~
If,
comme on dit, it’s Monday, it must be Baghdad. Kent Johnson’s ask’d for a room hereabouts to respond to Jim Behrle’s recent review: grant’d,
amigo. Though I am notably a mild bystander to debates ferocious or pussycat’d, I thought I’d—singular nonce item!—offer up my two cents, contextualizing here for poor folks.
Animosity runs deep in clowns. My favorite “instance”—one I liked to monicker the
CLWN WR, after some literary journal—occur’d when the younger and funnier Gabriel Gudding went after the older and toadier Charles Bernstein over the vitality (or vitals?) of Marjorie Perloff. One could look it up. Part of me says, simply, the Behrle / Johnson tangle is more jimcrack’d CLWN WRry, two Emmett Kelly-gizmo’s in a rage of “I’m
funnier than you,
muh’fuh!” Maybe.
Maybe not.
What strikes me about Behrle’s piece is its complete capture by the time-standards of popular culture. As if Behrle’s historical memory didn’t extend much back beyond, oh, say, th’onslaught of “reality TV.” Repeatedly, Behrle points to the seeming “datedness” of the poems in Johnson’s book: “That speech seems like it was given a decade ago.” “Most of what he is getting at is lost on me: what’s most lost on me is the point of collecting these pieces.” “Does anyone take that outfit seriously post-February 2003?” “[The] book is old news that hasn’t stayed news.” “. . . the poem was showing its age.” “We've become completely desensitized to the images the poem represents, it no longer shocks.”
There’s something pathetic in the litany—for the upshot is, that the war itself is no longer “material,” fodder for th’inane cameo-thrill machines of popular culture that Behrle lives by. He derides the cover of
Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz, claiming the Iraqi-leash image is “no longer sharp or cutting.” I suspect the slug on the cabbage leaf munching its ordinary half-moon under a half-moon’d sky (it all he
know), I suspect that slug of having a greater historical sense than Jim Behrle. Jim Behrle, that war isn’t over, isn’t near over, isn’t going to be near over for, oh, another TV season,
at least, and if it’s “stale,” if honorable responses to it are “dated,” that is precisely what the war-mongers and war-profiteers
want. They
depend on th’American populace’s inability to engage seriously with anything beyond the week or so it takes a friggin’ “crush list” to turn over.
(Thank God for me: I ain’t got no funny bone.) Here’s Kent Johnson’s piece:
A response to Jim Behrle’s review of Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the WarDear Jim,
I appreciate the review on your blog of
Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz, and I don’t mean that in a facetious way at all. I fully expected the book to be attacked from some quarters, and I fully expected that some of the specific charges you make in your review would be made. (Gary Sullivan also made some harsh comments on his blog, before erasing them, along with various replies in support of the book from others.) And you make the charges clearly and with energetic style, so that’s good too, since some issues get put prominently on the table for future discussion. Thanks in advance, in the interests of more discussion, for adding a link on your blog to this response at Hotel Point.
I won’t try to answer all of the accusations you make against me. And I’m certainly not going to try to write some full-blown exposition of the book’s ethics and aesthetics. I suspect others may have things to say down the road, and they will probably be better able than I to elucidate some of the work’s contradictions and eccentricities. But I’d like to offer here just a few thoughts I think might by useful to future conversation.
First, a specific correction: You say that I “lampoon” the widely respected writer and activist Ammiel Alcalay in a “fake blurb.” The blurb, like the others on the back of the book, is perfectly real (to the extent that any blurb is ever “real”), and I encourage you to contact Ammiel should you have doubts. *[see note below]
In fact, this error on your part—seeing personal disparagement where there is none—is of a piece with your sensing that I am expressing some kind of “opinion” (your obvious assumption is that it’s a negative one) about Helen Vendler, Ange Mlinko, David Bromige, and Ted Berrigan (these being writers you name in your review). But this is wrong. There may be some gentle satire in regards to Helen Vendler in the poem “Baghdad,” which is modeled on Margaret Wise Brown’s
Goodnight Moon, but I have absolutely nothing at all against Vendler personally, and I have nothing at all against the other three individuals. With the rather prominent exception of
myself, in fact, the only censorious opinion expressed anywhere in the book in relation to any poet identified by name is in the concluding polemic regarding statements made by Charles Bernstein—statements which (delivered, as they were, in reference to a war we are still very much in) remain much more relevant to the “politics of poetry” than you feel them to be. Furthermore, my opinions there are focused on his position and its cultural motivations and implications, not on his “person.”
Your misunderstanding (I think the fashionable term is “misprision”), though, is at its greatest in what you intend as the most damning point of your review: that the various writings in
Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz use, in your words, “. . . war victims . . . to score cheap points against poets.”
I’d argue—and it’s clear that numerous readers of the book already see it this way too—that it is really the other way around: The often cheap world of our poetry, left and right, is deployed in the work as a kind of scale-model theatrical setting for placing the starkest light this poet can shine on the fucked-up madness of this war—a war in which you, I, and all American poets can’t help but be complicit, banal and “old news” as that suggestion may seem. It’s a small gesture, yes, and most likely doomed for irrelevance. But as we wait for Godot, or whatever, prattling absurdly away as we are, having so much clever fun, blogging and partying and Googling, let’s pause every so often and listen to the screams, even let them, awkwardly, into our art.
Mind you, I’m not claiming there is an absolutely clear line between the world of poetry and the world of war in my book—or that the writing is pure of intention and heart, virtuously condemning something bad “out there.” The situation presented is admittedly blurrier than that. And that blurriness would be very much to the point. We speak from where we are; what we can see, if we’re honest, will be present in what we feel called upon to say. It’s not always pretty, what comes out in such implication, and it will hardly ever be popular. Hopefully, we’ll manage to say whatever we say with a measure of humor, even in these most dismal times . . .
Now, all of this might be boring for you, just like most of the book is, as you claim. Here, too, let me say, Jim, that I appreciate your candor about finding the book “boring.” Because if any work of art, whatever its medium, has any chance whatsoever of being remembered for a while and of making some little sound in the culture, it
must be considered “boring” by some. Or at least it must be considered boring by some and unusually engaging by others. When both those qualities of estimation are simultaneously and enthusiastically present in the work’s reception, it is a hopeful sign.
Such is the case, so far, with this book. For example, the book’s title poem is “boring” for you; for someone like Ethan Paquin, editor of
Slope, it is, as his blurb says, “by far the most relevant poem for / in / about this War . . . It is a poem for our time.”
Go figure. I love that disjuncture. It’s like the paradox and parataxis of good poetry proper. Even if the “avant-garde” poetry of our climate, all told, is proving to be worth shit in face of the horror before us . . .
So, I thank you again. And again, I don’t say that facetiously. Your energetic, even witty, negativity adds a dollop of trouble to a book that wears its troubles on its sleeve—much like another work I’ve had a relation to, though not as its Author: the Araki Yasusada writings, the second book of which is to appear any day now. It’s a bit strange, at least to me, that I’ve begun jotting down these thoughts on August 6th, Hiroshima Day.
Kent
* Ammiel Alcalay posted a comment to Jim Behrle’s blog on August 7th, stating the following: “I found your review of Kent’s book depressing and distressing. What makes you think I didn’t write the blurb?” Behrle wrote back, expressing skepticism, still, that Alcalay really had. Later, Behrle revised the relevant passage of his review, apparently accepting, at last, Alcalay’s insistence that the blurb had been freely written by himself.
~
To work.
