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

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!

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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

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

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

Gentle readers -

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

The MLA and Jazz & Poetry

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

"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

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)