Cosmopoetica

The latest issue of Pleiades (30.1) has a great piece of criticism by Mark Halliday (“Pushcart Hopes and Dreams”), in which he discusses the Pushcart Prize nomination process and his own part nominating poems, including a close look at his 10 selections for this year. It’s an excellent work that bridges the essay and the critical review, and I highly recommend hunting it down.

But what grabbed my attention and seemed worth sharing was Halliday’s astute point about the poetics of the “post-avant” crowd, made by way of a pre-able to sharing his Pushcart selections (emphasis mine):

“With one or two exceptions, the poems I chose are easy to understand. Their thinking comes at you openly; they are not cryptic, oblique, convoluted, abstruse, gnomic, or private. They do not implicitly say to the reader, “Something mysterious and deep is going on here which you can only guess at and which could never be paraphrased.” Instead, these poems manifestly try to get something across to you, as if your understanding matters, as if life is short and obscurity is lonesome and the chances to communicate about mixtures of emotion and thought are finite.

The clarity and readability of the ten listed poems may reflect the rushed nature of my hunt: I felt I didn’t have time to sit there and ponder obscure poems for many minutes to see whether their difficulty was justified. More significantly, though, the clarity and readability of my selections reflect, obviously, my “aesthetic.” (I’ve never liked being told that I have a certain “aesthetic.” Students writing pretentiously confused and confusing poems have been known to say “Halliday has a narrow aesthetic.”) The qualities I praise in my ten choices could all be turned upside down by such readers as Charles Bernstein, Paul Hoover, Ann Lauterbach, Marjorie Perloff, Ron Silliman, Cole Swensen—what I call clarity and readability, they could call obviousness, banality, reinforcement of oppressive capitalist norms… Often it has seemed to me that what those readers love best is not the “language-oriented” or “anti-quietist” or “experimental” poetry they praise, but rather their own generalizations about such poetry. When they’re expressing their views, their preferences, their defenses and attacks, that’s when you can tell they really care—and that’s (significantly) when they use language with intense clarity (insofar as they’re capable of intense clarity).

Now let me hurry to acknowledge that “language-oriented” and “experimental” poetry do not have a monopoly on badness. Bad poems, like bad persons, come in all styles and all traditions and all demographics. Pretension, fakery, preening, shallowness, dumbness, sentimental wallowing—you can find these failings in every camp. The vast majority of the six hundred poems I read to find Pushcart candidates were not experimental or disjunctive, because I didn’t even go seeking in most journals that tilt that way. (Though I did try Fence and New American Writing and Jubilat.) The vast majority of the six hundred poems were fairly clear while also dreary or thin or derivative or false.”

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“…noise is not only incidental, but essential to communication. … If, for example, a letter is written in careless or illegible script, there is interference in the reading process, which is to say that noise slows down communication.”

–Marjorie Perloff
from Radical Artifice

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“When people praise a poem that I can’t understand I always think they’re lying.”

[Boy do I understand this suspicion]

–Stephen Dunn

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[CC licensed image by moontan]

“What the slams are all about is an attempt to create an oral tradition. The real issue is that I don’t think there’s a lot of critical distinction in the slams. They are more interested in the quantity of expression versus the quality of expression. When I was at a slam in Boston I got in trouble for making a critical distinction. But, damn, it’s poems. I’m happy anytime someone gets up and gets poetic.”

(my feelings exactly)

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[CC licensed image by Stephen Poff] 

"… Donald Barthelme wrote that "the combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered." Is there a better one-sentence defense and explanation and manifesto of art? It is combinatorial agility– not just of words, but of sentences, paragraphs, images, objects, events, concepts, and characters- that generates, startles, and reveals.

I’m thinking here of Daisy crying stormily over the shirts that Gatsby tosses onto a table into a soft rich heap. These are shirts, Nick tells us, with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. "They’re such beautiful shirts," Daisy says, sobbing into their thick folds. "It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such– such beautiful shirts before. "The scene connects a rich guy’s wardrobe and turbulent emotion– beauty and sadness– in a surprising (but not inexplicable or mysterious) causal relationship. Like most literary surprises, Daisy’s reaction to what Nick calls the many-colored disarray seems correct, even inevitable. If Gatsby’s shirts made Daisy speak in tongues or punch Carraway in the gut, we would be surprised, all right, but not convinced or moved.

Or consider Isaac Babel’s "First Love," a story that conjoins delirious desire and genocide, and that contains this sentence: "For five of my ten years I had dreamed with all the fervor of my soul about having doves, and then, when I finally managed to buy them, Makarenko the cripple smashed the doves against the side of my face." Bird and face, peace and violence, passion and pogrom– juxtaposed, smashed, improbably but credibly.

Surprises are, in their effect and regardless of content, instruments of wonder and spirit. A surprise lifts aliveness toward consciousness, where it does not (and cannot) permanently reside. There are many reasons to read literature, of course. One very good reason to read literature is to be surprised. In reading, we perform the nearly oxymoronic feat of seeking surprise."

–Chris Bachelder
found in The Believer, v8 n1 (January 2010)

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[CC licensed image by topshampatti]

The January 2010 issue of Poetry has an interesting “notebook” by Carmine Starnino on “Lazy Bastardism”. Starnino makes a case for difficult poetry… or at least not giving in to notions of making poetry more intelligible for the “ordinary reader” when that market really doesn’t exist and the battle lines are being drawn out in a conflict that is occurring completely inside the heads of poets (the essay is, of course, far more cogent and eloquent than my rushed summary).

My fundamental disappointment with Starnino’s essay is his decision not to cite any specific poets or poems that exemplify this lazy bastardism. He apparently sees such work often enough to feel a need to very publicly note his objection… but where is it? I have some sympathy for Starnino’s argument, as far as I can understand it, but the whole thing is murky and abstract enough that I couldn’t hold up any specific poem as an example.

I must also admit that my first thought upon reading Starnino’s title was that this would be a (justifiable) indictment of the lazy bastardism of writing experimental poetry that is unintelligible and lacking in appreciable craft. In fact, just a few pages later, in the course of a completely unrelated review of Stephen Edgar’s History of the Day, Joshua Mehigan puts his finger right on the pulse of my objection to much “post-avant” poetry:

“The difference between these poems and much difficult contemporary work is that these yield meanings shareable by reader and writer.”

I need that “shareable” meaning. I’m sure many of the admired post-avant writers are quite brilliant… to the ideal reader that exists only in their own heads. The rest of us, including the post-avant’s many vocal admirers, are forced into the position of erecting a structure using the random pieces of building material provided to us (or patching holes in the ramshackle shack we’re offered), a kind of appreciation that is extremely malleable and far too susceptible to cults of personality and aesthetic electioneering.

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 5 Comments »

"Groups squabble about literature because they have other than literary uses for the literary. The schools, which are busy finding ways to get the answers to the Test of Time smuggled to their chosen favoritism as coaches slip answers to their players so they may pass the latest examination, will now and then speak of Art and claim a disinterested purity. And there are an unorganized few (the unhappy few whom I should like to represent, "the immense minority," as Juan Ramón Jiménez so significantly puts it) who sincerely love the arts. There are those for whom reading, for example, can be an act of love, and lead to a revelation, not of truth, moral or otherwise, but of lucidity, order, rightness of relation, the experience of a world fully felt and furnished and worked out in the head, the head where the heart is also to be found, and all the other vital organs.

[...]

Inside the Academy, at the Symphony, within Museum walls, each warring faction will boast that God is on their side, and claim transcendence for their values and opinions. This is done by trying to ensure that only their ideas, and works correctly expressing them, get put before the public in the future, and by reanalyzing the past as far back as the library catalog has cards (a deliberately out-of-date metaphor) in order to show, as I previously characterized their internecine struggles, that "it has ever been thus," whatever it is that they say it is now.

Outside, in the vendors” streets, there is nothing but temporary tents. The lasting, the universal, are despised (except by those who are still peddling the classics to old fogies). But who really wants reruns of already winded warhorses? Well, only those arrogant and rapacious revivalists who set Rigoletto in the Bronx and who want Dido and Aeneas to sing about their love while costumed as colonials. Their pitiful originalities would have once brought them to the gibbet or the stake.

The ideal cultural product can come powerfully packaged, creates a mighty stir, can be devoured with both delight and a sense of life-shaking revelation, provides an easy topic for talk, is guaranteed to be without real salt or any actual fat– contains no substance of any substantial kind– so that after you have eaten it, for days you will shit only air."

–William Gass
from "The Test of Time"
found in The Test of Time: Essays (2003)

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I "finished" "reading" Umberto Eco’s fantabulous essay/anthology The Infinity of Lists. The scare quotes are necessary because Eco’s 400+ page volume is two books in one: an extended essay on the idea and example of lists in art and literature and an accompanying anthology od excerpts and hundreds of color plates illustrating his points. I read (and in a few areas re-read) and marked up the essay but only read perhaps 1/4 of the anthology. I’ve read some of the work before… and trying to read all of the examples is just too much. I’ll be returning to the book many times!

The Infinity of Lists is a beautiful book. It’s well designed and produced on quality paper. It features scores of full-page color plates in addition to at least twice as many smaller ones. The selections of art and writing encompass both the familiar and the unfamiliar– Eco strikes a nice balance between examples that readers will expect, which are nice to have close to hand, and examples that are sure to be new to even bibliophiles and visual art connoisseurs.

The fundamental premise of the book is to examine various ideas of the "list" as they play themselves out in art and literature. Taking on the topic of lists in visual art– and assuming one wishes to go beyond the obvious kinds of list in literature– presents a daunting task. As Eco notes in the Introduction:

…I had never set myself the task of making a meticulous record of the infinite cases in which the history of literature (from Homer to Joyce to the present day) offers examples of lists (though names such as Perec, Prévert, Whitman, and Borges all come to mind right away). The result of this hunt was prodigious, enough to make your head spin, and I already know that a great number of people will write to me asking why this or that author is not mentioned in this book. The fact is that not only am I not omniscient and do not know a multitude of texts in which lists appear, but even if I had wished to include all the lists I gradually encountered in the course of my exploration, this book would be at least one thousand pages long, and maybe even more.

Then there is the problem of deciding what a figurative lists may be. The few books on the poetics of lists prudently limit themselves to verbal lists because of the difficulty in explaining how a picture can present things and yet suggest an "etcetera," as if to admit that the limits of the frame oblige the picture to say nothing about an immense number of other things.

Among the kinds of list Eco describes are: referential & practical lists, poetic lists, assemblages, Vunderkammern, cabinets of curiosities, curations, repertories, metaphorical alignments, chaotic enumerations, and lists of vertigos.

Eco first explores the contrast between referential lists (the non-infinite kind) which enumerate– or attempt to enumerate– everything in a domain, and infinite lists. A simple example of a referential list is a telephone book, which lists all phone numbers in an area at a particular point in time. The discussion gets more complex (speaking analogously: what of new and unlisted numbers, what of the series of lists exemplified by such directories, etc), but it anchors one end of the discussion.

The second kind of list is the infinite kind, the one created when the creator can’t possible enumerate all members of the set, but instead "proposes a list as a specimen, example, or indication, leaving the reader to imagine the rest." Needless to say, "the rest" must be important enough that the reader wishes to– and can productively– imagine more. This kind of list explores the "topos of ineffability" (a phrase, I must say, I love).

I couldn’t help but think how apt the list is as a form and framing device and motif for writing in and with this now-newish media and platform of blogging. Many of my favorite examples in the medium demonstrate the richness of the list in a variety of forms, sometimes a stream of consciousness by an individual or this or that group; sometimes a curation; sometimes a new-media rich commonplace book. The constant flow of memes, almost all of which are lists of a distributed kind, has become closer to a living thing than it ever could in another medium. The ability to flow, reflow, browse and meander with tags, categories, search and link make for living, breathing lists.

I’m sure I’ll post some excerpts from The Infinity of Lists to my own commonplace book, but it’s really a book one needs to experience– as a well-illustrated essay, as an anthology, a fascinating "art book" or all three.

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 2 Comments »

aka I am what I am
aka taking the guilt out of guilty pleasures

My second theme for 2010 is to double or treble my efforts to reinforce my defense against the pressure to conform aesthetically to please others. Some of this pressure is real, some imagined… but it almost always involves my own ego and the need to feel perceived in a certain way by some group or person. I need to banish the self-conception that leads me to worry that I’m not “post-avant enough” or “I’m too mainstream.”

I need to stop worrying so much that someone will come across my digital presence and find too much flim-flammery and tomfoolery and “off-topic” writing. I can live with the split between “work/edtech me” and “creative/maker me,” but I can’t continue to allow myself to become ever more splintered by worry about my (minuscule) audience. Each shard cuts me and in the end I suffer the death of a thousand cuts of the expectations I attribute to unknown others.

I like what I like. Those who aren’t interested in the same things– which is likely to be the significant majority– can walk on or look the other direction. I like British mysteries, BBC sitcoms, hard scifi, and the occasional romantic comedy. I like probably more than my fair share of pop fiction, pop culture and pop music. I like some television in controlled, commercial free doses… I’m not embarrassed at enjoying Red Dwarf & The Wire, The Sopranos and Rome, Dexter and Sherlock Holmes.

I like story in stories, narrative in films, coherence in poetry, and melody in music. Most of the time. And when I don’t, or I find something else… well, bully for me then!

I like Ray Carver’s “minimalism” and David Foster Wallace’s near logorrhea alike. I enjoy Le Carré & Hemingway, John Ashbery & Billy Collins, Jack Gilbert & EE Cummings. I love Faulkner & O’Connor but I also love Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels and Lawrence Sanders’ McNally’s series. Just to name a few.

I don’t have to choose between these authors when I can choose from them.

I don’t have to be ashamed that I read in different ways. Yes, sometimes I read as a writer, with pen in hand, and analyze. I’m not killing the subject with this examination. Sometimes I read for simple, unencumbered enjoyment. Sometimes, when I get really lucky, I and the work can sustain both of these activities simultaneously.

I can read without worrying about “readings,” and I can share what I enjoy in my reading without having to be a Theorist.

And I can substitute listening and looking at art for “reading” in all of the above. Shamelessly.

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[photo by Aube Insanite]

“The eyes of man are sun-like, because art comes and makes them more sun-like. Art is so mighty because it changes our perception of the world. It is almost as mighty as philosophy and not nearly so harmful, because it does not ask anything of us. Art makes no request except one – to be loved – but no other request will a work of art ever make. If we love art and participate in the experience given there then our entire being will be changed, so mighty is this experience and yet so harmless.”

–from the Blücher Archive

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Discussions that contain words like these are a good example of why I find it hard (if not impossible) to remain engaged in most discussion communities:

“Such discussions (about what’s a visual poem, what’s not) are like pinhead-angel discussions to the intellectually comatose, but for those involved they sensitize one to degrees of verbality and visuality, and the nuances each can be used to express, just as pinhead-angel discussions open one to sensitivity to the entire continuum of magnitudes, and quantities, and what reality most fundamentally is.  But, hey, go with passive wonder–it’s way easier than active understanding.”

Everything is interesting to someone. If we want to speak on that level, then talking about counting angels on the heads of pins never makes any sense. But assuming the more popular uses of such expressions– intended to signify a serious lack of interest to the individual—then the choices aren’t a binary of the intellectually comatose vs. those hanging on every word of a discussion.

I’m not particularly interested in creating a taxonomy of visual poetry, just as I’m not interested in variations of rap/hip-hop lyrics, Catalonian landscape painting, or Hummel figurines. That’s nothing like being intellectually comatose (though such characterizations are part and parcel of the speaker’s bag of rhetorical tricks, seeking always to position himself as a marginalized martyr at the hands of rednecks and rubes). I’m interested in different things. If people want to have long discussions about what a visual poem is or is not and then what category or label best fits this poem or that, more power to them. That doesn’t make the rest of us intellectually comatose.

Plus, wtf is wrong with simply enjoying something, with open, receptive (“passive” has a negative connotation, which is of course why the almost-always negative speaker I quoted from used it) wonder? This is where the idea of “angel-counting” becomes relevant. I can’t (and don’t need to) become an expert in every kind of art that I am interested in. I enjoy many kinds of art—I have no pretense or desire to becoming an expert in most of them. In many cases, arguments about what is or isn’t an X or Y are, for me, useless. They don’t enhance my appreciation, they are tedious, and in the end there is never any agreed-upon resolution. In fact, the manner in which they distract me and take time away from engaging personally with a piece of art might even be damaging. Resolution isn’t always necessary, of course, but the conversations themselves aren’t always necessary either.

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Though most of the resulting discussion has been about the virtues of collecteds vs. selecteds, which would be interesting had I not just engaged in my share of angel-counting on the NewPoetry mailing list, Joel Brouwer asks an interesting question at the end of his latest Harriet post:

“Here’d be the discussion question: Have you ever fallen out of love with a poet? Grown to love one you couldn’t stand at first? Have you ever changed your tune about a poet? Has your conception of a given poet ever undergone radical transformation? If so, circumstances, please.”

Anyone who starts reading poetry as an adolescent or earlier as inevitably witnessed a transformation in their thinking about a poet. For me that generally takes the form of a sequence: loving a poet without really knowing why, loving a poet and thinking I know why, and finally loving (or giving up on) a poet despite having given up any hope of understanding. The sequence is most obvious for me with poets like Hopkins and Keats.

Stevens (and Eliot) are poets I’ve come to appreciate, though in both cases there were individual poems I couldn’t help but love from the very first time I read them. With Wordsworth I’ve moved in reverse… I continue to admire a few of his poems—and his presence is a critical part in the chain that drives my aesthetics—but I read him now as mostly a prissy, wordy, egotistical, hypocrite.

I’m generally reluctant to give up on poems that have moved me once, even if I’m now in a place to see their flaws. And while I recognize that the coincidence of certain events in my life has had a direct bearing on my appreciation of many poems and poets, I usually cherish them for what they gave me at the time even if it’s only a memory now…

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[tRoMAI?]

I’ll use a poem by James Wright that seems to be the subject of more polarized opinions than usual:

“The Jewel”

There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind
My bones turn to dark emeralds.

Being the victi– I mean proud possessor– of a decent education in literary theory and philosophy, I could knock out 10 or 20 pages explicating this poem, short though it may be. If I did so, some of those pages would naturally be filled with far-out concoctions created almost wholly in my own head– personal interpretations with little likelihood of representing any part of James Wright’s intentions when he wrote the poem, while others would contain contentions as close to objective facts as possible– given the inevitable caveats of the postmodern age– demonstrated by the widespread agreement of those who read them.

But, like any piece of art, much of what makes Wright’s poem work (or not) depends on an emotional engagement that can’t be fully explained.  By “fully,” I mean explained in such a way that the person being explained to would take on your view, seeing that it was “true.”

For example: one criticism of this poem– indeed of much of James Wright’s poems– hinges on his use of words like “dark.” (more…)

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On July 4 at 3:10a–when I should have been resting up for a day of starting forest fires with illegal fireworks and burning hearty meats on the grill in celebration of my country, the One Country to Rule Them All–I was instead engaged in a discussion on the New-Poetry mailing list in which I was described as (accused of?) being anti-intellectual.

This is my anti-intellectual story…

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I clearly live in a different world than the flarfists and their new admirers. My reaction to the Poetry magazine feature on flarf was a long, sighing, bleeeeeeeehhhhhhh. With a few exceptions—Jordan Davis’s second poem and Sharon Mesmer’s entry—the poems just bored me. Or were, in the case of Christian Bok’s (sorry, I don’t know how to quickly make an umlaut) poem, just another in a long string of totally incomprehensible work from a celebrated author, not a single word of which I’ve ever understood. I’m way too dumb for Bok’s poetry! But the Lego drawings were fun…

I assume the flarf poems were worked and shaped and basically in some way crafted by the authors, but I see little evidence in the result, which is generally about as (un)interesting to read as it is to randomly Google (which was fun for the first few days of Google’s existence; the novelty quickly wore off), or flip through a book reading random sentences. Which is to say: not very.

I had pretty much the exact opposite reaction to the entire issue of Poetry than Stan Apps, who shares in excruciating detail how horrible he found the “Poems” and how fantastically interesting the “Flarf and Conceptual Writing.” For all the vitriol Stan directs at Tony Hoagland’s poem, at least that poem conveys something from the author, where stanzas such as:

RadioShack
GNC
Sears
Crabree & Evelyn

or

Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57 H98 06], used as a plasticizer: 52%.

are essentially only poetry if I use them to create a poem in my head with or between the assemblage I’ve been given. And that assemblage is pretty thin. Sandra Beasley’s “Unit of Measure” it seems to me, has much the same intent as a flarf list, but also tells a story (of a kind), crafting the search-engine like facts into a sequence that is thoughtful and amusing.

Some flarf is funny. Nada Gordon’s poem made me smile when I wasn’t wincing, both of which may well be part of the flarfist intent. The 22-panel Emo cartoon was funny, and reminiscent of a number of web cartoons I read regularly, though it was 14 panels too long. But John Hodgen’s poem “For the man with the erection lasting more than four hours” was funnier than both, as was Beasley’s “Let Me Count the Waves.”

Which isn’t to say there aren’t some bad entries on the “Poems” side of the ledger: Philip Levine and Charles Simic, for example, have pieces in the issue I can’t believe would make it out of the slush pile if they’d been submitted by anyone else. But overall, I think Poetry has—in the past few years—become a much more interesting publication publishing more variety than ever, as both the flarf and recent vizpo features demonstrate, not to mention poems like those by Ange Mlinko and Amy Beeder in this double issue. And it’s been my reading experience that the flarfists and post-avants are in no way immune to the same kind of name- and relationship-based favoritism they despise in the world of the mainstream.

But I do appreciate that some of those commenting on the flarf issue have pointed to poems and lines they like rather than attempting to elevate their preferred pieces by denigrating others, which is useless to me approximately 99.341% of the time. There’s a fine line between productive contrast (such as Stan Apps’ comparison of Hoagland’s “At the Galleria Shopping Mall” with Fitterman’s “Directory,” which I don’t buy at all and, in fact, illustrates precisely the problem I have with a lot of flarf, which is that Stan Apps’ reading—his creation using Fitterman’s words—is interesting; Fitterman’s poem is not) and the dubious taste of adrenalinized attack that emotions can propel us past rather quickly)

As I’ve noted here many times, including at length recently, I continue to look for my way into some of these different poetries, so I truly appreciate the blog entries and willing commenters that follow them. And whether I find much “there” there or not, I applaud Poetry’s effort to present a more diverse range of voices and approaches to poetry. In some ways the editors put themselves in a no-win position doing so, alienating some of the mainstream readers while inviting mockery from the rest, but it doesn’t appear to deter them from doing their best to revitalize the magazine.

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[photo by Stuck in Customs]

I’m consciously convinced that aesthetic appreciation is ultimately a subjective experience—a happening, even a communion, but in the end comprising a wholly individual appraisal. People come together to beauty in part due to the skill of the artist and in part through fortunate circumstance, by dint of shared experience, empathy and simultaneously finding a place where the strings of contingency have been drawn tight enough to dance on.

But there’s a small part of me that retains a vague faith—the kind that supports superstition rather than conversion—in something more universal, a sublime Beauty real enough to touch, broad enough to accommodate Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile and the rictus of my dead father’s mouth. Because capital-B Beauty isn’t found only in the pleasing, but the awe-inspiring and the terrifying, the things that for a moment open cracks in the carefully constructed shelter we build to protect us from that vastness that is other than us and which we know we can’t possibly see even as we are seeing it, the all of everything.

Part of my task is to capitalize on that faith by finding—or rediscovering—my own resources, my individual inner vision. More than I like to admit, my attention, and thus my apprehension and the resulting appreciation, is brought to bear only through the suggestion of others. The dismissed, poem I have read and as quickly forgot, a painting I stood in front of without imprinting a single conscious memory, becomes noteworthy because someone else—a friend, a critic, a complete stranger—points it out and I take a look or listen… this time with eyes and ears open.

I need to find once again that place where I can comfortably kneel and receive those gifts. I wonder if I can, if there is any “there” there. I wonder if I’m consigned to consuming words as so much mediocre mental fodder, anesthetizing my mind the way I numb my body with food, a narcotic I continue to need long after any pleasure derived from it has disappeared…

The only path is mindfulness. The only approach allowing the grasping hands and gaping mouth of attention to have their way. The only posture one of presence, awareness of every word, note and hue. It takes good work to make such gifts, but it takes good work to receive them too. There’s a humility in accepting what someone else has to give without crushing the fragile offering beneath the weight of expectations and preconceptions or shaping it to my will.

When I’m fortunate enough to find those pieces which fit perfectly into my glistening spaces—the natural bend of my bodies and wounds alike—I can give thanks in the small ways I know how. And when I’m not, trust in silence.

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 1 Comment »

There’s a brilliant essay by Ihab Hassan on "Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization" in Philosophy and Literature. A few bits and bobs:

I seem to have cornered myself into the position that aesthetics generally, and literary theory in particular, have something to learn from great art. (I can hear Gotthold Lessing grumbling and tossing in his deep grave.) Learn nihilism or what?

Learn more than nihilism, I think. Theory can take a hint from the inexhaustible range of human emotions, sensual impressions, and artistic forms.

A good theorist will be as inward with the aching human body–the mortal "body as the real and final home"–and with the human mind and heart, as any poet or novelist. A good critic will know how to follow the "inner momentum of a poem," as Helen Vendler does in Poets Thinking, rather than some extraneous thesis. (We can all do with a fix of "negative capability" now.) Best of all, both theorist and critic will find a way to withdraw tactfully sometimes, or at least turn aside, mindful of Cage’s insight that the best criticism of a work of art is another work of art.

[…]

This leads to the core of my essay. An epistemology of experience, relying on pragmatic principles, depends less on metaphysical truth than on human trust. This trust, as William James shows in The Will to Believe, depends on another’s trust, just as our faith "is faith in someone else’s faith…." Hence the self-defeating character of radical relativism, of extreme particularism. Hence, too, the innate sterility of fundamentalism, which spurns human trust in favor of fiats, ukases, edicts, writs, and gospels of every kind.

The fiduciary principle I invoke here, this idea of trust, is also the trust on which knowledge rests and by which knowledge is shared. Call it the epistemic contract; call it the aesthetic compact as well. Without this tacit compact, the artist can not create, let alone communicate; without it, the aesthetician can not theorize; without it, the critic or reader or viewer falls silent. This trust, I would argue, has a spiritual character.

[…]

I have stood frozen before certain objects in galleries around the world, feeling that no experience I’ve had at the Metropolitan or Uffizi, at Karnak or the Parthenon, can help me cope with what appears before me. I don’t simply mean the shock of the new; I also mean the profound, and ultimately inexplicable, threat of otherness. And I also mean the paradoxical temptation of indifference. You end by asking yourself: do I really have to deal with this? Do I care?

Admittedly, our perplexity nowadays is partially due to the radically disjunctive legacy of modernism, postmodernism, and assorted avant-gardes in the last hundred years. But haven’t we inured ourselves to the various avant-gardes by now? Haven’t we absorbed their shock? We actually live their scandal, or, rather, we let the media, if not our servants, live it for us. In any case, the arts continue to create their audiences somehow–with the possible exception of contemporary music.

But the difficulties of aesthetics today, of literary theory as well, are due to something larger than catachrestic modernism and paratactic postmodernism: that is, a collision, not only of styles, values, and expectations, but also of radical assumptions of being. Call it ontological diversity, a clash not of civilizations but of ways of being and breathing in the world. And yet, that may be precisely the creative moment in globalization, before homogenization sets in, before differences freeze into lucre or flare up into rage.

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You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as “beauty.” Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.

At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter. There’s no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as though this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we’re doing most of the time.

–Marilynne Robinson
from “The Art of Fiction #198″
(Paris Review, Fall 2008)

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Here’s one indicator by which I can differentiate my aesthetics from a rather large group of (mostly) contemporaries:

I find this poem by W.S. Merwin a wonderful, tiny work with some lasting resonance:

“Elegy”

Who would I show it to?

On the other hand, Bruce Andrews’ over-celebrated poem (I don’t know that it has a title) strikes me as a now-stale joke tied too closely to the context of the time, not unlike Rauschenberg’s “White Painting” or even Cage’s 4′33″:

A banana is an example

It’s not that the Emperor here has no clothes (I’ve come around– a little– on some of Andrews’ work), just that the once surprising duds are now threadbare…

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from Poetry:

…in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he issues a particular invitation to poets, arguing that poetry is in some way the model for all other art forms, and the exemplary activity of human beings. The poet, he writes, “uses the word—not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word.” Like Emerson, that is, Heidegger regards poetry as the truest form of language, and most language as merely defective poetry. “The nature of poetry,” he goes so far as to declare, “is the founding of truth.”

To understand exactly what Heidegger means by this numinous formula, it’s necessary to sketch his complex argument.

A very interesting look and not nearly as off-putting as the idea of discussing poetry, poetics, art, and Heidegger sounds to most people…

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