Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word.
Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997. xvi + 273 pp. $35.00.The three books under discussion in this review essay--Michael Davidson's Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, Aldon Lynn Nielsen's Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism, and Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990--raise a number of provocative issues. Taken collectively, these books ask us to give serious attention to the place of poetry in the current curriculum and to poetry's relationship to our imagination of nationhood. Such considerations take place at a time when narrative is the preferred mode of expression, and complex and innovative poetry remains in disfavor. If, as Davidson suggests, "writing is a form of knowing" (70), we may wish to consider what role, if any, poetry plays in contemporary thinking.
The writing of literary history, particularly when that history attempts to address the present and the recent past, is a particularly slippery activity. It has been more customary to write books of criticism on contemporary poetry that have been organized around close readings of the work of individual poets, usually packaged in a one-poet-per-chapter format. These three books, however, pay much more attention to histories that take a form other than the story of superhero individuals, and thus these books call into question (implicitly) the importance granted to individual labor. These books (as Davidson notes most directly) appear at a time of transformation from a written/book culture to a digitalized/hypertextual culture. Indeed, as Davidson suggests, histories being written today occur at the end of a particular scholarly era. The archives that we study--the world of the author's papers--are undergoing a radical transformation (in formal and material senses). What these three books have in common is a concern for and a study of the roles of mediating institutions in the formation of literary history and individual literary reputations. Nielsen, Davidson, and Rasula each offer detailed analysis of the roles of mediating institutions in the politics of shaping what kinds of poetry are deemed essential, important, representative, and of value--indeed, which poetries are allowed to become or remain visible and audible.
The writing of literary history, particularly when the subject is contemporary American poetry, can be an anxiety-producing activity, especially if the writer thinks it might be possible to write a "correct" or "complete" history. As Charles Bernstein claims, "There are no core subjects, no core texts in the humanities, and this is the great democratic vista of our mutual endeavor in arts and letters, the source of our greatest anxiety and our greatest possibilities."(1) As Bernstein suggests--and his suggestion is most germane to Nielsen's book, and somewhat applicable to the books by Davidson and Rasula--a goal of literary studies is not to construct a new history which tries to get it "right," but to sustain a memory of and the excitement about what is possible: "In literary studies, it is not enough to show what has been done but what it is possible to do." When we begin to read and to discuss and to teach the range of possible poetries, we may find ourselves in a position similar to Bernstein's: "I often teach works that raise, for many students, some of the most basic questions about poetry: What is poetry? How can this work be a poem? How and what does it mean?" (178). Such questions arise quite readily from contact with innovative poetry. For Bernstein, these questions result from poetry's "dress": "when a text is dressed in the costume of poetry, that (in and of itself) is a provocation to consider these basic questions of language, meaning, and art. Inevitably, raising such questions is one of the uses of the poetry to which I am committed--that is, poetry marked by its aversion to conformity, to received ideas, to the expected or mandated or regulated form" (179).
Aldon Nielsen's Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism provides a fine combination of advocacy and intense, careful research. It constitutes an act of recovery comparable to Cary Nelson's Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945, which demonstrated the importance of a wide range of forgotten poetry (often political poetry) of the modernist era, especially the 1930s. What makes Nielsen's book more shocking is that the forgotten poetry in his book is of the past thirty-five years and involves the disappearance of significant work by living poets. In an age of critical approaches to literature that have supposedly corrected and broadened classroom syllabuses (through developments in multiculturalism, postcolonialism, African American studies, and cross-cultural studies), Nielsen's book should serve as an important polemical warning and as equally important evidence for the significant bodies of poetry that are being neglected today. In his least polemical manner, Nielsen describes his project as follows:
At a time when the politics of identity have often guided critical readings
of American verse, the possible range of written subjectivities has too
often been narrowed in critical accounts by the elimination
from consideration of many poems that might stand in the world and
show themselves as alternative histories of (and) desires.
My concern at this early stage of a study of the poets of black
experiment has been to demonstrate the existence of discrete
communities supporting avant-garde work in African-American poetics in
the years following World War II and to give some indication of the
potential significance of these communities to possible histories of
African-American verse.
(165)
Nielsen presents many examples of challenging, complex, innovative poetries that have not been embraced in the newly broadened anthologies of American literature, beginning with William Melvin Kelly's Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970), a book which Nielsen calls an audacious literary experiment. Nielsen comments that "a course of literary criticism that expels such works as Kelly's from among its collection of sample texts to be considered, let alone from its canon, ends by offering readers an anemic and inadequate account of both the history and nature of American literature in general and of African-American literature in particular" (4). The case of Kelly is an instructive one--and one of perhaps one hundred cases presented in Nielsen's rich overview. Why is Kelly not a part of our conversations about important African American writing? Nielsen suggests, "Kelly's experiments and Dunfords Travels often overturn assumptions about what white and black language are, and so it will remain easier for those committed to essentialist views of linguistic racial difference not to read Kelly" (6). Like Melvin Tolson, whose later poetry "had reclaimed a blackness within modernism and posited a populist black modernity in writing" (8), Kelly attempted "a resituating of modernist forms within the continuum of African art forms that had given so much inspiration to the modernist moment" (6).Thus Nielsen begins with the example of Kelly because it gets to the crux of an impoverished and caricatured version of African American expression, a narrowness that is reinscribed in each new edition of the major American literature anthologies. Nielsen points to a narrow stylistic gate through which a black writer must enter the American literary canon: "One implication in North American literary studies, to judge from the contents of most recent multicultural anthologies, has been that a requisite `realism' of language practice must be adhered to by black authors if they are to be canonized as proper literary representations of the experiences of social marginality" (8). Nielsen's book constitutes an effective critique of such aesthetically based censorship.
Nielsen makes an argument on several fronts. He points out again and again the narrow version of the American literary canon in the era of a multiculturalism that often depends upon an essentialist identity politics and an unacknowledged "realistic" stylistic bias. Nielsen argues for a new understanding of modernism and postmodernism that will include and take seriously the theoretical and experimental contributions of a number of African American poets. In making such an argument, Nielsen understands very well a particular "romantic" pitfall of projects of "textual recovery":
There is always the risk that a call for broadening our consideration of
African-American poetics by returning to the study of such neglected
works as Kelly's might be seen as another "colonizing" move, another call
for revalorizing works at the poetic "margins" of African-American studies.
It may, in fact, be impossible entirely to elude such a charge. But the
call for a rereading of marginalized texts does not value such texts because
they are marginalized; rather, the argument is that we cannot claim adequate
understanding of and theorizing about the course of black literary
history so long as we begin such historicizing and theorizing at a point
where we have eliminated from view, in advance, works that might,
should they remain in view, challenge our histories and theories.
(10)
Nielsen considers his own effort to be a beginning in the process of textual recovery, a beginning that points toward a better understanding of the groundwork in the 1950s and early 1960s for the Black Arts movement. He is aware that a "first step toward that fuller comprehension will have to be a project of reclamation, perhaps as daunting and rewarding a project as recent rediscoveries of nineteenth-century African-American texts, because the texts of this early period of black postmodernity are mostly fugitive, having passed out of print or never having been printed in the first place" (82). Projects such as Nielsen's textual reclamation also allow us to reopen (and indeed begin to understand) "the questions raised by black postmodernity" (106).
In the current culture wars and in the process of expanding the American literary canon, many of us may unquestioningly think of the processes of blindness, amnesia, and narrowness as having taken place in a past that we are trying to correct. Nielsen makes us decisively aware of the same processes at work in the present. His book abounds in examples of provocative, excellent, recent African American poetry that have been, to use the euphemism of the library business, "deaccessioned." From my perspective, Nielsen's most significant textual recoveries include the work of Norman Pritchard, Lloyd Addison, the Umbra group, the Dasein group, Russell Atkins, and Jayne Cortez, and a new emphasis on work by A. B. Spellman, Amiri Baraka, and jazz poets such as Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. For example, Nielsen cites a poem titled "junt," by Norman Pritchard, published in 1971: "mool oio clish brodge / cence anis oio / mek mek isto plawe" (qtd. in Nielsen 12). Though the editors of new American literature anthologies make claims for greater inclusiveness and for significant new representations of marginalized writers who transgress constraining modes of expression, Pritchard's poetry, like nearly all of Nielsen's examples, is not to be found in the Harper or Norton or Heath anthologies. Interestingly, Pritchard was not what one could call an obscure or unpublished poet. The poem cited above appeared in a collection published by New York University Press, the year after Doubleday had published Pritchard's The Matrix: Poems 1960-1970, and Nielsen points out that Pritchard's picture was on the cover of the June 1967 issue of Liberator magazine. Nielsen concludes, "A poem such as `junt' clearly foregrounds the materiality of the means of signification, but critics have been slow to see black participation in the critical vocabularies of that trend in modern and postmodernist verse" (13).
As Nielsen himself is quite aware, many of his examples undermine "nearly hegemonic assumptions about the nature of the relationship between African-American oral traditions and writing, with a clear privilege given to the prevailing ideal of the oral" (18). Nielsen's book, along with important recent contributions by Harryette Mullen, goes a long way toward correcting a version of African American literary history that has been built upon "the construction of an idealized orality in opposition to a devalued writing" (19). Nielsen's own book privileges neither, and the latter half of Black Chant, with its emphasis on jazz texts, proves equally provocative in its investigation of poetries with a greater reliance on complex modes of orality.
Nielsen's book repeatedly traces a process of "deaccessioning," as poets and poetries that once did have visibility, prestige, and circulation are eliminated from the public record of American literature. He points out the many gaps in the "official" anthologies of American literature--the Heath, Harper, Norton, and McGraw-Hill--where "we see a repeated pattern whereby entire groupings of African-American poets once widely anthologized and seen as contemporary contributors to the innovation of new black poetries are deaccessioned from the steadily constricting canon of black poets available for critical attention and university instruction" (60-61). In his combination of analysis and literary history, Nielsen demonstrates the value and excitement of the poetry associated with movements and groups such as the Dasein poets (at Howard University) and the Umbra group. He correctly points to "the disinclination on the part of most critics to discover African-American literary precedents for white avant-garde writing" (71). Within the Umbra group, Nielsen makes a particularly compelling case for Lloyd Addison's poetry. About the Umbra group (and a few other poet-musicians), Nielsen speculates:
Sun Ra, Taylor, Pitcher, and Addison represented a threat to a soliloquizing
essentialist narrative of black identity and tradition, and that narrative
could not continue its hegemony undisturbed unless they could be made
to go away.... The writings of Addison, Pitcher, Pritchard, and so many
others have, however, nearly gone away for good, and this has allowed
critical histories to tell narratives of authenticity and triumphal identity
politics rather than tell the multiplying free stories of ever more complex
black modernities.
(115)
As Nielsen points out, as Addison's writing disappears, we also lose a context for reading and understanding the contemporary poetry of writers such as Nathaniel Mackey, Erica Hunt, and Will Alexander.
As one would expect in a book on postmodern African American poetry, Amiri Baraka's work receives significant attention. Nielsen points to the enduring importance of "Baraka's insistence that constant artistic innovation is at the heart of African traditions of expressivity, and that modernity, perhaps postmodernity, is not foreign to but constituent in African and African-American art forms" (107). But even as he gives Baraka due emphasis, Nielsen cautions, "it is crucial that we see Baraka not as LeRoi Jones, the lone voice of African America in the midst of the New American Poetry, as Allen's and most subsequent university anthologies present him, but as one of several young artists, including Clarence Major, Bob Kaufman, Jay Wright, Tom Postell, Stephen Jonas, A. B. Spellman, and Harold Carrington, who had set out independently to find modes of remastering and disfiguring modernism in a poetics of black expression, and who had then found each other in the pages of little magazines and in the coffeehouses and streets of postwar American cities" (107).
Thus Nielsen takes a strident position--in the realms of both poetry and theory--against what he calls the "one-at-a-time" phenomenon. He puts forward a rich tradition of black theorizing and of a black critical poetics:
We also see in [Lorenzo] Thomas's use of the term "transrealism" to describe
the "tampered English" of this African-American form of matching
transgressive syntactic and poetic structures to transgressive social
positions the continuation of an African-American critical tradition. From
Baraka's "changing same" and Russell Atkins's "psychovisualism," through
Thomas's tampering "transrealism" and Stephen Henderson's critical deployment
of the folk terminology of "worrying the line," to Ed Roberson's
"calligraphy of black chant" and Nathaniel Mackey's "discrepant engagement,"
black poets and critics alike have systematically set about the tasks
of theorizing black poetics and developing nomenclature appropriate to
the needs of their subject and of their social critique. Black Americans
have always engaged and produced philosophy and theory and have always
constructed vocabularies of poetic theory. Frequently, as in the case of
Henderson, those vocabularies have been drawn directly from black
vernacular.... These theories and vocabularies, however, like the poetry
they described, have generally been segregated from predominantly white
American national literary genealogies.
(134-35)
Nielsen's book begins to redress that habitual practice of (textual) segregation. A future that his book inspires us to hope for would be one of "transracial signifying practices" (36), so that our reading and writing might be part of an "intertextual relationship between black and white avant-gardes" (259). The many fine examples of African American experimental poetry culled by Nielsen make us join him in considering Cecil Taylor's pointed question: "What does it mean to our understanding of ourselves and of American language that black people make these orders of art?" (265). One thing that it means, as Nielsen points out, is that a complex modernism and postmodernism may be based, as in much African American experimental poetry, in a vernacular, populist orientation.
Michael Davidson's Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, oddly, has its inception in a moment that moves away from the print technology that the author investigates. While Davidson is intent on "confirming the value of writing as a material practice beyond its rhetorical complexities," he notes that a key moment in the development of his own interest in poetry "came not from a book but from a tape recording, one that had been dubbed, passed around from friend to friend, and shared as part of what I have called a `vernacular pedagogy' of literary education" (xi). But Davidson doesn't really push this study in many of the directions that such an audio pedagogy might have suggested. The autobiographical elements that begin and end the book remain muted, but they are among its most powerful features. While the overall book is extremely well researched, argued, and written, these tantalizing beginnings and endings left me wishing for greater dwelling within a more autobiographically based criticism. I feel that Davidson has so thoroughly imbibed various protocols of academic criticism that he may unnecessarily devalue the interest, pedagogy, and value of a seemingly more casual, autobiographical option.
Davidson investigates "material practice" in modern poetry. At issue throughout the book is what is "material practice," and how do we keep it in view in analyzing and reading modern poetry? Davidson perhaps writes more clearly about what he does not want to do: "While not attempting to relate modern poetry to specific social sites, I would like to restore to poetry a critical and political potential that earlier Marxist critics such as Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Theodor Adorno granted it" (xii). The particular (form of) location that Davidson attends to involves the palimpsest, intertextuality, and what he terms the "palimtext." This particular focus, it seems to me, runs the obvious risk, even in a professedly material study of poetry, of again aestheticizing the study of modern poetry. As Davidson is clearly aware, his own study stems, in part, from formalist critics who directed his attention to "what was on the page" (xiii).
Davidson has a brilliant command of current scholarship. A generous critic, he acknowledges the important work of others. For example, he wisely notes, "In [Peter] Burger's view, what began as the avant-garde's attack on the commodification of art as institution becomes its reabsorption into commodity culture" (7). He also notes Johanna Drucker's important observation about the connection between Mallarme's Un Coup de des and the typography of commercial advertising. Davidson begins to achieve his own particular contribution to our understanding of modern poetry in his development of the concept of the "palimtext," a concept which also has its own history:
My portmanteau variation, "palimtext," describes modern
writing's intertextual and material character, its graphic rendering
of multiple layers of signification.... My usage draws upon what
Jerome McGann calls the "textual condition," access to which necessitates
the study of marginal areas of writing: "the physical form of books
and manuscripts (paper, ink, typefaces, layouts) or their prices,
advertising mechanisms, and distribution
venues." I would expand McGann's list to include forms of materiality
outside the text that facilitate writing in general--the institutional,
disciplinary, and educational systems that validate material practices.
(9)
For Davidson, it is important to note that the palimtext "is not a final, ultimate version but an arrested moment in an ongoing process of signifying, scripting, and typing" (9).
Yet, as Davidson is fully aware, in spite of his attention to forward-looking forms of modern poetry, his study, by virtue of contemporary changes in modes of textual production, is rendered somewhat nostalgic and backward-looking: "experimentation in computer-generated writing and hypertext have altered the nature of textuality altogether, rendering the idea of the `visible page' a rather outmoded concept" (21). I am a bit puzzled at Davidson's rather passive acquiescence in this regard, especially since the kind of critical literacy he develops with regard to the palimtext would seem to be applicable to the development of a critical consciousness about newly emerging hypertextuality. Davidson briefly defends his self-chosen limitations:
Although in this book I deal with technology in various forms, I stop at the
frontiers of the digitized word. In comparison to the infinite vistas of
hypertext, the palimtext seems decidedly low tech--as dated as
the long-playing record, rotary dialing, and Dynaflow. But this is
its attraction.
(28)
As Davidson moves toward this self-declared outer boundary, his critical attention to George Oppen's manuscripts emerges as the highlight of this book:
Oppen's archive--and by extension the material text of others discussed
in this book--marks the end of a scholarly era in which authors' papers--qua
paper--can be collected and preserved. What, one wonders, will be
the equivalent research base for an author whose archive consists of a neat
stack of floppy disks? Where is the material text when its palimtextual
layers have only been seen in pixeled form on a computer screen?
(32)
Of course, the "only" in Davidson's final question marks his own particular bias. Already, such questions are being given substantial consideration, both in theory/criticism and in the library practices of sites such as the Electronic Poetry Center. As many of us realize from having changed word-processing packages every few years, even a stack of floppy disks does not provide a permanently readily accessible textual site, and one will indeed need to consider the material and ideological implications of various modes of computer-based textual generation. Even so, Davidson does have a fluid, process-oriented vision of the text, and his version of the modern poem's engagement with history embraces that lack of permanence: "Perhaps the cultural significance of modern poetry lies not so much in its ability to contain the library as a substitute for the British Museum, as Pound said, but to represent its own tenuous hold on a history that seems to be dissolving" (33).
As is to be expected in any consideration of the materiality of the text, the issue of commodification receives recurring treatment. Davidson's writing on Gertrude Stein is particularly good--precisely because his analysis avoids the pitfall of partisanship for either half of a binary opposition. Instead, Davidson begins by reversing our expectations: "Stein's transformation into a mass-culture object, far from representing a vulgarization of her more `serious,' artistic side, is a logical component of it, an inevitable result of developing an aesthetics that rejects the world by creating another to replace it" (37). So Stein does not get presented merely as one whose writing seeks to short-circuit the process of commodification. Yet Davidson acknowledges that "Stein's text was--and remains--threatening not because it attempted to purify the words of the tribe or diagnose the social malaise of the era but because it refused to become an object" (38); and "By practicing the sign rather than using it to achieve cultural ends, Stein made language hard to consume" (63). Thus Davidson establishes a finely nuanced reading of the dialectical tensions (between commodification and resistance to commodification) in Stein's writing:
In other words, Stein was both autonomous artwork--a self-created
artifact--and an enthusiast for mass culture at the same time. If this
seems like a paradox it is not because her life-style contradicted her
work but because she recognized, more than other modernists, the
close relationship between the artwork as commodity (she was a
proud "collector" of paintings, after all) and as aesthetic object (she was
a proud "creator" of portraits). She signaled her recognition of this
paradox through the extremity of her experimentalism. Rather than subject
her "difficult" writing to instrumental ends (fragmentation as a symptom
of cultural decay), she made difficulty the occasion or site in which
to interrogate the limits of commodification.
(40-41)
Davidson's most perceptive writing occurs in the sections devoted to Oppen. In his analysis of Oppen's manuscripts--complex overlayerings of quotations, marginalia, alternative phrasings, and other pre-hypertext hypertextuality--Davidson begins to wonder, "can we speak of `poetry' at all when so much of it is embedded in other quotations, prose remarks, and observations? Does Oppen's oeuvre end in the work we know as The Collected Poems, or does it end on the page where it began?" (66-67). Davidson's writing on Oppen becomes quite exciting as he considers the specific value and contour of Oppen's writing in relation to the generalization "that writing is a form of knowing" (70). In Oppen's case--as in Allen Ginsberg's, Robert Creeley's, and Charles Olson's poetry--there is "a pervasive attempt to ground thought not in reflection but in action" (70). The case of Oppen's manuscripts allows Davidson to claim that for Oppen "the poem does not represent the mind thinking; it is the thinking itself, including its marginal references, afterthoughts, and postscripts" (70). But in Davidson's study of Oppen and others, the archive (and manuscript or compositional page) as site oddly narrows or short-circuits his proposed material study of modern poetry. Davidson argues that his "purpose in describing the material component of Oppen's work is to suggest the degree to which writing was first and foremost a matter of something ready-to-hand--as immediate as a coat hanger or piece of wire. The pipe cleaners, metal clasps, and glue are visible representations of those `little words' that Oppen liked so well, the basic materials of a daily intercourse" (77).
Davidson sees his own approach as a corrective one: "As I have pointed out in my introduction, much modernist criticism has defined `materiality' in rhetorical terms--the foregrounding of poetic devices and defamiliarizing of language--thus validating artisanal aspects of the poem to the exclusion of the social world in which it is produced" (79). But from my perspective, Davidson too works from an often aestheticized, narrowed version of the "social world." For example, why not think quite specifically about the social site of the archive--the Archive for New Poetry at UC-San Diego--in very exact, material terms? What were the circumstances of its acquisition of the Oppen materials? What friendships came into play in that process? What sorts of financial transactions were at stake? How did the Oppen materials help to define and enhance the San Diego collection? Or, in looking at Of Being Numerous, what might we learn about poetry culture by studying where those poems first appeared in magazines? What does it tell us that such poems could and did appear in Poetry magazine, when in all likelihood they could not appear there today? I guess that I am bothered by a kind of textual "purity" that often governs Davidson's sense of the material text; I would argue that a material study might also need moments in which the focus of attention is a bit "cruder," perhaps concentrating on the financial and institutional aspects of textual production (as in the recent writing of critics such as Libbie Rifkin), as well as on the physical properties of the manuscript archive. While Davidson's writings on Oppen are indeed among the best we have--and in spite of his intentions, Davidson is often quite simply an impressive close reader of Oppen--I remain very skeptical of his chief assertion: "Oddly enough, we can see their [poets'] relationship to a social nexus best in those areas where an audience is least invited: in the poet's papers and manuscripts, in overlapping lines of typed print" (93). I don't conceive of a material study as an either/or: either one studies the "crude" materiality of financial and institutional exchanges, or one examines the specific materiality of textual composition via the manuscript page. I believe that both modes can be carried out at once. And I believe that Davidson's study, throughout, gives an almost singular emphasis to the latter approach.
Overall, Davidson's book feels like a somewhat stitched together collection of talks and essays. Often, Davidson writes best--on Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, and Robert Duncan--when he moves away from his alleged topic of material culture. For example, in his chapter on Muriel Rukeyser and Reznikoff, Davidson refers to the history of "crisis" in poetry, from that of the lyric in the age of mechanical reproduction, to the "crisis" invoked by free verse, to "the more recent rhetoric of crisis ... marked less by changes wrought by the introduction of free verse than by worries that poetry in general--the expressive lyric in specific--can adequately represent emerging constituencies and political identities at a transnational moment" (168). As part of his investigation of Reznikoff's writing, Davidson argues for a broadened version of narrative--"one truly heteroglossic and hybrid in its impulse" (169). Davidson is acutely aware of the centrality of narrative to contemporary critical understandings of poetry and of literature generally (and particularly of American literature). He notes that many current critical imaginings of narrativity are partial imaginings:
If, as Benedict Anderson points out, nationhood is an "imagined community"
constituted through print culture, such overt manipulation of printed
documents [as those of Rukeyser and Reznikoff] toward alternative histories
would seem a significant intervention in any totalizing view of nationality.
Furthermore, it should suggest that the importance granted by
cultural theorists to narrative as the self-evident vehicle for a nation's
story perpetuates its own exclusions and colonizations, removing certain
storytellers and historical subjects from their own histories. If poetry
is in crisis, it is perhaps because, like a postcolonial community, it
is still being imagined in its imperial form.
(170)
That disfiguring, partial, imperial form of imagination can be found in many places, including the New Formalist caricature of modernist poetry. For example, in his introduction to Robert McDowell's long narrative poem The Diviners (1995), Dana Gioia, in discussing the current revival of narrative poetry, claims that "Modernism had so completely repudiated the narrative mode that by 1970 there was no available tradition."(2) Davidson's study, on the other hand, points to a rich (but ignored) tradition of narrative and documentary experimentation. Davidson understands the present moment as one "when poetry as a form of significant intellectual discourse is in disfavor, in which a strong `narrative turn' has become the dominant mode" (230). But such a moment may be a consequence of the foreclosed, caricatured understanding of "narrative" that forms the basis for a range of understandings (and dismissals) of modern and contemporary poetry. Davidson points to a substantial body of hybrid works that began to appear in the late 1920s:
These works would include John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, James Agee
and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Zora Neale Hurston's
Mules and Men, Margaret Bourke White and Erskine Caldwell's You Have
Seen Their Faces, Hart Crane's The Bridge, Ezra Pound's Adams and Dynastic
Cantos, William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Marianne Moore's pastiche
poems, Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, Langston Hughes's Montage of a
Dream Deferred, and Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead." Such works complicate
our sense of high modernist formalism by relying on genres of
folklore, documentary, oral history, reportage, legal testimony, and
advertising.
(138-39)
The New Formalists, with their reinforcing tale of the abandonment of narrative by the modernists, are thus reinventing a superfluous myopic version of the "new" narrative. And many contemporary cultural studies and postcolonial critics practice a form of textual amnesia that forecloses consideration of those hybrid or innovative (often poetic) texts that might legitimately complicate emerging versions of subject identity and national (or cultural or ethnic) identity. In these matters, Davidson's book underscores similar perspectives developed by Nielsen in Black Chant.
Davidson's concluding chapter, "Technologies of Presence: Orality and the Tapevoice of Contemporary Poetics," traces the Olsonian rise of phonocentrism that began in the 1950s and 1960s, "a new oral impulse that served as a corrective to the rhetorically controlled, print-based poetry of high modernism" (196). As Davidson correctly points out:
Literary historians have explained the origins of this new oralism
as a revival of romantic immanence and expressivism in reaction to
New Critical ideals of impersonality and distanciation. While these
aesthetic contexts are relevant, they do not take into account the fact
that many of these developments were made possible by technological
advances in typography, offset printing, and ... magnetic recording that
would seem the Very antithesis of any poetics of unmediated presence.
(197)
His history of the tapevoice begins with the work of Paul Blackburn, whom Davidson calls "the first American poet to use the tape recorder as an archival vehicle for poetry, much as Alan Lomax and other rural ethnologists had used it for recording folk music" (207). Davidson's study of the tapevoice analyzes the intersection of text and technology in the work of David Antin (a close friend of Blackburn's), Laurie Anderson, and Steve Benson.
Davidson's book begins with the autobiographical moment in which the author recalls sharing a tape recording of various poets--part of the author's initiation and participation in a "vernacular pedagogy." The book ends with similarly based autobiographical observations: "My ability to summon up certain lines by Stevens is aided by the fact that I have heard him read them a number of times; they have become part of my acoustic mnemonic archive" (227). That personal recollection, though, hints at a changing "literacy" and changing compositional practices that are intertwined in complex ways with changing (archival and compositional) technologies. In what for me remains the most moving and provocative passage of his book, Davidson offers a personal narrative:
In the process of writing the previous chapter on the tapevoice, I lost half
my hearing due to the removal of a tumor from my left auditory canal.
Another tumor is still growing on the right side and will have to be removed
at some future date, posing the possibility of total deafness. While I am
not particularly superstitious, I was conscious of the uncanny
coincidence between my operation and my investigation of orality, my
attempt to relate surveillance ideology to the production of voice. Was
I being covertly investigated by cultural conservatives for proposing
that the voice is not natural, that it is produced in a cultural
marketplace among tape recorders, contact mikes, and phonetaps? In
this afterword, I argue that orality is constructed around "technologies
of presence" linked to state-sponsored surveillance, but the severing of
my acoustic nerve has forced me to rethink the ease with which I use
"voice" as an index for the way ideology speaks.
(227)
Thus it is at the end of his book that Davidson, in a fusion of the autobiographical and the grandly historical, achieves the complexity and urgency of questioning appropriate to the issues raised by fundamental technological mediation:
The medicalized body is the triumph of modernism, the end of a trajectory
that begins in Machinery Hall in Philadelphia in 1876. Here, among the
multitude of new labor-saving machines and whirring dynamos, one
could see the palimtext in formation: the first typewriter, produced by the
Remington Arms Company, Thomas Edison's new "multiplex" telegraph
on which multiple messages could be contained on one wire, and Alexander
Graham Bell's first telephone. In these three inventions, the private
voice was decisively separated from the body in a surgical operation that
left it in an odd epistemological limbo. Like the removal of the object from
the labor process in Marx's discussion of the commodity, the voice could
now attach itself to things and speak of desires formerly associated with
humans. Or, alternately, technology could produce new hybrid identities
in which to reconfigure agency. Whether this could lead to the emancipation
of a new subject (the proletariat) in the nineteenth century or new
gender categories (cyborg feminism, queer identities) in the late twentieth
is still open for debate. What is clear is that the work of voice in an
age of mechanical reproduction is neither a tapevoice nor a body, neither
a construct nor an essence. The voice may not necessarily be heard in
order to be heard or overheard in order to make sense. Sense is being made
in new virtual realities where sound is only one among several
options.
(229)
Such passages make Davidson one of the most valued poet-critics writing today. I hope that Davidson's future work will continue to emphasize the autobiographical and broadly cultural perspectives that begin to emerge in Ghostlier Demarcations.
Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990 is a brilliant, quirky, encyclopedic history and analysis of fifty years of American poetry. Rasula concerns himself with institutional and cultural modes of preservation, taxonomy, and display. He begins by noting that while wax museums are popular throughout the United States, we do not yet have such a site for poetry: "If there were [such a site], it would be an American Poetry Wax Museum, operated by the MLA and subsidized by the nationwide consortium of Associated Writing Programs. Special galleries would be dedicated to corporate benefactors, including The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Poetry and American Poetry Review" (1). Such a passage indicates the engagingly outrageous quality of Rasula's writing. He wonders, "Do poets really want a waxen shrine, an air-conditioned immortality?" (2), and thus he baits us into asking, What do poets (and readers of poetry) really want for poetry? It is quite clear to me that we don't have an answer to Rasula's question. We may want some preservation of our writing, we may want the writing to have some sort of currency, and we may want poetry to occupy a more critical (and valued) position in contemporary thinking. But any idealistic pronouncements about poetry and poets--the unacknowledged legislators of the world?--now take their place beside more caustic observations:
It's not enough to recognize that there's "too much" published poetry, as
conventional wisdom has it; there is a groundswell of verbal toxic waste....
The most painful truth about recent decades of American poetry is this:
the lyric voice has contributed to a mode of subjectivity as distinctly
American as self-help primers, television game shows, and video arcades.
(3)
Admittedly, Rasula's wax museum of poetry is somewhat metaphorical; conceptually, the museum "rhymes" with the anthology: "The canon-building anthologies operate in a dignified precinct which is tacitly equivalent to the sanctuary space of the museum" (4). Rasula announces the focus of his book as "a study of the canonizing assumptions (and compulsions) that have fabricated an image of American poetry since World War II, foremost of which is the enshrinement of the self-expressive subject" (4). To the extent that Rasula sticks to that goal, his book amounts to shooting fish in a barrel, since such a story is, by now, already well known and well told (by Charles Altieri, Donald Hall, and plenty of others). But Rasula's other focal point--"to consider what it means to assemble and police a national canon of poetry" (4)--proves much fresher and more provocative. Rasula explains:
My concern, in elaborating this thesis of a poetry wax museum, is to suggest
that the seemingly autonomous "voices and visions" of poets themselves
have been underwritten by custodial sponsors who have surreptitiously
turned down the volume on certain voices, and simulated a voice-over for
certain others. Nothing defines the situation more succinctly than the
police phrase protective custody.
(33)
Rather ominously, Rasula suggests, "If the oral rhetoric of print culture aspired to do the police in different voices (from Dickens to Eliot), the compulsion today is to homogenize the proliferation of voices--and internalize the police" (43).
Rasula presents a good account of some of the early and ongoing tensions in the story of American poetry, as he chronicles "the emergence of the New Criticism, the wagers of experimentalism and social commitment, the spectacle of poetry careerism and the management of reputations, the conflict between conformity and individualism, the clash between academic and Beat, cooked and raw, and again and again the postural antinomies of form and whatever seems to defy it" (68). He writes a particularly perceptive analysis of New Criticism (the only other comparably insightful history being Alan Golding's in From Outlaw to Classic). Rasula points out that New Criticism marks the beginning of American poetry's "subsistence in administrative environments" (68). He claims that New Criticism "remains the most successful American literary movement of the century" (70), and he reminds us that the New Critics "were almost exclusively published by commercial trade presses" (71) and that they developed the "institutional custodianship" of "scholarly quarterlies, symposia, and the summer institute" (76). The particular paradox, or logical consequence, that Rasula zeroes in on for the custodial quality of New Criticism's institutionalization of poetry is the price paid by the New Critical poet-heroes. In Rasula's view,
that "manic power" of the poets most obviously beneficiaries of the New
Critical support structure--Lowell, Schwartz, Jarrell, Berryman, Roethke,
Plath--[was] a desperate attempt to strike clear of the pedagogic greenhouse
in which they found themselves at once nourished and trapped.
Their poems could thrive like exotic botanical monsters under the devotional
scrutiny of so many close readings, but there was always the quarantine,
the constraint, to endure.
(89)
In identifying the heart of the poetry-pedagogy problem that comes from New Criticism's particular mode of institutional strength--the professionalized activity of close reading--Rasula turns to Lionel Trilling's analysis:
Trilling's persistent concern was to preserve literature as a site of
engagement, as a kind of exemplary trouble. So he famously complained that
teaching modern literature innoculated the disturbance that was modernism;
and he generalized that "American literature as an academic subject
is not so much a subject as an object of study: it does not, as a literature
should, put the scrutinizer of it under scrutiny but, instead, leaves its
students with a too-comfortable sense of complete comprehension."
(133)
Rasula goes on to link the comfortable, totalizing mode of (illusory) comprehension with the rituals of New Criticism's modes of reading poetry:
Acceding to the wisdom of the professionals has tainted literature as much
as anything else in public life, with the result that a poem is viewed with
as much distrust as a complex plumbing fixture: in the unfortunate event
that you have to deal with it at all, you call in a professional; and
professors of literature are called upon, esoterically, to undertake a
sort of cognitive plumbing (in, it might be added, the rarely used
executive washroom in a remote upper story of the building).
(133)
If poetry today is becoming an untaught or irrelevant genre, the history of poetry's institutionalization helps us to understand the onset and development of this predicament.
While Rasula's analysis is both humorous and insightful, my own belief is that, for the present, what we might learn from that story is not to turn our backs on the institutionalization of poetry per se but to revitalize the conditions and activities of that institutionalization. That institutional entrenchment, first via the professional protocols of the New Critics, and then via the construction of the creative writing wing, still carries with it considerable economic and cultural clout. My own complaint is that language writers and other practitioners of innovative poetries have been somewhat inept in their institutional politics. I would rather see "us" become as effective as the New Critics (and then debate the perils and compromises of institutionalization). At present, it is my sense that poetry--particularly the kind of "exemplary trouble" that Trilling argued for--is disappearing from the curriculum. At present, there is no textbook to replace Understanding Poetry, no alternative methodology to communicate, no ability to transmit a sense of value and excitement that might permeate secondary school and university curricula as an alternative to the ongoing force of thematic reading (the New Critical legacy) and poetry-as-personal-expression. What is called for is an effective institutional engagement, one that recognizes the need to counter a poetry field still dominated by the aftermath of New Criticism in which "[t]here is a tacit correlation between the educational prospect of correct reading on the one hand, and a set of exemplary (or at least inevitable) texts on which to perform that reading" (181). What's at issue is as fundamental as how (and why) to read poetry, and what it might mean today to "understand" poetry. Furthermore, as Rasula points out, we face an uphill battle, since the prevailing history of modernism, via New Criticism, discredits innovation itself.
Rasula provides important historical information, particularly in the elaborate and valuable appendices to his book. (Rasula's book concludes with ninety pages of appendices, including a wealth of information on American poetry anthologies, major prizes and fellowships, and critical studies.) For example, in discussing anthologies of the 1950s, Rasula points out:
the WASP was the figure of choice. Exceptions were very few and far between.
There would always be a designated "major" poet who happened
to be Jewish, just as there would always be a "significant" woman poet or
two. But blacks were invisible. Even Gwendolyn Brooks, who won the
Pulitzer for Annie Allen in 1950, was rigorously excluded from
the anthologies for more than a decade--a situation that provoked
[Karl] Shapiro to complain that the award proved a black poet could win
a Pulitzer, but it did not prove that the Pulitzer was worth winning....
Nor was Langston Hughes anthologized, despite his absolute preeminence
as dean of the Harlem Renaissance, while his contemporaries Richard
Eberhart and Robert Penn Warren became obligatory figures.
These examples are, I think, indisputable evidence of racism. But
to leave it at that is insufficient, because of the equally
vigorous exclusion of other poets during the fifties (Olson, Duncan,
Everson, and others) for reasons that have less to do with racism or
sexism. At root is the spirit of conformism
that permeated the postwar decade.
(175)
Rasula is at his most devastating in his analysis of the Robert Lowell phenomenon, a career managed and orchestrated with the needs of the era in mind:
Lowell's evident dismay at his own eminence, in the end, can best be
analogized to a prizewinning boxer who knows he had the moxie but
whose career was an orchestrated series of fixed fights. Convinced of his
own superiority, he's nevertheless haunted by his awareness that the public
show was rigged. As indeed it was for Lowell, mascot of the New Criticism
during the decades of its imperium.
(254)
Lowell's career proves so "fascinating"
precisely because it takes on the waxwork character of the freak show, the
exhibit of a human life assuming monstrous proportions. What is "monstrous,"
I should clarify, comes from the root monstrum and monere,
portent and warning: Lowell warns us, by self-exhibition, of the pitfalls
of life lived on a pedestal, in the showcase; life as continual
self-dramatization; poetry as public monument.
(256)
In the making of Lowell's career, Rasula claims that Helen Vendler "as critic and anthologist uses Lowell as a scouring implement for purging the map of competing figures and gutting the diversity of American traditions" (258).
Aside from the delicious and sophisticated amusement that Rasula's analysis of the Lowell phenomenon provides, I begin to wonder more critically what might constitute a credible paradigm for preeminence or excellence or "importance" today. What would constitute meaningful recognition for a poet today, particularly when most of the institutional mechanisms of recognition have been so thoroughly discredited, and when American poetry itself has become thoroughly atomized? Is the search for a "major poet," a poet of the age, merely a misplaced nostalgic quest coming after an era of literary judgment that was often demonstrably racist, sexist, and aesthetically unadventurous and xenophobic?
Rasula's immense study of American poetry forces us to confront a perhaps peculiarly American dilemma:
it has been a familiar syndrome in American poetry to deny the
poetic efficacy of collective action; to insist on the integrity of
the heroic ego; and to mistrust anything that smacks of the committee
room. These have been disabling denials because they set impossible
demands on the individual, as well as discounting the facticity of
social reality. Postwar American poetry is an archipelago of sites
(academic, Beat, Black Mountain, New York school, "deep
image," "confessional," "workshop," New Formalist, language
poetry) which the occupants repudiate, one by one, yet the cumulative
effect is collective.
(275)
While Rasula's own analysis tends toward an examination of that "archipelago of sites" and of the institutional histories of those sites, the double bind that he describes is pertinent both for the writing of the history of American poetry and for our current situation. Descriptions of these group sites are suspect because of a tendency to homogenize and simplify. But the more customary analysis and appreciation of the great individual gets written by means of an erasure of the social matrix of that poetic practice. Rasula manages, at times, to create an alternative: an examination of that dialectical tension between singularity and group identification.
Though Rasula's book is impressive in its range, ambition, and scholarship, there is an implicit and sometimes explicit (moral or moralistic) self-righteousness to his writing. He leaves himself open to the criticism that he is guilty in his own book of many of the transgressions that he finds in the work of other critics of contemporary poetry. For example, though Rasula complains several times about books of criticism on contemporary poetry that are really stitched-together collections of reviews, his own book clearly incorporates many reviews. One result of recasting these reviews into a seemingly more comprehensive overall project is that Rasula's book is plagued by repetition and a rambling quality throughout. Rasula's own critical biases are only minimally acknowledged (in the book's acknowledgments), so that his rather magisterial, cranky style seems to erase its own lineage (via the History of Consciousness program at UC-Santa Cruz, through a sustained working relationship with Don Byrd, in a poetics derived from Olson, Duncan, and Jerome Rothenberg, and in his distinctly Canadian perspective on American literary politics). Rasula often berates others for a lack of inclusiveness, but his own analysis and history of contemporary poetry misses many important areas, particularly the importance of a range of innovative feminist poetries. If we look at Rasula's list of works cited and his index, we notice how he barely acknowledges the work (including the poetics) of Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Kathleen Fraser (and the group of writers associated with HOW(ever) magazine), and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. The first three are not even included in his bibliography, and DuPlessis is cited only for her commentary "On the Davidson/Weinberger Exchange," even though her work appears frequently in Sulfur, where Rasula's own work has appeared for many years. While Rasula has indeed written a massive, excellent book, his own research remains partial and spotty. My personal angle on this spottiness leads me to note that my own work has often overlapped with Rasula's considerations, yet most of that work is not cited--including What Is a Poet? (an important exception to the point that Rasula raises about segregated writing communities) and essays on David Antin, on Charles Altieri's Self and Sensibility and the formulation of American poetry in literary criticism of the 1980s, and on anthologies. From my perspective, I can only conclude that even though Rasula pretends to a kind of superior coverage, his own research is idiosyncratic and somewhat random. My point is that his caustic tone--while provocative and often entertaining--leaves him open to the argument that his own book is equally partial.
At the heart of Rasula's book, however, is a serious consideration of the possibility "that there may be a certain futility in writing literary history, especially one that involves the recent past" (353). Rasula, at several points in his book, warns against the perils of a literary history that becomes a series of stories of the great poets: "Literary history should be resistant to the Marvel Comic Superhero syndrome, which is the historian's version of a canonical rollcall" (359). But Rasula points out a more practical problem for any of us who might wish to try a hand at a comprehensive history:
To think of "American poetry" as an open market is possible only for the
naive or the deceitful, for that is to think it plausible to somehow
adjudicate the work of thousands. Even to confine the sphere of
investigation to those poets listed in Appendix 2 (those most anthologized
in the postwar period) is to confront an implausibility. Quite apart
from matters of preference and inclination, who is prepared to step
forward and claim critical authority over the work (to cite by
alphabetic metonymy a mere half dozen) of William Meredith, James
Merrill, Thomas Merton, W. S. Merwin, Robert Mezey, and Josephine
Miles? Who's prepared to invest the time to read 4,000 pages to advance
from Me- to Mi- in the alphabet of "prominent" American poets?
(436-37)
Rather than writing a history of American poetry, Rasula proposes a model of four zones:
The poetry world is now configured by four zones. Utterly disproportionate
in terms of size, material resources, and internal stability, they are
nonetheless broadly discernable: (1) the Associated Writing Programs,
consisting of some three hundred institutionalized venues of creative
writing instruction; (2) the New Formalism, with a small but visible number
of adherents, whose goals are supported by a combination of small presses,
large trade publishers, and a few highbrow quarterlies; (3) language poetry,
with a well established alternative press network, and a considerable
critical reputation; and (4) various coalitions of interest-oriented or
community-based poets (which obviously renders this fourth zone more
heterogeneous and fluid than the others).
(440)
Of the four zones, Rasula's formulation and history are weakest in the fourth category. He does not, for example, offer any coherent, sympathetic, or detailed treatment of oral, sound, or performance poetries.
Related to this question of how to write literary history--and involved in similar questions of fairness--is the question of how to make an anthology. Rasula offers a simple, provocative hypothesis: "The segregation of poets into anthologies emphasizing their formal affiliations (`younger' [i.e. workshop] poets, New Formalists, language poets, university press poets, Bread Loaf poets, St. Mark's poets) makes every presentation seem a shrill reiteration of the same stance, intention, and goal, despite the obvious documentary benefits of these approaches" (446). Rasula wonders, as do I, "What are the impediments to the appearance of an anthology that is at once eclectic and representative?" (447). Or, to borrow Gerald Graft's terminology, when will we have an anthology that teaches (or foregrounds) the conflicts? As I have already argued in Contemporary Literature (36 [1995]: 362-83), and as Rasula argues in his book, the new anthologies by Paul Hoover (the Norton Postmodern American Poetry [1994]) and Douglas Messerli (From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960-1990 [1994]) are not inclusive, conflicted anthologies, though both do take the important step of "enshrin[ing] language poetry front and center" (460). In the wave of new anthologies (including the ones by Hoover and Messerli, as well as those by J. D. McClatchy and Eliot Weinberger), Rasula locates "a disabling nostalgia" (461). He claims that "Weinberger, Hoover, and Messerli are all transported by the reverie of the outside, the experimental, the dissident; yet all three pursue an explicitly conservative function in purporting to trace a genealogy of the vanguard" (461). Rasula wonders, "If real countermeasures are intended, what purpose is served by making an orthodoxy of the unorthodox?" (463). He concludes, "These new anthologies thus unwittingly perpetuate the same cycle they ostensibly combat" (462), "for none of them attempt to conceive heterogeneity from outside their own partisan coordinates" (465).
Rasula writes a particularly even-handed, insightful history of language poetry, beginning with his observation that from the outset language poets have addressed "a politics of poetry" (391). At present, from various viewpoints (including those of the workshop practitioners, some New Formalists, and partisans of more performance-based oral poetry), it is becoming commonplace to disparage language poetry as today's "academic" poetry. But Rasula's observation is worth keeping in mind:
This century's project in American poetics has been a continual examination
of assumptions and first principles, from Pound, Williams, Stein,
Stevens, Moore, Riding, and cummings through Zukofsky, Olson, Duncan,
Creeley, and such immediate progenitors of language poetry as Jack
Spicer, Jackson Mac Low, David Antin, and Jerome Rothenberg.
Given this tradition of a radical, investigative poetics, what is
confounding in retrospect is the continuing prevalence of
formally conservative (not necessarily "accommodational"),
self-expressive, family-snapshot verse. This tendency is obviously
buttressed by the proliferation of workshops, at both professional
and recreational levels, in which poetry
acquires the accessory functionalism of arts and crafts.
(392)
Such a view, as well as Rasula's detailed information about the systematic exclusion of language poetry from all "official" anthologies and textbooks of American literature (458-59, and various appendices), continues to be important to keep in mind. There is indeed a growing body of critical writing on language poetry, including a number of book publications and many articles in leading literary journals. But my own experience with the editors of the Heath anthology of American literature--where the 1998 edition cites my unsuccessful efforts (as a consultant/reader) to have language poetry included ("Hank Lazer argued eloquently for a selection of the `Language Poets,' but we were not persuaded that they would be taught by most users of the anthology" [lxvii])--suggests that there remain considerable barriers to a broad institutional (and academic) recognition of the vitality of language poetry.
In his own analysis of language poetry, Rasula refuses to homogenize the views of poets associated with the group. His history insists on the internal disputes, diversity, and arguments that characterize the movement. In trying to locate some common ground, Rasula concludes that "the only issues about which a consensus may be said to have been reached were the restoration of the reader as coproducer of the text, and an emphasis on the materiality of the signifier" (397). In historicizing this final display case in his American Poetry Wax Museum, Rasula writes, "Language poetry can be thought of as the specific attempt to rethink New American poetics in light of continental critical theory--structuralism, semiotics, Frankfurt school ideology critique, and discourse theory" (442).
Rasula's book is of lasting value because he encourages us to keep in mind big questions about the possible place(s) and nature(s) of poetry. His cultural study of poetry makes such questions have currency. In his juxtapositioning of television and poetry, Rasula writes:
A cogent point of comparison would rephrase Pound's dictum about poetry
being as well written as prose: poetry should be at least as well written
as a network television episode. The work of Richard Wilbur or James
Merrill patently avoids the comparison by its baroque elegance and wit.
The same could be said of the bardic orations of Ginsberg. But the garrulous
medium of the free verse lyric positively invites comparison to television.
(365)
Rasula argues that what is surprising is not that poetry and television might be in competition with one another, but that poetry "could ever be imagined as occupying a noncomparative autonomy in the first place" (366). Rasula concludes:
Poetry, as a minor public servant in the cultural disciplines, finds itself
with little to do but to perpetuate the legend of its own dignity. The
humanities as a whole are socially conscripted in a service
arrangement--wherein the corporate raider becomes an arts benefactor and
the arts cozy up accordingly--and if television is denounced as a kind
of mental whoring, it must be admitted that poetry is little different,
even if it would aspire to a more dignified directory listing like
"escort service." To admit this is to concede that any "crisis" of poetry
is at present a public relations fiasco.
(378-79)
The brutal candor of Rasula's conclusion leaves us--after we have abandoned or questioned the poet's self-promotional aggrandizement of the genre--with a fundamental question: what role might poetry play? Even if we were to phrase such a question by acknowledging poetry's status as a commodity--for example, What might be poetry's market (or cultural) niche?--we might wish to follow the lead of Rasula's provocative book and become advocates (within and without academic institutional venues) for the vitality of poetry's place in and as contemporary thinking.
The histories offered by Nielsen, Davidson, and Rasula are important for several reasons. Yes, often students do not know what they "should" know about modern and contemporary poetry, and these three books provide valuable histories. Similarly, the vast ignorance of faculty, of professors of literature, particularly their ignorance of poetry and of an entire century of innovative writing--an ignorance that smacks of fear, self-righteousness, and xenophobia--makes these three books necessary projects. As Charles Bernstein notes:
While I lament the lack of cultural and historical information on the part
of students, I also lament the often proud ignorance of contemporary culture
on the part of the faculty.... Just as we now insist that literary works
need to be read in their sociohistorical context, so we must also insist
that they be read into the present aesthetic context.
(180)
But as the books by Nielsen, Davidson, and Rasula demonstrate, we live in an authorized version of the present aesthetic context which has been narrowed by various forces of institutional mediation. The singular stranglehold of "realistic" narrative writing is possible, indeed guaranteed, by an enforced ignorance of "the present aesthetic context." That is, the possibilities that we--poets especially--draw on today are often erased from institutional representations of noteworthy writing. One irony worth considering is that the practices and communities that are held at a distance by academia might be sources for the reinvigoration of academia itself. As Bernstein explains:
I find it deplorable that the academic profession is, well, too academic.
Maybe this is because I am more accustomed to the form of cultural
exchange and production found among poets and through independently
produced "small press" books and magazines, which seems more vital
and more committed to the values often ascribed to the academic
profession--that is, more committed to fomenting imagination than
controlling imagination--than the academic profession itself.
(187)
My own hope is that the alternate histories provided by Nielsen, Davidson, and Rasula will go a long way toward informing and enlivening the institutions that play key custodial functions for American poetry.
(1.) Charles Bernstein, "A Blow Is Like an Instrument," The American Academic Profession, spec. issue of Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 126.4 (1997): 177-200.
(2.) Dana Gioia, introduction, The Diviners, by Robert McDowell (Calstock, Cornwall, Eng.: Peterloo Poets, 1995) ix-xiii.
 Printer friendly
 Cite/link
 Email
 Feedback
| |
| Author: | Lazer, Hank |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Contemporary Literature |
| Date: | Sep 22, 1998 |
| Words: | 10435 |
| Previous Article: | From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry. |
| Next Article: | Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. |
| Topics: | |