The Fringes of the MSA and the Axis of Ambition

"The border wars define the pallid center of the empire," writes Chris Hamilton-Emery in the latest PN Review. He's thinking about Salt, the upstart-turned-success-story of poetry publishing in Britain (and -- full disclosure -- my publisher), but his comment came to mind the other day down in Chicago, where the Modernist Studies Association held its annual conference at the Michigan Avenue Marriott. I bailed on attending the conference itself this year, but that didn't stop me from catching the Metra down to Michigan Avenue, meeting a poet, a critic, and a poet-critic or two and heading out for the kind of venue where all the real action happens at any conference: a nearby bar. I've always thought that the real exchanges at these places define the success or failure of any conference. I mean, I've enjoyed going to the 20th Century Literature Conference in Louisville for years, but I've learned more from talking until closing time at the bars on Bardstown Road and the jazz lounge in the Seelbach Hotel than I have from any of the panels. Except perhaps for the panel where Charles Altieri blew me away by saying, of the presentation I'd just given, "I find your paper irritating, but I didn't think anything else here was interesting enough to be irritating." But that's another story.

So I got together with Piotr Gwiazda (whose Gagarin Street is just out), Stephen Burt (whose Parallel Play is about to come out), and Matt Hofer (who just finished writing his Distance and Resistance: Modernist Polemic in American Poetries) and we talked poetry and drank Goose Island in some crummy dive until we split up, Matt and Steve hitting the big party at Walter Benn Michaels' place while Piotr and I kept talking up and down Michigan Ave.

Two items emerging from the Archambeau-Burt-Hofer-Gwiazda discourses:

1. The Axis of Ambition.

I brought the crew up to speed on the the ongoing blog saga of how-to-anatomize-contemporary-poetry, and they all proposed third axes to help make David Kellogg's model more useful. Steve's was, I think, the most useful: ambition. In addition to charting poetry in terms of the claims made for it as innovative/traditional or communitarian/individual, Steve proposed an axis that would chart the way the poems were seen in terms of the scale of their ambition. I suppose one would have to see the binary here as major/minor. I like the retro, even archaic, quality of the scale, and I like in particular the way thinking of this kind forces us to be evaluative critics, (and, with any luck, to get a bit reflexive about the criteria of evaluation, too).

2. Donald Davie, Poetry Critic or Poet-Critic.

Since the discussion had touched on classification and evaluation, and since I found myself at a table with three people who'd read all of Donald Davie's work -- a position I don't occupy every week -- I took a straw poll on how we should classify and evaluate Donald Davie's acheivement. Two votes went for "poet-critic," one for "scholar" and one for "man of letters" (yeah, that was me). Curiously, though, when we each named our favorite Davie book, all were books of criticism (one each for Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor, Ezra Pound, and two votes for Articulate Energy). So whatever we want to call him, Davie seems to be most valued as a critic. (Incidentally, only two of us had favorite books of Davie's poetry -- Six Epistles for Eva Hess was mine, The Shires was Steve's).

We never quite got to the question of where we'd put a guy like Davie on the modified Kellogg grid. I suppose I'd have to put him more toward the community end of the community-individual axis, because of all the Little Englandism in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. As a poet and critic with Thomas Hardy over one shoulder and Ezra Pound over the other, Davie covers a lot of territory on the tradition-innovation axis. As for ambition -- harder to say. As a critic he did big things, but never wrote a book that tried to totalize (no The Pound Era or American Renaissance). As a poet, he ranged over a wide terrain, but didn't write a single Big Poem of the kind that signaled ambition for Modernists and midcentury New American Poets. He had just enough Larkin in is soul to keep him from that. So I'd have to scratch my head and, somewhat surprised, put him somewhere around the middle of the axis of ambition.

Silliman Recants! Avant/Quietude Dichotomy Dies!

Though I've never posted twice in one day before, I've got to leap in with this late-breaking newsflash: Ron Silliman has recanted.

Surrounded by reporters and nearly blinded by the flashbulb-popping paparazzi, Silliman stood on the front doorstep of his home Saturday and read a brief statement:

In the process of writing these notes, day after day, I've learned far more than I could possibly have imagined when I first embarked on this process. The most obvious example would be that I had to give up my 1970s-centric map of the poetic landscape & replace it with one more appropriate to the 21st century.

Okay, the bit about the paparazzi and whatnot is just scene-setting, but the statement itself is real. No, really — check it out.

So the Avant/Quietude distinction is, quite possibly, dead (though we'll have to wait to see if it lives on in some hideous afterlife on syllabi and in academic articles). Now what? I wait by the poetic tickertape with bated breath...

For a suddenly dated discussion of these issues, see the post below. (Note that, in the new climate of glasnost, the younger generation may come to see Silliman as a kind of Gorbachev, not the Brezhnev he seemed to have become).

Stagnant Revolutions, Romantic Objections, and the One True Paradigm for Poetry

I see by the ever-handy site meter that last week's ruminations on David Kellogg's proposed map of contemporary poetry generated a huge spike in hits to this site of the sort not seen since the Contingent Manifesto was posted back in June. If the responses out there on other blogs are any indication, the response seems to have been one part glee at the smashing of old Langpo idols, one part enthusiasm about the possibilities of Kellogg's method, and one part glowering hostility. Great! I mean, if my poems could generate destructive glee, creative enthusiasm, and seething disdain in equal measure, I'd know for sure that I was on to something.

So, in the Kelloggian spirit of classification, here's a breakdown of responses:

1. The Children of the Stagnant Revolution Revolt

Kevin Andre Elliot (whose disdain for the Avant-Post/School of Quietude dichotomy launched a thousand posts) and Natalia Cecire both weigh in with posts about Kellogg's model being an improvement on the Sillimanic dichotomy. I know, I know, Ron's not the sole proprietor of the dismal dichotomy, but he's the primary propagator, and he's singled out by Natalia as something of an obsessive:

I must say, I do think Ron Silliman is ever-so-slightly on the obsessed side when it comes to this issue. Half his posts seem to say "OMG SoQ alert!!!!" about one book or another. I'm as unimpressed with Billy Collins as the next person with a pulse, but could we relax?

I want to state for the record that I think Bob Hass, Brenda Hillman, and Lyn Hejinian are all fantastic human beings and excellent poets.

What's interesting here, I think, is that both Kevin and Natalia are grad students, and watching their reactions to this little bit of resistance to the Silliman line seems just a bit like watching those kids in Berlin back in '89, when the wall came down and all the old statues that the aged revolutionaries had erected to themselves and their ever-advancing, ever-underdoggish revolution were pulled down. Okay, yeah, there's a difference of proportion, but you get the drift: a rising generation sees the rhetoric of the old former-revolutionaries differently than do the surviving firebrands themselves. I mean, I doubt Silliman and Company will ever feel like the establishment figures they have, in large measure, become, no matter how many research university posts they hold, no matter how many citations they get in the MLA database. And so they'll talk like they're the Che Guevaras of poetry, when for people younger than I am, they can seem more like the Fidel Castros (that's Fidel circa the Elian Gonzales imbroglio, not Fidel back when he looked cool in camo and the CIA kept trying to ice him). Or better yet: they come across like Leonid Brezhnev, peering out wanly from behind his medals and ghastly eyebrows, reviewing the parade of loyal Post-Avants in the Revolutionary Square below.

Natalia gives us a further glimpse into the Soul of the Grad Student when, after dismissing the Avant/Quietude dichotomy, she tells us:

If there's a dichotomy I really care about, it's "willing to be on my committee"/"unwilling to be on my committee."

By the way, I kind of like the sound of "Avant-Quietude." I hearby release all copywrite from the term, in the event anyone wants to apply it to some unfortunate poet or other (preferably someone who's been on the cover of the American Poetry Review).

2. The Romantic Anti-Structuralist Institute of Providence, Rhode Island Registers an Objection

This is the powerful research institute headed up by Henry Gould. The fact that Henry's the only member does nothing to reduce the power of the institute. I remember, from the old days of the Buffalo Poetics List, that a fair fight would be something like Henry vs. All the Rest of Us. Henry maintains that the Kellogg grid isn't really an improvement on the tired/misleading dichotomy of Avant and Quietude, because even in with the added dimensions of the Kellogg model,

Poetry is assumed to be this product which flows out of culture in measurable quantities. You can establish fixed criteria for assigning individual pieces of the product to a grid : ie., "tradition" and "innovation" are already known & defined, "self" and "community" are items you can abstract without too much difficulty from any particular portion of the GNPP (Gross National Poetry Product). Voila : your poet is assigned a critical niche in the Standard Schema.

He goes on to describe the complications this model runs into:

But what if the patterns of formative imitation which poets utilize are exactly the same - whether you're in either of the so-called camps? Innovators are imitating their 20th-century models; traditionalists are doing likewise. Both are claiming the mantle of tradition (the traditions of new & old, respectively). Add a further twist : what if the innovators claim to be new by going back to older models (epics, Native American songs, collective poetics, performance art, etc.) in order to be "new"? What if the models of the so-called traditionalists (rhymed iambic couplets, say) are of more recent provenance than those of the innovators (say, free-verse anaphoric lines)?

You know, he's got a point. I tried to investigate something like this at one of the Modernist Studies Association conferences a few years ago, up in Madison. I took Joe Francis Doerr's book Order of the Ordinary as an example of a book that could be claimed from every pole of every axis on Kellogg's grid at once. For me, this was a sign of Doerr's interest (gawd, but he's underappreciated) more than it was a sign of the limits of Kellogg's model, but I take Henry's point.

I think, though, that there's more to Henry's objections than this. He writes, for example, that "The uniqueness of interesting poetry swallows up every proposed schema." An interesting point, because a very Romantic one. I mean, the singularity of genius, the unclassifiability of truly impressive aesthetic experience — it all sounds a bit like a riff on Coleridge's discussion of organic form. Sometimes I think that, for all of his critical intellect, Henry is in the end a "we murder to dissect" guy, especially if the dissection comes out of a structuralist tradition, which he seems to see as mechanical (I'm disappointed that he took down a post that made fun of models like Kellogg's by pretending to sell a machine for the assessing of poetry — even though it took a shot at a model I admire, I thought it made a powerful objection with good humor).

So let's call Henry's objection the latest chapter in the ongoing battle of the Romantics against the Enlightenment, now in year 216, with no sign of either side wearing down.

3. Brave Men of Science Discover a Third Dimension

Joshua Clover, in his persona as Jane Dark (which I like, but don't exactly get), goes all mad-scientist on the Kellogg model and takes it to the next level, adding another dimension for a three-dimensional system of Cartesian co-ordinates:



His third dimension locates a given poet's degree of partisan, polemical fever. What does this mean? He (she? what should one call a male poet's femal persona?) explains:

For example, in the cross as currrently constituted, we get a "tradition/innovation" axis: per Kellogg, Poetry that, for example, emphasizes its continuity with the past (such as the New Formalist work of poets like Dana Gioia) represents a position close to the “tradition” value-identification. In contrast, avant-garde writing represents a position near the “innovation” value-identification.

Strikingly, though Gioia and Silliman e.g. find themselves at antipodes in this scheme, they have a deep commonality: their shared interest in impressing their own sense of value on the field via their writings, talks, position-takings, jobs, blogs, blurbs, etc. Discursively, they are both proselytizers; Silliman and Gioia would find themselves sitting on the same branch, staring down its full distance to Andrew Joron and Karen Volkman in the great distance.

Pretty sharp, eh? But just when you think things have gotten as clever as they're going to get, someone with some actual knowledge of co-ordinate systems comes in and makes you feel like the neophyte you are. This happened to me when I ran across Jeffrey Bahr's take on the Kellogg model. Bahr, who is no mere poet but a poet and and engineer (and therefore equipped with math and stats chops you and I can only marvel at) says, with what I imagine to be a slightly weary sigh at the follies of humanists,

As I've mentioned before, there is a statistical procedure for teasing out underlying axes of discrimination (multidimensional scaling), but it would take getting lots of input from poets in the form of poet-pair ranks.

I'd like to know more about this statistical procedure, which remains murky to my qualitative mind. Perhaps equipped with such forbidden knowledge, I will on some dark and stormy night ascend a windy trail to a dark tower on a mountaintop and, with the able help of my student assistant Igor, I'll fire up the Jacob's Ladder and the various machines that go ping and wait for a lightening strike, at which point I'll throw a mighty lever and bring to life the Paradigm that will Explain Poetry! No — Igor no! Not now! We don't know the ramifications! We've meddled in things meant for God alone! Too late! Nooo-ooooo-oooo! Igor! I am so very afraid!

Field Charts, Venn Diagrams and Dead Dichotomies: Maps of Contemporary Poetry

Kevin Andre Elliott, in dismissing the dichotomy of the School of Quietude and the Avant-Garde as tired and ready to be banished from literary discourse, has come out and said what many of us have been thinking. Who, other than Ron Silliman's old buddies from the wanna-be legendary past doesn't groan audibly when some Buffalo alum from the early nineties trucks out another load of heroic-us vs. oppressive-them rhetoric? And really, how far does a dichotomy like this take us in understanding poetry?

A case in point regarding these limitations: Jonathan Mayhew's recent test of avant-garde or quietude purity does more to illuminate the inadequcy of the dichotomy than it does to illuminate the countours of contemporary poetry. He asks his readers which set of poets they prefer. Do they like

Norman Dubie, C.K. Williams, Donald Hall, Mary Oliver, Sandra Gilbert, James Dickey, Howard Moss, Robert Pinsky, Irving Feldman, Charles Wright, Charles Simic...

or

Clark Coolidge, Susan Howe, Tony Towle, Bernadette Mayer, Ronald Johnson, Jess Mynes, Nada Gordon, Lisa Jarnot...

Mayhew then goes on to tell us about the significance of our choices:

Most people, if they've read contemporary poetry at all, will have a strong inclination toward one or the other side. If you like poets on both lists equally, then you are a true eclectic.

So here's the dichotomous model. Red vs. blue states of poetry, with homogeneity in each group and no overlapping:

But ay yi yi. I mean, look at that first group of Mayhew's! Robert Pinsky and Charles Simic are so different, you've got to wonder about the usefulness of any category that lumps them together. Sure, they're both English professors living in the northeastern states, but so's Susan Howe. And Pinsky's commitments have been to a kind of essayistic, discursive, neo-Augustan poetry of clear statement and careful judgement. He was, after all, a student of Yvor Winters, and his strongest critical praise has been for the most essayistic side of poets like James McMichael and Frank Bidart. His most strident complaint about poetry (made in The Situation of Poetry) has been aimed at poetry in the American Surrealist tradition launched by Robert Bly in his magazine The Fifties. This deep-image stuff eschews statement and, in the manner of European Surrealism, makes a poetry that, as Bly put it makes an art “in which everything is said by image, and nothing by direct statement at all.” Charles Simic, in contrast to Pinsky, is very much the product of this kind of deep-image neo-Surrealism. He's the editor of anthologies of European and Latin American Surrealist poetry, and his own work is very like the Serbian poets he reads in the original: odd, elusive, hard to reduce to statements. And don't even get me started on the differences in the second group!

The dichotomy between Quietude and Avant is about as crude as the political dichotomy between conservative and liberal -- in which the conservative label can be applied equally to groups as diverse as down-home Kansas blue collar anti-abortion protectionists and plutocratic Connecticut free-trade types.

So, what else is there? One tiny step toward a more nuanced view of things would be to look for some kind of overlapping between the two dichotomized groups. Think of a Venn diagram, for example:



In political terms, you might interpret the chart this way:

A = Liberals
B = Conservatives
C = Reagan Democrats.

Not particularly useful, but better than the simple dichotomy. In poetic terms, we could probably interpret the chart like this:

A = Avant-Garde
B = School of Quietude
C = Jorie Graham

Or whatever. But this still doesn't get us into anything like the Realm of the Subtle Insight. I think we can get a little closer to this promised land with the help of David Kellogg. Back in 2000, Kellogg wrote an essay called "The Self in the Poetic Field" for Fence, which has to be one of the most underrated contributions to contemporary poetic theory.

For my money, Kellogg’s essay provides the best model for understanding the social and aesthetic structure of American poetry. Kellogg proposes a field of poetry charted along two axes, one running from tradition to innovation, the other from self to community. It is within this matrix that poets take positions through their various actions (writing poems, giving poetry readings, seeking or spurining certain audiences, seeking or declining to seek honors, displaying or downplaying antecedents, etc.).

The total configuration loosely resembles Bourdieu’s model of the cultural field; that it, the actual possibilities are on the inside of the field and the abstract value-identifications on the outside. As Kellogg put it,

There is an effect in the field made by each successive position-taking. I have assumed that the independence of each position-taking is compromised by the presence of other, adjacent position-takings, so that a cluster of position-takings congeals into a stable position within the field. The space of poetry as such is measured by the distance between the center and the four possible sources of poetic value. As these named sources are on the outside, critics have all too easy access to them and critical positon-takings in the service of canonicity are predictable. The structure is an open one, and its capacity for change is rather high….The novel feature of this structure for poetry is the manner in which the two axes are each informed by the formal and social loci of value. The loci of each axis repel each other. The axes join together in the center so that the two axes map a four-sides field when represented on a two-dimensional plane. One axis maps a set of social possibilities and the other a set of formal possibilities.

Kellogg’s field or grid can be visualized as a simple square with the four value-identifications (self, community, tradition and innovation) making their claims from the outside:



Think of the vertical axis as having self at the top of the scale, and community at the bottom. Think of the horizontal axis as having innovation on the left and tradition on the right.

Anyway:

While position-takings are rarely, if ever, matters of pure identification with one principle alone to the exclusion of all others, there are identifiable positions that come close to one or another value-identification. Poetry that, for example, emphasizes its continuity with the past (such as the New Formalist work of poets like Dana Gioia) represents a position close to the “tradition” value-identification. In contrast, avant-garde writing represents a position near the “innovation” value-identification. I want to use the Language Poets as an example here but, as Kellogg points out, since poets like Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe started showing up in the American Poetry Review, the field seems to have shifted, and like all successful innovators, they lie closer to the center than they once did. The more-or-less confessional poetry of poets like Robert Lowell (after Life Studies), Sharon Olds or Louise Glück, with its emphasis on individual experience and distinctive authorial voice represents a position over by the “self” value-identification. Community, though, proves the most difficult of the value-identifications to define.

“The mirror image of self,” as Kellogg puts it, the community value-identification has to do not only with matters of subject and voice, but also with the audience a poet defines for him- or herself. While the poetry of self produces authors, says Kellogg, the poetry of community produces audiences. “Less important than ethnic, regional, religious, or sexual identity per se,” he continues, “is whether a certain poetry participates in, or is read as participating in, the social claims of one or more of these identities." Mark Doty, by this measure, is a poet of self, while Paul Monette is a poet of community. Adrienne Rich may well be the community-poet extraordinaire, claimed as she is by feminist, gay, and disability communities, all of whom she seeks to gather round her by her various position-takings.

So. I know Kellogg didn't quite pull Excalibur from the stone and rend the veil of oversimplification, but he did give us a much better swiss-army knife than the two-blade model (the one with the Quietude can-opener and the Avant toothpick) that Kevin Andre Elliot rightly tells us just doesn't cut it.

What we need:

Because it Matters: Some Politics

Democracy for America, an outfit I've supported for a long time, has started an online pledge to send a message to candidates in the upcoming congressional elections. It's worth a look. The essence of it is this:

I pledge to only support candidates who:

Acknowledge that the U.S. was misled into the war in Iraq.

Advocate for a responsible exit plan with a timeline.

Support our troops both at home and abroad.

I take "supporting our troops" to mean "wish them well, and well-cared for, and safe at home when war is not absolutely necessary." Some of my best students, as well as many members of my family, have been in the military, and (tenured radical or not) I've got a lot of respect for them. And their opinions about this war have been interesting. I remember talking with a student after my Irish lit class around the time Bush &Co decided to invade Iraq. He'd been a Marine lieutenant in Somalia during the whole "Black Hawk Down" fiasco, and he predicted the course of action we've seen with tremendous accuracy. We'd be stuck in Iraq, he said, with no way out and no way to win and no meaningful support from the people we were told we were helping, and every now and then a helicopter would go down or a patrol would be ambushed or a bomb would go off and a few more Marines would die. I wish Bush would interview soldiers who hadn't been screened by PR aides and given scripted lines. But there's not much chance of that.

The pledge is particularly important at a time when too many Democrats continue to refuse to take a stand on Bush's war. Representative Rahm Emanuel, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, for example, was recently on NBC saying that Dems must avoid calling for an exit strategy. We can't let people in the Democratic party continue to take the anti-war vote for granted.

Anyway. When you sign you're given the chance to type in a few words about why you're signing. I went a little overboard, and wrote this:

I am signing because I believe that members of the Bush administration systematically propagated lies about the need for a war in Iraq, that they proceeded against their own best intelligence, that they acted without a responsible plan, and that thousands of combatants and non-combatants have died needlessly due to the arrogance of a powerful few. I am signing because too many Democrats have remained complicit with a failed administration, and because Republicans need to know that the current administration's policies are unacceptable, regardless of party affiliation. I am signing because history will show that those who stood silently by while this war continued failed in that most essential of tasks, citizenship.

Signing takes about a minute, and it matters.

On a happier note, Chris Glomski's new book Transparencies Lifted from Noon arrived unexpectedly today. Must blog about him, and about Jim Behrle, another poet I've been admiring lately.

Raymond Federman On the Run

As those of you who've read my recent post on Stephen Burt's visit to Lake Forest know, I wasn't able to make it to Raymond Federman's gig at the College (I refer you to my earlier comments about the incompatibility of shellfish, campari, and the Archambaldian digestive system for an explanation). So, by way of making up for my inability to report on the visit, here are some excerpts from the campus newspaper's account, written by Melanie Meyer, a student at Lake Forest.

Considered a legend in the world of innovative writing, French author Raymond Federman told a group of students last Thursday that his style was defined by his childhood experiences in the Holocaust. "I am immortal," said Federman, who came to campus as part of the On the Run Lecture Series. "I should have been dead before, I'm not ready to give up."

***

"Language," said Federman, quoting Samuel Beckett, is "what gets you where you want to go and prevents you from getting there."

***

After opening with a reading from Loose Shoes, his book of short, fragmented writings, Federman read from his latest novel, My Body in Nine Parts. The novel is divided into nine sections, each describing a different aspect or feature of his body. The first aspect Federman shared was "My Toes." "Most people don't listen to their toes," Federman read. He then revealed the lessons have given through their colorful personalities, describing the big toe of his right foot as "neurotic." Federman also read from a passage on his scars, theorizing that scars have souls and want to tell stories.

***

Federman is currently working on three projects: a novel to be called Out of the Whole, an autobiography (Federman without Limits), and a memoir called The Sand Book about Samuel Beckett, whom Ferderman calls "the best author of the twentieth century."

Wish I could have been there, and at the traditional dinner and drinks with the author afterward, since by all accounts Federman is one of the most charming and funny guys you're likely to meet. Then again, it may be for the best. In the presence of a man who was a close friend of the man who wrote Waiting for Godot, I'm likely to get all wide-eyed and weird, cut him off mid-anecdote, grab him by the arm, and in a near swoon ask "what was Beckett really like?"

I am, it seems, Extreme

So there I was, surfing around to see what was up in Chicago poetry this month, when I came across chicagopoetry.com, and a surprising reference to myself as first on a list of Chicago's forty most "eX-treme" poets.

What could this possibly mean, you ask? An interesting question! I haven't got an answer, although I feel the weight of the expectation pressing down on me. I mean, I just gave a poetry reading as part of the Rosemary Cowler Book Festival in Lake Forest, and if I'd known I was "eX-treme" I'd have done it from a skateboard, or pehaps while rapelling down a rock face. At the very least I'd have had my hair done up in some kind of purple anime-style do. But, alas, no such extremity was in evidence. The most radical gesture I made was to read my poem about Vermeer after noting that the sterotypical poem by an academic poet begins with the line "Vermeer would have loved these Connecticut woods." I declared myself militantly academic, and may even have raised my right fist ever so slightly in the air, weakly echoing the old salute of the revolutionary POUM of Catalonia.

But think of the company I'm in! At the local grocery store, for example, they've taken to making the cashiers offer you, on the way out, the "extreme deal of the day." Recently this has included deoderant, Cracker Jack, and, if memory serves, some sort of mouthwash.

The true honor of being "eX-treme," though, lies in being made into a creature of one's time. Were I a poet of the sixties, I could perhaps have been part of the "psychedelic 40," and had I flourished in the eighties (when I was too busy pursuing militant hedonism to write many poems) I could have made it as a preppyishly "outstanding" poet. Instead, I find that I embody the zeitgeist of this decade. Now if only they'd start pushing my book at the grocery check-out...

The Audacity of Stephen Burt

A genuine, unironic embrace of pop culture, especially music. Politics, on the left, and not just in the poems. Charm, pitched a bit more toward the young than the old. A facility with form. Critical comments every bit as good as the poetry. A poem about homeownership. The ability to use the word "messagiorno" offhandedly and convincingly. These qualities belonged to W.H. Auden, but the belong, equally, to Stephen Burt, or did on his recent triumph here at Lake Forest, where he read to a packed house in Carnegie Hall. And like the young Auden, Burt gives the unmistakable impression that he's Going Places. More impressively, you find that you Really Want Him to Get There. (I think he knows all of this about himself — as a line from one poem, which I'll almost get right, testifies: "it isn't enough that a few people who don't know me like me").

Steve came down from Minneapolis for a reading Tuesday, and seems to have made quite an impression on the students who were there. File part of this under Boyish Charm (the Rough Trade Records T-shirt, the glasses that one of my wittier students dubbed "emo goggles"). File more of it under Polished Reading Style (the best part of which is a kind of full-body shrug at the end of certain poems, a gesture that seems to say, rather disarmingly, "yeah, I know you may have reservations, but, you know, I really believe this"). More of the appeal has to do with what I, not unbiased after a decade teaching at Lake Forest and some experience with big university teaching in the U.S. and Europe, think of as the liberal arts style of addressing an audience. Steve asks the audience questions, finds out and uses their names, forms an immediate bond with them more or less as equals, and takes requests. Like a really good liberal arts college prof (which he is, at Macalester) he plants the seeds of the questions he wants his audience to end up asking him, and when they ask those questions, he comes across with real answers. He also deals with big issues in a very clear and jargon-free language, which we can attribute in part to the liberal arts background, and in part to what seems like a generational shift. Where once it was a badge of honor to speak in hazy terms that seemed (to you, and perhaps to your friends) sophisticated, European, theoretical, that vile phase seems to be on the wane, and the bright people in their thirties seem to want you to understand what they mean, even — indeed, especially — when it is complicated.

Steve also scored a hit with the crowd when he talked about politics and art in unpretentious, deeply practical terms. You make political art to make art, not to influence politics, at least not if you've got any sense of the relative influence a poem is going to have on the electorate, he said. Steve's a guy who's done his share of knocking on doors during political campaigns, and this, he said, is the kind of thing that's going to help your cause. Give money if you have money, make calls, use some shoe-leather. Disrupting syntax can be good for your poem (or not), but it isn't going to disrupt the political system. For a generation that seems to be casting a concerned eye at the Hummer-driving, creationism-teaching, McMansion-building, war-waging, propaganda-eating America presided over by our current leaders, this hit home (even at Lake Forest, which was onced listed as one of America's preppiest colleges in The Official Preppy Handbook ). Maybe politics just doesn't seem as abstract to them as it did to those of us who argued about Deleuze and Guattari in the campus coffeehouses of the early Clinton years.

As is often the case, I left the room feeling good about the poetry crowds we've been turning out at the college for the last few years. Full auditoriums and good questions from young people warmeth the professorial heart. I'd hoped to see more of the same two nights later when Raymond Federman came to town, but was too ill (long story, involving shellfish and campari) to make it. Still, it was a good week for literature in our particular corner of the groves of academe. When Burt's new book Parallel Play drops in February, I'll want to get my hands on it right away, and so, I think, will a few of his new fans from Tuesday night.

Rue Hazard: Rejoice

John Latta's new blog, Rue Hazard is up and running, and everyone is required to go there immediately to read the excerpt from Patrik Ouředník's Europeana: a Brief History of the Twentieth Century, which presents us with a kind of intentionally banal, poker-faced history of the 20th century. The narrative style reminds me of Edward Sanders' historical poems, although with a bit more cynical edge: Sanders plays a kind of faux-naif role, while Ouředník speaks in the banalities of whatever historical moment he is describing -- a trick as old as parts of Joyce's Ulysses, but absolutely right for our times, where scraping the barnacles of received public opinion off the interior of one's cranium has become a daily necessity.

The more I look around, the more I see poets and other writers turning to history. For example, a few days ago I sent off an article on Kevin Prufer and Albert Goldbarth to the Notre Dame Review, for which I recently wrote a review of Kevin Ducey and Joe Francis Doerr — all poets deeply concerned with history. And I'm at work on a piece for Pleiades on the new prose book by Geoffrey Hill, for whom history and reformation theology have been major muses. Maybe it's just me gravitating to this stuff, or maybe I've become a kind of muse-of-history-go-to-guy for journal editors, but I think there's more to it than that that: something new is happening with the past.

The Public Sphere, the Market, and Books by their Covers

Late yesterday I found this message in my email inbox regarding l'affair Fence (see post below). It came from David Park, a professor of communications at Lake Forest whose mighty brain throbs with the very juices of genius (Park is pictured here enjoying S'mores in my dining room, as is his wont). Says Park:

The whole thing is fascinating. I should do a study of how journal/mag covers signify intellectual content. If your initial argument were taken to its fullest extent, we might see the Atlantic's next issue feature a cover with a porn star.... I don't think your foes are likely to come up with any solid philosophy of the magazine cover that will tell us why the front of a poetry journal should look like the front of a poetry journal.

Dave's up on his Habermasian public sphere theory, so I pestered him for a while via late-night email and, in the end, arrived at the following conclusion: many of the reservations literary types have about the cover come out of an affront to their inherited assumption that intellectual journals are public sphere stuff, not commodities in the market.

You know the classical public sphere model, as articulated by Habermas, right? The ideal of the public sphere is one in which there's a place where we all communicate as equals, where the status of our opinions comes from the merit of our arguments, and where we're removed from concerns of commerce or hierarchical authority. Intellectual journals often have an aura of this ideal. "My disinterested thoughts are here communicated to you, my fellow discussant, for your consideration and possible reply," sayeth the intellectual journal, sotto voce, on every page, "consider these ideas, and talk back, oh reasonable and capable reader." We like to feel, when we grab a literary journal from the rack where it is shelved between Art in America and Conde Naste Traveller, that we're part of a conversation, that we're not so much consumers as we are discussants, members of the public sphere.

When Rebecca Wolff put the topless model Quinne on the cover of Fence to get some sales action going, she committed a sin against these cherished assumptions. She reminded us that, whether we're members of a (real or hypothetical) public sphere or not, we're also part of a market. People out there on the other side of the editorial office door see us not only as subjects of the public sphere, but as consumers. And so she's suffered the fate of most people who bring unwelcome knowledge, and been chided for her actions.

I'm not quite willing to ditch the idea that there really are elements of the public sphere in the little world of literary magazines, though Dave seems to be, sort of. Here's his take:

It's an old question: is there such a thing as disinterested art/ideas/experience/anything? My answer: no, not ever. The more it matters to you, the more interested you are. Tautology ahoy! But still. The attempt to experience art/ideas/experience/anything as disinterested (even if it is accepted that interest is always in there) is what's in play here, and that's much more interesting. So, art and ideas aren't disinterested, and any attempt to experience them as disinterested is doomed to involve a great degree of misrecognition. In some different world, that insight might apply to only a portion of art/ideas. Instead, it applies to almost all that we could call the 'dominant discourse' in art and ideas in contemporary Western society. The presumption that we all give up our interests as we enter the game is a major part of what defines the systems of art/ideas. This is upset by what you call 'catchy packaging,' and what almost anyone else would call a cute topless girl.... I agree that it's a good way to sell magazines and journals, and it's good to be comfortable about selling journals, especially when those journals have reasonably good literature in them. Also, it's good to see someone take on the pompous asceticism common to the world of journals.

So: public sphere or no public sphere, Dave Park's behind the new issue of Fence. Maybe he'll even run out to Barnes and Noble to buy a copy. He'd better move fast, though: I hear they're selling quicker than usual.

My Anxiety of Influence

Ooosh. Semester has started early for me this fall, in part because of some administrative hoodoo that has moved the term up by a week, and in part because I'm teaching a freshman seminar, and these always start a week earlier than everything else at Lake Forest. So rather than blogging I've been running around prepping two brand new courses and humming one of the numbers from the unpublishable musical comedy about a former college official I've been writing for the delectation of my friends:

Teachin' at the college,
Passin' on the knowledge,
Teach them all the things they ought to know,
Teachin' at the college,
Passin' on the knowledge,
Their tuition is the source of my cash flow...

But that's not why you tuned in. No indeed. No doubt you were wondering when the next appearance of Archambeau secondary literature would hit the newsstands. Well, wait no more: there's a new review of Home and Variations out in issue 165 of my favorite English poetry magazine, PN Review. David C. Ward, the reviewer, says some nice things about the poems, and then claims that "Archambeau is an ambitious (sometimes self-consciously so) and intellectual poet; in the family tree of poetry he would be of the branch of Geoffrey Hill." Ambitious? Got me, at least on good days. Self-conscious? Oh yeah. Influenced by Geoffrey Hill? Yes, but honest to God I thought I'd hidden it so well that no one would ever know.

I mean, old weird Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence has a lot wrong with it, but one thing he gets right is the way many of us want to hide our influences, lest we be held up to some pretty intimidating comparisons. Hill has been a favorite poet of mine since my first year of grad school, but he makes me nervous in the way that only those you admire fully can make you nervous. I was once invited to a dinner where he was the guest of honor and didn't say a word at the time, so awe-stricken was I (when Keith Tuma argued with Hill over some minor point, I half-expected death rays to shoot out of Hill's eyes and vaporize him). Since Hill's always garnering praise along the lines of "Let us make one thing clear: Geoffrey Hill is the greatest living poet in the English language" (Nicholas Lezard, in a review in The Guardian), being compared to him is a bit like being a guitar player and being compared to Jimi Hendryx. On the one hand, you're grateful. On the other, you rather wish you'd covered your tracks a bit better.

So here's a game for you: which of Bloom's six "revisionary ratios" can you find in Home and Variations' Hill-influenced poems? Play as often as you want, but please don't tell me about it — I'm self-conscious enough as it is.

A Monkey on a String, or: the Heart of Dutchness

Back in the eighties and nineties, when the world was young and English departments awash with French cultural theory, a good friend of mine invented the term "Eurojive." He knew we needed a word to describe a genre of writing launched by a thousand "naturally the foundation will bear your expenses" junkets to the USA by visiting European intellectuals. Such intellectuals, wild-eyed at what passed as their newfound American celebrity, would typically walk off the jetway into the arms of a waiting, star-struck grad student. They would then be driven around for a few days, giving talks, meeting the local professorial fauna or tame literati, dine out a little, demand to see a shopping mall or perhaps a casino, and fly back to the École Normale Supérieur or, more likely, one of the many Écoles Normale Inférieures. They would then churn out on essay or, if ambitious (and these were ambitious times) a slim book purporting to explain America. Remember Jean Baudrillard's America? Either we must believe the man was a genius beyond all measure, able to hit the tarmac in Vegas, sniff the air, and grasp The American Soul in All its Complexity and Contradiction, or we must believe the man was something of a jackass. Take your pick. And Eurojive lives on even unto the present day, recently embodied in Bernard Henri-Levi's series of essays for The Atlantic, in which he is driven around more-or-less in the path of Tocqueville (ancestor of all Eurojive), and tells us all about who we are and what we mean. (I nearly knocked HBL over once, but it wasn't a critical comment on his work: I was late to meet my wife at a cafe near the Sorbonne and wheeled my bulky American self around the corner at great speed, having to pull up short lest I knock over the man as he opined into an adoring TV reporter's microphone).

Undeterred by my own skepticism about the general veracity of Eurojive, I've decided to lay down an inverse version of the discourse, and define the nature of Dutch culture on the basis of no more than my own recent experience hanging out in Amsterdam this summer. Having never left the city, having learned no Dutch, having met approxinately 16 of the country's sixteen million inhabitants, I nevertheless hazard this assertion: I have seen into the heart of Dutchness, and it is like a monkey on a string.

Let me explain.

The key to the Mysteries of the Dutch lies in plain view in the Rijksmuseum. It is Dirk Hals' painting "The Fête Champêtre," or, more specifically, the figure at the front of the painting. Like a lot of seventeenth century Dutch paintings, it presents us with a group of people. I'm sure there's nothing particularly new or even interesting about the observation that the Dutch emphasis on the group portrait, or "conversation piece," is closely connected to the nature of power in the Netherlands of the seventeenth-century: oligarchic in an age of absolute monarchs. It was a way of examining group dynamics and group power. (Many paintings of the period, especially Vermeer's, give us private spaces punctuating, or being punctuated by, public spaces, and I'm sure this was a way of thinking about the new relations of personal and public power in a mercantile society).

But here's the interesting thing about Hals' piece: it embodies one of the central concerns of capitalist societies, right at the moment when the Dutch are inventing modern capitalism. On the one hand, the painting is all about the rich clothes, conspicuous consumption, and general full-on yeee-hawness of the laughing, drinking, flirting partiers. On the other hand, front and center is the monkey on a leash. What's that? How'd he get there? And who let the leash go? Is the monkey going to wreck the party? Will he soon hurl his feces hither and yon among the seventeenth-century glitteratti? Irrelevant questions, all, class. The import of this particular simian is symbolic: he is part of a old tradition of monkey iconography in European art, dating back at least to the middle ages, in which the monkey is used as a cautionary figure of appetitive excess. Sex, food, drink, fun: all, all will make a monkey out of you, and the little guy makes his appearance in many artworks to drive the point home. Here, though, the monkey is sort of leashed and sort of unleashed: no one holds the end of the leash, which is draped or perhaps tied to a chair. Moreover, while the monkey is positioned in the front and near the center, the sheer bulk and brightness of the partiers makes for a real tension. Who has the power? Is consumption grand and fun and free, or must we remember that icon of medieval contemptus mundi, the monkey? The painting catches the moment when both Protestant-ethic self-denial andconspicuous consumption were coming into being as two sides of the same coin (a coin clutched in the fist of an Amsterdam merchant driving a hard bargain, or perhaps being flung easily down on the counter of a haberdasher by his spendthrift son). This tension seems central to Dutchness, not only because it finds its way into so many pantings from the great age of art in the Netherlands, but because it explains how Amsterdam can be simultaneously Europe's hash-bar crowded New Orleans and a city of bourgeois comfort, smugness, and propriety. Holland, a Dutch guy on the flight back to the States said to me, was too conformist for him — he'd moved to the Bay Area to get away from all that. Who am I not to believe him? But at the same time, I'd just taken a photo of a coffeehouse adorned with images of Gilbert Shelton's hippie icons, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, which gave me a hunch as to what would be going on inside. So there it is: the Heart of Dutchness is the ambivalence between desire and restraint expressed through the image of a monkey on a string. You heard it here first, kids, Ameri-jive style.