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Alteiri’s discussion of Ashberry’s work as emblematic of a mode that resists “the dream of a coherent and satisfying representation of the self, either as an individual or as someone in full possession of the terms by which he or she identifies with other people” is both helpful and intensely confounding: confounding because it elegantly articulates the difficulty of reading Ashberry as a problem of closure, “where there is no synthesis whose completeness is not a delusion,” where coherence rests not upon the reader realizing a totalizing intentionality, while wrestling with the desire to find one, but realizing that the self of Altieri’s speaker is always a transitional self, emblematizing a kind of permanent in media res, and helpful because it grants us license to view Ashberry with the particular freedom granted once we realize that the self of Ashberry’s poetry is not something to be divined through that same totalizing intentionality. Altieri is careful to entail this freedom though, implying that the terrain granted us once the reader is freed from digging with ax and pick to locate the poem’s Meaning gives us more rather than less responsibility because instead of portraying the self as merely confused, and easily dismissed, it allows Ashsberry to play ultra-realist, describing a way of seeing that intends to portray all possibility, by way of a more thorough form of mimesis, since the speaker as a kind of solipsist par exellence “can play all the functional roles in dialogue” positing a relationship between language, world, and self that sees the relationship as “somehow impossible, formed of so many things / Too many to make sense to anybody” and therefore more realistic in that the stance assumes that the concretizing powers of language and self are false (sorry for the long sentence here, but I’m not sure I can break this up). Ashberry then acts a kind of Dorothy among poets, pulling back the curtain to expose the real, real workings of the mastery of the poetic self as described by Yeats, highlighting the mode of the self as one in which mastery is not possible, where transition and absence are the primary states of being, highlighting both the intellectual rigor and the emotional pain of finding oneself always as being a form of absence, an absence that is always in transition (this sounds jargony but it means only that because we identify ourselves in relation to others that we are never ourselves because logically if one must rely on an outside relation in order to self-define then the meaning of oneself must always rest outside of oneself, in an other: this definition begins with Hegel). The emotional resonance in Ashberry then rests upon this self as lack, that when the self seems most stable is when it’s engaged in the more thorough delusion, which causes pain since the yearning is to be whole.

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Listen to "My Philosophy of Life" on www.poets.org, And Tell Me If I'm Wrong (I'm Being Sincere)

I am not sure that I could have understood Ashbery without the Altieri article. I did not need Altieri to help me see the “logopoeia” in the poems. Pound defines “logopoeia” as “’the dance of the intellect among words.’” “It employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play.” The “dance of the intellect” is apparent in “Decoy.” The first line of the poem is an example of what some people consider postmodernism—lifting something from the past and using it with irony. We do not expect a poem to begin with the first words in the Declaration of Independence, nor do we expect the following lines—“That ostracism, both political and moral, has / Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things—“ to share the Declaration’s tone of optimism and certainty. Of course, the lines do not actually share that tone; they are meant to be ironic.
I could not, however, recognize the commentary about modernism and the scenic style in “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” and “Metamorphosis” without Altieri’s help. I do not think that Altieri is reading his argument into the poems. Most, if not all, of the poems have lines and passages that might have come from an academic lecture. For instance, consider these lines from “No Way of Knowing:” “But difficult to read correctly since there is / No common vantage point, no point of view / Like the “I” in a novel.” This could be an excerpt from Perloff’s analysis of Rimbaud’s prose poem.
Altieri knows that some people probably “consider Ashbery [as] representative of only a decadent philosophical surrealism and of the kind of poetry that becomes important because it gives academics something to write about” (139). He responds to such criticism by arguing that Ashbery’s poems have as much affect, or emotion, as the poems of Stafford et al., but without the faux sincerity. I am not convinced. I do not see the “lyric emotion” that Altieri finds in “No Way of Knowing.” The first two words of the poem, according to Altieri, are “a muted yet anguished cry of belatedness” (140). Like the other “lyric cries” that Altieri mentions throughout his reading of Ashbery’s poems, this one is too muted. I do not feel any anguish. “Muted” is the right word for these poems. Their sounds and rhythms are rather unremarkable. Every now and then, I hear something interesting. “On angry screen-door moment rushing back,” for example, has an urgency. No “the” appears between “On” and “angry.” Also, the “door” in “screen-door” makes the third foot of this ten-syllable line a spondee—just the kind of loud interruption you would expect in a line about an angry exit. But, for the most part, I had to read these poems with my mouth shut. The occasional noises distracted me, and I needed to focus all of my attention on the intellectual “rhythms” and “polyphony.” Ashbery can start a good dance of the intellect. He may, as Altieri argues, “recove[r] Stevens’s and Pound’s sense that poetry must be excessive, must achieve sublimity by its scope of attentions” (151), but, unlike Stevens and Pound, he does this by divorcing sound from sense. The “late Victorian” (read “old fashioned” and “uptight”) Eliot knew what he was talking about. Like him, I enjoy poetry with an emotion I can hear before fully understanding, not poetry with an emotion I can only hear by fully understanding. Moreover, I have been routing around in some the latest scholarship on the high modernists, and I have found that their relationship with “low culture” is a little more complicated than Altieri makes it out to be. Of course, in the 70s, the high moderns were still tied to the whipping post for their elitism (the lashes for Anti-Semitism, fascism, etc. were deserved).

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A Not Very Insightful Post About Ashbery

I find writing about Ashbery to be rather difficult, and I suppose this is largely because it is hard for me to grasp his poetry--both in terms of its "meaning" as well as its intention. The Altieri article definitely helped to illuminate some of what Ashbery is doing, but I still find that in picking up an Ashbery poem I encounter a muddled mess of disconnected, abstract ideas and while I can tell that there is a bigger philosophical discussion going on, I can't easily discern what it is. In this way, Ashbery reminds me a little of Knox and even of some of the language poets in the way that it is evident that something is being done with language itself and that part of the poem's purpose is to either manipulate this language or to reveal its limitations. As always, this playing with and examination of language is fascinating to me--yet, at the same time, I am incredibly frustrated when I cannot understand what is being done or why. I found Knox to be less difficult so that even if I did not understand everything she was doing, I was able to glean enough to enjoy the poems (I think also this may have something to do with the humor I detect in Knox and may be why I am more tolerant of her language play than with that of the language poets who seem to take themselves rather seriously). What Ashbery is doing feels closed off to me, though it seems very smart--in this way, Ashbery seems a little like some genius-mad scientist who has locked himself away in his basement, never to reveal his genius to the world. Yet, this is not exactly an accurate analogy since Ashbery hasn't locked himself away from the world--rather, he is actually quite public, having sent his poems out into the world and which are not only published but are well known. And I think this is the crux of what troubles me; these poems are in the public sphere, yet they seem to have relevance only if you understand Ashbery's private intention. And while knowing the poet's intention may be helpful (or even necessary) in understanding or appreciating many poems, it seems as though one must work especially hard to identify Ashbery's intention.

That being said, I remain open to the possibility that I'm just not trying hard enough and that Ashbery's poems are worth the work. I recognize also that part of the "pleasure" in an Ashbery poem seems to exist in its difficulty, in grappling with the same philosophical questions regarding language that Ashbery seems to be grappling with in constructing the poem. I'm hoping that our discussion will help me understand (and possibly appreciate) this a little more.

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Solipsism and "Pathos vs. Experience"

This response will be an attempt, at best, to understand the purpose of Ashbery’s and countless others’ poetry through a lens created by Altieri. I say an attempt, at best, because I’m still working at understanding some of the rhetoric that Altieri employs. I’m sure that the jargon that Altieri uses is basic for poetic devotees in English master’s or doctorate programs, but in most instances it is new to me.

At one point in his chapter, Altieri describes solipsism and the “pathos vs. experience” battle that Ashbery wages, one that I think most poets fight, as well. My amateur understanding of solipsism is the preoccupation of one with self. This definition defines poetry as well, I believe. At the point of creation, a poet cannot act as another. Even when the poet uses a speaker, which is the case in quite a bit of poetry, the poet cannot view any event or scene as anyone but himself. He can make a valiant effort to see through another’s eyes, but those eyes are ultimately those of the poet himself. In “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery highlights this difficulty. Francesco looks through the mirror at himself to paint the self-portrait. Poetry, like this artist’s process, is always a reflection of self. No matter what the poet is attempting to communicate, he’s calling the shots, thus reflecting something about himself. Toward the end of the poem, Ashbery writes:

This thing, the mute, undivided present,

Has the justification of logic, which

In this instance isn’t a bad thing

Or wouldn’t be, if the way of telling

Didn’t somehow intrude, twisting the end result

Into a caricature of itself.

This illustrates the issue perfectly. A poet may have something to say, but the

process of turning that something into words on a page will inevitably “twist” the original intention. At the end of the poem, however, I become confused with the speaker’s request for Francesco to withdraw his hand. The speaker starts by saying that “Aping naturalness may be the first step/ Toward achieving an inner calm/ But it is the first step only….” So, in this instance, describing nature in the best way possible is the first step of the poet. But then the speaker calls this convention kindling and begs Francesco—this would also be directed toward other artists I assume (according to Ashbery’s explanation of his pronouns in Altieri’s chapter)—to remove his hand from the picture, no longer shielding the art or welcoming viewers. So this seems to be Ashbery asking for the removal of the poet in poetry. Before this point, he has spent the entire poem discussing the inability to take the poet out of the poetry, but then he makes this request. It seems that, although he describes the problem and asks this question, he gives no real solution.

This solipsistic nature of poetry thus sparks the “pathos vs. experience” conflict. I doubt that any poet would want to arouse pathos in his readers but rather incite the same experience that he has had. But, creating this effect seems to be inherently contrary to solipsism. The more solipsistic a poem, the less any reader other than the poet will be able to have that exact same experience because, alas, much like poets can see only through their eyes, readers can read only through their own.

Hopefully this hasn't been just a rehashing of Altieri. Reading over my response, I think it's more just my mental workings in writing.

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St. John: Altieri in verse

I think that much of St. John’s The Face discusses the dynamics involved in creating poetry and the aftermath of that process. If you read the book as “A Novella in Verse”—the subtitle encourages this—then it is more obvious than usual that the poems will interconnect.

The words “assembling” and “dissembling” recur throughout the poems of the book, sometimes together, sometimes apart. In poem II on page 4, St. John writes “Maybe/ That’s who I’ve been all along, just this restless anybody/ Assembling the reflections along the windows of drugstores, dress shops,/ Fruit sellers, hair stylists, stationery specialists & health food/ Supplement wizards on Main Street…” In this passage and many, as in so many others, St. John addresses some of the issues in the Altieri chapter. First, Altieri explains that “the desire for sincerity or naturalness…seems continually in tension with the highly artificial means required to produce the desired effects at a level of intensity adequate for lyric poetry”(15). Instead of an attempt at that sincerity or naturalness, St. John calls attention to it; he is highlighting the artificiality of poetry. He, the poet, can simply walk along Main Street and assemble the reflections in various places of business to create a poem. But, he refers to this type of person as a “restless anybody,” far from what I’m sure he considers a poet in his mind. So, on the fourth page of the book we’ve already got the poet in the picture calling attention to the construction of poetry.

Second, Altieri examines the “I” in contemporary poetry. He says that “The danger in contemporary poetry, and in contemporary culture, is that we see the ironic, depersonalizing forces so clearly that we flee into forms of extreme privacy that we hope are as inviolate as they are inarticulate”(16). I think that St. John offers a commentary on this exact sentiment. He alternates between Altieri’s depersonalizing forces and extreme privacy in The Face. At one moment he’s allowing Infanta to cast a teenage girl to play his character in the movie of his life. This seems to be about as depersonalizing as it gets. At another moment, however, he poses the questions “Who am I? (Who Was I; who will I be?); and at still another, he refers to the black room in which he’s been. In the final scene, for God’s sake, he’s watching his own life on a screen with a crowd of people in a movie theatre. This depersonalization is then juxtaposed with the intensely private moment of puking in a trash can. So, perhaps St. John is offering the same argument that Altieri is at times.

Finally, I see a criticism of what Altieri calls dominant modes in St. John’s poetry. Altieri refers to “one aspect of a feature in dominant mode that has wide ramifications: It shapes a good deal more than it positively describes”(8). Now, St. John’s novella tells the story of a director, Infanta, shaping art, the film of St. John’s (presumably) life. So couldn’t Infanta represent some sort of dominant mode shaping art, or rather St. John’s poetry? He watches as the dominant contemporary mode shapes his poetry and then sits behind the crowd as they analyze his work, which ultimately causes him to become sick to his stomach.

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Gluck and a little Altieri

I found these early Gluck poems to be a little disappointing. I've not read much of Gluck's work, but I recall liking the poems I had read. From what I've heard about Gluck, I was under the impression that her poems were strong, hard-hitting, searing--but many of these poems seem timid, even sentimental. The speaker often seems very vulnerable which makes me wonder if when Gluck takes on the voice of a character (other than the "character" which seems a representation of Gluck herself) it is as a thin veil for her own feelings, as a way to render herself less exposed. I guess, also, I'm a little puzzled as to why I'm resistant to this vulnerable speaker, as I normally like confessional-like, personal "I" poetry. I think I see the speaker in these poems as very unsure of herself, almost afraid to get at what she really wants to say. I like the idea that these poems represent the speaker's struggle to assert herself, to break free, yet, I find the process of this struggle frustrating--I want to the speaker in the poem to overcome. And so I wonder if these early poems can be seen as steps toward the speaker (and perhaps the poet) "coming into her own." The poem "Liberation" definitely seems to suggest something of this nature. I realize that I'm lumping all of these poems together and that this isn't the fairest method of assessment, and I don't mean to suggest that Gluck doesn't have her moments. I find part two of "The Garden," for example to be much more assertive, yet also subtle and deft in this assertion. The speaker seems in control. I love the end in which the speaker refers to the stone animals saying, "Admit that is terrible to be like them, / beyond harm." This strikes me as direct, yet not sentimental.

Yet, even as I'm noticing when I find Gluck's poems to be the deftest, I wonder if this is when they most conform to Altieri's scenic style. In describing the scenic style, Altieri writes (on page 10 of his article): "...the poems must clearly illustrate the controlling hand of the craftsman, but the craft must remain subtle and unobtrusive." It does seem that when I appreciate Gluck the most it is when she shows this control, when the poem seems "crafted," yet subtle. So, I wonder then if I've only learned to see a "good" poem as one that exhibits these qualities and if this is why I am resistant to Gluck when she seems less in control or more obvious. But even if I've been primed to accept the scenic style as good, doesn't necessarily invalidate the scenic style's criterion of what a poem should do. I just think (as we've talked about many times over the quarter) that how exactly we come to evaluate something as subjective as poetry is worth thinking about.

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St. John to Gluck: Throw some D's (rims) on that

The lyric persona seems alive and well in these works; how to separate affectation from whatever it is that comprises the self? Who's being real here? It's an interesting question that's most likely misguided but well-meaning. I don't know why, but it's frustrating though to feel as if the poets here are simply playing dress-up in order to veil rather basic emotional states, accoutering themselves in a stately kind of suffering. Both are lovely at times, but the self-imbued grandiosity leaves me a bit harried at times. As when St. John finds himself suffering among the ruins of the rich and fabulous, subtly and not so subtly treading along the footpaths of his idols (whether River Pheonix or Antonioni), or when Gluck feels the historically distant as if she might inhabit or encapsulate the past's pain. It is easy I think to want to see ourselves in these roles, easier still to want to suffer as elegantly (the past made elegant of course because of our distance from it). But I wonder in the end if Joanie isn't correct when she writes below that what comes from "isolated delirium" is transformed into "a tradition of delirium," a mantle to wear in times of emergency, whether real or imagined. More strange: though I like St. John's writing less I find it more politically responsible, since out of the myth of the stable character and our sense of fealty to the mirage that constitutes the lives of the rich and famous comes a sense of loss of the personal that leaves the body and mind free only to find an artificial self, a self gleaned in the reflection of the Ducati's gas tank, or the gilded mirror in the host's elegant hallway (martini in hand). The authentic is made a kind of elaborate Wardrobe, which corresponds very sensibly to Myspace culture, to internet phenoms, etc. (an old idea and aspiration finding an oddly democratic outlet). Gluck's writing, on the other hand, I find incredibly beautiful and even moving, but I wonder to what degree she encapsulates St. John's critique of Hughes and Plath, embodying a kind of suffering for art, making art out of suffering. Like Rich there's some of the feminist prerogative here, but it seems so cloaked in the personal that finding a way out into the world feels like a project typified by uncertainty. What to apply and how and to what and for whom?

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"The Islander," "Pomegranate," and "The Face"

The selections from Gluck’s first book were interesting. I did not know that she once wrote in fragments. “The Islander,” with its ellipsis points and resistance to clear narrative transition, almost resembles a “language poem.” Like many of Gluck’s other poems, this one reads like an intimate correspondence. In fact, the correspondence in the “The Islander” is so intimate that it becomes hermetic. For example, can we be sure which island the speaker and the “you” are on? The subways would seem to indicate Manhattan, but, as far as I know, chickens do not roam New York City. Of course, the chickens might not be literal. I do not think the grapes are literal; they represent whichever drug the “you” spends his nights looking for. Like anyone speaking to a loved one or thinking about a loved one, the speaker of “The Islander” does not feel the need to describe the context of relationship or why she uses the language of folklore in a modern city.
Poems like “The Islander” make me think twice about Altieri’s argument in Sense and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Poems of intimate correspondence, which are often scenic and written in a “natural style”, have a long history--one that dates further back than the failed cultural revolution of the 1960s. I could say that they go all the way back to 8th century China, but I do not read Chinese, so I can only say that American poets became interested in them after Ezra Pound published his free-verse translations of Chinese poems in Cathay. (The poet Charles Wright believes that this volume established the line as the unit of measure in American poetry). The fact that these translations were not accurate does not matter as much as the fact that whatever techniques Pound gleaned or appropriated from Tu Fu and Li Po—descriptions of natural scenes, sincere speakers, etc.—had an enormous impact on American poetry. An interest in the ancient poems no doubt precipitated imagism. So did all the fragments of Greek poetry that nearly everyone—Pound, H.D., etc.—was reading in the British museum. “The Islander” reminds me of not only of H.D.’s poems, but also Pound’s “Papyrus,” a translation of a Sapphic fragment: “Spring . . . / Too long . . . / Gongula . . .” These four words need no context: it’s Spring, and someone’s lover, Gongula, has been gone for far too long. Like Gluck’s poem, “Papyrus” demands that we fill in the context. In both poems, it is the foregrounding of artifice through fragments— or, as Perloff explains, the act of “lifting the saying out of the zone of things said [i.e. spoken in normal conversation], or framing the given object . . . in a new way” (130)—that creates an illusion of sincerity. We can imagine, if just for a moment, that these poems are letters or journals found in some museum. This illusion would be utterly destroyed if the poet’s “critical consciousness” slipped into the poem.
David St. John and Gluck, in her later poems, try to maintain a balance between the critical consciousness with which modernity has cursed us and the illusions necessary for art. Gluck uses myths and fables to maintain this balance. In “Pomegranate,” for example, she at once delves into an intimate relationship between mother and daughter and consciously explores an archetype through which this relationship has been understood. As David St. John tells the story about the movie of his life, he addresses the concerns that a number of literary critics have raised about autobiographies, journals, and the poems structured on them. The refrain of “Assembling, dissembling” addresses two major concerns of Altieri: 1.) that poets construct or assemble themselves in poems 2.) that this assembling is a form of masking or dissembling. Also, I may be wrong, but I think St. John explicitly explains the structure of his book in poem XVIII. He visits his old university and listens to a lecturer say, “’My ambition here is the collapsing of several languages / Upon one another, all the while subtracting the narrative armature until only / The activated field of the implied narrative remains.’” In the poem, his response to this lecture is less than flattering, but I think that this reaction is either self-deprecating or just simply a poet’s gut reaction to the way in which academic criticism turns art into an abstract mix of theory and praxis. St. John intersperses moments of self-consciousness, or lucidity, among moments of pure lyricism: “Black leaves. The notebooks filling with ash. The limbs of the city / Warping toward heaven, the limbs of angels angling toward the earth” (“V”). This very mixture of lucidity and lyricism is what the lecturer attempts to describe.

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Romantic Specters

I wonder if a new dimension to “reader-response” theory might be that not only is a text’s “meaning” contingent on the perspectives of its diverse readers, but even a single reader’s perspective is multiple and contingent on the many occasions of her reading. For such I’ve found this quarter, that I’ve found new avenues in works I’d previously thought shut for me.

Gluck, for example. How I have resisted this work. And how I have been chided. I resist her thin complaining, her pressed, solitary speaker (yet multiple also, in its array of dramatis personae), yet always this solitary experience in extremis: the bitter slice of “Love Poem” (Marshland 90), in which love seems analogous to pain: love and pain are often viewed as corollaries, but in this poem no peak intervenes between valleys. Such an atrophied definition of love, this. These blurred yet insistent “you”s and “me”s in the poems, the hazy details serving, strangely, to amplify the impression that I, as a reader, have stumbled into a painfully private and pressing conversation. Gluck struggled for years with anorexia nervosa, and her struggle infuses these early poems: as to take on the voice of Jeanne D’Arc, to accept to be “transformed to fire” (78): a distrust of flesh runs through these poems, and flesh’s corollaries: desire, love, passion, plenitude. But I risk pathologising the poems.

Yet the new avenue: Re-reading these poems, particularly in House on Marshland, I felt as if I were reading “fleshed” moments from some fiction by Hawthorne, as if these poems could have been written by Hester, describing her interactions with Dimmesdale, or else written by the wife (Elisabeth) of that minister (Mr. Hooper) who wore the black veil. In this imagination, for example, the “large solitary blossoms” of japonica (98), carried by a “you” to the speaker, after the rain has stopped and “[s]unlight/ motioned through the leaves,” this brings a stark association: “But death/ also has its flower,/ it is called/ contagion…”: and the speaker accepts this “contagion” as “a gift”; this imagination also finds fascination in the dramatic situation of "The Murderess" (69), which leaves us certain that at least one horrific murder has occurred, but uncertain of the details: has a mother murdered her daughter? a mother murdered a man (or men) who violated her daughter? All of the above? I find in these poems a “gentle but unconquerable obstanancy,” as Hawthorne described Mr. Hooper’s refusal to lift his black veil, even for his wife: these poems are too obstinate to lift their black veils. Such mystic imagination is part of Romanticism writ large: as if such fervent optimism in the human spirit ushers in un-reason, nightmares, the other side of the coin of “soul.” So these poems for me expanded from isolated delirium into, well, a tradition of delirium…. What is so different about the experience of reading romantic/gothic fiction: Hawthorne, Poe, perhaps even The Virgin Suicides? Perhaps even Amee Bender and Judy Budnitz. Flannery O’Connor? Why do I find these tales of human horror such much more intriguing and palatable than Gluck’s specters? Perhaps I find it just too frightening and too claustrophobic to read this kind of work from the isolated lyric perspective.

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LPs

So, Gelpi is hot. I like the cut of G's jib. I like very much his formulation (postmodern=mod-rom). Very nice. I like too the very easy distinction, said elsewhere in far more complicated ways, that where the modernists pose a basic epistemological question in terms of romantic aims that the postmodernists see the problem as strictly ontological, doubting the being of the very reality the mods and roms are seeking/searching for. In the LP's we can as simply see this divide between the real and perception as a kind of fetishizing of the sign and its apparent plasticity. Yikes. The LP's in this vein seem a bit ridiculous when at their most plastic, when the thing most emphasized is the letter or word with its combinations and components, its contingencies and arbitrariness, and its obvious materiality as sign (dots or lines on pages), where the divide between the real and its sign is willfully made opaque. It's interesting that in the more engaging works I'm usually able to identify or interpolate a subject, in other words something beyond the plasticity of the sign itself, where we reach even on some distant shore a glimpse of a certain signified, if only through the context that juxtaposition provides, whereas the work that deprives me of that just makes me think of a bunch of broken tools: "Look, here are these tools. Check them out. Ignore their usual uses. They're broken because we don't even know if anything is ever even broken for them to fix. But check them out. Aren't they weird when they're not doing the job that we believe they were meant to do, but they they don't really do if you think about it? Listen to them we turn them on and they make their broken noises. They don't look or sound right. Awesome." I mean the proposition is relatively interesting theoretically speaking, much like a large degree of Abstract Expressionism, but the problem with LP's is that they don't have something to rely on like the basic properties of color and their emotional correlatives, similar to the notes of music, which at its most abstract still evokes particular feelings, once the letter is simply itself. Also, when you get down to the material of the written word, which, if we ignore Derrida, is simply an evocation of the spoken, a sign for a sign for a signified, what we get to if we get to materiality isn't really the basic material at all. The written word is simply an interpolation of the spoken and the thing it describes or names (there are problems with this description if we believe as Cynthia Ozick does that reading is what guarantees speech, and not the other way around). In this way the arbitrariness of LP is shown as a typical academic calculation guised in marxist rhetoric. The true materiality (I'm being silly in part) is the air, the tongue, and the teeth (other parts follow here, too).

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Language, what is it good for?

The language poets are an interesting lot. I find the exacting, tedious methods MacLow uses in constructing (or deconstructing) the Pound poems, for example, to be fascinating. Yet, at the same time, I can't quite grasp the point of making a poem that it is inevitably devoid of meaning and that will prove incomprehensible to the majority of readers. I'm interested in the idea of trying to remove language from it's referential frame so that words exist only as the words themselves, words with no "baggage," or past (so to speak). Yet, I'm not sure that it is truly possible to ever do this--and if it is, I'm left wondering what the point is. To remove language from any kind of frame, it seems to me, is to render it utterly meaningless. Though, I suppose, that this is part of the point. But then this makes me wonder if such language constructions are really poems--and it follows that this question raises the eternal question of what exactly constitutes a poem. I don't intend to try to answer that question (I think I once wrote a very long paper addressing the "what is a poem?" question which inevitably could not provide an all-encompassing answer). It just seems to me that much of MacLow's work is an exercise in numerology more than it is poetry. I found Perloff's article to be helpful in determining the ways in which this kind of poetry is working (that Mac Cormack's poems are designed for the eye, for example) as well as in helping to see ways that this poetry can be categorized. Yet, I still find myself highly resistant to the work even if I better understand its construction and purpose.

I have an easier time accepting Bernstein and Hejininian's works--probably because the words seem a little less random, to have been chosen with at least some degree of personal decision and, ultimately, because their poems more resemble "poems" as I know them. Yet, while I might prefer reading these poems over MacLow's, the fact that Bernstein and Hejininian seem to allow even a small amount of word choice and manipulation makes me wonder why they don't choose one extreme or the other. That is, why limit the poet's control in some aspects but not others? How do they decide how much "choice" to allow themselves? The best answer I can come to is that they are trying as much as possible to remove language from its "prison" without reducing it to gibberish. Again, though, I really don't think language can ever be free from its referential use--it seems to me that every word carries with it some remnant of connotation, that we can't help but think of all different ways we have heard a word used or the things it has been previously associated with. Rather than a limitation, I see this as a challenge in constructing a poem--as a way to incorporate these associations, but also to manipulate them and to create new ways of seeing the word. But maybe I'm just one of Gelpi's Neoromantics, preferring to believe in the idea that language is not entirely corrupt or used up, that it is still good for something.

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No Clever Title Come to Mind

Well, during an initial publishing attempt, my computer froze. In light of that mishap, I apologize if this time around I’m much more scathing than I first was. I hope this does not turn into mindless bashing, but you’ve been forewarned. After reading works from Mac Low, Bernstein, and Hejinian, I had to take several hours before I could begin to make a coherent response. Perhaps this is a result of some of the incoherence and disjunction that make language poetry language poetry. Perhaps I could not respond because of my original bewilderment by the amount of works by poets that I knew very little about; it was reminiscent of my first time in a large bookstore, looking up (I was a wee little guy then) at countless books by countless people that meant absolutely nothing to me. Or, perhaps I could not stop asking myself one question: why? I read several poems which I ultimately enjoyed, but that annoying little why repeatedly snuck up and tapped me on the shoulder or, as was the case with the poems I did not enjoy, walked up in front of me and slapped me across the face. We’ve discussed the purpose of poetry in class and I’ve done so at length in other classes and with my mother, so I like to discover purpose every time I read.
Now, I read the Gelpi article which helped answer some of the surface-level whys. Language poets like to highlight the fact that a reader gives meaning to the words on the page. Some want to eliminate poet presence completely. But, at the risk of sounding truly un-academic, I want to make a brief statement of my opinion of this language poetry: at some point, poetic experimentation becomes crap. I was willing, at first, to allow Mac Low some room to play with me, but when I got to Bernstein’s disfrutes experimentation effectively transitioned to crap. About the only thing I took from the book was the title’s meaning in Spanish. If a person needs to read twenty pages of critical analysis to find any semblance of purpose in a poem, the poetry loses its potency.
As always, I don’t want to throw all language poets and their work into one metal trash bin; that would not be fair to those poets and works that I have not seen yet. Actually, I don’t even want to discard all of Mac Low, Bernstein, and Hejinian. I really enjoyed Bernstein’s “The Bricklayer’s Arms.” I think I may have actually understood what he was getting at, to the extent that a reader can ever really accomplish this. I saw how the bricklayer was responsible for the initial commands to his arms, but as the arms began cradling souls and doing other odd things, he was left with that quizzical look on his face. The bricklayer, sans arms, represents the poet while his arms represent the poem. The poet has the ability to put the words on the page, but as soon as his pen’s down and the words are published for the world, he no longer has the ability to change anything to try to shape meaning in a different way. The reader comes in and takes the poem and makes it mean something. This seems to be one of the chief aims of language poetry: when the reader gets the poem, the poet is eliminated and the reader makes the words mean something. So, as a result of recognizing at least something in “The Bricklayer’s Arms,” I can say that I enjoyed it. But, several poems later, when I dove headfirst into disfrutes, I was very disappointed to find that there was no water in the pool. “Disfrutar,” if I remember correctly, means “to enjoy” in Spanish. Therefore, I think “disfrutes” means “you enjoy.” My apologies, Charles, but I did not enjoy--please don’t be upset with me.

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Hopless Romantics

One could easily make nasty comments about the language poets that we were assigned to read. People have and will probably continue to do so, not necessarily because some of these poems defy expectations, but because some are outright alienating. Ranting and raving are not enough, however. Perloff encourages us to historicize our reception of poems, and Gelpi’s short history of Modernism and Postmodernism helps me understand my reaction to a poem like Words nd Ends from Ez. Gelpi’s thesis is that Romanticism, although it has changed significantly throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, did not die. Thus, when I expect to find some kind of human connection in poetry—with myself, with the writer, with others—I expose my latent Romanticism. In short, I do not want to feel alienated. This is the way MacLow’s poem makes me feel. For instance, how am I supposed to read a line like “aZe luRs”? Is this the word “azure,” which appears elsewhere in the poem, broken into two syllables? Probably. What is the point of making the word appear unfamiliar? To make me understand its meaning differently, or to gain a fresh perspective? It, like the rest of the poem, is probably meant to show me that language is unstable and arbitrary. That’s alienating. I do not feel totally alone in my alienation. Bernstein’s “Thank You for Saying Thank You” shows that language poets can be alienated by the public reception of their poems.
Gelpi also helps me understand why I like MacLow’s “15TH LIGHT POEM: FOR SUSAN WITLIN -- 11 AUGUST 1962.” It begins with a translation of the first line of the Divine Comedy. Intertextuality is a familiar Modernist characteristic. Also, the source itself is a Modernist favorite, likely because the Divine Comedy, in both content and form, reflects the Modernist’s “desperate insistence on coherence . . . amidst the ravages of time: the instability of nature, the unreliability of perception, and the tragedy of human history.” MacLow’s poem is also brief, about as short an imagist poem. Poe (an American Romantic?) thought brevity is an important aspect of lyric poetry. It is the appropriate length for the epiphanies and “visionary insights,” to borrow Gelpi’s term, that I find in Romantic, Symbolist, and Imagist poetry. MacLow even seems to be making a Romantic gesture in the poem when he suggests that middle-aged people can still find the intuitive child within. Finally, the poem features the evolution from metered verse to free verse that Perloff outlines in her article. The beginning of the poem can measured in anapests, and the end can be measured in lines.According to Gelpi, MacLow is a “trickster,” whereas Bernstein and Hejinian are “serious poets.’” I am not sure that I totally agree with distinction, but I do see how Bernstein and Hejinian address public issues, which I guess would make them more serious poets. In My Life, Hejinian does not overlook the political and cultural context of her childhood. For example, she comments on the Civil Rights movement and the race riots in the paragraph headed “Yet We Insist That Life Is Full Of Happy Chance.” However, I do not see how her formal decisions enhance her political statements. As in Bernstein’s “The Ballad of the Girlie Man,” the most potent lines could have come from almost any contemporary American poet who cares about politics. In “The Bricklayer’s Arms,” Bernstein effectively uses a catalogue to celebrate the tradesman and mourn his deferred dreams. Yet, I would guess that most readers are familiar with the association and juxtaposition that poets generate through a catalogue. We saw this technique in Pinsky, the popular poet laureate. In fact, “The Bricklayer’s Arms” is NeoRomantic. It is a Wordsworthian celebration of a common tradesman in a Whitmanesque catalogue.

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The Public/Private Spectrum

Komunyakaa and Pinsky both seem to incorporate the public and private spheres in their work in different ways. Yet, when compared to the other poets we've read, their approach seems more similar than disparate. I see both poets using the public/private in a way that differs, for example from Forche. In general, I think Forche seems to be more specifically addressing a public--she wants us to see or feel something. While Forche's poems are told from her personal perspective and thus inherently include her private point of view, the goal of the poem seems to be to act upon a public. With Komunyakaa and Pinsky, it seems as though their poems reflect a weaving of both the public and private. This differs too, I think from Strand, whose work could perhaps be viewed on the opposite end of the spectrum from Forche's--that is, as being primarily private. I'm not exactly sure where Rich would fall--somewhere in the middle with Komunyakaa and Pinsky, but with a definite leaning toward the public end. Although Rich's poems are often intensely personal, they definitely seem directed toward a public. Of course, all poems can be said to address a public in some way--I see then Rich's poem as being highly conscious of this public and as attempting to do something specific (not unlike Forche) in the way that she communicates with this public. As for Knox, I think what she does with her poems exists in a slightly different category from everyone else--because her work aims to explore and manipulate the structures of language itself, I see her as slightly removed from the public/private spectrum. Knox definitely seems to be having a discourse with a public, but I'm not so sure she has a specific message to convey and examining the private self doesn't seem to be her foremost aim. The self and the public are inherently part of Knox's work, yet I think she is more concerned with the way these things can be depicted through language than with the private and public themselves.

Komunyakaa and Pinsky seem to deal with the public/private in a sort of middling ground in which they are concerned with the way the public affects the private as well as the way the private can serve to represent the larger public. Pinsky's poetry seems a mixing of specific private and public detail. I see this operating in "An explanation of America": Pinsky is painting a picture of America using a series of detailed descriptions that reflect his personal vision of America . And while this poem does not really contain details from Pinsky's private life, the poem itself is framed by the fact that this is Pinsky's explanation to be given to his daughter--a seemingly private act. Yet, the poem also functions as Pinsky's explanation to us as readers, something more public.

Komunyakaa's work also seems a blend of the public/private, yet I think Komunyakaa more often gives a personal narrative through which we can see how larger public themes operate on the individual. We see the effect of public events on a private life--we also see the way in which Komunyakaa's personal experience can be representative of a larger public experience (i.e. the Vietnam war). If Pinsky, give us an intermingling of public and private detail in order to piece together a picture of both the individual as well as the society he lives in, Komunyakka gives us a specific picture of the individual from which we can extract the larger public.

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Private Self in a Public Cosmos

Komunyakaa’s and Pinsky’s poems are amazing similar. At first, I did not think that I would find much similarity. What I knew of Komunyakaa came from reading Magic City, an amazing book about his childhood and young adulthood in Bogalusa, Louisiana. What amazed me most about the book was its strong imagery. When I first read Pinsky, I did not know quite how to describe him. “Discursive” seemed to be an appropriate word, mostly because he and his critics used it. (I briefly glimpsed the title of an article that referred to his first important book of criticism The Situation of Poetry as “an attack on the image”). However, this word only fits poems like “Essay on Psychiatrists” and “An Explanation of America,” two works which I found refreshing if only because I had not read too many like them. I cannot honestly say that this word came to mind as I read “The Figured Wheel” or “The Avenue,” more recent poems in which the images, although strung out in catalogues, are striking. Pinsky uses the “jump-cut” and the “panorama,” to borrow a couple words from Quinn; Komunyakaa, I once thought, prefers the “close-up.”
So what? Well, the close-up is good at capturing intimate moments. It is the preferred type of visual focus when one writes in what Altieri calls the “scenic mode.” The self stays in place to brood, meditate, remember, etc. When one jumps from image to image to image, the self does not stay in place. This technique can lead to what Quinn, describing the “breathless lyricism” in “History of my Heart, calls “a sublime moment, with the speaker lifted beyond the threshold of the private self—with its wishes and needs—into exhilarating panoramas of public desire” (46). In the “Everywhere I Go, There I Am” section of “City Elegies,” the panoramic views of a city lead to the speaker’s awareness of the similarity between his material body and the city. Just as the body’s “cells / . . . die by millions and replicate themselves,” the city—including its people, wildlife, infrastructure—is constantly dying and replicating itself. This comparison would also imply that the speaker’s life and death form part of the city’s life and death.
It would not be fair to limit any comments about Komunyakaa to the mode he uses in Magic City. (My memory of the book may faulty, anyway). In fact, a poem like “1984” is as broad and cosmic in its perspective of America as “The Figured Wheel,” perhaps even more so. But I do no want to overlook the fact that Komunyakaa is able to touch political and cultural themes even when exploring very intimate moments from his past. Dowdy provides an insightful explanation of how he makes this move from private to cultural. In the conclusion to his reading of “Fever,” Dowdy describes how, in the poem, “The organic character of individual experience and memory invades America and inextricably links the self with his or her society.” “In this capacity,” he continues, “the individual affects the basic character of the culture, exposing its secrets and hypocrisies” (814). When considering the relationship between culture and individual, I normally think of the process that Dowdy describes here in reverse: that is, culture conditions the individual. For example, in “History of my Heart,” Pinsky describes his mother’s memories of Fats Waller and of his father along with “the acknowledgement of how the movies helped make these memories” (Quinn 46). Komunyakaa, as Dowdy explains, tries to uncover how culture conditions people. Dowdy’s reading of “Tu Do Street” is excellent, but I did not even need his analysis to understand what Komunyakaa is doing the poem. “Tu Do Street,” its ending in particular, struck me because it is so different from the preceding the poem “A Break from the Brush.” The latter poem is like a postcard from Vietnam viewed with dramatic irony. It is a poem of witness, and it is no less important because it is simply a poem of witness. However, at the end of “Tu Do Street,” Komunyakaa strikes a cosmic note with “underworld.” It is as if he stands back and looks at himself, the other soldiers, the Vietnamese prostitutes, and sees the “hellish” environment they share. In other words, he obtains a cultural perspective from a private experience.

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Ahmurika w/P&K

So, Pinsky & Komunyakaa vs. Forche, Knox, Strand, Rich. This would make for an odd cage match. What would the rules be even? Pinsky and Know go well together; they could make a match at the Poetry Prom perhaps; she the merrymaker, he the earnest incantationist. Komunyakaa goes with Rich and Forche (all platonic of course, though after alcohol who knows). Strand: stag! (I apologize for all this)...Moving on, the easiest way for me to differentiate between P&K is to look at the basics. K seems more stable in terms of unity of theme; when he begins, I can for the most part follow (the structure is often narrative, or if not, follows a line of melody, the parts of which appear somewhat related). When K moves he moves largely within the mind of the speaker (there are times when this is not so and K resembles P); when P moves he moves as if a camera flying over a landscape, inhabiting the particulars of an entire country. The movement, as in City Elegies, covers an enormous amount of space, where the details evoke the larger scene, which we cut from into a different scene, and then another, etc. Here there's little of Altieri's self-satisfaction (which we find in Komunyakaa now and again), little of the end silence. The poems simply stop, perhaps because they could go on.

Part of what distinguishes both of these poets for me, and connects them in some ways to Rich, are the ways in which they're depicting poetry as a "thing" in a culture; the context or scope of which seems almost always to have a culture in mind, a situation that unfolds beyond the private, a thing that intrudes upon the private and that the private intrudes upon. People are in places; the world is about, everywhere. Unlike Strand, whose poems seem at times to let us in only to a cloister in which Strand's emotional life battles the self-same demons, P&K's realm is far more public, and inhabits any number of stances in order to articulate stories about themselves telling stories (though all is not story here) about others, though K is often using himself to tell the story of the world in relation to him. History here is used for scope, to delineate ourselves in/from the past, whether K's vietnam or jazz or Pinsky's jesus or window.

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Forche, Knox, and the Psycho-Political Muse

I found both the Forche and Knox poems to be very challenging. I would like to discuss their difficulty in light of the assumptions about “radical poetics” that Breslin uncovers in the selection from The Psycho-Political Muse.
What I had heard about Knox did not prepare me for the ordered stanzas—quatrains, tercets, couplets, etc.—and closed forms that I saw on the pages of A Beaker. I do not normally associate these with “radical poetics.” In his description of the post-WWII rejection of “traditional forms,” Breslin expresses my assumption more eloquently than I can: [t]raditional forms, whether the prosodic exactions of rhyme and meter or the plotting of narrative, belonged to the realm of the external, the rational, and the rigid; it was necessary to break from them in order to have the greater spontaneity of ‘improvised forms’” (2). Knox’s poems seem to contradict this assumption. Although she often uses elements of “traditional forms—“ closed forms and ordered stanzas in particular—her poetry is anything but “rational” and “rigid.”
She shows “greater spontaneity” in a sestina, one of the most demanding traditional forms, than I have seen displayed in many poems that are written in “improvised forms.” The title of “Canzone: Lenses” refers not only to the poem’s subject—Knox losing her contact lenses—but also to an Italian closed form. It took me awhile to realize that the poem is more of a sestina than a canzone. (As far as I know—and I could be wrong—the two forms are mutually exclusive). Each line in the poem ends in one of five, as opposed to the traditional six, words: “sky,” “open,” “curtain,” “door,” and “window.” Knox even complicates the traditional order in which the “end-words” are supposed to appear in each stanza. (Perhaps this is why she calls the poem a canzone) I will not go into how she does this. Suffice it to say that each “end-word” appears more often than it would in a typical sestina.
Although the form of “Canzone,” once uncovered, is predictable, the content is anything but. It is amazing to see what Knox does with a simple story about losing her contact lenses and experiencing blurred vision. There is a short reflection on the Copernican and Ptolemaic universes, a recollection about seeing the Aurora Borealis, a quotation from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, and so on. Like “Canzone,” Knox’s other poems demonstrate how traditional closed forms can be quite radical. She does not shy away from the fact that formal demands—such as only being able to end a line with one of five words—work against the logic and rationality of normal discourse.
The most observable difference between the poems in Forche’s The Country Between Us and The Angel of History is the absence of a stable “I.” (Interestingly, Forche returns to the stable “I” in The Blue Hour). She explains this change in the endnotes to Angel: “The first-person, free-verse, lyric-narrative poem of my earlier years has given way to a work which has desired its own bodying forth: polyphonic, broken, haunted, and in ruins, with no possibility of restoration” (81). Out of all the different “radical poetics” that Breslin describes, Forche’s resembles Charles Olson’s in that it “oppose[s] to the ego not the deeper authority of the unconscious so much as a dissolution of the ego’s fixities through participation in the continual becoming of the material world” (20). However, Forche’s “I” dissolves not in “the continual becoming of the material world” but in time and memory. The “I” is fragmented into personal memories. It is also fragmented into historical memories—memories of those events, mostly atrocities, which, though she did not experience them, have nevertheless affected the way she understands herself and the world. The child in the poem, whom I assume is Forche’s son, might represent the unconscious, a state quite different from the historical and material world. The earliest stage of childhood and the afterlife, which is much more prominent in The Blue Hour, appear to be states of peace and coherence that are barely imaginable in the material world. In Forche’s poetry, the unconscious and the afterlife may be the “deeper authority” but they are not easy to enter or understand, a fact that, according Breslin, certain poets of the 50s and 60s failed to grasp.

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Sincere Surrealism

Mark Strand’s poems fascinate me because they are at once accessible and strange. They are written in what you could call a “plain style.” I do not have to wrap my head around elaborate metaphysical conceits, figure out numerous allusions, or make sense of an experience or story through fragments that are meant to resist cohesion. However, the events, people, and images in these poems are anything but plain and simple.
When I read “The Mailman,” for instance, I understand the sequence of events being presented. A mailman comes to the speaker’s door at midnight. He is upset about the bad news he brings the speaker and begs forgiveness for bringing it. The speaker invites him to the house, where he ends up falling asleep. As the mailman sleeps, the speaker writes some disturbing letters, apparently the kind that upset the mailman. The scene being described is clear enough, but I am left wondering why the mailman comes at midnight, why he cares about the news he brings, why he would sleep in the speaker’s house, and why the speaker is writing himself disturbing letters. Of course I immediately assume that the speaker in this poem, and in any others like it, is recounting a dream. Strand has just done away with any references to a reality outside the dream. He has not even included the word “dream” in the title.
Strand is an expert at blurring the distinction between dream and “reality.” “The Last Bus,” for example, appears to be based on an actual bus ride through Rio de Janeiro. It is dated “(Rio de Janeiro, 1966).” However, the speaker sees “[t]he ghosts of bathers” at night. Similarly, he describes how the city sleeps and how “the sea is a dream / in which it [the city] dies and is reborn.” What at first appears to be a rather imaginative description of a foreign city at night subtly blurs into the speaker’s own dream, in which people and objects from Rio, even the very bus driver, appear. Towards the end of the poem, the speaker looks out of a window in an apparent attempt to find his bearings in reality, but he sees nothing like the Rio he knows. I am left wondering whether he is trapped in his own dream, his dream has merged with Rio’s, or Strand is trying to depict the experience of entering one of the less touristy sections of Rio.
I would argue that more often than not Strand uses—perhaps while also resisting-- what Altieri calls “the scenic style” (11). Many of these poems have certain of the characteristic scenic elements that Altieri finds in Stafford’s “Ceremony.” Both “The Mailman” and “The Last Bus” “plac[e] a reticent, plain-speaking, and self-reflective speaker within a narratively presented scene evoking a sense of loss” (10-11). However, the “narratively presented scenes” in Strand’s work are often surreal. He seems to be one of those poets who “attempt to transfor[m] the [scenic] mode from within.” As Altieri explains, “[a]lthough they do not deny prevailing ideals of personal sincerity and the impact of resonant silence, . . . [they] try to acknowledge the pressures and opportunities for imaginative play afforded by self-consciousness about the motives in rhetoric” (17). I get the sense that Strand is coming to some deep realizations about himself and his experiences in “The Milkman” and “The Last Bus,” even though I know he is engaging in some “imaginative play.” I also recognize how Strand pushes the envelope, so to speak, in poems like “The Prediction,” “The Story of Our Lives,” and “The Unsettling.” In these poems, the poet writing the scene enters the scene and becomes part of the narrative. Even so, like the less playful poems, they are sincere mediations on death, loss, and nostalgia.

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