Further Notes from Underground

Ron Silliman writes in his most recent post:

I do want to reiterate that anyone who lived through the 1960s will remember that, in politics, the “third way” strategy advocated by Stefans – Walter Mondale was its apotheosis – invariably came out as road kill. While the intentions of a rapprochement may always be noble, in the world of American letters it requires amnesia to imagine it possible. If you’re anywhere on the post-avant spectrum – as Brian clearly is – the idea of rapprochement is virtually a death wish. Kasey, on the other hand, is exactly on target when he suggests that a “17th way” will be possible before a “third one” is.

You can read my own post about this subject to find out whether I "advocated" this "third way" or whether or not I stated (quite clearly, I thought) that I felt the Language poets were themselves symptomatic of a third way strategy, if not the third way themselves. They stand between the innovative, fractured, relentless, flawed and inspired "hot" modernists that one associates with the period between the Wars -- questioning every issue of language, gender, politics, society, spirit, fearless of falling off the cliff -- and the method of a more professional class of poets with their attendant university positions, presses, canons, critical debates and journals, collegiate panels, cultural capital and signature themes (whether the "anxiety of influence" or the "new sentence"), not to mention what I elsewhere termed a "loyal fan base," etc.

It's a difference between diving into the abyss of the "new" and exploiting methods that are, indeed, worth exploiting, but are not very original to its practitioners. There is nothing wrong with that, of course -- Shut Up, for example, could not have been written by someone without the ambition, immediate social support and life-strategy (his job, his discipline) of Bruce Andrews. The Language poets could be said to stand in comparison to this earlier period of modernism as Eliot's "Four Quartets" could be said to stand to "The Waste Land" -- a refinement of the earlier form, but also, in a sense, an amelioration of it -- but that, indeed, is cheeky!

Quite obviously, I find nothing wrong with the latter -- nor the Four Quartets -- it's just this idea the Language poets (or the New American poets) are always making noise, always howling in the field, while the "other" tradition has languished quiescent for the past several decades that strikes me as indefensible, or at least obsolete. I am trying to argue for a complete reevaluation of strategies by the "alternative" current in poetry if, indeed, we are to be the "young Americans" (the opposing force to the "School of Quietude" in Poe's mind) -- provocative, recalcitrant, pains in the asses.

The fact that my own writings over the past two weeks cannot be provided a rebuttal because it's impossible to "disentangle... the ad hominem attacks" from what is presumably the good stuff directs us to one obvious point: does Ron expect anyone to read something called "Silliman's Blog" and manage to "disentangle" what is written there from the person we've known (as readers and members of a "community" in which he occupies a position) for several decades as one of the most visible, opinionated -- which I applaud! -- and prolific poets out there? Isn't the point of being matter-of-fact, meat-and-potatoes, about your view of literary culture to force a reply?

The originator of the term "school of quietude" himself was prone to some classic ad hominem attacks, such as the following:

Had [Carlyle] not appeared we might have gone on for yet another century, Emerson-izing in prose, Wordsworth-izing in poetry, and Fourier-izing in philosophy, Wilson-izing in criticism -- Hudson-izing and Tom O'Bedlam-izing in everything.

Ouch! It points to the fact that the saltier statements of that initial post were geared toward the style of thinking and writing that appears on the blog, not "the person," and was then followed by a litany of specific points. I think it's ok, and certainly not in the class of "Larry Fagin's asinine bloviating," which RS quotes without comment in his post. The latter, by Daniel Nester, strikes me as a classic ad hominem attack, since it's vulgar, and I don't, after all, know what he's talking about nor ever learn.

(I'd also like to know what this "death wish" is? What a strange term! That one will be forgotten, like Hart Crane? That if I renounce God and the "lineage," it means I don't like sex? A truly odd moment in this paragraph...)

I'd also like to know what a political analogy from the sixties, which we all know was a terribly polarized decade, has to do with an analysis of poetical strategies in this century, which seems to me characterized by a sort of tribal attitude of protecting one's peers, of complaining about a "monoculture" but from the vantage of a subculture that, itself, is never questioned in its premises. Ironically (and not insanely) part of the reason I've been critical of Silliman's Blog is that many of the arguments stated there are about, and reflective of, my own reading of American literary culture, but often so limited in its purview, not to mention un-fresh in its terms, that I think they are either incredibly vulnerable to dispute by someone with a truly visionary breadth of knowledge (I'm certainly not saying this is me), or vulnerable to being entirely ignored -- indeed, a "death wish" in itself. If anything, the arguments should be improved by open, and not falsely "objective," disputation, not destroyed.

From this caution I pass to an observation of the late Sir Karl Popper, who could himself be a tyrant in argument but who nonetheless recognized that argument was valuable, indeed essential, for its own sake. It is very seldom, as he noticed, that in debate anyone of two evenly matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or "converting" the other. But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end up holding exactly the same position as that with which he began. Concessions, refinements and adjustments will occur, and each initial position will have undergone modification even if it remains ostensibly the "same." Not even the most apparently glacial "system" is immune to this rule.

This from Christopher Hitchens, a fantastic prose stylist though more infamous these days as a turncoat, in Letters to a Young Contrarian. Not inconsequently, besides illustrating the very motion of historical dialectic here (the "synthesis" being in the viewer of this public debate), this illustrates the very usefulness of there being not a "rapprochement" between two poetic "ways" -- it would be uncharacteristic of me to aim for a simple "rapprochement" in any aesthetic issue -- but an attempted, forceful, specific analysis of the methods used and consideration of their potential in the future. I just don't see how Lowell's interest in modifying, even destroying, his earlier prosodics because of revelatory experience with WCW can be discounted as another Brahmin ploy and the "innovation" of Robert Grenier's index-card Sentences -- a method of "early hypertext" Marc Saporta used ten years earlier in 1963 -- be routinely applauded? (I confess that a fare part of my ire was touched off by RS's "When I am completely dismissive of Lowell..." etc. line, which, let's be honest, was smug.) Our writing must be "built to last," with all its attendant inner dialectics, or "built to strike," with the coarseness of means one associates with polemic -- one must decide, I feel, what one is doing.

As it is, the structure of Silliman's Blog -- which leapfrogs from subject to subject, creating old news out of matter that, at least one day, seemed of central importance -- does not permit for active disputation, which I think is a flaw of blogs in themselves. Ron could write a perfect rebuttal to this very post tomorrow and off I'd be talking about growing avocados in the Andes. We also never know when something was posted, whether it was revised ten times, how long it took to write, or whether the writer is sitting in a hot tub with a laptop and chihuahua or stealing seconds away from a construction job.

I also think that, in this post-war political climate, "we" all have to learn how to be more cunning rhetoricians, more skillful and passionate analysts of ideas, if only because these skills will have to be put to use the next time a large portion of the population is in disagreement with the government. Talking among ourselves in listservs and blogs seems to me out of the question (not that I hope to become next years Daniel Cohn-Bendit -- I just don't want to sit around programming HTML as my only contribution to the discussion.) Isn't anyone insulted by how ignored "we" were leading up to the war?

Posted by Brian Stefans at July 9, 2003 10:28 AM | TrackBack