When I was a student at Berkeley circa 1970, Fred Crews used to teach a course on literature & ideology. His reading list had all the usual suspects, starting with Orwell & Brecht. And that was part of what kept me from ever bothering to take the course – it struck me as obvious that the writing one ought to be reading in such a class were exactly the works that appeared to be “non-ideological” and not about politics at all. The politics of a Pound or Celine or Bellow, on the right, or a Rushdie or Vonnegut or Denise Levertov or Amiri Baraka are all over their work. But what about the politics of John Ashbery or Billy Collins or Ted Kooser or Ted Berrigan? It’s not that they don’t have ideological commitments, even if their personal politics might be incoherent, but rather that they don’t foreground this dimension in their writing. That always struck me as being the right place to look if you wanted to have a truly useful discussion of a dimension like ideology.

Similarly, this summer at Naropa, I’m teaching a course that looks at the dividing line between self & other in contemporary writing. There are, of course, a million works these days in which the poet has brought in various literary devices to ensure that everything in the work is not the “pure expression” of the poet’s ego. In class, we’ve discussed John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Oulipo, flarf, Kenny Goldsmith’s uncreative writing. At the same time we’re reading three major critical pieces by Charles Olson – “Projective Verse” and “Letter to Elaine Feinstein,” two of his programmatic statements of projectivism, very much articulations of how the self might proceed in poetics, as well as “Proprioception,” Olson’s dialectics, which contains within itself a glimpse finally not just of self, but of other. Against this, what I didn’t want to do was simply pose works that offer the polar opposite practice, such as Mac Low or Goldsmith (different as they from one another), but in fact writers who don’t normally proceed as if the self/other question in the work is a major axis of their writing. The three books I chose were Aaron Shurin’s Involuntary Lyrics, Christian Bök’s Eunoia, and Geraldine Kim’s Povel. Not only does each poet come to a very different conclusion in these works as to how this question plays out in their writing, each represents a different demographic approaching this issue.

Shurin, with whom I went to UC Berkeley (for all I know, he may have taken Crews’ class), is a member of my own generation, old enough now to have had a couple of different careers as a poet, emerging first as one of the gay activist poets of the post-Stonewall period, then pushing himself further toward a post-avant poetics after working with Robert Duncan at New College. Involuntary Lyrics represents a return to the line after 15 years of prose poems, but for the project he chose the end words of Shakespeare’s sonnets (not necessarily in the same order as they appear in that sonnet) for which he wrote new lines, so to speak.

The best-selling poetry book in Canadian history, Eunoia is a marvel of narrative & sonic invention, as Bök, a generation younger than Shurin &, like many Canadians, as close to the European tradition of experimental literature as he is to the U.S. poetry scene. You can, if you wish, read (and even hear) the whole of Eunoia online, which you should. If you’re like me, you will still need to own both the book & CD as well, tho I must say that Bök’s reading on the CD seems muted & paced in comparison with the high-energy performance I heard him give of this at Temple a couple of years back. Each section of Eunoia presents a tale written entirely using a single vowel. The story of Helen is told all using words that contain only e, and there are some fabulously obscene moments in the i chapter. If the question in Shurin’s work is where does he end & Shakespeare begin (or vice versa), the question for the Oulipo-influenced Bök is where is he in the work?

Gerald Kim’s Povel presents this issue in exactly the opposite way. One could read her new sentence structured verse novel as tho it were an autobiographical text and, tho her book received the 2005 Fence Modern Poets Series prize from Fence (Forrest Gander was the judge), at least some reviews treat the book as though it were entirely a novel. Born in 1983 – she couldn’t have been more than 21 when she wrote Povel – Kim is of a new generation entirely, as well as a Korean-American writer, a cultural take that U.S. literature is only now getting to know. But the best part of this is that the distance between the Abbott Street neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Charles Olson grew up and Brooks Crossing, West Boylston, the street on which Kim was raised, is just 7.4 miles.