The Book You Need To Read

Hot news!  John Matthias' Collected Longer Poems has just appeared, published a month ahead of schedule by the good people at Shearsman, who have yet to publish a bad book.  The long poem is where Matthias is at his best, and the new book is the best possible opportunity to get to know this side of Matthias' work.

Here, by way of introduction, is a review I wrote some years back of Matthias' Working Progress, Working Title, from which some of the poems in the new book came.

*

For many of his most passionate readers, John Matthias will always be a poet of place.  His long topographical poems — “An East Anglian Diptych,” “Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest,” and “A Compostella Diptych” — have inspired much commentary and have merited every bit of it. Such poems place the contemporary experience of a specific landscape in the context of the history of the region, revealing unexpected rhymes among the events that have occurred in a given space.  Allusive, fact-packed, rich in specific dates, resonant with proper names, and tremendously ambitious, they have been both the means by which Matthias has made himself feel at home in particular landscapes and the means by which he has made himself existentially at home in the world.  Readers who love this side of Matthias’ work may be surprised by his most recent book, Working Progress, Working Title.  The two long poems that make up the book, “Pages from a Book of Years” and “Automystifstical Plaice,” seem oddly placeless.

Such surprise isn’t really warranted, though.  The new poems grow from a branch of Matthias’ work just as well established as his poetics of place: the poetic exploration of texts and historical archives.  Matthias has always been interested in investigating texts in the same way he investigates landscapes.  He has been an adventurous reworker of found or archival materials, notably in the poems of the 1975 collection Turns.  Here, Matthias enters a text and sounds out its parts, reworking them into new grammatical shapes and new intellectual contexts.  In a way, what he does with text is similar to what he does with landscape in his topographical poems: through investigation and play he makes himself at home in a previously alienating environment.  Whether that environment is physical or discursive, it becomes a kind of home territory through the act of poetic investigation.

In “Pages from a Book of Years” Matthias takes as his matter a rather unusual textual archive: a collection of yearbooks found in his recently deceased father’s closet.  These books — the annual reports from any number of fields of endeavor — provide Matthias with the material he needs to investigate several key years in his own life.  The reference works give him a rich store of historical arcana through which to reflect on personal and familial experiences.  It is as if one filtered Robert Lowell’s Life Studies through the Encyclopedia Britannica.  The personal takes on greater significance in the process.

“Automystifstical Plaice” is one of the oddest and most fascinating products of an odd and fascinating oeuvre.  Here, Matthias draws from a number of textual sources and finds the historical links between such apparently disparate phenomena as George Antheil’s Ballet Méchanique, the career of Hedy Lamarr, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and the invention of electronically interfaced music.  In the end, the poem becomes a kind of ode to the fusion of the human and the technological in the twentieth century. 

Matthias’ poems of place have always treated landscape as an archive of the local past.  Admirers of those poems would do well to read these new poems, where his archives lead us on new, unbounded adventures.

"I Fear That We Cannot Be Friends": Introducing Poetry Northeast

"If you don't find these turns of phrases intriguing, enticing, I fear that we cannot be friends."  This sentence, which follows a few quotations from poems in the first issue of the new journal Poetry Northeast,is the beginning of Zachary Bos' editorial statement, and it's just the right way to begin.  This journal, Bos implies, will be personal, idiosyncratic, and in the best sense of the word, amateur.  I like that.  And not just because the first issue contains an old poem of mine.

The issue includes poems by the increasingly-ubiquitous Ben Mazer, by George Szirtes, Meg Tyler, Dylan Willoughby, and others. Check it out, and see if you and Bos can be friends!

The Poet as Bohemian

"Bohemian Rhapsodies," a little thing I wrote about Roberto Bolaño and Jules Laforgue, has been out in print for a while but is now available online, too.  It starts like this:

Bohemia, that mythical land of outsiders, rebels, malcontents, slum- ming rich kids, and rent-grubbing scam artists, spreads its porous boundaries wide in both space and time, extending from Montparnasse to Green- wich Village to North Beach, from Thomas DeQuincey’s opium den to Barney Rosset’s office at Grove Press in the sixties, to a grimy gallery in a neighborhood too newly annexed to the Bohemian empire for the likes of us to know about it. Bohemia is often seen as a kind of effortless Arcadia, a patchouli-and-pot-smoke saturated world of laughter and lotus eating. But in two recent translations of books by Jules Laforgue and Roberto Bolaño, both of whose bohemian credentials are beyond reproach, we see something else entirely. In Laforgue’s case we see a struggle to overcome some of the habitual attitudes of the bohemian poet; and in Bolaño’s, a long struggle to endure the kind of alienation that drives the bohemian away from mainstream society.

You can find the whole thing here.

Seeing Red: The Poet Resigns

I'm almost done (for the time being) with the shameless plugging of my forthcoming book The Poet Resigns, due out in the spring.  But before I lay off the blowing of my own horn, here's a new version of the cover, in red, and another jacket blurb, this one from Kevin Prufer:

Archambeau offers brilliant discussions of the complex intersections of poetry, politics, literary criticism, academia, and the movements that have influenced the direction of the art.  His treatment of the problematic position poetry holds among the American public is by far the most thoughtful I have read. There is much to admire in this book, but what I think most highly of is Archambeau's ability to survey the fields of poetry, poetry criticism, and politics with such amazing breadth and detail, as if he is able to see them simultaneously from a great distance and up close, offering arguments that are both ambitiously sweeping and precise.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to weep for my sabbatical, which officially expires in three days.  May it rest in peace.

The Blurbs Are In: The Back Cover of "The Poet Resigns"

After a gathering of scholarly intensity of a kind not seen since the Second Vatican Council, my publisher has approved the jacket and catalog copy for The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World.  Here's what you'll find on the back cover, along with the least unflattering photo of me we can muster:

Robert Archambeau's book, The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World, is a fascinating study of what it means to practice the art in a new century. Archambeau is a wise and honest writer in assessing the pitfalls of poetry, and the shifting nature of the poet's role as public intellectual or private mutterer in the larger, noisier culture that has never really privileged poetry to the extent that the myth and history of its privilege purports. His personal touch and winning tone make the book suitable to those who favor a rich and friendly discussion of the social and cultural implications, and possible obligations, of poetry in our age. —Maxine Chernoff

"Archambeau is one of our smartest poetic sociologists, and he tackles the biggest problem facing poetry in our time: the dwindling of its audience and the growing divide between poets and a mainstream literary readership." —Norman Finkelstein, Contemporary Literature 

“If you want to see somebody having fun while thinking provocatively about contemporary poetry, try Archambeau: I always do.” —Stephen Burt

And here's the official description of the book: 

What are we really wishing for when we want poetry to have the prominence it had in the past?  Why do American poets overwhelmingly identify with the political left?  How do poems communicate? Is there an essential link between formal experimentation and political radicalism? What happens when poetic outsiders become academic insiders? Just what makes a poem a poem?  If a poet gives up on her art, what reasons could she find for coming back to poetry? These are the large questions animating the essays of The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time, a book that sets out to survey not only the state of contemporary poetry, but the poet’s relationship to politics, society, and literary criticism.

In addition to pursuing these topics, The Poet Resigns peers into the role of the critic and the manifesto, the nature of wit, the poetics of play, and the persistence of modernism, while providing detailed readings of poets as diverse as Harryette Mullen and Yvor Winters, George Oppen and Robert Pinsky, C.S. Giscombe and Pablo Neruda.  Behind it all is a sense of poetry not just as an academic area of study, but as a lived experience and a way of understanding.  Few books of poetry criticism show such range — yet the core questions remain clear: what is this thing we love and call ‘poetry,’ and what is its consequence in the world?

T.S.Eliot, Social Class, and Anti-Semitism

I've been working on a chapter about T.S. Eliot for a book whose current working title is Poetry, Autonomy, Society, and I've been trying to think of a way of addressing Eliot's very real, entirely inescapable anti-Semitism.  On the one hand, I don't want it to become the main focus of the chapter, since the book is about the idea of aesthetic autonomy.  On the other hand, I don't want to act like Eliot's anti-Semitism didn't exist, or didn't matter, or didn't play an important role in his poetry and his social writings.

One line of argument I'm making in the chapter is that Eliot's early interest in aesthetic autonomy comes from his break with his own social class' moralism.  That is: he comes from a long line of people who formed a social elite in Boston, and in various communities where Bostonians settled, as in his native St. Louis.  The Bostonian elite believed in a very paternalistic kind of civic-mindedness.   They were not firm believers in popular, bottom-up democracy—but they thought elites should be good stewards of the community, and they often lavished funds on hospitals, churches, schools, and charities of all sorts, and were wary of excessive avarice and of financial speculation.  

Beginning in the years after the Civil War, they began to be displaced by a newer and more overtly materialistic elite, often politically corrupt (this new elite was overwhelmingly made up of gentiles, both Protestant and Catholic).  The decline of their class accelerated right around the time Eliot was born in 1888.  And when their power fades and their old ideal of stewardship is no longer relevant to their new circumstances, Eliot turns his back on the moralistic aesthetic associated with his class—think of the poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier, or of James Russell Lowell, both with family connections to the Eliots—and writes less overtly moralistic poetry, as well as poetry that satirizes the old elite's rectitude and reserve. Think "Portrait of a Lady" or "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" — though there's more to both poems than a rejection of overt moralism and the ethos of the Boston elite.

So, since I'm already discussing Eliot's class circumstances as a way of explaining some of his aesthetic choices, I want to take this as an opportunity to discuss his anti-Semitism, especially since Eliot's prejudice isn't just a personal quirk: it's part and parcel of the outlook of his class.  Which is not to say that they were the only American anti-Semites, but their anti-Semitism took a particular form.  That is: the decline of the old elite happened to coincide with the arrival of numbers of Jewish immigrants, many of whom prospered in American conditions.  Always an easy target for those with axes to grind about their position in society, these immigrants bore much of the brunt of Eliot's class' resentment about their own loss of status.

Many among the old elite believed that scruple, gentlemanly habit, and class-based reservations hampering them in their attempts to retain privileged positions.  There is certainly some truth with regard to their loss of political power in cities like New York and St. Louis, where political bosses like William Magear "Boss" Tweed and Edward "Colonel Ed" Butler used tactics anathema to the well-bred gentleman to secure power, and it may have had some truth in the economic sphere, where fortunes like those of the Carnegies and Rockefellers (new money men, not members of the old elite) were built with a ruthlessness the old elite had never known.

But along with disdain for the new political and economic elite—both overwhelmingly Christian—came an anti-Semitism, drawing on longstanding bigotry and the coincidence of the arrival of Jewish immigrants with the decline of the old elite.  That is, a measure of the anti-Semitism endemic to Eliot and his class may be traced to their notion that their genteel ideals put them at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the Jewish immigrants who were arriving in America and often thriving in an environment that did not restrict their actions to the degree that many European countries had.  No less a Brahmin than Henry Adams, thinking of the man of the old class, wrote:

Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow—not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs—but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he—American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him… 

The old elite’s sense of displacement, coinciding with the arrival and success of Jewish immigrants, in no way excuses the anti-Semitism of “Gerontion” or After Strange Gods, although it might be said to provide an explanatory context: Eliot’s bigotries were those of his class in a particular phase of its decline.

The Poet Resigns: Early Notice

This is the cover of a book of my essays, due out in a few months as part of the series in Contemporary Poetics from the University of Akron Press.

It will include essays on the situation of poetry in the marketplace, poetry and politics, the real or imagined link between avant-garde aesthetics and left-wing politics, Cambridge school poetry, the post-avant, poetry and power, the question of whether poems can communicate, the attitude of language poets to academe, the New Criticism, the definition of poetry, avant-gardism in critical writing, the meaning of the manifesto, the decadence of the nationalist tradition in Irish poetry, and the state of American poetry.  There will also be essays on individual poets: Reginald Shepherd, Harryette Mullen, C.S. Giscombe, Yvor Winters, James McMichael, John Matthias, Pablo Neruda, Michael Anania, George Oppen, Robert Kroetsch, and Rimbaud.  It ends with a couple of more personal essays about what poetry has meant to me over the course of a life of reading, writing, writing about, and living with the stuff.

It should weigh in at around 300 pages, and will make a great gift for weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, bar or bat mitzvahs, religious holidays in all faiths, and for that most important of Canadian holidays, Bigfoot's birthday.

I'm currently trying to find a photo of myself in which my head looks neither like a giant pinkish egg nor a demonically grinning bearded demon effigy for use on the back cover.  Success has thus far been limited.

The Creative Writing Seminar: A Factual Parable

Bill Berkson, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch

I was on the phone today with one of my great mentors, Michael Anania, talking about poets as academics, and was regaled with the following anecdote about Delmore Schwartz:

Schwartz was teaching a graduate poetry writing seminar, and asked the small gathering of students how many of them thought they would go on to become great poets.  Every one of them raised a hand.

"Ha!" said Schwartz.  "If more than two or three great poets were alive at any one time, it would count as a renaissance!"

The students in the seminar were John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Robert Creeley, Robert Bly, and Frank O'Hara.

Four out of five ain't bad.

UPDATE AUGUST 19: Opinions on the factual nature of this anecdote vary: see especially Andrew Epstein's convincing note about what probably really happened in the comments stream below.  Also, I'll take the rap for any garbling of the anecdote -- listening on a sketchy cell connection while trying to keep a three year old from smashing things introduces an element of surrealist distortion to most narratives!

Bruce Andrews, Bill O’Reilly, and the Location of Knowledge

Where — or perhaps the better question is ‘through what means’ — does one find knowledge?  I wasn’t expecting to end up asking this question when I was hanging out at the Unicorn Café in Evanston with Michael Gregory Stephens and Lina Ramona Vitkauskas.  We were talking about how there’s been loss as well as gain with the rise of the new media: we all conduct our business with publishers over the internet now, and it’s just not the same as the days when Michael used to meet with the Grove Press people at Max's Kansas City.  This led us to talking about Youtube clips of various poets, and Lina mentioned Bruce Andrews’ appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News broadcast back in 2006.  I’d never seen it, but when I watched it, I felt almost immediately that the conflict between Andrews and O’Reilly wasn’t really a conflict between the political left and the political right, although that’s certainly how O’Reilly saw it.  At its core, it was a conflict deeper than that, a conflict about where, and how, one finds the basis of knowledge.  The most intriguing part of the conflict hove into view when it became clear that O’Reilly’s view of the location of knowledge had its origin in ideas propagated not on the right, but by the New Left of the 1960s and 70s — while Andrews’ view had deeper historical origins, in the classical liberalism of people like Matthew Arnold and, behind them, the Enlightenment.

O’Reilly wasn’t interviewing Andrews in Andrews’ capacity as a leading representative of Language Poetry, but in his capacity as a professor of political science at Fordham University.  Someone on O’Reilly’s staff had heard that there was a well-known book about then-President George W. Bush’s Iraq War lies on the syllabus of a course Andrews taught on foreign policy, and O’Reilly wanted to present this to his public as an outrage.  The segment of his show on which Andrews appeared was even called “Outrage of the Week.”  The conversation began with O’Reilly noting the presence of this anti-Bush book on the syllabus, and asking Andrews if “that sounds fair and balanced.”  When Andrews begins to talk about his syllabus, O’Reilly demands “which book is fair and balanced, or presents a pro-capitalist point of view.”

This is a fascinating question, since it seems to propose two contradictory theories about the path to truth and knowledge.  On the one hand, O’Reilly seems to be saying that only a book with a “pro-capitalist” point of view could be “fair and balanced.”  On the other hand, he seems to imply that individual books should be partisan, and that a course can become “fair and balanced” only by presenting different partisanships, letting the truth emerge from the clash of admittedly biased ideological viewpoints.  As the conversation goes on, it becomes clear that O’Reilly holds the latter view: that everyone has an ideological bias, that their discourse inevitably reflects self-interest, and only through presenting different views together can we arrive at valid knowledge.

Andrews, to his credit, does not let O’Reilly control the terms of discussion.  Rather than trying to find a “pro-capitalist” book on his syllabus, he responds by saying that the point of his foreign policy course is not to be pro- or anti- capitalism, but “to explain different countries’ foreign policies.”  It’s not about advocacy; it’s about analysis.  This simply does not compute for O’Reilly, who resumes his line of questioning about the ideological content of books on the syllabus.  “Is there any… book in your class you consider pro-American?” he asks.  Unshaken, Andrews replies by saying his is “not a normative class” — he doesn’t want to embrace or reject a particular ideology.  “It’s about understanding,” he says.  Unwilling or unable to grasp the notion of a course that aims at objectivity, O’Reilly asserts that Andrews is taking advantage of his students, “feeding them one world view” when he should be presenting more.

Andrews’ sense of the location of knowledge, here, is that it can be found in the individual’s attempt at objective, disinterested analysis—that we approach our texts with as cold and unprejudiced an eye as possible, and look not for what confirms our desires or our self-interest, nor for what we wish would be true, but for what is actually the case.  There’s a long tradition behind this way of thinking, with a center of gravity in the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18^th century.  More proximate exemplars of the tradition include Matthew Arnold and, later, I.A. Richards.  Since I have a particular fondness for Richards, and have his Practical Criticism ready to hand, let’s quote from him.  Here, he defines what he thinks of as primitive thinking:

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

In Richards’ view, primitive thought is thought that takes confirmation of one’s own biases, needs, desires, or vested interests as true.  There’s no sincere attempt at objectivity or disinterest.  Rather, what feels right must be right.  If you’ve ever had the dire misfortune of getting into an argument with a gun rights zealot, you’ve probably encountered this kind of thinking: dubious and misinterpreted statistics fly fast, and are hurled around without much checking into their validity or applicability.  Statistics are valued less for the rigor that went into their creation than for their utility as intellectual ammunition. 

Another, better approach to knowledge comes when we attempt to achieve disinterest — something not possible in an absolute sense, but approachable by degrees (there is, after all, a difference between outright propaganda by, say, climate change deniers, and the attempt at objectivity by most members of the scientific community).  Here’s how Richards describes the process of attempting disinterest:

To respond, not through one narrow channel of interest, but simultaneously and coherently through many, is to be disinterested in the only sense of the word which concerns us here. A state of mind which is not disinterested is one which sees things only from one standpoint or under one aspect. At the same time, since more of our personality is engaged the independence and individuality of other things becomes greater. We seem to see ‘all round’ them, to see them as they really are; we see them apart from any one particular interest which they may have for us. Of course without some interest, we should not see them at all, but the less any one particular interest is indispensable, the more detached our attitude becomes. And to say that we are impersonal is merely a curious way of saying that our personality is more completely involved.

The individual’s attempt to see things as they really are — that’s the essence of disinterest.  The goal of thinking, here, isn’t to win a fight by thinking up arguments for what you already believe, or what you think will advance your particular interests.  The goal, as Bruce Andrews might say, “is understanding.”

Bill O’Reilly’s sense is that knowledge isn’t located in the mind of the person who attempts disinterest.  Rather, it is located in the clash between overtly self-interested antagonists: that’s why O’Reilly can’t seem to understand Andrews when he refuses to accept the pro-American/anti-American or pro-capitalist/anti-capitalist dichotomies O’Reilly throws his way.  Knowledge must be a matter of conflict, in this view, and the notion of disinterest makes about as much sense as bringing a slide rule to a knife fight.

The truly interesting thing about O’Reilly’s view, which has become a staple of the right wing, is that it comes from a left wing source.  That is, biggest challenge to the notion of disinterested knowledge came from the left radicalism of the 1960s.  Here’s an anecdote that I think captures something of the circumstances under which that challenge emerged.  It’s from a memoir of teaching at SUNY-Buffalo in Robert Hass’ Twentieth Century Pleasures:

The year must have been 1969; the room was packed with students and faculty dressed, as the style was, to their archetypes: Indians, buffalo hunters, yogis, metaphysical hoboes, rednecks, lumberjacks, Mandingo princes, lions, tigers, hawks, and bears.  Everything the American middle class had repressed lounged in that room listening to speaker after speaker with beatific attention.  Which took some doing.  I remember in particular a graduate student from the Progressive Labor Party who read an exceedingly long essay on the parallels between Bob Dylan's career and the growth of political theory in the New Left….When he finished, Edgar Friedenburg, the sociologist, rose to speak.  He is a dapper man and he wore a light gray suit with a striped broadcloth Brooks Brothers shirt.  His glasses sat low on his nose, his hair was tousled, and he looked amused.  He only managed one sentence: "I have been reflecting this afternoon that we are patient beings, and that, though popular culture deserves our most urgent attention, it requires from us a good deal less credence and more clearwater."  Some of the audience laughed; and a student in the front stood up, jabbed a finger forward, and said, "Friedenburg, it took twenty fucking years of repressive fucking education for you to learn to talk like that."

Friedenburg is clearly a representative of the Arnoldian tradition, looking to the free and fresh play of ideas and to the calm clarity of the disinterested mind as the sources of truth.  The kid from the Progressive Labor Party isn’t having it.  For him, Friedenburg’s position is just another unconsciously ideological bit of self-interest, worse than most in that it masquerades as an objectivity that it can never be.

This New Left skepticism about disinterest entered the academy over the course of the 70s and 80s, becoming quite commonplace in certain departments, especially English and Comparative Literature.  A famous article by William Spanos appeared in PMLA in 1985 that explicitly attacked notions of disinterest, and called I.A. Richards to account.  “Richards,” wrote Spanos, “categorically dismisses as inevitably activating intellectual warfare … a hermeneutics of understanding as antagonistic dialogue.” For Spanos, the path to knowledge didn’t lie through the attempt at disinterest.  Rather, it was to be found by constructing arguments for one’s own self-interest, and pummeling the opposition with them.  The opposition was welcome to pummel back (if you want to know more about the Richards-Spanos debate, you might have a look at my article “Aesthetics as Ethics: One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism,” in Re-Reading the New Criticism, edited by Miranda Hickman and John D. McIntyre, out from Ohio State University Press earlier this year—you can actually read a large portion of the article for free using the "look inside" feature on Amazon.com's listing for the book).

At some point, the right wing adopted the New Left’s distrust of disinterest, taking the idea that no form of knowledge was free of bias and distorting it into the belief that opposing views must be presented on all issues, and are to be treated as if equal. Hence the phenomenon of talk shows on which a scientist, presenting what he or she sincerely believes to be the truth, is forced to debate a propagandist, often funded by giant corporations or their think tanks, who only wants to present facts, or pseudo-facts, that advance the interests of his paymasters.  We’ve got people who live by the culture of disinterest (always imperfectly attained) set in combat against people who don’t really care whether what they say is true, only whether it advances their cause.

It’s the triumph, on the political right, of what Spanos (himself no right winger) called “a hermeneutics of understanding as antagonistic dialogue” that makes it impossible for Bill O’Reilly to understand Bruce Andrews when he says his course isn’t normative, but devoted to understanding.  And it’s Andrews’ embrace of old notions of disinterested knowledge—in a climate where both the academic left and the political right distrust claims to disinterest—that makes him a truly counter-cultural figure.

The State of the Art of American Poetry: Now Online!

The VQR has posted my essay from their special issue on American Poetry, "The State of the Art," at their website.  I do hope you'll check it out.  

Orono Conference Report: The Golden Lobster Awards!

The National Poetry Foundation conference on the poetry of the 1980s has wrapped up, and the gathered poets, critics, and professors have dispersed, fleeing Orono, Maine for points south and west.  You know what this means: it's time for the post-conference Golden Lobster awards, given for distinction in conference-going.

Presenting this year's awards will be the ghost of Edwin Arlington Robinson, pride of Head Tide, Maine, author of Richard Cory, Miniver Cheevy, and Matthias at the Door, and favorite poet of Theodore Roosevelt.  Take it away, Eddy!

Robinson: Thank you, thank you, and welcome one and all to this gala event here in the Rae Armantrout Auditorium in Archambeau's Secret Backyard Writing Dojo.  A special welcome to President Obama and the first lady—sorry we couldn't get you better seats, but the tables at the front have been reserved for alumni of the Buffalo Poetics Program.  Console yourself with the thought that you aren't at the Iowa MFA table, which someone seems to have placed back by the men's room and the disused cigarette machine.  Let's not look to deeply into how that happened, and proceed without further ado to a list the winners in each category!

The Golden Lobster for the Demonstrable Power of the Word goes to... Alan Golding.  Professor Golding's talk on Armand Schwerner's poetic sequence The Tablets led to a run on copies of that title at the book fair, which sold out less than an hour after Golding's presentation.

The Golden Lobster for Professorial Gadgetry goes to...Aldon Nielson, whose array of laptops, tablets, cellular gewgaws and gizmos topped those of even the most geeked out grad students.  Some may have thought Nielson's digital watch was a disqualifying throwback to an earlier era, or perhaps a tribute to the calculator watches of the Reagan years (fitting in the context of the 1980s), but we have it on good authority that the watch actually controls the other electronic trinkets in Nielson's kit.  We look forward to seeing what Neilson brings to the next conference from what we can only imagine is a pre-conference visit to whatever equivalent Penn State has to Q's laboratory from the 007 films.

The Golden Lobster for the Clown Car Effect goes to Patrick Pritchett, who drove up from Harvard in a Honda Civic, into which he was seen wedging an unseemly mass of literary types on his return from Orono's only brew pub on Saturday night.  One portly Canadian poet-critic is still complaining about the imprint of the stick shift on his left buttock, though the bruise bears some resemblance to a patriotic maple leaf.

The Golden Lobster for Going Against Type goes to Norman Finkelstein, who was seen for the first time since childhood wearing a color other than black.  No more let it be said that he is the Johnny Cash of American poetry.

The Golden Lobster for Natty Attire goes to... oh! It's a tie!  Keith Tuma and Kathy Lou Schultz will share the award.  Tuma's floral-lined purple shirt and pork pie hat narrowly edged out another attendee's seersucker suit and cobalt blue shirt, since the panel judged the seersucker man to be wearing a few too many bangles and a mustache too overtly reminiscent of late-period Nietzsche.  Schultz's outfit, which might have come from the closet of Dorothy Parker, won extra points for matching her flapper-era high society bob haircut.  Could our schlubbish profession be undergoing a fashion renaissance?  Where are the chest-high shorts and madras shirts of yore?

The Golden Lobster for Audacity in Projected Scholarship goes to Joe Donahue, who was overheard in a local bar proclaiming that his paper at next year's Louisville conference will be called "The Gnostic Poetics of Barrett Watten."  I'll expect the ghost of Robert Duncan to be in attendance, his arms loaded with old copies of Poetry Flash.

The Golden Lobster for Stone Cold Badass Presence goes to...well, there's no surprise here, people.  It goes to Nathaniel Mackey, who, during his reading, emanated a vibe aptly described by one conference attendee as "Miles Davis with a trumpet mute."

The Golden Lobster for Breadth of Reference goes to Marjorie Perloff, whose plenary talk started out by drawing distinctions between Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein ("you don't get a lot of Cotton Mather in Bernstein") but ended up taking us from the tennis-and-martini aesthetic of the Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets to the miseducation of the young to the theory death of the avant-garde to the change in style of poets' essays since the 1980s to the differences between philosophy and critical theory to a comparative analysis of the job market for poets over the decades.  Our telegraph operator admits to having run out of ticker-tape, and was unable to send the full transcript to our headquarters, but even the partial evidence justifies the award.

The Golden Lobster for the Kavorka goes, as it goes every year, to Grant Jenkins, who was seen standing in a mustard colored corduroy jacket in the lobby of the University Inn Academic Suites hotel as he was approached by wayward members of a bachelorette party, who swarmed about him, stroking his lapels and cooing about how nice his outfit was.  The next day (and this, I must stress, is not something I am making up) his hair gel set off the airport body scanner, reading as an "anomalous substance."  It is not known if the incidents are connected.

The Golden Lobster for Cornucopia Ex Nihilo goes to Steve Evans, Ben Friedlander, Jennifer Moxley, and Carla Billitteri, for delivering an amazing conference experience for all of their guests despite brutal budget cuts and all the usual constraints that conspire against conference organizers.

And finally... the Golden Lobster for Benevolent Spirit Presence goes to the late Burton Hatlen, who meant so much to poetry and to the University of Maine.  Let's close this ceremony with a round of applause in his honor.  We will not see his like again.

Archambeau with Golden Lobster winner Joe Donahue.  Norman Finkelstein listens to Patrick Pritchett in the background (photo: Star Black)

History, Totality, Silence

Here's the text of the paper I'll be giving at the National Poetry Foundation's conference on the poetry of the 1980s later this week.  In the event you'd like to quote from it, here's the MLA citation format:

Archambeau, Robert.  "History, Totality, Silence." National Poetry Foundation Conference on Poetry of the 1980s.  University of Maine, Orono, ME.  30 June 2012.

History, Totality, Silence

Since the title of our panel is “Gnostics, Mystics, and Heretics of the Reagan Years,” I thought I might begin by proposing a kind of parlor game, in which we take each of the three figures under discussion today—John Taggart, John Matthias, and Laurie Anderson—and ask ourselves under which of these categories they fall.  I’m not sure if my co-panelists will want to play, but I do.  And I’ve got it on good authority that the subject of my paper, John Matthias, has heretical tendencies.  Here’s what Robert Duncan said about Matthias in an undated letter from the early 1970s:

Matthias is a goliard—one of those wandering souls out of a Dark Age in our own time… carrying with him as he goes in his pack of cards certain key cards that come ever into his hand when he plays: the juggler (as he was to be portrayed later in the Tarot), the scholar whose head is filled with learning and of amorous women and the heretic remembering witch-hunts yet to come.

A goliard! Already Matthias is in trouble, the goliards being clerical students of the middle ages who affirmed the flesh and derided the corruption of Mother Church.  And not just any goliard, but a goliard Duncan associates with the juggler of the Tarot (in esoteric decks, a figure for the magus who masters dark arts) and with the heretic seeing into a future of persecutions.  We may as well call in Torquemada’s inquisition and get this heretic burning over with.  But Duncan is talking about the Matthias of the sixties and early seventies, and thinking of Matthias’ political radicalism and of his early obsessions with alchemy and witchcraft.  What of the Matthias of the 1980s?

To ask about the Matthias of the 1980s is really to ask about three long poems that form a poetic suite: “An East Anglian Dyptich,” “Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest,” and “A Compostella Diptych,” written between 1984 and 1990, and published collectively as A Gathering of Ways.  The general project of the poems indicates a turning away from the Matthias described by Duncan: they are attempts of coming to terms with what Matthias called his “post-activist consternation” and alienation from American life.  “An East Anglian Dyptich” is Matthias’ attempt to make a psychological home for himself in England, and “Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest” represents a similar home-making project in America.  This is no longer the radical wanderer, but the poet in search of stability.  Indeed, “A Compostella Diptych,” takes as its subject the ancient pilgrim routes across France and Spain to Santiago de Compostella.  It’s an attempt by the post-activist Matthias to come to terms with, and possibly make himself at home in, both the history of the West and the dominant spiritual tradition of the West, Catholicism.

But to what terms does he come? If I were to try to sum up them up, I’d say this: in “A Compostella Diptych,” Matthias attempts to present a totalized history of the West and of Catholicism.  But he fails to find a happy totality, and this drives him toward an otherworldly yearning, a yearning for a world beyond history, an eternal world of free of violence.  This is essentially a Gnostic yearning for some eternal, infinite elsewhere of light, a yearning from which he only escapes at the very end of the poem.

When I speak of a “totalized history” in “A Compostella Diptych,” I want to use the term “totality” in a vaguely Levinasian sense: as something finite, in which diverse elements are reduced to “the violently pacified empire of Same” or “the counted-as-one” (to use Dominic Fox’s glosses for Levinas’ “totality”). With regard to history, we can think of totalization as the opposite of an unending series of discrete events— the opposite, that is, of Henry Ford’s version of history as “one damn thing after another”— or perhaps we can think of it as the hammering of such discrete phenomena into something whole, in which apparently disparate parts are in fact manifestations of a single force, or repetitions of a single pattern. We’re on the same page about this if you’re thinking of one of the most famous passages in the works of Walter Benjamin, which reads:

A [Paul] Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

This is a vision of history as total, and as total disaster.  And this very much the vision of history that Matthias gives us in “A Compostella Diptych.”

It doesn’t seem that way at first, though.  “A Compostella Diptych” begins with what seems to be a happy of the many pilgrims who have trodden the various routes through France and Spain to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostella.  There’s a barrage of proper names of people and places: some 41 different proper names in the first 45 lines of the poem.  On the face of it, this doesn’t seem like the writing of a man who would present history as a totality.  Nothing, after all, insists on irreducible specificity more than a proper name.  Indeed, proper names will be very significant at the end of the poem, when Matthias shakes himself free of a totalized version of history—but I’m getting ahead of myself.  The point I want to make here doesn’t have to do with proper names, but with a collective pronoun, “they.”  Unlike proper names, collective pronouns reduce the many to the one, and what we see happen in the opening of “A Compostella Diptych” is a reduction of the people of different European nations and centuries into a single, collective, “they”—a trans-historical subject for the people of Catholic Europe.  Here we have the multitudes “counted-as-one.”  It doesn’t seem, at first, to be anything but a joyous affair, a holy journey uniting the many.  But this all changes a few pages into the poem.  After Matthias gestures toward the song of the pilgrims, he adds this:

And there was another song—song sung inwardly

to a percussion of the jangling

manacles and fetters hanging on the branded

heretics who crawled the roads

on hands and knees and slept with lepers under

dark facades of abbeys

 the west portals of cathedrals…

There is a dissonance in the happy totality of history: those who do not fit, those who are expelled, despised, oppressed. This is a vision of the violence of the totality, and soon the history his poem recounts becomes a history of crusade, jihad, and inquisition, while a small minority yearns for an escape into timeless peace.  Indeed, history becomes totalized in a new way—as Benjamin’s totality of “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”

Matthias creates a sense of this catastrophic historical totality through four main techniques. I call them coincidence in place; rhyming actions; musical refrain; and musical reprise.

Coincidence in place presents history as total catastrophe by giving us a series of almost archeological sections in which the same geography hosts similar events over time.  For example, Matthias shows us Charlemagne’s minions slaughtered during a crusade in Spain.  These events coincident in space with later massacres of the Spanish Inquisition centuries later, and with still later massacres perpetuated by Napoleon in the Peninsular War.  We dig into the history of particular places, and, like Benjamin’s angel, see only wreckage piling upon wreckage.

By “rhyming actions” I mean historical events that Matthias presents as essentially parallel.  Notable among these is the fate of the cathedral bells of Santiago.  Early in the poem we see these hauled away by the conquering armies of Islamic Spain under Almansor, who hangs them upside down in his great mosque and uses them as candelabra.  Much later in the poem, and in history we see Alfonso VI of Castile sack the mosque and take the bells back to Santiago, installing them in the cathedral for their original use. The effect of these actions, which echo one another, is to remind the reader of conflict, and of the hubris of conquerors, as the constants of history.

There are many refrains in “A Compostella Diptych,” but among the most resonant refrains is the phrase “darkness fell at noon.”  We hear it at many moments in the poem when political disaster falls.  The refrain not only serves to unite these moments—it also connects those moments to more modern disasters.  Darkness at Noon is, after all, the title of Arthur Koestler’s novel about the evils of Stalinism.

Musical reprise is a technique quite common in opera and musical drama, but unusual in poetry: the passing of the same lyrical part from one voice to another in different contexts.  A number of different passages get a reprise in “A Compostella Diptych,” but the most insistent one is Charlemagne’s dream of war, an 18-line passage lifted from the Chanson de Roland.  We’re first given it as a prophetic dream in the mind of Charlemagne, but we hear it again, in whole or in part, in the voices of other characters (notably Aimery Picaud, the chronicler of the pilgrim routes, and John Moore, the English general killed while fighting Napoleon’s armies at Corunna), or with reference to other conflicts, including modern acts of terrorism by Basque separatists.  The effect of the reprise is to make all of history into Charlemagne’s nightmare of war—a nightmare from which we seem unable to wake up.

Not that some characters in Matthias’ poem don’t try.  Accompanying the long nightmare of history recounted in “A Compostella Diptych” is another story, a story of Gnostics who long for a world beyond this broken, bruised, and evil one in which we seem perpetually imprisoned.  This group includes the historical Gnostics and heretics of the times and places covered by the poem (Cathars, Albigensians, and the like).  But Matthias interprets Gnosticism broadly, and includes in it the Eleusinian mysteries, the practioners of the medieval Trobar Clus, and the Sufi mystics of Islamic Spain.  He even includs Ezra Pound, wandering as a young man through the south of France, and dreaming of a light beyond the nightmare and wreckage of history.

There is much in “A Compostella Diptych” to indicate that Matthias would join with the Gnostic tradition, especially in the poem’s final section.  Here, Matthias presents us with a moment where we seem to leave history, and indeed this world, behind, in an intersection of the timeless with time.  The occasion for the intersection is the explosion of an enormous Spanish armory, an explosion that shakes foundations and, from many miles away, creates shockwaves that ring the Santiago cathedral bells, the same ones that had been hauled away by conquering Moors and hauled back by crusaders.  Now, we’re told

                                                Men

whose job it was to ring them stood

amazed out in the square & wondered if this thunder

and the ringing was in time for Vespers

or Nones or if it was entirely out of time…

As it turns out, it’s the latter: the explosion is followed by a stillness that Matthias identifies with the silence before the existence of time. We are taken to a place of stillness “As it was…in the silence that preceded silence” when “there were neither rights nor hopes nor sadnesses to speak of,” where “in the high and highest places everything was still.”  We’re outside of time, and certainly outside of the totalized, catastrophic history with which the poem has presented.  Indeed, inasmuch as we are in some boundless place, we have escaped totality, and encountered the infinite.

Another kind of poet would end things here.  Indeed, a properly modernist poet would end things here—gathered into the artifice of eternity (as in “Sailing to Byzantium”), or purged of worldliness by fire (as in “Little Gidding”).  But Matthias doesn’t. Instead of turning from the world of history, he returns to it—in fact, for the first time in the poem, he enters history by name, appearing with his wife Diana on the pilgrim trails.  Here’s the passage:

Towards Pamplona, long long after all Navarre

was Spain, and after the end

of the Kingdom of Aragon, & after the end of the end,

I, John, walked with my wife Diana

down the Somport Pass following the silence

that invited and received my song

It goes on, in prose saturated with more proper nouns—29 in 21 lines—to describe John and Diana “blest and besotted” in Spain, and in their moment of history.  Escape to a timeless realm would be the Gnostic’s happy ending, but the true spiritual tradition informing “A Gathering of Ways” turns out to be something rather different, the best analog for which is the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.  For Levinas, the encounter with the unbounded or infinite is not an end in itself: rather, it returns us to experience with a sense of both wonder, and an invitation to enter into dialogue with the world.  And this sort of return and invitation is what we get in “A Compostella Diptych” when Matthias appears in the historical terrain of his poem, and when the silence “invite[s] and receive[s]” his song.  The encounter with the infinite releases him from a sense that history is catastrophe and nothing more.  Moreover, by inviting Matthias' particular song, the infinite shows it welcomes proliferation, rather than the reductions of totalization: Matthias' song is just one voice in a boundless infinity, not the total summation of all things.

It’s important to note the role of proper names here, because it underlines a slight difference between Matthias and Levinas.  For Levinas, the encounter with the infinite comes about through confronting a human face, in all its particularity.  For Matthias, though, the encounter with the infinite is with something still and silent and beyond us.  But the effect of that encounter is to return us to the world of specific people and places, the world of proper names—and to show us that this world is not reducible to some totalized history of catastrophe.  Particularity trumps totalization at the end of the poem, as a litany of proper names unassimilated into a grand pattern of catastrophe leaves us blessed and besotted.  In the end, it is this return that prevents Matthias from being a Gnostic.  As much as he is fascinated with that tradition, he can’t join it: he is too much in love with all of us who can be named.