The Grand Piano, part 1

I’ve survived J’s 5-day absence at the Shakespeare Association, & mirabile dictu I’m some 230 pages into reading proofs. So I need a break, & writing a bit about The Grand Piano Part 1 seems just the thing, tho I doubt I’ll be able to add much to John Latta’s wonderfully detailed notes (not to mention the fact that he’s a whole volume ahead of me now!). John’s done the heavy lifting of close reading & scornful pomposity-lancing, so I can stick my forte, which is hazy generalities.

Norman, it seems, is expecting me to be winding up for a big attack. He writes, in response to my previous wool-gathering,

At last! Scroggins is really going to give us his take on langpo. He's going to survey its strengths and weaknesses, the sociology of its avant-garde position, the implications of its successful bid for academic hegemony, and the ensuing marginalization of other formations equally entitled to being regarded as worthy successors to high modernism. He's going to point out the risks when previously marginalized poets attempt to write their own literary histories, not the least of which is a self-regard bordering on narcissism. Lay on, Scroggins!

Scroggins suppose he should leave all that stuff to folks more comfortable with various -ologies, -isms, & -ations, being himself a bear of very little brain. It’s hard, however, to resist quoting Joe Strummer: “Ev’ry gimmick-hungry yob digging gold from rock ‘n’ roll / Grabs the mike to tell us that he’ll die before he’s sold / But I believe in this and it’s been proven by research / He who fucks nuns will one day join the church.” That, of course, is a pretty much unanswerable summary of the institutional absorption of the subversive margins. (Adorno could probably say something much more lapidary about how the cultural industry can swallow up whatever threatens it, but it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to skank to.)

It’s of course an old move to point to how many prominent Language Poets (hereafter LPs) have moved into the academy, & how the publishers of choice for their theoretical statements are no longer Roof or Sun & Moon, but U of California P, Northwestern, U of Alabama P, & U of Chicago P (note snazzy MLA-style abbreviations). Or how Wesleyan UP, back in the 70s & 80s neck in neck with Pitt for the title of most tepid poetry series, has become almost a house press for various LP types. Those data in themselves mean very little in a grander scheme of cultural capital – that is, we’re still talking about print runs in the neighborhood of 1000 copies or fewer. And it assumes that there’s an identity between the academy – as in ‘academic hegemony’ – and the ‘inside’ from which the LPs were in those heady days of the 80s considered themselves ‘outside.’ I don’t think that’s the case: what the LPs attacked with some regularity (despite occasional sallies like Ron Silliman’s review of Barry Ahearn’s book on “A”, “Why the MLA Can’t Read”) was not the academy per se, but MFA programs, the culture of MFA poetry, & the poetry published by trade houses & large-circulation periodicals.

The “self-regard bordering on narcissism” Norman identifies (an identification which I’m not sure I entirely endorse) might be more closely defined as a desire, even as the group has moved closer to certain sources of power & influence (& let’s be realistic here: the big money & big circulation firesources – the NEA, the Guggenheim foundation, the Poetry foundation – are still entirely closed off to alt-poetry), to retain a stance of opposition & subversion. True enough, but it’s a trifle too facile to attack the LPs for this. While a rigid purist might attack Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Said, or Spivak for holding faculty positions at elite institutions, one can’t deny that they were/are able to exercise considerable subversive force from those bully pulpits. Would Foucault have accomplished more by throwing over teaching & writing altogether & taking up leaflet-distributing?

What I sense irks Norman is that many of the LPs most definitely do not promote a “big tent” picture of the avant-garde – that there are sheep & goats in the pastures they survey, & it’s not just “School of Quietude” that gets goatishly dismissed, but alternative varieties of alt-poetry – the visionary works of Ron Johnson & Robert Duncan, the so-called “analytic lyric” of Aaron Shurin, Benjamin Hollander, Norma Cole, etc., the short-lived “Apex of the M” phenomenon. One can, I suppose, fault the LPs for a certain puritanism, a sense that theirs is the only alt-poetry that matters, & that certainly shades into a kind of self-group-centeredness. (I recently heard a couple of prominents LPs dismissing “analytic lyric” – which a more accurate genealogy of alt-poetry would classify as a particular development of the poetics of Duncan, Spicer, & others – as a reaction-formation against 1980s Bay Area Language.)

But I’m inclined to allow a measure of narcissism to The Grand Piano. After all, to write autobiography, even “collective” autobiography, one needs a healthy dose of self-regard. And frankly I’m rather intrigued by the notion of these 10 poets chronicling their early years in this shifting, polyvocal fashion. They’ve repeatedly argued for collectivity in creative endeavors, and they’re putting their money where their (collective) mouths have been.

What surprised me most reading the first installment of The Grand Piano, however, was precisely how little space was given over to assertions of the innovativeness, the subversiveness, the sheer importance of Language writing. Perhaps one can credit Bob Perelman, who has always struck me – & everyone else who’s known him whom I’ve spoken to – as a singularly sweet human being. Perelman, by some roll of the dice or a cutting of the deck or whatever aleatorical means, got to write the tone-setting first segment of this installment, and he chose to write about of all things love.

That I suspect went a long way towards defusing the Mr Roboto theory-massage to which many of his coauthors have subjected their readers in the past. They can react against Perelman’s speculation about how the “desire” texts of his youth have given way to the “love” texts of his fatherhood – “Love, as the end of a poetic tradition at least in America,” Barrett Watten writes, “is authoritarian”; Carla Harryman claims that “The theme of love is subject to proprietary claims within poetry’s patrimony”; Ron Silliman begins his entry to detailing his father’s infidelities; Kit Robinson tells us that “According to Viktor Shklovsky, in order to write about love one must write about everything not about love” (& proceeds to do so) – or they play other, more positive variations on the theme: Lyn Hejinian tells us with admirable straightforwardness that “we were undertaking it for love” ; and Ted Pearson tells us, with Jamesian convolutions, that poetry is an “art, without embarassment or equivocation, I love, and loved then, as I also love, without conflation, its makers as makers of this art I love, that is, in the absence of any dispositive claims of filiation.” (Okay, read that one again, a trifle more slowly…) One contemplates with a shudder what the first segment of The Grand Piano might have read like if its opening had fallen to someone who chose to write about revolution, or disjunction.

The poets of The Grand Piano – and let’s name them, just for the record: Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, & Ted Pearson – write indeed with a sense of self-importance and historical moment, a sense that’s liable to rub one the wrong way. But I’d note a couple of things:

•For the most part these poets – as one would hope – write rather well here; there is little in the way of what Bunting called the “see-here,” the theoretico-parodoxial flourish or the obdurately unreadable but achingly important. Instead, by whatever collective process they’ve managed to produce a various & actually pretty obsessively readable set of meditations on what they were up to 30 years ago. It’s doesn’t have a hell of a lot in the way of lightness or wit or literary anecdote – cf. Lewis’s Blasting & Bombardiering for that – but then again it’s nowhere near as ponderous as Biographia Literaria.

•And self-importance is an index, in the end, of ambition; & I for one prefer the writing of poets of high ambition (whether misplaced or not) to that of those who’ll settle for a workmanlike minority. Philip Larkin, I’m convinced, never thought of himself as anything more than a minor poet, & he succeeded brilliantly in never becoming more than that. (Bunting, despite bestowing upon himself one of the best epitaphs ever – “minor poet, not conspicuously dishonest” – was just kidding: he knew how good he was.) If these 10 poets write with an air of self-importance, it’s at least in part justified: all 10 of them, 3 decades later, are still active & evolving writers. I’ve read work by all of these poets that I’ve found compelling; at least half of them have written books very important to me.

Whether we take the “Language” movement as a moment in these poets’ collective past or a still-active tendency in contemporary writing, the proof of the pudding is after all in the reading, & I for one am hankering for the next installment of The Grand Piano.

The Toy Piano

[This post began as a meditation on The Grand Piano, part 1, & became something else – a meditation on the reception of Language Poetry by a poet born in the mid-1960s, who first encountered the language poets on the page in his early 20s, & only met them in the flesh somewhat later.]

By the time I graduated from Virginia Tech, I was pretty deeply versed in “high” modernist poetry. I had written an honors thesis on the Poundian ideogram & its contemporary manifestations in Robert Duncan’s poetry, Guy Davenport’s fiction, & Hugh Kenner’s criticism. I was reading Ronald Johnson, Olson, WCW, Jonathan Williams, Robin Blaser, Leslie Scalapino. I had started to read Zukofsky. And I had heard, but only heard, something about this thing called “language poetry.”

Over the next few years, as I pursued my grad work at Cornell, I worked hard to bring myself up to speed on this “new” avant-garde. I bought & read the anthologies – The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, In the American Tree, “Language” Poetries – and the few critical works as they hit the shelves – George Hartley’s Textual Politics and the Language Poets (1989), Linda Reinfeld’s Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue (1992). The campus bookstore had a pretty excellent poetry section, & I could get almost any new book from Sun & Moon or Roof as soon as it was published. And the used bookstores wre unfailing sources for the prehistory of many of the LPs’ publishing, in the form of Ithaca House books.

During I think my 2nd year at Cornell, John Taggart alerted me that a pair of very interesting poets were on their way to Ithaca; the following Fall Harryette Mullen joined the faculty & brought with her her then-husband Ted Pearson, who had been – in his own inimitable parlance – one of the “original players” of the Bay Area Language “scene.” Ted was always delighted to talk, & I, young & impressionable, was happy to spend many hours listening to him reel off lists of names, recount reading series, and analyze the various components of the San Francisco poetry world in the previous decade. (& I would be the last to deny that Ted, thru the example of his own spare, highly lyrical – & sadly undervalued – writing, taught me a great deal about how to put together a poem.)

By the time I got around to writing my dissertation (on LZ and Wallace Stevens) & to reshape it into the book that was published as Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge, the language poets & various others who moved in their general neighborhood had come to represent for me a clear continuation & rethinking of Z’s own innovative poetics. In my book I directly discussed poems by Michael Palmer & Charles Bernstein, & name-dropped at some length a number of other folks – Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews, Barrett Watten, Erica Hunt, Lyn Hejinian. (An emblem of my divided loyalties, however, was that my final chapter, on continuations of the “Objectivist” tradition, focused not on any of them but on Taggart & Ron Johnson.)

This is not to say that Language Poetry was entirely unheard of in Ithaca in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, tho the poets in Cornell’s MFA program – AR Ammons, Kenneth MacClane, Phyllis Janowitz, & Robert Morgan – showed little interest in much alt-poetry. (They had other things to offer: Bob brought John Matthias & Geoffrey Hill to campus, & Phyllis had on the wall of her office a life-sized, deeply-cleavaged photograph of her novelist daughter Tama, who seemed to smile down when workshop became insufferably tedious.) Cecil Giscombe was managing editor of Epoch; he brought Nathaniel Mackey for a reading, commissioned me to write a review of Bedouin Hornbook & Eroding Witness, and allowed me to edit an issue of the magazine in which Clark Coolidge and Charles Bernstein appeared.

But even as he was ruminating over the good old days in San Francisco (over endless cups of coffee, followed by bourbon shots with Heineken chasers), Ted was alerting me to the existence of what WCW once called “a new wave of it” – a group of younger writers – God help me, of more or less my own generation – who were carrying on the Language torch: Andrew Levy, Benjamin Friedlander, Jessica Grim, Jena Osman, Jennifer Moxley, and others. As if my own sense of provincial belatedness were not already acute enough – not merely was struggling to take in the example of an avant-garde now almost 2 decades old, but I needed to come to terms with a cohort of writers my own age, for whom the LPs were immediate & available forebears.

Perhaps, I now believe (sour grapes?), there something enabling in such belated marginality. At least, when I read Jessica Smith, a poet perhaps 15 years my junior, lamenting the almost hegemonic influence of the Language Poets at Buffalo, I feel grateful for not having come of age in the shadow of that “scene,” and only coming to touch the hem of its garment in later years.
***
This is the point where I actually start talking about The Grand Piano – but damn! Mr UPS has just brought me 550 pages of page proofs to read, & J. is out of town thru the weekend (San Diego, the Shakespeare Association) so I have to get up at 7 to feed the children – and what am I gonna say about Nausicaa & Oxen of the Sun tomorrow night – what am I doing blogging?!?