"I can't understand it..." : Another installment of... My Back Pages

"In a world with so high a proportion of fools, it is neither disgrace nor dishonor when people say of a finished work, 'I can't understand it.'"

-- Carl Sandburg, February 1916 issue of Poetry (on Ezra Pound)

Pictured: Drawing of Purkinje cells (A) and granule cells (B) from pigeon cerebellum by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1899

My Back Pages

When a civilization is vivid it preserves and fosters all sorts of artists - painters, poets, sculptors, musicians, architects. When a civilization is dull and anemic it preserves a rabble of priests, sterile instructors, and repeaters of things second-hand. If literature is to reappear in America it must come not through, but in spite of, the present commercial system of publication.

-- Ezra Pound, in Poetry magazine, 1915

Poetry and the greenhouse effect

Poetry appeals as a product to which importance accrues. As a kind of boredom bearing prestige. It easily finds itself flattering an audience thirsty for the respectable. The demand for it is fixed, especially when literature is written and marketed as part of a state-sponsored project of moral disregard and denial. It serves as a kind of greenhouse, under which it's possible to adorn oneself with a feeling of spiritual cleanliness.

-- Aharon Shabtai

Roland Barthes' Recantorium: The New Life of Writing

I write, I “finish” (the work), and I die; in so doing, something lives on: the Species, literature → Which is why the threat of decline or extinction that can weigh on literature tolls like an extermination of a species, a sort of spiritual genocide.

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All of a sudden, then, this self-­evident truth presents itself: on the one hand, I have no time left to try out several different lives: I have to choose my last life, my new life, Vita Nova (Dante) or Vita Nuova (Michelet). And, on the other, I have to get out of this gloomy state of mind that the wearing effects of repetitive work and mourning have disposed me to → This running aground, this slow entrenchment in the quicksand (= which isn’t quick!), this drawn-­out death of staying in the same place, this fate that makes it impossible to “enter death alive” can be diagnosed in the following way: a generalized and overwhelming accumulation of “disinvestments,” the inability to invest anew → In the Middle Ages, a word: acedy. It can immediately be clarified that, if said and conceived of in a certain way, and despite the overuse of the word, acedy (a theme we’ll encounter again) is irreplaceable: the inability to love (someone, other people, the world) → Unhappiness often translates as the impossibility of giving to others.


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So, to change, that is, to give a content to the “jolt” of the middle of life—­that is, in a sense, a life “plan” (a vita nova). Now, for someone who writes, who has chosen to write, that is to say, for someone who has experienced the jouissance, the joy of writing (not unlike the “first plea­sure”), there can be no other Vita Nova (or so it seems to me) than the discovery of a new writing practice. Of course, one can imagine changing topic, doctrine, theory, philosophy, method, belief (and some people do: major doctrinal mutations occur as the result of an event, a trauma). But to change ideas is banal; it’s as natural as breathing. To invest / disinvest / reinvest, there you have the very drive of intelligence in that it desires; Intelligence (a Proustian notion, what’s more) has no other means of displaying its desire than by bestowing / withdrawing love, because its object isn’t a form and therefore isn’t fetishizable; even inveterate militants are hard to come by (more and more so): they always get cited as examples ≠ “faith” is different: there are those who turn to it, those who withdraw from it, but, as a general rule, it’s tough, because it’s linked to death. Therefore, for someone who has written, the domain of the Vita Nova can only be that of writing: the discovery of a new writing practice. The New expectation is only this: that the writing practice should break with previous intellectual practices; that writing should be detached from the management of the earlier movement: the writing subject is under a social pressure to become (to be reduced to) his own manager, to manage his work by repeating it: it’s this daily grind that must be interrupted.


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The New Work (new with respect to yourself: this is the postulation of the Work to be written) will probably only be possible, probably only get going in real terms when an old liking is transformed and a new one emerges → Perhaps what I’m waiting for, then, is for my Hearing to be transformed—­and perhaps that will happen to me, unmeta­phor­ical­ly, through music, which I’m so fond of → Then I might achieve the real dialectical becoming: “To become what I am”; Nietz­sche’s saying: “Become what you are,” and Kafka’s saying: “Destroy yourself . . . ​in order to make yourself into that which you are” → Thus, in this way, the distinction between the Old and the New would quite naturally be abolished, the path of the spiral marked out, and these words from Schönberg, who founded contemporary music and reinvigorated the music of the past, honored: it’s still possible to write music in C major. There, to bring things to a close, you have the object of my desire: to write a work in C Major.

-- Roland Barthes on "The Hope of Writing"

(Most people forget that in his very last lectures, Barthes spiraled away from the "death of the author" stuff.)

From: The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980)

Minor aspirations and mock debate

Literary reviews provide no more viable standards than I.Q. tests or annual income. They are simply another alternative; an attempt to bind temperament and action through language. Without resorting to epilogues or manifestoes, we want to embellish those proper nouns and common verbs which have made our culture too often a vehicle for minor aspirations and mock debate.

-- Charles Newman, ca. 1964, on the role of litmags - in the now-defunct TriQuarterly, which he edited for many years

On our culture of demarcation

when i was a teen in croatia, one year in the 90s i was told i belonged to a tribe that was fighting another tribe, whom i had hitherto considered to be my people. i was told that we were divided by certain linguistic differences in our common language, our alphabets, and sometimes our religion. they, i was told, wanted to kill me, and i was supposed to want to kill them. now that i am in america, tony hoagland points out that i am to belong to another tribe, this one based on the color of my skin. dear men-who-would-have-me-belong-to-tribes: sorry, i don't want to take part. carrying the last name of my father and grandfather is the only concession i will make to your culture of demarcation. i look forward to turning into a different form of energy and floating all over your borders and into your pores. sincerely,

- Ana Božičević, 10 February 2011

Vintage post-modernisms: on narrative

"With a pen in the hand, the narrative stream is a canal; it moves slowly, smoothly, decorously, sleepily, it has no blemish except that it is all blemish. It is too literary, too prim, too nice."

So, how to tell a story?

"... string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way."

That's Mark Twain, ca. 1895. His autobiography, as we now know, is conceivably a precursor to Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project.

And here's William Dean Howells on Twain's anti-narrative methodology, from a piece of writing also more than a century old:

... he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to. That is, he wrote as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page...

Make it new, already!

The week in culture.

Sad about cat. Got a too-short haircut. Read newish book about Milton, which struck everybody as uncool and out-of-touch, go figure. But also finished Bernstein's fun new collection of essays; and we have a piece in the pipeline from Susan Howe, so there. Went a week without a cheese sandwich. Suffered few ill-effects from not having been able to attend AWP, though wish I'd have been there for my panel. Noticed post-AWP increase in invective. Also noticed lack of pub credit for POETRY in Rae's new book, hm. Reading Ada Limón's new book, nice!!! What *won't* people say about Elizabeth Bishop! I can imagine her demurrals by the dozen... Roberto Bolaño is the new Joyce Carol Oates, and he's not even alive anymore. And of course: VIDA!!!!

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A new LRB; a great week for letters:

Wasn’t it Jarry, mentioned by Iain Sinclair, who used a revolver instead of a bicycle bell? And didn’t he reassure a pregnant woman who complained that he had so startled her that she might lose her baby: ‘In that eventuality, madame, I shall make you another’?

David Maclagan
Holmfirth, West Yorkshire

&

[...]

Some are of the opinion that the trouser clip is very middle class, any working man cycling to work just sticking his turn-ups into his socks, or if wearing overalls being unworried by oil. Should a Marxist academic renounce that bourgeois badge of shame the trouser clip by sticking his trousers into his socks?

Stephen Kay
Abergavenny, Monmouthshire

VIDA

"... it’s not equal, and it ought to be. The VIDA results seem to us a useful and necessary warning. For our part, we’re going to begin trying even harder."

"TOC anxiety," and some questions

Rich Villar, from his 2011 AWP presentation, Poets and Editors on Race and Inclusivity:

"Table of Contents Anxiety arises when the first reaction to holding a new journal or anthology in your hands, before you even read one line of literature, is to flip open the Table of Contents and quickly scan it for black folks, or Latinos, or Native Americans, or anything, ANYTHING, besides the usual Smorgasboard of the Unsurprising when it comes to editors and their lists. I know I am not alone in this TOC Anxiety. I know some of you in this room suffer in silence. I know some of you in this room haven't shut up about it since the 1970's. However you deal with your particular anxiety, know that is it very real, and it goes to the heart of this perceived mistrust within the literary community..."

[Click the link above to read Rich's full notes for the presentation.]

Barbara Jane Reyes, contemplating the same subject:

"While I don’t feel particularly ignored or objectified, I know the larger publishing industry isn’t invested in forwarding my community’s stories. And this is precisely why all kinds of independent publishers are born; specific communities’ needs are overlooked, or ignored, or simply inconceivable to the mainstream.

Since I am supposed to be thinking on diversity and publishing, I am thinking now on what it is my specific local community’s needs and demands are. One major factor is maintaining control over the means of production and distribution. Determining what is to be published, what aesthetics, what and whose stories to promote, not waiting for the permission or acceptance of others. Ultimately, there is the need to be independent of the larger, mainstream (USA) American publication industry standards, whether this be profit-driven, dumbed down, politically defanged, or 'white-washed.'

I have blogged about this before, asking for whose benefit we strive for diversity in American publishing. Is it for us marginalized folks, to experience the benevolence and political correctness of mainstream publishing bodies? Or for mainstream publishers to feel good about themselves for their acts of benevolence and political correctness? Does my community particularly care whether one of “us” get published in CV-worthy, prestigious journals or achieve successes within this MFA Industrial Complex? I don’t believe they do. I have been questioning why I choose to remain in this industry, and contradict myself by staying."

[Note: This is just a tiny excerpt from a series of excellent meditations on the subject, all worth reading, at her blog.]

Here's Rich again:

"I've often heard the complaint lodged by editors about writers of color: how can we consider you when you don't submit to us? And I've often heard its retort: How can we submit to you when you never consider us? [...] Where do we seek out new voices? What's the difference between soliciting work and seeking work out? When has a journal gotten too big to see past its own prejudices?

I leave the rest of these answers and questions to the audience here, but in the meantime, it is my hope [that raising these questions] is a beginning, not an ending point, and that constructive dialogues towards parity, inclusivity, and the end of Table of Contents Anxiety, can begin, at AWP, online, at home, in academia, and in the slush piles."

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More questions:

What is a mainstream?
If such a thing exists, is it good or bad?
And why?
Who defines what a mainstream is?
Must a writer or artist work with an idea in mind of a mainstream?
Social reality or metaphor, or both?
Etc.?


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Addendum: Not a single comment on this post after weeks. Anyway, here's something Rich asked on Facebook: "Since it's been brought up in other places, including in my own work as an editor and curator, do you think it's okay to have exclusively Latino, or exclusively African-American, or exclusively Asian, or exclusively ANYTHING, spaces within literature? I say yes. Unapologetically. But you? What about you?"

Brute Neighbors

At a time when our environment is under constant threat, we turn to an unlikely source for answers: The city. In this urgent anthology, poets, photographers and essayists show there is much to be learned at the intersection of the urban and the wild.

Featuring the work of Dolores Wilber, Stuart Dybek, David Baker, Susan Hahn, Reginald Gibbons, Edw ard Hirsch, Don Share, Billy Lombardo, Rachel Jamison Webster, Deborah Nodler Rosen, Ralph Mills, Maureen Seaton, cin salach, Chris Green, Patricia McMillen, Margaret Brady, David Trinidad, Kristy Bowen, Rachel Contreni Flynn, Helen Degen Cohen, Dina Elenbogen, Maureen Tolman Flannery, Mary Hawley, Mike Puican, Marc Smith, Patricia Monaghan, Susen James, Alice George, Arielle Greenberg, James Shea, Ed Roberson, Kathleen Kirk, Larry Janowski, Richard Jones, E. Ethelbert Miller, Tony Trigilio, Virginia Bell, Cecilia Pinto, Julie Parson Nesbitt, Martha Modena Vertreace-Doody, Elise Paschen, Barry Silesky, Christian Wiman, Jan Bottiglieri, Brenda Cardenas, Patricia Smith, Allan Johnston, Mark Turcotte, Christina Pugh, Mark Curran, Miles Harvey, Michele Morano, S.L. Wisenberg, Liam Heneghan, Peter Karklins, Sean Kirkland, Mary Jane Duffy, Perry A. Zurn, Barbara Willard, Randall Honold and Elizabeth Crane.

More info here!

Email Alecia at Depaul’s Humanities Center- aperson@depaul.edu - and free copies will be sent to you!