Article in Coldfront Magazine

(This is my second blog post about this.  I deleted the first one, which was certainly impassioned, but a little over the top.)

Coldfront magazine published an article of mine a few days ago, about the New Gnostics group of poets, here.  Ed Foster, an old acquaintance from Hoboken Russian-American poetry conference days (late 90s), edits Talisman magazine and recently ran a special section featuring the writings of the NGs.

I guess there are strengths and weaknesses in shaping an essay which foregrounds a history of rivalry between (mostly male) poetry collectives or schools.  This is what I do, framing the spiel on a contrast between the NG's and the Language Poets.  As it happens, I am currently reading a lot of psychoanalytic writings about the Bible & other literature.  History in general seems to be made up in large part of violent struggles based on (mostly male) Oedipal & pre-Oedipal fantasies - mythical stories -  about objects of desire (Mom, women, slaves...), and domination of rivals for same.  Very primitive, very adolescent, very subconscious...

So I can see why poets - especially female poets - might sigh with boredom & despair... deja vu all over again...

It's got me thinking, vaguely, though, about the region of poetry & the imagination... the middle region, the realm that Wallace Stevens liked to call "sense"... which art & poetry inhabit.  Where the intellect & the reason are fused with feelings, emotions... the "affective" responses to experience.  Poetry limns this region & helps us grasp where we are... the sense of words in poetry is multivalent.

Moreover, this brings in the whole question of the relation between the human imagination - the "vision thing" (as the 1st Pres. Bush so demotically put it) - and our knowledge of reality, our worldview.  There is no denying that poetry down the ages has been a platform for synthesizing and ordering a culture's "sense" of the world it inhabits.  And because this is true, it seems that there will inevitably be clashes of worldviews, battles over the orientations of basic belief.  Believe it or not, the stakes are high in this regard.  They are high, even if we wish they weren't - because part of us wants poetry to be a day of rest, a playful Sabbath-day, from ideology and fact.  We want the poet to express an idiosyncratic liberation from all fixed ideas and cultural shibboleths.  We want the poem to be free (& fun).

As my article sketches out, there are these incidents of forking paths : disagreements over how poets employ language, how they ring variations on past poetry.  I think, speaking as generally & basically as I can, that the story of the "contretemps" between Barrett Watten and Robert Duncan, and between Ed Foster & Charles Bernstein - this "event" - may have been motivated primarily by two different attitudes toward the "language of poetry".

(An aside : it would be interesting to reconsider the role of Louis Zukofsky in this regard.  He was apparently the occasion of the original disagreement between Watten & Duncan : & his work can be seem as greatly overlapping & over-shadowing both "schools".)

Simply put : for the Language Poets, the "word" is a Saussurian system of binary signals.  Words are bundles of potential meaning-signals.  if we "turn off" the meaning-function, we detach ourselves from hegemonic, oppressive ideologies & political structures; we create a new anarchic space of purely textual freedom.

For the New Gnostics, on the other hand, words retain their more traditional aura or ambience.  They can never be merely counters or linguistic codes, because words themselves are dwelling-places of affective memory and cultural-historical meaning.  In other words, there is the assumption of some over-arching, if implicit, meaning-architecture - which is not to be "switched off", but rather "turned on", intensified.

The encounter between Watten & Duncan seems emblematic in many ways.  I see it as a sort of a clash of two worlds : Duncan's mythic-archaic-shamanistic-magic-Romantic realm of the traditional Imagination, as opposed to Watten's modern, post-modern, disenchanted, ironic, intellectual Rationality.

My current readings in psychology and psycho-history underline for me how King Oedipus still reigns over the world of human imagination.  We live out myths without knowing it, sleepwalking down familiar paths marked out by the natural rhythm of pre-conscious fears & desires.  Art still has to discover its own lanterns, its own ways through this human labyrinth, toward some kind of liberation.  Both the Langpos & the New Gnosts were, & are yet, engaged in such searching & making.

Pound, Eliot - two great toy-grabbers ("fighting in the captain's tower" - over their toys). & thus between them establishing the tone of Professional Seriousness in modern poetry... Stevens, Crane at the other end of the toy-grabbing scale - different characters - the one too disinterested, the other too bohemian (which comes to the same thing, just about). WC Williams maybe around the midpoint on this toy-grab scale...

The grabbing-of-the-toys, of course, is the betrayal of art, the self-betrayal of the artist - since (according to Schopenhauer, Simone Weil, et al.) art is the release from, the suspension of, acquisitive desire... Yet this betrayal is forgiveable, due to art's doubleness : both desirable object & the (contemplative) quenching of desire...

Magazines, anthologies being essentially toy collections... Pound & Harriet Monroe (according to Peter O'Leary's recent article) instigated the diffident Zukofsky to grab for the toys (by way of branding them : mine, ours)... thus we have "Objectivism" : which is an aesthetics of the poem as perfect toy ("object", "rested totality", etc.)... & so the Langpos & the Conceptuals, in turn, learned from this model how to brand & grab...

I reflected on these things a little bit in an old poem called "My Byzantium" (in Way Stations). Here's an excerpt :

2

 
I wanted the toy bird,
I wanted to be the bird,
I wanted to sing like him,
I wanted to turn my back and
return to the womb -

 
the apple of her eye,
the only one, the pure one.
And after the long siren wail
and the freeway lotus
comes nostalgia's
D.O.A.

 
In the beginning
I wanted Jamie Freeman's agate,
the one he found in the dirt, glinting
like the color of light in earth caverns, threaded
with spirals, like a map.  Envy
burned - until I conceived
a ruse: he could play with my fire
truck in exchange.  I relished
his innocence, I gloated over my prize,
I despised myself.

 
He could never pronounce his "Ys" - yellow
was "lello".  We laughed.  We called him
mudpie - he was a molder of clay,
always caked in black dirt.

Berryman hit the nail (about poetry, & Henry) : His Toy, His Dream, His Rest.

The language poets and affiliates thought they could jettison the myth of the lyric self & romantic subjectivity & so on by objectifying "language" as a "material" phenomenon. In doing so they had to narrow down the theory of poetry, exclude all those epiphenomena we ascribe to accurate description, definition, feeling, evocation, symbolism, plot, meaning, etc., and just leave poetry a sort of stripped-down protest against the supposed domination of the signified. Some of the langpos aimed for pure versions of this procedure; their postmodern affiliates used those methods to "torque" (their term) their "language" in eye-catching contemporary fashion.

In my view the "language poetry" concept should be clearly rejected, as a cramping limitation on what poetry actually is and can be. I've tried to do just this, over the years... The essays over here around the Chicago Critics try to present a broader concept, which is formalist in a quasi-Aristotelian sense : the poem is an achieved intellectual-affective form, which is not restricted to its verbal texture - because texture is not the sum or limit of what poetic language does. Instead, language is a transitive element - a form of transportation - which may lead to both referential meanings and to aesthetic (intransitive) equilibrium.

Moreover, poetry is ineluctably personal. (I would go so far as to say that reality itself is ineluctably personal, but that's a somewhat different debate.) We will never return to those archaic times when art was the anonymous social expression of collective myth. But art is not only personal : rather it represents a synthesis of subjective and objective, personal and social. The modes, forms & genres of poetry are past signs (& not always relevant to the present) of the complex struggle to discover or create such syntheses.

The locus of interest in poetry is that very tightrope between these poles : it is precisely this wavering dialectic which opens the line of connection between poet and reader.

I suppose I'm behind the times, being anachronistic, by harping on the langpos and the postmods at this late date. Younger poets have "moved beyond" that bygone era of language poetry's flourishing. But how have they moved beyond? In the direction of new dialects or mannerisms, new sub-schools and urban collectives, new identity-affiliations? I'm suggesting they could move in the direction of a more capacious theoretical understanding of the art's possibilities.

Of course, theory generally (as John Latta's recent quotes from Larkin & O'Hara testify) can be considered inimical to poets and what they do. It is usually irrelevant to the working-out of a poet's life and gift. All I would suggest is that a theory which emphasizes personality, feeling, concreteness, accurate description, formal integrity, and at least the possibility of substantial, verifiable meaning - such a theory would be congruent with the actual practice of those two poets, and perhaps future poets too.