Also on Jonathan Mayhew’s blog is a plea to Joshua Corey not to “use the Izenberg article as inspiration for a dissertation chapter.” The Izenberg article being Oren Izenberg’s “Language Poetry and Collective Life,” published awhile back in Critical Inquiry. That took me back both to Josh’s comments about Izenberg – and more interestingly about Giorgio Agamben – and to reread the Izenberg piece. The latter is an almost perfect example of why people who read poetry as, and for, evidence in philosophical debates tend to be clumsy, if not outright incompetent, readers. The article is full of incommensurate leaps – taking individual sentences out of context from within a poetic text & turning them into over-arching claims that language poetry supposedly is making for itself. (Invariably making every langpo responsible for anything any other associated poet may have put into print.) To which Izenberg adds as evidence quotations from some (but hardly all, and hardly a representative sweep of) other langpos, as well as from others who have always been critical of language poetry (such as Leslie Scalapino & Jennifer Moxley), treated here as examples of the problem itself. Not to mention poets who may have felt one way at one time and another at a different time, such as Michael Palmer & Susan Howe. Part of that may just be the problem of trying to shoehorn a complex reality into a streamlined expository narrative, but mostly it’s just intellectual dishonesty. Izenberg very carefully avoids poets like Bob Perelman & Rae Armantrout who would simply contradict most of his major claims. Izenberg’s core complaint – tho he never quite articulates it clearly – seems to be that language poets have more generally aligned themselves with linguistics as defined by cognitive linguistics, whereas he still prefers the older (tho now largely superceded) generative school associated with Chomsky & the magical thinking of his “innateness” thesis.

But if you read Corey’s two blogs on the subject, that doesn’t seem to be what he’s attempting to do at all. So maybe Jonathan’s plea isn’t so much a warning that Corey is wandering down the wrong road as it is that he may be attempting to build a more interesting argument on too flimsy a theoretical base, one that Corey could probably do a far stronger job with just by starting out fresh. Corey has shown that he can read poetry, which appears to flummox poor Izenberg altogether.

The confluence of these three positions, tho, made me wonder something that had not occurred to me in quite this same way before. What if a young poet, or young critical reader of any kind, were to come upon language poetry first? To read Lyn Hejinian or Carla Harryman or James Sherry before, say, not just Ginsberg or Pound or Stein, but Lowell or Pinsky or Gioia or Phil Levine or Merwin or Snodgrass? Or even Wordsworth, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Shakespeare? Which is to say “utterly out of context.”

That of course is what happens whenever someone reads poetry – any poetry – for the first time. Context is precisely what is absent. But given the degree to which language poetry has self-identified as an oppositional poetics, what happens when there is nothing already there that one might oppose?

Particularly if one had this introduction relatively late in life – say, as a college freshman – there might well be the sort of foreground-background reversal we’re used to from optical illusions, such as Necker’s cube. Dana Gioia & Timothy Steele might look like the oppositionalists under such a circumstance. Context, of course, resolves those sorts of issues, and context gets acquired over time. But first impressions have a way of lasting, even when they’re skewed.

My gut feel here – no way for me to arrive at this question sans baggage – is that to read langpo without a prior context would tend to foreground certain poets & poetries, while making others seem precious or clumsy. A writer whose work is concerned with its presentation of the text – literally its poem-ness – is going to do better sans context, whether the work looks at least superficially conventional (Armantrout, Perelman, Robinson) or more decidedly not (Grenier, Watten), particularly since the reader would – theoretically at least – be sans convention as well. Works that rely outside of themselves – that depend on our knowledge of other texts, and of conventions – are less apt to fare as well. If you didn’t recognize the satirical target of many poems by Charles Bernstein, for example, works such as his studies of “Nude Formalism” are going to slide right on by.

Fortunately in the real world there are no ideal – nor completely innocent – readers. Layers of allusion & irony, often important elements in any langpo “statement,” can be counted on to be intelligible to large numbers – in poetry terms, anyway – of readers.

So I find that I’m not necessarily hostile to the idea of somebody investigating langpo as pastoral – just so long as they can incorporate the far reaches of Grenier, McCaffery, Melnick & Hannah Weiner into that bucolic mode – because I can imagine a context in which one comes to a project that might be stated as “how do you view the whole of poetry through the lens of pastoral”? At least in the abstract, that certainly beats “close misreading” as an investigative strategy.

As to Josh’s other question –

what are we, the post-Language poets, up to? By returning to "content" are we manufacturing identities and falling prey to the spectacle? Or are we simply asserting our own ontic particularity in protest against the levelling [sic] of affect seen in much Language poetry, synecdochic of the indiscriminate cutting edge of revolutionary violence?

I think the answer is mostly neither – tho I would note that there’s a fair amount of work out there that doesn’t fit the description “returning to ‘content’” just as the implication that langpo ever left it is provably not so. Rather, I think there is a drag effect in the evolution (as distinct from the “progress”) of literary forms. Most post-langpo work that appears to have returned to the terms of a pre-langpo existence is, in fact, pre-langpo. Just as the premoderns among the new formalist are literally that, only a few of them cagey enough to warrant being called truly anti-modern.