The (Charles) Olson Twins

Way back in 2000, Eliot Weinberger wrote a short, sharp, ever-so-slightly snarky piece called Canonizing the Sixties about the University of Maine's at Orono's conference on the poetry of the 1960s. Well, not about the conference per se, since it had yet to happen at the time Weinberger published his essay in Exquisite Corpse: the essay was really about the catalog listing the various panels, papers, and symposia. Looking over the events listed in the catalog, Weinberger came to the following conclusion:

According to the Oronists, there were 151 US poets in the 1960's who are now worthy of study. 27 are the subjects of multiple papers.

The Most Significant Poets of the 60's:
Duncan (9 papers)
Baraka, Zukofsky (7 each)
Creeley, Levertov, Oppen (6 each)
Ashbery, Ginsberg, Ron Johnson (5 each)
Plath (4)
Berryman, Bishop, Bronk, DiPrima, Guest, Lowell, Niedecker, Spicer, Wieners, Jay Wright (3 each)
Dorn, L. Hughes, Pound, Rukeyser, Scalapino, Sexton, Whalen (2 each)...

124 poets are the subject of one paper each. They range from establishment figures (Snodgrass, Dickey, Jarrell) to avant-gardists (Antin, Samperi, R. Waldrop) to poets who were barely published at the time (K. Fraser, F. Howe, Bromige) to pop stars (Bukowski, Bob Dylan, Leonore Kandel) to forgotten figures (Ruth Weiss, Judith Johnson, Robert Lax, Frederick Eckman) to micro-press regulars (d.a. levy, Doug Blazek).

Significant poets of the 60's now apparently of little interest: Berrigan, Blackburn, Eigner, Olson, Rexroth, Schuyler, Snyder (1 paper each)

When I first saw this, I was intrigued. Like a lot of my fellow humanists, I tremble with fear and awe before anything that looks even vaguely like a statistic or quantification. On the one hand, I was a bit ticked at Weinberger for what seemed like a bit of a disengenuous move on his part: pretending that the conference was meant to be representative of the true shape of poetry in the sixties, the way a decent reference book on the topic would be. Surely the conference reflected the personal interests of the participants, and wasn't meant to enshrine or canonize anyone. On the other hand, I was even more ticked off at the lack of interest among my tribe (that is: poets and critics more-or-less into the experimental wing of things) in some of the poets Weinberger mentioned. I was particularly stunned by the lack of interest in Olson. I'd always thought of Olson and Duncan as figures of similar import, and while I was glad to see nine papers on Duncan, I was flummoxed by how Olson had slipped so low. Maybe this was a fluke, I thought (perhaps the leading Olson scholars had all fallen ill from bad tuna at a recent luncheon meeting at the Glouster, Massachussetts Red Lobster). Maybe this was a reaction to Olson's swaggering heterosexual masculinity. Maybe it was a reaction, at long last, to the over-representation of his work in The New American Poetry anthology. Whatever the reason, it didn't seem right, and I was grateful to Weinberger for bringing it to light.

So I'm glad to say that two fairly recent books, Garin Cycholl's Blue Mound to 161 and Henry Gould's In RI make it clear that poets are still interested in Olson and the geo-historical poetics he professed. Garin and Henry each take a specific geography (downstate Illinois and Rhode Island, respectively), and work from geography into history. Garin's book is a kind of collage of disparate elements — songs, historical anecdotes, police reports and the like — while Henry's is held together by a lyrical, gently melancholy voice, punctuated occasionally by reworkings of old texts, notably Roger Williams' seventeenth-century dictionary of the Narragansett language, Key into the Language of America (a book that has inspired works by at least two other poets, Rosmarie Waldrop and Jeffrey Roessner). I love this kind of thing. And I especially love this kind of thing at a time when much poetry seems to be written under the auspices of a kind of James Tate/Dean Young elliptical referencelessness — not that there's anything wrong with that kind of thing, but it's good to find some books that are about something as concrete as geography and history. And good to see that Olson (for all his many flaws) hasn't been as thoroughly sidelined as he seemed to be seven years ago.

Punk In Theory, Part One: Pierre Bourdieu and Loud Fast Rules

So let's say you're on sabbatical, and you've been drinking coffee by the quart and reading stacks and stacks of French cultural theory to get your chops up for the book you want to write, and you realize you need a break from all this reading or you'll end up in some kind of under-the-table jittery fetal position fit. What do you do? Hop on your bike and bee-line it to the bookstore, of course! A moth to the flame, I know, I know. But that's what I did the other day, inelegantly dismounting and chaining the bike outside the local Borders before hitting the magazine rack, where, after a few minutes of general moping and browsing, I shooed a pack of loitering and malingering fifteen-year old black-clad mohawk and fauxhawk-having kids away from the music magazines (when did the kids start in with the mohawks again? They've been popping up in bristly abundance around Chicago lately, like the aggressive foliage of some kind of tropical fruit...). I dove in and fished around a bit in the shelves until I came up with the latest issue of Loud Fast Rules!, a punk music mag, clutched between my teeth. "Ah!" I cried, shaking the seaweed from my hair and brandishing my mag aloft, "the very thing!"

I couldn't quite figure out the nature of the strange frisson I got from leafing through the magazine there, by the resentful teenagers I'd elbowed aside. Then it hit me: the pages of Loud Fast Rules! looked exactly, and I mean exactly, like the pages of the crappy photocopied punk zines I'd read in high school back in the mid-eighties. There were the same typewritten sheets in the universal font of cheap manual typewriters (courier). There were the same irregular black areas around the edges of the magazines pages, the kind of dead-space you get when you photocopy an imperfectly-aligned page without putting the copier lid down. There were the same oddly-aligned images, looking like concert polaroids taped to sheets of type and then badly photocopied. Even the ads for bands (and there were plenty of these) had this low-tech, el-cheapo look to them.

Just as all of these eighties-looking production values were about to throw me into one of those Proust's-madeline fits of reverie ("Oh Jenny from bio lab! If only they hadn't moved your locker down to the other end of the hall senior year! Oh, 1974 Fiat Spider! If only your alternator hadn't crapped out on the way to the General Public concert!) I did a bit of a mental double-take: I realized I wasn't holding a photocopied zine, but a carefully constructed replica of a photocopied zine. When kids threw their zines together in the eighties using photocopies of typed pages and polaroids, they were on the cutting edge of do-it-yourself, no-budget publishing. But nowadays, anyone with a computer and a printer can make something much more professional looking, and an outfit like Loud Fast Rules! could certainly make something slicker if they wanted to. Little signs indicated they had considerable resources at their command (color on the semi-glossy cover, a UPC code, loads of advertisements, etc). So the question presented itself: what gives with these lousy production values?

And here's where all my pumping sociological iron with French cultural theory came in handy, kids. I'd been reading over Pierre Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production (a kind of ragbag of disparate essays), and remembered a short passage about what happens to fields of restricted cultural production (those are the fields of cultural production that aren't governed by some larger external force, like the church, the state, or the market) as those fields age. Check it out:

What happens in the field is more and more dependent on the specific history of the field, and more and more independent of external history; it is therefore more and more difficult to infer or to anticipate from the knowledge of the state of the social world (economic, political situation, etc.) at any given moment.

If field of cultural production isn't governed by external forces like the state (think of those crazy-ass North Korean festivals where people gather in arenas to put on patriotic pageants) or the market (think Hollywood), it tends, over time, to become governed by its own past. This is most evident when it sort of replicates that past (think Robert Frost) or references it (think T.S. Eliot). But according to Bourdieu this is also true when we seem to innovate within the field: often we're innovating not in response to external stimuli so much as we're innovating in order to displace the authority of earlier producers in the field, and to claim authority within the field for ourselves (remember how Harold Bloom cobbled together a crackpot-ish theory of all this kind of Oedipal struggle in The Anxiety of Influence?).

Looking at Loud Fast Rules!, we can really see Bourdieu's ideas at work. I mean, when punk was young, the production values of its zine literature were determined by the material and economic conditions of the relatively broke-ass kids who were into it. Now, with punk being a established, nay venerable, sub-field of music (one that, for the most part, pretty deliberately shuns the market) we see the production values of one of its journals determined not by economics so much as by the prior history of the field. And the position that Loud Fast Rules! takes — one of hommage — is actually a kind of conservative position within that field. This isn't to say that Loud Fast Rules! is conservative in the political sense, though: in fact, it reads a little lefty. You get a good sense of how the mag is conservative within the field of punk, and lefty in the field of politics, just by looking at the cover, which features The Clash, one of the great left-wing punk bands of the eighties. The message sent by the cover is politically leftist, but it also sends off an "honor thy fathers, young punks, for yea, their authority is great, and their ancient wisdom to be honored" kind of vibe.

But more important than the presence of The Clash is the replication of old-school production values. A magazine that looks like Loud Fast Rules! today means something very different than a magazine that looked that way twenty years ago. Back then, it said "hey! whoa! we can do this ourselves, even if we do kind of suck!" (a message much like that of the punk music genre itself). Now, it says "remember when..." I was reminded of some of my favorite lines from Peter Gizzi's (fabulous) new book of poems, The Outernationale:

When a revolution completes its orbit
the objects return only different
for having stayed the same throughout.

Such were my thoughts as I stood there, displacing those teenage punks in Borders. Knocked loose from my reverie when one of the kids muscled in front of me to grab an issue of Mojo, I assessed my potential purchase. Deliberatley un-slick, obsessed with the past, weirdly nostalgic for the eighties, and showing signs of irrelevance? Loud Fast Rules! seemed, for better or for worse, like a good fit for me. I threw it down on the check-out counter with my copy of The Economist.

***

Coming soon: Punk Theory Part Two: TV Eye (or, what happens when you listen to Iggy Pop while reading Guy Debord).

Laureate du Jour

You know who's a good poet? Joel Felix. That's who.

Poetry and the Nation State

So here's the first thing I learned this weekend: when you want opposition from a group, there's no response more unnerving than a kind of bored acquiesence. Let me explain.

So I found myself, through a process too strange and hush-hush and picayune to dwell on, seated with a cluster of literati in a Chicago office tower overlooking Millenniun Park, evaluating a group of contemporary American poems. Like the others in the room, I'd been asked to bring in a few American poems I admired. Since I'm still Canadian enough at heart to resent the exclusion of poems from any kind of consideration based on their country of origin, I'd decided to mess with the system a bit and bring in poems by people from other countries. "Ha-ha!" I'd said over my waffles that morning, before heading off to the meeting, "surely these poems will win the acclaim of the group! And then, when we've all agreed that they ought to be praised, I'll spring it on the unsuspecting literati, assembled in all their learned glory! These poems have to be excluded on the basis of their national origin! They're illegal immigrants in the groves of Parnassus!" Oh indeed. The syrup bottle shook in my hands, such was the anticipation. "Oh, the shame they'll all feel at the unexamined nationalist jingoism of their assumptions! Oh, what a frisson I'll have!" I may even have startled the ever-indulgent Valerie as I sprung from my chair, shouting "Epater les bien-pensants! Vive la revolution!" But then again, she's used to my mouth-frothing inexplicabilites, and was probably just happy to see me awake and functional at a respectable hour, what with me being on sabbatical.

Things went as planned at the meeting, and one of my ringers, a poem by an English guy, was singled out for praise by the assembled cogniscenti. But when I raised my trembling hand and, with all the sanctimoniousness of a semi-Canadian, intoned my bit about how we'd either have to drop the American exclusivity of our process, or eliminate this fine and deserving poem from consideration on the basis of an accident of geography, I faced no withering barrage of opposition. Nor did I face any shame-faced liberal guilt. I think the response is best described as a kind of collective "whatever." And the poem was not deported from our proceedings. The idea of a national literature fell without so much as a fourth of July bottle rocket fired in opposition.

And this, I suppose, is the second thing I learned this weekend: the nation state as a category for poetry lives on by mere inertia. Few believe in it enough to defend it, but fewer still are bothered by it enough to get rid of it.

The idea of a national literature seems to have reached its high point in the nineteenth century, but even then it was being undermined by a sense that literature was not entirely compatible with collective national representation. Here's what the sociologist César Graña had to say about this in Bohemian vs. Bourgeois, his study of the nineteenth-century's growing division between literary values and the dominant values of bourgeois society (here he's talking specifically about Flaubert's views on the matter):

There were two kinds of literature, "national" and "individual." The first required a form of mass solidarity based on a common fund of ideas which no longer existed in modern society. The second could only be sustained by intellectual diversity. Flaubert looked at national literature in the way that the romantics looked at national history, as the expression of a unique spiritual collectivity. In a national literature the problem of freedom did not really exist. There was no opposition between the work of art and cultural reality because national life was a human architecture radiating a unified inner principle which had in itself the characteristics of a work of art.

For the idea of a national literature to have any real meaning, there has to be some kind of congruence of (somewhat unified) national values and the literature that expresses them. While the idea of a national literature had a lot of appeal for some Romantics, and for elements of the ever-rising middle classes (who rejected the aristocracy's internationalism), it became problematic for a number of reasons. One of these was the increasing heterogeneity of modern nations. The other was the increasing alienation of cultural-producers from the values of the bulk of the population (Graña has a lot to say about why this occurred -- his book is well worth checking out). So the steam started to go out of the idea, even as it was picked up and institutionalized by the educational systems of many countries.

Sure, some poets actually think of themselves as speaking for a nation. Walt Whitman did — but even he's an odd duck, as a national poet. You could say his Leaves of Grass embodies the tension between a national literature and an individual literature, picking up the dissonance between those two great Romantic ideas, nationalism and individualism. In our own time, you could say Robert Pinsky thought of himself as a national poet when he wrote An Explanation of America. But he's sort of out of joint with the literary community in doing this (in fact, at a recent dinner I attended at which he was a guest of honor, he seemed much more at home with the college trustee types than he did with the literary crowd, but that's another story). The great Modernists like Pound and Eliot were conspicuously Europhile in their sense of literature, and of their place in literature — Comp Lit majors avant la lettre, in a way. A lot of poets think of themselves as part of identity-groups based in non-national bases (Adrienne Rich, say). And at the level of style, we've got to ask whether the nation is really a useful tool of analysis. Can we speak of an "American-style" poem, or a "British-style" poem, when those two nations' laureates, Donald Hall and Andrew Motion, have more in common with each other (in terms of style, and the literary traditions with which they affiliate themselves) than they have with the experimental poets on either side of the Atlantic?

So the idea of a national poetry seems, at least in an American context, a bit empty, a kind of holdover from another time. No wonder no one cared when I tried, in my small way, to sabotage the paradigm. No one seems to have much invested in it. I suppose the idea of a national literature is a bit like the body's appendix: we don't need it, and it is easy enough to remove. But no one bothers to take it out unless there's some urgent need. And we don't seem to feel that need, at least not yet.

(Artwork above copyright Matt Chisholm.)

The Kafka Sutra

No doubt you're well aware of the mysterious process by which Franz Kafka wrote certain passages of the Kama Sutra. But did you know those long-lost texts have been recovered and meticulously translated by the present humble blogger, and had their original illustrations restored to pristine conditions by Sarah Conner? No? Well, wallow in ignorance no more! Check out sections from that most evasive of texts, The Kafka Sutra, now available for viewing at The Cultural Society. Just click on "texts" and scroll down to the prose section.

Other contributors to the latest issue of Zach Barocas' Cultural Society include Michael Heller, Dan Beachy-Quick, Janet Holmes, Graham Foust, and many more.

The City Visible

The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century is so hand-searingly hot off the presses that you can't get it from Amazon.com yet, but you can order a copy directly from the publisher. [UPDATE: you can now score a copy on Amazon!]

The orginal title for the collection was (if my memory of a particularly louche night with the editors and sundry poets at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap serves) Alive with a Broken Nose: New Chicago Poetry, but the book was saved from such misconstitution by the intervention of Simone Muench, who proved yet again that she is our miglior fabbro (or should that be "fabbra"?).

So if you're interested in a taste of what's been cooking in Chicago poetry (and something's definitely started to bubble in our particular cauldron over the last few years), this is absolutely the place to dig in. Bill Allegrezza and Ray Bianchi have put together a striking list of contributors. I'm honored to be in such company:

Jennifer Scappettone
Suzanne Buffam
Srikanth Reddy
John Tipton
Eric Elshtain
David Pavelich
Peter O’Leary
William Fuller
Michael O’Leary
Mark Tardi
Erica Bernheim
Michael Antonucci
Chris Glomski
Garin Cycholl
Luis Urrea
Kristy Odelius
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
Simone Muench
Lea Graham
Ed Roberson
Arielle Greenberg
Tony Trigilio
Shin Yu Pai
Dan Beachy-Quick
Maxine Chernoff
Kerri Sonnenberg
Jesse Seldess
Paul Hoover
Michelle Taransky
Robert Archambeau
Bill Marsh
Larry Sawyer
Cecilia Pinto
Johanny Vázquez Paz
Ela Kotkowska
Jorge Sanchez
Joel Craig
Daniel Borzutzk
Joel Felix
Raymond Bianchi
Cynthia Bond
William Allegrezza
Jennifer Karmin
Tim Yu
Laura Sims
Roberto Harrison
Brenda Cárdenas
Stacy Szymaszek
Chuck Stebelton

There will be readings around the country by select groups from this list. The New York reading (featuring Kristy Odelius, Simone Muench, Bill Allegrezza and Joel Felix) will take place on Monday, May 14th, at the Poetry Project at St. Marks. Not since the days when Michael Jordan would effortlessly float above the bewildered Knicks defense has our big-shouldered city sent such a team New York's way. Be there if you can!

Tag! (puff puff) You're (wheeze wheeze) It!

Good Lord — I'm it! I've been tagged as a "thinking blogger" by Steve Burt.

It was Ron Silliman who tagged the unsuspecting Professor Burt while Steve was sweating innocently away in an attempt to wedge his 40-volume set of the letters of Randall Jarrell (vaorium edition, with annotations both explicatory and exculpatory) into an old Tivo box in preparation for his upcoming Steinbeck-like trek from the central plains to Harvard (or am I misremembering The Grapes of Wrath?). Silliman himself was tagged in turn by Ashraf Osman, who was tagged (I think) by Wallace Stevens, who was in his turn tagged by Alfred Lord Tennyson, who was tagged by the zombified hand of an undead Homer while giving a poetry reading at Heinrich Schliemann's archeological digs. Since Homer was tagged by poets of the early Sumerian oral tradition, the ultimate origin of the tag-chain lies lost in the mists of literary prehistory, although I suspect a time-traveling Frank O'Hara may be behind it all in the end. I won't know for sure unless and until the grant money comes in for further research.

Anyway.

Part of me thinks this whole blog-tag phenom is just a schoolyard game. The other part thinks so too. But neither part minds. Who doesn't miss the schoolyard, where one could whip a big red dodgeball at one's peers with impunity, aiming for face or crotch with velocities approaching mach one? I mean, what wouldn't you give to make that sort of thing a regular part of all faculty meetings? (Imagine here Archambeau supine upon the floor, mercilessly pelted by his colleagues, who wield a mace-like untethered tether-ball).

So. It looks like I'm supposed to tag five others. So here's who I'd chase down across the asphalt-and-wood chip landscape of the virtual schoolyard. Only in the virtual world would I, puffing like the bookworm/hedonist I am, be able to catch even one of them and shout "Tag! You're it — a thinking blogger!"

Mark Scroggins. I know Mark has already been tagged by Silliman, but since Mark objects to Ron's description of him as "a scrupulous literary scholar who doesn’t take short cuts even in his blog" I thought I'd tag Mark again in terms with which he'd be happier. It isn't that Ron's wrong — Mark oozes legitimacy: he once delivered a scholarly ass-whupping of epic proportions to a manuscript of mine, ridding it of half its pages and two-thirds of its many flaws in the process. Rather, it's that Mark feels Ron's description lays waste to his "cherished self-image of jaunty, effervescent bons mots, of quicksilver connections & startling juxtapositions" and depicts him as "Professor Microscope Drudge." (One could say Mark is over-reading things, but who doesn't fret over representations of themselves? I once blew a nearly John Edwards-level sum of cash on a new haircut after looking in horror at my photo on the cover of an alumni magazine). So here, for the record, is my characterization of Mark (cribbed from P.B. Shelley's Alastor):

By solemn vision and bright silver dream
His infancy was nurtured. Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient air
Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.
The fountains of divine philosophy
Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great,
Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past
In truth or fable consecrates, he felt
And knew. When early youth had passed, he left
His cold fireside and alienated home
To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.

Ron Silliman. Is it banal to tag the most popular blogging poet in the world? Probably. But I've been so relentlessly ready to fly off the handle at his worst qualities (his insistence that there's such a thing as a "school of quietude," his calling of Geoffrey Hill a fascist) that I feel a need to tap him on the shoulder and tell him I admire him for his alt-poetry-erudition ("altudition"?). Nobody knows more about the books nobody knows about.

Reginald Shepherd. Holy crap he's smart. Some of his recent blog entries are adapted from a forthcoming book of essays — a great preview of coming attractions. He also wins the Congressional Medal of Clarity for that rarest of feats, discussing people like Adorno in graceful English sentences.

Mairead Byrne. While the three guys I've already mentioned write essayistic blogs, Mairead Byrne's is a kind of diary-in-poetry. She's a thinking blogger, for sure, but her dialogue with the world takes place in poetry, not prose.

Simon DeDeo. Simon writes about individual poems with an energy and insight that leave me as slack-jawed as any roadside yokel watching a UFO suck up his Chevette with some kind of space-hose. And DeDeo should know about space-hose-having UFOs: he's a physicist at Fermilab, where (if memory serves) they invented both the tractor beam and the shamrock shake.

The Battle of Chicago: Peter Riley Emerges from the Rubble

This just in from Peter Riley, regarding my earlier post "British Poetry Wars: The Battle of Chicago.". Riley, whose open letter to John Wilkinson set off what I've thought of as a bit of a dust-up about the claims made for British experimental poetry, weighs in here with a few points about the context of his remarks and, more importantly, his reservations about a phrase of my own, "the Prynne tradition."

Just read Archambeau's excellently cheerful American response and wanted to append a couple of disclaimers.

First is that while I recognise the light tone I don't thing "war" or even "conflict" is the right way to characterise this. It is not a row between me and John Wilkinson, still less between two cultural positions. It is a challenge within a shared framework. I am not ironic in positioning myself within the tradition which I interrogate ("how did we...") . If I speak strongly it is because my worries about my own share in the condition entitle me to, and also put me in a position to shoot out arrows at targets far beyond immediate company.

And I'd essentially like to add for the record that when I sent the letter to Chicago Review I didn't know that the next issue was to be a British poetry issue featuring particularly those four poets. So it's not a response to that content, and John Wilkinson's review of Andrea Brady in it is both prior to and posterior to my remarks, for it indeed confirms that what I say is being said, is being said, but it is also a pre-answer to what I say.

Secondly I can't take this idea of a"Prynne tradition", which I think is an American reading. What I said was "The poetry that developed through Cambridge in the 1960s and 1970s" to which I attach great importance. This isn't a "Prynne tradition" for a number of reasons--

1) Jeremy Prynne was only one of about ten poets strongly involved in that formation. The poetry I'm speaking of emerged from a meeting, confrontation and to some extent conflict, between Prynne and the other poets, who I think affected his writing at that time as much as he did theirs. This contact produced a particular and recognisable way of writing which has emerged sporadically from those poets and others for some ten or twenty years afterwards, including some who were only marginally involved. Anthony Barnett, for instance, is relevant, the only contemporary British poet Prynne has ever devoted a lecture to, but who seems to have vanished from sight in the "Prynne tradition".

2) There are at least two JH Prynne poetries, polarised as early and late, and I for one find them so separated from each other that I don't see how one can be in the tradition of the other, let alone anybody else's.

3) I think Prynne's poetry has always been unique and inimitable. All attempts to write like him have failed. That's because there is a long developed and cultivated aesthetic underneath the affects of his poetry which he has pursued to an extreme condition and if you don't participate in that, and you can't, you don't have a chance of writing in that way. R. F. Langley, alone, knows and participates in this programme, which he turns to his own purposes. I don't think Keston Sutherland's poetry resembles Prynne's, or barely, still less any of the other poets in that issue.

I've got to own up to this much, at least: I did invoke Prynne in a broad way, using him as a figurehead for British experimental poetry with a Frankfurt-school inflection from midcentury on — from where Riley sits, this is painting with very coarse strokes indeed. And I can see why I finer brush is needed: as one of the many people who got in touch with me after the initial post pointed out, what's at stake here (in what I still take pleasure in calling the "Battle of Chicago") is Prynne's place in the history of British experimental poetry. Will we end up treating Prynne as the godfather of experimental Britpo, the key figure of the current generation's "useable past"? Or will he recede in importance until he seems like one of ten or so equally important figures? Will we or won't we see some future Hugh Kenner writing The Prynne Era? We don't know the future, but we know where Peter Riley has taken his stand.

Two Very Different Kinds of Press

"Hey Archambeau — you made me bite my cereal spoon!" Those were the words with which I was greeted as I walked into my English Lit seminar yesterday. One of my students, it seems, had been sitting down to a perfectly innocent breakfast and, glancing at the local newspaper, had been confronted with my face staring out of the pages. Yeah, I know what you're thinking ("What kind of horrible scandal has Archambeau entangled in himself this time?") but for I change I haven't been caught outing Valerie Plame, conducting illegal wiretapping, firing government lawyers for political purposes, or authorizing torture at secret prison sites in crumbling eastern European republics. Nope. I'd been tapped to say a few words on poetry and the teaching of poetry for a string of Chicagoland suburban papers. What's that? You need to read my comments right now? Aw, gosh, really? Well, okay, if you must. But the online version lacks the spoon-damaging picture of me, aptly described by my student as "sort of creepy."

Those of you jonesing for a bigger dose of me shamelessly opining about poetry (both of you?) might want to check out the
latest installment in Adam Fieled's "Waxing Hot: Poetics Dialogue" series over at P.F.S. Post (Adam is pictured here in his best Ezra Pound beard). He and I tossed the poetics football back and forth for a while, jawing about such topics as the real-or-imagined rise of the book-length poetic sequence, transparency vs. opacity, what's up in Chicago poetry, and the secret resemblance of the Norton Anthology of English Literature to a portside bordello. Ahoy!

Albert Goldbarth Talking

What distinguishes most contemporary poetry from prose isn't meter or rhyme or even line breaks, but a self-conscious spareness and a slightly arch or elevated diction. These are the hallmarks of the poet laboring to achieve intensity, the byproducts of the "language distillation" process.

An Albert Goldbarth poem, by contrast, is wacky, talky, and fat.

That, anyway, is what Eric McHenry had to say about Albert Goldbarth's poetry back in 2002, in an article commemorating Goldbarth's second National Book Critics' Circle Award. While I wouldn't bet the mortgage money on the universal validity of McHenry's distinction between poetry and prose, he's dead right about the talkiness of Goldbarth's poetry. I've been a fan of this talkiness ever since I was tapped to review one of Goldbarth's books and, being the obsessive-compulsive book geek that I am, set out to read the whole Goldbarth ouevre (I gave up after seven of his twenty or more books, but only out of human frailty and a looming deadline). So I was looking forward to some fantastic, wide-ranging talk during Goldbarth's visit to Lake Forest earlier this month. Man, did he deliver.

Favorite topics, as I squired Goldbarth around campus, drank coffee with him in the student center, or sat next to him in Lake Forest's best-because-only bar, included:

How we both used to get the Columbian drug-mule treatment at the U.S.-Canada border on a consistent basis during our respective years of disreputable hair (I was a sad victim of the 1990s guys-with-grungy-ponytails phenomenon; Goldbarth had a truly regal mane in the seventies, and still carries a shot of it in his wallet).

The sad similarity in format among poetry journals (digest-size paperback with an often bland gesture toward artiness on the cover), a state of affairs Goldbarth attributes to that ambiguous blessing, the patronage of Dame Academe.

Whether or not Wordsworth gets away with all of the digressive padding in his poems. I remember going upside Wordsworth's head about the hazy middle bit of the otherwise amazing "Tintern Abbey," and Goldbarth in turn going upside my head, saying that a poem can't be all muscle and no ligament (I think he cited Richard Howard as the source of this comment, but since this was one of the in-bar conversations, I'm not sure about that).

The superiority of Buck-Rogers era tailfin-having spaceships to Star Wars X-Wing fighter figurines. I warn you: do not cross Goldbarth on this issue. He knows all about it.

The decline of D.H. Lawrence's status in the canon. Goldbarth and I both fear Lawrence will hardly be read in a hundred years, and that his examination of gender will end up being treated just like Hemingway's: that is, it will be described as if it were a how-to book for the masculinity of John Wayne in The Ballad of the Green Berets.

Goldbarth also talked about his reticence to talk publicly, which struck me as odd at first, until I remembered a quote in an old Another Chicago Magazine interview I'd read, in which he complained about the expectation that poets would speak on panels, take part in Q&A sessions, and be endlessly interviewed about their work. He dismissed all of this as "breadloafing" that detracts from the appreciation of the work itself. I've gotta say, this made me nervous, seeing as how I'd booked Goldbarth onto a panel and as the speaker for a faculty luncheon event. But my fear was for naught. Though I couldn't make the panel (I was running around campus like a super-caffinated bigfoot, trying to find a missing poet who shall remain nameless), Goldbarth's talk for the faculty was prime stuff.

Playing to the mixed-specialization group of faculty (graybearded humanists, hipster-dufus social scientists, chino-wearing science guys), Goldbarth talked about the relation of poetry to scientific knowlege, speaking of a time, a kind of lost Eden, when such knowledge and poetic methods were not mutually exclusive (an Eden already lost when John Donne wrote his famous lines about the "trepidation of the spheres" in "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning"). One sad moment in the history of the divorce of poetry from scientific forms of knowledge, said Goldbarth, is encapsulated in Walt Whitman's poem "When I Heard the Learn'd Astonomer," in which the poet-speaker walks out of a scientific lecture:

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

"Enough with objective and abstract knowledge!" we can imagine Whitman yawping, "Give me experience! Give me subjectivity, proved on the pulses, not this objective dreariness!" For Goldbarth this is a lamentable moment: the poet is walking out on a boundless source of inspiration (Goldbarth mentioned Stephanie Strickland as a poet who has gotten some serious mileage out of science and mathematics; I thought of Randolph Healy).

The faculty kicked all this around for a while, with Dave Park unfurling the banner of his communication-theory erudition and making some good points about how this Whitmanic emphasis on subjective experience has contributed to a climate where poetry is granted almost no authority in public discourse (as opposed to science and social science).

If, with Whitman, poetry storms out of the astronomer's lecture hall, Goldbarth grabs it by the arm and steers it back in. I don't just say this because I saw an issue of Scientific American poking out of Goldbarth's bag: his poetry is always based on facts, information, and reports from out there in the objective, material world. If this doesn't exactly give him the authority of science, it certainly seems to provide people with something they hunger for in poetry: Goldbarth's reading to a packed house that evening may have been better-received than any I've seen at the college — certainly the applause thundered louder than it had at any reading since the late Michael Donaghy brought down the house during what turned out to be one of his last readings back in 2004. So here's to Albert Goldbarth, long may he keep talking about the world.

Archambeau World Tour: This Week

Come one, come all, to the antiseptic white bauhaus moderne yet somehow charming space that is Series A's venue at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago! Thrill to the literary stylings of Kass Fleisher! Groove on award-winning writer Matt Briggs! Observe the Billy Dee Williams-like smoothness of Bill Allegrezza's slick MC moves! See if there's any free beer, or perhaps a cookie or two, on the refreshment table! Endure my own poetic ramblings!

Live! Free! One Night Only!

Tuesday April 24, 7:00 PM, Hyde Park Art Center
5020 S Cornell Ave, Chicago, IL

directions

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.