well I'm back

The University of Louisville's 20th-Century Literature & Culture conference, as usual, was great fun. The normal pleasures of hanging out with friends, acquaintances, and frequent interlocutors – Alan Golding, Norman Finkelstein, Bob Archambeau, Ken Sherwood, Joel Kuszai, Lynn Keller; of meeting folks I hadn't before; the piquant doro wat at Kilimajaro restaurant; and Ear-X-tacy, a very cool record store that I tear myself away from conference-going to visit every time I'm in Louisville. It's by no means one of the world's greatest, but certainly better than anything I know in South Florida. I was relatively restrained: Black Acetate, John Cale's latest; Heaven and Hell, a 'best of' from the Mekons; and a brand new expanded reissue of John Martyn's 1975 Live at Leeds, a hard-to-find concert album that is to British folk what the Who's Live at Leeds is to rock & roll. This is Martyn at his most interesting, having grown out of the pseudo-Dylanisms of his earlier period and still a few years away from his overproduced, keyboard-drenched excesses of the 80s and 90s. For most of Live at Leeds, it's just Martyn's heavily echoplexed acoustic guitar and the astonishing double bass of his then-partner Danny Thompson (formerly of Pentangle). The two of them, according to interviews, spent the mid-70s pretty much continually dead drunk, and while that would certainly seem to be the case here judging from Martyn's between-songs patter, the alcohol hasn't blurred their musicianship one whit. A really dynamic set, hanging around the intersection of blues, folk, and free jazz, and occasionally descending into downright noise.

Down the street from Ear-X-tacy, one of the best guitar shops I've been in in recent years. They have my holy grail: an original Gibson ES-295, circa 1955 – like the one Scotty Moore played. No price tag – does that mean if I need to ask I can't afford it?, I query the counterman. "Naw. Price tag jes' fell off. I'll look it up... right, $7500." For some reason, I don't whip out the credit card, but give the guitar one long look before retreating out the door.

I had planned to fly into Louisville on Thursday, but ended up spending half the day in the West Palm Beach airport waiting to find out how badly my flight was delayed. (I ended up rebooking for Friday morning.) Ever anxious to improve the time, however, I read Christopher Middleton's Of the Mortal Fire: Poems 1999-2002 (Sheep Meadow, 2003), in the process reminding myself just how amazing a poet Middleton is: a truly stunning density of thought and sound, even in a collection he describes as "only afterthoughts" ("odds & sods," Pete Townshend would say). From "The Curlew":

Well, he has done rinsing the sky
Clear of ghosts now.
And the true, still it fools
All the hectic sectarians.
Only the hermits hear
But obey the cry's lash. Heavily
Clouded vistas they spread into
Seldom welcome
Such questioners, each in his arms
Or hers, as they patrol
Targeted streets, cradling
An old cave, snatched up
At the last possible moment,
A crystal hollowness torn
From its crag, now distant, each
Coolly questioning equipoise.

I mean to write some of my impressions of the conference itself – that seems to be a growing genre, conference-blogging (for a shockingly complete take on my own paper, see this post by Joshua Stuart). But I was conscious above all else of a certain "hole" in the proceedings. I've been going to L'ville for over a decade, always with pleasure and edification, always enjoying the company of other poets and scholars. But one motivation I've always had for going there was to jump in my rental, drive over to Lexington, and spend a few hours in front of the fire in Guy Davenport's sitting-room, surrounded by thousands of books, drawings, & paintings, listening to Guy ramble through his encyclopedic knowledge of pretty much every aspect of human culture that one might want to know something about. And now Guy's gone. Louisville is a fine and good thing, and I'm sure I'll be coming back – but the trip will never be the same.

A Party to which I haven't been invited

Well. The former-left-winger-turned-rabid-conservative David Horowitz, doing his best to sustain interest in his latest screed against commie-traitorous-terrorist-supporting academics in American universities, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, is running a poll on the Frontpage Magazine website to determine who's the #1 "worst professor" in the U.S. I'm sorry to say that I'm not listed on the poll, nor is there a space in which you could write me in. (I didn't even make it onto Horowitz's encyclopedia of paranoia, Discover the Network – tho some of my colleagues down the hall did.) At any rate, Michael Bérubé is leading the Frontpage poll for "worst professor" by several thousand votes, having urged his blog readers to come by and vote this morning.

Now I'm convinced that Michael is perfectly dangerous, especially when it comes to tree trimming gadgets and other sharp objects, but come on, folks: surely Cornell West (14 votes at this writing), that soft-spoken proponent of love, peace, and spiritual rebirth, poses a danger to the current hegemony? And what about Fredric Jameson (4 votes at this writing), whose books have probably caused more nervous breakdowns among grad students than anyone since Paul de Man? Isn't that dangerous? So go by the site and vote for your favorite evil lefty terror-monger; and as they used to say in Chicago, vote early and often – in the best intelligent design scientific spirit, you can vote multiple times from the same IP address.
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A very brief blog hiatus while I hie myself up to Louisville for the 20th Century Literature and Culture conference; hope to see you there.

Noted

oh my.
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And some sentences, from Simon Jarvis's 10 February TLS review of a clutch of Austen books, that make me wish I were reading Emma rather than Moby-Dick:

It seems likely that, for many of us, commentary on Jane Austen affords the scene of our first encounters with literary criticism, and, therefore, of our first disappointments with literary criticism. Not because the brightest and best haven't been the ones supplying the commentaries (they often have, at least among anglophone critics), but because it is so rarely given to literary criticism to find a style capable of facing Austen's. That style is not a container for content, nor an ornament to it, but the whole substance of whatever Austen's fiction knows. Nothing passes into her books untouched by style. After reading her, it becomes hard to tolerate any novel in which mere information or narration appears without the evidence of continuous thinking provided by work on language. The styleless author can tell us something outwardly quite probable, such as that Mr X got up from his chair and walked over to the window, and, after reading Austen, we just don't believe a word of it.

Repeat: "the evidence of continuous thinking provided by work on language."

Poetry on the ground

Michael Peverett made a useful comment to that last line of thinking (which has also been picked up by Bob Archambeau at some length, and with some witty schematicism). Michael remarks,

Seems to me Mark that there's a subterranean train of thought going on in your blog, from Thoreau's joyously disenchanting meditation on how literature that starts off "out there" turns into our comfort zone, then via Frankfurt, to the huge success of poetics as a sexy subject with students and as an institutionalized shaper of good citizens.

(I like that last phrase – "an institutionalized shaper of good citizens" – very much. It reminds me precisely how strongly the last century's crop of poet-theorists were theorizing with the ultimate end of making society something that one might be proud to be a citizen of, whether that might be a neo-renaissance fascist arcadia, a "polis" of connected and wide-awake townspeople, or some more ill-defined utopia: whatever they were working towards, it wasn't the colorless tenure-track "collegiality" that Michael's acid "good citizens" perfectly captures. [Michael is a sharp fellow, with an eye for a lot of things around him that aren't on pages: check out his blog.])

Michael's quite right about how grum and pissy Culture Industry gets when I try to think about contemporary poetry in the amalgam, its institutionalized forms, its networks and linkages and chains of power, whether pobiz or alt-pobiz. When I think about poetry in practice, when I turn to individual poems and books, then I'm altogether more sanguine. There's rarely a week when I don't read a poem or a book, by someone whose works I've known a long time, or by someone of whom I've never heard, that makes me say "Wow! how'd she do that? that's beautiful/compelling/totally surprising!" Latest cases in point:

Prageeta Sharma's Bliss to Fill (2000, reprinted subpress collective 2005): an entirely invigorating collection of poems that revolve around matters that one would think are entirely played out: youth, love, desire – all that stuff. But there's a wonderful, almost awkward obliquity to Sharma's turns of phrase that make one's distant youth come alive again. For instance "Paper II" (one of the collection's more straightforward moments):

There had been enough time for her to become an adult
without it having too much of an effect on her parents'

nervous system. She had certainly told them in a slow,
honest way, with a pre-planned epiphany – that she had lovers.

Madhu and Raju, her parents, out of their arranged marriage
grew a rhyme. And their daughter grew into a poet.

Or she grew into a lover which was taking up all her time
and poetry was only a series of mistakes worth claiming

to a page and not a lover.

Or Stephen Collis's second full-length collection, Anarchive (New Star Books, 2005). (Bloody brilliant title, and one that I'd certainly have used first if I'd had the gumption to think it up.) Collis (whom I consider a young poet only because he's a few months younger than me) works in what I like to think of as "late modernist" mode, writing poems that deform syntax and resist straightforward reading, but that still revolve around clear "subject matters." Mine, his first book, reads a bit like Robert Duncan presenting a history of the Vancouver Island coal mining industry. (In other words, nothing like Clark Coolidge's Mine, but quite as alluring in a very different way.) Anarchive plays over the matter of Republican Spain in the 1930s, a moment when the anarchist ideals that were so attractive to Joyce and others looked like they might actually get road-tested (until they were run over by the Fascism so attractive to Pound and others). Collis casts a wide net over the Anarchist archive – even the Clash and the Pogues make it into this book – and draws up a gleaming, idealist catch. This is political poetry, make no mistake, but political poetry that melds idealism with resignation, that steers its way from agit-prop to elegy:

If we are alone with the word

it is because wells
spring from all eyes

how is it learned
but through follies

naked we enter the bed
of their eternal wars

our hands intruding love
where blind fortunes hate

we become the penumbra
of powers know

death is certain
inconstancy distracting rage

as they would order nature
while nature must into its own orders fall

and we would keep to the chaos of growth
open at the top and

lifting from the bottom

institutionalizing poetics ii

New mailbox; will post photo when I get around to photographing it – you'll just have to wait.
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Joshua/Jane responds to my last post:

For what it's worth, I'm not sure that I draw the same conclusions. I'm interested in the expectation that poets ought to have theorized their own work in certain ways -- and how that expectation might be historicized. I'm less interested in debating whether actually theorizing one's own work is good or bad, and am prepared to take that on a case by case basis.

Relatedly: from my own experience of writing programs, I would say that it's frustrating that "poetics" (et al) courses are expected in lieu of critical/analytic courses happpening down the hall in the English Department. I am not at all averse to the idea that writing program students ought be expected to labor over critical knowledge, and indeed, contra your history, fear that these poetics classes are disreputable not for being an unnecessary supplement, but rather an insufficient one: a pale compensatory veil to cover over the absence of historical, aesthetic, and philosophical engagements that were once far more common among poets. When I hear "mardi," I think Mallarmé and Valéry.

Nothing here to disagree with: and SM & PV were precisely what I had in mind when I mentioned "mardi" – tho the fiction writers at least in my old program were far more like to think "Mardi Gras." At least within the institutions of MFA and PhD programs in creative writing, one might historicize the recent demand for poets to theorize their work in terms of something like disciplinary mimeticism: English studies managed to legitimize the reading of vernacular literature precisely by inventing the theoretical scaffolding of New Criticism; creative writing, now by some accounts one of the few growth sectors in the humanities, is trying to legitimize itself – while simultaneously trying to retain the air of the individual afflatus – by requiring self-reflexive "poetics" moments.

The increasing appearance of "poetics" sections in poetry anthologies, and even of anthologies of poetics, is I suspect largely driven by the market these new "poetics" emphases in creative writing programs have created. Most of such books are precisely as useless as the ubiquitous, mushroom-like "introduction to theory" volumes that turn up in my department mailbox every month.

institutionalizing poetics

Damn the postal service. Our mailbox got whacked during Hurricane Wilma last October – I mean deeply whacked: buried under a stack of tree limbs, the metal post broken off level with the ground. As soon as our yard got cleared, I rescued the box itself, which now looked like Daffy Duck's head after one of those TNT-swallowing incidents, tried to restore it to something like usability (let's just say at one point I was inserting a tire jack into it in an attempt to uncrumple it), and duct-taped it to the top of a handy three-foot stump at the end of the driveway. And there it's been ever since, until the duct tape wore away a few weeks ago. Now it balances atop the stump, except when the letter carrier leans out of his/her jeep to stick mail into it (then it inevitably slides off, usually into a big puddle when it's been raining) or when a windy day tips it over. Anyway, the p.o. has now informed us by rude form note that our mailbox is inadequate: apparently they won't deliver mail to anything that requires the letter carrier having to (horribile dictu!) actually get out of the vehicle.
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Sighted, a couple of displays of virtuosic snarkiness:

Michael Bérubé and the vile David Horowitz are at it again; Michael wins on points, because
a) Michael writes gracefully and makes good funnies (tho snarky funnies);
b) David knows neither how to punctuate (e.g., "Michael take note" needs a comma) nor how to insert accents into proper names (for "Berube" read "Bérubé");
and
c) Michael's right: David's a pathological liar and an evil dwarf.

On another front, Joshua Clover responds to Dan Hoy's rather weird essay on Flarf (should that be capitalized?) with some flashes of characteristic "more (cultural-)materialist than thou" snarkiness. But I'm taken with his final paragraphs:

If there's anything new-ish to the action, it's the presumption that poets should have theorized their own work explicitly and completely as a necessary supplement to the poetry, without which it can't be trusted or read as such (thanks to Tom Orange for the conversations regarding this topic). For this, Hoy can't be held entirely responsible; the relative success and insight of recent poetics in making theoretical accounts of itself that are at once persuasive, and relevant to poetics in general, has perhaps produced a certain set of expectations. Certainly there is a rise in general in the sense that poetry is well-accompanied by the author's "poetics," as seen in, for example, the collection edited by Spahr and Rankine (and the follow-up, Sewell and Rankine), or the increasing footage given over to critical writing by the poets in the back of the Norton Anthologies.

This issue — of how responsible poets are, especially those who make some claim on unfamiliarity, for theorizing their own practices — seems worth pondering further. This is true in part for exactly how historicizable an issue it might indeed be; it does seem inseparable from the endless parallel debates about the increasing academicization of poetry and the increasing centrality of the writing workshop.

So let's ponder it further. By "the relative success and insight of recent poetics in making theoretical accounts of itself that are at once persuasive, and relevant to poetics in general" I suspect Joshua means the array of theoretical and poetics-oriented writings produced within the general milieu of Language poetry. But I'm interested in how this has been institutionalized, how the writing of poetics – often quite apart from any engagement with "theory" in the sense that the term is most often used in the academy, but nonetheless drawing on the etymological sense of "theory," to look at with detachment – is being written into the requirements for creative writing programs. One can see this in the web pages of various CW programs around the country, which have begun requiring "theory" and "poetics" courses, and some sort of "poetics" component to their theses & dissertations. Even Our University has instituted a self-reflexive "poetics" moment into the requirements for the MFA.

All very different from when I did an MFA back in the day, where the very notion of an MFA student actually writing prose about what she/he was doing was seen as an idea landed straight from Saturn.* Without making any judgments about whether the general quality of work coming out of the poetry industry has gotten any better since management started requiring students to produce blueprints of their processes,** I'd agree with Joshua that this is straight-up "academicization," the final downfall of the old "workshop"/"atelier" model of teaching writing, which can now look only wistfully back on its origins as an artificial imitation of the buzzing café or the intense mardi, where the young gathered – voluntarily, with no grades assigned, no registrar involved – around the table or at the feet of the elder artist. What's at the root of it all, one suspects, is precisely how profitable creative writing programs are to universities.

*Read no nostalgia there.
**My sense is that it has, but I wouldn't hazard a causal relationship.

Swampt

I haven't actually dropped off the face of the earth, tho it might seem that way – it's just turning out to be one of those semesters, one of the ones where there seems never to be the time even to think, much less to write. But I've just cleared one large hurdle, & am gearing up for the next one, so I have a few days' breather.

Reading biographies lately – Rüdiger Safranski's Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (trans. Ewald Osers, Harvard UP, 1998), which I mentioned a while back; Robert D. Richardson, Jr.'s Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (U of California P, 1986), which I picked up on a whim at our library's sale shelf, & which is turning out to be a truly luminous, beautiful book (doesn't hurt when if you have Barry Moser designing and illustrating). The mail just disgorged Stefan Müller-Doohm's Adorno: A Biography (Polity, 2005), which I'm doing my best to avoid starting, since I know it'll eat up a substantial chunk of time (almost 500 pages of text, and another hundred of notes). The dedication alone is enough to put off those of us who have little patience with the fabled German ponderousness: "I dedicate this biography to my daughter Anna-Maximiliane because I would like my account of Adorno's life and work to help keep alive for future generations something of the thinking that was so influential for my own intellectual orientation." Phew! If you can’t wait for the paperback (I couldn’t), go to Amazon, which is offering a pretty substantial discount. But reserve at least 3 inches of shelf space.
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New on Michael Rothenberg’s Big Bridge is the collaborative poem, “Blue Poets in a Red State.” Some trifling prize to anyone who can find the 10 lines I contributed.

Reading Material

Delightedly received today: The latest issue of Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (#30-31, Fall 2005-Winter 2006). This one has nutty goodness in every bite, friends, including new work by Hank Lazer, John Olson, and a bunch of others, reviews by Susan Smith Nash, Tony Tost, and Norman Finkelstein (and a bunch of others), and a selection of North Carolina Poets edited by Joe Donahue. The centerpiece of the issue, however, is a memorial festschrift for Gustaf Sobin, who died last year. There are pieces here – mostly poems – by some very fine poets indeed: Peter Cole, Forrest Gander, Pierre Joris, Robert Kelly, Cole Swensen, Charles Tomlinson, Michael Palmer. There's a snippet of new work by Susan Howe, a piece of something called Souls of the Labadie Tract:

I'll borrow chapel voices
Song and dance of treble
bass for remembrance Stilt-
Walker Plate-Spinner air
piebaldly dressed heart's
content embroidered note
Distant diapason delight

Like most of the excerpted Howe I happen upon, it makes me itch to get my hands on her next book.

Yes, and there's my review of Michael Heller's latest, Uncertain Poetries: Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Poetics. But don't let that put you off of running out and buying a copy.

"We no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. He have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state is to be forgotten."

–Walden, "Economy"

[ager = "field"; and how to stress that last sentence? If we take "our art" to be stressed in contradistinction to "The best works of art," then it is little more than another shot at the pettiness of 19th-century New England. I prefer to the two in apposition – so that, in a vague anticipation of Frankfurt school aesthetics, art's expressive aspiration has become normalized into an analgesic: the opium of the masses.]

A few updates on the right, new links to newish blogs by folks I like & feel some distant connection to: Chris Funkhouser, who seems these days to be of all places in Malaysia; Tom Orange, blogging from Washington, DC, and keeping lots of political stuff front & center; & the estimable Jessica Smith, who's thrown over the post-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E hegemony of Buffalo and is establishing herself among the textual scholars of Charlottesville. Check 'em out.
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The other day eBay threw my way a DVD copy of Robert Fuest's (sometimes intentionally, sometimes un-) hilarious 1973 adaptation of Michael Moorcock's The Final Programme. Frankly better than I'd remembered it from a single rented viewing a decade or more ago, tho not a patch on the novel (which is not a patch on some of Moorcock's later, far more fragmented Jerry Cornelius books). Jon Finch and Jenny Runacre are splendid. Best of all is the "audio commentary" track, where Fuest and Runacre, both obviously a bit the worse for drink, gamely watch their way thru a film they obviously haven't thought about in a couple of decades. "Ooh, that's a nice bit, innit?" "How'd we do that special effect there?"

Heidegger & Adorno

I’m always fascinated by the conjunction of figures who separately interest me but whom I could never imagine in the same room together. Rüdiger Safranski’s biography of Heidegger, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Harvard UP, 1998; on the original title, see below), has an interesting chapter on Adorno’s attacks on Heidegger, particularly in The Jargon of Authenticity. Safranski doesn’t have much patience with the Frankfurt School in general, but he seems poised to give Adorno’s critique a pretty fair hearing. Then one comes upon this, Heidegger's former student-lover Hannah Arendt writing in a white-hot rage to Karl Jaspers, concerning a nasty Der Spiegel article about MH:

Although I can’t prove it, I am pretty much convinced that the real string-pullers here are the Wiesengrund-Adorno people in Frankfurt. And that is the more grotesque, as it has now been established (the students have discovered it) that Wiesengrund (half Jewish and one of the most repulsive people I know) tried to fall in line with the Nazis. For years he and Horkheimer have accused everyone who opposed them of anti-Semitism or threatened that they would do so. Truly an abominable crowd. (18 April 1966)

Gotta love that “the students have discovered it” – rather like the right-wing groups these days who solicit students for lecture notes and tapes of college courses taught by “leftist” professors.

And Heidegger himself? Richard Wisser, recounting a 1969 conversation with MH:

We talk about Adorno.... Heidegger: "When Adorno came back to Germany, he said, I was told: 'In five years, I'll have cut Heidegger down to size.' You see what kind of man he is." I: "A small statement but a great feeling of power. He was certainly mistaken in the matter, but there are many signs that the impact he has does not help further the reception of your thinking."..... Heidegger sticks with Adorno...: "I have never read anything of his. Hermann Mörchen once tried to convince me to read Adorno. I didn't."

In a conversation I deliberately use the expression "negative dialectic" as a key phrase for Adorno's way of thinking. "What does he mean by that – really?" Heidegger mischievously stretches the controversial adverb. I suggest that he understands his dialectic, in contrast to the positive Hegelian dialectic, to be a "denunciation" and a critique of what is for the sake of that about it which it is not and which is not allowed to be that way. I speak at length, perhaps too long, because I have recently published a review of Adorno's Negative Dialectic. "One reacts critically." Heidegger's commentary: "So he is a sociologist and not a philosopher." "But one who has more success with our 'revolutionary' studens than almost anyone else today. He practially causes critical protest, opposition. By reading him, it is possible to gain a philosophically supported position that is essentially a position of negation and that allows one to stand out, be different, act in reaction, agitate. Philosophical questioning in your sense is lost." Heidegger's response irritates me: "With whom did Adorno study?" I cannot answer this question and point instead to his origin as I interpret it; that is, to his publications. Heidegger does not go into it or into my comments on Adorno's Minima Moralia. He listens and then returns, to his question that had only been postponed, not answered, by my discussion: "No, has he really studied with someone?" "I don't know!"

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The Safranski biography – in the US, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil – was published in Germany in 1994 as Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger and seine Zeit (A Master from Germany: Heidegger and his Time). One gets the pun on Sein und Zeit, of course, but the real bombshell is not the subtitle but the main title – "Ein Meister aus Deuschland." Safranski explains that oh yes, MH was a "master" philospher, & something of a mystic like Meister Eckhart; and he was "very 'German,' as German as Thomas Mann's Adrian Leverkühn," Safranski notes, making explicit the Faustian aspects of MH's career. "And finally, through his political activity he also had about him something of that 'master from Germany' that Paul Celan's poem refers to."

Celan's "Todesfuge" ("Death-fugue") has been a required text in German schools for decades, a constant, canonized reminder of the Holocaust:

Er ruft spielt süsser den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft
dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng
[He shouts play death more sweetly Death is a master from Germany
he shouts scrape your fiddles more darkly you'll rise up to the sky as smoke
then you'll have a grave in the clouds when you won't lie too cramped
(my adaptation of Felstiner's version)]

Safranski's bio has attacted some flak for not coming down hard enough on Heidegger's Nazism; I don't know – I haven't gotten that far into it yet. But in its original German version, with a title that attaches Heidegger to the single most famous poetic response to Auschwitz, it's hard to see how Safranski could make the connection any more explicit.

Various

Josh Hanson comments that that list of "touchstones" for the argument that poetry ought to be read in the light of "truth" seems rather long in the tooth – in short, mostly bits of wisdom from the 19th century & before – and he's right. (And just to quote myself again, it's an argument "which I didn't necessarily endorse, but claimed was 'at least as old and interesting as the argument for pleasure detached from truth-value.'") The great watershed is the rise of Kantian aesthetics, & more generally the rise of an enlightenment & post-enlightenment aesthetics which values other aspects of poetry than its possible truth-telling value. But that doesn't mean we ought to be so hubristic as to simply cast aside whatever's been thought before, say, 1800, as we'd throw out the old Ford Pinto in favor of a brand new Lincoln Navigator. I have no patience for arguments from authority, either, but then Eric asked for some "touchstones": take 'em or leave 'em. I suspect, however, that we could come up with a pretty impressive list of 20th-century statements of poetics that weren't ashamed of using "truth" as a determining metric of value, from Heidegger, (Riding) Jackson, & Zukofsky ("thinking with the things as they exist") thru the more polically inclined works of Rich, Forché, & Baraka.

Yes, it's indeed an old-fashioned stance to argue that poetry ought ultimately be evaluated on a truth-basis, & I don't offhand know anyone – aside from some mullahs, many American clerics & conservative commentators, & a few leftover Stalinists – who would endorse it in as bold a form as it's offered by, say, Pope. But one is still left with Eric's question: "When we take poetry of thinking (there must be a single word for that in German) seriously as thinking, what do we do with those thoughts, if we're not evaluating them on the basis of truth? I proposed pleasure, but hey! I'm a languid, frivolous man." Is the "thinking" done in poetry to be received in a manner analogous to what we do when we read a work of philosophy – trying the premises & the logic of the arguments as they proceed, testing the conclusions & assertions against our own sense of how the world is put together – & what do we do when we've accurately "tracked" that thought and found it lacking (cf. Ben's remark on "those writers we love—Rilke comes to mind—whose language is beautiful and thinking is crap")? Not perhaps lacking in rigor, but lacking in "truth"?

Perhaps what's most interesting about this whole discussion for me is the manner in which the terms have shifted from discussant to discussant: from talk about poetry and "thinking" – as opposed to something else that poetry does – "emoting," or "perceiving"; to talk of "truth" (as the object of thinking) and (or versus) "pleasure," or "truth" and "rhetoric," or "truth" and "imagination." Thinking's other, that is, seems constantly on the move, even as we all agree that however central thinking might be to the poetry we value, there's still something else – tho we use a variety of words to name it/them – that's indispensible to our experience of the poetic art.
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Joshua Clover's Times review of Reznikoff's collected includes at least one sentence deliciously on the money: "The finest Objectivist verse is a Shaker table in the house of poetry, as opposed to, say, Confessionalism's Bakelite commode."
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On the blog scene: James K. A. Smith has a blog on (mostly Canadian) "politics, culture, the Church, &c" with the lovely name Fors Clavigera. (Cf. my thoughts on Ruskin & blogging from way back.) Phil Gyford is posting Samuel Pepys's diaries as a blog, with copious annotations; what fun!
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I'm dying to get a copy of The Ister, the Australian film about the Danube, Hölderlin's poem on the Danube ("The Ister"), Heidegger's lecture course on Hölderlin's poem, the Holocaust, and the course of postwar European history (among other things). Would love to screen it for my graduate seminar this semester, in fact. Doesn't look like an affordable US or Canadian version is coming anytime soon, tho – anybody out there in Europe or Asia (or any non-US-or-Canadian country) who can help me out by being a middleperson?

happy birthday L. Z.

Zukofsky would be 102 today. He had three birthdays: January 29th, the day he decided on when he had to have a birthday (enrolling for college, etc.), since his parents apparently mislaid his birth certificate; January 26th, the day he found when he discovered the document and misread the midwife's handwriting; and January 23rd, the "real" date. His mother died on January 29th; thru much of his life he was in the habit of celebrating his birthday on the 26th.

[Puttering. A bit of long-overdue maintenance – I've added a few new links on the right. Let me know if I've overlooked your blog. & I'm getting a little tired of this Skia typeface, which only shows up rightly (for me) when I use Firefox; maybe back to Georgia or something.]

poetry as thinking, the poem and truth

The conversation has gotten so complex and interesting that I don't see any point in summarizing any more, but wanted to pick a couple of threads out of the tapestry: First, Ben's lovely last post, which seems slightly to revise his first comments (or at least to recast them within a reception framework), and which quotes a passage from a Derrida interview I hadn't seen (I assume that's in the recent Fordham UP collection of JD's Celan writings, Ben?): "As I see it," Ben writes,

we must choose between saying (a) poetry is thinking and every aspect of the poem helps to perform it, or (b) poetry is thinking, but the poem as a whole is always more than that. The first rationalizes the poem tout court and constrains us to name all its varying effects "meaning." The second forces us to confront the limitations of thinking, to accept that there are experiences of language that refuse thinking's assistance.

Apropos of this second claim, here is Derrida from an interview in his book Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (referring to his reading of the poem "Grosse Glühende Wölbung," in an essay that engages the work of Gadamer):

"One can inventory a multiplicity of meanings in a text, in a poem, in a word, but there will always be an excess that is not of the order of meaning, that is not just another meaning.... Rhythm, caesura, hiatus, interruption: how is one to read them? There is, therefore, a dissemination irreducible to hermeneutics in Gadamer's sense.... [N]ot only does this not discourage reading but, for me, it is the condition of reading. If I could prove something concerning a Celan poem, could say, as many people do, 'See, here is what it means'—for example, it is about Auschwitz, or Celan is about the Shoah (all obviously true!)—if I could prove it is that and only that I would have destroyed Celan's poem. The poem would be of limited interest if all it amounted to was what it meant, what one believes it means. I try therefore to make myself listen for something that I cannot hear or understand, attentive to marking the limits of my reading in my reading. This comes down to saying: Here is what I believe one can reconstitute, what that could mean, why it is captivating and beautiful and strong, while leaving the unsaid intact, inaudible. That will, moreover, authorize other readings. My reading is modest and does not exclude many other readings of this poem. It is an ethics or a politics of reading, also."

Second, there's Eric's "challenge" for me to present some "touchstones in that argument for truth as a primary value to poetry" (an argument, by the way, which I didn't necessarily endorse, but claimed was "at least as old and interesting as the argument for pleasure detached from truth-value"). Okay then:

•Aristotle, Poetics: "Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars."

•Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetics: "Imitation, however, is not the end of poetry, but is intermediate to the end. The end is the giving of instruction in pleasurable form." (of course adapting Horace here)

•Giacopo Mazzoni, "On the Defence of the Comedy of Dante": "If, therefore, one has to reason about the end of this poetry, it can be definitely said that as an imitative art its end is the correctness of the idol, but that as recreation its only end is pleasure."

•Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism":
True wit is nature to advantage dressed;
What oft' was thought, but ne'er so well expressed;
Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.

•Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare: "Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.... This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life; that he who has 'mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious ecstasies, by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions."

•William Blake, "A Vision of the Last Judgment": "The Last Judgment is not fable or allegory, but vision. Fable or allegory are a totally distinct and inferior kind of poetry. Vision or imagination is a representation of what eternally exists, really and unchangeably."

•William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads: "Aristotle, I have been told, has said that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives competence and confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature."

•John Keats to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817: "I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination – What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth..."

•Emily Dickinson: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant..."

Phew! Maybe I'll add to this at some point – one could certainly add "Heidegger on poetry, passim," and bunches of Emerson – but that's more than enough for now. Take that, pleasure-boy! You gonna quote Oscar Wilde now, & tell me he's righter than all these heavy guys? (Tho of course Wilde was very rarely wrong...) I suspect one of the things that's going on in this discussion of truth in poetry (discussion #3 or 4, that is) is a kind of fuzziness as to what we mean by the term itself – to put it in its baldest terms, what Keats means by "truth" is doubtless rather different from a positivist or hard scientific definition of "truth," though probably closer to a Heideggerian notion.

More later...

more on poetry as theory

Phew! That last post elicited a storm of comments (well, what counts as a "storm" for this humble blog):

It’s no surprise that when I called his bluff, Norman came up with a lovely example of thinking in verse by William Bronk. This from The World, the Worldless:

The Nature of Musical Form

It is hard to believe of the world that there should be
music in it: these certainties against
the all-uncertain, this ordered fairness beneath
the tonelessness, the confusion of random noise.

It is tempting to say of the incomprehensible,
the formlessness, there is only order as we
so order and ordering, make it so: or this,
there is natural order which music apprehends

which apprehension justifies the world;
or even this, these forms are false, not true,
and music irrelevant at least, the world
is stated somewhere else, not there. But no.

How is it? There is a fairness of person too,
which is not a truth of persons or even, we learn,
a truth of that person, particularly.
It is only fairness stating only itself:

as though we could say of music only, it is.

It’s hard to argue with that. One of the things that makes this piece so successful – and it’s characteristic of much of the best of Bronk – is the way it explicitly plays off of the structures and rhetoric of conventional prose argumentation – that is, it’s quite explicitly a “thinking” poem, a poem which begins as an epistemological/aesthetic argument, then flexes that argumentative structure into a kind of insight that would not be available in conventional prose. I see it as a more discursive cousin to one of my favorite of Zukofsky’s short poems, a piece that encapsulates his own epistemological thinking – #21 of Anew:

Can a mote of sunlight defeat its purpose
When thought shows it to be deep or dark?

See sun, and think shadow.

If one were looking for less austere examples, poems more invested in the color & gaiety of language, one could throw out Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” as a text in which “thinking takes place within the rigors of form,” thereby becoming “not merely a description of ideas but an enactment” thereof. Ben Friedlander throws in Dickinson as an apt representative of thinking in verse, and rephrases what Norman has said quite felicitously: “poetry moves forward as thinking (and this is also true of post-Romantic philosophy) precisely by responding to the promptings (and coming to terms with the limitations) of the words that would register its movement.”

I can’t say I agree with him on his remarks on form, however – “What constitutes the promptings of language is where form comes in, but form in the ordinary sense is to my mind (so to speak) a subsidiary issue” – unless I’m a bit more enlightened as to precisely what Ben means by “form in the ordinary sense.” I confess to being something of an old-fashioned formalist – not that I believe you (yes, YOU! Caruthers! In the back!) should be writing iambic pentameter, but that I believe some degree of form, shape is if not of the essence to poetry than at least at the base of the art form. Things like a metrical frame, lines and line breaks, rhyme, sound patterning, word counts, mesotics, lipograms and the like are not merely the corporeal bodies that encase an inner "form" of poetry – the formally arranged poem is its body. That is, I smell platonism when you dismiss or subcontract out the discussion of "form in the ordinary sense," Ben. Please, tell me I'm misunderstanding.

Jane responds that he agrees with all of us, & that none of this is news, which is true enough. One of my points of course was that the assertion that poetry is a sort of thinking is a truth often asserted & rarely demonstrated; but another was that the situation about which Jane originally complained (ie an overreliance on Baudelaire & Hölderlin as exemplary figures in theoretical readings of poetry) might be usefully expanded: that perhaps part of the problem is theorists' overreliance not merely on particular exemplary figures of the lyric tradition, but on the lyric tradition conceived in a particular, very canonical manner – or even on the lyric tradition period, to the exclusion of a whole boat-load of other sorts of poetry: narrative, dramatic, discursive, philosophical, etc. I'd argue that it's only by a rather savage stretch that one would want to call the Bronk poem above a "lyric" at all, or by the absurd reduction of the term "lyric poem" to something like "poem less than two pages long."

Ben chimes in again with a comment that puts its finger on a lot of what's at stake:

I don't know if anyone doubts that poetry involves thinking. The problems arise when one wants to make a claim about the status of this thinking. Is it necessary, for example, for philosophers to take account of poetry's formulations and solutions to the classic philosophical problems (about knowledge, being, ethics, etc.)? If the answer is yes, then does poetry need to accept correction from philosophy—or is this the importation of an irrelevant standard? Is thinking central to poetry's task (as it is to philosophy's)? If so, what do we make of those writers we love—Rilke comes to mind—whose language is beautiful and thinking is crap? Also: if we do accept this or that poet's work as an instance of thinking, are we then obliged to adopt a position with regard to its conclusions? Or is this a possible difference from philosophy?

– a comment which, as Eric points out, wheels us right back to the ancient issue of "truth" and "pleasure." (Whenever Eric hears the word "truth," he reaches for his pleasure pistol / love gun...) (And when he evokes the "Baraka Zone," he reminds me of that Heidegger post from yonks ago that I still haven't finished .) But I can't quite sign on to his enlistment of poetry tout court under the banner of pleasure: "it strikes me that while poetry may offer some of the pleasures of thinking--of argument, of theory, of essay, in the root sense of the word--it does so precisely in the name of pleasure, rather than in the name of truth." For the nonce forget Sidney & Coleridge (tho recall that important word "immediate," and recall that even as Wordsworth writes of the pleasure of metre in the Preface, he sees it ultimately as the spoonful of sugar that gets down the poem's truth), and ask yourself: did Bronk write that poem to give you pleasure? Does that poem propose pleasure as its ultimate end? In some sense, are we not traducing the poem by using it simply as an instrument of pleasure, however intellectually refined that pleasure may be?

I know this could go on indefinitely, and could easily end in parody – does Heidegger read Hölderlin for pleasure? I've suffered for my art, now it's your turn! You! yes you, Selinger! Out of the Republic! – but I think the argument for truth as primary to poetry is at least as old and interesting as the argument for pleasure detached from truth-value. That is, poetry that thinks demands to be taken seriously as thinking, even if that thinking is cast in forms that we tend to aestheticize and thus exempt from evaluating on the basis of truth. (Back to Bob's disinterested aesthetic.) Basta for now.

poetry as theory

Norman Finkelstein, not usually irascible, seems fed up with Heidegger & his children: "What if," he comments,

we were to hold criticism and philosophy in abeyance for a while and instead consider the claim made by some poets, including a number with whom you are quite familiar, Mark, that poetry is in itself a way of thinking. At issue then is not primarily what is "theorized" about poetry, but what poetry itself "theorizes." Furthermore, the fact that this kind of thinking takes place within the rigors of form makes it not merely a description of ideas but an enactment of ideas. If nothing else, this practice makes us take poets more seriously as thinkers and makes us read poetry more closely. What we discover, I think, is that poets tell us as much about poetry, as an art and as mode of thinking, as do "theoretically-inflected" (or infected) critics.

That's undeniably elegantly put, & with a gun to my head I'd have to agree with it lock, stock, 'n' barrel. But...but... Yes, poetry is indeed a way of thinking – but only sometimes. Without going into the whole history of the conceptual distinction between poetic "knowledge" and other sorts of intellectual activity (Wordworth's "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, where he proposes poetry's opposite to be not prose but the "language of science," is one foundational document), I think you'd have to agree that in a great deal of poetry, while there may be mental activity of one sort or another going on, often it's a stretch to call it "thinking," much less "theorizing." Indeed, reminded of the roots of theory in "speculation" (or more literally, the "looking at" something), I'd be inclined to think that it's rather the exception for the poem to engage in the sort of self-reflexive mental activity that one could call "theoretical."

But let me play devil's advocate for a moment: What you've just said can be read as a high-horsical defense of poetry – even an old-fashioned defense of poetry – by a poet fed up with the self-aggrandizing claims of theorists and critics: in itself a pretty old genre, no? We have all heard such claims before, and most of them coming (perhaps paradoxically) from poets who themselves wrote criticism and works of prose poetics. Can you give me one concrete example of how a poem, thru the "rigors of form," "enacts" an "idea"? (I think I have a pretty good one myself offhand, but you da man making the claims, so you have to go first!) My point is not that you're in any way wrong or off track, but that such claims about "poetry" and "thinking" are easy to throw around but difficult to demonstrate – tho it's crucial that they be demonstrated, so that the large claims made by some poets – not just claims about poetry and thought, but claims about poetry and political praxis – can be fairly assessed.

I'm inclined to believe, in a rather old-fashioned way, that the theory "done" by poetry and theory "about" poetry are two different things, and serve different purposes. The use-value of a theoretically engaged reading of a poem – its exchange-value is probably nil – has to be something different than whatever theoretical insight one might gain from the poem itself. Different – and not superior to – and by no means displacing the poem itself – but at its best valuable, & not to be lightly dismissed. Susan Howe on Dickinson's "My Life had stood a loaded Gun"; de Man on Shelley's "The Triumph of Life"; Poe's "Philosophy of Composition" on "The Raven" (the latter a case in which a manifestly nugatory poem generates an endlessly suggestive piece of theory).

[intermission]

While I have much sympathy with Joshua Clover’s kvetch about the frequent appearances of Baudelaire & Hölderlin as synechdoches for “lyric poetry” in the work of twentieth-century philosophers of aesthetics, I can’t help feeling he’s narrowing his own aperture a bit too closely. What about Derrida on Ponge & Celan? Lacoue-Labarthe on Celan? But the problem isn’t so much with the specific figures of Hölderlin & Baudelaire as it is with a narrowed conception of the poetic as lyric, a conception into which Celan indeed fits without much trouble. (The problem, that is, besides the general shelving of poetry as a useful subject for cultural criticism – and even tho JC gives Fredric Jameson an honorable exemption, I can’t recall more than a passing reference or two to any contemporary poetry in Jameson’s work [aside from the silly bit about Perelman we all know].) What would contemporary theoretically-inflected literary criticism look like if, instead of Baudelaire & Hölderlin as models, writers took Apollinaire, Pound, and Loy as exemplary figures? Yes, yes, a hell of a lot more interesting.
***
And check out Josh Hanson on poetry & praxis: he doesn’t answer the question (& nobody has yet), but he asks it in quite a pertinent manner.

Politics & Philosophy (& poetry)

Over the long weekend on the Gulf Coast – unfortunately cut short for reasons too long to go into – I was reading thru some of the old books on my shelves, notably Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, ed. Gunther Neske & Emil Kettering (Paragon House, 1990), a collection of documents & responses concerning MH's "Nazi" years – his rectorship at Freiburg University in 1933-4, & as notably his long postwar silence about his involvement with National Socialism & about the Holocaust. It's a fascinating collection, reprinting H's rectorial address, his own immediate postwar explanations of the rectorship, & his poshumously published 1966 interview with Der Spiegel. All of it was prompted, of course, by the publication of Victor Farías's Heidegger and Nazism (Temple UP, 1989). There's a big shelf of responses to the Heidegger "affair" by now: books by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Derrida, & Jean-François Lyotard, a detailed "political biography" by the historian Hugo Ott, & probably another dozen books over the last decade.

But some of the pieces in Martin Heidegger & National Socialism, while they by no means at the cutting edge of the debate (which has no doubt gone I have no idea where) are still notable:

•Emmanuel Levinas (a Jew and a wartime prison-camp survivor), in conversation with Philippe Nemo, speaks of the huge impact Sein und Zeit had upon him as a phenomenological study, a "verifiable" examination of the human being's experience in the world. He finds MH's later work much less compelling, & faults it for its emphasis on exegeses of Hölderlin & etymological explorations – neither of which is as compelling to EL as the phenomenology of S&Z. Interestingly, the biographical note at the end of the book cites a statement by Levinas to the effect that his knowledge of MHY's involvement with the Nazis made him unable to read H's later work with the same intensity with which he had engaged the earlier. (Shades of Eric & Baraka!)

•Jacques Derrida, also in an impromptu statement, agrees with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe that "Heidegger's silence" constitutes a "wound to thinking" – his silence, not so much about his own involvement with the Party & the rectorship, but about the significance of Auschwitz. JD speculates that had H made some sort of definite statement – the rectorship & all that surrounded it were a terrible mistake, Auschwitz was one of the absolute horrors of human history – then H would probably have been immediately forgiven, & thinkers would have been "relieved" of the very real task of thinking the relationship between H's still-central thought and National Socialism.

Of course, the name "Ezra Pound" springs to mind in this connection; at least for me, who have invested quite a lot of psychic energy into Pound's work over the years. And of course I recall having lived thru the Paul de Man "affair" at its ground zero, the Cornell University English Department. Cornell in the late 80s was something of a hotbed of de Man worship, & after the news had first been broken about PdM's pro-Nazi wartime journalism, it was the poet David Lehman – an Ithacan, tho not a Cornellian (and not yet the impresario of the Best American Poetry franchise) who took the lead in pillorying de Man, & by implication all of post-structuralism, in the American popular press (first in an article in I think Newsweek, then in his book Signs of the Times). Lehman was promptly persona non grata, to say the least, in Cornell academic circles, even as he continued to associate with certain faculty members & to attend creative writing department functions. The enormous volume of "Responses" to de Man's wartime journalism Werner Hamacher edited a couple of years later for U of Nebraska P went a long way towards confirming the suspicions of those who thought that post-structuralists were really just sophists, adept at making the "bad seem good." Not a high point of late-20th-century literary criticism.

But leaving aside de Man – for his involvement with the Nazis was much less intense, & ultimately much less interesting, than Heidegger's, or than Pound's involvement with Italian fascism – I'm fascinated by the sorts of reactions that get triggered among the partisans, scholars, or followers of a philosopher or poet when attention gets drawn to this sort of unsavory involvement.

[to be continued – in the next installment, a typology of justification/vilification, and What This Has To Do With Zukofsky]

Fetish II

You’ll have to forgive me – it’s the first week of classes & my attention is too scattered for really concentrated thinking, beyond what I’m going to say during the next class meeting (& how to disguise my ignorance in front of dozens of keen-eyed undergraduates). Or beyond how to arrange books on my new (I estimate) 75 linear feet of shelf space. My original plan was to make the closet sort of a modernist & proto-modernist wonderland: On the Left, Ruskin & Joyce; on the Right, Pound, Eliot, & Williams; and Dead Ahead, modernist criticism. Getting these big blocks of books out of my study shelves (probably 100+ Joyce books, maybe 130+ Pound) would serve to free up lots of space for contemporary poetry & allow me to tidy up some of the “public spaces” in the house – which at the moment are decorated with Easter Island-like tottering stacks.

In the event, it turned out there was a lot more shelf space than I’d anticipated in that closet. Pound, Eliot, & WCW were swallowed up on the Right, so for good measure I threw in my Stevens collection (could’ve thrown in the Objectivists, for what it’s worth). Modernist criticism (when one left out modernist poetry criticism, which has its own home in the study with all the other poetry crit) barely made a dent on the back wall, so I added sections of Marx & Marxist thought, Frankfurt School, & Marxist cultural criticism. Still a lot of shelving to fill. Maybe everybody should send me a copy of their book.

Without rewriting Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library,” I can’t help but note a funny double feeling: my sense of immense pleasure in shlepping armloads of books from one room to another, then lovingly arranging them, given a peculiar twist by my concurrent realization that no, I’m not doing any intellectual labor by moving books, despite what my reptile-brain seems to believe. Ought to write an essay on the arrangement of books someday (ought to get around to reading that Roger Chartier book): I think it’s the first thing I notice when I’m visiting – how have they arranged their books? (That is, if I don’t have that sinking recognition that “these folks don’t have any books” – which Marjorie Perloff once noted of the Bush Sr. household.) I was tunneling thru Our University’s library yesterday putting together a reserve shelf, and I had my normal reaction to the Library of Congress classification system: Why the hell isn’t Heidegger on poetry somewhere closer to Gadamer on Celan? why is This next to That? I understand the LoC’s logic on almost every occasion – I just don’t always happen to agree with it.
***
Reading David Reynolds’s Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (Knopf, 1995), a book I’ve avoided for one reason or another for a long time. It’s not bad at all – indeed, cumulatively it’s very good indeed, serving up a wealth of very interesting information & some pretty relevant interpretations along the way. It’s just that on a sentence-by-sentence level, Reynolds’s prose is so “workmanlike,” so flat and assertive, leaving nothing to suggestion or implication, that I often feel like I’m reading one of my 3-year-old’s more advanced nonfiction books. And then I look up from Reynolds, & realize I’ve gone thru 10 or 20 pages, and learned quite a lot that I’m glad to know.

Glad for one thing to be reminded of the Whitman poem Zukofsky returned to the most, the bitter “Respondez!,” which Whitman wrote around 1855 and revised into the following version around 1871, reflecting on postwar events. Reynolds is right – it’s the “most cynical” poem of 19th century America – almost cynical enough to serve as commentary on the opening of the 21st century:

Respondez! Respondez!
(The war is completed--the price is paid--the title is settled beyond recall;)
Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade!
Must we still go on with our affectations and sneaking?
Let me bring this to a close--I pronounce openly for a new distribution of roles;
Let that which stood in front go behind! and let that which was behind advance to the front and speak;
Let murderers, bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions!
Let the old propositions be postponed!
Let faces and theories be turn’d inside out! let meanings be freely criminal, as well as results!
Let there be no suggestion above the suggestion of drudgery!
Let none be pointed toward his destination! (Say! do you know your destination?)
Let men and women be mock’d with bodies and mock’d with Souls!
Let the love that waits in them, wait! let it die, or pass still-born to the other spheres!
Let the sympathy that waits in every man, wait! or let it also pass, a dwarf, to other spheres!
Let contradictions prevail! let one thing contradict another! and let one line of my poems contradict another!
Let the people sprawl with yearning, aimless hands! let their tongues be broken! let their eyes be discouraged! let none descend into their hearts with the fresh lusciousness of love!
(Stifled, O days! O lands! in every public and private corruption!
Smother’d in thievery, impotence, shamelessness, mountain-high;
Brazen effrontery, scheming, rolling like ocean’s waves around and upon you, O my days! my lands!
For not even those thunderstorms, nor fiercest lightnings of the war, have purified the atmosphere;)
--Let the theory of America still be management, caste, comparison! (Say! what other theory would you?)
Let them that distrust birth and death still lead the rest! (Say! why shall they not lead you?)
Let the crust of hell be neared and trod on! let the days be darker than the nights! let slumber bring less slumber than waking time brings!
Let the world never appear to him or her for whom it was all made!
Let the heart of the young man still exile itself from the heart of the old man! and let the heart of the old man be exiled from that of the young man!
Let the sun and moon go! let scenery take the applause of the audience! let there be apathy under the stars!
Let freedom prove no man’s inalienable right! every one who can tyrannize, let him tyrannize to his satisfaction!
Let none but infidels be countenanced!
Let the eminence of meanness, treachery, sarcasm, hate, greed, indecency, impotence, lust, be taken for granted above all! let writers, judges, governments, households, religions, philosophies, take such for granted above all!
Let the worst men beget children out of the worst women!
Let the priest still play at immortality!
Let death be inaugurated!
Let nothing remain but the ashes of teachers, artists, moralists, lawyers, and learn’d and polite persons!
Let him who is without my poems be assassinated!
Let the cow, the horse, the camel, the garden-bee--let the mud-fish, the lobster, the mussel, eel, the sting-ray, and the grunting pig-fish--let these, and the like of these, be put on a perfect equality with men and woman!
Let churches accommodate serpents, vermin, and the corpses of those who have died of the most filthy of diseases!
Let marriage slip down among fools, and be for none but fools!
Let men among themselves talk and think forever obscenely of women! and let women among themselves talk and think obscenely of men!
Let us all, without missing one, be exposed in public, naked, monthly, at the peril of our lives! let our bodies be freely handled and examined by whoever chooses!
Let nothing but copies at second hand be permitted to exist upon the earth!
Let the earth desert God, nor let there ever henceforth be mention’d the name of God!
Let there be no God!
Let there be money, business, imports, exports, custom, authority, precedents, pallor, dyspepsia, smut, ignorance, unbelief!
Let judges and criminals be transposed! let the prison-keepers be put in prison! let those that were prisoners take the keys! (Say! why might they not just as well be transposed?)
Let the slaves be masters! let the masters become slaves!
Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever bawling! let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the stands!
Let the Asiatic, the African, the European, the American, and the Australian, go armed against the murderous stealthiness of each other! let them sleep armed! let none believe in good will!
Let there be no unfashionable wisdom! let such be scorn’d and derided off from the earth!
Let a floating cloud in the sky--let a wave of the sea--let growing mint, spinach, onions, tomatoes--let those be exhibited at shows, at a great price for admission!
Let all the men of These States stand aside for a few smouchers! let the few seize on what they choose! let the rest gawk, giggle, starve, obey!
Let shadows be furnish’d with genitals! let substances be deprived of their genitals!
Let there be wealthy and immense cities--but still through any of them, not a single poet, savior, knower, lover!
Let the infidels of These States laugh all faith away!
If one man be found who has faith, let the rest set upon him!
Let them affright faith! let them destroy the power of breeding faith!
Let the she-harlots and the he-harlots be prudent! let them dance on, while seeming lasts! (O seeming! seeming! seeming!)
Let the preachers recite creeds! let them still teach only what they have been taught!
Let insanity still have charge of sanity!
Let books take the place of trees, animals, rivers, clouds!
Let the daub’d portraits of heroes supercede heroes!
Let the manhood of man never take steps after itself!
Let it take steps after eunuchs, and after consumptive and genteel persons!
Let the white person again tread the black person under his heel! (Say! which is trodden under heel, after all?)
Let the reflections of the things of the world be studied in mirrors! let the things themselves still continue unstudied!
Let a man seek pleasure everywhere except in himself!
Let a woman seek happiness everywhere except in herself!
(What real happiness have you had one single hour through your whole life?)
Let the limited years of life do nothing for the limitless years of death? (What do you suppose death will do, then?)