There are those Dylan lyrics again, running through my head:

 

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter time too

When your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through

 

“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” certainly is one of my three or four favorite Dylan tunes of all time. I’ve always wondered if the allusion to that other great work of Juarez literature, William Carlos Williams’ The Desert Music, is intentional. Probably not, but it doesn’t really matter. What’s bringing the tune to mind today is the fact that in poetics nothing succeeds so much as negativity. My thumbs down review Monday of Jeff Clark’s debacle, Music and Suicide, brought more readers to my site than any other item I’ve run in 21 months: 659 visitors viewed 1,004 pages. Conversely, nothing brings readership down faster nor more deeply than poetry itself – the poems from the Rosenbach Alphabet – which included pieces by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Bob Perelman, Susan Stewart & Paul Muldoon, just to name four – was greeted by readers like I was giving out Ebola.

 

This is not news. There were always more readers for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E than for the poetry publications it discussed, just as there have always been readers who seem to think that perusing  reviews* in the New York Review of Books is the same as, if not better than, reading the books. Plus controversy never hurts. Write a bad review & the rubberneckers gather very fast. In general, I don’t write very many negative pieces here – life is too short & there are too many good books & poets who don’t get discussed nearly enough as it is. The last one, I think, was my piece on Jake Berry last September. As was the case with Jeff Clark in the comments on Monday, there were some exceptionally passionate, if mostly unsupported (&, I would venture, unsupportable) defenses of the work. In Berry’s case, he had to wait eight months for Jack Foley to write in something just approaching a close reading of work quite unlike the passages I’d dismissed in September. But I’m glad that that happened. In the comments thread on Monday’s piece, there are two brilliant posts – both of which disagree with me, tho to different degrees  & in different ways – by Geoffrey O’Brien (one of three people to whom Clark’s book is dedicated) & Pamela Lu. You should take the time to read those at the very least.

 

Some people do want the world divided up into the All Good & the All Bad. That sort of moral certainty may be associated with the political right, but it’s a thread that runs through everybody’s psyche at some level. Complexity & ambivalence are more difficult to contemplate & to articulate. One of John Kerry’s very worst traits as a campaigner is giving complex answers to complex questions – the Bush campaign is already running footage of some Kerry’s responses in its ads – and yet you know that is a side of Kerry that would make him a far more competent president than W.

 

I don’t think this is necessarily less true in poetry, even though the world of the poem is filled with people who value complexity & even find the squirminess of ambivalence a little autoerotic. If Music and Suicide doesn’t work as a book, does it follow that Clark is a bad poet? I’m sure that I didn’t say that. Conversely, if it doesn’t necessarily mean that, is it then conceivable that a “bad” poet – whatever you think that term might mean – could write a “good” – even “great” – book? I think that the answer to this latter question is yes, and I can imagine several examples. But what does that mean? I think it means that the writer – whatever his or her limitations – found him- (or her-)self at a particular junction in history – their personal history & the history of the society overall – that foregrounded & even may have transformed some aspects of their work. It makes sense to me, for example, that Emily Dickinson & Herman Melville are both far greater writers in the 20^th & 21^st centuries than they were in their own.

 

Ambivalence – or multivalence of any kind – is even more complicated. There is an enormous amount of work that has built up, in poetry, in critical studies, in fiction, over the past 20 years relating to borders & border conditions of all kinds – nomads of the morning or however you want to think of them – & polyvalence is an active element in every one of these situations – writing from multiple points of view, a perspective that I think is inherently uneasy simply because it’s unstable by definition. One poet strikes me as almost a test case for ambivalence in his writing, so I’ll tackle his most recent book tomorrow. That person is Peter Gizzi.

 

 

* Half of which are “think pieces” on the same general topic & barely discuss the books “under review.”