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I've been meaning for some time to offer a more thorough critique of Silliman's blog but haven't had the time. After all, he writes so much, using some terms developed over a few weeks or even months, that I figure one would have to print out at least 30 or so pages worth to give the appearance that I am being comprehensive, moderately impartial, and respectful of the breadth of the work I am considering.
Unfortunately, I don’t find these qualities very visible on his own blog, which is rather famously knee-jerk, even reactionary, in its judgements, and wears its partisanship on its sleeve. This, I gather, is one of the glories of blogs, that it usually contains writing that is off the top of one’s head, a bit raw, and hence more vulnerable to contradiction, open for debate. At least, I think that it is – miles away from the objective tone that is a necessity in academic writing (and that Bourdieu criticized so effectively in such books as the Logic of Practice and Pascalian Meditations, the mastery of which he associated with becoming part of a secular clergy of intellectuals).
But this does leave open the possibility that a blog writer can claim to have written something quickly and hastily and thereby duck the arrows of a critical reader who might question the terms embedded in the judgments found there, not to mention the value system behind it. I fear that part of Silliman’s overabundance of production is to avoid any such critical appraisal, but when I think that, I remind myself that Ron has always been a “good sport” about these sorts of critiques, and in fact invites them, even if he appears a little deaf to their implications.
Conveniently, his most recent post, a very brief one on Robert Lowell, contains in microcosm much of what I distrust about his blog, and indeed about the general trajectory of discussion about this apparent cultural divide in United States poetry. You can read the post in its entirety at his blog; I’ll quote rather liberally however in order to let the resonances of his writing have its own play. He starts:
Whenever I feel too completely dismissive of Robert Lowell, I think of Bob Grenier. Grenier studied with Lowell at Harvard &, I believe, it was Lowell who helped Grenier get into the Writers Workshop at Iowa City even as the triumvirate of Creeley, Zukofsky & Stein were beginning to render Grenier opaque to the Brahmin crowd back in the Bay State.
What is really happening is that there is an assumption that, because the “tradition” or “lineage” to Grenier is beginning to ally himself is occluded, then one could never in fact read his poetry – as if a reader of Grenier’s poetry in the “Bay State” had simply never seen Futurism or Cubism, never saw or read the poetry of Rimbaud, Marinetti or Williams, never read Woolf, Faulkner or Joyce, never heard of Stravinsky or John Cage, etc. (This lineage issue – nothing is more important than protecting the lineage to RS, and nothing more nefarious to BKS -- reappears below.)
Does one say that William Burroughs is an obscure writer because nobody understands his lineage in the Marquis de Sade and Lautreamont? We know this is not true – he’s not an obscure writer but quite famous, and even Asian Americans -- who, by RS's logic, are part of a "class" to which Zukofsky or Lautreamont would presumably also be "opaque" because they don't "tell their stories" -- have read him (and Grenier) with pleasure.
What in fact happens is that one grasps the writing with what one knows; not getting it exactly right is usually quite fine in an appreciation of art, and in fact should be encouraged. Brazilians, after all, have to read also, and we read their poetry without any understanding of their "lineages."
Lastly, Creeley, by many standards, is not such an unusual writer – there’s as much Herrick as Zukofsky in anything he writes, and he is quite conservative in subject matter. Even when he is being more pointillist he fits into some sort of “let it be” vibe that doesn’t strike me as alien to middle class mores – when I last visted Germany, for instance, he was one of the few American poets I saw frequently translated. To wave him around as some influence rendering a poet culturally “opaque” strikes me as absurd. What is “opaque” is his “lineage” in the Objectivist tradition – but so what?
You can still find vestiges of Lowell’s influence, though, in Grenier’s first book, Dusk Road Games: Poems 1960-66, published by Pym-Randall Press of Cambridge, Mass.:On the lawns before the brown House
on the hill above the city
the wheeled sick sit still in the sunshine –
One hopes it’s not the “transparency” of the language, the old bugbear of Language poets, as if any poem that attempts to record any visual sensation were influenced by Lowell – one could just as easily say it was influenced by Wordsworth or Chaucer. But of course, there is no partisan charge in doing so.
I can hear some Lowell in these lines – there’s a poem of his that starts “Tamed by Milltown, we lie in mother’s bed / the rising sun in [something something, warpaint?] dyes us red.” etc. Well, I can’t remember it. But it’s a poem that attempts to get the ball rolling with an image – we are, after all, all in the “imagist” tradition (I do believe that most American poets are imagists of some sort) – which is very Lowellian, as is the internal rhyme "hill" and "still" right on the crests of the rather heavy rhythm.
Anyway, we could have benefitted here from an understanding of how this poem reflects Lowell and not a hodge-podge of other writers who uses these techniques.
Lowell turns up again as an influence in the “conservative” portion of Hank Lazer’s remarkable Doublespace: Poems 1971-1989, his attempt to bridge the gulf between Le School d’ Quietude & post avant poetics. One of Marjorie Perloff’s first books was her 1973 The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell.
I don’t think one “bridges a gulf” by including one’s early poems (note the time span in the title) and later poems in the same book – one attempts to write differently than one did when younger, but where is the “attempt” in collecting these poems? I’ve never seen Lazer’s book, but my guess is that the “conservative porition” is very different from what I presume is the hip, “avant-garde” half – if so, then has anything been “bridged” -- isn't there, then, a gap created in such a book? Life Studies becomes more of a “bridge” – there is no “conservative” or “avant-garde” portion to that book, but a new style that is a synthesis of his older, Latinate blank-verse and the looser, diaristic manner of his prose.
I’ve had Lowell books on my shelf since I was 16 and I’ve never thrown them away, nor do I keep a "gap" between his books and those of the "avant-garde." I have books by Berryman, Bishop, Jarrell – the entire “school of quietude” – and it’s not rendered me unable to read Debord or the “radical” side of Williams, nor have they ill-prepared me to read Bruce Andrews (anyone seeing my first book will see that influence there) or Lyn Hejinian – who, it must be pointed it, is rather quietudinous in temperment herself.
So I ask again, in respect to the clannishness of Ron, not to mention many Language poets, when considering issues of “linage” – where is this huge “gulf”? Does the publication of Doublespace make Hank Lazar the Jackie Robinson of poetry? Who has he liberated by bridging this "gulf"?
(My second book is called Gulf, and in fact some of what I tried to deal with there is this perceived gap -- but I'll spare you the gory details.)
But what always gets in the way of any possible admiration I might have for Lowell is his poetry. When it was first published in 1946, Lord Weary’s Castle – that title alone tells you everything about literary allegiances –
was read, rightly, as a turn away from any poetics of direct speech, not only anti-Williams & the polyglot circus of Pound’s Cantos, but even anti-Frost & anti-Auden. For the New Critics, the conservative agrarian poets who were at that same moment consolidating their hold on English departments across the United States & beginning to wonder about their legacy, Lowell was an affirmation of their larger program. It didn’t hurt that he was a Lowell, either. By the time he was 30, Lowell had already won the Pulitzer Prize and had a photo spread in Life Magazine.
The poems in this book, many of which are tortured and mannered, are overly determined by Lowell’s background in the classics and his need to see irony in all details of history, but I don’t see how this is “anti” anything – if anything, they are a direct contination of Pound’s imagism in the early Cantos (Lowell’s main attraction for me, in fact, is his sharp eye for detail) not to mention the method of historical “rhymes” (Lowell’s later sonnets -- collected in a book called Notebook -- what does that title tell you of alliegances -- are a “circus” if anything. As there's never been a truly polyglot "post avant garde" American poet, I don't think he needs defense there).
They also reflect the influence of Hart Crane -- a great all-American poet who happily read French poetry, wrote in a highly stylized manner and was even politically correct, being "anti" Eliot even as he was impressed with the form. But he was also "anti-direct speech," presumably -- where do we put him? One of Lowell's best sonnets was about him, and even heroicized his homosexuality -- betrayal of his Brahmin instincts?
Pound, of course, is as "anti-direct speech" as any poet who wrote -- his translation of The Seafarer, for instance, is more impenetrable than the original must have been for the Anglo-Saxons (and, consequently, is a forerunner to some fo the heavy alliterative style of Lord Weary's Castle); outside of Cathay and a handful of haiku-like things, he rarely wrote outside of a very lugubrious "mask" in his early poems, and the most "direct speech" aspect of his Cantos are those sections where he's making fun of blacks and Jews (I'm exaggerating, of course, but it's true that the only time he really gets into "speech" is during the "satirical" parts -- which he had no gift for).
Lord Weary's Castle doesn’t, of course, reflect the influence of Williams, but very few poets did in those days – it was published in 1946, and I don’t think that Williams was appreciated enough at the time to have spurned an antithetical movement (imagining a “poetics of direct speech” to find its roots in WCW, as RS does elsewhere). Lowell's debt to Williams was very apparent by his last book, Day by Day, and he wrote appreciative essays on Paterson and The Desert Music (his buddy, Jarrell, wrote a great essay on WCW for the Selected Poems).
Consequently, suggesting that Lowell was some poster boy for the agrarian Right -- the "larger program" I suppose -- is a bit dishonest, and contradicted by fact. Lowell campaigned for Democratic presidential candidates and was a friend of the Kennedys; he was a conscientious objector in WWII and active as a protester during Vietnam. I wish I could go on about his politics but I don’t know that much about his biography – these are the famous facts -- but, alas, the implication that he was “quiet” and supporting an ascendant Right during these times is not fair, not to mention untrue.
("That he was a Lowell" make these political alliances and activities more, not less, brave, if we are to believe that the Brahmins are as provincial and hidebound as RS would have it. They would have been brave had his name been Seigenthaler, Torres or Tanaka as well.)
Yet Lowell, especially the early Lowell, is seldom a good poet for more than two or three lines at a time, which invariably are buried in larger lugubrious monologs that do little more than show a man unable to actually get to his own writing through his presumptions about “what poetry should be.”
This practice of letting two versions of a poem co-exist even conflicts with the Bourdieuian notion that an author's death is the final period on his or her life's work -- as if an author dies with a sort of purpose, to package the ouevre for history. To leave a poem in two or more final states seems an active contradiction of this sort of vanity (unlike other ways of arranging one's work -- winky winky).
Consequently, when, as Lowell did, a poet changes styles and approaches to writing several times in his or her lifetime – as painter Philip Guston did in his, to point to the most obvious example – it demonstrates a questioning of what poetry (or art) “should be,” not a dogma. My sense, frankly, is that Lowell changed his sense of “what poetry should be” with more frequency then RS has, if that means anything – after all, the New Sentence still hovers over, even justifies, the most recent writings of RS more strongly than Lord Weary’s Castle hovers over or justifies Life Studies or the later, very speech based Day by Day. I guess it’s ok to have “allegiances” and “presumptions” so far as they are the right ones. (My preference, of course, is for skepticism about both issues).
(And what does Ron have against "lugubrious monologs" -- I thought this was the blogger's MO?)
It is precisely that should be, the sense of obligation to a dead aesthetic inherited from a mostly imaginary British Literary Heritage, that I take to be behind David Antin’s famous line “if robert lowell is a poet i don’t want to be a poet,” a sentiment that was virtually universal among the poets I knew in the 1960s & ‘70s.I could go on about my feelings about Antin’s writing about Lowell – I read one of those essays in Kostelanetz’s anthologies years ago and thought it longwinded and misguided – but I’ll have to refrain for time’s sake. Again, though, the “should be” is implicit in nearly everything Ron writes – is it the “should be” we are questioning or the what it “should be”?
RS’s ideas about American literary tradition vs. a “dead” “aesthetic” “inherited” from “Britain” have always been so absurd to me that I don’t feel, for the moment, that I can comment on it without sliding into diatribe. But frankly, only if one believed that culture were produced -- in reading and writing -- entirely by sycophants with no critical acumen would one fear the influence of the productions of a particular country, not to mention time. This sentnece has curious echoes of Donald Rumsfeld in it -- the "Old Europe" business -- or, worse, something out of the Balkans -- we call this strategy of bating prejudices "Balkanization" after all. So I'll let it pass.
Still, in 1964, on a week when Time magazine could have focused on the aftermath & implications of the first Harlem riots of the decade, it chose instead to feature Lowell on its cover.
I’ll reserve my conclusions for later – time's a-wastin' -- further spelling corrections to come...
Posted by Brian Stefans at July 2, 2003 11:38 AM | TrackBackHey Brian, I had to laugh out loud at some of your comments (e.g. "Does the publication of Doublespace make Hank Lazar the Jackie Robinson of poetry?") but on the other hand, you are seriously a-tilt when you list the "famous facts" about Robert Lowell's politics and manage to leave out the infamous one . . . using his prestige and writing connections to launch the most vicious and insane of all Cold War witch hunts in the USA, with the help of his love slave Flannery O'Connor, on the director of Yaddo Elizabeth Ames and upon Lowell's fellow guest there Agnes Smedley. You say you don't know much about his biography, well this is the salient thing, he was just truly awful, worse than McCarthy. Many biographies excuse this episode on account of Lowell's madness (in eruption right at the moment). But how to distinguish one's madness from one's politics--I don't know--or rather, perhaps what Ron is trying to get at (in alluding to a "larger program") is that in madness Lowell found himself drawn back as though for comfort's sake into the right-wing fantasias of the ruling class of which he was a member. Anyhow you can find out all the details yourself, google Lowell plus Yaddo plus Ames plus Communist, you should find quite an array without even having to get a book. But, everything else being unequal, I agree with you about how fascinating Lowell's poetry is . . . as I tried to write my feelings about it and him in POM #1 manifesto thing. AND how, when he visited SF for Poetry Center at the height of his fame 1957 he was not attracted to Jack Spicer's writing but found Helen Adam instead a figure of august and eccentric importance (mirror fantasy?) xxx Kevin K.
Posted by: Kevin Killian at July 2, 2003 03:35 PMScandal! I'll look up what you say -- no way will I go out on a limb to defend Lowell's politics or political stances -- there's probably a labyrinthine degree of intricacy there to unfold -- but I do think he was quite nuts at times.
I still remember how shocked I was to read the portrait of Schuyler through the reminiscences of Padgett in that Lehmann book, especially the religious delusions as they never got into his poetry.
I don't think it quite hurts my critique in that I am basically going after Ron's belief that literary "allegiances" are somehow analogous to political ones -- that would make every user of "parole in liberta" a proto-Fascist including the Surrealists -- or that "literary allegiances" somehow provide a window on one's class background -- some of us write in "masks" after all.
That "allegiances" are always visible and chosen -- or whatever, that they even are rich as material for study -- just seems to me an unexamined assumption.
I understand that, as a Marxist, Silliman likes to see culture as some illustration of class warfare, hence elaborate connective threads are necessary, but I think the tools have to be sharper than this...
Well, I won't belabor this point...
Posted by: Mr. Arras at July 2, 2003 04:53 PMI find this critique of the idea of "allegiance" interesting because I found a similara phenomenon in Spain last month: a poet I know went on and on about which poets were on "our" side and which were on "their" side. It turned out Quevedo was on their side and Góngora was on our side.
A fascinating post on Silliman on Lowell. I can't wait for his response.
I wonder how Ron would figure a Pessoa in his Manichean board game of poetry? Caeiro a mystical shepherd and as limpidly "quietudinous" as they come; Reis a monacled monarchist and an out and out classical anachronism in his verse; de Campos a naval engineer pederast and proto-fascist futurist (a wild experimentalist, in fact, who considered the pastoral Caeiro his "Master"!)... All them complete and inside one of the greatest and truly avant-garde poets of all time. I'd propose that here we might find the intimations of a Third, Fourth, and Seventeenth Way.
Kent
Posted by: Kent Johnson at July 3, 2003 06:13 PMBreathtaking post/essay/review of Ron's blog on Lowell!
There is the "lineage compulsion," if that is not an overly awkward term. Cannot add anything particularly significant about that (have already awkwardly said a thing or two elsewhere) and do not loathe it, nor should I or would I, but, ah crap, it's just "a problematic," I guess. Can't get into it more. I'd be way out of place (coming only from intuition and not nearly enough wide reading), I think, 'cept to say that I follow your critique and admire its breadth and honesty (like Kevin's above in Reply, too, and of course Ron's own)...
Anyway, just wanted to say that it's quite a fine piece, really fine. Keeps your blog at the top of my list, along with Ron's, too, when I occasionally go surfing through the many good ones there are.
Posted by: Steve Tills at July 3, 2003 07:00 PMA few more musings and fumings. This a slightly revised version of an e-mail I sent to Kasey in reponse to his reply to me on his blog:
Hi Kasey,
Thanks for sharing that with the group. Yes, OK, elegantly said, como siempre.
BUT: The problem is that the Two-Party System Silliman cosmology can't imagine any possibility of *new poetical parties* which move beyond the logic of the binary paradigm (excuse that phrase) of THEM-US. That was the point about Pessoa as someone who points to poetic horizons that reside in a completely different dimension than the very institutional one that Ron so ironically shows himself to be trapped within, i.e. "We are Authors who write in more advanced forms and styles than the forms and styles the rest of you Authors write in"). The "third way" is only a "problem" if one accepts the reductive oppositions Ron is pushing. Because there are multiple universes in poetry not yet tapped into. Our job as poets, always, is to find the wormholes.
Personally, I find Ron's campaign astonishing. It's like holy war, or something. He sounds like one of those Bauhaus guys yelling that the new architecture is the ONLY architecture, and any architect like Robert Lowell who built a building with flying buttresses and gargoyles should be swept into the dustbin of history. He sounds, frankly, like someone who doesn't really have an open heart to the manifold body and spirit of poetry.
(Incidentally, I wonder, in light of Ron's fire and brimstoning, what we are all supposed to think now about that genius of Quietude, William Bronk --or, say, about all those often very quiet, meditative Chinese and Japanese writers of long ago. Am I a fool for loving some of James Wright's poetry, like the one about the young football players becoming beautifully suicidal in October? Is Thomas Transtromer out now too, or is he OK 'cause he's a Swede-- ever read his quiet poem about the death of JFK? How about Sonnets to Orpheus? Muriel Rukeyser wrote some quietude stuff, so did Oppen {I wonder what he would say about Ron's crusade-- now there's a guy who could write both Discrete Series and those poems about the deer startling and staring out, or about he and Mary walking down into a field and stepping into a pool of moonlight that they had thought was water-- go figure}. Rakosi, too, is full of it, this quietude thing. I really like Maurya Simon and Heather McHugh, and I LOVE Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg though I know I shouldn't say that. I mean where does the Red Wedge-led proscription stop, I wonder?)
Have you been checking Henry Gould's comments on all this? I think he is saying some very sane and thoughtful things.
Kent
Posted by: Kent Johnson at July 3, 2003 11:24 PMeven before this whole lowell thing i suspected that rs's blog was slow-poisoning my reading. strong words, i know.
Posted by: p. backonja at July 4, 2003 11:39 AMJust a quick question prompted by Ron's posting of Ted Berrigan's poem. Berrigan is a terrific and fun poet, for sure. But in hopes of moving Ron's critique beyond what strike me and others as caricaturnal, Cold War-ish tropes and into some comparative specifics (assuming that Ron is interested in engaging in some debate on the matter), I thought I'd ask: *What exactly* makes Berrigan a "better" poet than, say, John Berryman, one of his contemporary enemies on the other side of the Wall in the "School of Quietude" sector? Do The Sonnets represent something superior to the Dream Songs, for example? Do they more complexly question constructs of "self and ego," are they more intellectually complex, do they show a greater mastery of forms, do they give greater pleasure? In sum, should we value, as poetry, The Sonnets more than the Dream Songs? Not just the expected Yes to each of these questions, but *how so, please?
Kent
Posted by: Kent Johnson at July 5, 2003 12:48 PMBrian,
the weird thing is that anybody ever stood away from Lowell, not the man or the reputation, but the sturdy and ever growing body of his poetry, as good as it got in the 50s, and got me and so many of us going. We didnt have to do it after he did, but he showed a great local vernacular glory. A terrific poet, it still seems to me, and I happen to cherish Lord Weary's Castle -- whose lineage is to the deep folkish (that is to say, what people talk about and remember) dreamtime of our language.
Bless you for saying good things about him -- even if I think you're a bit mean to RS, who's done such great compassionating in his own work, and the ever churning blogmill keeps my interest. As does yours. Aieee, bless you both!
Robert
Posted by: Robert Kelly at July 6, 2003 09:34 PMHi Brian--
We've talked once I think (you suspected I was Jacques Debrot...)
Having attacked the Blog's binarism recently myself, I liked your defense of
Lowell very much (though I don't like most of Lowell's work, I'll stand up for
later Plath and the early _Dream Songs_ any time...)
Literary politics and conventional politics don't line up as neatly as Ron
wants them to (though Jed Rasula's critique of Lowell is more fully realized,
in cult-stud terms anyway: basically he sees Lowell as the poet 'the age
demanded' & then destroyed, the necessary sympomatic fucked-up expression of
the Anglophilic mid-century poetry wax museum.) And it's funny that Ron
invokes the term 'elliptical' when he wants to dismiss Jorie Graham, CD
Wright, Forrest Gander etc; a term that nobody else has used seriously, to my
knowledge, in quite some time, and certainly is not a term any of those poets
would take seriously...
You probably know this already but when you say
"I often think of Lowell, especially early Lowell, as the best American
approximation of the classically formed, but highly indeterminate, Symbolism
of Mallarme and Valery"
you veer from the party line. In the Perloff locus classicus, the exact
strand you mention here is defined as the not-Other tradition--it's OPPOSED to
the tradition of indeterminacy [Rimbaud-Pound-Stein-Cage, you know the drill].
And it's supposed to matter greatly, in terms of modernist teleological
arguments, that Lowell was not "advancing" from an earlier tradition--to go
back to an earlier stage in the debate, in Antin's terms, if I remember them
correctly, young TSE/Ez were reading Laforgue and Gautier when they should
have been reading Apollinaire and Cendrars. It's those terms (apart from lit-
politics) that are the intellectual substance of Ron's claim, I think--"Are
you fully aware of the possibilities of the medium?" And they're good terms!--
but it's easy to use them reductively (non-dialectically?)...
Nick LoLordo
PS--To take up Kent Johnson's point [loved _The Miseries of Poetry_!]
Between main body and this ps. I just read the Berryman/Berrigan comment;
their adjacency on my bookshelf has given me this idea more than once.
I'd say _77 Dream Songs_, given the criteria of sustained linguistic
excitement or invention, beats the hell out of the _Sonnets_. Now why can't I
believe both that AND that, say, _Lunch Poems_ beats the hell out of
Berryman? Of course Berrigan is just so damn hip....On a more serious note,
Berrigan's work is enmeshed in a value system we respect (avant-garde
collectivity); Berryman's is not ("who's number one? it must be Cal, right?"--
to paraphrase what was said at the death of Frost.) Berrigan worked with
people "we" respect; Berryman with New Critics, Jarrell, even that
embarrassing Delmore Schwartz...
Below is my reply from a couple days ago at a listserv to Ron S. (to his reply to something I had posted here). Since the exchange revolves around an issue initiated on this blog, and since the specific exchange that follows pertains to what I first posted here, it's appropriate, I think, to share it. Ron has not yet responded further. I better send ths before lightning knocks me off the air. Kent
On 6 Jul 2003, at 8:13, Ron Silliman wrote:
Ron, my comments below.
> Did I say Berrigan was a better poet than >Berryman?
Well, given that you have pinned Berryman into the School of Quietude display, and given that you are on record as stating that the poetry of the S of Q causes you to become "literally physically ill," I think it's understandable that one would infer you think Ted Berrigan a "better" poet than Berryman! (or than Moore, Bishop,
Roethke, Plath, etc.) In any case, Ron, your manifesto-like typology is intensely axiological, and I think you risk seeming disingenous with the question above (as if your aim has all along
been merely descriptive, and not a polemical planting of flags).
> It's hard enough defending positions I have. >Imaginary ones are much harder.
In fact, I think part of the problem, for some of us (and some of us care, because your work has been of value to us in the past), is that your taxonomy seems to rest on a largely *imaginary* phylum (the S of Q), under which you have set about classifying very different kinds of poets.
> I like Dream Songs a lot. Homage to Miss >Bradstreet, tho, is not much of interest to me
> (tho Miss Bradstreet herself is).
Here is my question: In what way or ways is The Dream Songs an
instance of the poetics of Quietude?
> I would say that Berrigan is an integral part
> of a rich & fertile heritage, whose work has
> enormous impact in many directions.
Agreed.
> I would say that Berryman was one of several
> interesting members of one branch of the
> School of Quietude who lived to see the >shipwreck of their project. The shipwreck itself
>is of interest to me. Any residual influences,
> though, seem of very little interest, in part
> because they're so few & so bland.
The phrase "their project" is revealing, I think, and betrays the abstraction that suffuses your schema. What "project"? What "their"? What needs to be shown is that there is a "their" there. I
don't see it.
By the way, there are excellent new comments by Robert Kelly and Nick LoLordo over at Brian's Free Space Comix. Would you mind if I shared this exchange with that discussion group?
Kent
>
> Kent, I want you to demonstrate that all of literature leads to
> Richard Tillinghast.
>
> But I'll have to wait to read it. I'm getting ready to head out of
> town & am putting all my Yahoo groups on nomail for awhile,
>
> Ron
The more sophisticated the critical pigeonholing/branding methodology, the further it gets from direct apprehension of the thing itself, that is, poetry. Ideo-political positioning avant la lettre shortcuts the poetic process. You can have your favorites because their colors match your political ideals, but don't forget what Yeats (& most recently, Philip Nikolayev, in his intro to Fulcrum #2) said about the difference between poetry & rhetoric. Poetry is a mode of talking to oneself; how political is that? If it is, it's only after the fact, in a secondary sense. Am I trying to neuter, pigeonhole, or downplay the moral import of politics in literature? Not at all. But poetry, the thing itself, evades the short-circuiting shuttled & prattled along by the bureaucracies of intellectual allegiance.
Posted by: Henry Gould at July 9, 2003 01:18 PMI enjoyed Ron’s comments on Lowell for the window it offers onto Ron’s own projects, but it goes without saying (doesn’t it?) that there are other ways of inhabiting literary history. I can put this in crudely experiential terms: Ron was a member of a literary movement under attack from outsiders; his belief in an “us” and “them” continuous across literary periods is thus confirmed by his own experience. But what if this ISN'T your experience? (It isn't mine and I gather not Brian's.) Wouldn’t it be necessary then to devise a different model?
There’s a viability to what Ron says, but in order to say it one must deemphasize a number of distinctions that don’t just qualify or add detail to his argument, they call it into question. For me, these distinctions provide a better starting point for literary historiography than the so-called “sides” (two, three, a hundred) that develop around them. I wouldn’t want to insist on this dogmatically, but for me it has the advantage of being true to MY experience.
In talking, for example, about a literary movement or affiliation between individuals, I would want to distinguish between shared institutional commitments, shared reading patterns, and shared poetics. Writers with different or even divergent projects often make common cause, and it’s obviously possible for writers to read different texts and arrive at the same stance--or to read the same texts and arrive at different stances.
These are platitudes, but that only goes to show how much you have to overlook in order to view the New American Poetry (say) as “one way” in a literary field in which there are only “two.” The commonalities linking factions as dissimilar as the New York School and Black Mountain Poets--or writers as dissimilar as Gary Snyder and Frank O’Hara--are not an inherent quality of the work, but an historicizable reading of it that has come to seem self-evident or natural.
This points to another distinction more important to me, I think, than Ron: that one’s response to contemporaries is much more socially determined than one’s response to writers from the past--which may explain Brian’s freedom vis-a-vis Ron in reading Lowell without prejudice. I know for myself that the closer I get to the present the more difficult it is for me to read with pleasure or even intelligently the sentimental poetry that has recently occupied my teaching.
Let these diffuse thoughts stand for a more substantial intervention. I enjoy the exchange of ideas here and at Kasey’s blog: reminds me of the glory days of the Listserv.
Ben
Ben,
This is very interesting to me, specifically:
"...member of a literary movement under attack from outsiders..."
It's not that I don't believe you -- I'm hardly a historian of these matters -- but it seems to me that there were very few outright "attacks" on the Language movements, which is to say point-by-point criticisms, but, rather, hostile dismissals (or silence on the matter entirely).
I only suspect this because I haven't read to many rebuttals by Language poets to these "attacks" -- these would be interesting reading! -- nor can I think of one writer who has really gone at the Language poets with possible the exception of David Lehmann quite late in the game, in The Last Avant-Garde.
But of course, he's on "our" side, as would be Tom Clark and, say, J.H. Prynne (English, I know, but an Olson / Dorn guy) in his famous letter to McCaffery -- at least in for the sake of this debate.
The middlebrow craze for Anglo/Irish poets; the phenomenon that is Richard Howard (translator of Barthes, Breton, Robbe-Grillet; blurber of "I was abused" workshop poetry); Robert Lowell admirers ("[Bishop and O’Hara] left behind bodies of work, whereas Lowell, like Yeats and Milton and very few others, left behind the monumental narrative of a career...."—A.O. Scott, _Slate_)...The perception and reception of poetry in this country is a never-ending source of awe; I for one am glad RS notices it, though I suppose he could camp it up more. Nobody likes a curmudgeon. (Well, I do.)
But you, Brian, are no curmudgeon; what’s your excuse for insisting on consistency and reason? Whatever happened to the poetic imperative Odi et amo? Panache in both may be our only consolation. (If this is not sufficient on political grounds, fine; but what has *ever* been sufficient on both aesthetic and political grounds?) I await the day a rigorous evaluative criticism becomes fashionable again, but til then I must demur when the journalistic consensus is that the ending of "For the Union Dead," wherein cars are "like fish," is worthy of comparison to Milton. And for the record, I thought this when I was 16 too. Best, A
Ouch-o-rini!
Yes, I see your point(s) -- nicely put(sched).
But this has nothing to do with a critique of "middlebrows" -- armchair sociology is not my thing -- otherwise I'd be talking about "white" literary culture and following these directions:
1) open package
2) remove shit
3) turn on fan
4) hit fan with shit
4) (try to turn off fan)
I.e. textbook scandalization. (Credit me with the originality of turning on the fan *before* opening the package.)
I'm only shooting arrows at my own small world and the way it speaks because it suggests the way I should speak -- its terms become ours because they are ubiquitous. I think the terms are wrong, and the phrasing often tautological.
The difference between a tautology and a contradiction (or "consistency") is I think quite wide. I don't mind contradicting myself so long as I am saying something. To be "rigorous" enough to be not tautological is quite fine with me, and difficult enough.
I would never speak of a "monumental narrative of a career" for all time -- the phrase sounds downright exotic to me.
But I think the end of "For the Union Dead" -- "Everywhere / giant finned cars nose forward like fish; / a savage servility / slides by on grease" -- are probably the best lines of that book (which I don't think, itself, is good at all). Tom Haynes could have been thinking of these lines when filming Far From Heaven.
(I wonder why poets on "our" side can never have "bad" books and "good" books -- it's all some representative single gesture -- at least in the criticism.)
I actually think there's more panache in this little "screed" than I'm being given credit for, but that's neither here nor there. You didn't like "Liberace's Ashram"?
Posted by: Mr. Arras at July 9, 2003 10:12 PMWhat if "School of Quietude" were replaced with the phrase "Official Verse Culture"?
There are fundamental divergences between the phrases in the way that Ron S. and Charles Bernstein, respectively, use them and work from them, even as both phrases imply a roughly similar hierarchy of cultural values pegging authors and works.
Broadens discussion to lineage question - "'lineage' in that...", and of what?
Posted by: Louis Cabri at July 9, 2003 10:59 PMI've only casually been following this discussion, but can't help chirping in on the question of Berrigan "versus" Berryman. Granted, this unnecessary opposition may be a carry-over from Ron's sometimes heavy-handed didacticism-- which you're all opposed to, right? However, I can't help, as a huge fan of Ted B., being a little bit taken aback at this "who's better than whom" line of argument, which seems to come down to a bunch of overeducated guys (and this ~does~ seem an operative category here, not least because I notice that almost no women have posted) having their say about whose oeuvre is "bigger," er excuse me, "greater," than another's. I'm not very well read in Berryman's magnum opus, I'll now publicly confess, but just as I'm eyeing a copy in the local used bookstore & thinking that I may want to dive in, the categorical imperative of this conversation puts a sour taste in my mouth. I'm sorry to be so hard on everyone; Nick & Kent certainly are amigos, & I hope won't hold it too much against me. (Nick, if you're around I'm sure we'll talk about it soon). For the record, I agree with much of what BKS says, as a meta-critique of Ron's argument, while also valuing Ron's at least historical documentation of those sorts of poetry community allegiances & divisions, which I personally do not want us to forget, however much I also want us not to be "bound" by them. As for _The Sonnets_, however you stack rank it against the _Dream Songs_, does any one of you care to deny that it's not just Berrigan's masterpiece but one of the seminal poetic works of the 60s, whether from the School of Quietude or from what I guess would be its opposite, the School of Noise (which I'm all for, incidentally)?--
Okay, like they say, I'll probably regret this post in the morning, & I apologize for its irritability, but I hope you will take it in the spirit of friendly/serious argument with which it's intended--
Love (and yes, from another one of the guys)—
Mark DuCharme
Posted by: Mark DuCharme at July 10, 2003 01:41 AMThe carnival of middlebrow poetry culture may be worthy of derision; but derision is also the perennial consolation of those who have failed to make a dent. This is a problem I have with the "two ways" theory : it merely reinforces an avant-garde subculture behind its carpitudinous escarpment. Poets will always have a struggle justifying their existence, but phony us/them pecking orders only justify complacency; it helps poets avoid the real issues, which can't be solved by committees or critical pabula.
Posted by: Henry Gould at July 10, 2003 08:12 AMBrian, of course you have panache--it's practically the title of your new book!
Yes, the terms are nebulous, or perhaps just embryonic, but I'm not worried about being bound by his terms--there's already matching us-and-them Nortons.
I just don't think Silliman was unfair to Lowell, even if he was reading Lowell the phenomenon at the expense of the poetry itself. (After all, RL's defenders do the same, shamelessly.) Nor do I think poetry wars are a bad thing. RS's blog has made things more interesting. So have you, despite being so good-natured for a poet. Fondly, A
Posted by: Ange at July 10, 2003 10:51 AMFor some reason, this didn't go through when I tried to post it yesterday. It's a copy of Ron's response to me over at ubuweb and my reply in turn. Since what he is replying to was first posted here, I'm forwarding. I haven't yet had a second reply from Ron. It would be interesting to hear reply, especially to my question regarding how, precisely, The Dream Songs qualifies as an instance of quietudist poetics-- as belonging, "ontologically," in the same family as, say, late Frost. If Ron can't be specific and demonstrate his sweeping claims of "ideological affinity," I think it's fair to say that his historical schema is in danger of collapse. Because one can then point to many other contemporary works and ask the same question... Anyway, here's the post in question. Ron's comments preceded by deltas:
*
On 6 Jul 2003, at 8:13, Ron Silliman wrote:
> Did I say Berrigan was a better poet than Berryman?
Well, given that you have pinned Berryman into the School of
Quietude display, and given that you are on record as stating that
the poetry of the S of Q causes you to become "literally physically
ill," I think it's understandable that one would infer you think Ted
Berrigan a "better" poet than Berryman! (or than Moore, Bishop, Roethke,
Plath, etc.) In any case, Ron, your manifesto-like typology is intensely
axiological, and I think you risk seeming disingenous with the question
above (as if your aim has all along been merely descriptive, and not a
polemical planting of flags).
> It's hard enough defending positions I
have. Imaginary ones are much harder.
In fact, I think part of the problem, for some of us (and some of us care,
because your work has been of value to us in the past), is that your
taxonomy seems to rest on a largely *imaginary* phylum (the S of Q), under
which you have set about classifying very different kinds of poets.
> I like Dream Songs a lot. Homage to Miss Bradstreet, tho, is not much
> of interest to me (tho Miss Bradstreet herself is).
Here is my question: In what way or ways is The Dream Songs an
instance of the poetics of Quietude?
> I would say that Berrigan is an integral part of a rich & fertile
> heritage, whose work has enormous impact in many directions.
Agreed.
> I would say that Berryman was one of several interesting members of one
> branch of the School of Quietude who lived to see the shipwreck of their
> project. The shipwreck itself is of interest to me. Any residual
> influences, though, seem of very little interest, in part because
> they're so few & so bland.
The phrase "their project" is revealing, I think, and betrays the
abstraction that suffuses your schema. What "project"? What
"their"? What needs to be shown is that there is a "their" there. I
don't see it.
By the way, there are excellent new comments by Robert Kelly
and Nick LoLordo over at Brian's Free Space Comix. Would you
mind if I shared this exchange with that discussion group?
Kent
> Kent, I want you to demonstrate that all of literature leads to
> Richard Tillinghast.
>
> But I'll have to wait to read it. I'm getting ready to head out of
> town & am putting all my Yahoo groups on nomail for awhile,
>
> Ron
I am looking at the Avedon portrait of Lowell on the cover of the NYT bk review...I can SO see cutting his head off and using it as a lantern. I'm guessing it could still light many a fool the way.
The image is of course copped from Lowell's own "Florence" and by "fool" i mean "myself"
Posted by: p. backonja at July 10, 2003 12:43 PMDear Brian Kim Stephens:
Uh, is this a post or wha? meant to be a personalish note merely to say: I'm sloggin through the bloggin at home, finally, and can do so now that the temp is low enough to allow computer on air conditioner off. Just to say your comments as always in this context are provocative and brave and confound expectations.
I agreed with Robt Kelly above. I guess a not so interesting charge against the blog - god, such an unattrative word -practitioners is of narcissistic something or other, but I think in Silliman's situation particularly, his generously comprehensive blog is counter narcissistic which is a real accomplishment at his ahem, age, degree of saturation, etc. Whereas who cares if young energetic poets are such? they better be narcisstic (in the casual sense of self involved not pathologically). Thanks to Kevin Killian's bracing Lowell biographical tidbits. How did these poets all find the time for such connivings and goings on?. Well, I'm going to go back and discuss all this amongst myselves.
Posted by: Kimberly Lyons at July 14, 2003 01:18 AMNo cause is so right that one cannot find a fool following it.
Posted by: Peterson Lee at December 10, 2003 04:36 PMHave no friends not equal to yourself.
Posted by: Berio Marina at December 20, 2003 09:01 PM'May you live all the days of your life.' - Swift
Posted by: Klein Sarah at January 9, 2004 11:56 AMThe Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Posted by: Gillam at January 19, 2004 03:06 AMThe Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Posted by: Eliza at January 19, 2004 03:06 AM