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Dear Brian,
Just read your piece on Pound. I especially appreciate your critique of the "state of things" in the final paragraph. Most important and useful to point out this "with us or against" mentality prevelant on both sides of the verse culture divide.
On the one hand, the avant-garde (in general) re-gardes the "official verse culture" as some sort of monolithic, programmatic, homogeneous whole, which attitude eschews the whole issue of having to take account the actual work of the "mainstream" (whatever that means in poetry), allowing readers (by which I mean our generation of poets, who've grown up with the divide as more or less a given) to simply write off the majority of American poetry in favor paying close attention to a small faction within the broader scheme.
On the other hand, many "mainstream" poets tend toward the same behavior, smugly assured of their genius and the inherent "quality" of their work by legions of editors and academics whose job it is to "authorize" authors for popular consumption. Many of them don't even know a single avant-garde poet by name, and many use the same dismissive gesture directed at them by the avants through equally homegeonizing terms such as "language poetry" or even "avant-garde."
But what is the value of this division? Is it politically efficacious? Is it intellectually ethical? One can't read everything, but must one choose what to read based solely on what you aptly term "cultural allegiance"?
What has been attractive to me about "difficult" work (which need not necessarily mean "avant-garde," cf. Ed Roberson or Yusef Komunyakaa) is that it attempts to deal with complexity on its own terms. Perhaps a better word for complexity would be "irreducibility." Difficult poetry seeks the irreducible, which might itself be defined as "untranslatable complexity."
I would distinguish this term from the related "negative capability" in that it points away from the subjectivity of the artist in the production of art (or the spectator in its appreciation of art) and toward the orientation of the work itself. Irreducibility is that complexity (of being, not NECESSARILY of linguistic difficulty) which resides in the work, not as static form, but as that which lives.
I admire Pound (cautiously) precisely because he understands in his work that complexity is comprised of "variety, optimism and excitement," not of ideological fealty, academic sanction, eshatological ennui or transgression as a value in and for itself.
One of the most moving and interesting things I have heard from the Pound cult of the 50's was Jackson Mac Low talking about admiring Pound's works despite his fascism. At 85, he said found himself still wrestling with this apparent contradiction. That, my friend, is negative capability, to stay optimistically IN the complexity, in the irreducibility, knowing it will not, cannot, ever be resolved.
Truly,
Mike
I don't have time to explain why I sent this to Joan Houlihan, a poet who works for Web del Sol -- but read the Possum Pouch to find out. The prose parts of the email quote from one of Houlihan's terrible essays slamming experimental poetry, but I use one of her own "poems of the day" (see rest of this story below) as an example of bad verse.
"It seems that not only are these words not best (or worst), they are not even among a specifically selected few. All word choices seem equally good (or bad) for this poem because the poem does not want to add up to anything, does not want to become anything, it only wants to resist becoming, to remain a baby in the continuum of its utterance. Therefore:
As Jimmie hears his cue: "The King of Croon,"
how does the fiddle do it? All seats,
--postures, giving muscle to melody--
empty. Even wallflowers crack their stone.
Tension dissolves in tone. Three short
revive and fling toward heaven. Only slaps
from bull strings land them back on the map.
A guileless mother hums as baby snorts
in her arm. The dream settles like beer foam
with a long bow that carries the weight of bones.
Reunion after exile. The sweet tune.
Strokes introduce the path back home.
How does the fiddle do it? Dead feet.
Then the trickster sustains our sympathy.
Why not? How does this version differ from the original? Only in its word order. And since the words don't count, since they don't have to be best, better, bad or in any way related to any potential meaning, my poem is as “good” as the original. In fact, I would argue my poem is the original—is, in fact, better than the original, because clearly this poem wants to be in quatrains! It wants to have the only interesting detail and the only character in the poem at the beginning, not the end. It is exactly the same poem, albeit with different word order—but neither set of words makes any difference to the meaning."
BC Presents
The Sol Poetry Daily
September 8, 2003
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wake Up, Goddamn, Give the Fiddler a Dram
Michael Graber
How does the fiddle do it? Dead feet
revive and fling toward heaven. Only slaps
from bull strings land them back on the map.
How does the fiddle do it? All seats
empty, even wallflowers crack their stone
postures, giving muscle to melody.
Then the trickster sustains our sympathy
with a long bow that carries the weight of bones.
Tension dissolves in tone. Three short
strokes introduce the path back home,
reunion after exile, the sweet tune
a guileless mother hums as baby snorts
in her arm. The dream settles like beer foam
as Jimmie hears his cue: "The King of Croon."
[I wrote this in response to the following New York Review of Books article on graphic novels. You might want to read the article first before my post.]
The New York Review of Books: Comics for Grown-Ups
As a poet, I have no particular reason to defend the field of "graphic novels," but I feel compelled to respond to such a vitriolic and uninformed essay such as that by David Hadju.
I think one can celebrate two artists who happen to satisfy his particular criteria for artistic success without having to disparage the entire field from which they sprang (and to which they themselves might have some great affection and owe a great debt).
It would be like me writing a flattering article about Christopher Hitchens while wiping out the entire field of highbrow, partisan political journalism. Indeed, Hitchens writes a much better prose than most of what I see in the "cultural" tabloids, and I'm not sure how Hadju could criticize "a legion of less-gifted imitators [who] reduce the notion [of the graphic novel] to baroque parody" with such an undistinguished, unattractive -- and certainly not innovative -- prose style as his own.
Or imagine me writing a flattering article about Richard Holmes or Simon Schama while wiping out the entire field of literary biography and cultural history as the practice of over-educated navel gazers? Or imagine me writing a flattering article about Ian Hamilton Finlay while mentioning over-and-over again that there hasn't been a single great Scottish poet since W.S. Graham and Hugh MacDiarmid died?
Of course, most of my readers would not know who W.S. Graham or Hugh MacDiarmid are, just as most of your readers won't know who the Brothers Hernandez or Renee French or Ho Che Anderson or the host of cartoonists and graphic novelists (many of whom predated Spiegleman) who have pretty much amazed me over the past two years as I have slowly, but enjoyably, read through their material. I would consider it my responsiblity to tell them (I'm a frequent reviewer myself).
I should have been suspicious from the start -- I don't think Genesis or Yes or King Crimson based a concept album on the interactions of a village of impoverished Mexicans, as the Brothers Hernandez did in Love & Rockets, and a critic who cites The World According to Garp as some sort of literary milestone while in the throes of disparaging an entire culture for being "junk art for adolescents" has certainly lost site long ago of what it means to be a popular, sophisticated -- not to mention culturally specific -- artist.
(Speaking of Robin Williams: Popeye, the cartoon, has that special magic that we associate with some of the finest artistic creations -- Vigo's L'Atalante or the boxes of Cornell, for instance -- aesthetic attitudes we should not sacrifice to the "real" or the "mature." The continuing fascination with noirish worlds of Little Orphan Annie and Dick Tracy, to take two examples, not to mention any in narratives that occurs in serial form would suggest that a wiser analogue for Mr. Hadju would not be rock opera but television, or even the gothic novel.)
Hadju, in short, clearly demonstrates no interest in reorienting his sense of aesthetic success in the face of a new(ish) subculture whose dynamics are particular, unique, and which he doesn't understand. "Comics for Grown-Ups" is a pretty irresponsible article and no service to your readers, many of whom probably picked up "Ghost World" when the movie came out two years ago, just as I read and enjoyed "Garp" after seeing the movie -- as "junk" culture -- at the ripe old age of 12.
[Here's a little piece of writing I did several years ago, I think "pre 9/11," for a Swedish journal, OEI. I probably wouldn't have used the poets names that I used in this statement had I spent more than an hour writing it, but so it goes. In general, it's still what I feel, though only the skeleton of the way I would express it now. All of the English language statements that were submitted to this issue of OEI can be found at www.ubu.com/papers -- very worth glancing at. Writers include: Christian Bök, Stgacy Doris, Peter Gizzi, Kenneth Goldsmith, Karen Mac Cormack, Jennifer Moxley, Jena Osman, Juliana Spahr, Chet Wiener. The questions were: "How do you conceive of innovative poetry in America after Language poetry?" and "How do you define your own relationship to Language Poetry?"
My apologies once again for posting this reheated slop but I feel this obligation to the "feed the blog" and yet, once again, don't have any time to write anything new. I don't think anyone read this outside of Sweden anyway...]
My own sense is that there has been neither a smooth transition from the paradigm of "language poetry" nor has there been a "clean break" with it. There are several younger writers who wish language poetry never happened, some who believe that the tenets of language poetry are still the best thing going, and some who are picking and choosing from among the ideas that language poetry put forward and trying to reconcile these with more traditional poetic values.
There are several reasons for this. One is that, even when Language poetry was most in the ascdendant, there were still strong strands in experimental work that didn't owe anything to their theories or work. Some writers, like Susan Howe, are considered "Language poets" even though her work shares little with the work of the main figures, while other writers, such as Eileen Myles and the ever-productive John Ashbery, were putting out strong work that didn't owe anything to them.
Also, it never had the grip on the public imagination that, say, Beat Poetry had, probably because it lacked any "lifestyle" element -- no costumes, no drugs -- and because it had a fairly technical, and not humanistic, approach to poetic value. It was a highly self-conscious movement which often put forward a very methodical way of writing, and American poets by nature tend to disavow this kind of self-consciousness since it conflicts with a sort of romantic liberatarian attitude that believes the poet is a free thinker and a "witness to events" who is also, as an act of rebellion perhaps, an improvisational writer.
I'm being reductive here, of course, but this is an element that runs from Whitman (who was, to a degree, in conflict with the methodical, continentally-inflected writings of William Cullen Bryant) through the Beats to Ann Waldman and the late A.R. Ammons. It's not a viewpoint to which I'm entirely unsympathetic.
Language poetry is also often seen as elitist because it never dealt adequately with issues of race, gender, and sexuality, at least as a whole. Since one of its early premises was the critique of "identity" and the self, it never had the language for dealing with minority issues that attempted to legitimize "identity" as a central subject of discourse. As a result, there was a sense of haughtiness on the part of the Language poets who didn't want to "stoop to that level," though recently there have been more attempts by Language poets to incorporate these issues. Not suprisingly, most of the Language poets -- certainly of the first generations -- are of European descent (which is to say, "white").
So what that leaves is a poetic past that seems at once finished, incomplete, still lingering, in its death throes, yet more relevant than ever. Several mainstream writers have made their career marks by incorporating Language methods in their work, for better or worse, and it's sort of become hip again in some quarters.
As for me, I've spent a lot of time imitating the works of writers I admire -- from Ezra Pound to Charles Bernstein -- and have always been interested in trying everything possible to write a poem. There are a huge amount of formal explorations that the Language poets have made, and I certainly identify strongly with this impetus toward radical new methods. However, I've also been interested in writers the Language poets never took under their wings (usually non-Americans, like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Haroldo de Campos, etc., or not "avant-garde" like Martin Johnston, an Australian), and have tended to want to avoid the American-centric, Oedipal attitudes -- WE are the next big generation -- that have marred some of their approach.
As I suggested above, I'm much more interested in the idea of the poet as cultural agent and "witness", of a reinvestigation of some of those "libertarian" poetics attitudes (and am avoiding the academy at all costs), as well as a reconciliation of my own specificity as an Asian American writer with the more theoretical, methodical, post-humanist aspects of the group.
I've moved very much into digital technology with my work. Most of my most ambitious projects have been for the internet (they appear at www.ubu.com). "The Dreamlife of Letters," for example, is a long Flash piece that owes a big debt to Brazilian concrete (it's my love letter to that country), and my new piece, "The Truth Interview," a collaboration with the poet Kim Rosenfield, is not a poem at all but a collage of animated texts, an interview/profile of Rosenfield, a sort of "web portal," and travesties of common web phenomena such as the pop-up box advertisement and the subliminal sexual ploys in web imagery.
I also deal with "avatars," having written a long sequence in the voice of someone named "Roger Pellett." Though these are traditional "poems" -- words on a page -- I somehow attribute them to the anonymity that is natural to web culture, and is an open field for play.
I think my work is a direct descendant of that of the Language poets, but because of this attention to digital culture, I am more prone to see text as "data" and even less as the autonomous art-works and sanctified language that Language poets themselves once criticized, and yet for the most part didn't overcome or replace with new attitudes. My closest peers in this effort have been those centered around the ubu chat group -- Darren Wershler-Henry, Kenneth Goldsmith, etc. -- but since I live in New York, I am in constant contact with writers of many stripes, and hope to steal from them also.
My hope is that my work will remain public, like the way graffitti is public, and will never be marred by a critic's misguided attempt to place it back into the box of continental Modernism.
[Alan Gilbert reminded me that there was a special issue of the online e-zine Pores devoted to questions concerning art practice and politics after 9/11. I've never been able to compose statements of this nature without sounding like a chest-thumping progenitor of humanist and/or Situationist clichés but nonetheless, trying to keep it simple and sticking to the questions, I did manage to commit a few things to words that would have been indifferent mental fluff (or neglected pineal furniture) otherwise. So with all humility it is here... I would recommend returning to the Pores site and looking at Alan's statement, among a few others. I am not sure if I agree with most of what I write below anymore, especially regarding street theater -- I had a naive belief, perhaps influenced by the apparent tension of the incidents described below in NYC, that people were paying attention. I've been disabused.]
What is your understanding of the cultural and political moment you find yourself in?
My sense is that we're kind of hanging in-between, waiting for that world “to be born” that, from this vantage, doesn't look very good though I have this feeling that, once it's here, we'll all know what to do.
I think there was some momentum created with the anti-globalization protests in Seattle and Genoa, and some of the radicalism that had been diluted by a too-theorized position-making in the 90s has been slowly leaking back into our notions of the arts in the world.
All of this seems to have been curtailed by 9/11.
Now:
* shucking off the worn ironies of an age of relative “prosperity” and experimenting with new artistic rhetorics and range of affects
* recovering from the aesthetic hangover after the optimism spawned by the innocuous successes of digital technologies (think The Matrix) and putting these technologies to work on a grassroots level (think Dogma 95)
* punching out of the total media-control that an indifferent mainstream (myself included) has permitted to occur
* preparing for a period in which the media will be questioned by everyone (not just by those trained to write about it or disaffected enough to not care) hopefully to the degree to make conversation about alternative responses to the world situation more possible, even imperative — for timid folks, like myself, but also among the politicians and other public speakers.
Also, waiting for the Bush administration to make its next ugly, decisive move. I'm surprised, given the media coverage of the range of war plans that have been appearing daily in the New York Times for the past several weeks (8/7/02), that there hasn't been more anti-war activism in the US, as if none of us can believe that they are planning on mobilizing a quarter-million troops against Iraq sometime within the next year. And asking Europe not to look.
I think a whole page of the Times should be dedicated each day to the exploits of the oil industry — I wanted to start a scrapbook myself, but realized that their stories on the oil industry's impact around the world only appeared very infrequently.
I don't know what to make of all of this in terms of aesthetics but I do get a sense that we are in a transition period. New languages will have to be used eventually that will be totally dissimilar to what we have now, and we will grow increasingly impatient with anything resembling academic hand-wringing.
(These statements seem to me very fragmentary, jumping all over the place, but perhaps the very static between the paragraphs is what I'm feeling.)
What necessities have emerged for you as a writer/artist/scholar after "September 11" and the events that have followed? How have these affected, if at all, your commitment as a practitioner?
No particular necessities – I don't think my life has changed all that much.
The only large difference might involve my turn away from internet art and an attempt to move more into performance/theater and, most recently, photography, possibly because I think these skills will be more useful in a period of civil unrest (such as I anticipate, in a way), but also because they have something to do with witness and spectacle which the web never really dealt with adequately or interestingly. Maybe as a form of cyborg navel-gazing, but not much more.
I'm probably just exaggerating (for you) but I do have this sense that I want to get out of my room (where I am chained to Flash and such things when working on the web) and into the daylight.
I feel some need to get back “in touch” with the world on a basic epistemological level, since it was that world in which I was dumped when the planes struck on 9/11. Process-oriented stuff has become less interesting to me since, though it leads to effects one could never have accessed in linear, improvisatory modes of writing, these effects are still bracketed by the procedure, by the idea of an algorithm, and exist in that culture which appreciates the elegant solution to aesthetic problems (a 'pataphysical culture, one which I still respect and respond to) regardless of more humanistic concerns.
I'm still very much an artist. In fact, I would never advise a writer to take up “topical” material if it threatened a certain integrity and excitement in the work – the example of poetic integrity is a political act in itself, and a poem that draws your attention out of the fabricated whole to the unanticipated completeness of piece of language achieves a sort of magic, a sort of clarity, that is its own form of activism.
Being boring melts the glaciers.
What forms of politics concern you? In what directions do they take you in terms of a need for actions or resources? How do they affect the practices available to you?
I don't think I'm a very effective “political thinker” if I am any brand of this at all, so anything I write about it will be pretty provisional and useless to anyone not myself.
But I will say that I have a sense for the need of some sort of public theater – some spectacle, with a touch of the bizarre, the gala, violence, community, song & dance, etc. – that can somehow get a handle on the media indifference to opinions that run up against the status quo, and form, if only temporarily, provisional communities against the ones constructed for us on television.
I think, in the handful of demonstrations that I have attended since 9/11, that there has been few bold, creative opportunities taken of the fact that a huge representation of the world's media is present – i.e. there are cameras everywhere, even on occasion important public figures (I saw Mike Bloomberg at a stand-off in Manhattan once) – but no one could create a gesture that would make the moment stick.
Something funny, but beautiful, etc. – the puppets are good, but I think we need bodies out there.
Not that I prize symbolism all that much – America is drenched with bad symbols, and when we run out we call in u2 – but I'd like a few symbols to be created spontaneously, from the passions of the people not being paid to create them.
My sense is that effective street theater of the sort I'm imagining would be the most immediate, far-ranging way to dispel the indifference that so many feel right now – I don't think any particular “point” will be put across, but it will turn our heads away from what is being seen on TV and in the paper and get us imagining what can be done now, in a group and as a culture, on the streets we live.
Spontaneous creativity, Situationist-style.
Obviously, this is not much of a political idea, if one is looking for an agenda, but it's something I've been thinking about. It's a more exciting idea than e-mail petitions, small press anthologies or even radical web-sites, though of course all of these things are important phenomena.
[Laura Elrick sent me the following which she asked me to post. It was originally part of an exchange on the subpoetics list, of which I myself am not a member so I can't contextualize it. I will mention, for those of you following this entirely through FSC, that Andrea Brady posted a comment this morning which can be accessed through my comments sidebar. Keston Sutherland's comments appear below. These offerings of Andrea's and Laura's seem to have been written unaware of the other; yes, the lack of causal chains may make it more confusing than "The Hours," and without the period-era costumes, but alas worth reading.]
I would like to add my two cents to the discussion, somewhat belated perhaps, on Quid 11 and Carol’s response to Andrea’s essay, apologies to those who wish it to be over. First of all… of course it is great to put together an issue such as the one Keston has done, and of course I appreciate it and felt gratitude to be invited to participate. I know Carol felt and still feels the same. Yet that should not inhibit any one of us from taking critical positions on what was in the essays or introduction at all. It is also true that it is Andrea’s right to evaluative opinions—I don’t think anyone would claim otherwise.
That said, I find to be slightly disingenuous the idea that I should be “grateful” to be introduced to British readers as a poet whose “poetry doesn’t suggest a particularly fine grasp of the elements and use of prosody.” Suggestions aside…besides that being a rather conservative way of talking about poetics, it is not, in the main, what I find disagreeable about the issue (even if you think that such “evaluations” are “true”).
Keston, in your intro to Q11 you claim that pluralism or rather “a plurality of voices” (human diversity, esp. in NY) acts as a kind of cultural template for US Imperialism—in fact, the work in Quid 11 is indirectly indicted, as if everything “produced” in the US not only “expresses” the US government’s imperialist designs, but is also guilty of actually deploying the same logic whether it means to or not. Though you don’t state so directly, I assume you meant such a critique (if one can call it that, since your tone is one of a magician astounded at the power of his brew) to resonate with Andrea Brady’s reading of my work, particularly the part about the “questionable invocation” of multiply arrayed “voices.” I also get labeled a “mimetic” “formalist,” as if the old divide were as relevant now as in the twenties—(can’t we talk about forms of content?) But though I disagree with Andrea on these points (I’ll touch on why below)—my main issue is with the conception of politics you propose, both in the intro and in your response to Carol.
While I do agree that neo-liberal uses of pluralism quash fundamental transformation of institutional/structural power, I fundamentally disagree with your assessment that subversive poetry and politics in the US is therefore necessarily politically still-born.
For starters—your statement that the European left “has long given up” on the US left is terribly out of touch. Which “left” are you talking about? The one that engages in struggles over space and power in the form of labor disputes, direct action, etc. (indeed it gets pretty messy both materially and ideologically), or the one that insists on ideological purity and is therefore relegated to standing outside the arenas selling those “more-radical-than-now” newspapers (“What do we want? Communism! When do we want it? Now!”) Even if that is the demand, and on the utopian plane I agree with it, proclaiming it won’t make it so. Funny—such maximalism is often in direct reverse proportion to the degree of actual political work that gets done. I too was annoyed by Silliman’s pronouncements after 9-11, but frankly, his broad-brush denouncement of “the left” strikes me as similar to yours, at least in tone. I haven’t heard such gloomy pronouncements since the cold war when, admittedly, the AFL-CIO was taking direct orders from the State Department (after two decades of being red-baited and rounded up by McCarthy-ites, I might add). That is clearly no longer the case, at least for now. And the labor left is getting increasingly interpolated into other struggles—green movements, civil rights, etc.
What about: The US (west coast, ILWU) and British (Liverpool /Merseyside) dock workers who successfully implemented a cross-border refusal to empty cargo in the Neptune Jade incident (Oakland / Seattle coordinated actions) when the English dock-workers were locked out, or the International environmental activists who have blocked drilling projects, or those U.S. worker-organizations who are collaborating with Maquilladora strikes in Mexico with increasing success, or the Global activist networks that are organizing some of the biggest demonstrations in decades?
I don’t mean to over-state the case, mind you. I would certainly agree that we need dialog to sharpen our critique, to clarify alternatives to the current configuration of this “democracy”-which-is-not-one. And those of us in the US who are committed to such change on such fundamental levels expect that our comrades abroad will not hold us (cryptically-“aesthetically”) individually responsible for the actions of our government, but will critically-support organizing against such actions in all the myriad forms that might take. No to collective punishment, in Iraq, in Palestine, right? I would be interested to hear you discuss why it is we are getting our asses kicked over here—domestically (Patriot Act, Presidential invocation of Taft-Hartley, corporate media domination, deployment of policing squads, mass round-ups). To me, these are not moral-aesthetic issues, to be handily marked-up as poetical-political platitudes.
As regards my poetry, I think it a regressive reading practice to drop-kick the word “voices” and thereby implicate my project with the pluralist dogma of neo and traditional liberalism. That’s too easy. I think Taylor does a good job of beginning the search for a new way to discuss this. I am clearly not “representing” “different” “voices” in my work—and I am certainly not corralling “them.” On the contrary, the soundings act more like dramatic readings of (the ventriloquy of) the social—where the residue of institutional ideologies are most likely to be concentrated—how people use and get used and, yes, as Carol says, the dense fabric of power relations in urban locales. I think Carol rightfully insists that the political-economic complexities of local and global inter-relationships is vital to an understanding of any text. The fabric of relations in any locale is rife with struggle and contradiction, no?
But I suppose it is the sweep of this whole thing as it has gone down (from Quid 11’s conceptual-political inception, all the way to the current commentaries and well-intentioned efforts to reconstruct this ‘debate’ on the subpo) that I’ve tried to respond to here. If I didn’t jump in, then it’s Carol there mainly on the hot-seat.
At the risk of causing another stir (and my question is—to what end),
Laura
[I received the following from Keston Sutherland, editor of the issue of Quid 11 in which Andrea Brady's essay on the poetry of Laura Elrick first appeared. Keston's email is a response to Carol Mirakove's comments on Andrea's essay that appear elsewhere on this blog. KS gave me permission to post it, and so I do here in the main column of the blog instead of the "comments" section, even if it doesn't read like an "open letter," simply to keep the matter stage center.]
Hey C: great news that the Q issue is generating some feedback. I got a good letter from Jules Boykoff about it this afternoon, plus several other responses already through e-mail. It's filtering into the UK scene concurrently.
I'm writing here about your piece in response to Andrea's. First off, let me say: I'm absolutely committed to publishing it if you decide that's what you want. It raises some important questions, though from a rather insistently speculative viewpoint that I don't personally find I have much sympathy for. Which is not to say that I agree with Andrea's estimation of Laura's work or even with her manner of criticism. Your point about the French language is a good one; but it doesn't exactly falsify Andrea's, unless Laura expects her work only to be read by people in her local environment (who can therefore claim initiate-status, as you do). There is after all a double-context to any speech act in poetry: its representational alliegance to a specific environment and social complex, and its necessary incorporation into the history of speech-acts in poetry as a whole; Andrea may have stressed the latter and so missed the former, but I think your corrective (although necessary in itself) tends toward a simple reversal of negligence. I have to say that your point about U.S. readers being more responsive to "new" and "valid" kinds of poetry is one that I absolutely do not share, and indeed one that I can't imagine you've actually researched; furthermore it's an idea that's just bristling with surreptitious ideological reverb, of a kind that my initiative in publishing QUID 11 was intended to quell or expose. I mean, C, how many British readers of contemporary poetry do you know well enough to classify them in this way? Surely you're not basing that view just on what the mainstream publishers, journals, educators etc. see fit to tell you? The whole question of what you could possibly mean by "valid" is something that instantly tears open a crate full of worm-cans. Valid for whom? Is poetry written in NY focused inevitably and justly on a NY reader-constituency, such that the misapprehensions of outsiders are total and dismissible from the perspective of insiders? You know, Andrea lived in NY for quite a few years too. I don't mean this to be a defense of her position, which I'm sure she'd want to offer for herself; but I don't think of her as a naif even of the wilful or elective stripe.
All this is just to say that I don't on the whole share your objections. Neither do I find Laura's work any less compelling on that account. But please don't let this put you off publishing in QUID, if you think it's important. I do think it's important to begin a dialogue of the kind you gesture toward in this piece; I think though--to be honest, and I say this as a friend--that people will discover in your piece a latent patriotism (or at least, NY-patriotism) that you might not see in it yourself. Partly that's just a misfortune caused by current political circumstances inside / outside USA: the left in Europe long ago gave up expecting anything from its natural allies in the US, who seem too preoccupied with parapolitical deflections and anti-corporate reformism to remain truly internationalist, and what I hoped to promote through starting the QUID dialogue was a recognition in both countries that poetry is potentially an internationalist (and not merely an international) discourse and power of social connection. I suspect that some readers of your piece might think that it goes somewhat against that trend, if indeed such a trend could even begin to exist.
I'm happy to say all this more objectively and clearly in QUID itself, alongside your article, if you like.
Above all: I can assure you there is absolutely nothing ad hominem in Andrea's piece. It is not intended as a slantwise reflection on her own work; I think that in raising that question you probably ought at least to offer your own answer to it.
Love and very best wishes, K
[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