Writing The Messianic

Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles – Mark Scroggins

2012-02-04T14:36:00.000-08:00

There’s an extraordinary excitement coursing through these new poems by Mark Scroggins. Electric with a kind of headlong internal enjambment & melodically stuttering parataxis (modernist spasms of ecstasy run face-first into moral entropy), they vibrate at a pitch where desire topples into the forbidden, the decayed, and the just plain nasty.

“Osaka Bondage”

Blind mouths pastoral suck bukkake
viscous splatter ablumenoid linseed fever
underpainted egg-white glazing ochre umber
common time waltz three-step coda
the smeared mayonnaise beaten yolk
do I look strange kidnapped
precipitous tropic rushed silent end.

This is the only poem I know of to make such cunning use of the perverse practice of bukkake. Or any use, for that matter. Reader, do not dwell on it. Or, if you must, reflect on the term’s circulation vis-à-vis Facebook’s recent public offering. As the narrator of the classic noir, Naked City, entones at the end of the film: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

Torture Garden takes its unsavory name from a book of the same title I’m not likely ever to read, Octave Mirabeau’s kinky, savage satire on fin de siècle ethics. Formally, though, the poems take their cue from Zukofsky’s magnificent 80 Flowers – using 7 lines per poem rather than 8. But they're more than a gesture of homage from LZ's biographer; these poems stand wildly and entirely on their own as late modernist vignettes of metropolitan shock, snarling with polyglot street-smarts.

But if the profane gets plenty of bandwidth, the sacred is not neglected either, especially in a small run of poems dedicated to Michael Heller, Norman Finkelstein, Joe Donahue, and Peter O’Leary, each of whom works in the vein of a gnostic cum sacramental poetics. This is “Cairo Chop Shop,” for Heller:

Celebrated the birdsong and updates
of the letter made free
textured cloth sewn-in weight lead
brass golden yod cubits
and myriads poised to rise gold-webbed
damask between Jerusalem and sever
Athens unshielded poised to rise.

Intricately woven and tensile with thick layerings, this poem nevertheless almost floats off the page. “Jersualem and sever/Athens unshielded” is an exquisite syntactical stroke that out-Oppens Oppen.

The “procedure” in Torture Garden involves mashing up the eight million; the book is lustrous with quotation and allusion, most of which are lost on me, I confess, though I was amused to find a poem using A.E. VanVogt’s classic SF novel about superhuman mutants, Slan, for its title. None of this feels forced or contrived – there’s a powerfully cohesive music in these truculent rhythms and oblique combinations. Put another way, it’s a display of brute force from end to end, all sheer velocity and collision, a strange new beauty emerging from the rejection of beauty, a poetics in which “thought experiment keeps the real.” I love these poems – they’re like fragments torn from the margins of Benjamin’s Arcades Projects, scenes from violent media landscape that are swarming yet oddly serene. Brimming with surprise and speed, and teeming with ghosts and weird echoes, they expand the dark horizons of language; baleful clouds racing above a city’s shadows.

“S&M Sniper”

I will tell it like
it is simple words training
the mind’s eye on water
sand sunlight the nipple astir
under cotton voyeur dancing webcam
hard northeast wind and premonitory
hints of snow zippers latex.

On Leave: A Book of Anecdotes

2012-02-04T06:30:00.000-08:00

Keith Tuma's amazing new book, On Leave: A Book of Anecdotes, is just out from Salt. More than a collection of random tales, it's also a daybook, a meditation on the role of the anecdote in literary criticism, and some first rate readings of a wealth of great poems. It's brilliant and impossible to put down.

Besides recounting numerous anecdotes, delightful in themselves, about literary figures, Tuma provides a useful history of the genre and its study, while formulating a theory that tries to account for the vital role of the extra-literary in criticism. It's less a method, though, than a style; Hugh Kenner figures as one of its great exemplars.

The anecdote strand is counterpointed by two others. The first is an intermittent daybook of public and private events modeled after Hannah Weiner's Weeks. Here's a brief sample:

"Cubs off for the day; talk of recession follows talk of housing slump. Gonzales quits. A white bag of finch food hanging out back blows in the wind. One can't be bewildered forever; eventually you're just a clod of unknowing."

Tuma's wit is delightful and these passages prove every bit as enthralling as the classic anecdotes woven throughout. The practice of the daybook here becomes less about the recounting of events, then the flow of experience through language.

Tuma's peregrinations while on leave from Miami University, Ohio, form the second strand. Among these are his trip in 2008 to Orono, where we bumped into each other and he described the project to me. (Our hotel rooms were adjacent and I remember coming back from a panel and hailing Keith and Tom Raworth as they enjoyed an afternoon drink on the measly patio that opened out on to the parking lot. I was in too much of a conference funk to join them, though).

Then there are the anecdotes. Tuma has a fresh and easy way with them; indeed the whole book reads like a lark. There's the oft told classic of Jeremy Prynne and Tom Pickard's dust up at Sparty Lea, which I first heard from Ric Caddell in Durham. (Or was it Peter Quartermain in Boulder?) And another one about Alan Golding singing up a storm at Orono in 2000, well into the wee hours. I was at that party, too, matching drinks with Mark Scroggins, David Bromige, George Bowering, Linda Russo, and Tom Orange. It was my first big conference and I thought, if this is academic life, I want more of it. Of course, I suffered from a massive hangover all the next day.

And there's this, a recounting of a story told by Alan Shapiro (anecdotes are nothing if not promiscuously transmissible) that's a barbed allegory of the writing life almost too good to be true:

"Marvin Bell and Mark Strand walk into a Barnes and Noble and head over to the poetry section. Bell looks at the books shelved under B, Strand at the books shelved under S. There's not a book by either poet in the store. 'I guess they don't carry my books here,' Bell says. 'Mine are sold out,' says Strand."

Linda Oppen at Harvard

2012-01-28T13:04:00.000-08:00

Last October, I had the great pleasure of hosting a panel discussion at Harvard on George Oppen with his daughter, Linda, his Eagle Island friends, Bob and Helene Quinn, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. You can now view the event in its entirety on You Tube.

In addition, a separate interview, conducted by Columbia professor and oral historian Gerry Albarelli, can be heard on the Woodberry Poetry Room's website.

None of it would have been possible without the vision, passion, and extraordinary commitment of the Woodberry's Curator, Christina Davis. Scholars and lovers of Oppen's poetry owe her a great debt of gratitude.

Core Samples from the World

2012-01-24T17:38:00.000-08:00

Forrest Gander's remarkable new book, Core Sample from the World, has just been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award. Gander, who studied geology as as an undergrad, makes sharp use of the idea of a core sample by shifting it from the vertical to the horizontal axis. Yet the book drills deep into the stratigraphy of the global human.

I've never studied with Forrest but he's been an extraordinarily generous supporter of my work, the kind that every poet dreams of. People revere him, and rightly so. Friends and colleagues who've worked with him, like Anna Deeny, Raul Zurita's translator, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio, whose powerful work on Edmond Jabes and Rosmarie Waldrop benefited from his eye, sing his praises. I think Peter O'Leary put it best when he said to me, "I'd take a poetic bullet for this guy." So would I. This nomination is richly deserved.

Here's what I wrote about Core Samples for Steve Evans' Attention Span 2011.

Forrest Gander | Core Samples from the World | New Directions | 2011

An itinerary of otherness, strewn with uncanny moments of tenderness and glancing blows that crack the fragility of conscience. The earth’s alien powder is sifted through, poured out, regathered in rich pulses of telluric current from the far side of everywhere. Poem, photo, and prose fold into and out of each other, remapping their own contours. The overlap and feedback amplifies into a kind of 21st Century global witness that is porous and humbling and strange. I can’t think of another book like it. Utterly extraordinary.

"Peculiar Language" or, Tuning into Gnostic Frequencies

2012-01-09T17:14:00.000-08:00

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Wordsworth's "Descriptive Sketches"
Biographia Literaria, Chapter 4

"In the form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of the particular lines and periods, there is an harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images all a-glow, which might recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit is elaborating. The language is not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength; while the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with the difficulties of the style, demands always a greater closeness of attention, than poetry,--at all events, than descriptive poetry--has a right to claim. It not seldom therefore justified the complaint of obscurity."

A Poetics of Failure: On Paul Nelson, Walter Benjamin, Ross MacDonald & Basil Bunting

2012-01-04T15:00:00.000-08:00

The heartbreaking season of job applications is now fading gracelessly from the sharpness of ignominy to mere disappointment. The season of breaking the soul in love with a word down to a fine, bitter dust. Of scholarship and bureaucracy. Of hope and the grind of midwinter, as Lowell says in one of his more maudlin poems. Or as Beckett writes, “Throes are the only trouble, I must be on my guard against throes.”

Somehow it puts me in mind of the legendary rock critic Paul Nelson who, after his prescient early success, became even more notable for his failure. Reading the reviews of the new book on his sad career, Everything is an Afterthought, I was reminded that I met him once, in 1991. I’d flown to New York to see Jay Cocks, who I was working with on his script for Kathryn Bigelow about Joan of Arc. Paul and Jay were in the middle of watching Robert Siodmak’s classic early noir, The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (a film I still haven’t seen – but I highly recommend Siodmak’s The Killers and Criss-Cross, both with a young, wire-coiled intense Burt Lancaster).

In a hired town car, the three of us set off for a destination that turned out to be The Bronx of all places. As we passed through the Burnt Over district and turned down an improbably well-lit, nicely kept boulevard, Jay reassured me that, “for certain reasons, this is a very safe neighborhood.” It soon became apparent what those were. We disgorged at a pavilion of late modernist neon called Mario’s where we were greeted by a very wide man in a pink dinner jacket whose neck, I swear, was larger in circumference than my thigh. I’m not even sure he had a neck. He extended a huge pink paw which was surprisingly gentle as he ushered us in.

I don’t remember anything about the conversation that night. What Jay said. What Paul said. All I remember was being made to eat a lot of Italian food. I mean a lot a lot. More than anyone should be made to eat. And thinking that if I didn’t the sinister guy named Nick who had an evil grin would shove my lifeless body into a back alley dumpster. That was my evening with Paul Nelson.

I recall it now because in this season of my own defeat it’s instructive to contemplate his odd, willful withdrawal into a self-imposed exile from writing. After creating a name for himself with groundbreaking pieces for Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy he ended up clerking at a video store and died a pauper, having subsisted, apparently, on little more than cokes and cigarettes in his final years. It’s a sad story of self-destruction, though I can’t help but feel that David Hadju’s review in the Times is more than a bit smug even it as struggles to assert the value of Nelson’s work.

Nelson idolized some of my own pantheon figures: Peckinpah. Chandler. Ross MacDonald. But his life stands as a cautionary tale for writers who embrace a certain kind of fatalism. Perhaps Hadju has a point, after all. Who of us doesn’t recoil from the logic of extremity, no matter how weirdly it may beckon? In that most magical and haunted of books, Berlin Childhood around 1900, Walter Benjamin recalls how his childhood wish to get his fill of sleep was ironically granted as an adult. “I must have made that wish a thousand times, and later it actually came true. But it was a long time before I recognized its fulfillment in the fact that all my cherished hopes for a position and proper livelihood had been in vain.”

I sometimes think these are the saddest lines I’ve ever read. For if hope cannot set us free, what can?

Which leads me, roundabout, to the detective fiction of Ross MacDonald. A couple of summers ago, Jay Cocks urged me to read The Doomsters. I found it gripping, but also overly plotted to the point of garishness. Nevertheless, I was hooked by MacDonald’s dark way with a sentence. I’ve since read The Underground Man, The Goodbye Look and The Barbarous Coast. What at first I resisted in his byzantine contrivances I’ve now come to see as the singular mark of his spiritual critique.

MacDonald’s baroque plot structures are not simply elaborate arabesques spun out for the purposes of prolonging the reader’s pleasure. Their intricacy – the way they unfold, double-back, and loop around – maps out the floor plan for the haunted house of history. The mind’s cunning labyrinth of justifications and self-deceptions – among the innocent and the guilty alike (the distinction is slowly obliterated in each novel) – mirrors a larger pattern: the way all social networks – family, friends, business, the law – are implicated in each other’s traumas, as Cathy Caruth puts it. History is indeed what hurts, and while Archer may set right some small wrongs, in the end he has always arrived too late to do anything but bear tortured witness, offering hope, as Benjamin writes, only for those who have gone past it, the hopeless.

For if history is to be more than an unbroken pageant of triumphalism then it must, as both Benjamin and MacDonald knew, attest to the failures – to those who were crushed beneath the wheel, cast aside; spurned, neglected, forgotten, and abused. I once thought of writing my dissertation about the poetics of failure, taking up the examples of Oppen, Niedecker, Bunting, and John Wieners, with Beckett as a kind of happy Charon (though I could have drawn just as easily from the life of Delmore Schwartz – who reads him anymore, that burned out glory boy?). It seemed too depressing.

But now, in midwinter’s solar hiatus, when the sun is a brief blinding flare above the horizon, I’m haunted by Paul Nelson’s legacy of abandonment. I think of MacDonald’s grim, doom-chased characters and of Lew Archer stumbling doggedly after them, as if he could catch and break their fall. I think of Bunting’s “Briggflatts” and the ejection of Alexander by the Angel of Judgment from the peak of a mountain into the Northumbrian grass and the song of the slowworm. Failure re-configured as the occasion for coming into the riches of humility.

Somewhere Terry Eagelton writes: “the mortified landscape of history is redeemed. Not by being recuperated into spirit, but by being raised, so to speak, to the second power – converted into a formal repertoire, fashioned into certain enigmatic emblems which then hold the promise of knowledge and possession.”

Just as in Benjamin, where “the concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe,” so the work of failure, like the work of mourning, is predicated on how traumatic loss is metabolized. Downfall produces rescue. And failure re-inscribes loss into the hermeneutical circle of self-possession: a re-reading that turns depletion into plenitude.

In “Briggflatts,” the poetics of failure transforms a fall from grace into a fall into grace. The expulsion from the violence of ambition leads to the welcome of Gelassenheit.

"But who will entune a bogged orchard,
its blossom gone,
fruit unformed, where hunger and
damp hush the hive?"

In other words, midwinter's counsel is to be secret, and exult.

For The New Year

2011-12-26T07:59:00.000-08:00

"When the bells jostle in the tower
the hollow night amid,
then on my tongue the taste is sour
of all I ever did."

-- A.E. Housman

Gnostic Frequencies

2011-12-21T07:55:00.000-08:00

I'm delighted to announce the publication of my second full-length collection of poems, Gnostic Frequencies, from Tod Thilleman's Spuyten Duyvil. It's available through Spuyten Duyvil's website and from Amazon, and will be listed next year with Small Press Distribution.

"Patrick Pritchett’s Gnostic Frequencies boldly and brilliantly takes up the Romantic quest to make an infinite Book. Just as Pritchett’s previous volume Burn offered a visionary revision of the Joan of Arc legend, here the poet ‘rewrites the myth’ of the Archive as a self-renewing ruin of absolute meaning, ‘a scripting of / impossible flowers.’ In musical measures, Pritchett aligns ancient paradoxes of the inspirited Word with post-postmodern meditations on the virtual body. This new book stands as a major contribution to the tradition of American radical lyricism."
-- Andrew Joron

The following is excerpted from the book's End Notes:

What is a gnostic frequency? And how do we hear one? Is it the poem we tune into, in the dark? The strange language in the middle of the way, on route, that speaks from the other side of knowing, the voice (who speaks?) that murmurs, in the middle of the night, from within not-knowing, out of hope for another kind of knowing? The poem that desires, above everything else, some small vision of the otherwise?

This is a book of poems about tuning into the hidden legacies and hermetic inheritances of modernism. A book of endarkening, as Duncan might put it, of a way of knowing that is encrypted, not in musty séances and etiolated rituals, but in the quickening mysteries of logos as it arises from, yields to, and reshapes matter. Becoming gnostic means listening to the heretical speech of the caesura, to the extravagant pulses and rhythms of the unspeakable as it swirls about us, allowing language itself to speak.

The poems of Gnostic Frequencies pay tribute to the thread of hermeticism that runs from high modernism to postmodernism. They make special demands of the reader in as much as they ask her to undergo an immersion in the a-signifying stream of language as though it were a form of rhapsodomancy. They are deliberately excessive, intentionally overflowing with an excess of signification and repetition, a kind of archaic ebullience.

A gnostic poetics (always lower-case) militates against positivism, against totality, against knowing-as-such. Such a stance invites charges of obscurantism. But what gnostic poetics really calls for is not a reading of the world, but a way to undergo it. Taken together, they comprise a haphazard map of my desire to write a postmodern sophianic poem. But any wisdom to be found here will be of a purely musical, self-cancelling, order.

The Task of Art

2011-12-17T06:39:00.000-08:00

“The task of the arts is to rescue from cognitive and rational oblivion our embodied experience and the standing of the unique, particular things as the proper objects of such experience, albeit only in the form of a reminder or a promise” (7).

J.M. Bernstein, Against voluptuous bodies: late modernism and the meaning of painting

Drafting Beyond The Ending: On Rachel Blau DuPlessis

2011-12-14T09:30:00.000-08:00

I'm very pleased to announce the appearance of Drafting Beyond The Ending, a special feature on the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, at Jacket 2's site. Curated by myself, it offers thirteen essays, some of them substantial, all of them generous with insight, plus two book reviews and a new poem by DuPlessis.

My deep thanks to Julia Bloch, Mike Hennessey, and everyone else on the Jacket team who worked so hard to produce this.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Drafting Beyond the Ending – Patrick Pritchett

Un-scene, ur-new: the history of the longpoem & The Collage Poems of Drafts – Ron Silliman

Openings: Some Notes on the Political in Drafts – Eric Keenaghan

“The Force of an Intervention”: DuPlessis’ Response to Oppen in “Draft 85: Hard Copy” — Libbie Rifkin

Envoy: Postings on the Digital Form –Paul Jaussen

How to Mourn-Touch: The Redactive Prosodies of Rachel Blau DuPlessis – CJ Martin

Take Your Time: The Ethics of the Event in Drafts – Catherine Taylor

A Little Yod and a Rocking Enormity: Reading Drafts – Daniel Bouchard

Inverting the Middle: Turning Points in Drafts – Thomas Devaney

“The page is slowly turning black”: Torques: Drafts 58-57 — Harriet Tarlo

“All serifs are seraphim”: Midrash as the Angel of History – Patrick Pritchett

At the Critical/Poetic Boundary: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Arguments with Adorno – Naomi Shulman

Drafts and The Epic Moment – Bob Perelman

Drafts and Fragments: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ (Counter-) Poundian Project – Alan Golding

Ghost Tracks: Reading the Signs in Pitch: Drafts 77-95 – Chris Tysh

On Pitch, with Special Reference to “Hard Copy” - CJ Martin

Debris Field – Patrick Pritchett

Draft 109: Wall Newspaper – Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Cool Hand Luke: What Louis Menand Gets Right – and Not So Right -- about Eliot & Modernism

2011-09-17T12:57:00.000-07:00

I’ve written about Luke Menand here before and my problem, if it even is one, with his compelling brand of intellectual history. Just to be clear here: I came away from my experience as his teaching assistant for “Art & Thought in the Cold War” at Harvard with nothing but admiration. He is a brilliant lecturer, a consummate professional, and despite what appears to be at first a slightly distant, somewhat awkward, reserve, stemming entirely, I think, from an intense shyness, a decent, down to earth guy.

My frustration with the way he often frames his accounts of cultural history is inseparable from my fascination with the appeal of his style. As David Bromwich notes, somewhat snarkily, in his review of American Studies, once Menand covers something, it stays covered. Case closed. Bromwich is vexed, though, and he can’t be alone, in wondering what it is, exactly, that Menand stands for in any of his summary pronouncements. It’s less a matter of evading a position, then an aversion to taking positions at all. He’s like the Cheshire cat of intellectual history, a sly smile fading out over the scene of writing.

The success of that writing hinges on appealing to a reader’s craving for being in the know. Menand satisfies this craving with a carefully qualified performance of knowingness. But its often achieved more through rhetorical strategies than analytical persuasion. The fascination is frustrating – how does he do what he does? Where is that shaky line drawn, exactly?

In his new review of T.S. Eliot’s two-volume letters Menand draws on his earlier account of how Eliot invented himself. That book was about Eliot’s self-fashioning as a modernist. Indeed, self-fashioning is the thread that runs through many Menand essays. Such an approach provides a bright hook but I suspect Menand’s interest in it – whether writing of Holmes and James, Kerouac and MacDonald, or Friedan and Warhol – runs deeper than that. It’s not just that such a framing of literary and cultural history lines up with his pragmatist approach: things turn out the way they do because people are the way they are. There’s something autobiographical, or autotelic, to it as well. It takes a self-fashioner to know one.

What Menand gets right about Eliot is his centrality for the New Critics and the evolution of the modern English Dept. What annoys me about this is the reductiveness of such an explanation, as though modernism came about because Eliot had a bad case of the yips. Marked by his characteristic cannyness, his seductive sense of giving the reader the inside scoop, he somewhat naively follows the Hugh Kenner model – modernism was hatched on the spot by the valiant Men of 1914 (Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lewis). I ate this up the first time I read The Pound Era, when I was 20. But there’s no room in this superhero origin story for Woolf, Richardson, HD, Moore, Stein, Loy, Cather, Williams, Hughes, or Stevens. Lawrence is slightingly alluded to in his clever (and pragmatic) riff on modernism as a turn inward and below the waist.

If this protest seems excessive, try to imagine this: a Menand essay (or one by the Salinger-idolizing Adam Gopnik -- Salinger? Really? But then The New Yorker is nothing if not self-congratulatory) of equal gravity and full-dress staging on the correspondence of William Carlos Williams. Right.

Menand is terrific at assessing the relation of the individual talent to the tradition of institutional history; not so good at detailing the fine grain of modernism as it actually happened. Granted, it’s a review of TSE’s letters – not a grand overview of a moment. That said, the bias of the piece is to collapse the moment into Eliot’s hollow soul. To reduce modernism to the Men of 1914 is rather like claiming that postmodernist poetry in America sprang from Lowell’s Life Studies, without mentioning Olson, Duncan, Levertov, Creeley, Ginsberg, and Baraka.

Reading The New Yorker piece alongside Michael Levenson’s excellent new book, Modernism, offers a useful counterpoint. Levenson, taking the wider range of reference that a book-length study allows, places Eliot’s prewar poetry alongside Blaise Cendrars. The value of such a comparison is that it rejects “the clarity of the contrast,” as he puts it, inviting us to “recognize the sheer spread of experiment” that marked this moment. But of course Levenson, a distinguished
scholar, is writing for a different audience.

This is where Menand as scholar hews a bit too closely to The New Yorker’s house style and its commitment to entertain. It’s a style that he’s both ably critiqued and exemplified. Scholarship and journalism are uneasy bedfellows, and the need to produce popularizing accounts of complex historical and aesthetic moments often leads a writer to lean too much toward his audience. I suspect Menand doesn’t so much acknowledge as wish to abolish the distinction. This is part of his success and charm as a writer. The Metaphysical Club, for instance, though dutifully more circumspect in tone, nevertheless reads like a very very long New Yorker article. (And much like a New Yorker piece, it all boils down to a simple comforting explanation: the Civil War produced American modernism out of the pragmatist’s aversion to totalizing theories). That is one of the reasons for its enormous appeal – the book is a sheer pleasure to read. And it's what I love about Menand’s work: he sees no reason why smart writing about difficult subjects shouldn’t also be pleasurable.

(Hence this slightly left-handed homage: as Ben Jonson translates Quintillian on writing: "First, seek to emulate the best").

In one of his essays – on Trilling, I think – he remarks that the process of becoming a writer is rooted in pleasure; it arises from wanting to learn how to make sentences the way someone like Trilling does. It’s a model I subscribe to myself. It’s something every writer feels, I think. Yet in treating such a significant figure as Eliot, the pleasure tends to get in the way of the history; the need to score the witty apercu overshadows the entanglements and ambiguities of modernism. T.S. Eliot didn’t invent modernism so much as suffer it.

Menand reproduces without comment Pound's famously flabbergasted remark to Harriet Monroe about Eliot having modernized himself. But did he really? This trucking in moth-balled myth does modernist studies no good. As Menand himself notes, "Prufrock" could not have been written without the example of Jule LaForgue (nor, before him, Baudelaire). So much for autogenesis.

Nor did Eliot, as Menand’s very good book on him puts it, even discover modernism. Rather, he made himself into a modernist through a combination of a violent, that is, original style, and some shrewd (if now rather hollow) obiter dicta which captivated the imagination and practice of a generation of scholars in search of a method. That it spread like crabgrass is no achievement on Eliot’s part, even if he did little to discourage it. Here’s where I could do with a little less pragmatist bottom-lining and a little more Frankfurt-style dialectics.

Menand is very good at locating Eliot’s poetics as both a symptom and a critique of modernity. And he’s certainly right, and funny, about the way the Notes to “The Waste Land” have been read by critics as some kind of paratextual holy of holies. It’s all in all a deft summation of a career whose influence it’s difficult to overestimate. But that deftness, which is driven more by narrative concerns than the needs of literary history, also feels impoverished; marked as much by what it excludes as what it includes. He’s rather too cavalier about TSE’s involvement with Action Francaise, while his account of Eliot’s marriage to Vivien strains for an impersonal and unsympathetic tone that is greatly at odds with the acute misery of the couple.

What Menand seems to find most admirable in Eliot is not the poetry, nor even the powerful early criticism, but the pace and resolve of Eliot’s industry. It’s not so much what he did as the impact that he had which he finds impressive, even enviable. That the critic should pay homage to the critic is no surprise. But is Eliot still, nearly a century after the publication of “The Waste Land,” “the most important figure in 20th Century English language literary culture”? I thought we’d moved beyond the Great Man cult. Menand’s co-editor for The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Lawrence Rainey, makes a more subtle case in his essay on Pound/Eliot about the critical obsession with literary hierarchies, and even Marjorie Perloff, whom Rainey is riffing on, seems, in her “Avant-garde Eliot,” to edge carefully toward their position, re-claiming early Eliot as an exotic species for her prewar garden of the avant-garde.

I’m not sure I buy it.

What’s at stake here, really? Verifying that Ivor Richards was right all along in consecrating Eliot as the Next Big Thing and that time and consequence have done nothing to change that? Eliot’s sphinx-like qualities lend him to all manner of template-making and revisionary ratios. we can read whatever we want into The Man Who Was Not There -- But Who Really Was. Personally, I’m at a loss as how to account for the distance between my own intoxicated enthusiasm for his pre-“Ash Wednesday” work when I was young and my defensive guardedness when I try to teach “Prufrock” or “The Waste Land” all these years later. What’s changed? Well, for one thing, I've learned a lot more about what modernism is and how it got that way. Same poem, different page.

Which is to say that all these years later it's Dr. Williams of Rutherford, NJ who seems to me more and more to claim the cardinal role in the early avant-garde.
Spring & All, recently re-issued in a beautiful facsimile edition by New Directions, came out in 1923, one year after "The Waste Land" set off its detonation, first in The Dial, then in the Boni & Liveright book, with the newly added Notes. (Rainey presents the definitive textual history of its publication, including all the background negotiations conducted by Pound and John Quinn -- who deserves his own monograph for his role in modernism -- and the extraordinary amount of money the poem fetched its author). And of course, Williams saw the writing on the wall. As he noted later, in his "Autobiography," the appearance of "The Waste Land" was “the great disaster to our letters — it gave the poem back to the classroom.”

More and more, Eliot's "modernism" looks like an extended freak-out about the erosion of self and the disappearance of the past -- one node in Marshall Berman's account of modernity -- while WCW's breakthrough book appears, alongside Stein's Tender Buttons, as the other node -- celebratory and truly innovative -- the singular exemplar of a modernism that was truly modern -- that is, that attended to the new while it contended with the ghosts of the old. "The Waste Land" mourned the dispersal of the Great Traditiion. Spring and All unapologetically made the case for a modernism without the tears.*

Eliot may have invented, willy-nilly, the modern English dept. Though even here Menand's account is biased in favor of the cult of genius. The trend toward a quantitative metrics in literary study was already underway. It would be more accurate to say TSE was its poster boy. At any rate, the tautology that places him as its fountainhead is also one that suppresses an enormous, vital, and equally significant history of literary development that opposed the Eliotic method and continues to flourish today. The history as Menand gives it is a bit too pat, and altogether too settled. The case is not closed.

* I credit Ron Silliman with making the case that nudged me to this consideration, That, and teaching the book for the first time last spring to my class at Amherst College, a week or so after the section on Eliot.

Fanmail from Some Flounder

2011-09-13T14:12:00.000-07:00

Each year now, for nearly a decade, Steve Evans, at the University of Maine-Orono, has been performing the heroic service of inviting poets to share the 11 titles that have most engaged or excited them over the past year. You can read my list, with comments, here.

The great benefit of Steve's collation is that it allows one to catch up with, or at least be alerted to, the many poetry titles that time and attention span make it impossible to keep up with. Lists, of course, are all about bias, about fixing boundaries and establishing genealogies. A list is desire's argument with transience. Even the most erratic constellation invites pattern recognition. My own, I can't help but notice, speaks to my proclivities for a visionary angularity that has not entirely forsaken the somewhat shop-soiled shibboleth of meaning.

Here are the titles of seven other books of poetry that I found crucial, dazzling, or simply beautiful.

R.H.W. Dillard | What Is Owed the Dead | Factory Hollow | 2011

Michael Price | Doombook | The Figures | 1998

Anna Moschovakis | You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake | Coffee House | 2011

Timothy Donnelly | The Cloud Corporation | Wave Books | 2010

Peter Gizzi | Threshold Songs | Wesleyan | 2011

Srikanth Reddy | Voyager | U Cal Press | 2011

Linda Norton | The Public Gardens | Pressed Wafer | 2011

Remembering September 11

2011-09-05T17:25:00.000-07:00

N.B. -- this was written on 9/19/01 and published not long after in the now defunct Boulder Arts Paper. Thanks to Jennifer Heath for running it.

Psalm 9.11

"All my pretty ones?
Did you say all?
What, all
At one fell swoop?"

1.

Gone

Sun in triage, gone

Wilderness of smoke –
hoop of blasted

[ ]

O gone

deluge I am
going to the end

Speech of madness
that would extinguish every name

Calamity that crushes us into
prayer

Into
make my silence
a flame that won’t
go out

2.

Cold water
for the laving
of wounds

Colder
than the surface
of the moon

Under cloud
they fall
they turn

Pour cold water
on their eyes
the dead who burn

3.

Weep
it’s OK to burn

Write
it’s OK to weep

Blank
to the furthest
horizon

What is
living

What is
tide

becomes us in a sweep
of grass, grace

4.

The sundering boom gapes
Who spills, who folds, who falls away

Dust is air, washing over
Is no water &
the beauty of their forms

skyline escarpment stutters,

it is evening—zoom to limb
to house, to rosary

Hell is
sunlight on the toe
of a shoe

Ich bin Ich bin Ich bin
Be all my sins remembered

5.

By the waters of X
I sat down and.

Cold wind
from the furnace
of broken syllables.

6.

Ship this whisper
as music

Be here lovely inside shadow
ache together under storm

the dead are forever
the meaning of any

moment held to
& dissolved

7.

And the point in the spectrum
where all lights become one

announces only
itself.

Beyond
that no one holds

the lone lumen
of stone

but stands
inside
a room

the sound of a voice
at the end

who will mark
my love

when she goes?

Who will stay?

8.

And dropped each
one
down

Past reach
of dire lyre

Song now gone
flume consuming

Tasked by
blast

Unknot
the clot
of living

Wind burn gasp

All peace ceases
out of doom
resumed

Catastrophe
blaze
apostrophe

O
day open

O
open day

9.

Yet say this also:

After saying everything
everything
remains to be said

Living the Impossible or, 9/11

2011-09-05T17:16:00.000-07:00

(Note; this was written on 09/19/01 and first appeared in The Boulder Arts Paper).

Out of all the images I saw on TV – jets impacting, buildings burning, collapsing, smoke roaring out in a choking shroud – one returns unbidden, over and over: a man in a suit falling head downwards along the length of one of the towers, tiny arms and legs flailing, starting to go into a slow spin. It seemed endless, his falling, then mercifully the footage stopped. And at that point I thought, “I'm on the edge of breaking down completely…”

*

If anything at all is clear to us from The Event (and very little is) it is that the old responses are no longer available to us. I've felt like Samuel Beckett these past few days: consumed by a desire to say something, having no means to say it, along with the overwhelming obligation to say it anyway.

A friend of mine remarked to me that the first casualty of war is not truth, but language. Bush’s naive appeal to the ultimate villain – “evil” – is not just a gross simplification of a vastly complex historical moment; it’s an invitation to resume our sleepwalking through history. I feel that what we’re really being called to by this calamity is of another order altogether: not revenge, certainly; it goes beyond even justice. It presents itself instead as the call to completely recalibrate the role America plays at large. Such considerations will not provide an “answer” to the Bin Ladens of the world. The only answer to hate is love, as MLK once said, but though we’ve arrived at the point in our history where it seems more necessary than ever, it’s doubtful that compassion will be adopted as the philosophical underpinning for all future foreign policy. Nevertheless, regardless of any impact on the rest of the world it might have, an examination of the enormous blindspot in our perilously conceived self-image and how it funds our actions might form the smallest of beginnings to an urgently needed metanoia.

After the First World War, the French poet Paul Valery observed grimly that “the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. Elam, Nineveh and Babylon were beautiful names. France, England and Russia are beautiful names. Lusitania is a beautiful name.” So is New York City. So is Osama bin Laden.

*

The morning of the attack I gave a presentation on tropes to my graduate pro-seminar. We sat around the large table stunned and shell-shocked. It seemed absurd. What could be more trivial, more irrelevant, I asked the class, than discussing poetic language? But now more than ever, it’s important that we study poetry. Because in the coming days and weeks ordinary language will undergo hideous deformations as it contorts itself into all kinds of rhetorical postures. Because poetry – and the figural language of poetry – helps us to cope with crisis. It gives a shape to our mourning.

Because the poem will always be equal to the occasion of any human event. Because more than anything else, the poem is that exquisite instrument that enables us to recover and transform loss. It makes the absent present once again. It provides us with a profound form of consolation simply through the performance of its utterance.

Adorno was not wrong when he said, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What the disaster invites us into, what it forces us to consider, is how all forms of culture are underwritten by barbarity, that even the most refined expressions of our culture are built out of it. Not to write poetry would, of course, be another kind of disaster. Because if we don’t, then we’re done for.

To go on after The Event will be unimaginably difficult. What can sustain us? If poetry fails to lift us, if language breaks down and proves inadequate to the task of recovery, where do we turn? How do we carry on?

One way is suggested in a recent commentary on the workings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa by Jacques Derrida, who advances an astonishing idea about forgiveness:

"Yes, there is the unforgivable. Is this not, in truth, the one thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? If one is only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable, what the church calls ‘venial sin,’ then the very idea of forgiveness would disappear. If there is something to forgive, it would be what in religious language is called mortal sin, the worst, the unforgivable crime or harm. From which comes the aporia, which can be described in its dry and implacable formality, without mercy: forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable. One cannot, or should not, forgive; there is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable. That is to say that forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself. It can only be possible in doing the impossible."

This is what we are being called to in this moment: to respond to the unimaginable by performing the impossible, the total and radical act of forgiving the starkly unforgivable. Can we do it? The real question is: can we afford not to do it? We must contemplate again the bleak, two-line parable that came out of the devastation of the death camps, which runs simply, “At Auschwitz, where was God?” And its reply: “Where was man?” Forgiveness here does not imply the forgoing of justice or the inevitable punic demands of the state. As Kristeva notes, forgiveness breaks the chain of cause and effect. It's caesura of temporal logic frees us from the downward spiral of bitterness, vindictiveness, and hate.

However we choose to answer to this harrowing moment, wherever it leads us, and whatever else may come, either by retaliation or by continuing terror attacks, one thing is certain: the task of holding on to the human will occur inside the demands that an impossible compassion lays upon us.

Writing the Disaster or, 9/11

2011-09-05T17:14:00.000-07:00

As the day draws closer this week for marking the ten-year commemoration of 9/11, with all its accompanying commentary, it's good to remember the words of Maurice Blanchot from his hermetic text on the Holocaust: "The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact ... the disaster takes care of everything ... the disaster is the gift, it gives the disaster."

This Sunday, 9/11/11, I will attend the birthday party of an 8-year old friend named Miles. We will ride a train through a park. We will play miniature golf (always a favorite). And that is how I will mark the anniversary of this event.

But, for what it's worth, I will offer in subsequent posts here portions of my initial reaction to 9/11, which first appeared in The Boulder Arts Paper, thanks to its editor, Jennifer Heath.

The Deaths of the Author

2011-09-01T16:49:00.000-07:00

Not long after I arrived at Harvard, in 2006, Jane Gallop gave a mesmerizing talk that revisited Roland Barthes' famous essay, "The Death of the Author." (Though it was a Comp Lit event, I remember thinking "where are all the English faculty?" Maybe they, too, had died ...)

That talk -- expanded now -- forms the first chapter of her elegant and powerful new book, The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time. Gallop turns the poststructuralist move of decentering the author to fresh account here, going beyond the necessary evacuation of subjective privilege to a moving engagement with the afterlife of the author as a haunting presence whose shadow still fills us with desire.

This is a book about the author as ghost -- a specter who continues to speak to and inspire us. It thinks the gap between the theoretical concept of the author's dethronement and the personal experience of losing writers we hold dear. In the tradition of the best theory, it insists that we cannot consider these things apart, but must always "think them together."

My notes on the lecture took the form of a poem. As I think back on it, perhaps one of the reasons I found her talk so stirring was that I had just lost my mother. The perverse idea of desiring the dead, not in a necrophiliac sense, but in the melancholy register of keeping their departure open, struck a deep chord. As Sebald writes (and as my notes on Solaris take up): "And so they are always returning to us the dead."

Everything hinges on that "and."

The Death of the Author
for Jane Gallop

If I were a writer, and dead, then how bright the sky at evening when evening is a word for making other words.

And how I would love to be dispersed across the sky, ashes thrown to the wind and someone’s beautiful eyes reducing me to a few precious details. Travelling outside whatever my life had been, joining me to a future that cannot know me, except as a toy that resurrects the destroyed.

If I were a writer and no longer a part of my story, but given over unseen to the birds at evensong, returning to the same life, the very same and yet different. Speaking warmly with strangers at the gate, skirting the paths through the park, spying on the couples who are kissing in their sleep, a part of the larger night where everything has already happened without me.

If I were a writer, and dead, I would enter the room of sudden desires. The one with salty snacks and glasses of whiskey. The book there where I had left it. Your eyes, your voice.

Whatever pierces me. Speeches me. Even now, dead, writes me.

Jacket Review of Michael Palmer's "Thread"

2011-08-29T15:27:00.000-07:00

My review of Michael Palmer's Thread can now be read at at Jacket 2. Many thanks to Michelle Taransky for doing such a beautiful job with it.

Scott Wannberg, 1953-2011

2011-08-22T06:35:00.000-07:00

Scott Wannberg was the first poet I ever knew. We met in a dorm room in Mary Ward Hall on the San Francisco State campus, both of us high, no doubt, and giddy with the energy of having appointed ourselves young acolytes of the Word. It was the fall of 1975. Though I was only a freshman and he was in the MFA program studying with Stan Rice, he treated me like an equal. I knew almost nothing about poetry. My idea of it was pretty much confined to the whimsicalities of e.e. cummings. It’s safe to say that meeting Scott changed my life, dramatically.

It’s rare, I think, when one can point to a single event, a instant that defines one for good. When Scott stood up – he was an imposing figure: tall, fleshy, stoop-shouldered, with a shaggy mop of hair, sweating no matter what the temperature was – and began declaiming in his soft, rapid, slightly monotone but urgent cadence, the libretto to Pound’s “Canto LXXXI,” some basic code mutated at the root level. It’s no exaggeration to say that nearly everything I’ve done since has proceeded out of that moment.

Yet
Ere the season died a-cold
Borne upon a zephyr's shoulder
I rose through the aureate sky

I had no idea, of course, what any of it meant. Who Waller and Dowland were I would soon discover, combing through the library, while ABC of Reading propounded Pound’s argument that after Chaucer English poetry had drifted into a doldrums that only Golding's translations of Ovid finally rescued it from. (This kind of heretical counter-canon making was head-spinning stuff for the uninitiated). I didn’t even recognize that Pound’s deliberate archaisms were archaic. Which plagued my earliest efforts at poetry, a fact Kathleen Fraser kindly drew attention to in her workshop. But it was the music that drew me in, its huge sweeping tides washing over me.

Pound was not the only poet Scott introduced me to. Williams, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas, were part of the cascade. Each searing, each pivotal, in revealing the possibilities of poetry. But it was Scott’s boundless joy in them, his sensitive, passionate reading and engagement with them, and his own example of wildly fecund permission, of letting words fly where they may, that blew the doors off the hinges for me. Not that anything I wrote then was remotely good. It was only a beginning.

Each week, like a pied-piper of bohemian culture, Scott led a small merry band of us to the art houses in the city to see Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Carne, or Kubrick’s anesthetized epic, Barry Lyndon. Along the way, he was a non-stop compendium of high-low cultural citationality. Strother Martin was as important a figure to him as Pound or Williams. (I regret we never saw The Wild Bunch together; it wasn't until years later I finally viewed it). Being with Scott was expansive, blistering, tornadic, and finally, exhausting. Yet, in the middle of the whirlwind was an incredible kindness and a compassion for the least, the lowly and the suffering.

After that heady year, Scott returned to LA and Venice. We lost touch and I didn’t see him again till the early 90s when I ran across him at the legendary Dutton’s Books in Brentwood. (Ironically, I’d worked at its sister store on Laurel Canyon, run by Dave Dutton, a few years earlier without ever getting wind of this). By that time I was working in the movie business and had begun shifting from the poetry of Charles Wright and Mark Strand to Susan Howe and Michael Palmer. Scott, it seemed to me, had stayed true to his neo-beat origins, continuing to mine that vein even more deeply. It was entertaining, energetic work, long on comic schtick and short on the more lyrical and cerebral qualities I’d come to prize. After all those years we had little to say to one another, but it made me happy to see him spinning dervish-like in the flux of citational associations. He was still a galvanic spirit, ebullient and enfevered for the life of the Word.

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage

Michael Palmer's "Thread"

2011-08-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

Note: here are the first three paragraphs of my 4000 word review-essay of Palmer's newest book, Thread. The entire piece will appear sometime in September or October at Jacket 2's website. Thanks to Julia Bloch, Michelle Taransky, Al Filreis, and everyone who is part of the new J2 team for making it happen.

Against Elegy: Michael Palmer’s Book of the Dead

“Thread—Stanzas in Counterlight” is Michael Palmer’s Book of the Dead. The title series of his 9th full-length collection, these eighteen interlinked poems are not elegies in the traditional sense. Neither songs of lament, nor, strictly speaking, commemorations for the departed, they reconfigure the genre. In these extraordinary poems, among the most moving and powerful of his career, the dead appear as companions on the way, intimately joined to the enterprise of living. “Thread” transforms elegy into crystalline paleography – a writing before writing that is also beyond it. Here, the customary polarity between innocence and experience is reversed. Innocence is not what is lost; it can only be gained. It does not precede experience, but is produced by it. For innocence is not a category of purity outside the travails of experience, but a condition that is achieved only by passing through the sorrows of an arduous contingency. The poems in Thread amply testify to this. In “Transit,” for instance, the sight of Creeley’s final book, On Earth, spurs a mournful, yet consoling, recognition.

We’ve come

to the old
echoes again,
swallowed songs,
tongues of cloud and wind.

The delicious image of a “swallowed song” rides on a cascade of vowels. The old echoes go with us, through us, speak out of us, again. So many of these poems feel like fragments of an overheard conversation. Nearly every one of them trails a ghostly double, beckoning us, in their uncanny incompleteness, to listen for further, unheard melodies. In “Fragment After Dante,” the first of a three-part series, the poet finds himself stranded in the realm of shadows: “And I saw myself in the afterlife of rivers and fields/among the wandering souls and light-flecked paths” (34). Amid the suffering of the dead, the greatest torment is to hear them speak, “chatting about nothing,” yet failing to understand them. The second Dante fragment resonates with muted pain.

And she clasped my arm and said,
You, my son, who have lingered

too long among the dead, go
and return to the lighted shore

for those brief moments you have left (35).

In a haunting image, the speaker’s face transforms “from old to young” as she vanishes. Memory’s dream of what-was mingles promiscuously with its hope for the Not-Yet. Throughout, Thread generously acknowledges that its every word is merely on loan from “the thief’s journal,” Palmer’s phrase, by way of Genet, for the floating para-text of unowned language. This is elegy against elegy: not a quixotic defiance of mortality, but a deepening awareness of it; a way to write into and out of finitude.

Thinking of the dead this way enables Palmer to do away with appeals to the cult of the personal and its fetish for the unique. “The dead” in these poems name an experience in which loss is only another form of continuity. They are always near and yet irreparably distant. In this way, the poem occupies a Rilkean angelic topos: it circulates freely between the living and the dead without making any distinctions between them. To speak the dead this way is to place them in an order of belonging beyond sentimental coercion. They remain strange and vivid; sheltered within memory, but also outside it; irrefragably singular.

“Thread” inhabits the melancholy landscape familiar to Palmer’s readers, a place where language ratifies itself by signifying its own failure. Written under the agonizing sign of Saturn’s slowness, they are harrowing in their humility and directness. Simplicity here is neither a reduction nor a retreat, but the earned complexity of a late style in a late hour. To call “Threads” a tour de force would only defame it. These “threads” are addresses, colloquies, homages – unanswered questions that concentrate Palmer’s concerns for his art as a site for making counter-meanings, those micro-resistances that push back against the crushing sense of moral fatigue born of loss, suffering, and slaughter.

Poetry in Time of War

2011-08-10T07:23:00.000-07:00

Note: this was originally written for a reading at Left Hand Books in Boulder, in March 2003, after the US invasion of Iraq.

“I have something incomprehensible to say, like birdsong during war.”
— Odysseas Elytis

People are fond of asking “How relevant is poetry in times of war?” As if war were somehow so radically different from other times of crisis when we naturally turn to poetry. Or as if poetry could only exist in some rare, hothouse environment that dissipates on contact with the so-called “real world.” As if the first great poem of the West wasn’t The Iliad.

The fact remains, however: poetry is never relevant. It is never relevant because whatever is relevant can be quickly made irrelevant. Poetry has not persisted on the basis of its relevancy, but rather, because it aims at the impossible task of saying itself outside of utilitarian ideology. The task it performs, if it performs anything, is an essentially utopian one. It takes place in a “nowhere” – a space that contests ideological inscription – and thereby affirms a scale of values in which Eros will always supersede history. That is why the best argument, indeed the only argument, that poets can make on behalf of poetry and against injustice is to continue to write poems, to continue to find a way to utter Dasein, as Heidegger might put it, in the time of the world’s night. A lyric on birdsong is every bit as powerful as Akhmatova’s “Requiem.”

This is not to say that the overtly “political” poem of protest or witnessing is somehow no longer needed. On the contrary, such poems of denunciation belong to an ancient tradition of articulating a committed disavowal of power and its machinations. The protest poem is simply a more pointed example of what poetry in general does: it opens up the possibility for a discourse of resistance; it permits us to speak out against the tyrannical on behalf of the human.

To say that poetry is not useful in a time of war, or at any time for that matter, is to say that language itself has no use. It is to measure the earth with a very mean scale and to judge human beings with all the nicety of the slaughterhouse. No matter how deranged the condition we afflict on one another, poetry will always be capable of forming a response. Because the poem is not a passive artifact for entombing bourgeois sentiment, but a prosthetic device for extending the range of the human, enabling it to tap into and register a wider dimension of experience and feeling than we are capable of unaided.

When language is treated as nothing but a tool for point-to-point communication, then words become instruments of domination. But when language unfolds the complex constellation of relationships that joins each of us to something greater than ourselves, then poetry may act as an ethical force that expands the possibilities for what we can say –that grows the limits of the real.

What can we say in a time when the abuse of power has become the status quo? Never enough — we can never say enough. And that is why we are compelled to keep saying it. That is why we enter language with humility – so that the poem might say something dangerous, something unsettling, something radically other.

The Waterworks

2011-07-31T14:49:00.000-07:00

The dog days are in full ascent here in Amherst. I feel overcome by a sweet inanition. Likewise, the blog is succumbing to drift. Behind the drift, I'm counting down the days till the semester shudders to life. So much to do! Class prep, that essay on Palmer. The MSA talk on Pound & Sobin. Etc. Still, this has been a very productive summer, and at the same time, a deeply relaxing one, the first in a long time.

Below is my review of E.L.Doctorow's The Waterworks. It originally ran in the now defunct LA View, in 1992, though I first read it in mss., with ELD's hand-written annotations in the margins, for Interscope Films. I fell in love with it and have taught it several times.

THE WATERWORKS

Like the moon, New York City holds one face to the light, the other in a perpetual umbra. In E. L. Doctorow’s eighth novel, The Waterworks, the hidden side of the city, its luna incognita, serves as both figure and ground in a dark moral fable about mortality, identity, hubris, and decay. Whether as a brooding meditation on the liquescent nature of history, with its endless shiftings and concealments, or as a modern valentine to New York City in the 1870s, The Waterworks complements Edith Wharton’s vision of the city in the same way that Blake’s Songs of Experience form a bitter refrain to his Songs of Innocence. This is the New York Garcia Lorca wrote about in 1929, a city in which the dawn has “four columns of mire and a hurricane of black pigeons,” where “furious swarming coins ...devour abandoned children.” Unleavened by Dickensian whimsy, it’s a harrowing trip through the sewers of Hell, lit by gas lamp.

Like Heinrich Schliemann excavating the successive layers of Troy’s ruins in search of Homer’s Ilium, Doctorow, beginning with Ragtime and continuing through World’s Fair and Billy Bathgate, has dug into the psychic strata of New York City to create a holographic portrait of American society that covers nearly 70 years. Only Gore Vidal has had the ambition to exceed that span of time in his series of novels chronicling the transition from Republic to Empire. But even Vidal, for all his prickly apostasy and intellectual acuity, can’t match Doctorow’s sheer lyrical largesse, which he lifts like a valedictory flare to illumine the names and faces of the past.

In his 1988 Paris Review interview, Doctorow described history not as “Newton’s perfect mechanical universe,” but as “constant sub-atomic chaos.” In such a state of turbulence causality breaks down. History is no longer a neatly condensed, monolithic tome, but a palimpsest scribbled over with innumerable, vying narratives, each underwritten by the protean stirrings of the unconscious self. The overweening assumption of modernity that is every civilization’s most “necessary illusion,” as Doctorow writes, melts down under such conditions, revealing “the skull beneath the skin.”

Early on in his career, Doctorow explored the use of the Western and science fiction genres in Welcome to Hard Times and Big As Life. Here he casts his story as a mystery, written in the ripping good-yarn style of Wilkie Collins and Robert Louis Stevenson. The effectiveness of this deliberately slight approach swiftly becomes apparent. Only a mystery could unravel the secret soul of the city. That soul, “roiling, twisting, turning over on itself, forming and reforming... like a blown cloud,” is the subject of the novel’s narrator-protagonist, a world-weary newspaper editor named Mcllvaine.

Six years after Appomattox, New York City is in the thrall of Boss Tweed and his venal ring of politicians, cops, and cronies. It’s an era, pointedly not unlike our own, of extraordinary avarice and brutality, of orphans and outcasts, ragpickers and street gangs, gamblers, grifters and bloodsuckers. Not a detail of this ghastly carnival goes unobserved by McIlvaine, who somehow retains an unsullied core of romantic idealism. The newsman’s all-inclusive eye is not as jocular, though, as that of Walt Whitman. In this New York, the Song of Myself has been drowned out by the infernal lament of the masses. In a twilit world where, “the air, in cinders, sifts through the filigree of fire escapes and telegraph wires,” the lonesome McIlvaine develops a paternal affection for one of his young, free-lance book critics, the moody and melodramatic Martin Pemberton.

Martin, who sees himself as a one-man bulwark against the swollen tide of Philistines overrunning the city, is the bitterly estranged son of the powerful Augustus Pemberton, a merchant who made his fortune in the illicit Caribbean slave trade. Not long after his father’s death, Martin bursts in on McIlvaine with the news that he has seen Augustus alive, being ferried about the city in a mysterious white coach. A week later, Martin disappears.

The hunt for his missing protégé leads McIlvaine from Martin’s self-possessed fiancé, Emily Tisdale, whose fetching combination of virtue and voluptuousness leave the veteran newsman smitten, to the more worldly sophistication of Augustus’s young widow, Sarah. But it’s finally with the help of Martin’s best friend, the quixotic painter Harry Wheelwright, whose Goyaesque portraits of mutilated Civil War veterans depict the dismemberment of the age, that McIlvaine and police detective Edmund Donne conduct a midnight exhumation of the older Pemberton’s grave. Its contents reveal the outlines of a monstrous conspiracy by which Augustus and his brilliant and amoral physician, Dr. Sartorius, have ensnared both Martin and the homeless children of the city.

Yet the psychic duel between the prodigal son and his sinister father occupies only the tale’s margins. At the center of the book’s superlative tension stands the conflict between Donne and Sartorius. Donne is the ratiocinative sleuth par excellence, a brother to Poe’s Auguste Dupin and a paragon of integrity; Sartorius, an arrogant and imposing medical genius after the manner of a Jules Verne villain, a man whose heinous scientific experiments foreshadow the Faustian acts of the Nazi death-camp doctors.

For McIlvaine, the scribe and witness, the pursuit is embodied in a haunting image out of a dream — a boy’s blue-skinned corpse, floating in the Croton Holding Reservoir at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, the future site of the New York Central Library. In this drowned “ceremony of innocence” our cherished mantras about progress and civilization founder until we feel, like McIlvaine, “the oppression of a universe of water, inside and out, over the dead and the living.” The cultural foundations of our society, Doctorow seems to imply, are written on water. More than that, though, our mechanistic conception of the world, as espoused by Sartorius, has set into motion an irreconcilable duality that can only end only with our destruction.

Walter Benjamin once observed, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Doctorow’s triumph is that he embraces both of these themes without abandoning the hope for transcendence, however slight it may be. At once a chilling morality play and a rhapsodic elegy to a moribund culture, The Waterworks displays all the flux and panoply of 1870’s New York, in the words of its ardent narrator, “forever encased and frozen, aglitter and God-stunned.”

Way Out West Part 4-The Wild Bunch

2011-07-26T04:22:00.000-07:00

Like The Professionals, The Wild Bunch is driven by questions of loyalty, honor, the integrity of identity (both group and individual), and the ways in which the past mediates the present. The film revolves around an aging gang of outlaws who, after the fiasco of their latest robbery, attempt one last job before “retiring.” In the course of events, the Bunch aligns itself with a Mexican warlord, who forces them to choose between their own survival, or the betrayal of one of their own. Without any other organizing principle except the pact that binds them together, the Bunch choose to keep faith, a decision that sets in motion an apocalyptic shoot out as they take down a small army of corrupt Federales with them.

When the Wild Bunch first appear, they do so disguised as Army soldiers. The disguise acts as a sign of inverted identity, through which the prevailing cultural discourse of law and order is repudiated for the Bunch’s own internal code, as well as undermined for personal profit. Unlike the professionals, or Ben Trane, the Bunch do not see themselves belonging in any way to the larger discourse, nor are they concerned with re-affirming their identity by revisiting the sites of memory. As outlaws living on the margins, they have formed their own discourse, thriving on what their culture has excluded. More than Trane or Rico and Dolworth, the Bunch’s leader, the fiercely determined, yet melancholy, Pike Bishop (played by William Holden), registers the anxiety of this anchorless position when he remarks on the need to “think beyond our guns” since the days of the frontier are “closing fast.” This recognition carries an anxiety for him which no re-connection with the past can renew, as evidenced by this pointed exchange early on between Pike and his second, Dutch (Ernest Borgnine, who also appears in Vera Cruz):

Pike: “I just want to make one good score, then back off.”
Dutch: “Back off to what?”

The predicament of the Wild Bunch is that they are men without a past, outlaws whose lives have denied them even the de-ritualized sites of memory to which Pierre Nora refers. All they really share in common is the expansive anodyne of their laughter, which as a marker of the absurd hopelessness of their lives temporarily immunizes them from despair, permitting them to embrace their rootless situation. Laughter – crude, raucous, celebratory – as in the scene where the aging desperado Sykes mocks the Bunch after the loot from the payroll robbery turns out to be nothing but sacks full of metal washers – “here you are, with a handful of holes, a thumb up your ass, and a big grin to pass the time of day with” – laughter erupts as a singular gesture of defiance that is also the recognition of a life saturated by the melancholy of violence; a life that is nasty, brutish, and short, demanding a transgressive response that is a-historical. Laughter is the true site of memory for the exiled Bunch and while it is not enough to provide them with an enduring hedge against oblivion, it nevertheless stubbornly marks the boundary of the body inside a history that will not remember them.

Unlike the Professionals, the Bunch’s crossing the border carries no promise of hope, but rather is done disconsolately, after their disastrous shoot out in Starbuck. Surveying Mexico from the banks of the Rio Grande, Tector Gorch remarks that it “just looks like more of Texas.” To which Angel, the passionate idealist for whom Mexico is home (and thus, more than a site of memory, but a real, living place), retorts, “You have no eyes.” Later, when the pursuing bounty hunters, led by Pike’s betrayed companion, Deke (Robert Ryan, again intertextually cast as the hapless man of action), arrive at the river crossing, Deke asks, “What’s in Agua Verde?” (the nearest town), one of them derisively replies, “Mexicans. What else?” In The Wild Bunch, Mexico represents neither a site of memory for the central characters, Pike and Dutch, as it does in The Professionals, nor an opportunity for renewal as in Vera Cruz. Initially, it is merely a place for the Bunch to lay low, a region not of rebirth, but of derision and defeat.

This changes in the scene in which Angel takes the weary Bunch to his village. Here, they are feted in gala style by the friendly villagers. Even the fearsome Gorch Brothers frolic like children with a village maid who is the very picture of innocence. No longer a dusty watering hole, Agua Verde takes on the idyllic aspect of Paradise regained. As one of the village elders remarks to a bemused Pike, over the languid sounds of a guitar: “We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all.” Fittingly, the dispossessed Bunch, who have nothing to “back off” to, find solace, however fleetingly, through a family of foreign strangers. This unabashed romanticism forms one strand for the film’s critique of the Western genre. Its brutal nihilism forms the other. By juxtaposing these strands, The Wild Bunch delivers a more complex and ambiguous reading of the possibility of renewal that is taken for granted in both Vera Cruz and The Professionals.

When Pike agrees to steal a shipment of Army rifles for the corrupt local tyrant Mapache, in exchange for the freedom of Angel, who has killed Mapache’s woman (Angel’s former lover), a chain of events is set into motion that irrevocably compromises the Bunch’s amoral spirit of anarchy with the idealism and honor of the impoverished rebel Mexicans. Though never explicitly suggested, the subtext of this arrangement seems to signify the formation and recognition of a familial bond between the dispossessed rebels and the equally dispossessed Bunch.

The story of the Bunch’s doom is in effect the story of their politicization. Dutch and Pike both state on several occasions their extreme dislike of Mapache’s bloodthirsty avarice and corruption, expressing a desire for a general uprising of the populace. When Pike initially suggests that Mapache’s simply another crook like themselves, operating on a larger scale, Dutch vociferously objects: “we don’t hang nobody!” Here, in its brutal kernel, is all we need to know about the code that bonds the Bunch together. Their politicizing – which is nothing more, really, than an uneasy, ad hoc alliance with the pueblo villagers (and by association, Pancho Villa, a distantly glimpsed presence in the background) who oppose Huerta and Mapache – remains in the end a deeply personal affair, one defined and motivated by their sense of loyalty (to Angel) and to their own honor.

Led by this code, then, the Bunch’s choice to join the cause of liberation is as close as the movie comes to attempting a resolution to the “crisis of memory” – the utter lack of any family or roots to which the Bunch can back off to. While little more than a pact for mutual survival, this code contains a kind of nascent social contract, one most forcefully expressed by Pike after the disastrous payroll heist in Starbuck, when the Bunch threatens to unravel. “When you side with a man you stay with him. If you can’t do that you’re like some animal. You’re finished. We’re finished. All of us.” Later on, Pike tells Angel, “If you ride with us, you don’t have a village.” These two statements form the moral underpinning of the film, and give rise to the final crisis for the Bunch.

In effect, the Bunch are their own village, and Pike’s struggle to give them some sense of identity, despite their inability to share in a site of memory, however debased, is one he cannot maintain for very long. In siding with Angel, the Bunch unknowingly take on Angel’s own fierce commitment, his deep sense of belonging, to the land and to his people. Without quite fully realizing it, they slide down the slippery slope of communal identity simply because it is the only thing, perhaps, that has ever resembled something in their lives to which they could “back off.” This is confirmed in the film’s final image of the border: the bridge over the Rio Grande which the Bunch destroy by dynamite after escaping over it with the stolen guns. The act of demolition, which symbolically bars them from returning to the United States, foreshadows the film’s bloody climax – a line which, once crossed over, permits no return.

The Wild Bunch, then, offers perhaps the ultimate expression of the logic of “regeneration through violence.” It is regeneration by violence carried to its final and lethally all-consuming endgame: apotheosis by apocalypse. More than that, though, the film demonstrates how the anxiety over the closing of the frontier – essentially, the foreclosure of the future – can collude with issues of collective memory, or its threatened erasure, in such a way as to create not redemption, as in the first two films, but nihilism and self-destruction. Ironically, it is The Bunch’s inability to ground themselves in a truly viable symbolic, as opposed to actual, past, as represented by sites of memory, that denies them access to an achievable future. For it is not only the frontier that is closing. It is memory itself – the localized, personally felt bond with a group or a region – that is being eradicated by the looming specter of history.

History, “analytical, critical, and secular,” is replacing the unstable text of memory, which Nora characterizes as existing in a state of “permanent evolution.” Like a new kind of cultural technology, history, which Nora observes is “perpetually suspicious of memory,” institutes a new mode of meaning production with which memory cannot compete. The Bunch’s separation from culture, then, is permanent and so, too, is their regression. Genuine regeneration, at least in the terms offered by the culture they have rejected, cannot occur. Engaged in what Richard Terdiman describes as “the intense struggle between repetition and innovation, between past and future,”the Bunch are destroyed because they do not possess a sufficient link to a past larger than themselves and therefore capable of funding a viable future.

Thus, the flashback montages of the Bunch’s raucous, life-affirming laughter, which director Peckinpah inserts at key moments in the narrative, do much more than serve as simple sentimental touchstones designed to cue a certain response from the viewer. They stand as pointed occasions for the force of living presence to spontaneously assert itself, reminding us that the fate of the Bunch is not simply that of outlaws living beyond the pale, but of humans who could not successfully negotiate the future because of their vexed relationship to the past. Nora notes that “memory is blind to all but the group it binds.” Simply put, the Wild Bunch are destroyed because they choose memory over history. In this sense, we are invited to compare their end to the tragic fate of similar marginalized groups, like the Mexicans peasants and native Americans who resisted assimilation into the cultural hegemony.

It is from out of this poignant framing of loss, I would suggest, that the film is able to generate such a tremendous attitude of warmth toward these savage and wayward men, paradoxically humanizing them at the point where, in another film, they would seem to be least human, namely, in the climactic bloodbath. As Pike says, “when you side with a man, you stay with him. If you can’t do that you’re like some animal.” It is precisely because this form of the social contract draws its power from memory, rather than history, that marks it as doomed.

Unlike the examples of psychological rebirth displayed in Vera Cruz and The Professionals, The Wild Bunch depicts a world in which Mexico can no longer function effectively as a trope for renewal. Instead, it offers a picture of the land south of the border as the place where the restorative powers of memory are chimerical, or bankrupt; where the past no longer has the power to mediate the present; and where anxiety for the future assumes its ultimate form: the last horizon, the final border, which is the crossing from life to death.

Though often referred to as both an elegy for the American West and for a certain style of more genteel filmmaking (after Peckinpah, the deluge), The Wild Bunch may also be read as a powerful elegy for memory itself. Its Götterdammerung-like staging of one last fatal border crossing sounds the knell not only for the frontier’s closing and the diminishment of local memory by absolutist history, but also for the kind of naive Western mythmaking by which Americans were able to reconcile themselves to the barbaric price they paid for their empire. With the eclipse of memory, the totalizing force of history becomes inescapable. More than that, though, the eclipse of memory marks a sea-change for the inner frontier where re-invention takes place, foreclosing the possibilities set in motion by desire, which is always exceeding itself, always yearning for what lies beyond its borders.

As Vera Cruz and The Professionals suggest, and The Wild Bunch powerfully enacts, the unstable logic of American nation-building, sutured together in the name of a dream of belonging, binds the drive to limitless expansion and aggrandizement on the one hand to the conserving movement toward stabilizing community on the other, only to fissure and split apart when followed to its inevitable and violent end.

Way Out West Part 3-The Professionals

2011-07-25T07:54:00.000-07:00

With The Professionals, the Mexican foray takes on a decidedly more romantic posture. Superficially a captivity narrative of the kind first made popular by Mary Rowlandson in 1682, the story concerns four specialists who are hired by cattle and mining baron J. W. Grant to rescue his kidnapped Mexican wife from a Mexican rebel named Raza. It’s basically the Western as a caper movie. Lee Marvin as Rico is the group’s military expert and leader; Burt Lancaster’s Dolworth is the dynamite expert and philosophical jokester; Robert Ryan (Ehrengard), plays the empathetic horse master; and Woody Strode (Jake) the non pariel scout and tracker. These latter two characters are fairly marginal. Ryan acts as the designated innocent, constantly raising questions of a compassionate nature which experience gradually teaches him have no place in the world of the professionals. Within the group’s homosocial dynamic, he also functions as the non-combatant “wife,” whose chief duties revolve around healing and caretaking. As an African-American, Strode’s presence is an indicator of racial integration, albeit of a limited and rather patronizing variety. Given virtually no dialogue, he carries a bow and arrow for weapon: a sign that associates him with the savage.

The rescue mission is complicated by the fact that Rico and Dolworth once fought with Raza on behalf of the Revolution. It becomes more compromised still when they rescue Grant’s wife, Maria, only to find she is not a captive at all, but fervently in love with Jesus Raza (whose surname means “the people”) and a devout revolutionary herself. After numerous twists and turns, the professionals conclude that Grant himself is the real kidnapper. They return Maria to Raza and take up their old struggle once more.

As with Vera Cruz, Mexico in this scenario acts as a metaphor for rebirth, only much more emphatically since the movement of The Professionals depicts their journey south of the border as both a nostalgic and a literal journey into their own past. The first third of the film features numerous scenes in which Rico and Dolworth reminisce over obscure battles, fallen comrades, and lusty women. These almost idyllic scenes are accompanied by a jaunty cantina score which continually serves to remind us of the professionals’ passage not only through space, but time. Their journey into Mexico begins by offering the possibility of tapping into actual memories, but eventually they realize that history has overtaken these places and that the past is no longer available to them as it once was. As Nora notes, these sites come into being only because “of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it.”

When the professionals come upon an old graveyard, Dolworth ironically eulogizes it as “the cemetery of nameless men.” Nora observes that the “nostalgic dimension” of these sites “marks the rituals of a society without ritual.” And indeed, as Rico laments, he and Dolworth fought unnamed battles in Mexico which no one now remembers.

Although the anxiety about the past is muted by the veneer of macho bravado worn by the mercenaries, it suggests nonetheless “the crisis of memory” Richard Terdiman refers to in Present Past. For Terdiman, the “memory crisis” developed in post- revolutionary French culture during the early nineteenth-century as a result of “a sense that [the] past had somehow evaded memory, that recollection had ceased to integrate with consciousness. In this memory crisis the very coherence of time and subjectivity seemed disarticulated.” It is precisely this disarticulation, as it makes itself manifest in the two main professionals’ lives (we first see Rico as a lowly weapons trainer, while Dolworth is in jail for gambling debts) which their new sense of self-purpose seeks to amend. That they are able to do so completely is a mark of the film’s romanticism. (For as we shall see in the nihilistic The Wild Bunch, the logic of the border does not always permit such resolutions). The discovery of the truth about Maria’s allegiances, and of how Grant coerced her into marriage (staking a rapine claim on her analogous to America’s annexation of Mexican territory) allows the duo to reclaim their former allegiances from the grasp of disillusionment.

Maria (played with spitfire fervor by Claudia Cardinale) symbolizes Mexico itself, as well as the Revolution and the temps perdu of the professionals. Her erotic otherness (the Revolution as goddess, as Raza puts it, evoking a common trope) with its supercharged elan vital, functions as a sign of the professionals’ once ardent idealism. In recovering her, the middle-aged adventurers recover their youth, through a metaphor that equates eros with subversion and thanatos with the cultural status quo. This status quo is aptly embodied by the avuncular Ralph Bellamy, who as the soulless corporate nationalist Grant, resembles a de-whiskered Uncle Sam.

The real theme of The Professionals states itself in an exchange between Dolworth and Ehrengard:

Ehrengard: “What were Americans doing in a Mexican revolution anyway?”
Dolworth: “Maybe there’s only one revolution, since the beginning. The good guys against the bad guys. Question is, who are the good guys?”

This acknowledgment of moral ambiguity not only expresses the dilemma which the professionals must later face when they discover that Raza is the good guy and Grant the bad, but exemplifies Slotkin’s “looking glass” effect which Mexico as a mythic space engenders. To cross the border is to risk undermining one’s own values; it is to invite transformation on a radical scale. Of course, reading the subtext of The Professionals, we may surmise that this is precisely what the heroes unconsciously desire. For if the culture of Mexico – with its erotic playfulness, its boisterous communality and its thriving primitivism – represents the wellsprings of innocence, then the professionals, weighed down by the moral fatigue of bitter experience, long to be rejuvenated by those primal energies.

During the attack on Raza’s compound (a site, in the spirit of the 60s, that’s made to seem both squalid and joyous), the film deploys a number of racist images to suggest the innate superiority of the American aggressors. The professionals’ use of clocks to coordinate their assault is the primary image, imputing to them a degree of abstract thinking beyond the grasp of the childlike Mexicans, who carouse till all hours, seemingly oblivious to the passage of time. Another is the conventional Western trope of the friendly Mexican who initially aids the Americans, then betrays them as they make their escape. Once the escape is made good, the film reverts to a more sympathetic portrayal of Raza and his pursuing band.

But the image of the border dramatically shifts. Passing through it southwards, it was porous, welcoming. During the return journey, it takes on the attributes of something hostile and virtually unobtainable. “None of you will reach the border!” declares a truculent Maria. From its benign mode of promised rejuvesence, the border acquires the stature of a metaphysical divide between life and death. It begins to exact a price for what had appeared to be a sentimental journey to the professionals’ lost youth.

The climax of the film – the showdown between Raza and Dolworth, who is fighting a rearguard action as the others move to safety – occurs on the very edge of the border, in an anomalous zone that erases fealty. Differences between friend and foe are flattened out so that the questions of identity and personal loyalty become paramount. The border shifts again to become the line which either separates, or joins, love and duty. Dolworth experiences an epiphany, or as he puts it later to Rico: “I found out what makes a woman [i.e., an ideal] worth a hundred thousand bucks.” It is the same conclusion the doubting Rico had been moving toward himself.

For the professionals, whose technical skills had functioned as a denatured form of honor (here to be considered as a synonym for the integrity of identity), true honor becomes obtainable once more by a return to the ideals they had forsaken. Their passage through Mexico, with its concomitant stages of separation, regression, and regeneration through violence, permits them to attain a rebirth that is really a consummation of their original mythic values. Moreover, by rejecting American culture, which is perceived as corrupt and dishonest, for Mexican culture, they reassert their own identity by a direct reclamation of the past, which for them, in L. P. Hartley’s famous phrase, is literally “a foreign country.”

Way Out West Part 2—Vera Cruz or, The Past Regained

2011-07-24T06:12:00.000-07:00

In Vera Cruz, Mexico appears as a land of opportunity for mercenaries and professional soldiers displaced by the Civil War. Ex-Confederate Colonel Ben Trane (Gary Cooper) travels south of the border to sell his services to Napoleon III’s effete puppet dictator, the Habsburg Emperor Maximillian, who is desperately trying to suppress the rebellion of the Juaristas. Trane hopes to earn enough money to return to Louisiana and rebuild his ruined plantation, rejuvenating the lives of “the folks,” as he puts it, who are counting on him.

To offset the strong implications of paternalism associated with this endeavor, the film presents Trane as a good man who just happened to be on the wrong side of the fight. Contrasted to the noble Trane is Burt Lancaster’s Joe Erin, an amoral gunslinger who initially tries to dupe Trane, but comes to respect him for his martial prowess and eventually forms an alliance with him.

Together, the two gringo adventurers turn down a plea to aid the beleaguered Juaristas, selling their guns for Maximillian’s gold. However, Trane gradually comes to sympathize with the Juaristas and their struggle for freedom, which the film depicts an analogue to the Confederate secession. He betrays Maximillian in order to secure a shipment of gold for the rebels, killing Erin to do so. Through this denial of mere self-gratification, Trane affirms the idealism that the Civil War had shattered, though the film’s ambiguous ending leaves open the question of his return to Louisiana.

Vera Cruz is a film in which the metaphor of Mexico operates on a number of levels. The overall tone is grimly cynical about human motives, yet Mexico still functions as a place where rebirth is made possible because of a political state of confusion that verges on the inchoate. In this climate, where the woman Cooper eventually ends up with is presented, successively, as exotic seductress, untrustworthy thief, and finally, dedicated revolutionary, nothing is as it seems, and identity itself becomes fluid, questionable. These are the very conditions that make Ben Trane’s redemption possible. But to undergo this redemption, he must first separate himself from his own cultural matrix, making, as it were, an archetypal journey to the underworld.

Trane never quite regresses, though. He does not take on the attributes of savagery usually associated with regeneration through violence. The casting of Gary Cooper in this role is largely responsible for this, as Cooper’s iconic status as the American Everyman was not flexible enough to allow him to play against the grain. Instead, it is Burt Lancaster’s Joe Erin, with his almost prankish sense of eroticism and larceny, who enacts the regression. While presented fait accompli, Erin’s savagery may be understood as the id complementing Trane’s ego, the primitive energies necessary to enable Trane’s idealism. What Trane represses, Erin expresses: the two men form a psychological symbiote, in which the ego agrees to a partnership with its temporarily unrestrained lower self in order to accomplish a goal. By himself, Trane can’t steal the gold. Once the French troops guarding it have been killed, with the help of Erin and his gang, the partnership must end. The savagery necessary to attain the gold then becomes sublimated in the act of assisting the Juaristas, who never appear except en masse, representing the needs of the collective, which must take precedence over the desires of the individual.

Vera Cruz posits a Mexico populated by primitive, yet noble, peasants, and lorded over by European decadence in the person of the ineffectual Maximillian. Against this is set the implacable pragmatism of a dispossessed American, Ben Trane, seeking to re-enfranchise himself in the cultural status quo through calculated acts of deceit and violence. For Trane, as for the viewer, the idealism of the rebels whom he aids evokes a sense of nostalgia which looks back to the “lost cause” of the Confederacy – Trane’s “site of memory” – thereby allowing the present to redress the anxiety created by that loss. This anxiety is further assuaged by the signs that invoke “the otherness” of Mexico: its exotic women, its Aztec ruins, its festive music. In this equation, Mexico becomes the land of the psyche’s provenance, a kind of rough and tumble Eden where the re-invention of the self is always possible.

Way Out West Part 1-Border Crossings

2011-07-23T08:50:00.000-07:00

As the defining marker of ideas about national space, the American West has unfolded in the cultural imaginary as both dawn and nocturne, embarkation point and final destination. The West is less place than it is the space between places, functioning as a free-floating zone of representational potentiality, a vast borderland where the anxiety of becoming is inextricably enmeshed with the deeper anxiety that is the threat of historical oblivion. This is one reason why the greatest of Western films are so frequently elegiac in tone. The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and Shane, to name only the most prominent examples, attest to a way of life on the verge of vanishing, that crucial moment in which violence is recoded, deliberately revised and effectively subsumed under the name of the law.

To take place, to inhabit space, is also to make history and the making of history means the drawing of borders, the delimiting of space in order to map the coordinates of belonging. As constructed over several generations by Western filmmakers, the cinematic image of Mexico is a crucial part of this process: it plays host to the Other necessary for constructing an American expansionist identity. As such, it invariably conjures up a region of exotic cruelty and licentious abandon, a land where outlaws flee to escape justice and where the innocent are often taken hostage by the cunning. Historically, of course, Mexico as a nation has been dealt with by the United States with cynical opportunism. Sometimes enemy, sometimes ally, the U.S. has treated its southern neighbor with varying degrees of exploitation and paternalism. With the Mexican War of 1846-48, in which California, Arizona, and New Mexico were seized by the U.S. (and the independence of Texas reaffirmed), a precedent for aggression was established. This colonial attitude was eventually reflected in a number of Western movies.

Prominent among them are Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (1954), Richard Brooks’ The Professionals (1966), and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), each of which frames Mexico as both a pastoral haven and a site of permanent exile. The Mexican/American border functions in them as a trope for psychological and spiritual rebirth, one that arose in response to the anxieties created by the closing of the frontier and the continuing cultural pressure to articulate a new site for redemption long after that closing. That all three are products of the Cold War, with the latter two made in the 1960s, after John F. Kennedy’s famous “New Frontier” speech, only underscores the extent to which the anxieties over “the frontier” are really the anxieties of empire. These films explore the crisis masculinity undergoes when its traditional field of cultural production is longer available. Ultimately, the questions raised by the closure of the frontier hinge on the problems of reconciling the excessive and restless character of desire with the need to set limits, to honor memory, and to build and maintain community.

In the cinematic grammar of the Western, Mexico provides one answer to this question. It not only figures as a refuge or place of exile for those living outside the hegemonic discourse, but it is the metaphorical membrane through which the hero of the Western seeks to work out his personal redemption, or in Richard Slotkin’s phrase, his “regeneration through violence.” This regeneration, writes Slotkin, is “the structuring metaphor for the American experience,” and is achieved through the hero’s separation from civilized society, his regression to a more primitive state, and finally, his redemption by the ideologically-sanctioned use of violence as a means of attaining synthesis.

If the Western prior to and immediately after World War II is concerned with staging narratives of ideological stability (the prime examples being John Ford’s cavalry trilogy: Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande), the more subversive Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s focus on the gaps in that narrative, whether they deal with more realistic depictions of violence, as in Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur, or in Ford’s own powerfully revisionary The Searchers. Westerns such as these, as well as the ones I will consider below in detail, conduct probing post-mortems on the closing of the frontier. The border, which hitherto had been presented as an uncomplicated pushing-outwards, returns in these films with all the vengeance of the repressed to haunt the dreams of the colonizers.

In the Western, the border functions as a zone of transition, populated by danger and uncertainty, a region which invites adventurism and exploitation, and not only by individuals living on the margins of the law, but by those forces which nominally support the status quo. Orson Welles’ late noir masterpiece, Touch of Evil, for instance, exploits this quality to brilliant effect, though it’s less sanguine about the possibilities for regeneration, detailing instead how the price of living at the border subjects the law to moral corrosion.

The meaning of the border depends largely on its context: it can be either a barrier or a gateway. This tension illustrates how borders police the terms of exclusion by which a culture insures itself as civilized. Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted observation that “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” succinctly sums up the vexed relationship between the binary structures which comprise the foundation of cultural identity. Borders in the Western make neat dividers, then, of such categories as civilized/primitive; rational/instinctual; noble/savage, and so forth. To go “south of the border” means to operate outside of the paradigmatic culture’s jurisdiction, venturing into a territory rife with ambiguity and dangerous possibility.

Mexico, then, functions symbolically as “the underneath,” an alterior region where the forbidden is permitted, a place in which the terms of discourse become inverted, and the possibilities for redemption by those whom the law has dispossessed are made tantalizingly available. In this sense, Mexico takes over the role once played by the western frontier, which was held by Frederick Jackson Turner to have “closed” in 1890. In The Professionals and The Wild Bunch, both set in the early years of this century, that frontier has already closed, while in Vera Cruz, which is set in the late 1860’s, the displacement and anxiety produced in the aftermath of the Civil War conflate excursions into Mexico with westward expansion and exploitation.

To transit the border is to shed one set of values and take up another. In Slotkin’s analogy, it is “to pass through the looking glass.” This passage allows the hero of the Western access to qualities, such as deception and savagery, which are excluded from the discourse of his own culture. He enters a mythic region, where the repressed energies of the psyche are made available to him once more, energies he presses into the service of his own regeneration. In both Vera Cruz and The Professionals, these energies are ultimately employed to affirm the values of the hero’s cultural matrix. In The Wild Bunch, they enact less stable results, though they unfold along structurally similar lines.

The border acts as a marker for locating memory. It situates both what is lost to civilization as well as antecedent to it. In the case of Mexico, the physical boundary counts for less than the temporal divide it represents. Crossing south of the border is a trope for recovering the availability of more primal modes of behavior that have been repressed, abandoned, or forgotten in the drive to achieve civilization. More than that, though, the Mexican border registers what has been erased from memory itself and subsumed into history-at-large. The border in the Western is not only both a bridge and a barrier between two different forms of cultural discourse, but a troubled conduit connecting and implicating two contesting structures of recollection and representation. In Pierre Nora’s phrase, it shifts from milieux de mémoire to lieux de mémoire, that is, from a “real environment of memory” to “sites of memory.” A site of memory, according to Nora, is “any significant object or place which by dint of custom, labor, or the passage of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community.”

These sites are configured at the juncture where personal, local memory is overwritten by larger, ideological concerns with preserving culturally sanctioned versions of events. They can be commemorative objects, rituals, or places, like museums or archives, where the anxiety created by the collective loss of memory is re-negotiated in such a way that the idea of continuity, rather than actual continuity, is maintained. In the case of the Western, the porous character of the Mexican border acts to negotiate the anxiety felt by the closing of the frontier. In each of the three films considered here, the border represents varying degrees of license, salvation, and nemesis.

Poetry Chronicles-Prospect of Release

2011-07-20T15:45:00.000-07:00

From the dog days to the doldrums. In my last post I promised a trio of offerings on some classic Western films. Upon further review, I'm not really sure they're ready for sub-prime time. Besides which in the interim I fell quite ill with a vile sore throat. I'm almost all better now, which is good, since Julie Carr and her husband, Tim, are about to visit us and we shall go climb into a cool pond nearby.

Illness, as Woolf notes, is altered consciousness. A magnification of the microscopic. A weird humming along the fractal ley lines of the wounded body. But that was before antibiotics, ibuprofen, and TV, and in particular before the advent of Apple TV and streaming. Streaming is a glorious, obscene thing. Why obscene? Because it makes good on the promise of late capital to deliver us to our toxic desires. So I have immersed myself in unspeakable pleasures. Namely, superhero cartoons. This requires a deep blog post which right now I don't have the cognitive juice for. Suffice it to say that the two prime forces which shaped my early imagination were the Catholic Church and Marvel Comics. I'll leave it at that for now.

Below is my 1999 review of Tom Mandel's extraordinary Prospect of Release, which first appeared in Christopher Reiner's WITZ. I cherish this book, all the more so now that my own parents are gone.

PROSPECT OF RELEASE

The problem of transmission is fundamental to Judaism, indeed to the idea of culture itself. The anxieties of establishing continuity go to the very heart of what we mean by memory. How may the past be guaranteed to the future? How is culture carried over and mediated from one generation to the next? How is identity formed and re-formed in its endless conversations with the dead? And how do the dead speak to us? Charles Reznikoff opens his great poem, “By The Well of Living and Seeing” with these lines:

My grandfather died long before I was born,
died among strangers; and all the verse he wrote
was lost --
except for what still speaks through me
as mine.

Here, transmission is envisioned as something enacted with a degree of autonomy, not necessarily to be read as genetic, but rather, perhaps, as a set of codes perpetuated in and by language itself.

Tom Mandel’s haunting Prospect of Release undertakes the task of recovering the lost primary mode of transmission -- the death of a parent. In this intricate series of 50 sonnets written in elegy for his stepfather, Mandel articulates the iterations of sorrow with all the rue and gravity of rabbinical injunction. Austerity becomes the principle not of denudation but replenishment. To start at Aleph, the zero, the nadir -- the place of irremediable loss -- is simultaneously to engage the plenitude of language as response to the dead, to make from the bare ruined choir of an unrequited antiphonal longing the forms of solace, that are also the forms of inheritance, of transmission.

For Mandel, as for Jabes, to confront death means to confront the very nature of language itself. How do we mourn the loss of the Other, these poems ask, while knowing that the words we use to connect also betray us with every breath? The form of all our knowing is language -- "the King's highway" -- as Mandel calls it. How we travel on this road, and what congress it maintains between its own public discourse and our private soliloquies, is just one of the many themes this book so brilliantly engages, not so much through elegy as by the quest for -- and the questioning of -- elegy.

Long associated with Language Poetry, Mandel in his previous book, Letters of the Law, began an investigation of the relationship between language, consciousness and codification which drew deeply on the tradition of Jewish law and mysticism that has always made those concerns its own. Prospect of Release in many ways continues that investigation, but on a much more intimately modulated and poignant scale. The marvel of the book is that the poignancy is achieved through a stripped down diction that plays alertly and harmonically on key ideas and phrases, and by a subdued, formal rhythm perfectly consonant with the starkness of the poet’s grief, his sense of loss.

Loss here remains loss -- what cannot be replaced -- and yet: “Don’t lance his healed wounds,” the poet enjoins, following the steps of the ancient Judaic prescription for mourning, its stern psychology. Loss is also what enables transmission from one person to another to occur; it creates a “reverence modeled on absence.” The form of language -- “our rigorous oral tradition” -- encodes the way of compassionate living. “Not stasis, neither gnosis is your goal.” And even though, as the poet laments, “Grief’s code of desire cannot be read,” it is nevertheless through language that he is permitted entry to the ongoing engagement and renewal of the world, a process not to be confused with history, or even nature, both “idols formed from false propositions.” “Of the ten things made at twilight/the greatest was ‘speech-act.’” Therefore, “vowels, bring on morning. Consonants, cause the sun to set.” Through utterance, we embody a world.

In the Sefer Ta’amei ha-Mitsvoth, according to Gershom Scholem, souls cluster in communal groups and may return to aid the living during times of crisis. “For the dead of each and every family ... are like the roots of a tree, and its branches are the living, for the living exist by virtue of the merits of the dead.” Mandel’s poems seem to draw nourishment from this idea: “Like the living the dead are many,/connected in all traces to the common social order.” This affirmation of communality takes its strength from Judaic tradition, but also recalls Joyce’s “the cords of all link back: strandentwining cable of all flesh.” To link to the dead, for Mandel, is both the expression of grief and the nominalization of a self in opposition to an absence:

I speak to establish my
isolation from you, the object of
my address, whose silence unattainable

listens but cannot respond. Only tears
interrupt such words; tears are
a trope for the presence of the dead.

The motions of grief are one and the same with the motions of remembering. The conjuration of the dead, that is so necessary for establishing the sense of communal continuity, is performed not by some necromantic apostasy, but through the sanctifying figurations of the poem. That which is absent is again made present, if only at a distance, if only at that remove inaugurated and solemnized by the gestures of invocation. Seen this way, it is the living who endure an exile from the dead, one that is redeemed by the tropes of memory. Above all, this exile is redeemed by the highest of speech-acts, the poem.

In his essay on Judaism, “The Indestructible,” Maurice Blanchot writes that Judaism exists as a means to affirm the nomadic quality of being human: “through exile ... and exodus ... the experience of strangeness may affirm itself ... as an irreducible relation ... so that ... we might learn to speak.” The project of living, which is also the project of life’s relation to death, might be described in just the same way. By the death of He-Who-Is-Loved, the poet is compelled to express the exactness of that relation between the dead and the living, the fulcrum and the hinge from which depends the all-that-is-sayable:

Interrupting each other thus, we make
language whole, grounding in speech
both isolation and resolution. We give
exemplary articulation to life and death.

Forming one meta-sonnet, these poems sustain their meditation on death and the possibilities of language through a structure both hermetic and open, enacting a syntax of repetition which continually questions and re-affirms language’s power to transmit “our rigorous oral tradition.” Unlike traditional elegies, these poems don’t presume to circumscribe grief by leveraging memory into the recreation -- the buyout -- of the vanished Other through an accumulation of mundane detail. Rather, they subject the appeal to memory, and its assumptions, to what might be called a poetics of absence. By signifying absence -- the total evacuation of the self -- presence may actually stand out beyond itself, revealed in the aura of its unsignifying numinosum. Blanchot, again, from The Space of Literature:
the lack is the being that lies deep in the absence of being ... the lack is what still remains of being when there is nothing ... when everything has disappeared, there is still something: when everything lacks, lack makes the essence of being appear, and the essence of being is to be there still where it lacks, to be inasmuch as it is hidden (252-53).

Dwelling at the margins of the sayable, Prospect of Release rescues the relation with the Other from the totalizing gesture of language. This steady refusal to collapse difference, not to annul the anxiety it stands in through appeals to conventional sentiment, gives these elegies a uniquely ethical distinction. Mandel’s concerns are not unlike those of Emmanuel Levinas, who writes of the Other in his Totality and Infinity that: “The relation with the other does not nullify separation ... does not establish a totality, integrating me and the Other ... Rather ... the relation of me and the Other commences in the inequality of the terms.”

You are my second, one says to the other,
whom repetition changes and explains,
bearer of identity, yet other --
my stand-in and myself.

Identity is both the measure of the gap between selves and what passes over that gap via transmission, the utterance and re-utterance of words, instructions, even those tears that are “a trope for the dead.” On the King’s Highway, “repetition transforms our route.” Or as Mandel writes in another sonnet: “an ultimate letter/chants the text it changes ...” In this sense, all writing is an enacting of a colloquy with the dead, with what has already passed, figuring through the ancient and various tropes of emptiness and absence a presence, it may be, that is beyond presence.

Do not speak of these
words but repeat them, accompany me,
understand the strength of transmission,

the authority of the lonely in the meaning
of words

In the meaning of words, the authority of the lonely is that which insists on itself, which makes of its isolation a bride to a meaning that the dead once occupied, and once invested with their living. But even to say so is already to have moved on, to have passed, and in passing reject both history and nature, those “idols formed from false propositions.” Instead: “the answer is/to be what’s named, the category/of person ...” By the authority of the naming, the task of the living becomes the transmission of a new code, a re-naming and a re-drawing of the circle which embraces both the living and the dead. (“Es war ein Kreis,” Mandel quotes Celan in the book’s epigraph - “it was a circle” -- and indeed, the entire sequence of sonnets moves in a circularity whose action continually re-inscribes the relations between self and other, performing a shuttle between the question and the affirmation, the call and the response).

These profoundly moving poems are a speaking for the dead in which the dead continue to record their fevers: what they burned for when alive, and what still burns the living. But the dead are also the metaphor through which we try to speak the presentness of our living: the instantiating moment that both eludes and propels us -- the sense of our own otherness, in opposition to the non-being of the dead, as it comes to us through the medium of their unending transmissions. Prospect of Release not only performs a reinvigorated Kaddish, a new inscription and recuperation of the Book of Departure, it also recovers for us what might be called a Bardo for the living, a set of instructions from which we may learn how to endure and reconfigure the absent presence of the dead. “The story that prepared us,” the text of the father, “has died.” Yet the process of re-inscription is fructifying, as Mandel makes clear in his beautiful translation of Isaiah:

Like dew, rain and snow descending
to fructify earth, my word falls from my mouth
to do my will and does not return
unfulfilled but completes the task of my intentions.

To become an interlocutor with the dead, of the dead, for the dead, as Tom Mandel has done in these poems with such an extraordinary combination of tenderness and acuity, is still and always to assay mortal things -- to go up against the place where, as Derrida says, “limits tremble,” and the tongue breaks off. The elegy becomes nothing less than an effort to recover first things by naming last things. Negation, the erasure of self and of form, is transformed. The poem enacts the supreme moment of chiasmus, of the intersection between convergence and divergence, between embodying presence and self-empyting absence. Out of absence and silence, it re-constitutes a new form and continuity, here where we always are, at the horizon of speech.

The Dog Days of Summer or, Time to Get Sirius

2011-07-02T11:12:00.000-07:00

As the last few postings here have shown, a spirit of midsummer lassitude has pleasantly descended here at The Messianic. Fear not, behind the scenes I am scribbling away mightily. Here's what's in the works:

- The special feature I've been editing for Jacket 2, on the poetry of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, is nearly completed and should go online sometime in August. It will contain some remarkable essays and engagements with Drafts, a new poem by RBD -- "Draft 109: Wall Newspaper" -- and a collection of photos documenting various stages in her career. Aside from a feature that ran a few years ago in However 2, the web avatar of Kathleen Fraser's groundbreaking avant-feminist zine, How(ever), this will represent the most sustained consideration of her work to date.

- My review of Michael Palmer's Thread will also be appearing later this summer in J2, as soon, that is, as I finish it. I will just say this for now: it's his most exciting and powerful collection since 1988's At Passages.

- Each year in August, for some time now, Steve Evans has produced an annual round up of what people are reading for his Attention Span site. It's a great service to the experimental poetry scene, one I've been contributing to since 2008. Because of dissertation pressures, I've never been able to do more than compile a list of books accompanied by all too brief and downright hermetic blurbs. This year, anticipating Steve's request, I've put together something a little more substantive and considered. And if it doesn't run there, it will run here, reader. Some of the poets will be familiar to readers of this blog.

- I've spent the last two weeks performing a major overhaul/retrospective of virtually everything I've ever written. This has meant going back to 1975 or so. An archaeological undertaking like this can place considerable strain on one's emotional resources. Reader, I found many poems that were very, very bad. (Sifting through the strata, I once again was reminded how deeply Rilke left his mark on my impressionable psyche. But why oh why did I spend so much time reading Robert Bly?) The point of this exercise was to take stock; and to locate the poems that weren't so bad. Of these, I'm happy to say, there are quite a few.

- This overhaul has also included all the book and film reviews written for various publications since 1990, along with the surviving number of script coverages I wrote in the movie industry from 1990-1997, and the cream of graduate seminar essays worth saving, with a view toward revision and eventual publication.

- More crucially, I've revamped and continue to tinker with two poetry manuscripts that I've been working on for a few years now (and submitting to publishers for ever, it seems): SONG X and GNOSTIC ETUDES. A third ms., still in need of editing, is centered around what I like to call, in lieu of that hoary genre, the nature poem, "eco-locations." It's entitled GROUND MUSIC. A few of these will appear later this year in Interim and Colorado Review, thanks to the good office of Matthew Cooperman.

- Finally, in the spirit of fugitive postings of old material that I remain inordinately fond of, I will begin posting here later this week a four-part installment on three great Western movies -- Vera Cruz, The Professional, and The Wild Bunch. This material dates from 1997, I think, though it's been spruced up a bit. Sensibility-wise, it straddles the moment when I was shifting from movie work and free-lance reviewing to full-on scholarly pursuits. The closing of the frontier has always seemed to me a greater subject than its opening since it always concerned with loss.

So far, the dog days are actually turning out rather nicely this year.

The Pure Cinema of Michael Bay

2011-07-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

The Transformer movies combine, however awkwardly, the powerful allure of fairy tale nostalgia, in the form of toys that come to life (and the struggle to control them), with the pleasures of seeing the human reduced in scale to the miniature. They display, in the most direct way, the promiscuity of technology: its shape-shifting perversity. The deeper satisfactions to be found, if I may venture such a notion, in these often incoherently plotted and farcically juvenile films are to be located in the theme of an alien cosmology and the return of strange gods. What is uncanny about the machines is not so much that they are giant dolls brought to life, but their status as displaced Gnostic angels. There’s more than a touch of Milton’s war in heaven to all the sturm and drang. Along this latter line, it almost goes without saying that Bay's idea of film is Riefenstahl meets DeMille: an unabashed spectacle of collectivist triumphalism.

Rachel Getting Married

2011-07-01T09:55:00.001-07:00

An overrated, trumped up bit of late capitalist cultural hysteria posing as deep drama. The self-conscious posturing of this production, drowned in ecumenical good taste and multicultural sanctimoniousness, grates like sugar on a sore tooth. At its heart, it is a ghost story, animated by a central, invisible presence – the specter of the son who was killed – and by the living ghost whom the daughter has become. But this promising, if strained, gothic element, is overcome by the inanity of the wedding and its bourgeois triumphalism. In this sense, at least, the much more modest Last Chance Harvey gets it right: weddings are ceremonies built not on inclusion, but exclusion: on who gets left out or meanly demoted. What Rachel does convey, if one can get past the histrionics, is that the basic unit of family psychology is the secret

Burning Down the House: Revisiting Bradbury and Truffaut’s FAHRENHEIT 451

2011-06-18T10:45:00.000-07:00

Immersing myself so intensely in Solaris this past week has proven unexpectedly powerful. Last night, I dreamt of my parents, both of them dead four years now. They were at an age I remember them at their happiest, in their early 60s, just before my father retired. They were smiling warmly and a feeling of great kindness suffused the scene. As Cixous writes, in "The School of the Dead," dreams "give us the marvelous gift of constantly bringing back our dead alive ... writing originates in this relationship." This is not a claim I would have endorsed till now.

Likewise, thinking about Tarkovsky has put me in mind of one of his favorite SF writers, Ray Bradbury. I devoured much of his work in my teens, but later lost my taste for his particular brand of American whimsy, though I think Martian Chronicles, for the most part, still holds up. My review of Fahrenheit 451, from 15 years ago, is pretty hard on the old Grand Master as well as Truffaut's adaptation of it. Beating up on Ray is easy sport, I fear. But I think the review does a good job of locating the real concerns of the novel as a severe case of brow-anxiety, as Menand might put it. In other words, 451 bears all the symptoms of the Cold War struggle to identify and fix cultural values.

Oddly enough, I once met Bradbury, in the early 80s, when Filmex was still holding its annual film festival in Century City. He was a sunny, avuncular presence. To my lasting regret, I turned down his gracious invitation to join him at a showing of John Huston's Moby Dick, for which he'd written the script. The screening was at midnight, and I was worried about missing the last bus back to Hollywood. Maybe I missed it anyway...

Here, then, is my take on 451:

Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 wants to be a chilling portrait of a future totalitarian state in which reading books is banned and the books themselves are burned. Instead, it's a rather quaintly dyspeptic take on dystopia. Bradbury's trademark whimsy and lyricism is poorly served by his choice of theme here. He lacks the behavioral savvy of a George Orwell; he also lacks Orwell's political sophistication. 451 (the temperature at which paper ignites) has little to do with the terror of the modern state. Awkwardly didactic at best, its real purpose is to chastise the subscribers of Reader's Digest and other middlebrow cultural elements, like TV, which Bradbury perceives as eroding the bulwarks of the cult of High Culture's purity.

For reasons best known to himself, French New Wave director Francois Truffaut decided to adapt Bradbury's novelette to film in 1966. What resulted was probably Truffaut's stiffest film; it's certainly his least characteristic one. Even so, he manages to breathe some life into Bradbury's heavy-handed social message through the inventive use of rapid montage and some camera work that fetishizes the book-burning fire brigade in their black outfits and incongruously innocent looking red fire truck.

On the whole, 451 the movie seems to have been no more than the result of Truffaut's desire to respond to compatriot Jean Luc-Godard's earlier - and far superior - futuristic thriller, Alphaville. Alphaville is much smarter, though, at playing with the conceits of a modish futurism than 451, although Truffaut, following Godard's lead, makes excellent use of present day settings to suggest the gleaming and soulless metropolis of the 21st Century. (Alphaville, with its blend of noir and sci-fi, is the unacknowledged cinematic inspiration for Blade Runner).

The story follows the conflict of state book-burner/fireman Guy Montag as he wrestles with his conscience and gradually undergoes a less-than-Saul like conversion from repressor to underground resister. It's a lackluster transformation, devoid of conviction and suspense. This is partly due to the flabby nature of the material, partly to the miscasting of Truffaut veteran Oskar Werner (Jules and Jim), who assays the befuddled Guy with his usual mordant Weltschmertz.

Julie Christie plays a dual role here, filling in as both wife and mistress, status quo seeker and subversive agitator. It may strike one as merely a clever gimmick, but Truffaut seems to be implying that both positions contain elements of seduction and distress for the hero. Unfortunately, this suggestion, which is purely visual, never rises above the level of subtext.

The movie is almost, but not quite, dull. Unlike the novel, Guy's giving into the desire to read forbidden books is presented fait accompli. There's never any genuine build up of suspense or tension, just a vaguely ominous sense of something sinister about to happen. Only it never does. The storyline is weakly resolved -- petered out would be more accurate -- as compared to the novel, but at least we're spared the silly business of the Mechanical Hound (which sniffs out traitors) and the disgraceful eugenicist notion that humanity could be regenerated by the purgative fires of a nuclear Armageddon.

Bradbury wants to engage us in a thoughtful debate about the evils of censorship, but his analysis of the problem only goes skin-deep. To his credit, he attacks intellectual and moral complacency, thought it's doubtful that our society would blossom into maturity overnight if everyone put aside his detective novel or her romance book and took up Kant and Jane Austen instead. Any "culture of compassion" to come will be founded not on books, but on a new ethos transcending our previous concerns. The world of 451 in some ways anticipates today's university wars about what makes up a literary canon. It fails, however, to take into account the vitality and subversive power of popular forms of culture (music, films) and how the interplay between highbrow and lowbrow feeds into and invigorates the mainstream.

Bradbury's vision of culture is suspiciously purist: there's room for Plato and Dickens and other elitist shibboleths; no room for Danielle Steel, Snoop Doggy Dog, or Pulp Fiction. Exclusive and pretentious, this is scarcely a democratic vision of culture. Bradbury inveighs against the evils of repressing free thought, but it never occurs to him that by championing the great works of Western Civilization at the expense of popular genres (like science-fiction, for instance), he's exercising his own equally pernicious brand of censorship. In the end, his self-congratulatory elitism is alienating and, ironically, just as philistine as the broad target he aims for.

My Solaris Problem or, Then and Now

2011-06-16T17:24:00.000-07:00

In the beginning there was Solaris, the film by Andrei Tarkovsky, and it was good. I’d never even seen it on the big screen, the only way any film by Tarkovsky should be seen, so I’d never had the opportunity, as I’d had with Nostalghia, or Andrei Rublev, to submit to the full immersion in the optical-temporal distension of which he is the peculiar master and which his films demand. Nor had I read the Stanislav Lem novel. I merely accepted as given the occult genius of AT, wholly prepared to take on faith his agonistic cinema as something verging on mystical experience.

But that was then – sometime in the late 80s/early 90s – and now, in 2011, re-watching it as I prep my SF class for the fall, some small doubt has begun to creep in. Is this ghost story, this tale of spiritual affliction, a work of genius, or a lot of hokum? Or have I somewhere along the way lost my own faith and begun to mistrust Tarkovsky’s obsessions with the innocent rituals of childhood and his naïve nature mysticism, as Jameson has called it? What has changed?

For one thing, I’ve now read the Lem novel, which is very obviously brilliant, but more to the point, grounds the experience of Kelvin, the fraught psychologist, through a mordant, yet deeply intimate and humane, first-person narrative. The film’s abstractions don’t come close to it. Kelvin, in Tarkosky, is maddeningly opaque. For another – and this is more to the point – what once struck me as profound and enigmatic now seems closer to stilted and camp. Bad Bergman or Antonioni, or what Kael used to mock as "the sick soul of Europe" -- a stunningly insensitive remark to make about what, after all, is really a post-Auschwitz cinema. Profundity always runs the risk of seeming merely pretentious). Still, at the level of character, Solaris is inhabited by little more than strained silences and darting cryptic glances; everyone looks distraught, isolated, leeched of all discernible affect save exhaustion and alienation. At least this seems true of the first 2/3rds of the film. The final third, however, unexpectedly builds on much of that tedium; it accretes into a frisson of melancholy glory that marks Tarkovsky’s work at its most penetrating.

The sense of paralysis, of lassitude, of confusion and ambiguity, that seemed like spiritual values in themselves (or the necessary preconditions for them) is still there, conveyed, not through the denuded storyline, but by Tarkovsky’s elliptical style, the richness of his slow absorptive eye, that invests the most ordinary surfaces – the metallic sheen of the station, the worn leather of its couches – with the uncanny threat of some impossible meaning. Hari’s suicide and resurrection still contains an awesome power – all the pain of mortality exudes from her violent recovery from rigor mortis. Resurrection makes her both more vulnerable and even more lonely than she was before. And yet ... what’s missing is the deep, unbridgeable sense the novel gives of a Total and Alien Otherness that is the planet Solaris. Without that, the rest teeters on the edge of Cold War allegory, merely a moving story of the human overcoming the institution, of love triumphing over duty.

For the resolution to Kelvin’s dilemma is highly problematic: he retreats, unequivocally, into the limpid island of the past, undergoing a kind of regression that Tarkovsky orchestrates as transcendence. This does not signal rescue, but surrender. It's the defeat of mortal knowledge -- the awareness that some things can never be made right or whole again; that the bitter logic of life is not about innocence regained, but learning how to live with loss, with exile and failure. In Lem, the ending is ambiguous, haunted, as everything in the novel is. He refuses to quiet the ghost, choosing instead the more difficult commitment – to wait in abeyance for the possibility of redemption. Lem’s finale is truly messianic; Tarkovsky’s theologically overdetermined.

Soderbergh’s Solaris is a different creature altogether. As Steven Dillon observes in The Solaris Effect, rightly, I think, despite his disclaimer that he is adapting Lem, Soderbergh’s Solaris is really a remake of Tarkovsky. It’s a brilliant one, too, in many ways more satisfying than the original. I won’t dwell on it at length, but among its many virtues is its brevity. It compresses the dilated Russian version without sacrificing any of the enigmatic qualities of Lem’s story, which also compresses Kelvin’s backstory with Rheya to a series of strategically deployed, emotionally powerful snippets. The sentimental node of the dacha is erased, with no ill effects. (Of course, dilation and distension, what Tarkovsky refers to as “sculpting in time,” is the whole point of his cinematic philosophy. The camera becomes the aperture of duration: a mechanism that erases its mediation).

Seeing Clooney in this you realize that this was the film that enabled him to play the title role in Michael Clayton. There are very few leading men among American actors capable of conveying the moral fatigue and spiritual emptiness of midlife with such desolate austerity. As for Natascha Mcelhone (and here, reader, I yield to mere idolatry), I wish we saw more of her in major film roles, and not just because she possesses the most arresting face of any female actor of her generation.

Soderbergh’s Solaris, like Tarkovsky’s, is concerned with the sublime of memory – the dream of forgiveness, of redeeming one’s mistakes – in effect, the erasure of the very conditions that endow mortality with meaning. His ending, beautifully wrought (his signature play with temporal sequence is masterful here), nevertheless succumbs to the temptation, negated by Lem, of making over the donation of Solaris into a form of grace. The central idea of the novel – that of the failed god, the weak god who resides solely in matter – is beyond the imaginative capacity of either filmmaker. The final enigma goes begging.

ADDENDUM:
The real Other, for both Tarkovksy and Soderbergh, is not the alien planet that invades the unconscious, but Woman. This resort to binaries is tiresome. Both versions -- and Lem's, too, for that matter -- cast Hari/Rheya as emotionally unstable and suicidal, while Kelvin is the rationalist par excellence (for all the good it does him). Following the hoariest of traditions, Rheya is introduced as "tricky" -- a seductress who may also be deeply disturbed. And indeed we learn later, in an awkward bit of backstory, that her mother suffered some form of schizophrenia.

As the insane muse Rheya becomes the via negativa, the opening of the way to the Beyond. Soderbergh makes this Langian trope explicit in the dinner party scene (one of K's flashbacks) where he and Gibarian debunk consciousness as epiphenomenal, a mere mathematical probability, overriding and silencing Rheya's impassioned defense of an informing Logos. The medium-range close up of her face as she falls silent is harrowing; her withdrawal from Kelvin becomes a metaphysical rebuke at this point while earning our sympathy. All this is recovered in the denouement, when Rheya becomes the rescuing angel of history, leading Kris to heaven/haven, even if it's only the eternal recurrence of the domestic same.

All three versions of Solaris cry out for a Lacanian reading: Woman as Symptom, Symptom as sinthome, the continual play of doubling & mirroring. Her phantomic status as the revenant of the Real exemplifies the crisis of the self, whose status can be read as a Symptom, an irreducible kernel or remnant of the trauma of the mirror stage.

As Zizek comments: "How do we account for patients who have, beyond any doubt, gone through their fantasy, who have obtained distance from the fantasy-framework of their reality, but whose key symptom still persists? Lacan tried to answer this challenge with the concept of the sinthome.... a certain signifying formation penetrated with enjoyment: it is a signifier as a bearer of jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense.... [H]ere is the radical ontological status of the symptom: symptom, conceived as sinthome, is literally our only substance, the only positive support of our being, the only point that gives any consistency to the subject... the way we "choose something instead of nothing".... That is why the final Lacanian definition of the end of the psychoanalytic process is identification with the symptom.".

In T's Solaris, the persistence of memory-as-symptom leads to some unintentionally parodic moments in which Kelvin tries to rid himself of this unwelcome -- clingy? -- lover. Poor Hari/Rheya, in both films, suffers some grotesque punishments at the hands of men. Her immortality becomes a source of horror -- a perversion of the Christic promise, or else the final expression of its logic.

Yet, as with Rachael in Blade Runner, she also proves herself more faithful to her own ontology; more fully human because she does not reject her doubt about who she is, but embraces the uncertainty. At the dramatic level, she grows, becomes more than she is, so that by the end her example leads Kelvin to an act of transcendent empathy. All the same, I like Lem's conclusion better -- it rejects the ease offered by theological solutions, opting to stay true to the complicated doubt of hope.

On "Battelstar Galactica"

2011-06-01T06:06:00.000-07:00

It’s inexplicable, but I’ve only just discovered Battlestar Galatica. Oh, I caught a few random installments on the Syfy channel back when I could afford cable. But the timing was never convenient and I’m simply not a destination viewer. Ron Silliman’s touting it piqued my interest and I’m finally catching up with it now, thanks to Apple TV’s on-demand system, and have become totally, ridiculously hooked. After sampling what looked to be some of the choicer episodes with a view to possibly adding them to my Posthumanism course, I’ve settled into routine watching and am almost done with Season One.

Naturally, I couldn’t resist paging through a few of the BSG and Philosophy books (there are three, at least, so far), and while all turn a well-informed scrutiny onto the show’s complex themes – its engagements with gender, religion, terrorism, and posthumanism – I never came across anything that put its finger on the show’s draw. The religious angle, for instance, is a terrible mess – riddled with metaphysical inconsistencies and offering up one theological red herring after another. And, as many commentators have noted, while BSG is exemplary in its use of strong female characters, this dedication appears to fall off sharply in the last two seasons.

Yet BSG is deeply compelling, whether as a mature meditation on the post 9/11 state of emergency and the ethical challenges it poses ("West Wing" meets "Star Trek TNG"), or as a fabulous mashup of Blade Runner and Star Wars. The question of why machines would naturally “evolve” into humans is one the show doesn’t directly address (at least so far). It seems they want feelings, too – access to the full range of affectivity that only embodiment can make possible. Also, deep space dogfights are cool.

But finally the appeal of this show, I think, is very traditional. I’d sum it up as John Ford’s cavalry trilogy in outer space. Which is to say, there’s a helluva lot of bro-love gushing through all the military ceremony and grace under pressure derring-do. You can almost hear Ben Johnson growling off-stage, “Get ‘er done, Starbuck.” The growling, though, in this case, is usually done by Edward James Olmos, in what is surely his finest performance, a minimalist masterpiece of restraint and understatement that is often very moving.

BSG openly glorifies military culture, offering its values as co-terminous with civilization's with only the occasional demural, and this is troubling. Yet beyond the pleasure of all the Fordian male bonding rituals and the Hawksian gratifications of men "just doing their jobs," it also asks the question the best SF has always asked -- in the face of the alien, the other, in the wake of genocidal catastrophe, what does it mean to be human? To want to be human?

Wakefield Press and The Return of Surrealism

2011-06-01T05:02:00.000-07:00

Surrealism has had few out-and-out practitioners in America. Its greatest exponent here was Philip Lamantia, who navigated the oneiric pathways with narcotic logic. Among contemporary poets, Will Alexander has created a poetic idiom unlike anything that’s preceded it: a mixture of Aime Cesaire’s political engagements and a wild sonic shamanism openly in quest of transcendence.

Meanwhile in Boston, the least likely of havens, two presses have re-kindled the Surrealist flame: Black Widow, which mounts large, authoritative editions of major works such as Tristan Tzara’s Approximate Man and Paul Eluard’s Capital of Pain; and the newly formed Wakefield Press, which focuses on exquisitely tailored minor works. Wakefield (www.wakefieldpress.com) is the brainchild of Marc Lowenthal, a book designer for MIT Press, who together with a crack team, has begun producing beautiful editions of the French Surrealists and others, all newly and expertly translated, and appearing under the rubric of imagining science. The latest of these is Andrew Joron’s translation of The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, by Paul Scheerbart, which brings an obscure fantasist of the technological imaginary into English.

Last Friday, my wife and I drove to Boston to hear Andrew read at Raven Books, in its attractive Newbury Street location. The evening, which was very well-attended, began with Lowenthal’s giving us a brief excerpt from his translation of Benjamin Peret’s The Leg of Lamb. He prefaced this with some remarks on Surrealist humor, noting that while Bergson stressed how laughter is provoked by the spectacle of the human taking on the properties of a thing, the Surrealists reversed this by giving things the qualities of the human. So, in the section he read, a humble pile of manure pleads with a gentleman not to assault it with veronese green. The pile, it turns out, is none other than Paul Claudel, the right-wing Catholic poet who had quarreled with the Surrealists, who never missed a chance for some payback.

Joron read then from Perpetual Motion Machine, a short work that struck me as part Novalis, part Bruno Schulz – a gently ironic mix of genuine Romantic yearning and whimsical satire that chronicles the author’s evidently very real efforts to construct, through an elaborate system of wheels, that holy grail of energy production, a perpetual motion machine. Needless to say, these efforts are crowned with failure. Yet the final pages of Scheerbart’s feverish little book radiate triumph as he turns, with moving eloquence, from a consideration of his contraption to a cosmic vision of the spinning dynamo of the earth itself, “the earthstar,” as he calls it, a humming bolus of gravitational power and infinite force that fuels all life.

The evening closed with Andrew reading a few poems from his own work – selections from the dazzling collections The Sound Mirror and Trance Archive.

I enter history
As a secret agent or stone effigy
dedicated to communism
but eaten away by music.

As Joron noted in his remarks, poetry must court a special kind of failure, one that opens the possibility for language to begin speaking otherwise, pushing it beyond “the poverty of fact” to the irrational, the vatic, the visionary. To imagine science is to think poetically.

Between The Surreal and The Medieval or, The Shock of the Now

2011-04-29T08:45:00.000-07:00

File this under: rumors of demise. No sooner did I announce that I was retiring this blog, then I decided to write a new post. Maybe I just needed to close out one chapter before starting another. No idea how frequently I will post, but apparently things ain't over yet!

*

Because the present is never just “the present” but rendered unstable by the flux and turbulence of its coming-into-being it continually compels us to find referents for it that either mark it as arriving from the future or the past. Journalists and commentators succumb to a kind of shorthand as a result when reporting on disasters, in particular, relying on the same set of terms to mitigate this temporal anxiety. Two examples of the moment: the word “surreal” used to describe the devastation of the Southeast tornados, or “medieval” as it’s applied to the siege of Misurata in Libya. Yet tornadoes have been a fact of life for recorded history, and sieges are hardly events safely relegated to and contained by the Middle Ages.

In the former case, the shock of the real can only be described in terms of dream logic. The sublime appears as a force unleashed from the unconscious, or visited upon us as a kind of perverse special effect, an overpowering trauma that reduces language to a gestural scrawl taken from disaster movies. In the latter case, the medieval functions as modernity’s Other.* When invoked, it acts to preserve our sense of ourselves as civilized, as having got past our barbaric origins. The medieval in this context signifies an aberration, an eruption of primitive energies which culture has successfully transcended or repressed. There is often an element of coded racism at work in the terms’ use. Thus, attacks by Libyan loyalists are medieval, unlike, say, the use of depleted uranium shells or Predator drone strikes by US forces in the Middle East.

The shock of events is often so severe that the response to them seeks refuge in the bunker of clichés. The sense of massive displacement is so overwhelming that the present can only be described as something else. In this way its fragile claim to continuity is preserved. It either belongs to the barbaric past or to the distortions of the unconscious and the stock of figures populating the cinematic imaginary. The tropes of the surreal and the medieval safeguard it, immunizing it from its own messiness and the fear that it might collapse.

* Carolyn Dinshaw is maybe the first to note the slipperiness of this well-traveled term in her 1999 “Getting Medieval,” while Bruce Holsinger, in his brilliant examination of the perverse legal tactics used by the US after 9/11, aligns the emergence of “Neo-Medievalism” as a powerful ideological structure with the rhetoric and policies of the neocons and their assault on non-state actors.

Schwanengesang or, What I Should Have Said All Along

2011-04-26T18:56:00.000-07:00

So, the messianic has been written.

This will be one of those retrospective blog posts that bids farewell to the idea that started it while offering shy suggestions as to the medium’s now outmoded use. It’s a classic blog trope, readers!

Not that anyone cares, really. But due diligence is required and the rites must be observed.

When I began this blog, in January 2010, I was entering the final throes of wrestling my dissertation to the ground. It functioned as a psychic ink blotter, in the cherished phrase of an old friend (who was speaking long before there was ever an internet). A safety valve, a way of blowing off steam: random ideas that fluttered and accrued in the process of writing and that somehow seemed worth disseminating. The struggle of that writing, I’m happy to say, is now ended. If it has done so less on a note of triumph, than of entropy, the euphoria feels very real all the same and that’s good enough for me.

Simply put, with the dissertation finished, I feel no need to continue this blog. New projects beckon that will demand my focus and energy. Much of this will take place within the confines of academic professionalization, as it ought to. I have a career to build, or rather, the hope of one.

But the value of this blog to me must be acknowledged. It’s forced me to think through some issues that are close to me. My posts on “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar,” and on SF as secular theology, for instance, have provided a raw nucleus around which I'm building my course on Posthumanism that I’ll teach at Harvard this fall.

And I'll always be keen on the odd juxtaposition of Oppen and Randolph Scott's late Westerns: two exilic figures trying to write a wrong. This is the essence of the messianic. Ethics, not six-shooters. I may be meeting Linda Oppen this fall and will ask her about her father's movie-viewing habits.

There are many things I'd like to blog on, but have refrained from out of a sense of self-preservation. Chief among these is the retreat of poetry into a late-late capitalist schtick: a quirky idiom of slacker-emo whimsy, derived from Ashbery, that lacks, as Yeats put it, "all conviction." As Marjorie Welish once remarked to me of a certain "major poet" -- "the ludic is his final court of appeal." This kind of supercilious court-jester antics seems destined to die on the vine. But for now, at least in the Northeast, it riots everywhere. I find it very dispirting.

All that aside, what a blog does best, I guess, is provide a means to respond to the moment – a way to address the contingent. In that vein, I feel, I was able to grapple, however awkwardly, with Luke Menand’s pronouncements about literature and experience; or Nicholson Baker’s very sweet and very wrong book, “The Anthologist;” or, much closer to me, the poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Andrew Joron, and Andrew Zawacki. A blog is an argument about the legacy of the ephemeral. But some of these things are not ephemeral. Not at all.

I may return to blogging down the road. But for now it feels finished. The blogs I follow the closest and most admire – Mark Scroggins’ “Culture Industry” and Bob Archembeau’s “Samizdat” – are consistently witty and learned. I’m grateful to them for their passion, their erudition, and their savvyness. And even the Dean of Poetry Bloggers, Ron Silliman, who invented the form and carried it forward into so much of its possibility, has acknowledged that maybe it’s time to pack it in and turn to – what? Twitter? God help us all.

I close on a note of unwarranted utopian exuberance: the final paragraph from my dissertation, “Writing the Disasters: The Messianic Turn in Postwar American Poetry”:

Though frequently unacknowledged, particularly by poets themselves, form is always an argument about history; a struggle to achieve a moment of resolution from out of the cross-welter of cultural turmoil and inner conflict. To deny this is to misconstrue the very basis of language as a social force. Though theology is no longer available for rescuing history from trauma, it cannot be abandoned completely since only through its language, its tropological resourcefulness, can poets after Auschwitz effectively write the incompleteness that is both the problem of our past and the question of our happiness. In Fragments of Redemption, Susan Handelman suggests that what links Rosenzweig, Scholem, Benjamin, and Levinas is “a kind of ‘messianism’ [that] exists as the pulling of thought toward its other, toward some interruptive force that can break through the violence and cruelty of immanent political history” (FR 338). This is manifestly the work of messianic interruption undertaken by each of the poets here [Oppen, Palmer and Duplessis]. “Only a god can save us now,” Heidegger, late in life, wistfully opined. Poetry is not that god. It cannot save the world. But, pace Auden, who nevertheless insisted on the power of praise, that does not mean that it makes nothing happen. Poetry saves language from becoming enslaved to abstraction, from its dehumanizing proclivity for a positivist rhetoric that elides difference, and above all, from its politically and socially coerced erasures of historical memory. Poetry saves language so that it might keep alive the promise of the world’s potential.

The Oppens on Eagle Island

2011-03-09T14:07:00.000-08:00

This is a story I heard two years ago, from Bob and Mary Quinn. Thanks to Sharon Howell for introducing us.

George liked to use a pair of hi-powered WWII binoculars, very highly valued (in fact, Bob still uses his). To solve the problem of always having to pass them back and forth between himself and Mary, he simply took a hack saw to them one day and sawed them in half.

This is quintessential Oppen, I think. The problem of how to reconcile the tensions between the self and the other; the problem of how to see and see clearly -- it's all here, contained in a single gesture.

Of course, what is lost in such generosity is depth of field. Is this, then, the meaning of being numerous?

Hiatus

2011-01-28T04:38:00.000-08:00

Gentle readers -

This blog will be on hiatus until late March. Thanks for your patience.

The MLA and Jazz & Poetry

2011-01-16T14:56:00.000-08:00

At MLA in Los Angeles (the city, for me, of ghosts, not angels) I gave a talk on John Taggart’s poem “Giant Steps” and its relation to both the Coltrane composition and to the sound innovations of Louis Zukofsky’s poetry. My talk was part of a panel called “Giant Steps: Jazz and Poetry,” chaired and organized by the indefatigable Aldon Nielsen, whom I sometimes think must do nothing but attend every cool conference there is. I mean, the man is everywhere.

The MLA, as everyone who’s ever been there will tell you, seems to exist for no other reason than to give its participants the opportunity to curse its monstrous size and feel crushed by its utterly pitiless all-engulfing maw. This is Kapital personified. Think of the Moloch scene in Metropolis and you get the picture. At the same time, it’s an exciting moment of wild juxtapositions, awkward mixings, and ecstatic reunions, sincere or feigned. Plus, some damned fine talks (of which more in a moment). Despite its inviting climate, I’m not sure LA is the best site for it. I lived there for 15 years, largely in Hollywood and Studio City, and while downtown has changed dramatically in some ways (the garish, uber-postmodern Disney-esque Staples Center), it’s still kind of a bleak shithole, all the garrison lofts of the hipsters notwithstanding. As Kevin Killian quipped to me, outside the SPD booth in the book exhibit hall, -- “it’s like new Times Square meets old Times Square.” Check. The one bright spot of redemption? Bottega Louie’s, on 7th and Grand. Get there early. Order the trenne pasta … and the “special” Manhattan.

My fellow panelists were brilliant. The delightful Meta Jones discoursed on the genre of Coltrane poetry, focusing in particular on poetic receptions and revisions of his classic and heartbreaking “Alabama,” and then added an audacious, thrilling contribution of her own to that genre that had our hair standing on end, before closing with a consideration of the fate of the black female body in jazz poetry. Michael New, a jazz musician himself and looking very natty in a grey pin-striped suit, offered a masterful overview of the emergence of jazz poetry as a genre (always already racialized) while noting the failures of classification attendant to the genre as well as the limitations of mimetic response by poets to jazz. His conclusion, drawing smartly on Derrida’s seminal “Laws of Genre,” located jazz poetry as a process or methodology, which termite-like, eats away at its own boundaries. (NB – I owe these observations not to any assiduity on my own part, but to the sharp ear of my lovely wife, Ingrid Nelson).

See here for some photos of our panel, and more, from Aldon’s blog, Heatstrings.
http://heatstrings.blogspot.com/2011/01/mla-2011-part-ii.html

The extraordinary and inspiring Jed Rasula was there and asked the first question and it was such a good one I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I stand by my original response, but I’d like to add it to here. Jed’s question went something like this – “why is most jazz poetry about bop and post-bop jazz?” Simple, yet complex, like all great questions. My off the cuff answer was that it had to do with how bop seemed readymade to answer to theories of how the modernist poem worked. Ellington is modernist, but not avant-garde. Whereas Parker, Miles, Monk, Trane are always represented as part of a vanguard scene and moving away from the traditional jazz of Armstrong, Hawkins, Duke, et al, as if their predecessors were not themselves the original trailblazers.

Yet this only begins to cover it. Bop, and all that followed – modal jazz, hard bop, free jazz, fusion – is distinctly a product of the Cold War. Which means that art suddenly experiences a postwar surge toward autonomy, as Adorno might put it. (Think Pollock, think Beckett). A rejection of shared communal values and meaning and a turn to the hermetic as a way to safeguard aesthetic experience from the overpowering encroachments of the culture industry. What’s important to note here is the relationship of jazz to its audience and to mass culture as such – and the post-war turn to the interior. The complicated affiliation of pre-war jazz to mass culture and popular forms of entertainment, like the dance hall, like the Cotton Club, means, I think, that the innovations of Ellington and Armstrong have been scandalously misread. Just because you can dance to “Jack the Bear” or “Caravan,” or whistle “West End Blues” doesn’t mean these are mere pop songs, as disposable as yesterday’s newspaper. Yet this is what has happened.

The modernist jazz idiom pioneered by the Duke and others and denigrated as “jungle music” – like calling Picasso “jungle painting” (which I suppose must have happened, too) – has not been received as sufficiently radical, even though its vocabulary made possible everything that was to follow. Even though its foundational break created a new idiom of expression. After the war, jazz ceases to be a form of mass entertainment. Due to economic pressures and a shift in popular taste, orchestras are forced to disband and small combos arise. Jazz becomes a thing of clubs, not dance halls. The cool effaces its own origins and takes up a mode of expression more in keeping with the increasing sense of cultural fragmentation that marks the postwar era. And poets respond to this sense of exile, isolation and retreat by rhyming their words against the lonely dissonance. If pre-war jazz is largely bold, symphonic, and utopian, postwar jazz is small scale, virtuoso, and messianic. In a word, lyric.

Addendum: Aldon gently suggests to me that what Jed was really asking was why do contemporary poets only seem to write about the bop/post-bop period? Why are there so few poems on contemporary jazz? That's not the question I heard, but it may every well have been the question that was asked. So I'll let the ramble above stand as it is, for whatever it's worth.

For The New Year

2011-01-03T09:46:00.000-08:00

"Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought."

Yevgeny Zamyatin,
On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters (1923)

Top Poetry Titles of 2010

2010-12-16T07:15:00.000-08:00

Like floral holidays, year-end book lists are an instrument of the industries which benefit from them; in this case, the book agents and publishing industry executives whose business it is to dictate intelligent taste and how it should be produced, packaged, and consumed. But as Don DeLillo drily notes, “all lists are forms of cultural hysteria.”

I offer my own, then, with that cautionary framing, and by way of providing a counter-word to the stale repetitions of the lists found in the pages of the New York Times, The New Yorker, and all those factories of institutional conformity. In no particular order, and without annotation or any claim to having sampled more than a fraction of what was published this year, here are the poetry titles that I found most compelling in 2010.

(N.B. -- In looking over this list I can't help but notice that of the thirteen living poets, only four are younger than me, and then by just a slim margin. This is a problem. Perhaps one resolution for 2011 will be to read younger poets and not just my contemporaries or elders).

Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005 – Lissa Wolsak (Station Hill)

Luminous Epinoia – Peter O’Leary (The Cultural Society)

Trance Archive: Selected and New Poems – Andrew Joron (City Lights)

Roche Limit – Andrew Zawacki (Tir Aux Pigeons)

Of Sarah: Lines & Fragments – Julie Carr (Coffee House)

Pitch: Drafts 77-95 – Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Salt)

Driven to Abstraction – Rosmarie Waldrop (New Directions)

Is Music: Selected Poems – John Taggart, edited by Peter O'Leary (Copper Canyon)

Reason and Other Women – Alice Notley (Chax)

R's Boat - Lisa Robertson (UC Press)

Mean Free Path - Ben Lerner (Copper Canyon)

Collected Poems – Gustaf Sobin, edited by Andrew Joron & Andrew Zawacki (Talisman)

engulf—enkindle – Anja Utler, translated by Kurt Beals (Burning Deck)

New Selected Poems and Translations – Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth (New Directions)

To Be At Music: Essays & Talks – Norma Cole (Omnidawn)

The H.D. Book – Robert Duncan, edited by Michael Boughn & Victor Coleman (UC Press)

And two outstanding critical works:

Norman Finkelstein’s On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry (Iowa UP)

Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (U Chicago)

Fair Game or, The Hazards of the Secret Life

2010-12-14T09:41:00.000-08:00

It’s premature to say so, of course, especially given the limited number of first-run films I actually see, but for my money, Fair Game is the film of the year. David Denby cynically downgrades it with faint praise, relegating it to the category of last year’s kvetch, as if there were an expiration date on injustice and malfeasance. This in itself is such a dismayingly cynical act of bad faith it makes you wonder who Karl Rove hasn’t gotten to. But the sense of shame and the hazards of moral integrity that drive this film are undeniably powerful, making it every bit as relevant as when Plamegate was unfolding.

Naomi Watts brings a clarity, an unfussiness, and a lack of vanity to this role that is completely focused and riveting to watch, while Sean Penn’s performance is both dynamic and subtle. Watts combines a wary intelligence with a sense of commitment and risk-taking that is deeply compelling. As Valerie Plame Wilson, she amplifies the role she played in 2009’s The International (see my post on it: here), here playing a dedicated professional forced by betrayal to become an unwilling crusader against the very service she’s devoted her life to. The demands of this complex role ask her to display a charged sense of duty with a vulnerability that is both harrowing and moving.

The film’s denouement, with its vindication of Plame and Joe Wilson’s speech to college students, reminding them that we live in a republic, is rousing, gratifying stuff, to be sure, but while the Wilson’s themselves come through their ordeal, the larger scandal of how the casus belli for Iraq was manufactured and sold still looms, unresolved, already a part of the collective cultural amnesia surrounding the Bush Administration.

Nevertheless, Fair Game is a potent revisitation of those crimes. Doug Liman’s direction and pacing are sterling and the script, by the Butterworth brothers, is smartly restrained, balancing and intermeshing the private and the public with great delicacy. At the heart of this film is an exploration of the nexus where family loyalty is entangled with patriotism, love with professionalism, personal integrity with duty and service, all set under an excruciating pressure. Far from acting as abstract mottoes or perfunctory duties, these spheres of activity penetrate one another in the most intimate ways so that when one unravels, they all unravel.

Such is the price, as LeCarre might say, of “the secret life.” The larger structures of the social, which even in an open society, depend upon the clandestine, always already pulverize the individual, reducing her to a subject, as part of that agreement, and there is no protection, no immunity, from the state one serves, even in good faith. Any system with the clandestine at its core operates according to the logic of betrayal, then.

Fair Game is really an allegory about the decline and fall of the technocratic managers who preside over the American middle class's "counterfeit freedom," as Adorno puts it. This is particularly brought home, so to speak, by the film's two halves, in the first of which Plame conducts the Agency's business in Kuala Lumpur and Baghdad and the second, where the arena of global tensions takes over ordinary domestic spaces: the kitchen, the living room, the playground. The buffer that kept these two spheres separate is dissolved. As Jameson might say, this collapse of difference is the logic of late capital.

If the clandestine is the price for maintaining a politics of global influence and consumer affluence, then as citizens of empire we are each of us living in its shadows, on the thin margin between the unchecked privileges of power and the exposure which can, at any moment, plunge us into disaster.

UPDATE: By chance, the nominations for the Golden Globes were announced today. Neither "Fair Game" nor Naomi Watts were selected, which means that the social amnesia is all but complete and Denby is right. Iraq is so yesterday's news. That's a shame, because this picture, despite its weaknesses,* deserves so much more.

* As a former story analyst in Hollywood, my report would have recommended one less scene featuring either parent maintaining a stiff upper lip as the world collapses around them while their kids make a kid-like clamor. This kind of scenic domestic shorthand is no substitute for building up the texture of lived reality. I don't even recall the names of the children. One small scene -- perhaps it was excised? -- between father or mother and one of the twins would have gone a long way toward sustaining that sense of layering. On the other hand, the scene between Watts and her father, played by Sam Shepard, is near-perfect.

Singing Nothing or, Hymns to Zero: Rosmarie Waldrop's "Driven to Abstraction"

2010-11-28T13:47:00.000-08:00

What is the value of zero? Is it nothing? Or might it be better to ask instead, what kind of cultural work does zero perform? How is absence woven into the metaphysics of presence, as Derrida might put it? To what extent do we depend upon the little bit of emptiness encompassed within the narrow circle that is zero? How does it uphold us? Undo us? Re-affirm us?

These questions bring to mind Paul Valery’s witticism: “God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing still shows through.”

They also call up some of the earliest, most primal considerations of nothing (or is it “something”?) from The Rigveda.

There was neither non-existence nor existence then.
There was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond.
What stirred? Where?

On the other hand: “The Void is a quantum sea of zero point waves, with all possible wavelengths,” as Frank Close tells us in his delightful book, Nothing.

On the other other hand, Andrew Joron announces: “zero point is also a crossing point, a crossing out and a crossing over of the Sign.” Poesis is cognate with the ground of the unsayable, a plenum of zeroes spilling over into speech: “an articulation, not a cancellation, of silence.” And: “This crossing point is a site of utter suspension, of an utterance suspended at the crux of beyond-being: the Cry at zero.”

Such thoughts belong to a vatic order of language. They lay a charge for a logos that somehow lives outside of history, even as it seeks to intervene, to alter and revise and clarify its logic. If there is a logic to history. If there is, it must in some way be supported by nothing and through the sign for nothing we can begin to imagine the greater valences of random connectivity which 0 both invites and permits.

The extravagant, multi-pitched final sequence in Driven to Abstraction, Rosmarie Waldrop’s newest book, takes up these questions in a storied and extended ode to the powers of kenosis and the ultimate value of nothingness. Waldrop is decidedly not of the tribe of the mystic, as is Joron, but of the skeptic, the ironist, the worker of the warp of words who subtends the genius of slippage. Yet, this, too, is somehow and in spite of itself, vatic.

Waldrop’s extraordinary constellation – beginning with “Zero or, the Opening Position” – reads like a history of the metaphysical comedy of negation -- its failures and its hopes -- from its cosmic architectures to its daily economics. It is a remarkable poem, a poem, not about nothing, the nothing of the mystics, of either the via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysus or the khora of Derrida, but a recitation of zero and its curious history as a concept. Of its migration into the West from medieval Arabic mathematics and its subsequent role as a placeholder for the underlying, the foundational that is anti-foundational, “zero, the corrosive number,” as she calls it, without which nothing counts.

Nothing. Zero. Absence of things, of signs. Unnatural. Hover in the same space and identical as twins. Point nowhere and like poems mean but what they say. And are but what is not.

Absence, signed by zero, is what enables language at all, for Waldrop. Zero is the empty knot at the center of every calculation. The absent present that permits speech to conjure spirit, the ghost inside every word and number. A form of grace or is it haunting that blows through every economy, the wind of circulation making the invisible tangible even as it drains the real of substance in the name of meaning.

“Zero or, Opening Position,” is really a suite of interlinked meditations, each one taking up some particular historical, cultural, or philosophical aspect of the concept of zero and its passage into the very core of Western epistemology (though it could be argued it was always already there, from Plato’s Parmenides, at least).

There are poems on money -- both bank and paper; on Vermeer and Montaigne and the ayn sof of the Kabbalists. On Meister Eckhart, modern cosmology, the hermetic lore of nothing, and King Lear's nothing, which strives to pierce his own blindness and is finally reckoned in blood.

If all this sound too abstract, Waldrop reminds us that zero is also profoundly intimate, a richly embodied experience.

Impossible to picture nothing. Even in a mind where unicorns roam whose bodies crumble before the light. Always I find myself hiding somewhere near the edge.

It’s not that nothing can come from nothing. Is it vanity, the delirious power of zero? Its exuberant potential? Of vanities? Its manufactures (and without hands) an infinite of numbers we can barely imagine.

And what profit has a man? Or, for that matter, a woman? Who loves the damp detour of the body? How, among, the infinite numbers – exceeding the grains of sand that would fill the universe – will they know each other?

The tenderness that haunts the precinct of zero casts a lonely, auratic light here. Zero is at once the inexorable, yet phantasmal, structure of capital's brutal empire, and the numen of plenitude that shines when one body touches another, the place where eros redeems, if only for a moment, the depredations of history.

In Waldrop’s catalogue, her bestiary of 0, it is everything and nothing, emptied of all potential and replete with the full range of signification and agency.

And yet. At the bottom of any thing I find a word that made it. And I write. Have made a pact with nothingness. Make love to absent bodies. And though I cannot fill the space they do not occupy their shadows stand between me and thin sky.

In the end, this is not the work of an ironist at all, but of a poet devoted to the thrill of language's endless permutations. Driven To Abstraction offers the deepest affirmation of how the poetic is wedded to the body’s tendrilled affiliations, its desires to connect across the void and against the heartbreaking limit of mortal distances and their continual erasures. It is the most sustained and powerful poetry of Waldrop’s entire career.

On Libraries

2010-11-22T14:41:00.000-08:00

A library is useful to a writer only insofar as it lacks discernible utility.

In addition to whatever it has of the needful – the research texts, the books one teaches, the responsible range of volumes which cover one’s chosen field – it should also contain a collection of the odd, the eccentric, the offbeat, the undervalued, the curious, the weird, and the totally indulgent and utterly useless.

Only in this way can it fulfill its true mission, which is not to be a summum bonum of knowledge, a repository of all things written, but to exist as a kind of commons for encountering the random, the chanced-on, the unlooked-for – whatever can spark the surprise of intervention. Which is also what goes by the name of grace.

Foucault, commenting on "The Library of Babel," by Borges, praises the idea of “the great, invisible labyrinth of language, of language that divides itself and becomes its own mirror.”

And in his magnificent elegy for Duncan, Palmer writes: “Send me my dictionary./Write how you are.” What else is a dictionary for a poet but a grimoire, a book of spells by which a world might be conjured and the dead come to visit us again? This is the very essence of the library -- a vast whispering colloquy of ghosts, attendant.

On Innocence and Contingency

2010-11-16T03:48:00.000-08:00

I was at a dinner with some poets and scholars not long ago when the conversation turned to the question: “What is it that artists want?” To which a noted Milton scholar smugly replied: “innocence.” How like a Miltonist, I thought.

But to understand innocence is to understand that it is and can never be primary, but secondary always. Innocence is what comes after; it is known only through its loss, its absence; it is what comes into being after the fall from grace, if grace is to understood as a category of not-knowing, of not-being-able-to-know that one is in a state of grace; a kind of spiritual blindspot.

Innocence is the name we give to the condition of naïve experience that cannot know itself. It can therefore never be true innocence. True innocence can only be arrived at – as a state of achieved simplicity that comes through and after complexity. That comes only through a dialectical negation of experience, loss, and the sorrows born of contingency.

The only innocence which can finally matter is not that which we have lost, but that which are striving to obtain. As a return to the imaginary of grace. A state that never was, but which we need to posit as original, as both preceding us and yet always still ahead of us. A state derived from the logic of the supplement, that precludes all appeals to the foundational, that recognizes that grace must always, can only, come after. It is not given – it is undergone. In a word, it is suffered. (See under: Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, et al).

It must be thought of as a kind of forgiveness, then. Just as Kristeva writes that forgiveness breaks the concatenation of cause and effect, its endless iron chain, so innocence is an intervention into and a surpassing of history. Its economy is libidinal, erotic, a-historical, that which opposes contingency.

But of course it cannot come on its own. It needs contingency to supply it with its moment for falling. Innocence is therefore inseparable from contingency. Without the pressures of history, innocence is an empty descriptor, a sentimental fetish marking some pre-conscious realm of purity.

What is it that artists want? The immature artist longs to recapture lost innocence. The mature artist strives to redeem language and experience from the predations of history. This, I would humbly submit, is the only and true meaning of hope.

Camera Lucida or, Obscured by Light

2010-11-08T13:25:00.000-08:00

Taken as pure artifact, the photograph may be seen as that singular instrumentality of desire by which we seek perpetually to recover or recuperate the past -- be it our immediate past, or the past of previous generations. Always, the photograph acts as the medium that would obliterate all trace of itself in the performance of its delivery of the Other -- other time, other culture, even other self. My self, as composed only yesterday in the failing garden of autumn, undergoes, through the agency of the photograph, a sea-change: the absent made present once again, the vanished self returned as revenant.

To see ourselves in the photograph is to gaze into a mirror with the power to eternize the past, to fix and stabilize identity, to stop the slippage of time. In its role as recording angel, as talismanic preserver of the real, the photograph provides the unimpeachable evidence by which we build a sense of continuity with the past, even as it subtly undermines that continuity, or rather, renders it fictive, replacing the idea of the past as immutable and somehow sacrosanct with a highly contextualized version it has manufactured on its own.

The photograph, seemingly innocent of history, is maculate with its desire to puncture and despoil history, to become its sole totem and fetish. The speculum of the photograph, which we clutch and display as we might some charm to ward off death, is steeped and stained in our mortality.

Perhaps this explains the deep and utter fascination it holds for us: through its impossible project of effacing the inevitability of death it appears to afford us with the opportunity to enlarge our personal being, to supplement our sense of loss and decay with the image; yet at the same time, it mordantly impresses on us that death is the end of all plots. At bottom, the photograph is metaphysical -- it expresses the longing of human beings to transcend space and time and the limitations of personal condition, to displace the acute anxiety we feel at the disappearance of the past through the replication of the past in an image. And yet, the ideality of the light, its power to illumine and clarify, is in the photograph transformed to something murkier, almost opaque.

To write with light, literally, in the photograph, is to inscribe on the psyche another kind of darkness or obscurity; “the real” is presented in all its crystalline and incontrovertible quiddity, only to be subsumed beneath the desire to possess what cannot be possessed; to restore by means of a technological apparition that which is already irretrievably lost, and by doing so assuage the unbearable melancholy that we read into the daily diminution of our being.

This theology of light embodied by the photograph represents for Roland Barthes both the triumph of a pellucid realism and the apotheosis of the romantic yearning to immemorialize the past. Barthes is openly and joyously lyrical about this self-described utopian project: for him, paradoxically, the photograph makes possible the ancient dream of a pure and wholly unmediated perception. In the photograph, proclaims Barthes in Camera Lucida, “the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation” (89).

Barthes fetishizes the documentarian power of the camera. His is a peculiar realism -- it extols and valorizes the image of the thing above the thing itself. This attitude extends even so far as to encompass the individual himself. The act of being photographed induces the subject to transform himself ”in advance into an image” (10). “I feel,” writes Barthes, “that the Photograph creates my body...” (11). It is very much as if Barthes feels himself to be undergoing the primal dehiscence which for Lacan characterizes the creation of the specular-I, that projection of one’s infant body in a mirror that presents an image of the self perfected, whole and complete.

Lacan writes, in “The Mirror Stage,” that the infant (or to substitute Barthes’ term, “the spectator”) gazing into a mirror is caught up in a drama whose origins are prompted by a sense of deficiency that eventually passes into the re-figuration of the self “through the lure of spatial identification” to arrive, via “a succession of phantasies” at a new a form of totality (4). “What I want,” says Barthes, “is that my (mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs ... should always coincide with my (profound) self” (12). Although a few sentences later he laments that this desire is doomed, that he can never attain a “zero degree” of embodiedness, the entirety of Camera Lucida is nevertheless underwritten by this wild and unfulfillable longing to authenticate the self as Other, to re-assemble the fragmentary aspects of being through the seemingly automatic, autonomous and anonymous aperture of the camera’s lens.

The key for this, for Barthes, is held in what he calls “the punctum” of the photograph, a term he initially characterizes as “that accident that pricks me” (27). The punctum precipitates a frisson; through the representation of some arbitrary detail it evokes a sharp emotional response. By its completely contingent nature, it speaks both to the wound and the mystery of being. It is the mark of the human, that is, it has the power to surprise us by touching us in a profoundly intimate way. For Barthes, the punctum provides a gateway to the Absolute, to the purely unmediated vision of the real. Charged with a “power of expansion” (45), the punctum is liberating: it bears the signal quality of what in an openly theological discourse would be called “grace.”

“What I can name cannot really prick me,” says Barthes (51). The punctum acquires its virtue through its resistance to classification; its opacity ennobles it, and deepens the sense of mystery it carries to the eye. The punctum behaves as a kind of Derridean supplement, making available a surplus of meaning that does not so much confirm the “studium” of the photograph (by which Barthes means its field of interpretation, the precise historical moment it presents to us) as it subverts and lays it open to another and deeper kind of seeing. The punctum is what restores being to its most intimate disclosure by way of violating the field of the studium. It is essentially a-historical. This is what enables Barthes to assert his claim for the photograph as the mechanism that rescues desire from mediation. It is a claim that refuses to recognize that desire is always already shaped by intention, that vision is always vision of something, and therefore necessarily delimited from its inception.

There remains, nevertheless, something appealing in Barthes’ impossible project. Merleau-Ponty sums it up in his essay, “The Specter of a Pure Language,” thusly: “We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which would ... deliver us from language by delivering us to things” (4). For Barthes, photography is such a language. It “reverses the course of the thing” photographed and opens the way to a “photographic ecstasy” (119), a moment of perception that is outside time, yet drenched in the erotics of the mortal, the absent.

Decrypted from a Dark Book: Some Notes on Sound in Andrew Zawacki and Andrew Joron

2010-10-24T17:36:00.000-07:00

A Roche limit, according to the Britannica, is “the minimal distance, with respect to the center of a planet, at which a satellite is able to orbit without being destroyed by tidal forces.” In Andrew Zawacki’s poem of the same title, this becomes a potent way to conjure not so much the influence of one poet’s work on another, as though it were such a cut and dry linear transaction, but the complex echo chamber of interactions and resistances, privilegings and reluctances, that mark the practice of reading.

Roche Limit sets this dynamic tension into play. Laid out in four-line stanzas, each one marked by roughly four beats per line, it surges forward in a compelling rhythm capable of surprising turns and reverberating with fractal resonances. Though its form most immediately calls to mind Ronald Johnson’s extraordinary AIDS elegy, “Blocks to Be Arranged in the Form of a Pyramid,” Roche Limit is less elegy, than homage to the late Gustaf Sobin, another master mason of the word-block and the serpentine line.

echoes off ledge
opens upon upon
a glassy rotation
some spectra aurora

a nor'easter carving
the littered littoral’s
bitmapped pebbles and
washed bottle script

neither itself nor
neither its neither
or it ruins
or it rains

Recalling the title of one of Sobin's collections, In The Name of the Neither, this intricate, nuanced sound play enacts its own model of the Roche limit, as words slide through one another and into their own process of associative elision and repetition, a principle of rime, as Duncan might say, that recalls the innermost linguistic and ontological structures for mapping levels of relation. As he puts it in “The Structure of Rime II,” “An absolute scale of resemblance and disresemblance establishes measures that are music in the actual world.”

Zawacki’s work is to be cherished for this, but I would be remiss if I did not at least mention the foremost practitioner of this method now writing, Andrew Joron, whose most recent books, Fathom and The Sound Mirror, exemplify this divinatory praxis. Joron capitalizes on the generative slippages which govern the chance combinatory properties of language. As he writes in “Voice of Eye” (dedicated to Sobin; and here I should note that both poets were responsible for editing Sobin’s Collected Poems; no better guardians of his work can be imagined).

"Air is merest modulation to err."

Or again, from “Nightsun, Sign”:

“Red, unread, as Eurydice’s indices—“

And again, in “As Ending, Send”:

“O tome, O tomb, I hum a hymn to home, to whom.”

These are lines decrypted from a dark book, pitched to an arcane thrum, a holy thread of labyrinthine sound that interweaves the soul and the tongue. The method -- is it a method? call it the logic of paronomasia -- teeters, at times, on the brink of decay, yet what rescues it into continual surprise is the poet’s commitment to the sublime yield of phonemic constellation and all the spaces, and nodes, of micro logical difference that open up between each slip-gap, each meld-slide, within a horizon of negation and wonder.

Perhaps the idea of the tremendous balance that keeps the Roche limit in play lends itself to an even larger notion, that of the continually negotiated relationship between the poet and language itself, with the stress of attraction to the gravity well of logos mitigated only by the poem’s own negentropic counter-thrust.

As Joron writes, concluding "Autumnal Spring":

To song, to sing, "There is no
Belonging."

& "Belonging
Elongates to longing & the gates of song."

These gates of song are the site of ever-repeated rituals of intimacy and dispossession, performed through the sway and elision of music's logic. To belong to song's longing is to be at once at-homed and exiled.

The Anthologist or, The Myth of the Poet

2010-10-05T12:58:00.000-07:00

One of the many questions raised by Nicholson Baker’s delightful, yet problematic, 2009 novel is how much does its view of poetry belong to its neurotic anthologist, Paul Chowder, and how much to the author himself? Baker – or Baker’s character – promotes a pantheon of tired, mid-century, all-white American poetry that’s straight out of another anthology. I’m thinking of Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry, but also Hall, Pack and Simpson’s New Poets of America and Britain.

In other words, the kind of poets and poetry The Anthologist endorses (Bogan, Nemerov, Moss), with a great deal of nostalgic fanfare, are the kind the editors of “The New Yorker” have made safe for consumption. ("The New Yorker" itself gets frequent mention as a part of a prestige name-checking schtick that seems half-put on, half homage, while its former poetry editor, Alice Quinn, the doyenne of the soporific, is praised as “the magnificent Alice!” with no apparent trace of irony).

Conspicuously absent so far (I’m only 60 pages in, not counting some leapfrogging about) is any kind of poetry associated with the avant-garde or the New American Poetry. The sole exception has been Mina Loy. The Anthologist, in other words, and I hate to put it this way, is a paean to what Ron Silliman calls the School of Quietude and its hallowed tradition of being, well, hallowed.

Now the SoQ is a term of decidedly Manichean proportions. As a category for describing the faultlines in American poetry between modernism and anti-modernism, the revolution of the word and the counter-revolution, it lacks in subtlety what it makes up for in paranoia and shrillness. Yet all too often Silliman’s tilting is spot-on. And for Baker’s novel, I think it’s case of “if the shoe fits…”

A brief list of poets mentioned as far as I’ve read include, in addition to those above: Scott, Shelley, Longfellow, Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Roethke, Berryman, Millay, Amy Lowell, Teasdale, Auden, Bishop, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope, James Fenton, and James Wright. Square as square can be. Pound and Marinetti are mentioned only pour scorn on them.

It’s not that I have a personal quarrel to pick with any of these poets. Or that many of them haven’t given me enormous pleasure. Shelley and Yeats especially, and Berryman to a lesser extent. But to have no Blake, no Whitman? (No Dickinson, either, but I’m sure she’s waiting in the wings). There’s no Stein, Zukofsky, Williams (yet), Oppen, Niedecker, Olson, Duncan, Levertov, Ginsberg (yet), Baraka, Brooks, or Ashbery. And surprisingly, no Creeley, who was a master of the four-beat line. In other words, nothing smacking of linguistic complexity or heterodoxy; nothing partaking of the mystic, the mythic, the transpersonal; nothing to detract from the notion that a poem is simply a tidy container of concisely reported minor personal experience (some observations capped by an epiphany) anchored in a fixed (not to say ossified) point of view; that it’s about, to use an example Chowder offers, an inchworm, or a flying spoon. The idea here is that a poem is really a story, (“prose in slow motion”) with some of the narrative links left out.

And that is certainly one model of what poetry is and not necessarily a poor one. Great poems have been written in this model. It would take someone far more churlish than I to denounce the beauty of Housman’s “white in the moon the long road lies,” a line of surpassing grace and simplicity which Chowder quotes with approval. But Michael Palmer’s “you can bring down a house with sound” is beautiful, too. One difference is that Housman’s delicate song is about the longing for an absent love, whereas Palmer is writing an elegy that takes apart some pre-conceived notions of how language works, doing it in a way that rejects the patient building of one line on top of another in perfect sequence, accruing power through juxtaposition rather than hypotactical jointure. The ancient power of the single great line endures, yes, because metrical language endures. But Chowder – or is it Baker? – turns it into the kind of fetish the New Critics once burned their profane cigars to.

Yes, the beat is the message, as Fanny Howe writes in her elegy for Creeley. Chowder gets it frustratingly right and wrong at the same time when he chidingly relates his anecdote about Ginsberg at Naropa denouncing traditional metrics in favor of a liberated, Olsonian model in which “the rhythm of poetry is the rhythm of the body.” As one character advises Chowder, who’s struggling with his introduction to the anthology: “People love neurobiological explanations.” The line comes off as a amusing put-down of trendiness. Yet this is exactly what the bedeviled narrator ends up doing over the course of the novel, passionately explaining how rhyme is a form of poetic dopamine (his riff on sobbing reminds me of Donald Hall’s classic essay, “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird”).

This argument is not without merit, but it ends up pathologizing rhyme rather than identifying how its consolations derive from a principle of symmetry and correspondence, how their music provides a cognitive patterning that may be part of our DNA but whose larger meaning is to be found in its meaninglessness. What starts off as a promising account of rhyme’s primal satisfactions ends up strained and pedestrian. The better analogy here would be to music, not the crossword.

Even the creakiest prosody manuals advance some form of a neurobiological account of meter and rhyme that is ultimately rooted in the body. Chowder/Baker’s view of rhyme and the four-stress line wants to be restorative, yet its very narrowness constricts the potential for how a poem can resist and subvert these models in powerful ways to produce a surprising music.

One of the problems with having a problem with The Anthologist is that when it’s not peddling a lame model of poetics, it’s laugh-out-loud funny. Baker is able to have his cake and eat it, too, holding up the earnest, yet hapless, Chowder for some light-hearted ridicule, while continually affirming him as a figure of genuine endearment. The novel’s view of poetry is antique, hopelessly mired in prosody textbooks of the 1950s, yet the pleasure it takes from poetry is genuine.

The other problem with the novel is a familiar one: trying to determine the reliability of its man-child, doofus narrator. What do we know about him? He’s been published in “The New Yorker.” He’s won a “Gugg,” as he calls it. He’s been anthologized himself. By his own admission he’s a lousy teacher. And he goes through a lot of the inane half-ass rituals all writers perform in the daily grind of finding a way into language. This is where most of the comedy comes in. Baker’s feel, his ear I almost want to say, for the obsessive micrologies of the writing life is hilarious.

But here’s where some of the confusion also comes in: Baker achieves many of his daffy moments by having Chowder ramble amiably on about poetry in a semi-daft, semi-serious way the upshot of which is that nothing is at stake spiritually or culturally. The closest he gets is to compare poetry to some kind of advanced crossword puzzle. It should be said that part of the pathos, though that's probably too strong a word, comes from Chowder's defense, not just of rhyme, but of poets like Bogan and Moss whom Baker surely knows are out-of-fashion. So is the joke on poetry, then?

Nowhere do we read about poetry as negation, about its tremendous power of disruption. Modernism appears to have not taken place at all, except as some minor wayward backwater exercise of a few kooks like Pound, Olson and Ginsberg. For Chowder, and presumably Baker as well, the Great Tradition in poetry is Apollonian; unyieldingly affirmative of such shibboleths as the eternal human spirit.

So who’s the joke on? On poor Paul Chowder, the faux naïf whose mixture of lovable zeal and irredeemable mediocrity suggests an imperfect character who confirms Ford Maddox Ford’s grim, but accurate, pronouncement that most artists are born to fill the graveyards? Or is it on the reader, who follows this fool for poetry love through one comic pratfall after another, discerning a kind of baseline nobility, while swallowing whole his gushy valentine to the four-beat line and the power of rhyme?

As a spoof of the writing life and an homage to the sonorous music of the Grand Tradition Itself, The Anthologist proves charming and seductive. (Did I mention there's also a plot? Something to do with getting back with an old girlfriend). As an apologia for the conservative virtues of meter, it makes a somewhat embarrassing and naively reductive case for timeless, essential values in “verse.” Or worse.

The Departed (Michael Gizzi)

2010-09-30T13:31:00.000-07:00

The news of Michael Gizzi's death, so sudden, it seemed, first came to me through Silliman's Blog. The rollcall of the dead, as someone named it. Yet Ron, for all his prickly acuity, does a great service here -- the duty of remembering the fallen, even if you've never heard of them, who share this queer hard labor of the word.

Which is what has struck me about Michael Gizzi's death. A guy I barely knew. A guy who bristled with strange charisma and his work, well, it was lovely. His departure, through deep trouble, sends out ripples and connects so many of us who care for the craft, care for what he cared for. The instant of surprise. That sense of being astonished on the lip of a poem.

I saw him last fall in Lowell, on a panel about Kerouac with Anne Waldman, Pen was there, lovely and poised, and he was bright with the call and response, and later, standing outside, early evening, by a brick wall, kind of hunched into himself, weirdly glamorous and all alone, and I could have spoken then and didn't.

The Departed

Say you say nothing.
That would be the simplest way.

Or say you sing a song of sixpence
then put the phone down.

Say you say the words, a few words
for you, for you are departed.

Choose random phrases.
It’s raining today.

Mix random phrases
with items from the news.

If I can bear it, I will call.
If I can bear his dearness then
I will call or I may fall silent.

Say you plead silence
and put the phone down
as terrestrial love creeps by unawares.

Say you say how each word matters.
The green grass, the golden pine needles.

Say it is raining somewhere.

How we go out in the morning.
How we come home in the evening.

Say in a few words how less
is better. How least, lost,
the last letter is a whisper.

Say it so the ghost can hear you.

The Shudder

2010-09-27T07:11:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I offered a somewhat clumsy overview of Adorno's notion of spirit, contrasting it with Hegel's. What drew me to the passages from Adorno's work was not so much his conception of spirit, but his insistence that art must become darkened, and enigmatic so as to protect "the shudder." A few more words then, on the shudder, which Adorno places at the heart of this theory about the origins of art and with which he concludes Aesthetic Theory. I find this passage perhaps the most forceful, if not exactly the most eloquent, apologia for the necessity of art among all I've read. It restores to art its original Dionysian violence and strangeness, its sheer uncannyness.

"Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder's own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness. That shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other. Aesthetic comportment assimilates itself to that other rather than subordinating it. Such a constitutive relation of the subject to objectivity in aesthetic comportment joins eros and knowledge" (AT 331).

What the shudder delivers to us is not only the strangeness of the other, but the intimacy of our bond with him; an empathetic link that both confirms and overcomes our essential strandedness and fraility. The shudder is anti-classical. It does not confer unity, it does not offer clarity, it makes no parade of symmetry or balance; none of the traditional consolations of art. And yet, it is erotic, touched perhaps with jouissance; ecstatic, maybe; corporeal, certainly; absolutely radical.

Adorno, Spirit, Enigma

2010-09-22T09:48:00.000-07:00

(N.B. - some random pages from my dissertation that will probably end up on the cutting room floor).

The question of what happens to spirit in modernity is a complicated one and I shall only touch on it briefly here since it seems to me that the late Objectivist moment is less concerned with locating and resolving issues about spirit as such and how it might continue to mean in some worthwhile sense, and more on how history might be repaired and redeemed. In other words, the concerns with spirit that occupied a previous generation (and continue to vex those who would appeal to the government-in-exile of timeless transcendental values) have now migrated into the question of how to redeem historical disaster, how to alleviate human suffering.

What Raymond Williams said of "nature" could be applied with equal justice to "spirit." It is perhaps the most complex word in the language, used by widely divergent groups to indicate often dissimilar things. Yet the one thing these usages of spirit share in common is the designation of a non-material essence or property, either etherially transcendental, in the theological sense, belonging to an intuitive order of perception, or describing an innate attribute, drive, or primary feature of character in the empirical sense; an interiority that is both self-reflexive and rational.

Hegel uses it on several registers: as the subjective intellect or feeling; as the objective common values of a group; as, in the absolute sense, art or religion; and finally as the historical process whereby the world recognizes its own totality; a kind of pan-cultural self-reflexivity. Dialectics propels spirit along these stages of identity, through ever widening spheres of self-consciousness, toward the culmination of history through the negative movements of Absolute Spirit.

Adorno’s use of spirit derives from this Idealist tradition but is turned in such a way as to oppose the idea of spirit as a vehicle for world history or unifying social totality. What spirit signifies, at least in part, for Adorno is “inwardness,” a category of subjective experience that has become increasingly emptied out to the degree to which the autonomous subject itself has lost social power. This inwardness, Adorno, says, poses a problem for art since it is at once “the mirage of an inner kingdom” that has become empty of content and yet without which “art is scarcely imaginable” (AT 116).

To meet this challenge, art must become enigmatic, or endarkened. It must “do justice to contingency,” which can be read as another word for history, I think, “by probing in the darkness of the trajectory of its own necessity. The more truly art follows this trajectory, the less self-transparent art is. It makes itself dark” (AT 115). This endarkenement (a term Robert Duncan employed in an anti-rationalist, or intuitive, context closer to that of The Cloud of Unknowing) acts to counter the synthesizing propensities of spiritualization, its inevitable drift toward abstraction and totalization.

To become truly redemptive, Adorno claims, art must act so that “the spirit in it throws itself away” (AT 118). This radical self-canceling “holds true to the shudder, but not by regression to it. Rather, art is its legacy. The spirit of artworks produces the shudder by externalizing it in objects” (AT 188). That is, art replicates the originary shudder of recognition and displacement in the work itself, which, endarkened and estranging, disrupts spirit’s recidivist move to totality. In this sense, all artworks are caesuras, ritual scissions which cut into the illusory fabric of social relations and ideology.

If spirit for Hegel is rational self-consciousness coupled to a restless pursuit of self-negation and overcoming that stems from the desire for achieving an absolute self-realization, then for Adorno spirit's vitality must always remain oppositional.
“Dialectics is the self-consciousness of the objective context of delusion; it does not mean to have escaped from that concept. Its objective goal is to breakout of that concept from within” (ND 406).

The Wayback Machine: D.A. Miller on Jane Austen

2010-09-19T15:23:00.000-07:00

(N.B. these notes first appeared on the Green Romanticism listserv at the University of Colorado, Fall 2002).

A Report on Style – D.A. Miller's “Jane Austen and the Secret of Style”

The Miller talk was as well attended an event as I've ever seen here. I didn't take notes, so what follows is my hazy reconstruction. From my perch in the back of the cavernous, faux-Oxbridge mead hall the backs of peoples' heads appear not as the absence of their faces, but as a second kind of face, albeit one that can't return my gaze, which must be what makes them a bit uncanny.

The gist of what Miller wanted to suggest is that all style results from a queering of language or textual affect. That style is that feminized part of the text that narrates the process of its own production and is concerned solely with that and with nothing else. Substance is associated with the masculine portion of the text, the content, or message. According to this queer logic, style inhabits a kind of aesthetic closet, which the writer must resort to disclosing in order to achieve style, which is otherwise barred from normative discourse. Style is invisible, then, in some ways, but calls attention to itself in others. It can and does appear everywhere, but always in code, never under its own name. A lot like the homosexual in hetero-dominant culture. Hence, the masterfully tranquil and transparent appearance of naturalness to Austen’s highly rigorous and artificial style.

To illustrate, he gave a close reading of a passage from Sense and Sensibility, in which a group of women observe a dandy in a jewelry store go through some preening, overly elaborate arrangements about a toothpick case. The case, itself more important than what it contains, serves as a metaphor for style, as does the performance of the arrangements, a gesture whose expenditure is calculated to inflate the value of the case itself, in effect, making it insignificant. The dandy himself, through a complex exchange of inverted gazes that code him as gay, likewise seeks to re-position himself over the discomfited women as the primary object of visual desire in the store. Again, a metaphor for style. Miller unpacked a wealth of meaning from this finely wrought, but very small, episode. I thought it was a pretty brilliant reading. At the very least, it displayed considerable style.

In response to a question (by an undergrad!), Miller asserted that Barthesian jouissance and Derridean play are not factors that effect Austen’s text since she maintains an “absolute control.” And she gets this control by way of “discipline,” or “repression.” But surely wherever repression is involved, then so is a return of the repressed. Which means that whatever has been excluded comes back into play to destabilize the text. “Absolute control” is an odd sort of retro-move to make this late in the day, a kind of nostalgia for the imperial text.

One area that I wish Miller had expanded on was the notion of style and donation. I didn’t catch all of what he said, much less make sense of what I did hear. But it made me wonder about the idea of style as a gift, as donatus. Style as donation may be the way a writer tries to escape the constraints of the debt incurred to presence by staging writing as a pure gift, a gesture void of content or substance. The “gift” of style tries to displace one presence - the writer’s - and substitute for it another - the authority of the text itself, purged of authoriality, as though it were a spontaneously and organically self-producing form. Such a move alleviates the burden of anxiety the writer carries in facing her text. The move to purify removes or cleanses the text of its polluting elements, which is the imprint of the writer herself. Style gives itself in place of the author. It’s a kind of sacrificial strategy, a formal violence that elides the writer in order to present the text itself to the reader.

Post-script:
The idea that style is generated out of the secret tensions between an expressed masculine and a repressed feminine inside the text makes it appear as though the question of detecting style, or of producing style, will always be a matter of “outing.” This is a very clever argument, but I’m suspicious of arguments that are only clever, as I’m afraid this one may be. Which perhaps is another way of saying that all style and no substance makes me anxious. But my question remains: isn’t this an overdetermined queer reading of the production of style?

Shelley Love (aka the 69th English Institute)

2010-09-13T14:54:00.000-07:00

Let me just say right out: I love Adela Pinch. She makes me all, I don't know, swoony. Her talk on Shelley love as a major chapter in the evolution of the psychology and discourse of love, on a Sunday morning, in the Fong Auditorium of Boylston Hall, was the highlight of the whole conference for me.

The English Institute, which sounds like some kind of sinister cabal of world plotters in a William Gibson novel, annually gathers the leading scholarly lights from across all fields to discourse dazzlingly each September on a single theme. This year it was "The Author."

Because I was back in Cambridge and seeing so many old friends, I attended only sporadically and no doubt missed some Major Stuff. But Pinch's talk, "A Shape All Light," from Shelley's "Triumph of Life," knocked my socks off. Witty, impassioned, and just plain beautiful, it mapped out the Victorian cult of PBS as a sentimental fetish and the demigod of etherial love -- an almost Christ-like figure, esp. for women writers like the now forgotten Elinor Wylie -- only to argue that this cultic frenzy played a strong role in the formation of early British object-relations psychology. Though she quoted Procul Harem's "Whiter Shade of Pale," I'm surprised that Pinch didn't see fit to work in The Beatles' "All You Need is Love" as well.

The love of authors -- the author as oracle, the author as the picture of our truer and better selves, the author as messianic -- was central to the larger cultural understanding of love itself. Though I think, really, that instead of "love," she might have used "interiority." For the author is the mapper of internal space, indeed, the author of that space, a space traditionally marked as feminine, but eventually seen as foundational to the confusing operations of subjectivity.

In some ways Pinch's talk reminded me of Judith Butler's thesis in "Psychic Life of Power" that the scission of melancholy produces subjectivity. Like love, melancholy, in Pinch's words now, not Butler's "gives shape to our internal object world." (She made this remark in reference to how Woolf used PBS in her famous essay, "On Being Ill").

There is much I'm skipping over here. The Shelley haters. The fascinating way Victorian occultists glommed onto poor Shelley, penning posthumous works in his name, even revising his poems! And the role which "good sound" plays in Shelley love -- the euphony of semiosis. This was drastically under-read, I thought. Perhaps the single point to take away was this: Shelley lovers were in the habit of planting violets around his grave. Other Shelley lovers practiced the ritual of tearing them up as keepsakes. Even Shelley's heart, Pinch told us, was wrapped at the last by Mary in a page from "Adonais." After she died, it was found in her desk drawer, crumbled to dust.

The word Pinch uses for all this is: "transferable." By which she also means: "perverse." "A shape all light" is that which continually eludes us; feeding and defeating us, it teaches us through the figure of the author how we might love ourselves as though we were other.

Poetry Chronicles, Part 2-Desire Series, Mark DuCharme

2010-09-10T05:37:00.000-07:00

This review was originally to have appeared in the journal 6ix in 1999 or 2000. But as one of its editors, Heather Thomas, later told me, an intern mysteriously vanished with the disc containing all the files for that volume. In my mind's eye I can still picture him, an unshaven undergrad with a perpetual slouch, some disheveled dude slacking away into obscurity.

Note: I haven't figured out how to preserve indentations in the blog editor yet, so some unfortunate violence will be visited on the elegant lines below.

Desire Series, by Mark DuCharme (Dead Metaphor Press)

With his latest collection of poems, Desire Series, Mark DuCharme once again offers compelling evidence that the poem is not an artifact, but an odyssey, and that reading is not a matter of passive absorption, but an activity that requires serious and engaged attention. Desire Series is a finely reticulated set of meditations on the mysterious interactions between between eros and imagination. Desire here behaves as both the longing for expansion and the perpetual deferral of that expansion. In other words, as differance.

The work is never as saturated as
We desire their presences to
Be
But still we live like houseguests
Strain at pushing into it

+ + +

Anything at all
Will do

Desire is not the transparent medium through which some inchoate impulse takes on form and movement. Rather, it’s coeval with language. More than that, desire resists the effort to lucidity that language attempts to assert. For desire, writes Judith Butler, “will be that which guarantees a certain opacity in language, an opacity that language can enact and display, but without which it cannot operate.” Any cogent theory of desire, then, will also be a theory of poesis, one that advances the liberation of reality from the machine of insensate consumer practice, which is also the practice of everyday language. This is precisely what DuCharme accomplishes in these austere and frequently haunting poems. Unease with language, an acute sensitivity to its betrayals, is coupled with the irrepressible longing of the poem to attain not some final arbiter of representation, but the ongoing availability of a highly contingent collaboration.

I knew I could find you there
In this place, holy to both of us
Though for reasons not located on any map
Terminus, or grace
The make-believe & infected decision
Idols, or an audience
Degree shed in moonlight

In this, the closing poem of the series, DuCharme addresses the beloved, the reader, and language all at once. For all three are linked by their evasiveness, their refusal to be pinned down, and their unsettling tendency to become “Idols, or an audience,” that is, the chimerical force the Other exerts on us, compelling us to re-question our own subject positions. The place we occupy then, with respect to all three, is provisional -- both central and marginal. It is also, recalling Plato’s image of Eros as interlocutor, the ceaseless shuttling inbetween. Like desire itself, language is a medium of endless fluidity and abrupt intransigence.

This view of desire does not seek to locate and pinpoint the Other through language in order to subjugate it. Rather, it welcomes and invites the homeostasis of reciprocity, by which self and other, subject and language, author and reader, mutually engender one another. Lacan’s originary misrecognition is reconfigured as a play of signs (and of bodies) offering not primordial lack, but plenitude.

I need desire, a substance lodged in black. I don’t believe in closure implying the strong poem, the wieldy senator. As if above her head were stirred with a kind of aching to be done. The vistas we liked best are subtle. It’s a secret we were eager to contain.

Between vista and containment the poem works its desire to be many and not one. But it also embraces absence, “the substance lodged in black,” more readily than presence, the old longing of the poem for closure. For closure forecloses the possibilities set in motion by poetic desire, which, like language itself, is always exceeding itself, always yearning for what lies beyond its boundary. If consciousness is in some way cognate with desire, and restlessly expansive, then what is the desire of desire if not more desire? Paradoxically, absence leads toward, not away from, fullness.

Choices

Which are not ours to make anymore ---
But name us

As surely as the conventions of the love poem, the desire
Series

Who are you, shadow I reach to touch

Mouth of straw
Which becomes my unbidding

Because it can never quite sing of its complete fulfillment, because it exists as differance, desire is also that which continually performs its own valediction.

Marked throughout by an elegant spareness, Desire Series dislocates the familiar locutions of “beauty.” Lyricism’s freight of song is still tinged with its ancient impulsion to praise, but it’s newly charged by the ambiguous rifts between the richness of our inner lives and the increasing dissonance of the world. To live in the continuum of our utterance requires a total discipline. In Mark DuCharme’s poetry, the resistance to an archaic transparency, to outmoded ways of saying, means oscillating in the boundary zone between the daily necessity to express and the obligation to transgress.

Poetry Chronicles, Part 1-Lyn Hejinian's "Letters Not About Love"

2010-09-02T13:43:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the chief problem in writing a blog, at least for me, is how to keep it going, how to supply new material. This is one of the reasons I put off starting one for so long. There are certain obligations attached with this enterprise, after all. So far, I've managed to post, on average, about once a week. But since invention all too often fails one -- and since I have no desire to post about events in my life; this is a blog about the life of the mind, thank you -- I think I have hit upon a solution, gentle readers.

Starting with this post, I will be putting up from time to time items that generally fit the description of "Poetry Chronicles." The chronicles will consist largely of things I've already written -- reports on readings, introductions of readers at Naropa, and so forth. In some cases, these will be items I posted to the Buffalo Poetics Listserv before The Fall, when it became a moderated list in the wake of the Flame Wars. My hope is that these stop-gaps will still hold some interest, either historically, or for what is said about the work itself.

Now read on ...

Friday, May 1, Rachel Levitsky and I drove down to the University of Denver to hear Lyn Hejinian show a film, give a talk, and read some poems. We also gorged ourselves on mussels and bouillabaise at a very nice French restaurant -- but that’s another story.

Present at one or both portions of the event: moderator Cole Swensen, Bin Ramke, Rikki Ducornet, Beth Nugent, Jack Collom, Jennifer Heath, Michael Friedman, Anselm Hollo, Andrew Schelling, Bobbie Hawkins, Laura Mullen, Cedar Sigo and Jeni Olin. And a host of grad students.

The film -- “Letters Not About Love” -- is remarkable. Directed by Jacki Ochs (incidentally, sister to Hejinian’s husband Larry Ochs, who himself provided a very powerful and haunting jazz score), it concerns itself with an exchange of letters between Hejinian and Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko from 1988-1993. Ochs asked the poets to shape their correspondence around a set of words -- Home, Grandmother, Neighbor, Poverty, Book, Work, Violence, Window -- which she gave them. The results form a sustained dialogue/meditation on two cultures, two idioms, and ultimately, the nature of dialogue and language itself.

As the poets’ conversation progresses, it underscores the way language both encodes against loss, in a very daily and personal way -- the loss of a sense of place, the loss of memory, of the quotidian -- and is vulnerable to that very same loss and slippage. The letter figures both as a method of communication that creates its own self-contained and ongoing continuum and a form of expression anxious about its existence, about the sense of dislocation, physical and emotional, that the act of writing letters has always sought to overcome.

Throughout, the richness of Jacki Ochs’ stream of visual images, combined with the music of Larry Ochs, provides a continual counterpoint, adding additional layers of “language” to the spoken words (read by the actress Lili Taylor -- Lyn said that Jacki thought her voice too “girlish” - and dialect coach Viktor Hurd).

Afterwards, some of the discussion of the film (both public and private) focused on the erotics of letter writing: on the subtle tensions that pre-inhabit the word and guide it; on the richness and power of letter-writing as a genre, a genre too often relegated to the ghettoized status of “women’s writing.” Hejinian spoke about “negotiating the gulf between words and things -- not to fill it [that gulf] -- but to enter it, as a realm of possibility -- a poetics of possibility...” An old White Russian woman who first read Arkadii’s letters for her warned her that he was a demon and wanted to possess her soul. And Lyn quoted Shklovsky: “the role of art is to kill pessimism.”

“Letters Not About Love” is, of course, precisely and ironically about love -- about the eros of logos. And the logos of eros. It has been screened at a number of film festivals, received at least one award, but at present lacks a distributor. Lyn remarked that exhibitors were nervous about its “lack of an ending.” (Haven’t they read “The Rejection of Closure”?).

After a break for dinner, Hejinian gave a reading, beginning with a selection of twelve poems from “Oxhota” -- the section based on expatriate jazz musician Steve Lacy’s list of the 12 components of the Russian soul: Betrayal, Death, Conspiracy, Truth, etc., which Lyn says got a good laugh from her Russian friends.

This was followed by new work -- an appropriately sprightly and altogether enchanting poem called “Happily,” a meditation on chance, sequence and agency:

“Is happiness the name for our involuntary complicity with chance?”

She closed the evening with a long portion from “A Border Comedy” (forthcoming soon from Sun & Moon). She described the genesis of this work as having arisen from her collaboration with Jack Collom in “Wicker,” which having enjoyed so much she attempted to try on her own -- a kind of self-collaboration where a line would be written, then put away to undergo some form of effacement -- and then added on to as if written by another.

“However lively the imagination it still benefits from contact with reality.”

“But a man doesn’t dump his mother in a horsepond just because it starts to rain.”

Frank Samperi

2010-08-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

Frank Samperi occupies a special place in late modernist poetry – a Catholic Objectivist, as much steeped in Dante as Zukofsky – and possessed of a sweetness and light that is dazzling in its clarity and painful in its simplicity: inasmuch as pain erases itself into light and light is the final erasure and confirmation: a word that speaks everything, once and for all, a wing covering the night in itself, and wholeness begins.

To me, he has always been a bridge figure – quite forgotten, it’s true – someone who links the ardor of modernism’s love of the new with the ancient rhythms of belief, confession, testament, and vision. “All things that are are light,” writes Pound, quoting Duns Scotus.

But this is not a light of dissolution. It is the light of solid objects, seen as if for the first time, drenched in the aura that is the angelic failure of the material, its holy signal flare, anointing the drowned souls and the burning of our bodies as they climb the westward road through collapse and ruin, gathering the grains of the lonely. To be a poet of ruined light is to be completely devotional (pace John Taggart).

Frank Samperi’s daughter, Claudia Samperi-Warren, has recently set up a website devoted to her father’s work. It is well worth a visit:

http://poetfranksamperi.blogspot.com/

Defending Theory or, The Death of Frank Kermode

2010-08-20T04:08:00.000-07:00

At this late date, what's loosely referred to in the press as "theory" should need no defense. And yet the death of Frank Kermode, at least as reported by the NY Times, has brought out the grumbling resentniks of the Old Guard, still sore about how liberal humanism and the so-called "freedom of the reader," as Verlyn Klinkenborg put it today in the Op-Ed page, have acquired a kind of asterisk, a spot of shame, which is of course nothing more than the taxonomic structure they already possessed.

Kermode had a healthy disregard for the "deformed prose," as he called it, of many second-rate theorists striving to emulate the first generation of mostly French masters. But it's odd, to say the least, that someone who revered Eliot and Joyce, for instance, two of the major exemplars of modernist difficulty, would take such an issue with a similar evolution in the complexity of critical writing.

This complexity, which necessarily produces awkward or convoluted writing, is a sign of language thinking in a new way, of moving from interpretation to decoding, from the hermeneutic to the semiotic, as Paul de Man puts it in "Resistance to Theory." This turn to language requires a new form. But, as de Man notes, the resistance to theory, which persists, will always persist, is a resistance to "the use of language about language." It removes language from its unmarked center as an unquestioned arbiter of meaning and sees it as a contingent, culturally constructed phenomenon.

The Times obit carries the headline "wrote with style." The implication is that style is always the marker of clarity and concision, that it is transparent, that it carries meaning across from writer to reader without the need to question the mode of conveyance. But true style is predicated on difficulty. It is the force of originality bending language, doing violence to it, re-inventing and exploiting its full resources. It as much as about endarkenment as enlightenment.

The Poetics of Failure, Part 2

2010-08-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

A poem can fail in many ways. But to be a truly failed poem it must take care to fail in the right way.

There are failures of omission and failures of commission. Failures to fund the poem's vocabulary with the necessary depth of observation and experience and failures of overdetermination and ambition, These are failures of style and technique, of craft, and therefore minor.

True failure begins with the recognition that speech is always already crippled. That poetry itself is a species of disability and the struggle to pronounce its own condition from out of a deep aphasia. Whatever we say falls short of the mark. The mark itself, which draws its authority from putative degrees of fidelity, is often little more than a fetish for precision, a coded by-word for positivism.

To fall short of the mark, of course, is to acknowledge the possibility of failure and is a topos as old as poetry itself: the humility of the speaking subject before the immediacy of experience.

The kind of failure I have in mind encompasses some of this. But to fail poetically means more than merely writing poems that don't quite do justice to themselves; it means more than a lifetime's labor spent on work that goes unseen and unheard. Failure must be understood allegorically, as Benjamin meant it. At one level it involves the point of friction and potential breakdown between choice and multiplicity and the potential for unsaying in every form of saying.

At bottom, though, failure is about time. Hence, the need to understand it as allegory, as a telling otherwise about collapse and inanition. About writing in the ruins. About writing as ruins.

“In the world of allegory,” explains Paul de Man, “time is the originary constitutive category. The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can consist only in the repetition of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority.”

The anxiety of poetic form is always an anxiety with respect to time. How can the poem articulate an image of time that includes the persistence of the human?

To fail is to perversely attain a sense of the limits of language. It is to engage the difficulty of time as such, the obdurate resistance by which my words reach out to you, reader, wherever you are and in so saying I have created you, ala Whitman, from nothing more than the rhetoric of distension and hope.

Failure is a kenotic value. It is apophatic; speech that erases speech in order to unburden itself of time. But besides a commitment to emptying out, or the insufficiency of language to forge a grammar of being, failure signifies the embrace of the broken, of the fragment. It names the desire for what Adorno calls "micrology," which is the desire for redemption in non-transcendental, non-teleological terms.

What saves history from the catastrophe of reification, Benjamin asserts, is an allegorical form of transmission that exhibits the fissures within it. The failed poem is the poem that commits to those fissures. A historian, he writes, or a poet, I might add:

"Stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the time of the now which is shot through with chips of Messianic time."

Matter & Spirit

2010-08-04T13:46:00.000-07:00

For the spiritual tradition of the west, matter has largely been viewed as something to be contained and regulated; dangerous, shifty, unstable, and prone to regressive tendencies. It is to be infused and uplifted by spirit, transformed and made over till it glows. But this top-down, Platonist approach is also responsible for much of the hostile and oppositional attitudes that have everywhere degraded both the bodies of others, especially women, as well as the environment. Its legitimacy is summed up by the proto-Enlightenment pronouncement of Bacon that Nature is to be subdued.

Following Foucault’s remark that it’s been the body that’s been trapped inside the soul all this time and not the other way around, we might ask ourselves: what if the real goal of spirit is not, as we have for so long imagined, to descend into and animate an intransigent material world? What if instead it is matter that must come to the aid of spirit? What if spirit is that which stands in need of being redeemed?

It is not enough, of course, merely to reverse the binary. Any provocations on behalf of matter must be made with a view toward locating what is oppositional within its own logic while at the same time holding the idea of spirit, that is to say, form, in tension; not collapsing it into a straw man.

Such a shift stands behind Tim Morton’s bold notion of an “ecology without nature.” A liberating dissolution of binaries that would free us from the tyranny of the mind/nature split. The turn toward immanence is a call to re-envision the role earth and the body play in making a sense of the sacred possible. And what is the sacred, in this sense, if not the ever renewable potential of that-which-is-possible. I often think of Swift’s wry quatrain, which Yeats quotes in his preface to A Vision:

Matter, wise logicians say,
Cannot without a form subsist.
But form, say I as well as they,
Must fail if matter bring no grist.

It is that delightful and untranslatable English word, “grist,” which provides the hinge here. Spirit’s grist, to be effectual at all, must become embodied. It must come down to earth, as DH Lawrence knew, and be enflamed by the eros of matter. Enter Marcuse and all the angels of the poor, singing.

The Poetics of Failure

2010-07-30T04:52:00.000-07:00

There are two ways to view the idea of the poetics of failure. The first is in the material sense: the life and career of the poet as a disappointment of ambition or achievement, marked by a history of neglect or indifference from the reading public, critics and publishers Poets who might be thought of this way include Oppen, Bunting, and Niedecker. Yet all of them managed to acquire well-deserved second acts late in life. Failure was redeemed, and became part of their myth, encoded as a perversely positive value, part of the larger trope of poetic privation.

The second category of failure is more difficult to define. It involves a willed aesthetic of the failed poem, built around a form of writing that incorporates the logic of failure, that writing can never be adequate to itself. As Beckett puts it: “Fail again. Fail better.” This is a familiar enough trope, outlined most thoroughly by Blanchot, but in certain writers it becomes not only ascendant, but comes to stand for the kernel of the writer’s accomplishment. Kafka and Beckett are perhaps the primary examples, while Baudelaire is failure’s patron saint. Benjamin belongs to both groups, and because he recognized the poetics of failure early on in both Baudelaire, Kafka and himself, is the exemplary diagnostician of failure.

But if failure means recognizing the limits of the poem, it also represents a stubborn persistence in the ability to signify even after the hermetic mode of poetry has contaminated the Orphic.

(More on this later, after our move to Amherst).

Kenotic Speech

2010-07-22T09:11:00.000-07:00

The idea of kenotic speech, of a self-emptying utterance that seeks zero as the point of plenitude and negation as the space of fullness, runs through poets from Oppen and Palmer to Andrew Joron. Maurice Blanchot takes up this impulse in several of his essays on poetry in The Work of Fire. In commenting on Rene Char, for instance, he writes:

"The poem goes toward absence, but it is to reconstruct total reality with it ... the search for totality, in all its forms, is the poetic claim par excellence, a claim in which the impossibility of being accomplished is included as its condition" (Work of Fire 104).

Similarly, in his essay on Holderlin, he remarks that “the language of the poem is nothing but the retention, the transmission of its own impossibility” (WF 126). Perhaps Blanchot's most eloquent exposition of this principle of kenotic speech comes in his essay on Mallarme:

"What does writing care about? To free us from what is … this liberation is accomplished by the strange possibility we have of creating emptiness around us, putting a distance between us and things. This possibility is genuine … because it is linked to the deepest feeling of our existence—anguish, say some, boredom, says Mallarme … it corresponds exactly to the function of writing, whose role is to replaced the thing with its absence, the object with its ‘vibratory disappearance.’ Literature’s law is this movement toward something else, toward a beyond that yet escapes us because it cannot be, and of it we grasp only ‘the knowing lack,’ that ‘we have.’ It is this lack, this emptiness, this vacant space that is the purpose and true creation of language" (WF 40).

This resonates with Allan Grossman's pronouncements in The Sighted Singer: “Orphic song is the speech of the world after it has ceased to be world, and its subject is the speech of the world before it has become world” (365). This recursive relationship between speech and absence, speech and presence – the world gone and the world returned – comprises the heart of kenotic poetics.

Re-Runs: Watching Steven Spielberg

2010-07-12T12:14:00.000-07:00

My good friend D, who's a bit younger than I am, recently expressed surprise when I turned up my nose at Jurassic Park. “You don’t like it?” he asked, incredulous. “That’s a great film!”* But even allowing for generational differences in the cultural production of taste, Jurassic Park is not a great film, not even by Spielberg’s standards. And it’s only mildly entertaining. The best thing that can be said about Jurassic Park, bits and pieces of which I watched again on AMC while taking breaks from my Oppen chapter, is that it aspires to be a theme park. Which is rather ingenious, in a way, if deeply cynical. It’s a B-movie weighted down with the hubris of an A-budget and a first-rate cast. Where it should be nimble, it lumbers about clumsily. Indeed, the most pleasurable moments are watching the reaction shots of two pros, the ineffable Laura Dern and the canny Sam O’Neill.

All the JP films are scripted with B-movie logic, but only JP-3 actually delivers the juice: as a re-make of Gorgo, it’s fast, down, and dirty. It can hold its head high alongside such classics as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Gwangi. Though in keeping with the Spielberg template, it can’t forgo shamelessly exploiting the audience with the plight of the child-in-peril. So many of Spielberg’s films are about broken families, of course, but the way he employs the spectacle of terrified children in JP is shameless. (He uses the same gambit in War of the Worlds, but despite Dakota Fanning’s glazed state of terror she can’t quite upstage the hyper-self-conscious and frenetic Tom Cruise).

Jurassic Park on one level is little more than a remake of Jaws, a kind of “Island of the Land Sharks.” But since the monsters are extinct, which is to say, dead and resurrected, then the drama becomes a battle with ghosts, with the idea of the past itself, all as a way to vindicate the triumph of the present.

JP's scale is also a perfect metaphor for the metastasis of the director’s ambition. Designed by turns to produce massive moments of shock and wonder, its whole art consists in invoking the sublime only to reduce it to the kitsch. This is one definition of populist art. It reminds me of Oppen’s disappointment with Carl Sandburg, whose initial impact in conveying the shock of the stockyards decayed into sentimentalism.

Still, there are quick pleasures to be had in JP. If the film's first half is a laborious, elephantine exercise in staging the reptilian sublime as a parable of hubris (in high hubristic fashion), with the thrills all coming from the human invading the wild, then the leaner second half gives us the tighter and spookier thrills of the wild invading the domestic. Velicoraptors in the kitchen!

But seeing it again set me to thinking of one of my favorite Spielberg films; the overlooked Catch Me If You Can. Besides being expertly constructed, with very little pleading for the audience’s affections (despite its broken family theme), the real subject of the movie is the artist as counterfeiter: the producer of his own alternative system of value. It’s hard not to read it as Spielberg’s spiritual autobiography, an allegory for the filmmaker’s art which, as Orson Welles knew better than anyone, consists alternately of deception and surprise.

Which leads me to speculate that Spielberg’s oscillation between two contrary impulses in American filmmaking – Wellsian theatricality and Fordian populism – may help to explain why nothing he has ever made, including the sincere failure of Schindler’s List, has ever really satisfied. He’s too calculating an entertainer (meaning he doesn’t trust his audience) to give pathos without sentimentality, yet too much of an ironist to trust his own extraordinary technical gifts. That’s why a slight film that is nearly all technique, Raiders of the Lost Ark, may actually be his finest. All the affect is in the style.

* Still, as Jay Cocks once sagely remarked to me, there are films that are great experiences, and then there are great films.

Ride Lonesome: Oppen and Boetticher

2010-06-28T12:07:00.000-07:00

In thinking about Oppen and his place among his contemporaries, inevitable comparisons suggest themselves between his work and that of artists like Rothko and Newman, or Samuel Beckett, all devotees of silence and absence, and each of whom treated intimately with trauma, with the ghosts of history and the unspeakability of the disaster.

But another context suggests itself as well, somewhat lower down on the distribution chain of cultural production, but one no less compelling. I’m thinking here of the remarkable series of films made in the late 50s by director Budd Boetticher, writer Burt Kennedy, and actor Randolph Scott. The so-called Ranown Westerns (named for the production company of Scott and Harry Brown), as distinctive in their mythic tropology and aesthetic minimalism (a result of the starvation budget the studio gave them) as John Ford’s are in their robust expansiveness, tell the same obsessive story over and over again. Scott plays a man of constant sorrow, a traumatized crusader seeking to avenge or regain dignity for the dead, usually his never-seen wife (the consummate ghost figure), who’s been murdered by either Indians or outlaws.

The spareness and austerity of Scott’s presence – he seems to be made of nothing but wood, sweat and leather – and the starkness of the landscape around California’s Mt. Whitney, where each of the films is set, offer an intriguing set of apposite tropes to place alongside Oppen’s stripped down poems, which themselves enact a similar drama of trauma, austerity, and painful recall. Above all, Oppen’s poems carry the weight of the pledge: the vow taken by the Good Man to right a wrong. Maybe this is just my own sentimental investment in a certain redemptive model of heroic masculinity, but it’s a reading I find highly attractive nonetheless.

It seems pretty unlikely that Oppen ever saw these films, since their initial release run coincided with his time in Mexico. I can’t imagine they ever enjoyed any retrospectives in the San Francisco theaters of the 70s (where I got my own film education at places like the Castro and the Surf), but they may have shown up on late night TV. What unites Oppen and Boetticher (I can hear Menand saying this with his tight-lipped smile of ironic bemusement) is, of course, the Cold War. What else?

But having said this – acknowledging the cultural rescue script of the imperiled feminine and the virtues of civilization she embodies – doesn’t begin to answer to the fullness of the aesthetic experience that both Oppen’s poems and Boetticher’s films provide. Really, they both seem rooted in the war. For each, the ghost is the scene of writing. In dealing with disaster, with remnants, with haunting, with promises, they show how the consequence of fulfilling a promise may require an act of violence. That is the price of culture. Boetticher, I think, endorsed this view without qualms, for that is obviously the genre convention of Western. But Oppen, who dealt with life as it is, never made peace with that. Still, he would agree with Scott's character in Ride Lonesome, when he says, "there are some things a man can't ride around."

Bad Poems by Great Poets: Oppen's "The Zulu Girl"

2010-06-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

The bad poems by great poets seldom feature in critical discussions. I'm not sure why this is. Perhaps a reluctance to speak ill of revered figures. Or simply an inability to agree on what makes a poem bad. When bathos, for instance, is openly pursued as a desirable poetic attribute by the Flarfistas, then all bets are off. But long before Flarf, the traditional notion of what constituted aesthetic value had undergone an important sea change. Nevertheless, great poets do write bad poems. Which suggests to me a topic ripe for expansion.

Case in point: George Oppen's "The Zulu Girl." As far as I can tell, this poem has escaped commentary by the major critics. Peter Nicholls' George Oppen and The Fate of Modernism is silent on it. Likewise, Michael Davidson sees fit not to annotate it in his otherwise exemplary notes to the New Collected Poems. Apparently it did not enjoy serial publication, nor is there any reference to the photographic source Oppen used. It’s possible that Mike Heller or Rachel Blau DuPlessis have taken notice of it, or that someone mentions it in the Man and Poet volume. But it’s also understandable why none of them would. It’s an embarrassment.

The Zulu Girl

Her breasts
Naked, the soft
Small hollow in the flesh
Near the arm pit, the tendons
Presenting the gentle breasts
So boldly, tipped

With her intimate
Nerves

That touched, would touch her
Deeply—she stands
In the wild grasses.

“Zulu Girl” appears in 1965’s This in Which. What interests me here, aside from the obvious thing to say, namely, that it’s a somewhat classy version of National Geographic porn, is the tone. Oppen’s gaze and his commitment to a minimalist reduction are exactly the same as any other person or object he might treat. Yet one can’t help but feel that this is a case of Objectivist sincerity being badly abused. There’s a distinct uneasiness reading about the poet as he imagines himself touching this unnamed woman’s breasts and her vivid response. The tone invites the reader to place the poem in a quasi-anthropological/"Family of Man" context – an artifact of the Cold War. But the intent seems purely salacious. You have to wonder what Mary made of this poem.

Oppen has a thing for women’s tendons. In section 32, “Of Being Numerous,” he writes:

And the beauty of women, the perfect tendons
Under the skin

When he touches on the erotic, most of the time, it is delicately, discreetly. Mary’s hips are praised in Discrete Series – “she lies, hip high” – and comes in elsewhere, here and there, for ardent, if muted, veneration. But Oppen does not permit himself to write of her naked beauty or her sexuality openly. If he ever did, we do not have those poems. And I rather suspect he did not. Instead the poem of the erotic gaze is reserved for the photograph of a semi-nude African woman. A colonial subject, the double other, subjected to the male gaze.

“In the wild grasses.” The phrase, and the whole mood of “Zulu Girl,” call to mind “Psalm, which also appears in This in Which. "Psalm" is most frequently commented on as a poem that achieves a kind of Heideggerian Gelassenheit, an opening of the field. But it can equally be read as an erotic poem – “the wild deer bedding down … the soft lips/Nuzzle.” And in that context, what to make of “The small nouns/Crying faith” – if not an erotic paroxysm? Maybe “Zulu Girl,” as awkward as it is, should really be read as “Psalm’s” companion piece: a poem in which ontology’s exterior is the erotic body?

P.S. -- This just in. Harold Schimmel's essay from "Man and Poet," "(On) Discrete Series" (makes you nostalgic for the days when parentheses in titles were all the rage, almost ...), wittily connects the Zulu breasts, if I may be permitted to refer to them that way, to the section from DS beginning:

White, From the
Under arm of T

The red globe.

In a rather Benjaminian way, by which inorganic objects modernistically and perversely teem with erotic contours and potential, Schimmel suggests we read "the red globe" as a nipple. So perhaps we can also read breast for "tendon" in GO's repressed lexicon of the erotic. I'm just saying.

On Wallace Stevens (briefly)

2010-06-23T10:55:00.001-07:00

Stevens’ poems are arenas for engaging in metaphysical skirmishes. The tone of these combats is often so subdued, so rarified, that it belies the ferocity and violence attending the stakes. For Stevens, the legacy of the Romantics and the French Symbolists consists most vitally as a means for pushing back against the encroachments of an instrumentalist reality, of clearing a space for the human, which is itself sustained, if not produced, by this enterprise of imagination.

Nature in Stevens is never merely the natural, nor is it a source for anything so simple as images by which to stage his oppositional agon. He is not interested in using nature as an environmental scold like Gary Snyder might, nor does he turn it into a kitsch backdrop for delicate melodramas as does Mary Oliver. Rather, nature is the metaphysical Other; the theater of dream in which we can break and re-make ourselves, not as we were (never that), but as we always longed we might be – luminous, shot through with a language of pure vocables.

On Science Fiction as Secular Theology

2010-06-11T11:15:00.000-07:00

Frederic Jameson has notably defined science fiction as the literary field most attentive to and invested in the utopian desires of modernity. It is less concerned with dramatizing actual futures as it is with dreaming the possibility of nascent or emergent transformations in the social order and with the technological remapping of human potentiality.

In many ways the best SF (not always the most literary, though it often is) offers nothing less than a poetics of becoming. It accomplishes this through what Darko Suvin, perhaps borrowing from the Russian Formalists, calls “cognitive estrangement,” that is, it presents our own familiar customs and institutions, our habitus, through a glass darkly, as the future, or the alien, that is also the human, now radically defamiliarized.

Yet if Jameson’s approach focuses almost exclusively on SF as an engine for re-imagining and resisting late capital, as in the works of Dick, Gibson, or Robinson, the genre seems equally driven to articulate the late capital desire for radical new economies of secular theology.

With its tropes of technological transcendence, science fiction has long been the domain for representing late, or postsecular, theology as the driver of social evolution. The recent renascence of space opera by authors like Iain Banks, Dan Simmons, and Alastair Reynolds, to name a few, provides a sophisticated re-tooling or upgrade of that hoary, but deeply pleasurable, subgenre.

In Banks’ post-scarcity Culture novel, Excession, for instance, the eponymous and black-body object of the title is revealed to be a sentient probe from another dimension/parallel universe, the artifact of a society vastly more advanced than even the artificial Minds of the Culture. Its enigmatic behavior serves as kind of cosmic MacGuffin, an aporia that drives the plot purely by its negative or passive qualities. In some ways it represents the incursion of the tremendum, a visitation from outside, and, without stretching the point too far, the event or Ereignis, a kind of messianic presence which fails since no one is capable of receiving it.

Similarly, in Dan Simmon’s Hyperion/Endymion novels, the messianic figure of Aenea leads humanity outside of its bondage to both a network of parasitic AIs and a tyrannical future Catholic church by triggering a latent ability to travel through deep space by means of the Void That Binds, a kind of Buddhist/quantum device that permeates the deep structure of reality. (This metaphysical liberation is surely an homage to the conclusion of Alfred Bester's 1951 classic, The Stars My Destination, which Chip Delany once described to me as the greatest SF novel ever written. I could not agree more).

The post-secular sublime – or as Istvan Csiscery-Ronay calls it, the sf sublime – appears in the novels of Reynolds through the canny use of scale. Deep space and even deeper time – stellar distances and eons of development across millions of light-years – form a background of wonder against which the human protagonists play out their dramas and intrigues, challenging and resisting these unimaginable limit fields even as the narrative insists on how dwarfed they are by them.

Equally crucial to this sense of the sublime are the various modes of posthuman or alien transcendence which occur. Baseline humanity, as Reynolds calls it, is an antique. In the Revelation Space series, Conjoining, or the Transenlightenment -- the implantation of nanobots – allows humans to participate in a massive neural network at vastly accelerated rates of cognitive processing. In House of Suns, the Great Leap Forward occurs through cloning. Both technologies impart transcendent powers to human beings (though in HS the clones, or shatterlings, become virtually god-like: immortal, possessed of magical technologies, including near-sentient starships). Even death is circumvented by the power to download consciousness onto software that produces a total personality simulation capable of full interaction.

The catch, as in all Reynolds’ novels, is that transcendence does not obviate traditional moral and ethical dilemmas. On the contrary, it intensifies them. While all the books feature exciting space battles and chases, the main problem for the characters is always a moral one: how does an interstellar super-culture confront historical disaster?

In the uneven, but compelling, Revelation Space, the richly satisfying Redemption Ark, and the tedious and disappointing Absolution Gap, it was the crisis of extinction posed by a machine-race (The Inhibitors) seeking to safeguard an evolutionary galactic balance through surgical genocides of emergent stellar species. In House of Suns, the dilemma is reversed: humanity is compelled to come to terms with its complicity in the genocide of a machine race. Both plots play out, on a galactic stage, Benjamin’s dialectical aporia: that the foundations of civilized order are inseparable from the barbarism it overcomes and represses.

(Coming to terms with "giga-death" (a phrase from Banks' Look to Windward) -- the xenocidal destruction of trillions -- features in all three novelists. Reynolds in particular, like Greg Bear in his Forge of God diptych, explores the potentially pessimistic ethical -- and Darwinian -- implications of the Fermi paradox; namely, that EM-noisy planetary cultures bring down doom on themselves because, as Bear puts it, "the forest is full of wolves," i.e. self-replicating machines intent on preserving their hegemony. While on the one hand this impulse is laudable since it lends a compelling moral and historically engaged seriousness to SF, it also leaves them open to charges of exploiting crimes against humanity for the sake of entertainment. On the other hand, what other genre is so daring? It's tempting to call this new branch of space opera "SF after Auschwitz").

Reynolds’ universes are deeply imbued with historical skepticism, which shifts in mood from the benignly comic (as in the names of the meta-civilizations which come and go: the Perpetual Commonwealth, the High Benevolence, the Pantropic Nexus, etc.) to Spenglerian melancholy. Empire, in his novels, is a kind of pathology. It can only ever end badly, leaving traces of strangely beautiful and enigmatic ruins across the galaxy. This, too, is part of the sublime.

None of these writers are quite the alienated Gnostic modernists that say, Lovecraft is. Their universes may be dangerous, but overall they are hospitable, that is to say. anthropic. The human, or rather the posthuman (always rendered somewhat anachronistically, of course, that is, on a less adventurous imaginative register than Octavia Butler, for example), has a place in it. But that place is also occupied by a pervasive sense of mystery and awe and it is this that imparts to their work, at its best, an uncanny shiver of the sublime that is radiant with theological desire.

Thinking the Messianic

2010-06-06T14:25:00.000-07:00

Up till now, this blog -- despite its provocative title -- has remained conspicuously silent on the topic of the messianic. Partly this was out of a desire not to be limited by a single topic, which seemed dreary and confining. But it was also because I was finding my way into the form of blogging itself, rather timidly, to be sure.

The initial entry paired two thoughts on the messianic by Benjamin and Derrida as a kind of bracket or limit-set for how to think about the messianic and what it offers us. And what, exactly, is that? As directly as possible, it has to do with the recovery of a certain domain of experience, a recovery that will allow not only for the survival of the personal, but the potential redemption of history. Above all, it is deeply construed with the vigilance of the promise, of potentiality itself.

In some way I can as yet only intuit, experience and the messianic are intimately linked, conjoined, even. There is much to say on this, some of which I may return to here, but the bulk of which will be reserved for my dissertation on Oppen, Palmer, DuPlessis and the afterlives of Objectivist poetry.

For now, I reprint here an essay that originally appeared in English Language Notes 44.1. It's a belabored piece, very heavy-going, but it represents my first attempts to think through this knot about five or six years ago.

The Breaking of the Vessels: Toward a Lyric of Messianic Form

“God becomes God when all creatures speak God forth: there ‘God’ is born.”
— Meister Eckhart, German Sermon 27

“To bear witness to God is precisely not to state this extraordinary word.”
— Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being

1.

If it is to speak at all of spirit, to what must lyric address itself? To what bear witness? Spirit falls, a catastrophe. First, in its unlooked-for coming; still more in its harrowing departure. The space that spirit opens in us is a rending. A wound. It enters us as another language, made of a strangeness we can barely begin to comprehend. Like trauma, spirit refuses to be internalized, except as the unassimilated and ongoing aftershock of its impact and wake. Thereafter, it haunts us.

2.

The poem that speaks of spirit today must find a way to work inside this catastrophe. It must take up residence in the tension between saying and not-saying, between Eckhart’s cataphatic nomination of God through the reciprocity of human speech and Levinas’s apophatic interdiction on the word for God itself. This new lyric (it resists history even as it succumbs to it) must inhabit the crisis of form arising from the opposition between utterance and silence. For to say “spirit” is to enter an aporia in which form itself breaks open, rended by the trauma, the raptus, of that which haunts language from outside. The invasion of mysterium tremendum. In the face of such an invasion, the old franchise on the rhetoric of transcendence dissolves. The catastrophe of spirit’s onset plunges lyric into loss.

Yet lyric, which is a swing of grace, antiphonal gesture toward an empty horizon, lyric still longs to say its originary affirmation, even if it is a song of mourning. That there is no origin is no impediment. The poem speaks always already in response-to; this is the condition of its founding and its brokenness. Likewise the desire for spirit comes after we are broken. The performance of tikkun which lyric undertakes occurs as a response to the brokenness of the world. In the fissure opened up by the breaking of being, by God’s self-recusal, the absolute need to bear witness to this evacuation descends. Lyric must become messianic.

The messianic lyric rejects the thematizing of spirit, that foreclosure of being into a circumscribed category, flush with certitude, the anathema of mystics. For it, presence is an event, not a state. The swift arc of a radical disruption, not a steady continuum. The poem wishing to say spirit looks askance at the valorizing proclamation of alleluia and its unmediated invocation of presence, even as it relishes the musical play of the word itself, its pure semiosis. It longs instead for the interstices in such code words as “glory,” those spaces of a radiant-going-beyond where the desire for God empties language of the name for God.

“God becomes God when all creatures speak God forth.” In this reciprocal equation, Eckhart places the speech act – logos – at the center of an autotelic poetics of lallation: the word nominates the world and the world incarnates the word. At the same time, like Levinas, he implores: “I pray God to make me free of God.” It is only by erasing “God” from God that the messianic poet wishing to speak spirit may truly escape the overdetermination of the divine. To say by way of unsaying is crucial for the poem that longs to utter the most ruined and impossible of words. Apophasis is not simply a rhetorical inversion, but the eucharistic movement of form that responds most urgently to the trauma of spirit.

If the messianic lyric must avoid naming God as such, it does so because radical form acts as the manifestation of revelation’s mystery. The poem’s ability to show forth this mystery derives its authority from the intercession of difference, from the keeping in play of spirit’s indeterminable status as a living force and not what Jean-Luc Marion has called an “idol of being.”

In many ways, the question of saying spirit is intimately enmeshed with the question of form. Spirit’s rupture requires a radical form that can speak mystery as mystery, as the presence of the unnamable, and not as a fetish.

Yet doesn’t relinquishing what Derrida terms the “master name” of Being place a still greater strain on the poetic work of tikkun? Like the trauma inflicted by the Lurianic withdrawal of God from the world after the breaking of the vessels, différance situates the messianic poem deep within its moment of impoverishment, in the acknowledgement of the frailty and inadequacy of all our forms of address for God.

This nadir is pure gift: it offers itself as the basis for a radical spiritual economy. After différance, after the trauma of God’s caesura, the messianic lyric abandons thematization so that it may revel in the dance of spirit’s seizure and evacuation, re-enacting the wound through a poetics that will transform loss into plenitude. The fissure rent by différance offers a magnanimous breaking open, a liberation from the ossified regime of conventional sacred discourse.

The messianic lyric utters the trauma of spirit’s wounding apophatically, as a form able to say “spirit” as if for the first time. That this is an impossible saying does not deter it from saying it over and over as if each day were the Annunciation. Each moment the strait gate, as Benjamin says, through which the Messiah might enter. Messianic lyric invests the horizon of its call with the expectation of another – the impossible response that must come from outside – what Jean-Louis Chretien calls “the disruptive suddenness of the unhoped for.” That which is ever ahead of us and always coming toward us, both already within and always outside of all expectation. In this way it seeks to guard spirit from spirit, refusing to reify the experience of spirit by turning it into the spiritual as such. Rather than genuflect before an outworn rhetoric of piety, it stages the brokenness of its own speech as the necessary condition for any genuine ebullitio of what stands beyond saying.

The messianic lyric generates its apophatic structure out its own brokenness and the world’s. This brokenness obliges it to render spirit as strange: outside. As something flashing up in the gaps between a totalizing fullness and an indeterminate emptiness. In the caesura that inaugurates spirit’s presence/absence (the “pure word” Hölderlin called it), in this khoric space kenosis – the breaking and emptying out of form – blooms into parousia and the fracturing of poetic form grows radical plenitude. The strangeness of being approaches as a haunting and a hovering, a profound uncertainty. To say this strangeness the poem must develop a strangeness of form capable of acknowledging it, however inadequately. Part of the strangeness of being is that being desires to escape being. To attain to an ex-cendence, as Levinas says. The lyric that would affirm such escape must pronounce it otherwise. Like Marion’s description of the eucharistic gift, the messianic lyric “anticipates what we will be, will see, will love: figura nostra … facing the gift we cannot yet welcome.”

Facing this gift means the poem must negate the history that enmires God. The peculiar power of the negative permits the poem to speak of God in such a way that the aporia of divine presence offers consolation from the very scene of the crime, the place of wounding and withdrawal. The trauma of God’s withdrawal from the world is generative: the primary occasion for the incursion of the unexpected.

Grace – arriving violently, in the breaking of the first set of Mosaic tablets, through the shattered forms of the vessels unable to hold the divine light – grace comes as both our belatedness – that is, the gulf of our distance from God – and the very condition that enables our rescue through the unhomed strangeness of radical form. In the messianic poem, grace appears as a kind of repetition compulsion: the annunciation, over and over again, of the enigma that refuses to yield itself to us from within the chasm of God’s night.

3.

“There will be new form, and this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else ... To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now. Being is constantly putting form in danger.”
— Samuel Beckett

Mallarme dreamt of a spiritualized book, a poem of the deeply immanent that would contain the entire world in an impossible transcendent text. Isn’t this the trans-tautological loop of Eckhartian poetics which names God to Godness through the reciprocating apostrophe of the world’s beings? That same apostrophe calls spirit to enter the poem in the doxology made possible by the rupture of form.

The poem rends spirit in order to render it as a response to the trauma of God’s silence, the kenotic departure from the world. What the divine has emptied, the poem must re-fill, wounding speech with the hope for a response whose power will carry us further into the surprise of the wound itself. Messianic poetics may be understood as an extravagant recovery of presence through the tropes for absence.

To speak of God is to speak of the original wound, the enigma of a trauma about a vanishing that whispers in fading echoes of a way to go beyond Being. Into the interstices of the Not-Yet.

In Howard Schwartz’s re-telling of the classic Talmudic tale, “The Golden Dove,” a traveling rabbi forgets to say his morning prayers before setting out on the road. Returning to the campsite, he finishes his ritual, when he sees a nub of gold peeking through the ground. Brushing the dirt away from it, he pries loose a golden dove. But the warmth of his hands transforms the statue to a living bird, which straightaway flies up to Heaven and perches on a branch outside the Messiah’s window. From time to time the dove flies back down to earth to judge if humanity is ready for the Messiah’s coming. But each time we are not and so the dove returns to its branch, where it remains silent for three days before resuming its songs of promise and deferral.

The messianic lyric also says, “Not yet.” Meaning, everything is still promised, still to come. Like the golden dove, it arrives not merely to give consolation, but to offer the promise of promise, the gift of pure potentiality, without which nothing can be accomplished. The poem is a temporal construct Inside the strictures of time completion can never become complete. Just so, the tikkun that the poem undertakes will never be finished. The reparation of Being that the poem aims for must itself be thought of as broken. It must be thought of as open, underway, in the continual act of remembering a forgotten prayer, continually in search of a new form, a new way to speak of and to being’s brokenness, to the abject condition of our spiritual poverty, so that to recognize the acute sovereignty of our being is to acknowledge at the same time how deeply estranged we are from it.

The dream of the pure word that could say spirit or being as it is, of the Adamic language which could, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “deliver us to the thing itself,” has a long history. It is this history - the history of the downfall of the word – that the messianic lyric must work inside of even as it strives to break free of it. Writing of Benjamin’s dream of this pre-Babel idiom, Agamben observes: “What remains unsayable and unsaid in every language is therefore precisely what every language means and wants to say: pure language, the expressionless word.” The empty word. The kenotic word. The word that survives after all meaning has been drained away from the broken vessel so that all we may hear of it is a lingering tone, a resonance, an echo of distant bird song from a window outside the house of the Messiah. An impossible word. A song that is both the sign for and the body of the messianic poem as it inhabits the catastrophe of its broken prayer, not in exile, but in radical immanence. The messianic lyric is always broken, that is, never original, but continually haunted by what has preceded it, a speech without a beginning. It always asks: “when?” To which its own reply is never anything but, “yes.”

On Leslie Scalapino 1944-2010

2010-05-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

Considering How Exaggerated the Light Is

What would you glean
mean

the long go-away-from-it plan
at hazard, sheer glass over
water

and the eking out
of syllables

ten cents-a-dozen
no rhymes

///

It would be occasion, return of the others from their something not right
I know, I could see them, moving down the aisle, that there should be
this music

This was the time when the dying brought in their wounded

///

The stippled
branch
of light
tips forward

ghosted
with pollen

and the promises of dust
stare back at us

give evidence of our having lived
the wrong questions
right

On Peter O'Leary

2010-05-20T03:51:00.000-07:00

WATCHFULNESS
Peter O’Leary
Spuyten Duyvil Books
2001

Are innovative poems about the holy still possible? Poems which are able to escape the rhetoric of piety that mars so much of the later work of Denise Levertov, for instance, or makes poets like Edward Hirsch and Robert Bly appear for what they are, etiolated imitators of Rilke and Rumi? And if so, what might such poems look like? Peter O’Leary’s vibrant and exciting first book, Watchfulness, presents us with the possibility for articulating the spiritual in a whole new register. His erudition and his models encompass modern poets working in the western Hermetic tradition like Robert Duncan and Ronald Johnson, as well as ancient masters of spiritual techne from the mystical schools of early Eastern Orthodoxy.

The distinction between the Orphic and hermetic modes of poetry made by Gerald Bruns set up antinomian tensions that remain largely unresolved in contemporary poets intent on working through the twin legacies of Mallarme and Stevens. O’Leary invokes hermetic themes, only to move the poems themselves into a modernist Orphic modality. He balances these two strains with great skill and sophistication, though in the weaker poems the effort required shows through. In fairness, these poems represent apprentice work. O’Leary’s more recent efforts, which can be found on-line at The Cultural Society and For Immediate Release, demonstrate an amazing formal vigor accompanied by what Abraham Joshua Heschel called “spiritual audacity.”

In a 5th Century spiritual tract collected in the Philokalia, St. Hesychios advises us that “Watchfulness is a continual fixing and halting of thought at the entrance to the heart.” The heart here is considered as something more than a trope for the emotions. It is a psychic and spiritual space, the place, as Augustine put it so movingly, “where I am myself,” implying both a unification and a bifurcation: a kind of utopian nexus, in much the same way that a poem might said to be. In the interior space of the heart, a space that is both there already and yet still awaiting our instructions for making it, attention to the dyslexic stream of awareness becomes the instrument for building the vehicle of light, that ancient mode of theogenesis. The rites for such building take form as an architecture of music, as in “Nipsis”:

Caritas of exquisite
stars arisen in

skies of ice whose resplendent
rites, untiring, unite.

The poems in Watchfulness comprise an arch-hymn to light: to the gold effusions of icons inside Orthodox basilica, to the luminous architectures of Louis Sullivan and the aureate desires of the legendary King Midas, to the ineffable splendors of the inner light outlined in the Philokalia and Jewish mysticism. All these are invoked, displayed, unfolded with an exuberant combination of austere minimalism and baroque saturation. This is poetry that honors both the small, still voice of the soul and the clamor and rush of kerygma, or pure proclamation.

At the heart of O’Leary’s poetics is the conviction, buttressed by deep and learned immersion in the heady mysticism of the Greek Orthodox tradition, that the true function of litany in prayer, as in the poem, is to guide and direct the flow of attention, channeling its energies into spiritual awareness. The language of liturgy raises the cathedral of the poem, just as Sullivan raised the first skyscrapers in Chicago and “the antique Holy Spirit iridesced /& smote its new lumen through American fingers and eyes.” The wisdom of the ancient East puts down new roots in the brash dream of a republic of continual self-invention. Straddling history and spirit, these poems work an alchemical process until gold, finally, figures as both the crass fetish of mercantile exchange and the embodiment of divine transfiguration.

The magnanimous economy of these poems, their repeated, indeed, insistent, gestures toward a life of inner largeness, in which the acknowledgement of “the gift of stars” marks the opening to a broader range of feeling and attunement, is a bold and risky one. At a time when the metaphysics of presence has been thoroughly trounced, it seems, by cultural materialism (and what is cultural materialism anyhow? only Marxism without the tears), they dare to affirm for poetic language a stage of action that is overpowering and mysterious. At the heart of their implicit critique of so much of today’s vapid vanguardism is something more radical by far than has been imagined by either the smart-alecks of the moribund NY School or the elite shock troops storming out of Buffalo, clutching their copies of the latest Bruce Andrews screed just as a previous generation clung to Mao’s Little Red Book. Namely, that the poem is a gateway to the mundus imaginalis.

Reading Notes: Poetry in Cambridge, Spring 2010

2010-05-08T14:58:00.000-07:00

Fanny Howe
Harvard University
April 5, 2010

In her introduction, Katie Peterson described Fanny Howe as a “poet of fear” and I think I know what she means. Howe’s work explores the trembling at boundaries, the spaces of in between that are rich with untapped being, and this is fearful business, spiritual business, the business of how to redeem a broken life.

For me, she is primarily a poet for whom compassion is a form of seeing and beholding a kind of rescue of the visible world and what goes on there; not just the wavelength of the beautiful but the difficult looking that requires recognition and reclamation. That takes place within what she calls “the glow of loneliness and humiliation.”

Howe’s reading consisted of a triptych, each long poem read in conjunction with still photos or imagery. The first set revolved around a series of time-lapse photographs taken by a friend of hers of a doorway to an abode home in a Mayan village. As children and chicken mysteriously appear and disappear out of its dark aperture, the poems act of attention makes palpable the ethical demands of discernment. The second series was more trance like: a series of poems read against footage taken from an apartment window looking over Memorial Drive at dusk. The twilight traffic ebbed and flowed, the shadow line of the river just visible, and the world hanging motionless. “Outremer” was the final piece. A poem on St. Francis and his struggles and what it means to live spiritually, it was read by the poet over haunting and evocative charcoal drawing animation done by her son, Maceo Senna. Slender images slowly emerged till a whole vivid landscape appeared: two men, a tree, the ground. Then all erased. “The supernatural is all the more wonderful for being natural.”

*

Norma Cole
MIT
April 8, 2010

Norma Cole’s work is continually alert to the tiniest nuances and to the possibility for the vastness of each one’s signification. Listening to her read, you get the sense that consciousness produces itself via lyric montage. Not just a random sequence of compelling images or phrases, but actual turns of thought, a deep thinking into language as event and the world as it seen and felt and registered continually. Objects are not merely named, but multiply-mediated. What calls our attention is seeing and seeing into and through language.

As in the series she wrote in collaboration with Ben Watkins, where she eschews the traditional format of ekphrasis and instead takes each of his photos as an invitation to respond, to make the poem not a comment on the photo, but an event enmeshed with its event, neither reductive nor overpowering, but alive to complexity.

*

Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop
Blacksmith House
May 3, 2010

Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop read at Blacksmith House last week, to a small, but deeply appreciative, crowd, which included the affable XJ Kennedy and his wife, Dorothy, Jericho Brown, Michael Franco, Jane Unrue, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio.

Rosmarie read first, staring with “Facts” from 1987’s The Reproduction of Profiles. I think of this as classic Rosmarie: the poem as a wry, playful, and even tender vehicle for dialectical disquisition that both honors and parodies the tradition of Continental philosophy.

Next she read from new work, entitled “Time Ravel,” a delicate and haunting meditation on memory and explorers. This poem, with its subtle sense of echo, traced a periplum of shifting contours that made, as it went, the map of an entire site.

Keith read, then, choosing poems entirely from Transcendental Studies. He began with “An Apparatus,” a poem of disjunctive apprehensions in which language names textuality itself as the site for Orphic testimony. This poem, like so many in Studies, generated a kind of quantum field of collage dynamics. The tone offers a reassurance – it has a steady pace to it – yet at every turn it contests content, insisting on form’s priority to organize linguistic experience.

He closed with “Stone Angel,” which is a masterpiece, if that word still carries any weight. Without ever sounding lofty, the poem manages to be both magnificent in its elegiac rhetoric and utterly hypnotic. Though at times it reminded me of Rilke, I can think of no poem closer to it than Valery’s “Graveyard by the Sea.” Far more personal than that, it nevertheless maintains, as does Valery, the fragile link between mortal regret and longing and the evanescence of the natural world as it shimmers through its durable forms.

Basil Bunting and Jonathan Williams

2010-04-29T04:21:00.000-07:00

Bunting to Jonathan Williams

whether it is a stone
next to a stone or
a word next to a word
it is the glory

JW, Elite/Elate 1971-75

Derrida and Religion at Harvard

2010-04-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I attended, rather sporadically, some of the proceedings of the Derrida and Religion conference at Harvard. It gathered some of the leading scholars in the field, including John Caputo, Richard Kearney, Joseph Cohen, and keynote speaker Hent de Vries. My notes are all too sketchy and probably do a grave disservice to the subtle thought of each panelist, but I present them anyway, for what they're worth.

Tall, dapper, with a casual mop of white hair and an engaging smile, De Vries opened the conference on Friday night, prefacing his talk with a long-winded and rather otiose set of Derridean qualifications that have grown quite stale by now. One sees the point, but haven't we moved past the need for such extensive and ponderous throat-clearing? Must we be compelled to prove our Derridean bona fides each and every time we engage in deconstruction? On the whole I found his talk disappointing. It was less a talk than a formal full-dressed essay, replete with complicated syntactical moves and multi-clausal sentences that made it difficult to follow. Maybe European trained scholars simply don't acknowledge the difference between the informal structure of the talk and a lecture as such.

Nevertheless, de Vries’ talk held some rewards, focusing on the para-religious categories of thought that have risen in the wake of post-structuralism. He concerned himself chiefly with Derrida’s Limited, Inc. and how the iterability of God’s name not only produces writing itself but also, in Derrida’s potent phrase, a “graphematic drift” that undoes the name which produced it and makes God another signifier among signifiers. Turning then to Rogues, he dwelt on how secularization remains ambiguously marked by the theological. The Name of God must undecide itself in order to escape falling into idolatry. Otherwise, it can never become messianic.

Saturday morning began with Joseph Cohen’s talk on Derrida and Abraham. Like de Vries, Cohen’s style was dense, full of baroque flourishes that announced an overdetermined style . About the only thing I gleaned from it was this tidbit: “the messianism of the event restores the negation that permitted or produced it.” Which sounds very Hegelian (I think).

Sarah Hammerschlag got up then and showed us how it’s done. A striking-looking woman with dramatic hair and a powerful style of delivery, she gave a model talk: well-paced and organized, clearly signposted, but sacrificing nothing in terms of thematic complexity. Her talk was titled “The Poetics of the Broken Tablet” and took up Derrida’s engagement with Jabes and Celan, the rabbi and the poet.

She began by making a swipe at Zizek, Badiou and Ranciere, all of whom have attacked the “postmodern fetish of the Other” esp. as “Jew” in an effort to refute Derridean conceptions of the ethical and reduce deconstruction to a Jewish science. From there, she moved on to a discussion of the structures of election in Celan and Jabes and of Derrida’s notion of the shibboleth. Messianic speech overcomes, she asserted, the structure of homogeneity, while repetition undermines election. The key feature of Derrida’s conception of the messianic (and of Levinas’s as well) is hospitality: the openness to the Other and the stranger. Such hospitality strongly marks the work of Celan and Jabes too, though I wish she had addressed how the hospitable can also take the form of a posture toward experience itself, an exposing of language by the poem to a non-enclosing structure of the non-identical.

One thing I took away from this talk was the thought of the broken tablets as the inaugural moment of the messianic: the promise that cannot be delivered, but exists as though suspended, and as the ghost or spectral figure informing the second set of lesser tablets. This echoes a theme announced by Luria: that the beginning is also the traumatic and that the breaking of the promise of the covenant also keeps the promise, but existing as that which is always yet to come.

The last talk I attended was by the dashing Richard Kearney, whom I’ve briefly met through Fanny Howe. Richard has warm, vivid presence. His book, The God Who May Be, is something of a classic, I think. It was, at any rate, along with Caputo's Prayers and Tears of Derrida, an important gateway for me into the fraught nexus where Derridean thought becomes entangled with post-metaphysical theology.

Kearney spoke on messianic atheism, setting off the topic by citing Levinas, in Totality and Infinity, where he spoke of atheism as a “salutary distancing from the totalizing of being.” He recalled as a well an anecdote about Levinas whispering an aside to Derrida at a dissertation defense about how we are obliged, when speaking of God, to only whisper his name.

Kearney’s talk was full of such good humor, weaving in personal stories about Derrida and Ricouer with the formal elements of his talk in an easy and welcoming manner, while trying, as he said, to avoid the appearance of “self-regard.” I’m not sure he succeeded entirely at that since such a gambit can’t help but buttress the authority of any claims one makes. Nevertheless, it was entertaining and insightful. Once, when Ricoeur congratulated Derrida on the appearance of Monolingualism of the Other he confided that he himself “could never write a philosophy about my penis.”

Kearney’s main thrust throughout was to make some key distinctions in how Derrida used the terms messianism and messianicity. The former is theistic and the latter atheistic; the former generates prayers, the latter tears. But though prayer is always an address to some one, it is not possible without the atheistic space of the khora. Immediately there is prayer, however, the khora is left behind. Nonetheless, khora, he stressed, is not another name for God; it is a-theistic. Both prior to and outside of God. To save the divine name, he said, citing Derrida in "Sauf le Nom," we must refuse to determine the name’s content. Yet I didn’t note how he squared this with the address which prayer makes (is it to "no one" then, as Celan has it?) and what is lost or gained by its linguistic determinations and “graphematic drift.”

What I missed, later that day, was a potential showdown between Caputo and the wunderkind Martin Hagglund, who vigorously disputes both Caputo and Kevin Hart’s attempts to claim Derrida for the para-religious moment. While I think such a counter-claim is needful since it stands to pry deconstruction away from a burgeoning piety, I’m not sure Hagglund succeeds in doing so. What he does do, though, very persuasively, is to offer a powerful reading of Derrida’s conceptions of messianicity vis-à-vis messianism. More to the point, he re-opens the question in a productive way that invites rather than refutes more debate, and that is all, finally, one can hope to do.

The Five Social Groupings of Poets

2010-03-15T12:51:00.000-07:00

1. Co-Conspirators
(movements & manifestos)

2. Fellow Travelers
(loose ad hoc confederations and alliances or mutual sympathies)

3. Strange Bedfellows
(academic partnerships; the publishing industry; the party circuit; business as usual)

4. Doctor Nos
(cranky gatekeepers: reviewers, editors)

5. Mavericks and Isolatos
(the fringe, the exiled, the out-of-it, the-above-it-all)

Is Literature Exceptional? (Reply to Menand)

2010-03-15T08:19:00.000-07:00

Is poetry, is literature, a special case? Can we still speak, with straight faces, of poetic exceptionalism? Or is literature, as Luke Menand avers in his recent consideration of Lionel Trilling, merely a report on experience that enjoys no special privileges?

Menand closes his article on Trilling on an autobiographical note:

"I was taught to think about literature as part of the history of ideas, and to believe that people wrote novels and plays and poems because they had something to say. I still think that this is true. I think that literature is a report on experience. I just don’t think that it’s a privileged report on experience. It is, as Trilling felt in his darker, anthropological moods, simply part of the cultural activity of making meaning."

Admittedly, it takes a fine mind to make an argument for dethroning literary privilege from the pages of The New Yorker. I’d like to think Menand is wrong. I’d also like to ask him why he’s taking a paycheck from Harvard while masquerading as an English professor. But the question is a serious one; it deserves consideration.

Reared on the high modernism of Pound and Eliot, I’ve always taken it for granted that what poets do is special. Not in the sense that we have access to some higher fund of wisdom, or more penetrating insights into the human heart. But that the music itself, the making of it, and the making of it within a long tradition, within the continuities and communities of form, sets it apart from other forms of cultural activity; because that concern with form is at its heart utopian. It sees the world as always potentially otherwise. More importantly, it attends to the myriad details that go by everyday unnoticed. Not just the details, but the warp and weave of them into patterns of meaning and from those patterns, song – the re-affirmation of the body’s scope – its pleasures and and its tremblings – the bewilderments of living.

When Williams equated poetry with the daily news, observing that “men die miserably everyday for lack of what is found there,” was he making a case for poetry’s difference from ordinary reports on experience found in newspapers – the common run of things – or was he instead dethroning poetry as an exceptional case, placing it in the order of the common run, saying it is no different a report than what is found on the front page, only you must learn how to read it if you could receive what it has to offer – “you got to try real hard.”

As a culture critic, Menand wants see around every corner, map out every angle of a of particular social nexus. (It is what we do, after all). The instrument he uses to perform this magic feat is, of course, historicism. But while his approach shares much in common with that of Greenblatt, attending to the nuance and complex intertwining of public and private, social and literary, relations, it also seems to set too high a premium on continuity.

It's perfectly well to map the circulations between film noir and New Wave, as he does in his Cold War lectures, making persuasive claims about how they are linked as moments and movements of cultural exchange. But his lack of finer grained detail sometimes troubles me since it runs the serious risk of conflating disparate things for the sake of unity and at the expense of all the discontinuities, large and small, that also mark these exchanges. Back of it seems to lie a method founded more on sustaining a certain ironic tone than revealing either linkages or fissures. And while without irony, no real historical distance can be credibly maintained, it's sometimes a slippery slope to enlightened, that is to say, cynical false consciousness.

Two readings I attended this week brought all this home to me. The first was an appearance of Seamus Heaney at Sanders Theater in Memorial Hall, a grimly gothic Godzilla of a building, an enormous cenotaph for Harvard’s Civil War dead. The theater itself is a kind of culture barn: all warmly burnished wooden risers and balcony; the overall mood one of reverential hush. This, dearly assembled, is where Culture takes place: the epicenter of the Privileged Report. Heaney, a very sweet and, it must be said, gracious and humble, man, was almost up to the task of filling so august a space, though I thought it did his poetry no favors.

The work itself was uneven. A poem like “Rain Stick” I found to be a mash of cloying clichés and bardic imperative: “Listen now again” – a line which anxiously closes the poem, all but suffocating the delicacy that precedes it. “Two Lorries,” an attempt at the frisson of the dialectical image that dissipated any force it might have had by meandering through anecdote and then resorting to heavy-handed juxtaposition. The two lorries, one that carried coal (and a flirtatious coal man) to his childhood home; the other that carted an IRA bomb down the same road, are clumsily conjoined by the phrase “flash forward twenty years.”

The violence of the episode and its historical significance fail to get any traction. His newest work, based on Book VI of The Aeneid, mixed charming Irish colloquialisms with a graver classical idiom, but the final effect was not very moving. At his best, Heaney has a way with pitch and stress that is marvelous: constructing clusters of tessellated consonants that are deeply chthonic; an Orphic music that makes you feel (as in Sobin or Bunting or Johnson) that if the trees and rocks could speak, this is how they would sound. Though I can never think of this strain in his work without recalling Terry Eagleton’s take-down of Heaney’s version of Beowulf, in which he rips to shreds the etymological fallacy of Saxon fetishism and regional vernaculars.

The second reading I went to, about an hour later, was Bill Corbett’s at Harvard Book Store. If Heaney’s reading exemplified what Manny Farber called “white elephant art,” the kind of work that’s mired in its own self-importance, then Corbett’s was surely “termite art,” work that tunnels through its own boundaries, constantly dissolving them. Corbett’s performance, in a small room of the store, maybe 30 folding chairs, with many folks crowded around in nooks and aisles, was a complicated mixture of bravura self-display and genuine generosity. Through anecdotes about Groliers, Robert Lowell, and many others, both famous and obscure, and by mixing their work in with his own, he invoked a vivid sense of continuum and community. Not just poems, isolated instances of speech, but of what it means to be part of poetry. It was as charged and vital a reading as I’ve ever heard. To cap it off, there was Heaney, Bill’s old friend, sitting in the front row, obviously and hugely enjoying it all.

What do these two readings point to? First, each offered its own version of exceptional cultural space and experience, from the very public to the quite intimate. Second, both displayed how poetry creates a space for saying things where none had existed before. This space belongs to no particular cultural forum but comes out of the ways in which language is used. Poetic speech is predicated on and proceeds by the drive to say what can’t otherwise find its way into speech. And if that sounds too much like therapy, let me put it this way: poetry opens us to the danger and risk of having experience – whether as Erleibnis, the shock of the instant, or as Erfahrung, the mediated measure of that instant. The best poetry does both.

If this doesn’t make literature exceptional, then I fail to understand the meaning of the word. Because how we make meaning matters. How we construct a poem is different from how we report the daily news. They report experience at two vastly different registers: the one reified; the other tearing away at the fabric of social conventions for understanding and feeling.

Poetry is not the only way to report experience. But for me, it is the most powerful, the most musical, the most spiritual, that is, the most alive to the potential and promise of being: that which cuts closest to what it means to be alive. Poetry may not, in fact, be a report on experience at all, but more insistently, more urgently, an experience in its own right, one that brings us into the presence of being alive, here and now, in a body, and feeling all the risks of feeling, listening to them as we never could have before.

P.S. Since first writing these notes, in the Fall of 2008, I’ve become a teaching assistant for Menand’s “Art and Culture in the Cold War” class, an experience I’m enjoying a great deal. Menand himself strikes me as a thoroughly decent guy: sincere, witty, and even warm and affable, though the affability seems to be swaddled in insulation; it has some trouble rising to the surface. I suspect he's intensely shy, or else socially phobic. I’ve always thought him of as being more of an essayist than a scholar, but that's only because he's so nimble at what he does that you tend to forget your reading some truly fine intellectual history. He belongs to a certain tradition of American letters I've always admired, one that includes Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Robert Warshow, Dwight MacDonald, and yes, Pauline Kael. And despite my misgivings about what kind of axe he might be grinding, his remark, in lecture, that "art messes with biology" will endear him to me always.

What I'm Reading (1)

2010-03-04T11:32:00.000-08:00

Aghast at the notion of hobbies and “free time” (since it cannot be defined apart from the time already subordinated to the unfreedom of the always laboring individual), Adorno declares that “making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them.”

On a somewhat less haughty note I offer here the first of an intermittent series of ongoing extracurricular reading, with a sideways glance at the “extra” since it, too, is already enfolded within the larger syllabus of attention. “The sideways glance” is a telling trope. These are books that give me pleasure or excite my interest in some way and have little or preferably nothing to do with my work as a scholar. But the sideways glance is merely the deferral, or diversion, of full attention. It is attention attended to on the sly.

Anatheism, Richard Kearney
Kearney’s earlier work has been important for me in thinking through my own projects and desires set in the ruins of theology, especially the groundbreaking The God Who May Be. The book’s seductive subtitle “Returning to God After God,” drew me in inspite of myself , since lately I’ve wanted more critical subtlety and less overdetermined affirmation on this subject than Kearney seems able to offer. The post-structural turn in religious studies, as exemplified by Kearney, Caputo, Winquist and Taylor, has fallen prey to a certain set of rhetorical pieties. A predictable and inevitable turn, really. But one wants more. I don’t know yet if this book has it. But Kearney’s work is marked by a largeness and generosity, a compassion toward the anxiety of our deepest questions about God, that I find uplifting. OK, so this is actually a book I’m reading (more like skimming through) with an eye toward my chapter on Oppen, trauma and theology. As is the next book, sort of.

The Thirteen Petalled Rose, Adin Steinsaltz
In the late 90s, I enjoyed a lively, if short-lived, correspondence with Tom Mandel while I was wrestling with my review of his remarkable and haunting book, Prospect of Release. Steinsaltz was an important thinker for him and I’ve returned to this book, which I never really found my way into, in the hope that it will speak to me more clearly this time around. Again, as with Kearney, I’m really after the academic angle here. Norman Finkelstein is organizing a panel on Mike Heller for next year’s Louisville conference and I have an idea of writing about Mike’s work in conjunction with Tom’s, especially the latter’s Letters of the Law, which I’ve recently returned to.

Thing of Beauty, Jackson MacLow
How is it I’ve never really appreciated the magnitude of MacLow’s accomplishment till now? Probably a suspicion about the legitimacy of procedural poetics. That suspicion has been laid to rest since I picked up this beautifully produced volume from UC Press at The Coop last week and have been stunned repeatedly by it. In Boulder I’d owned the jaunty little Burning Deck edition of The Virginia Woolf Poems, which I enjoyed, but somehow felt fell short of Major Significance. The big revelation in this book is the excerpt from “The Light Poems,” a series of procedurally-determined permutations which open continually onto themselves in a kind of slow cataract of shifting panoramas. And the elegy for Paul Blackburn is exquisite.

The High Window, Raymond Chandler
Since December, when I came across Judith Freeman’s lovely The Long Embrace, a very perceptive and moving biographical homage to Chandler and his wife, Cissy, I’ve been re-reading The Master’s collected works. And I’ve been reading them slowly, often at the rate of a single chapter per night, lingering over descriptions or particular constructions. There’s no particular order to my reading. I began with The Little Sister, which I’d only read once, then read Playback for the first time. I think I was always afraid how disappointing I’d find it, but while it’s not on the level of his earlier work, it’s still enormously pleasurable. The descriptions of La Jolla, in particular, take on special resonance after knowing the biographical details of that time in Chandler’s life. And some of the set pieces, such as Marlowe’s conversation with the old man in the hotel lobby, are as rich and eccentric as anything Chandler wrote. After that I went back to his earliest stories: all four pieces in Trouble Is My Business, two of which I’d never read before, and then a few from The Simple Art of Murder, which I didn’t find quite as satisfying. That was followed by The Lady in the Lake. The last time I read it, about two years ago, I raced through it and the plot seemed jumbled and faintly preposterous. This time around, read at a savoring pace, it gained strength and clarity. Now, The High Window, which I also recall as ending on a dismal note as far as plot resolution goes. Though no one in their right mind would read Chandler for his plotting. In all the novels what comes across most powerfully is a picture of a certain species of modern loneliness. They’re only moments, casually occurring here and there, seeming throwaways, mere transitions before the next thing happens, as when Marlowe enters his office, opens the windows, buys himself a drink from the office bottle, and contemplates the dusk, the smell of cheap cooking, and the dust gathered on his desk. These are the best moments in the work. They are also the quietist. The sense of someone being alone with himself, looking out the window at the city.

Up in the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell & Back Where I Came From, A.J. Liebling
About the beauty of human foibles and eccentricities, they were never wrong, the Old Masters. These paeans to mid-20th Century New York and a now nearly vanished scene of convivial urban modernity are without peer. Part social anthropologists, part lyric poets, part hardnose investigators, and all-round aficionados of all things Manhattan, Mitchell and Liebling immerse themselves in the rich detail and odd rituals of unsung lives that make the city The City: an emblem of heterogeneous abjection and delight. Along with James Agee, Mitchell and Liebling were New Journalists avant la lettre. To read these books is to fall in love with writing all over again.

Honorable Mentions
Last fall I took up with a spate of turn-of-the-century romances of the primitive. It began with Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, then moved on to Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes and A Princess of Mars. The Haggard was the best of the lot, with Tarzan the biggest disappointment. I’d never read it before and seemingly missed the crucial age range when it might have stirred me. These boy’s own stories still have the power to thrill, while their racist and primitivist constructions of Otherness and history offer endless grist for the scholar’s mill.

On Robert Lowell's "Obit"

2010-02-18T17:18:00.000-08:00

In the mid-1960’s, after the free verse turn of Life Studies and the somewhat more strictly entuned For The Union Dead, books distinctive for their powerful combination of Baudelairean spleen and frank autobiographical detail, Robert Lowell turned to the writing of sonnets – by the gross. The obsessions which drove those earlier works – the power and impotence of history; the poet’s relationship with his family; divorce; madness; death – are, if anything, even more evident in such works as Notebook 1967-68 and its companion volume, The Dolphin. In these latter two books, Lowell runs roughshod over the conservative qualities long associated with the sonnet. “Obit,” which closes Notebook, is a case in point. Lowell’s status as a renegade (he broke with Eliot!) has always been over-stated. Yet “Obit,” which I’d venture to say is moving to anyone who’s been divorced, is a very traditional sonnet: a love song and elegy that upholds the sonnet’s cultural position as an elite marker of subjective experience.

“Obit” is a lament for the end of a marriage and an era. For Lowell, the personal and the public are nearly always read in terms of each other, and, no exception, this poem’s imagery conflates the historical details of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s with the initial promise and then demise of his own marriage to writer Elizabeth Hardwick. While most critics seem content to attribute this kind of conflation of the historical and the personal to Lowell’s “vision,” part of the grand scale on which he operates, a sharper critique might suggest that the poet suffers from grandiose self-aggrandizement, narcissistically grafting his domestic woes onto the collective in a bid to inflate their value.

Having already made the radical break from his Agrarian mentors, Tate and Ransom, and seeking to overthrow the tyrannical grip of Eliot as well by following the example of Williams, Lowell now desired for yet another breakthrough. He sets out to achieve it by returning to the most traditional of poetic forms. Yet this turn to the sonnet needs to be read as part of a larger cultural moment, an overall chafing and disgust with the narrowness of Cold War culture in America. His libidinal investment in his own ego, while blatantly sentimental, must be read as a form of resistance to the stifling cultural regime of his time. It can be placed within the overall rejection of conformity that marked other cultural rebellions, from jazz to Mailer to Ginsberg and the Beats (Lowell’s wry remarks about the contemporary fault line between the raw and the cooked notwithtstanding).

The slide into cultural decay that marks “For the Union Dead,” with its “savage servility,” characterizes the post-Kennedy era for Lowell through the deflation of currency, the “old undebased pre-Lyndon/silver, no copper rubbing through.” Looking back on it from a vantage point of almost a decade, the poet muses that he knows now what he would have, if only he could: “old cars, old money ... old wives.” This line is delivered straight on, without any leavening touch of irony. One’s sympathies are entirely with Ms. Hardwick at this point. But the sense of nostalgia the poem’s first quatrain seems to invite is undercut immediately by the very first line itself, with its tone of grim resignation: “In the end it gets us, though the man know what he'd have.”

What is this “it” Lowell invokes? The sonnet's title points to an answer. “It” is either death itself, or its less than noble announcement in the daily newspaper. “It” gets us, Lowell says, with all the weariness of a dying Romantic poet, despite our best intentions, our deepest desires, our protestations of undying love. “It” may not only be the mortal condition, but human fickleness, too; the sad inability to keep faith even with that which is truest and best in oneself. “It” is the failure of love and love’s faith in its own promises.

“Obit” is a Shakespearean sonnet in blank, or unrhymed, verse. The poem does not scan neatly into iambic pentameter so much as follow a loose iambic rhythm. Of course, Lowell, whose technical gifts were superb, could have compelled this sonnet into strict obedience to traditional blank verse meter. Instead, he opted for a more flexible scheme that allowed him to capture the tone and feel of contemporary conversation and thought. As with so much else that he wrote, Lowell strains at the limitations of form, in the process changing our ideas of what a sonnet can and ought to be. With their wild range in pitch and meter, their giddy, freely cannibalistic efforts to capture everything from the sublime to the ridiculous, the sonnets in Notebook and its sequel, The Dolphin, often read like anti-sonnets, poems hell-bent on upending the furniture in the politely ordered room of this quaint, domesticated genre. The results are sometimes powerful, as in “Obit.” More often than not, though, they’re embarrassingly messy, and not in the triumphantly zany and delightful way that Ted Berrigan’s ramshackle and moving sonnets are, which appeared about the same time.

The first quatrain lays out the poem’s argument, or complaint: the chafing against death by a desire belatedly realized; the longing for old ways of living, for the old emotional currencies; and the understated candor of the poet’s admission, in line 4, that, “I could live such a too long time with mine,” meaning his wife. Pity the poor wife. The second quatrain, which begins like the first, (“In the end”), introduces a repeating musical figure as well as a conceptual motif, and expands the emotional reverie into a broader philosophical arena in which the poet meditates on the nature of being and death. “Before the final coming to rest, comes the rest/of all transcendence in a mode of being, stopping/all becoming.” This almost sounds like Wallace Stevens. In fact, it may be a quotation from Marcuse, according to the book’s “Afterthought,” but since Lowell doesn’t set off these lines with quotation marks, it’s hard to know.

At any rate, these ambiguous and somewhat enigmatic lines suggest that even the effort to attain some manner of transcendence over the daily business of life is fraught with its own built-in trap of delusional self-importance. Moreover, Lowell (the poet as “hypochondriac” -- line 5), also expresses the dubious hope that just before death, he might be vouchsafed a moment of perfect clarity and stillness. “Tis a consummation devoutly to be desired,” as that other grand ditherer in consciousness, Hamlet, opined, in a slightly different context.

The third quatrain actually begins its turn midway into line 8 with “I’m for and with myself in my otherness” and continues to line 12. The recognition that psychic opposition is actually a form of mutuality testifies less to a spiritual overcoming than to the kind of self-possession made possible by psychoanalysis. Lowell goes on to contemplate a form of renewal and possible redemption, albeit on an impersonal, cosmic scale, by an intense identification with “the eternal return of earth’s fairer children,/the lily, the rose, the sun on dusk and brick,” that is, through the reassuringly universal constants of nature itself, as well as those of human behavior: “the loved, the lover... their unconquered flux.” The dialectical motion of being and becoming considered in the second quatrain, in which the latter is subsumed by the former, is set back into play once more, and through it the poet attains to a broadening of consciousness, a kind of second life, via his panoramic perspective on the little things of life, a rose, the sun at dusk, a pair of lovers.

These lines achieve a mysterious and very affecting degree of tenderness and pathos, reminiscent in some ways of sections in Rilke’s Duino Elegies. It’s almost as if the speaker of the poem has already shuffled off his own mortal coil and now regards the earth he once inhabited from a disembodied vantage point, full of longing for the merely human joys and sorrows (“their painful ‘It was’.”) which he himself can no longer possess. This is where the full weight of the poem’s title makes itself felt. The poem’s nostalgia moves from the personal perspective of lamenting a lost way of life and affection to a posthumous mourning for life itself.

The closing couplet makes a plea and an admission, while its solemn music also returns us to the sort of formal closure we expect the sonnet to provide. “After loving you so much, can I forget/you for eternity, and have no other choice?” The unguardedness of these lines manages to be deeply touching. The unbearable regret Lowell expresses here commingles with the sense that what is irrecoverable in life is precisely that which marks it as most profoundly human. The forlorn dejection of the narcissist is made to stand eloquently for a larger sense of loss and the heady style of “Obit” proves itself to be thoroughly and comfortingly classical in its sensibility. Lowell almost rescues the sonnet from its worse tendencies – its grandiosity and “gigantism,” as he calls it in his “Afterthoughts” -- transforming it into an instrument of tremendous flexibility and restoring to it its accustomed intimacy through his use of colloquial, idiosyncratic language.

Yet the problem with deploying a language of raw emotion, whether it’s Lowell’s mawkish self-pity, or Ginsberg’s hyped-up adverts for the liberation of the self, is that it inevitably falls prey to the sentimentalism which underwrites it. In the end, sentimentalism is a kind of totalitarianism writ small; it is the repression, or even evacuation, of the self in the service of a master idea about the purity of an impossibly unmediated emotion. The unmoored “it” floating in the first part of the sonnet before its dramatic turn, persists, as Lacan would say, as the symptomatic kernel of trauma that keeps generating a perverse pleasure. “It” is not death at all, really, but the gratification the poet takes in revisiting the occasion of his painful loss. “Obit” revels in such discordant pleasure. Nobody ever worried a sore tooth, or a bereft soul, like Robert Lowell.

(1997, rev. 2010)

On Avatar and The Hurt Locker

2010-02-03T13:39:00.000-08:00

As most everyone on the planet knows by now, James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow were briefly married to each other in the early 90s. No match in Hollywood seemed more apt, if judged solely on the basis of devotion to a cinema of harrowing energy. It was during this time that I worked for them both, first at Cameron’s fledgling Lightstorm Entertainment’s bunker-like facility, situated in the industrial wastelands behind Burbank Airport. The joke around the office was that the place could take a direct nuclear hit. This was when Jim was filming T-2 and the office canteen featured a Terminator pinball machine as well as a life-size model of the Terminator itself, a demonically glowering metal skeleton. The industrial bay that took the entire back half of the building was large enough to park a plane inside. Under the direction of Jim’s younger brother, Mike, it was a thriving shop floor, packed with heavy-duty machines that cranked out hi-tech widgets. It was that kind of place: juiced on testosterone and apocalypse.

I later came to work, much more closely, with Bigelow, fresh off the now iconographic Point Break, from the couple’s home, perched on a cliff off Mulholland Drive. During this time they divorced and the huge double-terminated quartz crystal that adorned a table in the living room, a gift from Kathryn to Jim, spoke volubly for me of a potent absence. One day, when things were nearly over, Jim came into my “office,” a converted carriage house stuffed with Kathryn’s books, which included works by Louis Althusser and Robert Bresson, and began reciting the opening quatrains of Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and The Carpenter.” It struck me as a kind of oblique elegy, full of heartfelt loss, but tossed off with a boyish shrug of sangfroid.

Years and divergent career paths later, these two incredibly gifted filmmakers have given us an extraordinary pair of movies, each of which, in its own way, demonstrates powerfully the need of art to push violently against its own boundaries. In a perverse way, they’ve made the same movie. Both set their stories in far off lands, among alien cultures, where a brutal colonial war is underway. Both offer critiques of that war and of the allure and dangers of violence. And both are deeply invested in cinema as the medium par excellence for total immersion in the immediate.

Avatar and The Hurt Locker want to overwhelm the viewer, not merely with images of wonder or terror, but with a near-absolute experience of being-there. The formal virtuosity they employ to achieve this effect in both cases is breathtaking. Resistance is futile.

Cameron’s critique of violence is bluntly sentimental. He extols the virtues of primitivism while dazzling us with cinematic shock and awe. But the immense set pieces of destruction that make up the film’s bloated second half bludgeon feeling, rather than quicken it. Bigelow’s critique of violence is more subtle and complex, pervaded by a weird and unsettling ambiguity. For while The Hurt Locker is at pains to show us the brutal human costs of warfare, it also gives us war’s visceral thrill, its disturbing elations.

The estranging effects of violence don’t factor into Avatar. What Cameron has ingeniously created instead is a film about the experience of seeing films. Jake occupies a roughly analogous position to the filmgoer, a prompt for our own experience. Slide into your casket and slip on your trodes; settle in your seat and put on your glasses – and whammo – you’re transported, instantly, to utopia, ecstatic otherwhere. The power of the medium is such that it erases the mediation in order to make one feel the immediate. Film is a prosthetic device that makes us complete.

For Bigelow, immediacy is everything, too. The Hurt Locker opens with a sobering epigraph, from war journalist Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” But if war is a drug, then so is film. Both intensely claustrophobic and exhilaratingly expansive, the film plunges us into a closed-in universe where the sound of your own heartbeat is a ticking bomb. Indeed, the entire premise of the film, built around the defusing squad, stands as a rich metaphorical mirror image to the work of the filmmaker, who constructs intricate devices to capture and replicate sensations in order to blow us away. No other film in recent memory, Avatar notwithstanding, demonstrates so powerfully the potentiality of filmmaking itself. Like Avatar, The Hurt Locker is a film about filmmaking. It’s an allegory for not only how we structure representations of experience, but for how those structures are susceptible to estrangement.

Avatar and The Hurt Locker are not the same film. But they are dreaming the same dream. The name of that dream is total cinema and it begins with Wagner’s massive operas. Since then, Western art has striven to immerse us entirely within works of art that are simultaneously hermetic and diaphanous, self-contained and boundless. Avatar and The Hurt Locker, the one lumbering and elephantine, the other manic and termite-like, to use Manny Farber’s shrewd distinction, come achingly close to realizing the old dream of a total work of art.

Yet for all their aggressive modernity, the pleasures that both movies offer are ancient pleasures, little different, for all their bedazzlements, from what Homer achieves in The Iliad with the death scenes of Patroclus or Hector. Avant-garde technology still serves humanist needs.

In her famous essay, “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force,” Simone Weil writes that the true subject of the poem is force and its distorting effects; the way it turns humans into things. Force is an idol which extracts a heavy toll from all who would pray to it. In The Iliad, she asserts, “the human spirit is shown as modified by its relation to force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.” The commitment of both filmmakers to what I would call intensity, rather than force, poses a significant question about the ethical implications of their formal accomplishments. Can we critique something even as we enjoy its representation? And to what extent do we then become complicit in the subject of such a critique?

Avatar’s narrower emotional range forecloses these questions. For all its delights, the movie is finally too much of a wish-fulfillment fantasy, a gameboy wetdream, to return any dividends along these lines. The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, precisely because it does not address the ideological content of its subject head on, is the more serious moral work. It invites us to consider, amid its frenzied mayhem, what it means to submit oneself to force, to risk losing oneself in force’s narcotic rush.

Once, we were viewing a clip from a silent film Kathryn admired as part of the preparation for our own project. In the middle of a particularly anguished scene in which the heroine undergoes an excruciating internal struggle that seems to magnify her face, Kathryn exclaimed, "she's like a force of nature!” I always thought this got to the core of what Bigelow tries to do in nearly every one of her films. This is where she likes her heroes – in extremis, at the very edge, hanging on by their fingernails. Think Jamie Lee Curtis in Blue Steel, Keanu Reeves in Point Break, Ralph Fiennes in Strange Days.

They are not so much redeemed by the violence they unleash as undone by it, left shaken and trembling. Bigelow’s staging of violence in The Hurt Locker is grittier and more morally complicated than the comforting mythic scenarios of Avatar. It makes more stringent demands of both its hero and its audience. And while it trades openly in the electric currency of the immediate, it also asks us to consider the cost of our addiction to immediacy. It’s a movie about shock that asks us to reflect on shock’s melancholy wages. In other words, it’s a movie for grown ups who like some moral doubt mixed in with their sense of wonder.

That’s why, come Oscar night, I’ll be rooting for Kathryn, not Jim.

On "Sleep No More" at the A.R.T.

2010-01-22T12:25:00.000-08:00

A bravura re-imagining of the possibilities for the theater, this inventive, deeply atmospheric mash up of Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Macbeth is a combination of a haunted house tour, a dinner party theater production, and the cinematic frissons of David Lynch, whose sensibility may be too strongly infused into the evening.

What Sleep No More does daringly well is plunge the audience into the thick of the spectacle, so that one moves with and alongside the actors. Even the empty rooms, with their tingling uncanniness, carry the traces of what has gone on before or will transpire there shortly. Time is collapsed through a physical montage, a true Eisensteinian dialectic.

And indeed, the structure of the entire event is sustained not merely by allusions to or quotations from film, including, most effectively, soaring film scores, but by the logic of cinema itself. It’s like being an extra in a live-action silent movie. The most effective of these scenes which I witnessed was the final banquet where one by one all the characters assembled and silently conversed, gestured, schemed, cavorted, and finally convulsed into an erotic free-for-all fantasia, all of it in exquisitely timed slow motion – a form of staging that would be incomprehensible without reference to the technology of cinema. Yet it rewrites even that tired trope of the slo-mo dance. And it ends, in a determinedly and satisfying humanist move, with an old-fashioned bit of Aristotelian catharsis – the death of Macbeth – which savors of Grand Guignol, as well.

My own personal close encounter came with a tuxedoed actor who was cartwheeling about by himself in a stairwell. I followed him as he entered a little room whose floor was made to look like a cemetery, strewn with small graves, candles and a saint’s shrine. There he knelt as if in prayer before rising, and turning to me, locking me in his pleading gaze, he extended his open hand toward me in agonizing slow motion. I hesitated a moment, then gave him my hand. He clasped it, drew me in, then turned my hand over as if to read my palm. In a perversely intimate gesture he slipped my hand under his dress jacket and placed it over his heart. I could feel it beating. A perfect stage prop heart. He leaned over and, whispering in my ear, asked, “Am I alive?” Moved, I said “ Yes,” placing my other hand on his shoulder for reassurance. He dropped a shiny trinket on the end of a string into my hand, which later inspection revealed to be a bit of Hanukkah gelt, then off he spun again, arms flung wide, crying out in a stage whisper, “Then I can be born again!” I elected to leave him on his own after that and exited by another door.

Sleep No More is a Gothic hall of mirrors, in which the objects in rooms – statues, old radios, a bath tub lit by a ghostly spot, or a telephone gleaming sinisterly on a small table – take on the resonance of the piece and generate their own echoes. The overwhelming effect is a mixture of claustrophobia and delightful apprehension. The masks the audience members wear blank out personality. We enter a carnival space, but it is a somnolent carnival, attendant on shadows. This formal stricture makes the audience players, too. Eddies and swirls, small flocks and herds, form and re-form, following actors from room to room. A volatile space emerges, in which dramatic energy is produced by the audience as well as the cast.

Yet the gothic, finally, can be too much of a good thing and I found myself longing for some interiority, something beyond the attenuated and crepuscular Lynchian foreboding and the acrobatic pantomimes of tuxedos and evening dress. What I wanted was some language. Even taped voices in an empty room, now and then. Or as Ingrid so brilliantly suggested, a mix of registers – where one comes into a room in the midst of a full-blown Mamet-like tirade. There were one too many scenes of a solitary person – Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Danvers – crawling about on all fours, acting the madwoman.

But to conjure and maintain delirium is a tricky business and maybe the decision to ban dialogue is a wise one. A devotion to a certain species of silence is required if the spell of the haunting is not to be broken. Though the whole may be less than the sum of its parts, what Sleep No More gives one, in the end, is a vivid re-enchantment, a sense of deep mystery and a haunting cavalcade of images and scenes drawn not so much from the unconscious, as from the collective memory of a thousand plays and films. It is theater re-imagined as narcotic.