"Waxing Hot," Poetics Dialogue: Barry Schwabsky (London, UK), Adam Fieled (Editor, Philly USA)
AF: Could you go into some detail as to what exactly you learned from Harold Bloom, what you retained from your interactions with him, and how it has led you to schematize art & poetics for/to yourself?
BS: Well, that was a long time ago—circa 1979-80. At the time, Bloom was teaching two seminars, one on Freud and one on Wallace Stevens. I believe his book on Stevens was just about to come out. It was striking that he read Freud as a literary text while reading Stevens in a somewhat psychoanalytic way. For him, the turns of thought that Freud called “defenses” were synonymous with the turns of language Bloom liked to call “tropes.” While I had read Stevens a bit before, I wasn’t deeply familiar with his work, having come to modernist poetry through Williams and Pound (to whom Bloom was not sympathetic). So the fact that Bloom “gave” Stevens to me is already something very important. But his seminar was amazing. I’ve never experienced anything like it. Basically he would walk in each week with a massive pile of notes. He’d sit and start speaking from the notes but he hardly ever seemed to get past the first page of them, because he would start digging so deep into the matter at hand in what seemed a completely spontaneous manner. And just in order to follow Bloom’s train of thought in this monologue, you had to think so hard! Yet if you did, it was coherent. But eventually, he would get to a place where it was really difficult to follow him any more—the effort was too exhausting, maybe. And somehow just at that point Bloom would turn it around and pose it as a question to the class. And we would just sit there, stunned. How could you deal with such an elusive question? There would be some moments of silence, until one student or another ventured a response. The rest of us would be flummoxed—the response was even more incomprehensible than the question! But then Bloom would say, “So what you mean is that…” and would give a summary of what the students had just said, which would turn out to be something absolutely brilliant, and you would think, “Ah, that’s amazing!” while feeling like one of those little cartoon “genius” light bulbs had switched on above your head. And from there Bloom would take off on another intellectual excursion for twenty minutes or so, until something similar would happen all over again. I’ve never felt so intellectually challenged and stimulated, unless maybe by Paul de Man.
Now you have to remember that this was well before Bloom started emphasizing the idea of the canon of great books. He was working with the notion of influence, which in my view was a way of revising the idea of “tradition” such as you find it in Eliot for instance—a way of insisting on the idea of conflict or at least ambivalence between one work, one poet, and another, in contradiction to a more idealizing view of tradition. And this was tremendously important. I just happened to read an essay from 1982 by the art historian Linda Nochlin, in which she disputes “the premise that there is in fact an ongoing an continuous stream of great art with which the artist can be fused” and which she says is “that same tradition that Harold Bloom has recourse to in his formulation of the great (male) writer,” but in fact, in those days at least, Bloom was saying exactly the opposite! Anyway, there was somewhere in there an idea that impressed me very much, which was that a canonical author—by virtue of his poetic strength—was always in reality a heretical author, and that canons are formed by casting a veil over this conflictuality that never really goes away. So that a great poet is not only radical and in conflict with tradition but because of this also serves to bring out what was already radical in his or her precursors. In retrospect, maybe this wasn’t exactly what Bloom wanted to get across but this is what I got out of it.
On the other hand, there was a melodrama to all this that in the long run I found a bit overwhelming and unrealistic. There was too much about power and anxiety, not enough about the eroticism of language. He’s a moralist where I’m more of an aesthete. So his thought came to seem one-sided to me. But his passion for poetry was such a generous one that I value even his “wrong” ideas!
AF: I find this binary, aestheticism versus morality, intriguing, instructive, and omnipresent in serious art. Look at post-modern poetry: most of it (whether of the "Language" school or of other semi-related sub-movements, even Flarf) cuts against the grain of epiphanic poetry, the backbone of English Romanticism that Bloom so treasures. In the "epiphanic" model, the poet finds (often) an Other, usually in nature, that surfeits his/her consciousness until a transcendental state is achieved, and the poet then extrapolates a moral lesson (though this is more true of first Gen English Romanticism than second, with WW being exemplar.) Yet Lang-Po is ultimately just as much about morality as English Romanticism: only, the paradigm changes. Here, the poet subsumes the Self, the "I", and demonstrates that text is just text (and much ideology has been pirated from post-structuralism), that pretending that text is more than text is morally unsound (and that we then know that text cannot open a transparent window onto anything except its own “textuality”), and that the politics of the epiphanic "I" represent a kind of despotism, rather than a democratic undertaking. Yet, the eroticism you missed in Bloom is also (for me) missing in most (though not all) Language poetry. Common ground shared by Harold Bloom and Lang-Po: who would've guessed? Yet, I have to ask: what is lost, both in theory and in practice, when eroticism is lost? Pound, Picasso, so many others demonstrated a "phallocentric" orientation: in our PC world, we can amend this to Eros-orientation, what have you; how much of art's generative power is lost when the groin, the loins are taken out (in the sense that art may be preoccupied by straightforward eroticism or even just the Sontagian erotics of the creative process itself, or what we might even, with reservations, call "Beauty")?
BS: I don’t see the drawing of a moral lesson as typical of good Romantic poetry. Its morality does not reside there. The epiphanic moment you speak of is one in which the Self is momentarily broken open. In that sense, Language poetry could be seen as one big epiphany, without the lead-up or the trail off—a steady-state transcendence of subjectivity. Well, I told you I found some reason in Bloom’s notion that we are still working out the consequences of Romanticism. In any case, I don’t see the work of Lyn Hejinian or Ron Silliman or Barrett Watten or some others associated with Language poetry as being disembodied text—at least when the work is at its best. Its language is very physical, very present, very engaged with the senses. To me—and I’ve said this before, at a reading of hers here in London that I organized—Lyn’s writing in particular is pure pleasure. Something like what Roland Barthes called the text of bliss. What could be sexier than that? It’s not erotic in the traditional sense of a love lyric—unlike a lot of my own poetry, by the way—but it is charged with eros in a different way, and I respond to it viscerally. Lately I’ve been reading The Grand Piano, the serialized “experiment in collective autobiography” by ten of the Bay Area Language poets, which is now up to its third of ten projected installments, and so far it seems to be mostly about libido.
Even though what I do is very different, all that writing was tremendously important to me—a huge challenge, not to avoid being morally unsound, but to avoid writing badly! I remember reading Ketjak shortly after it was published—I’m not even sure how I got to know about it—and it was just so obvious that this was the thing that somehow had to be dealt with, the next great thing after Ashbery. And it was in my way, sure—so high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get over it—exactly the same feeling I’d had when I saw (I can’t even say “read”) “Clepsydra” for the first time. “What do you do with this?” Well, you don’t try to repeat it, that’s for sure. It does seem to disqualify certain possibilities, sure—it makes them unattractive. But that’s what might eventually give you the pleasure of discovering new possibilities, right? Anyway, I guess I’m very romantic in my view of Language poetry. They maybe thought they were critiquing the construction of subjectivity and “the voice,” and probably they succeeded in doing so, but in the process, but in the process they ended up getting at a kind of collective subjectivity, a collective voice. Silliman, to me, is comparable to Whitman. The difference is that while Whitman declared, “I contain multitudes”—and he really did—Silliman contains them without bothering to say so.
AF: Well, it will help to remember, as we carry this conversation forward, that we are of different generations. I was born in the mid 1970s (’76, to be exact), and my introduction to poetry came, as it often does for American teenagers, through the Beats: Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac. These are poets (and/or poet-novelists) who value the same things Shelley and Keats (if not Wordsworth and Coleridge) valued; spontaneity, personal expression and poetry expressive of the Self (or a multiplicity of Selves, as in Whitman), the notion of an individualistic poet, a "wilderness voice", taking a stand against a repressive cultural milieu (though that stance is much more pronounced in Shelley than in Keats, and Wordsworth started that way but later, according to Shelley and others, "sold out".) By the time I started seriously investigating Language poetry, and this happened through Anne Waldman (oddly enough), I had already written and read a lot of poetry. I had my own ideas about what a poem could/could not do, and though these ideas were tinged with naivete, some of them have stuck. The fact is that I don't get the "pure pleasure" you speak of from Hejinian, or most other Language poets. I find them (not always, but often) pretty boring. I know the Barthes text you're quoting from, and I actually wrote and published an essay quoting "The Pleasure of the Text." It happened to be about Rae Armantrout, one poet who others group under the Language aegis (I think mistakenly), and who I do get pure pleasure from. If I remember correctly, the text of bliss is one that threatens you, "brings to a crisis (your) relationship with language," but the crisis we get from Lang-Po has been around for thirty years now, and perhaps it isn't much of a crisis anymore. I feel a very compelling compulsion to look for the new, what hasn't been done. That's both in my writing and in my reading. I'm looking for a "buzz." I don't get it from Lang-Po (and I've only seen bits and pieces of Ketjak, though I know other classic Lang-Po texts, Progress, My Life, etc., very well). You resisted this when I first brought it up, but I have to reiterate that I think following the precepts which dictated Lang-Po, the most salient branch of post-modern art in poetry, would be a mistake. Do you have pronounced ideas as to what could effectively follow Lang-Po?
BS: Obviously we just disagree about the value of Language poetry, and although of course I’ve read the Beats—how could I not, Allen Ginsberg is my homeboy!—their work was never in any way formative for me. Still, I can’t tell you how surprised I was when a reviewer of my book Opera referred to me as a “post-Language poet.” It really made me look at myself with new eyes, because it’s certainly not a term I’d ever have thought of applying to myself. I’m not actually trying to write the next thing after Language poetry! Nor do I put a name to what it is I am writing. Honestly, I think it is mostly just traditional lyric poetry—as long as your idea of the tradition consists mostly of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Pierre Reverdy, Paul Celan, and Jack Spicer. You know, you can’t necessarily decide what you should do and then execute that decision. Some people can, but not me. For me, it’s not a question of what I should write or even what I could write—but of what I can write. I recognize that my capacities and aptitudes are fairly limited. There are all kinds of things I like to read but are part of an endeavor that I know it’s not in me in contribute anything substantial to. To some extent these limitations are almost physiological: I’ve got a nervous disposition, I’m easily bored, so it doesn’t work for me to try and do anything in too systematic a way—it’s got to be something more mercurial. And then there are questions of what you might call self-image that reinforce this. There are a lot of people out there who are trying to be professional poets. I don’t think they really are that exactly—in most cases it would be more accurate to say that they are professional poetry teachers. But in any case, they need to have a certain track record, they need to publish a certain amount and so on. And I think it makes more sense for those people to do project-oriented works than it does for me, so I kind of steer clear of their territory. I believe in a division of labor! It’s all worth doing, but that doesn’t mean that I have to do all of it. I cultivate an idea of myself as an amateur, so I like pushing the idea that I will write poetry without a plan or schedule, that it will be something I dip into periodically—like a dilettante! Why not? (Anyway, it’s hard enough for me to do that with the writing I have to work at systematically, my art criticism.) I admit that this is really a sort of vanity, not very different from my notion that since I don’t work in an office, I will never dress in any clothes that anybody would ever be likely to wear to the office—that way no one will ever mistake me for an office worker. Likewise, no one should ever mistake my poetry for that of a creative writing professor. Ridiculous, I know, but there you go.
AF: Well, no, actually I think that's pretty reasonable. Poetry has become all tied up with academia, which isn't necessarily a positive development, nor is the idea of "professionalism" with regards to poetry all that pertinent. Your profession is what you make money from, right? No one (or almost no one) makes substantial money from poetry. So, the idea of having a "poetry career," or being a "professional poet," seems slightly daft. I'm speaking from the "inside" here; I'm a PhD candidate with an MFA under my belt as well. What happens in these programs is that a certain kind of spontaneity-inhibiting pseudo-discipline is taught, where every line has to have a rational purpose, every poem must neatly fit under a certain rubric (which changes wildly from program to program), everything must be justified. Poets stop taking risks and start writing to satisfy a "meat market": small presses, journals (online and print), reading series, etc. I can't at all claim immunity to this process; it's just something that happens. My own way of fighting back is by writing poems that deliberately transgress the seemingly set-in-stone boundaries of poetic decorum. I have made a conscious decision, for example, to write a lot (and directly) about sex and sexual politics (and not from the vantage point of a PC academic feminist, to be sure). I mean the kind we hear about when Mick Jagger sings "Under My Thumb", or when Updike's Rabbit Angstrom deals with his wife (and this is not to be taken for misogyny either, as is often the case; the issue is the psychic struggle to the death between men and women, or between lovers in general). Post-avant poets, I've found, are very squeamish, and rather than try to appease them, I'd like to make them vomit! So I deliberately transgress and I take the heat for it as well. To bring up an earlier point, I get a buzz from poems that transgress, and do so with intelligence and style. I have the capability to churn out as much safe "product" as I want to. The point is that I don't want to. I want to bring back direct treatment (sans Lang-Po obfuscatory techniques) of sex, and if I say "I" again....no! God forbid! Here's something: we all know the mythology surrounding poets in/around among painters in history: Apollinaire/Jacob/Picasso, or Ashbery/O'Hara/Larry Rivers, etc. It seems that this kind of frutiful connection is absent from our post-avant world. Do you agree? Has the art world become segregated, and if so how and why?
BS: I’m squeamish too. I could never have been a doctor. Maybe that’s why I took up writing—an activity that deals with blood only in fancy. I don’t have anything against poets finding harbor in the universities. I can’t say it’s not a positive development if it has given more poets a way to keep going and keep producing. Most of the contemporary poetry I like is written by people who teach. But that’s just not where I ended up.
But as far as poets and art, maybe there’s less of a disconnect than it might seem. The editor of Artforum, Tim Griffin, is a poet, though he seems to keep that a little sub rosa. Likewise another of my favorite writers there, Frances Richard. I’m in awe of her work. These are people who are, I suppose, somewhere in between my generation and your generation, but in any case, they’re young enough to make me think that the connection is still there. But remember that the relation between the two arts has changed because so much art is now so permeated by language—or even just is made of language. So these arts impinge on each other’s territory now in uncomfortable ways. Gris could illustrate a book by Reverdy, but how could Lawrence Weiner illustrate a poet’s book? Words illustrating other words? An intriguing idea, but hard to see how you’d pull it off. More reasonably, the poet would just transform into the artist, as happened with Ian Hamilton Finlay, or else the artist into the poet, as occurred more recently in the case of Kenny Goldsmith.
Of course, assuming there is the “segregation” you speak, there could be more practical reasons as well: The dispersal of the poets around the country due to their becoming part of academia, as we’ve discussed, while art scene remains focused on a few urban centers; the rise in the art market that has vaulted at least the better-known artists into a completely different economic stratum than almost any poet—things like that mean that artists and poets may simply cross paths less than they once did.
AF: That's fascinating, and it brings up another salient point: who determines now what poetry is or is not? If I want to call Bruce Nauman a poet, is there anyone who could give me a reasonable reason not to? How about Barbara Kruger? Ed Ruscha? If a genre is, as Fowler says, more of a family than a classification (with fluid boundaries), would some kinds of intercourse between painters (and/or conceptual artists) and poets be incestuous? I have a nagging sense of disappointment about this issue. In some ways I really would like it to be 1955 or 1915 again in NYC or Paris. I mean, you would think that Silliman and Nauman would have a lot to talk about, right, even if they couldn't collaborate? Don't the best movements always go across all (or most of) the disciplines? The threads tying conceptual art to post-avant poetry seem thin indeed. Again, po-mo art seems a lot rougher, a lot more direct, "in your face", than the kind of poetry we're dealing with, that tends towards abstraction and (often) obfuscation. Would Nauman be happy at this point, to be called a poet? Or are these designations superfluous?
BS: I don’t suppose Nauman or Kruger or Ruscha would be particularly interested in being called a poet, although they all use language brilliantly—Ruscha’s in particular seems rather “poetic” to me, but that’s probably not a qualification for being a poet! I’m sure they’re all pretty well satisfied with the designation “artist.” Maybe one reason is that as a category, “art” has become a lot less determinate than “poetry.” Poetry does at minimum have to be language, right? Whereas art really can be just anything at all—language, video projection, oil on canvas, dead cow, live horse, walking, whatever. Personally, I’m satisfied with just working on language, but that scope means a lot to some people.
Silliman and Nauman probably would have a lot to talk about, except I don’t think Nauman talks about a lot with almost anybody. By reputation, he’s a pretty taciturn, pretty close-to-the-chest kind of guy. Silliman spoke somewhere about having been influenced by Philip Glass in writing Ketjak—which seems pretty obvious once it’s pointed out—so he might have a lot to talk about with Chuck Close, whose work, especially early on, was pretty connected with that of Glass (of whom he made a famous portrait). I can see Flarf as connected in spirit with a lot of recent figurative art. But it’s hard to think about it in terms of a period style, partly because even within any one art, there are so many different, seemingly contradictory things going on at any one time. Probably the underlying connections will become more obvious as the present recedes into history.
Maybe more than with artists, I think poets might have a lot to talk about with musicians. On the other hand I also wonder why even seemingly almost innately unpopular forms of music are still nonetheless so much more popular than poetry. For instance, I went to hear the re-formed Slint the other night. I read that their Spiderland album has sold 50,000 copies since it was released in 1991. That’s not much for a rock record, I guess, but it would be an enormous amount for a book of poetry. And yet honestly, I can’t see why anyone who could get into that record couldn’t get into any advanced form of poetry. I just don’t see the difference really. One is no more or less esoteric than the other. What do you think?
AF: I think people are just more willing to take a chance with music. I'm not familiar with the group you've mentioned, but I assume they're "avant", i.e. "out there". Even the most esoteric forms of ambient, electronic, and other branches of avant-garde music have more appeal for masses of people than poetry. It's always hard to tell how and why cultural mores form, but my hunch is that people become attached to music because it's so rampant in our society (in a way it wasn't in 1907 or 1807). Previous cultures didn't have recorded music or recorded music devices, or entertainment devices that invariably have a musical component (i.e. TV commercials ubiquitously feature music, etc.). A child born in the US or the UK will be hearing music every day. In Wordsworth's day, people told stories to amuse each other. Now, we switch on a TV, and there's music, or a radio, and there's music. Poetry is much harder to come by in quotidian life. So people accustom themselves to music from a very early age, rather than people telling stories (though obviously parents do still tell their children stories) or people reading aloud from books, and where once books were ubiquitous, music is now. That doesn't make it better or degrade poetry as an art form. It does mean that if you go into poetry, you better be sure no money and a limited audience doesn't bother you. Does it bother you, or do you have enough invested in your art criticism that poetry seems like a "side project", something done more or less for pleasure?
BS: From www.allmusic.com: “Though largely overlooked during their relatively brief lifespan, Slint grew to become one of the most influential and far-reaching bands to emerge from the American underground rock community of the 1980s; innovative and iconoclastic, the group's deft, extremist manipulations of volume, tempo, and structure cast them as clear progenitors of the post-rock movement which blossomed during the following decade.” Check them out.
Anyway, I disagree that poetry is hard to come by in daily life. I mean, you could say that art music is rare in daily life, but jingles aren’t, and background music isn’t, and forms of manufactured pop music that are maybe one-third of the way from jingles and background music to something I would actually think of listening to aren’t—but we accept those as music, of a sort. Well, by the same token advertising slogans are poetry, of a sort. (Lew Welch: “Raid kills bugs dead!”) There are all kinds of artful uses of language in our daily lives. But I admit you’re right insofar as this art of language is detached from any intimacy with the book as a medium. Régis Debray recently wrote that just as the ground of symbolic authority had once shifted from “God told me” to “I read it,” it’s now shifted from “I read it” to “I saw it on TV.”
If I have a complaint about all this, it’s not because I personally crave a large readership. Really. I don’t need to be popular. But I think it would be interesting—enlivening—if some form of poetry were. Like most poets, I guess, I would like to be more popular among my fellow poets, mainly. That’s what will determine whether the work has staying power. It is done for pleasure—or at least that sort of “negative pleasure” that is the relief of an overwhelming necessity—but hardly a side project. Rather, the ground.
© Barry Schwabsky, Adam Fieled 2007
BS: Well, that was a long time ago—circa 1979-80. At the time, Bloom was teaching two seminars, one on Freud and one on Wallace Stevens. I believe his book on Stevens was just about to come out. It was striking that he read Freud as a literary text while reading Stevens in a somewhat psychoanalytic way. For him, the turns of thought that Freud called “defenses” were synonymous with the turns of language Bloom liked to call “tropes.” While I had read Stevens a bit before, I wasn’t deeply familiar with his work, having come to modernist poetry through Williams and Pound (to whom Bloom was not sympathetic). So the fact that Bloom “gave” Stevens to me is already something very important. But his seminar was amazing. I’ve never experienced anything like it. Basically he would walk in each week with a massive pile of notes. He’d sit and start speaking from the notes but he hardly ever seemed to get past the first page of them, because he would start digging so deep into the matter at hand in what seemed a completely spontaneous manner. And just in order to follow Bloom’s train of thought in this monologue, you had to think so hard! Yet if you did, it was coherent. But eventually, he would get to a place where it was really difficult to follow him any more—the effort was too exhausting, maybe. And somehow just at that point Bloom would turn it around and pose it as a question to the class. And we would just sit there, stunned. How could you deal with such an elusive question? There would be some moments of silence, until one student or another ventured a response. The rest of us would be flummoxed—the response was even more incomprehensible than the question! But then Bloom would say, “So what you mean is that…” and would give a summary of what the students had just said, which would turn out to be something absolutely brilliant, and you would think, “Ah, that’s amazing!” while feeling like one of those little cartoon “genius” light bulbs had switched on above your head. And from there Bloom would take off on another intellectual excursion for twenty minutes or so, until something similar would happen all over again. I’ve never felt so intellectually challenged and stimulated, unless maybe by Paul de Man.
Now you have to remember that this was well before Bloom started emphasizing the idea of the canon of great books. He was working with the notion of influence, which in my view was a way of revising the idea of “tradition” such as you find it in Eliot for instance—a way of insisting on the idea of conflict or at least ambivalence between one work, one poet, and another, in contradiction to a more idealizing view of tradition. And this was tremendously important. I just happened to read an essay from 1982 by the art historian Linda Nochlin, in which she disputes “the premise that there is in fact an ongoing an continuous stream of great art with which the artist can be fused” and which she says is “that same tradition that Harold Bloom has recourse to in his formulation of the great (male) writer,” but in fact, in those days at least, Bloom was saying exactly the opposite! Anyway, there was somewhere in there an idea that impressed me very much, which was that a canonical author—by virtue of his poetic strength—was always in reality a heretical author, and that canons are formed by casting a veil over this conflictuality that never really goes away. So that a great poet is not only radical and in conflict with tradition but because of this also serves to bring out what was already radical in his or her precursors. In retrospect, maybe this wasn’t exactly what Bloom wanted to get across but this is what I got out of it.
On the other hand, there was a melodrama to all this that in the long run I found a bit overwhelming and unrealistic. There was too much about power and anxiety, not enough about the eroticism of language. He’s a moralist where I’m more of an aesthete. So his thought came to seem one-sided to me. But his passion for poetry was such a generous one that I value even his “wrong” ideas!
AF: I find this binary, aestheticism versus morality, intriguing, instructive, and omnipresent in serious art. Look at post-modern poetry: most of it (whether of the "Language" school or of other semi-related sub-movements, even Flarf) cuts against the grain of epiphanic poetry, the backbone of English Romanticism that Bloom so treasures. In the "epiphanic" model, the poet finds (often) an Other, usually in nature, that surfeits his/her consciousness until a transcendental state is achieved, and the poet then extrapolates a moral lesson (though this is more true of first Gen English Romanticism than second, with WW being exemplar.) Yet Lang-Po is ultimately just as much about morality as English Romanticism: only, the paradigm changes. Here, the poet subsumes the Self, the "I", and demonstrates that text is just text (and much ideology has been pirated from post-structuralism), that pretending that text is more than text is morally unsound (and that we then know that text cannot open a transparent window onto anything except its own “textuality”), and that the politics of the epiphanic "I" represent a kind of despotism, rather than a democratic undertaking. Yet, the eroticism you missed in Bloom is also (for me) missing in most (though not all) Language poetry. Common ground shared by Harold Bloom and Lang-Po: who would've guessed? Yet, I have to ask: what is lost, both in theory and in practice, when eroticism is lost? Pound, Picasso, so many others demonstrated a "phallocentric" orientation: in our PC world, we can amend this to Eros-orientation, what have you; how much of art's generative power is lost when the groin, the loins are taken out (in the sense that art may be preoccupied by straightforward eroticism or even just the Sontagian erotics of the creative process itself, or what we might even, with reservations, call "Beauty")?
BS: I don’t see the drawing of a moral lesson as typical of good Romantic poetry. Its morality does not reside there. The epiphanic moment you speak of is one in which the Self is momentarily broken open. In that sense, Language poetry could be seen as one big epiphany, without the lead-up or the trail off—a steady-state transcendence of subjectivity. Well, I told you I found some reason in Bloom’s notion that we are still working out the consequences of Romanticism. In any case, I don’t see the work of Lyn Hejinian or Ron Silliman or Barrett Watten or some others associated with Language poetry as being disembodied text—at least when the work is at its best. Its language is very physical, very present, very engaged with the senses. To me—and I’ve said this before, at a reading of hers here in London that I organized—Lyn’s writing in particular is pure pleasure. Something like what Roland Barthes called the text of bliss. What could be sexier than that? It’s not erotic in the traditional sense of a love lyric—unlike a lot of my own poetry, by the way—but it is charged with eros in a different way, and I respond to it viscerally. Lately I’ve been reading The Grand Piano, the serialized “experiment in collective autobiography” by ten of the Bay Area Language poets, which is now up to its third of ten projected installments, and so far it seems to be mostly about libido.
Even though what I do is very different, all that writing was tremendously important to me—a huge challenge, not to avoid being morally unsound, but to avoid writing badly! I remember reading Ketjak shortly after it was published—I’m not even sure how I got to know about it—and it was just so obvious that this was the thing that somehow had to be dealt with, the next great thing after Ashbery. And it was in my way, sure—so high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get over it—exactly the same feeling I’d had when I saw (I can’t even say “read”) “Clepsydra” for the first time. “What do you do with this?” Well, you don’t try to repeat it, that’s for sure. It does seem to disqualify certain possibilities, sure—it makes them unattractive. But that’s what might eventually give you the pleasure of discovering new possibilities, right? Anyway, I guess I’m very romantic in my view of Language poetry. They maybe thought they were critiquing the construction of subjectivity and “the voice,” and probably they succeeded in doing so, but in the process, but in the process they ended up getting at a kind of collective subjectivity, a collective voice. Silliman, to me, is comparable to Whitman. The difference is that while Whitman declared, “I contain multitudes”—and he really did—Silliman contains them without bothering to say so.
AF: Well, it will help to remember, as we carry this conversation forward, that we are of different generations. I was born in the mid 1970s (’76, to be exact), and my introduction to poetry came, as it often does for American teenagers, through the Beats: Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac. These are poets (and/or poet-novelists) who value the same things Shelley and Keats (if not Wordsworth and Coleridge) valued; spontaneity, personal expression and poetry expressive of the Self (or a multiplicity of Selves, as in Whitman), the notion of an individualistic poet, a "wilderness voice", taking a stand against a repressive cultural milieu (though that stance is much more pronounced in Shelley than in Keats, and Wordsworth started that way but later, according to Shelley and others, "sold out".) By the time I started seriously investigating Language poetry, and this happened through Anne Waldman (oddly enough), I had already written and read a lot of poetry. I had my own ideas about what a poem could/could not do, and though these ideas were tinged with naivete, some of them have stuck. The fact is that I don't get the "pure pleasure" you speak of from Hejinian, or most other Language poets. I find them (not always, but often) pretty boring. I know the Barthes text you're quoting from, and I actually wrote and published an essay quoting "The Pleasure of the Text." It happened to be about Rae Armantrout, one poet who others group under the Language aegis (I think mistakenly), and who I do get pure pleasure from. If I remember correctly, the text of bliss is one that threatens you, "brings to a crisis (your) relationship with language," but the crisis we get from Lang-Po has been around for thirty years now, and perhaps it isn't much of a crisis anymore. I feel a very compelling compulsion to look for the new, what hasn't been done. That's both in my writing and in my reading. I'm looking for a "buzz." I don't get it from Lang-Po (and I've only seen bits and pieces of Ketjak, though I know other classic Lang-Po texts, Progress, My Life, etc., very well). You resisted this when I first brought it up, but I have to reiterate that I think following the precepts which dictated Lang-Po, the most salient branch of post-modern art in poetry, would be a mistake. Do you have pronounced ideas as to what could effectively follow Lang-Po?
BS: Obviously we just disagree about the value of Language poetry, and although of course I’ve read the Beats—how could I not, Allen Ginsberg is my homeboy!—their work was never in any way formative for me. Still, I can’t tell you how surprised I was when a reviewer of my book Opera referred to me as a “post-Language poet.” It really made me look at myself with new eyes, because it’s certainly not a term I’d ever have thought of applying to myself. I’m not actually trying to write the next thing after Language poetry! Nor do I put a name to what it is I am writing. Honestly, I think it is mostly just traditional lyric poetry—as long as your idea of the tradition consists mostly of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Pierre Reverdy, Paul Celan, and Jack Spicer. You know, you can’t necessarily decide what you should do and then execute that decision. Some people can, but not me. For me, it’s not a question of what I should write or even what I could write—but of what I can write. I recognize that my capacities and aptitudes are fairly limited. There are all kinds of things I like to read but are part of an endeavor that I know it’s not in me in contribute anything substantial to. To some extent these limitations are almost physiological: I’ve got a nervous disposition, I’m easily bored, so it doesn’t work for me to try and do anything in too systematic a way—it’s got to be something more mercurial. And then there are questions of what you might call self-image that reinforce this. There are a lot of people out there who are trying to be professional poets. I don’t think they really are that exactly—in most cases it would be more accurate to say that they are professional poetry teachers. But in any case, they need to have a certain track record, they need to publish a certain amount and so on. And I think it makes more sense for those people to do project-oriented works than it does for me, so I kind of steer clear of their territory. I believe in a division of labor! It’s all worth doing, but that doesn’t mean that I have to do all of it. I cultivate an idea of myself as an amateur, so I like pushing the idea that I will write poetry without a plan or schedule, that it will be something I dip into periodically—like a dilettante! Why not? (Anyway, it’s hard enough for me to do that with the writing I have to work at systematically, my art criticism.) I admit that this is really a sort of vanity, not very different from my notion that since I don’t work in an office, I will never dress in any clothes that anybody would ever be likely to wear to the office—that way no one will ever mistake me for an office worker. Likewise, no one should ever mistake my poetry for that of a creative writing professor. Ridiculous, I know, but there you go.
AF: Well, no, actually I think that's pretty reasonable. Poetry has become all tied up with academia, which isn't necessarily a positive development, nor is the idea of "professionalism" with regards to poetry all that pertinent. Your profession is what you make money from, right? No one (or almost no one) makes substantial money from poetry. So, the idea of having a "poetry career," or being a "professional poet," seems slightly daft. I'm speaking from the "inside" here; I'm a PhD candidate with an MFA under my belt as well. What happens in these programs is that a certain kind of spontaneity-inhibiting pseudo-discipline is taught, where every line has to have a rational purpose, every poem must neatly fit under a certain rubric (which changes wildly from program to program), everything must be justified. Poets stop taking risks and start writing to satisfy a "meat market": small presses, journals (online and print), reading series, etc. I can't at all claim immunity to this process; it's just something that happens. My own way of fighting back is by writing poems that deliberately transgress the seemingly set-in-stone boundaries of poetic decorum. I have made a conscious decision, for example, to write a lot (and directly) about sex and sexual politics (and not from the vantage point of a PC academic feminist, to be sure). I mean the kind we hear about when Mick Jagger sings "Under My Thumb", or when Updike's Rabbit Angstrom deals with his wife (and this is not to be taken for misogyny either, as is often the case; the issue is the psychic struggle to the death between men and women, or between lovers in general). Post-avant poets, I've found, are very squeamish, and rather than try to appease them, I'd like to make them vomit! So I deliberately transgress and I take the heat for it as well. To bring up an earlier point, I get a buzz from poems that transgress, and do so with intelligence and style. I have the capability to churn out as much safe "product" as I want to. The point is that I don't want to. I want to bring back direct treatment (sans Lang-Po obfuscatory techniques) of sex, and if I say "I" again....no! God forbid! Here's something: we all know the mythology surrounding poets in/around among painters in history: Apollinaire/Jacob/Picasso, or Ashbery/O'Hara/Larry Rivers, etc. It seems that this kind of frutiful connection is absent from our post-avant world. Do you agree? Has the art world become segregated, and if so how and why?
BS: I’m squeamish too. I could never have been a doctor. Maybe that’s why I took up writing—an activity that deals with blood only in fancy. I don’t have anything against poets finding harbor in the universities. I can’t say it’s not a positive development if it has given more poets a way to keep going and keep producing. Most of the contemporary poetry I like is written by people who teach. But that’s just not where I ended up.
But as far as poets and art, maybe there’s less of a disconnect than it might seem. The editor of Artforum, Tim Griffin, is a poet, though he seems to keep that a little sub rosa. Likewise another of my favorite writers there, Frances Richard. I’m in awe of her work. These are people who are, I suppose, somewhere in between my generation and your generation, but in any case, they’re young enough to make me think that the connection is still there. But remember that the relation between the two arts has changed because so much art is now so permeated by language—or even just is made of language. So these arts impinge on each other’s territory now in uncomfortable ways. Gris could illustrate a book by Reverdy, but how could Lawrence Weiner illustrate a poet’s book? Words illustrating other words? An intriguing idea, but hard to see how you’d pull it off. More reasonably, the poet would just transform into the artist, as happened with Ian Hamilton Finlay, or else the artist into the poet, as occurred more recently in the case of Kenny Goldsmith.
Of course, assuming there is the “segregation” you speak, there could be more practical reasons as well: The dispersal of the poets around the country due to their becoming part of academia, as we’ve discussed, while art scene remains focused on a few urban centers; the rise in the art market that has vaulted at least the better-known artists into a completely different economic stratum than almost any poet—things like that mean that artists and poets may simply cross paths less than they once did.
AF: That's fascinating, and it brings up another salient point: who determines now what poetry is or is not? If I want to call Bruce Nauman a poet, is there anyone who could give me a reasonable reason not to? How about Barbara Kruger? Ed Ruscha? If a genre is, as Fowler says, more of a family than a classification (with fluid boundaries), would some kinds of intercourse between painters (and/or conceptual artists) and poets be incestuous? I have a nagging sense of disappointment about this issue. In some ways I really would like it to be 1955 or 1915 again in NYC or Paris. I mean, you would think that Silliman and Nauman would have a lot to talk about, right, even if they couldn't collaborate? Don't the best movements always go across all (or most of) the disciplines? The threads tying conceptual art to post-avant poetry seem thin indeed. Again, po-mo art seems a lot rougher, a lot more direct, "in your face", than the kind of poetry we're dealing with, that tends towards abstraction and (often) obfuscation. Would Nauman be happy at this point, to be called a poet? Or are these designations superfluous?
BS: I don’t suppose Nauman or Kruger or Ruscha would be particularly interested in being called a poet, although they all use language brilliantly—Ruscha’s in particular seems rather “poetic” to me, but that’s probably not a qualification for being a poet! I’m sure they’re all pretty well satisfied with the designation “artist.” Maybe one reason is that as a category, “art” has become a lot less determinate than “poetry.” Poetry does at minimum have to be language, right? Whereas art really can be just anything at all—language, video projection, oil on canvas, dead cow, live horse, walking, whatever. Personally, I’m satisfied with just working on language, but that scope means a lot to some people.
Silliman and Nauman probably would have a lot to talk about, except I don’t think Nauman talks about a lot with almost anybody. By reputation, he’s a pretty taciturn, pretty close-to-the-chest kind of guy. Silliman spoke somewhere about having been influenced by Philip Glass in writing Ketjak—which seems pretty obvious once it’s pointed out—so he might have a lot to talk about with Chuck Close, whose work, especially early on, was pretty connected with that of Glass (of whom he made a famous portrait). I can see Flarf as connected in spirit with a lot of recent figurative art. But it’s hard to think about it in terms of a period style, partly because even within any one art, there are so many different, seemingly contradictory things going on at any one time. Probably the underlying connections will become more obvious as the present recedes into history.
Maybe more than with artists, I think poets might have a lot to talk about with musicians. On the other hand I also wonder why even seemingly almost innately unpopular forms of music are still nonetheless so much more popular than poetry. For instance, I went to hear the re-formed Slint the other night. I read that their Spiderland album has sold 50,000 copies since it was released in 1991. That’s not much for a rock record, I guess, but it would be an enormous amount for a book of poetry. And yet honestly, I can’t see why anyone who could get into that record couldn’t get into any advanced form of poetry. I just don’t see the difference really. One is no more or less esoteric than the other. What do you think?
AF: I think people are just more willing to take a chance with music. I'm not familiar with the group you've mentioned, but I assume they're "avant", i.e. "out there". Even the most esoteric forms of ambient, electronic, and other branches of avant-garde music have more appeal for masses of people than poetry. It's always hard to tell how and why cultural mores form, but my hunch is that people become attached to music because it's so rampant in our society (in a way it wasn't in 1907 or 1807). Previous cultures didn't have recorded music or recorded music devices, or entertainment devices that invariably have a musical component (i.e. TV commercials ubiquitously feature music, etc.). A child born in the US or the UK will be hearing music every day. In Wordsworth's day, people told stories to amuse each other. Now, we switch on a TV, and there's music, or a radio, and there's music. Poetry is much harder to come by in quotidian life. So people accustom themselves to music from a very early age, rather than people telling stories (though obviously parents do still tell their children stories) or people reading aloud from books, and where once books were ubiquitous, music is now. That doesn't make it better or degrade poetry as an art form. It does mean that if you go into poetry, you better be sure no money and a limited audience doesn't bother you. Does it bother you, or do you have enough invested in your art criticism that poetry seems like a "side project", something done more or less for pleasure?
BS: From www.allmusic.com: “Though largely overlooked during their relatively brief lifespan, Slint grew to become one of the most influential and far-reaching bands to emerge from the American underground rock community of the 1980s; innovative and iconoclastic, the group's deft, extremist manipulations of volume, tempo, and structure cast them as clear progenitors of the post-rock movement which blossomed during the following decade.” Check them out.
Anyway, I disagree that poetry is hard to come by in daily life. I mean, you could say that art music is rare in daily life, but jingles aren’t, and background music isn’t, and forms of manufactured pop music that are maybe one-third of the way from jingles and background music to something I would actually think of listening to aren’t—but we accept those as music, of a sort. Well, by the same token advertising slogans are poetry, of a sort. (Lew Welch: “Raid kills bugs dead!”) There are all kinds of artful uses of language in our daily lives. But I admit you’re right insofar as this art of language is detached from any intimacy with the book as a medium. Régis Debray recently wrote that just as the ground of symbolic authority had once shifted from “God told me” to “I read it,” it’s now shifted from “I read it” to “I saw it on TV.”
If I have a complaint about all this, it’s not because I personally crave a large readership. Really. I don’t need to be popular. But I think it would be interesting—enlivening—if some form of poetry were. Like most poets, I guess, I would like to be more popular among my fellow poets, mainly. That’s what will determine whether the work has staying power. It is done for pleasure—or at least that sort of “negative pleasure” that is the relief of an overwhelming necessity—but hardly a side project. Rather, the ground.
© Barry Schwabsky, Adam Fieled 2007
