This
is going to be impossible. On Monday, the day I posted my four-part test of
poetry, this blog received 546 visitors, the most ever. I got back more – and
more interesting – responses than I could have hoped to have received. People
like Tim Yu took my impulses into entirely new directions. Others, like Josh
Corey, pretty much challenged some of my basic assumptions. In addition to Kent
Johnson, a man with experience using other identities, Noah Eli Gordon – a
commentator as well as one of the anonymous poets here – points up the
existence of a press dedicated to anonymous literature – www.anon.be.
These folks publish the journal Anon out
of the same mail drop in
So
I’m not going to pretend that this is a particularly coherent weaving of all
the comments I received on these four poems – whether from emails, on others
blogs, or in the very busy comments section to Monday’s entry. In fact, since
it’s directly accessible from here, I’ll mostly refrain from repeating what’s
in 20 items now in the comments section on the blog. That will enable me to
keep the rest of this down to just ten pages, single spaced.
A mere 4,648 words.
Rather,
what follows is an anthology of response, a range of reactions, starting with a
reminder from
But
this time – maybe I was feeling expansive, having just read to a full house at The Church – I thought I would test the process.
Lets start with Curtis’ note:
Dear Ron:
You surprise me with your latest blog.
About six months ago, I launched into a
diatribe regarding the sins of identity in art, to which you took strenuous
objection (or so I recall).
I actually suggested a literary magazine which
published in each issue works without by-lines, so that they could be read and
appreciated without regard to their reputations/preconceptions/judgments, and
the names of the authors could be identified in the subsequent issue. This
would allow the work of unknowns to be read side-by-side with veterans, without
anyone being able to set preconceptions about their value/meaning/impact/interest.
What a pleasure it would be to challenge someone like Harold Bloom or even YOU
(!) to decide how good these works were, and/or who he/you thought the works
belonged to! This is the best tonic I can think of to
the tiresome partisan posturing of literary entities. As an editor – either you
have a vision of what you believe in, which drives your sense of the quality of
what you promote, or you're a hack. What you choose to publish should be based
on the quality and integrity and interest in the work alone, without regard to
favors, friends, or reputations.
Is not your "Test" actually an
oblique application of my program?
Curtis
P.S. Gardens is Snodgrass, but I find all four
of these selections terrifically boring.
P.P.S. I always get off
reminding people that Tom Clark and
Michael
Bogue and Rodney Koeneke both noted early on how
closely this exercise mimics the exercise conducted by I.A. Richards that led
to his writing Practical Criticism. Indeed,
the online Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
depicts his use of anonymity in its entry on Practical Criticism:
Practical Criticism draws on Richards's
experiences and experiments in teaching. In his very popular
Michael
Bogue also posted an excellent reading of the first
poem, “Swamp Formalism,” on his own weblog.
Steve
Tills sent his analysis of “Swamp Formalism” by email:
I lean toward this being a womin,
but I’d rather say that I believe it’s a “femin/ine/ist subjectivity,” for such subjectivity can be
used by either male or femaele or other gender
identifications.
Why femin/ine/ist
subjectivity? (1) the subject matter(s) and subject(s) altogether – i.e., “As
if they were not men” is, for one, “writing poems as if from non-male p.o.v. AND also sarcasm toward assumptions of
doing so but really just rehabitually redoing the
same old male “hero” (including “make it new”), heroics, nonetheless. Those
transcending “male” competition subjectivities/ego don’t need to be heroes? (2)”Females” are more likely to be,
“sunning on the rocks,” prostrate, naked, vulnerable, open
to attacks from “the same blue [melancholy male] [sky, which is NOT the actual next term.] (3)Again,
“as if I was a hero or they were” calls into question heroes, heroics, and all
related male tropes. (4)Then, “as if the they and these us
that / arrived” is a questioning of male US/THEM splitting, again, a male
trope, male trope-ing. (5)Recognition
that in fact it’s the same “blue / ground bogs” from which both genders derive,
probably in fact from pre-split life form neither femaele
nor male, to begin with (pun kept). (6)Then, too, “as
if I [too] didn’t kill the plants, the / water, and the air” critiques
dominating male/masculine obsessions (Irrational
Man, William Barrett; The Chalice and
the Blade, Riane Eisler)
with “mastering” nature, “subduing” nature, taking position “above” nature,
“overcoming” nature – nature, here, “femaele” and “other,” or “mother,” from which males “by
nature” must “split off” in order to develop Self-identity/selves (Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Nancy Chodorow) a “male trope very early encoded, thus, by
crucial psychological development instinct, predating Lacan’s
and Freud’s Oedipal stage by 6-12 months, and perhaps setting the stage for all
that is “male” in the splitting of humans from nature and the destruction of
nature and the preference of “competition and domination” over “cooperation”
(willingness to be one with rather than separate from “mother,” other, nature).
(7)Then, too, “fruit and sheep were all /
diamond-shaped” suggests revering the usually degraded fruit (biblical, for
which Eve was blame) and sheep (meek). And then, just as quickly, there’s “and
melted,” so as to undercut the act of revering (“diamond-shaped”). (8)Then, “in the / main dust [from which we all rise and then
return, all mortal, even Rumsfield/eld], from the
self same / main dust spring” is, again, that
at bottom we are all THE SAME (neither male better than femaele
nor vice versa nor other gender identifications Over others, etc.). What’s
important is LIFE, from “the / main dust,” from “spring,” from “underground”
(the Unconscious) and “shadows” (the Unconscious again, this time Jungian,
typically a stranger male figure in dreams for male dreamers and a stranger femaele figure in dreams for femaele
dreamers, hence repressed and split-off “bad” selves we do not want to
integrate and instead thus project onto others, like “the Vietnamese” or the
“Republicans” or “the Moslems” or “the Communists,” hence wars).
Well, this is what [one] I of mine would have
meant had I written this poem and I would have liked it to be femaele or, in fact, transgender subjectivity based and
directed, I guess. But then, I’m “totalizing” the heck out of it – “a male reading/habit.”
Ah, well.
Steve Tills
From
just the other side of
Here's my reply to, A Test Of Poetry, Please
accept this as my rough off-the-top comment on the following poem. The premise of
anonymity you are exploring has definite relevance. I love for instance
browsing turn of the century privately printed amateur poetry books often found
in used bookbarns. So many bittersweet passions cast
to the winds as ghosts.
(A) Swamp Formalism by (?)
Admired this poem in
particular.
But a poem for our
great D.R.? - well I thought at first this is going to be
tough street creed. The title's cute, almost a paradox. Bound to be a set up and then a crash. And look, the topical
idolater's dramatically honored in italics. That put the bait in my trap, I'll
concede. - got my attention. So I guessed ahead the poem would be an anti-
editorial gone full tare. Then after reading on I'm not disappointed,
surprised, -in fact stunned. A powerful fighting metaphor looms forward,
(amphibious), strong enough, apt enough, to weigh in self-referentially for the
delicate hint of cynicism that creeps ahead. Yet it resolves and balances out
towards another kingdom. Sensitive in primordial sweep.
The text easily outstrips any preconception the strange title challenged. Any
note of insincerity too, or silly politicizing, vaporized. In fact I've been
reading Juniper Fuse recently and the
poem resonates well with the concept of primal awareness, especially in the
poem's last coda "in the main dust" that also clinches a pun on
spring, with perhaps, Gaen renewal. If there is
anything one could take to task, it might be the too "universalistic"
muddle of talking hard, but that's easily ameliorated by the running rhythmical
urgency that seems to jump out of situations like "my bog". Also the
word "formalism" in the title gave me the impression the poet was a
little tense about how far to torqued the overall language, a substitutes for
"oh well, I better fess up, its an experiment". The whole thrust
though, brought to mind David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous. and the loss of origin, et al.
I have to guess a studious poet with mythic
sensibilities penned this cry. Or weep; if you will. My roulette chip goes on
red for F-e rather than black for M-e – I was a friend of M.C.
Richards incidentally, who you may remember
wrote The Crossing Point in the
Sixties. She would have cottoned on to this poem I believe.
From
the
I “meet” each poem and at that moment as at a
cocktail party I make snap judgments based on snap inferences, I feel a liking
or a distaste, so though I can’t be said to know the
people something still feels like a social contact.
Poem A.
I feel an immediate resistance to the title;
it’s a jamming together of nouns that immediately suggests a whole world of
media-fuelled magazine reviews that is alien to my own way of thinking. Never
would I write these two words. “You’re not like me”, I judge. I also reject the
structure of “as if”s, I find myself internally
calling it “a conceit”, or some such other judgmental term. I take against the
line “as if the they and these us that” - the ugliness
seems over-familiar. I can’t but acknowledge certain pieces of intelligence
that rise from this swamp (“tiny and biting and black”, “lizard heads on
sticks”, “fruit and sheep were all diamond shaped”), nevertheless I feel free
to ignore them because rejection is the easiest thing.
Poem B.
We like people who are like ourselves, so I’m
immediately attracted to a form that I think I would like to create myself. I
think there is a rueful tone that is socially winning, too (“A crude sort of Hamletism, I know”). There is plenty in the poem to back up
my initial sense of intelligence and care: moustache printed on face like hoof
on sand, radio when you’re alone in a boat - I like those buried narratives and
connections that aren’t stated. “neighbor to nearby” - yes, that’s an
intelligent music. “daybreak” with its hint of radio stints and advertising
breaks and daytime programs... At the same time a tiny little doubt grows,
which takes shape as this: that the author really has had a clever thought
(“radio was the first form to conceal its function”) and that the author’s
clever thought has simply been stuck into the poem, though it’s merely what the
author believes. I am guarded now, it’s a
question-mark about sincerity. I have another drink.
Poem C.
The thought is itself well worn and of course
I am conventional too and so I sympathize with it. I feel at ease in certain
ways. I know how this person will react; this is the one I’d choose to be
trapped with in an emergency. I don’t think well of “a fake come-hither
solitude”, which sounds like someone who is thoughtlessly pleased with their
skill at ranting, and I reject the last line (“these luminous beacons”) as a
too-easy finale (rising to noble heights, like a poorish
fourth movement).
Poem D.
Instant reaction was to condemn the repetitive
syntax of “Unlike...” - compare “as if...” in Poem A. I knew where this poem
was going, I seemed to have read many such poems happily inhabiting the big
spaces of all those negations and leading to a fairly commonplace epiphany. Yet
after a little more consideration I’m won over. The strictness of the form
persuades me of a seriousness I care for. I approve of the subtle placing of
fog, and lava; the poem’s dynamics are more varied than I thought at first. I like things more (perhaps even a little excessively) when they
overcome an unfavourable first impression. I
weigh the amount of space before “Even now” and approve it - more space than I
would have used; the right amount of space, it now seems. I think the poem can
mean more than what I first jumped to, though it means that too.
Pamela
Lu picks up on this same sense of the poem itself as persona, focusing more on
the title than does Peverett:
Dear Ron,
This is an
interesting project, a good way to use the blog as a polling tool.
I echo the comment
from Marcus Slease – my first assumption, reading
through all four poems quickly before scrolling to the explanatory text, was
that Ron Silliman had decided to post a handful of new short poems on his blog,
possibly with some occasional motive in mind, or just simply as a way to post
some fresh work. Then I got to the rules of the "test" and had to
scroll back up and immediately rethink my initial reading of the poems.
Some thoughts: 1.
My reading was affected by the fact that you preserved the original titles and section
numbers. So that I was trained to think of A through D as parts of discrete
poem entities, and more specifically, B as a possible part of a serial poem
sequence (journalistic, arranged by date?) and D as stanza 1 of a longer poem.
Makes me look at C as a complete short poem and want to evaluate it on the
basis of whether it succeeds in developing its premise and achieves a
satisfying "closure."
So the title of a
poem can also function as a name attached to the poem, leading to
2. my assumptions
about A, based on the dedication to
3. Getting back to
your original line of inquiry about the authors behind the text, based on my
initial, relatively quick readings (basically the pace with which I go at texts
in a print or online journal), I can't say anything conclusive about the age of
the authors. To me, all four could have believably been written by the same
person-- they don't seem to exhibit terribly different ideologies or poetics.
They are at home with open-ended forms and the metonymy of language. A and D seem to resemble each other the most in their interest in
or denial of the simile. Then again, the fact that I could easily
imagine interchanging the authors of these similar blocks of poems might
indicate that the authors are younger, more fluid and less identifiable by a
signature style.
4. I can't make any
guesses about the authors' ethnicities. No obvious markers here.
5. I conclude that
all the authors are college-educated. I would wager that most, if not all of
them, have MFAs.
6. There are no
obvious class-identity indicators here. By class I mean the socioeconomic
background that the author grew up in. Of course, #5
might actually be a leading indicator of this. Or its
leading erasure.
7. I like to make
gender guesses, though. Here are my bets:
A: female
B: female
C: male
D: this one's a
toss-up, can't say either way (incidentally, it happens to be the poem that
interests me the most out of the set)
thanks for letting
me play,
Pam Lu
I
like Pamela’s willingness to take risk there in number 7 – she has two of the three
she commits to correct, missing only (B).
Tim
Yu uses his blog to a sharply political analysis of what one might learn from
this exercise – both sharp and political.
Tim’s right, of course. In several senses, I’ve stacked the deck here.
Josh Corey scolds me for dividing poetry into Us
& Them – I think that’s called recognizing history – and attempts to point
out “something interesting in Ploughshares.”
But he has to go back 27 years to find an example and – well, read it yourself – what
he comes up with is genuinely awful. I guess he thinks it’s
language poetry because it doesn’t make sense.
An
even more viscerally negative response came in a series of short emails from a
young poet from the
Swamp Formalism
this sounds like a
teenage girl with braces cutting into her lips. maybe she has a headache from
the orthodontist's tightening them.
95.9
it sounds
exasperated and the "it could be" adds to the affect, something
you seem to remember even though it's meant to be forgotten. seems
as if confusion has maybe become a sort of pastime like comparing baseball
statistics in your head. the form, the shape of the poem, is boxed,
even square-- rigid, cantankerous. the reference to Hamletism,
and crude, suggests an apathy or antipathy, or even disgust for academic
convention, maybe. but most of all the title reminds me of a Liz Phair lyric, when in the chorus she magically croons, "ninety-eight point five." and I can only listen
to her when I'm strong.
Word Worn
First and again,
it's easy for me to relate to, from the start. It appeals to
my desire to have an indifferent person be interested by me,
especially a woman. But I feel, after reading it a few more times,
that the best of this poem is in the first few stanzas. The rest is
ho-hum, but it still kind of turns me on. Gosh I hope a woman wrote that.
1
I hate this. It
reminds me of nepotism, makes me think it only took a secret handshake to print
this. It mocks me. I hate it.
I hate the word
"raw". It's like the privileged substitute for crazy, psychotic,
inane, or stupid or... sigh.
Lynn
Behrendt takes a similar approaching, trying to guess
the gender, age, and time of writing of the poems:
Dear Ron,
I didn't recognize any of the 4 poems. I read
through them before I read the explanation about your conversation with Larry
Fagin. And (though this is a little embarrassing to admit since it probably
reflects on the poor attention I pay in first readings) I read the four poems
as sections of one piece, written by one person. I liked it that way--better,
in fact, than I like any of the individual poems.
The above makes me
think about appropriation, and anthology.
The thing I find myself first trying to
determine is the gender of the writer, followed by the age, followed by the
approximate date the piece was written. If your test is just to guess who wrote
the poems, let me fail right off the bat, because I haven't a clue. But, on
first reading, I thought Swamp Formalism was written by a man in his early 40s.
Then it seemed that only a woman 35 or under could write
as if I didn’t kill the plants, the
water, and the air, as if the
fruit and the sheep were all
diamond shaped
Obviously it was written within the past year,
due to the Rumsfeld dedication.
My guess is that 95.9 was
written in the last five years by a man around 60 years old.
Word Worn was written about 15 years ago by a
woman either in her early 30s or early 40s.
The last poem, titled 1, I would have guessed
was written by a very young man, early 20s, about 8 years ago. But since I read
"Even now" and the 3 final question marks as part of the poem, I
don't know. Those last two elements make it much more interesting than the
previous too-listlike lines using what I find to be an
annoying plethora of commas and line breaks that I just don't understand and
don't like.
Another
person preferring anonymity, an assistant professor at a western university,
hazards a guess as to the identity of the first poet . . . and gets it right.
Ron –
First I was just gonna say the dog ate my
test, but on second thought,here
are a few more than random, less than rigorous comments....
a) I’m out of it enough right now not to have
read Lisa Jarnot since Ring of Fire but
this is her unless it’s somebody else consciously imitating her; that recursive
revising of a phrase, what could be a very simple phrasal prosody but with line
shortened and energized to get the keywords in different positions: imagine
doing this to a Whitman litany...
b) This troping-on-cliché
mode reminds me of Christopher Dewdney, possibly the first experimental poet I
ever heard/met; it also reminds me of
c) I don’t love it; the sense of an ending is
too lyric-epiphany for me; even though the poem is about the trite, the truistic, I don’t feel it does enough with the mode....that
line ‘the first line writes the poem’ reminds me of any number of Ron Silliman
gestures, but I don’t think this is Silliman...
d) The word “unlike” starts to quiver and
blur, in the way of the word you recite late at night in bed...the intercutting
of the geographical with, gradually, other discourses (political, economic,
sublime) could be read in terms of Romanticism: the language of nature
(aesthetic value) vs. the language of economic value, or, another dichotomy,
natural vs. productive forces: production, change, emergence seems the dominant
metaphorical strain. And the refusal of resemblance: plug in your theoretical
apparatus of choice here and fire it up....this seems a part of a long piece;
as it stands I don’t find so much going on formally but I’d be interested in
reading more...
Jonathon
Mayhew seconds the correct identification of Jarnot, albeit in a roundabout
manner, and adds a second one, Noah Eli Gordon:
Dear Ron:
I'll take a stab at your test:
(a) is trying to be "poetic." It
reminds me of Lisa Jarnot a little bit. (b) Noah Eli Gordon's
The Frequencies? (I just read
the book a few weeks ago). (c) is a mainstream attempt at "language poetry." I hear a female voice here though it could
just as well not be. It isn't dissimilar to Rae Armantrout or Pam Rehm, or
Norma Cole. (d) could be Julianna Spahr. Or maybe not.
What strikes me is that there isn't a whole lot of individual differences perceptible in
these short pieces. To read the author's personality into the text you'd
already have to know the author's "personality," which doesn't come
through immediately in most cases. I don't know why I wanted to project a
woman's voice onto each one of them. It looks like all four poets have read the
same reading list and are all writing around 2004.
Jonathan Mayhew
K.
Silem Mohammad posts responses on his weblog
for all four. I believe Kasey when he says that he knows who wrote three of
these pieces, tho we’ll have to use the honor system, since he did not name
names there. Shanna Compton, in the comments box,
thought the identification question was so easy as to be bogus (I’m paraphrasing
& just maybe overstating a wee bit for emphasis). Yet, including the
comments box, I received over 25 responses, only two of which actually named
some names – a total of three identifications out of 100 possible.
I’m
intrigued at how diverse readings generally were, especially those that were
judgmental. Every poem seems to have been somebody’s favorite and somebody’s least favorite as well. I
take that as a good sign.
I’m
also intrigued – definitely – at the couple
of readings that suggested trying to see this all as the work of one writer,
especially me. For the record, I’d have loved to have written any one of these
but I know myself well enough to know that I couldn’t have written any one of
them.
I
said before that I had stacked the deck. It’s true in the sense that (a) I only
picked poems from books that were in my backpack as I walked up the midnight
streets with Larry last Wednesday, one of which I’d been given only a couple of
hours before, and (b) I only picked poems that I personally like a lot – this
latter condition probably homogenizes the instincts of these poets more than
would otherwise be the case.
I’ve
already given away the first two poets, but here’s a formal list.
(A) “Swamp Formalism” Lisa Jarnot, from Black
Dog Songs
(B) “95.9” Noah
Eli Gordon, from The Frequencies
(C) “Word Worn” Charles Borkhuis, from Savior-FEAR
(D) “1” Brenda
Iijima, from Around Sea
I
want to thank everyone who participated in this. Tomorrow, if I get a chance,
I’ll take a look at the first of these four poems & poets. Followed each day by the next poet (with maybe a break over the
weekend). Then, if I’m not sick of the topic by then, I might return to
the question of anonymity one last time.
