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<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, November 15, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">On Tuesday, I noted <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2384413017">my
confusion</a> as to whether Thom </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan&#8217;s &#8220;<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">towards </i>24 Stills&#8221; in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kiosk </i>no. 1 should be read as a complete
work or as an excerpt. In a footnote, I suggested that such confusion wasn&#8217;t
restricted to just </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan&#8217;s work or to my own experience as a reader.
Mulling it over further in the days since, I have been reminded of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Technographic Typography,</i> a poem
reportedly of more than 800 pages that was being produced by Thomas Meyer back
in the 1960s when he was still a student at Bard.* Anyone who has read the
crisp, clean, short work of Tom&#8217;s mature poetry in books such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">At Dusk Iridescent </i>(Jargon, 1999) will
find it hard to believe that there was once was a sprawling, potentially
endless text, even if, line by line, it showed that same attentive care for
craft that has become Meyer&#8217;s signature. In somewhat parallel fashion, the teenager
who was the late Frank Stanford completed the 15,283 line <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You </i>&#8211; nearly five times
the length, say, of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beowulf </i>&#8211; went
off to college &amp; transformed into a writer of much tamer short poems by the
time he put a gun to his head at the age of 29. At some point during each of
their careers, both Meyers &amp; Stanford appear to have shifted their idea of
the scope of a poem. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I on the other hand seem to have
gone in the opposite direction. Before I wrote the booklength prose poem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ketjak, </i>let alone <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tjanting </i>or the on-going <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alphabet</i>
(800 pages in manuscript &amp; counting), I published <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nox</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>with Burning Deck in 1974, a collection of 60 poems that use a
total of 135 words. Here is the only poem in <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nox</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>that stretches out to four lines:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">cabin</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">quilt</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">river</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">latch</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">More typical are:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">ease</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">awes</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Or:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">bolism</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Because <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nox</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>is set in a series of fifteen quadrants, four poems to a page,
I&#8217;ve heard some <span class="GramE">readers</span> report that they could not
tell if each page was one poem or even if the book was a single work. It&#8217;s not
an unfair question, even if an answer in the negative seems transparently
obvious to me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This question of scope or
scale is not precisely the same as the question of when (or how) a poem ends,
although I sense that the two are closely intertwined. The problem of endings,
of closure, is even more complex &amp; difficult than that bit of magic through
which a poem begins. That fact alone accounts for any number of phenomena,
including the trouble readers, myself included, have deciding what the
boundaries of a given text might be. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">At one level, one of, &amp;
perhaps <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the</i>, strongest attraction of
closed forms in poetry lies not simply in the pale pleasures of pattern recognition
(real though they may be), but in the fact that the end point is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">déjà toujours</i> determined before a single
letter has been committed to paper. Since the poet knows in advance where he or
she is going &#8211; on a journey of three or fourteen or however many lines &#8211; the
opportunities for getting lost along the way are proportionately fewer.
Conversely, the old creative writing school saw that a novel is a &#8220;long
fictional <span class="GramE">prose work</span> with a flaw,&#8221; all but
acknowledges that a major engine of <span class="SpellE">flawedness</span> is
precisely the difficulty of locating the right end-point for an indeterminate
work, a potential problem that it shares with all poetry that is not defined in
advanced by a fixed form. More than one long poem has been started only to
disappear into in an inconclusive never quite finished state: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Leaves of Grass, <span class="GramE">The</span>
Cantos,</i> Beverly Dahlen&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Reading</i>,
&amp; the long untitled prose work from which Clark Coolidge managed to rescue
&#8220;Weathers&#8221; all demonstrate aspects of this issue. Only Celia Zukofsky&#8217;s
grafted-on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">&#8220;A&#8221;-24</i></span> <span style="font-family: Arial;">spares her husband&#8217;s epic that same fate. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The question of size or
scope impacts poems in all sorts of ways. Lines, sentence, even individual
words near the beginning or end carry a different sense of position than those
that appear to float &#8220;freely&#8221; in the middle. Indeed, one of the most
interesting moments in any poem, especially when one is reading a text on
paper, is that transition that occurs into an ending of the text, the moment at
which the logic of each word is dictated by how it will set up the final
phrase. It can occur in the last line or stanza, or even several pages from the
end, but you can almost always find it if you look closely. A poet such as
David Ignatow made a minor art form just out of this moment, the twist into the
conclusion &#8211; in some <span class="GramE">instances,</span> it&#8217;s the only thing
happening in the poem. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">An inverse transition occurs
near the start of a text, as it shifts from &#8220;setting out&#8221; to &#8220;settling in,&#8221; but
I think the reader is less apt to recognize its presence as the sense of
anticipation is quite different: it occurs at a point when the range of
reference in a text is still opening up. Most often it arrives at that exact
moment when the reader recognizes just how far &amp; wide the text itself can
go. At the far end of the text, just the opposite occurs: possibilities are
progressively stripped away until the poem arrives at an instant that is (or
should be) unavoidable. I would argue that these moments are as true for haiku
as for epics. In this sense, even the one-letter poems of Joyce Holland&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alphabet Anthology </i>(Iowa City: X Press,
1973<span class="GramE">)*</span>* have a beginning, middle &amp; end. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">These are not the only
changes that take place when works are <span class="SpellE">exceprted</span>. <span class="GramE">Part :</span> whole relations become entirely invisible. But it&#8217;s
just these transitional cues that are blurred whenever poems appear only in
part. Sometimes &#8211; though not always &#8211; other language in the excerpted text
takes over the role, assigned to it as much by a reader&#8217;s intuition as by the
text itself, surrogate transitions specific to the local occasion. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thinking about it, it seems
entirely possible that <span class="GramE">neither Stanford or</span> Meyer did
change their sense of completeness when they shifted away from the epic-length
projects of their youth. In Meyer&#8217;s case especially, it may have been that he
wanted (or even needed) at that point to compose without the necessity of such
closure. I know in my own case that the transition from the microwriting of <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nox</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>to book-length projects, such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ketjak</i>, proceeded very quickly. At the
time it seemed that I was merely focusing in on the smallest elements in the
writing, without which I could not have attempted anything on a larger scale,
although in some very clear way in my head, I knew that I was a writer of long
poems almost a decade before I sat down &amp; started to write one. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* I would
scarcely believe my own memory in this if I had not published &#8220;Fragment from
Graph 42&#8221; in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tottels </i>4 back in July
1971. The engineering vocabulary, in both the work&#8217;s title and segmentation, is
another radical difference from Meyer&#8217;s later poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** Joyce
Holland is, or was, Dave Morice. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, November 14, 2002</span></h2>

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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">I sat
down with
yesterday&#8217;s post to the blog from K. Silem Mohammad &amp; Tom Orange
&amp; just
listed the points to which I personally wanted to respond: my list came
to
three pages single spaced. It&#8217;s just not possible in blog form to
approach
anything with such obsessively pointillist detail, so I thought instead
to
group these sometimes disjunct ideas, each one of which could spark a
more
thorough discussion somewhere<span class="GramE">,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>&amp;</span> came up with two
intersecting
axes of concern:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">&#9679;<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">My</span>
definition
of abstract lyric &#8211; &#8220;</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">bounded by
modest
scale and focused on the elements within&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">&#9679;<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">The</span>
role of
&#8220;the social&#8221; within &amp; around poetry, a question that has been raised
by </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Louis Cabri</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &amp; others<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Hovering around these
two
axes I find a third key issue: the role of close reading &amp; &#8220;bean
counting&#8221;
in thinking through issues of poetry. I want to approach this one first,
because
I think its implications impact what can be said about either of the
other two.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Close reading&#8217;s
association
with the New Critics (NC) is often treated as grounds for distrust
because of
NC&#8217;s alignment with a reactionary aesthetic tendency in the United
States &#8211; one
that joined the poetics of the Southern Agrarians to those of the Boston
Brahmans &#8211; but it is worth noting that key NC theorist René Wellek&#8217;s
training
in critical practice came through the Prague Linguistics Circle, founded
in
1926 by a group of scholars that included Roman Jakobson &amp;
incorporated
many of the tendencies that originated within Russian Formalism (&amp;
in
relation to Russian futurist poets, from Mayakovsky to Khlebnikov).
Unless one
adopts the dual theory that (1) structural elements have inherent
political
biases &#8211; an argument that would be kin to an equation of, say, Poundian
metrics
with fascism &amp;/or that (2) aspects of the Prague School itself were
part of
a larger historical drift of a rightward moving avant-garde, the way the
Trostskyists of the 1930s New York Intellectuals transformed themselves
into
the Neocons of the 1970s (the history, say, of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Partisan Review</i>) &#8211; an argument that again puts close reading
into a
fundamental(<span class="SpellE">ist</span>) relation to a political
tendency &#8211;
then in fact one needs to look at the practice of close reading in the
light of
its materialist roots. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The process of bean
counting
&#8211; a phrase I really like, by the way &#8211; is predicated on the reality that
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">beans exist. </i>Signifying elements
(that
could be saying <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anything</i>)
actually
are present &amp; countable in a poem (as in a novel or any other social
product). One major &#8211; and characteristic &#8211; failing of much bad critical
writing
(which is in fact <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">most</i></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">critical writing) is that, in literal terms,
its
practitioners <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">don&#8217;t know
beans</i>. That
is, they make sweeping generalizations that cannot be tested because if
they
could, their assertions would collapse from the weight of contradictory
data.
Again, let me pose the example of M.L. Rosenthal &amp; confessional
poetry.
Rosenthal&#8217;s attempt to bind together disparate tendencies of poetry in
an
attempt to rescue the direct inheritors of NC&#8217;s aesthetic program from a
fate
it so richly deserved would fuel concepts such as Jim Breslin&#8217;s likening
American poetry to a land of many suburbs, absent conflict &amp;
ultimately
lacking shape &amp; content, sort of a Columbine of the heart. Dana
Gioia&#8217;s
terribly incomplete (&amp; too often inaccurate) social history of the
institutionalization of poetry in &#8220;Can Poetry Matter<span class="GramE">?,</span>&#8221;
is merely that same argument presented with a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Music Man </i>exhortation for the masses to go out &amp; buy
trombones.
Not coincidentally, many of the arguments made about langpo over the
past three
decades &#8211; that it is theory driven, humorless, anti-referential,
anti-narrative, self-consciously difficult, etc. &#8211; are all disprovable
simply
by actually looking at what is there. So, yes, I will continue to favor
the
enumeration of beans. I think it&#8217;s the most materialist critical
practice
available, when used appropriately, &amp; an excellent inoculation
against all
manner of mythology &amp; self-interested hokum.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Kasey states that he
is &#8220;<span style="color: black;">skeptical about such designations as &#8216;social&#8217; and
&#8216;asocial&#8217;
as polarized ways of conceiving lyric <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">formally</i>.&#8221;
That&#8217;s not precisely what I had said &#8211; although it is close to Tom
Orange&#8217;s
paraphrase &#8211; but the concept as such is worth pursuing. Tom&#8217;s own
argument was
rather the reverse: for him, a work that could be unpacked
hermeneutically is
less transgressive than one that resists by presenting an impenetrable
surface
of signifiers. It&#8217;s a logic by which Christian Bök&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eunoia</i></span></span> <span style="font-family: Arial;">or the
poetry
of Sheila E. Murphy or Peter Ganick might be seen as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">more social</i></span> <span style="font-family: Arial;">than
</span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Louis Cabri</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">s&#8217; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Mood
Embosser</i>, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Barrett
 Watten</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bad History</i> or
</span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Bob Perelman</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
First
World</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">From my perspective,
lyric
is a formal category, neither a pejorative nor an adulatory term. There
are
lyric poets whose work is wonderful (Joseph Ceravolo, Kit Robinson,
Barbara
Guest, the Zukofsky of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Barely and
Widely</i>)
&amp; there are lyric poets whose work would make any sensitive reader
cringe
(fill in the blanks). Contrary to Tom&#8217;s argument, however, I do not
think that
the capacity of a poem to be unpacked hermeneutically is by definition
the
determination of what is or is not a lyric. Rather, it is the poem&#8217;s
sense of its
own boundaries vis-à-vis the larger world. The New Critics&#8217; passion for
the
lyric is separate from their own use of methodology to demonstrate why
this or
that lyric, this or that poet should be anointed. As I tried to
demonstrate
awhile back with the poetry of <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_10_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2382880512">Bruce
Andrews</a>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">any</i> text can be
unpacked
through close reading &#8211; that is a condition of the reading mind, not
something to
which only some poets are subject to some of the time. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eunoia </i>is as much subject to such a process as would be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Mood Embosser</i> or Barbara
Guest&#8217;s
&#8220;Defensive Rapture.&#8221; What privileged the lyric for the New Critics was
not any
hermeneutic depth, nor any relation to personal expression, but rather
the
lyric&#8217;s sense of itself as aesthetically contained &#8211; &#8220;focused on the
elements
within&#8221; &#8211; which spared this genre entanglements with the social, a
category
that in the 1930s was at least as charged &amp; problematic as it is
today. It
was containment precisely that enabled the New Critics to claim that
they were
reading only what was in the poem &amp; nothing extraneous that might
&#8220;pollute&#8221;
the critique. Only lyric could thus verify their claim to be specialized
&#8211; and hence
professional &#8211; readers, the position that in turn enabled them between
1935
&amp; 1950 to become the dominant power within American English
departments. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Guest, on the face of
her
poetry, is clearly a lyric writer. That she elsewhere has been active in
service
to the field, as biographer &amp; teacher, doesn&#8217;t actually alter what
is on
the page, any more than Jack Spicer&#8217;s or Ezra Pound&#8217;s notoriously
antisocial
comments &amp; activities in the real world erases the value of their
poetry.
In this sense, Kasey is quite correct in asserting that the social is
not a
formal term. Where form does intersect with the social, however, has to
do with
the poem&#8217;s own sense of its permeability vis-à-vis the world. This has
less to
do with reference in the sense of &#8220;this poem is about the struggle of
the
heroic people of Lichtenstein&#8221; than it does with language sources, image
schemas &amp; -- the deciding factor for me &#8211; the way in which the poem
structurally defines itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The most interesting
instances in this territory (as in many others) are those that situate
themselves ambiguously along the border. Larry Eigner is an excellent
case in
point. His poems are as contained &amp; formally balanced as any written
over
the past 50 years:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">walking</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">the</span> idea
of
dancing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span class="GramE">time</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">making</span>
room<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This untitled piece
from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The World and Its Streets, Places
</i>(Black
Sparrow, 1977) could be analyzed in exactly the same kind of formal
terms that
I used with <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2383955338">Barbara
Guest</a> on November 3. The poem proposes itself almost as the essence
of
lightness, with extra spacing between lines &amp; the characteristic
Eigner
sweep down across the page. Its use of suffix &amp; sound organizes the
prosody: hear the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">k </i>move from
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">walking </i>to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">making</i> &amp; the elegant use of the liquid <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">m </i>from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">time </i>to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">making </i>&amp; finally to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">room. </i>There is nothing apparent
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">within </i>this text to suggest
anything
other than what is on the page &#8211; even the casual or unfamiliar reader
will
recognize that the relation between walking &amp; dancing (think of a
choreographer like Simone <span class="SpellE">Forti</span> or Sally
Silvers)
could be very adequately characterized as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">time
making room</i>. &amp; yet here is a poet who could not walk, who spent
his
life confined to wheel chairs. Nowhere is that mentioned: the fact
simply <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">haunts </i>the poem for anyone who
ever knew
Eigner or knew of him well enough to know how cerebral palsy shaped
&amp;
limited his physical vocabulary. <span class="GramE">At what level is this
poem a
lyric?</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Eigner is justly
famous for
his use of simple nouns &#8211; wind, tree, sun, sky &#8211; and yet it is
relatively rare
in his poems for these items to exist as abstractions. The presence of
the
human world repeatedly invades &amp;
contextualizes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">damp</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">wind</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">the</span> birds
chorusing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">clouds</span>
moving the sky<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">the</span> haze<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">blast</span>
the foghorn<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">through</span>
the trees<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Bounded at either end
by
couplets, the birds anthropomorphized, clouds assigned intentionality,
the key
verb <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blast</i> is as much a curse
as a
description of sound. Nature, in Eigner, is never innocent. Nor at times
is it
even nature. Another poem in the same book reads<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">the</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
rain and the stars<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">in</span> the
head<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span><span class="GramE">in</span> the head<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">beaches</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">slow</span>
clouds, the
dark<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Where exactly does
this take
place? What is the ontological status of the dark?
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Not all of Eigner&#8217;s
poems
work like this, but a substantial majority of them do. While his palette
is very
much that of the lyric, these poems are not contained but are often, as
with
these three, records of an intense struggle against constraint. These
poems are
in fact social very much in the same way that Olson&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maximus, </i>or Pound&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cantos </i>or
<span class="SpellE">Du</span> <span class="SpellE">Plessis</span>&#8217; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drafts</i> are. They take as a given
their
interactions with the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Another poet who very
much
straddles &amp; plays with these borders, albeit in a very different
manner, is
Jackson Mac Low. Characteristic of his approach is the book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twenties</i> (Roof, 1991) in which
each of
the 100 twenty-line poems is fixed not just formally, but in time &#8211; each
text
both as to the date of composition &amp; the location. Here are the
first two
stanzas of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">44</i>, written on
</span><st1:date day="2" month="3" year="1990"><span style="font-family: Arial;">March 2,
1990</span></st1:date><span style="font-family: Arial;">, in &#8220;Dr. Wadsworth&#8217;s consulting
room&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Certainty<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>tardive dyskinesia<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Pascal<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span>quilt<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">swift</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
adjacency<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>directed<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>cliff<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span>waltz<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">nostrum</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Galatians<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>seed difficulty<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>inert<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">parse</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
quelled draft marzipan<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span><span class="SpellE">pileate</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Zesty
quaff varnish<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>nice <span class="SpellE">ol</span>&#8217; obedience<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">lira</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
ingression <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span>price of
ineptitude<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>readiness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">lean-to</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
fortunate obligation<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>needle
paddle<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">assignation</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> league<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>reach<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Portugal</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> plot<o:p></o:p></span>

<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Each poem in the book
is
composed of exactly five such stanzas, almost all of whose lines also
exhibit a
spatial caesura. <span class="SpellE">Exoskeletally</span>, the poems are
as
fixed or closed as any sonnet series. Aurally, they&#8217;re a riot, sounding
like a
calliope heard under the influence of some bad psychotropic, with just a
hint
of the Daytona 500 buzzing in the consonants. To call them &#8220;lyric&#8221; in
the
prosodic sense is to parody the notion, which I think is part of the
point.
Most significantly, however, is the range of possible linguistic inputs
into
this verbal <span class="GramE">machine.</span> Its first line consists of
an
abstract state of belief; a chronic condition resulting from
anti-psychotic
medications, characterized by uncontrollable chewing motions; a
philosopher <span class="GramE">whose</span> most famous work&#8217;s title could be translated
into
English as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thoughts</i>; and a
homey
object &#8211; one that very often is composed of a limited set of repeated
patterns
&#8211; associated with craft more than art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;
</span>At one level, Mac Low is playing with our definition of the work
itself.
At another, he is pulling material in from everywhere &#8211; there is no part
of the
human experience that cannot be sucked into this process, &amp; like
both
tardive dyskinesia &amp; Pascal, many of the
</span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">ind</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">ividual words &amp; phrases by their very
nature
function as barbs or hooks to the social universe.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If Eigner gives us
what we
expect in a New American lyric form, he does while continually
problematizing
&amp; subverting the notion. Mac Low on the other hand fulfills the
social
contract for a lyric work with the passion of an obsessive compulsive.
The
poems are closed formally. At one level their sense of containment is
complete.
But at another, the world is traveling through these <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twenties</i> like so much </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Po</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">rt
Authority
traffic at rush hour. Mac Low gives us the outer structure, but violates
its
implicit (or possibly hidden) assumptions with an abandon that is often
</span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">brea</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">th-taking. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Mac Low &amp; Eigner
each
raise the question of lyric containment, but do so in ways that raise
the
stakes for the genre considerably. Like </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Rae Armantrout</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> (who might be thought of as a third front in
this
assault on the lyric), they demonstrate how a poetic palette &#8211; a set of
traditional devices &#8211; developed to insulate the poem from the dirty
world can
itself be socialized &amp; that, in fact, there is not just one right
way to go
about this. They functionally disprove the core tenet of New Criticism
&amp;
have expanded the possibilities of the poem not just for our time, but
for the
future. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
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Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/abstract%2520lyric' rel='tag'>abstract lyric</a>,
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, November 13, 2002</span></h2>

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<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-84466853' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">K. Silem
Mohammad responded to a question of Chris <span class="SpellE">Stroffolino&#8217;s</span>
on the Poetics List concerning my comments regarding <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2383955338">Barbara
Guest</a>, which in turn generated a correspondence between Kasey and Tom
Orange. The two of them offer an enormous number of good &amp; interesting
ideas, more than a few of which challenge some of my own thinking &#8211; a good
thing I&#8217;d like to encourage. While I generally feel it doesn&#8217;t make that much
sense to replicate on the blog &#8211; which gets between 50 &amp; 160 hits per day &#8211;
what has already appeared on the Poetics List, with its distribution to 900
people, I do think it&#8217;s useful here, to flesh out all of the issues. I&#8217;ve added
italics where email discourages it &#8211; those asterisks at the beginning &amp; end
of a word are bloody ugly &#8211; added a link to Tom Orange&#8217;s essay on Clark
Coolidge, which enters into the conversation, and corrected a couple of typos,
but otherwise not mucked with the text. Here is Kasey&#8217;s letter to Poetics:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">on</span></span><span style="color: black;"> </span><st1:date day="4" month="11" year="2002"><span style="color: black;">11/4/02</span></st1:date><span style="color: black;"> 6:36 PM, Chris <span class="SpellE">Stroffolino</span> <span class="SpellE">Stroffolino</span> at <a href="http://pv2fd.pav2.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/compose?curmbox=F000000001&amp;a=7fad30ce32ac5904ef7ea33f027ce570&amp;mailto=1&amp;to=cstroffo@EARTHLINK.NET&amp;msg=MSG1036473271.24&amp;start=5643481&amp;len=8161&amp;src=&amp;type=x" target="_top"><span style="color: #000099; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">cstroffo@EARTHLINK.NET</span></a> wrote:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">&gt; So,
what do you plural all think of this statement on the Blog? &gt; &gt; "one
sees quickly that Barbara Guest has become the single most powerful influence
on new writing by women in the U.S."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">I thought
as soon as I read this that it was a controversial claim, to say the least.
Certainly she's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">one</i> of the most
influential. But what about Lyn Hejinian, </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black;">Carla Harryman</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black;">, </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black;">Rae
 Armantrout</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black;">, Jorie Graham,
Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, Susan Howe, and at least a dozen
others I could probably list off the top of my head? Obviously these are writers
who cover a wide spectrum of different schools and approaches, not all of whom
we all will admire equally, and maybe we're dealing with very specific
definitions of "powerful" and/or "new writing," but
certainly the existing population of younger women poets, even if we limit it
to "experimental" communities, is by no means a uniform mass of
Guest-imitators. For that matter, a lot of male poets (including myself) have
been influenced by Guest as well, and a lot of male poets have influenced women
writers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">As a
matter of fact, I have some problems with the piece on abstract lyric as a
whole. (Ron, just for the record, I think your blog is a great thing&#8212;not least
because I frequently find myself disagreeing with you in ways that stimulate my
own thought.) To start with, the very notion that "it is in the poetry of
Barbara Guest that the form really comes into focus" begs a lot of
questions. Was it not in focus in the work of Wallace Stevens, for example? Ron
(or others), would you even consider Stevens an abstract lyricist? <span class="GramE">Hart Crane?</span> <span class="GramE">H.D.?</span> </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: black;">Dickinson</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black;">? <span class="GramE">Etc.?</span> Why or why not?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">Ron, you
define the A.L. as "a poem that functions <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as a lyric</i>, bounded by modest scale and focused on the elements
within." The italicized phrase seems to explain only circularly. Do you
mean that it functions primarily on the level of music (as opposed to, say,
logical argument)? This would eliminate a lot of reflective, philosophical work
that nevertheless strikes me as "lyric" (e.g., Keats). Do you mean
simply that it is relatively short (which seems to be covered by "modest
scale")? In what sense is A.L. any more "focused on the elements
within" than other kinds of lyric or poetry in general? The examples you
give are often examples of compact syllabic patterning, consonance, and so forth;
are these the "elements within"? Do you mean that the A.L. isolates
these elements as material language over against their function as units of
sense? Again, isn't this true of a lot of other poetry as well: that it
foregrounds the signifier?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">I'll accept
that "not all short poems are lyrics," but in what sense is </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black;">Rae Armantrout</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black;">'s poetry "only incidentally lyrical, if that"?
This claim, more perhaps than any other you make, bewilders me. "Lyric in
her case," you write, "is a feint or strategy, but is very seldom
what is actually going on within the poem." I'm fascinated by the idea of
lyric as a "feint"&#8212;the notion that lyrical effects can be randomly
simulated or hastily approximated rather than meticulously orchestrated, and
that it might nevertheless be very difficult for the reader to tell the
difference. But how, then, is it possible to tell when lyric is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> a feint? When is it "what is
actually going on" as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">opposed</i> to
something that is ... what? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Not</i> going
on? Then how can it be perceived as a "strategy" or anything else? I
don't have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Veil</i> in front of me, but
when I picture a page of it from memory, "lyric" is one of the first
terms that <span class="GramE">comes</span> to mind, and elegant, graceful lyric
at that. Have I been <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fooled</i> in some
way?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">You
provide a possible clue when you say that in comparison to Armantrout's poems,
Guest's are "as closed as sonnets." The implied distinction here is
one between an "open," and therefore non-lyric, poetic, and a
"closed," or rule-<span class="GramE">based(</span>?) one. But can this
possibly be right? Do we really want to say that intuitive,
"pattern-free" (if <span class="SpellE">patternlessness</span> is ever
possible) composition can never count as lyric, or at least not as
"abstract lyric"?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">You
compare Guest's poetry to Clark Coolidge's: "where Coolidge's works revel
in the sometimes raucous prosody of his intensely inventive ear, Guest's return
the reader again &amp; again to the word and its integration into a phrase, to
a phrase and its integration into a line, to a line and its integration into a
stanza or strophe." You go on to give some examples of this multi-level
integration in Guest, and oddly enough, the first thing that came to my mind
was a very methodologically similar recent reading by Tom Orange of Coolidge's
"Ounce Code Orange." (Once more, I don't have the reference or a
reliable memory handy&#8212;Tom's piece is in either <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New American Writing</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/13/coolidge-o-a.html">Jacket</a></i> or both,
and it's a great essay, despite my vague skepticism regarding this particular
mode of close reading, which I too indulge in from time to time.) I won't quote
at length, but I encourage everyone to visit Ron's blog and decide for
themselves whether the syllable-counting in question can really yield the kinds
of aesthetic evidence that Ron claims for it. I won't deny that the lines do
exhibit an admirable balance and sense of sonic precision that has something to
do with syllabic disposition, but I'm not yet convinced that it's a balance or
precision that can be explicated via quantification&#8212;that there is a substantive
difference, in terms of what can be materially demonstrated through structural
analysis, between Coolidge's "raucous prosody" and Guest's
"instinct for balance and closure." The differentiating element here
would seem to have to amount to either intention or instinct, and if it is the
latter, as this last quote would suggest, the line is thin indeed between
Coolidge's reveling and Guest's integrating.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">I've
belabored this at such length not just because I'm ornery (tho I am one ornery
cuss), but because this is something I'm wrestling with a lot myself at
present. So thank you, Ron, for the blog in general, and in particular for this
opportunity to flex my thinking-fingers on the question of lyric
"authenticity" <span class="SpellE">vs</span> whatever the opposite of
such authenticity is.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">&#8212;Kasey<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>*</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Tom Orange replied to Kasey,
copying myself, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Louis
 Cabri</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &amp; Kevin
Davies: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">kasey</span></span></span><span style="color: black;">,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">you</span></span><span style="color: black;"> raise some
(actually a lot!) of good questions here. <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">i</span></span>
can't speak for ron here of course but <span class="SpellE">i've</span> been
thinking about role/place of "the social" in poetic form a bit in
terms that ron and <span class="SpellE">louis</span> <span class="SpellE">cabri</span>
have staked out on the blog. <span class="GramE">and</span> <span class="SpellE">i've</span>
been trying to formulate my own thoughts so maybe this will help as much along
my own lines as much as yours.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="SpellE"><span style="color: black;">cetainly</span></span><span style="color: black;"> <span class="SpellE">ron's</span> initial definition of abstract lyric &#8212; "a poem
that functions <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as a lyric</i>, bounded by
modest scale and focused on the elements within" &#8212; is, as you point out,
partly circular or <span class="SpellE">tautologous</span>. <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">i</span></span> don't think this necessarily means music to the
exclusion of logical argument: see e.g. <span class="SpellE">zukofsky</span>. <span class="GramE">or</span> another example that <span class="SpellE">i</span> think
ron might agree with in terms of what <span class="SpellE">i</span> guess <span class="SpellE">i</span> can call the "social lyric" as opposed to
"abstract lyric" or "asocial lyric": </span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="SpellE"><span style="color: black;">dickinson</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black;">. (<span class="GramE">more</span> on that shortly.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">"modest
scale" certainly implies short in terms of length but more <span class="SpellE">i</span> think in terms of scope: pound's scale is epic, as is say
<span class="SpellE">zukofsky's</span> again in late <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"A"</i> (<span class="SpellE">i</span> forget, 22 or 23) where
thousands of years of history (large scale) are compressed into 1000 lines (not
page-long lyric but not, standing by itself, epic either).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">"<span class="GramE">elements</span> focused within" again refers <span class="SpellE">i</span> think to scale, as well as something like
"attention" (in the objectivist/projectivist sense). <span class="GramE">there</span> are no (or at least few) "figures of
outward." the poem's referential structure is largely not directed
outward, it's somewhat self-contained or self-reflexive. <span class="GramE">something</span>
of a well-wrought urn.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">which is <span class="SpellE">i</span> think what leads ron in part to a highly formalist, bean-
counting exercise with the guest poem (as to some extent <span class="SpellE">i've</span>
done in my work on early <span class="SpellE">coolidge</span>, as you point out;
yes it's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/13/coolidge-o-a.html">jacket<span style="font-style: normal;"> 13</span></a></i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">new <span class="SpellE">american</span> writing</i> 19.) now don't
forget, he's done this kind of thing with <span class="SpellE">armantrout</span>
too: the essay (<span class="SpellE">i</span> think in the burning press
collection) where he tracks the evolution of her work in terms of the
asterisk-separated "<span class="SpellE">sectionings</span>" of the
poems, putting the results into pie charts and whatnot. <span class="GramE">and</span>
with </span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">leningrad</span></i></span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black;">, running each of portion authored by himself and his peers
through computer-assisted stylistic analysis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">so</span></span><span style="color: black;"> in a sense,
although bean-counting can be instructive for both the abstract and asocial
lyric, there's a sense in which <span class="SpellE">i</span> hear ron saying
there's not much more to be done with the abstract lyric. <span class="GramE">and</span>
you see this curiously when you get to the very next sentence in <span class="SpellE">ron's</span> definition, to me just as if not more important as
the first part:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">"Not
all short poems are lyrics &#8211; the intense social satires &amp; commentaries of </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black;">Rae Armantrout</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black;">, for example, are only incidentally lyrical, if that.
Lyric in her case is a feint or strategy, but is very seldom what is actually
going on within the poem."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">in</span></span><span style="color: black;"> a way, yeah, <span class="SpellE">i</span> think <span class="SpellE">ron's</span> saying if yr only
seeing <span class="SpellE">rae's</span> poems as "lyric," in a sense
buying into their seemingly transparently "lyric" form, then yr
missing out or being fooled. <span class="GramE">in</span> <span class="SpellE">ron's</span>
terms, it's the "intensity" of social satire and commentary as
opposed to and outweighing the "incidental" lyric appearance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">for</span></span><span style="color: black;"> me again </span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="SpellE"><span style="color: black;">dickinson</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black;"> is a case in point, especially having just taught her to
college freshman again recently. <span class="GramE">those</span> are deceptively
simple looking little suckers, which is part of the initial appeal of her poems
to them. "<span class="GramE">much</span> madness is <span class="SpellE">divinest</span>
sense" for example, or "faith is a fine invention": there are
clearly the "intense social satires and commentaries" that can be
unpacked in these poems as in <span class="SpellE">armantrout's</span>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">but here,
with the notion of "unpacking," which <span class="SpellE">i</span>
take also to be a central activity to new critical close reading and especially
to the form that the new critics prized so much, namely the lyric &#8212; here it
seems to me that an <span class="SpellE">armantrout</span> poem, bearing only the
feint or strategy of lyric and hence "social" rather than
"abstract," is in fact AS IF NOT MORE lyric than guest precisely in
that it operates through a model of hermeneutic unpacking to arrive at a
message ("intense social satire and commentary"). <span class="GramE">by</span>
contrast, guest's poems resist that very unpacking activity. and to me the
gesture of poems that resist being unpacked, that resist "easy
access," are more of a challenge to new critical reading and interpretive
models and can even be seen resisting the very commodification that language
poetry in part set out to resist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">in</span></span><span style="color: black;"> other words, it
strikes me as a kind of curious return to "content" at the heart of
this debate about the social and asocial word.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">as</span></span><span style="color: black;"> a corollary, and
to come back to <span class="SpellE">coolidge</span>: ron said in his post <span class="SpellE">philly</span> talk discussion, "I don't think you could ever
by any stretch of the imagination argue a coherent politics out of the work of
Clark Coolidge. [<span class="GramE">laughter</span>] I love Clark Coolidge's
work, but that's not a dimension it has been engaged with &#8212; and if it was, it
would change in ways that I would find interesting, and </span><st1:place><span style="color: black;">Clark</span></st1:place><span style="color: black;"> would
find problematic." (16) &lt;<a href="http://216.33.236.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&amp;lah=c4a783e29ebd053c796501a3489a0678&amp;lat=1036795835&amp;hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2eenglish%2eupenn%2eedu%2f%7eadlevy%2fphillytalks%2farchive%2fpt6%2epdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: #000099; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 9.0pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">http://www.english.upenn.edu/~adlevy/phillytalks/archive/pt6.pdf</span></a>&gt;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">even</span></span><span style="color: black;"> if
"coherent" were the key word here, <span class="SpellE">i'm</span> not
sure <span class="SpellE">ron's</span> right. <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">jerome</span></span> <span class="SpellE">mcgann's</span> essay
"truth in the body of falsehood" (from <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">parnassus</i></span>, 1988 <span class="SpellE">i</span> think; it's published under the <span class="SpellE">noms</span>
de plume anne <span class="SpellE">mack</span> and jay </span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="SpellE"><span style="color: black;">rome</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black;">) certainly points the way to a start <span class="SpellE">i</span>
think. <span class="SpellE">i've</span> not read the essay in a while so can't
offer a precise sense of how, but for me it has to do with that very resistance
to unpacking, meaning, content, all of which lie primarily (and as so much of
our public discourse today) which falsehood rather than truth. <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">coolidge's</span></span> "raucous
prosody" is a bit of truth that challenges, calls such falsehood's bluff.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">t</span></span><span style="color: black;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">cc: <span class="GramE">ron</span>, <span class="SpellE">louis</span>, <span class="SpellE">kevin</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">To which Kasey then
responded:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="color: black;">Thanks for this
response, Tom&#8212;I've been thinking about these issues in different contexts for the
past couple of days. </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: black;">Reading</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black;"> your message makes me realize more clearly than before
that a major motivation for Ron in performing his "bean-counting
exercise" is precisely to demonstrate what he perceives as the
"asocial" signifying structure of Guest's poetry, and thus to impugn
the value of what he perceives as the tendency among contemporary women writers
to imitate this structure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">Ron, I
think it's undeniably the case that there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i>
plenty of contemporary writers out there, both female and male, who are writing
asocial poetry, in the sense that what they write serves primarily to advance
their own careers, mystified notions of their own romantic identities, etc.,
but I don't think this can be coherently mapped onto a preponderance of concern
with abstract formal elegance, as against predatorily encoded social
"messages." The "ellipticist" trend, for instance, strikes
me largely as vapid not because its <span class="SpellE">practicers</span> adhere
to an inward-directed formalist poetic, but because they are absorbed in a
superficial conception of "elegance" that attains neither social <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nor</i> formal relevance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">It may be
the case that the surface elegance of Guest's poetry has led some to generate
jejune imitations, but such imitators are "fooled" by that elegance
in the same way that some readers might be "fooled" by Armantrout's
strategic "feints." This is not to say that Guest and Armantrout use
the same strategy; in fact, what the inferior Guest-imitators lack, I would
argue, is the very instinct for balance and closure that you point out,
Ron&#8212;though I still wonder whether syllable-counting is a useful way of
demonstrating that instinct.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">I am
skeptical about the value of close reading as an index of sociality or <span class="SpellE">asociality</span> in isolation from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the actual social context of the poet's work</i>, just as I am
skeptical about the value of judgments on a poet's social or asocial status
made in isolation from close reading of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the
poet's actual work</i>. There are two diametrically opposed fallacies here,
both equally common and both equally counterproductive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">I am
skeptical about such designations as "social" and "asocial"
as polarized ways of conceiving lyric <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">formally</i>.
To equate a poetics that works extensively on "inward" principles of
structural "balance and closure" with a removal from the social, or
conversely, to equate a poetics that invokes the social in more or less
explicit ways via "outward," referential gestures of satire or
critique with an anti-lyric sensibility, seems to me to be committing an
oblique version of the fallacy of imitative form. This is the problem, for
example, that I have with the last thirty years or so of attacks on the lyric
"I." The whole bourgeois narcissistic confessional trend in
mainstream workshop poetry occupies a very small space in poetic history, and
constitutes a very small sampling of all the poetry out there that uses that
"I." <span class="GramE">Same thing with things like <span class="SpellE">referentiality</span>, disjunction, fragmentation, etc.&#8212;all formal
features, and nothing more in and of themselves.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">Tom, I
find your reflections on "unpacking" very useful. You're right:
Armantrout's work invites unpacking in inverse proportion to the strength with
which Guest's resists it. And I think we're more or less in agreement that it
would be a mistake to conclude on the basis of either mode that one poet is
more or less "social," since there are ways of deploying either <span class="SpellE">unpackability</span> or un-<span class="SpellE">unpackability</span>
in the service of poetic sociality (Coolidge being a good example of an equally
service-oriented point in between). Going back to the <span class="SpellE">ellipticists</span>,
maybe a big part of my distrust has to do with the way they seem not to be
doing any <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">work</i> outside the poems,
whereas Guest does seem to be. Part of this, of course, has to do with being
more familiar with Guest, Armantrout et al. than with the mass of recently-generated
MFA poets who are adopting the techniques of "disjunction" etc.: I
don't know them, I don't know their philosophies, ethics, politics, and I don't
feel compelled to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">get</i> to know them,
as they don't appear to be making any effort to insert themselves into the
social context by means of any device other than surface form. It's not that
the forms they use are themselves invalid; there simply has to be something
more. In Guest's case, for example, her engagement with modernist history and
culture are evident at every turn, even when not specifically referenced in her
work. She has established social <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">credentials</i>
that provide the reader with a sense of trust, and therefore give the reader a
sort of permission to enjoy the formal textures of her work without feeling
that to do so is to neglect "more important" matters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">I realize
I am coming close to suggesting that the poet may be more important than the <span class="GramE">poetry, that</span> we may be misguiding in attaching any kind of
autonomous authority to the text itself. Well, so be it. People <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> more important than texts, no? This
is what sociality means to me: that we enjoy, and benefit from, reading
literature when we are invested in the beliefs and values of the people who
create it, either individually or collectively. The mistake, I believe, is to
insist that these beliefs and values be manifested formally in the work (or for
that <span class="GramE">matter, that</span> they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> be).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">K.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>There may be antecedents to
the abstract lyric in English before Barbara Guest &#8211; I would point to Gertrude Stein,
to David Schubert, Edwin Denby or F. T. Prince &amp; of course to the John
Ashbery of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tennis Court Oath </i>&#8211; but it
is in the poetry of Barbara Guest that the form really comes into focus.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>By abstract lyric I mean a
poem that functions <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>as a lyric</i>,
bounded by modest scale and focused on the elements within. Not all short poems
are lyrics &#8211; the intense social satires &amp; commentaries of Rae Armantrout,
for example, are only incidentally lyrical, if that. Lyric in her case is a
feint or strategy, but is very seldom what is actually going on within the
poem.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Guest&#8217;s poems by comparison
are as closed as sonnets or as the sequences of short pieces, say, of Clark
Coolidge. But where Coolidge&#8217;s works revel in the sometimes raucous prosody of
his intensely inventive ear, Guest&#8217;s return the reader again &amp; again to the
word and its integration into a phrase, to a phrase and its integration into a
line, to a line and its integration into a stanza or strophe. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>At her best, as in the poem
&#8220;Defensive Rapture,&#8221; Guests paints a tonal language that tends toward aural
pastels, constructed around points of contrast. Each stanza is exactly one
sentence, in that it is bounded by a terminal period. Consider:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>stilled
grain of equinox<br>
turbulence the domicile<br>
host robed arm white<br>
crackled motives.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>What organizes this quatrain
is how that third line deploys only one-syllable words, three of which end with
a consonant of closure. It is precisely the prosodic complexity of the
multi-syllabic terms elsewhere that generates the stanza&#8217;s &#8220;turbulence,&#8221; felt
precisely because of their contrast with this penultimate line. Guest
accentuates the difference with the marvelous <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>crackled</i>, which does in fact characterize exactly this strophe&#8217;s
&#8220;motives.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#8220;Defensive Rapture&#8221; consists
of 12 such quatrains, each with its own internal demands and resolution. A lot
of where Guest is heading and focuses can be analyzed by counting syllables.
Thus<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>commends
internal habitude<br>
bush the roof<br>
day stare gliding<br>
double measures.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>could be schematized as<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><st1:date Year="2003" Day="3"
Month="2"><span style='font-family:Arial'>2-3-3</span></st1:date><span
style='font-family:Arial'><br>
</span><st1:date Year="2001" Day="1" Month="1"><span style='font-family:Arial'>1-1-1</span></st1:date><span
style='font-family:Arial'><br>
</span><st1:date Year="2002" Day="1" Month="1"><span style='font-family:Arial'>1-1-2</span></st1:date><span
style='font-family:Arial'><br>
2-2<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The busy-ness of that first
line, accentuated visually by its length, is offset by the stillness of the
second &#8211; not one single-syllable word in the stanza ends on a hard consonant* &#8211;
which expands in the third line with its two alternate &#8220;a&#8221; sounds in the first
two words, aurally &#8220;gliding&#8221; into that last term, which returns us to
two-syllable words, the last line almost physically demonstrating how strong
Guest&#8217;s instinct for balance &amp; closure are. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>When one looks at the women
writers who are just one age cohort younger than those collected by Mary
Margaret Sloan in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Moving Borders </i>(Talisman
House, 998)<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>,</i> one sees quickly that
Barbara Guest has become the single most powerful influence on new writing by
women in the U.S. My own instincts in poetry carry me away from, rather than
toward, stillness and I&#8217;m often wary of writing that strikes me as so &#8211; to
borrow </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial'>Louis Cabri</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s term from another context &#8211; asocial, but it is
impossible deny to the extraordinary skill &amp; intelligence which Guest
brings to everything she writes. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><br>
</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* Indeed, the use of
soft &amp; complex consonant combinations &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>sh,
th, f </i>&#8211; carries its own elegance here, with the first and last coming at
word&#8217;s end, with the middle one up front. <br style='mso-special-character:
line-break'>
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style='mso-special-character:line-break'>
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, September 02, 2002</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The abstract lyric certainly
existed before Barbara Guest &#8211; Stein, for example, and some of Williams&#8217; work,
especially prior to World War II; the French can go back to Mallarmé &#8211; but it
was/is Guest who in English seems to have perfected the form in the 1950s, a
period in which she was largely (and unfairly) unnoticed with the significant
exception of the Allen anthology &#8211; it is Guest who lead off the New York School
section in that epochal collection, even as she had the fewest pages of work
represented. Reading her poetry of that period sends me back along a different
coordinate &#8211; to the texts of David Schubert and through him to the short poems
of Hart Crane. I don&#8217;t know if Guest read Schubert, who seems to have largely
slipped through the cracks of literary history (albeit acknowledged as an
influence by John Ashbery and visibly evident in the poetry of Frank
O&#8217;Hara).<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160; </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>There is a tendency in
American poetry that one might characterize as academic in the old-fashioned
pejorative sense &amp; certainly the letters and essays in the 1983 <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>QRL</i> issue on Schubert reflects that
tradition: Alan Tate, Ben <span class=SpellE>Belitt</span>, Horace Gregory,
Louise <span class=SpellE>Bogan</span>, Ted Weiss. In a sense, the New American
poetry and its descendents (which include virtually every progressive mode of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-family:Arial'> poetry some 50 years hence) has exorcised itself of
even the memory of that tendency. Pound and Stein were geographically
inoculated from <span class=GramE>it,</span> the Objectivists simply avoided
all interaction (the feeling appears to have been mutual). Yet Williams dealt
with it and Marianne Moore positively thrived in that environment, and it is
evident that at least through Auden (curious interloper that he is after the
Second World War) the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-family:
  Arial'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span
style='font-family:Arial'> was willing to let some elements in. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>In some sense, trying to
sort out the role of such influences is not unlike those followers of Creeley
who do not understand his enthusiasm for Crane or Stevens. </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Reading</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> is itself always a narrative, the unfolding of
meaning in time &#8211; I read this book before that one. In my own life, it was
Philip Whalen&#8217;s poetry that gave me the inroads I needed in order to appreciate
Clark Coolidge&#8217;s work in the 1960s, yet I know of poets who came upon those two
writers in the opposite sequence and I simply cannot imagine what one would
make of it: I cannot fold my mental map into that configuration.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>An analogy from music might
be the relationship between Bing Crosby and Jimi Hendrix. Before </span><st1:place><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>Crosby</span></st1:place><span style='font-family:
Arial'>, singers belted out tunes as if they were still performing from the
stage of an auditorium, even as they were finally being recorded. It was Crosby
who understood that the implication of the microphone was that you could sing
softly and bring out a whole new range of possible music. Similarly, Hendrix
was the first performer to understand the full implications of the
electrification of the guitar. Crosby and Hendrix equally revolutionized music.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>In a decade in which so many academic poets continue to sound as if they were the contemporaries of Bing Crosby, I
find it intriguing that Barbara Guest should become the most influential of the New American poets. In part, it no doubt is because her work has not yet been fully incorporated, much as the Objectivists of the 1930s needed to wait until the 1970s to be brought completely  into view. So perhaps it is <i>because </i> the current generation of academic poets seems as relevant to poetry as astrology does to astronomy, the abstract lyric carries forward within itself aspects of a tradition all but unheard elsewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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