On poetic justice

It's a trope now and forever to call William McGonagall a bad poet, and to goof on his Poetic Gems - but he was courageous, if nothing else. This little gem is from James Campbell's review in the TLS of Norman Watson's recent biography, Poet McGonagall:

... in court to defend his son John against a charge of assaulting John's father-in-law, he told the judge that the victim had been "haunting me like an evil shadow, calling out to me, "Poet, Poet, Silvery Tay, bring out your sword an' I'll fight you." The judge was sufficiently impressed with McGonagall's response - "With one stroke of my sword I declare I could sweep fifty of King Edward's army into the Tay" - to throw out the charges against young John.

How's that for a bit of poetic justice?

Take that, Poets, Poets!

*

To turn serious now, let me add that poetic justice is not related to anything about how institutions-are-bad, filters-are-bad, MFAs-are-bad (though these all may or may not be); what a narrow sense of rectitude one gets from the squabble in our AmPo blogosphere.

There's a famous exchange between Joseph Brodsky and a Soviet trial judge to remind us that poets really do come up against unjust institutions; as Wikipedia explains the context, Brodsky's poetry was denounced, after which

... his papers were confiscated, he was interrogated, twice put in a mental institution and then arrested. After a secret trial in 1964, he was charged with social parasitism by the Soviet authorities, finding that his series of odd jobs and role as a poet were not a sufficient contribution. They called him "a pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers" who failed to fulfill his "constitutional duty to work honestly for the good of the motherland." [...] For his "parasitism" Brodsky was sentenced to five years hard labor and served 18 months on a farm in the arctic Archangelsk region where he chopped wood, hauled manure and crushed rocks, and at night read his anthology of English and American poetry.

JUDGE: And what is your profession in general?

BRODSKY: Poet translator.

JUDGE: Who recognized you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?

BRODSKY: No one. And who enrolled me in the ranks of humanity?

JUDGE: Did you study this?

BRODSKY: This?

JUDGE: To become a poet. You did not try to finish high school where they prepare, where they teach?

BRODSKY: I didn’t think you could get this from school.

JUDGE: How then?

BRODSKY: I think that it . . . comes from God.

(I've previously blogged about George Hitchcock, who was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1957. Citing the First Amendment, he declined to answer questions about his politics, though he did say that he was from Hood River, Oregon - "where the delicious apples come from" - and when asked what his profession was, replied: "My profession is a gardener. I do underground work on plants.")

*
Then, too, this being his centennial year I think of Miguel Hernández, whom I have translated. One of Spain's greatest poets, he was imprisoned by Franco and perished miserably at a young age.

This is from a recent article in The Independent:

Miguel Hernández died at 32 in prison in 1942, after a death sentence for his left-wing sympathies was commuted to 30 years. Now the poet's family want his supposed crime wiped from the records. In a law suit filed this week in the Spanish Supreme Court they ask for his guilty verdict to be annulled. In March, the family had a posthumous "declaration of reparation" from the Spanish government. But they are not satisfied. "We want something more, that they void the death sentence, so we can take away that burden," his daughter-in-law, Lucía Izquierdo, said. "That's why we are asking that justice be served, that they hand down a ruling of innocent."

The court has rejected dozens of petitions to void summary judgments by Franco-era military courts on the grounds that they followed the law of the times. But lawyers for the poet's family are optimistic. They are presenting new evidence, a 1939 letter from a fascist military official, Juan Bellod, testifying to his innocence. The letter was part of an unresolved case against the poet that was recently discovered when historic archives were digitized.

Here actual poetic justice remains to be done.

On being not so erinaceous as poets

Poets are today imaginative writers who use the technique of verse. This technique, though employed by the ancients for almost every form of utterance and record, from songs to dramas and epics, from legal codes to medical treatises, has come to be confined in our epoch to functions of a specialized kind. Where the novelist deals in character, adventure and situation, the poet is usually limited to the expression of emotion and mood or to the simple description of people and objects. As a consequence, being a poet is rarely a full-time job, and the poet has large spaces in life which are not filled by literary activity proper and in which they occupy themselves with a kind of professional politics. Poets form into groups, which in their combinations, disruptions and recombinations, their debates, practical jokes and fierce battles, tend to keep them in a state of excitement. In this group instinct they somewhat resemble painters--though painters by reason of the fact that they practice a genuine handicraft instead of a purely intellectual metier, have a certain amount of physical work to tire them and are not so erinaceous as poets. The reactions of groups of poets toward one another may be said to correspond more or less to the reactions of individual novelists.

-- Edmund Wilson, "The Literary Worker's Polonius: A Brief Guide for Authors and Editors" - ca. 1935, reprinted in Shores of Light (via Jennifer Lowe)

Pictured: Mr. Polonius

On coherence (for your fridge)

I wonder whether Arendt was right that Hiroshima changed everything oh could that have changed poetry maybe duh could that have led to some extreme elegies to grammar and syntax and diction oh maybe duh maybe a duh in silt and slippage oh why not sapphics and Alex Pope are you saying the mimetic fallacy is right and that an age of horror demands an accelerated dissonant face Oh Lord could it be yes yes yes no The last minutes of Leclisse why an eclipse and Hiroshima Mon Amour couldn't it be more lucid coherent and sweet Uh duh hunh and what are all these paratactical strategies God give me the strength to read Baudelaire without disgust God give me the strength to understand parataxis and disgust God give me the strangeness of going to and from Cythere at once Oh Lord I can connect nothing to nothing in such a positive mood Oh Lord thou expunges the connects thou splits apart the scratches Oh Lord when the mode of the music changes can't we all just calm down like the Lack of Criteria and think about good poems from 1912 particularly those that came before the war came Another mimetic phallacy Does Shapiro really think the mass murders of 1939-45 break apart the very seams of poetry Oh yes There must be poetry after Adorno but it will be different too There must be music after Berg but it will be a new and strange music There must be poetry split apart There might be poetry in of the dark Dis Just plunge this into the bottom of the poetry of Paul Celan and as you are freezing in ashes ask the same question Will Paul make a different music poetry and will his wife a different drawing after after after so wrought that the very word after begins to be clear

-- David Shapiro

Then there is the subject matter...

I have come to believe that the kind of meaning a poem has is like the kind of meaning a dream has: intense, loaded with symbols, quirky, personal and obscure. For that matter, many of the best novels and movies have that kind of meaning too. Think of The Big Sleep: a storyline so confused that even the original writer, Raymond Chandler, confessed he had no idea who murdered the chauffeur, yet a marvelous movie nonetheless. Perhaps the illogical sequence of statements in the poem is meant to shock the reader into this kind of realization -- that we are now in "The Twilight Zone," where different rules apply.

Then there is the subject matter, for example, the illogical contradictions involved in American democracy — we demand honesty from politicians, yet our real demands force them into dishonesty. And the contradictions involved in Rimbaud’s decision to be a poet, then his decision not to be a poet ever again. Both these contradictory positions were held with fervent sincerity. As a youth he despised the bourgeoisie, yet he spent all his adult life as a hard-working trader, a petty capitalist. So is poetry just a superior kind of interior decoration, that the older (and wiser?) Rimbaud was right to despise? What happens to the anti-bourgeois tirades of the outsider artist when they are marketed by savvy publishing houses to the very bourgeoisie these artists supposedly excoriate?

-- John Tranter, on a poem of his in the December "Q&A" issue of Poetry

Invent your own: Tom Pickard on form and Basil Bunting's Briggflatts

Although Bunting had a plan or diagram for Briggflatts I would argue that it was as much a walk in the dark for him as for anyone beginning to compose an original work. I’m sure that when he set off on his journey he wasn’t fully aware of what he’d find and had to leave much to chance. I mean, I don’t think that he lay down the blueprint and joined up the dots. There were key figures and emotions in mind - but they were distant mountains, and there was a lot of unknown territory between him and them.

As he began the journey of Briggflatts, Bunting was able discover new territory and chart the landscape as he hacked his way through it, heading for the mountains that peaked over the jungle. But he found that he was also able place material already to hand. His "Coda," the perfect end to Briggflatts, was written - on the back of tax return envelope - long before he’d even thought about the poem. Naturally, he was always thinking about form and taking pleasure in the masters and mistresses of it, and spent a lifetime studying it - but he also gave me some advice that I very much took to heart. As a young man I asked him “What aboot form, Basil?” He replied, “Invent your own.” That off-the-cuff response to my earnest query over a beer one night - invent your own - is tattooed, as it were, on my writing hand.

*

I can understand Bunting's joy when he found that old tax return envelope. In fact I remember him in the mid-sixties, first taking a blue pencil (more like a bloody scythe) to my early poems and leaving only two lines standing. "Just hang on to it, you'll find a use for it somewhere." Bunting's admonitions and strictures are never far from my mind, but I do occasionally trespass into uncharted territory for the hell of it. He encouraged experiment and suggested that we shouldn't be afraid to fail. It's almost an empirical approach to making poems.

-- from the December 2010 issue of Poetry

On the editorial question, "What are you saying...?"

J.H. Prynne on the difference between difficulty and obscurity in poetry:

It is useful to distinguish "difficult" from "obscure." When poetry is obscure this is chiefly because information necessary for comprehension is not part of the reader's knowledge. The missing information may be specific (a personal name, say, or some tacit allusion), or general (an aspect of religious belief, say); and finding out this information may dispel much of the obscurity. When poetry is difficult this is more likely because the language and structure of its presentation are unusually cross-linked or fragmented, or dense with ideas and response-patterns that challenge the reader's powers of recognition. In such cases, extra information may not give much help. Alexander Pope's The Dunciad (1728-43) is now obscure but not especially difficult; Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" or "Sunday Morning" (both published in his Harmonium, 1917 [sic; see comment by Steven Fama, below]) are difficult but mostly not obscure; Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), or in long retrospect the wuti ("no title") poems of Li Shang-yin (c. 813-58), are hard for readers because they are obscure and also difficult; indeed, their difficulties are deliberate and integral to poetic method; compare also the later case of Bada Shanren (1626-1707) [...] In a later case there is pastiche obscurity as a quasi-parody of eclectic learning: compare Lie E (1857-1909), Lao can youji (1907) [...] In such combinations, each type of hardship for the reader makes the other type harder (and, it may be, more rewarding) to deal with and understand.

- from note 1, "Difficulties in the Translation of 'Difficult' Poems," Cambridge Literary Review, 1.3 (Easter 2010), pp. 151-66


Addendum: There is now a website devoted to "difficult" poetry: http://www.arduity.com/

"Of the original apple, all of these clones since..."

Sina Queryas, in the December issue of Poetry:

Elegy attempts to get at something original about loss. Our pain is always unique. It's always more serious somehow than others' pain. And it's often impossible to recognize others' pain, even when we're at our most empathic. On the most simplistic level one can say that each apple is both unique and a replication - and now even more complexly so - of the original. The image is also laden with the laws of motion/emotion, the relation between the bite and life. It makes me consider how entrenched narrative gestures can be. There is some connection between the apple and grief for me.

On contemporary tribal relics: the map is not the territory

In a lengthy Facebook comment stream relating to my earlier blog post here, Sandra Simonds asked me to clarify my razzle-dazzle ending about interiority. Well, she got me! I hadn't yet seen Zadie Smith's ballyhoo'd piece about Facebook in the NYRB, in which she says something close to what was in my smaller craw:

Right now I am teaching my students a book called The Bathroom by the Belgian experimentalist Jean-Philippe Toussaint—at least I used to think he was an experimentalist. It’s a book about a man who decides to pass most of his time in his bathroom, yet to my students this novel feels perfectly realistic; an accurate portrait of their own denuded selfhood, or, to put it neutrally, a close analogue of the undeniable boredom of urban twenty-first-century existence.

In the most famous scene, the unnamed protagonist, in one of the few moments of “action,” throws a dart into his girlfriend’s forehead. Later, in the hospital they reunite with a kiss and no explanation. “It’s just between them,” said one student, and looked happy. To a reader of my generation, Toussaint’s characters seemed, at first glance, to have no interiority—in fact theirs is not an absence but a refusal, and an ethical one. What’s inside of me is none of your business. To my students, The Bathroom is a true romance.

... So I rather (inaptly) quoted Ramin Jahanbegloo on how "reading philosophy [though I was thinking poetry] can help us see the ontological difference between being critical of modernity, and remaining true to philosophy’s radical self-choice, which requires the ongoing Socratic task of bringing inwardness and dialogue into political life."

But Gene Tanta replied: "If ontologies existed, I'd wonder what the haters of modernity would have to squabble over with those who live reflective lives. Alas, since being is never 'there' fixed and forever, the difference is false or utopian (which, of course, makes the difference between a conservative person and a self-regarding person very important)."

I said: "You're not dispensing with Socrates, I take it."

No, he assured me, "I'm holding him close to my bosom, just look at my beard. You're not dispensing with modernity, are you?"

I suppose postmodernity has done that, or tried to - but me dispense with modernity? No way: I'm a-swim in modernism every day. Poetry arose in its wake, needless to say, the litmag being an invention of modernism; and here we are, many of us, still talking about Pound and H.D. & company after almost 100 years; or at least "writing through" them. Why?

And I wonder: how do we map such strange, shifting, and shiftless territory?

*

Here's Donald Fagen, if I may swerve again, from his blog (he's a terrific blogger!):

In September of '66, my formerly tweedy, graying poetry professor, Anthony Hecht, showed up for the new term in black and white-striped Uncle Sam bellbottoms, a bright paisley shirt, a suede vest and Beatle boots. We all assumed that these, along with a new laid-back, goofy expression, were the souvenirs of a summer spent among the flower children of Haight-Ashbury, a section of San Francisco that was just starting its climb to glory. Of course, my pals and I had to check it out as well. So, a few months later, I drove out there with a couple of friends.

The scene, made eerily vivid by the combination of psychedelic drugs and its own outrageous novelty, was pure sci fi: all these dazzling young girls dressed up in home-made outfits inspired by Pocahontas, Maid Marion, Annie Oakley and whoever. Tall, bony drug dealers with ponytails would walk past you muttering the names of their wares without the vowels, just in case you were a narc: Hsh! - Grss! - Zd! - Spd!. Blue Cheer, a group that touted itself as the loudest band in the world, was playing down the street at the Straight Theater.

It was fascinating, for about a week, anyway. Then you started to notice that a lot of the kids looked all waxy and wild-eyed, and that they were talking much too slow or much too fast and then you got that Oh Shit feeling like Lou Costello thinking he's talking to Abbott and then realizing he's talking to the Wolfman. On the corner, you'd spot the hustling predator (whose consciousness hadn't been raised as yet) looking to score off the middle-class kids who'd walked right onto their turf. It was over, bro, before it even hit Life Magazine.

By 1968, the paranoia was thick. The Vietnam War was escalating, Kennedy II and King were assassinated and both the right and the left were caught in a cycle of fear and fury. Several gruesome murders (the "Groovy" murders, Manson) broke the spirit of the alternative community. Almost immediately, the counterculture, this alliance of aspiring mutants, seemed to have a nervous breakdown and fragment into claques devoted to one authority figure or another: You could sign up with the Maharishi, Meher Baba, Rajneesh and his Orange People, Sun Myung Moon, the Sufis, the Jesus Freaks, the Hari Krishnas and various sects of Buddhists. Alternately, there were the human potential movements already mentioned, plus EST, Arica, Primal Therapy and scores of others. In the political sphere, you had the Panthers and the Weathermen. All this provided me and my droll companions with a lot of great material for after-dinner analysis, with or without herbal mood augmentation. Not that we all weren't feeling a little shaky ourselves. Now everyone had a map, but, as the Count liked to say, the map is not the territory. After a while, there wasn't any territory, either.

[I was lucky to meet Donald Fagen at my friend Don Guttenplan's wedding - as pictured above - and happily learned that he was a reader of literary magazines, including the one at which I then worked. I was also lucky some years later to have met Anthony Hecht, about whom I'd written; click here to listen to a reading Hecht gave at Harvard - just five years after the period Fagen describes.]

Is it all just a rush and whoosh? No map, no territory?

*

Here's Eliot Weinberger, in the New York Review of Books:

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a committed modernist had two ambitions: to make something new and to recover something old. In the search for new forms for the new age, it seemed as though everything was inspirational, and that the entirety of human history was rushing into the present: the folk songs and folk tales of European peasants, African and Inuit masks, Japanese haiku, Celtic rituals, Navajo blankets, Etruscan funerary sculpture, the unreconstructed fragments of classical Greek poetry, Oceanic shields and tapa cloths, alchemical drawings… The way into the future and out of the recent past—the perceived straitjacket of nineteenth-century art and mores—was to go back to the distant past.

A footnote reads: "In the prevailing evolutionary narrative of culture, contemporary tribal artifacts were seen as relics from the past, the 'childhood of man.'"
*

It is a whoosh, isn't it? So does modernism have a future? Possibly. This is Marjorie Perloff, writing on transition editor, Eugene Jolas:

From the first, Jolas's gift was an enormous sensitivity to different linguistic registers. Drafted in the U.S. army in 1917, he concentrated neither on military strategy nor on political issues but on the 'new words' that he heard from his fellow soldiers, most of them, like himself, recent immigrants: "profane words, crude words, voluptuous words, occult words, concrete words . . . a scintillating assemblage of phonetic novelties." "I heard," he recalls, "the vocabulary of the bunkhouse, the steamer, the construction camp, the brothel, the machine shop, the steel mill. I heard that lexicon of the farmhouse and the mountain cabin. . . . Here was truly a melting-pot, Franco-Belgian-Serbian-German-Austrian-Bohemian-Americans in our outfit mingled with native-born Americans with Anglo-Saxon names, and our conversations were often filled with picturesquely distorted English and foreign words that quickened my Babel fantasies."

[...]

"We tried," Jolas remarks sadly in the Epilogue to Man from Babel, "to give voice to the sufferings of man by applying a liturgical exorcism in a mad verbalism." But "now that the greatest war in history is over, and the nations are trying to construct a troubled peace in an atomic era, we realize that the international migrations which the apocalyptic decade has unleashed bring in their wake a metamorphosis of communication." The solution, he was quick to add, "will not be invented by philologists - we have seen their inventions: Idiom Neutral, Ido, Esperanto, Novial, Interglossa. These were pedantic, unimaginative creations without any life in them." Rather, one must take one's own language-and English, Jolas felt, was now the most prominent, used as it was by seven hundred million people around the world - and "bring into this medium elements from all the other languages spoken today." The new language "should not number several hundred thousand words, but millions of words. It will not be an artificial language, but one that has its roots in organic life itself."

The notion of interjecting "all the other languages spoken today" into the fabric of English is still a bit Utopian, but Jolas is on to something important -namely that multilingualism functions, not by mere addition, but by the infusion into one's own language of the cultures that are changing its base.

And Perloff goes on to outline how multilingualism is functioning in contemporary poetry. Still...

*

Addition and infusion. The past. Utopianism. And Babel fantasies. Such are the foibles of modernism that "unoriginal genius" - poetry by other means - may be supplanting. Or maybe it was all over before it hit Life magazine.

More power to 'em, as we used to say in the last century.

*

On the other hand, recent reports indicate that there's presently a turning back of the clock, so maybe it's the season to fall behind!

Pictured: 3 Dons

ANY ARTIST WHO IS NOT SELF-INDULGENT BETRAYS ART and other foibles

I had lunch last Thursday with Ilya Kaminsky (about whom some exciting news is soon to follow!), along with the PF's amazing Archive Editor, Jim Sitar.  I don't normally blog about my lunches, there being an inexhaustible literature on the subject of lunch poetry - but our conversation has led me to the strands of thought in this blogpost, so here I am typing this over breakfast.

Among the many things we energetically discussed (imagine two crazy and hearing-impaired Russians face to face for the first time - OK, 2nd, but first for a conversation - in a noisy restaurant!) was the way in which people read poetry: do we read poems or poets?  (Poor Jim has sat through many iterations of every ridiculous idea I have about poetry, and he was, as always, very polite about enduring my lengthy blather on the subject - this while simultaneously contemplating a Japanese spinach salad that looked a little like an asphalted, tattooed cupcake. To him my gratitude and apologies!)  Well, as this is just a blog, I can unpack a few thoughts on the subject without pressing, ironing, and hanging them up in any formal sense: it seems to me that when poetry is taught to people - or packaged and sold to them - they do read on the level of the poem.  Most people, if they read poetry at all, simply want to know: which poems should I read?  The thinking is something like this: "I don't want to read everything John Ashbery [or fill in the blank] wrote - what writings by this poet do I need to know - if any?"

This is survey-course mentality, greatest-hits mode, it's hitting the anthology highway.  I imagine that what happens is not so much that there's some kind of kitschy-wrong canon to be promulgated (there's an old hat if there ever was one), but that people want to cut to the chase.  Where's the shortcut, what can I click on, what's the takeaway?  (The mode of this post, by the way, is shitty metaphor and cliche.)  Ashbery's a good test case here: the presumption is that his numerous poems are somehow interchangeable, so you can form an opinion on the basis of a mere sampling: "The one I saw in the New Yorker the other day sucked/was great," etc.  This is quite untrue, of course - each of his books reads completely differently... but you'd have to read Ashbery book by book to notice that.  But Ashbery is, among many other wonderful things, a red herring, so try substituting any poet you wish and report back to me.  Why, the putative reader seems to ask, do I have to be bothered with everything a poet published?  Just tell me the good stuff.  Tell me if poet X is worth my time.  And it's as if the good stuff comes without, or doesn't come within the context of the bad.  To complicate things: even though we routinely and conversationally say that a poet or poem is good or bad, we simultaneously pretend du jour that no such judgment is objectively possible.  There's no such a thing as greatness, let alone goodness; who are we to judge?  Yet let's bring up - as I did during our lunch - Edward Dorn.  Ah, then you get something going on the subject of goodness and badness.

I object in principle to poetry a la carte, as you can tell, and find it no trouble whatsoever to read as much of a poet's work as I can lay my eyes upon.  In an age when everybody on the bus lugs around the latest Harry Potter book, or more literary types their Roberto Bolaños, you can't tell me people don't have time for or don't need, say, big honking books like the Library of America Ashbery or Frost or Pound or Crane; or the many differing texts of Marianne Moore's work, or all of Larry Eigner (unluggable, to be sure), or Ron Silliman's The Alphabet.  But more to the point: how will I know what to think of a poem, let alone a poet, without the experience of having to read enough - maybe more than enough! - to know something?

(I haven't even mentioned rereading!  I often try to reread poets whose work I've resisted, paying even more attention to them, in some ways, than to those I already know I care for.  John Cage famously used to quote the Zen koan: "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four.  If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on.  Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting.")

Ilya, I think, was not quite persuaded; he's a poem person, and not a poet person!

Your own mileage, as we used to say, may vary...

*

When poets meet, they often ask each other the lovely question: what poet are you excited about just now?  I'm excited about Geoffrey Hill's new book, Oraclau/Oracles, the new Pound selected, and The Capricious Critic, by Ari Martin Samsky - yet I mentioned to Ilya instead that I've been pretty absorbed in Dorn lately, heaven knows why. Probably just that I picked up a few old books of his in a used bookstore - among them, a signed copy of Yellow Lola that only cost a few dollars.  So: not the Dorn of Way More West - but the Dorn of the older Collected Poems and Selected Poems.   Dorn is certainly a poet who inspires heated debate, something I learned vividly back when Harriet had comments (re Aram Saroyan's "The Hero and the Gunslinger").  Silliman explores much of this interestingly here - in a blog post that's especially significant, I suppose, because it's cited in Dorn's Wikipedia entry.  Ron writes that "the real question" is whether "Dorn is as good or significant a poet as the Black Mountain acolyte gone bad of received wisdom."  Ron discusses Dorn in light of the way he has recently been represented in Way More West; he concludes that "there is no more tragic tale than that of Edward Dorn, who got political only to be revealed as incoherent. Way More West is an important book, precisely because it is such a sad & ultimately disappointing one."   My own experience was to have been disappointed in WMW not so much for the politics, but as a reading experience - not because it's a bad or un-useful book, but because I find the way-earlier Collected Poems so exhilarating.  It's not that Dorn's politics and prejudices don't matter - they sure do, and Ron shows why; but one can, one must in this case, exercise a bit of negative capability.  And what I get from Dorn's work at its (dare I say) best is an angry response to and rejection of the movieland, picture-postcard mythology indelibly associated with the places of the American West.  He finds poverty, fly-specked bars, vast spaces that must be crossed in shitty old automobiles by people searching for work - and, needless to say, much, much more.  In the current political environment, I should think Dorn's reality-check West would be of great contemporary interest.  And I'm not defending the man who, for example, Jane Dark referred to as "that prick Dorn;" I am humanly incapable of ignoring the things Dorn wrote or said about AIDS just as I never forget what Pound said about Jews.  I am, however, trying to read him.  That's the only way I can make up my mind about him, and maybe learn something.  I might even learn about hatred and bigotry; if that's something I've learned already, it doesn't hurt to learn it some more.  But I also find some terrific poems, some certain peaks among the low and desolating waste places.  And now I direct readers to this constructive (and sorrowful) exchange between CA Conrad and Dale Smith on the matter; in fact, if you stayed with me this far, you MUST read it. 

*

What the foregoing inadequately documents is a struggle with what we call, these days, subjectivity.  I'm also reading Marjorie Perloff's new book, Unoriginal Genius, a book about "what can be done with other people's words."  I suppose one way to dispense with the kind of all-too-human bigotry you might find in a poet's work or life is to reject utterly the lyrical interference of the ego - a project that's been with us for quite a long time now (that italicized phrase is from Marinetti's 1912 Futurist manifesto, notwithstanding Marinetti's own conspicuously dire views and ego.)  Perloff documents the evolution of an ego-mitigating citational poetics from Walter Benjamin's Arcades project and The Waste Land onward.  It's an excellent book (I'd only quibble that she refers to the "venerable Poetry Foundation of America" when the org is simply called the Poetry Foundation, and it's only five years old!).  Among its many virtues are a brilliantly lucid and exciting explanation of the way Benjamin organized his Arcades material; a vital history of the Brazillian concrete poets who argue for a need to recover the avant-garde by casting a critical eye upon postmodernism (because the latter employs a tactic which, as Augusto de Campos puts it, wants to "put aside swiftly the recovery of experimental art and to say all of this is finished."); and much more besides.

The concretist poets are particularly fascinating, and it's great to see them discussed and illustrated in the book; as Perloff notes, their work marks an

... important distinction between avant- and arrière-garde.  The original avant-garde was committed not to recovery, but discovery, and it insisted that the aesthetic of its predecessors - say, of the poets and artists of the 1890s - was "finished."  But by midcentury the situation was very different.  Because the original avant-gardes had never really been absorbed into the artistic and literary mainstream, the "postmodern" demand for total rupture [with the past] was always illusory.

They wanted, as Haroldo de Campos puts it, "to free poetry from subjectivism and the expressionistic vehicle" of the dominant mode while at the same time appreciating continuity.

Keeping, in other words, baby and bathwater.

If I dispense with the subjective, then I don't have to worry about the darker side of a Dorn or a Pound.  But don't I lose something thereby?  I guess I'm quaintly and hopelessly attached to a notion of poetry as a system of recovery: recovery from bigotry and history, among other things - a poetry which recovers, even as it transforms, what we can piece together of the past, notably including the terrible.  Many of Dorn's poems are a joy to me.  Then, too, his is a scary - and possibly emblematic - story; a pure product of America, maybe he went crazy.  I can learn from Dorn, and not just stuff about poetry.  Today's poetics may aspire to what Jameson calls "the end of the entrepreneurial and inner-directed individualism;" but individuals are causing a whole lot of wreckage and heartbreak on this planet, and I sure want to understand more about how that works, even from the work, however deluded or fabricated, of an inner-d poet.

I'm glad not to have to advocate any "kind" of poetry.  As a reader, I am thankfully free to read anything, everything I possibly can.  And so it's fine with me if the much-vilified ghost of Robert Lowell still walks among us (he turns up in Perloff's book, sure nuff, though I disbelieve that he haunts poetry at all these days), and I simultaneously adore his work alongside that which employs the techniques of "appropriation, citation, copying, reproduction," to borrow Perloff's list.  (I wish, by the way, that she had a chapter on Christian Bök, though she does talk about him.)  As she says, these techniques have been around in the visual arts for many decades; and as somebody who reads lots and lots of poetry submissions, I certainly hold no particular brief for the kind of "original expression" in verse that, Perloff notes, "dies hard" in the realm of the written word.  At the same time, we can take another lesson from the visual artists.  In his first Diasporist Manifesto - itself a work of free-verse collage and appropriation - R.B. Kitaj finds it amazing to be walking around among "shadows," among those who survive and remember the tragedies of genocide; those shadows, he points out, happen to be actual people.  In his second Diasporist Manifesto, he contemplates and advocates (more to the point) an art that "will comport with an idea of social justice" - 

Prophetic ethical concern for social justice in a modern interiority of... painting, beyond Mondrian; picture ethics.

I like the sound of that, and wonder what the analogue in poetry might be for "picture ethics."  And he says:

ANY ARTIST WHO IS NOT SELF-INDULGENT BETRAYS ART. 

Not just Art with a capital A, but ART.  And he adds: "Anyway, I've never met an artist who knows how to forgo self-indulgence."

The other side of self-indulgence is ethical concern; and it takes interiority and subjectivity to tell the difference.

Silence, Kitaj says, is good, too, so I'll shaddup now.


... but first, another quibble.  In a chapter on Susan Howe's The Midnight, Perloff quotes Roger Stoddard's famous sign in the Emily Dickinson room at Harvard that explains why access to E.D.'s personal collection of books has been limited; the sign points out that no annotations in Dickinson's hand have been found in the books.  Howe was unable to examine them.  Perloff says: "She who knows that the Dickinson fascicles to indeed bear crucial marks revealing the poet's intent is not permitted to examine them."  Stoddard's sign, however, explicitly and exclusively refers to the books in Dickinson's library - not the fascicles.   Full disclosure: 1.) I was Roger's colleague when I was a curator at Harvard, and 2.) I don't know anything about what transpired when Howe was visiting the Houghton beyond what is reported in her book.  I don't think many people get to see the fascicles, but this isn't so much the function, in my opinion, of what Perloff calls "the regime of power" as an attempt to care for the fascicles as physical objects.  The Houghton carefully digitized Dickinson's Herbarium, access to which is free online; and work will be done on the fascicles, too.  So though I'm not unbiased, I think that "library control" isn't quite fair in the description of this episode.  Just my 2 cents, and it really doesn't detract from Perloff's ingenious and sensitive reading of Howe's wonderful book.

Give us a perm...

Sean O'Brien has a swell commentary in the TLS of 20 October 2010 about the North of England. He takes note of some fascinating archival films that preserve glimpses and traces of a disappearing regionalism - one dear to me because of my love for such Northrons as Basil Bunting and Tom Pickard. (Though Pickard's film is called We Make Ships, not We Build Ships; not many people know, by the way, that Pickard is, among many other things, a filmmaker.) 

Among the films O'Brien mentions are Ken Russell's 1960 documentary The Bedlington Miners' Picnic; here's an amusing poetry-related snippet:

"... the film [...] gives a rare chance to hear the Ashington accent, with its startlingly posh-sounding vowels. (Example: a woman goes to the hair-dresser and asks for a perm; the hairdresser replies, "I wandered lonely as a cloud.")."

Gotta love that!  Wordsworth was, of course, a Northron himself.

Pictured: Austin & Pickersgill Limited, from The Sunderland Site