Exhibit A: Marcel Broodthaers

I've been tapping out a short essay about Belgian Surrealist poetry of the mid-twentieth century today (what, like you did something more important?), and this got me thinking about the whole Surrealist scene in Belgium from the 40s through the 60s. One of my favorite guys from the scene was Marcel Broodthaers, and his sensibility really takes you to the kind of half-wry, half-punk ethos they had going back then. Broodthaers started out as a poet. When (oh great inevitability) copies of his book Pense-Bête didn't sell, he cast a bunch of them in plaster and declared himself a visual artist. It worked out. So, you know, there's hope.

Roberto Bolaño and the Limits of the Aesthetic

Just coming back to my senses after three days zonked out on the couch with the flu. It's always strange, coming back to health: I feel like I could lift a Dodge pickup over my head Superman-style and hurl it at Dr. Octopus, saving the citizery from certain doom, if I had to (yeah, I'm mixing my D.C. and my Marvel — what of it?). Not that any such emergency is likely: Chicago's so arctic today Doc Oc would probably be found shivering in a snowbank, wrapped in all eight of his arms and checking on his Blackberry to see if he had enough frequent flier miles to visit his pal Mark Scroggins in Florida. For the past three days I've been deeply sub-superhero in my general functionality, and done little more than eat pretzel rods and watch movies on cable — indeed, one could say I've been reduced to my grad school level of existence. But I'm back, people, and lacking any heroic pickup truck hurling opportunities (curse you, Gods of Midwestern Winter!) I want to tap out a few thoughts about Roberto Bolano before getting back to working on my part of The Salt Companion to John Matthias.

So here's what I've been thinking, as I work my way toward the end of The Savage Detectives. One of the things that critics of Latin American literature say about Bolano (forgive me for leaving out the diacritical mark over the "n" throughout — I'm blogging in a hurry today) is that he represents a break with prior generations of writers who were committed to very different agendas: Magical Realism, say, or politically committed writing. And as far as I can tell, they've got a point. What I haven't seen discussed in any detail, though, is the way aesthetic autonomy plays into all this. Long story short, what I think The Savage Detectives gives us is a portrait of an imagined-but-sort-of-real generation of (mostly) Mexican poets whose lives and works are devoted to poetry, not to something beyond it. Bolano's characters, like Bolano himself, aren't just poets, they're poetry geeks, poetry nerds, poetry obsessives. They don't write to liberate the people or to forge the uncreated conscience of their race — they're into poetry as poetry. And, for Bolano, this is ultimately their doom. So The Savage Detectives is a kind of elegy for the doomed poetry nerd, and a confession by an aesthete of the dead-end nature of aestheticism.

If I weren't in a hurry to down some coffee, I'd probably go up to the study, pick up my copy of the novel, and type in a few of the passages I marked by way of evidence. But since that's not going to happen, I'll just offer evidence in summary form. Firstly, consider the novel's long opening section, "Mexicans Lost in Mexico," presented in the form of the diary of a young poet. I wasn't optimistic about the novel when I was reading this section — it just seemed like a salsa-and-guacamole version of The Dharma Bums. But it actually works quite well to establish Bolano's notion of a generation drawn to poetry as a way of disengaging with the world. Here we see young poets dropping out of the world of the professions, turning away from politics or a sense of folkloric connection to The People, and trying to form their own little island, their world-within-a-world, where all that matters is poetry. It's particularly important that their main concerns are with blasting away at the aesthetic conventions of prior generations. As Pierre Bourdieu points out in The Field of Cultural Production, the Oedipal imperative to overthrow older generations' aesthetics becomes most powerful when there's nothing at stake in art except style, when art becomes something pursued for art's sake alone. I mean, if you're an artmaker trying to score big with a market (think Hollywood movies), you actually cleave to established formulae. Same thing if you're all about putting your art at the service of power (think socialist realism, or, closer to home, of the portraits of institutional presidents hanging in the big neo-gothic hall of your local high-gloss university). But if the idea is to make a mark not in the broader world, but in an aesthetic scene cut loose from broader engagement and turned in upon itself (or, to put it in positive terms, set free from extra-artistic imperatives), you become kind of agitated about making new forms. Again, I'm in no way motivated to actually go up to the study and get the book, but I bet if I google a few remembered phrases I can pull a reasonably good passage of Bourdieu off the web. Hang on.... Yup. Here:

The literary or artistic field is at all times the site of a struggle between the two principles of hierarchization: the heteronomous principle, favourable to those who dominate the field economically and politically (e.g. ‘bourgeois art’) and the autnomous principle (e.g. ‘art for art’s sake’), which those of its advocates who are least endowed with specific capital tend to identify with a degree of independence from the economy, seeing temporal failure as a sign of election and success as a sign of compromise. (40)

Thus we find three competing principles of legitimacy. First, there is the specific principle of legitimacy, i.e., the recognition granted by the set of producers who produce for other producers, their competitors, i.e. by the autonomous self-sufficient world of ‘art for art’s sake’, meaning art for artists. Secondly, there is the principle of legitimacy corresponding to ‘bourgeois’ taste and to the consecration bestowed by the dominant fractions of the dominant class and by private tribunals, such as salons, or public, state-guaranteed ones, such as academies, which sanction the inseperably ethical and aesthetic (and therefore political) taste of the dominant. Finally, there is the principle of legitimacy which its advocates call ‘popular’, i.e. the consecration bestowed by the choice of ordinary consumers, the ‘mass audience’. (51)

I pulled these from this guy's site, which seems to have an interesting critique of Bourdieu. Anyway — you get the idea, right? Art for art's sake turns away from any form of consecration based on popularity, political efficacy, etc. And for believers in this sort of thing, a real event in art isn't the classically correct text, the big popular hit, the top moneymaking movie, the book that spoke to the soul of the nation, or the poem that inspired the revolutionary leader in his early days: it's the work of art that made an impact on the medium of art itself. It's the stylistically innovative piece of work.

This is what Bolano's characters value. Their little movement, Visceral Realism, is all about overturning the old poets. And Bolano shows us his characters trying to cut themselves off from anything heterogenous to art and literature. They want to live for the aesthetic alone (well, that and sex and marijuana). The pathos of the first part of The Savage Detectives comes from how doomed this seems. The characters are surrounded by thugs and pimps and corrupt police, and we can feel the world of power and corruption closing in on the naive poets, bit by bit.

The later sections of Bolano's novel, told in many voices, offer two versions of one of Bolano's great themes: the quest for the missing poet. We hear from a lot of narrators about two poets who are constantly in the background of the first part of the novel, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima (really based on Bolano and a friend and fellow poet). Belano and Lima are, in part, aimless waifs,but when they are motivated about something it's all about tracking down lost poetry from forgotten avant-gardes. So we as readers, catching glimpses of Belano and Lima, quest after them, our missing poets, never quite catching them satisfactorily, even as they themselves are on a similar quest for missing poets. The sad thing is this: when we hear of Belano and Lima finding the writers they quest for, the meetings are never satisfactory or transformational. This pursuit of poetry for its own sake seems more and more like an empty or desperate enterprise, like something conducted by people who never really learned to live in the world. Bolano really strips the glamor from the idea of the life lived only for poetry, giving us characters who seem vulnerable, lost, a little desperate. It kind of hurts to see it.

So there's a sadness to the book, in that it takes the position that the aesthetic autonomy that has been the informing principle of its characters is a dead-end. And Bolano's got ethos on this one, people: he lived the life of the poet maudit in a way we bourgeois-bohemians, perched behind our Apple laptops in our offices or studies, simply haven't. But what's more interesting to me is the cultural context of all this. I mean, when people think of Bolano's generation as offering a break with the big currents of Latin American writing, they're on to something — because much of that writing operated on principles other than aesthetic autonomy. This is actually quite common in non-first-world places. In places where people tend to feel semi-colonized, or dominated by an undemocratic oligarchy, they often don't feel that the national institutions represent their values, and they call upon literature to fill the void. Literature becomes a thing of national importance, a political and social thing more than an aesthetic thing (and does so for great numbers of people, not just for the eleven poets in the room, who want to think their work is somehow of vast social importance). (I'd quote my favorite guy on this, Declan Kiberd, but I already did so here and here, so I feel like I should lay off) (by the way: in the second link you'll find a howling screw-up, in which I and my editor both let a slip-up stand, with "Richard Hugo" written when I meant "Victor Hugo" — oh, the shame!). Anyway. In the Latin American context prior to Bolano there are many versions of this heteronomous aesthetic, this placing of the value of art in social rather than aesthetic criteria. There's Neruda's Marxism, for example. Or there's Magical Realism, which for all of its extravagence is a kind of identity politics, right? I mean, much of its goal is to show that there's a special, non-European-Enlightenment logic to Latin America. This makes Magical Realism a cousin to other identity-based reactions to colonialism, like, say, Negritude. But Bolano rejects all of this by following the path of aesthetic autonomy. Then he goes one better, and shows us the limits of his own path. He negates what came before, and negates his own negation (sorry for that sentence — one never really recovers from one's reading of Hegel).

I've got a strong sense this entry is a bit of a stylistic train wreck and in need of a serious proof-read, but I see Doctor Octopus has put on a warm scarf and is menacing the citizens of Chicago. They need me! And there's a very hurlable looking Dodge pickup parked conveniently nearby. It's not yours, is it? No? Alrighty, then!

10K, Publication, and a Place to Write

The official ads will be going out soon, but I thought I'd give a sneak preview of the second annual Madeleine P. Plonsker Prize, a publication and residency award we give out at Lake Forest. It's sort of a Virginia Woolf "room of one's own" concept. This year it's for prose, next year it'll be for poetry.


Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize (Prose)

Lake Forest College, in conjunction with the &NOW organization, invites applications for an emerging prose writer under forty years old, with no major book publication, to spend two months (February-March or March-April 2010) in residence at our campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs on the shore of Lake Michigan.

There are no formal teaching duties attached to the residency. Time is to be spent completing a manuscript, participating in the Lake Forest Literary Festival, and offering two public presentations.

The completed manuscript will be published (upon approval) by the Lake Forest College Press &NOW Books imprint.

The stipend is $10,000, with a housing suite and campus meals.

Send curriculum vita, no more than 30 pages of manuscript in progress, and a one-page statement of plans for completion to:

Plonsker Residency
Department of English
Lake Forest College
Box A16
555 N. Sheridan Road
Lake Forest, IL 60045.

Submissions must be postmarked by April 1, 2009 for consideration by judges Robert Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and Joshua Corey.

Please don't email me about this, though. We've got to take care of this via the address above.

Archive as Adventure: Jerome Rothenberg Revisited

Mere moments ago I braved the Chicago cold to retrieve a copy of Jerome Rothenberg's latest book, Poetics & Polemics: 1980-2005 from my mailbox, where it landed with a thud almost as satisfying, if somewhat less in the basso profundo range, as that made when the third volume of the Rothenberg & Joris-edited anthology Poems for the Millennium arrived a few days ago [*update/correction: the new volume in the series is edited by Rothenberg and Jeffrey Robinson, as Jerry has just reminded me]. Jerry was kind enough to send a copy of Poetics and Polemics my way, probably because it includes an interview with him I ran in the old Samizdat magazine in 2001. That issue was dedicated to celebrating the second volume of the Rothenberg/Joris anthology, and to their years-long creative collaboration (most, but not all, of the content is up online). Anyway, it seems like a good time to revisit the Rothenberg/Joris project, so here's the introduction I wrote to the special issue some eight years ago:

Editorial: Archive as Adventure

A year or two before the first volume of Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’ seminal anthology Poems for the Millennium appeared in 1995, I was sitting in a seminar room at the University of Notre Dame, wondering what John Matthias was going to say about the three books he’d arrayed on the table in front of him. “What does one do with something like this?” he said, hefting an enormous reference book that listed the names and addresses of thousands of American poets. “I suppose you could drop it on something that needed flattening.”

Here was poetry unsorted and unmapped, explained Matthias, here was a gathering of poets about whom no editorial choices had been made. “This isn’t much better,” he said, picking up the second book, nearly as large. It was the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. An anthology that tried to be all things to all people all the time, he explained, ended up being nothing much at all. One could root around in it for individual poems, but the book itself made no statement. As bland as a committee-authored document from the federal budget department, and about as informative when it came to the state of poetry.

The third book still lay on the table, rather old and conspicuously thinner. Squinting a little from where I sat, I could just make out the title: Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English, edited by Yvor Winters and Ken Fields. “Then there’s the opposite extreme,” Matthias said, brandishing the book, which was slimmer than the novels I’d been reading on the train ride out from Chicago to South Bend. “Here’s what Winters thought of as the real tradition, pared down to this little gathering.” Matthias, I knew, was no Wintersian–he was one of Winters’ renegade students–and his own taste in poetry was among the most catholic of anyone I’d met. But he’d used Winters’ narrow little book effectively to make his point: anthologists need to make principled choices if their books are going to have anything to say about poetry, its past or its future.

At first glance, you might think the two volumes of Poems for the Millennium fall into the same formless category as the Norton Anthology. Together they add up to a similar page count, and their presence on a bookshelf is far more imposing. But after you steel yourself for a long swim, dive into the anthology, and surface at the far shore, you emerge with a clear sense of the organizing principle–one could even say the mission–of Rothenberg and Joris’ great editorial project. The principle, in a word, is awakening: awakening to the possibilities of language, of experiment, of what Mallarmé called the “freed word.” Awakening, above all, to the usable pasts of modernist and postmodernist innovation.

In their introduction to the second volume, Rothenberg and Joris lament the dark days following the second world war. It was as a time in which the poetic energy of the prewar years had been drained away by the institutionalization of a tamed and truncated version of modernism. These years witnessed “an ascendant literary ‘modernism’–hostile to experiment and reduced in consequence to a vapid, often stuffy middle-ground approximation.” There was a willful forgetting of the openness of modernism, and a turn to “a fixed notion of poetry and poem, which might be improved upon but was never questioned at the root.” The task of poets coming of age in the fifties and sixties, argue Rothenberg and Joris, was to find what had been lost, to revive the electrical energy of the force that had crackled through poetry at the beginning of the century. They call the fulfillment of this task “the second great awakening of poetry,” and the second volume of their anthology is an archive of that awakening.

In our own time the discourse about poetry, if not poetry itself, seems to have suffered through a taming and truncation of possibilities similar to the one Rothenberg and Joris saw in the years after World War II. I don’t think we’re about to see anyone offering as narrow a version of poetry as Winters offered in his little anthology. But the easy division of poetry into mainstream and otherstream, into Iowa school and Buffalo school, into confession and langpo, has become stifling. The two party version of poetry is about as satisfying and representative as the two party version of politics. In this context, Rothenberg and Joris’ archive of poetry’s two great awakenings in the last century has a special importance. In its pages lie the usable pasts of a third great awakening of poetry.

The current issue seeks to celebrate the Rothenberg/Joris collaboration. No one else could have assembled the work they have assembled, and no one else could have performed so well the alchemy that converts archive to adventure.

I think I can stand by most of what I said back then, except for the penultimate paragraph. For one thing, the notion of an Iowa/Buffalo dichotomy seems dated. And the discourse about poetry has really changed in the past eight years, too, a development that has everything to do with the blogosphere and the migration of critical discussion online. Where we once had a culture of quarterly journal review pages consisting of nine parts logrolling and one part snark, and an incipient email list culture made up of nine parts snark and one part logrolling, we're now seeing more discussion, conducted more variously, than ever before. The blogospheric ambience may not be a match for that of the Parisian cafés of the '20s, but the talk about poetry has never been better.

*

In other news, I think I'm officially the last person in the world to join Facebook. I'm hoping it doesn't take up all my time: I've got a big anthology to get through.

Tragicomedy and the Politics of Poetry

Of all the responses I've received to "Poetry, Politics, and Leanings-Left", Mark Yakich's has been the most interesting. Mark's been kind enough to let me post it here:

I just read your essay in Poetry and you raise some important points. I think there are two that you don't mention, however, and they are the two responses (to my mind) contemporary poets favor: 1) using essentially nonfiction or oral history as witness; 2) using comedy or tragicomedy to subvert/engage the otherwise overly earnest dialogue of politics in "the world"/"society." There is the third way, the one [Joshua] Clover takes, though as you rightly point out it doesn't seem to engage in any overtly political way to the politic processes of the day, and (again to my mind) is much the same as the ole LANGUAGE poetry strategy which sought, as you know, to subvert syntax and grammar as as way of subverting the hegemony in the culture at large (a project, I would argue, that sounds nice but does little on the actual political stage).

To get back to my two points. The historical example of #1 above is Reznikoff's Holocaust, or his Testimony. A recent example of #1 is Ray McDaniel's series "Convention Centers of the World" (in Saltwater Empire) in which he uses the actual language of people who were in the Convention Center and Superdome in New Orleans. In talking with Ray, he told me that this was the only way he had of engaging the events — through the witnesses. Now, I think #1 is fine and of course reasonable and worthwhile; the problem I have is that nonfiction can do more in this regard (a good report on TV's 60 Minutes, say, or a film by Spike Lee) than poetry of oral reporting. The other problem, as Primo Levi pointed out, is that the only true witness is the dead witness — the ones who survive are one step removed from witnessing the horror of a tragedy. Levi takes an extreme position, one might argue, but he did live through a concentration camp, so who's going to argue with him?

To my main point: I believe that #2 above is an area that contemporary poets have largely failed to explore and exploit. Comedy and tragicomedy (as in Waiting for Godot, Slaughterhouse Five, Life is Beautiful, etc.) is doable in poetry, not just in film or fiction or stage). Again for me, outside of documentaries, I've always been most moved by tragicomic works, ever since first seeing Groucho Marx in Duck Soup and reading Slaughterhouse Five. There are a few poets who have worked in this vein, though they mostly get tossed off into some kind of "surrealistic" [sic] camp, and are mostly of the Latin American of East European variety. Tragicomedy (absurdity, if you like) in Central and Eastern Europe, as you well know, was the main strategy of subversion for decades. In the US, we didn't need as much of it of course because of our "free speech," and yet in the last eight years I feel that the only person pointing out the absurdity and engaging the politicos is Jon Stewart, with his Daily Show. This isn't news to anyone, I realize, but how come poets have been sitting around with their thumbs in their pieholes, debating "Oh, is poetry political or not? Should I or Shouldn't I? Oh, I'm so uncomfortable." For my bit, I tried in The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine, to play the tragicomic card — perhaps a weak card to many poets or readers who take all humor to be patently unserious, but to me humor is the only thing to take seriously. In the words of Gabe Gudding, humor and comedy are not here to make you suffer better or more (as a great deal of earnest, protest, or memorial poems are meant to do) but they are to help you endure.

In other news, over at Able Muse R.S. Gwynn's crowd are having quite a discussion of my post about him. Mostly they're not too happy about what I have to say (I understand). Gwynn got in touch too, first threatening to kick my ass at the AWP (I'd mentioned that, given the content of the post, he more-or-less had the right to take a swing at me), and then letting on that he was joking about the impending ass-whupping, saying that he had enjoyed the discussion. A hell of a good sport, really.

"I Am Not Now, Nor Have I Ever Been..."

So this gentleman has written a letter to the editor claiming I'm an "unreconstructed Marxist" on the basis of his reading of an article I wrote for Poetry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I disagree.

Old School

I recently discovered that two of my old high school pals, neither of whom I've seen in years, have both become poets: Oscar Martens and Keith Bridger. Must be something they put in the drinking water at Fort Richmond Collegiate in the 80s. We weren't drawn together by poetry back then: Oscar and I shared, I suppose, a general sense of being alienated grumblers, while Keith and I mostly bonded over binge drinking and ska. We also got involved with the same Icelandic girl and the same 1974 Fiat Spider convertible. Anyway, a little rooting around on the internet makes it clear that both Oscar and Keith are, in key respects, cooler than I am. While I (like just about every other versifier of my generation) became the poet-as-professor, these guys took alternate routes. Keith has become the poet-as-bohemian, making a living as a film and stage actor, a waiter, and a semi-successful competitive fencer (that's with swords, not fenceposts). Oscar's been the poet-as-adventurer, having lived in Kenya and New Zealand, and, to top it off, sailing a schooner through the Northwest Passage (the first time it's ever been done from west to east). He's also a badass martial arts guy who lives on a tugboat. You know: the full Hemingway. If you ever find yourself at a reading by either of these guys, shout "go Centurions!" and see what kind of reaction you get. And tell Keith I want my Sandinista! LP back.

Reading, 2008

I'm down in New Orleans, to which I fled so I could grade my students' final essays while lounging in the Cafe du Monde and eating beignets, or sprawling in one of the big chairs in CC's Coffee on Royal Street, listening to the French Quarter intellectuals jaw about how corrupt northern politics has become (as an Illinois guy, I'm ashamed to say that, with this Blagojevich affair, we've actually managed to disgrace ourselves by the standards of Louisiana politics, which is saying something). My plan worked fine yesterday, but Lousiana got some uncharacteristic cold and snow this morning, so I'm laying off the French Quarter flanneur routine and typing up a list of the books I read (or re-read) since the beginning of the year.

This is the first year I've kept a list of the books I've read, but I was inspired by Mark Scroggins' list on his blog last year. Frankly, I had no idea how many books I read in a year, though I thought it might be about one a week (way, way less than my wife, Valerie, who is a marathon reader). Then again, I think most of what I read now is either online or in journals (especially poetry, which I tend to read in the journals I scoop out of the magazine rack by the armload whenever I'm in a good bookstore). So this list is kind of incomplete. It leaves out books I didn't finish, or consulted for a chapter or two. And it also leaves out a lot of reading in anthologies (especially the Norton Britlit anthologies, from which I do a lot of my teaching), as well as the epic task, shared with Josh Corey, of reading the hundred or so manuscripts submitted to the Plonsker Prize competition. Thank god the latter task came during the lying-in-the-hammock-until-my-pals-come-to-collect-me-for-a-bike-ride season.

Anyway, here's the list...


Fiction

Saul Bellow, Seize the Day

It's like all of Bellow: great characters, great predicaments, no shape to the thing. But while most of Bellow's works are "great loose baggy monsters" (to steal Henry James' term for Tolstoy's novels), this is a svelte little thing.

Marquis de Sade, Justine

There's something to be written — well, it's probably been written — about de Sade and the rise of self-interested, amoral capitalism. The unfortunate Justine is punished over and over because of her tenacious sense of virtue, while her sister, Juliette, is amoral and self-interested in a Hobbesian way, and she does quite well for herself in the world. All this, written at the time when the old aristocratic order is falling to the bourgeoisie.

Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal

Has something been written about the alchemy by which Genet converts the abject into the sublime? I kind of wish Raymond Federman had written something of that sort: he and I had a great discussion about Genet when Federman was in Chicago this last February (he agrees that Genet is full of shit, and that it doesn't matter).

Anne Louise Germaine DeStael, Mirza

Madame DeStael was a big wheel in early nineteenth century literary theory (I'm sort of stunned she's not more canonical in that realm — the second edition of Critical Theory Since Plato inexplicably dropped her work). But she's not so hot with the novella, believe me.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

There's something very strange and interesting in this: it's almost like a retraction of Wilde's l'art pour l'art stance. Then again, I can never quite tell to what degree Joris-Karl Huysman's À Rebours, the model for Wilde's novel, is an ironizing of aestheticism, and to what degree it is an advocation.

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

This is sort of a perfect book, for me. It's got formalist balance, a powerfully articulated sense of the bildung of the heroine (who has to undergo a kind of Schillerian inner balancing to become self-policing and escape externally imposed order), and a lot more. I'm especially fond of how Bronte is clearly dealing with issues she intuits, rather than conceptualizes — she's clearly twigging to new developments in society before they can be fully understood and mapped out in any way other than the strange, contradictory way she gets at them here. And the love/hate business between Jane and Rochester — yow.

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

You really see how Freud wasn't the only guy cooking up notions of id and superego. Also, this book can be filed with Dracula as a prime example of Victorian middle-class heroism: only the professionals, acting, for the most part, in accord with their professional values, can save us.

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

If you know anyone who does cosmic pessimism better, let me know. Oh: if you're looking for good sport while reading this, mark the book every time Hardy gives a vivid description of Tess' mouth. Hardy's a bit obsessed with it. Yep.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

I re-read this for a graduate course on Romanticism I was teaching. It really pulled the themes from the course together — how couldn't it? Mary Shelley was at ground zero of the movement.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

When I teach this book, I draw a chart of the structure on the board. And every year there's someone in the class who really responds to that sense of symmetry. "It's like some kind of magic trick," said one of my students this year. He's not wrong.

Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House and Other Short Stories

Does anyone remember where one can find E.M. Forster's little parody of Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall"? It's in a letter, I think.

Jerzy Kosinski, Being There

I liked Steps, which was less like reading fiction and more like reading a set of illustrations to the ideas in Sartre's Being and Nothingness. This one didn't do much for me.

Octave Mirbeau, Le Calvaire

You want misogyny? You've come to the right place. This guy does misogyny like he's Emile Zola. If that's not your deal, stick with the chapter dealing with the protagonist's experiences in the Franco-Prussian war. You don't get a better treatment of the chaotic pointless evil of it all anywhere.

Poetry

Steve Halle, Map of the Hydrogen World

I wrote some jacket copy for this several months ago, and now it's actually out. See my previous post for some remarks about this one.

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market

Genius, in every sense. Especially the Kantian sense. Every weird Victorian anxiety you can think of about sex, gender, consumerism, addiction, and commerce finds its way into this little fable.

Robert Pinsky, Gulf Music

I reviewed this, along with Hass' Time and Materials for the Notre Dame Review.

Robert Hass, Time and Materials

See above.

Jessica Savitz, Hunting is Painting

Coming soon from Lake Forest College Press!

Karl Shapiro, Bourgeois Poet

Shapiro seems to die inside a little every time he realizes that the poet-as-professor is also, in some sense, the poet-as-bourgeois. A lot of us prof-poets still seem to hate facing this truth. I once tried to discuss Robert Hass as a 'bourgeois bohemian,' which I thought was a description, not a judgement. Then I found a critic quoting me in the American Poetry Review, claiming I was so exacerbated with Hass that I'd slung this nasty label at him. Anyway, some of these prose poems of Shapiro's are really wonderful, especially the ones where he describes a now-lost Chicago.

Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

I love the first half of the book. I don't know whether the problem with the back half had to do with the work itself, or with my increasing jitteriness after five cups of coffee. I'd liked it more the first time I read it. Maybe it's a younger guy's book.

Sam Greenlee, Blues for an African Princess

By the man who wrote the screenplay for the classic of black-radical film, The Spook Who Sat by the Door. It took me forever to find a copy of this. It's like reading Amiri Baraka, in that it shows how incredibly concerned with community this kind of 70s identity poetics stuff was.

John Matthias, Kedging

I reviewed this for the Cincinnati Review, and, in the process, finally learned how to spell Cincinnati. Anyway: Matthias continues his move into rhizomatic, intertextual, pan-historical splendor.

Mary Biddinger, Prairie Fever

I wrote some jacket copy for this a while back, when I had it in manuscript. It's always different to read the thing when it's between covers. Suddenly it has more gravitas or something.

Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Sad stuff. Not quite as sad as De Profundis, though: in that one you can see that the bastards really got to Wilde, and tormented him into recanting everything that made him special. It's painful to see.

P.B. Shelley, Selected Poems

Word on the street is that John Kinsella is editing a new edition of Shelley. This makes perfect sense: who else, among contemporary poets, could wear the Shelleyean mantle (radical, haunted, manic, living one's beliefs) so well?

Stephen Fowler, Thing Happen Hole

I discovered Fowler via an article he wrote on betel-nut chewing (not a bad pastime, I discovered, except for the great gobs of red spittle). Turns out he's a very good poet, in a kind of understated, Eastern Europe in the 80s way.

William Butler Yeats, Selected Poems

No one but Yeats could ever pull off so very well the trick of assimilating every poetic trend and fad around while remaining entirely himself.

Isabelle Baladine Howard, Secret of Breathe

From the ever-cool Burning Deck press, a two-voiced suite of poems written in a kind of whisper. Reminds me of Edmond Jabès.

Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray, Au Dela Des Gestes

You want Belgian Surrealist prose poetry of the mid-twentieth century? The Piqueray bros. have you covered. Much of this is really funny, uninhibited, and weird, in the great tradition of Belgian Surrealism, which tends to be a bit less full of itself than the Parisian variety. And I'm sure the Deleuzian concept of a "minor literature" applies here. If you ever write an essay about that, send me a copy, okay?

Mark Yakich, The Importance of Picking Potatoes in Ukraine

So funny and political you're surprised it's published by Penguin.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Selected Poems

When I was in grad school, my profs seemed to think of Tennyson as a kind of laughingstock. I'm going to work up a big section of my next book on him and, I hope, prove them wrong. He assimilates so many of the anxieties of his age. And it's interesting how the moralistic, utilitarian values that surround him clash with his innate sense of poetry as something beyond utility. By instinct Tennyson is like Keats, but he feels like he's supposed to make poetry into something good for us, and the tension makes for some incredible loops and twists. Some of which, I admit, are ghastly ("Locksley Hall" is truly weird stuff).

J.H. Prynne, Poems

I think it took me longer to get through Prynne than any other poet this side of John Peck. Worth the effort.

John Keats, Favorite Poems

I'm a bit disappointed with myself for loving the canonical Keats, and being cool toward the Keats poems everyone's cool toward.

Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

I'm convinced that there's something terribly wrong with Bryon, and with anyone who doesn't love him.

Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day

I blogged about some of these poems when they were coming out in magazines. Subtle stuff.

Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival

When I read this, I thought Bidart must be dying. It had that feel to it. Such, it turns out, is not the case.

Simone Muench, Orange Girl

I think I understand the kind of woman who likes horror films better, now that I've read this. The thrill of being vulnerable permeates this book.

Adam Fieled, When You Bit

There are some great poems about Wicker Park bohemia in Chicago. Which is strange, since Fieled lives in Philly.

Jackye Pope, Watermark

Sad, quiet poems about a failed pastoral life-plan in Amsterdam. You have to listen carefully to these.

Kevin Prufer, National Anthem

Prufer's as angry about the political situation of the past eight years as the rest of us, and knows how to make poetry out of it (unlike most of us)

Robert Kroetsch, The Sad Phonecian

I used to read Kroetsch a lot: he was something like the godfather of western Canadian postmodern poetry back in the 80s. This one's a bit of a disappointment: it's structured like Joe Brainard's I Remember, with a lot of anaphora, but it lacks Brainard's charm. It deals with a dead/dying relationship, and it wallows in gloom.

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads

They wrote this book to raise money for travel. Somehow I don't think that plan works for poets anymore.

William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience

I'm looking forward to reading these to my soon-to-be-born daughter. Yep.

William Blake, The Book of Thel

This too.

Joe Brainard, I Remember

Why, why why is this book as good as it is? I can't figure it out. Something to do with deadpan?

Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village

I thought this was harsh stuff...

George Crabbe, The Village

...until I read this.

Don Share, Squandermania

This is the kind of eclectic, smart book that makes me proud to be published by Salt.

Philosophy/Theory

Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art

The attack on the emptiness of what we call the 'art world' is fair enough. I wish he'd gone into what we find in the next book on this list, though.

Howard Becker, Art Worlds

A classic in the sociology of art, to which my colleague Dave Park hipped me. Becker sees aesthetic activity all over the place: a nice antidote to the claustrophobia of the official art world.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music

Man, can Nietzsche synthesize German idealism.

Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

Okay. So I skipped some parts of this tombstone-sized tome. It's got all of Russell's charm, and all of his Romantics-hatin' idiosyncracy. He'll never be fair to Rousseau.

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction

I skipped a lot of the charts. But this is the book we all crib from when we talk "cultural capital." The parts about the psychological perils of the autodidact are heartbreaking, and they get to me every time I read this book. Heartbreaking. In an abstract, conceptual way.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement

I don't think any other book has been as important to me as this one. I spend a lot of time hanging out in its pages.

Aristotle, Poetics

I used to love the clean, clear, systematic qualities of Aristotle, and I still respect them.

Plato, Republic

I used to despise this authoritarian, poet-hatin' thing. And I still despise those qualities of the book. But Platonic idealism has been opening up for me lately.

I.A. Richards and C.K. Ogden, Principles of Aesthetics

Richards' first book, and a bit of a train-wreck in terms of the writing. If you've read Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, you can probably skip this one.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

My pals in the social sciences look down on this, but I like the middle bits, with their super-abstract history of Marxist thought. Debord: right on the borderline between pretension and innate coolness. Sort of the Johnny Depp of critical theory.

Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II

Deleuze didn't want to present this as a book of interviews, because he doesn't believe there can be a coherent subjectivity expressing itself as if in a vacuum, so it's not Deleuze who speaks here, but Deleuze-in-conversation-with-Parnet, or Parnetdeleuze, or something like that. Nice.

Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class

Gouldner is some kind of lost gem of social theory. Anyway, I cribbed a lot from this book for my essay on poetry and politics in the November '08 issue of Poetry.

Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art

I went back to this after sensing that Adam Kirsch had addled its argument a bit. It was as strange as I remembered it: aesthetics as ontology, I suppose you'd call it.

Garrick Davis, Praising it New: The Best of the New Criticism

I've been rooting around in the New Criticism a lot. Just yesterday I scored an old copy of Wellek's Discriminations, and I'm going to devour it like it's a ham sandwich. Oh, I wrote about this for Pleiades.

Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man

You've got to get the right translation of this or you're doomed. My favorite is in the cheapo little Dover edition.

Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles

Never has plodding, slow exposition been so interesting. It's about the conditions under which creative vortices come into being.

Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature, Volume One

Worth the price for the essay on Beckett alone. And I don't even agree with what that essay has to say.

George Steiner, Martin Heidegger

I like almost everything Steiner writes, but I have a strong feeling we'd hate each other in person. I first came to this conclusion when I read an essay in which he claimed that kids today (the 'today' in question being, I think, the 70s) didn't understand that paperbacks were no substitute for well-bound uniform sets of an author's work. When I used to be a clerk in an antiquarian bookstore, I always thought these first-edition-and-bound-set people were like the people who chose their wine on the basis of the label, not the liquid.

Clive Bell, Art

It's amazing: only a Bloomsbury Brit could lay down Kantian ideas in a kind of charming, reader-friendly banter.

Drama

Samuel Beckett, Endgame

Funny and desperate.

Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape

Ditto.

Howard Brenton, Bloody Poetry

I blogged about this.

Politics

Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement

Taibi seems to want Hunter Thompson's mantle, which is sad, since Taibbi is good on his own terms. He notes the irrationalism on the right (religious fanatics) and the left (conspiracy theorists), and sees both as phenomena that come about when the government really doesn't do much for the people.

Chris Hedges, American Fascists

Scary stuff — he traces the deeply authoritarian tendencies of American fundamentalists.

Andrew Gelman, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State

Gelman is a professor of statistics, and it shows in the writing.

Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus

This puts a human face on the weird right-wing views of some parts of the blue-collar south. It continues the work Thomas Frank did in What's the Matter with Kansas, but this time the anthropologist is one of the tribesmen.

Graphic Novels

Craig Thompson, Carnet de Voyage

Quiet thoughts, quiet draftsmanship. Not his best work. I think his publisher pressured him into letting this be published.

Joe Sacco, Palestine

I would pay, say, a thousand dollars to be as cool as Joe Sacco. I'd also pay a grand to legitimately, and without charge of pretense, be universally referred to by Robert Louis Stevenson's college nickname: Velvet Jack. For real.

Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli, DMZ: On the Ground

I would have loved this when I was twenty. Now I find it a bit slick and a bit cynical.

History

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of American Empire

It's a bad idea to read this while getting tanked up on coffee before attending a political rally.

William Doyle, The French Revolution

For a book this short, it gets at the complexity of the phenomenon. Thanks to Dan LeMahieu for sending it my way.

Olwen Hufton, Europe: Privilege and Protest, 1730-1789

If you want a picture of Europe during the period when Enlightenment ideas were percolating but hadn't yet transformed society, this is as good a book as any. You really get a sense of how the society of the era was organized on particularist rather than universalist principles. People didn't experience themselves as similar subjectivities with more or less the same rules and laws pertaining to them: rather, they were defined in terms of very localized obligations and privileges. You know — not "we all pay sales tax and can go to local schools" but "the peasants from Presdelay have the right to pick Lord Mugo's blackberries along the roadside from May to June, but the burghers of Bregnant have to give the local seigneur two piglets and a shoeshine every other Whitsunday." All this before liberté, égalité, fraternité, the Rights of Man, and all that erased the gothic complexities and left the big clean sheet of universality and reason.

Criticism

Peter Stansky, William Morris

Just the facts, ma'am.

Stephen Burt, The Forms of Youth

I reviewed this for the Boston Review.

Angela Carter, The Sadean Woman

She's smart. And her notion of the patriarchal ideal of a "good bad girl" — a woman who has “a wholesome eroticism blurred a little round the edges by the fact that she herself is not quite sure what eroticism is” really cracks the patriarchal ideal of woman open (it's Marilyn Monroe, right?). I'm surprised it isn't a more prominent notion in contemporary feminist thought. Well, no, I'm not surprised. Just disappointed.

Ronan MacDonald, The Death of the Critic

I liked this book until he got into areas where I have (ahem) some expertise. Maybe the limits have to do with the brevity of the book.

Richard Kerridge and Neil Reeve, Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne

These guys understand the most obscure of English poets, and write decent expository prose, too. They do seem like True Believers, though. Then again, almost everything written about Prynne looks like it was written either by apostles or by sworn enemies. He's that kind of poet.

Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years

The stuff on Henri Rousseau is wonderful, the stuff on Satie even better. And the opening chapters really characterize the era. Still, I like the essays in The Innocent Eye better — especially when Shattuck talks about Dada and Surrealism.

Gene H. Bell-Villada, Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life

I'm torn, here: part of me wishes that more people would read this book (because he really understands the implications of aesthetic autonomy); then again, part of me wishes it would magically disappear (because I'm writing a book that takes on the same material).

Wendell Anderson, The Heart’s Precision

A neglected study of a neglected poet, Judson Crews

Marc Dachy, Dada: The Revolt of Art

I read this on the way to the Modernist Studies Association conference, and the juxtaposition led me to conclude that the difference between Dada and the study of Dada is the difference between tigers and National Geographic.

Tony Hoagland, Real Sofistakashun

The essay on the "jittery poem of our moment" is sharp, though not everyone's going to like it.

Bonnie Costello, Planets on Tables

I reviewed this for the Boston Review, but I don't think it's out yet. The review, I mean.

Other

Herbert Gold, The Age of Happy Problems

I scored a copy of this here in New Orleans, and devoured most of the essays in the quiet courtyard of the Royal Blend coffee joint on Royal Street. Nobody writes about bohemia, in all its glories and imbecilities, better than Gold — the central trio of essays on hipsters of the 50s is the highlight of the book. No, that's not true. His essay on teaching at Wayne State is even better. I don't know why Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe became more famous than Herbert Gold: they're good (well, Wolfe is, or was), but neither's fit to tie Gold's sneakers.

Heather Sellers, The Practice of Creative Writing

A good example of its kind, but I can't quite make myself into a fan of this kind of book. I'm trying.

George Plimpton, Edie

If you want to get a view of the Warhol world, but you don't want the impression that the whole world revolved around Warhol, this is your book. A sad, poor-little-rich-girl junkie story, too. You kind of want to give Edie Sedgwick's father a beat-down when you're done with it.

So there it is. But I'm already skeptical about the exercise of listing these things as a kind of census of one's reading: I mean, it reminds me of that bullshitty NEA report, the one that claimed reading was in crisis because people seemed to be reading fewer books. When you looked at the study, you saw that the definition of what counted as a book was narrow, and reading online (which has truly exploded) didn't count at all. Then again, I'm kind of glad I don't know how much time I've spent reading things I found via Silliman's blog, the Huffington Post, and Arts & Letters Daily. If I saw all that quantified, I'm sure I'd conclude that I should go outside more often. Like maybe now: the snow's melted, and my favorite flanneur shoes are right by the door...

Map of the Hydrogen World

Steve Halle's new book, Map of the Hydrogen World, is just out from Chicago's own Cracked Slab books, and you're out of your mind if you're not already on your way to order a copy. Halle's got pretty much everything you'd hope to find in a younger poet: a sense of urgency, an easy grasp of tradition, and an adventurous sense of experiment.

I want to dwell on this last bit just a little, because I think Halle is truly experimental, at a time when the idea of experiment has become muddied. It's sad, and ultimately ironic, that words like "experimental," "complex," "difficult", and "indeterminate" are, in some quadrants of the poetry demimonde, not so much a shorthand for idiosyncratic adventure, but more a brand-name, a sign of membership and even conformity. Johannes Goransson gives us an image of the time and place where this started to happen in his reflections on his experience at the Iowa writing program:

Lots of people bantered around the phrase "post-language poet" - as in "I am a..." This means that they - like Jorie [Graham] - used some of the textures of langpo to recreate high modernism, elegance, high learning - as opposed to ... "Images" which were vulgar and had to be controlled against their natural tendency toward excess; "confessional poetry" was ridiculed; "indeterminacy" was important... because it was "complex" and thus more "realistic." I remember a debate I got in because someone called something (not mine) "pornographic" because it wasn't complex...

Yikes. I mean, there's the sad logic of competitiveness/conformity that you get when people study at the feet of some charismatic teacher, with hopes of finding a respectable post in a semi-regulated profession. There's actually a pretty good book about how the best outburts of artistic creation take place among groups of peers without charismatic masters or hope of professional placement. It's called Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work by Michael P. Farrell, and someday, in the unlikely event that I get my act together and clear the decks of other writing commitments, I'm going to read the big Langpo group autobiography Grand Piano and see whether the experiences recounted there confirm Farrell's various hypotheses, one of which is that the charismatic master, or group of masters, can end up establishing a style that the students don't really understand, or feel compelled to use for any reason other than that it is what they think they're supposed to use. It's a problem that can afflict even the most groundbreaking of creative figures in their early years: I remember reading about Andy Warhol's first soup-can works, which were spattered with paint drippings in the Jackson Pollock mode. When someone asked him why he added the paint-spatters, he told the man that he thought that's what you were supposed to do to make it a work of art. The things that Pollock struggled for, and that meant everything to him, were to the young Warhol just a kind of credential, a sign that he wasn't just a kid from the benighted side of Pittsburgh, but a Member of the New York Art World in Full and Good Standing. Tradition does tend to be govered by entropy.

Anyway: my point is that Steve Halle's not one of these "I'm experimenting the same way everyone's experimenting because that's what you're supposed to do, right?" guys. Perhaps it was to his advantage that he didn't really have a particularly charismatic teacher in his undergrad days (when he studied with, um, me), and now that he's plugging away at grad school after a stint teaching, he seems to have a pretty firm sense of himself (besides, Gabe Gudding, his prof now at Illinois State, seems laudibly eclectic, and not in quest of disciples). So Steve's work doesn't really look like period style, and there's an interesting combination of techniques and influences at play in Map of the Hydrogen World. The jacket copy provided by the publisher gets at some of this:

Map of the Hydrogen World, Steve Halle’s first collection of poems, shuns the so-called divide between post-avant and Official Verse Culture poetics by embracing traditional forms and themes while simultaneously developing new ways of knowing and working through poetry. From traditional lyric and narrative poems to formal experiments, investigations and cuttings, Halle attempts to find his own way through place, history, art, politics, faith and self, mapping particulars as small as an atom and universalities as big as a world.

I try to drive a similar point home in my own bit of jacket copy:

Ginsbergian incantation, high modernist allusion, the post-avant rhizome and the documentary collage — these are the weapons in Steve Halle’s arsenal. Joyce, Eliot, Emerson, Whitman and Keats shoot through the static of text-messaging, global positioning systems, surveillance culture, and an urgent sense of the world’s victims. Halle carries a humanistic heritage into an inhuman world. It comes out shredded, torn into the bandages we need even more than we know.

Okay, so I kind of let that extended metaphor have its way with me a bit. And I failed to work in any reference to the strong Dada strain in Halle's work. So let's move on to another bit of copy, this one by Steve's most charismatic teacher, Anne Waldman:

Delightful voices and moves play out in the latitudes & longitudes of Steve Halle's Map of the Hydrogen World. Edgy with savvy and brio. It's one wonderful exciting romp.

I'm not sure I'd have said "romp" — Halle's book seems a bit more... what? A bit more somber than that, a bit too concerned with the morally urgent world to be called a romp. But don't take my word for it: see for yourself.

This Post is Not Called "R.S. Gwynn, or the Absence of Genius"

*DISCLAIMER: I woke up this morning with the urge to take this post down, because I think it may be taken the wrong way. But instead of getting rid of it, I'm just going to say this: I don't mean that Gwynn is a bad poet. In fact, as I say below, he's quite good at what he does. But I react very poorly to the kind of thing he does in poetry. It's not the rhyme and meter I have a problem with, it's something larger, something like the sensibleness of the New Formalism, or its containment, that bothers me. And I don't mean to say that I'm objectively right in disliking this, just that I'm a product of a tradition of thought and a structure of feeling that are at odds with the kind of work Gwynn does. In the end, I suppose this post is shamelessly self-indulgent: it's a long, drawn out examination of the basis of my own taste. Or perhaps I should say it's a long, drawn-out examination of my taste this week, since I've found myself defending plenty of formal, paraphrasable poems in print and in conversation. But if you can't be self-indulgent in your blog, where can you be? So I'm leaving this up. I've got a bad feeling, though, that R.S. Gwynn's going to gut-punch me someday. He's an old football player and probably knows how to knock a guy down, too!*

**

Sometimes, when I find myself utterly out of sympathy with a piece of writing, I wonder: is it the writing, or is it me? There are certainly instances where the answer is "It's you, Archambeau." Jane Austen, for example, is a writer whom I understand to be deeply insigntful, entirely excellent in a thousand ways, perceptive, historically significant, and full of a kind of charm to which I am utterly impervious. I think I'd rather eat a rat than read Emma again. And Emma is a great book. Maybe gender has something to do with it, although it's not that I can't get into classic British women's novels: I'm a big fan of Virginia Woolf, and I read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre at least once a year, always finding it both tremendously well-made and, you know, smokin' hot.

So, when I ran across a perfectly respectable, competent sonnet by R.S. Gwynn called "God's Secretary," while leafing through the latest issue of Poetry and found myself recoiling, I had to step back and ask myself: is it Gwynn's poem, or is it me? Deciding to give myself the benefit of the doubt (after all, if I don't, who will?) I began listing my reasons for disliking the poem. At first I found them pretty compelling, jotted down there on the back of my phone bill envelope. Soon, though, I noticed a pattern to the list of complaints — a pattern that revealed to me some of my own biases in taste. So: I'm going to list what I take to be the literary offenses of R.S. Gwynn, but bear in mind that in the end I think that the list of perceived offenses says more about my own limitations than it says about Gwynn.

Here's the beginning of Gwynn's sonnet, an octave set off as its own stanza (to emphasize, I suppose, the correctness of the author's use of the Petrarchan version of the form):

Her e-mail inbox always overflows.
Her outbox doesn't get much use at all.
She puts on hold the umpteen-billionth call
As music oozes forth to placate those
Who wait, then disconnect. Outside, wind blows,
Scything pale leaves. She sees a sparrow fall
Fluttering to a claw-catch on the wall.
Will He be in today? God only knows.

From a craft position, you really can't fault Gwynn: he knows what he's doing. If the rhymes are a bit full-on for some ears (mine, say), they are where they are supposed to be, and there's just enough enjambment to soften the effect a bit. The same goes for the scansion: it's regular iambic, with just enough thrown in by way of variation to keep it from sounding like a metronome (I'm a sucker for a spondee). You've got some variation of longer and shorter syntactical units, you've got an interrogative thrown in to mixup the declaratives a bit. And there's a fine balance in the combination of the mundane (email) and the highfalutin' (that allusion to Pope, who wrote that God "sees with equal eye, as God of all, a hero perish or a sparrow fall" — and beyond Pope, to the Bible). And "scything" is nice, with its conjuring up of mortality. So the poem is certainly succeeding on its own terms -- except maybe for the phrase, "God only knows," which seems a bit self-satisfied, this playing off of literal and idiomatic senses.

She hasn't seen His face — He's so aloof.
She's long resigned He'll never know or love her
But still can wish there were some call, some proof
That he requires a greater service of her.
Fingers of rain now drum upon the roof,
Coming from somewhere, somewhere far above her.

Okay. The sestet is actually a little less slick than the octave: I mean, that "of her" really, really wants to be read with the stress on the word "of," (echoing the stress-pattern of the line's rhyme-mate, which has a feminine ending). And that's a bit iffy. But the larger elements are all in order: the shift from external description to an examination of the secretary's inner state of mind comes exactly where it should in a straight-up traditional Petrarchan sonnet, at the volta or turn between the octave and the sestet. And the rhyme-scheme shifts, as the form demands. Again, there's a lot of full rhyme for some ears, but when it ticks over into actual repetition of the same word, it takes on a different kind of music, and we can appreciate it the way we appreciate the returning words of a sestina. So don't let anyone knock Gwynn's chops: he does what he sets out to do, and by and large succeeds on his own terms.

There's something about those terms of success that bothers me, though. The first thing I jotted down on my envelope-back of compaints was this: "utter lack of genius!" A bit churlish of me, no? But there's at least one sense in which I'm pretty sure I was right — the Kantian sense. If you'll all kindly turn to the 46th subsection of part two of the Critique of Judgement, you'll find the following passage, under the heading "The Faculties of Mind which Constitute Genius" (bear with the old sage of Königsberg here: like everything he writes, it makes your eyeballs feel like they're going to bleed, but it pays off in the end):

Of certain products which are expected, partly at least, to stand on the footing of fine art, we say they are soulless; although we find nothing to censure in them as far as taste goes. A poem may be very pretty and elegant, but is soulless. A narrative has precision and method, but is soulless. A speech on some festive occasion may be good in substance and ornate, but still may be soulless. Conversation frequently is not entirely devoid of entertainment, but remains soulless.... Now what do we here mean by "soul"? .... Now my proposition is that this principle is nothing else than the faculty of presenting aesthetic ideas. But by an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which induces much thought, without the possibility of any definite thought whatever. That is, without a particular concept being adequate to it, and which language, consequently, can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible.

So: genius, in the Kantian sense, involves the possibility of presenting us with a work that animates a thousand ideas, but isn't reducible to any one idea. It's like a conversation that takes on a life of its own, sparking ideas and arabesques of wit, rather than plodding dutifully along. Picture yourself on a barstool, listening to Oscar Wilde jawing with Quentin Crisp on your left, and a kind elderly couple having a discussion of the "How's your whiskey sour, dear?" "Fine, dear" on the other, and you'll have a fair sense of the genius/non-genius distinction. If you want more on this, consider what Douglad Burnham has to say in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Kant argues that art can be tasteful (that is, agree with aesthetic judgment) and yet be 'soulless'... What provides soul in fine art is an aesthetic idea. An aesthetic idea is a counterpart to a rational idea: where the latter is a concept that could never adequately be exhibited sensibly, the former is a set of sensible presentations to which no concept is adequate. An aesthetic idea, then, is as successful an attempt as possible to 'exhibit' the rational idea. It is the talent of genius to generate aesthetic ideas...

The Kantian idea of genius connects, then, with such post-structuralist darlings as indeterminacy and polyvalence. But it also connects to that dusty old New Critical term of praise, unparaphrasability. Which is not to say that indeterminacy is sufficient for genius in and of itself — I've read plenty of indeterminate, sub-Ashbery, semi-Jorie Grahamified poems that didn't set ideas alive in the least. The journals are full of them.

But I digress. To return to Gwynn. If there are three things that are in short supply in Gwynn's poem, they are precisely indeterminacy, polyvalence, and unparaphrasability. I mean, I think we could paraphrase the poem thusly: "there may or may not be a God, and sometimes we yearn for one. Signs of his existence remain ambiguous, although many of us dutifully go on trying to serve him." I mean, that gets most, if not all, of the conceptual content right there, no? The poem says what it says, we get it, and we're done. Was it Yeats who talked about a poem closing shut with a satisfying click, like a small box? (Strange that he'd say that, since such a clicking-shut would only apply to his mid-period verse, not the the early Mallarme-influenced stuff, still less to the late prophetic work, but I digress. Pedantically.) Anyway, looked at in positive terms, Gwynn's poem does just that sort of clicking-shut that Yeats, if I remember correctly, would like. Looked at in negative terms, it fails to manifest much by way of genius.

Another thing that bothered me about the poem made it onto my envelope as "cute when dealing with the uncute." That is, it's cute with a subject it shouldn't get cute with. I mean, we're talking about divinity here. Brahman. The Abgrund of Being. The First Mover. All that. And we do it by picturing the doings of the divine as a matter of answering the emails sent by the pleading souls of this mortal coil (the whole concept of God having a secretary is a bit cutesy). I mean, that's cool if what you're aiming at is comedy (the same trope is used in the Jim Carrey movie Bruce Almighty), but that's not Gwynn's trip, here. The gesture toward the infinite in the final couplet indicates that we're aiming for profundity. So what's called for is a brand of beauty at a pretty far remove from the cute — something more like the sublime, maybe. Beauty with a sense of awe at the impossibility of our mind grasping the infinite particulars of the totality before us, or of awe at the magnitude of a force we would be helpless to resist, but which leaves us undestroyed. This is more of Kant, by the way — rough and ready versions of his mathematical and dynamic sublimes, respectively. I'd quote another big chunk of his work, but fear I've exhausted the patience of all moderately sane readers already.

I suppose the fact that I'm bothered by the use of cuteness where sublimity is called for means that I'm outraged by a breach of decorum. Which makes me feel like I should look like Colonel Mustard, standing at the door to the conservatory, appalled that someone's left a revolver and a coil of rope among the candlesticks. It's got to be one of the most unhip things imaginable, being outraged at a breach of decorum. But there are breaches of decorum and breaches of decorum, and I can get down with a lot of them. The good kind, I think, is the kind outlined by Schiller in his truly great essay "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry." Here, he tells us that one of the ways our nature asserts itself is by welling up as a strong feeling that must come forth, no matter how socially inappropriate it may be. When I think of this idea, I always think of the great scene in the movie Mrs. Brown, in which Judi Dench's Queen Victoria is moping around in an interminable funk after the death of Prince Albert. Her groom, played by Billy Connolly, sees that the Queen is going to let herself die, and that none of her fawning hangers-on has the guts to step up and tell her to snap out of it. Finally, despite his lowly status as a servant, he can't stand it anymore, and his feelings burst out of him in a thick, Scottish burr: "Honest tae God woman, I never thought I'd see you in such a state." All are appalled, decorum lies in ruins. And the outraged Queen is suddenly in love. That's a breach of decorum in which a trivial set of rules is violated by a powerful and deep emotion. In Gwynn's poem, the breach runs the other way: a powerful and deep topic — the divine — is treated in a trivial mode, the cute. If disliking that makes me into some kind of fusty Colonel Mustard, meet me in the conservatory.

Finally, my list of complaints ended with this: "God = Dude? Again?" I mean, if there's any image calling out for some kind of Victor Schlovsky style defamiliarization treatment, it's the notion of the divine as a personality, specifically a male, patriarchal personality. Gwynn gives us that old image, and the goes further, picturing divinity as an administrative personality, a kind of celestial bureaucrat. We've seen a lot of this, and probably should have stopped with the implied celestial bureaucracy of It's a Wonderful Life.

So those were my criticisms. In a way, they aren't really criticisms of Gwynn's poem, so much as they're criticisms of the whole movement he's a part of, the New Formalism. And they're criticisms made from a very particular standpoint. Consider the ideas I've been knocking around: Kant's notions of genius and sublimity, (the parts of his thought most loved by the Romantics, especially Coleridge), Schiller on breaching decorum, and the nineteenth-century-lovin' Victor Schlovsky's idea of defamiliarization. Somewhere along the line I seem to have ended up interpolated into Romanticism. And Romanticism's exactly the sort of thing from which the New Formalists turned away in reaction. Asking Gwynn to appeal to a Romantic sensibility is like asking a vegan to sit down and eat Thanksgiving turkey with the rest of us. And asking someone immersed in Romanticism to like Gwynn is asking for trouble — it'd be like asking him to put down Brontë in favor of Austen.

Bang on the Drum: Adorno and Free Time

I think I must be undergoing some kind of Frankfurt School hangover from the panel on Adorno I attended down at the Modernist Studies Association conference last week, since I haven't been able to look at, read, or listen to anything all week without asking "What would Adorno Say?" For example: as I was brushing my teeth with my alarmingly overpowered electric toothbrush this morning, I flipped the radio on and caught the tail end of the Todd Rundgren classic "Bang on the Drum" (which, by the way, isn't a bad song to get down on your back molars to). And I think the sentiment Rundgren expresses is very much in line with what Adorno had to say about free time.

I suppose it's not really all that helpful to begin with Adorno's quip, in Minima Moralia about free time being nothing but "the reflex-action to a production rhythm imposed heteronomously on the subject." So let's move on immediately to Alex Thomson's gloss on the idea: "even when we are not working," says Thomson, summarizing Adorno, "our rest or relaxation is determined by our need to prepare for work, anticipate work, or simply work again." That is: we aren't really free in "free time," because free time isn't something that's there for us to be autonomous in. Rather, free time is time designated for our recovery from work, so that we can work again. Heteronomously (that is: not for ourselves, but for someone else's agenda. You know — for The Man.) If we're really autonomous in any meaningful measure, we don't think of ourselves as on or off the clock: we're doing our own thing. Such a blessed state is unalienated labor. And it's how I feel when I'm writing an article or book or poem: I can't really tell whether it's work or not, and I'm never really "off," since I end up writing notes with weird, often failed, ideas for the project all the time, on napkins or the insides of books or, more than once, on the side of a styrofoam coffee cup.

But this isn't the way most of us experience things most of the time: there's work, and there's free time, and they imply one another in a dialectical relationship. That is, the idea of free time implies unfreedom, for Adorno. It's only an officially sanctioned moment where we can adjust body and psyche so we can go back to work. I think this is what Adorno was getting at when he claimed that "free time is tending toward the opposite of its own concept." If the idea of free time is autonomy, then it's sadly ironic, because it's really just a compensatory moment that re-fits us to work on someone else's terms. It's not about autonomy at all: it's the shadow-self of alienation.

So that's Adorno. And here's Rundgren:

Every day when I get home from work
I feel so frustrated — the boss is a jerk
And I get my sticks and go out to the shed
And I pound on that drum like it was the boss's head
Because

I don't want to work
I just want to bang on the drum all day
I don't want to play
I just want to bang on the drum all day

So what happens after work? Well, play —the expression of spontenaity and freedom — isn't possible here. We're too frazzled and frustrated from the day job. The act of drumming isn't some outward expression of joy, here: it's a compensatory act for the frustrations of work, and in the end it serves work, in that it allows us to go back to work for our jerk of a boss, having let out (symbolically) the violent urges to which his jerkish bossery led us. So Rundgren isn't celebrating fun: he's crying out about the sad ironies of a system where even the things that should be fun are somehow linked to an alienating system of labor relations. Only he's doing it by rocking out, rather than laying down the kind of pseudo-leftist theory jive that is (I'm sad to say) all I've got to offer on the subject.

Adorno was famous for disliking popular music, and considered it a part of the nefarious culture industry. But I really do think there are significant areas where his point of view coincides with that of certain popular musicians. I remember Robert Kaufman saying, down at the Modernist Studies Association conference, that toward the end of his life Adorno was dragged to the movies, and urged to watch television, by his students. I kind of wish they'd made him tune in to a rock station, too.

Giscombe! Matthias! Ivănescu!

I'm back in Chicago from the Modernist Studies Association blowout down at Vanderbilt, but I arrived with mixed feelings. It was good to see all the Obama signs, Steppenwolf Theater posters, and Museum of Science and Industry banners on the way out of O'Hare. Nashville seems to specialize in advertising different kinds of things — in one two-block walk I saw bumper stickers reading "Drill Here, Drill Now," "McPalin for President," "Choose Life," "A Proud Descendent of a Confederate Soldier," and "1 cross + 3 nails = 4given." So it's nice to get back to a place where one's own values seem to be a part of the social landscape. On the other hand, Chicago was bite-ass cold and semi-snowy. The locals down in Nashville were complaining about their weather, but I'd take it over what we've got in the windy city any day.

Anyway — Ron Silliman has been hinting that he wants a full report on the conference, and I'm hoping to work up some kind of post on it within the next couple of days, but I'm pinned down for the moment with teaching (if it's Tuesday it must be Yeats), reading proofs, and following up on post-conference correspondence. So for now I'll forego the conference wrap-up report and point, instead, to the hot-off-the-presses new issue of the Cincinnati Review,which proves once and for all that the cultural life of Cincinatti continues to thrive, despite the demise of the much-lamented WKRP. The issue has (along with much else) new poems by C.S. Giscombe, Bradford Gray Telford (whose work I discovered this summer), and Mary Szybist (whose work you can hear on the latest Poetry podcast, too), as well as a big slab of translations of Mircea Ivănescu, an essay by Margot Livesey, and a bit of critical writing on John Matthias' amazing Kedging by your present humble blogger. Order a copy now and it'll get you through the long wait at the airport this Thanksgiving.

(By the way: this record store is my favorite place in Nashville, narrowly edging out the full-size replica of the Parthenon, complete with gilded 40-foot Athena — for real. The store may not have any Greek goddesses, but it did have a ton of Steve Reich, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Daft Punk. A welcome relief in a sea of honky-tonks!)