Comments on: A Few Thoughts on Poetry and Criticism, Part II

By: Jilly

Jilly — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:15:50 +0000

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 21:16:36 +0000

The idea goes back to Mallarme, so therefore it’s not exciting?
Uh, ok.
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By: bill knott

bill knott — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 18:38:14 +0000

. . . the resources societies allot to poetry
are so meager that poets urchins grubbing roots in a waste lot
must of necessity wrest among themselves for a bite——
every morsel Coolidge gets is one me and my gang doesn’t——
in the class system of the arts, poets are the lowest, the slave class——
clashing and contending for the only pittance they grant us——
poetry, the least compensated and rewarded of all the major arts——
i hope you’ll agree it’s a major art, even if those in the other arts don’t recognize it as such
and don’t support it with their wealth, even though most of that wealth comes from products stolen and plagiarized from the efforts of poets——
(how many of his million billions has Bob Dylan donated to the Poetry Foundation)——
(hey Fence magazine, got any funds from the millionaire Pynchon lately—or ever? have any of those rich prosewriters or songwriters or screenwriters helped subsidize your publications)——
as Genet describes us in “The Maids”:
‘When slaves love each other, it’s not love they feel.’
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:18:19 +0000

Kasey Silem Mohammad said:
>…what I find most exciting about Coolidge’s writing: its near-total independence from declarative tyrannies. Some would call this “meaninglessness,” but I see it as extreme fascination with meaning, with the way meaning slips into and out of focus around words.
Sorry, but why is this “exciting,” exactly? The idea goes back to Mallarme…
Or Archilochus…
Kent
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:59:17 +0000

coupla quick things:
totes fair enough, kasey, & i likewise agree w/ yr posts most of the time, & enjoy them always.
i find it funny to be cast by joan & one of my favorite poets, the inimitable mr. knott, as the avant-gardener here, as i’m usually on t’other side o’ the fence, pointing out all the wonderful bushes & weeds & flowers growing in the yard watered by the “main” stream. but ignoring any part of the tradition is what i oppose, where’er it may grow. not liking it is one thing: although i too like it: dismissing it out of hand is quite another, & not worthy of a serious critic.
but that’s an odd thing abt aesthetic argument: you end up defending positions that, because you’re usually surrounded by people who fervently take them up, you often try to temper, while arguing w/ people whose views, when held with less strident certitude, you share. i noted this when ange was in the position of arguing that yes the ideological & its dogmatic affinities is too a legitimate part of poetic distinction-making.
which is to say i think many of the language folks are straight-up idiots, & a few official verse kulchur apparatniks are among our finest poets. & vice versa. still: third way? no way.
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:02:53 +0000

Ooh, glad to be a tastemaker!! And I’ll take a pacemaker over being heartless anytime.
Hm, wonder what Spicer thought of Bazooka comics: bet he liked ‘em.
That Bill’s and mickey’s uncapitalized verse rants resemble each other is freakin’ me out!
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By: bill knott

bill knott — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:40:09 +0000

no, Mohammad, i (by a I)
ain’t being (of to)
sarcastic (on no);
i loathe the writtings of Coolidge and his kind:
and no babelful (we or by)
of your spaghettios critprose
can change the fact (a I of)
that (to on)
as the bestseller list on this site shows
(no we or)
most readers most of the time prefer
(me too oh)
poetry which is less ‘unconnected’ than his , , ,
but please don’t let that fact
discourage you avantistes
from performing your specialty acts, that same old huff and puff guff,
the incomprehensible in defense of the unreadable . . .
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By: mickey o'connor

mickey o'connor — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 05:40:27 +0000

some of you guys
think everything is literary
criticism soon you’ll claim
bazooka joe bubblegum wrappers
are a form of literary
criticism
oh well
the tastemakers will go on
until they need pacemakers
they always do
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By: mickey o'connor

mickey o'connor — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 05:40:27 +0000

By: K. Silem Mohammad

K. Silem Mohammad — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 03:36:35 +0000

Michael, yes, careless reading on my part about the conjunction thing, sorry. I still stand by my general position, however, regarding what I see as the arbitrariness of your general claim about why certain words are included and others aren’t.
I too “distrust the impulse to protect art from argumentative function”; I don’t think Coolidge’s art needs protecting from it, because I don’t feel it ever threatens it in the first place, at least not in the poem you discuss. I do see how a phrase like “declarative tyrannies” comes of as tendentious in a way I didn’t intend. Of course you’re right that there’s nothing wrong with declaration in and of itself, and no reason for poets or anyone else to view it as generically oppressive. Again, I just don’t think that Coolidge is making much use of the declarative function in this instance.
[Yipes, this point-by-point, back-and-forth argument stuff is addictive. It's worse (better?) than Scrabble!]
Sure, “The Red Wheel Barrow” is “inexhaustible,” but I still feel that there’s critical/editorial distortion involved in presenting it as an isolated poem rather than as part of a longer work, or at least as a work whose history includes being part of a longer work, even if Williams himself did contribute to this trend. All the same, when I said that such presentation made it “slighter” in some ways, I should have qualified that more carefully so it didn’t sound so much like a value judgment.
And finally, I most emphatically do not have a “let the poem be” aesthetic. I feel, as I’m sure you do, that poems are able to take whatever prodding and poking and slicing and dissecting a critic can muster. It’s good for ‘em. We just disagree in this case about the precise tools and methodology that should be used.
For what it’s worth, I do agree with about 87% of the things I’ve seen you say in this comment box, and half-agree with another 9%.
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By: mickey o'connor

mickey o'connor — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:54:48 +0000

totality of arrangements
never suited aesthetics
populated by twerps
geeks fun loving joes
cut their teeth on
abstruse critical
theoretical philosophical
late 20th. century
mysticism simplicity
arrangements let the chips
fall where they may
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By: mickey o'connor

mickey o'connor — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:54:48 +0000

By: Joan Houlihan

Joan Houlihan — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:20:48 +0000

Kasey, I thought Bill was being sarcastic too-hmm. Now the question is: at whose expense?
Michael, standard as I am, I still know how to see your side of things. I forgot that I had this, a parody of an old (2005) Silliman blog enrry, explicating–none other than Clark Coolidge! Enjoy.
http://www.bostoncomment.com/ron.htm
Now I am also jumping off the blog wheel for a while.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:57:26 +0000

Actually, K., I do need to respond to an obvious misreading: you say:
You remark, for example, that the “most striking omission” among the words in the poem is “yes” (even here seeming to contradict your immediately prior claim that the most “significant” omission is “and”), since the presence of “no” would seem to require the presence of its opposite as well.
In point of fact, what I wrote was:
Where there is no action, there can be no agency, which could explain the lack of any conjunction besides “or”: most significantly, “and” is missing, the conjunction of inclusion, abundance, and choice. These absences are thematized in the most striking omission, that of “yes,” whose presence logic would seem to call for, given the presence of “no.”
As you can see, the first claim is that and is the most significant missing conjunction. “Yes” is many things, but it’s not a conjunction.
The briefest way to explain my disagreement with yr response is to say that Coolidge’s writing is very much a part of his theory: it is not at all independent of “declarative tyrannies,” in part because he, like most sensible folk, does not view declarative functions as tyrannous. More to the point, I distrust the impulse to protect art from argumentative function; I don’t think you could be more off-base about “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which is an inexhaustible poem. I guess I mean to say you seem to partake of the same sort of “let the poem be” aesthetic that Joan is fond of.
And I now I must take a break from Harriet; I’m spending too much damned time here & not making a buck off it!
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By: Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:56:21 +0000

Look in the back of the book, Mickey. There’s some prose, (in addition to Gizzi’s), that is lit crit as far as I can tell.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:49:15 +0000

People talking about how poems are made is what literary criticism IS, Mickey. Cf. its entire history since Aristotle.
Thanks for the response, K. I definitely disagree, but since I’m not about to post my entire paper here, we’ll have to leave it at that.
And Joan, I understand yr point of view completely: it’s the standard one, in fact. I’m not at all perplexed that you just want to talk “about the poem.” That was Eliot’s initial proclamation in the intro to The Sacred Wood that got the whole NewCrit ball rolling — & thank heavens for that, for the New Critics are, on the whole, much-maligned & a thousand times smarter than the caricatures people who haven’t read them reduce them to (obviously I often disagree w/ them, but agreement shouldn’t be a criterion for reading anything). Nor am I surprised by yr reaction to Rodefer: I imagine it’s one most poetry readers would share. Similarly, my point of view is fairly easy to grasp. I doubt that’s our problem. We just disagree.
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By: K. Silem Mohammad

K. Silem Mohammad — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:27:40 +0000

Joan, I’m pretty sure Bill Knott was being sarcastic.
At least I hope he was.
Oh my god, maybe he wasn’t.
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By: Joan Houlihan

Joan Houlihan — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:10:20 +0000

Hi Kasey. Poetry has been and will continue to be a launching pad for all kinds of thinking. Poetry provokes, inspires, teaches, etc. To be brief and to the point, let me say with Henry that the subject of poetry criticism should be the poem. It seems self-evident to me and I don’t know why it doesn’t to you. Wouldn’t you be surprised to enter a class on say, physics, and find that the teacher was teaching art history? I would. I would think I was in the wrong place. I’d at least ask. If it turned out everyone there, including the teacher, believed, or convinced themselves, they were hearing about physics, my choice would be clear: pretend physics is really art history like everyone else, or keep questioning it (and get a failing grade). I’m in the latter category.
And yes, I agree that it’s very difficult for me to understand why so many seemingly intelligent people (including you) claim that work like Coolidge’s or Rodefer’s is fascinating and rewarding. The extra step you refer to, wherein I see how someone is deliberately not connecting has already been taken by me. But I find no reward, only the same barrel of ideas about language and its component parts. I can go to linguistics for information about language. Furthermore, poems that are constructed to be examples of an idea are purely informational and of very limited interest to me, especially when it’s the same idea. To answer your last question: “what sorts of things, one might ask, are empty jumbles particularly useful for building?” I would say if you work hard, you can build an actual poem from them, one that is neither empty nor jumbled. But as Bill Knott says, why do I have to build it? Isn’t that the poet’s job?
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By: mickey o'connor

mickey o'connor — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:02:58 +0000

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT
by J. Spicer , ed. Peter Gizzi
isn’t literary criticism it’s
just jack spicer talking about how he
makes his poems
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By: mickey o'connor

mickey o'connor — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:02:58 +0000

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT
by J. Spicer , ed. Peter Gizzi
isn’t literary criticism it’s
just jack spicer talking about how he
makes his poems
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By: Joan Houlihan

Joan Houlihan — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:01:42 +0000

Michael, I don’t think we can disagree because we haven’t even gotten to the point where we can understand each other’s point of view. I sense your intelligence and willingness to keep talking, and I appreciate your efforts to bridge this communication gap somehow, but I’m afraid even Clark Coolidge (especially Clark Coolidge) can’t help us now.
Henry, I like the sound of another voice in the wilderness, it’s comforting. (“D’oh!”)
Bill Knott, thanks for the Krazy Kat, brick-through-the window version of this thread.
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:56:12 +0000

New Critics again! Talk about being stuck in the 20th century…
They’re always going to be strawmen, aren’t they, so long as we keep “praising it new,” to borrow from the title of Garrick Davis’s recent volume exhuming them.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:50:25 +0000

True, what K. says about “The Red Wheelbarrow” and its context within Spring and All, but that’s a complicated example. Williams himself read and published the piece separately, as he also did the excerpt “By the road to the contagious hospital…” – and therefore made some real concessions to the poem’s standalone character.
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By: michael robbins

michael robbins — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:44:55 +0000

btw, those Rodefer lines rhyme! a connection! surely an indication the poem was carefullly constructed
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:41:56 +0000

What’s mud to some is just plain old logic to others.
See Reginald’s quote from Barbara K. Fischer in his most recent post above : “Meanwhile, New Critical aestheticism—its emphasis on the poem as a self-referential objet d’art, isolated from politics and the conditions of its making—was set up over and over again as a straw man for the arguments that comprised the revolutions in critical thinking of the 1970s through 1990s. As poststructuralists, New Historicists, and many others challenged the New Critical paradigm, they also demoted poetry as the privileged object of literary study.”
This is relevant to what I’ve been saying here, & maybe what Joan Houlihan’s been saying, too.
As I, anyway, understand it, the Chi School critics (ie. RS Crane & Elder Olson) clearly distanced themselves from the New Critical concept of the poem as autotelic verbal object – Fischer’s “paradigm” and “straw man” attacked by later generations. And they put together a different concept of poetry – in the early 50s. This was not a “purist” dogma, either : one of their basic principles was critical “pluralism”. They did, however, following Aristotle’s model, try to formulate a general definition of poetry – as a distinct sort of human activity, resulting in a distinct sort of product, a work of art. As Crane describes it, in his reading of Aristotle (in “The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry”), the activity of poetry is rooted in the pleasure that human beings take in beautiful – accurate, fitting, proportionate, integral – imitations from life. Not photographic realism or “transcriptions”, necessarily – but models which reflect the intellectual substance or spirit of their subject-matter. Crane makes a subtle distinction, too, between “pleasure” as an end in itself and as a supplement or side-effect. In Crane’s view, the real motive, end or goal of poetry is neither “pleasure” nor “instruction” : the goal is simply to satisfy the human thirst for the beautiful itself, the beautiful for its own sake, as an end in itself.
And IF this is the case : if the experience of beauty is the most basic and central motive for poetry-making : then we cannot set aside “the beautiful in itself” as a crucial, formative element of the activity of literary criticism. It either is or it isn’t. Clear as mud!
Furthermore, you cannot apply the “straw man” attack on the Chi School concept of poetry so easily as you can (and was done, as Fischer says) against the NC notion of the poem as autotelic verbal object. Following Aristotle, Crane & Olson conceive of the poem (at least in its mimetic forms) not as an “object” but as a “beautiful imitation”. In other words, its beauty is inseparable from its capacity to reflect some shared elements of human experience. So, following Crane here in particular, I think we CAN develop a critical approach which acknowledges “the beautiful-in-itself” without surrendering art & poetry’s roots in experience.
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By: K. Silem Mohammad

K. Silem Mohammad — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:37:29 +0000

Michael, I appreciate the obvious thought that went into your Coolidge reading, but I have serious misgivings about it swaying someone who’s resistant to disjunctive poetics, or in fact, providing an adequate context for appreciation of Space and other early works of his in general. I realize you’re only showing us part of a longer piece of writing, so I’m probably being unfair, but in a way I feel like that’s what’s happening in your analysis as well: by isolating a small part of Coolidge’s composition, and treating it as though it put forth an “argument,” you saddle it with claims whose weight it can’t possibly support. (This is very like what has happened historically to Williams’ “The Red Wheel Barrow,” which out of the context of the rest of Spring and All becomes both slighter than it is as part of the whole, and invested with a whole new dimension of ponderous and spurious “depth.”)
One problem I see with the points you try to make is that they are so often arbitrary, in that they could be replaced by similar claims which are equally difficult either to prove or disprove. You remark, for example, that the “most striking omission” among the words in the poem is “yes” (even here seeming to contradict your immediately prior claim that the most “significant” omission is “and”), since the presence of “no” would seem to require the presence of its opposite as well. But by the same logic I could as easily argue that since “to” is included, “from” ought to be, or since we have “on” we should have “off” too, and so on. Besides, there is nothing in the syntax (or asyntaxis) of the poem to indicate that the opposite of “no” as used therein might not more accurately represented as “some.” And further, one could deduce from the poem as it stands that there is an implicit “rule” in place which would preclude the use of “yes” on the basis of its having one too many letters. And so on.
Coolidge is possibly my favorite contemporary poet, or at least among my top five or so. I love Space: it was my first introduction to his work, and one of the texts that sucked me irreversibly into the quicksand of my love for poetry in general. I sometimes assign short excerpts from it to students myself, such as this, perhaps the most well-known piece in the book:
ounce code orange
a
the
ohm
trilobite trilobites
I make some brief comments about the poem here, where one of the things I note is that although the poem does suggest normative syntactical relationships between its parts, it cannot be reduced to any reading in which those relationships were fixed or taken for granted. One of the things, I would suggest, that makes the poem interesting (to those whom it interests) is just how unnecessary each part of the poem in isolation is, how “ounce” might be replaced with “ooze,” or “pounce,” or “inch,” or any of virtually infinite other options, and so on for every word in the poem, within certain structural parameters (i.e., at some point the basic shape and feel of the poem would be completely changed, but there’s a lot of room to play around in). I think “by a I” works pretty much this way as well, as does Space generally. The poems in it demonstrate, among other things, how little their precise form matters; what matters is that the form they do happen to take is striking enough in its overall “violation” of certain near-religious ideas of what constitutes poetic correctness (ideas like organic unity, necessity, precision, elegance, clarity, etc.) that it does the job.
My point, Michael, is not so much that the claims you make are “wrong” (though I guess in a way I feel they are), but that by presenting them as an “argument” the poem makes, they flatten out what I find most exciting about Coolidge’s writing: its near-total independence from declarative tyrannies. Some would call this “meaninglessness,” but I see it as extreme fascination with meaning, with the way meaning slips into and out of focus around words. I’m sure that in a lot of ways, we’re trying to make the same case here. My worry is that the hyperconfident, ultralinear explication you offer is more likely to cement a certain kind of distrust of Coolidge’s poetics (and ones like it) than to loosen it up.
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:13:38 +0000

Who’s dismissing b/Beauty in poetry? It’s the big baseball bat of Beauty-the-abstract-concept that’s proving itself to lack utility. Or rather than baseball bat let’s say Aristotelean (neo- or not) bludgeonry. Can we get beyond the 19th century, let alone the 20th – and move a little further ahead than the ancient Greeks for a change? If there’s mud, somebody will be a stick in it, I guess.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:05:24 +0000

And Joan, if you’ll accept Clark Coolidge as a substitute for Stephen Rodefer — they’re very different poets but I suspect you’d find them similarly connectionless — since I don’t have time to whip up a reading of Rodefer (difficult to believe, I know, but I post on Harriet when I need a break from writing my dissertation), maybe you can forgive my posting a reading of a Coolidge poem I wrote a few years ago. It won’t convince you to enjoy it but perhaps you’ll allow that I both understand & admire such poetry & am capable of elucidating same (as are many, many others). (I don’t know how well the lineation & spacing of the Coolidge poem will show up in this space. I don’t endorse, by the way, the view of language Coolidge’s poem tropes.) You seem genuinely interested in these questions, which I appreciate, & I think disagreements like ours make Harriet a more interesting place.
A poem from Coolidge’s Space (1970) demonstrates the point of this jettisoning of syntax as clearly as does any of the Language school’s theoretical formulations:
by a I
of to
on no
we or by
a I of
to on
no we or
To paraphrase T. S. Eliot on the Metaphysical poets, the idea and the metaphor become one. The idea of a subject formed by language is spatially established as the metaphor of an “I” surrounded by and sensible only in the material context of syntactical elements. With the important exception of the word “no,” which can be a noun, an adjective, or an adverb, every word in this poem is either an article, a preposition, a conjunction, or a personal pronoun—and the personal pronouns are those of the first persons singular and plural. Most important, “a,” “or,” “by,” “of,” and “to” are paradigmatic materials with which syntactical relations are built. The pronouns “I” and “we” are embedded in a network of syntax, are seen to be relative to linguistic connections: those that establish one thing’s position relative to another (“to,” “by,” “of,” “on,”); those that propose alternatives among things (“or”); those that negate relations among things or indicate lack (“no”); and those that specify cases of things (“a”). They are situated within a social context of language that, the poem seems to suggest, constructs the very notions of selfhood (“I”) and community (“we”). This is because syntax not only allows access to subjectivity (without syntax, we could not place ourselves in any kind of higher-order relations to the world) but to community (without syntax, we could not enter into any kinds of higher-order relations with others). Syntax allows us to differentiate ourselves from and situate ourselves with regard to everything else. That syntax is a finite system capable of infinite combination is cheekily alluded to in a kind of parody of poetic refrain: the poem consists of nine words which are, beginning in line four, repeated in order, though with shifting lineation, as if to emphasize that we are always performing variations on and with the same basic materials.
Crucially, there is also, on Coolidge’s reading, a privative dimension to our syntactical situation. While asserting the linguistic formation of the subject and simultaneously exposing that formation by eschewing the establishment of normative syntactical procedures, Coolidge also seems to stress the illusory nature of the connections and affirmations language allows us to institute. He seems to imagine syntax as a social context, yet the poem is composed of syntactical parts separated by expanses of empty space. Its syntactical relations are implied rather than actual, and there are no verbs, as if to imply that language locks us in, that we cannot escape its determining structures. Where there is no action, there can be no agency, which could explain the lack of any conjunction besides “or”: most significantly, “and” is missing, the conjunction of inclusion, abundance, and choice. These absences are thematized in the most striking omission, that of “yes,” whose presence logic would seem to call for, given the presence of “no.” Coolidge’s minimalist poem, then, contrives with only nine words and eleven letters to argue that because of our origin in language, whose non-identity with meaning and truth is well-established, negation and disconnection are our lot. Like much Language poetry, Coolidge’s work displaces or decenters—situates—the universal, univocal, agentive subject by insisting upon its contingency as a linguistic construct.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:45:27 +0000

Joan, I appreciate yr taking the time too, & putting up w/ my polemical barbs in good humor. I realize I am difficult, always, but try to be “courteous, / on the whole, in private.” At any rate, it’s nice to disagree about something one cares about passionately with someone of critical intelligence who cares equally.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:45:15 +0000

Joan, I appreciate yr taking the time to, & putting up w/ my polemical barbs in good humor. I realize I am difficult, always, but try to be “courteous, / on the whole, in private.” At any rate, it’s nice to disagree about something one cares about passionately with someone of critical intelligence who cares equally.
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