How Should We Read?

This has been an incredible year for me. As I said in my brief update, I got married, I traveled to the Squaw Valley Writers Conference to workshop some of my poetry, and got a new job in San Francisco. I live across the bay in Oakland, now, and find myself much happier over here. It's impressive to read back over some of the posts I wrote in my period of un or partial employment, and look at them as a sort of study in the emotional and psychological effects of joblessness and financial insecurity on a person. By way of that short aside, I'll bring myself immediately to the job at hand: I want to think a little bit about the title of this post, and the contexts in which it's an appropriate question. Because, when I went to Squaw Valley and was immersed in a world of reading and writing, of fun and work and the pleasure of creating, I met poets and people who I probably wouldn't have had occasion to interact with under other circumstances. Being exposed to so many different approaches to working and writing, I couldn't help but question my own methodology... or lack thereof. These experiences, the way that an individual might find himself thrown in with random other individuals, and might find himself enjoying the company of folks he couldn't imagine enjoying the company of, had me thinking about reading and poetry, and brought the question that heads this post to my mind: How should we read?

Immediately, some problems come to mind. First, the question, by itself, is devoid of a context. So, as I think about it, I would like first to provide the two contexts in which I see this as something valuable to consider. Any good analysis, I think, relies on creating these divisions and subdivisions that allow you to attempt to isolate things as a means of seeing them clearly. There's a real joy in a systematic analysis of that sort. I remember the line from Jorie Graham's poem, "Vertigo," where her speaker, watching birds in an updraft (oversimplification, much?) observes their flapping and the feathers of their wings: "Parts, she thought, free parts, watching the laws/ at work." That's as good a description of what I think I'm getting at as one is liable to find, anywhere. Another touchstone might be Fredric Jameson's system for reading, as he outlines it in the introduction to The Political Unconscious, where one "approaches" a text three times, each time with a specific goal, each goal folded into the next. In both of those metaphors, one gets the sense that a reading is something "built" of the pieces of the text, and that's seemed reasonable to me.

 The problem with my question, then, as it stands, is that from our distance we're unsure of the "parts," and want, through the parts, to glean the laws. I'll pose the question again: How should we read? What's important to notice is the problematic invocation of a "we" (readership? people? citizens of the United States? The four or five poetry enthusiasts who are left?) and the uncritical deployment of what's become, I think, a rather weighted term, "read." Read what, after all, and why? So, in the first paragraph of this post, in my anecdote about my new friends at Squaw Valley, I think I'm asking you to consider how any one of us might have "read" any other of us. The superficial readings that might have kept us apart in a regular social context, wasn't good enough once we were in a position where close attention to all of the other people, and to their writing, tastes and ideas, was necessary. That's one sort of reading I want to consider, what's generally thought of as critical reading. The other sort is specific to poetry or the literary arts, and it's a question about the physical process of reading aloud, reading to an audience, reading to be heard.

I'll start with critical reading.

Being on the west coast is odd for me, because of the geniality and general kindness of people to each other. There's a sense of an accepted heterogeneity, a supposed and celebrated heterogeneity that I don't recall on the east coast. I've spoken to a few people here about how much more serious east coast poetry seems to me than west coast poetry. The geographic framework I've fitted around contemporary poetry isn't absolute, I'm sure, and probably has more to do with my ignorance about the various poetic communities in each part of the United States than it does with any real difference. But, it's impressed itself in my mind, anyhow, and is as good a way as any to illustrate the type of differences in criticism and appreciation I want to discuss, here. I guess what I want to say is that there are two different approaches an individual can take (and in truth, probably the best approach lies somewhere between these poles) when approaching a piece of literary or visual art.

Lately, as art has seemed to wain in its powers to compel, the calls for an active and critical response have become more lively, more harried and frustrated. In the New York Times, for example, critic Dwight Garner stresses:

What we need more of, now that newspaper book sections are shrinking and vanishing like glaciers, are excellent and authoritative and punishing critics — perceptive enough to single out the voices that matter for legitimate praise, abusive enough to remind us that not everyone gets, or deserves, a gold star.

Our reaction to our diminished cultural status, he suggests, should be, perhaps, to shout louder, be angrier and more "punishing." It's an interesting idea. One that finds its visual-arts counterpart in another article I read recently, by an art critic named Simon Critchley. He makes much the same case for the visual arts, and their field of critics. He worries:

I am middle-aged enough to remember when literature, especially the novel, played this role and when cultural gatekeepers were literary critics, or social critics, often from literary backgrounds. That world is gone. The novel has become a quaint, emotively life-changing, and utterly marginal phenomenon. The heroic critics of the past are no more.

Here, we have a critic in one field echoing the complaint of a critic in another field, and extending that complaint to the visual arts. Note, though, that both identify a diminished role, not for a critic, exactly, but for the cultural products available for criticism. Books are dying, "vanishing like glaciers," and though, in the past, "cultural gatekeepers were literary critics," now, "That world is gone."Visual and performance art doesn't fare much better, and Critchely explains that  that "Contemporary art has become a high-end, global culture mall, which requires very little previous literacy and where the routine flatness of the gossip allows you to get up to speed very quickly." Dire indeed. Critchely goes on to explain what he thinks the proper aesthetic response to this diminished status is:

Here is my modest proposal: beyond endless video montages and the cold mannerist obsessionality of the taste for appropriation and reenactment that has become hegemonic in the art world, the heart of any artistic response to the present should perhaps be the cultivation of the monstrous and its concomitant affect, namely disgust.

And, suggests what an appropriate critical response might be, saying that, "we should become the enemies of art in order to reclaim it." Art must respond to its diminished capacity to incite a response by becoming its own enemy, and we need "authoritative" (authoritarian?) and "punishing" critics, at the same time, working to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.(p. 83)

What I like about this quote is that it navigates well our situation as readers. To my mind, there is a lot of junk out there. I don't like hearing about the latest craze to find out that it was intended for children, or young adults, or that, by most accounts, the writing is terrible -- not terrible as in somehow "lowbrow," but terrible in that it isn't satisfactorily edited. There are errors, the sentence construction is poor, etc.  So, while acknowledging the blandness of the available and the popular art, (you'll note that I tend to collapse literary and visual art into one undifferentiated cultural sludge) Auden is clear to ward off criticism that might promote itself by panning those poorly written products. Rather than getting more belligerent, getting louder and more frustrated, perhaps our job is to extol those rare actually praiseworthy products of authorial imagination we might stumble upon in a used bookstore, or have suggested to us by a smarter, more well-read friend. In his Poetry and the Age, Randell Jarrell provides one likely model, when he warns critics that they, "... can never be more than the staircase to the monument, the guide to the gallery, the telescope through which the children see the stars. (pg. 94)" At Squaw Valley, I encountered perhaps the best example of this attitude towards criticism, picking up a book called Orange Alert, by the poet, critic, and teacher Kazim Ali. I'll say here  that his was the work that most confounded me, and that most challenges me when I read it. Hearing him speak on his work, and on his philosophy towards writing and thinking about poetry was gratifying. He's kind and strikingly intelligent. In Orange Alert, essays about poetry, about architecture, about dance and -- an important term for him -- silence, intertwine seamlessly with seething, passionate essays about his experiences as a Muslim, as a racial and sexual minority in an increasingly xenophobic, homophobic United States, post-9/11.

The capstone essay in this collection, for me, is the one titled "Ersatz Everything," probably because it represents the point in the text where all of the pieces he'd been constellating throughout -- politics, poetry, imperialism, silence, architecture -- are suddenly activated, as if a circuit has been completed, and the whole work really comes alive. What I want to note, though, for my purposes here, is Ali's giving nature as a reader, and his concessions to the complexity of art. Discussing a collection of interviews with the poet Mahmoud Darwish that isn't available in English, he talks about reading something an individual can't understand, stating:

Words like blank spaces I do not yet understand, grammatical constructions I have not yet learned, yet I read anyhow, reading the gaps and the words alternating like music. The sense of it, its emotional tone, its notions of alterity and alienation, I understand perfectly. (pg. 153)

What's exciting to me, here, is the acknowledgement of a tension between things understood, and things not understood. I've got to say, on my own behalf, that I'm often so anxious about how intelligent or unintelligent I might be, that it's difficult for me to imagine acknowledging comfortably that I just don't get something. Though, I often don't get things, and I'm not sure I'll ever understand some things. So, Ali's work here seems to me to get beyond a notion of the critic as a mapmaker or tour guide for a text. Instead, he asks us, perhaps he invites us, to stand in admiration of a text that is a puzzle to him, and might likewise puzzle us.

I was really young when I first read William Burrough's Naked Lunch. I read it knowing nothing about the author, nothing about his motivations or approaches. I didn't understand a word I read. Instead I puzzled through the text, riding a rhythm, a diction, I'd never encountered before. I still don't know if there's a way "into" that book for me, I haven't reread it yet. But, I had amazingly vivid dreams when I read it. What excites me about literature, and particularly poetry, is how it can actually change you. Not in some metaphorical, hyperbolic way, but in real ways, in physical and psychological ways. I think that when Ali is writing, here, about reading "gaps and words alternating like music," he's inviting us to re-imagine the uses and reasons we might have for reading.

What Ali is seeking, I think, is the type of sincerity that Louise Gluck smartly interrogates in her Proofs and Theories. Gluck sees in attempts at sincerity a sort of meta-intentional failure to be properly sincere. What matters is the appearance of sincerity. That's a concern that isn't without it's precedent. The "Confessional" poet Robert Lowell worked hard on two fronts: first, crafting poems that seemed about him, in which the speaker stood in a one to one ratio with the poet, and secondly, in convincing people that creating those poems was craft, that the "realness" he was working with was an effect he attempted to achieve and achieved. It may in reaction to something like that, that Gluck writes in her essay "Against Sincerity":

Our present addiction to sincerity grows out of a preference for abandon, for the subjective "I" whose impassioned partiality carries the implication of flaw, whose speech sounds individual and human and falible.(pg 41)

This knot is becoming a little too complicated: it seems that the concern is that the "reality effect" of a poem is fake, and therefore, somehow at a remove from the actual real. So, where, then, should reality in writing be found? We could pursue that particular back-and-forth Ad Absurdum.

Another practitioner of Ali's sort of affirmative criticism is another one of the poets I worked with at Squaw Valley, Robert Hass. I've been reading his new collection of essays, What Light Can Do, and am, as per the usual, absolutely stunned by the scope and intelligence of his work. One moment of his trademark kindness stood out to me, and I want to reproduce it here. Hass wrote an essay about poets, usually international poets, who have been, or are, confined to prison due to their work. In his listing, he says:

I know a Cuban poet who was in prison for seven years and was released on several conditions, including his refraining from reading his poems in public. He immediately read his poems in public and went back to jail for, I think, five more years. His poems, I am sorry to say, are terrible... His story belongs to the history of courage rather than to the history of literature. (pg 370)

This moment in the essay gave me pause when I read it, and in pausing and considering, I found a sort of joy rising in me. I think that what I've found is that Hass has created a rhetorical framework that changes what would be a heartbreakingly sad and ironic assessment of the Cuban poet's work into, instead, an affirmation of the ties that bind poetry, reading, politics and the world. A veritable industry has come up around criticizing and dismissing history as the field of writing produced by dictators, imperialists and other powerful manipulators of human events. So, to see Hass in one turn of phrase rescue a failed poet from his own imperfect work as a poet, and supplant that individual into a register where it isn't his work, but the conditions under which he works that deserve our attention and admiration. That there might be a place for a history of courage, that is both outside of literary canonization and in opposition to history (a story like that of this poet would be suppressed by any "brand"-conscious dictatorship) as the "victors" would write it is as affirmative and as hopeful an assertion as I think I've ever seen made in an essay about poetry.

That the poet in the anecdote puts himself at risk of physical harm, and endures the incarceration and hiding away of his speaking, reading, body might be as good a segue as any to my next subject: reading as a physical act performed by a body.  I'll pick that up when I write again.

Updates.

So... I'll be writing again soon. Currently busy. Got married, got invited to the Squaw Valley Writer's Conference, which will be happening around the end of June. Been working a lot.

Confession as a Dominant Aesthetic Mode

Recently, I did a video about the Confessional Poets for my other creative venture, the Vlog Poets. I hadn't been very familiar with those poets or their work, but I recognized something very quickly: if you're a poet, or an admirer of poetry living in the United States, you're familiar with the approach of the Confessional Poets, and you're probably a Confessional Poet, yourself. I would go so far as to claim that we're all Confessional Poets, an idea that has it's predecessor in J.M. Richard's similar claim about Modernism(which you'll find discussed in the linked article). The idea is simple: when people enter into a specific epoch, they can't help but be a part of that epoch based solely on their involvement in human culture.

An oversimplified example might illustrate my point: if you were born among Neanderthals and raised in a cave, chances are that you would paint a seal on the cave wall using charcoal and animal fat instead of painting, say, Bosch's detailed vision of Hell. The society we live in, in other words, is in itself, the precondition for the aesthetic productions of that society. May the future forgive us for enabling 19 Kids and Counting. Anyhow, extending this logic to the production of poetry, I want to argue, briefly, that we find ourselves on the far side of a particular cultural moment that has enabled (or, somehow, demands) "confession" as a productive aesthetic mode, figured primarily in so-called Confessional Poetry. I'm not a fan of asserting a historical narrative of stops and starts, or "breaks," which seem, to me, too highly specific to really account for the varied and unfolding series of events and their even more various repercussions, which we call history. Instead, I'll advocate for a soft, non-confrontational evolutionary model, in which those series of small modifications and reconfigurations bring us suddenly face to face with  a whole new "animal;" one that bears a family resemblance to that of the moments preceding it, but bears, also, unmistakable marks of newness and change.

Remember that what is called Confessional Poetry is dated to the publication of W.D. Snodgrass' book Heart's Needle, in 1959. The poem that shares it's name with the book begins, after the epigraph, with these lines:

            Child of my winter, born

            When the new fallen soldiers froze

            In Asia's steep ravines and fouled the snows,

            When I was torn...

It is, to my mind, no accident that the first book to be called "confessional" begins a poem with an invocation of the social conditions in which the poet is writing, and specifically, with an invocation of a war. And this war, specifically, comes on the heels of another war in the same world region, which had ended just two years before the next started. Further, this is a war that the US will not win, that we were not excited to enter, and that many public intellectuals and artists would speak out against.  Notice in these introductory lines the collapse of the personal into the social. It seems as if the winter the soldier is dying in is the one the poet has called "...my winter..." and it seems to me that, if the soldier dies there, then the poet does have something to confess. Perhaps the framework of my larger argument can be seen in this point: the religious undertones of the word confess are inescapable, and it seems to me that a culture aware of the purging of ones guilt available to them in confessing are likely to confess; confess and never stop. In a different context, Michael Cobb says of a James Baldwin character that he uses a religious rhetoric that, "... is not therapeutic as much as it is strategic," (God Hates Fags, pg 54),"  and that "...the sacredness of religious rhetoric is":   

 

"... a limit of language, the expression of what cannot be expressed, as well as the literal  indication that something exists outside of language, and by extension, human culture."(Pg 64)

All of this appears in a discussion about Baldwin's attempts to work his way around his status as a queer, African-American man, but I think the ideological framework about religious speech is useful to us, here. If the "confessions" of Confessional Poetry aren't able to escape their religious connotations (and I think they can't), then it's relevant to see how a religious and confessional rhetoric can be employed in a way that nods towards the religious in a secular world. The question, for me, is what is the strategy involved? and, further, to what end is this strategy being employed? The use of confession in a largely secular world must be a particular, and new, function of language and poetry. There has, after all, long been the theory that art is a method of "dealing" with the loss of God, and that the "sublime" of images and artistic productions are second-class replacements for the sublimity of God, himself. So allow, then, the Vietnam War to stand for one of the modulations of human society that becomes a precondition for Confessional Poetry, and let the death of God, announced by Nietzsche in 1882, be another.

What should we let stand as the third modulation, the third conceptual construct that makes Confessional Poetry possible? I will follow Robert Lowell in suggesting that it is the most major artistic moment preceding his own: Modernism. In Lowell's Collected Prose, he registers the anxiety about following the Moderns that the Confessional Poets felt:   

"Were we uncomfortable epigoni of Frost, Pound, Eliot, Marianne Moore, etc? This bitter possibility came to us at the moment of our arrival. Death comes sooner or later, these made it sooner." (pg115)

With this, my tripartite scheme is complete. Confessional Poetry arrived in a cultural moment when: 1) poets and artists were experiencing a (guilt-evoking) war (it's not fun to be viewed as an intrusive imperial bully), 2) experiencing the anxiety about answering to, or moving beyond Modernism, and 3)speaking into a void where God's ear was not.    

This returns us to a matter of strategy. Who, under these conditions, to confess too? Everyone. And what changes when everyone might hear our confessions? Everything.    It is my contention that the shift towards a Confessional, personal, model has been semi-permanent, and that the poets, the artists, and society, are still trying to figure their way out of the logical trap imposed by confession as an artistic mode. The trap is this: in Postmodernity, if the dominant narratives are to be believed, we live in a period of extreme and complete heterogeneity. All things are only recognizable in their differences from other things, and are not any typical things in themselves. If this is the case, then, a Confessional poetry would be unsatisfactory because it represents an invocation of the notion of a "self" that, at least provisionally, is relatable to other, isolated, but existent, selves. That's why Ezra Pound sounds like this:   

II

The wind moves above the wheat-

With a silver crashing,

A thin war of metal.

I have known the golden disc,

I have seen it melting above me.

I have known the stone-bright place,

The hall of clear colours.

and someone like, say, Philip Shultz, writing in his book, Failure, sounds like this:    

My wife's younger brother took heroin and died

in the bed he slept in as a boy across

the hall from the one she slept in as a girl.

He sold pot he grew in their basement.

She'd leave work to take him to the clinic

but she understood she had to save herself.(pg 25)

The first sounds melodramatic and old. The images therein can be related to our own experience only in tenuous ways. We assume he means, by "golden disc," the sun, and that the "metal" sounds of "war" ascribed to the wind above the wheat is a sort of symbolism. On the aural level, especially in the melodramatic repetition of the iambic phrase I have, I have, I have. The second example, though, appeals to us on the aural level, and also at the level of the image, and in a larger conceptual framework in which the feelings an individual would feel experiencing these things are understandable by someone reading this poetic account of those experiences. I've known people on drugs, I've seen pot, I've been in basements. I know what it's like to leave work. Is that all, though? Is Confessional Poetry simply a sign of our own narcissism -- I can relate to this, and, therefore, it's important -- or our own self-involvement? What, after all, about the lines by Shultz makes them poetic, and not simply oddly shaped prose? The attempts to answer to these dissatisfactions with the Confessional mode have been diverse: prose poetry, conceptual poetry, New Formalism, and endless varieties of hybrid poetries have proliferated as poets, frustrated with what has become a new status quo, have struggled to move beyond the Confessional impulse.    For my part (and I think I'm now in a clear minority), I'm content to continue letting the Confessional mode have its day. I say this because I think that the move from poetry about the world to poetry about an individual's "inner-world" seems to me the logical endpoint of poetic innovation for the moment. Almost any other poetry represents only a manipulation of form, leaving content quite unaffected. In the most radical experiments, those in which, say, a computer writes a poem for you, it is still necessary for the "poem" to be represented by a particular construction made of lines and words. Words are inevitably indicators of our condition as human beings: they are symbol systems we've created for just these sorts of representations, after all.

Much in the same way some grammatical and spelling errors can slip by Microsoft Word, or autocorrect gets it totally wrong, a computer generated text is a construction imbued with meaning only when released back into a social context. For now, at least, our guilt, anxieties and passions are the stuff of poems. And I think we're better for it.   

Again, we're all Confessional poets now. At least that's what I think, tonight.   

** An addendum: An article in the Guardian, today, discusses a Scandinavian author who's just finished publishing a 6 volume autobiography described as "a scorchingly honest, unflinchingly frank, hyperreal memoir of the life of one man...". The term "hyperreal" has been employed more often lately to describe a "return" or, perhaps, an introduction, to an aesthetic that is clearly, at least in part, a response to the vagaries of non-representational and conceptual art. As the debate about the book continues, it's likely that the concept of the hyperreal (especially the concept as introduced by Jean Baudrillard) will be gain a more public and non-academic audience. 

Consider the author's admission about his family's reaction to the portrait of his grandmother: "... they said I was lying." The mode of Confession relies on anxiety about the status of truth and of authenticity for its valence, which is, also, it's biggest problem. The more fervently one confesses, the more intimate the truth they divulge, the more flat the admission feels. I remember reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and being unmoved. Partly, this was because Didion herself seemed unmoved, as she mechanically recited the facts surrounding the death of her husband, and subsequently, of her daughter. Our anxieties about authenticity have lead us to this point: we divulge everything, digging into ourselves like someone going through a trunk looking for that specific thing that might be at its core. It is possible, though, that we might not find whatever bauble it is that might anchor our sense of ourselves and give meaning to the narratives we tell. That we might end up disappointed, tired, and looking into an empty chest. Remember that 3 of the six major Confessional poets, in the end, committed suicide, after years of staring into themselves.

For the Workers

Debates about the aesthetic values of postmodernism are giving rise to an interesting array of linguistic devices. "Meta," for example, has escaped from being considered merely a prefix, and is now a descriptor in its own right, and even a budding critical category. Then, there is a range of metaphors meant to register the disgust of academics and cultural critics who are sure we've been here before: cultural necrophilia, or cannibalization among them. Beyond the first level of reference, that we're in some way "consuming" our aesthetic past, or images of past-ness, is a complicated mesh of warranted desires for a return to previous cultural moments and a despicable nostalgia for the open, uncontested sexism and racism of the past.

I wonder what makes the copycats of today any more pernicious or unscrupulous than the cultural movers of previous generations? My suspicion is that it has to do with the (perceived) difference between reaction and remixing. It's a relatively uncontested narrative that Modernism is a reaction to Romanticism, and Romanticism emerged as an aesthetic reaction to the Enlightenment, and on and on. Postmodernism, then, isn't merely a periodizing term (when it is, it refers to, roughly, the period between WWII and the present),  but also refers to an aesthetic break after which the values of the Modernist no longer obtain their cultural weight. In the Postmodern period, all potentially aesthetic productions are considered to have equal presence and merit, and any distinctions are subjective and personal: I can go to a museum and see one of Andy Warhol's screen prints hung a room over from works from Picasso's surrealist days. In that example, Picasso is reacting to the Romantic and formal painting of the 19th century, and Warhol is manipulating already extant materials (his screen print of Marilyn Monroe is made from a photograph by Eugene Korman) to create something that can't properly be called new. The problem of artistic integrity and legitimacy, then, must have something to do with creating a new sort of aesthetic product. So, here at the beginning of the 21st Century, having run out of images and materials that strike us as new, artistic production has moved into alternative mediums (film, performance, computer-based arts, so-called street art among them) and the measure of artistic integrity, creativity and originality is reserved for the assessment of the conceptual underpinnings of this or that appropriation or manipulation of "found" images and materials. I've witnessed how this often plays with the public first hand: I once went to a gallery with my father, and we stood together in front of a quilt made of squares of fabric that had been affixed over the tailpipe of the artist's car over a series of days. The stained squares were aggregated into a larger square that almost had the integrity of a single canvas. After pondering the image (or lack of an image) created by the piece for an inappropriately brief period, my dad looked at me and asked, "What the hell?"

My dad, art critic.

Interestingly, in the more popular forms of aesthetic production, film chief among them, we've seen -- rather than a similar retreat from conventional filmic images into re-appropriation and unbridled experimentation --  an unprecedented mining of previous narratives, forms, and images. I think much of the anxiety over this has a lot to do with a shortening of the temporal gap between the "original" and their reiterations: The Stephen Spielberg of E.T. revisiting the early 80's in his most recent movie, Super 8, seems like a good example. He's a great filmmaker (Jurassic Park? So good!), so why was he compelled to set this movie nearly three decades before the present day, in a period, after all, during which he was shooting original, less derivative movies? What accounts for the idealization of a time so recently passed?

Are these the marks of a cultural globalization that has temporal borders (particular decades, most often the "long" 60's or the 80's) and geographic borders (the United States in these periods)? It's not impossible to look at the 80's, especially, as a desirable past: it's often represented as both a time of financial and sexual decadence, and conversely, of innocence and exploration. The appeal is in some ways "universal" in that "everyone" can get what they want from it. In a naively optimistic way I'd like to see the phenomenon as an attempt to graft the smooth cultural/social functioning of the period's representations (and not, obviously, of its reality) onto our more precarious position now. Too, I think, it has something to do with Guy Debord's notion that the Image is, at last, a commodity -- moving on the ebbing and flowing tides of Capitalism and manipulated at every level of our societal hierarchies: the reclaimed PSA's of the G.I. Joe's available on youtube, where one might also see the ads for the militaristic, racist Transformers of Michael Bay's limited imagination (produced by Stephen Spielberg?!  Come on!).

I think something of the reiterative nature of our culture explains the appointment of Phillip Levine to the postion of Poet Laureate of the United States in August of last year. As our financial situation has worsened, and as we've looked to assuage our pain by fetishizing past moments of relative wealth and decadence, we've had, also, to face the realities of that past. The 80's saw great devastation to Union strength, and to the wage earners, generally. Not surprising then, to see a poet whose concerns have often been the workers of the US getting attention, and moving into a position of (relative) prominence. In the last few years, stories, movies, and poems about working and working culture have steadily gained traction in popular culture. Consider movies like Bridesmaids and Horrible Bosses: in these comedies (often the place of social critique...) economic disparity, a poor economy and job security are central to the plots. Likewise, there is a real pondering about the interstices of economics and art in Matthew Zapruder's poem, "Pocket":

...Today the unemployment rate/ is 9.4%. I have no idea what that means. I tried/ to think about it harder for a while. Then/ tried standing in an actual stance of mystery /and not knowing towards the world.

In the five lines, Zapruder grapples with a reality that interposes itself into poetry whether or not he wants it to be there. He, like many of us, pushes back against that reality, trying to stand "in an actual stance of mystery," as regards that reality, hoping for a transcendence and lyricism that seems like it's no longer available to us. The speaker's attempt to think the reality is marked in the poem and invoked in a way that lets us feel this process as work: the poem continues, "Which is my job." Poets after Romanticism are not merely aware of their crafting of poems as something that stands outside of the real world, yet bears a relation to it, but want to assert that what they do is some sort of work on that real world. Frank Bidart's incredible works attest to this fact, with a plethora of references to the creation of poems as making. His brief couplet, "Homo Faber" (which can be alternately translated as "man the creator," or "man the maker," or even "man the thinker") concerns itself with the work of being human beyond our local market concerns:

Whatever lies still uncarried from the abyss within
me as I die dies with me.

This isn't merely the anxiety of a poet or a creative worker, but the anxiety of full generations and nations. Most of us share a confidence that we have something to offer the world, and many of us, especially in hard economic times, are worried that the energy we want to dedicate to that pursuit of that something within ourselves is being diverted towards the bland material realties of life: we must eat, we must rest, we must seek shelter. Robert Hass says as much, when he writes in 20th Century Pleasures that, "The first impulse towards any art is, no doubt to make something, to act on the world (emphasis mine)." Our acting on the world is, often, a matter out of our hands; we pick up garbage, we use tools to fix an engine, we shovel sidewalks, or serve food. In any of those cases, I think, the individual puts something of herself into the work, wants something outside of the monetary in return. What she seeks is recognition of her part in a tapestry of human society.

So when we consider the conceptual work of contemporary artists, and poems about the work life of people in the United States, or comedies about the financially downtrodden as equally part of a nostalgia for a time that, perhaps, never was, I think we start to see what's so unsettling about the nostalgia of our age: if our nostalgia is for a past that we've mainly invented, it might as well be nostalgia for a past that never was. I think that the concern isn't really that the pop songs of 2012 are sad reiterations of the pop songs of 1985: it's that the pop songs of 2012 are markers of a creative nostalgia that imagines what it might be like to look back on a world that should have been. And as soon as you have a culture looking back at what should have been, it can't be too long before that culture looks forward to what should be. I think so far the consensus seems to be that 2012 should look like the 1985 we imagine Lean on Me to indicate, or Ferris Bueller's Day Off, or any of the sappy feel-good movies where guys and girls get what they want, thwart the grown-ups and are confident everything will be alright.

I think that what we want, rather than getting back to the future, is for our future to come back to us. Wherever we are. Maybe the real break with Modernism is somewhere in this: that we've, for the most part, suspended Pound's edict that we "make it new," while we are forced to focus more on just making it. That's what I think for now, anyhow.

* A friend of mine made a few important corrections that I think should be noted: Spielberg produced Super 8, but didn't direct it, and Spielberg's latest directorial work are both period films from before the 1980's... Tin Tin, and Warhorse. I'm not sure if this changes the content of my argument... but it does reveal that I'm a poor  researcher!

How Do We Communicate?

I'm currently in my fifth month of unemployment. The challenges and the stress of that unemployment are manifesting themselves in increasingly ugly ways. One manifestation has been an experience I think I probably share with a lot of people: knots of anxious frustration with no obvious outlet are incorporated into myself as anger and combativeness. In the moments I'm least proud of, this combativeness has been pointed at my partner of nearly a decade, (a wonderful, beautiful person and a fantastic photographer), Stephanie. Frustration about my personal circumstances become useless argument in which I externalize my issues with inferiority by claiming that the degrading thoughts I have about myself are actually the thoughts she has about me. Certainly that's problematic in itself. It's sort of tangential to what I want to talk about, here. The other phenomenon that is quite real, and quite apparent when I start my useless sparing, is that she and I speak at different levels, or utilizing differing value systems. (So, terms like "unprepared," or "want" or "need" are weighted differently depending on which of us is using the term, and what the larger context is).

At risk of revealing personality flaws in myself, I'll acknowledge that this happens to me in another, less complicated, sphere: on the internet! I argue, as I've mentioned here before, with Aunts and Uncles, friends, and the friends of friends, or completely anonymous people. Don't pretend you're immune. Or, if you are, please, for my sake, don't let me know how annoying I've become. Many of the arguments are political, and are more or less in the tone of most of the political debates that happen in the United States: "Neo Fascist!" "Socialist!" "See you at Thanksgiving."

Being outside of an academic setting, I'm out of practice in the cool, measured format of (most) of those conversations, and I'm thrown back into the fray, as it were. I'm making a concerted effort to change that, to attempt to convince through the reasonable presentation of understood (or misunderstood) facts when available, and (ideally) appealing to shared principles when they're not. I probably wouldn't be, if I hadn't seen this exchange on youtube a while back:




What you witness here is astounding in two ways: 1) It shows exactly how degraded media coverage is in this country (oops! This was on CBC - Canadian TV... the general sentiment still stands, though), especially as other networks pick up on and employ fox-style "reporting" tactics (as if Glenn Beck pretending to douse someone with gasoline is reporting, rather than psuedo-pornographic fear mongering ) and 2) Therein, you observe an impressive intellect disregarding the clearly unnecessary personal attacks as Hedges drives through to get his point across with absolute aplomb.

It got me thinking about communication, and the problems of communication in life and (of course) in poetry. I think that, in a lot of ways, all anyone wants if to be effectively communicative. The different systems I was talking about, above, are equally at play in our art and poetry. That's why, I think, in the work of many writers and poets, a reader can sense worry about communication and dialogue. Poets, particularly, are always worried about their own obscurity and the lack of attention paid to their work. It's not a modern problem, though. Roy Harvey Pearce, in a book that really shows its age, particularly in its deployment of gender pronouns, talks about poetry's relationship to communication in the United States:

"For the achievement of American poetry is a good measure of the ahcievement of American culture as a whole. The poet's particlar relation to his culture -- his self-imposed obligation to make the best possible use of the language he is given -- is such as to put him at the center of the web of communications which give his culture its characteristic style and spirit (pg 3)."

But, later, in The Continuity of American Poetry, in an example of the absolute worst of poetic "culture," states his "rule" for the production of good poetry:

"The rule is this: that the poet who would reach the great audiece had, willy-nilly, to cut himself down to its size. Such a cutting down does not imply only a falling below the standards of high art; it implies also the production of an art in some respects different in kind from high art, and to be judged and valued accordingly (pg 246)."

Pearce is playing fast and loose with the poetic tradition, trying to show that it's both central to American life and communication, and isolated from that life by, in its proper form, remaining a "high art," that would need to be "cut down to size" to become popular. All of this, too, in defense of the necessary obscurity of poetic culture, which, Pearce feels, is where it thrives. How poetry envisions itself as communication is in part due to its recognition of itself as an obscure art, and partly due to the sensibilities of individual poets. This is  Li-young Lee, (the best pessimist in the US) in his poem, "Sweet Peace in Time:"

                               "I said, 'We should give up/ trying to be understood./ It's too late in the world for dialogue (pg 31)."

In this poem, from his 2008 book, Behind My Eyes, Lee imagines a speaker relating to us (and thus forcing us to consider that even the speaker's reporting might be skewed by his own perspective) a conversation between his self and a woman only identified as "she." The mournful tone of the poem will be recognizable to anyone who's read Lee, before. This stanza, though, I read as a challenge, not merely to other writers and poets, but to all people. It says you have to figure out a way to be communicative. It dovetails neatly with my earlier evocation of Zizek's Living in the End Times in its nod to the idea that catastrophic, apocalyptic, things are happening in the world. For my own part, moments of overlap (between art and life) like these are exactly what I love so much about literature, poetry, photography: these are means of communication that can approach something like the "universal." It comes as no surprise to any lover of books that recent studies show that a good relationship with literature helps develop the human ability for empathy.

It may be imperfect, but it may also be all we have. I don't pretend that poetry will save the world, especially because the language of poetry is often seen to be so specialized and outside of the purview of ones life. In the rural town I grew up in, it's very unlikely that I'd be able to talk about US conflicts by invoking The Wasteland, or Wilfred Owen's incredible war poetry. Too much cultural pressure, too much fear that poetry is somehow feminine, that one risks their masculinity in reading it (even the sentence I've written just now is rife with some of the assumptions that would need to be made to maintain this tortured logic... maybe another post...). But, just because people aren't generally attendent to their poets, doesn't mean their poets aren't attendent to them. In 20th Century Pleasures, Robert Hass argues the rhythms and stresses of a poetic line metaphorically invoke the content of that line, so that he is able to say of a Gary Snyder poem about two friends parting ways on a mountain trail:

"The variation comes in the one three-stress phrase and in the set of three two-stress phrases. The paired phrases with a pause inbetween insist on twoness, on the separateness of the two friends (pg 129)."

The central line he's discussing looks like this (with Hass' emphases added): "HIKED up the MOUNtainside     a MILE in the AIR". So, there is, he argues, a metaphoricity in the rhythmic system of the Snyder poem: that stresses are so consistently paired, and then, later, deployed differently, suggests the pairing of the friends, and then their separation, adding emphasis to the content of the poem. I'm not sure I find the position persuasive, but it's certainly intriguing. It also illustrates something about what I'm saying, here: with all of the various systems of communication simultaneously in play, how does communication happen? Maybe something like the collapse of one communicative system into another really does happen, as Hass suggests. I've mentioned him before, because of my admiration of the way he sees the political and the real situations of the world at work in poetry:

"I have it in mind that, during the Vietnam war, one of the inventions of American technology was a small antipersonnel bomb that contained sharp fragments of plastic which, having torn through the flesh and lodged in the body, could not be found by an X-ray. Often I just think about the fact that some person created it. At other times I have thought about the fact that the bomb works on people just the way the rhythms of poetry do (133)."

Either way, it seems to me that our responsibility is to resist the speaker in Lee's poem, to resist giving up on dialogue, and to investigate how we communicate the way Hass does: with earnestness, with honesty, and with an ear for how what we communicate communicates. I want to continue thinking about what poetry means as a type of communication, and how it means. The examples I've used here are interesting, I hope, to people interested in poetry and in communication. The three thinkers/poets I've quoted (Hass, Lee, Pearce) each write to communicate to the reader something about poetry and its place in their respective lives. The variatious and multifaceted ways each of them evokes poetry to their own ends speaks to me about communication, generally. If Pearce is right about the central role of poetry in American cultural life, and Hass is right about the many levels on which poetry speaks to us, I hope Lee's lines find their place: they frustrate and challenge us, and make us contemplate the dire circumstances under which any dialogue happens, now.

 Here's hoping we communicate better in the new year.

... To that end, have I ever told you about the poetry vlog I'm part of? Project videobard? We put videos up on youtube every day of the week. Check it out!