Tintin is my Tintern Abbey

A couple of weeks ago I was poking around in a local bookstore, and had just given up on the poetry section when I noticed a few tall, svelte spines sticking up above their squat, chunky peers in the graphic novels section nearby. Having grown up reading a whole slew of French and Belgian comics—Tintin, Astérix, Lucky Luke, Iznogoud, and others—I knew at once what these were: English translations of various volumes of Hergé's series The Adventures of Tintin, in the British Metheun and Magnet editions and the slightly glossier, more luxurious American editions put out by Little, Brown. I scooped them up and headed for the cash register with all the speed and purpose of an addict on his way home with the first score after a long dry spell. I've been reading them compulsively ever since, and I think I know why. It's not just that most of them make for inherently compelling reading, with page-turning narrative cliffhangers and the forward thrust of all good whodunnits. It's that reading Tintin's adventures, as he chases around the globe with his dog Snowy and, at times, the bearish company of Captain Haddock, gives me a kind of double exposure. These were the books of my childhood, and reading them again in my forties both allows me to remember how I saw them when I first read them, and forces me to contrast that with how I see them now. What happens to me as I turn the brightly colored pages of The Broken Ear or The Secret of the Unicorn is like what happened to Wordsworth when he returned to his childhood haunts in "Tintern Abbey": I see myself as I was, and the world as I once saw it. Like Wordsworth, I realize that my perception of the world has become, in some crucial sense, a diminished thing.

The first thing everyone notices, coming back to Tintin after many years, is a certain cringe-worthiness in the depictions of non-Westerners.  While there are certainly characters of all ethnicities that Hergé intends as sympathetic, it's hard to get past the hook-nosed Arabs, buck-teethed Japanese, "Ugh!" and "How!" uttering Native Americans, and so-dark-they're-shiny Africans.  Indeed, this seems to have been a concern for the publishers, who have all-but-suppressed the most offensive volume, Tintin in the Congo, which does not appear listed with the other volumes on the back cover of the books after about 1980, even though other, more marginal volumes—the very early, black and white Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and the posthumous, incomplete Tintin and Alph-Art—make the cut.  It's certainly true that Hergé (the pen name of Georges Prosper Remi) didn't share our sensibilities on these issues.  In some ways, he held quite humane views: King Ottokar's Scepter is an anti-fascist work, and various books in the series express disdain for imperialism: in The Blue Lotus Tintin stops a western businessman in Shanghai from beating a Chinese rickshaw driver.  But nevertheless there's an uncomfortableness in coming back to these books and seeing some of the images.

When I first encountered Tintin, none of this was an issue for me, and I took the wide-ranging internationalism of the books in the spirit in which it was intended: as a kind of invitation to identify with the intrepid boy reporter as his adventures pulled him into all manner of exotic places.  The idea of a wide world spread out for me had an appeal, and a wonder, to it that I find hard to describe.  The best I can do to convey how I felt when I saw the cover of each new adventure—with Tintin striding out of a Balkan castle gate, or waving from a raft in a sea of sharks, or fleeing from the shadow of a Mayan pyramid, or intrepidly piloting a motorboat out to a black rock in the sea north of Scotland—is to quote a poem by the Swedish poet Jesper Svenbro that I had the good fortune to publish in Samizdat some years ago.  It's called "Idiolect," and it describes the way Svenbro, the son of a Lutheran minister, felt when his father spoke of "the world":

In my use of the word “world” there is a strangeness

which I have never been able to shake:

the word carries a hopefulness

which has no strict foundation

in the real world.

The world being what it is!

For although I know it cannot be used

in the sense I want to give it 

it is the same picture that faithfully

returns in my memory

whenever I pronounce it to myself—

it is the light space over my childhood,

white April sun over a province

whose horizon trembles in the distance:

The world rests over there.

It is the late 1940s. In those days

I went to Sunday school every week

in our northern Galilee. To me

Palestine was still a country

with heights, fields, and rivers such as ours;

and by a miracle

the hills of Rönneberga just outside of town

became the light green mountain

where on one spring day Jesus

had said to his pupils: “Go out into the whole world!”

Languages were buzzing in the air.

Jews, Arabs, Kappadocians, Egyptians!

We were in the Holy Land,

coltsfoots were blooming

along the ditch-banks of the whole world.

And among all the tongues that I heard 

was also the sound of my own.

Svenbro gets it exactly, that sense of the promise and the call of the whole world, languages buzzing in the air among exotic peoples, a world rich and strange, and about to include us—in the person of the dauntless and indomitable Tintin, to whom every door opened, for whom every scrape presented an unlikely deus ex machina rushing to the rescue.  What kid doesn't yearn for the world beyond the horizon, where the colors must be brighter and the streets more abuzz with life?  I certainly yearned for such a world away from my dusty, dry city on the Canadian prairies, and it seemed so tantalizingly possible to get there: how I envied my father, an artist always jetting off to then-forbidden China, or Japan, or some other enticing elsewhere, his rugged red duffle bag in the hallway, packed for unknown adventures.  My dad could do it, and Tintin, too: surely I'd soon be on my way.  And the possibilities were broad indeed, as one particularly resonant title in the Tintin series made clear: Destination Moon.  Tintin's globe-trotting appeared to me in the aspect of infinity, of possibility.  Political disapproval of his black-face Africans didn't appear on any map of my reading.

Likewise, the near-total absence of women in Tintin's world escaped my notice when I first read the books.  It can't escape my notice now.  You can go many, many pages with Tintin without a woman even appearing in the background.  I was surprised, when I recently re-read Cigars of the Pharoah, to find a woman appearing as early as page nine.  She even seems, for several frames, as if she's about to speak, but in the end she merely stands there, silently indignant at the goings-on: a fit emblem, if ever there was one, for the place of women in Hergé's boyish universe.  It's an utterly de-sexed universe, where men behave the way boys imagine they behave, and where anything resembling romance takes on the aspect of a comic trap: when the opera singer Bianca Castafiore takes an interest in Captain Haddock in The Castafiore Emerald, she becomes a figure for the Captain to escape, much as a boy might seek to escape from the cheek-pinching and embraces of an embarrassingly expressive and affectionate aunt.  It reminds one of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster series, where women are out, for reasons beyond a chap's understanding, to tie a fellow down, when all he wants is a good adventure with the lads.

But these matters of one's adult awareness of racial politics and sexuality, contrasted with one's childhood naïveté, are minor league stuff compared with the really important difference in perception one notices coming back to the books after many years away.  I see those pages differently than I did when I was a boy, and it's in noting the specifics of how I see them differently that I notice that these books are a kind of Tintern Abbey for me.

For Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey was a haunted place—not in the literal sense, but in the sense that it was shrouded with past associations.  If you were ever to want an illustration for Wordsworth's precept that, in poetry, feeling gives importance to action, and not action to feeling, the poem "Tintern Abbey" is for you.  Here, the whole action of the poem involves the speaker (let's call him "Wordsworth," since in the convention of the Romantic descriptive-meditative poem the distance between author and speaker largely collapses) standing near the ruined abbey he used to visit a child, remembering things and glancing over at his sister Dorothy.  What's important is the aura of memories and associations surrounding the place—the specific feelings that haunt Wordsworth when he comes back to a location he'd known intimately as a boy, and sees it with both his adult eyes and the eyes of his childhood self.  Here's how he describes the return of his childhood sense of the place, and the difference between that sense and how he experiences the place as an adult:  

...with gleams of half-extinguish'd thought,

With many recognitions dim and faint,

And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again:

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years. And so I dare to hope

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when first

I came among these hills; when like a roe

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led; more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,

And their glad animal movements all gone by,)

To me was all in all.—I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite: a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, or any interest

Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures. 

He cannot paint what then he was: it's all just too different, too alien, yet uncannily, it is his own experience, and he bears it within himself.  He experiences the place as if he were himself a part of the natural landscape, one of the deer that ran through the scene, and all the sense details passed into and through him as if unmediated.  When he sees the abbey now, he experiences it screened through thought and memory and judgement and layers of experience.  He's analyzing and sorting it—a process that provides its own satisfactions, but it is a "remoter charm" than the charms of youthful experience, something supplied by thought and reflection. The earlier experience was more primitive, more vital—an appetite, a haunting, a fear and a love.

In the end, the difference between adult and childhood perception in "Tintern Abbey" is the difference between Apollonian and Dionysian modes of experience: he stands back and understands things, now; but as a child he experienced no real division between himself and the world.  Freud, echoing Romain Rolland, called this the "oceanic feeling," the mystical oneness of self and other, and the preservation of a sense of this experience lies at the root of Wordsworth's pantheistic mysticism.

When I came back to Tintin, one of the things I noticed about the difference between how I read the books now and how I had read them as a boy was quite simple—and apparently quite trivial, compared to the differences Wordsworth felt vis-a-vis his childhood self: I read the books much faster now. This isn't a simple matter of being a better reader, being able to parse out sentences and arcs with the speed and skill of a longtime English professor, who totes around enough advanced degrees in literary studies to wallpaper a small faculty lounge. It's a matter of intuitively choosing the details that I'll treat as important. That is: I zip along in the narrative, noting which characters have entered the plot-arc, noticing the various narrative gaps that need to be filled in, and anticipating the curves in the road down which this plot-driven vehicle is heading.  I spend a lot less time than I did on seemingly irrelevant details: no longer do I pore over the depiction of a car's radiator grille, or the way a little Egyptian tea table in the background is put together, or how a Russian soldier's overcoat buttons up.  I remember how I lavished attention on these sorts of details, how I felt like I could spend a whole day sucking the juice out of each detail-rich page.  And it wasn't just visual details that held me: I remember trying to imagine the worlds in which those details would make sense.  In The Broken Ear, for example, Tintin's adventures take him to a couple of Latin American banana republics, and he ends up wearing an elaborate colonel's uniform—but it differs in cut and color from other uniforms worn by other colonels in the same army.  I tried to imagine the different branches of the military that might give rise to such differences, the social world and bureaucracy in which they'd make sense.  It haunted me for hours.  Or, in The Cigars of the Pharoah, I'd stare fascinated at a scene in which Tintin begins to hallucinate from the effects of a poison gas while trapped in an ancient Egyptian tomb.  He sees images out of Egyptian mythology, combined with the faces of people he knows, and as he passes out sees an image of his own face on the body of a baby crying in a cradle.  It all had a quality I'd recognize instantly when, as a teenager, I read a paperback copy of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater—and that I would recognize again a few years later when I first took certain hallucinogens in the company of a bunch of grad students in anthropology.  I remember groping for the significance of the image, and building a kind of nightmare vision of helplessness, of my own smallness in the vastness of that ancient Egyptian architecture and the huge duration of civilizational time.  It was one of my earliest intuitions of the sublime.  I could never get a sense like that from the image now: there's just no way it could cut through me like that.  I see the frame on the page, note the significance ("Tintin hallucinates, is helpless: plot point logged, time to move on") and turn the page.

The difference between how I read Tintin as a boy and how I read Tintin now is best understood by appealing to Aldous Huxley's notion of the mind as a "reducing valve."  In The Doors of Perception Huxley quotes the philosopher C.D. Broad, who says

The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. 

Huxley then adds his own commentary, including these remarks

… in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, mind at large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet…. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve…. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows… something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.

We adults are experts at screening material for relevance, at editing out phenomena that are, or seem to be, of no particular use to us. We need to do this just to get through the day, and, depending on the kind of things we do in our highly-specialized society, we screen out very different things. I still remember going on bicycle rides with a field biologist friend, and being perpetually humbled by how much more he saw on the trails around us, how he could read the nuance and significance of the way a dead cicada's body had decayed. He was hopeless at reading a poem, though, having no idea what to look for in terms of allusion or alliteration, a fact in which my wounded pride found some comfort.  He'd learned a framework of understanding that revealed a great deal to him, but also took him away from whole swathes of experience, and I'd done the same in a different way.  We were both living in highly screened worlds, sorted for relevance to the way we lived and the things we did in our daily experience.  These are adult ways of perceiving: a child sees things differently.  A child does not yet have a framework of relevance to use as a screen, and as a result the child's experience is radically different from the adult's.

Or perhaps this isn't quite right.  Perhaps it's not just that, as children, we don't know what's relevant to us, and thus experience the world in a less thoroughly mediated way than do adults.  Perhaps it's that, as a necessary part of our building up of our mental worlds, we're taking in as much as we can about all things at all times.  Maybe I pored over those Latin American colonel's uniforms to learn about the visual manifestations of authority (shoulder braid and jodhpurs and peaked caps), and to learn about the possible varieties of hierarchy and social organization.  Perhaps it's not that I had no sense of relevance, but that so much more was relevant to me, back when the mental tabula was so much more rasa than it has since become.  Either way, the physiological differences between the child's brain—in which the channels for, say, language acquisition are so much more open than they are later in life—must surely play a role.

This screening of experience for relevance is a powerful thing.  It certainly allows me to absorb a great deal of information quickly: when one "guts" a critical book, taking from its 250 pages everything one needs in an hour of selective reading, one is screening quite efficiently.  But something very real is lost in the process of learning to screen for relevance.  In fact, what's lost is every bit as profound as what Wordsworth feels he's lost in "Tintern Abbey"—and may amount to much the same thing.

What Wordsworth lost was a kind of selflessness, not in the sense of being a giving or unselfish person, but in the sense of not feeling, immediately and intuitively, any division between the self and the world.  He lost the oceanic feeling, the mystical intuition of the essential unity of all things.  When I read Tintin without regard for the usefulness of particular details for my understanding of the plot, I was reading in what a Kantian philosopher might describe as a disinterested way.  Not uninterested (far from it), but without self-interest, without a desire to limit perception to what is relevant to my intentions and goals.  This is pure aesthetic experience, for Kant, and it takes us out of our individual desires and goals and self-interests—it takes us, that is, out of our selves.  We become like the ecstatic Ralph Waldo Emerson when, in "Nature," he depicts himself in a state where "all mean egotism vanishes" and, as he says, "I become a transparent eyeball—I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me."  It's no small thing to Emerson, who continues his sentence by adding that, in such a state, he is "part or particle of God."

When I recall how I read, without self or self-interest, without the screening for relevance to my adult sense of what is significant, I feel that not having that experience any more is an enormous loss.  I feel the entry into self and self-interest—the entry into identity—is a loss, much as it is in Wordsworth's famous "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," where it is an entry into the "shades of the prison-house."  But, just as Wordsworth could recall his early, selfless self by returning to his childhood haunts, I can recall of my prior state by going back to the things over which I lavished my attention as a child—the two dozen or so volumes of The Adventures of Tintin.

Some might think there's a sad process of decline to be seen here, in that Wordsworth had his experiences of this sort at the dramatic ruins of an ancient abbey, and in the sublime forms of nature, and I'm describing mine as having occurred while reading the pages of that still-despised genre, the comic book.  But to think in this way is to miss out on a couple of things.  Firstly, there's the fact that Wordsworth's setting for such experiences only seems appropriately significance and literary to us because we live in the shadow of two centuries of Romantic and post-Romantic aesthetics.  Not too long before Wordsworth wrote, it would have seemed undignified and odd to locate significant experiences in a place as trivial and specific as an old, beat-up building in the boondocks.  When Milton wanted sublimity and significance, he took us to Eden, Heaven, and the halls of Pandemonium.  Secondly, it's less worthwhile to judge differences between the old abbey and the Tintin books than it is to understand their significance.  And there is, I think, some significance to the difference between how Wordsworth came to understand what he'd lost, in terms of childhood perception, and how I came to understand the same thing.

Wordsworth didn't experience his world as deeply rooted and traditional (his great poem "Michael," for example, is about the destruction of the rooted and the traditional).  But compared to us, he and his generation were astonishingly rooted—and this plays out in the ways we have our important experiences.  He has his by returning to a place he knew well as a child, a place near which he spent almost the entirety of his youth.  I, like a lot of people of my generation, had a much more mobile childhood—I lived in a city on the prairies of Canada, but I'd spend many weekends at a house on a lake up in the great evergreen forests, and part of each year in an industrial town in Ohio, and much of the summer in our house in Maine.  I moved houses more times than I can remember, often every year, and I've kept on moving ever since.  This may not be exactly typical, but it's indicative: we are no longer a people who grow up in one place, close to where our parents grew up, and then return to the same area for our adult lives.  We are a mobile people, and I think it's appropriate that my own early experience of self-loss, and my later experience of the difference between that early state and the world of adulthood, with it's very different charms, happened not in the rich experience of a physical locality, but in the act of reading.  Like other wanderers before us, we are a people of the book.

Work from Memory: Proust as Written by Dan Beachy-Quick and Matthew Goulish

Rejoice!  Work from Memory, a new book by Dan Beachy-Quick and Matthew Goulish, has just hit the shelves!  The book, from Ahsahta Press, is a kind of poetic investigation into Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, more personal than scholarly, more creative than critical.  You know I'm a sucker for any kind of rewriting, textual repurposing, or détournement, so I had to get behind the project as it was percolating.  Here's a paragraph I wrote about it for the press, an excerpt of which appears on the back cover:

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari began their great work A Thousand Plateaus by explaining the nature of their collaborative authorship.  “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together,” they say, “since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.” Work from Memory, which combines Dan Beachy-Quick’s poems with prose by Matthew Goulish, is a splendidly crowded book.  Not only does it alternate between work by each author: the book is haunted by a third writer, Marcel Proust, whose À la recherche du temps perdu provides the three passages over which Beachy-Quick and Goulish meditate.  Sometimes they think their way into Proust’s text, interpreting passages and reworking famous images.  Sometimes they think their way out from Proust, meditating on the traumatic disruption of memory in individuals and whole cultures.  Sometimes they reflect on their own act of collaboration.  Realizing that “to think is to interpret and translate,” they ponder the very meaning of their little crowd of authors, asking “what produces closure? How does the multiple cohere?” and “what constitutes individual expression?” and concluding that “memory is that chorus whose countless voices sing from within a single throat.”  Interrogating the nature of memory, of the book, and of authorship in pages one hesitates to label as merely criticism, memoir, or lyric, Goulish and Beachy-Quick have stepped out of the house of genre and into an altogether more shimmering place.

You can find the book here.

Edgar Allan Poe and Bolaño’s Detectives

Poe was one of the greatest technicians of modern literature.  As Valéry pointed out, he was the first to attempt the scientific story, a modern cosmogony, the description of pathological phenomena.  These genres he regarded as exact products of a method for which he claimed universal validity.  In this very point Roberto Bolaño sided with him, and in Poe’s spirit he wrote “The time is not distant when it will be understood that a literature which refuses to make its way in brotherly concord with science and philosophy is a murderous and suicidal literature.  The detective story, the most momentous of Poe's technical achievements, was part of a literature that satisfied Bolaño’s postulate.  Its analysis constitutes part of the analysis of Bolaño’s own work, which has three of its decisive elements as disjecta membra: the victim and the scene of the crime, the murderer, the masses.  The fourth element is lacking—the one that permits the intellect to break through this emotion-laden atmosphere. Bolaño went without this because, given the structure of his instincts, it was impossible for him to identify with the successful detective.

Okay, I didn’t write that paragraph, not really.  And it isn’t really about Roberto Bolaño.  It’s a paragraph from Walter Benjamin’s Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, with Baudelaire’s name changed to Bolaño, and a few other minor syntactical tweaks and omissions here and there.  The method is something I’ve ripped off from Benjamin Friedlander’s brilliant book of 2004, Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism.  In that book, Friedlander set out (in his words) to undertake “the creation of criticism through the strict recreation of an earlier critic's text (or, more precisely, through as strict a re-creation as the discrepancy between my source text and chosen topic would allow).” So the experiments in criticism consist of things like following the argument and phrasing of Jean Wahl’s A Short History of Existentialism to write a short history of language poetry.  Sometimes the criticism ended up saying things that Friedlander himself disagreed with, which is interesting: he’s really following Roland Barthes in erasing the author, and the author’s opinions, and replacing that figure with a “scriptor,” Barthes’ figure whose only power is to mingle different kinds of writing—in the case of Simulcast, the writing of Jean Wahl (and others) and the writing of the objects of criticism, like the language poets.

In the little paragraph above, where I hijack Benjamin to talk about Bolaño, I’ve done nothing near as bold as Friedlander does, because I actually agree entirely with the statement the paragraph makes about Bolaño.  I mean, the pervading atmosphere of Bolaño’s writing, from Nazi Literature in the Americas to The Savage Detectives, from The Romantic Dogs to Tres, and certainly in 2666 is a kind of noir desolation.  When there aren’t literally faced with victims and crime scenes, we’re still dealing with people who are in some way damaged, living in environments that reflect that damage.  The people we get to know in his work are always at odds with the great mass of people in society, and over everything there hangs a sense of a great wrong that has been done.  There’s never any real resolution, no true and satisfying success for any detective or searcher, though: in fact, there’s rarely anything specific at which one could aim one’s investigation. Bolaño is a writer of mood, and that mood is despair—the mood of an Edgar Allan Poe detective story without a detective to solve the crime.  I imagine this has to do with Bolaño’s generational experience: his is the generation of the Chilean revolution that failed, his is the generation of poets who could never come into the spotlight like their Latin American poetic predecessors had done, at least not in their lifetime.  He has a lot in common with an alienated outsider like Baudelaire, who could never quite find a social or political program into which he could channel his discontent for long.  I suppose that’s why when Benjamin nails it about Baudelaire, he nails it about Bolaño, too.

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.