AF: I often, to play Devil’s Advocate, make the claim that Lang-Po lacks real form, formal gravitas, whatever you want to call it. These poems are low on (traditional) craftsmanship, not that I’m a “craft fetishist” like a lot of Centrists, but for a poem to be enjoyable there must be (I would think) at least a modicum of (traditional) craft. I don’t see it in Lang-Po a lot of the time, and that’s why I like to suggest (though I know it to be a half-truth, or even a quarter-truth) that their work is formless.
MTE: Well, there are so many places to go with this…. What are you calling craft, for instance? I see a lot of "craft," a lot of hard formal work, in much of the Language poetry I’ve read, especially by such writers as
Michael Palmer,
Susan Howe, and
Leslie Scalapino, to name only a few. There’s a lot of formal rigor in their work, from the way they use musical structures to punctuation, white space, typography, and syntax. To my understanding, some poets were trying to undermine the notion of craft endemic to the short, confessional lyric—and who wouldn’t want to undermine that? Well, actually, too many…but, really, let them have it, what’s at stake in that enjoyment? (I think we might want to come back to that question later.)
But it is Language poetry, in my estimation, that has most rigorously extended the Modernist exploration and explosion of form, in particular the ways in which form itself is a kind of content. In these poetries, formal decisions signify as much as narrative or psychological content—semantic content—and, ultimately, for these poets the distinction between the two is only provisionally useful or else entirely bunk. To that end, there are certain examples of contemporary poetry that seem almost if not wholly vacant of any “content” in the traditional sense, where the language has little or no semantic function. I think you termed them “conceptual” in an earlier conversation? While these might be said to be the most “radical,” I tend to think they accomplish nothing more than
Dadaist poetics or
Apollinaire’s Calligrammes already have. I’m not sure anyone’s taken it any further, or that there is much room to go further with pure sound or visual “poetry”. I use scare quotes here not as a statement but as a question: does poetry need semantic content to be poetry? Can words or letters be strung together without generating semantic content?
Gertrude Stein said somewhere that she tried and failed, that it’s impossible to do so. I’m not sure there aren’t parts of
Tender Buttons that don’t succeed in that regard quite well, though! I know I’ve seen/heard other works that fail to signify for me completely. But that may be the beauty of it—that it signifies for some and not for others, and of course differently for various auditors. That signification or “textual production” occurs in the relation between reader and text (delimited primarily by the author), is a rote idea, even doctrine, at this point. I think it depends on what you need as a reader. I personally love the tension, flirtation, and copulation between “purely formal”/“purely material” (I’m skeptical of claims to purity) and semantic elements (which could never be purified of their material supports: sound in the air, ink on the page).
As far as aesthetics go, some Language poets seem to follow (followed, past tense?)
Adorno in claiming that beauty is politically reactionary. But, less famously, Adorno later recanted that attack on (lyric) poetry, as
Hejinian, for one, points out in her essay, “Barbarism”. Any claim that a certain aesthetic is inherently reactionary (or radical) seems the kind of reductive and essentialist thinking that many of the poststructuralist-minded (which I am, as well) Language poets would say their poetry subverts. Is Subversion in the eye of the beholder? It is, I would say, certainly in her “I,” if you’ll forgive the painful, shop-worn pun. I think it is the structure of subjectivity, the precipitation of any subjectivity, that is at stake in aesthetics. I’m not one of those who claims simplistically that there “is no subject” or thinks that subjectivity is (again) an inherently conservative formation. Perhaps the ego primarily is, but the “subject” is another matter. That useful, more nuanced distinction is why
Lacanian psychoanalysis has always seemed so much more radical to me than the work of
Derrida or
Foucault, and why Lacan was so important to
Althusser (would it be too much to claim that there’d be no such conception of “ideology” or “ideological state apparatuses” if not for a Lacanian notion of the unconscious?).
AF: Well, when I speak of craft, I do mean a more traditional kind of craft, in that I want a poetics that can comfortably contain empathy, epiphany (yes, that’s right, epiphany), humanity, and all the more spiritual things that Lang-Po tends to exclude (though I haven’t read some of the people you named, and I’m thinking more along the lines of
Silliman,
Bernstein,
Andrews,
Watten, and
Coolidge). I feel that keeping the reader “in the company of flesh and blood”, as
Wordsworth said, is not such a bad idea, especially living as we do in a decaying and (arguably) decadent age that prizes and rewards crass, spirit-killing materialism. What do we need now, explorations of form or explorations of pathos? It’s like in a certain sense we have to go backwards from po-mo to High Modernism; seeing the fractured landscape, the Waste Land, and recognizing and internalizing it to create deeply felt works of art, rather than laughing at it or “joining” it in a sort of Warhol-ian/ ironic/ nonsensical charade. Developing new kinds of narrative usages, which may or may not be linear, would seem to be the best way to do this. Successful use of narrative takes enormous craft-skill, and is (I think) more difficult (and rewarding) than ditching narrative altogether, as many Lang-Po people have done. Look at the meta-fiction people, like
Barthelme,
Foster Wallace,
Pynchon: they can skewer traditional narrative because they’ve mastered it. I’m not convinced the Lang-Po people (at least the ones I’ve read) have. It’s the difference between
Ornette Coleman, who could do Formalist trad-jazz if he wanted to, doing
Free Jazz, and a band like
Sonic Youth, who do atonal and avantist stuff but don’t have the capability to make a record like
In a Silent Way or
Bitches Brew even if they wanted to. I love Sonic Youth, but that’s not the point here. The point is that craft means mastery of technical skill and narrative is a fundamental poetic technique that cannot be ignored if we want poems with “flesh”, a heart and a soul, however equivocal these terms may appear to a poststructuralist mindset.
MTE: Once again, I (happily) don’t know where to begin! It sounds like you’re calling for poets to all become “new narrative” fiction writers! While I admire some of that writing a great deal (and I am still familiarizing myself with it), some of it disappoints me with its flat and flat-lining language. Some of these writers are as anti-aesthetic as many of the Language poets.
Kathy Acker and
Dennis Cooper come to mind.
William H. Gass and
Jamaica Kincaid come immediately to mind as writers whose sentences are infused with a gorgeousness and eroticism that the aforementioned writers completely lack. I had a class once that set Cooper side by side with
Francis Bacon (one of my favorite painters now, because of that class); I feel this is a misleading comparison. They’re both gay (sure), and they both underscore the ugly, the raw, the violent side of sexuality (no causal relation implied there), as opposed to idealizing it. However, Bacon’s
style of painting, although rough, sketchy, literally smudged at times, is still immensely beautiful—and moving. The kind of flatness of language that writers like Cooper give us is much more Warhol/Hockney (his paintings, if not his photocollages) to my mind. Bacon is much more
lush. It’s that lushness that I love—in writing, film, painting, music—you name it. “Flat” writing has pretensions to a kind of hyperrealism, a critical mode that I think ultimately fails to take into account the complexities of fantasy. It may be usefully simplistic to say it’s a case of Marxists vs. Freudians. Again, it comes back to the revolt against traditional notions of eloquence that were shoved down that generation’s throats in a rather stifling manner (if I can presume to speak for them). I think our generation no longer feels that, and can return to it and co-opt it. It may very well be, of course, that the condition of possibility for our “return” was this very revolt (or it may simply be another line of descent than our own).
Yes, heart and soul are sticky terms. I have no clue what you mean by them. I understand you perfectly—say no more. But please, do elucidate…
I don’t think narrative is the only or primary way of writing with “heart and soul”. The lack of traditional narrative and characterization (perhaps especially this) that marks so much experimental narrative and that disorients and diffuses traditional reader identifications, that proceeds in a non-linear, impressionistic manner, that foregrounds the lyrical or other material aspects of language, that is self-reflexive—these are some of the same qualities that equally mark what gets labeled as experimental poetry. And they are the reasons that traditionalists usually claim there is no heart or soul in them—fiction or poetry.
As far as “going back” to the Modernists—I’m not sure I, for one, ever left them. Or only insofar as poststructuralism left me differently engaging them. But how far afield is
Stevens, really? He’s actually my favorite American Modernist poet. Much of
Williams somewhat bores me (though I like teaching him a lot, at least
Spring and All), and
Pound and
Eliot I want to strangle. No, make that “bitch slap”. They’re askin’ for it. And, dare I admit it, on top of everything else, I prefer the “less radical” Stein of the portraits and plays. I saw a student production of
Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights at Tulane and have been very much in love with it ever since. That’s supposed to make me a “conservative” poet, right? Perhaps I am, by Silliman/Watten/Bernstein standards. A lot, or some, of Silliman’s work is autobiographical, though, isn’t it? But what’s interesting to me about “new”—sentence/narrative/essay—strategies is how they undermine – epiphany! We must talk more about that!
I find in a lot of experimental works a kind of anti-epiphany. The anti-epiphanic moment would be that moment when a subjectivity beyond ego-self, a self beyond Selfhood, has been precipitated, sparked—the moment has arrived, has passed, unnoticed—you find that something has taken place, somehow. The anti-epiphany is that unlocatable point or moment where one side of the Möbius strip crosses over to the other side, and this passing from one side to the other delineates the structure of the Möbius strip as precisely and enigmatically having only one side. I’m thinking, too, of the analytic setting, and how (
Bruce Fink?) has said something along the lines of how an analysis is “completed” when the analysand realizes not that it is over, but that has been over, changes in how she lives/thinks/feels have occurred, are occurring—at that moment it’s completed. Or: it ain’t over when you wake up to the crowd applauding the fat lady, taking a bow, but when you find yourself humming the song she sang on the way home. (I feel like I’m on a mission to find the trope juste for this!)
I think a lot of my own poetics comes out of this struggle with my Romantic heritage, which has included a desire for some kind of epiphany, for such a thing to still be possible. I am a master of the crescendo ending, and I have always loved the “cum shot”. But if you think it’s all just about that then you’re probably not very good in bed. It’s how that orgasm punctuates the whole erotic experience, how the fabric of the whole relationship threads through that orgasm, how the orgasm opens a space in which neither of you are present, a function made possible or tolerable by your bonding outside of bed (acknowledged and consolidated by all that yummy foreplay and cuddling), or by your mutual and utter anonymity, or else by your cosmopolitan sophistication/cynicism (which?), as well as by that (unconscious?) fantasy that it is at that very moment when the two of you are
most present to one another, the fantasy of the One. Hmm… I may have veered off-topic. But isn’t the “traditional” or confessional notion of epiphany and that of an “experimental” poet’s precisely in this presencing/closure vs. wandering/opening of the self ? God, I do ramble…does any of that resonate with you, or is it just bullshit? (I’ve just been thinking/writing about this lately.) Well, to put what I think I was getting at, where I believe I ended up, in simple terms: epiphany is about closure and consolidation, and anti-epiphany is about movements of opening and restructuring in a way that lends itself to these openings. One more false binary for the books!
AF: Your response is so ripe-leading-into-overripe that I’m not going to tackle all of it. First, something obvious. Look at the metaphor you’re using for aesthetics—sex, sexual intercourse. What is art at its best but a replication of Eros and erotic longings & fulfillments? That’s obvious, I know, & one thinks of
Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, even Warhol’s films, & then one looks at Lang-Po & sees—what? The poetic equivalent of a dry hump. Not that a dry hump doesn’t have a kind of perverse charm (unless you’re wearing jeans), just that Lang-Po (or the Lang-Po I know) takes Eros out of the equation. Not that
Sharon Olds writing about the transcendent joy of getting laid is any better, necessarily, just that Lang-Po
asks us to give up so much. It’s worth talking about because nothing has come along to challenge the hegemony of Lang-Po in experimental poetry, and the Lang-Po people are
the fathers and mothers we need to kill, on the figurative level, of course. There’s a definite & defiant perversity in bringing words like “heart” & “soul” back into the equation that is extremely deliberate & deliberately transgressive on my part.
Someone has to do this. I’m just sick of poetry that’s all intellect. I believe in hearts, I believe in souls, &
Derrida & all the rest can go f-ck themselves. Not that narrative is the only way to do this, but
the materiality of the text is not enough. I want
humanity. I don’t want text, or text-as-text, or text-within-text, or non-absorptive texts or all that other malarkey. I want poems I can feel, & if you or anyone else doesn’t know what that means then I’m not going to tell you. I want feeling & daring side-by-side in my sports car.
No, about epiphany I completely disagree with you, I don’t think epiphany means closure and anti-epiphany means “rejection of closure” in the Hejinian sense. You can treat epiphany any damned way you want, you can take an epiphany and close it or leave it open just the way you can take anti-epiphany and do the same thing. Almost every poem
Frank O’Hara ever wrote was an “open epiphany”, and that’s why we love him, right? He never tied up the loose ends, he just let them hang.
Ashbery does the same thing, albeit in a more baroque mode and key. Here’s the crux: the ability of Ashbery & O’Hara to write “open epiphanies” is why everybody, Centrists & post-avantists, love them.
They get everybody off. Not to be crude, but I think it’s true, and I think you could say the same thing about
Creeley. There is a poetic angle that cuts straight to the chase so that nothing is denied & everything is fulfilled. I’m speaking in deliberately broad terms because I’m speaking of a deliberately broad poetics, rather than a small narrow one.
MTE: OH! Does Olds write about the transcendent joy of being fucked? I might like her, after all! Your dry hump analogy, I have to say, made me laugh out loud. I suppose for all of its intellectual rigor, some Language poetry suffers a severe case of
rigor mortis. I will never be comfortable with that term, “lang-po,” for some reason…I suppose it strikes me as a packaged version of Language poetry (the consolidation of a school with that moniker is bad enough—I hope I successfully escape this fate!); I hope we aren’t being too reductive or unfair ourselves.
I wish you’d given an example of a poem by O’Hara or Ashbery as illustration. I’m not a huge O’Hara fan, although many people interact with me personally and assume I must be (no, all queers do not write alike!). I love his Lana Turner poem, but that’s due in part to what
Doug Powell’s overwriting of it, “[my father and me in hollywood, fading and rising starlets]” hs added for me—I’ll never again be able to read them in isolation from one another. The Billie Holiday elegy is gorgeous. Either of those might do. But is “Oh, Lana Turner we love you, get up” an epiphanic ending? We hear the high bitchy intonation of disappointment and judgment in those final two words, the disappointment of the idealization of love that we are given in the first part of the line, but what epiphany is there? Do we learn something about ourselves? Is a “truth” revealed, an insight into “human nature,” one that consoles, consolidates our little selves in our little worlds—now, now, there…? I think, rather, it’s a rupture. Not a lightbulb flicking on but a floor giving way. Maybe my definition of “epiphany” is too narrow. It certainly entails the kind of tying of loose ends which I would agree O’Hara’s work
doesn’t do, and which supports the fantasy that “nothing is denied & everything is fulfilled,” which I don’t believe O’Hara or Creeley or any poet either of us is bound to like is apt to indulge.
Regardless, I think we’re getting too caught up on a particularly fraught word, “epiphany”. How ‘bout “beauty”? Much better, right…?! But I do think it’s interesting to ask what’s at stake in “anti-beauty” aesthetics. What’s so fraught about beauty? Without its contrary, without complication and complexity it is no longer the beautiful, but deteriorates into the merely “pretty”. I mentioned Francis Bacon above, and again, I find his work at times very beautiful and very moving.
Woolf, Palmer, Stevens, Waldrop, Rilke, Berssenbrugge… I suppose what I find most beautiful is longing. God, I’m such a Romantic! Which also means melancholic (crap!). But the kind of eros I’m talking about pertains to a negativity, whether you call that
Nietzsche’s gazing abyss, Woolf’s “emptiness at the heart of life,” or Stevens’ “vermilioned nothingness” (though his arguably verges on a positivized negativity—the nothing that is there—though I tend to read it as being the effects of this lack which are very much present). A longing beyond the limits of the possible, then, produced by that limit, and not a positive libidinal force or energy. Not lust, exactly (though this is a modulation of that longing).
But I do understand where you’re coming from and I share your desire to be moved, to have an emotional as well as intellectual response to art. There was a point, when I was deeply entrenched in theory (I stopped writing poetry for 5 or 6 years because of it), when I had to stop worrying about how life is constructed, how my emotions themselves are constricted, determined, and produced by ideology, discourses, cultural determinants, etc., and I had to just allow myself to breathe, to feel, to think without a stranglehold of self-consciousness around every word. Not that I will ever completely lose it (not that I want to completely lose it, insofar as it supports or is tied into my ability for critical thinking).
I don’t think I’m as bothered by the Oedipal “anxiety of influence” model you’re using as I’m fairly sure many of the Language poets would be (unless
Marjorie Perloff had written it instead of
Harold Bloom, in which case it would be a radical, incisive analysis of the transmission and subversion of poetic traditions). But I think it’s important to ask why you feel so overwhelmed by their work, or specifically, it seems, the work of Silliman, Watten, and Bernstein (and Andrews? Perelman?). There are certainly a lot of other poets we haven’t mentioned, from
Ray DiPalma to
Rae Armantrout,
Carla Harryman to
Harry Mathews (well, I’m not sure if that last one exactly qualifies, but you see how I had to go there…) and I feel we’re setting ourselves up to be criticized as reductive. Nonetheless, I certainly have had that experience many times of quickly shutting down when attempting to read a book of “experimental poetry,” feeling as though the work is too coldly intellectual for my taste and that it feeds me nothing. But I don’t feel the same pressure to set my work apart from this movement as you do, for whatever reason. I’ve felt that only once, actually, with
Jorie Graham. I was convinced once upon a time (and a time it was) that she had done everything I wanted to do in poetry, that her Irigarayan/Levinasian explorations of the ethics of eros were superior to anything I could do, and that I might have to give up writing. Instead, I gave up Graham. Then I discovered Michael Palmer, Rosmarie Waldrop, and any number of poets after that, who were doing amazing things, some of whose projects were similar in one way or another. I do sometimes worry I’m a bit Palmer-derivative, in the very least musically, but I know this isn’t true for the most part (although, I did have a friend tell me that she can now no longer read his work without hearing mine—poor Palmer!—so who knows…). At any rate, I often referred to the process as my “necessary matricide” of Graham. It sounds like you need to do this with certain poets now. How will you do that? Ooh—: by getting off, of course!
Do you? Do you see other poets who are doing what you want to see more of? It sounds like you don’t. I think there are lots of amazing writers who are neither sentimentalists nor stony intellects (okay, a few…good poetry’s hard to come by). Two of my teachers at Brown,
Forrest Gander and
C. D. Wright come immediately to mind. I hope that doesn’t sound horrifically nepotistic or cliquish—I don’t mention them because they were my teachers; rather, I sought them out as teachers because I loved their work before I ever met them. They both, in different ways, are extremely smart, lyrical, narrative, erotic, and feeling poets. If you haven’t read them, Adam, you should; they may fit your bill. There is, of course, the cult of Anne Carson (I believe a good friend of mine is the founding member of that, actually). Going even younger, you have everyone from
D. A. Powell, Dan Beachy-Quick, Lisa Jarnot, Mark Levine, Eric Baus, Lee Ann Brown, Noah Eli Gordon… I’m totally blanking out right now, but I feel that most poets under, let’s randomly say 46, have reacted in part against (or write indifferently to) the coldly or overly intellectual and anti-lyrical aspect of much of the poetry that is most readily recognized as Language poetry. Ergo, the god-awful “post-Language, new lyric” epithet (save me, Baby Jesus, from this fate!). I love most of the work that gets slapped with this label, but labels, like the prospect of tattoos, babies, and organized religion, make me squirm a bit.
I’ll say one last thing, and then I’ll shut up, I promise. It’s a footnote, really, but something that seems glaring to me is how we have completely avoided politics in our discussion of Language poetry. It’s the central “tie that binds” this sometimes group, is it not? (Or would that be the materiality of the signifier?) But the political efficacy of poetry, the specific politics of Language writing, and an interrogation of just what notion of the “political” we’d be discussing would be another conversation entirely….
AF: To start with—yes, I think the last line of the O’Hara poem is epiphanic. It’s not the poet saying “look at me on the high cliffs of Dover registering the supernal wonder of the Universe”, but it’s a “slug in the gut”, a line that hits hard, and any line that hits hard is epiphanic—its’ just our epiphany, rather than O’Hara’s. Still, that counts for me. Or, in Ashbery, the title poem from
Self-Portrait… winds its way through all sorts of moods & territories but eventually the poet is forced to look at the inadequacies & limitations, first of art, then of life itself, & it all happens in an exquisite crescendo that leaves me gasping for breath every time. It
comes. In that sense, Ashbery’s poetics can be likened to a good
Stones song, though I bet no one’s done that before. Yes, the epiphany is “anti”, but it isn’t, because the feeling is continually heightened, and the thing
builds. That he isn’t talking about picking daisies doesn’t make the poem any less epiphanic.
Beauty—yes, of course it’s been absurdly devalued & needs looking at again. Sophists will say “What is beauty? Isn’t it relative/subjective?”, forgetting that it’s not something real, never has been, but an ideal that we shoot for. This, of course, changes from person to person but so does taste, judgment, and the ability to play with a yo-yo; does that mean we should outlaw yo-yos? I don’t think so. I like yo-yos. Maybe that’s what beauty is—the yo-yo of aesthetics.
I wouldn’t say I feel overwhelmed by the Language people. I am aware, however, that it’s time for somebody to do something new in experimental poetics. I, personally, think this means finding a new way to return to the “I”. There are people that have more or less been doing this—
Bill Allegrezza is one,
Mark Lamoureux. Yes, I like DA Powell very much too, among the people you mentioned.
Steve Halle in Chicago is doing interesting things with investigative poetics, and he’s been influenced by the radical approach of
Deborah Richards, among others.
Nick Moudry has taken up a new kind of Surrealism, that incorporates bits of Americana and Stein-ian rhythms and melopoeia. Other new people I like would be
Chris McCabe in the UK,
Amy King in NYC,
Andrew Lundwall in Wisconsin, and
Lars Palm in Spain. Andrew Lundwall is, to me, kind of a phenomenon—he’s insanely prolific, very wild, and not academic in the least. Not that he isn’t intelligent, just that he takes wild risks all over the place, and that’s what I look for in younger poets. I think younger poets should make every effort not to be academic, even if they have MFAs (which I do). Don’t be bullied into writing the same poem over and over again or taking all the piss & vinegar out of your work. I go way out of my way to keep an “edge on”, even if it means I fall flat on my face half the time. That’s the way I like it, and all the people I’ve mentioned write that way too, though some of them have better success ratios than I do.
© Michael Tod Edgerton and Adam Fieled 2007
