Alan
Golding
Anthologizing
the Innovative: Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris' Poems for the Millennium
Epigraphs are of course obligatory,
and for mine I'm taking a comment from each of the editors of the recent two-volume
historical anthology of international twentieth-century avant-garde poetry Poems for the Millennium that I want to
discuss today. From Pierre Joris:
"Just as 'true dadas are against dada' . . . so true anthologists are
against [anthologies]." From
Jerome Rothenberg: "I make anthologies . . . out of a deep suspicion of
anthologies." These comments point
in the direction that I'd like to take in my own brief remarks, where I want to
raise for discussion some of the complexities and contradictions surrounding
the construction of an anti-canonical or avant-garde anthology; the relation of
such an anthology to questions of canon formation; the definition of
"avant-garde" at work here; and the text's negotiation of gender
issues within the history of avant-gardism that it records.
In a 1981 essay, Rothenberg casts the
self-proclaimed canonizer Harold Bloom in Blakean terms as "exterminating
angel," deciding which poets shall live or die. In this view, Bloom as "teacher / Devourer / critic is
driven to despair and to canon-formation to relieve the stress" of what
could otherwise be experienced as a delicious literary-historical
complexity. Rothenberg's terms in this
essay--"Devourer," "exterminating angel"--help us
understand the ambivalence about questions of canon underlying Poems for the Millennium (which, due to
the visibility, academic clout, and distributing power of its publisher has the
best chance of any of the anthologies in which Rothenberg has been involved to
make an immediate canonical difference).
For in Rothenberg's view--and it's a common one, that has been with us
at least as long as the avant-garde itself--the impulses behind canonizing and
behind a revolutionary poetics are in direct conflict; there is an ongoing
"struggle between new vision & the literalisms of the canon-making
mind" (23). As a canonizing
critic, "Bloom's aim--against the whole thrust of visionary &
revolutionary poetics--has been to maintain the process of canon-formation
& the mastery of critic over poet," and he fails to acknowledge how
his own favored poets themselves struggled "against the total apparatus of
canon-formation both as a religious & secular phenomenon" (14,
25).
Subsequently, in a review of Donald
Allen and George Butterick's The
Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revisited (1982), Rothenberg applies
this skepticism about canonizing more explicitly to poetry anthologies. Looking back over some of the collections
preceding the Allen/Butterick one, he finds Robert Kelly and Paris Leary's A Controversy of Poets problematic
because it "unfortunately focused on individuals (hence:
reputations)," and in collections by Paul Carroll and Michael Lally
likewise "issues of poetics seemed secondary to the process of spotting
& predicting reputations" (182).
These criticisms rest on a distinction between anthologies that
emphasize a poetics and those that emphasize individual poets and their
careers--a distinction that I'll return to later in this talk, and that has
important implications for the project that Rothenberg and Pierre Joris were to
take on some years later, the two-volume Poems
for the Millennium. Rothenberg
writes of the Allen/Butterick collection that the more "the editors become
fixed in their idea of an avant-garde [as something done with and now simply to
be preserved, collected, represented], the more the matter of prediction
focuses on reputations: which poets have 'endured' & 'have achieved a
certain recognition' & which have not.
This is the canon-making mind at work again (not Bloomian here but at
the service of the 'avant-garde')."
The end result is an "enshrinement of the new [that] . . . seems
almost to freeze the idea of newness" (185) in its representatives from a
previous generation.
Pierre Joris proposes in a December
1995 on-line conversation that "an anthology of the avant-garde is in some
way a contradiction in terms--unless it tries to . . . resist taxonomies and
the building of boundaries." Like
Rothenberg in his remarks on Bloom, Joris puts his finger here on the unavoidable
central contradiction of the avant-garde anthology, which gathers
anti-institutional art in an institutional form and which aspires to use one
part of the art system (the publishing of anthologies) against itself. In their postwar groupings, Rothenberg and
Joris say, "the thrust in all was toward a rupture with the past, or a
renewal of the interrupted ruptures of the pre-war avant-gardes." In a variation on that familiar paradox, the
tradition of the avant-garde, the anthology will instantiate an ongoing and
uninterrupted rupture of all the ruptures that have preceded it. The aporias of such an anthology parallel
exactly those of the institutionalized avant-garde itself, reflecting perhaps
the single most significant change in the social location of avant-garde art
practices during the thirty-year period of their protracted death--the loss of
any possible "outsider" location.
(Rather than being continually re-pronounced dead, the avant-garde needs
retheorizing with this change acknowledged as the ground of any such
retheorizing. What is "dead,"
that is, is a historically specific conception of avant-gardism.) At the same time, a gathering like Poems for the Millennium rests on the
premise that the anthology in our own time can represent an institutional frame
susceptible to useful intervention (even if the effects, for instance, of Paul
Hoover's Norton Anthology of Postmodern
Poetry on Norton's general editorial and publishing practices are
minimal). It can be a medium of
intellectual change as much as of routinization, although to function as such
perhaps the form itself needs to be challenged in some of the ways that
Rothenberg and Joris indeed do. As
Rothenberg says of vol. 1, "part of the pleasure of the book is for the
first time being able to bring [previously excluded work] into the body of a
purported University anthology, book of etc. etc." He goes on, "there was a real
excitement . . . in having captured that frame [of the institutionally
sanctioned anthology] & then being able to use it towards the ends for
which it should long ago have been used.
But I had that feeling with anthologies from the start." (And in fact it is worth remembering that
Rothenberg's influential earlier anthologies appeared with large trade presses,
Doubleday and Random House.) Despite
Rothenberg's claims to the contrary, I find it hard to see this as anything
other than an act of canonizing--the use of an influential institutional
framework to put forward work previously outside that frame. In Poems
for the Millennium, then, we have an anthology that is countercanonical in
two contradictory senses: it contributes to a counter-canon of alternative
poetic practices, while seeking to counter the very notion of a canon and
refusing to claim canonizing status or ambitions for itself.
Canonizing, career-mongering, freezing
the ongoing processual nature of revolutionary poetics into a canon of
avant-garde names--these are the risks of even the avant-garde anthology for
Rothenberg and Joris. So how to
navigate these risks? To put that
question another way, how to create an anthology that doesn't read like an
anthology, if you are an editor who says quite explicitly, as Rothenberg has
done, "I . . . dislike anthologies?"
Anthologies of recent linguistically innovative American and / or
British poetry--gathering work that reassesses the boundaries and assumptions
of genre in every way imaginable--nevertheless do not rethink the nature and
form of the anthology itself. One signal
part of Rothenberg and Joris' achievement is that they do.
Though he has generally been willing
to use the term "anthology" to describe such gatherings as Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, A Big Jewish Book, and Revolution of the Word, Rothenberg
describes Poems for the Millennium as
less an anthology (though he knows it will be received that way) and more an
"assemblage as a pulling together of poems & people & ideas about
poetry & much else in the words of others and in our own." As such, the gathering is structured like a
long poem--as Rothenberg puts it, an "epic poem replete with histories
& voices." I would not put too
much store by the absence of the term "anthology" in the title, an
absence shared by many such texts.
There's a real sense, nevertheless, in which this is an anthology that
doesn't want to be one.
As far back as the 1974 Revolution of the Word, Rothenberg's
editorial concern has been with "individuals and groups" (xxiii; my emphasis). Poems for the Millennium
is organized alternatingly by themes and movement and by poet. Vol. 1 includes sections called
"Futurisms," "Expressionism," "Dada,"
"Surrealism," "'Objectivists,'" "Negritude,"
intermixed with "three larger, loosely chronological 'galleries' of
individual poets, without a stress on particular affinities or
interconnections" (15).[i] Thus Rothenberg and Joris do not gather all
the selections for a given poet in one batch as an invitation to consider that
person's work "whole."
Coverage of individual careers is not the point here, and a poet's work
may be scattered throughout the book.
The poetry and prose of Ezra Pound, for instance, the most heavily
represented American in volume I, appears at a number of places both within and
between sections. In vol. 1, to fulfil
their goal of offering "a history of the 'modern' and the
'avant-garde'" (4), they stress movements that "functioned as
collaborative vortices . . . bringing
together many individualities in a common push toward a new dispensation, aimed
at a drastic change of poem & mind" (6). "[I] remain distrustful of the rigidities & career
tactics implicit in the form [of anthologies]," Rothenberg wrote in 1978 (Pre-Faces 140); he remains so today, and
the structure of Poems for the Millennium
embodies that resistance to canonizing rigidities.
What I've suggested earlier as the
privileging of "poetry" over "poets" is evident throughout
Rothenberg's career as an anthologist.
As he and George Quasha put it in America
a Prophecy,
our general intention has
been to show modes of poetry rather than individual poets, and any reader who
takes what follows as an attempt to draw up definitive lists of poets or to
chart chronologies of careers will have missed one of the fundamental premises
of this anthology (xxxvi).
In
the same preface, he includes "A Note on Kindred Publications,"
listing related little magazines, small presses, and other anthologies and
suggesting his vision of poetry, poetics, and anthologizing as a collective
human enterprise. Rothenberg seeks to further this vision partly through organization. In A
Big Jewish Book, he writes "my first decision as to structure was to
stress idea over author" (xl).
Along similar lines, Revolution of
the Word proposes "not just a change of names or personnel but a
counterpoetics" (xvi)--again, then, an anthology of a poetics, a kind of
practice, rather than a representation of individual oeuvres.
Conceiving organization as an act of poesis, Rothenberg designs an anthology
as a poem-- as "a composition & collage" (Big Jewish Book xl), the way good little magazine editors design an
issue. (Conversely, he has also thought
of his own magazines as anthologies, describing Poems from the Floating World as "'an ongoing anthology of the
deep image'" [Pre-Faces
139].) Elsewhere he conceives of the
anthology as "a grand assemblage: a kind of art form in its own
right" ("The Anthology as a Manifesto").[ii] In some sections of Poems for the Millenium, chronology itself produces "a number
of chance juxtapositions that resemble a kind of modernist collage"
(I.15)--a collage of texts, however, as much as names. It could be claimed, of course, that
chronology--that "objective chance" structure--produces, or has the
potential for, the same kind of "chance juxtaposition" in any
anthology. More orthodox gatherings,
however, have teaching apparatus or intervening material--footnotes, headnotes,
bilbiographies--that dissipates or blurs the effects of sharp, even if chance,
juxtaposition.
As a form, then, structurally, Poems for the Millennium is designed to
counter any readings conducted in terms of canonizing judgments or in terms of
representing some presumed avant-garde canon.
To reiterate an earlier point: in their introduction to Poems for the Millennium vol. 2,
Rothenberg and Joris assert that their anthology is explictly not "an attempt to set up a new
canon of contemporaries" (13); on the contrary, it represents a rejection
of the canonizing impulse, "the abandonment of judgment as a bind on the
intelligence or of taste as a determinant of value" (3). The book actively frustrates a reading
conducted in terms of "taste," in contrast to the more conventionally
structured anthology organized around selections from individual poets that
invite the reader to decide whether he or she "likes" that poet and
wants to read further. In distributing
contributors' work throughout the volume (and in some cases, two volumes), the
editors also confound--or at least defer--that favorite reviewers' party game
of canonization-by-page-count: X gets 20 pages, Y only 3, Z isn't even there. Such counts are simply not easy to make in
this case--though to the extent that the game demonstrably still gets played,
the editors' resistance to it has qualified success. As Joris argues in response to one critique of the book's
inclusions and exclusions, "the intent . . . is to map & link
territories, to foreground areas of experimentation, to point to ongoing
possibilities, NOT to do a headcount of the best and brightest canonic or
anti-canonic heads." This position
remains vulnerable, I think, to the objection that the absence of a given group
or individual suggests that their work does not present "areas of
experimentation" or "ongoing possibilities" with sufficient
force to justify their inclusion. Be
that as it may, such a position is consistent with Millennium vol. 1, where Rothenberg and Joris propose "a
mapping of the possibilities . . . without turning the selection of authors
into the projection of a new canon of famous names," "a demand to be
freed from the tyranny of the canonic past," "the inherited
(authoritative) past" (3, 6). The
key terms here are "canonic" and "authoritative"--not, I
would stress, "past," since the editors, always conscious of poetry's
ancient roots, are not merely pointing to some kind of old-fashioned American
Adamism generalized to a global scale.
Rothenberg and Joris state in Poems for the Millennium vol. 2 that
they "have tried to avoid a doctrinaire avant-gardism while presenting
works that test the limits of poetry" (17)--a testing, by the way, that
one would have to say often resides more in the editors' use of the work than
in the writer's intention for it. (I
find it hard to imagine Robert Johnson or Tom Waits thinking of themselves as
"testing the limits of poetry.")
One question this anthology raises for us, then, is this: what does it mean to be
"avant-garde," and what definition(s) of the avant-garde does the
anthology propose? (I ask this in full
awareness that the anthology resists the taxonomic impulse implied in my
questions and in the term "definition.") Do those definitions look different when regarded from an
internationalist perspective? How
successfully do Rothenberg and Joris negotiate the tension between revealing
connections across cultures, nations, and generations (and in the process
sketching a definition of avant-gardism by implication) and honoring
heterogeneity and difference?
Certainly the editors are aware that
the notion of the "avant-garde" will vary in culturally specific
ways, as they show in remarking what specifically Japanese traditions the
Arechi poets react against. But--to
take the American context--what definition of an avant-garde writing practice
does not include Jack Spicer? Includes
a selection from Ashbery's "Flow Chart" rather than from The Tennis Court Oath or Three Poems? What definition of "avant-garde" is operative in the
choice of texts by, say, Anne Sexton or Adrienne Rich? They can't be described as part of a
self-defined avant-garde community (somehow Sexton, Plath, Lowell and Bishop as a Cambridge, Massachusetts
avant-garde don't quite cut it). Can
Sexton and Rich be described as producing particular avant-garde texts, and if
so what would that avant-gardism consist of?
The usual criteria of formal innovation, however defined, wouldn't
apply: there's little that's formally innovative about their work. And formally, something might look
"experimental" in relation to the writer's own oeuvre (Rich's move
into free verse, say) that looks perfectly conventional in relation to other
writers' practice.
Does Poems for the Millennium, then, ask us to accept the proposition of
something like an avant-gardism of content and theme as well as of structure,
of attitudes toward art, and so forth?
To include Sexton and Rich in this context is to include writers on the
basis of an iconoclasm of content--Sexton rewriting the Jesus myth, Rich's
rhetorically passionate 1970s feminism.
Sexton, however, only seems "iconoclastic" in relation to the
mainstream poetics of her own particular historical moment, and no more so even
in that moment than Lowell or (especially) Plath. And according to the criterion of content, why would Edna St.
Vincent Millay, for example, not appear in vol. I? I raise these definitional issues precisely because Rothenberg and Joris assume the continued relevance of
avant-garde practice. Indeed this is
one of the crucial contributions of their work, in the face of contemporary
theoretical arguments for the death of the avant-garde, or of claims like David
Lehman's (to cite the title of his recent book) that the New York School is
"the last avant-garde." In
other words, Poems for the Millennium
reminds us that avant-garde writing (whatever we might mean by that term) has a
century-long international history and an active international present.
Historical reminders come with
historical baggage, of course, and the baggage in Poems for the Millennium has to do with gender. The anthology asks gender questions of
itself, through the inclusion of this passage from Rachel Blau DuPlessis: There
are questions which the avant-garde must answer . . . Where is/are its women:
where in the poems, serving what function?
where in its social matrices, with what functions? where in its ideologies? How does it create itself by positioning its
women and its women writers? (433-34)
The
one aspect of literary history that Poems
for the Millennium does not place under sustained scrutiny is the
historically homosocial structure of avant-gardes. Rothenberg himself both acknowledges and tries to address the problem
of representation:
As the editors are well
aware, there's a notable lack of women in these opening entries [of vol.
II]--offset, in the natural course of things by a strong female presence as the
book & the century unwind. Thus in
the second gallery (post-1960), eight of the last ten entries (six of eight by
another count) are women--a change in the demographics of avantgardism & a
far cry from the 1950s.
Rothenberg's
observation does not entirely explain the gender imbalance of the volume as a
whole, however (which is about 25% women; vol. 1 is lower). Furthermore, it is hard to see on what he
bases this claim. At the risk of
seeming like a bean counter: the count of 6-out-of-8 obtains only if one
discounts the seven male artists in the book's final section, "Toward a
Cyberpoetics," and the three men to whom it is given to close the book:
the editors, and Robert Duncan. (In
other words, the gender balance looks pretty good toward the end if one ignores
ten male writers.) On the last two
pages of the table of contents, in fact 4 out of the last 15 names are women,
which is right around the 25% that obtains for the volume as a whole. As regards some quick suggestions on what to
do: firstly, it's not too hard to imagine a "feminist poetics"
section in the anthology. At the level
of specific inclusions, in the Anglo-American context, the inclusion of, say,
Joanne Kyger and / or Helen Adam as San Francisco poets; the inclusion (or at
least mention) of Barbara Guest with the New York school; of Joanna Drucker in
the context of visual poetics; of Trinh Minh-Ha and Harryette Mullen in the
context of race and gender identity; and of some more British women beyond
Maggie O'Sullivan could have gone some way towards redressing the balance.
If, as Rothenberg argues, "the
poetics of gender is taken throughout as one of the significant and necessary
breakthroughs of our time," we have to ask how that significance is
reflected in the text. If Poems for the Millennium is a
manifesto-anthology that involves "the sense of poetry being the center of
a program, a proposition or a set of propositions working in the public
sphere," what public positions does it project on the poetics of
gender? The use of Sexton and Rich seems
to suggest that, even in the context of an anthological history of avant-garde
writing, a feminist poetics is best represented by recourse to
unproblematically referential mainstream work.
(Parenthetically, I think it revealing that the text contains no comparably
mainstream male writers.) In raising an
eyebrow about these two poets, I'm embarrassedly aware of how my position could
seem to replicate the exclusionary judgments of male modernists who dismissed
their inadequately experimental female contemporaries. I do not want to do that, especially with
Rich, who has been and remains a crucial figure for post-World War II American
poetry. And I do not want to minimize
the anthology's utterly transformative effect--certainly on my own
understanding of twentieth-century poetry, and I imagine on that of many other
readers too. But I do want to argue
that a different gender balance and discourse in Poems for the Millennium would provide not just the powerful
revision of twentieth-century literary history that the volume already offers,
but a revision of that revision. In
addition to a revisionist history from an avant-gardist perspective, we would
get a realignment of or fresh perspective on that historically male-dominated
avant-gardism itself. To the extent
that Poems for the Millennium is a historical
anthology, it has the chance to re-examine the history that is its
subject. Like the very best
anthologies, it does not merely reflect but recreates in spectacular ways a
whole body of poetic knowledge, a century's worth of experimental writing practices. But it does not recreate the gendered
history out of which so many of those practices emerged.
Alan
Golding
University
of Louisville
Author’s
note: Page references to the Poems for
the Millennium prefaces are to the pre- publication versions, and need
revision.