Butler. She demonstrates this in many ways, but the most striking example for me was the change in the kinds of people who were profiled in biographical essays in the journals:

Reviews were getting professionally self-reflexive, in that articles and books on the lives and personalities of men and women of letters were filling the place once reserved for articles and books on statesmen and men of action.

What's interesting about all this to me, as I think about the migration of the poets into the English departments, is this: if, as Butler convincingly argues, the context in which literature is presented and discussed has an effect on the way writers see themselves, and the way they write, we can expect the academization of poets to have far-reaching consequences for poetry. The inclusion of poetry in a more general cultural discourse leads to certain results; and one imagines the limiting of poetry to specifically literary contexts — as has happened in our own time — will lead to very different results. I don't have anything like the scholarly data set required to make a proper statement about these consequences, but don't think for a moment that this is going to stop me from opining.

So what's our situation, exactly? Well, it is a situation where an unprecedented number of poets teach in English departments; and just as importantly, it is a situation in which poets publish, for the most part, in journals devoted only to literature. It is also a situation where poetry is reviewed and discussed primarily in literary journals. There are exceptions, of course, to this publishing situation. There are journals that place poetry and discussions of poetry alongside more general material (think of The New Yorker, say, or the Times Literary Supplement) but the percentage of published poems appearing in such venues is minimal. And what are the effects of this situation? Well, for starters, I'd offer these two:

1. Style über alles. If poets are affiliated with literary institutions such as English departments (as opposed to institutions of power, say, like the court of a Wyatt or a Spenser), it is the most specifically literary element of literature that we can expect to see at center stage. We can expect poets to claim prestige by stylistic affiliation, choosing either classic old-school forms or the newest-and-most-advanced forms as means of establishing cultural capital. You can just about hear the distant rumble of canon-fire from a battle between New Formalism and Language Poetry, can't you?

2. Sentimental politics rather than politics of a more hands-on variety. Academics tend to have pretty thought-out political opinions. But we don't tend to, you know, do much, except maybe cut a check to the Green Party and go to a demonstration near the campus cafeteria. I'm not against this, but it isn't the same thing as union organizing. I mean, there's a real difference between Charles Bernstein telling us "as a poet, you effect the public sphere with each reader, with the fact of the poem, and by exercising your prerogative to choose what collective forms you will legitimate" and Carl Sandburg (a poet of the poet-as-newspaperman era) working to organize for the Wisconsin Social Democratic Party, back when such organizing had very tangible consequences (like winning elections, or getting your head knocked in by a billy club).

I don't want to present our current situation as a kind of fall from grace. Nor do I mean to imply that we've reached the final state of things. In fact, Ron Silliman has pointed to two trends that seem to me to point toward the end of the era of the dominance of the poet-professor: the production of poets by the universities on a scale such that only a very small percentage of them can go back to the universities as professors; and the rise of the blogosphere as a venue for the publication and discussion of poetry.

It's too soon to say what these trends will mean. But it seems likely that the poet-professors, while not actually decreasing in numbers, will soon enough be overwhelmed by new breeds. And they (or, I should say, we) will stand agape, like a cluster of old genteel Yankees of the early twentieth-century gawking with incomprehension at the strangely-garbed crowds pouring through Ellis Island.

Oppositional Poetry vs. Oppositional Poetry

So, while Sunday morning isn't exactly a matter of Wallace Stevens' "complacencies of the peignoir" chez Archambeau, I do generally manage to sprawl around with a few cups of freshly-ground-Sumatra coffee and the New York Times while I let the Saturday night haze drift out of my mind on the gently floating caffeine breeeze. Today I added the latest issue of Pleiades to the mix, which helped jazz me out of my torpor, including as it did John Matthias' new poem "Poetics," my own piece on poetic difficulty (which I scanned for typos, spotting one humiliating one, left in due to my own proofreaderly negligence), and Reginald Shepherd's very sharp essay "One State of the Art." It was Shepherd's essay that mixed itself into a heady brew with a piece by Jim Harrison in the Times Book Review, and that, with truly first rate coffee as a catalyst, had me thinking about the beast that hulks wherever poets gather nowadays: the idea of oppositional poetry.

Long story short, I suppose my thesis here is this: a lot of poets are driven by the idea that they should be in opposition to both the dominant aesthetic ideas and the dominant political forces of their time — but when you open the hood and poke around among its innards, this idea doesn't turn out to have much to do with politics at all. And its relation to aesthetics turns out to be of secondary importance: if you were feeling generous you could call the real driving force community; if you were feeling ungenerous, you could call it conformity. (I'm sure there are exceptions). Let me explain...


Jim Harrison's piece in the New York Times, "Don't Feed the Poets," was occasioned by Harrison's rediscovery of Karl Shapiro's 1964 book of prose poems, Bourgeois Poet lying around his study. Here's what Harrison says about the genesis of Shapiro's book:

Shapiro (1913-2000) had gotten the title for his book at a party, after giving a reading in Seattle, when Theodore Roethke called him a "bourgeois poet." The question is why it caused Shapiro such severe unrest that he poured heart and soul into what is really one very long poem?

The answer, says Harrison, lies in Shapiro's not-unusual "heroic notion of the poet," a notion formed early on and persistenting throughout his life. And when Shapiro wrote Bourgeois Poet, he was obsessed with the French Symbolists. "This explains a lot," says Harrison,

...since Shapiro's notion of what a poet was implies the outsider, the outcast, the outlier, one who purposefully deranges his mind to write poems like Rimbaud, or one who could not walk, so borne down was he by his giant wings, to paraphrase Baudelaire.

So this was the image of the poet, but how do you maintain it if, like Shapiro, you're tenured and respectable, and your concerns revolve (as Kenneth Koch used to say of the poet-professor) around "the myth, the midterms, and the missus"? As Harrison puts it, "How can you be raffiné ... on a campus in Nebraska?" What's interesting here isn't really the answer to that conundrum (if in fact there is one), but the persistence of the question, and the way Shapiro experienced it with a terrible urgency. It really ate him up, this charge of respectabilty. To be a poet, he had learned from the Symbolist tradition, meant to be an outsider — or better yet, to be part of a brotherhood of outsiders — or even better still, to be a part of a brotherhood of outsiders intent on defying the aesthetics and politics of the establishment. But all of this inherited sense of What A Poet Ought To Be was very different from the reality of what Shapiro was (and, I suppose, most poets in America since Shapiro's day, actually are). So it tore Shapiro up, as a perusal of the self-hating pages of Bourgeois Poet makes clear.

What's extrordinary here is this: it somehow isn't enough for the poet to embrace oppositional politics. To conform to the norms of the oppositional poet he actually has to assert some kind of equation between his formal practice and his oppositional politics. Consider Yvor Winters: as Reginald Shepherd recently pointed out in his blog, Winters is almost always dismissed as a reactionary, even though his political positions throughout his life were impressively progressive, and even courageus. He was a member of the ACLU in the McCarthy era, and joined the NAACP before civil rights became a respectable position among white guys. But he never drew an equation between an oppositional politics and formal experiment in poetry, and, having avoided this equation, he doesn't fit the inherited idea of an oppositional poet, who must combine the two, and see them as somehow the same thing. (Why does a commitment to old-school metrical poetry trump the whole anti-McCarthy, anti-Jim Crow business? It's an interesting question worth investigating properly sometime...)

Just as important to the sense of Winters as reactionary is another factor: Winters' refusal to be identified with a band of brother-outsiders. I always knew Winters was a loner-curmudgeon type, but I never got to see the stubborness with which he protected his solitude until the latest issue of the Chicago Review clunked into my mailbox a month or so ago. The issue features an astonishingly cool and very large selection of Kenneth Rexroth's correspondence (edited by John Beer and Max Blechman, who totally deserve a shout-out for this). There's a fascinating exchange between Rexroth and Winters, in which Rexroth tries to wrangle Winters into attending the 1936 Western Writers Conference, which was to be a big oppositional-writers love fest. Winters voices some radical opinions (especially about Communism), and hints at his political activities, but is absolutely averse to the "let's get together and speak truth, not to power, but to ourselves" ethos of the radical writers congress. So Winters wasn't one of the boys, and he didn't write in the approved style of the bien-pensants, and, as far as his reputation goes, that seems to have meant more than the gutsy stands for the left that he actually did take. (Lest we think this kind of thinking dead, I might mention a big argument I got into after the Chicago MSA a few years ago, in which some people ganged up on Stephen Burt in his absence, calling him a right-winger. Some of Steve's poems rhyme, and he hangs with Helen Vendler, but I'm not inclined to the belief that this makes for right-wingery in politics — Steve was out there knocking on doors and holding placards for the good guys during the '04 elections, I recall, while I was curled up with my Mallarmé and my self-righteousness).

So this idea of the oppositional poet isn't entirely about political beliefs: it's about belonging as much as it is about believing. And one belongs, in no small measure, by displaying the appropriate formal plumage. Politics takes a back seat.

Anyway. Reginald Shepherd's Pleiades piece gets to the core of these issues by pointing out that there's kind of a disconnect between the things we think we mean when we speak of "oppositional poetry" and the what we actually mean. Shepherd begins by smacking both the poetry of "earnestly mundane anecdote" and the poetry of "blank-eyed, knee-jerk irony" upside their respective heads. He then goes on to say:

I am particularly disturbed by the self-righteous complacency of what Ron Slate calls the avant-gardeners, so smugly convinced that the grass on their side of the fence is not only greener but more virtuous. Their willful blindness to work by anyone who isn't a member of their club is especially problematic in light of their project's justification by its spirit of exploration and openness to the unknown. When it comes to the work of anyone they label a member of the "School of Quietude," all is already known, and there is never any doubt as to who is a member of this so-called school. If you're not one of us, you're one of them, and it is you who (by definition) are guilty of complacency and self-satisfaction. Such unnuanced either/or thinking is the opposite of openness and exploration, though it could be termed "oppositional" in a pejorative sense.

Zing! I mean, there it is: a lot of poets who think they're "oppositional" in the sense of opposing the (mysteriously linked) dominant aesthetic and political forces, are really "oppositional" in a very different sense: their most cherished belief is that there are two opposing forces in the world, and they yearn to be clearly identified with one side, and to condemn the other side. Much more than actual politics, this will to brand-identity motivates the thinking of such poets. (Memo to those who think formal experiment is political opposition: maybe it is, sometimes, but Dick Cheney does not fear your disjunction). Shepherd drives the point home with a great quote from Anne Lauterbach:

The aspiring young poet begins to write in such a way as to invite a certain critical attention, to 'fit' her work into one or another critical category. This is the main function of being identified with a group or school, to draw critical attention that individual poets, not affiliated with a movement or group, cannot easily attract. "New York School" or "Language Poetry" are given brand-name status, commidifying and homogenizing, so that critics (and poets) can make general identifications and totalizing critiques without having to actually contend with the specific differences between so-called members of the group.

I don't think it's really any coincidence that the biggest pusher of the us-vs-them version of oppositionality, Ron Silliman, is also the biggest pusher of the catchphrase "poetry is community." Yeah, I know, Ron says he likes some non-langpo types, like Robert Hass (whom everyone has always liked, by the way, all through the theory wars of the 80s and 90s — for reasons I tried to investigate in the Hass chapter in Laureates and Heretics which I am promising not to talk about any more, though it is coming out this fall and will make an excellent gift for the whole family...). But unless Ron drops the whole "School of Quietude vs. Post-Avant" distinction, his protestations of bipartisanship ring about as hollow as George W. Bush's. The "oppositional" thing seems less about politics than about belonging (or, if you're in a bad mood, you could say conforming) to a community. Remember that old Who movie Quadrophenia? You can only tell you're a rocker by showing that you're not a mod. And the ruthless class structure goes on unperturbed while the two groups bash away at each other. I demand someone remake this movie, setting it at the 2006 MLA and casting Charles Bernstein in the lead!

Anyway. This bourgeois poet needs to get back to his fabulous Sumatran coffee. And to his poetic community: Stephen Collis just sent me his new chapbook, which is formally audacious in all kinds of ways. I'm hoping to blog about it later this week...

Probably the Dumbest Thing Silliman Has Ever Said...

Sometimes — not always, but sometimes — rebutting Ron Silliman's more extreme versions of his characteristic us-vs.-them poetic manichaenism is like playing checkers with a monkey: you can win, but it isn't really worth the trouble (No — Mr. Pickles, no! Don't gnaw on the checkerboard! And for god's sake, don't fling that at the wall! Noo-ooooo-ooooooo!). But this time out I've got to say something, since Ron has committed at least two affronts to intelligence at once. They are as follows:

1. A false assertion that Geoffrey Hill and Gjertrud Schnackenberg have "fascist" aesthetic projects.
2. A false assertion that Hill and Schnackenberg have a shared aesthetic project.

Some Background

So there I was, checking out Reginald Shepherd's brand spanking new blog, when I caught his reference to a new comment by Ron Silliman. I blinked. I did a double take. I resisted, with great effort, doing a spit-take with my Dr. Brown's Diet Cherry Soda. Then I went over to Rantin' Ron's site to make sure this was really what Ron said.

For the record, here's what I now consider Ron's dumbest comment ever. The context is Ron brooding about Bill Knott. Mid-brood, Ron picks up on Knott's discussion of some other poets, including

...the likes of Geoffrey Hill & Gjertrud Schnackenberg (whose aesthetic program Knott characterizes, not incorrectly, as fascist).

This is the passage that redlined my bullshit detector.

Getting to the Source

To track down the arguments about Hill and Schnackenberg's allegedly fascist aesthetics I surfed over to a post on Knott's blog. There, I found that the ideas came originally from an essay in Magma by Laurie Smith. Since Smith's essay, "Subduing the Reader" is up online, it was easy enough to check out. Smith actually has some interesting things to say about the differences between Anne Carson and Geoffrey Hill, though he's a bit dismissive of Carson. Smith actually seems to admire Hill's chops, but he's actively angry at Hill for reasons that seem to me entirely wrong.

There are two things about Hill that enrage Smith, and Smith links both of them to what he calls fascism: Hill's allusions to high culture, and Hill's juxtaposition of past and present to the advantage of the former. Let's check these out.

Unbelievably Lousy Argument Number One: Dense Allusions Are Fascistic

Here's Smith taking both Hill and Carson to task for making allusions that most readers wouldn't be able to catch without footnotes:

...Carson and Hill share a common aim which is achieved by a common method. It is to interweave their material with such a frequency of cultural reference that the reader loses confidence in her ability to understand, therefore to judge, what she is reading. Faced with a plethora of references to 'high' culture which she feels she ought to know but does not, the reader feels increasingly ignorant and unworthy. She is forced to accept the poem on the poet's terms or not at all; her critical faculty is subdued.

and later:

[Hill believes] that 'high' culture should be accessible only to a small educated elite (kept especially small in this case by oblique references and a lack of notes), leaving the majority in vacuous ignorance, strong because obedient.

There's no ambiguity to Smith's condemnation of this as an aesthetic — at the end of his essay, he comes right out and calls it "fascist."

There are all kinds of things one could criticize in Smith's contention. For starters, there's the idea that the subduing of the reader to a state of vacuous ignorance is the "aim" of Hill and Carson. Smith does nothing to prove that inducing this state is the goal of either poet. I rather think that including arcane allusions challenges the reader to be active, to seek out some things outside of his or her current range of knowledge. Far from being passive and ignorant, the reader has to be both active and, eventually, informed.

Smith's argument is so strange I have to put it in capital letters just to fix it in my mind as something someone actually said:

SMITH (AND KNOTT AND SILLIMAN) ACTUALLY SEEM TO BELIEVE THAT GEOFFREY HILL'S POEMS SOMEHOW BATTER PEOPLE'S MINDS INTO SUBMISSION AND LEAVE THEM SO EMPTY, SO FREE OF THE CRITICAL FACULTY, THAT THEY ARE GOING TO BECOME ZOMBIES OBEDIENT TO AUTHORITARIAN POWER.

Okay. There it is. But I'm going to need, say, one piece of empirical evidence that Hill's Mercian Hymns has created a group of fascist zombies. Come on, guys, just one?

Unbelievably Lousy Argument Number Two: Preferring the Past to the Present is a Fascist Thing

Here's Smith on Hill's preference for the past over the present:

Hill's aim is that of Pound of the Cantos, his acknowledged master - to expound a view of culture in which the past is held up as admirable and the present dismissed as worthless. It is a view that brooks no argument, no discussion, and is, in the sense that Pound respectfully used the word, fascist.

Leaving aside the hyperbole (does Hill really see a "worthless" present?) there are three things that I can think of that are problematic (by which I mean "wrong") here:

1. To present the past as superior to the present is not to "brook no argument" any more than any other artistic or poetic position does.

2. To prefer the past isn't always to prefer fascism. It all depends on what version of what past one prefers to what version of what present. Raymond Williams has a really good chapter on this in The Country and the City. The chapter is called "Golden Ages," and its main contention is that there are aristocratic, bourgeois, and radical-worker versions of the past, all of which can be held up as criticisms of the present. The English folk rhyme (recited by the rebel priest John Ball during the peasant's revolt of 1340) "When Adam delve and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman" is just one very brief example of the radical-worker version of preferring past to present.

3. While Pound may have looked to the past, the poets most clearly identifiable with fascism were the Italian Futurists (Marinetti and company). As the name of their movement implies, they preferred the modern to the ancient — even going so far as to assert that "past-loving Venice" should be destroyed.

A Weird Assertion

Smith's essay concludes with yet another weird assertion: that the problem of fascism in poetry isn't limited to Hill, but extends to Gjertrud Schnackenberg "who is much admired by the New Republican Right."

Schnackenberg isn't a challenging poet of allusions like Hill (she's a New Formalist, more akin to Dana Gioia than to Hill or anyone in the Poundian tradition). So Smith must mean that a preference for the past to the present alone leads to, or equals, fascism. I think I've already given my reasons for why I think this is a lousy argument.

I'd also add that I think it is false to say that Schnackenberg is the darling of "New Republican Right." I mean, most of those people don't read poetry. And the Republicans who do read poetry don't tend to come from the wacko wing of that venerable political party. But even granting Smith this point, one could argue that to judge a work of art by the politics of those who like it is a dicey business. Hitler, after all, loved the art of ancient Greece. That's ancient Greece, folks — the culture that gave us democracy (early, flawed, limited, but real democracy).

Coda

Ooosh. That's enough for now. Anyway, my cherry soda's warm, so it's off to the fridge for a fresh one. But first two quick points by way of a coda:

A. I suppose I'm focusing on Silliman's endorsement of Smith's arguments (rather than on Knott or Smith himself) because Silliman looms larger than the others in the small corner of the poetry world of which this blog is a part. If you're reading this, you're more likely to read Silliman than Knott or Smith.

B. There's a good article over at Salon on the perils of throwing the word "fascist" around lightly. It is especially worth reading in these our troubled times, when there are real authoritarians out there.