Fowler on Irony

An interesting entry for irony in H. W. Fowler's Modern English Usage (revised and edited by Sir Ernest Gowers, 1965):

Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware both of that more and of the outsiders' incomprehension.
  1. Socratic ironywas a profession of ignorance. What Socrates represented as an ignorance and a weakness in himself was in fact a non-committal attitude towards any dogma, however accepted or imposing, that had not been carried back to and shown to be based upon first principles. The two parties in his audience were, first, the dogmatists moved by pity or contempt to enlighten this ignorance, and secondly, those who knew their Socrates and set themselves to watch the familiar game in which learning should be turned inside out by simplicity.
  2. The double audience is essential also to what is called dramatic irony, i.e., the irony of the Greek drama. That drama had the peculiarity of providing the double audience--one party in the secret and the other not--in a special manner. The facts of most Greek plays were not a matter for invention, but were part of every Athenian child's store of legend; all the spectators, that is, were in the secret beforehand of what would happen. But the characters, Pentheus and Oedipus and the rest, were in the dark; one of them might utter words that to him and his companions on the stage were of trifling import, but to those who hearing could understand were pregnant with the coming doom. The surface meaning for the dramatis personae, and the underlying one for the spectators; the dramatist working his effect by irony.
  3. And the double audience for the irony of Fate? Nature persuades most of us that the course of events is within wide limits foreseeable, that things will follow their usual course and that violent outrage on our sense of the probable or reasonable need not be looked for. These "most of us" are the uncomprehending outsiders; the elect or inner circle with whom Fate shares her amusement at our consternation are the few to whom it is not an occasional maxim, but a living conviction, that what happens is the unexpected.
  That is an attempt to link intelligibly together three special senses of the word irony, which in its more general sense may be defined as the use of words intended to convey one meaning to the uninitiated part of the audience and another to the initiated, the delight of it lying in the secret intimacy set up between the latter and the speaker. It should be added, however, that there are dealers in irony for whom the initiated circle is not of outside hearers, but is an alter ego dwelling in their own breasts.
  For practical purposes a protest is needed against the application of "the irony of Fate," or of "irony" for short, to every trivial oddity: But the pleasant note changed to something almost bitter as he declared his fear that before them lay a "fight for everything we hold dear"--a sentence that the groundlings by a curious irony were the loudest in cheering (oddly enough). / "The irony of the thing" said the dairyman who now owns the business "lies in the fact that after I began to sell good wholesome butter in place of this adulterated mixture, my sales fell off 75 per cent" ("It's a rum thing that..." seems almost adequate). The irony of Fate is, in fact, to be classed now as a hackneyed phrase.

I experienced a degree of mild shock that the "double-audience" aspect of irony was not one I had considered in quite this way before, though perhaps I should have; have I been missing one of the most well-rehearsed commonplaces of irony all this time? It has simply never occurred to me to project what I considered to be the special circumstance of dramatic irony, that is the uneven economy of knowledge wherein one party is aware of something that another is not, onto irony writ large. Fowler treats dramatic irony, in fact, as the second of "three special senses" of irony "in its more general sense," rather than breaking irony down into three related but separate varieties, as I have always believed to be the standard paradigm:
  1. classical or rhetorical irony (saying the opposite of what one means, i.e., with sarcasm or mock ingenuousness, which I would consider as encompassing Socratic irony)
  2. dramatic irony
  3. "the irony of Fate," or "Romantic" or "cosmic" irony, or just "irony" (events playing out in such a way as to constitute an apparently pointed reversal or deflation of expectations)
One might also consider the extension of this third sense into "postmodern irony" as a wholly new fourth sense, which Fowler naturally could not have included, writing in 1926 (I'm assuming the entry is his and not a substantial revision by Gowers). More on this difficult and vague term later.

Two things interest me particularly about Fowler's entry. First, and most trivially, I am surprised that he demotes the use of "irony" in situations where it means, in his words, "oddly enough" or "a rum thing" to the status of what we would now classify as "Alanis Morrisette irony." In both of the examples of abuses he supplies, "irony" seems perfectly appropriate to me, as I'm guessing it would to most contemporary readers who have some informed familiarity with the concept. The scene of the "groundlings" cheering the speaker is a little obscure, but as far as I can tell, the irony consists in the fact that the persons who cheer the loudest are the ones most likely to be used as cannon fodder in the impending "fight." If that's not it, it's clearly something structurally comparable. The second example seems even more reasonable: the dairyman's good-faith efforts to upgrade his inferior product are met with a loss of profits, as though the universe (or "Fate") were mocking the logic by which his commendable business practice might be expected to be rewarded. Fowler is either unable to see how these examples satisfy his double-audience criterion, or he has some additional, more exacting requirement in mind that I have not grasped.

Second, I'm intrigued by the idea that irony always entails the exclusion of part of its audience from the discourse of knowledge. The wording of Fowler's account, I believe, somewhat overstates this principle, relying on some Procrustean distortions to accommodate it to his definitions, as when he must posit the dramatis personae of Greek drama as part of the audience in order to maintain his conceptual model. Fowler appears almost at times to claim that when a speaker makes a rhetorically ironic statement such as "my opponent must be very proud of himself" (in a situation where the opponent, say, is guilty of criminal mismanagement of charity funds), this speaker really expects some part of the audience to interpret the statement as sincere praise. He manages to escape this absurdity with the concession "that there are dealers in irony for whom the initiated circle is not of outside hearers, but is an alter ego dwelling in their own breasts," but in doing so he suggests that these rarified "dealers" are to be thought of as aberrations from a normative ideal form of irony.

I'm going to give Fowler the benefit of the doubt, however, and conjecture that if he were alive and able to respond to this last objection, he would point out that I am taking him too literally, and that I am treating his subtle stylistic mordancies as myopic lapses--that, as a matter of fact, I am revealing myself as a member of the uninitiated part of the audience for his own irony. And that in itself would be quite ironic (or "a rum thing," or something). We can easily enough adjust his terms to understand him as saying that the double audience for irony is understood not as an actual distribution of persons, some of whom are in on the ironic secret and some who are not, but as a conceptual fiction: all that is necessary is that we are able to imagine an audience that doesn't get it. In the case of dramatic irony, the characters on stage can be seen as the embodied form of such a virtual audience.

Furthermore, I want to take Fowler's formula seriously as a way of describing the ideological function of irony: a social-discursive equation in which there must always be an excluded audience. Irony is, by this account, an inherently "elitist" mode of communication. Or rather, it mimics elitism in order to make a point, which in some cases amounts to real elitism. If I have to act like I'm talking over your head as a way of dramatizing a certain kind of social interaction, it is bound at times to have the incidental effect of you getting your head talked over for real. This is the irony of irony: in only pretending to exclude a part of its audience, with the benevolent aim of "praising" the entire audience for its ability to perceive this pretense, it cannot avoid occasionally performing genuine exclusions. This becomes proportionately more the case as the irony becomes subtler and more complex, and is further complicated by the inevitable situations in which the point of the view being conveyed through ironic means is not one that is shared by all the members of a given audience.

This brings us back to "postmodern irony." I have tremendous difficulty in getting even the most general sense of this concept across to students. My theory is that this is partly because the social and political conditions which are targeted by postmodern irony (if it is even possible to apply a term with such bold connotations of purpose and intention as "targeted" to something as concerned with the radical absence of agency as postmodern irony) are just those conditions under which today's students are held as constrained subjects, unable to avail themselves of the potentially enlightening perspective afforded by the ironic viewpoint, possibly the only viewpoint via which they would be able to register the existence of those conditions in the first place. What is uniquely ironic about postmodern irony* is that the earlier ratio of classical irony is reversed: whereas in classical irony, the actual audience (as opposed to fictional persons on a stage or imagined interlocutors in a dialogue) is mostly composed of informed hearers, in postmodern irony the actual audience is quite likely to be at a loss, while the text (there may no longer be any speaker as such) continues to address with great familiarity and confidence its understanders, who are equally likely to be purely virtual. How is this ironic? Simply in that, in its risking the historical failure of irony's originary ideal--the cultivation of understanding in an enlightened demos--it comes the closest to irony's founding fiction, the fiction of a communication that does not say what it says, that cannot be heard by those for whom it is spoken.

-------------------
* I am not directly concerned here with that other irony of postmodern irony: that, in its less sophisticated manifestations (I'm thinking of something like a McSweeney's aesthetic), it is reduced to a gesture that has no awareness of its purpose, or even of the kind of purpose it might be thought to have by someone who was concerned with it having one, while it acts as though it does have just such an awareness, feeling safe in the conviction that it is so difficult to tell the difference between postmodern irony that does have such an awareness and postmodern irony that does not that it can never be proven to be unaware (and perhaps reassuring itself with the thought that it does have this much awareness: the awareness that it is supposed to be aware of something which it in fact does not have, and that maybe this little bit of semi-awareness is all it was ever really required to have anyway.

Yasusada's Letters: Kent Johnson Responds

Kent Johnson responded in the comments box to my review of his new Combo Book a few posts back, and he points out a couple of careless statements on my part that I would like to correct here. Point taken that by the time the Yasusada poems were published in the book Doubled Flowering, they were "clearly marked as a fiction." I could have made it clearer that when I used the term "hoax," I was referring chiefly to the initial publication of the poems in various journals. On that point, Johnson comments:

[Y]our wielding of the term "hoax" (which you wield with censurable intent, of course) ignores an important truth, one that the work's harshest critics don't often mention: From its very first publications in magazines, beginning with "Renga and the New Sentence: A Tape-Essay," in Aerial magazine, the work has been clearly and liberally marked, through clues, anachronisms, and impossible errors, as a fiction. That the writing was so extensively taken (though some readers did immediately understand the matter with no problem) as written by an "actually-existing" author named "Araki Yasusada" was a stunning surprise to all of us who had involvement with the work, be it as writers or editors. Keep in mind: Hoaxes are designed to conceal their false nature; the Yasusada work openly announced its "made-upness" (to use your phrase) from the start.

Regardless of whether a few editors and other people were "in on it," the fact that it has to be framed in terms of "clues," etc., that readers would have to pick up on in order to determine that it is grounded in a fiction itself amounts to an admission of the work's hoaxish dimensions. And I reject Johnson's accusation that I "wield" the term "with censurable intent." Nowhere in my original post did I make any judgment claims, negative or positive, about the work's status as hoax per se. I simply asserted that it was indeed a hoax, an assertion that I maintain. Any overtones of censure in my evaluation are clearly directed at what I consider to be the work's literary merit or lack thereof, its relevance now vis a vis the time of its initial appearance, and/or the specific character of the author's self-publicizing tactics.

Johnson writes:

It also appears that you think the letters to "Richard" in the new book are presented as faux "translations," using the "English language in inventive ways so as to produce a clever imitation of translation from the Japanese." But in the context of the fiction, as the prefatory material and footnotes make clear, the letters are in English (both factually and fictionally), to an American pen-pal, who is either a figment of Yasusada's imagination or not.

I stand corrected. "Translation" was the wrong word. Johnson continues:

In this regard, Mike Magee's point about the role "orientalist kitsch" (or whatever we want to call it) plays in the book is important. It is fairly obvious, I believe (one letter in the book to a Japanese correspondent makes this explicit, in fact), that Yasusada, the character, is deploying linguistic and cultural slippage to toy with his "pal-pen" and doing so on different levels. At least that's one aspect of the book.

I don't want to answer this point hastily, as I agree that there are important distinctions to be made between "straight" orientalist kitsch and orientalist (or otherwise racist, or sexist, or homophobic, etc.) kitsch (or any otherwise "degraded" discursive mode) that is deployed on an ironic or otherwise self-conscious level--and further, that there are important distinctions to be made between effective and ineffective deployments of the latter mode (as well as complicated arguments to be made about what constitutes "effectiveness," and so on). For now, I have to fall back on something like "that's the way I see it in this case" and reserve the theoretical justification for later. Pressed for an accounting of my objections to the work, I can only say that it strikes me as snickery, smug, and oh-so-cute. There are (many) passages that evince considerable linguistic sensitivity, and the amount of detail in the assembly of the paratextual apparatus is on many levels impressive. Nevertheless, my overall response is a feeling that the work as a whole simultaneously cloys and repels. It may be the case that at least part of this reaction is colored by my predisposition to distrust Johnson's authorial persona on the basis not only of his prior work, but of his conduct in interpersonal communications, both privately and publicly. It may further be the case that for that reason I am not a qualified reviewer of his work. I don't think so, though. I have serious doubts as to whether it is possible (or desirable) to separate the personal from the impersonal when exercising aesthetic judgment. When we hold each other to certain artistic standards, we are always in part holding ourselves to ethical standards as well, and perhaps (though perhaps not always, but I don't know, maybe, yes, maybe always) vice versa.

Emergent Poetics

"Jane Dark" speaks of an emergent poetics, an invocation of Raymond Williams' ideas of the Residual, Dominant, and Emergent. I like the term better than any of the currently most popular alternatives (including "alternative"), and I chose "Emergent Forms" as the name of the reading series I coordinate at SOU for many of the same reasons as those Jane enumerates.

One reason I like the application of Williams' concepts is that it doesn't categorically exclude the residual as a politically conscious mode. As Williams points out, residual formations can be effective sites of resistance to dominant hegemony, just as they can be reactionary or blinkered. In some cases they can just be confused: plenty of "New Formalist" poets are politically aware in their personal lives, even as their work is complicit with a retrograde literary ideology--an ideology that nostalgically fetishizes the most superficial aspects of form, at the expense of appreciating fully the contexts within which such forms were put to use in their own historical moments. A work like Cary Nelson's Repression and Recovery shows, on the other hand, how "folk" forms in "sentimental" and "naive" traditions may achieve powerful social rallying effects, and in fact constitute an entire neglected aspect of twentieth-century modernism.

It is important to acknowledge too, as Jane does, that emergent status by no means ensures immunity to absorption into the dominant, and that all three categories can merge imperceptibly into one another. You could fill a whole essay on their interpenetration in the latest issue of Fence alone, I'm sure. Or even just its cover.

--------

To qualify part of what I said about New Formalism: better to say that NF work is "ideologically retrograde" to the extent that it is explicitly or implicitly presented as a corrective to other compositional tendencies. There's nothing "inherently" ideological about form.

There is nothing "inherently" radical or progressive about texts produced via aleatory procedures, etc., either. What makes them ideological in that sense is their deployment within a context of conscious poetic production in a given community and for a wider range of dominant response (or neglect).

Values of clarity, transparency, "plain" sincerity, "honest feeling," and so forth, when trumpeted as values, are invariably retrograde values. This is so not because there's anything "wrong" with clear, transparent linguistic expression in poetry (there are countless "emergent" poems that exhibit those qualities), but because the act of trumpeting in itself is aggressively encoded with militant and militaristic anxieties over territory and property.

So could there be an emergent movement in which writers motivatedly wrote poems in iambic pentameter (for example)? One answer: yes, and in fact a movement like NF is emergent to the extent that it stimulates followers, sets trends, etc., in such a way that it establishes a contrast with dominant practice and results in lasting change. History, however, is strewn with the debris of failed emergent formations, and ones that have proved finally less emergent than residual or dominant-in-disguise. From this perspective, of course, one can say that successful emergent formations (i.e., ones that become the new dominant formations) are also "failed" formations, in that they have not maintained their radical force. This is only failure in a very abstract sense, however. A smart emergent form knows that it must eventually become historical, and that other forms will inevitably be positioned as new in relation to it.

Another answer (one that attempts to answer the question you/I were really asking, where "emergent" means "compatible with the emergent formations with which we [as opposed to "they" (more on us-vs.-them dichotomies later)] are already sympathetic"): yes, in theory, but theory isn't always practical. Such a gesture would in all likelihood remain too conspicuously just that--a coy gesture rather than a vital action.

Yasusada's Letters

Recently received: Kent Johnson, Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters in English (Combo Books, 2005). Or, if you prefer, as the cover copy has it, by one "Tosa Motokiyu," edited by Kent Johnson and Javier Alvarez.

I won't rehearse the entire history of the Yasusada hoax here; if you're interested, you can get the basic background here or here or through here. To make a long story short, Araki Yasusada is a made-up Hiroshima survivor whose made-up poems created a literary scandal in the 90's when Johnson got them published in several journals. They were collected in the 1997 Roof Books edition Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, "translated" by "Tosa Motokiyu," "Ojiu Norinaga," and "Okura Kyojin."

I'm going to start with the wrapping and work in from there. First of all, this is the second edition to be published by Michael Magee's Combo Books (my A Thousand Devils was the first, in 2004), and it is as visually pleasing as any recent book of poetry I've seen. The front and back covers are red and black with white lettering, the black background featuring the swords of the title as an embossed wallpaper pattern. There are three blurbs on the back cover, from Ben Friedlander, Tony Tost, and David Rosenberg. The first two pages of the book are filled with nine more blurbs (or in some cases, I guess you'd call them anti-blurbs). In a way, this kind of elaborate built-in fanfare is inevitable: you could argue that it would be disingenuous for the book not to broadcast its self-awareness of the extratextual baggage it carries with it. The back-cover blurbs are uniformly positive (with a slight escape clause built into one--more on that in a minute), but the first quote inside, from APR editor Arthur Vogelsang, reads simply: "This is essentially a criminal act." From there on, the critical front matter is a carefully orchestrated ballet of pro and con sallies. Vogelsang is countered by a gushing Carolyn Forche ("'Yasusada's' writing is an entry into a spiritual space.... It is a work of art in the largest sense."), who is slapped down by an irate Charles Bernstein ("Yasusada is an expression of white male rage."), who is in turn rebutted by fellow Language Poet Ron Silliman, whose approving stance is echoed by all the remaining blurbists (Marjorie Perloff, Forrest Gander, Brian McHale, Eliot Weinberger) until the last one, an excerpt from Michael Atkinson's 2003 piece "Hyperauthor! Hyperauthor!" in The Believer:

No one will buy [this book], read it, or own it--why would we? We know that the poems are not "true" to any genuine emotional experience, and we know that the act of imagination that produced them was motivated by sardonic smugness or misanthropic disdain. Or both.... Yasusada hacks at the core of what's sacred in human endeavor.... Literature is our record of being, and to defraud it is an act of nihilistic mutiny.

Wow, mutiny! Arr! (Did you know, by the way, that this coming Monday is International Talk Like a Pirate Day?)

Regardless of whether you think including all this hyperbolic silliness on either side of the issue is a legitimate way to package a work of literature that wants to be taken seriously--and I'm not saying it is or isn't--to do so incurs a big obligation on the part of the author: the work then has to live up to the hype. And the problem here is that Johnson already has either lived up to it or not, as many of these comments (the Atkinson review for example) refer not to the present volume at all, but to Doubled Flowering, which came out seven years ago. A big part of the hoax's original force depended on the freshness of the publications, and the chance that someone might yet be taken in by it; once that phase passed, it was then a question of whether the poems themselves merited interest on "their own terms," whatever that might mean in a case where it is arguably impossible to separate such terms from the terms that make the poems scandalous. In my own opinion, those poems were interesting, but a considerable part of what made them interesting was that they had been able to fool people. The letters in the new collection stand no chance of fooling anyone, nor do they appear to be intended to do so. In fact, Johnson is at pains to include lots of prefatory material that makes it clear that Yasusada is fake, as is Tosa Motokiyu (Javier Alvarez I'm still not clear on, but what's the difference at this point?). This means that even more than with the poems in Double Flowering, the letters in this book must "stand on their own" in some significant way beyond their being connected to last decade's trickery if they want to justify their implied claim to literariness.

So do they stand on their own? Who knows? What are the terms by which one might answer this question? Are they "well written"? I guess so. I mean, they're made out of sentences which demonstrate that the author knows how to use the English language in inventive ways so as to produce a clever imitation of translation from the Japanese. But why is he doing this? As we said, the hoax is over, so what's the point? Unless he is trying to rekindle the controversy by the intentional use of racial stereotyping and outrageous exoticism in an "ironic" context, in passages like this:

Boiled tortoises are made to cool. Giggling geishas lift bones with tweezers. Red dace make eggs in mussel shells. Eels are sliding in baskets of bamboo. A carp goes eaten by the bride. Inside Fujiwara and Manabe there are bandits. This is one silly song sung while tops are spinning.

Goodbye sad father, goodbye for always. Until soon, Richard. I request you soon to write me. Now I must wash my yellow body.

or this:

(One night, in the prefecture of Kanda, I urined [sic] into some flowers of peony. The wind came and took my urination in a small spray to my geisha beside me. "I liked it," said she. Thus I shivered and looked at the luminous moon.)
*
lifting the lid
of night
my eye

(The "[sic]" there is Johnson's, by the way, not mine.) So what are we supposed to do with this? Be offended? Only someone who wasn't aware of the total context of the hoax would fall for that. Read it as a parody of Poundian Cathay-period imitation? Why, for heaven's sake? Isn't it a bit late in the day for that? Or is it rather a parody of contemporary "multicultural" literature, an indictment of "ethnic" workshop cliches? I doubt it, but if it is, the tone is a complete misfire, and again we'd have to ask, why take a cheap shot like that? Are we supposed to take pleasure in implied paronomasia (urine > pee on-y)? Or is Johnson simply giving himself complete permission to indulge in his own orientalist fantasies, as a kind of experiment in freedom of expression? In a way, this would be the most satisfying explanation, since it would at least suggest that he is going out on a limb in some way, that there is something "sincere" going on in the work, as his repeated conclusions of the letters with the phrase "I am sincere" would seem to want us to believe if this touch amounts to anything more than yet one another ironic sub-joke. But this would be a very shallow sincerity indeed. I'll take insincerity over sincerity any day when the insincere work has something in it that makes me want to keep reading and the sincere work doesn't.

The faux critical apparatus that underlies the volume, with its editorial footnotes and glosses, does nothing to supply any extra layer of fictive "depth" that would throw the letters into comic, or tragic, or satiric, or melodramatic, or any other kind of relief. It's all very painstakingly composed and straightfacedly mock-pedantic, but it never gives rise to any urge to laugh or get mad or be sad or anything else. If anything, the cumulative effect of the work can be classified as depressing, but not because it makes one engage with the horror of Hiroshima or anything like that. It's depressing because it's painful to imagine the author devoting so much time and energy to a project that is so blankly enervated at this stage of its overextended life.

That's most of what I have to say about the letters themselves, but back to two of those back-cover blurbs for a moment. Tony Tost writes:

Here in America, where even our best experimental writers seem to be constructing gigantic monuments to their own talents and are eager to lie beside Wordsworth in some canonical garden, [the Yasusada] project, whatever it ultimately is or ends up having been, strikes me as the most moving, unsettling, and important thing going on right now, or as the most egregious and dangerous self-delusion in American letters.

I am a great admirer of Tony's insightful and levelheaded critical perspective--except for this time. I'll let pass the absurdly polarized pair of choices he posits at the end of the blurb. What bewilders me is the charge he levels at "even our best experimental writers," and the "gigantic monuments to their own talents" they are allegedly constructing. What on earth are you talking about, Tony? Please name just three of those monuments that are under construction. Or two, even. I really draw a complete blank when I try to figure out what you have in mind. Or, no, come to think of it, the first thing that does come to mind when I try to picture such a thing is the Yasusada thing. Has there been any "experimental" poetic event in recent memory that involved so much tortured self-promotion and ego-obsession?

Then there's Ben Friedlander's blurb, which is I think, on to something. He writes;

These pidgin English fantasies of poetic mastery are awful and incredible. Like Frank O'Hara's "poem in blackface," they give us pause by giving delight. The delight, dear readers, is a ruse. It's the pause that constitutes their gift.

I'll buy "awful and incredible," if "awful" means "not good" and "incredible" means "not credible." I'll also accept the notion that any "delight" this book offers is a "ruse." I'll even agree that whatever value the project holds does indeed reside in the "pause" it gives us. In that pause we are able to reflect on our priorities as readers and question whether it is worth the trouble to keep playing Johnson's game. Whatever we decide, that kind of meditation on the value of writing is never entirely wasted time.

Quid 13-15

Recently received: Quid issues 13-15, featuring poetry and criticism by Andrea Brady, Stuart Calton, J. H. Prynne, Keston Sutherland, John Wilkinson, Rod Smith, Marianne Morris, Jeff Hilson, Sean Bonney, Tom Leonard, Mark Mendoza, Chris Goode, Luska Mengham, Ben Watson, Stephen Rodefer, Michael Kindellan, and Emily Critchley.

I don't know too much about the contemporary experimental scene in England beyond a fragmented acquaintance with a poem or review here and there, but Quid is one of the best reference points for the curious, as far as I can tell. And with these three issues, my curiosity is piqued yet further. There is a recognizable level of influence from American Language Poetry evident in these writers, especially of the Bruce Andrews strain (and in this they seem to proceed on a roughly parallel track with certain pockets of "Postlanguage" poets in the US and Canada, including Sianne Ngai, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Louis Cabris, Kevin Davies, et al.). Editor Keston Sutherland is a tireless intellectual force whose Marxism sometimes strikes me as doctrinaire almost to the point of quaintness, but at the same time, and in part for that very reason, as generative of an uncompromisingly fierce theoretical and aesthetic energy. Here is an excerpt from his poem "Dildo Ode" in issue 14:

Eat them a snow roast the atmolysis dead
pretty a new way. They had tied me
on a stool fully clothed out the window but
in the episode and reached my head.
Sex shone in them flush mounted dirt-bag
lingam with the yoni, who fed the
its drip through retard sic you
                                take love in at
                                three speeds e.
g. cop / hen. Inside them is a comb for
saliva who don't want in that. So quick
they are likely to love you. But too
far inside hooded in pin suds. They sound
they swap eating they clot about jog
sounds like glycosuria, inside the sugar
free speech enclosure dap choking
                                up on worked
                                up
hot vaseline spit you up for pith their toothless
toy ileum squeaks when you bounce it
you do not bounce it you become a hole
sensitive and nervous the pleasure of sharing
talk in the spray-proof hutch.

Go to www.barquepress.com for ordering information on these and other issues of Quid.

That Is Not It at All

Why is it sometimes so difficult to say the simplest things with economy and clarity? or, to be more precise, to say the exact simple things one wants to say, as opposed to some other simple and even, once it has been said, provisionally acceptable thing that is not, for all that, that initial thing that one really wanted to say?

In part because one does not always really know what one wishes to say until something else has been said instead. And yet the illusion persists that one did know in advance what one wanted to say, and that one "failed."

Within that illusion, the birth of critical conscience.

More on the Problem of Reviewing Poetry

Some useful functions for poetry reviews:

1) Purely annunciatory--"so-and-so's new book is out, and here's where you can get it, etc."
2) Explaining relevant context that may be helpful to the reader--notes on compositional procedure, background on the author and his/her situation within given communities, explications of historical and cultural references or allusions in the work, etc.
3) Registering direct affective response--did I like it? did I dislike it? did it make me happy, sad, angry, offended, etc.? do I think some of the poems are better than others?
4) Registering hyper-affective response--what do I think about the larger phenomenon of books like this one being published or not published at such-and-such a rate? how do I feel about the status of the author's overall reputation and the way this book augments that reputation? what makes "this kind of poetry in general" preferable or not preferable to some other "kind of poetry"? what makes it possible (or impossible) to use phrases like "this kind of poetry" intelligibly?

Problems associated with these functions:

1) None, really, other than that some people might suspect (perhaps perceptively) that you are avoiding the task of making a critical judgment.
2) Not knowing enough about the particulars of the work's production and background context to be of any help to other readers. Lots of books I like a lot fall into this category for me. For example, I could not have written as effective a review of Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist last year at this time as I could now, even though I admired the book back then as much as I do now, since I was unaware at that time of the particular procedure she used to compose it, and that procedure strikes me as one of the things I would most appreciate finding out from a review of the work. Similarly, If a reader were unaware of the various allusions to Sappho, Whitman, Matthew Arnold, etc. in Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, I would certainly consider them less qualified to write a certain kind of review than someone who was aware of those things.
3) Finding ways to express affective response that avoid banality and repetitiveness, and that are more informative than just using some rote method like a star rating system (4 stars=excellent, 3=good, etc.). This is one area in which the emphasis of the review can easily shift from the merits of the work to the reviewer's own inventiveness and eloquence, and not just as a result of egotism, but because the reviewer is responding to the felt pressure of finding new ways to say things there may just not be that many new ways of saying (I liked it, I didn't like it, etc.). What is the substantive difference, for example, between poems that are "luminous" or just "really cool"? This problem is more difficult, by the way, with positive evaluations than with negative ones. Are the ways in which things can "go wrong" just inherently more concrete and definable (even when such judgments are a matter of subjective taste) than the ways in which they can "work"? Take, for example, Jonathan's response to the phrase "blown to smithereens" in Linh Dinh's poem. Jonathan's criticisms are clear, precise, and reasonable to the extent that they describe faithfully the details of his initial response to the phrase. It is much harder, at least for me, to explain why I think the phrase is "good," even though I feel quite confident in my judgment that it is, within the context of this particular poem, good.
4) As with function 2, one difficulty here might be a lack of familiarity with larger contexts on the part of the reviewer, etc., but one hopes that anyone setting out to review a book of poetry is at least familiar enough with the current poetic climate to be able to form some general opinions and positions of this sort. In fact, it is usually much easier to do this than it is to address the particulars of a given body of work, and so this is in fact the form that many (maybe a majority of) intelligent reviews of contemporary work take. I say "intelligent" even though I am expressing the reservation that such an approach falls short of addressing the work as directly as one might wish, because at least such reviews further a sustained dialogue about things that readers within a community or group of communities care about.

A book like American Tatts is for me the most difficult kind of book to review, because if we exclude function 1 as being critically uninformative and function 4 as being something other than a review of the work per se, and if we further find that we cannot offer much that would satisfy function 2 (the poems don't appear to be constructed according to any particularly complex formal method, and there is no conspicuous matrix of allusion that I can spot, so there's not much to add on the level of supplementary commentary, unless of course I am missing something, which is entirely possible), then that leaves function 3.

Some books are easier to respond to vis a vis function 3 than others: I reviewed Rebecca Wolff's Manderley and Jennifer Moxley's The Sense Record a couple of years ago, for example, and in both those cases I was able to invoke relatively familiar concerns of "craft" on various levels. Both writers are steeped in certain canonical traditions that render certain modes of critical response conveniently available (though of course they put these traditions to quite distinct uses). On this level, function 3 blurs into function 2 in many ways; the difference is that it may not always be able to frame specific effects as factors of mechnical procedure or allusion, precisely, but rather as general tonal resonances pointing to such factors as formative influences on the work. Works like Michael Magee's MS and Heather Fuller's Dovecote, which I also reviewed, were much more difficult to comment upon, because their aesthetic surfaces are less directly accessible by means of canonical antecedents, but there was still enough of this sort of thing there for me to draw some oblique connections at least. Actually, I don't know much I was really able to address these difficulties in any of these reviews at all. This is why I'm embarrassed to look back at them. My fear is that I just used lots of excited superlatives and abstract expressions of admiration. Not that the works don't deserve such praise--they emphatically do--but that I worry about doing faint justice by resorting to empty rhetoric.

American Tatts is hard to address on the level of affective response, because in a way the book is all affect: crudely hewn chunks of messed-up affect set in the middle of a big parking lot and spray-painted all over. Or rather, if it really were just that, I wouldn't find it as interesting as I do, but it manages to convey that general sense while also conveying that there is something else going on as well. I reach critical failure at the point of having to say exactly what that "something else" is, however.

Linh Dinh's American Tatts

Linh Dinh's American Tatts (Chax Press, 2005) is currently filling my consciousness with so many inchoate and chaotic responses that critical commentary is almost out of the question. Make no mistake: I like this book a lot, and I recommend it highly. But any attempt to codify or theorize my responses at this stage would be a distortion. At some future date, my perspective on the work may have stabilized somewhat and I may be able to speak with some clarity about things like construction, meaning, craft, value, and so forth. But I don't see this future date as the point when I am truly perceiving the work, after a period of imperfect apprehension; rather, one mark of a successful poem or book of poems is the capacity to keep "stable" critical response at bay indefinitely. I don't necessarily look forward to a time when I can regard a poem like "Schema" with an impartial evaluative eye:

Apes are encouraged
To wear blue jeans,
Learn English grammar.

Enraged, they blow up
The Capitol Building.

Street to street combat,
Countless civilian corpses,
Civilization burns.

Ape fighters trapped inside
The Jefferson Memorial
Are blown to smithereens
By our own ape soldiers.

I've seen these apes so many times
Wearing T-shirts that don't make sense
Crowding the checkout counter at the Wal-Mart.

The President finally appears on TV
To announce that freedom and democracy
Have scorched the forces of evil.

Is this poem "well-written" on some articulable context of prosodic craft? The question seems terribly silly in relation to the more general sensation it produces in me as a reader. I say general sensation, meaning I don't really know what it is I'm feeling, beyond that I in some way applaud it. But even that is unsatisfactory. Do I really "applaud" this ugly, nightmarish, and weirdly cartoonish vignette? Rather, it razzes me, and I find myself valuing that sense of being razzed. This is a big part of what I look for in poetry. Any poetry.

* * *

I struggle increasingly with the problem of reviewing poetry in general. On the one hand, I firmly believe it is part of the responsibility of the practicing poet-critic to give an accounting of his or her affective and intellectual response to new work, thereby continually setting new terms for evaluation, valuation, and other such processes that provide a context for any discussion of artistic "advances"--or at least for an interrogation of the viability of such a concept in contemporary writing. On the other hand, the available apparatus for poetry reviewing seems to me to be increasingly inadequate, even embarrassing in its inevitable resort to overly familiar gestures of praise, objection, effusion, equivocation. This is the case regardless of whether the reviewer likes or dislikes the work.

There are many variables determining the specific types of difficulty involved, depending for example on considerations like the following: does the work invite evaluation according to a measurable prosodic standard? does the work locate its potential value explicitly or implicitly on any familiar horizon of "craft" (as opposed to sentiment, abstract self-positioning, ironic framing, etc.)? if it does either or both of these things, does it do so in such a way that the possible critical responses will take on significant relevance in relation to that particular work, apart from other such works with comparable appeals to comparable standards? and what is to be considered "significant" or "relevant" in such cases? the desires of a given community? the paradigms established by some official institution or other? the whims of the individual reviewer?

Another, yet stickier set of complications has to do with perceived alliances and antipathies between reviewer and artist. Chances are typically 99 out of 100, if not better, that a reviewer reviewing work by a friend will enter the project of reviewing predisposed to positivity, and the odds are perhaps only slightly less extreme that the obverse conditions will apply in the opposite case: if the reviewer doesn't value the prior work or general cultural position of the poet whose work is being reviewed, the review is likely to reflect this prejudice. Now, these are complications of a different order from the former set, of course. In theory, it ought to be possible for a courageous reviewer to exercise critical "objectivity" whether reviewing one's friend or enemy. Here too, however, it is easy to oversimplify. What are the usual reasons a reviewer tends to favor one mode of artistic production over another? It depends on the larger economy of the artistic scene. Take music, for instance. Music makes money, at least potentially. Even if most independent bands don't hit the big time, the big time is often a germane scenario--more often than in the case of poetry, anyway. It is what the artist wants, or is popularly perceived to want, and the methods of evaluation will necessarily reflect this dynamic. Thus it's common for reviews of independent bands and performers to be every bit as "ruthless" as reviews of mainstream acts, sometimes more so since more is thought to be at stake. In fact, when so much is perceived to be at stake, whether this perception is legitimate or illusory, the result is often the invention of new ways of being rigorous and demanding. Hence the often ridiculous levels of reflexive scrutiny and backlash-in-advance that characterize the discourse of indie music criticism. To apply such convoluted and even paranoid structures of artificially heightened critical severity to poetry within one's own communal sphere or subsphere is not only perversely counterproductive but just plain silly. In this light, it makes perfect sense that reviews of poets by their peers, granted a certain amount of wiggle-room for blatant lapses of baseline competence or good faith on the part of the poets under review, will invariably reflect perpetual mutual approval. (What gets said "behind the scenes," between friends in private conversation or catty party gossip, is a different story, as we all know.)

I can vividly imagine a critical opponent--someone whose poetic values are radically different from my own--leaping on these statements and holding them up as evidence of what they have been declaring all along: that the very notion of evaluation in experimental poetry is meaningless because a) there are no fixed standards to appeal to, b) social alliance cravenly takes the place of genuine concern for craft, and c) the audience for such poetry is so small and "elite" that its practitioners cannot afford any dissent within the ranks at the risk of the entire enterprise dissolving. But it is exactly at this level that valuation and evaluation become very important indeed. The values that bring certain artists together determine in advance, to a considerable extent, that a kind of prior mutual indulgence will be granted as well, at least until such a time as the values in question have saturated popular consciousness to the point that there is something at stake on a much larger level of cultural (and maybe even monetary) capital. Just because fixed and quantifiable modes of evaluation (e.g., prosody) are not necessarily in place does not mean that the work is not on some unpredictable trajectory toward a future context for evaluation. We can discuss the mechanical poetics of Emily Dickinson's work today on many levels that would not have been possible or relevant during her lifetime. We can discuss it in lots of other ways that wouldn't have made any sense then as well. There must be innovative poetic practices in any period that defer certain planes of analysis indefinitely.

And this is not to say that there isn't interesting contemporary poetry that is susceptible to analysis along certain familiar critical lines. It is also not to say that anything is sacred: I will not pretend a poem or collection of poetry is palatable to me when it isn't, regardless of who wrote it. What the way of thinking I'm advocating preserves is a "safe space" for poetry that may initially produce no tangible response in the reader, either negative or positive. Too often, there is an oppressive imperative to form an opinion, any opinion, that may cause the reader to rush to judgment that, as a consequence, is not true judgment at all but kneejerk espousing of platitudes, pro or con. (An alternative solution reviewers sometimes attempt is the "creative" review, with mixed results.)

* * *

Linh's book was probably a bad illustration to use for the broader point I've been pursuing here, since I feel fairly confident that however my perceptions may take on more disciplined contours in response to the book, I will continue to be impressed by it. A better example would be a book that doesn't really have any effect on me beyond a loose sense that I probably approve of whatever it may be doing, considered in the abstract--where my response, that is, like one of Meg Ryan's characters in Joe vs. the Volcano, is "Oh. I don't have a response to that."

2 from Slight

Recently received: two CD/chapbook thingies from Chris Sullivan of Slight Publications. One is Toast to Toast, which consists of a longish poem in several sections, with accompanying recording of Chris reading (though the read text seems to be somewhat different from the printed text). The other is ... well, I'm not sure how to reproduce this title. The best I can do is F < C < G < (D) > A > E > B| >F#: Telephone Captured Sound from the Web-log. It's a selection from Audblog recordings that have appeared over the last two years on Slight. Some are songs, including a musical rendition of the last stanza of my "Peace Kittens" from Deer Head Nation, and some are brilliant monologues / readings / interpretations / meditations.

Ordering info here.

I wish I had the know-how to hook up a little audio sample for you from "Barrabas" or "Mendacity." That alone would send you rushing for your email and checkbook.