Warsaw 2014
Projekt okładki
Marta Pokorska
Projekt strony tytułowej
Jacek Malik
Recenzenci
dr hab. Marek Paryż, prof. UW
dr hab. Jerzy Sobieraj, prof. SWPS
Książka współfinansowana przez
Szkołę Wyższą Psychologii Społecznej
Copyright © for this edition by Fundacja Augusta hr. Cieszkowskiego
ISBN 978-83-62609-48-2
Fundacja Augusta hr. Cieszkowskiego
ul. Mianowskiego 15/65, 02­‍‑044 Warszawa
e­‍‑mail: [email protected]
Wydanie pierwsze, Warszawa 2014
Skład
Studio Artix, Jacek Malik, [email protected]
Druk i oprawa
Drukarnia Sowa, Warszawa
Table of contents
Mikołaj Wiśniewski
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Grzegorz Czemiel
Taking Out the Trash: Mina Loy’s Exorcising of Modernist
Aesthetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Alan Golding
“The wedge of the WHOLE FRONT”: Document,
Pedagogy and Postmodernity in Charles Olson’s
Cultural Poetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Joanna Orska
Sincerity and Objectification: Object in Translation.. . . . . . . . 51
Christopher Patrick Miller
We Must Talk Now: George Oppen and a Genealogy
of “Objectivist” Sincerity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
David Bergman
Orality and Copia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
5
Exorcising Modernism
Anna Warso
“But there is another method”: John Berryman’s The Dream
Songs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
Nick Selby
Answering “Each in His Nature”: Some Ways out of The
Cantos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
Tadeusz Pióro
The Influence of the New York School on Contemporary
Polish Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
Mikołaj Wiśniewski
Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet “Nowadays” . . . 204
Agnieszka Salska
Galway Kinnell: Tradition and the Individual Talent. . . . . . . 230
Kacper Bartczak
The Poetics of Plenitude and Its Crisis in Wallace
Stevens, Rae Armantrout and Peter Gizzi:
A Pragmatist Perspective. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
Charles Altieri
Dodie Bellamy’s Version of Stevens: The Place
of Imagination in Erotic Experience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
About the Authors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
6
Mikołaj Wiśniewski
Introductory Note
Is the title of this book “Exorcising Modernism,” or is it “Exercising
Modernism”? In a sense, it is both, for it is intended to reflect the
ambivalent attitude of the poets discussed here to the tradition
of High Modernism which they challenged, but which also –
undoubtedly – determined their attitudes and stylistic pursuits.
In other words, the process of “exorcising modernism” cannot
be regarded without taking into consideration the ways in which
modernism was, and perhaps still is, “exercised” by post-war
American poets. Some of them are typically associated with the prewar modernist avant­‍‑garde, but have, in their later work, engaged
in a thorough critique of its ideological assumptions. This is the
case of Mina Loy whose poetry from the 1940s is discussed in the
opening essay by Grzegorz Czemiel. Loy explores modernism’s
blind spots, giving voice to the human “refuse generated by great
modernist designers,” and “reclaiming a social territory abandoned
by the moderns.” By doing so, Czemiel argues, she has worked out
a new and original “trash poetics,” akin to postmodern phenomena
such as camp or rubbish art. Other such transitional figures
7
Exorcising Modernism
discussed in the volume are: Charles Olson, Charles Reznikoff and
George Oppen. The latter two grew out of the great experimental
movement of late modernism, “Objectivism,” but have developed
it in directions different from those delineated by the movement’s
founder, Louis Zukofsky, broadening and complicating the notion
of “Objectivism” itself. For example, Reznikoff ’s “testimonial
verse,” as Joanna Orska points out, has to be read not only along
the lines of the “objectivist” tenets worked out by Zukofsky in his
famous manifesto, but also in reference to Hebrew mysticism –
Kabbalistic theories of language – as well as to the poet’s
personal experience when he was commissioned, in his capacity
as a lawyer, to work out a “universal encyclopaedia of law.” Both
of these factors – Reznikoff’s professional background and his
Jewishness – gave a new “spin” to “objectivist” poetics.
Apart from Zukofsky, the modernist father-figures, whose
influence was both “exercised” and “exorcised” by the later
generations of poets, are those of Wallace Stevens, William
Carlos Williams, and – of course – Ezra Pound. Two of the poets
discussed in this volume – Elizabeth Bishop and A. R. Ammons –
overtly grappled with the Poundian legacy in their work. As Nick
Selby demonstrates, Bishop and Ammons contested Pound’s
understanding of “nature,” which “reaches back to Romantic
conceptions,” and proposed instead an approach that can be
interpreted as an early shift towards eco­‍‑critical thinking. “Their
answer to Pound’s legacy,” Selby argues, “are poems that seek
to exorcise ‘nature’ as the ghost­‍‑in-the-machine of modernity.”
Stevens, on the other hand, is presented here primarily as the
poet who – in the words of Kacper Bartczak – “pushed literature
on the path of increased ironic self-awareness.” Bartczak shows
how this ironic attitude is continued and, in a way, radicalized in
the poetry of two contemporary authors: Rae Armantrout and Peter
Gizzi. Finally, Williams’s “anti-poetic sentimentalism” (as Wallace
Stevens called it in his well­‍‑known “Preface” to Williams’s
8
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Mikołaj Wiśniewski
Collected Poems 1921-1931) is discussed in the context of just
one of the many poets of the second half of the 20th century who
invoked the famous Rutherford doctor as their “predecessor.” The
work of James Schuyler – as presented by Mikołaj Wiśniewski –
shows a predilection for Williamsian “earthy tastes,” but it also
manages to work out new solutions to the poetic quandaries
dramatized in Williams’s lyrics.
Other essays presented in this volume address developments
in post-war American poetry which directly challenged the tenets
of modernist aesthetics: the turn towards orality (in the poetry
of David Antin, for example) and confessionalism (as opposed
to the ideal of poetic impersonality). An interesting “local touch”
is added by Tadeusz Pióro, an O’Hara scholar and renowned
contemporary Polish poet. Pióro, who published his first books
of poetry in the early 1990s, discusses the influence of the New
York school of poets on young Polish authors whose growing
interest in the work of O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch and Schuyler sprang
from their need to “exorcise” the modernist attitude – insistence
on “crafted language,” high seriousness and metaphysical depth –
prevalent in the poetry of the older generation of Polish poets such
as Zbigniew Herbert or Czesław Miłosz.
The volume closes with an essay by Charles Altieri who
chose to seriously consider a very recent work that many readers
might be tempted to dismiss as frivolous or even offensive. In her
2013 book, Cunt Norton, Dodie Bellamy reworks the voices of
famous poets of the English language by cutting their work up and
combining it with hackneyed pornographic phraseology. Focusing
on Bellamy’s controversial rendering of the poetry of Wallace
Stevens, Altieri points out that, far from being merely a crude
literary joke, it “provides one of our fullest images honoring many
of the civilizing roles imagination can play.”
9
Grzegorz Czemiel
Taking Out the Trash: Mina Loy’s
Exorcising of Modernist Aesthetics
Are they my poor?
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841)
My true environment is a dustbin.
Mina Loy
When the Fresh Kills Landfill finally stopped operating as New
York’s biggest waste dump in March 2001, an important chapter
in the city’s history was closed. Although it acted as a temporary
sorting site for debris from Ground Zero later that year, it was
scheduled for revitalization in 2008 and may now become a singular
example of turning around a doomed and festering wasteland into
a community park three times the size of Central Park. For the
previous half century, however, it was the embodiment of the bulk
garbage masses produced in America’s cultural capital throughout
the decades that marked the rise of consumer culture. The twin
poles of the infamous dump’s history – the moment when the
10
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
first load of rubbish was unloaded there in 1948, and its closing
in 2001 – roughly coincide with the framework that serves as the
basis of this essay: the “Bowery period” in the literary career of
Mina Loy, with the seminal poem “Hot Cross Bum” composed in
1949 (a poem “exercised” here as an important instance of antimodernist criticism), and the reopening of the modernist question
in literary and cultural studies in the 21st century (largely driven
by the impulse to “exorcise” modernism as a cultural formation,
especially with regard to its exclusivist tendencies).
The important lesson to be drawn from the fifty years
separating the two above‑mentioned moments lies in the
discovery that – as detective fiction teaches us – it is impossible
to hide the body. In this particular case, we are dealing with
the surfacing of the discarded body of modernism, which
materializes as inanimate refuse and human “refusees.”1 Turning
around the fate of Fresh Kills is not just about removing an
“eyesore” that spoils the urban vista, but also about attempting
to “embrace it and convert it into something constructive,” which
entails recognizing that garbage is in fact our discarded reflection
(Popson 2002). In the quoted review of an exhibition devoted
to the dump’s history, Colleen Popson rightly points out that
this “giant midden” actually constitutes a reservoir of “billions
of stories.” One of the most profound aspects of the dump is
that it has such a magnificent archaeological potential, rooted
in “garbage’s ability to encapsulate culture” (Popson 2002).
Ultimately, as William Rathje – the pioneer of “garbology” –
has pointed out from the perspective of an archaeologist and
anthropologist, “our garbage reflects truth” and provides “insight
into the long­‍‑term values of culture” (Popson 2002). Thus, the
Loy’s punning term, which she employed to refer to her own assamblages. However,
it can be understood more broadly, as the general side­‍‑product of modernization;
a “blend of refuse, Refusés, and refugees” (Burke 420).
1
11
Exorcising Modernism
exhibition at the Snug Harbor Cultural Centre exposes the true
elephant in the room, namely the hypocritical blindness to one
of the most radically repressed facts of the 20th century – the fact
that we have drowned ourselves in trash, accepting this as the
price of modernization.
The 2002 show curated by Steven Siegel featured, among
other responses to the closure of Fresh Kills, paintings by Alexis
Rockman, who depicted certain animals inhabiting the place –
bats, rats, flies or racoons – using “leachate,” which is a toxic
substance oozing from the dump. Transformations of this sort
are nothing new in visual arts, which have often been tempted
to showcase their ability to achieve secular transubstantiation, as
in the case of the ready­‍‑mades exhibited by Marcel Duchamp, or
Joseph Cornell’s boxes (both of whom were significant influences
on Loy). The “trash aesthetic” has spawned a separate genre in
the 1970s, when it jumped on the bandwagon of transgression
and camp, led by John Waters whose echoes are still detectable in
American culture, recently in Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers
(2009).2 Rubbish art, however, has always had a conceptual and
less shocking face. Now it occupies – through works by artists
like Anu Tuominen and Vik Muniz – an important place in the
broadly conceived niche of socially engaged art. The latter artist’s
appearance in the award­‍‑winning documentary film Waste Land
(dir. Lucy Walker, 2010) about catadores – collectors of recyclable
material at the world’s biggest landfill – has ensured that the
subject reached mass audiences in an appropriately digestible
In the introduction to the Polish translation of Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas,
Joanna Tokarska­‍‑Bakir points out that the society which obsessively exhibits its own
margins via a fascination with bodily orifices and the substances they secrete – i.e.
transgressive art – is either not afraid of anything and does not care for taboo boundaries,
or is in fact dismembered and exhausted, seeking some kind of stimulus that would
breathe new life into it. Ultimately – the Polish anthropologist claims – we may be
dealing with a combination of the two (Tokarska-Bakir 42-43).
2
12
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
form of a social-rise narrative that sparked a much‑needed
political debate.3
Given the above, Mina Loy’s early excursions into trash
poetics and found art, which extend criticism of the consumer
society and point out the dangers regarding the production of
waste, gain in prominence and originality. Her early contribution
to the debate offers unique insight into the birth of the modernist
trash­‍‑sorting system, which functioned – uninterruptedly and with
deadly efficiency – for decades and only now is being exposed
as the product of modernist ideology and duly problematized.
By addressing those issues in the 1940s and 1950s, Mina Loy
poses serious questions about the dark underside of consumption,
waste management, and asks whether avant-garde ideals have
retained any value in the face of new and urgent social issues,
which include commodification, homelessness, old age, as well as
social immobility and erosion of democratic institutions.
Operating at the dawn of the post-war era, literally crossing
the threshold of modernity, Mina Loy was able to pursue those
topics in her controversial Bowery period (1948-1953), when she
produced some of her most radical works, both poetic (a handful of
urban observations published in the years 1949-1962) and visual
(assamblages built from trash, exhibited by Marcel Duchamp
in 1959 at the Bodley Gallery). Seen from the perspective of
later sociological and anthropological developments, notably
Douglas (2002) and Bauman (2004), as well as recent critiques
of modernism (Miller 1999), Mina Loy emerges as a transitory
figure who exposes the paradoxes of modernism. She lays bare
modernism’s dependence on waste and offers an archaeology of the
era, excavating an important strain in the process which began with
3
I owe my discovery of those as well as other, similar art works and concepts to the
essay by Magdalena Kreis titled “Trash art, czyli życie po życiu śmieci” which offers
a wide range of bibliographical references useful for further exploration of the topic.
13
Exorcising Modernism
Pound’s dictum to “make it new” and avant-garde’s obliteration
of the social dimension, leading to an aesthetic dead-end of the
overflowing waste dump. Loy, an outcast in literary, national
and social terms, acutely felt the razor edge of sharp modernist
divisions. Her unique position – yielding insight both into the
high modernist salon and the metropolitan underlife – allowed
Loy to bid farewell to modernist enthusiasm, which is reinforced
in her own biography by her mourning for the mysteriously
disappeared husband, Arthur Cravan. Ultimately, Loy’s story of
an uncompromising and grief-stricken futurist-feminist ends with
her sinking to the bottom of the modernist waste dump, where she
was able to reinvent herself and reassert the transformative power
of an art that transcends the aesthetics of purification.
Mina Loy (1882-1966), daughter of an English woman
and a Hungarian Jew, famously christened herself as “AngloMongrel,” joining the ranks of typical early­‍‑modernist expatriates.
She embarked on a long journey beginning in London and leading
to Munich, Florence, Paris and finally New York where she eagerly
joined the melting pot by becoming an American citizen in 1946.
A transatlantic modernist associated with crucial bohemian and
avant-garde circles of the age, she was an elusive and subversive
artist exploring diverse areas, ranging from painting and lamp
design to acting and writing. After relocating permanently to New
York in 1937, Loy lived for a brief period with one of her two
daughters, but was soon stranded – the girls moving to Aspen – and
settled, lonely and aged, on 5 Stanton Street. Fabi and Joella tried
to lure their mother to join them in Colorado, but to no avail – Loy
was determined to stay in New York, in the heart of an ill-famed
lower Manhattan district, the Bowery.
The new surroundings pleased the poet, who enjoyed the
derelict nature of the area, populated by numerous bums, homeless
and helplessly hooked on alcohol. It must have been an ironic
match, Loy being a refined lady of immaculate manners and
14
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
Parisian designer chic. Still, the relationship worked and she was
soon embraced as an angel-like mother figure, looming over the
degraded parade of derelicts, who “accepted her as their local
Duchess” (Burke 412). This may be due to the fact that she was
one of the few to recognize them as human beings worthy of any
attention, even discerning a spark of beauty in their hazy eyes.
From Mina’s perspective, the bums represented her
lifelong fear of “outcasting.” To most people they
were wreckage, indistinguishable in their grime and
degradation, but in her eyes they were individuals with
habits and histories. (...) Pointing out the “beauty”
in the derelicts’ faces, she sketched them from her
window and sent them on errands so that she could
give them a quarter.
(Burke 412)
In her last, yet vastly significant creative period, Loy opened
her art, in an unprecedented gesture of hospitality, to a group of
people who, being the unwanted side‑products of modernisation
and the rising consumer society, were unrepresented in political
or aesthetic terms. Reclaiming a social territory abandoned by the
moderns, she exorcises modernism by speaking from within its
terrible rift – a doomed wasteland of failed social opportunity and
mass­‍‑produced poverty, downgraded in politics and anaesthetised
in the arts.
Mina Loy opens the gates to the Bowery in the poem
“On Third Avenue,” written in 1942, which is the first in
a series of works grouped by her in a folder significantly titled
“Compensations of Poverty” (Loy 207). The editor of Loy’s
Poems, Roger L. Conover, adds that it is possible to detect in
Loy’s poetry, since 1915, “a sympathy for and identification
with tramps, addicts and derelicts (...) the castoffs and human
15
Exorcising Modernism
refuse of her early rounds” (Loy 207-208). They emerge in the
poem as “shuffling shadow bodies,” “down-cast countenances”
and “irreparable dummies / an eerie undress / of mummies / half
unwound” (Loy 109-110) – they are never complete but always
half-present, disappearing, melting into the backdrop, dehumanized
and anonymous. The bleak imagery of the poem’s first part yields,
however, to an imagistic extravaganza in the second, final section.
Loy shifts attention to the eerie city lights: “electric fungus / sprung
from its own effulgence / of intercircled jewellery / reflected
on the pavement,” which turn out to be, as it seems, a neon hung
over a “sugar­‍‑coated box‑office” featuring a “Goddess / aglitter.”
“These are compensations of poverty, to see,” runs the refrain
in the second part, drawing attention, in the last stanza, to the
fleeting beauty of the anonymous crowd: “lovely in anonymity /
they vanish / with the mirage / of their passage” (110). In a single
flash Loy reveals that obscure secret which Charles Baudelaire
named the “modern” component of beauty. She has a premonition
of who would be the hero of modernity’s next stage: neither the
Parisian rag-picker or prostitute, nor the postmodern catadores
or migrants, but the indiscriminate “bum” – Loy’s champion of
her era, the suffering saint of mass production and consumption.
Who is this mysterious outcast? Zygmunt Bauman offers
a thorough examination of the mechanism that produces “wasted
lives” – modernity’s outcasts. In his study Wasted Lives, Bauman
considers the transformative processes of modernisation, especially
the long ride on the wave of post-war “developmental optimism”
(67), as the implementation of “compulsive, and addictive,
designing” (30). All projects of this type must necessarily
produce waste, which has to be disposed of: “No house is really
finished before the building site has been swept clean” (30). In
the case of post-war modernisation, however, we are dealing with
a special type of waste – human waste, “the dark, shameful secret
of all production” (27). Spawning wherever progress is pushed
16
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
forward at a mass scale, the growing numbers of unnecessary
people undermine traditional notions of poverty and charity,
leaving the moderns clueless as to the sources of homelessness
and joblessness, and later – mass migration and paralysis of social
mobility. Bauman provides a precise definition of those victims:
“Flawed beings, from whose absence or obliteration the designed
form could only gain, becoming more uniform, more harmonious,
more secure and altogether more at peace with itself” (30).
The direction that Bauman takes in his analysis resonates
with the dangerous, early‑modern ideas of hygiene and eugenics,
for a perfection of modernity entails intense purification and
removal of all waste products. The more dirt we produce, the more
sophisticated ideas we need to regulate what is clean and unclean.
In her classic study on the subject published in 1966, Purity and
Danger, Mary Douglas points out that pure dirt does not in fact
exist – it is a product of the symbolic divisions introduced within
a particular culture. Dirt is manufactured systematically, while
taboos are introduced to provide stability to the entire framework,
securing its delicate margins.
Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification
of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting
inappropriate elements. (...) In perceiving we are
building, taking some cues and rejecting others.
(...) Ambiguous ones tend to be treated as if they
harmonised with the rest of the pattern. Discordant
ones tend to be rejected.
(Douglas 36-37)
The unfitting elements, however, are highly charged and provide
convenient points of entrance to the system’s fragile interior:
“There is energy in its margins and unstructured areas” (Douglas
17
Exorcising Modernism
115). However, Douglas points out that those boundaries are not
concealed; they in fact remain within our sight and intellectual
grasp, the only condition is to calibrate perception. One way
to do that involves poetic speech; in Loy’s case this re-adjusted
sight is identified with the counter-modernist “compensation of
poverty.”
This argument holds ground both in synchronic and diachronic
terms, at the same time falling in line with an important argument
about “late modernism,” as laid down in Tyrus Miller’s study
on the subject. Loy’s life was that of an outsider, or a peregrinating,
rootless modernist. Her work, however, although eagerly read by
other poets and highly judged by some of the most influential
contemporaries, never made it into the canon and has remained
unknown in wider circles. Operating as a hinge between high
transatlantic modernism and a new literary idiom, Loy’s late poetry
occupies a position demarcated by Miller as “later modernism”; he
defines works of this category as “splinter-products of a shattered
‘classic’ modernism (...) divested, by political and economic forces,
of the cultural ‘cosmos’” (Miller 14). The key point made by the
scholar is that late modernism, interpreted as “high modernism
as ruin,” has supplied a fitting postscript to the entire period by
allegorizing its ruination: “late modernists reassembled fragments
into disfigured likenesses of modernist masterpieces: the unlovely
allegories of a world’s end” (14). Taking cue from Walter Benjamin,
Miller traces another important connection by claiming that the
production of such allegories is in fact a sign of regeneration: “the
compulsion to decline and the impulse to renewal, are not just
related; they are practically indistinguishable” (14). This approach
seems to be particularly well suited to tackle the work of Mina
Loy; indeed, Miller discusses her novel Insel in the closing chapter
of his study, but a broader look on her poetic language could
render equally interesting results. It seems especially revealing
to note how the modernist construction of myth collapses in the
18
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
confrontation with those “historical circumstances” (Miller 19)
which Loy associates with the production of waste in both the
material and social dimension. The bizarre yet original method
she chose to deliver her critique was a combination of futurist
technique and surreal imagery. Loy’s subversive approach to them
as allegorical, “ruinous” (dysfunctional) tools was made possible
by the in-depth criticism of phallocentric avant-gardism delivered
in her visionary pamphlets Aphorisms on Futurism and Feminist
Manifesto (both written in 1914). Loy achieved two goals with
her bold move: on the one hand, she would prove “how contingent
was the modernist buildup of form and formal mastery, crucially
important to the advances of small, prestigious group of writers
and critics” (Miller 18), while on the other, she could advance her
own, woman’s cause. Mina Loy, a great actress both in her life and
on stage, enjoyed the company of the leading Italian futurists –
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Giovanni Papini – to whom she
was muse, lover and disciple, until they proved to be chauvinistic
beyond hope of rescue, at which point she abandoned them. She
was acutely aware of modernist gender politics right from the
very inception of the avant­‍‑garde’s rise to the salon. As far as
surrealism is concerned – a movement that prefigures Loy’s later
interest in waste4 – it was her beloved husband Arthur Cravan
who provided the necessary link. A surrealist poet, eccentric and
boxer, he disappeared in Mexico and probably drowned, but Loy
could not accept the fact of her husband’s death until much later
in her life – a point I consider vital for understanding her attitude
4
Tyrus Miller rightly points out that “the surrealists were particularly self-conscious
in strategically revaluing this debris of the social system as a protest against the values
of work, technicity, and mechanical efficiency” (40). The major difference between
that programme and Loy’s is that she was not accusing technology per se but the ultraoptimistic spread of mass production as a certain value, resulting in raging consumerism
and the rise of new biopolitical means of handling the excessive production of human
waste (see: Bauman 96-97).
19
Exorcising Modernism
to modernism fully, marked by the composition of “Letters of the
Unliving” in 1949.
This elegy, sparked by re­‍‑reading letters from Cravan, in
which “hoarseness of the past / creaks / from creased leaves”
(Loy 129), bemoans the death of their author, bringing into the
foreground the lover’s “unwritten writing” and raising the question
of his ghostly existence. The haunting memories – “ghostly
reference” (Loy 131) – persist in Loy’s old age, elevating Cravan
to the unifying principle of her life, which is now irretrievably
lost: “who made euphonious / our esoteric universe” (129).
The difficulty of her task lies in its ambiguity, for she is at the
same time trying to conjure some interpretation from the letters
and to obliterate her poetic sensibilities: “O leave me / my final
illiteracy” (132). The paradox she plunges into is related to the
idiom of haunting: how is it possible that something is present
although it does not exist?
No longer any you as addresser
there is no addressee
to dally with defunct reality
Can one who still has being
be inexistent?
(131)
Through metaphysical speculation, the elegiac embrace employed
here widens to encompass a larger dimension, becoming capacious
enough to contain the lost futures of modernism, the lost cause of
the avant-garde and the ultimate failure of the modernist project.
Following Miller’s claim that “individual works of late modernist
fiction can be interpreted as allegories of the end of modernism”
(23), I would propose to treat Loy’s poetry as both an elegy of
modernism and an exorcising pursuit of the repressed potential
20
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
hidden in the refuse generated by great modernist designers. In
this way, her elegy for Cravan acquires a fundamentally political
dimension, which becomes apparent only upon juxtaposing this
poem with two other works from the last period of her career:
“Faun Fare” (1948), a scathing criticism of nouveau‑riche salon,
and especially the epic tribute to the Bowery “Hot Cross Bum”
(1949).
Even though modernism was diverse in aesthetic terms, its
shared ideals set up a value‑shaping framework that Loy lays bare
and criticises. Loy points out that Pound’s dictum to “make it new”
as well as the futurist’s vow to “destroy the past” – both being
founding gestures – are symptomatic of a trend which cuts across
aesthetics, politics and social life. Loy traces this mechanism
by focusing on the dirty and the rejected, confirming that “our
pollution behaviour is the reaction which condemns any object
or idea likely to confuse cherished classifications” (Douglas 37).
The concept of “making it new” was also criticized by Theodor
Adorno, who was sceptical of producing “novelty for its own
sake” (Miller 41), because a short­‍‑sighted revolution in aesthetics
was thus translated into the sphere of social production, providing
an ideological framework for embracing mass production,
consumerism and their inevitable social costs as a historical
necessity. In a sense, such development was an ironic distortion
of early avant-garde ideals, even Loy’s, involving for example
the “democratization of perception” (Miller 41). Thus, under the
pretence of egalitarianism a new rhythm of life was introduced,
albeit one that is not governed by pursuit of new things, but rather
the anxiety that one can become obsolete: “the fear of one’s own
wastage that oozes from the life experience of the dizzying pace
of change” (Bauman 109). The incessant pursuit of new things,
which immediately replace older ones, seen then perhaps as an
outburst of new economic energies, is today perceived as a factor
contributing to some of the most serious social challenges: “credit
21
Exorcising Modernism
and debt,” the two riders of the 21st century poverty­‍‑apocalypse,
“are midwives of waste” (Bauman 111). Loy anticipates this by
exonerating the bum and exploring possible ways of aestheticizing
trash in poetry and visual arts.5
“Hot Cross Bum,” a crucial poem in the light of the
above, offers a “tour of the neighbourhood led by a detached yet
sympathetic observer” (Burke 419). Loy’s perspective oscillates
between identifying with the bum (living in fear that she might
be herself “unhoused” and separating herself from the derelicts
through distancing “vision”) and attempting to “demonstrate her
belief that vision was itself a form of salvation” (Burke 422). In
a sense, she contemplates the possibility that her own writing is
not unlike a bum’s life: picking up objects, disbelieving, taking
false communions (with “hot­‍‑cross buns” and “creepy Pete” –
a cheap wine favoured by the locals; Loy 137-138), looking at the
world in an intoxicated reverie, sleepwalking through the surreal
dream­‍‑city, cherishing its disequilibrium and randomness. Loy
detects a utopian modality here, an ecstatic “Elysium” populated
by ironically subversive outcasts, contented by the trashcan,
living a “safe life under the sun” – Nietzsche’s “last men” who
have “invented happiness” (Nietzsche 10) and achieved blissful
indifference, “exchanging / an inobvious real / for over­‍‑obvious
irreal” (Loy 134).
The situation in the Bowery uncovers the unconscious of
the American society. Loy opens it before us theatrically, lifting
Another dimension of this problem is the fact that Loy touches upon the obsession
with youth. As an aging lady and a former beauty, she was quite anxious about her
looks, which might be read as another symptom of modernism being “youth­‍‑centred.”
Fear of old age also corresponds with the broader question of sustainability (understood
in ecological terms as stability and productivity of environment) as well as the
potential to recognize oneself in the mirror, i.e. acknowledge historical continuity and
responsibility. Loy uses powerful phrasing to convey this: “the future is inexploitable,”
while “the erstwhile agile / narrow silhouette of self” becomes “a Bulbous stranger /
only to be exorcised by death” (145).
5
22
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
a curtain to start a grotesque show: “Beyond a hell­‍‑vermilion /
curtain of neon / lies the Bowery” (133). The “choicelessly
corrupted” march in an “irrythmic stagger” (133), staging
a curious performance of gestures, somewhat reminiscent of
Samuel Beckett’s theatre of the absurd: “lunging a sullen blow
on sunlight,” “peering from shock-absorbent / torsos,” “flailing
limbs / of disequilibrium” and “spiring a querulous arm” (134135).6 This “Masquerade of Inexpressionism” (133) conveys
a sense of inertia – an effect achieved by the silent repetition of
futile gestures, the only words being “‘It isn’t my fault’ / –A truth
psychiatry / weighs courteously” (136). Loy’s bitter commentary
ensures us that to any “right­‍‑minded” onlooker such people are
“ideologically deceased” – they have no language but “shouts and
mutters,” or “murmur of the mass” (135-136). The lone complaint
sounds so formulaic that pity seems out of place. Whose fault
is it? The question is a haunting one, piercing through layers of
repression and provoking reaction. Here lies Loy’s exactitude
and precision – her “scalpel­‍‑talent” as Marianne Moore called
it – because by changing distance she traps the reader inside the
question posed by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Are they my poor?”
The pertinence of this question can be grasped if we consider
the extent to which the self­‍‑reliance of the individual (praised by
Emerson) and the accompanying American myth are subverted
by the possibility that the Bowery bums are in fact a product of
a society that is too engrossed in consumerism to notice the waste
it produces. Emerson was indeed right to reject the patronizing
of the poor, but the modern ailment has since exceeded in scope
his conjectures. In post­‍‑war reality, Loy seems to be suggesting,
social inequality has ceased to be a problem that we can ignore – it
The word “spiring” (which I read as “lifting” in this particular context) offers a good
example of Loy’s creative approach to language. Her unusual vocabulary is full of
linguistic games and far­‍‑fetched metaphors, while the boundary between neologisms
and outdated terms is often blurred.
6
23
Exorcising Modernism
is in fact everybody’s problem. Employing trash both as material
and the metaphor of segregating humanity provides Loy with
an artistic strategy fit to tackle multiple problems at once; she
questions the aesthetic politics of modernism, long­‍‑term effects
of mass production and consumption, as well as the culture’s
repressive gaze – the way it regards the West’s “untouchables.”
The paradoxical nature of “bumhood” is concisely revealed in the
following stanza:
So wonder why
defeat
by dignity of the majority
oft reveals
in close­‍‑up of inferno face
a nobler origin
than practicality’s elite
(139)
These lines bristle with mature political philosophy as Loy
diagnoses the “defeat” of the less fortunate as a wicked upturning
of democracy, which is produced by a mechanistic acceleration
of change – “modernisation” – which has led to the exorbitant
spreading of the social divide. The side­‍‑product of the modernist
project is a metaphysical flaw, which materializes as an erroneous
element that needs to be discarded. However, its “infernal” nature
hides a human face that refuses to become a mere function of
such “practicalities” as amassed wealth – a defining factor of the
market identity.
Towards the end of the poem Loy delivers a disturbing yet
crucial image. Religion, or church institutions, seem to be the last
resort for “God’s mysteriously / variously / retarded children”
(140). Still, the bums appear to have crossed the threshold
beyond which no consistent symbolic system can give credence
24
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
to their search for “intuitively desired / uni‑identity” (141). Loy
consistently pictures her Bowery outcasts as mystics who appear
to transcend the society that has produced them. They mockingly
outdo saints in poverty, ascesis and visionary potential, becoming
heretics who are marked for “branding (...) with the hot‑cross /
ovenly buns” (142). Then, suddenly, as the church doors are
flung open before the funeral procession about to “egress from
the church,”
Concordantly
a ravenous truck
comes to a churning stand­‍‑still
before the pious facade;
(...)
Collecting refuse more profuse than man
the City’s circulatory
sanitary apostles
a­‍‑leap to ash­‍‑cans
apply their profane ritual
to offal
Dust to dust
(142)
As the funeral is eclipsed by dustmen going on about their business,
the lingering “Dust to dust” acquires a new meaning. “Even
a putrescent Galaxy / could not be left where it lay / to disgust”
(143) because the imperative to relentlessly segregate waste from
the clean, purifying the profane, has become a key commandment
in the new reality. The arrival of “sanitary apostles” constitutes
a rite that defines a new religion – the worship of consumption
and economic progress, which requires that the “disgusting” be
displaced at all cost. The juxtaposition with a funeral procession
25
Exorcising Modernism
is all the more telling in this context because it indicates that
the profound ceremony centred on crossing from life to death
has spawned its own mechanized and sanitized counterpart. The
paradox of “collecting refuse” (a pun Loy would literalize in
her artistic life) lies in the anonymity and ubiquity of rubbish;
purification operates right in front of everybody’s eyes, but is at
the same time unnoticeable.7 Only a malfunctioning system of
waste disposal draws anybody’s attention. Loy cunningly blends
the background and foreground in this scene, exploiting the
ambiguity of words such as “offal,” “remains,” “lay,” as well as
puns on the voraciousness of vehicles, juxtaposing the “obesely
curtained hearse” with the “ravenous truck” (142-143). The cars
act as agents of the two segregation systems – Charon­‍‑like carriers
of bodies – purifying our reality from the scandalous excess of
“remains”: the dead, who have to make place for the living, and the
disposable, who clear space for new production and investment.
The suggestion that the waste disposal truck may take away the
unfortunate Bowery drunkards is strengthened by the subsequent
sequence of images, as the lyrical subject’s attention switches
from the “empty cans” to the street itself where Loy finds the
“communal cot” (143).
The communal cot stands as an important image in
Loy’s world since it not only appears in the poem, graphically
emphasized (“–the communal cot–”) and constituting a line of its
own, but is also the title of a mixed-media assamblage from 1949
(fig. 1), one of the most striking examples of her late collage work.
The artwork and the corresponding section of the poem
shed light on each other. The idea of street-as-cot bears special
significance, for it makes the city acquire the role of parent and
7
The work of purification can also be understood here in the sense given to the term
by Bruno Latour – as the incessant process of separating nature from culture, used by
the moderns to separate human beings from non‑humans (Latour 10-11).
26
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
Fig. 1. Communal Cot by Mina Loy (1949).
provider, nourishing its babies, altogether forming a nativity
scene of sorts. The ragged figures lying on the pavement are
“embalmed in rum / under an unseen / baldachin of dream”
(Loy 143). Mummified, dazed and sunk deep in an impenetrable
reverie, the bums occupy a liminal space, turning the street into
a “sore cemetery of the Comatose” (143). Their un-dead status
is ungraspable and difficult to pinpoint, which Loy captures
perfectly in the passage “here lies (...) // the belier / of disbelief /
in this brief / bystander” (143). What comes to the fore here is
the “irreal” dimension of the city, reinforced by the fact that the
assamblage assumes a sky-high perspective, offering an angelic
view of the “incognito ignis fatuus” (143), i.e. will-o’-the-wisps.8
Metaphors of nature and culture blend in an uncanny context,
It is worth noting at this point that the bird’s­‍‑eye perspective is an important critical
device used by Loy. “Property of Pigeons” is one instance of a poem that – as Jim
Powell observed – is written “from the vantage of the city, that most property-ridden of
human environments” (16). The airborne perspective of pigeons reveals “enclosedness
and isolation of urban life” (16) as well as the possibility of grasping the hierarchized
social world in more democratic, flat terms, encompassing all inhabitants, both human
and inhuman, overcoming the work of modernist purification.
8
27
Exorcising Modernism
exposing a life form that escapes the categories of the moderns.
There is a fundamental excess of uncontrollable zoe – sheer life
force, an energy that can exist half-realized and half-potentially,
completely alien to the world shaped by modernization.9 Loy
amasses overabundant metaphors of a desire that transcends nature
and culture to conclude the poem: “–interminable paramour / of
horizontal stature / Venus­‍‑sans-vulva– // A vagabond in delirium /
aping the rise and fall // of ocean / of inhalation / of coition” (144).
The coition alluded to in the quotation is confirmed by the fact
that the bum is actually “lovin’up the pavement” (144), though
the kind of Eros involved is something that Loy finds utterly
perplexing. Already in the poem “Mass-Production on 14th Street”
(1942) she was mixing nature and industry, exposing curious,
Deleuzian “assamblages of desire” in whose metaphors the erotic,
the collective and the technological converge: “flower / of closing
hour,” “commodious bee / the eye,” “foliage of mass­‍‑production”
(111). Loy was anticipating the cyborgization of man in images she
derived from fashion and advertising, e.g. in a statue that “jostles
her auxiliary creator / the sempstress,” or in “girls revolving /
idly” who “jolt to their robot turn” (112). Similarly, the Bowery
bum is a “mannequin” and “harlequin” (113) who treads – like
any liminal, trickster figure – a fine line between a slapstick clown
and a devilish Proteus, “aping” and thus exposing our arbitrary
concept of humanity. Communal Cot, “Mina’s modernization of
the twelve apostles” (Burke 421), delivers a powerful message
about modernity and its material practices which, under the guise
of sanitation, clean up large portions of raw life, obliterating a vital
Caroline Georgianna Miller draws attention to this aspect in her doctoral thesis,
pointing out that “Loy’s New York is a city that is always in the process of disappearing,
one that is curiously ephemeral, constantly floating in limbo between material and
immaterial, worldly and spiritual, concrete and abstract” (21). I would read it as
a suggestion that Loy constantly overcomes the nature-culture division, which she
sees as another product of modernist purification.
9
28
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
residue of energies that cannot be technologically harnessed. She
attacks the modernist mechanisms of selection and distribution
for their sinful un­‍‑seeing of the transforming and suffering social
dimension. It is not just the fact of progress producing poverty that
disturbs Loy, but the subtle ways in which we come to ignore what
we see right before our eyes, which needs to be “compensated.”
Therefore, the logical step in her artistic strategy was to make
her assemblages – like Communal Cot – use their own subject as
material, i.e. to foreground their acute, vulnerable materiality and
deliver the materialist gospel. Her objects are paradoxically both
transformed by art and untouched by it, because they “actually
lived at the bottom of the heap,” and simultaneously ensure “the
return of grace, or ‘spiritual supply’” (Burke 420). “In both poems
and constructions,” Burke concludes, “she had been trying to make
common suffering ‘appear’ although society preferred it to remain
invisible” (424).
Furthermore, the twelve drunken apostles are not
blasphemous because the waste bin does not respect any laws or
succumb to any forms of discipline, as has been rightly pointed
out by Antoni Chojnacki. Moreover, he argues, the trash heap
blends the human with the material, positing a “galaxy” that seems
absolutely alien to the known reality. This, Chojnacki concludes,
makes it impossible to submit the junk collage to “close reading” –
the only strategy that works here is “misreading” (Chojnacki
1998). The overabundant energy of waste bursts through the
formal boundaries established by close reading techniques, forcing
to produce relations, i.e. to “collectivize” the work of art by
threading numerous networks through it – fashioning connections
rather than policing them.
A similar approach can be found in the theatrical practices
and theoretical writings of Tadeusz Kantor, whose assamblages
or “emballeges” bear striking resemblance to works by Mina Loy,
because they also employ discarded, degraded ordinary objects.
29
Exorcising Modernism
The Polish artist developed a theory of “poor objects” as part of
his “lowest grade realism” – a visionary programme in which
decomposition, trash and refuse play an important role, for they
reveal an unknown form of reality in its elementary, material
condition (Kantor 413). Similarly to Loy, he was interested
in mental states that correspond to the cast­‍‑out position of the
delirious and convulsive. “A worn out object – he remarked – one
that is on the verge of turning into trash, useless in life, a piece
of junk, has the greatest potential to become the subject of art
and a work of art in itself” (Kantor 414). One of Kantor’s key
arguments is that the loss of the practical dimension awakens the
object’s history, which is the exact moment when imagination
starts working (Kantor 415). It is not only the question of
imagination, though, but of shaping values. Kantor’s post-war
search for a new ethics led him to a consideration of “life” as
a category that escapes academic notions of beauty and layers of
false interpretations (Kantor 424); he believed that new artistic
energy can be unleashed by concocting a “bio­‍‑object,” i.e. one
that would “exude its own, autonomous life” (Kantor 397). Kantor
discovered that “poor objects” are the most apt ones for conveying
the “imaginative dimension, which is facilitated by the realism of
poverty” (417, emphasis added).10 The parallel with Loy’s artistic
programme is quite clear here, for her “incongruous couplings of
commonplace objects” (Burke 420) follow the exact same logic,
i.e. by seeking ethical values in the lowest spheres they patiently
reveal life in the seemingly lifeless, at the same time uncovering
spiritual potential in “impoverished” matter. Loy exemplifies
this process in her poetry, too, for example in the poem “Chiffon
Velours” (1944), where an anonymous, destitute, “sere” woman,
who protects her humanity through her clothes, imaginatively
Kantor’s ambiguous term refers to the kind of realism that focuses on the most
shabby, degraded objects; hence, it could also be called “poor” or “impoverished.”
10
30
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
transforms the world around her into a material fit for fashion
and thus viable for recovery and reshaping: “half her black skirt /
glows as a soiled mirror; / reflects the gutter – / a yard of chiffon
velours” (Loy 119).
Jonathan Culler points out that rubbish is the marginal sphere
where different categories of values come into contact and are
negotiated (Culler 12). He even ventures to claim that the level
of rubbish is the site of a power struggle whenever any symbolic
reconstruction or overhaul takes place (16). Culler was inspired in
this, at least partially, by the rubbish theory developed by Michael
Thompson who focused (as the subtitle of his article shows)
on “the creation and destruction of value.” The premise here is that
there are essentially two categories of objects: the transient (losing
value) and the durable (gaining value), while the intermediary
stage between them is “rubbish.” Thompson emphasises the fact
that the only way for a transient object to become durable is to pass
the “rubbish” stage, which he shows on the example of real estate
(Thompson 18). Such a perspective in sociological research seemed
revolutionary at the time, for it leads to the conclusion that in
order to understand value creation better, “instead of examining the
eternal and unchanging, we should have been studying the erratic
flutterings of the butterfly of taste” (Thompson 15). Loy alludes
to this in the opening of the poem “Ephemerid” (1944), echoing
Baudelaire’s idea that beauty, as a value, consists of both an eternal
and a transitory component: “The Eternal is sustained by serial
metamorphosis, / even so Beauty is // metamorphosis surprises!”
(Loy 116). She drives her argument home by describing a little
girl emerging from a terrifying imp‑roach imago and allegorizing
it, in the last lines, as “Infancy’s / kidnap into Fantasia” (118).
Beauty, like other values, becomes something that is negotiated
and collectively assembled by shaping mechanisms of fantasy,
e.g. setting up certain transformative, liminal states as precarious.
One conclusion to be drawn from these observations is, as Liz
31
Exorcising Modernism
Parsons puts it in a commentary to Thompson’s Rubbish Theory,
that “[a]cknowledging the centrality of practice in the process of
value creation moves researchers away from an over­‍‑emphasis
on semiotics and representation” (Parsons 393). She discovers
this approach to reveal something that is being denied in consumer
cultures, namely the “potentialities” (392) that even the “poorest”
objects enjoy, which accounts somehow for the fact that rubbish
“continually exerts an absent presence” (391).
Such explorations as the ones indicated above, which unearth
the multi-dimensional, inexhaustible nature of even simple objects,
prove that the American consumer society, whose birth Loy
witnessed first-hand, may be locked in an unimaginative stasis.
Modernist praise of “innovation” and “designer temperament”
may have contributed to the shaping of a society in which “culture
is defined by the rate at which old is supplemented by the new
(...) a throw‑away society” (Bonheim 151). The productive balance
is disturbed when the side‑products and leftovers are sweepingly
discarded. The more rubbish a culture produces, the more energy
it needs to invest into sorting its trash and erecting “clean” facades
that cover up the immense work of segregation and purification.
Mina Loy combines these threads in a short poem about Marie
Dressler (1868–1934), a popular comic actress in the rising cinema
of the Great Depression era. “Film-Face,” whose composition date is
unknown, offers a synthetic image of two disjointed worlds, securely
separated by a “film” or “screen” soaking up what the noveltyhungry culture cannot stand – abject deterioration and poverty:
As the Gods sat on Olympus
Above travail of clouds
it dominates the garbage-barge
loaded with clouds
of sanitation’s chaos;
32
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
the enduring face of,
the ruined body of,
the poor people
on Marie Dressler.
(125)
This poem sums up the crucial questions raised by Loy in the
Bowery period: the growing social divisions, separation of
waste in material and human terms, as well as the obfuscated
mechanisms through which “sanitation” can dump its “chaos” in
a cloudy Neverland. This is done in a ritual ceremony designed
to please the new gods, who are seated at the Olympus-helm of
modernization. Marie Dressler appears in this poem in a specific
role – although her passing is mourned, she becomes a Christlike figure, whose eternally youthful countenance (as preserved in
cinematography) is locked in a painful dialectic with her ageing
body. Un-made as a woman, she is turned into a “film-face” – an
absorptive tissue soaking up the drama of poor people, in this
context the economic victims of the Black Tuesday aftermath.
Once again, the struggle that Loy describes takes place at the
exact spot where images are sifted and assigned new roles (as
Thompsonian “durables” or “transients”). It turns out to be
a conflict in aesthetics, which Loy posits as the sphere where
values are being distinguished and demarcated. In this sense, the
dustbin becomes the place where the new ethics will be negotiated
and formed. Loy, just like Kantor, attempted to rescue as much
life as possible from the modernist machine of progressivism,
at the same time fashioning out a morality for the new era – one
that would be rooted in practice and collective action rather than
dry, academic elaboration or a technocratic cult of efficiency.
“Loy’s poverty poems – writes Colbey Reid – reaffirm life by
transferring more and more of life to its periphery” (135). Loy tries
33
Exorcising Modernism
to balance the unfair distribution of value, rescuing a potentiality
that ultimately makes us human, but which became threatened by
modes of production that can so easily relegate people to economic
non­‍‑existence and thus to oblivion. To achieve this goal, she
adopts strategies that have always been a part of her repertoire.
Just like she negotiated her woman’s position by employing the
poetic techniques of the futurists, Loy turned later to the realm
of the ephemeral and discarded as sites of real aesthetic struggle.
Her work, deeply rooted in avant-garde practices, nevertheless
questions them, exposing the limitations of aesthetic theory in the
light of new consumer culture and social dynamics. Finally, she
never really abandoned the feminist cause, emphasising that (as
in Dressler’s case) those women who refuse to participate in the
new market game may risk becoming trash (Mason 65), something
she previously metaphorized as the commodification of virginity.
Drawing on the achievements of modernism, Mina Loy
was able to free herself from the alluring myth of absolute
order, for she understood all too well – given her aesthetics and
anxieties – that an important, vigorous energy is contained in
rubbish. A reflection of our humanity, a signature for the future
and a key factor in today’s global economy, trash and “trashed
people” are the unspoken heroes of modernity. Loy operates from
within the framework of modernism, but subverts and absolves
it by turning its “scalpels” at its own segregation processes.
She has witnessed all of modernism’s stages, herself living an
emblematic life – one that inevitably had its own old age and
a sense of obsoleteness to struggle with. Nevertheless, her eye,
so keen on tracing social change and the fate of the rejected ones,
was able to follow an important transition in American and world
history – a passage, through the hell of the Second World War,
to a new reality marked by ethical quandaries and deep economic
changes. In that transition she adopted the “ethos of the dustbin”
(Mason 57), aligning herself with the dispossessed in an attempt
34
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
to retain the discarded, excessive element – chance, accident,
error and ill fortune – seeing them as a key to the “recuperation
of individuality” (Mason 65) in the face of vast forces that
threaten to annihilate precious, lively difference. Mina Loy has
recognized a “design flaw in modernist history” (Reid 36) and
humbly inhabited it so that we can learn better from the mistakes
she and other modernists have made.
Works Cited
Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives. Modernity and Its Outcasts.
Cambridge: Polity, 2004.
Bonheim, Helmut. “Detritus and Literature.” Nordic Journal of
English Studies 3.1 (2004): 145-158.
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern. The Life of Mina Loy. New
York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1996.
Chojnacki, Antoni. “Poetyka śmietnika.” Wokół śmieci. Praktyka,
symbolika, metafora. Śmiecie / musor w praktyce,
w języku, kulturze, w sztuce, literaturze. Materiały z III
Międzynarodowej Konferencji Młodych Filologów (Siedlce
11-13 XII 1997). Ed. Roman Bobryk, Marzena Kryszczuk
and Justyna Urban­‍‑Puszkarska. Siedlce: Instytut Filologii
Polskiej Wyższej Szkoły Rolniczo-Pedagogicznej, 1998.
Culler, Jonathan. “Teoria śmieci.” Trans. Blanka Brzozowska.
Kultura współczesna 54.4 (2007): 6-20.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and danger. An Analysis of the Concepts of
Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2002.
Kantor, Tadeusz. Teatr śmierci. Teksty z lat 1975-1984. Wrocław:
Ossolineum and Cricoteka, 2004.
Kreis, Magdalena. “Trash art, czyli życie po życiu śmieci.”
Do rzeczy! Szkice kulturoznawcze. Ed. Jacek Małczyński
and Renata Tańczuk. Wrocław: ATUT, 2011. 21-34.
35
Exorcising Modernism
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine
Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Loy, Mina. The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Poems of Mina Loy. Ed.
Roger L. Conover. Manchester: Carcanet, 1997.
---. Communal Cot. 1949. mixed media, collage of cardboard,
paper and rags. Elrick-Manley Fine Art. New York. Accessed
December 31, 2014. <http://www.artnet.com/artists/minaloy/communal-cot-a-CYFw-DYHzk_k03ck-_aAag2>.
Mason, Dancy. “Ornament for Serious Purpose: Mina Loy and
Gaudy Consumer Culture.” PhD diss., Dalhousie University,
2011. Accessed December 31, 2014. <http://dalspace.library.
dal.ca/handle/10222/14100>.
Miller, Caroline Georgianna. “Abstract Concrete: Experimental
Poetry in Post-WWII New York City.” PhD diss., University
of Michigan, 2011. Accessed December 31, 2014. <http://
deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/86470>.
Miller, Tyrus. Later Modernism. Politics, Fiction and the Arts
Between the World Wars. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Adrian Del
Caro. Ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Parsons, Liz. “Thompsons’ Rubbish Theory: Exploring the
Practices of Value Creation.” European Advances in
Consumer Research 8 (2008): 390-393.
Popson, Colleen P. “Museums: The Truth is in Our Trash.”
Archeology 55.1 (2002).
Powell, Jim. “Basil Bunting and Mina Loy.” Chicago Review 37.1
(1990): 6-25.
Reid, Colbey Emmerson. “Mina Loy’s Design Flaws.” FACS 10.1
(2007-2008): 109-145. Accessed December 31, 2014.
Thompson, Michael. “Rubbish Theory.” Encounter LII.6 (1979):
12-24.
36
Grzegorz Czemiel | Taking Out the Trash
Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna. “Energia odpadków.” Introduction.
Czystość i zmaza. By Mary Douglas. Trans. Marta Bucholc.
Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 2007. 7-43.
37
Alan Golding
“The wedge of the WHOLE FRONT”:
Document, Pedagogy and Postmodernity
in Charles Olson’s Cultural Poetics
I want to begin by establishing two contexts for this essay, the first
that of my own current scholarship and the second a historical
one. So, context #1 involves the extended project on avant­‍‑garde
poetics and pedagogy of which this material on Olson forms part.
That project starts with Ezra Pound, arguing that his pedagogic
stance – including his insistent desire to reform American higher
education – is inseparable from his literary avant­‍‑gardism and
his commitment to the principle of “discovery” or “newness.”
This connection between experimental poetics and pedagogy
forms a central part both of Pound’s significance as a writer and
of his influence on a later avant-gardist and didact like Olson,
anticipating the complexities of the subsequent relationship
between U. S. American avant-gardes and the academy that we see
reflected in such institutions as the Olson-directed Black Mountain
College of the 1950s and the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program,
perhaps the United States’ most visible state­‍‑funded academic
38
Alan Golding | “The wedge of the WHOLE FRONT”
site for the study and production of alternative poetries. Olson is
a crucial figure for the ways in which he furthered and transformed
a Poundian tradition of pedagogical avant-gardism: locating that
pedagogy within an experimental academic institution; opening
his poetry, in a way that Pound never did, to academic tropes; and
foregrounding pedagogy as a constitutive feature of postmodern
poetics. I’ve discussed elsewhere how this set of concerns drives
some of Olson’s major poems such as “The Praises.” For now,
suffice it to say that when scholarly method becomes poetic
method, as it does in much of Olson’s work, that complicates the
relationship of the avant-garde poet to pedagogical institutions
and conventions and gives us useful insight into one aspect of the
American poetic avant-garde’s commerce with the very academy
it typically has derided as its invidious Other.
Context #2: As a historically and politically aware thinker
coming to intellectual maturity in the documentary decade of the
1930s, and as a renegade American Civilization student in the
late ‘30s at Harvard, Olson was almost certainly familiar with
what we now think of as the documentary photography canon, the
pioneering work of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and others. He
worked with Ben Shahn at the Office of War Information during
World War II, and subsequently invited him to teach at Black
Mountain College: at the very least, then, it seems likely that
he knew Shahn’s Farm Security Administration photographs
of itinerant destitute families, child labor, strike meetings and
small-town Ohio life from the mid-1930s. Olson’s first “book”
was actually co-authored with Shahn: an anonymously published
OWI pamphlet from 1943, Spanish Speaking Americans in the
War, featuring Olson’s text and Shahn’s photomontage of images
from government files, Olson playing Agee to Shahn’s Evans.1
This canonical visual notion of the documentary, however,
1
For useful, if brief, discussions of this pamphlet, see Gilbert and Maud.
39
Exorcising Modernism
with its literary extension into hybrid verbal­‍‑visual texts from
Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free to contemporary work by,
for example, Kristin Prevallet, Claudia Rankine, Lisa Robertson,
Jena Osman and Mark Nowak – to name just a few – is, except
for the early pamphlet, precisely not Olson’s. At the same time,
he does begin The Maximus Poems with a (reproduction of a)
photograph, and one that enlarges and extrapolates, in the best
modernist fashion, from a fragment. We can take the 1930s, then,
as a shaping context, though not a determining one, for Olson’s
notion of “document.”
One of the more odd, and least discussed, moments in the
first volume of Olson’s Maximus Poems involves exactly the
above-mentioned reproduction opposite the title page, glossed
by an editor’s note on the inside back cover:
A word on the title­‍‑page device: this “glyph” becomes
Olson’s “Figure of Outward,” striding forth from the
domain of the infinitely small; and, also, a written
character for Maximus himself – the Man in the Word.
It is (really, like they say) the enlargement of a sliver of
perforated tin ceiling found on the floor of a bar room
in a ghost town in Arizona. Frederick Sommer made
the discovery and the photograph.
How Olson gets from a sliver of material history to such tropes
as the Figure of Outward, from micro-documentary to his
persona, the culturally ambitious itinerant philosopher Maximus
of Tyre, is one way to conceive the subject of this essay – how,
for Olson, to “grab hold, first, (...) by DOCUMENTATION –
the specific (...) exact particular specific anecdote explored into
universe by conjecture. (...) PRIME EXAMPLE: Herodotus”
(Letters 82). “Document” is actually Olson’s own preferred
term, rather than “documentary”; “document” in his lexicon
40
Alan Golding | “The wedge of the WHOLE FRONT”
refers both to a textual or other artifact and to poetic method.
My discussion of “document” in Olson stands at the nexus of
his early correspondence with the poet and editor Cid Corman,
beginning in 1950, and his crucial participation in Corman’s
magazine Origin; essays such as “The Gate and the Center” and
“Projective Verse” (1950); his early poems and the writing of
the first volume of The Maximus Poems (1960); and his years at
Black Mountain College (1948-56). The letters to Corman are
themselves a kind of one-on-one tutorial: “god, Corman, you
must go to school, to ME: you must take it: you must learn”;
“arise, / and go to / school” (Letters 117-18). I draw on this
collation of texts and circumstances to consider document
as the methodology (the term he prefers to “technique”) that
underwrites Olson’s version of postmodernism, his ideal of the
scholar-poet or poet-pedagogue, and what one might now call
his “cultural poetics,” what Barrett Watten terms, in Olsonian
language, a poetics of the expanded field. I’m interested, that
is, in triangulating three terms – “document,” “pedagogy” and
the “postmodern” – the latter a term that Olson was the first
to theorize though technically not the first to use, and one that he
no longer used after the late 1950s. Put baldly, the postmodern
requires, in Olson’s well-known phrase, a new “stance toward
reality” (Collected Prose 246) and a new poetic methodology;
“document,” for Olson, is the appropriate one for the pedagogic
emphasis so central to his version of a postmodern stance.
Olson’s early correspondence with Corman persistently
connects his view of “scholarship” to his calls for a new poetry.
Olson’s “scholar” is the institutionally unaffiliated independent
researcher or public poet-intellectual whom he consistently
distinguishes from those lesser animals, “academics,” variously
represented in his writing as “typical pedants (...) playing
some state and low professional game” (Selected 72) or simply
“creatures” (Letters 92), “sons of bitches” (Selected 79) – while
41
Exorcising Modernism
for himself he claims “je suis un ecolier” (2), and, to reinforce
the point, “I am the wandering scholar, you dope” (4).2 While
“any French writer (...) stands on SCHOLARSHIP of his people,”
American writers have tended to lack that base until the present,
when “Americans are putting out a body of research ROUND the
WORLD, which is the kind of grounding on which that culture
of Europe rested.” He proposes to Corman “is not yr job (and
mine as helper) to DOCUMENT that PUSH?” “We are not here
either to praise or to bury BUT TO EXAMINE what’s around,
that is of USE”; after all, “KNOWLEDGE, lad, is what art and
culture BUILD ON” (Letters 10-11). From the scholar-poet’s
documentary examination across disciplines to cultural use:
that is how to achieve a rethinking of “art as the wedge of the
WHOLE FRONT.” And as for “AESTHETICS [?] pah bah shit”
(Letters 11).
The occasion for these initial letters to Corman that I’ve
been citing is Olson’s submission to Origin of “The Gate and the
Center,” the 1950 essay on the state of knowledge and education
that proposes “the poet is the only pedagogue left, to be trusted”
(Collected Prose 170) – something he restates verbatim in a letter
to Corman as his “primary position” (Letters 2). That pedagogue
will be “a documentarian like myself,” he writes to Corman,
claiming the crucial creative combination in their postmodern
moment as “that of documentarian & the selectivity of the creative
taste & mind” (Letters 27, 28). The models that he proposes for
the most valuable contemporary cultural work, the kind of work
that will be central to an emergent postmodernity, are all forms
of document: the anthropologist Robert Barlow’s drawings and
descriptive prose from Oaxaca, Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony,
Olson’s “je suis un ecolier” responds affirmatively to Corman’s remark in the
preceding letter that “you’re really a scholar, much as you might dislike the term”
(Olson and Corman I:32).
2
42
Alan Golding | “The wedge of the WHOLE FRONT”
Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notes on photography, the prose of
“physio-psychologists working on such things as the rods and
cones in a pigeon’s eye,” a Robert Creeley story made up of
“clippings from AP story out of LA, mit comments” (Letters
7).3 The poet­‍‑pedagogue will contribute to a document­‍‑based
interdisciplinary project that features, in the terms of the essay
“Homer and Bible” (1957), “contemporary writers who are laying
bases of new discourse at the same time that (...) scholars (...) are
making available pre‑Homeric and pre­‍‑Mosaic texts which are
themselves eye­‍‑openers” to a new understanding of cultural history
(Collected Prose 346).
One of Olson’s earliest and most significant uses of the
term “document” occurs in his 1946 poem, “La Preface,” the
preface to a postmodernity that begins with the wall scratchings
of Buchenwald prisoners: “‘I will die about April 1st...’ going off /
‘I weigh, I think, 80 lbs’... scratch / ‘My name is NO RACE’
address / Buchenwald new Altamira cave” (Collected Poems 46).
These records of human existence in extremis constitute not just
an end to the cultural ideals of high modernism but the beginning
of a new historical moment, which returns to the archaic for its
revised understanding of the human. The appropriate poetics
of this new moment is document – hence Olson’s description
of himself not as a poet but as an “archaeologist of morning.”
A few lines later, Olson’s postmodern beginning is linked with
his own birth date, and if the closed parenthesis is the graphic
symbol of a prior history and a now-defunct humanist era, the
forward-looking open parenthesis marks the new era:
On Olson’s apparently idiosyncratic valuing of scientists’ prose on the structure
of vision, compare the beginning of his 1950 poem “The Cause, The Cause,” where
Olson engages in a Jung­‍‑inspired meditation on masculine and feminine energies but
claims that “the method be / new, be / the rods and cones of, a pigeon’s or, a rabbit’s /
eye” (Collected Poems 190).
3
43
Exorcising Modernism
Draw it thus: () 1910 (
It is not obscure. We are the new born, and there are
no flowers.
Document means there are no flowers
and no parenthesis
(47)4
Document, the poetic method of the post­‍‑Buchenwald era, means
no sentimentality, no nostalgia, no romantic illusions, no memorial
flowers on the graves of the dead – who are here “unburied,”
with a “deathhead / at the apex / of the pyramid” (47, 46) of
corpses found in the liberated death camps. Like the prisoners of
Buchenwald, like the cave dwellers of Altamira, post­‍‑Holocaust
humans are recording / documenting a radical shift in subjectivity
on the walls of a new order:
I cannot, nor do I think any of us can, if we would write,
avoid the recognition that we are in an underground
beginning, scratching some early recognizable facts
on badly lit walls with rudimentary instruments picked
up after a long feast, bones, or the splinters of rock
split off by the fire.
(“Poetry & Criticism”)
Further on in the notes from which this unpublished comment
is drawn, Olson notes documentation as the earliest function
of poetry in such a new order: “The first impulse is to record –
language / to put a name on what we see & use.”
Cf. Olson’s comment to Robert Creeley in an August 8, 1951 letter: “the only
parenthesis I know are open which does not close, is, each our own birth (1910 – or
whatever-so – no para” (Olson-Creeley 119).
4
44
Alan Golding | “The wedge of the WHOLE FRONT”
An important transitional poem, except for a couple of lines
“La Preface” nevertheless discusses the formal methodology
that Olson terms “document” rather than enacting it. If we turn
to The Maximus Poems, however (as well as such influential
early poems as “The Kingfishers” and “The Praises,” constructed
as they are out of documents ranging from the Britannica
to Plutarch’s Moralia), immersion in source texts, pacing out
distances, mapping, numerical tables, lists of names and places,
direct citation, time lines and dating, cataloguing – all these
forms of document are crucial to the forms of Olson’s poetry
and to his development or enactment of a pedagogical poetics.
The poetics of Olson’s influential early work rests in highly
traditional, even Germanic, notions of research, and represents
a postmodernism that is a long way from the anti­‍‑foundationalism
conventionally associated with that term – a postmodernism
committed to rethinking utterly, and literally from the ground
up (“I hunt among stones”), the foundations of whatever we
might mean by knowledge, but not to dismissing the possibility
of such foundations.5 Indeed, in a 1952 review­‍‑essay on recent
work in Melville studies, Olson stresses the “validity of old­
‍‑fashioned scholarship” (Collected Prose 114) as a corrective
to intellectual sloppiness. In a letter to Corman that same year,
Olson turns to Webster’s definition of “pedagogy” to connect
the methodology of “document” with the teaching function:
“Educ. The science which describes and evaluates arrangements
of materials of instruction.” He goes on to reiterate how this
definition suggests a constructivist aesthetic close to his own: “it
insists (...) educationally, on arrangements of materials” (Letters
105), a phrase to which he returns insistently in his writing.6
See the end of one central text of Olson’s postmodernism, “The Kingfishers”: “I hunt
among stones.”
6
By the time of the 1956 Special View of History seminar, “arrangement of the
incidents” has become, from Aristotle via Jane Harrison, Olson’s definition of myth:
5
45
Exorcising Modernism
This constructivist and documentary “arrangement” is the central
method of the first volume of Maximus. Throughout the sequence,
Olson makes liberal use of Webster’s dictionary, the Encyclopedia
Britannica, the Dictionary of National Biography, in addition
to a massive range of historical sources.7 Bibliography and
the processes of scholarly documentation become poetry: “cf.
Force’s American Archives, / Fourth Series, I, 1645-1648 – get”
(Maximus 74), he writes in one poem, a scholar­‍‑poet’s note to self
and to reader. Elsewhere close reading becomes writing, as Olson
cites, summarizes and comments on the letters of the eighteenthcentury New England shipmaster and politician Stephen
Higginson. And before going on to document resonant details
from the historical archive, the poem “The Record” begins with
the scholar’s delight at the moment of discovery: “Weymouth Port
Book, 873 / Here we have it – the goods – from this Harbour, /
1626, to Weymouth (England) consigned to / Richard Bushrod
and Company / & Wm Derby and Company” (Maximus 121).
For the early Olson, poetry is the record of one’s reading and
the didactic passing-on of what one has learned – “that that which
has been found out by work may, by work, be passed on / (without
due loss of force) / for use / USE” (Collected Poems 100). As we
move through the Maximus sequence, “Tyrian Businesses” (which
began as a prose piece for a Black Mountain student) begins with
the announcement of a lesson plan: “This is the exercise for this
morning” (Maximus 35). “Letter 10” features a typically essayistic
beginning, announcing its subjects, posing a topic question and
“‘for,’ says Aristotle in the Poetics, in a most instructive definition, ‘by myth I mean
the arrangement of the incidents’” (Olson, Special 23).
7
In a 1953 bibliographical essay circulated to Black Mountain students, he starts with
a list of sources that form “the base of DOCUMENTATION”: “the dictionary,” “the
encyclopedia,” “THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION & ETHICS,” the library card
catalogue, “the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Lit,” “Herodotus’ HISTORY,” “today’s
(...) paper” – “ALL ABOVE SOLELY TO HELP TO MAKE SURE YOU KNOW
ANY FACT OR WORD YOU WANT TO KNOW” (“Starting”).
46
Alan Golding | “The wedge of the WHOLE FRONT”
answering it for a thesis: “on John White / on cod, ling, and poorjohn, // on founding: was it puritanism, / or was it fish? // (...) //
It was fishing was first” (45). This self-conscious avant-gardist’s
early style, then, is marked by academic – or at least discursive –
conventions, by the tropes that professors use. From this point of
view, the use of footnotes that emerges later in the volume (in “The
Record,” for instance) is almost predictable, while “Letter 23”
ends with a lecture-like summary, as if designed for note-taking,
complete with enumerated main points:
What we have in this field in these scraps among these
fishermen, and the Plymouth men, is more than the fight
of one colony with another, it is the whole engagement
against (1) mercantilism (cf. the Westcountry men and
Sir Edward Coke against the Crown, in Commons,
these same years – against Gorges); and (2) against
nascent capitalism except as it stays the individual
adventurer and the worker on share.
(101)
As the basis of Olson’s Herodotean history – “I would be an
historian as Herodotus was, looking / for oneself for the evidence
of / what is said” (100-01) – document grounds a culturally
ambitious pedagogical poetics, the work of the scholar­‍‑poet,
saturated in information according to the model of Olson’s muchcited January 1955 letter-essay “A Bibliography on America for
Ed Dorn”:
PRIMARY DOCUMENTS. And to hook on here is
a lifetime of assiduity. Best thing to do is to dig one
thing or place or man until you yourself know more
abt that than is possible to any other man... exhaust it.
Saturate it. Beat it. And then U KNOW everything else
47
Exorcising Modernism
very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years).
And you’re in, forever.
(Collected Prose 306-307)
In a contemporary institutional context, this sounds suspiciously
like the writing of a dissertation.
If “methodology is form” (117), as Olson insists in a 1952
essay and indeed throughout his writing of the early 1950s,
document is the basis of that methodology, and it is through his
use of document as formal method that Olson’s poetry becomes
a model of intellectual inquiry, engaging the whole “front” of
culture. Writing on Robert Creeley’s fiction, Olson proposes one
of the possibilities for contemporary (1951) narrative as “what
I call DOCUMENT simply to emphasize that the events alone
do the work, that the narrator stays OUT” (Collected Prose
283). He had actually theorized this position as early as his 1948
Guggenheim proposal:
I see in fact and in a scrupulous record of fact a literary
method which, if used with the proper intensity, can
accomplish creative results.
I first tried it in [Call Me Ishmael], particularly in the
“Facts” of that book, and I have used it since (...) in
the long poem about Thomas Granger.
This method, Olson continues, uses “the techniques of total
research (...) to get the author out of things and get back to some
of the objectivism older forms of narrative and drama achieved”
(“Guggenheim” 34). “Document” thus becomes the basis of
“Projective Verse”: if objectism is the stance in that well­‍‑known
essay, document is the method by which to counter the notorious
“lyrical interference of the ego” – “object” as against “wretched
48
Alan Golding | “The wedge of the WHOLE FRONT”
lyricism,” as Olson wrote to the potter Marguerite Wildenhain in
a 1952 letter.8
Pound­‍‑like, Olson would teach postmodern poets their
“ABCs” in the 1950 three-poem sequence of that title, and
“document” forms the basis of that teaching; the sequence ends
“what we needed most / was something the extension of / claritas:
what do we have / to report?” (Collected Poems 175). He writes
of Pound in an unpublished essay, “So what can he teach us? He
can reinforce the secular at the base of myth. For Ezra is one of the
real forerunners, the documentarians” (cited in von Hallberg 48).
If we wish to consider how important to Olson was the rigor of
documentarian report, and the ongoing activity of the scholar-poet,
we might remember that in his own edition of the first volume of
Maximus (beyond the self-corrections that the printed text already
contains), Olson goes so far as to correct in the margins some of
his own information. And if we wish to consider the importance
of his example for later poets, we might turn to Olson’s fellow
anarcho-scholar and bibliographer-poet Susan Howe, who defines
poetry as “factual telepathy” (297) and, in explaining her statement
that “I write in the poetic documentary form” (300), cites the first
and crucial definition of “document” from Webster’s Third: “1
obs: TEACH, SCHOOL, INSTRUCT” (299).
Works Cited
Gilbert, Alan. “Charles Olson and Empire, or Charles Olson Flips
the Wartime Script.” OlsonNow Blog. Archives and Special
8
Conceptually Olson links “document” to the use of found material across the arts.
Thus Cy Twombly’s student sculptures, because they are made up of such material,
“do repeat facts, the accidents of same” and “this is documentation (...) the artifacts
he finds surrounding himself” (Collected Prose 177).
49
Exorcising Modernism
Collections Dept. University of Connecticut Libraries.
Accessed December, 20 2007. <h t t p:/ / e p c.b u f f a l o.e d u /
a u t h o r s / o l s o n / b l o g / O l s o n _ a n d _ E m p i r e.p d f >
Howe, Susan. “Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at
Marker.” Beyond Document:
Essays on Nonfiction Film. Ed. Charles Warren. Hanover, New
Hampshire: University Press of New England and Wesleyan
UP, 1996. 295-343.
Maud, Ralph. Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography. Carbondale
and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1996.
Olson, Charles. The Collected Poems of Charles Olson Excluding
the Maximus Poems. Ed. George F. Butterick. Berkeley:
University of California P, 1987.
---. “Guggenheim Foundation Proposal, 1948.” Olson: The Journal
of the Charles Olson Archive 5 (1976): 32-37.
---. Letters for Origin 1950-1956. Ed. Albert Glover. New York:
Grossman, 1970.
---. The Special View of History. Berkeley: Oyez, 1970.
---. The Maximus Poems. New York: Jargon/Corinth, 1960.
---. Selected Writings. Ed. Robert Creeley. New York: New
Directions, 1966.
---. “Starting fr where you are.” Olson: The Journal of the Charles
Olson Archive 2 (1974): 28.
--- and Cid Corman. Charles Olson and Cid Corman: The Complete
Correspondence. Ed. George Evans. Orono: National Poetry
Foundation, 1987.
---. “Poetry and Criticism.” Unpublished essay, Charles Olson
Archive, University of Connecticut.
--- and Robert Creeley. Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The
Correspondence. Vol. 7. Ed. George F. Butterick. Santa
Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1985.
von Hallberg, Robert. Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.
50
Joanna Orska
Sincerity and Objectification:
Object in Translation.
Testimony: The United States 1885-1890: Recitative is a collection
of poems which in Reznikoff’s own terms can be described as
“objects,” although perhaps not exactly in the sense given the
word by Louis Zukofsky in his famous manifesto “Sincerity
and Objectification,” printed in the “objectivist” issue of the
prominent “Poetry” magazine in 1931. In the introduction to the
first of Reznikoff’s books titled Testimony (1934), Kenneth Burke
called these texts “vignettes of life” (Hindus 10). Milton Hindus,
in regard to sequel editions of Testimonies from 1965 and 1968,
spoke of “characteristic couplets, laconic and often stinging,”
written in verse called “recitative” (17). The “verses” presented
in these volumes are images of American life (American crimelife, to be precise, showing scenes of horror and violence) drawn
from legal reports which Reznikoff worked on when he co‑edited
Corpus Juris – an encyclopaedia of law for lawyers (the poet
was a law graduate, in 1916 he was admitted to the bar of the
State of New York). In conversation with L. S. Dembo, Reznikoff
51
Exorcising Modernism
said that Testimony may be explained in terms of T. S. Eliot’s
“objective correlative” – as he understood it: “Something happens
and it expresses something that you feel, not necessarily because
of those facts, but because of entirely different facts that give
you the same kind of feeling. Now, in reading law, if the cases
state any facts, they’re just a sentence or two; but, occasionally,
you’ll find the facts gone into detail, sometimes to explain or
defend the judge’s position. (...) In Testimony the speakers whose
words I use are all giving testimony about what they actually
lived through” (Dembo 202). Reznikoff wanted to create his
“recitatives” by selection, arrangement, and the rhythm of the
words used “as a mood or feeling,” as he put it.1 The period
of 1885-1890 was not particularly important to him “because
the same thing is happening today.” He finishes his statement
with a point that is well known to Reznikoff’s readers: “I didn’t
invent the world, but I felt it” (Dembo 202). The emotion gathered
in these “recitative” vessels was so powerful that Testimony,
along with Holocaust, another late work by Reznikoff, became
one of his most widely recognized works. Stephen Fredman in
his excellent study on Jewish dilemmas in objectivist poetry,
The Menorah for Athena, writes: “Making commitment of
viewing the world without illusions results for Reznikoff not in
bitterness or disillusionment but in ‘feeling’ – that is in pathos
and compassion” (22). Reznikoff’s poems inspired the artist
At the beginning of the interview Reznikoff mentions “the feeling” in relation
to Poems of the Late T’ang, edited by A. C. Graham in 1965. The poet quotes the
introduction remarking on 11th century Chinese poetry: “Poetry presents the thing
in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about
the feeling” (Dembo 193). Later he addresses this issue many more times and one has
a chance to understand better how actually the word “feeling” is understood here. It is
not sentiment or some personal emotion being expressed (or confessed) by the poet,
as in the case of romantic poetry. Feeling – the quality which, according to Reznikoff,
differentiates poetry from prose – can be best understood in relation to the genre of
testimony, as something that has happened, but since it’s not obvious, needs an adequate
description: it is something that “has been lived through.”
1
52
Joanna Orska | Sincerity and Objectification
Ann Hamilton to cover the gallery walls of the 1999 Venice
Biennale with passages from Testimony. She saw in them, first
and foremost, courtroom testimonies of victims of social forces
such as slavery, industrialization and class conflict.
Reznikoff quite precisely recounts the making of the verseobject in a way that might be understood in terms of Zukofsky’s
method of “sincerity and objectification” which he presented in
his famous “objectivist poetry” manifesto. The poet, however, was
distancing himself from the theoretical overtone of Zukofsky’s
manifesto. He was more interested in the creative process itself:
in the idea of finding, selecting and rearranging witness accounts
(treated here as linguistic ready-mades), exposing their structure
to make them more “visible,” beating up the rhythm of the words
used “as a mood or feeling,” in order to produce the self­‍‑standing
poetical unit, the symbolic whole – not of “what the witness felt but
of what he has seen or heard” (Dembo 202). This kind of approach
seems to convey some of the qualities of poetry as defined by
Zukofsky in the Poetry magazine “objectivist” essay:
In sincerity shapes appear concomitants of word
combinations, precursors of (if there is a continuance)
completed sound or structure, melody or form. Writing
occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of
thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing
them along a line of melody. (...) Presented with
sincerity, the mind even tends to supply, in further
suggestion which does not attain rested totality, the
totality not always found in sincerity and necessary
only for perfect rest, complete appreciation. This
rested totality may be called objectification – the
apprehension satisfied completely as to the appearance
of the art form as object.
(Zukofsky 273-74)
53
Exorcising Modernism
The words of Zukofsky’s manifesto, describing the phenomenon
of “objectification,” show features that are highly abstractive,
highly aestheticized and heavily modernistic, or – so to say –
“Poundian” in their search for the prefect completion, especially
when read in the context of the crude and sombre subject matter
of Testimony. To exemplify the poetic “sincerity,” referring in fact
to Pound’s notion of art technique,2 Zukofsky quotes a magnificent
one-line poem from Third Group of Verse, titled I. Aphrodite
Urania: “The ceaseless weaving of the uneven water” (The
Poems of Charles Reznikoff 25). The critic interprets the verse
as an “image of water in action,” or literally: shape concomitant
with word and melody, if one is imaginative enough. In Testimony
“the shapes,” if we could poetically trace them, burst out with
sudden ruptures and breakdowns on the plain canvas of life in an
industrialised society. On the other hand, the horrifying “totality”
of Reznikoff’s “making of America,” which is suggested in the
verses of Testimony, somehow echoes the final remarks that
Zukofsky makes when reading Reznikoff’s poems. To describe
the case of “objectification,” Zukofsky offers the poem Hellenist
as an example of a text arranged in an “objectivist” way. Verse is
treated here mostly with regard to the harmony between meaning
and melody (or rhythm). It is “objectivistic” due to the way the
words “resolve into a structure to which the mind does not wish
to add” (275). However, as Zukofsky further develops the key
concepts of his manifesto, the difference between “sincerity” and
“objectification” becomes blurred; at the end of the day most of
the texts do not appear “objective” in his eyes. “Objectification”
in Zukofsky’s text is primarily defined in a sublime and supple,
In his famous text “‘A Retrospect’ including a ‘Few don’ts’” Pound also writes
about “technic” by referring to the notion of law: “I believe in technic as a test of man’s
sincerity; in law when it is ascertainable; in the trampling down of every convention
that impedes or obscures the determination of the law or the precise rendering of the
impulse.”
2
54
Joanna Orska | Sincerity and Objectification
deeply avant­‍‑garde manner: “distinct from print which records
action and existence and incites the mind to further suggestions,
there exists (...) writing (audibility in twodimensional print) which
is an object or affects the mind as such” (274). “Objectification”
eventually turns out to be the hallmark of every word, which in
itself is already an “entirety” forgotten: “a relation, an implied
metaphor, an arrangement, and a harmony” (279). At the same
time “objective” parts appear in many unexpected places, and
“objectivity” itself seems to be something that the text longs
for, but what rarely appears as achieved. So Zukofsky’s remarks
on sincerity first allow him to include in the range of his interests
Reznikoff’s narrative, prose-like verses, and search for examples
of objectification there as well, and finally to write about infusing
“his care for the significant detail and precision into the excellent
verbalisms of the others” – pointing to the way in which Reznikoff
reworks historical material, allowing supposedly“objectifying”
moments to occur (Zukofsky 283). Still it shouldn’t go unnoticed
that the poetical ideal of “sincerity and objectification” reaches
in Testimony a consequent but at the same time strongly negative
realisation.
Fulfilling justice also means forgetting the grievance, and
apparently Reznikoff doesn’t want us to forget – as if sincerity
was unable of being reconciled with objectification. Testimony
seems to be a project which in many ways tends to “totality,” but
never fulfils its promises. As Reznikoff puts it in the quotation
which Kenneth Burke included in his introduction, mentioned
previously: Testimony is made of “cases from every state,”
showing “details of the time and place,” that could become
a history of “the century and a half during which the United States
has been a nation” – a history written “not from the standpoint
of an individual, as in diaries, nor merely from the angle of the
unusual, as in newspapers, but from every standpoint – as many
standpoints as were provided by the witnesses themselves”
55
Exorcising Modernism
(Hindus 46). To begin with, this assumption will appear to be
self­‍‑contradictory if we consider it in relation to the ideal of
totality. Reznikoff’s poetical project fulfils its testimonial tasks
sincerely, but can never become complete, with nothing to add.
The gesture closing the litany of injustice would be unjust, though
at the same time it is necessary to perform as the very condition
of the “testimony” being completed. Perhaps Zukofsky would
approve of the sincerity of the “recitatives,” distancing himself
from the possible “objectifying” effect of those verses, for he was
unwilling to grant any poem an object­‍‑like quality. On the other
hand, one should not forget that the “testimonial” aspect drives
Reznikoff’s poems precisely in the direction of “objectification” –
the kind, perhaps, which Zukofsky wouldn’t wonder about. The
poems, being excerpts from legal documentation, although
they have been poetically worked out, tend to “objectify” in
the strictest sense of the word. The very intention to poetically
utilize them sprang from the notion that they were to serve as
facts, not as fiction. “Testimony” works first of all as proof in
a court case, as a token of truth. From this point of view the work
of the poet gains a certain polemical twist, turning the words of
the Poundian avant-garde manifesto in such a way that it gains
a practical, and not merely technical, dimension. As Reznikoff
himself says: “By the term ‘objectivist’ I suppose a writer might
be meant who does not write exactly about his feelings but about
what he sees or hears; who is restricted almost to a testimony
of a witness in a court of law; and who expresses his feelings
indirectly by the selection of the subject­‍‑matter, and if he writes
in verse, by its music” (Dembo 194). Interesting are the means
by which this selection or arrangement occurs. The statement of
fact is not enough as proof in a court of law. One needs a fragment
of a story, standing for what is being stated, for the statement
to become an accusation. The interpretation (or, in other words,
the translation) of a statement – which from the legal point of
56
Joanna Orska | Sincerity and Objectification
view is a fact, or a transposition of feeling in its unspeakability –
is necessary for a verse‑object to come into being. Such an
“object” can never lose the dynamic which, paradoxically, is
enclosed in it as evidence of something that has happened and
became proof “objectified” in testimony. Both aspects forming
this particular poetic genre, which Reznikoff engaged in, are
clearly discernible in his “verses” or “recitatives” – they are
objects and, at the same time, precedents pointing to justice.
Reznikoff was building the “recitatives” up as units arranged in
structures suggestive of “rested totality, the totality not always
found in sincerity and necessary only for perfect rest, complete
appreciation” (Zukofsky 273). If we seriously consider what
Reznikoff told Dembo when discussing Testimonies (“I suppose
I’m an objectivist”), we must conclude that the poet assumes
a very peculiar interpretation of the “objectivist” method. The
stories Testimony consists of achieve an object-like completion
only for the short duration of the “recitative,” but for the most
part they stand against the idea of completion. One instantly
grasps the poem’s “completeness,” the fact that it requires no
additions, when looking at such texts as the ones included in
Domestic scenes or Boys and Girls. As critics have often pointed
out, these texts are free of poetical redundancies, they present
the events without unnecessary obscurities, and at the same
time possess a dramatic drive owing to the rhythm of what’s
being seen or said, concomitant with the construction of syntax
and verse, and the calming potential of “object‑like” words,
tamed by rules of grammar and patterns of stress – the musical
arrangement of the poetical phrases (consider for example the
staccato quality of “and beat him with a piece of rubber pipe,”
where the rhythm of the verse is one with the rhythm of beating).
For the rest, these poems work indeed as quotations: the emotions
connected with what is being said are eliminated, or suspended,
since they are deemed uncalled­‍‑for in a courtroom confession.
57
Exorcising Modernism
On the other hand, however, they determine the context of the
witness’s account: although the emotions remain undisclosed,
the “objective” report – limited to so-called “bare facts” –
unavoidably triggers them in the reader. Paradoxically then, it
is those hidden emotions that are of the utmost importance; the
context, made “invisible” for legal reasons, points to the absent
witness, a person alleging the truth of what is being presented.
Eliminating the emotions of the witness – i.e. writing them down –
is what “objectifies” the confession or account. From the point
of view of law, although something has been eliminated from
the testimony, it remains complete. A poem which presents (or
performs) a testimony, although complete in the legal sense (the
sentences are coherent and finished), insists on a completion of
a different sort, one that goes beyond the “interpretation” of law
and “delivery” of justice. Poetic completion – as Reznikoff would
have it – requires communal mourning, remorse and sympathy
with those who have been wronged, all which is not a matter
of mere interpretation. On the other hand, poetic testimony is
an interpretation, a transposition or translation “of what they
actually lived through” (Dembo). It is also ultimately finished
and complete, down to the level of a single word, for nothing
indeed can be changed here: “The child was about eight years
old. / For some misconduct or other / his father striped him naked
and threw him on the floor, / and beat him with a piece of rubber
pipe, / crying: ‘Die, God damn you!’ / He tried to dash the child
against the brick surface of the chimney, / and flung the child
again heavily on the floor / and stamped on him” (Testimony 21).
As Zukofsky indicates, Reznikoff – who was devoted to the
ideal of perfection, but at the same time mistrusted it – called his
writings not poems but verse. When Zukofsky states that “[there]
is to be noted in Reznikoff’s lines the isolation of each noun so
that in itself it is an image, the grouping of nouns so that they
partake of the quality of things being together without violence
58
Joanna Orska | Sincerity and Objectification
to their individual intact natures” (278), he has in mind a technical
aspect of Reznikoff’s poems. He is not really pointing at an
“objectified” calmness they would harbour, as one could imply,
although in order to grasp a certain quality of Reznikoff’s texts,
Zukofsky adopts the idea of perfectness and wholeness which
appears quite modernistic. For Zukofsky,the “object‑like” quality
of the word has nothing to the with the symbol understood as
a “semi‑allegorical gleam.” Poetic “objectivity” is a phenomenon
entirely different both from the objectivity of a material thing,
and from the objectivity of representation (which in fact is
detrimental to literature). This suggests that one cannot qualify
Reznikoff’s poems as mere transcriptions of reality, since they
rather appear as “object-like” translations, which tend to be
transcriptions of experiences or events that can be already
preconditioned by words (like court statements). Since each word
is an organised entirety, “which is itself a relation,” the meaning
of “symbolism” revived in the objectivist manifesto becomes
much broader, and does not necessarily imply some other, ideal or
transcendent reality: “The economy of presentation in this writing
is a reassertion of faith that the combined letters – the words – are
absolute symbols for objects, states, acts, interrelations, thoughts
about them” (Zukofsky 279).3 In this sense, the “verbal matter”
which Reznikoff utilizes is not objective per se, but emerges
as “objective” (or symbolic) only during the process of poetic
“re-covery.” In case of Testimony this could be understood as the
recovery of the plea for justice which has already been carried out
The notion of symbol must be here conceived of as distant from the meaning of
traditional symbolistic relations. As Charles Altieri puts it in his article on objectivist
traditions in Charles Olson’s theories: “the symbolist poet would concentrate
on relations that dramatize meaning beyond the event,” whereas in “objectivist” verse
“the primary relations are denotative (in an imaginary world) rather than connotative
or metaphoric. In order to keep the denotations intensely resonant the poet marks his
or her field – perceptually and musically – by a dense interplay of direct perceptions
standing towards one another as planes in an abstract painting” (Altieri 26-27).
3
59
Exorcising Modernism
(the renewal of the accusation, since justice alone fails to bring the
victim back to life). When a text of law, a precedent, is rearranged
it gains new meaning through poetical interpretation. Reznikoff’s
preoccupation with the accuracy of detail in writing – which for
Zukofsky is sincerity – might be seen as symbolic in the sense
of the modernistic ideal of a meaningful totality of words written
down as the token of “what they actually have lived through.”
This coincides with Pound’s famous statement about the “image”
from 1914: “The point of Imagism is that it does not use images
as ornaments. The image itself is the speech,” and: “An ‘image’
is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time” (Charles Reznikoff 17). The “object-like” aspect
of testimonial verse, like that of the symbol or image, denies (or
even forbids) the necessity of transforming the meanings; on the
other hand, testimonial verse is always a translation in progress,
a transposition of “a mood or feeling” which asks for completion.
Early 20th century modernist manifestos in many cases show
affinities with the ideas on language and meaning peculiar to the
Jewish tradition. In A Menorah for Athena, Stephen Fredman
describes the Menorah Movement of the 1930s – a cultural
platform forming the ideal of Jewishness in America against the
radical, nationalist ideas of the Zionists, calling for an exodus of
Jews to the new state of Israel. The critic talks about Reznikoff’s
commitment to the Menorah Magazine and refers the circumstances
of the publication of the “objectivist” manifesto which originally
was due to be published there, but finally was rejected by the
board.4 First of all, Fredman illuminates the question of the identity
4
Fredman writes that Zukofsky was criticized by Elliot Cohen, the managing editor
of the Menorah Journal, for being a poor translator who “could not write” (the poet
left a sample of a translation from Yiddish of Sholem Ash’s novel Die Mutter and the
“objectivist” manifesto was rejected along with it). For Zukofsky, writing in fact an
essay on one of the Menorah poets, it meant being turned down as a young Jewish
writer, wanting to engage in the journal. He was especially bitter because of critical
remarks on his Yiddish: “In ‘A’-4, Zukofsky had already staged a rebellion of the
60
Joanna Orska | Sincerity and Objectification
of young Jewish­‍‑American writers of the New York bohemia:
intellectuals and artists who were brought up in a traditional way,
and who sometimes, like Zukofsky, spoke Yiddish at home, but
were later assimilated into contemporary American culture. They
graduated from modern American universities and were writing
in English. The feeling of in-betweenness of the Jewish-American
artists, their “liminal position” between cultures, becomes apparent
in the invention of a poetics capable of registering the tensions
of a multi-ethnic urban world.5 Consequently, for Fredman
“objectivist” poetry is the poetry of ethnic interaction, based upon
a new relationship of equality between poet, language and society.
Moreover, for young Jewish artists the avant­‍‑garde cultural turn
tends to transform the purity of the Jewish religion, with its allpervading rule-structuring precision, density and terseness of the
Hebrew language, and the clarity of homiletic Jewish epigraphs,
into purity, density and constructiveness as part of the avant-garde
practice (Fredman 28). Fredman adds: “[the] Jewish poet becomes
cosmopolitan by necessity, speaking all the world’s languages.
(...) This poet, however, will always be in some sense a translator,
whose songs can never be ‘native’ to the language in which he
composes and thus never ‘as good as those of Guilhem of Poitiers’
lively, modern ‘jargon’ of Yiddish (...) against a stultifying and hieratic Hebrew, whose
symbolic value was espoused by the Menorah writers” (Fredman 125).
5
Ranen Omer-Sherman in the book Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American
Literature presents the ideal of “convivencia” as an accompanying term to the problems
of “liminality” of the Jewish diaspora culture in relation to the host culture: “Meaning
‘coexistence,’ it was used first by Spanish historians to describe the intermingling of
Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cultures in the ‘Golden Age’ of Spain, the intellectual
interchanges and cultural influence of Spain’s pluralistic medieval society. (...) Rather
than denote a state of ‘harmony’ or an actual Golden Age, it [this paradigm] suggests
a cosmopolitan setting (...). Despite the politics of competition, mistrust, and mutual
suspicion, unusually rich cultural exchanges flourished, and medieval Hebrew poets
revolutionized the prospects for Jewish poetry by adapting imagery and themes from
Moslem poets. By arming himself with evidence of Judaism’s adaptive genius in earlier
centuries, Reznikoff questions whether a static and insular Zionism might not cripple
Judaism’s historical potential for interchange and growth” (Omer-Sherman 119).
61
Exorcising Modernism
(quoted from Reznikoff’s historical prose The Lionhearted).
Instead, the Jewish writer will create a polyglot’s literature, in
which linguistic purity can become a pressing issue – in the
uncannily ‘pure’ German of Franz Kafka, the violently corroded
and annealed German of Paul Celan, and the crisp, compressed
English of Reznikoff, which strives to replicate the grammatical
compactness of Hebrew” (30). In Reznikoff’s case, studying and
“writing history becomes an active response to finding oneself
between two stools” (106).
In the Jewish tradition, the symbol plays an important part
in the interpretation of the Bible. Commenting on the so-called
“doctrine of Sefiroth,” Gershom Scholem states that to all the
Jewish mystics and Kabbalists of all time the Torah was a kind
of living organism: “Each configuration of letters in it, whether
it makes sense in human speech or not, symbolizes some aspect
of God’s creative power which is active in the universe. And just
as the thoughts of God, in contrast to those of man, are of infinite
profundity, so also no single interpretation of the Torah in human
language is capable of taking in the whole of its meaning” (Scholem
13-14). Endless interpretation is the main responsibility of a Jewish
mystic; language is here positively qualified as a divine tool, since
everything that lives, lives by virtue of the Godly language and
exists as an emanation of Godly letters. This gives quite a different
idea of the universalistic “whole”: it is created by many tongues,
since for the Kabbalist everything existing is endlessly correlated
with the whole of creation – everything mirrors everything. The
truth here is all­‍‑pervading and not separate from any fragment of
what is being said about the Torah – though at the same time it is
not one with it. Scholem illuminates the question of the “symbolic”
meaning of the Torah­‍‑texture, opposing it to allegory as in the
tradition of European poetics. Allegory tends to be a web of
meanings and correlations, but it does not go beyond the limits of
what can be expressed in language. Symbol transcends allegorical
62
Joanna Orska | Sincerity and Objectification
meaning: “[the] mystical symbol is an expressible representation
of something which lies beyond the sphere of expression and
communication. (...) A hidden and inexpressible reality finds its
expression in the symbol. (...) The symbol ‘signifies’ nothing and
communicates nothing, but makes something transparent, which
is beyond all expression” (Scholem 27). Jewish transcendence is
not separate from reality – it dwells in letters. However, it “lies
beyond the sphere of expression” and “signifies nothing.” In the
symbol truth becomes transparent and seeks endless translation.
Using Scholem’s terms, one might re­‍‑coin the famous Poundian
definition of the image: “image is speech,” for “letters are images”:
sounds, shapes and melodies which are attempts to “translate”
the perfection that – according to the Kabbalistic tradition – is
gradually dispersing after the primal catastrophe.6 The “object”
as characterised by Zukofsky shows features of the Jewish
mystical symbol re‑covered in the act of artful translation, as
Walter Benjamin puts it in his classical treatise The Task of the
Translator, with its notion of a pure, unpronounceable, absent
primal language, only glimpses of which are offered during the
process of interpretation (Benjamin 256). Perfection is always
there, although it is unreachable. Thus, “objectification” as the
act of using words for “moods or feelings” – as the flash of what
has occurred – follows in the wake of the Jewish tradition of the
text becoming / being an “object” (which makes the Jewish God
himself the most proliferate and most literate “objectivist”).
All this may sound a little too sublime perhaps, especially
when considered in the context of Reznikoff’s Testimony.
Omer-Sherman quotes Reznikoff’s response when asked about Pound’s antiSemitism. Avoiding the question, the poet stressed his interest in the ethos of influx,
experimentation, exchange and adaption: “I don’t see why can’t I benefit from the work
Pound did, whatever his prejudices. I was very interested in the music of everyday
speech and in free verse, and along came Pound, experimenting with these very things”
(Reznikoff in conversation with Ruth Rovner, published in Jewish Frontier, April 1976;
Omer­‍‑Sherman 120).
6
63
Exorcising Modernism
Nevertheless, the New York Jewish bohemia of the 1930s was
certainly tempted to break all limits – either in accordance with
Scholem’s description of the symbol as crossing the borders
of language expression, or by reworking the Jewish vision of
language in a specific avant­‍‑garde manner and presenting this
process as definitive for the American­‍‑Jewish intellectual. The
stance that avant-garde Jewish poets of these times (i.e. Reznikoff,
Zukofsky, Oppen, Rakosi) are taking is connected with their
specific “translating” duties, characteristic of writers who are not
at home in any language, having already lost their Hebrew and
trying to work out a new idiom in a language both native and – in
some way – alien to them. This possibility was offered to them
by the avant­‍‑garde turn (in our case, ironically enough, by Ezra
Pound’s poetical ideas).7 Fredman writes that for Reznikoff the use
of English was a sign of cosmopolitism and assimilation. Using
English was the consequence of the Jewish thinker’s intermediary
position among diverse groups of people, or in other words – the
position of translator from the holy, perfect and irretrievably
lost language of Hebrew, which is never really mentioned, but
which is reflected in certain language­‍‑habits and tendencies that
came to be associated with modernist poetry. The situation of the
poet­‍‑translator is quite peculiar. His being at home in a language
becomes a meta-question of all his poetical work, forming a point
of reflection, consideration, constant negotiation. This state itself,
sometimes specified as the condition of being an “Other,” a Jewish
Pound was very fond of Reznikoff’s work which Zukofsky had sent him to Italy, and
mentioned in his letter that he expected the next wave of the avant­‍‑garde to be Jewish.
Zukofsky’s correspondence with Pound – a Jewish poet and his anti­‍‑Semitic mentor –
Fredman describes as “bizarre and vaudevillian.” Both poets toyed with Yiddish accents
and Jewish stereotypes, and each of them had strong and mixed feelings with regard
to Jewishness as being “equally trapped (...) in the dilemma of betweenness that vexes
Jewish intellectuals, and to both of them Yiddish is a central feature of this dilemma.
From his side, Pound chants back in Yiddish accent to the Jewish Objectivists; while
on his side, Zukofsky translates a poem by Yehoash in ‘A’-4 that sounds like a Poundian
imitation of a Japanese original” (Fredman 130).
7
64
Joanna Orska | Sincerity and Objectification
immigrant, becomes something that is necessary to translate – and
something that is bound to be lost in translation, like the true
meaning of the Hebrew letter (equally transparent and illegible).
“Objectification” carries an assumption of something universal as
the prerequisite of the very impulse towards translation. The place
of the “Holy” original becomes absorbed in the field of allegorical
negotiations between the author and the world, or in other words –
the field of the widest artistic possibilities which create space for
a new communicating situation, perfectly fitting all the conditions
of the immanent clarity of language, and thus making apparent “the
ways of the creator.” Because the “Holy” original is ever­‍‑absent,
the unending work of translation is all that remains. And this is
the where “intra­‍‑semiotic” translation comes in.
Reznikoff’s Testimony can be understood in terms of the
legal notion of “intra‑semiotic” translation. This notion is also
part of the vocabulary of translatology. Edward Balcerzan in his
study Translation as the War of the Worlds, while referring the
Torop’s structuralist model defining different kinds of translation,
states that a film based on other films, or certain theatrical works
which are redactions of other theatrical works, or works of art
that reconstructs other works of art, albeit in a different style – all
formulate their meanings within the area of the same language
and are subject to its rules. Therefore, they can be classified as
cases of intra-semiotic translation (Balcerzan 246-47). A remake
or a cover can perhaps serve as the best representation of this
notion. Reznikoff’s “making of America” can be seen as an
instance of intra-semiotic translation from legal language into
legal language – in order to rephrase things and make them
precisely understandable, so that they can be translated into the
legal language of another nation for example. Legal language
consists of two levels of meaning: primary meanings of the
original language, which remains referential, and meta‑language
meanings which do not refer to concrete things or phenomena,
65
Exorcising Modernism
but to other law-language lexemes: lexical relations in the form of
legal definitions. Intra‑semiotic translation requires the knowledge
of law. For example, in order to explain the exact meaning of
U.S. law, intra­‍‑semiotic translation would have to include the
context of precedents. What Reznikoff was doing when writing the
definitions for Corpus Juris – painstakingly working out precise
definitions of law for lawyers – was a kind of intra‑semiotic
translation as well. The task of coining definitions for a universal
encyclopaedia of law for lawyers no doubt had great impact on the
“translating situation” described by Fredman: in Reznikoff’s case,
that of a Jewish immigrant who had just been admitted to the bar
of the State of New York. The constant use of legal English may
have heightened the translator’s feeling of homelessness, at the
same time situating Reznikoff in a position of a poet for whom
the work of translation has become a necessity. In face of the
“criminal life” of America at the end of the 19th century, the only
thing that appears universal is the universality of human suffering
for which there is no word in the legalistic jargon. Testimonies are
the aftermath of this work. It made Reznikoff go through “all the
case books” as he says in a conversation with Janet Sternburg and
Alan Ziegler: “Now Testimony: 1885‑1890 covers every state in
the union. I don’t know how many thousands of volumes I went
through, and all I could manage to get out of it were these poems”
(Sternburg, Ziegler 1984).8 Translation within the same language
is a common thing in poetry; in Reznikoff’s case, it boiled down
to a question of searching and selecting the right, poetical moment
within the testimonies of crimes and tragedies typical of the new
industrialised society. Presenting them in the right melody and
rhythm of common speech as the dark objectified symbols of
8
Milton Hindus adds: “Later, he continued to read these reports for the sheer human
interest of them and because he felt challenged to create for strangers (by selection,
arrangement, and a clarified, chastened style) the feelings which some of the cases had
aroused in himself” (Hindus 1984).
66
Joanna Orska | Sincerity and Objectification
human unending unkindness – the testimonies that do not carry any
meaning anymore, though they form something “objective,” since
they are texts of law that are not supposed to explain anything,
but rather suggest completion – creates the impression that they
can never be adequately and fully translated, that the labor of
describing and understanding these particular crime­‍‑cases will
never end. The person of the author can be glimpsed only through
the carefully made choices and compassionate “touching up” of
the stories that were actual translations of what “Others” had lived
through. And that – the poetical work – had to stand for the glimpse
of totality.
The reason I am actually concerned with the poetry of
Charles Reznikoff is not really connected with his Testimonies.
The purpose of this paper was to show how this special case
of intra-semiotic translation provides means for understanding
a poet’s style. As Fredman puts it, within the particular position of
immigrant-translator poets a special mode of speaking is created,
which finds itself outside of Hebraism, is expressed in the native
language, although it carries certain features of the identity of
“Others” and is pervaded with the experience of in‑betweenness.
These traces leave their imprint in the poetic matter. Together
with the feeling that one is not at home in any language comes
the compulsion of correcting, aiming at the purity and clarity of
expression, accompanied by the hypercorrectness of the stranger,
which makes the impression of something flawed and at the
same time poetic (since, in general, that which is poetic must
seem “incorrect” from the perspective of ordinary language).
Poetical scrutiny that brings the habit of constantly reviewing
texts, and involving constant reduction of meaning, results in
poems written in dense and clear “object-like” verses. Scrupulous
attention to detail – which from Zukofsky’s point of view was
a sign of the writer’s sincerity – was understood by Reznikoff as
translational fidelity to the context, to people, their language and
67
Exorcising Modernism
the accidental way in which it is often used. With such attention
comes alertness to all kinds of exclusionary practices and to the
grievance of those who are excluded. The complete picture of
Reznikoff’s “objectivist” style emerges when we combine its
features with a rigorous commitment to self-analysis and a subtle
demythologizing bent, which Fredman associates with the
enlightenment heritage of the Marranos, following the example
of Spinoza.
Works Cited
Altieri, Charles. “The Objectivists Traditions.” The Objectivist
Nexus. Essays in Cultural Poetics. Ed. Rachel Blau
DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa and London:
The University of Alabama Press, 1999.
Balcerzan, Edward. Tłumaczenie jako wojna światów. W kręgu
translatologii i komparatystyki. Poznań: Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza, 2010.
Benjamin, Walter. The Task of Translator. Trans. Harry Zorn.
Selected Writings. Volume 1. 1913-1926. Ed. Marcus Bulloc
and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: The Bellknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.
Dembo, Lawrence Sanford. “An Interview with Charles
Reznikoff.” Contemporary Literature 10.2 (1969): 193-202.
Fredman, Stephen. A Menorah for Athena. Charles Reznikoff and
the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Hindus, Milton. “Epic, Action-Poem, Cartoon: Charles Reznikoff’s
Testimony.” Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. Ed. Milton
Hindus. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1984.
---. Charles Reznikoff. A Critical Essay. London: The Menard
Press, 1977.
68
Joanna Orska | Sincerity and Objectification
Omer­‍‑Sherman, Ranen. Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American
Literature. Hanover and London: Brandais University Press,
2002.
Pound, Ezra. “‘A Retrospect’ including ‘A Few Don’ts.’” Pavannes
and Divisions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918.
Reznikoff, Charles. The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975.
Ed. Seamus Cooney. Boston: Black Sparrow, 2005.
---. Testimony. The United States 1885-1890 – Recitative. New
York: New Directions, 1965.
Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York:
Schocek Books, 1961.
Sternburg, Janet and Ziegler Alan. Conversation with Charles
Reznikoff. Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. Ed. Milton
Hindus. Orono, Main: National Poetry Foundation, 1984.
Zukofsky, Louis. “Sincerity and Objectification. With a Special
Reference to Charles Reznikoff.” Poetry 37 (1931): 272-85.
69
Christopher Patrick Miller
We Must Talk Now: George Oppen and
a Genealogy of “Objectivist” Sincerity
I believe people are terrified. Those who aren’t will be.
Someone said to me the other day “Change the axioms.”
And that was a writer of high school science text books! It
is necessary to talk, to begin to talk. I mean to be part of
a conversation among honest people... Of course we are afraid
the children will overhear us. But someday someone will
overhear the children and face absolute despair. The physical
scientists will give us no peace. One imagines a new Nietzsche
crying in the market place: “Newton is dead. Haven’t you
heard? Newton is dead.” Narrative, which is everyone’s art,
and everyone’s comfort, is wearing out. There is no fact more
obvious than that every life ends badly. Very badly. Loneliness,
desertion, irreparable physical injury. Every ship sinks. Every
calamity the hero escapes he does not escape. I mean to be
part of a discussion among honest people.
George Oppen to June Oppen Degnam, January 19621
Selected Letters 55-56. This letter was sent to his sister June, then editor and
publisher of the San Francisco Review, in regards to the publication of The Materials
1
70
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
What seems to be “wearing out” for George Oppen in this letter
he wrote to his sister shortly after returning to the United States
from exile in Mexico is not just the common art of telling a story
but the very conditions in which “honest” conversation is possible.
These tragic facts of social life and histories of violence that make
up the postwar “market place” require a new Zarathustra figure,
one who can call out not just the hypocritical cruelties of Christian
moral judgment but the seeming inapplicability of “natural law”
to the sublime scale of the coldwar military­‍‑industrial complex and
aftermath of the holocaust. But while Oppen might have learned
much from Nietzsche’s aphoristic style and critiques of moral logic,
he largely rejected the rhetorical agility that sustained Nietzsche’s
multi­‍‑vocal critiques. Oppen’s poetics are skeletal, close to the
bone, in that powers of voice or will seem radically constrained
to diminutive transitions of syntax. In a letter to his sister two years
later, Oppen sees his “voice” caught between the smallness of an
utterance and the incredible scale of destruction or confusion an
utterance might address: “I will cry havoc in a small voice” (UCSD
1.9).2 George Oppen sought to bring the wreckage home as it was not
only to be found elsewhere, in these military theaters, but reflected
in the poverty and segregation that made up George and Mary’s
various urban homes. Writing about a bike ride he took through the
“Bedford­‍‑Stuyvesant ghetto” in the same letter to June, he noted:
“Wreckage, wreckage, I mean [human] wreckage in the wreckage”
(UCSD 1.9). In a deeply practical sense, speaking honestly was the
by her review and James Laughlin’s New Directions in New York. Oppen specifies that
he doesn’t want to include “poems from Discrete Series” and that in the “last twenty
years I have suffered only from erosion. The tone and the method of those poems makes
it impossible to interleave them with the new poems” (56).
2
“To June on Sep 4, 1964.” All citations from George Oppen’s daybooks, notes and
unpublished drafts come from the Mandeville Archives at the University of California,
San Diego. For letters, the Box No. and Folder No. is provided. The citational format
for drafts and notes from the daybooks is as follows: Box No., Folder No., Leaf No.
Many thanks to those at the Mandeville library for their assistance.
71
Exorcising Modernism
means by which the actual wreckage of bodies and minds could
be re-articulated amidst structural violence. And if conversation
was to have historical traction and not just naturalize its speakers
to existing conceptions of law or narrative development, the field
in which “we” talk had to be expanded to include the material
infrastructures that sustain speech and our contemporary notions
of the human. “Who” was speaking was made contingent upon
where or how thought happened or what was spoken with.
Oppen’s much-discussed return to poetry after such a long
textual silence was, we might say, motivated in part by his sense
that accounting for laws and narratives of contemporary reality
demanded a new mode of “honest” talk or discussion.3 Reading The
Materials (1962), This in Which (1965) and Of Being Numerous
(1968), one feels the incredible ethical and epistemological
burdens placed on what it means to be “honest” without moral or
scientific axioms as guides and how the purportedly “overheard”
private speech of the lyric can be re-made into a “part” of a public
discussion. To understand Oppen’s negotiation of this burden of
“honest” talk, I will argue, we need to better understand how
Oppen adapted a notion of sincerity that was developed through
Pound’s early work with Fenollosa’s Chinese scholarship as well
as Zukofsky’s attempt at proselytizing an “Objectivist” program.
All three poets demonstrate a repeated concern for how art could
Rachel Blau DuPlessis cites 1958 as the turning point for the Oppens (George and
Mary as well as their daughter, Linda) after living in Mexico for seven years. They had
just been granted passports and George had his famous dream about “rust in copper”
that his therapist translated as fear over self-stagnation and neglecting his “paternal
and sorroral mandate that such rust was going to be prevented” (Selected Letters
xvii). DuPlessis notes how Oppen began writing again in May 1958, beginning with
“Blood from the Stone” and corresponding about his moral commitments to literature.
“In February, March, and August 1959, Oppen initiated contact with publishers–his
sister, June Oppen Degnan, who was affiliated with The San Francisco Review,
James Laughlin, and Henry Rago of Poetry Magazine” (Selected Letters xviii). The
Oppens returned once more with the Zukofskys to Mexico in 1959 before they came
back permanently in January 1960. For an extended discussion of Oppen’s return
to publishing, see: Selected Letters vii–xxi.
3
72
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
resist disingenuousness and forms of systematic exploitation, such
as Pound’s screeds on usury or Zukofky’s critiques of alienated
labor. Surprisingly, despite their emphasis on image and form over
the authenticity of individual psychology, all three poets remained
attached to sincerity as a principle concept of aesthetic construction.
Beginning with Pound’s reworkings of Fenollosa’s translations
of Confucius as well as his essay on the Chinese character,
sincerity comes to mean a commitment to a precise language
that can represent the dynamic material forces in which an artist
is situated. Being accurate as a poet, then, entailed showing the
successive, mutual developments of language and things, instead
of reproducing – in the form of a self‑transparent speaker – a form
of private truth and moral authority that was defended or affirmed,
not constructed, in speech. We might think of this in terms of
how we perceive structure within a dynamic process. As Barbara
Herrnstein Smith has written about the perception of closure: “The
perception of poetic structure is a dynamic process: structural
principles produce a state of expectation continuously modified by
successive events” (33). What remains constant is an expectation
for stability or composure – the very thing Oppen so radically
doubts in speech but seeks in the “actuality” of consciousness.
If we adapt our understanding of honesty to this notion
of successive development, being honest would mean voicing
the ways in which first­‍‑person speech acts or perceptual details
are not abstract reserves from processes of historical or cultural
succession but determinate expressions of them. In “The Building
of the Skyscraper,” Oppen phrases this as an process of selfexternalization: “It is the business of the poet / ‘To suffer the
things of the world / And to speak them and himself out’” (NCP
149).4 Sincerity in making trumps the sincerity of the maker.
4
This poem was included in This in Which (1965) along with the poem that would
become the basis of Of Being Numerous, “A Language of New York.” All quotations
73
Exorcising Modernism
Oppen exaggerates this dislocation, too, by figuring the literal
“business” of poetry as the citation of others and how they become
a part of our own patterns of speech. The distances compound
to the point where the refrained imperative of a poem, “we must
talk now,” is a way of building urgencies out of obstructions.
The practical and conceptual shifts of sincerity from a personal
value to a structural quality meant a revision of lyric selfconsciousness as such. Self-opacity was not necessarily a barrier
to communicating the truth of one’s experience. In her treatment
of sincerity as form in Wordsworth and postwar American poets,
Deborah Forbes provides a useful definition of how performances
of self-consciousness shore up our idea of lyric subjects: “If selfconsciousness is characterized by its reversibility, by the ways
in which self-possession gives way to alienation and alienation
may surprisingly coalesce into something like self‑knowledge,
lyric poetry is the terrain upon which this reversibility operates
with the greatest concentration, suggestiveness and freedom” (9).
For Forbes, the lyric performance of self­‍‑consciousness involves
a series of “sincerity­‍‑effects” by which a first­‍‑person speaker
can show itself as a false universal, as much inhuman as human,
as in Adrienne Rich. She argues that Wordsworth, on the other
hand, uses sincerity-effects to voice a series of doubts about the
first-person’s ability to unify “subjective experience or belief
and objective truth” (30). But for Pound, Zukofksy and later
Oppen, sincerity couldn’t be a self­‍‑conscious mechanism in the
way Kant conceived it – a transcendental condition out of which
subject-object relations, and thus self-knowledge, emerge. A more
processural notion of image and form was based on a notion that
knowledge and subjectivity emerge from a constant process of
fabrication and formation.
from the published, final versions of the poems come from Michael Davidson’s edited
collection, New Collected Poems (NCP).
74
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
What makes Oppen’s version of poetic truthfulness
particularly salient for contemporary conversations about
lyric and society, however, is that he adapts Pound’s emphasis
on process and Zukofsky’s emphasis on historical actualization
to the persistent socio-political question of “what is to be done”
in the face of such wreckage. The stakes are raised to the pitch
of havoc even while the voices remain small, anachronistic, and
dispersed, like the “public quality” of island folk we encounter in
last poem in Of Being Numerous (1968), “Ballad.” And the last
word is given to the woman who says to the speaker, presumably
George and Mary Oppen, who seems an answer to the prior
difficulty of being “serious” and knowing “what one means”:
“What I like more than anything / Is to visit other islands” (NCP
208). Sincerity, as a method of lyric construction, is a way of
moving across these isolate languages, showing what kinds of
lives are endangered and how these experiences of “havoc” are
re­‍‑mediated through the temporary housing of talk, vehicles,
apartments, and serial forms. Rather than close down the distances
between people, rendering “you” and “I” proximate, Oppen seeks
an intimacy that includes, preserves, and clarifies these distances
“we” hold in common. This notion of a distant intimacy gets
at two key “invest[ments]” of Oppen’s poetics: to objectify the
dismemberment of democratic culture and the alienations of public
life while also showing how moments of sincere convictions and
speech acts crop up among the “walled avenues” of urban life,
mass production, and a life lived in transit. Sincerity had to be
updated not just because its notion of a self­‍‑sustaining subject
was specious but because it couldn’t capture the displacements
and estrangements that American culture was a “product” of.
Both speech and perception imply an engagement with phrases or
images that are not “found” but encountered, tested and re­‍‑oriented
beyond the individual speaker. In his only published essay, “The
Mind’s Own Place” (1963), Oppen describes sincerity as a “test”:
75
Exorcising Modernism
“It is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue: but
the image is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet’s
perception, of the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of
conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness” (Selected Prose
31–32).5 Calamitous to Oppen, then, is not just the obfuscation
of violence, injustice and atrocity in axiomatic expressions or
narrative “comfort[s],” but also the rhetorical persuasiveness of
an “honest” speaker who might lead us to believe that structural
problems can be resolved through successful poetic analogies
or fiats of expression. What is interesting, though, is that this
doesn’t stop him from treating his commitment to actuality and
the truthfulness of talk as a kind of populism that can answer
to failures of democratic culture.
What these redefinitions of “sincerity” make possible
for us, as contemporary readers, is to think through modes of
lyrical utterance that take their emotional charge from the very
structures that seem to render a “public” language wrecked, self­
‍‑divided and seemingly without assuredness that “words” will
be sufficient to point us back or towards a shareable truth. After
charting a genealogy of sincerity as a concept and outlining the
“Objectivist” alternatives, we will turn in the final section to how
Oppen turns repeatedly to the social imperative of “talk” as a way
of situating individual wills amidst structures, and vice versa.
Sincerity and Truthfulness
We must talk now. Nothing ours
But words. We are too many
To live by pettiness, silence, by deception
Of each other. There is no shelter of the past
5
The essay was originally published in Kulchur 3, No. 10 (Summer, 1963). Oppen
first submitted this piece to the Nation in 1962 and it was rejected.
76
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
Will give shelter, no haunting adult shadow
Of ourselves
Will cast a shelter of the past behind us.6
At its simplest, speaking sincerely has come to mean
a correspondence between who we are and what we say – that is,
if we take sincerity as a verification of a singular and emphatic
voicing of a person. To speak sincerely is to will an idea of one’s
self in the form of speech towards another: trust me, I am what
I say I am. And to continue speaking sincerely is to verify this
correspondence of will, belief and speech throughout the flux of
circumstance: I will continue to believe what I claim to believe.
In Truth and Truthfulness (2004), Bernard Williams describes
sincerity as a “disposition to make sure that one’s assertion
expresses what one actually believes” (96). Belief in what one
says is communicated not just by the content of the assertion
but by the ways in which a speaker persuades others to trust the
relation between statement, will and duration of belief. It is this
relation between belief and assertion that also marks a divergence
between who does the saying and who does the hearing, as we
assume that a speaker has other beliefs just as we assume that
a hearer “will come to believe more than the speaker said” (96).
Even the root of the term Williams uses, disposition, keys us into
this dynamic between gaining and losing possession of one’s self
or one’s position in the world. Deserving truth and dislocation
come hand and hand, as both are means to adapt to shifting
requirements of accuracy and belief depending on what situation
George Oppen, Draft of “Leviathan” (UCSD 20.42.201). Another early version of
“Leviathan” relates being locked up in words to being locked up with the “inexplicable”
tools of labor. But these tools, like “our words,” remain facts in the sense that their
actuality doesn’t rely upon our individual purpose: “Locked up / With the tool box
and the lunch pail: / The height gauge / the dividers / And the / Files / Iron handles /
Of the fact. / What is inexplicable / Remains” (UCSD 20.42.203).
6
77
Exorcising Modernism
a speaker finds itself within. This dialectic of dislocation and
adaptation is especially important in the poetics of seriality where
the lines between lyric speakers and their environments becomes
blurred and the stakes for each speech-act seem pitched incredibly
high. We can see especially in the draft of “Leviathan,” where
the present-tense configurations of words is to be trusted over
a shareable past or sense of a cumulative present, one that cast an
“adult shadow.” What I want to think about in this section is how
a poetics of seriality is a way of thinking past, or through, more
individual-based notions of sincerity towards a more structural
sense of utterance, one that emphasizes what speech is “of” (the
infrastructures of a city, remembered speech, past iterations of one’s
self) over what kind of subject speech confirms. In “A Language
of New York,” later reworked as Of Being Numerous (1968), this
meant an emphasis on where speech occurs: “Occurrence, a part /
Of an infinite series, / The sad marvels” (NCP 163). Producing
a language that conveys the actual “existence of things” comes
to mean adapting one’s speech and imagination to localities “we”
are not “coeval” with (NCP 163). If talk was honest, it would
address how each speaker is merely an “occasion” (NCP 169)
among the things it speaks of.7
Consistent among genealogies of sincerity in Western
philosophy is a notion that sincerity emerged not only from
One of Oppen’s principle interlocutors in the drafting of Of Being Numerous (OBN)
was the radical empiricist philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Oppen’s copy of
Process and Reality, published by Whitehead in 1929, in the Mandeville Library at
UCSD is well marked. In the twelfth section of OBN, Oppen inserts a quotation of
Whitehead that speaks to this notion of the subject as an actual occasion among other
actual entities: “In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is
one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world” (NCP 169). Oppen saw in
Whitehead an alternative to the autonomous logic of math or a universe fabricated
in the image of man: “As against the notion of an autonomous logic, of math, as ‘the
man­‍‑made universe’: Fundamental ideas cannot be derived from each other. ‘No entity
can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe’ (Whitehead
in a different context): or, no entity, which is to say also no ‘idea’ can be conceived as
independent of the existence and the nature of the universe” (UCSD 19.9.175).
7
78
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
Greek political discourse but accounts of objects. In his fairly
comprehensive 1970 lecture series on the topic, Sincerity and
Authenticity, Trilling notes how in Latin sincerity referred to the
integrity of an object and not a person. A thing was sincere if it
was well made and held up to repeated use. However, European
Enlightenment and Renaissance culture shifted sincerity towards
more of a rhetorical concept associated with a transparent, selfconscious or “authentic” relation between language, person, culture
and the historical demands of truth. Sincerity entailed the mutual
project of knowing and being true to one’s self, figured somewhat
ironically by Polonius in his advice to parting Laertes: “Neither
a borrower nor a lender be, / For Loan oft loses both itself and
friend, / And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. / This above
all – to thine own self be true.”8 Trilling relates the rise in interest in
sincerity around the beginning of the sixteenth century to anxiety
around class position and social mobility in burgeoning mercantile
cultures. The workings of mercantile capitalism necessitated a new
socio-political hermeneutics for and typology of the “hypocritevillain, the conscious dissembler” (Trilling 17).
Many contemporary notions of sincerity thus rely upon some
notion of a cohesive person that verifies its independence and selfcoherence by demonstrating a self­‍‑similarity over time between
“Hamlet” (1.III.75–78) in The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd Ed., eds. Stephen
Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean H. Howard and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., 2008). It is interesting to think about how Polonius’s paternal
wisdom, which echoes the Delphic “know thyself,” ironizes sincerity as a personal
virtue. While Laertes might be said to be an embodiment of sincerity as a self-conscious
integrity and dignity, a model for courtly sociality, Polonius seems to represent the
dissembling, calculating and performative version of self-truth. Trilling notes how the
English Renaissance was both highly critical and accommodating of heroic ideals of
sincerity: “In the Renaissance, however, the heroic style of the superego was confronted
with a new antagonism, that which was offered by the ego, the aspect of the self which
has for its function the preservation of the self. The heroic mode came under attack not
only as being absurd in the grandiose elevation of its style and in the moral pretensions
which this expressed, but also as standing in the way of the practical conduct of life”
(Trilling 82).
8
79
Exorcising Modernism
conviction and action. Both Williams and Trilling track this notion
of the sincere subject back to the confessional style of Jean Jacques
Rousseau where the vagaries of urban mercantilism is something
to defend one’s autonomy against. Trilling notes how Rousseau saw
literature and theater as enemies of sincerity – precisely because
they demanded an individual’s indulgence in self-fictionalization
and dramatic displacement – and preferred the climate of open-air
sport.9 For evidence of this autonomous fortitude, we look to firstperson speech acts where an “I” measures its subjective intensity
and reflexivity against others. In poetic terms, this is a style and
form of utterance that has come to be associated with versions of the
“Romantic Lyric.” However, we can also think of sincerity, as Hegel
notably did, as closer to the painful disarticulation of the subject
into multiple, competing subject positions. This disarticulation,
necessary to self-consciousness, occurs through cultural expression
and development, and it is painful in the sense that one undergoes
or perfroms this contradictory plenitude. The Delphic inscription of
γνῶθι σεαυτόν (“know thyself”) so central to Greek, Enlightenment
and Romantic expositors of self-knowledge is traded for the
truthfulness of a virtuosic range and flexibility. Diderot’s “Rameau’s
Nephew” – and not the moralizing first­‍‑person narrator of the same
fiction – is Hegel’s privileged example for this operatic talent
because he follow spirit where it goes.
Trilling notes how Rousseau thought literature was dangerous because it encouraged
interest in the desires and approval of others instead of clarifying one’s autonomy
through public gatherings: “individual’s abnegation of personal autonomy in order
to win the forbearance and esteem of others (...). [I]n the First Discourse Rousseau
says that the chief usefulness of literary occupations may be thought to have is that
‘they make men more sociable [read: more conformable] by inspiring in them the desire
to please one another with works worthy of their mutual approval’ (...). In the place
of ‘exclusive entertainments which close up a small number of people in melancholy
fashion in a gloomy cavern, which keeps them fearful and immobile in silence and
inaction,’ there are to be free and festive gatherings ‘in the open air, under the sky’
at which nothing will be shown (...). ‘Let the spectators become an entertainment
to themselves; make them actors themselves; do it so that each one sees and loves
himself in the others’” (Trilling 58–62).
9
80
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
But even with Hegel’s more fragmented, performative notion
of sincerity, the question remains of “who” or “what” we are calling
sincere. Is sincerity a consistent relation that persists among the
parts or is it a subjectivity that verifies the integrity, accuracy and
authenticity of these parts? What do we, as readers of modern
poetry, typically refer to when we call a disposition sincere? Are
we referring to an inherent quality of mind or character, as one
definition of disposition would suggest, or are we referring to the
style in which a person or thing is arranged relative to what is not
itself? Diderot’s nephew and Rousseau’s confessional self present
opposing views of what kind of end sincerity serves. This end
can be social, as in a speech act that communicates a subjective
experience of an emotion, a desire or a need to another; it can
be cultural, as in a self-reflexive subject or object interpreted or
judged according to a set of normative signifying regimes and
practices; and it can be political, as in adjudications between
individual intentions or rights and a system of legal or political
representation. In each instance, to call a speaker sincere or give
an account of a sincere action is to describe two things at once:
a self-relation of an agent to an action and how that “sincere”
gesture or composition is mediated by social, political and cultural
standards of comportment, signification and public appearance.
What is interesting about “Objectivist” notions of sincerity as
a relation to craft is that it encompasses both things, a self­‍‑relation
and a process of mediation, while also introducing the problem
of who a sincere utterance is addressed to. In a fragment from
Oppen’s manuscripts for Of Being Numerous (1968) he uses the
figure of the “dead end” to gesture toward this struggle to assign
ends to sincerity when the person to whom it would be addressed
is also in question: “Dead end. // Perhaps not that there is nothing
to say / But no one to address” (UCSD 22.9.35).10 It is not just that
10
This fragment would become part of Section 9 of Of Being Numerous.
81
Exorcising Modernism
“I” am expected to appear self­‍‑consistent, well-formed, but that “I”
need someone to be sincere with.
Bernard Williams rightfully criticizes histories of sincerity
for fetishizing the act of assertion, in that the onus of distinction
between misleading speech and sincere speech is defined solely
in terms of the moral responsibility and explicit (or ironic)
intention of the speaker. The problem with such a criteria is that
it often leads to the contradictory position of defining all lies as
wrong (as violations of an abstract moral code) and advocating
for the necessity of masking some truths (to save a family from
persecution, for example) without an understanding of how
intentions are conditioned, and negotiated, between interlocutors.
“Deceit, after all, is a relation between you and your earthly hearer,
and the question of what you meant must be answered in terms
of intentions directed towards that hearer. God may know my
intentions in the sense of my good intentions, but the intentions
that form my meanings cannot rest with him” (Williams 104). In
other words, rules around honesty and deceit are not sufficient
in and of themselves to guide our judgments about why and
when a sincere relation is undermined. Just because a “rule” is
in place doesn’t mean that our forms of exchange are governed
by such rules or that we can assume others subscribe to all our
ethical assumptions. Aside from the objective truth content of
what one actually says in a particular situation, sincerity involves
“conversational implicatures” that operate according to both
rule-based behaviors we must assume (ranging from pragmatic
and provisional to the constitutional or hereditary) and fields of
reference speech content attunes us to, both in what words are
selected and which are not.11 We are motivated not just by abstract
On this notion of conversational implicatures, Williams writes: “What she said (in the
sense of her saying that...), or what she stated, is in our ordinary understanding identified
with its truth-conditions, whereas implicatures lie out the truth-conditions (...). This
natural conception of an assertion’s content helps to pick out ways in which we may
11
82
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
values like “honor” or “shame” but by the “particular relations
in which we socially and personally find ourselves” (Williams
117). Williams cites Adam Smith’s example of gentlemanly
humiliation and dishonor caused by making “a false promise to the
highwayman.” The humiliation, for Smith, comes from “being
coerced into making the promise” and not from “breaking the
promise” or from speaking from a position in which one’s promise
would never be taken seriously.
In attending to this dialogic reflexivity, a “sincere” speaker
is looking both outward to the others it involves and solicits
in its projects while also reflecting on what is gained or lost in
positioning itself in a particular way. Williams describes this
as a notion of truthfulness that speakers “deserve” depending
on what social situations they are responding to and what kinds of
relations – privacy, intimacy, co-operation, mutual resistance – are
necessary responses to conditions of powerlessness, atomization,
coercion, etc. We “deserve” a relation of truthfulness and a range
of trusts if we successfully balance my values with your senses of
legitimate claims on relevant pasts, presents and futures. In terms
of speech-act theory, J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell describe the
conventional history of language use, inherently a social history, as
the “illocutionary” conditions of a performative speech-act. What
Cavell adds to Austin’s theory, however, is a notion that emotional
response and agreement also shapes how we respond to utterances
that are meant not just to describe a problem but effect an action.
Sincerity, of course, often entails the recognition of a listener
be uncertain what a speaker has asserted (...). Not everything that one can infer from
a person’s making a particular assertion is an implicature. It is not a matter of implicatures
if one reaches the conclusion from the tone of his speech that he is not a native Englishspeaker, or, again, if one gathers form the timing of his interruption that he is tactless,
offensive, or does not know that this is the dead man’s widow (...). Implicatures more
resemble matters of linguistic rule, and it is a striking fact that competent speakers can
standardly recognize an implicature if they are presented with a sentence and are invited
to think of it as asserted in normal circumstances” (Williams 98–99).
83
Exorcising Modernism
that a speaker means, believes, or, in the case of a passionate
experience, suffers from what they say. For Cavell, this becomes
an inter-subjective demand in the way that Williams describes
the social legitimation of my truthfulness. Cavell describes the
situation of passionate utterance this way: “I declare my standing
with you and single you out, demanding a response in kind from
you, and a response now, so making myself vulnerable to rebuke,
thus staking our future.” Cavell describes this mutual emotional
staking as a crucial aspect of what Austin calls “total speech act
situation,” by which he means what is said and what needs to be the
case for that speech­‍‑act to be realized (185). When we think of how
sincerity is established as a condition of a poem and not simply
a character of a speaker, it should include this inter-subjective
process of emotional staking.
In poetic terms, diction and tone often do the work of
constructing this field of reference, signaling certain class, racial and
gender relations implied by certain vocabularies or inflections.12 This
is where Oppen’s attention to the ordinary drama of syntax becomes
particularly important because his austere vocabulary and “small
words” are used to convey the sense that the terms of honesty are
constantly shifting and speech must model these intimacies that form
through drift, dislocation and distantiation. In a draft of his Statement
on Poetics, Oppen writes: “It is true that my own temperament, my
own sense of drama, enters into this: I like to seem to be speaking
very simply – and a sense of drama is dangerous, I know that,
this is again a question of modulation, as is music: a question of
honesty, question of sincerity – the sincerity of the I and the we,
it is a tremendous drama, the things that common words say, the
Daniel Tiffany’s work on cant and diction in what he calls “Infidel Poetics” is a prime
example of how one could read the implicature of diction against or as distinct from
the particular forms poems deploy. In fact, he argues for a kind of dialectic between
diction and form through which we can read the social and political imagination of
particular poets.
12
84
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
words ‘and’ and ‘but’ and ‘is’ and ‘before’ and ‘after’” (Selected
Prose 48–49).13 What conveys the “common” drama of sincerity,
in other words, is not what “I” say or confirm about myself but
how these prepositional maneuverings build connections among
serial occurrences. The radical equivalency of syntactical positions,
pronouns and conjunctions, conveys this sense that disengagement is
impossible even while the distances between “I” and “those men” or
“The People” or “the walls / Of cities” seem insoluble in speech (NCP
171). As we turn now to an “Objectivist” lineage of sincerity, which
grows out of Pound’s and Fenollosa’s engagement with Chinese
texts, we will see how establishing an “independent” standard of
truthfulness involved a serial attunement to processes of construction
and circulation that exist beyond the fetish object of so much lyric
thinking: the private, absorptive experience of an individual.
A “Sincere” Program
It is not news to present the loose grouping of poets now referred to as
“Objectivist” by literary critics as concerned with related problems
of poetic form, political economy, and historical materialism. As
Michael Davidson has argued, materiality was for the so­‍‑called
“Objectivists” a “necessary adjunct to self­‍‑knowledge” because
“materials are embedded in social relations and conditions of use
and exchange” (101).14 To speak is to position “the outside” and
develop an affective relation toward materials.15 In the foundational
13
This “Statement of Poetics” was published posthumously, as Stephen Cope notes,
in Sagetrieb 3.3 (Winter, 1984): 25–27.
14
Davidson levels a meaningful critique at more analytical approaches to Oppen’s
poetics informed by the philosophy of mind. He criticizes the recent work of Oren
Izenberg, for example, who “value[s] words as tools by which we frame propositions”
instead of interrogating the “position from which we speak” (101). For the work he is
discussing, see: Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Being.
15
In her recent book, Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside, Miriam
Nichols describes the poetics of “the outside” in terms of the post­‍‑modern trajectory
of American poetry beginning with Charles Olson and the Black Mountain School.
85
Exorcising Modernism
introduction to their Objectivist Nexus collection, Rachel Blau
DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain point out that “Objectivist”
meant for Oppen and Zukofsky not an “objective viewpoint, but
to objectify the poem, to make the poem an object” (8). Departing
from centuries of Western thought about sincerity as a virtue of
a self­‍‑conscious individual or personal commitment to an abstract
truth, these poets posit a constructivist version of sincerity that
treats the lyric speech, figuration and thinking as an intensive, serial
process of social and historical mediation. Directness of emotive
presentation and the harmonic consistency between a creative self
and the world are not authorities that can be isolated by a poet or
claimed by a speaker; rather, sincerity is an emergent, provisional
quality of a lyric or lyrical series that neither a lyrical speaker nor
the histories to which it responds (including past versions of itself)
can comprehend fully. In his posthumously published Aesthetic
Theory (1970), Theodor Adorno charts a helpful distinction between
“individuation” and “objectivation” in artworks. Adorno sees the
“primacy of the object” in modern art as a desire for the aesthetic
to realize what is “nonexistent in them, for whose sake they exist
(...) however refracted” (Adorno 109). Like the sincere performance
of a speaker, objectivation seems to hold out the promise, within the
logic of capital, that what is not manufactured, alienated or reified
can present itself or be heard on its own terms. But rather than draw
upon an “a priori idea of the beautiful,” an artwork that emphasizes
objectivation seeks out formal solutions “that the imagining ear
or eye does not immediately encompass or know in full detail”
(Adorno 24). An artwork can have a “meaning” that is contingent
on the “nexus of its elements” instead of an idea a speaker beholds.
Where I differ with Nichols is not in her innovative readings of these poets’ engagement
with radical empiricist thought and practice but in the schism she sees between the
generation of Williams and Pound and the generation that followed. It seems to me
that Pound’s notion of sincerity as a modality of processural precision is inherently
oriented toward “the outside.”
86
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
When Zukofsky put together his essays and dossier of
poems for the 1931 special issue of Poetry magazine, he was
careful to place “Objectivist” in scare quotes (and maintain
them in the follow­‍‑up anthology, An “Objectivists” Anthology).
Burton Hatlen has pointed out that this use of quotation marks
was in fact a consistent strategy, one that maintained the title
of his heterogeneous grouping of poets (which would include
Basil Bunting, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Charles
Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Kenneth Rexroth in addition
to fore-runners such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams
and Marianne Moore) as a conspicuous act of naming or selfquotation (Hatlen 37). Of course, the 1931 issue was even
more heterogeneous, although Zukofsky was intentional in
applying his organizing terms of “Objectivism” – sincerity and
objectification – to one poet in particular, Charles Reznikoff. And
perhaps Zukofsky’s ironizing of his role of anthologizer is not
surprising given the fact that “Objectivism” was premised upon
a poetics of history and verbal accuracy that privileged restless
contact with particulars over doctrinal abstraction. As Charles
Altieri has argued, “[The ‘Objectivist’] model of poetic art needs
to be continually reinvented because as soon as perceptual and
compositional energies grow slack or seem inadequate to the
mind’s needs, writers seek to supplement concrete detail by
symbolic generalization.” The pursuit of companionable relations
between mind and world – what Altieri calls “thinking in and
with” instead of “about” things – takes precedence over the
kinds of symbolist abstraction that informed the poetics of Yeats
and Eliot. If we think of this in terms of a truthfulness based in
conversational and emotional implication laid out by Williams
and Cavell, we can see how sincerity with also takes precedence.
Altieri is surprisingly rare among critics of objectivism
in scrutinizing the two categories Zukofsky himself gives us
to understand this process: sincerity and objectification. Altieri
87
Exorcising Modernism
defines sincerity as refusing formal or abstract closure in order
to privilege the “post-logical movements” of thought, feeling, and
perception that are “intensified in the act of writing” (Altieri 33).
Zukofsky’s sincerity is also liminal in the sense that the phenomenal
accuracy of a word is not the achievement of reason or a life at
“rest” but the suggestion of a potential “totality” between word,
sense experience, and history. DuPlessis and Quatermain point out
how Zukofsky himself equivocates about the status of an axiomatic
formulation of objectification, going so far as to question whether
objectification “is more pertinent to the mind than presentation in
detail” (“Sincerity and Objectification” 278). Here is Zukofsky’s
fullest formulation of how the poem is made into an objective
combination of historical particulars, later republished in “An
Objective” in his collection of prose:
In sincerity shapes appear concomitants of word
combinations, precursors of (if there is continuance)
completed sound or structure, melody or form. Writing
occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of
thinking with things as they exist and of directing them
along a line of melody (...). Presented with sincerity,
the mind even tends to supply, in further suggestion
which does not attain rested totality, the totality not
always found in sincerity and necessary only for
perfect rest, complete appreciation.
(Prepositions 13)16
16
Zukofsky republished an edited version of his original “Program: ‘Objectivists,’
1931” in his later prose collection, Prepositions. The original “Program” provided
a prose statement by Pound on Carnevali (whose translations of Rimbaud are also in
the issue), an example from Hemingway’s “They All Made Peace – What is Peace?”
and a list of “Objectivist” poets that includes: “Pound, Williams, McAlmon, Reznikoff,
etc.” The brief “Program” is followed up by the more famous essay on “Sincerity
and Objectification” that takes Reznikoff as its primary case study. Pound arranged
with Harriet Monroe to have Zukofsky edit the entire issue. For the two essays and
88
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
What comes before rest, before the objectification of history in
a poem, is the ongoing elaboration of “sincere” combinations.
Sincerity is typically non­‍‑totalizing, in that it does not produce
resolved wholes or comprehensive experiences of aesthetic
tastes (“complete appreciation”), but functions as a “precursor”
to reproducible patterns of melody. Writing sincerely, we might
say, is a way of composing partial images and sounds. This notion
of partiality would be of particular importance to Oppen for whom
the discreteness of a mind was traded for the discreteness of series
as a perceptual record of a conscious implication in material history,
including the things one fails to say or think completely. If we think
of composition in musical terms, as Zukofsky does, partiality is
conditional on the consistent orientation of melos, a term Zukofsky
adapts not just from musical theory but Aristotelian politics.17
Zukofsky inverts Rousseau’s notion of autonomy in his claim
that a self­‍‑conscious honesty could be “counterfeited” because
examples of “sincerity and objectification.” Hereafter both the “Program” and the essay
on sincerity and objectification in Charles Reznikoff will be cited as Poetry with page
numbers.
17
In his Politics, Aristotle defines both a pedagogical and ethical function for melody
(melos) in that it can provoke in the “free and educated” listener states of “mystic
frenzy” that accompany belief or the calm and “purgation” that accompanies healing
or spiritual relief. For the “vulgar crowd of mechanics, laborers and the like” – here
Aristotle implies the slaves of Greek society – music will function merely to relax and
amuse. The effect of melos “correspond[s] to their minds.” What gives Zukofsky’s
melos a different aesthetic and political slant, however, is that Zukofsky’s use of the
term doesn’t assume a formal correspondence between mind, social order and racial
hierarchy. The musical character of poetry does not just refer to a temporal sequencing
of sounds and their affective counterparts but to a spatio­‍‑historical process by which
thought and culture dialectically “objectify” or “combine” each other. Interestingly,
this re­‍‑writing of Aristotelian categories also had a roughly contemporary European
counterpart in Antonin Artaud’s theorization of the theatrical staging of cruelty. In
his 1938 collection of essays “The Theater and Its Double,” Artaud defines melos
as a way of establishing a physical presence and affective response to this presence
before a figure or gesture is treated as representative. Artaud writes: “That is why in
the ‘theater of cruelty’ the spectator is in the middle and the spectacle surrounds him.
In this spectacle, sound effects are constant: sounds, noises, cries are chosen first for
their vibratory quality, then for what they represent” (Artaud 258).
89
Exorcising Modernism
it referred back only to the exclusive theater of the individual
mind. Sincerity meant a technique of truthfulness that aimed at
(to use Zukofsky’s metaphor of optical intensification) the ongoing
partiality of experience: “[The poet’s] concern must be with the
technique of presenting work that is an object of experience, of
objectifying, as Pound wrote, ‘the thing that is true and stays true
and keeps fresh for the new reader.’ (...) Poetic sincerity cannot
be counterfeited, one lives in a world with things as they are no
matter what one thinks about them” (Poetry 256). A trust is placed
in the actuality of materials, as it is for Pound and Oppen as well.
Given Zukofsky’s steady correspondence with Pound and
his titling of the first section of his 1929 essay, “Ezra Pound: The
Cantos,” as “Ta Hio” (which Pound translates as “grand learning”),
there is every reason to believe that his notion of sincerity emerged
out of an engagement with Pound’s “translation” of Confucian
Analects (Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The
Analects; first published by Glenn Hughes in 1928, reprinted in 1951
by New Directions). Pound’s experiments with Ernst Fenollosa’s
translations and research into Confucius as well as the ancient
Chinese poems collected as Cathay (1915) did not just think of
sincerity as a rhetorical quality of a self-conscious speaker but treated
it as a reciprocal relation to the constraints of the material world. In
the poems of Cathay, sincerity is often thematized as a problem of
voicing the impassable distances between speakers or the “drift” of
persons.18 In his version of the Confucian Analects, Pound figures
In fact, it is hard to find a poem in Cathay that does not treat of some form of political
exile, insurmountable distance or the enactment of love as a series of deferred arrivals
and eternal departures. Establishing a meaningful continuity of experience and language
is aligned with the incessant relational problem of crossing the land, returning home or
taking leave of a place: “Here we must make separation / And go through a thousand
miles of dead grass” (“Taking Leave of a Friend,” Personae 141). Preserving the unique
character and desires accumulated in these distances becomes the work of the poems.
The first and probably most famous poems of the volume, “Song of the Bowmen of
Shu,” (written “reputedly” by Bunno in 1100 B.C.) opens with the desultory action
of tired soldiers picking fern-shoots and the collective question: “When shall we get
18
90
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
sincerity as an evacuation of the self in order to commune with
the “inborn nature of others” and “the nature of material things.”
In other words, sincerity is a “talent” by which a speaker can take
on the character of the things he/she speaks of or passes over. Pound
translates “Tsze Tze’s Third Thesis” in the following way:
Only the most absolute sincerity under heaven can
bring the inborn talent to the full and empty the
chalice of the nature. He who can totally sweep clean
the chalice of himself can carry the inborn nature of
others to its fulfillment; getting to the bottom of the
natures of men, one can thence understand the nature
of material things, and this understanding of the nature
of things can aid the transforming and nutritive powers
of earth and heaven [ameliorate the quality of the grain,
for example] and raise man up to be a third partner
with heaven and earth.
(Confucius 175)19
Pound’s Confucian emphasis on “process” confounds the distinction
between subject and object in the act of poesis such that sincerity
is no longer a distinctly personal or private value but something
apparent in the pronomial and prepositional “drama” of prosodic
construction. In the terminology section of his “translation”
of Confucius, Pound describes the character for “Sincerity” as
“pictorially the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot
verbally. The right-hand half of this compound means: to perfect,
back to our country?” As the poems show, it is impossible to return to where one
began a journey, and one is more likely to encounter familiar forms as a series of
Whitmanesque strangers or estrangements.
19
Pound’s selection of Confucian texts were first published in 1928 and were based
on translations originally prepared by Ernest Fenollosa. He adds his own editorial notes
throughout the volume.
91
Exorcising Modernism
bring to focus” (24). As with Pound’s theorization of the ideogram,
two modes of representation are conflated: visual mimesis of an
ecological process (sunlight refracted, metaphorized as a lance)
indicates a precise verbal counterpoint (a “rest”). In Pound’s hands,
this Confucian concept becomes a justification for an ethics of
precision and radical continuity with “process.” One can find this
basic tenet in his translation of Tsze Sze’s first thesis: “You do not
depart from the process even for an instant; what you depart from
is not the process. Hence the man who keeps rein on himself
looks straight into his own heart at the things wherewith there is
no trifling; he attends seriously to things unheard” (101). To know
about the world, which includes having emotional responses to it,
is to participate in what the “open road” avails: “People do not
move in the process. Those who know, exceed.” Tsze Tse’s third
thesis phrases this paradoxical rest and extravagant consciousness
from within process as a self-evacuation in service of establishing
a continuity with “the nature of things.” This dialectic of rest and
actuality that exceeds the subject would be central to Zukofsky’s
and Oppen’s sense of composition, as one could actively cultivate,
through the form of a poem, a determinate relation between
a speaker and the material conditions that shore up their speech.
What Fenollosa’s speculations on English grammar in light
of Chinese characters and in turn Pound’s re-working of his
Confucian translations made possible for the later “Objectivists”
was a notion of sincerity as a system of relations instead of an
idea individuality. Throughout his pivotal essay on the Chinese
character, Fenollosa emphasizes the important relationality
throughout his influential essay on the Chinese character, going
so far as to claim that relations “are more real and more important
than the things which they relate.”20 A precise rendering of
“Relations are more real and more important than the things which they relate. The
forces which produce the branch­‍‑angles of an oak lay potent in the acorn. Similar
20
92
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
relations, for both Pound and Fenollosa, meant an attention to the
verbal “forces,” specifically transitive verbs, that communicated
the structure of the natural world and not just its verbal analogies
(Fenollosa 29).21 Poetic devices, specifically metaphors, did not
imply an evasion from the precise workings of the material world
but a materialization of “immaterial relations” that furnished
language and the natural world with inherent affinities.
Although Pound and Zukofsky treated sincerity as a matter
of historical accuracy and verbal condensation, their turn towards
a poetics of the processural also meant putting this precision at
work in a social context. Zukofsky writes of this contradiction in
Pound: “interest in the present, so that life, as Pound has said, may
not make mock of motion and humans not move as ossifications
(...). It follows that Pound has been both the isolated creator and
the worldly pamphleteer. To put the defences of his own being
in order, he has drafted himself into the defence of innovation
clarifying and making sincere the intelligence.” Zukofsky interprets
Pound’s “constant reinterpreting of processes becoming in himself
one continuous process” as the impetus behind his wide­‍‑ranging
dialects in The Cantos and personae in the earlier volumes. Each
persona or temporary vocabulary required an accurate rendering
of the relation between speech and historical situation. A sincere
intelligence was one that mediated “between speech and action” or
lines of resistance, half­‍‑curbing the out­‍‑pressing vitalities, govern the branching of
rivers and of nations. Thus a nerve, a wire, a roadway, and a clearing­‍‑house are only
varying channels which communication forces for itself. This is more than analogy, it
is identity of structure. Nature furnishes her own clues. Had the world not been full of
homologies, sympathies, and identities, thought would have been starved and language
chained to the obvious (...). The wealth of European speech grew, following slowly the
intricate maze of nature’s suggestions and affinities. Metaphor was piled upon metaphor
in quasi­‍‑geological strata” (Fenollosa 22–23).
21
Here is Fenollosa on transitive verbs: “Their power lies in their recognition of nature
as a vast storehouse of forces. We do not say in English that things seem, or appear, or
eventuated, or even that they are; but that they do. Will is the foundation of our speech.
We catch the Demi­‍‑urge in the act” (Fenollosa 29).
93
Exorcising Modernism
an actor and the cultural order he/she bristles against (Prepositions
69).22 In Zukofsky’s “Program: ‘Objectivist’ 1931,” he shifts
Pound’s (and Fenollosa’s) notion of precision from a “natural”
mimeticism and organic poesis to a historical fidelity – “accuracy
of detail” – achieved through a combination of musical balance
and optical intensification. As other commentators have pointed
out, he begins the “Program” with a mixed­‍‑metaphor of poetry
that includes both focalization (“bringing the rays from an object
to a focus”) and weaponization (“the thing which is aimed at”).
As an extension of each, poetry is the process and the goal, in the
sense that it is both a focalization of subjective investment (“Desire
for what is objectively perfect”) and a movement toward the
contemporaneous materials (“inextricably the direction of historical
and contemporary particulars”) (“An ‘Objectivist’ Program” 268).
Poetry is a way of historicizing desire, including how desire can be
mobilized for specific targets qualified as either allies or enemies.
And because language objectifies an ongoing process, sincerity
remains incipient, not yet objectified, and immanent to the kind of
worldly attunement Pound saw in poetic craft.
But Zukofsky doesn’t just echo Pound’s Confucian
formulation; he gives sincerity an ironic and historical slant. The
fact that such word combinations or “minor units” can be deemed
sincere and therefore cognitively suggestive of a possible totality
or perfection of rest (“objectification”) is an “ironic index of the
degradation of the power of the individual word in a culture”
(“Sincerity and Objectification” 274). The fact that one must cry
havoc in a small voice is not a heroic valorization of a minority
position or beleaguered political attitude but a comment on the
very status of cultural power to reshape existence, especially when
this reshaping is to be done by re‑asserting the strange facticity
22
This notion of a new medium “between speech and action” is actually quoted from
Pound’s comments on Lenin in the fourth issue of Exile published in 1928.
94
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
or music of a word. Zukofsky pictures the poem, as a totality-atrest, as non-violent ensemble: “the grouping of nouns so that they
partake of the quality of things being together without violence
to their individual intact natures” (Prepositions 13). When asked
about sincerity in an interview with L. S. Dembo more than
thirty years after the “Objectivist Program,” Zukofsky declared
his frustration with epistemology, precisely because it couldn’t
accommodate a notion of the word as a “physiological thing.”
What he remained invested in was mysterious objectivity of words
that thinking, and poetry, seems capable of preserving: “The theory
of knowledge becomes terribly dull to me unless somebody like
Wittgenstein, who really saw what the game was, writes about it.
Then it becomes very moving, because of the life, the fact, that
goes on in your head no matter how evaporated the body becomes”
(Zukofsky with Dembo 204).23 Sincerity would mean accounting
for the odd persistence of certain landscapes, images, or words
in situations where the precise character of those things seem
endangered, either by a failure of an individual or the failure of
a culture to recognize their truthfulness.
It is with Oppen where the poem becomes a standard of
truthfulness that “we” or “I” cannot possibly live up to yet,
strangely, seem capable of objectifying and becoming a part of
in speech. We can a glimmer of this in Oppen’s penchant for
Here is Zukofsky from the interview with Dembo on the physiology of words:
“To the human being with five senses. (...) (How many more is he going to get when
he goes up there beyond gravity? Probably lose them all.) Some senses are more
important to some people than to others. To the cook, I suppose taste and smell are
the most important; to the musician, hearing (the ear); to the poet, all the senses, but
chiefly, sight (the eye) – Pound said we live with certain landscapes. And because of the
eye’s movement, something is imparted to or through the physical movement of your
body and you express yourself as a voice (...). So much of the word is a physiological
thing. I know all of the linguists will say I’m crazy. In fact I think there’s a close
relationship between families of languages, in this physiological sense. Something must
have led the Greeks to say hudor and for us to say water. But the word is so much of
a physiological thing that its articulation, as against that of other words, will make an
‘object’” (Zukofsky with Dembo 205).
23
95
Exorcising Modernism
self­‍‑quotations, whereby past experiences and previous lines
from poems become the constitutive parts of a new, present-tense
experience of a place or social problem. Sincerity emerges as
a quality of revision instead of an assertion of authentic or accurate
presence. The most obvious example of this is Oppen’s recycling
of the sequence about (among other things) the interplay between
memory, language and urban form, “A Language of New York,”
into his most celebrated series, Of Being Numerous, in which prior
phrases are treated reworked as materials within another sequence.
In a lineated prose fragment that Oppen published in The Four
Zoas I (1974), Oppen redefines sincerity and objectification as
a process of revision:
...will
played out against the poem
relates, could relate to the
Objectivist Sincerity and Objectification! Stronger
I think more useful now than that objectivist
formulation.
The will and the poem.
AND the mystery of the “will”
(and) elsewhere To rid the poem of
impositions, false
impositions: to trust the content. To speak as clearly
as it can of TIME. A TIME
if word A must be next to word B, GET it
there.
This is what revision is
the Language is not a gift
(Selected Prose 45)
The act of revision took on a sort of ethical burden since building
a syntax also meant suffering the ramifications of speech. As
96
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
Michael Davidson has pointed out, one can see in looking over
Oppen’s drafts where he often edited each line down to its bare
minimum of syntactical elements in order to isolate certain
perceptual details, substantives or emotional turns (Ghostlier
Demarcations 64–69). What Oppen’s incessant self-revision
enables him to do is strip his own re‑purposed phrases and
borrowed speech of an aura of original intent and highlight how
the conviction voiced in a phrase can become a part of the “drift”
of other projects. In a passage in his daybook where he credits
William Carlos Williams for taking the movements of will as his
poetic measure, Oppen records this short fragment: “Eros – the
will – / Eros! drifts / In the ontological” (UCSD, 19.2.40).24 We can
see the implications of this if we return to the earlier quote from
“The Building of a Skyscraper”: “To suffer the things of the world /
And to speak them and himself out.” Displaying “moments of
conviction” involved voices in this constructive dialectic between
passionate experience and self-externalization.
What emerges through this piece-meal, disjunctive writing
process was the very halting, gnomic syntax that readers have
come to identify as Oppen’s paradigmatic style, the very syntax
that Oppen equates with sincerity itself. In a later Daybook, Oppen
wrote: “‘Forging a style,’ if one is sincere, is forging a syntax. We
recognize it as a syntax when we recognize it as sincere” (Selected
Prose 190). By shifting the measure of sincerity to syntactical
precision, the “accuracy” of an image is no longer measured by
its ability to demonstrate a historical totality at rest or provide
some crystallization of an aesthetic genius loci, but by its ability
to represent the partiality of any single conviction in relation
to another. As Oppen wrote to his friend Steven Schneider, who
On the same leaf, Oppen provides these definitions of Eros: “Eros, which of course
means love, would also mean desire, which would mean will, which would mean
vitality, the living as opposed to the inert. I do not mean to attempt an heroic inflection
in writing this.”
24
97
Exorcising Modernism
introduced him to the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy, “there is not will
before the will that can choose the content of the will.”25 There
is a sense that forging is an embedded or situated practice and
that any act of will is made amidst a series of prior orientations,
assertions and patterns of recognition. This changes our notion of
aesthetic judgment, precisely because the value or appearance of
a “style” is contingent upon what it develops in relation to. But
being part of an “honest conversation among people,” for Oppen,
is also like speaking through the freighted walls of a tenement
building. In a section which emerged out of his earlier writing
about urban life and history of New York, Oppen wrote: “Strange
that the youngest people I know / Live in the oldest buildings //
Scattered about the city / In the dark rooms / Of the past–” (NCP
177). Here, it seems that Oppen objectifies the uneven dialogue
between living bodies and the sedimented history of walls or
places. The section ends, after elliptically citing the first line of
Williams’s “To Elsie” (“The pure products of America–”), with the
mixed metaphor of finance and material struggle. These immigrant
children of the middle class are said to be “Investing” the “ancient
buildings” with their lives and jostling each other “In the half­
‍‑forgotten, that ponderous business. / This Chinese Wall” (NCP
177). This is not a poetics of assimilation but a way of clarifying
the “ponderous business” of negotiating limits to sociality.
“Dear Steven: I keep picking at this –. That you are disturbed over ‘the chromosomes’
so surprised me. If we are to speak of ethics, we must speak of the human will. And
the will is ‘given.’ Chromosomes or what you will, but there is no will before the will
which can choose the content of the will” (UCSD, 22.18.25). [In the same note Oppen
includes a draft of the poem “Time of Atrocity” which was later adapted as a part of Of
Being Numerous. In this same letter Oppen also expresses a faith in the ethical frame
of familial belonging over revolutionary action. When he later included the materials
from this draft, he would cut the opening line: “The will, the human will, // Which is all
that we have / Now in the helicopters the casual will // Is atrocious / Is it not. // To be
unable to accept / What happens” (UCSD, 22.19.72). The fear then is that one lacks
the preparedness to encounter this crisis, to witness it, and to be capable of adjusting
to how one is involved, personally, in particular atrocities.
25
98
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
Among the sedimented languages of a city, one is confronted
not simply by the alienation of one’s labors in the forms of products
or built landscapes but also in the form of the limited phrases we
have available to voice our most intimate memories, desires, or
affiliations. Nowhere is this dynamic of alienation and sincerity
better captured than in a draft of “A Language of New York,” which
would later become the raw material for Of Being Numerous:
How forget that?
How talk
Distantly of ‘the People’
Who are that force
Within the walls
Of cities
Wherein their cars
Echo like history
Down walled avenues
In which one cannot speak.
(UCSD, 20.17.64)
Abstractions of landscape or value did not just estrange life but also
become vehicles for shaping or propagating speech. To draw out the
ways in which these shelters also condition our forms of honesty,
Oppen doesn’t assume the mantle of sincere spokesperson for
“The People” but points instead to how the vehicles for individual
autonomy and social mobility in postwar consumer culture, like
money, cars, merely perpetuate these rarefied forms of speech.26
In his notebooks, Oppen compares the autonomous travel of the car to the money
form itself: “The automobile is a symbol of money – Not the other way round. The
26
99
Exorcising Modernism
The brevity of his line becomes mimetic of the kinds of historical
and spatial restrictions the lyric series is thematizing. In his
notebooks, Oppen describes the long­‍‑poem in particular as a form
constituted by “failed directions”: “to give an idea [of] where the
poem is [going] or means to go -- long poem and moreover it
breaks off at times, or even fails to achieve a [portion] it [attempted]
--- I have had to leave in those failed directions ---- because they
are part of what is achieved (...) on that basis I attempted to write
of NY.” (UCSD, 19.12.276). What New York seems to embody
as a language and a place is a problem of how one constructs
a mode of truthfulness when one cannot find the words, when
one’s life feels so deeply interrupted, distanced from others, yet
inevitably engaged with the shared material conditions that make
a common language necessary. In this last section, I want to address
this necessity Oppen locates in “talk” and how he shifts our notion
of how sincerity might be shared.
We Must Talk Now
Truth also is the pursuit of it:
Like happiness, and it will not stand.
Even the verse begins to eat away
In the acid. Pursuit, pursuit;
A wind moves a little,
Moving in a circle, very cold.
How shall we say?
gamblers: they are dealing with the very heart of the thing, with money, like a heart or
a brain operation” (UCSD, 19.3.74).
100
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
In ordinary discourse –
We must talk now. I am no longer sure of the words,
The clockwork of the world. What is inexplicable
Is the ‘preponderance of objects.’ The sky lights
Daily with that predominance
And we have become the present.
We must talk now. Fear
Is fear. But we abandon one another.
“Leviathan,” The Materials (NCP 89)
Populist lyricism would hardly be the first description that comes
to mind when we encounter Oppen’s often hermetic phrasings
and penchant for silences. Yet, in “The Mind’s Own Place,” the
essay where Oppen first began working out his relationship to the
Poundian image and sincerity, he describes his attention to actual
things as “populist” (35). This was a term he would pick up again
in the more syntactically granular lines of his late poem “Populist”
(published in Primitive (1978)): “over the flatlands poems piers
foolhardy / structures and the lives the ingenius / lives the winds”
(NCP 277). What is the agent of what or how the poem locates
“life” within existing structures are very much live questions in
this stretch of verse. There is in Oppen’s poetry a clear sense that
we might not have the words to substantiate a correspondence
between truth and an individual life or the social world to which
individuals belong. But this doesn’t keep him from treating lyric
voicing of as a precarious vehicle. As he wrote to his sister, June
Oppen Degnan, in September of 1963: “Humanity seems to me
fairly precarious – but the thing would still be there! Or so I feel
101
Exorcising Modernism
always; even my vocabulary is affected by that conviction, that
‘the Truth’ is not a pronouncement but a thing (...). Well, we talk”
(Selected Letters 89).27
We can see in “Leviathan” an instance of Oppen’s attempt
to link sincerity with the experience of precarity and truthfulness
with the instability of pursuit. The imperative to talk, like the
“pursuit” of truth, is of a piece with the broader necessity of using
poetry to exposure speakers and readers to the consequences
of cultural crisis. Writing again to June about his plans for his
second volume, This in Which, later in 1963 or early 1964, Oppen
described “Leviathan” as a kind of ars poetica of his role as poet:
“Tho I’ve said that Levithan [sic!] is my defense not of the work,
but of my role, still it is obvious that the poems arise from my own
need to write them. I do not know that they are of use. It is possible
that they contribute only to the process which is stripping people of
defenses (...). If you live to be very old, I think surely you will see
a crisis of culture, I mean of our whole culture, a way of thinking
and of feeling. In which case literature will exist, if it exists, as
a process of thought” (98–99). Out of the recursivity of thought,
the necessity for a contemporary speech emerges. Throughout
“Leviathan,” truthfulness seems to lie within a gulf between
explicability and actuality, language and measure, which is always
shifting its location and form. Developing a way to talk now and
be present to and as persons becomes exigent, but that exigency,
paradoxically, can only be expressed through a series of fears
and obstructions. What remains conspicuously absent from this
disastrous “clockwork of the world,” is not only a place to stand
27
Oppen emphasizes precarity again in “West,” a poem he included in his 1972
Seascape: Needle’s Eye, in relation to a poetics of veracity: “The rare poetic / Of
veracity that huge art whose geometric / Light seems not its own in that most dense
world West / and East / Have denied have hated have wandered in precariousness”
(NCP 215). Precariousness is here a condition of being honest about the fact that the
patterning light is not something the poem possesses or a speaker owns but rather
responds to.
102
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
but a way to guard that place through possessive or defensive
postures. The drama of Oppen’s sparse syntax in “Leviathan”
comes from the fact that the “whole man” of a “body politic”
seems perpetually unstable and the simplified, recursive, yet
sincere weighing of these “little words” (conjunctions, pronouns
and copular verbs) stand in for the social presence of persons or
a commonwealth in which “we” could actualize ourselves in the
common drama of talk. The questioning of sincerity – a process
Oppen likely took from his reading in Hei­degger – would then
link back to how poetry can voice the instability and absence of
a subject position, individual or collective, that might substantiate
a “common” discourse. If we understand aesthetic practice as not
just as a self­‍‑contained law but as a passionate appeal to others
to recognize or take up an experience we have had – what Cavell
calls the “passionate” character of utterance – the behest of
aesthetic “beauty” is shifted from a formal quality of an artwork
Cavell describes as the “intersubjective demand” of a speech act
situation (Cavell 185–192; Ngai 38–40).
In Oppen’s case, this “situation” is the lyric series in which
speaking “of” abandonment and drift and adjusting to the divergent
lives of a locality is as important as speaking one’s mind. As
we saw earlier, the ability to address others is also radically in
doubt, so we often encounter other lives through quotations, selfconscious acts of limitation, and citation of the ways in which the
infrastructure of a city, for example, links together disparate claims
on the history of a place. Unlike Fenollosa, Oppen doesn’t eschew
the value of the copular for the transitive verb.28 In fact, a sincere
For Fenollosa the work of poetry was to concretely and vividly convey “the
interactions of things” through “active words, each doing its utmost to show for the
motive and vital forces (...). We should try to preserve the metaphoric overtones. We
should beware of English grammar, its hard parts of speech, and its lazy satisfaction
with nouns and adjectives. We should seek and at least bear in mind the verbal undertone
of each noun. We should avoid ‘is’ and bring in a wealth of neglected English verbs”
(Fenollosa 28).
28
103
Exorcising Modernism
sociality seems to hinge on how the speaker becomes intimately
or passionately involved in the subtle shifts and linkings of “is” or
“are.” In his notebooks, Oppen describes this as his “tremendous
emotional response to even the slightest intuition of connection”
(UCSD, 19.12.269). Oppen means connection here in both the
formal and social senses, linking syntax with affective experience
just as he links sincerity with the “forging” of a phrase. In another
page in this same notebook, Oppen frames the “matter of syntax”
as a “matter of care for the purity and clarity of the materials”
(UCSD, 19.12.260). Here, we might think together Oppen’s
concern for the emotional mattering of syntax and Zukofsky’s
care for words as “physiological things” as ways to reconstruct
the material, embodied life that so many versions of sincerity refer
back to or assume to be at the center of social life.
Given the title, it is hard not to read “Leviathan” as a statement
about the relationship between truthfulness and political life. Oppen
is of course borrowing the same biblical figure that Hobbes borrows
to explain his early modern notion of sovereignty and political
representation (that would, in turn, serve as a foundational text
for more contemporary understandings of contract theory). For
Hobbes, the political animal, Man, is a crisis in motion: “life is but
a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part
within.” How do we recognize this animating principle? Hobbes
goes on to liken the bodily network of nerves, joints and blood
to the “Automata (engines that move themselves by springs and
wheels as doth a watch)” in which sovereignty is figured as the
“Artificial Soul” that gives “life and motion to the whole body.”
Art, Hobbes says, imitates this animation of wheeling limbs and
goes further than “the Natural” in creating a “great Leviathan
called a Common­‍‑Wealth, or State” (Leviathan 9). Political power,
like knowledge of the natural world, is formed out of a crisis of
representation. Hobbes of course would translate the Latin version
(nosce teipsum) of the Delphic aphorism of self­‍‑knowledge (“know
104
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
thyself”) into an act of self­‍‑textualization: “read thyself.” This
emphasis on the representational character of thoughts and passions
is not meant to “countenance, either the barbarous state of men in
power, towards their inferiors, or to encourage men of low degree,
to a saucy behavior toward their betters” but to encourage selfeducation about the “similitude of Passions” (Leviathan 10).29 For
Oppen, what exists as a representational burden is not the vested
sovereignty that animates otherwise disaggregated persons, but the
preponderance of actual objects, presented in the poem through the
interpersonal mediation of borrowed speech. The truth is in what
we say and the phrases we borrow and repeat, yet this truth also
moves and eats away at the signs we use to phrase memories and
convictions.
Where Rousseau could posit the irreducibility of individual
reason and Diderot the first‑person position of moral judgment,
there is a more fundamental doubt in the work of Oppen and other
“Objectivists” that sincere speech can model the reproduction
of a social contract through individuals. As Michael Davidson
has written of Oppen’s famous line: “Oppen qualifies the idea
that we must choose the social over the individual by stressing
that when we speak in the collective pronoun ‘We have chosen
the meaning / Of being numerous’ (NCP 166). That is, we have
chosen the story of sociality” (Outskirts of Form 7). Speaking
sincerely was a way of enacting a common problem of a lack
of a viable “public language” instead of a personal and political
29
Here is the full passage from the end of the Introduction to Leviathan: “But there
is another saying not of late understood, by which [men] might learn truly to read one
another, if they would take the pains; and that is, Nosce teipsum, Read thy self: which
was not meant, as it is now used, to countenance, either the barbarous state of men in
power, towards their inferiors; or to encourage men of low degree, to a saucy behavior
towards their betters; But to teach us, that for the similitude of the thoughts, and
Passions of one man, to the thoughts, and Passions of another, whosoever looketh into
himself, and considereth what he doth, when he does think, opine, reason, hope, feare,
&c, and upon what grounds” (10). Interestingly, the material basis of self-reflection
and empathetic response is the same for Hobbes.
105
Exorcising Modernism
mandate to perform a self-coherent subjectivity. What also seems
misunderstood in many readings of this passage is that the distance
between an “actuality” of existence Oppen trusted and a more
positive version of common sense – say the sensus communis
that Kant trusts aesthetic judgment rests upon – remains stark.
Oppen’s version of a sensus communus is defined largely by
the persistence of representational opacity, fear, alienation and
atrocity. Likewise, our common languages are freighted with the
failures of establishing a clear link between what the world tries
to be through “our” talk and the kinds of abstract personhood
guaranteed by political and economic liberalism. Oppen describes
this crisis in a draft of Section 26 from Of Being Numerous: “They
carry liberalism / to a conclusion / in suicide. / We want to defend /
Limitation / And do not know how” (NCP 177).
Although Oppen generalizes the “They” of liberalism (as
a sort of Hei­deggerian chatter of idle speech) in contrast to the
limited sociality of “We” in this revision, “they” has a definite
historical referent in a lengthier previous draft, which he titled “The
Poet’s Theatre” (referencing the New Bowery Theater in New York,
which put on one-act plays by LeRoi Jones, Frank O’Hara and
Diane Di Prima, among others). The passage that would go into
Of Being Numerous came from a longer draft of a poem entitled
“The Poet’s Theatre” in which Oppen extends this notion of the
boundaries of “our liberalism”: “The boundaries / Of our liberalism /
We want to say / ‘Common sense’ / And cannot. We stand on / That
denial / Of death that cleared the forests, / Cleared the forests”
(UCSD, 22.26.103). Oppen compares the loss of “our” ability
to phrase a present common sense (and not merely a quotation
of past speech) to the clear-cutting of forests. Failing to phrase
limitations to knowledge in speech is akin, for Oppen, to an active
denial of the death and ecological devastation contemporary life was
premised upon. Even if this is not a fair judgment of the projects
presented at the Poet’s Theatre – the one-act plays hardly represent
106
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
a robust “liberalism” that we would recognize today – the emphasis
on limitation as constitutive of speech is telling. Talking sincerely is
not a means of rendering one’s desire transparent or self-similarity
transparent to another, but a means of showing the loss of a common
ground. The implication of this loss, then, is that practicing an art
sincerely leads to a place or “course” of isolation. In what would
come to be the ninth section of Of Being Numerous, Oppen quotes
a question from Rachel Blau DuPlessis when she was a young
poet at Columbia University. Oppen re-works DuPlessis language
into a more explicit dialectic between the intensity of perception
and distance from other people. “I know” is less an assertion than
a consequence of this intensification among distances: “‘Whether,
as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance / From Them,
the people, does not also increase’ / I know, of course I know, I can
enter no other place” (NCP 167).30 The knowledge gleaned from
the making of poetry doesn’t enshrine a speaker or poet in a state
of self­‍‑understanding but is a process or “course” of subjecting one
to where and how thought happens, often elsewhere or otherwise.
Oppen draws out the paratactical “happening” of thought, speech
and person in the next couplet: “Yet I am one of those who from
nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what
has happened to me / Have made poetry” (NCP 167). Sincerity is
not a resolution of this distance between a subjectively intensive
seeing and “Them” but an expansion of what speaking, thinking,
30
In his interview with Dembo, Oppen writes of the province of this quotation: “Yes,
I quoted from a letter I received from a very young student at Columbia, Rachel Blau,
‘whether as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from them, the people,
does not also increase.’ It was a profound and painful question that I had asked myself
in her words. And that’s what you are asking me again, for all that I’ve written a whole
poem to establish, if I could, the concept of humanity, a concept without which we
can’t live. And yet I don’t know that poetry is not actually destructive for people (...).
It does lead to the growing isolation of the poet; there is no question in my mind about
it” (Oppen with Dembo 173).
107
Exorcising Modernism
and seeing involves us with. The survival of a public life in which
honest conversation is possible depends this.
Defenses of poetry, and literature more broadly, often emerge
in situations where the ability for poetry to establish a sense of
subjective and cultural continuity is in question. Allen Grossman,
for example, has claimed that the lyric form is born out of such
a crisis of communicability where speaking means the difference
between the continuity of culture or utter abandonment to fear,
despondency and the recurrence of atrocity.31 And if we accept
that poetry contemporary to such global atrocities as world war,
genocide and alienations of a pervasive free­‍‑market logic might
be based in a non-identity between word, thought and world, then
Oppen felt “we undertake something much more doubtful and
complex and something which makes much greater emotional
demands on emotional clarity! The fact is that ANY statement
we make becomes a declaration of faith, an emotional act.”32
Writing clearly meant acknowledging the possibility that the
world didn’t have the same “order of our ideas” and that the
function of “emotional clarity” might not be self-clarification
Grossman opens his essay “Hard Problems in Poetry, Especially Valuing,” with the
statement that “Poetry is the means of last recourse, the artistic form of communicative
action” (True-Love 15). What poetry can grant is “True-love, ‘the only worth all
granting,’” which “confers the power to transgress the threshold, however inscribed,
between existence­‍‑not­‍‑yet and the nunc stans: existence­‍‑just-now” (True-Love 18).
32
Here is the full quote from Oppen, which is written in his notebook as part of
a larger discussion of “A Language of New York”: “IF there is an existence which
corresponds to our ideas, which validates our ideas, that is, if ‘in the beginning was
the word,’ if it is objectively true that the world itself has the order of our ideas, then
there is no difficulty in words: they describe the world correctly. If it is NOT true,
then we undertake something much more doubtful and complex and something which
makes much greater emotional demands on emotional clarity! The fact is that ANY
statement we make becomes a declaration of faith, an emotional act.” He contrasts his
commitment to emotional clarity with T. S. Eliot’s work: “[Eliot’s] early work records
an aridity of disbelief – And the later work presents the world as it is experienced thru
an established and inherited faith. But it seems to me that the profound undertaking is
to describe the world, to grasp the world as most of us experience it, and as it will thru
the rest of history, I think, be experience” (UCSD, 19.12.253).
31
108
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
but the objectification of how these personal and collective
disasters develop through intimate speech acts. The poem is less
a stabilization of these conditions than a repeated imperative to find
common conditions for a sincere conversation, amidst our fears
and mutual abandonments. It is through a genealogy of sincerity
that Pound, Zukofsky and then Oppen rethink the aesthetic
demands of lyric construction in relationship to the “talk” of our
social worlds. To speak sincerely is to speak of a people without
a grounding sense of solidarity or the assurance of charitable
values. It is also to risk the exposure to the social assessment,
and possible revision, of our acts of emotional clarity as well as
the prospect that honesty might be something wholly divergent
from a verification of a moral or political order. Perhaps this is why
Oppen was compelled to define sincerity not as unification of style
and sentiment, but as the transitive, provisional forging of a style
out of a sense of being “homeless” or adrift in words. This is how
precarity might be revalued as a vulnerability to the inflection of
life not our own, particularly those that have been omitted or lost.
A special thanks to the Mandeville Special Collections at the
University of California, San Diego for their help with the George
Oppen Manuscript Collection.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot­‍‑Kentor.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970.
Altieri, Charles. “The Objectivist Tradition.” The Objectivist Nexus:
Essays in Cultural Poetics. Ed. Rachel Balue DuPlessis and
Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama
Press, 1999. 25–36.
109
Exorcising Modernism
Aristotle. Politics. Book 8, Part XII. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. MIT
Classics Internet Archives. Accessed December 12, 2014.
<http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.8.eight.html>.
Artaud, Antonin. “The Theater and Its Double.” Selected Writings.
Ed. Susan Sontag. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988.
Cavell, Stanley. Philosophy The Day After Tomorrow. Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2006.
Davidson, Michael. On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural
Poetics. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.
---. Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern American Poetry and the
Material World. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997.
Dembo, Lawrence Sanford. “Interview with George Oppen.”
Contemporary Literature 10.2 (1969): 159-77.
---. “Interview with Louis Zukofsky.” Contemporary Literature
10.2 (1969): 203–219.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau and Peter Quartermain. Introduction. The
Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Tuscaloosa:
The University of Alabama Press, 1999. 1–24.
Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for
Poetry. Ed. Ezra Pound. San Francisco: City Lights, 1968.
22–23.
Forbes, Deborah. Sincerity’s Shadow: Self-Consciousness in
British Romantic and Mid-Twentieth-Century American
Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Grossman, Allen. True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing.
Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2009.
Hatlen, Burton. “A Poetics of Marginality and Resistance: The
Objectivist Poets in Context.” The Objectivist Nexus: Essays
in Cultural Poetics. Ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter
Quartermain. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press,
1999. 37–55.
110
Christopher Patrick Miller | We Must Talk Now
Heller, Michael. Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of
George Oppen. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2012.
Hobbes. Leviathan. Ed. Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991.
Izenberg, Oren. Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social
Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Jay, Martin. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept
from Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley: University California
Press, 1986.
Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Nichols, Miriam. Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of
Outside. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010.
Oppen, George. New Collected Poems. Ed. Michael Davidson.
New York: New Directions, 2008.
---. Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers. Ed. Stephen Cope.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
---. Selected Letters of George Oppen. Ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1990.
Pound, Ezra. Personae: The Shorter Poems. Ed. Lea Baelcher and
A. Walton Litz. New York: New Directions, 1990.
---. Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The
Analects. New York: New Directions, 1951.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems
End. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968.
Tiffany, Daniel. Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance.
Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2009.
Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1972.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Harper: New York,
1929.
Williams, Bernard. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
111
Exorcising Modernism
Zukofsky, Louis. Prepositions: The Critical Essays of Louis
Zukofsky. Berkeley: University California Press, 1981.
---. “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the
Work of Charles Reznikoff,” Poetry 37.5 (1931): 272-289.
---. “An ‘Objectivist’ Program.” Poetry 37.5 (1931): 268–272.
112
David Bergman
Orality and Copia
Modernism as it developed into New Critical aesthetics reached
a number of dead-ends by the forties, but many of them can be
lumped together as the modernist reliance on viewing the poem
as essentially a visual text. The challenge to that conception of
the poem as a visual text is one of the elements that makes postwar poetry so disturbing especially for those whose responses
to poetry have been developed under the visual regime. Andrew
Welsh in his study Roots of Lyric argues that “A central concern of
modern poetry and poetics has been to re­‍‑explore and redefine the
ideas of ut pictura poesis.” For Welsh, “the sense of an image or
picture, the sense of intellectual patterning, and the sense of time
caught in space,” all these effects “dominated (...) the poetry of the
modern period.” Moreover, “They are, in fact, often formulated as
imperatives for that poetry” (67). It is just this imperative to see
the poem as visual text that Walter J. Ong fulminates against:
The New Critics have assimilated the verbal art work
to the visual object-world of texts rather than to the
113
Exorcising Modernism
oral-aural event­‍‑world. They have insisted that the
poem or other literary work be regarded as an object,
a “verbal icon.”
It is hard to know how this visual­‍‑tactile model of
a poem or other verbal creation could apply effectively
to an oral performance, which presumably could be
a true poem.
(160)
The New Critics cannot be describing “a true poem,” according
to Ong, since true poems are oral­‍‑aural events, not visual objects.
The New Critics have fallen into the fundamental error of
confusing categories – painting the loon’s call, plotting the map
of a brook’s babble. Ong presents a dichotomy – visual versus
oral – which although it has a certain heuristic and dramatic appeal,
is not especially accurate. It is a gross simplification to say that
the poets of the first half of the twentieth century are visual poets
while the poets of the second half are oral. The poetry of both parts
is concerned with the visual or oral dimensions of poetry, but the
balance between these elements shifted and Ong’s rather stark and
passionate argument is an historic part of this shift in emphasis.
Perhaps the most influential essay in American poetics in the
second half of the twentieth century is Charles Olson’s “Projective
Verse” (1950) which enacts the awkwardness of the transition from
a poem as visual object to the poem as oral performance. Olson
retains the language of objects by rather confusingly referring
to “speech [as] the ‘solid’ of verse.” “A poem – he continues –
has, by speech, solidity, everything in it can now be treated as
solids, objects, things” (56). Like Williams, he speaks of “the
machinery” by which a poem is made (51). Hardness, with all its
phallic connotations, is a virtue, and hence there is a good deal of
macho swagger in Olson’s poetics; the poet, for instance, is “the
Boss of all,” and the poem must avoid “[a]ny slackness” because it
114
David Bergman | Orality and Copia
would do away with “the push of the line” [Olson’s italics] (54-55).
Slackness weakens poetic thrust; it reduces “projective size” (60).
Poetic intercourse is mixed up with sexual intercourse. Like Pound’s
imagism, projectivism operates on a demanding economy of taut
self­‍‑control. Sprawling is like slackness, something to be avoided;
the poet must “stay inside himself,” for “if he stays inside himself,
if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger
force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will
give him secrets objects share” (60). The poet must become an
object so he can share the understanding of objects and, presumably,
produce poetic objects. Olson also has his own version of Eliot’s
impersonal theory of poetry which he calls objectism: “Objectism
is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual ego,
of the ‘subject’ and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which
western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature
of nature (...) and those other creations of nature” (58).
But although “Projective Verse” retains much of the
conceptual furniture of High Modernism, it places particular
emphasis on the oral­‍‑aural element of poetry. Olson takes Pound
to task for not going far enough in telling poets to compose with an
ear for “the musical phrase” (52). “Listening for the syllables must
be so constant and so scrupulous – Olson insists – the exaction
must be so complete, that the assurance of the ear is purchased at
the highest – 40 hours a day – price” (54). Olson uses the language
of economics, but instead of applying it to reducing the number of
words, he applies it to the training of the ear. The critic should be
able to exact from the poet perfect pitch. It’s not enough to write
according to the musical phrase, one must attend to every pitch
and pause, each grace note and trill.
Yet the orality that Olson demands of a poem cannot be
the primary orality of bardic performance. Whereas the earliest
poets, who lived before writing, needed regular meter and rhyme
as mnemonic devices, and whereas later poets needed pencil and
115
Exorcising Modernism
pen to crudely mark their more complicated metrics, twentieth
century poets finally have the technology that can free them from
the clutter of regular meter and produce an oral poetry whose more
complex and subtle rhythms are clearly marked. What has made
this revolution possible for Olson is the typewriter. Because of the
typewriter’s “rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet,
indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of
syllables” (57). “For the first time – Olson announces – [the poet
can] without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening
he has done to his own speech and indicate how he would want
anyone reading, silently or otherwise, to voice his work” (58). The
poets at mid­‍‑century, Olson informs his readers,
are composing as though not the eye but the ear
was to be its measurer, as though the intervals of its
composition could be so carefully put down as to be
precisely the interval of its registration. For the ear,
which once had the burden of memory to quicken it
(rime & regular cadence were its aids and have merely
lived on in print after the oral necessities were ended),
can now again, that the poet has this means, be the
threshold of projective verse.
(59)
At the heart of projectivism, then, is the belief that the poem should
develop a more subtle and complex musicality because it no longer
must rely on meter’s regularity to make poetry easy to remember.
The very exactitude of the visual technology allows the poem
to return to its oral origins, but freed of the need for meter to assist
memory. The printed text is viewed more like a musical score or
directions to a performance. That does not mean the poem exists
solely as performance, but that performance can be the ostensibly
silent performance in a reader’s head.
116
David Bergman | Orality and Copia
High Modernist poets were not very concerned about the
performance of poetry. According to Edward Field, they were
“above reading [their] poems well (...). Top poets like Wallace
Stevens and Auden mumbled their poems. In other words, it was
to be made clear to the audience that this wasn’t show business
but Serious Business. This was before Dylan Thomas came to the
U.S. and made readings a performance (his excuse being that he
was Welsh)” (Field 153). Hank Lazer, who is highly critical of the
ways in which poetry readings re-enforce “official verse culture,”
nevertheless believes that “At one time, perhaps from 1956 to 1976,
poetry readings on college campuses did have a revolutionary (or
at least disruptive) force (...). They were part of a process of inquiry
and exploration, for they were tied to a rejection of certain tenets
of high modernist poetry” (48).
When Yvor Winters comes to instruct poets how to read in
public, he sternly warns against “dramatic declamation” or making
the poem conversational since conversation is the “least rhythmical
of human utterances.” Instead he makes “a plea for a restrained but
formal chant, in which a sustained tone and movement will serve
as an impersonal but definite base for subtle variation” (84). He
does not want orality to reduce the “difficulty” of the modernist
poem. Post-war poetry has no equivalent to Ernest Fenollosa’s
The Chinese Character as Medium for Poetry. No essay in postwar poetry signals the move to orality in the way that Fenollosa
supported the move to imagism. Instead there were many books –
many of them now forgotten – that articulated the importance of
orality and marked a broad shift in poetics. Part of the reason
there is no Fenollosa of orality may be that the equivalent figure
died so young. Milman Parry was only 33 when he was killed
in an auto accident and he left far less than Fenollosa (whose
reams of notes and papers were preserved by his wife). From 1933
to 1935, Parry recorded Serbo­‍‑Croatian bards who performed in
areas so remote that they had been left untouched by writing. His
117
Exorcising Modernism
study of these oral epics gave him material from which to argue
for the oral base of the Homeric epics. Parry’s work remained
known only in scholarly circles until Albert B. Lord, one of Parry’s
students, published Singer of Tales in 1960. Lord’s work was
followed closely by Jack Goody whose Literacy in Traditional
Societies (1962) included a long article Goody wrote with Ian
Watt, outlining the effects of orality on communications. The work
on orality was supported by other books that are more associated
with the importance of technology in literate societies: Marshall
MacLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Walter J. Ong’s
pioneering Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958) and
Orality and Literacy (1982). There is no real difference between
these enterprises as Marshall McLuhan notes in the Prologue to his
The Gutenberg Galaxy: “The present volume is in many respects
complementary to The Singer of Tales by Albert B. Lord” (9).
George Economou’s “New Oral Poetry” of the sixties should
not be confused with Dana Gioia’s “New Oral Poetry” of forty years
later. Economou would hardly have embraced the poetry of James
Whitcomb Riley as Gioia does (Disappearing Ink 9). But both
Gioia and Economou would be happy to replace the ideogram as
the basic inspiration for poetic composition with the tape recorder.
Economou notes several changes in contemporary poetry
brought about by the emphasis on orality. First, the tape recorder
became an important instrument not only for preserving poetry,
but also as a part of poetic performances (658). Milman Parry
demonstrated the importance of the tape recorder to preserve
the performance of Serbo­‍‑Croation bards in the field of ethnomusicology. But the recording machinery also appears as central
to David Antin who tapes his “talk poems” as one of the stages in
their composition. To be sure, because “tape recording does not
record everything that the audience hears and sees or fails to hear
or see,” Antin goes back and edits, modifies and adds material for
the printed texts (Antin x).
118
David Bergman | Orality and Copia
Economou believes that one of the most important components
of oral presentation is the direct relationship between the speaker
and the audience. As Ong argues in an extraordinary passage in
The Barbarian Within, speech is “a sign of an interior condition,
indeed of that special interior focus or pitch of being which we
call life” (28). Unlike the reader who is in direct contact with the
inert page, the listener to an oral poem is in contact with the living
breath of a person, and this relationship charges the aural experience
with an intimacy and vitality not found in the reading experience.
The interiority, according to Ong, invades “others’ interiors” in
a “strangely magnetic action, which involves not so much one’s
going out to others as one’s drawing other interiors into the ambit
of one’s being” (28). But it is not merely the poet’s interiority that
is accentuated by oral performance but a feeling of communitas.
In addition to the physical embodiment of the poet and the
audience, and the intimacy and communality of their exchange, oral
poetry has critical values that are incompatible with the dogmas of
New Criticism. High Modernism, as we have noted, demands le mot
juste. Its efficiency is based on finding the right word – and only that
word – and it requires the author to keep revising until that word
is found. Readers, on their part, are required to examine the wellwrought poem repeatedly in order to understand it and to appreciate
its subtleties and exactitude. To the New Critical reader, the orallybased poem seems inexact, overly emotional and wordy. Since, as
Walter Ong observes, “oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is
uttered,” revision and re-examination – hallmarks of New Critical
author- and readership – are impossible, and since the oral poem
needs to repeat and simplify important details so that the audience
can take them in, it will appear to the New Critic repetitious and
obvious (39). For Ong, “sparsely linear or analytic thought and
speech [is] an artificial creation, structured by the technology of
writing” (40). The virtues of oral poetry have no place in New
Critical aesthetics. Instead of condensation, economy and reticence,
119
Exorcising Modernism
the oral poem celebrates “fluency, fulsomeness, volubility, what
rhetoricians call copia” (Ong 41). It is to copia that we now turn.
Copia is “rooted in oral discourse” (Cave 4). The good
storyteller is not one who strips a tale down to its essentials, but
one who is capable of spinning out a yarn for as long as it is
possible, to delight the listener in constant invention, to draw
the listener further and further in, to elaborate on the filigree of
detail so that the tale is hilarious, horrifying or wondrous. The oral
performance is not laconic. Copia is a Roman concept that “draws
into its semantic net connotations of military strength (pl copiae
‘forces’) and above all of eloquent speech (copia dicendi), while
retaining its connection with riches and a broad range of more
general notions.” (3) Its reappearance in American poetry after
World War II in many ways duplicates Rome’s imperial rise, for as
Cave points out, “That such a word was brought into prominence
might indeed be taken in itself as an indicator of the social and
economic priorities of Rome” (3).
Copia is a general term not attached to any particular trope
or figure. Copia is protean. “It suggests – according to Cave –
a rich many faceted discourse springing from a fertile mind and
powerfully affecting its recipients. At this level, its value lies
precisely in the broadness of its figurative register: it transcends
specific techniques and materials, pointing toward an ideal of
‘articulate energy,’ of speech in action” (5).
While copia is a quality that written texts enjoy – one can
think of the copia of Proust – it is not a requirement for its success.
In a written text, one can put something down once, and the reader
can return to check on it as needed. The written record is meant
to be consulted. But oral communication requires repetition so the
speaker can be reasonably certain that the listener has had a chance,
despite flagging attention or other interference, to understand what
has been said. And because oral communication requires such
a high degree of repetition, it is not effectively linear in the way
120
David Bergman | Orality and Copia
that written communication can be. It must loop back on itself.
Since the speaker must take more time to communicate orally than
in writing, the speaker who can fill those loops of language in
inventive, amusing, colorful ways is one that is more highly valued.
The person who can master copia has made an art out of a necessity.
Since copia is “rooted in oral discourse,” it operates under
the general rules of orality. In other words, it is “additive rather than
subordinative” (Cave 4) and “aggregative rather than analytical”
(Ong 37-8). We see this additive property of copia at work in Frank
O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter”:
One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life.
(112)
The poem takes in more and more; it starts with lines, becomes
a page, then many pages of “how terrible orange is / and life.” It
is as if orange were a magnet which can draw everything to it, and
one of the jokes in the poem is that even after writing twelve pages
about orange, O’Hara has yet to use the word. But as much as the
poem celebrates its fecundity, it is also defensive; O’Hara’s choice
of vocations is questioned as if there were something wrong in
being a poet, and given the resistance to copia, poets who employ
it are often on the ropes. Among the many reasons why copious
poets of the post­‍‑war era might be defensive is that since copia is
“aggregative rather than analytical,” it is subject to contradictions.
The oral poet works on his feet. As O’Hara writes in his campy
121
Exorcising Modernism
manifesto “Personism,” “I don’t have to make elaborately sounded
structures” such as the ones the New Critics praise, “You just go
on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with
a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it
up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep’” (xiii). A poetry that is
orally based operates on an aesthetic of imperfection rather than
equilibrium. It is willing to explore ideas wherever they may lead
rather than placing them against each other to produce an ironic
resolution. But this copious orality results in what David Antin
has called “a history of error” (154).
It is perhaps useful to consult Quintilian on copia’s
dependence on improvisation and inspiration, since he was the
one who first theorized the relationship between copia, speech and
writing. Copia as “eloquent speech” found its ultimate expression
in inspired improvised words. But Quintillian believed that
“extempore utterance (...) will merge as the ‘fruit’ of writing (and
reading)” (Cave 133) when performed in a moment of transport,
“the moment when discourse asserts its freedom to exercise
intrinsic powers” (127). According to Terence Cave, for Quintilian,
“the aleatory character of improvisation marks a detour in the
predictable paths of both theory and practice (...). [T]he extempore
moment is always, by definition, ‘ahead’; displacing the moment
of cogitatio, it constitutes an elusive present as the place, or time,
of license” (128). For Quintilian, then, copia is more than the
ability to produce eloquent speech copiously; it is a moment of
inspiration that goes ahead of or beyond the speaker’s or author’s
understanding or immediate preparation. It is a way of discovering
through speaking what one has to say. It is perhaps this capacity
of language to gush out without us knowing what we are saying
that is as disturbing as copia’s capacity to lead to error.
122
David Bergman | Orality and Copia
Works Cited
Antin, David. i never knew what time it was. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005.
Cave, Terence. The Cornucopia Text: Problems of Writing in the
French Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Economou, George. “Some Notes Toward Finding a View of the
New Oral Poetry.” boundary 2 3.3 1975: 653-663.
Field, Edward. A Frieze for a Temple of Love. Santa Rosa: Black
Sparrow, 1998.
Gioia, Dana. Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture.
Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2004.
Lazer, Hank. Opposing Poetries. Volume One: Issues and
Institutions. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1962.
O’Hara, Frank. The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Ed. Donald
Allen. New York: Knopf, 1974.
Olson, Charles. Human Universe and Other Essays. Ed. Donald
Allen. New York: Grove, 1967.
Ong, Walter J. The Barbarian Within and Other Fugitive Essays
and Studies. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
Welsh, Andrew. Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern
Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Winters, Yvor. The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises.
Chicago: Swallow, 1957.
123
Anna Warso
“But There is Another Method”:
John Berryman’s The Dream Songs
In a letter to Berryman from February 24, 1947, Charles Olson wrote:
That guy Pound!
We had it out again yesterday: “Damn! yr. generootion
must find its own...”
(...)
Sez he: now Berryman, 1 of 4, 5 serious.
Granted. Know work. Respect.
I have not opened ‘cause the Olson hand is little played
as yet. And I would lead, have any man lead, with his
work. Will now, though, Berryman can judge – book
(Melville etc.) “Call me Ishmael,” Reynal, out this
month, and poems coming up soon from Black Sun
Press.
So – for papa – this opener.1
John Berryman Papers (Mss 43), Literary Manuscripts Collection, University of
Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis. Box 29, Correspondence. Accessed in August 2009.
1
124
Anna Warso | “But There is Another Method”
Olson had begun to visit the Government Hospital for the Insane
in 1946. An account of those visits was later published as Olson
and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths and his study
of Herman Melville, discussing the influences, particularly
Shakespearian, in Moby Dick, appeared in 1947. Berryman visited
St Elizabeths as he worked on an introduction to Pound’s Selected
Poems, commissioned by New Directions, which was a work he
struggled with: “I finished the Pound introduction (three times
I finished it) & sent it off yesterday (...). Now I have a nightmare
month, one month, to finish Crane which is absolutely promised
for Christmas (...). Teaching bores me to the soul but it destroys
only two days. What I can’t stand is this long burden of Pound and
Crane” (We Dream of Honour 230). Ultimately, “The Poetry of
Ezra Pound” was not used in the selection and instead published
in 1949 by Partisan Review, then in 1976 in a posthumous
collection of Berryman’s essays, The Freedom of the Poet, and
recently included as an appendix next to T. S. Eliot’s “Introduction:
1928,” in Pound’s New Selected Poems and Translations, edited
by Richard Sieburth, who notes:
Overawed at having to compete with Eliot’s
authoritative introduction to the Faber Selected,
Berryman promptly blocked, turning his attention
to a cycle of love sonnets on the theme of adultery
(treason again) and sketching out his (very Poundian)
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (...). Berryman was
primarily responsible for the choice of the shorter
poems, which emphasized Pound’s early lyrics and
dramatic monologues, and some of the better known
Unless indicated otherwise, references to John Berryman’s correspondence and drafts
are meant as a reference to the materials hosted by the Literary Manuscripts Collection.
All quoted Songs referenced by number come from the 1993 Faber & Faber edition of
The Dream Songs.
125
Exorcising Modernism
Cantos, while Laughlin, a deeper student of the poem,
made sure that the more didactic and historical regions
of the epic (Confucian China, Renaissance Italy, and
the early American Republic) were drawn in. Pound
objected to Berryman’s initial selection from the Pisan
Cantos as a “hash” and “just a mess of snippets” –
which Laughlin recitified by “adding some fat
on the side of the bones.” But the long and scholarly
introduction that Berryman had written for the volume
(in which he argued that all of Pound’s poetry was
essentially autobiographical in inspiration, comparing
the Cantos to Wordsworth’s Prelude) was immediately
rejected by both publisher and poet: the former felt
that it was too specifically aimed at a “special high
brow audience,” while the latter dismissed Berryman’s
piece as “a lot of damn argument mostly with 2nd/
rate critics,” certainly “NOT a preface,” and certainly
“NOT whetting anyone’s appetite for the text.”
(357-358)
In the essay, Berryman mentions critics being “blinded, perhaps,
by the notion of ‘impersonality’ of the poet,” adding: “This
perverse and valuable doctrine, associated in our time with Eliot’s
name, was toyed with by Goethe and gets expression in Keats’s
insistence that the poet ‘has no identity – he is continually in, for,
and filling some other body.’ For certain poetry (the dramatic) it
is a piercing notion; for most other poetry, including Pound, it is
somewhat paradoxical, and may disfigure more than it enlightens”
(Freedom 264-265). What Berryman says about other authors will
often prove revealing with regard to his own work.
Olson’s letter leaves no doubt that both poets remained
much aware of the looming presences of their predecessors:
for Berryman things could not have been otherwise, taking into
126
Anna Warso | “But There is Another Method”
account his academic work and early influences. He will continue
to acknowledge and exorcise them in The Dream Songs, sometimes
openly (“I have moved to Dublin to have it out with you, / majestic
Shade” he writes addressing Yeats in Dream Song 312), sometimes
through his egalitarian poetic language and field of reference: in
Dream Song 1 “huffy Henry” replaces wrathful Achilles as the
hero of the unfolding survival epic, the Song’s melopoeic lines
include both the fluid “all the world like a woolen lover” and the
madly alliterated “the thought that they thought they would,” while
the syncopated opening verse primes the reader for the jazz-like
changeability of rhythm, and the closing two lines (“Hard on the
land wears the strong sea / and empty grows every bed”) distantly
echo Bessie Smith’s “Empty bed blues” with its tale of a deep sea
diver leaving behind an empty bed. Already the first part of what
Berryman referred to as a “long poem,” i.e. 77 Dream Songs, reveals
a search for a new poetic language and a new method: through
a thorough destabilization of meanings, re­‍‑figuration of binaries
such as authentic and fake, superficial and deep, high and low,
private and public, and an increasingly confessional tone, the Dream
Songs will signal a departure toward a kind of writing later held to be
symptomatic of the postmodern shift, which nonetheless provoked
a lot of critical dismay at the time of the volume’s publication.
David R. Slavitt’s 1964 reaction to 77 Dream Songs may be
viewed as representative of the early reception of Berryman’s poem,
framing it with the notions legitimacy, originality and sincerity,
crucial for contemporary – and earlier – discussions of identity, art
and language: “The task of the modern artist, as of the modern man
[was] to find something he can be sincere and serious in; something
he can mean” (Cavell 212). Commenting on Berryman’s use of
“dialect,” Slavitt observes: “he omits auxiliary verbs to talk echt
sprache with ‘de’ and ‘ol’ and ampersands” and asks: “Do Negroes
talk in ampersands?” (14). Interpreting Berryman’s restaging of
minstrelsy as a sincere, if misguided, attempt at racial mimicry,
127
Exorcising Modernism
Conarroe points to a certain amount of naiveté in Berryman’s
decision to use such “inflammatory” language “simply because as
a man of troubles and griefs he identifies with the black race, glibly
taking on its history as his own,” (104) and Bawer speaks of “the
ever-alienated Berryman [who] found it appropriate, upon starting
on The Dream Songs, to identify his alter ego with the most isolated
segment of American society, namely the black subculture” (25).
The actual problem of Henry’s language, however, lies in the fact
that what is usually recognized as a form of either black or “black”
vernacular, upon closer investigation reveals itself as a form that
is as much African American as it is anything else (cf. Davis’s
analysis of dialects in the poem), an observation also made by
Arpin who remarks that blackface minstrels never in fact “spoke
quite the way Henry speaks; indeed, before Berryman put the
words in his mouth, no one ever spoke like Henry” (76). In this
context, identification of what exactly is mimicked or referenced
throughout the Songs emerges as pertinent.
Dream Song 2, “Big Buttons, Cornets: the advance,” is the
first Song where the speaker takes on what the critics identify as
the blackface persona, the title itself containing a reference to Jim
Crow, who wore a vest with buttons made of five and ten-dollar
goldpieces. The opening stanza reads:
The jane is zoned! no nightspot here, no bar
there, no sweet freeway, and no premises
for business purposes,
no loiterers or needers. Henry are
baffled. Have ev’ybody head for Maine,
utility­‍‑man take a train?
Dream Song 2 relies on punning, typical of (although not only
of) the minstrel stage, with “jane” identified in Davis’s reading as
simply a woman, later referred to as “gal” – and if so, the gal is
128
Anna Warso | “But There is Another Method”
“zoned,” quite possibly stoned, drunk, mentally absent. “Zoned,”
however, carries also a reference to “zoning,” a term from the
sphere of urban planning, which would account for the following
catalogue of people and places not to be found in a decent
neighborhood. The reference to a “sweet freeway” may serve as
a good example of the minstrel double entendre. If “jane” is a girl
and she is intoxicated, it is her “sweet freeway” and “premises”
that cannot be used for “business purposes.” Alternatively (as
in “zoning”), the place is simply not designed to accommodate
Henry’s current needs.
Arrive a time when all coons lose dere grip,
but is he come? Le’s do a hoedown, gal,
one blue, one shuffle,
if them is all you seem to réquire. Strip,
ol banger, skip us we, sugar; so hang on
one chaste evening.
--- Sir Bones, or Galahad: astonishin
yo legal & yo good. Is you feel well?
Honey dusk do sprawl.
--- Hit’s hard. Kinged or thinged, though, fling & wing.
Poll­‍‑cats are coming, hurrah, hurray.
I votes in my hole.
Parts two and three of the Song rewrite the story of Henry’s sexual
and emotional frustration into a mock version of a medieval
romance: there is no white horse in this tale of courtship and
unfulfilled love, only an old “banger” driven along the “strip.”
Even though Mr Bones transforms into Sir Bones, or Sir Galahad
(renowned for his gallantry, purity and honest intentions), he
suffers a “hit” as his advances are rejected (“skip us we, sugar”)
and so it is going to be a “chaste evening” for Henry. The resulting
129
Exorcising Modernism
melancholy of Henry / Sir Bones is foreshadowed by the earlier
line, describing the slowly passing, honey­‍‑colored evening, that
nonetheless functions equally well as a crude pun: a direct address
or even an attempt to elicit a sexual encounter as Henry is trying
to talk the “honey” into “sprawling” her “dusk.” Similarly, the
“strip” references both a street and the act of stripping, while
“Hit’s hard” easily transforms into “It’s hard,” a thinly veiled
reference to erection. The third stanza culminates the Song’s
double signification: whether treated royally or completely
objectified (“kinged or thinged”), Henry will fling as poll­‍‑cats
(homophonically not very far from polkas, also a minstrel dance)
are “coming” (are about to be played). But the sudden appearance
of poll-cats brings an immediate thematic shift in the poem’s
rhyming slang, reminding Henry of his position in the “zoned”
world: “I votes in my hole” concludes the speaker (in an early draft
of the poem the last line read: “Vote in yr hole.”) The question of
“vote” calls perhaps for a further comment: in fact, while rarely
referring explicitly to the current political situation, several Dream
Songs voice a critical commentary on American democracy (see:
DS 23, DS 60, DS 72).
Calling for a reassessment of Berryman’s “black mask,” Peter
Maber points to what he identifies as the crucial difference between
the author of the Songs and his predecessors: “To the modernists
racial masks could be emblems of authenticity, ethnographic
signifiers of elemental, uncorrupted nature, but at the same time
they could be essentially opaque and artificial, suggesting an
indecipherable alterity” (139-140). For Pound, Eliot or Picasso, the
African‑American mask and what it was believed to stand for was
a tool of liberation from the oppressive stiffness of poetic and artistic
norm, paradoxically often confirming the power of the standard and
the hierarchy it introduces even when deviating from it (North 5758). Meanwhile, by repeatedly referencing the props and characters
of the minstrel convention, perhaps already through the gesture
130
Anna Warso | “But There is Another Method”
of dedicating Dream Song 2 to Thomas “Daddy” Rice, the white
“father” of blackface theater, Berryman’s poem directs attention
to the medium itself, and the layers of appropriation and misattribution
surrounding its constructions of whiteness and blackness.
Henry’s obsession and lack of luck with women is a recurrent
subject in the cycle: sexual frustration, sometimes conveyed with
puns, as in Dream Song 2, elsewhere manifests itself openly, as
in Dream Song 4, where it is channeled toward a comic relief:
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
And only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and crying
Like the disappointed Sir Galahad of Dream Song 2, outnumbered
by the enemy, Henry continues: “I advanced upon / (despairing)
my spumoni,” only to break out into a self-pitying, overly dramatic
cry a few seconds later (“Where did it all go wrong?”). However,
his angry mutter (“There ought to be a law against Henry”) is
met with a shrewd observation made by the unnamed companion:
“– Mr. Bones: there is.” This final remark, recalling solemnly one
of the tenets of Christianity (one is not to covet another’s wife),
introduces more than deadpan humor to the minstrel exchange:
in Dream Song 4 Henry the Pussycat is simultaneously (and
inevitably) both bestial and cultural. On the one hand, it seems
that only “the fact of her husband & four other people” prevents
him from giving in to the physical desire but on the other, he
ponders “falling” at the woman’s feet in an overly sentimental
gesture of courtly love. The poem’s ironic detachment is echoed
131
Exorcising Modernism
in Henry’s predisposition to “faint” and “cry,” while the alternative
of “springing on” the woman and “falling at her feet” expressed
through the non-committal “or” (positioning both options as
equally plausible) disturbs the hierarchy of “culture” and “nature.”
As in the 19th century minstrel shows, the hyper­‍‑sexualized
portrayal of the female Other in Dream Song 4 reveals more about
the desiring subject than the object of desire, while references
to the courtly romance emphasize both the intertextual character
of Berryman’s poetic experiment and the extent of the tradition
of female objectification in Western culture (performed under the
elevating ruse of sacred female virginity). The “low” diction of the
minstrel banter intertwined with the “high” diction of the courtly
romance only accentuates the parallels between them.
In Love and Theft Eric Lott speaks of blackface theatre as
a discourse on male sexuality where the fear of the female Other
coalescing with the fear of the black Other finds its expression
in the figure of a lustful blackface “wench” (26) whose body
belonged nonetheless to her male impersonator (female characters
in minstrel shows were played by men even after women were
allowed onto the 19th century stage) and it seems that this ongoing
process of reconfiguration and rewriting of identities is what
Berryman’s Dream Songs continue to expose: at first glance,
they rely on typical minstrel portrayal of the black and sexual
Other, but by drawing attention to and amplifying the element of
artifice, they have the potential to restage it with critical difference,
distorting traditional power relations. Upon closer investigation,
Dream Song 4, built upon popular clichés and binaries, can be
read as a commentary on the processes of cultural repression and
a testimony to the permutations of the artistic portrayal of the
desire for the Other. The sensual object of Henry’s lust has “black
hair, complexion Latin” – an echo of the dark locks and dusky skin
of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady or, in fact, of any of the numerous
stock archetypes of the threatening and yet tempting “dark”
132
Anna Warso | “But There is Another Method”
sexuality. In this case, “jeweled eyes” are modestly “downcast,”
the scene encapsulating Henry’s desire for the ethnically different
Other the dangerous sexuality of which is nonetheless properly
contained. Importantly, while Henry is motivated by the libidinal
urges typical of the blackened male on the minstrel stage, he
expresses them in a “non­‍‑dialectal” variety of English, breaking
one of the paradigms of minstrelsy where blackface end-men were
expected to use broken, incorrect, vernacular varieties strongly
contrasting with the polished, cultured, eloquent language of Mr.
Interlocutor. Meanwhile in Dream Song 4, with the exception of
the curiously accented “páprika” (which may be the speaker’s
attempt at a rendering of the woman’s pronunciation of the word,
whether actually heard, imagined or attributed to her), Sir Bones’s
idiom remains dialect­‍‑neutral, if strongly colloquial at times. What
Dream Song 4 may imply through its re-assignment of voices and
qualities associated with them is that both whiteness and blackness
(as well as femininity and masculinity) are culturally read (and
performed) through markers which are far from fixed – a direct
opposition to the essentialist view of identity typically associated
with and expressed on the traditional minstrel stage.
In a critique of the volume’s intertextuality Robert Bly writes:
“Anyone who has taught humanities for 30 years has an immense
store of useless details in his head (...). This is merely cultural junk
that accumulates in the attics of humanities professors, and Berryman
has decided to make use of all of it for poems – it’s a sort of garage
sale” (10E). The range and amount of cultural artifacts referenced
in the Songs may indeed seem overwhelming: in Dream Song 7 the
passage of time is marked with references to moving pictures: “the
race in Ben Hur, --The Lost World, with sound” and “‘The Prisoner
of Shark Island’ with Paul Muni”; Dream Song 244 is framed by
the graves of two cultural icons: Calamity Jane, who “lies very still”
positioned with “her soles to Wild Bill’s skull”; Dream Song 135
features two murderers, Richard Speck and Charles Whitman, whose
133
Exorcising Modernism
crimes were widely reported by the press and shocked the American
public in July and August of 1966. In Dream Song 50, opening with
a deadpan serious description of a soldier’s night on the frontlines
(“In a motion of night they massed nearer my post. / I hummed
a short blues”), the reader is presented with a catalogue of Henry’s
mismatched equipment: “grenades, the portable rack, the yellow
spout / of the antrax­‍‑ray,” and while the grenades and the portable
bed revoke the imagery of traditional war stories, stars that “go
out” and the anthrax ray as well as the reference to “this edge of
the galaxy” echo popular comic books and pulp stories of doom,
followed by “de roses of dawns & pearls of dusk, made up / by
some ol’ writer­‍‑man” (allusion, perhaps, to Homer’s “rosy-fingered
dawn”) and Dream Song 50 unfolds as a collage of tales of battle
and bravery used as background to illustrate Henry’s “troubles.” It
is references such as those that lead Bly to conclude:
Culture in Berryman’s poetry is extremely shallow;
his poems have cultural walls extremely thin, like the
walls in the new apartments. The point of culture is
not the ability to talk amusingly about many things but
to feel deeply about something (...). Berryman, who
had or has great gifts, ends up as a boring academic
poet. No amount of weird syntax can conceal that. In
short, readers interested in good contemporary poetry
should not go to this book.
(10–11E)
The last six lines of Dream Song 1 may be read as an echo of Bessie
Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues,” of Desdemona’s sorrowful song (Othello,
Act IV, Sc. 3.43: “A poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree / Her
hand on her bosom, her head on her knee / Sing willow, willow,
willow”) and of the balladeers of the minstrel show (whose first
part featured sentimental love songs, usually mourning an untimely
134
Anna Warso | “But There is Another Method”
death of a beautiful girl). Dream Song 366 restages a popular baseball
ballad by Ernest Thayer entitled “Casey at the Bat”:
--- Oh, I suffer from a strike,
& a strike & three balls: I stand up for much,
Wordsworth & that sort of thing.
The pitcher dreamed. He threw a hazy curve,
I took it in my stride & out I struck
In Thayer’s poem, Casey is an overconfident batter who, because
he is certain of his abilities, does not bother to swing the bat at
the first two pitches, however, at the last one, strikes out, ending
the game (and bringing great disappointment to everyone vesting
their hope in the player whose Wordsworthian egotistical sublime
leads to a failure). Meanwhile, the language of baseball begins
to resound with the tone of farewell, unraveling another layer of
the poem’s intertextuality:
Chilled in this Irish pub I wish my loves
well, well to strangers, well to all his friends,
seven or so in number,
I forgive my enemies, especially two,
races his heart, at so much magnanimity,
can it at all be true?
(...)
These Songs are not meant to be understood, you
understand.
They are only meant to terrify & comfort.
Lilac was found in his hand.
In Dream Song 366 Berryman alludes both to the Greek tragedy
(the Songs that Henry leaves behind are supposed to induce the
135
Exorcising Modernism
pleasure of pity and fear, “to terrify & comfort”) and, possibly,
to Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d.”
But what saves Dream Song 366 from naive sentimentality is
precisely the ostentatiousness of its intertextuality, paired with
incongruities of style and register (the pathos and the inversion
of “races his heart” and “out I striked,” the balladic first lines, the
melodic “hazy curve”) and contrasted with the “unpoetic” banter
of Henry’s friend and the self­‍‑parodic impulse (“I wish my loves /
well, well to strangers (...) so much magnanimity, / can it at all
be true?”), transforming Henry’s overly dramatic farewell into
a commentary on the poetic traditions of saying farewell.
Extensive citationality of the Songs deserves more attention
in the context of the theatrical models of eiron and alazon discussed
by Berryman in his study of Stephen Crane:
Specifically, early Greek comedy presented a contest
between the Alazon (Impostor) and the Eiron or
Ironical Man: after vauntings and pretensions, the
Alazon is routed by the man who affects to be a fool.
The Impostor pretends to be more than he is, the Ironist
pretends to be less. (...) Crane never rests. He is always
fighting the thing out with himself, for he contains
both Alazon and Eiron; and so of course, does the
reader (...). There is regularly an element of pathos,
therefore, in his ironic (oppositional) inspection, and
an element of irony in his pathos. A Crane creation,
or character, normally is pretentious and scared – the
human condition, fitted by the second for pathos, by
first for irony.
(Stephen Crane 278-79)
The struggle between alazon and eiron and the oscillation
between excess and understatement, filtered through the
136
Anna Warso | “But There is Another Method”
language of the minstrel stage, informs Berryman’s volume and
Henry’s personality. The alazon of Mr Bones (or Sir Bones) is
prone to amusingly bombastic claims and allows himself to be
carried away into pathos, self­‍‑pity and exaggerated emotionality.
Sometimes excess spans over a sequence of Songs, as at the
beginning of the Schwartzian sequence, sometimes it lasts only
a few lines: in the first stanza of Dream Song 36 Mr Bones’s overly
dramatic exclamation is immediately retorted by the companion’s
“Easy, easy, Mr Bones.” Similarly, in Dream Song 69, Henry’s
unbearable lust is cooled down by his commonsensical foil:
God, help Henry, who deserves it all
every least part of that infernal and unconscious
woman, and the pain.
(...)
--- Mr Bones, please.
The build-up of the first two stanzas in Dream Song 69 oscillates
between comedy (“the thought he puts / into that young woman /
would launch a national product / complete with TV spots &
skywriting / outlets in Bonn & Tokyo”) and seriousness: Henry calls
forth God and the Fates to witness his numbing desire and his undoing
(“before I pass from lust!”) and the eiron’s emphatic intervention is
an attempt to restore the balance of bathos and irony. In Dream Song
143, structured around the theme of the lost father­‍‑figure, eiron and
alazon speak simultaneously through the voice of Henry’s companion:
--- That’s enough of that, Mr Bones. Some lady you
make
Honour the burnt cork, be a vaudeville man,
I’ll sing you now a song
the like of whích may bring your heart to break:
he’s gone! and we don’t know where.
137
Exorcising Modernism
As the interlocutor chides Henry’s exaggerated displays of
mourning, his own expression becomes excessively pronounced,
taking over Henry’s theatrical manner, and the eiron becomes the
alazon. Both the robust exaggeration of the latter and the concise
understatement of the former are equally theatrical, drawing
attention to their own artifice.
Commenting on Berryman’s volume, Adrienne Rich recalls
a character from Godard’s Weekend who at one point exclaims:
“We’re not in a novel – we’re in a movie, and a movie is real
life!” to which Rich adds that The Dream Songs “aren’t literature,
they are poetry and the poetry is real life,” at once signaling and
dismantling the distinction between the given and the made: “we
are all experiencing this, those of us who want to write poetry and
not set-pieces,” writes Rich, describing American as an “amalgam
of ballad­‍‑idiom (ours via Appalachia), Shakespearian rag, Gerard
Manley Hopkins in a delirium of syntactical reversals, nigger
talk, blues talk, hip-talk engendered from both, Miltonic diction,
Calypso, bureaucratiana, pure blurted Anglo-Saxon” (128),
and naming two of her contemporaries who might have been
said to know “entirely what it is” (130). These were, according
to Rich, Bob Dylan and John Berryman. Around the same time
Karl Shapiro described Berryman as one of the “major poets of
the ex‑English language” (4) while four years earlier Richard
Slavitt wrote, comparing the author of the Songs to the earlier
generation of poets:
The difference is that when Mr. Eliot descended to the
colloquial (“We’re gonna sit here and drink the booze”)
he did so with gleeful distaste. Berryman’s use of the
voice is more like that of Ezra Pound (“Bi Hek! I been
all thru Italy / An’ ain’t never been stuck”). Berryman
has read and admired Pound enough to edit a volume
of Pound’s verse and apparently learn some of Pound’s
138
Anna Warso | “But There is Another Method”
despair of conventional styles. But the alternative is
the notion that vulgarity must be sincere because
refinement isn’t, and this affirmation, that the worst
must be the best because the best is suspect, is not
only ruinous but unnecessary. There is nothing in
Berryman’s material to drive him to such an extreme
of cultural poverty, and the conclusion must be that
he is simply slumming, an activity which now is
unfashionable and never was defensible.
(14)
Critical responses such as this (that have nonetheless contributed
to and solidified Berryman’s position on the American literary
scene) reveal a set of expectations regarding poetry and cultural
practice that rely on binaries such as profound and amusing,
original and copied, high and low. By emphatically positioning
both the speaker and the addressee in a position of heightened
“non­‍‑authenticity,” Berryman encourages an exploration of those
binaries, and in particular an exploration of the volatile relationship
between authenticity and speech, one leading through rooms
filled with mirrors and echoes where the authentic and sincere
are revealed as nothing more than a continuous restaging of an
idea of authentic and sincere. Dream Song 119 makes a reference
to Shadow and Act, a collection of essays where Ralph Ellison
discusses “act” as a defining American experience (54) – and this
seems to be also the truth of Henry’s act: it is a postulate of life as
theatre but one where there is no off­‍‑stage, where the subject is
the costume and everyone enacts an idea of themselves, a concept
developed further by confessional poetry.
139
Exorcising Modernism
Works Cited
Arpin, Gary Q. The Poetry of John Berryman. Port Washington,
New York and London: Kennikat Press, 1978.
Bawer, Bruce. “Dispossession, Dreams, Delusions: The Poetry
of John Berryman.” The New Criterion 8.4 (1989): 19-28.
Berryman, John. “The Poetry of Ezra Pound.” New Selected Poems
and Translations. Ed. Richard Sieburth. New York: New
Directions, 2010.
---. The Dream Songs. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1993.
---. We Dream of Honour. John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother.
Ed. Richard J. Kelly. New York and London: W. W. Norton
& Company, 1988.
---. Stephen Crane. London: Methuen & Co, 1950.
Bly, Robert. “‘A Garage Sale’ of Berryman’s Poetry.” Minneapolis
Tribune, 13 December 1970: 10E – 11E.
Cavell, Stanley. “Music Discomposed.” Must We Mean What We
Say? New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Connaroe, Joel. John Berryman: An Introduction to the Poetry.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Davis, Kathe. “‘Honey dusk do sprawl’: Does Black Minstrel
Dialect Obscure The Dream Songs?” Language and Style
18.1 (1985): 30- 45.
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage International,
1995.
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American
Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Maber, Peter. 2008. “‘So-called black’: Reassessing John
Berryman’s Blackface Minstrelsy.”
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture,
and Theory 64.4 (2008): 129-149.
140
Anna Warso | “But There is Another Method”
North, Michael. “The Dialect in/of Modernism: Pound and Eliot’s
Racial Masquerade.” American Literary History 4.1 (1992):
56-76.
Rich, Adrienne. “Living with Henry.” Berryman’s Understanding.
Ed. Harry Thomas. Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1988.
Sieburth, Richard. “Selecting Pound.” New Selected Poems and
Translations. New York: New Directions, 2010.
Shapiro, Karl. “Major Poets of the Ex­‍‑English Language.” Chicago
Tribune. Book World. 26 January 1969: 4.
Slavitt, David R. “Deep Sounding and Surface Noises.” Herald
Tribune. 10 May 1964: 14.
141
Nick Selby
Answering “Each in His Nature”:
Some Ways out of The Cantos
There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l’on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it
is smoothing?
There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!
Basil Bunting, “On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos” (132)
For Elizabeth Bishop and A. R. Ammons “nature” as it occurs
in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos – and, by extension, in modernism
more generally – is a ghost in need of exorcism. Not only is this
142
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
because the very fact of The Cantos looms over subsequent poets,
seemingly insurmountable – as Basil Bunting points out in the
poem I am using as an epigraph to this essay – but it is also because
the legacy of modernism they represent exerts such a powerful
sway over how these poets have come to think about the world
they depict and inhabit. For Bunting The Cantos are a discrete
world. They are massive, supremely unknowable and sublimely
indifferent (like Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”) to our foolish attentions.
Their “nature” is entirely other, uninhabitable. However, it is
with such a depiction of Pound’s poetic project that fault­‍‑lines
within modernist conceptions of “nature” begin to show and,
through them, the poetic edifice of The Cantos begins to crumble.
Bunting’s poem, that is, starts showing what it is that Bishop and
Ammons seek to exorcise in The Cantos. First, the nature of the
poem and the nature of reality are seen to be both incommensurate
and incommunicable. For, despite the mass and weight – their
“thingness” – ascribed to them by Bunting, The Cantos are absent
from his poem, named only in its title. The very fact of their matter
can be approached only through Bunting’s extended geological
metaphor. This, in turn, means that “nature” and culture are felt
to be inescapably divided. The fact of the Alps – “There are the
Alps” – and the fact of The Cantos may reflect each other, but
Pound’s poem stands apart from “nature,” the world of rocky
things “out there.” And second, this division is conditioned by
vertical tropes expressing a human desire to conquer “nature.” One
must, in Bunting’s view, either scale the heights of The Cantos
or wait for them to crumble down to earth. Such conditioning,
as Timothy Morton has pointed out, reaches back to Romantic
conceptions of “nature” but is inextricably bound‑into a modern
world­‍‑view.1 Facing such a modernist legacy, both Bishop and
The argument of Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature: Rethinking
Environmental Aesthetics hinges on the notion that the conception of “nature” developed
1
143
Exorcising Modernism
Ammons develop poetics that challenge the sorts of modernist
conceptions of “nature” made evident by Bunting’s poem. Their
answer to Pound’s legacy are poems that seek to exorcise “nature”
as the ghost­‍‑in-the-machine of modernity.
This essay traces such an exorcism by examining the ways
in which the respective poetics of Bishop and Ammons mark the
sorts of attitudes to “nature” that undergird The Cantos in particular,
and modernist American poetics more generally, as profoundly
troubled. The essay’s second half will focus especially on close
readings of Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” and Ammons’ “Corsons
Inlet.” And I will argue, throughout, that Bishop and Ammons find
ways out of Pound’s (and modernism’s) poetic legacy by exercising
an ecological poetics in which modernist conceptions of “nature”
(such as those revealed in Bunting’s poem) are disrupted. This is
because rather than presenting “nature” as something “over there”
whose heights might be scaled by human endeavour, their poetics
set out to explore a horizontal web of connections in which poem
and world, things and thinking, poet and reader are inextricably
entangled. Indeed, the sort of ecological poetics that we see
played out in “At the Fishhouses” and “Corsons Inlet” can be seen
to perform precisely the sort of “ungrounding” of the human which
“forces it back onto the ground (...) Earth,” and which – as Timothy
Morton argues – is necessary to “ecological thought” (Hyperobjects
18). These poems re-cast “nature” not as a transcendent reality
towards which a poem might gesture, but as the very ground in
which they work, an environment of “things” both human and
non­‍‑human extending across the poetic field in a relationship of
in Romantic thinking and furthered by modernity paradoxically stands in the way of
ecological thought. He notes (11) that Nature and a sense of place are a “retroactive
fantasy (...) determined by the corrosive effects of modernity.” The classic exposition
of the nature­‍‑culture divide is Raymond Williams in his Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society. See also Kate Soper What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the
non-Human.
144
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
consequences and contingencies. Both poets, that is, answer the
overarching scale and ambition of Pound’s “forty­‍‑year epic” via
a poetics of detailed observation and speculation that is bound
together in a web of intimate interrelations. For them, as we shall
see, the poem is an entangled environment. It is what Jane Bennett
describes as a “vibrant object” whose entanglements ground its
aesthetic operation in the earth rather than in conceptions of “nature”
that arise out of “the misty transcendentalism of modernity” that
Morton diagnoses as getting in the way of true ecological thinking
(Hyperobjects 20).2 What this essay asserts, then, is that it is precisely
from their poetic attempts to exorcise modernity (via Pound) that
Bishop and Ammons can be read as proto eco­‍‑poets.
Of course, it might be argued that The Cantos themselves
offer the sort of entangled poetic environment, detailed observation
and web of connections and contingencies that I am invoking when
I describe Bishop’s and Ammons’ response to Pound. This is very
much how Richard Caddel has read Pound’s epic. For Caddel, The
Cantos deliver “an experiential closeness to things” (145) which
contrasts markedly with a “Romantic sensibility to natural things”
which operates as “a kind of tourism” (141). Quite correctly Caddel
sees the power and inventiveness of Pound’s poetic project as resting
in its ability to give vibrant and detailed attention to “nature,” to the
things of the world as they become the things of his poem. Here, says
Caddel, is a poetic modelling for “an ecology” in that it is “based
on real observation” (143). In Caddel’s reading of it, Pound’s poem
is an “open-ended,” “interactive” and “dynamic system” and thus
provides a model for thinking through the “jump from nature poetry
to ecological poetry” (139). Such a description of The Cantos is
remarkably close to how I am seeking to characterise the poetics
See also Ecology Without Nature where Morton describes Nature as a “transcendental
principle” underpinning modern thought (5) and “a transcendental term in a material
mask” (14).
2
145
Exorcising Modernism
of Bishop and Ammons in their attempt to disentangle themselves
from the ghost of Pound. So, what is it – then – that allows us
to read their work as more properly ecological than that of Pound?
What is it that marks The Cantos as a less fully aware exercise
in ecological thinking than “At the Fishhouses” and “Corsons
Inlet”? At their heart, these questions recognise that modernist
conceptions of “nature” as they are at play in Pound’s poetics are
inadequate to the ecological thinking that I am arguing takes place
in the work of Bishop and Ammons (and it is for this reason that
I will refer to “nature” – in inverted commas – throughout this
essay). Answering such questions, therefore, propels my reading
of Bishop and Ammons towards an object­‍‑oriented poetics which
asserts a non-anthropomorphic understanding of “nature.” This
will require a more detailed discussion of Jane Bennett’s idea of
(poems as) vibrant objects. Before coming to that, though, I want
to think a little more about the modernist legacy that The Cantos
represent for Bishop and Ammons. To do this I will turn, first,
to Pound’s “Canto 13,” and then to a poem each by Bishop and
Ammons that, rather than taking the “long way round,” explicitly
face up to Pound’s legacy.
After the welter of Graeco-Roman myth, the babble of
various European voices and histories, and the starkly disjunctive
modernist poetics of fragmentation and disjunction that confront
us in the first dozen cantos, “Canto 13” announces a (poetic) realm
of natural order, political balance and aesthetic contemplation.
This canto signals the entry of Confucian thinking into Pound’s
epic project. It is delicate and poised, a still point in a turbulent
modernist world. It presents a contemplative moment of poetic
calm prior to the turbulent disorder and poetic rancour of the “Hell
Cantos” that immediately follow it and which bitterly excoriate
modern society. Yet, despite its apparent eschewal of modernity,
“Canto 13” still projects “nature” and the natural world through
a modernist lens. Indeed, “Canto 13” provides a useful measure
146
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
of Morton’s proposition that the idea of “nature” supports modern
thought by becoming “a transcendental term in a material mask”
(Ecology without Nature 14). The ground that “Canto 13” occupies
is one of Confucian instruction (which Pound patches together
from various sources in the Confucian Analects). Confucius –
“Kung” in the canto – discusses effective action and the arts of
leadership with his pupils. The pupils – quite literally – follow
Confucius as he walks through the landscape:
Kung walked
by the dynastic temple
and into the cedar grove,
and then out to the lower river,
And with him Khieu, Tchi,
and Tian the low speaking.
(Cantos 58)
Their various responses to Kung’s statement that “we are unknown”
offer military, political, religious and aesthetic solutions to the
apparent problem posed by their teacher. Tseu-lou would “put the
defences in order,” while Khieu would – as “lord of a province” –
“put it in better order than this is,” and Tchi would “prefer a small
mountain temple (...) with order in the observances, / with a suitable
performance of the ritual.” Different forms of order, that is, are
offered against the chaos of the unknown. But it is Tian’s “answer”
that provides the most sustained and complex response to Kung
and it is one that pitches aesthetic pleasure against the threat of
dispersal into unknowingness:
And Tian said, with his hand on the strings of his lute
The low sounds continuing
after his hand left the strings,
And the sound went up like smoke, under the leaves,
147
Exorcising Modernism
And he looked after the sound:
“The old swimming hole,
“And the boys flopping off the planks,
“Or sitting in the underbrush playing mandolins.”
(Cantos 58)
That Tian’s response to Kung is the lengthiest of all the pupils’
responses, riddlingly metaphorical, and couched in terms of music
is surely not unimportant as part of an epic project whose very title
refers to song and whose structure Pound conceived of musically.3
Indeed, George Kearns has pointed out that Canto 13’s “exposition”
of Confucianism operates in “the musical, not the rhetorical, sense”
(56). For Pound, it seems, the chaos of nature can be overcome
by the power of music, that is – extrapolating into the scheme of
The Cantos as a whole4 – by poetry. Or, at least, the poem offers
a space of retreat from the world; the “boys” may well remain
unknown but they do have the compensation of aesthetic pleasure.
And the calm poetic pleasures of the canto are ones associated with
being in the natural world: “flopping off (...) planks,” “sitting in
the underbrush” and noting, at the canto’s conclusion, how “The
blossoms of the apricot / blow from the east to the west / And I have
tried to keep them from falling” (60). What is being laid out here
is Pound’s conception of a rather special relationship between “the
poetic” and “the natural.” There are, however, problems with this
formulation. Through them, the crumbling of Pound’s depiction of
“nature” in his epic modernist project might be detected. For what
“Canto 13” proposes is an anthropocentric world­‍‑view grounded
in a stark division between “nature” and culture.
Pound described The Cantos as “rather like, or unlike, subject and response and
counter subject in fugue” in a letter to his father, 11 April, 1927. See Selected Letters
of Ezra Pound (210).
4
George Dekker in Sailing After Knowledge notes that “the implications of this canto
must be grasped if we are to understand the rest of the poem” (3).
3
148
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
This is made clear in the closing lines of the canto. The
resigned failure to arrest the falling of the apricot blossoms in these
lines suggests that the transmission of Confucian thought from
East to West will be piecemeal, at best, if not entirely thwarted.
What is interesting here is that “nature” and natural processes
(apricot blossom, the falling of leaves) become metaphors for
cultural processes. “Nature” is thus written over, transcended even
as it is announced in the text. We witness this, too, in the passage
detailing Tian’s response to Kung. His voice – he is described as
“low speaking” – and his music – “low sounds” – ascend into the
air “like smoke, under the leaves.” Such movement from depths
to heights effectively writes “nature” into a set of vertical (and thus
“transcendent”) relations. In such a hierarchy of relations, aesthetic
order overwrites “nature.” This all points to the fact that, in Pound’s
poetics (as in modernism more broadly), “nature” is read in such
a way that it becomes that which it is not, an aestheticised “other”
to human culture. The laying claim to “nature” for anthropocentric
purposes is at the heart of the canto and exposes the limitations of
how The Cantos treat the object world. This becomes even more
apparent when we consider the fact that Pound seems at particular
pains not to privilege Tian’s response to Kung over those of Tseulou, Khieu and Tchi. In Pound’s source – Confucian Analects,
Book 11, xxv, 1-8 – Confucius praises Tian above the others (who
he criticises for being self­‍‑serving). In the canto, however, we
are told that “Kung smiled upon all of them equally.” The reason
for this alteration lies in the subsequent lines of the canto and the
understanding of “nature” – a word that George Dekker notes
is a key word for “Canto 13” (6) – that they endorse. In these
lines Thseng­‍‑sie asks Kung which of his pupils “had answered
correctly” to which Kung responds: “‘They have all answered
correctly, / ‘That is to say, each in his nature’” (58). Here, then,
“nature” constitutes an internal, human, condition for Pound. It
is not seen as something standing on its own apart from human
149
Exorcising Modernism
intervention but as the means through which human action in the
world comes to be expressed and justified. To answer in such
a way – “each in his nature” – is thus to see such “nature” as
merely a foil to desires for cultural order, whether they be seen
in military, political, religious or aesthetic terms. In such a way,
Pound’s “nature” is both profoundly haunted by that of Emerson
and might be seen to lead to Pound’s totalitarian politics. It is
this intellectual legacy that both Bishop and Ammons interrogate
through their efforts to develop an ecologically nuanced poetics.
I turn now to two poems in which Bishop and Ammons
each explicitly answer Pound’s legacy. As well as demonstrating
Bishop’s and Ammons’s consciously felt need to face up to that
legacy, these poems also help define the terms of these poets’
respective eco­‍‑poetics – how they answer Pound, as it were,
“in their nature.”
First, Bishop’s “Visits to St Elizabeths” (1956) surveys
the wreckage of Pound’s life and of his shattered poetic project
after the second world war. She made several visits to Pound –
in 1949-1950 – at St Elizabeths hospital in Washington (where
he was incarcerated) while she worked as poetry consultant at
the Library of Congress. Her poem depicts him as a lost and
homeless figure, exiled in a poetic labyrinth modelled on the
nursery rhyme “The House that Jack Built.” Bishop’s Pound
is trapped in an increasingly complex, though repetitive and
bitterly ironic, poetic edifice of his own making. By turns Pound
is described as a “tragic,” “honoured” and “old, brave” man; as
the poem progresses he becomes “cranky,” “cruel” and “tedious”
and towards the end he becomes “the wretched man / that lies
in the house of Bedlam” (133-35). The poetic accretion that
spins out the rest of the poem from its opening declaration “This
is the house of Bedlam // This is the man / That lies in the
house of Bedlam” affords Bishop one way out of the disaster of
Pound’s politics. This is because her poetic form, building one
150
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
more line into each new stanza, makes very real the sense of
connectedness which Pound’s poetics tragically misses. Bishop’s
poem repeatedly reminds us, in the phrase that closes each stanza
(the “man / that lies in the house of Bedlam”), that Pound’s poetic
edifice is built on “lies.” In this way her poem serves, among
other things, as an indictment of the failures of modernism. If
her poem points to the modern world we inhabit (“This is the
time / of the tragic man”) it also figures such times through the
building of an insane asylum, with Pound the monster at the
heart of this modern labyrinth. For, as Guy Davenport has so
exquisitely shown, the myth of the Cretan labyrinth runs through
modernism and is very plausibly the origin of the rhyme “The
House that Jack Built” (45-60).
By writing Pound into the entanglements of this nursery
rhyme, Bishop’s point seems to be that no poem – no poet –
can ever be entirely innocent in its description of, and relation
to, the object world. The poetic house that Pound built – The
Cantos – fails, ultimately, for Bishop because Pound’s epic
desire to build a poetic republic renders the world mysterious.
The world is flattened by books (another form of transcending
the “natural”) only to be subject, in the next stanzas of the poem,
to the frustrated enquiries of a “boy that pats the floor” into the
state of that world. These enquiries are phenomenological ones,
grounded in the boy’s senses of sight and feeling. But they are ones
that cannot be answered in Pound’s poetics. They also expose one
of the conditions of modernity, namely its treating of the things of
the world as objects subject to the Daedalian ingenuity by which
humans transform that world into a dwelling place (of wooden
boards, walls and a door, all – presumably – made from “natural”
objects transformed through human technologies): “This is the
boy that pats the floor / to see if the world is there, is flat, / (...) /
These are the years and the walls and the door / that shut on a boy
that pats the floor / to feel if the world is there and flat” (134).
151
Exorcising Modernism
Here we can see that the grounds of Bishop’s response to Pound
are ecological ones; her poetry is concerned with questions of
home and how to describe the world in which we find ourselves.
In this she distinguishes herself from the cultural edifice – the
poetic house that Pound built – of modernity in which “nature”
is subsumed by human endeavours and failures. Her poetics is
thus – properly – ecological in the attention it gives to οίκος –
home – to the object world and our inhabitation of it. And it is this,
I argue, that allows us to trace what Bonnie Costello has described
as Bishop’s “major temperamental shift (...) from the poetry of
high modernism on which her imagination was bred” (92).
Second, we witness the poetic heave of such a shift in the
poem that opens Ammons’s Collected Poems. First published in
1951, “So I said I am Ezra” directly faces up to the poetic legacy of
The Cantos (1). Like Bishop’s “Visits to St Elizabeths,” Ammons’s
poem writes Pound into a web of poetic connections, into an epic
project that sees him finally stranded and voiceless, a homeless
exile. “So I said I am Ezra” acts out a deft poetic ventriloquism. It
follows Pound in its imagery and mythic resonance, but answers
him by attending to the ecological implications of the poetic
environment through which the The Cantos operate in their
opening moments. Like “Canto 1,” which begins with “And”
(“And then went down to the ship”) and closes with the connective
phrase “So that,” Ammons’s poem opens as already connected
to the environment of entangled myth, history and poetry from
which it emerges. Both poems take place on a windy shoreline,
with Ammons’s “voice of the surf (...) oceanward” echoing
Pound’s “winds from sternward.” And both seek to raise ghostly
voices. However, where The Cantos begin with the ritual by which
Odysseus calls up the spirits of the dead to facilitate his eventual
return home, Ammons’s poem seeks to exorcise the ghosts of
modernity that are raised by Pound’s poetic digging into mythic
shorelines:
152
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
So I said I am Ezra
and the wind whipped my throat
gaming for the sounds of my voice
I listened to the wind
go over my head and up into the night
Turning to the sea I said
I am Ezra
but there were no echoes from the waves
The words were swallowed up
in the voice of the surf
or leaping over the swells
lost themselves oceanward
(1)
Here it is not simply the voice, but the very bodily experience
of giving voice to something and of naming oneself that is
subject to dissolution by – and into – the forces of “nature.” The
contrast with the propitiatory rite with which The Cantos open
is thus heavily marked; whereas, in “Canto 1,” Odysseus’s dead
companion Elpenor desires to be remembered in the inscription
on his tomb – “A man of no fortune, and with a name to come”
(4) – the words of Ammons’s Ezra are “swallowed up / in the voice
of the surf” and his name is lost to the wind. “Nature” cannot be
coerced here into a mythic pattern of loss and return (one of the
controlling tropes of Pound’s epic project). Indeed, the violence
of “the wind whipped my throat” coupled with the disdainfully
playful “gaming for the sounds of my voice” renders the external
world implacable and unresponsive (“there were no echoes from
the waves”) at the scale of human concerns.
This is not to say, though, that Ammons’s poem merely turns
“nature” into an intractable force, much like Bunting’s earlier
characterisation of The Cantos. That would be – simply – to return
153
Exorcising Modernism
to views of “nature” as sublimely transcendent, the sort of
metaphysical foil for aesthetic endeavour – as Morton has shown –
that I am arguing Ammons seeks to challenge. So, although
Ammons stages, at the outset of his poetic career, the threat to his
poetics of being swallowed up by its modernist precursors by
taking on the name of Ezra in this poem, he also finds a means of
absolving his poetics from such a threat through the reading of
“nature” that the poem develops. We witness this in the poem’s
attention to tropes of echoing. Not only does the poem echo
“Canto 1” (and The Cantos more broadly) as we have seen, but
its tone, imagery and setting also echo Pound’s early imagist poem
“The Return” as well as H.D.’s “Hermes of the Ways” in that
Ammons’s “whipped my throat” recalls the wind­‍‑swept “coarse,
salt-crusted grass / (...) / [that] whips round my ankles” in H.D.’s
poem (38). The “arid plain” and “handful of dust” of Eliot’s The
Waste Land are also echoed in Ammons’s description of “sheets of
sand” that are “ripped” and thrown across the dunes by the wind.
In these examples, Ammons’s voice emerges from modernism’s
poetic echo chamber only to be subsumed into a seemingly mythic
environment of half­‍‑heard prophecy (the Biblical Ezra), drowned
voices (like Eliot’s Phlebas, lost to the “sea swell”) and a halfworld of sea “swells,” wind and mist (with Ammons’s startling
“seamists” signalling this swallowing of one thing into another).
Here, poetry itself occupies – indeed mediates, like Hermes, like
Homer’s Tiresias – a space between the quotidian and the divine.
And what is acted out in such a space is a human drama in which
“nature” is both transcendent and destructive: the wind “[goes]
over my head and up into the night”; there are “no echoes from
the waves”; words are “swallowed up,” “leaping over the swells /
lost”; and the speaker walks “over the bleached and broken fields”
[emphasis added]. The sharp separation, here, between objectworld and poetic-world is one, I argue, through which modernism
operates by privileging the human over the natural.
154
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
“So I Said I am Ezra” is not, however, content to rest on such
a separation. As the poem proceeds, its words become entangled
within the environment they describe, rather than seeking
to transcend it. This gives the poem a bodily force and vibrancy:
The words (...)
lost themselves oceanward
Over the bleached and broken fields
I moved my feet and turning from the wind
that ripped sheets of sand
from the beach and threw them
like seamists across the dunes
swayed as if the wind were taking me away
and said
I am Ezra
(1)
Rather than seeking aesthetic compensation by raising ghosts –
voices from the mythic past – to counter the loss of voice and
identity from which it is generated, the poem sees such loss as
a measure of its capacity to enact a proper sense of being-in-theworld. As a result, the poem’s human subject and “nature” as
the object of the poem’s attention become tangled together, with
Ammons’s poetic form expressly working to blur the division
between objective and subjective realities. Words are therefore
“lost (...) oceanward / Over the (...) fields” so that their dispersal
into the wind (and into the poem) underscores the fact that the
grammatically suspended subject in the following line – “I moved
my feet” – is also conditioned by the phrase “Over the bleached
and broken fields.” The actions of the wind and of the subject in
the wind are further complicated and entwined together in the
lines that follow where the speaker’s active movement in “turning
from the wind” gives way to his passive “sway[ing]” in the wind,
155
Exorcising Modernism
as though it “were taking [him] away.” These lines bracket three
other lines in which the wind’s power to enact such a taking away
of agency is signalled by the muscular verbs “ripped” and “threw”
(which in turn recall, again, many of the poems in H.D.’s Sea
Garden collection), and by the image of sand scattered “across
the dunes” by the wind. And at this point it is no longer clear who
or what is speaking. Both wind and speaker are so enmeshed
now that both of them could be construed as the subject of the
verb “said.” This impression is strengthened by the line break,
raising the question “Is it the poem’s speaker or the wind that
now speaks?” When heard here the phrase “I am Ezra” which
echoes throughout the poem is therefore either a defiant attempt
on the part of the poem’s speaker to re­‍‑assert his identity, or it is
the point at which that identity is snatched away by the wind, with
the poem’s voice now subject to the power and echoing mimicry
of the natural world.
And it is in this way that the poem exorcises the modernist
ghosts that are conjured up by the echoing invocation of its opening
word: “So.” For Ammons, what follows – or answers – modernity,
then, is a “fall[ing] out of being” rather than a ventriloquised
repetition of one of its key voices. In realising this, Ammons’s
poetics is released into engaging the object world as it is, rather
than reading it as an archetypal landscape onto which are written
human struggles. However much we may think it does, the natural
world does not reflect – echo – us. In recognition of this, the poem’s
closing lines, noticeably, do not seek dominance over “nature,”
rather they describe its speaker: “Ezra (...) splash[ing] among
the windy oats / that clutch the dunes / of unremembered seas”
[emphasis added]. Such “amongstness” is crucial, therefore, to the
poem’s negotiation of modernity (and, as we will see, to Ammons’s
development and deployment of an ecologically aware poetics) as
it marks the poem’s engagement with, and entanglement within,
“nature.” Whereas his modernist precursors write themselves away
156
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
from “nature,” Ammons seeks a poetics that immerses him in it.
The seas at the poem’s close are “unremembered,” that is, because
the poem now seeks to engage a world unmediated by echoes of
myth, past experience or previous poets. For the poem to “clutch
the dunes” in this way is to offer a new approach to the real in
which poem and speaking voice are participants in “nature” rather
than means of controlling it (via ancient ritual or poetic mastery).
What Ammons realises in this opening poem of his first collection,
then, is that he must answer Pound in his own poetic “nature” and
that to do this his poetics must acknowledge its own entanglement
within a play of forces that extend beyond just the cultural, the
human. A poem is not, for Ammons, therefore, merely a model
of the natural world (a sort of metaphorical ground into which
one might dig so as to release redemptive ghosts), but an integral
component of it. This poetic thought – which is, of its nature, an
ecological thought – brings us to Jane Bennett’s discussion of
vibrant objects, and to her notion that a poem’s affective force
rests in its acknowledgement of its condition as a vital participant
in the object world.
According to Jane Bennett “things” have “force,” they act
upon us – aesthetically, politically, ethically – because their material
nature is affective, or “vibrant.” We do not face, that is, a universe
of inert matter, but one in which human and non-human alike are
“actants” engaged and entangled together in everyday, earthly
existence (Vibrant Matter 8-10). Her assertion of “thing‑power”
or the “force of things” entails a shift of focus (which entails, in
itself, a shift away from modernist modes of thinking) from “the
language of epistemology to that of ontology” (3). This shift from
epistemology to ontology is, of course, central to Brian McHale’s
classic formulation of the differences between modernism and
postmodernism (McHale 10-11). I am not, however, simply arguing
that by exorcising Pound’s ghost Bishop and Ammons merely enter
the “postmodern.” Although much postmodern thinking is useful
157
Exorcising Modernism
to the sort of ecological thought that leads from an object-oriented
poetics, not only does postmodernism’s relativisation of values –
or “correlationism” (as Morton puts it) – rest on anthropocentric
views of “nature,” but it also rejects the idea that there can be
any reality outside of the textual (Hyperobjects 9). What I am
asserting is that this has profound consequences for thinking about
how Bishop and Ammons respond to their modernist legacy. Their
poetic negotiations with Pound, that is, furnish them with a new
poetics of reality, one which approaches the “force of things”
and consequently feels “nature” differently from their modernist
forefather. Theirs becomes a vibrant poetics. And it is precisely
the attention of such an object­‍‑oriented poetics to the nature of
reality, to that “irreducibly strange dimension of matter, an outside,” that marks it as nonanthropocentric (Vibrant Matter 2-3).
It exorcises modernism by privileging investigations of “being in
the world” rather than ones of knowledge about the world. Indeed,
what Bennett describes in her intellectual project as a shift “from
a focus on an elusive recalcitrance hovering between immanence
and transcendence (the absolute) to an active, earthy, not-quitehuman capaciousness (vibrant matter)” (Vibrant Matter 3) serves
well to describe the terms in which I am approaching a reading
of Bishop and Ammons after Pound.
Bennett’s opposition, here, between ideas of “the absolute”
and of “vibrant matter” points up a problem with Pound’s
modernist project that Bishop and Ammons, as I have started
to show, seek to answer. On the one hand, The Cantos provide
only a “model,” as Caddel has it, of the jump from “nature poetry
to ecological poetry.” “Nature,” as we have seen in the example
of “Canto 13,” operates throughout The Cantos as a transcendent
idea about the world that, moreover, conditions Pound’s thinking
about human-nonhuman relations. In effect, and to borrow Wallace
Stevens’s phrase, The Cantos deliver “ideas about the thing” rather
than “the thing itself” (534). This means that “nature” as it is
158
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
described by The Cantos is – as we shall see – withdrawn from the
object through which it is observed or realised. As object oriented
thinkers such as Morton, Bennett and Graham Harman have
argued, such a withdrawal (Bennett’s sense of the “recalcitrance”
of things) plagues modernist thinking.5 On the other hand, this
sort of withdrawal from its objects leads The Cantos to privilege
tropes of verticality over ones of horizontality. This is because
Pound’s epic project – indeed the poetics of modernism for which
it is a model – reaches after the absolute by reading the world
of things (“nature” itself) as a means of achieving visionary
transcendence (or mythic depth). As Pound noted, The Cantos
are an attempt to “bust thru from [the] quotidien [sic!] into [the]
‘divine’” (Selected Letters 210). By emphasising vertical tropes
in this way, Pound’s poetics hierarchizes his relation to the world
of objects and places the human at its centre. Curiously, then, The
Cantos – despite claims for them as the model for a modernist
poetics – are steeped in Romantic understandings of “nature”
(as transcendent, other, ultimately unknowable) that are both
anthropocentric and profoundly “American,” and which – Morton
has argued – preclude ecological thinking.6
In contrast to this, Bishop’s and Ammons’s poetics both
explore the gap between the things of their poems and the things
of the world, and emphasise horizontal relations. Rather than
seeking to read “through” things toward some transcendental truth
about the world, their poetry explores the relations that inhere
amongst and between the things of the world. And such things
include the poem and the poet; cultural objects do not – that is –
stand apart from natural ones. Such an object oriented poetics has
important political and aesthetic consequences, as Jane Bennett’s
Morton, Hyperobjects 11-15, 56-8, 76; Bennett Vibrant Matter 1, 50; Harman, ToolBeing 129-32.
6
In The Ecological Thought Morton writes that “What we call Nature is monstrous
and mutating, strangely strange all the way down and all the way through” (61).
5
159
Exorcising Modernism
work demonstrates. The horizontalising of object relations (quite
apart from undercutting discourses of modernity, as Bruno Latour
has pointed out7) is part and parcel of Bishop’s and Ammons’s
ecological poetics. Bennett has noted that “to begin to experience
the relationship between persons and other materialities more
horizontally, is to take a step toward a more ecological sensibility”
(Vibrant Matter 10). What this entails for Bishop and Ammons,
then, is not just to get past Pound’s politics (the instrumentalizing
brutalities that led to his advocacy of fascism) but also to move
towards a more properly ecological sense of poem itself as an
affective – “vibrant” – object within a field of entangled relations
to the world. Their poetry is thus neither distinct nor different from
the environment in which it finds itself an (aesthetic) actant. As
I hope to demonstrate further, theirs is a poetry that, in Bennett’s
words, “can help us feel more of the liveliness of (...) things and
reveal more of the threads of connection binding our fate to theirs”
(“Systems and Things” 232).
I want now to pick up two aspects of such object­‍‑oriented
poetics by considering Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” and Ammons’s
“Corsons Inlet.” As discussed above both of these aspects arise
from the assertion that the object world remains recalcitrantly
withdrawn from us. Though this sense of withdrawal might seem
to account for modernity’s attempt to repair a sense of alienation
and loss in its dealings with the world, my argument is that this is
not the case in Bishop and Ammons. And this is precisely because
their poetics takes place in a world of entangled relationships rather
than by standing outside of the world in order to describe it. For
them, alienation is a condition of Being to be explored rather than
a symptom of modernity to be conquered. First, then, I will argue
that Bishop’s attention to vertical and horizontal tropes in “At the
See Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern on the notion of horizontalisation
as a function of “Humanism Redistributed” (136-38).
7
160
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
Fishhouses” allows her to read against the epic instrumentality
of The Cantos. For Bishop, home (however contested) rests in
a poetic play of horizontalised relations. In this sense, as we shall
see, οίκος is at the ecological heart of her poetic economy. And,
second, I argue that “Corsons Inlet” does not present itself as
a poetic modelling of “nature.” Rather, it is a participant in it.
Poetic observation and speculation in Ammons’s poem, then, is
active – bodily, a walk – and it raises questions of scale, scope
and line because its concern is to determine what part of “nature”
a poem inhabits rather than to bracket off “nature” by poetic
description. My readings of “At the Fishhouses” and “Corsons
Inlet” proceed, then, as means of exemplifying and developing an
argument that Bishop and Ammons find ways out of The Cantos by
reading against the grain of modernist tropes of “nature.” Both of
these poems, that is, might be seen as attempts to assert, or at least
explore, the sort of vibrancy and connectedness between poetry
and the object world it encounters that is pointed up by Bennett.
Indeed, both poems are grounded on the assumption that a poem is
not an environment distinct from that environment in which it finds
itself and which we might call “nature.” In this respect their poetics
work to repair the gap between word and world which sustains
modernity’s poetics of loss and which is played out in The Cantos.
But this is not simply to reiterate claims for Bishop and Ammons as
“nature” poets. Their work does not merely describe a world “out
there” that is inescapably “other,” a transcendent realm reached
after but never brought under human control, rather it engages
that world as the dwelling point of their poetry. Seeing themselves
standing within nature, within a field of vibrant objects that includes
poet, poem and the “things” of the world all acting together, allows
them to delineate the terms of an ecological poetics, a means of
feeling the (poetic) textures of the ecological thought.
To start with Bishop. “At the Fishhouses,” despite its
seemingly observational offhandedness (at least in its first half),
161
Exorcising Modernism
is an exploration of the gap – and consequent play – between
knowledge and experience. It is set in Nova Scotia and details
Bishop’s return to a fishing town remembered from her childhood.
Though it is a poem generated out of the play of memory, loss
and nostalgia, its attention to how we – how poetry manages
to – front the world distinguishes it from the “stance towards
reality” encountered in modernist poetry such as Pound’s Pisan
Cantos. Like many of Bishop’s other major poems, it teases out
the conditions of being-in-the­‍‑world through minutely detailed
attention to the things of that world. The close observation that
characterises this poem is Bishop’s means of drawing us into her
experiencing of the world. It is in this sense, then, that “At the
Fishhouses” exceeds claims that are usually made for Bishop as
a “nature poet.”8 We see this in the poem’s opening lines where
the encounter between the world’s conditions and the conditional
nature of our being-in-the­‍‑world is played out in Bishop’s careful
poetic setting down of the fishermen within her descriptive
environment:
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
(64)
Thomas Travisano describes “At the Fishhouses” as “perhaps [Bishop’s] finest
nature lyric” (98); Bonnie Costello sees Bishop as “absorbing [Marianne] Moore’s
own sensibility [of] defining nature as art” (43); Jeffrey Thomson links Bishop and
Moore as “nature poets” concerned with ideas of “loss” (154).
8
162
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
In these opening lines we are gradually enfolded into the poetic
environment, spun into it through the carefully paced observation.
As Lorrie Goldensohn has noted, though Bishop’s poems “behave
at first sight as if they were simple description,” their “insist[ence]
on fact and thingishness” renders them skeptical about “the usual
species barrier between the fantastic and the real” (1‑2). Here,
Bishop’s keen eye draws us into a curious set of object relations
where the world – “nature” – is both familiar and strangely
withdrawn. According to Scott Knickerbocker, her “close,
careful description reveals the world’s strangeness” (58). The
consequences of this are revealing in terms of her temperamental
shift away from modernism. Unlike Pound’s underscoring of
what he takes to be a fundamental divide between the human and
nonhuman world, revealed most tellingly in some of the much
celebrated lyric passages of The Pisan Cantos, Bishop’s poetics
takes such strangeness to be the condition of experiencing the
world, not a barrier to it. For Pound, an infant wasp building a nest
brings hope of a redemptive spring renewal as it “carr[ies] our
news / (...) to them that dwell under the earth” (Cantos 547). As
with Odysseus’s summoning of ghosts at the start of The Cantos,
“nature” is here a mere conduit for human news, a mythic channel
between living and dead. For Bishop, spring is cold (indeed, “At
the Fishhouses” appears in her collection A Cold Spring) and
her poem confronts a resolutely hostile environment, a strange
“Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / element bearable to no
mortal.” The poem’s emphasis upon elemental forces – the ocean’s
unknowability – contrasts markedly with Pound’s recourse to myth
as a source of cultural renewal.
By engaging the “world’s strangeness” and exploring the
“species barrier” between the world and our perception of it, “At
the Fishhouses” sets out key terms within Bishop’s ecological
poetics. This is because the problem with the object world –
its withdrawal – becomes precisely the domain of her poetic
163
Exorcising Modernism
investigations. For her a poem can never be the object of its
enquiry. Yet she builds her poetics upon an attempt to observe
and record the world in such detail and nuance that the poem’s
experiencing of the world renders us closer to the condition(s)
of that world. In this respect she approaches ecological thinking,
by developing a poetic economy where dwelling on the nature
of the world – things and our affective relationship with them –
necessitates an attentive dwelling in the world. This develops as
the poem proceeds and is integral to its structure. Understated as
they are, then, the dialogues that structure this poem – between
land and sea; poet and fisherman; past and present; poet and seal;
experience and knowledge – are Bishop’s means of testing the
contingencies and entanglements that shape our sense of our place
in the world. The conditions of our being-in-the­‍‑world spin out,
that is, from the opening conditional clause of the poem. From
the start, the poem carefully, though in a quietly unannounced
manner, introduces its major concern, namely what it means to find
ourselves immersed in an inhospitable – cold – object world. By
starting with the conditional phrase “Although it is...” followed by
the relational “down by one,” the poem brings us news of a poetic
landscape in which human actions and our being­‍‑in-the-world are
already intricately entwined, conditional upon each other.
This, of course, is signalled by the old man’s work of
mending his nets, more obliquely by the fact that his “shuttle”
is “worn and polished,” and by the figurative economy that the
poem thus sets in train. Anne Stevenson has pointed out that it
is a poem “on the subject of living, and making a living,” and
this is undoubtedly correct, but the poem’s work is also to render
that living a withdrawn, impersonal force, much like the “it”
which we are told in the first line is “cold” (34). For the poem
to do this, it must present its objects as standing­‍‑in for something
which they are not, for it is in the act of standing­‍‑in that we might
detect the emergence of the poem’s – and poetry’s – affective
164
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
economy. Immersed in the setting of “gloaming” strangeness,
actors, actions and objects become hazily indistinct with the
divisions between them “almost invisible.” The fisherman is –
by virtue of the indefinite article, “an old man,” used to describe
him – an impersonal and vaguely representative figure for an
industry in decline. Consequently, his actions in the world (he is
“netting”) blur into the stuff of that world (“his net”) which itself
seems to spread into the oncoming “dark purple­‍‑brown” of the
evening. This blurring of verb and noun, action and thing, marks
the world’s recalcitrance as it does the description – or, more
properly, presentation – of the “worn and polished” condition of
the fisherman’s shuttle. In such a setting, making a living exposes
us to the erosive conditions of living in the world. But the poem’s
negotiation of the harsh conditions of fact and thingishness can
be based only in a poetic withdrawal from those conditions,
presenting them through the image of the fisherman’s shuttle or,
later, of his “black old knife / the blade of which is almost worn
away” (65). For this reason, the poet, too, at this point, is curiously
withdrawn from the scene, marking her experience of it via the
diffident possessive pronoun “one’s”: “it makes one’s nose run
and one’s eyes water.” Here the poet is passive in the face of the
sensory onslaught of the world, the overbearing smell of fish.
Hardly a moment of sublimity in the face of nature, the poet’s
involuntary act is intimate and bodily – it amounts to weeping –
and thus indicates the affective relations between poem and world
that is traced by the poem’s ecological thought. This line, in turn,
echoes the earlier use of the word “one” where we are told the
setting for the scene is “by one of the fishhouses.” Singular, but
non-specific, this setting gestures towards the intimate strangeness
of object relations that the poem explores.
The following lines of the poem continue this exploration.
Human endeavour in the world is now contrasted with a sense of
the spread of “nature” that constitutes that world through a contrast
165
Exorcising Modernism
between verticals and horizontals. We may have noticed already
that the fisherman sits “down by one of the fishhouses” (reminding
us, perhaps, of the downward trajectory of Pound’s house­‍‑building
wasp), and the description of the fishhouses itself is dominated
by vertical tropes:
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
(64)
While these “houses,” with their “peaked roofs” and “gables,”
are associated with the domestic, with dwelling in the world,
they also result from human exploitation of natural resources.
As “storehouses,” figures of the fishing industry, they serve
a larger economy. Embedded in the vertical imagery here – and
signalled further in the neatly functional “cleated gangplanks,”
“storerooms” and the ordered procession of “wheelbarrows (...)
up and down” – is man’s dominance over “nature.” While this
can be read back into the vertical imagery that dominates Pound’s
dealings with the natural world in the Pisan Cantos – the “smell
of mint under the tentflaps” and the “grass or whatever here under
the tentflaps” in “Canto 74” (442, 460); the changing number of
birds high up on various wires that recurs throughout “Canto 79”;
or the “infant wasp” that has “descended, / from mud on the tent
roof to Tellus” and the “mint” that “springs up again” in “Canto
83” (547) – Bishop’s view of “nature” departs from Pound’s in
subsequent lines of the poem, where such dominance over “nature”
is complicated by a growing sense of poetry’s involvement –
horizontal entanglement – within it.
Just as earlier the encroaching evening spreads into the
poetic landscape, the sea is now a horizontal force that spreads
166
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
across the texture of the poetic surface. As the poem’s new visual
horizon, the sea colours the things of Bishop’s attention ghostly
silver, diminishing their particularity under the spread and spill
of a translucent liquidity:
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
(64)
Such a sense of spreading relations among and between things is
as much aural as it is visual, and is witnessed in the procession
of “s” sounds in the first and second lines above that spread
throughout this passage, as though the spread of “silverness”
that is described here is the condition of the poem’s affective
energies. Bishop’s poetics, that is, becomes attentive to its own
play in the process of things that her poem observes and acts upon.
This is apparent, too, in the later detail of “layers of beautiful
herring scales” (64) that (like the spreading silver light covering
everything in the lines above) have “plastered” “fishtubs,”
“wheelbarrows” and the fisherman’s “vest” and “thumb” with
“creamy iridescent coats of mail” (64). In such moments the poem
explores its own status as a reflective surface – it glitters with
detail, yet is oddly defensive and impenetrable, like armour. It is
also oddly domestic, as the plastering of surfaces by these fish
scales imitates the action of plastering walls to make a house
fit for habitation. The poem asserts a set of horizontal relations
between itself and the object world; its poetics is one that extends
across and between the vibrant objects it presents, drawing human
and non­‍‑human together into the “net” of connections and actions
167
Exorcising Modernism
that constitutes “nature.”9 Increasingly, then, such a sense of
the spread of surfaces across the poem’s visual horizon means
that it enacts what Bonnie Costello has described as Bishop’s
replacement of “the vertical sublime with her own horizontal
accent” (10). The consequence of this is that as the poem proceeds
it seeks more insistently to question what the real cost of living
is. It goes beyond, that is, Anne Stevenson’s characterisation of
it as a poem about making a living. But it does this in resonantly
poetic terms, helping, therefore, to establish ways in which the
poetic itself might provide means for a proper approach to and
encounter with the (natural) world.
The turning point of the poem hinges on the interplay of
vertical and horizontal axes:
Down at the water’s edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.
(65)
This moment seems purely observational, yet it is one that shifts
the poem’s focus from a descriptive encounter with the things of
the world – poetic colours, sounds and, notably, the fisherman who
the poet recognises “was a friend of my grandfather” (64) – in its
first half, and onto an exploration, in its second half, of the texture
of our knowledge and experience of being in and of “nature.”
The poem’s horizontal accent allows it to test the extent to which
See Morton’s Ecological Thought which – throughout – elucidates further this
imagery of the net and “thinks through the mesh of life forms” (18) to explain our
sense of entangled relationship to the object world we inhabit.
9
168
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
human intervention – or, as we see later, immersion – in the world
determines such knowledge, much as such intervention determines
(from the felling of trees, to the need for easy access to the sea for
fishing boats) the fact that the “silver / tree trunks” here have – with
deliberation and care – been laid horizontally on the stones. If these
horizontal tree trunks facilitate the entry of boats into the water, they
also precipitate the poem’s entry into a consideration of how we
come to know the world we inhabit. With the poem itself another
such intervention in the world, this sort of figurative manoeuvre
becomes a necessary condition of our sense of being-in-the­‍‑world
in that it allows us to feel the force of things as they act upon us,
those “threads of connection” Bennett has noted, “binding our fate
to theirs” (“Systems and Things” 232). This is not to say, though,
that the world becomes – via the poem – immediately discoverable.
Objects, and our knowledge of the object­‍‑world, remain withdrawn
from us. Yet this, poetry asserts, is our ontological condition, the
intimate strangeness that allows an approach to the natural world. The
horizontalised object­‍‑relations that the poem’s figurative economy
discovers are the grounds of its ecological critique of modernity’s
propensity to subsume “nature” by turning it to metaphysical ends.
Thus, David Kalstone misreads “At the Fishhouses” when he claims
it “accumulates the sense of an artistry beyond the human” (57).
Rather than simply endowing “nature” with a mysterious otherness
so as “to win some authority over it” – Kalstone’s point about
this poem – my argument is that the poem’s recognition (which
is an ecological one) is that beyondness is our element. It is our
condition of being-in-the­‍‑world because it is what we share – as
actants, vibrant objects – with the rest of nature. The natural world,
spreading across the poem’s field of perception much as the tree
trunks are laid “across the gray stones,” therefore retains a sense of
intractable otherness. The poem now turns its attention to the ocean
water, which it describes as “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, /
element bearable to no mortal” (65), as a figure for “nature.”
169
Exorcising Modernism
However, this sweeping generalisation about the water being
“bearable to no mortal” is tempered immediately by the poet’s
realisation that non-human animals, “fish” and “seals,” can live
in it. This realisation sparks the poet’s memory of her encounter
with “one seal particularly” that appeared in the water “evening
after evening” and was “curious about me” (65). She recalls how
she “used to sing him Baptist hymns,” because “He was interested
in music: / like me a believer in total immersion” (65). A joke, yes,
but this anecdote also points up the poem’s theme of exploring our
immersion in “nature” and its ecological recognition that rather than
us simply looking out from an anthropocentric position at a world
“beyond the human,” that world, equally, looks back at us. The seal,
we are told, “stood up in the water and regarded me / steadily” (65).
Looking back across the horizontal surface dark water, then, the
seal’s gaze traces the threads of connection between poem and object
world, marking both as affective agents within it. And at this point,
the poem’s steady gaze – Bishop’s famous eye for observational
detail – shifts from the real world to one of speculation:
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would
burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire...
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
(65-66)
Here, the affective power of the object-world over us is seen
to depend upon our imagination of that world. What we make of
it, how we touch and taste it, results as much from the condition of
our poetic knowledge about the world as it does from our actual –
bodily – experience of it. Once again, our immersion in this poetic
170
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
environment is facilitated by conditional clauses (“if you should...”;
“as if the water”; “If you tasted”), thus underscoring Bishop’s
point that the condition of our being­‍‑in-the-world is a poetic one.
From here we move to the poem’s final image in which the sea,
and its ever expanding dark horizon (already a metaphor for our
entangled relations to the natural world), becomes a metaphor for
“knowledge”: “It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark,
salt, clear, moving, utterly free” (66). The ecological recognition
of “At the Fishhouses” is that proper knowledge of the world
draws from our immersive involvement in the world. This is both
an imaginative condition and one that is ongoing and affective –
“moving” – conditional, that is, upon a poetics of being-in-the­
‍‑world. That it is, we are told, “drawn from the cold hard mouth /
of the world” (66) is especially telling as this image draws together
senses of the poem as that which draws – depicts – the stuff of
the world and as that which acts in the world as a vibrant object
itself, drawing material – as does a bucket from a well – into
its own sphere. It confirms, therefore, the quality of the world’s
withdrawal from us.
The poem’s ecological force lies precisely here. It does not
take the figurative, as much ecocriticism has done, as confirmation
of a divide between “nature” and “culture.”10 Rather, Bishop sees
her poem as a means of exploring a world in which “nature” is
always already both imagined, a product of culture, and an actual
reality “out there.” As in Bruno Latour’s idea of a hybrid “naturecuture,” the figurative economy of Bishop’s poetics asserts that
the world as it is cannot be divorced from our encounter with,
and consequent entanglement within, it. Her poem presents the
natural world as simultaneously constructed and real.11 It ends,
On the troubled stance of Ecocriticism regarding ideas of the figurative see my essay
“Ecopoetries in America” (Selby 127-42) and Knickerbocker’s Ecopoetics (1-18).
11
See Latour (6) and Knickerbocker (9).
10
171
Exorcising Modernism
thus, by pushing its epistemological speculation towards an
ontological – or, more properly, a phenomenological – one in
which we experience its “dark, salt, clear” world as one that is
“forever flowing, and since / our knowledge is historical, flowing
and flown” (66). At once caught in the processes of “nature” –
its flow – and feeling the world as forever elusive – “flown” –
“At the Fishhouses” presents “nature” as the condition of our
being, the cold spring from which we draw our experience and
knowledge of the world. The poem’s closing realisation is that
human and nonhuman are not separate from one another but are
both immersed in the same process of being­‍‑in-the-world, both
drawn together as entangled objects. Poetry, then, is the fabric –
the netting – of such entanglement. And with such a realisation,
Bishop’s poetics becomes a means of avoiding the sublimation
of “nature” witnessed in the failed efforts of The Cantos to build
“a paradiso terrestre” (816).
That the poem is a field of affective action participating in the
flow of events of “nature” is central to Ammons’s “Corsons Inlet.”
So, in drawing towards my conclusion, what I want to examine
in Ammons’s poem is how a sense of bodily involvement in the
ever­‍‑changing flow of “nature” allows him to track a growing
sense of the changes of scale necessary to a properly workedthrough ecological poetics. My argument is that “Corsons Inlet” –
a key text in Ammons’s development as an ecopoet – exorcises
modernity’s ghost by demonstrating that poetry is something in
itself (a “vibrant object,” we might say) rather than being about
something. In this I agree with John Wilkinson whose essay
on “aboutness” in Ammons’s Garbage notes that “Ammons revels
in breaking Pound’s strictures, voluminously” (38), though, as
we will see later, I disagree with Wilkinson’s characterisation of
“nature” in Ammons’s poetics. “Corsons Inlet,” then, presents the
natural world not as something to be “bust through” by poetry
but to be taken on its own terms. Poetic experience, Ammons’s
172
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
poem argues, is co-extensive with knowledge of the world, and
the sea-scape that the poem describes enacts the poem’s – and
our – bound-iness with the object world.12 The poem is “nature.”
Such a move “toward nature” in Ammons is, as Susan Stewart
argues, contingent upon “things distant com[ing] close and all
standing things mov[ing] toward their ‘horizontals’” (25). We
will come to this sense of the distance and proximity of things
in “nature” later, in the poem’s ecologically significant dealing
with ideas of scale and scope. For now, though, as we saw with
Bishop, it is an emphasis on horizontal axes that allows for the
poem’s intermeshing of event and the recording of event in its
unfolding measure of the natural world. This is apparent in the
poem’s opening lines:
I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
rounded a naked headland
and returned
along the inlet shore:
(147-48)
The spread of the poem on the page here, its sinuous turns and
returns, traces the horizontal play of the poet’s vision over the
shoreline it describes. It also mirrors the poet’s act of walking
that constitutes this scene. The poem, that is, extends horizontally
outwards to go “round” the “naked headland” before returning
See Leonard M. Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry (84-5), who argues that the notion of
“homology” in Ammons – between poem and world – underpins the poet’s “perception
of ecological interrelatedness.”
12
173
Exorcising Modernism
towards its left-hand margin, “along the inlet shore.” We attend
closely to the poem’s (horizontal) play of lineation, even as it
directs our attention to the object-world of its setting. Indeed,
the poem’s turns and returns define its status as poetry, verse – of
course – being etymologically related to the Latin versus, or the
plough’s turning of the soil. Ammons, himself, has drawn the
comparison between a walk and a poem in just such terms: “the
(...) resemblance – he notes – between a poem and a walk is that
each turns, one or more times, and eventually returns” (“A Poem
is a Walk” 117). In “Corsons Inlet” the interrelation of poem and
walk is the ecological ground of Ammons’s poetics. And it is in
the poem’s line endings – where it turns and returns to the next
line – that poet, poem and natural world become entangled. As the
poet turns “along / the surf,” the placing of “the surf” as a separate
line makes it as much the subject of the two verbs – “rounded” and
“returned” – in the following two lines as is the poet himself. The
exchange of energy here – turning and returning – between poet,
poem and world means that they become interwoven as part of
a complex ecosystem (Scigaj 85). The ongoingness of the poem –
we are told the poet goes for a walk “again this morning” – brings
us alongside “nature.” And the resemblance between “again” and
“along” in these lines (where one turns into the other through
the action of the poem) indicates the dynamic interplay between
poem and world.
Such an apprehension of “things in the dynamics of
themselves” is something Ammons had experienced as a young
man contemplating the horizontal shoreline when onboard a ship
anchored in the South Pacific.13 It is an apprehension that structures
the thinking of his ecopoetics and that also distinguishes such
13
His account of this moment is given in “The Paris Review Interview” published in
Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues. See also Andrew Zawacki’s “Ego
and Eco” (49).
174
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
thinking from Bishop’s vision of “nature” because of its emphasis
on the dynamic process of things rather than on a drawing together
of things in our poetic apprehension of the world. This presents
a problem for Ammons. The dynamic play of the poem depends,
as we have seen, on the play of its line on the page. But, as the
poem announces,
in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of
primrose
more or less dispersed
(...)
I have reached no conclusions, have erected no
boundaries,
shutting out and shutting in, separating inside
from outside: I have
drawn no lines:
(148-49)
Aesthetic order – poetic form – and natural order – “primrose /
more or less dispersed” – seem troublingly at odds here; an
impression that is strengthened by the ironic separation of “inside”
from “outside” by a line break. And what this demands of the poet
is a twofold acceptance of his place within the “nature-culture”
complex posited by Latour. If, as Latour’s notion of “natureculture” suggests, the world we inhabit is “simultaneously real,
social and narrated” (8), then Ammons’s ecological poetics must
account for – indeed, partake of – the affective energies of such
simultaneous interactions. The poem cannot bracket off the world
from its experiencing of the world. For the poem to be “caught
always in the event of change” (149), its mirroring of reality –
the “overall wandering of mirroring mind” (148) traced by the
poem – must entail a yielding of form to formlessness. First, then,
this necessitates Ammons’s acceptance of the diminishment of his
175
Exorcising Modernism
affective agency as a poet, of poetry’s power to narrate “nature.”
Second, this decentering of the poet, entails an acceptance of
risk as poetry’s (and “nature’s”) determining energy. The first
half of “Corsons Inlet” deals with the first of these acceptances;
the second half with the second. In other words, by exposing the
anthropocentrism at play in poetic attempts to “draw” or “mirror”
the natural world, “Corsons Inlet” embraces risk. It does this not
simply as a poetic principle but as an ecological one that leads
to the insight, in the poem’s conclusion, that “there is no finality
of vision.”
In its first half, the poem’s giving up of thought in favour
of vision – which we might read as following the shift from
epistemology to ontology that accompanies mid-century poets’
attempts to find ways out of modernity – signifies its attempt
to determine ecological coordinates for itself:
the walk liberating, I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
of sight:
I allow myself eddies of meaning:
yield to a direction of significance
running
like a stream through the geography of my work:
(148)
With “perpendiculars” and “straight lines” once more eschewed,
the poet is left to survey the condition of his being in this landscape.
This is seen to depend upon the interpenetration of poetic and real
environments in which the material of the poem – its “blocks,
176
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
boxes, binds” of thought – are given up to the “flowing bends
and blends” of the poet’s vision of the material world through
the repeated “b” sounds. While we witness here a poetics of
reciprocity at work, between the poem’s geography and that of
the natural world it encounters, this sort of mapping is not without
ecological anxiety for Ammons. He is in the position of surveyor
and his “sight,” or poetic vision, enacts a mapping of the shoreline,
seeing it as material susceptible to human measure. This is felt
in the somewhat reluctant “yielding” to patterns of significance
beyond human scope that Ammons registers in the phrase “I allow
myself eddies of meaning.” The release into being­‍‑in-the-world
may be “liberating” but it is also – at this point in the poem –
rather forced because it is marked by Ammons’s apprehension of
an ontological difference between poem and world, human and
nonhuman. This anxiety rests on the operation of metaphor within
the poem’s affective economy. Given the etymological sense of
“geography” as a “writing of the land” the metaphor of the poem
itself as a landscape subsumes the problem of “nature-culture”
which it announces into a problem of poetic representation. This
“overly facile solution to the problem of mediating between sense
experience and thought,” as Roger Gilbert describes it (215),
points up the ecological problem that “Corsons Inlet” faces. Where
significance and meaning run “like a stream” [my emphasis]
in a poem that is likened to “geography,” that poem stands
significantly apart from the actual landscape it seeks to embody.
And this is still, significantly, a problem of anthropocentrism
whereby “nature” is made to stand­‍‑in for a human condition.
As the poem proceeds, it seeks to solve this problem by
tracing how it might stand in “nature” rather than stand-in for it. In
subsequent lines Ammons thus dismisses totalising, metaphysical
gestures which sublimate our experience of the world into the
meanings we make of that world: “but Overall is beyond me: is
the sum of these events / I cannot draw” (148). The decentering
177
Exorcising Modernism
this implies is also an implicit critique of Pound’s poetics in which
a reaching after poetic paradise is fatally – though in a highly
effective lyric move – compromised by its failure to face the world:
“That I lost my center / fighting the world / (...) / and that I tried
to make a paradiso / terrestre” (Cantos 816). The suspension of
time implied by such a poetic paradise (which has its roots in
Dante’s theological sense of a cosmic “Overall”) is anathema
to the ecological poetics that Ammons is developing. The insight
that “Corsons Inlet” pursues, then, is that poem and world (and,
indeed, walk) are ongoing processes, systems of energy exchange
rather than of achieved poetic stasis. Earlier Ammons “yielded”
to such energies, to “eddies of meaning,” now it is with willing
acceptance that the poet finds himself entangled in a world of
provisional meanings:
so I am willing to go along, to accept
the becoming
thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish
no walls:
(149)
Here, poetic thought is “becoming” both in the sense of it as
ongoing, a process, and in the sense of it as fitted to, or even
flattering, its occasion. At this point the poem becomes its
environment, rather than walling it off. We hear, too, the logic
of the poem’s argument at this point – signalled by the “so” –
accepting a new significance to the poem’s being­‍‑in-the-world (we
may also hear an echo of the earlier poem “So I said I am Ezra”
and thus read this ecological insight back into that poem). This is
the poem’s turning point, for it registers the ecological realisation
that poetry must become the ground it inhabits.
This realisation is carried out in the second half of “Corsons
Inlet” through its embracing of “risk” and the effects this has on its
178
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
notions of scale and order. Risk underpins the poem’s detailing
of the energy­‍‑rich eco-system it describes and which it, in fact,
comes to feel itself participant in. At its first use in the poem,
“risk” is that which has “exposed” “black shoals of mussels” to the
“air” and “sun” making them food for gulls. In particular one
“young mottled gull” eats “to vomiting” and, like the poem itself,
is “caught always in the event of change” (149). Both poem and
food chain are risky exchanges of energy, caught in continual
change. Risk, therefore, becomes the condition of being­‍‑in-theworld, it is the vibrant matter of “nature.” And – though it spreads
everywhere – it is not an abstraction, an “Overall” that divorces
experience from the world, rather
risk is full: every living thing in
siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small
white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks
and spears
the shallows, darts to shore
to stab – what? I couldn’t
see against the black mudflats – a frightened
fiddler crab?
(149-50)
Quite literally, the poet’s vision is obscured here by the actions of
the natural world as they unfold before him. Risk is full in “Corsons
Inlet” precisely because the poem cannot – as a participant in
the events it describes – see the whole picture, it can inhabit no
totalising position. Like the egret and the imagined fiddler crab,
the poem is subject to the demand of life, namely the constant
flow of energy between the participants in its events. The play,
here, between small and large scale event – between the “small
(...) egret” hunting for food and the demand of “life” that runs
through “every living thing” – sustains the poem’s ecological
179
Exorcising Modernism
thought because it allows the poem to feel its entanglement within
the processes of the natural world whose “constant change” is
“rich with entropy” (150). If the poem’s assertion of ecological
risk entails a facing up to “nature” that recognises the fundamental
interconnectedness of all matter – “the ‘field’ of action / with
moving incalculable center” (150) – then the consequence of this
in the poem is upon its evaluation of scale, and of poetry as our
measure of things.
In the “Introduction” to a new edition of his important book
The End of Nature, Bill McKibben notes that one reason for the
current ecological crisis is that “our sense of scale is awry” (ix).14
And it is the issue of a sense of scale that propels “Corsons Inlet”
towards its conclusion (which is, of course, that there can be no
conclusion). The poem realises that human order and natural order,
poem and universe, though they “go along” at seemingly different
scales – as different orders of being – are one and the same. Both
are constituted by a vibrant exchange of energy, by the “pulsations
of order” that are “working in and out” of them:
in the smaller view, order tight with shape:
blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:
snail shell:
pulsations of order
in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,
broken down, transferred through membranes
to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no
lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out,
together
and against, of millions of events:
(150)
14
See also Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry (13).
180
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
The ecological order that “Corsons Inlet” conceives, then, is one
that answers the desire of Pound’s modernist poetics to bring
order to what it perceived as disorderly “nature.” Indeed,
Ammons’s poem asserts that the natural order is “not chaos”
but “an order held / in constant change” (150). In contrast, as
we saw in “Canto 13,” Pound’s modernist project inheres in
the imposition of human order upon the natural world. Such
inherency is, for Pound and the modernism for which his poetics
are metonymic, crucial to its conceptualisation of “nature” and
its transcendence through culture. If Kung’s pupils answer “in
their nature,” then the natural becomes a category of the human,
a means of sublating into an idea of cultural poetics. As Pound
approvingly quotes, late in The Cantos, “‘A man’s paradise is
his good nature’” (637), thus confirming that his poetic project,
to build paradise, is founded on just the sort of absorption of
“nature” into a metaphysical characteristic of human culture that
Timothy Morton has diagnosed as a symptom of modernity’s
blindness to the actual world we inhabit. Modernist poetics
do not, in other words, read the ground upon which they are
inscribed but they transcend it, theirs is a hypostatised geography.
John Wilkinson’s otherwise brilliant reading of Ammons, of the
peristaltic process of his poetics, succumbs to this blindness in
its assertion that “Human beings are not so much ‘part of nature’
as the natural world is thoroughly human and worked over, and
must be accepted as such. There is nothing other than us, neither
garbage nor wilderness” (46). To see “nature” in such terms is
to undercut the ecological thought that underpins Bishop’s and
Ammons’s poetics. What this sort of account fails to acknowledge
is precisely the “pulsations of order” in which Ammons’s poetics
is entangled and which lead to its final apprehension that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of
vision,
181
Exorcising Modernism
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
(151)
This is – finally – a matter of scale (and we might remember
here the silver fish scales spreading over the poetic environment
of Bishop’s poem), a matter of how Ammons’s and Bishop’s
respective poetics might come to measure their being in and of
“nature,” their poetic entanglement in its scoping and scopic
processes. At Pisa, Pound movingly detailed his diminishment in
the face of “nature”: Birds on wires “write (...) in their treble scale”
(Cantos 539); we must “Learn of the green world what can be thy
place / In scaled invention, or true artistry” (535); and we are told,
“When the mind swings by a grass­‍‑blade / an ant’s forefoot shall
save you” (547). In such moments, “nature” is transcribed into
a human scale, transmuted to a set of aesthetic compensations.
For Ammons, the simple exercise of taking a walk by the seashore
presents him with the ecopoetic means to exorcise the ghost of
modernity, at least its tendency to sublimate the natural world by
turning it into a figure of human survival. For Bishop and Ammons,
poetry is (about) a risky engagement with the world of vibrant
matter it inhabits. Their poetry finds ways out of modernity by
engaging the natural world not as a paradisal “finality of vision,”
but as the texture and scope – indeed, the energy – of our being
in the world.
Works Cited
Ammons, A. R. “A Poem is a Walk.” Epoch 18.1 (1968): 114-19.
---. Collected Poems, 1951-1971. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972.
---. Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues. Ed. Zofia
Burr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
182
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010.
---. “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and
Timothy Morton.” New Literary History 43.2 (2012): 225-33.
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979. London:
Chatto & Windus, 1983.
Brooker, Peter. A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra
Pound. London: Faber & Faber, 1979.
Bunting, Basil. Complete Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe
Books, 2000.
Caddel, Richard. “Secretaries of Nature: Towards a Theory of
Modernist Ecology.” Ezra Pound: Nature and Myth. Ed.
William Pratt. New York: AMS Press, 2003. 139-49.
Costello, Bonnie. Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery.
Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University
Press, 1991.
Davenport, Guy. “The House that Jack Built.” The Geography of
the Imagination. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.
45-60.
Dekker, George. Sailing After Knowledge: The Cantos of Ezra
Pound. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.
[Doolittle, Hilda] H. D. Collected Poems, 1912-1944. New York:
New Directions, 1983.
Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy,
the Environment and the Future of Imagination. Cambridge,
Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Gilbert, Roger. Walks in the World: Representation and Experience
in Modern American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1991.
Goldensohn, Lorrie. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Harman, Graham. Tool-Being: Hei­degger and the Metaphysics of
Objects. Chicago: Open Court, 2002.
183
Exorcising Modernism
Kalstone, David. “Questions of Memory, Questions of Travel.”
Modern Critical Views: Elizabeth Bishop. Ed. Harold Bloom.
New York: Chelsea House, 1985. 51-74.
Knickerbocker, Scott. Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the
Nature of Language. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2012.
Kearns, George. Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Cantos. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine
Porter. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1993.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York:
Routledge, 1987.
McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature: Humanity, Climate Change
and the Natural World. London: Bloomsbury, 2003.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After
the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2013.
---. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, Mass. and London:
Harvard University Press, 2010.
---. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.
Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University
Press, 2007.
Pound, Ezra. Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941. Ed.
D. D. Paige. London: Faber & Faber, 1950.
---. Trans. Confucian Analects. London: Peter Owen, 1956.
---. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber, 1986.
Scigaj, Leonard M. Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets.
Charlottesville: University of Kentucky Press, 1999.
Selby, Nick. “Ecopoetries in America.” The Cambridge
Companion to American Poetry Post-1945. Ed. Jennifer
Ashton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
127-42.
184
Nick Selby | Answering “Each in His Nature”
Soper, Kate. What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non­‍‑Human.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995.
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1954.
Stevenson, Anne. “The Geographical Mirror.” Elizabeth Bishop:
Poet of the Periphery. Ed. Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott.
Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 2002. 31-41.
Stewart, Susan. “Salience and Correspondences: Tape for the Turn
of the Year.” Chicago Review 57:1-2 (2012): 12-26.
Terrell, Carroll F. A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound.
Vol. 1. Berkeley and London: University of California Press,
1980.
Thomson, Jeffrey. “‘Everything Blooming Bows Down in the
Rain’: Nature and the Work of Mourning in Contemporary
Elegy.” Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Ed. J. Scott
Bryson. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002.
153-61.
Travisano, Thomas. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.
Wilkinson, John. “About About: Ammons’s Garbage.” Chicago
Review 57.1-2 (2012): 36-48.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and
Society. London: Fontana, 1983.
Zawacki, Andrew. “Ego and Eco: Saying ‘I’ in ‘Expressions of Sea
Level.’” Chicago Review 57.1-2 (2012): 49-62.
185
Tadeusz Pióro
The Influence of the New York School
on Contemporary Polish Poetry
When the poets later labeled as the New York School were at
the outset of their careers in the early 1950s, the poetic idiom
available to them was “not so much depleted as irrelevant,” as
Charles Molesworth puts it in his essay on Frank O’Hara (219).
In the mid­‍‑eighties, Polish poets born around 1960 faced a similar
situation. While new modes of writing and fresh poetic styles had
been proliferating since the twenties, stagnation set in after the
imposition of martial law in 1981 and the decade­‍‑long political and
economic crisis that ensued. Older poets, who had been actively
pursuing ways of “making it new,” had either passed away or
turned silent. The New Wave (Nowa Fala), an informal grouping
of poets who started publishing around 1970, had retrenched from
politically motivated linguistic experiments to a more elevated and
conventional diction. Their principal strategy, which was based
on using the language of the media and other forms of Communist
propaganda in order to give voice to the truth in their poetry, had
come under critique from Zbigniew Herbert, whose “To Ryszard
186
Tadeusz Pióro | The Influence of the New York School
Krynicki – a Letter” was published in Report from the Besieged
City in 1983. After a preamble, in which he claims that not much
of the poetry written in the twentieth century will survive – the
exceptions being Rilke, Eliot and a few others who knew the
secret of forms that withstand the passing of time, without which
“speech is like sand” – he suggests that the younger poet consider
whether it is worthwhile to “debase the sacred speech” with the
drivel of political rallies and the “black spume of newspapers.”1
While Herbert’s point is obvious, what was less apparent at the
time of the poem’s publication is that he saw no alternatives to the
high / low, timeless / timebound distinctions he had put forth in it.
He completely ignores the sixty­‍‑year old tradition of poetic avantgardes in Poland, focusing on “the function of poetry at the present
time”: by trying to write like Rilke or Eliot, poets might be able
to resist the patriotic impulse to criticize the current regime in topical
terms and see it instead as yet another form of tyranny, so much
more interesting, after all, in its Roman or Byzantine incarnations,
described in dignified words by contemporary historians. It is hard
to imagine a more propitious time than this for the publication of the
July 1986 issue of Literatura na Świecie, devoted to translations of
John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler –
their poems and prose writings, as well as critical essays about
them. For a brief, initial glimpse of the effects of this publication,
consider the opening of Krzysztof Jaworski’s poem “Annoying
Pleasures,” written in 1988: “We’d done so much for that poor
poetry already / and lethally Brodsky turned back the clock. The
Blacks / are hurting her, too. And Czesław” (Mengham et al. 77).2
1
Quotations from Polish poems come either from the anthology Altered State: The
New Polish Poetry, in which case they are followed by a parenthetical reference, or
were made only for the purposes of this article by its author, in which case no reference
is given.
2
Jaworski’s lumping together of Brodsky, Miłosz and “the Blacks,” whoever they
might be, indicates that he is opposed to positive or exclusivist valorizations of high
earnestness or seriousness in contemporary poetry, and suggests that stylistic levity
187
Exorcising Modernism
In general, the New York poets opened up a new range of
possibilities for poetic diction that had hitherto been invisible
to younger Polish poets, most of whom did not know English
well enough to read poetry in the original, even had they been
able to obtain the relevant books. The few who did were older,
and they were the ones who translated these poems – most
importantly Piotr Sommer and Bohdan Zadura (born in 1948 and
1945, respectively). Their interest in the New York poets brought
about – thanks to their translations – a paradigmatic change in
the way poetic diction came to be understood and, eventually,
put into practice by the generation of 1960, as well as the one
that followed. By the 1980’s, the most important features of the
language of the New York School had become familiar through
assimilation to American readers, but were hotly contested in
Poland once they started to become manifest in the latest poetry.
The earliest, and perhaps the most characteristic, attack came in
1990, when Krzysztof Koehler, a Kraków poet born in 1963, took
to task another Kraków poet, Marcin Świetlicki (1961), ostensibly
for misconstruing the essence of poetic utterance. Instead of using
crafted language (which Koehler calls “conventionalized” speech),
Świetlicki, like Frank O’Hara, relies on linguistic “found objects”
and a misguided belief in authenticity and spontaneity, while
ignoring “Tradition.” The pretext for Koehler’s article, entitled
“O’Harism,” is the following passage from Świetlicki’s poem
“To Jan Polkowski”: “instead of saying my tooth hurts, I’m /
hungry, lonely, the two of us, the four of us, / our street – they
say quietly: Wanda / Wasilewska, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, / Józef
Piłsudski, the Ukraine, Lithuania / Thomas Mann, the Bible...”3 By
and genuine engagement in serious issues need not be at odds with one another (his
poems bear this out).
3
By including both Wasilewska and Piłsudski in this list of proper names, Świetlicki
is making a tacit comment about the apparent absence of political motivations in
valorizations of this approach to poetic language: Wasilewska was the only Polish
188
Tadeusz Pióro | The Influence of the New York School
valorizing the first type of diction, that is, direct and unmediated
by references to various traditions, Świetlicki shows his naiveté,
or just his unfortunate indebtedness to O’Hara, which for Koehler
seem to be one and the same. Instead of writing “my tooth hurts”
or “I’m lonely,” Koehler advises, tell your friends about it over
a drink – you might feel better, and won’t waste serious readers’
time, as well as your own talent.
In his response, also published in bruLion, the most lively
literary periodical of the time, Świetlicki defends the poet’s
freedom to experiment and try out various kinds of diction, but
also points out the exclusivist character of Koehler’s notion of
poetry, as well as its overall staleness. Interestingly, he denies
being an “O’Harist” – even though he uses the rhetoric and style of
O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto” in his riposte – and claims one
might just as well call him a “Brautiganist,” or “Berrymanist,” or,
indeed, “Pattenist,” none of these labels being just or accurate. He
also sees in Koehler’s attempt to classify him an effort to identify
naive or simply bad writing with O’Hara or his influence. What
we should bear in mind is that the first polemic about “O’Harism”
in Poland was ostensibly non­‍‑ideological, merely aesthetic, yet
had a strictly ideological motivation on Koehler’s side, and that
Frank O’Hara had, from that point onward, become one of the
favorite “soft” targets of conservative critics – not his work as
such, but the influence it exerted on younger Polish poets was
at issue.4
Communist trusted by Stalin, which says much about her patriotism, while Piłsudski
was a patriot and national hero despised by the Communists.
4
Krzysztof Jaworski (1966) ridiculed the conservatives’ approach in an untranslatable
poem called “O’Harists and Pederasts,” published in 1999. In the poem, Manhattan is
full of Polish critics working on construction sites, while Larry Rivers is hard at work
on his Polish spelling. The critics choke on Coca Cola and avocado salad, unacceptably
alien tastes for palates used to a diet of vodka and sausages. When Rivers finally learns
how to spell correctly, the critics give him friendly waves of their hammers – and so
on. The poem’s absurdities satirize the absurdities of current critical dogma.
189
Exorcising Modernism
Koehler’s knowledge of O’Hara’s work was most likely
limited to what he had read in Piotr Sommer’s translations, first
in Literatura na Świecie, and then in a selection published in
book form in 1987 under the title Twoja pojedynczość (Your
singularity).5 The selection contains fifty poems. Conspicuously
absent are, for instance, “In Memory of My Feelings,” “Memorial
Day 1950,” “Biotherm,” “For Bill Berkson and the Chinese New
Year,” “Easter,” “Second Avenue,” and most of the love lyrics
to Vincent Warren. Among the poems included are most of the
“I do this I do that” poems, as well as “Having a Coke with You,”
“John Button Birthday,” “Why I Am Not a Painter,” “To the Film
Industry in Crisis,” “My Heart,” “Personal Poem” and “Mary
Desti’s Ass.” Among the works from 1956 onwards there is a slight
imbalance in favor of poems that are typical of just one strain of
O’Hara’s poetics, aptly called “coterie poetics” by Lytle Shaw.
As was the case in America, these seemed to give the greatest
offence to some readers in Poland, and it is not coincidental that the
term “O’Harism” should have been coined by one such reader –
Krzysztof Koehler. Yet, as I indicated earlier, Koehler’s lack of
access to the corpus of O’Hara’s work was typical, so we may
assume that the O’Hara under debate was, so to speak, Sommer’s
O’Hara, and not the full spectrum of his work.
In the mid-nineties, a drawn-out critical debate in literary
journals about the new developments in Polish poetry cast the
“barbarians” against “the classicists,” and needless to say, the
“O’Harists” were lumped with “barbarians” of various stripes,
a classificatory and valorizing decision which, I suspect, would
have delighted Frank O’Hara. (John Ashbery’s allegiance was not
firmly established by the participants in this discussion.) The poetry
Some readers might find the following information relevant: the book had a print
run of five thousand copies, while the circulation of the journal at that time stood at
forty thousand.
5
190
Tadeusz Pióro | The Influence of the New York School
of the “barbarians,” according to most critics, was characterized
by anarchism, egotism and frequently tasteless goofing off. For an
example of a poem that bears some of these traits, and might well be
called “O’Harist,” I would like to quote part of Marcin Świetlicki’s
“Tobół” (the title means a load or burden, as well as a sack):
You did not give me much, America.
A whole lot less than you think.
A whole lot less than you gave the Silesian poets.
A few slanders, some cigarettes,
some music. Yesterday I fell off
a bar stool in “Klub Kulturalny”
and my forehead, though nothing
shows, hurts on the inside.
America, Canada. You helped a little
to raise Andrzej Sosnowski, who,
guided by an unexplained impulse, was
here yesterday and gave me the keys to his apartment
in Warsaw because I thought I had
lost my Kraków keys, but I hadn’t,
I handed them over to Monika
earlier and here we come to the return scene, when
Andrzej Sosnowski disappears somewhere and I’m
trying
to open my door with his keys, America, and
finally I just ring, America, and
Monika opens.
And don’t tell me about the Beats, because I’m jealous
and not grateful, for gratitude is unknown to me
like the Beats, America, today
191
Exorcising Modernism
is February ninety eight,
I am a most sweetly sober
sack.
And, America, you gave me Bob Hass,
Take back your Bob Hass,
I have enough sanctified scribblers here,
the time for joking is just about up.
The poem goes on to describe several other amusing incidents and
concludes with an assertion of the author’s strong personality, not
only as a poet, an assertion addressed to America. Yet Świetlicki’s
disavowals of influence are not limited to American poetry, and
extend to just about every poet, living or dead. The gibe at Robert
Hass is double­‍‑edged: Hass was in Kraków at a poetry festival
organized by Czesław Miłosz. Still, for all of his posturing, the
affinities with a certain comic or satirical strain of O’Hara’s poetry
are quite evident, and the posturing would fit into this pattern of
influence as well if it weren’t so deeply and painfully experienced
as the poet’s existential “authenticity.”
A different approach to appropriating the jauntier aspects of
O’Hara’s poetry may be seen in the work of Darek Foks (1966).
Foks has written a number of poems which might be called “covers,”
in the musical sense of the term, of several of O’Hara’s. Retaining
their basic formal features and lifting an occasional line or two,
Foks changes the meanings of the originals so that the new version
becomes topical and pointedly satirical. His work is perhaps the
most explicit example of the usefulness of O’Hara’s poetics to social
and cultural critique. The following is a fragment of Foks’s1997
version of “Mary Desti’s Ass,” entitled “Margaret Tischner’s Ass”:
but I always loved Kraków
those hands feeling your ass on a tram
192
Tadeusz Pióro | The Influence of the New York School
no it was a bus
well the ass isn’t bad anyhow
if they’d just stop checking tickets
and Lublin where I saw Krzysztof
Cugowski “the Hei­degger of vocal art” except
he sounded like a public TV Nietzsche
I didn’t know the history of television then
not like I got cable for free later
now if you feel like a ride
through Warszawa
you’d better just drive across Szprotawa
it’s like Wall Street in Mława
you don’t know where you’re going
but you rhyme
and in Łódź I knew
how to do a class act I spread my legs
and feared love and its bootprints on the snow
and I felt a cold draught I forgot
about the condoms in my purse
that was love and I grew a bit stiff
(Mengham et al. 49)
The title conflates Margaret Thatcher with Józef Tischner, a priest
who was also a professor of philosophy at the Jagiellonian
University in Kraków. His rather innocuous version of Catholic
humanism was merely wishful thinking when set against the reality
of the capitalist rat­‍‑race in 1997 Poland, which Thatcher’s first
name is meant to bring to readers’ minds. The tenor of this, as
well as Foks’s other O’Hara covers, might be compared to Yeats’
193
Exorcising Modernism
“men were born to pray and save,” from “September 1913,” but
without any nostalgia for a Romantic past.
If this is “barbarism,” what might “classicism” entail? Let us
consider a borderline case, Bohdan Zadura’s sonnet “John Ashbery
and I,” written in the early eighties. Zadura had met Ashbery in
Warsaw, and later in New York – these are the encounters referred
to at the beginning of the poem.
We say something else somewhere else in different
languages
I have an advantage over him since I understand
several hundred of his words
while he may guess the meaning of a few of mine
We met
twice Once here once over there So we’re quits
Several mutual acquaintances Several dead in common
At night from the plane the air above New York
A yellowish brown as in the tree tops of the Włostowicki
cemetery on All Souls’ Day
Light-shot fog and crystalline gin
He compared a train cleaving a landscape
to a zipper I know more than I can name
at least in this case sometimes it’s the other way around
I was never inclined to be avant-garde
I don’t want to be misunderstood
I don’t think this is a riposte Nor larceny
Yet again we see a (presumptive) disavowal of influence, at
least in the final line. Earlier, Ashbery’s cerebral and somewhat
Surrealist simile is set against Zadura’s own, grounded in personal
194
Tadeusz Pióro | The Influence of the New York School
experience, but striking and original nonetheless. If their respective
poetics, as the similes seem to declare, are so far removed from
one another, whence the idea of larceny? And why might the poem
be taken for a riposte? Quite simply, Zadura is suggesting that he
and Ashbery use different means of saying rather similar things.
Even if we identify Zadura’s wariness of avant­‍‑garde poetics with
his concern about possible misunderstandings (the original words
and placing of this line are just as ambiguous as my translation
when it comes to reference), the question of understanding as such
will remain, as will that of knowing “more than I can name,” or
vice-versa.
While O’Hara’s poetry (“Sommer’s O’Hara,” let us keep
this in mind) seemed to encourage the kind of license some Polish
readers were quick to associate with our Futurists’ literary pranks,
Ashbery’s never provoked more than the usual complaints about
inscrutability. I would suggest, however, that poets inspired by
Ashbery were also inspired by O’Hara, if only in matters of
tone and how much they could get away with in a non-comic
poem, although sometimes in more profound ways. Yet those
who thought O’Hara was simply a riot and not much besides,
unsurprisingly found Ashbery a little too demanding. Nevertheless,
his influence has been quite extensive, from questions of style and
diction to a general understanding of how poetic language works.
The most consistent Ashberian, at least as far as stylistic surfaces
are concerned, is Maciej Melecki (1969), one of the Silesian
poets Świetlicki refers to in “Tobół.” I quote in full one of his
uncharacteristically short poems, “Unclear Matters”:
One day, someone tells you: I love you.
You stand on the stairs and watch
yourself falling into an abyss of exposure. Now
you’d like to say that you also love someone,
but it doesn’t sound too convincing,
195
Exorcising Modernism
the time is running out and this makeshift
picture is being deleted. You’re sent flying
head first, are still flying and it seems
you’ve had it, since before the next
space probe has slipped by, the air’s edges
will twist your tongue. You get away
with it, but someone has noticed and
quite abruptly made a record. However, the story
is not taken up again from the same point.
The declining weight of night overtakes us.
We outflank it and somewhere
a screen is dripping with blood.
(Mengham et al. 117)
While Melecki wears Ashbery’s influence on his sleeve, other poets
tend to be circumspect in displaying it. For a notable exception,
I turn now to the work of one of the principal translators of this New
York poet, younger than Sommer or Zadura, and also one of his
most cogent exegetes. In his afterword to the first Polish selection
of Ashbery’s poems published in book form, Andrzej Sosnowski
(1959) provides a brief and accurate account of Ashbery’s rejection
of Modernist verities. By going straight to the heart of the matter,
Sosnowski alerted Polish readers, especially those of his own
generation, to the stakes involved in Ashbery’s approach to language
and communication, poetic diction and tradition. The book itself, No
i wiesz (And You Know), was published in 1993 in an edition of four
hundred copies, and contains forty poems, translated by Sommer
and Zadura, as well as Sosnowski. The selection includes “The
Skaters” and part of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” from among
the longer poems, as well as “Into the Dusk Charged Air,” “Soonest
Mended,” “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” “What Is Poetry”
196
Tadeusz Pióro | The Influence of the New York School
and “April Galleons.” Sosnowski’s translations of Three Poems and
the title poem from A Wave were published as one book in 2012.
Also, Ashbery’s Harvard lectures, Other Traditions, came out in
2008, with a different translator for each lecture. A monographic
issue of Literatura na Świecie devoted to Ashbery was published
in 2006, with Sommer’s completed translation of “Self-Portrait”
and scores of other poems. I should also mention the second New
York issue of this journal, from 1994, in which, besides poems
by Schuyler and Koch, readers could enjoy Ashbery’s plays and
a 20-page sample from Flow Chart. Thus it should be clear that in
terms of Polish translations Ashbery’s work has a great quantitative
advantage over O’Hara’s. Apart from the influence it continues
to exert on Polish poetry, it has also inspired a renewed interest in
Raymond Roussel (along with new translations of his writings) and
led, already in the nineties, to translations of the hitherto unknown
Ronald Firbank and, quite recently, of Henry Green.
But to return to Sosnowski and, very briefly, to O’Hara:
Sosnowski wrote a “cover” of “In Memory of My Feelings,”
entitled simply “Cover” (1998), in which he adheres strictly
to the division of the original into five parts, preserves the
number of lines and some aspects of the theme of the subject’s
metamorphoses, but more generally gives free rein to his own
memories and fantasies. For example, the following passage: “I am
an Indian / sleeping on a scalp / and my pony is stamping in the
birches / and I’ve just caught sight of the Niña, the Pinta and the
Santa Maria. / What land is this, so free? / I watch / the sea at the
back of my eyes, near the spot where I think / in solitude as pine
trees groan and support the enormous winds, / they are humming
L’Oiseau de feu!” (O’Hara 256) becomes, in Sosnowski’s version,
an acknowledgment of O’Hara’s influence: “I am an officer
stationed near Kępa Gdańska / who sees with his own eyes / the
US Marines releasing potato bugs on our Polish beaches / in broad
daylight and the bugs attack straight away like Frank O’Hara’s
197
Exorcising Modernism
poems. / What poem is this, as long as a division on the march? /
I watch and naturally a bottle of kerosene grows out of my hand
as this landing party infiltrates / fascine hedges, climbs the dunes
and vanishes inland behind dwarf mountain pines / in a swarm
of lines from ‘In Memory of My Feelings’!” Before we go any
further, those potato bugs require a gloss. Communist propaganda,
especially at the height of the Cold War, used to blame crop
failures on NATO saboteurs, who purportedly released swarms
of Colorado beetles in potato fields, and the beetles soon began
to function as a synecdoche of clumsy and outlandish propaganda.
Since the beetles in “Cover” are identified with O’Hara’s poems,
and Columbus’ ships become the US Marines, we get an inversion
of O’Hara’s allegory of colonial conquest, nuanced by the implied
comparison of the American poet’s Polish detractors to heavyhanded propagandists of the Communist period. Beyond this,
however, we see the triumphant march of a new kind of writing,
and more specifically – Sosnowski’s own.
And yet, “Cover” is a relatively rare instance of O’Hara’s
direct influence in Sosnowski’s oeuvre – in many ways Ashbery’s
has been more formative and extensive. In a essay about Flow
Chart, published in Literatura na Świecie along with his translation
of part of the poem, Sosnowski points out the apocalyptic
origins and implications of this work, its revealing of language
as a symptom of the end of time. In many of his own poems,
Sosnowski endeavors similar demonstrations or illustrations of
the apocalypse that is always already here and now. He does this
dramatically enough, but good­‍‑humoredly and with a healthy dose
of what he calls “old­‍‑fashioned irony” which he finds in abundance
in Flow Chart. We should note, however, that Sosnowski’s interest
in negative theology and theories of the apocalypse in general
predates his mature fascination with Ashbery.
Up to now I have focused on just two of the New York poets,
simply because their influence has been much greater than either
198
Tadeusz Pióro | The Influence of the New York School
Koch’s or Schuyler’s. While there is no evidence of Koch’s work
having influenced any Polish poet, a “Schuyler effect” is becoming
increasingly visible. Eclipsed by O’Hara and Ashbery in the first
of the New York issues of Literatura na Świecie, he features more
prominently in the second one, thanks to Zadura’s translation of
“The Morning of the Poem.” An entire issue of the journal, devoted
to Schuyler and Auden, came out in 2007, with translations of
“Hymn to Life,” an emended version of “The Morning of the
Poem” and dozens of shorter poems and prose pieces. His novel,
What’s for Dinner?, was published in 2013, and, the year before
that, three long poems – “A Few Days” along with “The Morning
of the Poem” and “Hymn to Life” – came out in book form. The
first poet to make use of Schuyler’s digressive narrative method
was, unsurprisingly, Andrzej Sosnowski. His “Wiersz dla J.S.”
(“Poem for J.S.”) adopts the versification pattern of “The Morning
of the Poem” and circles around the original’s themes of writing
and death or dying, yet at the same time manages to function as
a love poem as well. Much shorter than Schuyler’s (“only” eight
pages long), and focused on one, central event – a long night
of drinking with friends as an allegory of “active forgetting” –
it directly acknowledges the New York poet’s influence, in two
distinct ways: he is addressed directly as a “spiritual kinsman”
and appears as the subject of a reminiscence of Piotr Sommer’s,
whom Schuyler granted an interview in 1983. Sommer also wanted
to interview Kenneth Koch and Edwin Denby, but Koch was out of
town and Denby declined, saying he was about to leave for Maine.
This was not true – Denby committed suicide a few days later. With
Ashbery’s help, Sommer made an appointment to meet Schuyler at
the Chelsea Hotel, and, though shocked by the condition Schuyler
was in, asked his questions, the answers varying from “Yes, I think
so” to “No, I don’t think so.” Ashbery later told Sommer he was
lucky to have gotten that much. Sosnowski’s retelling of this
story, as well as the poem as a whole, might be seen as a kind of
199
Exorcising Modernism
homage, juxtaposing admiration with pity and terror – certainly
a new departure for the Polish reception of the New York poets.
When the poem first appeared in 1997, one critic called
it a “drawn­‍‑out, pointless account of the poet drinking with his
buddies in a bar” – this should give some idea of the difficulty
even professional readers had with coming to terms with the
new, “transplanted” poetics. Poems like the one “for J.S” came
as a shock, and it took a while before speechless amazement could
turn into disciplined critical response. Although today Sosnowski
is probably the most­‍‑written­‍‑about living Polish poet, others who
forged their own styles – for instance Foks or Marcin Sendecki,
who also translated “Hymn to Life” and “A Few Days,” and even
Bohdan Zadura – have largely remained “poets’ poets.” Zadura, by
the way, is currently working on an epic­‍‑length autobiographical
poem, using the versification pattern of “The Morning of the
Poem.” I mention this chiefly because it shows one of the most
visible manifestations of influence, apparent also in the work of
Sosnowski, Foks and several others, that is, their willingness
to adopt various formal models they discovered in the work of
the New York poets, if only to see what they can do with them, or
what these models might encourage them to do. In other words, the
adopted model is just a spring-board, a way in to the unknown, and
not something to copy for the sheer sake of imitation. We should
also keep distinct this kind of influence from the one I mentioned
at the outset, which turns on a new approach to poetic language
and is, indeed, fundamental to the developments outlined above.
It is precisely this new approach that baffled and unnerved
many critics, beginning with Krzysztof Koehler, currently the
director of a public television channel called “Kultura.” In his
polemic with Świetlicki, Koehler puts forth not only a prescriptive
model of poetry as “conventionalized speech,” but also implies
a model of reading developed to interpret the works of High
Modernism, or at least those that had relinquished its original,
200
Tadeusz Pióro | The Influence of the New York School
avant­‍‑gardist aspirations. Rilke, Eliot and Mann (to use both
Herbert’s and Świetlicki’s examples) were, by and large, anti-avantgarde and allied in various ways with religious beliefs and traditions.
Holding them up as examples of “timeless” literature is tantamount
to a threat: either you conform, or your work will not be taken
seriously. But that was in 1990. In 2014, Andrzej Franaszek, the
author of a monumental biography of Czesław Miłosz and an editor
of the Kraków-based Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, opined
in two long articles that the work of poets influenced by the New
York School, and the work of Andrzej Sosnowski in particular, must
be taken very seriously indeed, for it is noxious to Polish literature
and our culture in general. This caused a scandal and numerous
rebuttals. Still, his articles made clear how strong the resistance
to innovative literature remains in some influential circles. While
in the West the avant-garde artist or writer has become something
of a museum piece, an embattled avant­‍‑garde still exists in Poland,
making literary life by turns exhilarating and exasperating.
Returning to the question of influence, I should mention an
article written by Adam Wiedemann in 1998. Wiedemann (1967)
is a highly original poet and prose writer, who at the beginning of
his career was fascinated by Ashbery and O’Hara, even though
signs of their influence would be hard to find in his work. He
then turned his attention to the Polish avant‑garde of roughly the
same period and found in the work of Witold Wirpsza and Miron
Białoszewski some of the qualities apparent in the poetry of the
New Yorkers. These similarities are not obvious and Wiedemann’s
claims may seem problematic to many readers. What does ring
true, however, is the symmetry between the innovations of the
New York School and those of the Polish poets in question, who at
a time when poetry was widely read by the general public remained
rather marginal, especially Wirpsza. It would have been natural,
according to Wiedemann, for young poets in the eighties to look
to Białoszewski’s and Wirpsza’s experiments in their search for
201
Exorcising Modernism
a new kind of poetic diction, free of political engagement (for that
was an important, and hotly contested, consideration during that
decade). Instead, the New York poets exploded (on) the scene,
keeping the home team on the sidelines. Now that their work
has been assimilated, however, it is time to rediscover our own
avant­‍‑gardists.
Wiedemann made this intervention in good faith, without
implying that an either/or approach was needed. What his article
does imply, however, is the existence of a remarkable phenomenon
of a far greater scope than the issue he takes up. I mean by this
the fact that at least two generations of poets were influenced by
a large and diverse body of work in translation. This is a rare
occurrence indeed. The only modern precedent that comes to my
mind is the French career of Edgar Allan Poe, and even that, by
comparison, seems relatively restricted. While poets like Miłosz
and Herbert, Mayakovsky and Brodsky, Celan and Cavafy, did
become well-known and influential throughout Europe and in
the US, in each case we are dealing with a single figure, and not
a group of poets with similar views on the arts, as well as other
kinds of affinities. Moreover, influence of the kinds I have been
describing would be difficult to find in the case of the Polish and
Russian poets, with O’Hara’s taking up some of Mayakovsky’s
ideas a rare exception. Finally, the influence of the New York
School is not a thing of the past, as we can see by the growing
interest in Schuyler. New developments might take place: perhaps
Kenneth Koch’s work will yet inspire someone to write comic
poems, which have been in short supply for quite some time now.
And, invitingly or menacingly, Barbara Guest’s work still awaits
its Polish translators.
202
Tadeusz Pióro | The Influence of the New York School
Works cited
Mengham, Rod, Tadeusz Pióro and Piotr Szymor, eds. and trans.
Altered State: The New Polish Poetry. Todmorden: Arc
Publications, 2003.
Molesworth, Charles. “‘The Clear Architecture of the Nerves’:
The Poetry of Frank O’Hara. Frank O’Hara: To Be True
to a City. Ed. Jim Elledge. Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1990. 209-225.
O’Hara, Frank. Collected Poems. Ed. Donald Allen. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.
203
Mikołaj Wiśniewski
Williams, Schuyler,
and the Romantic Poet “Nowadays”
What, then, is a romantic poet nowadays? He happens to be
one who still dwells in an ivory tower, but who insists that
life would be intolerable except for the fact that one has,
from the top, such an exceptional view of the public dump
and the advertising signs of Snider’s Catsup, Ivory Soap
and Chevrolet Cars; he is the hermit who dwells alone with
the sun and moon, but insists on taking a rotten newspaper.
Wallace Stevens, “Preface” to W. C. Williams’s
Collected Poems 1921-1931
Accidental interest
Is James Schuyler this kind of a romantic poet? In many respects
yes. Perhaps the contamination of solar and lunar landscapes
by the “rotten newspaper” is even more exposed in Schuyler’s
work. Living symbols of nature, roses – those mystical flowers –
and Wordsworth’s daffodils, are just as momentous as the daily
204
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet
revelations found in New York Times. At some point, the godly
Helios and the paper impostor become indistinguishable: “A cloud
boy brings the evening paper: / The Evening Sun” (Schuyler
235). Nevertheless, Schuyler is deeply in love with all the shades
and motions of the natural light, from the juicy hue of sunrises
and sunsets, to the dirty, ethereal halo of the winter sky. There
is nothing unusual about this – the passion was instilled in him
a long time ago: “Once, when I was young, I / Awoke at first
light and sitting in a rocking chair watched the sun / Come up
beyond the house across the street” (215). Schuyler succumbs
to the hypnotic effect of “simple nature” more easily than his
famous New York colleagues: Ashbery, Koch and even Frank
O’Hara. It is precisely out of this susceptibility that, according
to Friedrich Schiller, the spirit of poetry is born. Geoff Ward claims
that “despite the historical gap that separates [Schuyler’s] work
from the early Romantic period, there are vital continuities,” (25)
and Helen Vendler does not hesitate to call the author of Freely
Espousing a pastoral poet. Evidently, situating Schuyler within the
widely understood poetics of Romanticism is not a particularly
subversive move. The problem, however, lies in the fact that even
in his most “romantic moments” Schuyler is never entirely earnest.
He is Romanticism’s legitimate but unruly heir. All the classical
oppositions of idealistic aesthetics collapse in his poems. Again, let
us take Schiller as an example. In his famous essay “On Naïve and
Sentimental Poetry” Schiller makes the reservation that fondness
for “simple nature” is the essential basis for poetry, provided
however “that neither affectation nor an accidental interest in it
be in play.” In general, “it is entirely necessary, that the object
which infuses us with [such fondness], be nature or certainly be
held by us therefor” (308). Affectation? Accidental interest? These
are no doubt Schuyler’s trademarks. And as far as the division (or
rather its lack) into natural and artificial objects goes, it is sufficient
to recall the poem “Shimmer” in which the pastoral poet’s attention
205
Exorcising Modernism
is equally drawn to the pear leaves shimmering in the wind and
the decal on the coffee cup. Nature and tasteless artifice are both
worthy of the poet’s praise. Similarly, it would be difficult to assert
whether Schuyler is Schiller’s naïve or sentimental poet. One thing
is certain – the diagnosis made by Stevens seems especially apt.
The romantic poet today is one who, paradoxically, at the same
time retains and de-regulates the nineteenth century paradigm
with its Orphism, its focus on imagination and nature spelled with
a capital ‘N.’
We will soon return to these important issues. In the
meantime, since the notion of sentimentalism has already been
touched upon, it may be worthwhile to investigate another path.
Let us be careful, however, for just as the “vital continuities” of
Romanticism present in Schuyler’s poetry are not to be taken at
their face value, so the parallel which I am about to make may
prove equally misleading.
“The doctor’s youngest son”
I am of course alluding to William Carlos Williams.1 In his
famous “Preface” to Williams’s collected poems, Wallace
Stevens claims that the Rutherford poet is both “sentimental”
and “anti‑poetic.” Even if this critical oxymoron was meant
as a compliment, it is clear that it conceals a certain anxiety –
a lack of conviction, or even hostility towards Williams’s poetic
strategy. Williams was conscious of the fact that Stevens’s praise
was ambiguous. The thing that particularly annoyed him was
the term “anti-poetical” which, as he frequently complained,
was constantly “aped” by critics. No doubt, Stevens’s dictum
discloses his Paterian inclinations. What he defines as anti‑poetic
1
The phrase “The doctor’s youngest son” appears in Schuyler‘s poem “The Master
of the Golden Glow.”
206
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet
is the radical realism of Williams’s “earthy tastes” – his reverence
for “the old man who goes about / gathering dog-lime / [from]
the gutter” (Williams 71), and his fascination with the patterns
of paint peeling off of “the fences and outhouses / built of barrel
staves / and parts of boxes” (64).2 The sentimental note, on the
other hand, is best explained by referring to “The Thinker” in
which the poet’s enthusiasm is stirred by the “gay pompons” of
his “wife’s new pink slippers” (167). Many critics find such naïve
or unabashed sentimentalism highly annoying. The English poet
Donald Davie suggests that most of Williams’s lyrical pieces
are simply “glib.” It is probable that the same verdict would
be returned on many of Schuyler’s poems, for example – “This
Notebook,” a poem which Davie would most likely dismiss as
infantile and pretentious.
It seems, however, that the comparison between Schuyler
and Williams has taken a somewhat unfortunate turn. Let us forget
about sentimentalism for a while and consider whether Geoff Ward
is right in claiming that Schuyler’s “true precursor (...) is neither
Auden nor O’Hara but William Carlos Williams” (16). Ward also
suggests that Schuyler is one of the most faithful continuators
of the “tradition of observational poetry sponsored by William
Carlos Williams” (32), which in a way should not be surprising at
all, since the “faithful” are rather numerous and include, to name
just a few, Louis Zukofsky, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson and
Robert Creeley. In fact, among American poets of the second half
of the twentieth century, it would be far easier to name those who
do NOT invoke Williams. What then is the basis for the claim,
advanced by the critics rather than Schuyler himself, that he is
Williams’s rightful heir?
Williams proclaims his „earthy tastes” in the poem opening his 1917 collection, Al
Que Quiere!; the images quoted here come from two poems of the same title, “Pastoral,”
included in this collection.
2
207
Exorcising Modernism
When speaking about poetic observation, Ward juxtaposes
it with metaphysical contemplation. Williams’s poetics is defined
as a materialistic one “in which any metaphysical depth to the
visible surface, or the experienced moment, is happily denied.”
Thus – Ward adds – the “work of William Carlos Williams
presents a layered­‍‑space manifesto as influential in its sphere
as Picasso’s Cubism” (11). This is a well known tenet whose
most compelling expression can be found in Marjorie Perloff’s
The Poetics of Indeterminacy. Moreover, Perloff argues that the
author of Paterson was bogged down by spurious symbolism
which he had sternly rejected in the 1910s and 1920s. Geoff Ward
draws a similar conclusion, though devoid of the critical edge, in
respect to Schuyler. He notices that in Schuyler’s materialistic
and anti-metaphysical poetics of observation “some shadow of
irony, of a rift between saying and meaning, is cast even over the
most sharply observed data” (33). And if irony is, as Kierkegaard
has it, a symptom of the dissolution of a paradigm, Ward can
admit that, in Schuyler’s case, this “may signify the reopening
of deep space” (11). Or at least an attempt at such a “reopening,”
a nostalgia for something irretrievably lost, which of course brings
us back to – sentimentalism.
What is it that has been lost? What would James Schuyler
miss? Taking into account the ending of “The Elizabethans
Called It Dying,” this “anterior state” is not a thing whose loss
might be considered lamentable: “not to be in love with you /
I can’t remember what it was like / it must’ve been lousy.” We
probably should not draw too sweeping conclusions from three
short and guileless lines. Not all of Schuyler’s codas are equally
affirmative. Moods such as boredom and anxiety are also often
present, for example – towards the end of “Dining Out with Doug
and Frank”: “Why is this poem / so long? And full of death?”
(250). Nevertheless, let us advance the following hypothesis: in
the final lines of “The Elizabethans Called It Dying” there occurs
208
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet
a certain reversal of the dissociation model – a paradigmatically
modernist model. Its roots, however, are thoroughly Romantic.
Dissociations, rifts, divorces
I am referring here to T. S. Eliot’s famous notion of “the dissociation
of sensibility.” Without getting into detailed deliberations let us
simply say – by way of alluding to Hei­degger – that according
to Eliot the history of poetry since the 17th century is a history
of forgetting, not so much of Being, but rather of a certain type
of experience in which sensual representation and intellectual
explication are fused. The ensuing dissociation – a rift, a divorce –
defines the situation of the poet “nowadays.” In the past, as Eliot
lamented, there were poets such as Donne who had the amazing
gift of coupling (“espousing”) the most heterogeneous elements
of human experience: that which is abstract and spiritual with
a surprising, sensual detail. Later, however, “something happened
to the mind of England,” and the totality of experience – Donne’s
thought which he felt “as immediately as the odour of a rose” –
was split into paroxysms of emotion on the one hand (Keats) and
reflective mastication on the other (Tennyson).
Thus, the land is wasted not only due to historical
devastation. There is a deeper, more mysterious process involved –
the erosion of creative imagination. Greater and greater “spheres
of experience” escape its grasp and the poet is no longer capable
of elevating them to the rank of universal symbols. “Universal
experience” is that which every true Romantic insists on, from
the later Kant, through Schiller with his aversion to matters of
“accidental interest,” to Eliot himself, notwithstanding his oftrepeated renunciation of Romanticism. Also Emerson, in his
Journals, affirmed that “that which is individual & remains
individual in my experience is of no value. What is fit to engage
me & so engage others permanently, is what has put off its weeds
209
Exorcising Modernism
of time & place & personal relation” (Yoder 60). Therefore, the
Orphic genius, whose coming is constantly prophesied by Emerson
and who never comes forth, is the one who “who re-attaches things
to nature and the Whole, – and re­‍‑attaching even artificial things,
and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight, – disposes
very easily of the most disagreeable facts.”
Similarly, the opposition – introduced by Schiller – between
naïve and sentimental (modern) poets, results from the very same
rift. In the past, the poets embodied nature. Modern poets seek
it, because it has vanished “from human life as experience” only
to resurface “in the poetical world as idea and as object.” Poetry
thus becomes a witness in a divorce case, officially testifying to the
termination of experience.
“Divorce” is a particularly important term for Williams,
especially in his later works. The affinity between Williams’s
“divorce” and Eliot’s “dissociation of sensibility” is striking,
despite the fact that Williams throughout his life was very critical
of Old Possum’s poetry. Many of the Rutheford poet’s artistic
projects may be seen as attempts at calling Eliot’s diagnoses and
solutions into question. In this light, Spring and All, published
in 1923, was a critical reply to The Wasteland (1922), while the
late epic Paterson in many places evidently alludes (sometimes
quite ironically) to Four Quartets. It is precisely in Paterson that,
as Marjorie Perloff claims, Williams’s style is marred by insipid
symbolism. All his observations are obsessively subsumed under
the abstract “marriage-divorce tension” (151). What is this divorce?
In the first book of Paterson, Williams states, or rather exclaims,
that “Divorce is / the sign of knowledge in our time, / divorce!
Divorce!” (17). Therefore, we have to satisfy ourselves with yet
another broad definition: “divorce” defines the state of knowledge
“nowadays”; knowledge becomes specialized and, consequently,
fragmented. In other words, the imagination has lost its power
to synthesize the field of human experience into a coherent image.
210
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet
Much earlier, the same predicament was lamented over by Carlyle
(in the first pages of Sartor Resartus) and, of course, by Carlyle’s
great disciple, Emerson, who called for the total – complete – Man.
In “The American Scholar” he presented a grim vision of society
in which “the members have suffered amputation from the trunk,
and strut about so many walking monsters – a good finger, a neck,
a stomach, an elbow, but never a man” (Emerson 54).
Marjorie Perloff claims that such quandaries – genuinely
transcendental – have never interfered with the earlier poetics
of observation and cubist “layering” adopted by the author of
Spring and All. It is this collection – containing the famous “Red
Wheelbarrow” – which Perloff focuses on in her study. However,
Perloff almost entirely ignores the specific context in which
Williams’s poems are set, and this context has indeed more in
common with “deep space” than with radical “layering.”
Readers who first encountered such poems as “The Red
Wheelbarrow,” “To Elsie,” or “By the Road to the Contagious
Hospital” in an anthology or an edition of Williams’s selected
poems, might be quite surprised (perhaps even unpleasantly
surprised) on seeing them in their original “setting.” For Spring
and All is not simply a collection of those popular Williamsian
“delicacies.” The poems are separated by longer fragments of
strange, hermetic prose. It is not always possible to say where the
prose piece ends and the poem begins. The well known titles –
added only in later editions of Williams’s selected poems – are
all missing. Instead, Williams numbers his poems, and this too in
a strange fashion, for example – number seven has disappeared
altogether. The relationship between the poems and the prose is
quite unclear. It is uncertain whether they complement each other,
or stand in opposition. It is even more problematic to characterize
the strange prose passages which seem to add up to some sort of
a bizarre poetic manifesto. Sometimes they resemble prophetic
visions (vaguely Blakean in style) and are full of sublime, almost
211
Exorcising Modernism
frantic rhetoric. But there are also milder moments, reminiscent
of Williams’s finest lyrics. Finally, we get a series of more or
less coherent critical reflections devoted to various authors and
artists: Shakespeare, Marianne Moore, or Juan Gris. Philosophical
seriousness is counterpoised by extravagant sense of humor. Only
one thing seems not to alter: the constantly reappearing word
“imagination.”
The fate of imagination today – the possibility of its
survival in the face of modern disenchantment – is the most
important question which Williams raises in Spring and All. All
those stylistic attempts are a means of searching for a language
capable of containing the essence of modern imagination. This
language is never found, which is why we are confronted with
so many broken sentences, crumbling definitions, emphatic
exclamations (typed in majuscule to strengthen the effect)
followed by auto­‍‑ironic remarks. We read that “in great works
of the imagination A CREATIVE FORCE IS SHOWN AT
WORK MAKING OBJECTS WHICH ALONE COMPLETE
SCIENCE AND ALLOW INTELLIGENCE TO SURVIVE”
(199). However, after a moment’s pause, Williams adds: “A very
clouded sentence,” and elsewhere, with marked irritation: “said
that half a dozen times already.” These nervous redefinitions
often become openly comical: “The imagination freed from the
handcuffs of ‘art,’ takes the lead! Her feet are bare and not too
delicate. In fact those who come behind her have much to think
of. Hm. Let it pass” (185).
If Schuyler really is Williams’s heir, it is not only because
both authors pursue the poetics of “layered space,” as Geoff Ward
puts it. In their “layered” observations Williams and Schuyler
remain critical and ironic continuators of the Romantic paradigm.
The difference, however, lies in the fact that at those moments
where Williams reaches an impasse, Schuyler eagerly, or even
naively, pushes forward, a bit like Williams’s imagination,
212
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet
without paying heed to “those who come behind.” Let us therefore
leave the “boggy” terrain of dissociations and divorces in order
to concentrate, if possible, on Schuyler himself.
“Freely espousing”
I already suggested that towards the end of “The Elizabethans
Called it Dying” there occurs a possible reversal of the dissociation
model. Eliot and Williams speak of a long forgotten union which
at some point ended in divorce. Schuyler reverses this: division
and isolation belong to the past. Now is the time of espousal.
Let us not exaggerate, however. The poem speaks about
love, but not necessarily sanctified love. That which in Elizabethan
England was poetically referred to as “dying” was the moment of
ecstasy. The word “moment”3 should be particularly stressed. It is
in such split­‍‑second, absolutely temporary relationship that all the
images in the poem appear: “Nagel’s Funeral Parlor” (almost like
“Angel”), and right next to it – a confectionery, draught beer, the
sound of bells “cheerily summoning housewives to early Mass,”
and further on: the hospital’s electric sign and the river which, for
a moment, reverses its current at high tide. Quotations appear, or
rather scraps of conversations, torn from contexts which are not
at all obvious; certain puzzling questions about, for example, the
shape of paving stones. What paving stones? Maybe those which –
with our eyes fixed before our feet – we see every day on our way
to work and back, and are later unable to remember whether they
were “hex- or octagons” (11). And how are we to relate all this
to the apostrophe with which the poem ends: “not to be in love
with you / I can’t remember what it was like / it must’ve been
3
It was also important to Williams, famous for his “momentary epiphanies.” One of
the “Pastorals” in Al Que Quiere! ends with the following declaration: “These things /
Astonish me beyond words!”
213
Exorcising Modernism
lousy.” Are these strange “free espousals” governed by any kind of
internal logic? What is their effect? Are we to regard them as those
“untranslatable glyphs. A story / not told” (215), which Schuyler
mentions in “Hymn to Life”?
“The Elizabethans...” is included in Schuyler’s first
collection of poems – Freely Espousing (1969). The explication
of this title might pose certain difficulties. Surely, there is
a reference to marriage: “espouse” derives from the Latin
“spondeo” – “to promise”4, “to make ceremonious vows.” In this
sense, “freely espousing” would mean “to marry voluntarily,” or
perhaps – rather subversively – “to agree to a free relationship /
fleeting romance.”
Today, however, “espouse” is most commonly used in the
sense of “accepting,” “giving support to.” Add the adverb “freely”
and the situation becomes slightly more complicated. The tone
of the expression “freely espouse” is quite ambiguous; it can be
both affirmative and critical. Let us take the following sentence:
“Individuals of different characters, who freely espouse each other,
enter into a mutually molding symbiosis.” Here, “freely espouse”
suggests conscious, voluntary acceptance. Another example:
“What happened to freedom of thought and expression liberals so
freely espouse?” In this case, the expression takes on the meaning
of “to take for granted,” or “to openly affirm,” but already in the
question “Are you confident enough of the view you so freely
espouse?” the tone of rebuke is evidently present. “Freely espouse”
amounts here to uncritical acceptance.
In the case of Schuyler’s poems, two of the above­‍‑mentioned
meanings seem particularly apt. “Freely espousing” as the
creation of free relationships – of syntheses which do not yield
Let us notice here that in contrast to “marry,” “espouse” may refer not so much to the
act of “being wed,” as to its “promise” – the act of “engagement” – which, as we will
see in a moment, is often enough for Schuyler.
4
214
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet
permanent “objective correlatives.” Were we to develop Eliot’s
famous chemical simile, we could say that Schuyler’s correlatives
are characterized by exceptionally short half-life. Moreover,
Schuyler’s “free espousal” is also close to the last of the above
cited uses of the phrase, with the reservation, however, that we
drop the negative connotations. Instead of “uncritical acceptance”
we will therefore talk of “spontaneous affirmation.”
Let us now examine how this abstract schema operates
in particular works. We will begin with the poem “The Master
of the Golden Glow,” also from Freely Espousing. As far as its
construction is concerned, it is very similar to “The Elizabethans...”
Again, we encounter a collage of images, obscure associations
and random quotations. These are, as Schuyler puts it, “autumn
tatters” which the rain throws against the window. Everything that
has been hurled onto the pane, both by the gust of the wind and
that other wind of memory, becomes a necessary, but probably
entirely interchangeable part of the lyrical pattern. It is defined
by words such as “tatters,” “debris,” “litter” and “clutter.” At the
same time, the confusion is permeated with an airy, evanescent,
but mathematically rigorous order: “one / leaf is seen to fall /
describing helixes of conch-shell cores” (34). This phenomenon
will be defined in “Hymn to Life” as “the impermanence of
permanence” (217) and is one of the dominant themes in Schuyler’s
work. It may well be that the “autumn tatters” will finally arrange
themselves into a pattern “fit to engage me & so engage others
permanently,” as Emerson would have it. The problem, however,
is that Schuyler, whenever a pattern begins to emerge in his poem,
becomes distracted and over­‍‑enthusiastic, and so the imminent
synthesis does not eventually take place. It shimmers for a brief
moment, barely perceptible, and engages the eye, without being
remembered. It is never retained, but rather becomes a sentimental
recollection – an after­‍‑taste which does not reclaim the loss. In
“December,” Schuyler admits that his “revelations” are extremely
215
Exorcising Modernism
ephemeral,5 or even puerile, remaining forever mere “hints.” Not
that it matters much: in a typically careless manner Schuyler
informs the reader that “to have been so happy is a promise / and
if it isn’t kept that doesn’t matter” (14).
Schuyler’s irony – just as his sentimentalism, often
consciously excessive – derides poetry’s pretensions to serve
as a tool for the recovery of the original totality of experience,
which Schiller, Proust and Eliot all so longed for. As the poem
“At Darragh’s I” seems to suggest, it is an endeavor as hopeless
as the tearing off of the fireflies’ phosphorous glow. Incidentally,
the childhood recollection described in the poem also reads like
a satire on the Proustian madelaine: the fruit cookie which the
poet munches in his memory glues his mouth and turns him into
a dreamy stutterer: “oval / oval / oval” (316).
As opposed to other ironists, however, Schuyler usually
does not adopt the tone of lament. On the one hand, he underlines
the fact that poetic language does not touch reality, that it is an
entirely arbitrary and artificial creation. On the other – he can
live with it. In “Freely Espousing” he formulates the following
injunction: “it is absolutely forbidden / for words to echo the
act described; or try to.” But he immediately adds: “Except
very directly / as in / bong. And tickle” (3). Williams is famous
for similar poetic light-heartedness6. It is present in such wellknown poems as “Danse Russe,” “Portrait of a Lady,” or “January
Morning.” However, more often than in Schuyler, Williams’s
irony is wrought with anxiety and discloses frustration, just as if
the poet was ashamed of his idiosyncratic fascinations and had
to explain himself. That is why the ending of “January Morning”
contains the following declaration:
In the same poem, quite unexpectedly, the following short dialogue is introduced:
“You didn’t visit the Alps?” / “No, but I saw from the train they were black / and
streaked with snow.”
6
Vide „Light Hearted William” in Sour Grapes (1921).
5
216
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet
All this –
was for you, old woman.
I wanted to write a poem
that you would understand.
For what good is it to me
if you can’t understand it?
But you got to try hard –
But –
(103-104)
“Oh, I cannot say it. There is no word” – Williams is exasperated in
another poem (“Portrait of the Author”). In the ironic coda to one
of the “Pastorals” (the one with the picturesque outhouses), the
poet reveals his hurt pride: “No one / will believe this / of vast
import to the nation” (65).
Schuyler, however, faced with those bewildering free
espousals which issue from under his pen, is satisfied to say the
following: “I can’t get over / how it all works together” (5). In
this sentence, taken from the early poem “February,” it is possible
to discern both an admission of helplessness (though far more
cheerful than for example Eliot’s “I can connect / Nothing with
nothing”), as well as the tone of that “spontaneous affirmation”
which we mentioned before. Schuyler’s key verb could be placed
somewhere between “I do not understand” and “I cannot stop
admiring” (“how it all works together”). The harmonies which
the author of Freely Espousing relishes are always messy. The
following three lines from “Fauré’s Second Piano Quartet” could
well serve as a motto to Schuyler’s collected poems:
(...) All this beauty in the
Mess of this small apartment on
West Twentieth n Chelsea, New York.
(328)
217
Exorcising Modernism
The beauty which the poet experiences, despite the fact that it is
often set within urban scenery, is evidently related to the “organic
beauty” of the Romantics and evokes the famous definition of
beauty as “purposiveness without a purpose.” Schuyler, however,
usually emphasizes the second part of the Kantian oxymoron.
Moreover, that which makes the impression of organic form is in
fact the effect of artificial procedures: everything “works together”
only as long as Fauré’s music is heard from the speakers. Schuyler
is particularly fond of such stage effects; he enjoys underlining
all arbitrary frames. The aromas which inspire him are not
Baudelaire’s esoteric parfums of, but – “Vanillin, artificial rum
flavoring” in the Christmas eggnog. The author of “December”
unabashedly admits that he succumbs to affectation and that
artificial, shoddy charms appeal to him:
Each December! I always think I hate “the overcommercialized event”
and then bells ring, or tiny light bulbs wink above the
entrance
to Bonwit Teller or Katherine going on five wants
to look at all
the empty sample gift-wrapped boxes up Fifth Avenue
in swank shops
and how can I help falling in love? (...)
(13)
Speaking of “light bulbs,” it is important, when reading Schuyler,
to pay attention to something which in scenic arts is of vital
importance – to light. Or should we say – lighting? The difference
is significant. The first suggests nature, the other – art and artifice.
Schuyler, without a doubt, is “The Master of the Golden Glow.” It is
this glow that frequently serves as the only principle of unification
in his poetics of “free espousal,” for example – in such poems as
218
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet
“Shimmer,” “June 30, 1974,” or the early “February.” It flares up
just for a moment and makes a momentary synthesis possible – one
whose meaning remains unuttered and perhaps unutterable. To be
precise, it is a synthesis that is always incomplete, unfinished;
a “promise [which] isn’t kept.” The figure of a story which remains
uncompleted, or merely hinted at but never actually related,
appears throughout Schuyler’s oeuvre. In “Hymn to Life” it is
highlighted by the golden glow:
(...) The sun shines on my hand
And the myriad lines that crisscross tell the story of
nearly fifty
Years. Sorry, it’s too long to relate. (...)
(214-215)
Schuyler also recollects poems which are “there,” but which
apparently have not been written. Again, however, “it doesn’t
matter” – as Schuyler states in “The Morning of the Poem.”
It thus seems that the golden glow is an effect produced by
natural light: it serves as a catalyst of that instantaneous epiphany
whose substance can be contained only in negative terms. The
illumination is strangely ineffectual: so much remains “not
understood, a sight an insight and you pass on” (215). These
“natural” associations are also confirmed by one other meaning
present in the title of “The Master of the Golden Glow,” as
golden glow is also a coneflower – a flower whose form is almost
diagrammatic, as if drawn by a child: a deep­‍‑purple centre and
oblong, radiantly yellow petals. Undoubtedly, Schuyler is not
only the “Master of the Coneflower,” but generally speaking
the master of observing and identifying flowers, trees, shrubs,
even common weeds. He knows them all by name. Or almost
all. In “The Morning of the Poem” we witness the following
dramatic scene:
219
Exorcising Modernism
A skinny weed, and this weed, this wild yellow
flower lower and larger than
A buttercup, but not lacquer yellow, more the yellow
of a marsh marigold, meaty
Like it, though not so large, not nearly so
large, sprinkled in the weedy
Wild­‍‑flower lawn, for God’s sake, what is your
name? (...)
(261)
Thus, on the one hand, we are dealing here with Orphic mastery
over nature, on the other, however, nature often slips out of the
poet’s grasp, leaving behind it only an empty catalogue of words:
inept similes and metaphors, clichéd phrases. In “Hudson Ferry”
Schuyler warns us that “you can’t talk about the weather” and “you
can’t get at a sunset naming colors” – “it’s like saying my lady’s
damask cheek” (21). That is why Schuyler’s solar epiphanies are
usually marked with an ironic awareness that their golden glow is
a photographic trick, a matter of employing a particular stylistic
convention, rather than “grasping nature” – in any possible, or
impossible, sense of the phrase.
It is in fact quite likely that the title “The Master of the
Golden Glow” is related to photography. The term “golden
glow” refers to the effect one can achieve when taking
photographs during the so called “golden hour” – the first hour
after sunrise and the last before sunset. With light falling at
a particularly sharp angle, the colors on the photograph become
warm and mellow, and the shadows – rich and deep. The least
photogenic objects – the municipal dump or “the advertising
signs of Snider’s Catsup [and] Ivory Soap” – all acquire (perhaps
a slightly banal) charm. The golden hour is one of Schuyler’s
favorite themes – both the evening (as in “February” where it is
exactly “five p.m. on the day before March first”) as well as the
220
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet
morning one (in “ June 30, 1974” and of course “The Morning
of the Poem”).
Gradually, the natural and the artificial light become
indistinguishable, just as in the poem “Song” the evening sun and
its paper double – “The Evening Sun” – cannot be distinguished.
To return to the Golden Glow, however, let us note – though this may
seem farfetched – that it is also the name of an alcoholic beverage.
It can be associated with a popular fruit wine produced in Nova
Scotia. However, a cocktail of the same name is far better known:
it consists of 3 measures of bourbon, 3 measures of dark rum, 3
measures of fresh lemon juice and 1 measure of grenadine. Would
the poem then suggest some sort of artificially induced elation?7
We are of course unable to answer this question. It is worth
pointing out, however, that very often in Schuyler’s poems the
elation is dependent on a frame. The golden glow pours into it. It
is not the frame of a painting, or a photographic frame I have in
mind here, but a window frame. Sometimes it is present explicitly
and sometimes it can only be guessed at. Many poems from
Freely Espousing are variations on the theme of looking through
a window: sometimes from the same window (as is the case in
the poems “February” and “April and its Forsythia”) through
which the same stone lions on the roof of the opposite building
are observed. At the very beginning of “The Master of the Golden
Glow” there is mention of “a sash facing west.” The poem in
memory of Frank O’Hara, “Buried at Springs,” is a melancholy
contemplation of a view from a window through which O’Hara
had looked eleven years before. Again, the same view, although
at the same time “quite / literally (...) not the same” (43).
In Schuyler’s later collections, the window theme appears
equally often. Many of the details seem familiar – they are like
A similar suggestion is present in the title of one of Schuyler’s books – Crystal
Lithium. Lithium salts have a stimulating effect and are used in treating depression.
7
221
Exorcising Modernism
a distant echo. In “This Dark Apartment,” the poem which
opens the 1980 collection The Morning of the Poem, the poet is
astonished when he realizes that the windows of the room he rented
to meet his lover open onto the façade of UN Headquarters: “in all
the / months and years I’ve / lived in this apartment / (...) I never
noticed / that it was in my view” (227). This is not entirely true: the
UN building which “on big evenings” sparkles like a “green wave”
was already mentioned in the early poem “February” (written in
mid 60s). This is hardly surprising. We have already noticed that
Schuyler’s revelations do not last. The golden glow – the frame
which encompasses the passing – always reveals something new
and always the same: “Discontinuity / in all we see and are: / the
same, yet change, / change, change” (230). And it is not only the
world of visible things that is discontinuous, but also the subject,
if we may still be allowed to use this term. Schuyler eagerly
underlines that his fascinations are ungrounded, or – that they
are grounded in sheer whim, i.e. in “affectation [and] accidental
interest,” which Schiller found incompatible with the true spirit
of poetry, and which Emerson referred to as “weeds of time8 &
place & personal relation.”
It is precisely this sort of whim that opens and ends “June 30,
1974.” At the beginning, the poet’s attention is drawn to a bayberry
bush. Why? Because it is his “favorite / shrub (today, / at least)”
(228). The poet breaks off when he is overcome with the temptation
to make himself a few more toasts. In a typically carefree, or even
a bit arrogant manner, Schuyler emphasizes the arbitrary frame
with which the poem is bound. The impressions, recollections
and associations which it captures cannot be imparted to others.
We should also mention a different frame which often appears in Schuyler’s poetry:
a time frame, which is usually exceptionally narrow. Many of the titles of Schuyler’s
poems include names of months (“In January,” “February,” “September,” “October,”
December”) or a particular date (“February 13, 1975,” “June 30, 1974,” “May 24th
or so”).
8
222
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet
Let us be even more explicit: in this poem, as well as in many
others, Schuyler’s poetic impulse is the result of the subject’s
alienation. This alienation becomes the condition of spontaneous
affirmation. A similar theme is present in Williams’s well‑known
poem “Danse Russe.” Schuyler – just like the famous doctor of
Rutherford – indulges in carnal delights, while other members
of the household – Jane, Joe and John – are asleep. Both poems
touch upon the theme of alienation and in both the joy is tainted
with fear. But the difference is quite evident. Williams’s ecstatic
dance is deeply disturbing: a bit hysterical, not to say pathological.
Schuyler’s breakfast celebrations are tranquil: pastel­‍‑colored and
sentimental. Williams’s alienation is a dramatic reiteration of the
word “lonely,” while Schuyler uses “alone”: “I like / to be alone /
with friends” (229). Whereas in the first case we are dealing with
an alienating “rift” which constitutes the subject, the second is
more about temporary retreat (as in the title of O’Hara’s “A Step
Away From Them”). The very expression “alone / with friends”
sounds ambiguous. It can be read simply as “together with friends”
or “lonely among friends.” Again, that which paralyses Williams –
the impassable subjectivity of momentary elation which cannot
be contained in a poem – does not interfere, in Schuyler’s case,
with the process of poetic inscription, even though one has to rely
on words which are always inaccurate; on tired phrases, like the
Shakespearian “my lady’s damask cheek.” Thus, the proper
substance of the poem is permanently situated outside its frame.
This suggestion appears in “The Morning of the Poem” when
Schuyler addresses his dead friend, the painter Fairfield Porter:
(...) this is not
your poem, your poem I may
Never write, too much, though it is there and
needs only to be written down
And one day will and if it isn’t it doesn’t matter:
223
Exorcising Modernism
the truth, the absolute
Of feeling, of knowing what you know, that is
the poem (...)
(262)
The external absolute of feeling is the poem itself – this sounds
like the declaration of a true Romantic. In his “Defence of Poetry”
Shelley stated that the poem resembles “fading coal” left after
the fire of imagination. But this coal retains at least part of the
primal energy, while Schuyler seems to suggest that a poem is
something that always falls outside the frame and will never be
written. The poem always implies some sort of overload, an excess
of material – “too much” to be contained in writing. The poem
is and is not part of the poem. It is precisely the notion of “the
frame,” which is and is not part of the work of art, that allows us
to come to terms with Schuyler’s paradox and think both of the
poem in front of our eyes, in black and white, as well as of that
other, “absolute” one – permanently unwritten.
We have already discussed window frames, and also briefly
mentioned the narrow time frame. It is interesting to notice,
however, that the function of “the frame” is often served in
Schuyler’s poetry by the word itself. It never aligns with the
described phenomenon, but defines an arbitrary field within
the pervasive discontinuity – a false appearance of terra firma.
Words “assault” amorphous, or as Schuyler puts it in “October,”
“unpatterned” nature. Thus, Schuyler’s pastoralism, which
Helen Vendler writes about, does not really reflect the passive,
attentive attitude of the early Romantics. It is aggressive, but
on the other hand – it has nothing to do with Faustian supremacy,
since Schuyler always stresses that the “assault” is (almost
grotesquely) ineffectual.
As already mentioned, Schuyler delights in disparaging
the epistemological pretensions of words: “you can’t get at
224
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet
a sunset naming colors.” He also shows how the discontinuous
phenomenon evades the mastery of language triggering a nervous
proliferation of tropes. In “The Morning of the Poem” this motif –
let us call it the motif of “the missing word” – appears very often.
In the passage quoted earlier, the poet who cannot recall the name
of the field flower tries to describe it and grasp it by means of
comparisons, metaphors, until he cries out impatiently: “for God’s
sake, what is your / name?” (261). A little later, he forgets the name
of a shade of green which his friend, Robert Dash, eagerly uses in
his paintings: “what is that green you / use so much of, that seems
to / Devour itself?” (261). Some more examples:
The way the brownstone facing of your house is
coming off in giant flakes: there’s
A word for that sickness of the stone but I
can’t remember it (you’ll find
It in that fascinating book Brick and Brownstone:
illustrative photograph)
(263)
(...) More kinds of
conifers than spruce grow
On this hill. I wish I knew their names, I have
a friend, a botanist,
Who could tell them to me, one by one. (...)
(265)
What is that bird big as a duck that’s not a
duck on the grass with a black
Bib and dark tan stripes, is it a kind of dove
or pigeon? What would I gain
By knowing? (...)
(267-268)
225
Exorcising Modernism
Schuyler is well-known for his concern for taxonomic precision
in describing nature. For him, it is insufficient to say “carnation”
if he has a “sweet William” in mind. It is insufficient to say
“ivy” – “Jill-over-the­‍‑ground” is the proper name. To call a bird
simply “duck?” – it is worse than slander. Geoff Ward quite
correctly includes Schuyler among the most faithful continuators
of the “tradition of observational poetry sponsored by William
Carlos Williams.” However, one often has the impression that
Schuyler delights not so much in the precision of observation, as
in the exotic, or sometimes even familiar names. “Whimbrel” or
“widgeon” sound great, but it is of secondary importance whether
they are plants or birds.
It should be noticed that in the passages quoted above the
missing word is never retrieved. The comforting thought that there
is someone who knows, or a book which contains it, is enough.
The word is like a safety net without which the very thought
of moving in the element of “Discontinuity / in all we see and
are” would be paralyzing. But Schuyler is not interested in the
refuge of knowledge which words offer. A far more interesting
perspective opens before the poet when the word loses its control
over the phenomenon and the defining frame begins to crumble,
disclosing its arbitrary character. This is what happens in the poem
“Snowdrop” when the charming flower suddenly strikes the poet
as resembling “a pale green testicle” (307). 9
In „Snowdrop” Schuyler addresses Reginald Farrer (1880-1920), an eccentric British
botanist who revolutionized the art of gardening in England, bringing seeds from his
travels in the Far East. One type of geranium, common today on English meadows,
bears the Latin name of Geranium Farreri. Farrer was also the author of books about
gardens: the most famous of those are The English Rock Garden and The Garden of
Asia: Impressions from Japan. In one famous incident, Farrer – having returned from
one of his Himalayan expeditions – decided to change the face of the English landscape:
he loaded his shotgun with seeds of exotic mountain plants and fired them into rock
cliffs and gorges in North Yorkshire. Farrerian extravagance is no doubt present in
Schuyler’s pastoral poetry.
9
226
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet
On the other hand, Schuyler can rehabilitate a compromised
word. However, he achieves it in a somewhat paradoxical manner,
by further exposing the fact that his poetic procedure is entirely
unwarranted – an effect of overstatement rather than symbolist
Correspondances. In a consciously naïve manner, he convinces
the reader that “bong” and “tickle” are words which, in an almost
magical way, contain the essence of what they designate. In the
poem “Seeking” this strategy produces an even more striking
effect – for a split second (but no longer than that) the impossible
happens:
Here are seven lucky stones
OOOOOOo
found in old New England. And a snail shell @
(30)
Finally, let us turn to yet another way in which words in Schuyler’s
poems are arranged to form arbitrary, entirely tentative frames.
What I have in mind are the formal echoes included in the text –
whole networks of echoing patterns. For although “it is absolutely
forbidden / for words to echo the act described; or try to,” they
can at least become echoes of each other and thus momentarily
confront nature’s (as well as the subject’s) discontinuity.
First of all, Schuyler masterfully, though rather seldom,
uses traditional poetic forms which are based on the effect of
a returning echo: in The Home Book there is the brilliant villanelle
“Poem” (“I do not always understand what you say”), while in
Freely Espousing Schuyler included his translation of Dante’s
sestina “Al poco giorno...” It is also important to notice that certain
expressions, metaphors and images “move” from poem to poem,
connecting Schuyler’s early and later work. Readers who have
been following Schuyler’s development from the early sixties
until the last collection – A Few Days, published in 1985 – will
227
Exorcising Modernism
certainly recognize these echoes, even if they are unable to locate
their source. Most of the poems in Freely Espousing are quietly
and loosely related to each other – they are freely espoused:
a surprising metaphor is repeated, the name of a flower, a situation,
a view, or even dominant colors of the poem, especially “goldgreen,” “green­‍‑copper” etc.
The poem “October,” quoted before, is a particularly
interesting example of Schuyler’s “poetics of the echo.” It comes
from Hymn to Life, published in 1974. This time the principle of
unification is not the golden glow, the window frame, music, the
sound of “the great bronze bell” (27), or the date alone; in this case
it is the echo. The network of sound and repetitions closes in from
both sides (in the first and third stanza), leaving inside a space,
a residue which resists assimilation into the emerging pattern:
Books litter the bed,
leaves the lawn. It
lightly rains. Fall has
come: unpatterned, in
the shedding leaves.
The maples ripen. Apples
come home crisp in bags.
This pear tastes good.
It rains lightly on the
random leaf patterns.
The nimbus is spread
above our island. Rain
lightly patters on unshed leaves. The books
of fall litter the bed.
(180-181)
228
Mikołaj Wiśniewski | Williams, Schuyler, and the Romantic Poet
An ordering net has been thrown over “unpatterned” and “random”
nature. However, its effectiveness is not only arbitrary, but also
incomplete. The sentence “This pear tastes good” does not echo
anything around it, just as the sentence opening the third stanza:
“The nimbus is spread / above our island.” The first seems to speak
about the irrevocably subjective (or rather “insular,” like the
“island” later on) character of sensuous experience; the second –
about the amorphous (like “nimbus”) nature of the phenomenal
world which escapes any ordering strategies. This does not mean,
however, that the desperate poet should renounce his ephemeral
patterns. As long as they last, we can accept Schuyler’s enthusiastic,
extravagant, even though naïve declaration: “The Great Divorce
Has Been Annulled” (28).
Works Cited
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library
of America, 1983.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981.
Schiller, Friedrich. Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom. Vol. 3.
Washington: The Schiller Institute, 1985.
Schuyler, James. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1995.
Ward, Geoff. Statues of Liberty: The New York School of Poets.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions,
1995.
---. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Vol. 1. New
York: New Directions, 1991.
Yoder, Richard Allyn. Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America.
University of California Press, 1978.
229
Agnieszka Salska
Galway Kinnell: Tradition
and the Individual Talent
Galway Kinnell, one of the best American poets of the second
half of the twentieth century, died on October 28, 2014 at his
home in Sheffield, Vermont. Born in 1927, Kinnell was one of
the surprisingly large group of talented and prolific American
poets born in the late 1920s. Among them are personalities so
impressive and so different as A. R. Ammons (1926), Robert
Bly (1926), Robert Creely (1926), Allan Ginsberg (1926), James
Merrill (1926), Frank O’Hara (1926), John Ashbery (1927),
W. S. Merwin (1927), James Wright (1927) and Philip Levine
(1928). As beginners, they learned from the somewhat older
poets of “the middle generation” (Theodore Roethke and Robert
Lowell were especially important for Kinnell) and, like them,
had to struggle with the still powerful presence of the modernist
giants – T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, William Carlos
Williams, and Wallace Stevens. Although, as a rule, Kinnell and
his contemporaries started out in the formalist mode, they soon
rebelled against the pervasive imposition in the 1940s and 50s
230
Agnieszka Salska | Galway Kinnell: Tradition and the Individual Talent
of the new critical conception of a poem. Coming into their own
in the 1960s and 70s, they radically decentralized and reshaped
the American poetic scene. They also were the first generation of
American poets who confidently and unselfconsciously assimilated
foreign influences, canceling the traditional opposition between
cosmopolitan aesthetes like Longfellow or Eliot and native
“barbarians” like Whitman or Williams.
Against the background of the multidirectional quests of his
contemporaries for their own poetic voice, Kinnnell appears as
a “poet who went his own way” (Lewis 2014). Despite the fact that
early in his career Kinnell was sometimes associated with the “deep
image” poets, one cannot really fit him into any of the customarily
differentiated groups or schools such as the New Yorkers or the Beats,
the Black Mountain experimenters or the followers of deep image.
Rather, like Ammons or Merrill, he seems a figure apart, a distinctive
individualist. His poetry, however, is deeply and intimately rooted in
tradition understood in the spirit of T. S. Eliot’s theory:
It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which
we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would
continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; the
historical sense compels a man to write not merely
with his own generation in his bones but with a feeling
that the whole literature of Europe from Homer and
within it the whole literature of his own country has
a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous
order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the
timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless
and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer
traditional. And it is at the same time what makes the
writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of
his own contemporaneity.
(Selected Prose 38)
231
Exorcising Modernism
Widely traveled and read, Kinnell, who began as poet under the
strong patronage of W. B. Yeats, with time worked out his own
poetic tradition. His poems evidence sometimes quite remote and
foreign affinities. While his work has been consistently linked with
Whitman, a connection the poet himself affirmed throughout his
career, Kinnell does not have Whitman’s confidence with which
to project a similarly “representative self” into the future. And
although, like Dickinson, he writes from the position of keenly
felt loss, unlike Dickinson he may no longer rely “in Tumult –
or Extremity” on the romantic power of “the Columnar Self”
(Dickinson 740). Believing with Robert Pinsky that “we learn
many of our attitudes toward language and reality from the past,
and that it takes considerable effort by a poet either to understand
and apply those attitudes for his own purposes, or to abandon
them” (Pinsky 4), I intend to demonstrate in this essay how,
in an age favoring experimentation and strategies for resisting
continuities with the past, Kinnell openly foregrounds his rapport
with poetic tradition to claim for his voice suprapersonal authority.
At the deepest level Kinnell’s poetry seems motivated by the
urge to test the possibilities of reaching some primary common
ground, some basic foundation where all life meets. And for him,
it meets in the inexhaustible energy sustaining its processes, in
sensual enjoyment of the physical world and in the inevitable
confrontation with death. At the same time, the poet acknowledges
the alienating loneliness of contemporary man and his imperative
need for distance and separation. Kinnell must somehow balance
the conflicting drives. Loyalty to and appreciation of the physical
world, of nature, the body, material objects and animal life is
accompanied by constant probing into the beyond and beneath
of the physical and material in search of connective patterns of
meaning. Yet Kinnell cannot really be called a romantic pantheist.
His poems only suggest shared patterns of experience and
shared forms of life. Kinnell’s investigations always start with
232
Agnieszka Salska | Galway Kinnell: Tradition and the Individual Talent
the particular, personal, local and physical to open perspectives
into the psychic, moral, communal and universal. They move
from the visible towards the invisible, to invoke Whitman’s and
Rilke’s method, though the invisible may never be as palpable for
Kinnell as it feels in Rilke’s Elegies. Yet the invisible can only
be approached through the visible, just as meaning can only be
grasped in form. This is not exactly a version of Williams’s “no
ideas but in things” for Kinnell goes farther than Williams in his
desire to enter the physical object and merge with it, to gain access,
as in “The Bear,” to its inner reality. In the “Introduction” to his
study of Kinnell’s poetry Lee Zimmerman observes:
Although T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams
epitomize opposite impulses in modern American
poetry, we need both the abscissa of one and the
ordinate of the other against which to plot Kinnell’s
relation to his century. The connection to Williams is,
of course, more overt.
(4)
At least in the early poems, one would like to add. Kinnell’s
early “For William Carlos Williams” addresses the older poet
at a reading, estranged from his inattentive audience: “In an
hour / Of talking your honesty built you a tower” (New Selected
4). Performing for an audience gathered under false pretenses,
Williams closes in himself, becomes untouchable and remote. As
a poet Kinnell believes that attention and empathy not only let
him see people, natural creatures and things, but can open for him
(and his readers) their inner reality. And so trailing the contours of
the physical world there is in his poetry the urge to reach “where
the meanings are” (Dickinson 320) so that the overt affinity
to Williams’s materialism is lined with an undercurrent affinity
to Eliot’s hunger for spiritual revelation. Williams’s celebratory
233
Exorcising Modernism
sensuality meets Eliot’s focus on decay, and Williams’s empathy
is counterbalanced by the alienated despair of Eliot.
Such duality is reflected in Kinnell’s wide and masterly
use of free verse on the one hand and, on the other, his periodic
recourse to formal poems. For Kinnell, the craftsman of language,
participates in the rebellion of his generation against academic
formalism and may be considered one of the modern masters of
free verse, a skill to which testify – among others – his beautiful,
personal lyrics such as “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”
or “Parkinson’s Disease.” Nevertheless, in many of his longer,
best known and highly appreciated works, for example The Book
of Nightmares, he openly invokes structures and forms associated
with the achievement of his poetic predecessors – in this case
Rilke – or, more generally, the aesthetics and style of some past
epoch. Thus When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone recalls
the tradition of seventeenth-century meditative verse. Among his
experimental and innovation-oriented contemporaries, Kinnell,
like a somewhat older James Schuyler (though in many ways
they are quite different poets), is marked by a willing reliance
on tradition. What I mean is not only his impressive erudition
and his excellent work as translator1 but also his frankly admitted
affinities to the work of older poets. Still, treating tradition as
resource for his work, Kinnell opposed Ezra Pound’s and Eliot’s
elitism, proposing to write “poems that could be understood
without a graduate degree” (Lewis 2014).
Kinnell’s translations include among others The Poems of Francois Villon (1965,
new edition 1982); Yves Bennefoy, On the Motion and Immobility of Douve (1968,
reprinted by Bloodaxe Books, 1992) and Early Poems (with Richrd Revear, 1991);
Yvan Goll, Lackawanna Elegy (1970); The Essential Rilke (with Hannah Liebmann,
1999). In view of the extensive translation work done by American poets in the 1960s
and 70s, it may be relevant to recall Pound’s conviction that “A great age of literature
is perhaps always a great age of translations” (81) and his doubt if “any man in our
time can think with only one language” (112).
1
234
Agnieszka Salska | Galway Kinnell: Tradition and the Individual Talent
Reviewing The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into
the New World. Poems 1946-1964, Christopher Ricks located the
book “In the Direct line of Whitman, the Indirect Line of Eliot”
(75), while in his essay “Autobiography of the Present,” James
Atlas called the title poem
one of the most vivid legacies of The Wasteland in
English building its immense rhetorical power from
the materials of several dialects, litanies of place, and
a profound sense of the spiritual disintegration that
Eliot divined in modern urban life. And like Eliot’s,
Kinnell’s is a religious poem, in which the chaotic
forces of survival (in this instance, the turbulent,
jumbled life of New York’s lower East Side, Along
Avenue C) ultimately preside over the terror latent in
our late stage of civilization.
(80)
The critic immediately adds that the comparison to The Wasteland
is not “an arbitrary reference” but “an effort to estimate the poem’s
durable achievement.”
Nevertheless, the first association that offers itself, not only
to critics and commentators, but also to the so­‍‑called general
reader, is with Whitman, the singer of Mannahatta and its teeming,
crowded life:
In the pushcart market, on Sunday,
A crate of lemons discharges light like a battery.
Icicle-shaped carrots that through black soil
Wove away lie like flames in the sun.
Onions with their skirts ripped seek sunlight
On green skins. The sun beats
On beets dirty as boulders in cowfields,
235
Exorcising Modernism
On turnips pinched and gibbous
From budging rocks, on embery sweets,
Peanut-shaped Idahos, shore-pebble Long Islands and
Maines,
On horseradishes still growing weeds on the flat ends,
Cabbages lying about like sea-green brains
The skull has been shucked from,
On tomatoes, undented plum-tomatoes, alligatorskinned
Cucumbers, that float pickled
In the wooden tubs of green skim milk –
(Leary 200)2
Passages such as the above consciously recall Whitman’s catalogue
litanies celebrating the miracle of the ordinary. Apart from clear
affinities with Whitman and Eliot, we find inserted in the poem
a quotation in the original from “Le Testament” by Francois Villon3,
the poet of the poor and disreputable who nevertheless have the
strength to resist despair. Kinnell explained in the Introduction
to the second (revised) edition of his translation of The Poems of
Francois Villon that “He [Villon] writes out of a peculiarly fierce
attachment to our mortal experience (...). What he holds on to is only
an unspecified vitality, the vitality of decay, perhaps, or of sorrow,
or simply of speech” (xviii). This sounds like an explanation of
Kinnell’s own deepest motives for writing, at the same time offering
an accurate description of what “The Avenue” is all about.
I’m quoting from a 1965 anthology, A Controversy of Poets, to show the poem’s
immediate critical recognition. The poem also figured in M. L. Rosenthal’s influential
anthology The New Modern Poetry British and American Poetry since World War II
(1967).
3
“J’ois la cloche de Serbonne, / Qui tousjours a neuf heures sonne / Le Salut que
l’Ange predit” (v. 276-78).
2
236
Agnieszka Salska | Galway Kinnell: Tradition and the Individual Talent
This God­‍‑forsaken Avenue bearing the initial of Christ
Through the haste and carelessness of the ages,
The sea standing in heaps, which keeps on collapsing,
Where the drowned suffer a C-change,
And remain the common poor.
(...)
In the nighttime
Of blood they are laughing and saying,
Our little lane, what a kingdom it was!
oi weih, oi weih
(Leary 209)
With the echo of Villon, the aura of Whitman and of Eliot,
“Avenue C,” a specifically local poem paying tribute to a particular
neighborhood in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, offers itself not
only as yet another snapshot of the modern metropolis, but as
a timeless site of never ending human struggle for physical and
spiritual survival.
The Book of Nightmares, published in 1971 (sections of the
sequence had appeared earlier in general magazines and literary
periodicals), made Kinnell famous. One of the blurbs on the first
paperback edition quotes James Logan in The Nation: “in our time
we can single out Galway Kinnell as one of the few masters in
poetry.” In another, Denise Levertov declared:
I read the whole Book of Nightmares to my class at
our final meeting, a grand farewell, and everyone,
including me, thought it magnificent. “A universe”
said one, after the last words and a long silence. It
encompasses within the breadth of it both political rage
and satire, and the most lyrical tenderness, and holds
them together: coheres.
237
Exorcising Modernism
The book, dedicated “To Maud and Fergus,” the poet’s children,
refers the reader, through its epigraph – the final lines of the fourth
Duino Elegy4 – to Rilke:
But this, though: death,
the whole of death, – even before life’s begun,
to hold it all so gently, and be good:
this is beyond description!
The whole sequence as if talks to Rilke5 in taking up the dominant
theme of “The Elegies” – the longing and necessity of accepting
death as part of life. Rilke’s ten­‍‑poem cycle suggested the structure
of Kinnell’s book whose ten parts, with their individual titles, can
be read as separate poems; in fact, some have been individually
reprinted and anthologized. In The Book of Nightmares free verse
is used in place of the more disciplined blank verse of Rilke’s
“Elegies,” but Kinnell’s ten poems echo one another in their
analogous division into seven sections each, the arrangement
strengthening the structural unity of the sequence. Also, somewhat
like Eliot’s Four Quartets, insistent repetition of particular images
(the dying / dead hen, old “shoes of wandering,” the bed with
its connection to crucial stages of human life, imprints of past
footsteps and bodies) contribute to the cycle’s unity. The Rilkean
transformation of the visible into the invisible is given a concrete
and intimately personal basis through the theme of the speaker’s
recent fatherhood; it is also given solid material substance through
elemental imagery present in the sequence. Images of fire, water,
earth and air reappear in the successive sections; they qualify
movement of time seen as linear from the perspective of individual
4
“Aber dies: den Tod, / den ganzen Tod, noch vor dem Leben so / sanft zu erhalten
und nicht boss zu sein, / ist unbeschreiblich” (206).
5
On The Book of Nightmares’ relation to Rilke and the Duino Elegies see especially
David Kleibard’s essay “Galway Kinnnell’s Poetry of Transformation” (193-204).
238
Agnieszka Salska | Galway Kinnell: Tradition and the Individual Talent
life so that human time gets inscribed in timeless cycles of natural
and cosmic processes.
The poem remains also in the shadow of Whitman, adhering
to Whitman’s confluence of the intimately personal and the
universal, as well as his devotion to the physical and erotically
sensual. If in Rilke’s second elegy the tenderness of touch is
characterized first of all by classical restraint, in “The Call Across
the Valley of Not Knowing,” Kinnell invokes Whitman at his most
erotic but also at his closest to the knowledge of death:
we two
lay out together
under the tree, on earth, beside our empty clothes,
our bodies open to the sky,
and the blossoms glittering in the sky
floated down
and the bees glittered in the blossoms
and the bodies of our hearts
opened
under the knowledge
of tree, on the grass of the knowledge
of graves, and among the flowers of the flowers.
(59)
It is impossible not to recall here sections five and six of “Song of
Myself” or some poems in the Calamus cluster, and in The Book
of Nightmares the Rilkean drive toward spiritualized abstraction
fuses with the earthiness of Whitman. Even as Zimmerman places
Kinnell between Eliot and Williams, in The Book of Nightmares
the transcendent hunger of Rilke is solidly balanced with the
physicality of Whitman. And the structure of Kinnell’s sequence
sends us in both directions: the cycle repeats the Elegies’ ten
part composition but each of the ten poems is, in the manner
239
Exorcising Modernism
of Whitman, divided into sections and verse paragraph. It is as
if in his response to Rilke, Kinnell was seeking support from
Whitman – the poet presiding over native American tradition – and
was thus inscribing not only himself but also the whole American
poetic tradition into the European modernist context.
Rilke’s Elegies and Eliot’s The Wasteland and Four Quartets
are poems written in the shadow of World Wars. Like them The
Book of Nightmares, written at the time of escalating American
military involvement in Vietnam, is overshadowed by war. In part
VI, “The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible,” political protest
against the Vietnam War invades and vividly colors the otherwise
almost confessional poem. And Kinnell seeks universalizing
associations with Eliot who had universalized post­‍‑World War
One despair. For example, the poem is bracketed with the horrified
exclamation “Lieutenant! / This corpse will not stop burning!”
If one recalls here The Wasteland (“Stetson! You who were with
me in the ships at Mylae! / That corpse you planted last year
in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout?”), one reconstructs in
imagination a chain of repeated war deaths bringing no renewal.
Although Robert Langbaum sees the fire of the “burning corpse”
as symbolically purifying,6 the realistic horror of television reports
from Vietnam seems closer and more palpable. After Vietnam,
“death by fire” acquired a terrible literalness and a terrible proximity
to the daily experience of contemporary everyman. Like Eliot’s
water, Kinnell’s fire seems intensely ambiguous: both purifying
and deadly. And gesturing towards Villon’s “Testament,” Kinnell
wants his reader to see the Vietnam War as one more incident in
the continuity of crimes committed by Christian civilization and
culminating in the twentieth century:
6
In his review, Langbaum points out echoes of Eliot’s Four Quartets, especially in
Poem III “The Shoes of Wandering” and echoes of “Tintern Abbey” in Poem I “Under
the Maud Moon.”
240
Agnieszka Salska | Galway Kinnell: Tradition and the Individual Talent
In the Twentieth Century of my trespass on earth
having exterminated one billion heathens,
heretics, Jews, Moslems, witches, mystical seekers,
black men, Asians, and Christian brothers,
everyone of them for their own good,
a whole continent of red men for living in unnatural
community
and at the same time having relations with the land,
one billion species of animals for being sub­‍‑human,
and ready to take on the bloodthirsty creatures from
the other planets,
I, Christian man, groan out this testament of my last will.
(42)
Writing about The Book of Nightmares, Langbaum says that “like
all nature poetry The Book of Nightmares is about the attempt of the
lonely soul, existing in a world where community has broken down,
to reforge connections” (58). One feels somewhat hesitant about the
adequacy of such a description since reflections on fatherhood and
intimacies of family life prominently figure in the whole sequence.
Still, Langbaum’s formulation feels absolutely accurate if applied
to “When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone,” the title poem of
Kinnell’s 1990 collection. Like all of Kinnell’s long poems, this
one consists of a sequence of differentiated units even as its regular
stanzas are woven together by the title phrase, which returns like
a refrain in the first and last line of each stanza. The whole sequence
consists of eleven blank verse thirteen-line stanzas. Grammatically,
each stanza constitutes one long, syntactically meandering sentence,
beginning and ending with the beautifully orchestrated title phrase.
As a result, each stanza follows the structure of logical argument:
“When one has lived a long time alone one does that and that, and
that and that happens to one when one has lived a long time alone.”
241
Exorcising Modernism
The formal organization of the poem into sonnet-like stanzas with
an argumentative structure places the poem firmly in the tradition
of seventeenth-century meditative verse. The meandering flow of
long sonorous sentences invokes Milton’s personal sonnets; even
reading the title phrase “when one has lived a long time alone”
one hears Milton’s similarly liquid opening of the famous sonnet:
“When I consider how my light is spent.” And lines from Paradise
Lost are indeed echoed later in the poem associating deliberate
avoidance of human society with satanic pride: “It’s better to reign /
in hell than to submit on earth” (67).7
Because of the proximity of the stanza form to that of the
sonnet and because of the insistent linking device of the recurring
title phrase, the reader is also reminded of Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”
and with them – of the religious associations attached to the form.
Moreover, Kinnell seems to adapt for his purposes the baroque
symbolism of numbers. The fourth section of the last poem in The
Book of Nightmares famously announces:
This is the tenth poem
and it is the last. It is right
at the last, that one
and zero
walk off together,
walk off the end of these pages together,
one creature
walking away side by side with the emptiness.
(73)
The last and eleventh section of “When One Has Lived a Long
Time Alone” ends with the image of lovers standing “in a halo
7
“Here we may reign secure; and in my choice, / To reign is worth ambition, though
in Hell: / Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” (Book I, v. 261-63).
242
Agnieszka Salska | Galway Kinnell: Tradition and the Individual Talent
of being made one.” One and one walk off together from the
pages of this poem. And one and one walking off together is 11.
Visually number 11 functions like an emblem representing the
kind of relation between similar but autonomous parts of which the
poem is made and of which it speaks. 1 and 1 put together make
a new and different value, much bigger than the mathematical
sum of the two digits, while the component parts still retain their
separate, single identities (Durczak 172).
The whole sequence is structured like a formal religious
meditation in the course of which the speaker reflects on his life
so far, realizes its misguided character and is granted a redeeming
vision. In religious meditative poems the soul must learn the depth
of its need for God by sinfully wandering away from Him; similarly,
the misanthropic hermit-speaker of Kinnell’s poem discovers his
need for community and communion precisely because he has
lived “a long time alone.” Despite the specificity of descriptions,
the intimate tone and the speaker’s reticence in refusing to figure
in the poem as the exemplary “I,” the sequence insists on the
representative character of the progress presented. Suppression
of the expected first person pronoun in favor of the indefinite
“one” generalizes the recorded development into a paradigm of
everyman’s spiritual journey. The poem speaks with the authority
of revealing a law by which one progresses to the mature vision
of one’s place among other living creatures. It also diagnoses the
habit of “living a long time alone” not only – and perhaps not
even first of all – as a personal plight but as a pervasive cultural
condition (“Freedom and Form” 127).
Some critical responses to the poem charged its author with
excessive sentimentality because, I suspect, in our time we feel
embarrassed by the kind of essentially religious need to commune
with something beyond the self, to “stand / in a halo of being made
one: kingdom come, / when one has lived a long time alone.” For
Kinnell, religious language and the language of love fuse in the
243
Exorcising Modernism
manner of baroque lyrics; the song is “both earth’s and heaven’s”
(When One Has Lived 69). The impression of sentimentality
may also have something to do with the flowing music of the
poem. Nevertheless, it is one of the most musically accomplished
poems by Kinnell. Its grammatically difficult sentences seduce
with their exquisitely orchestrated sound texture; the poem reads
easily, driven by its own melody. I cannot but recall Donald Hall’s
diagnosis of reasons for Kinnell’s controversial critical reputation:
I think that the literary traditions of the American
academy have deteriorated so much that most
American academicians cannot hear poetry, have no
sense of its art, lack a prosody or a notion of metaphor:
our leading critics of the contemporary read without
leg­‍‑muscles or tongues, read without bodies.
(165)
The long elegy “When the Towers Fell” occasioned by the terrorist
attack of 9/118 and then placed in the center of Kinnell’s last
collection of poems, Strong Is Your Hold9 (2006), conspicuously
lacks the musical smoothness of “When One Has Lived a Long
Time Alone.” Throughout his career, Kinnell not only spoke up
on public issues but was also actively involved in different social
and political initiatives, believing that
It’s the poet’s job to figure out what’s happening within
oneself, to figure out the connection between the self
The poem first appeared in the September 16, 2002 issue of The New Yorker.
The title refers to Whitman’s „The Last Invocation” (1868): “Let me glide noiselessly
forth, / With the key of softness unlock the locks – with a whisper, / Set open the doors
O soul // Tenderly – be not impatient, (Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, / Strong is
your hold O love.)”
8
9
244
Agnieszka Salska | Galway Kinnell: Tradition and the Individual Talent
and the world, and to get it down in words that have
a certain shape, that have a chance of lasting.
(Lund)
And so, like several other leading American poets, for example
Robert Pinsky, Martin Espada or Frank Bidart, Kinnell felt the need
to react to “what was happening between the self and the world”
in the wake of 9/11. Introducing his reading of the elegy on a CD
accompanying the hardcover edition of Strong Is Your Hold, the
poet explained that the immediate reason for writing the elegy was
a sense of responsibility toward his students. He had asked his
shocked class at New York University to respond to the tragedy
by writing a poem and felt that he should also do the homework.
Almost since the beginning of his career, elegy has been
Kinnell’s hallmark genre. “The Book of Nightmares” can be read
as a kind of elegy for himself, at the moment when the birth of his
children made the young father keenly aware of the passing of time
and of his own mortality. In the late volumes elegies stand out. In
When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990) there is “Farewell,”
an elegy for Paul Zweig, poet and Whitman scholar. Imperfect
Thirst (1994) contains the beautiful “Neverland,” mourning the
poet’s sister. Strong Is Your Hold (2006) is virtually dominated by
elegies for departed friends, among them the moving “How Could
She Not” commemorating Donald Hall’s wife, Jane Kenyon. But
the central piece of this last volume is a public elegy mourning the
victims of 9/11 and deploring the murderous madness of humanity
and human civilization. Aspiring to express with authority such
a huge communal trauma, Kinnell once more attempts “to force
language to transcend itself,” to quote Allan Williamson (170).
The poem consists of 14 unnumbered sections of varying
length interweaving personal reflection and graphic images
of catastrophe. To such a Whitman-like blend of relating and
reflecting voice Kinnell brings his extensive familiarity with the
245
Exorcising Modernism
international poetic tradition. T. S. Eliot is certainly the patron
of such practice, and even in the title of the poem the reader is
referred to section V of The Wasteland and its image of “Falling
towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London,” and
again when Kinnell’s “I sat by the waters of the Hudson” echoes
Eliot’s “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept,” and beyond
Eliot – the psalmist: “By the waters of Babylon there we sat down
and hung our harps in the willow tree” (Psalm 137). In this way,
like Eliot, Kinnell creates a historical sense, “which is a sense of
the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and
of the temporal together,” a cross‑cultural continuity of repeated
lamentations over human destructiveness and misery.
In this poem Kinnell needs the support of Whitman’s
authority as a national poet and the echo of Whitman’s voice as the
representative mourner of all the fallen in the Civil War. Above all
he needs Whitman as the author of the Lincoln elegy – a resounding
poetic response to the shock of Lincoln’s assassination, the central
act of political terrorism in American history until 9/11. In fact,
lines from the Lincoln elegy are quoted in the penultimate section
of Kinnell’s poem (“I saw battle–corpses, myriads of them, / And
the white skeletons of young men, I saw them, / I saw the debris
and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war”) just before the elegy
arrives at its concluding image of the towers forever falling into
the depths of our collective memory:
As each tower goes down, it concentrates
into itself, transforms itself
infinitely slowly into a black hole
infinitesimally small: mass
without space, where each light,
each life put out, lies down within us.
(Strong is Your Hold 42)
246
Agnieszka Salska | Galway Kinnell: Tradition and the Individual Talent
Kinnell also needs Eliot; especially, the Eliot of The Waste Land,
because of his lament not only for the fallen in World War One
but for the downfall of Western civilization. In Kinnell’s poem the
victims of 9/11 “come before us now not as a likeness, / but as
corollary, a small instance in the immense / lineage of the twentieth
century history of violent death” (Strong Is Your Hold 40). Yet,
while Eliot had little sense of his native country as involved in the
experience of Western despair because the center of disaster was
for him post-World War One Europe and London, Kinnell insists
on inscribing America into the pervasive sense of catastrophe of
our civilization and acknowledges America’s complicity in “the
immense lineage of the twentieth century’s history of violent death”:
black men in the South castrated and strung up from
trees
soldiers advancing through mud at ninety thousand
dead per mile,
train upon train of boxcars heading eastward shoved
full to the corners of Jews and Roma to be enslaved
or gassed,
state murder of twenty, thirty, forty million of its own,
state starvation of a hundred million farmers,
atomic blasts erasing cities off the earth, firebombings
the same,
death marches, assassinations, disappearances,
entire countries become rubble, minefields, mass
graves.
(Strong Is Your Hold 40)
Kinnell’s center of despair is New York on 9/11 2001, and America
is firmly planted within the violent cycles of the history of Western
civilization, while New York becomes yet another addition
to Eliot’s list of doomed cities. Thus, Eliot’s method of relying
247
Exorcising Modernism
on past poetic (and prophetic) tradition, as well as Eliot’s way of
quoting or adapting writers from the past, functions in the poem
with a significant difference. It is out of the American center of
disaster and through American poets of the past: Whitman and
Hart Crane, the Europeanized American Pound of “Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley” (“Some died while calling home to say they were OK /
Some died...”) and the cosmopolitan Anglo-American Eliot that
Kinnell fuses the English language lamentations with multilingual
elegiac voices of Francois Villon, Paul Celan, or a Polish poet
of Miłosz’s generation, Alexander Wat. The reader is thus sent
again to Eliot:
No poet or artist of any art has his complete meaning
alone (...) The necessity that he shall conform, that
he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when
a new work of art is created is something that happens
simultaneously to all works of art which preceded it.
(38)
Kinnell’s elegy moves from Manhattan outward in space, back
in time and also, deliberately, beyond the reach of English as the
means of communication. In the printed version of the poem,
Villon, Celan and Wat are quoted in their native languages
because, says Kinnell, “I wanted some other language in this
poem (...) as I was writing along in English, I was on the lookout
for some phrase or situation from another language that might
be able to help universalize this poem” (Anderson). The work of
mourning in “When the Towers Fell” expands to achieve global
and timeless reach. The poem mourns for the whole of humanity
while its personal anchoring in the events and the emotional shock
of 9/11 gives it concreteness and intensity. And Kinnell’s elegy
gives new relevance to the work of poets he calls back from the
receded past.
248
Agnieszka Salska | Galway Kinnell: Tradition and the Individual Talent
Among the critical reactions to the poem, there are several
charging Kinnell with making up his poem from fragments of other
poets’ work. Such opinions derive from misunderstanding the
poem’s design. In the first place, for all his life-long affinity with
the romantics, Kinnell is no romantic bard; he is a contemporary
poet who no longer commands the authority of a romantic poetleader, poet-prophet or poet-priest. The predominantly personal
or experimental nature of contemporary poetry makes it difficult
for today’s poet to command a credible public voice. Thus,
Kinnell brings into the poem voices from past elegiac tradition
to build a sense of continuity through ages of poets lamenting and
consecrating human misery, suffering and death. In my reading
of the poem, Kinnell goes beyond Eliot in that starting from
a concrete place and event (as Eliot’s poem does not), he moves
on to evoke a sacramental realm of collective memory made up of
voices of poets speaking to us and about us throughout the ages.
In Kinnell’s rendering it is not a particular poem that is brought
back from the past and given new life in the context of the present
catastrophe, nor do those voices in different languages and from
different times suggest a cacophony of voices and broken images.
A continual multilingual unisono flows in his elegy through the
history of Western culture committing to communal memory all
victims of mass violence, death and woe. In the final section of
the poem the “I” speaker is replaced with the plural “we,” and
the communion of the mourning now and through time becomes
both a consolation and the only equivalent that we may yet have
of eternal life. Poetry once again speaks the Word, becoming the
ark of the covenant between the living and the dead, again making
the individual part of something larger than his single self and fate.
Critics and scholars who write about Kinnell inevitably invoke
various past poets as reference points in their discussion. This is
not just a critical habit but a necessity since Kinnell consciously
builds his own supranational, atemporal poetic tradition. The
249
Exorcising Modernism
direction in which his poetry works seems to me the reverse of the
Bloomian anxiety of influence. If, according to Harold Bloom, the
late poet, suffering the anxiety of influence, has to devise strategies
of avoidance in relation to his strong predecessors, a maneuver
which de facto limits his poetic territory, Kinnell opens his poems
to frank acceptance of affinities with poets even as remote in time
as Villon or as out of cultural favor today as Milton. In interviews
collected in Walking Down the Stairs and in other comments,
“Kinnell not only identifies specific influences on his poetry, but
also (...) makes clear his own individual differences” (Calhoun
25). He can be generous in his acknowledgements because as
a strong poet in his own right, he deliberately makes his voice
resonate with a continuity of voices coming from generations of
poets addressing basically unchanged human longings and fears
in however different historical and cultural contexts. Reliance
on tradition so evoked or so constructed constitutes the aesthetic
and technical equivalent of Kinnell’s humane humility. As Stephen
Yenser observed, “for all his talk about sorrow, he never makes it
appear that his sorrow differs from anyone else’s” (94). His search
is for connections outside the self in regions that for better and for
worse all living creatures hold in common.
Works Cited
Anderson, Wendy. “An Interview With Galway Kinnell.” Bookslut
83 (April 2008). Accessed July 10, 2014. <http://www.
bookslut.com/features/2008_04_012634.php>.
Atlas, James. “Autobiography of the Present.” Critical Essays
on Galway Kinnell. Ed. Nancy Lewis Tuten. New York:
G.K. Hall, 1996. 80-81.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry.
London: Oxford University Press, 1973.
250
Agnieszka Salska | Galway Kinnell: Tradition and the Individual Talent
Calhoun, Richard J. Galway Kinnell. New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1992.
Dickinson, Emily. The Poems. Reading Edition, edited by Ralph
Franklin. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1999.
Durczak, Joanna. “Into Misanthropy and Back: Galway Kinnell’s
When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone.” Studies in
English and American Literature and Language. Ed. Irena
Przemecka and Zbigniew Mazur. Kraków: Universitas,
1995. 171-180.
Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Prose.
Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. 37-44.
---. Collected Poems 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970.
Hall, Donald. “Text as Test.” On the Poetry of Galway Kinnell:
The Wages of Dying. Ed. Howard Nelson. Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 1987. 157-168.
Kinnell, Galway. Strong Is Your Hold. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 2006.
---. A New Selected Poems. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
2001.
---. Imperfect Thirst. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994.
---. Trans. The Poems of Francois Villon. Hanover: University of
New England Press, 1982.
---. When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1990.
---. Walking Down the Stairs: Selections from Interviews. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978
---. The Book of Nightmares. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1971.
Kleibard, David. “Galway Kinnnell’s Poetry of Transformation.”
Critical Essays on Galway Kinnnell. Ed. Nancy Lewis Tuten.
New York: G.K. Hall, 1996. 193-204.
251
Exorcising Modernism
Langbaum, Robert. “Galway Kinnell’s “The Book of Nightmares.”
Critical Essays on Galway Kinnell. Ed. Nancy Lewis Tuten.
New York: G.K. Hall, 1996. 54-61.
Leary, Paris and Robert Kelly. Eds. A Controversy of Poets. An
Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry New York:
Doubleday and Company, 1965.
Lewis, Daniel. “Galway Kinnell, Plain-Spoken Poet, Is Dead at
87.” New York Times, Books Section, October 30, 2014.
Lund, Elizabeth. “Interview with Galway Kinnell.” The Christian
Science Monitor, October 25, 2001.
Milton, John. The Complete Poetry of John Milton. Ed. John
T. Shawcross. New York: Anchor, 1971.
Pinsky, Robert. The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and
Its Traditions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.
Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound. Ed. J.P. Sullivan. London: Penguin
Books, 1971.
Ricks, Christopher. “In the Direct line of Whitman, the Indirect
Line of Eliot.” Critical Essays on Galway Kinnell. Ed.
Nancy Lewis Tuten. New York: G.K. Hall, 1996. 75-76.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Poezje. Trans. Mieczysław Jastrun. Kraków:
Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1987.
Rosenthal, M. L. Ed. The New Modern Poetry: British and
American Poetry since World War II. New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1967.
Salska, Agnieszka. “Life and Poetry, the Life of Poetry: Poetry
and 9/11.” Siting America / Sighting Modernity: Essays in
Honor of Sonja Basic, ed. Jelena Sesnic. Zagreb: FF Press,
2010. 135-147.
---. “Freedom and Form: Galway Kinnell’s When One Has
Lived a Long Time Alone” in Literature and Theatre in
Crosscultural Encounters. A Festschrift for ISCLT at Thirty.
Ed Regine Rosenthal. Lebanon, New Hampshire: Lebanon
College Press, 2006. 124-130.
252
Agnieszka Salska | Galway Kinnell: Tradition and the Individual Talent
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and
Sculley Bradley. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965.
Williamson, Allan. “Language Against Itself: The Middle
Generation of Contemporary Poets.” On the Poetry of Galway
Kinnell: The Wages of Dying. Ed. Howard Nelson. Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1987. 169-177.
Yenser, Stephen. “Recent Poetry: Five Poets.” Critical Essays
on Galway Kinnell. Ed. Nancy Lewis Tuten. New York:
G.K. Hall, 1996. 93-97.
Zimmerman, Lee. Intricate and Simple Things. The Poetry of
Galway Kinnell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
253
Kacper Bartczak
The Poetics of Plenitude and Its Crisis in
Wallace Stevens, Rae Armantrout and Peter
Gizzi: A Pragmatist Perspective
First introductory remark: the pragmatist
intervention in American poetic modernism
American poetic modernism is a peculiar combination of the
epistemological and the aesthetic. The imagist revolution was an
effort to return poetry to its ability to properly channel those energies
which are responsible for cognition, formulation of judgment and,
ultimately, formulation of knowledge. The economy and precision
of the imagist poem were supposed to be a clarification device
helping to reestablish accurate proportions between emotion and
cognition in order to make the poetic form a mode of inquiry.
Pound was aware of that when he made a distinction between
“decorative and interpretative” metaphor.1
Pound‘s remarks on poetry having to regain its lost “interpretative power,” through
a return to thinking of metaphor as a hard tool of “interpretative” rather than “decorative”
1
254
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
But noticing the reciprocities between the aesthetic and the
epistemological was the constitutive idea behind the Emersonian
essay and the Whitmanian poem as “song,” before it became
an element of the modernist poetic discourse. Emerson returns
frequently to the dependence of ideas on the poetic ability to put
the rhetorical apparatus in motion, which, when so started, will
unfix the received concepts and lead to a reformulation of the
body of knowledge.2 Whitman professes the same belief in his
poems: it is the poet’s activity that stands in the midst, and
precedes, the cognitive activity that leads to the formulation
of knowledge.3 For both, the merger of the aesthetic and the
epistemological is a proper way of confronting the evolving
plurality of the world. Both Emerson’s near epigrammatic
method in the essays and Whitman’s identification of his
function, are scattered all over his essays. See especially fragments of “A Retrospect” (12),
“Cavalcanti,” where he wants this kind of metaphor to be “correspond[ing] to definite
sensations undergone” (162), and “Remy de Gourmont,” where he makes a distinction
between the “decorative” and the “interpretive” power of metaphors (344).
2
The rhetorical intrusion which reworks a fixed perception is a frequent motif in
Emerson. The theme of poetic imagination providing a spur to cognitive action is
central to “The Poet.” In this essay, proper recognition of one‘s condition is impossible
without immersion in the state of the flow of poetic tropes. It is with the “birth of the
poet” that we are “invited into the science of the real” (292). Emerson acknowledges
the presence and catalyzing force of poetic tropes “in every definition” (300), and
he discusses its role in the concepts of Aristotle and Plato. The placing of rhetoric
at the center of cognition leads Emerson to acknowledging the dynamic nature of
knowledge and understanding: “The quality of the imagination is to flow... symbols
are fluxional, all language is vehicular and transitive” (302). This thought appears
earlier, in “Nature,” when Emerson sees the poet as the one who “unfixes the land and
the sea” and “conforms things to his thoughts” (26).
3
The poetic origin of thought is central to Whitman‘s neo­‍‑Platonist theory of
knowledge. The dependence of knowledge on the current state of imagination is
signaled early on in “Song of Myself,” when the speaker promises the listener that
whatever concept he or she has of “the earth,” it is up for a change, when the poem leads
both of them to “the origin of all poems” (2233). When Whitman mentions scientists
later in the poem, it is clear that their “facts” are part of a greater procession of poesis
of which the poem is a more legitimate, more comprehensive, representative (2248).
I return to the Whitmanian merger of poetic imagination and knowledge later in this
essay.
255
Exorcising Modernism
empirical persona with the poem and the poem with the life of
the budding nation are ways of entering an interpretive excess
that both writers recognized as precisely that quality in nature
which makes pluralistic democracy “natural.”
While modernism retained the idea of the aesthetic object
as partaking of and fostering an excess of interpretive possibility,
it also needed to reformulate the mysticism of the individual that
informs the work of Emerson and Whitman. A crucial reformulating
impulse comes from the thought of American pragmatism, which,
from this point of view, serves as a transitive thought between
Romantic and modernist poetries, at least on the American ground.
The classical pragmatism of James and Dewey is a thought of
aesthetic and epistemological action in an environment of excess
and abundance. But this excess departs from Romantic mysticism.
Rather than the neo-Platonist pleroma, or Absolute, that clearly
stands behind the visionary excesses of Emerson and Whitman,
James and Dewey – both of them largely indebted to their
Romantic forerunners – shift our understanding of excess onto
the secular, the local, the ordinary, the close­‍‑at-hand, the palpable,
the material, and the inter‑subjective. Their idea of excess is of the
situation in which humans cope with and reinterpret complex and
plural environments of abundant stimuli waiting to be interpreted.
With this, they also change the sense of the individual.
No longer imbued in the clouds of the mystical, the individual
emerges as a world related concreteness within the excessive
interpretive situations which the individual co-creates. For
Dewey, the individual is a particular state of social relations;
these social “associations, whether domestic, economic, religious,
political, artistic or educational” go all the way down: “it is absurd
to suppose that the ties which hold [individuals] together are merely
external and do not react into mentality and character” (410). Such
shift from the idea of the individual subjectivity as a mystical
separateness to the materially and relationally understood
256
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
participatory subjectivity is not only characteristic of Dewey’s
openly non-religious philosophy of education and democracy,
but also of James’s early idea of the “will to believe,” which,
as a program for an active interpretive stance toward the world,
is a prelude to his later “pragmatism.” James redefines religious
“belief” and reformulates it toward a predisposition in which the
individual tunes in to his or her connectedness with the world.
In the mode of “belief” that James advocates “the universe is no
longer a mere It to us but a Thou... and the relation that may be
possible from person to person might be possible here” (Writings
1878–1899 476). Again, characteristically, religious experience,
that is the kind of experience that was formerly a paragon of
subjective depth – depth as separateness of the individual – is
here rewritten onto an active sort of interpersonal relationality.
In general, the transition from Romanticism offered by
the pragmatism of James and Dewey helped key American
modernist poets to think of their poems as aesthetic interventions
into epistemologically dynamic areas and to rethink the idea of
poetic subjectivity. By paying attention to how emotions, feelings,
needs and desires link consciousness to linguistic states (James)
and epistemological activity of inquiry (Dewey), the pragmatists
clearly preceded the modernist poets’ project of treating the poem
as a device which modulates the complex relations between
emotions, aesthetics and cognition. Jamesian and Deweyan theories
of inquiry replaced the traditional subject­‍‑object opposition with
the idea of a dynamic situational reciprocity between the human
organism and its environment. It is this situational engagement
that, by fusing the subject with its materials in new and evolving
constellations, becomes a locus of subjectivity itself. This
was precisely the move that the early modernist poets needed
to transform the mystically boisterous cultural individualism of
Whitman, by making its energies a part of the poem as a more
“objective” aesthetic artifact. Now, the subjectivity of the poetic
257
Exorcising Modernism
voice, the deep subjective experience of the poem’s speaker, could
be “objectified” and projected onto the poem’s form. Pound’s
imagism, Eliot’s theory of the “impersonality of poetry,” Williams’s
emphasis on the vernacular and local, Stevens’s exploration of
how the poetic “supreme fiction” is a form of faith in the world –
all these moves were played out as a formal revolution which
replaced the Romantic emphasis on visionary inwardness with an
emphasis on the poem’s distinct formal character, a transition that
was enabled by the climate created by the pragmatists.4
I would like to argue, however, that the concept of
individuality – in the sense of an individual entity – is not so much
lost in this transformation, as modulated: from deep psychology
of the human subject to the poem as a series of distinct formal
decisions. In this transformation, the idea of individual agency
is transferred from an empirical and psychological personhood
of the author as a separate being onto the formal being of the
poem understood as an event or situation – a situation that stands
separate from other such poems­‍‑as-situations. The poem can
I am summarizing an ample body of research on the relations between pragmatism
and modernist poetry. My summary, however, should be traced to the following sources.
Frank Lentricchia has shown how the form of Pound‘s Cantos, with its horror of
abstraction in politics and its insistence on the play of material detail, partakes of
James‘s insistence on the necessity of acting beyond the abstract conceptual schemes
(Lentricchia 189). Michael Magee has shown how Dewey‘s understanding of the
philosophical discourse as a kind of purposive action that transforms its environment
finds its equivalent in Williams‘s idea of form as ongoing poetic experiment (1819). Writing on the same pair, John Beck traces the similarities and correspondences
between Dewey‘s and Williams‘s understanding of participatory democracy, which
strongly shapes Williams‘s understanding of his “free” verse. Williams realizes that
no verse is “free” but “measured,” the “measure” of the poem being a testimony to its
active search for its own formal shape and its ongoing effort to adhere to the local
and the fluctuating: “if the poem ‘embraces all that we are’ and the significance of the
poem lies in its structure, then the social and political world, as part of everything we
are, must somehow be revealed in the structure of the poem” (138). Patrcia Rae has
illustrated how Pound’s “image” or “interpretative metaphor” (93-99) and Stevens‘s
poetics of active “hypothesis” are formal moves that follow James‘s redefinition of
deep subjective religious belief (151-200).
4
258
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
now be seen as a record of conscious formal decisions which
are equivalent to intelligent behavior in a complex environment,
a purposive action which changes the subject and its materials.
With the emotional and experiential “individuality” of the poet as
a person abandoned, and with technical mastery taking the center
stage, we can speak of the individuality of the poem as an aesthetic
object – interrelated with, yet separate from other such objects.
In this transition from Romanticism to modernism,
a peculiar American poetic legacy was born. The poem is an
epistemologically charged, individually delineated, aesthetic
action in an environment of excess and abundance of meanings.
This legacy has led to the formulation of a set of poetic features
and characteristics which I am going to describe in this essay by
referring to it as the poetics of plenitude. It is a term by which
I intend to characterize a certain tendency in the aesthetics of some
American poets – modernist and beyond5 – a tendency related
to the positioning of the poem toward the excessive environments –
cognitive, linguistic, cultural and political – submitted by the
external world. The term is not designed to be an exhaustive
characteristic of American poetry – modernist or contemporary.
Modernist poetics and its contemporary continuations are too
rich a phenomenon to be characterized by any one term. Rather,
the quality I have in mind only characterizes one line, which we
Throughout this essay I am relying on the understanding of the poetic modernism
proposed by Marjorie Perloff in her 21st Century Modernism. In this critical manifesto
Perloff argues for two major tenets. First, modernism in poetry should be predominantly
understood as the rethinking of the poetic form as artifice: the poem is a series of formal
decisions which make it clearly into a deliberate creative construction. Secondly, this
avant­‍‑garde idea of modernism was precisely what was misunderstood and neglected
in some mid-20th century failed continuations of Eliot, causing modernism proper
to enter a sort of dormant stage, from which it was recuperated only recently, in a form
of experimental international poetics, the American representative of which are poets
known as “Language” poets. In other words, following Perloff, I disregard the division
into modernist and post­‍‑modern poetry, by relying on her thesis of the crucial presentday continuations of modernism‘s experimental thrust.
5
259
Exorcising Modernism
might call the line of Stevens. As I am going to argue, Stevens’s
poems, more than the works of Pound, Eliot or Williams, are
a more radical transposition of individuality from the empirical
person of the author to the activity of the poem. This more radical
character is connected to a strongly auto‑referential quality of
Stevens’s poems. Stevens’s poesis – more pervasively than that of
his modernist peers – moves toward a strongly textual awareness
of the precedence of the “poem” over the materials of the world.
This stance produces a kind of epistemological irony in Stevens,
not encountered in other modernists, which is a constitutive
ingredient of the term I am developing. Finally, the characteristic
in question has been evolving, as American poets have had to look
for adjustments to their changing excessive environments – their
shifting political and social status. In what follows, I am going
to outline the tenets of the poetics of plenitude as it takes shape
in Stevens, and then signal its internal crises in the poetry of two
contemporary American poets – Rae Armantrout and Peter Gizzi.
Second introductory remark: a pragmatist
ironist paradox in epistemology and aesthetics
Before proposing a definition of the pragmatist ironist poetics of
plenitude, I would like to relate in more detail to the pragmatist
merger of epistemology and aesthetics in the environment of
excess in order to signal the roots of pragmatist irony, which is
one of the crucial features of the poetics I am trying to outline.
The classical pragmatism of William James reveals a basic
structural tension. It emerges between two major complementary
tenets of pragmatism: the impulse toward directness in adhering
to the stimuli coming to the human subject from the external
world, and the simultaneous multiplicity of the interpretations
of the stimuli. James’s thought is informed by the Emersonian
conviction that it is possible, indeed necessary, to experience the
260
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
facts of the world directly, in the manner of first‑hand experience,
outside of the conceptual schemes with which one is equipped.
Thus James speaks of the “datum” of the world, or the “facts”
of the world, which will put pressure on the received theoretical
schemata: “After all that reason can do has been done, there still
remains the opacity of the finite facts as merely given, with (...)
their peculiarities unmediated and unexplained” (The Writings
135). The discovery of the excess of the datum is at the same time
the discovery of the plurality of human ways of making sense of
it. Charles E. Mitchell, a commentator on Emerson’s intellectual
legacy, offers the following comment: “there is no possible point
of view from which the world can appear as a single fact” (84).
This means that the situation of the Jamesian inquirer is
paradoxical: the postulate of the direct experience of the world
produces an indeterminacy of the meaning of the experienced data.
The cognitive value of the datum at any moment is only a part of
an evolving flux, since the inquirer knows that the same sets of
data are subject to multiple perspectives and interpretations. Here
is Mitchell again: “the perceived construction of the world at any
moment is subject to revision” (91).
Mitchell’s remark introduces us into a consequence of the line
originated by James – the emergence of the ironic consciousness at
the brink of modernism. With the idea of all mental constructions
being “subject to revision,” we arrive at the thesis of the redescribability of the stimuli and it is this re-describability that is
taken up again by the neo-pragmatism of Richard Rorty who goes
back to James and digs up the ironic aspect of James’s pragmatism.
Rorty identifies irony as the consciousness of one’s central beliefs
being constantly subject to further re‑description. Rorty’s ironist
is the Jamesian inquirer who has accepted the idea that rather than
dealing with “raw data,” or any “given,” we are in fact dealing
with an abundance of their possible descriptions. This realization
stands behind Rorty’s decision to pay more attention to literature,
261
Exorcising Modernism
since it is literature that understands the action of description much
more effectively than philosophy.6
Rorty may have been articulating a deep intuition of the
interdependence of beliefs and their aesthetic formulation that was
already inherent in the modernist literary experiment, particularly
in Stevens, who, in many respects, prefigured the irony that Rorty
codified later. Paradoxically, it is the highly artificial nature of this
experiment – the experiment which pushed literature on the path of
increased ironic self-awareness – that is now the only channel toward
any sort of “directness” in dealing with the world. After the linguistic
turn in philosophy, accompanied by some concurrent studies in
literary criticism, we have come to understand the complicity of the
plastic arbitrariness of linguistic constructions in the formulation of
any sort of “knowledge.” In fact, this complicity has been the key
point of focus for a large area of recent American poetry.
The modernist text’s care for its technical and formal body
is a gesture whose importance exceeds any clear division into
aesthetic and epistemic divides. It is the self-aware formal activity
of the modernist literary text – as it mimics and sheds light on other
formal ploys we necessarily use in dealing with the daily panoplies
of data – that is our directness, the only “given” within which we
can pay more accurate attention to our ideas of the world.
For Rorty‘s “narrow” definition of pragmatist irony, see his Contingency, Irony,
and Solidarity, especially the chapter called “Private Irony and Liberal Hope.” Here,
Rorty defines irony as an awareness that the linguistic moves by means of which
one defines his or her deepest beliefs and commitments – what Rorty calls one‘s
“final vocabularies” – are never free of the liability for re­‍‑description (73-90). This
definition of irony has been widely criticized as utterly untenable, assuming a merger
of skepticism and commitment – a merger that is unthinkable to Rorty‘s critics. I am
convinced that the passages on irony in Contingency are insufficient for any fuller
understanding of Rorty‘s thinking of irony, and that this thinking is inseparable from his
larger commentary on the literary experience. Rorty thought of highly ironist literature
as conducive to commitment­‍‑based projects of self-creation. For an example of such
thinking, see his “Redemption From Egotism.” For critiques of Rorty‘s irony, see John
Horton, “Irony and Commitment: Irreducible Dualism,” and Michael Williams, “Rorty
on Knowledge and Truth.”
6
262
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
The pragmatist ironist poetics of plenitude
– an outline of the term
Based on the above sketch of the ironist tension found in the
pragmatist theory of inquiry, I will now attempt to define a poetics
which I am calling the pragmatist ironist poetics of plenitude.
Within it, the poem is an aesthetic equivalent of conducting
interpretive inquiry, an inquiry that finds itself in the environment
of abundant and plural interpretive possibilities identified by
the pragmatists. The poem becomes a report from the event in
which an as yet unknown subjectivity confronts a plenitude of
ways in which the received “datum” of the physical world may
be interpreted and endowed with meaning. The process will not
only confer meaning on the data, but will also give shape to the
inquiring subjectivity.
The subjectivity I have in mind is understood neither in
purely psychological nor purely epistemological terms. I am
not interested here in the psychological subject of the Freudian
or Lacanian discourse; neither am I referring to the subject in
the Kantian and post­‍‑Kantian philosophical traditions. Rather,
the poetics of plenitude sees subjectivity along the lines of
the pragmatist tradition, as a term that signifies the emergent
consciousness of the inquirer, as he or she proceeds deeper
into the inquiring event, and is consequently altered by it. It is
a consciousness which receives, grapples with and positions itself
toward the oncoming excess of the stimuli. Such consciousness is
presupposed in the very notion of plenitude: there is no “plenitude”
without a consciousness that could register the difference between
the lack of stimuli and their excess.
This subjectivity is coincident with the situation of the
inquiry, which, transferred onto the ground of poetry, is the
poem itself. It is a subjectivity which, as part and parcel of the
263
Exorcising Modernism
event – the poem as a combination of the aesthetic, the cognitive
and the communicative – will care for the event itself: it will
look for its energy, efficacy and aesthetic bearing. I am thinking
of the poem as an equivalent to the interpretive event. And just as
the inquirer must take active care of the inquiry – by constantly
examining its formula – so must the poem constantly care for its
form. This care gives the poem a sort of aesthetic resilience –
its distinctive character – that will allow it to survive in the
environment of other poems.
The poem’s care for its form is a care for its aesthetic
radiance – its ability to spark readings – which, however, does
not exclude the awareness of the poem’s re-describability. On the
contrary – this ironic awareness is calculated into the being of the
poem. The poems I want to discuss reveal a faith in their formal
being not as unchangeable, finished, end-product entities, but as
dynamic sources of future re-readings. There is a kind of cognitive
emptiness in the midst of the formal operations of the poems. But
this emptiness is also a form of wealth or generosity of the poem:
it allows the poem to proliferate into excessive environments
by requiring new readings, leading to new understanding of the
environment itself. The individuality of the poem is precisely
its capacity to attract new readings – the readings which will
inevitably change the notion of what the poem is. The poems of
the poetics of plenitude expose, highlight and coalesce around their
own activity of negotiating their shape – their being as separate,
potentially coherent aesthetic objects. But their ironist character
is contained in the fact that such coherence – just as the coherence
of the subjectivity of the inquirer – is never given, but is fully
dependent on the future readings.
Such ironic faith of the poem in its own aesthetic distinction
has a paradoxical world‑forming effect. The poems of the aesthetic
of plenitude look for their own (re-describable) shapes in the
264
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
environment of the richness and plurality, and, as they do so, they
affect these environments and perform a world-disclosing, worldformulating, or world­‍‑revising function. In consequence, these
poems develop a consciousness of their own deep intervention in
the world they come to describe, so deep, in fact, that it is finally
the poem itself that is found at the roots of the real. The evolving
coherence/distinction of the poem takes a further ironic turn as it
accepts the idea that reality depends on the dynamic poetic activity
of description. Here is another side of the pragmatist irony: the
poems discover their own activity where any sort of external world
was supposed to be found – be it the world of matter or of discourse.
The poetics of plenitude is a theory of the poetic origin of
the descriptions by which we make sense of the world. It speaks
of a peculiar merger of irony and commitment. The irony resides
in the awareness of double re-describability. First, it is a redescribability of the poem itself, as its very structure depends
on receiving future readings. Second, it is the re-describability of
the environment the poem visits, as it is revealed to be dependent
on the poetic activity. This complex ironic consciousness is
inseparable from a form of commitment found in the poem’s care
for its formal shape and efficacy – the poem’s equivalence to an
inquirer’s purposive engagement with the materials of the world.
The nexus of irony and commitment is a distinctive pragmatist
feature of the poetics of plenitude.
It is precisely this nexus that has been evolving in the line of
the poems I have in mind. As we move from the early modernism
to its contemporary continuations, we find an increasing tension
rising right within this very aspect – the complex exchange
between irony and commitment to the poem’s form as a mark of
its distinction. I will now try to illustrate this tension as it rises
between the poetics of Wallace Stevens and two contemporary
poets: Rae Armantrout and Peter Gizzi.
265
Exorcising Modernism
Stevens’s plenitude: irony and faith
A characteristic poet of the poetics of plenitude is Stevens, and
at the heart of his poetic method is his treatment of metaphor.
Stevens treats the poem as a special kind of metaphor: a metaphor
as an agent of reconfiguration of the conceptual space, which,
however, is empty of any cognitive meaning of its own.7 The
metaphor jump-starts the poetic processes of linking words into
descriptions, and it does so out of the poet’s desire for increased
self­‍‑knowledge and increased internal coherence. So metaphor
in Stevens is both a world­‍‑disclosing device and a self-reading
device. In his construction of metaphors, the poet is guided by
intuition and desire into a process of self-reading, in which the
initial lack of self-knowledge propels further creation and leads
the poetic self to its future shapes. In an essay called “Effects
of Analogy” Stevens investigates several modes of metaphorical
thought and finds one of them in “the [poet’s] sense of the
world,” a sense which is also an incomplete self­‍‑knowledge,
a self­‍‑knowledge in progress. Analogies are dictated to the poet
through his sense of the world, which for him is necessary and
plentiful: it is “inevitable and inexhaustible” (716). In a poem
called “Metaphor as Degeneration,” we learn that a poet in this
metaphoric mode is like “a man in black space / [who] sits in
nothing that we know, / Brooding sounds of river noises” (381). In
another late poem called “Prologues to What is Possible,” Stevens
theorizes the metaphorical mode as a journey by the poet in which
“he traveled alone, like a man lured on by a syllable without any
7
I have developed this understanding of Stevens‘s use of metaphor elsewhere, in an
article in which I draw a comparison between the poet‘s intuitional understanding of
metaphor and the concept of metaphor as an instance of usage, empty of cognitive
content, developed by Donald Davidson. See Bartczak, “Wallace Stevens‘s Pragmatist
Poetics of Plenitude.”
266
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
meaning” (438). Yet the entry into the journey is the source of
our knowledge of the world; it “creates a fresh universe out of
nothingness by adding itself” (439).
This understanding of metaphor is the source of Stevens’s
peculiar brand of irony. In his late poems Stevens frequently
realizes, and is more ready to admit than before, that the search
for “reality” leads him to the reality of the poem itself, to the
mechanism of the poem, its action, to the poem as metaphor which
is also the source of world descriptions. A paradigmatic poem of
this ironic realization, thus a paradigmatic poem of the poetics of
plenitude, is “Description Without Place.”
“Description Without Place,” from the volume Transport
to Summer published in 1947, is a notorious piece. Some prominent
Stevens critics, like Helen Vendler, thought of it as an excessive
and ultimately arid exercise in theorizing the power of poetic
description. Vendler calls the poem, mockingly, “an ode to the
Adjective” (218). In it, Stevens conducts a meditation on the power
of imaginative arrangements of words which sometimes result
in world­‍‑changing historical ideas. The middle sections contain
mannered, highly strange, scenes with Lenin and Nietzsche. But
these portraits are ironically skewed and incomplete: Stevens
is not interested in the specific ideas of these two men but in
the aesthetically rendered frame within which these ideas came
into being. It is the environment of thought, the environment
submitted by the poem, that matters as a precondition to any
given “philosophy” or “politics.” It is this positioning that creates
the air of theoretical aridity: the meditation proceeds in a calm,
repetitive, measured form, which Vendler will ultimately find
to break down under the unbearable convolution of its theoretical
tautologies. of historical places, moments, and the ideas with
which people make
Stevens’s proposition is radical: behind our understanding
sense of these places and moments works an activity of linking
267
Exorcising Modernism
words into descriptions, which Sevens first calls “seemings,” only
to realize in the course of the poem that these “seemings” are
the only reality (297-98). The ability in question is poetic. The
poem is a revelation of the poetic nature of reality, and rather
than on particulars it concentrates on the underlying mechanism
of producing descriptions and its capacity to keep on doing it.
The poetic medium is early on metaphorized as “the green queen”
(296) which stands for the freshness of imagination as it responds
to the physical stimuli of the world, the basic one of which is
the light of the sun. We are pushed to work by the rays of sun
or moon, so to speak, and what is switched on in us is our own
greenness: the fecundity of imagination. Imagination, the proper
medium of the poem, is a synthesizing field of binding forces, and
the monotony of the poem of which Vendler complains could be
seen as the poem’s tuning in to its own frequency: the oncoming
waves of its repetitive verses and tonality. The flow of the verse is
a materialization of the forces of the faculty of imagination which
points to the basic poetic function: binding of the physicality of
language into thought. These connections coalesce into our reports
of the world: they are “seemings” as the only reality. For Stevens
all our perception of the world, all of our descriptions of it, stem
from this poetic radiation, the action of his poem thus becoming
a description of descriptions. Here is a fragment of section VI of
the poem:
Description is revelation. It is not
The thing described, nor false facsimile.
(...)
A text we should be born that we might read.
More explicit than the experience of sun
And moon, the book of reconciliation,
Book of a concept only possible
268
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
In description, canon central in itself,
The thesis of the plentifullest John.
(301)
The world obtains its fullest – plentiful – meaning and is revealed
to us in the poetic action of which the poem is an instance. The
poem as metaphor, as the sheer work of imagination, is the
plentiful source out of which the world obtains its forms. Worlds
come from the ability of language to form descriptions. Stevens
says in the next section:
it is a world of words to the end of it,
In which nothing solid is its solid self.
(301)
But how is this descriptive world-disclosing capacity maintained?
The poetic action of moulding sounds into thoughts and concepts
runs on a special kind of sustenance. For Stevens, a poetic heir of
Emerson, the sustenance must be found with the action itself, the
doing, the spinning of the poetic fabric itself, its own presence
beyond all justification, its circularity and tautological character.
Imagination and what we say of the future must:
Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be
Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening.
(302)
As Vendler pointed out a long time ago in a reading whose
perceptibility does not seem to age, the peculiarity of Stevens’s
use of some verbs in the poem is that their more expected
transitive grammatical aspect is replaced by an intransitive one,
and the “rubies reddening” in the final line is the case in point:
“‘rubies reddening’ clearly means ‘rubies becoming a deeper
269
Exorcising Modernism
red,’ an action which is self-contained and self-limiting” (228).
These stones are not imagined to derive energy from any external
source; they increase their redness on their own – out of their own
presence. It is the poem as lamp, as source of light, the source
of reality, and it contains its own willingness to go on weaving
its own fabric. Vendler is both appalled by this figure, calling
it a “grammatical zeugma” (228), and attracted to it, admitting
that it is a figure of large imaginative thrust, whose power is
that of a self­‍‑sustaining prophecy, an excess by which visions of
a future receive their feasibility: “whatever we say of the future
must have more verbal energy than it needs for its own verbal
purposes, have a (...) radiance to share. Prediction (...) should have
prophetic beauty” (228-229). With the final verse of “Description
without Place” Stevens returns to the action of the poem itself
as the world-disclosing device. This “radiance to share” is an
instance of the generous emptiness inscribed in the structure of
the poem, its mode of entry into future excessive environments.
Although empty of any specific cognitive content, the poem-asmetaphor must display an insistence on its own action of spinning
descriptions.
Stevens’s ironic poetic plenitude, his installing of poetic
description in place of reality and the physical world, takes amply
from the Romantic Emersonian concept of power as higher level
coherence, which is also an appropriation of Coleridge’s concept
of imagination as the synthesizing faculty which brings the
fragmented data of the world into coherent wholes. Stevens, of
course, subjects this Romantic theory to a modernist modulation
of abstract, formal impersonality. At the center of Stevens’s
project lies the idea of a capacious, abstract “mind,” a mental
substance, that is impersonal, Stevens trying to align its workings
with a more universally conceived thought experience, and
“heroic” in its typically modernist effort at reaching all the way
270
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
down to some sort of a base of mental experience.8 This abstract
mind governs and manages the activity of description­‍‑making,
steering the proliferation of descriptions into forms of history and
politics, time and space. This mind is thematized in most of the
poet’s long pieces. We see it, for example, in the final cantos of
the “It Must Change” section of the grand poetic effort of “Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction,” where the mind is presented as an
immobile mental presence that presides over, justifies and enables
the mobile theater of forms intercepted by the sensual apparatus:
A bench was his catalepsy, Theatre
Of Trope. He sat in the park. The water of
The lake was full of artificial things
(343)
In this passage, the rich progression of changes developed
throughout the entire section now coming to its end is revealed
to have been a fantasy, a scenario, an orchestration of a potent
mind whose dreaming appears to be the only source of reality.
Stevens’s poetics comes to the modernist threshold of
textuality. It installs a “supreme fiction” of a capable, general,
almost over­‍‑human abstract mind whose imaginative activity is
responsible for the human reality of having a world. As it does
so, it sometimes tends to locate the imaginative faculty in the
textual material presence of the poem itself, as we have seen
is the case with the ending of “Descriptions Without a Place,”
For a detailed discussion of the necessity and role of abstraction in Stevens, see
Altieri (321-358). Altieri pays attention to Stevens‘s ambitious project of representing
a more fundamental base of formulating ideologies in general, a base some glimpses of
which – so Stevens wishes, according to Altieri – could point to a common imaginative
core beyond the individual ideological differences. For Altieri, this is an effort of
imaginative “appealing to levels of experience abstract enough to engage fundamental
recurrent needs and desires” (322).
8
271
Exorcising Modernism
whose grammatically dense play of “rubies reddened by rubies
reddening” indicates the running presence of the poem. But no
matter if the source of the poem’s resilience is sought in the
modernist abstraction of a capable generalized mind, or a textual
play typical of later 20th century continuations of modernism, all
of Stevens’s poetic effort rests on the notion of a strong belief of
the poem in its action. This belief is a kind of spiritual investment
in the poem’s own capable presence and will to survive, which
we could identify in the excess that Vendler rightly detects in
the convoluted grammar of the “rubies” metaphor and calls
“a radiance to share.” Stevens’s poetics of “nothingness,” which
he continued from the brilliant achievement of the early poem
“The Snow Man,” with its “nothingness that is,” rests with
a commitment and trust in the sheer presence of this excess.
The metaphor as a cognitively empty device is propelled only
by a bet-like stance that Stevens inherits from James’s notion
of “the will to believe.” The “will” that James talks about in
his famous essay is a faith­‍‑based stance toward the world, in
the absence of rational explanation of phenomena, that defines
and influences the subject­‍‑world relation. Because Stevens’s
metaphor is more of an energetically charged device aiming at
rearrangement and expansion of the existing cognitive sphere
than a container of a defined cognitive content, its success and
failure rest on an investment of commitment to it. For Stevens this
stance is a unifying, self­‍‑reliant condition of the successful work
of the poem as world­‍‑disclosing, imagination­‍‑propelled metaphor.
Rae Armantrout’s poetics of plenitude:
the poem as negative radiance
As Marjorie Perloff has argued in her 21st Century Modernism,
much of the innovative American poetry of the recent decades has
taken up and continued the unfinished project of a formal utopia
272
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
of the early modernist experiment in poetic form.9 However, the
kind of continuation Perloff has in mind is largely inimical to the
notion of the poem as self-sustaining imaginative unity – a unity
that also becomes a trope of imaginative power – that we have
seen informing Stevens’s poetics. Such a notion of unity became
the object of criticism in more recent American poetry. While a lot
of contemporary American poets have increased the ironic sense
of the poem as a re­‍‑describable textual creation, they have also
redefined the idea of the poem as an aesthetic object, moving away
from Stevens’s trope of power as unified, self­‍‑sufficient circularity.
While some of these poems belong under the rubric of the poetics
of plenitude, they introduce tension to this poetics, as they seek
to redefine the metaphorical poetic forces which disclose the world
and find themselves at the center of the excesses they confront.
Their efforts are twofold. First, they focus on finding a new
formula for the forces that bind the poem as an aesthetic object
separate from other such objects. Secondly, they will also need
to find new approaches to the excessive materials that are external
to the poem, the materials which the poems engage. For Stevens –
such externality was predominantly one of an epistemological
inquiry into the nature of matter; for the contemporary poets all
externality is ideologically tinged, which creates a new demand
on the poem engaging such externality. One of the most fruitful
recent examples of these tensions and reformulations is found in
the poetry of Rae Armantrout.
Although the excessive externalities engaged by Armantrout’s
poems may seem to vary from purely natural processes to ideologies
of the late capitalist culture, in fact the very method by which she
absorbs and enters these excessive fields soon reveals them to be
inseparably intertwined. She has worked out a formula of the poem
as a montage of more or less accidental, yet tauntingly related
9
See note 4 above.
273
Exorcising Modernism
fragments. Given to the aesthetics of recycling and the Duchampian
assemblage, her poems absorb external and intentionally unoriginal
linguistic utterances, engaging them in systems of rich sonic and
conceptual echoes, which frequently leads to exposing current
political and cultural ideologies as threadbare fallacies. She is
a poet of deep suspicion toward all descriptions, showing how
they become co-opted ideological clichés. And yet, as aesthetic
objects, her poems cannot afford to renounce the metaphoric power
of striking up connections between materials. In other words, as
I would like to argue, in its enhanced constructedness and artifice,
an Armantrout poem still hangs together as a distinct aesthetic
object, separate from other such objects. The question is what other
strategies can she use to achieve that goal, keeping clear of the
openly affirmative binding power of the metaphor. Here is a poem
from Armantrout’s volume Versed, entitled “Integer,” which I am
quoting in full:
1
One what?
One grasp?
No hands.
No collection
of stars. Something dark
pervades it.
2
Metaphor
is ritual sacrifice.
It kills the look-alike.
No,
metaphor is homeopathy.
274
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
A healthy cell
exhibits contact inhibition.
3
These temporary credits
will no longer be reflected
in your next billing period.
4
“Dark” meaning
not reflecting.
not amenable
to suggestion.
(Versed 93)
This is a poem of dark irony, representative of Armantrout’s
recent poetics. Unity is doubted and exposed as preposterous,
even ominous. The “integer,” a mathematical concept of
wholeness, is worked through in the first fragment and revealed
as vacuous, the vacuity resembling a black hole. For Armantrout,
the idea of a coherently closed whole, such as the whole of the
traditional self­‍‑obsessed lyrical subjectivity, simply implodes
under its tautological circularity. Thus the rest of the poem will
perform a very complex task: it will try to function as a distinct
literary object, whose distinctiveness will be rid of the idea of
homogenizing oneness.
The second part of the poem focuses explicitly on metaphor
and deregulates our understanding of the device. First, metaphor,
the central device of Stevens’s plenitudes, the key tool of his
abstract synthesis of the world by the forces of the poem, is
rejected as a killer of otherness by absorption of extraneous entities
through imposing identity on them. And yet, while rejecting this
275
Exorcising Modernism
formula, Armantrout’s poem understands that it cannot cut its
connection to metaphor completely, that it also partakes of the
metaphor as a general concept. So the very next lines make an
effort of proposing a different, reworked idea of metaphor. In it, the
metaphor is a device similar to the original tool in its establishing
a line of connection, with one key difference: the vector of the
connective force is reversed. Now the metaphor is responsible
for keeping elements healthily apart: “A healthy cell / exhibits
contact inhibition.”
While Stevens lectured on the power of the poetic language
to radiate through matter and synthesize it into meaning, Armantrout
practices this very power, introducing two vital modifications.
First, she dismisses Stevens’s circularity. This poem does not
pronounce the proud “I am because I am” which is actually what
Stevens’s metaphor of the “rubies reddened by rubies reddening”
proclaims. Second, she substitutes analytic suspension or outright
disjunction of meaning for Stevens’s insistent synthesis. Rather
than a self­‍‑declared whole, the poem, while thoroughly distrustful
of the materials it ingests, becomes a force field in which these
extraneous, worn­‍‑out elements begin to reverberate with formal,
conceptual, associative echoes, interrogating the connections
derived from their original use and establishing new ones.
Let’s take a closer look at the work of the poem. We notice
how the “dark” of the fourth part returns to the criticism of
wholeness / oneness from the first one. Next, the use of the word
“reflecting” in the final section connects the idea of “darkness”
with the fiscal language of part 3: “credits / will no longer be
reflected.” Incidentally, this connection casts an ominous shadow
over the meaning of “the next billing period” – when will this
be, and where will we be then? Doesn’t this period bespeak the
uncanny time of our final demise? The “dark” of the poem also
reverberates with the title of the collection to which it belongs,
which is “Dark Matter.” “Dark matter” is not to be accessed or
276
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
absorbed: it is “not amenable to / suggestion.” Like the modified
metaphor – the metaphor as healthy cell from part two – the motif
of the “dark matter,” besides all other possible connotations, also
points to the poem’s ability to stay clear of the materials it ingests:
it is the dark independence of the poem, its poetic force of the
suspension of first meanings of words and phrases activating the
entire interpretive play of the poem.
The darkness inside the poem is extremely equivocal.
On the one hand, it signals the death of any excessively unified
system of thought, the death of the subject as an enclosed
self‑referential wholeness. Even more strongly, it signals
the toxicity and pathology of such systems – such unity is
carcinogenic, Armantrout’s language borrowing from the medical
jargon, in which “contact inhibition” between cells is what blocks
the disease. On the other hand, there is also a connection between
the “darkness” of the poem and Armantrout’s “healthy” metaphor
envisioned in the last verses of fragment two. This is a kind
of “metaphor” that inhibits excessive connectivity of materials,
instead of establishing it. So the darkness is a trope that points
to the work and activity of the poem itself; it stands for the
power of the poem – the poem as metaphor – to notice and
critically examine various cognitive connections which the poem
intercepts. The poem itself is to be equaled with this revisionary
capacity – not with the absorbed elements – we know the poem
only as this negative force. The darkness stands for the evasive
power of Armantrout’s reversed metaphor to keep the elements
of various cognitive networks at a healthy distance, a distance
of anti-ideological reverberation, which examines clichés and
dismantles ideologies. While Stevens’s metaphor is a selfsustaining device clearly drawing on the Romantic trope of the
mind as lamp – itself the source of light – Armantrout’s metaphor
is a dark inhibiting force, a black hole. The poem that gives its
title to the cycle, “Dark matter,” reverses Stevens’s examination
277
Exorcising Modernism
of how ideas come into being, and observes the death of ideas,
their incompleteness, and recession:
Who am I
to experience a burst
of star formation?
I know this –
after the first rush
of enthusiasm
any idea
recedes and dims.
(Versed 69)
This revelation of the instability of ideas, their deep distrust, is
the negative “health” of Armantrout’s reversed metaphor which
renounces the powers of connectivity now appropriated by the
ideologies of the pervasive commercial and political discourses.
Armantrout’s poems examine their metaphorical connections and
reveal them to be clichéd political ideologies. A poignant example
of this technique is found in the poem called “Parting shots.”
In the second part of this piece we hear a sniper, hiding
“behind the only wall in sight,” reporting to a TV crew that “his
work is ‘invigorating’ / because it is ‘personal’” (Just Saying 23).
There is something deeply disturbing in the sniper’s description
of his job as “invigorating” and “personal.” Our ability to worry
about the disturbance will be increased when we trace a correlation
between this section of the poem and the apparently completely
disconnected former section, in which we hear reports of the
early visitors to American national parks. They comment on the
ambiguous “grandeur” of cliff walls which, although beautiful,
278
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
radiate a “bracing sense of insignificance” (23). The poem’s first
part presents an iconic American Romantic landscape which
divinizes rocky walls as a site of power, and then takes us to a scene
of one of America’s contemporary wars. The pivotal linking word
is “the wall”: it is now an American sniper who has taken on the
role of the source of power, formerly rested with the sublime
landscape. We only imagine the “bracing sense of insignificance”
experienced by his targets. The Romantic sublime has morphed
into a problematic mixture of patriotism and aggressive, predatory
professionalism which blinds Armantrout’s speaker to the terrible
moral pathos of his situation, providing him with a justification
which the reader will sense as being far too self­‍‑congratulatory
and complacent.
The poems of both Stevens and Armantrout are highly
ironic devices which find their own action at the center of worlddisclosing and world constructing operations. Stevens’s poetic
plenitude, however, is an open affirmation of the poetic power
of synthesis: it synthesizes matter into sense, and it synthesizes
the poem into a form of self­‍‑reliant subjectivity. But the ironic
plenitude of Armantrout’s poetry consists of its capacity
to decompose descriptions: here unification is the feature belonging
to the intercepted ideological systems of tropes and needs to be
resisted, as suffering from a pathological excess of connectivity.
In Armantrout’s poetics, to have a world means to dissolve the
crust of dominant ideologies.
We thus arrive at the paradoxical modification of the poetics
of plenitude. The reversed metaphor withdraws the self­‍‑proclaimed
presence of the poem as a synthesizing force. And yet, the idea
of the poem as a sort of poetic activity or force – precisely the
force that I have tried to distinguish from the materials ingested
in the poem – continues to be projected. The poem is an inferred –
if withdrawn – source of the examining dismantling power that
reestablishes a healthy separateness of ideas and rejects ideological
279
Exorcising Modernism
platitudes. In order to do that, the poem must also be assumed
to be a distinct aesthetic object – an organized, formally arranged
space within which the revisionary (re-)connections between
the various elements are struck up. These revisions do not just
happen on their own – they depend on just this particular formal
habitat. We also understand that these connections are different
from the clichéd public ideologies. The withdrawn negative force
of the poem proposes, strikes, suggests and submits possibilities
of new reverberations in place of the simple and threadbare
correspondences fed into the public metaphors.
While Stevens’s poem relies on the stance of belief, its selfproclaimed capacity of the poem to continuously sustain its own
activity is also a trope of power and control. As we noted, Stevens’s
landscapes are always ultimately revealed to be a creation of the
central, abstracted, poetically capable mind. As this poetics suited
the modernist injunction to put poesis in the place of ontology,
from the point of view of the contemporary American poet, such as
Armantrout, such poetics is too easily co-opted by the political and
cultural ideologies of the day. Consequently, Armantrout’s poems
of plenitude, as they engage the externality of tainted ideological
discourses and purify them by their reversed metaphor, must also
redefine the concept of the commitment to the poem that sustained
Stevens’s poetics. Here, the outright, explicitly professed “faith” in
the poem – its ultimate condition within the modernist discourse of
Stevens’s poetics – is replaced by a play of withdrawal, negative
inference, non­‍‑linear and indeterminate reverberation.
Armantrout’s poems often evoke and sustain an irresolvable
tension: a contradictory bind in which there is a clash between the
poem’s rejection of the co­‍‑opted forces of the traditional metaphor
and its own network of reverberations. Consequently, some of
Armantrout’s poems culminate in a deeply conflicted clash of
these two varieties of the binding force. A poem called “Djinn” is
a piece that takes on and dismantles all sorts of “beliefs” that come
280
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
into play when factual verification is unavailable. These beliefs
are in the end exposed as a fantasy held together by mysterious
undisclosed “forces”: “They believe / the bits are iffy; // the forces
that bind them, / absolute” (Versed 84). The deep paradox of these
closing lines of the poem is that they speak simultaneously of two
opposites: the poem mocks and rejects the false “beliefs” of those
who are enthralled by ideologies of the cultural moment, but at
the same time it points in the direction of the “forces” – even if
these are of negative nature – that we have seen put in play by
the poem itself. Armantrout’s poetics of plenitude is ultimately
found in the following formula: the poem’s being consists of, and
depends on, an ongoing constructed presence of this irresolvable
contradiction and tension.
Peter Gizzi’s poetics of plenitude:
poem as a sentient participant of plenitude
The pragmatist poetics of ironist plenitude describes various ways
in which the poem positions itself toward excesses of stimuli –
material, physical, linguistic or conceptual – and takes care of
its form by developing grids of possible relations, thereby also
reorganizing the excess into a new understanding of the world.
Stevens’s and Armantrout’s way of entry into excess, as we have
seem, is by following the poem’s metaphoric forces, in their two
opposite varieties. Another variety of such entry is Peter Gizzi’s
open and direct confrontation of the excess of the world in the
manner of the Whitmanian “song” or dictation­‍‑taking.
It is possible that Gizzi’s first model for thinking about
the poem as a reception of a dictation by the externality of the
world – the world as language but also the world as sheer physical
presence – is provided by the work of Jack Spicer. Gizzi edited
a volume of Spicer’s “lectures,” freely associative public talks
on poetics which he delivered in Vancouver, between mid-June
281
Exorcising Modernism
and mid-July of 1965. In these talks Spicer presents a highly
formal and impersonal theory of poetry, clearly prefiguring some
important tenets of the American “Language” poets who have had
another formative influence on Gizzi’s poetry. According to Spicer,
the poet loses his or her personality in the poem, as he or she
becomes “invaded” by the sheer externality of language (5-9). In
Gizzi’s condensed summary of this theory, it turns the poet into
“a radio receiving transmissions” (“Dictation” 2). Although Spicer
denies continuities with the Romantic models of poetic inspiration,
the trope of poetry as taking dictation sends us back unmistakably
to Emerson’s and Whitman’s varieties of mysticism. Critics have
already noticed this connection. M. D. Snediker, commenting
on Spicer’s rebellion against Whitman, points out how this stance
does in fact spell out a deep debt to Whitman’s all­‍‑out personal
biographical involvement with a life­‍‑long poetic project, never
finished, continuously touching and changing the poet’s empirical
persona. So Spicer’s stance is “more accurately (...) both antiWhitmanian and Whimanian” (Snediker 492), and Whitman is
for Spicer a poet of “non­‍‑diachronic multiplicity” (492). By this
term Snediker means Whitman’s proto­‍‑gay poetic, a testing of
various versions of one’s self. But beyond this, we clearly enter
the idea of the poem as subjecting the individual self of the poet
to the dictation received from variously understood larger orders:
somatic, linguistic, psychological, psychic and cultural.
Gizzi inherits the idea of the poem as a mode of participation
in such multiplicities, and Whitman is the original source of the
concept. Whitman’s idea of the poem as going back to the source of
all creation – the idea with which he opens “The Song of Myself” –
forms the conceptual roots of the American pragmatist poetics
of plenitude. Whitman’s poetics of dictation‑taking consists in
a gesture that John Michael Corrrigan has characterized recently
as a reversal of the neo-Platonic theory of creation as an outburst
and emanation out and away from the source. Whitman, according
282
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
to Corrigan who speaks of Whitmanian metempsychosis, reverses
the flow of the emanation and returns the poem to the source
of creation, thereby freeing the poem of the usual direction of
mimesis. The poem gets out of the mimetic order because it goes
back and becomes one with the source. Now it is the poem that
is the model to be imitated. With this, the poem obtains access
to its own creative sustenance as “creation’s own self‑constituting
ground” (Corrigan 116). Beyond and before Gizzi’s indebtedness
to Spicer, to Williams and the objectivists, particularly Oppen,
his poetics is shaped by this Whitmanian idea of the poem as the
creative, orphic, life giving and world­‍‑creating principle, that is
encapsulated in the simple term “song.”
The poem as “song” is a penetration performed by
linguistically, formally, aesthetically equipped consciousness
into the elementary levels of creation. Such poem is a full scale
engagement of the excess of externality, in which the poetic action
is an effort by consciousness to proliferate to the core and root of
the materials of externality: material, linguistic or cultural. Gizzi
has always thought of his writing along such lines, but the idea
comes to the fore in his 2010 volume, revealingly called Threshold
Songs. Here the formula of “the song” is installed early on as
a tuning in to a dictation coming from whatever is external – the
great externality of the world, the Emersonian non­‍‑me. “There is
a spike / in the air / a distant thrum / you call singing” (1) we read in
the opening piece of the volume, and this fragment is immediately
followed by an image of “this giganto,” – an indication of the
outside in its indeterminate largeness. Next in line is the imago
of a listener, a “you” (“I wonder if / you hear me / I mean I talk
to myself through you”), again indeterminate, associated with
externality itself. This is a reworking of the Whitmanian apparatus:
the “I” called into singing by a fantasmatic transformation of
externality into a great “you.” The song does not issue from the “I”
or the “you” taken separately: it is the situation of their reciprocity.
283
Exorcising Modernism
Such positioning of the poem­‍‑as-song takes it to the
“threshold” of the title. It is an orphic transitory area between life
and death, organic bios and non­‍‑organic absence of life. The poem
comes close, and then invades, the inorganic non-life of the world.
Frequently, in Threshold Songs, but also in numerous poems from
his earlier volumes, Gizzi brings the formal activity of the poem
to imagining the life of matter on elementary level. In “Eclogues,”
an open series of fragmented lines, the evocation of externality
leads to “the prayer between electrons,” and then to “atoms stirring,
nesting, dying out, reforged elsewhere” (Threshold 10). This poem
sends us back to a minimalistic piece called “In Defense of Nothing”
from one of the earlier volumes, which, in a move that strikes
against the self-limiting tones of the poem, shows imagination
to expansively pervade all the way down to the forces of the subatomic level: “It is hard to imagine atoms, hard to imagine hydrogen
& oxygen binding” (Some Values 53). Through such operations
the very biological base of life is shot through with the life of the
poem. “Eclogues” is representative again, with the last fragment of
this loose series equaling a “gene” to a “poem” (Threshold 10). All
forms of externality – physical, organic, other – are poetic, in the
sense that we have no access to them other than through imaginative
action of inquiry, and the poem is an echo and a condensation of
this action. Thus, not even the mineral bedrock is independent
of the poetic, as we find out in a piece called “Human Memory
is Organic,” from The Outernationale which begins with some
ordinary observations on geological time, whose passage is seen
in bent layers of rock, and then takes a sudden turn, with the voice
of the poem insisting on its position amidst salt and minerals:
I am just a visitor to this world
an interloper really headed deep into glass
I, moving across a vast expanse of water
284
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
though it is not water maybe salt
or consciousness itself.
(The Outernationale 27)
In the poesis of “the song” there is no difference between stone and
consciousness; neither is there a difference between the organic
bios and other forms of matter, the poem ending on a sort of
a “memory” of “the organic existence of gravity” (28).
But if Gizzi’s entry into plenitude is through the Whitmanian
song, there is a great cost for performing this gesture nowadays.
This cost is related to a reconfiguration of the idea of the
source. No longer from the mystical, neo-Platonic pleroma of
Whitman, Gizzi’s dictation reaches the poet from the reservoirs of
capacious cultural transmissions, the excess of the hyper­‍‑realistic
overproduction of the communication systems, brimming with
their corrosive mixture of ideology and politics as spectacle. There
is no difference for Gizzi between the material world of nature,
which he evokes frequently, and the broadcast of the modern
American society’s cultural apparatus, with all of its mediasponsored stupefaction and mental inertia.
Gizzi is the poet of the radio transmission of sound and of
the analogue and digital transmission of picture. But the light that
pervades a lot of his poems is not just the light of Pound’s and
Eriugena’s mystical notion contained in the phrase “omnia sunt
lumina.” Here this “natural” light is put through technological
filters and fibers. In a procedural serial poem “Imitation of Life:
A Memoir,” from Some Values, a piece that features permutation
to alter a closed set of motifs and lines, the poem itself, as a sort
of transmission, is revealed at the end to be shot through with
a TV transmission. The poem makes frequent references to a TV
network, its technological infrastructure which encompasses an
urban area, its presence as endless transmission and background
noise. This presence is complicit in the work of propaganda and
285
Exorcising Modernism
ubiquitous invisibility of power as it moulds landscapes freely
from human to inhuman. The poem can be read as a story of
a neighborhood whose inhabitants are expelled, or evicted,
to make place for a parking lot. The move is enabled by complex
interdependence of beliefs, religious and political, which changes
local populations into passive receivers of cultural transmission.
This network, like some kind of background noise, becomes
a hypnotizing tranquilizer that eliminates resistance. In the middle
of what should be seen as a serious crisis, the inhabitants’ role is
diminished, their consciousness debilitated: “the neighborhood met
to swap recipes over Kool-aid near the parking lot” (Some Values
33). The evocation of the chemically engineered drink, a product
of the food industry, works with other tropes of the poem to strike
disquieting correspondences. The “reports of life” from “chapter
1,” which are placed in “specimen bottles” on a shelf, reappear in
“chapter 2” in the phrase “the shelf life of a single human.” With
the preceding line of this fragment revealing “a boy” to be “the sole
transmitter” of warmth, and all these lines working in a grid other
sections of which are ideologically charged “stories of creation,”
the poem reconstructs and brings to life complex strategies of
bio­‍‑power which change citizens into units of biological energy
to be sustained for a given period and then exploited.
At this point we encounter the same risk of practicing the
poetics of plenitude nowadays that we saw earlier in Armantrout.
What does it mean for the poem to lay bare power devices? The
way in which power discourse moulds life into bio­‍‑units is not just
a down-to-earth, lifeless instruction, but a highly complex set of
interrelated belief networks. But how exactly are such networks
put into motion? Do they not require a combination of cognitive
commitment, arrangement, aesthetic efficacy, a combination of
the sort that the poem itself employs? In other words, the poem
finds its own echoes, its own forms and procedures, dangerously
close to the discourse of power. It is this discourse, in fact, that has
286
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
now become the excessive externality that the poem of plenitude
enters and of which it partakes.
How does a poem survive in such an environment as an
independent aesthetic object? While Armantrout’s strategy was
to reverse the vector of metaphor, from synthesis to ironical
disjunction and negative inhibition, one of Gizzi’s strategies is
to transfer all rhetorical force from the poem to a newly conceived
external source, a source that is an alternative to the rhetorically
enhanced power discourse. In some of his poems, the grammatical
disjunction is a means of evoking forces connected with powerful
physical realities, such as gravity, time­‍‑space, speed of light. These
poems are airy, loose, suggestive of their pale existence as mere
faint echoes of much more capacious physical entities.
A poem called “Fragment” is a case in point. It is a short
series of incomplete subordinate clauses most of which begin with
the relative pronoun “when.” Here is its beginning, in a quote that
preserves the original double spacing between the lines on the
page:
When you wake to brick outside the window
when you accept this handmade world
when you see yourself inside an accept its picture
(Threshold 18)
The clauses which end the series do not form grammatical wholes
with the “when” clauses. The penultimate line is an “if” clause,
whose meaning sounds dislocated, disjointed from the preceding
series: “if one could fancy vision then let it be of you.” Finally, the
last line presents some sort of surprising, unexpected grammatical
and logical continuity with the preceding line: “let it be thought
breaking in your view” (18).
287
Exorcising Modernism
These grammatical and cognitive incompletions do not build
any linear story. The double spacing between the lines underscores
the intervallic manner of delivery: there are all sorts of distance
between these lines. Yet the incompletion of this intermittent
procession itself succeeds in building a sort of environment,
a scene, however shuffled, spaced out, revealed in a jumbled
pictorial session, as if emitted from an old projector. The poem’s
main series of the “when” clauses builds a sense of continuity,
not of sense but of mood, which is one of expectancy, the “when”
clauses prefiguring a future event or moment. This moment, if
and when it arrives, will perhaps seal the procession, provide the
hanging clauses with a belonging for which they now grope. What
is more, steeped in continual expectancy, we recognize fragments
of a landscape: material, local, domestic and ordinary, placing the
poem in the long line of the poetics of the local, from Williams and
George Oppen, leading to Spicer and Creeley. The poem attends
to the neglected local landscape of crumbling matter, things which
are “handmade,” transient, loosely connected. This landscape,
crumbling and waiting for its redemption, prefigures and senses
a much greater externality. As we move along in the poem, we
understand that the poem presents itself precisely as a “fragment”
of this “other” larger force. In fact, the procession of the stunted
lines is a device that ushers in that force, makes it felt, until it is
actually thematized in the fourth line: “when you feel the planet
spin, accelerate, make dust of everything beneath your bed” (18).
With this line we understand that the lines of the poem participate
in a larger movability, one that evokes large physical entities, such
as mass, gravity and speed of light: “when you feel speed of days,
speed of light” (18). They are now felt as the principal presence in
the airy and stumbling procession of the lines of the poem.
“Fragment” reduces its own poetic means to usher the
presence among its spaced out verse of the biggest possible
external force of the material realm. It is as if Gizzi turns to the
288
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
imaginarium of modern physics and juxtaposes it, as a powerful
and plentiful externality, to the externality of ideological power
and its pernicious ubiquity. This seems to be a strategy of survival
of the poem amidst kinds of external excesses of which it partakes:
by switching to another kind of externality – one of physical
forces – the poem tries out a new positioning.
This paradoxical minimalistic strategy – paradoxical because
it evokes some very non‑minimalistic forces – seems to work
for Gizzi in several ways. At the end of “Fragment” we witness
a birth of some sort of internal light, or thought, which might be
the very kernel of the poem as a sort of awoken consciousness, free
from the stupor we observed dominating the “neighborhood” in
“Imitation of Life.” This is the lesson of Gizzi’s great predecessors:
Williams, Oppen and Creeley. The ascesis of form brings surprising
light – however precarious and unstable in the crumbling material
environments of today (one thinks of the devastated appearances of
the American post­‍‑industrial towns of the North­‍‑East). The ascetic
reduction of the poem’s own rhetorical presence lets in a portion
of more stable energy, a light, a thought, in the presence of which
the poem’s speaker redeems the ruined material localities. The
crumbling matter, degraded by political neglect, forlorn on the fronts
of historical change, is returned to us in a sort of aesthetic dignity.
The “brick outside the window” is now endowed with the poem’s
attention, raised from ruin, and the next line stipulates acceptance:
“when you accept this handmade world.” The “handmade world”
works against the inhuman transmissions of power from other
poems, as the phrase appeals to the dignity of labor.
Besides this calling to the value of human craft – labor – the
minimalism of “Fragment” introduces a tone of tranquility and
balance which, elsewhere in Gizzi, also works as antidote to false
bravados of propaganda. In a short poem called “Protest Song,”
we find the same strategy of withdrawing all rhetorical force from
the poem. The poem is merely a procession of negative statements,
289
Exorcising Modernism
self-limiting declarations on what the poem is incapable of
achieving, as it comes to confront the topic of war. The successive
negations build up a sense of the poem’s helplessness in the face
of the devastations of war: “This won’t help when the children
are dying / no answer on the way to dust // Neither anthem to rally
nor flag to flutter / will bring back the dead, their aches flying”
(Outernationale 88). But the entire passage of these negations has
a clearly palpable anti‑ideological effect: it removes the poem as
such from all propaganda gestures – there will be no justifying of
war, no assuaging of pain and death. By stating its helplessness, the
poem takes up a position that is limited, but also balanced, honest,
self­‍‑aware and authentic. It becomes a kind of a true mourning,
a reestablishing of emotional order and proportion in the face of
modern­‍‑day carnage, ideological excess, and information chaos
with which modern warfare is accompanied.
Gizzi is ultimately a minimalist poet of far reaching formal
ascesis. Most of his poems limit their means, rely on unattractive,
ordinary, almost vapid vocabulary. They are full of ordinary
objects, dilapidated materiality, simple facts of living in physical
surroundings. These minimalistic techniques, however, are defense
strategies. The reports of the ordinary that the poems propose
are always evocative of larger, encompassing externalities from
which the poems are inseparable, the externalities which inevitably
become a presence in the poem. Gizzi’s ascesis, the limited
means of his rhetoric, regulate the intake of the external stimuli,
and Gizzi’s poem as a reception­‍‑device achieves a high level of
sensitivity. So much so in fact, that the poem becomes endowed
with a kind of sentience: it is a device of very low threshold of
response, in which the contact with the externality of the world
is recorded as a “sensation.” The poem’s entry into the areas of
excess – its participation in the excesses of the power discourse,
the dynamic reality of physical processes, the sheer externality of
matter – is a reciprocal process. The orphic enlivening of the dead
290
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
material externality beams back on the poem, and the experience
is painful. There is a price for the poem’s finding itself as a germ
of life in the midst of inorganic matter: the orphic power of the
poem operates on a precarious threshold of life and death.
But Gizzi’s situation is different than that of his Romantic
and modernist predecessors. While the orphic power was healthy
and nourishing for Whitman – its originator within the bounds of
American poetry – it is deeply disturbing and dangerous for the
poet of modern contaminations and ambiguities. Next, while the
Whitmanian orphism survives in Stevens, whose wintry ascesis
finds a continuation in Gizzi’s minimalism, Stevens finds a safety
valve against the excesses of stimuli he confronts through the
abstract depersonalization of the imagination. An important
aspect of Stevens’s abstraction is a strict control and modulation
of the somatic side of his poetics: there is a sense of the bodily
in Stevens, but its sensitivity is slowed down and chilled by
abstraction. Gizzi, meanwhile, cannot separate the contact of the
poem and the world from its somatic side. He has commented
himself on this aspect in his work: “the poem is a universe, an
event (...) in the mind, that is [also] a body (...). In a world in
which everything teaches – everything emits some note – every
body is a singer” (“Correspondences” 179). Or, by reversal, in
Gizzi’s poetics of plenitude, every poem, or “song,” becomes
a “body.” And the transformation is risky because, as Gizzi says
later in the same text, this poesis sees a continuity of organic and
the inorganic, the living and the dead, the poem being a medium
of their combustive meeting: “a conflagration of the inanimate
with the living” (“Correspondences” 182). “Basement song,” an
autobiographical poem from Threshold Songs, provides a poetic
gloss to this theory of poetry:
Deep the song
inside summer.
291
Exorcising Modernism
Did I tell you it hurt
accepting air in a new body?
And since the change
the air burns.
(Threshold Songs 38)
Concluding remarks: the poets of plenitude
Within the context of American poetry, the modernist experiment
in form and the pragmatist theory of inquiry are linked by
corresponding ideas on how focused action within material
surroundings changes these surroundings and the subject that
acts in them. While modernism banished the idea of individual
expressive personality and withdrew the poetic subjectivity
to a highly abstract level of which Stevens is a primary example,
it clearly shifted our attention to the material presence and distinct
delineation of the poem. In its care and emphasis on its material
being, the poem draws our attention to its artifice. Its shape is
a result of a history of formal gestures, which might receive
various readings. The poem is both a strong kind of formal being
in the world and a kind of description of the world which –
since it might be re­‍‑read or re-written – is highly unstable. Thus,
an ironist awareness lurks in modernist poetics which I have
treated here as genetically related, historically and conceptually,
to the evolution of pragmatism, from Dewey and James to the
neo­‍‑pragmatism of Richard Rorty, with his ironist rereading of
classical pragmatism.
This kind of irony is formal and non­‍‑skeptical: it sees ironic
awareness as a way of entry into various excessive environments,
the environments characterized by an overabundant surplus of
stimuli. I have tried to treat the poem as an equivalent of a volatile
individuality burdened with the task of finding itself amidst such
292
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
plentiful environments. The poem does so by entering various
modes of interaction with the excess.
Stevens’s affirmative poetics of the poem as the sole governor
of all descriptions is one such mode. In Stevens the poem is more
a readiness of description, a formula of it, a cognitive thrust and
momentum that build and color all description, than a description
of any particular place. Stevens treats the poem as an insight into
those mental faculties which are responsible for the construction
of any description. At the basis of this poetics lies the metaphor
as a mode of powerful synthesis of matter into sense. But such
metaphoric operation only works when backed up by a stance
of commitment or faith. The metaphor is a bet. Or it is a kind
of action in free space, and the poem works only as it stands
firmly and explicitly behind its action. One way to see this faith
is as a continuation of the Emersonian aesthetics of self­‍‑reliance.
Another is to see it as a variety of the modernist trust in the power
of the aesthetic to replace the religious.
Whatever the source of this faith, it is precisely what becomes
problematic for two later poets of the pragmatist ironist poetics of
plenitude: Armantrout and Gizzi. Both of them clearly continue
the early modernist mode of thinking of the poem as constructed
artifice of multilayered ironies. Also, both of them share many
important themes and aspects of Stevensian poetics: besides their
Williamsian and objectivist lineage, they share with Stevens a high
degree of interest in the poem’s being an echo of any kind of
inquiry into the nature of the world, a clearly Stevensian poetics
that puts the poem at the basis of epistemic strategies. All these
three poets represent the irony of the poetics of plenitude: they
find the work of the poem modulating and changing the excesses
they come in touch with. But for Armantrout and Gizzi these
modulations must be of a different sort.
The poet of today’s excess is no longer free to engage in free
divagations on the poetic power of sense­‍‑making as these powers
293
Exorcising Modernism
are seen as co­‍‑opted by power-structures that these poems see as
detrimental and dehumanizing. Thus the modernist faith as the major
binding force of the world-disclosing rhetorical maneuvers of the
poem is replaced by these poets by highly complex strategies of
withdrawal, reversal and minimalistic reduction. Armantrout presents
a continuity of Stevens by resisting and redefining his concept of the
metaphor. While continuing the Whitmanian orphic stance common
for himself and Stevens, Gizzi reduces Stevens’s own frequent formal
ascesis to such a degree that the poem yields a shape of a sentient
body that reappears in the world, returned from Stevens’s abstractions.
With all these strategies, these poets refuse to admit that
there is anything in the externalities with which they grapple that
precedes the poem that they make. This makes all of them the
poets of the pragmatist ironic poetics of plenitude.
Works Cited
Altieri, Charles. Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American
Painting. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1989.
Armantrout, Rae. Just Saying. Middletown: Wesleyan University
Press, 2013.
---. Versed. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009.
Bartczak, Kacper. “Wallace Stevens’s Pragmatist Poetics of
Plenitude.” Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics: Critical
Perspectives on the Arts. Ed. Wojciech Małecki. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2014.
Beck, John. Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams,
John Dewey and American Cultural Politics. Albany: SUNY
Press, 2001.
Corrigan, John Michael. American Metempsychosis: Emerson,
Whitman, and the New Poetry. Fordham University Press, 2012.
294
Kacper Bartczak | The Poetics of Plenitude
Dewey, John. Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey’s
Philosophy. Ed. Joseph Ratner. New York: The Modern
Library, 1939.
Emerson, R. W. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Ed. Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library, 2000.
Gizzi, Peter. Threshold Songs. Middletown: Wesleyan University
Press, 2011.
---. The Outernationale. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press,
2007.
---. Some Values of Landscape and Weather. Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
---. “Dictation.” Introduction. The House That Jack Built: The
Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. Ed. Peter Gizzi. Hanover:
University Press of New England, 1998.
---. “Correspondences of the Book.” A Poetics of Criticism. Ed.
Juliana Spahr et. al. Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994. 179 – 86.
Horton, John. “Irony and Commitment: Irreducible Dualism.”
Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues. Ed. Matthew Festenstein
and Simon Thompson. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001.
James, William. Writings 1878–1899. New York: Library of
America, 1992.
---. The Writings of William James. Ed. John J. McDermott. New
York: Random House, 1967.
Lentricchia, Frank. Modernist Quartet. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994.
Magee, Michael. Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and
Experimental Writing. Tuscalooosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2004.
Mitchell, Charles E. Individualism and Its Discontents:
Appropriations of Emerson, 1880– 1950. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.
Perloff, Marjorie. 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
295
Exorcising Modernism
Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New
York: New Directions, 1935.
Rae, Patricia. The Practical Muse. Lewisburg: Bucknell University
Press, 1997.
Rorty, Richard. “Redemption from Egotism,” in The Rorty Reader.
Ed. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein. Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 389-406.
---. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.
Snediker, M. D. “Prodigal Son (Midway Along the Pathway).”
Criticism 51.3 (2009): 489-504.
Spicer, Jack. The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures
of Jack Spicer. Ed. Peter Gizzi. Hanover: University Press
of New England, 1998.
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode
and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.
Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer
Poems. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969.
Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” The Norton Anthology of
American Literature, 6th Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. New York:
W. W. Norton, 2003. 2232-2274.
Williams, Michael. “Rorty on Knowledge and Truth.” Richard
Rorty. Ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
296
Charles Altieri
Dodie Bellamy’s Version of Stevens:
The Place of Imagination in Erotic Experience
Here are some passages from Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt Norton (2013)
most overtly addressing the poetry of Wallace Stevens:
Honey my hour its solitude, push my single button
and fill my well with your greases which sing the sea.
Whatever self I have, finger it, putting a few drops of
honey on my maker. (...) You have mastered my night
with your right nipple and your clit, emblazoning the
zones of my fiery pole, arranging new experiences
with me. Blessed is your rage for orders: touch my
pale bead of pre-come to the tip of your fragrant
portal, its dimly-starred grooves. Smear my pre­‍‑come
all over our demarcations; keen sounds as I run my
tongue along your ocean lips. “The head of your cock
is smooth as butter,” I sing beyond the genius of the
sea. I glow when you look at my body – wholly my
body – fluttering like an empty sleeve, green neon.
297
Exorcising Modernism
(...) I take the boot you’re so fond of and rub against
it until the dark voice of the sea rises my clit through
my panties, so that my panties become the outer voice
of sky and cloud. Sink into my cunt, then take me from
behind, heaving deep air, heaving speed in the circular
spots on my body, heaving summer without end and
sound alone. Fuck me with the closeness of voice, ours,
among the meaningless plungings.
(44-45)
I am no expert, but this seems to me rather awful pornography –
my embarrassment when reading such stuff is primarily aesthetic.1
Even Stevens’s sex life may have been more interesting than this
record of claims for the production of ecstasy by any means
available. I probably date myself, but I cannot but share with
Stevens the suspicion that sex, if not pornography, is most
engaging as experienced in reflective space, where physical acts
get amplified by memory and adapted to persistent figures of
need and desire. I have to admit that Bellamy wants to revise our
grasp of pornography – making it dependent on the obsessive
phrase and our capacities to turn desires into mantras spoken
1
This critical attitude toward the pornographic aspect of the text is a view not shared
by most reviewers. The blossoming of MFAs in Creative Writing has produced ideal
audience conditions for Bellamy‘s enterprise because of the extraordinary visibility
of younger writers. To pleasure them, it must be hip, and then it may turn toward
somewhat conventional values. What better satisfaction than appropriations bringing
the spirit of pornography within the modes of cultural capital provided by the claims of
serious art. Arianna Reines‘ “Preface” to Bellamy‘s book offers a delightful emblem of
these forces at play: “To take the bracing, medicinal Burroughsian cut as far as Dodie
Bellamy takes it, such that it cuts and makes to pour forth, means to render each cut
into true congress: to cunt means to mark the spot where rupture and fusion become
indivisible. (...) I mean that this book gives the feeling that the whole thing itself, the
entire body of the tradition only wants to be come into, to be made to shudder, to be
transmuted to ecstasy, which is to say to be made to come – to have finally arrived.”
This beautiful, ecstatic, prose seems to me to prefer the metaphorics of pornography
to the intricacies of identification, and so misses at least what most gratifies this author
from a very different generation.
298
Charles Altieri | Dodie Bellamy’s Version of Stevens
by voices in complex juxtapositions. But for me the lyricizing
remains painfully thin without narrative because the elaboration
of statements of desire (or lyric desires for statement) will not in
itself complicate a pretty basic structure of events. So I think we
need to trace desire through various stages filtered through the
emerging hungers of characters, authors and audiences.
Ironically, the pornographic dimension is probably the least
interesting and least satisfying dimension of Bellamy’s quite
wonderful text. (The pornographic passages were worked out
separately with a collaborator and then woven into the thirty
two voices she appropriates.) What she does with these voices as
registers of possible modes of investing in sexuality is far more
compelling than the working out of particular sexual details. And
here she is profoundly true to the spirit of Stevens’s poetry –
in stressing the self-reflexive imagination’s relation to these
primary erotic desires and in developing elaborate examples of
how differences in imaginative constructions have the capacity
to animate experience as well as solicit appreciation for the
powers of language. This is not accomplished by slavish imitation
of any modernist. Her “cunt‑ups”2 of Stevens and 31 other poets
attempt a fiercely feminist undoing of the bids for authority of
these voices. (The text from which the originals are taken, the
1975 Norton Anthology of Poetry, can serve as an emblem of
male forms of that authority, imposing duties on a begrudging
undergraduate English major.) Yet at the same time her variety
establishes a powerful recovery of the roles a Stevensian
Bellamy characterizes “cuntings up” as “a joke, but it‘s also a feminist re-claiming
of the cut-up”: “The literal cutting of texts forces your mind in new directions, allowing
you to transcend the false logic that we live in. The cut‑up reveals the truth behind
the crap that‘s being fed to us. The illogic behind the logic. So, I‘m appreciating
Burroughs more and more.” See: “Conversation with Dodie Bellamy, posted in Open
Door on Thursday, November 21st, 2013 by Sara Wintz. It is also important to note that
Cunt Norton refers both to Eliot, the subject of the first pornographic piece, and to the
1975 Norton Anthology on which she performed her conceptualist appropriations.
2
299
Exorcising Modernism
imagination can play in reflecting on that body of experience.
As with Conceptualist Poetics, Stevens looks to culture rather
than nature for his imaginative satisfactions.
Let me comment first on how Bellamy beautifully captures
an ecstatic dimension of Stevens’s poetry, lost to critics absorbed in
epistemological questions. Then I will close by reflecting on how
Cunt Norton’s proliferation of voices provides one of our fullest
images honoring many of the civilizing roles imagination can
play. I love the possibility that this raw, insistently revolutionary
violence on authorial intentions turns out to realize perhaps the
most conservative aspect of the Modernists’ humanist imaginings:
ultimately sexuality seems to depend for its richness on the variety
of textures and tones literary traditions establish as conditions of
self-reflexive experience. But it may take the violence of Bellamy’s
gestures for our benighted culture to see this aspect of what their
heritage affords.
The best way to appreciate what Bellamy accomplishes in
her borrowing Stevens voice is to attend to the strange abstracting
force in Bellamy’s treatment of personal pronouns: if eros is to be
found in language it is important not to give ownership to sexual
pleasure or even to sex organs because the various positions and
the various pleasures simply extend beyond the boundaries of
person or specific gender. In sex, as in poetry, it must be abstract
and it must change for it to give the maximum pleasure. It is
difficult to take the specific sexualized voices seriously because
they are overwritten by the generic markers of pornography. But
in emptying these human voices, Bellamy oddly gives a presence
to something like the voice behind the voice, or, better, to the
voice of desire underlying the inarticulate flesh­‍‑bound utterances
of the speakers. Bellamy’s ecstatic moanings in the Stevens
section are plausibly Stevensian voices of need and desire and
pleasure, seen through their moderately pathetic reliance on the
tropology of the pornographic.
300
Charles Altieri | Dodie Bellamy’s Version of Stevens
Her play on the distance between voices exulting and voices
needing to speak their need also puts into question the sites where
erotic desire might actually achieve satisfaction. In her opening
sections I think she wants a Stevensian voice that can seem at one with
the presence of desire: there is only one button and one sea of bodily
co-presence. But by the conclusion – the third section I cite – Bellamy
opens herself more to the complexities of Stevensian imaginings,
and so to the hunger of bodies for the complicity of minds. “My
panties become the outer voice of sky and cloud” is terrible poetry,
without even the panache of Kitsch. But she nevertheless elaborates
transformative qualities of becoming, where outer voices given to the
atmosphere prove inseparable from the immediate intimacies of
erotic pleasure. Then this play of intimacy and distance turns more
self‑reflexive in the closing passage: “Fuck me with the closeness
of voice, ours, among the meaningless plungings.” Here closeness
between the lovers proves inseparable from their reflecting on the
fear of distance and absence. In our culture we think we are open
to the values of the flesh. But it might be a strange openness, based
on imaginary ideas of the body rather than investments in how my
body is positioned in relation to other persons.
Now to what I think is Bellamy’s major achievement, one
that brings Stevensian thinking on imagination sharply into how
we may attend to our present cultural situations. Cunt Norton’s
most Stevensian gesture is the refusal to trust in one voice or one
style in order to stage how desire and imagination seek mutual
fulfillment. Distance has as its complement the play of multiplicity.
There emerge at least thirty­‍‑two ways of seeing vaginas and
penises. And Bellamy makes her audience come to think that they
possess the capacity to internalize all thirty-two ways of putting
sexual pineapples together. In Bellamy’s text imagination at its
wildest depends for its permissions and intensities on the multiple
stances afforded by examples drawn from a quite conservative
canon, whose powers are gloriously made visible. The range of
301
Exorcising Modernism
poetic imaginings honors writing’s capacities to establish a wide
range for appreciating and intensifying possibilities of being.
This for example is Chaucer’s rendering of the innocence,
directness, and mutual easy adaptiveness possible in erotic
experience:
So have I blis, of oo thing God hath sente me­thee. So
generous, really. Is it okay that I touche thy face? Thou
art so scarlet reed aboute thy clit, still burning away al
that maketh the ozone dien. Thou art siker as I holde
thee and want thee for womman is mannes joye and his
font. My cock, it groweth beanshoot harde against thy
softe side that I may on thee ride til sonne rise morning
harde. It is exciting, allas – I am so ful of joye and of
solas hot for thee in thy rental car. Oon word, and I wol
fleigh down fro the beem onto thy ravenous wet pussy.
(8)
Then there is the expansiveness of Wordsworth, where there
is explicitly a synthesis of immediate pleasure with a sense of
belonging to a greater force of eros only available to self-reflection:
I touch my body and pretend it’s thy hands deeply
infusing my dwelling, lightly squeezing my breasts,
sliding through ocean and the living air, and the blue
sky, and tapestries. I love feeling thy head for its spirit
impels all my thinking. All objects become thy mouth,
open and dribbling, and therefore am I still a lover of
thy meadows. I love it when thou art “meta,” telling
of all that thou behold’st from this green earth with thy
mouth. We are both more than what each half creates,
this is what I perceive with thy tits on my lips. I love
the language of the senses – thus anchored, I love
302
Charles Altieri | Dodie Bellamy’s Version of Stevens
smelling thee, especially thy asshole, the guardian
of my heart and soul and all my moral being. Thy
voice aroused makes me grow taut with longing for
thy genial breasts, that I may come upon the banks of
thy fair river, my dearest.
(23)
The rhetoric of E. E. Cummings is so good at demystifying this
“meta” so beloved by Wordsworth’s speaker that his language
can bring the 1920’s alive as a frame for the unbridled simplicity
of mutual sexual pleasure (yet with an abstraction of joy foreign
to Chaucer):
Girl, let’s have fun. (Here, dab my tears that float many
bells down.) Spring on your hands and knees – let’s
pluck and dance as woman and man, both fingered.
Hey Pumpkin Fuck, what my eyes sow isn’t what they
reap. Help me go from total abjection to a few and
down (shower me with forgetting). How I long to love
you more by more, to drown inside you, crying until
my grief bird snows and stirs. (...) When we fuck like
demons, joyful is our song, joy so pure I’d never give
my heart to anybody else. Would you? (...) Only you
can pomp my must and shall, can move my father
through me uncircumcised. With your nipples rain pity
on me till I turn green as grain.
(50-51)
But the darker sides of eros cannot be put off entirely. This is
William Carlos Williams, whose Modernist imagination seems
committed to subordinating the pleasures of eros to the construction
of meaning. Bellamy captures with painful precision his aggressive
and desperate bid for masculine power in plain language:
303
Exorcising Modernism
These are the desolate, dark weeks – but when I move
my hand across your body I feel like a man. The year
plunges into night and my cock feels like one of those
small water pistols in a windswept place without sun,
stars or moon – just dripping instead of shooting. You
spin a dark fire – whirling my stomach, penis, and
balls – and I fuck you, aware of nothing, knowing not
loneliness, coming to life. Fucking you, my reason
embraces emptiness. (...) When I come your cunt is
comfortable and your tits make the sweetest music.
The source of poetry is seeing orgasm after orgasm,
shaking you until you’ve stopped ticking. Yesterday
went so well I want to plant myself inside you like
a fucking stone. My snake waits for your hips that
spread across the chair, my snake is quick and sharp
and ready to strike, quietly waiting for your invite
to sleep over. (...) All is permitted, as long as we
come – and in our chests, for the first time, understand
that we are only mortal, and being mortal we can’t
defy our fate: savage sexual energy is enjoyable. When
you’re among the jonquils and the violets, coming is
everything, and all you can do is shake your tits.
(46-47)
Finally there are the voices that cannot fully separate pleasure from
pain, innocence from guilt, and love from covert domination. In
short, Auden has a significant role to play in the panoply of erotic
voices:
Your sins can be forgiven if your body rises, smiling,
skinless, and watches me come, my innocent athlete.
Gesticulate with your forehead then fuck me to the
furthest point. My blessed will not care until your
304
Charles Altieri | Dodie Bellamy’s Version of Stevens
head shakes like a rattle with nothing to hide, dear.
I know nothing of your bed, but I want to have you in
my arms, love. You live to come, that’s what I hear.
To make you feel solid, I jimmy on your limestone
landscape. Look me over with both hands, bend my
head, my raw well­‍‑governed cities and ships. I’ll keep
loving you until my heart is in your hands instead of
my artificial darkest secrets. I kiss your features, bare
and brown, no blades. (...) You be a good girl – I’ll
take care of you – lay here in my hands with their
many fingers. I’ve never ever given anybody help who
didn’t come. Focus on my asshole, my manhood – I’m
not proud, I die as a man and then I come again onto
your breasts and shoulder. I’m an athlete at my game,
dripping like moss in a rain forest. My limbs are quick,
quick to music: your asshole turns into a large clit
on my dancing-floor, my weed-choked field. You’ve
bled on me since the circle began; into your vacancy
my bird flies up to safety.
(56-57)
I cannot deal this long with eros without seeking the protection
of academic armor. So I want to conclude by developing a little
moral tale about the process of exemplification that I am invoking
in order to illustrate how Bellamy’s work is so important for
a sense of the powers available to literary imagining. Ever since
Romanticism, and probably well before, literary work has been
distinguished from argument and practical discourse by the way
it establishes possibilities of reference. The discursive in all of its
forms tries to subsume individual details into generalizations or
categories that can be tested and so have probative value. Literary
work has to make its manner link to its matter so it has to preserve
its particularity as an action: the idea of Hamlet, or of Chaucerian
305
Exorcising Modernism
eros, must be visible within how the text renders particulars.
But how can the text maintain this commitment to particularity
and still play a role in the values basic to social exchange? The
only way to preserve attention to manner seems to be to forsake
the language of reference for the language of exemplification.
The text matters in social exchange less for what it can claim as
truth than for what it can specify as captured by the properties it
exemplifies. Think of the difference between treating a particular
as an example of some concept and an example as the display of
a particular event that might have general implications. In the
latter case the properties of the example define possible states
of mind that an audience might entertain and enter. Bellamy can
stage the manners of thirty­‍‑two writers because she is concerned
not with the truth of what they claim or the truth criticism might
find in why they claim it. Rather all of her textual energies are
devoted to making it possible for an audience to participate
affectively and self­‍‑reflexively in what the manner of the writing
establishes as possible states of being.
In her use of example Bellamy also helps us address a basic
problem: How do we decide what among the author’s sentences
seem actually exemplary of his or her characteristic manner?
There are many sentences in Stevens for example that could be
by any writer, so they are examples of uses of English but not very
effective examples of Stevensian manner. And the same problem
recurs when we try to abstract: when does abstraction become
merely a matter of pious generalization with no sense of honoring
a distinctive style? We then find ourselves with the following
dilemma. At one pole we would have to say that anything less than
an exact copy fails to exemplify the completeness of the work. At
the other pole we could point out that the example of Hamlet can
be said to be effective even for those who have only heard about
his melancholy inability to take revenge. This is where Bellamy
is especially interesting because she stretches the limits of what
306
Charles Altieri | Dodie Bellamy’s Version of Stevens
might prove exemplary by reappropriating lines that might seem
innocuous to get us to hear how her writers manage to inhabit
them. In her hands exemplification seems to be anything that
brings to bear what might be considered distinctive of attitudes
characteristic of certain authors or works. And in elaborating this
she makes visible an important aspect of the interface between
texts and worlds. We borrow freely from texts to produce possible
worlds that remain still responsive to the texts. I think any healthy
view of the civilizing process requires this generous and multiple
view of the work examples can do.
But to stop here is also conceptually dangerous – for
civilization and perhaps for pornography as well. We lose
something as well as gain something when we loosely adapt
examples. And the methods of appropriation bring this out sharply,
showing in effect why this aspect of conceptualist strategies is
more bound to the abstract and general, than is compatible with the
modes of responsiveness made possible by the richest art works.
One measure of richness might be just that while the text is open
to generalized exemplification it also makes manifest what one
misses when one only relies on these aspects of the exemplifying
process. Think of the difference between Bellamy’s generalized
Stevens for the work eros can do and the quite specific Stevensian
imagination carried not only in the great late love poems like
“The World as Meditation” and “Final Soliloquy of the Interior
Paramour,” but also in quite simple lyrics like “Restatement of
Romance,” “Yellow Afternoon” and “The Woman in Sunshine.”
Eros has a particularizing dimension as well as the capacity
to have us identify with general, almost impersonal forms of
desire. That indeed is why pornography seems best when it is
embedded in narrative or drama, and why poetry is richest when it
dwells in “the particulars of rapture” (Stevens 339): “For the style
of the poem and the poem itself to be one there must be a mating
and a marriage, not an arid love song” (846).
307
Exorcising Modernism
***
But stopping here is conceptually dangerous for a yet different
reason. I did not ask how Bellamy’s text might also provide
a particular example that could be useful in the world precisely
because of how it treated the relation between generality and
particularity. How could this quite vulgar experiment compete
with careful and precise work like the poets whom she “cunted
up”? More important yet, the precision of Bellamy’s project takes
its power directly from responses like mine. This work thrives
on what academics like me cannot or will not see about it.
Am I now just currying favor with the young and the
hip? Probably so. But it matters that one can bring an argument
to bear on this currying of favor, especially an argument won out
of one’s ignorance. There are at least two significant aspects of
how Bellamy’s text can function as a singular example in its own
right (so that one might invoke it as a concrete emblem seeking
precise identifications). The first one I have already touched upon.
To criticize her in what become obviously class terms is to align
oneself with a quite narrow aestheticism and to refuse to recognize
how those aesthetic ideals have a very tenuous social influence.
(I resist the implication that they have to be gender terms: some
of my best friends are feminist snobs.) The second feature offers
a means of combating this narrow role of the arts by suggesting
that the general level of examples, and hence a kind of generalized
model for feeling, can invite a range of applications that would be
distortions if we insisted on more precise aspects of singularity.
Especially in the domain of eros, it matters that we cultivate quite
general forms of both joy and wariness and guilt because these
involve the possibility of fully participating in a variety of situations.
Greater refinement may produce more exotic or refined feelings. But
there are situations, important situations in our lives, for which this
level of refinement may be a liability rather than a virtue.
308
Charles Altieri | Dodie Bellamy’s Version of Stevens
Finally there is an important corollary to certain aspects of
contemporary art involved in how Bellamy adapts these generalized
examples of affective states. Bellamy’s work produces a range of
emotions that involve complete provisional identification with the
texts. There need be no defensive withdrawal precisely because
the emotions are so general. One need not worry that one is
missing anything or one is being positioned by what one might not
recognize. All the emotions are on the surface, aggressively on the
surface, in a way that challenges any claims that erotic emotion
ought to be deeper or more precise. To be deeper or more precise
would involve the audience distrusting what we might call generic
feelings and so imposing a hierarchy of emotions that in turn will
produce endless anxiety about whether one is feeling correctly
or with sufficient depth. It is on such questions that academics
thrive, but also may do real harm by denying rights to simple and
powerful pleasures. So Bellamy joins pop artists and those that
embrace the commodity status of their creations in celebrating the
importance of surfaces. In what arena can this be more important
than an erotic one?
Works Cited
Bellamy, Dodie. Cunt Norton. Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2013.
Stevens, Wallace. Wallace Stevens Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed.
Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library
of America, 1997.
Wintz, Sara. “From Cut-Up to Cunt Up: Dodie Bellamy in
Conversation.” Poetry Foundation. Open Door. November
21, 2013. Accessed November 15, 2014. <http://www.
poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/11/from­‍‑cut­‍‑up-to-cuntup-dodie­‍‑bellamy­‍‑in-conversation/>.
309
Index
Adorno, Theodor 21, 86, 109
Ammons, A. R. 8, 142-146, 150, 152161, 172-175, 177, 178, 181, 182,
185, 230, 231
Antin, David 9, 118, 122, 123
Armantrout, Rae 8, 254, 260, 265,
272-281, 286, 287, 293, 294
Artaud, Antonin 89, 110
Ashbery, John 9, 187, 190, 194-199,
201, 205, 230
Auden, W. H. 117, 199, 207, 304
Austin, John Langshaw 83, 84
Baudelaire, Charles 16, 31, 218
Bauman, Zygmunt 13, 16, 17, 19, 21,
22, 35
Bellamy, Dodie 9, 297-301, 303, 305309
Benjamin, Walter 18, 63, 68
Berryman, John 124-128, 130-141
Białoszewski, Miron 201
Bishop, Elizabeth 8, 142-146, 150152, 157-164, 166-168, 170-173,
175, 181-185
Bly, Robert 133, 134, 140, 230
Bonnefoy, Yves 98
Brodsky, Joseph 187, 202
Bunting, Basil 36, 87, 142-144, 153,
183
Caddel, Richard 145, 158, 183
Carlyle, Thomas 211
Cartier-Bresson, Henri 43
Cavafy, Constantine P. 202
Cavell, Stanley 83, 84, 87, 103, 110,
127, 140
Cave, Terence 120-123
Celan, Paul 62, 202, 248
Chaucer, Geoffrey 302, 303
Confucius 73, 90, 91, 111, 147, 149
Corman, Cid 41, 42, 45, 50
Crane, Hart 230, 248
Crane, Stephen 136, 140
Creeley, Robert 43, 44, 48, 50, 207,
288, 289
Creely, Robert 230
Culler, Jonathan 31, 35
Cummings, E. E. 303
Dash, Robert 225
Davenport, Guy 151, 183
Davie, Donald 207
Dewey, John 256-258, 292, 294, 295
Dickinson, Emily 232, 233, 251
Diderot, Denis 80, 81, 105
311
Exorcising Modernism
Dressler, Marie 32, 33, 34
Duchamp, Marcel 12, 13
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 68, 72, 86, 88,
107, 109-111
Dylan, Bob 138
Economou, George 118, 119, 123
Eliot, T. S. 52, 87, 108, 115, 125, 126,
130, 138, 141, 154, 187, 201, 209,
210, 213, 215-217, 230, 231, 233,
234-240, 246-249, 251, 252, 258260, 296, 299, 318
Ellison, Ralph 139, 140
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 10, 23, 150,
209-211, 215, 222, 229, 255, 256,
261, 269, 282, 294, 295
Evans, Walker 39
Fenollosa, Ernest 72, 73, 85, 90-94,
103, 110, 117
Foks, Darek 192, 193, 200
Franaszek, Andrzej 201
Futurism 19, 34, 195
Ginsberg, Allan 207, 230
Gioia, Dana 118, 123
Gizzi, Peter 8, 254, 260, 265, 281-285,
287-291, 293-296
Godard, Jean-Luc 138
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 126
Goody, Jack 118
Gris, Juan 212
Guest, Barbara 202
Hamilton, Ann 53
Hass, Robert 192
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 154, 156
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 80, 81
Heidegger, Martin 103, 183, 193, 209
Herbert, Zbigniew 9, 186, 187, 201, 202
Higginson, Stephen 46
Hopkins, Garard Manley 138
Imagism 60, 115, 117, 258
312
James, William 256-258, 260, 261,
272, 292, 295
Jaworski, Krzysztof 187, 189
Jones, LeRoi 106
Kafka, Franz 62
Kant, Immanuel 74, 106, 209, 218,
263
Kantor, Tadeusz 29, 30, 33, 35
Keats, John 126, 209
Kinnell, Galway 230-253
Koch, Kenneth 9, 187, 197, 199, 202,
205
Koehler, Krzysztof 188-190, 200
Korine, Harmony 12
Lange, Dorothea 39
Latour, Bruno 26, 36, 160, 171, 175,
184
Levine, Philip 230
Lowell, Robert 230
Loy, Mina 7, 10-16, 18-36
MacLeish, Archibald 40
MacLuhan, Marshall 118
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 19
Mayakovsky, Vladimir 202
Melville, Herman 45, 124, 125, 318
Menorah Movement 52, 60, 61, 68
Merrill, James 230, 231
Merwin, W. S. 230
Milton, John 242, 250, 252
Miłosz, Czesław 9, 187, 192, 201,
202, 248
Modernism 7, 36, 113, 115, 119, 141,
200, 259, 272, 295
Moore, Marianne 23, 87, 162, 212
Muniz, Vik 12
New Criticism 113, 119
New Criticism, The 113, 114, 122
New Oral Poetry 118, 123
New York School, The 186, 188, 201,
202, 229
Niedecker, Lorine 87
Norwid, Cyprian Kamil 188
Index
Nowak, Mark 40
Objectivism 8, 51-54, 56, 57, 59, 60,
61, 63, 68, 87, 96, 293
O’Hara, Frank 9, 106, 121, 123, 186193, 195, 197-199, 201-203, 205,
207, 221, 223, 230
Olson, Charles 8, 38-50, 59, 85, 114,
115, 116, 123-126, 207
Ong, Walter J. 113, 114, 118-121, 123
Oppen, George 8, 64, 70-78, 81, 8487, 89, 90, 92, 95-111, 283, 288,
289
Osman, Jena 40
Papini, Giovanni 19
Parry, Milman 117, 118
Picasso, Pablo 130, 208
Plutarch 45
Poe, Edgar Allan 202
Pound, Ezra 8, 14, 21, 38, 39, 49, 54,
60, 63, 64, 69, 72-75, 85-88, 90-95,
109-111, 115, 124-126, 130, 138,
140-154, 157-160, 162, 163, 166,
172, 178, 181-185, 230, 234, 248,
252, 254, 258, 260, 285, 296, 318
Prevallet, Kristin 40
Proust, Marcel 120, 216
Quintilian 122
Rakosi, Charles 64, 87
Rankine, Claudia 40
Rathje, William 11
Rexroth, Kenneth 87
Reznikoff, Charles 8, 42, 51-69, 8789, 112
Riley, James Whitcomb 118
Rilke, Rainer Maria 187, 201, 233,
234, 238-240, 252
Robertson, Lisa 40
Rockman, Alexis 12
Roethke, Theodore 230
Rousseau, Jean Jacques 80, 81, 89,
105
Schiller, Friedrich 205, 206, 209, 210,
216, 222, 229
Schuyler, James 9, 187, 197, 199, 202,
204-208, 212-224, 226-229, 234
Shahn, Ben 39
Shakespeare, William 79, 125, 132,
138, 212, 223, 305, 306
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 143, 224
Slavitt, David R. 127, 138, 141
Smith, Adam 83
Smith, Bessie 127, 134
Sommer, Piotr 40, 188, 190, 195-197,
199
Sosnowski, Andrzej 191, 196-201
Spicer, Jack 281-283, 288, 295, 296
Spinoza, Baruch 68
Stevens, Wallace 8, 9, 117, 158, 185,
204, 206, 230, 254, 258, 260, 262,
265-273, 275-277, 279, 280, 281,
291-294, 296-300, 306, 307, 309
Świetlicki, Marcin 188, 189, 191, 192,
195, 200, 201
Thayer, Ernest 135
The New Wave 186
Thomas, Dylan 117
Thompson, Michael 31, 32, 36
Torop, Peeter 65
Trilling, Lionel 79, 80, 111
Tuominen, Anu 12
Villon, François 234, 236, 237, 240,
248, 250, 251
Waters, John 12
Watt, Ian 118
Whitman, Walt 133, 136, 231-233,
235-237, 239, 240, 244-246, 248,
252, 253, 255-257, 282, 285, 291,
294, 296, 318
Wiedemann, Adam 201, 202
Williams, William Carlos 8, 9, 77, 80,
82-84, 86-88, 97, 98, 111, 114, 185,
204, 206-208, 210-213, 216, 217,
223, 226, 229-231, 233, 234, 239,
313
Exorcising Modernism
258, 260, 262, 283, 288, 289, 294,
296, 303
Winters, Yvor 117, 123
Wirpsza, Witold 201
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 95
Wordsworth, William 74, 126, 135,
204, 302, 303
314
Wright, James 230
Zadura, Bohdan 188, 194–196, 199,
200
Zukofsky, Louis 8, 51, 53-61, 63, 64,
67, 69, 72, 75, 86-90, 92-95, 104,
109, 110, 112, 207
About the Authors
Charles Altieri teaches in the English Department at UC Berkeley,
where he refuses hints that he should retire. His latest books are
Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity (Cornell UP 2013)
and Reckoning with Imagination: Literary Theory Through the
Lens of Wittgenstein. A course on the grammar of poetry and the
poetry of grammar has occupied his time recently and may be the
subject for another book.
Kacper Bartczak is an Associate Professor of American
Literature at the University of Łódź. He is the author of In Search
of Community and Communication: the Poetry of John Ashbery
(Peter Lang 2006), and Świat nie scalony (Biuro Literackie 2009).
He is also a poet writing in Polish.
David Bergman is the author and editor of twenty books including
The Poetry of Disturbance, which will appear later this year. He
has written four books of poetry, the latest of which is Fortunate
Light. He teaches at Towson University outside of Baltimore,
Maryland.
315
Exorcising Modernism
Grzegorz Czemiel received his PhD at the University of
Warsaw and teaches at Maria Curie­‍‑Skłodowska University in
Lublin. Specializing in contemporary Northern­‍‑Irish poetry, he
also explores such topics as cartography, translation and urban
studies, psychoanalysis and speculative realism in philosophy.
His dissertation titled Limits of Orality and Textuality in Ciaran
Carson’s Poetry was published by Peter Lang; he has also written
on Mina Loy, Sinéad Morrissey, Paul Muldoon and China Miéville.
Alan Golding is Professor of English and Director of the annual
Literature and Culture Conference at the University of Louisville,
where he teaches American literature and twentieth- and twenty­
‍‑first century poetry and poetics. He is the author of From Outlaw
to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Wisconsin, 1995), which
won a CHOICE Best Academic Book Award, and of numerous
essays on modernist and contemporary poetry. His current projects
include Writing the New Into History: Poetic Form and Social
Formations in American Poetry and “Isn’t the Avant­‍‑Garde Always
Pedagogical,” a book on experimental poetics and / as pedagogy.
With Lynn Keller and Dee Morris, he co­‍‑edits the Contemporary
North American Poetry Series for the University of Iowa Press.
Christopher Patrick Miller is a PhD Candidate in English and
Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley where
he specializes in poetry and poetics, urbanism, materialisms,
and phenomenology. He co-edits the online journal for critical
aesthetic practice, FLOOR, with Lyn Hejinian and is a contributing
editor to Reclamations, a critical journal about education policy
and institutional history. He has published essays and poems in
Qui Parle and Lana Turner, among others.
Joanna Orska is an Assistant Professor at The Post-1918 Polish
Literature Studies Center (Wroclaw University’s Polish Studies
316
About the Authors
Department). An author of three book­‍‑length studies: Przełom
awangardowy w dwudziestowiecznym modernizmie w Polsce [The
Avant­‍‑Garde Turn In 20th-Century Polish Modernism], Liryczne
narracje. Nowe tendencje w poezji 1989-2006 [Lyrical Narratives.
New Trends in Poetry: 1989 – 2006, Universtitas, Kraków 2006]
and Republika poetów. Poetyckość i polityczność w krytycznej
praktyce [The Poet’s Republic. Poetical and Political Aspects of
Critical Practise]. Her numerous critical essays and reviews of
contemporary Polish poetry have been published in various Polish
professional and critical periodicals, such as Teksty drugie, Ruch
Literacki, Twórczość, Odra, Nowe Książki, FA-art.
Tadeusz Pióro is a poet and translator who makes his living by
teaching American literature at the University of Warsaw. His
monographic study, Frank O’Hara and the Ends of Modernism,
was published in 2013. He has also published articles about
John Ashbery, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Ralph Ellison. His
collected poems, O dwa kroki stąd, came out in 2012.
Agnieszka Salska is the author of Walt Whitman and Emily
Dickinson: Poetry of the Central Consciousness. She wrote the
chapter on Dickinson’s letters for The Emily Dickinson Handbook,
published numerous articles, mostly on American poetry, and is
one of the authors as well as editor­‍‑in-chief of a two volume history
of twentieth century American literature for Polish readers. Dr.
Salska retired from the Department of American Literature and
Culture at the Institute of English Studies, University of Łódź
where she taught courses in American literature and served as
Chair. She also served as President of the Polish Association for
American Studies from 1990 to 1996.
Nick Selby is Professor of American Literature at the University
of East Anglia. He has a wide range of research interests, with
317
Exorcising Modernism
poetry of the twentieth century at the core of his research. As well
as focusing on American experimental poetry, avant-gardism and
the issue of what constitutes an American poetics, his other interests
include transatlantic connections in British experimental poetry,
ecocriticism, and theories of the ethics and politics of close-reading.
His book, Poetics of Loss in The Cantos of Ezra Pound, was
published in 2005. He has published three other books, on Herman
Melville, T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman, as well as numerous essays
on topics concerned with American literature and culture. Nick
Selby is also editor of the journal Comparative American Studies.
Anna Warso is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department
of Anglophone Cultures and Literatures, University of Social
Sciences and Humanities SWPS. She wrote her doctoral
dissertation on figurations of loss in John Berryman’s The Dream
Songs at the University of Warsaw.
Mikołaj Wiśniewski is an Assistant Professor at the Department of
Anglophone Cultures and Literatures, University of Social Sciences
and Humanities SWPS. He studied English and Philosophy at
Warsaw University, and defended his doctoral thesis – Ironic
Orpheus: Deconstructing Kantian Aesthetics in Walt Whitman,
Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams – in 2007. In 2004-2005
he was a Fulbright scholar at UC Berkeley where he studied under
the supervision of Prof. Charles Altieri. In 2013 he was awarded the
Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship and spent the summer semester
working at UC San Diego at the Mandeville Special Collections
Library, researching the unpublished papers of James Schuyler
on whose poetry Dr. Wiśniewski is currently writing a book.
Mikołaj Wiśniewski is also an editor and co-founder of the Polish
philosophical quarterly KRONOS: Metafizyka, Kultura, Religia.
318
Is the title of this book “Exorcising Modernism,” or is
it “Exercising Modernism”? In a sense, it is both, for it
is intended to reflect the ambivalent attitude of the
poets discussed here to the tradition of High Modernism
which they challenged, but which also – undoubtedly
– determined their attitudes and stylistic pursuits. In
other words, the process of “exorcising modernism”
cannot be regarded without taking into consideration
the ways in which modernism was, and perhaps still is,
“exercised” by post‑war American poets.