An email takes the question of poetry
and the unconscious further, to poetry (especially langpo) and the
spiritual.
Dear Ron,
Rodney Koeneke here. I'm a San Francisco
Your recent discussion with Rachel
Blau DuPlessis prompted me to write. You both offered compelling reasons to
explain why Language poets tend to steer clear of the unconscious as a subject.
I agree with you, too, that Spicer probably explored this area more acutely
than any writer of his generation. He's also the poet whose interest in the
spiritual affects the way he actually uses language most concretely. In fact,
it's his interest in those areas
- the
unconscious and let's call it the spiritual - that
marks him off most starkly for me from the following poetic generation, who
often draw inspiration from his more explicitly language-y concerns while
leaving the ghosts and Mars and radios to one side.
My question is whether Language writing really CAN address
these subjects, or if that's exactly the point at which it parts company with
the New Americans and the current mainstream. This seems especially urgent to
me with so many younger poets sounding
like Language, displaying a sense of disjunctive cool while holding onto
content that Blyowa can staunchly approve of. In your
view, can Language poetry address areas of human experience like the unconscious
and the spiritual? Or does the theory which explains and extends the practice
of Language writing somehow by its nature mitigate
against this kind of subject matter? To borrow Rachel's phrase,
can you really be a spiritual girl living in a material world? Or do you have
to let the Language drop to go into the mystic?
Part of my interest in the question comes from some of the
parallels I've noticed between experimental poetics and certain branches of
mystical theology. Psychology, especially with Freud but even in Jung,
emphasizes models of depth vs. surface, enlightenment (illuminating the
absent), analysis and expressive creativity that run afoul of a lot of the
basic presuppositions of current experimental writing. The unconscious as it's
constructed by psychology is an absent presence, hovering behind the language,
which can ultimately be seen and shown.
I can see why writers of a poststructural bent rejected this and left the
subject largely to the mainstream.
The apophatic tradition in mysticism, however -
approaching the divine by what it's not - shares a lot of (perhaps superficial)
parallels with Language writing. The subject, or ego, comes into question as an
external construct; language is inadequate to apprehend reality; ideas are an
arm of the secular, external social institutions that seek to limit freedom. I
could imagine an apophatic spiritual poetry that looked very much like Language
writing, one that didn't raid the poetics for nifty effects, but took a similar
orientation towards writing out of a shared sense of what's at stake with
words. I wonder if Spicer was one of them.
In short, do you think Language writing (broadly speaking)
can address a subject matter that isn't primarily social? Or does the
mainstream alone get to Hoover up subjects like the unconscious and
(gasp...I'll say it) God (or Buddha or the Tao or Allah)? I'd love to hear your
thoughts on the matter.
Thanks for your work on the blog. It turns me on to many
things.
Sincerely,
Rodney
