Post 36: Great Books

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Post 36: 7/17/07

Great Books 1–10 + 2:
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I have been asked by the editors of Barnwood Press to provide a list of the ten most important books for my development as a writer. "The concept is that each poet offers a list of 10 titles that have been especially important in his or her development as a poet, plus commentary. As you will see [in volume 1], the poets in the book adapted the guidelines to their own fit. We think that the adaptations are one of the best features of the book, and we encourage you to make the project your own." It would be, of course, absolutely impossible to limit such a list to ten titles: I could cite that number of works by the writers of The Grand Piano project as crucial. So I decided to try to identify ten or so categories of works that were the most formative for me, commenting on five or six significant examples from each. The list, of course, is tilted toward works that established themselves early on as significant; it would be interesting to make a list of the works that were similarly influential in the last five years. I have bolded the most significant title in each one: had these works not existed, all would have been otherwise.

1) Modernists

James Joyce, Ulysses; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway: Gertrude Stein, Geography & Plays; Ezra Pound, Personae and Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII; William Carlos Williams, Spring & All; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem

I read Ulysses in 1968 backpacking from Indonesia through Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia; my copy was inscribed with a record of dates and places. A year later, considering whether to emigrate to Canada in 1969, I read Mrs. Dalloway; I saw it as a work of realism. Geography & Plays gave me my first sense of discontinuous meaning; there was no way to read Stein's work from cover to cover, and I never did. Pound's typography was likewise a disjunct communication that I can still sense more than remember cognitively; there was an physical aura attending his pages. I will speculate now that I read the imagistic lyrics of Personae as a kind of back formation to the mysteries of the Cantos. Spring & All, in the 1970 Frontier Press edition that restored the original edition's prose, was the single most important work that defined for me my future as a poet/critic: in it, text and context combine in a single literary system. I discovered Home to Harlem relatively late; it enacted the relationship between modern aesthetics and cultural identity/radical politics in ways that are only assumed in formalist versions of the canon.

2) Postmoderns

Charles Olson, "The Kingfishers" and The Maximus Poems 1–10; Louis Zukofsky, The Collected Shorter Poems; Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow; Robert Creeley, Pieces; Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals; Joanne Kyger, Places to Go

Olson's early writing seemed closer to surrealism than vatic history; the shifts in voice in "The Kingfishers" were a compelling poetics of the nonrational, nearly "taking off with blood." It was the allegory of unfolding subjectivity, rather than his use of historical materials, that made the early Maximus poems exemplary. Zukofsky's short poems were an education in mastering the undecidable in postmodernity that I felt enjoined to master. I read his work at discontinuous moments in social space until I was able to invest it with as much reality as any object. While Duncan was a mythic presence at Berkeley in the 60s, it was the work on the page—the measure of the line, the space on the page, the disparate materials, and serial poetics—that was convincing. I picked up Pieces in a bookstore in Toronto, during my attempt at emigration. The sans serif typography neurologically inscribed Creeley's minimalist syntax, which gave the strongest evidence to date that writing took place at the level of words. An entire poetics began therewith. Graphic ideas stood out in Ginsberg's Indian Journals, with its cover image of a naked saddhu, street photos, holographic doodlings, and refusal to distinguish poetry from prose. Joanne's Places to Go likewise sought a boundary between poetry and prose with a verse line that showed the shifting relationships between language and being-in-time.

3) New York School

John Ashbery, The Double Dream of Spring; Kenneth Koch, When the Sun Tries to Go On; Frank O'Hara, Second Avenue; Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets; Joe Brainard, I Remember; Bernadette Mayer, Studying Hunger

"Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches," wrote Gertrude Stein. The New York School was circular in that sense. I see them now as an island in time, undoubtedly the same island Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and the other great modernists were hailed on. But the interesting part of the New York School was its (ironic) insistence on its location: somehow miraculously the project of the "French School" was going to make sense in America, now that New York had "stolen the idea of modern art." One should never forget the ghost of originality in the New York School, which may precisely be that "double dream" Ashbery imagined. His poems—unlike the "language-centered" ones of The Tennis Court Oath, whose aesthetic he distanced himself from—defined an important cultural dynamic: the secondariness of literature. This is what it means that the sun "tries to go on" in Koch's poem; in Mayakovsky's ode on speaking to the sun, it is the sun who speaks and the poet who records. "Secondariness" also gives us Second Avenue, where the condition of arriving from "elsewhere" (internal or external) is identified as the source of art. Berrigan's Sonnets are the consummate work of secondariness: rewritings of his own poems, translations from Rimbaud, lines stolen from friends, a complete self-cannibalization. It is that act of production being a consumption of itself that Bernadette Mayer thematized in the hybrid writing project of Studying Hunger. And Joe Brainard's I Remember should be cited as one of the origins of cultural studies: culture surrounds us, and we find out who we are. There, I've just said more about the New York School than most critics, to whom I would say: you need to account for the belatedness of the New York School, or you're whistling Dixie!

4) The Turn to Language

John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath; Larry Eigner, Another Time in Fragments; Clark Coolidge, The Maintains; Robert Grenier, Sentences; Hannah Weiner, Clairvoyant Journal; Rae Armantrout, Extremities

The routes to "Language" in poetry were many, and came at the intersection of numerous works of art (that would only later be justified in theory). Ashbery's Tennis Court Oath, for example, was more addressed to aestheticism and the analogy of "words" to "paint" after abstract expressionism than to questions of language and meaning, but whatever his motives, language was set free to construct its own orders in the reader. From an altogether different perspective, Larry Eigner's phenomenological lyrics read the surfaces of the world as identical to mental constructs within the time-space continuum of fragmented everyday life. Coolidge's The Maintains was the first work I encountered that one could call entirely "constructivist": the poem was made of the words themselves, drawn from abstract sources (the dictionary) rather than from literature, conscious reflection, or experience. What Coolidge built up in the sequence of The Maintains, Grenier analyzed at the most minute detail, one lyric fragment at a time, in the 500 index cards of Sentences. Radicalizing the phenomenological imperative of proto-Language, Hannah Weiner's Clairvoyant Journal transcribed literally the details of consciousness. The impossibility of her project showed how language and mind were nonidentical, not joined in any basic psychological unity. If Coolidge, Grenier, and Weiner work to undo the image, the lyric poetry of Rae Armantrout takes place at the edge where imagistic presence turns toward nonreferentiality.

5) Language writing

Tom Mandel, Ency; Ron Silliman, Ketjak and Tjanting; Kit Robinson, The Dolch Stanzas and Down and Back; Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman, Legend; Bob Perelman, 7 Works and Primer; Lyn Hejinian, Writing Is an Aid to Memory and A Border Comedy

The explosion of Language writing in San Francisco and New York (and other sites) in the late 1970s defeats the priority of the canonical, single-authored work. What occurred was a multiplicity of invention and constant borrowing (either in the literal sense of stealing lines or in multi-authored projects) among a sizeable group of authors, only partly represented here. Silliman's two early long poems, and his more abstract work, propelled him toward the capacious, "world-making" project of language that occupies him to this day. Mandel's use of language's "spare parts" in Ency took anti-expressivism to an extreme, as did Robinson's The Dolch Stanzas. Robinson's lyrics enacted a social poetics that began with the aesthetic of the fragment and rhymed it with the fractured, downwardly mobile, but liberationist culture of the 1970s. The group-authored Legend contains most of Language writing's structural devices, and many that are still unique. It was the Language work most informed by the early reception of structuralism and poststructuralism, from Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson to Derrida and Lacan. Perelman's free improvisations led to the semiotics of Primer, identified by Fredric Jameson as a locus classicus of the postmodern. Hejinian's autobiographical reflections in her well-known My Life were made possible by the rigorous structures of Writing Is an Aid to Memory and brought to consummate fruition in A Border Comedy, a poem that mediates the gap between life and mind.

6) Hybrid texts

Carla Harryman, Under the Bridge; Steve Benson, Blue Books; Kathy Acker, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac (Imagining); Robert Glück, Jack the Modernist; David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives; Nathaniel Mackey, Djbot Bhaghostus's Run

After Language comes something equally compelling: the notion of an interface between world and word in hybrid forms. Carla's prose showed me something I had not seen in other writings: an "immanent" syntax that did not assume the distance of objectivity or transcendence, and that accessed the world on its terms. Benson's improvisatory forms had likewise realized the possibility of a being-in-time, in duration, made manifest at the level of language. His performances were transposable to texts, and vice versa. Acker's Nymphomaniac arrived in the mail in installments in the mid 1970s; I remember a performance in which a bunch of her friends showed up and claimed to be her. Acker's work expanded as it destroyed the limits of identity. With Glück's Jack the Modernist, the imperative to form was returned to the excessive grounds of sexuality as a revisionist account of realism. Close to the Knives pushed writing toward hybrid structures of knowledge/power at the site of sexuality, as Foucault would have liked. Nate Mackey's series of improvisatory jazz-inspired fictions locates a ground between invention and listening that he defines as the source of culture itself. All culture, for Mackey, is a form of listening to what "we" are collectively improvising.

7) Word/image

André Breton, Nadja, Les Vases communicants, and L'Amour fou; Marcel Duchamp, Selected Writings; Robert Smithson, The Writings of Robert Smithson; Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object . . .; Barbara Kruger, We Won't Play Nature to Your Culture;

While I consider Breton's Nadja to be one of the greatest works ever written—a complete intellectual construction that is simultaneously a poetics of lived experience that cannot be predicted—it is Smithson's writings that are most crucial to my own development. Smithson read Breton to the letter and continued his conversion of the material and intellectual into a method that both generated new art and read the extant surfaces of the world. If the distinction between method and technique I made in Total Syntax holds up and is of continuing use—and I am interested in seeing what it takes so that it eventually will—Breton and Smithson are the artists who show what is at stake: nothing less than total method. Yet each depends on a series of very particular occasions coming together—Breton in the overheated political climate of the 1920s, and Smithson in the 1960s. The imperative of method is thus historical: this is captured, literally, in Lippard's assemblage of documentation on whatever counted as conceptual, site-specific, or performance art in a narrow window of time. Generalizing this effect of the relation between text and image in Breton, Smithson, and Lippard, Kruger's semiotics redefined an imperative that could only end in their dissociation. Word and image coming undone in the work that most tries to unite them: all this is made possible in the tradition begun by Marcel Duchamp, who showed how autonomy is an illusion and that word and image are distinct.

8) New music/jazz

George Antheil, Ballet mécanique; Anton Webern, Complete Works, opus 1-31 (Pierre Boulez); John Cage, Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (Maro Ajemian) and Etudes australes (Grete Sultan); James Brown, "Sex Machine"; Steve Reich, Drumming: Anthony Braxton, For Alto and Creative Orchestra Music; Cecil Taylor, Conquistador and Unit Structures; Steve Lacy, Clinkers and Anthem; Franco, "Flora" and "Attention na Sida"; Derrick May, "Strings of Life"; Clark Coolidge, Sound as Thought; Ted Pearson, Songs Aside

I have given two examples of the twentieth-century classical tradition and three of the avant-garde improvisers of the 1970s to indicate what I was listening to over a very long time, and in a very wide field, which is not restricted to these lineages. Also central for me is the tradition of polyrhythmic percussion music, European and African/American. All these works were recordings I played repeatedly, for deep instruction into the possibilities of "syntax" and "statement" in music: each of these musics is in some sense "language-centered" or similar to language. Webern's use of the tone row, for instance, pushes music in the direction of syntax and semantics via the twin routes of repetition and defamiliarization. Cage builds up a grammar through the relation between notes and chord clusters in his Sonatas and Etudes; the damped tones and complex layers of his works are linguistic, meaning-making. Braxton's solos in For Alto bring phrasing into the productive syntax of a natural language, while his orchestral composition explode the social form of jazz improvisation to access other forms of hybrid music. Cecil Taylor's canonical works are as importantly paratactic and accretive as the Cantos; they show how affective states are built up in layers of expression. Steve Lacy's solos were as close to language as possible; they spoke the truth of repeated utterance as insistence. This list gives an condensed indication of the mix of Eurocentric and Afrocentric musics in my personal canon, which extends much farther, of course. Finally, Clark Coolidge and Ted Pearson are the writers who most demonstrate a poetics informed by musical listening.

9) Literary theory

Viktor Shklovsky, Third Factory; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis; Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning; Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory; Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language; Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language

Again, from such a broad field of writing as twentieth-century literary theory, what stands out are those texts that have inscribed themselves in memory, providing an almost physical platform from which to imagine further possibilities. Shklovsky's Third Factory in that sense is a culminating figure for the intersection of the literary and cultural, articulated by the dual imperatives that "one must be completely modern" and of social revolution, which are not incompatible in his mid-1920s account. His work stands for the vast field of Soviet literature of the avant-garde and the 1920s, which I read intensively in the 1970s. Two critical works of mid-century modernism stand out for defining the scope of literature as representation, for Auerbach, and the intersection of sound and meaning, for Jakobson—which, unlike the foundational work of Saussure, is not strictly differential but has positive terms. I read Jameson's Prison House of Language against the grain of its Marxist attack on formalism and structuralism; in the very act of writing the work I saw a synthesis that I think Jameson would not now disavow. Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language, more than Derrida or Foucault, shows the critical and cultural potential latent in "poetic language"—no matter that there is no essential difference between poetry and prose, or writing and speech. Kristeva's account explains the continuing importance of the poetic as that which exceeds meaning condensed in the symbolic order; poetry is affectively revolutionary in that sense. I came late to the centrality of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, which I now see as a theory of culture in and as the autonomous text.

10) Cultural theory

Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution and My Life; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter; Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish; Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology

More than any work I can name, Trotsky's history is the living proof that "history happens," that it is within the scope of human agency and will. No matter that his historical teleology has been superseded (or has been asserted to be): Trotsky, in his written account, re-presents the event, in one of the greatest histories ever written. While Breton praised My Life for its purity of tone, it is the irony of being a historical actor that comes through most clearly—as also the fact that the work was written in exile and defeat. What Trotsky's positive history could not present, Jameson's critical reflection would locate in absentia, via a method that unites economic determinism with the "absent cause" of that lived suffering we come to know as historical. The famous dictum "history is what hurts" shows how it is inscribed in avoidance—who would put her hand into the flame?—but also how it may be recovered in the fantastical products of art. While Williams's Marxism and Literature maintains the standard for the continuing relevance of Marxism to culture, it was Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony that allows one, in good conscience, to continue the Marxist project after the disappointments of its heroic phase. Only a critical Marxism will survive, and it is not going away. Gender Trouble, of course, is a major reason for its modification, as would be the orders of knowledge and power that Marxism cannot explain for Foucault. The larger project of cultural theory, however, is encompassing in and of its contradictions; just so, The Sublime Object of Ideology expands reflection on cultural theory itself to the status of renewed ideology critique.

11) Film

Sergei Eisenstein, Aleksandr Nevsky; Jean Vigo, L'Atalante; Jacques Clouzot, Wages of Fear; Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo Story; Federico Fellini, 8 1/2; Wojciech Has, The Saragossa Manuscript; Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers; Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless, Alphaville, and Numéro Deux; Ridley Scott, Blade Runner; David Lynch, Mulholland Drive

My earliest experiences in world cinema took place in the tiny, unkempt Studio and Guild Theaters on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. A precocious late bloomer in high school, I drove my parents' second car, a 1956 Cadillac handed down from my grandmother, like a Cruise missile through the Oakland Hills, seeking the heat of Berkeley in the aftermath of the Free Speech Movement. It was there I first met Ron Silliman, hanging around the Avenue in front of Pepe's Pizza down the block, in 1964. Sex and great art were both things that took place in darkened public rooms. Of my ten greatest films of all time listed here, I saw more than half between 1964 and 1969 at the Studio and Guild; Blade Runner and Mulholland Drive recapture that ambience. The most important film on the list is The Saragossa Manuscript, which taught me that all art is a construction. Runners-up would be L'Atalante, 8 1/2, and Alphaville for pure filmic fantasy; and Wages of Fear and The Battle of Algiers for pure filmic tension. Alexandr Nevsky and Tokyo Story stand for a propensity for cinematic epic that could be extended to many examples.

12) Great books

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders; Gustave Flaubert, A Sentimental Education; Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace; Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poésies; Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz; W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

My taste in "great books" has always been for the ones that, even if seen in retrospect, define the "literary" in their occasion and structure. The notion of inauthenticity, lying and theft, at the outset of the English novel in Moll Flanders tells me more about what a novel is than more positive examples, in that sense. Sentimental Education created an original anti-hero and showed how "he" was a social construction, a negative trope for the social history Flaubert was addressing, however ironically. War and Peace may be read as an allegory of construction, of the modern as much as of the novel, and points to the important place of "destruction" in the positivity of what we know as "culture." In one of my own works, I sampled paragraphs from the novel and juxtaposed them with stanzas of Language writing; the cross-connection worked, with Shklovsky's concept of defamiliarization leading the way. Lautréamont's Maldoror is, of course, all negative all the time; the writing itself, however, could not be more present or tactile, as bodies floated down the canal. Berlin Alexanderplatz is my most recent "great book": a comprehensive psychopathology of the twentieth century, using modernist methods to lay bare the aporia of Weimar Germany. I can hardly wait until the German DVD release of Werner Fassbinder's TV version appears in the U.S., with Hanna Schygulla and subtitles. The Rings of Saturn, another late entry, is one of the few recent works that redefines "literariness" in the historical sense that concerns me here.

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