"New Depthlessness": The Nation Reviews Spahr, Gordon, Moschovakis and Ossip

Wow wow! Stephen Burt has just reviewed some great books of poetry for The Nation, including Well Then There Now, by Juliana Spahr; The Source, by Noah Eli Gordon; You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, by Anna Moschovakis; and The Cold War, by Kathleen Ossip. Framing the review with Eliot's warning that poets not "seek new human emotion," Burt connects these works by considering what are perhaps long-familiar feelings in shapely 21st-century compounds, like the "'new depthlessness,' along with 'complacent eclecticism,' that Fredric Jameson identified in 1991 as part of the giddy postmodern sublime." Furthermore:

All these compounds of feeling color new books of poems by Juliana Spahr, Noah Eli Gordon, Anna Moschovakis and Kathleen Ossip. All four poets are reacting to big modern systems, above all to the system called capitalism, whose results and failures seem inescapable....The poets pursue reportage, or take stabs at abstract argument, and their work incorporates, adopts or deforms blocks of expository prose; their books are part essay, part catalog, part collage, and yet they possess the oddity, the density and the emotional resonance of the language we still seek in poems.

Burt reviews each book in-depth, starting with Spahr, of whom he writes:

All these parts of Well Then There Now, in proselike verse and stylized prose, seek to convey how it feels to imagine oneself as a small part—a self-conscious, self-critical part—of benign or malign worldwide systems. “The stream was a part of us and we were a part of the stream and we were thus part of the rivers and thus part of the gulfs and the oceans,” she writes in another verse poem, with an echo of Whitman (“There was a child went forth every day/And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became”). The lines recall hopes that Spahr later inflects, or deflects. . . .

Of Gordon's The Source::

The Source emerges from sources, but it is not identical with them. Nor does it need a utilitarian justification for the way it comes into the world: “If anyone asks you what the Source is, send them to their own senses, because anything written can seem like straw.” One relatively new emotion here is an unstable reverence for the mysterious, for the apparently transcendent, that does not deny but instead depends on our awareness that we cannot prove what we believe. It’s a tradition of thought (credo quia absurdum est) with roots in Pascal, Augustine and Kierkegaard, but here it’s renewed, severed from Christian and Jewish dogma. “The Source has inflicted a wound on the compact flesh of the intellect,” Gordon writes, “and the only thing that can emerge from this aperture is levitating into the night sky.”

Burt finds similiarites between Anna Moschovakis and Juliana Spahr:

An ambivalence about the taking of positions persists throughout [You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake]. Like Spahr, Moschovakis seems exercised by the politics and ethics of almost everything; like Spahr, she sometimes sounds imprisoned by the imperatives of postmodern social theory. “I have been attracted to the idea that naming is a form of violence,” she admits, “but does that mean we should go around calling everyone Hey You”? Moschovakis shows us how it feels to want answers to certain kinds of questions, to see processes and seek causalities, and then get stuck in hermeneutic circles instead. . . .

Burt writes of Kathleen Ossip's "fascination with early thinkers" -- "psychoanalysts like Menninger; historical explainers such as the Durants; and Wilhelm Reich," and notes that "Ossip dovetails with Spahr, and with Moschovakis, in her uneasy backward glances at the confessional mode, in which hidden shames were revealed as the source of the self and as symptoms of cultural troubles."

As for the grand scale:

It’s tempting, sometimes irresistible, to divide poets into movements and schools, to slot any poem that seems mildly memorable into the category New Whatever and argue that it represents our time. You can do that with these four poets if you come at them from a certain angle, an angle that they sometimes recommend; you can do the same with other contemporary poets—Claudia Rankine, Mark Nowak, Craig Santos Perez and especially C.D. Wright—who have won praise for quotation-filled, reportorial, essaylike forms. (The poet and critic Joseph Harrington has done just that in the online magazine Jacket2, announcing the age of the docu-poem, of what he prefers to call “creative nonpoetry,” whose arguments, facts and incorporated quotations—Perez, Nowak and Ossip stand among his examples—break out of any and all generic frames.) You can also find earlier precedents for these kinds of forms, too, from Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1925–69) to Muriel Rukeyser’s now undeniably influential U.S. 1 (1938); you can find poems made largely or wholly of source texts erased or altered in search of sublimity, like Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (1977), fashioned from Paradise Lost. Yet these new poems, from Wright’s to Ossip’s—unlike those older ones—function as essays, medium-length attempts at understanding some things without explaining everything: they do not pretend to predict the whole course of our history, nor do they tell us what we should do.

Read more about how Burt feels these poets will be remembered here.