“Leaving the Atocha Station” became an elegy last week. The poem, one of John Ashbery’s most famous early works, beginning with the lines

 

The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness

And pulling us out of there experiencing it

he meanwhile . . .  And the fried bats they sell there

dropping from sticks, so that the menace of your prayer folds . . .

Other people . . .             flash

the garden are you boning

and defunct covering . . .  Blind dog expressed royalties . . .

comfort of your perfect tar grams nuclear world bank tulip*

 

might not seem the prototypical elegy &, so far as we can tell, neither poet nor poem sought nor foresaw this fate. But in the wake of over 200 deaths and 1,500 injuries from a coordinated series of bomb blasts on the Madrid trains, the meaning of the words Atocha Station have been irrevocably transformed. Indeed, the instant you associate the name with explosions certain words in the text – darkness, pulling us out, menace, prayer folds, flash, nuclear & on & on – start to shift into a new, previously unimagined alignment in the reader’s mind. It’s as if the poem has been waiting over 40 years for these connotations to be unveiled.

 

This is not particularly a defect in Ashbery’s poem, which I’ve always taken to be a great one. But it tells us something about the nature of art, the nature of poetry, that relates back to this discussion of poetry & anonymity we’ve been having. Or I’ve been having, with many, many replies. And that is, contra I.A. Richards et al, that the poem, however well wrought it might be, never is composed with the impermeable glaze of an urn. Works of art, just like words & phrases – embedded, gay marriage, weapons of mass destruction, electability – acquire new associations & through them meanings shift. Indeed, a major reason we need a Supreme Court is precisely because words mean different things at different times. The word privacy, for example, currently very much under debate. The word marriage. The entire premise of the strict constructionists – that the meaning of laws should be fixed at the moment of their passage – is predicated upon a concept of language that is patently bogus.

 

The question of anonymity and its opposite – a category for which, tellingly, we have no easy name, only approximates – is really one of what do we permit into the poem & where do we let “non-present” elements sway our reading, our interpretation, our judgment. Would a poem by Richard Hugo published under John Ashbery’s name suddenly become interesting? Would the inverse be true as well?

 

When we were walking up Second Avenue – a street whose very name carries its own literary affiliation – Larry Fagin told me of a poetry group in which he had participated where he’d conducted a large-scale version of the experiment I tried here. I think he said that he’d photocopied over 80 pages of poetry sans attribution and brought them in for people to discuss. The response, he said, was that people were “furious! They couldn’t read the poems without the names. They didn’t know how to think about them.”

 

There are certainly moments in the responses I received to suggest that a few – maybe more than a few – of this blog’s readers felt likewise. One new formalist blog called me “a condescending douchebag” for a day or so, tho they’ve since edited out those remarks. People who didn’t share the values conveyed through the poems – really the only thing some readers had to go on – tended to be highly vituperative: “this sounds like a teenage girl with braces cutting into her lips” means what, exactly? Besides, that is, the fact that the respondent hasn’t thought through the sexist implications of his own language. [Ditto the word “douchebag” above.]

 

There are multiple things going on here. One is that a poem without a poet's name is, in some very real sense, incomplete – that, to my eye, is the problem with projects like Anon. A second one – one that I tapped into without fully realizing its implications, I think – is that we’re in a very specific moment in American literary history. In the 1950s, the number of practicing poets in the U.S., people who actually published, appears only to have been several hundred & even that was a dramatic rise over the years before World War 2. When Don Allen came up with four “groups” through which to articulate the New American Poetry, he may have been a little heavy handed & sloppy, but the categories were adopted by so many younger poets precisely because they were already thinking that way. And Allen managed to miss Objectivism and Deep Image.** By the 1970s, the number of publishing poets had climbed to several thousand & today there are easily a few thousand poets just in the broadly defined post-avant tradition alone. In spite of some interesting attempts – Apex of the M, The New Brutalists, Social Mark, even, I dare say, New Formalism  – there really hasn’t been any sort of sustained identifiable community whose presence is defining just through its ability to articulate a position since language poetry 30 years ago. In practice, this means that one reads poems that aren’t necessarily examples of types.

 

In fact, one of the ways we do speak of poetry is in terms of its heritage with regard to an identifiable community, thus post-NY School, post-langpo, post-Beat, etc. And this sometimes offers the reader clues or anchors when confronting any poet new to them.

 

So this is, for me, the second place where Larry’s argument breaks down. When you see a poem in journal by a poet whose name you don’t know, the only instant association you can make is predicated on the journal itself. If it’s House Organ, with its post-Black Mountain stance, you might come to one conclusion. If it’s Mark(s) out of Detroit, you might come to another. If it’s Can We Have Our Ball Back you might come to a third. But these distinctions are far less clearly marked off than they were ten-fifteen years ago. If I pick up House Organ 36 (Fall 2001), for example, I see a number of writers who fit my sense of its editorial stance: Carol Bergé, Diane DiPrima, Clayton Eshleman, Vincent Ferrini, Fielding Dawson, Rochelle Owens. But what about Hugh Fox, John Bennett, Lawrence Fixel, Sheila E. Murphy, Joseph Massey, Maurice Kenny or Daniela Gioseffi, none of whom really connect to that same aesthetic, at least not in ways apparent to me. And then there are writers whose work I don’t know at all, or only barely: Daniel Zimmerman, David Starkey, Brian Hill, Anita Feldman, Robert VanderMolen, Jim McCrary. In what ways are these poets not anonymous, in that I don’t know “what” their names might signify?

 

So Larry’s dream of the unpolluted text is exactly that, a myth. I can post poems anonymously on my blog, but it’s still my blog. Or your blog. Or it’s Larry bringing you a sheaf of poems he typed up & copied. There’s always a context.

 

I can publish under pseudonyms, a la Araki Yasusada or Ern Malley, but the project itself takes on many of the elements we would otherwise associate with The Person. You can’t really escape it there either. If you think of a project like Anon, you realize pretty quickly that it’s one thing if they publish anonymous work by people whose writing you know or anonymous work by people of whom you have never heard.

 

And even if this myth could be realized, you would still have the problem of “Leaving the Atocha Station.” The language of the text is no more freed of the impacts of the Outside, of commerce with the quotidian, of a reader’s assumptions & associations, than anything else.

 

The unspoken question behind Larry’s anonymity is this: how do you know whether or not a poem is any good? I only published ones that I liked & that happened to be in my backpack at the exact moment Larry & I were talking. In retrospect, I wish I’d picked something by Annie Finch, something by Eileen Tabios, something by Whittaker Chambers. There’s an uncollected poem by Jack Gilbert that begins “Helot for what time there is in the baptist hegemony of death.” I’ll bet I could get some readers to accept that as a language poem with no great difficulty. That might be unfair, both to the readers & to Jack. But it’s definitely do-able.

 

Names may be the simplest shorthand we have for so many of the diverse external pressures on the poem. One year ago, I had no clue who Stacy Szymaszek was. Today, that name conjures up an aesthetic, a poetics so clearly defined one can almost taste them, a sense of subject – in her case, the sea – a set of proclivities in her writing (she likes to use her ears, for example, far more actively than a lot of other poets) and even a literal community, the Milwaukee writing scene.

 

In my day job, we call that brand equity. Stacy Szymaszek has acquired a lot in the past year. Brenda Iijima, Charles Borkhuis, Noah Eli Gordon and Lisa Jarnot all have brand equity as poets as well. What we associate with those brands, their names, and the degree to which we recognize them – top-of-mind as the focus groups say – may vary, just as do their poetics. But the social process is largely the same.

 

That, in fact, is why Silliman’s Blog isn’t called something terminally cute, like so many other weblogs. Who, for pity’s sake, is sodaddictionary? Whether he’s a poet I love or hate – and I do presume it’s a he, based on internal textual details – there is nothing about that blognym that will ever cause me to pick up one of his books, simply because I wouldn’t know how to associate it. But there must be 50 poets whose work I knew first as bloggers – Jim Behrle, Kasey Mohammad, Jonathan Mayhew, Heriberto Yepez, the aforementioned Ms. Tabios, Tim Yu – and that led me to their poems. 

 

That’s also why my blogroll generally uses real names – I’ve really resisted calling people by the Internet equivalent of CB radio handles & cringe at every exception I make, whether because I can’t really figure it out – 2 Blowhards or Grand Text Auto, for example – or because they write and ask that I stick to something silly, like Karl Merleau-Marcuse or Johanna’s Rutabaga. It’s one thing when a writer has a serious reason for needing to be anonymous, such as the Invisible Adjunct who often reports on the demeaning aspects of a career that is permanently temporary & in jeopardy, or even for a group blog like IowaBlog or As/Is. But otherwise, it’s mostly an index of discomfort with the idea that, as a writer, you are a brand. Just like Janet Jackson. Like Martha Stewart.

 

I’ve argued before about poets failing to deal with that aspect of their lives & work. But it comes into play for us as readers as well. That really is what Larry Fagin is asking when he tells me that “names are the biggest cop-out” in poetry. What is a poem dissociated from its brand? His presumption is that it’s still the poem. But I would counter that, at a very important level, no, it’s not. Even more than generic oatmeal from your supermarket is not the same as Quaker Oats, which, more often than not, also manufactured that generic brand.

 

Finally, to look at the question from a radically different angle, I’d recommend Barrett Watten’s talk at SUNY Buffalo. You can get the text in PDF format here and a superb PowerPoint presentation here. I recommend that you read both.

 

 

 

* Ellipses in the original.

 

** Tho he could be rightly excused as saying that Deep Image (a) came somewhat later, circa 1965, and (b) never really was a single thing, given the presence of Robert Bly, James Wright, Jerome Rothenberg & Robert Kelly all under that umbrella.