Stephen Burt Considers Andrew Maxwell's Trifecta of Aphorism, Lyric, and the Avant-Garde

"What if a poet wants at once to write aphoristically, or apothegmatically, and to write lyric (personal, inward, emotional), and to write as part of a post-avant-garde?" asks Stephen Burt in a review of Andrew Maxwell's Candor Is the Brightest Shield (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014) for Los Angeles Review of Books.

...What if a poet owes something to G. C. Lichtenberg, and something to Emily Dickinson, but something else to Duchamp’s snow shovel hung from a wall? That poet might be the mysterious Andrew Maxwell, author of “many small booklets” privately circulated under the imprint “PRB […] for Poetic Research Bloc, later Bureau, or ‘Personal Resource Booklet,’” between 1999 and 2013. Five of these booklets have now been collected, or redacted, or assimilated, into Candor Is the Brightest Shield, published in 2015 by the redoubtable Ugly Duckling Presse. It’s one of my favorite books of the previous year, not so much for the questions it answers about aphorism and meaning and poetic form as for the questions it declares unanswerable.

As Maxwell explains in his afterword, he has “tried consistently to abandon poems and other objets d’art […] in pursuit of remarks and propositions, and portability of phrase”; he has, he adds, “been uncomfortable with the book […] I prefer the unfinished argument.” And no wonder: Even more than other post-avant poets who favor pointed or numinous generalities — from Michael Palmer to Juliana Spahr to Tan Lin — Maxwell takes the single phrase or sentence as his unit, and he uses each one of those sentences to say something about the big world, something not limited by an “I” or a “me,” open to an unlimited “we,” and almost teasingly solicitous of our response.

Moreover, you can rarely be sure what he says. Maxwell’s characteristic aphorisms at once tell, and show, how important, how delightful, it is never to be quite understood — for example: “To fail gracefully in a non-composited environment // Against the genius of the plants, the ruth of tears, or this approbation of literature.” His devotion to play, his insistence on gentle mockery, extends all the way to the metaphors that he chooses when trying to describe his own work: “We’re not done yet / with these technical snowflakes.” I’m only now done quoting his first page.

Maxwell duplicates the experience of jumping from proposition to proposition, measuring it against your own thoughts, and saying sometimes “Yes!” and sometimes “What?” You might also say, as he says, “[P]eople aren’t people any more / but swell to fit the fruit of an argument”; he reminds himself what his form, and our language, leave out. Some of the fruits of his arguments look familiar — for example, je ne regrette rien, as it might be restated by a malfunctioning AI: “Let’s forget how we lived, for / we lived as we do. This gay clover // and I won’t close the quote. // The scraps are ours.” (That’s “clover” as in a delicious pasture, or good fortune.) Sometimes they are not arguments so much as attempts, like Larkin’s, to show us how helpless Maxwell feels, how stuck in his own uniqueness, and how much he wants nonetheless to generalize, to say something that will also apply to you, and you, and you, and you. A numbered sequence called “Subject to Invention” describes its own components, accurately, as:

1. The man of feeling amongst familiars
2. Hunger and randomization
3. Down-in-the-mouth lyric and promissory assertions
hustling out the bric-a-brac of minor threats
and the ecstatic fragment
4. The ecstatic fragment
5. A mature poetry, or flotation device

(Mature poetry could be a flotation device; consider “The Castaway.”)

A clever resistance to semantic function, an insistence that we just don’t know, that words can turn opaque, pops up every few lines and yet never takes over a reader’s experience: that’s what you get when you try to merge aphorism (general truth) and lyric (personal truth) and Maxwell’s particular line of the North American and European avant-garde (what is truth?). It haunts, it teases, it invites me to return....

Head to LARB for the entirety of "It’s Suddenly Understandable: On Aphorism, Lyric, and Experiment."