Henry Bard has second thoughts

The ghost of Edgar Allan Poe troubled my sleep, and I awoke feeling reservations about the gaudy bardic proclamations of previous post.  Perhaps there are two deep currents in 20th and 21st-century poetry : 1) the urge toward engagement, fellowship, judgement, passionate witness; and 2) the urge toward imperturbable detachment, disinterested objectivity, the autonomous perfection of the art work.  You could say Whitman is representative of the first impulse, and Poe of the second.  David Jones across the Atlantic, another great modern exemplar of the long poem, wrote some wonderful essays in defense of the absolute freedom of the artist - as artist - from social/political requirements.  Art has a moral purpose, and forwards human freedom and dignity, simply by fulfilling itself, by working out its own quest toward integral beauty, in free association with the manual arts, applied technology and useful crafts.

It seems clear to me that I have wavered through my writing life between these two poles, between Whitman and Poe.  It's why my favorite American "bard" has always been, not Ezra Pound, but Hart Crane.  Crane's Bridge is a national paean to American culture : yet the poem is so dense and "overdetermined" with pure poetic resonance that it is always more than whatever abstract or paraphrase is applied to it.  The Bridge is multidimensional and recursive, self-referential : you could say the poem radiates the free-standing beauty of an achieved work of art, an "end-in-itself".

Also the serene formulae of the early-modern poetic movement of Russian Acmeism gave me examples of possible integrations of these two poles (call them the aesthetic and the political, or the communal and the individual...).  Gumilev and Mandelstam found a mediation between revolutionary Futurism and reactionary or detached Symbolism : by making poetic works of integral, pure and free art, by following, revising and fulfilling artistic traditions they had inherited, the Acmeists produced an art of and for the people.  "The Word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of flesh and bread : suffering" (Mandelstam, from the essay "Word and Culture").

Yin & yang, systole, diastole... the poet goes out singing, and comes back again - to work late, & in secret, at the smithy of the integral poem.

This may be another partial explanation for my marginal presence on the contemporary scene.  I've been too busy working at the forge.  My massive unread poems are an effort, in part, to bring the American long-poem enterprise to some kind of artistic, integral fulfillment, on the model of Crane's Bridge and Osip Mandelstam's life-work.  Island Road, Stubborn Grew, Forth of July, Lanthanum, Ravenna Diagram...  It would be somewhat ironic if someday critical reception picks up on the idea that the American national epic has been fulfilled by a contribution from Soviet Russia.  But don't call Putin or Trump : Mandelstam and Gumilev speak from a completely other Russia, the Russia of Pushkin, Chaadev, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova.  The spiritually-free Russian psyche, so radiant with balletic grace and deep chords of solemn harmony.

Gateway Arch Monument, St. Louis

Brent Cunningham posted this in one of the comment boxes below:

"I wanted to express some doubt that you could support what seems to be a component of your counter-argument to Ron, namely the idea that the Futurists weren't a central influence on the Formalists. Shklovsky anyway never misses a chance to champion Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky especially, & does connect the formalist method of literary analysis to futurist compositional strategies--this is very clear in VS's Mayakovsky & His Circle (where he writes "I was a Futurist at that time," i.e. 1915) and elsewhere. I'd say the Formalists analyze Doestoevsky or Pushkin as application of their method, but the method itself finds much inspiration in Futurist principles: the valuing of science and the mechanical, the sense of the primacy of component parts, the contempt for Symbolist mystification and transcendence, and also just personal friendship with that older generation. Tho he is maybe not a formalist (tho in many ways a formalist-linguist perhaps?), Roman Jakobsen's My Futurist Years also makes clear the personal and intellectual effect Mayakovsky had on his immediate circle.

Certainly, there was more to it than Ron's crib--yes, naturally formalists intervention in lit crit took place in a different field, where there was a different history and different figures and different debates, etc., that's all true--but for a thumbnail it's not far: Futurism, and Mayakovsky looming as its main figure, was really the great tributary into Formalism, and provided much of the social and tactical inspiration.

Ron's sense of connection between Russian Formalism and the New Critics is, as you suggest, much more debatable. But at the same time it is quite striking, as one goes along reading Shklovsky or Tynanov, to run across so many ideas that are deeply resonant with positions held by Brooks or Warren etc. despite the difference in their politics. Ewa Thompson has a whole book on this from 1971 that is worth looking at."

This is a serious challenge, & it got me to go down to the library today & look into the history of Russian Formalism - for which I'm grateful to Brent. And, after looking at some of the scholarly work on this, I have to agree that the Futurist poets, primarily Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, were closely affiliated with the Russ. Formalists - at least, with some of them - during their early (pre-Soviet) years. The Moscow wing was closer to the Futurists - the circle in Petersburg, however - primarily Boris Eikhenbaum - seem to have been more interested in the Acmeists.

However, these issues are extremely complicated. "Thumbnails" - mine included - easily become reductive distortions. It would be a mistake to project a kind of genetic or domino-theory description of the emergence of Formalism out of Futurism. Many of the ideas which the Futurists & Formalists shared - about the emphasis on the signifier, the autonomy of art from biography or social sentiment etc. - were in the air : one only has to point to the parallel genesis of abstraction in the visual arts during the same period. Moreover, even some of the most "avant-garde" Futurist assertions about the nature of poetry actually echo trends from the fin-de-siecle & decadent-symbolist styles which preceded them. (There's a good monograph on this topic, which I will try to locate.)

In other words, it would be a mistake to look at Mayakovsky as the "father" of the critical movement known as formalism. The poets & the critics shared some common interests and judgements, for a time. Then the critics moved on to refine & apply their theories to literature at large; and both movements traveled toward eventual destruction by Stalinism & soviet realism in the 30s.

So I will have to withdraw, partially, #1 of my proposed list of necessary logical props for Ron's original statement. But #2-4 still stand. First, the New Criticism and Russian Formalism are better described as parallel 20th-century developments, than as a genetic development of the former from the latter. Second, the relation between the New Criticism and Ron's School of Quietude is murky at best : if he's going to argue that the (soi-disant) School of Quietude has "nc roots", then he might as well say that Language Poetry does, too. Thirdly, to label poets like Auden or Lowell as among Brodsky's "School o'Quietude friends" is to misrepresent their work. Auden's neoclassical, social poetry displays the antithesis of New Critical dicta; Lowell's work, after Life Studies, differentiates itself also - toward autobiography, documentary, social chronicle.

All this nit-picking is out of proportion to the sheer nonsense of Ron's "thumbnail" depiction of Brodsky's career, these ersatz ironies. But if it leads myself and others toward a more detailed investigation of Russian poetics & literary history, I have him & Brent to thank. & I find it continually curious to have these debates, with their very faint and distended echoes of the original battles between Symbolist & Acmeist, Acmeist & Futurist, Potebnia-disciples & Formalists. What's ironic to me is that the debate takes place in the context of one of Ron's thumbnail biographical profiles (in which he specializes on his blog) : ie., the topic is molded, not by the literary, philosophical, philological or compositional problems in themselves, but by an author biography. Now this gets back to Kent Johnson's liminal presence in these debates, the way he harks back to ancient quarrels & hurt feelings on a Langpo trip to Leningrad, decades ago... because, considering the emphasis of the Futurists on the "word itself" - Khlebnikov's & Mayakovsky's insistence on the obliteration of the "author biography", the idea that "the poem is the only hero", and the poem itself is just "words as SOUNDS" (zaum) - when you get into this territory, you are getting into Kent Johnson territory : which is to say - away with these "thumbnail" promotion-demotions of individual writers!

So, in an odd & fairly primitive & definitely anachronistic American way, KJ & RS & HG are replaying Futurist/Acmeist debates. The Futurist demotion - in fact their scornful obliteration - of the bourgeois "author principle" & "literary tradition", played (for a while) into the hands of the general Russian-revolutionary zeitgeist - until their time of usefulness to the regime had passed. But the usefulness of such a demotion is still visible in the postmodern poetics coming out of Langpo and some other New American strains - and this usefulness, for his own poetics, is what propels Ron's Futurist-Formalist genealogy. Kent offers a more radical critique, regarding the consequences of such a theoretical move (in poetry). & I still stand with the Acmeists, more or less - unwilling to dispense either with "tradition", or with some purely poetic notion of "personhood", which has yet to be fully articulated.

Here I compost my difference.

If we accept the R. Formalist 6-sided model, still, we say, language is not dicing. The simple hexagonal formula elides an implication of the fact that the addressor is one of its facets: the implication that motive, impulse, is inextricable from the actuality of language.

"Words are fossil poetry", says Emerson (Thoreau?). The word from its origin is gestural, indexical, representational, mimetic. The "inner image" of the word (Mandelshtam's Potebnia, the anti-R. Formalist) is a complex made up of its etymological-gestural roots.

Imagine, not a six-sided die, but a sword turning every way.

A sequence:
1. the primitive word points to that.
2. the primitive word-maker inches toward self-consciousness.
3. the primitive word takes on the tincture of same (self-consciousness).
4. the primitive word becomes a polished mirror, a flashing sword.
5. the primitive word-maker points toward his/her Maker.
6. the primitive word turns every way.
7. and the primitive word saw that it was good, and rested.

For the (Mandelshtamian) Acmeist, the poetic word exults in liberation from necessity, it celebrates its inner free-standing harmonics, it honors the creative nature of which it is a part, it acknowledges the origin of its freedom in the "historical fact the the Redemption". Thus the primary border is not between past & future, as with the Futurists, but between time & eternity, or heaven & earth, which the intervention of the Divine Word fused together, and which the poetic word echoes & celebrates.

Mandelstam wrote that, ironically, the revolution broke the spine of cultural chronology stemming from the Incarnation (the Christian calendar), and in doing so, led not into a utopian future but a kind of inert state, which he mocked as "Buddhist Moscow".

(Obviously, here, I'm taking Mandelshtam in my own direction, building on certain strands of his oeuvre; I'm not presenting an objective/scholarly version, but a Henry-adaptation.)

To summarize: in poetic language, impulse & representation are inherently meshed & fused with the "verbal material"; there is no toss of some dice-object; rather, language is a human creation which is surrounded by & points toward its maker-matrix. The langpo/futurist/modernist emphasizes chance & formal reconstruction; the acmeist/modernist emphasizes historical fate, the inextricable cultural context. Futurism is construct; acmeism is embodiment & image.

More interesting comments from Josh Corey, relating to very general approaches to style. Raising a question about whether there is a "symbolist" aesthetics (Baudelaire, Eliot, Lowell), which accepts (is built on) the conceptual framing (allegorical?) of perception, as opposed to a more free-form, "pure perception" aesthetics stemming from Pound & Olson. I'm paraphrasing here.

His remarks seem a least tangentially related to distinctions I've made recently (& periodically) between very general "acmeist" vs. "futurist" poetics : the notion that poetry is in part a reflection/recurrence of the past - the Otherness of the past being recognized & reconciled in a re-making of the Same (ie. Stevens'

"the ever-never-changing Same,
appearance of Again, the diva-dame"

or something like that) - which could encourage a Crane, for example, to re-make rather than throw out the pentameter -

or perhaps these differences reflect an older, more basic distinction, between the beautiful & the sublime?

But I wouldn't like to promote yet another simplistic binary. Seems pleasant, though, to take these paths into matters of style rather than literary politics. Quietude/Negativity is not symbolist/imagist is not beautiful/sublime is not the cooked/raw is not New Critical/Confessional is not mainstream/oppositional. . .

the critic would evaluate the poem or poetics as a many-sided complex/simple within the circus of contemporary verbalizationzzzzzzzzzzz. . .

. . . but again, why didn't Hart Crane "break the pentameter"? There was a positive reason : he could reshape the Elizabethan line, as in "For the Marriage of Faustus & Helen", and parts of The Bridge. In Crane the 1590s returned; he was Marlowe as W.Stevens was Shakespeare.

The Nietzschean idea of "eternal return" was in the air; the notion of cyclical time & the presence of the past. It was reflected in Eliot's recapitulation of Tradition, his Heraclitean sense of the conjunction of time & Eternity ("History is Now and England"); it was in Mandelstam's invocations of Ovid; it was in Joyce's overlap of Homer & Dublin; it was in Pound's mythologizing, & Yeats' gyres. Crane thought he could see the recurrence of ancient times, Atlantis/New York in the dentist's chair.

Where you won't find it is in the futurist wing of modernism; for the Futurists, whether Russian or Italian or Vorticist, the past was something to be obliterated for the sake of absolute Progress. They were too much the sophisticated, politicized materialists, to accept some version of neo-Platonic aesthetics. In Russian poetics it's formalized in the divide between Acmeism & Futurism. Total novelty obliterates the potential for the presence of past times, past forms, past poems.

Acmeism, on the other hand, or the eternal return, intimates the possibility of re-incarnation, of time travel, of the ghostly presence of dead avatars, of communion with the dead.

I don't want to repeat a mirror-image of Ron Silliman's simplistic binaries. The futurist Pound & his disciples Olson & Zukofsky certainly created their own very effective versions of the presence of the past (& sometimes of the pentameter, too). But they did so in the context of a radical distancing from ordinary speech & cultural norms. It takes a very refined taste to appreciate how these prodigal sons echoed that general culture by means of ultra-private idioms. Their uncompromising independence makes them culture heros, in a sense; but their choices are not the only option (witness again, for example, Stevens or Crane).

Here's a very old poem of mine. It was written in the 70s, after a visit to the Minneapolis Art Institute. Across the street, hidden among some fir trees, I found a statue of George Washington.


MEMORIAL DAY


Statue standing grey in summer rain,
wrinkled stone worn by many seasons,
brow, shoulders, backbone full of purpose,
memory shivering in the roar of battle,
emblem of endurance everlasting,
lasting now in peacetime summer rain.

Rising in the shadow of the trees,
mist of thoughts returning from the dead,
comes to life within the broken heart,
comes to join the living and the dead,
statue of the mystery of glory,
statue standing grey in summer rain.