Stephen Burt

ode-y & emo

I’ve been reading part five of The Grand Piano, the serial self-mythologizing nostalgia 1970s scene report “collective autobiography” of ten poets and critics who lived in the Bay Area during the 1970s, participated in (some also directed) a reading series at the eponymous café, and later became known as Language Poets. Since one of the ten is one of my favorite living poets, I’d be following this series even if I had no interest in any of the other poets involved, nor in the way we think about literary history and literary scenes; since I do, and I do, I’ve been hooked.
Part five (whose keyword is “friendship,” I think, unless it’s “community”– for each part there’s a semi-secret noun to which all ten entries relate) confirms three senses I get whenever I read the prose Language Poets (or former Language Poets, or so-called Language Poets) write about their own endeavors:
1. It’s about as useful to describe Language Poetry as if it were one thing with shared principles as to describe the Decadents of the 1890s, or the “school of Auden” in the 1930s, as if those groups of poets and poems were one thing. About as useful, but no more so.
2. All these writers (the ones whose poems I admire and the ones whose poems, not so much) thought constantly about how to get around, disable, or replace the constraints (notionally fixed reference, Gricean appropriateness, the authority or lack of authority we attribute to a given speaker) which enable most prose to make prose sense. But the degree to which those writers succeeded in doing so, and the degree to which they wanted to do so, do not indicate the depth, or subtlety, or interest, in the poems.
3. As with the deeply Christian, deeply undemocratic, or deeply democratic, poets of the past, we don’t need to subscribe to the poets’ principles in order to admire, enjoy, or learn from their poems; we should, though, try to learn what those principles are. Even if they seem, to us, self-contradictory, or implausible, or overtaken by events.
4. As with all other avant-garde movements in poetry (though perhaps not in the visual arts), no matter how often some of these writers (and, more shrilly, some of their interpreters) go on about the radical break (with something— with what?) involved in modernism (whatever we take “modernism” to mean), their practice at its most interesting always links up with a literary past, one that goes back more than 150 years.
You’re free to tell me that in saying something like that I haven’t said anything about Language Poets, but only shown what I consider interesting. In response I refer you to Bob Perelman’s entry in the new GP, in which he discusses Catullus’ Odi et amo, lines that poets of apparently opposite tendencies seem to find ripe for translation, if not stuck in their heads. What poets, how, why? You know where to click…

01.28.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)