Brian Kim Stefans responds to my blog on K. Silem Mohammad’s article on Stefans’ Creep anti-manifesto:

Hi Ron and Kasey,

I try not to respond to writing about my writing to avoid the “echo chamber” effect and also to curtail any elevated sense of self-consideration about what I am doing, since, after all, like everyone else I probably think a bit too much about what I am doing, what people think I am doing, etc. Better to pretend it's not happening, like in that Roy Lichtenstein painting of that woman drowning, and the thought bubble saying “This is not happening.”

But nonetheless, here are a few quick notes to clarify and hopefully further confuse the situation.

I should mention, first, that I have translated the essay into synthetic Scots and that it appears in Fashionable Noise: on digital poetics, forthcoming from Atelos. The poems are also translated into Scots, though in what I hope is an absurdly literal fashion, illustrating what I elsewhere describe in the book as the vulnerability of digitized text to algorithmic processes, but also the possibility of “teleactive” literary activity in web culture – the ability to participate and influence the distribution of ideas and even the management of “cultural capital” in real-time from great distances (it seems Silliman's Blog confirms the efficacy of this formulation). So, I am trying to make Kevin Davies known as the great Scottish poet, as he damn well should be.

Also, the essay was a direct response not only to the substance of Stephen Burt's “Ellipticist” essay but to the style. I wanted to explore a rhetoric that I hadn't previously used, or at least signed my name to, and also to test whether such an absurd term as the “Creeps” would ever actually be adopted in the critical world – all of this is stated in the essay.

On lists: I am generally against lists as a critical strategy, whether they be the lists at the end of Harold Bloom's books (The Western Canon, most obviously) or, yes, the ones prefacing In The American Tree and The Art of Practice. The reason for this is that it is much more easy to include a writer whose work one has not read or even ever enjoyed on a list than it is to write insightful comments about this writer's work – a list takes easy advantage of the Adamic power of “naming” without doing the heavier, more threatening work of going out on a limb in support of the project of another writer. It puts one who has not been named in the position of waiting to be “named,” whereas many of us choose – by instinct – to avoid responding to such scholastic perspectives.

But also, the kind of writing such a list engenders in response is almost always of the “why is so and so in, why another out” variety, which I find not productive (this goes as well for anthologies). Ezra Pound's list of Imagists was in fact quite short, and very imperfect, but his dogma – I like dogma better, believe it or not, though lie as often in my dogmatic statements as I do in my lists – seems to me to have had a more lasting, usefully provocative effect. There is a mistaken assumption that the list of names is more democratic – has closer ties to some concept of "freedom" – than a more didactic, overdetermined prose, but I feel that the latter method, when used well, creates more opportunities for useful proliferation of ideas – it is engendering.

That said, lists are fun, and I do believe all of the poets (or rather, the books) belong on that list. I think of the list as a rebus, and leave it up to the reader to figure exactly how the individual element belongs within the parameters being described in the body of the essay. And all of the books were published since 1996 or so (I don’t remember what I wrote), and I’ve enjoyed reading them much more than I enjoy a similar list of books published around, say, 1991 – the “New Coast” time, which, for me, was a rather diffuse time for poetry in the United States. I'd rather hear useful, engaging rhetoric that is nonetheless incorrect (think of Rimbaud's Lettre du Voyant) than anything that could be mistaken for indifferent, even "even-handed," prose. (That said, I'm actually quite a nice guy in person.)

This is going on too long... I'll just hit some points, in defense I suppose.

I'm always amused by people who tend to see Jennifer Moxley's work as some sort of “return” to emotion, affect, sentiment, and how few people really think that there is an underlying humor, even irony, to her use of archaic tropes, etc. One can look at the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads to see that the motion of JM's writing is neither backward nor forward but both: maybe a "smart" (as in "smart bomb") pinpointing of that one cataclysmic moment when the Enlightenment and the "cult of reason" turned into Romanticism (and its attendant cults).

People seem to think that Jennifer’s work singled that it was ok to be “honest” and “candid” again, when it strikes me that – compared to, say, the later poems of Williams, like “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” which I feel much of The Sense Record responds to – the apparent emotional complexity of her work is actually more attributable to the drama, in the reader’s mind, of trying to determine how exactly she feels toward the language she is using. Most of the salient features of her poems can be attributed to her reading of books, even dictionaries (like Mullen’s Muse & Drudge language coming from Clarence Major’s Dictionary) and how she feels, as a woman who identifies with the working class, utilizing these words. (A similar drama is at play in Pamela Lu's novel, I think.)

If that's what you mean by epistemological issues, then I guess you have a point, but I guess my point is that the flavor of Moxley's writing is a far cry from that of Burt's essay – which, again, is partly what this is a response to – in that her project is conceptually cleaner (she is not knocked off her pedestal with every opportunity for a pregnant white space or a curious paradox) and she follows through with the premises of her poems (the Apollinaire riff, for example, or any metrical base note that she decides to declare in the first ten or so lines) that is absent from the more free-wheeling style of the "elliptical writers." There isn't any "magical realism" in Moxley's work much as there might be in, say, Michael Palmer's, and there is always a sense of pushing toward something "candid" in JM that attempts to critique the very artifice being employed while – in the fashion of "emotional exhibitionism" as I write elsewhere of JM – giving herself very much over to it.

It's also a form of "camp" – John Wilkinson links her writing to John Wieners in this fashion – that, were I to have thought of it, might have been a useful term to employ in the essay (though I don't think Darren Wershler-Henry, for instance, is writing in any sort of drag).

Ok, I'm getting tired... I wish Kasey would post his essay online somewhere so I can cut and paste a few things from it. The phrase "spectacularly unusable" seems a useful one, for example, and the "trope of getting it wrong" is also provocative – he (you, Kasey) accurately, for me, described how the essay was both bosh at heart but useful to describe, which is I suppose something I try to achieve in my "writings on poetics".

As for community: my sense is that I am involved in an international community of writers and artists, and that, in fact, I am much closer in spirit, and even friendship, to some writers in Toronto (in terms of the digital stuff) and the U.K. (at least when Miles Champion was there) than I am to many of the writers here in New York (but, of course, there are hundreds of those, many of them close friends). Nonetheless – and the project of Circulars has brought this to the fore, to me – we've all been "in touch" with each other, even if talking past each other, since the internet took off, and that, in "moments of scandal" (as I write in the essay), there is a sort of contraction that occurs among these poets no matter how geographically and even aesthetically diverse they are.

I am on the verge of believing that, in politics, one can point to the presence of virtual countries– not just communities – that are already operating in a fashion directly contradicting the legal fashions as laid out by the government-entertainment complex (file swapping being the most salient feature, but also indy media sites that are more read than, say, the NYTimes site*), and that these people will be able to behave in unison, in a coordinated fashion, regardless of how the governments of the members of these virtual "countries" are constructed. This may seem like science fiction for now, but my sense is that there is a hot lava working under the hardened bedrock of governments and any sort of institutional structure that accepted as legal, productive, useful, etc. and that it can behave as an organism in times of crisis to terrible effect. (Pardon the awkward metaphors.)

What this has to do with the "Creeps"? I guess I'm just pointing to how one can be "invisible" and "flea-like" and yet not feel so terribly small, since after all our lateral acknowledgement of each other across the horizon of today is far vaster than can be understood within the paradigm of looking for the "break with the past", pointing to singular phenomenon like "New American Poetry." I'm more interested in Caroline Bergvall, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Tom Leonard right now than I am in New Americans, but also in Dagmar's Chili Pitas, Aurelia Harvey and Ivan Brunetti, silly as that sounds. (This weekend, I am being interviewed by Giselle Beiguelman, a Brazilian digital artist, about my "hacktivism," as another example.) To break out of one's community has nothing to do with becoming part of a "mainstream" so much as becoming a node in larger cultural structures that are not given air-time in anything that could be considered a reputable media venue.

I don't think this is so pathetic as you make it sound, nor do I think that there is any sense among my peers that we don't know what we're doing here (but I love the fact that you know the song, which isn't in fact very good). My sense is that, were one to collect all of the various statements about what Language poetry was supposed to be "about," as a gesture, a coherent aesthetic moment, one would see more holes – more porousness – than unity, making one wonder whether the dictatorship of a Breton (which, after all, spawned Guy Debord, another useful aesthetic dictator), was more seminal in the long run than the all-inclusive good vibrations, but ultimately contradictory and even, to some, substanceless, project of Language writing – at least Breton was a moving target, a "body" of thought that, if only coherent within itself, was something to throw bricks at and hear a clang. There was an endgame in Surrealism and Situationism that doesn't exist in Language writing, since it seems, finally, that the point of Language writing was to make books and live forever in the minds of mankind, much like most writers do. How argue with that?

But I'm not the first one to suggest this; I'm only pointing to the fact that replies are coming in, but in terms that move "below the radar" (another Creeps term). One must be an achieved cultural polyglot to have any sense of "what's coming next."

[Looking back at your blog post, this line – "Sure sounds like Sartre’s vision of serialization & capitalist atomization to me, a series of infinitely substitutable parts that can be popped out of a box or anthology – like a chess set composed entirely of pawns – and dropped into any theory one wants." – is particularly vulnerable to critique specifically because you have had a tendency to make lists, create theories for them, then make lists that operate nearly as disclaimers to your theory – an equally good list could be created for such and such a theory is practically a trope in your writing. Isn't a singular, no-holds-barred theory better than one that gives away before it's gotten off the ground? But I don't believe Sartre's description is very accurate anyway, or that this hasty comparison is particularly persuasive.]

Oh, this is way too long...

Lastly, let me just note that, ridiculous as the Creeps essay was, some phenomena that followed long after it was written fit right in. First there are the books: Lytle Shaw's book The Lobe could have been a member of the list, as could Toscano's more recent work, Kim Rosenfield's Good Morning Midnight, the font work of Paul Chan (whom I didn't know at the time), etc. "Flarf," the school of poetry invented by Gary Sullivan that is currently all the rage in the Left Bank, seems quite Creep oriented to me, as does the phenomenon of Blogs (Jordan Davis's blog is full of solipsism, haranguing to invisible congresses, etc.) and metablogs, like the "Mainstream Poetry Blog" – "arpeggiated squeals of Moog fanfare without justification or apology" to use another of Kasey's phrases.

That "moments of scandal" are like the torches that light the bats in the cave seems also accurate to me – I noticed that more people read Tranter's Jacket when something controversial, even mean, appears there, as more people probably read your blog for the same reason (viz. the Canadian controversy a few months back). This suggests not a porousness and a replacibility so much as an unwillingness to show one's cards unless forced to, and with any luck the present war crisis will bring more and more poets into searching for ways to harangue – the public, the congress – while reserving the right to retreat into "rugged individualism," the comfort zone of sitting behind a PC, in touch but, yes, not. To be invisible is a useful property in times when one might be targeted by the government – or critics! (But alas, I am a critic too, and without apologies... just strong reservations.)

Ok, too long... knowing me, there'll be a postscript forthcoming. Thanks for the notes, etc.

best, Brian

* I have a deep suspicion that the popularity of these indy sites – with the possible exception of the rightwing Matt Drudge – are the net equivalent of an urban myth. – Ron

Perhaps the article in tripwire 6 that most directly tackles the question of community is K. Silem Mohammad’s “Creeping it real: Brian Kim Stefans’ ‘Invisible Congress’ and the Notion of Community,” a critique of sorts of Stefans’ “When Lilacs Last in the Door: Notes on New Poetry,” an overview of younger poets that Stefans initially undertook for Poets & Writers – specifically for  Michael Scharf’s “Metromania” column – moving it over to Steve Evans’ webzine, Third Factory after the P&W  editors rejected it.*

Stefans’ article proposes the existence of a new literary tendency that he literally calls The Creeps, after the Radiohead song. In his article, Stefans quotes from the song – “But I’m a creep / I’m a weirdo / what the hell am I doing here? / I don’t belong here” – to “explain” why he chose such a consciously anti-attractive moniker to assign to the fortunate few he so characterizes. Pointedly, Stefans neglects to include the lines that lead up to this chorus, perhaps because they articulate his position a little too plaintively:

I want to have control

I want a perfect body

I want a perfect soul

I want you to notice

when I’m not around

you’re so fucking special

I wish I was special

Stefans also lists 19 writers & 21 books to pin down if not what, then at least who (besides himself) he means:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Caroline Bergvall's Goan Atom

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Lee Ann Brown's Polyverse

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Miles Champions' Three Bell Zero

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Kevin Davies' Comp.

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Tim Davis' Dailies

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Jeff Derksen's Dwell

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Dan Farrell's Last Instance

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Robert Fitterman's Metropolis 1-15

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Kenneth Goldsmith's No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Lisa Jarnot's Some Other Kind of Mission

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Adeena Karasick's Dyssemia Sleaze

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Bill Luoma's Works and Days

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Jennifer Moxley's Imagination Verses and her chapbook Wrong Life

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Harriet Mullens' Muse and Drudge

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Rod Smith's Protective Immediacy and In Memory of My Theories

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Chris Stroffolino's Stealer's Wheel

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Rodrigo Toscano's Partisans

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry 

That’s an interesting – if not particularly coherent – roster, ranging from the constraint-driven formalism of Mullen & the Canadian post-Oulipo experimenters to the epistemology-centered Moxley**, to Pamela Lu’s poignantly retro novella, a retelling of sorts of Catcher in the Rye as filtered through Ashbery’s Three Poems, to several poets with visible post-langpo & post-NY school concerns.

If Stefans’ initial piece is itself an instance of post-langpo counter-canon formation, parallel in purpose if not specifics to the claims underlying the O•blēk ”New Coast” anthology & subsequent Apex of the M editorials or Sianne Ngai’s “Poetics of Disgust,” what seems to interest Mohammad most about Creepy poetry is a claim that I don’t think Stefans actually makes:

The eyebrow-raising element here is the claim that Creeps want to break out of the community model of experimental writing, a model that has held indomitable sway for decades, notably reinforced and codified in Ron Silliman’s passionate introduction to In the American Tree.

Given that, as per Sartre, the alternative to the group is serial formation, a phenomenon that is synonymous with the atomizing principles of capitalism – & nowhere more visible in literature than in the sales-driven approach to books of the New York trade publishers – that “break out” would more accurately be characterized as a surrender, if in fact it were the case. The adjective Creepy would acquire a whole new (or, rather, very old) set of meanings. But I don’t think this is what Stefans was driving at in his original piece.

The passage that Mohammad cites for this eye-brow elevation is the following:

all the Creeps share . . . a surprising desire to communicate, to perform, to create social interactivity, and to expand beyond the small communities that have been their inherited legacy from previous American avant-gardes. They are often experimentalists, but have no interest in experiment for its own sake, at least if the results are not something like a public, often very entertaining, form of poetry, a sort of deviant form of street theater itself. The Creeps are almost universally very funny, though why there has been such a turn to humor in their poetry is matter for debate.***

This anxiety about communicating with a broader constituency of readers fits in perfectly with the high-school discomfiture articulated by the Radiohead lyrics, but it’s a considerable leap – very nearly a rocket launch – to suggest that any, let alone all, of the lucky Creeps want to make the leap to appearances on Oprah or even Jim Behrle’s poetry spots on NPR’s Here and Now.

Stefans’ argument can be framed as making a case for a return from trobar clus, the consciously difficult poetry that the 12^th century troubadours wrote for each other along with the complex melopoetics of tobar ric, back toward something akin to trobar leu or plan, the more open-ended & simpler poems composed for less literate audiences. This I would agree with Kasey is eye-brow raising, but mostly because it so closely parallels the argument offered by Dana Gioia in Can Poetry Matter? The logic that one could theoretically arrive at a more popular poetry is sometimes put forward to justify the existence of a Billy Collins or Deborah Garrison or Sophie Hannah or Wendy Cope. Clearly, none of the Creeps are involved in anything remotely that creepy.

The problem – which in fact is the question of community itself – of belonging, as such, cannot escape history. History teaches what history teaches, which includes the inescapable detail that even as these genres were already subdividing amoeba-like nine centuries ago, the arrival of post-12^th century modes of story telling, ranging from the novel to cinema to reality TV, have occupied – for good reason – the social space previously taken up by trobar leu. In fact, if one looks to those contemporary societies in which poetry has occupied something akin to a truly popular genre, such as late-Stalinist Soviet Russia or the remoter districts of Yemen, there are inevitably & always specific historic circumstances that have thwarted or diverted the narrative genres that absorb these spaces in the post-industrial West. We don’t need Homer precisely because we already have Homer Simpson.

If Stefans was, as I suspect, doing some creative mischief-making for the institutional context of Poets & Writers, Mohammad attempts to spin this rather wispy daydream into a far more formidable theoretic construction. Mohammad asks:

So how does Creep turn away from a community-based poetics?  Only to the extent that it rejects the notion of a safe enclave, a privileged brotherhood of artistry in which the problems of the outside world are, after all, outside, and at least there’s that. It does this by raising the quixotic possibility of intercourse between experimental poetry and mainstream culture . . . .

Mohammad’s evidence for this, which goes on for a couple of pages, is entirely a list of literary devices associated with language poetry. This suggests that an important part of literary formation is, or at least might be, creative amnesia – and on this question I’d probably concur, noting how Robert Grenier’s great “break” with speech in 1970 was directed precisely toward the poetics toward which he felt himself most deeply attracted. Three decades hence, langpo finds itself drawn into this same quandary of being configured as an impediment rather than a foundation even as the evidence duly displayed directly contradicts the charge. Plus ça change.  . . .

Perhaps the most problematic part of Mohammad’s construction is that he pulls back from it at the end, not unlike Chaucer’s deathbed apology:

this is exactly what I find attractive about Stefans’ Creep (anti-) aesthetic: it’s a movement that is formed within the mind of the reader, not the designs of a self-articulated community. Stefans’ apprehension of Creepiness comes from his own Creepy imagination, his own desire to oversee a troupe of invisible, flea-like verbal acrobats.

Now there’s an attractive proposition! How would you like to be both invisible & flea-like? Sign me up, Kasey! Not.

However, Mohammad is almost certainly accurate in his next (and final) assertion:

That the poets [Stefans] names are readily conformable to such a desire says something about their shared use of certain techniques and their common concerns as postmodern artists, but more about a simultaneous resistance and porousness in their work that encourages progressive (but diverse) notions of community to be constructed from the margins outward (inward?) – there is no Creep manifesto, only an ever-growing passenger manifest, the names on which can be shuffled according to the needs of an equally various and multiple collective of readerly sensibilities.

Sure sounds like Sartre’s vision of serialization & capitalist atomization to me, a series of infinitely substitutable parts that can be popped out of a box or anthology – like a chess set composed entirely of pawns – and dropped into any theory one wants. This goes right back to the suppressed lyrics of the original Radiohead song, “I want to have control.” This is a vision of a generation of poets who have no clue what that might feel like. And don’t understand that such “porousness” is as much a lethal threat to themselves as it is astronauts on the space shuttle.

To the degree that Stefans, or Ngai or even the Apex / O•blēk gang make efforts to challenge that porousness, their attempts, however partial & one-sided, align them with the angels of history, for which they all deserve our thanks & support. But to the degree that anybody imagines a community of rugged individuals – which is what the post-community monad most certainly is – as a possibility, these poets can only continue to ask themselves “what the hell am I doing here?”

* Evans asks that links not be made to Third Factory, which is why the link to Stefans’ piece goes to a linked bibliography of Brian’s that does have an apparently authorized link.

** Stefans claims, using Moxley as his “evidence,” that “Creeps . . . are not . . . greatly concerned with epistemological issues”!?!

*** Again, the test of Stefans’ claim here is, or should be, Jennifer Moxley’s poetry. I’ve argued here before that this would be a total misreading of her work.

I sat down with yesterday’s post to the blog from K. Silem Mohammad & Tom Orange & just listed the points to which I personally wanted to respond: my list came to three pages single spaced. It’s just not possible in blog form to approach anything with such obsessively pointillist detail, so I thought instead to group these sometimes disjunct ideas, each one of which could spark a more thorough discussion somewhere,  & came up with two intersecting axes of concern:

●          My definition of abstract lyric – “bounded by modest scale and focused on the elements within”

●          The role of “the social” within & around poetry, a question that has been raised by Louis Cabri & others

Hovering around these two axes I find a third key issue: the role of close reading & “bean counting” in thinking through issues of poetry. I want to approach this one first, because I think its implications impact what can be said about either of the other two.

Close reading’s association with the New Critics (NC) is often treated as grounds for distrust because of NC’s alignment with a reactionary aesthetic tendency in the United States – one that joined the poetics of the Southern Agrarians to those of the Boston Brahmans – but it is worth noting that key NC theorist René Wellek’s training in critical practice came through the Prague Linguistics Circle, founded in 1926 by a group of scholars that included Roman Jakobson & incorporated many of the tendencies that originated within Russian Formalism (& in relation to Russian futurist poets, from Mayakovsky to Khlebnikov). Unless one adopts the dual theory that (1) structural elements have inherent political biases – an argument that would be kin to an equation of, say, Poundian metrics with fascism &/or that (2) aspects of the Prague School itself were part of a larger historical drift of a rightward moving avant-garde, the way the Trostskyists of the 1930s New York Intellectuals transformed themselves into the Neocons of the 1970s (the history, say, of Partisan Review) – an argument that again puts close reading into a fundamental(ist) relation to a political tendency – then in fact one needs to look at the practice of close reading in the light of its materialist roots.

The process of bean counting – a phrase I really like, by the way – is predicated on the reality that beans exist. Signifying elements (that could be saying anything) actually are present & countable in a poem (as in a novel or any other social product). One major – and characteristic – failing of much bad critical writing (which is in fact most critical writing) is that, in literal terms, its practitioners don’t know beans. That is, they make sweeping generalizations that cannot be tested because if they could, their assertions would collapse from the weight of contradictory data. Again, let me pose the example of M.L. Rosenthal & confessional poetry. Rosenthal’s attempt to bind together disparate tendencies of poetry in an attempt to rescue the direct inheritors of NC’s aesthetic program from a fate it so richly deserved would fuel concepts such as Jim Breslin’s likening American poetry to a land of many suburbs, absent conflict & ultimately lacking shape & content, sort of a Columbine of the heart. Dana Gioia’s terribly incomplete (& too often inaccurate) social history of the institutionalization of poetry in “Can Poetry Matter?,” is merely that same argument presented with a Music Man exhortation for the masses to go out & buy trombones. Not coincidentally, many of the arguments made about langpo over the past three decades – that it is theory driven, humorless, anti-referential, anti-narrative, self-consciously difficult, etc. – are all disprovable simply by actually looking at what is there. So, yes, I will continue to favor the enumeration of beans. I think it’s the most materialist critical practice available, when used appropriately, & an excellent inoculation against all manner of mythology & self-interested hokum.

Kasey states that he is “skeptical about such designations as ‘social’ and ‘asocial’ as polarized ways of conceiving lyric formally.” That’s not precisely what I had said – although it is close to Tom Orange’s paraphrase – but the concept as such is worth pursuing. Tom’s own argument was rather the reverse: for him, a work that could be unpacked hermeneutically is less transgressive than one that resists by presenting an impenetrable surface of signifiers. It’s a logic by which Christian Bök’s Eunoia or the poetry of Sheila E. Murphy or Peter Ganick might be seen as more social than Louis Cabris’ The Mood Embosser, Barrett Watten’s Bad History or Bob Perelman’s The First World.

From my perspective, lyric is a formal category, neither a pejorative nor an adulatory term. There are lyric poets whose work is wonderful (Joseph Ceravolo, Kit Robinson, Barbara Guest, the Zukofsky of Barely and Widely) & there are lyric poets whose work would make any sensitive reader cringe (fill in the blanks). Contrary to Tom’s argument, however, I do not think that the capacity of a poem to be unpacked hermeneutically is by definition the determination of what is or is not a lyric. Rather, it is the poem’s sense of its own boundaries vis-à-vis the larger world. The New Critics’ passion for the lyric is separate from their own use of methodology to demonstrate why this or that lyric, this or that poet should be anointed. As I tried to demonstrate awhile back with the poetry of Bruce Andrews, any text can be unpacked through close reading – that is a condition of the reading mind, not something to which only some poets are subject to some of the time. Eunoia is as much subject to such a process as would be The Mood Embosser or Barbara Guest’s “Defensive Rapture.” What privileged the lyric for the New Critics was not any hermeneutic depth, nor any relation to personal expression, but rather the lyric’s sense of itself as aesthetically contained – “focused on the elements within” – which spared this genre entanglements with the social, a category that in the 1930s was at least as charged & problematic as it is today. It was containment precisely that enabled the New Critics to claim that they were reading only what was in the poem & nothing extraneous that might “pollute” the critique. Only lyric could thus verify their claim to be specialized – and hence professional – readers, the position that in turn enabled them between 1935 & 1950 to become the dominant power within American English departments.

Guest, on the face of her poetry, is clearly a lyric writer. That she elsewhere has been active in service to the field, as biographer & teacher, doesn’t actually alter what is on the page, any more than Jack Spicer’s or Ezra Pound’s notoriously antisocial comments & activities in the real world erases the value of their poetry. In this sense, Kasey is quite correct in asserting that the social is not a formal term. Where form does intersect with the social, however, has to do with the poem’s own sense of its permeability vis-à-vis the world. This has less to do with reference in the sense of “this poem is about the struggle of the heroic people of Lichtenstein” than it does with language sources, image schemas & -- the deciding factor for me – the way in which the poem structurally defines itself.

The most interesting instances in this territory (as in many others) are those that situate themselves ambiguously along the border. Larry Eigner is an excellent case in point. His poems are as contained & formally balanced as any written over the past 50 years:

walking

      the idea of dancing

             time

                       making room

This untitled piece from The World and Its Streets, Places (Black Sparrow, 1977) could be analyzed in exactly the same kind of formal terms that I used with Barbara Guest on November 3. The poem proposes itself almost as the essence of lightness, with extra spacing between lines & the characteristic Eigner sweep down across the page. Its use of suffix & sound organizes the prosody: hear the k move from walking to making & the elegant use of the liquid m from time to making & finally to room. There is nothing apparent within this text to suggest anything other than what is on the page – even the casual or unfamiliar reader will recognize that the relation between walking & dancing (think of a choreographer like Simone Forti or Sally Silvers) could be very adequately characterized as time making room. & yet here is a poet who could not walk, who spent his life confined to wheel chairs. Nowhere is that mentioned: the fact simply haunts the poem for anyone who ever knew Eigner or knew of him well enough to know how cerebral palsy shaped & limited his physical vocabulary. At what level is this poem a lyric?

Eigner is justly famous for his use of simple nouns – wind, tree, sun, sky – and yet it is relatively rare in his poems for these items to exist as abstractions. The presence of the human world repeatedly invades & contextualizes.

damp

wind

    the birds chorusing

           clouds moving the sky

                                the haze

                   blast the foghorn

                 through the trees

Bounded at either end by couplets, the birds anthropomorphized, clouds assigned intentionality, the key verb blast is as much a curse as a description of sound. Nature, in Eigner, is never innocent. Nor at times is it even nature. Another poem in the same book reads

the rain and the stars

                            in the head

                            in the head

                                        beaches

                              slow clouds, the dark

Where exactly does this take place? What is the ontological status of the dark?

Not all of Eigner’s poems work like this, but a substantial majority of them do. While his palette is very much that of the lyric, these poems are not contained but are often, as with these three, records of an intense struggle against constraint. These poems are in fact social very much in the same way that Olson’s Maximus, or Pound’s Cantos or Du Plessis’ Drafts are. They take as a given their interactions with the world.

Another poet who very much straddles & plays with these borders, albeit in a very different manner, is Jackson Mac Low. Characteristic of his approach is the book Twenties (Roof, 1991) in which each of the 100 twenty-line poems is fixed not just formally, but in time – each text both as to the date of composition & the location. Here are the first two stanzas of 44, written on March 2, 1990, in “Dr. Wadsworth’s consulting room”:

Certainty       tardive dyskinesia   Pascal   quilt

swift adjacency    directed   cliff     waltz

nostrum     Galatians       seed difficulty      inert

parse quelled draft marzipan            pileate

Zesty quaff varnish      nice ol’ obedience

lira ingression       price of ineptitude   readiness

lean-to fortunate obligation        needle paddle

assignation league         reach    Portugal

plot

Each poem in the book is composed of exactly five such stanzas, almost all of whose lines also exhibit a spatial caesura. Exoskeletally, the poems are as fixed or closed as any sonnet series. Aurally, they’re a riot, sounding like a calliope heard under the influence of some bad psychotropic, with just a hint of the Daytona 500 buzzing in the consonants. To call them “lyric” in the prosodic sense is to parody the notion, which I think is part of the point. Most significantly, however, is the range of possible linguistic inputs into this verbal machine. Its first line consists of an abstract state of belief; a chronic condition resulting from anti-psychotic medications, characterized by uncontrollable chewing motions; a philosopher whose most famous work’s title could be translated into English as Thoughts; and a homey object – one that very often is composed of a limited set of repeated patterns – associated with craft more than art.  At one level, Mac Low is playing with our definition of the work itself. At another, he is pulling material in from everywhere – there is no part of the human experience that cannot be sucked into this process, & like both tardive dyskinesia & Pascal, many of the individual words & phrases by their very nature function as barbs or hooks to the social universe.

If Eigner gives us what we expect in a New American lyric form, he does while continually problematizing & subverting the notion. Mac Low on the other hand fulfills the social contract for a lyric work with the passion of an obsessive compulsive. The poems are closed formally. At one level their sense of containment is complete. But at another, the world is traveling through these Twenties like so much Port Authority traffic at rush hour. Mac Low gives us the outer structure, but violates its implicit (or possibly hidden) assumptions with an abandon that is often breath-taking.

Mac Low & Eigner each raise the question of lyric containment, but do so in ways that raise the stakes for the genre considerably. Like Rae Armantrout (who might be thought of as a third front in this assault on the lyric), they demonstrate how a poetic palette – a set of traditional devices – developed to insulate the poem from the dirty world can itself be socialized & that, in fact, there is not just one right way to go about this. They functionally disprove the core tenet of New Criticism & have expanded the possibilities of the poem not just for our time, but for the future.