Stephen Burt in n+1, Number 4

Excerpted from the symposium on "American Writing Today:"

Whom should more poets follow, or at least contemplate? Again, in poetry: George Herbert, Christopher Smart, pre-1937 W.H. Auden, Basil Bunting, Donald Davie, James K. Baxter, post-1964 Robert Lowell. Among living writers, maybe Thylias Mass, Juan Felipe Herrera, Laura Kasischke, Liz Waldner. In poetry criticism: William Empson, Donald Davie.

What current modes clog the pipeline and tire me out? (1) Quasi-automatic writing and a kind of comic quasi-surrealism, especially when the author wants to be winning, funny, "entertaining," and shocking at the same time. (2) Slack free-verse autobiography; chatty anecdote without interesting form. (3) Endless zeroxes of '50s formalist poems, copies of Anthony Hecht and Howard Nemerov. (4) "Spirituality," which, pursued as a primary goal, tends to make poems sound like bad translations.

Most poets today are writing either for a coterie of readers they know personally, who want to participate in the social circulation of new work (rather than in the rereading of old work), or else (in part) for an academic market in which the more you publish (as long as it's in semiprestigious venues), the more your chances for tenure and promotion.

Both paradigns encourage overproduction. Younger poets, in particular, seem to rush things, to make public ten pounds of cookie dough when, had they waited, they might have had five pounds of tasty cookies. I don't know what any of us can do about that, and for certain poets whose work is supposed to sound "raw" (such as Kasischke and Waldner) that may not even amount to a disadvantage.

Anything you can do 100 times in 100 poems without learning a new trick isn't worth doing more than twice. Sense is harder than nonesense; order is harder than disorder. But, as Stevens said, "A great disorder is an order"; as Dickenson said, "Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye."

Something by Caleb Crain, somewhat less memorable, followed.

hacia la multitud

Because it seems the thing to do (plenty more here), and having been a little more critical over on Posthegemony, a snippet from Pablo Neruda, specifically (almost) the end of his monumental Canto General:

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rev tim haggard: music saturday

A song I listened to recently put me in mind of Reverend Tim Haggard's situation.

The song is by the band 'Garbage.'

The title of the song is "Sex is not the enemy"

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O Bailan Todos o No Bailan Nadie

Crossposted from Posthegemony, as this bears, dare I say it, on some earlier discussions concerning politics, performativity, and the New Left. But I'll let others draw whatever morals or conclusions they will.

I've mentioned Douglas Oliver's Diagram Poems (1979) before, following a discussion of Deleuze's concept of the diagram. And I remember somewhere, sometime reading an essay about, or simply mentioning, these poems--I had thought that it was in Marshall Blonsky's On Signs, but no. Then Oliver came up again in a conversation last year with my friend Carol Watts. So I felt I should track this book down.

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Dropped out of the calendar

From Walter Benjamin, section ten of "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (Illuminations):

It is–if one follows Bergson–the actualization of the durée which rids man's soul of obsession with time.  Proust shared this belief, and from it he developed the lifelong exercises in which he strove to bring to light past things saturated with all the reminiscenses that had worked their way into his pores during his sojourn in the unconscious.  Proust was an incomparable reader of Fleurs du mal, for he sensed that it contained kindred elements.  Familiarity with Baudelaire must include Proust's experience with him.  Proust writes:  "Time is peculiarly chopped up in Baudelaire; only a very few days open up, they are significant ones.  Thus it is understandable why turns of phrases like 'one evening' occur frequently in his works."  These significant days are days of recollection, not marked by any experience.  They are not connected with the other days, but stand out from time.  As for their substance, Baudelaire has defined it in the notion of the correspondances, a concept that in Baudelaire stands side by side and unconnected with the notion of "modern beauty."

Disregarding the scholarly literature on the correspondances (the common property of the mystics; Baudelaire encountered them in Fourier's writings), Proust no longer fusses about the artistic variations on the situation which are supplied by synaesthesia.  The important thing is that the correspondances record a concept of experience which includes ritual elements.  Only by appropriating these elements was Baudelaire able to fathom the full meaning of the breakdown which he, a modern man, was witnessing.  Only in this way was he able to recognize in it the challenge meant for him alone, a challenge which he incorporated in the Fleurs du mal.

[...]

The correspondances are the data of remembrance–not historical data, but data of prehistory.  What makes festive days great and significant is the encounter with an earlier life.  Baudelaire recorded this in a sonnet entitled "La Vie antérieure." The images of caves and vegetation, of clouds and waves which are evoked at the beginning of this second sonnet rise from the warm vapor of tears, tears of homesickness.  "The wanderer looks into the tear-veiled distance, and hysterical tears well up in his eyes," writes Baudelaire in his review of the poems of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore.  There are no simultaneous correspondences, such as were cultivated by the symbolists later.  The murmur of the past may be heard in the correspondences, and the canonical experience of them has its place in a previous life:

Les houles, en roulant les images des cieux,
Mêlaient d'une façon solennelle et mystique
Aux couleurs du couchant refléte par mes yeux.

C'est là que j'ai vécu...

The breakers, rolling the images of the sky,
Mixed, in a mystical and solemn way,
The powerful chords of their rich music
With the colors of the sunset reflected in my eyes.

There did I live...

[...] "Recueillement" traces the allegories of the old years against the deep sky:

...Vois se pencher les défuntes Années
Sur les balcons du ciel, en robes surannées

...See the dead departed Years in antiquated
Dress leaning over heaven's balconies.

In these verses Baudelaire resigns himself to paying homage to times out of mind that escaped him in the guise of the outdated.

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ALLA BANDIERA ROSSA

ALLA BANDIERA ROSSA

Per chi conosce solo il tuo colore, bandiera rossa,
tu devi realmente esistere, perché lui esista:
chi era coperto di croste è coperto di piaghe,
il bracciante diventa mendicante,
il napoletano calabrese, il calabrese africano,
l’analfabeta una bufala o un cane.
Chi conosceva appena il tuo colore, bandiera rossa,
sta per non conoscerti più, neanche coi sensi:
tu che già vanti tante glorie borghesi e operaie,
ridiventa straccio, e il più povero ti sventoli.

- Pier Paolo Pasolini

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Paxless in Americana

It's a match made in heaven.  One wonders if they know each other?  A commenter on the latter, one "Big Billy" asks a good question:

What if a pair of opposing hypocrits (where one says one thing and doesw [sic] the other, and the other says the other and does the one thing) team up? As a human, I find it impossible to constantly avoid hypocrasy [sic], so why not pair up and embrace out hypocritical natures, and then we can really progress, right? My partner will do my work for me while I do his work for him. We will both get our jobs done while approaching more exagerated extremes.
But then again, we're probably better off if you just call me an idiot too.

In this our quest, for the ultimate blog brevity I then leave it to you, dear eater, to draw your own excursions.  For it is a black and white world, with the Author sitting f'evern top (ever'n especially whilst claiming the bottom!) and we was only ever kiddin', once Hugh challenged e to a duel. 

A duel, e says!  At dawn, no less.  E dunno, somehow "be offended, but say so" just don't 'ave the same ring to it.    An' sometimes it be da fools who call idiots, "idiots" best.

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falling in line

("Revolt is a crumpled page in the waste basket," wrote Reb Tislit. "But, often, a masterpiece is born from this sacrificed page."
And Reb Ezé: "True revolt is the one inspired by the impossibility of ending. God is in perpetual revolt against God."

"In this case, I renounce the God who has sacrificed the smile," said Yukel.)

Silence envelops the city, with its buildings leaning on one another: gigantic boxes, from some of which light gleams through a haphazard opening, maybe from a blow.
He thinks of the various processions he has taken part in, parades, forced marches.
We fall into line and follow.
We do not see the face of those in front, but we know it was once ours.
It is behind this face that we age, that we let time escape, that we take leave.
"I, for my part, belong to a generation without face," said Yukel.

They were the line and the failure.

(Edmond Jabès, from The Book of Questions)

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Vertigo

THE BUILDING OF THE SKYSCRAPER

The steel worker on the girder
Learned not to look down, and does his work
And there are words we have learned
Not to look at,
Not to look for substance
Below them. But we are on the verge
Of vertigo.

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Every Day is Like Sunday

There is something about the experience of Sundays which makes the Kafka quote resonate for me, though perhaps not in the Aggadic sense that Franz intended. Because I associate Sundays less with Kafka than with a more prosaic set of lines, from a poem by Dylan Thomas, ‘That Sanity Be Kept’. I always imagine Thomas’s poem must have been written on a Sunday, though there is no evidence for this belief apart from a few suggestive lines.

Sunday is certainly not a day for those, like Thomas’ narrator, ‘sitting at open windows in their shirt’, observing ‘what passes by’. It is a day to walk arm in arm across English parks, lending love illustration. The pathos of distance in Thomas’s narration is that of a writer who does not feel fully part of the world he is observing, observation is a consolation for isolation, the writer is inevitably an outsider. Here one sublimates ones inability to lend love illustration by illustrating others doing so. The dispassionate tone of ‘regarding’, ‘observing’ (twice), ‘watching’ (twice), ‘seeing’ conceals the passion of a will to power as knowledge. In the poem’s final lines this becomes apotheosis: the narrator is ‘like some great Jehovah of the West’, achieving that omniscience to which the poet or the intellectual aspires, even though such knowledge is known to be a burden.

In the chapter of Husserl’s Ideas entitled ‘The Annihilation of the World’ the philosopher considers the possibility that the physical world be completely destroyed. Though we can conceive our embodied ego no longer existing, we cannot think the annihilation of the cogito, the transcendental ego, as it is the precondition of any ‘world’ rather than a product of it. The total absence of consciousness is inconceivable, an insane thought.

Thomas’s narrator could almost have drawn on the insight. Separation’s counterpart is the nihilism of an observation (whether phenomenological or poetic) which contemplates the world’s destruction. Thomas already conceives it. ‘Thinking of death’ is sure enough the contemplation of the narrator’s own demise, his embodied disappearance; but it also seems the possibility of this world disappearing, perhaps in the act of a vengeful God whose omnipotence complements his omniscience. Thomas’ narrator, seemingly implacable, aloof, ‘unobtrusive’, all but threatens it. This is the nihilistic implication of the apotheosis, that either myself or the world could go under, what would it matter? Impotent melancholy’s alter ego is the fury of destruction. That sanity be kept, this is to be contemplated, though it is an insane thought it is one which will keep him from insanity. The thought that he is no mere ego, but Jehovah, this megalomaniac notion is surely the result of his separation from alter. But it is his simultaneous recognition of others who, despite their painful distance, are not so very different from himself, this thought can keep insanity at bay.

Thomas’ narrator is the third, the phenomenological observer who recognizes the recognition and the misrecognition of others, ‘marks the couples’ as well as could a philosopher, but as poet brings language to bear where concepts only say so much. It is at the level of the symmetry of words that ‘invitations’ prompt ‘inventions’, a ‘gesture’ calls up a ‘grimace’. We read too quickly and overlook how well drawn this picture is. But the subtle symmetry of expression does not last; the penultimate stanza moves uncomfortably towards the imbalanced, the upset, in rhythm as in life.

Thomas probably wouldn’t recognize himself in such a reading. It may be too abstract a take on what is actually rooted in place and time. After all, he gives us the detail of a particular world, the alter of Englishness confronting the Welsh self, Welsh difference amongst English self-sameness. And what would Thomas say were he around today, looking down on the same park? He would no doubt see on the ‘littered grass’ not ‘matrons’ and ‘brass bands’ but cohorts of carefree Sunday Times readers. Or ‘letting the traffic pass’ he would see countless Sunday shoppers thronging the unquiet roads, a different litter in tow. They too somehow lend love illustration. Though beneath their calm exteriors one could detect, now as then, a certain insecurity, the dark fear of being alone or being unemployed, unable to pay the extortionate mortgage without their precarious double income. It still expresses itself in gesture and grimace. A dawning sense that this could be all there is to their lives, what Thomas calls (in a line I carry about with me every Sunday) ‘a vague bewilderment at things not turning right’.