~
Mad scramble of days continue under sheer weather: a lithesome white light and hint of a chill. One day will see the “end of poetics” and th’unleashing of the dogs of fury into other, more pertinent realms. One does hope. Then the miscellaneous missiles’ll fly, then the scorn begins . . . It’s a tawdry, made-up time.
§
A POETICS—13
4
Jameson’s practice of pastiche is, as noted, “devoid of laughter.” To consider the reason, it is necessary to read Jameson’s reading of two texts: Vincent Van Gogh’s Paar Bauernschuhe (Peasant Shoes) and Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes. Jameson’s argument depends both on a separation of form and content in each instance, and on a subsequent reading that essentially discards the former in its determination, variously, to savor or debunk the latter. Indeed, Jameson goes so far as to suggest that Van Gogh’s work is “somehow a response” to an “initial situation,” to an “initial content,” to “initial raw materials”—all of which Jameson—in an out-Marxing Marx maneuver—in a rhetorical burst describes “simply as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state.” One longs to ask of Jameson: what about canvas? what about paint? But Jameson clearly sees form as an afterthought, content’s accessory—here he reads what he calls “the most glorious materialization of pure colour in oil paint” as “a Utopian gesture,” and as “an act of compensation.” Form takes part, oddly enough for Jameson, in a “division of labor.”
Eager to debunk the “postmodern” Warhol painting Diamond Dust Shoes (admitting that he is “tempted to say it does not really speak to us at all”), Jameson again, deftly, separates form and content in reading the painting. First, he locates the painting not as a “copiously reproduced image” (as he did the Van Gogh, implying a kind of universal availability, an object speaking for and to the masses), but as a work available only “at the turning of a museum corridor or gallery.” Here the shoes (“on the level of content”) are “fetishes . . . a random collection of dead objects, hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips.” (The agricultural metaphor is sadly out of place, recalling more precisely Van Gogh’s shoes.) Jameson: “There is in Warhol no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture, and to restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context . . . the world of jetset fashion or of glamour magazines.” When Jameson finally gets around to noticing form in the Warhol work, he can see only “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense,” and in “the glitter of gold dust . . . which seals the surface of the painting,” only “gratuitous frivolity,” evidence of the “waning of affect.” What Jameson is refusing to see, of course, is Warhol’s formal and ironic troubling of the notion of commodity fetishism. Warhol is playfully quoting the shoe drawings he himself did in early career as a commercial illustrator. Painting, he is in painting, painting painting. One could argue that the “larger lived context” that is restored by the painting is the play of the image-process itself—how a text’s desire to represent the object world wars constantly and inevitably with its own ineffable textuality, how a text is, in Saussurean terms, both signified and signifier, how—as Jacques Derrida notes—“il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” What Jameson fails to see is how—as Eco puts it in The Open Work—art’s “main way of speaking is as form”: “the real content of a work is the vision of the world expressed in its way of forming (modo di formare). Any analysis of the relationship between art and the world will have to take place at this level.”
Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes does not “speak innocently”; as Eco puts it in the Postscript: it accepts “the challenge of the past, of the already said.” But through irony, laughter (what could be more ironic than gold dust itself, sign of the meretricious, the “made-up,” so obviously “false” in the context, not paint made to look like glitter, but the material glitter itself?) it critiques both the world of glamour as image, and the image as glamour. Jameson is taking the game of postmodernism seriously indeed, without understanding it, and suffering, as it appears he does, from a peculiar nostalgia for some imaginary lost innocence. Jameson laments the “waning of the great high modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysteries of durée and of memory” and—in the essay’s numerous rhetorical flourishes—seems to long for a gone time of “real history”—of class-struggle and radical politics, history unsullied by “omnipresent, omnivorous and well-nigh libidinal historicism,” back before “the disappearance of the historical referent.” Jameson’s main problem lies in an inability to read form as “revelation” (the word is Denise Levertov’s) of content, its “main way of speaking.” Because Jameson insists on the separation of inside and outside, on form acting as content’s outer (invisible) garment—he writes: “the very concept of expression presupposes indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and the outside”—, he cannot see in the postmodernist emphasis on textuality anything but a denigration and discarding of the world and history. However, as Linda Hutcheon argues in A Poetics of Postmodernism: “The view that postmodernism relegates history to [obsolescence] is simply wrong. History is not made obsolete: it is, however, being rethought—as a human construct . . . [I]n arguing that history does not exist except as text, it [postmodernism] does not . . . deny that the past existed, but only that its accessibility to us now is entirely conditioned by textuality.”
5
In Postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, speaking of Max Ernst’s collages, notes that “they can be read as fantastic stories, as the telling of dreams, without any awareness that they amount to a discussion of the nature of engraving, and perhaps even of collage.” If postmodernism is a way of reading, as Eco’s remark suggests, is every text (somehow) plausibly postmodern? Eco admits that “in the same artist the modern moment and the postmodern moment can coexist, or alternate, or follow each other closely.” If “irony, metalinguistic play, enunciation squared” is central to postmodernism, can one not also—besides taking the ironic seriously as Jameson does—take the serious ironically? It is here, I think, that Eco’s own writings about “the open work” in the volume so titled propose (provisionally) some “ways of operating” in the mess and morass, that contradictory field of reading the postmodern. Some features of texts do encourage particular (postmodern) readings, it seems, whilst others act to hinder such readings. My argument is that in the works of a loose grouping of (mostly) poets and painters in New York in the 1950s, those “open work” features begin to evolve into what later becomes the dominant cultural aesthetic of postmodernism.
In The Open Work, Eco is quick to recognize that “a work of art is never really ‘closed,’ because even the most definitive exterior always encloses an infinity of possible readings.” He makes a number of important distinctions though, between conventional works of art and the opera aperta. Briefly, those distinctions include notions of univocality versus plurivocality; of increased “information” (and attendant ambiguity) as a product of the way new forms contravene traditional conventions of expression; of a shift in the relationship between artist and public, one requiring of the public (reader, viewer, listener) a greater degree of collaboration with the artist via the work; and of “serial thought” (a term and idea he borrows from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “Ouverture” to The Raw and the Cooked) and the ways it leads to self-reflexivity, polyvalence, and an ongoing (process-oriented) identification and transformation of historical codes in lieu of any insistent search for origin or foundation.
Eco’s concern is aesthetic value and its resultant pleasure, the “condition” of which, he argues, is “openness.” As such, of necessity, he must argue for artistic intentionality in the open work: “openness is intentional, explicit, and extreme—that is, based not merely on the nature of the aesthetic object and on its composition but on the very elements that are combined in it.” It is (at least partially) by means of such maneuvers that Eco is able to separate the “openness” of conventional works from that of the opera aperta. It is also through claiming for the open work “organic form.” Eco: “The open work assumes the task of giving us an image of discontinuity. It does not narrate it; it is it.” And elsewhere:
Th[e] tendency toward disorder, characteristic of the poetics of
openness, must be understood as a tendency toward controlled
disorder . . . toward a freedom that is constantly curtailed by
the germ of formativity present in any form that wants to remain
open.
And still elsewhere Eco argues:
[R]ather than submit to the “openness” as an inescapable element
of artistic interpretation, [the artist] subsumes it into a positive
aspect of his production, recasting the work so as to expose it to
the maximum possible “opening.”
Several things begin to coalesce here. “Pure formativity”—as Eco says elsewhere—relates to “the concept of form as organism” and must be “read in the fading light of the eternal opposition between form and content and form and matter.” What Eco seems to be suggesting then is that artistic intention is manifested in the open work’s organic form, that it is there—in form—that intention is read. This leads one to a problem noted by David Robey (in the introduction to The Open Work). It is that “in [Eco’s] view . . . the intention implicit in a work must be the determining factor in its interpretation.” We are, perhaps, back to Eco’s concern in the Postscript regarding “the quality (the risk) of irony”: how does one insure a reading of openness as intention, (“explicit, and extreme”) rather than as simply unintentional (clumsy, non-“artistic”) disorder, randomness, loss of control? Or how does one pursue and maintain a “way of forming” (a performance, a process, an openness) dependent on intentionality, implicit within which is an individual subjectivity along with accompanying conventional concepts of aesthetic originality and inevitable textual limitation and closure? Isn’t it the case that by identifying the “open work” as particular to postmodernism one is liable to relapse into a new brand of certainty—that of perpetual uncertainty, indeterminacy, rupture? It is necessary here to consider some examples of the “open work” itself.
6
Some statements to begin.
In a symposium titled “What Abstract Art Means to Me” (excerpted in Herschel B. Chipp’s Theories of Modern Art) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1951, Robert Motherwell says:
One of the most striking of abstract art’s appearance [sic] is
her nakedness, an art stripped bare. How many rejections on the
part of her artists! Whole worlds—the world of objects, the world
of power and propaganda, the world of anecdotes, the world of
fetishes and ancestor worship . . . [A]bstract artists don’t like any-
thing but the act of painting . . . [A]bstract art is stripped bare of
other things in order to intensify it, its rhythms, spatial intervals,
and color structure. Abstraction is a process of emphasis, and
emphasis vivifies life, as A. N. Whitehead said.
In John Cage’s Silence is reproduced an article titled “Experimental Music: Doctrine” which first appeared in 1955. Therein he writes:
A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another
sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration—
it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has
died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness,
its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these
and of itself.
Susan Sontag, in the 1964 essay “Against Interpretation” (in the book of that title):
Abstract painting is the attempt to have, in the ordinary sense, no
content; since there is no content, there can be no interpretation. Pop
Art works by the opposite means to the same result; using a content
so blatant, so “what it is,” it, too, ends by being uninterpretable . . .
Ideally, it is possible [to make] works of art whose surface is so
unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is
so direct that the work can be . . . just what it is. (The second
ellipsis is Sontag’s.)
And Frank O’Hara in “[Notes on Second Avenue]”—Second Avenue being a long experimental poem O’Hara wrote in 1953 (first published in its entirety in 1960):
[T]he remarks are explanatory of what I now feel my attitude was
toward the material, not explanatory of the meaning which I don’t
think can be paraphrased (or at least I hope it can’t) . . . [T]he
verbal elements . . . are intended consciously to keep the surface
of the poem high and dry, not wet, reflective and self-conscious.
Perhaps the obscurity comes in here, in the relationship between
the surface and the meaning, but I like it that way since the one is
the other (you have to use words) and I hope the poem to be the
subject, not just about it.
I put these rather lengthy statements together in order to suggest the emergence in a brief period of time (roughly the decade of the 1950s) and in a number of arts (and criticism) of some singular (though paradoxical) concerns pertinent to what comes to be called postmodernism. One is the notion of art as process—Motherwell’s “act of painting”; Cage’s “performance of [sound’s] characteristics”; Sontag’s “momentum”; O’Hara’s “attitude”—a kind of tendency, or motion—toward “material,” an interaction. One is a notion of form, a new emphasis on form (in its enactment) as content, with conventional content, reference “beyond” to Motherwell’s “world of objects,” denied (or, in the case of Pop Art, made so “blatant”—so much the form of a form—as to, it, too, resist reference). Here evidence is noted in Motherwell’s “art stripped bare”; in Cage’s “precise morphology . . . of itself”; in Sontag’s “no content”; and in O’Hara’s “unparaphraseable” “surface,” the poem itself as “subject” (and object). Another concern noted in the statements (though perhaps less explicitly) is that of the self-consciousness of the formal emphasis and how that predicates a self-conscious art object, one that is both “what it is” and “knows” it, primarily through “knowing” its art-historical place. As Harold Rosenberg describes it, such an art object is “anxious.” In The Anxious Object (1964) he declares: “Consciousness of art history rules the art of our time . . . It affects not only the objective status of new works, the conditions under which they are valued and acquired, but the impulses that enter into their creation, their esthetic meaning, in fact, their very existence as works of art.” Here, clearly, is a paradox—one of several that make of postmodernism the rather unstable, conditional, non-totalizing thing it is. The paradox is obvious in O’Hara’s statement on Second Avenue: in the conscious intent to make a “surface” object—something autonomous—rather than something “reflective, and self-conscious.” How is it possible to reconcile such opposing claims for the “conscious”? It may be here that O’Hara is caught looking “back” to modernism’s autonomous object at the same time he looks “forward” to the postmodern “self-conscious” text.
In a 1954 essay, “Nature and New Painting” (in Standing Still and Walking in New York), O’Hara tangles with the issues of self-consciousness in art. O’Hara begins with the argument that “Great art . . . is seldom about art, though frequently its insights are so compelling and so pervasive they can be applied to art as well as to their subject” and proceeds to note that “from the impressionists through the cubists to the present, art has been involved with nature.” However, O’Hara then goes on to call attention to another kind of art, that “which looks to be about nature but is lacking in perceptions of it.” Here is where a number of (subsequently) postmodern concerns get spelled out in O’Hara’s thinking. In the new kind of art, the artist “utilizes his visual experience for subject matter, but his experience is the subject, nature is not, and therefore the structure we observe is that of his experience rather than of what he has experienced.” This equating of “structure” and “experience” is akin to the process-orientation of the open work. As O’Hara later notes—“the artist is of necessity present” as “narrator,” as “medium,” to the “violence” of experience itself. That experience-as-structure tends toward fiction—toward, that is, less a representation of the object world (nature) than toward our ongoing storied identifications with that world (art)—is implied in that “narrator.” O’Hara says that in the abstractions of Willem de Kooning “we perceive structures of classical severity: the implacable identifications of man with nature. This is not symbolized. It is painted . . . [De Kooning’s] great Excavation shows us what we do to the earth just as his Woman shows us what we do to women.” What is painted (shown) is not, it is important to note, “earth” or “women,” but the structures (“classical,” “severe”), the “symbolizations” we have previously made of them. This is akin to Eco’s twice-removed “already said”—de Kooning’s paintings thus becoming investigations of history and its codes of representation in a move reminiscent of Eco’s art of “serial thought.”
The problem, of course, lies in O’Hara’s insistence that the work “is not symbolized,” but “painted.” O’Hara’s “[Notes on Second Avenue]” longing “to keep the surface of the poem high and dry” is here translated into “painting”—into de Kooning’s work’s desire to eschew reference, to reduce itself to object status. What Susan Sontag calls the “curse of mediacy”—the inevitable insertion (presence) of particular value, truth, reference into any created (constructed) work is pertinent here. We have just seen how de Kooning’s paintings—even in putting into question prior art-historical codes—nevertheless assert a new code, that recognition (and critique) of the “already said.” This is, certainly, one of the major stumbling blocks to any “definition” of postmodernism, or to any final claim that “here is a postmodernist work.” (Even that statement—with that totalizing “certainly”—asserts a code, ends the endless paradox of the postmodern, its ongoing “open” process of putting all codes into question.) The problematic of any narrative—always mediated by a provisional “self”—of postmodernism has been noted by a number of commentators. As Hutcheon asks: “From what position can one “theorize” (even self-consciously) a disparate, contradictory, multivalent, current cultural phenomenon”? The infinite regress of the “master narrative” whose claim is for the necessity of a thorough and systematic incredulity as regards the veracity of the “master narrative” (see Jean-François Lyotard) is always in danger of becoming the order of the day. Hutcheon’s answer to her own question is not entirely satisfactory. She suggests that it is self-conscious questioning that prevents the “open” postmodern text (or theory) from assuming the status of the meta-narrative. Hutcheon:
[Postmodern theorists] seem to imply that any knowledge cannot
escape complicity with some meta-narrative, with the fictions that
render possible any claim to “truth,” however provisional. What
they add, however, is that no narrative can be a natural “master”
narrative: there are no natural hierarchies; there are only those we
construct. It is this kind of self-implicating questioning that should
allow postmodernist theorizing to challenge narratives that do
presume to “master” status, without necessarily assuming that
status for itself.
7
In a somewhat different maneuver, one that seems to bear directly on O’Hara’s work (and on that of a number of “postmodern” artists of the 1950s), Roland Barthes (in Roland Barthes) proposes another solution to the problem. Barthes, ever the etymologist (he is kin to Heidegger here, another poet-philosopher of the radical logic of words), identifies postmodernism’s paradox within the word paradox itself: “a Doxa (a popular opinion) is posited, intolerable; to free myself of it, I postulate a paradox; then this paradox turns bad, becomes a new concretion, itself becomes a new Doxa, and I must seek further for a new paradox.” What follows then is a short history of Barthes’s own stops in a trajectory through the “Doxa / paradoxa”: the “demystification” of “the opacity of social relations” (Mythologies); “semiological science” with its “rational image-repertoire”; and “the texture of desire, the claims of the body,” which “is the Text, the theory of the Text.” It is here—where the desiring body becomes text—that Barthes’s (provisional) solution comes closest to O’Hara’s (and others’) poetics and practices. The “texture of desire” is always provisional, always changeable, just as the body is always plural (Barthes: “Le corps pluriel . . . ‘Which body? We have several.’”) Importantly, the effect of making the body the mediating measure for what Mutlu Konuk Blasing calls a “physiology of writing” is that that writing remains ever-transgressed, ever-immediate, and anti-heroic, constantly liable to rupture, shift, breakage, contradiction, evading the totalizing “death” of closure, or of removal (distance) from its own inhabited processes. Barthes: “my body is not a hero. The light, diffused character of pain or of pleasure . . . keeps the body from constituting itself as an alien, hallucinated site, seat of intense transgressions. . . [Pain and pleasure] are merely coenesthesias, whose function is to individuate my own body, without its being able to glorify itself with any danger: my body is theatrical to itself only to a mild degree.”
The body is what chastens (castus pure + -igare [fr. agere to drive, to act]) the self—pure action, movement, attention working to keep the self (and the writing) off balance, questioning, to keep the self (and its constructions) plural, indeterminate, not “boring” (“boredom” is O’Hara’s bête noire—he writes of the “esthetic athleticism” needed “to beat the bugaboos of banality and boredom” and when asked in an interview whether “it’s important to be new” replies “No, I think it’s very important not to be bored though”) rather than singular, monumental, concrete, “dead.” The “alien, hallucinated site” is the totalized self. In a curious untitled fragment written in 1953 (collected in Poems Retrieved), O’Hara sees the self as what escapes “into history . . . that punishment” (a kind of death, “facing blackness”) once it denies itself (bodily, the image is of a kind of auto-lobotomy) body-as-experience (the “infinite breaths” and “golden plains” of “my country,” the “intimacies”). Here is the poem:
My country, leafy and blue with infinite breaths,
somehow I shall escape into history, the valor of a heart
shall not refuse that punishment, I would burn
all characteristics, all intimacies, from a forehead
already too lofty; scoop out the golden plains, not
to feed the multitudes but to create vast sea beds
of the future, into which all mountains eventually must
relinquish their monuments, their thoughts of air.
Then, facing total blackness, I am at last my self.
There is, here, a recognition of the fate of the body-in-experience (and, one could argue, of the work-as-process, relinquishing its “thoughts of air”)—the fate of event becoming art, the body’s action stilled to self. In a letter in 1961 to Donald Allen wherein he talks about the process of writing the long poem “Biotherm (For Bill Berkson),” O’Hara again refers to “air,” here in terms of the “open”: “I don’t know anything about what it is or will be but am enjoying trying to keep going and seem to have something . . . I seem to have been able to keep it ‘open’ and so there are lots of possibilities, air and such.” In “[My Country, Leafy and Blue with Infinite Breaths]” there is also recognition of the limits to a poetic of pure action, of denying (through constant attention to the body-in-experience) the self any singular “self-ness.” (Barthes, too, in the same passage cited previously, recognizes the limits: “the Text [of “the claims of the body”] risks paralysis; it repeats itself, counterfeits itself in lusterless texts . . . tends to degenerate into prattle.” (Those “lusterless texts,” that “prattle” is evident, perhaps, in countless poems appearing today—poems of the present-tense “I” (self) attending to its surroundings and its memories, seemingly wholly ignorant of the “claims of the body” and its contradictory prerogatives . . .) There is some measure of relief in the final line of O’Hara’s poem—that “at last.” The positing and questioning of the “physiology of writing”—of constant motion, action, doing against death, or any stoppage that leads to “poetry” rather than “life” (as O’Hara notes in “[Statement for Paterson Society],” “it’s a pretty depressing day, you must admit, when you feel you relate more importantly to poetry than to life”)—appears regularly in O’Hara’s writings. Constant movement, change, doing—these are, perhaps, particularly American phenomena. (I think of Satchel [Leroy] Paige’s 1953 remark “Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.” Or I think of the Ralph Waldo Emerson of “Experience”—“We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them . . . our office is with moments.”) Also oddly American is the ever-threatening siren song of ordinary boredom, and the subsequent odd relief death—as an end to endless doing—presents. As such, it is no accident that O’Hara’s poem begins “My country” and toys with (subverts, processes) that country’s most inadequate and famous representations—the “golden plains” and monumental “mountains” recalling “amber waves of grain” and “purple mountains’ majesty.”
O’Hara strikes a range of attitudes toward the fate of the body-in-experience (and its writings). In “For the Chinese New Year & For Bill Berkson” he exhibits a defiant (rather modernist) rejection of history and an embrace of the “office” of the “moment” as being exactly what defers death:
no there is no precedent of history no history nobody came before
nobody will ever come before and nobody ever was that man
you will not die not knowing this is true this year
In “Five Poems” O’Hara offers a number of provisional selves in motion, a sense of endless possibility, no version preferred over another, but the defiance diminishes, the work of constant improvisation, of the self’s manic subversions of any unified “true” self, seems to be wearing O’Hara down and is questioned in the poem’s final line:
maybe I won’t go to sleep at all
and it’ll be a beautiful white night
or else I’ll collapse
completely from nerves and be calm
as a rug or a bottle of pills
or suddenly I’ll be off Montauk
swimming and loving it and not caring where
. . .
I seem to be defying fate, or am I avoiding it?
In “Memoir of Sergei O. . . .” the two final lines seem self-reflexive, referring to the “way of writing” of the poem itself. A kind of doubt, an American fatigue at what Harold Rosenberg in the book so titled calls “the tradition of the new” (“Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century”) seems to leak into O’Hara’s lines (spoken—oddly for O’Hara, who mostly avoids the dramatic monologue or the “persona poem,” though a welter of rather disembodied “other” voices invade some of the later “TV watching” poems—in the voice [admittedly tongue-in-cheek, parodic] of an “other,” that of the Russian émigré Sergei O. . . .):
where am I what is it
I can’t even find a pond small enough
to drown in without being ostentatious
you are ruining your awful country and me
it is not new to do this it is terribly
democratic and ordinary and tired
Finally, in “Rhapsody” the door to a building located at “515 Madison Avenue” (or, as Bill Berkson reports “‘off’ Madison on 53rd,” something “Frank would have passed . . . every day to and from the Museum” [of Modern Art, where he worked]) is the starting point to an “action poem” that blends fantasy (“your marble is bronze and your lianas elevator cables”) and a kind of empirical reportage (“I am getting into a cab at 9th Street and 1st Avenue / and the Negro driver tells me about a $120 apartment”) at high velocity so that the result is what Charles Altieri calls a “landscape without depth,” presence “demystified [and] stripped of [its] ontological vestments.” As Altieri notes: “if the present is without depth, whatever vital qualities it has depend entirely on the energies and capacities of the consciousness encountering it . . . [and] value depends entirely on the vitality with which one engages his experiences.” It is also important to note in this context the lack of hierarchy in the details of “Rhapsody”—as O’Hara himself puts it in the poem: “you know all about these things / as indifferent as an encyclopedia.” The “fantasy” lines engage as do the “reportage” lines and even the “look” of the poem (blocky stanzas, lines of similar, rather long, length except for one—“I would join”) suggests an indifference to prioritizing any one facet of experience over another. Experience of the moment is all; the reckoning of it leads no further than to Sontag’s “what it is,” not to transcendence, epiphany, clarity, or beauty. As O’Hara admits in “[Statement for The New American Poetry]”:
I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it . . . What
is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try
to avoid, goes into my poems. I don’t think my experiences are
clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else; they are just
there in whatever form I can find them.
Altieri also links O’Hara’s sense of “demystified,” “depthless” presence to the city—New York: “City details . . . have neither meaning, hierarchy, nor purpose not created absolutely by man.”
“Rhapsody” ends (in a gesture recalling that single, short, emphasized line “I would join”) with O’Hara’s “joining” of the fantastic and empirical gestures (“the Niger joins the Gulf of Guinea near the Menemsha Bar / that is what you learn in the early morning passing Madison Avenue”) and asserting that he “always want[s] to be near” light, “lying in a hammock on St. Mark’s Place sorting my poems / in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island.” Two lines later he ends: “I historically / belong to the enormous bliss of American death.” It seems pertinent that the final declaration follows so quickly after the image of “sorting my poems,” those “things made.” The “bliss” here comes in the form of a reprieve: the anxiety of continual process, of the “claims of the body,” of the “physiology of writing,” of the surface kept “high and dry,” of the self consciously reflecting on itself (in “Essay on Style” O’Hara says “I was reflecting the other night meaning / I was being reflected upon”) is always in danger of “winning out” in the open work; as such, every poem must needs end in death, and only poetry continues. (I think of “The Day Lady Died” where a multitude of little deaths occur in the final “Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.” There is O’Hara’s “death” (in the “present”) in the Ziegfeld Theatre tobacconist’s on seeing Billie Holiday’s face on front of the New York Post; O’Hara’s (in the “past”) in the 5 Spot on hearing Holiday whisper that “song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldron”; Mal Waldron’s (and everyone’s) on hearing Holiday at that moment; O’Hara’s (and the poem’s) “death” in the act of ending the poem (also in “Essay on Style”: treating / the typewriter as an intimate organ why not? / nothing else is (intimate)”); and the reader’s “death” in completing a reading of it. The problem of action becoming art (what it seeks to defy) seems irremediable. As Harold Rosenberg puts it in the “Preface to the Second Edition” of The Tradition of the New:
The Action Painter . . . may not intend . . .to produce an art object
but “to abolish art” in favor of the meaningful gesture. Painting,
however, is in the “realm” of things made, not of deeds done; and
art wins against the painter by changing his “act” back into a picture.
8
Back to Barthes. What exactly is this thing I am calling the “body-in-experience” and how does it become text? How does the “body-in-experience” deny or avoid a unified “self”? Where is such a stance made manifest in O’Hara’s (and others’) works? In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes speaks of “that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do.” Barthes also declares that “the pleasure of the text . . . can say: never apologize, never explain. It never denies anything: ‘I shall look away, that will henceforth be my sole negation.”
In a famous 1947 statement (quoted in O’Hara’s Art Chronicles) Jackson Pollock, explaining why he works with unstretched canvas that he nails to the floor, says it is so he can “literally be in the painting”:
When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing . . .
I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc.,
because the painting has a life of its own. . . It is only when I
lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess.
And O’Hara himself notes that in Pollock’s “all-over ‘drip’ paintings of 1948-50 . . . the scale of the painting became that of the painter’s body, not the image of a body.” He adds that on the “canvas surface . . . the physical energies of the artist operate in actual detail . . . ; the action . . . traces its marks . . . with no reference to exterior image or environment.” In an interview (in Standing Still and Walking in New York) O’Hara makes it clear that he sees a possibility for a poetry that enacts the same “claims of the body” as text. O’Hara: “measure . . . comes from the breath of the person just as a stroke of paint comes from the wrist and hand and arm and shoulder and all that of the painter . . . certain poets have been very much inspired by American painting . . . in the ambition . . . to be the work yourself.” (The lines recall Charles Olson’s emphasis on “breath” in “Projective Verse.” In the same interview, however, O’Hara distances himself somewhat from Olson, calling him a “great spirit” but rejecting the [modernist] heroics of Olson’s project: “I don’t think that he is willing to be as delicate as his sensibility may be emotionally and he’s extremely conscious of the Pound heritage and of saying the important utterance, which one cannot always summon up and indeed is not particularly desirable most of the time.”)
There are numerous manifestations in O’Hara’s work of what could be labeled a poetics of the body—including, most famously, the admonition in “Personism: A Manifesto” that “You go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street you don’t turn around and shout ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’” The aim is not “thoughts,” but moments of experience—“light,” “presence” and “clarity,” the seemingly “chemical” interaction of the body “breathing” in the world. In a short poem titled “Poem” O’Hara begins—“Light /// clarity /// avocado salad in the morning”—and ends:
mere presence
changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper
and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement
I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing
(A similar gesture is evident in lines that appear twice in the Collected Poems, once as a poem titled “Poem,” once as epigram to a poem titled “Two Variations”:
Suddenly that body appears: in my smoke
while someone’s heavily describing Greece,
that famous monotonous line feels white
against the tensile gloom of life
and I seem intimate with what I merely touch.
Here the body, like smoke, insinuates its presence against “someone’s heavily describing,” against, too, “tensile gloom.” The body’s appearance seems to be associated with writing, with the “line,” “white,” revivifying life itself, allowing presence in the form of “touch.”)
Marjorie Perloff, in Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, the first book-length study of O’Hara’s work, refers to O’Hara’s “aesthetic of attention.” Here we return to Barthes’s formulation that the “sole negation” consists in looking “away.” O’Hara’s references to “attention” are numerous. Bill Berkson quotes O’Hara regarding David Smith’s sculptures (O’Hara talked about Smith’s work for a National Educational Television Association broadcast in 1964):
[The sculptures] present a total attention and they are telling you
that that is the way to be. On guard. In a sense they are benign,
because they offer themselves for your pleasure. But beneath that
kindness is a warning: don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial
and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.
In “Meditations in an Emergency,” O’Hara writes: “it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things.” (Note the “in” of the title—like Pollock’s “in”—as opposed to the more conventional “Meditations on . . .” The point is not Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquillity” but Pollock’s “contact,” immediacy, experience rather than the interpretation of it, the processes of the here and now, which, like O’Hara’s eyes in the poem, “change all the time [and] are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal.”)
Other O’Hara-esque attentions to “attention.” In “Nature and New Painting” O’Hara writes of art’s demand for a “poise” (on the part of the artist) of “the most gigantic energies,” a “poise” that is “the passionate attention of natural forces.” And he notes that such attention means a “turning away from styles whose perceptions and knowledge are not their own occasion.” In a review of John Ashbery’s Some Trees written in 1957 for Poetry, O’Hara again calls for attention and process rather than the “looking away” of interpretation: “[Ashbery] attempts to look deeply into the actual matter of natural events, rather . . . than risk an interpretation which might only be a comfortable means of looking away.” And in “Ode on Causality,” a poem evoking Pollock’s presence (at Pollock’s grave “a child, says running / away hand in hand ‘he isn’t under there, he’s out in the woods’”) and art (the line “make my lines thin as ice, then swell like pythons” recalling O’Hara’s own notice of Pollock’s “amazing ability to quicken a line by thinning it, to slow it by flooding, to elaborate . . . to change, to reinvigorate, to extend”), O’Hara makes attention a prehensile (bodily) thing, whilst admitting to the loneliness (to be so ever-changing) of the stance: “the bang of alertness, loneliness, position that prehends experience.”
The open work is “uncomfortable” and “lonely” precisely due to its insistence on constant attention. This is where Barthes’s dictum “never apologize, never explain” comes in. As Barthes notes, attention (in the form, here, of the reader’s attention) “abolishes . . . all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple discard of that old specter: logical contradiction; [it] mixes every language, even those said to be incompatible; [it] accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity.” (I realize that Barthes’s main argument in The Pleasure of the Text is to distinguish between the texts of “pleasure” and “of bliss”—the former consistent, unbroken, “linked to a comfortable practice of reading” and the latter “untenable,” impossible,”—“you cannot speak ‘on’ such a text, you can only speak ‘in’ it.” I am considering O’Hara’s works [in general] as exempla of texts “of bliss”—as I think O’Hara, using other terms, considers Ashbery’s, Pollock’s, and others’ works of the same place and period. Barthes’s emphasis is on the reading [as writing] of such texts. My emphasis is—using Barthes’s terms—more on the writing [as reading, as attention] of such texts.) In considering O’Hara’s “Digression on Number 1, 1948” (the title refers to a Pollock painting—as O’Hara says: “not about
sight . . . [but] about what we see, about what we can see”), Perloff notes: “Contradiction becomes the proper condition for ‘seeing.’ O’Hara’s poem itself is splendidly inconsistent—bearing quite nonchalantly the marks of Barthes’s “simple discard of that old specter: logical contradiction.” O’Hara:
I am ill today but I am not
too ill. I am not ill at all.
It is a perfect day, warm
for winter, cold for fall.
A fine day for seeing.
§
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Trout Farm
~
Morning with G.’s third grade class (and other classes) “fishing” at the Spring Valley Trout Farm. Oh dear.
§
A POETICS—12
A FAIR QUESTION
Given the constraints, the limitations, the “law” of syntax, why the insistence on grammaticality in “Futility and Caprice . . .” and in the majority of my poems? The poems often seem to nod in the direction of the dilemma—see, for example, in “Perfect Sentences”:
Sad flowers. Perfect flowers. Flowers thriving like flowers.
I insist the wreckage of the world is elsewhere, not here.
And all sentences are perfect, my murderers.
Or in “The South”:
I know only the weights of words
And some are always rolling into gaps
In the ground the figure that is the story “stands on”
So that nothing is no more than a grammar
And discrepancy begins with a pencil mark.
Or in “The Fort and Fortress of Our Certainty”:
Such flowers! Everything drops into
Place in a sequence, the starting
Pistol mistook for a call
To arms, spiky penmanship like ant-
Tracks recording the stingy transliterations of
A welter of music and grammar
Lashes us blind.
I don’t know the answer to the question. My sense of my own resistance to the project of the Language poets (I use the project as an example—the same could be claimed for work of Zurich Dadaists like Hugo Ball or Jean Arp that experiments with sound-poetry, or for Khlebnikov’s zaum or “transrational” poetry, or even for the manifestations of some of Jackson Mac Low’s systematic chance operations) is that, while the results, deviating as they do from usual (possibly banal) linguistic order, are useful in marking out boundaries, limits, those same results are liable both to offer finally only a new system with its own laws, as doggedly artificial and dogmatic as that (grammatical / syntactical) one the work attempts to avoid (the predictable unpredictability phenomenon), and, more importantly, by distancing themselves from the usual (used) linguistic order, those results (poems, writings) flirt with a state of entropy (what Umberto Eco, in The Open Work, calls “disorder to the highest degree, containing within itself all probabilities and none.”) This, of course, is somewhat contradictory: the poems result in a “new system” (ordering) that is “entropic” (disordering). A somewhat lengthy quotation of Eco’s argument may only exacerbate the contradictions:
All deviation from the most banal linguistic order entails a new
kind of organization, which can be considered as disorder
in relation to the previous organization, and as order in relation to
the parameters of the new discourse. But whereas classical
art violated the conventional order of language within well-
defined limits, contemporary art constantly challenges the
initial order by means of an extremely “improbable” form of
organization . . . by imposing a new linguistic system with
its own inner laws . . . [But] rather than imposing a new
system, contemporary art constantly oscillates between the
rejection of the traditional linguistic system and its preservation—
for if contemporary art imposed a totally new linguistic system,
then its discourse would cease to be communicable. The dialectic
between form and the possibility of multiple meanings,
which constitutes the very essence of the “open work,” takes place
in this oscillation.
“Within well-defined limits.” I question here first, whether those limits are available to us now as “well-defined” only as a result of our subsequent historical / cultural development (elsewhere in the volume, Eco notes culture’s way of “gobbling up the avant-garde”: “Emergency: that which was Other is [always] on the way to becoming the same”), and second, whether poetries like those of the Language poets refuse the counter-demands of “preservation” in the assault on the “traditional linguistic systems” and thus veer towards (approach asymtotically) an “incommunicability” or a “communicability” limited to one communication—that of Bernstein’s “polyentendres and polyrhythms” “suggest[ing] the continuous choices of interpretation that confronting the world involves.”
The idea of every poem’s being the site of an indeterminate condition, a wavering unascertainable grid full of blanks for the reader’s constitution (of poem, of self) is as depressing a prospect as the New Critical idea that every poem represents a dramatic situation and a speaker—both seem diminishments of the undertaking, and formulaic. The additional possible danger of such unrestrained demand for information overload, for “polyentente” (discord’s accord, unity in disunity) is the non-information, the “noise” of entropy. The fact is, the reason I keep pestering the project of the Language poets, and relating it in backhanded ways to the poetries of the New Criticism (and, less pointedly, to the project of the New Formalists, whose polemics call for the abandonment of free verse which, as Brad Leithauser claims “at the moment shows signs of exhaustion,” and a return to favor of “the breadth and vigor of the iambic line), is that I see all of these projects as suffering under the indefatigable binarisms of any too earnest, too serious, too dogmatic militancy. It may be in the nature of any oppositional practice to see, in its initial stages, a necessity for absolutes, for a dividing of the available poetries (in this case) into two monolithic camps—here the “contestatory” and the “accommodationist” (as, earlier, the “raw” and the “cooked”). Such dualisms mark turf and, traditionally, act to “heroicize” the struggle of the avant-garde. And when aesthetic concerns are linked to political projects (as they inevitably must be, if one attends to the notion that any conception of “reality” is always already a function of the language by [in] which one speaks [or writes] of it), then the projects take on all the unpleasant doctrinaire attributes of any two-party race.
The Language poets claim a cultural critique of, as Shetley notes, “bourgeois instrumentalist discourse,” and its limits by attempting to counter (as Ron Silliman notes) its “expository, descriptive and narrative capacities” (and its hegemony, linked to our “capitalist stage of development”) through an insistent, plotted, manmade, and procedural short-circuiting of its modes of discourse. The project is rooted in poststructuralist critical theory: compare the remark of Julia Kristeva—“Magic, shamanism, esoterism, the carnival, and ‘incomprehensible’ poetry all underscore the limits of socially useful discourse and attest to what it represses: the process that exceeds the subject and his communicative structures” (first emphasis added)—with the valorization (quoted in Shetley) of “‘Unreadability’—that which requires new readers and teaches new readings” (emphasis added) by Bruce Andrews.
Some problems. How does “artifice” (Bernstein’s preferred word), implying agency and self-consciousness on the part of the “author,” critique “the process that exceeds the subject”? If there’s no getting out of language, isn’t the more honorable solution that of Rimbaud, that deafening silence? How is it that, if every writing (due to the slipperiness of the signifier) overdetermines, generates a polysemous structure, goes (as Shetley notes) “polyvalent, disseminated, and decentered,” a project should arise attempting (through the conscious efforts of the poet) to enforce and exploit that overdetermination (always already there), as if in distrust of the reader’s ability to “get (with) the program”? What is the achievement of a constructed polysemy when, in fact, it is the quotidian state of affairs in most Western, particularly urbanized, late capitalist cultures—a bombardment of decontextualized signifiers, sounds of radios, shop-window advertising, street signs, TV remote control blips, neighbors’ voices (I think of the plaintive voice, the voice of a man under assault, losing control, in a song by some fadeaway rocker: “Signs, signs, everywhere’re signs . . . / Can’t you read the signs?”) And finally, what (remembering Eco’s linking of “all possibilities and none”) prevents an over-articulated, overdetermined polysemy from slipping into something like the noise called “white,” noise that is not “heard” at all? As Shetley notes: “much of the writing that goes under the “Language” rubric, may be looked at as all meaning or all randomness.” And continues: “the interesting area, and the area of genuine difficulty, lies between.”
~
BETWEEN
The area “between” is never a comfortable one. It smacks of compromise, of disengagement, of a refusal to belong in a culture where belonging is all. I think of Ashbery’s (in “Frank O’Hara’s Question”) comment on O’Hara’s
~
SOME NOTES ON FRANK O’HARA(’S “HISTORY” AND OTHER “HISTORIES”)
Frank O’Hara appears to have snuck up behind me unnoticed—that’s what “influential” figures do. I am reading now an untitled poem by one John Latta. The only reason I retain a copy of this poem—of scores written over the years of adolescent itchiness and suspense—is that it was published (in May 1969) in a high school literary and arts journal called Overtones. Curious to read: “running / toward the empty beach / to catch the sandpipers / and! fly / bumping along / against the porcelain ceiling / of sky.” The fifteen-year-old dream of flight and (ultimately) containment interests me less than the stylistic tic—the gulping intake of breath signaled by the exclamation point’s misplacement: that “and! fly.” “Tic” because I see the same mannerism in another poem printed in the same pages: “waiting / for the smooth stones on the road / to sprout under / the glare / of the head / lights / and! grow / to craggy / shadows.” There is evidence here of the jejune mannerist imitations of a boy trying on one of somebody else’s hats, most likely a grownup’s.
~
That “grownup” could only have been Frank O’Hara—born 1926, died 1966. In “How Roses Get Black” one can see the borrowed headgear, the wholly idiosyncratic and mannerist use of the exclamation point: “First you took Arthur’s porcelain / pony from the mantel and! dashed / it against the radiator!” (The mention here, too, of “porcelain” is curious. Though the line serves perfectly to illustrate the “source” of my own early idiosyncratic punctuation, this particular poem, though written by O’Hara in Cambridge in 1948, was apparently not published until its inclusion—as “earliest” poem—in O’Hara’s Collected Poems in 1971. Is it possible that the “source” for both uses lies elsewhere? e. e. cummings would be a prime candidate. I remember reading cummings’s poems as an adolescent [like everybody else], but I don’t remember being particularly attracted to them.) Many of O’Hara’s early poems combine the dream displacements of Surrealism, the lists of objects of “everyday” life (not the usual paraphernalia of poetry, so far as I had noticed), and a sort of campy hurry and delight—that manufactured (and so, not entirely “sincere”) breathlessness that an overloading of exclamations can produce. Here’s a short example—a poem entitled “Today”:
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
~
I am writing this in an attempt to divulge (to myself, to others) the nature of the invasions called “influence.” That’s one reason. Why has Frank O’Hara’s poetry stuck so persistently to my own scribblings? (And there is the temporarily unlocatable line—O’Hara’s, I think, about something like “leaning up against a tree so long you got stuck to it.” The poem ends: “that kind of love is terrible.”) Why is there such obvious mendicancy to “influence”? Don Byrd said to me one day something like this: “I don’t believe anybody can point to one person and say ‘There’s the influence’” and I agreed, but O’Hara appears (after all these years) a little like family—the way family begs for our attentions, even when we (and it) hardly recognize the fact that it is doing so. I find it curious (and vaguely alarming) to be turning (back, as it were) to O’Hara more than twenty years after I first encountered him and maybe ten years after I thought I had discarded him—if “discarded” can describe a movement wherein a “voice” emerges as one’s “own.” (I know, the questions of “voice” and “own” are “vexed” in the loud intertextual noise that keeps us all awake nights in the present “period,” but I would maintain some imitations are more identifiable than others . . .) Did a voice emerge? (I have a note from Barry Silesky, editor of Another Chicago Magazine, rejecting a poem of mine written circa 1984. The note, referring to a line in my “A Letter Beginning with O Thirty,” reads in part: “‘First name, Inger’ rings too straight from O’Hara.” And he is right, though I had never noticed it. Straight out of “The Day Lady Died,” something about the bank teller “Miss Stillwagon,” “first name Linda,” who doesn’t look up O’Hara’s “balance” on that particular day.) Perhaps I am merely preparing myself here for an act of final “misreading” of O’Hara—that “act of creative correction” Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence labels “poetic influence.” He also calls it “self-saving caricature,” “distortion,” and “perverse, wilful revisionism.” Let’s say it like this: I am writing this in an attempt to trace the untraceable history of a poetic trajectory—those motions that have brought me to this brink of reassessment: I am re-reading O’Hara now against the taut scrim of postmodernism (that has been lowered, mostly, since O’Hara’s death). I want to argue that O’Hara is a liminal figure, a Janus whose faces look both somewhat yearningly back to modernism (and beyond, to Romanticism) and bravely forward to postmodernism.
~
GOTHAM POSTMODERN: FRANK O’HARA AND OTHERS OF THE NEW YORK SCHOOL
1
Postmodernism in American poetry seems recently to have found its niche, a rather large one it turns out, filling nearly seven hundred pages of its own “Norton anthology” (in Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry), surely indicating the arrival of something, even if nobody appears able to agree what that big, bumbling, reckless, blundering, and slippery beast is, or how exactly it relates to its namesake, that equally troublesome visitor (who stays and stays) called modernism. I think of Frank O’Hara’s characterization of Larry Rivers’s entry into the “scene” (the New York “art world,” circa, roughly, 1950-1952) “rather like a demented telephone. Nobody knew whether they wanted it in the library, the kitchen, or the toilet, but it was electric.” Or I think of John Ashbery’s characterization of Jackson Pollock’s drip-paintings: “a gamble against terrific odds.” Ashbery continues (in Reported Sightings): “Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing.” Mercurial, unassignable, unplaced because unplaceable, uncertain, foundering and anti-foundational, gambled, experimental—all terms that could apply to the postmodern moment and to the widely differing claims made in various attempts to describe that moment, that movement, or that “way.” For it may be that what postmodernism is, finally, is less an historical period, less an artistic or aesthetic credo, than a means of proceeding, a verb where no noun suffices, process seeking defiantly to avoid the (seemingly inevitable) lapse into product. Hoover himself, in the introduction to the volume at hand (an anthology that includes writers of such wildly contrary works as Russell Edson’s allegorical, fabulist prose poems; as David Antin’s improvisatory, speech-based “poem-talks”; as Jackson Mac Low’s “nonintentional,” ego-avoiding, systematic-chance compositions; as Allen Ginsberg’s “spontaneous bop prosody”—out of Jack Kerouac—and “first thought best thought” single breath unit lineations, inspirations; as Susan Howe’s Jack Spicer-inspired opening of the self through attention to “what’s coming through,” an attentiveness turned mostly to the effects of reading, in particular, various New England histories in order “to transform the archive and chronicle into . . . elusive, elliptical . . . deeply personal drama”; as Kenneth Koch’s comic lyrics and epic comedies wherein popular culture is apt to encounter the ottava rima; as Charles Bernstein’s “anti-absorptive” constructions that aim to enact the predicaments of the self captive in language, and constituted by it, as well as to compel the reader to meaning-constituting activity; as Wanda Coleman’s direct and profane Charles Bukowski-inspired critiques of class, race, and gender relations) offers a number of possible areas and concerns and definitions of postmodernism and its poetics.
In the interest of mapping the ground, that landscape into which I intend to insert Frank O’Hara and other New York School figures, I need to put down in the too-shifting sands some markers. One difficulty is this: due to the proposed nature of the markers themselves (“word-ed,” and so, untrustworthy), the positing of any kind of stability, anything a surveyor’s level might bring into focus, becomes problematic. The terrain moves because the instruments move and whatever can be represented can be so only in glimpses, momentary stop-action constructions that fictionalize the ongoing, constant “play” of the terrain itself. “Postmodernism” continually seeks its referent and locates it everywhere and nowhere, thus enacting one of the most noticeable impulses marking the “movement” itself.
In (merely) the first couple of pages of the introduction to Postmodern American Poetry, Hoover points to a splendid variety of postmodernisms. One is a new emphasis on the work of art as the simple (or complex) trace of an ongoing, open, provisional, incomplete, changeable and changing process (that “of living”), and the concomitant rejection of the idea of the work as product—closed, final, total, transcendent. Hoover notes Charles Olson’s early use of the term “postmodern” (in a letter to Robert Creeley) as questioning “the value of historical relics,” what Olson rejects as “so much trash of discourse, & gods.” Such a rejection of that “trash”—which, alongside “relics,” points to Olson’s adamant refusal of product (what “discourse, & gods” make) in favor, perhaps, of process—Hoover associates with “mainstream culture and the narcissism, sentimentality, and self-expressiveness of its life in writing.” The implication is that writing as expression, as a mirroring (of self, of culture) becomes merely “so much trash” of that culture, a product inseparable and indistinguishable from it, an ineffectual sentimental burden.
In opposition to that “mainstream” writing, Hoover points to “postmodernism” as a term synonymous with “the avant-garde,” or with “experimental” practices: he makes the blunt claim, in fact, that “postmodernist poetry is the avant-garde poetry of our time.” The claim, though, becomes unworkable—too encompassing, lacking the most undemanding kind of rigor—when put next to a number of conflicting definitions of the postmodern that Hoover offers. He admits both that it has “come to be considered a reigning style” and that “as used here, ‘postmodern’ means the historical period following World War II.” The situation is vexing and Hoover’s confusion is an index of it. How can “the avant-garde” function as a “reigning style” (echoes of “mainstream culture”) and characterize a whole “historical period” of nearly forty years, spanning the works of (at least) two generations of writers? Is there here—in Hoover’s tangles of seemingly contradictory definitions—evidence of an uncritical acceptance of the “new” (that modernist buzzword, that preferred word, too, of the apologists for the unceasing commodity “enhancement” and fetishism of late capitalist Western culture with its continual need to hawk “new, improved” products lest our attention and our spending waver, lest our buying habits falter, lest we realize our needs were sufficiently met, and that long ago)? Is there here, too, a refusal to examine how such an institutionalization of the avant-garde renders it ineffectual, mimicking as it does the very processes of “mainstream culture” in the course of becoming (inevitably, serially) subsumed by it? And finally, is there here a refusal to note remarkable differences amongst the aesthetics of the various postmodern poetries in the interest of maintaining an earnest and monolithic opposition to an ill-defined “normative” and “mainstream” ideology that may, itself, be encumbered, in useful ways, with internal aesthetic differences? My task here is not so much to criticize Hoover as it is to underline some of the contradictions of the postmodernist moment as preface to asserting that postmodernism must needs be conceived not as a “thing”—stable, knowable, and constant—but as a way of being or acting—changeable, uncertain, and ever aware of its momentary temporal and spatial configuration.
2
In Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger, whom Hoover mentions, noting briefly the “risk” of the avant-garde’s becoming “an institution with its own self protective rituals, powerless to trace or affect the curve of history,” details some inherent contradictions within the avant-garde. Bürger sees the historical avant-garde (early twentieth century movements, Dada and Surrealism) as responding to “the dominant characteristic of art in bourgeois society”—“its dissociation from the praxis of life”—by attempting “to organize a new life praxis from a basis in art.” However, the historical avant-garde’s attempt to close the gap between “art” and “life”—in a culture wherein “life” is defined largely in terms of what Bürger calls “the means-ends rationality of the bourgeois everyday”—can only end by participating in that rationality. As Bürger notes: “an art no longer distinct from the praxis of life but wholly absorbed in it will lose the capacity to criticize it.” Thus, Bürger’s argument, briefly, is that the historical avant-garde ends by “adopting an essential element” of nineteenth century Aestheticism—the “rejection of the world and its means-ends rationality” in favor of “l’art pour l’art,” a demand that the art object be self-sufficient, autonomous, an individual organism. The result is “dissociation” anew.
An additional difficulty in delineating an ongoing avant-garde practice lies in what Bürger calls the “culture industry” and its “commodity aesthetics that treat form as a mere enticement, designed to prompt purchasers to buy what they do not need.” Form equals product here, and new ways of forming—even those that mock the notion of product—are ever susceptible to being accepted as new products. Using the example of one of Marcel Duchamp’s famous “ready-mades,” “created” by adding the signature of an individual “artist” to a mass-produced object, Bürger notes:
Once the signed bottle drier has been accepted as an object that
deserves a place in a museum, the provocation no longer provokes;
it turns into its opposite. If an artist today signs a stove pipe and
exhibits it, that artist certainly does not denounce the art market
but adapts to it.
The opening and closing of the gap between “art” and “life” thus becomes the site of contradictory practices and an ongoing burdensome dialectic central to all avant-garde manifestations. That dialectic necessarily implies process, opposition, the “play” of ideas within a binary, the endless interactions with historical forces, and that Hegelian version of change in which an entity passes over into and is preserved and fulfilled by its opposite. As such, the avant-garde gesture is always reactive, always (as in a conversation) responding to something prior to itself. Any end to response (and ending is inevitable—the pencil stops moving, the paint can goes empty, the performance is over) can mean only sublation by the “culture industry” in an ever-accelerating willingness to embrace whatever provokes it, whatever is “new,” process gone to product, art to artifact. If high modernist avant-garde practices (the struggle to “make it new”) tend in all the arts to end in silence or cacophony—modes often indistinguishable, over-burgeoning noise going “white”—(Umberto Eco, in Postscript to The Name of the Rose, speaks of such practices as follows:
The avant-garde destroys, defaces the past . . . Then the avant-garde
goes further, destroys the figure, cancels it, arrives at the abstract,
the informal, the white canvas, the slashed canvas, the charred canvas.
In architecture and the visual arts, it will be the curtain wall, the building
as stele, pure parallelepiped, minimal art; in literature, the destruction
of the flow of discourse, the Burroughs-like collage, silence, the white
page; in music, the passage from atonality to noise to absolute silence)—,
it can only be a signal of an impasse: cannot the claim then be made that postmodernism attempts a sortie out of that impasse? That through a new emphasis on art as what Eco calls a “way of operating,” through a refusal to accept a too limiting call-and-response binarism that leads to silence in the face of history and, rather, makes of history a thing everywhere present and available always, and through a willingness to forego an endless succession of epistemological “truths”—always in need of repair and replacement—in favor of “depthless” (the word is Fredric Jameson’s) ontological gestures, surfaces that “quote” simulacra of knowledge, postmodernism rejects modernism’s end-product orientation whilst retaining evidence of that impasse in the mannerisms (deployed now with irony) of its “way of operating”? The argument contains its own contradictions. A postmodernism that is simply an ironic “take” on modernist tendencies re-enters the space of dialectic: what “conditions” it is the immediate past. As such it can only be seen as an extension of modernism, rather than as a “new” thing.
3
In the essay “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson points to the crux of one of the problems that troubles postmodernism. He asks: “does it [postmodernism] imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style- and fashion-changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation”? If modernism is the new, institutionalized, continual “change or break,” any succession to it is ever-defeated: modernism has become a “metahistorical category.” (It is interesting to note that Jameson—while arguing that “the two phenomena [modernism and postmodernism] . . . remain utterly distinct in . . . meaning and social function”—still lapses into the lingo of that “innovation” in discussing what one can detect in “the most interesting postmodern works.” Jameson: “This new mode of relationship through difference may sometimes be an achieved new and original way of thinking and perceiving; more often it takes the form of an impossible imperative to achieve that new mutation in what can perhaps no longer be called consciousness” [emphases added].)
If Jameson implies that modernism is a “metahistorical category,” Eco, in the Postscript, suggests that the term is more applicable to postmodernism. Eco’s remarks may help to clarify some of Hoover’s contradictions regarding postmodernism, though only at the expense, perhaps, of making the term itself (like its putative “projects”) a simulacrum, the image of an image, a code (Jameson: “modernist styles . . . become postmodernist codes”), something twice-removed, lacking any immediate “worldly” referent. Eco:
Postmodernism is a term bon à tout faire. I have the
impression that it is applied today to anything the user of the term
happens to like. Further, there seems to be an attempt to make it
increasingly retroactive. [Which, today, reminds me of Silliman’s
point’d slinging of the “post-avant” monicker, or worse, the “post-
avant avant la lettre” monicker, and, of course, its unfortunate
‘sucky’ opposite . . . JL]
I believe that postmodernism is not a trend to be chronologically
defined, but, rather, an ideal category—or, better still, a
Kunstwollen, a way of operating. We could say that every
period has its own postmodernism, just as every period would
have its own mannerism (and, in fact, I wonder if postmodernism
is not the modern name for mannerism as metahistorical
category).
Eco’s move here—pointing to postmodernism’s aperiodic, metahistorical nature, and linking postmodernism to mannerism, another style without a period—is apt. If one considers such various mannerist tendencies as an affected (that is, borrowed) style, and a reliance on the surface effects of ornamentation, artifice, ingeniousness, and rhetorical flourish, the connection may help us to define postmodernism. Indeed, Jameson’s attempt to characterize postmodernism features a number of notions seemingly applicable, too, to mannerism. Jameson notes “the waning of affect,” the “rise of aesthetic populism,” and the practice of “pastiche” or “blank parody” as—among others—features of postmodernist works. The “waning of affect”—in Jameson’s terms—seems akin, oddly enough, to the mannerist “affected style.” Jameson: “the waning of affect . . . means the end . . . of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal . . . This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings [what Jameson calls “intensities,” suggesting nodal clottings of already available, or “borrowed,” simulacra of feelings] . . . are now free-floating and impersonal.” And Jameson’s other features—“pastiche” and “aesthetic populism” (“the effacement . . . of the older . . . frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture”)—seem akin to mannerism’s non-historical presence, and to its use of historical styles as mere ornament. Jameson identifies pastiche, claiming it a “well-nigh universal practice today,” with “parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language.” And he adds that “it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter.”
Mannerism, however, is a problematical category in its own right—as sometime “neutral and chronological” art historical period (as Lowry Nelson, Jr. notes—“between Michelangelo and Rubens”), as sometime affected artistic style occurring in a number of different periods. Eco, rather than settling for identifying postmodernism as a metahistorical category similar to mannerism, posits a rupture with modernism—a loss of innocence that leads to a kind of constant, omnivorous ironizing—irony “squared,” as Eco says—in the form of a pact with the indestructible past. Eco:
The moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go
no further [“the white page,” “absolute silence”], because it has
produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impossible texts
(conceptual art). The postmodern reply to the modern consists
of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed,
because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with
irony, not innocently.
Eco’s example of a “postmodern attitude” is of a man who, realizing he cannot say “I love you madly” to a woman (because he knows romance-writer Barbara Cartland has already “said” it), says, rather, “As Barbara Cartland says, ‘I love you madly.’” Thus the past, hearsay, the “already said,” gets a nod and, as Eco notes, the woman “will have received a declaration of love all the same.” Eco’s version of postmodernism here—based essentially on the playful ironizing of prior forms and constructs—is a game. He speaks of “the game of irony,” of “metalinguistic play,” and notes that “with the modern, anyone who does not understand the game can only reject it, but with the postmodern, it is possible not to understand the game and yet to take it seriously. Which is, after all, the quality (the risk) of irony. There is always someone who takes ironic discourse seriously.” That “someone” could be Fredric Jameson.
§
Morning with G.’s third grade class (and other classes) “fishing” at the Spring Valley Trout Farm. Oh dear.
§
A POETICS—12
A FAIR QUESTION
Given the constraints, the limitations, the “law” of syntax, why the insistence on grammaticality in “Futility and Caprice . . .” and in the majority of my poems? The poems often seem to nod in the direction of the dilemma—see, for example, in “Perfect Sentences”:
Sad flowers. Perfect flowers. Flowers thriving like flowers.
I insist the wreckage of the world is elsewhere, not here.
And all sentences are perfect, my murderers.
Or in “The South”:
I know only the weights of words
And some are always rolling into gaps
In the ground the figure that is the story “stands on”
So that nothing is no more than a grammar
And discrepancy begins with a pencil mark.
Or in “The Fort and Fortress of Our Certainty”:
Such flowers! Everything drops into
Place in a sequence, the starting
Pistol mistook for a call
To arms, spiky penmanship like ant-
Tracks recording the stingy transliterations of
A welter of music and grammar
Lashes us blind.
I don’t know the answer to the question. My sense of my own resistance to the project of the Language poets (I use the project as an example—the same could be claimed for work of Zurich Dadaists like Hugo Ball or Jean Arp that experiments with sound-poetry, or for Khlebnikov’s zaum or “transrational” poetry, or even for the manifestations of some of Jackson Mac Low’s systematic chance operations) is that, while the results, deviating as they do from usual (possibly banal) linguistic order, are useful in marking out boundaries, limits, those same results are liable both to offer finally only a new system with its own laws, as doggedly artificial and dogmatic as that (grammatical / syntactical) one the work attempts to avoid (the predictable unpredictability phenomenon), and, more importantly, by distancing themselves from the usual (used) linguistic order, those results (poems, writings) flirt with a state of entropy (what Umberto Eco, in The Open Work, calls “disorder to the highest degree, containing within itself all probabilities and none.”) This, of course, is somewhat contradictory: the poems result in a “new system” (ordering) that is “entropic” (disordering). A somewhat lengthy quotation of Eco’s argument may only exacerbate the contradictions:
All deviation from the most banal linguistic order entails a new
kind of organization, which can be considered as disorder
in relation to the previous organization, and as order in relation to
the parameters of the new discourse. But whereas classical
art violated the conventional order of language within well-
defined limits, contemporary art constantly challenges the
initial order by means of an extremely “improbable” form of
organization . . . by imposing a new linguistic system with
its own inner laws . . . [But] rather than imposing a new
system, contemporary art constantly oscillates between the
rejection of the traditional linguistic system and its preservation—
for if contemporary art imposed a totally new linguistic system,
then its discourse would cease to be communicable. The dialectic
between form and the possibility of multiple meanings,
which constitutes the very essence of the “open work,” takes place
in this oscillation.
“Within well-defined limits.” I question here first, whether those limits are available to us now as “well-defined” only as a result of our subsequent historical / cultural development (elsewhere in the volume, Eco notes culture’s way of “gobbling up the avant-garde”: “Emergency: that which was Other is [always] on the way to becoming the same”), and second, whether poetries like those of the Language poets refuse the counter-demands of “preservation” in the assault on the “traditional linguistic systems” and thus veer towards (approach asymtotically) an “incommunicability” or a “communicability” limited to one communication—that of Bernstein’s “polyentendres and polyrhythms” “suggest[ing] the continuous choices of interpretation that confronting the world involves.”
The idea of every poem’s being the site of an indeterminate condition, a wavering unascertainable grid full of blanks for the reader’s constitution (of poem, of self) is as depressing a prospect as the New Critical idea that every poem represents a dramatic situation and a speaker—both seem diminishments of the undertaking, and formulaic. The additional possible danger of such unrestrained demand for information overload, for “polyentente” (discord’s accord, unity in disunity) is the non-information, the “noise” of entropy. The fact is, the reason I keep pestering the project of the Language poets, and relating it in backhanded ways to the poetries of the New Criticism (and, less pointedly, to the project of the New Formalists, whose polemics call for the abandonment of free verse which, as Brad Leithauser claims “at the moment shows signs of exhaustion,” and a return to favor of “the breadth and vigor of the iambic line), is that I see all of these projects as suffering under the indefatigable binarisms of any too earnest, too serious, too dogmatic militancy. It may be in the nature of any oppositional practice to see, in its initial stages, a necessity for absolutes, for a dividing of the available poetries (in this case) into two monolithic camps—here the “contestatory” and the “accommodationist” (as, earlier, the “raw” and the “cooked”). Such dualisms mark turf and, traditionally, act to “heroicize” the struggle of the avant-garde. And when aesthetic concerns are linked to political projects (as they inevitably must be, if one attends to the notion that any conception of “reality” is always already a function of the language by [in] which one speaks [or writes] of it), then the projects take on all the unpleasant doctrinaire attributes of any two-party race.
The Language poets claim a cultural critique of, as Shetley notes, “bourgeois instrumentalist discourse,” and its limits by attempting to counter (as Ron Silliman notes) its “expository, descriptive and narrative capacities” (and its hegemony, linked to our “capitalist stage of development”) through an insistent, plotted, manmade, and procedural short-circuiting of its modes of discourse. The project is rooted in poststructuralist critical theory: compare the remark of Julia Kristeva—“Magic, shamanism, esoterism, the carnival, and ‘incomprehensible’ poetry all underscore the limits of socially useful discourse and attest to what it represses: the process that exceeds the subject and his communicative structures” (first emphasis added)—with the valorization (quoted in Shetley) of “‘Unreadability’—that which requires new readers and teaches new readings” (emphasis added) by Bruce Andrews.
Some problems. How does “artifice” (Bernstein’s preferred word), implying agency and self-consciousness on the part of the “author,” critique “the process that exceeds the subject”? If there’s no getting out of language, isn’t the more honorable solution that of Rimbaud, that deafening silence? How is it that, if every writing (due to the slipperiness of the signifier) overdetermines, generates a polysemous structure, goes (as Shetley notes) “polyvalent, disseminated, and decentered,” a project should arise attempting (through the conscious efforts of the poet) to enforce and exploit that overdetermination (always already there), as if in distrust of the reader’s ability to “get (with) the program”? What is the achievement of a constructed polysemy when, in fact, it is the quotidian state of affairs in most Western, particularly urbanized, late capitalist cultures—a bombardment of decontextualized signifiers, sounds of radios, shop-window advertising, street signs, TV remote control blips, neighbors’ voices (I think of the plaintive voice, the voice of a man under assault, losing control, in a song by some fadeaway rocker: “Signs, signs, everywhere’re signs . . . / Can’t you read the signs?”) And finally, what (remembering Eco’s linking of “all possibilities and none”) prevents an over-articulated, overdetermined polysemy from slipping into something like the noise called “white,” noise that is not “heard” at all? As Shetley notes: “much of the writing that goes under the “Language” rubric, may be looked at as all meaning or all randomness.” And continues: “the interesting area, and the area of genuine difficulty, lies between.”
~
BETWEEN
The area “between” is never a comfortable one. It smacks of compromise, of disengagement, of a refusal to belong in a culture where belonging is all. I think of Ashbery’s (in “Frank O’Hara’s Question”) comment on O’Hara’s
~
SOME NOTES ON FRANK O’HARA(’S “HISTORY” AND OTHER “HISTORIES”)
Frank O’Hara appears to have snuck up behind me unnoticed—that’s what “influential” figures do. I am reading now an untitled poem by one John Latta. The only reason I retain a copy of this poem—of scores written over the years of adolescent itchiness and suspense—is that it was published (in May 1969) in a high school literary and arts journal called Overtones. Curious to read: “running / toward the empty beach / to catch the sandpipers / and! fly / bumping along / against the porcelain ceiling / of sky.” The fifteen-year-old dream of flight and (ultimately) containment interests me less than the stylistic tic—the gulping intake of breath signaled by the exclamation point’s misplacement: that “and! fly.” “Tic” because I see the same mannerism in another poem printed in the same pages: “waiting / for the smooth stones on the road / to sprout under / the glare / of the head / lights / and! grow / to craggy / shadows.” There is evidence here of the jejune mannerist imitations of a boy trying on one of somebody else’s hats, most likely a grownup’s.
~
That “grownup” could only have been Frank O’Hara—born 1926, died 1966. In “How Roses Get Black” one can see the borrowed headgear, the wholly idiosyncratic and mannerist use of the exclamation point: “First you took Arthur’s porcelain / pony from the mantel and! dashed / it against the radiator!” (The mention here, too, of “porcelain” is curious. Though the line serves perfectly to illustrate the “source” of my own early idiosyncratic punctuation, this particular poem, though written by O’Hara in Cambridge in 1948, was apparently not published until its inclusion—as “earliest” poem—in O’Hara’s Collected Poems in 1971. Is it possible that the “source” for both uses lies elsewhere? e. e. cummings would be a prime candidate. I remember reading cummings’s poems as an adolescent [like everybody else], but I don’t remember being particularly attracted to them.) Many of O’Hara’s early poems combine the dream displacements of Surrealism, the lists of objects of “everyday” life (not the usual paraphernalia of poetry, so far as I had noticed), and a sort of campy hurry and delight—that manufactured (and so, not entirely “sincere”) breathlessness that an overloading of exclamations can produce. Here’s a short example—a poem entitled “Today”:
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
~
I am writing this in an attempt to divulge (to myself, to others) the nature of the invasions called “influence.” That’s one reason. Why has Frank O’Hara’s poetry stuck so persistently to my own scribblings? (And there is the temporarily unlocatable line—O’Hara’s, I think, about something like “leaning up against a tree so long you got stuck to it.” The poem ends: “that kind of love is terrible.”) Why is there such obvious mendicancy to “influence”? Don Byrd said to me one day something like this: “I don’t believe anybody can point to one person and say ‘There’s the influence’” and I agreed, but O’Hara appears (after all these years) a little like family—the way family begs for our attentions, even when we (and it) hardly recognize the fact that it is doing so. I find it curious (and vaguely alarming) to be turning (back, as it were) to O’Hara more than twenty years after I first encountered him and maybe ten years after I thought I had discarded him—if “discarded” can describe a movement wherein a “voice” emerges as one’s “own.” (I know, the questions of “voice” and “own” are “vexed” in the loud intertextual noise that keeps us all awake nights in the present “period,” but I would maintain some imitations are more identifiable than others . . .) Did a voice emerge? (I have a note from Barry Silesky, editor of Another Chicago Magazine, rejecting a poem of mine written circa 1984. The note, referring to a line in my “A Letter Beginning with O Thirty,” reads in part: “‘First name, Inger’ rings too straight from O’Hara.” And he is right, though I had never noticed it. Straight out of “The Day Lady Died,” something about the bank teller “Miss Stillwagon,” “first name Linda,” who doesn’t look up O’Hara’s “balance” on that particular day.) Perhaps I am merely preparing myself here for an act of final “misreading” of O’Hara—that “act of creative correction” Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence labels “poetic influence.” He also calls it “self-saving caricature,” “distortion,” and “perverse, wilful revisionism.” Let’s say it like this: I am writing this in an attempt to trace the untraceable history of a poetic trajectory—those motions that have brought me to this brink of reassessment: I am re-reading O’Hara now against the taut scrim of postmodernism (that has been lowered, mostly, since O’Hara’s death). I want to argue that O’Hara is a liminal figure, a Janus whose faces look both somewhat yearningly back to modernism (and beyond, to Romanticism) and bravely forward to postmodernism.
~
GOTHAM POSTMODERN: FRANK O’HARA AND OTHERS OF THE NEW YORK SCHOOL
1
Postmodernism in American poetry seems recently to have found its niche, a rather large one it turns out, filling nearly seven hundred pages of its own “Norton anthology” (in Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry), surely indicating the arrival of something, even if nobody appears able to agree what that big, bumbling, reckless, blundering, and slippery beast is, or how exactly it relates to its namesake, that equally troublesome visitor (who stays and stays) called modernism. I think of Frank O’Hara’s characterization of Larry Rivers’s entry into the “scene” (the New York “art world,” circa, roughly, 1950-1952) “rather like a demented telephone. Nobody knew whether they wanted it in the library, the kitchen, or the toilet, but it was electric.” Or I think of John Ashbery’s characterization of Jackson Pollock’s drip-paintings: “a gamble against terrific odds.” Ashbery continues (in Reported Sightings): “Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing.” Mercurial, unassignable, unplaced because unplaceable, uncertain, foundering and anti-foundational, gambled, experimental—all terms that could apply to the postmodern moment and to the widely differing claims made in various attempts to describe that moment, that movement, or that “way.” For it may be that what postmodernism is, finally, is less an historical period, less an artistic or aesthetic credo, than a means of proceeding, a verb where no noun suffices, process seeking defiantly to avoid the (seemingly inevitable) lapse into product. Hoover himself, in the introduction to the volume at hand (an anthology that includes writers of such wildly contrary works as Russell Edson’s allegorical, fabulist prose poems; as David Antin’s improvisatory, speech-based “poem-talks”; as Jackson Mac Low’s “nonintentional,” ego-avoiding, systematic-chance compositions; as Allen Ginsberg’s “spontaneous bop prosody”—out of Jack Kerouac—and “first thought best thought” single breath unit lineations, inspirations; as Susan Howe’s Jack Spicer-inspired opening of the self through attention to “what’s coming through,” an attentiveness turned mostly to the effects of reading, in particular, various New England histories in order “to transform the archive and chronicle into . . . elusive, elliptical . . . deeply personal drama”; as Kenneth Koch’s comic lyrics and epic comedies wherein popular culture is apt to encounter the ottava rima; as Charles Bernstein’s “anti-absorptive” constructions that aim to enact the predicaments of the self captive in language, and constituted by it, as well as to compel the reader to meaning-constituting activity; as Wanda Coleman’s direct and profane Charles Bukowski-inspired critiques of class, race, and gender relations) offers a number of possible areas and concerns and definitions of postmodernism and its poetics.
In the interest of mapping the ground, that landscape into which I intend to insert Frank O’Hara and other New York School figures, I need to put down in the too-shifting sands some markers. One difficulty is this: due to the proposed nature of the markers themselves (“word-ed,” and so, untrustworthy), the positing of any kind of stability, anything a surveyor’s level might bring into focus, becomes problematic. The terrain moves because the instruments move and whatever can be represented can be so only in glimpses, momentary stop-action constructions that fictionalize the ongoing, constant “play” of the terrain itself. “Postmodernism” continually seeks its referent and locates it everywhere and nowhere, thus enacting one of the most noticeable impulses marking the “movement” itself.
In (merely) the first couple of pages of the introduction to Postmodern American Poetry, Hoover points to a splendid variety of postmodernisms. One is a new emphasis on the work of art as the simple (or complex) trace of an ongoing, open, provisional, incomplete, changeable and changing process (that “of living”), and the concomitant rejection of the idea of the work as product—closed, final, total, transcendent. Hoover notes Charles Olson’s early use of the term “postmodern” (in a letter to Robert Creeley) as questioning “the value of historical relics,” what Olson rejects as “so much trash of discourse, & gods.” Such a rejection of that “trash”—which, alongside “relics,” points to Olson’s adamant refusal of product (what “discourse, & gods” make) in favor, perhaps, of process—Hoover associates with “mainstream culture and the narcissism, sentimentality, and self-expressiveness of its life in writing.” The implication is that writing as expression, as a mirroring (of self, of culture) becomes merely “so much trash” of that culture, a product inseparable and indistinguishable from it, an ineffectual sentimental burden.
In opposition to that “mainstream” writing, Hoover points to “postmodernism” as a term synonymous with “the avant-garde,” or with “experimental” practices: he makes the blunt claim, in fact, that “postmodernist poetry is the avant-garde poetry of our time.” The claim, though, becomes unworkable—too encompassing, lacking the most undemanding kind of rigor—when put next to a number of conflicting definitions of the postmodern that Hoover offers. He admits both that it has “come to be considered a reigning style” and that “as used here, ‘postmodern’ means the historical period following World War II.” The situation is vexing and Hoover’s confusion is an index of it. How can “the avant-garde” function as a “reigning style” (echoes of “mainstream culture”) and characterize a whole “historical period” of nearly forty years, spanning the works of (at least) two generations of writers? Is there here—in Hoover’s tangles of seemingly contradictory definitions—evidence of an uncritical acceptance of the “new” (that modernist buzzword, that preferred word, too, of the apologists for the unceasing commodity “enhancement” and fetishism of late capitalist Western culture with its continual need to hawk “new, improved” products lest our attention and our spending waver, lest our buying habits falter, lest we realize our needs were sufficiently met, and that long ago)? Is there here, too, a refusal to examine how such an institutionalization of the avant-garde renders it ineffectual, mimicking as it does the very processes of “mainstream culture” in the course of becoming (inevitably, serially) subsumed by it? And finally, is there here a refusal to note remarkable differences amongst the aesthetics of the various postmodern poetries in the interest of maintaining an earnest and monolithic opposition to an ill-defined “normative” and “mainstream” ideology that may, itself, be encumbered, in useful ways, with internal aesthetic differences? My task here is not so much to criticize Hoover as it is to underline some of the contradictions of the postmodernist moment as preface to asserting that postmodernism must needs be conceived not as a “thing”—stable, knowable, and constant—but as a way of being or acting—changeable, uncertain, and ever aware of its momentary temporal and spatial configuration.
2
In Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger, whom Hoover mentions, noting briefly the “risk” of the avant-garde’s becoming “an institution with its own self protective rituals, powerless to trace or affect the curve of history,” details some inherent contradictions within the avant-garde. Bürger sees the historical avant-garde (early twentieth century movements, Dada and Surrealism) as responding to “the dominant characteristic of art in bourgeois society”—“its dissociation from the praxis of life”—by attempting “to organize a new life praxis from a basis in art.” However, the historical avant-garde’s attempt to close the gap between “art” and “life”—in a culture wherein “life” is defined largely in terms of what Bürger calls “the means-ends rationality of the bourgeois everyday”—can only end by participating in that rationality. As Bürger notes: “an art no longer distinct from the praxis of life but wholly absorbed in it will lose the capacity to criticize it.” Thus, Bürger’s argument, briefly, is that the historical avant-garde ends by “adopting an essential element” of nineteenth century Aestheticism—the “rejection of the world and its means-ends rationality” in favor of “l’art pour l’art,” a demand that the art object be self-sufficient, autonomous, an individual organism. The result is “dissociation” anew.
An additional difficulty in delineating an ongoing avant-garde practice lies in what Bürger calls the “culture industry” and its “commodity aesthetics that treat form as a mere enticement, designed to prompt purchasers to buy what they do not need.” Form equals product here, and new ways of forming—even those that mock the notion of product—are ever susceptible to being accepted as new products. Using the example of one of Marcel Duchamp’s famous “ready-mades,” “created” by adding the signature of an individual “artist” to a mass-produced object, Bürger notes:
Once the signed bottle drier has been accepted as an object that
deserves a place in a museum, the provocation no longer provokes;
it turns into its opposite. If an artist today signs a stove pipe and
exhibits it, that artist certainly does not denounce the art market
but adapts to it.
The opening and closing of the gap between “art” and “life” thus becomes the site of contradictory practices and an ongoing burdensome dialectic central to all avant-garde manifestations. That dialectic necessarily implies process, opposition, the “play” of ideas within a binary, the endless interactions with historical forces, and that Hegelian version of change in which an entity passes over into and is preserved and fulfilled by its opposite. As such, the avant-garde gesture is always reactive, always (as in a conversation) responding to something prior to itself. Any end to response (and ending is inevitable—the pencil stops moving, the paint can goes empty, the performance is over) can mean only sublation by the “culture industry” in an ever-accelerating willingness to embrace whatever provokes it, whatever is “new,” process gone to product, art to artifact. If high modernist avant-garde practices (the struggle to “make it new”) tend in all the arts to end in silence or cacophony—modes often indistinguishable, over-burgeoning noise going “white”—(Umberto Eco, in Postscript to The Name of the Rose, speaks of such practices as follows:
The avant-garde destroys, defaces the past . . . Then the avant-garde
goes further, destroys the figure, cancels it, arrives at the abstract,
the informal, the white canvas, the slashed canvas, the charred canvas.
In architecture and the visual arts, it will be the curtain wall, the building
as stele, pure parallelepiped, minimal art; in literature, the destruction
of the flow of discourse, the Burroughs-like collage, silence, the white
page; in music, the passage from atonality to noise to absolute silence)—,
it can only be a signal of an impasse: cannot the claim then be made that postmodernism attempts a sortie out of that impasse? That through a new emphasis on art as what Eco calls a “way of operating,” through a refusal to accept a too limiting call-and-response binarism that leads to silence in the face of history and, rather, makes of history a thing everywhere present and available always, and through a willingness to forego an endless succession of epistemological “truths”—always in need of repair and replacement—in favor of “depthless” (the word is Fredric Jameson’s) ontological gestures, surfaces that “quote” simulacra of knowledge, postmodernism rejects modernism’s end-product orientation whilst retaining evidence of that impasse in the mannerisms (deployed now with irony) of its “way of operating”? The argument contains its own contradictions. A postmodernism that is simply an ironic “take” on modernist tendencies re-enters the space of dialectic: what “conditions” it is the immediate past. As such it can only be seen as an extension of modernism, rather than as a “new” thing.
3
In the essay “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson points to the crux of one of the problems that troubles postmodernism. He asks: “does it [postmodernism] imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style- and fashion-changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation”? If modernism is the new, institutionalized, continual “change or break,” any succession to it is ever-defeated: modernism has become a “metahistorical category.” (It is interesting to note that Jameson—while arguing that “the two phenomena [modernism and postmodernism] . . . remain utterly distinct in . . . meaning and social function”—still lapses into the lingo of that “innovation” in discussing what one can detect in “the most interesting postmodern works.” Jameson: “This new mode of relationship through difference may sometimes be an achieved new and original way of thinking and perceiving; more often it takes the form of an impossible imperative to achieve that new mutation in what can perhaps no longer be called consciousness” [emphases added].)
If Jameson implies that modernism is a “metahistorical category,” Eco, in the Postscript, suggests that the term is more applicable to postmodernism. Eco’s remarks may help to clarify some of Hoover’s contradictions regarding postmodernism, though only at the expense, perhaps, of making the term itself (like its putative “projects”) a simulacrum, the image of an image, a code (Jameson: “modernist styles . . . become postmodernist codes”), something twice-removed, lacking any immediate “worldly” referent. Eco:
Postmodernism is a term bon à tout faire. I have the
impression that it is applied today to anything the user of the term
happens to like. Further, there seems to be an attempt to make it
increasingly retroactive. [Which, today, reminds me of Silliman’s
point’d slinging of the “post-avant” monicker, or worse, the “post-
avant avant la lettre” monicker, and, of course, its unfortunate
‘sucky’ opposite . . . JL]
I believe that postmodernism is not a trend to be chronologically
defined, but, rather, an ideal category—or, better still, a
Kunstwollen, a way of operating. We could say that every
period has its own postmodernism, just as every period would
have its own mannerism (and, in fact, I wonder if postmodernism
is not the modern name for mannerism as metahistorical
category).
Eco’s move here—pointing to postmodernism’s aperiodic, metahistorical nature, and linking postmodernism to mannerism, another style without a period—is apt. If one considers such various mannerist tendencies as an affected (that is, borrowed) style, and a reliance on the surface effects of ornamentation, artifice, ingeniousness, and rhetorical flourish, the connection may help us to define postmodernism. Indeed, Jameson’s attempt to characterize postmodernism features a number of notions seemingly applicable, too, to mannerism. Jameson notes “the waning of affect,” the “rise of aesthetic populism,” and the practice of “pastiche” or “blank parody” as—among others—features of postmodernist works. The “waning of affect”—in Jameson’s terms—seems akin, oddly enough, to the mannerist “affected style.” Jameson: “the waning of affect . . . means the end . . . of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal . . . This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings [what Jameson calls “intensities,” suggesting nodal clottings of already available, or “borrowed,” simulacra of feelings] . . . are now free-floating and impersonal.” And Jameson’s other features—“pastiche” and “aesthetic populism” (“the effacement . . . of the older . . . frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture”)—seem akin to mannerism’s non-historical presence, and to its use of historical styles as mere ornament. Jameson identifies pastiche, claiming it a “well-nigh universal practice today,” with “parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language.” And he adds that “it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter.”
Mannerism, however, is a problematical category in its own right—as sometime “neutral and chronological” art historical period (as Lowry Nelson, Jr. notes—“between Michelangelo and Rubens”), as sometime affected artistic style occurring in a number of different periods. Eco, rather than settling for identifying postmodernism as a metahistorical category similar to mannerism, posits a rupture with modernism—a loss of innocence that leads to a kind of constant, omnivorous ironizing—irony “squared,” as Eco says—in the form of a pact with the indestructible past. Eco:
The moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go
no further [“the white page,” “absolute silence”], because it has
produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impossible texts
(conceptual art). The postmodern reply to the modern consists
of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed,
because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with
irony, not innocently.
Eco’s example of a “postmodern attitude” is of a man who, realizing he cannot say “I love you madly” to a woman (because he knows romance-writer Barbara Cartland has already “said” it), says, rather, “As Barbara Cartland says, ‘I love you madly.’” Thus the past, hearsay, the “already said,” gets a nod and, as Eco notes, the woman “will have received a declaration of love all the same.” Eco’s version of postmodernism here—based essentially on the playful ironizing of prior forms and constructs—is a game. He speaks of “the game of irony,” of “metalinguistic play,” and notes that “with the modern, anyone who does not understand the game can only reject it, but with the postmodern, it is possible not to understand the game and yet to take it seriously. Which is, after all, the quality (the risk) of irony. There is always someone who takes ironic discourse seriously.” That “someone” could be Fredric Jameson.
§
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Down to the Sea
~
Received:
Green Mountains Review, Vol. XVII, No. 1 (2004), edited by Neil Shepard et al. ($9.50, Johnson State College, Johnson, Vermont 05656)
Short interviews with (and selections of poems by) Quan Barry, Major Jackson, and Mark Wunderlich, all with forthcoming second books following well-received first books.
Poems of note by Jennifer Dick and G. C. Waldrep. The beginning of Waldrep’s “The Grenville Orogeny”:
I walked down to the sea again.
This time the sun was setting. It seemed content
in this function, feldspathic. I had not thought to bring gloves.
There was this problem with gravity, everywhere I looked
something was eating or something was being eaten,
even the rocks. A sort of feral glare.
I am civic-minded, I would like to think I contribute
my share of carbon dioxide. But no one was coming to pick me up
so I stood in the cold breeze and asked
for the fuchsia of the gull’s beak, of the sea-fig
irrespective to the clarity of any fixed motive.
This was not my first time.
Diction with a formal bent to it, tone veering toward chaotic, or parodic, lines that seem to advance neither by aural means, nor by logic, narrative or otherwise, a slackness, or interspersal of prosiness—all attempts to characterize this. I am certain only that Waldrep’s is part of a colossal tune I haven’t quite heard before . . .
~
Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing, by Michael Magee (University of Alabama Press, 2004)
A book eagerly await’d, anticipated. Michael Magee’s long appear’d to’ve comb’d through all the long (finer) hairs of American pragmatism: I learned some years ago to read carefully any contribution he made to the Poetics list—always swiftly argue’d and apt. I’ve read (I suspect) some of this book in journals, and intend to get to it soon, pencil and notebook handy.
Thumbing through: Magee on how William Carlos Williams takes up the Deweyan ideal of the local (grounded in experience) and uses it in fashioning an aesthetic: “it is of paramount importance to Williams that he ‘show how the language he practices varies from English’ because he believes, as any pragmatist does, that in that language resides the imminent ideology of the culture. A language designed to support aristocratic practice would have to be changed if it were to foster and support democratic practices. As Williams himself put it, “It is impossible for any group of people to change their habits until the language has first given them the means to state their objective, this is the only permission use of ‘ideals.’”
§
A POETICS—11
3
Questions: What attitudes toward language are evinced in this odd poem called “Ann Arbor” by John Latta? [—“that strange, if not estranged signifier, surely not ‘my self’ whatever else it may ‘be’”—as a marginal scribble reads.] Does the poem call for a deconstructive reading? Is the language referential? To what? Does the language of the poem self-consciously deny its own referentiality? Let me try a short explication of the text.
The poem posits fields of opposition: a conflict between discrete objects and abstract psychological states, one between spoken “language-objects” and language as subjective representation. In the first line this contradiction is evident—lament is something “everywhere,” monolithic, indivisible, a state; lament is capable of a “smattering,” of becoming piecemeal, divisible, particulate, a set of objects. In “Tired of waiting bruises me like a doormat,” words themselves become both a set of (hurtful) objects, like sticks and stones, like the tramp and scuff of boots on a doormat, and a referential state(ment): it is this state of being “tired of waiting” for me (or me for you) that leads you (me) to speak these words (that refer to your [my] state).
There are other overlapping fields of opposition in “Ann Arbor” as well. Violence vies with (and contaminates) acceptance (the yawning and unconvincing “It doesn’t matter anymore” precedes matter-of-factly that sigh of acceptance but is immediately undercut and problematized by the violent image of the “electric drill” boring a hole into a “wooden heart”—the act that allows release of the very “tough dirge” just spoken). Resignation is revealed as unstable, both essential to the “self” (“a part of my anatomy”) and “other,” defined by its violent and angry contradiction (“a razor blade gone loco / and no loss of blood”). The opposing notions of leaving and remaining are problematized: the “I” has been left, apparently, by someone “tired of waiting” but sees leaving himself as a way to avoid the stasis of lament and enact a bit of received and conventional cultural role-play—he refuses the demeaning position of “doormat” (what’s stepped on as he / she “walks right out that door”), but carries—in leaving—that wounding “like a sash,” a victory constructed of the very remnants (words) of loss. The illusory nature of this ploy is recognized however in the following line—“flight” is defined as a “shadow’s wreckage” (an image of the “self” split—the airplane’s shadow is only “connected” to the airplane when the airplane is grounded)—and “flight” (destructive to “self”) is rejected as a possibility. Leaving, then, is accomplished by the sigh “as it leaves the body.”
What remains, of course, is the poem itself. This is made clear in the rather sonnet-like volta that begins the second stanza. Here the poem turns back to address itself directly: “There. An Americanism of mosts!” There is the story. It is full of our most American language of love and loss, our most American notions of moving on, our most American pastime of violence (not always subsumed by grim acceptance, of anger [mostly] tempered by resignation). “Here” is “only these words,” the vaguely Derridean “tracings.” Language is unequal to the task of narrative; there is no totalized narrative to be had; there is nothing but a series of “abandoned episodes,” linked by aporiae, those unresolvable doubts, the same “incisions of bleeding doubt” posited in the second line of the poem. “Symbiosis” and “schism,” while referring, perhaps, initially, to the “I”’s union now asunder, are now presented as part of an indifferent (resigned, uncaring) catalogue of difference by that “I.” These words deny a totalized meaning and point to the difficulty language (a thing always “different”) offers in evoking more than a severely local meaning (“rat’s hide” is “imaginable” certainly, but in the context of “schism, rat’s hide, nauseous” less “meaningfully” so). The poem may only go properly “writerly” in these few lines; the effect though is to alter our reading of the whole poem. Language as determinate of anything beyond itself is put into question. And the poem, in a nod toward the continental roots of its own gesture, goes “French.”
“Continue” brings the “I” “back” to the psychological state addressed by that previous sigh; the commonplace words “Still friends” do the work “tired of waiting” did earlier in the poem. But with a difference. Now the poem veers to a complex fantasy of sexual violence, or sexual play—(it is difficult to determine what exactly the gesture is here). It is interesting to note that it is here where the “other”—“you”—is first mentioned. Equally interesting is the sled—a “toy.” Who stands “akimbo”—that standard come-hither stance? Why “the French”?
I could argue (deconstructively) here that the “breaking of the spell” of the transparency of language prior to these line allows the “I” to formulate a fantasy that remains (knowingly) just that —a “trace,” (what’s already inscribed in) the “abandoned episodes” of the first stanza. Or I could argue that “sexual play” (depending heavily on that word “akimbo”) “contaminates” this scene of ”sexual violence” thus neutralizing or “denaturing” the scene of its broader social- / sexual- / gender-role implications. Or I could argue—taking a cue from Gayatri Spivak—that the “historical-institutional imperatives”—the late capitalist scene admitted by that “Americanism of mosts”—are, in fact, controlling the poem, that the “speaker’s” “personal good will” is here being subsumed by a truth (about man-woman relationships) contaminated by cultural interests—those that force us to continue to view those relationships as hierarchical and power-based. Frankly, I’m not very comfortable doing any of those things and I’m not (as the writer-reader) comfortable with the implications I see in the poem. The implications are these: power avenging loss and re-asserting a (patriarchal) hierarchy, the easy objectification of women (“like a sled”), violence attributed to the “other” (“the French”), the victim as provocateuse (“akimbo”)—in short, many of the most abhorrent attitudes of American (Western) late capitalist culture. So I refuse to use deconstructive tactics to justify the poem, or to exonerate myself. [I recognize, however, that the critique does effectively turn the reading toward the possibility that the “I” is constituted by those particular attitudes, those discourses.] Doing so would disallow the possibility of criticizing the values revealed in (at least) one of the two conflicting fields of the poem. It could be argued that the simple positing of conflicting fields admits a critique of those attitudes / discourses, but it does so only by nullifying critique itself, by denying any ethical consideration. If every text is contaminated by its contradiction, how are we ever able to assert value, and without value, how are we to make any ethical judgment? As Robert Scholes (in Protocols of Reading) says: “An ethic of reading can begin only when we are willing to accept some readings as better than others . . . Such judgments . . . require us to connect what is represented in the text with what we see in the world.” I see too clearly (and uncomfortably) what these final lines of “Ann Arbor” represent “in the world” to allow the ludic hide and seek of deconstruction its face-saving dishonorable shout of “All-y all-y in free.”
4
Now the Michael Palmer poem:
SEVEN FORBIDDEN WORDS
“Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litière”
—Baudelaire, ‘Spleen’
Who peered from the invisible world
toward a perfectly level field. Terms
will be broken here (have been broken here).
Should a city of blue tile appear
no one will be listening there.
He stood up, walked across the room
and broke his nose against the door.
A was the face of a letter
reflected in the water below.
He watched cross-eyed
learning a few words at a time.
The sun rose behind your shoulder
and told me to act casual
while striking an attitude of studied repose.
You grew these flowers yourself
so how could you forget their names.
The yellow one is said to be uncommon
and the heart tastes as expected, tender
and bitter like an olive
but less violent. It has been summer for a day
or part of a day
with shades drawn. The fires were deliberately set
and the inhabitants welcomed them.
An initial and immediate response to this poem is that it seems to deliberately inhabit forbidden territory, to be language willfully constructed (by a writer-subject) to deny the reader easy access. There are hints of this stance throughout: the “forbidden words” of the title; the admission that “Terms / will be broken here (have been broken here)”; the suspicion of, perhaps, “writerly” difficulty (ending in refusal to read / “listen”) in “Should a city of blue tile appear / no one will be listening there”; the one (reader?) “cross-eyed” as a result of “learning a few words at a time”; the “speaker’s” noticeable construction of himself (as benign but serious authority)—“act casual / while striking an attitude of studied repose”; the final reference to “fires” (seemingly destructive, denying access) as being “deliberately set” but “welcomed” by “inhabitants” (readers? we who have managed to inhabit the poem to the end?)
Clearly this poem cannot be reduced to paraphrase or slogan; we cannot say “The meaning of ‘Seven Forbidden Words’ is ————.” We cannot even propose a setting, a single context in which the poem “takes place.” We cannot distance ourselves with any secure knowledge of where or when the action of the poem is located, or who the characters are; the poem constantly thwarts any build-up of expectation, any causal (or other) development. The epigraph—a fragment, decontextualized—gives the reader the first clue to the poem’s procedure. The line is lifted from one of Baudelaire’s irritable little “Spleen” poems; this one begins with “a rain-laden gloomy cold, annoyed with the whole town, dump[ing] great torrential urn-fuls on the pale inhabitants of the neighboring cemetery.” The cat in Palmer’s epigraph “on the tiles searching for a bed” mimics the irritability of the weather outside by “twitch[ing] its thin mangy body with no repose.” The poem ends with this unease invading even the simplest of objects—a deck of cards (triggered, for Baudelaire, by “carreau”—the suit of “Diamonds”) where “the handsome Jack of Hearts and the Queen of Spades speak sinisterly of their departed loves.” [My literal translation. The lines quoted (from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal) are the following: “Pluviôse, irrité contre la ville entière, / De son urne à grands flots verse un froid ténébreux / Aux pâles habitants du voisin cimetière . . . / Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litière / Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux . . . / Le beau valet de coeur et la dame de pique / Causent sinistrement de leurs amours défunts.”] What is interesting here is how the line (about the cat) used by Palmer is completely devoid of the agitation that inheres in the line (cat) in the context of the Baudelaire poem: Palmer’s cat is good-natured and sleepy, that’s all. The decontextualizing act Palmer accomplishes by selecting a fragment as epigraph is not unlike the constant refusal to contextualize in the body of the poem itself.
What, then, can we do with Palmer’s decontextualized fragments? We can read “Seven Forbidden Words” as a poem about language itself—with a view of language existing only within a structure, a frame that both enables and constrains the possibilities for making meaning. We can view Palmer’s poem as a series of framed “experiences” occurring moment-by-moment (or sentence-by-sentence). The “meaning” of the poem then will be relational: the reverberations (overlappings) among a set of local soundings (frames or fields).
In “Seven Forbidden Words” Palmer writes: “You grew these flowers yourself / so how could you forget their names?” How does this statement relate to the poem? What questions need be asked and what can be answered?
—Who is the “you” here? The sentence follows directly after one containing the only previous second-person pronominal reference—“The sun rose behind your shoulder / and told me to act casual / while striking an attitude of studied repose.” This is, of course, highly ambiguous—does the sun strike that attitude or order the “me” to do so (while the “me” is told, too, to “act casual”)? The reader who notes the ambiguity is put in the position of the writer, he who “forget[s the]names” by making syntactical “mistakes” that lead to assignability problems. As such, the “you” here seems to be the writer—admitting the syntactical difficulty. The writer is he who “grew the flowers”—metaphorically, wrote the words. The statement seems a challenge and rebuke to the writer (the rebuke of the reader who refuses the ambiguous “writerly” nature of the text—it is akin to something like “If you, the writer, can’t tell me what this means, how can anybody?”) But the “writerly” reader will find himself implicated in that “you” also—he is “writing” the text by reading it.
—What, then, are the “flowers”? As suggested above, the flowers can be read metaphorically as words. What are the words for which one can “forget their names”? What are words without names? Are they words decontextualized, disowned, made ambiguous, the “terms . . . broken here”? The following sentence helps: “The yellow one is said to be uncommon / and the heart tastes as expected, tender / and bitter like an olive / but less violent.” “The yellow one” (flower? or “nameless” word, identified only by sense impression?) is “said to be” both “uncommon” and “expected,” “tender” and “violent.” That “said to be” is as important as the conflicting “terms” which follow. Words are “without names” because they are “said to be”—they achieve the status of “flowers” only in context, one we must “grow ourselves.” The names of those words (flowers) are exactly “forget[table]” because they are always “said to be.” The original statement in question then, when read in a “writerly” fashion, becomes less a rebuke to the writer and more a (playful) act of generosity toward the reader—akin to something like “You are the only one, dear reader, who can tell yourself what this ‘means’ or ‘names.’”
5
Language refuses to behave “properly” (refusing exclusive ownership, exclusive context)—so I wrote in my opening remarks. I had a different image of how this writing would look when I began than it now seems to look now that I am finishing. I had pictured a more personal approach to language, an examination of my relationship with it. I have, alternatively, merely applied some deconstructive techniques to the reading of two poems—each as they seemed to warrant (or demand) it. The strategies were different because the poems were different and each poet’s view of language (as manifested, at least, in these particular poems) was different. How different? The reader can decide. I can only say that my poem—while self-conscious about language and its conflicting impulses—still seems to offer that language embedded in a larger, more readily identifiable context, a “worldly” situation. [Perhaps only to me. Am I playing this game with loaded dice, loaded words?] And that Palmer’s piece—while perhaps less self-conscious about language on a local (word-by-word) level—offers that language less contextually (constantly re-situating, re-framing its context), making the poem more “difficult,” and possibly more generous. In language, I might add, how can I ever know the nature of my relationship to language.
It is a curious thing indeed to write (here) about my own text (the “explication”) of my own text (the poem “Ann Arbor”) of my version of the highly “textualized” event of breaking up with someone. The “worth” of the endeavor is beyond question—I saw more than I could see before; the “result” though may be even less than “remarkable.” (I say this with Northrop Frye’s amusing comment [just encountered, quoted in Spivak] handy: “Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is a remarkable document, but as a piece of Wordsworthian criticism nobody would give it more than about a B plus.”) It is also a curious thing to approach (willingly) a poem by an (admittedly rather peripheral) member of a group of poets (the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets) I have long misunderstood, mistrusted, and viewed with a mix of something like alarm, perplexity, and disgust.
An anecdote. Some years ago I was writing poems that were seen as “difficult”—dense, self-conscious regarding language, troublesome to editors—and nobody was publishing them. I decided—on a whim—to send some to Barrett Watten, editor of This, a magazine connected to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school. I can’t locate just now the note I received rejecting those poems but I do remember Watten saying something to the effect that he “couldn’t understand the poems,” or he “couldn’t understand what the words were trying to say.” This either amazed or enraged me—I forget which now. Watten’s own poems, to me, seemed utterly opaque; he had some nerve is what I thought. And my poems, although difficult, seemed models of transparency, representative of all the vagaries and ambiguities of the world. [A reader’s comment: “I’m reminded here of Derrida’s irritation at critics who ‘misuse’ his concepts—everyone’s language is mischievous, it seems, except on occasion our own.”]
Another anecdote. In the early eighties when I was editing and publishing Chiaroscuro, a poetry magazine I founded and kept alive for some years, I wrote to the poet William Matthews asking if he would like to write an essay on the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, an attack. Mine was a visceral response—I had briefly met a couple of the poets, read a few poems, skimmed (without much understanding) some of their more theoretical writings. My line was: “It’s all theory; the poems themselves are unreadable.” Plus the few poets I had met seemed too earnest, too cocky, too ambitious, and overly concerned with marketing, or with conversion. They reminded me of young Mormon missionaries. So, an attack. Here’s what Matthews replied:
The last two times I’ve been in the Bay Area, I’ve been told earnestly
by boobs about how the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets are very
intelligent. An intonation like “Miss Parton’s tits are very big.” Dumb
stuff. I don’t want to write the piece, but someone should. Not a
member of that group, Michael Palmer is very intelligent, though
intermittently rewarding, and somebody should rescue him from his
followers some day.
Evidence of a two-bit literary squabble mostly, but reflective of the larger struggle over the nature and use of language. [Representational authority. Even, paradoxically, supposed turf of those who would seem to forego its claims.] It occurs to me that I could (profitably?) use deconstructive reading strategies on this text also. (What sort of incompatibilities exist between the literal speech of “boobs” regarding “intelligence” and the figurative speech of someone “intelligent”—Matthews—regarding “tits”? What is the relationship between “intelligence” and physical attributes here, or between “intelligence” and “rewarding” poetry? [I am forever recalling Ammons’s remark—”I think a poet ought to keep himself just a little stupid.”] What does it mean, in this context, to “rescue” a non-“member” from his “followers”? Is Matthews a “follower”? What hierarchical assumptions are in play(?) here?) I won’t.
I conclude with this postcard—with these anecdotes—as a sort of backward glance, a gesture of autobiography, a notice of my own “blindness and insight.” Will I write poems any “differently” now? I doubt it. Do I conclude that poems must proceed field-by-decontextualized-field? No. Deconstruction (in its praxis a reading) seems (more than anything) to posit language as a field of furious play. I’m reminded again of Frank O’Hara’s words in “Personism: A Manifesto”: “You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’” This—about writing, of course—is pure tongue-in-cheek, but seems “right.” And in that “just go on your nerve” is another notion, that, by so doing, we “make” that “someone . . . with a knife” appear, a context, out of whatever unreason, whatever alogy, one kind of illation.
~
Leslie Scalapino, and Ron Silliman (of the succeeding generation). The poem continually subjects its images to a skeptical scrutiny, always attempting to deny any final viability they may be bent on asserting. It “bends” those assertions as a way of foregrounding the poem’s insufficiency and instability. I could argue, perhaps, that the poem also partakes of Perloff’s second and third strategies in smaller, more localized ways.
The “word as Image.” Euclidean and cinnabar append themselves to “the scene” as words with particular shapes and looks that I suspect the reader will attend to, consider. Despite the differences in syllable-count, they are words of similar weight. Robert Grenier, in a talk at the New York State Writers Institute, provides the word and notion: there, he offered the “contentless utterance” / writing / visual—“hummingbird / originating”—and noted how each word appeared to carry “equal weight.” The composition, then, becomes a kind of object in itself, refusing, as Grenier claims, “the distinction between inside and outside.” I relate Grenier’s proposition to odd compulsive musical phrases that often erupt in my writings—tiny word-lists—“spikenard, portulaca, hum”—that seem to display the individual words as things to be set on the scale of the tongue. The thinking is rather akin to that of something like quantitative measure—though the words, in order to gain such tangibility may require the rich isolation (too often lost in my poems) that Grenier allows them on the page. That is to say, if I write something about, say, “the imperturbable idiot of sleep,” one may fail to note how idiot and of have (to my ear) equal weights. Idiot. Of. Idiot: three shorts the o cannot quite open. Of: one long, the roundedness of the O torturing the narrow little end-fricative. Balance.
The “making strange” (or ostranenie, the reference is to the Russian Futurists’ project). Here, obviously, the resistances of the poem in question to absorption (the word is a favorite of Bernstein’s, see particularly “Artifice of Absorption” in A Poetics wherein he writes of it—“& its obverses— / impermeability, imperviousness, ejection, / repellence both as a compositional question / & as / a reading value”) are minimal; the poem replicates in crucial presentational ways the dominant “poetic” media it emerges out of. What mischief it can create within that discourse is not uncommon and is merely local: if I insist on reading a particular line as line and not as part of the sentence (which always overwhelms it), I can claim small syntactical ruptures. It is a small claim, and likely to go unnoticed.
One example: “Desire to deny whatever alters it, the way a sentence.” The phrase—isolated, dominant—allows me to read it as a definition of a sentence: a sentence is always already “the way”; the “Desire to deny whatever alters it” is what so characterizes it. Compare the remark to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s on the finite one-wayism of the sentence: “a finite body of rules utilizing a finite vocabulary at a determined moment to generate sentences whose length is not limited but whose probability diminishes to the vanishing point when they become longer and longer can generate only a finite discourse.” Or to Robert Duncan’s remark to Ekbert Faas on the syntactic coercions of the sentence: “When you write a sentence beginning with the word ‘the,’ aren’t you already under the law of ‘the’? No matter what you do from here on, you are under its law.” Or to Tristan Tzara’s project (quoted in Easthope’s Poetry as Discourse): “to dissolve the hard cement of an / apparently impregnable fortress: syntax.”
§
Morning threads of a song loop-stitching throughout throughout as I bike off hospital-ward for the monthly blood draw: something about the “cockamamie commissioner who’s setting us all to rights down along Blogger Row.” Result of, I’m sure post-midnight playing catchup in Blogland. “One would do better to pick up a book.”
~
Received:
Green Mountains Review, Vol. XVII, No. 1 (2004), edited by Neil Shepard et al. ($9.50, Johnson State College, Johnson, Vermont 05656)
Short interviews with (and selections of poems by) Quan Barry, Major Jackson, and Mark Wunderlich, all with forthcoming second books following well-received first books.
Poems of note by Jennifer Dick and G. C. Waldrep. The beginning of Waldrep’s “The Grenville Orogeny”:
I walked down to the sea again.
This time the sun was setting. It seemed content
in this function, feldspathic. I had not thought to bring gloves.
There was this problem with gravity, everywhere I looked
something was eating or something was being eaten,
even the rocks. A sort of feral glare.
I am civic-minded, I would like to think I contribute
my share of carbon dioxide. But no one was coming to pick me up
so I stood in the cold breeze and asked
for the fuchsia of the gull’s beak, of the sea-fig
irrespective to the clarity of any fixed motive.
This was not my first time.
Diction with a formal bent to it, tone veering toward chaotic, or parodic, lines that seem to advance neither by aural means, nor by logic, narrative or otherwise, a slackness, or interspersal of prosiness—all attempts to characterize this. I am certain only that Waldrep’s is part of a colossal tune I haven’t quite heard before . . .
~
Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing, by Michael Magee (University of Alabama Press, 2004)
A book eagerly await’d, anticipated. Michael Magee’s long appear’d to’ve comb’d through all the long (finer) hairs of American pragmatism: I learned some years ago to read carefully any contribution he made to the Poetics list—always swiftly argue’d and apt. I’ve read (I suspect) some of this book in journals, and intend to get to it soon, pencil and notebook handy.
Thumbing through: Magee on how William Carlos Williams takes up the Deweyan ideal of the local (grounded in experience) and uses it in fashioning an aesthetic: “it is of paramount importance to Williams that he ‘show how the language he practices varies from English’ because he believes, as any pragmatist does, that in that language resides the imminent ideology of the culture. A language designed to support aristocratic practice would have to be changed if it were to foster and support democratic practices. As Williams himself put it, “It is impossible for any group of people to change their habits until the language has first given them the means to state their objective, this is the only permission use of ‘ideals.’”
§
A POETICS—11
3
Questions: What attitudes toward language are evinced in this odd poem called “Ann Arbor” by John Latta? [—“that strange, if not estranged signifier, surely not ‘my self’ whatever else it may ‘be’”—as a marginal scribble reads.] Does the poem call for a deconstructive reading? Is the language referential? To what? Does the language of the poem self-consciously deny its own referentiality? Let me try a short explication of the text.
The poem posits fields of opposition: a conflict between discrete objects and abstract psychological states, one between spoken “language-objects” and language as subjective representation. In the first line this contradiction is evident—lament is something “everywhere,” monolithic, indivisible, a state; lament is capable of a “smattering,” of becoming piecemeal, divisible, particulate, a set of objects. In “Tired of waiting bruises me like a doormat,” words themselves become both a set of (hurtful) objects, like sticks and stones, like the tramp and scuff of boots on a doormat, and a referential state(ment): it is this state of being “tired of waiting” for me (or me for you) that leads you (me) to speak these words (that refer to your [my] state).
There are other overlapping fields of opposition in “Ann Arbor” as well. Violence vies with (and contaminates) acceptance (the yawning and unconvincing “It doesn’t matter anymore” precedes matter-of-factly that sigh of acceptance but is immediately undercut and problematized by the violent image of the “electric drill” boring a hole into a “wooden heart”—the act that allows release of the very “tough dirge” just spoken). Resignation is revealed as unstable, both essential to the “self” (“a part of my anatomy”) and “other,” defined by its violent and angry contradiction (“a razor blade gone loco / and no loss of blood”). The opposing notions of leaving and remaining are problematized: the “I” has been left, apparently, by someone “tired of waiting” but sees leaving himself as a way to avoid the stasis of lament and enact a bit of received and conventional cultural role-play—he refuses the demeaning position of “doormat” (what’s stepped on as he / she “walks right out that door”), but carries—in leaving—that wounding “like a sash,” a victory constructed of the very remnants (words) of loss. The illusory nature of this ploy is recognized however in the following line—“flight” is defined as a “shadow’s wreckage” (an image of the “self” split—the airplane’s shadow is only “connected” to the airplane when the airplane is grounded)—and “flight” (destructive to “self”) is rejected as a possibility. Leaving, then, is accomplished by the sigh “as it leaves the body.”
What remains, of course, is the poem itself. This is made clear in the rather sonnet-like volta that begins the second stanza. Here the poem turns back to address itself directly: “There. An Americanism of mosts!” There is the story. It is full of our most American language of love and loss, our most American notions of moving on, our most American pastime of violence (not always subsumed by grim acceptance, of anger [mostly] tempered by resignation). “Here” is “only these words,” the vaguely Derridean “tracings.” Language is unequal to the task of narrative; there is no totalized narrative to be had; there is nothing but a series of “abandoned episodes,” linked by aporiae, those unresolvable doubts, the same “incisions of bleeding doubt” posited in the second line of the poem. “Symbiosis” and “schism,” while referring, perhaps, initially, to the “I”’s union now asunder, are now presented as part of an indifferent (resigned, uncaring) catalogue of difference by that “I.” These words deny a totalized meaning and point to the difficulty language (a thing always “different”) offers in evoking more than a severely local meaning (“rat’s hide” is “imaginable” certainly, but in the context of “schism, rat’s hide, nauseous” less “meaningfully” so). The poem may only go properly “writerly” in these few lines; the effect though is to alter our reading of the whole poem. Language as determinate of anything beyond itself is put into question. And the poem, in a nod toward the continental roots of its own gesture, goes “French.”
“Continue” brings the “I” “back” to the psychological state addressed by that previous sigh; the commonplace words “Still friends” do the work “tired of waiting” did earlier in the poem. But with a difference. Now the poem veers to a complex fantasy of sexual violence, or sexual play—(it is difficult to determine what exactly the gesture is here). It is interesting to note that it is here where the “other”—“you”—is first mentioned. Equally interesting is the sled—a “toy.” Who stands “akimbo”—that standard come-hither stance? Why “the French”?
I could argue (deconstructively) here that the “breaking of the spell” of the transparency of language prior to these line allows the “I” to formulate a fantasy that remains (knowingly) just that —a “trace,” (what’s already inscribed in) the “abandoned episodes” of the first stanza. Or I could argue that “sexual play” (depending heavily on that word “akimbo”) “contaminates” this scene of ”sexual violence” thus neutralizing or “denaturing” the scene of its broader social- / sexual- / gender-role implications. Or I could argue—taking a cue from Gayatri Spivak—that the “historical-institutional imperatives”—the late capitalist scene admitted by that “Americanism of mosts”—are, in fact, controlling the poem, that the “speaker’s” “personal good will” is here being subsumed by a truth (about man-woman relationships) contaminated by cultural interests—those that force us to continue to view those relationships as hierarchical and power-based. Frankly, I’m not very comfortable doing any of those things and I’m not (as the writer-reader) comfortable with the implications I see in the poem. The implications are these: power avenging loss and re-asserting a (patriarchal) hierarchy, the easy objectification of women (“like a sled”), violence attributed to the “other” (“the French”), the victim as provocateuse (“akimbo”)—in short, many of the most abhorrent attitudes of American (Western) late capitalist culture. So I refuse to use deconstructive tactics to justify the poem, or to exonerate myself. [I recognize, however, that the critique does effectively turn the reading toward the possibility that the “I” is constituted by those particular attitudes, those discourses.] Doing so would disallow the possibility of criticizing the values revealed in (at least) one of the two conflicting fields of the poem. It could be argued that the simple positing of conflicting fields admits a critique of those attitudes / discourses, but it does so only by nullifying critique itself, by denying any ethical consideration. If every text is contaminated by its contradiction, how are we ever able to assert value, and without value, how are we to make any ethical judgment? As Robert Scholes (in Protocols of Reading) says: “An ethic of reading can begin only when we are willing to accept some readings as better than others . . . Such judgments . . . require us to connect what is represented in the text with what we see in the world.” I see too clearly (and uncomfortably) what these final lines of “Ann Arbor” represent “in the world” to allow the ludic hide and seek of deconstruction its face-saving dishonorable shout of “All-y all-y in free.”
4
Now the Michael Palmer poem:
SEVEN FORBIDDEN WORDS
“Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litière”
—Baudelaire, ‘Spleen’
Who peered from the invisible world
toward a perfectly level field. Terms
will be broken here (have been broken here).
Should a city of blue tile appear
no one will be listening there.
He stood up, walked across the room
and broke his nose against the door.
A was the face of a letter
reflected in the water below.
He watched cross-eyed
learning a few words at a time.
The sun rose behind your shoulder
and told me to act casual
while striking an attitude of studied repose.
You grew these flowers yourself
so how could you forget their names.
The yellow one is said to be uncommon
and the heart tastes as expected, tender
and bitter like an olive
but less violent. It has been summer for a day
or part of a day
with shades drawn. The fires were deliberately set
and the inhabitants welcomed them.
An initial and immediate response to this poem is that it seems to deliberately inhabit forbidden territory, to be language willfully constructed (by a writer-subject) to deny the reader easy access. There are hints of this stance throughout: the “forbidden words” of the title; the admission that “Terms / will be broken here (have been broken here)”; the suspicion of, perhaps, “writerly” difficulty (ending in refusal to read / “listen”) in “Should a city of blue tile appear / no one will be listening there”; the one (reader?) “cross-eyed” as a result of “learning a few words at a time”; the “speaker’s” noticeable construction of himself (as benign but serious authority)—“act casual / while striking an attitude of studied repose”; the final reference to “fires” (seemingly destructive, denying access) as being “deliberately set” but “welcomed” by “inhabitants” (readers? we who have managed to inhabit the poem to the end?)
Clearly this poem cannot be reduced to paraphrase or slogan; we cannot say “The meaning of ‘Seven Forbidden Words’ is ————.” We cannot even propose a setting, a single context in which the poem “takes place.” We cannot distance ourselves with any secure knowledge of where or when the action of the poem is located, or who the characters are; the poem constantly thwarts any build-up of expectation, any causal (or other) development. The epigraph—a fragment, decontextualized—gives the reader the first clue to the poem’s procedure. The line is lifted from one of Baudelaire’s irritable little “Spleen” poems; this one begins with “a rain-laden gloomy cold, annoyed with the whole town, dump[ing] great torrential urn-fuls on the pale inhabitants of the neighboring cemetery.” The cat in Palmer’s epigraph “on the tiles searching for a bed” mimics the irritability of the weather outside by “twitch[ing] its thin mangy body with no repose.” The poem ends with this unease invading even the simplest of objects—a deck of cards (triggered, for Baudelaire, by “carreau”—the suit of “Diamonds”) where “the handsome Jack of Hearts and the Queen of Spades speak sinisterly of their departed loves.” [My literal translation. The lines quoted (from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal) are the following: “Pluviôse, irrité contre la ville entière, / De son urne à grands flots verse un froid ténébreux / Aux pâles habitants du voisin cimetière . . . / Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litière / Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux . . . / Le beau valet de coeur et la dame de pique / Causent sinistrement de leurs amours défunts.”] What is interesting here is how the line (about the cat) used by Palmer is completely devoid of the agitation that inheres in the line (cat) in the context of the Baudelaire poem: Palmer’s cat is good-natured and sleepy, that’s all. The decontextualizing act Palmer accomplishes by selecting a fragment as epigraph is not unlike the constant refusal to contextualize in the body of the poem itself.
What, then, can we do with Palmer’s decontextualized fragments? We can read “Seven Forbidden Words” as a poem about language itself—with a view of language existing only within a structure, a frame that both enables and constrains the possibilities for making meaning. We can view Palmer’s poem as a series of framed “experiences” occurring moment-by-moment (or sentence-by-sentence). The “meaning” of the poem then will be relational: the reverberations (overlappings) among a set of local soundings (frames or fields).
In “Seven Forbidden Words” Palmer writes: “You grew these flowers yourself / so how could you forget their names?” How does this statement relate to the poem? What questions need be asked and what can be answered?
—Who is the “you” here? The sentence follows directly after one containing the only previous second-person pronominal reference—“The sun rose behind your shoulder / and told me to act casual / while striking an attitude of studied repose.” This is, of course, highly ambiguous—does the sun strike that attitude or order the “me” to do so (while the “me” is told, too, to “act casual”)? The reader who notes the ambiguity is put in the position of the writer, he who “forget[s the]names” by making syntactical “mistakes” that lead to assignability problems. As such, the “you” here seems to be the writer—admitting the syntactical difficulty. The writer is he who “grew the flowers”—metaphorically, wrote the words. The statement seems a challenge and rebuke to the writer (the rebuke of the reader who refuses the ambiguous “writerly” nature of the text—it is akin to something like “If you, the writer, can’t tell me what this means, how can anybody?”) But the “writerly” reader will find himself implicated in that “you” also—he is “writing” the text by reading it.
—What, then, are the “flowers”? As suggested above, the flowers can be read metaphorically as words. What are the words for which one can “forget their names”? What are words without names? Are they words decontextualized, disowned, made ambiguous, the “terms . . . broken here”? The following sentence helps: “The yellow one is said to be uncommon / and the heart tastes as expected, tender / and bitter like an olive / but less violent.” “The yellow one” (flower? or “nameless” word, identified only by sense impression?) is “said to be” both “uncommon” and “expected,” “tender” and “violent.” That “said to be” is as important as the conflicting “terms” which follow. Words are “without names” because they are “said to be”—they achieve the status of “flowers” only in context, one we must “grow ourselves.” The names of those words (flowers) are exactly “forget[table]” because they are always “said to be.” The original statement in question then, when read in a “writerly” fashion, becomes less a rebuke to the writer and more a (playful) act of generosity toward the reader—akin to something like “You are the only one, dear reader, who can tell yourself what this ‘means’ or ‘names.’”
5
Language refuses to behave “properly” (refusing exclusive ownership, exclusive context)—so I wrote in my opening remarks. I had a different image of how this writing would look when I began than it now seems to look now that I am finishing. I had pictured a more personal approach to language, an examination of my relationship with it. I have, alternatively, merely applied some deconstructive techniques to the reading of two poems—each as they seemed to warrant (or demand) it. The strategies were different because the poems were different and each poet’s view of language (as manifested, at least, in these particular poems) was different. How different? The reader can decide. I can only say that my poem—while self-conscious about language and its conflicting impulses—still seems to offer that language embedded in a larger, more readily identifiable context, a “worldly” situation. [Perhaps only to me. Am I playing this game with loaded dice, loaded words?] And that Palmer’s piece—while perhaps less self-conscious about language on a local (word-by-word) level—offers that language less contextually (constantly re-situating, re-framing its context), making the poem more “difficult,” and possibly more generous. In language, I might add, how can I ever know the nature of my relationship to language.
It is a curious thing indeed to write (here) about my own text (the “explication”) of my own text (the poem “Ann Arbor”) of my version of the highly “textualized” event of breaking up with someone. The “worth” of the endeavor is beyond question—I saw more than I could see before; the “result” though may be even less than “remarkable.” (I say this with Northrop Frye’s amusing comment [just encountered, quoted in Spivak] handy: “Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is a remarkable document, but as a piece of Wordsworthian criticism nobody would give it more than about a B plus.”) It is also a curious thing to approach (willingly) a poem by an (admittedly rather peripheral) member of a group of poets (the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets) I have long misunderstood, mistrusted, and viewed with a mix of something like alarm, perplexity, and disgust.
An anecdote. Some years ago I was writing poems that were seen as “difficult”—dense, self-conscious regarding language, troublesome to editors—and nobody was publishing them. I decided—on a whim—to send some to Barrett Watten, editor of This, a magazine connected to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school. I can’t locate just now the note I received rejecting those poems but I do remember Watten saying something to the effect that he “couldn’t understand the poems,” or he “couldn’t understand what the words were trying to say.” This either amazed or enraged me—I forget which now. Watten’s own poems, to me, seemed utterly opaque; he had some nerve is what I thought. And my poems, although difficult, seemed models of transparency, representative of all the vagaries and ambiguities of the world. [A reader’s comment: “I’m reminded here of Derrida’s irritation at critics who ‘misuse’ his concepts—everyone’s language is mischievous, it seems, except on occasion our own.”]
Another anecdote. In the early eighties when I was editing and publishing Chiaroscuro, a poetry magazine I founded and kept alive for some years, I wrote to the poet William Matthews asking if he would like to write an essay on the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, an attack. Mine was a visceral response—I had briefly met a couple of the poets, read a few poems, skimmed (without much understanding) some of their more theoretical writings. My line was: “It’s all theory; the poems themselves are unreadable.” Plus the few poets I had met seemed too earnest, too cocky, too ambitious, and overly concerned with marketing, or with conversion. They reminded me of young Mormon missionaries. So, an attack. Here’s what Matthews replied:
The last two times I’ve been in the Bay Area, I’ve been told earnestly
by boobs about how the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets are very
intelligent. An intonation like “Miss Parton’s tits are very big.” Dumb
stuff. I don’t want to write the piece, but someone should. Not a
member of that group, Michael Palmer is very intelligent, though
intermittently rewarding, and somebody should rescue him from his
followers some day.
Evidence of a two-bit literary squabble mostly, but reflective of the larger struggle over the nature and use of language. [Representational authority. Even, paradoxically, supposed turf of those who would seem to forego its claims.] It occurs to me that I could (profitably?) use deconstructive reading strategies on this text also. (What sort of incompatibilities exist between the literal speech of “boobs” regarding “intelligence” and the figurative speech of someone “intelligent”—Matthews—regarding “tits”? What is the relationship between “intelligence” and physical attributes here, or between “intelligence” and “rewarding” poetry? [I am forever recalling Ammons’s remark—”I think a poet ought to keep himself just a little stupid.”] What does it mean, in this context, to “rescue” a non-“member” from his “followers”? Is Matthews a “follower”? What hierarchical assumptions are in play(?) here?) I won’t.
I conclude with this postcard—with these anecdotes—as a sort of backward glance, a gesture of autobiography, a notice of my own “blindness and insight.” Will I write poems any “differently” now? I doubt it. Do I conclude that poems must proceed field-by-decontextualized-field? No. Deconstruction (in its praxis a reading) seems (more than anything) to posit language as a field of furious play. I’m reminded again of Frank O’Hara’s words in “Personism: A Manifesto”: “You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’” This—about writing, of course—is pure tongue-in-cheek, but seems “right.” And in that “just go on your nerve” is another notion, that, by so doing, we “make” that “someone . . . with a knife” appear, a context, out of whatever unreason, whatever alogy, one kind of illation.
~
Leslie Scalapino, and Ron Silliman (of the succeeding generation). The poem continually subjects its images to a skeptical scrutiny, always attempting to deny any final viability they may be bent on asserting. It “bends” those assertions as a way of foregrounding the poem’s insufficiency and instability. I could argue, perhaps, that the poem also partakes of Perloff’s second and third strategies in smaller, more localized ways.
The “word as Image.” Euclidean and cinnabar append themselves to “the scene” as words with particular shapes and looks that I suspect the reader will attend to, consider. Despite the differences in syllable-count, they are words of similar weight. Robert Grenier, in a talk at the New York State Writers Institute, provides the word and notion: there, he offered the “contentless utterance” / writing / visual—“hummingbird / originating”—and noted how each word appeared to carry “equal weight.” The composition, then, becomes a kind of object in itself, refusing, as Grenier claims, “the distinction between inside and outside.” I relate Grenier’s proposition to odd compulsive musical phrases that often erupt in my writings—tiny word-lists—“spikenard, portulaca, hum”—that seem to display the individual words as things to be set on the scale of the tongue. The thinking is rather akin to that of something like quantitative measure—though the words, in order to gain such tangibility may require the rich isolation (too often lost in my poems) that Grenier allows them on the page. That is to say, if I write something about, say, “the imperturbable idiot of sleep,” one may fail to note how idiot and of have (to my ear) equal weights. Idiot. Of. Idiot: three shorts the o cannot quite open. Of: one long, the roundedness of the O torturing the narrow little end-fricative. Balance.
The “making strange” (or ostranenie, the reference is to the Russian Futurists’ project). Here, obviously, the resistances of the poem in question to absorption (the word is a favorite of Bernstein’s, see particularly “Artifice of Absorption” in A Poetics wherein he writes of it—“& its obverses— / impermeability, imperviousness, ejection, / repellence both as a compositional question / & as / a reading value”) are minimal; the poem replicates in crucial presentational ways the dominant “poetic” media it emerges out of. What mischief it can create within that discourse is not uncommon and is merely local: if I insist on reading a particular line as line and not as part of the sentence (which always overwhelms it), I can claim small syntactical ruptures. It is a small claim, and likely to go unnoticed.
One example: “Desire to deny whatever alters it, the way a sentence.” The phrase—isolated, dominant—allows me to read it as a definition of a sentence: a sentence is always already “the way”; the “Desire to deny whatever alters it” is what so characterizes it. Compare the remark to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s on the finite one-wayism of the sentence: “a finite body of rules utilizing a finite vocabulary at a determined moment to generate sentences whose length is not limited but whose probability diminishes to the vanishing point when they become longer and longer can generate only a finite discourse.” Or to Robert Duncan’s remark to Ekbert Faas on the syntactic coercions of the sentence: “When you write a sentence beginning with the word ‘the,’ aren’t you already under the law of ‘the’? No matter what you do from here on, you are under its law.” Or to Tristan Tzara’s project (quoted in Easthope’s Poetry as Discourse): “to dissolve the hard cement of an / apparently impregnable fortress: syntax.”
§
Morning threads of a song loop-stitching throughout throughout as I bike off hospital-ward for the monthly blood draw: something about the “cockamamie commissioner who’s setting us all to rights down along Blogger Row.” Result of, I’m sure post-midnight playing catchup in Blogland. “One would do better to pick up a book.”
~
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