Poets, Community, and the New Gnosticism

Rejoice!  The January issues of the literary magazines are hitting the shelves and going live online!  If you look hard enough into the avalanche of new stories, essays, poems, and reviews, you'll find two modest pieces of my own.  One is "Twenty Poets Talking," a review of Tony Leuzzi's Passwords Primeval, a collection of interviews with poets.  My review starts like this:

“Don’t tell me what the poets are doing, don’t tell me that they’re talking tough,” sang the Tragically Hip back in 1998, “don’t tell me that they’re anti-social, somehow not anti-social enough.” Editor and interviewer Tony Leuzzi has certainly managed to get the poets talking in Passwords Primeval: the transcripts of his interviews with twenty very different poets, taken together, run to close to 350 pages.  The book is most likely to be dipped into rather than read straight through: one imagines its destiny involving resting on library shelves until people interested in the work of a particular poet pluck it down to read that poet’s contribution.  But one of the most interesting things to emerge when one does read all twenty interviews back-to-back is the lack of anti-social attitudes among the poets.  Most of them seem to speak out of, and to, defined communities, the sum of which make up the varied, fragmented, and (despite reports to the contrary) extensive readership of contemporary American poetry.

It goes on to talk about Kevin Killian and the post-AIDS San Francisco literary scene, about Billy Collins as that rarest of creatures, a poet unalienated from American suburbia, and about Karen Volkman and the world of the poet as creative writing professor.  The review appears in Gently Read Literature.  Information about subscriptions is available here.

The second essay appears in the latest issue of Talisman as part of a fantastic feature on the New Gnosticism in poetry, including pieces by Norman Finkelstein, Mark Scroggins, Patrick Pritchett, Ed Foster, and others.  My contribution is called "The Open Word: A Letter to Peter O'Leary."  It begins like this:

Dear Peter, 

What has your vocabulary done to you? To me?  To us? Or, to narrow it down a bit, to John Latta, who wrote, a propos your book Depth Theology:

Dysthymia: thymos being Greek mind, and dys- ascending out of Sanskrit dus- meaning bad, difficult, &c. O’Leary’s an inveterate neologist: in notes to Depth Theology he points to various “coinages from taxonomic roots: an apiologist (a word Emerson once used) is one who studies bees; a parulidologist is one who studies warblers.”

Your vocabulary also staggered Broc Rossell, who said in the Colorado Review that the lexical “register of Luminous Epinoia might be the most elevated in American poetry since Hart Crane.” You make up a fair number of words, Peter, and revive many more from the realm of the hapax legomenon, or the deeply buried Greco-cum-Latin-cum-Sanskrit & Aramaic lexicon. Of course there are strange words and there are strange words.  I once wrote something about the difference, and it went more or less like this:

Consider “kuboaa,” a word invented by the great modern Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, and put into the mouth of the starving hero of his masterwork, the novel Hunger. For Hamsun's delirious hero, the word was a pure sound, something outside, even above, the realm of signifying language. Always aware of the absurd, and with a longing after purity that led him into some dark corners of the psyche, Hamsun meant for his “kuboaa” to be a word free from reference. To encounter it was to encounter something alien, something of untainted otherness. You could say “kuboaa” was to be the verbal equivalent of one of Kazimir Malevich's paintings of a red square on a white background: everything familiar was to be left behind in the encounter with the unassimilated and elemental. Kuboaa was the word of the modern primitive, he word of regrounding, of beginning again, outside existing language and away from the freight of civilization.

The rest of the essay can be found here.

Life, Barely: Notes on Clive James

Lady Diana Cooper

Everyone is connected to everyone, the saying goes, by no more than six degrees of separation.  Between your uncle the cardiologist and Vladimir Putin, between Michael Jordan and a kid working a shoeshine stand in Istanbul, there are chains of relation and acquaintance much shorter than we might expect.  This notion is the premise of Clive James’ poem “Six Degrees of Separation from Shelley,” in which he seeks degrees of connection back through time to the poet Percy Shelley.  But the real theme of the poem isn’t connection: it’s whether life is worth living.  And his answer, just barely, is “yes.”

The poem begins with this:

In the last year of her life I dined with Diana Cooper

Who told me she thought the best thing to do with the poor

Was to kill them.  I think her tongue was in her cheek

But with that much plastic surgery it was hard to tell.

That’s Lady Diana Cooper to you, pal.  Largely forgotten now, she was much-lauded as the most beautiful woman in England during and after the first world war, and was certainly among the most glamorous: the (possibly illegitimate) daughter of the Earl of Rutland, she shone among a smart set of artists and intellectuals who perished in the war, glimmered on the silver screen, and moved from the center of London society only after the second world war, when she flew to Paris as the wife of the English ambassador and became that city’s most celebrated hostess, and event eluded to in the stanzas that follow:

As a child she had sat on the knee of George Meredith

More than forty years after he published Modern Love.

Though she must have been as pretty as any poppet

Who challenged the trousers of Dowson or Lewis Carroll,

We can bet Meredith wasn’t as modern as that.

By then the old boy wouldn’t have felt a twinge

Even had he foreseen she would one day arrive

In Paris with an escort of two dozen Spitfires.

Glamor aside, we’re not much encouraged to like her in James’ poem, are we?  She died in 1986, so that nasty remark about the poor was made in an era of nastiness regarding the poor, the years when Margaret Thatcher bestrode England like a smug colossus.  Was the aging aristocrat really as horrible as her remark makes her sound?  Did she really think the poor better off dead?  The poem leaves the question open, but in the process refers to Diana Cooper in such a way as to emphasize her shallow vanity, so even if we choose to believe she wasn’t expressing elitist disdain, and only making a joke in bad taste, she appears in an unflattering light.

She’s far from alone in this, though.  As we move back in time through a chain of notable literary acquaintance, those we meet tend not to come off well.  Ernest Dowson and Lewis Carroll are mentioned in their least-likeable aspects, and the aged George Meredith is pretty much shorn of dignity with the suggestion of impotence.

As we continue to trace the path connecting James to Shelley, we meet Thomas Love Peacock and his daughter, both of whom escape savaging, though Shelley himself is made to look a bit of a fool:

The book lamented his marriage to one of the daughters

Of Peacock.  Peacock when young rescued Shelley

From a coma brought on by an excess of vegetarianism

By waving a steak under his sensitive nose.

The portrait of Shelley takes a dark turn in the next, and penultimate, stanza:

Shelley never quite said that the best thing to do with the rich

Was to kill them, but he probably thought so.

Whether the steak was cooked or raw I can’t remember.

I should, of course: I was practically there:

Here’s where the poem starts to become something more than an interesting little list of biographical linkages.  The inverted parallel’s the thing: if Diana Cooper may have wanted a mass killing of the poor, Shelley may have wanted a mass killing of the rich.  What are we to make of this?  One’s first instinct might be to see it as a historical degeneration from an era of populist revolutionary hope to one of cynical reaction.  Or perhaps one’s first instinct is sigh and think “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” at the sight of a civilization that grows no less bloodthirsty as it grows older.  Is it all really as bad as this, we wonder?  Did Shelley, who wouldn't eat the flesh of any animal, really wish the death of whole classes of people?  James’ answer in this poem is “probably,” which introduces an element of doubt, and with that doubt, of hope.  He drives the point home in the final stanza:

The blaze of his funeral pyre on the beach at night

Was still in her eyes.  At her age I hope to recall

The phial of poison she carried but never used

Against the day there was nothing left to live for.

From Shelley’s death to the fire in Diana Cooper’s eyes seems, suddenly, a short leap.  But there’s more to the stanza than that.  We get a powerful sense of life set against death.  We see those last flames of Shelley’s funeral on an Italian beach, where Trelawny famously clutched Shelley’s heart from amid the flames to show how his spirit lived on.  We get Shelley’s passionate life living in the eyes of Diana Cooper, and a sense of the continuous pulse of all our little lives, linked together across the centuries that bury us.  We get, most importantly, Diana Cooper’s readiness to take her life, her readiness to believe, after surviving so many people whom she loved, that life is empty—and her final refusal, even in her aged cynicism, to take her life.

In the end, James’ poem is a narrowly-run race between cynicism and the affirmation of life.  We’re given just enough hope that Lady Diana Cooper didn’t really believe the poor should die, just enough hope to believe that Shelley didn’t wish death on multitudes, and we’re given a bit of proof, in that unused phial, that someone, even in a world of hate and human folly, found life worth living.

The Poet Resigns: A Notable Book of the Year at the Poetry Foundation

Great news! (Well, great news for me): The Poet Resigns has been picked as a notable book of the year by Alfred Corn on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog.  It's in good company, too, listed alongside books by Robert Pinsky, Marilyn Hacker, Richard Wilbur, and Don Share's wonderful edition of Basil Bunting's Persian translations.

The book, which deals with the conditions under which poetry is produced (among other things) is a bit big for a stocking stuffer, but don't let that deter you.

Much love to Alfred for noticing the book!

Slate Magazine on The Poet Resigns

Slate magazine has asked its critics to come up with a list of the best overlooked books of 2013, and I'm very happy to see that my book The Poet Resigns made the list of the "criminally under-appreciated" books of the year. 

Here's some of what Slate has to say:

Archambeau presents a complex and convincing case for the ways in which the current situation of poetry springs from and responds to its economic and cultural context—one which makes such ahistorical gripes seem lazy... Archambeau does this and much more in prose that's consistently welcoming, curious, and free of the anxiety that marks so much criticism...

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to pop open a bottle of wine.  The good stuff, the kind it would be criminal not to appreciate!

"Imagine That Happening Again in Poetry": The Future and History of Rhyme

Anthony Madrid (right) with Michael Robbins and Stephanie Anderson

It is, of course, a debatable proposition that Anthony Madrid's paper on rhyme at the recent Midwest Modern Language Association conference is the most exciting thing to come out of Milwaukee since the introduction of the Harley-Davidson Fat Boy in 1990, but I'm inclined to believe it is just that.  Indeed, in combination with another paper on rhyme by Robert Strong of Bates College, Madrid's paper led me to revise my sense of literary history.

Madrid came to Milwaukee to speak on a panel I'd organized on the poetry of Michael Robbins.  He joined Don Share of Poetry magazine, who spoke about the controversy that surrounds much of Robbins' work, and Lea Graham of Marist College, who spoke of capitalism and commercialism as influences on both the form and content of Robbins' poetry.  Madrid took a long view, and arrived at Robbins only after giving a précis of his University of Chicago doctoral dissertation on the history of English rhyme from the sixteenth century on.  What he revealed was, to the best of my knowledge, and entirely original and convincing theory on the evolution of rhyme, and a hint at the direction in which it may be going in English language poetry.

The story begins with the surprising frequency, in the Elizabethan period, with which rhyme words occur with particular kinds of semantic elements: rhymes that are not merely aural, but linked in certain kinds of elementary dyads, especially opposites like he/she or me/thee or ever/never, say, or hither/thither.  Synonyms are also common rhyme pairs in the period, as are pairings with a genus-species link (cherry/berry) or that come in one way or another from the same category (mother/brother, say, as a kinship pairing).  The idea was to combine semantic similarity with sonic similarity.

The striking thing is that these whole categories of rhyme begin to disappear, or become greatly diminished, in the Stuart period (Madrid's diligence over the course of several years in counting rhyme words is to be commended and honored, and perhaps also pitied just a little, in the way we might pity Milton's study-bound scholar in "Il Penseroso").  The disappearances happen without being theorized: there are no manifestoes or treatises condemning such rhymes, but the change is real and clear and empirically there.  Semantically significant rhyme becomes greatly reduced, and a new form or rhyming becomes the norm.  This new form is sonic or aural first, says Madrid, and seeks to be a kind of climate of background sound, a white noise or a lulling drug.  It does not wish to draw attention to itself by making a clever semantic parallel to the rhyme's sonic element.  Rather,  it wishes to go by as something felt but unmarked.  Mother/brother or hither/thither fade to be replaced by the kind of rhyme we in our time deprecate as mediocre or banal—moon/June and the like.  This is not to say that such rhymes, with their refusal to forefront any kind of semantic cleverness, are bad—although I heard papers at the same conference where Madrid spoke that asserted just that, as if there were transhistorical truths about rhyme, unbound by any historically contingent aesthetics.

The kind of rhyme that came to prominence in the Stuart era and lasted throughout the Augustan period fell from fashion with the Romantics and has not returned to fashion since (though it persists, of course, in many popular forms—wedding verse, greeting card verse, and other forms despised by the literati).  The Romantic transformation of rhyme drew inspiration, in England, from Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, that great rag-bag of popular song and balladry.  The transformation is most visible in the works of Lord Byron.  Byron, after all, was a great lover of the Augustans, and much of his poetry partakes of an Augustan form of rhyme.  But when he leaves off the seriousness of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage for the comedy of Don Juan, Byron lets loose with a new virtuosity in rhyme.  Instead of letting rhyme be unobtrusive, he juices it up, and makes us notice it for its originality, striking newness, and cleverness: "But oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual/Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all" is the most famous case of dozens, even hundreds, of virtuoso rhymes from Don Juan alone.  Rhyme, in the new dispensation, is to be about flash and dazzle and cleverness, and you are meant to notice it, as you had not generally been meant to notice it in the Augustan paradigm.  The new rhyme differs, too, from the old Elizabethan form, since it does not necessarily seek some kind of semantic parallel to the sound echo.  It is about startling freshness, however that might be found.

The trouble with this new kind of rhyme, Madrid says, is that it can, if established as a tradition, become tedious—especially when handled by pens less deft than that of Byron.  So rhyme falls from literary fashion almost altogether with modernism, or becomes something we  downplay and disguise with off-rhyme, enjambment, and other de-emphasizers.

Rhyme never really goes away, of course, and it has remained with us in popular poetry, in song, and in poetic movements that set themselves self-consciously against the dominant culture of unrhymed verse.  It has also been notably present in rap, and some poets have taken up the form of rhyme found there—a form in reminiscent of the Romantic or late Byronic model.  Here, rhyme is meant to be noticed for newness and originality, and sometimes, too, for a semantic component that goes along with the sonic one.  Rap rhyme is (as Robert Strong, who spoke at a panel just before Madrid's, says) often most intensely original and attention-grabbing at moments of extreme praise or of denunciation.  Moon/june just won't cut it in this paradigm.  And since one can bend the spoken/rapped word to fit the rhyme one can create oral rhymes where none would have been expected, as Eminem famously did when he created full sonic rhymes between "four inch" "storage" and the supposedly unrhymable "orange."

In his paper (which cites Madrid) Robert Strong describes the virtuosity of rhyme in rap battles, where rappers denounce one another with displays of originality in rhyme.  "Imagine that happening again in poetry," he says—but I don't have to, since I've seen it in the poetry of Michael Robbins.  The title poem of Robbins' book Alien vs. Predator, for example, consists of a depiction of just such a rhyme battle between the protagonists of the movies Alien and Predator, and—as in so many of Robbins' poems— deploys rhymes in the Byronic mode (the Robbins rhyme that most sticks in my head, and is perhaps destined to be his "intellectual/hen-pecked you all" is "Rorschach blots/Arnold Horshack thoughts").

After a fine analysis of Robbins' rhymes, and what they owe to those of Frederick Seidel, Madrid speculated on the future of rhyme, on whether it will take up the hyper-clever and virtuosic rhymes that he, Robbins, and some others of his generation employ, or whether this revival, too, will drown in a sea of its own cleverness.  But I'd run out of room in my notebook, so we'll have to simply wait, read, listen, and see. 

The German Self, The German Soul: Notes on Ambiguity and Translation

One of the things I like about teaching at a liberal arts college is the way the small scale of the place throws me together with people from other departments.  The things I've learned about communications theory and intellectual history from such encountershave always felt like the secret weapons in my critical arsenal. Alvin Gouldner, for example, may be one of the heroes of communications, but hardly anyone in literary studies cites him, and I was able to import his insights into my own field and land an article in a very fancy journal indeed.

Recently, I've been privy to a discussion between a colleague of mine in Asian Studies and a professor of German about the words "soul" and "self" in Hilda Rosner's translation of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha.  My Germanist colleague, Richard Fisher, was kind enough to allow me to reproduce some of his comments on the meaning of various German words that might be translated as self and soul—comments that go beyond mere issues of translation to get at the language, and linguistic technique, of German philosophical and theological writings.  Here is how the tremendously learned Fisher addressed the question:

[This is] a perenially interesting and vexed question, as many German concepts are a bit slippery in English, that is they can be ambiguous or ambivalent. This is because these concepts are already multi-valent in German, being lexically 'diverse' and for precise connotation depending a lot on specific context. To communicate intention, connotation and the penumbra of meanings is part of the translator's job, but this will always involve choices and, likely, compromise to render into English. So, atman will be mediated at least twice before appearing in an English context as self or soul.

The German word for soul is 'Seele'; the word for self is das 'Selbst' or 'das Ich' (ego). When it comes to palingenesis [reincarnation] or anything metaphysical, the terms, contexts and meanings are all over the place, depending in part on which aspect is stressed. The word 'Geist' is a good example: it can mean mind (as in the Greek noos or nous), spirit, intellect, sense, ghost, anything numinous or epiphenomenal or paranormal; but, with a bit of literary leeway, it might also mean 'the mind's eye' or 'soul' or 'self' or 'character' or 'inner life' etc. 

This polyvalency is dear to Hesse, and all German writers, because very often more than one meaning is intended, but which particular set of meanings is not linguistically specified--so the term retains, intentionally, a flexible range of meanings not strictly delimited--that's part of what Geist means--but all these meaning explicitly also contain and imply not being their opposites: matter, materiality, corporeality, substance, tangibility, concreteness, sensual reality etc. Importantly, Seele and Geist are also seen as modes of perception or apperception.

All Germans are dialecticians, so das Ich or das Selbst also implicate, by negation, the non-self or not-Self. And these slippery terms and pairings are, of course, everywhere in Hesse, notably among the novels also in Narziss and Goldmund, his medieval incarnation of the spirit-matter dichotomy or polarity. 

As with Hegel and Kant, translators make it easier for non-German readers by making the choice among denotations, and reserving the discussion of ambiguities for learned footnotes. In a way, the German terms do not want to be pinned down (Goethe uses the term 'bephählen' or hitting the bull's eye when talking about Schiller) making the suggestiveness richer, more complex, and less determinate; in English we seem to think and visualize more concretely, and find this cloud of extra meanings a bit vague and unclear, whereas for German readers this haze is part of exactly a not-unclear but multi-dimensional set of references. Seele or Geist immediately confront a reader with the entire metaphysical panoply of existence--a bit like quantum mechanics--but in English the terms are more circumscribed, more on the order of organs in the body or the abstract regions of an otherwise tangible-concrete or substantive hierarchy. 

So yes, the meanings of soul and self in German can often spill over into each other, but the contexts can render the degree or direction of this overlapping quite variously. Specifically Christian meanings can usually be detected by context, and in fact represent a narrowing of the otherwise amorphous, even aniconic use of the term in poetry and philosophy or speculation. For Hesse, the soul is not only that reflective part, capable of transcendence or salvation or communion with the divine, but also an autonomous entity partaking in the dynamic of all existence, phenomenal and numinous, spiritual and corporeal--and the same for the self. These are, a priori, epistemological terms in German, and not static states or entities. 

Some English readers will share this expansive, delimiting German understanding; others will find the terms fuzzy or messy.