Rodney Koeneke posed some intriguing questions about the nature of doubt in his response to the Fanny Howe prose poem by that title. Note that Koeneke doesn’t call Howe’s piece a poem at all:

 

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 U.S. poetries of the last half century. Howe’s take on doubt, as I understand it, might be calling into question the possibility of a political poetry at all, or at least any poetry we currently recognize as political. . . .

 

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!”

 

While I was mulling this over, old friend Tom Beckett sent along a note indicating that his decision some 20-plus years ago to devote two issues of his journal The Difficulties to my work and that of Charles Bernstein came about because “I thought at the time that you and Charles represented two different poles of "language" writing. Specifically, I felt that Charles' work proceeded from doubt and that yours proceeded from certainty.” As Nick Piombino would say, “Wow!”

 

The problem of doubt is a question I’ve been mulling over for some time. Like more than a few other human beings, I’ve been appalled at the devolution of talk radio & cable-talk TV from the diverse perspectives that characterized public discourse in the 1970s to the Rush Limbaugh-Fox News era of today. At the same time, counter measures that have been attempted from time to time, from Jim Hightower’s syndicated radio spots to many of the “preaching to the choir” news programs I used to get off Pacifica radio (KPFA-WBAI etc) tend to be cringe-making in the extreme. That sort of reductive radio just makes me embarrassed to be a progressive.

 

Attempts to present left perspectives on the cable networks have been no more encouraging – Phil Donahue, Mark Shields & other talking heads “liberals” are at best Rockefeller Republicans & when one does see a genuine progressive, such as Eric Alterman or Katrina vanden Heuvel, one is reminded that decent politics don’t necessarily translate into effective public speaking skills. The current project to raise funds for a liberal radio network sounds like another train wreck just waiting to happen. The reason, in part, has to do with the medium, which rewards certainty of the sort Bob Novak, Ollie North, Gordon Liddy, Rush Limbaugh & Bill O’Reilly so readily have at their disposal.

 

The underlying problem is not that certainty is the opposite of doubt, but rather that certainty is the opposite of complexity. I sometimes think that the political spectrum today runs not on a left-right axis, but rather on a simple-complex one. That’s why opposing the Rush Limbaughs of the world with leftward radio ranting never works – while it may counter the reactionaries at one level, it functionally concurs with them on a deeper, in some ways more profound one, insisting that the world is simple. Just pick the red team or the blue team.

 

The right – both directly & through the media – has been masterful over the past 35 years in playing to (& capturing) the simplistic end of the spectrum. Ronald Reagan’s infamous “There you go again” quip to Jimmy Carter was intended precisely to interrupt a complex response to a question. Similarly, George Dukakis was savaged by the media for giving a complex answer to the question of what he would do if somebody raped & murdered his wife. Al Gore became a laughingstock – much as George McGovern had 28 years earlier* – because he couldn’t give a simple answer to anything. Whatever one thinks of Bill Clinton’s gift for evading personal responsibility, his response “that depends on what the meaning of is is” is a statement that presumes the possibility of levels of meta-discourse. You will note that, with the sole exception of the social democrat McGovern, not one of these examples even qualifies as a progressive. Rather, the right has perceived that a substantial portion of American society is creeped out by any idea of nuance or the possibility that a single term might have more than one meaning at one time. Depending on the social context, such discourses are dismissed as legalese, psychobabble or pointy-headed intellectualist double-talk.

 

This can work both ways, of course. Popular media, which has the same general pack instincts of a herd of pigeons, is quick enough to typecast any “candidate of simplicity” as a buffoon or simpleton the instant they or their policies are perceived as weak – Jimmy Carter benefited greatly because Gerald Ford’s policies became equated with his penchant for falling down stairs in front of photographers, George Bush the Elder was ridiculed for his tongue-tied qualities & lack of the “vision thing,” and Dan Quayle will go down as the only former vice president in the 20^th century to run for the top job and be denied his own party’s nomination.

 

Bill Clinton, to date the only Democratic presidential candidate to really understand how to work this issue, notes that “When people feel uncertain they'd rather have someone strong and wrong than weak and right.” The Republican formula associates strength with certainty with simplicity, implying that the Democrats, by virtue of their tendency toward complexity, thereby are filled with doubt & weakness. Thus, in 2000, the assaults on George W’s obvious intellectual limitations, the focus on Bushisms, such as his promise to “make the pie higher,” actually strengthened Bush’s standing with a critical portion of the electorate precisely because it contrasted with the complexity of a candidate who had been the VP of a President who clearly used nuance & meta-discourse as an evasive measure. At one level, whenever Gore attempted to give an intelligent answer to a question he was tightening his association with the prevarications of the First Philanderer.

 

Presidential politics merely offers one clear demonstration of the problems of complexity. As I learned in the fall of 2001 when I suggested on the Poetics List that a war against al Qaeda was unavoidable, more than a few of that community’s 900-plus trained readers were unable to discern the difference between the inevitable and the desirable. My point then was that I felt trapped by the double bind of having an unavoidable conflict prosecuted by the entirely untrustworthy Mr. Bush. I still feel that way. The war in Iraq – which had no appreciable weapons of mass destruction, no demonstrable link with international terrorism & posed a threat only to its own people – demonstrates my point exactly. Whatever Gore’s flaws – they were legion – or the compromises to capital made by an abject Democratic party – they too are legion – no Democratic president would have attacked Iraq. Nor would any have thought to warehouse prisoners at Guantanamo simply to keep them beyond the reach of the U.S. Constitution. Nor authorized the various Draconian measures suggested by Mr. Ashcroft & others in the Bush2 administration.

 

The relationship between certainty & doubt, simplicity & complexity, intersects with poetry at many different points & angles. There are poets whose work looks simple but is often, perhaps always, quite complex, such Howe, Niedecker, O’Hara, Bernstein, Creeley or Armantrout. There are poets who openly embrace complexity – Olson & Duncan are excellent examples, as are Rachel Blau DuPlessis or Susan Howe. There are poets whose work is genuinely simple – some of whom write simply (Cid Corman, James Weil, Carl Rakosi) & some who do not (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Billy Collins). There are also poets whose work attempts to look complex when it really is not, a phenomenon I first saw up close & personal in the posturing of Jack Gilbert, but which I see more often today in too many on-line poems that are (literally) all Flash™ & little substance.

 

Olson & Duncan, whom I’ve categorized as openly embracing complexity, differed on the role of doubt – that, at least in part, is what the debate of “Against Wisdom as Such” is about. Interestingly, Olson, who argues for the value of doubt, is sometimes taken as an instance of the opposite, the most macho & heavy-handed laying down of The Law, simply by virtue of the fact that he would argue the point, almost any point, if it came up & he engaged the issue.**

 

Duncan is not arguing for certainty in the sense that, say, Bush & Cheney & Rumsfeld do, because, as somebody raised as a theosophist, as part of that religious counter tradition, Duncan was interested in the idea of alternate wisdom & the idea of knowledge as hidden. I’ve sometimes thought that he & Olson were talking at different levels, Olson coming out of New England where the prescriptive element of the Puritan tradition could at one time just seem crushing. The Puritans would have burned Duncan’s adopted ancestors at the stake, in that sense.

 

In practice, Duncan & Olson are both interested in a poetry that is exploratory, almost – especially in Olson’s case – as a mode of investigative thinking prior to (& really quite apart from) any interest in the text as a made or finished art object. Thus doubt, or Doubt, is a primary ingredient for each. This isn’t at all far from Charles Bernstein’s concept of poetry as the active aspect of philosophy. And one can find approximate parallels in all manner of other art forms, from the films of Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Henry Hills or Abigail Childs, to the music of Cecil Taylor, John Zorn or Anthony Braxton. Think of Harry Partch, whose music required him not only to compose it, especially those songs derived from graffiti and the letters of hobos (an amazing use of found language given how very early on it is), and to invent his own instruments on which to perform these strange compositions, & finally even to invent his own 72-tone scale in which to hear it. In order to take responsibility like that for every single element that enters into his art, Partch has to put into question anything he might have “learned” about music. That seems to me a very clear demonstration of how an artist doubts.***

 

How to separate out this kind of doubt, which is really an openness to complexity, from the indecisive prevarications the right invariably will characterize it as being – that is the question. How can the left embrace complexity? How can it articulate ideas that are at once dense & filled with layers of ambiguity without, in fact, coming across as “weak and right?” The work being done by George Lakoff and by groups such as The Metaphor Project – although I don’t always agree with their analyses (which could use a little more complexity, frankly) – seem to me a hopeful step, in that they are at least asking appropriate questions, confronting the problem at its core.

 

In & of itself, such work is not enough to characterize or sustain a movement. However, the propositions being put forward by Lakoff, the Metaphor Project & maybe a half dozen other like-minded groups offer an opportunity to address the questions of peace, justice & the distribution of prosperity in terms that neither abandon their complexity nor cede the field to the next generation of post-neocons. I doubt that any alternative to the depredations of the right that fails to heed their message is apt to succeed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* The Republicans used this strategy against McGovern, as they had against Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, because McGovern was such a sitting duck for it. It was Reagan, who developed his personal arsenal of political tactics as the anti-student-protestor governor of California, who understood the deeper implications of complexity as a political issue in & of itself and installed it at the heart of the Republican party. 

 

** I wonder (self-doubt) if this isn’t a little like what Tom Beckett must have been thinking when he placed me into the camp of certainty circa 1980. [Note to self: change behavior.]

 

*** It occurs to me that Beckett may be thinking of my use of visible exoskeletal structures as an example of certainty, contrasted against Bernstein’s use of forms that, at least at that point in his writing, moved from point to point not unlike the writing of either the Projectivists or certain members of the New York School. Yet close readers like Aaron Shurin pointed out very early on that very few of my “forms” are actually “set” in a programmatic way. Follow the final sentence of each paragraph in Ketjak and you will see what I mean.