The Academization of Avant-Garde Poetry?

           

Some come to praise, some come to bury, but all the poets and critics have come to comment on Jake Berry’s thorny, problematic, provocative little essay "Poetry Wide Open (Fragments in Motion)."  Berry’s essay appeared some time ago in The Argotist, and now we have a host of responses—some 16 in all—by poets and critics from both sides of the Atlantic and all over the spectrum of poetics.

Here are a few highlights from the commentaries:

Norman Finkestein:

Breaking away from established forms is not in and of itself a virtue: Berry does not escape the still commonly held fetishism of “make it new.”  But I do agree with Berry that most of the poetry produced in creative writing programs is indeed “a reproduction or reworking of the original works and methods.”  The development of a poet as an “individual talent,” as T. S. Eliot understood the term, is tremendously difficult, given the dialectic of tradition and originality which Eliot describes in his classic essay.  My sense is that such growth is not made any easier, and may well be stifled, in most creative programs. To be sure, there are gifted teachers in many programs who nurture their students’ talents without imposing a party line. But it is in the nature of creative writing programs, within an academic system that emphasizes professionalism and career advancement, to inculcate one or another aesthetic ideology to which students are encouraged to conform, in order to get published and secure a teaching post. Given the explosion of online publications in recent years, the former goal may be somewhat easier to reach. Given our current economic situation, the latter is far more difficult.

Marjorie Perloff:

Publishing today is extremely eclectic and—with exceptions like New Directions, which has a certain trademark--one can never tell who will publish what, where, and when. It’s a pretty open and fluid situation. Just when you label Princeton as quite conservative, they publish Andre Codrescu. Columbia has just published Kenneth Goldsmith’s critical prose Uncreative Writing. It seems that the real contrast is between “experimentalism” 1980s-90s style and that of the present. Historical change is certainly important to consider. But Berry’s dichotomy between Iowa and Language seems to me a false one. Bear in mind that some of our leading Language poets attended the Iowa Workshop: for example, Silliman, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten.  But such contemporary poets as Craig Dworkin, Uljana Wolf, Cia Rinne, Caroline Bergvall, Vanessa Place are quite outside the Iowa orbit and yet they do get published, even if, for now, at smaller presses. 

Dale Smith:

Private audiences tend to embrace the coteries and in-groups that acknowledge contexts outside the mainstream. For some, there’s a certain fierce pride in developing consumer practices outside of mainstream cultural production. Aficionados, amateurs, and those experienced and engaged in the loose affiliations of poetry often seek out art that is decisively outside the domain of mass culture. In many ways, this private concern for poetry enables an “Otherstream,” even as it is buried under an enormous veil of mass concerns stemming from commodity culture...

Henry Weinfield:

Berry will probably be criticized for oversimplifying the current situation—that is, for locating the poetry of the academic mainstream in terms of only two, diametrically opposed positions, those of the Iowa and Language Schools. I myself have no quarrel with this representation because it seems to me that contemporary poetry, cut off from its roots in the tradition, continues to oscillate between polarities of this kind, even if the Iowa and Language Schools have given way to other tendencies. Neither is capable of producing lasting poetry, in my view, because both are based on a fragmentary conception of the art. (At the end of his essay, Berry seems to abandon the very possibility of poetry lasting, and I shall have something to say about this later on.) The term “language poetry” is a tautology, as has often been said, because all poetry worthy of the name is language poetry; that is, its medium of expression is as much its message as what it conveys. The very fact that the Language School adopted this name suggests that most mainstream poetry for many years has been written as if language were not important, as if the poem could be reduced to a speech-act of some kind. Indeed, most of the poetry that comes out of the Iowa School poetry has no music and no language. This is poetry that fetishizes the “individual voice,” as Berry observes, which is ironic because most of the poets who work in this mode sound alike. Their work is based on what Jack Spicer called “the big lie of the personal.” So, the poets of the Language School were quite right to attack the Iowa mainstream, though wrong in the way they went about it, and ultimately part of the same futile enantiodromia (Jung’s term, borrowed from Heraclitus, for the violent shuttling between opposites).

Thanks to Jeffrey Side for putting together what amounts to a small symposium on the state of poetry (and apologies to him for not having the time to take part, except as an enthusiastic reader).

Knowledge in Chains: The Fate of Expertise in a Market Society

What do these things have in common?

1. Scientists discover that a gigantic corporation has consistently violated environmental regulations, and is introducing certain chemicals into the water supply at dangerous levels.  The corporation commissions an in-house study saying that we must lower our environmental standards.  A regulatory agency staffed by experts but placed under the command of a political appointee accepts this study, ignores the evidence against the corporation, and the chemicals continue to enter the water supply.

2. The girlfriend of a Russian oligarch decides to renovate an old building in Moscow, making it into the kind of fashionable art space one finds in London or New York.  She commissions a leading architect, to whom she gives guidelines about how the space should function and what its social role should be.

3. A well-respected, longtime university administrator is appointed president of a major university and guides the restructuring of that institution.  Two years later, a billionaire hedge fund manager who sits on the board of the university’s business school decides he wants the president removed.  He works with other wealthy members of the university’s board to have the president dismissed, and is successful.  The reason given for the removal of the president is the existence of “philosophical differences” with the board, though the nature of these differences is not specified.

What is the common thread?  Well, firstly, they’re all things that you’re likely to have stumbled across in the media recently. The first item is a partial summary of the J.R. Simplot Company’s history of releasing selenium into the rivers of Idaho at dangerous levels, and influencing politicians in efforts to reduce regulation of their emissions, a history recently covered with wit and brilliance by The Daily Show.  The second item refers to a Newsweek article on Dasha Zhukova, girlfriend of Roman Abramovich (a multi-billionaire former smuggler and convict whose fortune comes from having bribed politicians to acquire Russian public oil interests far below their value), who has hired architect Rem Koolhaus to implement her plans for a new cultural space in Moscow.  The third item is a brief précis of a Slate article on the ousting of Teresa Sullivan as president of the University of Virginia, at the urging of former Goldman Sachs partner and hedge fund billionaire Peter Kiernan.  But these aren’t just stories in the news: they illustrate the increasing subordination of experts (in environmental safety, in the arts, in education) to property holders.  There are all kinds of elites in the world, including elites of knowledge and elites of property.  In our time, more than in any period in recent history, the elites of property have come to a position of overwhelming dominance.

But what, exactly, is this elite of knowledge?  What does it do, and does it matter that it has come under the thumb of property?  The most important thing to note is that it doesn’t contain all people who have knowledge (everyone knows something).  Rather, it consists of those people who serve knowledge first, rather than putting knowledge at the service of something else.  The distinction is as old as the ancient Greek distinction between the philosopher, who sought knowledge for its own sake, and the sophist, who deployed his specialized rhetorical knowledge as a kind of mercenary.  And the distinction is as new as the distinction between a research scientist who uses her knowledge to determine the safe level a chemical byproduct of industry in the water supply and a public relations professional who offers to use his special knowledge to convince the public that the research scientist is wrong.

Hegel was one of the earliest theorists of the elite of knowledge, who wrote of it as the “universal class” in his Jena lectures of 1805 and 1806.  There, Hegel describes a class consisting of “completely indifferent universal people” — indifferent, that is, to any claims beyond those of what they knew.  They were to be objective, disinterested people—and for Hegel, their natural habitat was the state sector.  It was right and proper, Hegel thought, for people in business to pursue their private interests, but someone had to mediate conflict, someone had to have “no vested interest in business” and these people would staff state regulatory agencies and the justice system, as well as the police and the military.  They would work not on behalf of their personal well-being or for the profit of their employers, but “for the existing whole” of society.

The notion of a “universal class” was one of the grand ideas of the nineteenth century, and we see variations on it everywhere.  If Hegel saw it in typically German statist terms (he lived in the shade of the first great bureaucracy, invented by Frederick the Great), others saw it in terms drawn from their own national traditions.  In France, the Comte de Saint-Simon took things to a revolutionary extreme and argued that “savants” in science and the arts should displace property owners as the rulers of society (for this he invented the word “technocracy”). Later in the century Matthew Arnold would follow the British tradition of moderation and argue, in Culture and Anarchy, that a cultivated class of people with no vested interest in any particular social class should serve as the umpires of society, mediating between existing interests.  These people could come from any class, but their education would make them “aliens” to their backgrounds, allowing them an impartiality they would not otherwise have.

Americans get hold of the idea in the twentieth century, and take a wide variety of positions.  Lionel Trilling was generally sympathetic to Arnold, but noted that there was something fishy about the idea of an umpire class, since a class was defined by its interests: no umpire, Trilling thought, could ever be truly disinterested and guided by pure knowledge.  This notion was elaborated and exaggerated by a host of neoconservative thinkers in the late 1970s, many of whom looked askance at the increasing role of the public sector in American life after 1945.  Unlike those who saw those decades as a period of unprecedented prosperity, increased social, class, racial, and gender equality, they looked at their times and saw mostly darkness.  B. Bruce Briggs of the conservative Hudson Institute, for example, argued that the rise of what he called “the new class” threatened to convert “a system of privilege via family property to one of privilege via formal education” — a very bad thing, from his perspective.  As far as he was concerned, the knowledge-based elite was no less self-interested than the property based elite.  This view has become tremendously powerful in certain American circles: indeed, it has been absorbed into the worldview of Fox News, where climate scientists are dismissed as figures who only purport to believe in global warming in order to get their hands on more research funding.

Other American thinkers see things differently.  Alvin Gouldner, for example, argued that intellectuals have a high degree of insulation from market forces, and, not having to sell their knowledge for their personal material self-interest, are able to offer a relatively disinterested and objective assessment of phenomena.  Thinking in particular about those involved in education, Gouldner says that such people “come to be defined, and to define themselves, as responsible for and ‘representative’ of society as a whole.”  That is: they look at things not with an eye to how they can use them for their own gain, but with an eye to whether these things are good for society in general.  Gouldner is aware that absolute objectivity or disinterest is impossible, but he doesn’t move from this awareness to a collapsing of all difference between the relatively disinterested person and the completely self-interested person.  For Briggs (and Fox) there’s no difference in objectivity between a climate scientist and, say, the CEO of a company that produces huge quantities of greenhouse gases; for Gouldner, one of these people is in a position to be relatively more objective.  The knowledge elite (which, like Briggs, he calls “the new class”) has an important social role for Gouldner, as it did for Hegel. The difference, though, is that Gouldner doesn’t see the state sector as the exclusive home of the knowledge elite.  It can find its home in many locales, including nonprofit foundations (which, one might add, were the initial source of environmental reports on the dangerous activities of the J.R. Simplot company).

People like Briggs felt, in the late 70s, that the knowledge elite had become too strong in America.  Indeed, it became an article of faith among right-wingers: Robert L. Bartley, who for 30 years edited the opinion page of The Wall Street Journal, followed the economist Joseph Schumpeter in believing “the inability to control the critical impulses of intellectuals would prove the ultimate undoing of the capitalist system.”  Few, I think, would share this fear of the knowledge class in 2012.  Although the financial crisis of 2008 was precipitated by the private sector, it is the public and nonprofit sectors that starve and weaken across the whole of the West.  And 2008 was only an intensification of trends that go back to the neoconservative resentment of the knowledge elites in the 1970s.  Indeed, there is much evidence that we are moving from a society with inherent checks and balances to a kind of social monoculture based on the rule of property elites.  Once, we had a rich combination of market values and other values.  But according to Harvard’s Michael Sandel, we’ve stopped being a market economy, and become a market society.  A market economy, according to Sandel, is a great thing—“a valuable and effective tool for organizing economic activity.”  But a market society is “a way of life where market values seep into almost every sphere of life, and sometimes crowd out or corrode important… non-market values.”  In this brave new world, scientists who warn about pollution are overturned by agencies whose politically appointed leaders bow to the influence of moneyed corporations; great architects work not for their own visions, but at the whim of those who orbit kleptocratic billionaires; and professional administrators with strong academic backgrounds can be cast out of the universities at the whim of hedge fund managers, whose donations to universities have become vital due to the gutting of public funding.

It is not that the knowledge elite has no privileges and no influence.  The world we live in is complex and integrated and requires such people to function.  But the knowledge elite has become what Pierre Bourdieu called “the dominated part of the dominant class.”  They (or should I say “we,” since anyone likely to be reading this is either part of a knowledge elite, or aspires to be) work in foundations and universities and research centers and state agencies, and offer what, to the best of our (fallible, human) knowledge, is the disinterested truth.  And then the elite of property either takes these attempts at disinterested truth into account or doesn’t, depending on whether they feel such truths represent a threat to their material wellbeing or not.

Of course what this means is that a small, hyper-privileged class increasingly does as it wishes, without constraint or remorse.  Sometimes what it wants to do is to offer a sop to the knowledge elite (the museum in Moscow is such a gesture) to keep them happy and docile.  Sometimes it is mysterious why it wants what it wants (the expulsion of the university president is an incident of this kind).  And sometimes—too often— what it wants is to enrich the few at the expense of the rest of us.  They don’t call this class war.  Except when we fight back.

The Good, The Bad, The Unforgivably Canadian: Notes on Contemporary Cartoons

“You’ll need this!” read the felt pen letters scrawled, next to a thumbprint in what could have been blood, but was more likely marinara sauce, on a manila envelope someone had slipped beneath the door of my secret backyard writing dojo.  I was puzzled for a moment, but when I tore the envelope open, half afraid of what I might find, I saw immediately that there was no cause for fear.  It was a manuscript from my long-lost former colleague, Raskolnikov P. Firefly, last seen fleeing the greater Chicago metropolitan area in the wake of the double scandal wrought by his radical analysis of the sociology of the rich idiots of the North Shore and his dissertation on the fashion sins of academics.

What I needed, apparently, was Rasko’s guide to toddler television.  There’s something to this.  Since the birth of my daughter some three years ago I’ve been immersed in (no, bombarded by) all manner of cartoons, puppet shows, and costumed storytelling on cable, Netflix, Youtube, and other tentacles of the great gelatinous octopus that is the culture industry under American capitalism.  But Minerva’s owl flies at midnight, people — wisdom comes too late!  Rasko’s report, typed out on an Olivetti portable with a missing ‘n’ key, dusted with the ashes of his unfiltered Winstons, would have done me good years ago, when I was first dragged, kicking and spitting, into the world of kindertainment.  It would have saved me countless hours of exposure to saccharine sanctimony and high-minded mind-numbery.  It’s too late for me now, but please, those of you with newborns or with munchkins imminent— heed his words.  Heed his words and save yourselves!

The manuscript, titled “The Morphological and Ideological Dimensions of Contemporary Cartoon Discourse, with an Additional Inquiry Into Live Action Children’s Television: What is Good, What is Evil, and What is Unforgivably Canadian.”  I will omit his methodological introduction, exculpatory preface, and the little sketches (often obscene) he’s doodled in the margins, and offer only the conclusions of his five main chapters.  They follow forthwith.  I have compensated for the missing 'n' key, and added my marginal annotations in brackets.

Chapter One: Concerning Undersea Adventure

The Good: Octonauts

           

So there’s this octopus bookworm who lives in an octopus shaped undersea ship/base (not unlike that of James Bond’s nemesis Dr. No, though sadly the show lacks any cartoon equivalent of the young Ursula Andress rising like a white-bikined Venus from the sea).  The octopus has a kind of Professor X function as advisor to a group consisting of a polar bear, a penguin, a one-eyed cat, a rabbit, and some kind of anthropomorphized carrots or something.  The polar bear sounds like Matt Berry, which makes up for a lot (such as the fact that the bear is the same size as the penguin).  They travel the seas saving creatures, and the show ends with a “creature report” where we’re told all about the creature in question, which is generally a sea slug or a deep sea tarantula or some other disgusting oddity about which you will be unable to answer your child’s questions without resorting to Wikipedia.  Which means you’ll have to learn something new for a change, you complacent Cheeto eating bastard.  [Rasko has underlined this passage twice, adding “THIS MEANS YOU ARCHAMBEAU” in what I hope is red ink.  Next to this note is, the first of his obscene doodles, an inexplicable vulgarity indicating advanced male fertility].

The Evil: Bubble Guppies

The premise here is that these little mermaid-mermen kids float around having adventures or something undersea.  But it’s not undersea.  Or rather, it is undersea, in that their teacher at school is a fish and they meet whales and whatnot, but EVERYTHING LOOKS JUST LIKE IT WOULD IF IT WERE ON LAND.  That is: even though they float like they’re under water, there is both land and sea, and there are cars and ships and airplanes, and when they play basketball the laws of physics that obtain above water are in effect.  WHY DID THEY PUT THIS UNDERWATER?  WHY DID THEY FEEL THE NEED TO MAKE THESE KIDS INTO MERKIDS AND HAVE THEM FLOAT AND HAVE TAILS?  WHY DID NO ONE STOP THE PRODUCERS FROM PRODUCING THIS ABOMINATION WITH ITS DEFIANCE OF THE LAWS OF GOD AND MAN?  WHAT CAN BE DONE NOW? AFTER SUCH KNOWLEDGE WHAT FOREGIVENESS? [These last lines have been typed with such fury that one can feel the indent of the letters on the page.  And one must ask: is that a tear stain in the margin?]

Chapter Two: Representing Cultural Diversity

The Good: Dora the Explorer

So you want your daughter to grow up as a fully actualized human being, rather than one of those self-objectifying hootchie princess types, batting her eyes and waiting for some guy to whisk her away to an expensive piece of real estate somewhere?  [Do not judge Rasko for his bitterness: not until you’ve met his first two ex-wives.]  What’s not to love about Dora?  She’s independent, caring, capable, analytic, she’s good at Spanish and orienteering, she’s got a pet monkey, and she can dance.  You wanted something else in a role model?

The Evil: Little Bill

Fuck Bill Cosby.  I mean, he was great.  He was funny (like, back in the seventies).  He invented the show Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, from which I, in my childhood, learned that you could hang out in a dump, make saxophones out of old vacuum cleaners, and play a game called buk-buk where the heft of the big man counted as an insurmountable advantage.  But now he’s produced this sanctimonious pile of authoritarian moralizing goo.  And even though it depicts a flourishing middle class African-American family, with a jazz aficionado father and a kindly matriarch, there’s a strange way in which it does a disservice to its audience.  Whereas Dora the Explorer is an independent operator, empowering herself through her ability to break tasks down into parts (those maps always have three challenges that she needs to memorize and solve: “troll bridge… forest… yellow mountain!” etc.), Little Bill is never encouraged to act on his own.  He waits for Wisdom to be Dispensed from Above.  Grandma knows best (and her Attila-like power is right there in her name “Alice the Great”).  This is no way to show kids how to operate.  This is a way to produce servile milquetoasts.  I condemn Cosby for betraying the glory of his early career.  There’s a special vestibule in hell for people like that, and it has a television that only shows Little Bill.

Chapter Three: Canadian Anthropomorphizing Animal Shows

The Evil: Franklin

This is a show about a sniveling wretch of a turtle, and it is at least as stifling of autonomy as is Little Bill.  Here’s the format: Franklin does something.  But it was bad and wrong to do something.  So he apologizes to his parents, gets a lecture, and is reduced to conformity.  The National Film Board of Canada considers this demeaned and dependent state a thing to celebrate.  For this they will join Bill Cosby in hell.

Also Evil: The Berenstain Bears

The art is so ugly I can’t make myself watch it.  Another Canadian letdown!  Get it together up there, people — make me proud to be from Winnipeg!

Chapter Four: Live Action Shows

The Good: Yo Gabba Gabba

This is the best thing on television, and I mean television overall, not just kid’s television.  You’ve got a DJ in an orange jumpsuit and a psychedelic fake-fur version of the hats worn by the guards at Buckingham palace.  And he carries around a magic boom box in which he keeps the de-animated bodies of four mutants and a robot, who come alive in their own private universe.  While teaching valuable lessons such as “don’t bite your friends” they meet guests like Questlove, Jack Black, Andy Samberg, Rachel Dratsch, and (I repeat because I cannot emphasize this enough) Questlove.  When Timothy Leary instructed us to “tune in, turn on, drop out” I’m pretty sure this is what he wanted us to turn on.  [The video clip at the top of this post comes from Yo Gabba Gabba.]

The Evil: The Fresh Beat Band

Okay, first of all, I object to the fact that everybody is reasonable and cool except the white male, who is an impractical doofus.  I know we white guys are the dominant group and everything, and that that’s not right, but can we lay off kicking the whole demographic around at the outset of one’s television viewing life?  Also, the show, which purports to be about music, serves up a steaming soup bowl of suck chowder, musically speaking.  It’s the worst sort of sub-bubblegum pop, and could lead your child to commit such future atrocities as downloading Katy Perry songs.  It’s a huge underestimation of the musical sophistication of the under-four set.  I mean, Yo Gabba Gabba has had The Roots on, and the equally splendid puppet show Jack’s Big Music Show (omitted from the present study due to lack of research funds) has had whistling freak-folker Andrew Bird, Afropop genius Angélique Kidjo, and Chicago Blues immortal Buddy Guy.  In a just world, the producers of The Fresh Beat Band would be forced to wander from city to city clad in burlap sacks and covered in birdshit, whacking themselves on the head with boards as a sign of penance for what they’ve done to the musical taste of America’s once-proud future.  [Rasko’s marginal sketch here, depicts the members of the Fresh Beat Band with their musical instruments being put to the most unsavory and unmentionable purposes.  Sometimes I worry about a guy who could even dream this stuff up.]

I’d love to summarize Rasko’s scene-by-scene statistical analysis of the various shows, but he’s scribbled angry obscenities over most of the charts, and it’s almost time for Dora,  so — vamanos!

American Poetry: The State of the Art

My essay "The State of the Art," about American poetry in 2012, is out in a special issue of VQR, along with a great selection of new poetry (from Kim Addonizio to B.F. Fairchild to Charles Bernstein) and essays on the state of poetry by a number of critics.  It's not up online yet, but the print issue is out and looks great.

Here's the beginning of my contribution:

The year is 1712, and the state of the art of American poetry is, in a word, provincial.  The best-known and best-selling American poem remains Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom: A Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment, written some forty years earlier and currently in its fifth edition.  A bumpy, ballad-meter ride through Calvinist theology, it will remain popular for decades. When Francis Jenks writes about it in the Christian Examiner in 1828, he'll remind his audience how much this strange, homespun work once meant to our countrymen.  It was, says Jenks, "a work which was taught our fathers with their catechisms, and which many an aged person with whom we are acquainted can still repeat, though they may not have met with a copy since they were in leading strings."  It was, moreover, "a work that was hawked about the country, printed on sheets like common ballads," and it presented, in language often graceless but equally often vivid "the common theology of New England at the time it was written."

The Day of Doom represents a kind of poetry at the service of religion, written by men who do not consider themselves to be, first and foremost, poets. Wigglesworth, having turned down the presidency of Harvard, held the title "teacher at Malden Church in New England," and saw himself as a man of God who happened to write poetry, not as a poet who happened to believe in God.  When he died in 1705, there was not much by way of American institutions to support poetry, and his work found its way to readers through the primitive market for written works, carried by peddlers down the roads and river valleys of the land.

It goes on from there, looking at the state of the art in American and English poetry in 1712, 1812, 1912, and 2012, with a glance at the social and aesthetic circumstances behind the poetry.

Many thanks to VQR poetry editor David Caplan for commissioning the essay and editing the issue!

New Work at The Cultural Society!

Great news!  The new issue of The Cultural Society is available, with work by:

Dan Beachy-Quick
Joel Bettridge
Norman Finkelstein
Michael Heller
Pam Rehm
Mary Austin Speaker
John Tipton
Mark Scroggins
Tyrone Williams

and more, including an essay on William Blake by Peter O'Leary, as well as three prose poems by the great midcentury Belgian Surrealists Gabriel & Marcel Piqueray, translated by Jean-Luc Garneau and some guy named Archambeau.

Many thanks to the redoubtable Zach Barocas for putting it all together!  Here, by the way, is Zach on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, playing the drums in his band Jawbox.  Note the Cultural Society hoodie:


Jawbox - Savory (Late Night With Jimmy Fallon) by HightowerAndJones

Moonrise Kingdom: Wes Anderson's Lost Children

Christopher Orr, writing for The Atlantic, says that Moonrise Kingdom is Wes Anderson’s best feature film since Rushmore, in no small measure because, like Rushmore, “it takes as its primary subject matter odd, precocious children, rather than the damaged and dissatisfied adults they will one day become.”  It’s an interesting claim but, I think, completely misguided, in that it misses the central fact of Anderson’s work: there is no meaningful distinction between his children and his adults.

There’s a curious equality between Anderson’s characters, regardless of age, as we see in, for example, the relation between the Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman characters in Rushmore.  The adults are lost in a world they cannot quite seem to master, and so are the children, whose precocity puts them in adult situations (seeking self-reliance, or projecting long-term plans, or yearning for romance), but who find themselves no more master of the situation than Anderson’s adults.  Indeed, Anderson’s vision of humanity is of a set of lost, gifted children, even if those children have lived long enough to appear to be adults.  Dignan with his elaborate life plans in Bottle Rocket is a figure of charm and pathos because he is clearly not entirely up to the challenge of the world; the grown-up child prodigies in The Royal Tennenbaums are still fundamentally juvenile, as is their father; the grown sons in The Darjeeling Limited never transcend their childhood; and Schwartzman’s Max in Rushmore is a boy, but his actions, ambitions, and desires are like those of an adult. When we see him on his journey what we’re really seeing is the hopeful, bewildered, and slightly sad child that Anderson sees within every adult — the situation is just made more visually explicit because of the age of the character.

Anderson’s adults are just kids who have been around a while, accumulating disappointments and trying to maintain some semblance of control.  This yearning for control appears in all of the lists, flowcharts, and plans characters come up with, as well as their maps and collections.  When Anderson shows us children as protagonists, the sense of precocity comes from the fact that they essentially undertake adult actions.  But in a way they’re not children, they’re what Anderson sees when he sees adults: people whose ambitions and plans and hopes are charming but also frail, people around whom hangs a slight aura of pathos.

We see this child/adult conflation everywhere in Moonrise Kingdom.  Many scenes we’re familiar with from war movies—the ambush of the protagonist, the uniformed scout who rallies his peers to defend one of their own, the fumbling romance between the 12 year old male and female leads on the beach—are just defamiliarized adult moments, in which the age of the characters makes us think of the vulnerability of the characters more than we would had they been played as adult scenes.  We get a sense, too, of the playing of roles, of people aspiring to be what they wish they could be, and this is something fundamental to Anderson’s characters regardless of age. 

Anderson’s much-praised visual sense is connected to his sense of the essential identity of adults and children.  Just as his treatment of children as adults allows him to show us slightly overmatched people, whose innocence and optimism come already paired with a little pathos and tarnish, Anderson’s visual sense constantly combines a kind of gee-whiz coolness with the faded, the obsolete, or the broken.

When Anderson has the budget, everything in his movies is designed deliberately.  This deliberateness is what Anderson loved about the stop-motion animation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox— every coffee cup and pencil had to be made deliberately, nothing could be taken for granted.  In Moonrise Kingdom, everything comes out of a period ethos, and is meant, says Anderson, to look like it could come out of a Norman Rockwell print.  But it’s not just a matter of period detail, or of Rockwellian Americana: everything is tweaked just a bit to make it not quite elegant or awe-inspiring.  Uniforms come with too-short trousers; the cut of a winter coat is slightly clumsy; the fabric of a dress looks a little faded.  It’s not Rockwell, strictly speaking: it’s as if Norman Rockwell had a yard sale for all the things that had become just slightly too shabby to keep.  This is significant: it shows us that what Anderson is after isn’t a kind of nostalgia for innocence; instead, he wants to show us innocence already tarnished, already touched by disappointment or pathos.  Just like his children, who are always as damaged as they are precocious, the objects with which Anderson fills the screen are always already scuffed and not quite adequate to the demands of life.

This touch of pathos is particularly present in when Anderson trots out technology.  The old record players and cameras and tape recorders in Moonrise Kingdom, like those in The Royal Tenenbaums or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, are often things that would, when they were new, have been high end gadgetry—but as an audience, we can’t help but see them as things that have been outclassed or rendered obsolete, even when we’re watching what is notionally a period piece (Moonrise Kingdom is set in the 1960s, but really exists in Anderson’s ahistorical fantasy space).  It’s that touch of pathos again, that sense that we’re all just the left-overs from some unreachable innocence.

The sense of lost innocence comes into play in the final scene of Moonrise Kingdom, where we see our romantic leads, Sam and Suzy, together again.  Sam is painting an imagined recreation of the one place where the were closest to happiness: an island inlet so insignificant it has only a number, not a name, where, on the run, they’d camped out for a moment.  It was a place where Sam put all of his scouting skills, all his little tricks to control the world, into play, but the would-be Eden they created there was doomed from the start, and destroyed twice over: first by the authority figures who capture them, then by a storm so violent it wiped the inlet away.  This is the always lost innocence, the hopeless, pathos-ridden attempt at Eden that haunts Anderson and his characters.  In Sam’s painting, he’s able to recreate the lost world that never quite was, and he’s even able to give it a name, “Moonrise Kingdom.”  But of course the real innocence never quite came into being, and is lost forever, and the painting, naïve and amateurish, is no substitute, despite Sam’s best attempts.  This sense of loss, and of our fundamental lostness and weakness, is at the core of Anderson’s art, and at the bottom of his sense of adults as lost children, and children as already-lost adults.

The Battersea Review Has Arrived!

Rejoice!  Thanks to the tireless efforts and editorial bravado of U.S. Dhuga and Ben Mazer, the inaugural issue of The Battersea Review is up online (and soon to be available in print).


Contributors include:


Marjorie Perloff on Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and Duchamp!
Adam Kirsch
Nora Delaney on Philip Larkin!
Stephen Burt
Todd Swift on poetry of the 1940s!
Ben Mazer's long, adventurous poem "The King"!
Philip Nikolayev
Stephen Sturgeon
Gerard Malanga (the original bad boy of Andy Warhol's Factory)
Jeet Thayil
John Hennessy
Joe Green
Greg Delanty
M.A. Schorr
Kathleen Rooney
Mario Murgia
Ailbhe Darcy
Previously uncollected work by the late, great Weldon Kees!
Also... Robert Archambeau (a few poems of mine have found their way into the issue).


According to the opening editorial, "The erudite Robert Archambeau is struggling in the most positive sense between the polarities of modernism and post-modernism, with a firm eye on our times" — I can't speak to my alleged erudition, but I think Dhuga and Mazer nailed it about the struggle.  Reading that sentence, I feel exposed in the same way I did when a critic wrote that my poems were haunted by a powerful father figure.  It's something I'd never noticed, and then suddenly, unnervingly,  saw to be true.


The Battersea Review has announced itself with a bang.  This will be a journal to watch, people.

T.S. Eliot Graduates from Aestheticism

I’ve been doing some research on T.S. Eliot’s brief journey through aestheticism on his way to becoming a religious poet and a moralist with a reactionary critique of modernity—and I can’t think of any clearer demonstration of the change in his poetry than the contrast between one of his most famous Christian poems, “Journey of the Magi,” and a very early untitled poem, known in Eliot circles as “At Graduation 1905.”

Eliot wrote the latter poem, an ode, when he was 16 years old, and read it at his graduation from Smith Academy.  His greatest literary influence at the time was Edward Fitzgerald’s famous translation of an 11^th century Persian work, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.  Fitzgerald’s rather free translation had attracted a cult following in certain English literary circles ever since it appeared in 1859, and had gone through several expansions and editions over the course of the late nineteenth century.  It was particularly popular in Pre-Raphaelite circles, and later among the aesthetes of the Rhymer’s Club in the 1890s.  One can see why: it was a kind of antidote to the moralistic poetry of such Victorian heavyweights as Tennyson and Matthew Arnold.  Here’s a fairly typical stanza, in which we are urged to see the world as temporary, as without any great moral meaning:

The Worldy Hope men set their Hearts upon 

Turn Ashes—or it prospers; and anon, 

Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face, 

Lighting a little hour or two—is gone.

“The Charge of the Light Brigade” it ain’t.  Instead of duty to Queen, country, and God, we find a world almost existentially absurd, a world in which the momentary fleeting impression of beauty is what matters.  Bohemians like Dante Gabriel Rossetti loved Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát, and it anticipates both Pater’s aestheticism and the whole emphasis on a poetry of fleeting impressions, loaded with imagery of transience, that we get with Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and other 1890s types.

Fitzgerald certainly came as a relief to the young T.S. Eliot, who had grown up in an oppressively strict and moralistic family milieu.  When I read his recollections of encountering the Rubáiyát, I thought immediately of John Stuart Mill’s recollections of first encountering Wordsworth and the “culture of the feelings” after his narrow, Utilitarian upbringing.  Here’s Eliot:

I can recall clearly enough the moment when, at the age of fourteen or so, I happened to pick up a copy of Fitzgerald’s Omar which was lying about, and the almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling which this poem was the occasion of giving me.  It was like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious, and painful colors.  Thereupon I took the usual adolescent course with Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, Swinburne. 

There’s reason to wonder just how Eliot found a copy “lying about,” since he grew up in a household where even Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were banned, and the Rubáiyát is both agnostic and (on occasion) just a bit racy.  But I digress.

Here’s a representative stanza of Eliot’s graduation ode.  The influence of Fitzgerald’s agnostic, aesthetic ethos is clear enough:

We go; like flitting faces in a dream;

Out of thy care and tutelage we pass

Into the unknown world—class after class,

O queen of schools—a momentary gleam,

A bubble on the surface of the stream

A drop of dew upon the morning grass.

“Graduation addresses,” says Eliot biographer James E. Miller Jr., “are generally supposed to be inspirational, saying, in effect: now go forth and live a life of great achievement and fulfillment.  Eliot, therefore, must has startled his listeners.”  Indeed!  This is a poem without moral exhortation, without homiletic reassurances.  This is a poem in which fleeting moments of beauty are the best for which we can hope—an aesthete’s poem.

Two stanzas from the poem offer an early version of one of Eliot’s recurring motifs: the return to a place long left behind, and the difference felt by those returning (the most famous instance is in “Little Gidding,” where Eliot writes “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”).  Notice the alienation felt by those who return to Smith Academy after graduation:

Standing upon the shore of all we know

We linger for a moment doubtfully

Then with a song upon our lips, sail we

Across the harbor bar—no chart to show,

No light to warn of rocks which lie below,

But let us put forth courageously

As colonists embarking on the strand

To seek their fortunes on some foreign shore

Well know they lose what time shall not restore

And when they leave they fully understand

That though again they see their fatherland

They there shall be as citizens no more.

We don’t get much by way of an explanation for this alienation—and this itself is significant.  Eliot, at 16, gives us a sense of separateness without any specific moral attached to it.  Those who return are no longer at home in the place they’ve left, but we’re not given any moral to attach to this story.  It’s not that the world has corrupted them, and they must touch base with the virtues embodied in the old school.  Nor is it that they’ve become Real Men, who must put aside childish things and get back out into the jungle where they compete with one another to push back the frontiers of darkness and spread the light of empire.  What we have is a mood, without a moral: the very stuff of impressionism and aestheticism.

Flash forward to 1927, and we find Eliot touching on his ‘return’ motif, but quite differently.  Eliot was now 39 years old, had settled in England, and had just been baptized and confirmed in the Anglican Church.  It was a move that rattled his deeply Unitarian family back in the U.S., and that puzzled his English friends, who tended to be secular intellectuals.  When Eliot went to visit I.A. Richards at Cambridge, for example, Richards and his friends were surprised to find Eliot carrying a “large, new, and to us awe-inspiring Prayer Book,” and were a bit flummoxed by the demands of Eliot’s faith, being “suddenly made much aware of our total inability to advise him on (or even discuss) the character of the various Services available on Sunday mornings.”

This was a new Eliot, and one of the poems that he published in 1927, “Journey of the Magi,” captures both his sincere Christian commitment and his sense of alienation.  After recounting the travails of the magi on their way to the nativity, and loading the poem up with imagery foreshadowing the crucifixion, the poem concludes with the return of one of the magi to the kingdom he’d left behind:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

This is the first point in the poem where we’re made aware of the speaker’s silent interlocutor, a scribe figure to whom he dictates his accounts.  And of course, since the accounts we have of the journey of the magi are scriptural and without any mention of the magi's return, there’s a suggestion that the speaker’s words, which he twice insists be recorded, have not been recorded— that they've been suppressed by someone who did not want such discouraging comments to be put in front of the faithful.  And the comments are discouraging, telling us of the pain of conversion, of how one’s rebirth as a Christian is also a death of one’s former self.  The nature of the pain is significant: it comes in the form of alienation from one’s people.  One returns, as one does in Eliot’s graduation ode, to find that one no longer belongs.  Unlike in the graduation ode, though, there’s a specific moral to the story: though conversion is difficult, and though it leads to a rift with those one loves (we may think here of Eliot’s shocked family, or of his puzzled friends at Cambridge), conversion is not to be reversed.  The speaker suffers from his sense of difference, but it’s important that he never raises the possibility of re-conversion: he’d rather have “another death”—a literal one— than that. 

Set side by side with the graduation ode, “Journey of the Magi” looks very much like a moralist’s poem.  Its ethos is one of religion, and poetry at the service of religion, rather than aestheticism, and the appreciation of the passing moment as the highest of goods.  If Eliot’s graduation ode was a poem of moments, “Journey of the Magi” aspires to be a poem of the intersection of the timeless with time.

UC-Davis Wants Joshua Clover & its Own Students In Jail For Protesting: Help Do Something About It

The University of California-Davis, an institution you may remember for how its campus police pepper sprayed seated, peaceful student protestors, is now trying to send eleven of its own students and one faculty member—poet Joshua Clover—to jail for up to eleven years, and fine them up to one million dollars, for protesting.


Here are the details.


And here's where you can say that this is wrong.


Please take the time to sign the petition.  When the university should be standing with its own students against a vindictive bank, it has chosen to continue to disregard the principles of free speech and peaceful protest.  In November the university showed contempt for the physical well-being of its students, and now it shows contempt for their financial futures and their freedom.

And the Best Poet is...: Poetry Prizes and Normative Criteria

How does one decide which poet, or which manuscript, should win any of the ever-growing number of poetry prizes?  Peter Riley, in an article in the Fortnightly Review, remarks on the obscurity of prize criteria.  Awards tend to be given out to poets who are “the best” or to collections of poems that show “excellence,” but very little is ever said by way of clarifying “the best at what?” or “excellence in terms of which criteria?”  In this, poetry competitions are quite unlike cattle shows.  As Riley points out, cattle shows have clear, objective, and normative criteria for excellence:

If at a county show you are one of the judges in the section for Aberdeen Angus cattle, you will have a comprehensive list of points which must be fulfilled. There is the carriage of the creature’s head, with even teeth and broad muzzle. It should have a long body and strong legs with the joints well set. The back should be straight with a slight dip at one end. It should be well and evenly muscled with not too much fat. Viewed from behind the rump should be rounded, the legs straight and the hooves correctly positioned. When it walks its hind hoofs should enter the marks of its front hoofs without overstepping or understepping. If it is a cow its udder should not be pendulous and the teats should be of the right size and placement. If it is a bull the testicles should be large and the sheaf firmly attached and not pendulous. But all these distinctions should be weighed against the proportions of the whole animal and the aim is to assure that both it and its progeny should fulfill their commercial function. If all these boxes are ticked, you have your winner.

For poetry prizes, though, we have no clearly articulated normative criteria — and even though Riley says “surely some version of this schemata could be devised for judging poetry competitions,” one suspects his tongue is in his cheek.  Much as one is tempted to simplify matters of judgment by simply taking the cattle competition criteria over into the literary sphere (the winning poet should be “well and evenly muscled without too much fat” and “viewed from behind the poet’s rump should be well rounded,” if male the poet’s “testicles should be large,” etc.) no version of overtly normative criteria is likely to appear in the judge’s guidelines for any competition.  Not even if the norms had to do with meter, imagery, and syntax rather than body fat, rumps, and testicles.

In fact, revulsion at the thought of normative criteria for poetry runs deep, and even manifests in our popular culture.  Consider the first two minutes of this clip from Dead Poets Society, in which the teacher played by Robin Williams offers a strongly worded condemnation of the normative criteria for poetry outlined by the fictitious critic J. Evans Pritchard:

A few critics have laid down fairly clear normative criteria for poetry. Yvor Winters, for example, comes to mind—and it is perhaps worth noting that in addition to being a poet and critic, he bred show dogs and had them evaluated by criteria much like those applied to cattle.  But the rare exceptions prove the rule: normative criteria for poetry are unusual, and generally perceived as crackpot-ish at best, philistine at worst.  Despite what Dead Poets Society would have you believe, such criteria are unlikely to appear in any textbook, except perhaps surrounded by apologetic statements, qualifiers along the lines of “this will help get you started as a poetry reader but shouldn’t be taken too seriously” and other semi-retractions.

Why is this?  I’m not asking in order to say we ought to come up with criteria for poetry.  I’m asking because a sense of the origins of our current anti-normative way of thinking may cast some light on what is actually happening when poetry contests are judged.

The notion that the things that make poems excellent can’t be defined is at least as old as the seventeenth century.  It was then that the French poet Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux put forth the idea that what distinguishes truly sublime work from lesser poetry was “a certain je ne sais quoi”— that is, a certain “I don’t know what.”  Boileau’s ideas were immensely influential, and the notion that excellence could be felt but not defined gained currency across Europe.  The nature of good writing, a believer in the je ne sais quoi says, is something I know and I can't explain.  Inherent in the idea is the notion that there's no point in trying to explain one's criteria, since it is inherently elusive.  

Boileau's ideas are connected to the reception of art, to what goes on in the mind of the reader.  In the nineteenth century, there's a new turn of mind, toward the art object itself, and thinkers like Coleridge begin to argue that the internal qualities of works of art resist normative judgement.  When Coleridge talks about organic form, for example, he tells us that poems, like all works of art, cannot be held up to some external standard.  They generate their own rules from within.  In this way Coleridge dismisses those who would criticize Shakespeare's tragedies for deviating from the formal criteria outlined in Aristotle's Poetics.  He opens up the theoretical pathways that justify a great deal of artistic innovation.  He also makes it much more difficult to offer a theoretical justification for the normative assessment of poetry.

Both Boileau, with his sensitive reader who detects the undefinable, and Coleridge, with his hyper-individualistic artist discovering his personal path in art, can be seen as symptoms of modernity, of the gradual replacement of old, collective, authoritarian ways of thinking with new, atomized, individualistic ones.  Fredric Jameson gets at the nature of the shift they represent when he writes, in "Criticism in History," of the difference between the rhetorical and the stylistic.  The former, Jameson says, is normative and conformist, while the latter is deeply bourgeois and individualistic:

Rhetoric is an older and essentially pre-capitalist mode of literary organization; it is a collective or class phenomenon in that it serves as a means of assimilating the speech of individuals to some suprapersonal oratorical paradigm, to some non- or preindividualistic standard of the beau parler, of high style and fine writing.... Style on the other hand is a middle-class phenomenon, and reflects the increasing atomization of  middle-class life.... in its emphasis on the uniquely personal, in the etymological sense of the stilus, the inimitable and wellnigh physiological specificity of my own handwriting.

So when we shy away from normative criteria for poetry, we're simply being who we are, participating in our modern or postmodern individualistic identities.  But this leaves us in a tricky spot when it comes to poetry contests, and our position is made all the trickier by virtue of the fact that poetry prizes and contests have become a bigger and bigger part of how poetry in Western countries is published and rewarded.  There was a very brief period in the middle of the nineteenth century when poets were rewarded well by the market, and after that there were a number of decades when to be a poet was almost necessarily either a bohemian (Yeats lived for most of his adult life in a two room flat) or someone with a day job (Wallace Stevens as insurance man).  Now many poets live in the publish or perish sphere of academe, and poetry publishing is often done via the contest method, with poets submitting manuscripts to prize-givers.  At the more senior end of things, the big prizes given out by foundations and (less often) government agencies play a significant role as sources of income and, more importantly, as badges that give one clearance into the more prestigious clearings in the groves of academe.  Prizes matter now, but we live in a poetic culture inimical to clearly articulated, objective, normative criteria of judgement.


What to do?  One path that's been tried, both in the past and in our own time, involves moving away from criteria for the poem to criteria for the person judging the poem.  David Hume's great essay "On the Standard of Taste" argues that we may not be able to define beauty, but we can describe the sort of person who is likely to have a good sense of beauty. Such a person must be familiar with many art objects of the kind under consideration, for example—you wouldn't want someone who'd only read fifty poems to be the judge of a poetry contest.  Such a person would also have an un-agitated mind at the time of judging, and (among many other criteria) would give due attention to the object of judgement.  


Kant's Critique of Judgment takes Hume one step further, and tells us that a true judge of beauty must, above all else, maintain disinterest.  That is, he shouldn't let personal connection to the artwork, or its maker, or its moral sentiment, get in the way of his judgement.  Good judgement of beauty, for Kant, is essentially a manner of screening out all non-aesthetic criteria and looking at what's left.  In our own time, the emphasis on high-profile expert judges for poetry competitions is, in essence, an adopting of a Humean or Kantian position: we may not be able to define what the best poems are like, but we know what sort of expert can make a good judgement.


The problem, of course, is that this solution doesn't always work.  First of all, the proliferation of different styles and schools of poetry means that the familiarity with tradition upon which Hume's good judge depends becomes difficult to attain: no one has mastery of the entire spectrum of poetic styles.  A Helen Vendler covers one corner, a Marjorie Perloff covers another, and the room has many, many corners.  In addition the criterion of "due attention to the object" is trickier than it sounds in our present context: I've been a judge for a poetry prize, and found myself with literally hundreds of manuscripts to read, all while teaching, grading papers, looking after my kid, and trying to do my own writing.  It wasn't easy.  Indeed, I don't think I was fair to every manuscript, and I don't think I could have been.  The day has too few hours, and the world too little caffeine.  And with regard to the Kantian notion of disinterest—well, it was given a good sharp kick in the teeth by multiculturalism, by the claim that so-called disinterest was simply a screen behind which certain entrenched (white, male, bourgeois, heterosexual) norms lurked.  It never really recovered.


Even more discrediting to the notion that choosing qualified judges will save us from having to articulate normative criteria was the whole unpleasant business exposed by the people at Foetry some years ago.  They looked for nepotistic patterns in the awarding of prizes, and they found them.  Far from being disinterested, many prominent contest judges proved all-too-human, awarding prizes to friends, lovers, and former students.  The score of the game, it seemed, was: self-interest 1; disinterest 0.


Another path, one worth trying, would be the one suggested by Michael Theune and Bob Broad in the November 2010 issue of College English.  Theune and Broad began with the premise that people who care about and work with poetry have internalized certain criteria of judgement, and that those criteria can be made explicit through conversation about particular poems.  Their work involved conducting sessions in which poets and critics discussed poems they admired, and gave reasons for their admiration.  From this, Theune and Broad began to tease out things that the poets themselves might have been unable to articulate before.  They moved from je ne sais quoi to mais oui, je sais quoi—a movement many more of us should follow.  In fact, it might be worthwhile for contest judges to do some long hard self-examination before agreeing to act as judges, and then make public some kind of statement about what they love in poetry and why they love it, including all of their ambivalences, their contradictions, and their openness to surprise.  It would be strange, at first, but it might begin to take us forward from our current situation, where so much rides, for so many, on such vague criteria.