Rodney Koeneke
offers his own reading of Fanny Howe’s great prose poem, “Doubt”:
Dear Ron,
I enjoyed your post today on Howe and doubt,
especially since it revisited some of the folks from our earlier
exchange. I found myself right there with you in equating certainty with
the holocaust, gulag, Khmer Rouge & U.S. unilateralism, while putting doubt
on the side of the angels, poetry and, fundamentally, language itself.
Three cheers for inexactitude!
But going to Howe’s
essay, I wondered if doubt as she conceives it might mitigate
against the kind of political commitment you see in a lot of the most
exciting
“Is there, perhaps, a quality in
each person—hidden like a laugh inside a sob—that loves even more than it loves
to live?”
Imagine her “is there?” as a “there
is,” how differently that would read (and how
much Spicer’s line profits—“If there isn’t/A God, don’t believe in him”—from
that conditional ‘if’).
At the same time,
Howe calls Weil a poet (sorry—she “could be called a poet”) “because of the
longing for a transformative insight dominating her word choices.” The
choice of that most political of words, “dominating,” can’t be
accidental. Is the surest protection against the “claustrophobic
determinism” that scared Woolf in Freud, and may
drive your own conviction that “certainty has killed more people than doubt,” a
belief (or at least a longing for belief) in some kind of transformative other
within the self?
Howe’s sympathy for Woolf & Weil seems to stem in part from the tragedy of
their efforts to will themselves to believe:
“Anyone who tries, as [Woolf] did, out of a systematic training in secularism, to
forge a rhetoric of belief is fighting against the
odds. Disappointments are everywhere waiting to catch you, and an ironic
realism is so convincing.”
and,
earlier on:
“While a change in discourse is
a sign of conversion, the alteration of a single word only signals a kind of
doubt about the value of surrounding words.”
Am I reading this
right as a suggestion that a will to change—a politics—without some kind of
conversion, transformative insight, sense of a “dominating” force guiding word
choice, boils down to so much rhetoric? “My vocabulary did
this to me.” Was the problem in the end that it was merely
vocabulary, Howe’s “rhetoric of belief”?
Or was it too much lyric uncertainty of the kind Woolf
and Weil half-resisted? That would suggest a less sanguine reading of
doubt in Howe’s essay than the one you offer in your post. Or am I all
wet?
I'm especially
interested in this question as a way of figuring out how to balance political
conviction with poetic uncertainty. “I find myself deeply
troubled,” you write, “by the promise of certainty, which invariably must also
be the promise of belief.” I hear you—utopias wilt to dystopias
awfully quick in modernity’s heat. But does doubt leave an adequate basis
for political action? Didn't it take a kind of certainty to advance the
political and poetic aims of Language writing in the teeth of mainstream
resistance? A lot of mainstream poets argue that poetry
shouldn’t be political on grounds not totally dissimilar to the ones you
outlined today. Politics is the place for slogans, principles and
self-evident truths; poetry for doubt, ambiguity, ‘feelings’ and
inexactitude. Obviously you don’t agree—it’s just that I could see
Collins nodding his head in approval over key sections of your post:
“Yes, exactly! That’s why I stick to the knitting!”
Anyway, doubt,
poetry, politics, belief—they all went up in my head after your blog today and
still haven’t come down. What a day.
Sincerely,
Rodney Koeneke
