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"When You Write, You Risk"

1/31/2015

The above was an aphorism which popped into my head a few days ago.

I might expound upon it in greater depth—what provoked the concept to arise in my consciousness—but the feelings are raw, personal, and would serve no purpose in the recounting. Suffice it to say, that when one has reached a certain age of discretion, one no longer yearns to control outcomes: the world will operate as it does, or as it must, and men and women likewise. Poetry is evocative, not expressive, "except at a secondary or even tertiary remove" quoth Joseph Salemi. One cannot predict another person's actions, as one might those of a molecule in a scientific experiment.

Perhaps some social scientists would reduce man so, but let me not. Even as a boy, I had evidence, that words provoked sometimes erratic responses; yet erratic perhaps from the outside looking in. Nevertheless, "let the chips fall as they may" as I have said: with the press of time, well, Franz Kafka's "Next Village" may prove unreachable. Time rushes in one direction only; and all activities are fraught with risk—so there is no good point to dwelling on it.

"Expect no further word nor sign from me." What I mean to say is, even if not for a project (i.e. writing an essay), I do hope to make a dent in my Atticus. It is very easy, after the holidays and through the winter, for me to get derailed from whatever (reading) projects I have at hand; I feel, if I don't give it a concerted push, I may lose it altogether. So, hiatus for real, if I can manage it—for a fortnight or so. "All things can tempt me" alas!

Anis Shivani Against the Workshop

1/30/2015

Against the Workshop by Anis Shivani has been on my list for a while; because I thought it might help me on the essay I wanted to write, I took the plunge and acquired it. My plans, at least for the time being, have fallen through; and furthermore, instead of being a reasoned critique about the title subject, the book is merely a smattering of assorted writings, many of them available online, to diverse ends. Still, several do address it. “Why is American Fiction in Its Current Dismal State” is one of those. Nevertheless, instead of reading straight through, I’ve approached the pieces selectively. Do I really want to see an individual writer or a book demolished which I have already made my mind up on? Jorie Graham again? No, thank you.

It was heartening to read, from the introduction: “At least the [literary] gatekeepers everywhere are visibly biting the dust”. He has studied the scene, and in his essay on fiction discusses the mechanics of it, with many of his tropes applicable equally well to poetry. Still, the limits of this kind of inspection are evident. The writer today has issues to worry about beyond who gets published and why.

He writes:

Contemporary literary fiction has chosen to marginalize itself from mainstream culture. It has its own niche, like specialized Foucauldian sociology or Derridean philosophy, catering to the sensibilities of other experts in the field.

This certainly seemed an apt description of what I found recently at the sites pertaining to “conceptualism” in writing. The coterie—another of the group’s code-words—seems to be writing to no one outside of its closed academic circle. There is no reason this should be deemed wrong; even a Finley or a Momigliano surely wrote treatises for a select and narrow audience of specialists from time to time, though much else was designed to appeal to the generalist. If the general or lay reader has been dropped from consideration, one has the sense that academia tries to bring more people into its select compass. (Hence the adoption of jargon across boundaries.)

The essay “Writers in Universities” addresses more directly the issue:

University teaching has the following overlapping deleterious effects on writing: a) shrinkage of the writer’s audience to likeminded academics; b) disinterest in the fiction and poetry of public import; c) inability to redraw the given boundaries of the chosen genre; d) lack of risk-taking and subversion, because of the shrunken reconceptualization of the writer’s status; e) infinitesimal subdivisioning of the writing, rather than branching out to encompass competing genres—a typical academic malady; f) focus on immediate reward rather than continuance of the literary tradition; g) withdrawal from public engagement, to the fatal detriment of literature’s timeless values; and h) reorientation toward the lowest common denominator, dumbing down writing.

None of this is exactly hokum, but some of his points strike me as being eccentric or expressive of a curtailed outlook. In trying to summarize his gist to a friend, I wrote, “I’ve just laid my hands on” the book:

Really less substantial than I would have wished, but he [gives] a good description of all the poetry being written in today's MLA culture as being career-driven, in which case, oh this is off the cuff here, it's a three step process. 1) teachers have to teach absurd ideas like "voice" (he rants on about this) and then can't help but have their writing begin to resemble the rules they preach. 2) to make headway in your career you have to write kinda in imitation of your teachers and 3) for gods sake don't say anything substantive or wave-making as that might derail your career...

In Shivani’s own words, “University writers teach simplistic rules. The writers’ own writing then begins to reflect it.” “Yet another effect of the writer’s assimilation in the university is the degradation of the literary journal.” “Writing programs like Stanford like to take young and inexperienced writers, then mold them according to the rules.” Too bad the entire essay is not available online—I’m not inclined to try and flesh out in rehash what the author has stated succinctly himself. The book is recommended, if with the caveat that a lot of the matter addresses specific concerns and may be extraneous to one’s inquiry. Still, nuggets of gold can be worth the work of separating—there is a good concentration of ideas here, if contemporary “Provocations, Polemics, Controversies” (the book’s subtitle) in today’s literary milieu pique the curiosity.

In relation to the “conceptualism” post of a few days ago, David Need made an apropos comment at the Montevidayo site:

I guess I can’t see the point of preserving anything called “conceptualism” so I don’t see why any effort should be spent assuming “an articulation of conceptualism’s globality,” nor any point to using its “trans-national significance as a way to catalogue and historicize contemporary literary production.” It’s like wanting in on the aristocracy, isn’t it?

Jefferson obliged that revolutions must needs periodically occur; however the typical scenario, after much destruction, often sees a replacement or substitution of overlords without systemic change—as Machiavelli noted the thing hardest to effect. Hence typically the rising conservatism with age. “It’s like wanting in on the aristocracy,” and installation of oneself as the new gatekeeper to replace the fallen. This may be inevitable (nor do I ascribe such motives to the “Gringpo” crew), yet, in light of history, the introspective soul must take pause.

Caryl Churchill Top Girls Arc Theatre

1/30/2015

A Rare Production at the Den Theater

It is a rare privilege to be able to see a play by Caryl Churchill in Chicago. Arc Theater is doing a production directed by Mark Boergers which I was lucky to be at last night.

Of all living playwrights (in English), none has Churchill's range—speaking of course from my far-from-inclusive experience. It has been a long while since I read her plays: I picked up vols. I & II of the Methuen collections when I was in Stratford many moons back. It appears two further volumes have since been published, and they should be worth looking at—but I have expressed my preference these days for seeing things enacted on the stage over reading text.

Top Girls, as I remember, is one of Churchill's better plays—but, truth to tell, I found them all good. Fortunately, with what seems like two decades' intervention since I last read them, I remembered very little so it was almost like seeing it cold. Previously I blogged about having seen a production by Defiant Theater of her The Skriker—it was after that that I first read her plays: individually they are masterful (talk about experimental, I can't think of anyone who's been able to "push the boundaries" as far successfully as she), and taken as a whole the lot is incredibly varied.

Possibly some years ago I attended a Chicago production of Cloud 9, perhaps her most famous play. Possibly—because if so, it was unmemorable. There may have been one or two other stagings of her work in the decades I've been living in Chicago—but I hardly keep abreast of everything, and shows open and close rather quickly. Plays by Churchill at least.

There is not much to say about the production: it was well-done. The theater company is new, and not a company of great means like, say, old Court Theater about which I have written, and which has a good production of Waiting for Godot up now. That said—my preference is away from splashy spectacle (though when flawlessly executed I can be mesmerized as well as anyone) in favor of the action of drama: the most significant element to be seen upon the stage in a work of drama is Time.

The casting of Top Girls was excellent, the caliber of the acting uniformly good (and in some cases superlatively so); of course it makes a difference when actors have a meaty script to work with.

This is not a review, but rather a note. But recalling my musing upon Romulus and The Cryptogram, I find Top Girls superior to either. Here I am not discussing production but rather script. Thematically Churchill covers successfully a lot more territory than either. If Romulus attempted more, David Mamet executed more perfectly (than Gore Vidal) his little thimble-full; but not moreso than Churchill—and the range of her imagination seems just boundless.

After Words: Some Impromptu Verse

1/29/2015

After Words

When you dismantle, by critique,
Another person's icon,
Friendship may break, if it was weak:
Not carrots over daikon,

A simple preference of one's taste
A matter so severe,
Which makes investment bankrout waste
If friendship had been dear.

Such is the common stews of man
(Before earth stops the ears)
Or Christian or Muhammadan—
All speak but no one hears.

Perhaps a friendship has been blown
Due my intemperate tongue,
As words prevail—so I was shown
In youth that am not young.

All things must pass; if friendship is
Premature in its passing,
’Tis not great like a Judas kiss
Though stripes we keep amassing.

Conceptualism vs. Metamodernism

1/28/2015

Literary Movements, Academic or Not

One of the advantages to having no university association—not being a teacher, in other words—is that no one forces you to toe the line to an official interpretation of things. While I have not been able to figure out what "Conceptualism" is, via links such as this one, I've learned enough to determine that it appears to be centered in the school, and that the word "historicize" is one of several that is important to the movement's adherents. Not being affiliated with a school, you don't have to adopt jargon—which is the off-putting thing about writings intended for a closed group.

Still, failing to find a definition for "conceptual poetry" is no matter: ask a roomful of literary scholars and poets to define what poetry is and the conversation will go on for hours, become quite heated, and resolve nothing.

I noted in Haki R. Madhubuti's introduction to Don't Cry, Scream, published in 1969, he begins: "The most significant factor about the poems/poetry you will be reading is the idea. The idea is not the manner in which a poem is conceived but the conception itself." If this has some relation to "Conceptualism" or not, I don't know; or if, perhaps Don't Cry, Scream, a groundbreaking text in its day, contributed something toward an ur-text for the movement—as I understand the group's usage of the term. (The fine distinction his words point to reminds me of the academic type that dissertations and theses get written for and PhDs awarded for; but, though on occasion I sat beside the Third World Press table when Non Fit Press was an active force in marketing my books, I don't recall hearing "Conceptualism" proclaimed.)

I returned to Madhubuti's text because I vaguely remembered in his introduction—from which I quoted in my essay on McKay—that he had mentioned, if not answered, some of the same ideas which, as I mused in that recent post about Gringpo, perplexed me two days ago.

Madhubuti writes—and I quoted—that "blackpoets deal in the concrete rather than the abstract". I suspect Madhubuti speaks for himself (or for the himself he was in 1969), and may not even endorse the ideals of "Conceptualism" either. Pura especulación one might say. The questions are academic, and I intend to leave them; but nagging incongruities kept fluttering back into my mind, even as with the Chesterton posts a while back, demanding their vent.

Elsewhere I saw a proclamation that "Conceptualism [in art] derives from [Marcel] DuChamp." If that is the case, I don't wonder if Metamodernism, as a movement, arises in response to or in counterpoint of, Conceptualism. "Metamodernist" poetry possesses, or at least proclaims, its own merit; I've been unable to find comparable examples of poetry from "Conceptualism". The "metamodernist" motto, presumably, would have to be: Before DuChamp!

Movements belong in academia: where else does one hear of Pound's "Imagism" today, or any of the other movements he founded?

That being said...

The above photo is of the lobby after the memorial gathering held for Sheldon Patinkin two nights ago—an important figure in Chicago theater. I did not realize—my only brief encounter with him took place before he became the entrenched figure at Columbia College that the evening's many speakers and attendees gave testament to—just how entrenched in academia he was; though his early roots (I believe) lay outside that.

On Sonnets by Bernadette Mayer

1/27/2015

And Otherwise

The Critical Flame, which in its latest issue has my piece about Claude McKay (the original, extended version is here) also has a review up of Sonnets by Bernadette Mayer. I’m ashamed to say I had not heard of a book so influential, but Amazon describes it:

Sonnets, first published in 1989 as Tender Buttons Number 1 is widely considered to be one of the most generative and innovative works of contemporary American poetry, radically rethinking the traditional sonnet form.

A publication date of 1989 means it predates my Sonnets by about three or four years. I always find correspondences like that intriguing, and I hope to lay my hands on a copy—the 25th anniversary edition is out and it has been expanded. The review doesn’t give a lot of excerpts from which to formulate an opinion—but I have to admit I got a chuckle when I came across these sentences in the review:

[C]ompare Mayer’s title, Sonnets, to that of Ted Berrigan’s volume The Sonnets. Unlike her Poetry Project peer, Berrigan, who made grandiose claims about his own volume, Mayer didn’t set out to compose a book of exceptional or groundbreaking greatness. Notice that the patriarchal self-pronouncement of greatness in Berrigan’s “The” is absent from Mayer’s title, Sonnets.

It is even possible that my use of the title predates her use of it (though I’m not going to suggest that she snitched the idea from me). I was avoiding patriarchal self-pronouncement and didn’t even know it!

My book will not offer you “considerable verbosity [compressed] into sparkling gems, each around fourteen lines in length.” Despite the blurb by Richard Wilbur on the back cover, he had his reservations too (carefully concealed by ellipses), which, when occasion permits, I will try to dig out from the archives to report on. Nevertheless I can assure you that you won’t find poems “around fourteen lines” but that I managed to hit that number square on the nose every time.

For something of a balanced view of the book—warts and all—check out what Arthur Mortensen had to say in his online review. Despite an earlier composition date, the Non Fit Press edition did not come out until after my Requiem—excuse me, The Requiem. Yes, that book was more of an orchidaceous self-pronouncement...

Your Limerick for the Day (27 Jan 15)

1/27/2015

This is not a form that I have the wit for—a friend had something up that relied on a complicated setup to get you a pun in the last line about "Putting his Horace before Descartes" or something like that. Because the preceding four lines were clunky, I tried reworking them, but made no headway in the exercise. Finally I gave up and popped this out. "It is what it is" may be the best to be said about it.

[His talents lay...]

His talents lay all with pastiche
But, no parvenu nor nouveau riche,
He found patrons would spare no
Cash for his Inferno—
He never reached heaven, capisce?

On "The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo"

1/26/2015

Those articles which come around with excruciating frequency about the state of poetry in America—usually by some well-placed participant in the academic so-called PoBiz itself—grow tiresome after a while. Somebody posts a link on Facebook, and everyone hotly discusses it, or blogs exchange critiques and jabs (or words of assent) and pretty soon things die down.

Something of an article like that is making the rounds, and a Facebook friend duly linked to it. His friend commented on the process:

Step one: use a quantitative metric to categorize qualitative things.
Step two: play on the insecurities of a tiny number of people.
Step three: cause a kerfuffle over nothing.

The linker defended what he saw in the article, to which the friend responded: “It's certainly an interesting question, but not really raised substantively here. This seems more like feather-ruffling than inquiry or analysis.” This was spot-on, and a good descriptor of the genre.

Another link was posted, about which the linker said this: “[I am a]lso thinking about this: ‘poetry critics and their favorite poets are 50 years behind in reading, selective in their memory, fixated and beholden to whiteness as property, whiteness as elevation, whiteness as transcendence.’”

I’m not requesting you (dear reader) to look at the link itself. Actually the link was the second of two pseudonymous blog posts responding to something up at another site. By itself, the post from which the quote was extracted is hard to follow; so I traced the links and read the original pieces. The first is a piece called “What is the Relationship Between Conceptual Art and Conceptual Writing?"

Herewith let me confess my ignorance. I am not familiar with either “conceptual art” or “conceptual writing”. Right off that puts me at a disadvantage in understanding what is possibly being disputed or what its importance may be. Looking at the site (“Montevidayo”) at which the pseudonymous postings occurred, it took me a while to figure out that the site belonged to a consortium of individuals, and that the postings in question went up at the hands of one individual contributor to that site. They are linked here (“The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo Responds to the Links Between Conceptual Art and Conceptual Poetry” and “The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo Offers Extended Thoughts on the Tattered Flag of White Conceptualism”) and, as the titles suggest, polemical in nature. The site also concerns itself with something called “kitsch,” which, though obviously a word I have heard, is something I’ve never heard defined or studied to a point where I might identify it.

The friend of my linker commented—about the “Tattered Flag” link—with insight, “That's a much more interesting article/letter. I don't know enough about the particular argument that's going on there to weigh in, but it's good grist for the mill.”

This is a lot of preliminary matter, possibly leading up to nothing of much significance. For polemics the two posts do a remarkably poor job of characterizing what it is they are opposing; bringing an ambivalent and external-to-the-loop reader little to cohere to. My knee-jerk reaction is to make a fast dismissal. Yet, having recently written about Claude McKay, it is inevitable I should find correspondences, especially regarding the impact of colonialism on English literature. The first post offers a manifesto, almost Marxist in its tone: “We are reminded that white empire is united. Their front is united by colonial dominance, cultural arrogance, their devotion to financial capitalism and global disasters” (all caps in the original). And: “Gringpo’s adoration and devotion to mimicking hierarchies of financial capitalism does not cease to amaze.”

Here—though I am forced to fall back on speculation because the term is not defined—I take “Gringpo” to mean gringo (white) + poetry, or poetry written by whites (“conceptual” or no). This is my best guess. The second post says:

Peddling the notion that white male poets make art about ideas…vs what? Black poets write about the body? From their body (because this is so horrific!!!!)? Female identified writings are produced by their feelings? The consistently old Cartesian dichotomy that “some” writers are engaged with the process of ideas (and therefore abstraction and therefore elevated) while “others” are fixated to the realm of the earthly crass and contingently precise: these are clearly marked racialized and gendered divisions. So to get this right: white male writers and their companion poets make work for the mind, of the mind. Let’s not even mention their obliteration of the soul: everyone else is stuck with the body. Gringpo has gotten so sloppy it can’t even dress up its racism.

While the emotion behind these assertions is obvious, it is harder to pinpoint the crux of the issue, at least without example. What is the “consistently old Cartesian dichotomy” that peddles “the notion that white male poets make art about ideas” while “everyone else is stuck with the body”? Where are the sources to this assertion? Academic citation does have its place, though a certain laxity is permitted to online diatribes.

Still—entirely in line with my thoughts on McKay—I would like to better understand the thrust of the argument. The proposition of a “united front” (or even a unified one) is probably incorrect, which would sap the argument prima facie. My independent observations want to confirm “that poetry critics and their favorite poets are 50 years behind in reading, selective in their memory” and so forth; but the tortuous phrasing of the posts finally makes any endorsement impossible.

Perhaps I am lending too much credence to ideas that were penned and posted pseudonymously. Jaron Lanier concluded that anonymous postings were the bane of the internet. Some years ago my first blog was done pseudonymously—and thankfully so, for I repent some of my rash pronouncements—but in the end I came to agree with him. In my introduction to Small Poems I relate the experience of being called onto the carpet for “drive-by” postings. Anonymity becomes a convenient shield. Responsibility for defamations may be ducked, or, as in this case, for the inarticulateness of one’s assertions.

Certainly in some circumstances, pseudonymity is called for. Consciousness that I am posting under my own name does not necessarily make me a more careful blogger—momentary fits of passion may drive me to post without check. Yet possibly I am inclined to “think twice” before I go live with a post, knowing that I may have to stand by my words.

To anonymous posters such as “Mongrel Coalition,” my inclination always is to ask, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”

Lines in Iambic Pentameter

1/25/2015

An Abandonment

I linger over twisted turns of prose
Trying to make words hang together right
To no avail, and therefore I suppose
In poetry I take refuge tonight.

The information inundates me fast
And furious—what's the matter with the world—
As humankind, it seems, will be the last
To understand how much has been imperiled.

To correlate and tabulate it all
Sentences fail, nor find I any answer
To myriad questions; come another Fall
May it obliterate this human cancer.

It seems that mankind wages war against
All that is natural in the world; will slaughter
The true and innocent, and war commenced
Contaminates the land and poisons water.

The air we breathe, becomes hypocrisy;
The various loves we vow to one another
Foul travesty—nor can one ever be
In conscience free exploiting of a brother.

Words fail me: little lambs led to the slaughter
Bleating their fears, will haunt my waking dreams,
While parents hide the truth from son and daughter
Painting a world that light and sweetness seems.

How far from truth, the wretched lies we tell,
The worst we tell ourselves, until, grown weary,
We long for death, and pray escape from hell
When images of heaven falter dreary.

Momigliano and the Rhetoric of History

1/23/2015

My attentions are otherwhere at the moment, but the chance perusal (meant in the modern, careless sense of a glance rather than the old meaning of careful scrutiny) of a review up at The Nation brought me to a website called Varieties of Unreligious Experience, whereat, in a compact post, I learnt a little about the clash of viewpoints between Arnaldo Momigliano and Hayden White, author of one of the books reviewed at The Nation (and by a protégé of White, or at least a former student).

The review brings up issues which I—with the carriage horses pointed toward eternity—feel there can be no stopping for. But Conrad H. Roth, in his posting (Varieties of Unreligious Experience appears to have ceased activity five years ago), gives a summation of the conflict's crux, at least as Momigliano saw it:

White's basic point had been—and still is, apparently—that historiography is a branch of rhetoric, and that the way one writes history is governed by the same sorts of rhetorical tropes as are found in oratory and fictional literature. Style becomes more important than truth: what could be more postmodern? Momigliano, the old-guard Warburg philologian, objected: what sense can we make of history if we forget that it centres on facts and problems?

Roth quotes Momigliano: "As the history of historiography is basically a study of individual historians, no student of the history of historiography does his work properly unless he is capable of telling me whether the historian or historians he has studied used the evidence in a satisfactory way." This sounds quite typical, and reasonable. Roth, having just that day attended a lecture on Momigliano, continues:

Amélie Kuhrt, in the discussion after Murray's paper, described Momigliano's response to White as a moral distaste: the aim of historiography should be an ethical engagement with the problems of the past in relation to those of the present, not mere games with words and ideas, as White, the formalist, wanted to give us.

My latest book by Momigliano, which I have left off reading, does not, alas, contain his essay "The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric" in which he rebutes White—by its title you might expect to find it there, but it rather concerns itself with the studies of historians that so absorbed Momigliano. (I would rather read about theory than about this or that historian's biographical data, which perhaps explains my preference for Finley.)

As you might surmise from my previous blog post titled "The All-Redeeming Virtue of the Liberal Mind", I should prefer to adhere to a historian "determined to understand and respect evidence from whatever part it came" instead of one for whom history is "mere games with words and ideas". Certainly it was important to Finley to get the facts right; and I doubt he would approve a history that was also not "an ethical engagement".

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