As I've always said, out loud, and I think Prof. Hinkel will agree with me, there's something essentially utopian/Platonic/gnostic about the general notion of Language Poetry. I am referefering to the "general notion", not individual language poets (individuals don't exist in language poetry theory, anyhow).

It's a product of an intellectual function, a procedure. Excise that pesky "speech" of "idealized Subjects" (people) and you will liberate "writing" to reflect a liberated consciousness in an un-liberated society.

The trouble is, that repressed self, that ego, that person, always returns (often in the form of individual Poets, those conceited Jabs of Gab). Je est un Auteur, ("I is an Author", quoting Rimbaudelaise) : inescapable.

I is in favor of Bruegelian Personism. ("I" said that. Hinkel too.)

Prof. Hinkel, in his latter days at Mt. Holyoke, when he was oft o'erthrown by the sherry bottle, was wont to say:

"Literature, my dears, is an eternal dreary chess game between Talent and Prestige. Both go down to defeat : the only winner (or perhaps loser, I should say) is the Chaste & Virgin Reader."

Prof. Hinkel's middle name is, oddly enough, Vladimirovich.

The philosophical "paint-myself-into-a-corner" problem shows up in chess games all the time. The critic-polemicist enters the game as White Knight. Of course the ultimate checkmate is to tip over the board itself : but this is another form of one-upmanship. . . Ultimate Pacheesi. Prof. Hinkel, by by the way way, has written extensively (extenenenenensively. . .) about the cheese/chess oscillation conundrum. See his article in Amazing A-Mazes, "Cheddar Man in Petersburg : Prehistoric White Night?"

The player, too, is captive of caprice
(the sentence is Omar's) on another ground
crisscrossed with black nights and white days.

 
God moves the player, he, in turn, the piece.
But what god beyond God begins the round
of dust and time and dream and agonies?

                                      
                                        - JL Borges, "Chess"

Jonathan's cute comment is a mild & funny version of something I descibed yesterday as "malice constitutes the game of oppositions":

This got me thinking again about an idea I had several weeks ago: avant-garde eye for the mainstream poet: A team of four or five post-avant bloggers descend on the hapless straight man and start telling him to lose the blurb from Robert Pinsky, straighten out his similes. I think this could work. Any volunteers?

I've been talking about this phenomenon since the beginning of HGpoetics & long before; actually it's been my way of participating in the literary malice game.

"Oppositional poetics", built on a structural us/them division, is, in essence, a way of short-circuiting thought, a way of not talking about poetry, a way of avoiding substantial literary opportunities or challenges, a way of deleting reference to outsider audiences (outside the coterie) or general/anonymous audiences, a way of dumbing-down/negating literary history, a way of. . .

It's been the modus operandi of language-&-related school ("post-avant") polemics for years now. (It goes back before that to the hoopla around the New Americans, the debates about Paleface/Redskin, raw/cooked poetry; it goes back before that to the polemics of Moderns vs. Victorians, traditionalists vs. experimentalists, WC Williams vs. Eliot, & before that to Americans vs. British. . .) & I've been badmouthing it for years. It's been fun. Prof. Hinkel has even written a book about it : it's called The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey into the Labyrinth of Mirrors Known As "The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey Into the Labyrinth of Mirrors Known As The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey. . ."

Why Josh & Jonathan are perturbed about Language Poetry I cannot fathom. Prof. Hinkel cleared all that up in his lecture yesterday.

Language Poetry conforms to the trope known as hypneropophatela (no relation to mortadella, which is pretty good with provolone), ie. "the use of a word as if it were a word", for ex. if I say "Give me that brick" in a language poem, this means precisely "Give me that brick" in a context wherein "bricks", "me", and "give" refer strictly to each other in equilateral congruence, ie. brick = me, me = give, and give = brick. Linguists believe this usage developed among children playing "rock scissors paper", a competitive form of an more "primitive" game called "mud puppy dwink".

Hello again, people of the world. I greet you from the mountaintop off-centered in the vale which is Providence, former armpit of New England, now fragrantly deodorized.

My lecture this morning centers on Language. Language, the thing, the poetry Movement, the something something.

In recent decades "Language" has been re-conceptualized for us by a looseleaf-bound collective of poet-thinkers, who around the mid-70s discovered the comic potential of tautology and self-reflexivity, if you "know" you know what I "mean" mean. How do we know we know? Since in "knowing" ourselves we enact a fission of subjectivity, producing a knower/known dichotomy where once was a single "identity" (I put "identity" in quotes in case someone tries to hit me)?

Let me ask again, "?"

Ron Duluth foresaw the cul-de-sac of "language" about "language" several years before language poetry came to the fore (perhaps intuiting the epistemological conundra by way of his own name, often implicated in a radically unstable way with the third largest city in Minnesota, at the apex (or nadir, if you will) of the largest freshwater body of water in the world, Lake Superior. Duluth, twinned with the town of Superior, Wisconsin, has as a result been "subjected" to an inferior "position" (since Superior, Wisconsin will always be "superior"), and Ron Duluth, unavoidably linked with his namesake city, Duluth (the dual "u"s in Duluth undulating with reinforced abjectivity), is himself consequently abjectified within a form of urban "inferiority complex", resulting in an emotional shading of surface phenomena denying meaning to itself, in itself (& for itself, obviously).

Thus in this sociological complex we recognize by analogy a structure of hierarchical power relations, whereby "poetry" - already abjectified as "inferior" to utilitarian prose (which does things with itself) - when identified with Language-As-Language, reverses these power relations by instaurating them in formal actualization. In doing so, however, "language poetry" attaches to itself a permanent Achilles heel, a wound or scar, the mark of Cain or ritual victimization, just as "Duluth" (Ron, I mean) by the very fact of identity of name-and-(inferior)-city, is immoveably positioned in his victim status (as inferior to Superior, Wisconsin). Thus we see how the tautology of self-reflexivity has come full circle : the abjectivity of poetry, having been granted a "name" ("Language"), is now confirmed in a kind of official academic-ceremonial status-granting ceremony (indicated by my lecture, which you are "reading" at this moment (I think so, anyway, unless you're slurping some coffee all over your keyboard instead)).

This week's assignment : re-read the Collected Completely Long Poems of Ron Duluth, and "write" an essay based on your "responses" to his "work". Due Friday; no excuses.

- Professor Hinkel