K. Silem Mohammad responded to a question of Chris Stroffolino’s on the Poetics List concerning my comments regarding Barbara Guest, which in turn generated a correspondence between Kasey and Tom Orange. The two of them offer an enormous number of good & interesting ideas, more than a few of which challenge some of my own thinking – a good thing I’d like to encourage. While I generally feel it doesn’t make that much sense to replicate on the blog – which gets between 50 & 160 hits per day – what has already appeared on the Poetics List, with its distribution to 900 people, I do think it’s useful here, to flesh out all of the issues. I’ve added italics where email discourages it – those asterisks at the beginning & end of a word are bloody ugly – added a link to Tom Orange’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’s letter to Poetics:

on 11/4/02 6:36 PM, Chris Stroffolino Stroffolino at cstroffo@EARTHLINK.NET wrote:

> So, what do you plural all think of this statement on the Blog? > > "one sees quickly that Barbara Guest has become the single most powerful influence on new writing by women in the U.S."

I thought as soon as I read this that it was a controversial claim, to say the least. Certainly she's one of the most influential. But what about Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, 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.

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—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? Hart Crane? H.D.? Dickinson? Etc.? Why or why not?

Ron, you define the A.L. as "a poem that functions as a lyric, 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?

I'll accept that "not all short poems are lyrics," but in what sense is Rae Armantrout'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"—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 not a feint? When is it "what is actually going on" as opposed to something that is ... what? Not going on? Then how can it be perceived as a "strategy" or anything else? I don't have Veil in front of me, but when I picture a page of it from memory, "lyric" is one of the first terms that comes to mind, and elegant, graceful lyric at that. Have I been fooled in some way?

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-based(?) one. But can this possibly be right? Do we really want to say that intuitive, "pattern-free" (if patternlessness is ever possible) composition can never count as lyric, or at least not as "abstract lyric"?

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 & 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—Tom's piece is in either New American Writing or Jacket 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—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.

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" vs whatever the opposite of such authenticity is.

—Kasey

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Tom Orange replied to Kasey, copying myself, Louis Cabri & Kevin Davies:

kasey,

you raise some (actually a lot!) of good questions here. i can't speak for ron here of course but i've been thinking about role/place of "the social" in poetic form a bit in terms that ron and louis cabri have staked out on the blog. and i've been trying to formulate my own thoughts so maybe this will help as much along my own lines as much as yours.

cetainly ron's initial definition of abstract lyric — "a poem that functions as a lyric, bounded by modest scale and focused on the elements within" — is, as you point out, partly circular or tautologous. i don't think this necessarily means music to the exclusion of logical argument: see e.g. zukofsky. or another example that i think ron might agree with in terms of what i guess i can call the "social lyric" as opposed to "abstract lyric" or "asocial lyric": dickinson. (more on that shortly.)

"modest scale" certainly implies short in terms of length but more i think in terms of scope: pound's scale is epic, as is say zukofsky's again in late "A" (i 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).

"elements focused within" again refers i think to scale, as well as something like "attention" (in the objectivist/projectivist sense). there 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. something of a well-wrought urn.

which is i think what leads ron in part to a highly formalist, bean- counting exercise with the guest poem (as to some extent i've done in my work on early coolidge, as you point out; yes it's jacket 13 and new american writing 19.) now don't forget, he's done this kind of thing with armantrout too: the essay (i think in the burning press collection) where he tracks the evolution of her work in terms of the asterisk-separated "sectionings" of the poems, putting the results into pie charts and whatnot. and with leningrad, running each of portion authored by himself and his peers through computer-assisted stylistic analysis.

so in a sense, although bean-counting can be instructive for both the abstract and asocial lyric, there's a sense in which i hear ron saying there's not much more to be done with the abstract lyric. and you see this curiously when you get to the very next sentence in ron's definition, to me just as if not more important as the first part:

"Not all short poems are lyrics – the intense social satires & 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."

in a way, yeah, i think ron's saying if yr only seeing rae's poems as "lyric," in a sense buying into their seemingly transparently "lyric" form, then yr missing out or being fooled. in ron's terms, it's the "intensity" of social satire and commentary as opposed to and outweighing the "incidental" lyric appearance.

for me again dickinson is a case in point, especially having just taught her to college freshman again recently. those are deceptively simple looking little suckers, which is part of the initial appeal of her poems to them. "much madness is divinest 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 armantrout's.

but here, with the notion of "unpacking," which i 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 — here it seems to me that an armantrout 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"). by 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.

in 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.

as a corollary, and to come back to coolidge: ron said in his post philly 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. [laughter] I love Clark Coolidge's work, but that's not a dimension it has been engaged with — and if it was, it would change in ways that I would find interesting, and Clark would find problematic." (16) <http://www.english.upenn.edu/~adlevy/phillytalks/archive/pt6.pdf>

even if "coherent" were the key word here, i'm not sure ron's right. jerome mcgann's essay "truth in the body of falsehood" (from parnassus, 1988 i think; it's published under the noms de plume anne mack and jay rome) certainly points the way to a start i think. i've 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. coolidge's "raucous prosody" is a bit of truth that challenges, calls such falsehood's bluff.

t.

cc: ron, louis, kevin

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To which Kasey then responded:

 Thanks for this response, Tom—I've been thinking about these issues in different contexts for the past couple of days. Reading 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.

Ron, I think it's undeniably the case that there are 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 practicers adhere to an inward-directed formalist poetic, but because they are absorbed in a superficial conception of "elegance" that attains neither social nor formal relevance.

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—though I still wonder whether syllable-counting is a useful way of demonstrating that instinct.

I am skeptical about the value of close reading as an index of sociality or asociality in isolation from the actual social context of the poet's work, 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 the poet's actual work. There are two diametrically opposed fallacies here, both equally common and both equally counterproductive.

I am skeptical about such designations as "social" and "asocial" as polarized ways of conceiving lyric formally. 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." Same thing with things like referentiality, disjunction, fragmentation, etc.—all formal features, and nothing more in and of themselves.

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 unpackability or un-unpackability in the service of poetic sociality (Coolidge being a good example of an equally service-oriented point in between). Going back to the ellipticists, maybe a big part of my distrust has to do with the way they seem not to be doing any work 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 get 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 credentials 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.

I realize I am coming close to suggesting that the poet may be more important than the poetry, that we may be misguiding in attaching any kind of autonomous authority to the text itself. Well, so be it. People are 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 matter, that they not be).

K.