I sat
down with
yesterday’s post to the blog from K. Silem Mohammad & Tom Orange
& just
listed the points to which I personally wanted to respond: my list came
to
three pages single spaced. It’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, & came up with two
intersecting
axes of concern:
● My
definition
of abstract lyric – “bounded by
modest
scale and focused on the elements within”
● The
role of
“the social” within & around poetry, a question that has been raised
by Louis Cabri & others
Hovering around these
two
axes I find a third key issue: the role of close reading & “bean
counting”
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.
Close reading’s
association
with the New Critics (NC) is often treated as grounds for distrust
because of
NC’s alignment with a reactionary aesthetic tendency in the United
States – one
that joined the poetics of the Southern Agrarians to those of the Boston
Brahmans – but it is worth noting that key NC theorist René Wellek’s
training
in critical practice came through the Prague Linguistics Circle, founded
in
1926 by a group of scholars that included Roman Jakobson &
incorporated
many of the tendencies that originated within Russian Formalism (&
in
relation to Russian futurist poets, from Mayakovsky to Khlebnikov).
Unless one
adopts the dual theory that (1) structural elements have inherent
political
biases – an argument that would be kin to an equation of, say, Poundian
metrics
with fascism &/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 Partisan Review) – an argument that again puts close reading
into a
fundamental(ist) relation to a political
tendency –
then in fact one needs to look at the practice of close reading in the
light of
its materialist roots.
The process of bean
counting
– a phrase I really like, by the way – is predicated on the reality that
beans exist. Signifying elements
(that
could be saying anything)
actually
are present & countable in a poem (as in a novel or any other social
product). One major – and characteristic – failing of much bad critical
writing
(which is in fact most
critical writing) is that, in literal terms,
its
practitioners don’t know
beans. 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 & confessional
poetry.
Rosenthal’s attempt to bind together disparate tendencies of poetry in
an
attempt to rescue the direct inheritors of NC’s aesthetic program from a
fate
it so richly deserved would fuel concepts such as Jim Breslin’s likening
American poetry to a land of many suburbs, absent conflict &
ultimately
lacking shape & content, sort of a Columbine of the heart. Dana
Gioia’s
terribly incomplete (& too often inaccurate) social history of the
institutionalization of poetry in “Can Poetry Matter?,”
is merely that same argument presented with a Music Man exhortation for the masses to go out & buy
trombones.
Not coincidentally, many of the arguments made about langpo over the
past three
decades – that it is theory driven, humorless, anti-referential,
anti-narrative, self-consciously difficult, etc. – 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’s the most materialist critical
practice
available, when used appropriately, & an excellent inoculation
against all
manner of mythology & self-interested hokum.
Kasey states that he
is “skeptical about such designations as ‘social’ and
‘asocial’
as polarized ways of conceiving lyric formally.”
That’s not precisely what I had said – although it is close to Tom
Orange’s
paraphrase – but the concept as such is worth pursuing. Tom’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’s a logic by which Christian Bök’s Eunoia or the
poetry
of Sheila E. Murphy or Peter Ganick might be seen as more social than
Louis Cabri s’ The
Mood
Embosser, Barrett
Watten ’s Bad History or
Bob Perelman ’s The
First
World.
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 Barely and
Widely)
& there are lyric poets whose work would make any sensitive reader
cringe
(fill in the blanks). Contrary to Tom’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’s
sense of its
own boundaries vis-à-vis the larger world. The New Critics’ 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 Bruce
Andrews, any text can be
unpacked
through close reading – that is a condition of the reading mind, not
something to
which only some poets are subject to some of the time. Eunoia is as much subject to such a process as would be The Mood Embosser or Barbara
Guest’s
“Defensive Rapture.” What privileged the lyric for the New Critics was
not any
hermeneutic depth, nor any relation to personal expression, but rather
the
lyric’s sense of itself as aesthetically contained – “focused on the
elements
within” – which spared this genre entanglements with the social, a
category
that in the 1930s was at least as charged & 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 & nothing extraneous that might
“pollute”
the critique. Only lyric could thus verify their claim to be specialized
– and hence
professional – readers, the position that in turn enabled them between
1935
& 1950 to become the dominant power within American English
departments.
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 & teacher, doesn’t actually alter what
is on
the page, any more than Jack Spicer’s or Ezra Pound’s notoriously
antisocial
comments & 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’s own sense of its permeability vis-à-vis the world. This has
less to
do with reference in the sense of “this poem is about the struggle of
the
heroic people of Lichtenstein” than it does with language sources, image
schemas & -- the deciding factor for me – the way in which the poem
structurally defines itself.
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 & formally balanced as any written
over
the past 50 years:
walking
the idea
of
dancing
time
making
room
This untitled piece
from The World and Its Streets, Places
(Black
Sparrow, 1977) could be analyzed in exactly the same kind of formal
terms that
I used with Barbara
Guest on November 3. The poem proposes itself almost as the essence
of
lightness, with extra spacing between lines & the characteristic
Eigner
sweep down across the page. Its use of suffix & sound organizes the
prosody: hear the k move from
walking to making & the elegant use of the liquid m from time to making & finally to room. There is nothing apparent
within this text to suggest
anything
other than what is on the page – even the casual or unfamiliar reader
will
recognize that the relation between walking & dancing (think of a
choreographer like Simone Forti or Sally
Silvers)
could be very adequately characterized as time
making room. & yet here is a poet who could not walk, who spent
his
life confined to wheel chairs. Nowhere is that mentioned: the fact
simply haunts the poem for anyone who
ever knew
Eigner or knew of him well enough to know how cerebral palsy shaped
&
limited his physical vocabulary. At what level is this
poem a
lyric?
Eigner is justly
famous for
his use of simple nouns – wind, tree, sun, sky – and yet it is
relatively rare
in his poems for these items to exist as abstractions. The presence of
the
human world repeatedly invades &
contextualizes.
damp
wind
the birds
chorusing
clouds
moving the sky
the haze
blast
the foghorn
through
the trees
Bounded at either end
by
couplets, the birds anthropomorphized, clouds assigned intentionality,
the key
verb blast 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
the
rain and the stars
in the
head
in the head
beaches
slow
clouds, the
dark
Where exactly does
this take
place? What is the ontological status of the dark?
Not all of Eigner’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’s Maximus, or Pound’s Cantos or
Du Plessis’ Drafts are. They take as a given
their
interactions with the world.
Another poet who very
much
straddles & plays with these borders, albeit in a very different
manner, is
Jackson Mac Low. Characteristic of his approach is the book Twenties (Roof, 1991) in which
each of
the 100 twenty-line poems is fixed not just formally, but in time – each
text
both as to the date of composition & the location. Here are the
first two
stanzas of 44, written on
March 2,
1990 , in “Dr. Wadsworth’s consulting
room”:
Certainty tardive dyskinesia Pascal
quilt
swift
adjacency directed cliff
waltz
nostrum Galatians seed difficulty inert
parse
quelled draft marzipan
pileate
Zesty
quaff varnish nice ol’ obedience
lira
ingression price of
ineptitude readiness
lean-to
fortunate obligation needle
paddle
assignation league reach
Portugal
plot
Each poem in the book
is
composed of exactly five such stanzas, almost all of whose lines also
exhibit a
spatial caesura. Exoskeletally, the poems are
as
fixed or closed as any sonnet series. Aurally, they’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 “lyric” 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 machine. 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 whose most famous work’s title could be translated
into
English as Thoughts; and a
homey
object – one that very often is composed of a limited set of repeated
patterns
– associated with craft more than art.
At one level, Mac Low is playing with our definition of the work
itself.
At another, he is pulling material in from everywhere – there is no part
of the
human experience that cannot be sucked into this process, & like
both
tardive dyskinesia & Pascal, many of the
ind ividual words & phrases by their very
nature
function as barbs or hooks to the social universe.
If Eigner gives us
what we
expect in a New American lyric form, he does while continually
problematizing
& 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 Twenties like so much Po 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
brea th-taking.
Mac Low & Eigner
each
raise the question of lyric containment, but do so in ways that raise
the
stakes for the genre considerably. Like Rae Armantrout (who might be thought of as a third front in
this
assault on the lyric), they demonstrate how a poetic palette – a set of
traditional devices – developed to insulate the poem from the dirty
world can
itself be socialized & that, in fact, there is not just one right
way to go
about this. They functionally disprove the core tenet of New Criticism
&
have expanded the possibilities of the poem not just for our time, but
for the
future.