Comments on: Who rained on that parade?

By: john

john — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:02:02 +0000

Michael [Winky],
If you send me some lyrics for the Pseudoindividuals to play, I’ll write some music.
It’s tricky to rock the dialectic, to rock the dialectic without feeling dyspeptic, it’s tricky!
Rock on!
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:52:13 +0000

Ange – I think it’s more in keeping w/ Adorno’s thesis that even in advertising & popular culture the possibility of negation can be glimpsed although not realized: these forms incite the knowledge that a better world is possible. (It’s tricky to rock the dialectic.)
best,
[Winky Emoticon & the Pseudoindividuals]
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:11:20 +0000

I think the current absence of what we think of as the poet-critic has less to do with either Marxism or Theory than with the level & energy of general public discourse. It parallels the supposed decline of the “public intellectual” or the independent “person of letters”. & this has less to do with the academic disdain for “belletrism” than with the migration of so many poets themselves into academia. The excitement of the “poet-critic” is the combination in one person of poet and independent writer (the journalist, the observer of society, the diarist of public life).
There have probably always been accomplished poet-critics who are really scholars, who write from their deep & erudite researches in literary history. But if they lack this quality of writing for the general public, then they cannot contribute to any sense of a presence of the “poet-critic” in society at large.
Of course the rise of Theory, Politics & other fogs can be blamed for this situation… but poets themselves probably bear the most responsibility. They’re the ones hanging about the greeny groves all day.
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By: Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:20:22 +0000

I will look up that Hill essay, Bobby. It reminds me of this passage from Agamben:
Johan Huizinga reports the case of Denis the Carthusian, who tells how once, upon entering the Church of St. John at Bois-le-duc while the organ was playing, he was immediately entranced by the melody and brought to a prolonged ecstasy: “Musical sensation was immediately absorbed in religious feeling. It would never have occurred to Denis that he might admire in music or painting any other beauty than that of holy things themselves.”
As an aesthete myself, it serves to remind me of my limitations.
And Michael: Does the idea of “a bulwark against the closed world of bureaucratic domination” bear any resemblance to the idea — I may be fuzzy cuz it’s, like, Kafka via Bakhtin via Susan Stewart — that we must have God because the idea of no third person — no one to overhear — in the interrogation room is too unbearable?
Don, full disclosure, I actually just sat on a panel with Steve Burt about the state of poetry reviewing. So this really has been much on my mind, and Starnino’s essay was a good summation of the problem (such as it is) … the suspicion surrounding the poet-critic. But at heart I am an epicurean. For me, it’s hard to improve upon “Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.”
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:15:31 +0000

“These academic ambiences / really do get to me. / They’re always done in some new unfam- / iliar shade of gloomy…”
George Starbuck, Talkin’ B. A. Blues; The Life and a Couple of Deaths of Ed Teashack; or, How I Discovered B.U., Met God, and Became an International Figure; a Rhyming Fiction in Seven Chapters
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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:52:43 +0000

Bukharin to the Academic Marxist Poet-Critics
What he said, in 1913, or thereabouts,
when even the Central Committee
was variegated as a Comment Box:
To the factories, comrades!
To the community colleges!
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By: Bobby

Bobby — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:38:09 +0000

On the subject of Geoffrey Hill and the adversarial imputation of religion, can I suggest his brilliant but somewhat bizarre little essay “Between Politics and Eternity”? The piece is about Dante’s Monarchia, and it ends with these lines, which serve a better brief for the essay than I could presume to give:

Between politics and eternity, aesthetic considerations, as, for instance, ‘taste’ and ‘enjoyment,’ are quite simply irrelevant; alien to the purpose and quality of the Monarchia as they are to the work of Antonio Gramsci who dismissed Croce’s aesthetics and would have rejected Eliot’s had he known of them. As an Anglo-Catholic conservative, I arrive at this conclusion reluctantly but hardly with surprise.

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By: john

john — Tue, 06 May 2008 05:35:01 +0000

One of my favorite anthologies is a collection of the verse that the commander of British forces in the Middle East and later southern Asia during WW2 had memorized, and published during WW2, “Other Men’s Flowers.” I mention it because of how the editor is credited on the cover of the posthumous edition I picked up for a quarter:
A. P. Wavell
The Late Field Marshal
Earl Wavell
P.C. G.C.B. G.C.S.I. G.C.I.E.
C.M.G. M.C.
I just looked up Earl Wavell on Wikipedia, which told me what all those initials are. (I hadn’t known.)
So, Michael, your wish to list your initials has precedent!
Also, [Winky Emoticons] is the best unclaimed band name I’ve come across in a while!
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:16:01 +0000

ARRGH. Apologies for posting three times in a row, but vanity demands that I correct a typo that makes me look rather less sophisticated than we all know I am [winky emoticon]. Raymond Geuss’s last name is not “Guess.”
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:08:37 +0000

Ange -
Samaritan is wonderful, but not, I think, as good as Freedomland, although my favorite Price is now Lush Life. You’ll have to let me know what you think (did you see James Woods’s review in The New Yorker? weird). The Wire is my favorite show as well. The final season was a bit hinky with the speechifying, but i already miss it. Thank the gods for Battlestar Galactica.
You make me feel bourgeois indeed with yr library card! I really shouldn’t be buying crime novels in hardcover.
Best,
mr
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:55:51 +0000

I’m not sure that I know where to impute religion adversarily invites battering. At the University of California? Surely one might confess one’s opposition to religion on Harriet, might say, with Raymond Guess, that religious belief in the twenty-first century “would have to be even more willfully obscurantist than it was in 1805 because it requires active suppression of so much of humanity’s accumulated stock of knowledge and lacks the institutional support that was still entact in much of Europe in the nineteenth century,” without arousing so much as a tut-tut.
The question is rather one should allow one’s opposition to religion, or to liberal humanism for that matter, to prevent one from reading in the vatic tradition from Augustine to Grossman. I can think of nothing shallower than the collected high-school arguments against religious belief of the Dennet-Dawkins-Hitchens axis. Guess is also quite lucid on religion, in the tradition of Critical Theory, as “a bulwark against the closed world of bureaucratic domination,” though he finally argues against this position. At any rate, the gods aren’t going away any time soon, though liberalism & Marxism probably are.
Kent, you are welcome to use anything I say as a blurb for whatever you wish as long as you credit me properly: “B.A., M.A., M.F.A., A.B.D.”
Best,
mr
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By: Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:04:12 +0000

Happy Fifth of May; good day to listen to “Isis.”
Or Liz Phair, depending on how old you are.
I’m still on the library waiting list for Lush Life, Michael: I’m halfway through Samaritan. Rereading Personae too — am just bursting with politically aggressive bourgeois individualism!!
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:48:36 +0000

Oh, and by the way, the video of that talk I gave in Minneapolis is now up, in correct form.
No doubt most will be sad that it is now me and not Isabella Rossellini, but hey. And believe it or not, Isabella wrote me to apologize!
I said, that’s no problem, Isabella, because in fact, did you know that Ron Silliman said on his blog today that “Kent Johnson has never looked better”?
Ha, ha, said Isabella… No wait, she said, Do you mean Ron Silliman the Linguistic Poet, he is one of my literary crushes.
Yes, I said, that one. Can I tell him you said that, Isabella?
Oh, no, please, I would be tooooo embarrassed, you know, I would just DIE!!!
Kent
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By: Kent

Kent — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:17:25 +0000

Michael Robbins said:
>I can certainly vouch for Kent in this as in all other matters. And I heartily recommend his piece in the last issue of CR. It made me LOLZ, then I had to sit down for a while, then I stood up & began to spin in place, very slowly, & the world was as pink as a pit of chemical waste from an industrial hog farm.
Micheal, I love this, even though I don’t know what LOLZ means… When the critical mystery is published in novella form, I will certainly use the above as a blurb. Should I credit it (as in your poetry journal bios) to Michael Robbins, Ph.D. candidate?
And Henry is right–Where does modern literary criticism in the U.S. begin? Why, with the master of Crime fiction, Poe!
Kent
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By: jane

jane — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:02:50 +0000

Oh, I’m not sure that “religion” (or the theological, which is a different matter) is unmentionable, so much as the fact that if one imputes it adversarily, one gets inevitably battered about for daring to suggest such a thing So I prefer to let the mentioning be done by apologists, and then at least we can have the cards on the table. I myself think there’s much of interest in theological thought, though it is interesting — symptomatic — how consistently, for example, poets and others prefer the messianic Benjamin to the materialist Benjamin. Much as Ange with her prophet, I can’t imagine someone not crying when reading the latter.
I’m not sure that I think knowing or naming historical events coeval with certain poems, and even giving them explanatory force, strikes me as “historicizing” as I understand the concept. I love poetry in part because it has the capacity to make the unseeable structures of historical situations stand before me — briefly, surprisingly, and like no other kind of thinking. Sometimes this “seeing” is greatly aided by critical accounts of poems. I am not currently experiencing a shortfall of the vatic, nor of liberal humanist truisms. But listen, I get it: those are the things that will be defended endlessly here, and defended as if that were not a politically aggressive move but somehow just treating of poetry as such. Happy Fifth of May; good day to listen to “Isis.”
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:21:44 +0000

I can certainly vouch for Kent in this as in all other matters. And I heartily recommend his piece in the last issue of CR. It made me LOLZ, then I had to sit down for a while, then I stood up & began to spin in place, very slowly, & the world was as pink as a pit of chemical waste from an industrial hog farm.
Ange, I just finished Lush Life! ZOMG!
Dark Clover’s objection to Grossman is very familiar &, it seems to me, a bit, well, pompous & silly. It says that he’s a vatic writer right on the bottle. You don’t have to buy into his claims to find something of value in them any more than you have to believe that consciousness constitutes all its objects to learn something from Husserl. As someone of Marxian bent, I find it deeply refreshing to read critics with whom I disagree.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:15:43 +0000

Modern criticism BEGAN where crime fiction began…. cf. Edgar Poe. Maybe it went downhill from there (bloodhounds lost the scent).
Edgar was a pretty nippy critic, too.
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By: Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:25:20 +0000

Hm. I am reading Richard Price, so maybe you’re right, Kent…
Don, when I was researching the Duncan-Levertov friendship I came across Perloff’s essay “Poets in a Time of War.” She suggests that, these days, poets are far too reticent to criticize one another, and Duncan’s willingness to criticize Levertov — which cost him her friendship — was also what made him a major poet-critic.
I have to admit, Joshua, I took 2 advil after reading your comment. When you ask “what is it about poet-critics that makes them reticent to take on engaged historicizing?” but you admit that you “can’t really speak to Hill” I have to wonder what your interests are. For is there a serious reader of contemporary poetry who doesn’t think “Geoffrey Hill” when they hear “poetry” and “historicizing” in the same sentence? Or does “historicizing” mean something else altogether? It seems to me Hill does nothing but historicize poetry; I suspect something “extrapoetic” about him — his Britishness? His Christianity? puts him beyond the pale of your interests.
“I am in awe of Grossman’s erudition, but his all-but-transhistorical claims about poetry’s purpose and function and so on (moment generative of speech, etc) are, frankly, ridiculous — and I fear that even I am not mean enough to find such accounts interesting simply because they’re pompous and silly. By which I mean, I find the lack of attunement to history and historical change, and the accompanying pronunciamenti, plenty dull no matter how well-written — they’re not interesting about the world, regardless of prose style.”
Again I suspect the unmentionable word here is “religious,” which Grossman’s poetics is. But hardly ignorant of history — “Milton’s Sonnet ‘On the Late Massacre in Piemont’: The Vulnerability of Persons in a Revolutionary Situation” thinks about poetry and revolution and the value of the person … yet this is somehow not what you’re looking for.
I think the “transhistorical claims” you reject so vehemently are beautifully laid out in the first two essays of The Long Schoolroom; it is impossible for me to read them without crying. If you can’t find some way to embrace their claims about poetry’s origins — even if we take the myths as metaphors — then I invite you to consider Grossman’s antithesis, Steven Pinker, whose explanation for value in the arts can basically be boiled down to one credo, courtesy of our mutual favorite show:
“It’s all in the game.”
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By: Jordan

Jordan — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:16:06 +0000

Claims and accounts (law and finance).
Starnino’s thesis appears to be that bullies need the bullied. Nolo contendere. (Law.) No interest whatever. (Finance.)
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By: Tim Upperton

Tim Upperton — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:33:35 +0000

Pound preferred poet-critics, too. To paraphrase from his ABC of Reading: if you wanted to know about a car, would you go to somebody who had made one and driven one, or somebody who had merely heard about one? And if the first, would you go to the person who made a good one, or the person who made a botch?
F.R. Leavis made the perfect, unanswerable riposte to this, if only I could remember what it was.
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By: Kent

Kent — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:31:21 +0000

Ange Mlinko said:
>How about a new tack: why are so many poet-critics *dull*?
I ask this question myself, in so many words, in a conversation with J.H. Prynne at Pembroke gardens, in the last issue of the Chicago Review, wherein I consider his recent poetry in context of the anti-belletristic and crypto-Marxian (more accurately, really, nouveau Martian) Langpos. Prynne nearly swallows his chew when I ask him if he thinks it’s possible that Frank O’Hara never actually wrote “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” Things get worse after that: threatening phone calls, actual violence at the Keat’s museum in Hampstead, and so on.
The review-essay on Prynne is the second of a four-part series I am writing on current British poets (the first is available at the CR web site); the next part is due out any day now–a discussion with Tim Atkins on defenestrating Horace through the aperture of translation. All of the critical discussion in this series takes place (by the way, Michael Robbins, who is an editor of CR, can vouch for this!) against the backdrop, incredible as it may sound, of a secret society based in Cambridge, UK, charged with protecting certain secrets related to O’Hara. Prynne, it is rumored, is its Magus figure.
Anyway, these four sections are the first four chapters of a critical novella in progress, one that is based in real facts concerning the mystery of “O’Hara’s” famous poem.
I mention all this as preface to reply to Ange’s question, a reply I am very confident about:
Because poetry criticism has not yet figured out how to fold itself into the genre of Crime fiction.
Kent
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Sun, 04 May 2008 19:37:42 +0000

Ange, you’re right… I was looking at Starnino’s question from a slightly different angle, though I think that in the end we’re asking the same thing. I’m not looking, though, for quantity, but general responsibility: surely some of our best poets ought also to be our best poet-critics. I agree with everything you’ve said so well, in any case.
Maybe if our own generation(s) had good mentors in the art of poet-criticism, we’d be in different shape: I know that my own teachers couldn’t be bothered.
P.S. Inspired by my own blather, I picked up a used copy of the Delmore Schwartz book for a poet who’d never seen it; least I could do…
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By: john, B.A.

john, B.A. — Sun, 04 May 2008 17:11:30 +0000

To clarify my own class position (Jane knows this, because I’ve told him, but others might not), I was raised into the college-educated middle-class and got my own B.A. after having dropped out for 10 years (to devote my life to theater and music and writing). I went back to school because I saw myself being excluded from jobs on the basis of “college degree required.” I’m glad I went back — had fun, learned a lot.
I’ve responded overdefensively to Jane’s overdefensiveness. Jane accused me of making a “point” about jargon. All I said was, I’ll cede jargon to the academics, but not sophistication. I should clarify further: I’ll cede the professional requirement to master literary jargon to the literary academics, but I won’t cede sophistication to that process. Sorry. Call me unsophisticated, go ahead. (Which reminds me, does anybody else hear the echo of “sophist” in sophisticated? And does anybody else object to Socrates’ dissing of the sophists? It seems to me a professor must be wary to accept Socrates’ diss, since one of Socrates’ big objections to the sophists was that they accepted payment for their instruction!)
Oh, would that I were in the position to make my definition of “jargon” an element of jargon!
Because — making up new definitions for words is fun! I once coined “neo-vocabularism” to describe the process, but, dammit, it hasn’t caught on!
I’m being too flip — sorry. Like I said above, nothing against the academics — I stand by that; I read ‘em too, and often find them helpful, instructive, illuminating.
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By: jane

jane — Sun, 04 May 2008 16:57:36 +0000

I half-agree with Ange, or I entirely agree with part of the claim: that poet-critics are often better prose stylists — and that this is a larger fact than sometimes understood, if one accepts the constructivist possibilities of writing itself in making thinking happen, rather than merely conveying thoughts, (as poets tend to do, happily).
However, the charge all-too-easily leveled at, say, Muldoon or Grossman (I can’t really speak to Hill) is that they tend to be far less sensitive to extra-poetic context. And this too is a problem of interest. I am in awe of Grossman’s erudition, but his all-but-transhistorical claims about poetry’s purpose and function and so on (moment generative of speech, etc) are, frankly, ridiculous — and I fear that even I am not mean enough to find such accounts interesting simply because they’re pompous and silly. By which I mean, I find the lack of attunement to history and historical change, and the accompanying pronunciamenti, plenty dull no matter how well-written — they’re not interesting about the world, regardless of prose style. So we agree there are (at least) two obligations here, I hope, and being an eloquent writer is necessary but not sufficient.
Or to phrase Don’s question from this perspective, what is it about poet-critics that makes them reticent to take on engaged historicizing? And as a corollary, is it them? Or is one offered a platform to say some things more than others?
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By: john

john — Sun, 04 May 2008 16:03:31 +0000

Jane and Michael,
Of course academic jargonistas are going to defend their lives, which have been lived mastering one or usually more jargons. One of the purposes of an academic jargon in the humanities is to provide an initiatory process for the aspiring academic. Sometimes academics do this by taking common-coin vocabulary and giving it an esoteric spin — see, for example, Baudrillard on “obscene” or Badiou on “disaster,’ “obscurantist,” and a bunch of other words. By taking common-coin vocabulary and redefining it, jargon-ist academics create an us/them boundary between those who have initiated themselves into the new definitions and those who have not.
In many cases, I have not found these redefinitions useful or illuminating. You can chalk it up, Jane, as a mere matter of taste — “I don’t like” — or pretend that “I don’t understand.” But by jargon, I meant, “terms of art that I don’t find useful, which apparently have the purpose of creating boundaries between the initiated and the uninitiated.”
Now, to the initiated, the boundaries are useful! I recognize that! One of the primary purposes of the university system in today’s America is to enforce class boundaries. In some cases, the university provides a gateway for the lower classes to enter the white-collar class, but in many professions, a college degree is simply a filter to keep out the rabble. The gateway is a hoop to jump through.
I also recognize that mastering a jargon takes a lot of effort. Walter Kaufmann ascribed some of Hegel’s reputation to the effort that his writing required a reader to make in order to understand it; once a philosophy student takes a lot of time to understand someone, Kaufmann argued, concluding that the effort wasn’t worth it can be too painful for people to face. Now, I haven’t mastered Hegel — have barely read him at all — so I don’t have an opinion on Hegel per se; but I have taken pains with other writers and have concluded that the effort, while perhaps providing an enjoyable cognitive exercise, did not provide me with a fresh, new, better, more sophisticated, or more accurate understanding of anything.
If others find Baudrillard’s redefinition of “obscene” useful, God bless you! And please don’t worry that my marginal carping might have the effect of eliminating tenure. It won’t.
Kneejerkingly yours,
john
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By: Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko — Sun, 04 May 2008 03:20:09 +0000

“Hmn, dunno about Red Scares and May Days, and no disrespect to Perloff, Altieri, Bloom, Vendler, et al. – but I’m just trying to figure out why more poets are not also critics. Present company excluded?”
Don, you’re asking why there aren’t more poet-critics; I thought Starnino was asking why those who do exist don’t have more prestige.
How about a new tack: why are so many poet-critics dull? I was browsing in a used bookstore tonight; I passed over a book that I figured I should really own, on principle, given that it is by a female poet-critic; but her sentences were just boring. High-minded, but boring. Poets are my people; I’d rather read Hill or Muldoon or Grossman — or Alices Fulton and Notley — or William Corbett — than straight-up critics: but it must be said that one thing that makes us poets is an ability to turn a phrase, to connect with the senses/passions, to create rhythms; and yet these are often the first casualties of critical prose.
Maybe that’s why I feel like defending the odious “belletristic” — because I don’t think there should be more poet-critics, and I don’t particularly care if they’re considered Important, but I think that those who can do it, should at least look alive!
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Sat, 03 May 2008 21:42:36 +0000

Michael, I love reading Hill and Grossman, though they generally spend much of their critical force writing about things other than contemporary poetry (nothing wrong with that!), and Muldoon’s writing about poetry seems mostly limited to the Oxford lectures (nothing wrong with that, either)… So I feel that Starnino’s point still stands.
As for yours about audiences… maybe we should amend Whitman (and Harriet Monroe) thusly: To have great poet-critics there must be great audiences, too. On second thought…. nah!
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Sat, 03 May 2008 21:14:23 +0000

Hmn, dunno about Red Scares and May Days, and no disrespect to Perloff, Altieri, Bloom, Vendler, et al. – but I’m just trying to figure out why more poets are not also critics. Present company excluded?
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Sat, 03 May 2008 17:39:28 +0000

How’s this for “raining on the parade” of a belletristic ex-Trotskyist Poet-Critic?
I gave a talk and reading at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on April 10th (an evening when an ice storm befell the city), where I talked about authorship issues, forgery, and related matter–and criticized Charles Bernstein for this and that (politely). The video of the event was made active yesterday.
http://channel.walkerart.org/detail.wac?id=4371
Today, I have about twenty emails bemusedly asking me why the video is not of me, but of Isabella Rosselini, the actress, talking about acting and art. I am not kidding. I’ve been in love with her ever since David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
It could be the museum staff (wonderful folks, truly) did this purposely in a kind of homage to allegory. There was, in fact, a major installation there of works by Richard Prince when I gave my presentation, so I suppose it’s perfectly apropos.
Well, as Ron Silliman just wrote me, “You never looked better.”
Kent
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By: Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko — Sat, 03 May 2008 17:16:03 +0000

It’s true I’m thinking of a small — but rigorous! — corner of the poetry world which is both anti-belletristic and crypto-Marxian when not actually Marxian, like the Langpos. Who needs Jameson when you have them?
Again, many of my favorite writers — including poets I have written about on Harriet — are socialist; how does describing them thus constitute red-baiting? I thought the bourgeoisie was the class that dared not speak its name, not leftist academics …
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