MAKE IT BROKEN

My book of essays, Make It Broken: Toward a Poetics of Late Modernism, is shipping from the printers today. It can be ordered directly from the publisher, Black Square Editions.

This book was a long time in the making. I'm deeply grateful to John Yau, Peter Gizzi, Kit Schluter, Margaret Galey, and Shanna Compton for their brilliant and dedicated labor as well as to the many folks along the way whose conversations, input, and notes enriched these essays. Special thanks go to Ingrid Nelson whose faith in my work has been unflagging.

After the disaster of World War II, Ezra Pound’s exhortation to poets to “make it new” lay in shambles. The essays in MAKE IT BROKEN assert that a certain group of poets, taking their cue from both Pound and George Oppen, employed modernist strategies of interruption, negation, and seriality to recharge poetry with moral acuity and formal audacity. By writing from inside the ruins, poets like Michael Palmer, Lorine Niedecker, Gustaf Sobin, and Fanny Howe use the very brokenness of language to redeem the poem in the wake of catastrophe.

"Patrick Pritchett’s Make It Broken: Toward a Poetics of Late Modernism is a treasure book of lively reading, research, and erudition, bringing salutary attention to the work of eight recent American poets deserving wider and deeper engagement. It is a book of elegant collation and crucial reckoning, lifted high out of the ordinary by brilliant, resonant insights and Pritchett’s fluid, cadence-rich writing—ever exact, ever adroitly qualified, ever with a rightness of touch—a juggling of weight and attunement he even makes look easy. The book offers an essential, exemplary study of important areas of concern in experimental poetry and poetics that are not often enough examined. Pitch perfect and scary smart, it had me smiling, tearing up, and crawling under my bed to hide."

Nathaniel Mackey

"I have long known Patrick Pritchett to be one of our most able critics of modern poetry, but the cumulative intelligence and imaginative understanding of these essays is something else again. Taken together, they present an argument for poetry—gnostic, messianic, and against the grain of language and history—that is as highly refined and as beautiful as any I have encountered. Pritchett’s erudition is profound but always handled with grace; it enables him to bring in other voices to support his reading at all the right moments. His clarity is a gift. Pound, Oppen, Niedecker, Olson, Ronald Johnson, Palmer, DuPlessis, Taggart, Sobin, Fanny Howe: Pritchett illuminates them all with skill, attention, and abiding love."

Norman Finkelstein

"In this brilliant and astonishingly clear study of late modernist poets—Oppen, Niedecker, Palmer, Sobin, Fanny Howe, and others—Patrick Pritchett demonstrates what truly engaged critical scholarship can become: not a form of light, but a mode of transformation, for as the practice of midrash teaches, the living text begins with commentary. With Pritchett we learn that war, in its endless horrors and outrages, whether in the 20th-century or now, can never adequately be written “about,” it can only be written through and with. As it breaks us again, we must respond in kind, with a broken and sorrowful poetics. The poem, in other words, is a burnt offering. The apophatic poets Pritchett reads with such loving attention and outstanding care un-say what cannot be said. Out of the ruins and the ash, an un-whole holiness emerges."

Julie Carr

"Poetry survives, even flourishes, not simply because it is read, but because of what poets themselves have had to say about it in all its variety and particularity. The poet Patrick Pritchett’s Make It Broken is an illuminating group of essays on modern and contemporary poetry whose chief distinction is the breakdown of form—fragmentation, parataxis, montage, or what Pritchett calls "radical formal disjunction." His lucid readings of sometimes difficult poems will make the reading of these poems a new adventure."

Gerald Bruns

On Louis Simpson, Richard Wilbur, George Oppen, and World War II

(N.B. this is a draft fragment from a much longer essay in progress about George Oppen's war poetry. Some of this was written in China for a keynote address to a conference on “Language, Culture, and the Military” at Changsha’s National Defense University of Technology. The talk was titled “How to Write a War Poem: George Oppen’s Broken Language.” Jan. 4, 2019. Except for a scholar from Hong Kong who called herself Smile, mine was the only the talk delivered in English. A tall, dashing Pakistani officer joked to me afterwards, “you’re a *real* scholar." His own talk had been about strengthening ties between Pakistan and China, given in English and flawless Mandarin. We bonded over a common love of LeBron James -- basketball, a language more universal than poetry).

Among American poets who fought in Europe during World War II, three carry the unusual distinction of having fought in the Battle of the Bulge, then gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize: Richard Wilbur, Louis Simpson, and George Oppen. Their reports on their experiences in that theater of war vary considerably in both tone and depth. Unlike Wilbur and Simpson, whose first books contain war poems, Oppen didn’t write about his wartime experience until rather late, when he was in his early 50s. Poems like “Blood from a Stone,” and “Survival: Infantry” (from 1961’s The Materials) weren’t delayed, as it were, because of some larger strategy on the poet’s part. Rather, the severe trauma Oppen suffered necessitated a longer gestation period. As a result, the war poems he began writing in the 1960s achieve a haunting, introspective quality that are lacking in Wilbur and Simpson. Oppen’s circumstances – deep wounds from mortar fire, later persecution by the FBI – allowed him, if that’s the right word, to more thoroughly metabolize his experience.

(N.B.: Wilbur won the first of two Pulitzers in 1957 for Things of This World; Simpson, in 1964, for At The End of the Open Road; and Oppen, for Of Being Numerous, in 1969).

As Anthony Beevors relates it in Ardennes 1944, Louis Simpson, “came across a Sherman tank, with a sergeant from the 10th Armored Division ‘seated negligently in the turret, as if on the saddle of a horse.’ Fifty metres down the road a panzer burned. He asked the sergeant what had happened. ‘They tried to get through,’ the sergeant replied in a bored voice and turned away … ‘I saw Tolstoy’s sergeant at Borodino, with his pipe stuck in his mouth, directing the fire of his battery. On men like this the hinge of battle swung. They did not see themselves in a dramatic role. They would do great tasks, and be abused for not doing them right, and accept this as normal’” (A 209-10). This, of course, is the essence of the Tolstoyan view of history: that random actions by anonymous individuals and odd chances shape the outcome of large historical events rather than the grand designs of Napoleons.

Simpson’s war poems like “Carentan” and “I Dreamed That in a City Dark as Paris” carry a poignant melancholy but they’re finally, for all their sincerity, too placid, too Wordsworthian, to adequately convey their speaker’s actual experience. Indeed, the weaknesses of Simpson’s war poems have only been magnified by the passage of time. They serve to underscore the long-running argument about traditional and radical conceptions of form that’s shaped so much of the anthology wars: is form a matter of adhering to regular meter and rhyme, or does it follow content, as Olson and Creeley urged, creating self-sustaining patterns based on breath and perception? Simpson’s war poems act as containers of experience. Indeed, he describes how “Carentan’s” ballad-like structure enabled him to get a purchase on the trauma of the war, which had left him in a semi-amnesiac state. “Carentan” is a personal favorite of mine. It’s a poem that continues to grow on me, even as its shortcomings become more pronounced over time. To find it wanting by comparing it to Oppen’s war poetry is crass. But its emotive power feels remote, encased under glass.

By contrast, Oppen’s poems – with their internal fissures, their half-exploded stanzaic patterns and jagged, shrapnel-like enjambments – are centrigual rather centripetal. They do not seek, in Beckett’s words, to contain the chaos of postwar reality but to let it in. Not as an orderly and formal report on experience, but as the written trace of trauma.

No man
But the fragments of metal
Tho there men there were men Fought
No man but the fragments of metal
Burying my dogtag with H

For Hebrew in the rubble of Alsace (NCP 218).

According to Robert McDowell, writing of his Collected in a1989 issue of The Hudson Review, Robert Bly and others criticized Simpson’s earnest traditionalism, faulting it for its failure to adequately express “grim modern realities.” McDowell, nothing if not lavish in his fulsome praise, goes on to declare At The End of the Open Road “the poetry volume of the sixties” – a judgment that sounds risible now (The Hudson Review 42.1 158-164). Of course, nothing is easier to mock then the smugness of older critics’ notions of posterity. But in a decade which ratified the emergence of Creeley, Levertov, Baraka, and Ashbery the idea that this book defined the decade is absurd. That said, At The End of the Open Road probably stands as Simpson’s most singular achievement and still rewards attention, especially the title poem, notable for its elegant, understated and ironic juxtaposition of utopianism and muted, postwar despair.

Simpson served with a glider-infantry regiment of the 101st Airborne Division in France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany. In combat he was a runner; carrying messages – a not unhazardous undertaking. In Holland he was wounded by a shell, and at Bastogne his feet were frost-bitten; but he survived. After the War, however, he had a nervous breakdown and was taken into hospital suffering from amnesia. The War was blacked out in his mind, as were episodes in his life before the War. When he was discharged from hospital, he found that he could hardly read or write. In a contributor's note to an anthology, Simpson says:

“Before the war I had written a few poems and some prose. Now I found that poetry was the only kind of writing in which I could express my thoughts. Through poems, I could release the irrational, grotesque images I had accumulated during the war; and imposing order on those images enabled me to recover my identity. In 1948, when I was living in Paris, one night I dreamed that I was lying on the bank of a canal, under machine-gun and mortar fire. The next morning I wrote it out in the poem 'Carentan O Carentan', and as I wrote I realized that it wasn't a dream, but the memory of my first time under fire.” (qtd. in Jon Stallworthy, "The Fury and the Mire," The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. Tim Kendall (Oxford: OUP, 2007): 566–67.

Perhaps Simpson’s most evocative poem of the war is “I Dreamt in a City Dark as Paris,” from 1959’s A Dream of Governors. The instant irony of the title, for Paris is commonly known as the City of Light, takes us into its melancholy, rueful dreamscape at once, in the which the speaker imagines himself addressing a soldier much himself like from 1914.

The helmet with its vestige of a crest,
The rifle in my hands, long out of date,
The belt I wore, the trailing overcoat
And hobnail boots, were those of a poilu.
I was the man, as awkward as a bear (DG 83).

As Hank Lazer remarks, in looking back from the 1940s and Simpson’s own bitter experience, the poem offers a lament for the futility of both conflicts, indeed, of all wars. (On Louis Simpson: Depths Beyond Happiness, UP of Mich, 187). Janis Stout draws a similar conclusion, noting that “the two soldiers’ experiences have an essential sameness” (159) (Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars, Alabama UP 2016). Indeed, the poem positions Paris at a grave intersection of the diachronic and the synchronic, where a certain historical fatalism and cultural instinct for self-destruction keep reenacting themselves.

Simpson’s World War II poems record the personal but gesture at the universal. Oppen’s poems, written at a much later date, steer away from any larger statements about the war – except of course “the we” of “of being numerous.” His experience taught him to be wary of such generalizations. Such declarations, such claims to totality, had been knocked clean out of him.

On the other hand, Wilbur’s expertly crafted poems about his experience in Alsace have a remote, detached flavor to them. They read like someone on holiday, as though the poet were only a tourist, a voyeur at the Battle of the Bulge. Let me blunt: as war poetry they are embarrassments. The real war seems to have occurred outside the compass of his experience or his ability to convey it. They have a polite distant feel to them, as if conveying trauma would be an act of bad manners. Wilbur’s experience is suffocated by the straight-jacket of his technique.

According to Robert Bagg, Wilbur served as a radio operator behind the lines with the second detachment of the 36th Texas Division Message Center. As Bagg notes: “Explosions that failed to kill anyone appear as momentary inconveniences” (THR 440). It’s not clear how much actual front line combat he saw. Bagg states that his unit came under heavy fire as they advanced through the Midi. Yet Wilbur’s posting allowed him plentiful leisure time in which he could write poems and letters home to his parents. Wilbur’s perhaps best-known war poem, “First Snow in Alsace,” sounds a rather off-key note of the pastoral that verges on the soporific. To judge from its calmly measured tone, one would never know he was in the biggest battle of the European Theater. Although the snow covers ammo dumps and the bombed-out roofs of homes, its benign presence altering the landscape by temporary erasure, Wilbur’s effort to evoke the miraculous in the midst of ruin borders on the banal:

Persons and persons in disguise,
Walking the new air white and fine,
Trade glances quick with shared surprise.

At children's windows, heaped, benign,
As always, winter shines the most,
And frost makes marvelous designs (PRW 182).

If this is irony, it’s rather filigreed. Harvey Shapiro, in his introduction to the LOA anthology “Poets of the Second World War,” notes that Wilbur, along with fellow combatant Anthony Hecht, have been criticized for a certain “decorative formalism,” but he hedges it with an ambivalent “wrongly, I think.” I have no such qualms. In the midst of war’s horror, Wilbur’s poem seems leeched of life, bloodless, a mere formal exercise in the nicety of perception that defined the ideal of the well-made poem in the 1940s. Its lulling tone-deaf rhyme schemes give it a precious, hand-embroidered feel, as when the poet observes in “Mined Country,” that “cows mid-munch go splattered over the sky.” The frivolous tone of the poem is not, as one might expect, imposing some kind of ironic distance on scenes where cows suffer grotesque dismemberment.

By contrast, Louis Simpson’s famous poem “Carentan,” sounds a classic ballad-like dirge about the fierce fighting to take that key French village as part of the D-Day invasion. Simpson’s simple four-beat measure echoes the stark cadences of “The Battle of Harlaw.”

The Hielanmen, wi their lang swords,
They laid on us fu sair,
An they drave back our merry men
Three acres breadth an mair.

And here's Simpson:

Lieutenant, what’s my duty,
My place in the platoon?
He too’s a sleeping beauty,
Charmed by that strange tune.

Carentan O Carentan
Before we met with you
We never yet had lost a man
Or known what death could do

Simpson, who as a member of the legendary parachute division, the 101st Screaming Eagles, took part in the bitter D-Day fighting in Carentan (as memorably dramatized in the HBO series “Bands of Brothers,” though he was not part of Easy Company). He conveyed his experience of combat by relying on the traditional meters and protocols of the ballad, which gave him a form with which he could transmit something urgent yet contained.

Unlike Simpson’s elegant constructions and Wilbur’s rather glib poeticized gems about his experiences in Alsace, Oppen’s poems about the war are not neatly packaged nuggets loaded with dull ironies. They are haunted, shot full of holes, figuratively and literally: the broken syntax enacts the trauma of war and specifically of his being wounded by mortar shrapnel. The broken syntax signifies “the strange ego” that replaces “the simple ego” of lyric untouched by war.

Oppen’s approach joined his commitment to an impersonal modernist aesthetics consistent with the principles of the Objectivists to the experience of the war. In Samuel Beckett’s trenchant phrase, he sought for a form that could “admit the chaos and … not try to say that the chaos is really something else … form that could accommodate the mess.” As Oppen himself put it in his poem, “Blood from a Stone”: “There is a simple ego in lyric,/A strange one in war.” The lines indicate a fracturing of consciousness – a vivid before and after portrait. One becomes estranged from oneself and the simple purchase one had on one’s pre-war mind is pulverized by the brutality of combat.

Oppen’s wartime experience – along with his disillusionment with modernism itself, especially that espoused by his former mentor, Ezra Pound, led to his deep distrust of language. As he writes in, “A Language of New York”: “Possible/to use/ words provided one treat them/as enemies./Not enemies—Ghosts/Which have run mad/In the subways” (NCP 116). But who are these ghosts that haunt the poet? They represent the failure of language itself -- of the inability of words to adequately express the most basic experience, which the war has destroyed.

AN ETHIC, Christina Davis (2013): Revisting a contemporary classic

N.B. Chloe Garcia invited me to review this marvelous book in 2013 for the Zoland Press website, which has gone dark. I've reposted it here with some small, but important, revisions which seemed right after some retrospection. It's a book that deserves to be more widely known.(Unfortunately, the blog format does not allow the preservation of indentations so some minor violence to Davis's precise lineation has occured).

George Oppen’s heirs are more numerous than one might suppose. Robert Creeley, Michael Heller, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Michael Palmer, John Taggart, Norman Finkelstein, Elizabeth Robinson, Julie Carr, Pam Rehm, Joseph Massey, and Graham Foust, among others, come to mind as poets who have registered his influence, either amplifying or re-directing it through an investigation of the poem’s rhetorical resources. But to call these poets heirs gives a false impression, for there is and can be no School of Oppen. What poets take from him is a commitment to form that expresses itself in a ruthlessness toward what language can be made to say. As Oppen puts it “Possible/to use/ words provided one treat them/as enemies.”

Christina Davis stakes a strong claim to this tradition and her new book, An Ethic, is written less in the shadow of Oppen than as a kind of posthumous collaboration with him – a dialogue with the older poet’s austere, epistemologically rigorous work. The whole point of Oppen’s poetics is to test the meaning of a single word, a single poem, to work out, as exactly as possible, just how much truth a poem can carry, the way a structural engineer might test a suspension bridge to determine its maximum degree of torque and weight-bearing capacity in a windstorm. For Oppen, it turns out that a poem possesses considerable tensile power, provided one applies the proper degree of estranging torque. In this sense, poetry is a bridge that must also resist being a bridge. Hence, the appearance, on the page, of poems that look both remarkably fragile and severely worked out.

Davis has taken up this difficult regime, but her investigations have less to do with testing the truth of what can be said, then with the desire of the poem to connect, to carry across that unbridged space between loss and memory, absence and presence, you and I, a kernel, a trace, a spark that persists. Oppen’s poetics of ethics is famously founded on what he called “the bright light of shipwreck.” Catastrophe: personal, historical, moral – and the failure of poetry, as well – produces the necessity for a poem that refuses an easy and morally inert subjectivity in order to see the true relations between the self and the world. The Objectivist term for this process, of course, is sincerity. Davis’ sincerity emerges out of personal catastrophe: the death of her beloved father, John. Many of these poems are harrowing disquisitions of the void that appears after the death of a loved one, the long absence and aching desire which persists. They are whittled down cries; spiky confrontations with elegy that honor loss by both admitting and resisting it.

What sets Davis apart from Oppen is the way her poems hover just an inch above heartbreak. The way she manages the lacerations of loss is precise, controlled, and subtle – this is what she takes from Oppen: a ruthlessness toward her own grief and it makes many of these poems, like “An Elegy,” quietly devastating.

Above all, beneath all,

in as many ways
as the spider has

known the wall,

I miss and am
member of you
and of that race the grass
grows thru.

The sonic pattern of this poem achieves an exquisiteness that is in no way precious: the sense of breath and space, the rhyme of “all” with “wall” (as if to say that what was once experienced as unity now suffers a barrier); the spider as a hand, running over that wall, blindly knowing it through touch alone; and finally, the sharp cut of “am/member,” invoking both the call to remembering and its sundering.

This is a strong collection, but not every poem quite hits the mark. “Addendum,” for instance, comes across as somewhat awkward: “Who was it said: ‘AND//is the greatest/miracle’? Praise//be his/her name.” Perhaps Davis has in mind here a particular “him” – William James who, in A Pluralistic Universe, observed that “and” is the word that links everything to everything; it escapes closure; it deifies our efforts to forge a totality. “The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes.”

In the moving and completely marvelous “Big Tree Room,” perhaps the central poem in the book, the sense of continuity and rupture is rendered in a series of deceptively transparent meditations on death and re-birth. Their complexity is totally earned:

It is hard to keep remaining whole
as for the leviathan to stay
surfaced is hard.

It is hard, and therefore, a task to keep remaining.

We have not been born
in a while

Though wrenched from context, lines like these are nevertheless delicious with paradox, defying easy parsing. They invite us to face the size of loss, all the while maintaining a faith in language to equip loss with a meaning – to be born, after a while, after the task of grieving. Or is it under the sign of grieving?

An Ethic consists of two parts, the first of which is given over to elegy, while the second looks beyond to the world of ongoing, present-live connections. The hinge joining these two is the knowledge that the dead do not sever us from them the present, but bring us more closely to it. In both sections the questions driving the poems’ urgent predicament is the need to recognize both worlds: the dead and the living. This work of seeing is arduous because it also demands coming to account with loss without recourse to easy forms of consolation. This is what it means to create an ethic.

Davis prefaces her collection with a quote from Oppen’s legendary Daybooks: “An ethic an ethic: ethos …/what other words can be found? Awe perhaps.” But Davis excludes what follows, for Oppen goes on to conclude that awe “is not ethical.” What to make of this? For one thing, it seems to me that Oppen here is insisting on the clearest possible definition of his terms, a process of continual refinement evidenced in both his poems and his journals and letters. To confuse awe, an essentially theological category of affect, with ethics, which must, among other things, adjudicate the precise differences and relations between things, would be to submit to a kind of heresy or distortion. Yet there’s a suggestion in Oppen that perhaps awe is what produces ethics, that it’s an enabling condition. For awe is also a measurement: it marks the distance as well as the nearness between the perceiving subject and the other. It is as much a witnessing of that distance as it is the experience of undergoing the humility it imposes.

The greatest philosopher of ethics in the 20th Century, Emmanuel Levinas, asserts that ethical relations do not derive from first principles based on preserving the rational pursuit of self-interest. It is far more radical than that, he claims, based rather on proximity and the demands the other’s immediate presence places on me before any codification of law or custom. Ethics, then, is a form of hospitality: a welcoming of the stranger as guest. The poem as an ethic is the primary mode of acknowledging what Levinas calls the “there is” (il y a ), that which, even after the witnessing “I” has been subtracted, remains, demanding attention.

In his essay on Levinas, “Should Poetry be Ethical or Otherwise?,” Gerald Bruns makes a “distinction between language as kerygma and language as contact, where the one predicates something of something (this as that) while the other is an event of sensibility or proximity in which the visible is no longer an object of consciousness … but is an impingement or obsession.” The poems in An Ethic move back and forth between these two nodes, shuttling from proclamation to touch as if to say the one is the other, only by touch may I proclaim you.

The book begins and ends with poems entitled “An Ethic.” Both are magnificent. The first begins:

There is no this or that world.

One is not more or less
admitted. Into the entirety

One is invited
and to the entirety
one comes.

The line breaks are the syntax, as someone said of Milton. Each pause, each hovering, with an air of omen or premonition, freighted with enormous silence, marks the care by which the poem proceeds and defines the very insistence of each instant that must answer to the call of an ethic. The final poem closes with a quote from Thoreau: “What do you see?//One/world at a/time.” This may be the only real ethic – to see this world as it is. Here and now.

Throughout An Ethic, Davis maintains a deep humility before the visible, the tangible, its wreck and its promise. This humility is the sign of an extraordinary openness and vulnerability, a willingness to be porous to the currents of the moment, the heart, the earth. This is tricky business, because unlike Oppen, who was a hard-headed materialist, Davis, finally, carries an ecstatic, Emersonian outlook. She wants to be overwhelmed, to be carried away in the flood. For the spiritual landscape these poems move in is deeply sensuous. Their apparent modesty is deceptive and should not be mistaken for a lack of scope. “Flock” exemplifies this. It smallness does not prevent it from being called masterful.

But she was glad to be looking

and them not
always to arrive

was like

love is
love of

a future

Here all the promise of living is contained in awkward grammar (“them/not always”) and a spilling of line breaks; the delay of each one’s arrival is the lived moment of the poem – messianic, that is, always on the way, never quite arriving, an acknowledgement that the future is always the horizon we speed toward even as we know it full well to be bounded by finitude. The future is always about possibility, including the possibility of the loss of possibility. This is one reason we have poetry.

Davis’ previous work, Forth a Raven, was infused with a fierce spiritual longing that threatened at times to overwhelm its slender architecture. What she has taken from Oppen is a stringency; a steely quality to temper the ardor. The yearning for connection that marks her earlier work has become more palpable due to loss and grief. These poems are utterly urgent and often harrowing in their immediacy, in the demands they make on us to listen, to become present. Davis does not title her book “Ethics,” but An Ethic: a particular, deeply individual set of relations and of seeing grounded in the singular opening up to the approach of the Other, even when, or especially when, the Other is a ghost. What an ethic requires is a response, a turning toward the other, not out of rational first principles, but because a call has been issued and it cannot be ignored. Ethics then is always an event of the impossible – a wholly new response generated to the unforeseen. This is the poem. This is the second life it gives us.

Linda Oppen at Harvard

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.

The Poetics of Failure

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).

Ride Lonesome: Oppen and Boetticher

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"

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.