Catachretic Meaning

[Note: this is the same post I put up yesterday, only with a different title and the first two paragraphs excised.]

One recurring explanation for the distrust of poetic "obscurity" has to do with the way in which words seem necessarily to bear with them an intrinsic claim to referentiality, and so for parsable phrases and sentences to resist definitive interpretation suggests a betrayal of that implicit truth-claim. In other words, according to the old argument, poetry is a kind of lying. Sir Philip Sidney's famous rejoinder to this complaint--that the poet "nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth"--is rhetorically pleasing, but its underlying sophistry is clear enough. It is even signalled by Sidney's own comparison of his defense of poetry to the arguments of a vainglorious horseman who is bound always to make the most outrageous claims for his own occupation, in the face of all logic. Certainly poetry, as long as it takes the form of grammatically recognizable constructions, affirmeth. Shakespeare affirmeth that his mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. Emily Dickinson affirmeth that she felt a funeral in her brain. Wallace Stevens affirmeth that the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. Mayakovsky affirmeth that he is a cloud in trousers. Nada Gordon affirmeth that you must eat your neck.

All these affirmations can be understood as statements in a language, and it doesn't matter whether we think the poet "really means" them; what matters is whether they get in our heads and make things happen there. Sometimes I suspect that some readers simply lack the capacity, in varying degrees, to experience such poetic happenings, just as some people are tone deaf, or colorblind, or have no sense of humor. There is no way to explain to someone for whom all music is irritating noise why it "really" isn't. And as I said, this may occur in varying degrees: just as someone with partial colorblindness may still have an acute appreciation for certain nuances of shade and tone, many readers possess a sophisticated sense of one or more verbal phenomena--euphony, descriptive subtlety, figurative aptness, poignancy, argumentative wit, and so on--and thus are able to respond feelingly to much of what goes on in a great deal of poetry. This appreciation may be so advanced as to allow these readers to become accomplished scholars and even poets themselves. And yet they may still lack that sensibility which allows them to "understand" why a certain string of words, for no rational reason, affects the reader/hearer "poetically." They may resort to familiar accounts of the pleasures of sound, as in childhood rhymes, alliteration, and repetition, and in fact such concerns are in many cases indeed relevant to poetic experience, and these persons may even respond genuinely to such effects.

What is it, then, that these hypothetical persons (straw men of my concoction?) are missing? Once we have accounted for wit, soundplay, and all the other categories I've mentioned, what is left? It does not have fundamentally to do with irony, I think, though many of the arguments I see as germane to this question raise its specter. We are somewhat closer to getting at it when we speak of the "irrational," though this term is broader in its applications than the specific idea I have in mind. Certainly devices such as rhyme, consonance, assonance, meter, lineation, and other formal schema are in some sense irrational, in that they do not contribute substantially to the referential dimension of the poem--but neither do they detract from that dimension, at least not by their nature, though they may of course be applied so heavily as to exert an estranging effect. Even disruptions of normative grammar and syntax need not induce an overt irrationality in the sense I posit. The following bit of doggerel should provide adequate evidence of this:

so sad
dark dreams lonely demons
my heart my love my waaaahh
sweet baby gone left me blue
ruination brooding loss

This is bad, but it is not irrational: despite its fragmentary construction, even the most inexpert reader will recognize it almost instantly as an expression of dismay over a romantic disappointment.

But take, by way of contrast, this excerpt from Joseph Ceravolo's Fits of Dawn:

I'm calm he's ashamed he nocturnal no way
Has back co-wept?
A skar in brimful final
Inexhaustable gyp become yes
next outulated   Me!       absolutely care mommy
aurora net takey benem ahoom got
soon enemy weave cryman
awayontop terre or sappho crop
why?    harmony hey-o coyote
Moans cry want flee
leak die toss-find a when
producted rare pow torn.
Like the why-moon daring
insuspicious striped like labors
serious choke.

I've chosen this passage because it's a fairly extreme example of the type of poetic language that, even in lesser doses, sends some readers who consider themselves aesthetically sensitive into paroxysms of outrage or at least vehement apathy. It is, one might say, "nonsense"--not nonsense in the vein of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, whose verse is entirely narrative at base (even if the narrative is always the same one of "nonsensical things happened in an impossible world"), but nonsense that resists assimilation into a recognizable semantic framework altogether (unless that framework is one which always repeats "this is experimental writing," but I think that's a less useful generalization than the Carroll/Lear one).

If irony were to enter the dispute, it might be suggested that this is ironic poetry because it makes the motions of affirming, but with a motivation that is absolutely contradictory to true affirmation. The same might be said of some of my earlier examples. When Nada Gordon writes "You must eat your neck," for example, part of our "proper" "understanding" of the line must include the assumption (a fair one, I hope) that she does not really think anyone should eat their own neck, as well as perhaps a recognition of a parodic Rilke allusion. Any poetry that operates on such principles of saying what one does not really mean may fairly be conceived of as ironic. But again, I don't really think irony is the issue here.

It may be anticlimactic to pull such a motheaten old rabbit out of my hat (and one which I've already recently pulled out in other posts), but I think that what I'm trying to get at here is finally something more or less like Keats' "negative capability" (which he defines in a letter to his brothers, for those of you who have forgotten, as the capability "of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason"). Or, if you like, we can make it sound a little more current and refer to it as "negativity." This is more than just a cosmetic adjustment of Keats' concept, I believe; the uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts I'm thinking of are not just broad ones having to do with philosophical and spiritual belief, but specific ones related to the question of what language can do as a medium. Appreciation of certain modes of poetic expression depends on an acceptance of what might seem a completely untenable proposition: that one can say something without actually saying it. Irony and even metaphor, depending on how you look at them, are either ways of assenting to such a proposition or normalizing its contradictions. The truly relevant figure here is catachresis: the patently absurd "misuse" of language, either as a mistake or a deliberate rhetorical strategy. The most famous literary example is probably Milton's "blind mouths." Catachresis relies on negativity for its force: it strikes the mind by virtue (or vice) of its wrongness, its unworkability, its self-canceling anti-sense. Irony may do this as well, but with a clearly visible qualifying gesture, whether a tone of voice, "scare quotes," or just an obvious context that establishes the basis of the irony--i.e., the non-ironic position that motivates the irony in the first place. When we get into concepts like "blank irony" in the postmodern sense, we may in fact be getting closer to a catachretic principle, but even here the emphasis is still on a fundamentally rhetorical stance--one concerned with "making a point"--rather than a poetic one.

One of the earliest surviving western poetic texts, a poem by Sappho, contains what I think of as an exemplary catachretic moment: her proclamation that her jealousy makes her "greener than grass." It may be that in the original Greek, this is not such an odd phrase. Nevertheless, I would maintain that its power for many modern readers consists in large part precisely in its oddness, no less than a phrase like "blonde push" in Dickinson, or Ceravolo's "serious choke" (serious joke?). The focal point of expressive power in Sappho's lyric, as, I would argue, in poetry generally, is that point at which expression, from one perspective, threatens to fail outright. Not everyone will accept this formulation. For some, the defining aspect of true poetry consists in direct, sincere expression of human truths, for example. I don't wish to discount such a value, but it is not one that is exclusive to poetry per se, and thus it isn't of much use in accounting for the poetic qua poetic.

What, one might ask, about poems which appear to be completely straightforward, in which there are no obvious aporias or violations of sense? One answer is that there aren't any--that simply by being a poem, a poem announces its opposition to ordinary language. For example, I could write:

I am terribly hungry
and wish that my father
would come home with
the cheeseburger he
promised me.

As soon as I frame this as a poem rather than simply a factual (or even non-factual) statement, I have changed the way the reader perceives it. The line breaks do part of this work, but they are not essential. I could break it up in different ways or not at all. All that matters is that I have asked the reader to consider it as arranged language above and beyond--or at least in addition to--considering it as an everyday utterance. This, I would argue, is a fundamentally counter-referential gesture, and as such appears to deploy the signifying function of language against itself. This is not to say that because, e.g., Williams' "This Is Just to Say" can be understood as a poem it can no longer be understood as an apologetic note on the poet's icebox; it is just to say that once something is identified as a poem, that identification makes one's ordinary sense of what it says in some way contingent to its poetic "sense." This contingency need not imply in all cases that the ordinary sense is by necessity secondary, but when the ordinary sense assumes any more than an equal status with the poetic, the poetic sense ceases to be a sense altogether, and becomes a mere distraction, as when one unintentionally rhymes in casual speech, and accordingly causes one's listener to lose focus on what one is saying. The best poems in the so-called "plain style" are generally ones in which the ordinary and poetic senses are more or less balanced.

What makes all of this finally very difficult is that it is very unlikely that two different people will ever have exactly the same sense of when catachretic language produces a dynamic poetic effect, and when it simply produces uninteresting noise. With poetic devices such as meter, rhyme, metaphor, and so forth, there is always a degree of measurable competence with regard to which, if differing readers do not necessarily agree, they may at least acknowledge the intelligibility of the dispute. The territory of negative aesthetics for which I am claiming a nearly primal poetic importance is one which resists intelligible criteria altogether, and therefore leads to exactly what we know poetry to be: a wide and various field with no determinate boundaries and very uncertain prospects of internal mapability. This is not just a condition that poetry has to put up with; it is one on which it depends. If there weren't people who "didn't get it," poetry would have no way to identify itself. Likewise, even within the ranks of the initiated, there must always be factions that position themselves against other factions who don't get it as much as they do, and so on. Without this bluntly antagonistic pattern of social formation, there might be monuments of literary greatness, but there could be no living poetry.

Flip a Dick?

How many of you have ever heard or used the expression "flip a dick," meaning "make a U-turn"? It was current among some members of my circle of friends in Modesto, California, ca. 1980. The other day, while Anne was making a U-turn, it occurred to me again. Maybe it had something to do with the "flip-flop" captions given to the recent video that bloggers have been posting of Dick Cheney in the 90s warning against the folly of invading Iraq. Anyway, when I got back to my computer, I did a search on it. As far as Google knows, it shows up in only two places on the entire web: the Urban Dictionary, and The Online Slang Dictionary, where it appears only as a variant of the much more common "flip a bitch." There are two listed contributors for the OSD entry. One is from Oregon City, Oregon, and the other from Robo, California, which leads me to wonder if it's a purely west coast usage, and an extremely limited one at that.

Poetix on Poetic Intelligence

At Poetix: an interesting discussion of poetic evaluation.

The process of writing a poem is investigative: there is a "problem space", which is that opened up by the poem's initial gestures, and there are better and worse poems to be found within that space. It is not necessarily always a process of steady refinement: there are a variety of strategies for getting around. Departing from a known good in the direction of the very worst may sometimes be the only way of getting out of a local plateau in which there are at best only adequate poems to be found. But the criteria determining what is "better" and what is "worse" are themselves immanent to the problem space, or rather to the investigation which opens it up. In a sense, the answer to the question "what is a good poem" or "what makes a poem good" must always be a poem, or a group of poems through which the path of an investigation can be traced.

The entire idea of immanent (rather than, say, "relative") aesthetic value--a space of evaluation that remains particular to the context of a given poetic "investigation," and from which a more general scale of evaluation cannot be abstracted without violence to the specificity of the demands and priorities of the original occasion for poesis--is one that invites further development.

Can we speak of an evaluative scale being immanent not merely to the "problem space" of an individual poem, but to a similar space defined by the work of multiple poets operating in collective sympathy to one another? And if we can do this, where do we draw the line between evaluative immanence and "transcendence"? At what point do the prescriptions that prove useful for an isolated problem space take on, for better or worse, the quality of seeming attractive as prescriptions for a blanket model of poetic value? How, for instance, do we arrive at condititions in which it seems desirable (to whomever) for all poetry to traffic in "concrete imagery," or in "plain speech," or in "radical artifice," or what have you--not just within the conscious limits of a historically or culturally situated problem set, but as a totalizing aesthetic imperative?

New Criticism and "Quietude"? Part 2

I never managed to come full circle in my post last night to address fully the initial question (posed by Dale, who says more today) of the New Criticism's importance vis a vis a supposed "School of Quietude." What follows are just a couple of stray thoughts.

1. The New Americans, and by extension later groups influenced by them, are no less enmeshed in New Critical ideas than were the "academic" poets of midcentury. Creeley's dictum, for example, that "poems are not referential, or at least not importantly so" is perfectly in line with the ubiquitous New Critical (or for that matter Russian Formalist) tenet that poetic language proceeds more by connotation than by denotation, and that denotation in poetry is generally subordinated to its connotative purpose. Cleanth Brooks, for example, writes in The Well-Wrought Urn that "the poet does not use a notation at all--as the scientist may properly be said to do so." Or as Suzanne Langer writes in Feeling and Form: "Poetic reflections ... are not essentially trains of logical reasoning, though they may incorporate fragments, at least, of discursive argument. Essentially they create the semblance of reasoning; of the seriousness, strain, and progress, the sense of growing knowledge, growing clearness, conviction and acceptance--the whole experience of philosophical thinking." Certainly Language Poetry too has been identified with a swerve away from reference toward a more presentational dimension of language. Even the frequent corrections to and qualifications of this identification, like Charles Bernstein's reminder that Language Poetry does not proclaim the "'death' of the referent--rather a recharged use of the multivalent referential vectors that any word has," maintain the basic New-Critical/Formalist focus on polysemousness and ambiguity.

2. Many of the currently and recently active poets that could be accused of a "Quietude" show little if any interest in the questions of reference raised by the New Critics and others, even when their surface methods ("free verse" line breaks, "plain speech" diction, etc.) show the influence of poets like Creeley, or more broadly, of Creeley's great model Williams. If anything, their shortcoming from an opposing viewpoint consists in what might be considered their naive faith in transparency and "direct statement." The Louise Glück poem I commented on the other day provides a good example.

No conclusion here yet, except to point out that I'm not trying to make a case either for or against the New Critical principle in question--though I do think it's still a useful concept, as a provisional "way in" to thinking about poetic language. It's very helpful, for example, in encouraging students to think with more complexity about how poems work. In fact, I would almost insist that my own students engage with this idea before they try to theorize any of various modes of "uncreative writing" and such. I don't subscribe to the old belief that you have to learn to paint "realistically" before you can paint "abstractly," but when it comes to criticism, there might be something to the notion that you have to know what position you're departing from before you can depart meaningfully from it.

New Criticism and "Quietude"?

Dale Smith asks: "Does 'School-of-Quietude' = New Criticism and its descendants?"

This is a reasonable question. The way Ron has framed the concept of SoQ, it sometimes seems so. But as far as I can see, the strain of American poetry that was truly informed by the New Criticism now occupies a relatively small subsection of contemporary verse, and to the extent that it is still practiced, it's a lot more interesting than a great deal else of what is now considered "mainstream"--and much of what is considered "experimental" as well.

To repeat many of the same points I made about a year ago in this post (and maybe to contradict some of them), when I think of the poets whose styles most visibly bear the marks of the New Criticism, I think of poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, early Adrienne Rich, Donald Justice, John Berryman, and the like: poets who often incorporate forms and manners that would not be out of place in a Renaissance sonnet or a nineteenth-century ode. I think of poets, that is, who are also students of canonical literary history. The same cannot be said of every poet writing what is now considered, or is coming to be considered, "mainstream" poetry.

The fact is (again repeating my earlier points), the products that come out of many "mainstream" workshops are increasingly difficult to differentiate from the products of the so-called "post-avant." Fragmentation and disjunctiveness, for example, can no longer be relied on in every case as sure markers of anything. Nor, for that matter, can complete sentences. Grammaticality and ungrammaticality in and of themselves are nothing more than available poetic styles. It is not as simple, either, as saying that the deciding factor now solely consists in content rather than form, and not just because of the usual, well-rehearsed reasons why the form/content dichotomy is inadequate and incoherent. The question of subject matter is just as vexed as that of syntax and line breaks.

The real difference between x and y brands of poetry (in which x and y are meant as two all-encompassing and mutually differentiating terms, and in which x is formulated as aesthetically and politically retrograde whereas y is formulated as progressive and "resistant") is neither stylistically nor thematically fixed. It is a difference in the social systems within which x and y are circulated, and in which codes of self-identification and invidious comparison are devised with a conscious or unconscious motive of maintaining said social difference. (It may be the case that the motives for partisans of the y group tend to be more conscious, and those of the x group less so.) The idea of the difference, then, precedes any "essential" characteristics of the "two types" of poetry, which is to say that there are of course not really two types of poetry which perfectly illustrate said difference, only two groups of people with more or less equally strong investments in maintaining the fiction that there are two types of poetry etc. When a poet's work doesn't fit neatly into either the x or the y category, it need not be because that work is significantly different in kind from either x or y poetry; it may be because the poet has not identified his or her orientation clearly toward the ideology of either x or y.

In any given historical moment, it may be possible for a poet to signal the kind of difference under discussion entirely through stylistic and/or thematic means. So, for example, for Ted Berrigan, in the 1960s, to use radical collage methods and invoke frank sexuality in writing The Sonnets was a clear statement of alignment with the then-current avant-garde. For someone to make similar gestures now, in the 2000s, does not in and of itself constitute an equivalent statement. It may, for example, constitute an attempt to write what one thinks will "sell" in a calculatedly "edgy" poetic "market." And in fact, even if we look into the past and try to ask such questions as "Who was more poetically pure--Charles Olson or Elizabeth Bishop?" we end up banging our heads against a wall. The particular wall I'm thinking of has as its mortar issues of class, gender, race, politics, and so on, and mortar is a real, solid substance, but the bricks--which after all are what we think of as "the poem itself"--are just words.

It's the mortar, then, that's actually the object of all the x vs. y hair-pulling. (This may be a hasty and ill-considered metaphor, because, for example, I can imagine the same metaphor being used to differentiate words themsselves and the syntactical structures in which they are arranged, which is not what I'm talking about here.) It's the social contexts of the work, the complexes of privilege and exclusion that are metonymically connected to the work. And these are things very much worth considering, and I would not say, as some would, that these concerns are external to poetry as such. We can't separate the poem from the fancy drawing room, or the fleabag boarding house, in which it was written. It's all real. The mistake is to think that we can reify the real differences that are at stake into formal differences which will always reliably mirror the real ones.

I'm trying to make sure my conclusion doesn't appear to go in either of two equally disastrous directions. First, I'm not arguing that it all just comes down in the end to good poetry and bad poetry, although each of us, I would hope, does have some personal sense of good and bad--a sense that does not depend desperately on some transient distinction like "experimental" vs. "mainstream." It must be a personal sense, as there can be no absolute consensus on such a thing. That would be artistic fascism. Second, I'm not arguing that good and bad are completely relative concepts, that, for example, "poetry is good if you like it and bad if you don't." This is really a topic for a different discussion, but suffice to say that we can all (potentially) have cogent reasons for holding one thing to be good and another to be bad, even if we don't agree with each other about them. I'm arguing that what we decide is either good or bad in poetry cannot be contained within one conceptual frame.

A line of a sonnet may be bad because its meter is irregular. It also may be good because its meter is irregular. Both of these instances occupy the same conceptual frame. Then again, a line of a sonnet may be bad because it is clearly derivative of another line in a better sonnet by a different poet. This is a different conceptual frame, in that it involves a judgment that can't be made by dealing with the poem in isolation. (A case could probably be made that no act of reading ever occurs in isolation, because literacy necessarily entails familiarity with more than one text, but I hope the difference between the two frames I've described so far is still apparent.) Goodness and badness, then, have both intrinsic and extrinsic vectors. Neither vector on its own is sufficient to supply us with a well-rounded evaluative model for critical judgment. People who say "just read the poetry" are as misguided as those who value the abstract idea of a particular school or style or ideological bent more than any individual poem. You can't read the poetry without reading all the stuff that surrounds it, whether that stuff is other poetry or the fact of the literary clique or academic institution you know the poet is associated with.

Rachel Zolf, Human Resources

We have been dealing for some time now with that awkward moment in contemporary poetic practice where innovation and novelty give way to the basic problem of reflecting the state of human language with a feeling accuracy. "Feeling" is the key term here, for while it is valid to object that anyone can slap together a jumble of computer code, spam text, and instant messaging slang and call it a poem, it is more useful to acknowledge that such materials really are a significant portion of what the poet now has to work with, and that if one is truly interested in contemporary poetry, one must reckon with these materials--or rather, their application--in a way that is neither superficially celebratory nor blindly dismissive.

The problem of separating a facile from an artful engagement with "a selection of language really used by men," as Wordsworth put it, is that radical historical changes in such language occur at a pace that appears both gradual and dramatic to its reflective users (e.g., poets). The sense of newness is perpetually at war with the sense that this is what we've settled into without even noticing it starting. The poet who treats it as a novelty will write verse that is at best novel, at worst cynically fashionable. The poet who works with an actual feeling for the language in its awkward transitional throes is the rarer case. In the context of language as it has been transformed specifically by recent online communication technology, for example, I think of artists like Alan Sondheim not just as pioneers but as feeling pioneers.

It's important not to dilute "feeling" as I mean it here with a simplistic sense of "emotion," or "authenticity." I'm talking about feeling in the sense of the carpenter's feel for wood and awl, or the sewist's for fabric and thread: in other words, "craft," but more than mechanical craft. Craft as it is defined by the craftsperson's aesthetic attunement to the materials. What does it mean to have a sympathetic "feel" for computer code, for hack ad copy, for typo-ridden cable news tickers? Whereas Wordsworth embraced "common speech" out of affection (however paternalistic and "romanticized") for the working classes, our relation to today's common speech is invariably more conflicted, if not downright anxious. Can materials that seem degraded not just to a literary establishment, but often to the poet herself, be used "feelingly" in the way I'm trying to get at here?

Answering this question is, as I see it, one of the primary tasks of contemporary poetics. And though I'm not prepared at the moment to offer even a rough prolegomenon to anything like a study of the same, I can at least offer a glance at a new book that impresses me greatly by being consistently sensitive to its unwieldy, unlovely verbal sources. The book is Rachel Zolf's Human Resources (Coach House, 2007). (Thanks to Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand for telling me about it and sending me a copy.)

Zolf draws on several web-based resources: Lewis LaCook's Flash Poetry Generator, WordCount, QueryCount, and the Gematria of Nothing (GON) engine. There's a note at the end of the book that goes into more detail about how she used these tools, but I'm most interested in the one she mentions half-jokingly: "the author's proprietary machine-mind(TM)." The book comes partly out of Zolf's own experience as a marketing and employee-relations copy-writer, so it's not hard to figure out where the palpable overtone of disgust and contempt comes from. One thematic thread revolves around professional bureaucracy, managerial attempts at employee control, and so on. This is complemented with a subtext of excretory, racial, and biological "taboo" language. These concerns are largely directed into what may be the book's primary concern: the "waste" of language, figured as both misspent energy and as actual physical waste. The close-up on the cover of a nicked-up Lincoln-head penny looks at first glance like nothing more than a fecal smear, suggesting the collapse of something intended as vital currency into a useless blob of shit.

Which returns us to the problem at hand: how to recognize the poetry in shit. The problem is essentially alchemical, like turning lead into gold. As such, it is fundamentally chimerical, and poetry must always face this truth: that at base it is nothing more than playing with words--words that are in one way or another "dirty," like much-handled money. If poetry is to remain a viable concept, this truth must be countered by an aesthetic, and aesthetics always raise the specter of "transcendence." There may be no getting around it.

Zolf's work feels "poetic" to me by virtue of never deserting its poetics of negativity, but at the same time never resting on a false conviction that negativity will do all its own work. She does not wallow in cultural bankruptcy for shock value, nor does she attempt to "get past" all the cheapness to a pure poetic space of value. Everything is treated as what it is and put to use in the instance of need described by the verse as it proceeds.

Trapped in this high-performance culture, let's suspend all disbelief, ignore the elephants in the room.

I won't remember that avant-garde chaos frees the writing machine's choked circuits.

Our abstractions stink of pure gibberish and no one notices the false pundits.

Look through the mirror, it's the Information Age, where every surface is 1793 brilliant urine requests scum wolf and nothing shines.

Or:

Mass affluent consumers' key satisfaction drivers aspirational by most common queries of most - common - English - words - engine: fuck Q1 sex Q2 love the shit god i venus cunt a ass jesus dog Q13 pussy hate bush john me hello vagina america bitch cat dick you war yes she like and cock no damn david gay man computer money word mother michael poop Q42 happy mom asshole orgasm he mike apple peace help one hi car bob fart cool it chris microsoft crap woman what good is death hell conquistador iraq james house mark butt porn cum girl paul home dad work but of beer nigger andrew tom tit tits usa anal baby stupid boy joe father kill mary school sarah smith Q100 re-scoped the guestimate--the generic one month is longer than 30 days. You can control the reader's reaction without changing the facts

This is not like Wordsworth's notion of common language, of course, in that it is not "the way people actually talk"--but then, neither was Wordsworth's verse. What made his verse memorable was not that it broke through artifice to authenticity, but that it took an artfully rendered interpretation of authenticity and wedded it to the poet's own feelingly rendered deployment of existing poetic conventions. The existing conventions in Zolf's work include both the slightly "elevated" register of "expressive" statements in the first person (singular or plural) and the deliberately decontextualized "New Sentence" rhythm of discrete utterances sitting in disjunct sequence (which bleeds into a Bruce-Andrews-esque prosody of manic social expletives). Intruding on both these conventions is the emergent convention of machine-text imagined as inhuman bot-voice, improvising semi-random strings of words, numbers, and other forms of quasi-verbality into a strangled attempt at motivated discourse. One index of the value of these lines as poetry is to be found in the interplay between all the modes of convention that are at play at any given time: dominant: those that are firmly established to the point of risking cliche, those that have risen to a newly precarious dominance, and those that are so new as to smack of gimmickry. This is what interesting poetry does in any period: rather than trying to escape entirely the traps of conservative tradition, dominant orthodoxy, or inchoate innovation, it finds ways of creating electrical pathways between them.

Available at SPD.

Glück in the New Yorker

From "A Village Life," by Louise Glück in the New Yorker:

On Sundays I walk my neighbor's dog
so she can go to church to pray for her sick mother.

That is one talented dog.

The Trouble with Shakespeare

Dan Donohue as Caliban in Libby Appel's OSF production of The Tempest.

Back in June, I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of The Tempest. It had mostly slipped my mind, but today a colleague of mine emailed me to ask what I thought of it.

For what it was trying to do, it was perfectly acceptable (some strong performances, some just adequate), but I had the same problems with it that I have with a lot of contemporary stagings of Shakespeare. In particular--and this may just be my own idiosyncratic quirk that I shouldn't expect anyone else to share--I always struggle with the disconnect between the text in its historical dimensions (the archaic language, the unfamiliar allusions, the obsolete rhetorical and dramatic conventions, etc.) and the "realist," "psychological" approach to performance taken by even the most "postmodern" productions.

For some plays, this is less of a problem than others: for example, comedies like Twelfth Night can be made to rely enough on physical humor and other direct sensory effects that the language and other time-bound stuff isn't foregrounded in the same way, and the contemporary sensibility has room to take over. The Tempest has some of this flexibility, especially in the first half, when much of the action revolves around the introduction of characters, general exposition, and the novelty of the spirit-world aspect of the play. A great deal of it, however, strikes me as now relevant mostly on a level that requires some intensive familiarity with Renaissance culture, so that an ideal performance by my lights would be that tries to recreate the early modern conditions of performance as closely as possible, down to vocal delivery and bodily gesture (as nearly as such things could be guessed at on the basis of available scholarship). Or, conversely--it would be a performance that radically revises or even completely supplants the orginal playtext with a whole new "translation." (The closest example of such an approach I can think of offhand is Peter Greenaway's 1991 film Prospero's Books, which combines reordered sections of Shakespeare's script with Greenaway's own invented "quotations" from imaginary books in Prospero's library. Another example, Jean-Luc Godard's 1987 King Lear, is in a different category altogether, as despite its title it is really a wholly original artistic text that occasionally borrows elements from Shakespeare.) As it stands, most of today's productions feel to me like compromised middle-zone negotiations between these two possibilities.

Obviously, there are thousands of people who are perfectly happy with the way Shakespeare is currently treated on the modern stage, and who would find my view eccentric, even elitist. Probably my position stems from a general distrust of what passes for "high culture" within a middle-class economics of mass entertainment. I've noticed that as a rule I enjoy amateur productions of Shakespeare more than professional ones, and this may be because in the former the areas of difficulty and strangeness are not so successfully glossed over or normalized. In a weird way, knowing that the line delivery is more likely to be screwed up causes me to listen more anxiously, and therefore more attentively. In professional productions all the anxiety is often combed out, leaving nothing but a comfortable spectacle of Our Canonical Heritage.

"You taught me language," says Caliban to his masters, "and my profit on 't / Is I know how to curse." That is, one way to resist a colonizing force is to subvert its symbolic system. Too often, contemporary bardolatry takes the received language of Shakespeare and uses its multivalent registers only as "Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not."

Adrienne Rich, "The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood At Last As a Sexual Message"

Adrienne Rich

The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood At Last As a Sexual Message

A man in terror of impotence
or infertility, not knowing the difference
a man trying to tell something
howling from the climacteric
music of the entirely
isolated soul
yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego
music without the ghost
of another person in it, music
trying to tell something the man
does not want out, would keep if he could
gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy
where everything is silence and the
beating of a bloody fist upon
a splintered table

from Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972

In some ways, this might seem like a "typical seventies poem." The free verse format looks shapeless at first glance, and the diction could be borrowed from a popular psychology textbook. And yet I remember this as a poem that made a strong impression on me when I first encountered it over twenty-five years ago in a school anthology, and coming to it again after all that time, I still feel its power. It's a little cyclone of a poem, angry and smart and righteous and cruel.

The poem's apparent formal arbitrariness reveals upon closer examination a closely modulated progression of thought and syntax. The first two lines, with their fake-out rhyme, are followed by another two lines with the same subject ("a man") and an equivalent predicate (in both cases, the man's menopausal fear and confusion comes up against the limits of his capacity for expression). Although the third and fourth lines do not rhyme, the entire set of four lines is bound up in a tidy chiastic structure: the A phrases expressing the man's fear of biological midlife ("in terror of impotence / and infertility" and "howling from the climacteric") frame the participial B phrases expressing his inability to articulate this fear ("not knowing the difference" and "trying to tell something").

Then, for the next few lines, the subject shifts from "the man" to "music," suggesting that perhaps the poem will resolve into a series of grammatically parallel quatrains, like a sonnet. This turns out not to be the case: the phrases with "music" as their subject do not follow the same pattern as the earlier lines, and at any rate, the poem has fifteen lines, not fourteen (I would like someday, by the way, to undertake a study of the fifteen-line poem as a distinctive verse animal). Nevertheless, there are significant congruences: where the lines concerning the man are broken into two groups of two, the lines concerning the music are broken roughly into two groups of three. In the first of these two groups of three lines, the music's "yelling" echoes the man's "howling" in line 4; in the second group, the music is described as "trying to tell something," an exact repetition of the same phrase that is used of the man in line 3.

The first and second of the three "music" clauses initiate a new idea-repetition: that of isolation. The phrase "of the entirely / isolated soul" in lines 5 and 6 is matched by "without the ghost / of another person in it" in lines 8 and 9. These phrases are alternated with the aforementioned echoes (in reverse order) of the man's shouting and striving, creating an effect of thematic interweaving.

The phrase "the man" is reintroduced at the end of line 10, paralleling the position of the third use of "music" at the end of line 9, much as the first and second instances of "music" sit in the same positions at the beginnings of lines 5 and 8.

The rest of the poem is given over to the man's will to repression. Although the music, like the man, is "trying to tell something," it is apparently not the same thing, for what the music wants to tell, "the man / does not want out." This discrepancy seems paradoxical: surely whatever the man is trying to say, he tries to say through his music, and if the music itself is trying to say something, the most intuitive interpretation of this is that "the music" is to be understood as metonymic for "the man." How then can what the music is trying to tell be different from what the man is trying to tell? But this, of course, is the "point" of the poem. The Ninth Symphony's ostensible theme, for the speaker, is a cover-up, a perverse apparatus by means of which the man is "gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy."

Here still, and from here on, the dominant poetic conceit is the dissolution of what at first seems paradox. When we recognize the play on chords/cords, it becomes clearer how Joy can be figured as an instrument of sado-masochistic restraint. Finally, all of this musical dysfunction occurs in a place "where everything is silence and the / beating of a bloody fist upon / a splintered table." If there are chords playing, how can there be silence? This paradoxicality too fades away in the light of our knowledge that Beethoven was deaf when he composed the Ninth.

The image of the bloody fist beating on the table is all the more forceful for having to be imagined as silent. Here the poem's beginning theme of impotence returns in a startlingly vivid form. I wonder if writer/director Neil LaBute had it in mind for the climact(er?)ic scene of his 1997 film In the Company of Men, the scene where Matt Molloy screams "Listen to me" over and over but cannot be heard by the deaf woman he addresses (or by the audience). Probably not, but it is a similar effect. Of course, in Rich's poem, it is the man himself who is deaf, and the woman hears his psychosexual howl of rage and resentment all too clearly.

Chez Burroughs

Just returned from a picnic in Lawrence, Kansas honoring the tenth anniversary of William Burroughs' death. It was held in the yard of his old house on Learnard Street. It was hot and muggy, but a pleasant and relaxing setting nonetheless. Among the snacks: saltines, a big block of yellow cheese, and canned anchovies (a favorite of Burroughs', we were told). Great conversation with Jim McCrary (Burroughs' secretary for some time) and his wife Susan Ashline, among other folk present.

There is a little melancholy garden in the side yard, where at least seven of Burroughs' cats lie buried, including Calico Jane.

The house itself is now apparently occupied by college students, who have placed posters for all five Harry Potter movies so far in the living room and "decorated" the bathroom in KC Chiefs paraphernalia.

Guest Poet Dept.: Ryan Daley

Ryan Daley
Nice of You to Offer Help

Nice of you to offer help. I'm excited that I found this group. I really wanted to be able to get a good shave with a straight razor (sr), but I was about to give up. I actually did a quite a bit or reading on how to hone a sr. and I thought I was doing it properly. After I tried shaving with the brand new sr, it didn't work so good. Then, I purchased some honing items. Even though I followed the proper procedure as recommended by many web sites, my razor shaved even worse afterwards. Obviously, I didn't do it correctly. Going in the direction from the sharp edge to the spine. Then, I take razor and finish it off on a double sided wooden paddle with leather on either side. I use diamond paste on both sides. On the rougher side I use .5 grain. On the smoother leather side I use the finer .25 grain diamond paste. I give the razor four back and fourth strokes on the .5 side and and then four trips up and down on the .25 grain to polish it off. With the double sided wooden paddle strop, I pull the razor in the opposite direction then I do on the water stone. After all of that, I stop the razor up on my hanging double sided strop. Did the fingernail test and it seemed just fine. Also... went straight through a sheet of paper. But... It shaved even worse. Obviously, I screwed it up. I also have a stainless steel sr, but I have no idea how to hone that one. I live in North NJ and I go into NYC all the time.

Are you a barber ????