Nothing in this Life: Nick Cave Among the Poets

The wonderful literary journal Horizon Review has, I've been told, suffered the inevitable fate of most wonderful little journals, and come to an end.  It's inaccessible now, the issues disappeared, the website gone dark—all very sad, since the affair began with great promise.

Since it's no longer available, I'm posting my own contribution to a 2011 Horizon, an essay on Nick Cave and poetry called "Nothing in this Life."  It will appear in somewhat different form in The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World, a book of my essays that will come out later this month.

*

A pair of young poets once approached me and asked if I’d like to contribute to an anthology they were editing.  I write prose quickly, but I’m a slow poet, and don’t keep much ready-to-publish material on hand, so I was a bit wary.  “What’s the theme?” I asked, as a series of possibilities for an anthology in which I might belong flickered through my head. Rapidly graying poets? White guys who could lose some pounds?  The last generation of poets to get on the tenure track before the general derailment of academe?  It turned out to be none of the above: the young poets wanted to put together an anthology of poetry inspired by Nick Cave.

            When I mentioned the project to the Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden, he didn’t miss a beat.  Nick Cave?  Lumsden had written a poem for Nick Cave and, through a series of events too complex and unlikely to present here, he’d heard from an octogenarian friend who’d lunched with Cave that the great man himself had pored over the little chapbook in which the poem appeared—pored repeatedly, apparently fascinated, but inscrutable.  There seems to be some special connection between Cave and the poets, and I think I know what it is.

*

            It was in December of 1983—right around the time Cave’s early band The Birthday Party was breaking up—that I first put my hands on a scuffed-up bootleg cassette of “Prayers on Fire,” an album the band had cut in Melbourne a couple of years earlier.  I remember clamping the headphones of my Walkman on—that’s the verb that seems most right for the kind of willful, teenaged, cutting oneself off from the world that those headphones represented—hitting play, and hearing the familiar tape-hiss (oh sound of my generation!).  But how to describe what happened after that?  I think Emily Dickinson’s words may be the only way to get at it: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” said Dickinson, “I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it.  Is there any other way?”  Somehow, during that cold night on the Canadian prairies, the top of my head was indeed taken right the fuck off.  We can actually calculate how long it hovered there: between the 2:38 of “Zoo Music Girl” and the 2:03 of “Just You and Me,” my scalp, with its lamentable gel-tipped spikes of hair, took some 29 and a half minutes to reattach to the rest of my thunderstruck self.  I’ve been able to count on a similar effect from Cave’s music—at least from a track or two from every album—ever since.

            I think at least part of the connection I felt, and still feel, to Cave’s music, comes from the one—and, really, only one—fundamental similarity between us.  We’re both the progeny of provincial culturati—which puts us into the same metaphorical shoes, even though his literal shoes are savagely cool black cowboy boots and mine are, more often than not, dopey looking sandals or grubby sneakers.

            Cave was born in Warracknabeal, Australia—a boondock town of some 2,000 souls midway between the glittering metropolises of Wycheproof and Dimboola, a place known mainly for its statistically improbable abundance of highly freckled redheads.  His parents, though, were great lovers of literature—his father was an English teacher, and his mother a librarian.  Later, the family moved to Wangaratta, another small town, one best known for being near the site of the outlaw Ned Kelly’s last stand.  As the son of an art professor in western Canada, I like to think I know a little bit about what this means.  It means a certain division of loyalties, even a kind of dislocation.  On the one hand, you love the place you’re from with the kind of intensity that only the provinces can inspire. The love of a great metropolis like New York is different, more sophisticated and perverse, and tends to take the form of a kind of hatred—would any real Manhattanite be caught dead in an un-ironic “I heart New York” tee shirt?  The love of the provinces is a simpler thing.  On the other hand, you feel connected to a set of high cultural traditions that have their deepest roots somewhere else.  It’s not that there aren’t serious readers in Warracknabeal, or art lovers in Winnipeg—it’s just that, if that’s your thing, you know you’re a little at odds with the dominant local culture. A colleague of my father’s once complained that there could never be much of an art scene in Winnipeg because there was no money to support it.  “There’s enough money,” my dad replied, “but it doesn’t get spent on art—it goes to fishing boats, cabins in the woods, and hockey tickets.”  Nothing wrong with that—but it can leave a young aesthete feeling vaguely dislocated.

            And this brings us to the Romantic poets—the first great laureates of artistic dislocation.  Much ink has been spilled trying to define the nature of Romanticism.  Carl Schmitt argued that Romanticism was all about the individual's “subjective occasionalism,” a kind of fetishizing of the moment of individual spontaneity—one might think of Jack Kerouac, hopped up on Benzedrine, and clattering away on his scroll-fed typewriter, or shouting “Go, man, go!” at Ginsberg's Six Gallery reading of Howl as the late-blooming apotheosis of sort of Romantism.  The Encyclopédie Larousse assures us that it's really all a matter of form, of artists who “freed themselves from the classical rules of composition and style”—one thinks of Paganini cutting loose with defiantly flashy and unruly solos.  M.H. Abrams said it's all a matter of emphasizing the visionary imagination, with the mind seen as a light-casting lamp, not a mirror reflecting the world as it is.  Morse Peckham said it was all a matter of self-assertion, and so did Bertrand Russell. Irving Babbitt went a step further, saying Romanticism was an “anarchy of the imagination,” such as you might find in Rimbaud. But Karl Mannheim went the other way, saying Romanticism was fundamentally conservative; dead-set in opposition to the ever-rising “bourgeois-capitalist mode of experiencing things”—if you've had a look at Wordsworth's depiction of Bartholomew Fair in The Prelude as a Dantean circle of hell, you've seen this kind of Romanticism.

            Since Romanticism can appear in so many aspects, it's no wonder, really, that Arthur O. Lovejoy shook his head in despair and said we should give the term the chuck.  I was almost willing to join him, until the great Franco-Brazilian sociologist Michael Löwy set me straight.  What holds all these loose strands together, for Löwy, is their opposition to modernity, their sense of not fitting at a comfortable angle vis-à-vis industrialism, the quantification and rationalization of all things, technocracy, and the general disenchantment of the world.  Anarchists? Backward-looking reactionaries?  Imaginative visionaries? Stylistic malcontents? Individualist outsiders?  Come on in, people—Löwy's bigtop is a commodious place.  But its inhabitants all have one thing in common: the modern world has left them homeless—sometimes literally, in the form of the poète maudit kicked out of his garret by a greedy landlord—but usually in a more metaphorical way.  It makes sense.  Think about the state of things when the first generations of Romantic writers came of age: the arts, long the handmaidens of church and state, had lost that affiliation in the breakdown of the old social order, and had yet to find a new one in the gaudy commercial world that would take its place.  Displaced from their old social roles, Romantic writers would leap into invented worlds, like Blake did.  Or they'd dream of a transformed future world, of revolution and Utopia, like P.B. Shelley.  Or they'd look to what they imagined as a lost, better world: like childhood, or village life deep in the provinces—Wordsworth's great themes.  Sometimes they yearned for the fuller, more organic social life in the middle ages, the period of the romances that gave the Romantic movement its name.  If they were particularly bright and observant, like the nineteen year old Mary Shelley, holed up in Switzerland with her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and their egos, they might dream of monstrous outsiders whose great minds and open hearts meant nothing to the torch-and-pitchfork bearing peasants who drove them to endless wanderings.  The world did not fit, felt these dislocated artists and intellectuals, and wherever they looked, it was to turn away from the modern bourgeois world of getting and spending that seemed to have no place for them.  Perhaps Baudelaire got at the situation best, when he called for a voyage going “anywhere out of the world.”

            Of course all this mattered for the kind of art these writers produced.  Earlier poets, sitting comfortably on the knee of aristocratic patronage, knew their audiences, and how to write for them.  When Lord Godolphin asked Joseph Addison for a poem commemorating the battle of Blenheim, Addison knew the political point of view, the formal norms, and the level of readability his patron expected, and for which he would pay.  Even when the market began to make its first inroads into the old patronage system, the world of paying readers was small enough that Alexander Pope knew exactly what they'd want—commonly shared views elegantly expressed in digestible couplets; or, as Pope put it, “what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed.”  But how to write in conditions when no patron, no institution, and no real market exists for the poet's work?  What to do, that is, in the Romantics' position?  Well, if there's nothing left to lose by way of worldly reward, there is, at least, a compensating freedom—a freedom for art to get as freaky as it wants to be.  And so with the Romantics we enter the world of cryptic symbols (what does Coleridge's pleasure dome stand for?); we launch off into the deep space of visionary dreams (have a look at Blake's Book of Urizen, but only after you strap yourself in for a long, strange trip); and instead of the clear, crisp pronouncements of Pope, get ready for Keats' negative capability, with its refusal to settle down into a clear statement of fact.  From here to Surrealism is just short ride on the Metro. 

*

            If we ride that same train a few more stops, we arrive at the early concerts given by Nick Cave and The Birthday Party.  I was too rusticated in the provinces to see them, and too young to get in even if I'd been in the right places.  But Duane Davis, the great bearded guru of rock history and presiding spirit of Wax Trax Records in Denver, Colorado, was kind enough to clue me in about those shows.  Here's what he said about them in Waste Paper #30 some 20 years ago, in prose he has since come to see as a bit hot-house (“I was deep in the grip of Bataille and Baudrillard,” he told me, when he sent his article my way):

The intensities of experience, the desire to act out a daily suicide in the face of an uncertain and questionable re-birth, the compulsion to burn away all the wicker of the socially woven masks our families and communities demand we wear, the immersions in pain and pleasure that take brute feeling past all points of endurance and the arrogance of total marginalization, the refusal of a Utility that measures the individual only to determine his/her productive capacities: somehow Cave has survived all this -- and more: is still searching for a performance that is a language at once private, personal and interior that can be understood by the audience, the Other, that haunts his darkest, most solipsistic, nightmares.

That's the Romantic stuff: implacably opposed to the modern, utilitarian world, and acting out its alienation in intense, dark ways.  “Everything that was him is mere charcoal and waste;” says Davis, “what is left standing is monstrous and alien.”  This is Cave as Childe Harold, as Frankenstein's monster, as Baudelaire's disheveled nighttime-wanderer in the city streets.

            Unlike a lot of rock Romantics, Cave never really left that alienation behind.  Instead, he made it the bedrock of his career.  Consider the lyrics to “There She Goes, My Beautiful World,” from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' 2004 double album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, a song I've chosen more or less at random (it came on my iPod Shuffle when last I hit the treadmill).  The song makes all the big Romantic gestures.  Here's the opening:

The wintergreen, the juniper,

the cornflower and the chicory,

all the words you said to me

still vibrating in the air.

The elm, the ash and the linden tree,

the dark and deep, enchanted sea

the trembling moon and the stars unfurled

there she goes, my beautiful world,

There she goes, my beautiful world,

There she goes, my beautiful world,

There she goes, my beautiful world,

There she goes again.

Well, it's certainly cryptic—the opening imagery is a bit hard to parse, but I do think there's a unifying theme to it.  Cornflowers were traditionally worn by young men pining for love, the idea being that their hopes would wither with the flowers.  Chicory was used in times of deprivation to substitute for coffee, and wintergreen was similarly used as a substitute for tea.  And the juniper?  Well, it was in a juniper tree that the prophet Elijah found shelter.  So we're dealing with a time of deprivation, a time when we need shelter and sustenance to get by.  The notion of the prophet in hard times is important, too: as we'll see in lines to come, the thing that Cave is missing here is his muse, so he's presenting himself as a kind of Romantic poet-prophet deprived of inspiration, which had been the only thing that made the world a beautiful, bearable place.  And, like a true Romantic, Cave sees the best world as something in the process of disappearing.

            Things become a bit clearer as the song goes on, introducing a catalog of outsider writers producing their work in a world that doesn't care for it, or for them:

John Wilmot penned his poetry

riddled with the pox;

Nabokov wrote on index cards,

at a lectern, in his socks;

St. John of the Cross did his best stuff

imprisoned in a box;

and Johnny Thunders was half alive

when he wrote "Chinese Rocks"

John Wilmot, better known as the Earl of Rochester, the man Lord Byron wished he could be; Nabokov, the amoral émigré aesthete; San Juan de la Cruz, mystic and martyr; Johnny Thunders, prototypical rocker junkie—Cave's given us a roll-call of alienated creative visionaries.  It's sort of perfect, and only an odious, ink-stained pedant would point out that it was Dee Dee Ramone and Richard Hell, not Johnny Thunders, who wrote “Chinese Rocks.”

            Let's send the pedant away, then, and get on with the song.  The next bit is where we see that it is of the muse Cave sings:

Well, me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears.

Me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears.

Me, I'm lying here, for what seems years.

I'm just lying on my bed with nothing in my head.

Send that stuff on down to me,

Send that stuff on down to me,

Send that stuff on down to me,

Send that stuff on down to me.

The world offers nothing: only inspiration from on high matters.  We hear this, and then we hear about more alienated visionaries enduring, or failing to endure, in an uncaring world:

Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles

while writing Das Kapital.

And Gauguin, he buggered off, man,

and went all tropical.

While Philip Larkin stuck it out

in a library in Hull.

And Dylan Thomas died drunk in

St. Vincent's hospital.

At home or abroad, these are exiles, displaced, working without hope of worldly reward, and sustained only by a kind of autotelos, a commitment to one's private muse.  The fate of the artist deprived of this one sustaining thing is made starkly clear with the invocation of Dylan Thomas' inglorious end.

            The next verse shows with absolute clarity the Romantic bargain: utterly alienated from this mundane world, the disciple of the muse receives something eternal instead:

I will kneel at your feet

I will lie at your door

I will rock you to sleep

I will roll on the floor

And I'll ask for nothing

Nothing in this life

I'll ask for nothing

Give me ever-lasting life

“Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes in holy dread,” say the townsfolk, when they see the poet-visionary at the end of Coleridge's “Khubla Khan,” “for he on honeydew hath fed / And drunk the milk of paradise.”  Cave offers the other perspective, that of the visionary who's turned his back on the quotidian.  He'll ask for “nothing in this life,” but that's not because he's unambitious, it's because, to paraphrase Lord Byron, he aspires beyond the fitting medium of ordinary desire, and aims at the eternal.

            With this vast ambition comes the dream—perhaps the delusion—of the outcast visionary or Romantic prophet:

I just want to move the world,

I just want to move the world,

I just want to move the world,

I just want to move.

In the first three lines, we're not just out to free ourselves from an uncaring, mundane world: we're out to transfigure it with the power of the muse.  I've always thought there should be a band called the “Unacknowledged Legislators,” since there's such a powerful strain of mystical world-changing desire in rock music, just as their was in Shelley's dream of a world secretly remade by poetry.  Greil Marcus wrote, in Lipstick Traces, about the strange feeling one gets at a great rock show, the sense that something powerful is happening, that the disenchanted world outside the club doors is somehow about to be transformed forever.  He knew what he was talking about.  But Cave does him one better, with the change we see in the last line of the verse.  It's a confession of sorts, an acknowledgement that the world won't be remade by the song.  But the singer might be, and the deliriously dancing audience in front of him—at least as long as the spell lasts.

            As we move toward the end of the song, there's a further acknowledgment of limitations, along with a kind of affirmation:

So if you got a trumpet, get on your feet,

brother, and blow it.

If you've got a field, that don't yield,

well get up and hoe it.

I look at you and you look at me and

deep in our hearts know it —

that you weren't much of a muse,

but then I weren't much of a poet.

The muse, it turns out, wasn't some celestial goddess, but merely a real person.  The song wasn't earth-shattering prophecy.  But that doesn't mean we should give up in resignation.  It just means we'll have to carry on, doing the best we can with whatever means of creation we have available in this otherwise fruitless world.  It's important, as Cave makes clear in the closing lyrics, still addressed to the muse despite his understanding that she is, to some extent, the creation of his own imagination, a projection onto the real person at whom he's looking:

I will be your slave,

I will peel you grapes,

up on your pedestal,

with your ivory and apes

with your book of ideas,

with your alchemy.

Oh come on,

send that stuff on down to me,

send that stuff on down to me,

send that stuff on down to me,

send that stuff on down to me,

send that stuff on down to me,

send it all around the world.

'Cause here she comes, my beautiful girl.

There she goes, my beautiful world…

The double movement at the end's the thing, isn't it?  The muse arrives—but at just that moment the vision slips away again.  That's the real Romantic state, burning with passionate intensity that can never slip into complacency, because the better world for which one wishes is always in the process of vanishing, and the merely mundane world from which one feels alienated—the world of Coleridge's farmer from Porlock—is always ready to intrude on the evanescent realm of the visionary.

            So.  When I think about all the poets I know who love Cave's work, and all the poets I don't know, whose poems on Cave will soon fill an anthology, I think I understand the connection.  Poets, more than novelists or playwrights or memoirists, are out on the fringes of the utilitarian world we live in.  “Give up verse, my boy, there's nothing in it,” said Mr. Nixon, the successful novelist in Ezra Pound's “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.”  That was 1920, and the world hasn't become less commercial since.  If you're plugging away as a poet nowadays, odds are you're in some sense a Romantic.  And I bet when you hit the treadmill (since only the most Romantic of Romantics aims at an early death), you've got Nick Cave on your iPod.

Anselm Hollo, R.I.P.

Photo of Hollo by Jane Dalrymple-Hollo

I am very sad to have heard from Mark Johnson that Anselm Hollo died this morning.

give up your ampersands & lowercase ‘i’s
they still won’t like you
the bosses of official verse culture
(U.S. branch)    but kidding aside
I motored off that map a long time ago

Those lines come from one of two poems from Anselm Hollo's "Where if Not Here" we published in Samizdat back in the 1990s, and they capture some of my favorite things about Hollo's viewpoint: his lack of pretense, and his complete disregard for the laurels, prizes, and jockeying-for-position that had already become endemic in the little demimonde of American poetry.

Hollo's grasp of the gulf between the sublimity of which poetry is capable, and the absurdities into which poets fall in pursuit of that chimera, a "career in poetry," made him the ideal person to hold the title of United States Anti-Laureate, to which he was elected by the Buffalo POETICS list back at the turn of the century.

Here is the announcement of his election to that position, originally posted to the POETICS list, along with his response, written to accompany the announcement when Andrei Codrescu (who happened to be visiting us at Lake Forest College when the election results came in) reprinted it in Exquisite Corpse.

*

Presenting the award for United States Anti-Laureate is Miss Suzanne Somers...

And the winner is...

ANSELM HOLLO 

(Wild applause, accompanied by a murmur of discontent coming from 
Barrett Watten's table). 

Mr. Anselm Hollo 

is hereby appointed 

UNITED STATES ANTI-LAUREATE 

for the year 2001 

with all the ironies and contradictions

appertaining there unto 

And remember, kids — all the real dadas are against dada.

With Great Sobriety and Dignity, 


Robert Archambeau 


High Commissioner 
United States Anti-Laureate Commission 
_______________________________________________________________

 

9 july ("from the desk of the anti-laureate")



"With all the ironies and contradictions appertaining thereunto" (High 
Commissioner Robert Archambeau of the United States Anti-Laureate 
Commission), I am delighted to accept my appointment as US Anti-Laureate for the year 2001.

While I agree with several of Barrett Watten's points regarding the "Iowa 
exclusion" and the "system of representation on which the [US] Poet 
Laureate[ship] is based," I prefer to read the title as simply representing a 
"Big No" (as in George Grosz's remarkable autobiography, Ein kleines Ja und 
ein grosses Nein -- A Small Yes and a Big No) to the "laurels" bestowed by some librarian and his cronies in the (increasingly) provincial capital of 
the world.



A "No," as well, to the tiresome hype (put out by publishers, arrangers of literary events, etc.) of all the "award-winning" So-and-sos -- a hype to which perhaps only "arts administration" bureaucrats still pay any attention.



As for the Iowa Exclusion [anyone with an Iowa MFA was disqualified from consideration for the title of anti-laureate] , and the Exclusion of the Great Dead, I may, upon 
further Pataphysical Reflection and Discussion with The High Commissioner and other interested parties, decide to suggest waiving these in years to come. The Anti- and Alternative Laureates are legion, and include many more than those nominated this time around. I agree with Watten that Robert Grenier's indomitable US American lyricism deserves recognition, as does the dynamic, visionary, linguistically and philosophically innovative work of Alice Notley (my nominee).

Since the Anti-Laureateship is not funded by taxpayers, I cannot invite 
Notley, or Grenier, or Watten, or any of you, to come and read at the Library 
of Congress. I have, however, acted as an advisor to the illustrious Left 
Hand Reading Series in Boulder, Colorado, for the past couple of years, and 
intend to continue to do so. The organizers of the series, poets Laura E. 
Wright and Mark DuCharme, pass a Venerable Hat for Honorarium, which thus varies according to the number of solvent persons in the audience. In its modest way, this series has been, is, and will be working toward "undoing the system of representation on which the [US] Poet Laureate[ship] is based" (Watten). For my personal record of efforts in that direction, see my book Caws and Causeries: Around Poetry and Poets. 

And in case Bob Grumman, and anyone else, truly wants to refresh his or her 
memory of any of my work, s/he now has an opportunity to do so by asking the local public librarian to obtain a copy of my Notes on the Possibilities and 
Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems 1965-2000.

Allow me to end this message with the poem "Piano Solo" by Chile's Anti-Poet Nicanor Parra (translated by Jorge Elliott): 



Since Man's life is nothing but an action at a distance, 

A bit of foam shining in a glass; 

Since trees are nothing but agitated furniture,


Mere chairs and tables in perpetual motion; 

Since we ourselves are merely beings 

(Just as god himself is no more than god); 

Since we don't talk to be listened to 

But merely to get others to talk, 


And since an echo precedes the voices that produce it; 

And since we haven't even the consolation of chaos 

In a garden that yawns and fills with air, 

A puzzle we have to solve before dying 

So that we can be tranquilly resuscitated 

After we've over-indulged in women; 

And since there's also a heaven in hell, 

Allow me to do a thing or two: 

I want to make a shuffling noise with my feet, 

I want my soul to find its body.

Photo of Hollo by Tom Raworth, 2012

31 Letters, 13 Dreams, and the Communications Revolution

If you want to understand the significance of Richard Hugo's 1977 book of poems, 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, you're going to need to check in with the Envelope Manufacturer's Association.  Let me explain.

Although the slim Norton edition I've been reading features an envelope on the cover, the importance of communications technology—and the envelope is certainly a technology of communication—isn't the most immediately apparent thing about Hugo's book.  Indeed, it comes across more as a book about solitude and loneliness than anything else, as I'm sure Hugo intended.

As the title indicates, the poems in the book come in two forms: letters and dreams.  The letters are invariable given a title in the format "Letter to [name of recipient, usually another poet of the 1970s] from [name of town, usually someplace with a university Hugo was visiting, or a little western town where he'd gone to fish]." So: "Letter to Ammons from Maratea," for example, or "Letter to Simic from Boulder." The dream poems, too, have titles that follow a format of sorts: "In Your [descriptive word] Dream."  Thus: "In Your War Dream," "In Your Hot Dream," and so forth.

One soon catches on that the letters and the dreams are really two different ways of addressing the same theme.  The letters are the public, or semi-public, way of dealing with Hugo's sense of isolation as an aging, unattached man who spends a lot of time traveling around the country from one poetry reading or visiting writer gig to another.  There's a lot of alienation, and a fair bit of non-specific frustration and detachment: "I'm awfully frightened/and I don't know why.  I keep feeling revolutionary/but I have no cause," he writes in "Letter to Hanson from Miami"—"I feel I am going to dynamite/the swimming pool."  It's a condition he attributes to being "as far from home/as I can get in the United States." 

Letters sent to someone with whom he feels a connection, an old girlfriend, say, or to a fellow poet, becomes a way of trying to connect, to write his way out of isolation.  It's also a way of converting pain and sometimes panic into anecdotage, reminiscence, and a presentation of himself as wistful, gently melancholy, a little stoic.

The dreams, by contrast, are private: not Hugo's way of trying to communicate to sympathetic people in the world, but his way of trying to communicate with himself.  That is, they're where his unconscious feeds up images of his isolated condition, directing them to the waking mind for contemplation and interpretation.  "You are riding a camel/in Athens.  The citizens yell 'We are not Arab.  This/is not sand" we read in "Your Wild Dream," before discovering that, through the metamorphic logic of dreams, "the camel is a yacht.  You cruise/a weird purple river.  Girls doze on the bank.  One/stands up and waves.  You yell, 'Where is your town?'/You are alone."  The imagery is weird, but the condition from which the dream springs is clear enough: isolation, displacement, a yearning to connect.

This kind of confessional poetry, in which the poet takes stock, as best and as directly as he can, of his inner needs and fears, and tries to tell them to others, is pretty out of fashion now.  Indeed, reading Hugo's book concurrently with Juliana Spahr's wonderful 2011 collection Well Then There Now, one really senses a change in style and attitude from the poetry prominent in the late 1970s to the well-received poetry of our own time.  Spahr's work is all about Hawaii, which one would think would give her ample cause to write about isolation and distance.  But instead we get a picture of Hawaii as a place deeply interconnected with every other place: we see it penetrated by, landed on, and changed by information and bodies and species from all over the world.  Like Spahr's equally fine This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, it is a book about connection and community, and her preferred pronoun is not "me" but "us."

And if we want to understand this difference between Hugo's lonely confessionalism and Spahr's sense of interconnectivity and community, we'd do well to look at the Envelope Manufacturer's Association 2006 report "First Class Mail and the United States Postal Service: Future Strategies for This Time-Honored Medium."  This, after all, throws into stark relief the very different communications regimes under which Hugo and Spahr have written.

The report, issued after a "summit meeting of former postal leaders and mailing industry leaders," is a bit panic-stricken.  The envelope industry, it seems, is deeply worried about the fate of the personal letter, as the wrapping of such letters has been a major source of their revenue.  But, they note, the share of United States Postal deliveries taken by first class mail (primarily letters and post-cards) has been in steep decline.  Sometime around 2002 the volume of first class mail sank beneath that of pre-sorted mail (bills, large-scale business mailings, much junk mail) and the plunge has been precipitous since then.  It's indicative, of course, of the rise of the internet, email, Facebook, iChat, Skype, and all the other means by which people keep in touch.  Richard Hugo, back in the 1970s, wrote in a world where personal communication over great distances was either very slow, like the paper letter, or very expensive (a three minute Sunday off-peak phone call in 1970 would cost over four dollars in today's money, which was down from the equivalent of almost 23 dollars in the mid 1960s; and when 31 Letters and 13 Dreams was published air travel was about two and a half times more expensive per mile than it is today, though the in-flight meals were better).  All of this matters at the experiential level: when my wife's work takes her to Paris, as it sometimes does lately, I can get on iChat and have a video chat with her for hours at, essentially, no charge.  Back in the eighties, when I had an argument with my girlfriend during her family's vacation to England, the satellite phone bill ran to some 80 bucks (maybe $160 in today's money), and the short time-lag as one's voice bounced into space and back made for some very confusing moments.  I think it might have led to the break-up. 

Anyway.  If we think about Hugo's moment, it wasn't just a time of relatively expensive communications: it was a time when American poets, novelists, and artists were more geographically scattered across the nation than ever before.  In the early decades of the twentieth century, the tiny number of people privileged enough to be engaged in these kinds of creativity clustered in a few places—Greenwich Village, say, or the parts of Paris where expats hung out together in cheap cafes.  The expansion of the universities in the decades after World War Two allowed many more people to make their way as artists and writers, but it also scattered them across the continent. And this scattering took place at a time when it was much, much more difficult to stay in touch with likeminded people than it is today.

This combination of the growing academic-cultural establishment, and the still-primitive nature of communications technology, accounts for much of Hugo's pervasive sense of loneliness.  He travels from gig to gig, from college town to college town, accumulating acquaintances but not close friends.  He's uprooted, and yearns to be in touch with the people he's met who care about the same things he does.  He can't go and meet them at a left bank bistro, because they, like him, have been scattered to the four winds by the great academic hurricane of the mid-to-late twentieth century.

This, I think, connects to a powerful feeling I had, mid-way through reading 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, that this was a book my father would love.  My dad (a ceramic artist of some renown in the field) comes, like Hugo, from a generation of artists scattered by academe, and linked only by slow or expensive communications.  I remember how big a deal it was when other artists would come to visit us—the painter Toni Onley making a grand entrance landing his pontoon plane on the lake at our weekend place, John Cage making off with someone else's beaded Indian jacket, which he mistook for a gift for the Visiting Grandee, and so forth.  And I remember the hand-written letters from artists all over the world.  Sometimes the sense of isolation and alienation in them could be moving: I remember sneaking a peek at one left on the dining room table, in which the Florida-based artist wrote of "not feeling like part of America anymore, but more like one of a handful of eternal madmen."  You get the idea: confessional, passionate, troubled stuff, born of a kind of isolation it is now difficult for us to imagine.

Nowadays, we live in a kind of dialectical synthesis of the low-tech world where artsy types had to cluster in a few bohemias, and the technological/academic world of mass culture and distance.  We're scattered all over the world, as was Hugo's generation, but thanks to our iPhones and Facebook, we're always in touch, making minor small talk and nudging one another.  There was no small talk in Hugo's letters—communication was too precious for that.  And it would be very strange to find something like the passionate, lonely statement in that letter my father received in a Facebook update or a tweet.  We're more like the gossiping left bank crowd, except, you know, without the affairs, the croissants, and the absinthe.

So: one significance of Hugo's 31 Letters and 13 Dreams comes to light when we think about the kind of statistics on letters given in the Envelope Manufacturers' Association report.  That doesn't exhaust the significance, of course—but statistics on dreams are harder to come by.

Otherness and Empathy: Harvey Kurtzman’s War Comics

I don’t remember much about the war comics I read as a kid, in part because I didn’t read them the way I read Tintin or Asterix (obsessively, slowly, repeatedly).  I couldn’t read them that way, because they weren’t mine: they belonged to the kids whose family had a little cabin next to my family’s weekend place on a lake a couple of hours into the enormous conifer and rock-outcrop forest of the Canadian Shield.  The Reichert kids were older than I was, and had lived in England for a while, and kept a stash of English and American war and horror comics in a back room of the cabin, and sometimes, when our family was visiting theirs, I’d sneak into that back room and hurriedly read through a comic or two with a flashlight.

The horror comics were a mistake: I’d always rush home and try to forget about the terrifying images by reading Asterix, but it never did any good, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night convinced that the sound of the wind in the branches could only be the wailing of corpses risen from the grave.  But the war comics were fascinating: full of guys punching out heavily armed enemies with nothing but the oversized knuckles on their spectacularly rendered fists, or jackbooted Nazis and commies marching in lockstep against our side’s ragtag bands of can-do misfits.  I do remember one exception: a grim tale of a Vietnam veteran returned home after a bad injury in the jungle, only to face social rejection, unemployment, a girlfriend who’d left him while he was away at war, and finally a crippling drug addiction.  In the end, he tries to commit suicide, but when he pulls the trigger of his old service revolver, nothing happens, and a mysterious man appears to explain that he can’t take such an easy way out: he died in the jungle, and this America to which he’d returned is hell.  But by and large the pages of Nick Fury and His Howling Commandos, Smash! and Sgt. Rock took a more gung-ho tack.

This early experience of 1970s war comics conditioned my expectations when Michael Robbins pulled a nicely produced hardcover of Corpse on the Imjin! And Other Stories by Harvey Kurtzman from his courier bag and passed it to me in the departmental lounge one evening (he’d written a review of the book for The Chicago Tribune).  Kurtzman wrote—and, frequently, illustrated—many issues of the EC comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat during the 1950s, and I expected to find simple jingoism like I’d seen in the comics I’d read growing up.  I mean, these were comics about war during a time when America was at war in Korea, when Cold War propaganda was picturing a red under every bed, and before we’d had the hard national disillusion of Vietnam.  But instead, I found something rather different.  Perhaps because Kurtzman had been a soldier himself during the Second World War (though not a combat infantryman), his stories tend to be defined by two characteristics: an acute sense of the suffering of all soldiers; and a sense of the essential irony of war.  That is: the soldiers in his stories aren’t the sort who’d shout “go get ‘em, boys!” and charge down an enemy machine gun nest.  Rather, they’re people whose boots aren’t good enough for the journey, who hunger, who are plagued by fear and lack of sleep and more fear and by naïve courage that lasts exactly up to the point of first contact with the enemy.  Which is also exactly as long as the best-laid plans of officers lasts: armies plan, in Kurtzman’s stories, and the gods of war laugh.  More often than not, soldiers are caught in their own traps, or by their own illusions.  And it’s not just minor characters who perish: protagonists die, sometimes quickly, sometimes alone and in pain.  At least one critic, Ng Suat Tong, writing for Comics Journal, has complained that Kurtzman presented war as “gentle, dignified, and bloodlessly pleasant”—to be perfectly honest, I do not know how he could experience Kurtzman’s stories, in which we watch corpses float down rivers, see the laboriously built homes of innocent farmers destroyed by mere chance, and witness the slaughter of P.O.W.s by their captors, in this light.  If this is dignity and pleasantness, I shudder to think of indignity and pain.

There are, to be fair, occasional moments where we hear the false note of jingoism —“America is a way of life... and as long as we believe in good we can’t go wrong!” But generally Kurtzman is better than that, even in a format that openly panders to the audience’s prejudices (the last panel of many stories consists of a little message like “That’s it readers!  Did you enjoy this magazine?  Your letters give us an idea of what you like to read so won’t you please write us and tell us what you liked and why!”).

What’s most interesting is the sympathetic treatment Kurtzman gives to the Chinese and North Korean experience of the war, in comics for an American market published during the war itself.  Although Kurtzman doesn’t get into the political issues behind the war, he does treat the ethics of individual combatants, and in doing so he refuses to elevate the Americans above their Chinese and Korean opponents: both are shown as capable of dehumanizing their enemies, both are capable of great loyalty to their fellow soldiers, and of self-sacrifice, not for some abstract cause, but for the other guys in the unit, in the hopes of getting everyone back home safely.

One story, “Air Burst!” is told from the point of view of Chinese soldiers in a dangerous retreat after a failed offensive, and they are treated with exactly the same level of sympathy one sees in Kurtzman’s stories about American G.I.s.  Unlike the faceless German soldiers of Sgt. Rock, these guys have nicknames, they carry each other when wounded, they’re individuated, with some being kinder or more skilled than others, they suffer from terror during shelling by Americans, and, like the Kurtzman’s G.I.s, their fates can be ironic—in the end, one is killed by the trap his squad set to slow the American pursuit of their retreat.  Here, we've moved beyond the sympathetic to the empathetic, in that we don't just feel for the Chinese soldiers, we feel through them, are asked to see through their eyes and feel what they feel.  We become them, to the degree that we become Jane Eyre or Huck Finn or any other protagonist with whose plight a story asks us to identify.

Or almost.  There's one major stumbling block to our identification with Kurtzman's Chinese soldiers: the way he represents their speech.  Kurtzman's American G.I.s speak as realistically as he could make them, given the anti-profanity restrictions placed on publications by the Comics Code Authority.  But his Chinese soldiers, for all their humanity, speak a stilted, formalized version of English.  "Let us pause a moment" one will say, "Why do you stop, Lee?" another will ask. Then an airstrike that would have caused one of Kurtzman's Americans to shout "hit the deck!" makes a Chinese soldier call out "fall to the ground!" and then "we shall give the Americans a taste of shrapnel."  Seeing an American observation plane, another soldier calls out "he circles us!" and "let us run!"— you get the idea: no slang, no contractions, the kind of thing the writers of Star Trek did when writing for Spock or Data.  The idea seems to be to present the Chinese characters as exotic, and this interferes with the attempt to give us their experience and their point of view, since they are exotic only to us, not to themselves.  If they come across as exotic, we are taken out of their lived experience, and reminded of their otherness.  We are no longer fully experiencing their point of view.

The easiest thing to do would be to dismiss this as a kind of failure of imagination on Kurtzman's part, but the more I think about Kurtzman's representation of Chinese speech, the more I can see a point to it.  In fact, it has some of the characteristics most admired in postmodern translation theory.

Consider this passage from Michel Foucault's essay on Pierre Klossowski's translation of the Aeneid:

It is quite necessary to admit that two kinds of translations exist; they do not have the same function or the same nature. In one, something (meaning, aesthetic value) must remain identical, and it is given passage into another language.... And then there are translations that hurl one language against another... taking the original text for a projectile and treating the translating language like a target. Their task is... to use the translated language to derail the translating language.

That is, some translations seek to appear as if they were written in the new language: to make a version of Goethe, say, that seems like a work originally written in English.  This is the most commonly held sense of what a good translation looks like, and I confess that I've often thought of good translation in these terms.  When, for example, I read a translation from the French that stays too close to the Latinate side of English, using "submarine rock formations" rather than "underwater rock formations" for the French "formations rocheuses sous-marines," I tend to sneer at this as a bit prissy.  But there's another kind of translation, one that aims to retain the sense that the translated work was written in another language—this is Foucault's "projectile" translation.

The late Antoine Berman, one of the most influential and controversial translation theorists of the last thirty years, elaborated on this second kind of translation in an essay called "Translation and the Trials of the Foreign" (the title comes from Heidegger's discussion of Hölderlin's strange translations from the Greek).  Here, Berman describes a type of translation that maintains a strong sense of the original language's difference from our own tongue, and aims "to open up the foreign work to us in its utter foreignness" by "accentuating its strangeness," which is, paradoxically, the only real way of "giving us access" to the foreign text as such, that is, as a foreign text.  The idea is to maintain a sense of strangeness in the translation, thereby preventing the reader from erasing the real, existing otherness of the original text itself.

Kurtzman, of course, isn't translating anything—he, not a Chinese author, wrote 'Air Strike!" and he wrote it in English.  But the representation of Chinese speech as a marked English, as something other than idiomatic, native-speaker stuff, may be taken as an attempt to maintain for us a sense that the people he is depicting are not simply Westerners with slightly different bodies: they come from another culture, and speak another language, and his representation of their speech keeps this always in front of us.

There's a case to be made against this kind of speech representation.  When I see pop-culture depictions of Native Americans, and they speak a kind of hyper-formal, dignified, contraction-free, unslangy English, I always rankle a bit, because it seems like this involves a flattening out of the emotional and expressive range of the characters.  They're not talking like the Cree and Blackfoot kids I knew growing up in western Canada, kids who were capable of wackiness, low diction, fast-talk, and as full a range of human affect as you or I.  But if Berman is to be believed, there's also a case for a kind of speech representation that marks difference as difference, that refuses to allow us to forget the foreignness of the foreign.  If we proceed on Berman's assumptions, then we can see "Air Strike!" as a combination of a Chinese point of view—inviting empathy—with speech effects that remind us that the empathy we're feeling is an empathy that stretches across cultural divisions.  And that's a subtle move—far subtler than many of us have been willing to attribute to something in the often maligned form of the old-school comic book.