The Reading Experience

Tangibility of the Word, Part II

Continued from a previous post.

In a way Silliman makes the task of reading a poem like "Blue" easier by framing it as a narrative, although obliquely so:

The Marchioness went out at five o'clock. The sky was blue yet tinged with pink over the white spires which broke up the east horizon. The smell of the afternoon's brief shower was still evident and small pools of clear water collected in the tilt of the gutters, leaves and tiny curling scraps of paper drifting in the miniature tides which nonetheless caught and reflected the swollen sun, giving the boulevard its jeweled expression.

The first line is an allusion to Paul Valery's asservation that he could never write novels because he would be compelled to write sentences like this one. The rest of the paragraph humorously completes the first paragraph of Valery's unwritten novel, while also establishing "Blue" as a narrative of sorts without explicitly identifying it as a first-person narrative related by the speaker. In effect, this first paragraph invites us to consider the poem unified through a loose narrative structure (completed by the final paragraph, in which the Marchioness arrives at her destination), and thus perhaps the poem can be read as an account of a walk through the Lower East Side, as Silliman's note informs us, but we should not expect it to tell us its story through hypotaxis or outright signs of narrative development.

In fact we are free to make connections among sentences in a way that arguably enhances the narrative beyond literal events and perceptions:

If challenged, its first response is to spit. This took place at the museum. Wires slope from the pole to the house, where they gather, entering a narrow pipe along its side. This conveys motion. I am writing in shadows. Don't you worry about accessibility too?

The first line of this paragraph is perhaps a direct reference to a cat or some other animal encountered on the walk, perhaps just a general reference to such an animal. "This" tempts us to link back to the spitting animal, but of course such an encounter would not take place in a museum. Or would it? Line three seems to bring us back to the walk, a sentence of pure description, but the setting of course contrasts greatly with the (memory of?) the museum, although the contrast may be exactly what Silliman is after. (Still, what the poet is after in a poem like this both can't really be determined and is probably irrelevant--if making  "purpose" clear was a priority, the "new sentence" approach would be self-defeating, to say the least.) "This conveys motion" might in this instance actually refer to the wires, but our previous encounter with the demonstrative pronoun suggests caution in making the connection. The last two lines apparently bring us out of the immediate scene of the walk into the scene of the composition of the poem (something Silliman does frequently in many of his poems). What are "the shadows" in which the poet writes? Literally the shadows forming the environment in which the poet was writing this line? (Probably.) The figurative shadows cast by the environment of the Lower East Side as the poet composes his poem? (Possibly as well.) To whom is the question in the final line asked? Another poet? Silliman, by another poet? The reader? All three are plausible, and a different layer of connotation is added depending on which auditor you choose and what answer to the posed question they give.

While the kinds of sequential paragraphs featured in "Blue" or the following poem, "Carbon," are more or less the central device of Silliman's poetics, there is variety of form in The Alphabet. "Demo" is essentially a sequence of single sentences (or combinations of clauses punctuated as a sentence), "Force" seems structured as a medium-length verse poem (although with an occasional paragraph embedded therein), but the lines unfold in recognizable new sentences, part of "Jones" is composed in what seem like quatrains, "Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect" is one 84-page paragraph, etc. "Non" employs stanzas of various lengths, "Quindecagon" is a series of 15-line stanzas the final words of each of which are repeated throughout the poem (in different orders, end of first line in one stanza going to the bottom in the next), somewhat in the mode of a sestina, while Silliman himself calls "VOG" a "collection of "ordinary" poems."

In other words, the reader will find a great deal of manipulation of form in The Alphabet, even if the result is "form" of a type not really found before. As also revealed in the Notes, form in many of the poems is derived from Oulipo-like restraints, especially mathematical, as in "Lit," in which "every section is predicated on the number 12," or in Silliman's use of the Fibonacci series, which structured Silliman's previous "Tjanting" and which in The Alphabet appears in modified version in "Ink," "Lit," and "Oz." However much Silliman at some level was motivated as a poet by political beliefs about the commodification of language, his poems are a formalist's delight, at least if formalism is defined as an interest in the malleability of form, and the extent to which Silliman's work, as exemplified in The Alphabet, attracts future readers unschooled in the origins of Language Poetry will greatly depend, it seems to me, on the interest its considerable formal achievements continues to provoke and ultimately to satisfy.

Although the formal experiments of Silliman's poetry are their most conspicuous aesthetic attribute, they also offer other, more immediate rewards. While many of the sentences are ordinary declaratives and descriptions, some are quite striking in themselves: "A shift not in light, but to light, as day's first illumination floods the room so that colors exist, however muted. . .Mockingbird gargles a whole new song." If most of Silliman's paragraphs and stanzas work through disjunction and discontinuity, sometimes they have an evocative if obscure cohesion of their own:

Before dawn, a kitchen light casts its full glare out over the snow. Sense of panic in a dream. In the bank, a large woman hands me my money stapled together in an envelope. I'm pulling my children through the streets on a sled, waiting for the street lights to come on. I wave and realize I'm alone in my bed, then see her asleep wrapped in some blankets on the floor. "Brittany," he shouts when I ask him what breed his dogs are. More snow begins to fall. ("VOG")

Perhaps the most consistent pleasure the poems in The Alphabet provide is their humor, in particular Silliman's inveterate punning:

When in the course of cumin events. . .The unbearable whiteness of being. . .Thirteen ways of scratching at a blackboard. . .Note to the typesetter: you can't always get what you font. . .Rhyme and punishment. . . .

That each of these puns is taken from a poem, "Under," that contains some of the most obvious "political" discourse in The Alphabet (much of it is composed during and is a running commentary on the first Iraq war), and that they to a significant degree undercut the seriousness of this commentary, indicates to me Silliman's ultimate allegiance after all is to poetry, and to the verbal play that is its most fundamental characteristic, not to external political goals. Even if the "tangibility of the word" to be found in such puns, as well as other kinds of wordplay found in, for example,"Lit," does call attention to the "transparency" of ordinary discourse, that is because poetry (good poetry) always call attention to the inadequacies of ordinary discourse.

However imposing The Alphabet might at first seem to the casual reader, it is accessible given time and the alternative reading strategies I have mentioned. It could even be read sequentially, provided the reader can be tolerant of inevitable obscurities and confusions, which are best left for later when the alternative strategies don't apply. Eventually the poems teach the determined reader how to read them. Speaking for myself, I found the later poems much more satisfying for the effort, although I now recognize my appreciation of the earlier ones was incomplete. All the more reason to read them again.

Read as a single essay.

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Tangibility of the Word

The sheer bulk of Ron Silliman's The Alphabet, as well as its apparently arbitrary structural principle, could initially leave the impression it deliberately defies reading. The same could be said of the larger project, the "life work" in progress and of which The Alphabet is a part, that promises when complete to be gargantuan in size and scope. And to a significant extent Silliman does want readers to be intimidated before a work like The Alphabet, uncertain enough about how to proceed to abandon preconceptions about both books and poetry and willing to learn how to read differently.

I think readers who are so willing will ultimately find their fortitude and patience is rewarded, but one of the first lessons to be learned is that The Alphabet can't really be read discreetly as a book, a process we usually consider as self-enclosed and sequential, a task to be completed before moving on to the next book. Indeed, I found it better to read the poems separately, over a few days or even a few weeks (some of the poems are a few pages long, but most are 20 pages long or more, and one, "VOG" is over 100), and then perhaps putting the book aside for a while. Such a reading strategy acknowledges the occasional and highly fragmented nature of these poems, and even more time could be allowed to some of the poems--"Skies," for example, in which each section of the poem corresponds to the calendar day on which it was written over the course of a year. To really experience the full effect of the poem, we might duplicate the process, reading a section a day for a year.

Certainly the poet doesn't quite expect we will approach such a poem in this way, but The Alphabet in its very excess persistently challenges us to ask just why a poem shouldn't be read like that, or be written like this, or why a book can't be held together, to the extent that it is, by the fact that each of its poems corresponds to a letter of the alphabet, presented in, well, alphabetical order. Those already long familiar with Silliman's work, both through his poetry and his critical writing, will of course not find it surprising that this book poses these questions, although now that the individual poems included have finally been gathered to form the book, the latter does provide a new setting for and potentially a new experience of the poems. The challenge will be most acute for readers encountering Silliman's poetry for the first time or who have had only a casual acquaintance with it, but arguably The Alphabet could provide the most enlightening reading experience for precisely such readers.

Silliman's most significant contribution to the aesthetics of poetry, however, is to be found not at the global level of the book, but at the most fundamental level of the poem's existence as "verse." While the equation of "poetry" and "verse" was questioned prior to Silliman in the development of "prose poetry," Silliman has further undermined the association of "verse," whether free or metrical, with poetry as such in his focus on the "sentence" as the fundamental unit of poetry. While on the one hand Silliman substitute sentences for "lines" in his poems, the "sentence" is reconceived so that it no longer fulfills the function it is assigned in ordinary discourse. This allows it to remain an aesthetically plausible basis for "poetry," but it also forces the reader to read sentences in a new way, the failure to do so causing probably the most serious impediment to engaging with Silliman's work, finding it instead "difficult" or unsatisfying.

Silliman wants us to consider his sentences not as instances of "hypotaxis," the discursive process in which elements of the sentence, and sentences themselves, maintain a subordinate relationship as parts of a developing thought, the connected parts of a larger rhetorical whole, but as self-sufficient "parataxis," by which the sentence stands autonomously as a unit of sense, connected to previous and following sentences only by the thinnest, implicit "and." It is essentially Silliman's poetry, or perhaps most importantly, his critical writing about it and the work of other like-minded poets, that gave rise to the concept of "Language Poetry" to designate the practice among American poets of using parataxis to minimize connections among images and statements and calling attention to those images and statements, the sentences, as language, free of the obligation to cohere into transparent "meaning."

Silliman's initial formulation of the hypotaxis/parataxis distinction as applied to poetry was essentially part of a Marxist critique, by which poetry demonstrates that hypotaxis is a kind of capitalist conspiracy. "What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development," he writes in "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World," is "an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive, and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of 'realism,' the illusion of reality in capitalist thought." Since it seems to me that when language passes into any stage of development--through the development of "society" and "culture," however rudimentary--the "tangibility of the word" will be sacrificed for expository and descriptive power, to emphasize the culpability of capitalism is only to affirm you especially don't like its kind of anaesthesia.The argument that poetry is fundamentally an effort to counter the anesthesia of language in general is certainly credible enough, but Silliman's version simply subsumes poetry to a larger ideological project, however much it purports to "unmask" ideology.

Ultimately, however, much of what Silliman has to say in essays like "The New Sentence" can stand, lightened of its Marxist baggage, as a perfectly coherent defense of a "poetics" anchored in parataxis and organized around sentences and paragraphs replacing, for the most part, lines and stanzas. As I wrote in a prior post, "The New Sentence" in particular is "first of all a relatively straightforward and learned history of ideas about the sentence in both linguistics and literary criticism that demonstrates the potential of the sentence as an autonomous unit of language has not really been appreciated." Although Silliman makes exaggerated claims for both the revolutionary potential of the new sentence and the unprecedented nature of its appeal to language over sense, the kind of poetry Silliman's explication of it makes possible seems entirely plausible.

The Alphabet certainly confirms the plausibility of such a poetry, but in doing so it also illustrates that an artistic practice inspired by a non-artistic agenda can hold up as an artistic practice, especially over such an enormous canvas, only if it is aesthetically justified quite apart from whatever other motives brought it into being. The Alphabet does withstand aesthetic judgment, in my opinion--indeed, any reader could read any or all of this book with no knowledge of Silliman's ideological commitments and be able to appreciate his poems (or not) solely for their contribution to the "art" of poetry. It is admittedly not art of the musical, imagistic, or strongly figurative variety associated with what Silliman labels the "school of quietude" in poetry, but whatever long-term value The Alphabet will prove to have can only come not just from its status as part of Silliman's challenge to school of quietude poetics but as a successful collection of poems manifesting an alternative poetics that is no less aesthetically compelling.

That the first poem in the book, "Albany," is quite brief, a single arranged paragraph of hypotactic sentences, gives an uninitiated reader the opportunity to get an immediate purchase on Silliman's aesthetic strategy, an opportunity Silliman enhanced by the previous publication of Under Albany, in which he gives an account of the circumstances behind (under) the composition of the poem, line by line. Through Under Albany the reader can get a sense of what the poet believed himself to be doing and of how the poem emerges from actual experience after all, however much it might seem at first to be just a series of disconnected declarations. While this may seem an overly onerous way to begin a book, such a reading strategy not only makes it more likely the reader will continue with the other poems but begins to indicate the way in which reading The Alphabet will not be like the experience of reading a conventional book.

For readers who still find the dissociated density of "Albany" intimidating, moving on more quickly to the second poem, "Blue," might be productive. Still a reasonably short poem, "Blue" is structured as a series of short paragraphs which manifest Silliman's "new sentence" poetics but perhaps in more approachable portions:

Rust designs that old truck door. The number of objects is limited. Some leaves on the fern are more yellow. Sooner or later you will have to get up to change the record. That buzz is the dryer.

If we turn to the brief notes for each of the poems that Silliman provides at the back of The Alphabet, we learn that "Blue" was "occasioned by a long walk through the Lower East Side." From this paragraph we get one sentence, the first, that must surely be a detail from this walk, but the other sentences seem to have little, or at least very obscure, relationship to this initial detail. At least one, the last, seems to be in deliberate contrast to the details of the walk, as if a moment from the poet's own more comfortable life intrudes on the immediate, tawdry scene. Otherwise, the sentences might seem randomly arranged into a "paragraph" the exists mainly to store these seemingly discrete sentences.

Such a paragraph can stand as a model of what Silliman has in mind in the use of parataxis. The construction of the paragraphs, as well as the unfolding of the paragraphs as a "poem," provoke us to meld these sentences into an ongoing discourse or chain of images, but the relationship among them is not as a progression but as a simple juxtaposition. Thus at first such a poem as "Blue" frustrates our desire to make it yield sense or meaning, yet the reader who again spends some time with it might find it actually yields more meaning when the possibilities of a paratactic juxtaposition gradually reveal themselves. That the sentences considered as a forward-directed chain do not willingly release their meaning does not preclude us from finding meanings by reading them in a different way.

TO BE CONTINUED

The Horizon of the Sentence

(Continued from previous post)

If in essays such as "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World" and "The Political Economy of Poetry" (The New Sentence, 1987) Ron Silliman contends that New Criticism (presumably Silliman wants New Criticism to stand in for other varieties of formalism as well) puts too much emphasis on author and text in determining the "potential content" of the work, in my opinion he compensates for this failing by in turn giving over too much of the opportunity to "actualize" content to individual readers. Silliman is right to insist that the reading experience must include the reader as part of the process--the reader must be up to the task of apprehending the aesthetic qualities of the text--but in his determination to make poetry the servant of Marxist social reform, Silliman, at least in these theoretical essays, wants the reader's attention so thoroughly directed at the "meaning" a poem might provide that whatever aesthetic effects might accompany it are at best an afterthought, at worst regressive cultural baggage that must be discarded.

Silliman is not advocating for a crudely propagandistic kind of poetry, reducible to polemic and explicit "statements." Indeed, the meaning he wants readers to get from poetry is conveyed indirectly, through its material formal and syntactic procedures. Silliman believes (or at least this is what the Silliman of these essays, written twenty-five years and more ago, believed) that by frustrating the reader's ability to ready "hypotactically" (via transparent language and explicit connections made between parts of a discourse), the reader could be made aware of the way in which capitalist culture maintains its dominance through hypotactic communication. Thus both Silliman's poetry and that which generally came to be called "Language Poetry" employed instead a "paratactic" strategy, by which language refuses transparency and connections are denied (the former achieved mainly by the latter). The notion that parataxis might work to produce worthwhile poetry is far from outlandish (more on this in a later post on Silliman's The Alphabet), but while the disruption of expectations implied by Silliman's poetics could easily enough lead readers to a reconsideration of the assumptions behind conventional definitions of poetry, that this would in turn necessarily lead to increased skepticism about the machinations of capitalism is not a step in logic I can follow.

Silliman's most important exposition of his call for paratactic poetry, "The New Sentence," is largely free of Marxist rhetoric, and offers an account of what such a poetry might be like that even an apologist for New Criticism could take seriously. It is first of all a relatively straightforward and learned history of ideas about the sentence in both linguistics and literary criticism that demonstrates the potential of the sentence as an autonomous unit of language has not really been appreciated. Silliman also discusses a few precursor poets, such as the French symbolists as well as Gertrude Stein, who point to this potential but don't finally fully realize it.

The "new sentence," for Silliman, is one that "has an interior poetic structure in addition to interior ordinary grammatical structure." The "poetic structure" of the poem derives from the poetic structure of the sentences, arranged into paragraphs, a device that "organizes the sentences" but is "a unit of quantity, not logic or argument." In combination, this approach "keeps the reader's attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below."

Thus the notion of "language poetry," which in effect forces the reader to attend to the poem's language as it comes, not in relation to the "syllogistic movement" we ordinarily expect between sentences and through the poem as a whole. It is ultimately a kind of prose poetry, and, according to Silliman "the new sentence is the first prose technique to identify the signifier [language itself]. . .as the locus of literary meaning. As such, it reverses the dynamics which have so long been associated with the tyranny of the signified [that to which the language refers], and is the first method capable of incorporating all the levels of language, both below the horizon of the sentence and above. . . ."

Unless by "prose technique" Silliman means specifically techniques used in prose poetry, I really can't accept the assertion that the new sentence is "the first prose technique" to call attention to the signifier as an end in itself. Metafiction, anyone? However, the radical break with the inherited presumptions about what makes for "good poetry" is real enough. Still, as far as I can tell, there is nothing in Silliman's poetics that should alienate the most recalcitrant formalist (even a backsliding New Critic). One could easily conclude after reading "The New Sentence" that poets without the slightest interest in Marxist theory could adopt the new sentence as credo and produce potentially interesting poetry, a challenge to convention and ordinary ways of reading, yes, but not necessarily a challenge to poetry as an ongoing tradition. (Or to Western capitalism, although one could also imagine some readers making the connection between the two kinds of challenges that Silliman would like, pursuing the extra-literary implications of the strategy after engaging with it on a purely aesthetic level--in my opinion an appropriate reversal of Silliman's priorities that more suitably preserves the integrity of the literary text.)

Silliman's animus toward New Criticism is additionally unfortunate in that his own close readings of particular writers and their work are surely New Critical in spirit if not in fact. In The New Sentence, his essay on Jack Spicer, "Spicer's Language," is a very precise and ultimately very evocative analysis of one relatively brief Spicer poem (as well as, along the way, Ezra Pound's 84th Canto and a few additional Spicer passages). Granted, the burden of the essay is to show Spicer as an important influence on the new sentence, but I found it to be the best piece of commentary on Spicer's work I've read, typified by this sort of careful exposition:

Spicer's poem is composed in one stanza, written in what are ostensibly sentences, with a surface conventionality that extends to the capitalization of the letters at the lefthand margin. We have already seen the amount of tension which is set up in the first line ["This ocean, humiliating in its disguises"] by the irreducibility of the subject and its modifying clause to any single, simple envisionment. The leap to the second sentence is made before a verb occurs in the first. In being suppressed, this verb ("is"?) becomes yet another moment of an absent presence. And there are no less than five positions in the sentence which it could have taken, so that its absence (i.e., its presence) is not perceived at a single point, but instead floats freely, a syntactic equivalent of anxiety. Far more jolting to the reader, however, is that the two sentences to a degree that is nowhere possible in the Pound passage, appear to come from entirely different discourses.

The combination of detailed description and critical insight ("a syntactic equivalent of anxiety") is very satisfying, and here, as in similar readings posted on his blog, Silliman seems to me to exemplify a particularly scrupulous (and therefore all too rare) kind of literary criticism. While The New Sentence elucidates a poetics that affirms the active part played by the reader in locating the "potential content" of the poem, his critical readings nevertheless implicitly assert the importance of informed criticism, the existence of some readers who through skill with the "codes" always associated with attentive reading can help other readers overcome the limitations of their inherited codes and approach poetry in a more rewarding way.

It is indeed true there is no "universal" mode of poetry--no "normal poetry" from which anything else is an aberration--and it is also true that much conventional poetry, with its "normative syntax, classical metrics, and a deliberately recessive linebreak" requires "at the level of the reader's experience" only "passivity." (Although I can't accept the further complaint that this passivity means the reader "can only observe, incapable of action": observation is not what happens in our interaction with a text, only reading, which is itself a form of action.) Silliman's challenge to the universalist and passive conception of poetry is entirely well-justified and should not be dismissed. But it is literary criticism embodying universal intelligence that keeps the multifarious practices of poets from devolving into chaos, and Silliman's criticism participates in this stabilizing process. It is, after all, in critical writing such as The New Sentence and on his weblog that Silliman convincingly makes his case against universalist assumptions and passive reading. Yet the cogency of this case depends upon a reader willing to defer to a critic speaking in what can't be denied is a critical "voice" of manifest authority.

Articulating a Poetics

Ron Silliman begins The New Sentence (1987) with this unimpeachable claim:

. . .if we look to that part of the world which is the poem, tracing the historical record of each critical attempt to articulate a poetics, a discursive account of what poetry might be, we find instead only metaphors, translations, tropes. That these models have a use should not be doubted--the relationships they bring to light, even when only casting shadows, can help guide our way through this terrain. Yet their value stands in direct relation to their provisionality, to the degree to which each paradigm is aware of itself as a translation of the real, inaccurate and incomplete.

Such a pragmatic perspective on the utility of "poetics" (of literary criticism in general) seems to me the most efficacious way of encouraging open-ended debate about all questions relating to a subject so thoroughly contingent as what properly constitutes the "literary" qualities of literature. (I especially like Silliman's reference to "that part of the world which is the poem," which correctly emphasizes that a poem is a phenomenon in the world, not a reflection on or of the world that somehow transcends or detours around the merely real. A text is an element of reality, not just an opportunity to discourse about it.) It is admirable that Silliman's first words warn against taking his own poetics as the last words on the subject, but as a critic he has firmly-held positions nonetheless and they are positions that, in my view, cast all those who would disagree with them not just as mistaken but as fundamentally bad people.

Silliman next locates his approach as a critic by identifying himself with other poet-critics such as Pound, Olson, and Creeley, who were themselves situated "warily midway between the New Critics" and the "anti-intellectualism" that New Criticism provoked among "other sectors of 'New American' poetry." Although it seems to me that Silliman's criticism, both in this book and on his blog, has much in common with the close reading of the New Criticism, he is very harsh here in his comments about it, characterizing it as a "positivist" approach encompassing "an empiricist claim to transcendent (and trans-historical) truth." But the New Critics did not view poems as "empirical" evidence (the text) that would lead to a claim to "transcendent" truth (the critic's interpretation.) This is, in fact, a wholly mistaken representation of the New Critics' project: New Criticism was "empirical" only in that it insisted readers attend to the perceptible structure and actual language of the text, and the only "transcendent truth" it implied was that reading a poem was not a search for transcendent truth. Indeed, the burden of New Criticism was exactly to convince readers to read rather than interrogate poems for their unitary "meaning."

Silliman makes his disdain for New Criticism (or at least the conception of "literature" he thinks it represents) even more blatant by comparing it to Stalinism:

Necessarily. . .a poetics must be concerned with the process by which writing is organized politically into literature. It is particularly disturbing when, under the New Critics as well as Stalin, this transformation is posed and explained as though it were objective and not related directly to ongoing and fluid social struggles.

Certainly the New Critics were attempting an "objective" form of reading in that they believed a poem could be approached as a work of art with discernible features that could be identified by paying close attention--"dispassionate" is perhaps the term that might justifiably be used to characterize the attitude of the New Critics' ideal reader. And they surely did not have any interest in "ongoing and fluid social struggles" (at least where the analysis of literature is concerned) and would never have accepted that "a poetics must be concerned with the process by which writing is organized politically into literature." Silliman, of course, believes they were a part of such organizing nevertheless (a retrograde part), and in the first several essays in The New Sentence he undertakes to establish that indeed poetics is finally about politics, poetry "a form of action," presumably on behalf of those "social struggles."

These first few essays are aggressively Marxist in their declarations about the place of poetry. In "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World," we are told that the transparency of language we encounter in much ordinary communication is part of "a greater transformation which has occurred over the past several centuries: the subjection of writing (and, through writing, language) to the social dynamics of capitalism."

Words not only find themselves attached to commodities, they become commodities and, as such, take on the "mystical" and "mysterious character" Marx identified as the commodity fetish: torn from any tangible connection to their human makers, they appear instead as independent objects active in a universe of similar entities, a universe prior to, and outside, any agency by a perceiving Subject. A world whose inevitability invites acquiescence. Thus capitalism passes on its preferred reality through language itself to individual speakers. . . .

Because poetry "is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts" but "returns us to the very social function of art as such," it is in the best position to combat this commodification. Indeed, "perhaps only due to its historical standing as the first of the language arts, poetry has yielded less to (and resisted more) this process of capitalist transformation." But it hasn't resisted enough. According to Silliman, "The social role of the poem places it in an important position to carry the class struggle for consciousness to the level of consciousness."

By recognizing itself as the philosophy of practice in language, poetry can work to search out the preconditions of a liberated language within the existing social fact.

Despite the dogmatic tone of these passages, the underlying analysis of public language vs. literary language seems pretty cogent to me. Extending the analysis to fiction, Silliman notes that "the most complete expression" of the "invisibility" of language "is perhaps in the genre of fictional realism, although it is hardly less pervasive in the presumed objectivity of daily journalism or the hypotactic logic of normative expository style." Further, "it is the disappearance of the word that lies at the heart of the invention of the illusion of realism and the breakdown of gestural poetic form." That calls for simplicity of style and an emphasis on narrative--both in fiction and journalism--reflect an impatience with language as medium and the dominance of "message" is undoubtedly true, and the proposition that poetry especially represents an opportunity to "liberate" language from these constraints is one I can easily accept. But I fail to see why it is necessary to lay the blame for the crudity of public language specifically on capitalism, as opposed to the general human reluctance to pay attention to subtlety and nuance and willingness to accept the "preferred reality" of authority. Capitalism will get no propping up from me, but I can't see that it has uniquely invoked these human limitations.

Much of the logic of Silliman's poetics (as well as, ultimately, his own poetry) depends on the assumptions he brings about the "role of the reader in the determination of a poem's ideological content" ("The Political Economy of Poetry"). Silliman contends there is no "genuine" version of a poem, only those versions experienced by a particular audience at a particular time:

What can be communicated through any literary production depends on which codes are shared with its audience. The potential contents of the text are only actualized according to their reception, which depends on the social composition of the receivers. 

Again this is a defensible position, but again I fail to see that asserting reception is determined by "social composition" is to say anything very significant. At best it establishes that audiences and readers bring to the reception of poetry their life experiences and circumstances, but to make "social composition" into the kind of essentialized, metaphysical entity Marxists want it to be doesn't convert a mere sociological fact into a revelation. Similarly, to say that "context determines the actual, real-life consumption of the literary product, without which communication of a message (formal, substantive, ideological) cannot occur" seems to me little more than a truism, and belies the question whether "communication of a message" is the goal a poet ought to be setting for him/herself. It is the goal that Silliman is setting, although in his practice as a poet he does concentrate on the "formal" message, through which the substantive and ideological are finally expressed.

. . .To be continued.

News of the Poetry World

    The Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog recently announced it is abandoning the "discussion model" to provide instead "a daily news feed with links and excerpts from other outlets around the world." This means that the site will no longer feature blog posts from a selected group of poets "discussing" poetry but will become like every other digest blog offering "news."

    The PF is making this move because "The blog as a form has begun to be overtaken by social media like Twitter and Facebook.  News of the poetry world now travels fastest and furthest through Twitter. . .with the information often picked up from news aggregator sites rather than discursive blogs." Further,

. . .anyone involved in the more dynamic discussions of poetry, poetics, or politics in the past year knows that more and more of the most vibrant interactions have been found on Facebook.  We saw this happening last month as our National Poetry Month posts traveled far and wide through various status updates, wall postings, and links.

    I always thought the "discussion model" used at Harriet was a little too chatty, too often short on extended analysis, but nevertheless I checked in on the blog several times a week and usually found some posts on the practice and reading of poetry that were well worth my time. I can with some certainty say I will never look at the site again, as it now gives in to the preoccupation with the "fastest and furthest" that characterizes too much of the blogosphere. "News of the poetry world" will replace the consideration of actual poetry.

    I don't know whether "the blog as a form has begun to be overtaken by social media like Twitter and Facebook," at least where serious commentary on poetry and fiction is concerned. That it has overtaken the blog as a source of quasi-public instant messaging is probably true, and to the extent this leaves the weblog as a space that might be put to use for more substantive discourse is a good thing. But why the PF would think that Twitter-type shout-outs would be better for poetry than the "discursive blog" is not something I can understand.

    Is more "information" what we really need? Does the rapid-fire posting of ephemera amount to "dynamic discussions" or does it just reduce the discussion of poetry to the same relentless focus on trivia that characterizes the coverage of movies, of celebrity culture in general? What seems to me to be motivating the Harriet change of approach--what seems to be motivating the Twitterization of online discourse in general--is precisely the desire to see what is posted disseminated "far and wide through various status updates, wall postings, and links," not a concern for the substance of the post. The mere accumulation of friends, followers, and hits, evidence of "interaction," is the end-in-itself.

    The digest form of weblog has existed from the beginnings of the blogosphere, is probably the original, most recognizable form of blog. Plenty of them still exist and provide useful "news." If Twitter now performs this function more efficiently, so be it, but that doesn't seem to be a good reason to transform all blogs into versions of Twitter. Both poetry and fiction need more "discursive blogs" examining the news that stays news, not fewer.

NOTE Andrew Wessels at A Compulsive Reader has some similar thoughts.

Outside the Realm of Poetry

    David Biespiel is convinced that "America’s poets are uniquely qualified to speak openly in the public square among diverse or divisive communities," despite their current "intractable and often disdainful disinterest in participating in the public political arena outside the realm of poetry." Although he assures us he agrees that "a poet must make his way in the world as best fits his vision for himself as an artist," nevertheless his essay is so filled with apocalyptic urgency about the need for poets to reclaim a role in "civic discourse" it clearly implies that those who settle for "quiet rooms of contemplation" are neglecting their responsibilities both to democracy and to poetry.

    Biespiel wants to maintain a distinction between poets writing a deliberately "civic" poetry and using the "gravitas" that comes from being a poet simply to speak out on public affairs, but ultimately he really can't keep his frustration with the "cliquish" and "self-reflexive" nature of contemporary poetry from condemning it outright, not just for its civic derelictions but for its retreat into "art-affirming debates over poetics and styles." In other words, poetry has become satisfied with the "merely literary."

    To an extent, Biespiel's essay seems to me an effort to shame poets into entering public debates by comparing their retreat into insular "coteries" to the larger retreat of Americans generally, who are "self-sorting into homogeneous enclaves," becoming "a collection of increasingly specialized interests":

Like Americans everywhere, America’s poets have turned insular and clustered in communities of aesthetic sameness, communicating only among those with similar literary heroes, beliefs, values, and poetics. Enter any regional poetry scene in any American metropolis or college town, and you will find the same cliquey village mentality with the same stylistic breakdowns.

Surely poets don't want to be like those huddled suburbanites in their gated communities, damaging the public weal in their very tendency to huddle. "Aesthtic sameness" must surely be avoided in poetry as in lawn care. What good is poetry if it gives us only "stylistic breakdowns"?

    Biespiel's call for poet-sages to emerge is predicated on the belief that  "Poets are actually uniquely suited and retain a special cultural gravitas to speak publicly and morally about human aspirations." This seems to be an assumption shared by all those who would have both poets and novelists "engage" with the public sphere, but it's a claim  that cannot be sustained if what Biespiel means is that poets have some special ability not just to speak "publicly and morally about human aspirations" but to speak more intelligently or more persuasively about "human aspirations" than anyone else as part of "civic discourse."

    Certainly the examples Biespiel provides to support his assertion do little to give it credibility: Allen Ginsburg certainly had plenty to "say" in the public realm, but who doesn't think that a good deal of what he said now seems--probably seemed at the time--rather embarrassing in its simple-mindedness? Adrienne Rich may have spoken up from a feminist perspective, but what kind of public impact did it really make, as opposed to the statements of non-poet feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan? Robert Bly is a crank, Dana Gioia a conservative shil, and I'm not sure what Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, or Charles Simic have ever said that has reached anyone other than their devoted readers who already agree with them.

    Biespiel's argument essentially rests on the notion that poets have "the ability. . .to write poems that penetrate differences and discover connection" and partake of poetry's "ancient predisposition for moral persuasion." One could argue that what distinguishes the poet is not primarily his/her ability to "penetrate differences" but to put words together in aesthetically provocative ways and that the connections made are connections between poetry as it has been and poetry as it might be, not between competing "communities," but even if we were to accept Biespiel's amorphous formulation it does not follow that this ability is readily transferable from page to public square. It especially does not follow that whatever "predisposition for moral persuasion" has been attributed to poets over time so naturally manifests itself in modern poets, to most of whom the title "poet" applies in a much more restricted way than it did to Dante or Milton, who did not limit themselves to the lyric mode and who saw fewer differences between poetry and other forms of moral or religious discourse. If most poets now cultivate their own lyrical gardens, it is because that is seen as the appropriate task for the poet, not "moral persuasion."

     Even more dubious is Biespiel's accompanying proposition that "when more poets participate in the public sphere of democratic discourse and even politics, then I’ve little doubt that one consequence will be greater public enthusiasm for the private revelations of our sonnets, odes, and elegies." Exactly why the heretofore unenthusiastic public would suddenly find an interest in sonnets after sampling the poet's political discourse is left unexplored, unless those sonnets turn out to be about "issues" after all--a list of those the "citizen-poet" might take up include "cultural fragmentation, national health care, decrepit infrastructure, threats of terrorism, energy consumption, climate change, nuclear proliferation, warfare, poverty, crime, immigration, and civil rights"--and are not really separable from his/her civic pronouncements. It's hard to know otherwise what would lead people indifferent to poetry to seek it out, so wide is the gap between private and public, at least according to Biespiel in the rest of his analysis. If the sonnets, odes, and elegies are primarily concerned with "memory, private reclamation, and linguistic chop-chop," as Biespiel has it, why would a public yearning for "moral persuasion" bother with it?

I don't want to suggest that poets, or any other writer, or any other citizen, should not enter into "civic discourse." As concerned human beings, of course they should take whatever actions, rhetorical or literal, they think they must. I suppose that the residual esteem still attached to the vocation of "poet" does even give their public words some additional weight, and if particular poets exploit the opportunity given to speak wisely or act courageously on matters of public importance they perform a commendable service. Such a public intervention is only tangentially, even accidentally, related to their work as poets, however, and to laud them for doing it (or condemning them for not) while ignoring the work devalues poetry rather than saving it. It suggests that poetry is mostly good for something else, something other than being itself. Why must the value of poetry be judged by its potential to be a good tune-up for speaking out on more important matters?

    

A Wedge Between Writers and Readers

A "News and Trends" item in Poets & Writers on the state of reading in America informs me that

some say another fundamental factor in the decline of reading must also be addressed: contemporary writers themselves, who have a critical role to play if current trends are to be reversed. “I do think for a long time writers turned completely away from the audience,” [Christian] Wiman says. “You can’t simply go back to the past, of course, but I do think writers have to be aware of an audience.” [Audrey] Niffenegger points specifically to modernism as a wedge between writers and readers. “There was a shift away from narrative, where writers gave you less and less and made you work harder and harder. People got the idea that everything was going to be like Finnegans Wake, and everybody just said, ‘Okay, we’re going to the movies.’”

It's tempting simply to dismiss these as the philistine remarks they clearly are, but a closer examination of what both Wiman (as editor of Poetry magazine, presumably chosen to scold modern poets) and Niffenegger (left to take down modern fiction) are actually saying reveals that they're also just wrong.

It's telling that Wiman follows his accusation that poets have "turned completely away from the audience" with the caveat that we "can't simply go back to the past," as if the accusation implies exactly that in "the past" poets embraced their proper audience. Given that Wiman is one of the prominent exponents of the "poetry ruined itself when it stopped rhyming" school of advanced critical thinking, it's almost certain that what he really means here is that if only poets would return to rhyme and meter, they'd get their audience back.

But from my experience teaching introductory literature, most "general" readers of poetry seem to find contemporary confessional-style lyrics more accessible than older, closed form poems. They tend to be written in plainer, more idiomatic language, and their lack of rhyme and meter only makes them seem more direct, less concerned with artificial devices. Indeed, the farther back into the tradition of English-language lyric poetry they go, these students tend to find older, more ostensibly conventional (and thus more formally recognizable) poems less engaging. The intricacies of meter and rhyme scheme only appear peculiar to them (once they've been alerted to their existence), and the more obviously "poetic" language of this poetry they find difficult, hardly productive of the pleasure Wiman suggests poetry no longer provides.

There's plenty of accessible plain-language poetry around (Billy Collins, anyone?), so unless Wiman means to identify only the most insistently "experimental" poetry of the last 50 years or so as that which snubbed an audience, it's really hard to understand his complaint. Since few casual readers of poetry even know this line of poetry exists, it seems a pretty brittle stick with which to bash contemporary poets.

Niffenegger is more willing, it would seem, to identify the usual suspect of modernism for the putative decline of reading. ("Modernism" in such critiques being generally equated with "difficult" writing, that which makes us "work harder and harder.") And while it is arguably true that modernism began a shift in fiction away from a focus on "story," this shift was motivated by a stronger interest in "character," in ways of representing character that seemed faithful to the ways real people thought and acted. It really isn't credible to allege that in making this shift writers were offering "less and less"; they believed, in fact, they were offering "more"--more insight into human behavior, more emphasis on the motivations that give rise to "story."

If readers have become moviegoers because of changes in the form that fiction assumes, it has been in response to this sort of character-driven fiction, not because Finnegans Wake has become the paradigm for writers of literary fiction, which it certainly has not. Most nonreaders are as ignorant of the existence of Joyce's experimental novel as they are of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y, and if they'd rather go to the movies than read serious fiction, it's because they find Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor or Toni Morrison just as difficult, just as "boring" as any of the high modernists or metafictionists. If all fiction needs to do is be more like movies, what's the point of writing it in the first place?

If people like Wiman and Niffenegger want to continue to blame writers themselves for the American audience's indifference to their work, they should at least get their facts straight and reflect on their own assumptions about American readers, about whose tastes they offer only fantasies.

Avoiding Oblivion

Todd Swift wonders about the future life of poets:

At the point where [poets] enter into the world of publication, two roads diverge. One of those roads is marked The Canon; the other is marked Oblivion. Canons are problematic, and disputed, and there are currently at least three: Mainstream, Innovative, and Outlaw. These three canons are all represented by serious publishers of real merit. However, only a poet published by a Mainstream, large press, has any chance of avoiding "oblivion".

The problem with this assertion only begins with the fact that it's self-contradictory. Doesn't the very existence of the other two canons demonstrate that non-mainstream poets do survive? If only mainstream poetry survives, how is that innovative and outlaw poetry have also survived?

A second problem is that Todd defines "mainstream" entirely in economic terms: "the large presses have marketing budgets, and the clout to distribute the work to bookstores, and critics, in major cities, around the world. It really is almost as simple as that - get published by a large press, and your work will be sold and reviewed in many more places than if you are published by a small press. . ."

I don't visit bookstores as much as I used to, but the last time I was in Barnes & Noble, or Borders, or even the local "independent" store, I didn't see many volumes of poetry on display, and certainly not many by living poets, even those one could plausibly label "mainstream." As Ron Silliman recently put it, "The days when major publishers brought out poetry as a “loss leader” (or because some poet might turn into a profitable novelist) are almost entirely behind us. The number of trade publishers who even touch poetry are so few, and their collective aesthetics so very narrow, that they have largely relegated themselves to irrelevance. And book sellers are under profound pressure from the rise of alternate channels of retail distribution, including big box retailers and the web. Each week in America two new bookstores open, but five others shut down. . . ."

Perhaps it could be argued that there is a heirarchy among publishers of poetry, certain publishers on whose list many poets would like to be included, but this is a heirarchy of community esteem, as Silliman might put it, not a heirarchy based on "marketing budgets" and "clout" with bookstores or newspaper book reviews. For all the "marketing" a book of poems gets, it might as well be hand-sold by the poet's mother in the Wal-Mart parking lot. And while publishers of poetry no doubt already "distribute" copies to book review editors, getting those editors to print reviews of them has less to do with "clout" than with happening upon an editor who actually likes poetry to begin with. (Good luck with that.)

In my opinion, the biggest problem in Todd's analysis is his very use of the term "Canon" to identify successful or important writers. Canons are neither made nor maintained by publishers, mainstream or otherwise. "Canon" was the term adopted to identify those works of literature that should be included in curricula of literary study--after literary study was itself made respectable as an "academic" subject, a process that wasn't really complete until after World War II. Thus the "canon" refers to those works that should be taught, that aided the canon-makers in their self-assigned roles as gatekeepers of our Literary Heritage. A canonical work is not necessarily one that has met the test of time, or stays in print, or continues to be a source of inspiration for other writers. It is merely one that the academic study of literature has made "great" enough to deserve placement on a college syllabus.

The poetry--or the fiction, for that matter--that will survive will do so because poets and readers of poetry continue to read and to use it, not for separate agendas on literature syllabi but for their revelation of poetry's still untapped possibilities, of what poetry might still become if approached with this or that author's courage or insight or, as I put it in describing what I look for in works of fiction, dedication to "adventurous" freedom. The world of online publishing and the literary blogosphere will only make it more possible for more poets to avoid immediate "oblivion" while this encounter between present and past plays itself out. (Here are the "hundreds of very serious people" Todd is looking for who can give poetry its proper audience and make the New York Times irrelevant.) Todd thinks that the lack of "public recognition" makes the future of poetry a bleak one, but it seems to me that the only recognition worth having is that which is forthcoming from other writers and from readers who take poetry (literature more generally) seriously to begin with. Recognition from those who don't like poetry, who have to be cajoled and manipulated into noticing it, doesn't seem worth the trouble.

Who Killed Tennyson?

Here is Lev Grossman's account of the alleged demise of poetry:

If poetry is dead, who killed it? In the 19th century it was a vital part of Western culture. Writers like Byron and Tennyson were practically rock stars. "Every newspaper in the U.S. printed poems," says Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. "At the end of Longfellow's life, his birthday was like a national holiday."

But the 20th century saw the rise of Modernism and brilliant but difficult and allusive writers like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. (Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was first published in Poetry magazine.) Poems became less like high-end pop songs and more like math problems to be solved. They turned into the property of snobs and professors. They started to feel like homework. "It's thought of as a subject to be taught instead of simply an art to be enjoyed," says Christian Wiman, Poetry's editor.

This historical narrative is frequently enough recited that I have to assume some people actually believe it. Poetry was a "vital" art, read by one and all, back in the good old 19th century (when poets still knew how to rhyme, dammit!) but has been destroyed by putatively "brilliant" but in fact dastardly Modernists intent on making poetry too "difficult" for the average reader, a private possession of the "snobs and professors." (If it were only true that professors still admired poetry, difficult or otherwise, homework or not. Unfortunately, academic literary study has mostly turned poetry into the same simplistic source of sociological critique and political agitation it's turned fiction into--although this does, admittedly, drain all the enjoyment out of it, if not in the way Wiman thinks.)

What this story leaves out is the evolution of mass taste--and the emergence of other forms of "entertainment" to satisfy it--that occurred between Longfellow and John Ashbery. While it is true that some poets in the 19th century (but not all: think Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins) were popular in a way we cannot easily imagine for poets in our time, poetry was an early beneficiary of the spread of literacy both in the United States and Europe and was regarded as entertainment because it was accessible to many people at a time when few other "entertainment options" were available. Gradually poetry lost this audience to fiction, but both poetry and fiction ultimately lost it to the popular arts as we now know them: film, television, etc. Poets were no longer "rock stars" because that role was taken over by, well, rock stars.

It could be said that the "difficult" writers of the 20th century began to experiment with the conventions of poetry and fiction for the same reason that painters in the 20th century began to turn away from the conventions of representation to produce various forms of irreal and abstract art. Painters no longer saw the point in reproducing reality in the era of photography; poets and novelists no longer saw the point in clinging to traditional narrative and familiar forms, in straining to entertain "the people" in the era of vaudeville and movies. Instead, both painters and writers began to examine their media for other possibilities to be explored, to find other ways to engage their viewers and readers, even if that meant potentially alienating some of those in the mass audience who just wanted painters to paint pictures and novelists to tell stories. Or poets to rhyme and express nice sentiments.

Gioia and Wiman would like to reverse this history, to take poetry back to a more innocent time when pretty words made young girls swoon. This isn't going to happen. Poetry is now written and read by people who actually like to write and read poetry. (To "enjoy" an art doesn't preclude enjoying informed criticism of that art, either.) I honestly don't understand why it's necessary to change that. Poetry is as vital as its ever been, judging by the number of journals, small presses, and blogs devoted to it. "Western culture" should have to take care of itself.

Refurbishing the Wheel

K. Silem Mohammad (Lime Tree) contends that "new forms" in poetry can be just as stultifying as the conventional kind if the poet comes to believe that "the mechanics of composition are more important than the experience created by the work."

He goes on to suggest that Ezra Pound's command to "make it new"

does not mean to reinvent the wheel every time you write a poem. The original image associated with this phrase was that of the (same) sun rising every morning, always new. The wording could just as easily be "make it fresh," or "make it seem as though new." It's more about what the reader is enabled to perceive than it is about the writer's use of novel formal techniques.

I would agree that the attempt to create something "new" in either poetry or fiction does not necessarily involve the reinvention of form, if that means ignoring literary history. The poetic "wheel" would require reinvention only if it could be established that the wheel wasn't really a wheel after all. One's precursors not only wrote poems of a sort one no longer fancies, but they didn't actually get at what poetry really is, did not instigate or participate in a tradition that can now be accepted as properly "poetic."

In this sense, making it "fresh" seems entirely sufficient, although one could still be "reinventing" if this is understood to mean adding to the existing tradition something that hasn't been tried before (or something that hasn't been tried in this or that way). A writer who thinks of him/herself as "innovative" because he/she has determined to take nothing for granted, to assume that literary forms can always be reshaped and reconceived, would, in my opinion, be justified in using that designation. This would be less a matter of developing "novel formal techniques" than regarding the existing presumptions about form to be always potentially expandable.

Mohammad's own definition of form as "near-physicalizations of possibility, not yet quite frozen into fact, but charged with fact's imminence" thus seems entirely satisfactory to me, although I would be less inclined to think of achieved form as "fact" except insofar as the poem produced does indeed embody the sense of potential with which the poet began. Even here, however, the "physicalizations of possibility" would need to be inherent in the poem itself, represented in its formal turns and rhetorical processes but not necessarily literally "physicalized." The poem does not seek to be encased in its form but to demonstrate in its pursuit of form both the strugge to attain aesthetic completion and the ultimate impossibility of achieving that goal, especially if it entails reaching a perfection of sorts in the exploitation of form. Other, equally good if not yet imagined explorations in form are always possible. (The work of Wallace Stevens seems to me a good example of this kind of approach to aesthetic form.)

Undoubtedly it is still easier to debate this conception of "form" in poetry than in fiction. For better or worse, fiction is still tied to story as its irreducible form, even though "story" (telling it, relating it, making it known) is more an excuse for invoking form than a formal property itself. Thus, different kinds of narrative strategies, different ways of arranging and disclosing the story, are acceptable, are even praised as the appropriate kind of "experiment" in fiction, as long as they are there in order finally to present the story in the most dramatically effective manner. But few readers and critics seem willing to consider other kinds of formal structures, structures that foreground language and the non-linear ways in which it might be manipulated, that experiment with other "shapes" a work of fiction might take, as an alternative to the predominance of story. This need not mean dispensing with narrative altogether--although at this point the distinction between poetry and prose fiction might break down in a way that could provide further fruitful experiment and critical discussion--but it would mean acknowledging once and for all that, now we are entering a second century in which visual means of storytelling are proving more effective at satisfying most people's narrative needs, "telling a story" is not the most relevant skill a good fiction writer possesses.

It does seem to me that the wheel that has allowed the oxcart of fiction to keep moving for the past 250 years has begun to break down due to overuse and the tremendous weight it has been asked to bear. A sturdier, more adaptable model might be in order.

Talking About Issues

"Why doesn't 'culture' include 'poetry'?," asks Jonathan Mayhew, while explaining his own practice of sending academic articles on poetry to journals of cultural study, where "they will be seen by people who wouldn't normally read an article on 'poetry.'"

Noting that cultural studies focuses mostly on novels, and that "people who are (otherwise) quite well-read often confess their near total ignorance of poetry," Jonathan further asks:

When did the novel get to be so important?. . .Is it [simply] a matter of the fact that more people read novels? Or is it because novels talk about the "issues" people want to talk about, and therefore can integrated seamlessly into a certain vision of cultural studies?

Jonathan's answers to his own question are surely part of the explanation of why, where "cultural study" is concerned, the novel has gotten "to be so important," but I would add that another reason this brand of inquiry goes on "in near total ignorance of poetry" is that encountering a poem requires an initial acknowledgment of and response to the constructedness of literary works, the formal and ultimately wholly artificial quality that makes them literary to begin with and that renders poetry less than congenial to the bull-in-a-chinashop approach to "content" favored by cultural studies. In other words, poetry requires some literary sensibility on the part of the reader, and that is the one thing that has been bred out of literary "scholars" in the cultural studies camp. That is why they so readily "confess" their ignorance of (that is, contempt for) a kind of writing so "merely literary."

I would love to see fiction develop in a direction that also makes it less nutritious fodder for the "issues" people (or continue to develop in that direction--I think much of postwar experimental fiction has indeed moved fiction closer to poetry already.) A kind of fiction that foregrounds language, form, the vicissitudes of "structure," and the very processes of meaning-making and "expression" and that de-emphasizes "character" and "theme" and, indeed, "issues" would be just the thing for separating those who value literature precisely because it is merely literary (that is, verbal art) from those who glom onto it because it seems a convenient means to more conventionally "serious" ends (that is, the study of almost everything except literature itself). I'd like to see fiction become less "important," less "seamless" in its utility to cultural studies and more utterly, blessedly frivolous.

Born of Blood and Emotion

When I wrote this post, I did not know that Poetry editor Christian Wiman participated in the 2004 conference, “Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Connecticut,” at the University of Connecticut. According to this account at electronic book review, here is what Wiman had to say:

. . .Throughout the entire proceedings, he had sat a bit pushed back from the table, looking sallow and brooding, else intent and reticent. When his turn came to speak, he cleared his throat and slowly, in carefully enunciated syllables, began with this proposition: if Wallace Stevens is influential in 50 years, then the break between American poetry and the world will be complete. Much of the crowd, a bit confused by this comment, leaned in attentively. Was Stevens a great poet? Yes of course. But, was he a companionable poet? No, not at all. In fact - Wiman continued in measured tones - he was almost inhuman, uprooted, impenetrable, unpenetrating, a self-indulgent effete, a hyper-cerebral poet with raw talent blazing but little sense of how to convey something a reader might enter into, something born of blood and emotion and the shared commonalities of lived life. He was a destructive influence on modern poetry. . .Stevens’ poetry has abjured the world, Wiman continued, he lived in a bubble of the mind so that he might not be infected by life. His poetry corrosively and obsessively studied itself and was utterly unconcerned with the specificity of things and with relationships to people. There was coldness or distance that Wiman sensed in Stevens’ poetry and it turned him off, way off, didn’t arrive at the root of him as a reader. The early poems thought in sounds, not in ideas, and throughout Stevens’ career, all he could see were busy associative surfaces with very little depth. . . .

What strikes me most about this passage (acknowledging that it is a paraphrase of Wiman's remarks, not direct quotation), is the dishonesty of allowing that Stevens might be a "great poet," even though his poems have the grave defects Wiman enumerates. Clearly Wiman doesn't believe Stevens is a great poet; how could someone who had "a destructive influence on modern poetry" be great? Wiman has high moral standards for poetry to meet--it mustn't be "inhuman" (that word again),"uprooted," "self-indulgent"--and manifestly Stevens's poetry doesn't measure up. (Although is is important to note that these standards are moral. There's nothing in this diatribe that actually touches on Stevens's facility as a poet, his ability to indeed think "in sounds.")

Although perhaps it is more important for a poet to be "companionable" than to dilly-dally around so much with words and stuff, more important to offer "something born of blood and emotion" (as if Stevens's poems don't contain emotion--has Wiman read "The Death of a Soldier"?) than to write skillful and provocative poems. Presumably Poetry will be publishing poems that manifest the opposite qualities Wiman describes here, and readers can decide for themselves whether they represent an advance in the art of poetry. But if I had to bet on what will be influential 50 years from now, the issues of Poetry editied by Christian Wiman or the poems of Wallace Stevens, my money is decidedly on the latter.

Thanks to John Palatella for alerting me to the ebr article.

Market Discipline

Rather than use its $175 million to help out actually existing poets directly, the Poetry Foundation is instead going to engage in some social work: ". . .the stewards of that large sum believe they can use it to bring poetry 'back into the mainstream of American culture'". This involves "a series of programs designed to jumpstart interest in poetry among nonspecialist readers."

Bizarrely, the goal of these "programs" is intended to build "a readership for poetry large enough to make it possible for more poets to succeed in a commercial marketplace rather than rely on academia to make a living." Why such a roundabout way of giving poets some assistance, unless the real goal is to further debase American poetry by forcing it to be "commerical"? (''More poems should rhyme," says Poetry editor Christian Wiman. "More poems should have meter. More poems should tell stories in accomplished ways. More poems should do the things that people like poems to do.") Unless the real recipient of the foundation's beneficence is capitalism itself, which will now teach even poets a good lesson in the imperatives of market discipline?

We are told that "the foundation's strategy emphasizes rebuilding a general, nonspecialist, and, crucially, nonacademic audience for poetry." The assumption everyone involved in this project seems to share is that at one time poetry did have a "broader readership" that contemporary poets for some reason renounced and that the self-appointed saviors of the Poetry Foundation will now reclaim. But when was this "golden age" that Wiman in particular speaks of? Certainly not in my lifetime. The greatest American poets of the twentieth century are, arguably, Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, both of whom published in Poetry. How much influence did they have on "the mainstream of American culture"? They profoundly influenced those who take literature seriously, but what impact did their work have on "general, nonspecialist" readers? Even now, what would such readers make of "The Idea of Order at Key West" or "Four Quartets"? They would be as incomprehensible to them as the most elusive lines of John Ashbery or the most resolutely nonreferential L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems.

What is a "specialist" reader? Someone who reads poetry? What's a "nonspecialist" reader? Someone who can take it or leave it? Why would poets want to appeal to such a reader?

James Longenbach has it right. People like Christian Wiman and John Barr and Dana Gioia are invested in the notion that poetry is "good for us." It's this "good" they're interested in spreading around along with their money, not poetry itself. Longenbach says further: ''Poets can do without much money. . .and that's a good thing. . . . Poets have much more aesthetic freedom precisely because nobody cares how or what they write. That freedom is priceless." I agree. And American fiction might benefit if more fiction writers took this idea seriously as well.

Alive and Poetic

Jonathan Mayhew is

"increasingly interested in language as it actually already exists rather than language as it is dressed up for various "poetic" uses. That is, I like poems that make use of the ways in which language is already alive and poetic, rather than those that view ordinary language as insufficient and attempt to remedy this situation."

Josh Corey believes that

"in addition to being whatever else it is, poetry, by being composed of language, resembles and tends to draw into itself recognizable chunks of other sorts of discourse: argument, philosophy, begging letters, what have you. This creates a confusion that you could lament, or that you could accept as intrinsic to the form and therefore just as you play with rhyme, alliteration, imagery, etc."

Language "as it actually already exists" is, of course, partially comprised of "recognizable chunks" of various discourses. Poetry (I would expand this to self-consciously "literary" language in general) will inevitably draw the already-existing elements of linguistic practice into itself, and, as Jonathan points out, often enough the most "poetic" uses of language come from an imaginative shuffling of these elements rather than a straining after the kind of ornamental effect some readers associate with poetry.

I am interested in these comments because too often, in my opinion, readers interpret writing that incorporates the kinds of discourse Josh Corey mentions as somehow signalling an intention to make arguments or engage in debates about "philosophy" very broadly construed. Since literature occurs in a less "pure" medium than painting or sculpture or music, it is finally impossible to entirely avoid leading fiction and poetry into such debates (or at least into debates about whether they are indeed participating in debates), but as Josh says, for readers and critics to rush in after them and assume that "signs" operate in literary language exactly as they do in ordinary discourse is to ignore the fact that poets ultimately see them as something to "play with as a material for poetry." (Often enough, in order to deliberately confound our "ordinary" understanding of language as communication.)

There's something about the element of "play" in literature that makes certain kinds of readers and critics impatient. (Especially American readers. If we must have "literature," let's have it straight, please. Just tell me what you mean.) If they can't simply dismiss it, they'll wrangle it into shape as a vehicle for this or that rhetorical gesture, either one that can be approved or one that merits only our disregard. (I'm thinking of the kind of fiction review to be found in such publications as The New Republic and the New York Review of Books, as well as all the endless complaining about "postmodern" excess.) Neither are these critics likely to appreciate "the ways in which language is already alive and poetic," since this would call into question their own reduction of language into acts of critical drudgery and trivial blather. Of course, most such critics (and most book reviews and other "literary" publications) generally ignore poetry anyway, which only seems to confirm we don't really like our art to be too arty.

Popular Diction

And on the heels of the previous post, Camille Paglia thinks that

. . .Poetic language has become stale and derivative, even when it makes all-too-familiar avant garde or ethnic gestures. Those who turn their backs on media (or overdose on postmodernism) have no gauge for monitoring the metamorphosis of English. Any poetry removed from popular diction will inevitably become as esoteric as 18th-century satire (perfected by Alexander Pope), whose dense allusiveness and preciosity drove the early Romantic poets into the countryside to find living speech again. Poetry's declining status has made its embattled practitioners insular and self-protective: personal friendships have spawned cliques and coteries in book and magazine publishing, prize committees and grants organisations.

In other words, poetry has lost touch with the People. And the People are to be found, astonishingly enough, in the "media," which to Paglia is essentially television and popular music. Paglia's intellectual slumming in front of the tv and the boom box has always seemed to me her least appealing quality (I liked Sexual Personae, but even it is not free of this pop-idolizing cant), and it does nothing to make her new poetry anthology seem something we ought to take seriously. Paglia (correctly) emphasizes the way in which English is constantly changing--which makes it an ever-renewable source of new kinds of writing--but she ought to consider this when elevating the Romantic poets' "living speech" over "dense allusiveness and preciosity." Try putting even one of Wordsworth's sonnets in front of a classroom of freshman literature students. To them, Wordsworth's language is just as "precious," and just as difficult, as that of any Augustan satirist.

(I will admit that a consequence of literature's relatively small audience is the insularity she describes. But this is finally a problem only if we can't separate the "literati" from literature itself. The former ought simply to be ignored, although in a celebrity culture like ours even the big fish in the small pond are going to get their unfair share of attention.)

I do agree with Paglia in her observation that "over the [last several] decades, poetry and poetry study were steadily marginalised by pretentious 'theory' - which claims to analyse language but atrociously abuses it. Poststructuralism and crusading identity politics led to the gradual sinking in reputation of the premiere literature departments, so that by the turn of the millennium they were no longer seen, even by the undergraduates themselves, to be where the excitement was on campus. One result of this triumph of ideology over art is that, on the basis of their publications, few literature professors know how to 'read' any more - and thus can scarcely be trusted to teach that skill to their students." But she doesn't inspire much confidence in her own alternative practice, which is apparently buttressed by her own kind of "theory":

. . .Animated by the breath force (the original meaning of "spirit" and "inspiration"), poetry brings exhilarating spiritual renewal. A good poem is iridescent and incandescent, catching the light at unexpected angles and illuminating human universals - whose very existence is denied by today's parochial theorists. Among those looming universals are time and mortality, to which we all are subject. Like philosophy, poetry is a contemplative form, but unlike philosophy, poetry subliminally manipulates the body and triggers its nerve impulses, the muscle tremors of sensation and speech.

Now, it's all well and good to hope that a poem might be "iridescent and incandescent," but exactly how does this happen? One can only conclude from what Paglia says in this piece (admittedly an edited version of the introduction to her book) that it's just some kind of magic, akin to the "divination" she says is practiced by critics of poetry, which resembles "the practice of oracles, sibyls, augurs, and interpreters of dreams."Although Paglia claims to "maintain that the text emphatically exists as an object," she doesn't offer any suggestions as to how that object comes into being. There's no indication in her discussion that she understands that poetry--all art--is at least as much craft as it is inspiration. Her exhortations that poets create the "powerful, distinctive, self-contained poem" are all very vague and mystical, leading one to suspect her book won't have much to offer to either writers or readers interested in experiencing everything that poetry might have to offer.

Furthermore, her dismissal of contemporary poets is equally vague:

. . .In gathering material, I was shocked at how weak individual poems have become over the past 40 years. Our most honoured poets are gifted and prolific, but we have come to respect them for their intelligence, commitment and the body of their work. They ceased focusing long ago on production of the powerful, distinctive, self-contained poem. They have lost ambition and no longer believe they can or should speak for their era. Elevating process over form, they treat their poems like meandering diary entries and craft them for effect in live readings rather than on the page. Arresting themes or images are proposed, then dropped or left to dribble away. Or, in a sign of lack of confidence in the reader or material, suggestive points are prosaically rephrased and hammered into obviousness.

It's revealing she won't name names, relying instead on such smug generalities. Perhaps she doesn't because if she did cite any specific poets who are supposedly guilty of these sins, she, and we, would discover in examining "the body of their work" that Paglia's description is a caricature, a glib excuse for ignoring the work of poets that doesn't measure up to a preconceived notion of what poetry is supposed to be. I really would like to see Paglia engage in a close reading of the work of eight or ten of the most respected living poets--say Jorie Graham or John Ashberry, Derek Walcott or Seamus Heaney, one or more of the "language poets"--and honestly conclude that their best work resembles in any way the cliched rendition Paglia rehearses in this passage.

"Artists are makers," says Paglia, "not just mouthers of slippery discourse. Poets are fabricators and engineers, pursuing a craft analogous to cabinetry or bridge building." But nothing else in her essay is consistent with this description. It's all about "primal energies" and "illuminating human universals," about the sacred and the sublime. If she were truly to accept that poets are "makers," she would also have to admit that what they sometimes make will not be immediately recognizable to the People, will either ignore "popular diction" or turn it inside out. In my reading of this essay, Paglia does not really want a poem to be a verbal object but instead some kind of oracular pronouncement, a pronouncement in which "art" really has little if any role.

Finally, Paglia informs us that "All literary criticism should be accessible to the general reader." All criticism? There's no role for criticism that assumes a "general" knowledge on the part of the reader and seeks to take the reader beyond the most obvious surface features of the text? I agree that surveying these features is where criticism should begin (something that has indeed been forgotten by most academic critics), but does it have to end there? Presumably it does if the experience of literature is essentially a religious one: "I sound out poems silently, as others pray." By definition poetry as holy text does not really allow for an appreciation of what "individual poems" are really like; in Paglia's scheme they're to be recited, but not understood.

In my opinion Paglia has let her contempt for the politicizing of postmodernism get the better of her. Poets may not be "mouthers of slippery discourse," but I don't think many of them believe they are. If academic criticism has reduced poetry to this, the academic critics are to blame, not the poets. And in her zeal to discredit these critics, Paglia indulges in some pretty slippery discourse herself. She appropriates poetry to a version of "spiritual renewal." To me, this doesn't seem like much of an improvement.