Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Think about John Ashbery’s Three Poems from the perspective of readers in 1972 when it first appeared as a Viking Compass volume, a photo of a trim mustachioed Ashbery standing somewhere on a farm with movie-star good looks peering back at the reader. The Double Dream of Spring, Ashbery’s 1970 collection, had been the first book about which any Ashbery fan of the period could justifiably complain, as some did, that it offered little that was formally new or different from his earlier work. Previously, the one thing that had appeared certain about Ashbery, who followed Some Trees with The Tennis Court Oath and that in turn with Rivers and Mountains, was that you couldn’t predict what the next volume might look like based on whatever you thought about the most recent. One argument that I did hear made about Double Dream was that, well, you certainly couldn’t have predicted that.¹ In narrowly extending, consolidating really, aspects of Ashbery’s poetry that went all the way back to the early 1950s, Double Dream seemed to want to demonstrate the effortless excellence of Ashbery’s craft as he moved into his forties. The implication, at least according to optimists, was that readers should be patient – the next book would be a doozy.
It’s worth keeping in mind the role of the modern prose poem within American poetry in 1972. Hayden Carruth’s omnibus 1970 anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us, containing 136 poets representing “American Poetry of the Twentieth Century,” 722 pages long, has exactly zero prose poems. It’s not that prose poems were not being written. Robert Bly and his fellow contributors in The Sixties had been actively pursuing the genre, as had George Hitchcock’s ancillary deep-image journal, Kayak. At
If Edson’s model of the prose poem was the short fable of Kafka, Bly’s paradigm was borrowed from the work of French poet Max Jacob, author of The Dice Cup: a short piece of prose aimed at surprising the reader in some fashion, intended to “distract” the beleaguered language consumer, the one solace Jacob could envision for the poem. Readers of modern French literature knew, of course, that there was much more to the prose poem than this, but until the very late 1960s, the only readily available alternative translated into English were the works of St.-John Perse. Perse had won the Nobel Prize in 1960, but had begun publishing over a half century earlier and with a style that has always reminded me of the art of Maxfield Parish. Here is the opening of the fifth section of “Strophe,” a part of Seamarks, translated here by Wallace Fowlie:
Language which was the Poetess:
“Bitterness, O favour! Where now burns the aromatic herb? . . . The poppy seed buried, we turn at least towards you, sleepless Sea of the living. And you to us are something sleepless and grave, as is incest under the veil. And we say, we have seen it, the Sea for women more beautiful than adversity. And now we know only you that are great and worthy of praise,
O Sea which swells in our dreams as in endless disparagement and in sacred malignancy, O you who weigh on our great childhood walls and our terraces like an obscene tumour and like a divine malady!
Perse’s overly humid prose seemed so far removed from the proliferating Jacob-Bly & Kafka-Edson editions of the prose poem, predicated as those strains were upon brevity, that it’s not clear that anyone, at least in
In 1969, however,
¹ I am not including Ashbery’s first Selected Poems, which appeared between Rivers and Mountains and Double Dream.
² This was not atypical in 1970, a moment when perhaps only Robert Duncan & Jerome Rothenberg were seriously arguing for her inclusion in any consideration of American poetry. Patricia Meyerowitz’ Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures 1909-1945, the volume through which many poets of my generation first became aware of Tender Buttons, was originally published by Peter Owen in 1967, but not reissued in the Penguin edition that finally gave it broad U.S. distribution until 1971.
³
Labels: John Ashbery, prose poems
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Edson published at least four things prior to The Very Thing. Put russell edson jargon in Google and it'll show you.
Ashbery's Double Dream was not understood at the time as a consolidation of aspects, as you say here (that sounds more like a retroactive criticism), but a weirdly eccentric take on Sixties art. Fragment, which occupied the central position in that collection, was an excerise in the application of surrealistic materials--both of content and expression--to strict form, and a pattern of trying a long poem as the centerpiece of each book (Europe in Tennis Court, The Skaters in Rivers and Mountains, Self-Portrait in Self-Portrait, The Nut Brown Maid in Houseboat Days, etc.). Ashbery's models would be French because America had never had a clear (non-Continental) tradition of the prose poem, but he was so much more capable than anyone you could name, then, at it, that he was virtually alone (Stein continued to be unread and unappreciated here, even after the dazzling Yale volumes had appeared in the 1950's). Edson, Bly, Hitchcock (and his cadre), hadn't quite the right turn of mind to write this stuff. I taught Bly's prosepoems at Iowa in the early 1970's, and my students disliked them, finding them predictable and bland.
Perse has always been a mystery to readers in English. Either his works in French can't be translated, or he typifies a strain of mild impressionistic romanticism which one can hear in Debussy's La Mer, perhaps the greatest example of vaguely programmatic musical abstract narrative in the history of music: No matter what kind of "story" one envisions for the panels, none is as evocative and moving as the music itself ("the women come and go, speaking of Michaelangelo"). Perhaps it is this quality which Perse is presenting. It simply falls flat, though, for us. "Childhood's walls and terraces" does not work because by being too general (we've all seen walls and terraces, but we each have a different memory and association for them) it can't tell us anything vivid. The thing about Maxfield Parrish is: One ,the light, which is all-encompassing and always unreal; and Two the placement of classically posed figures within improbable landscapes, typically recumbent or at play or in meditation. They share with Darger a quality of illusion and suspension which would appeal to Ashbery's sense of the static, of sub-teen innocence corrupted, and perfected surface which serves no purpose but its own nonsensical pretext. Parrish's lucid Oz is the perfect adjunct to the fin-de-siecle decadence, a cleaned up color version of Beardsley for the masses, uniting juvenilia with perversion, making it palatable. It leads right into Wyeth and Rockwell (and, I suppose, Darger and Gaston Goor).
Did anyone else see the PBS thing on Rothko last night? Simon Schama's "lecture" on the Seagram murals is not bad, integrating social and artistic trends in America between 1920 and 1960 to show how Rothko's conception developed.
Ashbery's Double Dream was not understood at the time as a consolidation of aspects, as you say here (that sounds more like a retroactive criticism), but a weirdly eccentric take on Sixties art. Fragment, which occupied the central position in that collection, was an excerise in the application of surrealistic materials--both of content and expression--to strict form, and a pattern of trying a long poem as the centerpiece of each book (Europe in Tennis Court, The Skaters in Rivers and Mountains, Self-Portrait in Self-Portrait, The Nut Brown Maid in Houseboat Days, etc.). Ashbery's models would be French because America had never had a clear (non-Continental) tradition of the prose poem, but he was so much more capable than anyone you could name, then, at it, that he was virtually alone (Stein continued to be unread and unappreciated here, even after the dazzling Yale volumes had appeared in the 1950's). Edson, Bly, Hitchcock (and his cadre), hadn't quite the right turn of mind to write this stuff. I taught Bly's prosepoems at Iowa in the early 1970's, and my students disliked them, finding them predictable and bland.
Perse has always been a mystery to readers in English. Either his works in French can't be translated, or he typifies a strain of mild impressionistic romanticism which one can hear in Debussy's La Mer, perhaps the greatest example of vaguely programmatic musical abstract narrative in the history of music: No matter what kind of "story" one envisions for the panels, none is as evocative and moving as the music itself ("the women come and go, speaking of Michaelangelo"). Perhaps it is this quality which Perse is presenting. It simply falls flat, though, for us. "Childhood's walls and terraces" does not work because by being too general (we've all seen walls and terraces, but we each have a different memory and association for them) it can't tell us anything vivid. The thing about Maxfield Parrish is: One ,the light, which is all-encompassing and always unreal; and Two the placement of classically posed figures within improbable landscapes, typically recumbent or at play or in meditation. They share with Darger a quality of illusion and suspension which would appeal to Ashbery's sense of the static, of sub-teen innocence corrupted, and perfected surface which serves no purpose but its own nonsensical pretext. Parrish's lucid Oz is the perfect adjunct to the fin-de-siecle decadence, a cleaned up color version of Beardsley for the masses, uniting juvenilia with perversion, making it palatable. It leads right into Wyeth and Rockwell (and, I suppose, Darger and Gaston Goor).
Did anyone else see the PBS thing on Rothko last night? Simon Schama's "lecture" on the Seagram murals is not bad, integrating social and artistic trends in America between 1920 and 1960 to show how Rothko's conception developed.
There's a rather good note on Perse in the new Soft Targets by Alain Badiou:
"Basically, from the fifties onward, Saint-John Perse occupies the post left vacant by Valéry, that of official poet of the Republic. He is a man fulfilled: An Edenic childhood, a distinguished career in the State, a noble exile, serene loves, major honors. He seems beyond the reach of the century's violence. In this regard, continuing and consolidating the Claudelian figure of the poet-dipomat, with a mandarin-like aspect (as if to say: "I write stanzas on exile and the impermanence of human things, but I allow no one to ignore that I am undersecretary to the Emperor"), Saint-John Perse embodies a figure who manages to perpetuate 19th century conditions in the very midst of the 20th."
"Basically, from the fifties onward, Saint-John Perse occupies the post left vacant by Valéry, that of official poet of the Republic. He is a man fulfilled: An Edenic childhood, a distinguished career in the State, a noble exile, serene loves, major honors. He seems beyond the reach of the century's violence. In this regard, continuing and consolidating the Claudelian figure of the poet-dipomat, with a mandarin-like aspect (as if to say: "I write stanzas on exile and the impermanence of human things, but I allow no one to ignore that I am undersecretary to the Emperor"), Saint-John Perse embodies a figure who manages to perpetuate 19th century conditions in the very midst of the 20th."
Ron, FRAGMENT and THE VERMONT NOTEBOOK were in there too before THREE POEMS, which is my all time favorite Ashbery book.
Curtis, I'm surprised you didn't mention Henri Michaux, whose SELECTED WRITINGS, which read like prose poems to me, came out from New Directions in '68. As for Stein and Ponge, even I, an autodidact up until I went to Iowa in '66, knew about Stein and the Yale series of all her work, and like most hispters into reading, there were certain presses that I just picked up anything they published, like New Directions and the few "small" presses of the '50s and '60s, so as soon as anything came out from Cape and/or Grossman, Black Saprrow, et. al. I got hold of it, as most people I knew into poetry and/or just being hip to what was new, did too. So who do you mean by "readers"? 'cause that would be just as true today then (though there would be more of them just due to the greater population in general). Hope that made sense.
And by the way, lots of people were writing prose poems before those you mention, not just the French poets, I always had some in every book published of mine from 1970 on, as did Ray DiPalma for the most part since his first, also in '70, etc. etc. and I published them in anthologies and magazines and presses I edited throughout the 1970s (e.g. the anthology NONE OF THE ABOVE). In fact, I got sort of tired of the reality in the '70s of what seemed to me too many glib and tossed off prose poems seemingly everywhere you looked. But maybe that was just me.
Curtis, I'm surprised you didn't mention Henri Michaux, whose SELECTED WRITINGS, which read like prose poems to me, came out from New Directions in '68. As for Stein and Ponge, even I, an autodidact up until I went to Iowa in '66, knew about Stein and the Yale series of all her work, and like most hispters into reading, there were certain presses that I just picked up anything they published, like New Directions and the few "small" presses of the '50s and '60s, so as soon as anything came out from Cape and/or Grossman, Black Saprrow, et. al. I got hold of it, as most people I knew into poetry and/or just being hip to what was new, did too. So who do you mean by "readers"? 'cause that would be just as true today then (though there would be more of them just due to the greater population in general). Hope that made sense.
And by the way, lots of people were writing prose poems before those you mention, not just the French poets, I always had some in every book published of mine from 1970 on, as did Ray DiPalma for the most part since his first, also in '70, etc. etc. and I published them in anthologies and magazines and presses I edited throughout the 1970s (e.g. the anthology NONE OF THE ABOVE). In fact, I got sort of tired of the reality in the '70s of what seemed to me too many glib and tossed off prose poems seemingly everywhere you looked. But maybe that was just me.
You're right, Ron, that the translations of Ponge and Segalen provided English readers with different models for the prose poem.
I'd include there too the 1969 publication by Univ. of Michigan of a translation of Andre Breton. Included in Manifestoes of Surrealism was what was described as the automatic text "Soluble Fish," which I consider a set of prose poems.
And Maldoror, the ur-longprosepoem, had been translated into English decades before.
I'd include there too the 1969 publication by Univ. of Michigan of a translation of Andre Breton. Included in Manifestoes of Surrealism was what was described as the automatic text "Soluble Fish," which I consider a set of prose poems.
And Maldoror, the ur-longprosepoem, had been translated into English decades before.
And for others writing prose poems -- in English -- early on, see the little anthology of prose poems that Charles Henri Ford edited and which was included in the 1953 New Directions Annual 14. Lamantia had some good ones there.
And then there's the really obvious. So obvious, I somehow forget them: Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Their prose poems were widely available, and I believe widely known, from the 1940s on. And the bright ones -- Harry Crosby being just one example -- knew that work, and wrote accordingly, in the 1920s.
Rimbaud in particular showed that the prosepoem could be -- should be -- anything. Including long (A Season In Hell) or totally out there (Illuminations).
So Ron, based on the availability of Rimbaud and Baudelaire in translation, I say you've missed the mark here with your claim that American readers in the late 1960s were only "beginning to get hints" of the broader landscape of poetic prose.
In fact, I can't believe you've missed the mark so badly here. Or am I missing something?
And thanks for discussing prosepoems. I love prosepoems. Poemprose too.
Rimbaud in particular showed that the prosepoem could be -- should be -- anything. Including long (A Season In Hell) or totally out there (Illuminations).
So Ron, based on the availability of Rimbaud and Baudelaire in translation, I say you've missed the mark here with your claim that American readers in the late 1960s were only "beginning to get hints" of the broader landscape of poetic prose.
In fact, I can't believe you've missed the mark so badly here. Or am I missing something?
And thanks for discussing prosepoems. I love prosepoems. Poemprose too.
Well, basically just what I said (French models). I've never read Michaux, but love Baudelaire, Verlaine, Corbiere, Rimbaud, Soupault, and a host of others. Cribs of Baudelaire's poems read like wonderful prose poems. Ron argued that Double Dream (which contained Fragment) showed a clear "consolidation" which is a nice way of saying "retreat" from experimentation of form. Actually, I don't think Ashbery--the King of camp--has ever written a "straight" poem in his life. It always has at least three levels of irony, and two more you didn't even know about. It never impressed me as a density with interest (like Zukofsky), which is why I grew weary of his work after Houseboat Days. Everything he writes is totally competent and absorbing intellectually, but as necessary objects they stopped convincing me a long time ago. I keep wanting Ashbery to be dead (aesthetically) so I can close the book on him, but he just keeps going like the Energizer Bunny. Always another qualification, and another, and another, and another. Avant-dernieres pensees.
Jordan,
"I write stanzas on exile and the impermanence of human things, but I allow no one to ignore that I am undersecretary to the Emperor" -- sounds like what Ezra Pound wished for.
Curtis,
Rockwell's juvenile imagery does not strike me as perverse. I don't see the connection with Parrish. Rockwell's biggest influence is Rembrandt: both paint, brilliantly, the drama of revelation and relationship: Jesus breaking the bread; the little girl showing off her missing tooth; the angel visiting the evangelist Matthew; the boy praying with his grandma in the diner. R & R both depict the subtleties of emotion with acute perceptiveness and skill.
"I write stanzas on exile and the impermanence of human things, but I allow no one to ignore that I am undersecretary to the Emperor" -- sounds like what Ezra Pound wished for.
Curtis,
Rockwell's juvenile imagery does not strike me as perverse. I don't see the connection with Parrish. Rockwell's biggest influence is Rembrandt: both paint, brilliantly, the drama of revelation and relationship: Jesus breaking the bread; the little girl showing off her missing tooth; the angel visiting the evangelist Matthew; the boy praying with his grandma in the diner. R & R both depict the subtleties of emotion with acute perceptiveness and skill.
ad paragon's bothering joule
drone near kasimir, forking light wills substance threading knee pale keening kankerbossie, the hula fading lobes to jiva kiva viva must
angstrom finely a warp tooled churruck voce. bis muth, ah, a mail free of wiping clean tiles in the simmering of glabrous chattering mirrors,
a dose flange or a doubt in elastic butterfly rules must charge the shapeless mahogany sitzfleisch with a grandeur peopled with sieve-like
statue-thorns whose fountain foam furingles in the dialect of ions some pook or puchersum now hanging in the headthrall of a knave, a
scrying butter slathered on a bladder of lotus' milk gone sour in a sulphur cave, whose ruby-throated hives of wine-cured mummy fringillinae,
ache in thumbs forced to hold up the beast's snout while the foolscopped parsley nimbles train their valve less britches to the incombustibilled
airs. how fair, a paper rhino beetle will float for awhile, then absorb slowly the meaning of life and sag to the bottom's autumnal samarkand,
fitting itself to the bronze casings of sisygambis' styptic and caustic pencils run amok in alexander's starchoral gaze, a thing like an ivory puzzle
pushing up through the skin, a backgammon like a fantastic still of docks in which a procession of plesiosaurs in feathered shrine saddles mimic
the alchemy of teacups annoying the candied dandys of identity, narcissus frozen in medusa's palm-lined eye-ponds, iris kits for fond fox head
clown troopers fondling tremor'd stupas' stupor pupa puppeting the langue-gilled buffalo hosiery. hosanna in the eye nest, fluid finches jostle
wrenches.
drone near kasimir, forking light wills substance threading knee pale keening kankerbossie, the hula fading lobes to jiva kiva viva must
angstrom finely a warp tooled churruck voce. bis muth, ah, a mail free of wiping clean tiles in the simmering of glabrous chattering mirrors,
a dose flange or a doubt in elastic butterfly rules must charge the shapeless mahogany sitzfleisch with a grandeur peopled with sieve-like
statue-thorns whose fountain foam furingles in the dialect of ions some pook or puchersum now hanging in the headthrall of a knave, a
scrying butter slathered on a bladder of lotus' milk gone sour in a sulphur cave, whose ruby-throated hives of wine-cured mummy fringillinae,
ache in thumbs forced to hold up the beast's snout while the foolscopped parsley nimbles train their valve less britches to the incombustibilled
airs. how fair, a paper rhino beetle will float for awhile, then absorb slowly the meaning of life and sag to the bottom's autumnal samarkand,
fitting itself to the bronze casings of sisygambis' styptic and caustic pencils run amok in alexander's starchoral gaze, a thing like an ivory puzzle
pushing up through the skin, a backgammon like a fantastic still of docks in which a procession of plesiosaurs in feathered shrine saddles mimic
the alchemy of teacups annoying the candied dandys of identity, narcissus frozen in medusa's palm-lined eye-ponds, iris kits for fond fox head
clown troopers fondling tremor'd stupas' stupor pupa puppeting the langue-gilled buffalo hosiery. hosanna in the eye nest, fluid finches jostle
wrenches.
yes, even lowell "imitated" baudelaire (though not the prose poems that i am aware of) and rimbaud was a fixture of the new directions line, with their powerful arty covers. for me prosepoetry was a strong part of fifties avant culture: consider henry miller and jack kerouac, ecstatic swinging passages bearing the central intentions of their work, and even patchens journal of albion moonlight which as an adolescent i put up there on the same short shelf.
when three poems came along it did not immediately bring to mind this american strand of prose poetry, the methodology was almost the reverse of whitmanic, but i will testify that a prose poetry had been an ambition for each generation (mine was high school '59) since the early fifties.
when three poems came along it did not immediately bring to mind this american strand of prose poetry, the methodology was almost the reverse of whitmanic, but i will testify that a prose poetry had been an ambition for each generation (mine was high school '59) since the early fifties.
I was taken aback when I read a while back your preference for Perse over Jacob, and this essay helps me understand your position as well as the importance of Perse to your poetry in the early 70s.
Jacob was a purely synthetic rather than analytical Cubist; he had no interest in representation of the world and only wished to utilize it for a collage and transformative effects that existed for it’s ‘own sake;’ his manifestoes reflected this position. He was depressed and escapist and his anger at biographical interpretations of literature was arguably a reflection of wanting to retreat from himself and his life. Codrescu’s wonderful translations of Jacob from the early ‘70s coincided with a similar aesthetic bent of his at the time but Andrei was never adverse to autobiography. The coincidental comparison of Jacob and Perse grants this contrast of the synthetic and the representational, as it was Perse’s objective for the epic to contain history as well as nature’s essence.
Jacob’s aesthetics are incompatible with Langpo’s ‘appearance of the world’ and most other experimental and traditional models of literature but to reduce his work to “a short piece of prose aimed at surprising the reader in some fashion, intended to “distract” the beleaguered language consumer, the one solace Jacob could envision for the poem” is just plain unfair and inaccurate. He is an essential figure of Paris of that period whose methods influenced Dadaism, though, like a few of the Dadaists, his methods became a willful constraint that aided him in being minor.
Jacob was avant to the core, while Perse undeniably exhibited many of the characteristics of the SoQ. That the lines of influence would be inverted in this way in the US is both happenstance and possibly the residue of the unfortunate battle lines such as those drawn by Bly in his 1963 essay ‘Wrong Turning of American Poetry’ where he pitted many poets in translation against the tradition of Dr Williams. The reputations of Jacob as well as Vallejo, Rilke, Machado, and Mallarmé have had to recover from Bly’s utilization of their names for his narrow positions, as none of those poets asked to be so contrasted with the American modernists by Bly.
Perse’s major influence was Paul Claudel, who attempted to reconcile the traditions of Rimbaud and Mallarmé with Catholicism and in so doing so became a primary figure of the Surrealists’ SoQ. This fusion of Claudel’s, which made the best elements of French poetry compatible with traditional tastes, enables such digestible phrases as ‘divine malady.’ Both Claudel and Perse were diplomats, though Perse’s politics, personality, and aesthetics were more palatable to most, resulting in a Nobel; Claudel was for instance a vocal supporter of the Vichy while Perse resigned his post at that time. It was Claudel who infused the line with a biblical like breath (concurrent with Artaud, Ginsberg’s influence for the lines of Howl), a tactic Perse combined with Asian incantations, which may have influenced the structure of Ketjak.
Both Perse and Clark Coolidge have studied geology extensively; both have compositional styles that resemble geological formations as closely as previous conventions of literary form. That nature would inform form in this way is more conducive to the Western US, the Caribbean, and the Asian expanses of Perse’s Anabase, while the conversational tone of Jacob’s narratives, Ashbery’s Three Poems, the Surrealist prose poems, and other NY School works are more conducive to the concentration of population in NY and Paris.
Perse knew little of Modernism other than Claudel; this naivete is appealing to the Wallace Fowlie gang. Jean Paulhan’s statements on Perse in the M1 anthology typify the critical use of Perse: it was Claudel that softened the juxtapositions of Rimbaud and the fragmentations of Mallarmé, a dubious purpose, and passed that on to Perse, who gets the credit for it because he is not like Claudel considered deplorable to academic tastes.
Paulhan’s statement that Perse ‘brought together’ what Mallarmé separated should be seen for what it is; Mallarmé only fragmented verse in revolutionizing it. Although the Surrealists infused the prose poem with ‘life’ in all its aspects, one can make the case that the prose poem hasn’t been improved upon since Mallarmé’s; I think Ashbery would agree. The new Oxford translations make that more apparent for English-language readers like me.
Whatever preferences or reservations I would care to share, the influences that made Ketjak, Sunset Debris, and Coolidge’s early 70s work happen are auspicious to no end, which is the matter of most importance here.
Jacob was a purely synthetic rather than analytical Cubist; he had no interest in representation of the world and only wished to utilize it for a collage and transformative effects that existed for it’s ‘own sake;’ his manifestoes reflected this position. He was depressed and escapist and his anger at biographical interpretations of literature was arguably a reflection of wanting to retreat from himself and his life. Codrescu’s wonderful translations of Jacob from the early ‘70s coincided with a similar aesthetic bent of his at the time but Andrei was never adverse to autobiography. The coincidental comparison of Jacob and Perse grants this contrast of the synthetic and the representational, as it was Perse’s objective for the epic to contain history as well as nature’s essence.
Jacob’s aesthetics are incompatible with Langpo’s ‘appearance of the world’ and most other experimental and traditional models of literature but to reduce his work to “a short piece of prose aimed at surprising the reader in some fashion, intended to “distract” the beleaguered language consumer, the one solace Jacob could envision for the poem” is just plain unfair and inaccurate. He is an essential figure of Paris of that period whose methods influenced Dadaism, though, like a few of the Dadaists, his methods became a willful constraint that aided him in being minor.
Jacob was avant to the core, while Perse undeniably exhibited many of the characteristics of the SoQ. That the lines of influence would be inverted in this way in the US is both happenstance and possibly the residue of the unfortunate battle lines such as those drawn by Bly in his 1963 essay ‘Wrong Turning of American Poetry’ where he pitted many poets in translation against the tradition of Dr Williams. The reputations of Jacob as well as Vallejo, Rilke, Machado, and Mallarmé have had to recover from Bly’s utilization of their names for his narrow positions, as none of those poets asked to be so contrasted with the American modernists by Bly.
Perse’s major influence was Paul Claudel, who attempted to reconcile the traditions of Rimbaud and Mallarmé with Catholicism and in so doing so became a primary figure of the Surrealists’ SoQ. This fusion of Claudel’s, which made the best elements of French poetry compatible with traditional tastes, enables such digestible phrases as ‘divine malady.’ Both Claudel and Perse were diplomats, though Perse’s politics, personality, and aesthetics were more palatable to most, resulting in a Nobel; Claudel was for instance a vocal supporter of the Vichy while Perse resigned his post at that time. It was Claudel who infused the line with a biblical like breath (concurrent with Artaud, Ginsberg’s influence for the lines of Howl), a tactic Perse combined with Asian incantations, which may have influenced the structure of Ketjak.
Both Perse and Clark Coolidge have studied geology extensively; both have compositional styles that resemble geological formations as closely as previous conventions of literary form. That nature would inform form in this way is more conducive to the Western US, the Caribbean, and the Asian expanses of Perse’s Anabase, while the conversational tone of Jacob’s narratives, Ashbery’s Three Poems, the Surrealist prose poems, and other NY School works are more conducive to the concentration of population in NY and Paris.
Perse knew little of Modernism other than Claudel; this naivete is appealing to the Wallace Fowlie gang. Jean Paulhan’s statements on Perse in the M1 anthology typify the critical use of Perse: it was Claudel that softened the juxtapositions of Rimbaud and the fragmentations of Mallarmé, a dubious purpose, and passed that on to Perse, who gets the credit for it because he is not like Claudel considered deplorable to academic tastes.
Paulhan’s statement that Perse ‘brought together’ what Mallarmé separated should be seen for what it is; Mallarmé only fragmented verse in revolutionizing it. Although the Surrealists infused the prose poem with ‘life’ in all its aspects, one can make the case that the prose poem hasn’t been improved upon since Mallarmé’s; I think Ashbery would agree. The new Oxford translations make that more apparent for English-language readers like me.
Whatever preferences or reservations I would care to share, the influences that made Ketjak, Sunset Debris, and Coolidge’s early 70s work happen are auspicious to no end, which is the matter of most importance here.
Perse and Mallarme. They both strike me as the essence of what's wrong with French academicism. Claudel and Valery. Reverdy and Guillevic. A tendency to put their feet into concrete and sink them in the harbor. It's almost impossible to remain "obscure" in France, yet obscurity is the greatest opportunity in art since it protects you against canonization and stasis. Or, as the French say, immobilite.
It would be difficult for all but the most brilliant polyglots to perceive, at the level of phrase and syllable, how William Carlos Williams compares to someone like Reverdy. The quality which makes Williams unique--his jagged zig-zagging prosody and unfolding tumbling phraseology--doesn't have any competent imitators in English. As I read the 20th Century French poetry--and I have precious little French--it seems to tend towards an aural monotony, which I used to think was deliberate, but may be a quality of that language itself.
It would be difficult for all but the most brilliant polyglots to perceive, at the level of phrase and syllable, how William Carlos Williams compares to someone like Reverdy. The quality which makes Williams unique--his jagged zig-zagging prosody and unfolding tumbling phraseology--doesn't have any competent imitators in English. As I read the 20th Century French poetry--and I have precious little French--it seems to tend towards an aural monotony, which I used to think was deliberate, but may be a quality of that language itself.
Also probably worth noting that Ashbery is one of the translators of the work in Bill Zavatsky's Sun Press's edition of The Dice Cup.
Curtis, as an anglophone currently working in the French academy (I teach 20th century poetics at the University of Strasbourg II), these statements for me reek of a number of rather glaringly prejudicial topoi regarding French poetics.
I wonder, have you worked in, or been to France, recently? “[French] seems to tend towards an aural monotony, which I used to think was deliberate, but may be a quality of that language itself”. This is so shocking to me that I must ask: what is your notion of contemporary French poetry? Would you label the melodic and metric parities and disparities of a Claude Royet-Journoud “monotonous”?:
aux abords de celle-ci
le travail respiratoire
s’éprend du motif
son excitation la périphérie
de langage comme un irascible
entraînement
aux choses
de l’attention
(from “Le Renversement”, 1972)
May I humbly postulate that French doesn’t sound “monotonous” to the French? I wonder if we’d permit ourselves such statements about Arabic, Chinese, Farsi.
As for Perse and Mallarmé being “the essence of what's wrong with French academicism”. I’m not sure what century you think it is in France, but may I mention poets such as Emmanuel Hocquard, or Jean-Marie Gleize who, as well as their association with la Littéralité or Hocquard’s “la modernité négative” are at once fiercely anti-mallarméan and also in no way estranged from the French academy. Also, Ponge, Bonnefoy, Jaccottet, and what's sometimes called the "realism" of l’après-guerre?
And what of the extremely notable absence of Aimé Césaire from this discussion?
This is not to play goalkeeper for the French academy: the French do this same sort of thing about English and American poetics – England, meaning the Movement, is “conservative”, America, meaning Plath, is “confessional” etc. – and it is equally ignorant, equally parochial and equally reductive.
Come over to Paris some time, we’ll have a coffee and I’ll show you what’s happening in the real, living city, instead of the one where Gene Kelly’s dancing with Théophile Gautier on the banks of the Île Saint-Louis.
Kindly.
I wonder, have you worked in, or been to France, recently? “[French] seems to tend towards an aural monotony, which I used to think was deliberate, but may be a quality of that language itself”. This is so shocking to me that I must ask: what is your notion of contemporary French poetry? Would you label the melodic and metric parities and disparities of a Claude Royet-Journoud “monotonous”?:
aux abords de celle-ci
le travail respiratoire
s’éprend du motif
son excitation la périphérie
de langage comme un irascible
entraînement
aux choses
de l’attention
(from “Le Renversement”, 1972)
May I humbly postulate that French doesn’t sound “monotonous” to the French? I wonder if we’d permit ourselves such statements about Arabic, Chinese, Farsi.
As for Perse and Mallarmé being “the essence of what's wrong with French academicism”. I’m not sure what century you think it is in France, but may I mention poets such as Emmanuel Hocquard, or Jean-Marie Gleize who, as well as their association with la Littéralité or Hocquard’s “la modernité négative” are at once fiercely anti-mallarméan and also in no way estranged from the French academy. Also, Ponge, Bonnefoy, Jaccottet, and what's sometimes called the "realism" of l’après-guerre?
And what of the extremely notable absence of Aimé Césaire from this discussion?
This is not to play goalkeeper for the French academy: the French do this same sort of thing about English and American poetics – England, meaning the Movement, is “conservative”, America, meaning Plath, is “confessional” etc. – and it is equally ignorant, equally parochial and equally reductive.
Come over to Paris some time, we’ll have a coffee and I’ll show you what’s happening in the real, living city, instead of the one where Gene Kelly’s dancing with Théophile Gautier on the banks of the Île Saint-Louis.
Kindly.
We stayed at Jeu de Paume on Ile Saint-Louis, and it was a wonderful place. Albeit if one didn't need to drive a car--definitely a liability on a par with Madrid, Rome, London, etc.
Of those you mention, Ponge is the only one I have read much of. I translated Reverdy at Iowa in the early 1970's, and found his syllables to be monotonous.
I freely confess to a sensitivity towards different languages that verges on naivite. Chinese, Russian, Farsi, Swahili--each has a distinctive, characteristic quality with a set of consonantal and vowel slants and spins that give it its specific flavor and sound. This is nothing but a big cliche to those who study languages, and I make no higher claim for it as a basis for discrimination. I deplore the constant lobbying for more translation, which I think in many cases is just a dead end. It may be that different languages are never destined to be "resolved" in some sort of super-esperanto; and that those of us who enjoy poetry may have to accept, once and for all, that the barriers to apprehension in an unfamiliar tongue are simply too high to be scaled by 99% of the population. Even for those for whom a second language is as familiar as their first, I do wonder whether or not the subtlest effects and "counter-music" (which underlies some of the greatest and most refined poetry) are not in fact completely silent to non-native speakers. Frost, for instance, uses ordinary speech in such a way that it has both a colloquial and an academic spin simultaneously--it frequently doesn't work, but I doubt very much whether a German or Russian would "hear" that ambiguity under the lines. You have to possess an experience of common speech patterns, as well as a familiarity with philosophical jargon, IN THAT LANGUAGE, to see what's being done. No one could live long enough to have that kind of verbal experience in two cultures. And no dictionary or grammar could begin to provide the merest outline of these qualities. Even Nabokov--supposedly a truly bi-lingual creature--frequently exhibits a tinny ear in his English which no native speaker, even an uneducated one, could fail to hear in a nanosecond. The emotional subtleties in poetry are so delicate....
Of those you mention, Ponge is the only one I have read much of. I translated Reverdy at Iowa in the early 1970's, and found his syllables to be monotonous.
I freely confess to a sensitivity towards different languages that verges on naivite. Chinese, Russian, Farsi, Swahili--each has a distinctive, characteristic quality with a set of consonantal and vowel slants and spins that give it its specific flavor and sound. This is nothing but a big cliche to those who study languages, and I make no higher claim for it as a basis for discrimination. I deplore the constant lobbying for more translation, which I think in many cases is just a dead end. It may be that different languages are never destined to be "resolved" in some sort of super-esperanto; and that those of us who enjoy poetry may have to accept, once and for all, that the barriers to apprehension in an unfamiliar tongue are simply too high to be scaled by 99% of the population. Even for those for whom a second language is as familiar as their first, I do wonder whether or not the subtlest effects and "counter-music" (which underlies some of the greatest and most refined poetry) are not in fact completely silent to non-native speakers. Frost, for instance, uses ordinary speech in such a way that it has both a colloquial and an academic spin simultaneously--it frequently doesn't work, but I doubt very much whether a German or Russian would "hear" that ambiguity under the lines. You have to possess an experience of common speech patterns, as well as a familiarity with philosophical jargon, IN THAT LANGUAGE, to see what's being done. No one could live long enough to have that kind of verbal experience in two cultures. And no dictionary or grammar could begin to provide the merest outline of these qualities. Even Nabokov--supposedly a truly bi-lingual creature--frequently exhibits a tinny ear in his English which no native speaker, even an uneducated one, could fail to hear in a nanosecond. The emotional subtleties in poetry are so delicate....
Ian,
Quite a lot of ideas in your comments that I've never actually heard expressed before, especially in regards to Jacob, & incompatibilities w language poetry. Can you say more? For me these were a few questions that came to mind:
1) I take it you'd be in the camp that sees Jacob's theatrical conversion as, a., sincere and, b., consistent with his earlier aesthetics and beliefs rather than a contradiction of them? Catholicism as, perhaps, the ultimate lack of interest in the "representation[s] of the world"?
2) Seems like many critics don't give Jacob much credit for consistent thought--he's a clever and charming writer, even a great writer, who was at the right place at the right time, but no theoretician, etc. You describe him as consistent enough to have a position that's not just a hodge-podge of various avant-garde and/or mystical notions around him. Maybe you just see him as consistent with his own escapist tendencies? Or as a real thinker of Escapism?
3) Are his other manifestos you mention, besides the Dice Cup preface, in english somewhere? I probably need to go back to the library and look again in that Hesitant Fire book, yes? Pls note other titles if they exist. It was hell enough to find & afford a copy of the Dice Cup (two actually--do be careful lending that book to other poets).
4) I've heard people take the term "situation" which he uses in that style/situation binary in the preface to Dice Cup as being evidence of Jacob's awareness of and interest in the concrete socio-historical "situation," contra what you seem to be saying here, and in a way that might be compatible enough with language poetry's aesthetic materialism (if that's even a real or consistent thing itself--but let's avoid that debate). Certain Dice Cup poems could be mobilized towards this argument of course, but I take it you don't read the preface that way at all? With that term (situation) it's hard not to read backwards with some knowledge of the situationists so maybe that colored it for me. Actually, off the topic now, can anyone with french (Mr. manning?) confirm it's even the same term? And to ask a surely dumb question, what about the opposite possibility: were the situationists at all aware of Jacob's Dice Cup preface when they settled on the term?
5) I don't know that Ron's summary of Maxian aesthetics (“a short piece of prose aimed at surprising the reader in some fashion, intended to “distract” the beleaguered language consumer, the one solace Jacob could envision for the poem”) has to be read as utterly derisive. Jacob always talked approvingly of "charm," boasting that the Dice Cup charmed everyone he read it to, etc. I could see taking Ron's gloss as almost a defintion of charm, no?
yrs,
Brent
Quite a lot of ideas in your comments that I've never actually heard expressed before, especially in regards to Jacob, & incompatibilities w language poetry. Can you say more? For me these were a few questions that came to mind:
1) I take it you'd be in the camp that sees Jacob's theatrical conversion as, a., sincere and, b., consistent with his earlier aesthetics and beliefs rather than a contradiction of them? Catholicism as, perhaps, the ultimate lack of interest in the "representation[s] of the world"?
2) Seems like many critics don't give Jacob much credit for consistent thought--he's a clever and charming writer, even a great writer, who was at the right place at the right time, but no theoretician, etc. You describe him as consistent enough to have a position that's not just a hodge-podge of various avant-garde and/or mystical notions around him. Maybe you just see him as consistent with his own escapist tendencies? Or as a real thinker of Escapism?
3) Are his other manifestos you mention, besides the Dice Cup preface, in english somewhere? I probably need to go back to the library and look again in that Hesitant Fire book, yes? Pls note other titles if they exist. It was hell enough to find & afford a copy of the Dice Cup (two actually--do be careful lending that book to other poets).
4) I've heard people take the term "situation" which he uses in that style/situation binary in the preface to Dice Cup as being evidence of Jacob's awareness of and interest in the concrete socio-historical "situation," contra what you seem to be saying here, and in a way that might be compatible enough with language poetry's aesthetic materialism (if that's even a real or consistent thing itself--but let's avoid that debate). Certain Dice Cup poems could be mobilized towards this argument of course, but I take it you don't read the preface that way at all? With that term (situation) it's hard not to read backwards with some knowledge of the situationists so maybe that colored it for me. Actually, off the topic now, can anyone with french (Mr. manning?) confirm it's even the same term? And to ask a surely dumb question, what about the opposite possibility: were the situationists at all aware of Jacob's Dice Cup preface when they settled on the term?
5) I don't know that Ron's summary of Maxian aesthetics (“a short piece of prose aimed at surprising the reader in some fashion, intended to “distract” the beleaguered language consumer, the one solace Jacob could envision for the poem”) has to be read as utterly derisive. Jacob always talked approvingly of "charm," boasting that the Dice Cup charmed everyone he read it to, etc. I could see taking Ron's gloss as almost a defintion of charm, no?
yrs,
Brent
Perhaps Curtis, but isn't it one thing to posit the existence of these inter-linguistic variances/vagaries, while it's quite another to construct literary-historiographical assertions based on them?
I'd bet, at least since the death of Valery in '45, that there have been more French poets in rather strident opposition to Mallarmean poetics than the contrary.
As for translation, I think translate translate translate. Translation is more often than not an impetus to make people find out more about a "foreign" poetics, rather than the opposite. But I would say that, being a 'comparatiste'...
I'd bet, at least since the death of Valery in '45, that there have been more French poets in rather strident opposition to Mallarmean poetics than the contrary.
As for translation, I think translate translate translate. Translation is more often than not an impetus to make people find out more about a "foreign" poetics, rather than the opposite. But I would say that, being a 'comparatiste'...
John:
"Rockwell's juvenile imagery does not strike me as perverse. I don't see the connection with Parrish. Rockwell's biggest influence is Rembrandt: both paint, brilliantly, the drama of revelation and relationship: Jesus breaking the bread; the little girl showing off her missing tooth; the angel visiting the evangelist Matthew; the boy praying with his grandma in the diner. R & R both depict the subtleties of emotion with acute perceptiveness and skill."
This is intriguing. What I think I meant is that--if you look at the divergent strains of development in late 19th/early 20th Century art--on the one hand Illustration, and on the other hand the academic/popular/fine art market, it's possible to see how Beardsley combines the pedestrian/scatalogical side (Pope/de Sade) with the high style in order to shock and decorate pretentiously. Parrish (and his contemporary, Wyeth Sr.) exploit a dreamy fantasy world which is nonetheless meant to be accessible to the bourgeois audience, yet it's very suggestive has been sanitized (sexually--young boys and girls in extravagantly romantic dress and attitudes). As in Rembrandt, there's an undercurrent of the vicarious which is impossible to miss. Illustration is inherently programmatic and narrational, whereas high art aspires to a classic stasis which suspends time and shrugs off the ephemeral. In Rockwell, this is reversed.
Rockwell attempts to unite these traditions at the service of a vision of subject matter that is at basis imaginary--NOT visionary as with Parrish--and nostalgic, but nostalgic with a peculiarly American kind of dishonesty. Rockwell's images are unfailingly edited by a puritanical embarrassment with the body, with wealth, and the realities of economic oppression and hardship. Rockwell idealizes the American myth of democratic equality by condescending to virtually every type and group he portrays. While masquerading as an art of the common man, his skill is in emphasizing the mundane surface of objects and tones in the service of the full panoply of American hypocrisy: proletarian respectability, religious "tolerance," childhood innocence, sexual guilt and concealed lust, racial bigotry, class envy, distrust of ideas and authority and sophistication, etc. Rockwell was the standard-bearer of a strain of American culture which grew into the popular mass-cult of the 1930's--indeed, the deprivation and despair of The Depression feed directly into the grotesque "dream" which his images express--and beyond WWII, accompanying the rise of prosperity and national vanity of the 1950's and beyond.
The children in Parrish are the same children one sees in Rockwell, though now made a little uglier and more common--more everyday, those silky locks now soiled or greased-up, perhaps with a recalcitrant cow-lick. Ill-fitting shoes, lumpy shirts, cherry red cheeks, and a gap-toothed grin. Everything designed to ILLUSTRATE a fake vision of American small-town lower-middle-class life as an ideal, oversimplified world of gold-watch vests, train-station calendars, skinned knees, election-day confusion, gauzy parlor drapes, loony prayer-meetings, and aw shucks boy-meets-girl relationships. If Parrish is about fantasizing sub-teen sex in an immoral wilderness (with links to Eden), then Beardsley is about the fatigue of decadence, the boredom of sex itself; and Rockwell's scampy young hooligan is none other than Alfred E. Neuman himself, up to mischief again.
"Rockwell's juvenile imagery does not strike me as perverse. I don't see the connection with Parrish. Rockwell's biggest influence is Rembrandt: both paint, brilliantly, the drama of revelation and relationship: Jesus breaking the bread; the little girl showing off her missing tooth; the angel visiting the evangelist Matthew; the boy praying with his grandma in the diner. R & R both depict the subtleties of emotion with acute perceptiveness and skill."
This is intriguing. What I think I meant is that--if you look at the divergent strains of development in late 19th/early 20th Century art--on the one hand Illustration, and on the other hand the academic/popular/fine art market, it's possible to see how Beardsley combines the pedestrian/scatalogical side (Pope/de Sade) with the high style in order to shock and decorate pretentiously. Parrish (and his contemporary, Wyeth Sr.) exploit a dreamy fantasy world which is nonetheless meant to be accessible to the bourgeois audience, yet it's very suggestive has been sanitized (sexually--young boys and girls in extravagantly romantic dress and attitudes). As in Rembrandt, there's an undercurrent of the vicarious which is impossible to miss. Illustration is inherently programmatic and narrational, whereas high art aspires to a classic stasis which suspends time and shrugs off the ephemeral. In Rockwell, this is reversed.
Rockwell attempts to unite these traditions at the service of a vision of subject matter that is at basis imaginary--NOT visionary as with Parrish--and nostalgic, but nostalgic with a peculiarly American kind of dishonesty. Rockwell's images are unfailingly edited by a puritanical embarrassment with the body, with wealth, and the realities of economic oppression and hardship. Rockwell idealizes the American myth of democratic equality by condescending to virtually every type and group he portrays. While masquerading as an art of the common man, his skill is in emphasizing the mundane surface of objects and tones in the service of the full panoply of American hypocrisy: proletarian respectability, religious "tolerance," childhood innocence, sexual guilt and concealed lust, racial bigotry, class envy, distrust of ideas and authority and sophistication, etc. Rockwell was the standard-bearer of a strain of American culture which grew into the popular mass-cult of the 1930's--indeed, the deprivation and despair of The Depression feed directly into the grotesque "dream" which his images express--and beyond WWII, accompanying the rise of prosperity and national vanity of the 1950's and beyond.
The children in Parrish are the same children one sees in Rockwell, though now made a little uglier and more common--more everyday, those silky locks now soiled or greased-up, perhaps with a recalcitrant cow-lick. Ill-fitting shoes, lumpy shirts, cherry red cheeks, and a gap-toothed grin. Everything designed to ILLUSTRATE a fake vision of American small-town lower-middle-class life as an ideal, oversimplified world of gold-watch vests, train-station calendars, skinned knees, election-day confusion, gauzy parlor drapes, loony prayer-meetings, and aw shucks boy-meets-girl relationships. If Parrish is about fantasizing sub-teen sex in an immoral wilderness (with links to Eden), then Beardsley is about the fatigue of decadence, the boredom of sex itself; and Rockwell's scampy young hooligan is none other than Alfred E. Neuman himself, up to mischief again.
Curtis,
My argument was against the imposed conflict between Dr Williams or Mallarmé, not on behalf of one or the other. I’m trying to get at the question as to why people feel the need to pick sides and to reduce one of them in phrases like “the essence of what's wrong with French academicism” when both were essential Modernist innovators. You’re only playing Bly’s little game when you go there!
Brent,
I have lent Hesitant Fire and gotten it back, but at the moment I can’t find it: I try to lend books to myself as infrequently as possible.
Jacob’s religious conversions has been explained as a result of deep feelings of guilt, which may have arisen from lust for boys. Again, Jacob would hate this sort of speculation, and materialists will assiduously maintain that his non-materialist aesthetic was contrived to avoid these issues. So he withdrew from the world with the Catholics.
Consistency: I don’t know if he ever backtracked from pulling the plug on representation, but I do think he set forth this theory definitively and this rubbed off on the Dadaists. The manifestoes I mention are essentially the Dice Cup preface and not Hesitant Fire; I don’t have the Dice Cup here but I found this use of ‘situation’ from that Preface online:
“Rimbaud extended the scope of our sensibility and every literary man must be grateful to him for that, but authors of prose poems cannot take him as their model, for the prose poem in order to exist must submit to the laws of all art, which are style or will and situation or emotion, and Rimbaud leads only to disorder and exasperation. The prose poem must also avoid Baudelairean and Mallarmean parables, if it would distinguish itself from the fable.”
I should say that I like the Situationists but the word ‘situation’ for me goes through the prism of Sartre, which is rife with those materialist components. Without elaboration anchoring the term there, I am inclined to think Jacob intended a more open-ended and creative meaning for the term, a ‘situation’ arising from his narrative propulsions and winding up where they tend to wind up. The words ARE a situation, and to assign to them a representational function for the existential situation is to deny them their own situations, will, and emotions.
Some of Jacob uses the one-liner and the shocking, freaky switcheroo that can be pigeonholed as ‘poetry for people who don’t like poetry,’ while Ron prefers methods which are vindicated through extension and repetition which appeals to the reader that’s read it all and wants something else that they can live with a while. Jacob is often that, I think, though what he is is often transformative on the terms that he has set out for poetry.
Sweet dreams to all of dancing Parnassians, Ian
My argument was against the imposed conflict between Dr Williams or Mallarmé, not on behalf of one or the other. I’m trying to get at the question as to why people feel the need to pick sides and to reduce one of them in phrases like “the essence of what's wrong with French academicism” when both were essential Modernist innovators. You’re only playing Bly’s little game when you go there!
Brent,
I have lent Hesitant Fire and gotten it back, but at the moment I can’t find it: I try to lend books to myself as infrequently as possible.
Jacob’s religious conversions has been explained as a result of deep feelings of guilt, which may have arisen from lust for boys. Again, Jacob would hate this sort of speculation, and materialists will assiduously maintain that his non-materialist aesthetic was contrived to avoid these issues. So he withdrew from the world with the Catholics.
Consistency: I don’t know if he ever backtracked from pulling the plug on representation, but I do think he set forth this theory definitively and this rubbed off on the Dadaists. The manifestoes I mention are essentially the Dice Cup preface and not Hesitant Fire; I don’t have the Dice Cup here but I found this use of ‘situation’ from that Preface online:
“Rimbaud extended the scope of our sensibility and every literary man must be grateful to him for that, but authors of prose poems cannot take him as their model, for the prose poem in order to exist must submit to the laws of all art, which are style or will and situation or emotion, and Rimbaud leads only to disorder and exasperation. The prose poem must also avoid Baudelairean and Mallarmean parables, if it would distinguish itself from the fable.”
I should say that I like the Situationists but the word ‘situation’ for me goes through the prism of Sartre, which is rife with those materialist components. Without elaboration anchoring the term there, I am inclined to think Jacob intended a more open-ended and creative meaning for the term, a ‘situation’ arising from his narrative propulsions and winding up where they tend to wind up. The words ARE a situation, and to assign to them a representational function for the existential situation is to deny them their own situations, will, and emotions.
Some of Jacob uses the one-liner and the shocking, freaky switcheroo that can be pigeonholed as ‘poetry for people who don’t like poetry,’ while Ron prefers methods which are vindicated through extension and repetition which appeals to the reader that’s read it all and wants something else that they can live with a while. Jacob is often that, I think, though what he is is often transformative on the terms that he has set out for poetry.
Sweet dreams to all of dancing Parnassians, Ian
Curtis,
Thanks for the comments. I take issue with a bunch of it, natch.
Here is issue.
"Illustration is inherently programmatic and narrational, whereas high art aspires to a classic stasis which suspends time and shrugs off the ephemeral. In Rockwell, this is reversed."
I agree about illustration and Rockwell, but you overstate the case against high art -- Rembrandt (again), Futurism, and Duchamp all struggled against the suspension of time. As a generalization, though, I think you're on it.
Your case against Rockwell as avatar of the full panoply of American hypocrisy is stated rather than demonstrated. I honestly don't see how it applies to Rockwell any more than it does to any American artist with liberal, progressive, or even radical aspiration. We all benefit from and live within the warm sticky embrace of what Rexroth called "the Social Lie." Rockwell was an ameliorist and an avatar of the middle class, the affluent-as-never-before-in-history American working class. I won't argue against the charge that his representations are sentimental, but they are no more so than any other popular or even representational art of the time. The tough cynical noir-ists and depictors of gum-cracking molls were no less sentimental, mythical, and hypocritical in their way.
The non-representational artists have historically been avatars of pure capital, of the excess signifying power of capitalist society. That's how the state department deployed Abstract Expressionism, that's why bank lobbies display (for pay) nth-generation Abstract Expressionists today. The non-representational poets and post-melodic composers have to get teaching gigs in order to get paid in their respective fields; at universities, bastions of class stratification and fragrant bouquets at the dinner party of American capitalism.
It seems to me that once you start tarring popular culture with the contradictions and depredations of American society and politics (and there's no reason not to), you might as well take in the whole cultural field. It's only fair. I happen to like Rockwell (a lot), for the reasons I stated already. (Love the Abstract Expressionists too, and the post-representational poets and post-melodic composers, as a fully indoctrinated capitalist cultural consumer.)
Thanks for the comments. I take issue with a bunch of it, natch.
Here is issue.
"Illustration is inherently programmatic and narrational, whereas high art aspires to a classic stasis which suspends time and shrugs off the ephemeral. In Rockwell, this is reversed."
I agree about illustration and Rockwell, but you overstate the case against high art -- Rembrandt (again), Futurism, and Duchamp all struggled against the suspension of time. As a generalization, though, I think you're on it.
Your case against Rockwell as avatar of the full panoply of American hypocrisy is stated rather than demonstrated. I honestly don't see how it applies to Rockwell any more than it does to any American artist with liberal, progressive, or even radical aspiration. We all benefit from and live within the warm sticky embrace of what Rexroth called "the Social Lie." Rockwell was an ameliorist and an avatar of the middle class, the affluent-as-never-before-in-history American working class. I won't argue against the charge that his representations are sentimental, but they are no more so than any other popular or even representational art of the time. The tough cynical noir-ists and depictors of gum-cracking molls were no less sentimental, mythical, and hypocritical in their way.
The non-representational artists have historically been avatars of pure capital, of the excess signifying power of capitalist society. That's how the state department deployed Abstract Expressionism, that's why bank lobbies display (for pay) nth-generation Abstract Expressionists today. The non-representational poets and post-melodic composers have to get teaching gigs in order to get paid in their respective fields; at universities, bastions of class stratification and fragrant bouquets at the dinner party of American capitalism.
It seems to me that once you start tarring popular culture with the contradictions and depredations of American society and politics (and there's no reason not to), you might as well take in the whole cultural field. It's only fair. I happen to like Rockwell (a lot), for the reasons I stated already. (Love the Abstract Expressionists too, and the post-representational poets and post-melodic composers, as a fully indoctrinated capitalist cultural consumer.)
I wasn't trying to build an edifice on art--simply trying to make a case about Rockwell descending from Parrish and other illustrators. Rockwell is one kind of technical master--but such craftsmen come and go in every generation--his "contribution" differed according to his fake-"realistic" subject-matter, one of the great conservative myth-makers.
Really a kind of apologist for the status-quo. The message of his art is: See, things may be confusing and disturbing now, but we have this sweet, mawkish, charming past in which everyone was hard-working, modest, decent, devout and kind of homely. It's the same world Garrison Keillor presents in his Lake Wobegone stories. "Where all the women are strong, all the men are handsome, and all the children are above-average." It's cute, comfy and trite. The reality was closer to Lewis's Main Street, or Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio--but Depression-era (and later) audiences wanted excelsior, and Rockwell gave it to them.
Really a kind of apologist for the status-quo. The message of his art is: See, things may be confusing and disturbing now, but we have this sweet, mawkish, charming past in which everyone was hard-working, modest, decent, devout and kind of homely. It's the same world Garrison Keillor presents in his Lake Wobegone stories. "Where all the women are strong, all the men are handsome, and all the children are above-average." It's cute, comfy and trite. The reality was closer to Lewis's Main Street, or Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio--but Depression-era (and later) audiences wanted excelsior, and Rockwell gave it to them.
Hi, Ian,
Thanks very much...I reread that Dice Cup preface last night and I certainly see what you mean about the parnassian qualities of Jacob's notion of situation. In the Atlas press edition there's even a footnote to that effect: "...in 1934 Jacob acknowledges that he had used a word in this preface that had been misunderstood: 'situer'. He claims he meant that 'a work of art must take its place somewhere other than on earth...' It goes on from there with some detail but that's the gist.
I did notice that Ron, being generally careful, seems to have taken his summary of Jacob right out of the preface. MJ does work out a more complicated definition of "distraction" however, and following that I think one could make of him something more like Viktor Shklovsky of the Russian formalists with his "enstrangement": that is someone who argues for autonomy of art in the sense of the importance of formal invention(which is more what he means by the style/situation distinction). The stark difference between the two later on is because Shklovsky spends the 20s revising and denying his view of the autonomous under the socialist-realist pressures of stalins regime, while Jacob becomes a religious convert advising young poets to find their true inner self which, he claims, they will discover to be identical to Jesus Xst.
Anyways, worth reading that Dice Cup preface for those that can find a copy...
yrs
Brent
Thanks very much...I reread that Dice Cup preface last night and I certainly see what you mean about the parnassian qualities of Jacob's notion of situation. In the Atlas press edition there's even a footnote to that effect: "...in 1934 Jacob acknowledges that he had used a word in this preface that had been misunderstood: 'situer'. He claims he meant that 'a work of art must take its place somewhere other than on earth...' It goes on from there with some detail but that's the gist.
I did notice that Ron, being generally careful, seems to have taken his summary of Jacob right out of the preface. MJ does work out a more complicated definition of "distraction" however, and following that I think one could make of him something more like Viktor Shklovsky of the Russian formalists with his "enstrangement": that is someone who argues for autonomy of art in the sense of the importance of formal invention(which is more what he means by the style/situation distinction). The stark difference between the two later on is because Shklovsky spends the 20s revising and denying his view of the autonomous under the socialist-realist pressures of stalins regime, while Jacob becomes a religious convert advising young poets to find their true inner self which, he claims, they will discover to be identical to Jesus Xst.
Anyways, worth reading that Dice Cup preface for those that can find a copy...
yrs
Brent
Yeah (sheepish), I gotta admit, there is that undercurrent of nostalgia in a lot of Rockwell, but quite a lot of his stuff is contemporary, if often small town -- which (must admit again), denotes nostalgia in itself for many people.
Where I disagree is on the assessment of "reality." Winesburg, Ohio packs a wallop, but the sweet and the bittersweet depicted by Rockwell is real too; an aspect of the real; a real part of millions of people's lives. I know it's part of mine!
I'd also call him a Roosevelt & Kennedy liberal -- that's the polity his art evokes for me -- not conservative, which in that era meant anti-New Deal, anti-Civil Rights. I can feel why you take his stuff to be condescending, but only occasionally; usually I take him to be straight-up respectful.
Dave Hickey has an essay in which he talks about tagging along with his semi-pro jazz-playing dad in the 1940s, to go to a jam session at somebody's house. His dad is white, some of the players are black, one of them is a German-Jewish refugee. Hickey wrote the narrative of the jam session and showed it to his wife. His wife said that people would take it as allegorical multi-culti pabulum. Hickey protested -- but that's not what it is, this really happened! And he tried to imagine who could depict the scene, and settled on Rockwell. Hickey says, "there is in Rockwell (as in Dickens) this luminous devotion to the possibility of domestic kindness and social accord -- along with an effortless proclivity to translate any minor discord into comedy and forgiving tristesse -- and this domain of kindness and comedy and tristesse is not the truth, but it is a part of it, and a part that we routinely deny these days, lest we compromise our social agendas. We discourage expressions of these feelings on the grounds that they privilege complacency and celebrate the norm as we struggle to extend the franchise. But that is the point (and the point of our struggle): Kindness, comedy, and forgiving tristesse are not the norm. They signify our little victories."
Where I disagree is on the assessment of "reality." Winesburg, Ohio packs a wallop, but the sweet and the bittersweet depicted by Rockwell is real too; an aspect of the real; a real part of millions of people's lives. I know it's part of mine!
I'd also call him a Roosevelt & Kennedy liberal -- that's the polity his art evokes for me -- not conservative, which in that era meant anti-New Deal, anti-Civil Rights. I can feel why you take his stuff to be condescending, but only occasionally; usually I take him to be straight-up respectful.
Dave Hickey has an essay in which he talks about tagging along with his semi-pro jazz-playing dad in the 1940s, to go to a jam session at somebody's house. His dad is white, some of the players are black, one of them is a German-Jewish refugee. Hickey wrote the narrative of the jam session and showed it to his wife. His wife said that people would take it as allegorical multi-culti pabulum. Hickey protested -- but that's not what it is, this really happened! And he tried to imagine who could depict the scene, and settled on Rockwell. Hickey says, "there is in Rockwell (as in Dickens) this luminous devotion to the possibility of domestic kindness and social accord -- along with an effortless proclivity to translate any minor discord into comedy and forgiving tristesse -- and this domain of kindness and comedy and tristesse is not the truth, but it is a part of it, and a part that we routinely deny these days, lest we compromise our social agendas. We discourage expressions of these feelings on the grounds that they privilege complacency and celebrate the norm as we struggle to extend the franchise. But that is the point (and the point of our struggle): Kindness, comedy, and forgiving tristesse are not the norm. They signify our little victories."
Curtis wrote:
It's the same world Garrison Keillor presents in his Lake Wobegone stories. "Where all the women are strong, all the men are handsome, and all the children are above-average." It's cute, comfy and trite.
Naw. That's the way life truly is in Minnesota. Just like Garrison says. Or at least it was until the bridges started falling down.
pac, lov and undrstanding (nvr giv up!)
Stv Ptrmir
no man's land
minnapolis, mn
usa
It's the same world Garrison Keillor presents in his Lake Wobegone stories. "Where all the women are strong, all the men are handsome, and all the children are above-average." It's cute, comfy and trite.
Naw. That's the way life truly is in Minnesota. Just like Garrison says. Or at least it was until the bridges started falling down.
pac, lov and undrstanding (nvr giv up!)
Stv Ptrmir
no man's land
minnapolis, mn
usa
I think a big historical shift occurred with respect to the American Zeitgeist between, say, 1940, and 1975 (post Vietnam). A director like Capra could construct these weird (Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, etc.) fantasy daydreams of a fake America in which the nostalgia and sentiment of the lower middle class are exploited to the hilt, and people bought it. That innocence was totally effaced by the 1970's, in which the world of the Mafia (as in the Godfather sequence) could be seen as the true expression of the "American [immigrant] family" at war with the rest of society (and with itself)--reprised recently in the Sopranos series on cable. Americans could now believe in the inherent evil of the American system of ambition, selfishness and exploitation which characterize our economic and social behavior (especially at the highest levels). It's hard to imagine how an "illustration"-style painter today could portray American life in the 1970's as an ideal dream of innocence and sweetness--and I don't think that's just a shift in actual conditions, it's an aesthetic shift that's changed irrevocably how America is able to think about itself. In 1950, we could still "pretend" to believe in the fake vision of 1905, but that's simply no longer possible. We're too jaded and cynical today.
Oh sorry Brent I just saw your question: yes, situation is "situation" in Jacob's French (and the Debord manifesto for instance is "Rapport sur la construction de situations").
As to whether the SI knew of Jacob before: that would take some digging...
As to whether the SI knew of Jacob before: that would take some digging...
Curtis, I think you're right that perceptions have changed more than conditions, but that perceptions have changed to the degree that an artist like Capra (or Rockwell, or even Thomas Hart Benton) could not present such visions post-1970. I don't really understand *why* that is, but I think it's true.
"Where all the women are strong, all the men are handsome, and all the children are above-average."
Actually, he says all the men are "good-looking", not "handsome". "Handsome" would defeat the purpose of the joke.
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Actually, he says all the men are "good-looking", not "handsome". "Handsome" would defeat the purpose of the joke.
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