Walks with Paul Celan

Posterity deals some strange cards to the dead poets. Consider e.e. cummings — someone as lighthearted and playful as he was would probably cringe at having become the poet most often used to torment reluctant students in ninth-grade classrooms across America. Or, at the other end of the light-hearted/heavy-hearted continuum, consider Paul Celan. His gnomic, cryptic poetry and his status as a Holocaust survivor color our interpretations of his 1970 suicide by drowning, often making it into a statement about the inadequacies of language to the horrors of experience. Celan becomes a kind of larger-than-life figure, less a man who lived and suffered in dark times than an icon, a kind of literary saint, or a marble statue in the soft and saddened shadows of a hushed and somber shrine. You get some of the flavor of this from the title of John Felstiner's (generally excellent) biography of Celan: Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. Here, Celan the individual fades, and he becomes a representative, standing for all poets, all survivors, all Jews. It's a heavy load to lay on Celan's shoulders, and it's a load that the French poet Jean Daive does his best to lighten in Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, originally published in 1996 and newly translated into English by Rosmarie Waldrop.

Daive's book is one of those genre-defying works the world needs more of: part notebook, part memoir, part literary essay, it gives us Daive's experience of Celan's works, and of Celan's company, often during the walks the two took together in the St. Germain and Latin Quarter districts of Paris — the dome of the title must, I think, be the dome of the Panthéon that towers on a hilltop over these neighborhoods. I'm not even halfway through it (I received a copy in the mail yesterday, and started reading it this morning), but I'm enthusiastic enough I feel the need to say something about it right away, and I think I see what Daive is up to. He's trying to give us an intimate portrait of Celan the man, not a hagiographic image of Celan as the triply-iconic "Poet, Survivor, Jew" we get in Felstiner's book. This is not to say that Daive doesn't see Celan in all of these roles, just that he's out to honor the memory of an individual he knew as an individual, rather than to burnish the statue we've placed in the shrine of Celan.

Much of Under the Dome is written in the form of short observations, juxtaposed without any seeming order. But this notebook quality is a bit deceptive, and as one reads one begins to see the highly composed nature of Daive's book: passages repeat, with variations, certain images come up again and again in different contexts, and sometimes two passages are spliced together, creating a new resonance between the two observations. Here, for example, is one of the images that Daive uses to humanize Celan:

Avenue Emile-Zola: the empty apartment he has occupied for a week now. In the bathroom he bends over the tub, dips his left hand in the water: underwear floats up. Laundry. "You'll excuse my finishing the laundry?" With his smile.

We need an image of Celan like this one, I think, to remind us that the legend was also someone who lived day to day. But the genius of Daive's approach is to bring images like this back later, and combine them with the mythic moments in Celan's life, as he does a few pages after the laundry episode:

The brutal shock of his disappearance. I "see" the jump into the Seine. I can see it. And I see again his laundry soaking in the tub Avenue Emile-Zola, his hands stirring the soapy water. With elegance and determination.

We get the legend, and we get the man, and the two images are bound together by the visual rhyme of the body lost in the Seine and the water immersed in the tub. As the reference to Celan's everyday elegance and determination makes plain, this isn't simply a matter of deflation, of bringing the icon down. It's a matter of respecting the reality of the man, and not losing him in the bright glare of legend.

Celan's work is much-mystified, but Daive, who knows the Celan canon better than almost anyone, offers what seems to me like very good common-sense advice about reading Celan. Here, for example, is a passage I wish I'd read before going to a gathering of Chicago poets intent on reading Celan together a couple of years back:

Apropos Windgalle and Treckschutenzeit
        Wind gall         Bargetrekking time

    All the words are composites. The second term always the most important. The verb is tied to the second term. There is a vertical sense.

    Paul Celan chews a word like a stone. All day long. It produces word-energy. It all goes into the energy of his composite words. Here we have his biography.

    Paul Celan invites the reader to travel inside the word (voyage, labyrinth).

    On the on hand, the composite noun — on the other, no verb is given. Paul Celan does not give the verb.

....

    Absence of the verb: the verb is absorbed into the energy of the composite noun.

I can't really think of a better introduction to Celan's poetry than that. And I can't think of a better introduction to the hauntedness of the man, the constant sense of loss that he endured, than the following brief paragraph, and the even shorter section that follows:

To recollect a Sunday we spent together. Took the bus as far as the Opéra. The Saint-Lazarre area. The theater. Then went into a café where Paul notices a woman sitting among the crowd. Her face drawn. Pale. He falls back, as if frightened. Pushes me. We rush out. In the street he tells me "Her face reminded me of a friend who died."

High alert during all our encounters.

One could imagine a different kind of poet offering a very different reason for rushing out of a café at the sight of a woman (indeed, I've been with such a poet more than once, fleeing a bar or coffee joint to avoid the fallout from his ill-advised romantic entanglements). But Celan is not a poet haunted by eros: he's a poet haunted by ghosts, by the voices of the dead, and here we see how this has left him permanently on-edge and raw-nerved in a world that too-constantly reminds him of the enormity of his losses. Literary criticism often approaches Celan's sufferings in terms of the debate with Adorno about whether there can be poetry after Auschwitz. Daive gives us a much less abstract, much more palpable sense of the damage that had been done to Celan. We don't get Celan as a chapter in the history of literary thought, here. Daive's gift to us is the presence of the man himself.

Being There: Facebook vs. Danny's Tavern

Robert Archambeau: I was all set to blog about Nicanor Parra and Roberto Bolaño, but talked my ideas out late last night after too much coffee at my favorite breakfast-for-dinner joint. Signs now point to no bloggery today: consider yourselves spared, people of earth!

That, people of earth, was my Facebook update this morning, but it seems I'm not much of a prophet: I'm blogging after all. Not about Parra and Bolaño, though: rather, I'm posting a Facebook exchange I had with Seth Abramson shortly after posting my update about the two Latin American poets and the late-night breakfast. Strangely enough, given my recent talking-out-live those comments that might have gone into a blog post, the exchange with Seth was about the relative importance of live and virtual discussions of poetry.

As I was scrolling around on Facebook, I ran across this, a provocative update of Seth's, apparently intended as a response to the developments in Chicago-area poetry that Kent Johnson, the present humble blogger, and others had been blogging about, as well as to Steve Burt's Chicago-heavy roster of "New Thing" poets. Those of you who don't waste hours in online social networking might be surprised by Seth's use of the third-person to describe himself. Rest assured he's not emulating Caesar's Gallic Wars: Facebook's format sort of encourages you to write this way:

Seth Abramson: thinks one can't apply pre-internet school-creation models to the Internet Age. Proximity is no longer a prerequisite for an aesthetic school. There is no New Thing or New Chicago School. Poets are inspiring each other from great distances, and to think it requires sharing a bar with someone to be like-minded/mutually-inspired is to take a literal view of how art moves that hasn't been relevant since 1980.

Seth, a veteran of many internet conversations, followed this up almost immediately with the following comment, designed to prevent people from jumpily assuming he was out to attack anyone's poetry:

Seth Abramson This is not to, in any way, denigrate the poets now being associated with those schools, who are (many of them) extraordinarily talented. Their work simply cannot be aligned, however, merely on the basis of either Flood Editions (The New Thing) or Danny's (NCS), etcetera. The world's a lot bigger than that now. Bigger than Chicago. Bigger than a single excellent independent publisher. We need to think about schools in new ways, and not listen to those who would have us trying to re-create cultural artifacts from the 50s and 60s.

Ah! I thought. This is interesting! And it's made all the more interesting in that it's a comment being made at exactly the same point in time that a bunch of Chicago's poetry people have gathered at the Hyde Park Art Center for a day-long conference on the poetry of our fair city (a conference I'd have been part of if I hadn't dinged up my leg in a cycling accident that still has me stuck with limited mobility for several more weeks).

The question of the relation of virtual networking and actual face-to-face contact became more vexed when I received, via Facebook, a Blackberry-sent note from Larry Sawyer, saying he was down at the conference. I messaged back, asking him to tell Ray Bianchi and Bill Allegrezza that I wished I could have been there. I was sure there were interesting conversations taking place down at the Art Center (and due to take place at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap or some nearby taco dive later) of which I simply wouldn't be a part. At the same time, I was privy to Seth's online comments, and semi-involved in the Hyde Park event via Larry's trusty Blackberry and the good graces of Facebook. Which kind of proximity, real or virtual, mattered most? I typed out a reply to Seth:

Robert Archambeau: I agree that proximity is less important than ever, but I don't think it's completely over with yet. Let's call it residual and declining rather than obsolete. Like CDs.

The other big factor that remains, even in the internet age, is the whole old-school tie thing: networks of people who went to grad school together seem to be pretty important. The campus could be the new unit of literary history for a while.

Things got a little muddled after that, as Seth and I cross-posted (not that live encounters lack such confusion: had Seth and I met live, in, say, that favorite hang of Chicago poets, Danny's Tavern, we probably would have had to repeat ourselves over the din of the assembled literati, hipsters, and assorted bar barnacles):

Seth Abramson: Robert, I'm glad you mentioned this--I was about to add a comment about Kent Johnson's reference to Iowa. It's odd to think I would be more influenced by (say) Iowa classmates I never, in many instances, workshopped with or socialized with than--great example--Ron Silliman, whose work I first discovered through his blog. I am, without a doubt, an Iowa poet more influenced (now) by Silliman than any student I studied with at Iowa. MFA programs don't really traffic in influence in that way; my classmates all had their own visions. And Peter Gizzi affected me the most of any professor I had--and he teaches at UMass.

Seth Abramson: To add to my above comment, Robert: I mean to say that what happens between MFA students happens primarily, I think, post-graduation, not on campus. Those networks b/t peers who also become lifelong friends and cooperative readers. Brown--not Iowa--is actually the very best example of this.

Robert Archambeau: What I mean is this: people are likely to be in contact with the poets they met in grad school, likely to bear some relation to their prof's work (even if it is rejection), likely to stay in some kind of touch, likely to publish one another over the years, etc.

I take your point about you and Silliman. But I also think that even now, our face-to-face contacts still exert some influence. I think about the people I knew at Notre Dame, who almost all think of John Matthias as a hugely important poet. Very few people who went elsewhere seem to feel that way. And this is true even in a time when physical proximity is in decline.

Robert Archambeau: Looks like we cross-posted, Seth, and are more or less in agreement about all this.

Seth Abramson: I do agree--we must "meet" those who will influence us. Many of those "meetings" take place online or via books we read (i.e., often it is a unilateral "meeting" whose other half may never know it's even occurred). MFA programs allow some of these meetings to happen, even if the actual influence will exert itself over many off-campus years of contact through phone, e-mail, blog, or book publications. Kent's essay about the New Chicago School was so literal about "place" that he required all members of a school to be within not just driving distance of one another, but reasonable driving distance. Does this mean Peter Gizzi (Brown) is no longer influenced by Lisa Jarnot (Brown), because they both went there but then moved off to their own lives and pursuits (while remaining friends)?

When I left for more coffee, the conversation was still going on, with contributions from Angela Genusa, David Groff, and others. I'm hoping to check in on it later: I'm as interesting in hearing what went on there as I am in finding out what happened in Hyde Park. For now, at least, both kinds of conversations matter.

*****

In other news, Johannes Goransson makes some important points about "Double Gesture," an essay I wrote for Boston Review about Lars Gustafsson and Frederik Nyberg, Swedish poets of different generations.

Also, Henry Gould continues his meditation on manifestos, which began as a letter about an essay I wrote for Poetry about the future of manifestoes.

Chicago Poetry Conference, plus What George Oppen Means to Me

This just in from the "I Wish I Could Make It But I Still Have Mobility Issues After That Bike Accident" desk: Bill Allegrezza, who puts on the ever-interesting "Series A" events at the Hyde Park Art Center, has outdone himself, putting together a mini-conference on Chicago poetry. Here's the schedule:

Series A Conversations: Mini-Conference on Chicago Poetry

Saturday, Sept 19 in Chicago at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, Chicago. All events take place in the 4833 studio room.

New Media Poetics—Film and Poetry
10:00-11:15
(with a film screening)
Francesco Levato, Moderator
Kurt Heintz, Julia Miller, Eric Gelehrter, and Nate Slawson

Other People's Poetry
11:30-12:30
Tim Yu
Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy and Judith Goldman

Poetry and Place
12:45-1:45
Raymond Bianchi and Garin Cycholl,

Poetry Publication--Founding, Editing, and Distributing a Print Journal
2:00-3:00
Chad Heltzel, Moderator
Jennie Berner, Garrett Brown, Tasha Fouts, Jennifer Moore, Sara Tracey, and Snezana Zabic

Rapid Poetry Reading
3:15-4:45
Bill Allegrezza, Moderator

Larry O'Dean
Tim Yu
Kristy Bowen
Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy
Quraysh Ali Lansana
Ray Bianchi
Kristy Odelius
Garin Cycholl
Chad Heltzel
Dan Godston
Simone Muench
Nick Demske
and many others!

In the great tradition of our bootlegger city, you're invited to BYOB.

"The conference is not associated with any university or organization except for Series A (which is not really an organization at all)," says Bill Allegrezza, "feel free to come and throw your voice into the conversation and perhaps join us afterward for food and drink." That attitude captures a lot of what I think makes the local scene special just now.

*****

In other news, the new issue of Mimesis is out (with some content also online). It includes an essay of mine, which begins like this:

Writing the Impossibility, or What George Oppen Means to Me

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. But in his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
— W.H. Auden

When, as a student with vague ambitions in the direction of poetry, I ran across those words from The Dyer’s Hand, I underlined them with unusual care and paused for a moment, pencil poised to make some kind of significant comment in the margin of the book. In the end, all I could write was “yes.” I’ve never really gone beyond simple agreement in my thoughts on the passage, but Auden’s statement has stayed with me for two decades, during which time I’ve accumulated the usual small hoard of indicators that one is, in fact, a poet: graduate degrees, journal publications, book, teaching job, a modest prize or two. But all along I’ve been haunted by doubts about just what we’re doing when we write poems. Why do we do it? I’ve seen the piles of submissions surrounding editors’ desks, and know for a fact the world is suffering no shortage of the things. We no longer live in an age when aristocrats commission poems to celebrate battles the way they commissioned painters to line their halls with flattering portraits. Rarely do we find a poet who, like Milton, sees poetry as a way to justify the ways of God to man. The bourgeois reader no longer turns her yearning eyes to bearded, sad-eyed sages like Tennyson to learn How to Live. And, with the possible exception of a few hacks employed by the greeting card industry, the market takes no real interest in poems. Their raison d’être is far from obvious. On a bad day, I think poetry is (at least for me) impossible.

I’m not alone, either. Recently I heard that an American poet I admire, Gabriel Gudding, was thinking of giving up poetry. The author of two well-received books, Gudding certainly wasn’t failing as a poet, but for some reason he seemed to feel that poetry was failing him. He’s part of a long tradition of poets who’ve concluded that going on in poetry was simply impossible: there’s Matthew Arnold, for example, who gave up poetry for criticism, as did Paul Valéry for a time. There’s Basil Bunting, who took a long hiatus from the art, and there’s Laura Riding Jackson, who left poetry behind to concentrate on her prose. William Empson quit writing poetry. So did Arthur Rimbaud — probably the most famous defector from poetry — when he concluded that poetry was a weak way to rebel against his parents, and took to running guns instead.

It may well be that poetry is, at this late date, an impossible art. But even if that’s true, it’s no reason to give it up. That’s what I learned from one of poetry’s great prodigal sons, the Objectivist poet George Oppen, who gave up poetry for decades before finding his way back. For Oppen, the problem was one of isolation. He yearned to connect to the world, but at the same time saw poetry as an isolating activity, setting him apart from others. The surprising thing is that he never really let go of the doubts that drove him away from poetry. Instead, he found a way to make art out of them.

Subscription and ordering information for Mimesis is available here.

*****

And finally, in news from the "probably of no interest to anyone," I've finally joined the 21st century and turned the comments feature on for this blog. I think the decision had something to do with Bill Allegrezza's comment above about people adding their own voices to the conversation.

The New Chicago School

So there I was, leafing through some of my old notes on Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, and Nelson Algren, pulling together a plan for the next installment of the seminar I'm teaching on the literature of Chicago, when an email from Kent Johnson dropped out of the sky, announcing his post on what he's calling The New Chicago School of poetry. Dragging myself out of the past is never easy: it's like answering the call of the alarm clock and pulling myself out of dreamy reverie and into a world where things are actually happening, and I'm called on to play my own part. But Kent's post is worth shaking yourself awake: he spells out, more convincingly than anyone I've seen yet, just what it is that's been happening (and something has definitely been happening) in the literary life of our city.

A couple of years ago Kevin Killian's quipped that, when young poets ask him where to go, he says "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," and I think he was on to something, although just what it was that was happening remained a bit obscure. Around the same time, Bill Allegrezza and Ray Bianchi released their anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Millennium , putting forth a range of poets and groping toward a sense of what is most vital in the city's poetry at this point. Two younger poets, Adam Fieled and Steve Halle, also made attempts at defining the city's new poetic scene. Fieled ventured the term "Chicago Eliotics" for a group of formal-yet-experimental types including Allegrezza, Bianchi, Eric Elshtain, Simone Muench, Larry Sawyer, Jordan Stempleman and myself. Halle edited (and still edits) Seven Corners a blog-journal devoted to showcasing the work he finds most exciting from Chicago and environs. Attempts at definition came from the realm of Respectable Authority, with the University of Chicago launching an annual symposium on Chicago poetry, and Harvard's Steve Burt giving a special tip of the hat to Chicago-based poets in his Boston Review article "The New Thing," which put neo-objectivism at the heart of what is new and vital in American poetry.

Noble attempts! But Kent has, I think, come closer to getting at just what has been most characteristic (and, to me, most fascinating) about the poetic vortex that's been gathering around Chicago for the past few years. Here's how Johnson begins his piece, called "The New Chicago School::

My proposal: That the closest thing we presently have to a “School” of younger, rigorously innovative poets in the U.S. (one that stands closest chance of being retrospectively seen as akin in significance to the NY School in its first-​generation, proto-​formation years ... is what I’ll call the New Chicago School. It’s a list of accomplished, experimental writers, more poetically focused as a collective, per­haps, than the contents list of the City Visible anthology of a couple years back, and more geographically focused, too, inasmuch as all the poets have roots in the city...

He then names names, including (out at the edge of things, in an uncertain netherworld between poet, critic, and scholar) that of the current humble blogger:

William Fuller, Ed Roberson (these first two the elder fig ures of the group), Anthony Madrid, John Tipton, Devin Johnston, Peter O’Leary, Robyn Schiff, Bill Allegrezza, Dan Beachy-​Quick, Michael Robbins, John Beer, Arielle Greenberg, Lisa Fishman, Jesse Seldess, Nick Twemlow, Suzanne Buffam, Srikanth Reddy, Jennifer Scappettone, Francesco Levato, Eric Elshtain, Jennifer Karmin, Leila Wilson, Nathalie Stephens, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Garin Cyncholl, Joel Felix, Chris Glomski, Erica Bernheim, Larry Sawyer, Patrick Durgin, Joshua Corey out in the suburbs, Tony Trigilio, Daniel Borzutzky (though some thing of a separate case, the work of these last two, perhaps)… and a gaggle of brilliant scholar-​editors associated, past or present, with the Chicago Review, along with Robert Archambeau, on the outskirts of town at Lake Forest.

He lists other groups (especially of younger poets) before asking "From a poetic standpoint, what would justify the set?" After making the obligatory gesture toward the limits of any broad definition, he offers the following idea of what connects this group:

....it’s held together by a vibrant, active scene and certain broad affinities of poetic predisposition and — quite often, and with the necessary exceptions — affect. The tilt is towards a “scholarly,” brainy, less “pop-cultural” and more self-​consciously “critical” mode than tends to be the case around St. Mark’s, for example. And, I’d argue, the work by and large tends to be more thematically ambitious, more novel and challeng ing in its registers and forms, more earnestly in tune with the international than the work of the younger NY scene, still largely caught, the latter, within tonal frames of the hip, the pop, the vernacular, the anecdotal, the flarf.

Kent's on to something here: his thesis is certainly true to my own, previously inarticulate, sense of what makes Chicago poetry more than just poetry written in the greater metropolitan area. Kent's article is up online, courtesy of Bobby Baird at Digital Emunction. It's got big shoulders.

****

In other news, John Matthias (along with Michael Anania an intellectual and artistic godfather to untold numbers of Chicago poets) seems to be ramping up for a full-scale prose memoir, with autobiographically-based pieces appearing in the recent issues of Harvard Review, Parnassus, and Chicago Review. Be the first on your block to collect the set!

Shamans of the G.O.P.: Health Care and Hysteria

As the tide of frothing-at-the-mouth anti-health-care-reform whack-jobs begins to recede a bit, many of us in the not-entirely-irrational community find ourselves asking questions that are, in one way or another, versions of "What the hell was that?" How, after all, could so many people have so much passionate intensity about a reform bill about which they clearly know next to nothing?

The answer, I think, lies less in the realm of ordinary political analysis, and more in the realm of anthropology. To get a sense of how the kind of mass hysteria we've seen at dozens of town-hall meetings can be conjured into existence, we need look no farther than Claude Lévi-Strauss' classic Structural Anthropology — specifically, the passage in which he explains the function of shamanism in tribal cultures.

Here, Lévi-Strauss makes a distinction between normal thinking and pathological thinking, and describes the traditional shaman’s role as a socially necessary intermediary between the two modes of thought:

In a universe which it strives to understand but whose dynamics it cannot fully control, normal thought continually seeks the meaning of things which refuse to reveal their significance. So-called pathological thought, on the other hand, overflows with emotional interpretations and overtones, in order to supplement an otherwise deficient reality….We might borrow from linguistics and say that so-called normal thought always suffers from a deficit of meaning, whereas so-called pathological thought (in at least some of its manifestations) disposes of a plethora of meaning. Through collective participation in shamanistic curing, a balance is established between these two complementary situations.

So, when we're thinking "normally," we face a world in which there's a surplus of phenomena and a lack of understood significance. We see things, we don't quite understand how they work or what explains them, and we try to fill in the blanks. We try to figure things out, and spread light into those obscure and darkened corners of the map labeled "here dragons be." When, however, we're thinking "pathologically," things go differently. We begin with a surplus of emotions — fear, say, or anger, or aggrievement — and we look for something to which we can attach those emotions. One of the more important functions of the tribal shaman, for Lévi-Strauss, is to offer an explanation of the world that A) satisfies our "normal thought" desire for an understanding of how things work, and B) that takes our free-floating "pathological thought" emotions and attaches them to a definite object.

If you're thinking this sounds a lot like the finding of scapegoats, you're on to something. Consider the situation in Germany leading up to the Second World War: a defeated and impoverished people wanted to know how they fell so low (a "normal thought" desire for an explanation); at the same time they harbored a lot of anger, resentment, and fear, the proper causes of which were complex and difficult to locate. A talented but completely unscrupulous and immoral group of politicians could go far by offering both an explanation for German defeat, and group of people upon whom to focus anger and fear. Of course those politicians did go far, coming to power while blaming Communists, Jews, Gypsies, and others for the state of affairs. That this explanation wasn't valid wasn't really relevant: it allowed people, as long as they didn't think too hard, to satisfy the desire for an explanation of things (normal thought), and it allowed them to project their anger and fear on conveniently vulnerable scapegoats (pathological thought). The propagandists of the new regime were, in effect, performing a particularly evil version of the shaman function. That they performed this shamanic function with modern media and technology contributes to the particularly uncanny combination of the technological and the atavistic that was so characteristic of the horrors of the holocaust (as Martin Amis so memorably put it, the German political powers “found the core of the reptile brain, and built an Autobahn that went there").

While the current situation differs greatly in scale and in general evilness from the German example, both represent moments when the shamanistic function comes to the fore in modern politics. I mean, think about it: there's an awful lot of free-floating anxiety out there now, in post-9/11, post-economic meltdown America, especially among some Republican constituencies, who until recently have had a harder time finding a focus for their negative emotions than Democrats have had. (The issue for Dems is easy: Bush is the bad guy. Focus of negative emotions found, explanaiton of our woes located). Where are people who don't want to blame Bush & Co. to locate their negative emotions? How are they to explain the sad state of affairs in our country? The G.O.P., and their allies in the insurance corporations, have some very sharp people handling their publicity, and they seem to have made a deliberate decision to direct people's anxieties toward a particular objects: the federal government and the idea of socialism in connection with health care. Both the federal government and socialism seem remote to most Republicans (familiarity with someone or something makes it harder to turn that person or thing into a scapegoat), and both come pre-equipped with negative connotations, connotations manufactured or magnified by decades of public relations efforts.

"Why do you feel uneasy? Why are you afraid?" ask the shamans of the G.O.P. "Because the socialists and the federal government have been out to get you! And before you know it they'll haul you before a death panel!" The fact that this is false doesn't rate: it's satisfying to both the normal and the pathological thought-processes. It doesn't have to be true: it works. Or so you might think if you're unscrupulous, and don't mind the fact that millions of people in this country go uninsured.

Frank Luntz, for my money the most powerful Republican shaman (or, in more conventional terms, "political consultant") is the great architect of this strategy. He's quite bright, and his book Words that Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear is depressingly on-point most of the time. He's the one who said, of the idea of expanding access to health care, "we have to turn this into a government takeover." It's his strategy that we see when those red-face, screaming people pop up at town-hall meetings. They're angry, they're afraid, they're insecure. And, ironically, their insecurities have been quite successfully attached to a reform bill that would, objectively, make them a hell of a lot less economically and medically insecure.

I wish I knew what to do about this, but really, I'm pessimistic. After all, we live in a country where scapegoating has a tradition going back to the Salem witch trials, and that in modern times has manifested in the Palmer Raids, the House Un-American Activities Committee, Reagan's talk of welfare queens, Lou Dobbs' anti-immigrant screeds, and the big scare around gay marriage. It's hard to fight this sort of thing with reason and evidence, since so much of what's involved is pathological rather than rational. And, perhaps foolishly, one hesitates to put on face-paint pick up the shamanistic rattles and snake-charms and work shamanistic strategies for one's own side. I mean, most of us just don't look good in wolfskin robes and ancestral totem masks.

**

In other news, the good people at Poetry are running a bit of a debate about my piece on the (temporary) obsolescence of the manifesto in the back pages of the current issue, with contributions by Henry Gould, Ange Mlinko, Michael Marcinkowski, as well as my own weak and fumbling response.

Aestheticism and the Language Question in Ireland

Back in the 1990s, that magical time when the air was still scented with Derrida's eau de cologne and the prose of academic journals soared ever higher into the spheres of the mandarin, I and some of my cronies took an interest in postcolonialism. Since the venue for this was Notre Dame, much of the thinking and talking and arguing about postcolonialism had to do with Irish literature. And one of the Big Debates revolved around an age-old issue in Irish studies: the language question. The question was, specifically, this: what language was right for Irish literature?

Many of the literary people kicking around Dublin in Yeats' day felt that Ireland should throw off the shackles of the English language imposed by the colonizer, and take up the Irish language. The fact that there was no such thing as a single, official Irish language, but rather a cluster of different dialects no one of which was dominant, was often swept aside. As was the question of who, on the overwhelmingly English-speaking island, would write or read the new literature. Yeats hedged: he was too deeply invested in English to get out, and decided that Irish content in English-language poetry would do the trick (this was during his early, Celtic folklore phase). Others went the Irish language route. Still others, like J.M. Synge, decided to catch the true sounds and rhythms of Irish English — although Synge didn't think his own, urbane speech was the real thing. He trekked off to Wicklow and listened to the servants through a hole in the floorboards to get the true sound of things for his play Riders to the Sea, or so the story goes.

So we jawboned, we grad students, in the coffee shop, between bites of the excellent Irish soda bread stockpiled at Notre Dame to generate ethnic sentimentality among students who would, someday, be potential donors. How were we to feel about the language question? Had Yeats taken a wrong turn? Was the revival of the Irish language practical? Was it a tool of decolonization? Did the movement to revive the old language imply an ethnic essentialism that was ultimately untenable? The latter position was the popular one. We'd all read Brian Friel's play Translations, which made the point. And we stood in awe of Seamus Deane, then the king of Irish studies at Notre Dame, whose Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature set out to show that Irish literature was a palimpsest of different languages — Irish, Latin, Norman French, English — written haphazardly over one another. If there was a graduate student position on the language question, I suppose it was something like "we're all in favor of cultural decolonization and the preservation and prestige of the Irish language, but we're too hip and postmodern to believe the Irish language represents the truth about the nation, which is of course hybrid, like all good things ought to be, according to those sages upon whose partially-understood words we hang." And so we munched our soda bread and nodded sagely as the cheers echoed faintly from a football arena that still hosted a winning team.

As it turns out, we'd missed a whole other angle on the question. Like most American academics who talk about Irish lit, we'd followed too closely the canon-making apparatus of Irish nationalism. I've blogged before about how the idea of literary nationalism came to dominate the canon of Irish writers, lifting those who foregrounded cultural nationalism and decolonization to high status and relegating others (including most of Ireland's more modernist and experimental poets) to obscurity. And despite some good research on the issue, most of us still haven't found a way to expand our horizons. It was while I was working on a bit of my own horizon-expansion today that I came across an aspect of the lrish language question that I'd never seen before.

It was in the works of George Moore, who most definitely did not fit the bill as nationalist, anti-colonial writer, that I found this new angle. (New? well, new to me). Moore, who came from a Catholic landowning family in County Mayo, was a late Victorian figure (born 1852, died, I think, 1933), and is best remembered as a kind of hanger-on of the French Impressionist painters, and a fringe figure in the Aesthetic movement of London in the 1890s (he didn't spend much time in Ireland after his childhood). His Confessions of a Young Man, a memoir of his Parisian exploits, is probably the book of his most read, though I'd hardly call it canonical — especially not on the Irish Lit syllabus.

Moore bought into the whole program of aestheticism: art was to be for art's sake, and it was set against what aesthetes saw as the ugliness and irredeemable unpleasantness of the world of utility, industry, and bourgeois moralism. It seems unlikely that such a figure (an absentee landlord to boot!) would much care about the language question that so obsessed Ireland's literary nationalists. Like most aesthetes, he looked on ordinary politics and nationalism as beneath the true artist's concern. But he did have an opinion on the language question: he was strongly in favor of the revival of the Irish language. His reasons had nothing to do with nationalism, though, and everything to do with the aesthete's disdain for business, utility, and mere information. The Irish must revive their language, he argued in "Literature and the Irish Language," or be condemned to use a language irredeemably befouled by utility. "From universal use and journalism," he said (we must imagine the word "journalism" spat out in contempt), "the English language in fifty years will be as corrupt as the Latin of the eighth century." The Irish language, here, is a refuge from an English scarred and made ugly by its very usefulness. The Irish language, then, becomes not a part of the war against imperialism, but rather the war against English utilitarianism and industrialism — a war conducted, in this instance, not on behalf of the proletariat, but on behalf of beauty.

Of course in contrasting a utilitarian English against an unsullied Irish language, Moore works with a notion of Ireland as pre-modern, and even as mythical and irrational — an idea put about in the nineteenth century by Englishmen like Matthew Arnold to justify the imperial project — their argument being something like "we, the dull but rational Anglo-Saxons, are here to help, not exploit, you amusing, poetic, impractical Irish!". It's not the first time such notions of an anti-rational Ireland were turned around and used against things English. Much of the Celtic Revival was nothing but a taking of English imperial descriptions of the Irish and, rather than discarding them, re-valuing them — the Celticist argument being something like "we're irrational and mythic, sure, but that's why we're better than you!". Until this morning, though, I'd never seen such notions turned around to quite this angle before: the Irish language as a weapon of the aesthete in his war on modern utility.

Intention & Accident, Authenticity & Artifice

Whenever Valerie comes in with the mail and tells me there's a new issue of the Notre Dame Review, I always ask "am I in this one?" and then, even though I write for the journal often enough, I feel like a complete an ass for asking (I get the same feeling when I Google my own name). As it turns out, I didn't write for the current issue, but there's work by plenty of people more interesting than I am: a series of poems by John Peck (for the few, the proud, the serious poetry readers), a couple of pieces by Andrea Brady (who is becoming one of my favorite Cambridge-school, Jeremy Prynne-ified poets), new stuff by Joe Doerr, some crazy-looking work by Kevin Ducey, and — the first thing I turned to — a new poem by Michael Anania. It's a bit uncharacteristic in voice, being more talky than lyrical, but you don't just go to Michael for lyricism, nor for his uncanny ability to capture qualities of light in a poem: you also go to Michael because he's one of the smart guys, and whatever he's up to will be interesting. I mean, he's read everything, and read it all deeply. Whenever I have an intellectual conundrum and can't figure out who, among my habitual panel of experts, might be able to help me, I call Michael. And his poems, in addition to everything else they can be, are often places to get the kind of news that stays news.

The new poem, "This Cup," takes, as its occasion, the placing of a coffee cup on a piece of newspaper, but in the end it becomes a meditation on the roles of intention and accident in the creation of literature, as well as an inquiry into the relation of artificiality to authenticity in literary works. Since my trusty mechanical pencil was all out of lead when I read the poem in the magazine, and since this broken leg makes it inconvenient to hobble across the room to get another pencil, I took notes on the poem down on my laptop. Here, I just brush them up and insert them between Michael's stanzas. Forgive me if the effect of reading them in the middle of the poem is a bit like sitting next to a guy who keeps pausing the Cubs game on Tivo and giving his insufferable opinions about left-handed pitchers and the state of the ivy at Wrigley Field.

This Cup
Michael Anania (Notre Dame Review #28)

I placed a coffee cup
on Jhumpa Lahiri's
sweater set (NY Times
Book Review, 4/6/08)
and round it was, the stain

Okay! "and round it was" gives us our first bit of allusion: to Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar," which can be taken, among other things, as a poem about the act of creation (it's often read as being specifically about poetic creation). Here's the whole poem:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

So: Anania's comparing the placing of his cup to the placing of the jar, which means there's some pretty powerful stuff at work. The jar, after all, is an artifact that imposes order on the world which, in its presence, ceases to be wild. In Stevens' version of things, the order-giving artifact is austere, and unlike the birdy, bushy, world of sprawl and messiness to which it gives a center and an order. Is the cup going to have a similar function? Or, put another way, does Anania share Stevens' old, high modernist view of art as an austere and deliberate order-making? Put still another way, does Anania share with Stevens a sense of the banishing of mere accidental relations by the intentional act of the order-giving artist? We'll get to some answers, but not for a while. Anania's still laying all his cards on the table. Here's how his poem continues:

of it, that is, and dark,
and despite her bright eyes,
her modest, round earring
and stern but endearing
refusal to smile, thought

of William Gass' Willie
Masters' Lonesome Wife,
the first edition where
coffee cup rings mark
the text and margins

(Tri-Quarterly, 1968)
at random, as though some
careless reader had put
his cup down here or there
willy-nilly, though the text

begins to gather itself into
the rings and eventually
comments on them, so it's
the writer not the reader
or the writer as reader

who was careless or perhaps
deliberate and careless
or deliberately careless
with his cup; "this is
the moon of daylight"

one says; another speaks
in fragments of coffee,
in fact — "in early morning coffee
down the little sterling ide of" —
as calculated as such things

inevitably are in fiction,
even, or especially, when
their beginnings seem simple
and more or less accidental —
"the muddy ring you see

just before you and below
you represents the ring
left on a leaf of the manuscript
by my coffee cup," a reminder
(sometimes we need one) that there

was a time of composition
that preceded the book,

Here's something interesting: we add another dichotomy to intention/accident. This time it's a authenticity/artifice, and it comes about via the juxtaposition of Jhumpa Lahiri and William Gass' weird, fascinating little novella Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife. Lahiri and Gass are very different kinds of writers: Lahiri writes in a plain, clear, lucid language, and tends to base her fiction on autobiography, or on the experiences of people she's known. Gass, of course, is a first-rate metafictional experimentalist, and about as far from plainspoken as you're likely to get. He's fascinated, too, with the visual surfaces of his books, and is always doing something to draw attention to shake you out of your sense of book-as-representing-authentic-experience and make you think of the book-as-book. (He told me, once, that he wanted his publisher to print his magnum opus, The Tunnel, in the kind of Germanic script that looks like barbed wire, and that he wanted obscene pop-ups to be interspersed with the text. Sadly, the economics of publishing trumped the extravagance of the imagination).

Anyway. So: it's Lahiri vs. Gass, and therefore authentic representation vs. the foregrounding of artifice, right? Well, no. Or only sort of. Because Gass plays a clever game with the images of coffee rings printed throughout Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife. I mean, on the one hand he's reminding us that the book is artifice, something he imagined and typed. On the other hand, he's saying "these coffee rings are authentic representations of real events: they're on the same passages of the printed book as the actual coffee rings did." So he's telling us that texts are artifice, but he's also telling us, in a different, less conventional way, that authentic representation does take place. So it's Lahiri representing one kind of authenticity, and Gass representing both artifice and an alternate kind of authenticity. Or so it seems so far. (By the way: don't the bibliographic details the poem brings up also insist on some kind of authenticity?) Back to Anania:

its duration different
in so many ways from the duration
of reading, though each, reading

and writing, can be put aside,
each ringed by its own
neglected cup, the circles
left there imposing an order
of their own, ungrammatical

and asyntactic, something
the text seems to rise up toward,
the urgent way that messages
rise through the inky black of
an eight ball to tell the future,

advise the love sick, heart-
weary and lonely, letters, words
pressed against the ball's small,
dark window so briefly
it is often hard to be sure

what you read there — "Outlook
good," "Signs point to yes,"
"Most Likely," "As I see it,
yes." "It is decidedly so,"
"Reply hazy, try again."

Here we have something like an answer to the question of intention and accident initially raised by the allusion to Wallace Stevens: both reading and writing are order-giving activities, but for Anania there's much more aleatory wiggle-room than there was for Stevens. Order comes into being, but it isn't austere and authoritative. It doesn't, "take dominion everywhere," the way Stevens' jar does. In fact, the order is " ungrammatical and asyntactic," and it is never fully achieved. It is only "something the text seems to rise up toward." And then there's the whole Magic 8-Ball bit, which Anania uses to address both the creation/writing of things and the consumption/reading of them. The creators of the Magic 8-ball did, after all, impose a kind of limited matrix of possibilities on the answers the ball will give. "Signs point to yes" can come up, but "She's going to leave you tomorrow" or "You're a lying sack of shit" can't. Then again, the users can impose order too. Anania stresses their neediness — "the love sick, heart-weary and lonely" — and it's when we're needy that we're likely to take a vague, random phrase like "Signs point to yes" and take it to mean whatever we need it to mean. So: Anania's got a looser, more reader-centered sense of the order-generating qualities of poetry than does Stevens. But what about the question of authenticity and artifice? (By the way, I know those are loaded terms. I don't mean "authenticity good, artifice bad, nor do I think authenticity comes unmediated in literature. But I'm covering my ass like a nervous grad student giving his first conference paper). Back to Anania:

The book's last coffee stain
encircles the navel of the nude
who has been posing (hard
to imagine these days) or as
the author might say, representing,

page after page, the title's,
if not his own, lonesome wife.

So! Ha! It looks like Gass may have been having us on with the whole coffee-stain-as-authentic routine. After all, the stain coming around the woman's navel just as the book is coming to a close looks like a deliberate gesture of artistry, a bit of artifice. It's like that moment right in the middle of that most symmetrical of novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Joyce, for no reason, has the Jesuit pull out his watch and mark the time. It's a gesture of authorial knowingness: I mark this point in my text, because it is formally significant (for Joyce, a middle, for Gass, an end). What had seemed authentic is now revealed as artifice. (All this in a novel where photos of a woman try to suggest that the woman of the narrative was real — "here she is, in photos!" — Gass is all about playing with the idea of authenticity). Anyway: let's get to the end of the poem, which returns us to Anania's own coffee ring, on the New York Times photo of Jhumpa Lahiri:

And the stained sweater set,
not the sweater itself
or Jhumpa Lahiri, the alluring

author with the sideways glance,
but the artifact in black and white
on newsprint wicking coffee
along its random strands of fiber,
occurs as fiction might occur

amid a tangle of causes at once
intended and accidental.
The coffee's damp expands
its ring of paper, which in turn
rises like a blister of cashmere

at once fictive and tangible,
two mother of pearl or plastic
replica mother of pearl buttons
catch the ambient light, twin
crescent moons in their own daylight.

At first I didn't like the ending: I thought the buttons-as-moons echoing Gass' statement about the coffee ring as the moon of daylight was merely a formal echo, with no real significance. A lot of poems end that way, like comedy routines do — they echo a previous comment for a sense of closure and fullness, then bow out to applause. But Michael's always been better than that. And he is here, too, though it took me a moment to see it. But think about it: the button-moons get tied up with the questions of authenticity and artifice, and those questions are every bit as tangled as they are in Gass' novella. The blister of paper left by the coffee is real enough, tangible and authentic, but the cashmere is artifice, representation: a mere image, an illusion rather than a reality. And even the buttons within that representation of a sweater may be (in the context of artifice and representation) authentic or artificial.

I suppose there's a sense of Anania choosing sides here: questions about artifice and authenticity don't come up in Lahiri's kind of writing (powerful as it can be). And for the Stevens of "Anecdote of the Jar," artifice is in its place (the jar, so isolated from the world to which it gives order) and reality sprawls around in its own birdy, bushy place. For Anania, as for Gass, there's no easy separation of artifice and authentic actuality: they're woven together.

Another way to think of "The Cup" — a poem committed to order but open to chance, and fascinated with the interpenetration of art and experience — is as anars poetica, played in the key of late modernism, Anania's kind of music.

Partisan of Volta

"Partisan of what? What of Volta?" Okay. I admit: the title of this post sounds like some kind of indie rock band, made up of a bunch of guys with skinny jeans and Mission of Burma obsessions. But what I'm really thinking of is the volta, or turn, in the traditional Petrarchan sonnet — you know, the moment after the first eight lines, where the general rhetorical thrust changes and we get something different for the remaining six lines (so we'd have, say, eight lines of "ooh, I just love her!" followed by six lines of "but argh, I can't stand her!"). And who is the partisan of the volta, you wonder? Well, if I had to limit myself to a 150 mile radius of my study, I'd say the most powerful partisan of the volta would have to be Mike Theune. From his secret rebel outpost in Bloomington, Illinois Mike argues persuasively for the centrality of the volta to poetry. He's written a good book on the topic, and he totally schooled me on turns in Jorie Graham's poetry a while back.

Now he's picked up on my old Poetry/Not Poetry post and offered his own riffs on the meaning of the volta to poetry. He doesn't go so far as to say that the volta is what distinguishes poetry from prose (much of the best prose is full of rhetorical turns), not does he think that all good poetry needs to turn. But he does say that good turns necessarily make for good poetry, which is a pretty bold claim. Meet the partisan in his hideout, if you dare!

Hoodoo and Dérive

Okay, okay, enough about me. Now: what do others think about me?

People who've written about my poetry have had all sorts of different things to say: some say it's allusive, some say it's derivative (I think they're on to the same thing, only some don't like it). I've read a description of it as "sentence-based" rather than elliptical, but I've also read that it can be disjunctive to the point where it's "reminiscent of an interrupted telegraph cable." One critic scared the hell out of me when he showed me a whole pile of father-anxieties I'd never known were there (what's worse is this: I'm sure he was right!). Another critic was kind enough to class me "among the better poets writing in our day" but also critical enough to say that I had some serious limitations, because "any poet who corrects subject-matter insufficiencies with mere formal tricks will fall into some kind of error or another." (When I think of his article, I always hear Tom Waits' voice singing "Step Right Up," with its great line about how "the big print giveth and the small print taketh away"). One of my favorite reactions was a kind of creative splicing-together of one of my poems and one by Louis Armand by a guy who seems to be on a mission to cross-breed poems by all of Salt Publishing's poets. But I've never had a poem of mine compared to a cross between Situationism and urban shamanism, which seems to be what's happening here, where a poem from Home and Variations, "Citation Suite" comes up in the context of Stephen Grasso's theories of English hoodoo and dérive. I'd always thought the poem was some kind of cento-meets-dérive exercise, a kind of textual-spicing meets psychogeography. But I'd never knowingly aspired to hoodoo. Anyway, I'm interested, and even more amazed than I was when the guy unearthed all my dad-issues from behind my protective screen of objective correlatives.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Swedish Poetry But Were Afraid to Ask

What now? Can't you see I'm trying to fix the knackebrod on my Volvo with an Ikea catalog while the Swedish Chef socializes some lutefisk in the kitchen? Oh, fine. If you must come in, put some ABBA on in the sauna and busy yourself with "Double Gesture," the piece I wrote about the evolution of Swedish poetry over the past two generations. The good people at The Boston Review have, at last, added it to their website.

Hej då, pojke och flikarna!

Poetry and the Market: John Keats' Moment of Doubt

So, as part of my ongoing process of poking away at the project whose working title remains "The Big Boring Book of Aesthetics, or: How Poetics got to Now from Then," I've been rooting around in Keats' letters. It's been a while since I've read them, and it's good to meet them again. You get to see Keats pine for love, recover from a black eye he got in a game of cricket, you get to watch him hang with Coleridge and talk nightingales, nightmares, and poetics, and, most importantly, you get to confirm your sense of Keats as the ultimate aesthete — most of the time.

Poetry, for Keats, was about poetry — a radical position at the time. It wasn't about anything like a quest for truth (his famous idea of negative capability meant we needn't seek after certainties), and it certainly wasn't about persuading anybody of anything ("we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us," he writes, a line I think of whenever I find myself at some kind of "poets for social justice" event). Beauty must not only reign as the supreme value, for Keats: it must "obliterate all consideration" of other things.

Keats has a tremendously strong sense of the autonomy of the imaginative act: if you're a real Keatsian, you don't write with a goal in mind (not, say "this poem will convince them that the war is bad," nor "I must complete a full-length manuscript that'll win the Picayune Press Emerging Writers Award," still less "I need something they'll publish at the kind of journal the tenure committee cares about" nor even "this'll show her I'm sensitive and then she'll want to meet for clove cigarettes and some snogging"). If you're a real Keatsian, you surrender to the imagination's own imperatives. "If Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves of a tree," says Keats, "it had better not come at all."

The most challenging part of this, for a lot of people, is the lack of a sense of ethics, the failure to worry about whether one is writing something morally acceptable or not ("what shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the cameleon poet"). But the ethical content of a poem isn't a problem for Keats, because he believed, like Philip Sidney before him, that the poet affirmed no particular truth; and he believed, like Auden after him, that poetry made nothing happen. It simply existed, as beauty.

It wasn't a position shared by all the Romantics. In one letter, you can catch Keats chiding Shelley for being too political in "The Cenci," saying "you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist" — and this when Shelley was scratching up some cash to haul Keats' tubercular ass down to Italy, lest he die of an English winter. Keats was an aesthete, but that didn't mean he wasn't aggressive.

So: no surprises here about Keats and aestheticism, at least not yet. But there is one moment in the letters when we see, ever so briefly, young Mr. Keats' faith in aesthetic purity and the autonomous imagination shaken. For a brief moment, we can watch that growing force of the nineteenth century, the logic of the marketplace, put the fear into Keats. Is poetry, he wonders, nothing more than a commodity? Check it out:

(From a letter to Benjamin Bailey, March 13, 1818, for those keeping score at home)

I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lantern to amuse whoever may be struck by its brilliance — as Tradesmen say every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardor of the pursuer — being in itself a nothing...

Look out! Tradesmen are trudging across the well-kept lawns of poesy, their hobnailed boots mucking up the flowerbeds! What's poetry worth? What's it for? Is it just a low-returning venture in the entertainment industry? One hears echoes of the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham's dictum that pushpin (a pub game worth trying) is as good as poetry, when it comes to having a good time. All that was solid in Keats' aestheticism melts into air, and the poem is "in itself a nothing," just a blank slate onto which the market will inscribe a (no doubt deeply-discounted) price.

But even as the abyss of market-value opens before Keats, we see him shifting things around, and finding a way to value poetry other than by market appeal. When he speaks of the work taking its value from "the ardor of the pursuer" he opens a door to a different set of values than those of the market. After all, the market isn't about the individual's degree of passion for something: it's about big groups, and tipping their passion just to the point where they'll buy. When Keats shifts the ground of value from a poem being "worth what it will fetch" in the market to the degree of ardor a poem can incite in a single reader, he changes the rules. Suddenly, the poem's value isn't something you can put on a price-tag. Rather, the value is determined by how much any one person can love the poem. Poetry, it seems, doesn't need a big demographic appeal — the poet can settle for what Milton called "fit audience though few." If, to cite that doyen of aesthetes, Walter Pater, the poem can make a few people burn with the light of a hard, gem-like flame, then it has value, no matter what the broader market may feel.

I'm pretty sure that the little mental-judo move Keats comes up with to escape his moment of doubt is one still in use today. In fact, I remember invoking something similar when I was arguing for the importance of the great, and greatly unpopular, poet John Peck: "I don't foresee a world in which Peck's readers outnumber those of the laureate who sings the praises of television," I wrote, "but for a small number of readers Peck will always matter tremendously. Be one of them." I didn't know I was being Keatsian.

***

In other news, John Gallaher has written "Robert Archambeau: We're Still Shopping at the Romanticism Store," an intriguing response up to my earlier post "Poetry/Not Poetry."

Johnson & Klein on "Poetry/Not Poetry"

I've been surprised by the amount of feedback I've been getting back-channel about the Poetry/Not Poetry Post (I suppose back-channel is the only way to get feedback, since I'm the only blogger in the world who hasn't turned the "comments" section on). Anyway, here are two comments I thought were particularly interesting, pointing as they do to some of the shortcomings of the post. I think both Kent and Lucas are dead right.

*From Kent Johnson:

Just wanted to say I really liked the last blog post on Poetry/Not Poetry. A collection of these clear, instructive pieces would make for a book that could attract some attention, I think. I've sent the link out to a few folks, already, today.

Just a couple comments, if you don't mind: There seems to be a slight weakness in the essay, inasmuch as your case of the Augustans as exemplary model of Pre-Romantic notions of poetry gets contradicted a bit when you quote Coleridge on Shakespeare as exemplary model of organic form! In other words, I'm not sure Pope and Dryden so neatly stand as representative of some unbroken attitude towards poetry's nature (prose with versification added, as you have it) dominant before Romanticism. In their conjoining of the poetic and didactically discursive, the Augustans themselves represent a historical break and turn, really. I know that your point is a general one, and the essay does a great job of putting forward a helpful, broad, heuristic frame. But I wonder if a couple sentences of qualification there might be good: Systems of patronage aside, there are important differences of poetic attitude and belief, surely, between the Elizabethans and the Metaphysical poets, for example, vis a vis the 18th century masters...

The other thing I was thinking you could qualify/clarify is that you are speaking about the *Western tradition*. It's very interesting that Chinese poets in the late Tang, for instance, or Japanese renga poets for centuries--and long before the Romantics--were practicing a very elliptical, even "postmodern," "discontinuous language" kind of poetry (Renga is the prototype of the New Sentence!). Of course, some of this classical work has helped make our own modern and "post" period in English-language poetics what it is, starting with Pound, and so on, so it's not like it's new. But in other ways, we're just beginning to appreciate how ahead of "us" (by something like 1000 years!) the Chinese, for example, were.

Anyway, and really, excellent stuff. It's refreshing to see, frankly, complex ideas put into clear and even entertaining prose. So just quickly sending you these comments, for what they're worth.

*From Lucas Klein:

I found myself really responding to your blog entry. I think it helps me clear up a number of things I've been thinking about recently. One quibbly question, though: when you say "Suddenly, poetry wasn't more-or-less continuous with prose, or prose-plus-special-effects," I wonder if this shouldn't actually mean that prose wasn't poetry-minus-special-effects. Isn't poetry older than prose?