This is not kitsch

Photograph of William Carlos Williams, seated against a pole, with an unidentified man and a donkey (not, for some reason, a white mule). [Not pictured: white chickens, wheelbarrow.]

Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1203209

Are Our Writers as Bad as Our Bankers? Or: Another View of the "Elliptical"

Urban Intellectual Fodder.

Neither original nor path-breaking, this art is derivative hommage; postmodern commentary around the edges of art.

It is art born of attitude, not passion. It is art that postures but doesn't grip. It is art created by those who are more passionate about a career in art than about art itself.

It encompasses:

1. The indie rock spawned in urban art ghettoes.

2. The visual art spelonked in Williamsburg.

3. The movies sputtered by independents hoping to get into Sundance.

4. The novels spritzed by creative writing majors from Iowa University and other environs.

1. THE ART OF THE SMART

What distinguishes this art from actual art?

Primarily, this is art that thinks about art. Art of the intellect, not the heart. Art done to bring us the smart, not the art.

The artists of Urban Intellectual Fodder act like art critics doing art -- they're better about their art than with it, better on their art than in it. Their art is done to show their smarts, and that's primarily what one gets from their art.

Smart art: in America, the land of anti-intellectualism, it's perhaps inevitable that our art should devolve into a screech against the national celebration of the dumb.

Unfortunately, this art does the smart thing to the detriment of the other things that art can do. It does the soothing, lulling thing, because it is art to make the viewer feel smart. The audience I'm talking about wants only that from art: to be made to feel smart. So they get their art of the brain, for the brain and by the brain. Art that panders with its braininess.

Urban Intellectual Fodder is the prozac of the American intelligentsia.

It's studiedly smart; it's properly elliptical; it's quite self-aware and often very meta; it is extensively footnoted, either actually or mentally; its distance from its material is either ironically remote or uncomfortably close-up; it is intensely minimal or wordy or effects-ridden, in either a refined or extravagant way; it specializes in conceits, and sometimes its conceit is to be devoid of one; and it makes its small points, and sometimes its big obvious ones, in either a very guarded or rather grandiosely ironical way.

Critic James Wood coined a name for it: “hysterical realism.” Dale Peck had a name for it, too: “recherche postmodernism.” Both ain't half bad.

You know who and what I mean: everyone you imbibe by book, CD, movie or artwork creates Urban Intellectual Fodder.

-- Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash; read the full magilla at 3QD.

[Of course, MAD magazine had the skinny on all this fifty years ago; click here.]
Pictured: the National Bank of the Republic

He doesn't care a nickel for his own skin

At first it seems that Larry Eigner is an onlooker, but as one reads on it becomes clear that he deeply inhabits the world. He throws away all chances to make commentaries or to philosophize, and he doesn't care a nickel for his own skin or to tell us "How sensitive I am!" At his best he writes in a kind of state of grace with respect to the real, an openness and trust between himself and the world, by which the two blur, and real objects keep dissolving towards a deeper, stranger reality. His best lines are less invented descriptions than the acts themselves of this contact.

-- Galway Kinnell, Poetry, September 1962

*

Listen to Larry Eigner here.

THE .DOC FILE OF J ALFRED PRUFROCK

T.S. Eliot (age 25) and Ezra Pound (age 28) met on this date in 1914, and had a cup of tea in Pound’s Kensington flat... in honor of which, this excerpt from an updated version of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which appeared in Poetry magazine the very next year:

***

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Is this wanky?" "Is this fair?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair
With a comment on the level of your player
[They will say: "How his server's lagging slow!"]
My morning cosplay, collar mounting firmly to the chin
My website rich and modest, but accessed by a simple login
[They will say: "But how his content's growing thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the interwebs?
In a minute there is time
For fanfictions and revisions which Google Docs may reverse.

Full text here.

Tip of the hat to my Twittering friends at the Scottish Poetry Library!

Is Narcissism Good for Poetry?

Narcissists, new experiments show, are great at convincing others that their ideas are creative even though they're just average. Still, groups with a handful of narcissists come up with better ideas than those with none, suggesting that self-love contributes to real-world success.

Narcissism and creativity seem to go hand in hand. Creative people often appear self-important, hungry for attention, and unconcerned with others' ideas and opinions— all traits narcissists share. Think of Pablo Picasso, famous for his iconoclastic paintings but infamous for declaring, "I am God." Like Picasso, narcissists often rise to positions of importance in art, business, and other endeavors, suggesting that they have ability and ideas that others do not.

But do they really?

Click here for the full article, properly titled "Is Narcissism Good for Business," in Science

Pictured: What's-his-name, painted by Caravaggio - a modest fellow himself

Steve McCaffery on innovation: "innovation for its own sake is, like art for art’s sake, ultimately otiose"

But innovation for its own sake is, like art for art’s sake, ultimately otiose. Kenneth Goldsmith’s and Tan Lin’s recent claims on behalf of unoriginality and uncreativity are major interventions in the contemporary avant-garde that need to be taken seriously. But they too partake in a legacy of negative poetics that starts in anglophone literature as early as the Preface to the second edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Bold innovation is immediately co-optated into a patinated rhetoric of supercession which gets one nowhere beyond the ephemeral titillations of fashion. I prefer to that other narrative of Midas that re-visions the avant-garde as a storehouse of available and cumulative techniques deemed viable and adaptable to the urgencies of the present. Poetry won’t change the world but might render the world rethinkable. This is not a Utopian inclination but a tactical strategy within a multiplicity of dreams, agendas, mistakes and arrogances. It is a poetics of promiscuity envisioned as a tactic. I adopt a chiasmic view of history: that’s partly Eliotian and partly Benjaminian: the present contemporarizes the past as much as the contemporary is historicized by the past. Any worthwhile poetic must be historically rigorous and admit the capricious power of the anachronism. A serious rethinking of the lyric and aesthetics in general is evident too in this selection. I believe Jeremy Prynne derived from the poetry of George Meredith the phenomenon of a dizzying display of terminology that nonetheless is anchored by a feeling of surety, of “lyric” anchor. I won’t call this voice and thereby open a Pandora’s box of problems but I will venture to call it architected style. It is style that offers a refuge for the self and it is evident in the paradox of Eliot’s modernist poetics of impersonality that in so may ways has dominated the contemporary from Cage and MacLow to Goldsmith and Bök. Style reveals the individual behind it bringing word and flesh together in a writing that, of necessity, interpenetrates a world. My “style” is evident in all the poems in this volume and my “life” informs them insofar as my reading constitutes a major component of both my writing and my life. I like to think of lyric not as a historically defined genre but an atmosphere in which its problems, contradictions and aporia play themselves out....

And let’s not forget humour and the simple pleasure of a laugh. Poets should not take themselves too seriously as politicians or world-changes (leave that to the Pol Pots, Stalins, Endira Ghandis, Margaret Thatchers, and Jesus Christs of the planet. Mina Loy envisaged a wonderful portmanteau of practical science and linguistic innovation she called the laboratory of the word and dropped Gertrude Stein in it. Laboratories are used for dissection and transmutations, anatomizations and alembications... That state of the induced laugh has been adequately philosophized from Bergson to Bataille, its revolutionary power installed inside advanced counterinsurgencies against the hegemony of the Logos... Its elder sister of course is satire, that almost defunct telos of writing that dominated and defined the 18th Century. The lampoon seems to have shifted ground from poetry to late-night television.

-- Steve McCaffery, in an afterword to his Selected Poems

Pictured: An 19th century laboratory

For an outsider to become an insider isn’t ironic or paradoxical: it’s just the way things work.

Most AmPo folks have focused on Elif Batuman's essay in the LRB with regard to what she says about writing programmes, so to speak. But I haven't seen much discussion of other interesting stuff she says, viz -

*

Novelistic alienation – the realisation that lived experience doesn’t resemble literature – was invented in Don Quixote. And, ever since Don Quixote, the novel has been concerned with social inequality. Class and religious difference are, after all, two major reasons why certain forms of human experience don’t get documented. Hence Cervantes writes not only about windmills mistaken for giants, but also about prostitutes mistaken for noble ladies, and Moriscos who carry ham under their arms as a badge of racial purity. But, in Don Quixote, race and class have no higher an order of significance than, say, a hidalgo’s typical weekly diet, or the noise produced by a textile mill: aspects of an undocumented historical present. What was missing from the older literary forms, in other words, wasn’t social justice, but the passage of time – a dimension the novel was specifically engineered to capture. The novelistic hero is by definition someone whose life experience hasn’t yet been fully described, possibly because of his race or class, but more broadly because he didn’t exist before, and neither did the technology for describing him. The durability and magic of the novel form lies in the fact that, having gained a certain level of currency, the latest novel is immediately absorbed into the field of pre-existing literature, and becomes the thing the next novel has to be written against. In this dialectic, the categories of outsider and insider are in constant flux. For an outsider to become an insider isn’t ironic or paradoxical: it’s just the way things work.

***

Literary writing is inherently elitist and impractical. It doesn’t directly cure disease, combat injustice, or make enough money, usually, to support philanthropic aims.

***

In the greater scheme, of course, the creative writing programme is not one of the evils of the world. It’s a successful, self-sufficient economy, making teachers, students and university administrators happy. As for literature, it will be neither made nor broken by the programme, which is doubtless as incapable of ruining a good writer as of transforming a bad one. That said, the fact that the programme isn’t a slaughterhouse doesn’t mean we should celebrate, or condone, its worst features. Why can’t the programme be better than it is? Why can’t it teach writers about history and the world, and not just about adverbs and themselves? Why can’t it at least try? The programme stands for everything that’s wonderful about America: the belief that every individual life can be independent from historical givens, that all the forms and conditions can be reinvented from scratch. Not knowing something is one way to be independent of it – but knowing lots of things is a better way and makes you more independent. It’s exciting and important to reject the great books, but it’s equally exciting and important to be in a conversation with them.

"Get a Real Degree," Elif Batuman

Pictured: Don Q. going crazy from reading books

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," as the man said...

A friend of mine—one trying to keep a journal afloat—told me with horror that his teachers while he was getting his MFA boasted about how they subscribed to no journals. They only read journals that were sent to them (either as contributor copies or just cause they were famous). I think, and not having been there I can’t be sure, but I think that they were boasting about their having made it to the professional side of the money/time economy of poetry. They ALWAYS got paid for poetry time—whether reading or writing. They NEVER paid for anything poetry related.

-- Jason Schneiderman, full blogpost here.

We want bread and roses, not trees.

Bertolt Brecht once wrote that there are times when it can be almost a crime to write of trees. I happen to think that the statement is valid as he meant it. There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning. If one goes on to imagine a direct call for help, then surely to refuse it would be a kind of treason to one’s neighbors. Or so I think. But the bad fiddling could hardly help, and similarly the question can only be whether one intends, at a given time, to write poetry or not.

There is no crisis in which political poets and orators may not speak of trees, though it is more common for them, in this symbolic usage, to speak of “flowers.” “We want bread and roses”: “Let a thousand flowers bloom” on the left: on the right, the photograph once famous in Germany of Handsome Adolph sniffing the rose. Flowers stand for simple and undefined human happiness and are frequently mentioned in all politi­cal circles. The actually forbidden word Brecht, of course, could not write. It would be something like aesthetic. But the definition of the good life is necessarily an aesthetic definition, and the mere fact of de­mocracy has not formulated it, nor, if it is achieved, will the mere fact of an extension of democracy, though I do not mean of course that re­striction would do better. Suffering can be recognized; to argue its definition is an evasion, a contemptible thing. But the good life, the thing wanted for its elf, the aesthetic, will be defined outside of anybody’s politics, or defined wrongly. William Stafford ends a poem titled “Vocation” (he is speaking of the poet’s vocation) with the line: “Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.” And though it may be presumptuous in a man elected to nothing at all, the poet does under­take just about that, certainly nothing less, and the younger poets’ judgment of society is, in the words of Robert Duncan, “I mean, of course, that happiness itself is a forest in which we are bewildered, turn wild, or dwell like Robin Hood, outlawed and at home.”

It is possible that a world without art is simply and flatly uninhab­itable, and the poet’s business is not to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to seek to give to political statements the aura of eter­nal truth. It should not really be the ambition even of the most well-meaning of political and semipolitical gatherings to do so, and to use verse for the purpose, as everyone perfectly well knows, is merely ex­cruciating. Therefore the poet, speaking as a poet, declares his politi­cal nonavailability as clearly as the classic pronouncement: “If nomi­nated I will run: if elected I will hide” (I quote from memory). Surely what we need is a “redemption of the will”—the phrase from a not-yet-produced young playwright whose work I have read—and indeed we will not last very long if we do not get it. But what we must have now, the political thing we must have, is a peace. And a peace is made by a peace treaty. And we have seen peace treaties before; we know what they are. [...]

And where is the poet who will write that she opened her front door, having sent the children to school, and felt the fresh authentic air in her face and wanted—that?... (more)

-- "The Mind’s Own Place," George Oppen, ca.1963

(via Wood's Lot)

Nothing sets poetry back: On American poetry

Nothing sets poetry back fifty years. It's as if you're graphing a line of progress; as if each generation was getting closer and closer to the roseate goal of perfect poetry. And along comes some dastardly bastard who through his influence sets us all back fifty years. That's nonsense. Poetry isn't proceeding in that line anyway. No one can demonstrate to me that the poetry being written today is any better - generically - that the poetry Keats wrote. Our language may have changed, our concerns may have changed, but you can't demonstrate that. You can't demonstrate the myth of progress, that each decade poetry is getting better and better and better until some day there will be a millennium and everybody will write poetry that will be absolutely, ravishingly fantastic. It's utter bullshit. Any concept that any one poet or critic can set poetry back is all rubbish. Poetry isn't going anyplace anyway, so how can it be set back?

... I hate these people who are more concerned with the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, where something is going, and what is happening to American poetry, than the act of creation itself... [Y]ou're not involved in some historical process which is consciously shaping the future of American letters. It's English Department talk. It's the talk of people who are more interested in the historical process than they are in the poetic moment... When they come to evaluate the historical process and what's going on in this country, I'll be long dead. It will make no difference to me. But no one will take away from me the moments of poetic creation and reshaping of the world. Small as they may have been. Unimportant as they ultimately, historically, turn out to be, they are the heart of poetry. And this is what the poet ought to be concerned with.

-- George Hitchcock, ca. 1978

Americans have a peculiar affinity for marking their history off in decades. Each decade in turn gives rise to its particular and often exaggerated zeitgeist, which literary and social historians promptly embody in a "generation."

-- George Hitchcock, ca. 1958, in a review of On the Road and Howl for American Socialist

Pictured: Five generations in one photograph

The first notion of what literature is...

Michel Houellebecq does not deny having copied “technical descriptions from the anonymous compilers of Wikipedia” for use in his latest novel - including “a description of how flies have sex.” But he says of the people calling this plagiarism: “If these people really think that [this is plagiarism], they haven’t got the first notion of what literature is.

- Via Moby Lives, where you can read more...

Note: Being literary myself, I copied the illustration above from Moby.

The Three Types of Criticism

... either sheer gush (out of ignorance or guilt) or a transparent attempt to weaken competitors... capitalistic dog-eat-dog competitiveness and corporative "don't knock the company" team spirit...

There is a third possibility: those who are interested in the same type of poetry attack each other sharply, and still have respect and affection for each other. I don't see why this approach should be impossible for Americans.

-- Robert Bly, ca. 1967

Mad Men

The fact that I always felt uncertain in the face of masterpieces seemed natural to me. It is the good right of masterpieces that they should upset our arrogant certainty and question our importance. They took away a part of my reality, commanded silence, a halt to mouse-like scampering around unimportant and stupid things. They didn't permit me - as Thomas Moore says - "to concern myself too much with that domineering thing called 'I.'" If it is proper to call this a transaction, it was the most profitable of transactions conceivable. In return for humility and quietude, they gave me the "honey and light" that I could never create myself.

One of the deadly sins of contemporary culture is that it meanspiritedly avoids a frontal confrontation with the highest values. Also the arrogant conviction that we can do without models (both aesthetic and moral), because our place in the world is supposedly so exceptional and can't be compared with anything. That's why we reject the aid of tradition and stumble around in our solitude, digging around in the dark corners of the desolate little soul.

There exists a false view to the effect that tradition is like a fortune, a legacy, which you inherit mechanically, without effort, and that's why those who object to inherited wealth and unearned privilege are against tradition. But in fact every contact with the past requires an effort, a labor, and a difficult and thankless labor to boot, for our little "I" whines and balks at it...

Poor utopians, history's debutantes, museum arsonists, liquidators of the past are like those madmen who destroy works of art because they cannot forgive them their serenity, dignity, and cool radiance.

-- Zbignew Herbert, from "Animula," in The Collected Prose, 1948-1998, edited by Alissa Valles

Pegasus

It is known that by striking his hoof Pegasus created the spring Hippocrene, at the foot of Helicon, the seat of the Muses. But this only means that everyone can drink from the spring: wanderers, oxen - and poets, too, under the condition that they return to the spring, that is to the beginning. There are few of them, and they don't swim with the stream, which carries with it toppled ideologies, smashed icons and - garbage.

...

The old mare metaphor was put out to pasture, they thought she was no longer good for anything. This was not done without great losses in the sphere of poetics, which does not at all mean playing the poet, but craft. In a shipwrecked world, nothing can be compared to anything else. That's why, the innovators think, one must multiply the tautologies (the spiritual self-sufficiency) of egotists. Ego + Ego = Ego. E + E = E. And then the world is perfectly futile, that is coherent - consistent.

Pegasus is lonely and one of a kind.

Poor Pegasus! You are indifferent to all this. You are an immortal horse. You freed yourself from the yoke of the pretenders who claim you. You know very well that people are always trying to hitch the divinities - good and evil ones - to their carts, to get them to pull those silly carts down to forbidden dives.

-- Zbignew Herbert, from "Pegasus," in The Collected Prose, 1948-1998, edited by Alissa Valles

Pictured: James Thurber's Pegasus, for Poetry magazine; photo by Gary Sullivan