Kurt Cobain, Alfred Hitchcock, Wilson Pickett

We passed, at twilight, a decrepit mansion where, years before, during a still-famous concert, Kurt Cobain had been shot from the stage in a makeshift one-man glider into the sky, his arms strapped to the crossbars like a blond, beardless Christ. The people aiming him had, however, accidentally sent him to the wrong landing site, and he ended up in the top floor of another large house where, fortuitously, it turned out that the residents revered the arts and were happy to receive him.

***

A beautiful young woman, her legs temporarily weakened by some affliction, floated therapeutically in the small, square pool that was the front yard of her apartment. As we talked in low, sympathetic tones to each other, she gestured at the corner across the intersection, where a modest old-style movie theater advertised THE BIRDS on its still-handsome marquis. The employees activated some mechanism that made the marquis revolve on a hidden axis and turn inward, leaving visible on its back only a row of shelves where drab-colored socks and legwarmers were laid out for sale. "They're finally going out of business," the young woman whispered. I was filled with disappointment and rage, as I had only just discovered the existence of the theater at that moment.

***

The hands held a small, flat, silver box, like a cigarette case. It opened to reveal a little keyboard--only five or six keys. One finger of the hand began to pick out a melody instantly familiar but elusive. I felt as though any second I would be able to identify it. Then, as if to anticipate me, the underside of the case's lid spelled out the artist and title in block letters: WILSON PICKETT, DIGGING IN THE RIVER. Of course, I thought. Some words from the chorus became audible:

If you're happy and free
Have a future you can see
It's because unlike me
You're not digging in the river

I began to walk down the street, the music now filling my head, perhaps through earphones. Wilson Pickett's voice continued plaintively:

God loves all human children
Little boys grow up like their mothers
Some joke and laugh for their brothers
Like monkeys....

It was sunny but raining lightly. A bus drove by, radiant and yellow. I thought about how Wilson Pickett would once have had to sit in the back of that bus, and about how daring and dangerous Wilson Pickett still was, the boldest of revolutionary voices, and how proud I was to have his voice in my ears. My throat began to clinch up, and I struggled to hold back sentimental tears. I was walking under the awnings of quiet midcentury shops on this street with its ambient light in this neighborhood that was both busy and serene, that might have been in late 1960s Modesto, or in a leafy part of Chicago. The people in front of me were walking just too slowly for me to pass them comfortably, and there were just enough people behind me to make me feel enveloped by a small crowd, a friendly feeling. I worried that people could sense my tears, which I tried to cover up by sniffling loudly as though I had a cold. Like everyone else, I was wearing extremely lightweight plastic rain gear, even though the rain only amounted to a few drops on the gold-tinted sidewalk. I felt such a kinship with the people around me, with this street, its traffic and trees and nostalgic hues, that the inexpressible sadness which was part of my happiness began to sharpen and expand: sadness that this idyllic home of mine could not be shared with someone else who was miles away, forced by fate to live in a dull landscape of gray concrete tuna factories and soulless modern convenience stores. But then this aching sadness expanded into the dawning apprehension that it was not really my home either, that the subtly muted radiance of this street scene would gradually fade, that it was fading already with this realization.

Ron Silliman at SOU

Ron holds forth at last night's Emergent Forms reading and lecture at Southern Oregon University.

Also, there was a giant panda.

I wish I had more pictures, but my camera is dying.

The Poem Is You

Two central aspects of poetry in constant tension with each other:

1) A function of positive expression, eminently apprehendable, with an impulse toward revealed presence. The mode of revelation, epiphany, connection: "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies," etc. In its simplistic form, this function is discussed in the context of "accessibility" or the poem's appeal to "the common reader." The new poet laureate talks about poetry "reminding us of our humanity." In "Paradoxes and Oxymorons," Ashbery concludes, "The poem is you"--a gesture that proleptically announces the poem's triumph as vehicle of total transitivity, the dissolution of all barriers between reading and experience.

2) A function of estrangement, reflexivity, negative signification. "A poem should not mean, but be," or more succinctly, "Even though a poem is composed in the language of information, it is not part of the language-game of giving information" (Wittgenstein). A bastardization of this perspective yields the banality that poems are "non-referential." Ashbery's phrase from this vantage points to the intransivity of the poem, its infinite referral back to a point of pre-reception, perpetual unreadability or unreadness.

The pernicious insistence on dichotomies (mainstream vs. experimental, SoQ vs. post-avant, etc.) signals a failure to register this tension adequately. It is a tension not to be resolved, but constantly reckoned with and respected. The poem shows you your critical and imaginative limitations, reflects your own prejudices and blindnesses back at you, to your gratification or frustration. The poem is you.

I've talked before about the role played in poetry by what Roman Jakobson terms the phatic, a role that as far as I know has not been examined in detail much beyond Yuri Tynianov's discussions of equivalent form in The Problem of Verse Language (1924), and more recently, Nate Mackey's concept of "founding noise" in Discrepant Engagement (1993). What all these terms revolve around is the notion of a neutral base material (static, silence, meaningless language, etc.) that allows poeticity to reveal itself. A rough analogy: the mortar between the bricks, without which the bricks would not manifest a pattern or keep their structural integrity. The shortcoming of this analogy is that with bricks, there is clearly such a thing as too much or not enough mortar, unless we're talking about some kind of modernistic brick assemblage art project. With poetry, the very question of what constitutes too much or not enough phatic material is primary to the entire concept of poesis in the first place, so it must always remain a question. One cannot generalize outward from a given reader's predilection for, on the one hand, a poetry of direct statement and ordinary language, or on the other hand, a highly coded poetry of indirection and opacity, to a "correct" position on poetic form/content. The poem is always a negotiation of the impossibility of such a position being universal. The poem is you.

Christopher Nealon, "The Poetic Case"

Christopher Nealon's essay "The Poetic Case," in Critical Inquiry 33.4, 2007, examines the concept of "unrealizability" across several centuries of both indictments and defenses of poetry, and culminates in a reading of Jennifer Moxley's poem "On This Side Nothing" from her 2002 collection The Sense Record. As Nealon himself admits, the reading is potentially problematic because Moxley's poem draws on the same critical discourse on labor, history, and social value for which he proposes to use it as a "test case." His implication is that in some ways a poem ostensibly unconcerned with these issues would run less risk of rigging the results, so to speak, though I have more than once mulled over the same problem from the obverse perspective: how can any theory of poetry be adequate that does not take into account the way in which contemporary poetry (contemporary to any period) continually absorbs and reflects the discourse of criticism, particularly that criticism which, through whatever shortsightedness, assumes a split between the art object and its own relationship to that object? I think for example, of Paul De Man's deconstructionist readings of Romantic and Modern poems, which, as brilliant as they are, always cause me to consider how the same argumentative strategies would fall short if used to read Language Poetry or even the more radical works of early Modernism--works that resist deconstructive theory to the extent that they are themselves informed by it, or at least by discourses and attitudes that operate along parallel paths to it.

One could argue in turn that poetry has always been informed by such discourses. Nealon acknowledges this when he begins his essay by asking, "What might a poem be said to be exemplary of, today? How is its exemplarity shaped by discourse on poetry, on the aesthetic, on history?" If a poem's exemplarity is always a function of its own self-realization in relation to poetic and critical history, it would follow that poetry writ large has always occupied such an ongoing double position: on the one hand, the poem as autonomous object under the gaze of theoretical consciousness, and on the other, the poem as the product of such consciousness in its most creatively ambitious mode. The poem's exemplarity, from this point of view, is of its own ability simultaneously to embody and resist the historical conditions that determine its possibility--or impossibility. Nealon frames the contradictory implications of this ability in the context of what he terms "unrealizability":

I believe that we are able to read poems through the lens of their partial realization of the possibilities of the category poetry because the history of the Western discourse on poetry is itself built around recurring topoi of unrealizability. ... [T]hese unrealizability topoi range from meditations on whether poem making is a kind of labor to claims that poetry illuminates the unimportance or even pointlessness of all human labor. The questions posed in such topoi are so basic that they are capable of making the category poetry straddle what we would now think of as two very different languages of value: an ancient language of use-value and a modern one of surplus-value. Questions about whether a poem really is a made thing oblige us to think about something like the use-value of poems, what they are for, what they can do, and whether for-ness, telos, is really the right language for thinking about poems. Questions about the pointlessness of human labor, meanwhile, shine a light on what goes on in laboring activity, whether it can be said to be for something, a higher purpose, or whether it is simply toil or exploitation. A central argument of my essay is that, in the history of defending poetry, the topoi of unrealizability give poetry's defenders a way to suggest that the significance of poetry is not captured by the language of making or purpose but that it is a type of activity that puts pressure on the social meanings of both. And as the meaning of the social develops ever-greater complexity, relentlessness, and intensity, this demurral from instrumentalization opens up a space of bewilderment about the present that is potentially critical, even as it risks valorizing uselessness as such.

I'm wary of fuzzy locutions like "opens up a space of" (though I'm sure I've used that one myself more than once), especially when the space in question is one of "bewilderment" that is only "potentially critical," and further "risks valorizing uselessness." Not exactly the kind of language that's going to win stockholders! Nevertheless, I find Nealon's ideas stimulating and useful, even if I have to suppress my natural inclination just to go ahead and valorize uselessness uncritically and unapologetically. As I read his argument, what poetry most exemplarily exemplifies is its own capacity for exemplifying itself--at the expense of ever actually materializing as an actual identifiable thing. He writes:

Another way to describe what I mean by unrealizability is that it describes a condition of poetry as not most importantly a made thing or perhaps not a made thing at all. Certainly this is what Plato thinks; and one feature of the defense of poetry, as well as of the Left aesthetics that comes to draw on it, will be to accept Plato's characterization [in the Republic] and ask whether the not-made-ness of poetry is such a bad thing. This opens up other ways of thinking about the importance of poetry, not least as the scene of a perpetual making that never quite settles into the state of having-been-made. Unrealizability, then, might also be a name for the way in which any given poem can be read as much for its instancing poetry as for its separate status as individual poem.

Further on in the essay, after rehearsing several positions from defenses of poetry by Sidney, Vico, Shelley, and Schiller that in one way or another allow him to relate his conception of the "unrealizability topos" to the concerns of Left aesthetics, Nealon turns to Georg Lukács' 1920 book History and Class Consciousness and Gayatri Spivak's 1985 essay "Scattered Speculations on Human Value." Observing that the "fatedness" implicit in Lukács' position holds the entire category of aesthetics in subordination to the conditions of material labor, Nealon addresses the limiting binary opposition between aesthetics and labor maintained by the Left throughout much of the twentieth century: the idea that the potential of the aesthetic is always "alternative" and contingent, that it can only be imagined as a force capable of productive activity either in some future time of liberation, or as a negatively subservient adjunct to the work of propaganda.

In political terms, this idea has tended to mean that only those whose labor is obviously an instance of capitalist exploitation—especially wage workers—can be imagined as the potential agents of revolutionary change. In aesthetic terms, the language of fate tends to burden poetic or artistic activity with an obligation to reflect, negatively, the operations of a capitalism we then believe we fully understand.

Spivak's notion of "inadequation," Nealon suggests, provides a way of loosening up this binary. I interpret him as interpreting inadequation as the tendency for material processes such as the transformation of use value into exchange value into surplus value to be subject to unpredictable variations, variations that, as Spivak notes, constantly drift off into open fields of textuality and indeterminacy. It is at this point that Nealon shifts his attention to Moxley's poem. As sensitive as his reading is on its own, I can't help but feel that some of the energy of his larger investigation drops off here. Part of the problem may be that he is entirely right in claiming that a poem is not most emphatically a "made thing," but something that always enacts the impossibility of its own coming-into-being: this being the case, when Moxley's poem is drafted into service as a sort of secondary source for Nealon's argument, our attention is diverted from its most significant characteristics qua poem. The problem is not so much that the poem is itself embedded in the discourse that Nealon uses to examine it, as he worries, but that he relies chiefly on its most discursive aspects as support for his claims, converting its phraseology into "statements" that function essentially like expository prose, rather than looking at what he himself so evocatively describes earlier in the essay as the uniquely "unrealizable" operations of poetic language.

That said, Nealon's work here and in his recent "Camp Messianism, or the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism" (American Literature 76.3, 2004) is some of the most intelligent and provocative current poetic criticism I've seen, and I look forward to each new piece from him.