Primary Trouble (1996), a review

[I haven't had the time to water my blog for several days now, but I want make sure that visitors here get some good roughage to eat once in a while, so here is a little slab I found on my hard-drive a few days back. Please note that I haven't had time to correct several instances of unnecessary hyphens included in certain words that were automatically hyphenated in my word processor.

This is a very old, unpublished review of an anthology poems that, while clearly partisan -- very heavy into "Language" poetry in those days -- shows how and what I was thinking back then quite well. I wrote my brief essay about Veronica Forrest-Thomson at around this time, as well as one about Ian Hamilton Finlay which first appeared in the St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter. This may have been intended for that as well -- I'm sure I sent it off somewhere, was soundly rejected, and decided not to send it anywhere else. Too bad I didn't have a blog then.

Certainly my views have changed on the state of art, etc., and I am not out to rankle anyone with this -- it lacks decorum at points, and I don't see any point in poetry in-fighting on the eve of war -- but I think the method is basically sound, a "defense of poetry" of sorts, and since I was never much of a theory guy it's pretty down-homey, blog-worthy style. I discuss an anti-war poem by John Taggart at the very end.]

Primary Trouble
An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry
(Jersey City: Talisman House, 1996) $24.95

The latest in the recent bevy of anthologies of American poetry that attempt, in the manner of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry, to bring an “underground” scene to a greater attention is Primary Trouble, edited by Leonard Schwartz, Joseph Donahue and Edward Foster. This anthology is the least satisfying, and yet it may be said to take the most risks by not including any of the “major” predecessors in its contents to concretize a “tradition” which the anthology maintains or realizes. As a result, however, the burden of telegraphing the main tendencies of the book to the browsing public falls on the introduction, written by Leonard Schwartz, who describes in the following paragraph what the editors thought they saw in, and sought to derive from, the contemporary American scene:

Primary Trouble, then, strives not to define but to draw attention to some of the very latest tendencies in American poetry. While the anthology is in no way thematic, there is a common interest here in a certain vocabulary, a certain set of possibilities towards which these texts have both tended and been chosen. To call this interest “the sacred” would be too officious. To speak of it as “the spiritual” would be amorphous, too easily misconstrued in terms of belief and not imagination, unless “spiritual” be defined as a radical anger with the conditions of the world, socially and metaphysically. Or else it might be conceived as a critical detachment from the given – a detachment creative of the otherness of clarification, of a complex emotional and imaginary spark in the light of which metaphor and reality are constantly in question. To call it a new eroticism would also be reductive, but surely this poetry has an ample category for pleasure, a category absent, as Joel Lewis has noted, in the hegemonic mode of experimental formalism known as language poetry: this poetry sees sexuality as a crucial nexus between the body and the world, one that defies but revivifies words in their very effort to render erotic impossibility.

In this paragraph, Schwartz moves toward vaguer statements while operating within a rhetoric that makes it appear he is fine-tuning his enunciations or attaining a greater subtlety of thought, a tactic which becomes clear when the term “spiritual” is discarded for being too “amorphous”, and yet at the same time is vulnerable to being “misconstrued” as something specific (understanding “belief” to be religious belief, which he clearly wants to avoid), and then is finally replaced by the equally amorphous “radical anger with the conditions of the world”. Descriptive phrases – some of which are decidedly divorced from anything that appears in the volume, such as “a critical detachment from the given” (unless this describes the dream-speech argot many of the poets employ) – are proposed but then quickly withdrawn, or in one case finds its justness in the approval of another – “Joel Lewis has noted” – without a quote or elaboration, as if this were enough to settle the dispute that “an ample category for pleasure” has been “absent... in the hegemonic mode of experimental formalism known as the language school”. (This “ample category for pleasure” eventually becomes plain “sexuality” and then “erotic impossibility” later in the sentence, with no comment on the gaps between these rearticulations.) Postmodernism, uncomfortable with stable definitions, may be at work here, but the paragraph’s awkward errancy points more toward the need to circumscribe a set of ambitions – some of them purely contrary rather than positive, as the italicized “this” in the final sentence indicates – while not falling into the trap of appearing partisan.

Schwartz’s inability to manipulate terms becomes clear with his contention, earlier in his introduction, that the language poets have an “agenda for poetic hegemony”, a statement that is impre-cise and unfair – imprecise because innovation in the arts, whether Abstract Expressionism or Cubism (or eighteenth century English neo-Classicism or the “variable foot”), always produces more work of a second-rate then that of the innovators, thus making the entire aesthetic orientation appear misguided, and unfair because he is re-cording an injustice without providing the evidence, thus creating no more than a general feeling of ill-will and furthering the need to misunderstand. Does the editing of journals, the statement of goals, the creation of new terminologies, the explorations of new tradi-tions and of new forms of writing constitute an “agenda for poetic hegemony”? This agenda is certainly worth uncovering if it exists (it is, ironically, this type of uncovering that characterizes Charles Bernstein’s criticism in Content’s Dream and A Poetics, the type of research which provided many of the ideas that galvanized the mo-tivation for change in poets during the mid-seventies). Criticism of any artist or school is beneficial provided there is data and a speci-ficity of analysis to support contentions, and a desire to produce options rather than adopt authoritative poses that feed off a general discontent, but which mask a lack of substance behind apparent subtleties. When a “new way” is being predicted or anticipated to the detriment of an “old way”, it seems especially important to give the previous paradigm a thorough and illuminating consideration, and to provide the data, which means “new” poems that help one imagine and understand why a shift is in order.

Schwartz doesn’t provide these terms or analysis in his intro-duction, but rather his ideas revolve around a few general concepts of “eroticism”, “mythic vocabularies”, “category for pleasure”, “epistemological rigor”, and “radical anger”, all or most of which, one presumes, is present in the selection, a selection which, conse-quently, is not to betray an “agenda for hegemony”. Consequently, this paragraph, as does the entire introduction, seems to call for a return to a “universal” set of values while maintaining the pretense of newness and oppositionality, but it never, at the same time, dis-tinguishes itself from the aesthetic and political values of the estab-lishment – whether literary or political – which the avant-garde usu-ally subverts on some level. This makes it appear that the “radical anger” described in this introduction is only to be leveled against other poets, which is disappointing if true. It is also worth noticing that the only thing that separates many of the writers included in the anthology from the writing of the sixties and from the main-stream writing of such poets as Charles Simic and A.R. Ammons (who could have been included, were they younger), or Jorie Gra-ham or James Tate (who certainly assimilated much of the “New American” poetics), is their very experience with the writers and ideas of the language school, uncomprehending or unsympathetic (or undesired) as this experience is.

If there is one tiny piece of dicta that is worth resurrecting from Pound – the language of it has not aged terribly much – it is this: “It is better to present on Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” This phrase is useful in attempting to spot a “poetic hegemony”, for based on the smallest level of the word-event, the image, it would be very difficult to prove that there isn’t a poetic hegemony operating throughout most of Primary Trouble. An example of a few great lines of poetry compared to many of the lines of poetry included in Primary Trouble is worth, in this case, hazarding, for there isn’t much within the anthology that is unusual or excessive enough against which to gauge the general tenor of the writing. The following is from a sonnet by Hopkins:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
    As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
    Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
    Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
    Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells;
Crying What I do is for me: for that I came.

Hopkins serves the purpose of being a poet who is spiritual and not allied with any artistic movement or avant-garde, and yet who quite obviously has taken pains to radicalize his language. One might, indeed, understand Hopkins to stand for many of the values that Schwartz promotes in his introduction – even the “eroticism” and “rigorous epistemology” find their representation – and yet he equally satisfies the call for an intensity and fullness of language, not choosing to hide behind ellipses and mysticism. Lines from another poet, John Ashbery, demonstrate how a this aural intensity need not be sacrificed when satisfying a hunger for contemporane-ity (this is the opening to “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”):

Something strange is coming over me.
La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars
Of “I Thought about You” or something mellow from
Amadigi di Gaula for everything - a mint-condition can
Of Rumford’s Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy
Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller’s fertile
Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on greige, deckle-edged
Stock - to come clattering through the rainbow trellis...

Image follows image with differing degrees of authorial intrusion, but it is worth noticing the near-physicality of the rhythms them-selves (as in Hopkins), the syllables rolling over each other like waves, the metrics of each line fulfilling and developing upon the expectations of the previous one, with precise shifts that can slow a line incrementally – “Helen Topping Miller’s fertile...” – until it must explode past the enjambment. The variety of the images and rhythms in these poems – along with their lack of theoretical jargon and philosophical circularity – are worth keeping in mind when reading Primary Trouble.

The following are lines from different poets in the anthology who utilize a vague surrealistic language that hints at a nascent “spiritualism”, but which nevertheless has yet to attain a fullness of expression:

Who sees
all breathing creatures
as self, self
in everything breathing,
no longer shrinks
from encounter.

*

the long shadow
of a walking stick
stretched across the desert
warm blood drawn
from the neck of the beast
tales from the withered arm
the dried-up cup
that speaks in small flames
round the rim

*

branches abroad
a memory only
for moods
fail to recognize
a difference
nothing also
has a face

*

Closest,
restored sections of

what is farthest

late drawn borders
re-examined

pulled out as “cuts”

        (resistant
    that tiny sweet “heart” of

oxygen’s nerve)

*

these are the unspoken details
born out of so many days
walking
the vanishing skies & what follows
as the rains close in
thomas, why have you come so far
to hear so little

For many, and one assumes for the poets themselves, these lines may be evocative, and yet there is a lack of specificity – of signa-ture – in them that eventually hinders interest. A homogeneity is demonstrable in both interests and expression, all of these excerpts establishing an air of anticipation and insecurity, of a strangeness that could be this or that, but never solidifies, the hands left to con-tinue groping along the wall. This makes the reader wary that the air of uncanniness may simply be the poet’s discomfort with the actual idiom in which the poem is operating, as if the poet were merely maintaining a distinction from, say, diaristic or confessional modes of writing, and describing the struggle to do so. What is interesting is that nothing is fixed upon as even possibly coming into view; the writing is so caught up in the possibility of perception, that the terminology appears to be based in a pre-existant dis-course, rather than in the lived trauma of a suffering being – the mode seems academic. The “thomas” included in this last excerpt is an event, especially when set against the ubiquity of the “radical epistemology” which seems to make imagery – and humor – meta-physically impossible. The poetic line is basically “speech-based”, and yet speech itself, with its spastic urgencies, never intrudes to modify what is often a safe repetitiveness. As for the “category of pleasure”, one is unsure from which quarter that is supposed to ar-rive.

There are, of course, many poets in Primary Trouble who don’t write like this, though an inordinate number of them do at some point in this selection. Will Alexander and Dodie Bellamy, two writers who at their best overwhelm with their imagination and willingness to risk linguistic and psychological overload, are pre-sent. The choices for Joseph Ceravolo, especially “The Crocus Turn and Gods” from his long poem Fits of Dawn, are excellent and stand out with their confidence of aesthetic. Two long pieces from Clark Coolidge appear, but they are not as polyphonic as his best writing, and bland in their vocabulary and word combinations – odd, because Coolidge was motivated early in his writing by the need for a new vocabulary in poetry. Joseph Donahue, in the po-ems included here, appears haunted by Ashbery’s idiom, especially in these lines from the poem “Desire”:

It’s someone else’s dream
this bewildered amusement left on your tape
the surprise party the world has arranged for you

and your life passes and you wait for the secret call
when the guests have arrived, you wait for
the one who will intimately mislead you through the rain.

Donahue’s poems are, nonetheless, careful and various, especially “Transfigurations”, which works with a shorter line. William Bronk’s poem-preface, “The Nature of Musical Form”, is a nice little piece of work, but he is one of a number of the poets in Primary Trouble who doesn’t seem to experiment at all with language be-yond the idiosyncrasies of his personal idiom. Virginia Hooper is another example; the following is from her poem “Drawing Room Drama”:

Concealed in the style of a late manner,
It was the spectator hiding behind the curtain
Celebrating the discrepancy
That the context of action conditions the illusion.
The desire to explore has tainted the evening
With a noiseless rush of jazzy agitation for three nights running.

Hooper’s writing is promising, but at this point it appears to have taken its terms – again – from Ashbery, though she has substituted the detail and humor in his poetry with abstractions and Chinese-box-like statements – “the context of action conditions the illusion,” for example – that begin to lack invention. Susan Howe’s “Thorow”, included in Eliot Weinberger’s anthology three years ago, makes an appearance, and one wonders how a reading of her work suffers by its inclusion among other poems that are derived from her style though without her use of ballad-like rhythms or her scholarly intellect. (Both she and Nathaniel Mackey – strongly rep-resented here – have developed a poetics that are derived directly from readings of Olson and Duncan, and yet they are each exam-ples of how some of the ideas of the “language” writers have given both definition and substance to the aims of the recent generation.)

Ronald Johnson makes an appearance with sections from his long poem Ark, which has just been published in its entirety; he is a maverick of sorts, not conforming to any easy rubric, and much of his writing can be beautiful, though oddly static. Bernadette Mayer and Eileen Myles are represented, each not quite satisfacto-rily, the Mayer selection devoid of the color, liveliness and inven-tiveness of her best work, and Myles having only one poem. Claire Needell’s very short poems are interesting, and brief enough to quote whole; the poem “Propagation” runs: “I want you to think / me hollow. Intercourse suggests / an artificial point”, creating a conundrum of body and syntax that doesn’t flow into overelabora-tion. Alice Notley and Geoffrey O’Brien are both strongly repre-sented, as is Michael Palmer, whose poem “Untitled (September ‘92)” makes use of the “sacred” theme, but while utilizing the entire arsenal of techniques available; it begins:

Or maybe this
is the sacred, the vaulted and arched, the
nameless, many-gated
zero where children

where invisible children
where the cries
of invisible children rise
between Cimetiere M

and the Peep Show Sex Paradise
Gate of Sound and Gate of Sand -

One is often not sure how much Palmer is merely engaging in art-culture games, using his talents for no more than picture-books, but this poem demonstrates his ability to create waves. David Shapiro’s poem “Archaic Torsos” (one of Clark Coolidge’s poem also takes off from this theme of Rilke’s) is a sonnet that begins “You must change your life fourteen times”, and which proceeds to do that, ebulliently, for its duration; the rest of his poems here are otherwise pretty standard for him. Gustaf Sobin’s work derives from a basic theory that the sound of poetry is a tunnel into some sort of tran-scendental awakening, but many poets, including some in Primary Trouble, explored this theme more thoroughly – Olson, Duncan, Coolidge and Mackey have made similar investigations – so that he appears derivative. There are other writers and poems worth look-ing at in the anthology – Ann Waldman, John Yau, Lee Ann Brown, Robert Kelly, Myung Mi Kim and Ann Lauterbach are also included – but strangely enough the selections from many of these poets are flat, and one suspects that there has been an effort by the editors to purposely exclude certain poetic practices even when the individual poets embraced them.

John Taggart’s poem “Twenty One Times” is one of the few poems that take up a social theme, and is worth considering in some detail, for it points to some problems with the editorial pa-rameters of the entire book. The poem is centered around a refrain of the word “Napalm”, and the first four of its verses run:

1.
Napalm: the word suspended by a thread
the word grows as salt crystallizes
I will grow cells of the word in your mouth.

2.
Napalm: leaping as if wrought in the sea
leaping as if pursued by the horse and his rider
a young hart a young heart comes out leaping.

3.
Napalm: rub the new-born child with salt
“the fault is that we have no salt”
if the master’s word is taken the salt is love.

4.
Napalm: soap will not wash the word out
the word breaks through partitions and outer walls
breakthrough of cells of the word in the mouth.

There is something about the refrain of “Napalm” that is discon-certing, especially with the allusions to the salivation that accom-pany repetitions of the word, as if this attempt at exorcism were really an excuse to reinvestigate and reestablish his relationship – very “erotic” it appears – with the word. To publish a poem using “Napalm” as a refrain in the present decade exhibits not only a nostalgia for a time when poets sense more clearly their class dis-tinction from the establishment, and hence could be self-righteous and hieratic, but also for a time when the American government was at its most actively militaristic, engaged in a warfare that deci-mated an entire country, regardless of the prophetic and spiritual agencies of these poets. One is free to make poems out of any subject matter one wishes, but Taggart’s poem – technically sophis-ticated, full of apocalypse, yet elusive in its specific meanings – re-mains, like many of the poems in this anthology, caught up in its own machinery, deriving its main social value from the the “jellied gasoline” – the “blackbird” in this poem that owes much to Stevens. Does this poem recognize its debt to atrocity, and intend to insti-gate a change in thinking? does one care how many times “Na-palm” can be perceptually reconfigured in a poem, and is it valid as a method to take this word and investigate it for its aural and evocative content? is this an adequate way to record history, and to warn of its possible recurrence? These questions, which exist at the intersection of art and politics, have been further complicated not only by the innocuosness of a the contemporary hieratic mode – based on modes of the sixties but lacking its danger – but by the various revolutions in information technology that render the poet’s task of getting attention more difficult. Since most of the poems in Primary Trouble cannot be said to represent the “latest tendencies” in American writing – especially since the editors have purposely sought to erase rather than confront the achievements of the most innovative practices of the last two decades, that of the language school itself – the very parameters with which one can begin to in-vestigate these questions are not even present in the volume beyond the ambitious terminology of the introduction.

Posted by Brian Stefans at March 18, 2003 01:16 PM