Savage Aesthetics: Coherence and Ethics Then and Now

I can’t decide whether it’s David Shields’ courage I admire, or that of his publisher. You know Shields, I think, at least by reputation: after writing four novels, he’s having his moment of basking in the full glow of the media, promoting his manifesto-as-collage-of-quotations, Reality Hunger. It’s a collection of quotations from all manner of sources, plus passages he’s written, with no attribution given to any of the passages except in a tiny-print section at the back, a concession to his publisher and their lawyers. Shields’ attitude to the inclusion of this section is pretty clear: he’s added dotted lines along the left-hand margin, with a little picture of scissors: he’d prefer you cut the pages out, and have the experience of reading the book without any sense of who wrote what.

For those of us who live on the tiny moon of experimental poetry, none of this is really shocking: collage and the death of the author have been the air we breathe for some time. But on the larger planet of fiction published by New York conglomerates, where the atmosphere contains some trace elements of money and fame, Shields’ book has caused some trepidation (and on the great glowing sun of pop culture, he’d find himself in real danger of lawsuits).

Anyway: I’m glad Shields’ book is out there: someone needed to make a big, visible move in the direction of intellectual freedom at a time when property rights threaten to dominate in all creative fields. While some very sharp lawyers are at work on this, too, Shields has achieved the kind of notoriety around which people might rally. He’s caught some flak for taking his stand, of course. As he puts it, “numerous bloggers appear to think I’m the anti-Christ because I don’t genuflect at the twin altars of the novel and intellectual property,” but none of this seems to bother him. I like that.

For all of Shields’ admirable audacity, though, some of the things he says still drive me up the wall. It’s not the fact that he refuses to genuflect before the altar of intellectual property that bothers me: it’s his worship of another false idol, one which I suppose we could call presentism, or perhaps (following the poet and philosopher Owen Barfield), chronological snobbery. In History in English Words, Barfield defines chronological snobbery as the belief that, intellectually, “humanity languished for countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific dictum of the last century.” While Barfield was thinking about early twentieth century scientism, the kind of chronological snobbery he describes seems to be an occupational hazard for a certain generation of guys who teach postmodernism — just as the equally boneheaded idea of American exceptionalism afflicts a certain generation of literary Americanists, and just as the utterly odious, ahistorical, notion of favoring "native species" rots the souls of the less-enlightened breed of eco-critics. (Am I going overboard? I am, I am. Forgive me, and think of all the lunches with colleagues during which, outnumbered and tongue-tied, I’ve sputtered in graceless frustration over my enchiladas).

Anyway. Consider what Shields says in the recent essay "Long Live the Anti-Novel, Built from Scraps":

We live in a post-narrative, post-novel world. Plots are for dead people. Novelly novels exist, of course, and whenever I’m on a plane, it’s all I see everyone reading, but they function for us as nostalgia: when we read traditional novels, we get to pretend that life is still coherent.

Oooh. Argh. I mean, here’s a guy who thinks that life (and the art that represented it) were simple, coherent things, until our own time, when a great postmodern enlightenment broke like long-awaited sunlight over the stricken land. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be literary was sheer heaven. Now, in our enlightened age, even the casual airborne novel reader thumbing this week’s James Patterson title knows in his deconstructed soul that coherence of life and form are quaint things to be appreciated with nostalgia for the time when they were all that the simple groundlings knew, and all they needed. “Art, like science, progresses,” says Shields, leaving no doubt that he feels we’ve moved on from a naïve sense of coherent life and art and into something better, and more knowing. Listen carefully, and from far beneath Shields’ airplane a spinning noise can be heard from Owen Barfield’s grave.

It’s not that Shields is ignorant of literary history. When he writes about the freedom of authors to quote with or without attribution, and to creatively incorporate the work of other writers into their own creations, he appeals to a long tradition. As he says near the end of Reality Hunger, he’s “writing to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted.” But this sense of history is excruciatingly limited: Shields certainly seems to take for granted the notion that the past was a time when aesthetics were guided by a sense of coherence.

Of course there have been moments when the idea of coherence has been a predominant aesthetic principle. In antiquity, Horace’s idea of decorum was all about the fitting of parts to a whole; in the neoclassical theory of, say, Alexander Pope, coherence was one of the guiding principles of art, and his “regularized” edition of Shakespeare attempts to save the bard from roughness and irregularity. Coleridge’s notion of organic form is a very sophisticated attempt to reconcile the variety of art to a notion of coherence, and Coleridgean ideas entered the American academy under the New Critics. But this is only one side of the story. There’s a long tradition of art full of incoherencies and dissonances, and an accompanying set of aesthetic theories justifying and explaining such art.

Consider the greatest and most popular of nineteenth century English aesthetic theorists, John Ruskin. He despised what he saw as the oppressive regularity, coherence, and formal perfection of classicism and, in his famous ragbag of an opus The Stones of Venice held up against it his own version of gothic aesthetics. In one of the most famous passages of that work, he defines the qualities of mind and form that constitute the gothic in contrast to the classical Greek:

Formal Qualities of the Gothic
1. Savageness
2. Changefulness
3. Naturalism
4. Grotesqueness
5. Rigidity
6. Redundance

Gothic Qualities of Mind
1. Savageness or Rudeness
2. Love of Change
3. Love of Nature
4. Disturbed Imagination
5. Obstinacy
6. Generosity

There’s a lot to work with here, but since what we’re concerned with at the moment is the idea that incoherence as an aesthetic principle is not just a quality of our own times, let’s look at what Ruskin says about savageness as an aesthetic principle, and its relation to ornament. After going on for a while about the northern origins of the gothic, Ruskin moves on to an appreciation of the gothic relation of whole to part in a work of art (here he’s talking architectural as art):

If, however, the savageness of Gothic architecture, merely as an expression of its origin among Northern nations, may be considered, in some sort, a noble character, it possesses a higher nobility still, when considered as an index, not of climate, but of religious principle.

In the 13th and 14th paragraphs of Chapter XXL of the first volume of this work, it was noticed that the systems of architectural ornament, properly so called, might be divided into three:—1. Servile ornament, in which the execution or power of the inferior workman is entirely subjected to the intellect of the higher;—2. Constitutional ornament, in which the executive inferior power is, to a certain point, emancipated and independent, having a will of its own, yet confessing its inferiority and rendering obedience to higher powers;—and 3. Revolutionary ornament, in which no executive inferiority is admitted at all. I must here explain the nature of these divisions at somewhat greater length.

Of Servile ornament, the principal schools are the Greek, Ninevite, and Egyptian; but their servility is of different kinds. The Greek master-workman was far advanced in knowledge and power above the Assyrian or Egyptian. Neither he nor those for whom he worked could endure the appearance of imperfection in anything; and, therefore, what ornament he appointed to be done by those beneath him was composed of mere geometrical forms,—balls, ridges, and perfectly symmetrical foliage,—which could be executed with absolute precision by line and rule, and were as perfect in their way, when completed, as his own figure sculpture. The Assyrian and Egyptian, on the contrary, less cognizant of accurate form in anything, were content to allow their figure sculpture to be executed by inferior workmen, but lowered the method of its treatment to a standard which every workman could reach, and then trained him by discipline so rigid, that there was no chance of his falling beneath the standard appointed. The Greek gave to the lower workman no subject which he could not perfectly execute. The Assyrian gave him subjects which he could only execute imperfectly, but fixed a legal standard for his imperfection. The workman was, in both systems, a slave.

But in the mediæval, or especially Christian, system of ornament, this slavery is done away with altogether; Christianity having recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul. But it not only recognizes its value; it confesses its imperfection, in only bestowing dignity upon the acknowledgment of unworthiness. That admission of lost power and fallen nature, which the Greek or Ninevite felt to be intensely painful, and, as far as might be, altogether refused, the Christian makes daily and hourly contemplating the fact of it without fear, as tending, in the end, to God's greater glory. Therefore, to every spirit which Christianity summons to her service, her exhortation is: Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear of shame. And it is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they thus receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.

Servile ornament is the realm of coherence, but the gothic is the realm of revolutionary ornament, the triumph of part over whole, an aesthetic that allows for imperfection in its celebration of freedom. Was this really what mediæval gothic was like? I’m no expert, and my go-to mediævalist has skipped town for Cambridge, but anyone who’s spent much time wandering around a period cathedral will know there’s at least a strong measure of truth to Ruskin’s view of the middle ages. And his views were deeply influential in his own century — on Preraphaelistism in visual art and literature, for example, and on the Arts & Crafts movement in ceramics, woodworking, furniture design, and architecture.

I don’t mean to limit this aesthetic of incoherence to Ruskin and the gothic, either. As Daisy Fried (who hipped me to Sheilds’ essay on Facebook) pointed out, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for example, also courts incoherence. As does the Romantic genre of the deliberate fragment, And the tradition continued in all sorts of ways throughout the twentieth century, from Dada to, say, the atonal serial music of a guy like Karlheinz Stockhausen. Anyway: the point is that this notion that the past was a time when aesthetic coherence was always lauded is false.

So Shields is a presentist, a chronological snob, at least in the essay in question. But what’s bothersome is not just his sense that he’s on to something new when, in fact, he’s not. It’s that the version of the view he offers is, in fact, a kind of reduction of stronger versions of the view offered in the past. Consider Shields’ reasons for championing an aesthetic of incoherence and multiplicity. He turned to such an aesthetic, he says, because he found the alternatives “predictable, tired, contrived.” That is, he wanted novelty. Okay. But that’s a pretty shallow rationale, especially when compared with some of the deeper thinking on the issue from thinkers predating Shields. For Ruskin, there’s an ethical quality to an aesthetic of savage incoherence. In his view, it is the way to honor individuality, and not just that — it is the way to accept the individual in all of his imperfection. And this ethical dimension continues in whole swathes of thinking about those kinds of art that eschew coherence. Let’s come back to Stockhausen for a moment. Stockhausen said that his refusal to give his compositions clarity, wholeness, and accessible coherence by subordinating the parts to a dominant tonality was in essence a reflection of his ethical stance. To take the elements of music and “use them all with equal importance,” rather than subordinating some to others, was nothing less than “a spiritual and democratic attitude toward the world.” Stockhausen would no more subordinate musical parts to the whole than he would sacrifice individual lives to an abstract cause, or expropriate one person's labor for the benefit of another. For Stockhausen, the emancipation of musical dissonance is, at a formal level, a kind of parallel to the emancipation of the oppressed in the world. It doesn't actually free anyone, of course, but it exemplifies a way of thinking that could have ethical implications for those who appreciate it.

So: it’s not just that Shields sees novelty where, in fact, there’s a long historical tradition. It’s that his version of an aesthetic of incoherence in “Long Live the Anti-Novel, Built from Scraps” is attenuated in the ethical dimension that was so thoroughly elaborated by earlier thinkers. Shields’ version of the aesthetic of incoherence isn’t a triumphant break with an impoverished past: it’s a pale echo of an old idea. It's weak tea that thinks it is nitroglycerine.

Poetry and the Challenge to the Public Sphere

A few years ago I wrote an article that said (along with some things about Surrealism and Aestheticism) that the more extravagant claims for the political power of language poetry were a bit overblown. While I heard some nice things from the comparative literature crowd, the article was greeted, quite rightly, with a shrug of indifference from langpo quarters. It hadn’t, after all, said anything about language poetry that, say Geoff Ward or Charles Altieri hadn’t said earlier and better. I suppose I expected a similar indifference to “Public Faces in Private Places,” the article I wrote about the experimental poetry associated with Cambridge. Such expectations, though, weren’t met: I’ve heard some praise, and I’ve heard some passionate blame. But I’ve also found myself accused of saying things I didn’t say. One responder (who admitted he hadn’t read the essay) told me that what I really meant was that poets have to give up on poetry entirely if they wish to be serious about politics: “you implicitly criticize poets like those of the CS [Cambridge School]” he wrote, “for their refusal to accept that the minimal condition for realizing restructured social relations is the relinquishment of poetry.” I’ve also been told that my essay “shaded … into an exercise in bureaucratic control.” On a few occasions I’ve tried in my bungling, defensive way to point out that what I wrote was that there were a few specific claims about the political power of the poetry that I found unsupportable. One of the responses I’ve had, when I took that tack, was to be told that no one actually makes any grandiose claims.

For the most part, the claims I engage in the essay have to do with the purported power of a specific kind of experimental poetry to make an impact on the public sphere. The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Literature, for example, claims that this kind of poetry sets out to be “capable of challenging the public sphere.” And David Shepard has said that such poems “recombine a language fragmented into technical jargons,” incorporating the vocabulary of specialized discourses into the poetry and thereby “return[ing] this knowledge to the public sphere from its sequestration in the ivory tower.” N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge (whose book on J.H. Prynne's poetry is generally quite admirable, even indispensable) claim that poetry this kind “collide[s] with the powerful instrumental discourses of the culture” with the effect of “smashing them into pieces.” They also claim that, in bringing together different kinds of language and placing them in contexts not normally their own, the work “break[s] out of the institutional space allotted to poetry and literature in late-capitalist culture.”

To assess these claims about how the poetry has challenged the public sphere, I suppose it would help to have some sense of what such a challenge looks like. To begin with, then, we need to remember that the public sphere is a set of conditions for communication. It is unlike the private sphere, which is the realm of the home, or any other area where the individual enjoys a high degree of autonomy, removed from institutional authority or the pressure to conform to standards set by others (a publication here might be a post-it note you put on the fridge to remind your spouse to buy more bananas). It is also unlike the sphere of public authority, which is the realm of state power and regulations (a publication here might be an internal memo of the Internal Revenue Service). In contradistinction to these places, the public sphere is the place where we meet not as members of a family, or functionaries/beneficiaries/victims of a state, but as (in Jurgen Habermas’ phrase), “private people come together as a public.” What does this mean? It means that the public sphere is where we communicate not in any special capacity as members of a household or as officials with authority, but without respect to status (the idea of the coffeehouse is a classical one in illustrating the public sphere: we come there to talk to each other, and meet on a kind of neutral ground, where the fact that you are a Deputy Minister of Finance or Chief of Police or Associate Professor of New Media Studies doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t confer on you any special status to overrule the next guy simply by virtue of your title) (the idea of a journal open to letters from readers is another classic example). The notion at work here is that, again in Habermas’ words, “the issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate.”

One common criticism of the public sphere in some of its manifestations — and often a valid one — is that it doesn’t live up to the ideal. Many people aren’t able to communicate in the allegedly public media such as newspapers, journals of opinion, radio, television, what have you (the internet’s impact of the public sphere is still being sorted out. I know a guy who’s job it is to be on top of this, and he’s perpetually frazzled by the enormity of the task). Certain opinions are shut out, and at times whole classes of people are silenced. Sometimes specialized knowledge becomes inaccessible, and this too can be a problem for the public sphere. And authority of various sorts (“I’m an expert, and you’re not”) can distort the ideal of equal participation, as can the power of money to trumpet some views over others. There are, in short, plenty of reasons to challenge the way the public sphere is organized in any particular place and time.

So challenges to the public sphere are important. But what do they look like? Well, they have to threaten to change the existing network for the public expression of ideas, opinion, and information. The first example that comes to mind is one cited by the historian J.H. Plumb, when he wrote about the organization of radical political opinion in England during the period between the American Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. He begins by discussing Edmund Burke’s anti-revolutionary writings and the exclusion of radical writing from the established channels of communication, and goes on to describe the enormous effort that went into challenging the (at this point restrictive and reactionary) public sphere:

In some ways Burke himself was largely responsible for the growth of these radical clubs. Thomas Paine, an active and violent supporter of America Independence, had replied to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in his Rights of Man, in which he had proclaimed the necessity for universal sufferage and the sovereignty of the people. He denounced monarchy and aristocracy as useless archaisms. His book was immensely popular. It was welcomed by the Society of Constitutional Information, formed in 1780 by earlier radicals to further the cause of Parliamentary Reform; and in 1792 almost every town in England and Scotland had a club for Constitutional Information or its Society of Friends of the People. Most of their members were drawn from the working or lower middle classes, with a sprinkling of educated, professional men. The general aims of these societies seem to have been twofold: to spread Paine's ideas by reading his works, and to impress the government with the strength of public opinion favorable to France. At the same time they kept up an adulatory correspondence with the National Assembly in France and with various Jacobin clubs. This movement was given a clear organization by the formation of the London Corresponding Society, which, under the energetic leadership of Thomas Hardy [no, not that Thomas Hardy — (Archambeau)], a working man, acted as leader for the provincial societies. Two general Conventions were held at Edinburgh and at the second, in 1793, the British Convention of Delegates of the People, a number of emergency resolutions were passed which provided for secret leadership and meetings in case the government took repressive action. A revolutionary organization was in the making and the government took steps to thwart it.

So that’s what it takes to challenge the public sphere — you make possible new channels of communication for a broad public; you make public, and not just to a handful of people, ideas and information not otherwise available; and most importantly you include otherwise silenced classes of people in public discussion. Many people’s life-works went into the effort described by Plumb, but it was a real challenge to the existing public sphere at the time. The proof that it was a real challenge, of course, is that it incurred real repression. We’re not talking about snide dismissiveness, we’re talking about state power, violence, prison, and the like. I mean, in one sense a challenge is easy to make. I can say “I challenge Mike Tyson to a fight” right here. But a real challenge is one that is heard as a challenge, and met as a challenge (and Mike Tyson’s not reading this blog. Even if he did, he wouldn’t experience my “challenge” as a challenge). A challenge to the public sphere is, to quote an American politician of no small repute, “a big fucking deal,” and it doesn’t come about that often.

As for the claim that the British experimental poetry associated with Cambridge has “challenged the public sphere” — well, I’m not convinced it has, not if what we mean by the public sphere is anything like what Habermas meant. Which is not to say anything more than that. To say this doesn’t imply that poets should give up on poetry as the minimum condition for being political (Tom Paine, the heroic challenger of the public sphere Plumb cites, wrote poetry — some people still read his poem “Liberty Tree”). Nor does pointing out the over-grand nature of these particular claims imply that poetry should submit to bureaucratic control (I'm not even sure what that would look like). Nor does it mean that there’s no politics to poetry. But it does mean that the effects of British experimental poetry on the public sphere have, in these particular instances, been overstated. The public sphere in Britain continues much as it would have otherwise, and I don’t think it is aware of any threat from the vicinity of, say, J.H. Prynne. (Note that Prynne hasn’t made any claim to such transforming power, just some of his more zealous advocates, as quoted above).

I should say that I do think that the way much of this poetry has been distributed and read has often occurred at an interesting angle to the public sphere. For decades, Prynne and those associated with him often published in the kind of micro-press world that’s familiar to many poets: self-publishing, free distribution to a small network of those who are interested, tiny journals, etc. This seems to me less like a challenge to the public sphere than a withdrawal from it into something that sits somewhere between the private sphere of family and friends and the public sphere. But an alternative — a good thing in itself — isn’t the same thing as a challenge. (It is also, I might add, exactly “the institutional space allotted to poetry and literature in late-capitalist culture,” not a breaking out of that space, as Kerridge and Reeve maintain).

Anyway, what struck me, and what gave my essay its title, was the strong public-spiritedness of the poetry, combined with the non-public-sphere methods of distribution it had for many years. It called to mind Auden’s phrase about “public faces in private places” being “wiser and nicer than private faces in public places.” I don’t think of this as hypocrisy, or in any way negative. I did, and do, think it is different from a returning of knowledge to the public sphere, or a challenge to the public sphere. If you think that's an obvious point, so do I.

*****

In unrelated news, Marcela Sulak (whose new book, Immigrant is out), recently arrived in Tel Aviv from Washington, D.C. and points west, and has started "Writing from Israel", her new blog on poetry and other things.

Cambridge Poetry and Political Ambition

Back in the summer of 2008 I spoke at the Sorbonne about the poetry associated with Cambridge and J.H. Prynne, and tried to understand what I took to be some of the more grandiose political claims made on behalf of the poetry (that it "smashes the discourses of power" and the like). The Cambridge Literary Review published a longer version of the Sorbonne talk in their inaugural issue, and that essay's just been published in the U.S. in Emily Taylor Merriman and Adrian Grafe's new book Intimate Exposure: Essays on the Public-Private Divide in British Poetry Since 1950.

The essay kicked up a bit of a stir when it appeared in England. At first I wasn't sure why, since I didn't think it attacked the poetry, just some of the less supportable, more Utopian claims for what poetry could accomplish. But as the scuffle went on and on, I got a better look than I'd had at the conditions that seem to have made so many of the poets associated with Cambridge a bit prone to defensiveness. They really do seem to face a climate of hostility in the larger poetic community, a hostility greater by orders of magnitude than that faced by their American counterparts in experimental poetry.

Since the good people at the Cambridge Literary Review have made the letters section for the second issue available online as a PDF file, I thought I'd take the liberty of posting Andrea Brady's response to what I wrote, and my own fumbling response to her. For the record, I think Andrea Brady makes some very level-headed and sound comments, and knows more about these things than I do. But I don't think I made an equation between "publication in the larger academic and commercial presses and the authenticity of a poetry’s claims to political efficacy." If I did make that equation, I was wrong: I don't think any poetry in England or America, at the moment, has a political impact of any major scale (for reasons larger than any particular poet's efforts — I try to analyze why this is the case in a big article called "The Discursive Situation of Poetry" that will be coming out in an as-yet-untitled book edited by Mary Biddinger next year) (I expect a bunch of people will be angry at that article, since one of its premises is that we can't just will ourselves to be agents of political efficacy, that larger objective conditions have to be right, and that those conditions determine both our consciousness and our field of impact) (but I digress).

Anyway: this isn't to say that poetry can't aim at politics, express political viewpoints, or have the kind of small-scale impact that many other kinds of actions (teaching a history class, writing an article on sociology, attending a rally, talking to your friends, ranting in your blog) can have. I mean, I don't think Andrew Motion changes the political climate appreciably more than does John Wilkinson. Of course poetry helps in its tiny way to change consciousness, just like many other things do. But British Petroleum does what it does with equal disregard for iambs and disjunctions. I think Andrea and I agree, more or less, about this.

The other thing I'd add at this point is a bit of a rejoinder — not so much to Andrea individually as to a bunch of us, including me, in the critico/academic/alt-poetry multiverse. Many of us have at one time or another turned to the idea of poetry, and the teaching of poetry, as acts of political resistance. The rejoinder to this notion of resistance-politics comes in a comment Alain Badieu once made about Gilles Deleuze. For Deleuze, says Badieu, "nothing was interesting unless it was affirmative. Critique, ends, modesties... none of that is as valuable as a single affirmation."

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Dear Cambridge Literary Review,

I was gladdened to read Robert Archambeau’s essay in Cambridge Literary Review issue 1. It is an intelligent and serious engagement with the poetries erratically gathered under the name “Cambridge School,” and with their most significant and problematic contention: that they are committed poetries, with political aspirations beyond the simple plundering of domesticated interiority for its symbolic potential. It is also offers, in spite of itself, a kind of reassurance that there are indeed readers for this poetry, readers gathered far from Greenwich Meantime, on the shores of Lake Forest Illinois, into the nanosphere of the British micropresses.

I am certainly aware of the problems with that contention. The poetries are too, and deal with those problems in very different ways. I want to hold onto the distinctions among their strategies and qualities, to the point of questioning the validity of the term “Cambridge School.” But I also know that protesting about the designators is something of a cliché when it comes time to respond to synoptic pieces like Archambeau’s, and that in introducing a large, various and sometimes grotesquely self- aware body of works to new readers it is helpful to be able to assert some continuities or shared aspirations, just so we have a starting line. So I’m not going to go into the particularities of what I view as the most important differences between the poetries of Prynne, Sutherland, Wilkinson, Jarvis, Riley and myself—to say nothing about the countless others who we could associate with “the CS”; I’ll simply say that the term remains a pretty coniferous lump for me to swallow. Personally, I feel like I’m forever being tagged “Cambridge School,” even though I’ve lived in London for twice as long as I was a gownie, and my time in the UK still adds up to far less than half my life. When I did live in Cambridge I felt distinctly female and distinctly American. I’ve always said that I was influenced less by Prynne than by Frank O’Hara; my commitment to a politicized art predates any serious reading of Prynne, and even now I have profound misgivings about the political methods of Prynne’s late poetry. During my five years as a student and one as a worker in Cambridge, I was seriously afflicted by the gentility and ancientness and patriarchy of the place. I guess it was no accident that I ended up writing a chapter of my doctoral thesis on the way that seventeenth-century literary coteries preserved the authority of patriarchal poets through agonistic self-definition and fantasies of all-male reproduction. I didn’t see the resemblance at the time.

So now I find myself teaching early modern literature at Queen Mary University of London, and this week we were working on exactly one of those patriarchs, rare old Ben Jonson. We were thinking about the stigma of print, and how Jonson reviled coterie literary styles and sought to dignify professional authorship through the publication of his ridicu- lously monumental 1616 Works. We discussed his first epigram, ‘To the Reader’, with its behest “To read it well—that is, to understand.” We recognised that this plea for understanders, for readers who shared social, political, ethical and literary values, was an attempt to replicate in print the conditions of manuscript circulation—exclusivity, similitude, privilege—but that Jonson was trying to use his poetry’s moral and aesthetic authority to create his readers while still prospering from commercial circulation.

Sorry for the history lesson. I suppose you can see where I’m going with this. It suddenly seemed like a familiar predicament: the construction of print as a democratic and politically progressive medium, but one which many authors experienced as subject to internal and external censorship, stylistic constraints and the pressure to dumb-down; the struggle to maintain private values and still recruit a public audience; disdain for readers who had failed to prove their qualifications (as anyone who disagreed with or disliked the poetry did fail, by definition); the need to trade the exclusivity of manuscript for the public authority to be garnered from print. Many of these characteristics are attributed to “private” and “public” forms of circulation in Archambeau’s essay. While his terms are open to question—not least because the limited circulation for all poetry, distributed by micro- or macro-press, by internet or letterpress, is so incredibly small—the comparison with early modern publication systems might help open the discussion up a bit further.

Scholarship on that period understands manuscript to be a form of publication, with political and social influence and efficacy. Like even the most “prominent” (Archambeau’s term) of contemporary poetry books, early modern printed editions usually ran to less than a thousand copies; so it is inaccurate to claim that print quaprint was especially effective in inducing political change. But most importantly, the networks of readers established by what Archambeau might decry as circulation in “private comforting confinement” did more than challenge early modern politics: these networks completely transfigured European thought and society, and were the engineers of the Renaissance.

Obviously, there’s been a lot of water under the Bridge of Sighs since then. These coteries were for the most part privileged elites in stratified societies—much as we academics are now—but they were a lot closer to the seats of power than we are. I’m not saying that Prynne is our Erasmus. But I wanted to use this example as a way of outthinking the rather crude equation between publication in the “larger academic and commercial presses” and the authenticity of a poetry’s claims to political efficacy. Certainly I see a problem with any poetry’s (“messianic”) claim to change the world, to flatten instrumental reason with the hammer of détournement. But it was telling that Archambeau found that claim (also, to an “incidental political potency”) in critical essays by John Wilkinson – or, more importantly, in a controversy he was having with Peter Riley. It would be much harder to find it in any of the poems, which are more likely to be awash with self-criticism for their impotence than boasts about smashing the state. I’m perfectly aware that my poetry isn’t going to change the world because it is “far from a mass movement,” as I wrote somewhere: it’s not part of the class struggle, energized by direct action or likely to inspire it. I can carry on writing it if I think it will be available to future readers as a record of a peculiar dissidence. At times that in itself has seemed like a major accomplishment. At my most optimistic, I hope it encourages its readers—who, as readers seeking out this kind of work, aren’t likely to require encouragement—to think critically about politics, or perhaps to be inspired by such thinking to participate in collective efforts to overcome the tyrannies of capitalism. As a reader myself, I’ve been inspired by poetry to do what else I have done; and I would include, among my political acts, teaching, conversation, and collaboration. I think I share with other Cambridge types the belief that engaging with 300 or more students every week in debates about literature, politics, rights and forms and language, is a political and ethical activity. When I teach difficult late modernist poetry (including the most recent poetry written by my peers) alongside the tweedy canon, I hope I am not being a hopelessly narcissistic self-advertising git. I consider it my pedagogical duty to those students, to examine with them the full range of alternatives to the regal discourses of jargon and bathos and greed. They can take what they want. I say this not because Archambeau has thrown the typical stink-bomb at the politicized poets who are also ghosts in the universities’ ivory machine, but because lecturers, who spend their working hours immersed in critique and negativity, can be a very masochistic bunch when it comes to describing the politics of their work. I think it’s worth proclaiming publicly that that work is a kind of activism, which promotes creative, intelligent, belligerent… well, yes, resistance.

That’s Prynne’s word for it, of course. I hope that as the large and various body of work which has had some connection to Cambridge in recent years is read and matures, Prynne will become less important as a totemic figure, the TLS anti-celebrity, and more important simply as a poet. In my view the existence of a Cambridge School should not be predicated on Prynne’s example: not on the example of his poetry, or of his attitudes to its circulation and promotion. If the Cambridge School
did exist, then it existed between the years of the publications of the English Intelligencer and A Various Art. But these days there’s a great deal of obscurity around, in Manchester, London, Newcastle, Glasgow, and Totnes; is all this poetry not “Cambridge School” unless it is branded with the mark of Prynne? If Barque is the modern home of the CS, then
that field stretches also to Paris, Berlin, China, New York and Winnetka. If it’s all about geography, would we say that Dell Olsen is now Cambridge School, because she lives in the episcopacy? Do the most recent Yankee immigrants Justin Katko and Ryan Dobran know what they’re in for?

Neither is it correct to claim based on Prynne’s example that others of that ‘school’ are perversely or morally inclined to refuse invitations. So Prynne demurred when Poetry Review came calling? Keston and I didn’t. We’ve been on the radio. Keston was the poet-in-residence for the bloody Newbury Spring Arts Festival!—as you can see on a flier headlined “Mickey Salberg’s Crystal Ballroom Dance Band to play at the Lambourn Centre.” We’re not refusing a mass audience or a university press on principle, we’re just waiting to be asked. The new generation is full of fame whores. But Archambeau’s article among others shows that there is some kind of notoriety slowly building up out there; the nasty sniping which Jeremy Noel-Tod among others has rebuffed shows that the poetry is public enough to get up the nose of Craig Raine. We can blame that on the internet. The digital age has much more powerful powers of distribution at its disposal than the early modern republic of letters—which is
another way of saying that even poetry which is micro-published by a fly-by-night outfit like Barque can get halfway around the world, thankfully, to our comrades in Illinois. The Archive of the Now, the free digital repository of recordings of contemporary poetry which I run at QMUL, has a fanbase on Facebook that extends to Japan, Finland, Brazil and Idaho. Perhaps inevitably, distinctions such as I’ve been making about collegiate membership are going to get lost in transit. The problem with shipping everything under this Cambridge School bill of lading is that a great deal of really important poetry gets lost too, because we feel we know where the poetry is happening, and from there it’s easy to assume we also know who is making it. On the other hand, maybe “Cambridge School” is a smart branding exercise: it’s contentious enough to generate lots of valuable publicity.

I don’t mean to attack Archambeau’s piece, though I recognise I’m quibbling about terms and affiliations, rather than mucking in with the analysis and detailed close reading of the poetry. That work is the most interesting and most valuable, and Archambeau’s essay is an important example of it. To defeat the expectations which come along with the name “Cambridge School,” the deeply various poetry published in the Cambridge Literary Review needs intelligent readers and critics; I’d even
go so far as to say that it is written in expectation of them. I’ve seen critics from beyond the blood-soaked Trumpington perimeter stick their heads above the parapet, only to be shouted down by the defence forces entrenched in their tiny garden plots—and so decide to stop caring. I don’t want Archambeau to stop caring. I’m grateful to him for paying attention to this work, and for contributing to the important debate about how a poetry can be actively and effectively political.

Andrea Brady
Queen Mary University of London


Robert Archambeau responds:

I’m grateful to have such a thoughtful response to my essay, and I certainly understand the wariness about the term “Cambridge Poetry,” even when it comes with a string of disclaimers attached. It was the much the same when people started talking about Language Poetry. When you write that you’re “forever being labeled ‘Cambridge School’, even though I’ve lived in London for nearly twice as long as I was a gownie,” and when you ask “would we say that Dell Olsen is now Cambridge School, because she lives in the episcopacy,” I suppose you’re objecting to the geographic nature of the term. I get it. But I suppose what’s happened is that geography has become incidental, just as publication in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E became incidental to what was meant by Language Poetry.

I use the term because it seems to be the term that is coming into general use. One might—one should, I suppose—ask whether the term is, in the end, a good thing. I’m inclined to think that, like most words, it both reveals and conceals. Everything you say about differences between individual poets is true, and everything you say about periodization sounds right, too. I understand your idea of that the period “between the years of the publications of the English Intelligencer and A Various
Art may constitute a distinct moment—but even making this distinction would probably bring down a rain of bile on your head if you made it loudly enough. Someone would come along and quite rightly insist on the variety of poetic activity in the Cambridge orbit at that time. Still and all, I don’t think all generalization is always bad. If any of us really thought that, we’d be left with nothing to say but proper names, if those. And I do think there are a cluster of techniques, ideas, publication and reading venues, influences, and the like that we can speak of as related phenomena. I’m interested, for now, in what the term can reveal; while you seem more concerned with what it conceals.

The other thing I take from your response is the question of the political claims made for the poetry, and the relationship between public presence and political ambition. Some of the claims really have been large. The claims I cited included one from David Shepard, who described a Prynne poem as an attempt to “recombine a language fragmented into technical jargons,” incorporating the vocabulary of specialized discourses into his poetry and thereby “return[ing] this knowledge to the public sphere from its sequestration in the ivory tower.” This would be a hell of a feat, and hugely politically important. The logistics of it, though, would require a huge effort at outreach, at actually bringing alienating kinds of language into public discourse. Shepherd either didn’t quite mean what he said, or, like a lot of us, he substituted a political wish for a political reality. Another claim I mentioned came from N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge. According to Reeve and Kerridge, the kind of poetry they discuss can “collide with the powerful instrumental discourses of the culture” with the effect of “smashing them into pieces.” Poetry can certainly depict such a smashing. But the gulf between depiction and actuality gets glossed over here. The instruments of power continue on their way, despite the poets’ interventions. John Wilkinson makes some big claims, too. He says that you and Keston Sutherland are writing at “a point of historical convergence” where your poetry might exercise “political potency.” Either Wilkinson’s sense of what political potency looks like is very different from mine, or he’s making claims that are quite unlikely to be supported by events. I’m actually much more inclined to agree with your own sense of the political reach of poetry (or at least the political reach of poetry at this point, and in the first world), when you write that you “see a problem with any poetry’s (‘messianic’) claim to change the world, to smash instrumental reason to bits with the hammer of détournement.” This isn’t the sort of claim I was taking issue with in the article.

All of this brings to mind some comments made by Reginald Shepherd, a fine poet and critic who died last year. As a gay black man from the Bronx, he knew a thing or two about the need for political change. Here’s something he wrote about politics and poetry:

Those who wish to change society might better turn their energies toward society itself, to the real areas of oppression and suffering, economic, political, racial, and sexual. […] To blame literature, or culture as a whole, for social, economic, and political woes (or even to see it as central to their perpetuation) is evasive at best, dishonest at worst, a kind of posing as politics. […] George Oppen gave up writing poetry for several years in favor of political activism, because he believed neither that poetry could change society nor that it should be subordinated to an agenda. In Oppen’s words, “If you decide to do something politically, you do something with political efficacy. And if you write poetry, you write poetry, not something you hope, or deceive yourself into believing, can save people who are suffering.” Several years ago, I was asked by someone I had just met whether my poetry was Afrocentric. I told him that I didn’t know what he meant by that term, and he said, “You know, dedicated to the liberation of black people everywhere.” My only answer was, “I don’t think that poems can do that.”

I found that convincing when he wrote it. I find it convincing now.

Robert Archambeau
Lake Forest College

Because You Love Poetry More Than You Love Your Mother: Don Share and I Read on May 9th at Myopic Books

The redoubtable Don Share and I will be reading this Sunday (that's right: Mothers' Day) at Myopic Books in Chicago (1564 North Milwaukee Avenue) at 7:00 pm. If you're in the area, check it out! It's one of the best bookstores in town.

Here's the official propaganda from Larry Sawyer, who curates the Myopic series:


Sunday, May 9 – Robert Archambeau & Don Share



Don Share is Senior Editor of Poetry magazine. His books include Squandermania (Salt Publishing), Union (Zoo Press), The Traumatophile (Scantily Clad Press), and Seneca in English (Penguin Classics); forthcoming are Bunting’s Persia (Flood Editions), and a critical edition of Basil Bunting’s poems (Faber and Faber). His translations of Miguel Hernández, collected in I Have Lots of Heart (Bloodaxe Books) were awarded the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize, the Premio Valle Inclán Prize, and the PEN/New England Discovery Award. He has been Poetry Editor of Harvard Review and Partisan Review, Editor of Literary Imagination, and Curator of Poetry at Harvard University.



Robert Archambeau's books include Home and Variations (Salt), Word Play Place (Swallow) and the just-published book of criticism Laureates and Heretics (Notre Dame). He is a professor of English at Lake Forest College, where he co-directs Lake Forest College Press and judges the Madeleine Plonsker Emerging Writers Prize. He blogs at samizdatblog.blogspot.com, and is editing the English works of the Swedish poet and critic Goran Printz-Pahlson.


The Myopic Poetry Series is a weekly series of readings and occasional poets' talks at Myopic Books in Chicago. All readings begin at 7:00 / 1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue, 2nd Floor.

http://www.myopicbookstore.com/poetry.html

773.862.4882

Contact curator Larry Sawyer for booking information and requests.

E-mail: larrysawyerpoet@yahoo.com

Laureates, Heretics, and More on Robert Duncan

There's a nice note about my book Laureates and Heretics up on the Boston University creative writing program blog. In other L & H news, thanks to a certain eagle-eyed editor of a well-respected literary journal, I now know about the first two of what I expect will be several errors in the book. The ones the esteemed editor found are on pages 32 and 221 — so, next time you're sitting around with your fellow literati, crack open a copy of L & H, flip to the appropriate pages, and see if you can spot the howling errors! Oh, the fun you'll have...

And in news from our non-L & H desk, Josh Corey has blogged about the second day of the recent Robert Duncan symposium in Chicago.

Field Report: The Truth and Life of Myth, A Robert Duncan Symposium

You know me, people: I like to hole up in my study and paw through the pages of obscure texts in solitude as much as the next soft-handed, grumpy, poet-critic-professor type. But last week I was dragged from my cave by the lure of not one but two unusual poetry-oriented events just a Metra ride away in downtown Chicago.

The first of these events was a focus group meeting in the offices of the Poetry Foundation to discuss the future of copyright practices for poetry. As many of you know, there's a bit of a crisis just now, in that the law is unclear on just what constitutes fair use — that is, legal quotation without permission — and publishers can get a bit jumpy about letting poets and critics quote from the poetry they publish. The lack of clarity about the extent of fair use has had a bit of a chilling effect, and has allowed guys like Paul Zukofsky to behave like bullies, threatening people who want to quote from copyrighted works even when the law allows for such quotation. If you want to see just how bullying Zukofsky can be, check out his list of demands to those who would quote from his father's poetry. This is probably not the place to go into detail, but suffice it to say that his view of his rights is a bit singular. He's aggressive and tenacious, though, and has intimidated a number of people, including the editors of Jacket magazine, who removed a group of essays on Louis Zukofsky after Paul snarled and yelped at them. Anyway, a group of concerned lawyers is working on setting up some guidelines for publishers that will, it is hoped, keep the poetry world from falling into the kind of litigious nightmare that has afflicted the world of popular music. It was good to be consulted.

As interesting as it was to be a part of the copyright discussion, though, it was a lot more exciting to drop by the Chicago Poetry Foundation's main event for the year, "The Opening of the Field," a seminar on the work of Robert Duncan. The energy kicked in even before I made it in the front door of the School of the Art Institute: as I paused on the street to make a phone call, Peter O'Leary came loping up to me, looking, as always, like a handsomer version of the young Robert Lowell. "You know where you're going, right?" he asked, grabbing me by the shoulder and hustling me inside. I haven't been steered into a building like that since the last time I was in New Orleans and wandered down Bourbon Street past the tourist bars and strip clubs. Once inside I found myself in a crowd that was both numerous and surprisingly familiar: in the seats immediately around me were the poets Reginald Gibbons, John Tipton, Ed Roberson, Joseph Donoghue, and Norman Finkelstein, the critics Richard Strier, Robert Von Hallberg, and Stephen Fredman (an old prof of mine from my Notre Dame days), and the Brazilian consul general, the writer João Almino (who — unlike any American consul to anywhere — has written on Duncan). I also ran into two poets I've read but never before had the pleasure of meeting — Siobhán Scarry (busy putting transparent sheets of poetry over one another to create multi-layered compositions) and Brian Teare. I heard Jennifer Scappetone, too, but didn't actually see her in the sea of literati.

The event I'd arrived at was a curious hybrid — the first half a poetry reading by Nathaniel Mackey, the second half a paper on Robert Duncan and childhood given by Michael Palmer. The event was actually the second part of the Duncan symposium, but I'd been unable to make it to an earlier panel of papers by Siobhán Scarry, Steve Collis, and Steve Fredman.

Anyway: it was the first time I've actually heard Mackey read in person, and it was impressive. He's got a good reading voice, and a cool, slightly distant delivery. As he dipped into various books of his, it became clear to me why he was such a good choice for an event honoring Duncan: not only did Mackey know Duncan personally, his work is deeply indebted to Duncan's poetry. Like Duncan, Mackey works in serial form, writing long, open sequences akin to Duncan's The Structure of Rime, and doing so with a sense of the spiritual possibility of poetry, a sense much akin to Duncan's own. Like Duncan, Mackey refuses to close down the possibilities of any part of his composition: a word or phrase that seems subordinate in one section of a poem may turn out to be the opening into a larger theme in another section, and the ongoing nature of the composition means the poem remains replete with infinite possibility at all times and in all parts. I think this connects with the spiritual aspirations of Duncan and Mackey, too: this kind of composition is a way of seeing the world in just one grain of sand, and of knowing that any other grain may also open up to a similarly large world at any time.

When Mackey writes about the oud (the north African ancestor of the lute), we get a sense of how he sees discrete moments of music, separated by time and space, as connected, as parts of some larger, historical song:

Some

ecstatic elsewhere's

advocacy strummed,
unsung, lost inside

the oud's complaint...
The same cry taken
up in Cairo, Cordoba,
north
Red Sea near Nagfa,

Muharraq

The kind of connection over distance he describes here seems to me to be something like a formal principle for his serial composition: the parts of the poems constantly reach backwards and forwards to each other; and they yearn to be adequate to some larger spiritual vision that can't quite be grasped, an "ecstatic elsewhere" that we sing of, and to, forever, without quite embodying it in song.

By some odd coincidence, I'd just been reading another African-American poet who works in serial forms, C.S. Giscombe (I'm reviewing his book Prairie Style for The Cincinnati Review). The chance to compare and contrast Giscombe's work to that of Mackey, with Mackey appearing in person, was a real privilege. I think the main point of comparison is the sense of the infinite possibilities of parts of the poem, and the desire to build onto passages that might not have seemed important when they first appeared in the serial sequence of poems. But the difference is this: while Mackey comes out of Duncan's kind of poesis, Giscombe comes out of Charles Olson, whom he's clearly read with care. Like Olson, Giscombe turns to particular landscapes (Canadian, Midwestern, what have you) as his bases of inspiration. Mackey is more free-form, I think.

But I digress. Mackey's reading was followed by Michael Palmer's presentation of a paper called "Robert Duncan and the Invention of Childhood." It began with a collage of familiar writing from the perspective of childhood: James Joyce's famous baby-talk opening to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, both versions of Blake's "Nurse's Song" (the one from Songs of Innocence and the one from Songs of Experience), and a great passage about a princess who could change her head, and kept dozens of alternate heads in elaborate cabinets in her palace (this was from Frank Baum's Ozma of Oz). Palmer went on to discuss how childhood is a period of linguistic openness, where sense and nonsense coexist, with nonsense always lurking just below the surface of sense-making (think of the opening to Joyce's Portrait, where the toddler Stephen Dedalus tries to sing the songs he hears, and comes up with an almost-in-English lispy jumble of syllables, "O the green woth botheth" — it's a liminal case of sense and nonsense existing together). This, said Palmer, is the kind of thing Duncan valued — language, and especially poetry, not as a matter of statement-making, but as a constant hovering at the verge of significance, a hovering that maintains the potential of going off in another direction, or already having a significance that we haven't yet realized was there. Duncan, said Palmer during the Q and A that followed his paper, believed that the poet's ecstasy was like the infant's ecstasy, as the infant tries on all potential syllable combinations and waits to see which few the slow-minded adults can understand. As the father of a fifteen-month old kid, I felt the truth in this.

Palmer's paper must have built on something from earlier in the symposium, since he called us back to some earlier comments about the potential of language. Indeed, "potentiality" seems to have been a big word at the panel I missed earlier in the day: Palmer mentioned that Steve Collis had name-checked Giorgio Agamben, and potentiality is a big theme in Agamben's work. I'm not sure which direction Collis was going in, but I bet it had something to do with Agamben's notion that we should regard all works as gestures toward a larger potential, which can never be fulfilled in its entirety. "Every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned," wrote Agamben in Infancy and History, "and is destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks." My guess is that Duncan would regard this sense of the unending, and ever-unfulfilled, nature of writing as a positive thing, an opportunity to keep talking and aiming one's words at something like Mackey's "ecstatic elsewhere."

As the event wound down I trudged outside for some fresh air, thinking about how glad I was that events like this — with papers as well as readings — were going on outside the auspices of academe (albeit in an academic room). But I didn't get far with these thoughts before running into Zach Barocas, poet and punk rocker extraordinaire, with whom I compared notes on the glories of working in used bookstores (the Strand for him, the long-gone Aspidistra for me), before I hopped into a crowded cab for the next part of the symposium. This time we were extra-academic in venue, too: the Green Lantern Gallery in Wicker Park, which is really a big old loft-style apartment. You know you're in for the real poetry when the instructions for arriving at the reading say: "Green Lantern is above the Singer Sewing Machine shop; the doorbell doesn’t work but the door will be open." You read that and right away you know this ain't no bullshit Derek Walcott reading — this is the genuine, inconveniently located article.

The Green Lantern event began with a great deal of milling around, which was fantastic: I got to talk about the infant's relation to syntax with Palmer and Mackey, got to hear Steve Fredman reminisce about his days on a San Francisco poets' baseball team ("Michael Palmer was the archetypal third baseman, able to go from vertical to flat-out horizontal instantly"), and I got the lowdown on the best Canadian poets I haven't read from Steve Collis (Jordan Stutter and Roger Farr, and someone else whose name I can't quite decipher in my trusty Miquelrius notebook). Brian Teare and I compared notes on the poets at Stanford, especially Ken Fields and Eavan Boland, about whom we have similar feelings.

Since everything was running wonderfully late, I could only stick around for the first two readers — Steve Collis and Joe Donoghue. I'm in dept to both guys. Steve and I first met about a dozen years ago, when we traded chapbooks in the Louisville airport. He's sent me a lot of his work since then, and I've admired all of it. I've just not been prolific enough to send him much of mine. And Joe Donoghue? I think he paid for the bourbon when he and I and Norman Finkelstein hung out at the MLA last December in Philly. And I suppose I'm more in debt now, since each delivered a fine reading entirely appropriate to an event held under the aegis of Robert Duncan.

Collis' early work was very much in the mode of Duncan, and while he's moved on somewhat from that mode, the influence is still clear, even in some of his titles — "Poem Beginning with the Title of a Cy Twombly Painting," for example, echoes Duncan's "Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar." By a nice bit of synchronicity, Collis also showed a reverence for Michael Palmer, using a line of Palmer's ("There's still no truth in making sense") as an epigraph for "Gail's Books," Collis' powerful elegy for his sister. Joe Donoghue read from a serial poem called "Terra Lucida," and was, if anything, even more Duncanesque than was Collis. He worked some fine anaphoric repetitions while speaking of "the coming of a world of light after a life of knowledge," which seemed very much down Duncan's street, especially after Joe introduced a series of troubadours, alchemists, and Bedouins into the poem. Both Donoghue and Collis got the real poet-visiting-Chicago treatment, in that their readings were punctuated by the rumble of the El, which passed just outside the gallery's windows, and by blues harmonica emanating from the nearby Double Door club. If there'd been a little random gunfire they'd have hit the windy city trifecta.

So: all honor to John Tipton and Peter O'Leary for putting the symposium together. They're clearly guys who know Duncan's poetry, and know how to throw a party. Long may the tattered banner of the Chicago Poetry Project wave.

**

My colleague Josh Corey went to Saturday's Duncan symposium events. Let's hope he blogs about what went down.

We Interrupt this Blog for a Moment of Political Outrage

Bewildered by what happened on Wall Street? Furrow that brow no more. The Samizdat Blog financial research team has figured it all out. It's like this:

If General Motors behaved like Goldman Sachs, they'd make their money by taking out life insurance policies that paid off when drivers of Chevrolets died. Then, noticing that they'd make more money if more people died, they'd start building cars without brakes.

Seriously. This is exactly what credit-default swaps were like. Wall Streeters sold bundles of bad mortgages to pension funds and other investors, knowing these were bad. Then (this is the credit default swap) they bet that these bundles of crap would fail. They made money, and everyone else (the people who couldn't pay the mortgages they'd been suckered into, the people who rely on their pensions being there, etc.) lost.

Somebody's got to go to jail for this.

Robert Duncan in Chicago!

No, the late Robert Duncan hasn't risen to walk among us (although it sort of looks like he's thinking about it in the photo above, from Michael Anania's old magazine Audit). But his spirit will surely descend on the attendees of a Duncan shindig sponsored by the Chicago Poetry Project, the Writ ing Program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Poetry Center of Chicago.

I mean, what more could you want? Michael Palmer will be there, and Nathaniel Mackey, and Joseph Donahue (to whom I owe a bourbon, after the MLA in Philly last year) and Peter O’Leary (whom I last saw manfully brazening his way through an evening at the Brazilian consulate with what looked like a blood stain on his shirt). Norman Finkelstein will be there, and my old prof Stephen Fredman, and Canada's own Stephen Collis, and many more. Look for me by the book table, trying to cadge free copies of whatever's on offer.

The official details:


The Truth and Life of Myth: A Robert Duncan Symposium

April 22-24, 2010
Chicago

“The surety of the myth for the poet has such force that it operates as a primary reality in itself, having volition. The mythic content comes to us, commanding the design of the poem; it calls the poet into action, and with whatever lore and craft he has prepared himself for that call, he must answer to give body in the poem to the formative will.”

Keynote speakers:

Michael Palmer - “Robert Duncan and the Invention of Childhood”

Nathaniel Mackey in conversation with Joseph Donahue and Peter O’Leary

Presenters:

Faith Barrett + Stephen Collis + Joseph Donahue + Amy Evans + Norman Finkelstein + Stephen Fredman + Karl Gartung + Siobhan Scarry + MargaretSloan + Brian Teare

Events include: talks and read ings by the keynote speak ers; a dra­matic reading of Duncan’s play “Medea in Kolchis”; poetry readings by presenters; and talks, presentations, and conversation about Robert Duncan’s poetry.

Events will take place at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
in the Columbus Auditorium
280 S. Columbus Drive
Chicago, IL 60603

and

The Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection
5th floor, 37 S. Wabash Ave.
Chicago, IL 60603

More information is available on the Chicago Poetry Project blog.

Charles Bernstein's Academic Anxiety

A Short and Easy Commonplace Book

So there I was, gently noodling my way around the internet in search of nothing in particular, when I ran across the site of Gerald Bruns, one of my old profs in graduate school. I haven't really kept up with him personally, though I do tend to read his work when it comes out, and since he's always got something interesting to say, I thought I'd poke around a bit and see what he's been up to. One page on the site struck me, since it offered a small selection of quotations that seemed to serve as Gerry's personal credo. Here's the first quote from the little collection, which Gerry called "A Short and Easy Commonplace Book":

The world has become chaos, but the book remains the image of the world: radicle-chaosmos rather than root-cosmos. A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being fragmented. At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world. In truth, it is not enough to say, "Long live the multiple," difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made , not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available--always n -1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n -1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and crabgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass.

Good stuff! From Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, which I'd just taught a few weeks ago. "So," I thought, "Gerry's made the heterogeneity of rhizomatic thinking his credo!" I felt confirmed in this thought when I saw the next quote, from an essay by Charles Bernstein:

Within the academic environment, thought tends to be rationalized--subject to examination, paraphrase, repetition, mechanization, reduction. It is treated: contained and stabilized. And what is lost in this treatment is the irregular, the nonquantifiable, the nonstandard or nonstandardizable, the erratic, the inchoate.

Poetry is turbulent thought, at least that's what I want from it, what I want to say about it just here, just now (and maybe not in some other context). It leaves things unsettled, unresolved--leaves you knowing less than you did when you started.

There is a fear of the inchoate processes of turbulent thought (poetic or philosophic) that takes the form of resistance and paranoia. A wall (part symbolic, part imaginary) is constructed against the sheer surplus of interpretable aspects of any subject. You fix upon one among many possible frames, screens, screams, and stay fixed on that mode monomaniacally. Such frame fixation is intensified by the fetishizing of dispassionate evaluation not as a critical method but as a marker of professional competence and a means of enforcing a system of ranking.

That's from "What's Art Got To Do With It?" — Bernstein's plenary address to the Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) conference back in 1992. And it certainly seems to affirm the notion that Bruns is waving the banner of interpretive and evaluative irresolution.

The third quote, while much briefer, and considerably more cryptic, further affirmed the sense that Bruns wants to support thought that does not seek resolution. It was a single, uncharacteristically short sentence from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: "Only what does not fit into this world is true." Here we have a gesture toward the idea of negative dialectics — toward, that is, the idea that any whole or totalizing system of thought leaves something out, that (in Adorno's famous inversion of Hegel) "the whole is the false." Truth, in this view, can't appear whole in this world — it is something evasive, excessive, and ultimately beyond representation. It can't be reduced to formulae, or made manifest in any final way.

So there I sat, people, a bit too pleased with myself for having found the string that binds those three gems together. But it wasn't long — about the time it takes to take two sips of coffee from a travel mug— before an incongruity struck me.

On the one hand, we had Bernstein, contrasting the "turbulent thought" of an open-ended poetry against the kind of thought we get in "the academic environment," thought which fears irresolution and multiplicity in favor of " paraphrase, repetition, mechanization, reduction." For Bernstein, academic thought is devoted to the quantifiable and the standard, and it walks in fear of the inchoate. This is odd, in that all of Bruns' quotes on the value of the irresolvable and the inchoate come at least in part from academics: Deleuze had taught at the Sorbonne, and later at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes/St. Denis), where he wrote the book from which Bruns' quote is drawn. Guattari spent most of his career at the La Borde Clinic, which was both a functioning clinic and a para-academic institute, where research was conducted and where training took place in philosophy, psychology, ethnology and social work. When Adorno wrote the book that would be published after his death as Aesthetic Theory he was a professor at Frankfurt. And Charles Bernstein had been the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at SUNY — Buffalo for two or three years when he skewered academic thinking as devoted to reductive standardization.

Here's one problem: if Bernstein is right about academic thinking, then we have to see him as a non-academic. This might be plausible: he'd only been a professor for a few years when he made his statement, and we might plausibly see him as in-but-not-of academe. But here's another problem: Deleuze and Adorno aren't marginal academic figures. In their own lifetimes, and certainly by the time Bernstein made his NEMLA plenary address in 1992, Adorno, Deleuze and Guattari had become some of the most influential figures in academe, making a huge impact on multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences in many nations. And they didn't just speak of the kind of thinking that exploded reductive, standardizing, paraphrasable interpretations: like Bernstein, they wrote in styles that set out to frustrate attempts at reduction, standardization, and paraphrase.

I think Bruns' point in bringing the three quotations together was simply to emphasize, and advocate, the kind of thinking they liked. But the juxtaposition (perhaps fittingly) doesn't allow us to settle easily into approval of all three statements. We are faced with a choice: either Bernstein is wrong about the nature of academic thinking, or Bernstein, Deleuze, Guattari, and Adorno have to be defined as non-academic figures.

It may just be possible to take a figure like Bernstein and argue that he's not really an academic, despite the fact that he's held very swank academic appointments for more than twenty years. In the article "Charles Bernstein and the Professional Avant-Garde," for example, Alan Golding has made an argument for Bernstein as having a "non-normative status" in academe, largely on the basis of Bernstein reflecting critically on his own academic status in his poetry and critical writing. I find Golding's article provocative, and his readings of Bernstein both subtle and insightful, and I'm glad he takes issue with those who would sneer at Bernstein for becoming a professor. But I just can't buy the notion that Bernstein is somehow not quite academic because he parodies, and is critical of, academe in his writing — if I bought that line of argument, I'd have to say that David Lodge isn't really academic because he writes satirical campus novels like Trading Places and Small World. But even if we can make the argument that Bernstein and his "turbulent thought" aren't representative of academe, we'd have a far more difficult argument to make in putting Adorno, Deleuze, and Guattari outside academe. In addition to their training and (with the partial exception of Guattari) their careers, there's the matter of their influence. They are among the most cited figures in several fields, and those citations do not in any significant portion consist of dismissals and attacks.

To understand just what's going on when Bernstein sets academe up as something it does not seem to be, we need to take a closer look at the piece from which Bruns drew his quotation.

Bernstein Tells the Northeast Modern Language Association All About Academe

Despite a few glaring self-contradictions (such as the competing claims that academe values "principles of critical self-evaluation" and that academic thinking is "unable to confront its own inevitable positionality"), the lines of battle are pretty clearly drawn in Bernstein's NEMLA plenary address of 1992, "What's Art Got to Do with It? The Status of the Subject of the Humanities in the Age of Cultural Studies." On the one hand, we have the "professionalism" of "the university environment," where thinking is inherently reductive and as such "antipoetic." The procedure of academic thought, according to Bernstein, is "to elect one interpretive mode and apply it, cookie-cutter like, to any given phenomenon." If you want to think like a professor, according to Bernstein all you need to do is this: "You fix upon one of many possible frames." This insistence on single-minded, narrow, method-driven frame of thought leads to an "academic culture of imposed solutions at the expense of open-ended explorations," perhaps because Bernstein's academics want to reduce phenomena to determined meanings, and shriek when they see "the sheer surplus of interpretable aspects" of their subjects."

Against these unappealing academics, Bernstein places a poetic tradition, in which thought is much more open. "The poetic," says Bernstein, "is both a hypoframe, inhering within each frame of interpretation, and a hyperframe, a practice of moving from frame to frame." Unlike academics proper, the poet is multidisciplinary in his individual thoughts, and is happy moving from one frame of reference to another: his thinking is a "an art of transitioning though and among frames." He has "context sensitivity" and "allows different contexts to suggest different interpretive approaches while at the same time flipping between different frames."

This ought to give us pause. I mean, Bernstein's dichotomy seems to make a straw-man out of academe. I suppose one can find some instances of the cookie-cutter approach he sees as endemic to academe. I think immediately of one of the most misguided publishing ventures of recent memory, the Bedford Critical Editions of classic literary texts. These were an attempt to emulate the success of the Norton Critical Editions. Unlike the Norton editions, though, the Bedford editions didn't collect prominent pieces of existing criticism to package with the text itself. Rather, they published commissioned essays, each of which was meant to represent a particular theory — so you'd get your novel, along with essays purporting to be "a feminist reading" or "a Marxist reading." But the very fact that Bedford failed to make significant inroads against the Norton editions, with their less mechanical, more intuitively interdisciplinary and miscellaneous commentaries, shows that academic culture was not predominantly a phenomenon of the kind Bernstein claims it is.

Moreover, Bernstein's characterization of academe is at odds with the work of a figure Bernstein actually cites in his essay: Stanley Fish. While Bernstein sees Fish as an academic of the reductive sort, we need look no further than the opening pages of one of Fish's most famous essays, "Interpreting the Variorum," to see how far off-base Bernstein has gone. "Interpreting the Variorum," which appeared in Critical Inquiry in 1976, was a kind of über-review of a collection of several centuries worth of commentaries on Milton's poetry. Fish surveys the long conflict of interpretations, and the deep history of different forms of interpretation ("frames" in Bernstein's terms), and tells us that the problems of interpretation simply do not lend themselves to resolution:

In short, these are problems that apparently cannot be solved, at least not by the methods traditionally brought to bear on them. What I would like to argue is that they are not meant to be solved, but to be experienced (they signify), and that consequently any procedure that attempts to determine which of a number of readings is correct will necessarily fail.

Fish can hardly be seen as without influence in academe, and like those other influential academics Deleuze and Adorno, he believes in a multiplicity of meanings, supports a multiplicity of "frames" of understanding, and welcomes the inchoate and inconclusive.

One could wear oneself out citing academics, prominent when Bernstein gave his address, whose ways of thinking are utterly unlike the "cookie cutter" reductiveness of what I can only think of as Bernstein's academic straw man. Even the New Critics, antiquated and marginalized by the 1990s when Bernstein wrote, did not believe that meanings must be "subject to … paraphrase." One might wish to remind Bernstein that they considered paraphrase a heresy. Or, moving to "The Humanistic Intellectual: Eleven Theses," an essay that appeared in 1989 (the year Bernstein entered the academy), one could point out that no less prominent an academic than Richard Rorty argued that the social function of academics in the humanities was "to instill doubts in the students about the students' own self-images and about their societies" — a goal best accomplished by "keep[ing] the humanities changing fast enough so that they remain indefinable and unmanageable." This is hardly the academic world Bernstein depicts. And it is an image of the academic humanities upheld by no marginal figure, but by one of the most influential thinkers of the late twentieth century.

The Skeptic and the Guys in Lab Coats

"Okay," says the skeptic. "Maybe Bernstein is wrong about Rorty's humanities, and about the social sciences where Adorno, Deleuze and Guattari have had so much influence. But he's at least right about the sciences, right? They want to reduce everything to a single, unified theory, a single master frame, right?" Well, no. I mean, I'm no expert on the philosophy of science, but Peter Medawar is, and here's what he has to say about the notion that science is all about reducing multiple frames of understanding to a single frame (it's from his book Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought, which appeared in 1968 — this isn't some newfangled view that came about only after Bernstein's complaint about academe):

Reducibility; emergence: If we choose to see a hierarchical structure in Nature — if societies are composed of individuals, individuals of cells, and cells in their turn of molecules, then it makes sense to ask whether we may not "interpret" sociology in terms of the biology of individuals or "reduce" biology to physics and chemistry. This is a living methodological problem, but it does not seem to have been satisfactorily resolved. At first sight the ambition embodied in the idea of reducibility seem hopeless of achievement. Each tier of the natural hierarchy makes use of notions peculiar to itself. The ideas of democracy, credit, crime or political constitution are no part of biology, nor shall we expect to find in physics the concepts of memory, infection, sexuality, or fear. No sensible usage can bring the foreign exchange deficit into the biology syllabus, already grievously overcrowded, or nest-building into the syllabus of physics. In each plane or tier of the hierarchy new notions or ideas seem to emerge that are inexplicable in the language or with the conceptual resources of the tier below.

So even the lab-coated guys with the good calculators resist being categorized as the hidebound, narrow-minded jerks that populate Bernstein's imagined academe. They're as interested in multiple frames, and as wary of reducing matters by single-framed, cookie-cutter thinking as humanists and social scientists.

Status-Shifting and Self-Doubt

So why does Bernstein present such a distorted version of academic thinking? It's possible that he's simply ignorant of academic thinking, but that hypothesis seems both extremely uncharitable and unlikely to the point of impossibility. In fact, Bernstein cites plenty of academic thinkers in his NEMLA plenary address. The strange thing is that when he approves of them, he positions them as outsiders, at war with what he imagines to be the dominant norms of academe. So when he tells us he admires Roland Barthes (from the Centre national de la Recherche Scientifique and the Collège de France), Stanley Cavell (who was Bernstein's thesis advisor at Harvard), Erving Goffman (from the University of Chicago), Michel de Certeau (from the University of Paris — VII, and other institutions), and Luce Irigaray (from the Centre national de la Recherche Scientifique) he has to pretend they aren't creatures of the academy, and to deny their status as some of the most influential academic thinkers of our time.

So what gives? Bernstein works in academe, and seems to admire the kind of thinking that academics do — but he refuses to see it that way. Instead, he mischaracterizes academe as a place inimical to the kind of thinking he admires (which he claims is the special province of poetry, and of a few thinkers who, despite their academic status, are somehow meant to be anti-academic).

When we find that someone's statements about the world are inaccurate without being ignorant, one course of action is to stop looking for explanations in the world outside that person, and look instead for some inner cause. That is: if Bernstein is wrong about academe, but has knowledge of academic thought, the explanation probably lies in some inner need, on Bernstein's part, to present a distorted view of academe.

If I had to venture a hypothesis about why Bernstein distorts academe, I'd look at his unusual career trajectory into the academic world. Unlike most academics, who go to graduate school with the hope (however farfetched in recent years) of going on to a career as a professor of physics or French or creative writing or what have you, Bernstein began his career as a poet outside of academe. He wrote his books and led an active poetic life while working from the early 1972 to 1989 as a medical writer and an arts administrator, and only then found his way into academe. While he'd been an engaged student at Harvard as an undergraduate, he didn't go the usual route of the Ph.D., and I think this shows in his attitude to academe, which seems fraught with the kind of anxiety one might expect when someone leaves one status behind and takes up another, without the usual certification.

The sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb get at this sort of status-anxiety issue in their study The Hidden Injuries of Class. Here they examine the psychological consequences of changing work status, mostly by examining blue collar workers who transition into low-level white collar work. It's not that Bernstein has changed social class per se (medical writers, arts administrators, and English professors all fall within the professional classes), but he did shift from one status system (that of corporations and non-profit agencies) to another (the world of the universities, which is stratified in different ways, and by different criteria). And what happens to Bernstein seems very like what happens to the workers described by Sennett and Cobb.

Consider the case of Frank Rissarro (not an actual name: Sennett and Cobb change the names of their subjects to protect their privacy). Rissarro's father was a laborer, and he himself held a job as a meat-cutter for most of his working life. At one point, after he failed to raise the capital to start his own small business, a friend introduced him to a local bank manager, and he got a job in the office helping people fill out the loan forms that a higher-level official would review for approval. In many ways, Rissarro is satisfied with his new life — but because he arrived among the other bank workers by a non-standard route, he feels the need to defend the kind of life he left behind, and to denigrate the norms of the system he's joined. "I'm working, like I said, with fellows that are educated, college boys, in the office," says Rissarro, "I go in at nine, I come out at five. The other fellows, because they got an education, sneak out early and come in late. The boss knows I'm there, a reliable worker. 'Cause I had the factory life…" Even though Rissarro chose to leave his old life for a new opportunity, he sees his old life as having a kind of legitimacy that the lives of those around him in his new career don't have. "These jobs aren't real work where you make something" says Rissarro, "it's just pushing papers." This is how Rissarro deals with the anxiety of not being a 'real' banker (an anxiety caused by his non-standard, and late, entry into the field). He needs to denigrate the new norms, even as he conforms to them. It's how he can feel legitimate: he's a representative of his old set of values in this new world of mere paper-pushers.

The analogy with Bernstein is this: like Rissarro, he enters a new field late in life, without the usual educational certification. Like Rissarro, Bernstein associates virtue with the way of life he's left behind (for Bernstein, this is the extra-academic world of poetry). Like Rissarro, Bernstein decides to read the kind of work he sees being done in his new environment as more-or-less worthless (Rissarro's paper-pushers become Bernstein's narrow-minded, "cookie-cutter" thinkers). There's a sad kind of self-loathing at work in both cases, a kind of self-doubt (the autodidact, says Bourdieu, is constantly on trial in his own mind). An unfairness, even a distortion, of the activities of those around them serves as a way to compensate for these anxieties and doubts.

Maybe I'm wrong, here. But I can't see any other explanation, beyond a defensive self-justification, for Bernstein's almost deeply skewed description of academic thinking. And I suppose this post is a kind of defensive move of its own, since I don't like to see academics (a group that includes me, many of my friends, and some relatives) so inaccurately maligned. I mean, there are plenty of good reasons to malign academe. Bernstein's doesn't seem to be one of them.

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In other news, if you're interested in the crowd I write about in Laureates and Heretics, you'll want to have a look at the anthology Five American Poets just out from Carcanet. An American edition is, I'm told, in the works, but you can order the British edition now. It's an updated version of an anthology from the seventies, and contains work by John Matthias, John Peck, Robert Pinsky, James McMichael, and Robert Hass.

The Cultural Society: Rejoice!

Rejoice, people! The latest installment of Zach Barocas' journal The Cultural Society is up online, featuring Joel Bettridge, Norman Finkelstein, Roberto Harrison, Amanda Nadelberg, Michael Heller, and (be forewarned) the present humble blogger, among others.

In the unlikely event that you need to be convinced Barocas is cooler than the rest of us, I've included above the video for "Savory," a song by his band Jawbox, which re-united not long ago to play on The Jimmy Fallon Show. You can probably use the Fallon appearance the next time you're playing "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" and want to link poets to Hollywood.