zeitgeist-tracking

My friend & colleague A. Papatya Bucak has a great little piece up at the Chronicle of Higher Education on the experience of getting tenure; I find my feelings on promotion are pretty much the same (tho I can't say I share her enthusiasm for Anthropologie).

It seemed that Eric Selinger was (alas!) deep-sixing his consistently lively & thought-provoking (if not consistently updated) blog Say Something Wonderful, but happily he's reconsidered & has resurrected the blog as what it was at its best, a sandbox for his own ideas-in-progress & reactions to the books & scholarship he's reading. Latest post is a read-thru of Eric Keenaghan's essay on Robert Duncan in the latest Contemporary Literature.

I realize now that I ought to read Ralph Maud's bio of Olson, if only as counterweight to Tom Clark's. See Alan Casline's assessment here.

Steve Evans's annual core sample of what people are reading, the "Attention Span," has taken shape on Third Factory. I'm delighted to see that four people reported reading The Poem of a Life, & two of them were generous enough to say write nice comments about it.

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The poetry blogosphere all a-buzz at Stephen Burt's latest attempt at capturing the Zeitgeist in the Boston Review, "The New Thing: The object lessons of recent American poetry." (Many reactions, including this by Bob Archambeau & this by John Latta.) I was pleased to see the attention Burt pays to the press Flood Editions, & the Zach Barocas's consistently excellent website Cultural Society. (Also nice to see my own name appear, if only as a member of a list...)

What do I make of Burt's essay as a whole? Well, I'm not sure yet. I admire the impulse to try to make sense of the shifts in poetry that one feels around one, the sense one gets that the social organization of the art, & the art itself, is evolving as one ages. I've watched the "scene" changing over the past 2 decades with some interest – from my own callow youth, when the most visible insurgency on the scene was the highly vocal (& now largely forgotten, I guess) "new formalists" (the Language Poets, far more radical, were only an ugly rumor in academic & official verse culture circles), to my grad school years when I learned of an entirely new generation of poets (my own generation, I guess) who'd been reading the things I thought I was the only person alive reading, to the general dissemination of certain post-avant gestures thruout both academic & OFC circles (what Burt in an earlier essay calls "elliptical poetry), to Flarf & the new conceptual writing.

Once or twice along the way I've tried to conceptualize or theorize why people started writing in ways different from the ways they'd been writing in – or rather, why presses & journals were publishing things different from what they'd published – or rather, why critical & popular attention was being paid to the latest "new thing," so that suddenly yesterday's status quo seemed altogether, er, yesterday. But I've always given up after throwing out a half dozen hypotheses & outlines of ideas. This is I guess what I admire about Burt – that he's willing to set stakes into recent poetic movements & try to write real literary history, just as it's happening.

The problem of course is that when one tries to assess where we are – especially in a literary landscape as astonishingly varied, lively, & just plain densely populated as the first decade of the 21st century – one invariably ends up seeing only part of the picture. Literary shifts, shifts in writerly fashion, are incredibly overdetermined, & many of the causes contributing to the trends in poetry writing probably won't be evident for decades to come – if then.

That's not to say that one needs to just sit by George Bush-ly and let history be written by those who come after us. Literary histories written on the spot & for the first few decades after tend to be markedly partisan, devoted to establishing the legitimacy of a particular poetics or cluster of writers. Roy Harvey's Pearce's Continuity of American Poetry, for all its acute readings, really aims to establish American poetry as a long prelude to Wallace Stevens; Marjorie Perloff's "Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?" is in part a brief on behalf of the post-Poundian Language Poets; and heaven knows how many books were written between 1930 & 1955 showing anglophone poetry's hegelian evolution up to TS Eliot.

Perhaps more to the point, I'm not convinced that literary histories written decades after the fact are all that more insightful than on-the-spot assessments like Burt's. The historian's choice of which among an overdetermining variety of factors are most important shifts with intellectual fashion, & we never really get more than a partial view of what was going on at any given point, or what's going on now.

At times, I wanna say hey, it's really simple – poets get bored with what they're reading & writing, & decide to do something different. Other poets like what the first group's doing, & do something similar. Voila! A shift in the Zeitgeist. But that sounds like the School of Larkin Criticism, doesn't it? Kudos to Stephen Burt for trying to do something more, as Quixotic as the attempt may be; and wholly unreserved kudos to him for drawing attention to some very interesting poets & presses.

laser rot; Shane MacGowan's teeth; year's end

I'm an unabashed Pogues fan, have been thru thick & thin since maybe 1986. One of my stocking stuffers this year was the band's latest "best of" compilation, The Ultimate Collection – probably not really a necessity, since I already own The Best of the Pogues, The Rest of the Best of the Pogues, & The Essential Pogues. But this one contains, as a second-disk lagniappe, "Live at the Brixton Academy," a recording of one of the gigs from the band's 2001 reunion tour. Judging by the Brixton disk & by the various concert videos up there on YouTube, the band is frankly better than ever – faster, sharper, more melodic. And even Shane MacGowan, the man of many words & few teeth, seems to be slurring his vocals a bit less than he was on such latter-era Pogues releases as Peace and Love & Hell's Ditch.

So I set to ripping the rest of my Pogues collection to iTunes, & discovered that laser rot has affected not merely Shane's teeth but my CDs as well. Turns out that Waiting for Herb (1993), the band's first post-MacGowan release, simply won't play at all. This is not a huge loss, mind you: the Pogues minus Shane MacGowan is kind of like non-alcoholic beer, or a gin & tonic without the gin. But there were some pretty decent tracks on that disk, I seem to recall, & I'm irritated to think that I'll be tempted in the days to come to actually purchase a second copy of that anemic record, just so I can satisfy my inner anal completist.

[Oddly enough, it turns out that the band's 1996 release, Pogue Mahone – also without Shane, & without my hero Terry Woods & two other core members of the group – is actually a pretty potent piece of celtic punkery, or so the first listen in maybe 8 or 9 years reveals.]
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There's an eloquent post today on Eric Selinger's Say Something Wonderful; Eric, humblingly, takes the publication of The Poem of a Life as occasion for asking what he should be doing next. Eric's done the academic writing-about-poetry thing, in a tenure-panel's worth of peer-reviewed essays & in the form of his lovely first book, What Is It Then Between Us?: Traditions of Love in American Poetry; he's spent years training secondary school teachers to teach poetry in his NEH seminars; he's published – what? – 8 or 9 perceptive and lively omnibus reviews of books of poetry in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, writing for whose editor Herb Leibowitz makes writing for PMLA seem like falling off a log; and he barely mentions it, but he's co-edited two big & important critical collections, Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections (with Jonathan N. Barron) & the forthcoming & eagerly awaited Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (with Joel Bettridge).

Eric & I have been friends a long time now – at least 15 years or so – & there's nobody's critical opinion I value more highly. To be frank, Eric's always made me feel like an also-ran: his prose makes mine seem lumpish & academic, his critical eye cuts to the quick of the matter while mine is still lingering over the surface, & his wit runs circles around mine. I've always felt like Jack Lemmon to his Tony Curtis. So it's odd now to find that both of us are in something of the same boat: for I, too, am wondering what to do next.

I've been in Zukofsky-land for a long time now, ever since I started my dissertation at Cornell almost two decades ago. That dissertation morphed into a handful of articles & the book Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge (1998), & the biography, which I started work on while LZPK was in production, seemed a natural outgrowth of that project. Along the way, there were some ancillary jobs – the essay collection Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky (1997) & the "additional prose" section of LZ's Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays. And of course I was writing other things: conference papers, essays, lots & lots of book reviews (the best of them, like Eric's, for Herb L's Parnassus). But this major, panoptic Zukofsky-project was always the great looming presence in my intellectual & writing life.

And now my Zukofsky affair has come, if not to an end, then to an appropriate pausing point, or at least a fermata. And I, like Eric, am wondering what the hell to do next. I have a bunch of ideas:

•first & foremost, it's time to find a publisher for another collection of poetry; goldfinches, maybe 120 pages of carefully cull'd post-post- poetry, has been shamefully gathering dust in a drawer of my hard drive

•and then there's the notion, which I might have aired on the blog some months back, of a brief & popularly-pitched book on the relevance of biography for reading modernist & late-modernist literary texts; this isn't a wholly serious intellectual project, but I've been reading the books middling biographers have been publishing lately on their art & have concluded that I could do just as well, if not better

•and there's all those book reviews and occasional essays – maybe 3-400 pages' worth, tho I haven't counted lately; but I'm not Helen Vendler or Marjorie Perloff or Dominick LaCapra – it would be a mad press indeed that would take on a collection of Scroggins odds 'n' sods

•what about another biography? ask readers who have little idea of the effort & agony that went into The Poem of a Life; truth to tell, I'm deeply tempted by a second biographical venture, but I have no idea who the lucky biographee might be

•a book on contemporary British avant-garde poetry, focusing particularly on those poets' relationship to the English language, to history, to place

•a book on the poetics of gardens, and the poetry of gardening – from Marvell thru Pope all the way to Ian Hamilton Finlay – indeed, such a book would probably end up being a book on Finlay with a very long historical preamble; but Lordy, the research it would take, & what I'd have to learn!

It comes down I suppose to a question of obsession, for I've found that I can't really write deeply or memorably at length about a given subject unless I'm to a certain degree obsessed with it. And while I'm pretty interested in all of the above subjects (the poetry collection, of course, is something else altogether), I'm not – yet – quite obsessed with any of them. (Now a book on contemporary avant-garde erotic poetry, that's got me interested at the moment...)

I suspect it's the time to lie fallow for a while, to let the next thing grab me from behind, unexpectedly. It's no great sin to stand and wait awhile, to see whether this past decade's labor will turn out to be a grand Roman candle or a damp squib. In the meantime, I'm entertaining and & all suggestions as to where my energies ought to be applied.

My worst fear, tho, is that my own Oblomovian tendencies will get the better of me – that 20 years hence, as I shuffle onto the dais to receive the gold-tinted, Chinese-made wristwatch Our Fair University hands out to career retirees, the young poets publishing four-dimensional poems on the ultra-internets & the young turks at the MLA will vaguely recall my name as "that guy who wrote some stuff on Zukofsky back in the day."