Comments on: Who You Callin’ “Post-Avant”?

By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 22:21:01 +0000

I have come to this/ days too late, and reading through all of it
has put a knot in my tum-tum. So there’s no need to approve
this comment, such as it is. Anyway, here’s a little silly:
. . . . 9
When his golf ball didn’t
go in the hole,
the golfer drilled
a hole in his golf ball,
and turned his tee
upside down. So there.
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By: Archambeau

Archambeau — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 12:15:20 +0000

Interesting stuff, Reginald! And I like both Henry Gould’s response and Ron Silliman’s, both of which bring context and tradition to bear. I’ve posted a long-winded response called “Negative Legislators: Ethics of the Post-Avant” (I’d had a lot of coffee) over at my blog ( http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/negative-legislators-ethics-of-post.html ).
Gluttons for punishment are welcome to check it out.
Bob
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:34:52 +0000

Or as Ezra Pound once put it, “it ain’t the splendours that make grouping. And booze is not the river of enlightenment.”
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By: Paul Hoover

Paul Hoover — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:00:47 +0000

Since the subject of Flarf has come up, I’ll offer my blurb for Sharon Mesmer’s recently published Annoying Diabetic Bitch, published by Combo Books late in 2007:
Who or what’s eating Sharon Mesmer now? Saint Brave tugging on Jesus’ weenie? There’s more to this book than just a bullet to the brain! A kind of Dadaist courage to destroy form through the contents of discontent. She makes the surrealists look like sissies. “Rock and Roll” originally meant Sharon Mesmer. This book could give a girl a stiffy. No one has a more permanent home on the face of the page! “An acerbic visionary” (Lungfull). Half angel, half park ranger. For those who love distraction in poetry and art.
______________________
Here’s what I offered about the indigestible to Christian’s blog which equally belongs on Reginald’s, excerpted. The entry began in response to D.W. Fenza and swerved to:
But despite all of its influence and the fact that major presses publish some of its authors, language poetry retains its Outside status. No one ever mentions Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, or Leslie Scalapino as a “third way” or “lyric postmodernism.” They resist assimilation. Yet you can read Lyn’s book SLOWLY as meditative lyric; lyric, that is, that doesn’t try to slather the reader in the greasepaint of feeling. The avant-garde practice that has proved least assimilable is, strangely enough, performance poetry. There’s something within the body of poetry that resists its invasion. It never quite makes the mainstream, and by the mainstream I mean those of us, regardless of aesthetic, who make up poetry’s central economy: the Caroyn Forches, Charles Bernsteins, and Christian Wimans. Edwin Torres is fabulous, but why has language poetry, despite its difficulties, had so much more impact?
All of humanity wants to be considered innovative. It’s disconcerting.
A student of mine in Chicago, a female Hispanic, first-generation college student, was accepted to an MFA program in the East through an ethnic scholarship. So far, so good. But her work was rejected in the workshops as inaccessible. She could engage the meditative mode, the ‘abstract,’ but her poems were lyrical and so firmly framed as to be narrative. Beautiful poetry, but her workshop instructors claimed not to understand them. They asked her if she wouldn’t like to write some nice poems about being Hispanic. But she already was! The experience was a torture for her. She was perceived to be a carrier of these parasites D. W. Fenza imagines to exist. One of her professors took a summer vacation in San Francisco and returned with startling news. “There’s something called language poetry there,” she declared to her class, “Do you think it will come here?”
Why was Holderlin such a great poet? He failed at power.
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By: susan

susan — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 01:30:06 +0000

Careful, boys. You do know that when you start talking about your contemporaries by name, you just look resentful? Nietzsche would be proud.
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By: john

john — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:19:16 +0000

Reginald,
The critique of self-destructive emotional release through alcohol etc. echoes Frederick Douglas’s critique of the Christmas revels, during which too many slaves spent their too much of their “time off” drinking too much. I’ve seen similar self-destruction (among the lower and upper classes), and have experienced my own self-destructiveness and self-limitations in other ways.
Woody Herman commissioned “Ebony Concerto,” which I’ve never liked, from Stravinsky. The Bartok is called “Contrasts for Violin, Clarinet, and Piano.” Goodman recorded it with Bartok on piano and Joseph Szigeti on violin. I’ll email details to you back channel.
Cheers –
John
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:43:54 +0000

I have been posting to much, I am aware, but I just had to share this poem, sent to me today by an MFA student in California who attended the AWP. (I promise the piece is not by me!):
“In the Bathroom At AWP”
This one’s a post-modernist,
this one’s avant-garde,
this one writes long
narrative poems
about horses and blood.
And yet, though they may assume
different poses,
they’re all holding on
to the same fucking thing.
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:40:26 +0000

>I don’t see how Joshua Clover’s work is indigestible by the academic institutional belly, especially given its theoretical apparatus.
Reginald,
Could be my poor prose, but my point there is that the theory-charged poetry of Clover *is* perfectly digestible– just as the Flarfers and Goldsmith, whom Hoover mentioned, are digestible.
Of course, this implies no judgment on Joshua’s work, which I admire in many ways.
Kent
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By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:47:06 +0000

Hi John,
Thanks for reminding me that I can also get caught up in over-heated rhetoric. I was probably unfair to Goodman–I think it was the Ebony Concerto that he commissioned from Bartok, but I could be wrong. My point was that most of what we think of as jazz Adorno didn’t know about and wasn’t writing about. He might not have liked it if he had heard it, but that’s speculation. People often accuse Adorno of racism because of his criticisms of jazz, but he’s writing about white musicians and at one point says that there might be something more authentic in the black music on which they were drawing.
Adorno’s was definitely a puritanical Marxism. He wanted a better society in which people could experience true joy, but until we got there, he wasn’t taking any substitutes. Again, I can’t imagine what it would have been like to spend time with him, as he seems to have been utterly humorous and incapable of relaxing. But I value him for his writing and for his ideas, not for how fun he might have been at cocktail parties, which are the kind of thing I hate anyway. I don’t believe in judging writers or thinkers by their personalities or biographies.
I’m not saying that some people are real people and some people are automatons. I’m saying that capitalism turns real people into automatons who act out their inchoate frustrations through drinking and taking drugs and abusing one another and themselves in almost unlimited ways, with very little opportunity even to become consciously aware of their unhappiness, let alone do anything about it. Maybe that sounds too harsh, but I live in a very working class area and I see it all the time. When I was working menial jobs in Boston I did a lot of stupid, self-destructive, or just wasteful things to try to block out the fact that I was a wage slave, so I don’t exempt myself.
Take good care. I think that now this post must have exceeded the Harriet record for number of comments. Cool.
peace and poetry,
Reginald
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By: john

john — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:19:01 +0000

Reginald — thanks for the stuff about Adorno on Stravinsky — very interesting!
I want to respond to one piece of you what you said:
“Let me put it another, harsher way: our society screws people over and that screws them up. It gives them distorted ideas about their own interests (yes, there is such a thing as false consciousness), makes them work and believe against their own interests, . . . ”
I’m with you 100% of the way here. I’ve seen it too. I’ve known homeless people who vote Republican.
You continue:
” . . . and provides no opportunity to become real people; it turns people into automatons who participate in their own oppression.”
I get what you’re saying, but the rhetoric of “real people” v. “automatons” is disconcerting to me. Dehumanizing people — even rhetorically — ain’t right. People who work against their own self interests are still people.
And, by the way, Goodman’s music wasn’t stereotyped dreck. He hired many brilliant and individualistic musicians, including Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, and Billie Holiday, and he himself was a brilliant, individualistic player who later commissioned Bartok to write something for him (a terrific piece, the name of which is escaping me). Even if you don’t like Goodman, beating up on him to defend Adorno’s ignorance of Ellington doesn’t really help Adorno.
“A deep suspicion of pleasure” is representative of a not-uncommon strain of puritanical Marxism. Bummer.
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By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:50:43 +0000

Dear Kent,
I just wrote a comment and the program ate it, so I am going to try to reconstruct what I wrote.
I don’t see how Joshua Clover’s work is indigestible by the academic institutional belly, especially given its theoretical apparatus. Both of his books are published by academic presses–this is not a criticism, I am published by one as well, and am immensely grateful for their consistent support over the years. His work has been written about in an influential article by Christopher Nealon called “Camp Messianism” in American Literature. (Am I jealous? Of course I am.)
The “hyper-critical Marxist surfaces” of his work fit perfectly well with the current preoccupations of English departments, where these days everybody cool is some variety of leftist or pseudo-leftist, at least at prestige institutions. Joshua’s new book is in part a compendium of leftist theory (a summary of the totality for kids, one might say), which would have great appeal to academic literary theorists. Again, this is not a criticism, just a statement.
I’m not familiar with the reception of Barrett Watten’s work (did you know that he went to Iowa, as did Bob Perelman? and did his thesis with Donald Justice? I read it while I was doing my MFA there), but many literary theorists are very interested in Language poetry, because it draws on the same theoretical material they work with–they understand its intellectual underpinnings, its theoretical framework makes sense to them. Indeed, many of them read it not as poetry but as theory by other means.
Dear Joshua,
Maybe we’re not as far apart on Malevich as all that. He welcomed the February revolution (as did everyone except the Czar and his family) and the October revolution, as did most Russian artists and writers. But, like many if not most such, the Revolution betrayed him when it turned to more conservative artistic ideas. Even Tatlin found his “un-Socialist” abstractions intolerable. He was not anti-political or even apolitical, but politics was not the motivating force of his art, except insofar, as Peter Gay puts it in his excellently synoptic Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, “his…paintings were the incarnation of a spiritual ideology. He wanted to put something in the place of nothing, artistic sensibility as a substitute for capitalist greed” (135). For a while he saw the Revolution as embodying that ideal. My main point is that he was no negationist; his whole worldview was motivated by hope and possibility.
Dear John,
I can understand your being put off by Adorno. He was harsh, priggish, often rigid (though much less rigid than people take him to be–and he was able and willing to modify his positions), and probably no fun at parties. I adore his work, but I wouldn’t want to have hung out with him. He had a deep suspicion of pleasure as a kind of seduction to mindless surrender to the tyranny of what is.
I can’t say much in defense of his writings on popular music, except that he was writing about stuff like Benny Goodman (one of the only musicians he mentions by name) which really was stereotyped dreck. He didn’t have a deep knowledge of jazz music, and knew pretty much nothing of black jazz music. He was responding to standardized radio and dance hall music, which was the pop music of the time.
I would also say that he didn’t idealize classical music either. If you think he was harsh on popular music, you should read some of the things he wrote about Stravinsky and Shostakovich in The Philosophy of Modern Music. He was particularly scathing on the pseudo-spiritual feelings of superiority and virtue much of the classical music audience cultivates. He definitely did not believe that “that classical fans were exempt from the delusions of pop fans.” One of my favorite Adorno quotes is when he writes that culture is the enemy of art.
I myself love a lot of pop music and very recondite music (almost all my favorite “classical” music, besides Wagner and Strauss, is twentieth century). But I’m not typical, and if you like both, you’re not typical either.
As for the people you mention who were poor and produced art (a much more common phenomenon more recently, when there’s been more social mobility–Clare is a pretty damned rare pre-twentieth century example), part of the point is that they were all exceptions–that’s why one can list them. And most of the people you mention came up through the (twentieth century) popular music industry, which was more open largely because it was (and is) less respected/respectable–that’s one reason black people and poor people have had access to it.
I certainly didn’t mean to soften Adorno’s edge. Let me put it another, harsher way: our society screws people over and that screws them up. It gives them distorted ideas about their own interests (yes, there is such a thing as false consciousness), makes them work and believe against their own interests, and provides no opportunity to become real people; it turns people into automatons who participate in their own oppression. Not a lot of people have the chance to get out of that. I’ve seen this and I’ve lived it. This isn’t to blame them: it’s something that is done to them, and that’s yet another reason Adorno hated capitalism. But he did think there was a better possibility, even if it might never be achieved. Honest.
In general, it would be an interesting change if we could talk about poetry here instead of theory or the faux-politics and pseudo-sociology of poetry. Right now I am enjoying and being very moved by Rusty Morrison’s new book, The Truth Keeps Calm Biding Its Story, just out from Ahsahta Pres, and by Suzanne Gardinier’s amazing little chapbook from 1990, Usahn. I’ve also just reviewed Mark Doty’s new and selected poems volume, Fire to Fire, for Publishers Weekly. And I’m planning to reread Sidney Keyes, a British neo-Romantic poet who died in World War II in his twenties.
peace and poetry,
Reginald
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:35:13 +0000

Hello PAUL,
I thought we’d agreed that you would only call me KENTY in our clandestine back-channels. Now the cat’s out of the bag…
Interesting on the New American Poetry and the comparison of the post-avant to the Jacobeans (!). Actually, I would see Language poetry as something like the illicit child begotten from the secret mating of the New Criticism and the NAP. The bastard child denies it, but the evidence is compelling. I’m serious, and I could explain later, if anyone is interested, but this comments thread is already approaching death-toll numbers for U.S. soldiers in Iraq!
On Flarf, yes, I am aware they are the hot commodity. Pasted below, on that topic, for what it’s worth, is a section from an interview I did on the topic of Satire and Poetry, recently out in the new issue of Plantarchy.
And Michael Robbins, I meant *already* prego, not “already” prego. Don’t do anything to this historic comments string that will get you arrested.
Kent
*
>KJ: Well, definitions of Flarf are contested. Here’s my somewhat unpopular
one: Flarf is a fashionable, cliquish grouping of very smart, very gifted younger
writers who use Google search hits to generate various modulations of
appropriative collage. Their most common practice is to poach “uneducated”
discourse from chat rooms, personal web pages, and such (without the original
writers’ knowledge, of course) and create what some take to be “funny” poems
and plays. It’s all a bit sophomoric, a kind of urbane put-down of (as they say
in grad school) the subaltern. And all of it, it bears emphasizing, ends up in
service of perfectly conservative dress codes of Authorial custom.
These poets rather grandiosely see their aesthetic as—it’s their preferred
description—a Neo-Dada expression… as if such expression had any useful function in a
culture where a “Neo-Dada” simulacral fog has become the greater part of the
ideational air we breathe. Well, there is satire and then there is satire. As Peter
Schjeldahl recently put it, in a review of the big Dada exhibit at the MOMA,
“What young self-styled bohemian of the past ninety years hasn’t got at least
briefly high on Dada?” The sad thing is that most of these Flarf hipsters who
are high on it are now in, or approaching, middle age… What was that SNL
sketch of the pop singer who would shake his rear end and yell, “Look at my
butt!”? Well, Flarf is more or less like that: a “Look at my iconoclastic hipness!”
shaking of the Author booty. Well, a glowing article in The Believer magazine
no doubt awaits.*
But maybe they’ll find a way of turning things around—becoming “inappropriate,”
as they like to put it, in more interesting and original ways.
* [In fact, some months after this conversation was submitted to Plantarchy, a glowing
article about Flarf did appear in The Believer: .]
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By: Paul Hoover

Paul Hoover — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:41:15 +0000

KENTY JOHNSON WROTE:
Paul Hoover wrote:
>I’d like to be persuaded that literary professionalism is not dulling innovation’s oppositional edge, or, worse yet, subsuming marginal practices in order to make them seem its own. Are Newlipo and Flarf the unrepentant, indigestible poetics of the new? Would it matter if Christian Bök and Kasey Mohammad had tenure-track positions?
An interesting commentary, Paul. And I think you make a clear observation here: “Whether you call it the mainstreaming of the avant-garde or the vanguarding of the academy, the result is a compromise, or mutual collapse, in which the avant-garde risks losing its signal powers of opposition and originality.”
(Though I wanted to ask: Don’t you think your Norton anthology helped impel, a small bit, this w(h)ither-the-avant-garde crisis now well underway?
THAT’S AN INTERESTING THOUGHT ABOUT THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY. PERHAPS ITS BEING PUBLISHED IN THE DUSK OF THE LAST MILLENNIUM BROUGHT SHARPLY TO CONSCIOUSNESS OUR PLACE IN HISTORY, PARTICULARLY OUR GENERATION’S BELATEDNESS WITH REGARD TO THE NEW AMERICANS. WE’RE THE JACOBEAN TO ITS ELIZABETHAN IN THAT CONTEXT. THEY WERE THE AWAKENING MOMENT OF EXPANSION, OPTIMISM, AND POSSIBILITY, NEXT TO WHICH THE LATTER-DAY AVANT-GARDE MAY SEEM TENTATIVE WITH WITHDRAWN. BUT THE GREATER ISSUE SEEMS TO BE HOW MANY POETS THERE ARE THE POST-NEW AMERICAN GENERATIONS, EACH DESIRING HIS AND HER 15 MINUTES OF HISTORCIZATION. CLAIMS ARE BEING MADE AND CLAIMS ARE BEING JUMPED.
I am confused, though, Paul, by your suggestion that Flarf may represent the “indigestible poetics of the new.” What’s indigestible about it? Flarf seems to me something like a poetry version of grunge (except flarf was inside the machine, so to speak, from the get-go, and its “rebellious” hipster practitioners were/are mostly thirty or forty-somethings.
TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC AND TO MANY EARNEST PRACTITIONERS OF THEIR OWN GENERATION, THE FLARFISTS ARE HARD TO TAKE. THEY’RE TOO SILLY, THEY HAVE NO LINGERING CULTURAL CRITIQUE, THEY HONORING COMMODITY VALUE EVEN AS THEY MAY SEEM TO SPOOF IT, AND SO ON. WE’VE PUBLISHED THEM IN NEW AMERICAN WRITING, NO PROBLEM. I’LL POST SOMETHING LATER ABOUT THE LINGERING INDIGESTIBILITY OF LANGUAGE POETRY (A GOOD THING).
PAUL
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:08:01 +0000

The Countess of Flatbroke has been moved by Reginald’s post that begins I am actually starting to find it funny how endless this comment stream is becoming. She has granted me permission to post her sonnet.
The Bitter Side of Flatbroke
Some people lead an easy life, from birth
to death, connected, pampered, lucky, rich,
convinced that smiling fate defines their worth,
quite safe and snug and settled in their niche.
I wonder why I can’t be one of them.
If I had money, I’d have time to write
and read and socialize with any femme
or butch or in-between who came in sight.
Or spend my time alone or take a trip.
Then I could call my life a life and not
this constant jungle fight to get a sip
of water, find a place to rest, too hot,
too cold, too worried, hungry, lost, alone.
Perhaps someone will throw this dog a bone.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:04:04 +0000

I see the “battle” in contemporary poetry as primarily a theoretical dispute among poets, not really political. This is MY battle, anyway.
I think poets took a wrong turn when they bought into the whole stream of philological theory, beginning with Saussure, I guess, down through Deconstruction – which posits language as a kind of objective phenomenon, entity, thing, ambience, system of differences, etc. etc. & what have you – rather than primarily a tool with which human beings do specific things (like pointing & communicating & describing).
The trend to identify poetry itself with language-as-system or -entity is the basic wrong turn, taken by New Critics, Postmods & Language Poets. Poetry, as I see it, is a human art, primarily involving intellectual/affective GESTURE (as I posted over on C. Bok’s latest entry on this site). Language per se is only one element of a larger aesthetic whole, as Aristotle and the Chicago Critics, among others, have emphasized. I’ve written essays about this.
I’ve been “battling” for a long time in favor of a sense of poetry which underlines PARTICULARITY, SPECIFICITY, HISTORICAL ACTUALITY, HUMANISM, EMBODIMENT, PERSONAL IDENTITY, REALISM, REFERENTIALITY, DEFINITIVE ACCOUNTABILITY…. all those actual consequences of an art of indication and gesture – which tend to be “elided” when art is subsumed to some framing epistemological-linguistic “system”.
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:07:00 +0000

>As long as tenure committees and prize panels and book reviewers are deciding your economic fate, the author shot will always be the money shot.
Bobby,
In talking about poetry, I’d choose to say, ahem, “cultural capital shot.” But I absolutely agree with your point.
The post-avant is very much in erotic bondage now to “tenure committees and prize panels and book reviewers.”
As Bob Perelman put it to me (somewhat idealistically, in retrospect) back in 1990, at the dawn of the denouement, “It’s where the fight is now at.”
And Michael Robbins, dude, I think this comments stream is “already” quite prego…
Kent
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By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:24:57 +0000

No, Mary, I am not serious serious. Just having serious fun. The humorlessness of this “state of the art” stuff concerns me more than the ideas; if that is what they are. Most of the conversation strikes me first as a collection of compound abstractions that are completely beside the point. Presumably we all love language and poetry. I tend to be one of those happy idiots that has not broken the habit of believing in the power of love, but I hate language and poetry or rather what they have become. And there is no finger pointing involved in that comment. I just put my head down and do the best I can. I see most of this as an dramatization of Sartre’s concept of bad faith.
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By: john

john — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:07:31 +0000

OK, I had a translation of Adorno’s 1941 essay “Popular Music” on the shelf, and I just read it, and it’s mostly an un-argued, irrational harangue about how the shape of a popular song is standardized and its parts have no intrinsic relationship to its totality, by contrast with serious music — in particular, good serious music — where every detail has a relationship to the whole. Seriously, there’s no argument there — no “there” there. Just a rant. A detail tells the tale: While discussing a book on popular music, written by people who like it, Adorno quotes the other authors’ assertion that the formal strictures of the 32-bar standard song form allow for as much creativity as the sonnet. Adorno doesn’t argue the point; he dismisses it with a scoff. His counterargument could be summarized with, “As if!” This is not to say that the 32-bar song form was not standardized some time in the 1910s, but Adorno never provides one jot of evidence that the parts of the songs have no relationships to their wholes, and that their parts are interchangeable. It’s ignorant crap.
The essay is pre-bop, so Parker doesn’t figure, but Adorno stereotypes the improvisation of jazz as being stereotyped (that is to say, much jazz improvisation is indeed stereotyped and predictable, but by no means all). His insult of choice is “pseudo-individualization.”
He has some nice stuff about the role of sentimental songs in providing a release for people who realize they are unhappy and unlikely to become happy, but have no opportunity to express it. It’s the one sympathetic, persuasive moment in the essay. He’s scathing about dance music, likening its adherents to the followers of “anthropophagous collectivism.” Fascist cannibals! Sounds like a punk band.
All of this he contrasts to the true individualism found in classical music. He was very knowledgeable about classical.
But he was ignorant and pompous about pop. Elitist all the way in his un-argued assumption that classical fans were exempt from the delusions of pop fans, and that classical played a critical, truly individualizing role while pop merely provided diversionary placebos.
The quote from Michael and the “Popular Music” essay both murmur seductively about the pitiable, distasteful ignorance of the masses while they cordon off true individualism exclusively to the elite. I can see why people like him. He makes his readers feel special!
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By: john

john — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:32:09 +0000

p.s. I am sure I have trampled on Adorno’s subtleties. It’s been a long time since I’ve read him on jazz, and he could well have made distinctions between jazz and pop that I have forgotten. If so, my apologies to him and to those who hate to see violence done to him. (And I appreciate the call for non-violence!)
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By: john

john — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:11:42 +0000

Reginald,
First of all, I’m with you 100% on the question of to hell with poverty. Right on: No one should be poor, and I’m glad to know that Adorno was on board.
But he was still elitist. His most famous pronouncements on the subject — notorious, I should say — are about jazz and popular music. Talk about negativity! Yucky might be another word.
Extended to our day, his yucky attitudes would definitely extend to dance music (which I love too, though, to my regret, I was never much of a clubber, and now I’m middle-aged & married with a kid — yeah, yeah, excuses excuses).
In the realm of music, we see myriad contributions made by people who grew up in families whose parents worked in machine-cog trades, or poorer. Jazz is replete with astounding icons who were extremely poor, from Louis Armstrong growing up on the streets (as did Irving Berlin) to Eric Dolphy living for months at a time on white beans to Pharoah Sanders being homeless in his adulthood. In pop and dance music, Ella Fitzgerald and Elvis grew up poor, techno was born in the “poorer quarters” of Detroit, hip hop in the Bronx — I’m sure you know a lot of history I don’t here. (Joshua knows tons more about this than I do too.)
To Adorno, all of this music would be crap. He didn’t distinguish between, say, Duke Ellington and Kate Smith, or Charlie Parker and Perry Como. (No offense to Smith or Como fans — I like them both.)
In poetry, John Clare is the extreme example of an impoverished laborer achieving aesthetic autonomy, though Samuel Greenberg in the 20th century was extremely poor and wrote gorgeous poems that had a real influence on Hart Crane, and Blake worked a trade all of his life, having been apprenticed as a young boy.
Now, I know you have softened Adorno’s hard edge. You said: “If you have a real job, certainly if you have a proletarian job, you really don’t have much time, energy, or education to develop as an autonomous individual” — much time or energy — as opposed to Adorno’s, “the pressures of the struggle for survival allow only a few human beings to grasp the universal through immersion in the self or to develop as autonomous subjects capable of freely expressing themselves.” Now, it is true, he didn’t say “rich people.” But the “pressures of the struggle for survival” implies economic struggles. I would say that, at the very least, Adorno overstated. It seems, from the way you softened his edge, that you might agree. “Overstating” and “stating the facts” are not the same.
As for “grasping the universal,” I must confess that I follow “period style” in rejecting the notion of the universal. Perhaps I need a guaranteed income in order to have the time to develop my individuality to the extent where I can leave period style behind and grasp, if not the universal, at least the possibility of someone else grasping the universal. But I’ve never seen it. Do you have anybody in mind? Who has grasped the universal?
The poetry / music divide in the arts world is deep and intense. Most poets who might read or take part in this discussion are deep believers in the worthiness of their recondite endeavor — dare I say, their elite endeavor — and good for them! But it seems that most are equally comfortable with pop music, and many if not most have no interest in recondite music. (4th generation middle-class semi-pro musician, I grew up with and love both recondite & pop, and have never known a hierarchy between them.) Considering Adorno in this context intrigues me, but I have no answers. It strikes me that the only person who has ever quoted Adorno to me in any way that made me feel I was learning something that made sense to me, that helped me understand the world better, is the composer and critic Kyle Gann, who grew up not liking pop, and who, I suspect, doesn’t like it much now either. Maybe when my ship comes in, or after the transformation of our society into a post-scarcity-and-competition mode, I will find time to read more Adorno to really see for myself, but for now, he’ll remain for me an elitist snob with an old-fashioned sense of the universal, and who was seriously wrong about a lot regarding aesthetics.
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By: Bobby

Bobby — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:46:25 +0000

Dear Jake (Jane? (Joshua?))),
Regarding this:
>But still however “loud” anyone gets in individual posts around here, the politics that the colloquy seems comfortable with are pretty quiestistic.
I think I take the point–quietistic is the word you’re looking for–but maybe you can clarify which point I’m actually taking. Is it:
a/ That the forum/discussion setup of Harriet, which is so clearly exemplary of one of the basic conceptual models of liberal democracy, doesn’t really inspire anyone to think outside said setup and said conceptual model
or
b/ That however loud or obnoxious someone gets around here, a group survival instinct combined with a kind of regression to the political mean ensures that their radicalism will be muted at worst and shouted down at best
or
c/ That however sincere our political commitments may be, we’re still a bunch of bourgeois ninnies if we think spending time in forums like is even possibly commensurate with radical politics.
or
d/ Something else or some combination of the above…
I would probably have to accept some version of (b) as true and (c) as applicable to myself, though for reasons we hit somewhere up around comment #64 on this thread (I have no idea actually), I’d like to think that (a) is actually not true. But I’d be curious to hear more about this from you. (How’s *that* for a lib-dem signoff…)
Bobby
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By: Bobby

Bobby — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:02:19 +0000

Dear Kent,
Of course I hope you’re right, I simply fear that you won’t be.
Yes there are vast swathes of unoccupied parauthorial territory out there for the taking. But pressing the metaphor a little, we might ask: why do people pay thousands of dollars a month to rent a closet in New York when they could own acres in West Texas? They’re following the money. And it’s not just the positive attraction of lucre and fame and fame and lucre; the downsides can be seem pretty steep as well. The machine doesn’t like being duped, as Laura Albert and James Frey can well attest.
So to hell with the machine, right? Well, you know better than I do what the price tag of that phrase actually is, but if someone were asking me, I’d say they’d be smart to find themselves a coterie of empathists and a source of inflation-protected investments in a hurry.
As long as tenure committees and prize panels and book reviewers are deciding your economic fate, the author shot will always be the money shot.
Thanks for your thoughts,
Bobby
PS. It’s worth mentioning , too, since I narrowed the discussion, that heteronyms (or whatever we decide to call them) obviously aren’t the only alternative model. JH Prynne has seemed to put up a pretty heroic resistance to the mechanisms of literary stardom in the UK and he didn’t have to abandon his name to do it. But he did have to find a coterie and a secure job.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:56:15 +0000

I want to take this comment stream out behind the middle school and get it pregnant.
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By: Jake

Jake — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 22:10:59 +0000

Bobby wrote, “aren’t both positions also constantly invoked *on behalf of* oppositional art?” Which is a very fair point. But its not so accurate in this venue, which–truth to tell–does seem to have a tendency to want to depoliticize art/deny the political efficacy of art/declare such politics hypocritical, and generally to efface the kinds of demands they used to call “radical.” Whether or not those demands are bullshit or not is an open question, but it isnt unreasonable to point out that Harriet isn’t exactly a hotbed of envisioning radical change, aesthetic or political.
And I think that’s sort of the point. Clearly lots of regulars have sincere political commitments. But still however “loud” anyone gets in individual posts around here, the politics that the colloquy seems comfortable with are pretty quiestistic. If thats a word. Is that a word? My browsers spellcheck thinks it isnt.
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:50:42 +0000

Bobby,
Thanks for the comment in reply.
Good examples with Goldsmith and Flarf, since they tend to be touted as outer-limit cases, exemplars of the institutionally indigestible (as Paul Hoover put it here), and so on. One could add, too, the poetry of a Watten or Joshua Clover, whose hyper-critical Marxist surfaces would aspire to be somewhat upsetting to the Institution Art’s belly, as well.
Yes, I would, as you suggest, argue that such cases are only transiently “unassimilable”: There is much iconoclasm on the canvass, but the signature and the frame are ready-made (accidental ironic pun) for hanging in the Museum– and it doesn’t take long, as we know, for the iconoclastic to find its cozy way there.
I’ve said before that to point this out is in no way to impugn the motives of anyone, nor to disdain any (often impressive) talents involved. But I do think we’re at a conjuncture–some might call it a crisis–in U.S. avant poetry where it’s worth taking some time to problem-pose a process of absorption that appears to be unfolding at ever-increasing rates of velocity–a process of absorption that’s beginning, I’d say, to show some first strong glimmers of accommodation. And asking, as we do, if you’ll pardon the old Marxist in me, what might be tried beyond the obvious, reified relations of poetic production and exchange.
In that last regard, I disagree a bit with you, Bobby, on some of your comments regarding “heteronyms” (an ugly, unwieldy term–sounds like a scalp disease, and we need, with apologies to Pessoa, to find another one). You say,
“And that suggests another “tried pathway” that you keep hinting around: heteronyms. And here, sure, there’s the possibility of a true stepping outside, but the problem is that such a possibility remains open only as long as the heteronym’s creator remains a pure secret. As soon as even one other person knows, the same old rules and power flows get to work again establishing the one-to-one artist-to-work relationship.”
But there are secrets and there are secrets. In fact, I’d say there’s a whole spectrum of the possible (i.e. still awaiting exploration) as far as experiments with authorship are concerned, a whole range of variable associations that empirical authors, or groups of authors, may enter into with created, apocryphal ones. And were poetry to step more widely into such fictional space–or, maybe better said, were paratext removed from its institutional, legal sanctuaries and taken up as a dimension to be folded into “poetic labor” itself–all manner of unsuspected branchings (ones that would easily slip enforced attributions and classifications) might begin to occur. Attributions, genealogies, claims, and refusals, I think, would also become, within a developed pseudographic field, fluid poetic elements too. I am not talking about *replacing* or even foregoing, standard modes altogether, as these will always be with us; I’m proposing that we imagine the work of creating a parallel poetic area, a kind of extra-legal liberated zone, that has some chance of resisting the now nearly automatic purchase and domestication of everything.
And I believe this is something worth imagining not only for “political” purposes, but for poetic ones, too, because new kinds of conceptual energies are likely to be untapped in the bargain.
Which is utopian in its ring, for sure…. but not completely without semblance of precedent: Back in the last decades of the 18th century and first decades of the 19th, a huge amount of literary works in English were published anonymously or pseudonymously, authors moved about evanescently, and people went nuts for it. How, from that more relaxed there, have we gotten to this uptight Here, where “avant-guard” heroes like Ron Silliman or Charles Bernstein glare out of their Author head shots like some bust of John Crowe Ransom?
Well, enough for now.
Kent
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By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:48:19 +0000

I am actually starting to find it funny how endless this comment stream is becoming (I’m sure this must be a record number of comments), and how far it’s strayed from my original topic.
I would like to say to John that the Adorno quote was neither elitist nor metaphysical, but just a statement of fact. If you have a real job, certainly if you have a proletarian job, you really don’t have much time, energy, or education to develop as an autonomous individual. That’s one of the bad things about being a worker–one’s lack of autonomy, one’s lack of control over one’s life, one’s lack of the opportunity to be more than a cog in the machine. I spent three years doing such menial jobs, after dropping out of college, and I well remember how hard it was to sustain a sense of myself as a human being at all, let alone to continue reading, writing, and thinking–and I had the advantage of my education.
It’s often true that only rich people get to grasp the universal, because in hierarchical, stratified societies they’re the only ones to get the chance. Adorno wasn’t recommending that state; he was criticizing it. In the ideal, free society, in which people are treated as ends rather than goals, everyone would have that opportunity.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say that “poor people have always made lots of the happening art,” but unless you’re referring to folk art (which pretty much doesn’t exist anymore), I just don’t think it’s true, for the same reasons I’ve mentioned above. In terms of formal art, poor people have been denied access and opportunity, let alone the time and energy to devote themselves to it. Again, this is one of the bad things about capitalism and about hierarchical, stratified societies in general.
Thanks for the compliment, Joshua. But I’m still not sure what your problem with the idea that Adorno’s negativity was in the service of the positive goal of a better, more just society, something he explicitly addresses in Aesthetic Theory, is. I don’t see how that neuters him or makes him “mild.” He didn’t hate capitalism just for the sake of hating; he hated it because it deprived people of their full possibilities for an authentic life. If he were just into negativity and destruction for its own sake, then he’d be like the Italian Futurists, who ended up as Fascists. (Not “fascists,” but actual historical, political Fascists. I like words to mean things.)
I don’t know how living in Pacific Palisades (wherever that is) made Adorno a hypocrite. Unlike many privileged faux-leftists, he didn’t romanticize poverty. The point, as I understand it, isn’t that everyone should be poor but that no one should be poor.
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By: jane

jane — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:10:55 +0000

Ah — yes, well, “Don’t believe everything you think” begins at home. I’ll certainly take the historical record on Malevich (whose visionary interests didn’t much interfere with his commitment to political negation, which was fervent, obvious, and documented), and Adorno (if you think he’s an elitist prick and/or trapped in a dance of death with the Third International, fine, then don’t cite him as needed to support your argument; but if you mean to use him as a bludgeon against the very poets who take his relentless negation seriously — Negative Dialectics, anyone? — best of luck.)
PS: two lighter notes. One: Regarding the discussion above about distinguishing between thought and feeling, it was Adorno who remarked that separating the two was a mere replication of the logic of division of labor. And two: speaking as someone who used to work in a nightclub where Reginald went to dance — o vagaries of chance! — I can indeed testify that he was a wonder on the dancefloor.
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:50:21 +0000

Aaron – I’m not sure if I’m laughing at your Red Queen post because it’s funny or sad. Mutually assured destruction – heh. Glad I’m a Poet/nobody.
Henry, DETECTIVE STORY is hilarious.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:15:14 +0000

Joshua/Jane – My apologies in advance of any justified expression of umbrage on your part for the tone of my earlier comments. Apparently I left my superego at home.
Best,
Michael
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By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:13:22 +0000

The Red Queen said, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Poetry is experiencing the effect of a Red Queen’s arms race where the conditions are not being met for a Nash Equilibrium. Poet/professors or Poet/editors or Poet/critics evolving more effective means to seek notoriety while their notoriety rests in the hands of those who are after the same, evolve more effective means of evasion from those who would seek notoriety.
The ideal conditions would be:
1. The poets all will do their utmost to maximize their expected publications as described by the MFA program.
2. The poets are flawless in execution.
3. The poets have sufficient intelligence to deduce the solution.
4. There is common knowledge that all poets meet these conditions, including this one. So, not only must each poet know the other poets meet the conditions, but also they must know that they all know that they meet them, and know that they know that they know that they meet them, and so on.
The fourth criterion of common knowledge may not be met even if all poets do, in fact, meet all the other criteria. Poets wrongly distrusting each other’s rationality may adopt counter-strategies to expected irrational play on their opponents’ behalf.
This all refers to a situation in which there is a competition for a shared resource and the contestants can choose either conciliation or conflict. Also known as the game of Chicken or, if you like nuclear war, mutually assured destruction.
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