Posts
Post 37: 8/19/07
Continuous Reading:
Ten Reviews in Ten Days (Part I)
The following is an experiment I have wanted to conduct for some time: to write a series of reviews of a predetermined number of works of poetry, on the same number of days. The point would be to use the form of the review to generate new meanings in their own right, to discover connections between works, to construct an overview or thematic threads, to generalize as well as particularize about the state of poetry—not necessarily to "review" in an authoritative manner the work at hand, but to be responsible in as many senses as I could manage. Poetry, in my real-time experience, takes place in a virtually permanent deficit of symbolic value: there is always more significant work being published than anyone can read, which turns out to be a precondition for the making of "touchstones" of value so that one does not have to deal with the rest. The entire mode of production of modernism, from Pound and Eliot on, concerned itself with value in the sense of restricting production and distribution—no matter what revolutions of taste or method, the restricted economy of symbolic production would rationalize them. On the other hand, we are now witnessing the development of internet-based archives for poetic texts (particularly in visual or audio forms) that has only begun to intersect with critical responses. The following ten books were, in August 2007, on a shelf with a number of poetry titles I intended to read. As I left for a week's time in Upper Michigan, I chose ten of them, which I will read in alphabetical order. I also want to employ two stylistic constraints: one quote per review and no more than five paragraphs.
è Part I: Daniel Bouchard; Brenda Coultas; Suzanne Doppelt; Robert Fitterman; Merrill Gilfillan
è Part II: Ted Greenwald; to be continued.
19 August 2007: Daniel Bouchard, The Filaments (La Laguna, Sp.: Zasterle Press, 2006)
I do not want to begin with a formal or stylistic account of Daniel Bouchard's The Filaments; I do not want to attempt to name at the outset what its genealogy might be, or its commitments to genre. Rather, I want to try to state the "problem" it identifies as a condition of poetry, and how it attempts a solution. It is not the author who either proposes or disposes here; it is the limit of the possibility of poetry at a particular time and place. Adorno, in his lectures on History and Freedom, makes the same point in terms of philosophy 's limits: "If thought finds itself locked into a situation in which practice is blocked so that interpretation is the only activity left open to it, it would be an illusion and pure self-deception for philosophy to react otherwise" (128), and he goes on to propose, in place of the tasks of "first philosophy," the questions "What does it all mean? Is what we see really all that there is? Is there nothing more to it than this?," finally concluding that what makes such question so interesting is absence.
I see Bouchard's poetry asking a similar question of the presentation of experience in everyday life, where "Is that all there is?" is predicated on something withheld, hidden, covered up, or dissembled: absent. The writer begins in a state where an important aspect of experience is being withheld, and then evaluates the language he uses as product of and response to the condition. We might think about the question Bouchard asks through Georg Lukács's title, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism—which referenced, when it was first used, the continued debates on the Left between social meaning and modernist abstraction. We might nuance this title with the addition of "post" and arrive at post-contemporary realism, or even post-realism, as Bouchard's problematic: the limits of poetry in a condition where "something is missing" is the condition of the real, with poetry the only possible way of locating it. Bouchard's poems begin by accessing the capacity of language, in a straightforward manner, to record the condition of everyday life, but they are rapidly caught up in a preexisting condition of denial and discontinuity:
To dwell inside this dot pattern minutiae:
a believable urban landscape
of line art and one-color filler
made real in the tessellated surfaces
denoted by tiny marks
making shadows of ridges
as plausible as a stroll on a sidewalk
"What the fuck" [22-23]
What is realist about this passage is not simply referential (the depicted urban scene) but the tracking movement of the lineation. The poetic begins at the intersection of referential intention and its disruption, with the all-American one-liner, so pleasurably repeated three times in sequence: "What the fuck?" A kind of word balloon rising over the now-cartoon scene, the interjection of low-mimetic diction breaks any illusion of realism in two. Of course, such a thing is very frequently said; it both instantiates a cultural condition of radical doubt and interrupts any such thing as mimesis. The effect of what I would term a "plotted" irruption of unlikeness, then, is the via negativa Bouchard uses to name the condition of the post-contemporary real. The reality effect that results is the consequence of making unreal, which language accomplishes both literally and in absentia.
The political reading of Bouchard's work—and I am certain it intends a politics—begins with the status and limits of discrepant intention. To interrupt the seamless discontinuity of the depthless real by a device that makes strange and only less real—is this a form of agency (perhaps the only one possible) that returns us, at the very least, to a condition of understanding the real in its pre-planned absences? As if they were having a war somewhere out there in the distance, and all we get are the occasional discontinuities in reality coverage to tell us that it's there? And all that we can do, using the devices of poetry, is intuit the gaps in the real as not represented by its discontinuous effect? The frequent irruptions of "the president"—a post-realist referent if there ever was one—pinpoints the use of this device. The "president" as site of comprehension for "what is going on" becomes, as we are aware, a moment of pure opacity, a sound bite identical to a gap in the auditory continuity. "The president" in this sense can only address the "citizen" (the man on the street; the enlistee to Iraq; the poet) as nonexistent; this confirms "the president" in his pre-plotted ways, conducting a war that simultaneously derealizes the present and makes discontinuous its ground elsewhere.
Bouchard's work, then, is to plot, almost on graph paper, the contours of a post-contemporary post-realism. It is in the strain between a poetic literalness (and an interesting and viable syntax that results from the suspension and continuity of elements in the tension between line and phrase) with overdetermined moments of discontinuity, referential or otherwise, that the limits of poetic language are assayed. This is not a preconstructed technique, and all the more interesting for that. Bouchard shows, through poetry, how other forms of agency have been blocked, with derealized representation a primary vehicle for doing so.
20 August 2007: Brenda Coultas, Early Films (Boulder, Colo.: Rodent Press, 1996)
Brenda Coultas's Early Films is a series of prose vignettes, indebted to the prose poem but emphatically diegetic and hence squarely on the side of narrative, even in the briefest examples. After the concept of "theme music," we have here presented a series of twenty-four "theme narratives," each based around psychic complexities of social nature as encountered in the sticks, the backwaters, the land of the truly bereft. These themes are, as one might expect from the importance of bereftness in the psychobiography of all American adolescents, clustered around the usual foci of developmental coming-into-consciousness: the body, sexuality, reproduction, unfairness, cruelty, authority, a-sociality, death, and nature. This cluster of themes wraps around an overarching master trope of expressionist depth taken out of itself and literalized as the condition of "life" unregulated by the modern, assumed as the world where developed art practices such as hers is makes sense. The writing splits the pre-modern themes it clusters around from their development as art and frames them as entryways into the condition of being modern. The writing is educative as much as developmental: a particularly American ritual of escaping alive from one's origins as formative.
The title indicates Coultas's formal interest in nonnarrative sequences such as can be found in Edison's or Lumiere's early movies. In one work, "Ostriches Running," three short takes play minor variations on a single action: "A man is running alone in a corral. Suddenly the corral is filled with ostriches running along side him" (65). This take is framed by a variation that simply places it at the beginning of the film and one that substitutes "chickens" for "ostriches" at the end. Ostriches become a physical embodiment of unlikeness (ostriches are "the other white meat," "the new meat," we learn in the next vignette) as both defamiliarized and literal. This is a constructive device familiar in Eisenstein's simultaneous metaphorical linking and autonomy in the assembling of shot sequences out of which the "higher order" narrative begins to emerge—as such, it is a central formal feature of modernist film. Coultas, oppositely, uses filmic sequences to unlink connections—to dismantle narrative so that the strangeness of the individual shots, as it were, becomes its primary vehicle. It's as if filmic progression were to cancel itself out in single images.
What this does is bring us back to the pre-modern elements that were presumed to be organized, and thus canceled out, in modern techniques. But as we know from the second law of thermodynamics, the greater order is a greater disorder, just as the forces that constructed the modern Babylon of New York (identified in the narrative as the place the narrator fled to and retreats from after a decade or so) forces those remaining on the land back through successive developmental stages. The world of Early Films has many elements of a medieval landscape, filled with the ghosts of religion, patriarchal violence, lust and sin. It is closer to The Autobiography of Margery Kempe than to Winesberg, Ohio, in this sense: transcendence is nowhere guaranteed by the aesthetic, and one is continually lapsing back to the condition of an abortion or an afterbirth or simply an errant physicality:
Because the angels were created in my image, I assume them to possess coarse and dark crotches. Detailed like my own self which I no longer display naked in public except in grainy photographs. Like the portrait of my spirit guides I paid to have drawn in pastels. I saw for several hours as the artist meditated and sketched and then meditated and sketched. When I saw the finished portrait I was appalled to find that the artist had drawn an angel with an extremely large cock. [57]
Returning to the land of bereftness, Middle America as a formative dystopia, gives a somewhat conventional reading to such passages. More interesting would be to transpose a world of Cormac McCarthy-style anomie, violence, and sexual mayhem into an altogether prior, non-American order. This is a world of survivals, where the artist is a survival too (though of another sort). And that makes all the difference in the larger frame of Coultas's aesthetic: while the form of her work emerges from and makes perceptive the objective conditions lived on backroads in a border state, it is not content simply to explore such a double edge. Otherwise put, I noticed a struggle around metaphor (the overarching trope toward thematic likeness; the containment of the typical as merely unimaginable) that is characteristic of a certain type of thematizing cliché. In an essay I have not yet written, I want to explain precisely why a serious writer should never use the word like: it should be stricken from the repertoire of creative writing, particularly poetry with any hint of narrative whatsoever. If anything, the word like is meant to be exploded in unlikeness, as Coultas does frequently here. A good example would be "Basketball Story," a compilation film of gothic bereftness circling around random acts of unmotivated violence (including a thumbnail of Dreiser's An American Tragedy). The multiplicity of stories reduces their cumulative impact and reveals an underlying strata of fetishistic projection that used to be called "naturalism" but now is simply a storehouse of devices to be recycled in horror films seen in drive-in moves, inspiring copulation and axe murder.
Writing these remarks in a cabin in Upper Michigan, it is interesting to utilize their cues to perceive the cultural environment one finds oneself within. Suddenly the world is more full of contingent acts of violence and bodily depravity than one is ever aware of in the big city (though they are not difficult to find). Alcoholics hanging at the bar of the local tavern try not to glare at the skin-tight halter top of the contractor's babe, his truck parked outside. Teenage boys skateboard behind dumpsters and spin out on nonlethal drug combinations. Sturgeons are hauled out of the lake, their opened bodies spilling over with roe. Quicksand on the sand banks sucks in the occasional tourist. There is a return to primal material in the devolution of social coherence that has everything to do with something bad going somewhere else (job losses and housing decline in the rest of the state), all of which is eerily naturalized. Coultas's filmic sequences of border culture link together such corporeal mayhem with an original elsewhere.
22 August 2007: Suzanne Doppelt, Ring Rang Wrong, trans. Cole Swenson (Providence, R.I.: Burning Deck, 2006)
If there is a "problem" being worked out in Suzanne Doppelt's Ring Rang Wrong, we are reassured by the title not to take it too seriously. A problem for the work, then, might be a demand to "get it right" in some sense or another, while still allowing that a mis-take might equally be to the point. The Oulipians had a term for this: the clinamen or "swerve." I will therefore hypothesize that the point Doppelt argues is both mis-taken and a "swerve": it is the multiplication of two negatives. If so, the writing comes out literary in the positive sense. It "adds new forms to nature" by being mis-taken in some way, a swerve from its proper object.
Peeling the onion, perhaps the art problem here is misrecognized as its addition to nature; perhaps it is the status of method as it add new forms to tradition. How it does so then becomes an art problem? Via a technique that, through acts of mistranslation, renders new meanings from a prior text. This prior text appears to be fragments from the pre-Socratics, written through a process of oblique deconstruction. Better, processed through an encryption device so that their opaque attempts to say how the world appears seem somehow like an incontrovertible natural fact in their own right, to be approximated but never translated.
he lies down in the sun covered with manure and dies the next day. The rainbow, pale green and red, is both a cloud and the reflection of the sun on a cloud: the sign of a tempest. The water that overflows this cloud makes the wind rise and the rain fall and even, in certain caverns, run in rivers. Floi'floss'omm' aflom'if'lier' fos'oulou't'flui't lul'ssfon't; loi 'ssoss' resseïelsse sél'ot'fir't'foi' olf'ottoir'os't'fur'fer'ofsav't'loze t'fû'al''if'for'loze'errsé'olf't' lur't' liféïa'omm't'. The earth rests on the water like a piece of wood or something similar or something able to float on water, the earth rests on the water and floats like a ship, the earth floats on the water like a chunk of wood or any other thing that can stay afloat [18–19]
For a work of literature, this is a noisy text. There is little high-value information here, in other words. The frog at the bottom of the well (high-value information) is the classic text, but even that is errant. Did the ancients (or at least one of them) actually believe that earth floats in water like a chunk of wood? Maybe that was just a message they left on their cell phones, except they didn't have cell phones. Come to think of it, they might have. I feel as if I am about to go on a shopping spree when reading this text, to an incredible mall just outside Paris where all the outlets sell the classic text. In a range of colors and fabrics, but only one size.
The point may be that we are wearied with a certain style of writerly erudition that overly works its paraphrases from the classic text in order to install itself as literary. Some examples of such overworked classicism might be Zukofsky's Catullus or the Latinate poetry of Pascale Quignard. On the good side of the ledger would stand Bouvard & Pecuchet, Ponge's Soap, David Melnick's Men in Aïda, Bob Perelman's cut-ups of Mozart ("How to Improve"). Doppelt thus appears to be making a generational move, releasing literariness from traditional anxieties about the classic text and creating for pleasurable surface out of prior anxiety.
Most of the pre-Socratic fragments vamped on here involve some kind of bizarre approximation of a description of nature, which easily could be read as ignorance or delusion and which mocks its own authoritativeness. Nature itself is authoritative, of course, so that even a pre-Socratic misapprehension of nature still tips its hat in the right direction. But I am not willing to grant the text its "natural" underpinnings, as it were. This is a constructed work, in which errancy is all too deliberate. Juxtaposed with the text are a series of non-objective, surface-oriented, art photographs that further complicate any naturalistic reading (and which offer their own account of non-objectivity), and homophonic mistranslations of the pre-Socratics interrupting it every so often. I should also mention Cole Swenson's translation, which accurately conveys the "fly on graph paper" buzz of the work.
24 August 2007: Robert Fitterman, Metropolis XXX (Washington, D.C.: Edge, 2004)
The use of roman numerals in Rob Fitterman's Metropolis XXX is, for the cognoscenti, no innocent device: A Draft of XXX Cantos. Metropolis, then, begs comparison with the use of documentary materials in the Cantos, as well as in at least two other works using documentary that somehow managed reference to Pound: my own Bad History and Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Drafts. As the most recent in the series, Metropolis is indeed doing something with document. It is not simply the documentary as material or text it assays, but the "emptying out" of aesthetics and intention from the mere facticity of the document. As well, this emptying out appears as a historical argument, via the subtitles reference to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There would be a conjunction of a particular sort of the documentary and the historical in the organization of such material—a poetics.
Booths 1–10
ACC Craftfair Baltimore
ACC Craftfair Columbus
ACC Craftfair San Francisco
Accessories–The Show
Accessories–The Show–Holiday Resort
ACCI International Craft Expo
ACCI International Craft Expo
ACE Hardware Spring Convention & Exhibit
ACE/Annual Claims Exposition & Conference
ACESS EXPO [21]
Taken seriously as a poetics—how the "work" is made—the list reveals to begin with a bizarre (once you come to think about it) conjunction between what Adorno termed "category" and "experience." Categories are contingently arranged and bear only a weak relationship to a coordinating rationality. While the list form presents them as parallel or coordinate (without the use of the conjunction and that would make them paratactic, after the Cantos), their sequence is highly contingent. The alphabet itself, of course, is unmotivated, except as a mere convenience. The use of repetition ("ACCI International Craft Expo") reveals a baseline referentiality—each listed entity has one booth. The categories themselves are "like" (as would be implied by their equivalence in the form of the list) only on the basis of "exchange value": each entity pays for one booth. Experience, whatever these booths represent as "use value," is thus reified in the form of the list of exchangeable categories. Adorno would have to be pleased.
The poem is essentially a series of such uses of document, with a twist. The series itself makes equivalent the various instances of document Fitterman locates and presents (one might even say "redacts"): a cento of tour guide prose; a customer prospectus for an investment firm; ad copy for a finishing school; e-mail prose of hobby aficianados; names of miniature golf course holes, and so forth. The fact that these can be each re-presented in a thumbnail sketch might give pause; the experience of reading is often, "I got it," and then either generously continuing with eye-scanning or ungenerously flipping to the next. I found myself a generous reader, submitting to the conceptual devices to see what they would do to me, after Reznikoff or Kenny Goldsmith.
One place to look for the poetics would be in the "analysis" of historicity brought to bear by the materials. First would be, as above, the question of reification: all these examples indicate how our lives are lived within exchange relations that permit no meaningful agency. This is the condition that would cause Pound's tilt toward fascism as the location of a possible agency; so we may speculate that Fitterman rejects agency as he would reject Pound's conclusion. It is only by immanent critique of the banal surfaces of reification that one can construct a poetics. Well and good, but I also see in most of these materials specific historical references that are not merely reducible to reification. The description of styles of miniature golf courses, for instance, intersects vernacular American religious culture in the early Bush era: Jonah is depicted in Bermuda shorts inside the whale.
The more important dimension of poetics, I think, has to be the documents' arrangement, and here comes the twist. While the title of the section references Gibbon, the "decline and fall" scenario is minimally emplotted in the work. I can see two primary senses in which it signifies: first, the division of the work into two sections, "The Decline" and "The Fall," within which versions of the same documentary strategies are presented, but in reverse order. That seems pretty cheeky as an analysis of what causes empires to decline and fall. The second sense would be that historicity is so emptied out from cause and effect that any representation ot contemporary, or modern, exchange relations in fact "says" the same thing. Either this is hyper-Marxist or historicized Andy Warhol. Since the work appeals more toward conceptual strategies than historical argument, I would conjecture that Fitterman wants to finesse the historical in conceptual terms. Adorno, however (e.g., in his History and Freedom lectures), still must be propitiated.
23 August 2007: Merrill Gilfillan, Selected Poems, 1965–2000 (New York: Adventures in Poetry, 2005)
The back cover shows a photo of the poet Merrill Gilfillan, c. 1968, in Iowa City. All the accoutrements of the writer are there: table, papers, glass of something, upright typewriter, floor lamp that one might buy twenty years later in St. Vincent de Paul's—no need for anything fancy or electronic. Gilfillan's work, which I have been reading since the 1970s, has a particular advantage of getting into one's ear, from the shapeliness of the lines on the page. Poetry used to be more like that, so that when a certain poet came up with a particular "ear combination"—the immediate experience of, say, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets on first reading, that was all that was necessary. One read for the inner shapeliness of the ear, through the line, and activated the imagination.
The fact that it is no longer like that seems eerily prefigured by Gilfillan's sense of the "datedness" of his imagination. There is an implicit sense that whatever is being transcribed of the present already exists in memory; this becomes a figure for the culture he writes in and of, and is objectified in a range of references from a nonexistent hotel on the Mississippi River at Burlington, to the sudden appearance of Edward Hopper painting out of the back of a truck, to the matted pompadours on a Crow reservation. William Carlos Williams skitters between the lines in a pointed straw hat (why pointed? why not crushed?); various prairie flowers are crushed between pages of Yeats; noir scenes reappear in the hotel rooms that might have given rise to their initial instances. The poetry is all about the pleasure of the local detail, a connoisseurship of the minor, a poetics of the immanent appearance:
Roll out barrels
of pickled beets
with eggs, stand them up
along the roads—float dollops
of ricotta in—
that the tongues be red
and big herons lift from the shores.
Reading Gilfillan in Upper Michigan is useful. One could fill whole notebooks with observed detail after just a few pages of his work. This is very like the method of its own composition—it seems to feed on itself and produce more of the same rather than "advance" toward any other goal. This holding steady would, by now, be an optimistic approach to viewing the half of the country that has been emptied out, as we crowd the coastlines looking for the next global moment of warming. I can still see a place, however, for a new fact—such as the conversion of millions of acres in the Midwest, say, to biofuel grains, already long under way. Merrill, will you write a poem on some of the genetics issues surrounding hybrid crops, when you get a chance?
Screen door slams. Behind a row of trees, a single outboard motor. The sky as it may be described at this moment is a mixture of breaking solid cloud cover and more turbulent open spaces. There are two apple trees from a former orchard immediately in front of the window as I write. One is producing an overload of small, round, hard apples that fall to the ground when squirrels raid the branches. The other has few fruit, probably red delicious, and has been invaded by a parasitic vine. I originally did not like the weeded, sandy, open ground partly covered with rotting fruit, but now—all things may be redeemed in the aesthetic.
I met Merrill at some point after he had left Iowa City, where he probably did not work with Donald Justice but certainly spent time with Ted Berrigan. Various of that early cohort made their way from Iowa City elsewhere, to New York (Jayne, Fran, Foley). It's interesting that women's names appear one time each in this volume (true of other proper names as well). I wondered why there wasn't more sex, but it seemed to be plowed into the local detail: once upon a time, a pair of tossed bikini underpants. Upping the ante on Williams's "the local is the universal," Gilfillan's aesthetic totalizes the serial effect of such restricted details.
[Continues: part II.]
[Copyright © Barrett Watten 2007. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]