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[The following is a brief essay by Carol Mirakove that she asked me to post, the context of which is described in the first paragraph. Please feel free to post responses and commentary -- the new sidebar should make comments easily accessible as they accumulate. For the sake of formatting I've hidden the URLs that Carol references and embedded the links in the text. Click "more" below to see the rest of the essay.]
In the name of the “dialectic” of the “violent imperium” that collects the work of Laura Elrick, Heather Fuller, and me in QUID 11, I am compelled to respond to Andrea Brady’s essay on Laura’s poetry.
While Andrea’s native tongue is American English, I understand that her current literary engagements are located in England, and that she is today identified as an English poet-critic. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic are quick to recognize a significant difference in the approach to criticism in the U.S. and UK. Both approaches are problematic in their own ways. Kristin Prevallet wrote a terrific essay on the problems with U.S. criticism called “Why Poetry Criticism Sucks,” which appears in Jacket 11. My intention here is to consider some factors in UK criticism trends that may be counter-productive.
I think we might all agree on this: poetry and criticism that activates social and political change is good. How do we achieve this? I would suggest that we ask the following questions of a text: What does it value, in form and content? Where is it located, and what are the circumstances of that location that inform the work? What new locations might the text offer, towards regeneration and reconstruction?
My biggest grievance with Andrea’s essay on Laura’s poetry is that it seems superfluously antagonistic at nearly every turn. For every “compliment” there is a discrediting. I believe this pattern is counter-productive if we are to foster community, and a unified front against the real enemies: imperialists and global capitalists. While I appreciate that Andrea is writing in a [British] tradition that is foreign to me, I can’t help but feel it necessary that a critic demonstrate some degree of engagement with the geographic, cultural, and political positions from which a poet-under-review is writing. The disconnect that Andrea experiences from Laura’s location is most evident in the following passage:
In ‘Dream Helmet’, an argument in French between the speaker and a friend, and in ‘TOW’ the phonetic transcription of a black American dialect (“listen ahngonna be honest wichu”), emphasize the persistence of alternate modes of speech and localized idioms, even if their invocation seems rather suspect. For, while the possession of French linguistic skills signals a class privilege, African American speech patterns mostly present an economic disadvantage.
In fact, in the NY metro area, in which Laura lives and works, French speakers come from Haiti, Senegal, Guinea, Cameroon, Chad, the Ivory Coast, Rwanda.. The suspect invocation, then, is on Andrea. Furthermore, the phrase Andrea tags as “a black American dialect” is actually a class-inflected one, being a transcription of a marked Queens and Brooklyn speech pattern that is shared by blacks, Puerto Ricans, Irish Americans, Polish immigrants (and almost anyone else learning to speak English in the boroughs, native or immigrant) and which is part of the dense social fabric of power relations in New York.
Andrea seems, on the whole, suspect of Laura’s project. It’s not clear to me, for example, how Laura’s engagement with multiple speech patterns is “a liability,” or how her elliptical phrases might be edited to “carry enough weight.” In fact, the elliptical phrase Andrea quotes in her essay (“click, as in pistol cock”) is clearly less a “qualification” of the noise in question, than a critique on the gendered discourse of industry and social-engineering. In addition to such misreadings, I wonder if Andrea’s position in England — a country that has a deeper allegiance to tradition, to which it seems to appeal for literary validity — might inform her complaints. I have a sense that U.S. readers tend to be more permissive regarding new, valid forms of poetry, and might, therefore, be more accepting of Laura’s judgments regarding appropriate weight. For example, I, unlike Andrea, don’t read Laura’s “small units” as summations; I read them as events. I, like Laura, live in the NY metro area, and I may therefore be better disposed to ally with her project, which often attends to the daily encounter as it is marked by discrete utterances and signs. These small [language] events carry a great deal of weight in the context of NY. We are densely populated. We are constantly negotiating space and interpersonal relations. We do not, exclusively, project our politics (cf Andrea’s comment on Laura’s poetic forms being mimetic); we experience our politics, and we shape them in our immediate and constant contact with our neighbors, where a wide range of lived realties are encompassed in a small geographic area, yet are subject to the same historical forces affecting, and in turn being affected by, culture and class.
Andrea writes that “dealing with limited information passionately is a necessary skill, one which Elrick’s poems seem to want to impart to their readers.” Is not all information limited? Or, what would “complete” information look like, for Andrea? And what about the poem as experience?
I value Laura’s poems precisely for this, the textual performativity of them, and for her socially arrayed interventions, of the people, voices, and situations that arise out of Laura’s community-based activities in Harlem, not activities I would otherwise engage. Her poems provide me some insight into the ambiguity and contradictions of language-usages and lives I otherwise wouldn’t know at all. And, a better understanding of people in all locations, however limited, can only benefit an informed resistance.
While I appreciate and value the practice of challenging one another in our dialectical struggle towards a more just distribution of wealth and power, I cannot glean from Andrea’s essay any real suggestions regarding how a poem might best intervene in this dialectic. And I do wonder what a worthwhile poem would look like, for Andrea. I wonder if her own poems measure up to the undefined standards that Laura’s poems apparently often fail to meet. What would a “truly shared and social language” look like? It seems to me that some incarnation of Eliot’s objective correlative is implicitly championed in Andrea’s criticism, and that’s problematic, as it necessarily appeals to a fundamentalism, discounting circumstances, which are critical factors in solving our global problems.
In the course of composing this response, I stumbled upon an amusing passage from John Cage’s poem-essay “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)”:
Europeans are still up against it.
They seem to require a center of
interest. They understand tragedy but
life itself (and any art that's like it)
puzzles them, seems unsatisfactory.
— Carol Mirakove
I've posted Keston Sutherland's response to Carol on the main page.
http://www.arras.net/weblog/000108.html
Posted by: Mr. Arras at January 23, 2003 10:30 AMRemember when the world fell further apart and we were all told that criticism had become unacceptable, the community too weak to bear it? That seems so relevant to some of Carol’s claims that, for me, it makes this whole dialogue somewhat disturbing.
I thought, that is, that we lived in communities which valued argument, dialectic, criticism. I was going to start by enumerating the three or so sentences in my 3-page review of Laura Elrick’s poetry that I would consider ‘critical’, not even antagonistic (these were mostly about technical points, on prosody, length of lines etc.), and the 14 or so sentences which are laudatory (these were mostly about content, mimesis, her delivery of a critique of capital and alienation). In the latter category I’d include some ‘value-neutral’ analysis, which anyone who knows me (as Carol’s remarks here suggest that she does) would understand are laudatory: in that, they embrace, consider, respond to work with respect, as a cultural event worth engaging on its own terms – the terms of its production generally, within multiple contexts, rather than just with what I’m told I should ‘humble’ myself before, the worthy vocational occupations of its poet. That’s what ‘demonstrating some degree of engagement with the geographic, cultural, and political positions from which a poet-under-review is writing’ means to me. Not trying to replicate the micro-climate in which the poem was produced.
I mean, am I supposed to be more critical of say Bill Fuller’s poetry (which I love) because he works in a bank? I don’t know Laura, but as I say in my review I look forward to reading more of her work; Carol and I know each other a little, by e-, and our correspondence has seemed to me fruitful and generous over a few years, expressive of shared goals and beliefs and mutual support for each other's work and even suffering to make that work. Which is why I find her exaggeration (‘superfluously antagonistic at almost every turn’), and her uncharacteristically roughshod diagnosis of the UK poetry scene, really peculiar.
I won’t make that enumeration, because I already had my say. I wonder, though, how we could have encountered the same document and come up with such completely different interpretations. I’m thinking that there are problems on both sides, writer and reader. Can I challenge a few of what seem to me misreadings not justified by my own lapsing prose and vague language? Carol says that I ‘seem, on the whole, suspect of Laura’s project’. I say, for example, ‘Elrick’s criticism of this clinical language again foregrounds the relationship between restricted speech and authority. But her dramatic enactment of the examination of the prisoners, and the degradation of their rights—especially in the experience of childbirth—is both accurate and necessary.’ Or, in a passage which Carol somehow reads as suspicion, ‘Laura Elrick challenges the authority that implements that discipline, and hopes to offer some of the tools for replacing the prison with the community centre, the barred and fragmented individual speaker with a shared and truly social language.’ Carol asks ‘What would a “truly shared and social language” look like? It seems to me that some incarnation of Eliot’s objective correlative is implicitly championed in Andrea’s criticism, and that’s problematic, as it necessarily appeals to a fundamentalism, discounting circumstances, which are critical factors in solving our global problems.’
Now this is really bizarre. My phrase, I admit, is imprecise. It gestures towards the goal which I think I share with Laura and Carol, to interrogate the ‘corrupt’ uses of language by corrupt powers, of thinking toward a way of uniting in a language that we all owned and used fully, completely, all of its resources turned toward our own individual liberation and that of other people. Ok, that’s still imprecise but you see what I’m getting at. How could that be 'fundamentalism'? I don’t know what a poetry would look like that used such a language (a post-apocalyptic universal language), because it doesn’t exist yet. I care about poetry which is trying to create it: and even the failures of that poetry, along with its successes, can point us towards it. As for her ad feminam asides, I don’t know if my poetry is seen to be working towards that goal sufficiently; I look forward to a reviewer telling me – a reviewer who offers the kind of critical engagement that shows they think of me as a mature, and yet a learning, adult, whose poetry grows through conversation, questions and disagreements. I.e. not what Kristen (in the article Carol points us to) describes as a ‘fondling’ review that gives me as much insight as jacket-copy.
What Eliot has to do with this I have no idea, other than that he was an American who emigrated, and he wrote about tradition. Whether all this ‘we live’ stuff is relevant other readers can judge. Is Laura’s poetry trying to explain to me what it means to live in New York, and nothing else? Is New York the only ‘location’ I am allowed to answer, according to Carol’s suggested profitable questions? That seems a bit literal to me. Carol’s comparisons of small units to small living space, of the discrete signs and polyglot communities, is interesting, and shows me an alternate reading that hadn’t occurred to me straight off; I think it’s evidence of the poetry’s resourcefulness that two such interpretations can exist alongside each other.
As for the Cage quotation, it made me laugh. First Carol advocates a finer attention to the specificities of place, then she ends with a judgement about ‘Europeans’ which really isn’t based on any understanding of the cultural situation here, references no work or other critics. It's pure backlash. Give the Europeans their castles and their finery, their ‘tragedy’ as an art form: the muscular Americans understand Real Life. It coincides so exactly with the kind of reasoning by which Rumsfeld and his cronies are going to convince Americans to ignore EU resistance to war, for example, that it unclouds the whole issue.
This is an important conversation to have, finally, and I’m glad that Carol has used this site to initiate it – allowing the back-and-forth by the response windows which will help us to clarify our differences, and (what I suspect is stronger) our likenesses. If it seems narcissistic for me to put my four other cents in here, I’ll just say I did it to correct what seems an unlikely misreading of my own reading, and finally, to express my respect for both Carol and Laura, in their poetry and in their efforts to align that poetry with an ethical, examined life.
In solidarity,
Andrea
the cage quote was meant to be funny -- glad you laughed
of course i shouldn't have engaged this discussion on the level of us/uk trends, because i think that made things messy, and probably sent out a skewed message. of course i enjoy and admire most of the people and poets i know, europeans heartily included.
obviously we're experiencing some serious, fundamental differences in this discussion and are talking past each other more than anything else.
but i do want to say: peace all.
carol
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