A Contemporary
Poetic Litmus Test
Progress, by Barrett Watten
Reviewed by Ron Silliman
The
poetry of Barrett Watten has become something of a litmus test for readers of
contemporary verse. Most poets have small audiences surrounded by a sea of
apathy and neglect, but Watten's detractors are every bit as passionate and
noisy as are his fans. Indeed, readers of Poetry Flash, a local monthly
calendar of events fleshed out with reviews and gossip, can hardly be blamed if
they have come to anticipate "the Barrett Watten debate" as a regular feature
of the publication.
Like
most controversies in the arts, this one is much more interesting for what it
implies in general than for any light that it may shed, pro or con, on Watten's
work. For a medium that takes great pride in its "avant-garde tradition"—a
heritage that can be traced back to Whitman and Baudelaire, and that includes
such important 20th-century authors as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Robert Duncan
and John Ashbery—poetry is fundamentally a conservative art form, not unlike
ballet or architecture. As the "vanguards" of the past have been incorporated
into the canon of the present, the very innovations that were forced upon
literature by these "subversives" often have been taken up by their followers as
rigid dogma.
The
late Josephine Miles once told me that the poets of her generation, herself
included, had found the work of William Carlos Williams "unreadable." Forty
years later, Williams is now the model of directness and plain speech. To
challenge this new model, which is as central to the verse of Robert Pinsky and
Adrienne Rich as it is to that of Allen Ginsberg, is to risk the wrath of
virtually every poet and critic who identifies with the Williams tradition.
Barrett
Watten is certainly not the only writer to make this challenge over the past 15
years, as the limitations and internal contradictions of the Williams model have
become increasingly apparent. But he is the most uncompromising. Thus, a volume
such as the book-length poem "Progress," Watten's most recent and ambitious
work, has been received with all the equanimity of an AIDS outbreak amid the
Moral Majority.
For
a generation, Williams' dictum of "no ideas but in things" has been accepted by
poets as a warning against the metaphysical abstractions that characterized the
closed verse of academic poetry before World War II. For some, particularly
among younger members of the New York School and the brief Actualist movement of
the early '70s, this credo was shortened into a brash anti-intellectualism, "no
ideas" period. Yet here is Watten's first stanza, one of exactly 200 of
identical length, each ending in an ellipsis:
Relax,
stand at attention, and.
Purple snake stands out on
Porcelain tiles. The idea
Is the thing. Skewed by design . . . .
At
once simple and almost nonsensical, these lines amount to a gauntlet flung in
the face of contemporary verse orthodoxy. The first sentence is a series of
commands that appears to lead nowhere. The second, the only sentence here to
incorporate "things," is a pop-art parody of the concreteness of linguistic
images. The third contradicts Williams' assertion directly. The fragmentary
fourth sentence can be read as a comment on the method of the poem itself—"things"
are not going to get any easier in the next 120 pages.
Militant
in its resistance of fictional devices—such as character and plot—"Progress"
proceeds with an intensity that is often dizzying, spinning an argument that can
be summed up nowhere in a single quotation or paraphrase. If it's difficult
poetry, it is in the tradition of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, demanding,
as the second line suggests, the reader's absolute attention at all points.
Few
of its references are any more obscure than the allusion to Williams. Or, if
they are—the incongruous "and" at the end of the first sentence could be
read as suggesting Ezra Pound, whose "Cantos" begins with that word—the
reading doesn't really depend on it. More than anything, those two opening lines
are there to make readers conscious of their own presence. "Progress," above all
else, is a meditation on awareness, particularly self-awareness, in the face of
the onslaught of disconnected and often horrifying details that make up our
experience of contemporary life.
As
such, narrative in "Progress" exists precisely in tracing the movement between
sentences, especially those between which no superficial connection would appear
to exist. To find the story, the reader must recognize and acknowledge the logic
that joins those first four sentences, and the hundreds more that follow. Once
this is done, these deliberately awkward, incomplete and often impersonal
statements open up into a panorama that is as vivid and dense as rush-hour
traffic in Times Square.
Deeply
pessimistic about the concept of progress itself, the poem is, in many ways, a
direct descendant of Allen Ginsberg's classic of the '60's, "Wichita Vortex
Sutra." Although "Progress" is a much longer work, the range of the two poems,
their density and overall sensibility are remarkably similar.
Where
Ginsberg was trying to locate the spiritual origin of the Vietnam War in the
domestic life of middle America, Watten's sense of history is ultimately much
larger. Both American imperialism and daily life are themselves symptoms of a
much broader and deeper phenomenon. In Watten's view, even capitalism, the
Marxists' bogeyman, which "Sutra" personified in the figure of the small-town
entrepreneur, may just be a further symptom. The disease might be humanity
itself. The figure for this in "Progress" is language, which accounts, for much
of the poem's self-reflexivity, concern for the issues of linguistics and formal
austerity.
This
is where Watten differs from Ginsberg. "Sutra" states its case with a rhetoric
that harks back consciously to Whitman, seeking in that poet's 19th-century
patriotism a vision of America above the genocide we reaped in Indochina.
Watten
suggests that even this vision, with its romantic view of the "organic"
individual, is thoroughly a part of the same worldwide system. Thus to adopt its
poetics, whether in the mode of Whitman, Williams or Denise Levertov, is to
become equally culpable for the consequences of this logic in all its
applications, whether these be in the silent moments of personal despair or the
"secret war" in Central America.
The limitation of "Progress" is that it is inescapably a part of the same world it indicts. Yet if Ginsberg sought redemption from an impure source, Watten demands instead a witness fully aware of its own complicity. His use of a fixed system of stanzas differs from the closed verse patterns of academia in that it is used not to indicate harmony, but to articulate the constraints of form itself, any form.
If
there is no way out of this "prison house of language," "Progress" nonetheless
insists that each reader be aware of the cage, and thus accept responsibility
for our actions within it.
[Progress was first published by Roof Books (New York, 1985). The review appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, 17 November 1985; the graphic printed with the review is reproduced above. Copyright © Ron Silliman 1985, 2004. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]