This is supposed to be the post in which I sign off, pack up my bags and leave as gracefully as possible.

Unfortunately I’ve been distracted from that task by a recent article in the Boston Review by Stephen Burt called “The New Thing”, an attempt at typology, so typical in American letters, especially in the so-called post-post phase, when what critics are left are scrambling to make sense out of an ever expanding bevy of institutionally educated poets. Burt reminds me of Zhivago, the poet-doctor, arriving at a field hospital overflowing with the casualties of war and having to perform the healer’s art under deplorable circumstances. Burt has to do something, so he names this ward of the riven “The New Thing”. The New Thing is of course derived from an old thing, namely the objectivists and Williams (no ideas but in things – one of the most self-limiting utterances ever made by a great poet, with which even Dr. Williams himself soon lost patience). I found the article fascinating, as I find most of Burt’s articles, but I didn’t believe a word of it. In fact it seemed like total fabrication, a parody of poetic “school” formation. Evidently though, Burt is serious, as serious as Yuri Andreievich, who, after throwing his hands up in desperation, gets down to the task at hand. 

 Here is what he has to say:

“The poets of the New Thing observe scenes and people (not only, but also, themselves) with a self-subordinating concision, so much so that the term “minimalism” comes up in discussions of their work, though the false analogies to earlier movements can make the term misleading.”

Huh?

“The poets of the New Thing eschew sarcasm and tread lightly with ironies, and when they seem hard to pin down, it is because they leave space for interpretations to fit. Woodward’s Rain, with its five-word lines and five-line elegiac stanzas, makes a good example:

                      the slick

of rainwater converts each thing’s

outside to an image of

inside the only object without

a soul is the sun

“So says one stanza; six pages on, another reads:

                     the tar they use to

fill the cracks shines orange

from the orange streetlights but

is blacker than the asphalt 

which doesn’t shine

Burt goes on, by way of justification: “We may have to reread to see, amid these scenes, the grief (for Woodward’s dead friend Patrick) that guides the whole book.”

My response after reading these stanzas, was to blink twice and go back to Burt’s explanation. I’m not quite sure which I find more inane, the explanation or the poetry itself. I even wondered whether or not I was being toyed with. Surely, if you are going to create a new school of poetry, or describe one, you’ve got to do better than that. “The poets of the New Thing eschew sarcasm and tread lightly with ironies, and when they seem hard to pin down, it is because they leave space for interpretations to fit.” What is Burt trying to say here? The poem quoted not only “eschews” sarcasm and irony, it eschews poetry. There is absolutely nothing there that would make me want to read, as Burt recommends I do, this 5 X 5 bit of puddle exploration more than once.

What could Mr. Burt be thinking? Or is there something I’ve missed simply by having lived for a quarter of a century outside of America?

At the moment I am actually, for the first time in two years, in the United States, looking out at the sea as I write, and struggling with several competing interests: a huge translation project (a book length ethnographic study on the history of nationalism in Galicia and Northern Portugal), a very ill father, a tired mother and, alas, trying to say good-by to Harriet, whom I have come to love. As a stay, I suppose, against disorientation, a shoring up of my ruins, I have found myself, since arriving, writing my personal diary in Portuguese, the language I speak with my wife (who is not with me on this trip). This – writing my diary in Portuguese – happened spontaneously and has surprised even me who thought himself beyond surprise, beyond the need for acclimatization. I think it lends credence, were any needed, to the fact that I am no longer gracefully adjusting.

Burt’s article has only fueled that impression.

I would not even be here (I would have preferred the Baltic to the Atlantic this year) were it not for my parents, both of them trying heroically to live as one lives in the grip of crisis, to get on with it despite my father’s Parkinson’s. Four years ago, in an even worse phase of the disease (after my father had broken his hip and his neck chasing my mother’s car down the driveway because he wanted to go to the dump with her), I spent quite a bit of time here. I was needed physically for things like transference, lifting, rolling, swabbing, etc. Since then, my mother has been coping alone and my father, thanks to a very talented physiotherapist and no little will of his own, has regained his agility. He is no longer allowed to sit in his favorite wheelchair, and he moves about the house and the garden unassisted by anything other than his walker, of which he has four models placed in strategic locations. The blue anodized one with the seat and the disc brakes he calls his Corvette. My father is a boy from Detroit who did exactly what he wanted to do in life. He made money in the automobile business and passed his time around cars. If there is a silver lining to his disease (and their usually is a silver lining to all misfortune) it is that he became too ill to continue working and sold his business right before the whole industry went bust. All of his automobile cronies, some of them now bankrupt, persist in remarking on this bit of serendipity. Walter Earl, even though he had no choice in the matter, knew when to get out. I think there is true poetry in that convergence of necessity and intelligence.

Being with my parents, especially now, is more important to me than poetry (which doesn’t mean I have stopped writing it). T.S. Eliot said that poets should write as little as possible. I don’t quite agree, but I think some restraint should be practiced. Besides provocation, which Eliot raised to both an art and an embarrassment, what he meant was that poets should write out of necessity and not out of mere reflex. There is, frankly, in America too much of what people call poetry written out of reflex. Supply has outstripped demand. I think it behooves us, especially in these times of economic meltdown, to look more closely at the economy of poetry, to not continue printing it recklessly and to recover, if it is possible, if it is not too late, something of poetry’s gold standard. Otherwise it is just so much worthless paper money.

Burt’s exercise seems a perfect example of how American critics and poet-critics and just plain poets (or not) attempt to confect silly sounding schools out of wan spats with the self and then tell us that if you didn’t get it the first time it’s because you didn’t fill in your own meaning, or understand the “the grief that guides the whole book.” What’s wrong with you?

The problem is that grief is not a guide. It has no legs. It cannot walk. It is a weight, a coagulation, an inert mass of meaninglessness sitting on top of you and suffocating you. It is poetry that must guide grief and not the other way around.

My impression is that what is left of poetry in America is not, except for a few cases, getting talked about by the dwindling supply of critics competent enough to talk (Burt certainly being one of them), or adequately published via the committee-based, consensus-driven selection employed by poetry presses who award prizes instead of making books that will be read beyond that ephemeral fifteen minutes of publishing fame. Poetry like science is non-consensual. Burt’s New Thing is a consensus-forming gimmick whose soul purpose is to legitimize fluff and perpetuate awful, anemic, limping, bedpan poetry.

Poetry in America is in crisis. It is irrelevant because it has lost its capacity to put a name to what is wrong, to blame squarely the perpetrators, to witness what is real, to not shy away from what is tragic, what is ruined, what is bereft of value and spiritually corrosive. It has lost its talent for trafficking in facts and it has misread the relationship between the fact and the aesthetic possibilities locked within the fact. Indeed, in its very flight from the aesthetic, it has lost access to the fact, to the work of transformation, of redemption, of truth telling. Prominent movements in the 1980s and 1990s with their insistence of conceptual strategies, with their misreading of Nietzsche and their uncritical reception of the philosophies of the unmoored referent left American poetry neutered, blinded, gelded and hysterectimized.

An event as unspeakable as September 11 was simply beyond the purview of American poets. Poetry in its reduced state was wholly incapable of measuring up to the dimension of such horror. American poetry spoke to the horror in the voice of the politician, it became fickle and evasive like politicians, it became forgetful like politicians. It retreated quickly down the university rat-holes and hooked itself back up to the drip drip of sinecure, privilege and pretension.

I leave Harriet in even more despair than I was in when I arrived. I am more profoundly impressed with my father’s newfound ability to shovel mulch than I am with American poetry.

And yet, ever the businessman, the guy with his eye on the books, my father says to me after dinner, slumped sideways in his chair, talking about one of my friends, “but he has a book out and you don’t.” Those are his exact words. 

So, Stephen and Jon, you still have one up on me, according to the mulch shoveler. 

Gary Winogrand, one of America’s greatest street photographers, working in the tradition (or rather reworking the tradition) of Henri Cartier-Bresson, said that he was not interested in reality, per se, but what it looked like in a photograph. Camille’s passionate reading of a Bishop poem recently allowed me to make a connection I would have otherwise never made. Or at least that is what I assume, or I probably would have already made it. But, it was Camille’s picture of the poem, her version, what she highlighted and chose to include in the frame, how Bishop’s poem looked in her post that put me in mind of Padre António Vieira.

Padre António Vieira? The connection would not have been lost on Bishop, since she was, how shall we say, an honorary Brazilian, having lived there for fifteen years. She was also fascinated by the culture of Latin Letters.  He was a 17^th century Luzo-Brazilian priest who left behind him one of the great bodies of Portuguese prose. It is hard to imagine that she would not have come across his work, or at least learned something of his life.

It is one of his sermons, given three days before he was to leave to return to Portugal to push for legislation to free the indigenous peoples of Maranhão State from slavery that suddenly shed new light on the Elizabeth Bishop’s “This Fish”. A few years ago I had translated and excerpt of Padre António Vieira’s “Sermão de Santo António aos Peixes” [Saint Anthony’s Sermon to the Fish], an indictment of the vanities of his compatriots. It shares much with Bishop’s poem in terms of figures, metaphors, description (the suffocation of the fish in what Bishop calls the “terrible air”, the hooks and tackle of the trade) and above all the subject of human vanity.  The sermon is composed as an allegory. Bishop’s poem turns allegorical through the pressure she places on the visual. Both authors rely heavily on anthropomorphism.

One of the most exciting qualities of Padre Vieira’s prose is how close to necessity it is.  This necessity is larger than the author, and yet he invests himself in it, in the guise of Saint Anthony, as though he is the only one that actually understands the true extent of the problem. His stance is almost Socratic in the way he uses the rhetorical question and statements of the obvious to make his audience feel their own thoughtlessness; and not only that, like Socrates he takes actual risks in preaching what he has to say. So there is drama; though it is not displayed so much as implicit. The art of it is that it is so beautifully fluent and so unflinchingly pertinent to the task at hand. The irony, the critical eye, even the grace notes are subsumed in the unwavering logic. Each sentence wields a dialectical edge. The parodic attention to fish, and their fine scales draws comedy to itself in isolation, but as a component of the argument it lays bare its antithesis in a rather miserable depiction of human vanity. Bishop’s poem has much in common. They both, after all, describe the life, character and motivations of a fish.

“The Fish” must be one of Bishop’s most anthologized poems. That is because it is one of her most accessible, even though it doesn’t work that differently from “At the Fish Houses”, “The Bite” or even “The Moose”. They move, these poems, from banality via crescendo through ever deepening riffs of observation until enough pressure has accumulated that epiphany must ensue.

It is only natural that after a few readings of the poems I have just mentioned, the veneer of naturalness becomes increasingly thin and we are forced to look at them as pure aesthetic constructs, assembled with a watchmaker’s care, rather than realistic narratives of the poet immersed in the act of examining her world. We know there won’t be a crisis – things in a Bishop poem are always very precise, emotions always a bit gauzy. How unlike Emily Dickinson, another naturalist, where the movement from natural to metaphysical is always a sharp, somewhat insane leap of faith.  

In “The Fish” descriptive virtuosity is ennobled, to a certain extent, at the cost of its subject. The life of the fish, its history of conquest over adversity for which it carries its medals hooked to its jaw; the portrayed fish, with its wallpaper skin and the isinglass eyes – all of this is gorgeously rendered, yet finally somewhat improbable. They are details that, after we have read the poem enough times, tend to become cloying rather than expressive. Vieira’s fish is a rhetorical fish as well. The difference is that we assume this from the beginning. That’s the premise. Released from realism he manages to be more realistic.

The verisimilitude of the poem’s narrator, what there is of her, depends as well on the description of the fish. She uses the fish to justify her own presence as observer. Besides her keen eye she is hardly there, or made so discrete that she seems hardly there. “I caught”, “I looked”, “I held”, “I starred and starred”. There is absolutely no introspection.  Two issues come to the fore in this poem, both concern the narrator: on the one hand her rather disembodied presence as an actual person sitting in a boat and catching a fish, and, on the other, her exaggerated, painterly precision which increases in power as the depiction shuttles line to line gathering force.

Epiphanic structure, especially when used as a method of closure, typically releases its charge upon the character or narrator who has had the epiphany. James Joyce’s use of epiphany in the short stories of Dubliners is one of the 20th century’s great examples of shattering denouement through sudden realization. The reader, having gradually merged with the narrator is also meant to take the brunt of altered knowledge, in which the story we have just read, thinking one thing, suddenly begins to flicker and shift, like those old-fashioned mechanical arrival and departure boards in train stations and airports. Poets have always relied on this device. “And in the garden, cries and colors.” The last line of one of John Ashbery’s short obscure little poems from Rivers and Mountains is an epiphany wondering what it’s doing at the end of the poem it is assigned to, “Last Month”. And yet the poem would not be complete without it. One of Bill Knott’s great poems, published in Selected and Collected Poems (Sun Press, 1977), “To American Poets”, uses an anti-epiphanic ending to extraordinary effect. Because it is a political poem (one of the most successful ever written by an American in my opinion) we have felt the blood and flesh narrator throughout, as though he were mounting the barriers of 1848 and shouting, like Baudelaire, Il faut aller fusiller le Général Aupick! A bas Aupick! Aupick was Baudelaire’s much-loathed stepfather.

Because the narrator in the Bishop poem is as thin as air, the final epiphany simply discharges, to no effect, into that very same air. The more we read the poem, knowing that that final line is there, waiting to impress us, the more artificial the description of the fish becomes. Is it building towards the epiphany, or is it description for description’s sake? Likewise, the more remote and unlikely the narrator seems to us, the more meaningless the epiphanic structure with its melodramatic penultimate line of repeating rainbows finally is. Like all epiphanies, this one is meant to transcend, and to a certain extent replace the poem with new meanings. But we are not sufficiently invested in this opaque narrator to receive the charge. Any moral line, drawn between narrator and subject (the idea that the narrator has learnt something) is shot to hell by the baroque perfection of the poetic eye – at one remove from the speaker and finally the main subject of the poem. The failure of the poem is that we want the life of the person describing the fish to be sufficiently there to care about. But she’s not. Instead of cathexis there is diffusion. This misalliance grows the more we read the poem, and I’ve been reading the poem for thirty years. I first became uncomfortable with it when I tried to teach it about fifteen years ago, when, naturally I read it many times over a short period. Since then I have hardly read it at all. I finally realized there was a problem when, after reading Camille’s post, I tried to read Bishop’s poem once again for the umpteenth time and found it a labor, not of love.

The image of Thomas Mann at his writing desk is, for me, emblematic. The writer at work. Five thirty am, the light of day nowhere apparent, two candles illuminating the mahogany surface of his desk, haloing pens, inkstand, blank pages. The order in his studio is impeccable; filled with antiquarian trinkets, a crisp bourgeois density pervades. His only music, the scratch of the nib as it begins to fill the empty pages.
 

Shift to your typical painter’s studio: the smell of turpentine and oils, dust, canvas, glue, cigarette smoke. The music is often blaring and if not that the shuffling of the painter’s feet creates a kind grating effect, as though someone in an empty apartment on the floor above were rearranging the furniture. Add to that the spotting, dabbing, swatching brush; then the lurch of the observation stool (every painter has a stool, a bench, a chair) on the uneven, bedabbed, begrimed and, otherwise, abused floorboards of the studio.

That’s what Mercer Street was like. What today they might call a microloft, was, in 1981, when I first met Pontus, a dark and desperate attempt to draw domesticity out of some industrial past. You could see, beneath the clutter of canvases and pallets and tables with their jumble of tubes and pots that someone had tried to make a home there. But Pontus, the subletting painter, new to New York and its city-wide project of gentrification, had let the whole thing slide back. You had the sense that pure unwavering industry was again reclaiming the space. I only went there once or twice to meet this tall Swede in his paint-streaked foreman’s outfit, who spoke three languages fluently, and yet employed each with a different tone of reticence. He wanted me to tell him what he was doing. So I talked.

Broom Street Studio, New York

Soon the conversation moved to a grander studio. Thomas Mann brought the same mahogany desk from Germany to Switzerland, to California and then back to Zurich. Pontus moved all of his stuff to Broom Street in the winter of 1982 at the invitation of Jean Miotte, a French painter, with Orientalist leanings. Pontus flatly dismissed Miotte’s work, but Miotte would leave for weeks at a time, leaving Pontus in charge of the studio (the top row of arched windows looked due west, to the river and Hoboken beyond). Pontus and I entered into a kind of collaboration almost immediately. I sat in the middle of the studio with my portable Adler, drinking tea and smoking as I wrote, while Pontus painted. Later we’d make dinner, drink wine, and talk about his paintings. We rarely talked about my poems. The emphasis was on his paintings. And I would do most of the talking. Already his Bauhaus inspired canvases (Kandinsky, Klee) from Mercer Street, with their delicate surrealist dance of suspended figures, were exploding into heavier and thicker forms with chewed edges and boldly stenciled overlays, cryptic traffic signals, grillworks, screaming color-rattling heads, the canvases larger and the paint more thickly applied. A new visual language was developing – or was it enhancing an earlier language. I have watched Pontus’s style shift, double back, and then move forward again. His painting has always been located between abstraction and figuration, at times moving in one direction, at times in the other. These changes can often be linked (vaguely perhaps) to his particular working space, and also to whatever state he is in emotionally. He works in Paris, where he now does more sculpture, which look like his paintings in 3-D, ceramic slabs with similar motifs and palette; or in his Berlin studio where he paints, and then, each summer, in a village in the south of Sweden which looks out onto the Kattegat, the strait of water the lies between Sweden and Denmark. He is always shifting and adapting himself, never staying longer than a few weeks or a couple of months in one setting. Although, for two years he was gravely ill, and mostly stayed in France. During this time he kept a “diary” of very small paintings, a little larger than the average postcard; these were covered with painted and drawn images, little applications, cut-outs glued to the surface and a lot of scrawled writings. There are at least a hundred of them. They reminded me of poems.

Painters and poets have been wed from the beginning. Language itself has pictorial roots. The best know examples date back 17,000 years to the cave paintings in Lascaux and elsewhere. And yet the first representational art was found near Schelklingen in Germany and dates back the to beginnings of the Upper Paleolithic period, 35, to 40,000 years ago. It was out of this Aurignacian culture that the first cave art develops. From these drawings eventually (over a period of twenty thousand odd years…an unimaginable number, really; it almost makes us seem contemporaries of what we refer to as the Classical World) came pictograms, symbols still based on seen forms, but simplified and standardized, used to represent objects (and used today, in fact, in places where different language groups cross – cities, train stations, traffic signs – making sure we walk into the correct bathrooms). This was a kind of proto-writing still based in copying the shapes of nature. The development of writing followed a path of gradual abstraction; out of pictograms come ideograms, which represented ideas instead of objects. The rebus principle allowed the pictogram to represent the sound of a syllable pushing pictograms toward phonograms. Only Chinese and Japanese preserve the their logographic origins. Rebus writing was already part of Egyptian culture by 340 BCE, whence modern alphabets began to form.

Poets are attracted to the symbolic and pictographic traces of their own language in painting. For poets, painting is full of atavistic vocabularies. Painters, on the other hand, have always looked to poets to articulate what we might call their sublime backwardness. It is curious that the language of painting reached its most sophisticated moment, its representational apogee, in the late Renaissance and Baroque and only discovered a new language through a gradual loosening of the nearly photographic rigor of such artists as Vermeer and Dürer. The early Baroque painter Caravaggio preserved an exacting realism but upped the fever pitch, adding a dramatic tension that went beyond Renaissance composure. Like Rembrandt before him, with his almost psychoanalytic insistence on the self-portrait, Beethoven was already in departure mode. Große Fugue is the death rattle of the classical style. Arnold Schoenberg’s “Verklarte Nacht” is full of Beethoven’s late quartets.

It is over a period of nearly three centuries that prose begins to overtake poetry. Ironically Latin, which had continued to develop beyond the classical period began to fade as a civic, academic and theological language during the Renaissance. With its fascination for the pure forms of antiquity, it insisted upon a return to classical Latin, which hindered its further growth as working language. Modern European languages evolved in various forms. The novel, the essay, reportage, even the printing of gossip grew along with the growth of literacy and the mechanization of publishing. As the demographics of literacy spread, prose was ready to absorb the growth.

As though in retreat from public relevance and in search of aesthetic and formal purity, or perhaps forced inward by the demands of the market place, poetry and painting became less transparent, more expressive of the individual “soul”. By the time we reach the late 19th and the early 20th century, painting’s documentary role had been replaced by photography. Poetry would begin to construct its own parallel universe. The notion of entertaining the masses fell apart after Tennyson. Swinburne perhaps tried, or rather the job was handed to him, but he was already too debilitated by erudition and alcohol to be an effective “public” poet. Thomas Hardy is an amazing example in which this tension between public and private discourse (read prose and poetry) is played out in the selfsame author. There are also the belated exceptions – Robert Graves in some cases, who like Hardy constructed a popular prose persona and a more intricate poetic one; the short-lived Dylan Thomas; Robert Frost and Philip Larkin. But in all of these cases the public’s acceptance was based on the poet’s own construction of a public persona rather than on the poems themselves, which led to a misreading of an underlying nihilism and to an inability to attend to the high alter of poetic craft (which is what really drove these masters). Poetry and painting became, in the public eye, eccentric and difficult. Your average reader or connoisseur now needed guidance. A critical industry arose to usher us through the intricacies of post-modern painting and poetry.

Lithography, from Stundenglas, by Martin Earl and Pontus Carle (Edition Maldoror, Berlin, 1992)

The relationship between painters and poets (there were many poets who, themselves, painted, and painters who wrote) is well documented. There are the towering examples, from Michelangelo to Gertrude Stein, Cummings to John Ashbery, who for many years made his living as an art critic, while pretty much refusing to engage in literary criticism.

Frankly, as a poet, my own visual and musical education has been at least as important as my poetic one. At times more important. I have loved poetry, but my belief is that poetry looks up to the condition of music and to the sheer visceral impact of painting, whose special formal dynamic is released from time.

*

What sparked this meditation was a blog I read last week, or two weeks ago, on the Venice Bienalle by Stefano Tonchi, entitled “Venice, Slowly Surely” in the New York Times, June 9. Tonchi only uses the word “painting” once in the article, and it was used in passing. Nowhere does he discuss a painter.

Of course, the death of painting has been announced several times, perhaps most explicitly by the Russian constructivist, Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko. In 1921, in Moscow, he exhibited three monochrome canvases, Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow Color. He would later say that “I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it’s all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation.” In the context of the Russian revolution this could be seen more as a political and ideological expression than and aesthetic one, a rhetorical rather than a painterly gesture, utopian in its intent to mark the death of the bourgeois past and the beginning of a new Soviet Russia. Yet it echoes the Dadaist proclamation in Zurich in 1911 that “art is dead.” Marcel Duchamp would follow: his last painting, Tu m’, was meant as a statement of not only his own retirement from traditional oil on canvas, but the death of painting generally.

There is a 2003 article in The Guardian, by Andrew Marr, in which David Hockney is quite candid about the modern art world.

“Hockney lights a Turkish cigarette and quotes a thought from David Freeburg’s book The Power of Images: ‘When the history of art parts company with the history of images, the power is with images – and art becomes just a small thing.’
“As for himself, ‘I just say that I am interested in painting and drawing and picture-making, meaning, including photography.’ But he thinks the art world has become brittle and fragile, with too much power in the hands of too few.”

There are many painters who have resisted the post war dominance of conceptual art: Hockney, Gerhard Richter, Julian Freud, Kitaj, Paula Rego, Jane Freilicher and my friend Pontus Carle, just to name a few off the top of my head.

I know the expression “the death of painting” has become journalistic shorthand, but, as poet, I still feel threatened.

1.

My first camera, which I was given at the age of twelve, was a Japanese made Petri, a simple rangefinder camera that my father had bought at the PX in Okinawa, where he was stationed for three years as an Air Force Lieutenant, from 1954 to 1957. The camera traveled back to the U.S. in the hold of a ship, just as the pre-me did, doubly held in my mother’s “hold”, which was, in turn, held, strapped into a top bunk, in the ship’s hold. All together, I am told, we rode out a typhoon.

The rangefinder camera was a design perfected, most famously, in the early 1930’s in Germany by Oskar Barnack for Leica. Rangefinder cameras are still being produced, mostly because of a strong niche interest in the superior optics that the lenses used on these cameras are capable of and for the smallness of the camera itself, its precision and rapidity of use. Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Eggleston, Gary Winogrand and Robert Capa (who, during the Spanish Civil War, took perhaps the most famous combat photograph of the 20^th century on September 5^th 1936) all used Leicas. Among the camera wielding masses of today, it is rare, indeed, to see anyone using a Leica or a Zeiss rangefinder, not to mention film. 

At school, in a photography class, I learned the basics of my Petri, of negotiating between three possible choices: aperture (the F-stop: how wide the shutter blades would open), shutter speed (how long it would stay open) and film speed (either ASA, or –internationally – ISO). The higher the speed, 400 ASA let’s say, the greater the capacity of the silver halide emulsion coating the negative to absorb light, but also the more “grain” the image would contain. Lower ASA would produce a more pellucid image, but needed more light to begin with. These were the technical considerations – one could learn them. Then there was the aesthetic factor, framing and composition, which remains a mystery and cannot be, in the strict sense of the word, learned. Modern photography in a nutshell. The advent of the SLR (single lens reflex), in time for the Vietnam War (the Nikon F was the photojournalist’s M-16) simply substituted the range finder (which worked via parallax correction, aligning the viewfinder with the lens) for a through-the-lens view at the picture frame thanks to a mirror and a prism – that tiny pyramid on top of the camera.

During the 70s and 80s electronics, automated systems and plastics gradually overwhelmed those three basic principles, empowering and enabling the photographer, professional and amateur alike, to achieve a wider range of pictorial wonders without having to “think” about the simple technical compromises at the heart of photography. Motors replaced winders; auto-focus replaced manual focus, aperture priority and more sophisticated matrix metering released us from the need to understand light and finally fully automated systems eliminated the problem of getting bogged down in how the camera actually worked thus freeing up our creative energies and allowing us unfettered access to an ever opening visual world.

The advent of digital photography enhanced this paradigm even further. At the top of the list of miracles was the fact that as soon as the sensor replaced the negative, and the pixel replaced the grain in silver halide emulsions, a whole new dynamic was introduced. Since there was no longer a one to one relationship between cost and image, we were now free to shoot endlessly. This inspired a whole new way of taking photographs. The end product was released from its classic terms of production as labor was subsumed by the camera itself. Instead of doing the work of making an image, we could “capture” hundreds and pick the “one” we wanted, deleting the rest. And that one image (the result an aleatory process) could then be altered in Photoshop to suit our inner vision of the outer world: change the sky, add clouds, ramp up the saturation, remove the undesirables, like airbrushing away an apparatchik fallen from grace. There was no need to ever stop capturing, stop manipulating, stop deleting and adding, or to differentiate between still image and video, nor was there any need to understand the underlying technology, or the properties and raw materials converted by that technology. In fact, the technology was gradually replacing the subject. It was no longer the look of the world that fascinated, but the look of the way a very compact and, for most, incomprehensible system had taken that look and manipulated it according to a pixilated grid and its underlying Boolean system of endless recombinations, algorithms of plusses and a minuses: an amorality of one or the other. In the hands of the greatest practitioners it was still possible to distinguish and evaluate, aesthetically, what had come from their art. But even this ability to judge seemed to be increasingly eroded by a proliferating second echelon of photographers, whose qualities and languages created a swirl of color, a visual vortex generated by empowering anyone who cared to be a photographer, that sucked both master and minion into the same downward swirl. 

 2.

 The rise of literary theory and its colonization of what we used to quaintly call the “primary text” parallels the rise of those technologies which have changed “photography” into “digital capture”. Since the seventies and eighties of the last century the technology of literary theory, with its increasingly complicated circuitries, have gradually supplanted a more analog notion, especially in poetry, of that sense of a particular and completed act, of the poem as an aesthetic object which is capable, within the broader contexts and conditions of life: social, artistic and historical, of conclusion and, in its own way, like the photograph, of stopping time and dictating the terms of its own insight.

Like digital technology, literary (i.e. French) theory defers conclusion. Conclusions are of course reached. We must still eventually stop. The aching question is how inbuilt deferral affects the creative process, how students educated in theory first and poetry second end up writing poems, and how teachers (poets) who have deferred leaving the academic world end up teaching their students how to write poems. Just as there is a digital divide, there is a theoretical divide; both of them occurred in the last decades of the 20^th century, both changed the way humanity a large inhabits its world, and poets in particular inhabit poetry and the poem.

Try to calculate the distance between a fountain pen and a high-end program, like Microsoft Office for Mac, the crème de la crème of document producers. You can’t; that is because there’s a basic gap, a wormhole between the two space-times. Instant publication, the instantly created simulacrum of the published page, the ease of editing, the surpa-cerebral storage of knowledge, the never ending supply of reference which converts a hunch into an assumed fact on the basis of speed-of-light data sampling, the temptation to include everything, the failure to adjudicate and the whole loss of the manual, temporally based, book-in-the-hand, wrist-strengthening accumulation of knowledge have opened up new ways of viewing ourselves and our artistic products. Certainly a variety of suffocating hierarchies have been shattered, and a more democratic, a more leveled playing field has been established. But the heft of the thing has been lost. This gap finds its perfect analogy in the difference between the developed silver halide negative (which will never change) and the digital file, which has not only converted light into an algorithm instead of an image, but changes – loses information – every time it is manipulated; ie., opened, sent through the internet, printed, etc. With the pace of technology our seemingly secure digital files of today will be, within ten years, utterly outmoded, unusable artifacts of a bygone era, while the traditional negative will remain forever adaptable to new means of production.

The formational texts on poetics written during the eighties and nineties now read as apologias, attempts at measuring drift. And yet, like the new technological advances, their primary crusade was, at the time, to enable the reader, or to empower the user of the product. The author (read the death of – watered-down Nietzsche), was downgraded to the status of mechanic, a kind of interface, or a content provider, and the reader (under the tutelage of critic-theorists, some of whom were poets themselves) was elevated to the status of avenging angel. Armed with the hermeneutics of deconstruction, no poem was safe. Augmenting the reader’s tool-kit with the latest super-hard drill bits was coupled with an attempt to politicize the reader whose duty it became to tear down not only the poem, but the whole poetic canon; the political project was grounded in, and justified by a very traditional American trope of liberating the individual (a recycling of the radically conservative vision of the individual conquering the wilderness, that vast and open linguistic frontier). The incomprehensible poetry of the Language School blessed by the sanctification of a group of ur-language poets (Emily Dickenson, Gertrude Stein, the early Ashbery of The Tennis Court Oaths – his least favorite of his own books – and others) created an instant oppositional tradition for the now largely MFA sequestered avant-garde. For a poet-theorist of the day it was the politico-ethical projects like “anti-absorptive” poetics (the strategy of poetry as a continuation of politics by other means was how one of our more famous poets, a bit too cutely, put it) that legitimized an endless stream of conventionally un-interpretable poetry, and took as its target the poem as an aesthetically achieved whole. The fact that much of language poetry was anti-readable was hardly an impediment to the more over-arching project of empowering readers. While Williams and the Objectivists were intent upon opening up poetic form, and creating theoretical rigor and fixed strategies (Williams’s tripartite line, Olson’s breath-based scansions) that could stand up against the well-oiled mustaches and bow-ties of New Criticism, later generations of poet theorists would bring in traditional late nineteenth century notions of personal empowerment (echoing an Emersonian version of the anti-Trinitarian and personal Godhead), a kind of Unitarianism for poetry, or, in secular or civic terms, a Thoreauvian poetic disobedience.

There were, however, a couple of problems. Foremost among them was the fact poetry was never going to lead to broader political effect, nor would it free the reader, over the author’s dead body, especially since most of the readers were the actual authors. Most problematic of all, however, was that there was no evidence that readers wanted to be empowered in the first place. Empowerment ran against the two thousand three hundred year old notion, first formulated by Aristotle in his Poetics, of catharsis. According to the Aristotelian tradition readers read (or, in his version, attended theatre) because they wanted their emotions to be purged. They wanted to experience the emotion of falling from a great height and then they wanted to go home and have a good night’s sleep. The American poetical avant-garde of the late twentieth century lacked the humility to give American readers what they craved, a cathartic experience, and instead tried, with great hubris and the new technology of literary theory, to feed them an agenda.

I said above that there was an analogy to be made between the deferral built into digital technologies and the deferral (a radical stance against closure) built into literary theory and the now academically accreditable discipline of poetics. These days our cameras do the work for us, and armed with the conveniences of poetical technologies poets point and shoot. Photographers don’t know how their cameras work and poets don’t know how their poems work. The fabrication of vast quantities of doggerel is like the obsession of capturing every moment of our lives digitally and then “publishing” them on Flicker. 

W.H. Auden once said that he always felt that he was the youngest person in the room, even at an older age, when this was certainly not the case. I’ve felt similarly while blogging, especially when being reprimanded by commentators half my age. This could have all sorts of explanations. But for the moment let’s file them under “Monkey Glands”, aka W.B. Yeats. Today, I have a more pressing issue at hand, a comment on the younger generations of scriveners; or to reverse Auden’s impression, all of those younger than myself and involved, in one way or another, in the palimpsestic quest of poetry. I mean poets in their twenties, thirties and forties – fifty being the cut-off date.

Of course, there are exceptions but for the moment I am intent on generalizing. In the field of poetry, women make better bloggers than do their male counterparts, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the women are clearly superior. Not only is their poetry more ambitious and achieved but their criticism is more daring, their originality of thought deeper and their wit more honed.

Why should this be? One reason perhaps (and this is undoubtedly one of those clichés for which I will be run out of town) is that women have an ontological connection that men don’t have to making and creating, to nurturing form out of raw materials: out of themselves, out of language and out of the ground, in the sense of both lettuce patches and the Heidegerrean notion of fundamentum absolutum, or der grund. Heidegger posits a reversal of the Cartesian first principle and says “I am therefore I think.” This stands in well for the difference between male and female sensibilities.

Traditionally discouraged or prevented from taking part in social paradigms of creative expression (with the exception, of course, of motherhood) women have learned patience, the art of autonomy and a capacity for restraint. Related to these qualities is the fact that they are more open to difference, generally more tolerant, and less threatened by the mechanisms of authority: those mechanisms that are found in traditional knowledge structures, traditional language structures and traditional institutional structures. Since historically women have had to defend themselves against the power emanating from these structures, their mastery and insight into the workings of power is deeper. Likewise, women’s competitive instincts are more subtly attuned to the task at hand, the medium they are dealing with, the objectives of a given project than they are with the impression they would like to make upon the world. This comes from ease with self-effacement, which in artistic endeavors results in a more thoroughgoing capacity for immersion in the project at hand. They are more apt to experiment in ways that produce organic forms for expressive purposes rather than try, as men so often do, to trick language into duplicating the will. Because women are generally more sensitive to others, they are more sensitive to the needs of the poem. Because they are more coherent, grounded and possess a higher degree of self-knowledge at a younger age, they are better prepared to resist the influences of their teachers, their education and even the expectations of the medium they are working in. Hence they are more original.

Decades of work by women to open new formats, create equalities, to encourage creative and intellectual work, to valorize the special experiences of women (both material and intellectual), and to formulate a critical framework for understanding the various forms of oppression woman have born, and continue to bear, is, in my opinion, and in my special field of concern (poetry and literary criticism) also responsible for the health, innovation and continuing wonder of the medium. But it is not the whole story, and it is time to move on, away from theory and back to practice. On a practical level, that of making and reading poems, male poets now have more to learn from how women work, and from what they are saying and creating than vice versa.

And yet in spite of what I say above (characterizing women’s experience, perhaps inaccurately, and seeing their poetry as having benefited from that experience) I have never been comfortable with the designation “women’s poetry”, or with any of the other normative appellations that marked 20^th century discussions on the subject and that led to misleading typologies and atomizations. In fact, I follow Berryman’s cue in not distinguishing between British and American poetry – and I carry that further to all poets writing in English: Irish, South African, Indian and West Indian, Australian etc. (two of my favorite poets, John Kinsella and Less Murray, are from down under).

I’m even uncomfortable (since I live and work in a polyglot setting) with classifying poets or their poems by language. To pit French poets against German poets seems hardly useful when we finally arrive at the poem itself. My Portuguese colleagues, some of whom I’ve translated, are essentially doing the same thing that I do when I write a poem. The fact that they are writing in Portuguese doesn’t matter in the end. Of course different situations produce different poems, but this is a question of topicality and character and follows no scientifically consistent pattern. When I have to use categories I prefer them to be as large as possible and related to historical conditions, which effect poets in an aleatory fashion. I recently argued that postwar Central European poetry was stronger than that produced in Western Europe over the same period, but these are supranational categories and have more to do with how two different political systems effected creativity in a variable and highly unorganized fashion. Just as women, over the last three centuries, have had more hurdles to overcome than men when it came to legitimizing their status as artists and poets, Central Europeans had far more difficulties creating poetry and publishing freely in the postwar period. Perhaps a degree of resistance helps in the creation of art. Be it as it may, it is the art that we must finally look at, independent of even the most sweeping categories.

(cf. http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/onlinemagazine/2007May/20quintais-earl.pdf )

This is not to say that poets should not use (if such were possible) their special experience, experience that can derive from many things: location, language, race, gender, poverty, wealth, temperament, what they read and what they don’t read, or whatever. But for the reader or the critic to use these experiences taxonomically corrupts our capacity to evaluate poetry at the level of the poem.

By looking at poetry qua poetry we are more apt to read more sensitively, praise more accurately and winnow more decisively. But just in case you’ve missed my point, I think we’d all be the better for paying serious attention to the poems now being made by poets who happen to be women, and trying to figure out why they’re so good.

We are rapidly approaching the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, the most emblematic event of the collapse of communism in Europe, and of its ensuing collapse in the Soviet Union itself.

  This will take place on November 9, 2009. The symbolic import, not to mention the material and psychosocial consequences of this event for both Europe and the world, cannot be underestimated. And it will take historians of future generations to clear the debris and construct a viable narrative of the period. One thing is certain however, the events that led up to 1989 and those that followed created the first great geopolitical paradigm shift since the First World War and the October Revolution, ending alignments and misalignments, ending a century of war, both hot and cold and wars of proxy (often fought in the aftermath of decolonization), and provoking the implosion of the 20^th century’s two principal economic systems (or perhaps more accurately put, marking the definitive end of one, and the beginning of the end of the other). The interregnum that followed 1989, was short-lived. Communist economic policies collapsed with communism itself; the western free market economic system (partly through its hubristic response to the collapse of the command and control economy of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries) would take another two decades to burst its bubble. Meanwhile, by 2001, twelve years after the fall of the Berlin wall, a new brand of ideological division on a global scale, one that had been gathering force ever since the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, suddenly became painfully concrete. Similar to the continuum between the first two world wars, the first Gulf War, predating September 11^th, which was followed by the invasion of first Afghanistan and then Iraq should be seen as parts of the same event, the second war arising out of the unfinished business of the first, and, as well, a new interventionist agenda in Washington, which we now know was already in the works before September 11, but became a kind of juggernaut afterwards. The rise of El-Qaeda’s extremist ideology was already beginning to underpin the West’s anxiety over oil. The events of September 11^th provided concrete proof, as though any were needed, that we were facing a formidable enemy and tipped us into remobilization in the Gulf. Militarily, President Obama’s recent election, based on a platform of change, has changed nothing. The drawdown in Iraq has been revised several times and still seems more contingent upon events on the battlefield than any firm date set by Washington, and rather than a withdrawal from the region, as though that were even conceivable, what is really occurring is a shifting of fronts and a relocation of resources back to Afghanistan and most likely into Pakistan, as the national governments of both countries continue to crumble and Taliban/Al-Qaeda forces push ever closer to Islamabad. The Thirty Years War of the 21^st century looks set to continue. Except in this case it will be financed by China, who owns most of the United States debt, nearly one trillion dollars of it. The British Empire collapsed in similar fashion, as the world’s hired gun, even as it ran out of money to pay for bullets.

All this by way of a short introduction to one poet’s observations on how art functions in times of duress.

                                                            ***      

Roughly two weeks ago (on the 21^st of April) I came across an article in my daily newspaper with the following title: O Muro de Berlim vai ser restaurado pelos artistas que o pintaram há 20 anos (The Berlin Wall Will Be Restored by the Artists that Painted it Twenty Years Ago). As a sometime resident of Berlin, and a self-declared Wallist, this caught my attention.

What is a Wallist? This is a term I devised for someone (namely myself) who was obsessed, not with the wall, since it was no longer there, but with the space left in its wake – at the time a sandy, weed-cluttered corridor. In 1992, it was still possible to follow the “death strip” left by the dismantling, a process which was just being completed when I made my first trip to Berlin. As you walked along, West Berlin was on the right, and East Berlin on the left (or vice versa, depending on which direction you took). These were two distinctly different worlds in terms of architecture, mood, and what photographers call “grayscale”, the gradations of which I worked out in my notebook. I would start out from Kreuzberg, where I lived right across the street from the swimming pool and Görlitzer park, where the old Görlitzer Bahnhof once stood, gateway to the East and the principal rail route to Vienna – hence the name of my street, Weiner Strasse. The railway station was bombed into scattered bricks on the 3^rd of February, 1945 during raids that left 3,255 people dead or missing and over 119,000 homeless in the surrounding Kreuzberg district.” Görlitzer Bahnhof was re-opened, in makeshift form, by June, a month after the fall of Berlin. Yet, as relations between East and West chilled and it was not longer tenable for a Western station to operate on an Eastern line, it was finally closed to passenger trains by the GDR in April of 1951, although freight still passed between East and West until 1986, where there was a border crossing point on the bridge over the Landwehrkanal at the end of the park.

In 1992, there were no train tracks in the park itself, though it was easy to identify the line they followed. But on the other side of the canal, in Treptow, the adjoining East Berlin neighborhood, the tracks were still there, rusted in disuse next to an abandoned factory collapsing, brick by brick. From my house, I would cross the rickety bridge, or follow the canal into Treptow, where I would pick up the line that the wall had left.

This ghost strip was, for me, a place of the imagination, a nullity so rife with the echoes of postwar history that the air seemed to crackle in distress. I set myself to studying the topographies of this vast, flat, suddenly “united” city, venturing at times into the Eastern neighborhoods, and at other times into the Western ones. I sketched, took notes, photographed. I had already lived in a divided Europe for five years. I pleaded with this gash (pleaded with its random piles of wall rubble, the lonely watch tower no longer watching anything and with the strange cut-off houses) to reveal itself to me. And, as poets do, I became the actor in that slow process of revelation, coaxing secrets out of vanished stone.

Having watched the events of 1989 on television, far away in Portugal, the toppling of the GDR had remained somewhat abstract to me. Now that I was in situ the negated enormity of the obliterated wall began to whisper. The Soviet Union had collapsed only two months earlier. The acrid sting of heating coal was still palpable in the winter air. I had had to learn how to light and stoke a coal fire in one of those large ceramic stoves that occupied a central place in every Berlin apartment, East or West. The city was, of course, still divided. The Germans had a name for this: “Mauer im Kopf”, which means “the wall in the head.” This division was glaringly visible. You could see it most blatantly in the way the Ossis dressed as you took the U-Bann into East Berlin, in the shock that was etched on their faces. Lives in the East were coming undone. Some left for the West as soon as they could, others (my friend Misha, for instance, a painter) escaped to Moscow – though he was soon back in East Berlin. Theirs was a kind of naiveté, the East Germans, and yet that was balanced against a toughness of spirit and the sense of fatality that comes of having been stripped of something essential (in their case, time). They reminded me of the Portuguese in a certain way, geographically isolated and only 15 years past their own 40 odd year experience of dictatorship. All of this was brought into high relief crossing west to east.

The first time a saw the most extensive section of remaining wall was when we were leaving for a reading tour, first to Leipzig, then to Halle and Jena. It was still only about 8:30 in the morning, but Max, my editor, wanted to stop in Alexanderplatz to stock up on supplies for the journey east. I waited by the car (my little Renault), illegally parked, while Max, Misha and Pontus went to get what was needed, which turned out to be a bottle of vodka and a case of beer, some sausage and bread and big bag of potato chips. Once we were on our way, bottles opened, conversation roaring, Max started shouting directions from the back seat as we sped along Mühlenstrasse, which runs along the east side of the river Spree. The wall suddenly loomed into site, covered with mural paintings and graffiti, before ending abruptly about a kilometer and half later at Oberbaumbrücke, one of Berlin’s loveliest bridges, with its red brick turrets.

I learned later that this was known as the East Side Gallery, supposedly the world’s largest open-air gallery. This is the section of the wall that will be restored, according to the article in O Público. All of the murals and graffiti will be removed, the underlying cement reinforced and then the whole strip will be repainted under the direction of Theirry Noir, one of the original West Side wall painters, by the original artists, and then covered with a graffiti proof varnish, an irony which cannot (to indulge in the obvious pun) be varnished over.  

I haven’t been to Berlin for about three years. During my longest sojourns between 1993 and 2005 I lived in East Berlin in Friedrichshain, right off one of its central avenues, Karl-Marx-Allee, on Richard-Sorge-Strasse. When I came across this article in my daily newspaper, I thought back to that first morning in February 1992. What had bothered me was that the murals and the graffiti were on the wrong side. I realized immediately that this seemingly Holy Scripture had been scripted post-89. The authentic writing on the wall had occurred on the other side, the West Berlin side. The East Side Gallery post-dated the Cold War. It was a species of mimicry. This section of the wall should have been grey. Grey with white panels, a page on which it was illegal to write.

notes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Görlitzer_Bahnhof
Midas Filmes – www.midas-filmes.pt (translations by the author).
http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/incisiveline/handouts/printresearchpapers/relief%20printmaking%20essay.pdf
http://www.galerie-noir.de/ArchivesEnglish/walleng.html
http://www.be.berlin.de/en/stories/art/stories/thierry-noir/
ibid.

NB: I will try to integrate these notes into the text briefly. To my sources, thanks for your patience.

The catalyst, the fuse, call it what you like, whatever it is that sets sweeping change into motion, often comes in the form of epiphany, the sudden realization that things are not what they had seemed to be a moment earlier.

At the time this happened to me, I was living in an attic apartment in Paris down the street from the Moulin Rouge in Pigalle (a dismal, seedy neighborhood) in a converted chambre de bonne. It had a nice kitchenette and seemed like the inside of an upside down boat. I had settled down to write after dinner, having pulled up a side table in front of the sofa, opened and loaded my portable Adler with the much-loathed blank sheet of paper, ready to put down, as I always was, the first thing that came into my head. Clackety-clack. One line, two lines, a half page. Then everything ground to a halt.

“Why was I writing in this way and not in another way,” I asked myself.

Maybe this will strike you as banal – it is banal. (In fact, I have learned over the years that banality is the wellspring.) But this was the moment in which my “faith” began to unravel.

Without my coreligionists, my fellow travelers: my teachers, my friends; without that certain quality of air that filled the cultural bubble I’d inhabited during my New York years, where I’d blended reading and writing and talking into an essence, a vehicle, a means forward. Without all that, and with all the newness and the loneliness of my present situation bearing down on me, I broke.

Everything I’d written up until that moment, everything I’d thought about how poetry should be carried forward, that whole linkage between ourselves, as writers, and a certain tradition we’d grown up by, seemed discardable, flimsy, irrelevant and self-indulgent.

It was the moment in which I realized that the construction of a certain discourse that went by the name of “contemporary American poetry” was context sensitive in a way that other discourses were not. It simply didn’t work (for me, at least) outside its own well-established parameters. What seemed perfectly credible in New York came off as gibberish in Paris.

Novels didn’t disappoint in this way, even in translation. Or history, or biography, or memoir, and certainly not the best of contemporary writing on science. Nor did painting, or contemporary classical music. These forms, at their best, transcended boundaries. But contemporary poetry, my own and others, felt increasingly parochial. I felt myself suddenly mourning, not only my own failure, but the failure of American poetry in general.

Of course, identifying one’s own failure with perceived larger failures is one of the first signs that delusional thinking is setting in. In the poet’s case, a more general loss of linguistic bearings (at the macro level, of poethood and tradition) tends to dovetail with the process of writing poetry itself, in which losing one’s language can be a poem-by- poem experience. Since poets, more than other writers, are always faced with the challenge of linguistic reinvention, the whole existential crisis of writing poems in the first place, of loss and overcoming loss, is often imported into the drama, becoming the meta-subject of the poem itself.

After leaving New York, I experienced this loss at both the macro and the micro levels. It took me about three years to learn how to write again. There were a few beacon poems along the way, but when I look back at those years. I see mostly grayness, the slate-colored Paris sky and a series of failures and still births. And yet, paradoxically my ability to incorporate this failure into my poems was a way to continue writing them. 

Over the next weeks, months (we’re talking 1983) as this realization began to take hold, I allowed my living masters (those that actually taught me), John Ashbery above all, C. K. Williams, James Tate, Ann Lauterbach, to somehow escape my general condemnation. But I was already seeing them in a new light, already glimpsing a new way to read them, ways with which they probably wouldn’t have agreed. 

On the other hand, I saw a vibrant health in poetry translated into English (even if it wasn’t well translated). The Russians first of all, and Eastern European poetry (Holub, Popa, Herbert), then Cavafy, Pavese and Pessoa (Pessoa before I even moved to Portugal…thanks to Edward Honig’s translations). My overriding impression was that this was poetry that favored subject matter over self-expression. In fact, in their poetry self-expression was often stripped down, minimalist, anti-poetic, as Nicanor Para would call it. It was grounded in observation of the world and not obstructed by observation of one’s own delicate sensibility. Cavafy looked at himself, in his autobiographical poems, with the same ironic detachment that he used to look at historical figures and the struggles of ancient communities – and yet this didn’t prevent his poems from being intimate. The poet as the center of his own universe was still there, still executive, however toned down. By comparison, the American avant-garde seemed a gifted yet over-straining adolescent. I was, at the time poised somewhere between the New York school and the Language poets – one of my favorite books was Charles Bernstein’s Controlling Interests (1980). I liked the audacity and endless invention. Even though the program (because these poets always came with a kind of ersatz Frankfurt School program) seemed a bit silly, inflated. European poets, as I began to figure out, were not really concerned with “poetics” – poetry was an act of survival, the poem an act of witnessing.

It also could have been the denaturing process of translation itself, which gives us, at best, the husk of poems. But it was the husk I needed, not the grace notes. I needed a new conceptual platform.

 Why?

Looking back on this moment a quarter of a century later it seems quaint: a young writer who had based his whole identity around one of the many ways to be a poet (the New York way in my case) suddenly discovering that this particular way, like wine, didn’t travel well. It was, in short, non-adaptive. It couldn’t possibly process what was happening with my life, not to mention what was happening in Europe at the time. One reason was that the New York style meta-poem, the poem that was, in formal terms, at least in part, a celebration of its own ability to be a poem against all odds, shunned that old equation which said the poet was uniquely fit to observe the world, to be the winnower, to overcome contingency and assemble a narrative. This tradition had been a strong presence in American literature in figures as diverse as Frost, Williams, Bishop, Thoreau. But the American avant-garde in those years was more concentrated on assimilating continental theory than describing suburban hedgerows.

My own problem, at that given moment (which I realize could be taken as a sudden splurge of neo-romantic self-pity) was, in fact, more practical. I was suddenly aware of the fact that I had not really been trained to be a writer at all, so much as some exquisite compiler of verbal obfuscation.

Something fundamental about how poets are perceived by society made me feel embarrassed, presumptuous. Uprooted, as I was, the French language all around me, I was suddenly averse to calling myself that thing that I had staked my whole identity on: poet. I was embarrassed by the fact that poets were not tested, like other writers, in the market place. They lived off grants, on campuses and only expressed their poethood to captive audiences, their students and other poets. The French poets, were the same, they were all but invisible. The French press made a great deal out of its novelists, but poets were hardly on the radar. For all that the world cared, we might as well have been speaking Latin among ourselves, so monastic, so cloistered had we become. I had been protected from this realization while living in New York, since there was never a shortage of poets, readings, and sympathetic types who liked the bohemian ambiance. But this life tended to obscure the extravagant act of introversion that writing poetry in America was, as well as the new theoretical apparatus that underpinned it. 

Without that support system, the production of the kind of poetry that flourished in a particular context, yet not beyond it, and the whole set of characteristics that went with it – indeterminacy, dissonance, the play on register, disjunction, the idiom of camp, the derision of values, the so-called critique of establishment narratives – seemed like outdated ordnance. I wanted to connect with the new friends I was making, but they were unable to read what I was writing, even if some of them were native English speakers, long-time residents in Europe, artists and intellectuals. But mostly I needed to make sense of cobblestones, of a majestic river, of the way an army of sweepers opened the street gutters each evening as this city began to quiet, the round café tables with the inevitable ribbed metal band wrapping around a Formica top, cardboard coasters and bakelite ashtrays, the interior courtyards, and pollarded plane trees.

To return to the original intention of this present set of posts (my presumption of offering practical advice on the option of voluntary exile) I would say that the lessons I took from those early days, when I was still living in Paris, before moving to Portugal, were that one’s initial education in the craft needed to be tested severely if the craft was to be raised to the level of art. De-familiarization, self-estrangement and the abandonment of community were, however harsh, ways to test one’s range as a writer. The immersion in foreign cultures, the learning of foreign languages, and then operating in those languages are for the poet counter-intuitive and to a certain extent self-destructive. Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, all refused to leave “mother” Russia, which, in becoming the Soviet Union, threatened to cripple their creative lives. And yet for them mother Russia was as much a state of language as it was a nation of peoples, sovietized or otherwise.

The situation today for English writing poets is perhaps similar, in the sense that our stance is still defensive. 

For the Russian poets after 1917, a great part of their mission was to salvage freedom of expression and the Russian language against the perversity of the political slogan and the bureaucratization of public discourse, not to mention saving their own skins. Young North American poets of the early 21st century must come to understand that the English language has become the global language, and this global idiom comes in two basic forms: hegemonic and co-opted; that is, English has become a language which embodies both power and the struggle against power, both the standardization and the defense of the particular. Historically, this trend emerged out of a postwar American economic boom, which spread to Western Europe through, firstly, the Marshall Plan and became consolidated when both America and Europe were, in the postwar context, simply kept on a nearly full-time war-footing, both economically and ideologically, the latter tending to enforce a polarization between the western consumer class – buying a new car was a patriotic act – and the communist enemy, collectivized and without the freedom to consume. English, following the American model was the preeminent language of consumerism. On a geopolitical level, the Cold War, the continuing American occupation of Europe, the creation of NATO and the implementation of that vast military industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned against all helped to consolidate English as the supranational language of commerce, culture and war. 

Adopting the language of the victors has, to a certain extent, allowed Europe to unionize and live in peace. But, at this point it has gone far beyond that. The only way to understand how English operates in the world today is to leave the metropole and see for yourself how the process is evolving. These days, the best way to see the English language is to look at it from the outside, to hear how the world speaks it, and to learn to speak in their languages, as both a gesture of respect, and for the insight it provides into the relationship between the syntax of a culture and the way that culture manifests itself materially. It is only then that one can begin to understand the forces that have come to form our own contemporary vernacular. Poets no longer create the language of the tribe (there is no longer just one tribe). It is our duty now, since English has become the language of globalization, to continually recycle all of its registers, to shift and shuffle them, to be at once plain spoken and baroque, as need be, to keep the language exercised, lean and honest.     

Perfect Parallax Correction

In my case it took almost two years of leaving and then returning, and then leaving once again to reach the point at which I finally gained what I would call a legal footing in Europe. In the midst of these two years (1984 – 1986) I even spent a week in China – an alternative to the European project – having planned for a year. It was a tumultuous period. I was arrested once in Paris and locked up in a classic gaol, the Conciergerie prison on the Ile de la Cité (exactly where, one hundred and ninety-one years earlier, in 1793, Marie Antoinette had awaited execution); on another occasion I was pulled off a train on the Swiss-Italian border and detained for several hours (both times for having been found to be in possession of illegal class-b drugs – the first time they were hid in my pouch of tobacco, the second time in my left sock); besides these mishaps, I was constantly dodging the gendarme’s check points in the Paris metro, due to my chronically defunct tourist visa. Even recently, I was nearly arrested in Frankfurt at a mid-airport Reisekontrolle, which seemed to loom up out of nowhere, because my Portuguese residence card was five years out of date.

After living in Europe for twenty-five years I feel quite at home. But I’ve come to realize that I will never feel quite so at home as I did in America before I left. Maybe this has to do more with middle age looking back upon youth, than it does with relative topographies. And yet, were I to return, there would be no possibility of feeling, in any sense of the word, at home in America, since the country I remember no longer exists. To survive this experience of limbo (of feeling more or less at home nowhere) I have had to construct a kind of internal, or personal country. In the following series of posts I would like to show young American poets considering voluntary exile just how this country of invisible borders and unlikely landscapes came into being and why a young poet, despite all of the difficulties of doing so, would want to live there.

We must first, however, deal with certain terminologies, namely the notion of exile and its related categories. North America (that is, the United States and Canada), European countries and a smattering of others around the globe are the only places on the planet from where one cannot, in the true sense of the term, be exiled. (It is only recently that the central and eastern European countries lost their ability to force exile upon their citizens, just as, in the mid 1970s, Portugal and Spain did.) In these fortunate places, a mere fraction of the planet’s populated surface, the only legitimate reason to assume the label of exile is if one has committed a serious crime, that is, exile as an alternative to incarceration (though in the eyes of the law you are a fugitive, a word which is derived from the Latin verb  fugere; and cognate with the very common Portuguese verb fugir, to abandon a place rapidly and precipitately). In this case, there are a bevy of states to protect you, basically all of those which still have the capacity to force exile upon their own citizens. Often, when asked why I left America, I respond, ironically, tive de fugir - “I had to escape,” a “fugitive” from American poetry.

At any rate, the term exile is thus inappropriate for young North American poets. And yet, related terms (expatriate, immigrant, émigré) certainly fall short of describing the life of a young North American poet living abroad. I associate the term “expatriate” with high-earning employees of multinational corporations. Some of them, over the years, whether Europeans or Americans, have been my friends and this is the designation that they feel most comfortable with. Low-salaried teachers working abroad in private-sector language schools (some of the most likely employers) also favor describing themselves in this way. Politically, emotionally and materially the term “expatriation” is less freighted with the various connotations that accrue naturally to the term “exile”. It is a more neutral term that admits a certain notion of impermanence or transience. It contains no sense of rejection or formal removal from one’s country of origin. For its part, the term “immigrant” is at once too class-specific (in socio-economic or historical senses), that it also falls short of adequately describing the permanent state of cosmopolitan discomfort that poets living abroad feel. Immigration is driven above all by the economic realities that individuals face. In my case, I fled a life of certain prosperity for one of polite poverty. This was not immigration in any sense of the word. I simply began to wander, and when I found the conditions I thought conducive to a life of poetry, I settled.

Contrarily, the term “émigré” carries with it the historical weight of war, of migrations of communities and of the dissolution of erstwhile sustaining political systems. Émigrés (like immigrants/emigrants) are more apt to live in improvised communities rather than as individuals alone among (for them) foreigners. A classic example would be the Nabokovs, who fled the Bolsheviks along with a range of Russians of various political stripes, many of them from the middle and upper classes. There is a lovely, albeit exaggerated, description in Speak, Memory, of Vladimir and his father above deck, as the family fled Sebastopol on the last ship, playing chess, under a hail of bullets directed at their fleeing vessel. Though he was fluent in English and French by the age of seven (not nearly so in German, which by his own admittance he never properly mastered), his early literary career was conducted, first in Berlin, then in Paris, in Russian and directed at a Russian émigré audience. Nabokov, like many of his cosmopolitan contemporaries (Walter Benjamin for one, who wasn’t quite as lucky) can claim the double status of having graduated from émigré to exile; in Nabokov’s case, this was an unparalleled bit of good fortune for the novel in English. After fleeing the Bolsheviks, he was then forced to flee the Nazis (his wife was of Jewish descent). His émigré community quickly became a thing of the past in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

You might wonder why I am harping on designations, why I needed to classify myself. It is because of the sheer transformative nature of the move. Even if you are unpublished and unknown as a poet, just engaging in such an activity, adds, unlike being, say, an air traffic controller does, a public layer to your private layer. I needed to find some label for this, especially since I was abandoning the community of poets (the early 1980s community in New York) that had sustained me. I was in subtle ways rejecting them. Though they didn’t need to be rejected, and certainly didn’t know they were being rejected, I needed a label that would legitimize what I was doing, something that would carry the punch of Robert Graves’ title Good-by To All That.

So, let me tell you how things panned out as a voluntary exile, and how this led to my oxymoronic life abroad.

In terms of employment, sustenance, legality, housing, etc., I kind of just rode the curve. My first strategy, once I had established myself in Paris, on my flimsy tourist visa and in my dear friend Pontus’ atelier, was to return to New York whenever I ran out of money, work for a couple of months, a semester here, a restaurant gig there, and then return to Paris on a refreshed visa and never more than a thousand dollars in American Express traveler’s checks. That went a long way, since I had learned quickly how to survive on a few francs per day. I paid Pontus a nominal rent, the electricity came in through an illegal feed, I never used the telephone, ate vegetables, rolled my own cigarettes and spent my days reading and writing in the public library at the Centre Pompidou. Finally I got a teaching job at a private language school and was paid under the table. I nearly snagged a job which would have kept me in Paris at the American University, but I ran into that familiar “catch-22”: to get the job I needed to have working papers and to get working papers I needed to have a job. What I would like to suggest is that the material part of eloping with oneself was the easy part. The nuts and bolts of it would be different today. My escape was analogical, yours will be digital. That, in itself, will make a huge difference. Though it is comforting to know that our operating system is still not purely digital. We still need ADCs for everything, analogue to digital converters. And all exiles, whether voluntary or otherwise, should be happy to note that the technology to overcome converter nonlinearities, is called “Dither”.

It was the emotional (and since I had reached the stage of self-apprenticeship) the literary consequences which were more deeply problematic. I will take these difficulties up in part two.

Much of what passes for poetry these days is written by talented pretenders, or pretending talents. They are the products of a system which turns out poets as ably as medieval Italian city-states turned out artisans: legions of well-trained technicians who made careers out of duplicating the brush strokes of their masters. Their task was to insure that production levels were maintained in the ateliers of the day and that the decorative needs of the aristocracy were met. Public buildings, houses and city squares were adorned with works that, in most cases, served to reinforce the status quo by raising the excellent poses and good deeds of a landed and arrogant ruling class to emblematic exaggerations and symbolic heights. Sometimes, by its refusal to stray from the status quo, both in terms of the various formalisms of the day and the subjects (or mere aural content in some cases) that it indefatigably reiterates, contemporary poetry seems to provide this same service, essentially a decorative function, for the dwindling literate classes of our times.

The process of downgrading, which is a re-codification of those same aristocratic requirements, into what might constitute a viable (and politically corrected) discourse for modernity (a kind of retooling of the high-art medium which poetry has been since, well, since it began to be written down instead of recited from memory) for the super-select audience of intellectual elites that constitutes the contemporary readership of poetry today, has largely been managed by a cabal of editors, panels of judges, senior poet-professors and an archipelago of coercion know as the MFA. The young poets themselves, paying dearly to be processed through the mill, seem, at times, almost secondary to the systemic necessity to produce professional poets.

So what happens when one of their greatest talents (for they do exist, these great talents, at a ratio to the general poetic population that great talent has always maintained) decides to go to prison?

C.D. Wright, who, for a long time now, has been patrolling that borderland between the so-called mainstream and its self-regulating experimentalist periphery, has done just that. And what she brings back, in the form of One Big Self (Copper Canyon, 2007) is indeed a challenge to the poetic cold war that still, despite any lack of interest by the general reading public, rages on. Her book shatters the distinctions (simply by ignoring them) that have kept two important factions of American poetry apart since the period of late high modernism – one of which leveled its sites on a mimesis of the vernacular, the line which runs from Whitman to Williams, to Black Mountain and, finally, and dismally, to Buffalo; and the other which, based on an appropriation of three centuries of continental tradition, adopted a mandarin taste for epithet, metaphysics and, in spite of Eliot, or perhaps because of him, the lyrical sublime. The latter tended toward the private world of book-lined studies and summers on the coast. The former lived in Harlem, Brooklyn and Morocco and constructed a faux vernacular.

Only the rare exceptions spent any time in prison: for example, Robert Lowell, for a year, for the crime conscientious objection, not so much against the idea of service but because of his manic enthusiasm, at the time, for Roman Catholicism. While “Memories of West Street and Lepke” from Life Studies, is a description of prison life through the eyes of a Bostonian Brahmin (much in the tradition of Thoreau, the town-dweller turned moral botanist and taking to the woods), C.D. Wright’s One Big Body becomes instead, through a kind of mutli-vocal collage, an embodiment of prison life. It is as though she went to these places and said, “here, use my voice, make it yours and tell your story.” Her poem, by adopting, in part, a documentary approach, by maintaining something of the journalistic distance of classic reportage, at the same time that it makes itself utterly porous, almost to the point of authorial erasure, gives us the deeper picture, the inside story. I can think of no other poem in recent American literature that combines an epic framework with such an intimate regard for subject, or perhaps I should say, for the language of her subjects, incarcerated Americans.

Joseph Brodsky, who was certainly no neophyte when it came to internment, defined prison as “a lack of space compensated by a surplus of time.” Many of the voices embodied in One Big Body would agree. In fact time, what to do with it, becomes the daily weather of incarceration. Wright confronts this dichotomy (lack of freedom/ time on your hands) by showing us how prisoners narrate their experience, how they fill the time by talking about where they are, what they’re missing, and what they’ll do when they get out. Wright’s ability to capture these poignant strategies in a language which is both authentic and arch, exacting in detail and so soulfully clipped, reminds one of a much different case: the late Ashbery: stream-consciousness vernacular. In both cases the American idiom is being used to its fullest. Wright’s textures, explicitly and implicitly loaded, in a political/didactic sense, contrast with Ashbery’s no less serious attempt to portray, in Steinian terms, “everybody’s autobiography”. Yet where Ashbery appropriates the vernacular (just as Byron did in his time) with an expressive mixture of irony and philosophical wonderment, Wright let’s it filter through her. They both owe a great debt to William Carlos Williams. But the similarities perhaps stop there. Ashbery’s more patrician and delicate deployment is much closer to Romantic precedents of self-expression, albeit stripped of the traditional lyrical ego. Wright’s project is documentary. One feels there is a hard fact behind every line. She has, in this sense, found a new use for poetry.

The book starts with an introduction, in prose, called “Stripe for Stripe” (echoing both traditional prison garb and the American flag). It runs about five pages and serves a few different functions, including that of wrenching our heart from our heart-holders and preparing us for what’s to come. The relationship with Deborah Luster, the photographer who drew C.D. Wright into the collaboration, is hinted at; intimations of the language to come (“the soft-spoken cadence of Louisiana speech”) signal that this will be a work with something of an ethnographic cast; and there is also a rough narrative of the fieldwork which foretells a kind of authenticity that American poetry is not used to. That is, the documentary approach that I have mentioned above. The need to accommodate poetry to this particular method, is justified almost in the form of an apologia, in which the poet, C.D. Wright, anatomizes (whether retrospectively on not) the narrator of the poem. For this reason, the introduction is, in traditional terms, perhaps the most intimate part of the book. And yet these five pages prepare us for how explicit the once-removed narrator of the poem itself will be.

From the introduction then: “Driving through this part of Louisiana you can pass four prisons in less than an hour. ‘The spirit of every age,’ writes Eric Schlosser, ‘is manifest in its public works.’ So this is who we are, the jailers, the jailed. This is the spirit of our age.”

The invocatory, to the poet herself, (her way of subtly reassigning narrational angle of view) is mixed with the expository: “Try to remember it the way it was. Try to remember what I wore when I visited the prisons. Trying to remember how tall my boy was then. What books was I teaching. Trying to remember how I hoped to add one true and lonely word to the host of texts that bear upon incarceration….Something about the extra-realism of that peculiar institution caused me to balk, also the resistance of poetry to the conventions of evidentiary writing.”

Quoting from this poem is like quoting a sentence (barring the one that opens the book) from Dickens’ Hard Times, and then expecting that sentence to somehow stand in for the whole. This is a shame, because almost every line in the book could stand on its own in the middle of an otherwise blank page and tell us something. Aphoristic, numinous, down to earth, telescopic – these are just some of the qualities that describe the voice of the hovering, permeable narrator that gradually emerges throughout the development of the poem. There are certain sentences that generalize or echo other internments, “Hopelessness against hopelessness” (p. 79) pays homage to another prison narrative, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope. Time-marking (the true religion of incarceration) is represented nakedly, untitled, informally, on the very first page of the poem. This is our first signal that the book will mix the voice of the narrator with the truth-telling of the subject, the act of witnessing with the naked reality of the witnessed, the aesthetic with its raw and authentic source.

Count your fingers
County your toes
Count your nose holes
Count your blessings

It becomes apparent that the poet (as I-based lyrical narrator) has done something which is, for a lyric poet, counterintuitive. This is where the nexus lies; where the poet crosses with the photographer. My instinct is that in this work, in its original incarnation (The Reappearance of Those Who Have Gone, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, Twin Palms Publishing, 2003), the photographer pulled the poet out of herself, and the poet pulled the photographer, strangely, back into an introspective stance. That is, the meeting between text and image, though it is neither choreographed, nor illustrative, hits a similar focal length, both artists contradicting the natural grain of their proper mediums. In fact, it is the incongruity between Wright’s immersive language, her attempt to master the rawness and the lyricism of her subject’s vernacular and Luster’s theatrical, aestheticized take on traditional documentary portraiture (the ‘mug-shot’ made burlesque) that helps to re-set the dichotomy between inside and outside, internment and freedom, artist and subject. Both photographer and poet are constantly aware of the voyeuristic nature of the work, and part of their story is about the need to offset that, or perhaps to incorporate it truthfully.

The poet’s strategy is to render the voices of her subjects as rawly as possible, with minimum interference (though we never lose our sense that the ear of a master, keen to timbre, register, and combination, is at work in the background); the photographer’s is to snatch her subjects out of their prison setting (she uses the neutralizing backdrop of classic portraiture; her subjects have carefully chosen how to represent themselves – choices as myriad as life itself ). It is the subjects themselves (is this a part of the artifice of photographer and poet?) who in the end tell the story they want to tell.

Deborah Luster is nothing less than meticulous in her reification of photography’s mechanical sublime. Though she says she never spent more than the time necessary to make the photographs with her subjects, and would never presume to have given us some essential reading of their soul; but the process of making these photographs, in its entirety, was, in terms of how things normally move in the world today, a slow one. Just as C.D. Wright creates as sense of slowness, an abidance, through linguistic collage, variations in register, and attention to minutia, Luster’s photographic method, in itself, is an attempt to register this time lapse. Doug MacCash writing for the New Orleans newspaper, The Times-Picayune, describes Luster’s approach like this: “She used a black backdrop to remove any modern prison features from the background. To further remove her photos from the contemporary world, she printed them in black and white on small sheets of metal with an amber colored glaze, reproducing the look of the tintype photos popular during the Civil War….By creating present-day inmate portraits that appear to be antiques, Luster slyly suggests that while the rest of the world has undergone social and technological sea changes, incarceration is essentially the same as it has been for more than a century.” http://blog.nola.com/dougmaccash/2008/01/photos_of_louisiana_prisoners.html – this link is worth following, since it not only contains MacCash’s article in full, but a video-interview he made of the photographer.)

Various modes are adopted and then repeated by the poet throughout One Big Self and these provide familiar islands of language for the reader, stations along the way. For the working of the poem itself, this allows for accretion within the collage, which gradually increases tension and works to create a sense of movement, the feeling that there is a kind of progress or inevitability. One of these devices is the letter, a genre obviously crucial to prison life. The repeated letters enable the poet to amplify this importance and to stress one of the remaining formalities left to people living in the alternative world of incarceration. Language, after all, is the one thing that can’t be taken away from them. Letters are written to the reader, to the prisoners; there is even one called “Dear Dying Town”. These lines, on page 39, not a letter, but about a letter, go straight, like a drill, to the heart.

Mack trapped a spider
Kept in a pepper jar
He named her Iris
Caught roaches to feed her
He loved Iris
When Iris died
He wrote her a letter.

I’m learning. And I’ve learned an incredible amount about contemporary American poetry and the forces that drive it, and the discussion that follows it, just by collaborating with the Foundation, my colleagues and everyone that has written in.
Most of the people who respond to my posts have a better idea about the doings of contemporary poetry in North America than I do. And the intricacy of thought, the generosity with knowledge and the specific gravity of the banter, all go to show that poetry is alive and well there. In fact, the scene here in Europe is a great deal more provincial – and I use that word carefully, because it means different things to Americans than it does to Europeans. My impression is that American poets, however self-involved and self-contained they are, are more open to, and knowledgeable about the European scene than vice versa. Europe, despite the attempt at political union, despite the great waves of migration, despite the adoption of a common coin, is still driven by nationalist sentiment.
Of course provincialism is at the base of nationalism, and is the opposite of cosmopolitanism. After having lived in Portugal for more than twenty years I can certainly say that I have become more provincial, much to my regret. I suppose the baseline here is that I am most at home when I’m at home. The rest of the world interests me of course, but provincials tend to give more weight to what is local, while what is not local becomes increasingly abstract.
Since I love abstraction, this is not too much of a problem, except, perhaps, for the fact that America and American poetry are abstractions for me, as they are not for my readers and colleagues at Harriet. You will have noticed that I am, at heart, a generalist. Does the generalizing tendency in any way redeem abstraction? I think not. Rather it aggravates it. That is why Provincials love to generalize and make value judgments about what is, in the older sense of the expression, beyond the pale. The tendency is to inflate the value of the local to the detriment of the world abroad. Because of this, I am not always able to make sense of the discussion generated in response to what I am saying in my posts. Poetry like politics is always local. The great Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh takes up the subject in a sonnet entitled “Epic”. I’ll copy it out for you:
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul’
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
‘Here is the march along these iron stones’
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
In fact, my commentators often don’t seem to be very interested in what I have to say. I guess they are busy making “their own importance”. It is rare that specific issues that I bring up are discussed with any specificity. If I am beginning to see in the “thread” a kind of anarchy, which is vaguely more compelling than the politesse of letters to the editor, and traditional op-ed, my problem remains: the challenges leveled in my direction lack the decorum that I am used to, and their indirection confounds me. As a provincial, it is one of my basic creeds that form excites conviction, and conviction disciplines discourse. One of the difficulties I have with this format is its immediacy. Critical thinking in these circumstances tends to rely on stock response, which is then fortified by a shield of loosely harvested information. This form of thinking is not felt. It is produced. And no blogger, I dare say, can genuinely keep up with the disembodied information that is hurled back in their direction.
Another perhaps deeper component of my chagrin, is the fixation on poetry. This of course might seem a strange thing to admit. After all, I have been hired to write about poetry. But everyone seems to have more interest in poetry than I do. And the truth is, I don’t find poetry (except my own, but that is a private matter) as interesting, generally, as I generally find history, philosophy, the newspaper or fiction, not to mention music, painting and photography. No contemporary poet could ever get in the way of my love for the essay, the letter, or the garrulous and often harebrained prose of Coleridge, or the first one hundred pages of The Baron of Corvo’s (Frederick William Rolfe) The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, or the manically descriptive ramblings of In Youth is Pleasure, by Denton Welch. Though I do hold fifteen or so contemporary poets in very high esteem, I am not interested in poetry, per se. The obsession with contemporary poetry as witnessed on the web today, and the annual stock of contest winners, and all the variations of the poetry of isms, and the issues of fair-minded representation, and the pretence of democratic reform of the discourse, all figure very low on my agenda.
I would be the first to admit that this particular flavor of alienation could have something to do with the life I have fallen into. Why should I be interested in the contemporary poetry scene in the United States. I’ve not lived in the country for a quarter of a century. But I think it runs deeper than that, and includes a distaste for the precocity and the presumption of poetry itself, ever since it gave up on the attempt at being aesthetically ambitious, or beautifully useful. I am not an Arnoldian, and I would not wish to be taken for one. But poetry has lost its documentary rigor; even the sense of documentary rigor in the way John Ashbery conceives of it, as a flux of detail that is intensely particular but oddly impersonal, fundamentally aleatory. Marilyn Hacker achieves this same rigor. In her case the observing self is foregrounded, but held mercifully in check by traditional craft. In the cases of both poets, the aesthetic carriage is unimpeachable. Most of contemporary poetry’s interests, especially among the younger poets, range from disposable meta-poetic performance on one end of the spectrum to the anemic representation of the feeling self on the other. The world – as a subject – seems to have fallen through the gap in the middle.
My interest in writing for Harriet, when I was quite generously offered the space to do so, was twofold. Firstly I thought it a wonderful opportunity to get involved directly in the to and fro of American poetry, especially in its new, increasingly internet-based life. Secondly, the money (as little as it is) attracted me. The nature of freelancing is to cobble together paychecks from different sources, until they add up. If you can control where they come from, all the better. After roughly two months, I have come to see the project in a slightly different light. For one thing, at Harriet, we are a team; we are a mixed bag, but the mixture (and we must include the commentators) is fortifying. Poets from different places, with different backgrounds and a range of different interests are somehow creating a collective impact. If anyone, the ideal reader of blogs, had the time to keep up with all the posts and all the threads, and could then find the wherewithal to characterize what was there, we might then possibly be able to judge the effect.
But we live in a provisional world in which neither we, nor the world can afford to stop long enough to understand this effect. Luckily, reading poems, even if you just have one great poet that you read, like Emily Dickinson, or Fernando Pessoa (in his case you get four or five for your money), can at least slow things down a bit. The importance of poetry is what a single poem can do to a single person in a single moment. It could be any poem or any person, or any moment. Nothing else really matters. Since, once things click, that moment expands in time, becomes time, which is the one subject with which we need all the help we can get.
Um abraço a todos,
Martin