The Mathematical Sublime: Mark Scroggins on Contemporary Poetry

Mark Scroggins is, hands down, bar none, my favorite critic of contemporary poetry. His latest collection is out now from MadHat which, under new leadership from Marc Vincenz, is turning into a press I'm very into watching (they're about to publish the latest book by Michael Anania).  The Mathematical Sublime takes a broad and ecumenical look at contemporary poetry, often of the more adventurous kind, and examines a host of fascinating figures. I mean, Scroggins has taste in poetry, damn it, no matter what one thinks of his Doc Martens and skinny jeans in (shall we say) surprising colors. Poets discussed include:

Charles Bernstein
John Matthias
Eric Selinger
Norman Finkelstein
Maeera Shreiber
John Wilkinson
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Peter Quartermain
Nathaniel Mackey
Charles Alexander
Rae Armantrout
Daniel Bouchard
Julie Carr
Cris Cris
Stephen Collis
Joseph Donahue
Cecil Giscombe
K. Lorraine Graham
Janet Holmes
Tony Lopez
Tom Mandel
Geraldine Monk
Jennifer Moxley
Tom Pickard
Patrick Pritchett
Kit Robinson
David Shapiro
Ron Silliman
Stephen Vincent
Craig Watson.
Geoffrey Hill
Susan Howe
Robert Duncan
Ronald Johnson

Also, due to Scroggins' idiosyncratic reading, the great Victrorian John Ruskin and some guy named Robert Archambeau.

The fool who does not buy this book is, to paraphrase that icon of literary acumen, Mr. T., to be pitied.

Inventions of a Barbarous Age, or: How I Finally Dressed Like Mark Scroggins

Here's the cover of my next book, Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme. I'll post something about the contents soon, but I'm not here to talk about the contents today, I'm here to talk about the cover.  Because it represents the first time I have presented myself as spiffily as Mark Scroggins, whose The Mathematical Sublime: Writing About Poetry will appear from the same publisher at the same time.

Mark, you see, is a snappy dresser. Here he is in his ordinary togs. If you wish to imagine me on the same day, think rumpled cargo shorts (summer) or rumpled Brooks Brothers (winter).  Either way, Mark wins:

But compare our book covers:

Twinsies! In fact, the resemblance is so strong that MadHat will be offering the books in a special, bundled deal for a reduced price.  Go nuts!

Proud Men in Their Studies: On Mark Scroggins—New in GHR!

Rejoice! The new issue of Lou Rowan's always-too-cool-for-school Golden Handcuffs Review has dropped from the skies.  Poetry by Fanny Howe and Joseph Donahue and Jerome Rothenberg!  More poetry by Susan Schultz and Mark Scroggins!  Fiction by Ken Edwards!  Lost work by Reginald Edward Morse, edited by Rick Moody!  George Economou on translation!  Peter Quartermain on Jerome Rothenberg! And more! More! Including a little thing I wrote about Mark Scroggins' Torture Garden called "Proud Men in their Studies."  It begins like this:

"Poetry, drawing away from the collective life of the court, can only withdraw into the privacy of the bourgeois study, austerely furnished, shared only with a few chosen friends, surroundings so different from the sleeping and waking publicity of court life that it rapidly revolutionizes poetic technique.  Crashaw, Herrick, Herbert, Vaughn — all the poetry of this era seems written by shy, proud men writing alone in their studies… Language reflects this change.  It is a learned man’s poetry." 

 That’s a passage from Christopher Caudwell’s 1937 book Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry, in which the young writer — who’d have proved a second George Orwell, had he not been gunned down in the Spanish Civil War — describes the formal changes that came about when English poetry stopped being a public game played at court and became the pursuit of solitary men among their books.  No longer something for public declamation, poetry became learned, private, knotted with a kind of profound cleverness that, requiring time and erudition to appreciate, wouldn’t have pleased much as a glittering gentlemanly accomplishment at court. 

Certainly 21^st century America has little enough in common with England in the 17^th century, but when I read Mark Scroggins’ Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles, Caudwell’s passage on Crashaw, Herbert, and company came immediately to mind.  Why, though?  It’s not as if anyone would confuse a poem like George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” with Scroggins’ “Perfume of a Critic’s Burning Flesh”:

 Animus deploys nurses exceptionally diligent
attention finely tuned skills culture
of detachment unreliable deceptive the
law of the negative everlasting
Nay structures of determination truth
of the labyrinth quasi-persons reeling
in customized systematic reeling pain.

But despite the very different texture, and the eschewal of reference and discursive meaning, Scroggins’ poems have a lot in common with the English 17^th century as described by Caudwell: they are learned, private, written for the few rather than the many.  And, like the works of that greatest poet of 17^th century England, John Milton, they are angrily at odds with the dominant culture of their time. 

To begin with, there are the matters of form and allusion....

Well, it goes on.  But you don't want to stay here.  You want to get your hands on GHR posthaste.

Seven Romantic Poets Reviewed in Seven Lines: New at Lute & Drum

New poetry by Nathaniel Mackey! Mark Scroggins (who else?) on Adorno and model soldiers!  A story by Magdalena Zurawaski! And much, much more—including my own modest contribution, a review of seven Romantic poets in seven lines, the first in a Lute & Drum series called "Seven Things."  It's a fine new journal with a very slick design, and you can find it all here.

Here's a description of the contents from J. Peter Moore's editorial introduction:

This specter of aesthetic sociality emerges in Magdalena Zurawski’s “The Lamb,” when the professor protagonist realizes that literary meaning, like veterinary obstetrics, depends upon an a community of attentive midwives. Similarly in Edric Mesmer’s sequence from Strawberry Island, exilic regionalism undermines individual property rights: “local axiom—no one ever really owns an umbrella.” In our first installment of Moonlighting, a recurring feature that focuses on writers’ para-literary avocations, Mark Scroggins takes us through the anti-social exercise of raising an army in one’s basement, as he discusses his long-time obsessive-compulsive affair with model soldiers. In our other recurring segment, First Thought/Seven Things (a list of one-sentence reviews addressing a single topic) Robert Archambeau gives us the bathroom graffiti guide to Romantic Poetry. 

Rounding out the issue, Ben Lee’s review of The Feel Trio mines the gentle ferocity of Fred Moten’s poetic insistence (after Édouard Glissant) that diasporic metaphysics begin with the “consent to not be a single being.” And finally, in murmuring tones of awakened consciousness Nathaniel Mackey returns us to those verdant boughs of sugar maple: “So it was green loomed out my window.” In his “Said to Have Been Heard to Say Hush,” we find perhaps the clearest annunciation of that lost past that pervades present day Riddle, that “Remembered moment lamenting / its exit.” In Mackey’s hand, the indestructible city, the little city of Lute & Drum, becomes an upper room where music plays on in our absence.

Shades of Oppen and Rimbaud

The other day Robert Pinsky said, a propos an insightful essay on his work by David Kaufman in The Yale Review, "it's good to be seen," meaning, of course, that he felt the review got at something central about his work.  Today the new issue of The Notre Dame Review came out, including Mark Scroggins' review of my book The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World, and I feel much as Pinsky did. Firstly, Scroggins sees exactly what it is that has interested me most over the decade or so in which the essays in the book were written:

The shades of Oppen and Rimbaud stalk unmentioned through much of The Poet Resigns: Rimbaud, the intransigently avant-garde Communard sympathizer who abandoned poetry for gun-running; Oppen, who bailed out of the Objectivist “movement” (and poetry itself) in order to organize strikes for the American Communist Party. The two men are as it were limit-texts for the collision of poetry and active politics. But in their wake there have been whole generations of poets, in both Rimbauldian and Oppenian genealogies of influence, who have argued that making poems can be in itself a way of doing political labor. Archambeau’s subtitle, “Poetry in a Difficult World,” evokes Adrienne Rich (An Atlas of the Difficult World): where Rich’s poems aim to examine and perhaps even to intervene in a world of disquiet, cruelty, and injustice, Archambeau is interested in the place poets stake out for their art, the claims they make about the relationship of poetry and power—and the motivations for such claims.

Secondly, Scroggins nails something about how I tend to think.  He notes that the essays in the book were all written for one sort of occasion or another, then adds:

And they have the advantage of the best occasional writing: immediacy, a sense of responsiveness, conversationality. But Archambeau is a “big ideas” critic: he invariably wants to spin his momentary interpretations of texts into larger insights about the place of poetry in the world. Sometimes, as in the more general essays in the first half of the book, this results in excellent and provocative meditations; sometimes individual poets, poems, and passages from poems become grist for a relentless point-making mill.  There is enough to think about in The Poet Resigns to fill a shelf of books, and if Archambeau has the tendency sometimes to answer the big questions of our poetic moment a bit more rapidly than I’m comfortable with, he’s to be given abundant kudos for raising them in such a clear and thoughtful manner, and for tackling them in such lively and intelligent prose. There are many moments in The Poet Resigns when Archambeau’s affection for poetry (in all of its forms) and his sensitive critical intelligence align perfectly with his structure-making impulses. And the more personal moments of this collection, such as the delightful “My Laureates,” show that the poet-critic, whether his resignation be temporary or permanent, is by no means afraid to subject his own socio-politico-theoretical position to the same examination he has brought to bear on others.

He's got my number, Scroggins has: every time I read a poem I do want to spin the interpretation out into a general discourse on the history of Western aesthetics since the Enlightenment, and a concomitant social analysis!  And I do love giving an outline of an entire system of thought as a prelude to making often relatively minor observations (see, for example, the blog post preceding this one).  This can certainly be a vice, even as it can, on a good day, perhaps be a virtue.  Scroggins isn't the only person to have noticed this.  During the recent MLA convention in Chicago I was several drinks into the evening with the writer of another, forthcoming review of The Poet Resigns, who told me "most of those essays ought to be books!"  I took this as a compliment at the time, but I suppose there's a very different way of seeing it, too.

Anyway: I get what Pinsky means: its good to be seen for exactly what you are, and Scroggins sees pretty damn clearly.

The whole review can be found here.

Louisville Notebook

Peter O'Leary, Robert Archambeau, Vincent Sherry and Joe Donahue, Louisville, Feb. 2012 (photo credit Mark Scroggins)

Yesterday, in a journey that seems in some strange, anachronistic way to have been the true story upon which the 1987 movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles was based, I returned from the 40th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, an event everyone seems, understandably, to call "the Louisville conference."  I've been going there on and off for something close to 20 of those 40 years, and always find it congenial. With some 400 attendees, it's a manageable size: next week's AWP Convention here in Chicago will have more than 20 times as many people crowding its panels and workshops.  And it's not just scale that makes the Louisville conference a more palatable event than the AWP.  In Louisville, there's an actual aura of intellectual engagement, whereas the AWP is little different than a boat show: it's all about sales and glad-handing.  At least it can seem that way.


Anyway.  Here, in no particular order, are a few or my personal highlights and lowlights of this year's conference.


Highlight: Louisville as a foodie city.  


When I first started going to the conference in the early '90s, you couldn't eat in Louisville, unless you wanted deep-fried battered whatnots or a well-done hamburger.  I suppose that's an overstatement: the Seelbach Hotel had a decent restaurant, though I could never quite get comfortable in the place, having as it did an ambiance I'd call "white tablecloth Republican."  But every year Louisville seems to get better and better in terms of food.  Proof, the restaurant attached to the 21st Century Museum, is a good place with a hip, but not oppressively hip, vibe to it.  And the Mayan Cafe on Market Street is fantastic, and would stand up to any comparable place in Chicago.  Also, I enjoy the attitude of the staff.  Fourteen of us were gabbing and drinking away when the waitress stepped up and asked if we were from the university.  We said no, but almost: we were with the literature conference.  She told us they'd been trying to guess who we were back in the kitchen, and had concluded we were philosophers.  "Why?" I asked.  "You know," she said, "the beards, the glasses, the lack of women."


Highlight: Conversation in the interstices of things


This is really the reason I come to the conference.  It's hard to pick one bit of conversation as the best.  I had a great time swapping memories of John Matthias with Vincent Sherry, and talking smack about contemporary poetry with Mark Scroggins, and hearing Norman Finkelstein describe the bottle-green corduroy suits of yore, but I think the real winner for me this year was talking St. Augustine with Peter O'Leary.  O'Leary, who used to look like a young Robert Lowell, is now rocking a John Berryman beard (I assume the next midcentury poetry great whose look he'll adopt will be Elizabeth Bishop).  We were talking about his book of poems Luminous Epinoia, a real Teilhard de Chardin-style work of Catholic mysticism, when I mentioned I'd never been able to get a real feel for God-the-Father in the Trinity.  Even as an atheist, I've long had a strong, even a visceral sense of the the relation of the holy spirit to God incarnate as Christ — seeing in it something important about the way one can be both completely beyond an individual or particularized experience, and at the same time embedded in it, suffering and yearning.  But the paternal God never did much for me, at least not until Peter pulled me back to Augustine's book on the Trinity, where the spirit is understanding, the son is will, and the father is something completely unlike the judging, alien authority figure I'd always seen in William Blake's terms as "Nobodaddy" (a jealous figure of secretive laws and arbitrary authority).  In Augustine's view, the father is a kind of memory, a way of thinking of ourselves as inevitably coming into the world interpolated into an existing story.  He's a reminder that whenever we examine things, we're already bound up in particular traditions and histories.  I like that.


Lowlight: Simon Critchley's missing keynote lecture


I admire Simon Critchley's writing — his little introduction to continental philosophy is about as good a short book on the subject for Anglo-American readers as you're going to find, and elsewhere he manages to shed light on Heidegger without uprooting the man from his dark Teutonic forest.  Maybe my admiration for Critchely contributed to my sense of being let down by his plenary lecture.  He was meant to talk about Hamlet but, he told the crowd packing the auditorium, he hadn't gotten round to writing the lecture, so he was going to read us an old piece he'd written about the writer Tom McCarthy, who was present at the conference.  I despise this kind of move, and despise it all the more when it's played as blithely as Critchley played it.  Firstly, there's an enormous egotism to it: "I'm in too much demand to fulfill all my commitments," he might as well have said, "but, of course, I shit gold, so eat this instead."  It wasn't just the A-lister entitlement that rankled, but the discourtesy to the audience, since the piece he read was a fairly close reading of a work of fiction few in the audience had read.


The let-down was kept palpable by the little bits and pieces of the unfinished lecture that Critchley dropped into his talk as asides.  "I see Hamlet as the hero of inauthenticity," he said, intriguingly, and later he defined authenticity as "when the self corresponds with itself, and when the self corresponds with the world."  I wanted to hear more of this, and more of what he meant by inauthenticity, especially when he spoke of the "illegitimate authenticity" of the old regimes of the Cold War eastern bloc, where authenticity was based "on the fake will of the people," and where Havel was right to insist on "living in truth" as an antidote to this.


The most offensive part of Critchley's presentation came in one of his asides, in which he spoke of the art world (or, I should say, of what people in Manhattan mistake for the art world, which is to say, a small and particularly commercialized corner of a larger art world that is largely invisible from that island).  "Artists now are all about appropriation," he said, "they want to come out of grad school, claim a particular site of appropriation and, as quickly as possible, turn it into material gain."  He paused for a moment, then added "of course that's what's so great about the art world: in a way it's so much more honest than what we're doing here, where we act as if there's no money changing hands."


I should perhaps mention that I have no kind of poker face, and that I'm rarely able to restrain myself from expressing derision when I'm moved to do so.  I mean, at the last wedding I attended, a priest described Pope Benedict II as "God's only true representative on earth," and I involuntarily emitted a scornful snort audible throughout the chapel.  Something similar happened after Critchley's art comment: I instinctively gave him the finger.  I don't think he saw, though Mark Scroggins, seated next to me, did, and gave me a grave nod of assent.


My problems with Critchely's remark may be ennumerated thusly:


1.  It was not an analytic statement, it was a gesture toward worldly sophistication and the creation of a glamourous, bad-boyish persona.


2. It was the kind of  frisson seeking reversal of the audience's values with which Oscar Wilde used to play ("seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow," say, or "a man can be happy with any woman, so long as he doesn't love her").  But Wilde did this with charm and wit, and Critchley did it with neither.


3. With regard to the "as if no money were changing hands" bit, I wanted to say: "maybe you're getting paid tonight, Critchley, but not the rest of us so, you know, fuck you."  In fact, Critchley may have had a something of a point here, in that money does change hands at these events.  But since the conference was financed almost entirely by our fees, some of which went to pay him for the plenary address on Hamlet he didn't bother to write, this would argue against his implication that we are all running the kind of scam he sees New York artists running. The situation, instead, indicts him and leaves the audience to whom he says "j'accuse!" blameless.


Highlight: Joe Donahue, Robert Zamsky, and Peter O'Leary talk about John Taggart


The panel on which these three spoke was the best discussion of John Taggart's poetry I'm ever likely to hear.  O'Leary broke Taggart's career down into three phases (a phase concerned with objectivist experiences; a phase concerned with minimalist incantation, and a phase concerned with meditative plaint) and did so with the unalloyed enthusiasm that makes for a wonderfully non-professorial break with academic norms, a kind of amateurism in the best possible sense of the word.  Zamsky spoke of Taggart's "Drum Thing" as the moment when the poet found his own voice, because in connecting his work to John Coltrane's song of the same name Taggart released himself from expressive lyricism and entered an imaginative world of pre-existing aesthetic objects out of which he could fashion an art that didn't rely so heavily on the self.  Joe Donahue spoke of Taggart's poems for the Rothko chapel, and made some intriguing remarks about Taggart's characteristic linguistic repetitions-with-variations.  These are, said Donahue, an allegorizing of the relation of the individual to the group: the variant lines harmonize with one another while retaining difference and even dissonance, much as a church choir harmonizes voices even as members participating in this group practice may maintain differences of conscience from the words of the hymn being sung.  Later, Donahue spoke of how Taggart would establish a pattern of repetition, and then drop some completely incongruous element into the verbal structure.  He wouldn't leave it as an anomaly, though: out of a kind of horror at unmeaningness, Taggart would somehow incorporate the anomaly into a newer, more encompassing pattern.  In the Q & A session after the panel Coleridge's idea of organic form came up, and it seemed to me a perfect fit for Taggart's process as described by Donahue, since with organic form nothing can be pre-ordained, but nothing can be accidental.  This locates Taggart as a kind of Romantic (an idea that disturbed the poet Norman Finkelstein: later, while driving me back to the Brown Hotel, he looked over at me and said "think of what that means, to have a horror of the unmeaning!").


Highlight: Mark Scroggins on Pound, Vince Sherry on Decadence


I spoke on a panel with two of my heroes among contemporary critics, Mark Scroggins and Vince Sherry.  Mark unpacked the meaning of the phrase "yeux glacques" in Pound's "Mauberley," tracing in the various meanings of the term an implicit etymological argument, on Pound's part, for the decline of a brilliant classical culture into a dull and ennui-ridden modernity (Scroggins also offered an argument for reading Pound etymologically, which involved a look at Ruskin as an under-acknowledged influence on Pound).  Vince Sherry took on the matter of the rechristening of the Decadence of the 1890s as "Symbolism," and pointed out what was lost in the transition.  Vince managed to talk me out of my admiration for Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle, which had argued for the basis of the symbolist aesthetic in American transcendentalism, and therefore made symbolism into a kind of aesthetic of the new.  This, Sherry pointed out, was a falsification of the sources of the aesthetic we associate with Mallarmé and company, and hid the association of the aesthetic with a declining social order.


Lowlight: Louisville as a microcosm of our nation


When I'm at a conference for any length of time, I tend to need a break from the listening, the talking, and the heavy drinking, so I usually find some time to walk around the host city for a couple of hours.  At the Louisville conference I did this late at night, and have to say the flâneur experience was a bit depressing.  If downtown Louisville has added a lot of galleries and microbrew bars and hip restaurants over the years, it also seems to have accumulated ever more street people, wandering in ones and twos through the night, or lying stretched out on the sidewalk, asleep next to a paper cup used for begging.  The trend of the city seems to have been to grow at the top and the bottom of the wealth & privilege scale.  In this, it's not unlike Chicago, or America.  And it's just not fucking right.

Tag! (puff puff) You're (wheeze wheeze) It!

Good Lord — I'm it! I've been tagged as a "thinking blogger" by Steve Burt.

It was Ron Silliman who tagged the unsuspecting Professor Burt while Steve was sweating innocently away in an attempt to wedge his 40-volume set of the letters of Randall Jarrell (vaorium edition, with annotations both explicatory and exculpatory) into an old Tivo box in preparation for his upcoming Steinbeck-like trek from the central plains to Harvard (or am I misremembering The Grapes of Wrath?). Silliman himself was tagged in turn by Ashraf Osman, who was tagged (I think) by Wallace Stevens, who was in his turn tagged by Alfred Lord Tennyson, who was tagged by the zombified hand of an undead Homer while giving a poetry reading at Heinrich Schliemann's archeological digs. Since Homer was tagged by poets of the early Sumerian oral tradition, the ultimate origin of the tag-chain lies lost in the mists of literary prehistory, although I suspect a time-traveling Frank O'Hara may be behind it all in the end. I won't know for sure unless and until the grant money comes in for further research.

Anyway.

Part of me thinks this whole blog-tag phenom is just a schoolyard game. The other part thinks so too. But neither part minds. Who doesn't miss the schoolyard, where one could whip a big red dodgeball at one's peers with impunity, aiming for face or crotch with velocities approaching mach one? I mean, what wouldn't you give to make that sort of thing a regular part of all faculty meetings? (Imagine here Archambeau supine upon the floor, mercilessly pelted by his colleagues, who wield a mace-like untethered tether-ball).

So. It looks like I'm supposed to tag five others. So here's who I'd chase down across the asphalt-and-wood chip landscape of the virtual schoolyard. Only in the virtual world would I, puffing like the bookworm/hedonist I am, be able to catch even one of them and shout "Tag! You're it — a thinking blogger!"

Mark Scroggins. I know Mark has already been tagged by Silliman, but since Mark objects to Ron's description of him as "a scrupulous literary scholar who doesn’t take short cuts even in his blog" I thought I'd tag Mark again in terms with which he'd be happier. It isn't that Ron's wrong — Mark oozes legitimacy: he once delivered a scholarly ass-whupping of epic proportions to a manuscript of mine, ridding it of half its pages and two-thirds of its many flaws in the process. Rather, it's that Mark feels Ron's description lays waste to his "cherished self-image of jaunty, effervescent bons mots, of quicksilver connections & startling juxtapositions" and depicts him as "Professor Microscope Drudge." (One could say Mark is over-reading things, but who doesn't fret over representations of themselves? I once blew a nearly John Edwards-level sum of cash on a new haircut after looking in horror at my photo on the cover of an alumni magazine). So here, for the record, is my characterization of Mark (cribbed from P.B. Shelley's Alastor):

By solemn vision and bright silver dream
His infancy was nurtured. Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient air
Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.
The fountains of divine philosophy
Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great,
Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past
In truth or fable consecrates, he felt
And knew. When early youth had passed, he left
His cold fireside and alienated home
To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.

Ron Silliman. Is it banal to tag the most popular blogging poet in the world? Probably. But I've been so relentlessly ready to fly off the handle at his worst qualities (his insistence that there's such a thing as a "school of quietude," his calling of Geoffrey Hill a fascist) that I feel a need to tap him on the shoulder and tell him I admire him for his alt-poetry-erudition ("altudition"?). Nobody knows more about the books nobody knows about.

Reginald Shepherd. Holy crap he's smart. Some of his recent blog entries are adapted from a forthcoming book of essays — a great preview of coming attractions. He also wins the Congressional Medal of Clarity for that rarest of feats, discussing people like Adorno in graceful English sentences.

Mairead Byrne. While the three guys I've already mentioned write essayistic blogs, Mairead Byrne's is a kind of diary-in-poetry. She's a thinking blogger, for sure, but her dialogue with the world takes place in poetry, not prose.

Simon DeDeo. Simon writes about individual poems with an energy and insight that leave me as slack-jawed as any roadside yokel watching a UFO suck up his Chevette with some kind of space-hose. And DeDeo should know about space-hose-having UFOs: he's a physicist at Fermilab, where (if memory serves) they invented both the tractor beam and the shamrock shake.

Celan Salon

Last night, in a break from my usual wild-ass Wednesday night of ordering Chinese food and seeing what kind of Netflix residue has washed up on my shores, I hoofed it down from the burbs to the glorious city of Chicago to hang with the local poets and talk Paul Celan. When I finally figured out the intricate system of buzzers that allowed me into Garin Cycholl's inner sanctum, I rallied with Garin, Mike Antonucci, Ray Bianchi, Bill Allegrezza, Jennifer Scappettone and Stefania Heim and, suitably rallied, set out to scale the heights of Celan's Threadsuns in Pierre Joris' translation. Since Ray put this whole thing together and bought a cake, I can't hold it against him that he forgot to print out Pierre's responses to the questions we'd sent him by email — and I'm sure Ray will be passing those around when we get together to talk Vallejo in a few weeks. I'm looking forward to them, since comparing various translations left us with more questions than answers, despite an emergency phone call to our German language consultant.

Threadsuns is an opaque work, even for Celan, and a lot of our discussion centered on the nature of the opacity. Allegrezza threw down the gauntlet by declaring that he felt Celan's mental health at the time of composition (which was sketchy) and his subjection to electro-shock therapy (which was appalling) played into the book's fragmentation. I'm sure there's some way that these experiences enter the poems, but I tend to see this at the level of image and theme more than at the level of fragmentary form. I'm too late-afternoon fried-out to type up a long poem, but here's a short one from Joris' translation of Threadsuns that seems to me to reference Celan's mental-hospital experience:

The excavated heart,
wherein they install feeling.

Wholesale homeland pre-
fabricated parts.

Milksister
shovel.

Okay, it isn't exactly One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but among the various fields of reference, there seems to be something of the normalizing/therapeutic form of psychology ("the excavated heart" and all that). And Celan doesn't seem too keen on this instrumental view of psychology.

And this brings me to Adorno. I know, I know, I've been reading Adorno, so the answer to any question I'm asked lately seems to be "negative dialectics" As in the following exchange:

Local Guy: "Hey Archambeau, what do you figure the Bears are going to do in the Superbowl?"

Archambeau: "Negative Dialectics, man! There're going to take the notion of the totalizing instrumental reason of the Colts' defence and seek out its fissures and disunities and... hey — where did everybody go?"

Anyway, in reply to Allegrezza's thesis about mental health and fragmentation, I made some semi-articulate claims about the extreme crypticness and fragmentariness of Celan's late-period poetry, most of which I cribbed from an old listserv post by Clifford Duffy, from back in '98. Here's an edited version of Duffy's post, in which he claims that Celan's fragmentary and cryptic work is, in essence, a stylistic reply to a criticism made by Adorno (I've edited this down a bit, and left in the eccentric punctuation — remember, this was written as an email, not a formal piece of writing):

In the early 50's Paul Celan published his poem ** Death Fugue ** . This poem became very widely read and universally accepted as a powerful statement 'about' the death camps of Europe. The poem is exacting, intense entrancing, and excruciating. It pushes to an extreme an emotional response that the reader undergoes while reading it…. Sadly by the early 60's the poem became so widely antholgized in Germany and had become a standard part of the learning of German children in Western German education. I say sadly because of this. The poem by sheer dint of repetition had lost some of its intensity and had (through the abuse it has been subjected to, and as the biographer of Celan infers, Guilt on the part of the generation of teachers and educators 'teaching ' this poem to their children) had become a standard' tool of analysis. …. It got to the point where school children in Germany used it to analyze metrics effectively undermining its meaning and its impact. …It has its place. -- But the Poem was diverted from its path...When ** Death Fugue** was published Adorno read it and said in a written statement. This is too beautiful One cannot write Beautiful poems about the Holocaust. One can only be silent in the face of what happened there. …. The effect on Paul Celan from what I have read was very strong, if not close to devastating.

In this view, Celan's choice of fragment, arcane reference, and the like, are strategies of refusal: he doesn't want the poems to be appropriated into generic tools for the learning and teaching of conventional poetic techniques like metrics. I'm pretty convinced, really. I'm also about to miss my train, so I'm outta here.

BREAKING NEWS (added Feb. 4, 2007): Mark Scroggins (who has been keen on debunking bad footnotes to James Joyce of late) points to the merely semi-accurate nature of Duffy's post. I'm thinking of changing Mark's nickname to "Hawkeye," but I'm not sure how he'll feel about having to give up "T-Bone"...

Difficult Pleasures

Josh Corey, Eric Selinger and Mark Scroggins have been blogging up a storm about difficulty and pleasure in poetry (and, as always seems to be the case when difficult art comes up, ethics and politics have reared their sober heads). There's some interesting stuff going on, but I'm not at all sure there's a conclusion available, and some of the terms of the debate seem a bit squishy. For what it's worth, here's my take...

The Story So Far

Josh began by writing about the different kinds of pleasure he gets from reading different kinds of texts. Long story short, he makes a distinction between the relatively easy and, to his mind, somewhat passive pleasures to be had from reading mainstream fiction (Richard Russo's novel Straight Man being his primary example) and the thorny, effortful pleasures to be had from reading experimental poetry. From the way he talks about this second class of texts, he seems to be thinking mostly of Language Poetry. And he uses one Language Poet's categories for his discussion, taking Ron Silliman's terms "absorptive" and "antiabsorptive" to describe the experience of reading mainstream fiction and alt-poetry, respectively. (For those of you who've gone a little foggy on Silliman's terms, the breakdown is like this: for Silliman, absorptive texts give you language that you don't notice as such, and allow you to settle back and watch a mental movie. In contrast, the anti-absorptive text throws a bit of a linguistic monkey wrench into the movie machinery, stopping the show — we have to confront the language in its unassimilability to our ordinary reading processes). Josh says he likes both kinds of reading for different reasons (the absorptive text, he says, will get you through a long flight better than the anti-absorptive text, and as a guy who suffered through a long wait in the Rejkjavic airport with nothing but Gulliver's Travels, a Toblerone and a bottle of duty-free scotch to sustain me, I feel Josh on this one). But Josh sort of worries about the non-hierarchical nature of his pleasures. Aren't the difficult texts somehow better for us, he wonders?

Eric Selinger jumps in with his answer to this last question: a resounding No. In Eric's view, it's all good: straightforward texts, difficult texts, what have ya. He rejects the kind of moral hierarchy that Josh raises as a possibility. He rejects the dichotomy of purely-absorptive and purely-antiabsorptive texts (yet another one of Silliman's dichotomies crumbles under scrutiny). Eric also points out that the difficulty of a text is subjective, not objective: the mainstream fiction that Josh breezes through with ease is easy to him beacuse he understands the conventions well. Other people might struggle with it (the way I do when reading French or Swedish, where my skills are taxed by Le Monde and the Sydsvenska Dagbladet, let alone the poetry of Mallarme or Jesper Svenbro). This last point raises another idea (one Eric doesn't explore much): that something like Language Poetry isn't necessarily "difficult" to its primary readership: other language poets and the profs who swarm around them. (I try to follow this idea up a bit in a review of Allen Fisher's Gravity, among other books, in a soon-to-be-released issue of Pleiades: check the lit-journal section of your local supermarket for copies).

Enter Mark Scroggins. After giving a summary of the debate much like the one I'm giving now, he takes sides, saying that he, like Josh, feels that there is a sense in which the difficult, anti-absoprtive text is better for us — if not in terms of pleasure, then morally or ethically or politically. Mark presents this as a gut feeling, rather than an argument, and admits that the various arguments for this position that he's encountered don't ever satisfy him for long. But he does give us some sense of what lies behind his gut reaction (and no, it isn't the volcanic south Florida hot sauce he uses as a metaphor for challenging reading): he tells us that the difficult, anti-absorptive text is connected to our ability to recognize the Other as Other (with all Lacanian capitalizations intact). The otherness of unabsorbable language becomes a kind of homology for the otherness of the Other, and our recognition of it somehow makes us, you know, better.

Some Problematic Equations

Here are some assumptions that creep in here and there at the edges of this (interesting, stimulating, end-of-semester brightening) discussion. They are, I think, questionable, if by questionable we mean wrong.

Difficult = Anti-Absorptive = Ethical

Both of the equals signs in the above equation are problematic.

1. Difficult = Anti-Absorptive

Okay, so this is problematic in two ways. Firstly, there's the point (implicit, I think, in Eric's piece) that difficulty is something experienced by the reading subject, rather than inherent in the textual object. What's difficult for me may be easy for you, and vice-versa. This goes for all schools of "difficult" poetry. I mean, the formidably difficult works of Modernism have become pretty straightforward to thousands and thousands of readers over time, as we (I fear that is the professorial "we") have internalized the linguistic conventions with which they were written.

Secondly, the equation of "difficult text" and "text that defies ordinary conventions of usage" leaves out a whole range of difficulties, from allusions to matters of sympathy-with-the-devil (I've harped on about this so much before, I feel I ought to leave it alone for a while). (It is also a part of the Pleiades piece I mentioned).

2. Anti-Absorptive = Ethical

Man, this idea just won't die. I mean, the idea is better than a century old, in one version or another (not to keep pointing to my own stuff, but I've got an essay on this coming out next year sometime). There have been all kinds of versions of it, from the Surrealist notion that their particular form of strangeness was fundamental to any true political revolution, through Brecht's revolutionary hopes for the baring of the device, and on to the more modest claims of the Langpo and post-langpo types, who so often to equate linguistic rupture and the like either with resistance to commodification (see Charles Bernstein's "The Value of Sulfur for a brief and distilled version of this argument) to the notion that it defamiliarizes our habitual perceptions of the world and therefore opens us up to the Other (the position dear to Mark's heart).

I can see two problems with this equation. Eric points to the first when he says, a propos Mark's statement that his instincts point in the direction of this position, "show me the money." We'd need actual evidence that this stuff works, and such evidence is on the threadbare side.

The second problem is this: it is wrong to imply that only the defamiliarizations of anti-absorptive art can truly bring us into relation with the Other. I mean, Mark's protestations that the Russian Formalists had a stake in the avant-garde notwithstanding, we would do well to remember that Victor Schlovsky (the man who gave us the concept of defamiliarization in his essay "Art as Technique") used Tolstoy for all (or was it almost all? I'd have to check, and the book is way over there, behind the stack of essays I'm supposedly grading right now) of his examples of defamiliarization. And one could point to plenty of entirely absorptive, formally conventional works that have gone a long way toward bringing people like me into contact with cultural otherness. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, for example, gave me rich sense of the otherness of Nigerian history. Ditto Thomas Hardy for English country life of the last century. Ditto Charlotte Bronte for the contradictions of feminine desire in a patriarchy. I don't think I came away from anything by Lyn Hejinian or Catherine Daly with this much of a sense of otherness. (Josh points to a sharp essay on science fiction and experimental poetry with some bearing on all this). Which is not to say I don't find a huge value in anti-absorptive texts: I just don't think the window-to-otherness argument is very tenable.

Other Stuff to Consider

1. Hierarchy and telos. I can't quite be down with Eric's "it's all good, to hell with the hierarchies" position (if that is in fact where he's at). I think it is inevitable that we have hierarchies for different kinds of pleasure -- every time we put one thing rather than another in our Netflix queue, we make an implicitly hierarchical decision. The trick is not to seperate hierarchy from telos: when we ask "is this better than that?" we're really asking "is this better than that for some particular end or purpose." Josh began with a kind of acknowledgement of this when he praised the "it will get through a long flight better than a bucket of Bernstein" virtues of the Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian. But by the end of his post he'd been consumed by doubts, and seemed to wonder if there wasn't an absolute (rather than telos-driven) hierarchy, in which the anti-absorptive was absolutely (rather than relatively-with-regard-to-a-particular-telos) better. Gotta have the telos if you have the hierarchy.

2. We aren't really talking much about pleasure any more. We've gone into ethics. What kind of pleasure does anti-absorptive writing actually give, and how is it distinctive from other kinds of reading pleasure (if, in fact, it is different) is a question we haven't done much to answer, although Eric gestures toward this kind of thing when he starts asking about Aristotelian eudaimonia in contradistinction to sensory pleasure (though the sensory, bodily pleasure of reading is generally minimal — way, way, way below neck massage, say, and not anywhere near the cold beer/hot day nexus).

3. We need some actual data. I know all of the soulfull-eyed, soft-handed humanists of the world blanche at the those two syllables, for I am of that tribe myself, and nurtured in its non-empirical ways. But while my heart yearns for the kind of humanistic interrogation of pleasure Eric outlines (he calls for a discussion invoking "Barthes, Adorno, Freud, Lacan, even Aristotle"), my head tells me we'd do better to have some new information to work with, of a kind that can be measured with actual scientific instruments. You may snicker, oh my fellow humanists, but researchers have been doing interesting things with neural imaging and the humanities — there's been, for example, some interesting work on what happens in various parts of the brain during meditation and what the subjects of the experiments describe as religious experiences (long story short: when people report feeling a mystical union with the universe during Bhuddist meditation, it seems that they've managed to reduce the flow of blood to the part of the brain responsible for showing us our location in time and space). I know the Archambeau Institute for the Neurobiology of Aesthetic Experience isn't going to come into being in my neck of the liberal arts, but I think some serious research into what actually happens in the brains of different readers as they have different kinds of textual and aesthetic experiences would be an important beginning to getting beyond the "my favortie kind of art happens to be good for you and will open your mind to the Other" assertion as a justification for experimental art and writing. Go Big Science!



4. I'm not through reading it yet, but it looks like Simon DeDeo's new essay on anarchist poetics may have some bearing on all of this. So I'm off to read the rest of it now — what better way to put off reading that pile of essays?

Text as, or vs, Experience, with a Peroration Concerning the Availability of British Experimental Poetry in the U.S.A.

Steve Halle and Joanne Chapman have an interesting dialogue about poetry, intertextuality, and obscurity going over at Seven Corners. Here's a bit from Steve's contribution that struck me as interesting:

When I started in poetry and wrote poems in the lyric/Romantic tradition, I struggled to find ways to include what I was reading and thinking, so much a part of my experience. Investigative poetics has freed/enabled/permitted me to use the source as is, so I don't have to translate something in order to use it in my own creative process.

What I find particularly interesting here is the disabling dichotomy between text and experience implicit in the post-Romantic tradition Steve's talking about. I've used the dichotomy myself sometimes -- I remember trying to talk to my students about the difference between Catherine Daly's DaDaDa and C.K. Williams' Repair by saying something like "well, his poems are based in his ordinary experience, while hers are based in textuality." I suppose I wasn't completely off base, in that the poems in Williams' book tend to be slice-of-life stuff, often autobiographical, while Daly will do things like slice and dice Spenser's "Amoretti" in her series "Adorata," or compress the plots of dozens of novels in "Mistress Plot." But the simple fact that should have been staring me in the face as I opined in the seminar room was this: reading texts is an experience. Reading Spenser is as much a part of Daly's autobiographical experience as taking a train through France is a part of Williams'. I suppose the dichtomy rests on a whole bed of unexamined and indefensible ideas about a distinction between mediated and unmediated experiences, with reading being a mediation of experience. What's that? You want proof that non-reading experiences are no less mediated than reading experiences? Okay. Look no further than the nearest Hummer H2, being driven by an actuary on his way to a time-share seminar. Look deeply into his eyes (I know it's a long way up from your battered Hyundais, oh poets, and I know you should be looking out for oncoming traffic, but this is important so bear with me, and take the risk). There -- see that strange, faraway gleam? That's the gleam of mediated experience, folks: that dude is experiencing the I-94 as an off-roadin' festival of manliness, bustin' stumps in the wilderness of his mind. Oyez. Anyway: the interesting question might not be why Daly downplays her travels and moments-with-nature, but why Williams, a well-read guy, downplays his reading experiences.

The false dichotomy between the experience of texts and other forms of experience is surprisingly pervasive in our culture. There's a whole racket out there in the vast wasteland of middlebrow contemporary educational theory devoted to this very distinction. One finds the dichotomy in discussions of poetry, too: usually in the writings of people who want to return poetry to a Romantic emphasis on the moment lived intensly in the presence of nature (I'd say "return" instead, but scare quotes were banned after the 1996 MLA -- too many repetitive stress injuries at the postmodernism panels). But you also sometimes see the dichotomy in the work of those who want to defend experimental or intertextual writing -- as in Eleana Kim's "Language Poetry: Dissident Practices and the Makings of a Movement," which holds up "deconstructive strategies" against "experiential" poetry. The irony here is this: when you buy into the distinction you've already surrendered too much ground to what I'm calling (for today) the post-Romantic tradition. Wordsworth may have bounded like a roe through the hills above Tintern Abbey, but this was no more or less experiential than Robert Duncan bounding like a roe up the stairs of Cody's Books. Dammit.

**

In other news, it seems I spoke too soon when I claimed that there was only one late 60s/early 70s era anthology of British experimental poetry, John Matthias' 23 Modern British Poets. Mark Scroggins has taken a minute off from jamming out like a crazed sasquatch on obscure stringed instruments to hail me from the confines of his thirty-story scriptorium in the swamps of Florida (where, when he's not jamming, he's busy with the deep, rich experience of sneezing over mouldering pages), and waves Michael Horovitz's 1969 anthology Children of Albion enthusiastically in the humid air. If anyone can tell me where to score a copy, let me know.

Mark also blogs away learnedly about British experimental poetry, noting that American ignorance of the stuff has a lot to do with material conditions: very little of it is readily available in the States. He's not wrong, but if you're in America and feel the urge to check it out, you can always order directly from the publishers. Salt, which puts out a lot of great stuff by British experimentalists, makes their wares available via Amazon.com, and so does Wild Honey, but some others don't. There's only one Reality Studios title available on Amazon.com, for example (Spitewater Provocations, a pamphet-length interview with Peter Riley). But you can do a bit better on Amazon.co.uk, the British Amazon, which will ship to the U.S., and is happy to accept your gringo greenbacks, reduced in value though they be by these late years of war and fiscal follies.