Adam Kirsch's Heidegger and Modern Poetry

"Sometimes," I recall my high school art teacher saying as he looked through my sketchbook, "it's by fucking up that we get the most interesting results." I never knew whether to take that as praise or as blame, and I don't know how Adam Kirsch would take what I'm about to say about his essay on Heidegger and modern poetry from the January issue of Poetry were he to read this. (Yeah, I'm just getting around to reading it — some of us are slow, okay?). But what I want to say is this: Kirsch has his Heidegger sideways, but I think his off-base reading of "The Origin of the Work of Art" takes him to some interesting places. "Fucking up" is, by the way, not really a fair way of describing Kirsch's piece, which isn't bad at all, despite the flattening-out of some of Heidegger's philosophical mountains — but those words from my art teacher are a touchstone of mine, and they do sort of bear on Kirsch's essay, which makes all of its headway out of what I take to be a misreading of Heidegger.

Kirsch's Heidegger

The most interesting thesis of Kirsch's essay, "The Taste of Silence," is that we could write an interesting history of poetry over the last century or so by examining it as a turn away from a poetry of the world and toward a poetry of the earth. Kirsch takes the terms "earth" and "world" from Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art," where, he tells us, they have very particular meanings. In Kirsch's view, Heidegger's term "earth" refers to "the sensuous reality of the non-human, which we tend to forget when we are engaged in practical tasks" while "world" refers to "the historical human context in which we work, suffer, and hope." Both of these are inevitably present in the work of art, but for Kirsch, the poet can align himself or herself with one or the other side of "the dichotomy of earth and world."

Where the poet lines up in terms of this dichotomy will have an effect on the nature of the poetry itself. "If the poet is primarily concerned with earth—with displaying particular being and concrete reality," says Kirsch, "he will tend to conceive of poetry as a passive art, concerned with perception and preservation. The ideal of such poetry is naming..." But if the poet is "more concerned with world—with the historical, mythic, and spiritual context that the poem creates or invokes—he will tend to see poetry as an active art, and in some sense even a domineering one." In this case, the poet "wants to interpret experience for the reader. He goes beyond names to commandments." In fact, his art "imposes an order" on reality.

A Journey from the World to the Earth

After laying down this précis of Heidegger, Kirsch applies it to the history of poetry since Modernism. "The Modernists," says Kirsch,

looked to poetry to re-establish a world, in the Heideggerian sense, at a time when the world they inherited had been shattered. Modernist poetry wants to ... projec[t] new coordinates of meaning and order. In Yeats's ghosts and gyres, in Pound's sages and tyrants, in Eliot's "idea of a Christian society," we find various attempts to create a world. Yet none of these worlds is authoritative enough ... to inaugurate a new cult and a new history. Instead, they remain—like Heidegger's own work, perhaps—expressions of longing for a lost world, and nostalgia for a time when poets had the power to make a new one.

After what Kirsch sees as the Modernist failure to establish, through poetry, a system of meanings and values, poets have turned from this world-making project to a poetry with more modest, less legislative ambitions, a poetry concerned with what Kirsch thinks of as Heidegger's earth:

Yet the failure of the poetry of world has not meant the end of Heidegger's influence. On the contrary, poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are deeply in his debt, directly and indirectly. That is because the decline of the poetry of world has meant the rise of the poetry of earth. This poetry—our poetry—prefers to imagine the artist not as a creator, but as a witness.

Judging from the examples Kirsch sites, I'd say the common thread of this poetry is its emphasis on a defamiliarization of the ordinary, material world (a great image from a Heaney poem about the "Scissor-and-slap abruptness of a latch./Its coldness to the thumb" is my favorite of these examples). And Kirsch really does seem to think that this is the common denominator of contemporary poetry after modernism — he calls it "our poetry" and claims that it extends across a range of poets "as different as Seamus Heaney, Charles Simic, and Billy Collins." That range — all the way from A to B, or possibly to C — may well give one pause. But more on that later.

Heidegger without Kirsch

I actually don't think we should give everything Kirsch says the chuck, but I've got to say that the ideas he presents don't really have much of a basis in Heidegger's essay. I mean, I don't know what they told Kirsch about Heidegger up at Harvard, but at the University of Manitoba we heard something different about "The Origin of the Work of Art." (Which is not to say that I nailed Heidegger on the first take: I remember how, years later, both Gerald Bruns and Krysztof Ziarek had to go upside my head with a copy of Sein und Zeit before things Heideggerian really began to gel for me).

In fact, I think the first thing hard-core Heidegger guys like Bruns and Ziarek would say to Kirsch is something along the lines of "Dichotomy of earth and world?!? Dichotomy?!? Dichotomy you say? Surely you don't mean dichotomy but dialectic! DIALECTIC, I SAY!" And yeah, they'd have a point: if a dichotomy involves (as my second-favorite dictionary of philosophy tells me) "the division of things into two basic parts that are regarded as fundamentally and/or irreducibly different," and a dialectic involves "the process by which a thought or an existing thing leads to or changes into its opposite," then Heidegger definitely sees the manifestation of earth and world in the work of art as having a dialectical relationship. But let's not start there. Let's start with what Heidegger means by earth and by world — because what he means by those terms is rather different than what Kirsch seems to think he means.

Check it out. Contra what Kirsch implies, when Heidegger writes about earth he isn't referring to, you know, physical stuff per se — not rocks, or trees, or door-latches. Instead, he's referring to the tendency of things to resist our ability to understand, or even to notice, them. There's a whole realm of the unknown and not-understood out there, and it surrounds and contains us, even makes up a great deal of our physical self and our psyche, and this is what Heidegger has in mind when he writes about the earth (yeah, I know, it's an odd term, but it plays into a whole series of extended metaphors in Heidegger's writings, so let's let it slide). There's a famous passage, in "On the Origin of the Work of Art," in which Heidegger talks about a Van Gogh painting depicting some old, worn-looking peasant shoes. He says that shoes like this are generally things we don't notice (as opposed, one imagines, to the sort of shoes you'd buy here) — we wear them and use them as equipment, for their instrumental value, and we tend not to notice them when we do. Shoes like this, when they're actually worn, "belon[g] to the earth" says Heidegger — and they belong their not so much because they are material objects, but because they go unnoticed and un-thought-of. But we notice them in Van Gogh's painting, where they become part of something more. Here, in the painting, they get noticed or, in the standard translation of Heidegger, become "unconcealed." It's the concealedness of the shoes before they get into the painting, when they're just something around us that we don't notice, that makes them belong to the earth. The earth and the things that belong to it are self-concealing, and withdrawn from our attention and understanding.

But what about the world, in Heidegger's sense? Yeah. Okay. So it's like this. The world, for Heidegger, is the context in which and through which we apprehend, understand, or notice things — it's where things become (to use the Heideggerian term) "unconcealed." I mean, Kirsch is sort of semi-right when he says that world consists of "the historical and the mythic," but it's broader than that, and the important thing here is the fact that things like history and myth make us aware of things, they unconceal them. History, myth, etc. give us a way of noticing things, talking about them and feeling their presence. Heidegger's "world" is sort of like what a later generation would call "discourse" — the systems of thought and representation that let us notice things. As an example, let me mention how I had a pretty visceral experience of entering a different world than my habitual one when I started taking long bike rides through the woods with colleagues from the biology department — after a few months, my sense of my environment went from one where I noticed only greenery and bugs to one where I could tell my myriapods from my bryozoans. Well, on a good day I could. Anyway, you get the point: the world I'd entered, or that the bio boys led me to, made a whole lot more of the earth apparent to me. But maybe this is misleading, since it seems to imply that the earth is all a matter of material, ecosystemic stuff for Heidegger, which it isn't. I imagine that if I were to hang with my musicologist pal some more, and enter his world a bit, I would become more aware of sound patterns. That is, it would make non-biological, non-material stuff come out of earthly concealment into the unconcealment of the world. I mean, it's important not to think of the earth here as material stuff, but rather as that-which-we-don't-notice-or-understand, or that-which-conceals-itself-from-us (although that last phrase, which is closer to Heidegger's, gives the earth a weird kind of agency). This is really where Kirsch's essay distorts things most. Anyway, you get the idea, right? What? Move on, you say? Right.

So anyway, about that whole 'the relation of earth and world in Heidegger is a dialectic not a dichotomy' thing. It's true! That is, in the work of art, earth and world are always involved in a kind of struggle. If a work of art were pure world, it wouldn't be art, it'd be propaganda, or ideology: a closed system of mental coordinates that never come into contact with anything that resists it. It'd be sort of Orwellian. But the art work doesn't allow anything so easy to happen. Even as it starts to open up a whole world (or discourse, or paradigm, or way of understanding) for us, it gives us elements that resist appropriation into that world. If the work of art in question is, say, a poem, we might say that it resists paraphrase, or closure; or that parts of it remain indeterminate; or that it shoots off so many connotations that we're uneasy reducing it to a denotative meaning. Any attempt to make the art work into mere world runs up against all kinds of elements that escape that world. Robert B. Stulberg put it this way in a fantastic little article in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism back in 1973:

In the calm self-repose of the work, the world and the earth are engaged in a struggle, a struggle in which each 'opponent' attempts to assert its own self in the art work. The earth — the concealing and self-closing realm — tries to draw the world into itself. The world — the open and unhidden realm — tries to surmount the hidden earth... Heidegger ... explains that the struggle is never entirely resolved in the work of art...

Earth and world oppose one another, but they also need one another. You wouldn't exist as a conscious entity without some kind of world, or paradigm; and a work of art wouldn't function without proposing one, however partially and provisionally. At the same time, no world is absolute, no world exhausts the possibilities of earth. I mean, think like Bakhtin for a moment and it all becomes clearer — for Bakhtin, no one kind of language reveals all of the truth, in fact, each conceals a certain part of it (medical language gets at the truth of your body, but not of your personality, say; legal language gets at the truth of your rights in a given society, but not at much else). Or maybe the better analogy is with Wittgenstein, and his famous statement "the limits of my language are the limits of my world." For Heidegger, all worlds are limited, all conceal even as they reveal. And I think it's the failure to emphasize this part of Heidegger's thinking that leads Kirsch to some suspect statements about Modernism.

Meeting the Moderns

Hey. You must really be into this whole Heidegger deal if you're still with me. Either that, or you bear Adam Kirsch some strange animus, and are looking for me to really lay into him (you're out of luck if that's the case: I'm going to wheel this essay around in the next section and claim that, despite his somewhat dodgy take on Heidegger, Kirsch makes an intriguing, and quite probably true, point about contemporary poetry).

Anyway. Kirsch's take on the Modernists is that they are drawn to the idea of world-creation, to projecting systems of values and to the "domineering" act of forging "new coordinates of meaning and order." This, I have to say, I don't quite get. At least not in most cases. Kirsch argues that the Modernists wanted to present worlds in the sense of thrusting domineering, totalizing systems of knowledge upon us, but that they somehow failed to make these things come together. But come on. It isn't like Eliot wanted to say that there was a single key to all mythologies — if he did, he'd have written a book like Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance, not a deliberately fragmentary poem that riffs on that book, and refuses to settle into a smooth whole. In fact, Eliot's The Waste Land seems much more like Heidegger's idea of the work of art as a place where a world starts to open up for us, but then falls away into concealment and unmeaning. Kirsch might have a point when it comes to Pound, who seems to have wanted The Cantos to cohere into a kind of ideology, and who's confession near the end of the poem that he couldn't "make it cohere" sounds like an admission of failure. But this failure to create a coherent world wouldn't be a failure from a Heideggerian perspective: it would simply be an example of the work of art doing what it does, and ought to do: bringing world (or unconcealedness) into relation with earth (or concealedness).

[Would it be muddying these already murky waters to point out that William Carlos Williams, with his "no ideas but in things" poetic, is a Modernist who doesn't try to project value systems so much as he tries to focus our attention on material things — thus making him a poet of "earth" in Kirsch's sense, though not necessarily in Heidegger's? Yeah, you're right, it probably would. So I won't mention it. Right, then. Moving on.]

Kirsch without Heidegger

So okay. Kirsch's take on Heidegger is a bit sketchy: his notion of earth being out of whack with Heidegger's, and his sense of the relation of earth and world being different from that proposed by Heidegger, too. But let's set all that aside. I mean, does an idea really need a pedigree to be taken seriously? There's one element of Kirsch's essay I want to take seriously: his proposal that poets have become reticent about projecting "coordinates of meaning and order." I think there's something to this. I don't want to propose that "our poetry believes" that we shouldn't project coordinates of meaning. That would be a generalization (even a totalization). I mean, is this really universal? I'd say it's just prevalent. There's also a reification in Kirsch's statement ("our poetry" is an abstraction and doesn't believe anything, it's poets who believe things). I'm skittish around both the totalization and the reification, but I do think Kirsch is on to something. There are plenty of poets who do what Kirsch says "our poetry" does: they "witness" (Kirsch's word) "the sensuous reality of the non-human" things of the world, and draw our attention to them, without aiming to issue "commandments" about how we should judge, interpret, and value these things.

In fact, if we move beyond the excruciatingly narrow range of poets Kirsch discusses, we find a related phenomenon among writers of more experimental verse. Take a guy like Jeremy Prynne. He's certainly not a no-ideas-but-in-things poet, who defamiliarizes the common objects of the world for us as a way of avoiding making Big Totalizing Statements and Proposing A Dominant Ideology. But he's got a goal quite similar to poets who take that path: he's all about avoiding the kind of world-projecting, or ideology-creating that Kirsch writes about. In the polydiscursive poetry of his early period, for example, he's all about showing the limits of any particular kind of language, or ideology, or world-projection. As N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge put it in Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne, "Prynne would want a poetry neither useful to some manipulative power, nor providing musical accompaniment to a commodifying culture," and he structures his poems accordingly. In Heidegger's terms, there's a whole lot of earthly concealment going on in them, and a lot of undoing of worldly unconcealments. Prynne makes a big deal out of the idea of "rubbish" — the sort of thing we don't notice, and have no use for, and would like to exclude from our worlds. For him,

Rubbish is
pertinent; essential; the
most intricate presence in
our entire culture

(from "L'Extase de M. Poher" — the spacing is quite different in the original, but my html skills are weak, people, weak)

That is, he finds the idea of the excluded and unnoticed and unused important, because it points to the limitations of our systems of meaning. Rubbish is, by definition, something that we discard and don't want to think about. It highlights the limits of our world.

Okay. So I don't have any more empirical evidence than Kirsch does, but I do sense from my general rooting-around-in-poetry that the reticence about proposing systems of value that Kirsch sees among his range of poets exists; and my sense is that, in different ways, this reticence is shared by many members of an experimental writing community that seems to lie outside of Kirsch's range of knowledge, or maybe just outside his range of sympathy. But if this is indeed the case, one might well wonder, you know, why? Why don't many poets want to do that Dante thing and lay down The Authoritative Values of Our Culture in Unambiguous Four-Part Allegory? Ah! I think I have it! And I think I can break it down in a a single paragraph! (Well, in a provisional kind of way — the confidence is not so much me as it is the coffee. Can you tell that I've been writing this while working my way through a giant carafe of Intelligentsia Panamanian El Machete Fair Trade Goodness?).

The Culture of Critical Discourse

Yeah. So it's like this (in a provisional, non-totalizing, probably-part-of-the-answer way): much contemporary poetry, both of the Nobel-and-U.S-laureate type Kirsch describes and the freaky-experimental school I mentioned, eschews the projection of authoritative coordinates of meaning because of... (drumroll, please, Anton) ...their embrace of the Culture of Critical Discourse! [insert wild applause here]. And what's that, you ask? Ah! It's all laid down by the late, great Alvin Gouldner, sociologist-of-intellectuals extraordinaire. In The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, Gouldner argues that a common characteristic of virtually all contemporary intellectuals is their commitment to the Culture of Critical Discourse (or CCD, as he always abbreviates it). The CCD is pretty much what it sounds like: a set of received assumptions about the nature of truth; specifically, assumptions about how truth isn't a matter of authoritative revelation, but a matter an open-ended inquiry. If we buy into the CCD (and the contemporary educational system, especially at the university level, is all about the CCD), we don't expect truth to be something that can be set down once and for all. We expect truth-claims to always be subject to questioning, and we expect that our paradigms will probably have to change as new evidence comes in from our investigations. To paraphrase The Dude in The Big Lebowski, we expect new shit to come to light. Poets, as a subset of the class of intellectuals, just don't have faith in the idea of truth being something one can set down once and for all any more (there may be exceptions, but they'd be outliers, from areas of our culture beyond the mainstream. I suppose there may be poets out there belonging to one or another of the fundamentalist movements who think that the coordinates of meaning can and should be set down once and for all, but they are eccentric with regard to the dominant poetic culture of our society, which is heavily conditioned by the CCD). So, don't expect any Dantes, at least not Dantes with an MFA. People coming out of a sympathetic identification with university culture (long may it wave) just aren't likely to believe they can set down everlasting systems of value.

Oh, and Don't Miss This!

If you're in Chicago on August 22nd, and have recovered from my turgid prose, check out The Printer's Ball at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Tout le monde of Chicago poetry will be there, and the good people from Beard of Bees Press promise no one will be hurt this time when they fire up the Gnoetry Poetry Machine.

Archambeau World Tour August 2008

The annual Art & Craft Northwestern Summer Writers' Conference kicks off in a few weeks, and I'll be sullying a schedule that includes S.L. Wisenberg, Susan Harris, Rosellen Brown, Simone Muench and Ed Roberson. I'll be on an August 14th panel about writers and the internet with Wisenberg and others. Expect a groggy Archambeau, though: it'll be at 9:00 in the morning, around the time I'm usually fumbling with the coffee pot and bumping into things.

I was there for the '06 conference, and was supposed to be there last year, but took a tumble on the bike trail and couldn't make it. Since this year's iteration of my bike crowd's 50-miler is tomorrow, I'll probably be able to recover from my inevitable humiliation and low-grade injuries in time to make the gig at Northwestern.

Innovation as Supreme Value?

The zeitgeist is nothing if not promiscuous, and apparently she's been two-timing me with Ron Silliman, whose post today has to do with continuity and change in poetry. I'd been tapping away at my laptop about how there are continuities and samenesses within poetry, which we tend not to notice in our quest to define newness, change, and different schools of writing (if you want to check it out, and have some semi-serious time on your hands, see the post just prior to this one).

Today, Ron weighs in, and I honestly can't tell from what he's written whether we're mostly in agreement, or mostly not. Consider this, his general thesis:

The history of poetry is the history of change in poetry, an account not of best works, but of shifts in direction, new devices, new forms, as Williams once put it, “as additions to nature.” The cruder writing & rougher edges of the first to do X, whatever it might be, invariably are preferable.

For Ron, innovation is what gets noticed and recorded. Poets may come along in the wake of an innovator and actually do more refined work in the new idiom than the innovator did, but these people don't get a place in history: history, in this view, is reserved for the inventors. In some sense, I think Ron and I are in agreement: we both believe that this is how the history of poetry (and, indeed, the history of any art) gets written nowadays. What I can't tell is whether Ron thinks this is a good thing. In fact, he seems to argue both that it is and that it isn't.

For the record, I think that the story of change and difference, while sexy, is only half the story, and if we're interested in really understanding the course of poetic history, we have to look for both change and continuity, both similarity and difference. As for Ron, it's hard to say. There are moments when he seems to celebrate history-as-the-story-of-invention-and-difference. Here, for example, when he's thinking about the recent Zukofsky blow-out, he even seems to gloat a bit about history celebrating newness:

Does anyone think you could fill up an auditorium at Columbia for a weekend, for example, to celebrate the centenary of Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, Robert Francis or Richard Eberhart, the SoQ poets closest in age to Louis Zukofsky?

I think the emotional content of this is something like "Woooh-hah! No one reads you no more, Eberhardt! Suck one, fool! My team beat your team till you all cried like little crying crybabies, so go cry, why don't you! History celebrates the winners! Nyaaaaaaaah!" Well, okay, maybe it's just a little like that. But there's certainly a sense that history is right to celebrate the new, rather than any other quality.

Then again, there are also moments when Ron seems to think it's sad that the dominant way we write aesthetic history — by emphasizing newness — winnows things down so much, and puts too much pressure on people to try to force innovation. "[O]ne could argue that the visual arts world," says Ron, "at least in New York & London, has become self-trivializing by thrusting change into warp drive because of the market needs of the gallery system." When he talks about poetry (where the lack of a big-money incentive insulates us from some of the art-world pressures), Ron also seems to see this "history is the story of changes" as problematic. Here, for example, Silliman laments the disappearance of Ron Loewinsohn from the historical record:

In The New American Poetry, Ron Loewinsohn – just 23 when the book was first published – demonstrated an uncanny ability to channel the style of William Carlos Williams.... Yet Against the Silences to Come, Loewinsohn’s 1965 chapbook from Four Seasons Foundation, arguably is the best work ever written “in the Williams mode” of stepped free verse. Who (but me) celebrates that?

So on the one hand, Ron revels in the idea of innovation as the main criterion for inclusion in the history of poetry. On the other hand, he sees how this can create a limited view of the shape of poetic history, a view that can make us blind to many fine books of poetry (I, for example, had never read Loewinsohn's book, and I'm going internet-up a copy ASAP) (for all of my disagreements with Ron, I've got to say, I'm glad he's got his particular form of erudition).

In the end, I think the reason I can't pin Ron down is that he's feeling contradictory things, as we all do at times. Since I'm feeling Manichean this morning, I'll lay down the following theory: Bad Ron likes the idea that history selects on the criterion of newness, because it makes all of the investments he made in innovation pay off. But Good Ron is less selfish, and more generous: Good Ron loves the celebration of Zukovfky, but laments the invisibility of Loewinsohn's Against the Silences to Come.

Us as Them, Now as Then: Sameness and Continuity in the Poetic Field

Gather round, boys and girls, and I'll tell you a tale of a long-ago magical time known as the Clinton Administration. Back in those charmed days of peace and prosperity, some of the good people of the land attended grad school, where they learned that we were to understand people in terms of otherness, and time in terms of discontinuity. Their professors taught them the gospel of otherness from yellowed texts written by a great, brow-furrowing, ancient wizard named Lacan; and from the yellowed texts of a great, bald-domed ancient wizard named Foucault they were taught the gospel of historical rupture and discontinuity. And happily romped the grad students in the sunny fields. All, that is, except one, a grumbling malcontent (let's call him me), who loved the wizardly teachings, but (forgive him, reader, he'd been reading Hegel) felt that the opposite ideas might also be a part of the truth. Snarl churlishly, did he, in seminar rooms; mutter uncharitably, did he, in the coffee shop; badmouth, did he, his kindly profs, who tolerated his general orneriness due to the mild kindness of their dispositions, with nary an eye-roll evident. Verily (ish). And so did pass the breezy days in the checkered shade of academe's quadrangles, until a great curse fell upon the land in the person of Dick Cheney. But of that sad tale we speaketh not.

Instead, we fast-forward to the dying days of Cheney's baleful reign, to test the grumbler's hypothesis that sameness and continuity are forces as strong as those of otherness and discontinuity. Let's start by checking in with the poets, tapping away into their laptops and eying one another across the coffee-joints and faculty lounges of the land. And it is with suspicion that they eye each other, oh doe-eyed and innocent reader (What's that? You're not doe-eyed? Not even one of you? And you lost your innocence when? Jesus, really? Ah, well, okay. Anyway). Where were we? Oh, right. The suspicion with which the poets eyeball one another. Okay. So consider these, the words of Mark Halliday, in his recent hatchet-job review of Joshua Clover's book of poems The Totality for Kids (he lays into Clover for pretension and twitchy insecurity, although to criticize a guy who writes rock criticism for the Village Voice for these qualities is like criticizing Los Angeles for the lousy traffic — of course it's true, but if you're going to get to what's valuable, you'll have to get past all that). After taking apart a few of Clover's poems in excruciating detail, Halliday says:

Will Clover or his admirers respond to my review? Probably not, though they blog constantly. Why should they respond? I'm on the other team (the lyrical and/or narrative mainstreamy team). We grant tenure to our players, they grant tenure to theirs; mostly we avoid shootouts.

There you go. The suspicion in the poets' eyes seems to come from a sense that poets play on two different teams, call them what you will (the prominent poet-blogger in the front row has raised his hand, I see, to suggest "School of Quietude" and "Post-Avant"). Otherness is rampant on what passes for Parnassus! And, as the generally reliable Al Filreis argued out in a semi-recent blog post, the lines of battle have been drawn for some time:

Robert Creeley wrote the preface to Paul Blackburn’s Against the Silences. Creeley there counted Blackburn as among those who starting in the late 1940s had hopes for poetry and felt “the same anger at what we considered its slack misuses.” Thus Creeley implicitly interprets Blackburn’s title phrase: this is a new poetry written against the quietude (to use that apt Sillimanian phrase) that Creeley and Blackburn, among others, associated with poetics that we can now describe as between modernism and postmodernism. I especially like the dating of Creeley’s realization: the late 1940s.

Okay, clarity-and-context wise it isn't quite up to Filreis' general standards, but you get the gist: the Big Division of Poetic Otherness between the School of Quietude and the Post-Avant (and that pre-Post-Avant phenom, Blackburn and Creeley's New American Poetry) is well established.

But this got the grumbly believer in the-truth-of-sameness equaling the-truth-of-otherness (let's call him me) thinking. I mean, when you compare what Paul Blackburn thought about the role of poetry in society to, say, what a representative of the square poetry community of the mid-twentieth-century thought, you actually find more continuity than difference. Sure, there's variability within the poetic field, but in the broader field of culture, the whole sub-field of poetry is actually pretty small, and pretty coherent. No matter how hot the debates may get, the two warring parties are in the end much more similar than they are different (make your own analogy to the American two-party political system here, if you like).

Check it out. Here are a few lines from Paul Blackburn's "Statement," a kind of declaration of ethos and poetics he wrote in 1954 (you can find the whole text up in an old issue of Jacket, where the line breaks and indentations are preserved better than I preserve them here, html-challenged creature that I am):

Personally, I affirm two things:
the possibility of warmth & contact
in the human relationship :
as juxtaposed against the materialistic pig of a technological world,
where relationships are only ‘useful’ i.e., exploited, either
psychologically or materially.

2nd, the possibility of s o n g
within that world

And then, later, this:

...if a man could sing the poems his poets write

— and could understand them — and if

the poets would sing something from their guts, rather than
the queasy contents of same,
then that man would stand a better
chance, of being a whole man, than
him who stands or sits and says but ‘Yes’ all day.

Enough man to stand where it is necessary to take a stand.

So okay. For Blackburn, the big problem of our time is instrumentalism, the reduction of everything to utilitarian concerns, or to a calculation of gain. Everything, including human relationships and human beings, gets reduced to its usefulness in a big, technocratic scheme. You know the nightmare he's talking about: something like the situation diagnosed in Dialectic of Enlightenment or One Dimensional Man, or embodied in, say, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And poetry's role is to help save us from that nightmare: instead of reducing us to our value as money-making machines, it cultivates the "whole man" (pardon Blackburn's sexist language, won't you? It was the fifties). And this cultivation of our whole character actually helps give us some ballast against the immoral, or amoral, imperatives of the big technocratic scheme, giving us the fiber to "take a stand" rather than bend, yes-man-style, to whatever wind blows from the direction of Power.

Not a bad role for poetry, eh? I mean, the view really honors the art, and makes big claims for it — it certainly seems more important than mere decor. It's oppositional, dammit! I mean: Woo! Yeah! Long may the counter-culture's mangy flag fly! And screw those squares in their uptight, formalist ivory towers, right? All they cared about back when Blackburn was laying down this righteous line was formal irony and the affective fallacy, right? Right. Except, you know, no.

Let's check it out by comparing Blackburn to the godfather of the New Criticism himself, I.A. Richards, when he talks about poetry's role in society. The presentation is more button-down collar than unbuttoned work shirt, but the points he makes are, in the end, strikingly similar to Blackburn's. Richards’ thinking involves a kind of theory of the balancing of opposed drives in the experience of art. Aesthetic experience tempers what Richards calls emotional belief with intellectual belief. Without such tempering, says Richards, we would behave as primitives, indulging self-interest and bending truth to fit our desires. This passage from Practical Criticism is as compact a statement of the kind as I can find:

In primitive man ... any idea which opens a ready outlet to emotion or points to a line of action in conformity with custom is quickly believed.... Given a need (whether conscious as a desire) or not, any idea which can be taken as a step on the way to its fulfillment is accepted... This acceptance, this use of the idea — by our interests, our desires, feelings, attitudes, tendencies to action and what not — is emotional belief.

Without a balancing of intellect and emotion, we’re left with little more than a crude will to power, and we end up treating the world as means to our own ends, or self-advancement. We end up becoming a part of what Blackburn called "the materialistic pig of a technological world, where relationships are only ‘useful.’"

By contrast, the aesthetic experience, for Richards, harmonizes our conflicting interests. The results are very much like what Blackburn seemed to have in mind when he described poetry as engaging the "whole man," since an engagement of a broader spectrum of our urges and impulses moves us toward a balanced subjectivity: “the equilibrium of opposed impulses” in “aesthetic responses,” writes Richards in Principles of Literary Criticism, “brings into play far more of our personality than is possible in experiences of a more defined emotion.” Our appreciation of the world becomes broader than it would have been had we made our perception and thought instrumental to self-interest, because “more facets of the mind are exposed and, what is the same thing, more aspects of things are able to affect us.” Moreover, Richards envisions this process as leading us past our own primitive urges to reduce everything to a means to our ends: "since more of our personality is engaged the independence and individuality of other things becomes greater," he says in Principles of Literary Criticism. "We seem to see ‘all round’ them, to see them as they really are; we see them apart from any one particular interest which they may have for us. Of course without some interest, we should not see them at all, but the less any one particular interest is indispensable, the more detached our attitude becomes. And to say that we are impersonal is merely a curious way of saying that our personality is more completely involved."

So there ya go. Someone like Richards and someone like Blackburn may be at different ends of the poetic field, but that field itself has a lot of coherence, and people who occupy different camps within the field end up offering a fundamentally similar view of poetry's position vis-a-vis society: for Richards as for Blackburn, poetry is a corrective to the instrumentalizing bias of modern society; a corrective that works by cultivating the whole personality and teaching us to see beyond instrumental ends.

And that's my argument for Sameness. But wait! No! Don't file out of the ponderous professor's lecture hall just yet! I know the seats are uncomfortable, but I haven't delivered my Peroration Concerning the Continuity of the Poetic Field over Time! Let me just dust off these lecture notes, and see if I can adjust the (admittedly feeble) air conditioning. Ah. Much better, and thank you, Igor, for wiping my brow with that moist towelette. Now where were we? Oh yeah. Continuity. Well, since most of you seem to have snuck out under cover of Igor's towelette intervention, I'll keep it brief. My point is this: the position held in common by Blackburn and Richards in the middle of the 20th century was already a well-established one, dating back at least to the Romantic period. I mean, check out what Schiller had to say about poetry's place in society, way back when he wrote Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in the 1790s.

Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man gives us a theory of a two-sided human nature. The first part of our nature consists of what Schiller calls the stofftrieb, a kind of sense-oriented self-interest, a collection of appetites and desires. The second part of our nature is the formtrieb, something like our reason, but more specific: it is our drive to impose order on our experience, to create moral and conceptual systems. Neither of these parts of our nature should be allowed to dominate the other, lest we become imbalanced creatures. An excess of stofftrieb would either reduce us to mere appetites (think of Charles Dickens’ image of the industrial workers of Hard Times as nothing but hands and stomachs), or turn us into monsters of self-interest, exerting a Nietzschean will to power over our rivals. For a creature of stofftrieb things exist “only insofar as it secures existence for him; what neither gives to him nor takes from him, is to him simply not there.” The inverse situation, in which we have an excess of formtrieb without sufficient stofftrieb, is no better. Without an appreciation for the senses and the particularities of the material world, the man of formtrieb becomes “a stranger in the material world.” Worshipping only his abstract system, he will be a figure as disconnected from quotidian existence as the scientists of Laputa in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

For Schiller, we can finally become fully integrated creatures, in whom both urges are fully developed and fully reconciled. But we are capable of such a reconciliation only through the cultivation of a third drive, the spieltreib or play instinct. Man is “only Man when he is playing,” writes Schiller (forgive him his sexist language, oh reader, it was the 1790s), because it is only play that allows for a full recognition and engagement of both the senses and the urge for rules and order. The whole person is recognized and fulfilled in play. And play is most fully available to us through art and poetry, because the “cultivation of beauty” will “unite within itself” the “two contradictory qualities” of our nature. Blackburn's "whole man" comes from a long tradition of people influenced by Schiller, and Richards' ideas are even more rooted in this: he summarized Schiller in his early Principles of Aesthetics.

So sure, okay, poetry is divided into camps. And poetry changes over time. But in all our emphasis on different teams, and micro-evolutions of styles, maybe we should take a break and check out how samenesses exist, and continuities endure. And maybe I should head outside and knock back a cold one. All formtreib and no stofftrieb makes Archambeau a dull guy. And thirsty, too.

Fit Audience Though Few: Cambridge Poetry and its Readers

Back from Paris, where I was at a fabulous, compact conference on poetry and "the public/private divide" at the Sorbonne. There were too many excellent papers to discuss — Daniel Szabo on R.S. Thomas, Marc Porée on several British women poets, and (the best of the lot, I thought) Helen Goethals on the effect of the growth of newspapers on the discursive place of poetry in the eighteenth century. I missed Stephen Romer's reading, but in the first of two odd bits of delayed serendipity I found a solid discussion of his new book in the TLS I'd brought along for the flight home. If I'm being totally honest, though, I've got to say the real highlight happened on the flight from Chicago to my layover in Amsterdam, when through some capricious gift of the gods, I was seated next to the great jazz drummer Hamid Drake, who set me straight about Sun Ra, Eddie Harris, and Kurt Elling. He knows a thing or two about poetry, too — and as I should have expected from an adventurous improvisatory musician, he's sympathetic to the avant side of things. He was also on his way to work with Amiri Baraka as part of a European tour.

My own presentation at the Sorbonne went well enough, I thought, although when it comes to poetry events I always seem to end up as either the squarest guy in a room of hip experimental types (as happened a week or two ago when I read with Adam Fieled, Steve Halle and Laura Goldstein), or the most out-there guy in a room full of respectable types. The Sorbonne event was one of the latter, really: in a room where the most admired poets were clearly Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, and Gerard Manley Hopkins (all of whom I admire) I was there to talk about Jeremy Prynne, and the debate between John Wilkinson and Peter Riley regarding Cambridge School British experimental poetry. But the audience seemed both knowledgeable and receptive, and asked good questions. One of the questions, coming from a Cambridge academic (though not a Cambridge School poetry-type) concerned what she tactfully referred to as "the presumably small, largely academic audience" for the kind of work produced by Prynne, Wilkinson, and company. I muttered something about how the work deliberately set out to demand an active engagement from an audience. But in the second bit of delayed serendipity on this trip, I found a much better articulation of the position I was trying to outline lying in my email inbox on my return. It came from a conversation Cambridge poet Keston Sutherland was having with the publisher Chris Hamilton-Emery on the Britpo discussion list. Replying to Chris' claim that the mystique of the Prynne persona plays into his reception, Keston lays down a pretty radical position about experimental poetry's readership. Check it out:

Hi Chris,

I suppose that's probably true, but before I went along with it I'd want to distinguish between readers and consumers. It must assuredly be true that lots of people have bought Prynne's books because they think he's a weird or fascinating figure, and I'm sure the great majority of those consumers do take a look inside and maybe get to the end once or even twice. I don't think I'm disparaging that use of the object if I say that for Prynne at least it wouldn't amount to "reading" the book, just as it wouldn't amount to knowing, or looking closely at, a painting if I just lingered in front of it at the National Gallery for a minute or two. On Prynne's terms, at least, and perhaps they are not uncommon among members of this list, being a reader of poetry means engaging closely and carefully with it, staking an intimacy on the work of interpretation, in some way perhaps even needing that intimacy or submitting to it as a sort of definition of oneself, or the component of a definition. Some poetry demands and makes possible that sort of intimacy more than other poetry. A lot of poetry would seem hardly to care about it at all, just as a lot of poetry is so infatuated with the rubric of it that it ends up as little besides an advert for the experience it imagines it creates.

Anyhow, I think this consumer/reader distinction is a useful one to keep in mind, though I'm sensible of its liability to be used invidiously and dismissively, because otherwise we might fall to thinking that, simply put, sales = culture. A lot of consumers of books are not readers. Naturally as a bookseller you have to be concerned with consumers, but I imagine most poets (I leave out the Andrew Motions and other ditzy glamour models of Oxford etc) are more interested in readers, even to the no doubt partly pathological extent that they'd prefer three readers to a hundred consumers. For that, they get called "elitist".

As Brecht said, popularity is not very popular any more.

K

I don't think you could get a clearer statement of the kind of relationship between text and reader that poetry like Prynne's (or, from what I've seen of it, like Sutherland's) solicits. There's a real sense in which these guys are inheritors of the position Milton takes around the middle of Paradise Lost, when he re-invokes his muse, Urania, saying:

I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visitest my slumbers nightly, or when morn
Purples the east: still govern thou my song
Urania, and fit audience find, though few...

I mean, the Cambridge crew shares with Milton the sense of opposition to the "evil days" they live in, and the "evil tongues" of public discourse, as well as a commitment to an audience of very devoted readers, rather than a broader, more casually interested readership.

This notion of audience is connected to the two things I like most about Cambridge School poetry: the seriousness of it, and the utter lack of respect for established criteria of success (book sales, awards of big-money prizes, etc). Then again, it's also connected to the thing I've found least appealing in my (mere) year or so of rooting around in Cambridge poetry: the narrowness of it. Don't get me wrong: there's breadth of a meaningful kind — Prynne himself seems to be remarkably polymath. But if a true, meaningful engagement with a book means allowing it to define who you are, then you really are going to have to limit yourself to a very few key books (or you'd end up like a guy who used to come into the old Aspidistra Bookshop where I worked when I was a student in Chicago — he'd come in most weekends, sidle up to an attractive young woman, and, no matter what book she was looking at — Siddhartha or The South Beach Diet — lean over louchely and declare "that book changed my life...").

I don't mean to say that this kind of focus on a few key texts, or on a certain set of concerns, is bad or wrong: just that it doesn't appeal to me as a way of experiencing poetry. I'm not one of those guys "needing that intimacy or submitting to it as a sort of definition of oneself." I'm sure there's a lot to be said for it, and the distinction Sutherland draws between this kind of reader and a "consumer" hints at how being this sort of obsessive can keep one from being blown hither and yon by the winds generated by the infernal machines of marketing and consumption.

But Sutherland's use of the word "submitting" is also important, and it reminds me of something from Alan Shapiro's memoir The Last Happy Occasion, where he describes his own time spent "submitting" to the works of a poet very different from Jeremy Prynne, the formalist Yvor Winters. There was a tendency on the part of some of Winters' students at Stanford to turn to his ethical and formal ideas with something like fanaticism gleaming in their eyes, and they certainly focused on a few key texts as the only tradition worthy of their attention (it was contained in Winters' little anthology Quest for Reality). Alan Shapiro wrote about the prevalence of the phenomenon in the 1970s, after Winters' death, and he makes an explicit comparison with religious extremism. Shapiro recalls one episode from his grad school years in particular, when he was being berated by an old friend who had converted to Hasidism. “I listened with superior, somewhat contemptuous amusement,” he writes, “for I too (though I didn’t recognize it then) was a true believer, and the faith I clung to… had its sacred doctrine, replete with clear and definitive prescriptions.” While Shapiro’s friend had turned to Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Lubavitcher movement, as his spiritual leader, “mine,” said Shapiro, “was Yvor Winters.”

I'm sure that from where Sutherland sits my own kind of eclectic reading looks as shallow, magpie-ish, promiscuous and consumeristic as it probably is. And while I enjoy reading Prynne, and have found the time I've spent with his work, and the secondary writing around it, important — sometimes profoundly so — I'm never going to have the focus on him that Sutherland does. I'm not capable, in my intellectual life, of the kind of devoted submission required by a Winters or a Schneerson, and I kind of get the feeling that Keston Sutherland's Menachem Mendel Schneerson is Jeremy Prynne.

El Kafka Sutra

Sé qué usted es pensamiento. Usted es preguntándose cuando "El Kafka Sutra" estará disponible en Español. Pregúntese no más, el amigo - gracias a los esfuerzos de la buena gente en Mexico, Ácido: La Revisita publicado una traducción Español. Pero qué si no en México ¿consigue una copia? usted pide. Afortunadamente, el texto está disponible en en internet en Español!

Tengo gusto de Ácido, que (en la versión impresa) se ilustra maravillosamente. También tengo gusto de cómo describen el &NOW como un "movimiento," qué sonidos muy emocionantes. Y tengo gusto especialmente de cómo me describen: "maestro de poesía contemporánea en el Lake Forest College de Chicago": Maestro! Olé!

Apologies, by the way, to anyone appalled by what I'm sure is only semi-fluent Spanish on my part. Soy solamente un pinche gringo, after all...

Two New Poems

As I forge my way forward through the second-last of the big writing assignments I took on for the summer, I thought I'd post links to a couple of poems of mine that are up online. Consider them further proof that I haven't been chased into the wilderness by a bear, struck by lightening, beaten at chess by a 12-year old and therefore been driven into a silent depression, or otherwise been rendered incapable of blogging.

The first piece, which was written for a musical collaboration that's still in the works, is called "Manifest Destinies, Black Rains", and is up (beta-style) at Zach Barocas' The Cultural Society, which will officially unleash a new issue soon. This is a kind of splicing-of-found-texts piece, something I've been keen on ever since "Citation Suite", my first chapbook from Wild Honey, published by the great Randolph Healy about a thousand years ago. In a semi-direct way I suppose it contains (for what it's worth), what I have to say about America projecting its power across the Pacific. Yeah. So uh, expect major changes in foreign policy soon.

The other newly-public piece is called "Letter to Albert Goldbarth", and is up at Adam Fieled's P.F.S. Post. It's a kind of writing-through a poem from his Budget Travel Through Space and Time, and I really did send it to Albert as a letter (an actual, paper letter: the man doesn't do email). I think it works without any knowledge of the original poem upon which it riffs, but I'm in no position to be the judge of that, really. Anyway, it's been lying in a drawer (or, rather, in a file on my laptop) for a while: I remember writing it after I'd reviewed Goldbarth's book, about a year and a half ago.

Makes me feel bookish as hell — all these being poems made out of other pieces of writing. Then again, I've always carried as a touchstone a weird little moment of television I caught on a moniter in an airport when I was in highschool: a young Italian fashion designer was being interviewed by a woman who accused him of being derivative. "I combine the things I love, the things that fascinate me, things that have already been made. I am not ashamed of this."

Okay. Time to hit the bike trail with a couple of pals. The goal is thirty miles today, but there's a good chance we'll crap out at the sight of the first ice-cream truck.

Laureate du Jour

You know who's a good poet? Stephen Fowler. That's who.

Not Dead: Giving a Reading

What? No! Wrong again, ruffianos! I haven't died (though last Sunday I had a run-in with a bad burrito, the less said of which the better). Nope. Not dead. Nor have I been swept off to Gitmo with my head in a sack courtesy of Homeland Security (although I bet I'm on their list of 8 million "unfriendly" Americans, to be detained during "national emergency"). I've been writing a bunch of stuff under deadline, but now that I've emerged from my cave, I'm clearing my throat and hefting my megaphone to announce an addition to the Archambeau World Tour '08: a reading at Kate the Great's in Chicago's Andersonville.

I'll be there with Adam Fieled (whom I like because he cares about the Romantic poets and the Beatles), Steve Halle (who survived an education under my dubious tutelage), Tim Yu (with whom I've read — what? four times? We should get some kind of legal arrangement drawn up) and Laura Goldstein, whom I'm looking forward to meeting.

So, that's June 20, 7:30 PM, at 5550 North Broadway, Chicago. This is the Swedish 'hood, people, so don't go talking Norwegian unless you want someone to go upside you with a chunk of lutefisk.

Spatial Anxieties

There's a short review of The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century in the Boston Review, in which you may read of my "spatial anxieties." I knew I was afraid of heights, but apparently it's worse than I thought!

Chicago Poetry Symposium 08

Ring the bells and sound the trumpets! Fire up the timpani and sackbutts in celebration: the University of Chicago has finally made a full-on commitment to the poetry of its own city! Yes, it's true. The U of C has, of course, supported poetry in many ways, and the Chicago Review has rarely been as strong as it is now, but the university has often seemed to function as a kind of Island of Laputa out of Gulliver's Travels, floating serenely through the air, wreathed in abstraction, and bound to no place in particular. The institution of a new annual symposium on Chicago Poetry, though, seems to indicate that things have changed, with the university catching a whiff of what's been cooking in the local scene. David Pavelich, who works with the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library, put together the first symposium, bringing Devin Johnston, Michael O'Leary, and Michael Anania to campus to celebrate the library's acquisition of the papers from Anania's Swallow Press years and the archives from Johnston and O'Leary's Flood Editions. The symposium, an afternoon-long series of discussions with a full house in attendance, provided a good occasion to look back on what lies behind the current flurry of poetic activity in our city — and a good occasion, it turned out, for debating the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of the city's evolving poetic scene.

The Autonomous Life

Pavelich kicked things off by quoting Kevin Killian's comment about how, when young poets ask him where to go, he tells them "Chicago is the most exciting scene around. Years from now we'll be looking back at the early 21st century and wishing we'd all relocated there at this time in poetry history." Ruminating on whether the current scene is an unprecedented flowering, or the latest of a series of periodic renaissances, Pavelich seemed to take the latter position, mentioning the Modernist era of Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay; the Henry Rago-Karl Shapiro years, the era of Michael Anania, Ralph Mills, Sterling Plumpp, Lisel Mueller, Haki Madhubuti, and above all Gwendolyn Brooks; the Paul Hoover-Maxine Chernoff-Yellow Press scene, the Paul Carroll circle, the birth of Slam, and much else besides. He then quoted Basil Buntings' observations about Chicago poetry, including the interesting claim that poetry in Chicago had "an autonomous life," unlike the European-inflected literary scene in New York. "If it's an autonomous life," said Pavelich, "it's an autonomy with a history," and with this he introduced Devin Johnston and Michael O'Leary, who took the podium to talk about one of the more recent chapters in that history, the rise of Flood Editions.

The Poetry Adventure

Michael and Devin talked about the conditions necessary for Flood to thrive, reflecting on the immensely empowering lack of authority or hierarchy in Chicago's literary scene. But the more I listened to them, the more it seemed to me that the most enabling and empowering thing in the Flood story was the shared sense of friendship and adventure among the core group of poets — Devin, Michael, Michael's brother Peter, John Tipton, and others — affiliated with the press. When Michael talked about the road-trip over a flooded Mississippi River to visit Ronald Johnson in San Francisco, and when Devin talked about a later trip with Michael and Joel Felix to see the aging Johnson and put his papers in order, everything they said (and, most especially, the way they said it) indicated that this wasn't some dry editorial collective, these were the boys and the boys were having a fantastic time, racing around the country on pilgrimages to see forgotten poets, arguing about how to set up a press and make it break even over their plates of cabbage at Scruffy's Irish Diner, and looking to old issues of BLAST, old copies of City Lights books, and to the publications of the Jargon Society for inspiration. "When I read those City Lights books," said Michael at one point, "I had some vague sense that the poets all knew each other, and wrote for each other." When Michael ended with the exhortation to "find a friend and start a press," the thing that came through, more than anything else, was the romance of group endeavor, and specifically of young, male group endeavor, with all its wayward, road-trippy, cocky splendors (long may it wave). Which isn't to say Flood is all about the guys (Lisa Jarnot and Pam Rehm are important for Flood, for example), but the energy seemed very much of a piece with the Guy Debord Situationist crew, say, or with the pile-in-the-car-guys Beat vibe. Or that's the way it sounded at the symposium.

Objection!

Perhaps it shouldn't have come as a surprise, then, that one of the first questions to follow Devin and Michael's talk came from a woman who seemed concerned about what she took to be the exclusivity of the vision of Chicago poetry being presented. She spoke a kind of grad-student-ese, but presented herself as an outsider, and expressed dissatisfaction with the "particular face" being put on Chicago poetry in the privileged context of a University of Chicago symposium. Though she didn't specify the nature of that particular face, I'm pretty sure she meant the white, male face: perhaps she'd taken her cue from Ron Silliman, who'd pointed out on his blog that none of the three speakers were women. It's not like she was wrong: almost all of the do-it-yourself, entrepreneurial, by-the-bootstraps anecdotage about Flood had been about a group of guys making something great happen on their own, out of the love of the group and the task (and make no mistake: Flood has been a great thing). And this first symposium did feature only white guys as speakers. When David Pavelich assured her that this first symposium wasn't to be the last word on Chicago poetry, she said she found the answer "unsatisfactory." I wish I'd had a chance to talk to her after Michael Anania's talk, though, since the picture he painted of Chicago poetry over the last few decades was one of the greatest possible diversity, in both aesthetic and social terms.

The Scene's Big Shoulders

"The thing about poetry in Chicago," said Michael Anania, "is that it's never where you think it is." With this, he introduced an anecdote about how he, as a promising student poet, was sent up to Chicago from Omaha in 1960 to attend a gala fund-raiser hosted by Poetry magazine. Michael approached W.H. Auden at the black-tie affair, saying "I owe it to the guy I borrowed this suit from to introduce myself." "Poet?" asked Auden. "Yes," replied Michael. "Then why don't you steal some champagne and we'll sneak off," suggested the great man, and sneak off they did, to talk for hours at the Allerton Hotel while the Great Poetry Establishment (consisting then of John Ciardi, X.J. Kennedy, and the anthology editors Louis Untermeyer and Oscar Williams) droned on at the gala. Unknown to both the gala's attendees and escapees, a far more interesting group of relatively unknown poets was meeting downtown under the tutelage of John Logan, a Notre Dame prof who'd come in to teach informal poetry seminars — a group including Bill Knott, Paul Carroll, and Charles Simic, among others.

This sense of multiple scenes, and a city big and broad enough to embrace them, pervaded Michael's story of his years in Chicago. As I listened to Michael talk about A.K. Ramanujan, Ralph Mills, and Lisel Mueller; and about Jennifer Moyer's invention of the Poetry in the Schools Program that supported Angela Jackson; and about the Obasi Workshop that launched the careers of so many African-American poets (notably Carolyn Rogers and Haki Madhubuti); and about the founding of Tia Chucha Press; and about the night Robert Bly was pelted with eggs by Evanston-based Trotskyite Surrealists (who were then counter-attacked by the Stone Soup crowd), and about Gwendolyn Brooks' integration of the white and black reading scenes, I got a real sense of the complexity, diversity, and depth of the scene over the decades.

Maybe it was the rarefied air of Hyde Park, but I left with a head full of Hegelianism, thinking about how the symposium I'd just left was not only a continuation of the city's poetic tradition, but also a kind of rising to self-consciousness of a scene that too often has had too little of a sense of its own history.

The &NOW Awards and the the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize

After much work, with the kind help of the administration at Lake Forest College, and with the generous support of friends of the college, I and my colleagues Davis Schneiderman and Josh Corey are happy to unveil some new literary awards, and a new press. &NOW Books, an imprint of the just-founded Lake Forest College Press, will be publishing a series of anthologies called The &NOW Awards (affiliated with the &NOW Festival), and will also publish books of poetry and prose. In addition, Lake Forest's new Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize is a truly fantastic opportunity: two months to write, $10,000, and publication of a first book.

Soon Davis will be whisked off to this year's &NOW Festival in California to make the official announcements, but fret not if you can't be there for his stirring speech — here are the details as they'll appear in various print ads, and on our website.

&NOW Books (an imprint of Lake Forest College Press) and the &NOW Awards

The newly formed Lake Forest College Press is pleased to announce the formation of its imprint, &NOW Books. Every two years, &NOW Books will publish The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing — a collection of the most provocative, hardest-hitting, deadly serious, patently absurd, cutting-edge, avant-everything-and-nothing work. Distribution of &NOW books will be through Northwestern University Press.

Attendees at &NOW 2009 (Fall, SUNY Buffalo) will receive a complementary copy of the debut anthology, but writers need not attend &NOW to be included in the collection.

The contents of the &NOW Awards will be chosen through a nomination process and we need your help. Attendees of the &NOW conference, and friends of the organization, can send up to four nominations of published creative pieces (print or online) to andnow@lakeforest.edu with the subject line: “&NOW Nominations.” Please briefly tell us why we should consider a particular piece, and, whenever possible, send us relevant author bibliography and/or web links. Nominated works must have been published since 2004 (the year of the first &NOW conference), and the first anthology will cover the period from 2004 through 2009.

We’ll send email notification of this process after this year’s conference.

&NOW/Lake Forest College the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize

Lake Forest College, in conjunction with the &NOW Festival of Innovative Writing and Art, invites applications for an emerging writer under forty years old, with no major book publication (chapbooks and the like excepted), to spend two months (February-March or March-April 2009) in residence at our campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs on the shores of Lake Michigan. There are no formal teaching duties attached to the residency. Time is to be spent completing a manuscript, participating in the Lake Forest Literary Festival, and giving two public presentations.

After the residency, the completed manuscript will be published, upon approval, by the new Lake Forest College Press &NOW Books imprint. The stipend is $10,000, with a housing suite and campus meals provided by the college. The position will be offered on alternate years to writers of prose and poetry, with the 2009 residency going to a poet. Hybrid genre and non-classifiable applications are welcome during either year. Send curriculum vita, manuscript in progress, and a statement of plans for the completion of the manuscript to Plonsker Residency, Department of English Lake Forest College, 555 N. Sheridan Road, Lake Forest, IL 60045. Review of manuscripts by judges Robert Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and Joshua Corey will begin May 15, 2008 and continue until the position is filled.


I don't have an exterior picture of the Glen Rowan House handy, but lest you think we're planning on putting the visiting writer up in some dingy room, here are a couple of shots of the place — one of the library, and one of the view over the main terrace. It's the Lake Forest College guest house, and the visiting writer will have a suite of rooms there.




Since we have a lot of our visiting speakers stay there, there should be plenty of opportunities to meet interesting people as they pass through.