Archambeau World Tour: This Week

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

Live! Free! One Night Only!

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

directions

British Poetry Wars: The Battle of Chicago

It shouldn't surprise us that the latest round of internecine British cultural warfare has occurred on American soil. I mean, this country was founded by a bunch of disgruntled refugee British cultural dissidents with funny hats and a lot to learn about growing corn and trading beads for turkeys and real estate. So the Brits have a distinguished tradition of exporting their squabbles. They also have another distinguished tradition: one of arguing bitterly about the nature and value of avant-garde poetry over the last three decades or so (if you want to read about a particularly savage episode, check out Peter Barry's new book Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court, out last summer from the good people at Salt Publishing). And the last few weeks have seen the two traditions collide, with the carnage splattered across the pages of the Chicago Review, and on the walls of Chicago's Elastic Arts Center.

Let me explain.

It all started quietly enough, with a review of a new book by the younger British poet Simon Jarvis by John Wilkinson, a fellow Brit recently transplanted to (God help him) South Bend, Indiana. The review itself begins with the not-all-that-hyperbolic assertion that Jarvis is an odd kind of poet. "It would defeat rhetoric to overstate the peculiarity of Simon Jarivis' book The Unconditional: A Lyric," writes Wilkinson, claiming that it "must be among the most unusual books ever published." How's that, you ask? Well, Wilkinson continues: "imagine if you can... a continuous poem of 237 pages mainly in iambic pentameter, in which whole pages pass without a full stop," a poem "dedicated to a high level of discourse on prosody, critical theory, and phenomenology; all this conducted in a philosophical language drawing on Adorno's negative dialectics" and "a narrative language that is the unnatural offspring of Wyndham Lewis and P.B. Shelley." Moreover, the book is filled with a particularly unusual cast of characters, a group resembling nothing so much as "refugees from an Iain Sinclair novel finally fed up with walking" with names like "=x" "Agramant" "Qnuxmuxkyl" and "Jobless," a group who start out on a Canturbury Tales-like trip, but wind up in a dingy pub displaying unlikely degrees of alienation and erudition.

(I can't be the only one to rush to Amazon.com immediately after reading that description, can I? Amazon's note on the status of the book, then and now — "currently unavailable" — indicates that Jarvis' American fan base is either so large that the book flies off the shelves like the latest Harry Potter, or so small that Amazon can't be bothered to keep the book around. I dream of a world where the former case prevails, but suspect otherwise...).

Anyway, after outlining the oddball parameters of Jarvis' book, Wilkinson lays down some heady lines about the goals of Jarvis' project, saying that Jarvis wants to invoke Adorno's notion of a negative utopianism, that is, "a redemptive utopianism that is understood to be impossible" but is nevertheless "the necessary horizon for art, philosophy, and political struggle." What Jarvis fears, says Wilkinson, is that "the extinction of a utopian horizon for the left leads necessarily to the installation of capitalism as an historical terminus." Instead of getting his Thomas More mojo on and laying out a specific utopia, though, Jarvis (in the story Wilkinson tells about him) refuses such a temptation (which could only lead to violence and dystopia). Instead, says Wilkinson, Jarvis wants to use difficult form, full of things that can't be glossed over or assimilated to our usual patterns of understanding, to set the reader "on edge" so he or she will not "float into a complacent sphere beyond all struggle." You know, the usual Frankfurt School, Langpo-ish stuff you learned from the local school marm while working on your M.F.A. Ah, how fondly I look back on those days, taking a crayon to the image of Max Horkheimer in my coloring book, and nervously standing before the class, my hair slicked down, my Hush Puppies freshly shined, as I recited Charles Bernstein's poems at prize day in the quaint old chapel by the soccer pitch. Oh, the fun we had in those salad days! But I digress.

So. When I first read Wilkinson's review, I admired his specific and clear description of Jarvis' book, which sounds unlike anything I've read. But I sort of blew off the big ideological claims Wilkinson made, since claims of that kind I have read before, in, I think, about every third review of experimental poetry I've come by over the past 15 years.


But Peter Riley did not stand by so idly and complacently in the face of these familiar claims for the political value of experimental poetry. Gird, did he, his loins for serious battle. Tap, did he, most vehemently into his laptop. Publish, did he, an open letter, in the next issue of the Chicago Review. And, judging by Wilkinson's response, wound, did Riley, his formidable foe. Check it out.

Riley begins with a genteel moment, praising the Cambridge/Prynne tradition embodied by Jarvis and polemically upheld by Wilkinson. But this feels sort of like the moment when two boxers "shake hands" by thumping their gloves together at the start of a match, and soon the blows begin to fall heavily. Riley's main target is the identification of formal innovation with political utopianism. As the first sentence in this paragraph of Riley's makes plain, he's going after Wilkinson here, for sure, but he's also going after all those other Frankfurterized reviews of avant-poetry:

For Wilkinson as for most other commentators on the forward side of things, to speak of poetical virtue is to speak of political virtue, there is no distinction. Poems and poetical thinking are politically good or they have no good in them. I guess we are used to that these days. The one big claim left to the poem, that it (rather “somehow”) holds the answer or counter to political harm by occulted inference. It’s more alarming to notice that in this particularly fervent British version the contrary also holds: political virtue can only be poetical virtue. “Aesthetically-founded politics” (which involves more than poetry of course, but): only the (poet) is qualified to be a politician. It is not just that the poet “knows better” than the working politician, indeed I don’t think that claim is made, but that only the poet has the spirit to inhabit the sphere of total oppositional negation which is the only political register to be tolerated. Doesn’t this mean that in a sense there is actually a withdrawal from politics, from the politics that happens and can happen into one that can’t possibly? An understanding of how politics works and how amelioration can be wrought through the science of it, of what the mechanisms are and so of what could be done – all this would be beneath us? To assume that you can go straight from aesthetics to ethics is worrying enough, but aren’t the two here fused into one substance?

Yow. Didja see where Riley landed that blow? Right smack on two of the Big Assumptions of avant-poetry: that formal radicalism is special because it is political radicalism; and that the total negation of current political reality is the only responsible position, and the rest is all complicity, all the time. Such assumptions, says Riley, leave "the entire non-poet population of the world (and most of the poets), condemned as criminals." Come on, admit it: you've encountered the very thing Riley's on about: the insistence that only a certain kind of poetry can be ethical, and the rest of the poets may as well all run off in their giant SUVs on their way to Dick Cheney fundraising events, spouting clouds of carcinogens from their tailpipes and tossing non-biodegradable burger wrappers out the window as they go.

Anyway, after this comes my favorite part of the piece, Riley's powerful cri de coeur directed toward the avant-garde community in which he himself has much standing: "How do we get to be so haughty?" It kind of hits home, really. I think of some of the haughty-ass theoretico-jive that's come out of my mouth at various conferences and coffeehouse readings over the years, and I shudder.

I think Wilkinson must have shuddered a bit, too, judging by his (not yet published) response. He begins with what seems like a kind of conciliatory statement, saying that he didn't mean to imply that Prynnite, Langpo-ish avant-postery was the only good or ethical kind of writing:

I reject the idea in Peter Riley’s letter that referring to a relatively small number of poets must imply an exclusivity in taste or could be used to impute an aesthetic or political programme. It is a mistake to assume that anyone necessarily worries away publicly at what he most loves; and this is especially misleading where writers rather than scholars are concerned, since generally writers write about two kinds of writer – those whom they feel fail to receive their due, to some extent a covert special pleading for their own work; and those whose work seems whether successfully or not to tackle ideas or technical problems which trouble them. But we all have different ways of reading in different circumstances, as musicians do of listening and painters of looking; what need to argue why merely to glance at certain poems by John Donne or Thomas Hardy or James Schuyler can bring tears to my eyes, any more than I have to justify to myself a preference for Lee Konitz over John Coltrane or for sea pinks over daffodils. It is typical that working life has left me too dependent on early-established taste, but teaching now shows me much to enjoy and admire in writers I once dismissed with youth’s arbitrariness.

(Many thanks to Wilkinson for letting me quote from this — you've got to admire I guy who'll let you quote unpublished material that you find intelligent but not always entirely convincing).

I'm not too keen on the "don't expect me to be fair, I'm a writer" argument. And I'm not sure how to feel about the "hey, I didn't get the chance to read around enough to have a broad taste because I had to work at a real job" line (Wilkinson was a mental health professional for many years). Had he directed the comment at me, I'd have assessed my career path so far in life (brief and inglorious military service, used bookstore clerk while a student, and standard-issue academic since), felt some kind of prof-caste guilt, and cut Wilkinson some slack. But he's directing this at Peter Riley, who scrambled to make a living as a rare book dealer for years (and may so scramble still, for all I know). So the ethical high ground falls away from beneath the Wilkinsonian sandals. That said, the embrace of ecumenical pluralism is encouraging.

Wilkinson goes on for a few pages, and, being both bright and combative, lands a few good blows of his own. But as I was watching the critical fisticuffs fly, I couldn't help thinking that what gets lost in his exchange with Riley about exclusive taste and pseudo-political haughtiness is the poetry itself. Then, as if on cue from whatever goddess reigns on Parnassus these days, a group of stangers appeared at the edge of town. They were Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady, and Peter Manson, and if you wanted an actual exhibit of the kind of post-Prynne, Jarvis-y poetry Riley and Wilkinson were arguing about, you couldn't have asked for anything better. All three poets have work in the Spring '07 issue of the Chicago Review. But the poets themselves were making a Chicago stop on their trans-continental American tour, courtesy of Kerri Sonnenberg and her ever-amazing Discrete Reading Series at the Elastic Arts Center, so I hightailed it down to the city, disgracefully wolfed down enchilladas at El Cid with Kristy Odelius, Bill Allegrezza, and Jennifer & Chris Glomski, then made the scene. Which was really two scenes in one, since the usual Discreet crowd had been joined by tout le monde du Hyde Park, especially the Chicago Review crowd. I ran into Josh Kotin, Bobby Baird, Eirik Steinhoff, as well as Dustin Simpson and Josh Adams (who seem to be engaged in a Surrealism-versus-Oulipo debate of the sort that can only rage with such intensity in the rarified air of Hyde Park). Also Joel Craig. And I saw Chicu Reddy and Suzanne Buffam from across a much-crowded room of black turtlenecks and Amstel Light bottles. If Ray Bianchi hadn't been in Istanbul, and if Albert Goldbarth had descended upon us from his secret mountain fortress, we'd have had almost all of the main speakers from this year's Lake Forest Literary Festival on hand.

But I digress. I wanted to talk about the poetry, not the audience. For my money Keston Sutherland gave the strongest performance, and I've got to say this about his work: it was all the things Wilkinson said Jarvis' work was: formally strange, intriguingly metrical, and very much in the Prynne tradition. It even had a strong social component, addressing anxieties about capitalism (particularly incipient Chinese capitalism) and the ways it enters into our most intimate psychic spaces. Sutherland's work tries to get a handle on these anxieties not through making a statement about them (the mimetic and statement-oriented elements of language are only intermittently in operation in his work), but by casting them in oddly familiar forms (his work is strangely ode-like, and intriguingly metered — formalist, I want to say, but nothing at all like Dana Gioia). He registers all kinds of things that are going on out there politically. But there's nothing messianic about it. There's nothing in the work (at least in what I saw that night) that claims "because I do this, my politics are pure" or "because I do this, the Empire of Media-Saturated Capitalism quakes" or even "because I do this, Philip Larkin was a bad poet." And it was a hell of a show, too.

In the end, I'm inclined to agree with a comment Eirik Steinhoff made between readers at the Elastic Arts Center that night: "the problem isn't the Prynne tradition — the problem is the messianism attached to it." If Keston Sutherland represents the Prynne tradition in its current iteration, I'm inclined to think it's the most vital part of British poetry today. If we could only find some way of talking about it that didn't imply it was a way — no, the way — to save the world...


*****
LATE-BREAKING NEWS: THE SENTIMENTALITY OF EXEMPTION

This just in from Eirik Steinhoff:

Did I really say that about Prynne the Messiah? ....Can we correct that quote to read "print" for "Prynne" and "Masala Dosai" for "Messianism"? That sounds more like something I might have said that exciting evening.

That sd, the Wilkinson/Riley colloquy does usefully illuminate the issues that crop up when promises are made that poetry is often hard pressed to keep. Keston's keenly alive to this problem, speaking of the "sentimentality of exemption" avant-gardes fall prey to.

*****
MORE LATE-BREAKING NEWS: HENRY GOULD WEIGHS IN

I'm not sure how to feel about being called "chipper." Then again, I've been called a lot worse, generally with justification.

They Come In All Colors, One Size Fits All...

Remember the ending lines of Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California"? Ginsberg imagines turning to Walt Whitman, and asking:

    Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
    Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

If you're listening to Ginsberg read these lines on your iPod as you stroll down, say, Michigan Avenue's glitzy shopping zone, and find yourself thinking of the America we have now, and what Walt Whitman would think of it, you may catch yourself mentally rewriting the opening of "Song of Myself" thusly:

I celebrate my wealth, and sing my wealth;
And what I consume you can't consume;
For every item belonging to me cannot belong to you...

Trust me. It could happen.

Lake Forest Lit Fest / John Matthias Early Warning

I find myself, dear reader, in the middle of a chickenshit monsoon related to next week's Lake Forest Literary Festival (clicking on the picture above will give you the official poster with all the info you need for three days of literary bliss). But all the guano-storms are going to be worth it: the theme this year is Chicago Poetry, and we're bringing in former Chicagoan Albert Goldbarth to headline an event featuring Srikanth Reddy, Ray Bianchi, Joel Craig, and Kristy Odelius, among others. The web site is (after much stuggle) up and running. Everything is free, fabuous, and open to the public! Here's how you get to campus, and here's a map of our leafy acerage, suitable for printing, if not exactly for framing.

Also, this just in from the good people at Salt: John Matthias' new book of poems, Kedging is coming out soon. Here's their press info:

Kedging is John Matthias’s first book of poems since his long New Selected Poems of 2004. The volume is divided into five parts: “Post-Anecdotal” includes short poems on autobiographical and elegiac themes; “The Memoirists” engages the lives and writings of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Edward John Trelawney, Frederick Rolfe, Céleste Albert, and Vernon Duke; “The Co-translator’s Dilemmas” deals with Swedish poets, Swedish poems, and issues of translation; “Laundry Lists and Manifestoes” ranges from Homer and the Old Testament to Internet technology; “Kedging in Time” deals with the lives of several families in the context of British naval history; and “The Back of the Book” prints an essay called “Kedging in Kedging in Time,” which was commissioned by Chicago Review as a commentary on the final poem in the volume. The three extended sequences in the book underline the observations of Mark Scroggins in a review of New Selected Poems – that Matthias, working in the tradition of late modernism, but in middle-length poems that are not open-ended, has “written one Briggflatts after another.” Robert Archambeau has said that Matthias writes “successfully in a wider range of styles than any other contemporary poet.” John Kinsella has said simply that Matthias is “a great poet.”

“One of the best poets in the USA.” —Guy Davenport

And here's an advance peek at the contents of Matthias' book:

Kedging


’s all you’re good for
someone said. Is what? Your good

and for it. Not to fear: O all your
goods so far. Your good 4.

Your goods 5 and 6. With a little tug
at warp. So by a hawser winde

your head about. Thirty nine
among the sands your steps or

riddle there. Who may have
sailed the Alde is old now, olde

and addled, angling still for some
good luck. So labor, lad: when other

moiety of men, tugging hard at kedge
and hawser, drew us from

the sand? Brisk and lively in the
dialect East Anglian. Ain’t so well

as I was yesterday, for I was then
quite kedge. Even though I pull and

pole and persevere I’m blown to
windward. Winding still. Warping so

as not to weep, cadging as I can.

Okay, back into the monsoon. I did take shelter from it a few days ago, at an amazing British experimental poetry roadshow featuring Keston Sutherland and various post-Prynne types. More on that when the storm lets up and I scrape the chickenshit residue off my longsuffering shoes...

The Kafka Sutra, Live!

We're just past the middle of the spring semester in my leafy corner of academe, and you know what that means, don't you, class? Yep, that's right: this is the time of semester that devours my soul and crushes my spirit. One side effect of all this is that my blog has been reduced to a string of short entries and announcements, and today's entry is no different — but if you're in Chicago, I really do urge you to check out the event I'm annoucing: a show at the Chicago Printmakers' Collaborative that runs from tommorrow through late May. It features work from a host of young, hip printmaker types, including Sarah Conner, who has worked with me on a series of prose poems/prints called The Kafka Sutra. The prose poems are kind of what you'd guess they might be from the title: Kafka's parables rewritten as if they were the Kama Sutra. Conner's prints go beyond being mere illustrations to the writing, I think, and can stand on their own without the text — but booklets featuring some of the prose poems will be available at the show, so come on down and get your neo-Kafka on for free. The show is at:

4642 N Western Ave
Chicago, IL 60625
(773) 293-2070

Notre Dame Review #23: Rejoice!

Rejoice! The latest Notre Dame Review is out, and there's almost too much to love. From the very cool cover photo by Catherine Gass (whom I met when she came up to the &NOW Festival to hear her dad, William Gass, read), to the reviews in the back (lots of good stuff, including Christopher Merrill on Merwin, and Igor Webb on the ever-amazing John Peck), it's a rock-solid issue, and admirably diverse. Poems by W.S. Merwin, William Logan, Michael Anania, John Peck, and Jesper Svenbro, among many others (if you read only one Swedish poet, it should be Svenbro, so give your transations of Tomas Tranströmer one last, yearning look, and set them afloat on the icy blue breakers of the Baltic). The issue also contains new work by Chicago's own Kristy Odelius, whom we've just convinced and cajoled and arm-twisted into coming up to Lake Forest for the Lit Fest this April (she'll read on the 17th). And, for those of you who've had enough excitement, there's my essay "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Poetry," perhaps an anomaly in this (ahem) most catholic of journals (it's probably for the best if you wince at that).

We Interrupt this Broadcast for a Bulletin from Ancient Sparta

So there I was, at the age of ten or eleven, sitting on the floor of my parents' weekend place in the Canadian wilderness. I had a perfectly functional tree fort outside, I had a canoe and fishing gear at my disposal. These being delightfully unenlightened years, I had an air rifle in my arsenal. I had a couple of Cree Indian kids as friends, causing much envy among my city pals, who imagined me in mocassins, creeping like a miniature Hiawatha through the underbrush. There was even an abandoned gold mine nearby, entirely verboten but easily accessible if you knew where to squeeze through the fence. But was I going to take advantage of any of these things? Not a chance, ace. I had a brand new book of world history, and I wanted to see if its illustrations of the battle of Thermopylae were going to be as mad-ass, awe-inspiringly cool as those of my other big book of world history, a book I'd pretty much destroyed through excessive and overzealous reading and rereading.

I say this to establish my credibility as an ancient history geek of many, many years standing. This goes deep with me, muchachos, deep.

So I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I'm going to rain on the big, fabulous, over the top parade that is 300, the new movie about Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae. You're thinking I'm going to list a thousand historical innacuracies of interest to no one but the most dire literalist. But seriously: I don't mind most of the liberties the filmmakers took with the story. You want to ditch the armor to go all-out with the chiselled Spartan abs? No problem. You want to make Xerxes into an actual giant? Sure, why not. Go nuts. No harm no foul. You want to cash in on Warholian Minute 14 of the whole body-piercing thing and make the Persian leaders look like they got drunk in the West Village on a Friday night and woke up looking like punked-out pin cushions? Hey, I'm down with it. I mean, you've gotta make the Persians look exotic, as they would have to the Greeks. (Of course the Persians looked exotic to the Greeks in no small measure due to their curious and foreign habit of wearing pants, but that's just not going to look weird to the avergae chino-wearing soccer dad at the multiplex, so the whole piercings-for-pants substitution can be seen as a legitimate act of translation).

What gets all up in my ancient-history-lovin' grill is this: the movie lies about the nature of Spartan society in ways that come too close to the kind of lies we hear about our own country in contemporary America. I just can't get past this in the name of fun & games the way I can get past Giant Xerxes or the Abdominizer Army. Let me explain.

You might wonder why a military powerhouse like Sparta could only field a paltry 300 soldiers. With so much at stake, why would the Spartans send the equivalent of about two infantry companies? There's a movie answer, and there's a real answer, and between the two lies a giant gulf.

The movie answer is this: the Persians bribed Greek priests in order to get the Oracle to say that the no army should be sent during the sacred Karneia festival. Despite these weak-willed, treacherous, peacenik enemies-at-home, 300 heroic Spartans are willing to defy the Oracle and Fight the Good Fight for Freedom.

The historical answer is this: Sparta was a brutal slave-state, and the ruling warrior class was in more-or-less constant fear that the Helot slave-class would rebel and win their freedom. Sparta couldn't spare many troops, becuase their own society was fraught with inequity.

So the movie masks a real class struggle and national disunity with — well, with what? With unthinking nationalism, and repeated (and unintentonally ironic) cries of "freedom!"

You, there, with the Dell laptop — I can hear you mumbling "You can handle a giant Xerxes, but you can't handle this?"

Yeah, I suppose that's true. I guess it's because I don't live in a country with a heavily pierced giant as president (which, you've got to admit, would probaby be an improvement). The things that bother us — unthinking nationalism, a complex, tragic war justified with too-simple shouts of "freedom" — have to be closer to home.

World Premiere of "Two Sonnets for Music" March 6

Last summer Lake Forest College's composer-in-residence Rami Levin and I worked together on "Two Sonnets for Music," which will be performed with full choir and orchestra Tuesday night at the Lily Reid Holt Chapel. It was a miracle of long-distance collaboration, given that she was in Brazil and I in Chicago. Anyway, here's the press release — hope you can make it.

I kind of wish they'd used the (entirely accurate) phrase "LIVE! FREE! ONE NIGHT ONLY!"

On Tuesday, March 6 the Lake Forest College Chamber Orchestra and Chorus will perform a special work created in honor of the 150th anniversary of Lake Forest College titled "Two Sonnets for Music." The performance will be held in the Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel at 7:30 p.m. The public is welcome to attend free of charge.

"Two Sonnets for Music" was written by Associate Professor of English Robert Archambeau (text) and Composer-in-Residence Rami Levin (music), and will be performed under the direction of David Amrein, a member of the College's music faculty. The program also includes a performance of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony by the Chamber Orchestra and music of Purcell performed by the Chorus.

Robert Archambeau's books include Citation Suite (1997), Word Play Place (1998), Home and Variations (2004), and Laureates and Heretics (2007). His critical essays, poetry and translations have appeared in numerous journals in Europe and America, and he has been a visiting professor at Lund University, Sweden. From 1998-2004 he was the editor of the international poetry journal Samizdat. He has received prizes for his poetry from the Illinois Arts Council and the Academy of American Poets.

Rami Levin’s works include pieces for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, and solo instruments. They have been performed in the U.S., Britain, Canada, Spain, Norway, Italy, Israel, and the Slovak Republic. Her orchestra piece, Anima / breath of life, recorded by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra was recently released on the Master Musicians Collective label. The piece was premiered by the Slovak Radio Orchestra in May 2003. In June 2003 clarinetist Richard Stoltzman recorded her Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra with the Slovak Radio Orchestra. That recording was released on the Master Musicians Collective label in August 2006. Levin has received consecutive annual awards from ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) since 1994. She has served as president of American Women Composers, Midwest and has been active in the Chicago music scene both as a composer, and as the founding director of Lake Forest Lyrica.

Situationism: The Smackdown

Imagine if you will your humble blogger seated at his study table, surrounded by ghostly spirits. As they swirl in their disembodied way about his head, each calls out in thin-voiced dismay, urging the seated man to a course of necessary action. "Revise your old manuscript! The press wants it reformatted, and cannot wait!" urges one wispy and ectoplasmic entity. "Heed not those words," urges another "for you owe the editor of a book some notes on your contribution!" A third spirit whirls feverishly through the air, gibbering insistently about an omnibus review of an under-appreciated poet for which the immutable deadline looms. Then another ghastly apparition arises, sending the previous speakers off to cower in the corners of the room, by the unread stacks NYRBs. "Grade your students' papers!" it commands, its hollow eyes offering vistas of the abyss. What to do when confronted with such poltergeists? The humble blogger rolls up his sleeves, and, turning to his age-old strategies of semi-industrious avoidance, undertakes some research for a new book, a project for which no deadline exists.


No doubt this will lead to terrible regrets later. But I gotta tell ya, I'm glad I did things this way today, because the research involved reading an exchange between two scholars of Situationism, and watching the first scholar smack down the second was at least as exciting as watching Roger Federer crush the will of yet another hapless opponent. (I was actually watching both smackdowns at once, reading with tennis on in the background. God knows how I stood the excitement).

The exchange on Situationism took place in the pages of Social Justice's special issue on "Art, Power and Social Change" (that's vol. 33 #2, 2006, for those of you running to your archives or rooting around on the coffee table to find it under the remote control and that bag of Funyuns on which you've been secretly gorging). It began with a piece by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen of Copenhagen University, to which Simeon Hunter of Loyala (New Orleans) replied. It ended with the resounding thud, as Rasmussen threw Hunter down in a devastating-yet-politely-professional riposte.

Before filling you in on the specifics, a few words on Why This Matters, beyond the base thrills of the gladiatorial arena. What's important about the exchange, I think, is this: it shows us two important things that can happen when we equate aesthetic actions with political actions (as so many on the avant and post-avant tracks seem to do). Firstly, the exchange shows us how this can lead to the overt subordination of aesthetics to politics, which can be deadly to art (this is one of the conclusions Rasmussen draws about Situationism); secondly, the exchange shows us how easy it is for those of us immersed in aesthetic activity to think of aesthetic gestures toward politics as much more grand and powerfully subversive than they actually are (this is the conclusion I draw from watching Hunter try to form a coherent reply to Rasmussen).

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen on the Situationists

The story Rasmussen tells about Situationism comes, for the most parts, from his thinking about Guy Debord. If I had to paraphrase it in narrative form, I'd say it goes something like this:

Back in 1957 Guy Debord and his crew looked around and saw nothing but the ruins of old avant-garde movements. The old avant-garde had been killed off, or suppressed, or marginalized, or had their radicalism domesticated and commodified and reduced to mere style. But Guy and the others were young enough and idealistic enough to think they could revive all that was best about the interwar avant-garde. They told themselves that, like the heroes of Dada, they could mock and undermine bourgeois norms and art and values; and like the heroes of Dada, they could liberate art from the institutions that had separated it from life, reducing it to useless decor and toothless aestheticism. They also told themselves that, like the heroes of Surrealism, they could break down the barriers between life and art and revolution. They turned for inspiration to the Surrealist notion that the unleashing of the unconscious and the repressed would bring us freedom, since the unconscious is not controlled by the social powers that be.

But soon enough Guy Debord and his crew looked around again and saw that they hadn't managed to accomplish much, and they decided that art was not the solution they had hoped it would be. Debord came to the conclusion that our social order had evolved to the point where it was dominated by spectacle — by a system of images that colonize our minds and reduce us to passive consumers and obedient producers, and that dissolve all social associations that don't serve the dominant order. Art was simply appropriated by this system, and the spectacle even managed to colonize our unconscious. Debord looked down at the two six-guns he held in his hands, the one called Dada and the one called Surrealism, then looked up at the towering Godzilla that was the spectacle, then he looked over his shoulder to his companions shouting "our weapons are useless against it!" and ran for cover. [Rasmussen, who looks like a very serious man with serious glasses, didn't put it this way, and might not be too happy with me for so doing, but I believe I'm not too far off, really, in paraphrasing his position].

When Guy and his band of outlaws reassembled in their secret caves, they gathererd round the fire they'd built from the only available materials (a couple of old chair legs and a dozen copies of Dialectic of Enlightenment, if I remember correctly), and asked themselves a question: in a situation like this, with Dadaist and Surrealist techniques rendered useless, how can we remain true to the spirit of the avant-garde? The answer came from Guy himself, from where he'd ensconced himself behind a protective wall of film-canisters containing the complete cinematic works of Jean Cocteau. In a voice not untinged with sorrow (indeed, in a voice not unlike that of Milton's Satan, as he addressed the defeated army of rebel angels), Guy told his companions that the only way to stay true to the revolutionary ideals of the avant-garde in an age when art was co-opted by the spectacle was to abandon art. Hear the voiceover to this sad scene, as narrated by Rasmussen himself:

There was no doubt in Debord's mind: it was time to affirm the historical necessity and transcend the obsolete pseudo-communication of art.... Art had to be negated and realized in revolutionary practice even if that meant losing art. The Situationists had to abandon art; historical development necessitated this dramatic move.

And so the Situationists were through, theoretically, with the production and criticism of such obsolete entities as literature and visual art per se, and set about a path of radical refusal: they "restained themselves from making artworks out of fear of commercial integration and institutional cooptation." The attempt to form a politics fused with aesthetics led, in the end, to the abandonment of aesthetic activity. Art died, that ideology could live.

Simeon Hunter's Reply

Simeon Hunter's attempt at rebuttal begins promisingly enough: he asks us to look not at Debord's philosophical positions, but at the actual practice of a multitude of artists who follow in the Situationists' footsteps:

I do not propose to object to Rasmussen's exposition. Rather, I wish to suggest that his account is overly pessimistic and that the value of Debord's text lies less in its argument and more in the possibilities that it opens despite itself. If we are to measure these possibilities, we need to focus our attention on those tangential visual practices and evidences that Debord seeks to close off, but which his thinking nevertheless propagated and indeed continues to propagate.

What's that? Yes, I know, I know, Hunter's verb tense choices are a bit iffy, but quit being such a language nerd, why don'tcha, and listen to what the man has to say. Jeez! What Hunter means is that, despite Debord's sense that art could not significantly contribute to the big historical revolution of which Debord and his cronies collectively dreamed, there is still a lot of art that came out of the Situationist tradition, and such art is in fact politically efficacious. Debord may have thought such art futile, but, according to Hunter, it came into being anyway.

Most of what follows in Hunter's essay is a list of various Situationist-inflected art projects (I say "inflected" rather than "influenced" because it isn't always clear that there is a direct line of influence). The examples include, among others, works by Andy Warhol and the Guerrilla Girls. I'd like to look at these in particular, because I think the distance between Hunter's claims for what the works accomplish politically, and the actual effects of the works, is huge. And the vastness of that gulf between claim and effect speaks stongly about the sentimentality of those whose interest in the aesthetic is justified by politics.

1. Warhol. Hunter tells us that Warhol's work was, among other things, an example of art that worked to subvert the spectacle-driven social order Debord described. "The really clever part," says Hunter, "was that [Warhol] managed to make his critique so close to its subject that the system unquestioningly distributed the work for him.... It was reproduced, celebrated, and distributed by a commercial media unable to spot the subversion." Sigh. I mean, do I really have to say this? Well, okay: a subversion so subtle that it goes unnoticed as a subversion doesn't subvert much at all. It is reasoning of this kind that maketh one shudder when one hears one's fellow poets and professors speak blithely of the subversive nature of their favorite art. The question of tangible results has to be swept under the faculty-lounge carpet (probably by non-unionized immigrant labor, too).

Several of Hunter's examples are roughly analogous to the Warhol example in terms of the question of tangible results. My favorite is that of the Lettrists, text artists who, according to Hunter, "sought to unify sign systems into a single politico-poetic voice designed to ameliorate the conditions of living for all by disrupting those specializations that the Enlightenment had imposed..." One yearns to grab a Lettrist by the lapel and ask "Say, that project of ameliorating the living conditions of all by getting jiggy with fonts? How's that, you know, working out for you?" Round the colossal lack of impact of such projects the lone and level sands stretch far away...

2. The Guerrilla Girls

Some of Hunter's examples involve work that does, in fact, have plausible claims to having had tangible effects. But a look at the most convincing of these examples, the Guerrilla Girls, shows us the limits of the kind of effect they have, and the overblown nature of the claim that they fulfill the Situationists' massive goals of social transformation. [Full disclosure: I think I was in some weak way connected to the committee that brought the Guerrilla Girls to visit Lake Forest College a few years back, but memory fades...]. I mean, consider the following statement, drawn from a Guerrilla Girls' piece consisting of a parodic recreation of the Ten Commandments:

Thou Shalt Admit to the Public that words such as Genius, Masterpiece, Seminal, Potent, Tough, Gritty, and Powerful are used Solely to Prop Up the Myth and Inflate the Market Value of White Male Artists.

The politics of the piece are pretty typical of the GGs. I actually think they've got valid points, and I think they've had an impact on the art world. But these are very limited politics — the politics of art institutions. While such things do have an eventual broader impact, this isn't exactly the revolutionary liberation of society for which the Situationists longed. It isn't revolution at all: it is an urging of the reform of some institutions that serve the privileged classes. And it is first and foremost about modifying the way we talk about art. If this is Situationism, it is a greatly diminished thing, in terms of social goals. (Was it Dwight MacDonald of the old Partisan Review crowd who used to look at the shrinking goals of his radical friends, and speak of an imaginary species of bird that went extinct because it could only fly in smaller and smaller circles, until eventually it disappeared up its own ass? Anatomically dubious, but one takes his point...)

Rasmussen's Smackdown of Hunter

It was at this point that Rasmussen, who had been quietly positioning himself high up on the ropes of the ring, leapt down and slammed Hunter to the mat. And as he took Hunter down, he twisted the poor guy's body in two directions. First, he wrenched Hunter over to the corner to our left, and banged the hapless art-historian's head on the turnbuckle while uttering through gritted teeth that there has been "a widespread effort — visible in Simeon Hunter's reply, too — to turn the Situationist project into an art movement," despite the Situationist rejection of art. Having knocked his opponent around sufficiently at that end of the ring, Rasmussen the Dangerous Dane pulled the staggering Hunter to the center of the ring, cast him down, and delivered the coup de grâce, saying:

We must still come to terms with the proliferation of images, but without repeating the damned grandiose themes of the Situationists, for whom it is a question of all or nothing, requiring the destruction of images to liberate the imagination.

It is at this point that the bell rang, and the referee mercifully intervened, raising Rasmussen's arm in a spectaclular display of victory.

Jabès and/or Beckett

A bunch of Chicago-area poets will soon be braving weather conditions that would probably send a Floridian to an early grave in order to assemble at Garin Cycholl's place to talk about Edmond Jabès, so I've been reading The Book of Questions.

This isn't actually the book we're supposed to read, but out of some poorly-defined nostalgia connected to the aging process I'm reverting to my old undergraduate habits — instead of reading the assigned text, I'm reading a different work by the same author. I used to do this out of a deeply misguided and pathological anti-authoritarianism. Oh, the craziness and general imbecility of it all. I can see Young Archambeau now, grumbling, beneath all that hair gel: "ain't nobody gonna tell me what to read! Old man thinks he knows about books... hah! I know about books...mutter mutter, grumble grumble" [fumblings in one's backpack for one's 1987-era walkman, placing of headphones over ears, sullen slouching away across the quad, to the sound of Hüsker Dü's Candy Apple Grey accompanied by tape-hiss and adolescent moping].

Anyhow, as a way of getting a handle on Jabès, I've been doing little compare/contrast exercises as I read. Here's today's effort, hot from the pages of my notebook:

Jabès: Like Beckett

ambiguous and abstract settings

stories that do not get told

language that gestures toward a truth it cannot attain or present

primal issues: death, God, death of God, etc.

Jabès: Not Like Beckett

not funny

According to Rosmarie Waldrop's memoir Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Jabès was funny in person. But the work is solemn, people. Solemn.

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In other Beckett-related news, I have finally discovered that the entirely unsolemn pal of Beckett, Raymond Federman, has a blog. Rejoice!

The Poets as Professors

Maybe it's because I've been hanging out with Ray Bianchi lately that I've been thinking a bit about the en masse movement of the poets into professorial robes. Ray's a poet but not an academic, which makes him two things at once: A. the historical norm for poets; and B. an aberration among the poets of early 21st century America, for whom "professor" is almost certainly the single most common job-description. Ray's been ruminating over this situation, and I suppose listening to him do this over lunch the other day at a local joint has got me chewing things over a bit, too.

It's not that I've got a Romantic sense of the poet as glamorous outsider. In fact, one of the things being a prof has done for me is to give me enough of a historical sense to know that the poet as outsider, free from any attachment to institutions, is only a brief chapter in the history of poetry. For most of the history of poetry in English, the bulk of poets have been affiliated with one or another kind of institution. It could be courtly (Edmund Spenser, say, or Wyatt) or eccesiastical (the later Donne, or George Herbert), or it could be a matter of sub-courtly aristocratic patronage, or the odd, eighteenth century combination of patronage and incipient market-oriented publishing (Pope and Johnson). To a degree, the Romantics really were knocked loose from institutional support by the disruption of the old patronage system and the rapid development of forms of writing more commercially viable than poetry. The situation continued for much of the nineteenth century, despite prominent exceptions. But by the early decades of the twentieth century a lot of poets had found support through affiliation with journalism, and after World War Two the migration into academe was on. Now, with the MFA mills running into overtime shifts, we're probably close to the zenith of the poet-as-professor era. With the huge overproduction of credentialled poets, after all, we're going to have more of them than can possibly find academic, or even para-academic, work. The whole process feels vaguely dialectical, but I've descended too far down the declining side of my caffeine curve to follow up on all that just now (no doubt to the relief of all concerned).

Anyway, I think I've found an angle from which to approach the question of what the migration into academe may mean for poetry. It comes from an essay called "The Review: Culture's Medium" in the very-academic sounding collectionThe Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. The essay was written by my favorite Romanticist this side of Jerome McGann, Marilyn Butler. Butler's essay is, essentially, an examination of the role of the various cultural reviews of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in influencing the way poets and novelists saw themselves. Because Butler is fiendishly clever, she blows right on by the commonplace notion that the reviewers for these journals were in a position to praise or blame various kinds of poets. Her topic, she says, is "Reviews rather than reviewing." That is, she's interested in how the format of journals, and the kind of discourse they represent, influence literature. It isn't individual book reviews she cares about, it's the conditions of communication that the journals created that matter to her. (I believe my colleagues in Communications have a term for this, but Dave Park hasn't returned my phone message yet, damn him, so I'm going to have to do without it).

Long story short, Butler's argument goes something like this:

1. The important journals of the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century (Butler is far too sophisticated to write as if there were firm start-and-stop traits for these things, but I'm not above a rough handling of delicate materials) treated literature in the context of various social and political ideas and events. The journals reviewed literature along with works on other issues, and often treated works of literature from a socio-political standpoint. Importantly, writers responded to this treatment, and tended to see themselves as part of a general public sphere in which large social and political issues were discussed in generally accessible terms. My favorite example here involves not poetry but the novels of Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth. Butler tells us "most late eighteenth-century novels were viewed as entertainments and as fodder for the female reader," but journals like The Edinburgh Review and The Quarterly Review, in treating literature along with Adam Smith-ish political economy, created new horizons of literary expectation. Butler writes:

The Edgeworth family took both quarterlies, Scott wrote for both of them: between 1809 and 1914 Maria Edgeworth and Scott "turned" novels to documentation and social realism and into that discourse of contemporary history and social analysis to which the serious nineteenth-century novel belongs. Edgeworth's Ennui (1809) and The Absentee (1812), the best-received of her Irish tales, appeared at just the right time to win accolades from both quarterlies. Naturally so, for these tales mirror the qualites and contents of the higher journalism. Firmly grounded in the science of society, they are composed in vivid, accurately observed scenes that seem to invite selection as quotations — that is, virtually to anticipate a second career in the columns of either quarterly....[T]he nonfictional elements that make ... Edgeworth so newsworthy, so much at home in these periodicals devoted to the public scene, repeat themselves in Scott. Both novelists echo the quarterlies' commitment to social order and government.

So the journals in which literature was reviewed created a climate to which the writers responded. Writers, seeing their works treated in the context of social debate, came to see themselves as participants in that debate, and wrote accordingly.

2. As the nineteenth century rumbled along, many journals that reviewed literature became more specifically literary. That is, they became more interested in literature, and less interested in the broader issues of political economy that had formed the main concerns of the earlier journals. 1820 seems to be the watershed date: "An ordered separation between literature, especially poetry, and independent or reformist or scientific thinking was in train by 1820" writes Butler. She demonstrates this in many ways, but the most striking example for me was the change in the kinds of people who were profiled in biographical essays in the journals:

Reviews were getting professionally self-reflexive, in that articles and books on the lives and personalities of men and women of letters were filling the place once reserved for articles and books on statesmen and men of action.

What's interesting about all this to me, as I think about the migration of the poets into the English departments, is this: if, as Butler convincingly argues, the context in which literature is presented and discussed has an effect on the way writers see themselves, and the way they write, we can expect the academization of poets to have far-reaching consequences for poetry. The inclusion of poetry in a more general cultural discourse leads to certain results; and one imagines the limiting of poetry to specifically literary contexts — as has happened in our own time — will lead to very different results. I don't have anything like the scholarly data set required to make a proper statement about these consequences, but don't think for a moment that this is going to stop me from opining.

So what's our situation, exactly? Well, it is a situation where an unprecedented number of poets teach in English departments; and just as importantly, it is a situation in which poets publish, for the most part, in journals devoted only to literature. It is also a situation where poetry is reviewed and discussed primarily in literary journals. There are exceptions, of course, to this publishing situation. There are journals that place poetry and discussions of poetry alongside more general material (think of The New Yorker, say, or the Times Literary Supplement) but the percentage of published poems appearing in such venues is minimal. And what are the effects of this situation? Well, for starters, I'd offer these two:

1. Style über alles. If poets are affiliated with literary institutions such as English departments (as opposed to institutions of power, say, like the court of a Wyatt or a Spenser), it is the most specifically literary element of literature that we can expect to see at center stage. We can expect poets to claim prestige by stylistic affiliation, choosing either classic old-school forms or the newest-and-most-advanced forms as means of establishing cultural capital. You can just about hear the distant rumble of canon-fire from a battle between New Formalism and Language Poetry, can't you?

2. Sentimental politics rather than politics of a more hands-on variety. Academics tend to have pretty thought-out political opinions. But we don't tend to, you know, do much, except maybe cut a check to the Green Party and go to a demonstration near the campus cafeteria. I'm not against this, but it isn't the same thing as union organizing. I mean, there's a real difference between Charles Bernstein telling us "as a poet, you effect the public sphere with each reader, with the fact of the poem, and by exercising your prerogative to choose what collective forms you will legitimate" and Carl Sandburg (a poet of the poet-as-newspaperman era) working to organize for the Wisconsin Social Democratic Party, back when such organizing had very tangible consequences (like winning elections, or getting your head knocked in by a billy club).

I don't want to present our current situation as a kind of fall from grace. Nor do I mean to imply that we've reached the final state of things. In fact, Ron Silliman has pointed to two trends that seem to me to point toward the end of the era of the dominance of the poet-professor: the production of poets by the universities on a scale such that only a very small percentage of them can go back to the universities as professors; and the rise of the blogosphere as a venue for the publication and discussion of poetry.

It's too soon to say what these trends will mean. But it seems likely that the poet-professors, while not actually decreasing in numbers, will soon enough be overwhelmed by new breeds. And they (or, I should say, we) will stand agape, like a cluster of old genteel Yankees of the early twentieth-century gawking with incomprehension at the strangely-garbed crowds pouring through Ellis Island.

Between Baudelaire and the Catholic Left: An Open Letter to Ray Bianchi about César Vallejo

Ray Bianchi's got an interesting post up about César Vallejo, the great Peruvian poet, revolutionary, and denizen of Parisian bohemia (it was in his capacity as Parisian deminondaine character that Vallejo got his portrait sketched by Picasso, as seen to the left). Ray makes some good pints about the Andes as a cultural region (and he ought to know: he lived in Boliva) and mentions, with some frustration, the relative obscurity of Vallejo in the United States. Despite his less-bulky output, Vallejo ought to be the peer of Neruda, but comparatively few have read him. I confess to having been one of the ignorami until a few weeks ago, when Ray turned me on to Vallejo's work. By way, perhaps, of starting a bit of a dialogue, here's a letter I sent to Ray after reading Vallejo for the first time:

Hey Ray,

Just read Vallejo's first book, Los Heraldos Negros. I can see why you like him. I remember you writing,a propos our meeting about Celan, about how Celan didn't appeal to you, in part because of his rootlessness. On a first reading, I'd say that Los Heraldos Negros is a profoundly rooted book, even though it is by a man who is soon to go into a kind of exile.

What strikes me most is the strange combination two things: on the one hand, there's a strong, socially-concerned, Catholicism-and-Familia element to the poems; on the other hand there's an almost equally strong Baudelairian sense of the poet as accursed and isolated.

My touchstone poem for the first side of Vallejo is "El Pan Nuestro." I think James Wright really gets at what's important in this side of Vallejo when he writes:

"His home town was small and provincial, with an ancient and living tradition of large, affectionate families who were of necessity mobilized, as it were, against the physical and spiritual onslaughts of death in its ancient and modern forms: disease, undernourishment, and cold on one hand; the officials of the tungsten mines on the other..."

And for the late Baudelairian (or very late Byronic) sense of the poet (something akin to what Baudelaire gives us in his poem "The Albatross" -- do you know that one?) there's Vallejo's "Espergesia," with its refrain "Yo nací un día / que Dios estuvo enfermo."

Anyway, thanks for turning me on to Vallejo. I'm looking forward to reading the more surreal stuff from Trilce, and to what I'm told are the strongest poems, in Poemas Humanos.

All best,

Bob

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In other news, Michael Anania will be reading at Danny's in Chicago on the 21st. As the famous father of one of my former students would put it, "I pity the fool who misses this."