Turandot
When I try to imagine
what heaven will be like,
I think of Puccini’s Pekinese
court, ruled by a big Joan Sutherland
type wearing an enormous headdress,
where riddling has metastasized
from a show of wit into a burning
passion, consuming all the time
that passes in the progress
toward an end that never comes,
and everyone, not only the sympathetic
slightly ridiculous Ping, Pang and Pong,
has long since been sated by the marvels
of the capital, and just wants to go home.
In keeping with the this-worldliness of Dlugos’s sensibility, its insistence on the preciousness of the things of this world, “Turandot” is an ironic meditation on ideas of the afterlife, imagining heaven as the rather warped imperial Chinese court of Puccini’s opera, in which the titular virgin princess (recorded by, among other sopranos, Joan Sutherland) subjects each of her suitors to a set of three riddles, and executes all those who cannot answer correctly, which turns out to be all of them. (Really, the riddles aren’t that hard. But perhaps all these princes are too addled by love to keep their heads.) As the comic courtiers Ping, Pang, and Pong complain in the opera, life has been reduced to three bangs on a gong, three riddles, and one head chopped off. This is how Dlugos pictures heaven, as a place where nothing happens, over and over again forever.
Whereas the opera ends with Turandot’s heart finally being melted by Prince Calaf, who answers the three riddles and whose true name, she realizes, is love, in the poem’s heaven there is no end to the riddling, to the pomp and ceremony and ritual. There’s a clear allusion to and an implied critique of the ceremonials of organized religion, specifically the elaborate rituals of the Catholic Church in which Dlugos was raised, and of the religious emphasis on the life to come as opposed to the earthly life which is the only life we know we have. At the end of this rather brief poem, everyone, having had more than their fill of the wonders of Peking, simply wants to go home. But of course there is no home to which one can return after death, no going back to earthly life. Thus the poem also implies a critique of the Christian notion of the resurrection of the body, and of all the ideologies that convince us to value an imagined or potential afterlife over the actual life we are living. So “Turandot” is a veiled carpe diem as well (Calaf tears off Turandot’s veil to melt her heart with his kiss), which warns us to seize the day and live in the now. As the opera tells us, there are three riddles, but only one death—and only one life.

This state of affairs has always troubled me, for I have never felt the chasm between my writing and my critical intellect (or that between my emotions and my thoughts on which it is based) that so many seem not only to take for granted but determined to enforce on others. Other literary works, both those with which I have felt affinities and those toward which I’ve felt great antipathy, have always been both inspirations for and challenges to my own work and the work I aspired to do. Indeed, I never would have considered the possibility of writing poetry without the impetus of reading deeply in it, wanting to comprehend, apprehend, and wield the power I found in it.
Complementarily, criticism and what is sweepingly and too vaguely called “theory” have been very helpful in thinking through my own writing, and have helped me work through many an impasse in my poetry. This is what the best literary criticism does and should do: elucidate and illuminate literature for readers and for writers. In this way, it is a very valuable tool.
Most literary academics have no idea how to read a poem, having imbibed the conviction that close reading or textual explication is reactionary or simply passé without ever having informed themselves about just what such reading might entail. While poetry writing programs have burgeoned, poetry has fallen by the wayside as an object of literary study in favor of the examination of novels as social documents. As Barbara K. Fischer has recently noted, “Despite sporadic resurgences, poetry has for several decades occupied a marginalized position in English departments, where fiction and popular culture have become the preferred objects of analysis. The New Criticism, with its heuristic approach to analyzing a poem’s tropes and formal construction, left a generation of students with a distaste for the seemingly clinical task of ‘explication’—the dreaded homework assignment. Meanwhile, New Critical aestheticism—its emphasis on the poem as a self-referential objet d’art, isolated from politics and the conditions of its making—was set up over and over again as a straw man for the arguments that comprised the revolutions in critical thinking of the 1970s through 1990s. As poststructuralists, New Historicists, and many others challenged the New Critical paradigm, they also demoted poetry as the privileged object of literary study.”

Even though the Four Quartets is Eliot’s most talky, prosaic work, and thus my least favorite among his poetic ouevre, I still read it in an entirely different way than I read any of his essays, enlightening and even eloquent as they often are. I cannot conceive of a piece of criticism as replete with meaning and feeling as Stevens’ “The Snow Man” or Williams’ “The Young Housewife.” Nor can I imagine having my life transformed by even the best of Eliot’s essays in the way that it was transformed by “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Seven Types of Ambiguity is a brilliant book, though as a writer I have found Some Versions of Pastoral to be more useful, and as a reader I’ve found it more engaging. But again, I read William Empson’s handful of amazing poems in a completely different way than I read his criticism, and would gladly trade it for them. “The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.” Indeed it does.
Literary criticism and theory have been useful to me in becoming a better reader and writer of literature, but they are just that–tools. A mindset that finds literature and literary criticism equivalent or interchangeable is utterly alien to me, though it was just that kind of thinking that drove me out of the first PhD program I attended. Nor would I ever wish to inhabit such a mindset. It’s this mode of thought that drives and incites much of what Michael Robbins refers to as knee-jerk anti-academicism, and with regard to it, I am happy to jerk my knee as well. But then, I am one of those benighted souls who believes that the phrase “love of literature” still has some meaning

To be a good writer one needs to be a good reader, and a large part of learning to write is learning to read, to analyze (that is, take apart and examine) other pieces of writing and see how they work, if only so that one can utilize some of those techniques in one’s own work–and for that matter, so that one can avoid some of them as well. (One can learn a lot from work one doesn’t like.)
I’ve always aspired to be a poet-critic, being of the belief that at least as a poet one one can indeed add a cubit to one’s stature by taking thought. With the recent publication of my book of essay, Orpheus in the Bronx, I’d like to think that I’m come closer to that goal.
I can’t think of any good poets who have avoided thinking and writing about poetry and the issues it brought up. (We’ll take up the question of what a “good” poet is at a later date. Much later.) To take some obvious historical examples, Pound, Eliot, Moore, Stevens, Williams, Zukofsky, the New Critics (including R. P Blackmur, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate, all fine poets), Auden, Spicer, and even Mr. Insouciance himself, Frank O’Hara, didn’t do so, not to mention such diverse contemporary examples as Charles Bernstein, Allen Grossman, Robert Hass, John Hollander, Susan Howe, Mary Kinzie, Ann Lauterbach, Heather McHugh, Michael Palmer, Robert Pinsky, Ron Silliman, and Susan Stewart. The explosion of online discussions about poetry, in poetry blogs, on this web site, and elsewhere, is evidence that this process is still going on today, and hopefully will continue to enrich poetry and thought about poetry.

While an MFA or a PhD is for the most part necessary to get a teaching position, the vast majority of MFA graduates don’t get such jobs (and the teaching jobs they get are in general poorly paid adjunct jobs with no security and no benefits—I’ve done that too). It’s not a practical degree, and no one should pay or put themselves in a lot of debt to get an MFA. But in general MFA programs have fairly good financial aid, usually in the form of teaching assistantships.
Despite many people’s reasonable doubts (and many other people’s unreasonable attacks or dismissals), MFA programs are in general a good thing. Mine gave me several years to focus on reading and writing, during which I didn’t have to worry about looking for or working at a job.
What was most important about my time at the two MFA programs I attended was that I met several fellow students with whom I clicked as people and as poets, many of whom are still among my closest friends. Having felt very isolated as a writer for much of my life, especially during the several years I was out of school before finishing my BA, that was very important to me. It’s very valuable in general to get outside perspectives on one’s work, even if one doesn’t agree with all of them, as one never will. To imagine one’s work through other eyes is absolutely crucial for a writer.
If one goes to an MFA program without any illusions about what it will do for one professionally or practically, and if one doesn’t pay through the nose or put oneself in debt to do it, it can be a very rewarding experience. Whatever one does afterward, one will still have had that time to focus on what one wants to do, which is a rare opportunity in our society.
One can read and write on one’s own while working full-time. But I know from my own experience how draining and demoralizing most nine-to-five jobs are, and how hard it is to gather up one’s resources when one gets home at night to do anything mentally substantial. (There’s a reason that Adam and Eve’s punishment was to labor by the sweat of their brows.) It’s hard to find the time and energy to study while making a living doing something else. I was very disciplined about such things when I was working nine-to-five, but that’s because I had to be in order to do it at all, and thus to maintain some sense of myself as a human being, let alone as a potential artist.
Most MFA programs aren’t intellectually rigorous, though some are surprisingly so. In my experience (I’ve attended three of them), most PhD programs aren’t intellectually rigorous either, though they do put one through many hoops, some of them on fire. If you want to read and think and write about literature for its own sake, not as a social symptom or an illustration of a theory (and I write this as someone who has found “theory” very useful to my development as a writer), a PhD program is not the route to take.
A PhD is a professional degree, and love of literature is an impediment to academic professionalization—I was once told that it’s something one outgrows. That attitude is antithetical to mine, or to any attitude compatible with being a writer. It’s also, I would add, incompatible with conveying to students that literature has any value other than as a social, ideological, or theoretical document. If that’s one’s only interest in literature, it’s hard to see how any interest in literature can be sustained, which is why so many such types drift off into pseudo-social science (that is, social science without the rigor, the research, the thought-out, consistent arguments, or the standards of evidence) while still claiming to “do” literature.

I like the idea of poetry as dictation, because writing does feel like that sometimes. I’ve had at least one poem that was literally dictated to me—I woke up and the poem was reciting itself in my head, though I had to come up with my own ending. Don’t we all? In that sense Spicer conveys what it often feels like to do poetry. The recent history of the study of the mind, from Freud discovery/invention of the unconscious to breakthroughs in the biochemical understanding of the brain, certainly supports the idea of dictation, from some source or another. It has certainly revealed just how little of what we think or do is really under our control, though that’s a pretty old idea dressed up in some new clothes. For the ancient Greeks, after all, the poet was a person possessed by a daimon, which is one of the reasons that Plato distrusted poets: they were not ruled by reason.
I also admire Spicer’s ambition to make poems out of real objects, to “put the real cliff and the real ocean into the poem,” and his conception of words as what sticks to the real, though I don’t think that’s possible, except to the extent that words are real objects out of which we build real poems. Language is a thing in the world as well as a thing about (in both senses) the world. Poetry, at least in part, is made out of the attempt to achieve that identity between word and world even while knowing that such a goal is unattainable. If you don’t try, you’re just playing games, doing parlor tricks (what Eliot meant when he said that poetry was a sophisticated diversion—luckily, he was lying). If you don’t realize that it’s impossible, then you end up with religion or dogma. Allen Grossman speaks of poetry as an impossible goal that every poem tries to achieve. If only every poem did so try! That dovetails with what Spicer writes that he learned from Robert Duncan, “not to search for the perfect poem [which doesn’t and can’t exist except as an aspiration] but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths, explore and retreat but never be fully realized (confined) within the boundaries of one poem.” That seems to balance the exploratory, experimental impulse with the recognition that failure is inevitable, that judgments still can and must be made. There are, after all, greater and lesser degrees of realization.
Interesting and even inspiring though Spicer’s notion of dictation is, with its promise of escaping what he calls “the big lie of the personal,” I wonder if it’s not simply the mirror image of romantic inspiration. Instead of coming from deep within one, from one’s soul or innermost self, the poem comes from outside one, from the Martians or the spooks. In either case, the poet is passive, and abdicates thought and responsibility. He listens for the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. This can be seen as a kind of askesis, an emptying out of the self so that some Other can occupy that space, if only temporarily. It can also be seen as an evasion, since no one truly has the mind of winter of Stevens’s snow man, at one with what surrounds him. Spicer’s Martians seem to be the Muses dressed up in space suits, another way to preserve the romantic (small “r”) notion of the poet as a specially inspired individual with access to the transcendent, and to preserve both the notion that there is a transcendent (Derrida’s transcendental signifier?) out there waiting to be tapped into and the confidence that it can be reached. As Spicer insists in his Vancouver lectures, there is “a difference between you and the outside of you which is writing poetry,” but the poet is still the radio. Not everyone receives these transmissions, after all. Capital “R” Romanticism, in its various incarnations, too often betrays the transcendent by identifying the poet’s inspiring genius with his or her ego.
We ourselves are the real, part of a reality and a reality in ourselves. (Are we ourselves?, as The Fixx asked in song long ago.) That desire to connect with something outside us is also a desire to connect with something inside us (and vice versa—the way in is the way out, as Heraclitus might have said). We are part of what we see and talk about, but we are also inaccessible to ourselves in the same way and to the same degree that the “real world” is inaccessible to us. This idea of an internal and inaccessible real, an internal transcendent, is very Lacanian: for Lacan, the always lost Real is the level of immediate and unitary somatic experience, absent lack and lacking absence, from which language inevitably and necessarily alienates us. It is literally unspeakable.
So poetry is both about eroding boundaries and borders and about recognizing borders and boundaries that were invisible, and the poem isn’t a representation of the world but an analogy of it. The materials out of which the poem is built (words, sounds, images, lines, phrases) are analogous to the materials out of which the world is made (bricks and rocks and twigs and leaves and mites and midges). If words are objects in the same way that bricks are, with their own heft and palpability, then that is the way (the one possible way) to make poems out of real objects. Analogy is one of Spicer’s favorite words, and one of Stevens’s.
The poem, when it is at its best, when we are at our best, is a kind of agon between the poet and the language, and the poet has to bring all his or her resources to bear, or it’s not a real struggle at all, just a performance. After all, Stevens did say that the poem has to resist the intelligence almost successfully. For that resistance to be meaningful, the pressure of the intelligence must be strong. As Spicer notes, “The more you know…the more building blocks the Martians have to play with.” Perhaps in reaction against Modernist “intellectualism,” too many American poets from the Forties onward (beginning with the generation of Lowell and Bishop and Jarrell) have surrendered or renounced their intelligence, which too often has resulted in taking dictation not from the Martians but merely from the culture at large, or (as too often) small. But poetry demands better listening than that.

“True Night” is a lovely example of what Bloom calls “a central sensibility seeking imaginative truth without resorting to any of the available evasions of consciousness,” whose temptations are both acknowledged and refused. The poem opens at midnight, “The abiding absence between day and day,” a present absence that is both instant (and an instant) and eternal, because it is no given day and no single time, but rather the moment between dates. This no-time is all times, both everlasting and utterly ephemeral. It is (or rather, it is “As though”—what we know is not the thing itself, but only its appearance, our own knowing of it) an air that has opened soundlessly, an air that we take into ourselves with every breath. Particularly within the precincts of a poem, the phrase “an air” in conjunction with the evocation of sound calls up a pun on the Renaissance sense of an “air” as a song. Here, it is a song without sound; it was Keats who wrote that unheard melodies are sweetest, and this soundless air is sweeter than any song one could ever hear.
Here in this time that is no time, the polarity of identity and difference is suspended, and opposites meet. Things are beside themselves, at peace with their own restlessness and discontent, their own failure to be identical with themselves: they are “Perfected in self- discrepancy,” like the off-rhyme of the words “perfectly” and “discrepancy.” All wrongs are posed in the perfection of a still life, no less wrong but now transfigured into necessity and equipoise: “Here every grief requires its grief.” The poet’s task is both to capture this momentless moment and to leave it undisturbed, to touch its untouchability into art without marring or altering it. The line “I should not rearrange a leaf” can be read either as “I wouldn’t rearrange a leaf even if I could, all is perfect as it is” or as “I should abandon any desire to rearrange a leaf, to insert my own will into the seen/scene.” For this poem, paradise is paradox, where longing (the source of suffering, according to the Buddha) is illumination, and to be lit is to be like darkness “at an altar,” at prayer, prayed to, or both.
The poem’s last stanza insists that no discordant wing (shattering the harmony of the soundless air) should be allowed to corrupt the sorrows the poem presents into song, at least “As long as truest night is long.” That is to say, this admonition holds both forever and only for the most fleeting of (non-) moments. And yet the poem itself, unavoidably, is a song (“lyric,” after all, comes from “lyre”), voiced and heard. The poem both “mystically” asserts a paradoxical concord (echoing and amplifying Stevens’s avowal that “The imperfect is our paradise”) and takes a potentially ironic stance toward it: the poem is both entranced and undeluded.
The inescapable paradox of “True Night,” the truth that it both embodies and struggles against in the name of truth, is that the poem’s discordant wing has corrupted the scene into song: it is helpless not to do so, for otherwise there would be no poem. But the poem has also acknowledged and honored the difference between scene and song: it has reminded us that is remains is however much mind and music might wish it otherwise, however much metaphor and song might wish to translate being into seeming.

Though always committed to poetry (including, in his words, “even doggerel narratives in early childhood”), he had originally decided on philosophy as a career, and did graduate work at Yale to that end, until he realized that the dominant analytical school excluded all the important philosophical questions. It was in poetry that those unanswerable questions, questions of knowledge, perception, and the relation between being and appearance, could properly be addressed. As Feinman somewhat jocularly told me, “I was, even philosophically, convinced that, as I liked to put it, if according to Aristotle, ‘Poetry is more philosophical than history,’ so is it more philosophical than philosophy. The work I’d have had to do in philosophy would be to lay out the grounds for privileging poetry—which indeed our era has been more or less doing—vide Heidegger, Rorty, Derrida, etc.”
Feinman’s first book, Preambles and Other Poems, was published by Oxford University Press in 1964 to praise from such figures as Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hartman, and Bloom. (Bloom’s discussion of this volume in his book The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition is the only extended treatment of Feinman’s work of which I am aware.) Now out of print, it was reissued with a handful of additional poems by Princeton University Press as Poems in 1990; that volume is also out of print. Feinman’s lack of a wider reputation is partly due to the unabashed difficulty of his poems, though as Harold Bloom writes, “their difficulty is their necessity” (The Ringers in the Tower, 315). But, given the popularity of other “difficult” poets, his neglect is mostly due to his distaste for the rituals of literary self-promotion.
Alvin Feinman is a true visionary poet, heir to Stevens and Crane in the modern line and, further back, to Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley, poets who invented human consciousness as a subject matter for poetry. In Harold Bloom’s description, “the central vision in [Preambles] is of the mind, ceaselessly an activity, engaged in the suffering process of working apart all things that are joined by it” (op. cit., 315). Bloom calls this “a tragedy of the mind, victim to its own intent, which is to make by separations” (op. cit., 316).
Feinman’s poems demand much of the reader (at times resisting the intelligence almost successfully, as Stevens said that the poem should), but they offer many rewards in return, including dazzling imagery (light and the work light does is omnipresent) and dense, rich verbal music. Eliot wrote that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood, and Feinman’s poems do so amply.
John Hollander has written that Feinman’s poetry explores the indefinable boundary between the visual and the visionary. In one of the blurbs for Preambles, Conrad Aiken wrote that Feinman’s was “true metaphysical poetry.” His poems constitute an epistemological and phenomenological investigation of the world, a probing of the surfaces of things that moves from seeing to seeing-into to seeing-through to the other side of appearances, exposing the luminous interior of the material world. As Bloom has written, the “opposition between the imaginative self and reality seems as central to these poems as it was to Stevens’ and as grandly articulated.”
2
Alvin Feinman is also the only person in my writing life whom I could truly call a mentor. I have had professors from whom I’ve learned, who have taught me valuable things about my work (sometimes intentionally, sometimes inadvertently or even against their will). But few were truly formative, and fewer still were both consistent and constructive in their attention. For one thing, he was the first professor to understand what my poems were trying to do, even though they didn’t always succeed.
Alvin, with whom I did my undergraduate creative writing thesis at Bennington College, never did anything for me but help me write better poems. He never did anything to me but make me see that however pleased I was with something I’d written, it could always be better, had to be better if I were to call myself a poet. For Alvin, to be a poet was always an aspiration, not something that one could claim to be. I think if I’d have asked him he would have said, “I would like to be a poet.”
Alvin expected everything of poetry, his own and others’. As he once said to me, “Poetry is always close kin to the impossible, isn’t it?” There was no point in reading a poem unless it was great, and no point in writing a poem unless it (not you: it) aspired to greatness. He was especially alert to the occasions when a poem failed to live up to its own possibilities, when it fell away into the mundane from therevelations it proposed. Usually the poem failed by settling for the merely personal. For Alvin, one’s interest in oneself had no place in poetry, and in his poems one will find not face but mask. But it’s a mask more alive than the great mass of mere faces.
Alvin also helped me learn the difference between whether something was done well and whether it needed to be done at all. He warned against the dangers of what he called “fluency über alles,” of writing something because you can or because you want to. What you want has no place in poetry: only what the poem wants matters. He once said of a poem of mine that he saw little in it but my desire to write a poem, and he saw accurately. But Alvin also taught me to listen more carefully, to look more closely, to be more aware of the poem’s intentions. He was an exacting reader, and his is an example I am constantly trying to live up to.
3
I love all of Alvin’s poems, but this one in particular, the first poem of his I ever read, is one of my favorites.
November Sunday Morning
And the light, a wakened heyday of air
Tuned low and clear and wide,
A radiance now that would emblaze
And veil the most golden horn
Or any entering of a sudden clearing
To a standing, astonished, revealed…
That the actual streets I loitered in
Lay lit like fields, or narrow channels
About to open to a burning river;
All brick and window vivid and calm
As though composed in a rigid water
No random traffic would dispel…
As now through the park, and across
The chill nailed colors of the roofs,
And on near trees stripped bare,
Corrected in the scant remaining leaf
To their severe essential elegance,
Light is the all-exacting good,
That dry, forever virile stream
That wipes each thing to what it is,
The whole, collage and stone, cleansed
To its proper pastoral…
I sit
And smoke, and linger out desire.

The Modernists, let alone the poets who preceded them (both those who inspired them and those with whom they struggled) cannot be merely wished away. “You cannot experiment with only the history of experimentation as your archive,” in Ann Lauterbach’s acute admonition (The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience 65).
The avant-garde frequently forgets that Pound’s injunction to “Make it new” contains two parts. They concentrate so much on trying to be new (which ends up as a cult of novelty that mirrors the planned obsolescence of the consumer culture it claims to critique, a consumer culture my main criticism of which is that it isn’t in fact available to all) that they neglect the necessity to make something, that newness is not a value in itself (no human being is “new,” though each person is unique) but a means to the rejuvenation of aesthetic experience (and thus, analogously, of our experience of and in the world). Ann Lauterbach points out that “In re/citations of Ezra Pound’s injunction to ‘make it new,’ emphasis has invariably fallen on the word ‘new,’ the word which most conjures the operations of commerce. We have been in thrall to the new, even as it has worn itself through with recyclings, a kind of déja new, which has exhausted our attention and made us all victims of fashion. As Jean-François Lyotard says, ‘Hidden in the cynicism of innovation is certainly the despair that nothing further will happen.’ We have ignored the other two words, ‘make’ and ‘it,’ as if they were of no significance” (The Night Sky 44).
Though it has produced many wonderful works of art, fracture has become too easy, even evasive: it’s become simply another style. Rather than just cutting things up or claiming that they just are cut up (a reductive view of art as a reflection of the world shared by many avant garde writers, at least in America), it’s much more difficult and interesting to put things together despite or in the face of fragmentation, not to create false wholes or a false confidence in wholes, but to see and show that things are related, however random their surfaces may appear. That randomness is an ideological illusion, and this is as much the Marx in me as the John Crowe Ransom. Marx wrote in the Grundrisse of the distinction between the apparently real and the actually real, the chaotic, disconnected surfaces of the world and the interrelated, interconnected whole (however riven and fissured) which that world actually comprises. In Terry Eagleton’s explication, “it is a mistake to equate concreteness with things. An individual object is the unique phenomenon it is because it is caught up in a mesh of relations with other objects. It is this web of relations and interactions…which is ‘concrete,’ while the object considered in isolation is purely abstract” (How to Read a Poem, 142).
Totalities are always contradictory, but they are totalities, and we live in, among, and with them. Part of the work of thought and the work of poetry is to trace out their lineaments: poetry, language, and thought are about producing and revealing relation, about making connections among disparate things often seen as disconnected or even opposed or contradictory: contradiction and opposition are also modes of relation. Barbara K. Fischer notes in The Boston Review of some of the transgressive or subversive claims of “experimental” writing that “From the vantage point of our current historical-political moment, ‘sense, order, and coherence’ don’t seem like such terrible things,” and goes on to warn against “the dangers of enshrining yet another chaos that cannot redeem itself.”
Our experience is (falsely) fractured, atomized, and my self (like my society) is likewise fractured and atomized, in pieces. But it is also a whole, of a piece, a complex unity of contradictions. As Fredric Jameson writes in “Reflections in Conclusion,” the afterword to the Frankfurt School compilation Aesthetics and Politics, “An aesthetic of novelty today…must seek desperately to renew itself by ever more rapid rotations of its own axis…when modernism and its accompanying techniques of ‘estrangement’ have become the dominant style whereby the consumer is reconciled with capitalism, the habit of fragmentation itself needs to be ‘estranged’ and corrected by a more totalizing way of viewing phenomena” (211). Paul Hoover puts it another way in his essay “Murder and Closure: On the Impression of Reality in American Poetry” (included in his collection Fables of Representation) when he asks, “ if this interruptiveness is inspired by electronic mass media, which is controlled by powerful capitalist interests, how is such a literature revolutionary?” (14). Far from being transgressive or subversive, it becomes just another social symptom and reflection.
It’s much more difficult to articulate things together than just to toss out the pieces and say “Nothing can be done with this,” or even, “I have seen the future and it is broken.” As Jack Spicer wrote to Robin Blaser, “Things fit together….Two inconsequential things can combine together to become a consequence.” My interest in syntax, the relation of words and phrases to one another, arises from the desire to make or reveal connections among the elements of my poems and my world(s). My questions are always, “How can these things be put together? What constellation do they form?” Which is not to claim that a reconciliation of self and society, or self and self, can be effected in or by means of language, let alone linguistic art.

One of my objections to the use of the term “avant-garde” in relation to contemporary work is exactly that it’s often used as a synonym for “good poetry” or “the poetry I like,” or “the poetry I’m willing to respect. (Stevens’ reminder that “It Must Give Pleasure” is frequently left by the wayside: one doesn’t get the feeling that many people enjoy the poetry they champion as avant-garde.) Too often these terms aren’t used to make distinctions among different kinds or work doing or attempting to do different kinds of things, but as marks of virtuousness or sinfulness. I don’t think that at this point they refer to actual entities but instead announce attitudes and positions: “I am of the angels’ party and you/they are of the devil’s party.”
Brent Cunningham writes that “one of the main articulations of the historical avant garde was that good and bad are not transcendent judgments, but are always closely determined by specific, lived contexts.” It strikes me on the other hand that Dada, Surrealism, Situationism have no interest in producing works of art at all, let alone in making aesthetic judgments among such artworks. That, it seems, would strike them as mere “art appreciation.” Their interest is in process, by whatever name that process is called—the Surrealists and the Situationists called it revolution. Andé Breton wrote that the supreme Surrealist act would be to discharge a loaded pistol into a crowd.
With regard to separating the work from the person, with much historical literature we do this a matter of course, as little is known of the author. It’s a necessary condition of reading at all: Shakespeare has been dead for a long time, and yet we can still read his plays and poems. The work is separate from the person; as Picasso allegedly said, art is called art because it is not life. In any case, for me at least, my interest in the author derives from my interest in the work. (Though there are some authors whose works don’t interest me but whose lives do, like Ronald Firbank.) If my primary interest is in an historical period, a social context, I read about that, rather than trying to read a piece of literature as a social document or record—a novel or a poem is a very inefficient way to learn about history.
By the end of his comment, Brent Cunningham seems to end up defining avant-garde not as a kind of art or a way of proceeding in the making of artworks, but as a way of reading and interpreting already existing artworks. An avant-garde reading would be one which we “[talk] about how the writer and the work are interlinked and socio-historically situated,” whereas a non-avant-garde reading (whatever name one would give to that) would ignore “the whole complex politics of poetry.” I have written on many occasions that a work of art, that art itself, emerges from a specific social/political/economic matrix, from a specific individual on what Foucault has called the grid of specifications. My point is and always has been that it is not defined and wholly determined by what might be called the conditions of its production.
And with that, I bid everyone a fond good-night.