Saturday, November 16, 2002
Version 1.2
Updates, this version: La Tazza readings added;
also more Spring events at Penn (Laurie Anderson, Brad Leithauser,
Johanna Drucker, Simon Ortiz, Simon Pettit, Susan
Sontag), Daisy Fried at Swarthmore.
November
16, Saturday, 7:
Abigail Susik & Fran Ryan at La Tazza, 108 Chestnut (off
18, Monday, 7: George Economou & Rochelle Owens. Two of the younger poets associated
with the New American poetry and around such journals as Caterpillar. Both have recently moved to
18, Monday, Daisy Fried,
30,
Saturday, 7: Michele Myers & Greg Fuchs at La Tazza, 108 Chestnut
(off
December
3,
Tuesday,
4, Wednesday, 2 events with Michael Ondaatje at
9, Monday,
14,
December: Michael Gizzi & Sarah Arvio at La Tazza, 108 Chestnut (off
January
30, Thursday,
February
11,
Tuesday,
20,
Thursday,
26,
Wednesday,
27,
Thursday, Time
27,
Thursday,
March
5, Wednesday,
19, Wednesday, 5 PM: Dennis Barone, poet, novelist,
critic, editor. Kelly Writers House, 3805
Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.
20,
Thursday, Time TBA: Poet & lawyer Brad Leithauser, Kelly
Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information,
call 215-573-WRIT.
20,
Thursday,
24, Monday, 6:30 PM: Laurie Anderson, reading &
performing. Kelly Writers House, 3805
Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT. –
This requires an advance rsvp to whfellow@english.upenn.edu.
25,
Tuesday,
27, Thursday, 8: Symposium
on Blues, Jazz, and American Literature, with Pew Fellows Sonia
Sanchez (so many books, including *Does
Your House Have Lions?* and *Shake
Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems*) and Major Jackson (*Leaving
Saturn*), with critics Robert O'Meally (Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at
Columbia University, editor of the anthology *The Jazz Cadence of American Culture*, biographer of Billie Holiday
etc) and Farah Griffin (*If You Can't Be Free, Be A
Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday*). Scheuer Room Kohlberg Hall,
27, Thursday, 4:30:
Simon Pettit, Kelly Writers
House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus.
For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.
April
3, Thursday, 4:30:
Simon Ortiz, the
great Acoma Pueblo poet. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call
215-573-WRIT.
3,
Thursday, 7:30: Reading & Discussion with Tom Devaney, Jessica Lowenthal & Gil Ott,
Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on
the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.
8, Tuesday, 7:30:
Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott (*Omeros*, *Tiepolo's
Hound*, *The Bounty*, *The Odyssey: A Stage Version*, *What the Twilight Says*),
in a reading sponsored by the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry, Thomas Great Hall, Bryn Mawr
College, Bryn Mawr. For further information,
contact Helene Studdy at the Bryn Mawr
College Office for the Arts, 610-526-5210.
21, Monday:
22,
Tuesday,
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Friday, November 15, 2002
On Tuesday, I noted my
confusion as to whether Thom
I on the other hand seem to have
gone in the opposite direction. Before I wrote the booklength prose poem Ketjak, let alone Tjanting or the on-going Alphabet
(800 pages in manuscript & counting), I published nox with Burning Deck in 1974, a collection of 60 poems that use a
total of 135 words. Here is the only poem in nox that stretches out to four lines:
cabin
quilt
river
latch
More typical are:
ease
awes
Or:
bolism
Because nox is set in a series of fifteen quadrants, four poems to a page,
I’ve heard some readers report that they could not
tell if each page was one poem or even if the book was a single work. It’s not
an unfair question, even if an answer in the negative seems transparently
obvious to me.
This question of scope or
scale is not precisely the same as the question of when (or how) a poem ends,
although I sense that the two are closely intertwined. The problem of endings,
of closure, is even more complex & difficult than that bit of magic through
which a poem begins. That fact alone accounts for any number of phenomena,
including the trouble readers, myself included, have deciding what the
boundaries of a given text might be.
At one level, one of, &
perhaps the, strongest attraction of
closed forms in poetry lies not simply in the pale pleasures of pattern recognition
(real though they may be), but in the fact that the end point is déjà toujours determined before a single
letter has been committed to paper. Since the poet knows in advance where he or
she is going – on a journey of three or fourteen or however many lines – the
opportunities for getting lost along the way are proportionately fewer.
Conversely, the old creative writing school saw that a novel is a “long
fictional prose work with a flaw,” all but
acknowledges that a major engine of flawedness is
precisely the difficulty of locating the right end-point for an indeterminate
work, a potential problem that it shares with all poetry that is not defined in
advanced by a fixed form. More than one long poem has been started only to
disappear into in an inconclusive never quite finished state: Leaves of Grass, The
Cantos, Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading,
& the long untitled prose work from which Clark Coolidge managed to rescue
“Weathers” all demonstrate aspects of this issue. Only Celia Zukofsky’s
grafted-on “A”-24 spares her husband’s epic that same fate.
The question of size or
scope impacts poems in all sorts of ways. Lines, sentence, even individual
words near the beginning or end carry a different sense of position than those
that appear to float “freely” in the middle. Indeed, one of the most
interesting moments in any poem, especially when one is reading a text on
paper, is that transition that occurs into an ending of the text, the moment at
which the logic of each word is dictated by how it will set up the final
phrase. It can occur in the last line or stanza, or even several pages from the
end, but you can almost always find it if you look closely. A poet such as
David Ignatow made a minor art form just out of this moment, the twist into the
conclusion – in some instances, it’s the only thing
happening in the poem.
An inverse transition occurs
near the start of a text, as it shifts from “setting out” to “settling in,” but
I think the reader is less apt to recognize its presence as the sense of
anticipation is quite different: it occurs at a point when the range of
reference in a text is still opening up. Most often it arrives at that exact
moment when the reader recognizes just how far & wide the text itself can
go. At the far end of the text, just the opposite occurs: possibilities are
progressively stripped away until the poem arrives at an instant that is (or
should be) unavoidable. I would argue that these moments are as true for haiku
as for epics. In this sense, even the one-letter poems of Joyce Holland’s Alphabet Anthology (Iowa City: X Press,
1973)** have a beginning, middle & end.
These are not the only
changes that take place when works are exceprted. Part : whole relations become entirely invisible. But it’s
just these transitional cues that are blurred whenever poems appear only in
part. Sometimes – though not always – other language in the excerpted text
takes over the role, assigned to it as much by a reader’s intuition as by the
text itself, surrogate transitions specific to the local occasion.
Thinking about it, it seems
entirely possible that neither Stanford or Meyer did
change their sense of completeness when they shifted away from the epic-length
projects of their youth. In Meyer’s case especially, it may have been that he
wanted (or even needed) at that point to compose without the necessity of such
closure. I know in my own case that the transition from the microwriting of nox to book-length projects, such as Ketjak, proceeded very quickly. At the
time it seemed that I was merely focusing in on the smallest elements in the
writing, without which I could not have attempted anything on a larger scale,
although in some very clear way in my head, I knew that I was a writer of long
poems almost a decade before I sat down & started to write one.
* I would
scarcely believe my own memory in this if I had not published “Fragment from
Graph 42” in Tottels 4 back in July
1971. The engineering vocabulary, in both the work’s title and segmentation, is
another radical difference from Meyer’s later poetry.
** Joyce
Holland is, or was, Dave Morice.
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Thursday, November 14, 2002
I sat
down with
yesterday’s post to the blog from K. Silem Mohammad & Tom Orange
& just
listed the points to which I personally wanted to respond: my list came
to
three pages single spaced. It’s just not possible in blog form to
approach
anything with such obsessively pointillist detail, so I thought instead
to
group these sometimes disjunct ideas, each one of which could spark a
more
thorough discussion somewhere, & came up with two
intersecting
axes of concern:
● My
definition
of abstract lyric – “bounded by
modest
scale and focused on the elements within”
● The
role of
“the social” within & around poetry, a question that has been raised
by
Hovering around these
two
axes I find a third key issue: the role of close reading & “bean
counting”
in thinking through issues of poetry. I want to approach this one first,
because
I think its implications impact what can be said about either of the
other two.
Close reading’s
association
with the New Critics (NC) is often treated as grounds for distrust
because of
NC’s alignment with a reactionary aesthetic tendency in the United
States – one
that joined the poetics of the Southern Agrarians to those of the Boston
Brahmans – but it is worth noting that key NC theorist René Wellek’s
training
in critical practice came through the Prague Linguistics Circle, founded
in
1926 by a group of scholars that included Roman Jakobson &
incorporated
many of the tendencies that originated within Russian Formalism (&
in
relation to Russian futurist poets, from Mayakovsky to Khlebnikov).
Unless one
adopts the dual theory that (1) structural elements have inherent
political
biases – an argument that would be kin to an equation of, say, Poundian
metrics
with fascism &/or that (2) aspects of the Prague School itself were
part of
a larger historical drift of a rightward moving avant-garde, the way the
Trostskyists of the 1930s New York Intellectuals transformed themselves
into
the Neocons of the 1970s (the history, say, of Partisan Review) – an argument that again puts close reading
into a
fundamental(ist) relation to a political
tendency –
then in fact one needs to look at the practice of close reading in the
light of
its materialist roots.
The process of bean
counting
– a phrase I really like, by the way – is predicated on the reality that
beans exist. Signifying elements
(that
could be saying anything)
actually
are present & countable in a poem (as in a novel or any other social
product). One major – and characteristic – failing of much bad critical
writing
(which is in fact most
critical writing) is that, in literal terms,
its
practitioners don’t know
beans. That
is, they make sweeping generalizations that cannot be tested because if
they
could, their assertions would collapse from the weight of contradictory
data.
Again, let me pose the example of M.L. Rosenthal & confessional
poetry.
Rosenthal’s attempt to bind together disparate tendencies of poetry in
an
attempt to rescue the direct inheritors of NC’s aesthetic program from a
fate
it so richly deserved would fuel concepts such as Jim Breslin’s likening
American poetry to a land of many suburbs, absent conflict &
ultimately
lacking shape & content, sort of a Columbine of the heart. Dana
Gioia’s
terribly incomplete (& too often inaccurate) social history of the
institutionalization of poetry in “Can Poetry Matter?,”
is merely that same argument presented with a Music Man exhortation for the masses to go out & buy
trombones.
Not coincidentally, many of the arguments made about langpo over the
past three
decades – that it is theory driven, humorless, anti-referential,
anti-narrative, self-consciously difficult, etc. – are all disprovable
simply
by actually looking at what is there. So, yes, I will continue to favor
the
enumeration of beans. I think it’s the most materialist critical
practice
available, when used appropriately, & an excellent inoculation
against all
manner of mythology & self-interested hokum.
Kasey states that he
is “skeptical about such designations as ‘social’ and
‘asocial’
as polarized ways of conceiving lyric formally.”
That’s not precisely what I had said – although it is close to Tom
Orange’s
paraphrase – but the concept as such is worth pursuing. Tom’s own
argument was
rather the reverse: for him, a work that could be unpacked
hermeneutically is
less transgressive than one that resists by presenting an impenetrable
surface
of signifiers. It’s a logic by which Christian Bök’s Eunoia or the
poetry
of Sheila E. Murphy or Peter Ganick might be seen as more social than
From my perspective,
lyric
is a formal category, neither a pejorative nor an adulatory term. There
are
lyric poets whose work is wonderful (Joseph Ceravolo, Kit Robinson,
Barbara
Guest, the Zukofsky of Barely and
Widely)
& there are lyric poets whose work would make any sensitive reader
cringe
(fill in the blanks). Contrary to Tom’s argument, however, I do not
think that
the capacity of a poem to be unpacked hermeneutically is by definition
the
determination of what is or is not a lyric. Rather, it is the poem’s
sense of its
own boundaries vis-à-vis the larger world. The New Critics’ passion for
the
lyric is separate from their own use of methodology to demonstrate why
this or
that lyric, this or that poet should be anointed. As I tried to
demonstrate
awhile back with the poetry of Bruce
Andrews, any text can be
unpacked
through close reading – that is a condition of the reading mind, not
something to
which only some poets are subject to some of the time. Eunoia is as much subject to such a process as would be The Mood Embosser or Barbara
Guest’s
“Defensive Rapture.” What privileged the lyric for the New Critics was
not any
hermeneutic depth, nor any relation to personal expression, but rather
the
lyric’s sense of itself as aesthetically contained – “focused on the
elements
within” – which spared this genre entanglements with the social, a
category
that in the 1930s was at least as charged & problematic as it is
today. It
was containment precisely that enabled the New Critics to claim that
they were
reading only what was in the poem & nothing extraneous that might
“pollute”
the critique. Only lyric could thus verify their claim to be specialized
– and hence
professional – readers, the position that in turn enabled them between
1935
& 1950 to become the dominant power within American English
departments.
Guest, on the face of
her
poetry, is clearly a lyric writer. That she elsewhere has been active in
service
to the field, as biographer & teacher, doesn’t actually alter what
is on
the page, any more than Jack Spicer’s or Ezra Pound’s notoriously
antisocial
comments & activities in the real world erases the value of their
poetry.
In this sense, Kasey is quite correct in asserting that the social is
not a
formal term. Where form does intersect with the social, however, has to
do with
the poem’s own sense of its permeability vis-à-vis the world. This has
less to
do with reference in the sense of “this poem is about the struggle of
the
heroic people of Lichtenstein” than it does with language sources, image
schemas & -- the deciding factor for me – the way in which the poem
structurally defines itself.
The most interesting
instances in this territory (as in many others) are those that situate
themselves ambiguously along the border. Larry Eigner is an excellent
case in
point. His poems are as contained & formally balanced as any written
over
the past 50 years:
walking
the idea
of
dancing
time
making
room
This untitled piece
from The World and Its Streets, Places
(Black
Sparrow, 1977) could be analyzed in exactly the same kind of formal
terms that
I used with Barbara
Guest on November 3. The poem proposes itself almost as the essence
of
lightness, with extra spacing between lines & the characteristic
Eigner
sweep down across the page. Its use of suffix & sound organizes the
prosody: hear the k move from
walking to making & the elegant use of the liquid m from time to making & finally to room. There is nothing apparent
within this text to suggest
anything
other than what is on the page – even the casual or unfamiliar reader
will
recognize that the relation between walking & dancing (think of a
choreographer like Simone Forti or Sally
Silvers)
could be very adequately characterized as time
making room. & yet here is a poet who could not walk, who spent
his
life confined to wheel chairs. Nowhere is that mentioned: the fact
simply haunts the poem for anyone who
ever knew
Eigner or knew of him well enough to know how cerebral palsy shaped
&
limited his physical vocabulary. At what level is this
poem a
lyric?
Eigner is justly
famous for
his use of simple nouns – wind, tree, sun, sky – and yet it is
relatively rare
in his poems for these items to exist as abstractions. The presence of
the
human world repeatedly invades &
contextualizes.
damp
wind
the birds
chorusing
clouds
moving the sky
the haze
blast
the foghorn
through
the trees
Bounded at either end
by
couplets, the birds anthropomorphized, clouds assigned intentionality,
the key
verb blast is as much a curse
as a
description of sound. Nature, in Eigner, is never innocent. Nor at times
is it
even nature. Another poem in the same book reads
the
rain and the stars
in the
head
in the head
beaches
slow
clouds, the
dark
Where exactly does
this take
place? What is the ontological status of the dark?
Not all of Eigner’s
poems
work like this, but a substantial majority of them do. While his palette
is very
much that of the lyric, these poems are not contained but are often, as
with
these three, records of an intense struggle against constraint. These
poems are
in fact social very much in the same way that Olson’s Maximus, or Pound’s Cantos or
Du Plessis’ Drafts are. They take as a given
their
interactions with the world.
Another poet who very
much
straddles & plays with these borders, albeit in a very different
manner, is
Jackson Mac Low. Characteristic of his approach is the book Twenties (Roof, 1991) in which
each of
the 100 twenty-line poems is fixed not just formally, but in time – each
text
both as to the date of composition & the location. Here are the
first two
stanzas of 44, written on
Certainty tardive dyskinesia Pascal
quilt
swift
adjacency directed cliff
waltz
nostrum Galatians seed difficulty inert
parse
quelled draft marzipan
pileate
Zesty
quaff varnish nice ol’ obedience
lira
ingression price of
ineptitude readiness
lean-to
fortunate obligation needle
paddle
assignation league reach
Each poem in the book
is
composed of exactly five such stanzas, almost all of whose lines also
exhibit a
spatial caesura. Exoskeletally, the poems are
as
fixed or closed as any sonnet series. Aurally, they’re a riot, sounding
like a
calliope heard under the influence of some bad psychotropic, with just a
hint
of the Daytona 500 buzzing in the consonants. To call them “lyric” in
the
prosodic sense is to parody the notion, which I think is part of the
point.
Most significantly, however, is the range of possible linguistic inputs
into
this verbal machine. Its first line consists of
an
abstract state of belief; a chronic condition resulting from
anti-psychotic
medications, characterized by uncontrollable chewing motions; a
philosopher whose most famous work’s title could be translated
into
English as Thoughts; and a
homey
object – one that very often is composed of a limited set of repeated
patterns
– associated with craft more than art.
At one level, Mac Low is playing with our definition of the work
itself.
At another, he is pulling material in from everywhere – there is no part
of the
human experience that cannot be sucked into this process, & like
both
tardive dyskinesia & Pascal, many of the
If Eigner gives us
what we
expect in a New American lyric form, he does while continually
problematizing
& subverting the notion. Mac Low on the other hand fulfills the
social
contract for a lyric work with the passion of an obsessive compulsive.
The
poems are closed formally. At one level their sense of containment is
complete.
But at another, the world is traveling through these Twenties like so much
Mac Low & Eigner
each
raise the question of lyric containment, but do so in ways that raise
the
stakes for the genre considerably. Like
Labels: abstract lyric
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Wednesday, November 13, 2002
K. Silem
Mohammad responded to a question of Chris Stroffolino’s
on the Poetics List concerning my comments regarding Barbara
Guest, which in turn generated a correspondence between Kasey and Tom
Orange. The two of them offer an enormous number of good & interesting
ideas, more than a few of which challenge some of my own thinking – a good
thing I’d like to encourage. While I generally feel it doesn’t make that much
sense to replicate on the blog – which gets between 50 & 160 hits per day –
what has already appeared on the Poetics List, with its distribution to 900
people, I do think it’s useful here, to flesh out all of the issues. I’ve added
italics where email discourages it – those asterisks at the beginning & end
of a word are bloody ugly – added a link to Tom Orange’s essay on Clark
Coolidge, which enters into the conversation, and corrected a couple of typos,
but otherwise not mucked with the text. Here is Kasey’s letter to Poetics:
on
> So,
what do you plural all think of this statement on the Blog? > > "one
sees quickly that Barbara Guest has become the single most powerful influence
on new writing by women in the U.S."
I thought
as soon as I read this that it was a controversial claim, to say the least.
Certainly she's one of the most
influential. But what about Lyn Hejinian,
As a
matter of fact, I have some problems with the piece on abstract lyric as a
whole. (Ron, just for the record, I think your blog is a great thing—not least
because I frequently find myself disagreeing with you in ways that stimulate my
own thought.) To start with, the very notion that "it is in the poetry of
Barbara Guest that the form really comes into focus" begs a lot of
questions. Was it not in focus in the work of Wallace Stevens, for example? Ron
(or others), would you even consider Stevens an abstract lyricist? Hart Crane? H.D.?
Ron, you
define the A.L. as "a poem that functions as a lyric, bounded by modest scale and focused on the elements
within." The italicized phrase seems to explain only circularly. Do you
mean that it functions primarily on the level of music (as opposed to, say,
logical argument)? This would eliminate a lot of reflective, philosophical work
that nevertheless strikes me as "lyric" (e.g., Keats). Do you mean
simply that it is relatively short (which seems to be covered by "modest
scale")? In what sense is A.L. any more "focused on the elements
within" than other kinds of lyric or poetry in general? The examples you
give are often examples of compact syllabic patterning, consonance, and so forth;
are these the "elements within"? Do you mean that the A.L. isolates
these elements as material language over against their function as units of
sense? Again, isn't this true of a lot of other poetry as well: that it
foregrounds the signifier?
I'll accept
that "not all short poems are lyrics," but in what sense is
You
provide a possible clue when you say that in comparison to Armantrout's poems,
Guest's are "as closed as sonnets." The implied distinction here is
one between an "open," and therefore non-lyric, poetic, and a
"closed," or rule-based(?) one. But can this
possibly be right? Do we really want to say that intuitive,
"pattern-free" (if patternlessness is ever
possible) composition can never count as lyric, or at least not as
"abstract lyric"?
You
compare Guest's poetry to Clark Coolidge's: "where Coolidge's works revel
in the sometimes raucous prosody of his intensely inventive ear, Guest's return
the reader again & again to the word and its integration into a phrase, to
a phrase and its integration into a line, to a line and its integration into a
stanza or strophe." You go on to give some examples of this multi-level
integration in Guest, and oddly enough, the first thing that came to my mind
was a very methodologically similar recent reading by Tom Orange of Coolidge's
"Ounce Code Orange." (Once more, I don't have the reference or a
reliable memory handy—Tom's piece is in either New American Writing or Jacket or both,
and it's a great essay, despite my vague skepticism regarding this particular
mode of close reading, which I too indulge in from time to time.) I won't quote
at length, but I encourage everyone to visit Ron's blog and decide for
themselves whether the syllable-counting in question can really yield the kinds
of aesthetic evidence that Ron claims for it. I won't deny that the lines do
exhibit an admirable balance and sense of sonic precision that has something to
do with syllabic disposition, but I'm not yet convinced that it's a balance or
precision that can be explicated via quantification—that there is a substantive
difference, in terms of what can be materially demonstrated through structural
analysis, between Coolidge's "raucous prosody" and Guest's
"instinct for balance and closure." The differentiating element here
would seem to have to amount to either intention or instinct, and if it is the
latter, as this last quote would suggest, the line is thin indeed between
Coolidge's reveling and Guest's integrating.
I've
belabored this at such length not just because I'm ornery (tho I am one ornery
cuss), but because this is something I'm wrestling with a lot myself at
present. So thank you, Ron, for the blog in general, and in particular for this
opportunity to flex my thinking-fingers on the question of lyric
"authenticity" vs whatever the opposite of
such authenticity is.
—Kasey
* * *
Tom Orange replied to Kasey,
copying myself,
kasey,
you raise some
(actually a lot!) of good questions here. i
can't speak for ron here of course but i've been
thinking about role/place of "the social" in poetic form a bit in
terms that ron and louis cabri
have staked out on the blog. and i've
been trying to formulate my own thoughts so maybe this will help as much along
my own lines as much as yours.
cetainly ron's initial definition of abstract lyric — "a poem
that functions as a lyric, bounded by
modest scale and focused on the elements within" — is, as you point out,
partly circular or tautologous. i don't think this necessarily means music to the
exclusion of logical argument: see e.g. zukofsky. or another example that i think
ron might agree with in terms of what i guess i can call the "social lyric" as opposed to
"abstract lyric" or "asocial lyric":
"modest
scale" certainly implies short in terms of length but more i think in terms of scope: pound's scale is epic, as is say
zukofsky's again in late "A" (i forget, 22 or 23) where
thousands of years of history (large scale) are compressed into 1000 lines (not
page-long lyric but not, standing by itself, epic either).
"elements focused within" again refers i think to scale, as well as something like
"attention" (in the objectivist/projectivist sense). there are no (or at least few) "figures of
outward." the poem's referential structure is largely not directed
outward, it's somewhat self-contained or self-reflexive. something
of a well-wrought urn.
which is i think what leads ron in part to a highly formalist, bean-
counting exercise with the guest poem (as to some extent i've
done in my work on early coolidge, as you point out;
yes it's jacket 13 and new american writing 19.) now don't
forget, he's done this kind of thing with armantrout
too: the essay (i think in the burning press
collection) where he tracks the evolution of her work in terms of the
asterisk-separated "sectionings" of the
poems, putting the results into pie charts and whatnot. and
with
so in a sense,
although bean-counting can be instructive for both the abstract and asocial
lyric, there's a sense in which i hear ron saying
there's not much more to be done with the abstract lyric. and
you see this curiously when you get to the very next sentence in ron's definition, to me just as if not more important as
the first part:
"Not
all short poems are lyrics – the intense social satires & commentaries of
in a way, yeah, i think ron's saying if yr only
seeing rae's poems as "lyric," in a sense
buying into their seemingly transparently "lyric" form, then yr
missing out or being fooled. in ron's
terms, it's the "intensity" of social satire and commentary as
opposed to and outweighing the "incidental" lyric appearance.
for me again
but here,
with the notion of "unpacking," which i
take also to be a central activity to new critical close reading and especially
to the form that the new critics prized so much, namely the lyric — here it
seems to me that an armantrout poem, bearing only the
feint or strategy of lyric and hence "social" rather than
"abstract," is in fact AS IF NOT MORE lyric than guest precisely in
that it operates through a model of hermeneutic unpacking to arrive at a
message ("intense social satire and commentary"). by
contrast, guest's poems resist that very unpacking activity. and to me the
gesture of poems that resist being unpacked, that resist "easy
access," are more of a challenge to new critical reading and interpretive
models and can even be seen resisting the very commodification that language
poetry in part set out to resist.
in other words, it
strikes me as a kind of curious return to "content" at the heart of
this debate about the social and asocial word.
as a corollary, and
to come back to coolidge: ron said in his post philly talk discussion, "I don't think you could ever
by any stretch of the imagination argue a coherent politics out of the work of
Clark Coolidge. [laughter] I love Clark Coolidge's
work, but that's not a dimension it has been engaged with — and if it was, it
would change in ways that I would find interesting, and
even if
"coherent" were the key word here, i'm not
sure ron's right. jerome mcgann's essay
"truth in the body of falsehood" (from parnassus, 1988 i think; it's published under the noms
de plume anne mack and jay
t.
cc: ron, louis, kevin
* * *
To which Kasey then
responded:
Thanks for this
response, Tom—I've been thinking about these issues in different contexts for the
past couple of days.
Ron, I
think it's undeniably the case that there are
plenty of contemporary writers out there, both female and male, who are writing
asocial poetry, in the sense that what they write serves primarily to advance
their own careers, mystified notions of their own romantic identities, etc.,
but I don't think this can be coherently mapped onto a preponderance of concern
with abstract formal elegance, as against predatorily encoded social
"messages." The "ellipticist" trend, for instance, strikes
me largely as vapid not because its practicers adhere
to an inward-directed formalist poetic, but because they are absorbed in a
superficial conception of "elegance" that attains neither social nor formal relevance.
It may be
the case that the surface elegance of Guest's poetry has led some to generate
jejune imitations, but such imitators are "fooled" by that elegance
in the same way that some readers might be "fooled" by Armantrout's
strategic "feints." This is not to say that Guest and Armantrout use
the same strategy; in fact, what the inferior Guest-imitators lack, I would
argue, is the very instinct for balance and closure that you point out,
Ron—though I still wonder whether syllable-counting is a useful way of
demonstrating that instinct.
I am
skeptical about the value of close reading as an index of sociality or asociality in isolation from the actual social context of the poet's work, just as I am
skeptical about the value of judgments on a poet's social or asocial status
made in isolation from close reading of the
poet's actual work. There are two diametrically opposed fallacies here,
both equally common and both equally counterproductive.
I am
skeptical about such designations as "social" and "asocial"
as polarized ways of conceiving lyric formally.
To equate a poetics that works extensively on "inward" principles of
structural "balance and closure" with a removal from the social, or
conversely, to equate a poetics that invokes the social in more or less
explicit ways via "outward," referential gestures of satire or
critique with an anti-lyric sensibility, seems to me to be committing an
oblique version of the fallacy of imitative form. This is the problem, for
example, that I have with the last thirty years or so of attacks on the lyric
"I." The whole bourgeois narcissistic confessional trend in
mainstream workshop poetry occupies a very small space in poetic history, and
constitutes a very small sampling of all the poetry out there that uses that
"I." Same thing with things like referentiality, disjunction, fragmentation, etc.—all formal
features, and nothing more in and of themselves.
Tom, I
find your reflections on "unpacking" very useful. You're right:
Armantrout's work invites unpacking in inverse proportion to the strength with
which Guest's resists it. And I think we're more or less in agreement that it
would be a mistake to conclude on the basis of either mode that one poet is
more or less "social," since there are ways of deploying either unpackability or un-unpackability
in the service of poetic sociality (Coolidge being a good example of an equally
service-oriented point in between). Going back to the ellipticists,
maybe a big part of my distrust has to do with the way they seem not to be
doing any work outside the poems,
whereas Guest does seem to be. Part of this, of course, has to do with being
more familiar with Guest, Armantrout et al. than with the mass of recently-generated
MFA poets who are adopting the techniques of "disjunction" etc.: I
don't know them, I don't know their philosophies, ethics, politics, and I don't
feel compelled to get to know them,
as they don't appear to be making any effort to insert themselves into the
social context by means of any device other than surface form. It's not that
the forms they use are themselves invalid; there simply has to be something
more. In Guest's case, for example, her engagement with modernist history and
culture are evident at every turn, even when not specifically referenced in her
work. She has established social credentials
that provide the reader with a sense of trust, and therefore give the reader a
sort of permission to enjoy the formal textures of her work without feeling
that to do so is to neglect "more important" matters.
I realize
I am coming close to suggesting that the poet may be more important than the poetry, that we may be misguiding in attaching any kind of
autonomous authority to the text itself. Well, so be it. People are more important than texts, no? This
is what sociality means to me: that we enjoy, and benefit from, reading
literature when we are invested in the beliefs and values of the people who
create it, either individually or collectively. The mistake, I believe, is to
insist that these beliefs and values be manifested formally in the work (or for
that matter, that they not be).
K.
Labels: abstract lyric
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