Announcement!

So here's what you've all been asking about:

The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky has been in progress since 1998. It is a full-length critical biography of Zukofsky, covering the whole of his life and taking note of his writings in all genres. It incorporates the findings of many hundreds of hours of archival research among manuscripts & correspondence, & draws upon numerous interviews with Zukofsky's fellow poets, his students, & his family members. The book as a whole clocks in just a little short of 600 pages; I'm not sure precisely how much short, since I haven't yet generated the index – which will be comprehensive, scrupulous, & highly useful.

The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky is scheduled to be released in jacketed hardback, with a cover price of $30 (a bargain or what?), in early December 2007. It will be published by Shoemaker & Hoard. S&H is the latest venture of the legendary editor & publisher Jack Shoemaker, the motive force behind Sand Dollar Press (Ronald Johnson's Radi Os, Robert Duncan), the long-lived & extraordinary North Point Press (Gary Snyder, Leslie Scalapino, Michael Palmer, William Bronk, Ronald Johnson, Guy Davenport, Evan S. Connell, Wendell Berry, Stanley Cavell, Hugh Kenner, & too many others to name), and more recently Counterpoint Press (with many of the same authors, & Geoffrey Hill to boot). Jack has for 30 years been one of the major names in American independent publishing, & I'm proud that he's elected to bring out The Poem of a Life. Of course, I think he's absolutely right to do so.

So that's the news: the proofs have been corrected; the 8-page photo insert of mostly hitherto unpublished LZ-related photos has been set up; the index has yet to be generated, but once that's done there's nothing left but the waiting. As Ray points out, it's not up on Amazon yet (tho it is on the database of the Library of Congress), so I'll let you know when you can start pre-ordering the book. In the meantime, I'm gearing up to do some promotion. Chicagolanders with access to talk series or bookstore appearance scheduling – I haven't yet made any plans in re/ the next MLA, but I certainly could make it up there this December. Anybody else with open Spring lecture spots, keep me in mind – I've got a book to sell, & lots to talk about!

So if you've got a blog, by all means link to this announcement; send it out to whatever listservs might find it of interest; tell your friends & relatives; tell your professors; tell your students; put the damned thing on your holiday wish list...
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(And in the interim, there's still that pesky poetry manuscript burning a hole in my hard drive...)
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Recently read & recommended: Martha Ronk, In a Landscape of Having to Repeat (Omnidawn, 2004), & Carla Harryman, Baby (Adventures in Poetry, 2005).

Behold...

...what Mr UPS brought by this afternoon.

Am I happy? I am happy.

More biography

My call for suggestions in re/ a prospective course in biography netted a plethora of suggestions. Everyone seems to enjoy biographies – everyone, that is, except Ray Davis, who manages nonetheless to toss out some excellent possibilities (Ray’s reservations about the genre give me pause, tho they remind me as well of Hugh Kenner’s diatribes about Ellmann’s Joyce distracting readers from Ulysses etc. – one of the great old critical rivalries, Kenner v. Ellmann, tho I suspect RE’s coming out the longterm winner) – including Gaskell’s Brontë (one of the Victorian classics) & a great example of the biography-as-problem genre, Symons’s Quest for Corvo. Oh, & perhaps the ground-breaking deflationary biography, Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (which Alex also cites).

The group bio is an interesting case. I’d read the TLS review of Lovell’s book on the Mitford Sisters (which Pam suggests), & found myself actually wanting to read the book, a response I only have to TLS reviews about 1/3 of the time. Strachey come to think of it is less a group or collective biography than it is a roundup of short lives, their very brevity (apart from Strachey’s delicious nastiness) serving to deflate the Victorian tradition of multiple-volume documentary monuments. The only proper group biography I recall reading offhand is Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings, a neat read but so far as I can remember lacking one of Guy Davenport’s best anecdotes (by way of his tutor H. Dyson): in the midst of an interminable reading by Tolkien of the latest stretch of Lord of the Rings, CS Lewis wedges his pipe out of his mouth and growls “Oh fuck, not another elf!”

Tiffany & Frank, by citing Richard Holmes’s Coleridge (compulsive reading) & Hermione Lee’s various books, remind me how good the current crop of professional British biographers are. Holmes, Lee, Michael Holroyd, Victorian Glendenning, Clair Tomalin all write biographies that are both scrupulously researched & and remarkably graceful reads. (Holmes & Holroyd have each as well turned out a couple books apiece on the process of writing biography.) It’s these folks that make the reviewers keep talking about a “renaissance” of the genre. I’m sure there are Americans out there just as good – but I, like most biography readers, choose the book by its subject first, & only later shop for authors.

I’m probably not alone in thinking that 20th-century poets haven’t been awfully well served by biographers – poets, that is, from the generation after the “high” modernists. (And Stevens & Moore have yet to have a readable biography written on them.) Linda Hamalian’s Rexroth is indeed pretty good (tho I’m told that Norton made her cut out vast stretches of actual discussion of the poetry, which is a bit of a shame). The Bunting and David Jones lives available aren’t really much good. I have my problems with the Mina Loy and Laura (Riding) Jackson biographies. I like the Killian/Ellingham Jack Spicer biography, tho I often found myself saying as I read, “this is too much information – I didn’t need to know this fascinating factoid about Jack’s sex life or anatomy…” And I too can’t wait for Lisa Jarnot’s Duncan, tho deep within me there's some type-A gnome who keeps thinking of her as the competition.

I’m glad that Paul suggests Steven Nadler’s excellent life of Spinoza & Tony throws out Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein (the latter was for me a wonderful thing, coming as it did on the heels of a deeply researched & really flatly inert first volume of what looked to be a very long bio by Brian McGuinness), as well as Peter suggesting lives of Mozart & Jung. (As for philosophers, Tony & Paul, I’d steer you towards Rüdiger Safransky’s wonderful life of Nietzsche.) Steven Fama is right – “biography” alone is way too broad a field.

Of course, literary biography is what I know best, with philosophical biography coming in a distant second. (I’ve read more than a handful of historical biographies – mostly of 17th-century folks – and for you, Ray, I’d recommend Antonia Fraser’s life of Cromwell: long but rewarding.) But both literary & philosophical biography are in some ways special cases: writing the lives of people who are best known for themselves writing. A little closed loop there, a conceptual Möbius strip. One way to break out of it, while still hewing to one’s sense that it’s somehow more important to have written a perfect poem than to have won a bunch of battles, is to look at biographies of writers who actually did stuff: Pepys, for example, who never suspected he’d be remembered for his personal diary as he went about the real work of reforming the navy; or Charles Montagu Doughty, who thought of himself first as a poet but who gets remembered as a guy who trekked all over uncharted Arabia.
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I’m gonna find it hard to resist assigning Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives, a big book which begins with a short bio of Shax (basically covering everything actually known about the chap & leaving out all of the speculation that fills three-quarters of Greenblatt’s & everybody else’s books) & then proceeds to map out a history of the tradition of Shakespeare biography right up into the 20th century (with highly entertaining side trips into the Bellevue or St Elizabeths of the “authorship question” wackos).
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Did I mention that I’ve written a biography that’ll be out later this year?

The Biographical "Would"

I’m moved by Josh Corey’s thoughtful comments in the aftermath of Monday’s Virginia Tech horror, & given pause especially by his final meditations:

I was dismayed to learn that Cho was an English major, as though that somehow tarnished the discipline, further tugging on my perhaps overdeveloped sense of responsibility. One of the New York Times' articles on the shootings today includes this sentence: "Carolyn D. Rude, chairwoman of the English department, said faculty members were pro-active, even attending seminars on helping students in distress, a skill particularly applicable in an English department, where creative writing teachers had intimate glimpses into their students’ troubles and temperaments." This intersection of the academic discipline of creative writing with mental health and crisis prevention frankly takes me aback. In what sense has my scholarly and literary training prepared me for "helping students in distress"? If I am supposed to be a mental health counselor for my students, give me the appropriate resources and training! It surely doesn't hurt to attend "seminars on helping students in distress," but is it really a creative writing teacher's job to counsel disturbed students and to search their work for evidence of pathology? And should we accept the culture's further demand to view "creative writing" as thinly veiled narratives of the pathological, as opposed to the difficult art of possibility that it is? I fear these attacks will lead to the further erosion of the dignity of writing—will encourage the tendency to view poetry and fiction as more or less transparent containers and blunt instruments for deeply impoverished notions of "the personal" and "the real."

Perhaps I’ve been remarkably lucky – or perhaps I somehow project an of air of prickly unapproachability to my undergraduates – but in my decade & a half of teaching I’ve only very rarely had to deal with students who had personal or social problems severe enough to merit institutional intervention. Those very few exceptions, however, invariably happened in creative writing classes.

It’s not that I encourage the unveiling of unvarnished personal histories, emotional autobiographies, present desires, in my workshops – on the contrary. But it happens anyway, inevitably. I think that by the time students reach college, many of them already have a conception of creative writing as a fundamentally confessional, therapeutic activity – in Josh’s words, of “poetry and fiction as more or less transparent containers and blunt instruments for deeply impoverished notions of ‘the personal’ and ‘the real.’” It may be, given our culture’s obsession with self-revelation & sensationalism, & with the way that creative writing is used in primary & secondary school (somehow the verb “taught” doesn’t seem quite right) – as an exercise not in making verbal objects, but in “self-expression” – that keeping tabs on the potentially dangerous pathologies of students in undergraduate workshops is simply part of the job description of the creative writing professor. I wonder if instructors in other disciplines – studio arts, for instance, or musical composition – have similar challenges.
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It’s question with something of a connection to the issue of literary biography. A bit over 100 pages into Will in the World, his bestselling Shakespeare biography, Stephen Greenblatt lays his cards on the table: “the whole impulse to explore Shakespeare’s life arrives from the powerful conviction that his plays and poems spring not only from other plays and poems but from things he knew firsthand, in his body and soul.” I’d begun dipping into Will in the World year before last, soon before Ron Silliman began blogging his way thru it in earnest, but had laid the book aside in irritation – that is, for all of Greenblatt’s forceful prose and encyclopedic command of early modern culture, his book seemed far more speculative & sensational than more sober, informative Shax bios – notably, books by Park Honan and Dennis Kay, and Samuel Schoenbaum’s beautifully spare Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, which simply presents all of the surviving documentary evidence of Shax’s life, woven together with restrained interpretation.

For all of Greenblatt’s captaining of the at-the-time revolutionary “New Historicism,” he’s produced a remarkably old-fashioned life of Shakespeare which reminds me of nothing so much as Sidney Lee’s & Georg Brandes’s turn of the century psychobiographies of the bard (Stephen Dedalus cribs most of his sensational interpretation of Shax in “Scylla & Charbydis” from Brandes). With Shax, one has almost a blank slate: the man was an early modern script doctor and content provider who left not a whole lot of traces of himself outside of his published writings (think fast – how much do you know, or expect to know, about the personal lives of the screenwriters of The Sopranos?); Greenblatt in essence reconstructs a highly speculative (which at rare moments he admits is highly speculative) personal history of the playwright from the evidence of the plays and poems themselves.

Greenblatt does it well & highly readably, so long as one keeps reminding oneself that what one is reading is more akin to historical fiction than to documentary history. What irks me, however, is how often one encounters what I’ve come to call the slippage of the “biographical would”: The biographer first posits that subject X “may” have done something; a page or two later, that “may” has metamorphosed into a “could have,” which soon after becomes by extrapolation a “would have”; and a couple of pages later it becomes a simple past tense “did.”

For instance, take Greenblatt’s argument about Shax’s Catholicism. He begins with a now-lost document discovered in the 18th century in which Shax’s father asserts his own Roman Catholicism. A lost document, mind you, whose authenticity has always been in question. He then speculates (along with a number of others, granted) that Shax worked for some time in a northern Catholic household as a schoolmaster, & might even have met the Catholic missionary Edmund Campion. Thruout, Greenblatt is careful to deploy the language of speculation: “would have,” “might have,” “may have been,” “it is at least possible,” “it is altogether possible,” and so forth.

It’s unfortunate, then, that when SG finally gets to an authentically Shaxperean document, an anti-papal diatribe from King John, he slips out of the language of speculation into the language of certainty: “This coarsely explicit piece of Protestant pope-baiting is by no means the sum of Shakespeare’s mature attitude toward the Catholicism in which he had been immersed as a young man.” The preceding 20 pages or so may indeed give the impression that Shax “had been immersed” in Catholicism in his youth, but SG hasn’t presented real evidence, but rather a chain of speculation and thin circumstantial coincidences. A whole stack of “maybes” doesn’t add up to a single “had been,” but rather a big “might have been.”

(Many thanks, by the way, for the stack of recommendations in response to my call for suggestions; comments to follow.)
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Department of Self-Promotion: The most recent Chicago Review, an excellent issue on contemporary British poetry, includes my review of John Wilkinson’s Proud Flesh and Lake Shore Drive.

My students will tell you that for better or worse I’m rarely at a loss for words. But today I just feel weary, & sad, & tired of talking. I was an undergraduate at Virginia Tech twenty-odd years ago, a double major in philosophy and – yes – English. It’s hard to watch the videos of the buildings I spent four years taking classes in, the drill field I used to cross every morning, snow, sun, or (mostly, it seems in retrospect) rain. It’s harder than I’d imagined it would be to see the distraught or nonchalant undergraduates in front of the CNN microphones, young people who look much as they did all those years ago. I’ll write about biography or poetry tomorrow, or the next day: tonight I just wish I were in Blacksburg, & could do something.

Call for Suggestions

The long haze of reading proofs is almost over, just in time for the last run-up to finals week & the ensuing purgatory. So I suppose I'll be back to scribbling here in a day or two. But in the meantime –

In Spring 2008, I've decided, I'll be teaching a graduate seminar on biography – history & theory of the genre, research methods, stylistic decisions, reception, practical problems, etc. (Clearly, I'm still thinking my way thru what's gonna go into this gumbo...) So I call out to my 7 1/2 readers: What are your favorite biographies? (Lives of literary figures, historical figures, scientists, politicians, musicians, whatever?) What books have you found compelling, perhaps even despite your lack of initial interest in the subject?

Help me write my syllabus, please!

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.
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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?!?

Among the Kabbalists

A lovely if somewhat shambolic – or perhaps lovely because shambolic – seder this evening at a colleague’s house. Yesterday we ventured down to Hollywood (FL) to meet up with some family members who’re in town to celebrate Pesach with the Kabbalah Centre (TM); when I got home I found myself sent back to Gershom Scholem, determined after all these years to knuckle down & tackle Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. The medieval Kabbalists about whom Scholem writes would have little to do with Scholem himself, with his own resolutely rationalist and historicizing habits; I suspect the present-day adherents of the Kabbalah Centre would have even less. In turn, I imagine Scholem’s shade is glad that he didn’t live to see what forms his beloved Kabbalah has taken these days.

From what I understand, Rabbi Philip Berg of the Kabbalah Centre & his followers regard Kabbalah less as a sort of gnosticism or “mysticism,” an immediate communing with the godhead, than as a technology. “You don’t have to believe in it,” I was straightfacedly told; “that’s the beauty of Kabbalah: it’s not just another organized religion, it’s science, a technology to tap into the spiritual structure of the world. Just to look at the words of the Zohar, even if you don’t read Aramaic, sets beneficial forces in motion.”

The potential of such a faith-neutral spiritual technology is breathtaking – not least its potential as a profit-making enterprise. At the various Kabbalah Centres around the world (there’s a large, new, and very plush one here in B––), you can buy beautifully-bound copies of the Zohar; you can buy those red strings Madonna & Britney Spears famously wear, which have been wrapped around the tomb of Rachel and ward off the evil eye; you can buy “Kabbalah Water” (TM), Canadian spring water that Rav Berg has subjected to a process of Kabbalistic meditation, thereby imbuing it with various healthful, even cancer-fighting properties; you can buy Kabbalah Energy Drink, the familiar caffeine-heavy brew with the addition of Kabbalah Water. (“Red Bull with a Red String,” I call it.) The medieval Roman Catholic Church, with all its trade in indulgences & relics, had nothing on these folks.

As someone who was reared in a fundamentalist Protestant church where the taking of the collection seemed to be viewed as a necessary but embarassing, even slightly scandalous part of the Sunday service, the unabashed, enthusiastic product marketing of the Kabbalah Centre has always struck me as alien and disconcerting. There’s a word for it, with which Joyce was quite familiar: simony.

Scholem’s Major Trends shows elegantly how mystical movements such as Kabbalah arise out of & in tension with the ordinary evolution of major religions – that Kabbalah & Hasidism are both part of & other to “normative” Judaism, just as medieval Catholic mysticism could not exist apart from a more generalized Catholic theology & faith practice. Kabbalah, that is, is not a tradition apart from normative Jewish tradition of interpreting & following Torah, but is a particular mystical or gnostic-like counterpart to those traditions, which takes those traditions as a baseline & extends them in particular directions.

But the Kabbalah (TM) of the Kabbalah Centre, it seems to me, is no longer a form of Jewish religious hermeneutics or religious practice, no longer a form of Jewish mysticism at all. Kabbalah (TM) is spirituality for the first-world global consumer, what the grand traditions of the medieval rabbis have been reduced to under Late Capitalism. Salvation – in the form of little bits of red string, $400 sets of the Zohar, videos of Rav Berg’s lectures & homilies, bottles & pallets of holy – er, Kabbalah – water, cans of carbonated energy drink – can now be easily bought – bought for hard cash, bought thru easy (but expensive) courses of study & Amway-like personal marketing; but never at the price of real spiritual assent, of what the old-fashioned would call faith.

Like Apple’s GarageBand software, which offers one the opportunity to make pretty good-sounding pop records without the hassle of actually learning an instrument – & I’m sorry, all you shiny anti-“Rockists” out there, but learning to play a real-time instrument, from the human voice to the violin, is of a far higher order of qualitative difficulty than mastering a piece of software – Kabbalah (TM) offers an ersatz version of the rewards of traditional religion without ever asking its adherents to make the ultimate commitment: to actively change their lives, and change their world.

[I’m well aware, by the way, that there seems to be a good deal of evidence that what Berg’s Kabbalah Centre organization offers its rank & file members is something much more closely approximating the demands of the “cults” one heard so much about back in the ‘80s – constant financial demands, a regimented lifestyle, a kind of military devotion. (See this Guardian article, for instance.) But for its more well-heeled adherents, the Madonnas & Britney Spearses of the world, Kabbalah (TM) offers a guaranteed spiritual technology, & demands in return neither faith nor a changed life, but the most painless sacrifice of all – the abstract marker of exchange-value we call money.]

Now available for pre-order...

The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, edited by the estimable Corkonians Alex Davis & Lee M. Jenkins, with dandy entries by folks like Peter Nicholls, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Lawrence Rainey, & yrs truly (on WCW, LZ, & Olson).

Refinding Neverland

I think it’s fair to say that JM Barrie & the whole Peter Pan/Neverland mythos had precisely zero influence on my childhood. I didn’t even see the Disney film until a year or two ago, & soon afterwards we somehow landed a video of Mary Martin in one of those clumsy early-60s TV filmings of the old Broadway musical (the Native American princess Tiger Lily as a startlingly peroxide-blonde bobby-soxer) – which the girls are inexplicably fond of. It’s like my inability to accept a middle-aged fat guy in a wig playing Parsifal in a Wagner production: I just can’t wrap my head around what’s obviously a late-thirties woman pretending to be the boy who never grew up – my negative capability just isn’t capable.

It was only after seeing the Johnny Depp vehicle Finding Neverland that I decided, no matter how saccharine the movie’d been, I really ought to read the JM Barrie novel & find out what the undiluted, un-Broadway’d, un-Disney’d buzz surrounding Peter Pan etc. was all about. I was pretty intrigued: a beautifully, wittily written book, sunk deep in a certain kind of late-Victorian sentimentality, but with an edge of memorable strangeness and twistedness. All of that is of course wrung out by homogenizing machineries of Broadway & Disney, but it’s strong & rank in Barrie’s original, which – like all the best kids’ book – seems in some ways quite inappropriate for children.

One reads, at times, in parallel to one’s partner. Eric’s written about getting to know his wife’s “six best friends” – Jane Austen’s novels; luckily, J. & I already shared Tolkien when we hookt up, but trying to penetrate the world of children’s literature, which she knows about as well as Eric knows his Haggadah, has been a bit of an effort. We’ve trawled thru the strangely popular seas of Harry Potter, over which we’re agreed we’d choose Kipling’s Stalkey any day; I’m a trifle more enthusiastic about A Series of Unfortunate Events than she; and both of us were ravished by Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. So her obvious Xmas present last year was Geraldine McCaughrean’s Peter Pan in Scarlet, the first “official” sequel to Barrie’s Peter Pan.

One could buy the book with a good conscience, after all. Barrie had left all of the royalties from Peter Pan to a charity, the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children; but the copyright for that book runs out this year (look for a flood of cheap editions, scholarly editions, internet texts, graphic novels, etc.), and in order to keep their funding stream intact, the Hospital ran a contest for an “authorized” sequel, a contest which was won by McCaughrean, who seems to be a one-woman children’s lit factory.

Now J and I have never read a sequel by someone other than the original author that we liked. But Peter Pan in Scarlet is different – a wonderfully written, beautifully-detailed book that both stays true to the original’s conception, in all its weirdness, and deepens & makes more poignant that strangeness by more pointedly negotiating the borders between Neverland and the “real” world. Michael Darling, it turns out, has died in the Great War, whose shadow, it is suggested, might be part of the reason for the dark changes that have come over Neverland. Those changes are delineated in wonderful, simple but telling prose:

Dawn welled up, and Tootles glimpsed the shifting, oily sheen of the Lagoon. In her* memory, it had been a shining crescent of turquoise water over shoals of white sand. The Lagoon she saw now was darkly heaving: a horse’s flank slick black and streaked with foam. A mane of washed-up seaweed lay among the pebbles, busy with flies. All along the high-water mark lay strange, white containers, like birdcages or crab-pots. On closer inspection they proved to be the skeleton ribcages of mermaids, with here and there a backbone or a hank of yellow hair. Tootles looked nervously around and ran back to the cave.

McCaughrean never sets a foot wrong in Peter Pan in Scarlet, & that’s something I wish I could say for the last half-dozen “adult” novels I’ve read. Long may the Great Ormond Street Hospital stay solvent.

*The “lost boy” Tootles, in returning to Neverland for this sequel, has undergone a very witty sex change.

Shakespeare?

My favorite local used & rare book dealer is working his way thru at least 3 vast collections he’s recently acquired, & I’ve been getting brief peeks into the riches that will eventually be up for sale. One collection, that of of all things a hotelier with a penchant for literature and history, is pretty astonishing: hundreds of Loeb Classical Library volumes, scores of volumes and sets of early modern dramatists, 65 volumes of Jules Verne in translation… Thus far, I’ve confined myself to a rather battered set of ET Cook’s 1911 biography of John Ruskin, but I’m waiting for word on whether I’ll need to sell a kidney to set myself up with Bullen’s 1885 8-volume edition of Thomas Middleton.

I’ve been marginally obsessed with Middleton for some years now, spurred on by the Shakespeare scholar Gary Taylor’s frequent assertions that Middleton is, if not actually better than Shakespeare, a dramatist who conforms more closely to modern habits of mind. (I remember Taylor, with dramatic curtains of belated-hippie hair and a rather outlandish set of couture decisions, addressing a Shakespeare Association of America audience in Miami some years back, & wondering how relevant to contemporary morals Shax’s obsessive interest in female virginity might be: “Are there any virgins here today?” he asked. And nobody spoke up.)

Middleton, from the 8 or 10 of his plays I’ve read, is very good indeed: his comedies are funnier than anyone but Ben Jonson’s, and his tragedies – Women Beware Women, The Changeling – are better than anyone but Shakespeare at his best (and maybe one or two of Marlowe’s). If Gary has his way, the 21st century will be the Middleton century in early modern studies.

Taylor’s been promising a huge complete Middleton, to be published by Oxford UP in a format similar to Taylor’s own Oxford Shakespeare, for maybe a decade and a half now. Rumor has it that the big book is at least in proofs now. Me, I’m hedging my bets – unless I see an ad from OUP with a projected date of publication, I’m inclined to take out a mortgage or sell a couple of guitars to get my hands on the Bullen edition, which, even as it hovers around the 120-years-old mark, is still the text that Middleton scholars turn to. Maybe I’ll even retool myself into a early modern drama person.
***
The spectacle of scholars leaping from one field to another has always fascinated and rather scared me. One’s graduate training, I’d like to believe, gives one the linguistic, textual, and theoretical chops to take on pretty much any text whose language one understands, but when one shifts period and genre, there’s an immense amount of catching up to do: early modern history, social history, linguistic and literary traditions, philosophical and ideological backgrounds, etc. Not to mention, in the case of Shakespeare at least, the vast library of critical works that have sedimented around the man’s works (at least some of which is worth reading).

So I’m vastly enjoying Gary Wills’s Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (OUP, 1995), a book which I understand took quite a drubbing in Shakespearean circles. Whatever Wills is – the only other book of his I know is the delicious Reagan’s America – he isn’t a professional Shakespeare scholar. But he writes beautiful, crisp sentences, and lays out what strike me as very fresh insights as discusses Macbeth as a play written in the aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot: “Words like ‘train’ and ‘blow’ could no more be used ‘innocently’ in the aftermath of the Powder Plot than could ‘sneak attack’ or ‘grassy knoll’ in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor or John Kennedy’s assassination.” (What words, I wonder, will a hundred years hence mark the texts written after September 11?)
***
Ron Silliman, in his RSS-enabled weekly trawl thru the media, has fished out one of the latest manifestations of the intellectual pathology that calls itself “Shakespeare Authorship Studies” – or in plain parlance, people with too much time on their hands who want to argue that William Shakespeare didn’t write “Shakespeare.” This particular writer, Roger Stritmatter, is an Oxfordian: that is, he believes that Roger de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the chap who wrote the plays and then had them disseminated under the name of some nobody from Stratford. The “evidence” for this doesn’t even deserve the name evidence (and the evidence against is rather telling – Oxford died in 1604, & several of the late Shakespeare plays have clear topical references to events after then – such as, in Wills’s and many others’ account, the Gunpowder Plot material in Macbeth).

I seem to end up reading an anti-Stratfordian book every year or so (which may say something about the time on my own hands), but I’m struck by a statement of Stritmatter’s which echoes most of the other anti-Stratfordians:

The beguiling notion that our author could write "King Lear" without ever suffering the ostracism of Kent, the madness of a hunted Edgar, the dilemma of Cordelia or the alienation of Lear allows us to reduce the play to mere entertainment, without ever contemplating its ring of terrible authenticity. A papier-mache author who accomplishes everything through sheer genius fortifies the American myth that anything is possible if you just click your heels three times and wish hard enough.

The Oxfordians’ main strategy, then, is to show how events in the Shakespeare plays find parallels in Oxford’s life and career. I don’t think one needs to comment on what an impoverished notion of imagination, or what a simplistic conception of the literary process – among other things, the way Shakespeare as veteran “content-producer” and script-doctor is forever overhauling old plots and old plays – this bespeaks. No, like Hemingway the playwright has to be forever “writing what he knows.” You can’t write a bullfight unless you’ve been to one or a boxing match unless you’ve fought one, or write about Lear unless you have youself suffered ostracism. Oxford’s “life, in myriad ways, illumines the Shakespearean oeuvre,” Stritmatter writes fatuously, “and becomes the touchstone for grasping the meaning of many obscure passages in the plays.” Well, I guess looking for parallels with the life of a colorful nobleman beats the hell out of interpretation when you’re confronted with an “obscure passage.”

The roots of the anti-Stratfordian pathology are only partly based in sheer snobbishness (how could these works have been written by a middle-class nobody, they must have come from an Oxbridge man with a title!). What I find more sympathetic in these folks is a very human desire to know more about the life of the writer whose works they so admire. (Though they ignore the fact that we know as much about Shakespeare as we do of any early modern dramatist except Jonson, and far more about him than most of the others.) It’s the same desire that keeps literary biographies flying off the shelves, even when the readers have read no more of Pound or Eliot or Plath than the half-dozen poems they encountered back in college. In sheerly literary terms, it’s a misguided impulse – biographical knowledge won’t in the end help you come to terms with Joyce or Proust or Kafka – but in human terms, it’s deeply understandable. A damned shame, then, that Aubrey never got around to interviewing Shakespeare’s daughter, or that Drummond of Hawthornden didn’t pump Jonson a little more assiduously for details about the Swan of Avon.

More

Last night’s bout of tongue-biting insomnia sent me back to another FSG freebie I’d forgotten I had until it slipped off the shelf into my hand as a potentially ideal sleeplessness-cure: James Fenton’s An Introduction to English Poetry. Says Katherine A. Powers (of the Boston Sunday Globe) on the cover:

I have never come across a book quite like this one: so unfraught, so uncontentious, so lucid and gentlemanly. I cannot imagine that even the most wised-up spouter of poetry would not find it irresistible.

Hmm, and hmm again. Well, if one takes a few things in hand – Fenton is a dyed-in-the-wool old-style formalist (Rbt. Frost style, that is, free verse as tennis w/out the net etc.), he doesn’t have an ounce of sympathy with modernism, much less our own post/late-modernism, he thinks concrete poetry is generally for the birds (pigeons)) – one almost agrees. Reader, I thought I would hate this book, or that at the least it’d put me to sleep. But it’s actually alright. Few of the formal-explainers (Hollander, Fussell, Attridge) do as neat a job as Fenton does showing precisely how the classic meters work; he scans the opening of “Tithonus” in a way that ought to make most alt-poets (who don’t know an amphibrach from a hole in the ground) embarassed. And his take on the workshop-ethos is right on:

In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have ‘trained’ or ‘practiced enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached Grade Eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on advanced training. We cannot hoop on a train to Paris, or a flight to New York, and go and show our works to an acknowledged master, and ask to be taken on as a student.

There are courses in creative writing, and it may well suit some temperaments to sign on for the tuition. But to pretend that such teachers are the equivalent of, say, voice coaches would be foolish. It would be very surprising to find a serious opera singer who had not been coached. It would be very surprising to find a poet of whom one could say: she was coached by X, in the way that Callas was coached by Tullio Serafin.

***
Over unnumbered beers and half a botter of single malt the other night with a pair of colleagues more recently emerged from the MFA-mill than I, found myself marvelling at how things have changed in the X number of years since I was in those corridors: mostly a matter of professionalism, of professionalizing. Of following the prizes, the contests, the paper-chits of publishing here or publishing there. Or maybe I was just out of it, too busy reading Limited Inc. & Geography of the Imagination to subscribe to APR.
***
The not-always-dyspeptic John Latta has a dandy set of musings on the shift from eclecticism to doctrinarity in small press publishing, and remembers the salad days of Baxter Hathaway’s Ithaca House Press. When I was in Ithaca you could still find the little books almost paving the streets between the used bookstores, & together they formed about as eclectic a snapshot of late-70s early-80s American poetry as one could ask for. They spot my shelves – Ray DiPalma, Bob Perelman, David Melnick (Eclogs, still one of my fave books of all time), CS Giscome, JL himself, and the first effort by one Ronald Silliman (Crow, that is).

But isn’t eclecticism a function of eclectic editing? Where did I hear that Ithaca House’s alt-poetry bent was due largely to David MacAleavy, working then on an Oppen dissertation, later to be encountered in the halls of whatever skyscraper George Washington U’s English department was housed in? And where are the paeans to that wild man Jack Shoemaker (Sand Dollar, North Point, Counterpoint, etc.), publishing Ron Johnson, Michael Palmer, Leslie Scalapino, and – at the same damned time – Wendell Berry? As for Burning Deck and the ageless Waldrops, any press who’s doing Pam Rehm and Gale Nelson covers about as broad a chunk of contemporary “verse” as anyone alive.
***
Pippa (aet. 5) lost her first tooth today. And lost it, somewhere in the sands of the playground. Twinkle the Tooth Fairy (that’s Toothe Faerie to you goths) will have to settle for an apologetic note.

FSG freebies

One of the more trifling and fatuous manifestations of Ron Silliman’s manic desire to divide the poetry world down the middle (sheep : right / goats : left) is his periodic boastings about what a small proportion of his poetry collection is made up of books published by trade houses.* (I believe it’s precisely 2% – or maybe he only owns two books from trade publishers, I can’t remember.) I can see his point, however: the last time I winnowed the poetry shelves, it seemed like every other book heading out the door was from Athenaeum, Random House, or some other mighty New York name.

Nonetheless, I’m a sucker for free books, & Farrar Straus & Giroux – now of course a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck – is remarkably happy to throw free books my professorial way at a moment’s notice. Right now I’m skipping thru James Fenton’s Selected Poems, just to get an idea of in precisely what ways boring English poetry differs from the cisatlantic variety. John Betjeman’s Collected Poems is useful both as a doorstop and as a reminder of how right Hugh Kenner could be: in certain quarters of English society – ie, where poets laureate are chosen & where books of poetry receive a wide readership – modernism simply never happened. Betjeman (1906-1984 – a near contemporary of Louis Zukofsky’s) is a walking, talking, versifying, & highly popular coelacanth – a 20th-century Victorian. But he’s better than Billy Collins.

All I know about Federico García Lorca, alas, I learned from Jack Spicer, and now that I finally have the Spaniard’s massive Collected Poems before me, I’m a bit at a loss as to where to begin. Any suggestions from anyone out there – favorite poems, favorite volumes? Steve Collis, you must know more about García Lorca than just an obscene Shane MacGowan lyric.

I never had a teacher or mentor who took Robert Lowell very seriously, so I happily missed the whole “Age of Lowell” buzz entirely. That is, I’ve never found him a poet that must come to terms with one way or another, & therefore I’ve never felt the need to savage his memory, to kowtow to his ghost, or even to spend much time with his work. Of the 4 collections I’ve read, I prefer the impacted formalism of Lord Weary’s Castle & The Mills of the Kavanaughs to the “ground-breaking” confessionalism of Life Studies & For the Union Dead. The recent FSG Selected Poems, which is before me now, seems to offer a handy way of assessing career without swallowing the whole bolus of his work. Of course, I wouldn’t even be offering it the inch-&-a-half of shelf space it’ll take up if it weren’t for some pregnant remarks by Peter O’Leary, a fellow whose recommendations I’m inclined to take seriously.

*By the way, any tendency on my part to rib Ron shouldn’t be mistaken for personal dislike (a swell guy, the fews times our paths have crossed), dislike of his poetry (I like and admire much of it), or disagreement with the general aesthetic tenor of his blog (I usually agree with it).

Rosmarie Waldrop II

[This one from earlier this evening, when RW read before a standing-room-only crowd at the "Board of Trustees Room" of Our University's Administration Building. A lovely event.]

I have it from my friend the poet C. S. Giscombe, usually a quite reliable source, that the ideal introduction for a poet should run no more one minute.* For the poet being introduced, waiting nervously to see whether the introducer will mispronounce a name, get a book’s title wrong, or spiral off into the mindless repetition of vague encomia, the one-minute rule might seem quite the godsend. But Rosmarie Waldrop, this year’s Lawrence A. Sanders visiting writer-in-residence, has only herself to blame – herself, and her ceaseless, energetic activity – if her introduction seems less a punchy one-minute warning than the overture to Parsifal. Introduce Rosmarie Waldrop in one minute? Give me an easy one, like summarizing Proust in thirty seconds!

When I introduced Rosmarie Waldrop two days ago, I felt as though I had exhausted my breath in enumerating her honors and accomplishments – that the Republic of France has named her a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, that she is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, that she is the recipient of awards and grants from the NEA, the Fund for Poetry, the Howard Foundation, and the DAAD Berlin artists’ program; that Burning Deck, the “small” press she runs with her husband Keith, has been one of our primary outlets for innovative poetry & prose over the past three decades; that her many translations – of Emmanuel Hocquard, Anne-Marie Albiach, Jacques Roubaud, Paul Celan, and especially Edmond Jabès – have made her one of the principal mediators of contemporary European poetry for an Anglophone audience; that her prose works, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès and Dissonance (if you are interested) set her squarely in the ranks of the most interesting contemporary poet-critics.

But the prospect of hearing Waldrop reading her own poetry has for better or worse given me a second wind. The handiest overview of Waldrop’s poetic career, the 1997 Another Language: Selected Poems, includes a blurb which I initially found rather curious: “A thinker and a poet is an extraordinary combination. Waldrop is both.” What, I wondered, is so “extraordinary” about the combination of thinker and poet? haven’t poets, from Lucretius to Dante to Eliot, been among the foremost thinkers of their eras? The etymological roots of “poet,” however, mean not thinker but maker – the poet is someone who makes things: she fashions speech, she crafts words into resonant shapes, she weaves language into tensile baskets that carry burdens of narrative, of emotion, of sensation – only occasionally is she a thinker as well. Waldrop is indeed both thinker and poet. From the early, spare free verse of 1972’s The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger, through the remarkable historical and linguistic meditations of A Key Into the Language of America (1994) to the extraordinary trilogy of prose poem sequences collected in last year’s Curves to the Apple, Waldrop’s poetry has grown into a durable and keen instrument to explore and probe the gendered social body of our language, the social language of our embodied gender. A poet born into one tongue and adopting another in which to write, a translator dedicated to melting down and recasting texts into other languages, Waldrop’s chosen field of play is the “between,” the “Lawn of Excluded Middle” – between languages, between genders, between poetry and fiction, between verse and prose. And while she navigates these various conceptual “betweens,” Waldrop never loses sight of the primordial pleasures of poetry – the resonant shapes of words on the tongue, the surprise of unfamiliar verbal combinations, the energy of torqued syntax and counterpointed etymology. The “lavish dissonance” of her work – if I may be permitted to recast two of her titles – emerges into the resolution of an exquisite polyphony of thought and music. As we are about to hear. Let’s welcome Rosmarie Waldrop.

*This by way of Aldon Lynn Nielsen.

Rosmarie Waldrop I

[A new feature: the texts of introductions to visiting speakers/poets. Rosmarie Waldrop is spending the week at Our University as a visiting writer, and this evening delivered a lecture on poetry & poetics, "'The Language of the Gods'" (note quotation marks).]

It would be pleasant to introduce this year’s Lawrence A. Sanders writer-in-residence, Rosmarie Waldrop, merely by her honors – that she is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of awards and grants from the NEA, the Fund for Poetry, the Howard Foundation, and the DAAD Berlin artists’ program. It would be pleasant to introduce her under a single literary function: as a poet, or as a translator, or as an editor. That one must introduce her as all three, however, is a trifle overwhelming. Burning Deck books, the press she edits with her husband Keith Waldrop, has for over four decades been one of the most consistently rewarding sources of new poetry on the American “small press” scene, publishing books & chapbooks by some three or four generations of innovative poets & writers – American, British, French, & German. As a translator, Waldrop has established herself as a central mediator of contemporary European poetry for an Anglophone audience: she has translated Jacques Roubaud, Emmanuel Hocquard, Anne Marie Albiach, Paul Celan, and others, but will no doubt be irreversibly identified with the French Jewish master Edmond Jabès; the 17 books of Jabès’s work she has translated have had a profound effect on American innovative writing of the past two decades. Most of the major modernist writers were translators – Proust translating Ruskin, Eliot translating St.-John Perse, Benjamin translating Proust, Beckett translating Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Mexican poetry, & himself, Pound translating, well, everything – and Waldrop’s work as a translator is far more than a mediating or ancillary activity, but has profoundly informed her own 18 volumes of poetry, from her first collection in 1972, The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger, to the trilogy of prose poem sequences collected in last year’s Curves to the Apple. Her writing, that is, constantly moves in the space of “between”: between languages, between verse and prose, between poetry and fiction; it is constantly at play on what she has called the “lawn of [the] excluded middle.” I would perhaps overstep the bounds of propriety to mention that in her recent nonfiction volumes – Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès and Dissonance (if you are interested) – Waldrop proves herself a sensitive and sophisticated theorist of poetry and poetics: but this I think she will prove herself in the next hour. Let’s please welcome Rosmarie Waldrop.

A Retrospective Arrangement

Culture Industry is now two years old. I had only a vague idea of what I wanted to do with a weblog when I started this one back in 2005. I knew there were models out there that I liked, models of day-to-day critical intelligence, of lively and amusing writing, of thoughtfulness. Culture Industry has not been particularly distinguished by any of those elements, but rather by contingency, haste, & a kind of poetics of reaction – ie that its entries are more often determined in reaction to other things – others’ books, others’ weblogs, etc. – than by any “ideas” of my own (“ideas” a commodity I realize I have a startlingly small stock of).

When I started posting entries here, I had in mind a sort of electronic Fors Clavigera, a place where I could put up readings & ramblings & polemics, notices of new & newly read books, even perhaps a bit of my own poetry from time to time. That latter function fell by the wayside a good long while ago: in the implicit economy of poetry, it turns out, readers (& why shouldn’t they?) are more likely to value your work if it appears on someone else’s website than on your own.

I’ve discovered that I am at best an uncomfortable polemicist – perhaps even a classical “liberal,” so willing to entertain all sides of an issue that I end up in a kind of Joycean paralysis or Laodicean lukewarmness.

The virtual community of the blogosphere is probably ultimately overrated, but nonetheless very real. (When one lives in Palm Beach County, one values any aesthetic community at all, even a virtual one!) But like all self-selected communities, the alt-poetry blogosphere all too often becomes a fishbowl of tiny & petty quarrels, of distinctions without differences. Long may that fishbowl flourish.

At any rate, two years later Culture Industry is on the verge of having had 50 thousand visits (no, I don’t know how many thousand of those are my own), nothing special in the poetry blogosphere & barely a blip on the radar screen of weblogs in general, but an intensity of attention that I had frankly never expected when I began the thing, & for which I am immensely grateful. Thanks for dropping by. I’ll try to make it a bit better in the future.

So I guess I'm using the new Blogger – this by way of a test post, nothing more. They twisted my arm. Wouldn't take no for an answer.

Black Panthers

My MO when teaching Joyce is to do all the reading for the seminar before the seminar begins; then to read along with the students as the syllabus progresses, both primary texts & critical essays; and at the same time to work my way thru a couple of “classic” pieces of Joyce criticism & a couple of more recent things. The “classics” right now are SL Goldberg’s The Classical Temper: A Study of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1961) (a bit of a slow go) & CH Peake’s James Joyce: The Citizen & the Artist (1977) (luminous). The recencies are Enda Duffy’s The Subaltern Ulysses (1994) and Geert Lernout’s The French Joyce (1990).

Lernout has in recent years become one of the big movers in Finnegans Wake-based “genetic” criticism, a peculiar, highly specialized tulip that seems to flourish best in the Low Countries. In The French Joyce, an early work, he’s probably trying to do too much – to provide a history of Joyce studies in France & simultaneously to offer a potted summary of post-structuralism. (Some would argue that the latter goal is hamstrung from the start by his reliance on the reactionary La Pensée 68 by Luc Ferry & Alain Renaut; I’m inclined to agree, tho I do find Ferry & Renaut useful for providing a history of Hegel’s reception in 20th c. French thought, as well as some institutional context for the rise of the new theory.)

But Lernout is mainly a close reader & a seeker-out of howlers – and one is amazed by the howlers he finds in the classics of French Joyce criticism: Hélène Cixous’s (Freudian?) slip of identifying the “Nothung!” of “Circe” as Sigmund’s sword; Jacques Derrida’s virtuosic juxtaposition of Bloom’s “I. AM. A.” (“Nausicaa”) & Stephen’s “I, I am I. I” (“Scylla & Charybdis”), hampered by the fact that the latter passage (presaging Bob Marley) actually reads “I, I and I. I”; Jean-Michel Rabaté’s identification of a Joycean source in “the Preface of the official Livre de messe of the Church of Dublin (the one Joyce must have used)” – which turns out to be the good old Book of Common Prayer, common to both the Church of England and the Church of Ireland, & which Joyce might have known, but which – raised as he was Roman Catholic – certainly wouldn’t have used.

Lernout can’t help coming across as what he admits he is – a guy who was really into theory in grad school, but who got disenchanted when he discovered what one could do with genetic studies – theory’s antithesis. He’s weakest on Lacan, relying largely on Stuart Schneiderman’s compulsively readable but not too illuminating Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero. But then again, I don’t know many of us who had much of an idea what Lacan was doing before Slavoj Zizek, the wise-cracking colossus of Ljubljana, showed up. Maybe he’s “saved” Lacan for another generation.

I recall a conference at Cornell 4-5 years ago where someone remarked that trauma studies seemed to have “saved” Freudian psychoanalysis for cultural studies – the poor old thing was on the verge of dying off, before the hip new discourse came along and applied the defibrillator. (Of course, Freudian psychoanalysis has been dead as a doornail for ages in practical psychiatric circles. Sometimes my inner skeptic wonders whether it’s as if the chemistry departments were getting on with the stuff they do best, while the humanities programs are building huge edifices of thought on phlogiston theory.)
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Enda Duffy’s book – & I can’t get out of my head a Russian student, some years past, solemnly rambling on about Edna Duffy and her fatal flaws, even as I kept interjecting “ENDA” and “HIS” – is postcolonial studies by the numbers. It’s not enough that Joyce was the only one of the high modernists who treated Jews with anything like affection, or that he hated all forms of authority – we’ve got to have a Ulysses which is “the book of Irish post-colonial independence.”

But Duffy reminds me of a factoid I used to know & had forgotten. Remember Haines, the obnoxious English cultural tourist whose nightly panther-dreams & condescending hibernophilia help to drive Stephen away from the Martello tower (“We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame”)? Joyce based him, as Richard Ellmann (that’s “priceless Richard Helmann” in one Lacan text) details, on one Samuel Chenevix Trench, not an Englishman at all but an Anglo-Irishman of such potent nationalism that he had his given name changed to “Dermot.”

It seems that Trench was given to actually taking potshots at the black panthers he dreamed, one instance of which gunplay drove Joyce from the tower for good. Five years later he would turn the revolver on his own head.

What relation, I wonder, was Samuel (Dermot) Chenevix Trench to Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1866), Archibishop of Dublin, probably the crucial member of the troika (another was Herbert Coleridge, the poet’s grandson) who in 1858 set in train the compiling of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles – the OED?

Joyce’s preferred source was Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary; he does not appear in the index of Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, tho every particle physicist knows that “quark” is from Finnegans Wake.

How Was Louisville?

Very nice, thank you. I spent a good deal of time over the weekend with some old friends and acquaintances, talking, eating & drinking, catching up – and there were even some intellectual moments, as well. A few highlights:

Panel-wise –
•a panel on Jewish-American modernism, with old pal Norman Finkelstein delivering a highly poised essay on Reznikoff & prophecy, Dan Morris speculating on the links between Marjorie Perloff’s assimilated-Jewish Vienna upbringing (as told in her memoir, The Vienna Paradox) & her propensity for writing on avant-garde texts, and Merle Bachmann reading a highly informative chunk of her forthcoming book on early 20th-c. Yiddish literary culture
•a panel on poetry & performance, where Phil Metres’s very intelligent but subdued paper on Lev Rubinstein had to compete with Michael Magee’s screening of various Flarf performances (via YouTube, on the overhead projector)
•my own fellow panelist, one Cynthia Hall, delivering a paper arguing Dylan’s “Desolation Row” as a thorough rewriting of The Waste Land (I was convinced) in a Kentucky accent that made me feel as though I were back in my Aunt Charlene’s dining room for Sunday dinner once again

Lecture-wise –
Well, I missed the big reading, & gather I didn’t miss much – Sherman Alexie delivering 45 minutes, not of poetry or of prose, but of mediocre stand-up comedy (someone sourly suggested, “why don’t we just get Chris Rock next year?) – but I made it the big closing “theoretical” lectures by Mladen Dolar & Alenka Zupancic, both of the U of Ljubljana. I suppose that institutional link, as well as the fact that Matthew Biberman invoked Slavoj Zizek in introducing both of them, led me to assume they’d be Zizek-lings of the worst sort, but I was pleasantly surprised by Dolar’s talk on “voice” and “stone” from Hegel to Beckett (starting with the Temple of Memnon in Hegel going down thru the rock at the beginning of Sartre’s Nausea to Molloy’s sucking stones). The fact that Dolar delivered the entire lecture in one of the most soporific tones I’ve ever encountered (to an audience nodding off from 3 days of conferencing) probably lessened the impact of his funniest line: “Not surprisingly, Molloy finds de stones haff no taste, provide no flavor. De stones suck.” I myself found attention wandering during Zupancic’s talk on comedy & evil, which dealt with various treatments of the Third Reich in comic cinema (To Be or Not to Be, The Great Dictator, Mein Hitler); the best moment her closing strictures on the “culture of happiness” in American society.

Social-wise –
•a truly sybaritic multi-course dinner with Alan Golding & his wife Lisa Shapiro, Dee Morris, Lynn Keller, Norman Finkelstein, Barrett Watten, & Carla Harryman, topped off with a pint of micro-brewed stout that had been aged in bourbon casks: something like sweet alcoholic espresso.
•the annual Golding/Shapiro Party. This year Alan worked a poetry reading into the festivities, so one could hear Norman reading some of the astounding, delicate new things the Martians have been giving him; Bill and Lisa Howe ripping through an in-progress new visual text; yours truly stumbling his way breathlesssly through one of the newish things on the latest Fascicle; and Lisa S. revealing a previously unknown talent for rather beautiful sound-poems (the first sounding a bit Polynesian, the last arrestingly cantorish). Later on, trying in vain to follow (with maybe one too many drinks aboard) Matthew B’s exposition of how one can use a Rodechenko-like Vincent motorcycle gear to explain Lacan’s perennial triad.
•Lovely conversations with various previously-met and/or fallen out of touch with people – the Howes, Kristin Prevallet, the Oppen scholar Stephen Cope, Mark Cantrell, etc.
•And Norman & Alice’s Maltese Tchotchke was there!