Comments on: Canon Fodder

By: john

john — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:04:08 +0000

Michael,
OK, to cases. You’ve claimed that “goosestepping” was not an allusion to Naziism. I refuted your claim. You rolled your eyes. Not really a rebuttal, but I don’t suppose you have one.
Zizek (sic!). I honestly thought you knew that homophobic remarks (and homophobic murders) and sexual harassment occurred in lower class milieus and non-capitalist regimes as well. The literature on this is ubiquitous, deep, and irrefutable. I find it hard to believe that you live such a sheltered life where you might not be aware of this, but some white cultural workers really are that sheltered, I suppose.
I can find sources for you on homophobia and sexual harassment in non-capitalist regimes and lower class milieus if you really are that removed from social conditions. Please let me know.
Your condescending tone is really misplaced. But if it’s all you got, you better go with it. It doesn’t hurt my feelings, though, so don’t worry — I think it’s funny!
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:28:18 +0000

“Hey, if all else fails, imply that your interlocutor is a Nazi!” If that’s what you call “debating,” then I can only roll my eyes.
As for Zizek, I don’t know what you want me to do: I think he’s right, & his arguments are spelled out for all to see. You claim his views are “astoundingly ignorant.” Congratulations on thinking that — you’ve definitively refuted him, as far as I can tell.
Not sure what “insults” you think I’ve been dropping; what you seem to object to is my tone, which is sarcastic, to be sure. That seems to get under your skin — I guess I’m sorry you’re so upset, but if it’s insults you’re interested in, I’d check out the thread that all but accuses me & Kent of being agents of white suprematism.
I’ve said more than once that I’m finished responding to your baiting, but I keep coming back for more. If you’d like to do more than imply that you have an argument to make while accusing others of not having arguments, perhaps we could have, um, a debate. If not, not.
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By: john

john — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:58:55 +0000

Michael,
Schoolyard tactics? You mean debating?
You mean pointing out the nastiness of your rhetoric? (Your defense of your analogy is pure weasel-ism. To argue no connection between the poem and person is ridiculous; likewise to say that you intended no Nazi allusion. Language doesn’t work that way; astounding to see a poet arguing for a limitation on the allusive and suggestive power of language, especially when the allusion is a cliche used in the stereotyped manner.)
You mean condemning Zizek (sic!) for having a poor grasp of social conditions as people actually live them? “sexual harassment, homophobic remarks . . . are the problems of the American upper middle classes.” That’s an astoundingly ignorant remark. You put it out there. Defend it if you can; or, you can keep dropping insults and whining about it when you get called on it. I’m good with it either way.
Kent,
Is this atavistic enough for you?
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:50:46 +0000

Loathe as I am to respond to John’s continued schoolyard tactics, I will note only that der Stechschritt is not unique to the Wehrmacht, & that the poems are the ones doing the goosestepping in the analogy, not my interlocutors.
I saw The Dark Knight yesterday, & quite enjoyed most of it. But my favorite part of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns was always Clark Kent’s recollection of Bruce Wayne’s testimony before the congressional committee convened to address the superhero menace: “Of course we’re criminals. We’ve always been criminals.” (It’s been some time since I was fourteen, so I might be misremembering that slightly.) Although the new movie retains Batman’s vigilantism, it forces a heavy dose of obvious moralism down the viewer’s throat: a growly Christian Bale responds to corpsepainted Heath Ledger’s cookie-cutter Nietzscheanism à la Leopold & Loeb with cookie-cutter sentiments about “the good” & the need for heroes. Tendentiousness is one thing; to be lectured at by caricatures about caricatures is a higher order of intellectual tedium. A comic-book version of reality, to be sure.
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By: john

john — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:24:11 +0000

Michael,
“goosestepping . . . liberal values” — Hey, if all else fails, imply that your interlocutor is a Nazi!
(Although, I have to say, I’ve never seen the connection between geese and marching. I’ve seen a lot of geese, and I’ve never seen a Nazi that looked like any of them.)
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:35:32 +0000

Gee Michael,
Thanks for asking that. I’ve been thinking kinda the same thing.
In fact, I’ve been thinking about how righteously retro this whole attack on Wright’s poem is– as if culled from instructions in some papyrus fragment unearthed from a time capsule buried in 1988 behind the Student Union at Stanford.
Well, not papyrus, obviously, that’s silly. And the cute anachronism is unfair, really, to latest developments in post-Tel Quel Maoist-inflected theory… Thank the gods the Alexandria library got burned down. Who knows *how* many pollacks and pullets were rolled up in those backward tube books?
What is to be done now is rid the radical canon of that fake cuddles-bear WCW, once and for all. Remember how he snickered to his pal Pound (I think it was Pound–Weinberger has the quote somewhere in an old Sulfur) about Hiroshima? “Those poor Japs, they’ll never know what hit ‘em.” Something like that. Damn…
And what the hell is Poetry Magazine doing publishing this special portfolio of the anti-Semite Spicer?
Well, I’ve got a number at the NEH, and I’m going to call it.
Kent
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:52:28 +0000

Hey, I just realized no one’s asked the important question: even if Wright’s poem is racist & sexist — SO WHAT?
Anyone can come up with a wearisome personal canon of their favorite racist, sexist, capitalist, warmongering, fascist, &c. poems — poems of power & beauty &c. Right? Or do we insist that our art be pure & blameless, goosestepping humorlessly with our precious liberal values?
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By: john

john — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:33:31 +0000

Posted my retort before your mea culpa had appeared . . .
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By: john

john — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:21:54 +0000

Dictionary says, the noun form is acceptable as an adjective. With no disparaging “informal” or “slang” or “sic” or “whatever.”
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cliche
I hereby sic a “sic” upon your “sic,” sir!
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:00:07 +0000

actually, I’m wrong. mea culpa. lesson: consult the OED before getting all pedantic on Harriet (of course, then we’d be here all day).
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:44:44 +0000

I don’t know how to make the diacritical marks for Zizek’s name, but that’s not what the “sic” was for. “Cliché” is a noun; the adjective is “clichéd.”
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By: john

john — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:27:06 +0000

OK, Daisy, no need to be needlessly respectful here. If needless respect arouses your hate, well, I don’t respect that. There, does that make you feel better?
“Hen” is a cliche (sic — that’s for you, Michael! — I still haven’t learned the code for the accent mark [sic?], and I’m not even sure that “accent mark” is the academically correct term!), and it’s meant disrespectfully more often than not.
I have hens. I’ve never met a woman who looks like any of them. But, maybe I don’t get around enough.
Zizek (sic!) gets paid really well to diss *other* people’s struggles — nice work if you can get it! Well, the idea that sexism, homophobia, and racism are confined to capitalist regimes and upper middle class milieus is magnificently counter-factual. Is Zizek (sic!) really that ignorant, or is he just a provocateur?
And the way he attempts to claim victimhood for himself! Poor Zizek (sic!), that poor victim of blackmail!
Whatever, dude.
Nobody around here (that I’ve seen) is claiming that racial or sexual justice trumps economic justice. Seems to me that most people see them as *connected*.
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By: Lucia

Lucia — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:13:51 +0000

I just want to weigh in on Wright–one of my favorite poets–though I think Mark’s right about his use of (somewhat stale) stererotypes–the noble savage, the sex-starved housewife, whom we also see in Philip Levine’s “Not this Pig” (Levine being another favorite of mine.) I chalk it up to Wright’s being of his time, which damages his work a little in that it steers it a wee bit toward the sentimental.
BUT…People should read the late Wright/NYC/”Gamela” poems to see what was a radical swerve in his work toward the end of his life. An investigation and apologia of sorts. If he hadn’t died I think he would have kept working in the direction of “Many of our Waters: Variations on a poem by a Black Child”–which should be canonized alongside “Martin’s Ferry”.
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:06:54 +0000

LB,
Write me back channel, if you’d like, on this or any other question in general relation:
kent.johnson@highland.edu
Kent
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By: Desiree Dawn

Desiree Dawn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:00:19 +0000

…….Badges gleam; they dump the sack
…….Into the water, turn and go.
It is peaceful in the Southland; tomorrow
They will hang and shoot some more
Of ours: but tonight, as all true men
…….with southern blood will tell you.
The possum is abroad, the bloodhounds sleep,
And it is beautiful. Comrades.
…….“Let us do this thing together.
Black man, comrade, we must together.
And he is dead. There is work for living
Men to do. We salute him.
We have no tears for him.”
Ok to look at this …. this is what I see…………………….
War,,,,,,a since of attack………….peace and truth…………………….
deceivedness… “Mississippi word”"”"” conivedness “Another Mississippi I made it up word’
Cockyness false assuredy “Is that a word”? Im kind of dyslexic … I can write just cant spell……lol
next I see team work fall myrtre … ism so I have not read enough in my life I just write and sing … so this is interesting to me because it is quite deep….. not a real melodic groove
more story…ish however in my creative chaotic mind… yep thats the way I see the story told by the words that came to mind with each little bit I read… Desiree Dawn songwriter songwryter
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By: Lbehrendt

Lbehrendt — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 14:08:52 +0000

I would very much like to know specifically who, when & where the word “project” was used in referring to the Yasusada poems. Was it you, Kent? or someone else? In Conjunctions? or where?
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 19:56:48 +0000

JDJ (Jonathan),
OK, now I see–though just to say I didn’t think of your postings as “anonymous/pseudonymous,” unlike those of some others posting here.
Anyway, as I said, I feel the posts from you in this discussion have been the real highlight, tremendously rich and challenging–and others, also, have shared that same opinion with me, so thank you for taking the time to offer those pieces.
…
And Bill!
A jolly good Saturday night to you, too.
Kent
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By: JDJ

JDJ — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:06:47 +0000

Kent: You say, “..I’d given my vote above to JDJ (whoever he or she is)”…I’m a very real person. JDJ are my legal initials. I am actually very open about myself. My initials, “JDJ,” have been hyperlinked to my online home at the end of each of my posts. I’m working on empty so my apologies for the typos in my last response. I haven’t joined this conversation anonymously or pseudonymously at all. ~JDJ
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By: CDC

CDC — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:11:16 +0000

How can one overcome capitalism without imagining an alternative? Zizek’s answer relies on his extension of Lacanian clinical principles into social analysis. For Zizek, every social system contains a Symbolic (social institutions, law, etc.), an Imaginary (the ideologies, fantasies and “pseudo-concrete images” which sustain this system), and a Real, a group which is “extimate” to (intimately present in, but necessarily external to) the system, a “part of no part” which must be repressed or disavowed for the system to function. Zizek identifies this group with the symptom in psychoanalysis, terming it the “social symptom”. Just as a patient in psychoanalysis should identify with his or her symptom to cure neuroses, so political radicals should identify with the social symptom to achieve radical change. This involves a “statement of solidarity” which takes the form “We are all them”, the excluded non-part — for instance, “we are all Sarajevans” or “we are all illegal immigrants”. By identifying with the symptom, one becomes for Zizek a “proletarian”, and therefore “touched by Grace”. Thus even academics like Zizek can perform an authentic Act while retaining their accustomed lifestyles simply by identifying with anathemas thrown at them by others. Since the social symptom is the embodiment of the “inherent impossibility” of society, identification with it allows one, paradoxically, to recover a radical politics which is rendered unthinkable and impossible by the present socio-symbolic system. Identification with the symptom is not an external act of solidarity.
Zizek does not accept a division between individual and social psychology, so he believes identifying with the social symptom also disrupts one’s own psychological structure. This identification involves neither the self-emancipation of this group nor a struggle in support of its specific demands, but rather, a personal act from the standpoint of this group, which substitutes for it and even goes against its particular demands in pursuit of its ascribed Truth. Thus Zizek mercilessly rejects the present state of the world. On the one hand, he is very aware of problems of great significance for the left: the privatisation of everything from telecommunications to genes, the invisible exploitation of workers in sweatshops, the growing ecological crisis, and the weight of the forces lined up to make these attacks, and the crisis they generate, seem “normal”. And yet on the other, he launches conservative attacks on liberalism and reflexivity, bemoaning the lack of a Master, denouncing campaigns against sexual violence, railing against “permissiveness” and “decadence” and calling for a conformist “normal mature subject” prepared to submit to authority on trust and to identify authentically with social roles. -Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:10:16 +0000

OK, I’d given my vote above to JDJ (whoever he or she is) for “Best Comment of the Year” at Harriet.
But this one is even better!
Kent
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By: bill knott

bill knott — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:48:33 +0000

responding to these condescending words of Smith’s,——
Hey Bill, you sound, as they used to say at Stanford, ca. 1989, “angry.” . . .
take a deep breath there, Bill, ——
i can only reiterate that i agree with L.N.’s assessment of
his spurious “project” . . .
it stumps me why anyone would rather waste time on the
insipid pastiches of “Yasusada”
instead of reading valid translations of
authentic great poets like Tanikawa Shuntaro
and Shiraishi Kuzuko or Tamura Ryuichi
and other superb Japanese poets whose work can be found
in anthols . . .
*
responding to “Matt”——
bowling with William Logan? um, i don’t remember Logan urging
poets to try to write political poems, or encouraging anthologists to
select political poems . . . isn’t Logan in your camp on this issue?
doesn’t he agree with you on this matter?
you and Logan are one when it comes to the question
of the poet pledging to write political poetry . . . you’re both
against it, aren’t you?
*
responding to Robbins——
” this entire silly argument about James Wright’s fine poem ” ——
gee, i guess you win the argument . . . how could i a lowly poet
possilbly refute the words of Zizek or any other
philospher you sortes the garble of . . .
or how could i disagree with your calling Nowak and L.N. “silly”
because they find flaws in Wright’s “fine poem” . . . ——
call me silly too because i think it’s a mediocre poem at best—
and you and most of the commenters here have not addressed
Nowak’s original query as to why this poem, this particular
poem, appears in so many anthologies: why has it been
so ubiquitously canonically recognized . . .
(and my additional point —why are Wright’s attempts at political
verse like “Eisenhower’s Visit to Franco” not selected
instead?)
*
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By: JDJ

JDJ — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 01:30:38 +0000

I thought that I had nothing more to add to this discussion. I entered early and attempted to respond with a fullness befitting the challenges that Mark Nowak rightly places before us as we confront the social and political realities of poems.
But as this week has progressed, as the comments have mushroomed I found that I really should add a few more things and take advantage of one of the beauties that this forum affords us.
One of the beauties of this forum on Harriet is that it provides persons like me who have no standing or position within poetry institutions the opportunity to both listen and respond from the hopes of our own reading.
(1)
When our posts and comments veer too far from careful, detailed analysis of the poems themselves we lose our integrity, and sometimes even our dignity, as poets and thinkers about poetry. But, it is not only that we “close read” poems before we indict them; we must also approach the task of reading with great generosity and precision. Rather than careful, direct, extended textual analyses of the poems themselves (line-by-line if need be), our sharing is often fails to take account of the interdependence of form, diction, structure, tone, style, and all the formal elements at work in the best of poems.
In his original indictment of James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” as racist and sexist and his subsequent explanation, Mark justifies his reading of the poem by reacting to his experience of its diction (or word choice), particularly one descriptor above others, “Polack.”
Unfortunately, indicting the poem as racist or sexist for one isolated and de-contextualized facet of its invention reduces it to hagiography. I submit that the poem demands a fuller and more precise reading that considers a variety of its elements in relation to one another. Examining the use of the term “Polack” or “Negro” in isolation from other formal work greatly distorts the poems social awareness and cultural problem. This kind of misreading gerrypicks a few elements out of the context of the whole invention.
Recognizing this misreading is particularly important when we consider Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” because it is a poem whose effect depends on its multi-layered irresolution and capacity for multi-directional interpretation. It’s a poem that figures a scene of conflict—-the scene of the autumn football game in the working class town within which James Wright was raised. As a poem whose central image is of conflict, its uneven lineation (or arrangement in lines), its mixture of cultural personages, and its both “high” and “low” diction transforms its witnessing of the football into a difficult, crisscrossing, and uncomfortable characterization which embodies, and not just comments on, the problem.
Using the descriptors “Negro,” “Polack,” and “pullets” exposes the fault lines of the cultural conflicts within the town in a way that other diction may not. These terms’ very cultural baggage—from hurt to banal description—allow the speaker of the poem to address the experience from the vantage point of simultaneous empathy and great privilege. The point is that the speaker is caught irrevocably within these conflicts and the poem dramatizes this difficulty.
As I noted in a different way in my earlier comment, just because James Wright hails from the town, just because he understood the post-Great Depression pain of its diverse citizens, none of these facts makes his poetic remove as a commentator about the football game any more difficult. That his diction throws us powerfully into the divisive heat of racial and sexual characterizations is part of the very necessary challenge of the poem.
In other words, the poem is not didactic propaganda. The poem does something much more important: it figures the fallibility of the townsfolk, the women’s constrained living as housewives before WWII, the shame of the men (“All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home”). The terms “Negro” and “Polack” were living parts of the cultural landscape of the town. And they remain extremely difficult to hear. That is why they are necessary in the poem: hearing them as part of the speaker’s attempt at empathy shows us that the on-the-ground cultural reality of the town.
The poem is neither political perfection nor cultural creed. It contains both the error and the elegance of Wright’s own position as a white working class-reared man privileged in several poetry institutions who writes about pre-WWII poor experiences. Not understanding the poem with the measure of this kind of reading is reactionary without full textual support.
(2)
But not considering the way that the poems’ seemingly discrete elements combine to create effects is not the only problematic ramification of veering too far away from truly competitive readings of poems. The other problematic ramification is even more important; indeed, it is a problem posed at the very divides that we think exist between us as we contemplate our citizenship in a political world (and this is how I once heard the truly great poet Eleanor Wilner characterize discussions of “political poetry”–as reflections about our artistic “citizenship.”)
Throughout Mark’s original post (and the some of the subsequent comments) there is a terribly deceptive idea that poems can somehow be perfect political artifacts, or politically or aesthetically faultless products.
This faulty notion is always at odds with a far more real-politic notion of poems as necessarily imperfect processes bound entirely by the careful readings that we bring to them and the cultural histories that crisscross around, through, and despite them.
Behind the condemnations of James Wright’s poem; behind the accusations against some white male poets here as bigoted; behind the characterization of L.N. (who proudly affirmed her black womanhood) as overly emotional and given personalized attack; behind all these often jejune approaches is this flawed notion that any one poem or any one person can be a perfect political model.
But no truly gift-bearing poem or person can be so perfect.
Our very fallibility as artists demands that we speak to how our poems negotiate always-present imperfections and biases.
My skin is as dark as the seeds tucked inside the core of apples; my rearing was often as poor as any socio-economically disadvantaged person in the country could be; but my commitment to deep reading demands that I never prostitute my own disadvantage as some vaunted calling card of political expedience. Just as whiteness is a vexed political construct, so is blackness, so is yellowness, so maleness, and femaleness, so is is canon-ness, so is any position that veers us away from the fallibility and the particurity of the texts themselves as we carefully read them.
Lastly, anyone who has spent time on the streets in devastating situations of poverty can probably spot shameful tricks and gimmicks. In his classic Forms of Fiction the terrific novelist John Gardner called these aesthetic tricks and gimmicks, intellectual and emotional dishonesty. This kind of dishonesty is predicated on affect rather than substance, propaganda rather than polyvalence, deception rather than transparency, stance rather than process. I would like to think that working against intellectual and emotional dishonesty always makes us unpopular because we cannot easily be narrowed into one isolated political or cultural tableau. Being unhoused in this manner is, for me, the only way to be a reader or poems.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:18:42 +0000

Based on this quote, Michael, it seems to me that Zizek has no clue about American history, no clue whatsoever.
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By: Rich Villar

Rich Villar — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 21:30:55 +0000

Self promotion on the net. I’m shocked.
I’d post a link to where I further explain my shocked…um…ness….but I’m too shocked. That, and plus I already linked it on my signature. Shockingly.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:59:25 +0000

I’m just going to let this passage of Zizek’s stand for my response to this entire silly argument about James Wright’s fine poem & the cliche (sic) animalization of women:
To be slightly cynical, if you read cultural studies texts you would think that sexual harassment, homophobic remarks and so on are the big problems of today. But in reality these are the problems of the American upper-middle classes. So I think we should take a risk and break with what is a contemporary taboo and state clearly that none of these struggles – against harassment, for multiculturalism, gay liberation, cultural tolerance, and so on – is our problem. We shouldn’t get blackmailed into accepting these struggles of upper-middle-class victimization as the horizon of our political engagement. One should simply take this risk and break the taboo – even if one gets criticized for being racist, chauvinist, or whatever. . . . To avoid any misunderstanding, I am not opposed to multiculturalism as such; what I am opposed to is the idea that it constitutes the fundamental struggle of today. . . . [The problem with these struggles] is that either they endorse capitalism or they ignore it as a central problem.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:55:04 +0000

A totally irrelevant aside :
when my mother told my grandmother she was going to name me “Henry”, she advised against it. Her uncle was named Henry, and everybody called him “Hen.”
My mother went ahead anyway. Now (but only among close friends & family) I am a cliche sexist animalization of women, along with everything else…
Henrietta
Little Chicken
“but names can never hurt me…”
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:07:28 +0000

Wait, someone used the internet for self-promotion?!
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By: Lydia Olidea

Lydia Olidea — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:59:14 +0000

And this has been so interesting. Especially as there had been a discussion which seemed to get both at social/political Big Ides, and deal with the particulars of poems; a real Harriet highlight, I thought. But then…
I wonder if Harriet could have a policy where anyone was free to post an emoticon– is there one that looks like Kent? — that indicates, “I’ve thought a lot about matters sorta related to this discussion, and if you’d like access to the wealth of my thoughts — and others’ thoughts on my thoughts — and links to people linking to my thoughts — and so on — feel free to email me.” And we could avoid discussion-killing self-promotion parades passing themselves off as thoughtful conversation?
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By: Daisy

Daisy — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:40:22 +0000

John said: “However! “Pullet” means “hen.” “Hen” is a cliche sexist animalization of women.”
John–
Sometimes women look like pullets. I hate it when men get all needlessly respectful and stuff.
Signed,
A Feminist
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By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:33:50 +0000

Bill, don’t be shy, tell us what you really think Yowza.
You and William Logan should get together and go bowling.
(Note to Harriet gatekeepers: that wasn’t a personal comment, that was a pop culture reference. They’re all the rage these days.)
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