Post 44: Processing Orono

Posts
Post 44: 7/12/08

Thinking Through Orono:
Poetry of the 70s

Poetry of the 70s, University of Maine, Orono, 11–15 June 2008

The three-week window of memory may be kept open just a bit longer for the Orono conference, as the comments, posted papers, and videos continue to be posted, prompting recollection and synthesis. Here, I want to bookmark—to come back to later—a number of threads from the fifth "decades" conference hosted by the National Poetry Foundation (NPF). As they all have been, this was a combined scholarly conference, art event, and manifestation of community that transcended the academic task of constructing a critical or historical account of poetry and poetics in the period. The decades conferences have been, in each of their incarnations, beautiful in their intensity, humanity, and recognition of the value of creative and intellectual work.

There have now been five decades conferences, and it is worth revisiting their history and motivations. The "decades" format originated as a revisionary move after a series of author-centered modernist conferences—whose history I am not that familiar with as I did not participate in them—sponsored by the NPF. These began with Ezra Pound and the "Pound Tradition," which translated into the "Man and Poet" and, later, "Woman and Poet" rubrics for single-volume publications on modernist authors, featuring Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, H.D., Creeley, Reznikoff, and others (and whose portraits grace the NPF web site to this day).

The author-centered canon, in the period of the Pound conferences, was one of the ways—not, as it turned out, all that critically adequate—that the Anglo-American version of literary or "high" modernism was established and reproduced itself. In retrospect, what we now think of as a stable literary category, "modernism," had at its origins a quite flimsy rationale or series of rationales—one can go back to Robert Graves and Laura Riding's A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle, and the New Critics (who provide little in the way of specific readings of modernism) to see this is so. "Modernism" was to begin with an institutional arrangement, of Eliot and the New Critics on the one hand, and the reception of modernist authors on the other.

As Alan Golding's From Outlaw to Canon suggests, there is more than one way to make a canon. A significant counter-canon, based on poets' rather than critics' readings and enthusiasms, emerged with the valorization, by the New Americans and critics such as Hugh Kenner of the "Pound Tradition." This tradition would be double-edged: looking with one eye toward the Eliotic assumptions of the academy from the 50s on, and on the other to the poets and maverick critiques who valorized Pound and his "tale of the tribe." The author conferences were an institutional corrective as much as they limited themselves, in what since Barthes and Foucault has been seen as a "conservative" move, to define literary tradition in terms of the "author." (The current disciplinary move is away from author-centered formats at conferences of the MSA and its European parallel, the EAM.)

With the decades format, however, a new revisionist imperative was recognized: to open up the modernist canon to authors and literary movements that surrounded it, were influenced by it, that critiqued it, but which did not align with Eliot or Pound's criteria for literature. Cary Nelson's Repression and Recovery: American Writers and the Politics of Culture Memory, 1910–1945 presented poetry as a cultural text that reflected the aspirations of political and cultural movements of the larger period. Rather than organize his history under authorial rubrics, Nelson presented a multi-authored discourse (approximated in the form of his study as undivided text without chapter headings). Arguably as a result of Nelson's revisionary critique, and other work, the first decades conference, on Poets of the 30s, was staged in 1993. Nelson was one of the keynote figures; David Ignatow and Allen Ginsberg represented perspectives on the cultural politics of the period of the Popular Front. It was important to see Ginsberg, identified with the New Americans and the 50s, locating himself in terms of an earlier Leftism: the connection between the two decades could not have been clearer. From that point forward, the decades conferences sought to recover the work of authors and the discourses that formed them. Part of the ebullience of the conferences, then, had to do with the emergence of what had been repressed—any larger cultural and historical motives; gender, race, and class—as embodied by the participants. The Popular Front as a model informed the counterhegemonic alliances, we would say, being reconstructed in these terms.

Looking back on the series of decades conferences, I am interested in what kinds of revisionist projects they encouraged, and also how I responded to their imperatives. I was, it turned out, at all five of them: 30s, 50s, 60s, 40s, and 70s, and presented work at a number of levels. At the 30s conference, inspired by the range of recovered cultural texts and the importance of the task of recovery itself, I presented a paper on a neglected modernist author I had been working on, Laura Riding. Her connection to 30s discourses may not have been immediately apparent, given her radical formalism, but I think it is motivated nonetheless. This is one point on which I agree with Marjorie Perloff—the 30s conference broke new ground, and was arguably the most exciting.

With the 50s conference (1996), I tried to move away from the "author" and toward cultural logics that "produce" him or her. While the New Americans were canonized, and many neglected figures usefully recovered, I presented a paper on "hailing" in the 1950s as a visual essay on a nonpoet—Bettie Page. In a highly fraught, psychoanalytic argument, I wanted to demonstrate how the erotics of "hailing" (Bettie Page photographed at Coney Island or in bondage costume) could explain how I and many others were "hailed" by the Beats (through accounts of Allen Ginsberg's Howl in Time magazine, for instance). The presentation—with its projection of enormous photographs of Bettie Page from 50s men's magazines—nearly caused a riot. Several people in the audience complained directly to Burton Hatlen—I should have my professional credentials revoked on the spot! (I was at the time untenured; one of those so reacting, very good-naturedly, said some ten years later she regretted her response). I remember trying to explain to a colleague my motives for this project: it seemed the entire structure of my unconscious was on view. It became my notorious Bettie Page talk, which I still need to rewrite and bring into print. One day I may manage to do that.

There is a cunning of reason in the deployment of the negative, in that sooner or later it's going to all work out (or not). Having invested my 50s contribution in the spectral image of Bettie Page, I was able to recoup when offered a plenary role at the Poets of the 60s conference (2000)—and I decided to make maximal use of the occasion. Stopping off to visit Maria Damon on the road up to Orono, I remember telling her—as I previewed Berkeley in the 60s and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point—that I wanted to restage the 60s, as part of the conference. This was at the end of the Clinton Era, with its "unfulfilled democratic demands," and during the ramp-up to Bush, 9/11, and war; I thought an immediate return to the politics of the 60s, in actual practice, was more than required (doubly so in the face of persistent demands by neoconservatives that they be eradicated from our history). In my multimedia presentation, I tried to reconstruct a context for the poetry's "turn to language" in the conditions of public discourse of the period, focusing on Berkeley as a site and Allen Ginsberg's Indian Journals as a text, using Ernesto Laclau as theorist.

From the back row, Amiri Baraka launched an impassioned attack on my claim that the politics of the student movement was a politics at all, and that went as well for the antiwar movement (which Baraka associated with his own debates with Allen Ginsberg). And the rest is history—Baraka and I agreed that we would hold an impromptu debate in a student cafeteria, which we located for an unauthorized event (although we did talk to Burt Hatlen about it). As happened, the discussion turned into a high-volume, low-content wrangle, so that the tape recording my son Asa made of it is destined straight for the archival vault—no transcription or circulating of that! In defense of this misfire, I can only say that I am sure Baraka and I had the same goal in mind—to encourage debate and to decrease fear of confronting, particularly, race as a public issue. Was I prepared to do so, at that level? Yes and no. I learned a great deal of what I did not know of the 60s and about race from the encounter. I only wish the event itself had been more productive; although it has been discussed in several online reviews, I haven't heard from Baraka since, and the separation between radical "formalist" and "political" poetries remains as vast as ever for many.

My larger criticism of the Poetry of the 60s conference was its overall failure to connect what was happening in the 60s with the poetry it produced to begin with, and then to address the "politics of the 60s" in larger frameworks. Even now, there really is no larger cultural debate than that, or a debate where the relation between culture and politics, seen as distinct, is more urgent. The "culture wars" had begun in earnest in the 60s, even if substantially prefigured by the 30s and 40s—much to the point of the Orono conferences. With the Poetry of the 40s conference (2004), however, there was a more noticeable failure of direction. Was this to be the conference of the "Greatest Generation," as I heard more than one participant say, focusing on the emergence of the New American Poets in the postwar period, and particularly on the role of Robert Creeley? If a conference on an historical period ever resolved around one man—even as the topics addressed were of course various—this was it. Perhaps that is only my feeling in retrospect, as the conference was the next to last time I saw Creeley, and also the last time I saw Jackson Mac Low.

In retrospect, the 40s conference attempted to follow the lead of the 30s, but it ran into the Great Man theory of the emerging 50s and could not find the right cultural movement to recover—as would follow, as the 40s was a catastrophic mixture of war, labor unrest, nuclear anxiety, and anticommunist reaction. The cultural work of the conference might have been to bring the uncertainties of this difficult period into dialogue with a movement from high modernism (Eliot's Four Quartets) to postmodern authorship in the New Americans and the Beats—but I'm not sure. At the memorial to Zukofsky, I gave what I later heard Creeley thought was an attack on him, a testimony to Zukofsky's importance that still questioned the poetics of modernist mastery as it saw Zukofsky a poet of skeptical, endlessly self-revising, authorship. My own attempt to connect the 40s to the 30s continued on a two-person panel with Alan Gilbert, who for like reasons presented some of Olson's work for the U.S. government in the 40s, Left-influenced propaganda addressed to immigrant groups' participation in the war. I essayed to periodize Olson in the 40s via a reading of Fredric Jameson's A Singular Modernity, and to read Olson's poetry through Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image. Olson thus would preserve the utopian and materialist politics of the 30s even in his radical idiosyncratic work of the 40s.

A larger point is hopefully emerging here, which is: What was the project, and the promise, of the focus on "decades"? Why historicize in this manner; what does it have to do with poetry and poetics, except to create rough-and-ready periodizations for literary history? I don't think this is a question that was answered, or even addressed, at the Poetry of the 70s conference. Rather, there was a consistent methodological consensus, at the crossroads where three critiques meet. First, the focus on major authors was reinforced by the eight plenary readings, which advanced the "author," not the "critic," to the central position. Second, there was a consensus that the recovery of minor authors was the work of the sessions, a general democratic leveling that owed its form, if not its content, to the poetics of the Popular Front in the 30s—including hegemonic constructions of race, class, and gender. (The elision of the distinction between major and minor, after Deleuze and Guattari's Minor Literature, may well be the point, but it would be good to hear some critical discussion of this. Otherwise, there is a present danger of mystification in that the minor absorbs the anxieties of the major, while the major seems to be absorbed.) Finally, there was an overall downplaying of theory and the role of the critic in shaping the conference's agenda, and with that the dialogue between institutional and poetic reception that had been the conference's point all along. There was a palpable absence of an entire generation of critics—connected through Burton Hatlen—and little effort to identify new critics of that or the succeeding generation to give overviews of poetry and poetics in the period, as well as to tie poetry to other aesthetic or cultural concerns (conceptual art; second-wave feminism; early postmodernism, etc.). If there had been a readable generational succession, that would have been one thing, but there wasn't; more truly provocative would have been a bit more contrast between generations. One only hopes that in the future (2012, it appears) the generational politics in poetry criticism will be better defined. The survival of poetry and poetics in institutional frameworks depends on it—or innovative poetics will end up as only the left wing of Creative Writing!

My own presentation, "Late Capitalism and Language Writing," was well received, even if there were some issues. It felt a bit lonely up there, at least initially. Originally, the session was to be a two-person plenary panel, but with the withdrawal of the other presenter, I simply went with the full-length version of my talk—PowerPoint slides and poems added. The Q&A afterward was excellent; seldom have I felt so accurately engaged, even if the questioners—after Maria Damon and Michael Golsten's thoughtful responses—were predominantly male. But there was otherwise a lack of places where a conversation engaging "overviews" or "theory" or "critical approaches" or "historical contexts" could be pursued. The predominance of plenary readings led to a kind of aesthetic appreciation of critical talks—either valued for their display of language and argument or "riffed on" as a part of the poetry intake. This strikes me as problematic in Peter O'Leary's otherwise generous account at Harriet, where he publishes a picture of himself in the back row, with his notebook, as if to emphasize his distance from the "authority figure" in the distance. He imagines, as well, the Q&A to be primarily Oedipal, sharks circling around a solitary castaway at sea. Well, Peter, here's news—the next generation of poet/critics is not going to get there by snarking from the back row. I suggest you get with the argument and figure out a critical response. Develop it, keep doing it twenty years, and you can give a plenary.

What I really like about Orono, though it may not seem so above, is the chance to wear two hats simultaneously. That's why I regret the overall diminishment of the critical (and historical) component of the decades conferences. It is truly something to imagine one is operating at the level of intimate response to poetry, and at the same time taking part in a larger process of the organization of knowledge and critique. This is where I mildly disagree with Ron Silliman's recent account of the priority of the poet in canonizing processes, as much as I like his sense of poetry as a nonindividual discourse—"there is no such thing as poetry, only kinds of poetry." Being outside the academy, quite naturally Ron might take that view, but he conflates the cultural work poets do with the process of creating the larger social structures for the preservation, reception, and inculcation of their work.

Two important points are missed, in terms of institutional structures: that poetry has always had a central role in determining the nature of the literary, from the romantic to the modern periods, and hence has a powerful site to argue its legitimacy; and second, the democratizing work of canonical revision, from the recovery of the 30s on but importantly including poets of our own generation, has created a climate where a closeness between the poet and her immediate reception is now assumed. We are a long way from Eliotic distance and the cult of the author it reproduces. Yet one should not miss the social construction of this close relation, and the need for it to be maintained through criticism and historical contextualization, not just curating.

For this reason, I valued several strong lines of "argument" within the conference's presentations (of course, limited by the panels I was able to see and papers I have accessed since). One was Kaplan Harris's effort to identify the microclimate surrounding the tensions between Language writing and New Narrative in the late 70s. The papers by Kaplan, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, and Rob Halpern were of primary use in revising our understanding of what was at stake in the period; this is not work that would have been done by poets per se, in Silliman's sense. There was a strong queer component to the conference (Eileen Myles did a fine if a bit dissociated David Antin-like poetry routine; Dodie Bellamy personally represented first-person second-wave autobiography; and Kevin Killian reported on John Wieners's Beyond the State Capitol; or Cincinnati Pike, one of the neglected touchstones of the decade), but the representation of other identity poetries—African American, Nuyorican, and Asian—was not enough, even with Jayne Cortez and Fred Wah among the plenary readers. Also missing was a strong connection to experimental visual arts—performance, installation, site-specific, and conceptual art—that made New York and San Francisco such fertile grounds for cross-aesthetic initiatives. I heard strong theory papers by Jeanne Heuving, Miriam Nichols, and Christopher Nealon; and Michael Golsten's paper on allegory in Clark Coolidge offered a theory of the open interpretation of language-centered forms. But in my view the author-centered sessions often failed to provide larger periodizing or theoretical frameworks for their authors' reception; particularly I thought this to be the case with Coolidge's work, whose vast corpus is in need of more encompassing framing; it was less true, after Peter Baker's, Jasper Bernes's, and Jonathan Skinner's papers, for Bernadette Mayer. Hannah Weiner was a center of attention, at the crossroads of conceptual and performance art strategies, disability studies, and Language writing. The Language school, it should be mentioned, were given their due, and the work proceeds apace: Bruce Andrews's talk broke new ground in bringing his political science expertise to the table in his account of "surplus security"; Bob Perelman's use of bathos (after one of the lesser known San Francisco Talks in the 70s) argued for a line of influence connecting his work to Ashbery and Ben Friedlander; and Kit Robinson's paper on Ted Greenwald generated a discussion reminiscent of the Talks in the 70s.

While there were areas awaiting further development in this sense, and a sad lack of critics of Burton Hatlen's generation, there was everything else to like: the readings were uniformly excellent, the bus ride to Colby College to view their Alex Katz and Joe Brainard exhibits well worth the trip (though there should have been more emphasis on other kinds of art in the 70s, and Katz's portraits of New York School poets of the 70s were annoying in that most were male and all were white, white, white). The Grand Piano reading, with Kit Robinson, and Steve Benson, was warmly attended and duly recorded. But most clearly in my mind's eye I see a moment in Rae Armantrout's high-voltage, utterly perverse reading, belting out the non sequiturs, above the conference poster below her on the podium: "Poetry of the 70s." If this is the poetry of the 70s (as equally Tom Raworth's barrage of high-grade language detritus right before it), what does that mean? It means that the 70s happened, and thirty years later, this is the poetry of that decade. It's what the 70s produced—a hyper-conscious, material-textual, language-centered author. And truth be told, I never would have understood that so clearly without this conference: the poetry of the 70s, the champagne of concrete.

[Home Page]