Setting out Late

An autumn leaf
trembles in its guise
of paling green, feeling
slightly out of date or off key.
The unsure basso is the worst of all
but it’s been time to get moving
for quite a while
in your head, which is maybe
lazy and a little timid
but gaining momentum.

This poem concludes a volume that might be called They Wouldn’t Go Home Till They Had Thought of Something. Such anyway is the caption on an illustration – a squirrel & rabbit, both dressed in human clothes, in a forest under a full moon, obviously concentrating very hard, lost in thought – that appears on the cover.

The volume has roughly 100 pages, 8.5-by-11, stapled on the left rather in the manner of old issues of The World or Sal Mimeo. I can’t tell you who published it, because there is no information given of that nature. I can’t tell you who wrote this poem, nor for that matter any of the poems included in this venture, because that information isn’t given either. It’s a collection of anonymous poetry.

I’ve tried a magic trick with this poem, tho. I’ve read it alternately as a John Ashbery poem, as a Bill Berkson poem & as a poem by Larry Fagin. It works for me under each of those conditions, but it’s a different poem every time. What if I thought of it as a Billy Collins poem? Or a poem by Bill Knott? Does it then become any less interesting? More?

Here’s another poem from the same volume.

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To myself and into the air
He promised silence
On the long solid self
To nest waving
                    I want. Lady,
A red scarf goes under
My delicate body when I waken.
I like to block myself up,
To thicken on the horn, shackled with a big drink.
In the Parthenon, Marion, we
Were half so fragile. We were
Asleep. But we said, “I block you,”
Or your with teeth, our pale feet,
Our clouds, down to the color, romping.

My little magic trick doesn’t work so well here. For one thing, there is nothing here equivalent to the logic of the last sentence in the first poem that jumps out as being so clearly branded (or at least brandable) a device. Yet the logic to the second poem is hardly conventional – there are NY School details throughout. But the twist at the end of the first sentence, that almost deliberate afterthought of I want and the grammar of street jargon – block myself up – suggests to me a younger poet. Am I just projecting that? Possibly. The use of caps at the left margin, if I think about it, suggests just the opposite – that’s a detail in the punctuation of verse that is declining faster than the use of semi-colons.

In all fairness, there is a broader range in this volume than I’m suggesting from those two pieces, both of which strike me as being archetypal (if not generic) NY school. “The Hard Heart,” for instance, has an almost confessional tone:

I would never have wanted to see your sad face again
Your hollow cheeks and hair in the wind
I left across fields
Through the damp woods
Night and day
In the sun and the rain
Dead leaves crunched beneath my feet
Sometimes the moon was shining

Then we were face to face again
Looking at each other but not saying anything
And there was no room left for me to leave again

For a long time I stayed tied up against a tree
With your terrible love in front of me
More anguished than in a bad dream

Finally someone greater than you released me
All the tearful expressions follow me
And that weakness one can’t fight against
I flee quickly toward unkindness
Toward the force that raises its fists like weapons
On the monster that pulled me from your sweetness with its claws
Far from the soft sweet hug of your arms
I go away breathing hard
Across fields and through the woods
Toward the miraculous town where my heart beats

There is an evenness of affect here – the straightforward syntax, the steady deployment of clichés – that tells me this is intentional, that the poet wants me to understand that terrible love and miraculous town are vague because that’s a critical detail, one reason the narrator appears to seek abusive relationships. Which is to say that I read this not as bad or maudlin verse, but rather as a poem that is consciously exploring sentimentality and its relation to abuse & violence, deliberately employing the devices of bad verse as devices. It’s an interesting, complicated trick, and its effectiveness depends on its seeming artless. Again I have to ask myself am I projecting?

I try my magic trick with this one, but this time it’s a double layer of gender, not the names of possible poets, that I try. I read this as representing the voice of a woman in a lesbian relationship, then of a man in a gay relationship, then of a man in a heterosexual relationship & then (and only then) as a woman in a heterosexual relationship. Then I try all of these positions with a second layer of this game (sort of a reverse Kevin Bacon game, genderwise), trying each of these narrative positions, but presuming that it was written by a woman. Then I do it again, only presuming that it was written by a man. It’s a very different poem if a man wrote this depicting a lesbian relationship, for example, than if a hetero woman wrote it about herself. Does it cease to be dramatic monolog if it’s truly “confessional?” Would it be a better poem if written from a less predictable gender position?

Larry Fagin, who is a closet New Critic, has argued that we ought to be able to read poems with no identifying marks whatsoever and thereby determine whether a poem is, at the least, “good” or least “interesting.” He probably disapproves of my magic tricks, seeing it as infusing the poem with extraneous data, looking back at my own reflection to decide what I do or don’t like. But I don’t think so. If anything, I think this collection demonstrates the fallacy of such purism. Partly because poems don’t exist outside of history – when is R. Mutt’s fountain just a pisser? – and largely because an inordinate number of details in the poem don’t actually engage without that connection to the real. Again, with that second poem, it means something different if it was written by the late David Schubert than it would had John Godfrey penned it. Both would be meaningful & interesting, but not the same meaning, not the same interests. Or if the third poem was written by Diane Wakoski or Leland Hickman or Ishmael Reed.

A further possibility might even be that every poem in this collection was written by the same writer, which would suggest (a) that the author is a chameleon or (b) that these are works pulled from very different parts of a long career. Given how many of the works here show the scar tissue of St. Marks & environs (no actual mentions of Ukes or Gem Spa that I recall, but still . . . ), this is a genuine option.

So I find myself liking the first two, but for fairly different reasons, admiring the third, but not really engaging with it at the same depth. And the project as a whole reminds me very much of Jessica Smith’s Organic Furniture Cellar with its attempt to abdicate control of the poem, to hand it over to the willing reader. In a sense, each project echoes for me those old “music minus one” recordings where the viola part is omitted from a string quartet so that students can practice. Both projects are consciously incomplete, but one completely different axes. In their absence, the reader is invited to substitute whatever presumptions are needed – like a “paint by numbers” kit that lacks a code for assigning colors.

Smith wants the reader to take more responsibility, not just in the reading but in everything they do. Fagin, when he argues his “anonymous poems” case, doesn’t really want – at least as I understand it – readers to fill in the blanks. But the blanks are real. Even if we read a poem and it’s by a poet we have never read before, that is information, a context. If anything, these anonymous poems are far more controlled than Smith’s – which makes the large gaps opened up by the sheer absence of a name more intriguing. But it doesn’t fill them in.

Think for a moment of the federal government’s great wish to hear every phone conversation, read every email, and it’s inability to assign anything better than “keyword searching” software to the task because of the absolute volume of data involved. The sentence It’s going to be a bomb means something very different to the question How do you think Mel Gibson’s next picture will do in New York than to What are you taking on the flight to Milan? Or What do you think of Joe Lieberman’s campaign now? Context, as Roman Jakobson used to note, is one of the six functions of language.

Writing of Gabe Gudding’s essay on the impact of creative writing programs on the evolution of American poetry yesterday, I noted that at “its heart, what [Gudding’s essay] asks us to do is to think what the poem might be absent this particular literary history.” I found myself thinking of that exact question while reading the latest book from Quale Press, Sherwood Anderson’s Mid-American Chants. Originally published in 1918, Mid-American Chants is an anomaly, a relatively early work – his third book – of a late starter (Anderson was 42 when it first came out, four years after his first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son), a collection of poetry from an author known for his fiction. Here is a reasonably typical example, entitled “Song to New Song”:

Over my city Chicago a singer arises to sing.

I greet thee, hoarse and terrible singer, half man, half bird, strong, winged one.

I see you float in cold bleak winds,

Your wings burned by the fires of furnaces,

In all your cries so little that is beautiful,

Only the fact that you have risen out of the din and roar to float and wait and point the way to song.

 

Back of your grim city, singer, the long flat fields.

Corn that stands up in orderly rows, full of purpose.

As you float and wait, uttering your hoarse cries

I see new beauties in the standing corn,

And dream of singers yet to come,

When you and your rude kind, choked by the fury of your furnaces,

Have fallen dead upon this coal heap here.

 

Kneeling in prayer I shall forget you not, grim singer,

Black bird, black against your black smoke-laden sky,

Uttering your hoarse and terrible cries,

The while you do strive to catch and understand

The faint and long forgotten quality of song,

By never sweeter singers to be sung.

Several things in this text stand out, above & beyond the obvious influence of Whitman. One is the fact that there is nothing personal here about the use of the first person singular. Is “I” here even a person? More accurately, it strikes me as a rhetorical position. Nor is there anything personal, even personified, about “you,” bird man of the furnaces. Rather, this is a kind of public, figurative language we hardly hear any more, save possibly in church. If it seems preposterous or stilted or dated, that is the index of just how far outside our expectations such language is today within the poem.

And yet it is not, clearly, a sign of any weakness on the author’s part – rhythmically, this work is rock solid. You can tell almost instantly just how certain of his craft Anderson is here. In its 19 lines, only ten words have as many as three syllables and just one – beautiful – has four.

It’s hard for me to imagine that this kind of poetry was possible less than 30 years before I was born – my ear hears it as tho an echo of another age altogether. But of course those 30 years were not just the period of the rise of the creative writing program with its emphasis on getting in touch with personal experience, but also of aural mass communication for the very first time as radio, in particular, and later motion pictures made the spoken word something that could take place on a one-to-many basis for the very first time. The very first thing you noticed about an emerging public figure like JFK or Lyndon Johnson was that they “talked funny,” which is to say that each showed pronounced vestiges of a regional accent. A lot of that has dissolved for those of us who grew up in the years immediately after World War 2, especially after corporations began to dictate the movement of families hither and yon over the landscape. So Anderson employs a rhetoric that sounds as foreign now as does Ezra Pound’s trilled r in the recordings of his readings, conventions that have ceased to exist over the past century.

One of the listservs I’m on has had a somewhat similar discussion about a more recent project, Robert Duncan’s Ground Work, recently reissued by New Directions. Some writers there noted that they had not gotten into his work because they found it grim. I hardly think of it myself in those terms, but I do think that it insists on the seriousness of poetry itself as a vocation, and that Duncan himself – even where he farms his childhood and family mysteries for material – never particularly saw the poem as an occasion for personal expression. He was, literally, much more interested in the transpersonal, the idea that, as he put in an earlier poem, the dance exists prior to the presence of any dancers, who are merely “permitted to return” from time to time. It’s a view as old as Blake’s, but one that is a far cry from the experiential voice of the old McPoem of creative writing workshops and from the phenomenological sweep, say, one finds in much language (and post-) poetry.

Once you begin to do this, you start to see other kinds of poetry that likewise fall outside of Gudding’s model – the whole of vispo for one – and you begin to wonder what it means that this alternate tradition has not, at least to this point, ever been articulated as such. Is it that they have not had the institutional advantage of the MFA programs that carry forward the “growth agenda” of creative writing. Where, say, does Kenny Goldsmith’s “uncreative writing” fit into such a counter tradition? Or the post-dada noodling of the likes of Fluxus or Dick Higgins? Or, for that matter, Gertrude Stein.

I don’t – today, anyway – have answers. But looking at the world through Gudding’s glasses does tend to bring different elements into focus. And that’s what I find interesting.

Gabe Gudding loves the role of trouble maker. You can see it in his poetry, his criticism, his weblog, his missives to listservs, the people he chooses to champion. He lists “tastelessness” as a research interest on his web page at Illinois State University in Normal and is photographed there in front of the razor-wire fence of a prison.

Not unlike Kent Johnson, Gudding is one of those people whom it’s possible to admire even as you want to slap him across the face with an old trout. The impulse behind the ruckus is often good, but the impulse itself comes with a lot of baggage. It’s taken me years, for example, to get around to reading his essay, “From Petit to Langpo: A History of Solipsism and Experience in American Poetics Since the Rise of Creative Writing,” which I finally loaded onto my Palm TX & read while I was in California. The title is off-putting enough, but somewhere early on when it was first posted to the FlashPoint magazine website in 1999 I scanned it, saw a cheesy comment about Charles Bernstein (“arguably one of the most benighted and boring writers in the United States”), an aside that actually had nothing to do with the point then being made in the paper & thought of all the other times that Gudding has gone jousting against some of my own favorite windmills, myself included, and decided for the time being that I didn’t need to read that.

In fact, I was wrong. In spite of its somewhat misleading title – the subtitle is where all the action is here – Gudding’s essay is an attempt to understand the impact of creative writing programs on poetry itself, both the verse being written and, even more so, the divorce between the poet as experiencer of Big Feelings – what everyone from Oprah to Garrison Keeler mean by the adjective poetic – and the contemporary writer of poems that are often dismissed as too difficult or insular to bother reading. While there are a few poets – Robert Bly, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Amiri Baraka – who deliberately produce verse for audiences who don’t otherwise read poetry, most poets, regardless of their literary heritage or tendencies, are readily dismissed by mass audiences.

Gudding’s genius here has been not to ascribe this disjunction to one literary tendency or another (tho he also, just as clearly, demonstrates that its roots, if not its effects, are as far from the post-avant tradition as one could imagine), but would appear to be grounded in the history of American education as such, specifically in the rise of English departments, a phenomenon that did not exist 200 years ago, and within them the rise of creative writing courses. Gudding makes great use of John Dewey’s Art and Experience and the writings and work of William Hughes Mearns, whom Gudding credits as the first to teach the subject by name.

Gudding’s point is that creative writing never was intended to produce poets, fictioneers, playwrights or (the latest and most telling development, tho Gudding somewhat surprisingly doesn’t mention it to support his case, which it surely does) professional purveyors of the “personal essay.” Rather, from the beginning, the purpose was to develop, in Mearns’ words, “self-expression as a means of growth, and not poetry…. The business of making professional poets is still another matter – with which this writer has never had the least interest” (Gudding’s ellipsis). Mearns’ efforts might not have created poets, but it sure did create jobs for them, paid work aimed precisely at replicating the same fuzzy experiential agenda – the idea that a creative writing course is the one class in college that is explicitly about You. Gudding cites a then-current University of Montana creative writing program’s brochure that quotes the late Richard Hugo saying “a creative writing class may be one of the last places where you can go where your life still matters." Gudding implies, and he’s not wrong, that this isn’t necessarily a good thing. While I was out in California last week – staying at the home of one of Hugo’s former students, no less, now a psychotherapist whose bookshelves are full of the Pablo Neruda-to-Jane Kenyon spectrum of verse – one former Mills professor told me of a “revolt” that occurred in one of his classes when he had the temerity to suggest that his students actually read contemporary poetry.

The very same poetics of experience that lies at the heart of this growth agenda – Gudding calls it “democratic freighting,” acknowledging the impulses behind Dewey’s view of curriculum – leads to an aesthetic of the overwrought on the side of the School of Quietude, and to a phenomenology of the signifier among post avants, neither of which is calculated to gain a broad readership in a world where the lowest common denominator seems to be Dan Brown’s plot-driven conspiracy narratives.

Gudding concludes by demonstrating just how pervasive this aesthetic of the personal has become, quoting poet after poet, from all literary tendencies, who argue, in form or another, that the poem is found – the contemporary poet doesn’t so much write the poem as she or he discovers it – rather than constructed (the alternate model Gudding traces back to Coleridge): Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Bill Stafford. A secondary, but not unimportant aspect of Gudding’s panoply of consequences is the rise of prose within poetry, precisely on the theory – Russell Edson is cited here – on the grounds that it is closer to experience because prose entails less of a formal dimension.

At its heart, Gudding’s argument is fascinating and troubling pretty much in equal amounts. At its heart, what it asks us to do is to think what the poem might be absent this particular literary history. That’s a profoundly important question.

But Gudding’s execution – this appears to have been written while he was himself still in the MFA program at Cornell – is beyond sloppy. His gratuitous dismissal of Charles Bernstein ignores Bernstein’s own work in this area – and Bernstein’s Brechtian send-ups of the personal in his own poetry would seem to be exactly what Gudding is tacitly advocating.

Further, Gudding’s description of prose as an anti-formal aesthetic strategy sounds very 1960s and the constructivist tendencies of the language school are nowhere considered, particularly since they (we) are being dismissed out of hand. It puts Gudding into the convoluted position of arguing for things that he otherwise trashes. One wishes, for example, that he had simply set aside the cheap shots and made the sort of meticulous case for his position that one associates, say, with the work on the history of canons done by Alan Golding. It wouldn’t have been that hard to do, but FlashPoint is hardly the only online journal that seems to think that editing stops with accepting a particular work.

But Gudding shouldn’t be dismissed just because he may be his own worst enemy rhetorically. The argument that he is making – however incomplete and riddled with problems it might be – has elements that ring true and would be good to think out at far greater length. Gudding’s own poetry might be characterized as neo-Georgian, particularly with its emphasis on satire and social wit, as if the only way to sidestep the problematics of the personal might be to go back to the last period in which such concerns were not (yet) an issue. I’m not convinced of this, either by the poems themselves or by Gudding’s reasoning here, but at the very least this misnamed essay offers gateways through which one might begin to address such issues.

While I was in California back on July 10, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on Afghan poetry in the U.S. on its front page. The article by Masood Farivar, which has been reprinted by a few other newspapers in places such as Pittsburgh and Birmingham, Alabama, is worth reading in its entirety – when was the last time you saw a cogent piece on the sociology of poetry on the front page of a newspaper? Me neither. The headline in the Journal was “For Afghan Cabbies, A Poetry Tradition Spurs War of Words.” Most of the other papers, however, realized that this wasn’t about taxi drivers, giving it the plainer, but more accurate heading of something like the Post-Gazette’s “D.C. Afghan poetry groups fight war of words.”

The gist of the article concerns two reading series that take place in the same Masonic Lodge in Springfield, VA, on different Friday nights each month. One, “An Evening with the Dervishes,” in the words of Farivar, “

prefers what it calls the serious, scholarly pursuit of poetry. The group views itself as a literary clique focusing on masters such as Abdul Qadir Bedil, a 17^th century poet and Islamic mystic, or Sufi. Its gatherings feature top scholars and poets.

The other, older series, “An Evening of Sufism,”

brings all forms of Afghan poetry to large audiences. It also treats attendees to free refreshments and pop-music performances.

The article makes a point of noting that a reader in the latter series recently “informed the audience that she’d just finished her poem in the parking lot.”

The differences between the two groups echo the division within American poetries between the School of Quietude, that ensemble of aesthetic tendencies that tends to stress the conventionality of poetry and its continuity with English literary traditions (and tensions) & the broad range of post-avant alternatives that emerged with the New American Poets of the 1950s, but which can be traced back to Whitman & Poe a century earlier. Farivar characterizes the dispute:

Mostly they adhere to Afghan social norms, treating each other with civility and even deference. Occasionally, they drop by each other's gatherings. But at times, their rivalries have burst into the open.

Members of "An Evening of Sufism" accuse the Dervishes of tearing down their flyers from Afghan stores, and have dubbed them "hash-heads," which in Afghanistan is a term associated with the uneducated.

In fact, the Dervishes seem closer to the group’s origins in a series of evenings when the poets would seriously debate the nuances of classic Afghan texts, pooling their money to call M.I. Negargar, a former Kabul University professor now living in exile in England, to tease out the full potential of the works they were discussing.

If one steps back from the specifics of the current tempest – who tore down whose flyers or who is trying to get whom kicked out of the Masonic Lodge – one sees two distinct approaches to literature emerging, one focused on the historic canon of Afghan poetry and emphasizing continuity with traditional Afghan culture – there is a move among the Dervishes, for example, to ban all forms of musical accompaniment at their readings – the other focused more on the present, which includes contemporary writing and concerns that may affect Afghan exiles in the U.S., but which would be of little import from the perspective of traditional culture in Afghanistan. Finishing a poem in the parking lot just before the start of a reading may not be the best way to present polished writing, but it certainly is one way of foregrounding the value on the present that the other group has.

The article made me wonder just how much these same divisions may underscore roughly parallel, and far older, chasms within American poetry. For example, just how much of the School of Quietude/post-avant debate can still be traced back to this nation’s origins as a gathering of exiles, one group concerned with accentuating its continuity with European cultures, especially British culture, the other hoping to foreground that which is somehow uniquely American about American poetry?¹ How does this compare with the same sort of division, say, back in the U.K., where the distinction seems instead to reflect class divisions as much as anything else (a cleavage that goes back to Shakespeare’s day, at the least, when the Bard initiated the post-avant impulse by composing his own sonnet series to demonstrate that an uneducated writer of popular entertainments from the boonies could perform at least as well as a “University wit” like Ben Jonson).

The U.S. Afghan exile literary scene dates, according to this article, back to the 1980s when the first wave of exiles began to write. The article implies, without seeming to realize that this is what it is suggesting, that the scene in Springfield, VA, represents literary processes that may be larger than just Afghan or U.S. verse, and represents an opportunity to observe an evolution in the social history of poetry not unlike the way a cyclotron enables a scientist to recreate conditions near, if not at, the Big Bang from which all current tendencies necessarily follow. Regardless of where you might fit into these broader literary traditions, the rise of Afghan poetry in the U.S. should be worth watching.

 

¹One could argue that between a colonial imperialism lurking within one tradition & an unexamined nationalism lurking in the other, that both tendencies offer ample territory for critique. This division isn’t so much about who might be “right” as it is about the values being propagated by each tendency’s agenda.

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.

Philosophy after Auschwitz is barbaric.

That sentence, which is true in the sense that it is possible, that we can say & think it, can hear echoes of other similar sentences within it, can substitute any discipline into that first word-slot – mathematics after Auschwitz is barbaric – can substitute any horror into the third position – mathematics after Hiroshima is barbaric – can even, if we are prepared to cross a line not everyone will be comfortable with, substitute any characterization into the last slot – mathematics after Hiroshima is transparent – bedevils me.

Poetry & philosophy are twins, each looking to the other, anxious to compare. For every Adorno or Sartre or Cavell who addresses literature as a professional philosopher, we have poets who mime, as well as mine, philosophy itself, from Ezra Pound to John Taggart to Anne Carson & Susan Stewart, from Charles Olson to Charles Bernstein to Allen Grossman to Geraldine Kim. And then there is Wittgenstein, more widely imitated by poets, yours truly included, than any other practitioner of a “non-poetic” genre, more even than Bob Dylan. Not to mention Walter Benjamin – him I see as philosophy’s Jack Spicer. Both were obsessed with the task of the translator.

Like a lot of poets, I enter into this with a history & a bias. My formal training in philosophy consists of two classes, one on set theory, the other an intro course at Merritt College while I was picking up the units needed to transfer from the creative writing program at San Francisco State, which had been decimated by the 1968 student strike, to the English Department at UC Berkeley. My instructor was an Algerian-born Frenchman who’d gone into exile when it became unsafe for the French in Algiers, and who used Bertrand Russell’s decidedly idiosyncratic history as his text. Like a lot of kids – or at least guys with intellectual pretensions – of my generation, I’d read around in Kierkegaard & Heidegger in high school primarily so that young women would notice me reading the books. By the time I got out of high school, tho, I had the idea that a poet probably ought to know as much as possible about linguistics and about philosophy in order not to be simply a fool with a pen.

I found Chomsky’s linguistic texts impenetrable. The most intelligible line I ever read there, to this day, is ”Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” though I think it’s considerably more meaningful than does he. On the other hand, Dwight Bolinger’s Meaning and Form, a basic text, and the writing on linguistics by Charles Hockett in Scientific American, had a deep and lasting impact, sending me back through the history of linguistics first to Saussure & then to Roman Jakobson. It is not an accident, I think, that when MIT math major George Lakoff wanted to take a course on poetry & got Jakobson as his teacher, that Lakoff was destined – one might say doomed – to become a linguist. Nor is it an accident that when Claude Levi-Strauss heard Jakobson at the New School while in exile in New York during World War 2, that Levi-Strauss was similarly doomed to develop the structuralist school of cultural anthropology, which is exactly the structuralism to which all post-structuralism today imagines itself to be post-. The series Levi-Strauss attended was later published as Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. Sound & meaning, not accidentally, are the critical dimensions of the poem. Jakobson’s ideas first began to percolate when he was still in Russia, where he was a young poet collaborating with the likes of Mayakovsky. This is how Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov & their kin among the doomed poets of the Russian revolution, ultimately begat Derrida, begat Deleuze, begat Gayatri Spivak, begat Zizek, none of them the wiser.

Reading Wittgenstein for me was a life-changing event, perhaps because I read Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations back to back & could see there the passion of the self-tortured mind. Passion, I would argue, is precisely what separates the very best philosophers from the bulk. It’s what I love about Willard Van Orman Quine & about Sartre, with whom I never ever agree. It’s what I love about Adorno, even if his attitude toward jazz makes me want to club him with a saxophone. Philosophy is all about feelings, but that’s not all.

Poetry & philosophy are two practices that propose their texts as instances of the self-valuable word. It would be easy enough to sketch them out, one pulling on the side of connotation, the other denotation. But as twins, this pair is incestuous. One could argue that continental philosophy is on the side of connation, analytic philosophy on the side of denotation, that continental philosophy as such has been infected with the poetic.

When I was a creative writing major in the 1960s, the obsessive quest of such programs was to help young poets find their voice. It was early in that decade when Charles Olson first drafted the nines essays that make up Proprioception, the closest thing we have ever had to a dialectic of, by, and for poets. Over the decades since the obsession with voice has changed. We live now in the age of flarf – at least one definition of which is poetry created to be deliberately awful or anti-literary – as a genre and of Google-sculpting & myriad chance operations as everyday literary devices, of appropriated texts & found ones. Kenny Goldsmith, sometimes known as Kenny G, writes &teaches what he calls uncreative writing, scanning in an entire edition of The New York Times, offering us a year’s worth of weather reports. Today, younger poets find themselves in exactly the inverse position of the one I confronted 40 years ago, seeking not so much their Voice as ways out of it, seeking not their Self but their Other. But what does that mean? I think it’s at least as nebulous as the concept of voice. My own goal for this week is to explore that dividing line in as many ways as possible.

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This statement is for a panel, to include Elizabeth Willis, Anne Waldman, Chris Tysh, Donald Preziosi and me, Monday morning, June 26. The description of the panel itself is as much instruction as we were given, save to prepare a statement, seven to ten minutes in length:

What is it in philosophy that writers find so attractive? How important should philosophy be to a writer? Panelists will discuss how philosophical inquiries have informed their thinking and writing. Be it Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Jean-Luc Nancy, or some other French guy, our panelists will discuss the philosophers they have been reading. Panelists will also discuss which investigations‹whether class, gender, society, desire, philosophy of language, or other areas‹most inform their work and thinking.

Keston Sutherland is being vague. Actually, this isn’t accurate. Keston Sutherland is being very exact about being vague, almost painfully so, in his superb article “Vagueness,” which begins on the front page of the new PLR. Given that I was just as harsh I seem to have been on Jake Berry over this very issue, the question of vagueness – or perhaps The Vague – seems worth considering further.

 

Sutherland begins with Bertrand Russell – a cagey starting-point, given both Russell’s mentoring relationship to Wittgenstein (and through Wittgenstein the whole ordinary language movement) & Russell’s own commitment to political engagement (which leads not necessarily to, say, the Frankfort School or the later likes of Bourdieu, but is not so distant from the trends these continental writers represent, either). More precisely, Sutherland begins (albeit after several paragraphs stalking the point) by rejecting Russell’s conception of vagueness as “merely the contrary of precision.” The implication, as Russell proposes it, is something like this: the world is not vague; it is only human beings who can be vague, by not understanding their relation to a set of facts that is (not just represents) the world.

 

That’s a position that might lead one to modes of moral certainty & it is this predilection that seems to make Sutherland most uneasy. If one were merely “clear” about the facts, it would be self-evident to anyone that, say, the U.S. incursion into Iraq was the run-up to a disaster that may well take decades to unfold, detail by distressing, gory detail. Yet the very presence of moral certainty as a stance is exactly the tone usurped by the likes of George W & even the most radical Islamic fundamentalists, such as Bin Laden, who directly oppose Bush & the capitalist modernity Bush might be said to represent. In such a milieu, it’s hard to feel good about moral certainty.

 

Which brings Sutherland (via Heidegger) to this:

 

It is vigilant now not to avoid but to comprehend vagueness, to substantiate for an in vagueness its dialectics. This is a laborious kind of vigilance. For me it is most thorough only in writing poetry. I feel my work becoming thickened by inspecificities, I see and produce language ripped down a screen of vagueness. It is a kind of unhappiness and can in facile ways be attributed to anything: I say “over the lilac / and nothing and bake” maybe because, what? Kim Il-Jong? Because a Labour MP in Portsmouth called the Paulsgrove outbursts a healthy expression of democracy?

What I feel is a pressure not to specify, but more anxiously a pressure not to concede to precision, by which I do mean Pound’s sense of the word, and Russell’s sense, and the word less specially understood. This would be easier to theorise if I could believe that vagueness in language is a definite index of disappointment, or alienation, or even of the pretentious believe that I experience these conditions. I would then merely be documenting and not dementing life. It is perhaps vaguely such an index; but this reflexive circularity, the characterization of experience by reference to itself as a predicate, is now – in our present spin of days – a form of recumbent and ultimately indifferent thinking.

 

The idea of vagueness as a register or index of something concrete – alienation, disappointment, overwhelming complexity, whatever – is attractive, no doubt. Sutherland senses its implications for poetry &, quoting Gadamer on Celan, takes us to the idea, oft expressed, that

 

it is “obligatory” that a poem “not contain a single word standing for something in such a way that another word could be substituted for it.”

 

This is a concept that we have heard said of the poem a million different ways. It is implicit in the first two of the three principles for Imagism that Ezra Pound, H.D. & Richard Aldington concocted in the summer of 1912:

 

1.      Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective.

2.      To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

 

Sutherland turns instead to Eliot: “It is impossible to say just what I mean.” That’s a statement that might be read as yet another dictum against paraphrasing the poem, but it might also be seen an acknowledgement of an ineffability that lies right at the heart of what Sutherland intends here by vagueness. Sutherland carries this into an attack on the concept of le mot juste, the idea that there might be (must be?) if not an ideal order to any statement, at the very least a best one. And that beneath juste hides an entire conceptualization of justice. Sutherland asks

 

Is le mot juste, so admired by Pound, the negation of vagueness? Had vagueness been, at this earlier point in the century, unjust? Could it now be time to reverse the intuitive order of that relation, choosing to feel that vagueness is the just, positive term of which precision is the distorted negative?

 

Sutherland is asking, if I read him right, if in fact vagueness might not now be a register of the impossibility of specification as such in a world in which specification has been reduced to missile-targeting coordinates? The word that Sutherland really wants to defend, to propose, is just this: impossibility.

 

Impossibility is not just a faded watchword echoing the 1960s campus occupations of “Utopian” vocab. It is the absolute target-concept; it is a positive contingency of all humane expression.

 

Yet once the term impossibility is introduced, Sutherland does indeed invoke a utopian rhetoric:

 

this defiance is crucial and true, it is impossible, and as such it is truly expressible only without precision. . . . In poetry, this impossible defiance shines, like love as the ideal limit of hatred.

 

I don’t agree with Sutherland not because I don’t share a sense of a common goal, but rather because I think he has conflated different (and conflicting) circumstances into this word vagueness. What is called for is a little Coleridgean desynonymy, teasing out the differences between two states – a politically retrograde & dangerous one (much exploited by the current regime here in the U.S.) that I think is the historic & adequate meaning of the term vagueness & a second one that has, indeed, liberatory potentiality & which is characterized not by vagueness but by a specific mode of overdetermination Norman O. Brown used to call the polymorphous perverse.

 

To draw the distinction, though, I think we need to go back to Russell’s initial conceptualization & add to it the Gramscian notion of positionality. That is, I would agree with Russell’s initial assertion that the world is not vague, but would reject any concept of a universalizing objectivity because that necessitates a transpositional universe, the idea that these relations – and it is the relations to facts that Russell thinks can be vague – are not impacted by our position with regards to them, not so much to challenge the idea, say, that two plus two equals four, but rather that this equation means the same thing to all peoples, regardless of age, gender, color, history, class, historical moment & so forth. Thus the same “facts” might mean very different things to different people – if the current situation in the Middle East were not evidence enough, let us think simply of how any poetic device changes meaning generation to generation & place to place. In 1923, when William Carlos Williams first published Spring & All, the speech-defined free verse line was a concept that stretched the possibilities of English-language verse in ways they had not been challenged since the youth of Wordsworth & Coleridge. Not one, but several generations of poets arose who made great use of the device, particularly important in articulating all the ways in which American poetry was not to be confused with its indirect historic antecedent, British verse. This work reached its apotheosis in the 1960s in the writing of poets such as Charles Olson & Paul Blackburn, both of whom have been dead now for over 30 years.

 

Indeed, their deaths in 1970 & ’71 largely ended that tendency of poetry as an investigative approach toward expanding our understanding of poetics. There are many – thousands, literally – poets who follow modified free verse protocols in their work today, but few if any do so with a sense of extending the possibilities of transcribed dialect implicit in the work of the Projectivists. Furthermore, this is true on both sides of the School of Quietude / Post-avant Poetics divide. Thus, what the speech-based free verse line means in 2003 is quite different from what it meant in 1970 & even more radically unlike what it meant in the 1920s. Yet, in fact, the dynamics of what happens inside a line have not changed & even the subroutines poets run (e.g. enjambment) to signal The Spoken to their audience are largely untouched over the past three decades.

 

What then is a “fact”? It isn’t any less objective than before, certainly not if we gauge by actually existing lines in actually existing poems, but its position, both historically in the most general terms and with regards to what each of us might want to do with it personally, is completely different. To write like William Carlos Williams in 2003 does not make one post-avant or even avant. Indeed, it defines one as a particular kind of antiquarian, just like the neo-beats one seems to find in any major metro area, replicating Allen Ginsberg in form perhaps, but antithetical to his life & the project of his writing.

 

Vagueness, to my mind, is the recognition of just such pressures (social, historic, economic, etc. etc.) on any given topic, object, “fact,” without a perception of position. Vagueness lacks critical consciousness precisely where (and when) it is most needed. That lack is what defines the vague. When George W articulates the logic that Saddam Hussein was a vicious autocrat with no visible appreciation for the preciousness of life and Osama Bin Laden is a vicious autocrat with no visible appreciation for the preciousness of life, therefore they must have been in cahoots, he & his handlers rely on a sizeable portion of the populace not recognizing that the relations of these two historical individuals to – to just pick one detail – the role of the state in Islamic societies was entirely different, even if their background as one-time CIA “projects” is not. That vagueness was politically useful to Bush in the run-up to the war, in that it prevented some from questioning the obvious problems in pro-war rationale. The Bush program for the environment, the economy, education and numerous topics not beginning with the letter E relies heavily on just such vagueness, because infusions of critical consciousness would transform each of this issues precisely because they erode the welfare of most Americans (not mention our neighbors) most of the time. 

 

The shape-shifting overdetermined aspects of the polymorphous perverse (PP) recognize not only position, but direction & the compression of felt change. As such, PP certainly has room for the irrational – that is often our first register of changing conditions – but it works very hard at not being vague. The distinction in practice is not hard to draw.

 

Here is an example taken not from poetry, but from the most recent round of American elections held just this past Tuesday. In the village of Bolinas, just north of San Francisco, whose 1,200 residents include such poets as Joanne Kyger, Robert Grenier & Stephen Ratcliffe, Proposition G passed by a vote of 315 to 142. Proposition G reads exactly as follows:

 

Vote for Bolinas to be a socially acknowledged nature-loving town because to like to drink the water out of the lakes to like to eat the blueberries to like the bears is not hatred to hotels and motor boats. Dakar. Temporary and way to save life, skunks and foxes (airplanes to go over the ocean) and to make it beautiful.

 

Dakar! It is not possible to know from this electoral prose poem whether that noun refers to the city in Senegal or to the custom-designed off-road vehicle. Either one throws a conceptual frame that is consistent with enough of the remaining two sentences to make some sense & the co-existence of the two haunt the text in a way that makes it vibrant, not vague.

 

For sake of contrast, here is one sentence I quoted before from Jake Berry’s Brambu Drezi:

 

Their pulsing flesh-blue fingers dominate

         the boundless sky that lies between the vertebrae

      whose long electric veins

             pour a half-ape angel into old winds and hollows.

 

The only phrase in this passage that isn’t vague is “flesh-blue.” Telling us that fingers have pulses or that the sky is boundless is to tell us nothing, exactly, any more than resurrecting  the old trope of the half-ape angel tells us anything even remotely new about humankind. Long electric veins suggest the course of the nervous system through the spinal column, but in terms any child has seen dozens of times in science museums – nothing new there. Berry has some idea that he is trying to convey here – roughly “fingers dominate sky between vertebrae” – but he doesn’t have a sense of position & instead just plugs in cliché after cliché, trying to surround or overwhelm the emotion. But clubbing an idea into submission is not articulation. Knowing that “Their” refers to “ancestors” doesn’t do much more than suggest that Berry was fretting over biological determinism.

 

My conclusion is that Berry is vague where Prop G is not. Not that I expect either to save the skunks & foxes, but one raises issues in ways that makes me take it seriously, at least as a desire, and one does not.

My piece Wednesday on H.D., Noveliste, has me thinking about the further question of how form, genre & chance impact our lives. Several things I saw this past week reinforced this mulling-over process. One was an article in The Guardian, which I actually suspect may be an adapted introduction from his book, by Salam Pax. Pax, a Baghdad architecture student, created a personal weblog in English only to discover that it had become one of the most widely read “inside views” of the last days of Saddam & the first days of George & Rummy, a process that turned him, to his considerable discomfort (and undoubtedly much risk), into

 

·         An author

·         An “expert” on the Iraqi experience

 

Pax professes to be neither. But excerpts of his blog can be had now in book form in the U.K. & Grove Press will release a U.S. edition in October.

 

The second item is the Perceval Press web site. Perceval is a new small press that recently published a book of René Ricard’s paintings & drawings, and is about to release Land of the Lost Mammoths, a novel of left culture critic Mike Davis. Some interesting & quirky material. Perceval has also published four books, including poetry, painting, collage work & photography, by press founder Viggo Mortensen, whom you may know better as Aragorn/Strider from The Lord of the Rings films.

 

As someone who has edited Davis, a brilliant but exceptionally undisciplined author, the prospect of a novel, a project completely in keeping with Davis’ uniquely British mode of Los Angeles post-Marxism, just makes my eyes dilate, nostrils flare & chest constrict. This I have to see.

 

Mortensen has seen his own public notoriety skyrocket of late. In addition to his career-making role in the Ring trilogy, anyone who saw his turn as the painter boyfriend in A Perfect Murder & realized that those were in fact his paintings will understand Mortensen takes these other genres seriously, however variously he may succeed or not in each. Unlike, say, Jewel or Leonard Nimoy, Mortensen is at least a serious artist whose day job happens to be in film, not unlike Michael Lally or Harry Northrup.

 

The third is a DVD I saw the other night, Genghis Blues, a 1999 documentary starring two musicians, Paul Pena & Kongar-ol Ondar. If you saw the list of CD stacks I have in my study, you know that one stack focuses on blues & another on world music, with a fair amount of Tuvan throat singing in the latter pile. Genghis Blues is one of the very few places in which these two interests converge.  

 

Throat singing or khoomei is a harmonic singing tradition in which the performer sings two, sometimes even as many as four, notes at one time. Different versions of this tradition exist in Tuva, Mongolia & Tibet. Pena, the blind-since-childhood blues singer who wrote “Jet Airliner,” a hit song for Steve “Guitar” Miller in the mid-1970s, discovered & taught himself not only this exceptionally difficult method of singing, but, in order to do so, had to learn at least the rudiments of the Tuvan language. And since there are exactly zero Tuvan-English dictionaries in the world, he had to learn Russian just to get to the Tuvan. (Pena may be an almost archetypal example of the starving blues artist, but he is also very obviously nobody’s fool.)

 

Tuva, once the nation of Tannu Tuva, is now one of the Russian Republics & is located along the northwest border of Mongolia. It’s a state of just 300,000 people the size of North Dakota & a large portion of the population remains nomadic, raising camels & horses & rather furry looking Asian cows. Even though Genghis Khan’s top general was Tuvan, the history of the nation is that of so many landlocked cultures, shifting from parent state to parent state, spending relatively little historical time with any kind of autonomy.

 

After Pena’s wife died of renal failure in 1991, the bluesman has lived a pretty hand-to-mouth existence in San Francisco’s Mission District. He had discovered throat singing over a shortwave radio broadcast, but it had taken him years to find a recording. But from that point, it appears to have taken him only a week or so to actually learn the process of singing in multiple notes. Having learned this extremely rare singing style, Pena managed to get himself invited to a Tuvan throat singing competition in Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva. Genghis Blues is a documentary of that trip, where Pena cemented his friendship with Kongar-ol Ondar, the “Elvis Presley of throat singing,” won two awards in the competition & found himself in a place, literally, where his skills & talents could be completely appreciated, a mere 12,000 miles from home. A fairly rudimentary, even crude, documentary, Blues was nominated for an Oscar and won several film festival awards largely on the basis of its improbable, infectious content, fabulous music & the openness of its two main characters to go beyond their intellectual & cultural borders.

 

In every one of these instances, questions of social framing can be raised in many different ways:

 

·         Is Salam Pax an architecture student who writes, or vice verse?

·         Is Viggo Mortensen an actor, poet, painter, photographer?

·         Is Mike Davis a novelist?

·         At what level is Paul Pena a Tuvan singer?

There are artists who have been successful in more than one field, such as Abigail Child, but historically they’re rare. Bruce Andrews likes to note that every nice thing that has ever been written about him in the New York Times has been about his scores for Sally Silvers’ dance, never once about his poetry. Ned Rorem, a composer more widely known for his memoirs, simply demonstrates that this phenomenon works in both directions.

 

What conclusions might one draw from this? Only that there are no guarantees – what makes an artist successful in one genre may have no bearing whatsoever on another. And there certainly are instances in which artists commit a larger part of their live to an endeavor that, like Hilda Doolittle’s novels, gets far less public recognition than some other form. Gertrude Stein had something like this happen to her when The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, clearly written to be a best seller, recast Stein’s public image dramatically.

 

One can come up with even more complicated configurations. Stan Rice, when still an extremely ambitious up-&-coming academic poet/professor, encouraged his wife Anne to write. The phenomenal financial success of her vampire novels eliminated any economic need on his part &, after he left his job at San Francisco State, Stan developed into a kitschy sort of painter who actually refused to sell his work. After publishing two books of poetry in two years in the mid-1970s – we shared one publisher, The Figures – he only published four others over the next 25 years. Anne’s publisher printed the last three volumes, which gave them broader distribution than even most School of Quietude poets can hope for. And frankly Stan’s skill as a poet disguised his sentimentality in a way that his paintings could not. Yet by the time he passed away last year, the only context remaining for either of his media was the one created by her writing. It may have been a very comfortable sort of marooning, but if ever there was a man who needed to invite other poets into his room of one’s own, it was Stan.