Avocados in the Andes (with a side of panache)

Kasey Mohammed's posted an excellent email by Jeffrey Jullich on his blog lime tree, from which the following excerpt is taken (Jullich is referring to Kasey's notion of "hypocrisy" in a "quietude" writer adopting poses of "negativity"):

You’re imagining a wolf in sheep’s clothing, just because it lopes like a quadruped and eats raw meat under that fluffy tail and baaing;—but what I’m trying to remind you, Kasey, is that that what you’re taking for a wolf may in fact be a creature more like Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves.

Surely, Kasey, put differently, you’d agree rather that self is formed by language. It is, in fact, the long practice of various verbal/writing technologies (and all those technologies’ socially established options) that inform the potential character of any individual so as to result in anything that could be construed as a Quietudist or a Negativist poet. That is to say, there is no Negativist writer without literary Negativism; the former follows out of the latter; it is the precedent of the literary school or movement, in both Q & N cases, that, in our current historical scene at least, is taken up as, up to an extent, an artifice, and out of which then only afterwards can develop gradually, by the process of (labor’s) identification with one’s product (non-alienation), something like a protagonist who can discover him-/herself in that text as in an eldritch mirror, or be so strongly linked with it, with one style, as to be so branded.

That the "self" is made of "language" seems an old truism to me now, but he freshens it with the suggestions of camp, of drag, of dissimulation, inherent in the framework he is setting up, and perhaps the suggestion that a poetics of "negativity" depends on taking advantage of a "situation" rather than anything that could be so programmatic and pious as to be a "lineage." (Jullich is, of course, the guy who turned me into the Times for the Vaneigem pieces because he thought I was a fraud!)

Certainly, Jullich is critical of anything that could be considered an "essentialism" in the activities of a poet; his suggestion that there is a habitus (well, that's a word I'm adding, from Bourdieu -- Google it!) in which a poet operates -- a field of prizes, assurances, mores, counter-instinctual behaviors such as the potlatch -- and that the more successful of "us" has a third eye telling him/her where the walls are, is more or less in agreement with mine. (This is not the equivalent of saying that all poets are opportunists in a field of survival of the fittest, only that there is a response to social forces that are far from obvious -- a digression I'd like to avoid for now.)

Though you would think, reading Kasey's and Jeffrey's posts, that I had nothing at all to say on this discussion -- I feel like the son who pointed to the fire only to watch Mom and Dad save the pets and Claude Van Damm video collection to my own neglect, which seems to me just punishment for being a bore -- I think the dialogue there is rather rich and detailed if, at times, weighed down by terms -- sometimes getting too deep into things puts us too far at the back end of Plato's cave, fingering the remote control to electrify the shadows.

But in reference to Silliman's stated support of KSM's views: Kasey is being quite clear in his emphasis on his "two" ways being that of negativity and some presumed "quietudinousness" -- he's talking about a binary metaphysics here, to a degree, suggesting that the "DARK is the absence of LIGHT" dualism stands in contrast to what I think many of us think is a Manichean dualism between the equal forces of LIGHT and DARK (not to mention RED, WHITE, BLUE, etc.). Kent Johnson raises this issue with his comments to Kasey about Pessoa -- hunt around in the comments section -- Pessoa being, one might suggest, the first poet of postmodern "camp" and originator of the avatar -- though a stylistically astute one at that!

Kasey holds this in contrast to an armchair sociology that equates the former binary with political positioning -- not to disparage sociology itself, just to highlight its casual cameo appearances in discussions of poetic history. I'm not sure whether we know anymore what a truly "negative" political position is these days unless it be, as Jullich suggest, that type which adheres to "wildcat" strikes (yes, another lifting from my readings of Debord). Well, I could go on about that, about politics, about wildcats... but it's really not my field. (I did see Walter Mondale once in person, when he came to speak in Rutherford campaigning for Carter.)

I kind of wonder if John Lydon is upset that Thom Yorke is using some of his vocal affects and copping his lyrics in the new Radiohead album, or whether Steve Howe is claiming the guitar riff from "Myxomatosis" is from an early Yes record. But that is neither here nor there. ("Myxomatosis" is the name of a Philip Larkin poem, by the way -- but I still like the album! In fact, I like the poem quite a bit also -- Google it, but don't use my spelling!)

On another note: I’ve been assured by several emails that the Language school has never been in fact “attacked” by the "mainstream" (or "Official Verse Culture") -- that most of the “attacks” came from within our own New American "lineages." Is this true?

I was on a NYFA panel once with Louis Simpson years ago, and he made it clear that he thought Charles Bernstein's poetry was total crud, but even he thought the criticism was quite good, in fact important and provocative, and CB got the grant. I'd like to read one old school "mainstream" poet who has attacked the Language poets, if only to see what terms are being adopted to do so and whether they match up with the "theory" "we" use to describe it. The most I've ever seen is a lame phrase or two like "the school of Stein" -- clearly a diss, but not an "attack."

The question being: has Language theory really complicated things for anyone, like Williams did for Lowell (or Laforgue did for Pound, etc.), or has it just thrown up the chance for membership in a distinctive, supportive, and much more exciting subculture of American poetry? (Ok, casual reductions again... but I'm interested.)

Another note from Hitchens that I copied down for a different purpose yesterday, but by the magic of cut-and-paste appears for you today:

I have a dear friend in Jerusalem…. Nothing in his life, as a Jewish youth in pre-1940 Poland and subsequent survivor of indescribable privations and losses, might be expected to have conditioned him to welcome the disruptive. Yet on some occasions when I have asked him for his impression of events, he has calmly and deliberately replied: “There are some encouraging signs of polarisation.” Nothing flippant inheres in this remark; a long and risky life has persuaded him that only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity.

And for what it's worth: here's something I wrote ages ago of an anthology of poetry that had just appeared (a paid job, indeed), and which I think demonstrates that I share many of Silliman's views on the aesthetic hegemony in a certain branch of literary culture -- really, the culture of the two editors. I situate this anthology as representative of one node between Ashbery / Graham / Ammons (any reader of the Lehman anthologies will know them), the performance poets, New Formalists, late "New Americans," etc.

My attempt was to be specific and critical while not turning my objects of study -- the poems themselves -- into elaborated, ossified Hallmark cards, written by the Partridge Family or the digital extras on board the Titanic, though indeed (I haven't seen the anthology in a while, I sold it), I guess it was hard to do. I'm not holding this up as an exquisite piece of critical work, which is why I didn't put it into my "Little Reviews" section of Arras, just, well, more (cannon) fodder for discussion.

The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry
Michael Collier and Stanley Plumly, editors
University Press of New England, 2000)

This anthology represents the middle-ground of major American contemporary poetry, passing by such writers as John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, or Jorie Graham who, in comparison, are just too “out there,” and going nowhere near New American Poets -- such as Robert Creeley or Gary Snyder -- the “Language” poets, performance poets, nor much that could be taken for “new Formalism” (Jacqueline Osherow is the exception) . For this reason, it is a convenient book, since it gives one a clear way to assess what has happened to the academic/confessional line of Lowell, Plath, and Berryman, the group that replaced, for a certain type of literature, the expat dream of the 20’s with that of angst-ridden domestic “responsibility”, but which was too old for the Beats once they hit the scene (though some tried to latch on) . Initially, one could say that it has simply devolved: the narcissism is still there, with most of these poems being too long about anxieties, “deep sensibilities,” distrust of the world, adultery, pleasant afternoons and vacations, etc., but the formal mastery of the Lowell generation -- with its ties to Eliot’s modernism, Auden’s precociousness, Williams’ directness and prosody, along with Lowell’s background in Latin and Berryman’s syntactical experiments based on readings of Shakespeare, etc. -- are gone. While most of this work is not “confessional” in the strict sense, it is disheartening how few poems rise above the basic frame of the unescapable self in the world, or how, when a different theme is adopted, it is still tied to basic formal tricks -- the piling up of redundant detail as a baroque display of knowledge is one of them -- which renders the work repetitive and mundane. Consequently, even when formal meters are adopted -- as a way out of the too free, often just prosaic, free verse meters -- nothing like the sparkle of the Elizabethans (those to whom Eliot paid homage) breaks through. One hundred poets were invited to select from their own work, eighty-two of whom responded: include several well-known names, such as: Marvin Bell, Stephen Berg, Frank Bidart, Lucille Clifton, editors Michael Collier and Stanley Plumly, Alfred Corn, Deborah Digges, Stuart Dischell, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Cornelius Eady, Tess Gallagher, Louise Gluck, Linda Gregerson, Maralyn Hacker, Michael S. Harper, Brenda Hillman, Mark Jarman, Galway Kinnell, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, the late William Matthews, W.S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Alberto Rios, David St. John, Gerald Stern, Mark Strand, James Tate, C. K. Williams and C.D. Wright. Most all of them are either university professors (most of those for whom job status is blank in the brief bios are also professors) or editors of such journals as the Virginia Quarterly or The American Poetry Review. The most interesting pages are probably provided by Louse Gluck -- though not her best work, there is enough of her Rilkean “purity” of expression and her various lineation to satisfy -- and Linda Gregerson, whose tight lines in irregular, Williams-esque tercets often achieve a microtonal variety that lifts them above the pedestrian: “It had almost nothing to do with sex. / The boy / in his corset and farthingale, his head- / voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin / was not / and never had been simply in our pay. Or / was it some lost logic the regional accent / restores?” (95, “Eyes Like Leeks”). Mark Strand’s “I Will Love the Twenty-First Century” is quite masterful, with it’s quiet, Prufrockian ending -- after the narrator has a Cooleridgean wedding-guest type encounter with a man who foresees a ghostly double for himself in the next century, the poem finds a rich muteness in: “‘Oh,” I said, putting on my hat, ‘Oh’.” William Matthews has probably the two most easily dislikable lines in the book -- “I’ve ended three marriages by divorce / as a man shoots a broken legged horse” (190) , a real derailing of whatever charm Berryman might have possessed -- but triumphs with “Bit Tongue,” with it’s polyglot mish-mash of tonalities and languages, confined within a persona that is pathetic but mildly attractive. Several poets -- like Tate and St. John -- have written much better elsewhere, and look mediocre here; other bits and pieces, such as the first section of Yusef Komunyakaa’s meditation on Whitman and slavery, “Kosmos” -- are quite beautiful. In any case, this is not a book that reflects a “commitment to the future of the nation’s poetry” as its editors profess, so much as a tombstone for its glorious past -- or one of them, at least. It is the type of writing that the workshops are modeled after, which is why this type of poetry is on a downward spiral.

Posted by Brian Stefans at July 10, 2003 08:19 AM | TrackBack