Modernism, or Talking to Dead People

Wars, the persecution of heretics, the whole centuries-long history of Spain as the Islamic realm of Al-Andalus, the Chanson de Roland: this is the stuff of John Matthias’ long, late-modernist poem “A Compostella Dipytch.  The poem came about after Matthias walked the ancient pilgrimage route from southern France to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostella, near the westernmost point of Spain.  Not long ago I was talking to an old friend of Matthias about how I love the poem, mostly because of how it opens up whole layers of history and turns them into a kind of music.  Matthias’ friend also admitted to admiring the historical nature of the poem, and then commented on how different Matthias’ experience of walking across Spain was from that of a younger poet he knew.  Where Matthias saw the past everywhere, the younger poet saw the present: the living world of German backpackers and American trust-fund kids, the world of hostels and internet cafes and casual romance and talk of high-tech hiking boots.  This, said Matthias’ friend, was how you could tell Matthias is truly a modernist: whereas the younger poet talks to the others on the trail, Matthias spends a lot of his time talking to dead people, thinking about what he’s read and what he sees left behind in old churches and in ancient pilgrim way-stations.

There’s something to the idea that modernist poetry converses with the dead as much, or more, than with the living.  It is, after all, at the core of that most significant of modernist essays, T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where Eliot tells us

…if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged.... Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want if you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense [which] involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order….

There it is: the past as something alive around us, as much present on any pilgrim route as the backpacker up ahead yakking on his iPhone and wolfing down Protein bars.  When I explain this to students, I usually begin by telling them that every time they open their mouths to speak, it's the year 1066 again.  This is actually a pretty bad pedagogical strategy, since my students are overwhelmingly American, and have generally been taught almost nothing about English history. I usually have to remind them that 1066 was the year of the Norman conquest, when a French-speaking elite displaced the Anglo-Saxon regime in England, initiating a long, slow process whereby French and Anglo-Saxon fused to create the hybrid creature we call the English language.  So when you say "the submarine went underwater" you're doing something that couldn't happen had the Normans lost the Battle of Hastings: you're using a French-derived word ("submarine," coming from the French "sous-marin") and something closer to Anglo-Saxon ("under water," linked to the Germanic "unter wasser").  The results of a battle in 1066 matter now, and in a sense that battle lives on in virtually every English sentence.  And there are implications of this presence of the past poetry.  Eliot goes on:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead... what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.… Whoever has approved this idea of order… will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past…

Of course a lot of people, my students among them, do find it preposterous that the present can modify the past (and it is preposterous, in the root meaning of that word: "preposterous" originally meant a confusing of time periods, a placing of the pre- and the post- in the wrong positions).  But there's some sense to Eliot here.  Consider Satan.  Or, at any rate, consider Satan from Milton's Paradise Lost.  Milton means for him to be a villain, but William Blake famously observed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it," meaning that Milton was more of a rebel than he thought he was, that a poem intended as a defense of obedience to God was really more in love with individualism than anything else.  And after Romanticism — after Blake's Milton and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and a thousand other poems and plays and novels that echo and reinterpret Milton — it's difficult to see Paradise Lost as one could see it before Romanticism.  Milton's initially villainous Satan now seems to have had many of the positive qualities the Romantics found in him.


By the time we get to modernism, this kind of revisiting and revising of the literature of the past has become one of the major poetic moves: Eliot scrapes together the fragments that make up his Waste Land, Pound reworks Homer in The Cantos, David Jones mines Welsh literature and legend, H.D. reworks the classics in Helen in Egypt, and so on.  (It's important to make a distinction here between modernism and the avant-garde, which often wanted to shrug off the past).

So many modernists wanted to converse with the dead poets.  But why?

A big part of the answer comes when we look at modernist poetry in relation to the larger literary culture around it.  Indeed, if we don't, we'll never fully understand why modernists wrote as they did.  And the larger literary culture around them was mass culture in its early dawn.  Andreas Huyssen has argued, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, that the two phenomena come into being in tandem, that "the twin establishment of a sphere of high autonomous art and a sphere of mass culture" only make sense in relation to one another.  Indeed, he says, since they're beginnings "modernism and mass culture have been engaged in a compulsive pas de deux."

There are a lot of reasons for the rise of mass culture, with its cheap novels, its enormous output of crime writing, its how-to and self-improvement books, but for the moment it's just important to note the incredible rise of this sort of literature from the 1880s on into the period between the two world wars (things start to change then — D.L. LeMahieu's study A Culture for Democracy explains how).  Publishers in the 1850s and 1860s could actually expect to make a reasonable, even substantial, profit from poetry, but the growth of the mass market for works appealing to a relatively low level of literacy meant that profit margins were so much higher in other genres that, by the turn of the century, poetry became a marginal commodity.  Poets were very much aware of this, and modernist poets often sought to find a justification for their work in terms other than popularity, on the grounds of which they lost decisively to more commercial works.  Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" captured the situation perfectly:

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace,

Something for the modern stage,

Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries

Of the inward gaze;

Better mendacities 

Than the classics in paraphrase!

The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster, 

Made with no loss of time, 

A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster

Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

Here we see modernism against the mass culture of its time—in fact, we see it being defined at its core as in opposition to the mass culture of its time.  Huyssen puts it this way: "modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture."

One way to oppose the mass culture of the present was to turn to the already-esteemed culture of the past: to acquire tradition by the sweat of one's brow, to start talking to dead people. It's tempting to see the whole phenomenon as a defensive turn.  You can't beat murder novels in sales?  So what!  Those tawdry writers may be reaching a lot of readers, but you're not insignificant, Mr. Modernist! You're changing the whole meaning and direction of the tradition!  You don't have a place in the market, but you've got a place in history!

Well, that makes the modernist ideal sound like a huge ego trip, and I suppose it can be.  But there are more sympathetic ways this plays out: I remember talking to the poet Joseph Donahue not long ago about the lack of audience for complex mystical poetry like his, and he told me that he derives satisfaction less from the connection with an audience now than from participation in a centuries-long tradition of mystics and poets, from continuing the conversation they began.  That's talking to dead people in the grand old modernist tradition, and it isn't a matter of seeking to slake the ego with a sense of personal historical significance.

Of course there's more substance to the modernist rejection of mass culture than simply a defensiveness about being displaced in the marketplace.  Yeats, for example, argued in his great essay "What is Popular Poetry" that for poems to be truly significant and beautiful, they must appeal to and resonate with tradition, they must look to old legends and myths and  "borrow their beauty from those that used them before," because then the emotions of the poem will be seen "moving before a half-faded curtain embroidered with kings and queens, their loves and battles and their days out hunting."  A poetry that talks to dead people, Yeats argues, will have an enormous resonance beyond what is possible for writing that doesn't allude to what has come before.  

There's a great deal of truth to this: I think, again, of the poetry of John Matthias, which often gives us arcane bits of old text, or antiquated pieces of our language.  The critic Vincent Sherry once said of the poetry of John Matthias, that, “on the one hand, the pedagogue offers from his word-hoard and reference trove the splendid alterity of unfamiliar speech; on the other, this is our familial tongue, our own language in its deeper memory and reference.”  We get to see our own language, and our own ways of experiencing the world, connected to their roots, to the words and ideas and ways of living from which we come.  This makes us more at home in the world, and more knowledgeable about ourselves: we see something of where we came from, and thus become more empowered in understanding why we are as we are.  We even become more capable of change, since we see that the things we think of as permanent have a history, and can thus be changed.  There is, at least potentially, a very liberationist politics at work in any kind of writing that leads us to understand our history.

There's also a preservationist politics to modernism of this kind, of course.  In the modern era of Schumpeter's capitalist "creative destruction," when (as Marx wrote) "all that is solid melts into air," the insistence on retaining a tradition is a kind of statement of dissent, though it's often a reactionary dissent.  That's certainly what it is in Pound, in Eliot, and in Yeats, where the present often appears as a horrible distortion and despoiling of a better, finer past, to which the poets wish we could return.

There's another issue involved, too, which we might think of as political.  When a poet talks to dead people, you're not going to understand the conversation if you, too, haven't tuned in to the past and done the (pleasurable, luxurious) work of acquiring a sense of the appropriate traditions.  Many people find this off-putting right at the start.  Many, too, find it elitist: it sets up a certain barrier to instant understanding for the reader, and, if you take it as a principle not just of reading but of writing, it sets up a very high cost of entry for anyone seeking to set up as a poet. 

When I hear the charge that modernist poetry is elitist and therefore excludes readers, I generally think of three things by way of response.  Firstly, I think of the poet Michael Anania, who pointed out that all of his allusions and historical references are simply things that one can look up, a difficulty far from insurmountable in the age of Google and Wikipedia.  Secondly, I think of the effort many people expend trying to get to the final level of a video game: they don't call those games elitist, even though they require a great deal more effort to get through than, say, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and the glosses on its allusions (and anyway, one could argue that the effort in both cases is, in fact, the main source of pleasure).  Finally, I think of something the dear, late poet Reginald Shepherd said:

It’s often said that “difficult” poems exclude potential readers. This can certainly be true, but I feel excluded by poems that give me nothing to do as a reader, that offer me no new experience and nothing I didn’t already know. It’s wearying to read such poems, and it makes me want to watch music videos instead, where at least one sometimes gets glimpses of shirtless guys with six-pack abs. Any good poem gives the reader something, what Allen Grossman calls the interest of the world: feelings, sensations, experiences. 

Reginald may have looked for different things in music videos than I do, but we have turned to poems for the same reasons.

With regard to the charge that the approach to becoming a poet that Eliot outlined in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is elitist and restrictive — one can only respond that it's true.  If you want to be the kind of poet who talks to dead people (and that's not the only kind of poet), you're going to have to spend a lot of time in conversation with old books.  There's certainly an elitism to this, in that it requires a great deal of time and effort, and there's a material and financial reality behind the opportunity to take that time and make that effort. Of course the old modernist path to becoming a poet does not propose as great a material and financial burden as the new, 21st century way of becoming a poet we have in America: the completion of an MFA program.  It's what our age demands, and in a way, the existence of these programs has shown the inexorable progress of the very forces of modernity — standardization, credentialing, commercialization, and commodification — that led so many modernists to turn against modernity itself and immerse themselves in the splendid alterity of the past.

The Chicago Poetry Scene

This just in from ace reporter Conner Stratman, who surveys the Chicago poetry scene over at THEthe Poetry:

Lake Forest College is also a hotbed of innovative writing; Joshua Corey, Robert Archambeau and Davis Schneiderman still maintain the northern part of the state as a literary stronghold, with the college hosting a fantastic literary festival, as well as running the excellent &Now Press.

It's true about the maintenance of a stronghold, but between the sub-literate marauders from Wisconsin and the book-burning Vikings arriving via Lake Michigan, it's a constant struggle. Josh and Davis are boiling up a cauldron of oil right now, while I taunt the attackers mercilessly from the castle walls.  Send help immediately in the form of more cows and poultry to fling down on the foul-smelling invaders!

Louisville Notebook

Peter O'Leary, Robert Archambeau, Vincent Sherry and Joe Donahue, Louisville, Feb. 2012 (photo credit Mark Scroggins)

Yesterday, in a journey that seems in some strange, anachronistic way to have been the true story upon which the 1987 movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles was based, I returned from the 40th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, an event everyone seems, understandably, to call "the Louisville conference."  I've been going there on and off for something close to 20 of those 40 years, and always find it congenial. With some 400 attendees, it's a manageable size: next week's AWP Convention here in Chicago will have more than 20 times as many people crowding its panels and workshops.  And it's not just scale that makes the Louisville conference a more palatable event than the AWP.  In Louisville, there's an actual aura of intellectual engagement, whereas the AWP is little different than a boat show: it's all about sales and glad-handing.  At least it can seem that way.


Anyway.  Here, in no particular order, are a few or my personal highlights and lowlights of this year's conference.


Highlight: Louisville as a foodie city.  


When I first started going to the conference in the early '90s, you couldn't eat in Louisville, unless you wanted deep-fried battered whatnots or a well-done hamburger.  I suppose that's an overstatement: the Seelbach Hotel had a decent restaurant, though I could never quite get comfortable in the place, having as it did an ambiance I'd call "white tablecloth Republican."  But every year Louisville seems to get better and better in terms of food.  Proof, the restaurant attached to the 21st Century Museum, is a good place with a hip, but not oppressively hip, vibe to it.  And the Mayan Cafe on Market Street is fantastic, and would stand up to any comparable place in Chicago.  Also, I enjoy the attitude of the staff.  Fourteen of us were gabbing and drinking away when the waitress stepped up and asked if we were from the university.  We said no, but almost: we were with the literature conference.  She told us they'd been trying to guess who we were back in the kitchen, and had concluded we were philosophers.  "Why?" I asked.  "You know," she said, "the beards, the glasses, the lack of women."


Highlight: Conversation in the interstices of things


This is really the reason I come to the conference.  It's hard to pick one bit of conversation as the best.  I had a great time swapping memories of John Matthias with Vincent Sherry, and talking smack about contemporary poetry with Mark Scroggins, and hearing Norman Finkelstein describe the bottle-green corduroy suits of yore, but I think the real winner for me this year was talking St. Augustine with Peter O'Leary.  O'Leary, who used to look like a young Robert Lowell, is now rocking a John Berryman beard (I assume the next midcentury poetry great whose look he'll adopt will be Elizabeth Bishop).  We were talking about his book of poems Luminous Epinoia, a real Teilhard de Chardin-style work of Catholic mysticism, when I mentioned I'd never been able to get a real feel for God-the-Father in the Trinity.  Even as an atheist, I've long had a strong, even a visceral sense of the the relation of the holy spirit to God incarnate as Christ — seeing in it something important about the way one can be both completely beyond an individual or particularized experience, and at the same time embedded in it, suffering and yearning.  But the paternal God never did much for me, at least not until Peter pulled me back to Augustine's book on the Trinity, where the spirit is understanding, the son is will, and the father is something completely unlike the judging, alien authority figure I'd always seen in William Blake's terms as "Nobodaddy" (a jealous figure of secretive laws and arbitrary authority).  In Augustine's view, the father is a kind of memory, a way of thinking of ourselves as inevitably coming into the world interpolated into an existing story.  He's a reminder that whenever we examine things, we're already bound up in particular traditions and histories.  I like that.


Lowlight: Simon Critchley's missing keynote lecture


I admire Simon Critchley's writing — his little introduction to continental philosophy is about as good a short book on the subject for Anglo-American readers as you're going to find, and elsewhere he manages to shed light on Heidegger without uprooting the man from his dark Teutonic forest.  Maybe my admiration for Critchely contributed to my sense of being let down by his plenary lecture.  He was meant to talk about Hamlet but, he told the crowd packing the auditorium, he hadn't gotten round to writing the lecture, so he was going to read us an old piece he'd written about the writer Tom McCarthy, who was present at the conference.  I despise this kind of move, and despise it all the more when it's played as blithely as Critchley played it.  Firstly, there's an enormous egotism to it: "I'm in too much demand to fulfill all my commitments," he might as well have said, "but, of course, I shit gold, so eat this instead."  It wasn't just the A-lister entitlement that rankled, but the discourtesy to the audience, since the piece he read was a fairly close reading of a work of fiction few in the audience had read.


The let-down was kept palpable by the little bits and pieces of the unfinished lecture that Critchley dropped into his talk as asides.  "I see Hamlet as the hero of inauthenticity," he said, intriguingly, and later he defined authenticity as "when the self corresponds with itself, and when the self corresponds with the world."  I wanted to hear more of this, and more of what he meant by inauthenticity, especially when he spoke of the "illegitimate authenticity" of the old regimes of the Cold War eastern bloc, where authenticity was based "on the fake will of the people," and where Havel was right to insist on "living in truth" as an antidote to this.


The most offensive part of Critchley's presentation came in one of his asides, in which he spoke of the art world (or, I should say, of what people in Manhattan mistake for the art world, which is to say, a small and particularly commercialized corner of a larger art world that is largely invisible from that island).  "Artists now are all about appropriation," he said, "they want to come out of grad school, claim a particular site of appropriation and, as quickly as possible, turn it into material gain."  He paused for a moment, then added "of course that's what's so great about the art world: in a way it's so much more honest than what we're doing here, where we act as if there's no money changing hands."


I should perhaps mention that I have no kind of poker face, and that I'm rarely able to restrain myself from expressing derision when I'm moved to do so.  I mean, at the last wedding I attended, a priest described Pope Benedict II as "God's only true representative on earth," and I involuntarily emitted a scornful snort audible throughout the chapel.  Something similar happened after Critchley's art comment: I instinctively gave him the finger.  I don't think he saw, though Mark Scroggins, seated next to me, did, and gave me a grave nod of assent.


My problems with Critchely's remark may be ennumerated thusly:


1.  It was not an analytic statement, it was a gesture toward worldly sophistication and the creation of a glamourous, bad-boyish persona.


2. It was the kind of  frisson seeking reversal of the audience's values with which Oscar Wilde used to play ("seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow," say, or "a man can be happy with any woman, so long as he doesn't love her").  But Wilde did this with charm and wit, and Critchley did it with neither.


3. With regard to the "as if no money were changing hands" bit, I wanted to say: "maybe you're getting paid tonight, Critchley, but not the rest of us so, you know, fuck you."  In fact, Critchley may have had a something of a point here, in that money does change hands at these events.  But since the conference was financed almost entirely by our fees, some of which went to pay him for the plenary address on Hamlet he didn't bother to write, this would argue against his implication that we are all running the kind of scam he sees New York artists running. The situation, instead, indicts him and leaves the audience to whom he says "j'accuse!" blameless.


Highlight: Joe Donahue, Robert Zamsky, and Peter O'Leary talk about John Taggart


The panel on which these three spoke was the best discussion of John Taggart's poetry I'm ever likely to hear.  O'Leary broke Taggart's career down into three phases (a phase concerned with objectivist experiences; a phase concerned with minimalist incantation, and a phase concerned with meditative plaint) and did so with the unalloyed enthusiasm that makes for a wonderfully non-professorial break with academic norms, a kind of amateurism in the best possible sense of the word.  Zamsky spoke of Taggart's "Drum Thing" as the moment when the poet found his own voice, because in connecting his work to John Coltrane's song of the same name Taggart released himself from expressive lyricism and entered an imaginative world of pre-existing aesthetic objects out of which he could fashion an art that didn't rely so heavily on the self.  Joe Donahue spoke of Taggart's poems for the Rothko chapel, and made some intriguing remarks about Taggart's characteristic linguistic repetitions-with-variations.  These are, said Donahue, an allegorizing of the relation of the individual to the group: the variant lines harmonize with one another while retaining difference and even dissonance, much as a church choir harmonizes voices even as members participating in this group practice may maintain differences of conscience from the words of the hymn being sung.  Later, Donahue spoke of how Taggart would establish a pattern of repetition, and then drop some completely incongruous element into the verbal structure.  He wouldn't leave it as an anomaly, though: out of a kind of horror at unmeaningness, Taggart would somehow incorporate the anomaly into a newer, more encompassing pattern.  In the Q & A session after the panel Coleridge's idea of organic form came up, and it seemed to me a perfect fit for Taggart's process as described by Donahue, since with organic form nothing can be pre-ordained, but nothing can be accidental.  This locates Taggart as a kind of Romantic (an idea that disturbed the poet Norman Finkelstein: later, while driving me back to the Brown Hotel, he looked over at me and said "think of what that means, to have a horror of the unmeaning!").


Highlight: Mark Scroggins on Pound, Vince Sherry on Decadence


I spoke on a panel with two of my heroes among contemporary critics, Mark Scroggins and Vince Sherry.  Mark unpacked the meaning of the phrase "yeux glacques" in Pound's "Mauberley," tracing in the various meanings of the term an implicit etymological argument, on Pound's part, for the decline of a brilliant classical culture into a dull and ennui-ridden modernity (Scroggins also offered an argument for reading Pound etymologically, which involved a look at Ruskin as an under-acknowledged influence on Pound).  Vince Sherry took on the matter of the rechristening of the Decadence of the 1890s as "Symbolism," and pointed out what was lost in the transition.  Vince managed to talk me out of my admiration for Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle, which had argued for the basis of the symbolist aesthetic in American transcendentalism, and therefore made symbolism into a kind of aesthetic of the new.  This, Sherry pointed out, was a falsification of the sources of the aesthetic we associate with Mallarmé and company, and hid the association of the aesthetic with a declining social order.


Lowlight: Louisville as a microcosm of our nation


When I'm at a conference for any length of time, I tend to need a break from the listening, the talking, and the heavy drinking, so I usually find some time to walk around the host city for a couple of hours.  At the Louisville conference I did this late at night, and have to say the flâneur experience was a bit depressing.  If downtown Louisville has added a lot of galleries and microbrew bars and hip restaurants over the years, it also seems to have accumulated ever more street people, wandering in ones and twos through the night, or lying stretched out on the sidewalk, asleep next to a paper cup used for begging.  The trend of the city seems to have been to grow at the top and the bottom of the wealth & privilege scale.  In this, it's not unlike Chicago, or America.  And it's just not fucking right.

Archambeau World Tour, February-March 2012

The motorcade has already pulled up outside Stately Archambeau Manor, the engines of the limousines and auxiliary support vehicles purring, the chauffeurs trading jokes and Russian cigarettes under the porte-cochère, where they seek shelter from the day's  light drizzle, as well as from the occasional gusts of rhetoric emanating from my study window.  Soon they will be whisking me away, and I'll wallow in the cocooned comfort of the luxurious passenger cabin, giggling as I repeatedly raise and lower the window separating me from the driver.  But where will we be going?

Glad you asked.  There will be two destinations in the days ahead:

On Friday, February 24th, I'll be speaking at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900.  These are the details:

Panel on Modernist Poetry and the Nineteenth Century 

Friday February 24th, 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM 

Room: Humanities  117
 
 

 My paper is called “Victorian Expectations, Modern Conditions: Real and Imagined Audiences for Modernist Poetry” but don't let that deter you.  I'll be accompanied by Mark Scroggins, who will speak on “The Questing, Passive Gaze: Ruskin and Pound's Yeux Glauques”and Vincent Sherry, who will discuss“The Codes of Decadence: Modernism and Its Discontents.”

Then, on Friday March 2, I'll be in Oak Park, Illinois (Frank Lloyd Wright's town, adjacent to Chicago) for an off-site, in this case a way-off-site, poetry reading during the AWP Convention.  The details are:

“Route 66” AWP Off-Site Reading 

Friday, March 2, 3:30-5:30pm 

Buzz Café, 905 S. Lombard Ave, Oak Park, Illinois  

On board for the reading will be the incredible Mark Wallace, the devastatingly handsome Grant Jenkins, and others.

Poetic Pluralism on Trial

Back in 1998, it still seemed marginally plausible to believe that much of the grand expanse of American poetry could be divided into two fields, one centered in Iowa City lyricism, the other in Buffalo language writing.   It was then that a much younger and more naive version of the present humble blogger wrote in praise of Chicago, in the first editorial for Samizdat.  "Chicago has fostered poets," I claimed, "without pressuring them to conform too closely to the establishment or the counter-establishment.  It is in the interstices between orthodoxies that poetry finds innovation and life, and this is why Chicago has become one of the good places for poetry."  It was the first in a series of essays in which I tried to go to bat for pluralism.  I wanted to say that confessional lyricism and language writing were both important, and that good work could be produced in both of those idioms, and in a whole range of other modes.  In the years that followed I like to think my understanding of the contours of the American poetic field has become subtler and more detailed, but I also like to think that my pluralism has remained intact.


On the face of it pluralism is among the least exciting and provocative of positions.  Who, after all, could really get worked up at someone who advocates letting a thousand flowers bloom, who wishes for nothing more than that we live, let live, and try to find things of value in works that come from traditions other than our own?  Who indeed? Well, as it turns out, just about anyone who strongly believes in what they've committed to.  I was reminded of this recently when reading Keith Tuma's On Leave, in which Tuma, whose criticism both explains and advocates experimental poetics, writes of the difficulty he had in maintaining his friendship with the immensely charming formalist poet Michael Donaghy, whom he knew when they both studied at the University of Chicago.  Differences in poetics mattered between those two guys (both of whom, I should add in a pluralistic aside, I admire).  And I've had people take me on for my pluralism, too, sometimes quite effectively: if you bother to root around in some of the comments on old posts of this blog, for example, you'll find Keston Sutherland letting me have it for a lot of things, including, if I remember correctly, my pluralism.  If you're seriously committed to a particular program, pluralistic poetics can look like a cop-out.


Rather than revisiting any old arguments, I'd like to put my own pluralism on trial today.  For that purpose I've put myself in the defendant's chair, called Judge Lance Ito out from whatever room they send you to after your fifteen minutes of fame have expired, and summoned two imaginary lawyers to do the talking.


THE CASE FOR THE  PROSECUTION will be made by a thin man in black, his turtleneck unwrinkled, his great bald dome gleaming above his expensive glasses, his elegant, pencil-skirted assistant whispering in his ear intermittently.


THE CASE FOR THE DEFENSE will be made by a puffy, sweaty man in a worn brown corduroy blazer.  I am unnerved to see that his shirt is only partly tucked in, and that his briefcase contains a tuna sandwich, Doritos, and what looks like a pair of extra socks.


After a shuffling of papers, the prosecutor speaks, pronouncing the word "professor" with just a touch of icy contempt.


THE PROSECUTION: Let me begin by reminding the court that we are here to determine whether Professor Archambeau's longstanding poetic pluralism is a defensible position, or an affront to all those who truly care about poetry.  It is, as I shall demonstrate, the latter.  I call to the witness stand an academic whose standing, it will be agreed, exceeds that of Professor Archambeau: G.W.F. Hegel, late of the University of Berlin.  I thank you, Mr. Hegel, for taking the trouble to appear here from beyond the grave.


MR. HEGEL: Ja, ja, gut.  Indeed.  Though why you couldn't simply cite my books is beyond me.  It's quite a long commute from the circle of hell reserved for bad writers, you know.


THE PROSECUTION: Would you speak, please, to the issue of pluralism in the matter of aesthetics.


MR. HEGEL:  There was a time, you know, when poetry, and all art, mattered to people, and mattered as something powerful, not merely as something interesting.  Plato, of course, cast the poets out of the Republic, even though he admired them: they were too important for him to tolerate, because they were too important to the people.  They could move the masses, they could change the beliefs of the populace,  they could sway not just a few aesthetes, but the entire polis, and they couldn't be tolerated.  I didn't live in an age when art mattered like that, still less do you.  I, and you, live in an age when science prevails as a way of knowing and of making things happen, not art.  Art does not disappear under such conditions, but it affects people differently.  "However splendid the effigies of the Greek gods may look," I have written, "and whatever dignity we may find in the images of God the Father, Christ, and the Virgin Mary, it is of no use: we do not bend our knees before them."  Art, since the triumph of science, is at the periphery of our society, and no one goes to war over whether images should or shouldn't adorn a church.  Art has worked itself out, and the reason people like this Archambeau can say they admire poems in all sorts of different styles and idioms is that art simply doesn't matter to such people.  Poetry is interesting to people like him, not vital.  He is symptomatic of an age in which art has become marginal.  


THE PROSECUTION: Thank you, Mr. Hegel.  No further questions.


THE DEFENSE: If I may, Mr. Hegel: what are we to make of the partisans of one or another sort of poetry?  If we live in an age when poetry is merely interesting, and not vital, how do we account for those who would say "Jeremy Prynne is good, or right, and therefore Glyn Maxwell is bad, or wrong"?


MR. HEGEL: Those who truly care, those for whom different kinds of art aren't simply different but worse or somehow (politically, ethically, morally) wrong are throwbacks, of course, to an earlier age, survivals within our age in the way that Greek civilization survived inside Rome.  But we can say this: at least poetry matters to them, as it surely does not to the defendant, a modern-era dilettante if ever there was one.


THE DEFENSE: I see.  Well, I'd like to call on another witness now, whom we've fetched in with some difficulty from the cycle of eternal return.  Mr. Nietzsche will now take the stand... ah.  Thank you.  Mr. Nietzsche, what do you make of the most extreme partisans of particular kinds of poetry, those who condemn the works of other schools of poetry?


[A great shriek of feedback comes from the microphone on the witness stand as it becomes entangled in Nietzsche's mustache]


MR. NIETZSCHE: What kind of untermensch wired this place for sound? Hah? Bah!  Well.  Of course we must look at the partisans of various schools of poetry — when these schools are not the dominant one — as people compelled by ressentiment, by a sense of injustice and injury.  They look at the prizes and accolades awarded to those who write in the dominant poetic styles, and they grind their teeth in frustration and outrage.  They feel that such poetry isn't just different, it is evil, because its prominence deprives them of what they crave.  They wish to see it cast down, and yearn for a great redemption in which they and their kind of poetry are redeemed into the light.  This, of course, is slave morality.  "It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey," I have said, and we shouldn't be surprised when the lambs talk to each other, saying "these birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb—should he not be good?"


THE DEFENSE: So you'd say, then, that those who condemn pluralism are just envious?


THE PROSECUTION: Objection!


[Lance Ito nods slightly, though it is unclear whether he sustains the objection, or is simply nodding off in a stupor.  The prosecutor pounces on the opportunity, while the defense attorney seems absorbed in trying to unwrap his sandwich].


THE PROSECUTION: Mr. Nietzsche, does this not imply that Mr. Archambeau's pluralism, in contradistinction to the alleged slave morality of his critics, is an aristocratic ethos?


MR. NIETZSCHE: Yes! Or close enough.  If he actually has some preferences, but is willing to tolerate the things he doesn't really care for, that would be true.  The birds of prey look on the lambs without any real hatred or sense that the lambs are evil.  Rather, they say of the lambs "we bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb."


THE DEFENSE: [with a mouth full of tuna sandwich] Surely you don't mean that Archambeau would eat poets he doesn't like!


MR. NIETZSCHE: Him?  No, he'd hardly have the will to overcome his own hesitation.  He'd just write a lukewarm review, with mild condescension hidden behind seemingly neutral language.  I've seen him do it.  But in a general sense, his pluralism implies a kind of privilege—just as the resentfulness of the partisans of particular styles masks a slavish ressentiment.


THE PROSECUTION: Just so.  Partisans seek justice for their excluded and despised poetry, while Professor Archambeau, ensconced in the ivory tower, looks down on them.


THE DEFENSE: I must object.  This line of argument implies that Mr. Archambeau advocates for a particular style, and merely tolerates others.  I assure you: my client has never had a clear aesthetic conviction in his life!


[Archambeau looks distinctly uncomfortable, shifts in his chair, and, brow furrowed, seems about to speak, when the attorney for the defense speaks again]. 


THE DEFENSE: I must now call my final witness, the late Mr. Leszek Kolakowski, whom some of you will know for his devastating critique of Marx in three volumes, Main Currents of Marxism.  I know this may seem strange, but I assure you his comments will be most relevant to proving the defense.  Welcome, Mr. Kolakowski.


MR. KOLAKOWSKI: Make it quick.  We're poking Stalin with sharp sticks in the afterlife, and it'll be my turn as soon as Orwell tires out.


THE DEFENSE: Very well.  Could I prevail upon you to read a passage from your study Modernity on Endless Trial—the part I texted you about?


MR. KOLAKOWSKI: Yes, yes.  Here it is: "A few years ago I visited the pre-Columbian monuments in Mexico and was lucky enough, while there, to find myself in the company of a well known Mexican writer, thoroughly versed in the history of the Indian peoples of the region.  Often in the course of explaining to me the significance of many things I would not have understood without him, he stressed the barbarity of the Spanish soldiers who had ground the Aztec statues into dust and melted down the exquisite gold figurines to strike with the image of the Emperor.  I said to him, “you think these people were barbarians; but were they not, perhaps, true Europeans, indeed the last true Europeans? They took their Christian and Latin civilization seriously; and it is because they took it seriously that they saw no reason to safeguard pagan idols; or to bring the curiosity and aesthetic detachment of archeologists into their consideration of things imbued with a different, and therefore hostile religious significance. If we are outraged at their behavior it is because we are indifferent, both to their civilization, and to our own.”  There it is.  But what relevance this passage on the fate of civilizations could have to these picayune proceedings is beyond me.


THE DEFENSE: Ah! Yes.  Well, the point is this: isn't my client, by virtue of his pluralism, free from any charges of insensitivity and cultural arrogance?  He's no conquistador — I mean, just look at his paunch and soft hands!  He couldn't destroy an Aztec temple if he wanted to, and I assure you he wouldn't — no more than he'd write a negative review of a book just because it came from some poetic movement with which he had no affiliation.  He's a man of peace and tolerance!  The defense rests.


THE PROSECUTION: I confess I must shake my head in disbelief.  Can my colleague on the defense really misunderstand Mr. Kolakowski's passage so profoundly?  Can't he see that Kolakowski defends western civilization against its critics?  Can't he see that what Mr. Kolakowski says only affirms Mr. Hegel's charge that people like the defendant don't really care enough about anything in particular to have beliefs?  Indifference, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is my charge against the defendant.  If he truly cared about something, he'd be less ready to tolerate anything.  The prosecution rests, as well.


JUDGE LANCE ITO: ...What? What?  We're done then?  I leave it to the jury.  If the charge won't fit, you must acquit.  Who wants to go for a smoothie?  My boss at Orange Julius says I'm getting good at making them.

Misremembering Szymborska

Since the death of Wisława Szymborska a week ago, the Nobel-winning Polish poet has been memorialized countless times.  Generally, the media tributes have been quite accurate, although there's been something of a tendency to make her sound more grandmotherly than seems right, with Newsweek calling her an "old Polish poetess" and The New York Times calling her "gentle and reclusive."  This kind of characterization takes the edge off her, and hides so many things about her poetry, which often cast a cold eye on tragedy and the darker patches of history.  


This, though, isn't the kind of "misremembering" I have in mind.  Instead, I'm thinking of my own misremembering of a Szymborska poem years ago.  I'd read the poem, "The End and the Beginning" in Clare Cavanagh's translation in The New Republic, and loved it immediately.  In the weeks that followed, I'd run the poems lines and images through my mind, or talk about them to friends, urging them to have a look at Szymborska's work.  A few months later, when the book containing the poem came out, I rushed down to the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore by the University of Chicago to get a copy.  On the train back home, I read the poem again, and realized I'd remembered it incorrectly, in essence making my own poem out of the poem Szymborska had written.  The only thing for it was to write my version of the poem, which had evolved, by now, not only into a warped version of the original, but into a poem about misremembering, and about the conversation different poems can have with each other.  Here's Cavanagh's translation of the Szymborska poem:

The End and the Beginning

After every war

someone has to tidy up.

Things won't pick

themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove

the rubble to the roadsides

so the carts loaded with corpses

can get by.

Someone has to trudge

through sludge and ashes,

through the sofa springs,

the shards of glass,

the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post 

to prop the wall,

someone has to glaze the window,

set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities,

and it takes years.

All the cameras have gone

to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,

the railroad stations, too.

Shirtsleeves will be rolled

to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,

still remembers how it was.

Someone else listens, nodding

his unshattered head.

But others are bound to be bustling nearby

who'll find all that

a little boring.

From time to time someone still must

dig up a rusted argument

from underneath a bush

and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew

what this was all about

must make way for those

who know little.

And less than that.

And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there

in the grass that covers up

the causes and effects

with a cornstalk in his teeth,

gawking at clouds.

And here's the poem I ended up writing in response, a kind of sampling-plus-morphing of the original, along with reflections on the nature of misremembering (it's in my book Home and Variations):

Misremembering Szymborska

I read your poem in a magazine, the one about how

after every war, someone

has to tidy up, about how,

as years trudge on with shovel and with trowel,

bridges are rebuilt, windows glazed, doors set back

into their jambs, until someone,

propped broom in an arm's neat crook, a hand-back wiping

at his brow, tells how it was to a nodding neighbor, until

the task-bound crowd of a rebuilt city finds such talk

a little boring,

until those who were there

are gone, and those who knew them, until, at last,

someone lies in the grass, over all the old and rusted arguments,

"a corn stalk in his teeth,

gawking at clouds."  I read it, there, but

remembered it differently.  Somehow

in the tired and task-bound wearied mind those final,

placid, resting limbs

became a body in the earth, not on it,

a corn stalk growing from that place in which it lay.

I see your poem now, again.  "The End and the Beginning,"

and know I've carried my mistake for months.

That soldier I remembered — that's what he must have been,

that body under earth — he would have dreamed

of days spent gawking, on a hillside, at the clouds.

Perhaps he fought for just such days, that he should have them, perhaps

that dream is where he lingers even now.

Perhaps he can lie beneath your dreamer, a rightness, there,

each in his way the other's end.  Perhaps, too,

we could say my poem lies in the grass of your poem's dreaming,

forgetful, pulls at cornstalks, gawks at sky.

W.B. Yeats, Madame Blavatsky, and the Mesmeric Force of Beards

"Yes," wrote the 24 year old William Butler Yeats in 1889, "my beard is off!"

The declaration comes in a letter to Katharine Tynan, an Irish poet and novelist some four years his senior. Those of you familiar with Yeats' constant vacillations over all things won't be surprised at his primary emotion on the momentous occasion: ambivalence.  "...my beard is off," he says, "and whether for good or ill I do not know."

Yeats' secondary emotion upon the loss of his beard won't be a surprise either, at least not to those familiar with his spiritualism, his Theosophy, and his susceptibility to anyone with a Ouija board tucked under her arm.  Invoking the name of London's most notorious spiritualist, Yeats continues his letter: "Madame Blavatsky promised me a bad illness of three months through the loss of the mesmeric force that collects in a beard."

I cannot speak to the mesmeric force of beards, though I do confess to an instinctive distrust of clean-shaven men.  But was the loss of Yeats' beard "for good or ill" at the aesthetic (as opposed to the mesmeric) level?  You be the judge.  The photo above depicts Yeats not long before the loss of his beard.  The photo below comes from the 1890s, when (if I may editorialize) the transformation from Dashing Young Rake to Canned Ham with Hair was complete.