Reading an Avant Garde/Post Avant Poem
July 3, 2009
Since every term used to delineate non-mainstream poetry from mainstream poetry is problematic (including all the terms I just used in the title and thise sentence), just take them with a grain of salt or mentally substitute your favorite term. What’s interesting here doesn’t rely on it.
I recently lamented the lack of teachers (in the general sense of the term) of new poetries. Tonight I made the mistake of trying yet again to make some sense of the post avant/quietist (god I hate those terms) debate with an eye, as usual, not to resolving the debate, but to read between the lines and see what readers of the former kind of poetry find in it. It’s now 3:45a, but I think I can finally go to sleep because I discovered a post with a poetry enthusiast doing exactly what I was asking for.
In “The Surgeries and Cuts of Ivan Blatsky,” Johannes Goransson shares a bit of how he reads this poem:
MISSPELLED
So restoration is not spelled au
I spelled it so thinking of the czech word restaurace
to restore
and go with a lady to the Room
like a unicorn in the mirror
all naked in the mirrors
so that I could see the blood trickling.
Setting aside the wrangling between Goransson and Joseph Hutchison, I greatly appreciate what Goransson has done in his post. I, like many of the mystified, recognize that there is a tension between traditional ways of examing a poem and newer poetries that don’t necessarily rely on the characteristics those methods were designed for. The tools are misfit. As Goransson prefaces:
I am opposed to defending a poem that I love; I am opposed to the idea that there must be some kind of organic unity of the poem that can be revealed through close (but apparently, as you’ll see, not very close afterall!) reading; I am opposed to the idea that sharp turns in poems are bad, or that ephemerality is bad; and I am opposed to the use of “avant-garde tics” as a criticism
But then he gets down to business and does exactly the kind of thing I think we need a lot more of, sharing what and how the poem means– and I use that phrasing purposefully– to him. As he puts it:
However, against my better judgment, I will now attempt the stunt of showing how this poem makes a lot of sense and perhaps to show however sketchily what appeals to me about it.
I hope Johansson doesn’t retrospectively feel he made the wrong decision. And I know it’s a lot of work to put together a reading like this. But it’s desperately needed. I think many readers are like me– they don’t dislike new poetries, they are baffled by it. I suspect many also, like me, want to find a way to read the poems. Who desires dislike or distaste? But where we spend many years being taught to read classic, traditional and mainstream poetry, we get very little exposure to the basic features of new poetry or ways to read it.
If I could find more examples of this kind of writing– sharing personal feelings about specific poems without engaging in divisiveness or derision– I would feel a lot less despondent about contemporary poetry. It’s amazing to me that there is so much (often heated) discussion of poetry and poetics and so little attention to poems.
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July 3rd, 2009 at 2:43 pm
And Göransson does a great job close-reading it, which I’m glad of, because it completely refutes his complaint against defending poetry and close-reading!
That aside, how did you like the poem? I enjoyed it very much–slightly on the 2nd read (honing in on the unicorn and the foreigner image, but not understanding it) and far more on the 3rd read, after reading Göransson’s exposition. I think the film theory idea of montage is probably widely important to much poetry, avant garde, modernist, and otherwise. It certainly was to the imagists.
Another idea that I latched onto, probably as the theme, is the impossibility of any true “restoration” for the speaker. The non-native speaker, the foreigner, struggled to even write the word correctly; it is no wonder then if Göransson’s reading is correct, that sex produces no restorative sensation–rather it effects a clumsy, preposterous, equally impossible unicorn image in the mirror. The bleeding could be from the montage-like cut, or it could be metaphorical for wounds “on the inside”.
July 3rd, 2009 at 2:46 pm
… At the same time, I don’t want to forget that this poem was, apparently, written by an insane man, but that too is a point for aesthetic discussion.
July 3rd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Honestly, I’m not sure. Goransson’s reading certainly opened the poem up for me. There’s a point at which my own interpretation of a poem becomes essentially creating a poem that I don’ think is really there. I guess there’s something to that– I was just reading a blog entry today by someone who was mentioning that they like post avant poems *because* they are co-creative activities, where I tend to see that as a significant weakness.
On the other hand, I agree with the thoughts here and in Goransson’s piece about montage. This makes intuitive sense to me. But that’s another weakness when I read may post-avant poems– a movie that is nothing but an associative montage is interesting– at best– as a curiosity, and so poems that have no narrative force. Which doesn’t mean a traditional story must be told for me to really enjoy it, but if I’m going to make the story up completely by myself I don’t need anyone else’s words as story starters. That, to me, is the work of poetry. Using whatever tools are at hand to create a kind of narrative force, even if it’s just a moment.
Not saying this poem doesn’t do that. If anything, it seems obvious that this poem IS telling a story, of a kind, just from the point of a speaker who can’t really tell it.
And I’m completely aware that my “objections” (such as they are) could be taken to be like looking at a Pollock or Rothko and complaining that I don’t see proper figures there. It’s an irrelevant expectation… but we all have expectations, don’t we?
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:12 pm
I love your observation about creating a poem that isn’t really there. I suspect I was doing that, too. The problem is–and I suggest this in my email response–is that the more I interpret, the more sensible my reading becomes, the more convinced I am that my reading is Good, and that the meaning is There.
So I must ask if this is a weakness in the reader? Or a weakness in the poem?
Or, as some surely would argue, a strength in the poem?
If the latter, isn’t there something _too_ zen about this kind of poetry? I mean, if we’re reduced to that, I’d much rather take a hike and project my meaning onto nature.
P.S. I’m not much of a fan of Pollock, though Rothko for some reason is more interesting. You probably don’t want to ask me about modern artists, though. Everything I know I learned second-hand through Jamie, and she is admittedly harsh on abstract art. She and I are, indeed, a well-suited pair of fuddy duddies.
July 3rd, 2009 at 11:33 pm
Whether you like Pollock or not is beside the point. You only have to see value in ONE abstract artist and the damage has been done. And I know from direct personal experience that you see something in the work of a few of them
The point isn’t about personal evaluations of modern art, but about recognizing that different art can have very different methods and needs to have any kind of evaluation at all. Abstract art, in general, can’t be judged by much of the same criterion as figural art. It wouldn’t make much sense to do so.
Which is why, in the end, I’m a lot less interested in the poetics and aesthetics arguments than having people– as Goransson has here– share something they like and their perspective on what they like. In the end I don’t think the most significant parts of aesthetic appreciation can be explained anyway. But that doesn’t mean none of it can be.
July 4th, 2009 at 9:38 am
So does that mean your original request–to be taught how to read avantish poetry–is futile? For how can one teach to you the poetry, if one must first redefine what it means to read, and even be poetry?
Or do you predict a new method of reading particular to avantish verse?
July 4th, 2009 at 9:59 am
I don’t see why a new kind of reading– or at least new tools for understanding and evaluating a new art made of similar base materials to the old– isn’t possible.
I learned a new way to consider words when I learned to appreciate Cummings, for example. To see his work as inferior because the method I used to read and understand Donne would be crazy.
But, yes, the request for teaching might well be futile.
July 21st, 2009 at 3:46 am
After reading the prose around the poem I braced myself for something very obscure, like Ashbery at his most disjunctive. But the poem is surprisingly limpid. It becomes ambiguous at line 4, where the speaker is apparently imagining trysting with a (virginal? That might account for the unicorn and the blood) lady in a store room. And when the unicorn canters in, yeah, perhaps you have to collaborate with the poet a bit to create a meaning. Perhaps you have to supply a few connections yourself. But is there anything really “new” about that, and is there really a dirth of teachers of that way of reading? Doesn’t Koch, for example, teach that way of reading, and aren’t his writings readily available? I like the poem, though–makes me want to write one.
July 21st, 2009 at 6:04 am
I have no idea how “new” the poem is. I can make up a reading as well. Probably a half-dozen of them in fact. Maybe “au” is used as the chemical symbol, references to various mythologies, yada yada. But that’s my point about a poem like this: it’s incomplete. It isn’t just having to make a connection, it’s that in the ambiguity much of the art of writing a poem is lost in favor of vague referents that force me to write the poem myself and come up with stretched interpretations like yours. If it’s a storeroom or a rubber room or Heaven or Hell, if it’s a virginal woman or a torturer, why not do the work and say so? It’s the assumption that vagueness lends some kind of power that most makes my skin crawl. Somewhere between boring didactic poetry and boring collage– this poem is certainly not at the far end of the spectrum– is poetry that has been crafted to mean more than what I bring to it.
And yes, given all the post-avant mewing, there is clearly a lack of teachers who use this kind of poem in their teaching. I’ve never met– and rarely heard of– teachers who reference any post-avant work, and when they do it’s the usual “accessible” suspects who, by the very dint of being taught, are halfway out the post-avant door…
July 21st, 2009 at 7:45 am
You do have to supply some connections; I admitted as much. What you call my “stretched” interpretation was affected by my personal history: I used to work in dorm kitchens and warehouses; there were always plenty of storerooms and female co-workers and fantasies about accompanying Stephanie to the storeroom for a new mop-head and one thing leading to another. Obviously other interpretations are possible, but the range of plausible interpretatons strikes me as fairly narrow. If you start talking about chemical symbols, you’re probably spiralling up into the cryptosphere and leaving the poem behind. That’s what I meant when I pronounced the poem “surprisingly limpid.” The prose around it led me to expect a chaotic farrago of unconnected words; it turned out to be a poem that almost makes sense without any help from the reader. And I, for one, don’t assume that the logical gaps in this or any other poem lend power. I think of this kind of poetry as mysterious, subversive, spacey. It shakes up my habitual way of perceiving things, diverts my thought away from conventional channels. It’s not necessarily more powerful than, say, Philip Larkin. As for teachers, you’re probably right that very few people teaching poetry classes talk about this kind of poetry. But you’ll find enough guidance if you look around.
July 21st, 2009 at 8:55 am
One more thought before I go to my job. You may be thinking,”If he’s justified in calling ‘the Room’ a storeroom just because of his private hide-the-salam-in-the-storeroom perversion, aren’t I justified in calling it a panic room or a mushroom or Jack White’s little room or whatever? And if I am, isn’t there an infinite number of plausible interpretations?” Well, I think you can come up with an infinite number of subtle variations on a few plausible interpretations. If you made a long list of interpretations that cover everything in the poem the way a great sleuth’s theory covers all the facts of the case, I’d probably say “yeah, yeah, it could mean that” to several of those interpretations and then reject the rest as implausible. And you could come up with a great many subtle variations on the keepers. Okay, that’s probably gibberish…
July 23rd, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Maybe the word “stretched” has a negative connotation– one I didn’t intend to imply. It’s all a stretch, to some degree, but more so in some kinds of poems than others. The location of the poem DOES matter, and that makes the import of what room is being referred to a more important than not. And since it’s important, I wonder why its left obscure. Does it make the poem stronger?
There’s a range of intelligibility, of course, and I understand that this was more intelligible than you were lead by my surrounding words to believe. But in the end “almost making sense” is pretty much the same as “only being a little non-sense” which is a bit like being “a little pregnant” isn’t it? I just see this fragment, which I don’t dislike, as being highly illustrative of a facet of a certain kind of contemporary poetry that I don’t get– not just in the sense of denotative meaning, but in the sense of wondering why what strikes me as a lack of craft is admirable. So much of that poetry– like this– reads like a first draft of spontaneous journaling that could be shaped into a really good poem but wasn’t. It’s all potential, tasty evocation and all.
I’ll just have to take your word on the “guidance is there if you look around” notion– I’ve been looking around intensely for YEARS and at best there’s very little and at worst a pretty regular current of resistance to the notion that any kind of guidance is even possible, much less desirable. I’m OK with that, for the most part, because I understand the impulse that leads to such feelings even if I don’t think they are accurate.