A Dissociated Writing Program (or, the Quiddity of Things)

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April 2010 ushers in the conjunction of National Poetry Month with the vast and bulbous Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Conference (in Denver this year), and so, under the lights of such stars, we non-attenders and outsiders are tempted to assess the national state of the art. But the first question is, is there such a “national state”? Should we call it “America” or “the United States,” or neither? I’m going to use “America” and “American” here for the sake of convenience. But simply deploying a name is not enough : you have to prove the name corresponds to something in nature. Presently we Americans are enduring a time of extraordinary divisions, partisan disputations, multiple balkanizations, political and economic stress, upheavals and dislocations, war and terrorism, (man-made) ecological threats, poverty, uncertainty, change and anxiety; is it possible even to speak of a single American nation and culture anymore?

I’m not going to try to answer that question directly. My interest here is in the character of poetry, especially American poetry, now – another vast and diffuse and elusive phenomenon; it seems the only proper way to begin talking about that subject is to try to describe the limits of one’s own perspective and method of approach. My method and perspective in this essay are going to be deliberately eccentric. I’m going to look at our subject through the lens of a single critical concept, which was articulated just 100 years ago by a Russian poet in St. Petersburg, a founding member of the fleeting Russian literary movement called “Acmeism” – Nikolai Gumilev. The concept or hermeneutic tool was something he called “chasteness.” Gumilev identified chasteness with a general sense of the integrity of individual, actual things in the world. The concept has religious, Biblical roots (the earth and universe are a creation, which God “saw was good” : the divine is present through God’s “incarnation”), but it is primarily (in Gumilev’s hands) a philosophical idea, with cultural and artistic consequences. Chasteness is akin to Joyce’s aesthetic of the “epiphany” : the artist’s sense to recognize, and to express, the brilliant, distinct particularity of individual things – their quiddity.

The philosophical roots of Gumilev’s notion are clearly planted in Aristotle. Aristotle’s intellectual modesty – that is, the essential humility of the scientific investigator, empirical, inductive – allowed for the substantiality of distinct things, for the “concrete universals” of poetic representation. In Aristotle’s Poetics, the integral wholeness of dramatic plot (beginning, middle, end) undergirds the unique architectonic of each work of poetic art, which in turn mirrors the chaste and distinct integrity of the matter which it represents.

It is indeed the architectonic dimension of Gumilev’s Aristotelian approach which seems particularly interesting and potentially fruitful. Like an Escher drawing, or a series of mutually-supporting vaults, this notion of chaste integrity bridges the distance between the distinct integrity of the poem, and the normative qualities of human experience, the ethos, which it expresses, guards and celebrates. It is an exercise in equilibrium. And there was (and is) a democratic or egalitarian aspect to this projected ethos, since, as Gumilev put it, chasteness represents the inherent dignity of each person and thing, as it is : that is, its right to be itself. (As Mandelstam wittily put it, Acmeism celebrated the “beautiful Law of Identity : A = A.”)

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So then – how do we apply this imported Russian aesthetic concept to contemporary American conditions? As noted above, we inhabit a time of particular storm and stress, of ideological polemic and conflict, of multiple challenges to any claim to authority or consensus. But the Gumilevian/Aristotelian idea of chasteness/integrity, when used as a lens, brings surprising things to light. First of all, it can possibly justify our concern for a specifically American poetry, in that, by the law of “epiphany” and chaste integrity, every culture has a unique history – a particular set of circumstances, characteristics, traditions, choices, events, which go into defining its quiddity. To base one’s approach on such a quasi-scientific, disinterested method is to push back against both ends of the current spectrum of polemics : that is, one the one hand, against neo-classical formalists and traditionalists, who center the norms of poetry in English, and the richness of culture per se, in the great works of past times and places; and on the other hand, against the anti-historical and anti-traditional relativism of the postmodern “permanent revolutionaries.” Our poetry, in such “chaste” light, will be seen as inevitably the expression of a distinct culture and nation (which will also, of course, inevitably include its own set of borrowings, hybridities, endurances, etc.).

Such might be viewed as a statement of the obvious; but then, lost in our byzantine labyrinth of literary jargon, polemics, and the Emperor’s ever-new clothes, sometimes the obvious becomes the necessary. Moreover, Gumilev’s concept rhymes to a striking degree with something very characteristic of American poetry : the sharp-eyed, down-to-earth affection for, and attention to, things-in-themselves. Robert Frost rendered this strain (out of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson) memorably and perhaps best : “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” In his introductory essay to the very popular (and still in print!) mid-20th century anthology, the Mentor Book of Major American Poets(1), Edwin Honig focused on the fond attention to particulars – the confluence of humble, everyday reality and poetic metaphor, in imagery – as the defining characteristic of American poetry (beginning with the Puritan poet Edward Taylor, and growing stronger from there). Imagistic realism, by itself, is an insufficient measure of American poetry (or any poetry) as a whole (in the same way that the Imagist movement of the early 20th-century had inherent limitations); however, when subsumed within the more general concept of integrity (as presented by Gumilev, Aristotle, Joyce), the architectonics of a national literature begin to become visible again (in outline or sketch) through the polemical mist.

In a recent study of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams(2), Harold Kaplan projects a similar sense of American poetry as integral and distinct, by contrasting Eliot’s and Pound’s attachment to traditional European cultural authority, with Stevens’ and Williams’ bent toward democratic humanism. Without referencing the Acmeists, Kaplan describes how Stevens’ notion of human “nobility” was part of an effort to define the social purposes of poetry in relation to more general ethical norms – that is, grounded in a similar “chaste integrity” of persons and things. (Interestingly, in an appendix, Kaplan underlines an affinity between the argument of his book, and a study by Michael Eskin, on the ethos and poetics of Emanuel Levinas, Paul Celan, and… Osip Mandelstam(3)). The integrity of both things and poems, according to Kaplan (and Levinas), is underwritten by the fundamental integrity of persons : and this ontology has consequences for theories of literature – for the status of reading, writing, language and meaning. Kaplan outlines a philosophical realism, grounded not in systemic abstraction, but in a sense of reality that begins, ends, and centers in consciousness – the reflective, affective, ethical, and expressive consciousness of the human person. Again, this affirmation of the distinct personhood of authors and readers is in harmony with what we have called the American (and Acmeist, and Joycean) affirmation of the chaste integrity of things-in-themselves – things, including art works.

Things, including poems. Rather than carry these proposals further into the realm of polemic, here I only want to suggest that such polemic might prove necessary, eventually. By this I mean that the more deliberately one defines the characteristics of an American literature, the more inevitably will disagreements follow – since we inhabit a contentious democratic culture, subject to change, growth and decline. Furthermore, as a critical perspective is articulated, its application to actual works (by both critics and poets) becomes more self-conscious and differentiated. The more it becomes possible to see the outlines of a particular poetic phenomenon, the more one begins to distinguish between the inherently aesthetic and the ideologically (or otherwise) tendentious. What I believe Gumilev’s Russian Acmeism(4) and Kaplan’s American humanism offer us are the beginnings of a “way of seeing” our own poetry – as independent art, grounded in imaginative freedom, in the substantial dignity of persons, and in the quiddity of things.

1) Mentor Book of Major American Poets, ed. by Oscar Williams and Edwin Honig (NY : Signet, 1962)
2) Kaplan, Harold. Poetry, politics, and culture : argument in the work of Eliot, Pound, Stevens and Williams (Brunswick, NJ : Transaction, 2007).
3) Eskin, Michael. Ethics and dialogue : in the works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan (NY : Oxford Univ. Press, 2001)
4) For an invaluable study of Acmeism and the poetics of Gumilev and Mandelstam, see : Justin Doherty, The Acmeist movement in Russian poetry : culture and the word (Oxford Univ. Press, 1995)

Harold Kaplan's humanism

Posted this comment to another blog today, Josh Corey's, covering the AWP conference.

"Funny, Kaplan is probably the very last scholar-critic anyone at the current AWP would ever be reading....

but I see a thin phosphorescent clamshell path leading through his work back out to poetry....

Kaplan sets the humanism of Stevens & WCW against the authoritarianism of Eliot & Pound, without denying that all 4 poets were searching for the real social value or sanction of poetry; he also sets their humanism against the dissociations, determinisms and reductions of contemporary literary & philosophical trends.... he suggests that his position on the nature of poetry & literature is akin to that of Emanuel Levinas, who has written strongly against the depersonalization & defacements of post-structuralism... it's a kind of realism in which authors are responsible for their works and establish a "triangulation" between author, reader, & the work... civilization itself is grounded on the substantiality of persons, and in literature the person, the human face, shines out... but the main thrust of Kaplan's book is a reading of the opposing attitudes of Stevens/WCW vs. Pound/Eliot, on the ethical status of human imagination & its expression in poetry.... He shows how these issues are still with us, & suggests how poetry might climb out of its current infatuations with everything that reduces, rather than builds up, the human & the personal..."

Here's the Google link to Kaplan's book...

Poetry, religion, humanism

My life may manifest a spiritual dimension. It may involve a spiritual search. I may indeed be, off & on, a sort of hermit cum rabbinical student, mulling over obscure passages of ancient texts for secret, personal or contemporary meanings. I may make a confession of faith; in fact, I believe I am a Christian of some sort.

But none of these beliefs or attitudes will alter my firm sense of poetry as something utterly secular - "non-denominational", universal, and perfectly human.

Although I'm not a philosopher, I think there's a philosophical basis for this position, which actually accords with my sense of Christianity. But that's not why I hold this position. Yes, I hold with some kind of quasi-Aristotelian sense of the quiddity, the utter distinctiveness, of individual things; I hold that this applies as well to individual persons; and my understanding of poetry is that it involves the most distinctive, characteristic, imaginative utterances of individual persons, out of their unique times & places.... but the fact that this view accords well (I think) with Christian notions of the person is not why I think of poetry this way. In other words, I don't have to justify my understanding of poetry by an appeal to my religious faith.

Poetry is an expression of primordial human character; of personhood; it is the "voice" of the essential human face. This is why I can support the position of someone like Harold Kaplan (see previous post), a committed "secular humanist" if there ever was one; there is no contradiction. What this shared position does oppose, I think, are some of the trends in art and cultural theory which, while they are "postmodern", were prefigured (as Kaplan demonstrates) in forms of modernist "culture criticism" & literary practice, produced, in different ways, by Eliot & Pound (along with many others).

My sense that poetry is, in a fundamental way, a form of free and undetermined imaginative creation, grounded in a distinct and individual human gesture and stance toward reality, does not sit well with current views that stem from post-structuralism, the New Historicism, etc. These prevailing ideologies influence contemporary poetic style & technique - witness the successive waves of experimentalism which reduces poetry to language, to text, to formulae, to chance operations, to pastiche, to de-personalization, to agit-prop, to "documentary", etc. etc. etc. Even the so-called "hybrid" poetries represent a concession to the prevailing theoretical winds.

Let me quote again from that "humanist" Osip Mandelstam (his essay "Word and Culture") :

"'There are epochs that maintain that they are not concerned with singular human beings, that human beings must be put to use, like bricks, like mortar... Assyrian prisoners swarm like chicks under the feet of a gigantic Tsar; warriors personifying the power of the state inimical to the human being shackled pigmies with long spears, and the Egyptians are dealing with the human mass as if it were building material... But there is another form of social architecture who scale and measure is... man... It doesn't use human beings as building material but builds for them... Mere mechanical grandeur and mere numbers are inimical to humankind We are tempted not by a new social pyramid, but... by the free play of weights and measures, by a human society... in which everything is... individual, and each member is unique and echoes the whole.'"

A totalitarian state is not required in order to apply reductive and determinist theories of existence and human being to the realm of aesthetics. That is exactly the era we have been living through for the last several decades.

In another place, Mandelstam wrote (quoting roughly from memory) : "in such conditions, Man must become the hardest thing in the universe : harder than diamond." In my view it is from this crystalline, ineluctable center of the human heart & mind - from the person - that poetry proceeds.

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p.s. : & sure, I can be accused of (& dismissed for) my own polemical over-simplifications & reductivity. The self is complex; poetry is social; the self is constituted in relation with others; poetry is fundamentally dialogical; etc. Yes to all that. But I did not say the work of art is simply identified with the self. The art work sustains a dialectical relation with its maker : it is a form of synthesis, of proportion - of balancing opposing forces... shaping a unitive image of resolution. "Out of the quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry," wrote Yeats (I'm paraphrasing from memory).

Harold Kaplan, Michael Eskin : poetry & humanism

Have been reading terrific book by Harold Kaplan, Poetry, politics and culture : argument in the work of Eliot, Pound, Stevens and Williams (Transaction, 2006). Despite the horrendous proofreading of this text (full of typos), I couldn't put it down.

When you think everything (& too much more) has been said about the "great Moderns", along comes a prof. emeritus (born in 1916) with a new reading. Kaplan creates a context for the differing worldviews, personalities, aims & styles of these four, and in the process re-establishes the threads connecting poetry with culture at large. The seriousness with which these poets themselves understood poetry as the expression of a culture's sensibility & self-consciousness - its inner "rage for order" - also reverberated in their differing political worldviews. Kaplan contrasts Stevens & Williams, as poets who allied the imagination with the American project of "democratic humanism", with Eliot & Pound, whose sense of 20th-cent. world crisis led them in authoritarian directions.

This in itself is obviously nothing new : but on the basis of this fundamental difference Kaplan provides a wonderful discernment & insight into the poets & their poetry in detail.

I think there is something valuable in the synthetic perspective offered by Kaplan, as in that of another scholar Kaplan points toward (in an appendix), & with whom he shares affinities : Michael Eskin (whose book on Mandelstam/Celan/Grunbein/Brodsky - Poetic Affairs - I just finished reading). There is something valid & useful in Kaplan's Stevensian emphasis on the centrality of the human imagination, in connection with Eskin's (drawing on the philosophy of E. Levinas as well as Mandelstam) focus on the inevitably dialogic, personal & human substance of poetry. I have a hunch there is some solid ground here for (re-)shaping a contemporary sense of the poet's & poetry's place in the world. Moreover, Kaplan's searchings into the status of imagination and personhood seem directly relevant to all the current polemics about experiment & style, making & speaking, artifice & authenticity, & what (if anything) distinguishes poetry from other arts & activities...

Wrote a poem a few years ago when I was thinking about this basic contrast (say, Eliot/Stevens). Called "Fragment from Purgatory" (published in Dove Street)