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Writing and Failure (Part 7)
Ange Mlinko has suggested in her recent post that the avant-garde avoids an engagment with the sensuality of experience, when in fact nearly every variety of avant-garde practice takes delight in the material pleasure of language itself—the jouissance of its phonemes and textures, often freed from the arduousness of sense. Ange admits to disliking discursive, essayistic language in poetry (and I totally agree that such anecdotal reportage is almost always tiresome), but I am not so sure that the cited poets, whom she dislikes, actually make a habit of indulging in such asensual, abstract writing at all. Ange dismisses both the Black Mountain poets and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets out of hand and then goes on to celebrate, as exemplary, a work by Basil Bunting—but ironically, Bunting has written a poem in the tone of a short essay, subordinating the concrete, material language of “seafoam” to a lot of abstract claptrap: “its restless immobility infects the soul”; or “its indifference haunts us to suicide”; or “strong memories…exasperate impatience” (to cite but three of many examples in the work). I think that, in this poem at least, abstract nouns outnumber concrete nouns to such a degree that, if submitted by one of my young poets in class, such a poem might actually “foment” some very discouraging commentaries about essayistic meditation, in the hope that the sensual appeals of the “real foam” in the poem might otherwise prevail….
7.
Poetry not only fosters, but also endures, extreme degrees of incompetence, the likes of which other artistic practices see fit to weed out through the intense discipline of their school, through the drastic costliness of their medium, or through the protean evaluation of their market. Of all the artforms, poetry now requires only the most picayunish investment of time, cash, and work, for practitioners to declare themselves competent enough to meet the requisite standards for acceptance by other peers in the field—and as a result, poetry has become the artform to which middling artisans can find themselves happily demoted after they have failed in harder fields of expertise. Do not ask poets “to write what they know,” because they know very little of anything. If such poets know something of epistemological significance, they have much more lucrative incentive to become experts in physics or history, biology or finance, where they might reap the rewards of their epiphanic discovery—but because “math is hard,” such intellectuals have little choice but to become poets in the hope that they might increase our sociocultural understanding of language itself. No other artform, however, has set both its standards and its ambitions so low that it now no longer feels obliged to redress even its own sociocultural inconsequence. No other artform has managed to produce bourgeois audiences so apathetic that everyone who attends a reading politely applauds even when the poet performs with a forthright deficiency so egregious that, if committed by a musician, such inadequacy must nevertheless result in the immediate dismissal of the offender from the stage under a hail of booing catcalls and rotten tomatoes.
Posted in Criticism, Group Blog on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 by Christian Bök.
Comments (11)
As poets, we get bored with prosaic discourse, the “irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Keats). Why? Well, partly because when language is treated as merely functional, it can grow colorless, dull. It loses its own inner liveliness. But from whence did this liveliness flow, originally? From an imaginative-expressive word-forming capability – a response to real phenomena.
It seems to me that Ange Mlinko, in criticizing the merely verbal gaming of avant-garde experimentalism, was reminding us that the “figural language” of poetry – when it maintains some kind of representational relationship with all that (beyond-verbal) experience and sensation – performs a re-enactment of that original poetry of word-creation itself.
But when words are considered to be mere things, mere building materials for the Olympian-Daedalian Artist, something odd happens. We get a sort of reverse mirror-image of the prosaic transparency of discursive writing. It’s boring, utilitarian transparency’s twin : utlitarian opacity.
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Christian, you seem allergic to examples. Could you offer a poem that exemplifies sensual material language sans claptrap?
Cheers,
A
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I can’t understand why Christian Bök’s shorts are in such a wad. He has evidently never strolled through a local ArtFest, or suffered through films directed by the likes of Roger Corman and John Landis, or listened to the aural pap offered up by his nearest ClearChannel robotic DJ, or slogged through any of the French-fried theoretical prose so many L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets rely on to justify their practice. Standards are low for poetry? No doubt. But they’re low for every cultural endeavor in the good old U.S.A. Not because we don’t produce great art, but because we no longer produce great audiences—for anything. But I encourage Bök to take heart: time will take care of the winnowing, as it always has. The fellow booed off stage tonight may be lionized a century down the road. (I remember reading a review—in the NY Times, I believe—of Aaron Copland’s First Symphony, in which the critic claimed, “A man who could write such music could as easily commit murder.”) Those of us who call ourselves poets can sport the label whether we’re prized or prizeless, remunerated or un-, prescient or simply deluded. We can play the disappeared vowel game or the sonnet game or the counting syllables game or the blank verse game. Who cares? Death will come with its cure for all our ambitions, other poets will arrive and depart, and people we’ve never met or even imagined will decide if what we wrote was worth the trouble. Calm down, whiners! This is called “freedom.”
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A footnote to my previous post. Great audiences are vanishing in Britain as well. Case in point: Crystal, by Katie Price, “the topless model better known as Jordan,” is beating the combined sales of all six works on the Man Booker shortlist.
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“No other artform, however, has set both its standards and its ambitions so low that it now no longer feels obliged to redress even its own sociocultural inconsequence.”
If you picked the right examples you could assert that they all had.
Or, contrarily, you could show that certain flavors of poets feel obliged to do nothing but redress a perceived sociocultural inconsequence, having been told earlier that they are or should be the unacknowledged legislators of Delaware. Only poetry and high-culture visual art (the kind that produces installations in galleries with Contemporary in the title) seem to oblige so many of its committed practitioners to run around arguing until they turn blue that, practiced correctly, the right form of poetry (or visual art) constitutes a crypto-revolutionary subversive intervention in somebody’s discourse.
I do think Ange picked the wrong Bunting poem– but the right poet, in Bunting– to make her point.
Are we, in this thread, reading, or reading about, the long-delayed Theory Death of the Avant Garde?
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Christian:
Surely you can’t be claiming that poetry is the only art form currently in crisis! An honest examination with input from up-to-date practitioners in various artistic disciplines would clearly show (would it not?) that all the art forms are facing similar challenges and questions. The most extreme of these crises is in fact to be found, as you know, in what used to be called the visual arts, which are facing a severe crisis of relevance framed by both the instability of aesthetic judgement (taste, and competence, in fact! one ought to not let go of that important Brian Philips essay for its willingness to be vulnerable) and by the still ongoing spectre of commoditisation (the latter poetry has never had to deal with). The art world is reaching increasing levels of speed and desperation. Curators are going nuts trying to figure out what counts and what doesn’t, sometimes including thousands of artists at one go; many “artists” (the very term might invite mockery) are either retreating into things like needlework and making clothes for their friends (an old approach in poetry) on one hand or into forms of public action on the other. These are interesting and viable strategies, but the fact also remains that as far as “visual” art is concerned, virtually none of what is being done necessarily leading anywhere: for most everything is eventually absorbed into an institutional framework, or dies. Neither “the drastic costliness of the medium” nor “the protean evaluation of the market” serve to “weed out” second or third rate work as you claim– it’s more often the opposite, in fact! The questions of competence and incompetence (“tolerance for incompetence”), not to mention relevance (“sociocultural consequence”), are precisely the ones that have been thrown for a spin ever since the advent of photography and video and then the conceptual art! How utterly obvious! Are you saying that what goes on in the official art world (including the avant garde) makes or has made any damn difference to the lives of most of the inhabitants of this planet? At least poetry has the knack of being able to travel and last. I grew up in a country, Zambia, that did not have a single significant museum or art gallery: I’m not sure if they have one now. And again we are back to Brian Philips, and to an earlier blog post by Kenneth Goldsmith, and the problem of taste.
Music still finds refuge in genres and various kinds of compartmentalisation governed by audiences, schools, and regional traditions. Hence musicians are able to grade basic competency, at least, by the terms framed by their respective systems. But how much longer will this elaborate illusion last?
In other words: you are trying to have your modernist cake and eat it too.
No way.
The question is not just what is good art or relevant art, but what is art? The answer at this point must lie not either in the monumentalist notions of the modernist avant-garde, nor in the anything goes and terminal non-arrival of the post-modernist avant garde, but in something beyond post-modernism. This something, I feel, would be a project of recovery as much as of invention. Call it the reconstruction. Painting somehow refuses to die, although the search for the ideal or the complete painting has essentially been abandoned. Painting in poetry is not dead, either. You can find it in Eunoia. That’s not all, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is something rather than nothing.
And in this context, poetry may have much to teach the art world. The sense of persistence, the recallibration of relevance, utility, and consequence, the steady craftsman’s hands, the attention to minutae, the address to a small but engaged audience, the link with something sort of like ancient tradition (even if partly invented) and a line of descent, the borrowing, the recycling, the use of partial measures– may not be all, at all, but may turn out to be of surprising utility to our survival in this beyond.
One thing: I take your point about the inanity and fearfulness of poetry audiences. (as for bourgeois– almost all audiences for any kind of avant garde art are that) It may be problematic that poets favour the ostrich approach. And yet the ostrich approach is the source of their strength. Partly this may be just a matter of modality: artists (to dabble in archetypes) party hard and throw tomatoes; poets hide and turn their anger inward: both strategies might be forms of avoidance.
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The issue of poetry as a languishing art form aside, I think that when considering the issue of the sensual in the Black Mountain / LANGUAGE camps, it is important to consider what they (and we have to speak very generally here in envoking “they”) meant by the concept referred to here as “the sensual.” Charles Olson posited the feelings of the body as being primary to his poetries, even those not dealing directly with corporal issues. He laid such thought out in his essay “Proprioception,” which dealt with the way the body felt to itself and how the psyche was derivative of such feelings. What is important to consider here is that Olson thought of internal stimuli (thought, feelings of the body) and exterior stimuli (the experience of facets of the world) to have places of just about equal importance in his poems. Robert Duncan and Michael Palmer later followed up on the idea in a lecture (I don’t have the dates or location in front of me at the moment, it was somewhere in California in the early ’80s) on “Field Theory” in which they set forth the concept of the poet as agent within a field (and here they are working off the basic notions of Olson’s “Projective Verse”) who responded to those things that were contained in her/his field, be they physical or psychological sensations. The bottom line is that they (again, the very general LANGUAGE / Black Mountain groupings) took a somewhat more expanded view of the sensual than others who may consider the sensual to deal only with the body feeling exterior sources of input (tactility etc.). As a point of opinion, both seem to be equally valid conceptions of “the sensual.”
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For any trainspotters who might be interested, the “Field Theory” lecture was given at New College, 13 Sept. 1983.
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Hello, everyone:
Thanks for your extended comments. Alas, I am in Norway right now, doing performances at the Audiatur Festival, so I cannot respond adequately in a timely manner to all of your great comments right way—but please let me address at least the first couple (to start):
To Henry Gould:
I think that you forget that our experience of language itself is a “real phenomenon,” to which a poet might elect to respond without recourse to the “representation” of things beyond language. Your suggestion that avant-garde poetry constitutes a kind of oxymoron called “utilitarian opacity” does not take into account the deliberate, enigmatic character of art that rewards re-reading…. I think that often we revisit a poem because it provides a mystery that gives us pleasure with each consultation. I might suggest that what you call “utilitarian opacity” is itself so opaque a catchphrase that we can only view its ambiguities as a kind of propaganda (in which obfuscation really does have a functional value)—and I might argue that, in contrast, much of the avant-garde constitutes a direct attack upon such abuses of language….
To A:
I am hardly allergic to examples when they are far too numerous to mention….
I am pretty sure that you are familiar with the entire legacy of “sensual” lyrical poetry, much of which takes its cues from the precedents of Imagism (and its countless successors). I probably do not have to rehearse the idea that there are “no ideas, but in things”—and I doubt that I have to trundle out a warehouse of red wheelbarrows in order to make the argument that avoiding essayistic abstraction means avoiding the discourse of “sweetness,” “expectation,” “immobility,” “sterility,” “loneliness,” “hostility” (etc.), in just the first few lines of the poem by Bunting….
To Joseph Hutchinson:
You seem to be missing the point of my complaint. You seem to be suggesting that great poets must simply “accept” being ignored by their contemporaries, when I am arguing in fact that great poets have no desire to wait a century or more to get redeemed by critics too stupid to recognize the revolution in their midst. Why in fact must such poets wait? We are more prepared to reward golfers immediately for their excellence than we are willing to recognize the skill of a poetic genius—and I think that any poet willing to accept such failure as a noble cause (just because history has refused to learn from the lessons of the past) does not really hope to succeed in the first place. I think that this kind of attitude only contributes to our notion that poets are inborn losers, no smarter than the myopic, modern critics who dismiss such work long before its ink has even dried upon the page….
More responses down the road, of course, when I get back—and thanks again for the continuing responses to my thoughts out loud (all much very appreciated…).
Cheers, Christian
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Responding to Christian’s comment above : You raise the rhetorical temperature a bit by branding my phrase “utilitarian opacity” as some kind of propaganda. There is no single way to make art or write poetry : by describing some of the pitfalls of recent experimental poetry in English, I’m not trying to condemn experiment or the avant-garde in toto. And I agree with you, of course, that language-in-itself is a “real phenomenon” : I’m sure scholars have explained all about the various human uses of language, not simply to point and to represent, but to express emotion, even to vocalize the inexpressible.
I’m simply pointing out that there ARE potential pitfalls in detaching language from representation for aesthetic purposes. Artistic egoism can subject language to a kind of utilitiarian (self-serving) necessity, which is indeed the mirror image of ordinary, discursive, utilitarian usage.
And I’m suggesting that A. Mlinko’s original comment, about a different kind of aesthetic effect – figural language with a basis in “real phenomena” – is well-grounded, in what is perhaps the primary characteristic of language itself. And that is the primal imaginative-intellective act which created words in the first place : as sound equivalents ,or signs, for real observed phenomena (physical, emotional, psychological, intellectual…)
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This possibly pertinent remark is from John Latta’s blog, Isola di Rifiuti:
“I… insist: metaphor is no mere décor, no spalling off of isolated (pure, “objectivist”) nominal (or verbal) energy—Dr. Williams didn’t say “No ideas but in one thing”—metaphor is precisely how one “carries” knowledge about, like paper money fold’d against itself, or a book stack’d up against another book: working the dross, the smear, the continuum for relations and sets of relations. Or, as Williams puts it in Paterson (echoing Pound’s “ply over ply,” quoted in Furlani’s Guy Davenport):
a mass of detail
to interrelate on a new ground, difficultly;
an assonance, a homologue
Triple piled
pulling the disparate together to clarify
and compress.”
[The formatting of WCW’s lines cannot be reproduced properly here, alas.)
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