Raymond Roussel's New Impressions of Africa was the last book he saw published in his lifetime. Begun in 1915, but not published until 1932 (a year before the author's death), it's a poem consisting, as Mark Ford - its latest translator - explains, "of four cantos of 228, 642, 172, and 232 lines respectively. Each is prefaced by a heading referring to a location in Egypt, and each begins with a few lines evoking the location in question." The poems are disrupted, if that's the right word, by bracketed, parenthetical thoughts, interrupted by a second... then a third... then a fourth divagation. And there are footnoted verses that contain several sets of brackets themselves. The book was composed in alexandrine couplets with alternating masculine and feminine rhymes.
The illustrations for the poem by Henri A. Zo (great name!), with whom Roussel had worked before. But on this occasion, Ford tells us,
... Zo had no contact with the author himself: he received his instructions for the fifty-nine illustrations [...] not from Roussel, but through the intermediary of a detective agency called Agence Goron. He was informed, further, that he would not be allowed to read the poem for which his fifty-nine Chinese ink drawings were commissioned until after its publication. When Zo eventually found out the name of his employer, he at once fired off a letter of remonstrance:
"Please allow me to tell you that I bitterly regret the fact that you wanted this collaboration to be shrouded in such an impenetrable mystery. These are not the pictures I would have made if I had known I was illustrating Raymond Roussel!"
Yes! Dickinson attached the above illustration, with another cut from page 359 of the book, to a poem she sent her sister-in-law Susan around 1859. As my wonderful former colleagues at the Houghton note -
"Interestingly, the book bears the ownership inscription of the poet’s father, Edward Dickinson; if the dating of the poem is correct, his daughter felt free to cut snippets from his books while he was around to discover her biblio-vandalism. Or perhaps the poet knew he wouldn’t be reading a novel?"
When reading poetry is not directed to the goal of deciphering a fixed, graspable meaning but rather encourages performing and responding to overlapping meanings, then difficulty ceases to be an obstacle and is transformed into an opening.
-- Charles Bernstein, "Creative Wreading & Aesthetic Judgment"
C.D. Wright. One with Others: [a little book of her days].
Worthy poets, worthy books, though the list seems familiar. Does one prize lead to another? Well, that's ok; one reader leads to another. The figure of a circle of book critics interests me, though; Bernstein's model for creative "wreading" led me to wonder how critics, as well as students and other readers, could introduce a few tangents or new openings into the familiar process of judging awards.
Are your friends more popular than you are? There doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason to suppose this is true, but it probably is. We are all more likely to become friends with someone who has a lot of friends than we are to befriend someone with few friends. It’s not that we avoid those with few friends; rather it’s more probable that we will be among a popular person’s friends simply because he or she has a larger number of them.
This simple realization is relevant not only to real-life friends but also to social media. In Twitter, for example, it gives rise to what might be called the follower paradox: most people have fewer followers than their followers do. Before you resolve to become more scintillating, remember that most people are in similar, sparsely populated boats.
Nice image: mute lonely figures on their becalmed boats...
"Thus, we can conclude that despite being more crowded together than average, most of us are less popular than average."
That's a little discouraging. Oh, well; I'm going to get some coffee and try to figure out how all this works if ones substitutes "friends" with "poets," or "readers."
P.P.S. Speaking of tangents: "It is not enough to stand at a tangent to other peoples’ conventions; we should also be the most unforgiving critics of our own." -- Tony Judt
In 2012, Poetry magazine will celebrate one hundred years of continuous publication. There are older magazines, to be sure, but I've been looking around to see which are turning the big 100 - and one is... Boy's Life!
Thanks to Steven Lomazow's amazing blog, Magazine History, I learned not only of BL's birthday, but the fascinating fact that one of its founders, Daniel Carter Beard, was also apparently behind another very different magazine, Anti-Trust: Champion of the People. Their motto: "Fearless of Any. Honest with All."
There still is an Antitrust Magazine, published by the American Bar Association; no relation, it seems. And I'm not sure what their motto is, but the ABA's is: "Defending Liberty. Pursuing Justice."
I came some time ago to think of despair and victimization as being at the service of the ruling class and the whole social edifice. It is the way in which imagination and intelligence eliminate themselves from the contest for power. Not that they are rivals for the same power. There is a difference. But [...] the only power they do exercise freely, without interference, is the power to despair. That is the monochromatic madness. Having myself felt it, known it, bathed in it, my native and temperamental impulse is to return to sanity in the form of laughter. This is not an affirmative policy. Nor do I expect anything but a disfigured success. But there are other powers from which we have abdicated - powers of gratification, of beauty and strength. When we agree they are gone forever some of us at least are shamefully lying. In my first two books I so agreed, shamefully. Then I realized I was merely doing another conventional thing. Conventionally lying.
... poets and novelists have retreated into the self and the writing school, increasingly clueless about how to talk about what’s happening in the world. As I’ve written, after 9/11, the New York Times and the New Yorker asked prominent writers to respond. One said it reminded him of the day his father died; another took an herbal bath and called an old boyfriend; and so on. Only Susan Sontag — and she was reviled for it — could put it into a larger context, but of course Sontag modeled herself on European public intellectuals. -- Eliot Weinberger
*
See also Pankaj Mishra's recent piece in that NYT "Why Criticism Matters" roundup, from which this:
There is little point in blaming “New Criticism,” which fetishized the uniqueness and autonomy of literary works, or in lashing, yet again, the dead horse of creative writing departments, which prescribe an antihistorical formalism while turning a noble vocation into yet another moneymaking opportunity. For these practices are merely symptoms of a larger phenomenon that, deepening through the cold war, is only more manifest now: mass depoliticization as political and economic arrangements seem depressingly unalterable.
“In our political as in our economic lives,” Tony Judt wrote in “Ill Fares the Land,” a lament for moral idealism and engaged citizenship, “we have become consumers.” A similar docility marks our cultural choices. Most writers as well as readers of literary fiction see it as a refined form of entertainment or instruction.
* Here's a glimpse of the reading/consuming "public" -
"...my sense — as I've insisted, however inadequately, elsewhere — is that this language, the language of avant-gardness and innovation, is far too deeply entangled in dominant cultural institutions and market systems to be at all recuperable. Further, the blind lust among artists and critics for newness, for advancedness, rests on a deeply troubling relation to time that not only pits new against old but presupposes a single landscape, a single temporality, such that, to point to one frustrating example, the rich multiplicity of American poetries that circulated during the 1970s and 80s can scarcely ever be considered by critics outside their relation to (or distance from) the New American Poetry or Language Writing. The fact of newness, of innovation, is always already built into efficacious work — work that productively intervenes in a situation at a specific moment in time — and so the desire to fetishize newness, avant- or advanced-ness, is to slavishly subordinate our labor to the stagflated market value of a transcendental signified that wrenches our attention away from the far more immediate, material conditions of our making."
Then there's this fine review essay, in Essays in Criticism, which includes some good quotes from Bob Archambeau on the "Cambridge School," viz -
"The contradictions of a publicly-concerned poetry that works only by negation and obscurity come to a head here. It isn't just the idea that such poetry doesn't so much engage politics as it withdraws from politics that bothers [Peter] Riley, either: He's haunted by the sense that poets of this kind have become elitists, unwilling to sully their hands with the practicalities of political struggle. After the passage quoted above comes Riley's cri de coeur, directed toward the avant-garde community in which he himself has much standing: ‘How did we get to be so haughty?’"
(See my own earlier post on the fate of the avant-garde here...)
*
Speaking of criticism, here's more on the critics' identity crisis:
The most significant thing about the feature on “Why Criticism Matters” is the title. The New York Times would never find it necessary to publish an article on why science, mathematics, medicine, music or art matters. The need to explain why criticism matters emphasizes as clearly as possible the fact that it doesn’t.
Something goes on here every dawn, when they sing their hymn of praise, although why He deserves a gift of praise for doling out this parsimonious distortion and prickliness only God knows, who accepts everything without thanks.
Something goes on here, but no matter how early I try to get up to hear that morning hymn of praise in the desert, I'm always too late. I come when it's all over. The crippled cholla-cactus wives have just finished dancing. The proud candelabra-men, the saguaras, have just finished singing praise to the creator for their meager rations.
Something goes on here, especially at night when the saguaras pay with bloody scratches for every drop of prickly pleasure after lying with those twisted freaks, their cholla wives. Nothing comes easy around here.
Late at night the snakes crawl out of their holes. The wolf barks, the coyote curses. It's a late-night bacchanal, proof that here too is a slice of the world.
But at such an hour it's dangerous for human feet to intrude. They say that the proud saguaras cry every night with human voices, praying God, have pity on your insane world.
-- Jacob Glatstein, translated from the Yiddish by Ruth Whitman
Does anyone know Richard Chase's essay, "The Fate of the Avant-Garde," which originally appeared in Partisan Review waaay back in 1957? It used to be quite famous, but seems to have fallen into obscurity, though it does get cited now and then.
In view of some recent blogging about this very subject, and to augment my own questions on the subject (e.g., How big is an avant-garde? Is the avant-garde a permanent movement? Etc.), I herewith present, for your entertainment and/or enlightenment, some brief excerpts.
*
It is the custom nowadays to pronounce the avant-garde dead. But the fact seems to be that under modern conditions the avant-garde is a permanent movement. Far from being merely the isolated band of highbrows and sterile academicians many Americans think it is, the vanguard of writers and artists has been, for more than one hundred and fifty years, a necessary part of the cultural economy, and the health of culture depends upon its recurring impulse to experimentation, its search for radical values, its historical awareness, its flexibility, and receptivity to experience, its polemical intransigence.
Historically the avant-garde is the heir to the aristocratic coterie or court circle of artists and intellectuals. But whereas the aristocratic coterie of medieval and Renaissance times had no commitment except to itself and posterity and consequently felt free to cultivate the disinterested pursuit of art and ideas apart from the rest of society, history has imposed upon the modern avant-garde the duty not only of disinterestedly cultivating art and ideas but of educating and leading an aimless body of philistine taste and opinion.
The historical role of the avant-garde was thus necessitated by the breakdown of the aristocratic class and by the spread of literacy. After the eighteenth century, the democratization of culture and the new literacy confronted the advanced intelligence with a newly arisen welter of taste and opinion which, left to itself, found no other standards than the conformism, at once aggressive and complacent, of the bourgeoisie. In this situation, the dissident intellectual, himself characteristically a bourgeois, found his mission. The mediocrity and, as it were, historical helplessness of his class in matter of art and ideas were an open invitation to his powers of discrimination and foresight. At the same time, his instinct for self-preservation and his powers of polemic were animated and challenged by the hostility with which his efforts were met.
[...]
What has happened to the avant-garde in our "suspended" culture of the 1950's is a psychological equivalent of what has happened to it sociologically. Sociologically, it has been institutionalized by the universities and the publishers, which by definition means that in its modern phase it has to come to an end. At the same time, it has been internalized, so to speak, in the flexibly dialectical mind of contemporary criticism. In this withdrawal from the field of action it finds a possibility of continued life. The resiliency of the best critical minds must be counted on the keep the avant-garde alive during periods which have no immediate task for its polemical mission.
Yet the task of the temperamental or born avant-garde critic is not limited to the polemical purpose of converting the philistines to art. He is also perennially the disinterested student and historian of culture, looking into the past and the present for the radical and not merely the contingent and incidental facts. The past convinces him that discontinuity and contradiction have always been of the essence of American culture. The present convinces him that among critics only the most powerful and resilient of "suspended" minds are capable of keeping alive the avant-garde spirit, or any spirit, or of embodying cultural contradictions of any sort without collapsing under the great strain into a formless middle way of feeling and thought. Who can doubt that this formless middle way of feeling and thought, with its increasing moralism and conventionality, is hardening into the new "cake of custom?" As for the future, one can only believe that the end of the present interim period will be marked by a new resurgence from the uneasy subliminal depths of our culture, in the classic manner of avant-garde action - provided, that is, that 1950 marks the end of a phase of American culture as we have known it, and not the end of that culture itself.
*
N.B. PR's editor, William Phillips, described the modern artist as "a suspended" person who "keeps the balance of opposing forces." Ur-hybridism?! PR writer Lionel Trilling similarly viewed culture as "nothing if not a dialectic. And in any culture there are likely to be certain artists who contain a large part of the dialectic within themselves..."
<><><><><><><><><><><>
Now. Remember Steve Allen?? It always bugged me, what he did with Elvis Presley and that hound dog on his TV show.
Interesting point: modern art, modern jazz, modern sculpture, modern poetry, modern politics, modern science, modern philosophy, etc., seem to leap far ahead of their audiences. The mass audience, which evidently will never learn, is not content to say "I just don't understand this new jazz." The usual comment is "It's not funny ... it's not jazz ... it's not poetry," etc.
*****
OK, let's get back to the "present" situation. Bob Archambeau says:
Story tellers in the expanding middle class eager for professional careers move across sites of struggle in "battleground" fields. We are our soul but we haven't yet got the dead of it. You steal on me you step in close to easy with soft promise your limit and absolute absence.
-- Susan Howe, That This
*
A quick post to say that I'm reading Howe's wrenching and beautiful new book, That This, which responds to the sudden death of her husband and friend, Peter. The book features six "photograms" (as above) by James Welling, I think it will be inevitably, but perhaps profitably, juxtaposed with Anne Carson's sorrowful Nox (also, as it happens, published by New Directions).
*
I can't remember if there was snow on the ground but I do remember the cold. If winter landscape meets the being of the subject of the soul now and before, and conveys what is yours to join the finished pastoral invention of others that is rationalism's secret.
Sinbad was not bad. Sysyphus has a bad back. Happy Birthday to me and to all a good night. May the new year not be the worst so far. This very day let us take out our insides and make them the same as our outsides. "The worst so far, oh hold it off if you can with your thumb or pivot finger (it doesn't exist.)" Let Elizabeth be right--one year in the past is enough to be the most terrible so far. She was speaking of a whole century like moonlight digested by a crane and held in his beak like a worldly comparison. Excuse me "while I disappear." Frank Sinatra discovers poetry...
