I agree with everything Ange Mlinko says here.

ON THE OTHER HAND,

I think poets DEMAND to have it both ways.

In other words, poets & poetry oscillate between self-expression and objectivity, between the expression of personal emotion and the framing (perspective) of distances and evaluations.

The polemical among us (in the great tradition of Pound & Eliot) insist on one or the other: ie. the "extinction of personality", precision, the objectively perfect, the image, etc... or (in the Harold Bloomian neo-Romantic polemic) everything that is the other case.

Thus polemic proves itself unclean.

I have a lot of trouble telling the difference between Professionals & Careerists in this picture. Most of the hype is generated by professional careerists, whether they have MFA-type academic jobs or not.

Both need very much to get published, because they've been writing very hard for many years. Best of luck to them, I say. A lovely tree awaits your sees n' saws.

What this tells you about the quality of their poetry is not much, one way or the other.

Kind of similar situation with the SoQ/Post-Avant descriptor. Basically, it gives acquisitive collectors a handy cubbyhole for their collections, and loud trumpeteers a special key to punch on their polemic-horns.

Josh Corey's Selah crossed my desk for the first time today; I was very impressed. Josh shows a tremendous amount of verbal gusto, allied with great stylistic acumen. The poems were much more original than his blog postings, which I find thoughtful, but often somewhat ingratiating/bien pensant - rhetorically impressive, you might say.

Today's post, covering literature/history/politics, is no exception. The somewhat ponderous self-righteousness of the left intellectuals, who feel they must recreate the wheel at every opportunity (justice, and the state, and violence, and so on).

I would encourage all bien-pensant anarchists to take a closer look at the radicalism of republican-democratic government (as attempted, albeit imperfectly - we live in an imperfect world, for the time being - here in the USA). What is democracy but the people taking responsibility for the state? What is democracy but the people establishing civil society as the measure of government? Anarchism would do away with the state entirely - how silly! Democracy takes responsibility for the state, without granting it "hegemony".

Inevitably, I can hear the wailing chorus, reciting the American government's serial betrayals of its own creed, its own careful & constitutional fragmentations of tyranny. The chorus from the left AND the right.

Take a look again at Auden's musings on Plato & the poets - their differing emotional chemistry. The poets are not Platonic-utopian, because, oddly enough, they are realists (immersed in the experiential & emotional particularity of the real).

Remember Stevens' lines about "the imperfect is our Paradise" (have I got it right?) - in flawed sounds & stubborn words, etc. -

Political dogmatism (gift of the 80s-90s) destroys the feeling for the future, the hope we carry along through the daily multifarious struggles - in the midst of human frailty - to make justice happen.

Josh talks about power. The American system is an inspired dispersal of power. It bears witness (on its good days) to the one thing that leavens power with grace : humility. What is the sign of humility in this world? Service, not power. "The greatest among you shall be your servant." That's the Jewish heritage for you : a recognition of the paradoxical (& hidden, & unworldly, & righteous, & pure) glory of freely-offered, unrewarded slavery to others. Love-in-action. Natural Law. Human (really human - childish, adoring) nature. "You must become as little children, if you would enter..."

... am I just being divisive again, setting up my own teams system, like that other guy? Not necessarily. I may indeed differentiate between critical approaches - but I don't claim one is better than the other (though I may prefer one over another); and a new critical approach might find previously-unremarked values in poems from various, different "camps" - not just promote its own school.

...thus, note carefully what Crane is saying here : the ultimate criterion of poetic value is its lastingness, the perennial quality of its beauty and interest.

If true, this should make us revise our notions of literary tradition and development. Not to say that there are not productive advances in literary forms, or that the canon is a fixed collection of past classics. (As Crane points out, Aristotle might have found King Lear a more complex & interesting example of tragic poetry than Oedipus.)

It is to say, however, that beauty is the criterion, which subsumes both pleasure & instruction. The criterion is not merely formal or aesthetic in an exclusionary sense - it's probable that ethical, moral & political values will inform our notion of the beautiful. But poetry also has its own scale of inherent expressive values - originality, elegance, rightness, clarity, eloquence, etc. - which make up the beauty of the work as a whole.

If beauty is the criterion, the critic will have to shun polemics and special pleading of every kind. Claims of novelty, "experiment", marginality, "progressiveness", political relevance, etc., are all partial claims, which - if not related to the final cause and the ultimate criterion (lasting beauty) - actually fall outside the realm of critical judgement.

With these things in mind, maybe readers can begin to distinguish for themselves between general "poetry business" (promotional activities of the entrepreneurial or socio-political kinds), and genuine criticism.

...read this review this morning. Here again is that mainstream/alternative divide, except in Britain. I like the layers of complexity the writer (David Kennedy) brings out. A review should note the provenance of the book under review, however. Not to do so seems to underline the ingrown nature of the poetry toenail.

This "binary", this divide, this line in the lime... if you started with an economic analysis of the poetry world (which Kennedy touches on), and then observed the different ways various poets, critics & reviewers manipulate that economic situation (ideologically, professionally), you'd probably come up with something resembling a pale replica or minor offshoot of the political left/right divide in general (1. capitalists, 2. workers, 3. intellectuals = 1. professional published poets, 2. unpaid "marginal/progressive" poets, 3. "critics").

Kennedy remarks on the complacency trap which both sides of the divide tend to drop into. I suppose Bourdieu & American Poetry Wax Museum have probably covered this stuff with more discourse than I could ever assimilate. The professional rewards are real (academic jobs, grants, awards, royalties, fame), on the one hand, and yet the constraints (ethical, practical, aesthetic) on poetry careerism are equally real, and this contradictory situation creates all kinds of weird phenomena in the realm of poetry's critical reception (blurbism as criticism; tactical ideology as criticism; buddy networking; etc.).

Pushkin thought poets should be treated as independent literary professionals, whose "market" is the general public - reviewers, bestowers of honorary positions, and interest claques be damned. It's a nice idea, sort of like western civilization.

"Ain't it a little late in the day," you ask, "to bother with criticizing the "'New' Critics?"

First of all, you shouldn't use "ain't" unless you need a rhyme for plaint. Secondly, this here Chicago School, it seems to me, clears the ground, enlightens the region, establishes some first principles, or reminds one of existing principles for which you don't need to re-invent the refrigerator magnet.

Relevant it is indeed to such contemporary issues in this wee corner of Blogistan such as:
1. how the heck can I ever read all them poetry books?
2. how can I get around that current can of ards which asserts that poets today ain't got no theory?
3. how can I get beyond this plague of simplistic labels, pigeonholes, clubs & sandwiches?
4. what is a literary critical method anyway?
5. can I be a critic too?
6. what is the relation between poetry & reading public? is it really a closed system or "guild"?

What RS Crane, for one, emphasizes, is that both Aristotle & Coleridge established grounds for evaluation on several bases, & in so doing, allowed for a criticism which resists reduction to some totalizing analogy or reductive principle (ie. Empson : poetry = linguistic ambiguity; New Formalists : poetry = traditional metrics; Language School : poetry = denatured diction). So there's a lot of poetry out there. Say you find something that grabs you, and you want to read it with certain practical purposes in mind, like mapping its territory or explicating its virtues. With some of the knowledge provided by the Chicago critics, you can begin to develop your own means & methods of evaluation & appreciation - on a vastly different, & independent, philosophic &/or aesthetic basis.

Getting back to Jonathan's "decorum", just some square-hole-in-a-round-peg thoughts...

thinking of an intellectual economy of various decorii. Imagining an imaginary literary culture, obsessed with codes, styles, formats, fashions, pecking orders, which nevertheless fails to meet a foundational or primordial fitness test, having forgotten the first principles of the decorum of its particular calling.

Poets set the benchmarks or patterns, by means of which they attune all the little elements of fitness to their sense of fitness as a whole : how a poet fittingly behaves on this straw-strewn threshing-floor.

Who in modern US poetry applied him or herself to Dante's fitness test? In relation to the poet's response to the challenges of the present?

Pound had the grandiose ambition & the social indignation. But observe the contrast between these two paradigmatic exiles.

I have the feeling that contemporary poetry fails a fitness test, in two or three basic directions, at least:

1. failure to acknowledge the difficult technical challenges to good writing in general.

2. failure to recognize the serious themes of great poetry : magnanimity, justice, vision (Dantean terms).

3. assumption that poetry is a means and not an end : a means to social conformity & worldly success.

4. assumption that poetry is a means and not an end : a means toward expressing sour, narrow-minded resentments, rather than exploring paths toward the amelioration of conflict & suffering.

I feel stuck between the sub-cultures of #3 and #4. The former exemplified in the MFA industry, magazine verse, the various cliques of youth-Kult "party poetry", etc.; the latter exemplified, just to use a small current example, in Dale Smith's implying a similarity between contemporary US & Nazi Germany (here). I know this wasn't the main thrust of Dale's point : but it's the typical coin of the realm among the cult of poesie du ressentiment.

Un Coup de Des Jamais N'Abolira le Hasard


Antithetical memes of the blogosphere strike again. Oftentimes when I ponderifurcate laboriously on the roots of my praxismo literario, if then I gallumph over to here, there is somebody, somebody goin' in the opposite dierection.

Just a coupla russian Gorby dolls - dolls-within-dolls, that is. Or two bowling pins, bobbling on their bases, simultaneous-like.

RS sez it helps to know what you're dealin' with - like applied mechanics (linguistics). I have no problem with this, except that, as RS Crane teacheth (Language of Criticism & Structure of Poetry), we work within different frameworks.

RS lays out a genetics of langpo going back by way of Russian Formalism & Russian Futurism to a new & true-blue re-do of Modernism (Habermas). Poetic language (& all language) is a kind of 6-sided die, turning & revolving one side or another (addressor/addressee, signifier/signified, contact/code).

So inside the Russian doll of understanding poetry via linguistics sits the littler doll of understanding langpo via formalism/futurism/modernism.

Language is a throw of the dice, or a twist of the facets, based on the game plan of the neo-Modern avantistadora. The duality here is between the renovating motive of the modernist, and the functional matrix of the neutral langue-parole. The primary divide, the locus of artistic action-praxis, is between a revocable past and the avanti!-future.

Here I interpose my difference.

It's an odd path I traveled to election day. I don't believe in military solutions to human problems. I don't believe in one nation imposing its will by force on others. I think there is a disconnect, as well as a relation, between American wealth and power, on the one hand, and the world's poverty & social oppression, on the other, which no amount of imposed political ideals, in themselves, can ever ameliorate. Only social justice and an effort to address grievances and basic economic problems can do that. I believe there is a fundamental contradiction in the notion that a few nations, armed to the teeth, can police the other nations, with respect to weapons of mass destruction : only further & universal disarmament will bring real security in that regard.

All that having been said, however... I hold another set of views, perhaps contradicting myself in the process. I think there is a global terrorist network & movement, dedicated to a mix of tyrannical politics and Islamic-fundamentalist expansionism ("the Caliphate"). I think for about the last half century, the Middle-Eastern Arab nations have chosen the path of authoritarianism and violence; and while the colonial powers of the West bear much responsibility for this outcome, the primary responsibility lies with the choices of the Arab governments themselves. I think that the events of 9/11 left the US government no choice but to deal with the problem of global mass terror in a systematic way, and I think the Bush policy of confronting state sponsors of terror, as well as the terrorist networks themselves, made sense. I think the nature & practices of the Saddam Hussein regime fit the category of state sponsors of terror. I think Saddam brought his downfall down on his own head, when he thought he could respond to US demands with belligerence and stalling. I think Iraq and the Middle East will be better off with the Saddam mafia out of power, and an elected government. I think the response of the anti-Bush peace movement and the European governments was blinkered by a kind of self-righteous and naive attitude of appeasement, in an untenable and unjust situation, in which Saddam manipulated the sanctions system to benefit himself & punish his own people.

Much of my progress to this position came about as a kind of dialectical protest against the attitudes and propaganda of the politicized "poet-networks".

I don't want to upset anybody, or stoke the fires. Will be glad to return to philology, soon. I learned at the start of the Iraq war that, by jiminy, not all poets think alike.

I've been using Ron Silliman's blog as a scratchpost since the inception of this here blog. I guess it reveals my own limitations more than anything else. My shallow/tunnel-vision perspective on both Blog- & Poetry-World. It's all Silliman's fault(! - just kiddin'!) because he sets himself up as genial Yertle, master of all he surveys, and because that brings out a rivalrous argumentative attitude. He's a foil for my own ostentatious litter-hysterical narrative.

Also, I read him as one of the spokespeople for the literature industry In Our Time. But he's only one, & I shouldn't pick on him alone so much.

HG Poetics stands (in Grand Fenwick) on the following bedrock principle: Literature is Not an Industry. Don't ask me to explain this. OK, I will explain. Poetry (aka Fenwickana arcana) is the escape from everything that is not-literature (including industry, business, publishing, success, failure, getting-along, making a living, eating, sleeping, networking, and so on).

Industry is Sleep.

Anna Akhmatova was more intelligent & informed than either of these Americans.

Gee-Whee & Bon-Bon were down at the Boathouse this morning, where Gee-Whee was trying to untangle some fishing line that had gotten snarled around his little dog Guppy's ankle, & Bon-Bon was taking notes on the bat colony under the roof (hoping that the geometrical arrangement of sleeping bats might help him organize his catalogue system for reading the 1700 types of poetry he had identified on his sagging bookshelf). As they worked at their respective chores, they had a little chat about Henry's latest "post" on his "blog", which was getting a lot of attention around the world (the world of Grand Fenwick, that is).

BB: These bats seem to form some sort of nonlinear dynamic pattern... a pattern which I can't see from here.

GW: & I can't get this darn knot untied, either.

BB: Did you read Henry's blog this morning? He doesn't sound like his old art for art's sake effete self. He's contradicting himself. He's saying literature is a social construct, or something like that.

GW: Are you getting jealous, Bon-Bon? That he won the 2002 Litter Medal?

BB: Why should I be jealous? I won it myself in 2003! We rotate the medal, you know, Gee-Whee. This year is Baldwin's turn. Henry gets it again in 2005. Nothing to be jealous about. No, I was just surprised.

GW: You needn't be, B-B. Look more closely at what he wrote. He didn't say that literature was determined by social forces, "cultural politics". He said that "literary POLITICS", not literature per se, is determined by culture.

BB: Sounds like a mere quibble; a putative, ostensible distinction; without substance, however.

GW: Remember, Henry is a disciple of OSIP MANDELSHTAM. M. maintained a distinction between poetry and what he called "literature", or "official literature". The authoritarian nature of Soviet government brought home to him, with absolute clarity, the coercive power of cultural politics. Poetry, on the other hand, was "a stone fallen from heaven", free from determinism of any sort. M.'s "poetry" equals Henry's "literature"; M.'s "literature" equals Henry's "cultural politics".

BB: this dual-use term "literature" is awfully confusing, Gee-Whee.

GW: Literary politics, sez H., is a kind of faulty hearing, a white noise (likely caused by ear-wax), a listening which is actually a sounding-off, a yelling, a badgering. Literary politics is the aggressive self-assertion of cultural politics, dressed in the masks & get-up of art. Literary politics latches onto the free constellations of artistic imagination and integrity like a leech, like a parasitical growth.

BB: This is why, here in Grand Fenwick, we have the annual Fenwick-Failieure Medal Award for Litter. The calm annual triune circling of that honor amongst the three of us, Balwin, Henry, & Bon-Bon, serves to protect the august autonomy of Literature from any taint of venal interest.

GW: I'm so happy to hear that, Bob-Bon.

[Clumping sound along dock outside boathouse.]

Henry [peering down into boathouse]: Hey fellows - has anyone seen my copy of Rod & Reel?

The Weekly Fenwick Fenestration

Today's fenestration demonstration opens a window on What is Literature?

1. Cultural politics (how we live together) determines literary politics. Not in a linear-Marxist way, but simply because most literary efforts express the experience & viewpoints & opinions of particular social groups. Literature is not strictly defined by cultural identity, but the latter is certainly a big influence. The most valuable literature offers a critical & evaluative reflection of exactly such concrete backgrounds.

2. Literary politics, & literature itself, consists, mostly, of masks, protective coloring, camouflage, and illusion. It is cultural politics (relatively less-mediated, relatively direct personal experience) - not literary politics - which moves, challenges, frightens, inspires, motivates people. Literary politics is generally an escape from & compensation for cultural politics.

3. To speak of mainstream vs. avant-garde literature is to refer to an imaginary divide within a sphere of literary production which represents, on the whole, an extremely narrow band of prior cultural politics. To dwell on this supposed schism is to displace the pressure of real experience, of real cultural-political dilemmas and schisms.

4. The motor of the narrative sequence, the plot, of the poem Stubborn Grew - the Guide, the Hermetic psychopomp, the "Virgil" to the narrator's "Dante" - appears to be a ghostly voodoo Native/African-American possibly gay half-crazed possibly ex-con street person (Bluejay). He guides "Henry" throught the bowels & rear of the "whited sepulchre", the Atheneum, a building representing cultural "establishment" (supported, paradoxically, on the pillars of the infernal literary pride of Poe & Pound) - echoing Virgil's guidance of Dante through the anus of Satan.

Walking home from work last night, thinking of Jordan's comments on reading Raworth, did I have a minor epiphany, or just another wobble of opinion? But it did occur to me, that lambasting "langpo" for highlighting the signifier is a hopeless endeavor. Why? Because leaning on the signifier is so integral to all poetry; and, despite the wheedling mutilations of "Theory" which some "language poets" use to justify their mediocre verse, they, along with all poets, are just as wrapped up with, enamoured of, the youthful geste of the word-for-its-own-sake: the poet's most basic assertion of independence, which is to have fun with words, no matter how irrelevant & insignificant & socially-disengaged that activity may be, no matter what the consequences. So underlying their opportunist theorizing is a more basic & shared impulse toward (literary) freedom, liberation.

So that perhaps even the "highest", the most ambitious, profound, engaged, meaningful, relevant, knowing, great, etc., poetry is - at some hermetic & inaccessible level - grounded on fun - and if not, it rings tinny, ponderous, hypocritical, phony, etc.

*

Extra-nice & precise over at Hotel this morning. Still, I would say, there is a place for the "objective", for observation. All Proust's qualifiers & refinements (the inward experiential accuracy of impressionism) nevertheless require it. & without basic perception, the stylistic excesses fall just as bloatedly in the other direction.

Responding to Jonathan's riposte of today:

There's no getting away from criticism.  They criticize "the mainstream"; I criticize them for it.  It may be that Steve Evans' lists are positive - I agree they certainly show a helpful initiative & healthy interest on his part.  But my beef was directed at quote from Evans' comments over at the Hotel (yesterday).  There Evans was quoted lining up the usual ideological game-formations  (the mainstream is fortified by big bucks, etc.).

I also agree that Ron Silliman puts great effort into his response to little-known & marginalized poetries.  That's nice & impressive, I can only respect that.  But he often frames his diatribes and polemics around a "we are better than them" scaffolding.  See for ex. his post yesterday mocking "self-similarity" in mainstream poetry publishing, vs. the wonderfulness of the usual names (Zukofsky, Olson, etc.).

Today I processed 25 books from SPD that crossed my desk, for the great poetry collection over here.  All brand new, from publishers large & small across US & Canada.  They will go on the shelves.  In the long run there is little difference between a famous poet & an unknown poet : they all end up on the shelves.  & the challenge for every poet, as I was strongly reminded once again when I glanced through these 25 volumes, is to create something sustained, original, interesting, memorable. 

In such a context (I mean my context, in a library, in a library, in a library... which collects thousands & thousands of books of poetry), it seems so clear to me that the us v. them po-biz maneuvering is really a form of intellectual simplification for po-pol-biz purposes, rather than genuine criticism.

I'm not cranky, Jonathan; just slightly depressed.   I do indeed respect those who put more interest & energy into noting/reviewing/etc. individual books & poets than I do myself.  Yet I'm entitled to my beeferoni.  A line in the Jessica Stern book struck me:  "Sociologists argue that the first requirement for mobilizing a group that feels oppressed is the identification of a common enemy. 'Without the identification of an adversary, or another social actor in conflict with the group for control of certain resources or values, discontent and protest will not engender a movement,' sociologist Alberto Melucci argues."

How much are unhappy frustrated under-published under-rewarded poets being manipulated and rewarded by "literary organizers"?  How do these organizers profit from creating these us/them worldviews & literary "movements"?  They become "leaders", for one thing. . .

But this literary organizing, I argue, is deleterious to genuine criticism & reception.

 

"Those were times of fracas & uproar," spake Sir Henry, adjusting the corset of his rusted cuirasse.  He leaned against his plastene shield, marked with the scarlet Cross of St. Andrewe and 3 yellow puffballs, insignia of the Fellowship of the Golden Fleas. 

He spake at length, then, in his gruff knightly-hangover voice, of his glory days in battle against Poesie de Langage, and other reprobates and infidels.  "Twas at the dusk of the last millennium, during the reign of King Bill, in the Ville de Buffaloe" quoth he; "many were the scuffles and duels, then; oft'times single-handed, 'gainst all comers, belike.  Methought then, and methinketh now yet, that one signal cardinal sin bore down, with plumbous bars, that dur Langpo :  twas their feigned or attempted extinction of Personality.  For personality, my young lads & damsels, may be likened unto this checker'd insignia, inscribed upon my battered, trusty old shield.  Tis emblematic of one's very Soul:  like that fransiscan brother's - his name escapeth me - Walt, was it? - his grassy handkerchief, designedly drop't by his own winsome Lord.  Or as that other brother - Nicholas, of Cusa fame - quoth:  "All things Giulianize in you, Guliano" - every word of every poem, no less so."

poleRon's complex counter-polemic (in post of today, 6.11) to the New Formalist polemics of Steele & Schreiber, attacks the latter's oversimplifications of literary history and 20th-century practice. However, the elaborate model of prosody Ron builds & defends here (via Zukofsky et al.), combining language/music/speech/writing, etc. in different permutations, serves to obscure one basic point made by Schreiber:

"Phrasing in music works in relation to the beat, not as a substitute for it."

This is a legitimate criticism - offered perhaps most strongly (& originally) by Robert Frost - to the Poundian nostrum of "composition by musical phrase". The correlation of meter & phrase, or speech pattern, is not simply part of the toolbox of optional traditionalist techniques. It is a basic aspect of poetry, and as such, serves as a kind of grounding for creative experiments of all kinds. To deny or minimize this both rules out vast fields of poetic enterprise, past and future, and distorts the evidence of 20th-cent. literary history.

The synthesis of rhythm and phrasing is one element of the overall harmonics to which composition aspires. It can be found in some of the most memorable passages of Pound & Eliot (Annie Finch's "ghost of meter", for example in the contrast of pentameter lines with trochaic beat of parts of the Cantos, or the hidden metrical forms planted in Four Quartets). The same synthesis was worked out more thoroughly and paradigmatically, if not always successfully, by Hart Crane. Crane again and again trumps these distinctions between free & metrical verse, between modernist innovation and traditional forms. Wallace Stevens, too, in his own less emphatic way, melded pentameter & free verse.

Setting up the New Formalist agitators as straw men with which to thump Quietude & plump Post-Avant is itself a polemic which tends to box, pigeonhole & truncate contemporary understanding of technical possibility.

[p.s. ...& then, moreover, what would Yeats say?]

Extra busy at the Rock these days.

Reading the poem examples over at John Latta's Hotel (evidence for non-binary unpigeonholeability), thinking

there should be a poetics - a theory of poetry in the Wallace Stevens sense - capable of interpeting recent & contemporary literary history - under the aegis of a concept of poetry per se -

which transcends the politico-polemics of the subcultures -

both the modest/minor security of academic conservatism (finicky re-workings of traditional forms for mandarins in the wilderness)

and the bowdlerizing, vulgar blare of all these callow oppositionalists -

said poetics would go beyond particular notions, such as my remarks here recently about "dialogic" resurrection of past poetries - this is only part of the story - & would "explain" the relations between a beautiful, well-wrought, careful style, the sense of an addressee or audience, and the conceptual/aesthetic transformations made possible in the process of reception - based perhaps on an underlying notion of the synthesis of speech, language and beauty -

a more rigorous general poetics might create a context for closer attention to what a particular poet is trying to do - a frame for criticism rather than promotionals -