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[Here's a review I wrote for the NYFA newsletter of a recent MIT publication, the excellent if pricey New Media Reader. This is the rough, and much longer, draft; it doesn't incorporate any of the changes that the editor (ok it's Alan Gilbert) made, so there are probably a few unforgivable gaffs and tedious attempts at humor -- please excuse them!]
The New Media Reader
Edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort
MIT Press
February 2003
ISBN 0-262-23227-8
8 x 9, 837 pp., 325 illus.
includes CD-ROM
Something in me misses the day when publishers used to put out supermarket-novel sized anthologies with names like “The Structuralists,” “The New Novel” or “The Lower East Side Scene,” kept the page count below 350 and put a whopping price tag of two dollars or so on the cover, and still managed to include the essential texts – by Roman Jakobsen, Monique Wittig or Paul Blackburn – associated with the title. The non-intimidating size of the book left a lot of room for subway-trapped laymen to acquire some pretty heady, relevant information without having to budget in for a new, potentially (self-)alienating library. Consequently, these egalitarian, bite-sized encyclopedias – thirty or so years after publication – have gone on to have rich afterlives as lucky-find additions to the Strand’s outdoor dollar paperback carts, providing minoritarian competition to their trade-sized Routledge, Zone or Princeton cousins costing ten times as much in the great air-conditioned indoors.
Luckily, the folks at MIT think otherwise, and their latest edition to the incredible shelf of books crossing the nexus between art, science and language – genuine encyclopedias such as Steve McCaffery and Jed Rasula’s Imagining Language and Stephen Wilson’s Information Arts – is a stunner, perhaps the most convincing argument for this handsomely, even lavishly, designed and edited series so far. A search of MIT’s online catalogue produces a welter of books that have come out in the past decade including in their titles the words “information” (60 at least), “digital, “new media” (including Lev Manovich’s seminal The Language of New Media ) and “hypertext,” but it would be hard to imagine any of these volumes being as complete or as energetically, even giddily, edited. The delight of brainy duo Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort — their other collaborations liberally speckle net.art space — comes through not just in the longish preambles to each of the book’s fifty-four chapters and the reams of text on the CD itself, but in every additional 8-bit Atari game, forgotten manifesto, “Aristotelian” comic strip, and chunky piece of Deleuze and Guattari they found a way to cram into the collection.
The New Media Reader contains most of the classic, if not often read, staples of digital cultural theory such as Vannever Bush’s 1945 article “As We May Think,” his argument for the conversion of wartime experimental research into pacifistic technologies such as the “memex” – created for secretaries, it’s the information-retrieval equivalent of the washer-dryer combos that were just coming out, one that types, talks and does much of what our present day iMacs do while storing everything on microfilm – as well as essays by AI guru Alan Turing and the inventor of the term “cybernetics,” Norbert Wiener. But this section of the reader, titled “The Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate,” starts with a short story by Jorge Luis Borges – “The Garden of Forking Paths” from 1941 – and ends with a brief but rich anthology of writing by the Oulipo, that French group of writers who devised complex mathematical formulas by which to compel – rather than write themselves – a “potential” literature, the prime example being “A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems,” by Raymond Queneau, ten sonnets whose lines are rendered interchangeable by cutting the pages, such that each line can substitute for its peer on another page — a paper computer. An essay by Allan Kaprow about the Sixties “happenings” and a bit by William S. Burroughs describing the “cut-up” method land in the middle of the section, pages away from the white paper “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communications System” (1963) by Ivan Sutherland – replete with flowcharts and formulas, it describes the technology that would later produce graphical user interfaces – and “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960) by J. C. R. Licklider, a decidedly non-Burroughsian view of human and machine collaboration.
What Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort achieve by such a frottage of scientific and creative texts is manifold. The scientific papers, which can seem dated by the pace of technical innovation or obtuse by their jargon, are ironicized in a way that renders them more than quaint or insufferable geek-talk. In fact, they are melded into the very inner psyche (or outer superego) that produced some of our most iconic cultural visions, making us see the Strangelove in the heart of every (decidedly not roaring) mouse. Indeed, Douglas Englebert’s 1968 “mother of all demos” (included on the CD), spoken at a Stephen Hawkins pace, of a basic form of the mouse, hypertext, interactive teleconferencing and collaborative authorship, seems to argue for his species of researcher, and not that of the late Edward Teller, as the inheritor of the prophet function in society after the age of Einstein. These early struggles among cyberticians can then be seen as a search for human forms and practices — like the sonnet or the Heimlich maneuver — that are unlikely to be improved upon. This mingling also show how often “creative” writers have outpaced technology itself, a most obvious (though perhaps contentious) example being how very simple Oulipian writing such as Queneau’s “Yours For the Telling” – a ridiculous choose-your-own-adventure about “three tall, lanky beanpoles” who have “deliciously oneiric” dreams – provide many if not more of the transcendental delights that hypertext was supposed to bring about in the hands of a competent, if not necessarily brilliant, writer of fiction. Many fine hypertext works have succeeded remarkably well and move well beyond what a standard codex could do, and some of these, like Wardrip-Fruin’s own “Impermanence Agent,” which bases its story on a user’s indifferent web browsing, have no “author” at all. But much of the Tron-like rush of participating in the random-access universe while in pursuit of a negligible, however charming, “plot,” is contained in Queneau’s witty and concise literary parlor trick.
“Collective Media, Personal Media,” section two of the book, includes bits by Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Raymond Williams, Hanz Magnus Enzensberger and Nam Jun Paik, and looks at more cultural ramifications of a virtual, mediated horizon that is constantly revising the very rules of approach. A chapter of Williams’ Television: Technology and Cultural Form is followed immediately by a very different work, the nearly Blakeian mixture of drawings and often “counter-cultural” speculations that signals perhaps the true end of the “white paper” approach to computer writing, Ted Nelson’s “Computer Lib / Dream Machines” — “the most important book in the history of new media” in the words of the editors. Nelson avoids the trap of writing about specific uses for known technologies that will be outdated in a decade’s time while adhering closely to precisely described visionary concepts, many of which he groups under the term “fantics,” a broad science of the study of humans and reactive or responsive machinic environments. “Design, Activity, and Action,” the third section of the reader, has its share of manifestos, and continues much of the man/machine speculation of Nelson’s, for instance through the model of Greek theater in Brenda Laurel’s famous book Computer and Theater , or through the image of the “cyborg” in Donna Haraway’s influential, if often misunderstood, “A Cyborg Manifesto.”
The real charge of The New Media Reader comes in the political inclusions in the final section, titled with much bravado “Revolution, Resistance, and the Launch of the Web.” One realizes, first, that little in the previous 600 or so previous pages has concerned technologies that are being actively used today: the internet, MP3s, digital film, P2P clients, recent video games or (not unexpectedly) blogs. But a dramatic shift in scale has also occurred: the discussion has progressed way beyond whether an isolated office worker will be able to locate an invoice via a pipe-infested thingamabob right out of Dr. Seuss (or the wet dreams of beans), but whether revolution itself — the physical kind, like what could have happened in Tiananmen Square — will be nurtured or squashed by, respectively, satellite communications or government surveillance technology — two sides of the same coin. “Cybernetic” and “haptic” space — the “global village” of MacLuhan — sheds any sheen of naive technological optimism when we read of the Hacktivismo group cDc (Cult of the Dead Cow)’s practice of “disruptive compliance” — an obtuse offshoot of “civil disobedience” that involves the enabling, through contraband software, of the free flow of information in such zones the “Great Firewall of China,” the mostly tightly controlled cyberspace in the world. (The romantic version of this is epitomized in the perhaps forgettable image of Ice-T transmitting the cure for AIDS through a dolphin in a football helmet in Johny Mnemonic .)
Internet technology has little left to prove in organizational practices — the anti-globalization and anti-war movements relied heavily upon it for the accuracy and efficiency with which it coordinates millions of people worldwide with hourly precision. Underrecognized themes by the more seemingly aberrant thinkers today, such as the theory of “copyleft” rights, “hacktivism” in the cDc style, and the Computer Art Ensemble’s concept of “nomadic power,” or even John Ashcroft’s (yes, he thinks, too) push for increased digital surveillance rights, may not always be, like suicide bombings and purchased elections, front-page headlines, but if any of this power is harnessed the way it could be — either for or against basic human liberties — you can bet they will. This would be a safe bet, if the scale of our “symbiosis” with the machine increases to the same degree it has from the first to the final inclusions in this reader. Its unwritten chapters are yours to write.
The New Media Reader is so generous in its witty, jargonless editorial commentary, rich bibliographies, informative sidebars, as well as in the content itself — I’ve touched on less than a percentage of it — that it almost seems as if the editors, hip to the new politics of information and intellectual property rights, struggled to make it seem free by going several extra yards, down to having it printed in small but very legible typeface (Michael Crumton’s elegant, interactive design made this possible). Whether this book will replace “The Lower East Side Scene” in the Strand’s outdoor dollar carts is beyond my overextended skills of prediction, but it’s hard not to believe that a blueprint for the next stage of world culture — even or especially from those areas where a computer is not to be found — is hidden in its pages.
[Some people have been writing to me asking whether the St. Mark's review I wrote of the two new editions of Pound were online. Alas, it is now. This version doesn't include a few edits Marcella Durand made nor the additional book info -- but I'm getting out of the office, so I'm slapping this up quick. You can find most of the book info you need online.]
The Pisan Cantos
New Directions
Poems and Translations
Library of America
Pound introduces one of the lesser celebrated themes of the Cantos in another poem entirely, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” in which he writes: “He had moved amid her phantasmagoria, / Amid her galaxies… / Drifted... drifted precipitate, / Asking time to be rid of... / Of his bewilderment...” What the “phantasmagoria” is might be one of the most contentious questions surrounding his poetry, since one’s understanding of this field – a rhythmical mesh of “luminous detail” which either does or does not find its place in a closed matrix of meanings, the forerunner of Olson’s own sense of the geography of the page – goes a great way toward explaining the Cantos as a “political” poem.
The phantasmagoria clearly has nothing to do with “free association” – that’s what the Surrealists claimed they were doing, though their associations were conspicuously reproductive of the convulsive effects of Lautreamont and never as boring as dreams often are. Is it the “broken bundle of mirrors” of “Near Perigord,” the “dim wares of price” of the “Portrait D’une Femme” – seeing as he got the word from Henry James (“Of course I moved among miracles. It was all phantasmagoric...”), and the latter poem, about a woman, is an exercise in the Master’s sentence (in both meanings of that word), that sort of helps. Is it the “swoon” of Charles Bernstein’s poem “The Klupzy Girl,” the one that “brings you to your senses”? Bernstein himself argues that Pound “was obviously unsatisfied with anything but a complexly polyphonic style,” and that, despite his “fear of indeterminacy,” created work “filled with indeterminacy, fragmentation, abstraction, obscurity, verbiage, equivocation, ambiguity, allegory” – practically a short-list for all the good bad things that Bernstein has found so useful in his own work (“repetition” and bracing lyrical purple being notably absent).
The French poets think of Pound as a mystic in the Symbolist tradition, or so the American poets think the French poets think – I’ve never got a straight answer on this one, but Denis Roche translated both the Pisan Cantos and the A.B.C. of Reading – the latter, a glossed assemblage of “luminous details,” the only critical book that could be classed a “phantasmagoria” – suggesting he felt that “The Pisan Cantos” had some didactic function as a repository of useful knowledge. Some poets worked the worked the wild thingness of the “phantasmagoria” into an intellectual backbone for some nativist, anthropological or shamanist poetics, a channeling of the material unconscious – this might be the Rothenberg/Joris approach, branching off from New American poetics of Ginsberg and Sanders. One academic critic (I forget his name) related every image and symbol in the “Cantos” to the images on the American dollar bill – either an insult to the Quark team that designed the dollar bill or a justification, in an Oulipian frame, of the entire project.
The questions raised above come back to life with these two new volumes, beautifully edited and glossed by Richard Sieburth, a scholar more known for his translations of Hölderlein than for his work on Pound (though his first book, Instigations, on Pound and Remy de Gourmont, is one of the best ones I’ve read on the poet). Sieburth’s introduction and notes on “The Pisan Cantos” make the poem nearly intelligible on conventional levels -- you can read it in the park! -- and passages that I never bothered to look up because they seemed to correspond with other passages that I never understood in the first place -- my Beavis and Butthead version of the “fugal method” -- obtain a new clarity, granting some of the slighter gestures, such as the Dada turn of the line about “urine” below, an aesthetic charge that might have been eclipsed:
and Mr Edwards superb green and brown
in ward No 4 a jacent benignity,
of the Baluba mask: “doan you tell no one
I made you that table”
methenamine eases the urine
and the greatest is charity
to be found among those who have not observed
regulations
Pound’s patronizing attitudes toward African Americans -- saying Edwards had a “Baluba” mask made him both a character in a real-life Noh play and a figure out of Frobenius’ Congo -- is tinged with affection (anyone who says anything nice in a Pound poem is clearly a good guy), though also tinged, as Sieburth clearly explains, by further racist attitudes about Americans and the “melting pot.” What is important, for our purposes, is the ease the glosses give in clarifying what might be called the narrative of “The Pisan Cantos,” making room for an appreciation of when the cunning technician -- the strong, provocative rhythms of the first lines of “Tenzone,” the play of the Dada “buffoon” (in his own word), or the drop to contemporary bathos in “Homage to Sextus Propertius” -- resurfaces here in the line about “methenamine.”
Sieburth obviously agrees with the contention of Christopher Hitchens (citing Robert Conquest) that “lousy poetry was a good if not exact predictor of bad faith in politics,” but whereas Hitchens’ approval rating for a poem drops it strays too far from an Auden/Larkin line, Sieburth clearly believes that Pound had the right idea about poetry itself: “As is often the case, Pound is his own best critic: when in the late thirties and forties he writes ‘kikery’ or ‘judeocracy’ as a synecdoche for usury we need go no further than the imprecision of his terminology to know he is utterly wrong, utterly in violation of his own doctrine of le mot juste or cheng ming.” ( Instigations, 103) The “phantasmagoria” of “The Pisan Cantos,” in light of the overlapping cultural maps of the Poems and Translations, force the question of whether an aesthetic compass can ever be a stay to an ethical compass that has gone haywire. When lost in a eyes-glazed-over dérive through the 800 pages of the Cantos, the fact of a compass of any stripe becomes important.
The story of the “Pisan Cantos” is well known – I won’t waste precious space here since you can all Google it if you’d like. At the same time, Pound was working on a complete translation of the works of Confucius, kind of like the Plato, Homer and Ben Franklin of Asia wrapped into one (you can Google him, too). Unlike his other translations, such as the “Sextus Propertius” (Google) and “Cathay” (Google), these were idiosyncratic but struggled to be loyal to the meaning of the texts as they were set down – i.e. he didn’t start smashing different parts of the texts together to make new poems. Poems and Translations make an impressive, if unspoken, argument for the plausibility of a part of Pound’s project that is occluded by discussions of his politics: his efforts to piece together an American “renaissance” – Confucius, he felt, was key to it.
Any comparison of Pound’s early poetry to that of the latter parts of the two-volume Library of America Nineteenth Century American Poetry – spirited but staid work by Richard Hovey, Madison Cawein, George Cabot Lodge, Trumbull Stuckney, and a small host of American poets who tried to reach Europe but died either too young or before Modernism exploded – will show that, even when Pound was imitating Browning and Yeats and churning out “Canzoni,” the liveliness of his line – the budding “polyphony” – was setting fires under the feet (literally) of more rule-based metricists. Pound’s early “stale creampuffs” were punk rock compared to the prudent stanzas of the American adherents of Parnassianism and Decadence. That he would add to these early studies, not simply discard them, and thus begin the sketchbook of meters that would be “our” – that is, us poets’ – inheritance is why, in the fifties and sixties, there was a sort of idolatry around Pound despite the repugnance of his social views. The early parts of Poems and Translations dart from idea to disparate idea, many of them eventually brought to completion; the “Pisan Cantos” reads, with the help of Sieburth’s glosses, as the outer galaxy that the Hubble telescopes of “Mauberley” and “Near Perigord” pointed to. No poet before or since has left so much for other writers to work with while emphasizing that, indeed, that was the point of his voyages -- to jump-start a renaissance by putting as much on the table as possible to work into something “new.”
Compare this variety, optimism and excitement to the expressions of cultural exhaustion prevalent now in the United States, in which you would think -- after a century of the most manic and ambitious explorations into the most divergent writing styles, from Derek Walcott to Barrett Watten, going back to Emily Dickinson and coming up to now with Christian Bök -- that there are only two flavors of writing: “post avant” and “official verse.” What Pound asked of poets was that they peek out of the hole, partake in some intellectual “dissociation” -- certainly beyond any tedious question of “lineage” and beyond the borders of our own self-centered country -- to set the stage for this “renaissance.” Our lack of concern with metrics beyond occasional lip service paid to the repetition of vowel sounds and like matter (here on Silliman’s Island) regardless of a phrasing’s cultural base or an examination of the larger corpus from which a cadence arose, has been detrimental to our present culture of poetry, in which the line is often equated with some statement of cultural allegiance, rather than the bow and viola that Pound would have us believe.
[I wrote this a few months ago, before I took Ron Silliman to task about his "School of Quietude" business. It's really just a scan of the book -- the "Mills of the Kavanaughs" is probably more a curse than a blessing, even for "Lowell fans," but I still think the book is important and a great read. I think my lines about Browning, brief as they are, are key considering Browning's huge impact on Pound -- I think Lowell got Browning much better than Pound did (a comparison of the three pre "Cantos" and "Mesmerism" to "After Surprising Conversions" testify to that), even if he could never achieve the scale. There's a little Browning in all of us -- even in Charles Bernstein ("The Klupzy Girl" especially) and in that poem of RS's dedicated to CB, "What," which starts with an allusion to that very poem. I'll explain all of this later in my radio interview with the BBC.]
Robert Lowell
Collected Poems
Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Lowell died in 1977, about a year after John Ashbery -- a poet who writes nothing like him, but who would displace him as the major living figure of his time -- won a triple crown of literary awards (including the Pulitzer) for Self Portrait In A Convex Mirror, which in hindsight could be seen as the oblique, Chinese cousin of the elder poet's landmark 1959 collection Life Studies. One can't help, reading through this massive, spellbinding volume, mourning some of what has been lost in American poetry since Partisan Review crowd was in the ascendant: an earnestness about writing (and rewriting) poetry in a bid for immortality (Berryman's narcissism may have killed any frank courting of this instinct), an intellectual aggressiveness that was more ethical than theoretic in nature (like Auden, Lowell's pacifist politics were often transparent, and he was a conscientious objector in WWII), an imagistic impulse that was best typified by Lowell's unerring sense of visual detail ("...octagonal red tiles, / sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; / a Rocky Mountain chaise lounge, / its legs, shellacked saplings." [162]) and an embodied, phantasmagoric sense of history and geography, highlighting that generation's greater chronological proximity to Pound and, before him, Robert Browning (and the Victorian habit of comparing one's "age" with a prior historical epoch, especially that of the Roman Empire). The greatest misfortune of Lowell's critical reception is that he would be called a "confessional" poet -- as Bidart's afterward essay notes, not only did Lowell carefully sift through details to preserve those with greatest aesthetic effect (he seemed to aspire to a Mallarmean impersonality despite his accented vulnerability), but these details themselves were sometimes stolen from the lives of his peers, such as the following famous "autobiographical" lines, lifted from an anecdote told by Delmore Schwartz's wife: "It's the injustice… he is so unjust -- / whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five. / My only thought is how to keep him alive. / What makes him tick? Each night now I tie / ten dollars and his car key to my thigh…" Lowell fans will be delighted to see the full version of "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," cut down to a handful of stanzas for the Selected Poems, as well as the complete Land of Unlikeness, his awkward first book which he never allowed to be reprinted (and which, containing earlier versions of poems in award-winning Lord Weary's Castle, appears as a humbling appendix); a small group of unfinished and late poems is also included. The ambitious blank verse sonnet-sequence History, never as popular as the "confessional" books, shows him confronting the specter of Browning with prismatic, distinctive voicings of historical figures from Caligula to William Carlos Williams: "Ninth grade, and bicycling the Jersey highways: I am a writer. I was a half-wasp already / I changed my shirt and trousers twice a day." (578) Not enough can be said to encourage the reader to absorb, even attack, this book, from beginning to end or skipping around, to make an adventure of how Lowell's style -- "lurid, rapid, garish, grouped / heightened from life, / yet paralyzed by fact" (838), from his earliest poems to several late, unfinished works -- remained constant, yet occasionally swerved revealingly, with each poetic challenge.
Edited by Janet Kraynak
The MIT Press
0-262-14082-9
420 pages
Nauman claims, in the extensive 1980 autobiographical interview by Michele de Angelus, that he knew very little about Marcel Duchamp’s affinity for puns when creating his own semantically slippery conceptual art style: “MD: You found out about that later? Like the Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q… BN: I think that we all saw all those letters written there but I don’t think anybody ever explained it and I never asked.” (233) Nauman’s eerily intuitive way of creating sophisticated, intellectually angular art out of simple gestures –a ten minute film of himself bouncing balls in a studio and titled “Bouncing Two Balls between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms,” for example – relies on the dry matter-of-factness about his language as it is placed in juxtaposition to a confounding visual element, often something whose fascination is never offset by the blandness inherent in repetition or naive craft. He is nearly a poet in this sense – his neon spiral “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths,” for example, has the uncanny resonance to neon works of the Scottish concretist Ian Hamilton Finlay – and yet, again and again in these interviews, he makes very few claims to an intellectual – and certainly not “postmodern” – agenda, despite his wide reading in such writers as Wittgenstein, Nabokov, and Beckett. The 1972 interview with Lorraine Sciarra has him confessing to not having heard of Merleau-Ponty even though, she states, several critics have insisted his work responds to the French philosopher’s ideas. Instead, Nauman – who, despite the occasionally violent or sadistic nature of his art, seems most concerned with creating beautiful, contemplative, and often "interactive" experiences – discusses how “a book called Gestalt Therapy [was] very important because it has to do with awareness of you body and a way of thinking about it […] I think what happens is you get sort of interested in something and then something else, someone, or some book, comes along that makes what you are doing more clear to you, and you can proceed more easily.” (166) Such formulations might be disappointing to a reader looking for a West Coast version of the ambitious essayist Robert Smithson, or – accepting simplicity and reticence – a Warholian spirit of enigma or Fluxus-inspired loyalty to trumping the bourgeois. Perhaps his nearest analog might be with the worldly and sage-like Brian Eno, someone who courts extreme, even clinical, thinking, if only as a way to achieve practical and reliable experiences in art, as when Nauman summarily comments on his use of puns: “I think humor is used a lot of the time to keep people from getting too close. Humor side-steps and shifts the meaning.” (193)
Of the group of nineteen artist writings in this book – mostly instructions for repetitive performance pieces that take the viewer/reader on experiential voyages that are difficult or nearly impossible to create, reflection of his appreciation of his friend LaMonte Young’s minimalist compositions which can potentially run for eternity – about nine haven’t been previously published in last year’s Art + Performance volume on Nauman (one of these, a cheeky comment on “earth art,” was intended to be skywritten and is a single line: “Leave the Land Alone”). Five of the interviews also appeared in that volume, which leaves nine exclusive to Please Pay Attention Please, one of which – the 100-pages by de Angelus – has never before appeared in complete form. The long introduction by Kraynak is satisfactory in its marshaling of basic semantic theory to explain Nauman’s relationship to words, and his words to their contexts, but lacks the cathartic insights one might expect in such a tight focus on his language, and utterly avoids the issue of Nauman’s relation to other conceptual artists who use words extensively -- she references Bakhtin and Benveniste over Rusche or Holzer -- this in lieu of the 27 essays and reviews that appear in the Art + Performance volume. Nauman is mild and reticent as an interviewee – he rarely answers a question beyond what is being asked – yet this volume is necessary for anyone wishing to get behind the ideas of his art, even if it duplicates much of the recent John Hopkins volume and is nearly twice as expensive.
(Image courtesy: The Art Institute of Chicago: Art Access.)
[I hope to do a much fuller write-up on this book -- Pound was my first great poetic love in high school, and I had far too many ideas about this book than could fit in one paragraph -- so please accept this as "credit" for the later essay.]
The Library of America
ISBN: 1-931082-41-3
14,000 pages
$45
The writings of Ezra Pound have been traditionally associated with the late James Laughlin’s avant-garde publishing venture New Directions, and volumes such as his 1949 “collected” poems Personae, his sprawling epic The Cantos, his thick book of Translations, and the slim, tidy distillation of Selected Poems with its forbidding, purse-lipped profile of the poet, have been foundational, strangely comforting features on poetry lovers’ shelves for decades. Containing Pound in a single, albeit huge, volume that made claims to completism seemed impossible, and yet Richard Sieburth – best known as a critic and translator of Holderlein – has done an amazing job of finding and logically arranging nearly everything that Pound wrote that could be called a poem or translation, including the juvenalia of “Hilda’s Book” – written for fellow University of Pennsylvania student Hilda Doolittle – to the late, moving elegy, first published in 1971, that he wrote for the brother of one of his St. Elizabeths acolytes, but which Sieburth clearly intends for Pound himself: “Out of the turmoil, Mother of Griefs receive him, / Queen of Heaven receive him, / May the sound of the leaves give him peace, / May the hush of the forest receive him.” (1203) That Pound could figure himself as a seeker of peace while being, infamously, a virulent anti-Semite and supporter of Mussolini, is just one of the conflicts that make this volume compelling; but except in the rich chronology and footnotes that Sieburth provides (there is, sadly, no introduction), practically none of this social context make its presence known beyond proclivities of style: the poet's always precise, even "macho" meters, the near absence of any intimate or autobiographical tone, and his Puritan impatience with “Symbolist” ambiguities – he was set on curing the world of the decadent “nineties.” That Pound famously considered his life-work, the 800 page Cantos, a “botch” – and took to referring to himself as a “minor satirist” during the last years of his life as he suffered crippling depressions – makes the verve, optimism and confidence of such undertakings as the reversionings of Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel (however shackled by 19th century conventions), the robust, still fresh “Cathay” sequence, the metrical displays of “Tenzone," “Dance Figure” and "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and the innovative “Homage to Sextius Propertius” – all from his richest period before the 1920s - right through his passion for translating Sophocles and Confucius’ Classic Anthology, seem like an Icarian flight primed for a great, however morally distressing, fall - one that took some of American poetry’s very thirst for hearty, internationalist undertakings with it. Pound believed that all mankind needed to know of literature could be contained in a two-foot shelf, and he set out translating, for a country he thought had yet to ascend out of “barbarism,” those works that were missing; his own place on that shelf might not be that thick – all-in-all, many of these pages are taken up by trivial sequences like the “Alfred Venison” poems (Cockney ballads in support of his “social credit” ideas) and the social farce of "Moeurs Contemporaines," idiosyncratic “readers” versions of Sophocles and Japanese Noh plays, and the Confucian works which crave simplicity and wisdom but are clearly the products of a didactic, irascible and fatally undialectic iconoclast: “He said: problem of style? Get the meaning across and then STOP.” (731). Yet one can’t help to think that the appearance of this volume, which seems streamlined, coherent and responsible compared to the many pages of The Cantos that are barely readable due to stylistic infelicities and political excesses - compare his work on the Analects to the "American President Cantos" - will give readers of poetry a sense of starting over, of renewed energy in resorting through the horrific details of a long, ideologically wounded century and the myriad luminous details of a few millennia of European and Asian literature.
Talonbooks
0-88922-473-0
Derksen likes to position his poetry right in the mainstream of the saltier, sparring realms of “political discourse,” his lines surfacing from the same semantic gumbo that produced Spiro Agniew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism” and Oscar Wilde’s whipsmart butlers getting one over on their narcissistic, hidebound masters. A spirit of paradox lurks behind the arras of Derksen’s lava-paced comedic discharge: “From agitprop to diamat / I believe it was Tatlin / who said — or was it Jacques Villeneuve: / Learn to make leisure / more work, rumours over tumours, / strategies over tactics. I stand / before you asking to be memorable / for my memorabilia and / symptomatic for my mottoes / in these times when we are told / that movement is what we all share / it’s just that some have more legroom.” (98) 1996’s Dwell began the exploration of a style that would become linked with Derksen: poems of spare, astute “socialist one-liners” (his own phrase) that accrued sentence by sentence to elaborate a complex field of issues, mostly concerning geopolitics and nationalism but also sexuality, culture and class identity. The mode departed from earlier varieties of “Language” poetics – such as those espoused by Barrett Watten, Bruce Andrews or the “new sentence” of Ron Silliman — by not fetishizing opaque formalisms over (or in place of) “content”: Dwell was, even for the newbie, accessible in themes, comfortably paced, and motored by an anti-heroic punk sensibility that jived with the author’s working class background in Vancouver, Canada. Transnational Muscle Cars, his third full-length collection, doesn’t add greatly to the poet’s arsenal of poetic methods — the title poem, “Social Facts are Vertical” and “But Could I Make a Living From It” could be extensions of poems from Dwell, and indeed of each other — though “Jobber” and the stanzas of “Forced Thoughts” (which read at times like decidedly un-Juba-to-Jived Harryette Mullen quatrains) reflect a confidence in extending his methods into longer works. There is a noticeable increase in the language of globalism — focus on the “specific,” especially brand names, is valorized, as a welter of capitalist detritus is depicted as links in a chain of transnational correspondences (“I want to see / the real relations / but you’ve got Nikes on and I like you / so I have to try and understand”) [10], while abstract terms are rendered material, humanized so as to be subjected to warm satire: “I’d like to inflate a bubble building as a mobil public sphere, but I’m a little breathless.” (106) Derksen quirps in “Social Facts are Vertical”: “I questioned authority and the question won,” a characteristically self-effacing remark that takes the “self” as both identity trace and Cartesian burden, but exhibiting a note of frustration with the language of theory itself as a wieldable force of opposition. But Derksen has turned this question into incredibly effective, lively but careful, Brechtian poetry that turns the event of reading into a hootenanny in the village square, and has already been quite influential on other writers creating bridges between radical formalism and a vaudevillian social platform, such as Kevin Davies, Rodrigo Toscano and Tim Davis.
Spuyten Duyvil Press
1-881471-20-9
$10, 90 pages
Magee exaggerates the ludic, punning qualities of language to propel his lines deep into the space where Kurt Schwitters’ counter-Socratic Dada meta-logues -- the syllogistic catastrophes of the German’s lyric “An Anna Blume” are refigured repeatedly in this volume -- meets a sort of “Jive to Juba” African-American scat-talk (a la Harryette Mullen), all with the breathless pace, if not quite the soul, of Frank O’Hara at his peak typewriter-hysteria period. “The belles of St. Mary knell ‘The Real Slim Shady’ / have made up their minds and are keeping their babies / their CHANNELED HISTORY Knickerbockers by proxy,” he writes in “Convention-al: A Poem,” an improvisation that echoes with the eclipsed tragedies of American black history: “what Amadou to you / later, cable wires in the white poplar / a concrete vector”. The poem -- a sort of all-over critique of television culture that programs viewers’ sense of history into hard-wired mainstreamed truths, moves on -- with a nod to Wittgenstein -- to deconstruct the language-game, but still maintaining the stand-up poststructuralist momentum: “did you forget to program the kith? / if I tell you kith is self-programming, do I mean / a) kith : kit :: kin : kitchen / b) Knick fans thwart monikers / c) We’re born cable-ready / d) Ask your mama / the day-glo (hunter’s) orange wallet’s got a / heap of Signifyin in it / this item is not available in stores”. Not all of the poems in MS have such discernible motives -- some magic is lost when the poet seems vainly invested in maintaining the effect of a mind radiantly overloaded with linguistic possibility, haplessly reaching for the first neat pun or paragram he can muster for fear of being left behind, throwing in ten bad jokes in lieu of one good one -- “his dead brain melted in / her like a do, adieu to his dejected manor / the insular nationality of Carolina, miniscule / in the gales, foot-ways of the moon shouldering / the folds of waves.” (77) One might discern some philosophical language assay here -- the poem is named “The Comedian as the C Word,” alluding to a poem of Wallace Stevens’ -- but unlike in the best work of Charles Bernstein, who might be considered the muse of this poem (he provides one of the book’s epitaphs), one gets the sense of a poet slightly overpleased with his facility rather than hot on the heels of a poetic effect previously unknown to humankind. But the pleasures of this book are many: here is a poet interested in capturing the vicissitudes of a tsunami-force of language in forms that can by turns be as spare as Robert Creeley’s, as philosophically resonant as Lyn Hejinian’s lyrics in The Cold of Poetry, and yet have a boyish, infective charm (even if, at moments, it strays into locker-room towel-slapping tactility -- yuck-yucking over the word “vagina,” for instance). As Magee, already a distinctive poet, matures into a more complex, contradictory personality -- forsaking the easy play of “like mallards, like melba / toast we are / dying on the bank / like a bank shot” for the more sincere probes into the nitty gritty of readings of nearly-illegible marginal American culture (see “Leave the Light On,” with its faux gender-studies slant on the word “shaft”) -- he’ll have more than enough in the toolbox to make it work.
[Here's a very old review of mine, published in the first issue of Arras. Kent Johnson had asked, on the ubu list, how one might compare the Sonnets of Berrigan with the Dream Songs of Berryman. This review, which is at times, naive, perhaps hints at ways these two writers might be understood together, but I use the Cantos (of course!) as the touchstone more than either the long works of either writer. But, as you can see, even then I had some beef with this "two solitudes" theory (it is a term often applied to Canada's identity crisis) of American poetry.]
The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan
Though Ted Berrigan may have been the ultimate “fan” poet of Frank O’Hara, upon reading the Selected Poems one realizes that a truer kinship may be with the “city poet,” of Ezra Pound. Berrigan was not able to achieve mastery of the larger improvisational structures of O’Hara, nor did he have the immense vocabulary and range of cultural reference that makes even O’Hara’s most spurious poems, like “Joe’s iJacket” or “Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” rich catalogues of the “things,” in Williams’ sense, running through his mind. Berrigan’s shorter poems are structured more often in a way that doesn’t hint at its resolution (there is little motivating attitude throughout) until it has actually occurred; in other words, he tends to adopt Pound’s London period haiku-like formulas for his work, which often involves a listing of images and a resolution in a brief moment of sentiment, or even catharsis, conveyed in its last line. One example appears in Berrigan’s “Personal Poem #9,” which concludes with the line he repeats in his sonnets, “feminine marvelous and tough.” These adjectives in the poem describe his “new book of poetry! to be printed in simple type on old brown paper,” but they also serve as the moment of intensity, the “vortex” of the poem, which until that point seems a rather selfconscious homage to “The Day Lady Died” or any number of O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” poems. Berrigan was aware of the derivation, and his status of “fan,” interestingly enough, makes him one of the first poets after the initial wave of the “New York School” to recognize Ashbery, Schyler, Koch and O’Hara, all of them still living at the time, as participating in the active founding of a new tradition.
Pound’s London period is characterized, at its best, by such poems as “In a Station of the Metro”, “Portrait D’une Femme” and Mauberley, but there is a whole group of lesser poems like “Les Millwins”, the “Salutation” series (for Blast) “Villanelle: The Psychological Hour”, and the short pseudo-Chinese (not from Cathay) and Hellenic poems that give an impression, when taken as a whole, of a completely different poet. “Villanelle” shows Pound attempting a sort of human generosity that doesn’t really work for him (but which is suited to Berrigan); in it, he is contemplating the visit of friends and their eventual departure, and he confesses his weakness, a sort of inhibiting self-consciousness, in lines that seem a awkward coming from the arrogant poseur of Mauberley. However, it is this poem and others like it that demonstrate Pound’s effect on a poet like Berrigan; there is not the straining after intensity but rather a laissez-faire listing of action and attitude that attempts to convey a moment of privacy. The most Pound-like poem of Berrigan’s is, however, The Sonnets, for in it he is able to use the fourteen line poem as a unit of measure, each offering its own opportunity for a new venture but which is constructed consciously as a separate element of the whole. It may seem odd to compare The Sonnets, which can often seem formally confused and not as heroically ambitious, to Pound’s Cantos, and yet one must remember that many sections of The Cantos are themselves confused and uninspired. The Sonnets are most like the Pisan Cantos, in that they convey the thought, in a personal measure, of one man isolated but among a stream of reference and encounter. What is most interesting, however, is that The Sonnets, a modest project, actually includes a translation of Rimbaud modified in a puzzling and entirely idiosyncratic way, which is one of Pound’s more difficult tactics:
Sweeter than sour apples flesh to boys
The brine of brackish water pierced my hulk
Cleansing me of rot-gut wine and puke
Sweeping away my anchor in its swel
And since then I’ve been bathing in the poem
Of the star-steeped milky flowing mystic sea
Devouring great sweeps of azure green and
Watching flotsam, dead men, float by me
“Star-steeped milky flowing mystic” may not be an great innovation, and seems to have more than a touch of Ginsberg to it, and yet the sober melody of these lines, a distinct contrast with those of the original, are “pure Berrigan,” a poet who was more inclined to compare himself with the relatively tranquil Appolinaire than to the precocious rebel and poet maudit Rimbaud. Berrigan’s version seems as true to himself as one could hope it to be, and yet its additions and innovations do not grate at the ears and sense like many academic variations do, nor does he attempt, like Robert Lowell, to usurp the poem for his own didactic usage. Though he may not have achieved the verbal fireworks of “Le Bateau lyre,” he has nonetheless “made new” a sentiment that needed translation into a modern idiom, but with proper acknowledgement to its originator.
It might be somewhat odd to consider that Berrigan’s nearest analog among his contemporaries may be John Berryman, and yet certain parallels between their stance towards their predecessors and contemporaries and the nature of their own achievements arise in a certain consideration. Both poets seemed to have an unease with the achievements of their predecessors and therefore adopted a self-conscious “bardic” stance that was part pose but thoroughly modified by sincerity. Consequently, a great degree of partisanship among readers of their work mars any true understanding of their poems: academics don’t like Berrigan for his lack of form and the surface quality of his “content,” and poets of the anti-establishment (which often itself becomes an establishment when a certain spark is lost) think that Berryman was motivated by pure ambition and was the inspiration behind the much of the confessional slush of The American Poetry Review. This may be an exaggeration of the division, and yet it must be acknowledged that innovations by each poet must often seen through their respective monikers, “confessional” or “(post) beat,” before consideration of the purely formal aspects of their work can be achieved. One of Berrigan’s poems not included in the new selection (but on display at the Museum of Modern Art as part of Alex Katz’s Face of the Poet series) points to one of their mutual interests, which is centered around modifying, and inventing, syntax:
Buddha On The Bounty
“A llttle loving can solve a lot of things’
She locates two spatial equivalents in
The same time continuum. “You are lovely.
I am lame.” “Now it’s me.” If a man is in
Solitude, the world is translated, my world
& wings sprout from the shoulders of
The Slave Yeah. I like the fiery butterfly puzzles
Of this pilgrimage toward clarities
Of great mud intelligence and feeling.
“The Elephant is the wisest of all animals
The only one who remembers his former ilves
& he remains motionless for long periods of time
Meditating thereon.” I’m not here, now, & it is good, absence.
This poem is probably as convoluted and “difficult” as much of The Dream Songs; it is, indeed, curiously like the Ann Lauterbach poem that appears next to it (one stop past his face) on display at the Museum, in that there is a tie to Stevens that is not prominent in Berrigan’s generally non-meditative work. The quotes lifted entire and unexplained from other sources, a tactic that both poets used in their own ways, reminds one also of Marrianne Moore’s work (that the quote is about an elephant helps, too). Berrigan was reading Ashbery, of course, but certain violent swervings from normal syntax (the sort which appears in The Tennis Court Oath, for instance) are characteristic, though of a different sensibility, of Berryman, either in the extreme of “The Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” which seems a little unnatural and an academic pose, or the more realized, speech-like Dream Songs. Of course, the sensibilities of these two poets are entirely different, and yet a comparison of the later poems of Berryman, those dedicated to Tristan Corbiere for instance, and the candid (though never “confessional”) work of Berrigan might be a fruitful, however odd, venture.
Roof Books
$12.95
96 pp.
The two terms separated by an “or” in the title of Smith’s most recent collection finger out of the lineup of guiltless aesthetic pleasures the axes around which his work to date—collected in two previous books, In Memory of My Theories (1996) and Protective Immediacy (1999)—decidedly revolve, never in fact choosing one over the other but melding them in what must be the most melancholic and vulnerable, and often immediately appealing, writing to come out of the Language poetry tradition so far. Like his two earlier efforts, Music or Honesty is a slim volume that can be read as a single work, and each book can be seen as some continuation of the last. That there is purpose in this overflowing of borders is apparent in the second section of the book, “Autospy Turvy,” which starts with the prose poem “Ted’s Head”—a short parable about the US's latest salesman President based on the Mary Tyler Moore Show that ends: “Now imagine if Ted were Lou, if Ted were the boss. You know how incredibly fucking brainless Ted is, but let’s imagine he understands & is willing to use force. That’s the situation we’re now in as Americans.” (27). The section then segues into a 10-page poem called, again, “Autopsy Turvy,” a more indeterminate but still strikingly satiric excursus on the dark whims of testosterone-driven government (“the sportive hucksters are carping / to the gunshop retirees in the gold dawn”), and ends with the three-page “Dissociadelic,” which, as the neologism suggests, escapes the circuit of rational summarization entirely and usurps the page for the staging of some classic Langpo pyrotechnics: “Look, he’s up in the sky--/ gasping & the roof falls in, etc. / an entire ladder company / holds its bladder America, / It’s not magic if you trust it. / the soft night of weasel balls / beeps” (38) Smith’s more characteristic run-on-but-sonorous style – such as in the section “No Minus,” with its homage of Tom Raworth – is a stand-up theorist’s channeling of both the absurd and the sublime, or perhaps absurd into the sublime, forcing a collapse of both categories in a microtonal melange of lingual rubble. It’s a style one associates with Kevin Davies or John Ashbery's first books after The Tennis Court Oath, in which he's beginning to use a mellifluous line but letting the waves break on the crazy, recalcitrant detail he’s culled from children’s books, dictionaries of old slang and similarly evocative detritus, forcing bizarro yokings of disparate strands of culture: “The mist rises from the bourgeois canopy / to reveal Warburton’s tome Philosophy: The Basics / which is inimitably blurbed by “some / dead motorcyclist’s demystified rock start status” / & it can’t imagine the lord uploading / that hot mass at half-price without checking / with Doctor Said first.” (48) The real game, reading Smith, is the play between determinacy – what the poet “intends” to write and what he “means” – and chance – how the poet grabs onto what swims across his ken and places it, wholesale, into a poem – a collage aesthetic mated with a sort of discovery narrative of the decidedly un-islanded mind. This is ultimately the question of life itself, understood as a daily improvisation dependent on the tools at hand, some of the most useful of which are distraction, unreason, humor, pity and piety, not to mention music and honesty themselves.
The Figures, 2003
$20
836 pp.
Werner Herzog, the stoic devil that best managed to capture avenging angel Klaus Kinski on film deep in the wilds of the Amazon, once said that a film director is more an athlete than an aesthete -- that stamina is as important as sensibility. Kenneth Goldsmith has made a career out of creating, through masochistically tortuous writing practices, impossibly long, but very simply conceived books that follow through to the bitter end on some writing tick -- either through collecting, for two years, all of the phrases he encountered ending in the sound “r” (No. 111) or by spending an entire Bloomsday recording his every body movement into a tape recorder and transcribing it (Fidget). Book writing is a second career for Goldsmith, as he was a successful RISDY-educated gallery sculpture for several years; a photo project, "Broken New York," was recently featured in a New York Times article. He probably as well known now as the creator and maintainer of the ubu.com website (a huge collection of concrete poetry and sound files), as a provocative, frequently banned disk jockey on New Jersey’ s WFMU, and as a regular reviewer of avant-garde music for the New York Press. Goldsmith’s new book, Day, doesn’t reneg on this promise for extremity -- extremely simple acts repeated to the point of complex insights -- as it is a complete resetting of one day's Times, read linearly across the page (like a scanner), into plain text without missing a sales pitch, a day’s errata note, obituary or punctuation mark. This huge blue tome makes his 610-page No. 111 look like an issue of Reader’s Digest (indeed, any book less completist feels so), creating, of course, a lively air of scepticism (the meat of his art) in the mind of anyone who might chance to “read” it. Of course we must be sceptical -- of course we must be human -- as one was sceptical when Howard Johnsons first started appearing across the American desert and Warhol siphoned millions into his checking account without lifting a brush. But, in fact, Goldmsith is on to something deeper than mere pop bravado, as Day shows that a reader's interests are fed by only a fraction of the available information out there, but one needs this exclusivity, this personal-editing, to gird identity. For a tennis fan, there is a unique pleasure in reading about Andre Agassi's 3rd round loss to Arnauld Clement in the 2000 French Open, just riding the wave of his big comeback, showing he's human and also not yet married to Steffi Graf (a little beyond human) -- and that this "day" occurred before 9/11 adds to the pathos. There's also an obscene -- as in “offstage” -- generosity in this book that treats everyone from the Wall Street brokers (represented by the largest number of pages, pure numbers and business names) to children (in the ads for children's clothes) to, of course, those folks populating the news and entertainment stories (it was a Friday) as equals before the blind deity of digital typesetting and book binding -- an interesting gloss on how history tends to reserve its annals only for the exceptional few (and how it might not have to any longer). Day makes for a giddy anthropology, and if one is to grant that it’s “poetry,” it is the grinning slacker brother to the Chaucer's cross-class ventriloquy in The Canterbury Tales, but one that, in essence, arrives hot off the press every day. It would take weeks to even run your eye over all of this stuff (one generally spends less time “reading the paper”), and the book gives you a sublime sense of how many words are published every second on this planet. Flattening out a pyramid of textual society -- its politics, its banalities, its heroicism -- into a 4th-person narrative like this -- making a newspaper weigh over 5 pounds while in the process engaging in a full frontal act of acidic plagiarism -- is itself a sculptural gesture, but also philosphical one that teases the well-worn point that the value of a text is often in how it’s read than in the words, the sportsman Agassi as unwitting Chaplin-man mascot for this postmodern truism.
Digital Art
Christiane Paul
$14.95
0—500—20367—9
224 pp.
Thames & Hudson
Probably no birth of a genre has been celebrated as much as that of “digital art”—in some quarters known as “new media art” and others the “information arts”—and Paul does an impressive job where many of her bigger-budgeted, theoretically-enthralled predecessors have failed, compressing the activity of a huge field in which there are no obvious heroes, no single aesthetic line, into a readable pocket-sized book.
She is especially deft at laying the groundwork for such diverse practices as "telepresence" (the transferring of an artist’s or user’s activities over telephone to other parts of the world) to “browser art” (the creation of alternative browsers to navigate and present web data) and “hacktevism”—political art, often aimed at corporations, that is also a guerilla warfare enacted through hacking, viruses, and other forms of maverick programming.
Paul adequately explains why certain analog arts, such as photography, sculpture and even literature have been so impacted by digital technology as to spawn entirely different genres.
For those who have been following this fast developing field—it grew exponentially in the nineties, though had been thriving in video and sound art much earlier—everybody you’d expect to see is here: from the Barcelona-based web art team jodi (Joan Hemskeerk and Dirk Paesmans) to new York's Asymptote architectural team (founded by Hani Rashid), from Robert Lazzarini’s 3D anamorphic skulls to Eduardo Kac’s weird experiments with animal genetics (he once bred a glow-in-the-dark rabbit).
In fact, there are so much art covered that Paul is often forced to contain her discussion of an artist’s (or team’s) entire body to a few sentences; occasionally, she is able to grant a paragraph, but in many cases, the most information is found in the capacious captions that accompany the many illustrations (many of the artists, luckily, are under 35, several under 30, and so have only a few major pieces under their belts).
If there is a flaw to this book, it is in the uneventful prose style and recourse to abstract postmodernisms to explain the meanings of an artwork. A sequence called The Bone Grass Boy by Ken Gonzales-Day “challenges differences and boundaries between cultures, race, and class, as well as those between the photographic and digital media, both of which raise questions about their relationship to representation” (37)—not the kind of thing to make you jump and say “ah.”
But in general, Paul doesn’t get lost in this language (which is really endemic to the culture, and so her parroting of these phrases doubles as a sort of reportage) and one learns to appreciate the brevity of her style, along with the lack of evaluative affect, as the image of a burgeoning new art culture—independent of the gallery system, infused with the spirit of innovation and even a jingostic attitude toward the new media—takes focus.
[I don't as usual have anything to put up today. My "conflicted" poem based on Marianne Moore's "Poetry," called "Blogs," was recently published in the St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter. Also, as you've noticed, there's been a redesign. Also, Circulars is officially in "hibernation" mode. Well, to test out this new design I thought I'd throw up a little review I did some years ago, which now appears on my Little Reviews page at Arras.]
poetics@
Edited by Joel Kusai
publisher: Roof, 1999
isbn: 0-93780-479-7
price: $18.95
While it is probably true that internet listservs as vehicles for the dissemination of critical thinking is still going through its "experimental" stage, with contributors still unsure of the ontological status of their words, this edition of cullings from the early years of the "poetics list," run out of State University of New York at Buffalo, should prove at least one thing: that literary criticism among the "experimental" community has advanced past the stage of statements of "poetics" and moved into something more engaged, passionate, "real time," and direct.
As the Kusai notes in his introduction:
It was all here: the quick dismissals and the brilliant precis, the idle chat and the meticulous scholarship, the silly and the self-important, the smug arrogance and startling generosity, the noise and music.
[5]
As a quasi-academic volume that positioned itself against the academy -- that is, in response to the "frame lock" of much academic poetic discourse -- A Poetics of Criticism bore little relation to the poetics statements by New American poets collected by Donald Allen in the Poetics of the New American Poetry. Few of the writers really said why they wrote, what it is that they do when writing or what their social contexts were, but rather suggested their range of interests, and outside of a few -- Lew Daly, for example -- most writers didn't offer many upsetting, candid, charismatic, downright narrow-minded or convincingly visionary views of how poetry is or should be written today.
This isn't to say that Poetics was a bad volume -- it is a great record of its time, and several essays by writers such as Lisa Robertson and Tan Lin could be referenced as key texts in these writers' personal canons -- but it lacked the "whole field has been lifted" excitement that, for example, William Carlos Williams saw in "Projective Verse." Its unclear how the group of writers it recpresented interacted with each other, and one wonders if its community snapshot may have exposed more fissures than commonalities.
One can spectulate that a result of these strategies -- not just in Poetics but elsewhere -- was a decreased sense of what could be called "feedback" for works of poetry, as if poems were no longer to be understood as discrete statements executed into a living, palpable world that could be upset or enamoured by them, but were, rather, mere turns in some myriad proliferating strands of discourse concerning the "avant-garde," a text stream unresponsive to the poem's status as "outside." A pious attitude toward avant-garde writing and its traditions had settled in, and the naturally impious attitudes of the artist looking for singularity against the gray scales of the given could find no place in it.
The writing in poetics@, in contrast, is practically an explosion of the issues, anxieties, enthusiasms, intellectual rivalries, contentions and cross-cultural camaraderie -- all the barroom talk that can be, if taken seriously, the living critical culture of poetry -- that were rendered silent by an anxiety to perform in the field of "poetics."
While it is a mere chip off the iceberg of what had been written during that time (the first two years, from 93-94, running at 10,000 printed pages) and though it still leans toward the writing strategies of academics, poetics@ is nearly complete as an image of the nexus of issues that -- in our "globalized" and technologically connected world, in which the Cold War has been replaced by corporate monoculture -- have grown to characterize writing about poetry since, inside and outside the "experimental" communities.
"I think you boys must be getting a little saddle weary from all that wobbling," opens an email by Jennifer Moxley, already clearing the air of the technical stylistics of writing that is self-consciously non-academic, and she continues:
Those who muse around in definitions of community without self-referentiality obviously can 'step away' long enough to question: are we in one? do we want one? etc... Most people on earth are born into your vagary.
[tk]
The range of subjects run over in this volume is amazing, and little of it has appeared in any of the more standard academic texts, such as The Marginalization of Poetry or the books of Marjorie Perloff, concerning writing of the past twenty years: New Zealand poetry (N.Z. poets like Alan Loney and Wystan Curnow were active early participants), Diane Ward's book Imaginary Movie (and an ensuing debate on the relevance of the "pleasure of the text" in reading it), the meaning of "experiment" in "experimental" poetry, a debate over the journal Apex of the M which had appeared at the time (possibly the most controversial first issue of a journal to appear in the 80s and 90s), why "few women post" (i.e. write criticism from a sort of activist perspective despite the activist motivations of much feminist writing) and why the "boys" are always engaged in verbal sparring, what sort of role the academy plays in the continuation or nurturing of avant-garde activity and whether it can any longer be called "avant-garde" -- just a random selection of the topics crossed, which flow into each other with fluidity rather than being separated by chapter headings and lead sentences.
Poets from the "mainstream" mingle with "Melbournian Doctoral Students," African American poets with English cyberpoets, young upstarts with established Language poets, with both ease and masterfully expressionistic unease.
The "image" of this book, what it presents metonymically as a substitute for the whole, is that of a dialogic complexity in which the basic contract is to let the text of the "other" sound itself out prior to any knee-jerk engagement with the author or ideas.
In real life, of course, the Poetics list was, and continues to be, something quite different from this happy utopia of fleshy vectors engaged in an experiment of radical democracy. Because of the ontologic crisis about the place of these texts in the universe of time and space, writers on the list often engage in ad hominem attacks on individuals, usually with a brand of rhetorical strategies that want to be intellectual pyrotechnics, or seem born of a falsely self-convinced strategy of neo-romantic improvisational brilliance, but are unfortunately something like mental self-preening in front of the computer screen, a private, perhaps therapeutic activity gone public.
Whether this book, which finally places a lot of the digitized writing "in print" and on the poetry consumer market, could make an effect on this confusion (the list has not been nearly as central to people's concerns since then) remains to be seen, but as a break in the continuum of anthologies of poetry (in which the editor, with the exception of Ian Sinclair, seem timid in writing anything that suggests critical perspective) or about poetry by poets, poetics@ seems the place to go to get a quick bird's eye view of what poets were talking about in the nineties, in a language that is imperfect in such a way that is revealing rather than demeaning.
[Again, I'm at a loss for material for this blog, but I did find this crappy scan of an essay I wrote on Frank O'Hara sometime in the early 90s. I would have been, say, 24. It was written on an Apple SE, printed on a dot-matrix very lightly -- I scanned it in several years ago but never corrected it. But it looks just fine to me now.]
The Collected Poems of Frank OHara
1995, University of California Press, Berkeley
588 pages, paper, $18
Frank O’hara was one of the last poets to possess the great idea of liberty, one port-able enough for the whole city, for all situations and inconveniences, but which also knew the dangers of indulgence and lax attention. It was the liberty of the French po-ets, of Apollinaire and Breton, which bore on its shoulders a philosophy that argued against the possibility of personal agency, but which could also win the day, given en-ergy and a sense of purpose. CYHara did win the cfry, which is why one wants to go outside and see these poems in action. Some of them are like an entire season; however, rather than the famous sai~v~ of his great predecessor Rimbaud, they are seasons in zen” (sorry), meaning that the openness and inclusiveness of John Cage is there, too, with all its wealth of non-noise, hanging aphorisms, and Thoreau-like confidence among the wilds.
Ol-lara describes this cross of influ-ences with characteristic nonchalance in Tive Poems” (a poem that dldn’t appear in Donald Allens Se/ectedPoenis of Frank O7kra published in 1974, but which is included in this paperback reissue of Allens terrific collection from 1971):
~i invil*ion In lunch
H~i DOYOU LIKE THAI?
when Ionlyhwe l6centsand2
p~ka~s of yogurt
ttvjres a lesson in that, isnt there like in Chinese poetry when a leaf falls?
That lesson is contained in a number of OHaras best known poems, somewhere be-tween the construction workers, sandwiches, cheap copies of Genet and lonesco, in the voice of Billy Holiday or in a painting of Mike Goldberg~s. This excerpt contains the most famous elements of OHaras aesthetic in naked paradigm: the ubiquitous lunch, numbers (very Charles Demuth), the real concerns of a young poet in the city but also the victorious optimism. Trivial objects with a right all their own brush tq against “heavy” Chinese philosophy -- the vogue then, thanks to Pound, Rexroth and other surveyors of world culture.
In fact, much of O1-taras poetry can be seen as an arglinent against the self-importance of much of the aesthetic posturing in poetry at that time; after all, it was Pount2rs didactic urge and ability to assimilate cultures that led to his adoption of fascism. Ol-laras casualness, his ability to approach but not be disturbed by the various programs of American poets (in a New York that was populated by Europes most talented exiles) can be seen as the necessary breaking free from these pressures to dictate -- though, in the long run, OHaras “Personism” became as influential as any American manifesto for the arts, especially in New York. Ol-lara had numerous heroes
-- Pollock, DeKooning, his friend Jane Freilicher, Picasso and Matisse -- but none of them were cast in the “hero and hero-worship” mold, demanding emulation. “Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world” 01-tat-a writes in an early poem, and he followed his heroes with a secret understanding (or an understanding of their secret), not with futile reverence. He could even disarm with one line a theory that threatened to replace the personal with abstraction (in this case Charles Olsons) as when he writes (in “Hotel Transylvanie”) “Where will you find me, projective verse, since I will be goneT
Which means that you can be perfectly g1oon~y and read OHara, too; he knew how to move among and excite the tangle of constructs that are, generally, ones strength and burden: the personality. He was one of the few poets who could use moods as material for art, and his aim is to disturb you into self-possession, and into enjoying it if he can help it. “In the beginning there was YOU -- there will always be YOU, I guess,” reads one of his “Lines for Fortune Cookies”; it is when he combines this ability with his startling ear, his endless supply of new forms for poetry and his sure sense of languaqe that one is, well, floored:
hook
at you and I wouhi rather look at you than all the portraits of the worhi except p~sibly for the Polish Riih oc~osionaI ly mid anyway itS in the Frick which thank hesyans ytiu havsi t pine to yot so we can gu to~ther the first time mid the fm~t that yw move so bewatiful ly more or k~s tokes care of Futurbn just as at hmne I never think of the Nii~DexewikrgaStafrcase
frem “HavinqaCoke With You”
Ol-tara looked at art and life through the same pair of eyes; if that sounds obvious, consider that this poem, which is basi-cally high caliber talk, is Surrealist in both its being “automatic” writing of sorts, and in its use of montage techniques to trace weird, geometric narrative patterns -- going from “you” to the Polish ft’kkf, then zooming into the Frick and back out again in two lines, ending up at home thinking of Duchamps painting (itself about lay-ered time) which has, however, already been annihilated by 01-tat-as, what, hyperbole? He is sure of where art stands in his relationship with the world; it is tense but easy. A sketch of an entire relationship --who lives with whom, what they have seen, etc.-- at-tentive to both its trivialities and granch.ier is expressed in these lines, in what is gen-erally not a “psychological” poem; John Berrymnan should be so skillful. The poem seems to have been written for two people very successfully -- which is one more than usual -- 01-tat-as special brand of postmodern “transgression”, taking the poem into the personal (and the person to whom it is written) so much that it. is nearly transparent.
[I haven't had the time to water my blog for several days now, but I want make sure that visitors here get some good roughage to eat once in a while, so here is a little slab I found on my hard-drive a few days back. Please note that I haven't had time to correct several instances of unnecessary hyphens included in certain words that were automatically hyphenated in my word processor.
This is a very old, unpublished review of an anthology poems that, while clearly partisan -- very heavy into "Language" poetry in those days -- shows how and what I was thinking back then quite well. I wrote my brief essay about Veronica Forrest-Thomson at around this time, as well as one about Ian Hamilton Finlay which first appeared in the St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter. This may have been intended for that as well -- I'm sure I sent it off somewhere, was soundly rejected, and decided not to send it anywhere else. Too bad I didn't have a blog then.
Certainly my views have changed on the state of art, etc., and I am not out to rankle anyone with this -- it lacks decorum at points, and I don't see any point in poetry in-fighting on the eve of war -- but I think the method is basically sound, a "defense of poetry" of sorts, and since I was never much of a theory guy it's pretty down-homey, blog-worthy style. I discuss an anti-war poem by John Taggart at the very end.]
Primary Trouble
An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry
(Jersey City: Talisman House, 1996) $24.95
The latest in the recent bevy of anthologies of American poetry that attempt, in the manner of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry, to bring an “underground” scene to a greater attention is Primary Trouble, edited by Leonard Schwartz, Joseph Donahue and Edward Foster. This anthology is the least satisfying, and yet it may be said to take the most risks by not including any of the “major” predecessors in its contents to concretize a “tradition” which the anthology maintains or realizes. As a result, however, the burden of telegraphing the main tendencies of the book to the browsing public falls on the introduction, written by Leonard Schwartz, who describes in the following paragraph what the editors thought they saw in, and sought to derive from, the contemporary American scene:
Primary Trouble, then, strives not to define but to draw attention to some of the very latest tendencies in American poetry. While the anthology is in no way thematic, there is a common interest here in a certain vocabulary, a certain set of possibilities towards which these texts have both tended and been chosen. To call this interest “the sacred” would be too officious. To speak of it as “the spiritual” would be amorphous, too easily misconstrued in terms of belief and not imagination, unless “spiritual” be defined as a radical anger with the conditions of the world, socially and metaphysically. Or else it might be conceived as a critical detachment from the given – a detachment creative of the otherness of clarification, of a complex emotional and imaginary spark in the light of which metaphor and reality are constantly in question. To call it a new eroticism would also be reductive, but surely this poetry has an ample category for pleasure, a category absent, as Joel Lewis has noted, in the hegemonic mode of experimental formalism known as language poetry: this poetry sees sexuality as a crucial nexus between the body and the world, one that defies but revivifies words in their very effort to render erotic impossibility.
In this paragraph, Schwartz moves toward vaguer statements while operating within a rhetoric that makes it appear he is fine-tuning his enunciations or attaining a greater subtlety of thought, a tactic which becomes clear when the term “spiritual” is discarded for being too “amorphous”, and yet at the same time is vulnerable to being “misconstrued” as something specific (understanding “belief” to be religious belief, which he clearly wants to avoid), and then is finally replaced by the equally amorphous “radical anger with the conditions of the world”. Descriptive phrases – some of which are decidedly divorced from anything that appears in the volume, such as “a critical detachment from the given” (unless this describes the dream-speech argot many of the poets employ) – are proposed but then quickly withdrawn, or in one case finds its justness in the approval of another – “Joel Lewis has noted” – without a quote or elaboration, as if this were enough to settle the dispute that “an ample category for pleasure” has been “absent... in the hegemonic mode of experimental formalism known as the language school”. (This “ample category for pleasure” eventually becomes plain “sexuality” and then “erotic impossibility” later in the sentence, with no comment on the gaps between these rearticulations.) Postmodernism, uncomfortable with stable definitions, may be at work here, but the paragraph’s awkward errancy points more toward the need to circumscribe a set of ambitions – some of them purely contrary rather than positive, as the italicized “this” in the final sentence indicates – while not falling into the trap of appearing partisan.
Schwartz’s inability to manipulate terms becomes clear with his contention, earlier in his introduction, that the language poets have an “agenda for poetic hegemony”, a statement that is impre-cise and unfair – imprecise because innovation in the arts, whether Abstract Expressionism or Cubism (or eighteenth century English neo-Classicism or the “variable foot”), always produces more work of a second-rate then that of the innovators, thus making the entire aesthetic orientation appear misguided, and unfair because he is re-cording an injustice without providing the evidence, thus creating no more than a general feeling of ill-will and furthering the need to misunderstand. Does the editing of journals, the statement of goals, the creation of new terminologies, the explorations of new tradi-tions and of new forms of writing constitute an “agenda for poetic hegemony”? This agenda is certainly worth uncovering if it exists (it is, ironically, this type of uncovering that characterizes Charles Bernstein’s criticism in Content’s Dream and A Poetics, the type of research which provided many of the ideas that galvanized the mo-tivation for change in poets during the mid-seventies). Criticism of any artist or school is beneficial provided there is data and a speci-ficity of analysis to support contentions, and a desire to produce options rather than adopt authoritative poses that feed off a general discontent, but which mask a lack of substance behind apparent subtleties. When a “new way” is being predicted or anticipated to the detriment of an “old way”, it seems especially important to give the previous paradigm a thorough and illuminating consideration, and to provide the data, which means “new” poems that help one imagine and understand why a shift is in order.
Schwartz doesn’t provide these terms or analysis in his intro-duction, but rather his ideas revolve around a few general concepts of “eroticism”, “mythic vocabularies”, “category for pleasure”, “epistemological rigor”, and “radical anger”, all or most of which, one presumes, is present in the selection, a selection which, conse-quently, is not to betray an “agenda for hegemony”. Consequently, this paragraph, as does the entire introduction, seems to call for a return to a “universal” set of values while maintaining the pretense of newness and oppositionality, but it never, at the same time, dis-tinguishes itself from the aesthetic and political values of the estab-lishment – whether literary or political – which the avant-garde usu-ally subverts on some level. This makes it appear that the “radical anger” described in this introduction is only to be leveled against other poets, which is disappointing if true. It is also worth noticing that the only thing that separates many of the writers included in the anthology from the writing of the sixties and from the main-stream writing of such poets as Charles Simic and A.R. Ammons (who could have been included, were they younger), or Jorie Gra-ham or James Tate (who certainly assimilated much of the “New American” poetics), is their very experience with the writers and ideas of the language school, uncomprehending or unsympathetic (or undesired) as this experience is.
If there is one tiny piece of dicta that is worth resurrecting from Pound – the language of it has not aged terribly much – it is this: “It is better to present on Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” This phrase is useful in attempting to spot a “poetic hegemony”, for based on the smallest level of the word-event, the image, it would be very difficult to prove that there isn’t a poetic hegemony operating throughout most of Primary Trouble. An example of a few great lines of poetry compared to many of the lines of poetry included in Primary Trouble is worth, in this case, hazarding, for there isn’t much within the anthology that is unusual or excessive enough against which to gauge the general tenor of the writing. The following is from a sonnet by Hopkins:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells;
Crying What I do is for me: for that I came.
Hopkins serves the purpose of being a poet who is spiritual and not allied with any artistic movement or avant-garde, and yet who quite obviously has taken pains to radicalize his language. One might, indeed, understand Hopkins to stand for many of the values that Schwartz promotes in his introduction – even the “eroticism” and “rigorous epistemology” find their representation – and yet he equally satisfies the call for an intensity and fullness of language, not choosing to hide behind ellipses and mysticism. Lines from another poet, John Ashbery, demonstrate how a this aural intensity need not be sacrificed when satisfying a hunger for contemporane-ity (this is the opening to “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”):
Something strange is coming over me.
La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars
Of “I Thought about You” or something mellow from
Amadigi di Gaula for everything - a mint-condition can
Of Rumford’s Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy
Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller’s fertile
Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on greige, deckle-edged
Stock - to come clattering through the rainbow trellis...
Image follows image with differing degrees of authorial intrusion, but it is worth noticing the near-physicality of the rhythms them-selves (as in Hopkins), the syllables rolling over each other like waves, the metrics of each line fulfilling and developing upon the expectations of the previous one, with precise shifts that can slow a line incrementally – “Helen Topping Miller’s fertile...” – until it must explode past the enjambment. The variety of the images and rhythms in these poems – along with their lack of theoretical jargon and philosophical circularity – are worth keeping in mind when reading Primary Trouble.
The following are lines from different poets in the anthology who utilize a vague surrealistic language that hints at a nascent “spiritualism”, but which nevertheless has yet to attain a fullness of expression:
Who sees
all breathing creatures
as self, self
in everything breathing,
no longer shrinks
from encounter.
*
the long shadow
of a walking stick
stretched across the desert
warm blood drawn
from the neck of the beast
tales from the withered arm
the dried-up cup
that speaks in small flames
round the rim
*
branches abroad
a memory only
for moods
fail to recognize
a difference
nothing also
has a face
*
Closest,
restored sections of
what is farthest
late drawn borders
re-examined
pulled out as “cuts”
(resistant
that tiny sweet “heart” of
oxygen’s nerve)
*
these are the unspoken details
born out of so many days
walking
the vanishing skies & what follows
as the rains close in
thomas, why have you come so far
to hear so little
For many, and one assumes for the poets themselves, these lines may be evocative, and yet there is a lack of specificity – of signa-ture – in them that eventually hinders interest. A homogeneity is demonstrable in both interests and expression, all of these excerpts establishing an air of anticipation and insecurity, of a strangeness that could be this or that, but never solidifies, the hands left to con-tinue groping along the wall. This makes the reader wary that the air of uncanniness may simply be the poet’s discomfort with the actual idiom in which the poem is operating, as if the poet were merely maintaining a distinction from, say, diaristic or confessional modes of writing, and describing the struggle to do so. What is interesting is that nothing is fixed upon as even possibly coming into view; the writing is so caught up in the possibility of perception, that the terminology appears to be based in a pre-existant dis-course, rather than in the lived trauma of a suffering being – the mode seems academic. The “thomas” included in this last excerpt is an event, especially when set against the ubiquity of the “radical epistemology” which seems to make imagery – and humor – meta-physically impossible. The poetic line is basically “speech-based”, and yet speech itself, with its spastic urgencies, never intrudes to modify what is often a safe repetitiveness. As for the “category of pleasure”, one is unsure from which quarter that is supposed to ar-rive.
There are, of course, many poets in Primary Trouble who don’t write like this, though an inordinate number of them do at some point in this selection. Will Alexander and Dodie Bellamy, two writers who at their best overwhelm with their imagination and willingness to risk linguistic and psychological overload, are pre-sent. The choices for Joseph Ceravolo, especially “The Crocus Turn and Gods” from his long poem Fits of Dawn, are excellent and stand out with their confidence of aesthetic. Two long pieces from Clark Coolidge appear, but they are not as polyphonic as his best writing, and bland in their vocabulary and word combinations – odd, because Coolidge was motivated early in his writing by the need for a new vocabulary in poetry. Joseph Donahue, in the po-ems included here, appears haunted by Ashbery’s idiom, especially in these lines from the poem “Desire”:
It’s someone else’s dream
this bewildered amusement left on your tape
the surprise party the world has arranged for you
and your life passes and you wait for the secret call
when the guests have arrived, you wait for
the one who will intimately mislead you through the rain.
Donahue’s poems are, nonetheless, careful and various, especially “Transfigurations”, which works with a shorter line. William Bronk’s poem-preface, “The Nature of Musical Form”, is a nice little piece of work, but he is one of a number of the poets in Primary Trouble who doesn’t seem to experiment at all with language be-yond the idiosyncrasies of his personal idiom. Virginia Hooper is another example; the following is from her poem “Drawing Room Drama”:
Concealed in the style of a late manner,
It was the spectator hiding behind the curtain
Celebrating the discrepancy
That the context of action conditions the illusion.
The desire to explore has tainted the evening
With a noiseless rush of jazzy agitation for three nights running.
Hooper’s writing is promising, but at this point it appears to have taken its terms – again – from Ashbery, though she has substituted the detail and humor in his poetry with abstractions and Chinese-box-like statements – “the context of action conditions the illusion,” for example – that begin to lack invention. Susan Howe’s “Thorow”, included in Eliot Weinberger’s anthology three years ago, makes an appearance, and one wonders how a reading of her work suffers by its inclusion among other poems that are derived from her style though without her use of ballad-like rhythms or her scholarly intellect. (Both she and Nathaniel Mackey – strongly rep-resented here – have developed a poetics that are derived directly from readings of Olson and Duncan, and yet they are each exam-ples of how some of the ideas of the “language” writers have given both definition and substance to the aims of the recent generation.)
Ronald Johnson makes an appearance with sections from his long poem Ark, which has just been published in its entirety; he is a maverick of sorts, not conforming to any easy rubric, and much of his writing can be beautiful, though oddly static. Bernadette Mayer and Eileen Myles are represented, each not quite satisfacto-rily, the Mayer selection devoid of the color, liveliness and inven-tiveness of her best work, and Myles having only one poem. Claire Needell’s very short poems are interesting, and brief enough to quote whole; the poem “Propagation” runs: “I want you to think / me hollow. Intercourse suggests / an artificial point”, creating a conundrum of body and syntax that doesn’t flow into overelabora-tion. Alice Notley and Geoffrey O’Brien are both strongly repre-sented, as is Michael Palmer, whose poem “Untitled (September ‘92)” makes use of the “sacred” theme, but while utilizing the entire arsenal of techniques available; it begins:
Or maybe this
is the sacred, the vaulted and arched, the
nameless, many-gated
zero where children
where invisible children
where the cries
of invisible children rise
between Cimetiere M
and the Peep Show Sex Paradise
Gate of Sound and Gate of Sand -
One is often not sure how much Palmer is merely engaging in art-culture games, using his talents for no more than picture-books, but this poem demonstrates his ability to create waves. David Shapiro’s poem “Archaic Torsos” (one of Clark Coolidge’s poem also takes off from this theme of Rilke’s) is a sonnet that begins “You must change your life fourteen times”, and which proceeds to do that, ebulliently, for its duration; the rest of his poems here are otherwise pretty standard for him. Gustaf Sobin’s work derives from a basic theory that the sound of poetry is a tunnel into some sort of tran-scendental awakening, but many poets, including some in Primary Trouble, explored this theme more thoroughly – Olson, Duncan, Coolidge and Mackey have made similar investigations – so that he appears derivative. There are other writers and poems worth look-ing at in the anthology – Ann Waldman, John Yau, Lee Ann Brown, Robert Kelly, Myung Mi Kim and Ann Lauterbach are also included – but strangely enough the selections from many of these poets are flat, and one suspects that there has been an effort by the editors to purposely exclude certain poetic practices even when the individual poets embraced them.
John Taggart’s poem “Twenty One Times” is one of the few poems that take up a social theme, and is worth considering in some detail, for it points to some problems with the editorial pa-rameters of the entire book. The poem is centered around a refrain of the word “Napalm”, and the first four of its verses run:
1.
Napalm: the word suspended by a thread
the word grows as salt crystallizes
I will grow cells of the word in your mouth.
2.
Napalm: leaping as if wrought in the sea
leaping as if pursued by the horse and his rider
a young hart a young heart comes out leaping.
3.
Napalm: rub the new-born child with salt
“the fault is that we have no salt”
if the master’s word is taken the salt is love.
4.
Napalm: soap will not wash the word out
the word breaks through partitions and outer walls
breakthrough of cells of the word in the mouth.
There is something about the refrain of “Napalm” that is discon-certing, especially with the allusions to the salivation that accom-pany repetitions of the word, as if this attempt at exorcism were really an excuse to reinvestigate and reestablish his relationship – very “erotic” it appears – with the word. To publish a poem using “Napalm” as a refrain in the present decade exhibits not only a nostalgia for a time when poets sense more clearly their class dis-tinction from the establishment, and hence could be self-righteous and hieratic, but also for a time when the American government was at its most actively militaristic, engaged in a warfare that deci-mated an entire country, regardless of the prophetic and spiritual agencies of these poets. One is free to make poems out of any subject matter one wishes, but Taggart’s poem – technically sophis-ticated, full of apocalypse, yet elusive in its specific meanings – re-mains, like many of the poems in this anthology, caught up in its own machinery, deriving its main social value from the the “jellied gasoline” – the “blackbird” in this poem that owes much to Stevens. Does this poem recognize its debt to atrocity, and intend to insti-gate a change in thinking? does one care how many times “Na-palm” can be perceptually reconfigured in a poem, and is it valid as a method to take this word and investigate it for its aural and evocative content? is this an adequate way to record history, and to warn of its possible recurrence? These questions, which exist at the intersection of art and politics, have been further complicated not only by the innocuosness of a the contemporary hieratic mode – based on modes of the sixties but lacking its danger – but by the various revolutions in information technology that render the poet’s task of getting attention more difficult. Since most of the poems in Primary Trouble cannot be said to represent the “latest tendencies” in American writing – especially since the editors have purposely sought to erase rather than confront the achievements of the most innovative practices of the last two decades, that of the language school itself – the very parameters with which one can begin to in-vestigate these questions are not even present in the volume beyond the ambitious terminology of the introduction.
[The following review was just published in the Boston Review.]
8
This is the beginning of a new
spiritual and ethical position. For a woman.
Based on the supposition of harmful intent—
that another, male or female, even without realizing it
might very well want to hurt me, cause my subjugation.
I don’t propose an equalitarian lovingkindness or compassion.
I propose, for women, always an instinctive wariness.
I propose, further, meditation in separate closets, without
instructions. That’s
the whole religion. It never has to be proposed again
in order to exist. It has no organization and no beliefs.
Written in Paris from 1995 to 1996, Disobedience is in method something of a synthesis of Notley’s last two books, both of which also pursued clearly defined conceptual projects. Like The Descent of Alette (1996), it derives many of its themes and much of its imagery from dreams and conjoins the description of a subterranean journey with a concerted effort against the day world of oppressively bureaucratic, often male, society. Structurally, Alette was distinctive for its use of quotation marks to break up the line into breath units, and each of its untitled sections—which otherwise looked like normal stanzas—added up, serially, to the whole of the poem. Disobedience is also a serial poem, but each of its irreverently, often histrionically, titled sections is a constellations of fragments, some of which resemble barbed fortune cookies—“Starving because there are ‘jobs’ in our consciousness”—and others which run as long as a page. Like Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), a suite of sixty-nine poems that chronicled significant events in the author’s life (including her marriage to Ted Berrigan, her changing attitudes towards writing, and her second marriage, after Berrigan’s death, to English poet Douglas Oliver), Disobedience is written freely from an “I” and with the forthright, even defiant, lyric subjectivity she feels has been subsumed under the projects of collagist poetics with which she herself—as a member of the “second generation New York School”—had once been deeply engaged. In Disobedience this “I” becomes a troubled site, sometimes represented as total absence (the soul is the “universe’s asshole,” she writes, and later, “I am exactly material and in fact non- / existent as a self, am everyone else”) and at other times as a singular, rebellious presence, as when she revisits Rimbaud’s famous “I is another” with a formulation that reflects the friction between the “exactness” of the refreshed identity that she is pursuing and the anonymous, troubled commonality she can’t do without: “What’s exact / is I, whose particulars may not be mine. / I is never another.”
[What follows is a "little review" one the short, occasionally opiniated summaries that I've posted to listservs and on websites from time to time. This one was written quite a while ago, but I thought to include it now to help advertise the Little Reviews section of arras.net, as well as to debug the "more" button that you see below.]
With Strings
Charles Bernstein
publisher: University of Chicago, 2002
isbn: 0-226-04460-2
price: $12
"Readers are cautioned that certain statements in this poem are forward looking statements that involve risk and uncertainties. Words such as 'bluster,' 'rotund,' 'interstitial,' 'guerilla,' 'torrent', 'prostrate', and variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and projects about the aesthetic environment and assumptions made by the author and are not guarantees of future performativity." [73]
writes Bernstein in "Today's Not Opposite Day," one of many cagey, slapstick satires in his large new book. But even when this poet -- in his best vaudeville bureaucrat's voice -- just tells you what to expect, buckle up for a plateful of much weirder fare (the mixed metaphor is apt).
Bernstein has never been an easy pleasure, from the early minimal work of his Language years to his recent incarnation as professa-widda-(Yiddish)-attitude, but the more recent work reflects a growing comfort with his role as public intellectual and avuncular proselyte for all things counter-hegemonic, hence a huge turn toward satire and even lyric in his work.
The Bernstein "lyric," of course, takes on every convention one could imagine lurks close to the humanist heart:
"the toilet seat is down now
it's there I plan to sit
until I find that doggy bag
I lost while just a kid" [39]
By making the poems so nail-scratchingly obvious in their form -- as in "Besotted Desquamation" in which every line in the poem contains four words beginning with the same letter "marshalling muted might majestically" -- Bernstein anchors the aesthetic object (art always want to rise into the aether) in deep engagement with the most mundane modes of culture.
This rationale for writing very "bad" poetry makes one put all aesthetic -- and by extension social and moral -- judgments in scare quotes, pitting the reader against the very value system that may have brought him or her to the poem itself:
"& the moral of that is: Better
a loose potato chip than a
hot tamale. & the moral of that
is: It is a rocky road that's
filled with bumps. & the moral
of that is: If you kill the spirit
in others, you kill it in yourself.
& the moral of that is: Watch the
slings and arrows & the automatic
weapons will get you every time." [33]
While some of this "companion to My Way: Speeches and Poems" (as he states in the intro) seems filler -- those few poems that avoid kitsch and in which the poet seems merely to have failed achieve an effect -- or maybe too annoyingly bathetic, there is no real way to determine where "filler" ends and the "quality" writing starts, and where the poem ends and the jacket copy starts, which just goes to show that everything good comes with strings attached.
[Here is a fairly old, kind of slapdash review of Tim Davis's first book, Dailies, that I had written for Tripwire magazine for their Winter 2000-2001 issue. I'm posting it because Tim is now writing regular poems and reviews, or poem-reviews -- he calls them "Photems," which I think suggests they are also photographs -- for the website artkrush.com. I'd always wanted to revise this review and someday I will, but for now here you have it in its raw glory -- huge citation from Bataille and all -- though I've corrected a few basic errors and given it a nip and tuck. I take a few cheap shots at a particular poet in this one because of another book that had been released about that time -- not the one mentioned -- for which I ask your indulgence.]
Tim Davis
Dailies
The Figures
111 pp.
ISBN: 935724--77--X
Writing of another city poet, Baudelaire, Jean-Paul Sartre describes an ethical and aesthetic background (or battleground) against which a description can begin of Tim Davis’s unique idiom in Dailies:
In order for liberty to be complete it has to be offered the choice... of being infinitely wrong. It is therefore unique in this whole universe committed to Good, but it must adhere totally to Good, maintain it and strengthen it in order to be able to plunge into Evil. And he who damns himself acquires a solitude which is a feeble image of the great solitude of the truly free man. In a certain sense he creates. In a universe where each element sacrifices itself in order to converge in the greatness of the whole, he brings out the singularity, that is to say the rebelliousness of a fragment or a detail. Thus something appears which did not exist before, which nothing can efface and which was in no way prepared by worldly materialism. [...] The deliberate creation of Evil -- that is to say, wrong -- is acceptance and recognition of Good.
This may seem an enormously oversized frame in which to place a poet who is often noted for his quirky neologisms, improvisationally resonant (very American, part bee-bop part-Olsonian) rhythms, stream-of-consciousness near-hysteric joke-making, and desire, it appears, to mask a natural sincerity behind a hard-core urban irony, but that is because we are not living in a country known for its attention to a complex (and significantly contradictory) moral/ethical universe, or at least one that is not easily thrust into parody by the note of a sexual scandal or backdoor money, or subsumed under the blanket term of “pragmatism.”
Davis, like all poets of roughly thirty years of age in the United States, was an adolescent during the Reagan years, when the Christian right were pulling the marionette strings of American politics, and in which the idea of flattened, readily-accessible “good” was infiltrating public-speak in the nefarious forms of both “family values” and the “politically correct,” a virtual minefield against which any significant detail -- any dive beneath the glass floor of narrowly ethical expression (or shall we say being?) -- was rendered perfectly visible and per-fectly condemnable in a single gesture.
Against such a background, any adolescent wary of the terms of socialization -- and in some ways any member of the marginal classes who happens to be situated in a non-marginalized social sphere (like a college) -- becomes “something... which did not exist before,” that which, by not dissolving into the background of the social fabric being described, endlessly, through channels as diverse as aerobics commercials and U2 videos, could only situate itself on the side of “evil.”
But America also has a rich counter-cultural tradition, one in which Davis finds a place. The names of Lenny Bruce, Ed Sanders, and Frank Zappa are often heard of when discussing Davis’s work, and it is perhaps on this seamy side of comedy, rather than in “evil,” that one would want to situate his writing (not to mention his author photograph, of the author hanging naked from a Joshua Tree).
The problem, of course, is that Davis is a poet and not a comic, and he uses words, lines, sentences, often in fragmentary forms, the entire machinery of which rebel on the page against this dissolution into the fabric of the whole (there’s a bit of Mallarmean melodrama in any poet who strikes out against the dominating whiteness), and so the category “comedy”, and even “satire”, does not extend wide enough through the universe to contain what is happening there. Hence the recourse to “evil,” at least in the Manichean sense -- productive evil, or the detail that is found in and against the void -- which is not a native product of the United States.
So the question, then, is regarding details. The work is called “dailies,” the reference being to the uncut film shot during a production as it observed after a day’s work on a movie.
Oddly, two other books of poetry were released at about the same time with references in their titles to the same activity. Perhaps there is something in the zeitgeist that is asking, after so many years of “non-referential” writing (which is how Language poetry is often, inaccurately, described), there is a desire to touch ground with the physical and personal (as if it were that easy), and hence a return to the “lunch poem” ethos of Frank O’Hara or the heroic “dailiness” of Mayer’s Midwinter Day: what I see matters, this little ephemeral moment which I will alchemize with my training with words can, itself, be a poem.
There is a need to break past the epistemological torments and sublimities of the “French lyric,” or the post-Marxist syntactic social subversion that seems difficult to discern while easy, and prestige-enhancing, to describe. Hence, I will write one a day; after two years I will have 730, most of which will be kept in my underwear drawer until they are discovered by loving peers.
This sort of bravado -- “moral exhibitionism” in Benjamin’s term (describing the surrealists) -- becomes the sad activity of bankrupt literati when it decides to stay within the frame of O’Hara (or Ashbery or Koch), not even adopting the full range of possibility that these New York poets pointed toward but adopting their symbolic value. David Lehman’s Daily Record, in fact, seems to derive entirely from one element of one single tone of one of O’Hara’s poems, and never leaves that safe area lest it risk being a unique, sovereign poem.
Davis, conversely, only touches down with O’Hara in an oblique instant, perhaps somewhere from the heart of “The Day Lady Died”; from that point on, he is traipsing off into the wilderness, a maximalizing effort outside of (though not above, which would be hard to do) O’Hara’s urbane and catty scripts. His details, then, are not Coca-Colas, the names of his friends and De Koonings over the mantles, but the pantheon of poetic techniques and political contradictions that have surfaced since the fifties in a world of increasing globalization.
The rush of comedy and torquing of reference takes on a tone of invective despite itself; it becomes the harsh discord that Adorno describes in serial music, that scream that is the natural speech of the post-Romantic crisis of subjectivity. Yet this is not “dark” work in the manner of Baudelaire or a German Expressionist, but because there is no room for it (in the offices of New Directions, where he was working at the time and where he wrote the poems), the “oppositional” tone of invective seems to take over, at times.
Here is the entirety of “Shy Riot”:
history pimps itself it
depletes itself I say
history is a selfmade man -- and worships its creator
history hanged itself to avoid the daily task of dressing
like mackerel by moonlight it
shines and stinks
[germany sent seven thousand gasmaks to Israel today]
history is a despotism tempered by epigrams
there is no other granola like this
on the board of who am I incorporated sits
lists deposed by history’s inquisitors
times you’ve yelled you whoreson zed
times it befell the three little sows
trade in houses for hotels and
heft the rent
[flying tigers]
why should men eat shrimps and avoid cockroaches
methodology of the fucker [flying
tigers]
history is the worship of jackals by jackasses
pickle-herring in the puppet show of history
say steering clear -- all arks are off
nobody can beam and warble while
chewing pressed history and diabolical mustard
fresh baby cranium peelback [context]
dust on the saga
basta
We are nearly entering the rhetorical universe of Pound’s “Usura” canto, here, but whereas the modernist found a central theme, even an area of placidity (in the Platonic perfection of forms) against which to judge the failures of history, Davis is flying into the open: “why should men eat shrimp and avoid cockroaches.” There is kind of an inversion in all of the Davis’ poetry, each sentence (or line) turning back in on itself so as to avoid any chance of easy comprehension.
“Shy Riot” is one of the easier ones to “understand,” it seems to point outward to coherent “meanings,” but in general Dailies is a drama of never quite breaking away from the language and soaring to the next thought, the next “utopic” vista, the satisfaction of the abstract promise of... abstraction.
Nothing is very abstract, the philosophical words take no hold, nor do ideals ever surface beyond the things (from “Smart Poets Society”):
(rodrigo’d get a village reargaurd hard on)
1-800-COLLECTIVISM side of fries
the body is (quickly, fill in “duck-billed raven”)
a place for forest fires
if not full on fusion (tear it torrid)
The complex of Dailies is that it seems to exist in contradiction to the basic tenants of pragmatism and the “good works” of our Puritan forefathers; it doesn’t want to succeed as product, something that can be added to the great heap of American literary achievement (the literary equivalent of a green lawn), and yet it chooses the daily over the ideal, parataxis and improvisation over the formal seductions of the “well-made poem.”
There is a New England moral tone resonating through these poems, and yet this tone can never escape the clanging, equally opinionated units of phonemes that suck it back into language. It is as if E. E. Cummings put away his tab and space keys and instead plunged into the heady intoxications of hyper-referentiality before getting down to the tale of the anti coprophagic Olaf.
Sometimes the book is difficult to read because of this; one waits for Davis to soar -- into invective, fiction, reverie, lyricism -- but because meaning is never surrendered, and because the erotic, sophisticated and, perhaps, comfortable semantic slippages of deconstructive poetics are never explored, one feels as trapped in the details of history, culture and the ceilings and floors of the ethical sphere as Davis, the “selfmade man who envies its creator.”
Perhaps this is true freedom, or the closest one will get to it, not as a solipsism but with a sense of oneself as “detail,” that which stands against the whole and creates but which, then, cannot speak but through inverted or negating gestures.