Tuesday, December 13, 2011

I've been having an interesting discussion over at the blog of Canadian writer Conrad DiDiodato. The discussion started with the following quote, on Conrad's blog, from Eliot weinberger:

"The United States doesn’t have the class of literary supplements that you find in Spain and many other countries… Criticism, in the United States, has been reduced to ‘recommendations’, which arrive through reviews, blogs and Twitter. Prizes have become the standard validation of literary merit. I can’t think of a single American critic to whom one can turn in search of ideas …" (read the full quote here)

We then discussed the high quality of reviews and essays in the French press, and I introduced Conrad to Pierre Assouline's blog. We do have the TLS and the London Review of Books, which, although they're pretty conservative, do carry quality critical writing. But in the broadsheets, reviews of poetry, at least, are largely reduced to ‘recommendations’, witness this recent 'review' in The Guardian. The blogosphere seems to be the place for a wider range and more in-depth discussion of poetry. But even here, there's a problem; namely, that in the age of Facebook and Twitter, poets are very likely to know each other, if not personally, then virtually. On-line communications lends itself, indeed, possibly requires, comforting compliments and regular praise, to keep communication flowing with someone you've never met; or, conversely, unrestrained, anonymous venom. Neither of these things are conducive to objective, disinterested critique. Maybe we need more critics who are not poets, and therefore untrestrained by the need to butter up publishers and other poets. But such people are rare; maybe it just needs a bit more courage and objectivity from poet-critics.

40 comments:

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Alan,

I agree that Facebook, Twitter are likely to compromise significant discussion but that just makes it necessary for poet-critics like us to search for the quality 'writing', 'blogging' out there. And once found to stick to them like "hoops of steel". I think I've found a few pretty outstanding places to read & critique online.

Well worth the efforts.

Alan Baker said...

I think I'll be starting to blog more, and, more importantly, read and interact with the blogs of others. FB etc are OK, but they're designed for socialising rather than serious discussion.

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Glad to hear it!

There are some heavy-hitters out there: Jerome Rothenberg, Tom Clark, Ron Silliman, etc. I'm convinced Eliot and Pound today would be out there in 'cyberspace': they had a nose for significant literary trends and where real readerships were to be found.

Ed Baker said...

this article jus' might add
phuel-to-the-fire
(especially the post scriptum) :

http://theclaudiusapp.com/1-johnson.html

I got to it via Ron's newest list of what's what in Poetic-Lit Circles

... most of which/who are merely Circle-Jerks

I cld continue, however, criticism-ing, as y'all know
is not my forte (pardon me for not being able
to put that accent over the "e"

;an accent grave?

Ed Baker said...

well
so don't criticize me too severely

I was almost right I was thinking on the
other-way leaning accent the aigu
which
opposes /contradicts the (accent) grave

so,
you can criticize my spelling
but
don't mess-around with/in my mind.

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Ed,

I just saw this line (at John Latta's blog)William Carlos Williams to Zukofsky:

"The only thing that has ever seemed to me to be important is never to yield an inch of what is to the mind important—and to let the life take care of itself".

And so the difference between a good and bad critic: the good ignore the bad spelling.

Ed Baker said...

off center a bit but now that you mention LZ and WCW
you know

that Manhattan group who after the phacht of their doings
became known as The Objectivist School
that
Ted was a 'member' of that group?

I got a picture (in a book) around here

sitting in a sort-of circle of chairs

there is on the left Ted Enslin and to his left
the Usual Suspects:

Rakosi, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen (and as I recall) Williams also there.

looks like they were meeting in one of those cold basement rooms
of a church.... maybe St.Marks?

John B-R said...

Hi, Conrad, long time no etc ... you quote WCW to LZ:

"The only thing that has ever seemed to me to be important is never to yield an inch of what is to the mind important—and to let the life take care of itself".

I don't understand this. Why is it important to never yield an inch etc if it has no effect on the life? (Of course WCW always did get a little wacky when writing to LZ ...)

I think we have a lot of great literary critics, by the way. It's just that they're not literary critics. They're philosophers, affect theorists, film studies people, etc etc. I can name names.

Anyway, it's always a pleasure to eavesdrop on two such interesting gentlemen.

John B-R said...

Did I say two? I mean three ... Sorry, Ed.

Alan Baker said...

I think the WCW quote could be read in two ways: first, it seems brutally uncompromising - let us not forget the concentration camp guards who listened to Mozart in their spare time (therefore, I'm with John; life is as important as any 'work' - second, it could be read as good advice, in the sense we'd been talking about i.e. try and separate objective critique of poetry from friendships, socialising and networking. Let's give WCW the benfit of the doubt and assume the latter.

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Hello John!

Actually, I took Williams's quote as being illustrative of a 'mindfulness'property of poetry that seems to be lacking today.

As for your second point, I must draw a distinction between 'criticism' and academia: in my view, the two have nothing in common. Literary criticism is a thing unto itself. Affect theory is affect theory, not criticism, in the sense that it cannot give the full contour & character of a literary work (however ingeniously) without also peddling affect theory. Academic theory is a good thing but it's neither a necessary nor sufficient condtion of good criticism.

The only thing that counts as proper literary criticism is 'literary criticism', and we have plenty of theorists to sample, from Aristotle to Arnold to Silliman. I suppose I lament the loss of the literary critic the way I lament the non-existence today of the 'public intellectual', something young people once actually underwent years of academic discipline to become.

It's curious to me (but not surprising) that the two have virtually vanished off the face of the planet (well, the North American side of it).

Ed Baker said...

here
criticize this:


https://plus.google.com/u/0/109262383606113952045/posts

he looked at my painting for nearly a full minute
& said: "I understand this. What makes you think that
I don't understand."

as I was not interested in anyones "understanding" I did not reply. Then
he turned to Dennis & said;
"Is your brother crazy? Why isn't he more like you... like everybody else?"

AHH. my father. my greatest supporter-critic!

John B-R said...

FIrst, while you guys may better interpret WCW than I, one of my favorite aspects of the WCW/LZ correspondence is the way WCW was actually utterly mystified and tongue-tied in the face of LZ. He tries SO HARD, but clearly doesn't get him, tho he knows that LZ is important in some way. I think the good doctor is intimidated ... especially when he has to comment on just about any of LZ's writings ...

But anyway:

I doubt a literary critic is any more able to give the full contour of a work of literature than is an affect theorist, after all, a literary critic pushes "literary criticism", doesn't she?

Emphasis on **full contour**.

I believe the reason for the interest so many (in and out of) academia have for atrworks is that they can NEVER be fully unpacked.

Therefore a Lauren Berlant, say (affect theory) or a Lyotard (namy writings) may have as valuable insights into a work of art as a strictly "literary" critic.

[Cute story interlude: read a piece yesterday by Alan Davies, on Emma Bee Bernstein. "Charles has from-time-to-time-over-the-years reminded me of something that happened at a poetry reading that I gave at the Ear Inn. Emma was perhaps five or six at the time. After I had given my reading Emma turned to Charles and said — I think I understand Alan Davies. She evidently said this in seeming earnestness / and it was doubtless in response to what I had just read. So it was a considered and a serious response."]

Let me ask what I think might be a fruitful question:

Since you distinguish between "literary criticism" and all other genres, how would you define the strictly literary?

Ed Baker said...

well
since you asked

I would (conditionally" de:fine "strictly literary"
as being
snake-like
absent any

metaphorical
symbiosis

in other words
the "straitly literary" is
rather

obtuse


& is only known

1. after the phacht
2. when seen by The Blind Man

I just did another painting.
Put my second "snake" in this piece.
am calling the piece : Nagini: hissssss

what does this mean?
what does anything?

Conrad DiDiodato said...

John,

I suppose I'm committed to giving a 'genre' description of 'literary criticism'.But I won't do it in the way, for example, that an art critic puts forward neoformalist or representational criteria of what constitutes artwork. I can say, to begin with, what literary criticism certainly isn't. To discuss art by the type of artwork it's defined as being, whatever the name, is only to do part of the work of giving the 'thing' itself. Presumably things other than artworks & art in general can be considered 'representational' or 'neoformalist'. And since academics, by the nature of their work,are restricted to offering critiques by the use of similar names & characterizations only (as affect theory, culture studies, etc) true literary criticism necessarily eludes them. Lyotard is a brilliant culture (not literary) critic.

To fail to appreciate this difference is to fail to appreciate Weinberger's lament for the real literary critic to whom readers can turn for significant ideas.Academics can clarify problems and introduce useful distinctions; what seems to be required, however, is a kind enlightened 'generalist' perspective with its own benchmarks and exemplars. Or a sense of received traditions that accord aptly with a distinctive style of writing (and talking) about literature & art.

John B-R said...

Conrad,what you offer is a "negative theology", so to speak, whereby the literary critic is only known by what she is not. I don't know how one can extract difference from a negative theology, I'm not claiming one can't, I'm simply saying I don't know how ...

So when you write "To fail to appreciate this difference is to fail to appreciate Weinberger's lament for the real literary critic to whom readers can turn for significant ideas" all I can say is ***at this point*** in our discussion I do indeed fail to appreciate it. Because I still don't know what a "real" or "pure" literary critic is.

I am, of course, making the assumption that you're not proposing we return to the well-wrought urn thing, and the New
Criticism ...

Lyotard is actually a brilliant art critic as well as philosopher/cultural critic. (By the way, his newly translated Discourse/Figure is all about the inability of discourse to engage with the totality of nonlinguistic representation ...)

Given what you say, how account for Foucault's utterly brilliant reading of Roussel, Lacan's utterly brilliant and justly famous reading of The Purloined Letter, Deleuze on Proust, Heidegger on Holderlin, etc etc??

I realize that these last two paragraphs are potentially somewhat besides the point, since I'm still not sure what a "pure" literary critic is, or why you don't want to include the folks named above in that category. So I'm willing to discard these potential red herrings ...

I do think that academics / theorists / whatever do two kinds of work: one is the very specialized kind of disciplinary work that might be represented by a certain kind of analytic philosophy. The other is much more interdisciplinary as they say, which really means sans-discipline, and which leads to good work.

Do you think Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a good literary critic? (She's an academic) What about Barrett Watten? (ditto) I could list a million of em ... even Ashbery has been teaching for many years, and his books of prose on other authors (what's it called? The Other Tradition or something?) is really good.

Notice, all I'm really doing is suggesting that valid and useful and important literary criticism can a) come from within the academy and b) come from philosophers, theorists, etc.

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Well,

let's look at modernism or, at least, how it was needlessly usurped by the poststructuralists. There was no inevitability about it: it consisted of a series of well-placed strategic moves (after Foucault,Barthes, Eco)that banished meaning from an authorial center, to the peripheries of language & convention. The death of the "great critic" seems to coincide with the death of language or, inversely, by the rise of the New Sentence. I'll make the even stronger case that the death of the "lyrical voice" coincided with the experimentalist poetries of our day. There's no need to go into the details: you know where I'm going with this.

We can't time-travel back to Eliot's day and so I'll propose a "altermodernist" version of the "well wrought urn" tradition more attuned to our contemporary poetic sensibilities. I'm using a term marxists Hardt-Negri coined in "commonwealth" to talk about capitalism not as an absolute limit but rather a horizon for locating significant "resistances" to a capitalist totality.

Brooks read paradox and ambiguity--significant ruptures from the past-- into the text but kept the text as a significant 'referent'. Ruptures from the 'great book' seem to be tolerated, giving rise to many interesting poetries, but not without referring to benchmarks & exemplars. The intellectual, here as in Hardt-Negri, is not the privileged transmitter of 'esoterica': s/he will be one among many theorists (like us)and writers.

The literary critic, in this "altermodernist" sense, is not the specialist writing good literary one-offs (Foucault on Roussel. And wasn't his critique of "Las Meninas" brilliant!). I envisage more the interdisciplinary than purely theoretical: the writer who, like Assouline's view of Baudelaire in a recent blog article, rather mixes his genres, throws off the censors or critics and makes a literary career of looking for originality in the most unexamined places ("ailleurs"). The writer in whom the poet and critic are practically indistinguishable. But I don't like the interdisciplinary model either since it's too closely tied to poststructuralism, and has recently evolved into the stupidities of Perloff's "unoriginal genius" and Goldsmith's "creative plagiarism".

I can't comment on DuPlessis but as for Watten,he's everthing my poet-critic can never be.

John B-R said...

OK, Conrad, I'm beginning to see where you're coming from.

In the first place, I think we have different views of poststructuralism. I don't think it needlessly usurped modernism (without claiming for it any sort of inevitability). I think poststructuralism is modernism stripped of its utopian aspects, so that when Lyotard writes of the end of the grand recit, he's really saying the end of the utopian grand recit. That's my interpretation, and I certainly won't argue with a different one. (I wouldn't be "postmodern" if I did!)

Now to a second point where I think we see things differently. You write: "Brooks read paradox and ambiguity--significant ruptures from the past-- into the text but kept the text as a significant 'referent'." Well, I keep waiting to read some poststructuralist/postmodernist who doesn't, but I've yet to find one. Admittedly, a Derrida has a lot more "fun" with a text than a Brooks, but he never really strays far from it, and he's the usual suspect.

I see the postmodern/poststructural in TJ Clark's terms: a freaked-out (as in "don't take the brown acid") modernism under the horrific and paralysing sign of a reasonable complete modernity, made possible by a digitized and financialized global tho uneven economy.

You write: "The intellectual, here as in Hardt-Negri, is not the privileged transmitter of 'esoterica': s/he will be one among many theorists (like us)and writers."

I don't see ANY of the figures I've mentioned, and I don't see academics either, as "privileged transmitters of 'esoterica'. But you'll have to forgive me here, I've worked on a university campus for almost 25 years, I read Hegel for fun, etc so what do I know from esoterica? You will just have to forgive me my myopia. (I hope you will forgive me)

You write: "The death of the "great critic" seems to coincide with the death of language or, inversely, by the rise of the New Sentence."

Well, coincide, yes, but not cause and effect. The period in question is the 1970s, which is when the new neoliberal-fascist state began to stir (and I use fascist in Mussolini's sense, to describe "the corporate state" under which we now live (something much light Negri & Hardt's Empire). Remember those years? Reagan-Thatcher, the fall of the so-called-tho-not-really communist states, the rise of petty nationalism and the resurgence of tribes, fundamentalist religions, AIDS, etc etc ... I''ll return to this later. Lyotard's Postmodern Condition is, I think from 78 ...

We all know how much the corporate state likes intellectuals. Look at France, where the big intellectual star is Bernard-Henri Levy (not Assouline). Or look at Italy, where Berlusconi owns the media.

But:

I think there's plenty of good thinking and writing about literature these days, but it's on the margins now, because of politics and economics. Jacket, and now Jacket2, have good essays.So does How2. John Latta (whom you mention) makes me think (I think he inherited Edward Dahlberg's vocabulary!). Brenda Iijima makes me think. So do you. Without attempting flattery, you seem as interesting as any of those old guys.

And where it's not in the margins, it's in academia, because academics are among the few who are paid to think. Whether or not she's a strictly literary critic, is Lauren Berlant a public intellectual? Well, she does blog, and it is a good blog ... does that qualify?

Finally, you write, quite eloquently, "I envisage ... the writer who, ... rather mixes his genres, throws off the censors or critics and makes a literary career of looking for originality in the most unexamined places ("ailleurs"). The writer in whom the poet and critic are practically indistinguishable." For the reasons listed above, I don't think there's a space for such a career in the Anglophone world these days ...

Conrad DiDiodato said...

I think Alice Oswald is a poet with the right idea about the nature of poetry (and so a candidate for literary-critic: I'll ignore the irony of her withdrawing from the T.S.Eliot prize. I think the poor man's memory's been unjustly mired in UK politics):

"..for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking. It goes lower than rhetoric, lower than conversation, lower than logic, right down to the very faint honest voice at the bottom of the skull. You can hear that voice in a letter written by the 16th‑century poet Thomas Wyatt to his son: "No doubt in any thing you do, if you ask yourself or examine the thing for yourself afore you do it, you shall find, if it be evil, a repining against it. My son, for our Lord's love, keep well that repining" (from Alan's Thursday, December 15 blog post)

I like that "voice at the bottom of the skull", just where I seem to hear most of my own literary chatter. And I record it unfiltered, unmediated by the current Canadian "literacy by bureaucracy" standards. I calls 'em as I sees 'em. It's the source of the poem, not affect theory, paid sabbatical leave, government research grants, "official verse culture". It's the voice on the margins that matter.

People who are paid to think about 'poetry' are, by definition, charlatans & fakes: and so very few academics can actually write good poetry. So very very few (Berryman, Wright perhaps)It'd be nice to ignore them except (as you know) they control the "means of literary production" through university presses and editorial boards, and hold their own students hostage by putting their works on courses of study. Their stranglehold on the literary imagination is, in my view, as pernicious as that of the banks, hedge funds and financial institutions in the arts community.

It's time to call them out and hold them responsible for the atrocities committed against language and the lyrical self: literally snatching out from under all of us both 'world'& 'word'.

John B-R said...

Conrad--

You write:

"People who are paid to think about 'poetry' are, by definition, charlatans & fakes:"

Samuel Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

It might have been a bitter moment for him, but nevertheless he did get paid for his writing, and I think (I think) we would both agree that the world is better because his "Lives of the Poets" is in it.

" ... and so very few academics can actually write good poetry. So very very few (Berryman, Wright perhaps)It'd be nice to ignore them"

Two responses: 1) I think we will need to define what's meant by good poetry, not just in this context. I for one don't particularly care whether poetry reaches any heights. I'm more interested in it because it a way of making sense of the world, and since I'm interested in people, I'm interested in the sens they try to make ... 2) Even before we define good poetry, time has a way of effacing the poetry that's unnecessary, so, again, "what thou lovest well remains / the rest is chaff" (memory quote, close I hope).

" ... except (as you know) they control the "means of literary production" through university presses and editorial boards, and hold their own students hostage by putting their works on courses of study. Their stranglehold on the literary imagination is, in my view, as pernicious as that of the banks, hedge funds and financial institutions in the arts community."

I too have problems with authority, whether it comes from academic, TS Eliot prizes, big commercial publishing houses . etc etc. Which is why I'm rather anarchist about poetry. And prefer 1,000,000 poems a day from 1,000,000 people to any notion of good poetry. After all, the notion of "good poetry" is itself a form of authority.

But now I get why you have this visceral thing vis-a-vis academia. To me, academics are just like civilians, for the most part, just going to work each day, ... but that's cause I work with them. It probably does seem like some behemothic tyrant from the outside ... (forget for a moment that behemothic probably isn't a word (or wasn't til a moment ago)

"It's time to call them out and hold them responsible for the atrocities committed against language and the lyrical self: literally snatching out from under all of us both 'world'& 'word'."

I don't care about atrocities against language, or, better, poet's atrocities against language are so far down the list of said atrocities that they barely register. I am much more alarmed by media's atrocities, politician's atrocities, capital's atrocities, religion's atrocities, science deniers' atrocities, etc. Poets won't sink the ship; these other folks will.

But I think we FINALLY come to the meat of the WHOLE discussion when you write "atrocities committed against ... the lyrical self: literally snatching out from under all of us both 'world'& 'word'."

Would you like to have a discussion about "the lyrical self"? If yes, Alan, if you're still reading, would you like to join us?If so, where should we conduct it? Is this the appropriate place.

I think it would be a very important discussion to have.

Conrad DiDiodato said...

John,

by 'lyrical' I mean the restoration of authorial presence:i.e the capacity of a work's internal structures (whatever they may be: from traditional rhythm, figurative devices,to more contemporary flarf, appropriation techniques, etc)to draw a reader's attention to capacities for engagement & absorption. It's a minimal condition that the work's individual properties be seen as clearly discernible parts, which means I ought to be able to see the type of writing it presumes to be. However, it's a necessary ('formal') condition that the reader be critically responsive to the way properties engagingly relate to form.

By my formulation of the 'lyrical' even the view of poetry as "multitude" you instance ("1,000,000 poems a day from 1,000,000 people") can be considered 'formal' or 'lyrical'. Since something like a notion of 'authorial presence' is obviously preserved and offered as a poetic model, the validity or appropriateness of a "multitude" ideal(after Antonio Negri)will also have to meet some sort of threshold.Even the 1.000,000 poems a day can be considered substandard & fail formally, in which case it subtends a 'lyrical'notion that's quite different from a contemporary notion of art as serving no measurable yardsticks at all, eschewing them, in fact, as modernist "tyrannies".

A rough definition of 'lyrical'.

Alan Baker said...

John, Conrad, Ed (if you're listening)
I'm very happy to host this duscussion, thought I may, at some point, lift it from the comments stream and put it somewhere else (Litter maybe...). I know the discussion has morphed into something else now, but briefly, on the previous topic, I can suggest two very good critics who may represent a whole lot more: they are Robert Sheppard (http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/) and Tony Lopez, whose Salt book "Meaning Performance" discusses a wide range of poetry and poetics, and manages to include WS Graham's relation to 1940s Fitzrovia and national identity in Basil Bunting's "Briggflatts".

Lyrical = song. Singing can be a way of losing oneself. The effacement of 'the self' in much post-modern poetry seems to aiming at a similar goal to that of Buddhism, in which belief system the self is a social and psychological construct that has to be acknowledged as such before enlightenment can happen i.e. before we can be selflessly compassionate towards others (that's my own quickly-thought-up definition).

Alan

Ed Baker said...

"Lyrical Poetry"
&, yes I am 'listening'
to the beat-beat-beat
of the tituhnabulating of the bells
bells bells
and am jus a-bout to re:trace my steps

count syllablells
,meter
,stanzas
&pay
all
due attention to rhythm
& spelling!

but/hoever I must
first

! get the chile-from-scratch going
2. learn French so's I can
follow

in the origin; cadences, meanings &
inyourenddos

-Badio,Foucault (especially his chapt-her:
Scienttia Sexualis), and (when I master The German
get me some of that Goethe 'stuff' down pat &

On The Way To Language (via Heidegger

Hell,
Lyrical Poetry?

it s All about relationships, sex, and ring-around-the-
rosy kitchen hearth!

wrll

now that I am
a-listening/reading/writin?

I best pay attention to spelling
& punckchewation...

or
as I stole this from Nanao :

sing
dance
leave

which is about what my Original Muse said to me just father she said:
"All you think about is SEX!"
to which I replied: meekly::

"That's not all that I think about."

so
that night I left (her &) Manhattan that was Sept 10.
(she lives (still) about 5 blocks from the
was
two towers.

net morning I flick on the tv to see
live broadcast of smoke coming out of top
of one of the buildings

then the other one (that looks like a missile or a plane just crashed into the tower," said the announcer.

then

dots coming down people then firemen and tv guys broadcasting it as it was happening
asked a fireman "what's those thuds?

"People jumping out and hitting bottom.... dead."

anyway

let's count syllables :

one
two
buckle-my-shoe

three, four
shut the
door

(I think Ill call F. I mean
after 45 years AND 9/11

maybe she still has

The Hots for Me?

John B-R said...

I have no objection to this morphing into a Litter discussion, Alan, if that appeals to you.

And I have no objection to either yours or Conrad's definition of lyric. Tho I am having a great deal of trouble figuring what poetry would be excluded from lyric as so defined.

To get some clarity, tho, on something else you say, Conrad ("threshold.Even the 1.000,000 poems a day can be considered substandard & fail formally, in which case it subtends a 'lyrical' notion that's quite different from a contemporary notion of art as serving no measurable yardsticks at all, eschewing them, in fact, as modernist "tyrannies"):

I wonder if the formal threshold that creates the possibility for failure you mention is political, or aesthetico-political (meaing there's no way to disentangle the aesthetic from the political). I mean, there are "multitudes" ... and then there are "multitudes", the difference between them being some kind of ability/inability to meet an aesthetic/political standard.

What if the formal threshold creates what Berlant (!) (you'll have to forgive me, Conrad) calls Cruel Optimism. That is, what if the formal threshold promises onething (positive) but delivers another (a kind of horrible life)?

So we may have to define our yardsticks.

The ssend half of your quote reads: "...a 'lyrical' notion that's quite different from a contemporary notion of art as serving no measurable yardsticks at all, eschewing them, in fact, as modernist "tyrannies"

OK, assuming we just say Fuck Your Modernist Tyrannies, is it still possible to find a yardstick that doesn't serve some other form of tyranny? That question assumes nothing, by the way. I ask it openly, not rhetorically. But of course if I have to ask it I leave open this possibility: What if it isn't?

I think we need (I need) to get specific on two things: what kind of poetry is excluded from the lyric as you define it, and what non-tyrannical yardsticks can we find.

As Fran O'Hara said in Personism, this is getting good, isn't it?

John B-R said...

Fran is Frank, but he wouldn't mind the typo.

And Ed, I want you in on this, too.

Conrad DiDiodato said...

I can't exclude any poetry since poetry, by my 'lyrical' definition, can't be excluded by anything: and that includes appropriation, chance-directed, restraint-based,fragments (Watten), 'Sentences'(Grenier) etc. To say that it must is circular. The Language poet Ron Silliman, for example, likes to refer to 'formalism' as the school of Quietude. Though he claims his new 'sentence' is also a new method of literary analysis",his 'new sentence' is actually a death-sentence.

To the 70s iconoclasts (whose influence til the present is still strongly felt) I say there's no escaping the "thresholds" or "benchmarks" against which even Silliman's deliberate "sly and carefully-honed incommensurabilities"
have to be judged (I'm always amazed at the traditionalist terminology Silliman employs, like 'quantity', 'measure','structure', 'syllogism', when he tries to dismantle traditional verse). Anyways, I attribute the Language phenomenon to its strong academic affiliations.

I like the 'aesthetico-political' idea, one that certainly jibes with my own ideological impulses. Any 'poetics'(aesthetics in general) that seeks to overturn & exclude, even resorting to this Sillimanesque name-calling--or is certainly administered in some such language--is political to the nth degree. If Heidegger can make his ontology a Nazi propaganda tool and all but eliminate his Husserlian adversaries, well...Yes, yardsticks in the wrong hands can serve "other tyrannies". But it was the postmodernists who used this sort of language to condemn modernism and its patrician poetics. Remember the outrage over Derrida's accusing the oppressed holocaust survivors of using a language of the oppressors? David H. Hirsch wrote "Deconstruction after Auschwitz" as reply.

Politics and poetry (literature, philosophy, etc) can easily turn combustible. Language atrocities may be far down the list but it still does count as one, with recognizable causes, agents and tendencies. Was the Egyptian slogan-couplet not a powerful antidote to the Mubarak tyranny? A rhyming revolution. So (in response to your twofold request): (a)nothing is excluded by a true 'lyrical' poetry that's radically person-centered (whether 1 or 1,000,000, single poet or the "multitude") and attentive to 'form', and (b)yes, yardsticks can turn tyrannical unless safeguarded by attention to strictly 'cultural' (old school) narratives of style, genre and literariness(all of which can also be linked to national identities).

John B-R said...

OK. Conrad, so what you're basically saying is at least in large part Blake's "Poetry fetter'd fetters the human race"??

I'm 100000% with you if that's it. That's my position at least. I had a t-shirt once that said that.

If I'm wrong about the Blake, then you'll have to help me out. You'll have to help me out anyway, because I want to understand what you mean by standards or yardsticks if everything's in.

Or is the really important thing to you a humanism? If you're a humanist, I can see the problem with postmodernism etc ...

Or??? Help me out, Conrad, I think I'm getting close to getting it.

As for "Remember the outrage over Derrida's accusing the oppressed holocaust survivors of using a language of the oppressors?" I don't, actually. This is not disingenuousness. Where did he do that? I believe you, but I find it hard to reconcile with his very eloquent and sympathetic work on Celan.

John B-R said...

Oh, and I forgot to ask, when you write about "safeguarded by attention to strictly 'cultural' (old school) narratives of style, genre and literariness(all of which can also be linked to national identities)", how do these safeguards work?

Conrad DiDiodato said...

John,

I most definitely am a humanist, in tradition of Matthew Arnold (I say unabashedly!). I'll reflect more on the 'humanist' thing this weekend. And I'll make clearer what the 'benchmarks' amount to.

I forget the details but you'll have to read Hirsch's book where he makes no bones about his linking 'deconstruction' to a great moral evil. I'm not taking sides here: just a reminder of how 'political' theory can get.

I just heard Hitchens died: there was a guy with guts (defending Rushdie back in the day) and intellectual integrity (whatever you thought of his views). A great 'public intellectual' too.

John B-R said...

Hi, Conrad--

At least I got the humanist thing right. Hopefully I was close with the Blake. There's nothing wrong with being a humanist, I should think, as long as it's a nuanced humanism, meaning one informed by humanism's not always savory politics - I'm thinking how humanism was used to justify a certain kind of imperial and racist system in the c19. But I'm not advocating throwing out the baby with the bathwater, just learning from the past's mistakes.

I think the same could be said for big T Theory. I now recall what you're talking about: the whole De Man controversy. I remember Derrida's essay in Critical Inquiry. When I read it I thought: weak, very weak. And his response to its critics was wrong-headed and also weak (not that it could have been strong - not that kind of weak).

But that doesn't mean e.g. Derrida or Theory can be *reduced* to "only that kind of thing" any more than humanism can be reduced to its bad points.

That would be like claiming that Deleuze and Guattari were anti-Palestinians because the Israeli Defense Forces made (conscious) use of their notions of transversality and the war machine in their Gaza invasions.

Personally, I am a humanist posthumanist romantic classically-oriented conceptualist jazz langpo beatnik ironic object-oriented mystical holistic cynical Wobbly Enthusiast Enlightenment figure with strong libertarian anarcho-socialist Social Democratic tendencies, and I make no apologies for it.

I look forward to learning more about your humanism and benchmarks and everything

And

Conrad DiDiodato said...

John,

I suppose I'll have to defend my 'humanist' defense of poetry (after Matthew Arnold)along some such lines as the following: in his "The Study of Poetry" Arnold says poetry ought to (a)provide models of the 'best'(& that can mean anything from tanka to flarf), (b)adhere to twin ideals of "truth and seriousness" and (c)employ key stylistic components of diction, rhythm, etc with a view to creating a distinctively poetic medium.

The humanism of it all derives from Arnold's remarkable claim that "Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry." It's this last line I've kept with me since my youth: and is probably the reason I write poetry instead of theology and philosophy. I honestly do believe that poetry is the only real human language.My beef with Langpo is that they've managed, within the course of about 30 years, to subvert these venerable 'humanist' principles.

Am I friggin nuts? Am I living in Victorian England or something? No: in fact, nobody is likely to defend more passionately the writings of Derrida, Deleuze & Barthes than yours truly. I can't speak highly enough, in particular, of Deleuze and Guattari's "Thousand Plateaus", a work I credit with having freed up my own poetic energies. It wasn't too long ago I contributed reams to the old online Deleuze-Guattari "Spoon Collective"(University of Virginia) whose archives can be still viewed.A crazy radical sort of online forum where "lines of flight" daily collided with politics, poetry,psychoanalysis culminating in the wildest thought experiments I'd ever encountered.

So here I am: a strange modernist/postmodernist hybrid who believes in their synthesis, & actively works towards showing it in my own stuff.So, for example, how do I reconcile the Arnoldian ideals of "truth and seriousness" to experimental poetries. Aside from the fact that the 'experimental' has always resided in 'formal' poetries anyways,(as tangential properties which weren't much talked about),well, what part of John B-R's "Zeitgeist Spam" project isn't interested in unearthing the most salient contemporary ideals of art & culture? I suppose if placed on a continuum "In the House of the Hangman" can be placed closer to Silliman than anything I write, which probably lies somewhere between lyrical brashness of an Irving Layton or Charles Olson and bpNichol's broken laments for a true Canadian literary identity.

Ed Baker said...

hell
man!
hardly anyboddhi
know a Wobbly!

or who the Wobblies were...
must be them California Dock
workers of tester-yore?

Eric Hoffer?
Henry Miller??

nothing like writing "porn" at a nickel a word
to survive?

must be Union & Political/Religious correctness... now.

I am now thinking about this girl that picked me up when
I was hitch-hiking up coast (Hgwy 5?) of CA
in about 1966... said she was Joe Hills niece... took me to the commune that she was living on..

she had saddle-sores so, instead of fucking.... we slept.

John B-R said...

Ed, we're all Joe Hill's children ... some know it, some don't, at last not yet ...

Conrad, I don't think we disagree about much of anything, really. It's just a question of getting familiar with each other's vocabularies/frames of reference, etc.

As you explain them, I think ZS and In the House of the Hangman definitely reflect Arnoldian sensibilities of seriousness and truth. And it should be needless to say I always try my hardest to do my best, so that should qualify as "the best".

ITH is dedicated to my grandsons, by the way, my daughter's 9 month old triplets. They're going to inherit a rather fucked-up world, and I want them to say, "Well grandpa had his eyes open, he did what he could, and he was on our side." How much more humanist can it get, really?

I dont think you're nuts. The work of D&G, Derrida, etc etc also exemplify these values, tho they would use different words to describe them. After all, what is deconstruction but an attempt to reveal that we all always stop short of truth and seriousness? Why else pursue nomadic lines of flight except to live and fight for those values another day? When Derrida says that these are values we can never actually reach, I wonder whether Arnold would agree. I haven't read his poetry recently, but I think he might, at least on occasion, else why write a poem like "Dover Beach"?

You write: "My beef with Langpo is that they've managed, within the course of about 30 years, to subvert these venerable 'humanist' principles." I actually don't think they do, tho its a large "they'. Some language poets are pretty damned, too damned, doctrinaire. But others really aren't. I think of, say, Rae Armantrout, or Stephen Ratcliffe or Clark Coolidge - I think their recent work is quite humanist in the sense we're discussing. I think that Langpo **tried** to subvert a kind of humanism without realizing that they were really more humanist than the humanism they thought they were subverting. But maybe we ought to discuss why we think what we think about Langpo ...

I think the only problem with "humanism" is when it falls into "the wrong hands" and an antiquated version of it is used to justify iniquities and inequities, which often happens. But that need not bother a true humanist one bit.

John B-R said...

I also thought you'd enjoy this, since you mentioned Hitchens. It's not very positive about him, but it does reflect his public nature. It's from a website called Lenin's Tomb, which i really enjoy:

... it's too long to post here, so if you're interested ...

The Late Christopher Hitchens

Ed Baker said...

J
you mean Liberals defend murder?
or
is it that we weren't the ones to go into Iraq?

In the name of Holy Righteousness?

John B-R said...

Ed, yes, yes and yes. The problem isn't defending murder; there are circumstances under which virtually everyone does that. The problem is pretending you're not defending murder when you are.

Alan Baker said...

Excellent discussion gentlemen, which I largely feel unqualified to contribute to: 'listen and learn' is probably my best option. Conrad, I love the quote from Arnold: where he says "...religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry" he reminds me of Wallace Stevens, who also seemed to envisage poetry as an alternative to religion (or as an alternative religion).

P.S. If you guys keep this up long enough I'll be able to claim I'm a rival to Pierre Assouline in terms of number of comments (only another 500 or so to go...)

Ed Baker said...

well
Alan

being either

"qualified" or "Unqualified to
comment/add to

any thing has

never stopped me !

These two guys swamp me that's why I continue along
almost alone
drawing/paintin and poeming about

(What's her name) !

every thing else is b o l o g n a


especially religion, politics and philosophy

John B-R said...

No, Ed,

"drawing/paintin and poeming about / (What's her name) !" ***is*** religion, politics and philosophy! (Just not all of it)

Ed Baker said...

yeah... I guessed as much sort of in
stinkedtivelee.

took a picture of latest done in today's 4 a.m.
painting of "her"
"she" is walking through door-way with Snake over
"her" self nude !

will send it to you

even though this Apple "thing" takes photos in re:verse!

then? back to my Intellectual/Philosophical?Damn Skippy
purrsuits