Barrett Watten, "Mode Z"

Barrett Watten
Mode Z


Could we have those trees cleared out of the way?
And the houses, volcanoes, empires? The natural
panorama is false, the shadows it casts are so many
useless platitudes. Everything is suspect. Even
clouds of the same sky are the same. Close the door
is voluntary death. There is one color, not any.

Prove to me now that you have finally undermined
your heroes. In fits of distraction the walls cover
themselves with portraits. Types are not men. Admit
that your studies are over. Limit yourself to your
memoirs. Identity is only natural. Now become
the person in your life. Start writing autobiography.

——
from 1–10 (This Press, 1980)

I won't go into a lot of ponderous theoretical detail about Watten's use of the "New Sentence" or whether and how much this poem critiques the traditional bourgeois subjective lyric "I" or any of that stuff. Not that those aren't still interesting and important approaches, but I want just to say why the poem figures prominently in my own mental anthology. When I first read it, sometime in the mid-nineties while procrastinating writing my dissertation, I was intrigued by the way the individual utterances in the poem generated a complex but simple instant deniability: everything was in invisible brackets as though ironic, but the usual features of irony were absent. It was like "blank irony," rhetoric without motive. Or at least the motive wasn't made immediately available through accessible gestures. I had just been reading a ton of Elizabethan sonnets of widely varying quality, and there was something similar going on in all of them: a tension between competing goals of on the one hand ambitious self-fashioning and on the other self-effacing immersion in the anonymity of extreme conventionality. Things are said and in the same stroke of the pen unsaid. Things are meant in order to unmean. A famous example: Sir Philip Sidney's "I am not I: pity the tale of me" from Astrophil and Stella.

Watten's use of this auto-cancelling trope is different, of course, in that he does not court the reader with elegant paradoxes that are ultimately revealed as humorously sly pick-up lines, and in that his difficulties are not just ones of metaphoric conceit or local syntax. Rather, they are problems of what he might include in his definition of "total syntax," a referential and counter-referential field of both formal and social determinants that affect the way we feel, understand, and value writing. "Mode Z" requires imaginative participation from the reader of a different (though not necessarily any more or less rigorous) order from that required for appreciation of Renaissance sonnets: we must constantly invent and revise contexts in which the "voice" of the poem makes sense, or in which its failure to make sense makes sense. Well, I guess some Renaissance sonnets do that too.

For me the poem is as though "spoken" through a bullhorn by a figure in black pajamas standing on top of an imposing but faceless public structure. The orders and advice and observations offered by this speaker are offered, in front of a constantly changing geopolitical backdrop, to a likewise shifting audience. That blank irony I mentioned colors everything, including the pauses between sentences. It's like poetry translated from human into Vulcan--no, Romulan--by a robot, for insects, only the insects are also robots. And Romulans. And when you read it, you, like, become one of those Romulan robot insects. AND THEN IT MAKES YOU OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT, or something. I may have oversimplified this somewhat.

C[l]over Irony

"Jane Dark" on "ironic" cover versions of old songs:

What I want to suggest is that the particular form of irony we'll call "cover irony" is indeed deeply relevant to the postmodern, but often as a counter-strategy. That is to say, by producing a form which refuses the literal meanings of the original lyrics and/or/via a shift in the understood emotional tenor of the original sounds (Frente's "Bizarre Love Triangle" would be one example), it's a strong assertion of, rather than an effacement of, authorial power. Irony is a way of controlling meaning in a circumstance where meaning is already rich. It needn't displace the previous meaning to function this way; it simply needs to show a new meaning there.

This is a subject I've been thinking about lately, as I've been trying to use pop culture examples to get the idea of postmodern irony across to my freshman core class. A big difficulty, typically, proves to be that of distinguishing between irony and mere parody or sarcasm. The younger generation's lack of historical perspective is also a problem: it's a lot harder than you would think to explain why it is (or at least was at first) ironic that Leslie Nielsen stars in all those Naked Gun-type movies, or that Tony Bennett had a second stage of celebrity among the MTV crowd a few years ago.

So it was exciting to see Jane address these issues, and the entry is very useful and thought-provoking. As attractive as that definition of irony in the last two sentences quoted above is, though, I’m not sure I can agree with it fully. In order for the designation of irony (in the classical rhetorical sense, saying the opposite of what you really mean in order to make a point, and in the dramatic sense, a turn of events that seems to mock the expectations of those involved) to remain meaningful, mustn't it be the case that anything called by that name should "displace the previous meaning" in some way? It's exactly for this reason that I don't hear Frente's cover of "Bizarre Love Triangle" as ironic--unless by this it is meant that the original New Order version was itself ironic by virtue of its flat, affectless intonation of lyrics that refer to affect-heavy situations, and the Frente cover, by singing those lyrics "straight," i.e., with noticeable emotional inflection and thus non-ironically, induces a state of counter-irony? Maybe.

Still, this would imply that an original meaning had indeed been displaced. And this seems like what is happening in the other examples I can think of as well: Sonic Youth doing the Carpenters' "Superstar" (brilliantly) as though from the depths of a dark, static-filled cellar; Flying Lizards doing "Money"; Pat Boone doing "Crazy Train"; or, the most obvious and unequivocal example I can recall, Sid Vicious' rendition of "My Way." Some more complicated cases: Johnny Cash doing "Hurt" by NIN; William Hung doing "She Bangs" (does it have to be intentional on the part of the artist in order to count as ironic, or can the irony reside entirely in the way it's received by the audience? [actually, that one and the Cash one are pretty clear now that I think about it: the marketing is clearly ironic]); Deerhoof doing The Shaggs' "My Pal Foot Foot" (what the hell do you call that?).

Lisa Jarnot, "Ye White Antarctic Birds"

Lisa Jarnot
Ye White Antarctic Birds


Ye white antarctic birds of upper 57th street,
you gallery of white antarctic birds, you street
with white antarctic birds and cabs and white
antarctic birds you street, ye and you the
street and birds I walk upon the galleries of
streets and birds and longings, you the birds
antarctic of the conversations and the bank
machines, you the atm of longing, the longing
for the atm machines, you the lover of the
banks and me and birds and others too and
cabs, and you the cabs and you the subtle
longing birds and me, and you the
conversations yet antarctic, and soup and
teeming white antarctic birds and you the
books and phones and atms the bank
machines antarctic, and you the banks and
cabs, and him the one I love, and those who
love me not, and all antarctic longings, and all
the birds and cabs and also on the street
antarctic of this longing.


——
from Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001)

This poem made a big impression on me when it appeared in Colorado Review about five years ago. In fact, it was one of the poems that inspired me to start writing again after a grad-school-length period of bad writer's block. Or total atrophied creative wastage is more like it.

The delights are immediate and plentiful here: the oratorical Whitmanian syntax ("the / conversations yet antarctic") filtered wittily through Steinian repetition ("you street / with white antarctic birds and cabs and white / antarctic birds you street"); the ironic disjunctive arbitrariness ("and soup") co-existing with urgent Personistic urban joy ("you the lover of the / banks and me and birds and others too and / cabs"); the accretive, roughly chiseled consonantal bulk of the glacier-like whole nestled softly in the white cloud-pillows of its imagery.

At first, I doddered a little over the line-endings: were they strategically placed in any way whatosever (syllable-count, end-word repetition, etc.), or just a typographical transcription of where the original handwritten (perhaps) lines of a prose-like paragraph ended on a scrap of notebook paper? As far as I can tell, it doesn't really matter: the real measure in the poem is found in its fractured rhetorical rhythms, the archaic kitsch-diction that buoys up all the important physical objects like birds and ATM machines and longings. [Uh, longings aren't physical--oh wait, yes they are. Never mind.] All the lines ending with "the" and "of" and "and" and so on would be considered a failure of craft by certain standards for a certain kind of poem, but here they work almost more visually than sonically, making a blurry, frayed tear down the right margin, adding to the elegant cragginess of the lyric structure (this is another technique Jarnot gets from O'Hara).

Another way of thinking about the line-endings is that they're not at all concerned with such form-and-function paradigms of structure: that their role, rather, is as socially (as opposed to formally) motivated markers of stylistic affiliation with one tradition of lyric rather than another. But then, some might say that the same is true of conventional English metrical composition (for example), at differing levels of self-consciousness in its different historical phases as an emergent, dominant, and residual practice, or some combination thereof.

Rod Smith, "Ted's Head"

So there's this episode of Mary Tyler Moore where Ted's trying to
get a raise & after finagling and shenaniganizing he puts one over
on Lou & gets his contract changed to non-exclusive so's he can
do commercials which is not cool w/ Lou & the gang because
Ted's just a brainless gimp & it hurts the image of the news to
have the anchorman selling tomato slicers & dogfood so Lou gets
despondent because the contract can't be rescinded but then he
gets mad & calls Ted into his office & says, you know his voice,
"You're going to stop doing commercials, Ted" & Ted says "why
would I do that Lou?" & Lou says "Because if you don't I'll punch
your face out" & Ted says "I'll have you arrested" & Lou says "It'll
be too late, your face will be broken, you're not gonna get too
many commercials with a broken face now are you Ted?" & Ted
buckles under to force & everybody's happy, except Ted but
he's so dumb nobody cares & everybody loves it that Lou's not
despondent anymore he's back to his brustling chubby loud love-
able whiskey-drinking football-loving ways. Now imagine if Ted
were Lou, if Ted were the boss. You know how incredibly fucking
brainless Ted is, but let's imagine he understands & is willing to
use force. That's the situation we're now in as Americans.

——
from Music or Honesty (Roof Books, 2003)

I've had a copy of "Ted's Head" up on my office door for over two years now. The poem is quickly attaining its own word-of-mouth canonical status as one of the key poetic texts of the "post-avant"--or in Smith's case, "submodernism."

In terms of its political statement, or just how funny it is, the appeal of this poem is obvious. From a poetics perspective, the thing that strikes me most about it is the effect it creates of seemingly effortless, un-self-conscious transparency. Is it a "lyric" or a "prose poem"? Not only is this question completely uninteresting, it is made to seem completely ridiculous in light of the anarchic self-confidence with which the poem suspends all such considerations. It may not even be a poem at all, and it just doesn't care. This is partly a function of context, since Smith is known chiefly as a disjunctive, "non-referential" poet; the poem is funny and powerful by any standard, but it is even more so because he wrote it. The rest of Music or Honesty, for example, is much less conventionally discursive (though equally hilarious and disturbing, and you should buy it now).

So why, then, do I call the poem's transparency an "effect"? Am I suggesting that it is in reality a "difficult" poem, and that readers who take it at face value are missing some essential point? No. Like I said, the appeal of the poem is obvious, and it is meant to be "gotten" in a broad way by a broad range of readers. But one of the things I find most brilliant about the poem's "joke" (and it is essentially structured as a joke) is the way it springs the punchline on you without fully working out the allegory it insinuates. In fact, if you even start to try to work through the logic--like, OK, Ted is Bush, but how does Lou figure in then, and who are we, and why would we want to make commercials in the first place and what if anything does that represent--it quickly becomes clear that there isn't really much logic here. The end of the poem is a shock (or a pleasure, or both) because it brings home an irrational, emotional truth, and it makes it seem, absurdly, as though the best possible vehicle for the figural expression of this truth is an old episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show. However tenuously, it makes the conceit seem necessary rather than arbitrary.

As an aside, for an illustration of how one little cut can make a just-pretty-good poem into a masterpiece, see the original published version here.

Kultureflash

My “Words Mean Things (Blee Bloo Blar Blog)” is the poem of the week this week at Kultureflash. Thanks, Barry—and I’m especially delighted to be featured in this particular issue, for reasons that will be clear the second one clicks on the link.

Bob Perelman, "Politics"

Bob Perelman
Politics


Once there was a straight line which told how it got bent.
Someone died and the town was named:
Pittsburgh, Piedmont, Emeryville.
The tree was planted and then cut down,
its leaves scattered by the magic hand of chance.
Now drugstores and hospitals
go through their days, with a profit to show at year's end.
A twelve-thousand-ton building at dusk adopts a certain realistic tone
that metaphors, archaisms, and plain old schizophrenia just can't budge.

Chance is a modern idea.
A page out of the book of dreams
can't be just any page, it has to be the very page
where your mother first noticed your father.
They lived in the middle ages, when the sword was still stuck fast in the stone and there was no distinction between God and wealth.
There was no time to be subtle: in the ambulance
the Queen of Hearts noticed the Page of Hearts
thus making him the King of Hearts.
But you, you nameless blush,
aren't even conceived yet and so aren't supposed to be there
reading, imagining all the names might mean.

There are examples of people overcoming chance,
achieving political embodiment, the posters suddenly materializing, ascending to the heaven of free air time, the pure paranoia of unendable meaning,
thus gaining a status quite unlike the local hardware store, which might in a few months become a jogging store.

Suddenly I heard the car across the street call my name
and so I knew that this was my cue:
as I was saying, once there was a road
that never curved except to provide a bit of pleasure,
but here we are already at the hospital.


---
from Face Value (Roof Books, 1988)

This poem was one of my first acquaintances with "Language Poetry"--perhaps my first. It was in the first Best American Poetry from 1988, edited by John Ashbery.* I didn't know anything about Language poetics at the time, though I'd read a few New York School writers like Ashbery, Padgett, Berrigan, and Elmslie, a smattering of Coolidge. I wasn't aware yet that poets like James Tate or Charles Simic or even Ashbery were considered by some to be part of a "mainstream" whereas poets like Perelman were "avant garde." Similarly, when I came across Silliman and the poets in In the American Tree (very shortly thereafter), I had no idea that many of them didn't see themselves as I saw them, as a kindred extension of rather than a dissatisfied departure from the aesthetics of the New York School.

So formally, Perelman's poem seemed to me to be something like Ashbery's own work, just a bit icier and more unindulgent of its own humanity. I liked the contexts changing abruptly but nevertheless revisiting themselves here and there, as when the "straight line" that was "bent" transforms into a "road" that almost never "curved," or when the "ambulance" finally arrives at the second mention of a "hospital." "Chance" presents itself as a central theme, or at least pretends to, as do the stores and other buildings scattered throughout insisting on their embeddedness in the shifting physicality of the market economy that manifests them.

I didn't yet recognize by name the use of "New Sentence" syntaxis, or its partial re-naturalization via an Ashberian lyric/narrative structure. I could tell that the Keatsian diction was ironic (now, to my ear, somewhat archly so), as was all the folderol about the playing card characters; but I didn't see that the irony was directed as well at the similar, less ironically ironic use of such irony by writers like Randall Jarrell and Donald Justice. In fact, I'm not sure if I fully see that even now, or whether Perelman is to some extent unconsciously revealing strands of midcentury academic-poetry influence.

The poem doesn't seem altogether certain about where it's going or what it wants to do when it gets there, which adds to its sense of reckless energy. Being "at the hospital" feels both like a prelude to a delivery, with all the possibility and futurity that entails, and like the sudden sinking in of the fact of trauma: the critical architectural bulk of the destination (its "realistic tone") finally displacing the reverie that has brought one to it. Aestheticization of crisis? Maybe. But it was a very generative reading encounter for me, and I always come back to this poem with interest.

——
*I wish I still had that collection. Looking at the table of contents list from the BAP archives, it was a promising beginning for that series. The 1989 BAP, edited by Donald Hall, also had a selection from Perelman: the long poem "Movie."

* * *

Ron Silliman responds:

That's an interesting account. There are of course poets--Alan Bernheimer, Kit Robinson to name two--who were not at all disaffected by the NY School & were friendly with many of its folks.

Ron, yes, I didn't mean to suggest that all Language writers were in antagonistic reaction-formation to NYS. Especially since there are many writers connected fairly equally with both trends, like Coolidge, Palmer, and so on.

Daniel Kane's All Poets Welcome gives an interesting origins account that puts the NYS/Language "schism" in the context of social competition, and the way in which certain younger writers in Bernadette Mayer's workshop in the early 70s felt shut out by the NYS because of their theoretical/political interests, etc. I don't have the book in front of me right now so I can't be specific, but I'm curious whether you think that narrative is at all accurate, Ron. Have you read Kane's book? Anyone else?

Thoughts on Thinking

§ Thinking is a physical process that can be felt by the thinker (especially in a state of fever or great nervous agitation) as an irritable membranous friction.

§ The most basic form of writing is thinking.

§ The text of thinking is inscribed on the wall of the brain itself. It is an unreliable text because the walls are wet and porous.

§ Thinking is like a thin king. There is also a knight.

§ Speech is an imitation of thinking.

§ Thinking is constantly destroying and regenerating itself. This is why ESP is impossible or very difficult.

§ Thinking builds up the brain, but eventually wears it out.

§ Thinking like all physical processes is a measure of pain. Endless thought is a definition of hell.

§ Thinking is to consciousness as writing is to reading.

§ Thinking follows a script, but the code is unstable, dynamic, plastic--a fixed set of instructions in a state of constant random flux.

§ Thinking is labor without social relations, production without an economy.

§ Thinking produces the great Cosmic Illusion of Presence.

§ Poetry is thinking rhythm.