For my 500th post (huzzay! alarums and excursions!) I thought I'd try to put The Pisan Cantos to bed for now. I've been dwelling on the recurring Latin phrase "aram neumus vult": "the grove needs an altar." Pound's resolutely pagan vision of pastoral in these Cantos (made most explicit by the long lynx passage ending Canto 79) requires the grove or garden to be made sacred, to be a place that invites the gods to return to it. The desire for an altar makes me think of Heidegger's temple as his figure for the artwork that organizes the nature (or "earth") around it, that which "worlds." Here are some excerpts from the passage on the temple in his essay, "The Origin of the Work of Art":

A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this concealment lets it standout into the holy precinct through the open portico. By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as holy precinct....

Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the mystery of that rock's clumsy yet spontaneous support.... The temple's firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and thus come to appear as what they are. The Greeks early called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things Phusis. It clears and illuminates, also, that on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth. What this word says it not to be associated with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere, or with the merely astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation. In the things that arise, earth is present as the sheltering agent.

The temple-work, standing there, opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back again on earth, which itself only thus emerges as native ground. (Poetry, Language, Thought 41-42)

Now this isn't pastoral—this is a whole aesthetic theory, even a theology. When Pound talks about the grove needing an altar, he's talking about the work of the poet (really the work of the artist, which encompasses the work of the statesman—in Pound's case, unfortunately, that's Mussolini), which is to found a vision of the world. But the how of that founding is significant: Heidegger preaches a worlding that "arises without violation," and he elsewhere opposes this to the spirit of modern technology, which suppresses the qualities of things (the Being of beings) and converts them into resources for exploitation. Heidegger treats technology as an autonomous force, "unconditional production" (PLT 115), the spirit of techne run rampant; his critique is not based on an understanding of capitalism or commodity reification, which is one of his most serious flaws as a critic of modernity (it makes him vulnerable to charges of irrationality and humbug, charges whose seriousness is exacerbated by his Nazism). But in a way, my understanding of modernist pastoral is beginning to depend on the failure, the aporia in the critiques of Pound and Heidegger. Failing to come directly to grips with the beast of capital—failing even to make an accurate picture of it—Pound and Heidegger create potent fantasies of nature as the only source capable of renewing recognizably human values. The poet-thinker goes into nature (into the cage, into the clearing), the source of value both economic (Pound's Monte dei Paschi bank) and cultural (the "worlding" "thinking" that Heidegger equates with "poetry"). Both Pound and Heidegger fetishize thingness, use-value (though Heidegger may be more extreme: Gelassenheit or letting the thing be may mean refraining even from using it, let alone exchanging it). Without a working critique of capitalism (and perhaps, without a collective consciousness--I'll have to think more on that), Heidegger's pastoral gestures toward renewal are dead-ends into the merely personal. After the war and his "turn," Heidegger's Thinker (which he aligns with the terse figure of the Black Forest farmer) is a solitary figure, detached from der Volk (as Adorno detaches himself, violently, from mass culture), letting things be. He does open the path toward environmentalism, though. At his best, Heidegger opens the possibility for mythic, mimetic thought (thought which shelters Being, the thought of letting-be) to check the ravages of instrumental rationality. But he was never a dialectical thinker, and at his worst he simply superimposes myth over the rational. If we would all just go back to speaking ancient Greek, he seems to say, everything would be all right.

But Pound, Roman in many senses, floundering alone in his tent, a disintegrating mass of texts, seems at least to understand what he's missing: he reaches desperately for the bonds of affection. Thus his evocation of the lynx/Dorothy in 79 and this statement near the beginning at 80 (previously falsely attributed to Adams): "Amo ergo sum, and in just that proportion." Canto 80 adventures through Pound's past, stopping at more restaurants (including, significantly, a cafe in London that was turned into a bank), briefly eulogizing "poor old Benito"—but the tone has changed. He is uncertain now, softer, searching, exploring the boundaries of a tautology voiced by Alexandre Dumas:

The young Dumas weeps because the young Dumas
has tears
     Death's seeds move in the year
                                   semina motuum
          falling back into the trough of the sea
          the moon's arse been chewed off by this time
semina motuum
     "With us there is no deceit"
                  said the moon nymph immacolata
                  Give back my cloak, hagoromo.
                  had I the clouds of heaven
                      as the natuile borne ashore
                  in their holocaust
                      as wistaria floating shoreward
with the sea gone the colour of copper
     and emerald dark in the offing

Hagoromo is a Noh play about an Ariel-like nymph who loses her magical cloak and does a dance signifying the phases of the moon to get it back; some commentators have seen Noh as a model for the Cantos, a solution to the problem of writing a long Imagist poem. The problem is addressed from another direction late in the Canto, with the repetition of a phrase attributed to Aubrey Beardsley: "Beauty is difficult, Yeats." This difficulty is not merely aesthetic; rather, it is the difficulty of bringing the aesthetic into the political. The connection to Yeats harks back to much earlier in the Canto, where Yeats' membership in the Irish Senate is recalled:

the problem after any revolution is what to do with
your gunmen
as old Billyum found out in Oireland
         in the Senate, Bedad! or before then
         Your gunmen thread on moi dreams
         O woman shapely as a swan,
Your gunmen tread on my dreams
Whoi didn't he (Padraic Colum)
         keep on writing poetry at that voltage
"Whenever you get hold of one of their banknotes
(i.e. an Ulster note) burn it"
                  said one of the senators
                  planning the conquest of Ulster
This he said in the Oirish Senate
         showing a fine grasp of...
                  of possibly nothing,
If a man don't occasionally sit in a senate
         how can he pierce the darrk mind of a
                                                 senator?

Now, it could be that Pound has legitimate reasons (within his kooky system) for denigrating the unnamed senator's (neither Yeats nor Colum [another poet] but certainly associated with them) proposal, but I'm tempted to read the breakdown signified by those ellipses as Pound's loss of confidence in his own critique. This gets turned around by a kind of protest: why wasn't he, Pound, a senator? Why don't poets have real power? But perhaps when poets do, they end up attacking money (like Pound himself), unable to free themselves from fetishization, from nominalization. Yeats the "smiling public man" is a warning to Pound: beauty is difficult and the more so in government. There may be in fact no place in government for the beautiful. Pastoral provides a flight out of government and history into beauty—but Pound is alone there with the shades: "[Only shadows enter my tent / as men pass between me and the sunset,]".

So I see I've completely failed to dispose of the Pisans entirely. Next time I'l make another push, at least through the "what lovest well" canto—the emotional climax of this decad. I'm curious as to how this beginning of a withdrawal from meddling in political affairs will be reconciled with the "advice to princes" that the bulk of the remaining Cantos are said to consist of. Perhaps it will be a floating antimony. Or perhap Pound's renunciation will be incomplete.

Utterly bogged down. "Pastoral" is so flexible an instrument that I cannot settle on a single approach to it, any more than I can decide what the most meaningful way to apply it to Pound is—or more to the point, why. Now I'm yawing back toward my original fascination with the language of rural simplicity that pops up in Heidegger: the notion of the "clearing" in which worldness is disclosed is the most alluring (it connects ineluctably in my mind with Robert Duncan's meadow of first permission) but of course it's also immediately problematized by what Heidegger rejects in his implausible attempt to allly himself with the Black Forest farmer: idle chatter, ambiguity, curiosity—the (rootless, cosmopolitan) signifiers of "inauthenticity." These might be read as the attributes that the "complex man" tries to discard as he tries on the virtues of the "simple man" "in touch with Nature" that Empson describes as the most basic pastoral maneuver. Now, someone like Walter Benjamin or Ernst Bloch would point us toward the redemptive possibilities inherent in the inauthentic, whose attributes resemble those of the commodity society. But is it so easy to discard the longing for authenticity, even if one accepts the notion that Heidegger did not intend "inauthenticity" to be pejorative? Although Heidegger insists on the distinction between Dasein and any particular subject, authenticity seems to be about a wish to be firmly rooted in one's subjectivity, to participate completely in one's "thrownness" into a given class. The notion of the proletariat as universal subject of history can be read as a more acutely historicized version of authenticity, whereby we see that class struggle has produced the authentic subject that the intellectual may ally himself with but can never actually be. Heidegger's notion that rigorous Denken (a thinking of one's own particular Being-toward-death) can result in authentic being for the individual subject has to be rejected as bourgeois illusion by a Marxist. But the expression of desire for authenticity continues to resonate. Pound's weird subject position shows this longing in him: his poems are never addressed toward a mass audience and in fact he insults such audiences every chance he gets. Instead his poetry imagines a readership of select individuals who have achieved something like authenticity through rigorous study—though on close examination what distinguishes the Poundian "expert" is not a learned expertise but the content of his character. So expertise and authenticity are tautologically the same for Pound, and yet the gap of their obvious difference is a source of anxiety for him. It takes his imprisonment at Pisa with people who are differently (if no less problematically) authentic—his fellow prisoners, all poor, black, and illiterate—for him to discover if not his own authenticity at least some of what was inauthentic about his previous Fascist position. Authenticity is achieved, or tended toward, through suffering. The discovery of the world in its worlding—the pastoral moment of discovering a landscape of self-sufficient figures that include oneself—is a kind of ascesis that gets dialectically sublated into pleasure and "just enough" of goods (including social goods, the currency of acknowledgment, Being-with without the "they" [das Man]). Then I could procede by examining how pastoral authenticity gets picked up and dropped again by poets after Pound, whose political commitments might lead them toward more and more acute criticisms of authenticity as a mode (no one makes more fun of the yearning for authenticity than Ashbery, for example) but can only abandon it by transforming monadic authenticity into collectivity—by attempting to realize themselves as part of a class.

Well gee, that sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Why can't I transmute that into an actual argument using poems as examples? Speculation is so much more fun than argument, but argue I must if I want those letters after my name. Sigh.

Henry intervenes in my musings re: Pound, pastoral, Heidegger. I find I want to resist his conflation of pastoral in the classical sense (a city person's poem about shepherds) with its religious sense (as in the pastor of a "flock"). It's too Christian for my taste, and one of the things that interests me about classical pastoral is its pagan or even secular conception of the Golden Age. Christians have insisted on reading Christ into Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, but it seems clear to me that the speaker in that poem is imagining a child whose intervention into history will not require or carry the force of divine revelation (not that I don't also have problems with the military means he envisions the grown child using to create the new Golden Age). It's a very earthly paradise that Virgil imagines the hero-child presiding over. But then I went back to Heidegger and his phrase about the poet being the "shepherd of Being." Now Heidegger's tautological language and generally apolitical position (a position he was driven to after 1945, which is roughly when he began talking like this) tend to drive out notions of the social, so I imagine a solitary shepherd alone in the clearing with "Being." But we only per/re-ceive Being through a particular world, which is always a social and historical creation—the "frame" or consensual hallucination called "reality." Poets "shepherd" Being and the earth (the ground of Being and of all worlds, never perceivable directly) through their language which "attends" (in the old senses of "waiting on" and also "listening to") Being rather than intervening into Being in the name of particular interests. (An aside: When the Bush administration scorns "the reality-based community" they are bragging about their ability to intervene, not least through their meretricious use of language, into Being and so to change the world of our perecptions, though this intervention takes the form of a violation. That's why we liberals find it harder and harder to recognize the world that the American media presents to us; the Bushies have leveled it, black-and-whited it.) The poet's aestheticist position (disinterest) is what enables shepherding. But the relationship between this manner of shepherding and the shepherding of a flock is difficult to discern—hunkering down with Being between the departure and return of the gods is not the same thing as actively leading a group toward such a return. Heidegger's shepherding "in a destitute time" can look a lot like Adorno's "hibernation" in the face of the decay of the bourgeois subject and the rise of mass culture.

Also, the versions of pastoral that I've been contemplating do not involve a narrative of returning to the promised land through the desert; in fact, they do not involve narrative at all. Arcadia is a beautiful image trespassed upon and defined by its bordering wilderness (both hostile nature & the darkness of the unconscious) on one side and civilization (capitalism & the libidinal repression it demands) on the other. It is a wholly synchronous space; the diachronies of narrative and history are alien to it and threaten its precarious existence in the imagination. Arcadia is a dream of a wholly aestheticized and limited socius, in which social recognition (who is the better poet) is the only good competed for and the exploitation of nature, one's fellows, and oneself is unknown. The pastoral mindset is one of Gelassenheit, letting-be, precisely because one can afford it (this is the high privilege of pastoral that will require some further interrogation by me—Ben Friedlander explores this idea vis-a-vis the work of Lisa Robertson here). The curious thing about Pound is that for me his most pastoral moment comes in the Pisan Cantos, where so far from being privileged he is at his lowest point. The pastoral disinterest with which he regards nature there stems from a sense of his privileges having come to an end; he is "a man on whom the sun has gone down." His is the anti-pastoral pastoral of Lear, frolicing in the flowers after his power has been utterly wrest away. Come to think of it, this is the only kind of pastoral I'm really interested in: the pastoral of the powerless and homeless (though one may return to power, hopefully wiser, after one's sojourn in Arcadia, as the Duke does in As You Like It). The other version of pastoral in Pound—his agrarianism, the Monte dei Paschi, etc.—is very much the pastoral of privilege and authority, legislated from his (mostly imaginary) perch behind Mussolini's ear. So it appears I'll have to investigate more closely the "destitution" required for this pastoral, and how it is one comes to renounce one's own interest at least temporarily. As I think I've mentioned elsewhere, the urban pastoral of the NY School and the Abstract Expressionists strikes me as stemming from the desire for a beautiful world in the face of political repression on the micro and macro scale. The flight from representation is the flight from a world one has no power to change by such representation, toward a world of pure perception: color, mass, form. The pathos of their Arcadia comes from their inability to totally exclude either the macro narratives of history or the micro narratives of their own inevitably diachronic lives (et in Arcadia ego), their unhappy love affairs (the pastoral topic par excellence), and the myth of heroic suffering. But poetic shepherding also happens in the work of Frank O'Hara (for example), where fragments of his life and locus are allowed to exist immanently in constellation with each other, as his language finds them.

Gone far astray from Henry's comments, which are astute—and I think his reading of Pound would be a profitable one. But the store's getting too busy for further speculations just now. Next post will probably be about D&D anyways.

Some fine morning I'm going to get up and write something interesting on this blog again. But not this morning. Instead, I'm going to paste in the bulk of an e-mail I sent to one of my professors about my prospective dissertation project. Why am I doing this again? Because I'm hoping for ideas from you, my gentle readers. I'll get back to poetry soon, I promise.

---------------------------------------

Here is a rough sketch of the three topic areas I'd like to read in:

I) Aesthetics. In order to get a handle on the biggest questions (What is poetry for? How does it work?) I want to familiarize myself with the field of aesthetic theory in general and theories about poetry in particular. My list starts with Plato, Kant (Tracy McNulty in Romance Studies is doing a reading group for the Third Critique this summer, which will be helpful) and Schiller, goes on to include Burke, Arnold, Ruskin, and Pater, and finishes up with Lukacs, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Adorno. There might also be some supplementary reading of Marx and Marxist critics (Jameson, Raymond Williams) because the social function poetry might serve (especially as critique) is of particular interest to me.

II) Pastoral. Although my thinking about pastoral must necessarily include the _genre_ that starts with Theocritus and Virgil, I am much more interested in pastoral as a _mode_. There are a number of layers to this idea that don't yet gel, but for the time being I've put the complex of ideas and theories that will be the engine of my dissertation into the category of "pastoral":

- Pastoral dialectic: Here I want to consider the opposing views of pastoral: as a mode in which the individual withdraws from the larger society to contemplate the eternal verities of love/sex and death (classical pastoral); and the "proletarian fantasy" mode in which a convenient fiction of shepherds and nymphs serves to provide a simplified access to more complex modes of being. The latter is rooted in William Empson's book on pastoral, which if nothing else provides me with a model for moving the category "pastoral" away from a particular kind of verse and into a larger range of possibilities. In addition to reading his book more closely, this category will probably overlap somewhat with the Marxist criticism I mentioned above. And of course I'll (re)read some classical pastoral: the Idylls, the Eclogues, bits of Milton and the metaphysicals, etc.

- Pastoral of the drives: Some of the reading I've done in psychonalytic theory (Lacan and Kristeva) has suggested another way of thinking about pastoral: as a fantasy about how the organism's biological drives might find a "natural" home and "natural" objects, without there being any troubling remainder or excess. Lacan refers to the pastoral in this way in his Ethics seminar, and Kristeva describes something very similar to this in her book Revolution in Poetic Language when she talks about "a direct transcription of the genetic code" (50). My understanding of psychoanalysis is still rather tentative but I think this could be one of the most promising areas of research.

- Existential pastoral: This revolves around Heidgger and the suggestive parallels to pastoral as both a hyperindividualistic and as a political mode that I've found in his work. The Dasein who seeks to become authentic in Being and Time does so through its resolute Being-towards-death, which strikes me as resonant with the notion that death, too, is necessarily in Arcadia. This consciousness of death frees Dasein from its fallenness into the "they", taking it out of a world which is always already understood and making authentic individuality possible. There are also tantalizing suggestions of this brand of pastoral in Heidegger's imagery of the farmer in the Black Forest. But there is a tension in Heidegger's work which at least partially recuperates it from the charges of solipsism and fascism that naturally accrue to it: Heidegger's notion of the function of the art work in his later writings suggest that it can be art (and most especially poetry) which does the work that Being-towards-death does in Being and Time: it can "clear" the always already understood and make possible new relationships both among human beings (ethically, politically, religiously) and between humans and nature. I've already done much of the reading in this area but I will also want to look into some basic texts of phenomenology, as well as backward to Nietzsche and forward to Levinas and Sartre.

III) Objectivism. The poets and poems I'm most interested in reading this summer tend to cluster themselves around the second-generation Modernists often grouped together under the rubric, "The Objectivists." Williams is something of a senior member; the other poets I'm interested in reading include the core group of George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, Lorine Niedecker, and Basil Bunting; there are then some contemporaries and fellow travelers of theirs who include Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson (the latter two are instructive for the ways in which they rejected Objectivism for a kind of revivified Symbolism), and Ronald Johnson; and there is at least one contemporary poet who has publicly declared her allegiance to Objectivist principles, Rachel Blau duPlessis. The Objectivists seem like a natural choice because of their insistence upon the concrete, musical qualities of language (Zukofsky: upper limit music, lower limit speech) which will help to ground me in the home of the poetic amidst all the theory I'll be reading. Their effacement of the "I" in favor of reimagining collectivity and collective experience ("Of Being Numerous") suggests their possible affiliation with the proletarian face of pastoral. And Charles Altieri has written an important essay about them in which he described their attempts to put objects into language in such a way that there would be no remainder that would tempt the poet to insert him- or herself into the poem in a Romantic way--which sounds strikingly similar to the Lacanian pastoral fantasy I described above. And there's one more vector: many if not most of the core Objectivists were Jewish, and I have a particular interest in Jewish ethics (as differently articulated by Franz Rosenzweig, Sigmund Freud, and Emmaneul Levinas) and the ways in which it might inform their sometimes spare, sometimes baroque, but usually self-effacing and politically conscious poetry.

Over the weekend I've had a lively and engaging exchange of e-mails with the poet Reginald Shepherd, who used to teach here at Cornell. With his permission, I'm going to paste the relevant excerpts from the messages here for perusal by you, my gentle readers:

First message, from Shepherd to Corey:

...I am writing because I was quite disturbed by some comments you made regarding the relationship of poetry and politics in your recent entries. I have already written the substance of these comments to a friend who pointed out the comments, so I thought that I might as well share my thoughts with the comments' author.

Your assertion that a conservative poetics leads to a conservative politics shows a simplistic view of the relationship of literature and politics (I
had thought that deconstructing such one-to-one correspondences, art as mirror of the world, was one of the tasks of the avant-garde--certainly the Modernists were hard at work at it) and furthermore ignores the history of Anglo-American modernism. The Anglo-American moderns are notable for their conservative and even reactionary social-political stands: Yeats's contempt for democracy and the mob, Eliot's Anglo-Catholic monarchism and anti-Semitism), Pound's fascism (including massive doses of anti-Semitism). Gertrude Stein's hatred of FDR, socialism, or any egalitarian political programs. There are certainly exceptions, William Carlos Williams most prominent among them (with Stevens occupying a kind of middle ground but still, with regard to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, being in his words on the side of the coons and the snakes versus the Dagoes). It's interesting, because aside from the Italian Futurists, Celine, and some but not all of the German Expressionists, most continental European modernists were socio-political leftists (though often of a rather amorphous variety),
which got them in trouble with Herr Hitler and, earlier, with a Russian Revolution which after some hesitation decided that it liked its art safe,
accessible, and obedient to orders social, cultural, _and_ aesthetic.

In academia today, pseudo-political talk too often substitutes for talk about poetry (and literature in general)--and it's certainly easier than
actually reading and thinking about poems. And of course political talk about culture ('cultural activism') is _much_ easier than political action, which might require _doing_ something in the real and messy world. Though I am no admirer of his poetry (quite the opposite), I actually thought that it was rather brave of Billy Collins to come out publicly against mauling Iraq, given his government sinecure. Since Congress is busily renaming french fries (which are actually Belgian) "freedom fries" and "french toast" "freedom toast," along with enacting various economic measures against France (how dare they have an opinion of their own!), they will no doubt soon get around to abolishing the post of poet laureate as punishment for Mr. Collins' impertinence. Or perhaps, though, they'll just strip him of his laurel crown, like Vanessa Williams deposed as Miss America and sent off in disgrace, though not nearly so attractive...

My point is that such simple and simplistic correspondences between art and society do not exist and never have. It is odd that an
aesthetic-intellectual tendency which insists so on poetry as an autonomous language practice also so often insists on a view of literature as nothing more than an ideological epiphenomenon of society (which, as Marx reminds us and too many soi disant leftists forget, is _not_ a seamless totality, but riven, rifted, and conflicted). Adorno, for one thing, presents a much more nuanced view of the complex and shall we say over-determined nature of the relation between these two entities. Even Althusser's tautologically totalizing system allows for the semi-autonomy of art.

I should point out that Mr. Shepherd's comments were preceded and followed by some complimentary and courteous gestures that I see no need to reprint here. Here is the bulk of my reply:

First of all, I'm not sure I ever conflated conservative poetics with conservative politics in the way that you say. I'm fully prepared to concede that there are poetically conservative poets with impeccable left-wing credentials, who have found the language and the tradition more or less as given adequate to their purposes, and of course the Modernists you mention were no democrats (more on this below). There is of course no one-to-one correspondence between one's aesthetics and one's politics. But I do recognize a continuum between the big-P Political language that is being utterly debased for quasi-fascist purposes ("regime change," "shock and awe," "possible war") and the small-p political or cultural language that may be coming from the East Wing of the same White House ("there's nothing political about American literature") or from the desk of a self-appointed cultural commissar like Joseph Parisi who "sees just about everything" at his $100-million magazine. I think a poet who approaches language with a remaking rigor, with a desire to either show how dirty it's become (what I've elsewhere called "re-representation") or else to break through its clotted surface to express what's been covered over, is better equipped poetically, and _perhaps_ politically, to produce a text adequate to the crisis. I'm glad you mention Marilyn Hacker, whose work I respect a great deal: I'm not sure I would call her poetically conservative because I feel her formalism (aside from having a great ear behind it) has that breaking and resetting rigor that I demand from a poem right now. I am passionately interested in formalism, which is why I once wrote sonnets like "Kimono"; it's just that I became interested in different sources and traditions of formalism (from Baudelaire's prose poem to Pound's poem including history to Olson's projective verse to Language poetry) than those espoused by the New Formalists.

Your point about the generally fascist tendencies of many of the high Modernists is well taken, but relies perhaps on an overly symptomatic
reading of their work. As I initiate myself into Modernism studies, I am continually struck by the connections to be made between the poetry and prose of Stein, Eliot, Lawrence, et al, and the thought of Martin Heidegger, both early and late. The late Heidegger's arguments for aesthetic autonomy, for the world-founding powers of art, resonate with the early Heidegger's insistence on achieving authenticity in one's life through one's Being-towards-death, which is supposed to perform the work of "clearing" that makes it possible for Dasein to shape its individual destiny--a destiny that is most vivid outside of the socio-phenomenological boundaries that form the ordinary distracted person's world. A large part of the Modernist project seems implicated here, and the dissertation I'm working toward formulating will probably be devoted in part to showing how Heideggerian the poetics of the Modernists is. Of course, invoking Heidegger exposes and makes more plain their fascist tendencies, and I do not want to shy from this. Fascism has left an ineradicable stain upon the Modernist project, but I want to argue that there are strains of repressed resistance in Heidegger that manifest similarly in the poets. Just as Levinas' ethics of the face is
impossible without working in, through, and against Heidegger's thought, the poetically and politically radical work of the Objectivists, the Black Mountain poets, and of course the Langpos is inconceivable without the high Modernists. Whatever the political sentiments of Eliot, Pound, and Stein (sentiments that I would concede are not extrinsic from their work), they have opened an aesthetic realm in which the poetical and the political can make contact and influence each other in new ways. Stein may have rejected the New Deal, but her work clears a space for a powerful feminist and lesbian poetry far more radical than anything Roosevelt dreamed of. Pound was a fascist and an anti-Semite but his work makes Charles Olson's rediscovery of lost American histories in his poetry possible. Eliot's politics were stultifyingly conservative and his loathing of the sexual body almost comical, but "The Waste Land" is probably the first and best model in
English of a poem that deconstructs different socio-political registers through an almost Benjaminian dialectical pastiche.

...The poetics/politics or aesthetics/ethics nexus has been troubling my sleep for years, now. The dissertation is one place where I'm hoping to work out some kind of strategy for dealing with the divide, and the blog has become another.

Okay, now here's what he had to say to that:

You have misinterpreted my point about the Anglo-American Modernists, with whom I have lived in a happy agon for quite a long time; my position regarding the relationship of their too-frequently very dubious politics (the conservatism of which often involved a recoil from the unfamiliar and the Other seen as threat to the integrity of the beleaguered self) to the interrogations and explorations of their poetry (which occurred and for readers still occurs in exactly that land of unlikeness) is exactly the opposite of that which you seem to impute to me. I also wish to make it clear that I don't consider conservative or even reactionary positions as equivalent to 'fascism,' a term that is thrown around all too casually as an all-purpose political pejorative. Conservatism, at least in Europe, is often antithetical to fascism, which is after all a phenomenon of modern mass society, exactly the thing that someone like Yeats despised. I call Pound a Fascist because he proclaimed himself one, and did the work for Rome Radio to prove it. I don't think that precise thinking can occur without precise speaking and writing.

Allow me to clarify. I disagree vociferously with those--unfortunately a dominant party in the current academy--who dismiss the work because of the personal or political failings of its author, or at best read the work as a symptom of the author's opinions, feelings, or social position: in fact, regarding literature itself as a social symptom. (As Eliot wrote, poetry is not the expression of personality and emotions but the escape from these things--with the understanding that only having these things, occupying and being occupied by a subject position, could impel one to wish to get out of or out from under them). I would argue strenuously (and in several published essays have done so) against those who read Eliot's poems, say, as symptoms of his politics (or his misogyny or repressed homophobia or what-have-you), or what could be called (borrowing from Dali) the paranoiac-schizophrenic collage method of The Cantos (in which each element automatically calls to mind an association that the poem, whatever the fragmentation of its surface, insists is intrinsic and intrinsically meaningful) to Pound's clear personal need to control everyone and everything around him, which is obviously one source of his attraction to Fascism and its specious claims to order and make meaningful every aspect of life. On the contrary, I consider those aspects of these writers to be the most mundane and _uninteresting_ things about them (as I responded when one of my Cornell students asked whether Yeats was a misogynist, "Yes, and that's the least interesting thing about him").

The Anglo-American modernist cohort was not and is not distinguished the mass of people of their time or, sadly enough, of ours by their socially normative racism, homophobia (sometimes internalized, and with the conflicted exceptions of figures like HD and Hart Crane), sexism, classism, elitism (which I mean in the social and political sense rather than in the too-loosely tossed around high cultural or artistic sense, in which latter sense, 'cultural elitism', I as a gay black man who grew up in Bronx housing projects and was to a large extent rescued by Eliot, I just don't believe--whatever the frequent and specious assertions to the contrary, poems don't oppress people, though social, political, and economic systems, including other people wielding and/or being the instruments of power, certainly do) (at the risk of being hyper-parenthetical, in this regard I quite object to pseudo-political pejoratives like 'cultural commissar,' as Mr. Parisi has no state-sanctioned or otherwise power to censor or silence, simply because he chooses only to publish certain kinds of work, work in which you might not be interested, in his journal--that is, actually, a part of rather than antithetical to freedom of expression). It's that their work, while rising out of their subject positions as socially situated individuals, also rises above those limitations (while still of course bearing their scars--Adorno calls style in art one of the scars of history), reflecting them in negation. As Adorno says (and I find Adorno a much more salutary thinker on art in itself and on art's relationship to society than Heidegger, who is too often deliberately mystifying and obfuscatory about
frequently banal notions of authenticity and truth, his articulations of which I do often find disturbingly conservative in their social implications), art takes the alienation on which capitalist social relations are based and sublates it, in the Hegelian sense, into the objectification on which aesthetic relations are based--with regard to lyric poetry, it alienates language from its alienation in everyday use, negating exactly that debased use of language (with the emphasis on use, and thus on mis-use) that we both, I believe, despise and fear in its power over our daily lives and the lives of millions of other people who are not lied to on a minute-to-minute basis but cut off from the means of apprehending and articulating their own experience in any terms but those shoved down their throats and ears. Certainly some poets (hello, Billy Collins, and goodbye too) and other 'cultural producers' (a telling term) also participate in that process of debasing language and thus occluding the world and our experience of it, however honorable their political intentions (I would grant no honor to Mr. Collins' poetic intentions).

For William Carlos Williams, poetry was a mode of attention--anything could become not only the subject of a poem but a poem in itself (a note pinned to the icebox, for example) if the proper attention were paid to it, and this is a model of living in the world and actually seeing it (the life springing up along the muddy borders of the road to the contagious hospital that is death), that realm of things existing not as the objects of what Horkheimer and Adorno call instrumental reason and Lyotard calls performativity which Kant calls the kingdom of ends, freedom itself. Whatever Eliot may have "thought" (and his best poems, at least, exhibit a mind too find to be violated by ideas, as he wrote of Henry James, in the sense that they enact the process of feeling/thinking rather than laying out the conclusions to which one comes after one has discarded that process--this latter state of certainty afflicts the Four Quartets, much to their detriment), his poems enact that same exploratory openness to an experience of word and world. Having recently taught "Prufrock," "Preludes," "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," and The Waste Land, I was struck by the way in which the last section of The Waste Land, What the Thunder Said, in contrast to those other poems which are willing to enact their multiple dilemmas--social, historical, psychological (and, yes, spiritual), economic, sexual, aesthetic--without claiming to be able to resolve them, pulls back from the presentation and exploration of situation into the attempt, however tentative or tenuous, to claim possession of A Solution, which turns out to be "Find God": a real let down from the rest of the poem's willingness to explore rather than merely answer questions. As Yeats said, poetry is what we make out of what we _don't_ know. But again, as I tell my students all the time, we only care about any of these author's personal or social opinions (including Eliot's Christianity--even if one were a believer, Christian, Buddhist, or Hindu, to name the three possibilities the end of The Waste Land offers, one wouldn't need to read Eliot's poetry for the sake of faith) because we care about their poems.

It's exactly art's semi-autonomy that allows it to both posit a realm beyond the imperatives of capitalism in particular and social/political/economic power in general and to acknowledge and even insist on that realm's impossibility or at least its present inaccessibility--when it doesn't acknowledge this, when what Adorno calls art's promise of happiness claims that it can be fulfilled in the world as it is, it's not art but mere escapism, a lie that tells a lie rather than a lie that tells the truth. Speaking of Barnes and Noble, to which I myself much prefer Borders, and speaking also of the odd and unexpected circumstances in which one can find a glimpse of truth (and only, as in Frost's poem, a glimpse, and momentary--for once, then, something), last week a banner in the music section of Pensacola's local branch displayed a remarkably and apparently utterly accidentally Adornian quote from someone of whom I've never so much as heard, one Edward H. Howe: "When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have." I would say that thing is freedom, where people and things exist for their own sakes and not for the sake of profit or power or some other end extrinsic to the actual existence of the entities of the world.

So on the issue of the Modernists and their heritage, I believe that we are in agreement. I was simply questioning the implied equation I read in your web log between aesthetic tendency and political tendency.

Still here? Okay, here's the latest and last component of our exchange, sent by me:

It does in fact look like we are in fundamental agreement about the importance of the Modernists and the "happy agon" (a happy phrase) many contemporary poets have with them. I was interested and moved by your statement that you felt yourself to be "rescued" by Eliot--he and Stevens were the two poets who had the most impact on me when I was a teenager and it's a tribute to poetry as an art form that they can and do stimulate and provoke "a gay black man who grew up in Bronx housing projects" as much as they did this straight white Jewish boy from an affluent Jersey suburb.

I've been planning to read Adorno's Aesthetic Theory for some time, and your e-mails only make my encounter with his thought seem that much more urgent. I'm familiar with Adorno--I've slogged my way through Negative Dialectics and Minima Moralia is one of my favorite books of philosophy--but it's becoming clear to me that his contribution to aesthetic theory will be crucial for my understanding of the topic. One reason Heidegger has appealed to me, for all his wilfull obscurantism and Nazi utterances, is that his notion of art is one that builds something (bilds something?) in the world, something that newly arranges human relations both to other humans and to the self, as well as to that vexed and nearly forgotten thing called Nature (this is what he calls somewhat ponderously the "fourfold" of man, the gods, the sky, and the earth). Adorno's essential negativity frustrates me, even as his "corrosive postmodern no" provides a devastating and necessary
critique of the administered world (something nearly equivalent to Heidegger's "world-picture" or technological "enframing"--he has a lot more
in common with Adorno than the latter would like to admit). So I haven't given up on the notion of art's at least having an influence on the actual world (as much, surely, as the actual world has upon it), on its ability to press back on "reality" with all the considerable force of the Stevensian "imagination," and on its role as a vehicle for imagining other possibilities, even if a genuine utopia must always be no place. This is why pastoral interests me and will probably become the organizing trope for my dissertation. I believe that Modernist poetry contains the seeds of both a negative pastoral and an erotic pastoral. "The Waste Land" might be a negative pastoral, in that it suggests an unrecoverable but much-longed-for whole through its mosaic of fragments--a mosaic which as you point out is falsely resolved in the poem's final section. This kind of pastoral is death-haunted, constructing a Being-towards-death for the speaker who arrives at his authenticity at the cost of a sociality which always contains an erotic dimension ("Prufrock" is another good example of this). Erotic pastoral is the strain in Modernism that celebrates rather than recoils at the tropes of the Heideggerian inauthentic (idle chatter, curiosity, ambiguity), that finds new worlds in which the possibility of a heroically "inauthentic" sociality become possible. Stein and Woolf's opening of a field for women, the domestic sphere, and a specifically feminine/lesbian eroticism is a good example of this kind of pastoral. Perhaps the most paradigmatic Modernist for what I'm talking about would be D.H Lawrence: [in Women in Love] Birkin's weird conception of marriage as two stars locked in orbit around each other yet somehow "unaffected" by each other is a tortured attempt at a compromise between a valorization of the authentic self
being-towards-his-death and a valorization of being-with-others, of erotic and ethical engagement with them. Negative pastoral rejects the inauthentic, which means it rejects all possible political spheres except perhaps for a single collective blut-und-boden; erotic pastoral does engender an ethics but it puts an emphasis on privacy that can make the political seem irrelevant. Williams might offer a useful alternative: his Arcady is Paterson, N.J. and grounding erotic pastoral in a particular place with a particular history might open up non-authoritarian political possibilities. I'm still working these ideas out, obviously, and I expect they will change considerably, perhaps beyond recognition, as I continue to research pastoral, aesthetics, Modernism, and Modernism's Romantic/Victorian precursors.

What the hell am I working on? Is it the Pound chapter or the introduction? I know I should just put the chapter to bed (well, at this moment it's still sitting in front of the TV and begging me for "five more minutes") but it's impossible not to think about the Big Picture and nearly impossible to reconcile thinking about the Big Picture with the fine detail work that is actual chapter writing. What I should probably do is write some "introduction" (this would be my half-dozenth attempt at writing one) just to scratch the itch in my head and clarify a few things. Then I can go back to Pound refreshed. A conversation with my chair last week convinced me that I need to address the split in the two general interpretations of pastoral (as social construct, as engagement with nature) that I alluded to the other day head-on in the intro. I think I can use Heidegger to bridge the gap. Been reading some essays on Being and Time and the concept of "authenticity" (Eigentlichkeit), a better translation for which might be "ownness." My challenge is to extract from Heidegger's existentialism a historical construct, or rather to see it as such: an account, reading against the grain, of this existentialism as almost a modernist artwork rather than a structural account of timeless Dasein. It means misreading Heidegger, I think. What do the environmentalists do with him? Is it just his critique of technology and the "world-picture" that they embrace? As always, I'm less interested in any given author's intent than in what we can do with him or her—ever since I embraced poetry I've embraced my own tendency to creatively misread, which valorizes the present and future-potential over the claims of the past to be accurately transcribed. Not a historian's approach, I'll grant you, but you have to be true to your own nature—if you're lucky enough to discover what it is.

Lookee lookee at this new mag Puppyflowers—new to me, anyway. I often have a hard time reading poems on the web, but the large bright font against the dark pseudo-wood background is very legible. Particularly enjoying Shafer Hall's "The Dray Man & His Dray Horse Draw the Bulk Away," Shanna's alliterative "A Latin Atlas," and this remarkable line from Rachel Levitsky: "alley/gully/gutter/shaft".

Well will you just look at the time!

The Garden State soundtrack has become a fixture in the coffeeshops of Ithaca. I often hear it at Gimme! and they seem to have it on continuous repeat here at Juna's on the Commons. Is this true everywhere? Saw The Life Aquatic last night and thought it a gorgeous trainwreck, kind of similar to I [Heart] Huckabees. What a great soundtrack, though—Portugeuse Bowie! I may have to pick that up.

Fallen, as it were, back into Heidegger today—trying to better crystalize the pastoral strain in his thought. One of his more important verbs is tarrying [verweilen], a state somewhat similar to the Stimmung of disinterestedness Kant saw as key to aesthetic judgment. When we tarry with something we are concerned solely with "how it looks"—that is, its surface facticity, its Being-in-the-world with emphasis on in-the-world, with us. Tarrying is associated with comfort and recreation (he gives us the Greek for these on page 138 of Being and Time) and opposed to "the world of work": it is made possible by care (Sorge) set free as circumpsection (Umsicht) or looking. The key passage is on page 172, right after the striking phrase "the lust of the eyes" (Augenlust?):

Being-in-the-world is proximally absorbed in the world of concern. This concern is guided by circumspection, which discovers the ready-to-hand and preserves it as thus discovered. Whenever we have something to contribute or perform, circumspection gives us the route for proceeding with it, the means of carrying it out, the right opportunity, the appropriate moment. Concern may come to rest in the sense of one's interrupting the performance and taking a rest, or it can do so by getting it finished. In rest, concern does not disappear; circumspection, however, becomes free and is no longer bound to the world of work. When we take a rest, care subsides into circumspection which has been set free. In the world of work, circumspective discovering has de-severing as the character of its Being. When circumspection has been set free, there is no longer anything ready-to-hand which we must concern ourselves with bringing close [the ready-to-hand is the world of equipment and productive activity]. But, as essentially de-severant, this circumspection provides itself with new possibilities of de-severing. this means that it tends away from what is most closely ready-to-hand, and into a far and alien world. Care becomes concern with the possibilities of seing the "world" merely as it looks while one tarries and takes a rest. Dasein seeks what is far away simply in order to bring it close to itself in the way it looks. Dasein lets itself be carried along [mitnehmen] solely by the looks of the world; in this kind of Being, it concerns itself with becoming rid of itself as Being-in-the-world and rid of its Being alongside that which, in the closest everyday manner, is ready-to-hand.

That's basically phenomenology: tarrying becomes the mode or mood in which bracketing can take place. This is what Heidegger elsewhere calls "the arduous path of appearance" that was so important to George Oppen ("That they are there!"). It's arduous because taking a rest from the everyday world of production is actually a kind of sacrifice, akin to the sacrifice made by those who keep the Jewish shabbat: it takes you out of the world, it instills difference. The progress of difference from primordial authenticity to hospitality for the stranger is the progress of the twentieth century, in my opinion, though it's suffered many setbacks. The shift from Heidegger to Levinas mimics the shift from modernism to postmodernism, if we conceive of the latter as an ethical project (which most people don't). Hm. My mind insists on patterns and resemblances that are probably naive; I'm probably redescribing the described here. Well, it's only a dissertation: a contribution to knowledge, to my knowledge, which is bound to make me a better teacher at least. Anything truly new there is just a happy accident. I've always suspected that however much I enjoy scholarship, it's poetry where I'll make my mark or fail to. Language is smarter than I am, after all, and poetry puts that hierarchy in its proper place, whereas in criticism I'm trying to master language and success is measured by the margin of my failure. What saves the project is in fact the happiness of accident, or just plain fun. It's fun to put your thoughts in order, whatever Mussolini might say. It's fun to discover that you have them: again, "That they are there!" Yip.

Josh Hanson, whose blog I've just become aware of, has this response to what I said about Oppen yesterday. Got all that? Hanson (to avoid confusion I won't call him "Josh") argues that since Oppen operates from a presumption of Heidggerian "in the worldness" or "being-with," the transcendental dichotomy that I extrapolated from his letter doesn't make sense. Of course, Heidegger's position is, literally, hard to determine: always already in the hermeneutic Kreis? It's been impossible for me to determine the vantage point from which Heidegger is able to make his observations about authentic being, etc.—how did he manage to escape the conditioning of modern inauthenticity? Sheer geniusness? Poetic thinking? Etymology? But anyway, we don't entirely escape dichotomy even if I accept Hanson's description of Oppen's stance, because the poem takes on a dual nature: it's an object (another object in-the-world on the same playing field as the objects that compose it—both the words and their referents) but it's also a "sincere document" of being-in-the-world (which is more or less synonymous with object-ness, no?). So already the poem is not identical with itself; a document is another object-in-the-world, but one that refers. I guess now I'm wondering if the act of referring is not automatically transcendental; even on the linguistic level, the semiotic is transcendental to the semantic, or vice versa. One could insist, I suppose, that the poem-as-object and the poem-as-document-as-object exist on the same horizontal plane. But the passage of time—the retreat into the past of the event-objects documented by the poem while the language the poem does its documenting in remains perpetually present-tensed—irresistibly introduces an elevated vantage point occupied by the reader, and probably the poet too. Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquility" becomes Oppen's "object recorded in language." Oppen can then, through a kind of rhetorical force of skepticism or scorn, push language back down onto the level of its objects. But he goes against language's grain to do this, and it pushes back.

Well, even if I have managed to make a case for the (resisted) transcendental in Oppen, this doesn't address Hanson's point that Oppen's nominal poetics precludes anything resembling engagement, leaving us with the paradox of a leftist man with an artistocratic or decadent artistic stance resembling l'art pour l'art. This actually makes a good argument for Oppen as a pastoralist in Empson's sense of pastoral being about but not for "the people." Oppen's politics can only manifest in the poetry as another object for sincere documentation. Or perhaps they can manifest in/as language, which insists on its difference from the object-life it refers to. Stripped nude, almost obscenely so, his langugage nonetheless continues to manifest the strange Odradek-life that words display more antically in the mouth of a "Radical Dogberry" (to borrow a title from Chris Stroffolino), expressing themselves as objects almost simultaneously with the objects they express. Insofar as language always exceeds intention, it retains at least a subversive potential. But "subversive" isn't democratic, is it? I'm merely making the same argument by which Ezra Pound can be found to be deconstructing his own Fascist project for coherence. Language asserts its own autonomy and attacks all intentions, good or bad. I'm not prepared to accept this argument, which is too simple by half, but I can't think my way out of it just now.

Funny though to realize how I've taken Oppen's extreme aesthetic ascetism, which famously led him to renounce poetry altogether for decades, as a badge of his political goodwill, if not his efficacy: the existence of a leftist politics coupled with a refusal of the usual luxuries of poetic subjectivism led me to assume a causal connection that may not actually exist. It could even be read as a moment of classically Modernist snobbery. The refusal of poetry's usual pleasures does and will exclude many readers; I am reminded here of Adam Kirsch's claim in the new Poetry that a "poetics of authenticity" (back to Heidegger?) has been the dominant one in the past half-century of so; I don't agree with him at all that it's a failed project (Kirsch focuses willfully on a conception of totally bourgeois, individual authenticity, excluding alternative political possibilities and social imperatives) but I do think he might be on to something when he refers to the acesticism of such a poetry, its Puritan refusal of pleasure. Of course the pleasures he refers to are very specific ones, primarily the pleasures of meter and rhyme that we associated with conventional poetic beauty. That beauty might take other forms does not seem to occur to Kirsch, and he is also clearly uninterested in the notion of a sublime or Brechtian anti-beauty or unpleasure that does another kind of work on its reader. I'm tempted to call Kirsch's conception of beauty aristocratic, but if so it masquerades as populism—"it's not a real poem if it don't rhyme" and so forth. But here I am again using political metaphors to talk about aesthetic questions whose separation from politics (a capital-M mode of being-in-the-world) I've just demonstrated. It's a powerful habit which may itself have something to tell us about how language manages to both be in-the-world and also about-the-world. More on this later, maybe.

Heidegger, my muse and bane, is famous for saying that "Language is the house of Being." I identify the basic tension I feel as a poet in that statement and its reverse, "Being is the house of Language." On the one hand you have Heidegger's basically Romantic view of things: the poem uses language to disclose the experience of Being—an experience which, as near as I can tell, is something like that of the sublime. The poet's language, which is lifted out from ordinary language and purged of its instrumentality (language which is always for something, language as resource or "standing reserve," the language of industry, commerce, and production), becomes an experience in its own right, language for its own sake, which somehow (there's the rub! somehow) creates for the reader an intuition of experience that is not normally speakable. This is the "order of angels" behind ordinary experience, available only to the poet who can perform that act of "clearing" the language, who can deinterpret the world:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed
in his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure,
and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.
   And so I check myself and swallow the luring call
of dark sobs. Alas, whom can we turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and the sly animals see at once
how little at home we are
in the interpreted world.

—from Duino Elegies, translated by Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2000), p. 5.

So there's that. On the other hand, angels have been done to death, and Rilke's dark sobs banalized through repetition, and Derrida and the Language poets and even Heidegger in a different mood will tell you that subjectivity, the "I" of the poet is a fiction useful primarily to the dominant ideology, and Romantic poetry questing for an indvidiualistic experience of Being is mostly a cover for the solipsistic reification of what has become under late capitalism an emptor ergo sum. Thousands of poets stand in their backyards with a glass of wine in their hand, experiencing the last-line epiphany bestowed by a language that, in cleansing itself of everyday associations, has accidentally and by-the-way been removed from any conceivable context of encounter, sociality, or politics. These are the folks nodding along to Auden's "Poetry makes nothing happen" and thanking their lucky stars. Standing in righteous opposition to them are a bunch of Marxists every bit as concerned as the Romantics with renovating ordinary language. But they aren't chasing the sublime: they want to rub your face in the toxicity of language in the service of ideology so that you'll wake up from your carceral slumber, Matrix-style, and be moved not into some (necessarily?) depoliticized sublime but into political action. The best expression of this point of view (a point of view explicitly hostile to art if art is conceived in any way as a palliative or compensation or commodity), in content if not perhaps in form, is from Michael Palmer's "Baudelaire Series":

A man undergoes pain sitting at a piano
knowing thousands will die while he is playing

He has two thoughts about this
If he should stop they would be free of pain

If he could get the notes right he would be free of pain
In the second case the first thought would be erased

causing pain

It is this instance of playing

he would say to himself
my eyes have grown hollow like yours

my head is enlarged
though empty of thought

Such thoughts destroy music
and this at least is good

—from Sun (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), p. 19.

The irony of both poets' being published by the same press is another suggestion to me, though an irrational one, that these two opposed positions might not be inseparable. Perhaps it's just a question as to which point you privilege when you negotiate your piece of turf between them.

I haven't really expressed here what "Being is the house of Language" might mean, but I imagine it has something to do with an insistence upon the experience of the signifier qua signifier as being central to poetry. That is, it's a quasi-theoretical way of insisting upon something I haven't touched on at all, which is the transformation of language into a rich and strange sensory experience as being the crucial component of the poetry I value most. Both of these texts partially fail that test: the Rilke because it's in translation, the Palmer because it isn't sufficiently divorced from ordinariness. Of course Rilke does succeed wonderfully in the original (Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen?) whereas the dryness of Palmer's language is very much part of his point.

Up absurdly early this morning because of all the stuff I've got to do today:

1) Teach: Well, this is actually no biggie, I do it all the time. And a movie like Nikita practically discusses itself.

2) Teach Next Year: Today is the English department's deadline for turning in your request form for what you'd like to teach in the fall and spring. I've been dithering over this because I wasn't even sure I should teach, at least not both semesters. My book is coming out in September or perhaps October and I'm going to want to travel around reading from it. And in the spring I'm going to be looking for creative writing jobs which (hopefully) will involve traveling for on-campus interviews. All the while I'm supposed to be writing my dissertation. But I now think I can teach a Tuesday-Thursday schedule without much difficulty: I can always get somebody to sub for me if I go touring for a week, and as far as interviews and such go they usually happen on weekends, so as long as I don't have to be in a classroom Fridays and Mondays it should be manageable.

The larger question then becomes: what should I teach? Cornell's First-Year Writing classes follow a "writing in the disciplines" approach and come in a variety of stock flavors—I'm one of perhaps seven people teaching some variant of "Writing about Film" this year. But film isn't really my subject and the only poetry class that gets offered every year is something of a shapeless survey. How can I teach something centered on my own interests (Modernism and/or postwar American poetry) that's going to draw freshmen? I woke up at quarter to six this morning with an inspiration for a class that I'm going to call New York Poets and Poetries. Its course description will look something like this:

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son

Can you capture New York in a poem? In this course we will read some of the poems that have come to be associated with the sprawling mass of contradictions that is New York City, and explore their role in shaping how we've come to experience the city today. We will consider the work of poets who differ radically in their aesthetics, politics, and ethnic or sexual identities, all of whom have strong claims to being poets of New York. We will start with Whitman, perhaps still the most representative and inclusive poet of the city, and move up to study the nightmare New York of Federico Garcia Lorca, the urban pastoral of New York School poets like Frank O'Hara and Barbara Guest, and the spoken word poetry of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, before concluding with a consideration of contemporary New York poetry in the aftermath of 9/11. Students will write critical essays on a range of poets and topics, and perhaps try their hand at a poem or two of their own.

Poetry is never a big draw, but many, many Cornell students come from New York and I think that description might be enough to hook the requisite dozen or so I need to have a class. It will require me to learn a thing or two (aside from a few encounters with the Aloud anthology I know nothing, really, about the Nuyorican poets) and will also give me a chance to introduce stranger, more subversive ideas about poetics than students are likely to encounter in other poetry classes here. When it comes to latter-day manifestations of the New York School I'm really a babe in the woods, so I would appreciate any New York-knowledgable readers of this blog to e-mail me with names and suggestions for a class on this topic taught by a bridge-and-tunnel kind of guy.

My day isn't over, not by a long shot:

3) Prepare presentation for "Writing Home Conference": This weekend divers papers are being presented under this loose and inclusive rubric, one of which is a paper I wrote in which I wrestled seriously with deconstruction for the first time—I think it was a draw. The paper's called "Deconstructing the Diasporic: 'Jewish Writing' and Its Zionist Other," and it's a doozy at 25 pages which I have to figure out how to compress into a 20-minute presentation. Here's the abstract I e-mailed the conference organizers back when this all seemed like a good idea:

My paper is concerned with the characterization of "Jewish writing" as necessarily diasporic in the thought of Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari. The "minor literature" that Deleuze and Guattari describe Kafka as practicing is explicitly opposed to the literature of "symbolic reterritorialization" that must have "its political result in Zionism and such things as the ‘dream of Zion.’" Deleuze and Guattari valorize a writing of deterritorialization which disrupts the official "maps" of conventional literary representation—a nomadic, diasporic kind of writing that acts on the reader like Barthes’ "text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss." Derrida’s thought suggests an ethical valence for what would otherwise be an inscription of pure negativity: the refusal of metaphysical presence, ontological stability, and "at-homeness" (Heimlichkeit, chez soi) creates a space for "Other" thinking to emerge. This ethics for diasporic writing is derived from the work of Emmanuel Levinas and his precursors Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger. My presentation will revolve around an examination of Levinas’s ethical philosophy (in a literary context) and what I call its repressed Zionism—that is, the ways in which it suggests possibilities for Jewish writing that go beyond the diasporic. Levinas attacks Heidegger’s claims for the fundamental importance of ontology and describes ethical imperatives for the subject that are derived from the messianic mission of the (necessarily diasporic) Jewish people as described in Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. Yet while Levinas devotes considerable energy to attacking Heidegger’s presentation of ontology as prima philosophia, he nonetheless grants an ontological stability and rootedness to the subject—a rootedness which that subject is only compelled to abandon out of his or her desire for justice. This desire can only be achieved if the Jews are willing to step back into the ordinary, Christian history that Rosenzweig’s "eternity" excludes them from—yet they are asked to do it without the metaphysical security other nations take in their historical and geographical rootedness. In the last part of my paper I offer a Levinasian interpretation of Kafka’s parable "Before the Law." I argue that the man from the country in Kafka’s text has voluntarily placed himself in the impossible position of an ethical Zionism, and in so doing suggests possibilities for a Jewish writing that is willing and able to risk fullness of representation while remaining responsive to the demands of the Other.

Naturally I've done almost no preparation at all, so I'm going to have to spend the morning and part of the afternoon after my class snipping and sniping at the damn thing. Maybe I'll just read the abstract. Very. Slowly.

This also means I have to wear a sportcoat and slacks to school under a ten-year-old topcoat in 10-degree weather.

4) Romance: Yes it's Valentine's Day in the third year of the reign of George II, and I'm fresh out of duct tape. But in spite of all that, my girlfriend Emily and I are going to try and have a romantic dinner after the conference at a local restaurant called Turback's which I happen to have a gift certificate for. Don't know if the food's any good, but we can at least afford one or two decent bottles of wine, which I'm going to need.

Thanks for reading, all—and good luck to all you wonderful protesters in New York and elsewhere tomorrow. No pasarán!

Sitting at one of the upstairs windows at Juna's Cafe, looking down on the Commons while snow follows its own meandering path downward. Trying as usual to lay hands on the separate pieces of my dissertation, trying not to be daunted by the scale of it all. My Pound chapter is turning into a Pound/Heidegger chapter, which seems natural enough: both were tremendously influential on postmodern poets/thinkers with progressive tendencies; both were themselves Fascists. Extracting the pastoral dimension of Heidegger's thought is like unwinding a ball of yarn into a second, identical ball: painstaking and yet a bit obvious, at least to me. (But it's the moment, the action, the energeia of unspooling that matters, right? "On the Way to Language," indeed....) Still nowhere near actually discussing The Cantos or even Pound's "Imagist" poems. It's going to be a long chapter. I hope the others come more swiftly.

I really enjoyed writing "The Prisoner Poems" below and thanks to those who've remarked on them. I tried to use the show as a kind of pivot around which to swing some verbal energy, as opposed to writing "about" it. I imagine it's a similar impulse to that expressed by David Lynch's use of noir conventions in Mullholland Drive; they're there to inspire and to provide a web of reference for the audience, without actually constituting a "plot" or "subject matter." Shannna, just because I "beat you to it" doesn't mean the world doesn't need more poems about The Prisoner! In fact, that might make a nice anthology to follow up Aubergine. (Speaking of which, like Michael, I too received a Yale Review subscription flyer in the eggplant aftermath. I figured it was because J.D. McClatchy had my address, but now I wonder.... Of course I get unsolicited poetry-related mail fairly frequently; we could just all be on the same list because we once subscribed to Poets & Writers or something.)

Later on I'll post my own stab at Court Green's bouts-rime challenge.

Huh. New-style Blogger interface. Think I prefer the old one. Anyway, I spent the morning pleasurably immersed in Giorgio Agamben's short, dense book The Coming Community. Agamben is a philosopher very much working in the wake of Heidegger and Levinas, and in some ways this book reads like an attempt to synthesize their thought--an ethical ontology. The argument is not easily summarized, but what fascinates me about the book is how it gestures toward quiddity or the "whatever" (not in the sense of "whatever, man" but as a way of gesturing on a thing's tendency to be whatever it particularly is. It's the attribute of having "whatness") as the fundamental property of beings, a property that itself does not belong to either the particular or the universal. It reminds me strongly of that Oren Izenberg article in the Fall 2003 issue of Critical Inquiry, in which Izenberg argues that the project of Language poetry is "the ontological and ethical practice" of gesturing toward "the human capacity of free and creative agency" lodged within language qua language. The Language project becomes particularly visible in Agamben's formulation of its opposite: the condition of language under the society of the spectacle in which we all live. Here, the "communicativity" essential to any sense of community that is not predicated on "identity"—that is, the possibility of escaping the oppression of the State or homogenous nation—has been erased and absorbed by the spectacle, which replaces that possiblity with its sinister and inane tautology "What appears is good; what is good appears." In the following quote, Agamben assigns the Hebrew word "Shekinah" as a symbol of language reified as an instrument of knowledge (another barrier to what Agamben calls "the Common":

What hampers communication is communicability itself; humans are separated by what unites them. Journalists and mediacrats are the new priests of this alienation from human linguistic nature.

     In the society of spectacle, in fact, the isolation of the Shekinah reaches its final phase, where language is not only constituted in an autonomous sphere, but also no longer even reveals anything--or better, it reveals the nothingness of all things. There is nothing of God, of the world, or of the revealed in language. In this extreme nullifying unveiling, however, language (the linguistic nature of humans) remains once again hiden and separated, and thus, one last time, in its unspoken power, it dooms humans to a historical era and a State: the era of the spectacle, or of accomplished nihilism. This is why today power founded on a presupposed foundation is tottering all over the globe and the kingdoms of the earth set course, one after another, for the democratic-spectacular regime that constitutes the completion of the State-form. Even more than economic necessity and technological development, what drives the nations of the earth toward a single common destiny is the alienation from linguistic being, the uprooting of all peoples from their vital dwelling in language.

     For this very reason, however, the era in which we live is also that in which for the first time it is possible for humans to experience their own linguistic being--not this or that content of language, but language itself, not this or that true proposition, but the very fact that one speaks. Contemporary politics is this devastating experimentum linguae that all over the planet unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities.

This sounds so close to Izenberg that I'm convinced he must have been drawing upon Agamben for his argument; I wish I had a copy of the article in front of me. But in any case I'm very attracted to the suggestion here that the role of poetry is in unlocking "the very fact that one speaks"--it's Heidegger's "Language is the house of Being" transformed into an imperative. (An interesting parallel here between poetry as providing access to linguistic being and Allen Grossman's more humanist notion of poetry as being the power of granting personhood; but  think Grossman sees poetry more conservatively as a means of representation--which would trap him within the State/identity paradigm.) And of course I'm hardwired to try and think this through pastoral--Virgil's Eclogues give us a liminal space between wilderness (later aka myth) and civilization (later aka Enlightenment) whose shepherds create a provisional community based upon their powers of song. By relating to each other primarily as singers, as opposed to economic or political units, they create a humane and livable community, albeit one that is both imaginary (the fantasy of aristocrats) and always under threat (as signified by the eviction of Meliboeus in the First Eclogue).
 
Maybe I will end up doing a chapter on the Language poets (heavily indebted to Izenberg) in which I examine their project, or a chunk of it, as a pastoral one. But another question opens: what are we, the post-Language poets, up to? By returning to "content" are we manufacturing identities and falling prey to the spectacle? Or are we simply asserting our own ontic particularity in protest against the levelling of affect seen in much Language poetry, synecdochic of the indiscriminate cutting edge of revolutionary violence? Pound believed that Social Credit would make it possible to technically correct society's ills; it was an alternative to revolution. The technician usually fails to anticipate the ways in which his experiment will change its conditions. On the other hand, the revolutionary lets a thousand flowers bloom by lopping off the heads of thousands more. Agamben writes, "Selecting in the new planetary humanity those characteristics that allow for its survival, removing the thin diaphragm that separates bad mediatized advertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates only itself--this is the political task of our generation." The critical question then becomes: what is the nature of Agamben's proposal? Is it technical, revolutionary--or some barefly imagined hybrid?

Really getting into it now. Yesterday I read Eleven New Cantos (31-41), which forecast later nuttinesses: wholesale importation of presidential diariess, Major Douglas' Social Credit, Greek words sparkling with the same luster Heidegger tried to put on them (I think of Heidegger more and more as I read; he and Pound had similar ideas around techne). Learning things about Martin van Buren, a president I never expected to care about; Pound's hero for remarks like "Thou shalt not. . . jail 'em for debt" (Canto 37). More anti-Semitism in Canto 35, what my trot, William Cookson's A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound mincingly calls a "satire, directed agaisnt Viennese Jewish society. . . not narrowly racialist." Oh no? When someone named "Tsievitz / has explained to me the warmth of affections, / the intramural, the almost intravaginal warmth of / hebrew affections, in the family, and nearly everything else...." One could come up with a positive spin on "intravaginal" if one labored hard enough, I suppose, but it's meant to disgust and succeeds. Cookson's apologetics are often hard to take, as in this paragraph explaining Pound's adoration of Mussolini, who appears as "the Boss" (and who finds the Cantos Pound shows him amusing, "divertente"):

It is probably impossible to have the kind of acute perception which Pound possessed without a counterbalancing blindness. In politics he missed much which was obvious to people not "afflicted with genius." But it needs to be pointed out that despite Pound's admiration for Mussoini, the political thought of the Cantos represents an attempt to restore the Anglo-Saxon heritage—it is against unlimited sovereignty and therefore fundamentally anti-fascist. Of such contradictions poems are made.

It's more Cookson's tone than what he says that raises my suspicions and hackles. Because there is indeed evidence of an unfascist, even anarchistic Pound in the Cantos, as in this extract from a letter by John Adams in Canto 33 [the typography here is hard to duplicate]:

Is that despotism
or absolute power...unlimited sovereignty,
is the same in a majority of a popular assembly,
an aristocratical council, equally arbitrary, bloody,
and in every respect diabolical. Wherever it has resided
has never failed to destroy all records, memorials,
all histories which it did not like, and to corrupt
those it was cunning enough to preserve......

Plus there are again the beauties, scattered here and there but sometimes concentrated, as in Canto 39, which evokes the dangers and erotic pleasures of Circe's island:

               there in the glade
To Flora's night, with hyacinthus,
With the crocus (spring
               sharp in the grass,)
Fifty and forty together
               ERI MEN AI TE KUDONIAI [In the spring the quinces]
Betuene Aprile and Merche
               with sap new in the bough
With plum flowers above them
               with almonds on the black bough
With jasmine and olive leaf,
To the beat of the measure
From star up to the half-dark
From half-dark to half-dark
               Unceasing the measure
Flank by flank on the headland
               with the Goddess' eyes to seaward
By Circeo, by Terracina, with the stone eyes
               white toward the sea
With one measure, unceasing:
               "Fac deum!" "Est factus." ["Make God!" "He is made."]
Ver novum! [New spring!]
               ver novum!
Thus made the spring,
Can see but their eyes in the dark
               not the bough that he walked on.
Beaten from flesh into light
Hath swallowed the fire-ball
A traverso le foglie [Through the leaves]
His rod hath made god in my belly
               Sic loquitur nupta [So the bride speaks]
               Cantat sic nupta [So sings the bride]

Dark shoulders have stirred the lightning
A girl's arms have nested the fire,
Not I but the handmaid kindled
               Cantat sic nupta
I have eaten the flame.

He really does try to awaken the gods, doesn't he? Pound's battle-cry is "Damned to you Midas, Midas lacking a Pan!" (Canto IV). The spirit of unexploited nature. Here's where I begin to stitch the idea of Social Credit to pastoral; I don't know enough about economics to understand exactly why it's as nutty as everyone says it is (though I do understand Pound's fatal conflation of use-value with exchange-value, which is what enables him to discredit the labor theory of value; for all his epic reach, Pound wasn't much of a systematizer), but there's something powerful about the notion of "underconsumption"—that there are goods/gods aplenty and we just don't have a fair system of distributing them. One purely pastoral solution to this is Morris' world of artisanship and handicrafts, and Pound pays some homage to this idea. But by lodging the creditor, the usurer, in the position of devil, he ends up praising not just the forces of production but everything to do with production: the capitalist (more often pictured as an aristocrat like Malatesta) is celebrated because he owns the means of production, and his exploitation of the workers goes unnoticed. Douglas Mao, who's on my dissertation committee, makes a brilliant observation about this in his chapter on Pound in his book Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production:

[V]irtually the same take on subject-object relations that serves a Marxist politics when the normative subject is a member of the proletariat can be absorbed by an anti-Marxist, and in this case lingeringly Fascist, agenda when the subject in question belongs to the class of rulers. It is worth recalling, in addition, that Pound's regression to the archaic form of instruction to princes in these cantos [Rock-Drill and Thrones] virtually requires him to neglect the changes in the experience of making engendered by mass production, to imagine techne (against his earlier habit of opposing the artisinal to the industrial) as a mode of knowledge that operates similarly in handicraft, assembly line work, and government. Viewed in relation to the thinking of a Marxist like Lucacs, therefore, this passage shows also how Pound's alignment with Fascism, if in some respects adventitious, was nonetheless supported by a characteristically Fascist transformation of revolutionary rhetoric into a gospel of action founded on historical continuity rather than rupture, and in particular upon an excision (from the center of historical inquiry) of attention to alterations in the conditions of production. (183)

What I find most suggestive here for my own project is the notion of how a critical approach to the operations of capitalism (instrumental reason, quantity absorbing quality, etc.) utterly transforms depending upon the subject position of the critic. Pound's fatal flaw then becomes his identification with rulers rather than the ruled (consider how directly the instincts of a Pound-influenced poet like Oppen run in the opposite direction). But there's something deeply pastoral about this: I think again on Shakespeare's pastoral plays, As You Like It and The Tempest in particular, in which a ruler forced out of power and into nature discovers a new wisdom, even a new power, from his association with nature; and when he returns to power at the end of the play he presumably will carry with him the new knowledge, which will make him a more just or perhaps just more secure ruler. Propsero is an interesting figure because he must renounce the power his ability to read the book of nature has given him before he becomes Duke again; he must drown it. To carry back the power of shaping nature to the throne would certainly turn him into a despot. The best example of pastoral lesson-teaching in Shakespeare comes in the anti-pastoral of King Lear, where exposure to what "poor wretches feel" prompts the king to say, "O, I have ta'en / Too little care of this!" We do get a more genuinely pastoral scene later, when the mad king is dressed in flowers. But this pastoral prepares him for death, not rulership. Hm. Well, it's the germ of an idea, and something may take shape around it today, as I plunge into The Fifth Decad of Cantos, 42-51.

A beautiful day has become, I imagine, a beautiful evening. I have to imagine it because I'm stuck here at The Bookery. Outside the Ithaca Festival has begun: musicians, food stands, craft booths, and other miscellany in celebration of "ten square miles surrounded by reality." This seems to mean slightly more business at the store than usual, but only slightly. Folks must do their serious book buying during the day. But they do buy them, even the wacky things I insist on stocking. Renee Gladman's The Activist has sold, I'm glad to see. I've just gone through the SPD catalog doing my part to keep the shelves cutting edge. Hopefully I'll be here when they arrive: it's fun to stack up all the new books at once and give each on a glance before I shelve it.

Tonight I'm looking through the newest Yale Younger Poet, Peter Streckfus. His book The Cuckoo seems like a vast improvement over the last dozen or so Yalies (though I do have a soft spot for Loren Goodman's Famous Americans). Lovely images are rigorously and surprisingly confined by form, then released by wit. Here's his poem, "Ode":

The most beautiful thing in my life today. A nut brown flea
floating in the middle of a lake underlain with white flowers.
                                                            My bowl of tea.

The armor glistens, its equine head and legs stammer
in this new element, knocked by arrow or hammer

                                                  that fatal moment in the field.

That's rather nice, isn't it? Like a tiny samurai movie. He has a few poems referencing the career of Ronald Reagan that aren't too successful. I like when the wit flirts with creepiness:

Encephalitis

If your drop of lemon juice leaves the lemon in your hand and the oyster doesn't wriggle upon being touched by the juice of the lemon you should not eat it for the oyster is not whole in its mind.

It's a book with lots of world in it, particularly fragments of Buddhism, Basho, and general Japanophilism. A blurb on the back from Arthur Sze perhaps defuses charges of Orientalism. What the book really seems to practice is a brand of aestheticism that hopes to make contact with reality by referencing another culture whose traditions and rituals were once matters of life and death. We Westerners are probably unable to see the apparent seriousness around the Japanese tea ceremony any other way. That there are rituals in our own lives every bit as important, but less colorful due to our casual intimacy with them, is difficult to remember. It's easiest when traveling back in time: I cringe when I think of the clothes my mother let me wear in junior high. Who knows how much grief I would have been spared if I'd stopped wearing those horizontally striped polo shirts a size too big for me? Anyway, this is not meant to dis Streckfus; I think I deploy similar manuevers in my own poems often enough. I try to remember that it's not the real Asia refracted through a poem like my "She Is Made a Gift to the Emperor," but a palpable fantasy of it. Is this clear to readers? Probably not. A similar activity, but one less fraught with cultural imperialism, is the co-optation of past Western cultures—really even just simple allusion. When a bit of Shakespeare manifests in one of my poems, it's meant largely to activate the reader's sense of the past, of a world not like ours that we nonetheless fit for our purposes. Hm. These thoughts may stem from my current reading of, yes, Ezra Pound. Yes, I'm reading The Cantos. Completionist madness? I'm certainly not looking forward to all the warmed-over Confucianism; the Malatesta bit is already boring me and I'm not even in double digits yet (well, actually I'm in four digits: Canto VIII). But there's also some achingly beautiful stuff in there: no one writes better about the sea except Pound's protege H.D. So much flows from Pound; not coincidentally, I find thinking in the wake of Heidegger to be very useful and stimulating, though I'm often bored by Heidegger himself (and of course his politics are as bad or worse than Pound's; Pound at least, arguably, expressed remorse for his activities). Should everyone read The Cantos? I would never say that. But I think there's a very real sense in which it can be said that any poet who does page as field, or who incorporates others' texts into their work, or who uses poetry to think about history, or pursues (perhaps even non-disastrously) a political engagement in their poetry, already has. Maybe he isn't speaking to you, but I feel pretty directly addressed by Basil Bunting, here:

On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!