What Remains

(Before I say anything else: rocking good news from Mr. Bernes about his collection Starsdown (great title!). I've been waiting for a while now for someone to have the good sense to publish that work. Well done!)

Jessie, Emmet, and Virginia Mann, from Sally Mann's 1992 collection Immediate Family.
This past weekend we saw a documentary about photographer Sally Mann named for her exhibition of photographs of decaying bodies, landscapes in which death had occurred (Civil War battlegrounds, but also a spot on her own land where an escaped convict had killed himself to avoid capture by the police), and—as a perhaps willed moment of redemption (redemptivity?)—luminous, spooky photos of the faces of her three adult children (who as youngsters were made famous by photos like the one above). I'm a sucker for portraits of artists at work, which partially redeemed Pollock for me (almost more as a portrait of an actor at work than a painter); this is also why The Five Obstructions continues to be one of my absolute favorite films. The film depicts Mann as that rarest of artistic birds: a committed romantic who is also thoroughly unsentimental. The controversy that erupted over her most famous photos, which made her something of a bit player in the culture wars of the early 1990s, was centered on the the photos she took of her own children, many of them nudes or partial nudes. At least as disturbing to the public as the simple fact of a mother exhibiting photos of her naked children was her characteristic oil-and-water mixture of high romanticism (the photos are ravishingly beautiful, as are the children themselves—the whole Mann family appears to be an unusually good-looking one) and a refusal to idealize children in the accepted ways. If Mann's children are "little angels" and cherubim, they come out of Milton rather than Hallmark: fierce, terrifying, simultaneously innocent and knowing, and sexy without being sexualized. Mann's photos aren't in the least degrading of their subjects—these images are as idealized as anything produced by John Singer Sargent—but they refuse the uncomplicated notion of innocence that we like to attribute to children and childhood experience. They are, in short—you knew I was going to say this—a mode of pastoral.

The makers of the film What Remains have a lot invested in their notion of Mann as a pastoralist. She is depicted for the most part as rooted to the ground of her Virginia farm (though curiously isolated from other Virginians, save for her family members and a couple of family friends) and seemingly detached from modernity. The camera fetishizes Mann's own camera (a gigantic nineteenth-century model that uses glass plates) and the matter-of-fact, dirty-hands artisanship of her photographic practice. If there's a computer or a TV in her house we don't get to see them, and it's mildly shocking to see Mann driving her BMW (which has a pro-choice bumpersticker on the back windshield, the only glimpse of overt politics in the film). Interviews with Mann stress her attachment to the land, while the narrative of the film mostly thwarts the possibility of her cosmopolitanism (in spite of a photo of young Jessie Mann that imitates Manet's Olympia [Manet—even their names sound the same]). We do get to see her briefly at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, but because the Pace Gallery in New York decided not to show the death-haunted photos of What Remains we are spared the country-mouse-in-the-city image of Mann in Manhattan (where it is hard to imagine that this supremely confident woman would not in fact fit right in).

I am not trying to argue here that Mann's connection to the Virginia landscape is bogus—it's rather that I believe the filmmakers' desire to present Mann as a pure product of that landscape is a disservice to the full sophistication of her art. While Mann admits to being naive about the impact her family pictures would have—and how could she truly have anticipated her work's becoming a political football?—it's a mistake to depict her, however subtly, as a "naive artist" the way the film seems to want to. It may also be a mistake, though, for me to discount Mann's participation in that particular act of mythologizing—consider her response to an essay on the family photos by Noelle Oxenhandler (now THERE's a pastoral name!). Although she rather uninterestingly slams academia, for me the most vital part of Mann's response to Oxenhandler is her insistence that her children are willing collaborators in artmaking. I think this is a necessary fiction for many artists—not that by "necessary fiction" I mean that the assertion is necessarily untrue, only that it's a construct, a kind of ethical ladder, that the artist needs to climb if she's to fully encounter her subjects and materials. It's a particularly fraught fiction for a pastoral artist—someone with an investment in depicting the possibilities of a non-exploitative relationship to and among nature. In the case of Immediate Family, Mann's children appear as nymphs, spirits of the landscape that both beckon to and withdraw from the camera's eye. The images are startling for their unpredictable combination of polish and rawness: we feel we are beholding something of the quicksilver essence of life, yet that essence slips away even as we sense its presence in the stony, vulnerable eyes of Mann's children. In the spirit of nature we discover the unheimlich, the uncanny which, as Freud taught us, comes from recognizing some detail entirely intimate to our own lives that we have disavowed. We see ourselves in the photos as we imagine we once were, as we dream we might be again: fully alive, at one with our desire, suffering and free.

An image from the What Remains exhibition.
The What Remains photographs are a logical next step for Mann to take: from the uncanny of eros to the uncanny of death. Et in acardia ego: according to the film, Mann began taking these photographs after her husband Lawrence was diagnosed with a rare form of muscular dystrophy, bringing a whiff of mortality into their idyllic Virginia landscape. Also crucial was the above-mentioned convict's suicide by self-inflicted gunshot in full sight of Mann's house. Mann became fascinated with landscapes through which death had traveled, and from there became fascinated with how landscape travels through death in the form of decomposition, the absorption of the body by the land. So she took beautiful, deliberately flawed pictures of battlefields, and then she took photos of a beloved dog's decay (the above image), and from there took the most controversial step: she took photos at a coroner's laboratory of the decaying bodies of human beings. Presumably those people gave their bodies to science, but did they also intend to give them to art? In what sense is Mann a collaborator with the dead? It's the sort of unanswerable question that sharpens our relationship with that most seemingly harmless and pastoral of art forms, the landscape; as Mann says in the documentary, it's the artist who gives meaning to a landscape by remembering the deaths that took place in it.

Untitled #7 from Mann's Antietam series.
Mann's work is valuable for my understanding of the artist's pursuit—her construction—of a relationship to nature and the world that is neither exploitative nor wholly passive. We might call it humanist pastoral, or by any other label that would preserve the active stance we ought to take toward the world that made us and which we make. It also presses me closer against the barrier between my vulgar Marxist understanding of the world as a vortex of ideologies that conceal real material conditions, and my intuition of something more significant—some kind of resource—to be derived from mythic patterns of understanding of life and death. These structures of thought and feeling need to contest each other more vigorously, rather than coexist uneasily or through blindness to the other's reality. It's that path of contestation that Mann's work helps me to see more clearly, and to tread. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood....

Here Comes Everybody

An anthology of the interviews that Lance Phillips conducted over the past couple of years is now available from BlazeVOX Books. Check it out.

UPDATE: Oh well, never mind. See here.

Tonight's the Night

April Enthusiasms

- Mika, "Grace Kelly." Does Daniel Nester know about this guy? He's the absolute reincarnation of Freddie Mercury (I hear/see more than a little bit of Rufus Wainwright and Hedwig and the Angry Inch too), and this is the wittiest, most infectious pop song I've heard in ages. Deserves to be as big as Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," or bigger.

- Effing #6, edited by Joe Massey. It's almost all excellent, but what stands out in my mind (with the magazine not in front of me) are the contributions of Mairead Byrne. She has a poem about a sponge in a plastic bag that nearly moved me to tears.

- The Show with Ze Frank. I am so very sorry I missed this while it was happening, but a stroll through the archives does not disappoint. Who likes the little duckies in the pond?

- Khaled Mattawa's poem "Tocqueville" in the premiere issue of /nor. One of the darkest, most sustained, genuinely terrifying political poems I've read in a long while. A searching investigation of self-betrayal and the violence that infects every level of empire, margins and centers. A poem-war on terror-war, a postcolonial polemic that never entirely loses sight of the mutual demands language and ideology make on each other. To paraphrase Ezra Pound, what this nation might be if it read poems like this haunts my sleep.

Vegetarian seder plate from Monday night, with Paschal Yam

The New Enclosures

From left to right: Barry Maxwell, George Caffentzis, Iain Boal, and Peter Linebaugh.

"Between Primitive Accumulation and the New Enclosures" took place at Cornell this past weekend and featured the gentlemen above (Silvia Federici was unable to attend) thinking out loud about what many call globalization but what they call, following a concept invented in the early 1990s by the Midnight Notes Collective (of which Caffentzis and Linebaugh are charter members), "the new enclosures": the rampantly successful efforts of global capital to privatize "the commons," that is, property held in common by one or more communities. Wikipedia defines "enclosure" as "the process of conversion of common land to private ownership. Historically, enclosure is primarily associated with the privatization of land in England from the 12th to 19th centuries." "New enclosures" don't stop at land, but refer to what Iain Boal calls in the title of a forthcoming book "The Long Theft" of oil, the airwaves, intellectual property, and perhaps most fundamentally human labor (slavery was and is enclosure in its rawest form). The work of enclosure goes hand in hand with the creation of scarcity: it's practically common sense to realize that there's more than enough food produced to feed everyone on the planet, and yet for "economic reasons" that most of us poorly understand, food is not permitted to flow to the neediest but must be turned to profit and loss. Enclosure is also crucial to generating the surplus labor that capitalism demands: people in Africa, for example, who get pushed off of their subsistence farms (so that cash crops can be grown according to the "structural adjustments" dictated by the World Bank and IMF) are then forced to join (or try to join: there are miserable millions who cannot even get so far) the international labor market. Those with means of livelihood outside of the labor market pose a threat to that market, if only for the obvious reason that someone with a means of survival other than the wage can go on strike for longer than someone who lacks such means.

I was drawn to the conference primarily to hear Iain Boal, one of the members of the Retort group and one of the authors of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, which made a forceful impression on me back in 2005 (you can read the first essay from the book here). The book remains the most acute synthesis of the post-9/11 situation from a left perspective that I've encountered: a Debordian reading of the attacks, our responses to them, and to the ways in which political, cultural, and even military action are now mediated through/in the society of the spectacle. It was interesting to witness the conversation between Boal and the others; Caffentzis (who was the primary speaker at the morning session, devoted to Africa) and Linebaugh have a more traditionally Marxist view of the situation—as Linebaugh said, "I study Afflicted Powers looking for the class struggle and I do not find it." This was something that Boal said would be partially rectified in a missing chapter of the book, unready at press time (the book was published on Election Day 2004) that I gathered would eventually see the light of day, but Linebaugh's comment underscored the ideological differences among these men who were nevertheless unselfconscious users of the word "comrade": as Boal said, "The analysis of enclosure pushes one into the black tent" of anarchism, whereas Linebaugh and Caffentzis are still marching under the red banner of Marxism. But it was agreed in the general discussion that the concept of enclosure is actually enormously useful because it doesn't actually push one into any sort of tent, but is a mode of analysis useful to reds, blacks, and greens as well.

As a student of pastoral I was interested in hearing a green voice regarding the concept of the commons, but such was present at the panel only in its absence. The original "New Enclosures" essay that Midnight Notes published in 1990 (available at their site or from the conference site) is critical of the Green movement for its essential political conservatism after the waning of the anti-nuclear movement:

Ecologists in the Reagan period returned to the self-righteous ideology of "natural consciousness," morality of "good will" and a practice of "recycling" and "stewardship" of the 1970s. This movement has all the markings of Marx and Engels' petty producers' thought and manners writ large. Even the etymology of its name has echoes of the ancient Greek aristocrat's "aikos" or "hearth and home." But just as the word "economy" surreptitiously introduces into the capitalist factory the rural patriarchal relations of father-wife-child-slave, so too "ecology" presumes that the earth is an "aikos" to be well managed instead of the terrain of global class struggle. For proletarians might be natives of the earth but we have no home here. (331)

Natives without homes: I think as I so often do of the protagonists of Virgils' First Eclogue, Meliboeus and Tityrus, whose hold on their "native," idyllic land is so precarious, subject to the whims of Rome and the weapons of soldiers. But I wonder too if Midnight Notes should be so confident about the desirability of transforming the earth into the battlefield for class struggle; I think of Michel Serres' crucial insight in The Natural Contract (published as Le Contrat Naturel in France the same year as "The New Enclosures") that the earth is not merely the background of human struggles but a third party implicitly excluded and subjugated by the combatants, who do not even have the minimal contract of war (expressed in the question, "Who will win?") between themselves and the earth that suffers from the combat and eventually retaliates against the combatants. I agree that thinking of the environment in terms of "management" is problematic; but I would rather see a left ecology movement that enlisted the environment as, in effect, one of the proletarians rather than sticking to the traditional Marxist view of nature as the "non-organic" object of human manipulation.

Susan Buck-Morss' dog.

A great deal of food for thought: I will be thinking more in terms of "the commons" (a term whose inherent romanticism ought to be resisted) as I proceed with my pastoral project. And I'm interested in how some of the panelists' statements contradicted Frederic Jameson's claim that there are no longer any meaningful "pre-capitalist enclaves," and that in fact it is the condition of postmodernism that there be no outside to capital. The panelists seemed to suggest, particularly in their discussion of Africa, that there remained a mode of class struggle different from the struggle over the wage (that is, the class struggle inside capital): the struggle to remain outside of capitalism and to create or recover the commons. Perhaps this contradiction speaks simply to Jameson's being more concerned with describing the first world scene. But I was interested in the possibility opened here for the creation of the commons, and the panelists' claim that "commons" of one sort or another were constantly being produced by social groups, and are in fact the necessary ground of a social group or class' self-reproduction. I thought of course of the poetry world and how the DIY and small press scenes attempt to create a common space in which poets and poetry can create and sustain themselves. This commons is of course under constant assault by forces of enclosure that would appropriate it (another word for "commons" in this context would be "indie cred") or seek to turn its resources to the advantage of those who would, literally, capitalize upon it. At the same time there are limits to this analysis: if a poet from within this scene acquires some mainstream success and/or trappings, does this necessarily mean he or she has exploited and enclosed the commons? Perhaps a poet of integrity could find a way to re-integrate their new resources into the commons, providing new opportunities for the publication and support of others. The model of climbing out of the ghetto—any sort of ghetto—has to be countered with the model of replanting and reharvesting the seed, rather than selling it for market price (and driving down the value of others' seeds). That's where my thinking about this has led me, for now.

And yes, I have just joined the 21st century and acquired a digital camera. You can expect to see more images on this site from now on.

Light Switches

The first Interplay session with Prof. Matthew Belmonte and myself on Wednesday evening was quite fun—more like a conversation than a reading/lecture. I did my best to draw a connection between poetry and autism with a reading of my homophonic translation of Paul Celan's "Psalm" (it's the first poem in Selah), hypothesizing that the act of homophonic translation depended on a fixation of the surface features of language that possibly resembled an autistic relation to language. (This was partially confirmed by Matthew later on when he told us about how one autistic man uses slogans he's heard on television in an attempt to communicate—slogans whose relevance to the situation are rarely immediately apparent to his listeners.) My "reading" of Celan finds peculiar English analogues to the sounds of the German (a language I didn't know at all at the time the poem was written; I can now read it with a dictionary and lots of effort) so as to transplant, in a way, his first-order experience of trauma into my second-generation experience as the child of successful assimilated Jews (on my father's side) and of Holocaust survivors (my mother and her parents). Here's Celan's German:

Psalm

Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm,
niemand bespricht unsern Staub.
Niemand.

Gelobt seist du, Niemand.
Dir zulieb wollen
wir blühn.
Dir
entgegen.

Ein Nichts
waren wir, sind wir, werden
wir bleiben, blühend:
die Nichts-, die
Niemandsrose.

Mit dem Griffel seelenhell,
dem Staubfaden himmelswüst,
der Krone rot
vom Purpurwort, das wir sangen
über, o über
dem Dorn.

Just typing this out, I see how my translation was really more sight than ear-driven, since I didn't realize that the German W is pronounced with a V-sound. But choosing ignorance is part of homophonic translation, and in this case was meant in part to convey the literal and metaphorical darkness in which Celan's experience, and my own family's, lay. Anyway, here's Michael Hamburger's translation, followed by my own:

Psalm

No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
no one conjures our dust.
No one.

Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower.
Towards
you.

A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing-, the
no one's rose.

With our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red
with the crimson word which we sang
over, O over
the thorn.


Psalm

Neiman Marcus knits a leader out of earth and lime.
Neiman be-shops a western stab.
Neiman.

Galloped apts do, Neiman.
Dear zoo leads woolens
to veer bloomers.
Dear
engager.

Nine naughts:
where we're singed, we're wared,
we're weary bluehound.
Deathnaut dreading
kneed man's rose.

Mid-
den grin seals in hell
dem stable-faded him's liverwurst,
dares crone's rot.
Vow the pupa's word. Dazzled weresong.
Or bear, O you bar
the door.

I just noticed there's no period at the end in Selah; that's a typo. Ah, well. The whole poem is a travesty, deliberately so, indexical of the impossible relationship of my personal (American) history with capital-H History. The poem is a little pile of the wrecked language that Benjamin's Angel cannot set right, a little rhythmic rocking in the face of the improbability of my own existence.

Matthew's presentation was fascinating. He used a remark of mine about some new poems I read ("I didn't know I could say these things until I said them") as a jumping off point to talk about how normal people tend to peel past the "shallow" surface features of language so as to abstract a "deeper" meaning from them: we do violence to the percept so as to get at the concept. Autistic people do not have this means to control "the continuous flow of happenings," so they devise more primitive rituals to create a sense of safety and predictability—like flicking a light switch on and off for hours, secure in the knowledge of the perfect repeatability of their action. He shared with us a remarkable poem by a fourteen year-old autistic boy named Tito Mukhopadhyay:

Men and women are puzzled by everything I do
Doctors use different terminologies to describe me
I just wonder
The thoughts are bigger than I can express
Every move that I make shows how trapped I feel
Under the continuous flow of happenings
The effect of a cause becomes the cause of another effect
And I wonder
I think about the times when I change the environment around me
With the help of my imagination
I can go places that do not exist
And they are like beautiful dreams.
But it is a world full of improbabilities
Racing towards uncertainty.

It's a remarkably clear expression, I think, of the impulse behind writing, or any sort of creative activity, which attempts to master "a world full of improbabilities / Racing towards uncertainty." Matthew also showed us some paintings by autistic artists (high-function autistics tend to be either verbally or visually oriented), many of which were nearly photorealistic except for certain peculiarities—the color scheme was often tuned toward the highest possible contrast, creating a psychedelic feel. In a remarkable painting of Times Square—done from memory, Matthew believes—the cars are lovingly detailed, right down to every reflection and gleam of metal, but there are no people and no drivers.

Matthew used the wonderful phrase "a Cartesian cinema" by which to imagine autistic experience: one is watching a film with an incompetent projector, so that there's a picture but no sound, or vice-versa, or only a tiny portion of the screen is visible; so you go upstairs and ask the projectionist to run the film again, and again. It doesn't change the flaw in the information, but you scrutinize that flawed information over and over, hoping to master the hidden whole. It's not hard to see that these descriptions of autistic experience are like heightened expressions of everyone's experience—indeed, Matthew was quick to draw a comparison between postmodernity as described in literature (he cited Gravity's Rainbow) and autistic art. Ultimately, Matthew believes, it comes down to The Denial of Death—a book by Ernest Becker that he recommends for its insight into the need to hold back chaos, and our simultaneous resistance to the structures that we set up to protect ourselves from chaos. The autistic painter, losing herself in the details, or the autistic boy rocking and rocking, or flipping the light switch over and over, haunts us as an image of imprisonment in our own armor—an armor which will ultimately and after all, not protect us in the end.

Shifting gears, I'm looking forward to a conference being hosted at Cornell this weekend, "Between Primitive Accumulation and the New Enclosures." Unfortunately I'm going to miss the opening session this afternoon, but the readings for the conference (available here) are fascinating and will, I think, contribute a lot to my evolving understanding of the particular exigencies and necessity of utopian thought in the face of what Iain Boals calls in a wonderful interview the false Malthusian logic of neoliberalism.

It's Hard to Resist the Title Field

For a long time I've blogged mostly without titling my posts—it seemed to me that titles went against the informal spirit of blogging. (In that same spirit I'm extremely reluctant to revise a post once it's been posted.) The presence of the title field is something I've generally ignored except when I'm posting something that feels more like an essay than a blog post. But most bloggers do title everything, just as e-mail caused everyone to start thinking in terms of re: lines, introducing a formal element of the business memorandum into what has actually become, in my experience, an informal and intimate descendant of the personal letter. Now I'm feeling a new pressure from the medium to title my posts because I see that Google provides the title of a post when you search for one, which gives the entry the title's attached to just a little more weight and significance. I can't decide if this is part of what makes blogging a new medium, or if it's actually a pendulum-swing back toward print modes like the newspaper column or feuilleton.

Anyway, I've returned from a week of family visits with the in-laws (in Palm Beach—a very surreal place, like Vegas with the volume turned down) and surprising my sister and grandmother for their respective birthdays in Chicago. Now I'm back it's time to stop kidding around and get that dissertation finished. I am at the halfway point in my Ronald Johnson chapter, talking about him as a concrete poet: ARK will be next, perhaps via a detour through The Book of the Green Man as an example of a somewhat more conventional mode of pastoral that Johnson had to travel through on his way to the constructivism of ARK. I'm also beginning to look ahead to the book the dissertation will eventually become. The long poem seminar I'm auditing has shown me that there are at least two more canonical modernists whose work is fundamental to my conception of pastoral as a constructivist mode. Stein's Stanzas in Meditation is one of the purest examples I've found of abstract language used to approach the condition of a reciprocal accommodation to nature; I would also bring her Geographical History of America into my discussion because the dialectic she sets up between "human mind" and "human nature" also speaks to this question. And for today's seminar I'm hurrying through WCW's Paterson for the second time, and finding it stranger, more delightful, and more intensely self-critical than I'd remembered. Really it would be strange for me to write a book about modernist pastoral without discussing Williams; yet I've held off because I somehow needed to travel through more ostensibly difficult texts ("A", The Cantos) to arrive at my theory of pastoral. Those texts seemed to present more starkly the opposition between nature and history that constructivist pastoral dialecticizes. But now that I've passed through those texts I'm prepared to approach others whose renditions of that dichotomy seem either more crude (Williams) or oversubtle (Stein). Finally, having just taken Rachel Zucker's advice and downloaded James Schuyler's "Hymn to Life" from PENNSound, I am more than ever persuaded that I should write about the New York School as pastoralists, focusing particularly on Schuyler and O'Hara. It's exciting and a bit relieving to think of this project's life beyond the dissertation: exciting because I see I'm nowhere near done with this topic after five years of working on it, and relieving because I see how I can let the dissertation be a good dissertation (that is, a done dissertation) and reserve my perfectionist tendencies for life after the degree.

To conclude miscellaneously: if you're in the Ithaca area you might want to check out a new reading/talk series that the Cornell English department is starting called Interplay. It's meant to start interdisciplinary conversations: tomorrow night at 6:30 PM I'll be reading some of my poetry, then Professor Matthew Belmonte, who's an autism researcher, will give a paper, and then we'll see what common ground can be found. My first thought is that autism, as far as my limited understanding of it goes, requires the rational deciphering of social contexts and cues from those afflicted with it, a deciphering that non-autistic people perform intuitively and without much effort. Some poets, you might say, assumes a deliberately "autistic" attitude toward language and discourse, problematizing what ordinary language users take for granted. Of course I'm on dangerous ground with these speculations: it's just a few steps from here to the romanticization of illness as an opportunity for performance (Rain Man, anyone?). I look forward to a fuller conversation on the subject.

The Rigor of Poetry and the Pleasures of Theory

There's been a lot of discussion recently of creative writing pedagogy, an extension of sorts of the conversation I began on the two cultures of AWP. Kasey Mohammed's incisive "Breaking the Self-Affirmation Barrier" has been followed up by Reginald Shepherd's "More on Creative Writing Pedagogy" and "A Few Issues in the Creative Writing Classroom." [CORRECTION, 3/25/07: The original post on this topic was from Reginald: "What Is Creative Writing For?" Kasey's post, and mine, followed from that.] I think it's worth recapitulating here the four "minimal requisites" that Kasey proposed for a creative writing program that would not "perpetuate the whole predatory pedagogical system":

1. Some degree of grounding in various historical and intellectual contexts for the production and reception of poetry
2. Some degree of immersion in contemporary poetic theory, as well as relevant political and philosophical studies
3. Some degree of engagement with the social and communal aspects of the poetic life, especially insofar as this involves stepping out of the institutional framework and looking critically at what it means to be within it in the first place, and what it means for other writers to be outside it
4. Some degree of consideration of what lies beyond "craft" as defined above: under what conditions might vagueness be considered a "style" worth taking seriously? when do the protocols of "precision, concision, and avoidance of cliché" fall short, and what might be the value of deliberate unwieldiness, ugliness, or banality in certain contexts? and what else is out there?

Kasey's ginger touch with the word "craft" (note the scare quotes) points to the history of that word's being used as an ideological bludgeon, and I think his stipulations in general reframe the conflict that Reginald's first post puts in professional terms (scholar-academics vs. poet-academics) as "craft" vs. "theory." It ought to be obvious what a false distinction this is, and yet the two words are routinely used to represent opposed positions that grind exceeding small back and forth, giving and losing meager amounts of ground, flung like mortar shells into the trenches and foxholes of English departments all over this land. The participants in this battle get the mud of pettiness and spleen all over themselves and their positions, though very occasionally it is transported to a more elevated plane: I'm thinking here of the famous confrontation between Robert Duncan (here standing for "craft" in its most occult aspects) and Barrett Watten (ditto for "theory") at a memorial for Louis Zukofsky at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1978. (You can find an account of the conflict by Nils Ya here; scroll almost all the way to the bottom.) Duncan, aggrieved enough to respond aggressively to Watten's aggressively cerebral approach to Zukofsky, is supposed to have said at one point, "Can't we just have fun?" To which Watten replied, "But Robert, this is how some of us get our fun." At which point the debate collapses into de gustibus non disputandum—and yet I am amazed how often those who turn "craft" into an ideological position attack scholars and theoretically minded writers for being puritan killjoys blind, deaf, and dumb to the pleasures of the text. The possibility of taking intense pleasure in reflective and critical activity doesn't seem to occur to them—more pernicious still is the belief that taking pleasure in critical thought somehow dulls one's senses to the kinetic and lingual pleasures of poetry.

There's no craft, or any practice of any art, without theory: the only question is whether or not one is conscious of the theory of poetry that you've adopted, or that's adopted you. Reginald's second post is an account of the difficulties of getting beginning writing students to accept even the most basic theory of creative writing: namely, that one has an audience in mind. The students come to a creative writing class with a romantic theory of spontaneous self-expression that must be gruelingly unlearned for them to get at the next level of sophistication, the theory of craft. The strength and weakness of this theory lies in its vagueness: the impoverished critical vocabulary of the "earned" ending, the image that "works," etc., can force the more persistent and inspired student into inventing his or her own critical idiom. At best, it steers the student clear of overdetermining vocabularies; at worst it itself overdetermines a complacent response to aesthetic givens. The theory of craft can be reified into an ideology with a Procrustean tendency to fit poems into whatever categories are most fashionable in a given academic community; without active and adventurous questioning on the part of the instructor or students, poems end up being measured against an imaginary normative given, and get either stretched or chopped so they fit.

A theory of craft is essential to any poet: it's the cognitive leap from a belief in one's own natural expertise to a respect for language as a material that offers up considerable resistance to expression. The next step—and this I think is what Kasey's program tries to address, since even most graduate programs don't address this level of thinking—is the crafting of theory, the cultivation of the skills necessary to articulate one's own poetics and place them in some kind of active relation with the numerous other poetics that are out there. Among other things this requires a sense of history, which means doing a lot more reading and a lot more work. It requires, above all, an instructor who is thinking and working on this level—but there are still many creative writing teachers out there, some of them in prestigious programs, who reject the very idea of theory, and instead instill a more-or-less rigid ideology of craft in their students. Of course the smartest or most stubborn students will react appropriately to this dogmatism, but if one of the goals of creative writing instruction is the promotion of critical and imaginative skills—if we believe that the study of creative writing should be an asset to the majority of students who will not go on to become professional writers—then we have to work to promote this more critical-theoretical model of pedagogy, and fight against the laziness and anti-intellectualism that characterizes so much of our culture, inside the academy and out.

It seems to me that the best teachers (and students) approach craft seriously and simultaneously with questions that belong properly to the realm of theory: what are different sorts of poems for, what effects are possible, what histories of poetic discourse are we bearing in mind, how can language be made responsive to identity and vice-versa. At the same time, I think the ideal poet's education would include megadoses of the canon (or canons—I certainly wish my own education had required me to study the poetry of another language, for example), the study and practice of traditional-closed and experimental-open prosodies, study of the history and practice of poetic distribution (small presses, little magazines), and the encouragement to follow an ultimately self-directed path through the contemporary scene. This poet's education can and does work in harmony with what I'd term an intellectual's education, defining as "intellectual" the preoccupation with analysis of the given (in literature, in politics, etc.). Although potentially synergistic, they are two very different practices: as practitioners of poiesis—as makers—poets challenge the given with very different tools than intellectuals. They stand somehow between the philosopher who seeks to understand the world and the activist who seeks to change it.

It is not truly necessary for a poet to be an intellectual, but I have a strong inclination toward those who embrace the "and" of my title, though they might emphasize one more than the other at times. The antagonism between the two falls away, I think, if one embraces the real rigor of poetry and turns away from the thoughtless model that equates poetry with pleasurable spontaneity and intellectualism with puritan drudgery. Which is not to say the conflict can be totally wished away, especially when it's internal. As someone who participates in any number of awkward hyphenates (MFA-PhD, poet-scholar, writer-critic) I sometimes myself am caught up in the trap of participating in a restricted economy in which the resources allocated to one dimension of work are stolen from the other. For most of my experience, though, they've actually enlarged each other. When I was at the University of Montana some of my fellow students in the MFA program bemoaned its rather minimal academic requirements: "I just want time to write!" they said. Meanwhile, I was finding that the literature seminars to be as stimulating as the workshops, sometimes more so. There was a real synergy between the two kinds of thinking, the two strategies of knowing: making and analysis, craft and theory. It's still true for me now, though the intellectual labor of a PhD program demands considerably more of my energy and time, and I do find myself wishing for pure "time to write."

Well, I see I've lapsed into personal anecdote and I don't expect such to be especially persuasive to anyone not similarly inclined. But I do believe in the rigor of poetry and the dignity and pleasure to be taken in intellectual work, and I think they ought to be put in productive relationships with each other. I believe in a limitless general economy of thought, and I would like to share that sense of abundance and possibility with my students, however I can.

Outstanding SOON reading this past Saturday with University of Denver alums Robert Strong (Robert was supposed to come last month, but there were seven feet of snow in his way), Karla Kelsey, and Karla's husband Peter Yumi, who for the last part of the reading collaborated with her by performing electronic music (which included in its many voices a riff from Celia Zukofsky's music for "A"-24) to accompany an excerpt from her remarkable new manuscript Iteration Nets, a sequence of sonnets that expand into prose poems in the second section which are then put under erasure in the third. Robert began the reading with his prose poem Brethren: Order of the Seasons, which had for the occasion taken the form of a sensuously beautiful chapbook published by Karla and Peter's Imprint Press. The poem follows the laboring lives of members of an intentional religious community; that plus Robert's having edited an anthology of spiritual poetry (from which he read selections by Emily Dickinson, Alan Dugan, and others) and having written a book of poems titled Puritan Spectacle has caused him to be asked in interviews, "What it's like, what are the challenges, in being a writer of faith?" Which as he wryly remarked, made him wonder what sorts of questions were asked of scholars and poets whose subject matter was drawn from study of the Third Reich. He and Karla complement each other wonderfully as readers: their charisma, which is considerable, comes from opposite valences—Robert comes out to meet you, Karla draws you in. Karla read some new work as well as the selection from Iteration Nets and from her mysterious and luminous meditation on Platonic epistemology, Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary. Hers is a fierce, flickery talent. It was a pleasure to hear them and to host them and to have breakfast with them.

If by chance you'll be in NYC next week on March 22 (my sister's birthday!), you should check out the reading that's being put on in honor of Robert's anthology, Joyful Noise, at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe at 7 PM. Sadly, I will not be there (I'll be spending spring break with family), but it's your chance to hear some of the book's most kick-ass living contributors (Kazim Ali, Frances Richard, Timothy Donnelly, Catherine Barnett, Karla Kelsey, Richard Greenfield, Jennifer Murphy, Joshua Moses, Leonard Gontareck, Danielle Dutton, Tara Moyle, and Nicole Collen) read their work.

And as long as I'm announcing things, Susan Tichy has asked me to spread the word about a course she's teaching through George Mason University, PoetryScotland, which entails writing and studying poetry all over Scotland. I'm tempted to do it myself, especially since a visit to Little Sparta is part of it.

ADDENDUM (3/14): Betsy Wheeler, the editor of Pilot, has alerted me to a Kelsey-Yumi collaboration that can be seen and heard on her site by clicking here.

Further Thoughts on Affirmation and Estrangement

The furor stirred up by the last post wasn't always edifying, but I think it does point toward the anxiety stirred up by not only by an event such as AWP but also by the very attempt to practice what Seth Abramson calls the sociology of poetry. I try never to draw lines that work to mystify or efface my own involvement in the thing I'm trying to analyze. Let me be clear: I am in no way exempt from the desire, the need, for affirmation as a writer, and neither is anyone else. But I do think it's possible to assume a critical perspective toward the culture, or maybe more usefully the institutional structures, that have been established to meet that need and which, I think, do an at best indifferent job of meeting it. Meantime those who would found alternative institutions or provisional filiations (DIY, the flarflist, etc.) are accused of elitism, of being too cool for school, etc. Because too many people have invested their self-esteem—their natural desire for affirmation—into institutions and frameworks that actually perpetuate the master-slave dialectic we're uncovering here.

Though Joshua argues quite reasonably that it's unreasonable to expect that any social unit embedded in a contradictory and unjust society would somehow itself be exempt from contradiction, I keep looking for alternatives. I think again of the panel on Jewish identity which functioned, I thought, as something of a hinge between the two cultures I describe. Each panelist seemed to me to be negotiating the transformation of his or her problems of identity (as writer, as woman, as immigrant, as mother, as gay man, as Jew) into the terms of an artistic problem, without ever actually losing sight of its social-political provenance. Not coincidental with this was the overall theme of simultaneous embrace and estrangement, of an intense ambivalence that I recognized as my own and as being fully applicable to both my Jewishness and to the larger culture of poetry that I've so recklessly subdivided. In other words, an experience of affirmation derived from being in the presence of the kind of creative-critical process that I turn to writers and writing for.

I'd like to close by excerpting an e-mail that G.C. Waldrep sent me last night. I think it's a remarkably smart and humane document of engagement with the issues described here, and a model of the kind of personal and critical reflection that might actually get us somewhere:

I wanted to address something you said at the end of your precipitating post, i.e. how to bridge these two camps (which are real, just as the two camps Anne proposes are real; this is a multidimensional space we are talking about). As you know, I started writing in a vaccuum--when it comes to an active literary culture--and remained in that vaccuum for a good six years, before circumstances introduced me to Bread Loaf, AWP, the colonies, and finally Iowa. I had been writing and publishing for six years before I ever experienced a poetry workshop, eight before I taught one. Which is only to say that I relate only in part, and even then in odd ways, to the discourse of professionalization, even though I'm now a Ph.D. with a t.t. job in creative writing.

After four years of teaching undergraduates, I'm convinced that one reason they come to c.w. classes--one reason they "want to be writers" (so different from actually wanting to write!)--is a desire for "authenticity." They aren't sure what that is, but they are sure it's a problem in our culture, and they see poetry (rightly or wrongly) as one sphere in which "authenticity" (of a putative self) can be achieved and celebrated. Hence your first camp.

What I have tried to get across to my students, increasingly, is that if authenticity of (a) self can be achieved in language, then craft matters. The host culture has sufficiently colonized our brains with language--we are awash in media--that the seemingly simple act of stripping away cliche from one's writing can take years of self-conscious, often discouraging effort. That through solving problems of craft a writer is not distracting him- or herself from that authenticity, but rather finding ways to deepen that authenticity: of voice, of form, and yes, in the end, of self. I'm one of those characters who doesn't know what he means until he sees what he says, so for me the idea of a self coming into being even as the words unspool is a potent one, at least in theory.

(I was asked this explicitly at my Bucknell interview, by the way, with no prompting from me: "Is it possible to achieve or realize an authentic self in or through language?")

It seems to me that there are two critical problems with the first camp, as you define it. The first is the tendency toward what one of your commenters called "a non-judgmental space," presumably a space in which all writing is validated because it is writing, because an individual wrote it. I understand the history and manifold interfaces of identity politics, and the need to create spaces of safety and nurture, but I have to say I despise this to the extent that it interferes with the sort of critical inquiry we both value. (But then, I started writing not because I wanted to achieve a self or an identity per se, but because I wanted to write good, lasting poems in dialogue with the poems and poets I loved.) The second is that the professional aspect of this affirmative camp circles around Being A Writer, rather than around writing. In other words, it's not enough to write to feel that one "is a writer" in the affirmative or identity-related sense that this matters; one must also be able to make a claim to the mantle, which in this culture involves publishing, credentials, etc. Tell any stranger you are a writer and the first question you'll receive back (in a suspicious tone) is "Oh, have you published anything?"

So it seems to me that the writerly culture of affirmation is caught on two axes of indifference, at least as regards to craft. The first supposes that critical inquiry undermines this search for authenticity, creates a space in which it is unsafe to follow one's muse etc. etc. The second validates the literary enterprise through seemingly every aspect of literary life (degrees, publication, classes, blogs, community membership) except the writing itself.

As it happens, having started to write in a vaccuum, I very much value the community of writers I have come to know since 2001. As it happens, as someone for whom the ongoing conversation that is the public manifestation of literature has real meaning (this is how the living talk to the dead, and vice versa), I am also deeply invested in the act, and dynamics, of publication. And of course I happen to have marked out a social and spiritual space for myself rooted in an identity orthogonal to much of mainstream American culture. I'm not denying that any of these aspects of what it means to "be a writer" is reprehensible. It's just that to the extent any of them preclude a deepening of the writer's experience of self-through-language that craft provides, they are harmful.

I don't know how to address this other than through trying to create a discourse of writerly craft that emphasizes how the authentic (if it exists) is related to, may in fact be beholden to, the act of writing, which automatically includes issues of craft. (My own gut feeling is that "the authentic" comes into existence moment-by-moment *through* craft, through language-in-making, but that is perhaps an aesthetic bias on my part.) One of the reasons I like to use Surrealist parlor games in the classroom (I am particularly enamored of the "What is...?" game) is that they trick students into discovering, or at least suspicioning, that their "authentic" selves lie deeper, and more strangely, than they had hitherto imagined, and that language, if employed within a critically conscious framework, can afford them access to these selves, if they will be adventurous.

(Ha. Now I sound like Breton. I would prefer Cesaire, but what can one do.... At any rate, I do think the commercialization and general diffusion of Surrealist technique has obscured some of the more useful lessons the movement had for all of us who work in the arts.)

I see this problem primarily pedagogical terms because I'm engaged with it on this level from day to day. AWP, as a suprainstititonal phenomenon, is a different sort of venue. But I think the problems you are describing run deeper in the culture, especially when it comes to the culture's contradictory attitudes toward poetry itself: Poetry as an abstraction continues to be held in high esteem--it still evinces significant cultural cachet--even though very few individuals in the culture at large read it.

Yes, it would be nice to have a smaller conference, as at Carrboro. But to create such a smaller conference would to bring principles of exclusion into play. I confess that I felt aesthetically, politically, and personally excluded from the Carrboro festival, which was especially hard on me because I am, in fact, a North Carolina boy, and the idea of participating in such a discourse on home soil was particularly attractive. Leading back to the age-old question, one that lay at the heart of my first nonfiction book: how does one *extend* a sense of community (literary or otherwise) while simultaneously *defending* the space it defines? (I am glad Kasey points out that such a smaller gathering would not replace, or even supplement, AWP, but would in fact be providing an entirely different experience, and bring entirely different criteria to bear.)

Post-AWP, my panel-mate Kasey has expressed the wish "that there were a smaller annual conference dedicated entirely to poetry, minus all the content oriented around professionalization." This is a fine idea, but I wonder if it would really address what I perceive to be the clash of cultures that takes place at AWP and in writing programs more generally. The first is what I think of as the culture of affirmation; the other is the culture of solving artistic problems. The former, larger group consists of people who are most urgently concerned with confirming their identities as writers; the panels they assemble and attend are overwhelmingly concerned with publication, professionalization, and a more or less romanticized vision of "the writer's life." Most of the ads I see for MFA programs in Poets & Writers or elsewhere appeal to this mindset, as does Richard Hugo's famous maxim, ""A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters." The second, smaller culture consists of people who, though hardly free of the anxiety and desire for affirmation that constitutes the affect of the first, are primarily concerned with questions about what they'd like to accomplish as writers and how they should go about doing it. The panels these writers set up and attend are devoted to the theory of writing (not necessarily in the sense of literary theory, but it does seem to be the case that this culture is much friendlier to theory than the culture of affirmation is; the former, not without justification, sees theory as a barbed wire fence intended to keep them out of the garden). Put simplistically, the first culture concerns itself with becoming, while the second assumes its being so as to get on with questions of doing.

The tension between these cultures is palpable, and it's intensified by the fact that almost every member of the second culture was at one time a member of the first. Almost no one feels entitled to the role of artist in American society: without some persistent culture of affirmation (be it the encouragement of parents and teachers, the assembly of a clique or movement, or one's cohort at an MFA program), very few of us would have the strength to go on writing poetry in the face of the world's colossal indifference. (Even the solitaries, I would argue, take strength from the imaginary community of affirmation they assemble from the books and writers that they arrange about them in an imaginary conjuring circle.) But as we become more secure in our identities, there is a natural tendency to want to distance oneself from that older, now disavowed self—the self which desperately sought affirmation from sources high and low to confirm his or her identity as poet. It takes a lot of compassion and self-forgiveness, I believe, for members of the second culture not to treat the first with condescension, scorn, or the desire to haze its members the way they themselves were hazed.

As a writer, as a teacher, as a human being, I'd like to find some way to bridge the gap between these cultures. Personally, I feel that engaging with artistic problems is more personally empowering and more likely to establish that necessary bedrock of writerly identity than the more touchy-feely stuff—so maybe the best that can be hoped for is to speed the transition from one culture to the other, while having the wisdom and courage to recognize that the desire for affirmation never really goes away, and the contempt I might feel for someone's naked desperation or emotional neediness or obsessive logrolling has its origins in the wince of self-recognition. We could all stand to show a little more compassion, of course. But what I'm wondering is if there's something that could be accomplished on a structural basis to facilitate the education of writers without so much tension and bad feeling between what are the fully legitimate needs of the two camps.

So Nu at AWP

Came back from Atlanta yesterday afternoon, utterly exhausted by the exigencies of modern air travel. Thursday was a nightmare, and to be unable to reach the conference in time to present the paper I've been working on was quite painful. Fortunately, it and the other "Strategies of Excess" presentations will be published next month in Action, Yes so it will have an afterlife, and those who have expressed curiosity about it will be able to read it there.

Arriving late Friday afternoon to a conference that began on Wednesday is a recipe for anticlimax. I did attend exactly one panel with the rather dreadful title "Nu? What's New about Jewish Poetry?" featuring Arielle Greenberg, Rachel Zucker, Jehanne Dubrow, Jason Schneiderman, and Ilya Kaminsky (Erika Meitner was unable to attend). At first I was irritated with what I took for the panelists' devotion to a Jewish identity heavily invested in a kind of perverse (but all too common) nostalgia for the immigrant experience and even the Holocaust. Since for me what's most difficult and alienating about my Jewishness has to do with the disintegration of the legacy of the Jewish left—the fact that names like Emma Goldman and Walter Benjamin have been succeeded by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Ariel Sharon—I was impatient with what seemed to be their preoccupation with the past. What about empire, I wanted to shout, what about the widespread participation of Jews in imperial projects and the rampant disavowal of same?

But gradually I began to recognize that all of the panelists were talking about degrees of self-estrangement. Ilya is after all a first-generation immigrant, who as he said, experienced anti-Semitism directly and forcefully. Rachel Zucker read a long poem or lyric essay—it was hard to determine which—titled "O Where Have You Gone, Allen Ginsberg, and What Would You Think of My Drugs?" about being the mother of two sons (with one more on the way), dealing with depression and anxiety through medication, and living with her "country club Jewish" husband—intimate elements of her own life that seem to possess her more than she possesses them. Jehanne Dubrow's parents were diplomats who raised her in Poland, of all places, which she said has become for her a kind of triggering town (to use Richard Hugo's phrase), and now she lives in Nebraska where there are no Jews to speak of. Arielle Greenberg's experience was one of resisting her parents' resistance to assimilation: raised modern Orthodox and unable to reconcile that with the second-wave feminism of her mother, she fled from Jewishness as an adult, only to find that her first book, which she had thought of as un-Jewish, was largel preoccupied with genocide. Finally Jason Schneiderman talked about being raised an Army brat ("Christianity was in the air we breathed, so were taught not to breathe too deeply") and his deep estrangement from Judaism as a gay man—as he said, while there were others who fought for acceptance and tolerance from the religious community, he was simply too angry to do even that much. He was very fast and funny, and finished by reading some very moving and powerful poems from his book Sublimation Point, which I'll now be looking for.

By panel's end, I was actually feeling surprisingly warm and fuzzy about the panel and my Jewishness, because we are all united in complex layers of self-estrangement and attachment. One of the panelists, I can't remember who, used the example of the Jewish mother who embraces and criticizes at the same time. I did ask a less angry version of my question and got some good answers—Ilya's was brief and to the point: "I choose diaspora, a new diaspora," and I think that comes close to expressing my own position vis-a-vis my Jewishness. One is never entirely unconscious of difference, and there is a special difference in the difference you feel from your fellow Jews—a difference that unites us in quarrelsomeness and humor and sensitivity to language (most of the panelists spoke of how Jewishness and Judaism instill that critical approach to how things are said as being central to their sense of themselves as writers, something I too feel strongly), not to mention ethical imperatives which have, alas, manifested today most visibly as neoconservatism, but which still have the potential, I believe, to manifest justice and compassion.

The rest of the conference was devoted to seeing friends. I missed, for example, the poetry and politics panel, which was apparently tumultuous, and included a talk by Joshua Clover (he's sent me the text) on political content in poetry (really, in poets), which renews the debate he and I and others were having last fall about the efficacy or self-delusion or what have you about voting Democratic. Joshua's argument, put more cogently I feel in the paper than it was in the heat of the moment, is that voting nowadays is a merely formal gesture—as he puts it, "The content of the Democratic platform can shift endlessly to the right, can in fact be absolutely anything, and as long as the Republican platform seems one jot less appealing, the so-called 'decision' is already made. It's content-free." One's politics therefore resides, or ought to reside, not in one's attitude toward this system which only ever reinforces the regime of neo-liberalism, but in what one actually believes in and stands for. And if you believe in, for example, fair trade and workers' rights, then you find ways of fighting for them exclusive of voting for a content-free system. And actually, it's less radical than that: really, Joshua isn't against voting for Democratic candidates (well, he personally is, because he can find no candidates that support the rights of "people who don't look like me"—his example is a young Mexican woman south of Juarez), provided that they are truly dedicated to the issues that constitute your own political content. But he is against voting Democratic for the sake of accruing power to an entity as utterly in thrall to neo-liberalism (albeit more cuddly, less obviously insane) as the Republicans. I find this argument, phrased as it now is, unimpeachable, and if I'd been at the panel I might have stood up to say so (but unfortunately I was asleep in my raggedy hotel room trying to recover from the tender mercies of Northwest Airlines). Its greatest value is that it returns the listener again and agan to the question, "What's your political content?" What do you actually believe in, what do you want to bring about? And then you have to take a long hard look at the candidates available to you to see if they share your position. And if they don't (and of course even if they do), you must find some way to act consistent with what you believe your content is to be. Or you must wrestle with the contradiction that tends to arise between what you think your content is and what it may actually be.

That, more or less, was my AWP—plus a few books bought (many fewer than usual), a few drinks hoisted, and some good conversations with friends old and new. Now it's back to teaching and dissertating, though if given the option, I'd rather sleep until June.

Beautiful Detroit

My connecting flight to Atlanta was canceled due to mechanical problems and I'm thirty-something on the standby list for the last flight of the day—which also apparently has mechanical problems. It looks like I'm not going to make my panel tomorrow, which I very much regret. If that turns out to be the case, I'll post the text of the paper I was going to give here.

If you're already in Atlanta, good for you, and buy a book or two at the bookfair for me.

En route this morning from beautiful Elmira, New York to the conference in Atlanta, already in progress. We'll see if I have any time to blog from the source.

Most of the energy I usually devote to blogging has been consumed lately by grading and working on my postmodern baroque presentation for AWP in Atlanta this Friday. For those who are curious, here's the panel description that our fearless leader Lara Glenum came up with:

Post-Avant: Strategies of Excess.
(Jed Rasula, Johannes Goransson, Anne Boyer, K. Silem Mohammad, Joshua Corey, Lara Glenum)

Certain contemporary poetry flies in the face on the well-worn strategies of elegance and eloquence. Such poetry is invested in strategies of excess, violence, and aberrance. Opposed to the New Critical "no noise in art" dictum, these poets oppose the functional and the tasteful and revel in extravagance. Six writers inquire into the nature of these post-avant modes, from the grotesque to flarf to the postmodern baroque.

Should be fun, though you'll have to get up early to see us—the panel's at 9 AM.

I'm also excited to announce the players for the next SOON reading: Robert Strong (who was supposed to read for us last month but couldn't due to mountains of snow), editor of Joyful Noise and author of Puritan Spectacle, and Karla Kelsey, author of a beautiful book of poems from Ahsahta, Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary (the title comes from one of Plato's dialogues but it's tempting to remove the commas and turn "forms" into a verb).

I'm also also excited to be able to tell you about a chapbook of my prose poems that will be coming out soon, but I'm not sure the details can be made public yet. So stay tuned.

Finally, I'm in the market for a new laptop computer. Any suggestions? I know I want a PC so I can play the cool games on it.

Spent much of the week snowbound and sick, disinclined to do much beyond the necessary. Still cogitating on the baroque as a contemporary mode and what relevance, if any, it might have to the question of theatricality raised by Stan Apps, who has clarified the point that "mysterious theatricality" has less to do with religiosity than "a way of doing business," which can be secular or religious, Stalinist or Christian. I think that still leaves theatricality and ritual squarely within the realm of myth in the sense that Benjamin and Adorno use that word: an instrument for naturalizing domination. Yet there's an appealing side to myth too: myth taken reflexively, stripped of its ideological kernel—I think especially of the European mythic elements that comprise the modern literary genre of fantasy (dragons, knights, fairies, etc.). Myth remains a mode of meaning-making, but no longer demands our consent or forces our perceptions to conform to it. Similarly, "mysterious theatricality" is something with strong appeal, and worth celebrating, if it can somehow be drained of its ideological content. That "somehow" requires strong critical intervention, or at least the passing of time, as I alluded to in an earlier post.

We think of the baroque, of course, as a highly theatrical mode: opera was born in the baroque period, and its excesses of ornamentation, movement, and strong evocations of feeling seem theatrically dynamic: the architecture and sculpture of Bernini evoke the action and movement of the theater. At the same time, though the Baroque movement in history was largely an instrument of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, I still have a sense of its works as being so in excess of the ideological work they were intended to do as to undermine that ideology, or at least render it irrelevant to the aesthetic effects achieved. In other words, the Baroque is an urge of the modern, which is to say a product of the shift in the means of production toward the division of labor and the separation of the premodern Lebenswelt into logical, ethical, and aesthetic spheres. The ideological/ethical component of, say, Bach's B-Minor Mass (which is very much excessive of its ideological birthplace, being too long to perform as part of the liturgy, and being an essentially Catholic form in the hands of a Protestant composer) is still present in the work: but it's like a brain in which the corpus callosum has been severed so that there's no longer organic communication between the speech center (the left brain) and the image center (the right brain). In Lacanian terms, the given Symbolic (the Mass) has become disconnected, though still associated, with the Imaginary of the work. One recognizes in hearing it that the Christian Symbolic no longer provides an adequate representation, and so feels the disquieting/sublime presence of the Real.

I want to say, therefore, that an American baroque in poetry would be that which refuses to surrender the pleasures of mysterious theatricality, high oratory, ornament, and the excessive signifier, but which does not practice this theatricality as "a way of doing business" or accumulating power. The father of this baroque would have to be Wallace Stevens, especially the early Stevens of Harmonium, who is very much preoccupied with the beauty of ritual while foregrounding its emptiness at the same time. (The later Stevens might very well stand accused of trying to ideologize his poetics—I'll reserve judgment on this for the time being.) And so this train of thought has led me back to the American modernist who has meant the most to me as a poet, though not as a critic, strangely or not so strangely. Perhaps I've finally discovered a way to think him critically here.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

Looking for clues on the spiritual, I turn to Robert Strong's introduction to the anthology he edited, Joyful Noise in which I have a poem. "All poetry is spiritual," he says, which seems too broad a claim to dispute, and then he refines it: "spiritual things give us templates of extra-ordinary perception that canot be explained, unless by poetry." What does "extra-ordinary perception" refer to as a ground-point for the spiritual? Perception beyond what's empirical and quantifiable? That fits with my intuition that spiritual experience is real, even if the material of so much of that experience is locked up and controlled by arbitrary codes. The Word is dead until animated by that necessarily subjective experience.

Then Robert makes another statement: "Across generations and leanings, we discover a constant poetic-spiritual dilema: a central observer overwhelmed by the eternal realization that he or she is not, after all, the center. From our false human centger, poets cast out language, as Walt Whitman's spider-like soul does, 'Ceaselessly musing, venturing... Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere.'" I like this because it demonstrates how the spiritual might actually undermine and oppose religiosity, if by that word we mean the tendency to codify spiritual experience into an Archimedan lever for manipulating the social. Above all this notion captures the radical humility demanded of the spiritual seeker, who acknowledges not merely that one is part of something bigger than oneself (which is sufficient for religious experience, which most often makes you small and insignificant now while promising to enlarge you later into one of the elect), but that one has no firm knowledge of what your relation to that thing is, the thing itself being centerless (but if you give it a center, you fall out of spiritual humility and become the founder of a religion).

In some ways I'm trying to think Stan Apps' claims for a materialist poetry against mystification with Reginald Shepherd's Allen Grossman post. Grossman is about as far from a flarf poet as you can get, given his unembarrassed affinity for what Shepherd calls "the elevated, vatic mode." What preserves Grossman from faux-seriousness or religiosity, however, is his consciousness that, as Shepherd argues, the grand style is an aspiration rather than an achievement on his part. When I read Grossman I perceive this as a kind of glorious awkwardness—so many of his poems seem gawky in their radiance, like a preacher in an ill-fitting suit. He persuades me of his sincerity—or rather, his sincerity shades itself over into action—largely through his persistence, through the large body of work he has built up—and also because he has failed, or perhaps refused, to cultivate a personal mythology: Grossman has built no ministry and has no disciples that I'm aware of (unlike T.S. Eliot, Jorie Graham, or other poets of the grand, vatic mode).

Grossman is easy to criticize or not take seriously because his aspirations are so high, and one Lawrence LaRiviere White has made this acute comment on Shepherd's post: "I know my interest in great voices is in part symptomatic: I hold the prophetic voice, the subject presumed to know, & know profoundly, as an ego ideal. I would like to be the man in the robes. (To whom the proper response would be Bugs Bunny's: 'What a maroon'!)" This precisely and elegantly repeats the criticism that Apps and Gary Sullivan level against poetic religiosity, and there can be no better emblem of flarf's desire to puncture pretentions than Bugs Bunny, preferably dressed as Brunhilde in What's Opera, Doc. White writes, "if one tries to expand the interest in Grossman, it would be important to eschew the vatic mode, to find a lower register in which to present his case, to lure those who only listen to the vernacular & domestic. It's a cannier approach." That would indeed make for cannier marketing, but denies too much of what makes Grossman Grossman. What would a truly vernacular seer look like? Even Whitman, the most democratic prophet I'm aware of, resorts to grand gestures when he's not hinting and whispering.

I've tried to stake out a distinction between the religio-social and the spiritual-individual, which is rather undialectical of me. Mystic experience is forever being recycled into ritual structures, while few mystics have failed to make use of the existing ritual structures their particular historical moment rendered available to them. (The naive artists that so fascinated Ronald Johnson fascinate me in this regard: assembling homemade worlds out of bits and pieces of the quotidian and the sacred alike, so blurring the distinction between them.) More fundamentally, on a gut level we seem to have a powerful desire to communicate and share our spiritual experiences with others, and all of the successful communities and collectives that I can think of arouse a quasi-spiritual camaraderie in their members. And then there's Badiou's notion of the Event that one commits to, which I think could be characterized as a spiritual experience (as I think he puts it, one makes a decision about something undecidable). This commmitment in turn transforms reality either for the individual or collectively, in the four major spheres of truth he recognizes (love, art, politics, science) as being those in which purely subjective commitment is decisive.. That's the lifecycle: spiritual experience makes a commitment possible, which in turn might set up a structure arranging the materials available for future experience.

All of which goes to say that, as admirable as I find the materialist critique of mystified religiosity, it may not be sufficient in itself for demarking the most subjective zones of experience; more significantly, it does not take into account the spiritual commitment that this poetics itself demands to its conception of political truth, since that truth is negatively defined (non-hierarchical, non-mystified, etc.). Its saving grace, its biggest gun, is its historicism, which is another version of the spiritual realization that one is not at the center, and that all the structures that surround you have temporal origins and endings. How curious and yet unsurprising to discover this kernel of spiritual experience in Marxian historicity! And a flarfist is nothing if not radically humble in his or her renunciation of the poetic ego ideal. Though I suppose merry prankster is a much sought-after ego ideal for some. Did Jesus tell jokes?

Once again I must stop short of announcing my unified field theory of poetry. But there's something happening here.

"Strategies of Mysterious Theatricality"

Thinking about a recent essay-post by Stan Apps that he dedicates to Gary Sullivan, "The Great Enabler." It's a rich autobiographical accounting of Apps' experiences writing three kinds of poetry: a kind of proto-flarfist, scatological poetry that would "try to describe the gooey mess of myself (my 'actually existing subjectivity,' as it were) as I experienced it all the time like a hot wet ashamed gunk churning in my skull"; a satirical religious poetry that was "messianic, heretical, and passionate" and which engaged a self-critiquing persona that subtly attacked the very notion of sincerity on the rhetorical level; and safe, teacher-approved poems that were "lyrical, emotional, reasonable, and ended with realizations about how to live"—a poetics of reflexive affirmation. You can see how Apps was most engaged by writing from negativity, and how the first two sorts of poem are flip sides of the same coin, devoted as they both are to assaulting and mocking hypocritical social relations from a position of profound alienation. He then goes on to talk about Sullivan's poetics as a practice of radical materialism, working to undermine the mode of alienating hypocrisy peculiar to poetry itself, including most avant-garde poetries, which goes by various names: sincerity, seriousness, religiosity, all of which can be placed under the umbrella of the phrase I've appropriated for the title of this post. "Gary’s poetics consists of decisively rejecting mysterious theatricality, and thereby creating an aesthetic of material accountability." It's one of the most succinct descriptions of the poetics, which is also an ethics, that I've come to associate with the names of Sullivan, Nada Gordon, Rodney Koeneke, Katie Degentesh, Kasey Mohammed, Anne Boyer, Michael Magee, et al.

I'm most provoked by Apps' criticism of the residual religiosity that he locates at the bottom of the various claims various poetries make to authority. Part of my confusion is personal: my upbringing was thoroughly secular, and so my attitude toward religion and religosity tends to vacillate between horrified disbelief and fascination with the profuse evidence of spiritual experience that lies all around us, not least in poems, not least in myself. It seems to me that, as a critique of socio-poetic organization, Apps' attack on quasi-religious strategies of mysterious theatricality is unimpeachable. As he astutely points out, every avant-garde has positioned itself as an attack on mystification, only to deploy mystification itself as a strategy for consolidating its power. I'm reminded of that post of Ron Silliman's where he discusses Duncan and more or less makes the case for literary theory's replacement of mysticism to explain how, in essence, one avant-garde (Language poetry) came to trump another (Duncan's New American romanticism). Ron refers to the rise of theory's relevance to American poetry as precisely a "resecularization" of poetry, and yet it seems obvious now that the strategies of theory can and have been used as rites of initiation into a social practice of writing, another example of what Apps says Sullivan's idea of religion is: "religion is primarily about the obsessive-compulsive element in human nature enacting controlled scenarios that are supposedly the most important and most meaningful parts of life—but finally the defining material element of these scenarios is their empty ritualistic quality, as Gary puts it 'How arbitrary social code is.'"

A couple of thoughts. One is the possibility of poetry's liberation from archaic social codes through the simple passage of time. On a Cantos reading list that I belong to, the point was recently made that both Dante and Pound proceed from what strikes modern readers as outmoded theologies—but our ability to recognize that means that we have become capable of rediscovering what's valuable in their thought, which may very well be modes of critique applicable to our own socio-historic condition. The other is to wonder what possibilities remain for the spiritual in poetry, assuming the spiritual can be permitted to exist as a category separate from social practices of mystified domination. One might try to clear a space for spiritual experience (or, more aptly in the case of poetry, spiritual performance) distinct from the social, but a good materialist will immediately criticize that as another act of mystification, maybe even the primal one. I suppose it's an obvious point: a materialist by definition denies the existence of the spiritual as anything other than a more-or-less mystified social instrument—though he or she might well resort to the language of spirituality as a metaphor, as Marx famously does to describe the behavior of commodities. Marx's take on religion provides the only viable materialist pathway that I can see at the moment: his description of religion as the opiate of the masses refers less to the sense of the opiate as induced ecstasy than it does to painkillers. As Adorno might say (probably does say), the index of the truth-value of religion lies in the imprint it contains of material suffering. A properly materialist "spiritual poetry," then, would somehow undo itself from within, twist itself inside out to reveal its matrix as that of suffering. Which sounds, come to think of it, a great deal how Apps describes his "excretory" poetry.

What I wonder about is what possibilities may exist for the social organization of the poetic field (which is really what we're talking about here: not poems per se but the ways in which they organize and are organized into a social field which for most of history has been hierarchical and mystified) beyond the essentially anarchist strategy of the flarfists. Or maybe I'm not even looking for an alterantive to anarchism—yay, anarchism!—but rather some strategy to deal with my own semi-choate yearnings for seriousness, mystery, and ritual. Without trying to think myself out of the social, I guess I want to recognize that there are conditions of human being that are not primarily conditioned by it: mortality, personal limitation, what Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral refers to as the enormous waste in even the most fortunate of lives. Maybe this is simply the empty-seeming category of "spiritual but not religious," which seems to express a yearning to engage with these questions without having to participate in a mode of social organization that inevitably strategizes mystery rather than dwelling with or in it. And finally there's the argument from hedonism: attacking social mystification is one thing, but theatricality? The pleasures of a quasi-theatrical representation through the animation of appropriated multiple voices (Googled or otherwise) are certainly active in the best flarf poems, albeit in a campy, over-the-top, deliberately "inappropriate" way. (As a negative category I have some trouble understanding "the inappropriate," and I would suggest to flarfists that that's the dimension of their practice itself most prone to becoming the center of a new strategy of mysterious theatricality, a means of initiation and exclusion.)

The implications of all this for my thinking about the baroque as an alternative strategy of excessive representation have yet to become clear.

Reading around in the new EOAGH, a special issue subtitled "Queering Language," dedicated to the late Kari Edwards—and realizing something head-slappingly basic: the modern computer screen is wider than it is tall (like a movie screen, like a #10 envelope, like the lenses of my glasses). A simply profound re-orientation from that of the 8 1/2 x 11 page or the 6 x 9 book, which is taller than it is wide. Is this not a fundamental re-orientation of writing's consciousness?

Cases in point: Jen Hofer's stunning tightrope of a war/culture-of-war poem, "no fiction no belief" ("air grinding in sixes" is a remarkable synthesis of the brute conceptual apparatus that makes "armchair war" possible while also evoking the physical image of a helicopter); Chris Nealon's campy, defiant "(I know prose... )"; David Cameron's witty post-Charlie Chan "The Lemonade Man", which only unfurls horizontally in its last stanzas (I love the title of the manuscript it comes from: Flowers of Bad); and Joe Elliot's long prose poem "An Instruction Manual for Kim Lyons". That last is particularly interesting: the widescreen presentation blurs the boundary between prose and verse. Narrower margins would produce a more ordinary looking prose poems, but the super-wide margins it actually has means that a block of long lines don't really register as paragraphs.

Most of the poems are vertical, as most verse tends to be: isn't that what verse is, the visible tension of the vertical against the horizontal where usually (prose) the vertical is almost totally sublimated? On a computer monitor that means a vast margin of white space on the right side of the screen. The wide screen changes the temporality of reading: it takes longer to read across a wide screen than it does to absorb the relative narrowness of the page. (Actual books wider than they are tall are also slow to read, and I halt and staggers when I encounter poems in books and journals that require you to turn the book on its side. The seeming happy medium, the square page, is unsurprisingly inert.) The almost ideogrammic effect of a short line that can be taken in at a glance is short-circuited by the long strokes from left-to-right required of screen reading. Q: The relation between the change of axis and the queering of language? Thinking of D.A. Powell's poems which tend to emphasize the horizontal, most spectacularly in the case of the gorgeous (yet undeniably awkward to shelve, read, and handle) physical object that is his first book, Tea. The wide page, a derivation of the widescreen experience that in our culture connotes totally immersive virtuality.

Wondering about the availability/desirability of "widescreen" pen-and-paper notebooks. And the end of the screened word as merely transitional toward the printed word. If we can no longer fetishize the book as object, what will we fetishize? Eyeballs and hit counters, probably. In that respect the book as nostalgic object has some dialectical critique value: it is actually less of a commodity, less reducible to pure exchange, than a web link.

Screened experience is first-world experience and is certainly, as Anne Boyer grimly notes a historical and temporary phenomenon (though the fugee landscape poetry she imagines marks no return to the vertical). As she suggests, representations of futurity are invariably nostalgic (Q: is representation itself invariably nostalgic?) and presume the endless extension of what already is. She derails that with the dystopian, but a utopian interface with the new is also desirable and necessary. We are passing through the screened toward the we-know-not-what. To interface representation with the thinkable. To pass through representation into the not-yet-thinkable.

"A poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream."

Secular and divine, history and nature, existence and essence, enlightenment and myth, horizontal and vertical. Reginald Shepherd today on Allen Grossman and his high Modernist "distinction between the 'person' represented and representable in poetry and the 'self' of everyday life, which resists but also demands representation." Connecting this with Jameson's notion of the unrepresentable totality of late capitalism which nonetheless demands our conceptualization. If we could represent it it would already be something else. Adorno's teacher Siegfried Kracauer in an unpublished review of his pupil's first book, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic: "In the view of [Walter Benjamin's studies of the Trauerspiel], the truth-content of a work reveals itself only in its collapse.... The work's claim to totality, its systematic structure, as well as its superficial intentions share the fate of everything transient, but as they pass away with time the work brings characteristics and confiurations to the fore that are actually images of truth" (quoted in Robert Hullot-Kentor's Foreword to Kierkegaard, p. xv). Q: Is the resistance of the "self" similar, so that only through its decay is its truth revealed? (Re the proto-capitalist Croesus: Only after his death do you know if a man was happy.) Q: Is the point of representing the resistant-to-representation self similar to the point of representing totality, e.g., to dissolve both resistance and the resistant object? (Perverse post-humanization of Grossman.) Of course the self doesn't survive the way the artwork can, so we can only be speaking of a poem of self. Grossman's poem wants to do honor to the self through the necessary medium of the representable "person." Maybe that's Romantic vs. modernist representation in a nutshell: the modernist wants to represent a resistant totality, the Romantic wants to represent a resistant self (the Romantic of the egotistical sublime insists on blurring the two categories).

On to Hart Crane in Roger's long poem class, a poet predictably dismissed by William Logan in last week's Times Book Review and explicitly at the origin of the poetics of Modernist passion (is that another phrasing of the Modernist-Romantic synthesis?) that Shepherd cites as part of his long foreground in his essay "One State of the Art" in the latest Pleiades. In his complaint about the territorialization of the American poetry scene I hear another version of the tension between particular and universal: in our urge to carve up the fictional universe of poetry into conceptual categories (post-avant, School of Quietude), individual-existential-actual poems are being lost. Of course you can't actually recognize/represent a post-avant/SoQ poem on its own existential terms: you need the categorical cues most of us are all too eager to provide. Lyricism versus lucidity, says Shepherd, citing Charles Altieri's particular slice-n-dice of the poetry continuum, so he speaks up for a third way: "our best poets...question and even erase the dichotomy between the emotional and the intellectual." But I am more inclined these days to name the dichotomy as existential (preoccupied by the horizon of everyday life) and conceptual (what can be thought). Catching the two up with each other through aesthetic labor is the ambitious poet's task, but you can't simply "achieve" that by idealistic fiat. In fact, it can't be done, and yet it must be done.

Existential poetry: the vast majority of it, preoccupied by the experience of being situated in a particular body at a particular moment. Identity poetry, nature poetry, I-do-this-I-do-that poetry, any poetry that can be predicated. Conceptual poetry: most obvious and readily available in the form of language poetry, which might as well be called out for its redundancy as poetry poetry: putting the means of representation into impossible relation with what cannot be represented and then writing about that, hoping maybe to free representation (and thus enlarge the store of available existence) a little bit from the grip of what can only (and that just barely) thought.

These are not camps, these are not styles. These are approaches and modes and the most interesting poets venture into both. The pure conceptual poem is a starved thing, the pure existential too prone to reproducing what's given. The trouble is that too often aesthetic camps and the social (the poetry social, the ice cream social) are the only zone of mediation between the two modes. How is flarf recognizable as critique without the Flarflist? How does Frankfurt School-type poetry manifest as more than snobbery? Who do we permit to do our thinking for us?

Thinking and representation, calls for more thinking.