“All conceptual writing is allegorical writing” argue Rob Fitterman & Vanessa Place in Notes on Conceptualisms, a fascinating little book with painfully small type. At the core of Cole Swensen’s Ours, published last year by the University of California Press, is the allegory of the garden, French gardens to be exact, and especially the work of André Le Nôtre (1613-1700), the “father,” to use Swensen’s term for it, “of the French formal garden.” Le Nôtre’s work most famously includes Versailles, as well as Chantilly, Saint-Cloud, Sceaux, Vaux-le-Vicomte & the Tuileries, where he himself was born, the son & grandson of royal gardeners. Le Nôtre, of course, means ours in French, but this isn’t the most important dimension of the pun tucked into the book’s title. Rather it is the logic of the garden, or of a certain type of garden, & the logic of the poem, our art. Or of a certain type of poem, the sort that Cole Swensen might be called upon to write. And beyond that, possession (or at least possessiveness) of the earth itself, such as royalty might imagine to be their “divine right.”

But if all conceptual writing is allegorical, does it then follow that the reverse is also true? If Ours represents a booklength allegory, does this mean that it is a form of conceptual writing? And is Cole Swensen a conceptual poet? As the co-editor of American Hybrid, an anthology that seeks to define a middle path between post-avant & quietist poetics, one might think Swensen exists outside of the flarf vs. conceptual debate, or that her work & vision of poetry in some way precedes it. It’s difficult to imagine the precision of her writing alongside the loud (and knowing) nonsense of Kenneth Goldsmith typing up (or, more likely, scanning in) The New York Times, or the Hugo Ball-meets-Daffy Duck aural pyrotechnics of Christian Bök’s Eunoia, the thinking man’s Mel Blanc.

Like Goldsmith’s work, which makes extraordinary use of facts even as it problematizes that category, Swensen’s poem is obsessed with external detail:

The first orangerie in France was built by Amboise at the end of the 15^th century,

but the form reached its height in the 17^th

coinciding with what’s called “The Little Ice Age,”

a series of exceptionally cold winters

But where Goldsmith’s work – and to a lesser degree that of Bök & the other poets who are normally (or normatively) implied by the rubric conceptual – strives to demonstrate form without ever being at all “literary,” Swensen is writerly as all get out. Its demonstration of “the literary” is its claim to form. One could write a book about how Swensen uses the line in Ours, and of the balance between prose & verse evident in so many of its sections. That book would be much larger than Ours, and would never be completely equal to its subject. Consider the second of these three lines: The circle of philosophers / in stone; riven by voices, they stand at crossroads; they incite fountains. The voices / grow louder whenever someone lives. A line with not one but four hard stops – Swensen offers the most complex verse line since Olson, but never does so with the wheezing lunge that propels the bard of Gloucester forward like a lemur through a forest’s canopy. The essence of her line is balance, just as his is imbalance. Yet her line here, not unlike so many of his, begins and ends in the middle – there is nothing contained or complete.

Allegorical writing is necessarily inconsistent, containing elaborations, recursions, sub-metaphors, fictive conceits, projections, and guisings that combine and recombine both to create the allegorical whole, and to discursively threaten this wholeness. In this sense, allegory implicates Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem: if it is consistent, it is incomplete; if complete, inconsistent.

At which moment Place & Fitterman insert their claim that heads up this note.

All of this is true – in spades – of Swensen’s Ours. Is she therefore a conceptual poet? One might think so, and yet

One might as well argue her role in the history of flarf on the grounds that, long ago & far away, she was Nada Gordon’s junior high school teacher.

Flarf & conceptual poetics have been treated as antitheticals, except where they’re not. In five years (or minutes) no one will remember that they were once imagined to be oppositional, rather than as flavors of a larger investigative poetics. Flarf will discover that conceptualism expands the terrain of writing by valuing the extra-(and anti-) literary, conceptualism will discover that flarf’s ruling framework – “badness” – is an inherently conceptual move.

Hybrid poetry, by definition, brings alternative paths together: Pound’s Mauberly not perceived as satire. The first hybrid poet, almost by design, was Marianne Moore, old friend of Pound, advocate of Williams, but working a day job as editor of The Dial, the magazine that invented “dull” long before Paris Review, Granta or Narrative. Yet there was nothing dull about Moore, just as there is nothing dull about Swensen, C.D. Wright, Ann Lauterbach, Robert Hass, Donna Stonecipher, Forrest Gander or any of the other poets one might today imagine as “hybrids.”

If allegory assumes context, conceptual writing assumes all context. (This may be in the form of an open invitation, such as Dworkin’s Parse, or a closed index, such as Goldsmith’s Day, or a baroque articulation, such as Place’s Dies.) Thus, unlike traditional allegorical writing, conceptual writing must be capable of including unintended pre- or post-textual associations. This abrogates allegory’s (false) simulation of mastery, while remaining faithful to allegory’s (profound) interruption of correspondences. Allegory breaks mimesis via its constellatory features – what scattershot this is. Conceptualism’s mimesis absorbs what Benjamin called “the adorable detail.”

This suggests instead good vs. bad allegory. On the one side are a series of texts that might be called instances of mastery (Ours would be a case in point), on the other a series of texts that approach (indeed seek) unreadability in the name of breaking mimesis. A literature of works that one might have no particular desire to read, not unlike the idea that not everyone will want a urinal in their living room, even if it is signed “R. Mutt.”

Swensen reminds us that the old fashioned approach to extraneous (non-lyrical) data invading the text is called research. Ours sits like an ice flow atop a surface beneath which lies all of her reading & thinking on the subject of gardens. If, in fact, there are “adorable details,” they arrive via selection, precisely what the conceptualist counter-examples listed above seem to call into question.

What is the role of selection in poetry?

When I moved to Pennsylvania in 1995, one of the local phenomena that I had not anticipated was the presence of numerous formal gardens open to the public: Longwood Gardens, Chanticleer, Winterthur down in Delaware. The first & last of these had been homes for the DuPont family, who very much sought to replicate the best of French noble living in the new world (the founder of the American business empire had in fact defended Louis XVI & Marie Antoinette from a mob at the Tuileries in 1792, an act that led to the family’s move to North America). Gardens such as these remind one very much just how close culturally this part of the nation is  to its European roots, a far cry from either the drought resistant gardens that are the rage these days in the American west or the consciously socialist landscape architecture of a Fredrick Law Olmsted. That Swensen would pick Le Nôtre, rather than Olmsted, as the source for her work is, as a poker player might put it, a fascinating tell. She is, after all, one of our leading translators of poetry from the French. But if the logic of Olmsted’s gardens, with their sensitivity to landscape & imbalance, might lead one inexorably to the poetics, say, of a Charles Olson, the gardens of Le Nôtre seem obsessive in their symmetries.

As an aesthetic dynamic, symmetry is inherently stable, even static. Asymmetry by definition is unstable, it tends to lurch about. La Bayadère vs., say, Sally Silvers, Simone Forti or even Twyla Tharp. Symmetry is the driving principle of all closed works of art, indeed of closure itself.

One might argue that the conceptualist works figured above are themselves obsessively symmetrical – completeness is a value in & of itself (it’s not enough to do just a page of the New York Times). Just as one might argue that they are nothing but catalogs of adorable detail.

And one might argue that Swensen is no less obsessive than, say, Goldsmith, in the projects she takes on – Ours is not a poem about a garden, but a book, and one that leaves unspoken what is surely its largest single claim – that writing poetry is essentially (I mean this adverb literally) a process of gardening. From the forest of language to arrive at a garden of text, a poem.

Is Cole Swensen a conceptualist or the disproof of conceptualism? Or is conceptualism the proof or disproof of Cole Swensen?

Janet Holmes

A couple of the books that have come across my desk recently have gotten me thinking. One is Jared Hayes’ RecollecTed / CaGeD, printed in a limited special edition for the 101^st reading of the Spare Room series in Portland, Oregon. (You can read the CaGeD part of this book by downloading this PDF file from the folks at Dusie.) The other is by Janet Holmes & published by Shearsman, one of the very best presses in all of the U.K., entitled THE MS OF M Y KIN, or perhaps THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON.

This is only going to get me into trouble, but…

I was thinking about the debate, to call it that, between flarf & conceptual writing, and specifically thinking that such a debate was in many respects the healthiest single phenomenon I’ve seen regarding poetry in several decades, because it meant that there were two contending (contesting) approaches to the new, and that you can actually feel the discourse getting off the dime finally of what to do after langpo and just doing it. And that feels so long overdue, frankly.¹

Then I had the thought, what if this were the 1950s? There are some interesting parallels. Flarf & conceptual writing appear literally decades after the last collective literary tendency, not unlike how the New Americans showed up 20 years after the rise of Objectivism. And there are already different voices & formations, again as in the 1950s. So the question occurred to me: if these are the new 1950s, just who are flarf & conceptualism. And then suddenly it was as clear as sunlight in spring:

Flarf is Projective Verse
Conceptual Poetry is the New York School

Flarf, precisely by its interest in “deliberately awful” writing, is amazingly writerly. Its first notable device, Google sculpting, is not unlike way Olson et al reconceived the use of the linebreak & its relationship to speech so as to completely redefine how everyone (not just the Projectivists) would think about poetry. In this scenario, Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson is For Love for its generation. K. Silem Mohammad’s Dear Head Nation is what – the first Maximus? I don’t want to carry this analogy too far – Nada Gordon & Katie Degentesh don’t have to fight over who gets to be Denise Levertov (both are considerably more interesting in the long run, anyway). It would be valuable to note the differences between these formations as well – flarf is far more democratic, small d, for one. One doesn’t see Gary Sullivan pulling a “Reading at Berkeley” number any time soon. And is Rod Smith the Duncan, the Blackburn, the Edward Dorn?

Conceptual Poetry, like the NY School, borrows importantly on concepts from the New York visual arts world. Like Personism, it’s not about individual works of great art. It doesn’t overvalue personal creativity. It opts for fun. And it’s nostalgic for traditional forms – Kenny Goldsmith & Christian Bök, to name two, are deeply retro in terms of the projects they choose. Their relationship to fluxus & dada are as direct as Ashbery’s are to Stevens & Auden. All they’ve done is to switch the nameplates.

So where are the new Beats? Is that what slam or def jam poetics are about? I doubt it, actually, given just how completely the key early Beats were into form & literary history, but the whole valorization of the street poet, especially by the numbskulls who confuse Bukowski for a beat, has a deeply anti-intellectual strain one finds at a lot of slams.

And what would be the new SF Renaissance? One senses that the New Brutalist phenomenon really has not borne a distinct literary sensibility (one doesn’t hear anyone speaking of the New Yipes series as the foundation for a new poetics, for example, tho maybe I’m just hard of hearing). Is there a distinct aesthetic perceptible in Bay Poetics? Or are Bay Poetics as much of a fiction as was the first SF Renaissance? Maybe what that scene needs is a Jack Spicer, but is there anyone just plain grumpy enough?

It will, I think, be obvious that such an analogy as this does a lot of violence to all those named, for which I apologize, sort of. Sort of, because I don’t think my gut feel here is wrong. What we are seeing is the resurrection of some very basic tendencies active within poetry for over half a century, seeing them coalescing once again into shapely coalitions we can actually name. From my perspective, old collectivist that I am, this can only be a good thing for moving poetry forward.

 

¹ From my perspective the great “tragedy” of langpo is that there were no other seriously contesting approaches to poetry. Actualism, which I’ve written about before, dissipated after the death-by-alcoholism of Darrell Gray, and the NY School, gen 3, was never interested in working out its relationship to other poetics, period. Everyone else was pursuing the isolato mode of individualism, still the most popular (and futile) option.

Laynie Browne is conducting a survey about poetry for the forthcoming symposium on Conceptual Poetry in Tucson. Here are my responses to her questions.

1.  What is conceptual poetry?

I see it as a specific move within the larger possibility of the history of writing, one that requires (a) the pre-existence of conceptual art and (b) writers whose concept of an avant-garde – which they believe still exists and to which they feel committed – is predicated on the desanctification of the aesthetic object (a la Duchamp’s moves within sculpture nearly a century ago). It is thus an avant-garde that is widely accessible precisely because (a) it is retro & nostalgic and everyone can recognize it, and (b) anyone [in theory] can do it. Its tell-tale sign is that it usually removes some or all of the normal tasks of reading & interpretation from the process of consumption. The point isn’t to read the work so much as to “get it.” Having said that, some of its practitioners are exceptionally talented.

 2.  Can poetry be non-expressive?

Yes, absolutely, but to be non-expressive is a series of specific moves within the possibilities of language and poetry. Which is also to say that there is more than one way to get there.

3.  Is there such a thing as a “direct presentation of language”?

Yes, and for very much the same reasons that language can be non-expressive. It occurs as the result of specific moves within the creation of the poem.  

4.  Intellect rather than emotion? 

I reject the either/or nature of this question. I am only interested in both/and, thank you.

5.  Dismantle this line-drawing

Untitled, Eugene Andolsek, American Folk Art Museum
from the show Obsessive Drawing

 6.  What is the purpose of form and formlessness?

To differentiate themselves one from the other. To create foreground & background & a million effects such as shape.

7.  Distinguish between procedural and conceptual

One category of conceptual is procedural (think of Kenny Goldsmith’s works, such as Fidget), but a lot of poetry is procedural without being conceptual. Shakespeare’s Sonnets are entirely procedural. So are Ted Berrigan’s.

8.  What formal restraints do you practice every day?

The common ones of ablutions. The first thing I eat in the morning is a banana. I’m writing a poem in which each “sitting” is determined by how long it takes my six-year-old PC to boot up. I always go to sleep lying on my left side.

9.  What is the responsibility of the writer?

To respond.

10.  Why are women virtually excluded from the UBU web anthology?

There are two answers to this question. The first is generational. The gender bias of the institutions of literature (as distinct from literature itself) have only begun to seriously bend and open during my lifetime. In spite of the decisive role that certain women – Gertrude Stein, who is present in this anthology; Bernadette Mayer, who is not; Lucy Lippard, who is not; Hannah Weiner, who is not; Barbara Krueger & Jenny Holzer, who are not; the Guerilla Girls, who are not; Juliana Spahr & Jena Osman, who are not – have played in making conceptual poetry possible, indeed inevitable, they have generally been underrepresented all along. To the degree that this short list (just 31 items) tries to represent a few key moments in the history & pre-history of conceptualism, it invokes several periods when women did not make up half the world of writing, which is quite recent. One might likewise ask why are Dada and Russian Futurism under-represented here. Indeed, where is Dmitri Prigov, who coined the phrase “conceptual poetry”?

The second answer is more concrete: you ought to ask Craig.

This week’s blog at the Poetry Foundation has been Kenny Goldsmith on the virtues of uncreative writing. While this sounds like coals to Newcastle, Goldsmith’s conceptual poetics – he offers lots of examples, especially with Friday’s annotated reading list – is both well-considered &, given its location, hysterically funny. The best thing Poetry has done in years.

It was the Russian Formalist critics who first noted that one of the historic roles of art – and one of art’s inexorable drivers toward incessant, ongoing change – is to incorporate new aspects of society into the art itself. Without which any genre would very quickly lose much of its connectedness with the life of the community from which it springs. Indeed, in poetry, the refusal of this function in favor of a defensive conventionality is perhaps the most serious weakness of the School of Quietude, the fundamental absence, even a form of denial, right at the spot where a heart should beat.

One clear instance of poetry bringing in new language into the place of the poem was Ed Friedman’s 1979 project, The Telephone Book, which presented, verbatim, a month and a half of transcribed telephone calls by the then-director of the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church. The culture of phone etiquette – this was before you could actually who was calling before they identified themselves – combined with the elements of Friedman’s life – not just poetry, but also his participation in the controversial do-it-yourself therapy movement called co-counseling – to yield a text that edged up against, say, Bernadette Mayer’s works of memory & reconstruction on the one side, and social codes so banal that they were all but “invisible” because of being “too boring to notice.” The result was a brave & wonderful book & consciously a challenge to read, at once formal & painfully intimate.

All of these same elements, save for the co-counseling, are invoked again in a new work, Inbox (a reverse memoir), by Noah Eli Gordon, forthcoming from BlazeVOX books. I’ve been asked if I’d blurb it, but I think this book is too important to let pass with just a few words for a rear cover. Inbox is exactly what its title suggests, a work of art that includes email received by the author, albeit written entirely by his correspondents, over a period of time. By way of introduction, Gordon uses his permission letter, which reads (in part):

Dear Friends,
I recently completed a book project that includes
some of your writing and wanted to both tell you
about it and ask your permission to [attempt to]
publish the work. I’m currently calling the manuscript
INBOX, which should send up the requisite bells and
whistles, 55 pages of uninterrupted prose that
constitutes a kind of temporal autobiography, well
conceptually anyway. I thought it would be interesting
to see what would happen if I were to take the body-
text of every email that was addressed specifically to
me [nothing forwarded or from any listserv] currently
in my inbox [over 200] and let all of the voices collide
into one continuous text. The work is arranged in
reverse chronology, mirroring the setup of my email
program. I removed everyone’s name and any phrase
with which they’d closed their email; additionally, I
removed any specific address mentioned. I’m really
pleased with the results, as it sculpts the space
between the every detritus of dinner plans to
discussions of fonts and notes from long lost friends.
To be honest, as I’m a person pretty free of drama,
the bulk of the work is boring, but intentionally so, in
the generative, ambient way that Tan Lin writes
about, well, one would hope anyhow. It’s the collision
of voices that makes the work compelling, at least to
me. The only thing is… I didn’t write any of it; you did!
Of course there’s something awfully self-aggrandizing
to a project like this, and I’m fully aware of it, which is
why I’m thinking of it as an autobiography. I don’t think
it would be right for me to show any of the
manuscript to anyone until I’ve received everyone’s
permission to share the work. Let me just say this:
there’s not really anything all that incriminating in
here, and most of the gossip is pretty bland. I still
have many of the emails from which the text was
created [although not all] so I’d be willing to send folks
copies of whatever they’ve written that I do still have,
if need be. Although, to be honest, I think the integrity
of the project is kind of dependant on folks NOT being
aware of the make up of their contribution, as the
voices dissolves into one another without any
transition. Also let me say that if I do end up doing
anything with the text, it will not include anyone’s
name, outside of those mentioned in the body text of
messages; besides my name, there is no author
attribution within the manuscript. Most of the text is
dinky pobiz stuff, me hashing out the shape of
chapbook manuscripts I’ve published, or will publish,
directions to readings, etc. It is not at all my intension  
to take advantage of or disrupt anyone’s confidence.

This is a remarkably accurate description of the book itself, tho, like The Telephone Book, inbox somewhat fetishizes its source material by printing it pretty much verbatim from start to finish whereas I think you would get a truer picture of the actual language of email (or of phone conversation) precisely by breaking it apart – sentences seem an obvious point – and scrambling them, so that you look primarily (if not only) to the language & not all these miniature narratives. Will Noah accept this invite? Will the proofs for that chapbook be adequate? Etc. I’m reminded that when Kathy Acker decided to focus on the juridical language of the courts system, she didn’t adopt the dramatized fictive canon of Perry Mason et al, but used the actual language of in re van Geldern as her source material, while also substituting in the names of friends (and by that fact, characters from other sections of the same novel). Acker’s strategy is not unlike Harry Partch’s music composed on a scale of his making on instruments he invented from materials & objects that already exist in the world. Friedman & Gordon more or less give you the raw objects instead.

Sociologically, Inbox is fascinating. As reading, it’s a tougher go, and I think one finds it possible almost primarily because of the “guess the writer” roman a clef element in the work. Who wrote, for example, on the very second page of the work:

I’m writing to invite you to read in the Poetry Project 2004-2005 Monday Night Series at St. Mark’s Church in NY on January 24, 2004, 8 p.m. I know the New York audience is eager to see you here – and to course I’ve seen your work quite a bit, and admire your range (among other things). In short, I’d love to have you read! Details: You would be paid $50 for the reading itself, and unfortunately we can’t afford to cover travel costs (something we’re hoping to work on in the future), but I hope you can make it (it’s not too much from Amherst, yeah?). Additionally, your reading time can run from approx. 20-40 minutes, up to you. Your reading partner will be Barbara Cole. If you’re not available for 1/24, let me know as soon as you can, and we’ll work something else out. I’ll also need a full address from you, so we can send a “contract” out. The Poetry Project’s archaic and long-winded way of welcoming. :) Thanks very much and hope to be in touch soon.

My own sense is that the material works best to the degree it is most mysterious, most turned toward the language, most disjunct:

Have you worked as a DJ? What relationship do you see, if any, between the worlds of publishing books & putting out music? Silliman’s Blog tells me today that you just won the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. What manuscript is in the works on that front? Can you talk a bit about your chapbook venture?

That, I presume, is all one correspondent, but the jump-jump-jump between sentences gives it an urgency the passage above lacks.

So my sense here is that the “more aesthetic” approach that, say, Linh Dinh takes toward the discourse of instant messaging in his most recent work, writing in that discourse rather than mere replicating of the always already written, ultimately makes more sense to me in terms of how best to bring a previous absent (albeit all-but-omnipresent) layer of language into writing. But this doesn’t cancel out the importance of Noah Eli Gordon’s Inbox. It presents the highest order of conceptual poetics just by being itself.

It is not simply the Oulipo-derived games, impressive as they are, that makes Christian Bök’s Eunoia (Coach House, 2001) so notable, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and, most wondrous, an avant-garde title with 8,000 copies in print within its first year of publication. (See a flash presentation of “Chapter e” here: http://www.ubu.com/contemp/bok/eunoia_final.html.) Bök’s book’s driving pleasure lies in its author’s commitment to the oldest authorial element there is: a great passion for rigor, particularly at the level of craft.

 

Consider:

Relentless, the rebel peddles these theses, even when vexed peers deem the new precepts ‘mere dreck’. The plebes resent newer verse; nevertheless, the rebel perseveres, never deterred, never dejected, heedless, even when hecklers heckle the vehement speeches. We feel perplexed whenever we see these excerpted sentences. We sneer when we detect the clever scheme – the emergent repetend: the letter E. We jeer; we jest. We express resentment. We detest these depthless pretenses – these present-tense verbs, expressed pell-mell. We prefer genteel speech, where sense redeems senselessness. (32)

 

In addition to the evident wit & active sense of jest throughout, all winking meta-commentary, there are just two small moments here (“hecklers heckle” and “sense redeems senselessness”) in which a reiteration of root terms raises the possibility that another line of attack might have been posed, e.g. “even when the hecklers’ specter severed speeches.” But this alternative (for example) adds one extra character, and just might render the typesetting – every line in the title text is justified so that no paragraph ends mid-line (this rule is adhered to also in the Ubu.com version, which presents each paragraph in 10 lines as against Bök’s book’s 13) – impossible. Add to this an awesome ear and, well, ease awes. And it is precisely because Bök makes it all feel as natural as rain that makes us swoon. Great stuff!