It's Alan Golding --
Every year I am surprised
He wears an ear-cuff.
(More to come -- let a fella recover from the conference before you start making demands on him already. I mean, sheesh...)
I'm escaping from Chicago and heading south, first to get my literary groove on in Louisville at the 20th Century Lit Conference, and then down to Austin, where I'll be giving a reading at what seems to be on the verge of becoming an institution in its own right: the fringe-events surrounding the generally gawdawful, resolutely anti-intellectual, networkers-in-full-on-self-promotion AWP Convention. (Do I sound bitter? Sorry. I mean, I'm sure your panel will be good, but look around in the corridors at the hotel sometime. Doesn't the posturing, posing, and pussyfooting sort of creep you out, just a little? I mean, even more than at the MLA?)
Prophetic Statment of the Day: Someday, far in the future, the AWP fringe will devour the core events, as happened with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival so long ago.
Anyway. The Austin reading, which will be MC'd by G. Matthew Jenkins, will be held on Thursday, March 9 at 8pm at The Bouldin Creek Cafe in what Jenkins (an actual Texan) tells me is the low-key hipster "So-Co" neighborhood.
On the off chance that you want to buy me a drink in Louisville, you can look me up at the Seelbach.
Back when I was an obnoxious, dismissive, egomanaical dipshit of a grad student, I used to love hanging out in the O'Shaughnessy Hall coffee shop at Notre Dame (where I was once brushed aside by John Favreau during the filming of Rudy). 
Somewhere between my third cup of coffee and my second or third rant about [insert name of whatever guys with ponytails were ranting about in the mid nineties] [no, I don't have the ponytail anymore], I'd probably opine thusly about whatever poet had recently visited campus: "Oh sure, [insert name of poet] is good at what he attempts, but the poems, you have to admit..." (here I would pause portentiously, and gaze at whoever hadn't quietly slipped away from the table) "...the poems are inadequately researched." At this point I would lean back in the smoky air and feel smugly superior for a moment before steering myself toward the sandwich tray.
Oyez. Already I was a big fan of contingent difficulty in poetry, of the notion that the poet who isn't trafficking in the long ago or far away or arcane or weird was missing out on everything important. I've mellowed in my premature dotage, no doubt, and one feature of this mellowing is to note that I was (rightly or wrongly) out of step with the times. The movement that was already gestating back then, and that has since come to fruition, wasn't toward the researched poem, but the theorized poem.
A number of people have been talking about this new state of affairs, in which the poet is almost expected to write a kind of poetics. The phenomenon is interesting and can, I think, be explained as the result of several trends converging. It has all sorts of implications for poets, but also for poetics. In fact, I think it has a chance of changing the way the theory of literature is written.
Joshua Clover has turned his gaze onto this state of affairs, writing that there is now a kind of presumption out there that:
...poets should have theorized their own work explicitly and completely as a necessary supplement to the poetry, without which it can't be trusted or read as such .... the relative success and insight of recent poetics in making theoretical accounts of itself that are at once persuasive, and relevant to poetics in general, has perhaps produced a certain set of expectations. Certainly there is a rise in general in the sense that poetry is well-accompanied by the author's "poetics," as seen in, for example ... the increasing footage given over to critical writing by the poets in the back of the Norton Anthologies.
Mark Scroggins picks up the discussion and notes that there's an institutional dimesion to it:
I'm interested in how this has been institutionalized, how the writing of poetics – often quite apart from any engagement with "theory" in the sense that the term is most often used in the academy, but nonetheless drawing on the etymological sense of "theory," to look at with detachment – is being written into the requirements for creative writing programs. One can see this in the web pages of various CW programs around the country, which have begun requiring "theory" and "poetics" courses, and some sort of "poetics" component to their theses & dissertations. Even Our University has instituted a self-reflexive "poetics" moment into the requirements for the MFA .... I'd agree with Joshua that this is straight-up "academicization," the final downfall of the old "workshop"/"atelier" model of teaching writing, which can now look only wistfully back on its origins as an artificial imitation of the buzzing café or the intense mardi, where the young gathered – voluntarily, with no grades assigned, no registrar involved...
There's a lot of evidence for the Clover-Scroggins hypothesis -- from immediate personal experience, I offer the following:
I've been reading her lately, since she's coming to the &NOW Festival here at Lake Forest in April, and since I'm teaching her book DaDaDa in my poetry seminar. One of her web sitesincludes a brief page on "poetics" that starts with the statement: "In certain circles, one is continually asked to codify one’s poetics in a written statement." We get a real sense that Daly experiences the writing of poetics as a kind of obligation.I write, I work, I do with a pencil. I like how the words come out of my head and travel down my arm to that sharp point. I like holding a pencil. Also a baseball, a smooth stone fresh from the river, a walking stick, my daughter's hand. So I write everything in pencil first.
(No, I am not making this up.)
But why is this happening? What has propelled the poets into theorizing? Forthwith, the Four Explanations, with all their limitations and lacunae:
1. Explanation: Stylistic
We live in an time without any single, received notion of poetic style. We have no generally-accepted set of conventions or genres in poetry, and as a result we find that we can't rely on people to anticipate what our projects will be. We can't rely on an audience prepared to be in sympathy with us. Like modernism and avant-gardism, with their raft of maniestos, pluralism means always having to introduce yourself, and make explicit the theoretical underpinings of your art.
I used to believe this was, on its own, a sufficient explanation for the increase in poets writing poetics. Back in 2001 I began my intro to Vectors: New Poetics by riffing on a quote from Wallace Stevens' "Of Modern Poetry," which really needs no riffing:
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what was in the script.
Then the theater was changed
To something else. Its past was souvenir.
Cast of characters:Guy who seems to have Just Completed his Dissertation (JCD) Guy who seems to be the Director of a University Press (DUP)
JCD: So, since we're being candid, how should I pitch it?
DUP: Just don't say it's a just book about Forster. I mean, maybe, maybe you could mention A Passage to India as a kind of postcolonial text, push that angle.
JCD: But...
DUP: Just don't do it that way. No single-author studies. But if it's postcolonialism...
JCD: That's a part of a chapter, but...
DUP: If it's the theory of the novel, the theory...do you work with his Aspects of the Novel?
JCD: Not really, but if you want me to revise?
DUP: No. Maybe. How about as queer theory?
JCD: Oh. Yeah. I could totally change it.
Oosh. It leaves me feeling clammy and vaguely violated to remember it, though I'm not exactly sure why.
Oh wait, I think I do know why: the eager self-abasement of the life of the mind before the idol of the marketplace. Yeah, that's probably it. I'm mandarin enough to get queasy when I see it.
4. Explanation: Dialectical
I think this would run something like this:
Thesis: The English Departments of the 1980s and 1990s (high theory by theorists)
Antithesis: The MFA Programs of the same period ("craft"-oriented workshop model for poets)
Synthesis: Us, now (poetics by poets)
Now that's Aufgehoben, baby.
*
Okay, right. So what happens to poetics when it is taken out of the hands of, say, Aristotle or more contemporary straight-up theorist types and put in the hands of poets? Lots of things. But one of the more interesting is this: we start to more of the formal techniques we associate with "creative" or "literary" writing in the theory. I mean, when guys like Benjamin Friedlander write extended pastiches and present them as criticism, or when Gabriel Gudding writes highly-wrought, deadpan-funny, alliterative, Jakobson's poetic-function having essays on poetics, something interesting is going on. Poetics are getting (forgive me for this) poetic (Brooke Bergan rates a mention here: her "How MiMi Got (Presque Ou Peut-Etre) Postmodern" in Vectors is a tour de force of poetic technique in the creation of poetics).
If form signifies (as it does), all this will change theory. After Plato chucked the poets out of the ideal republic for their emotional appeal and their freewheeling approach to the word, he said he'd be glad to let them back in if they could write a proper defense of poetry — in prose. In writing poetics that employ the literary techniques we associate more with poetry than with discursive prose, there's a kind of smuggling of the poetic back inside the walls of the republic of theory.
Allrighty, then. Having spent the afternoon expounding on the contradictions of feminine desire in the Victorian novel, I'm off to see if I can scare up the ingredients for one of these.
Having seen this very blog and the old Samizdat site singled out for praise, I wish to state that while I am not worthy, I'm not turning anything down.
You remember the theremin, right? The musical instrument developed by electronic music pioneer Léon Theremin in the 1920s? Most of us know it as a maker of weird, spooky sounds in the sci-fi flicks of the fifties, or perhaps from the beginning of The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations." The thermin works through an electromagnetic field, so you don't even have to touch it to play it — you just wave your hands in the air like a conductor. It was orginally developed as part of Theremin's grand scheme for a purely electronic symphonic orchestra, but it took a few odd turns in its development, as did Theremin's life ( which involved Paris and New York in the jazz age, marrying the African-American ballet dancer Lavinia Williams way before the civil rights movement, being kidnapped by the KGB and forced to develop the electronic eavesdropping device known as the bug, and other things that won't happen to you or to me).
I'd been thinking about writing a poem about Theremin for years, and had originally intended to contrast the utopian future he'd dreamed of in the twenties (a sort of Fritz-Lang's Metropolis-looking world of wireless orchestras) with the very different utopia he saw at the end of his life, when he went to California and heard "Good Vibrations." Fritz Lang vs. Michael Lang, really.
But that poem, which I may still write someday, took some odd turns of its own. Originally called "Theremin in California" it has morphed (via all the discussion about names over the past monts, among other things) into "Called Léon, a Leonardo" and it is up at Seven Corners, a new site with some great stuff by Kristy Odelius up as well.
Oh yeah. The poem has links that help make the looking-up of contingent details a little easier, as well as a link to a tremendous little film clip in which a nonegenarian Theremin demonstrates his invention.
Since I'm planning on heading down to Myopic Books for Gabriel Gudding's reading on the 12th, I thought I'd have a look at his 2002 book of poems, A Defense of Poetry, which I haven't read since it came out. Coming back to it after having spent a lot more time with Surrealism, and a little more time with poets like Ted Berrigan, I'm a lot more sympathetic to the project now than I was then when, moody and deep-deep-deep into Geoffrey Hill, I saw that Gudding was on to something, but didn't really get into it (to paraphrase George Steiner, I got it, but I didn't dig it at the time).
Having recovered from my 2002 bout of gravitas (watching your country ramp-up for a needless, devastating war will do that to you), I'm in a better position to get down with Gudding's poems. His New York School influences are clear enough: there's the breezy, sometimes goofy, talkiness of the poems, sometimes combined with a faux- or semi-faux- naif attitude (oh, how changed is the world, when the New York School lives and breathes in Bloomington, Illinois). There's also a touch of (forgive me, poetry hipsters) Billy Collins in the humor, although usually with a darker edge.
As for Surrealism — well, there's nothing really by way of direct influence, although Gudding's world, like his sentences, does tend to operate in accord with a set of rules different from that which governs the square community. But before I made it a half dozen pages into this year's reading of A Defense of Poetry, I had to abandon my enormous red chair and run upstairs to dig my way into the back of the closet that consitutes the official home of the Samizdat archives in search of Michel Delville's punchy little article, "A Secret History of Belgian Surrealism." (Delville's piece is in Samizdat #8, which isn't on the website yet, but anyone who wants one can email me at the address on my profile page and I'll see if I can't hook you up with a copy). Here's what Delville had to say back then aboutGabriel and Marcel Piqueray, Surrealist poets active in Belgium in the 1950s:
As for the irreverant, scatalogical aesthetics of the Uninhibited Poems, it is typical of the work of Marcel and Gabriel Piqueray. To me, the "Sproks" poems have always resembled a cross between Satie, Beckett, Buñel, and Laurel and Hardy. The proximity of food, garbage and shit in the poetry of the Piqueray brothers points to a poetics that does not shy away from describing fantasies of infantile regression and puts them to the service of a popular art that delights in imagining how the most banal situations can degenerate into absurdist extremes. Such manifestations of the eccentric, the repellent, and the abject create a space where the shock aesthetics of the revolutionary avant-garde meet the verbal games of the poèt-farceur, who considers poetry a form of slapstick comedy.
Gudding is certainly more poèt-farceur than revolutionary avant-gardist, but a lot of what Delville has to say about the Piquerays pertains to Gudding's poems. I mean, check sections seven through nine, and their footnote, of the book's 26 section title poem (these are right and left justified text blocks, but I'm feeling an html-deficit today, so you'll just have to imagine, class):
7. Is your butt driving through
traffic
that it should toot so at the
world? I am averse to urine,
yet I shake your hand upon
occasion;
8. I have made a whiskey of your
tears—and Joe-Bob made a
flu-liquor of your night-
mucus;
9. That some of your gas has
been banging around the
market like a small soldier
carrying a table. God-booby1
---------------------------------------------------1 Just as the fog is shackled to the
dirty valley stream and cannot go
out loosely to join the loopy clouds
who contain hollering eagles and
whooshing falcons but must stand
low and bound and suffer the
scratch of a bush and the round
poop of deer and the odd black
spore of the American black bear or
the bump of a car on a road or the
sick crashes of paintings thrown
from a rural porch, so also is your
mind bound to the low reach of
trash and the wet wan game of
worms and the dripping dick of a
torpid dog—and unlike the clouds
above you you do not feel swell but
clammy and pokey and sweaty: a
leaf-smell follows you, odd breezes
juke your brook-chaff, lambs and
rachel-bugs go up and forth in you,
and when a car passes through you,
windows down, the car-pillows in
that car get puffy, absorbing water in
the air, and those pillows become
bosoms, gaseous moving bosoms,
and that is the nearest you come to
bosoms.
Okay! Right! I imagine you can see why the transition from Geoffrey Hill's sombre and powerful work to this sort of thing was a bit tough for me. But only a year earlier I'd been translating the Piqueray bros., and I should have seen the parallels. I mean, you've got the eccentric, the repellent, and the abject front-and-center with the elaborate treatment of flatulence, and the claiming of this sort of thing for poetry gives the same kind of transgressive frisson now as it did decades ago — good taste gets jumped and roughed-up by the abject elements of the body.
But wait! There's more! Not only does Gudding bring the abject into the poem, he attacks two kinds of discursive pretentiousness at once in his footnote. Here, he pulls a classic act of Bakhtinian transcoding (the mix of high and low for comic effect) by writing about "poop" and the weirdly quaint "bosoms" in an overly-long, overly-elaborate epic simile ("just as blah-de-blah-de-blahdeeblah, so blahdeblah-de-bah"). But just as the epic simile gets skewered here, so also does that other form of high-discourse writing, the footnote, signifier of scholarly earnestness.
If I weren't out the door to catch a movie I'd try my hand at a critical pastiche (see "Pastiche as Criticism," two posts back), adapting bits of Delville's piece on the Piquerays into a brief discussion of Gudding. But this will have to do: the projectionist waits for no man.
Steve Halle will be at the Gudding reading. Let's hope he brings cigars for everyone!
The latest issue of the Notre Dame Review has made landfall in the nearby harbor, and from the hold of that mighty vessel come poems and prose both rich and strange. There's a short story by Ihab Hassan (whose Paracriticisms first turned me on to PoMo back when I picked up a copy at a garage sale when I was in high school (dad was an art prof, so I grew up in a university ghetto, and the books of the moving-because-they-didn't-make-tenure crowd were often on sale at a deep discount). Also poems by Albert Goldbarh, Tom Raworth (and yeah, he did the cover too), Joe Francis Doerr (the ND Review and Salt seem to have a lot of overlap lately), and the crazy-good and utterly unknown Jere Odell, who someone's got to put on the radar soon. And John Peck, writing on Christopher Merrill with his usual 400-pound-per-square-inch perspicacity.
My own piece in the issue, "Gravel and Ghosts," treats the historcial poetics of Kevin Prufer and Albert Goldbarth. Since all my thinking about them began on this blog, I'm posting the first two paragraphs of the ND Review piece. They go something like this:
If you catch me on a bad day and ask me about the state of American poetry, you’ll probably get an earful of ill-humored grumbling about the enervating predominance of two kinds of poetry. “On the one hand,” I’ll gruffly opine, “we’re still swamped with the poem of the semi-confessional backyard epiphany.” You’ll probably tune out after ten minutes or so of examples drawn from recent contest-winning books, and your eyes will glaze over during my comparison of Charles Altieri’s notion of the Scenic Mode of Poetry and Ron Silliman’s idea of the School of Quietude. You won’t need to hear the finer points of their theories, because you already know what they’re talking about: poems that focus on the exquisite sensitivity of the speaker, caught in a meditative moment in an ordinary American life. Just as you think you’ll be able to slip out the back door of the campus coffee shop, though, I’ll start in on my other bête noir. Citing examples from the fat, respectable university quarterlies as well as any number of weird little online magazines, I’ll grumble and gripe about the linguistically hazy, indeterminate, pseudo-sophisticated nonsense verse that has emerged from the wreckage of language poetry. “Post-avant, they call it!” I’ll shout, alarming the people lined up by the cappuccino machine, “but Faux-avant is more like it! Poems about nothing, doing nothing that hasn’t been done before! This emperor has no clothes, and we’re all too cowed by Charles Bernstein-quoting associate professors to say so!” This outburst will leave me a little sheepish, and I’ll no doubt appreciate a few kind words from you before you make your getaway and your mental note never to ask me about the state of poetry again.
If you caught me a few weeks ago, though, when Albert Goldbarth’s Budget Travel Through Space and Time and Kevin Prufer’s Fallen from a Chariot landed on my desk, you’d have found me in a considerably better mood. Both poets find grist for their creative mills outside of those usual stockpiles of contemporary American poetry, sensitive autobiography, and sophomoric wordplay. Both Goldbarth and Prufer turn to the long-ago and the far-away as means of understanding contemporary experience, and their poetry is much the richer for this xenophilia. Both seek out facts, images, and anecdotes from history, and both interrogate contemporary experience through the examination of the exotic historical other. The two poets use the past to interrogate the present differently, though. Goldbarth is an omnivore, devouring anything he sees, hears, or reads, absorbing it, ascribing significance to it, and using it to understand contemporary experience. Historical anecdotes are the chunks of gravel in his gullet, and he uses them to digest the often-difficult world around him. For Prufer, the past is more elusive. While it offers parallels to contemporary experience, those parallels are often mysterious in nature. The past doesn’t explain the present, it haunts the present. Images from poems set in the past recur in poems set in the present, but the full meaning of the images remains undisclosed, as does the meaning of the recurrence. Indeed, the recurrence of these mysterious, melancholy, and beautiful images is, in some sense, their significance: the sublime unknowability of the world endures, the ghosts shimmer into appearance but cannot be grasped.
Of course the cartoonishly-caffinated Archambeau depicted above is a bit more of a believer in the avant/quietude dichotomy than is the sedate and mild-mannered Archambeau who reads quietly in his study of an evening, but the real me makes lousy reading. Anyway, some of the issue is up online, along with bits and pieces of bonus material.
Even after all these years, the beginning of a new semester always smacks me upside the head a little more than I expect it will, and I've been away from blogging for a while, unless you count the rerun of a bit of social satire that I ran last week after the original post was quoted in a Chicago newspaper. I've been busy, though, what with teaching, getting the revised manuscript of Laureates and Heretics out the door, and writing an essay for Avant-Post, a book Louis Armand is editing for the very happenin' Litteraria Pragensia in Prague. I keep changing the name of the essay, but most versions include the phrase "Pastiche as Criticism," and today's re-entry into the inner blogosphere is fuelled by some of that project's fallout.
I've noticed several examples, lately, of critics straying into areas of composition where once only poets and fiction-writers dared to go. Specifically, I've noticed criticism being written in the form of pastiche, with the deliberate imitation, by the critic, of a pre-existing source text. This is interesting for all kinds of reasons, not least of which being the way it upsets one of our more established critical/theoretical applecarts: the idea that language is somehow entropic, that it becomes less meaningful the farther it moves from originality, and the closer it hews to the repetition (in style and in content) of earlier ways of talking. Here's Goethe taking this line, back at the end of the 18th century:
All dilettantes are plagiarizers. They sap the life out of and destroy all that is original and beautiful in language and in thought by repeating it, imitating it, and filling up their own void with it. Thus, more and more, language becomes filled up with pillaged phrases and forms that no longer say anything...
Okay. So Goethe tells us that we need linguistic innovation to regenerate cliched ways of writing, talking and thinking. We need heroic individual innovators to keep things fresh. If it all sounds a little avant-gardist, or at least modernist, it should (I actually came across the passage while reading a kickass essay by Jochen Schulte-Sasse, in which he claims that avant-garde ideas of lingusitic entropy and alienation are present much earlier than we tend to expect to find them, and are in fact coincident with the rise of capitalism). This is a way of thinking common to modernist writers (think Ezra Pound's "make it new"), and it persists today (think of Richard Rorty's riffs on Harold Bloom and the redescriptive power of the poet in the "Contingency of Selfhood" chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity).
But what if repeating, imitating, using pillaged phrases and the like becomes not the means of saying nothing but cliches, but rather the means of creating new insights? This was also a modernist idea, but it was a modernist idea in what we think of as the creative genres (poetry, the novel), not in what we think of as the critical genres (the lit-crit essay, say, or art history). (I know, I know, the dichotomy is false, but it persists in our usual modes of thinking -- bear with me).
This use of pastiche as a form of criticism seems to be the method of a few innovative critical types lately, including Benjamin Friedlander and my man David Kellogg. They deliberately take old bits of language and go about "repeating it, imitating it, and filling up their own void with it." The result isn't the banality Goethe feared, though, but the shaking-up of our received modes of critical thinking. Check it out!
Here's Kellogg, who begins "The Self in the Poetic Field" with a pastiche made up of (in his words) "a line by line rewriting, with a few sentences removed, of J.D. Watson and F.H.C. Crick, 'A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid' published in the journal Nature in 1953.". The original essay, as every bio major knows, begins like this:
We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.).
This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.A structure for nucleic acid has already been proposed by Pauling and Corey (1). They kindly made their manuscript available to us in advance of publication. Their model consists of three intertwined chains, with the phosphates near the fibre axis, and the bases on the outside. In our opinion, this structure is unsatisfactory for two reasons: (1) We believe that the material which gives the X-ray diagrams is the salt, not the free acid. Without the acidic hydrogen atoms it is not clear what forces would hold the structure together, especially as the negatively charged phosphates near the axis will repel each other. (2) Some of the van der Waals distances appear to be too small.
And here's Kellogg:
I wish to suggest a structure for contemporary American poetry (C.A.P.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable critical interest.
A structure for poetry has already been proposed by Eliot. He has kindly made his manuscript available to the world for the last eighty years. His model consists of an enveloping tradition, with the dead near the center, and the individual talent on the outside. In my opinion, this structure is unsatisfactory for two reasons: (1) I believe that the material that provides the poetic structure is the living community of readers, not the dead. Without the stack of coffins, it is not clear in Eliot's model what forces would hold the structure together, especially as the variously interpreted bodies near the center will repel each other. (2) The self of the poem is extinguished along with the poet.
Okay, that last sentence is a pretty big departure. But you get the idea. The original is inhabited the way a hermit crab inhabits another sea-critter's shell. Benjamin Friedlander takes this method to a whole new level in his new book Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism. Here's his description of the method of that book:
I describe these works as experiments because all four are based on source texts and thus inaugurate a species of criticism in which the findings only emerge after struggle with predetermined forms. Sometimes this struggle took shape as an exercize in translation, not unlike the re-creation of a sonnet's rhyme-scheme and meter. Often, translation was impossible, and the struggle resolved itself instead in an act of controlled imagination -- not unlike the sonnet's original creation. In each case, the production of my text had less in common with the ordinary practice of writing an essay than it did with the composition of metrical verse....[the book's] somewhat scandalous methodology [involves] the creation of criticism through the strict recreation of an earlier critic's text (or, more precisely, through as strict a re-creation as the discrepancy between my source text and chosen topic would allow). Thus, my "Short History of Language Poetry" follows the arguments (and even wording) of Jean Wahl's A Short History of Existentialism, while "The Literati of San Francisco" takes Edgar Allan Poe's Literati of New York City as its template.... Although I was predisposed in each of these pieces to certain arguments and conclusions, I willingly abandoned these when they became incompatible with the critical approach demanded by my source.
What's interesting to me about Kellogg and Friedlander are the ways they turn the dominant assumptions about language around. We do tend to think like Goethe: repetition of the past seems bad, derivative, weak, and destined to perpetuate cliches. But Kellogg and Friedlander avoid all this. In fact, their use of source-texts as a critical tool takes them away from their own instinctive thoughts about literature, and forces them into new insights, different from their own critical predispositions. This seems a lot like Oulipo to me -- the use of a deliberate, systematic form of writing, carried through with some rigor and against our 'natural' (that is, habitual) modes of composition and thinking, as a means of generating new insights.
What makes this particularly effective, I think, is the turning to source-texts at a bit of a remove from the dominant critical prose norms of our time. Kellogg leaves the humanities behind and seeks out a scientific source-text, while Friedlander turns to remote, belletristic stuff (Poe) or to a philosophy currently deeply out of fashion in the academy (Existentialism). This is different enough to break our usual norms of thinking, but familiar enough to generate insights that are still comprehensible, if not uncontroversial. It reminds me of a comment Vincent Sherry made about John Matthias' poetry and its use of arcane historical source-texts in Word Play Place: "on the one hand, the pedagogue offers from his word-hoard and reference trove the splendid alterity of unfamiliar speech; on the other, this is our familial tongue, our own language in its deeper memory and reference." We get an estrangement of thinking, but it is an estrangement based not on an absolute alienness, but on a revival and reexamination of disused discursive strategies.
The critics are doing it like the poets have been doing it for decades. This is positive, and I hope we can see more of it: nothing is more enervating than the prose-style of our immediate inheritance: the half-assed theoryspeak of the professoriate, 1979-1999. May it rest in peace. Long live pastiche as criticism!
Since I've been getting a lot of hits from subscribers to Crain's Chicago Business, which mentions this old entry, I'm reposting it. Enjoy! (Disclaimer: since this is probably something that looks like ivory tower snobbery about people who actually have or make money, note that I also make fun of academics like myself).
Although I always thought I'd stick to the humanities in this blog (poetry, philosophy, and a bit of art), I find myself morally compelled to sully my soft humanist hands with the rough silt of the social sciences -- let me explain.
The following report was passed to me by Raskolnikov T. Firefly, Ph.D., a former colleague of mine at another university. He seemed nervous, demanding to meet in the middle of the night at the Denny's on route 41. I arrived on time, but he was late, shambling in like a twitchy fiend as I was finishing my Eggs-over-my-Hammy special. He kept looking over his shoulder and trying, fruitlessly, to light cigarettes, which he then discarded. He said I had to help him, that my blog was his only hope now that the agents of his enemies had turned the respectable journals against him. Taking his yellowed, coffee-stained manuscript from his trembling hands, I promised to do what I could. This was all some time ago, and I haven't heard from him for weeks, although my caller ID indicates that the inhabitant of a certain single room in a certain Motel 6 near the Wisconsin border calls and hangs up every couple of hours. Frankly, I'm a little concerned for Rasko, as we used to call him in the grubby little leftwing bookshops in that university town in the mountains by the seashore in another country oh so long ago.
His report follows:
A Socio-Anthropological Typology of the North Shore
by Raskolnikov T. Firefly, PhD
My decade long researches among the inhabitants of Chicago’s North Shore have, at last, yielded results. I and my crack research team (thanks, Kid V, Pravda and Jimmies B and C -- couldn’t have done it without you), have spent the better part of the last ten years lurking in such dangerous and unpalatable locales as artisanal bread shops, high-end cycling centers, national-chain arthouse movie theaters and, in a true show of courage, Starbucks outlets not yet unionized by the I.W.W. Forthwith, our conclusions.
1. Method of Study
Lurking, malingering, and harumphing in lines outside American nouvelle cuisine bistros, sneering from our Hondas and Chevy Cavaliers as we pass the Aston Martin and Land Rover dealerships, looking suspiciously around the room during late night visits to Ben & Jerry’s, drifting aimlessly through Anthropologie or Jos. A Banks, trooping out to Lake Geneva Wisconsin to observe North Shore fauna in its semi-migrational mating-and-antiquing phase, attending community theater and Suburban Fine Arts Center fundraisers, checking the license plate numbers outside Unitarian churches, noting the girlish giggles of septuagenarian matrons in the Marshall Fields’ handbag section and the boorish grunts of Dick Cheney look-alikes from the 16th hole rough. Drinking cosmopolitans and anything ending in -ini, so long as it is from the color palette present in a roll of Jolly Ranchers. Also, a lot of internet surfing and repeated viewings of Ordinary People and Risky Business, for which we have drawn elaborate location charts and alternative storyboards depicting general uprisings of the people and the creation of a service-worker’s Utopia led by Tom Cruise and Rebecca DeMornay. Oyez, oyez. Power to the people.
2. A Typology of North Shore Habitants
A. The North Shore Goof (NSG)
You know this guy. He looks like Chevy Chase, especially the Chevy Chase of Caddyshack. Good-natured, but more of less useless on account of never having had to work a day in his life. Habitats include golf courses, convertibles, east Lake Forest, and restaurants featuring club sandwiches. Harmless, except when seen objectively.
B. Predatory Corporate Status Monkeys (PCSMs)
Think thirtysomething or fortysomething. Think wire-rimmed glasses in sylishly contemporary frames. On the weekends you see him biking like Lance Armstrong and looking at you with a faint disdain for not making as much money and biking as frantically as he, or out with his wife (either a PCSM herself -- 25-30% are women -- or a Subscriber) on a powerwalk, pushing the kid in an ergonomic high performance mountaineering pram, making quality time with the nipper he’s not seen all week and won’t see again until he makes sure the guys in Acquisitions get the WEENUS report in on time. Habitats include west Lake Forest, east Highland Park, and Glencoe, also the Green Bay Trail and Miramar. American Express gave him his Blackberry as a Preferred Customer Premium.
C. The Man
He does not work. You work for him. The PCSMs work for him. In the end, one way or another, we all work for him. He neither toils nor spins: he owns. His markings include great height and a shock of white hair. Habitats include houses that cannot be seen from the road. With stunningly little variation, he looks like George Plimpton.
D. Vic Wilcox
Named after a character from David Lodge’s splendid little novel Nice Work, the Vic Wilcoxes of the world have some cash and won’t be shy about telling you that they’ve earned their pile. They’ve earned it by building up companies that plate things in nickel, or supply Styrofoam coffee cups to office parks in the western suburbs, they’ve earned it by getting the contract to sell tanning beds to Carnival Cruise Lines, they’ve earned it by keeping those union guys out, they’ve earned it and they don’t mind telling you and they almost almost don’t mind that they’ll never be The Man because they’ve earned it and they haven’t had time to get comfortable at Lyric Opera fundraisers and their picture won’t ever be in Chicago Social (sorry, “CS”), they’ve earned it and wonder if they can trade in their first wives for new ones who might have contempt for them but could tell them which charities they could give to so they could go to the parties where they won’t be comfortable -- and wouldn’t they rather watch football and eat a meatball sub anyway. Usual cause of death is angina and a quite despair that knows not how to speak its name.
E. Subscribers
These are, as you guessed, the subscribers to that esteemed and storied magazine, North Shore Bitch. Picture that title, if you will, in the elegantly curving cursives of that journal’s cover. You see them jogging with their iPods, keeping it all in shape. You see them buying tureens at Williams and Sonoma, buying sundresses at Saks, buying stylin' maternity clothes at Bellydance, buying DVDs of Martha Stewart. Basically, you see them buying, often in small gaggles of the likeminded, oblivious to those outside their braying bubble of buy-buy-buy. In their fantasies they are Princess Diana as she marries Charles, or better yet as she has that affair with the dark and brooding Saudi billionaire. “How fun!” they gush, between bites of the roasted tomato and grilled chicken salad at Southgate. Only one fear haunts the manicured lawns and magazine-ad-like, blowing-curtained, wicker-furnished sunrooms of their dreams: becoming DFWs.
F. Discarded First Wives (DFWs)
Little is known about these middle-aged women of the North Shore, seen only buying gin in the Jewel or behind the wheels of slightly aged Volvos. Little is known because one dare not meet their gaze, so bitter it is, so soaked in the tannic fluids of experience and thwarted entitlement. Fear them.
G. Evil Withered Sticks (EWSs)
If you’ve seen Nancy Reagan, you know the type. Her weight never gets into three digits, her skin has, through repeated exposure on tennis courts and seasons in Coral Gables, attained the consistency of fine Corinthian leather. She may once have been a subscriber, fearing DFWhood, but she is now a formidable feature of the landscape, braying with laughter behind her cocktail glass at a lawn party on a sunny afternoon. Try the Onwentsia club if you seek a high concentration of the species.
H. The Good People of Evanston (GPEs)
This is a subspecies of the PCSM, with the following distinction: they’re smug about their virtue. Having once written a $500 check to the Sierra Club, having once attended a book signing by Deepak Chopra or perhaps Dave Eggers, they are secure, indeed ontologically grounded in their sense of superiority to their fellow PCSMs from farther up the shore. Also, since they live near Chicago, they secretly suspect that they’re street, homes, street. Surprisingly, not all GPEs actually live in Evanston. Some live elsewhere but are members of the North Shore Unitarian Congregation.
I. Standard Academic Clowns
Not often found outside of Evanston and a small enclave established in the unlikely and infertile soil of Lake Forest, these hapless sorts are distinguished by rumpled chinos, dented upper-mid-range cars, Steve Earle CDs, good internet access and a wonderful conformity of ideas, consisting of centrist beliefs masquerading as radicalism. Often seen birding, or overheard telling their friends about how little television they watch.
I think it was because I've been thinking about war poetry lately that Simone Muench suggested I check out Brian Turner's Here, Bullet, a book that's been getting a lot of high-profile press (New Yorker, New York Times,). I gave it a read during the interstices of the first teaching day of the new semester at Lake Forest, devouring bits between my two seminars, and finishing it on the train home. Although it isn't my usual thing, I can see why she suggested it. It is (pardon the pun) hit-and-miss, but it is a good example of how in war poetry so much of the poetry is, as Wilfred Owen said nearly a century ago, in the pity. And much of the pity, interestingly, comes it the use of proper names.
The poems are generally anecdotal, loosely put together, and usually depend on a kind of scene-setting over which an emotional sheen has been cast. Turner's also not above a few cliched forms of phrase, like ending a poem with the adjective-concrete noun-of-abstract noun formula. What's strong about Here, Bullet, though, is the emotion, which covers a range well outside the usual poem of backyard epiphany. The white-knuckle world of the American soldier in Iraq comes through loud and clear, as does the strangely unreal quality of the soldier's experience over there. As does the all-too-real nature of the violence. As does the existential absurdity of it all, as seemingly inexplicable acts of violence tear through the day, and friend/foe/bystander categories become muddied.
I'm intrigued by the way names come into all this. In contrast to poets like Randall Jarrell and Kevin Prufer, who deal with the dehumanizing nature of war by making their soldiers anonymous, Turner is hell-bent on keeping the people around him real, and making their tragedy specific, through using their proper names (that he does this for both Americans and Iraqis is especially laudible).
This is most effective when a name is incanted over and over, as in "AB Negative (The Surgeon's Poem)." In just over a page, we hear the name of the wounded protagonist five times, twice with both given- and surname: "Thalia Fields lies under a gray ceiling of clouds"; "Thalia / drifts in and out of consciousness"; "a nurse dabs her lips with a moist towel / her palm on Thalia's forehead"; "Thalia / sees shadows of people working / to save her"; "a way of dealing with the fact / that Thalia Fields is gone, long gone." The repeating of the name is redundant, grammatically, but syntactical efficiency isn't the point here, any more than it is in any chant or lament. Repetition is the faith Turner keeps with the dead.
Lots of interesting responses to the Berrigan/proper names business, including some interesting thoughts by Josh Corey. He tells us that, when it comes to proper names in New York School poetry,
Well, I'm generally for it, as the same principle allows me to refer to a man I've never met as "Bob" in this blogpost. There was a time, though, when I felt that sense of outrage he describes when public sphere expectations are violated by the introduction of private codes: I remember reading an issue of The Germ years ago and reading an interview between Keith Waldrop and Peter Gizzi (long before I knew who either of those gentlemen were) and being irritated by the first-name basis they seemed to enjoy with legions of poets I'd never heard of. I felt deliberately excluded—yet if I were to read the same interview now I'd nod my head with recognition and feel a sense of warmth and inclusion more pervasive, if less intense, than my initial sense of repulsion. And for whatever reason that earlier feeling failed to deter me from my interest in the strange and marvelous world of poetry I discovered in The Germ... But come to think of it, maybe my irritation derived more from the fact that the medium was an interview, which I imagined was meant to be precisely the disclosure of a private sphere unto the public one: isn't that what we read interviews for?
I kind of like the breaking of public sphere/private sphere norms in Berrigan's poetry, where I think it serves a number of interesting roles (not the least of which is drawing our attention to those often-unexamined norms). But I'm not sure how I'd feel about the Waldrop-Gizzi interview. Anyone want to send me a copy?
John Palatella, who didn't get to say everything he's hoped to in his review of Ted Berrigan's Collected Poems for The Nation, has a number of good points to make.
I think readers have been inclined to misunderstand Berrigan’s use of personal names in part because of the way other poets have reduced what Berrigan and O’Hara did into simple name-dropping, a manner of advertising one’s eccentricity and status. Berrigan says in an interview with AnneWaldman and Jim Cohn that one of the many poets he read when he arrived in New York was Ezra Pound, and that he learned from Pound what to put in a poem—everything that’s going on in your life. What you learn from the letters you get, the books you read. What this means is that instead of Browning we get Dick Gallup, instead of Confucius, Ron Padgett, instead of Jefferson, Joe Brainard. I don’t think Berrigan was joking when he said this. I think he meant it, mostly because he was a poet who, not unlike EP, read in order to write.
I also think the names are a way for Berrigan to imagine a listener, to create the conditions necessary for sympathy, or the transmission of a feeling that touches some second figure. In that same Waldman interview Berrigan says “I didn’t want people to come into my poems, but if I could make things come out…” One of the things that comes out is sympathy. (It comes out explicitly, and a little viciously, in "Red Shift"-- "I'm only pronouns, & I am all of them, & I didn't ask for this / You did / I came into your life to change it & it did so & now nothing / will ever change / That, and that's that.") What's more, because the names are a way to invoke a listener, the personal identity attached to the name often doesn’t matter. The name could be mine or yours. Some of Berrigan’s readers have been keen to figure out the identity of the Chris mentioned in The Sonnets. Alice Notley’s notes in the Collected to The Sonnetsenable one to do that, but again, I think that the significance of the appearance of the name Chris in the poems, like the appearance of the name Dorothy in “Tintern Abbey,” doesn't hinge on knowing Chris's personal identity and biography. It's very interesting to me that when Berrigan does speak fondly about certain friends, as in "Red Shift," he chooses not to identify them by name.
Although Wordsworth never actually names Dorothy in "Tintern Abbey," I see what Palatella means. In fact, this makes Berrigan's use of names into a way to construct the relational self Ellen Hinsey talks about, and helps to take Berrigan out of the depths of self-obsession that so much of American poetry fell into during the sixties and seventies. Were I not fried from the last-chance-before-teaching-starts-again attempt to go over the manuscript of Laureates and Heretics one last time, I'd opine about it at great length. You may well consider yourselves spared...
Steve Burt (who should, as of yesterday, be a new father), writes in with regard to my Robert Hass post made about Robert Lowell calling for a "return to Rome":
Aren't you being a bit unfair to Lowell? He "advocated a return to Rome" in the sense that in the 1940s he was a Roman Catholic, but I think you mean his Juvenal adaptations and other pseudo-neo-Latin work from the Sixties, especially Near the Ocean -- & the point of that work was not that we should become more like ancient Rome, but that we (the US) were too much like Rome and didn't know it, that if we all knew more Roman history and literature we wouldn't be repeating Rome's dreadful mistakes,
in small war after small
war, to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in his monotonous sublime.
(He was right, too!)
You know, I think I let the fact that three of my degrees are from Notre Dame blind me to the fact that "returning to Rome" can mean different things to different people. I was thinking about Lowell's turn to Catholocism in the 40s -- a longing for a more hierarchical/theologically clear religion, in contradistinction to the world of Hass, with its "flexidoxy" in religion.
