Do not copy copia!

Speaking of copying and unoriginality, etc., this, from a recent piece in the TLS by Victoria Kahn called "Do Not Copy Copia." --

Classical rhetoric is no longer taught in grammar schools and the notion that copious argument can be "found" or generated from rhetorical exercises in variation or speeches pro and contra has mostly disappeared from composition textbooks.  To the extent that there is any formula for producing a student essay, it is the tired idea of the thesis statement, three paragraphs of argument, and a conclusion.  But where is one supposed to find a thesis?  School and university students are still to a large extent victims of the Romantic cult of genius, according to which ideas are supposed to spring full blown from their brains, like Athena from Jupiter's forehead.  This may be changing now.  We all have access to Wikipedia, the cyberspace version of the commonplace book; and it may be that the internet is fundamentally altering our ideas of copying and originality, by giving us easy access to a vast online world of arguments which we can borrow, imitate and recycle (not to mention plagiarize, which, as Renaissance writers recognized, is the insufficiently digested or transformed use of another's arguments).  But our composition textbooks have not caught up with our practice.  The insight that the very act of writing produces copia survives in books for adults on writer's block, where the reader is advised to leave perfectionism behind and simply "free write," just to get going.  But we do not help our students use other people's arguments to discover their own and imitate other people's eloquence to develop their own style of writing.

Picture: A photo legally deemed not to pass the threshold of originality.

Aram Saroyan's "Four Monologues" - Not that kind of Kindle

I've always believed that an essential part of a poet's education is to become a publisher. My own first work was published in two chapbooks that I designed and printed many years ago, assisted by a very bemused print shop employee in Providence, Rhode Island, who taught me about paper size, binding, typesetting, and much else. When every syllable of a poem - and each extravagance of the imagination - costs you money, and you don't have a lot of money - you learn something tactile and real about Pound's slogan, "dichten = condensare"—"to compose poetry is to condense." I got an ISBN number, called myself The Smoke Shop Press (because I lived then above a smoke shop), and the rest was not history.

But I learned a lot. And when I cut my editorial teeth later on at such places as Partisan Review and Salamander and Harvard Review, what I knew about layout and printing gave embodiment to such fantasies I had about being an editor, let alone being a writer. Then, too, that phrase about how New Directions books were "published for James Laughlin" lingered deliciously.

Poetry has a staff of five people to put out a monthly literary magazine, and we still design, copyedit, proofread, and typeset the thing by ourselves. But obviously the mechanics of literary publishing have come a long way since I spent those many hours in the back room of a small shop with a printing press in front of me and ink all over my hands and clothes: we have all kinds of online systems to take us far away from ink, Exacto blades, paste, and dangerous machinery. Yet paper and ink, at present, is still with us, and the romance lingers. And it's not enough to live your life behind a computer screen and think of poems as consisting of printed out sheets of Word documents. (For what it's worth, I think this is directly relevant to such contemporary poetry discussions as that pertaining to the fate of BlazeVox and other one-person poetry presses; anyone who has something to say about that ought to try publishing books of poetry: seriously.)

Not long ago, through poetry, a shared love of Artie Shaw, and having a publisher in common, Aram Saroyan - one of my heroes! - and I became friends. He let me see a work entitled "Four Monologues," which he called exfoliations on the relationships among Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Nahdezda Mandelstam. The monologues, along with a translation of Mandelstam's poem on Stalin, are from a play called The Laws of Light. It kindled something in me, and I don't mean Kindle - I instantly knew I wanted to see this work into the world. I talked to my ingenious colleague Fred Sasaki, who connected me with his Printers Ball-collaborators at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book & Paper Arts. When I brought the monologues to the legendary Steve Woodall and Clifton Meador, it was just a great notion. But the next thing I knew we had a project to involve their talents and those of their brilliant students to design and produce a book. Everybody went away to think for a while. And with Aram's extremely generous blessing, the students came up with something unaccountably apt and beautiful: a handprinted, handsewn book consisting of four pockets, bound together, holding each piece of the work. The book makes tangible, as does Aram's piece, the poignant fact that these four writers were both brought together by writing and the printed page and separated tragically by the events of history.

We decided to use the imprint at the Center which also publishes such notable things as the Journal of Artists' Books: Epicenter. And now the first copies in an edition of 300 have been assembled. The pictures above cannot do the book, or Aram's writing, justice. I'll shortly provide information on how to obtain copies - and also about another embodiment of the work that will involve theatrical interpretations of it on a stage here in Chicago, and much else, besides, including a possible iPad app featuring this and other artists books. For now, I want to thank Fred, Steve, Clifton, and the gifted, dedicated crew who put their skills to work on the project: Jenny Garnett, Boo Gilder, Michelle Graves, Hannah King, Jackie McGill, Jenna Rodriguez, Christopher Sacolo, and Claire Sammons. I'm grateful to all of them for letting me be their catalyst in bringing poetry, printing, theater, and history together.

Above all, it's the history that counts. As explained in the introduction to the book, Mandelstam was arrested in Moscow in 1934 for writing that poem denouncing Stalin.

"Barely avoiding execution - thanks in large part to the efforts on his behalf of Boris Pasternak and a number of others - he was exiled to Voronezh. In 1937, he was allowed to return to Moscow; then in 1938 he was rearrested and was last seen in December of that year, feeding off the garbage heap of a transit camp near Vladivostok at the far eastern end of Russia."

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches...

*

This beautiful limited edition book can be obtained here.

And... I'm pleased to say that our next book together will be a very different project, thanks to another extremely generous poet, Ben Lerner - a new work of his called The Dark Threw Patches Down Upon Me Also.

Unoriginal genius and the Sons of Ben: Another installment of... Make It New, Already!

Just the other day, Kenneth Goldsmith's article "It's Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It's 'Repurposing'" for the Chronicle of Higher Education got folks buzzing, even though it, well, repurposed things he's said before many times, e.g., in many dozens of Harriet posts - and the very term he deploys, "unoriginal genius," is taken straight from Marjorie Perloff's latest book of that title (see my blogpost about the book and related matters here); the article itself is the introduction to his new book, Uncreative Writing. A literary fun-house of mirrors, kinda! Anyway, the article begins:

In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more." I've come to embrace Huebler's idea, though it might be retooled as: "The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more."

It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing: With an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours.

The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term "unoriginal genius" to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, "moving information," to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine.

He adds:

Perloff's notion of unoriginal genius should not be seen merely as a theoretical conceit but rather as a realized writing practice, one that dates back to the early part of the 20th century, embodying an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text is as important as what the text says or does.

This gets, as perhaps it's designed to do, some folks in quite a huff, presumably because they work so hard to be "original." I don't feel very bothered by any of this, and it's perfectly provocative, questioning things in a spirit that should be acceptable to anybody who reads and writes poetry. But here's something that got left out, as far as I can tell. Goldsmith says:

Today technology has exacerbated these mechanistic tendencies in writing (there are, for instance, several Web-based versions of Raymond Queneau's 1961 laboriously hand-constructed Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), inciting younger writers to take their cues from the workings of technology and the Web as ways of constructing literature. As a result, writers are exploring ways of writing that have been thought, traditionally, to be outside the scope of literary practice: word processing, databasing, recycling, appropriation, intentional plagiarism, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, to name just a few.

Well, though it's probably true that present-day technology has a role to play in the techniques being described, the thinking is quite - is it not? - traditional. Ben Jonson, for instance, our greatest poet of impersonation, would have found all this perfectly sensible and comprehensible, and rooted in the classics of antiquity. This is from an excellent forthcoming biography of the poet by Ian Donaldson:

Jonson's comedies often turn on some more or less mischievous act of impersonation, as one character fraudulently assumes the personality of another [e.g., Volpone, The Alchemist, The Devil is an Ass]... Yet as [the curiously hybrid nature of Jonson's Discoveries] testifies, there was another more sober and seemingly more legitimate form of impersonation in which Jonson was also deeply interested, associated with the practices of classical imitation: a process by which a modern writer might in some sense assume or appropriate the character of an admired writer from the past, feel at one with his thoughts and practices, speak (one might almost say) with his very voice. "The third requisite in our poet or maker," Jonson wrote... "is to be able to convert the substance or riches of another poet to his own use. To make choice of one excellent man above the rest, and so follow him till he grow very he, or so like him as the copy may be mistaken for the original." Though this passage is following familiar classical authority, it is disconcerting in a number of ways. The advice to follow another poet so closely that "the copy may be mistaken for the principal" may look (for a start) uncomfortably close to those of Jonson's own comic tricksters.

In the prologue to his biography, Donaldson examines a passage from the Discoveries that is "closely modelled, often phrase by phrase, on a passage from Seneca the elder's preface to his Controversiae" which needs to be read "almost with surgical care" to disentangle its borrowings, echoes, and feats of remembering; it's a work, in effect, of collective memory.

Jonson, of course, introduced the word "plagiarism" into English; it comes from, Donaldson reminds us, the Latin plagiarius: a kidnapper or body-snatcher. Jonson elsewhere expressed views against plagiarism, but, his biographer notes, the advice given in the passage quoted above gives rise to "a metaphysical puzzle." What happens, Donaldson asks, "when the aspiring poet fulfils the advice that is offered here, subduing entirely his own identity to that of the model he emulates...?"

Goldsmith highlights this very question. So, what I want to know is: are writers employing the techniques Goldsmith describes actually somehow... Sons of Ben?

Better late than never

"The problem with many among the Others and Conductors is in part their unwillingness to understand that Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford are not Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates, that a late stage in an art's development might legitimately produce an atmosphere of accommodation and catholicity of taste, that, as [Keith] Tuma says, avant-garde traditions might now exist alongside other traditions and that the work itself might properly 'leave its first coterie audience behind and enter the public sphere' without pretending that 'radical subversion of institutions or large-scale social change is likely to result.'"

-- John Matthias, ca. over TEN years ago, "British Poetry at Y2K," reprinted in his superb new book, Who Was Cousin Alice and Other Questions


Pictured: Chaos.

Here's a writing program you can't rank!

Student: “How do you go about writing a poem?”

Frost: “Well, first something has to happen to you. Then you put some words on a piece of paper and ride them like a horse until you have a poem.”

Student: “I think I should set myself a program and write two, four, even six hours a day, whether I feel like it or not. Do you think that’s a good program?”

Frost: “It sounds like a good program. I’m sure it’ll improve your handwriting.”

Student (angered): “I’m serious.”

Frost: “I’m serious, too. You want me to give you the truth wrapped in a bundle so that you can put it under your arm and take it home and open it when you need it. Well, I can’t do that. The truth wouldn’t be there anymore.”

Full story here; photo by Eric Beggs.

Poetry, taste, and guilty pleasures (and "publishing models?")

Would anybody in AmPoBiz write analogously about poetry? - here's Lindsay Beyerstein's "theory of what guilty pleasures are":

For people my age, taste is a personal aesthetic code. Good taste can be idiosyncratic, in fact, it's expected to be. You're supposed to like what you like for your own well-thought-out reasons, and not just like what everyone else likes. (There are also shared cultural and class standards of "good taste," but those aren't what I'm talking about.)

Someone with taste has a well fleshed-out theory about what makes a work of art good or bad. The cultivated observer is supposed to be able to see something new and rigorously scrutinize it according to their code.

That's why people who put a lot of stake in their own good taste are so delighted when they discover a brilliant unknown band in a seedy bar. By recognizing brilliance in unpromising circumstances they are demonstrating that their aesthetic judgements are uncontaminated by extraneous factors like whether the band is popular or heavily promoted.

Having coherent reasons for your preferences is integral to the concept of good taste. You're supposed to be able to recognize a band that swings hard, or a rocking baseline, or witty lyrics, or whatever you think is important in music.

You gain status for your good taste if you can reliably pick stuff that other people will like. You can't be capricious. If you recommend songs strictly because they have sentimental value for you, they're unlikely to appeal to other people. You have to appeal to shared musical values.

"Guilty pleasures" are things people like but can't justify liking. The concept of a guilty pleasure only makes sense if you try to live by an aesthetic code in the first place. If you just like whatever you like, for any reason, or no reason--you don't have guilty pleasures. If you can admit that you like a song just because it was playing while you lost your virginity, the concept of a "guilty pleasure" is irrelevant for you.

A lot of people who aspire to have good taste won't admit that they sometimes like songs for "irrelevant" reasons. It's human nature to enjoy music that you associate with other pleasures. Sometimes you love a song because the singer is pretty, or because it was a number one hit the summer you drove across the country, or because it has become soothing by sheer repetition, or because it's your best friend's karaoke standby and you love her.

When it comes to poetry, one should no doubt have dozens of guilty pleasures. And the open secret about guilty pleasures is that they're nothing to feel guilty about at all - quite the contrary. Just think what a poetry readership with far broader taste might mean for "publishing models."

Poets as vending machines

Michael Hofmann on Elizabeth Bishop in the LRB:

Other poets are predictably and more or less unvaryingly themselves, like cellophane packs of cigarettes from a vending machine; with Bishop you get the surprise gift in a plastic ball – sometimes purposeless and perplexing, more often flat-out exhilarating, the toy of your dreams, like ‘An acre of cold white spray … Dancing happily by itself’. Bad Lowell is just bad Lowell; it has something parodic and clanking about it, as the epigrams sail bafflingly past their targets. Lesser Bishop may be disappointing, but it isn’t demoralising, somehow doesn’t affect the whole. You stand in front of the machine, the dispenser of miniature planets, and throw in more quarters; surely you will be luckier next time; you have the obscure but possibly correct feeling that it is your fault for not understanding the toy you have been given.

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