Roberto Bolaño and the Extravert Muse

There's something primal and pre-rational in the fear I've always had of heights. Picture a sweaty, trembly Archambeau trying hard not to look like he's freaking out, and you've successfully pictured me in any high structure or on the edge of any precipitous precipice. At the Tour Eiffel, on the cliffs of Dun Aengus, climbing a fire lookout back in Manitoba, or even in the upper floors of the Hesburgh Library at Notre Dame, I'd always feel like my lower intestine had been seized by something I can only describe as an icy, electrified demon-fist. It's always hazardous for me when people come to visit from Europe: invariably, they want to go up in one of Chicago's skyscrapers, and I gamely take them, but have learned to stick to the Hancock Center: it has a bar on the 95th floor, and one can steady one's nerves somewhat with a bucket-sized slug of bourbon. It's funny to see, I'm told, this gripping-of-handrails and gritting of teeth, but it really takes me to some bizarre, primal emergency state. Once, while we were visiting a colleague who lived on the 19th floor of a tall, narrow building with floor-to-ceiling windows, an ornithologist pal of mine mercilessly teased me about my queasiness (used as he was to lurking around in trees and the edges of ravines in his bird-watching escapades, it was hard for him to appreciate my crisis of confidence in high places). I like the guy, and we bust each other's chops all the time, but heights mess with my chi, people, and so messed-with was I just then that I pulled a very uncharacteristic move, hauling-off and knocking the poor guy into the wall to make him stop. Not cool, I know. But that's how freaked I get when I'm more than, say, a dozen stories up. (I think he forgave me, but I notice he doesn't ride elevators with me any more).

There are two exceptions to this sad and weird phenomenon, though: I'm in no way freaked out when I fly, and for some secret reason known only to the muses, I never get the icy demon-fist effect when I visit the offices of Poetry magazine. Since their current digs hover 18 floors up over Michigan Ave, with an open floor-plan and glass walls, this is a true surprise. And a welcome one, since I'd really rather not knock Don Share or Christian Wiman into the wall, even when they publish Jorie Graham. I'm sure Don and Christian had no sense of all this Tuesday, when the elevators whisked me up to their aerie for an interview about an article I wrote for the November issue. Insufficiently caffeinated, I think I sort of tanked at the interview, but the editor, I'm assured, is good at cleaning up one's mumblings for the podcast. Anyway, Don was kind enough to hook me up with an advance copy of next month's issue of Poetry, and I pawed through it on the train home, eagerly devouring a dozen or so pages of the great Chilean poet Roberto Bolaño in translation. I'd been reading the October issue on the way down, and something struck me about how different Bolaño was from the (very able) poets I'd been reading in the October issue. I couldn't quite put a name to it until I was almost at my stop, when the word finally leapt to my lips: "extravert!" I said, eyes wild with discovery, "Bolaño's a Jungian extravert!" The conductor's sidelong glance indicated that he either disagreed (holding deep-seated views on Bolaño and Jung at odds with my own), or that he thought it was weird to see a big beardy dude talking to himself on the Metra. Be that as it may, I really do think Jung's ideas are a good way to get at what's special about Bolaño, and at some of the limits of a lot of American poetry.

Jung is one of those guys whose work is more wide-ranging and various in actuality than it is in the popular perception. I mean, when most people think of Jung, they probably remember that he quarreled with Freud, that he said something about archetypes, and that Robert Bly more or less drowned his own chances of being taken seriously when he watered down Jungian ideas in his Iron John-era drum circles. I'm no expert, but when I was writing about the poetry of John Peck (a Jungian analyst by trade), I worked on getting my Jung chops up a bit. My favorite discovery was the essay "On the Relation of Analytic Psychology to Poetry" (which runs some 20 very readable pages in Penguin's Portable Jung, if you want to check it out).

Long story short, Jung's argument is that there are two fundamental orientations a poet can take toward his or her creativity: introverted and extaverted. Like a lot of Jung's terms, these don't quite mean what they do in common parlance. And like any binaries, of course, the introvert-extravert split is pretty limited, but it makes for a good way to start drawing distinctions between different types of poetry. Jung's introvert poet isn't what you might think (the phrase conjures up some spindly, black-sweatered guy sort of hiding out behind the Emily Dickinson books in the library, hoping not to have to talk to anyone). Rather, he's a poet who identifies with his own creative process, seeing it as something he understands, consciously directs, and is generally on top of. It's a matter of knowing, or thinking that you know, what you're doing, of going about your poem-making deliberately. The artist thinks the art comes from inside himself and is under his control — so it is in this sense that he is "introvert" in orientation. Here's Jung on the idea of introvert writing:

There are literary works that spring wholly from the author's intention to produce a particular result. He submits his material to a definite treatment with a definite aim in view; he adds to it and subtracts from it, emphasizing one effect, toning down another, laying on a touch of color here, another there, all the time carefully considering the overall result and paying strict attention to the laws of form and style. He exercises the keenest judgment and chooses his words with complete freedom. His material is entirely subordinated to his artistic purpose, he wants to express this and nothing else. He is wholly at one with the creative process, no matter whether he has deliberately made himself its spearhead, as it were, or whether it has made him its instrument so completely that his intentions and his faculties are indistinguishable from the act of creation itself.

So this is a guy who doesn't think of the act of writing as a mystery, or the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, or a visit from the capricious muse. This isn't the guy who objects, in a creative writing class, to the idea of writing a poem as an assignment. This is a guy who believes in craft, in technique, and in setting out to nail an effect with care and precision. You can imagine him looking with approval at all those heavily marked-up pages they put next to interviews with writers in The Paris Review — "Ah!" he'd think, looking at an annotated, revised page, "there's a guy who knows what he's doing, and isn't afraid to park his ass in a chair and work!" (I remember the short fiction guru Lee K. Abbott actually saying this, once, when he came up to Lake Forest for a visit).

What Jung's describing here isn't so much poetry, or even the process of composition, but the attitude a poet takes toward his or her work — an attitude of deliberate, careful, conscientious control (an attitude we profs kind of hope our students will take toward the writing of their essays, if not necessarily in their poems). Of course, this could be a kind of false consciousness on the part of the poet: as Jung puts it later in his essay, "it might well be that the poet, while apparently ... producing what he consciously intends" nevertheless gets carried away by "an 'alien will,'" or force beyond his or her conscious intellect. The first example of this that comes to mind for me is actually one from visual art: I really believe Georgia O'Keefe meant it when she said she thought there was nothing sexual about her paintings of flowers. But something sexual clearly got expressed there — it just came from a part of herself that O'Keefe didn't let come to consciousness. So she thought of herself as a controlling, introvert artist, but something else was at work, too, something alien to her intentions.

Disclaimers about false consciousness aside, the attitude a poet takes toward his or her creative processs matters for Jung — not least because it will tend to have an effect on the kind of work the poet ends up creating. The introvert poet will give us "a conscious product shaped and designed to have the particular effect intended," a poem that will "nowhere overstep the limits of comprehension," and the effect of which will be "bounded by the author's intention and ... not extend beyond it." Let's set aside deconstructive notions of the inevitable failure of such intention-driven outcomes, since, in a way, they're just versions of Jung's idea of a secret alien force slipping in, O'Keefe-style, behind the controlling consciousness of the introvert artist. And let's see what a poem of this kind looks like. As my Metra North Line epiphany made clear to me the other day, a lot of the poems in Poetry magazine are of this type. Here's one from the October issue by Derek Sheffield (after all these years of blogging, I'm still not clear if quoting the whole poem is fair use — but since it's up on Poetry's web site, I'm hoping it's cool. If it's not, and you're Derek Sheffied, Don Share, Christian Wiman, or one of their phalanx of lawyers, let me know):

A Good Fish

Jerk that bitch, urges my guide,
and I give my shuddering pole
a jerk, hooking the throat
of the first steelhead of my life.
Reel 'em, he mutters and revs the motor.
I horse my pole and reel and horse.
The boat's mascot whines, her claws
clicking. Let it take some line.
My father, uncle, and cousin
are reeling. First fish! they shout,
and I shout, What a fighter!
A silver spine touches the air.
There, he points, a hen. And guess what?
She's gonna join the club,
somehow spotting in that glimpse
the smooth place along her back
where a fin had been snipped.
He leans over the gunwale, dips a net,
and scoops her into the boat.
She is thick with a wide band
of fiery scales, slap-
slapping the aluminum bottom.
Welcome to the club, he says,
and clobbers her once, and again,
and once more before she goes still.
A bleeder, he says, shaking his head
and handing her to me. I curl
a finger through a gill the way
you're supposed to, determined
not to let her slip and flop
back to the river, a blunder
I'd never live down. A good fist.
Fish, I mean. A good fish.

Okay! I mean, sure, the poem deals with an unconscious process — the way something apparently innocent, like fishing, is linked with some deeply primal stuff, like sex and violence. It even includes a rendition of a Freudian slip ("fist" for "fish"). But the way it deals with this process is clearly very deliberate, and all of the details push toward making the single point that fishing contains these primal things. I mean, if you wanted to show your students in a creative writing class how to establish a consistent pattern of gestures, you couldn't do much better than to aim them at this poem and ask them about the emotional undertones to each of the actions undertaken by the characters in this poem. Every time Sheffield has them handling a fish or fishing implement, it's either associated with violence, or with sex (or, really, more properly with masturbation — all that jerking, all those poles, and that fist at the end add up to an almost indecent image). It all looks very deliberate, and all points in the direction of a single, rather authoritative, interpretation. Even the Freudian slip, so carefully placed at the end, has the feel of deliberation and control. There's nothing in it that refuses to make sense, flirts with disaster, or seems troublingly unassimilable to an interpretive paradigm or sense of aesthetic wholeness.

The word for a poem like Sheffield's is, I think, accomplished. Or maybe skillful. Or fully-realized. All of which are legitimate terms of praise, especially when we think of how many poems aim at this sort of effect and miss by about three feet. In all this accomplishment, the poem sort of reminds me of nineteenth-century French academic painting: it shows the artist knows what he was doing. But along with this very real virtues comes a kind of limitation. Trying to describe that limitation, I fall back on a comment my dad made once, after we'd spent a day in the Louvre, among all those galleries of grand format state paintings. "What I saw," he said, looking wearily up over his espresso, "was a whole lot of technique, and not much else." That's too harsh as a statement about Sheffield's poem, but it gets at the weaknesses to which introvert art is prone. (I think it's not a coincidence, really, that Georgia O'Keefe's best work are those floral paintings where she's expressing all kinds of sexual stuff that her conscious mind denies is there — when she gets away from that, her work gets closer and closer to well-made kitsch).

The other pole of Jung's binary is inhabited by the extravert poet. Again, the term is misleading: I mean, doesn't it make you think of some kind of coffeehouse blowhard, cornering you by the big jar of biscotti and forcing you to hear his sub-Howl effusions while he rants, gesticulates, and tears at his Moses-length beard? But enough about my last poetry reading! That's not what Jung had in mind at all. By "extravert" Jung means the poet who thinks the source of his or her creativity lies outside of the conscious self, maybe even outside the self entirely. Instead of feeling like he's in control of the process of composition, he experiences the process as an urgency, a matter of being seized by forces beyond conscious control. This was very much the idea held about poets and rhapsodes in classical antiquity — remember Plato's "Ion," where the title character describes himself as being seized, in the poetic act, the way a piece of metal is seized by a magnet? It's like that. Spontaneous overflow, a visit by the muse or the daemon, a welling-up of We Know Not What that makes us grab the pen (or brush, or keyboard) and get something out. The poem seems to come from beyond, from something alien, from outside — hence "extravert," the other-oriented position. Jung puts it this way — with extravert creativity,

...works positively force themselves on the author; his hand is seized, his pen writes things that his mind contemplates with amazement. The work brings with it its own form. Anything [the poet] wants to add is rejected, and what he himself would like to reject is thrust back at him. While his conscious mind stands amazed and empty before this phenomenon, he is overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and images which he never intended to create and which his own will could never have brought into being.... Here the artist is not identical with the process of creation; he is aware that he is subordinate to his work or stands outside it...

Hollywood loves this idea of the artist (as a topic, not as a way of directing movies, for which it relies on a bunch of dependably careful introverts). I mean, think of Vincent van Gogh as played by Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life, or Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock. These are depictions of artists who receive, rather than direct, the gift of creation. Or at least that's how the extravert artist sees him- or herself. He's gripped by something as primal as that icy, electrified demon fist that grips me in high places.

From Jung's point of view, what's really going on is that the artist has formed an autonomous complex within his or her psyche, an area of mind not fully unified with the rest of the personality. It wants to come out and find its expression, and does so by breaking through the filters of the conscious mind. It's a very Romantic sort of idea, and one that the champions of deliberate, introvert writing often look on with suspicion. Yvor Winters based his whole mature poetic on a rejection of this extravert sort of thing, arguing that people (Hart Crane, say) who engage in what Jung would call extravert creativity are unhinged, psychologically unintegrated, and quite possibly a danger to themselves (though one could argue Winters' own attempt to prune the wild antipodal gardens of the mind held their own dangers, to art and to psyche alike).

[Digression of interest only to people who love German Idealist philosophy: those of you who are deep, deep, deep into German philosophy will probably recognize the influence of Schiller on Jung's thinking. The categories extravert and introvert roughly correspond to Schiller's ideas of the naive and the sentimental, respectively — Jung even acknowledges the debt in his essay. I think this connection must have had something to do with my coming to think about Bolaño and Sheffield in these terms: the reason I was so groggy and impervious to caffeine during the interview for the Poetry podcast was that I'd been teaching a night class the previous evening — a seminar on Kant and Schiller for our grad students. So Schiller and Jung were percolating somewhere in the back of my head while I was reading the October and November issues of Poetry on the Metra.]

Anyway. Just as the introvert orientation to creativity had consequences for the products of creative action, so too does the extravert orientation affect the poem. With the extravert artist, says Jung, "we would expect a strangeness of form and of content, thoughts that can only be apprehended intuitively, a language pregnant with meanings, and images that are true symbols because they are ... bridges thrown out towards an unseen shore." This kind of stuff may lack the polish of careful, introvert poetry, but what is it Rimbaud says? "La musique savante manque à notre désir" ("sophisticated music falls short of our desire"). I mean, extravert poetry may be rough around the edges, but because of its sources in the repressed or unconscious areas of the psyche, it often comes out with a force, a freshness, and a surprising, even unsettling, set of insights or emotions.

One thinks of Surrealism here, of André Breton and automatic writing. (I wonder, sometimes, what Jung would have made of something like the Oulipo, or other forms of procedural writing, where the poet sets up an arbitrary series of conventions, then lets them produce a text that comes into being without his control. I imagine he'd see the creation of the rules for these procedures as very much an introvert's act, but the product as looking much like an extravert's poem). One thinks of Breton, but not necessarily of Poetry magazine. I mean, while a journal with such a long track record is bound to have published quite a few extravert works in its time, the reputation of the magazine is that of a venue for highly accomplished, but generally non-freaky, poetry.

That's why it was such a great thing to find the big spread of Roberto Bolaño's poetry in the November issue. I mean, Bolaño's work has all the hallmarks of the extravert poet: rapid juxtapositions, images that call out to us as significant without being reducible to a particular significance, a sense of urgency and of rapid, inspired composition, and all the rest of it. The connection to Breton isn't all that far-fetched, either: I remember that Benjamin Kunkel once described Bolaño in the London Review of Books as the co-founder of a "punk-Surrealist poetry movement called infrarrealismo." Consider, for example, "Soni," the NC-17-ish poem that opens the Bolaño section in Poetry:

Soni

I'm in a bar and someone's name is Soni
The floor is covered in ash       Like a bird
like a single bird two old men arrive
Archilochus and Anacreon and Simonides       Miserable
Mediterranean refugees       Don't ask me what I'm doing
here, just forget that I've been with a girl
who's pale and rich       Either way, I only remember blush
the word shame after the word hollow
Soni! Soni!       I laid back and rubbed
my penis over her waist       The dog barked in the street
below there was a theater and after coming
I thought "two theaters" and the void Archilochus and Anacreon
and Simonides sheathing their willow branches       Man
doesn't search for life, I said, I laid her back and
shoved the whole thing in       Something crunched between
the dog's ears       Crack!       We're lost
All that's left is for you to get sick, I said       And Soni
stepped away from the group       The light through dirty glass
rendered her like a God and the author
closed his eyes

Zowie. It's harder to say something about this poem than Derek Sheffield's, isn't it? We could start with the nonstandard punctuation (although after a passionate, eros-driven number like this, I feel like the King of the Nerds leading with punctuation). But it's significant! For one thing, it leaves those Greek names marooned, their status and significance not fully defined. Are they the two old men? But there's three of them. Are they the Mediterranean refugees? The geography works (Bolaño's writing this in Mexico City, thinking of Greece), but the syntax and punctuation leave it all a bit ambiguous. Some of images decode pretty well (two theaters? Sure: the real one outside, and the imaginary one where Bolaño — I take the speaker as him — and Soni just performed for one another). But others don't: like those two old men who arrive as a single bird. I'd bet Jung would consider this one of those images "pregnant with meaning," but not an image that had actually given birth to a defined meaning. Compared to Derek Sheffield's "A Good Fish," which masters the experience it describes, this poem's a tangle of undigested emotions. It's hard to sort out what Bolaño feels about his encounter with Soni, and what his feelings had to do with her wealth and paleness, sociological facts that seem to matter to Bolaño in ways too deeply buried to be comprehended (but not too deeply buried to be expressed). Do the sociological facts have something to do with the presence of Simonides and Archilochus, both of whom were social satirists? Maybe. But I'm still not sure why Anacreon's hanging around in this poem. Maybe it has to do with how he writes about intoxicating love — but who among those Greeks didn't? It's a tense little ball of the deeply felt and urgently expressed, too strange and opaque to pin down.

Jung saw work of this kind as important, because it was through extravert creativity that the least-understood elements of our experiences came to light. Truths arise from this kind of art that can't find articulation in any other form, and through contemplating these things we're eventually able to articulate them and integrate them into our self-understanding. It's not the sort of thing an introvert artist can do, really: his task is more a matter of reiterating, or working variations on, things we already know (saying "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed," as Alexander Pope put it — and what's Pope's neoclassicism but the distillation of introvert creativity?). It's also not the kind of thing that's easy to teach in an MFA seminar, which may be why we see comparatively little extravert poetry in our most prominent journals: after all, the most careerist, professionalized, outwardly-ambitious types of poets, the types who'd sweat to get into a brand-name journal, tend to come out of such programs. It's a shame, really, that there's an extravert-introvert imbalance in the big journals. But the generous Bolaño section in November's Poetry gives me hope that this can change.


(Valerie Archambeau offers her opinion of Roberto Bolaño)

A Supposedly Fun Thing He'll Never Do Again: Rereading David Foster Wallace

It's been long enough for the news of David Foster Wallace's death to sink in. He died right around the time Reginald Shepherd died, and I never really let myself feel the loss, since Shepherd had meant so much to me. Since then I've spent some time rereading DFW, and I'm finding the writing full of sentiments I never noticed before. Of course when a writer commits suicide, any mention of depression or suicidal thoughts will stand out when one goes back to the writer's work. But the surprising thing for me is how often I now see even DFW's comic writing as overwhelmingly sad. Here, for example, is a paragraph from the long title essay of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a piece where DFW satirizes the cruise-line industry:

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir — especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaity-noise ceased — I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.

When I first read this, back in '97, I took it as biting satire. But now I see in it the meditations of someone who'd become, of necessity, a kind of connoisseur of his own implacable sorrow.

Laureate du Jour: Special Double Issue

You know who knows how to be cool about spilling an exotic tropical tomato amuse bouche on his shirt during a reception for poets at the Brazilian Consulate in Chicago? Peter O'Leary, that's who.

But I digress. The real question is this: who's emerging as a leading poet-critic of his generation? Stephen Burt, that's who. Here's why.

Hass and Pinsky Sail to Byzantium

Wake up, dammit! It's a beautiful Sunday! The sun shining, the birds singing, with many a youth and many a maid dancing in the chequered shade, etc. Oh, and the latest Notre Dame Review has just landed with a thud on your Norman Rockwellesque porch, so slide those slippers on, make sure your bathrobe is done up (I'm talking to you, Josh) and for the love of Mike get yourself out there to scoop it up! I mean, it's got Devin Johnston, it's got W.S. Merwin, it's got Stephanie Strickland, John Kinsella, Ray DiPalma, Renée E. D'Aoust and many more. And sullying a spread near the back is an essay by your present humble blogger, a double-barrelled review of Robert Hass' Time and Materials and Robert Pinsky's Gulf Music.

Back when I was putting the review together, I realized I'd been reading these two poets, one way or another, for twenty years. Which flipped my still-not-too-thinned-out wig, people. Flipped it. Time's winged chariot, it seems, tears on up next to me on the expressway and looks like it might just start trying to edge me onto the shoulder. But as I fretted about the inevitable Archambaldian aging, I realized it must be much worse for the two laureled Roberts, Pinsky and Hass: not only do they have a few decades on me, they're part of the baby-boom crowd hooked on the notion of their eternal youth. So age became the hook for the piece. It's called "Hass and Pinsky Sail to Byzantium," and it goes like this:

How to be an old poet? We live on the precipice of a great age of older poets, writes Roger Gilbert in the Michigan Quarterly Review, with an unprecedented number of American poets still going strong as they approach, or pass, their eightieth birthdays: Maxine Kumin, Robert Bly, John Ashbery, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Donald Hall, Philip Levine, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder — one could of course go on. One imagines each of these éminences grises has found his or her own answer to the question of how to be an old poet, and plotted out a route over the mackerel-crowded seas to Yeats’ Byzantium of ageless art. But what about the baby boomers, members of that rapidly getting-on generation hooked on the notion of youth? What, especially, about those poets whose careers began with a bang of youthful notoriety, rather than the now-typical whimper of post-MFA chapbooks and blog posts? The appearance of new books by Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass gives occasion to reflect on how the poetic wunderkinds of the early baby boom navigate waters.

It is perhaps unsurprising that Pinsky and Hass have sailed on parallel routes into what, with some slight euphemism, we might call poetic maturity. Their careers have, after all, followed remarkably similar routes since they attended graduate school together at Stanford in the sixties: each chose an academic career, each was picked up early by a major press, each has filled his trophy case with as impressive an array of prizes and awards as one could hope for, each has published good literary criticism as well as poetry, each has served multiple terms as Poet Laureate. Now, as the two poets push seventy, they have found similar ways to write as mature poets. Both have turned in some measure to a public-spirited, civic poetry; and each, in a different way, has developed what I’d like to call a poetics of accumulation, sensitive to the tradition behind them and to the presence of the work of their peers.

The rest of the piece is available as a pdf, if you're absolutely committed to not getting out of bed to get your copy of the magazine. Read on, punishment-gluttons, amidst the croissant crumbs and unfinished New York Times crossword puzzle! Hear of the civic poetry and Eliot-style assimilation and transformation of tradition! Thrill to the assessment of Hass' poem "Bush's War," and chuckle knowingly over the analysis of poetic minutiae! Also, gimme some of that croissant, will ya? Mmmm. Yeah. That's the stuff. Got any more coffee?

The Anxiety of Influence

Exhibit A: Action Yes logo, as deployed by Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney in their fabulous online journal of the same name:

Exhibit B: English Beat logo, as displayed on tee-short worn by Robert Archambeau, 1984-1991 (R.I.P., favorite tee...)



Suspicious, no? And made all the more so by Joyelle's resemblance to the English Beat girl...

Action Yes!

Don't you think Johannes Göransson's Action Yes has the best name for a literary journal since Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. (which was going for quite a different effect)? Sure you do! Agreed, then! Anyway, there's a new issue up, packed (as usual) with smarter-than-the-average-journal stuff, the lone exception being my own humble essay "The Avant-Garde in Babel," in which I try to respond to the overwhelming erudition of Per Bäckström's "One Earth, Four or Five Words: The Notion of 'Avant-Garde' Problematized" from the previous issue. Bäckström and I both try to get at just what it is we talk about when we talk about avant-gardism. He gets a lot further than I do.

I'm genuinely stoked about the direction Johannes is taking Action Yes: there's lots of adventurous work to read, and there seems to be a genuine effort to bring critical prose — often on large topics — to the fore, rather than confining it a back-of-the-book reviews section. Also, as an unreconstructed drawer of diagrams, I'm very happy that Johannes posted the chart I drew of Bäckström's schema of modernism and the avant-garde:

I always find charts like this good as points of departure, but bad as points of arrival.

Speaking of departure, there's a knock on my office door, so I'm heading out of blogspace posthaste. Ciao!

Republican Motives

So check this out:

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.
....
Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats.

Okay. Right. So these are some of the opening words of Jonathan Haidt's article "What Makes People Vote Republican" over at Edge.org. He does a pretty good job of briskly summarizing much of the recent work on right-wing Americans and their ideology (there's a lot of good work by Bob Altemeyer, who revisits Adorno's Authoritarian Personality; by John Dean, who used to work for Nixon, the president who really got the authoritarian politics of resentment rolling; by Thomas Frank of What's the Matter with Kansas; by Chris Hedges, who wrote American Fascists; and by a host of others). Haidt seems like a bright, well-meaning guy. But this opening bit of his drives me crazy. There's a real error here, a false dichotomy so naive I hope it's just a mistake, a matter of bad writing. It's this: Haidt tells us that we can't explain the right-wing's views with reference to social psychology because those views are honestly held. This is preposterous: often, we hold our views most sincerely, and uphold our preferences most honestly, precisely because we are psychologically motivated.

Of course the views of the left are as psychologically and socially motivated as the views of the right, so it doesn't follow, as Haidt says, that the linking of right-wing thinking to such motives gives the left the moral high ground. Unless you define the moral high ground as a place of tolerance, individualism, and curiosity. And the most interesting and challenging part of Haidt's article comes when he asks whether we should really look to individualism and tolerance and curiosity and the like as the primary virtues. Noting that "the moral domain varies across cultures," Haidt asks whether group solidarity shouldn't also play a role, as it does in so many societies. He cites Emile Durkheim, whose work I've admired, but read only in part. If I remember correctly, though, the kind of group solidarity Durkheim describes depends upon the constitution of an ingroup by definition against a despised and demonized outgroup. This may be a good way to maintain social order in relatively homogenous groups who don't actually have much contact with people unlike themselves. It may also work when an isolated group is being exploited by powerful outsiders. I'm thinking, here, about something James Wright once wrote about the great Peruvian poet César Vallejo's upbringing in small mining town: "His home town was small and provincial," says Wright, "with an ancient and living tradition of large, affectionate families who were of necessity mobilized, as it were, against the physical and spiritual onslaughts of death in its ancient and modern forms: disease, undernourishment, and cold on one hand; the officials of the tungsten mines on the other..." I mean, I can certainly understand how the whole defense-of-the-ingroup vs. the hated outsiders thing would come about in a situation like this one. But — given that "the moral domain varies across cultures" — you've got to wonder about firm ingroup loyalty/outgroup hatred as an ethic for modern and postmodern societies, which are diverse, large, mobile, and in constant contact with other groups around the world.

I remember my own contact with the whole ingroup-vs-outgroup ethic, back when the neocons where just starting to ramp up their let's-go-to-war talk back in '02. I was on a committee at the college where I teach, a committee where representatives from all the college constituencies (faculty, students, staff, etc.) could discuss general topics. Someone asked whether we should in some way address the coming conflict. A faculty member suggested we should bring some Iraqi intellectuals to campus to get their view of things (from what I've read and heard from Iraqi intellectuals since then, I imagine we would have heard that Saddam Hussein was a very bad man with a very bad regime, and that invasion would lead to chaos). While this was being proposed, I saw a member of the coaching staff, who has since moved on to greener pastures, first furrow his brow, then set his jaw in stony determination. I don't recall him saying much else in that committee, but I vividly remember him getting up after the prof had finished, and saying "Why bring their side in? Why not bring in a vet of the Gulf War!" It puzzled me at first: the only Gulf War vet I know had told me he thought an invasion was a bad idea, and that Colin Powell had been right in stopping the first Gulf War from expanding beyond the liberation of Kuwait. But the more I mulled it over, the more it became clear to me: for the coach, we weren't proposing to get a full view of all sides of an issue — we were inviting the other team into our locker room. We were supporting the enemy. Liberal types valued the idea of critical discourse and individual judgement, but guys like this coach valued ingroup loyalty. To question, or even examine, national policy critically would be like refusing to execute the play the quarterback had called — it just didn't make sense.

The coach's mindset makes sense in a football game. I imagine it even makes sense in a lot of historical situations — but it strikes me as an older ethos that causes more harm than good in the diverse, globalized society we live in now. Ingroup feeling is still strong, and can be mobilized politically (to speak only of America, we can see examples in the McCarthy-era witchhunts, in the demonizing of gay people in the "defense of marriage" movement, or in the it-was-okay-when-my-ancestors-came-but-now-it's-different anti-immigrant hysteria we see from time to time). But it's a dangerous sentiment to exploit. I mean, I like football as much as the next guy with three degrees from Notre Dame, but life is more complicated than fourth-and-long.

Reginald Shepherd, 1963-2008

It saddens me greatly to hear of the passing of Reginald Shepherd.

We lived a few blocks from one another in Chicago's Wrigleyville, but we never met face to face. I am honored, though, to have known him through our correspondence over the past couple of years. He was a real poet, a real intellect, and a man to be admired. The world was not always kind to him, but he died a deeply loved and respected man.

Here, because I am too sad to say anything new, are the opening paragraphs of my retrospective review of his five books of poetry. The piece appeared in the spring 2008 issue of Pleiades:

A Portrait of Reginald Shepherd as Philoctetes

Philoctetes, sadly, has never been a favorite character of Greek legend. He gets only a brief mention in the Iliad, and missed his chance for greater acclaim when the last manuscript of Proclus’ Little Iliad, where he may have played a greater role, was lost to history. The Greek tragedians liked him — he’s the subject of a play by Aeschylus and another by Euripedes, and two by Sophocles — but their audiences didn’t fall in love with any of these plays, and history has been unkind to the manuscripts: only one full Sophoclean script remains, along with a few lines of the other. The Aeschylus and Euripedes have fared even worse: neither has been preserved, even in fragment. When Edmund Wilson surveyed the history of the Philoctetes story in The Wound and the Bow, he found it left surprisingly little trace in literary history: a bungled seventeenth-century French play by Chateaubrun, a chapter of Fénelon’s Télémaque, an analysis by Lessing, a sonnet by Wordsworth, a John Jay Chapman adaptation, and a version by André Gide. The six decades since Wilson’s survey have added little to this short list: mentions in Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, and a few short poems by Michael Ondaatje are the only distinguished examples.

This is a shame, in that the Philoctetes story seems remarkably suited to our times. It is, after all, a story of othering, or (to steal one of Reginald Shepherd’s words) of otherhood. An archer equipped with a bow that never missed its mark, Philoctetes suffered a wound to his foot so distasteful to his fellow Greeks that they stranded him on an island en route to Troy. Ten years into their fruitless war, the Greeks learn that without the skills of the man they’ve wronged, they cannot win. They coax the understandably outraged Philoctetes to join them, which he does, distinguishing himself in battle. Edmund Wilson saw the story in a Romantic light, treating it as a myth of the alienated artist whose skill is somehow connected to his isolation. But we can see the story in more contemporary terms, too, as a myth of social disenfranchisement and the damage it causes. Seen this way, the real wounds aren’t physical at all. They are, rather, the social and psychological burdens placed on those othered, and the losses to society caused by its failure to embrace the human potential of all of its members. It is no accident that the three poets to pick up the story after Wilson are all postcolonials.

Reginald Shepherd’s poetic career mirrors the Philoctetes story in both its contemporary and Wilsonian versions. The contemporary version of the story fits in that being born gay, black, and poor in America — as Shepherd was — is to be triply othered, to be shunned and devalued for one’s sexuality, race, and class. It isn’t that gayness, blackness, and poverty are wounds in themselves: it is that America treats these things in a wounding way, much as the Greeks treated Philoctetes. Just as the Greeks’ cause at Troy suffered because of their failure to embrace Philoctetes, America suffers from its othering of people like Shepherd. The Wilsonian version of the myth also applies to Shepherd, in that Shepherd’s poetic genius is intimately connected to his otherness in American society: his work returns, again and again, to the particulars of his outsider status. Shepherd’s poems also return to the same solutions to the dilemma of otherhood, seeking solace in never-quite-trusted yearnings for beauty and interracial erotic fulfillment.

And here is an older poem of Reginald's, an elegy for his mother:

How People Disappear

If this world were mine, the stereo
starts, but can't begin
to finish the phrase. I might survive
it, someone could add, but that
someone's not here. She's crowned
with laurel leaves, the place
where laurel leaves would be
if there were leaves, she's not
medieval Florence, not
Blanche of Castile. Late March
keeps marching in old weather,
another slick of snow to trip
and fall into, another bank
of inconvenient fact. The sky
is made of paper and white reigns,
shredded paper pools into her afterlife,
insurance claims and hospital reports,
bills stamped "Deceased," sign here
and here, a blank space where she
would have been. My sister
said We'll have to find another
Mommy.

And this is how
loss looks, my life in black plastic
garbage bags, a blue polyester suit
a size too small. Mud music
as they packed her in
damp ground, it's always raining
somewhere, in New Jersey,
while everyone was thinking about
fried chicken and potato salad,
caramel cake and lemonade.
Isn't that a pretty dress
they put her in? She looks so
lifelike. (Tammi Terrell
collapsed in Marvin Gaye's arms
onstage. For two hundred points,
what was the song?) Trampled
beneath the procession, her music.
Pieces of sleep like pieces of shale
crumble through my four a.m.
(a flutter of gray that could be
rain), unable to read this thing
that calls itself the present.
She's lost among the spaces
inside letters, moth light, moth wind,
a crumpled poem in place of love.

Chicago as Rio de Janeiro: Two Nights Only!

Click for a larger, more printable view.

Print many copies.

Stand on a street corner.

Pass them out like pizza coupons.

Repeat!

Nietzsche Sounds Off on Barack Obama

It might have been the three bottles of Tsingtao, it might have been the extra-spicy shrimp chow fun, it might have been all those hours eyeballing the cable coverage of the Democratic National Convention while surfing the blogosphere for amateur punditry. Odds are they all played into the dream that came to me a few days ago as I slouched over my laptop in a living room lit only by the blue glow of small-hours MSNBC. And an oddly highbrow dream it was: the figures who habitually make appearances in my dreams tend to range across a spectrum the low end of which is my junior-high science teacher, demanding the carbon count of a benzene ring, and the high end of which is Jane Fonda as Barbarella, demanding something altogether different. But this time the dream-presence was an intense little man whose enormous moustache bristled with general defiance. I knew him immediately from the cover of a dog-eared college paperback still on my shelf: Friedrich Nietzche.

“It’s like this,” he began, jabbing toward my chest with the stub of his cigar. “Your man Obama has a problem. Half of his supporters want him to be Apollo, the other half want him to be Dionysus. He has to be both, but he could end up being neither — and then,” he paused, eyes boring into me from beneath eyebrows fit for Bigfoot, “you know... kaput!”

Before I could even unslouch myself enough brush the crumbs from my shirtfront, Nietzsche was pacing the room, flinging cigar ash at the potted ficus and occasionally picking up the chow fun carton and sniffing suspiciously. “‘Enough with the big rallies and the speeches’ says the Clinton woman — but they can’t get enough! 200,000 people in Berlin! 84,000 in Denver! This is what they yearn for, after two demoralizing terms of a Republican White House: to feel the power of their unity in a crowd, to lose their small selves there, to be a part of a movement. This is what Dionysus is all about, and Obama’s the first Democrat to understand it in years. The bond of citizen and citizen is forged by the magic of the Dionysian rite — and those benighted anemics who look down on Dionysus have no idea how cadaverous they seem to the rest of us. They might as well be Mike Dukakis!”

Realizing that trying to interject would be like trying to get a word in edgewise with cocaine-era Robin Williams, I shut up and let Nietzsche roll on. “So what do they want, the rally-haters? ‘Substance! substance!’ — they shout it from behind the wheels of their hybrid cars. After eight years of the dimwit Bush’s administration, they want the piercing, analytic gaze of rational Apollo. They want reason, specific plans, policy that comes from expertise, not gut-feeling. And Obama gives it to them: he gives them page after page of...” (here Nietzsche wrinkled his brow, and grasped in the air with both hands after the right word) “... page after page of wonkery, I believe you say. But what comes of this? ‘Elitist! Egghead!’ scream his enemies. ‘Too Harvard,’ says one, ‘inept bowler!’ says another. They won’t admit it, but even his supporters worry about this. The teeming crowds at his rallies? They want a left-wing Reagan, not a new Adlai Stevenson.

“Now,” he continued, underlining each word with a poke in my chest from his burnt-out cigar, “what — is — to — be — done?” I started to mumble something about swing states and swift-boating, but the man snorted with contempt. “Details! Bah! For untermenschen! Think big! What is the greatest achievement of civilization?” My mind quickly raced: was it chow fun? blogs? No, not blogs. Maybe Barbarella... “Greek tragedy!” shouted Nietzsche. “And why? Why has this pinnacle of art stood above us for centuries in lofty grandeur? Ah! Because they knew, the Greeks, that the greatest, most enduring appeal comes from the fusion of Apollo and Dionysus! Thought alone is nothing. And mere spectacle without reason is worse. But together — ah, together...” He seemed to swoon for a moment, before snapping back to attention. “Well, if Obama can keep Apollo and Dionysus together, the election is his. The election? No, the nation! The age! From his mountain swift-stepping Zarathustra descends, and...”

“But what about McCain?” I asked, mustering my courage. “Doesn’t he have something to prove, too? I mean, he doesn’t really rate as an Apollonian candidate of reason, does he? Not if he can’t tell his sunnis from his shia. And he’s never been able to give the religious conservatives the Dionysian thrill they so deeply desire. When his handlers put him in front of one of those mega-church audiences you can actually see him recoil and, you know, die a little.”

“Oh, him,” Nietzsche replied. “He isn’t particularly good at being Apollo or Dionysus. Sure. But as long as the media keeps spinning this election as a referendum on Obama, he doesn’t have to be much of anything. The less we think about him, the more likely it is he’ll win.”

I had more to ask the agitated old philosopher, but with a start I found myself in the morning sun as it shone on the empty bottles and food cartons. I was awake, groggy, and blinking in the wake of what had started to seem like a nightmare.

Bloody Poetry

Okay, okay, okay. Sure. Since you've been after me about it for so long, I'll tell you. You're always asking me "how does it feel to go to a play about the English Romantic poets directed by, and starring, students to whom you once taught the works of the English Romantic poets?" Well, I'll tell you: it feels good. It also feels odd, and gives one a sense of time's winged chariot zipping by at an alarming pace. I mean, I'm used to running into former students working as bartenders and wait-staff (I teach English, after all), but now I've been at this game long enough to start seeing my former students accomplish impressive things. They go to grad school. They have kids. Some of them make piles of money. And some of them put on plays in cooler-than-cool little Chicago theaters. In the present case, they've put on a play that pushes a whole lot of my buttons, dealing as it does not only with Romanticism, but with the contradictions of the autonomous intellect.

The play is Howard Brenton's Bloody Poetry at the Side Project Theater, directed by Evan Jackson, and starring, among others, former students of mine Mark Dryfoos, Catherine Hermes, and Tristan Brandon. Brandon plays Byron, which is perfect: I always thought he had a Byron-meets-Brian Ferry kind vibe to him, and he assured me after the show that he was able to kit himself out in full Byronic regalia from his personal wardrobe. Anyway, the play's a sharp two-acter about the goings-on between Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, Claire Clairemont, and Dr. Polidori. I'd call it a love triangle, but I think it's more like a love dodecahedron, with revolutionary politics, social deviancy, polymorphous sexuality and a bit of opium thrown in for good measure. There's also sudden death, Shelley's funeral pyre, and some weird supernatural hauntings.

For me, though, the most interesting thing about Brenton's play is the way it depicts the relations between the bourgeois world and the nascent bohemian intellectual demimonde, right at the moment of that demimonde's birth. Long story short, up until the late eighteenth century European intellectuals (including literary types) tended to be supported by, and subordinate to, various powerful institutions. Sometimes it was the aristocracy, which patronized (in both senses) writers, artists, philosophers, and scientists. Sometimes the church did this, or even the royal court. With the rise of market forces and the bourgeoisie, though, some intellectuals stepped away from this system and found the same combination of support and subordination in the marketplace, writing or thinking or painting for the money to be found there. But there's more. In the great bust-up of aristocratic and ecclesiastical authority, some intellectuals chose to step away from the old patrons and the new market system. Some of these writers went broke, and were on the outs politically (think Shelley), others happened to make a lot of money from writing, but did so without having that in mind as a goal (think Byron, who walked away from many of his royalties because he thought accepting them beneath him, and who had great kegs and barrels full of inherited cash anyway). There was an historical opportunity to serve no one, and the Shelleys and the Byrons of the world took it.

For Byron, this opportunity for freedom was largely a matter of hedonism, beyond even the level of self-indulgence in which a peer of the realm could generally revel. For Shelley, it was a matter of revolution, a chance to change the social order for the better (Byron signed on for some of this too, and famously died in the service of a Greek revolution). The really great thing about Brenton's Bloody Poetry, though, lies in the way it captures two of the great complications attendant upon such assertions of freedom.

The first complication involves the way the bourgeoisie (represented in the play by Polidori, Byron's physician and a would-be writer himself) is both attracted to and repelled by the new, autonomous intellectuals. In the play Polidori (played with splendid creepiness by Mark Dryfoos in the Chicago production) is obsessed with the literary genius of the Shelley-Byron circle, but angered by his own exclusion from their literary projects. He's even more obsessed by their sexual intrigues, from which he is also excluded. Envy of the Romantics' intellectual and sexual intrigues turns into a kind of hatred, and he vows to take revenge in the memoirs he's writing. He wants to paint the Romantics in salacious terms, to get even with them, and, as he says in a dark aside, "to own them." There's a creepy way in which we, the audience, are Polidori: after all, we're also Peeping Toms at the Romantics' sexual irregularities, and we're also excluded. His prurience is ours, and if he stands condemned by the play, so do we.

The second complication isn't a matter of clever audience-positioning, but it does give us some of the better speeches in the play. It's the problem of the isolation and uselessness that accompanies the new freedoms of the intellectual. While a court poet knows where he stands in society (he adorns the existing social order), a poet who declares his autonomy from power faces a problem. He doesn't really know what his role is. Even if he yearns for a role in social revolution, he's got to face the question of whether or not his efforts really have any effect (well, he's got to face this, or mire himself in a whole lot of self-deception about the efficacy of his linguistic activity in challenging the powers). There's a great bit in the play where Brenton's version of Byron rants about how restless he feels, and how he wishes there were a revolution, because then at least the poets would have a role, writing the songs and making the banners. And there's a fantastic speech where Shelley gets so caught up in the problem he nearly drowns in a storm at sea, as he calls out “I write poems. But most of the world cannot even read. So what can I do? Act as if I were free. Write, as if I were free.” There's the stuff, the subjunctive utopia of the autonomous intellectual. You know: where most of us live now.

I suppose it's important that Howard Brenton, an old sixties radical, wrote the play during the dawn of the reactionary Thatcher era in Britain. He'd have to have been thinking about the revolutionary dreams of his generation, and the rude awakening when the bourgeoisie reasserted itself with a vengeance. The solutions to the world's problems that Brenton and his friends had hoped for didn't seem to be taking hold, and the whole question of what all their writing and thinking had been for must have been painfully present. They had tried to live and write freely, as autonomous intellects, but to what end?

Brenton's play flirts with at least one solution to the problem of intellectual autonomy: aestheticism. Strangely, it gives this view to Mary Shelley. When Byron dismisses Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" on political grounds, she stares down the decadent Lord and refutes him by saying, of the poem, "but it sings." Its beauty is its justification. This art-for-art's sake position isn't, as far as I know, where Mary Shelley really stood. But accuracy be damned: Bloody Poetry sings, too.

Chicago Feeding Frenzy: The Printers' Ball

"It's picked over already! You'd better hurry!" These, gentle reader, were the words with which I was greeted by Patrick Durgin (my collaborator on the MLA Marathon Reading some months back) when I saw him at last night's Printers' Ball at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Durgin, who'd remained calm and collected while I underwent bout after bout of outfreakage during the various crises involved in organizing our 50-poet wingding last December, had a wild, hunted look in the eyes peering out from behind his Buddy Holly specs. I couldn't quite remember where I'd seen this look before — certainly not in Durgin's eyes. Then it occurred to me: this was a fire-sale-at-Filene's look, the look we all get when there's a seriously good deal to be had, and a crowd all around us intent on getting it before we do. This was a hurry — supplies are limited! look, and it was everywhere around me. Within minutes, I had it myself, as I rushed around the H-shaped network of galleries scooping up free books and journals like some kind of poetry-loving Pac Man. As Josh Corey said to me after it was all over and we were coming back to our senses over gin and tonics, "it's moments like this that you realize we aren't the captains of our own desires."

Indeed. It was a feeding frenzy. And it'll be some time before I've digested the pile of Chicago-area journals I scooped into my gaping maw — Court Green, Stop Smiling, TriQuarterly, Other Voices, Poetry, Warpland, Columbia Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, and so many others. (I eschewed the tote bags from Poetry magazine, ironically inscribed with Marianne Moore's famous phrase about poetry — "I, too, dislike it" — and actually managed to overstuff my jumbo-sized Freitag courier bag for the first time).

I never made it out to the sculpture garden where the Gnoetry poetry machine was cranking out black smoke and elegant verse, but I did run into Don Share, Ed Roberson, Ray Bianchi, Traudi Haas, Jennifer Karmin, Tim Yu, Dalkey Archive's Martin Riker, Danielle Chapman (who'll soon be opening the new poetry lounge at the Chicago Cultural Center) and many others. Fred Sasaki, who was running the show, appeared preternaturally calm in the midst of the hipster literati crowding the bars, Chicago-dog tables, piles of books, DJ-tables, and theatrical performances — a still point in the turning world.

Last year the Printers' Ball was busted by the overzealous Chicago police. But this year's big show — held almost 40 years to the day after Chicago's finest delivered an authoritarian beat-down to the protestors at the 1968 Democratic Convention — went off without so much as a "could you please keep it down, the neighbors are complaining about the elliptical verse."


(Left to right: unknown literary brooder; Fred Sasaki; Jennifer Karmin; Timothy Yu; Martin Riker; Atari-lovin' Josh Corey)

(UPDATE: "unknown literary brooder" has been identified as cool/happenin' poet and karate-guy Nick Twemlow.)