Aaron Kunin on Milton & Scalapino

Aaron Kunin sent me an e-mail commenting on my post about Milton's syntax, and has kindly given me permission to post it here:

Just a quick note to say that I hear and understand your observation about Milton and Scalapino. It's something I've thought about more than once. There is a fundamental difference in the way I think about them, though: Milton's writing seems to be motivated by sheer discomfort with the English language; the most exciting moments in his writing often feel like they're testing the limits of the language, or like they've passed beyond them—it's not English anymore. (Sometimes it's the syntax that does this. From Samson Agonistes: "Smote Cisera sleeping through the temples nailed"—where the order seems to be determined by some other language that just happens to be using the materials of English.) Whereas Scalapino's writing gives a completely different feeling: it's like the universe speaks English. She seems to inhabit the language comfortably (which makes her writing, I think, very different from most experimental writing). Like this line from one of her first books, which I'm quoting from memory: "a man going by says 'good' to himself"—that isn't quoted exactly, but if I could remember it better, it would give the feeling that each word is in exactly the right place....

Anyway, I tend to put Milton and Scalapino together for other reasons.

1) They belong to a really small category of people who once had a sense of humor, then lost it. With Milton, this loss can even be dated precisely (1659, although one might argue that "A Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth" is a brilliant political joke). With Scalapino, it's harder to pinpoint, but it seems to occur somewhere in the pages of The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion.

2) They hate being misread. It's really kind of frightening, how angry they are about being misread, misquoted, appreciated for the wrong reasons, etc. And in their fury about being misread, they momentarily recover the sense of humor which they had previously lost due to excessive seriousness. For example, Milton's reply to Dryden, Scalapino's replies to her critics in R-hu, and her refrain "That's a poem" in The Front Matter, Dead Souls.

3) They hate being misread because they are radically iconoclastic. They object on moral principle to the replacement of an object by an image. They object to an image not because it's inaccurate, but simply because it's an image.

I'm not qualified to respond to some of Aaron's comments, because I simply don't know Scalapino's work well enough, at least not the books he mentions. I can say, however, that in Milton's case, although I agree with Aaron that Milton is "testing the limits" of English, I'm not sure this is the same thing as saying that he is uncomfortable with it; he is antagonistic and violent in his wresting of it, yes, but in a way that only someone who has lived for a long time in harmony with its facile beauties could manage. Read the sonnet to the nightingale, for example, or for that matter, "Lycidas": the entire early corpus is a methodical exhausting of conventional lyric possibilities. He does seem to know early on that he will move beyond this point, as he suggests in "At a Vacation Exercise," in which he addresses the English language directly:

I have some naked thoughts that rove about
And loudly knock to have their passage out;
And wearie of their place do only stay
Till thou hast deck't them in thy best aray;
That so they may without suspect or fears
Fly swiftly to this fair Assembly's ears;
Yet had I rather, if I were to chuse,
Thy service in some graver subject use,
Such as may make thee search thy coffers round,
Before thou cloath my fancy in fit sound....

English, he lets it be known, has its work cut out for it with him. And yet, the language of the late, great epics and Samson is always a pushing of English not beyond the point of identity with itself, but up against the outer boundaries of that point. As Latinate as the verses get, they always leave open a route for being unwound, straightened into elegantly conventional English syntax. English wrestles with the classical serpent, but always wins.

Finally, I wanted to mention, and forgot to, that one of the high points of the Trans Genre conference last weekend was a screening of a video by Konrad Steiner featuring Scalapino's beautiful reading of part of Way. Steiner's videography is stunning, and the two artists complement each other wonderfully. It is an extremely moving piece of work.

Joshua Corey on Davidson & Mullen

Josh Corey discusses Daniel Davidson's Culture and Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary in his most recent post. Oddly enough, I've just been reading both books myself: I taught the Mullen last week in my Reading Poetry course (ugh, that sounds presumptuous--as though a book of someone else's poetry is something you can just commandeer and "teach"), and I've been reading the Davidson just because it was there on my shelf and I realized I hadn't read it yet.

Josh's comments are smart and honest, as always, but I can't help interjecting my own somewhat contrary opinion. I admire both books, but for me Davidson's provides more prolonged readerly engagement. The poems Josh cites from Sleeping, "Dim Lady" and "O, 'Tis William," are actually among the ones that I tire of the fastest: they strike me as toy poems, mere giddy exercises. Not that there's anything wrong with this in itself. They're perfectly enjoyable, and they're wonderful for stimulating students to loosen up and try new procedures.

I'm more interested, however, in Josh's resistance to Culture, or to be more precise, I'm interested in some of the terms he uses to express his resistance. I can't help but recall Jonathan Mayhew's objection that Russell Edson's language is not sufficiently "charged with meaning" (in Pound's words) when I read Josh's criticism that Davidson's "language isn't sensuous at all, nor does he offer much in the way of images." I don't want to argue that this is simply a "subjective" judgment; rather, I want to call for a rigorous definition (or set of possible definitions) of terms like "sensuous." Again returning to the Poundian triad of melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia, I think we can make a distinction here between a text (Sleeping) that foregrounds melopoeia and one (Culture) that foregrounds logopoeia.

Something Muriel Rukeyser writes in The Life of Poetry (thanks to Heather Fuller for turning me on to this book) helps me think through some tentative definitions of these concepts:

A painting is made by the hands of the painter, setting up the imaginative experience taken through his eyes. Music is written by the hand of the composer, giving us the imaginative experience through the ears. Poetry is made by the hand of the poet, and if we read the poem, we take the imaginative experience through the eyes with a shadow of sound; if we hear it, we take it through the ears with a shadow of sight.

Limits may be set on this by work with the illiterate, the blind and the deaf, who can help us to know the ways of sense.

But the reality of all the arts is that of the imagination.

Focusing on that middle paragraph for a moment, we might try to formulate the question as follows:

Melopoeia is lost on the deaf.
Phanopoeia is lost on the blind.
Logopoeia is lost on ... whom?

Rukeyser's category "illiterate" seems like a good place to start. Someone in the eighteenth century might say the "dull": those who, literally or figuratively, cannot read. The figurative sense I have in mind would apply to someone who, though technically literate, is incapable of registering rhetorical effects like irony or metaphor, whose imagination is incapable of navigating any detour from the path of the most direct referential communication. Such a person would also not understand puns, or rhymes, or rebuses, or iconic computer "smileys," all of which include mediated--shadowed, to use Rukeyser's word--versions of sound and sight.

I don't mean to suggest that the logopoetic dimension is entirely, or even inordinately, absent from Mullen's work. Certainly many of the poems in Sleeping invite us to make challenging mental connections, etc. But as Josh himself points out, the book is "immediately delightful," and quite often works of this sort make certain sacrifices in other areas. More to the point, works that dramatically foreground the logopoetic dimension often make sacrifices in the area of what we would usually consider "sensuous" effects. I suspect this is part of what keeps Mike Snider, for example, from being able to rank Zukofsky with Milton: Milton's sonic and even visual rewards are much more immediate. (Although, having said this, I must add that Milton is one of those poets who holds all three -poeias in near-constant, near-equal balance; I might also add that Davidson could be one of those poets I was trying to think of the other day who can achieve syntactic effects comparable in their subtlety and force to Milton. Early Milton, at least, which is nothing to sneeze at.)

It doesn't sound very exciting conceptualized in this way ... too much like an injunction to eat your vegetables because they're good for you even if they don't taste that good. But that brings us back to the need to redefine the "sensuous." We all know that certain experiences that we might shun at first later provide us with more intense satisfaction than those experiences we first preferred. In my case, jazz would be an example. For that matter, going back to vegetables, I now prefer lima beans to Kandy Korn, hands down. Some experiences, that is, don't at first strike us as sensuous simply because we have not yet awakened the specific senses needed. Sometimes these senses need to be invented anew. The reality is in the imagination, as Rukeyser says.

I hope it doesn't sound like I'm implying that Josh is illiterate because he doesn't appreciate Davidson sufficiently. Not my intention. Let's get back to the whole logopoeia question, since I was being kind of telegraphic. What I'm trying to get at is that logopoeia encourages a use of the meaning-making part of the brain that stretches it beyond its baseline functions of rational deduction, linear synthesis, etc. It is a use that involves sound and image, but perhaps at a level of shadowedness (Rukeyser again) that can best be apprehended in the abstract, as opposed to through direct sensual perception, or perhaps more pertinently, as opposed to through the mimesis of same. Thus a high tolerance for abstraction is a key component of the requisite logopoetic literacy.

Josh's impatience with Davidson's writing, he says, has to do with a lack of anchorability: not enough to grab onto, no surface footholds, whatever. This is something Juliana Spahr discusses in her essay "After Language Poetry", when she talks about what initially attracted her to Language Poetry:

In my thinking, I tend to begin with detail and then if I am smart enough, I move from there to the system. What was useful about language writing for me then was that it kept demanding that I look at the system, most obviously the system of language, before I marveled at the detail.

I like this formulation because it suggests that neither approach—detail first, then system, or vice versa—is superior, but that the ability to switch back and forth between them is valuable. Also, the "before I marveled" suggests that the detail (which I take to include primarily effects of melo- and phanopoeia, though that may be an oversimplification) is always going to be important, but that we may have to come up with ways of conceiving it that cause us to swerve away from it for awhile, as though in a temporary investigative orbit.

Mullen does require us on some level to work out a system (albeit one which is broadcast loudly to us by the title of the book), but it gives us plenty of instant pleasures to occupy ourselves with while we're getting there. Like I said, nothing wrong with this, except that in some cases, I wish that the surface delights were more subtle, or contained more layers. The system in her case, however, almost seems like more of an ornament at times than a necessary structure. (Though I don't find this to be so much the case in an earlier work like S*PeRM**KT, whose playful surface ripples correspond more rigorously to its sobering contextual undercurrent.) Davidson's book, on the other hand, is less indulgent. As we've established, it's confrontational like its author. Its particular method of confrontation is to present the reader with resolutely impenetrable and unhummable phrasal collocations. A passage from Product:

Joint venture with moth-like animals.

Made in entertainment, the phenomenon is really nothing made easy.

Experts have struggled to increase you, capital assembling to visions, your typical, sensuous, brilliant passion.

Show us your health care.

Timeless, masterfully-crafted writing.

A revolution in the American tradition of contemporary design, where you wish to increase you.

Our imaginations are the time-frame of quality features and financial privilege.

See the differences.... At all locations.

Return to those glorious days.

Whichever reason, the world.

Blocked-out, removed, and collected in the soothing modern, each personal sense of satisfaction is the offspring great old ideas are intended to address.

Check out our terrific training models, designed to pamper a wealth of old-world privilege.

Rewards such as a month to continue our typical service.... And your office is the time frame.

Satisfaction.... It's a model we can no longer overcome. Experience it now.

The question is, how does one ever get to a system here? It's clear that there is some "critique" of consumerism going on here, but is there a textual design or ratio that will reward careful, repeated reading, so as to make the critique more cogent? Maybe, maybe not. Gary Sullivan informs us in his afterword that Product was composed with the aid of "Breakdown," a text-manipulating software program. Knowing this explains some of the funky grammar and syntax, but it doesn't "explain" anything thematically except in the broadest, most banal metaphorical terms (consumerism = chewing subjects up and spitting them out as recycled cliches, etc.). The system is important here, I feel, not as a cognitive destination, but as a conceptual stopping-post that re-orients the reader, preparing him or her to let go of certain expectations and improvise others. Once we've recognized that there are really two authors, only one of which is human, we can appreciate certain effects of phrasing and inflection for what they are: ochestrated accidents, or accidental orchestrations. We can even appreciate the happy half-chance of thematic motifs coming together almost integrally ... passion, satisfaction, style. "Half-chance," that is, since the author has not completely surrendered control to a machine; he has winnowed the results of computerized processing with bias and sensibility. He has developed—imagined—this sensibility as a response to the demands of the method he himself has devised extempore. I think of Cage's remark that once you do something boring long enough, you eventually discover that it is not boring at all. Further, you discover that it has rules, however vague or fractally complex, and that these rules yield focused perceptions. Finally, these perceptions constitute a form of sensuousness.

I have a similar response to Barrett Watten's writing: in its deliberate flatness, there is a quality I find extremely sensuous. It may be a reptilian, or cyborg, sensousness, but it is "charged with meaning" on a plane that more conventionally "emotive" writing doesn't have access to.

I still don't think I've finished my thought. I often wish I had the discipline to argue a point through in detail, leading up to a firm conclusion, the way Ron Silliman does on a consistent basis. Not that I always agree with his conclusions, but there's a truly admirable confidence to his writing.

Continuing that digression, I have to mention that Ron's reading of Chris Tysh's Continuity Girl (reading of the first few pages, that is) this morning was more successful at making me want to buy the book than it was at convincing me that her approach was somehow passe. Similarly I want to read more about this "cognitive blending" that he refers to in the same post.

I'm afraid now that I overstated my preference for Davidson over Mullen, or at least for eat-your-vegetables poetry over Kandy-Korn poetry in general. As I said, I do admire Mullen's work a lot (otherwise I wouldn't have assigned it for my class). Also, I do have a weakness for "toy poetry" (though I don't mean to imply that Mullen falls into this category, at least not all the time or even usually). Some of my favorite poems are toy or Kandy-Korn poems. I think of Ron Padgett's "Nothing in that Drawer," or a lot of Richard Brautigan, or David Trinidad's poems made out of TV and song titles, or even works like Coolidge's "ounce code orange," Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" ... some might disagree as to the toy status of some of these, but I don't necessarily mean anything derogatory or trivializing by it: just that the poem works in part via some kind of compact minimalistic cuteness. It hops up in your lap to be petted. It's only a problem if it happens to have fleas, or drools excessively, or is trailing sand from the litter box.

Guest Poet Dept.: Claire Deane & Alli Warren

This last week, for a workshop component of my Reading Poetry class, I had students write poems using the Bernadette Mayer and Charles Bernstein experiment lists. Lots of great results. Here are a couple. Thanks to the authors for giving permission to post them here.

Presidential Misplacement
Claire Deane


She calls me from the cold
Among the vicissitudes incident to life
Just when I was low, feeling short of stable
No event could have filled me with greater anxieties
And all that she intends
That of which the notification was transmitted by your order
And all she keeps inside, isn’t on the label
Received on the 14th day of the present month
She says she’s ashamed
On the one hand
And can she take me for awhile
I was summoned by my country
And can I be a friend, we’ll forget the past
Whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love
But maybe I’m not able
From a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection
And I break at the bend
And, in my flattering hopes
We’re here and now, but will we ever be again
With an immutable decision
’Cause I have found
As the asylum of my declining years
All that shimmers in this world is sure to fade
A retreat which was rendered every day more necessary
Away again
As well as more dear to me
She dreams a champagne dream
By the addition of habit to inclination
Strawberry surprise, pink linen and white paper
And of frequent interruptions in my health
Lavender and cream
To the gradual waste committed on it by time
Fields of butterflies, reality escapes her
On the other hand
She says that love is for fools who fall behind
The magnitude and difficulty of the trust
And I’m somewhere in between
To which the voice of my country called me
I never really know
Being sufficient to awaken in the wisest
A killer from a savior
And most experienced of her citizens
Till I break at the bend
A distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications
It’s too far away for me to hold
Could not but overwhelm with despondence
It’s too far away...
One who ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own
Guess I’ll let it go

———
Author’s note:
Every other line beginning with the first line is from “Shimmer,” by Fuel.
Every other line beginning with the second line is from George Washington’s 1789 inaugural address.

———

Burning a Hole through Each Detail’s Abstraction with the Dishonest Perspective and Money, What the Hell’s Money
Alli Warren


I figure someone was speeding and got fidgety and needed a drink and there’s a party up in the hills so it’s a long line because they’re buying
lots of wine and the checker’s new and the loudspeaker’s broke.
The moral of the story, if you will,
the man just wanted some Pepsi Cola.

This is our time--
this is a BMW
that is a BMW
That is after she took my father’s name in marriage
Did she really take it?
Her middle name was her name from birth which was of course her father’s name and her father’s name which is my grandfather’s name got
his from his grandfather
You can’t go back forever.

Go back and edit and edit the happening of it.
You should write that one down, it’s literal it’s really like life happening and trapped in something else or inside something else but we overlook it and
don’t think of what’s inside the inside the inside the inside.
You might only see the legs of the nanny,
just the paint itself.

The streetlights look like big galaxies, look over there
with that black
that’s exactly what a galaxy looks like
we made it, that’s another big one.
I tried to restrain myself but in my younger days I did
I called you I wanted you to listen to it too--
the history of it
the first trick ever pulled,
so the story goes that the story goes,
you’re gonna die in two breaths.
So the first trick actually came from Egypt and it was two balls in a cup, the cups in the balls trick, with the three, do you know?
Don’t get into the second, first is pretty important because it’s first and I don’t even know if that’s first--
it goes back that seems just as good as just not knowing.

Hold the sky it will make you warmer,
those lights are for light
maybe that’s why
You are too I am not you are too
that’s a good one, I like that one, those double ones
There was a big question--
the detail or the abstract balloon--
at that same time those words seem so small
I think a lot of it is just being awake.


———
Author's note:
Transcription of a videotaped 24-minute parking lot conversation.

Milton's Sonnet 18

Teaching Milton this quarter has been a rich pleasure. Among English poets, he is the recognized master of syntactical innovation: his innovations have been so successful that it is now necessary to innovate away from them, and has been for the past couple hundred years. Allowing that he picks up on Shakespeare's technique in this regard, he runs with it as far as can be imagined. It's often pointed out that he uses Latinate structure to achieve his syntactic flexibility, and this is true, but in such a way as to make this structure almost synonymous with poetic syntax in English for more than two centuries. What now might sound old-fashioned or stiffly conventional to some ears was at one point a startling, sudden expansion of prosodic frontiers. Sit down for a half hour or so with "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso": even at this relatively early stage of his career, he was turning out subtle, sensuous verse whose power stemmed in large part from confidently lithe enjambment and expertly modulated grammatical pacing. Or take this poem from 1655 or so:

Sonnet 18 [On the late Massacher in Piemont]

Avenge O Lord thy slaughter'd Saints, whose bones
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold,
Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our Fathers worship't Stocks and Stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groanes
Who were thy Sheep and in their antient Fold
Slayn by the bloody Piemontese that roll'd
Mother with Infant down the Rocks. Their moans
The Vales redoubl'd to the Hills, and they
To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow
O're all th' Italian fields where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant: that from these may grow
A hunder'd-fold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian wo.

Much of the emotional urgency, the pathos, the sinewy pulse of this piece can be accounted for by syntax. "Their moans / The Vales redoubl'd to the Hills, and they / To Heav'n": stop and work this out. It's a compactly enfolded contraction of "The vales redoubled their moans to the hills, and they [the hills] redoubled their moans [in turn] to heaven." But the word order encourages an initial reading in which "they," parallel to "Their" in the previous line both grammatically and spatially, seems to refer to the slaughtered saints themselves. It is as though these victims of massacre are raised to heaven so abruptly and efficiently that they don't even need a verb to get there.

Among modern American poets, one who seems to me to have an equivalent level of syntactic tightness is Zukofsky. Among contemporary poets, it's tougher to say—the "strong line" is not exactly something that's fashionable to hold up as an ideal in an experimental context. If I were pressed, however, to suggest candidates, I might point toward Scalapino ... that angular, parsing-resistant toughness that nevertheless opens out onto polysemic prospects....

Flarf

"Flarf" came about a couple of years ago when Gary Sullivan submitted a deliberately bad poem to Poetry.com, one of those vanity companies that lures the unsuspecting with lavish praise of their poetry and then offers to "publish" it for an exorbitant fee. Theorizing that no submission, no matter how heinous, would ever be treated with anything other than solicitous fawning, he sent in a poem titled "Mm-hmm":

         Yeah, mm-hmm, it's true
big birds make
big doo! I got fire inside
my "huppa"-chimp(TM)
gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god
wanna DOOT! DOOT!
Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey!
oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake then take
AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee)
uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah
hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get
off the paddy field and git
me some chocolate Quik
put a Q-tip in it and stir it up sick
pocka-mocka-chocka-locka-DING DONG
fuck! shit! piss! oh it's so sad that
syndrome what's it called tourette's
make me HAI-EE! shout out loud
Cuz I love thee. Thank you God, for listening!

Sure enough, he received a full invitation to have his timeless piece of literature enshrined for all posterity.

Gary shared his poem, the style of which he dubbed "flarf," with members of the Subpoetics mailing list, and before long a few other participants began posting poems to Poetry.com, including myself, Nada Gordon, Drew Gardner, Katie Degentesh, Mitch Highfill, Maria Damon, Jordan Davis, and a handful of others. Eventually, we formed a separate mailing list.

The initial aesthetics of Flarf went largely unarticulated, but they can probably be approximated by the following recipe: deliberate shapelessness of content, form, spelling, and thought in general, with liberal borrowing from internet chat-room drivel and spam scripts, often with the intention of achieving a studied blend of the offensive, the sentimental, and the infantile.

Flarf has largely become stylized out of existence, made inseparable from the usual writing habits of its practitioners, as Gary and Nada and others have pointed out.

Maybe the problem was ever announcing "flarf" as a concept, suggestive of a movement, etc., in the first place. There were those among us who shrewdly warned about the dangers of such a move. The truth is, flarf is not a movement, and never was, because it has no principles as such, beyond some characteristic compositional techniques that developed along the way (collaging Google search-engine results, etc.).

One day there will no longer be "flarf" and "non-flarf." There will only be bad poems and worse poems. The worse poems will be stronger and will eat the merely bad ones. What is now provisionally gestured toward as "flarf" (falsely so, but necessarily) is merely an exercise in preparation for that eventuality.