Jessica R. Feldman. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 261pp. $60.00.

Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff

These terms– artist, audience, work, and the reality to which the work refers–—are familiar to us from the classic studies of Roman Jakobson and, later, Meyer Abrams, carried out more than fifty years ago. For Jakobson, the four terms were the poles that efined the dominants of literary criticism: the relation of work to “reality” (the mimetic), of artist to work (the expressionist), artist to audience (the affective), and concentration on the work itself (the formalist). Why, then, should these poles be somehow peculiar to Victorian Modernism? It is a question Feldman never answers. She is sensitive to the fact that “a rich critical literature reading Modernism across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” already exists. But whereas most such studies define the Modernist work as a form of resistance to “spiritual crisis,” and “exile from the homeland of certainty,” resulting in an “autonomous art,” Feldman defines the link between the Victorians and Moderns as, on the contrary, their concern for “tenderness, pleasure, beauty, playfulness, fascination” (4).

Seek and ye shall find. By limiting herself to a highly particular set of Anglo-American authors and wholly ignoring the roots of Modernism as they took hold on the Continent, Feldman is able to come up with a coherent picture of an aesthetic-cultural complex that we might call the sentiment-cum-sublime camp in later nineteenth / earlier twentieth century Anglophone culture. In the Introduction, Feldman’s exemplar of this complex is—and here she does choose a European– Proust, evidently because he was a disciple of Ruskin’s. Proust’s great novel is so rich and varied that one can find in it almost any emotion or aesthetic trait one is looking for. Foregrounding the quite untypical third-person narrative of Un Amour de Swanns (less than a tenth of the novel), Feldman finds her four categories: sentiment (Swann’s sympathy for Vinteuil), aestheticism (Swann’s profound love of art), sublimity (Swann’s recognition of Vinteuil’s genius) and domesticity (the emergence of Vinteuil’s art from the “richness of daily life in Combray,” 14). To characterize Proust’s great phantasmagoric novel as domestic will strike most readers as more than a little strange, especially since the richness of Vinteuil’s daily life in Combray features the rather Gothic moment where Vinteuil’s sadistic daughter, trying to please her lesbian lover, spits on her father’s portrait. The young Marcel, passing the Vinteuil cottage on one of his daily strolls, improbably witnesses this scene, which takes place at the open window.

Feldman’s Introduction thus creates more problems than the later chapters can effective solve, and one wonders why she felt she had to classify her authors, works, and literary phenomena so neatly. Fortunately, the subsequent chapters are more successful, for when the author gets away from the need to define Victorian Modernism and gives new readings of specific works, she is often quite interesting. Her Ruskin emerges as less the Victorian moralist or proto-Modernist aesthete than as a writer who fuses the rhetorics of domesticity and sentiment. “For all his fascination with architectural structure, Ruskin loves watery mixtures of things more than solid constructions” (18). For him, it is “in the ordinary and the local [that] our salvation lies” (31). Even Ruskin’s paeans to the great Gothic cathedrals, Feldman argues, are always related to his interest in ordinary dwelling places; indeed, his “scene of writing” is first and foremost “home,” wherever home happened to be. The sublime, accordingly, is deeply rooted in sentiment, the aesthetic entwined with the ordinary, the public with the private. People and buildings, moreover, begin to share qualities: the external surfaces of buildings have human faces even as the human body is an architectural form.

Feldman’s Ruskin is thus less eccentric, more accessible than the Ruskin to whom we are accustomed. A similar revaluation occurs in the case of Rossetti. Both in his paintings and his poems, Feldman suggests, the key to Rossetti’s art is “richness of arrangement” (67); in Monna Rosa, for example, the hawthorn pot is related not only to the woman’s robe and peacock feathers within the painting but also to his own collections, as “arranged” in his house and studio, his placement of the art work within the domestic interior of his sitting room (69). What sometimes strikes readers as excessive ornamentation can thus be justified as a feature of Rossetti’s ‘domestic sublime,” his feminization, as in Ruskin’s case, of particular settings and occasions so as to intermingle the aesthetic and the everyday, the inside and the outside, the “real” rose plant and the painted decorative stylized cluster of roses.

This is an appealing reading of Rossetti, but it should be remarked that Modernism—at least Modernism in any usual sense of the term—has conveniently disappeared. For where are these feminized arrangements of interiors in the work of Joyce or Eliot, Pound or Stevens? Feldman sometimes alludes to the latter but she cannot quite make the austere poet of “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” a proponent of domestic collage. The skewing of Modernism comes to a head in Chapter 4, the chapter on Augusta Evans. Here I must plead ignorance for I have never read Evans, but, whether or not she was a disciple of Ruskin, as Feldman claims, Evans’s novel St. Elmo, which is Feldman’s Exhibit A, is by her own account such an oddly written “hodgepodge,” that one wonders why it is being discussed at all in a book on the domesticized aesthetic and the sentimental sublime. Evans, we are told, “explores the significance of silence; the fascination of the grotesque, the deadly, the diseased, and the over-wrought; the mirroring of characters; the counterpointing of plots; and the intricacies of self-reflexive narratives” (127). Her novel sounds like an interesting example of a popular form of decadence but what has happened to Modernism? Feldman argues that, like Ruskin and Rossetti, Evans is interested in the arrangements of interiors, in the complications and disturbances of objects in relation (134). It is a valiant case, but not likely to put Evans in anyone’s Victorian Modernist pantheon.

The weakest of the four author chapters, however, is, to my mind, the one on William James. The familiar themes come up: the entanglement of domestic and sentimental in James’s letters and journals, the connection of philosophical and personal in James’s philosophical writings. But here the reader familiar with James can’t help wondering what has happened to his central ideas, his actual arguments. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, Feldman argues, James “conflates the domestic and the aesthetic through a sentimental performance that, reaching outward to seek sublimity as it is experienced by real people at the margins of their consciousness, enacts the very philosophical position it purports to present scientifically” (180). This may well be the case but it places the emphasis on context—“genteel domestic and popular culture” (192)– at the expense of content. Indeed, every writer of the period, including William’s brother Henry, can, at some level, be “placed” in the domestic space in which he functioned, but that doesn’t mean this domestic space is the central facet of his or her work as Feldman would have us believe.

Between the four author chapters, Feldman places four fairly short “Meditations” on her four topics. The least convincing of these is the first, “Aestheticism and Pragmatism.” Trying to refute fin-de-siècle Art for Art’s Sake on the one hand, and Marxist aesthetic on the other, Feldman comes up with little more than the “realm of beauty that both respects and defies dichotomies” (62). The meditation on Domesticity is more successful; here, one might say, to play on her own emphasis on domesticity, Feldman is much more at home; the feminization of culture, together with Sentimentality (Meditation 3)—these constitute her sphere of interest. Indeed, her case for a sentimentalism that differs, on the one hand, from the Age of Sensibility, and, on the other, transcends the usual concepts of Victorian kitsch, is convincing; for Feldman the sentimental always fuses feeling and moral value and can hence be very effective indeed. And,in this context, Sublimity (the fourth Meditation) becomes part and parcel of Sentiment.

In conclusion, then, one wishes that Feldman had made less grandiose claims for her theme and had written more fully and about her beloved late nineteenth-century authors, especially women authors, with regard to the domestic or sentimental sublime. Modernism seems to be curiously alien to her concerns. Indeed, a more historical treatment of her subject would have shown her how and why the domestic became a more contested “discourse” in the twentieth-century. Two World Wars intervened, wars that play virtually no role in Victorian Modernism. The spatial, which Feldman studies so assiduously, also governs her own analyses with their constant resort to triads and quartets. Individual readings are often acute and original, but Feldman’s rigid methodology cannot come to terms with issues of periodization, ethos, and the larger aesthetic climate of the later Victorian era.

Clive Fisher. Hart Crane: A Life. 567 pp. Yale University Press. £25.00. 0 300 09061 7

Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff

Published in TLS August 30, 2002, p. 9.

On 12 September, 1927, Hart Crane wrote to his patron, the banker Otto Kahn, asking for financial help. Kahn had already given him $2,000 to work on his projected epic poem The Bridge, which Crane couldn’t seem to bring to completion. He was drinking heavily, picking up sailors on the New York docks and getting into terrible brawls that sometimes culminated in a night in jail. Longing to impress Kahn with the good progress he was making on his poem, Crane sent him a précis:

. . . I jump from the monologue of Columbus in “Ave Maria”—right across the four intervening centuries—into the harbor of 20th-century Manhattan. And from that point in time and place I begin to work backward through the pioneer period, always in terms of the present– finally o the very core of the nature-world of the Indian. What I am really handling, you see, is the myth of America.”

The last sentence must be one of the most poignant in American letters — poignant in its idealism and the disarming naiveté of that “you see.” Imagine Arthur Rimbaud, to whom Crane is often compared, assuring a potential patron, “What I’m writing, you see, is the myth of France.” But then Rimbaud never attempted to write a long poem that introduced well-known historical figures—in this case, Columbus, Pocahontas, Rip van Winkle, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, or the Wright Brothers—into the fabric of lyric meditation. And yet it does make sense to talk of the “myth of America” where Crane is concerned, for his own brief and tortured life is paradigmatic of that myth, as Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway might have portrayed it. Hence Crane’s enormous appeal to the biographer: Clive Fisher’s Hart Crane, running to nearly 600 pages, follows in the wake of Brom Weber’s pioneer study of 1948, John Unterecker’s Voyager (Farrar Straus, 1969), and Paul L. Mariani’s The Broken Tower (Norton 2000).

The central facts about Crane’s life are not in dispute. Earlier biographers made much of the trauma of Crane’s childhood, and Fisher examines it very fully. An only child, born in1899 in Garrettsville, Ohio to Clarence Arthur (CA) Crane and Grace Edna Hart, both from distinguished, affluent Midwest families, the poet was caught early on in the crossfire of what turned out to be the disastrous marriage of his parents. “I think it’s time you realized,” Hart wrote to Grace, as he came to call his mother, in 1919, “that for the last eight years my youth has been a rather bloody battleground for your’s [sic]and father’s sex life and troubles.”

The turmoil of Crane’s youth–his parents separating, reconciling, separating again, announcing their plans to remarry, and then finally divorcing—was exacerbated by his discovery, in mid-adolescence that his sexual desires were directed toward men, not women. In the “genteel” Ohio world of the Cranes and Harts, homosexuality was, quite simply, taboo. Hart never told his father the truth about his sexuality and couldn’t bring himself to tell Grace until 1928, when they were in California together. Even then she claimed not to believe him. Hart’s sex life was thus unusually secret and furtive. The most serious relationship Hart had was with the Danish merchant marine, Emil Opffer whom he met in New York in 1923. But Emil was frequently at sea, and soon Hart went back to his usual habits—brief, anonymous sex, primarily with sailors he picked up in the bars and on the waterfront of lower Manhattan.

This, then, was the matrix within which some of the great American lyrics —especially love lyrics—of the early twentieth-century were written. Given Hart’s relatively scanty education—he was a high school drop-out and autodidact—his self-creation as a Poet was astonishing. While still in Cleveland in 1916, he had already published his first poem “C-33” in Bruno’s Weekly; and by the time he was twenty-three and living in New York, he had written Part II of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” the first part of “Voyages,” and had published “Black Tambourine,” “Chaplinesque,” and “Praise for an Urn”– all in serious little magazines. Already in these early poems, Crane had developed a unique style—elaborately rhetorical, densely figurative, and yet alluding at every turn to the actual modern world of “stenographic smiles and stock quotations.” Avoiding the free verse of his Imagist confreres, he wrote primarily in iambic pentameter, packing his memorable and musical lines with alliteration, assonance, and rhyme.

Crane, as Fisher is at pains to document and as all his biographers agree, had an enormous capacity for friendship and although, when he first came to New York in 1916, he was a complete greenhorn, within a few years, he was driving up to Connecticut with the Malcolm Cowleys to visit Eugene O’Neill and attending New York parties with e.e. cummings. He was especially close to two of the most prominent poet-critics of the period: Allen Tate and Yvor Winters. At his best, Crane was charming, generous, funny. At the same time, his heavy drinking invariable led to misunderstandings and bitter arguments. The story of his falling out with Tate and his then wife Caroline Gordon, with whom he was sharing an old farmhouse in upstate New York in 1925, has become legendary: Hart refusing to do his share of the chores, Hart carousing and disturbing the Tates to the point where they would only communicate with their house guest by means of notes stuck under each others’ doors. Similar quarrels occurred with other close friends, and Hart was always packing, leaving in a huff, going off to the Isle of Pines or back home to Cleveland. White Buildings (1927), his first book, was a big success: it received a wealth of flattering reviews, and many of its poems—“At Melville’s Tomb,” “The Wine Menagerie,” “Voyages”—became instant classics. But despite—or perhaps because of—his success, 1927 was also, according to Fisher, “the year in which his alcoholism finally took hold.” The twenty-seven year old poet wrote less and less and experienced long bouts of depression. The Bridge, so long in the planning, refused to jell, and Crane knew it. When a less ambitious version of the originally planned epic was finally published in 1930, Hart had to endure the stinging critique of Winters and Tate, both of whom declared The Bridge to be excessively Whitmanian and incoherent.

Everything was now moving toward the final act of the drama. In 1931, a down-and-out Hart was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and decided to spend his grant year in Mexico. His old friend Waldo Frank warned him that the temptation to drink heavily would be even greater there than in New York and that he would be cut off from friends and family. The situation was exacerbated by the arrival of Peggy Cowley, who was divorcing Malcolm and decided to make it her mission to convince Hart that he was really heterosexual. The two had a passionate but brief romance— Hart expressed bliss at his “conversion”– followed by the usual Cranean fights, reconciliations, and drinking marathons. Peggy was herself unstable and unreliable—Fisher refers to her as the “veteran drinking companion to half the Village”– and by the time the two booked passage on the SS Orizaba, supposedly to go home to the U.S. and get married, everything was falling apart. The final chapter—Hart having to be locked up in his cabin, Hart trying to seduce a crew member who wasn’t interested, and then, just before noon, with a sick Peggy still asleep below deck, jumping over the ship’s rail to his death—has been recounted again and again. Like the tale of Sylvia Plath’s suicide (she, too was thirty-two when she died), the Orizaba story has gotten almost too much play, as if Crane’s suicide, in clear view of the passengers on deck, had somehow made his poetry more valuable.

Fisher’s account of the Mexico episode and of Peggy Cowley’s role in it is the most detailed we have; indeed, the biography contains much new material, for example, on Crane’s relationship with the flamboyant Harry and Caresse Crosby—a kind of opera bouffe—and on the untimely death of Hart’s Uncle Frank, (Grace’s brother) from a mysterious morphine overdose. The poet’s father emerges, in these pages, as a more sympathetic figure than he did in the Unterecker or Mariani’s biographies. CA was hardly the cold businessman Hart’s friends heard so much about; he was himself interested in literature and music and was, from all accounts, deeply devoted to his son. True, he would not support Hart’s escapades in New York and elsewhere because he was convinced that Hart would do better if he had to work for a living, but he was always sending his son money and trying to get him to straighten out his life. Certainly, CA was not as destructive as Grace, whose own neurotic demands on her son must have been hell to cope with.

But despite its meticulous documentation, its careful research, and its sober, low-key style, Fisher’s biography is, in the end, disappointing. For one thing, the author insists on paraphrasing most of Crane’s extraordinary letters—a great pity because, like Keats, Crane was a superb letter writer. Unterecker’s biography, which cites so many of Hart’s and Grace’s letters verbatim, is thus much livelier—more fun to read. Unterecker was writing before the publication of Thomas S. W. Lewis’s monumental Letters of Hart Crane and his Family (Columbia, 1974), and so Fisher may have felt he shouldn’t just recycle materials that are now readily available. But in paraphrasing so heavily, he fails to capture the intimacy and immediacy that make Crane’s prose especially appealing.

More important: Fisher seems to have no slant of his own on what is now a familiar story. True, he avoids Mariani’s romantic and somewhat stagy portrait of Crane as tragic hero, a victim of a cruel, homophobic society. But although Fisher regularly calls this or that poem “beautiful” or “great,” he succeeds no more than did his predecessors in connecting the poet to his visionary poems. For Fisher, Crane seems to be, yet again, the poète maudit of his generation, whose sins and sufferings were “redeemed” by the greatness of his lyric. But this is to take Crane at face value, underrating the role early twentieth-century poetry culture played in the drama. Indeed, seventy years after the poet’s death, what seems remarkable is not how broke and miserable Crane was, but, on the contrary, how respected and admired he managed to be. In post-World War I New York, the individual poet could still be—and often was—adulated as a hero. It was a time, antithetical to our own, when poets and their critics were still published–and reviewed in–the mainstream press and read by the larger “literary” public. Poetry, in other words, still mattered, so that it was not considered far-fetched to invoke the great names of the past when assessing the work of a contemporary.

Thus Yvor Winters called Crane “one of the five or six greatest poets writing in English and opined that “Voyages” merited comparison with “no one short of Marlowe.” And both Allen Tate and Waldo Frank declared on the basis of “Faustus and Helen” and “Voyages,” that Crane was the greatest living poet. Who can imagine any poet today—Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich— receiving this kind of praise? And how is it that Crane was so much more admired in his lifetime than were those other more durable Modernists– Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein?

These are questions that don’t come up in Fisher’s biography. He simply assumes that Crane was a major poet and that therefore the biographer’s object is to accumulate new information about his subject. But in Crane’s case, knowledge about yet one more sailor he went to bed with or one more person he befriended on the outbound trip to Vera Cruz in 1931, doesn’t satisfy our curiosity about the more literary and cultural issues of the day. How, one wonders for example, could critics as brilliant as Kenneth Burke or Malcolm Cowley not see that the problem of The Bridge was not only organizational but ideological? In Crane’s “epic,” the subway symbolizes hell, as opposed to the noble “curveship” of Brooklyn Bridge, aspiring “to lend a myth to God,” not to mention those “Up-chartered choristers of their own speeding,” as Crane referred to airplanes. It seems never to have occurred to Crane (or to his early critics) that the technology that made possible the suspension bridge and the airplane is the same as that which produced the subway. And so the facile opposition of “above” versus “below” cannot sustain the poem.

Like Crane’s contemporaries, Fisher fails to see this as a problem. “’The Tunnel’,” he writes, “besides establishing its author as a major practitioner in the principal twentieth-century poetic tradition—that of urban despair—continues [the] pattern of recurrence. . . . the poet reflects that Hell must be like these tunnels he now travels—darkly involved, endlessly repetitious and inescapable.” A critical biography—and this is what Hart Crane now deserves—must read Crane more strenuously.

Some Aporias of Literary Journalism

Marjorie Perloff

Published in PN Review 115 (April-May 1997): 17-25; Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: Literary Journalism and Literary Scholarship from Fielding to the Internet, ed. Jeremy Treglown and Bridget Bennett, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), pp. 224-49.

Writing about poetry and poetics has for a long time occupied an anomalous place in the larger humanistic discourse in which it is embedded. Take, for example, two long reviews that appeared just a few months apart in the Times Literary Supplement. The first is a review by Richard Sennett of four books on contemporary architectural theory (18 September 1992, pp. 3-4), the second, one by Glyn Maxwell of eight books on contemporary poetics (29 January 1993, pp. 9-10).

Richard Sennett is a well-known social critic (currently professor of sociology and humanities at New YorkUniversity) whose most recent book The Conscience of the Eye (1991) is subtitled The Design and Social Life of Cities. The books under review in this, a special issue on “Cities”, which also featured articles by Gavin Stamp, David Rieff, and Saskia Sassen, were Jean-Louis Cohen’s Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR: Theories and Projects for Moscow, 1928-1936 (Princeton, 1991), Robert Harbison’s The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable (Thames and Hudson, 1992), Beatriz Colomina’s collection, Sexuality and Space (Princeton, 1992), and Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny (MIT, 1992). Sennett wrote about these books as an informed insider: he has himself been active in the symposia held at the Princeton University School of Architecture, where some of the material in question had been aired. His essay takes it as a given that urban spaces are now largely disaster areas but argues that architects neither are to blame for this state of affairs nor can be expected to come up with blueprints for some kind of Utopian renewal. Rather, he suggests, in sympathy with the theorists under review, that what is needed at the moment is perhaps a better understanding of how these spaces actually work, how buildings, streets, and open spaces relate to the human body.

Cohen’s book on Le Corbusier supplies Sennett with his historical frame, for it details the great architect’s design for the proposed Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, a design based on the attempt to integrate inside and outside, the built form to its surrounding space so as to downplay ceremony and create a truly popular architecture. The rejection of the plan by the authorities in 1932 “in favour of a standard-issue monument in neo-Palladian style by Zhotovsky” is taken, both by Cohen and by Sennett, as emblematic of the difficulties of trying to invent a genuinely “popular” form of architecture. Perhaps, then, as Robert Harbison and the contributors to Sexuality and Space argue, the best that buildings can do is to create what Harbison calls “fictions of value.” Harbison “sees the experience of industrial ruin as inviting a radically innovative response”; in the case of Richard Rogers’s Lloyds Building, for example, the elaborate “mock-ruins” unexpectedly built from steel and glass have a curious way of altering our sense of time. And Anthony Vidler’s Architectural Uncanny (a book that has since become celebrated in discussions of the postmodern arts) carries this notion one step further. To counter the deadness of contemporary neutralized urban spaces, Vidler suggests, one must open oneself to the “uncanny” of crossings, must try to break down the existing borders between suburb, strip, and urban centre and see what their intersection will produce. Loss, dislocation, invasion: these become positive values.

Another reviewer might have been less sympathetic to those under review than Sennett, but I think most readers would agree that his is an interesting, sophisticated, well-informed review that helps one to understand what’s going on in recent urban theory. And Sennett’s knowledge of the social context, his own participation in the debate on what to do with urban spaces, makes him an excellent expositor.

Glyn Maxwell sees his role rather differently. The books that he was assigned to review are, in fairness to him, as curious an assortment of apples and oranges as one can imagine. [1] First, two critical studies of of established poets: The Art of Derek Walcott, a collection of essays edited by Stuart Brown (Seren, 1989) and James Booth’s monograph Philip Larkin, Writer (Harvester, 1992). Next, a biography, A. T. Tolley’s, My Proper Ground: A Study of the Work of Philip Larkin and its Development (Edinburgh, 1992). These were followed by three more theoretical works: Linda Reinfeld’s Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue (Louisiana, 1992), Charles Bernstein’s A Poetics (Harvard, 1992), and Anthony Easthope and John O. Thompson’s Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory (Harvester, 1991). These three books are related: the poet Charles Bernstein’s manifestos, theoretical prose poems and cultural explorations collected in A Poetics stand behind Linda Reinfeld’s analytical history of the Language Poetry movement in the U.S.. and Easthope and Thompson, for their part, have brought together a variety of critics who hold the common view that the more radical poetries today have much in common with poststructuralist theory. The three, in any case, have nothing in common with the Walcott and Larkin studies on the one hand or with Robert Pack’s The Long View: Essays on the Discipline of Hope and Poetic Craft (Massachusetts, 1991), on the other. Pack is an American poet who has been around for a long time and is best known as an anthologist. His essays are avowedly personal, impressionistic and casual. Finally, the review includes a study of Emersonian-Jamesian poetics, Poetry and Pragmatism (Faber, 1992), by one of the distinguished academic critics in the U.S., Richard Poirier.

Unlike the four books reviewed by Sennett, which are closely related, both historically and ideologically, Maxwell’s list thus has no rationale, except that somehow all eight books (published, incidentally, over a four-year period) have some bearing on contemporary poetry, whatever that is. One should note that Maxwell was given some four columns to cover eight books, as against the six columns allotted to Sennett. More importantly: whereas Sennett is on a par with the authors he reviews, having written comparable books and essays as a fellow-worker in the field, Maxwell seems to have been assigned this review in his capacity not as a published poetry critic or scholar or theorist (none of which he is) but as a poet. Indeed, it has become increasingly common in literary journalism for theoretical and historical studies of poetry like Reinfeld’s and Poirier’s, to be reviewed–when they are reviewed at all– by certified poets. (A certified poet is one who has published a book or two of poems with a mainstream publisher and has received a few respectful reviews in the mainstream press). The parallel, in the case of the architecture books, would be to have an architect, perhaps a partner in a respected firm that specializes in office buildings on Park Avenue or in suburban tract housing, review Anthony Vidler’s Architectural Uncanny.

Maxwell begins with a set of assumptions: (1) the “great poem” induce[s] strong, conflicting emotions in every reader who reads it in its language; (2) “it is always instantly memorized”; (3) once its author is dead, it quickly gets overinterpreted, has meanings read into it, and a myth of its author comes into being that threatens to displace the “authentic” poet who wrote it; (4) “Poets know what is worth saying about other poets”; and (5) the concept of “schools” is “especially unhelpful.” All these theorems are put before us as if they were simply a matter of common sense, even though critical theory of the past half century has dismantled, step by step, the notion of the authentic ur-poem, destroyed by later misreadings, the poem as catharsis of “conflicting emotions” (shades of I. A. Richards), best understood by other poets. As for the memorability criterion, which Maxwell puts forward as if it were the second law of thermodynamics, this criterion does not allow for free verse (hard to memorize), prose poetry or visual poetries–all of them very prominent and exciting today. Memorability depends, of course, on rhyme and metre; it’s much easier to memorize Don Juan than The Prelude, Emily Dickinson’s short hymn stanzas than Whitman’s long poems, Robert Frost than William Carlos Williams. And how would one “memorize” Ian Hamilton Finlay’s poetic compositions? Or Susan Howe’s?

Maxwell doesn’t worry about such thorny issues. He knows what he likes and the books on Walcott and Larkin are deemed worthy, not because their contributors are doing anything special, but because Walcott and Larkin are worthy. The reviewer doesn’t worry much about them, nor about Pack and Poirier (the latter gets rather short shrift), his witty barbs being reserved for the so-called language poets discussed by Linda Reinfeld, by some of Anthony Easthope’s contributors, and by Charles Bernstein, himself one of the founders of the movement. Maxwell doesn’t like the concept of the movement or school, which animates Reinfeld’s discussion of language poetry, but he never bothers to investigate if the poets in question–Bernstein, Howe, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Clark Coolidge, Ron Silliman– do, in fact, constitute one. Never mind: the main thing is that these, to Maxwell, self-evidently worthless poets continue to write about each other “long after the magazine that gave them their name [L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E] has disappeared, along with any likelihood of anyone else taking an interest.” And further: theirs is a poetry of “complete and deliberate impenetrability”, a poetry that “jettison[s] the notion that language can communicate.” The twin goals of poetry–to teach and to delight–are thus totally violated.

Unlike Richard Sennett, then, Glyn Maxwell has no commitment to the approaches taken by his subjects. On the contrary, he gives no evidence that he has ever read a single poem by Charles Bernstein or the other poets Reinfeld discusses; indeed, it is doubtful that he has so much as looked at A Poetics, since Bernstein’s arguments are cited only from Reinfeld’s book, as if her account, which is after all an interpretation of Bernstein’s theory, were simply equivalent to it. As for the Easthope-Thompson volume, I can testify to the fact that he hasn’t read my own essay in that collection, of which he writes, “Elsewhere, Marjorie Perloff celebrates the brick wall of Steve McCaffery’s work by invoking Ezra Pound– odd how these radical, dethroning writers will gulp whole the dicta (‘Make it new!’) of an old apologist for fascism.” Period. My essay on McCaffery’s Lag never mentions Pound’s name nor do I say anything in it about “Make it new!” But even if I did, the assumption that a Pound echo in McCaffery would somehow link this poet to fascism takes one’s breath away. And, incidentally, how and why is McCaffery’s poem a “brick wall”? Is it enough merely to so pronounce?

Maxwell’s is thus a review that blithely ignores the facts, not to mention the poetic principles involved. The reviewer’s assertion that “no one” takes an interest in the language poetry movement is belied by so many articles, books, and symposia, not only in the U.S. but also in the U.K. (as in France, China, Japan, and Australia) that the statement hardly warrants serious rebuttal. Indeed, this review would hardly be worth talking about, were it not so typical. For the fact is that whereas TLS reviews of books on architectural theory, on feminist studies, on the Elizabethan theatre, or on philosophy (the same issue included a brilliant, excoriating piece by Arthur Danto on Charles Taylor’s Ethics of Authenticity) are largely responsible pieces, written by experts in their various fields, the journal’s discourse about contemporary poetry (perhaps about contemporary literary forms in general) is largely impressionistic, uninformed and philistine. And the TLS is by no means the worst offender.

Here, for example, is Anthony Libby, a poet-critic who teaches at Ohio State University, on Stephen Dunn’s New and Selected Poems: 1974-94 (Norton, 1994) and Stephen Dobyns’s Velocities, New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992 (Viking-Penguin, 1994) in the New York Times Book Review for 15 January 1995:

Are all the best poems about loss? They are not, probably, about happiness or love’s sweet contentment, and the poet who aims to traverse those pleasant territories takes a hard road. . . . The heart of [Dunn’s] collection records a long struggle to develop a voice true to Mr. Dunn’s simple affirmations and proof against the cynical reader’s resistance. . . . [As for Dobyns], his is a more traditional style of masculinity, somewhat cool or repressed, angry, torn by constant awareness that “we are the creatures that love and slaughter”. . . . The triumph of Stephen Dobyns’s poetry may be that it keeps that sense of play intact, without denying horrors. . . . His quirky imagination affirms by celebrating itself, if not the dark and clouded world. [2]

What is this supposed to mean? Why should the “quirky imagination” of our time “celebrate itself”? Why do we want poetry that conveys a “somewhat cool or repressed masculinity”? And do we in fact need poetry to tell us that “‘we are creatures that love and slaughter’”?

Or, to take a third example, consider the poet David Kirby’s review of Marilyn Hacker’s Selected Poems, 1965-1990 (Norton, 1994), again in the New York Times Book Review (12 March 1995). Kirby begins by announcing, “The history of recent literature is the history of the phrase ‘Only connect.’ Writers and readers have taken these words from E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End as an exhortation, with ‘only’ meaning ‘merely’ or perhaps ‘exclusively’” (NYTBR 6). Those of us who don’t quite subscribe to the notion that American poetry in the 1990s is written under the sign of E. M. Forster needn’t worry. The reference functions merely as an acceptable literary lead-in, and Kirby quickly moves on to his more personal impressions: “At a time when so many writers seem to be measuring life from a considerable remove, it is invigorating to watch Marilyn Hacker glad-handing her way through the world with a warm facility. And a formalism so colloquial as to undo any readerly stereotypes”(6).

The New York Times Book Review has been castigated for not devoting enough space to poetry. For the period January-June 1995, of approximately 500 reviews, only five–1% — deal with new poetry. But quantity is not the answer. Indeed, if journalistic discourse on poetry can’t be better than these examples, one might prefer a moratorium on the half-hearted attempt to include, for the sake of some residual notion of “culture”, the occasional poetry review along with the occasional poem, the latter invariably presented inside a box as if to cordon it off from more important matters. But my modest proposal is not as pessimistic as it may sound. For I also want to suggest that the abysmal state of poetry reviewing is not, paradoxically, hurting the cause of poetry itself, which is, to my mind, extraordinarily healthy at the moment. Rather, there seems to be a mechanism at play that is making “literary journalism” irrelevant so far as contemporary literary production is concerned. It is this mechanism I want to explore.

History Lessons

Was poetry reviewing better in the Good Old Days? Is it only in recent years, thanks to the increasing commodification of our culture, that poetry has seemed to have no place in the public arena? Conservative critics like Dana Gioia would have us think so,[3] but a statistical survey of actual book reviewing tells us otherwise. My examples here are taken from what are generally regarded as the two leading book reviews in the United States: the New York Times Book Review, at this writing exactly a hundred years old, still the review that can make or break a book so far as sales are concerned, and the New York Review of Books, which began publication in 1963 in response to to the extended strike at the New York Times, and quickly established itself as the intellectuals’ book review of choice.

The first issue of The New York Times Book Review (subsequently cited as NYTBR) appeared on 10 October 1896 as what was then called the Saturday Book Review Supplement. Its avowed purpose, according to the introductory essay for the Arno Press Reprint (1968) by the then Book Review editor Francis Brown, was “to bring to readers news of books, news of authors, news of publishing, literary news of all kinds.” [4] In 1896, this last category included such things as “reports on the state of Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol.” Indeed, there are continuing reports, throughout 1897, on Wilde’s condition, which is declared “beyond human endurance”, and his consequent turn to spirituality (see Rowland Strong in the 12 June 1897 issue). Reviewing was thus a form of reporting, its avowed aim being, as Brown puts it, “to help the reader and buyer, not the writer or publisher.” The reviewer, Brown suggests, had the interests of the non-specialist reader in mind; he (the pronoun is used generically) functions as his reader’s guide, philosopher and friend. It is his business to say of new books what there is in them in such wise that his reader may learn whether the book under notice will probably interest him. Knowledge, equity and candor are the chief elements in the equipment of the book reviewer.

Two assumptions govern these and related statements. First, it was assumed that objective judgments on books could be made by more or less anonymous professional reviewers. (In the early years, the front page leader was in fact anonymous). And second, it was taken for granted that a review of “literature” was just that–a review of novels, poems, plays, perhaps belles-lettres, not, as is prevalent today, primarily books on political, historical, psychological, anthropological subjects, on current events, biographies and memoirs. Reminiscing about the pre-World War I years, Brown writes:

In retrospect these were great literary years, these years before World War I. In verse, names were being made that would dominate for a long time to come: Yeats and Masefield, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Edward Arlington Robinson. In the novel it was the age of Conrad and Thomas Mann, Galsworthy, Anatole France, the still unappreciated Dreiser. Willa Cather wrote ‘O Pioneers’, D. H. Lawrence, ‘Sons and Lovers’, and there was always Mrs. Wharton. Kipling in 1907 received a Nobel Prize at 42. (Introduction, unpaginated)

The canon would not be described all that differently today. And Brown is also proud to note that in 1922 NYTBR pronounced Joyce’s Ulysses “the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the twentieth century” and that Proust’s Swann’s Way received high marks. In the 6 February1897 issue, Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s Lyrics of Lowly Life, published by Dodd, Mead & Co. with an intoduction by W. D. Howells, received extravagant (and anonymous) praise for its wit, keen satire, subtle humor, and “rich colours.” Richard Le Gallienne, reviewing Dunbar’s Complete Poems on 18 January 1914 went even further: the poems, he declared, “have a certain classical rank in American literature by virtue of an excellence which is in need of no allowances on account of the poet’s race.” Dunbar’s is an “authentic achievement which must give him a high and permanent place among the dialect poets of the world”, and such poems as “The Debt”, written in standard English, are also singled out for praise and cited in full. One would be hard put to find a an African-American poet today who has received this sort of attention in the Times.

But lest we wax nostalgic, it was also true that reviewing as spreading-the-word (more blurb than critique) ran into trouble as the volume of books increased sharply after World War I. Indeed, not just their volume, but their variety. In 1909, after all, F. T. Marinetti had managed to get his first Futurist manifesto published on the front page of the ParisFigaro, where its competition was little more than the race-track news, the stock-market quotations, and the society news. After the war–a watershed for book reviews as for so much else–a larger literate (and voting) population demanded more political, historical, and social coverage, in reviews as in news articles and editorials. At the same time, the new Modernist poetry was often intentionally difficult and demanding. The Waste Land (1922), for example, could not be processed as readily as could the collections of short lyric poems to which audiences were accustomed, even if those poems were, like Dunbar’s, by a black man. Eliot’s long collage-poem, with its foreign phrases and fussy footnotes was not reviewed at all in NYTBR. By this time, in any case, books no longer meant just literary books On 6 January 1924, for example, the front page of the now larger (thanks to increasing advertising space) book review was devoted to a French memoir, the former premier and war minister Paul Painlévé’s Comment j’ai nommé Foch et Pétain. The same issue has a review of Count Burian’s memoir of the Kaiser Franz Joseph and of Bertrand Russell’s ABC of Atoms. And by the early 1930s, the basic blueprint and layout that characterizes the NYTBR to this day was in place. The lead article (on the cover, usually with a large photograph at the center) tended to be a review of a “major new novel” or of a large-scale historical/social critique. On 14 January 1934, for example, the leader is a review of Pearl Buck’s The Mother; on 28 January, Sinclair Lewis’s Work of Art, on 4 February, Phyllis Bentley’s A Modern Tragedy (with the headline “A Novel that Clarifies Our Age”), and on Feb. 11, Oswald Spengler’s The Hour of Decision.

Big novels, big ideas! What happens to poetry or to the more avant-garde literary productions in this context? Poetry could hardly be eliminated, a neo-Victorian, neo-Romantic culture continuing to demand its “higher” presence, even as it does in today’s New Yorker, New Republic, or Atlantic. But as slender books of poems continued to proliferate, the group review became normative, one of the reviewer’s chief tasks thus being to find a common thread like Kirby’s “Only connect.” The reviewers tended to be themselves minor poets or, as in the founding days of NYTBR, professional journalists. Certainly there was no precedent for asking a poetry specialist (e.g., an academic critic or theorist) to review these books. For poetry– and this bias is still with us– had come to be considered a category of writing to which the usual questions of expertise did not apply. As Pierre Bourdieu has demonstrated in his study of literary reception:

Poetry, by virtue of its restricted audience . . . the consequent low profits, which make it the disinterested activity par excellence, and also its prestige, linked to the historical tradition initiated by the Romantics, is destined to charismatic legitimation . . . Although the break between poetry and the mass readership has been virtually total since the late nineteenth century . . . poetry continues to represent the ideal model of literature for the least cultured consumers. [5]

Jimmy Carter’s recent poetry venture is a case in point. “I have always found it possible”, said Carter on the publication of his best-selling Always a Reckoning (1995), “to say things in my poems that would have been impossible to say in prose.” Things like how sad he was to have to kill his aged dog:

Yesterday I killed him. I had known

for months I could not let him live. I might

have paid someone to end it, but I knew

that after fifteen years of sharing life

the bullet ending his must be my own. [6]

Try saying that bit of blank verse in prose! The newspaper reviewers, evidently impressed by the sheer disinterestedness of the former President’s efforts, did not wish to be harsh. And soon Jimmy Carter was embarking on a book tour around the U.S. and to Dylan Thomas’s Wales.

The 14 January 1934 issue (the one with J. Donald Adams’ review of Pearl Buck’s The Mother on the cover), typically has a full-page article on “Six New Books of Verse by a Diversity of Poets.” Among the poets are Kimi Gengo, Adelaide Love, C. Arthur Coan, and Mary Owens Lewis. The reviewer, Percy Hutchinson, praises the poems in Adelaide Love’s The Slender Singing Tree (its “highly engaging title” is remarked upon) which are “written with skill against a background of deep thought.” He cites “The Lien”:

Relentless press of little things;

Eternal haste to do them all;

The prior claim upon our days

Relinquished to the trivial.

Our obligations never paid

But endless and imperative.

O life, why must you always leave

So little time to live?

“Somehow”, remarks Hutchinson, “this seems to us the possible utterance of a disciplined Emily Dickinson. Not, of course, that the real Emily could ever have been disciplined, either as to thought or poetic utterance. . . . But . . . the Amherst spinster-poet must ever stand symbolically for her sex’s expression of itself in poetry. Thus it seems to us that Adelaide Love carries on what might be termed the Emily Dickinson tradition, that is, she expresses herself fragmentarily while seeing with inclusive vision, and plucks at the heart-strings, but always with the most gentle touch, perceiving and transferring beauty” (p. 14).

From our vantage point sixty years later, we can laugh at the very idea of Adelaide Love’s little jingle being favourably compared to the work of the, alas, “undisciplined” Emily Dickinson. But the problems of poetry reviewing confronting Percy Hutchinson were not all that different from those experienced by David Kirby in his review of Marilyn Hacker or even by Glyn Maxwell in his omnibus piece for the TLS. The mandate–to say something telling and original about five or ten unlike and generally unexceptional volumes of short personal lyrics–is not easy to fulfil. We can see this even in the more specifically literary journals like the Georgia Review or the Hudson Review. Consider an article in PN Review 80 (1991), in which T.J. G. Harris discusses Michael Hulse’s Eating Strawberries in the Necropolis and Andrew Motion’s Love in a Life, along with the first book, Tale of the Mayor’s Son, by the very same Glyn Maxwell, who, being the newcomer in this group, gets one long paragraph:

Glyn Maxwell combines strictness of form with abrupt arbitrariness, a kind of headlong, thrown-together, jagged improvisation that, if it often has small attraction for the ear, certainly has, as Joseph Brodsky remarks on the back of the book, a ‘propulsion . . ., owing in part to his tendency to draw metaphor from the syntax itself’. But the propulsion is not so often real as apparent, and one has the frequent impression that a device (a tricky self-reference or address to the reader, a drawing of metaphor from syntax, a blatant obscurity of one kind or another–of which there are far too many) has been thrown in not so much to keep something going as to stop it from flagging. The ‘propulsion’ also makes reading this book, which would have been better shorter, a wearying–and not, as it should be, an exhilerating– experience, since everything starts sounding the breathless, edgy same as it whoops and echoes in the ear’s labyrinth. Maxwell needs an editor. But he is good at creating an atmosphere of arbitrary urban or suburban menace, and he can be funny. One senses a definite and characteristic style coming clear in this, his first book. [7]

This may have a more sophisticated patina than a comparable review in NYTBR, but what is it we really learn about Glyn Maxwell from Harris’s review? Primarily that the book has the imprimatur of Joseph Brodsky, which probably accounts for its having been published by Bloodaxe in the first place What else does Harris tell us? Well, that Maxwell uses “strict” forms (presumably rhyming metrical stanzas) to contain his “jagged improvisation.” But since “improvisation” is by definition a form of extempore composition, designed to look natural and unrehearsed, why is it better served by “strictness of form” than by, say, free verse or Marinettian parole in libertà? Further: if Maxwell is, as Harris implies, tricky and needlessly obscure, how and where is he “funny”? But the most gratuitous phrase in this review is the reference to that “atmosphere of arbitrary urban or suburban menace”, which Maxwell is evidently so “good at creating.” Does this mean he is not good at creating an atmosphere of rural menace? Lambs stolen by vicious vagrants? Cows on speed jumping over fences? Or does he mean that Maxwell does not take on the menace of wild, untramelled nature? Of fire and flood and earthquake? But then what English poet today does write about these subjects? Urban or suburban–that about covers the menace most of Maxwell’s readers are likely to have experienced.

The fault here is not, of course Maxwell’s, nor is it strictly speaking that of his reviewer, T. J. G. Harris. It is the assignment, the demand for the one telling paragraph, that is the problem. The reviewer simply doesn’t have space to define his or her terms. Even in somewhat longer reviews, this haziness of vocabulary, coupled with the need to make definitive judgments, poses problems, as when Katha Pollitt, in a full-page review of Robert Pinsky’s The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 for NYTBR (18 August 1996, p. 9), praises the long poem “Essay on Psychiatrists” because it “really is an essay, that moves from a group portrait of psychiatrists as a bourgeois social type . . . to a large and fully earned conclusion: ‘But it is all bosh, the false / Link between genius and sickness’.” Like Harris’s “urban or suburban,” this assessment cannot withstand scrutiny. For why do we want a poem “really” to be an “essay”? Surely we have enough essays around. And secondly, if an essay really came to the “it is all bosh” conclusion cited above, wouldn’t most readers find the analysis rather facile, given the large library of works that have probed the relation of genius to madness?

The New York Review of Books, to which I now turn, does not go in for this sort of empty impressionism. Its own solution (and LRB’s is similar) is to limit the list of reviewable poets, confining itself to a very small circle and then devoting long, individual reviews to its members. From its inception in 1963, NYRB has limited itself largely to the poetry of Robert Lowell (the then-husband of Elizabeth Hardwick, one of NYRB’s founding editors) and to the Lowell circle that includes John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, and James Merrill. Auden is an elder statesman who belongs to the group as is, at the other end of the age-scale, Adrienne Rich. A few British poets–Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, later James Fenton– have been invited to join the club along with Americans on the circle’s fringes like Theodore Roethke, W. S. Merwin and Howard Nemerov. Helen Vendler, a regular NYRB reviewer, has tried to bring John Ashbery into the fold, but Ashbery seems not to be taken very seriously by such other NYRB poetry reviewers as Denis Donoghue and Frank Kermode; a number of his recent books have not been reviewed in NYRB at all.

However this parochialism may have been justified in the 1960s and 70s, when, incidentally, the NYR ignored the Objectivists (Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Lorine Niedecker), the Beats, the Black Mountain and San Francisco poets, as well as John Cage, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and any number of Dada, Surrealist, and Fluxus poets, it has become, in the mid-90s, a way of denying poetry its very life. For most of the above are now safely dead, and where are the young who should replace them? Has time simply stopped so that “poetry” can mean no more than a review of Elizabeth Bishop’s posthumously published letters or an obituary essay about James Merrill? Much of today’s “literary journalism” would have us believe so. In a recent article in The Economist (8 July 1995, p. 82), for example, we are told that “[America’]s poetic voice has shrunk to a whisper”, that “Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, America seems to have lacked a major poet. In fact most people are not even aware of the concerns of American poets these days. It has declined into a minor art, subsidised principally by universities.” The occasion for these ruminations is the publication by prestigious Faber & Faber of three younger (actually not so young) American poets: Charles Simic, Chase Twitchell and August Kleinzahler. But since these are (rightly, to my mind) discovered to be not all that remarkable, the anonymous Economist writer feels the point has been proved.

The reasoning here is purely circular. If Chase Twitchell “represents” the New American Poetry, then the New American Poetry can’t be very good. And since many of us would argue that even Robert Lowell can’t represent great American poetry quite as convincingly as did Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson or T. S. Eliot, things must be really bad. Thus, while the New York Review of Books and TLS pay careful attention to the New Historicism, the New Gender Criticism, or the New Cultural Studies, they pay no comparable attention–indeed, no attention at all–to the New Poetics. Let us consider why this is the case.

Poetry Degree Zero

Suppose a reviewer is assigned to write a piece on Renaissance New Historicist studies. He or she knows (or quickly learns) that the founding father of this movement is Stephen Greenblatt, a professor at Berkeley, whose new book is to be discussed in the review along with others by Thomas Lacqueur, Richard Helgerson, and Nancy Vickers. The reviewer reads “background” material, considers opposing views, and is ready to write the piece. A similar process takes place when a reviewer takes on, say, the most recent book by Jean-François Lyotard or Hélène Cixous.

But–and here’s the rub–what is poetry anyway? Does anyone have a clear idea? The problem is not insurmountable if the review is to be of studies of Milton or Eliot or even H.D., for these canonical authors at least partially provide the aesthetic norms against which books about their oeuvre have been and will be judged. But Charles Bernstein? Charles Wright? Charles Simic? Who knows what is to be looked for in the case of their books?

A further complication has been produced by the relative positioning of poetry and theory in the university curriculum of the past few decades. We expect graduate students in English or Comparative Literature to be familiar with Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified, Roman Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy, with Lacan’s elaboration on that distinction, and Paul De Man’s related discussion of irony and allegory. The “death of the author,” as defined by Barthes and Foucault is now a common topic of discussion. Judith Butler’s notions of “gender performativity” are regularly cited, as are Fredric Jameson’s interpretations of consumer culture and Homi K. Bhabha’s theories on the hybridity and porosity of nations. But when the book to be discussed is a book of poems, the reader suddenly seems to forget everything he or she has learned about literariness, about the cultural construction of the subject, the naturalisation of ideology, or the relation of genre to gender. The fairly simple principle that the choice of verse form is never merely arbitrary, that one doesn’t just “at will” write sonnets on Monday, fragmented free verse on Tuesday and prose on Wednesday is largely ignored, as is the twin question why poet X–say, Philip Larkin- never wrote prose poetry. And beyond the individual poet, what about period style? National or ethnic styles? Are the “affirmations” of a “quirky imagination” the same in 1990 as they were when Wordsworth wrote “Resolution and Independence”?

A sense of history and a sense of theory: these are the twin poles of criticism missing from most poetry discourse today and hence missing in the typical poetry review. Poet X, we read regularly, “has found his voice.” But is his voice one worth finding? Poet Y never lets her formalism get in the way of the colloquial. But why do we want poetry to be colloquial? “There is a distinct world in Michael Longley’s poetry”, writes his fellow poet Eavan Boland, “He has created it from a sense of lost values, out of lyric irony, and with a considerable fortitude.” [8] But in most discourses today the very idea of a “distinct world” is suspect, and as for those “values” to be recovered with “considerable fortitude”, maybe it would be better if they were “lost.”

The poetry review (one poet reviewing another) comes, directly or indirectly, out of the poetry workshop, and the poetry workshop (or, for that matter, the creative writing workshop in general) is still dominated by a regressively Romantic concept of the poet as a man speaking to men (or woman speaking to women–the principle is the same), by the notion that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity, the poet speaking for all of us–only more sensitively, perceptively, and expertly. And how could the workshop be otherwise without going out of existence? How could it not be based on the assumption that a given student just might have “talent”, that that talent needs to find a conduit of expression and then he or she can become a certified poet. One writes on a given subject or uses a given verse form, the instructor and one’s fellow students provide constructive criticism and, if one is diligent and lucky, poems are born–and published in American Poetry Review.

Ironically this workshop / journalism discourse is wholly at odds, not only with the discourses of architecture, anthropology, social science and philosophy, but also with the amazing body of writing on poetics (often by poets themselves) throughout our century. From Roman Jakobson’s brilliant study of Khlebnikov called New Russian Poetry (1921), Ezra Pound’s “How to Read”(1928), and Gertrude Stein’s How to Write (1931), to the Concrete Poetry manifestos of the 1950s, produced by the Noigandres group in Brazil, to John Cage’s Silence (1962) and A Year From Monday (1969), Ingeborg Bachmann’s Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden (1983), and Susan Howe’s The Birthmark (1993), we have an exciting body of poetics, a discourse on poetry impressive in its richness and excitement. This is not to say that there is large-scale agreement between individual poet-theorists, but what can be said is that, from Futurism and Dada on down, the international poetic impetus has been constructivist rather than expressivist: it is committed, in other words, to the basic theorem that poetry is the language art, the art in which the “what” cannnot be separated from “how”, in which the said exists only in the saying. In his widely discussed “Artifice of Absorption” (reprinted in A Poetics), Charles Bernstein calls this quality the “non-absorbability” of poetic discourse. But then Yeats had already said as much when he declared that “Our words must seem to be inevitable.” At the same time–and here is a corollary principle about which there’s little disagreement in the arena of poetics (as compared to the arena of poetic journalism)– poetic language is never simply unique, natural, and universal; it is the product, in large part, of particular social, historical and cultural formations. And these formations demand study.

There is, then, no good intellectual reason why poetry reviewing in, say, the TLS, couldn’t be just as useful and interesting as reviews of urban or gender studies. But–and here we have to consider the larger cultural landscape –it’s not likely to happen in our culture because, to put it bluntly, there isn’t enough at stake. As long as self-proclaimed poets appear on the scene in every city and small town in Britain or America –and, oddly enough, poetry still has enough cultural capital for this to be the case[9]–as long as the editors of NYTBR, NYRB TLS, and so on have to choose books to be reviewed from a wide variety of disciplines and areas, there is no way to weed out the dross, which is about 90% of so-called poetry publication. Who, we say democratically and bravely, is to decide which of the countless poets now plying their trade are worthy of attention? And why is one set of poetic principles–say, the ones I’ve just adumbrated above–any more “valid” than another?

Notice we never say this about historians or anthropologists–or even architects, perhaps because certification in these fields is a complex process. A given architect or architecture critic might, for example, personally dislike the work of Frank Gehry or of Denise Scott-Brown. But that work won’t be dismissed by reviewers as simply unimportant or irrelevant. In poetry journalism, however, it happens all the time: witness James Fenton’s “Getting Rid of the Burden of Sense”, a review of John Ashbery’s Selected Poems (1985) in NYTBR (29 December 1985, p. 10). The poet, declares Fenton, “ask[s] of the reader impossible feats of attention . . . yielding only a minimum of reward.” And he confesses that “There were times during my reading of this ‘Selected Poems’ (a gathering from 30 years’ work) when I actually thought I was going to burst into tears of boredom.”

New Thresholds, New Anatomies

What, in the face of such arbitrary and subjective judgment, can be done to strengthen critical writing about poetry? A lot, actually, but perhaps no longer in the popular literary press. In the last decade or so, thanks to the world of the internet and hyperspace, of desktop publishing and small press production, poetry, as even the newspapers keep telling us, is once more a widely practiced and popular art form, and the discourse about it is becoming much more interesting. A case in point is a large, glossy-paged volume called Exact Change Yearbook no. 1: Yearbook 1995, edited by a young poet named Peter Gizzi, who received his training in the Buffalo Poetics Program from Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe and Robert Creeley, and is co-published by Exact Change in Boston and Carcanet Press in the UK. Its elegant and perhaps too extravagant layout has been executed by a team of production assistants and printed in Hong Kong. Yearbook 1 features Michael Palmer, glamorously pictured on the book’s cover and represented by an excellent interview with Peter Gizzi and a twelve-page selection from his work. And–signs of the times– the Yearbook includes a CD of readings by twelve poets from Palmer to Ted Berrigan[10] and is available for $35 in the U.S., £19.50 in Britain.

In their prefatory “Publishers Note”, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang (who doubles as the book’s designer) write that they wanted to replace the now defunct New Directions annual (edited for some forty years by James Laughlin) with “a large miscellany of avant-garde work, both contemporary and historical, chosen less to represent a particular ‘school’, and more in the spirit of learning what’s out there.” To this end, the publishers asked Gizzi “to help us find a range of contemporary work that draws on the tradition we publish in our books of Surrealist and other early twentieth-century experimentation. . . . To what came back we added work by Exact Change authors [Stein, Cage, de Chirico, Aragon], as well as a few other discoveries we were eager to share.”

What makes the project unusual is that it juxtaposes avant-garde poets and artists from the U.S. (ranging chronologically from the Imaginary Elegies of the late Jack Spicer and Fanny Howe’s presentation of extracts from John Wiener’s very moving journal 707 Scott Street, to a “Gallery” of younger largely unknown poets like Paul Beatty, Tory Dent, and Jennifer Moxley), with their counterparts abroad–specifically, in Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia–and, closer to home, in the Caribbean and Canada. And as if these juxtapositions weren’t enough, we can also read, say, Clark Coolidge or Susan Howe against Gertrude Stein’s Before the Flowers of Friendship faded Friendship Faded, which is printed for the first time (as Julianna Spahr explains in her headnote), together with Stein’s source text, Georges Hugnet’s “Enfance,” exactly in the form they were originally published in the journal Pagany (1930). Or again, we can read Barbara Guest’s lecture “Poetry the True Fiction” against Hugo Ball’s “Grand Hotel Metaphysics”, the “Radio Happenings” of John Cage and Morton Feldman against Erik Satie’s “Dried Embryos”, Michael Palmer against Louis Aragon’s “Peasant’s Dream” or the “Fragments” of De Chirico.

Such collaging gives, me at least, a sense of –forgive the taboo word– transcendence. For instead of the usual anthology wars (who’s in, who’s out, which editor is sufficiently multicultural?) the Exact Change Yearbook offers the most convincing evidence I’ve seen to date that our own radical poetries are not (as Maxwell or Fenton would have us think) some kind of local aberration, spawned by a bunch of theory-crazed, left-wing poets in New York and San Francisco, and perpetrated by les jeunes at Buffalo and other out-of-the way stations–poetries that deserve simply to be ignored. Indeed, what Gizzi’s juxtapositions of U.S. and foreign portfolios suggest is that the attention to the materiality of language I spoke of above, to syntactic disjunction and visual constellation, and especially to the reconfiguration of lyric as speaking, once again, not for the hypothetical “sensitive” and “authentic” individual (“Here’s a vision I had as I was weeding the garden yesterday”) but for the larger cultural and philosophical moment–that all these are now characteristic of poetries produced around the globe.

Take Jeff Twitchell’s portfolio of the “Original Chinese Language Group.” As Twitchell explains, “Original, not in the sense of unique, but because of their interest in the earlier meanings and associations that can be read in the Chinese written character. . . .So, too, the recuperation of the original impetus of poetry as the play in language.” The “Original Poets”, Twitchell notes, go beyond their predecessors, the so-called “Misty” (because branded “obscure” by the official critics) poets of the late 1970s, of whom the best known in the U.S. is Bei Dao. The 1988 “Original” Manifesto, reproduced here, comes out strongly against the localism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism that bedevilled Communist China until quite recently. The aim is to make contact with “modern Western art”, and the vehicle for such contact, the manifesto declares, is the written character, which, compared to spoken language, is “less polluted and pre-judged.” “We do not avoid”, they declare, “the phrase ‘word games’ which already has aroused great misunderstanding. We even like it. ‘Game’ [yóuxi] is a word, connoting the profound, eerie spirit of art and philosophy.” And the text gives way to the visual image of a large black cross which represents the intersection of “swim” [yóu]–to get in touch with reality– and “play” [xì].

Twitchell’s portfolio is taken from the selection that appeared in the British journal Parataxis (#7, 1994), edited by the poet Drew Milne. In translation, the poems themselves–by Che Quian-Zi, Zhou Ya-Ping, Yi Cun, Huang Gan, Xian Meng, and Hong Liu (the one woman in this group)–don’t quite live up to that manifesto.[11] “Word games”, in the sense of Steve McCaffery’s or Charles Bernstein’s paragrammatic play, are less common than neo-Surrealist imagery and the casting of a sharp eye on the “direct treatment of the thing,” in the Poundian Imagist sense. Just as Pound’s fabled “invention of China” turns out to have little to do with the classical Chinese models which were his source, so the Original Poets’ version of “language poetry” is more graphic and precisionist than, say, Lyn Hejinian’s or Bob Perelman’s. Here, for example, is Part III of Zhou Ya-Ping’s “Vulgar Beauty”:

An afterbirth is unfolded, taking the shape of an umbrella.

The ridges of an umbrella along yellow lines.

A fetus like a coal cinder has long been reared in it,

Lit by me, it will give off light.

A white crane, unexpectedly covered by a black string-net

A snake, bound with a copper wire, body

Like a tightening spring, soft parts flashing.

We must remember that in the Chinese, as J. H.Prynne notes in his Afterword, the “iconic deployment [of the language] by stroke play and contexture makes a traffic with the eye worked by a different ground-plan.” At one point, the translators planned to include some of the Chinese text so as to show how the tactile element works, but the Originals themselves countered this idea because, as Prynne puts it, “it would suggest exoticism or extraneous willow-pattern ornament; to them, we are the exotics, with our credit-card view of the speech act.”

That “credit-card view” is satirized in Prynne’s own poems in Bands around the Throat, the entire chapbook, originally published in Cambridge in a limited edition, reprinted in the Exact Change Yearbook. And Tom Raworth’s “Anglo-Irish Alternative,” a portfolio printed elsewhere in the anthology, provides a rich context in which to understand Prynne’s work. Such contextualizing (one should certainly read Rosmarie Waldrop’s Berlin portfolio “against” Raworth’s) provides a kind of information that is absent from the short review, however elegant, of the individual poet. And Gizzi’s juxtapositions have their counterpart in a number of recent anthologies. Since 1993 alone, the following have appeared: Eliot Weinberger’s, American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders (Marsilio, a best-seller in Mexico in a Spanish edition), Paul Hoover’s A Norton Book of Postmodern Poetry (Norton), Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-90 (Sun & Moon), Volume 1 of Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’s Poems for the Millennium (California), and, most recently, Maggie O’Sullivan’s Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK (Reality Street Editions). Some of these anthologies have barely been reviewed, and yet, in what is a surprising development, they are already being assigned for classroom use and discussed at conferences. Romana Huk, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, for example, has organized an international poetry festival called “Assembling Alternatives,” largely based, in the case of Anglo-American poetry, largely on such yet-to-be-reviewed anthologies and small press books, many of which she came across during a fellowship year in the UK.

But how, it will be asked, is such work disseminated if not via reviews in the major papers? Here is where electronic discussion groups and the internet come in. On the Poetics Discussion Group sponsored by the Poetics Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo and open to anyone who hears about it by word of mouth and cares to join, the daily conversation now contains an average of 1200 lines and includes postings from all over the world. Much of the “talk” is trivial: who said what to whom where, what X meant when she said Y, and so on. But there have lately been extended conversations on the nature of free verse, on “close reading” (Peter Quartermain began this one when he asked, on the net, “Why the animus against close reading? Do we want distant and/or careless reading?”), and on the relation of language poetry to other contemporary movements. Bob Perelman’s new critical book The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (California, 1995) has been discussed in a series of postings; indeed, the argument as to what Perelman’s book does and what its implications might be, acts as a kind of supplement (in the Derridean sense of substitute as well as addition) to the more conventional book review.

Buffalo also sponsors the Electronic Poetry Center where one can call up, say, an “Authors” file and access an impressive list of poets, each one represented by a photograph, followed by selected poems, prose writings, bibliography, and so on. Then, too, the ElectronicPoetryCenter publishes its own journal, Rif/t, which contains poems, fictions, critical essays, and reviews as does the on-line Postmodern Culture, published at the University of Virginia. A new group has just been formed in San Francisco that discusses concrete poetry, visual poetics, and language-art relationships; this one is called Majordomo and is accessed by subscribing to something called Wr-eye-tings; a related group is Silence, devoted to the work of the late John Cage; this group is extremely active, sharing information about Cage scores, recordings, musical interpretations, poetic texts, and so on. James Pritchett’s recent book on Cage’s music (Cambridge, 1994) was discussed and debated in a series of postings.

The “reviewing” that occurs on such lists and in the new e-zines is by no means ideal. Internet reviewers are not as accountable as are their counterparts in the print media, and editors are not likely to ask for a lot of revisions and fact checks. The immateriality of the digital medium controls the discourse: one flick of the finger–and this is a very easy mistake to make– and the text disappears from the screen, perhaps not to be found again. Then, too, onscreen discussion of poetry and poetics is designed for a limited (and largely younger) audience that is at home with the new technologies.

And this raises the spectre of the nominal “public” that, for the past hundred years, has ostensibly depended on reviewers to help it decide what poetry books to read. Doesn’t a weekly paper like TLS owe something to this non-professional public, and isn’t it therefore better to “cover” a range of books, even as Glyn Maxwell does in his omnibus piece? Two books on Larkin, one on Walcott, some theoretical treatises from the U.S.: why not let the reader decide which ones are worth her while?

My own sense is that this middle-class poetry public no longer exists, that poetics is now at least as specialized as is architectural discourse; indeed, the latter actually speaks to a much wider audience than does poetry, given that everyone lives and works in specific buildings and hence takes an interest in the look and feel of the built environment. In the case of poetry, however, the rapprochement with the university may well be a fait accompli[12]. And thus it is that the TLS or NYRB review may well be on its way toward becoming obsolete.

Take the case of Charles Bernstein’s A Poetics, the book Maxwell dismissed so offhandedly. This 1992 collection of “essays” (the first and longest piece “Artifice of Absorption” is, strictly speaking, a verse treatise, written in what is predominantly iambic pentameter) was reviewed neither in NYTBR nor in NYRB, nor in The New Republic, The Village Voice Literary Supplement, or The Washington Post Book World, to mention just the most obvious daily and weekly papers. Yet within two years of its publication, it appeared on course syllabi across the U.S. (and many in the U.K. and Australia as well), has become a popular item on PhD qualifying exams, and is cited, along with Bernstein’s earlier collection of critical prose, Content’s Dream (Sun & Moon, 1986), with increasing frequency. The relation of “absorption” to “anti-absorption” in poetry is discussed in learned journals. And A Poetics has now sold some 5,000 copies and has gone through two printings and numerous translations.

How does the process of dissemination work in a case like Bernstein’s? How is the readership for such a book constructed? Can the Electronic Poetry Center and other e-zines, together with the more traditional scholarly journals and small poetry magazines in which A Poetics has been reviewed, [13] really make the difference? Or is distribution dependent on word-of-mouth on the campus and at the ever-burgeoning number of conferences? Or controlled by a particular group of fellow-poets, professors, end editors? These are questions I can’t yet answer satisfactorily. But what I can say is that literary journalism, as we used to know it and as many of us still practice it, has had nothing to do with the case.

The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez,

by Franco Moretti. trans. Quintin Hoare Verso, 180 Varick St., New York, NY 10014-4606. 256 pages; cloth $64.95, paper $19.95.

Marjorie Perloff

Published in Electronic Book Review 4 (Winter 1996/97).

Moretti’s thesis is seemingly simple. Such “monuments” as the “drama” Faust and the “novel” Ulysses are more properly classified as belonging to a category Moretti calls “modern epic”: “‘Epic’, because of the many structural similarities binding it to a distant past . . . but ‘modern epic’ because there are certainly quite a few discontinuities . . . to dictate the cognitive metaphor of the ‘world text’.” Indeed, the epic, Moretti argues, “has “halved modernism,” Ulysses being more properly read against the background of Faust than side by side with a bona fide modern novel like Woolf’sMrs. Dalloway or Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Indeed, “Modernism has become unusuable because it containedtoo many things. . . . Less is more.”

So what is a “modern epic” or “world text”? It is, to begin with, encyclopedic in ambition, unique in its representation of a particular national culture, but also, Moretti thinks, a “super-canonical form,” whose exemplars are “virtually unread” today because they “depend so closely upon scholastic institutions.” And further: modern epics are often “semi-failures,” in that they “reveal a kind of antagonism between the noun and the adjective: a discrepancy between the totalizing will of the epic and the subdivided reality of the modern world.”

To understand this “totalizing will,” Moretti turns to Hegel, for whom the epic form rested on three foundations: (1) it presents “the occurrence of an action which must achieve expression in the whole breadth of its circumstances and relations”; (2) this action must enable a “total world of a nation and epoch” to emerge; and (3) “Everything that later becomes firm religious dogma or civil and moral law still remains a living attitude of mind, not separated from the single individual as such.” This third foundation is the most troublesome, for “since historical evolution very soon puts an end to the age of heroes,” how can the individual remain central? “With the coming of the State, in short, individuality must no longer give totality a form, but confine itself to obeying it.”

Most Hegelians–for that matter, most contemporary critics– have therefore concluded that the epic is a thing of the past. For “if epic conventions have a real foundation only in the pre-State era . . . then between epic and modernity an inversely proportional relation obtains. . . . the nearer we come to the present, the more epic loses any meaning.” This, Moretti knows, is the common wisdom, but he cannot quite accept it. For in the same years Hegel was holding his courses on aesthetics, Goethe was announcing his epic ambitions in Faust, whose hero declares, “And in my inner self I will embrace / The experience allotted to the whole / Race of mankind, my mind shall grasp the heights / And depths.” The drive toward epic grandeur remains, but, as Moretti also recognizes, Faust’s declaration, “Im Anfang war die Tat” (“In the beginning was the Deed!”) never comes to any kind of fruition, Goethe’s hero sacrificing action for the “spectacle so rare” proffered to him by Mephistopheles. Indeed, whatever Faust actuallydoes in Part I–primarily he has a love affair with Gretchen– could have been done without any help from the Devil. Actor becomes spectator and much of the “epic” drama is given over to bricolage and “refunctionalization.” Mephistopheles, far from granting Faust an agency he doesn’t in fact need, serves to shield him from the violence outside himself, for example, the blow of Gretchen’s brother Valentino in the nocturnal duel.

Why then attempt epic at all? Because–and here the argument becomes especially interesting– its nineteenth-century alternative, the realist novel, as representation of the modern scientific perspective, was not enough. “Physics,” as Moretti puts it, “will never replace Hesiod,because it does not confront the same questions.” As an inherited form, epic allows the modernist to confront the past, to historicize. But since the encyclopaedic work is no longer trusted, modern epics likeFaust and Moby Dick can only be “flawed masterpieces.” Digressions becomes the main purpose of the epic action. The construction of national identity is no longer temporal and historical, as in classical epic, but geographical: witness the spatial construction ofFaust, Part II or of Ulysses. And polyphony, what Bakhtin called heteroglossia, is asserted, although in practice, as in Moby Dick, the monologic voice (in this case, of Ishmael) reasserts itself. “In the last resort,” writes Moretti, “the ambition of the narrator of Moby Dick is precisely this: to take the multifarious codes of nature and culture, and to demonstrate that they are all to be found in the moral super-code.” Or again, take Whitman, who declares “I am large, I contain multitudes,” and calls for a “rhetoric of inclusivity” that can encompass all creatures large and small. But “contain,” as Moretti notes, also implies “control and surveillance”; like the voice in Moby Dick, Whitman’s is a “monologism that is ashamed of itself, and dresses itself up as polyphony.”

The failure is not the individual writer’s but the failure of the culture. In Wagner’s great cycle The Nibelung’s Ring, for example, we can see one of the purest examples of the modern epic’s “desire to reunite what history has divided: knowledge, ethics, religion, art, narrative, drama, lyric poetry; literature, music, painting.” A “world text” like the Ring, likeThe Waste Land and Yeats’s visionary poems, “rejects the calm agnosticism of the novel: it rebels against the slow decline of the sacred, and seeks to restore lost transcendence.” The ambition is noble but it cannot be fulfilled. AGesamtkunstwerk like the Ring cannot maintain complexity throughout; in Wagner’s case, this means “simplicity of the drama, and complexity of the music. . . . One level of the work can be bold because the other is crude and superfluous.”

This insight brings us to the end of Part I of Modern Epic , with its lively, provocative, genuinely fresh examination of the transformations of epic. Part II, “Ulysses and the Twentieth Century,” does not quite live up to the promise of Part I; nor does it resolve the issue of epic continuity. Moretti begins with familiar terrain: Georg Simmel’s analysis of the “nervous stimulation” of the modern metropolis, Walter Benjamin’s discussion of “shock” experience in Baudelaire, and the increasing commodification of capitalist culture. The stream of consciousness, in Moretti’s reading, is the rhetorical embodiment of the new sensation glut, the “inexhaustible transmitter of the capitalist metropolis. And Moretti writes:

A different style is required, in order to find one’s way in the city of words; a weaker grammar than that of consciousness; an edgy, discontinuous syntax: a cubism of language, as it were. And the stream of consciousness offers precisely that: simple, fragmented sentences, where the subject withdraws to make room for the invasion of things; paratactical paragraphs, with the doors flung wide, and always enough room for one more sentence, and one more stimulus.

In a chapter on the evolution of the stream of consciousness technique, Moretti contrasts the Joycean paradigm characterized above to such earlier variants as Tolstoy’s in Anna Karenina or such later ones as Benjy’s monologue in Faulkner’sSound and the Fury. For the novelist, Moretti posits, stream of consciousness is used for dramatic effect at certain moments of narrative crisis (e.g., Anna’s thoughts leading up to her suicide). The stream of consciousness in Ulysses , on the other hand, is non-selective; it presents what is. Indeed, Moretti regards the Joycean stream of consciousness as “the last anthropocentric attempt,” “the last language of the modern individual.

Moretti’s account of stream of consciousness would be an accurate description of our own “language poetry” –the long poems, say, of Charles Bernstein or Clark Coolidge. But I don’t think it’s an accurate description of what Joyce is doing. Moretti takes pains to show us that Leopold Bloom’s language is characterized by its passivity and absent-mindedness, the replacement of action by consumption: “Things; then commodities; then images; then words; and finally possibilities.” At the microlevel, Moretti believes, modern epic allows for such freedom to fragment, suchbricolage. But it is not clear, at least to me, that the stream of consciousness technique has the freedom Moretti attributes to it. As the passages cited from “Lotus Eaters” and “Hades” make clear, even Bloom’s stream of consciousness is highly controlled. Joyce makes sure that his hero’s mind will always come back to such recurrent counters as the soap, Gilbraltar, “oh rocks,” the kidney, the Turkish bath. “Joyce’s parataxis,” says Moretti, “constructs separate, independent sentences,” but the seeming randomness and disconnection gives way, on closer inspection, to a dense network of echoes, all of them intricately related. This becomes more obvious if we ask ourselves: what doesn’t Bloom think about or see or notice? And the answer would include about eighty percent of “normal” observation and perception. It is no coincidence, for example, that Bloom thinks about kidneys or Plumtree’s Potted Meat but not about spinach or turnips.

It is not clear to me, then, that the microlevel of a text likeUlysses is all that different from the macrolevel. At that level, as Moretti convincingly argues, the drive, as in the case of Wagner, is toward totalization, toward what Eliot called, in his famous essay on Joyce, the “mythical method,” that is, “a way of controlling, of ordering, giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorma of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history.” Beginning with Chapter 7, “Aeolus,” Moretti argues, Joyce downplays the bricolage of the stream of consciousness in favor of a series of stylistic experiments (the weakest, Moretti suggests, is the musical structure of “Sirens”), allowing “the languages of modern institutions” to take over. The modern epic thus expresses an irresolvable tension between the remnant of individualism, as embodied in the stream of consciousness, and the “encyclopedic” drive toward a larger totality that is no longer fully believed in, much less trusted.

The dominance of institutional discourse in the latter part ofUlysses has been noted before, but I wonder if the distinction between it and the early chapters is all that sharp. Are Bloom and Stephen ever “individuals” in the full sense? And is it true that the various languages of Ulysses “do not communicate with one another,” that language fields have become “objects”? That Ulysses is, in Moretti’s words, “a novel without style, which is made up of styles without a novel”?

Moretti views Ulysses as a giant complexity system–a “mechanism so easy to set in motion that it almost always ends up beingdominated by chance: by trivial affinities . . . or accidental similarities.” And he cites J.-L. LeMoigne: “Complexity is the property of a system that can be modelled to show behaviours that are not all predetermined (necessary) even if they are potentially foreseeable by an institutional observer of the system (possible).” The modern epic must be such a system because, unlike its earlier counterpart, it cannot construct an encyclopaedia: encyclopaedias already exist. Every reader, coming across Eliot’s or Pound’s fragments, makes up her own mental encyclopaedia, “which will inevitably be unlike anyone else’s. Context, in other words, has become so weak, and commonly accepted symbols have so wholly disintegrated in our commodity culture, that the complexity system is a necessary response. Yet complexity is frightening and so most modernist works have opted for some kind of reduction of it, the “totalitarian temptation–present from the start in the modern epic . . . is never absent in the world texts of modernism.” The Waste Land, for example, is in Moretti’s scheme of things, a “monologic Ulysses”; it subordinates complexity and bricolage to what is finally a rigid mythic superstructure.

If the totalitarian temptation is the aporia of modernism, Moretti finds a hopeful note in his final exemplar,One Hundred Years of Solitude (1968), a masterpiece no longer European but of the New World. In Garcia Marquez’s “novel,” Moretti finds that the perspective of Faust has been reversed. “We no longer see things from the core of the world-system–but from the periphery. And from this new viewpoint, epic digressions become something else. Interferences: weighty events, with long-lasting consequences.” Magic Realism, by this account is an answer to the polyphony of the Modernist Epic, it satisfies our thirst for “meaning,” for imagination,” for a “re-enchantment” denied by our own literature. Western technology and Western consumption which stand behind the problematic bricolage of the Western epic from Faust to The Cantos is here regarded as a game, a form of magic, and hence “nothing frightening.” In this scheme of things, the West looks to other continents for those “reserves of magic of the modern world-system” now denied us. And Moretti concludes,

The sixties. With the withdrawal from Africa, the phase of open colonial conquest comes to an end: the phase of gunboats, and military violence. And a novel reaches Europe which recounts those hundred years of history as an adventure filled with wonder. Is this perhaps the secret of One Hundred Years of Solitude?

As an explanation of Garcia Marquez’s enormous popularity in the West, this may well be convincing. No doubt we do go toOne Hundred Years for those “reserves of magic” we are otherwise too sophisticated to trust. Still, Moretti’s Epilogue strikes me as something of a cop-out. For the response he describes to Garcia Marquez’s novel and related non-Western texts seems like little more than exoticism, a new Noble Savagery that ignores the vexed relationship between the individual and the state in modernity, that bathes events and conflicts in a mysterious, magical glow.

Then, too, Moretti never comes back to his original thesis as to the bifurcation of Modernist literature, the competition, as it were, of epic and novel or epic and lyric. In regarding modern epics as necessarily “flawed” masterpieces vis-à-vis their classical counterparts, Moretti still adheres to the Marxist, more specifically the Lukácsian model of decline; indeed, he quotes Lukács’s Goethe and his Age as discussing Faust as the “poem of primary accumulation,” a work that tells of of “capital running with blood.” Like Lukács and like Fredric Jameson, who is an important presence in Modern Epic, Moretti is nostalgic for the “organized whole,” for a pre-Capitalist world in which there is not yet the necessity for the bricolage / polyphony paradigm he himself has put forward. And, again like Lukacs and Jameson, Ernst Bloch and Hans Blumenberg, Moretti regards the aporias of the modern metropolis and modern commodity culture as created solely by Capitalism, as if the Communist East had somehow produced more fruitful epic paradigms in the twentieth century.

Moretti knows, of course, that this is not the case, knows that the appeal the pre-Capitalist Macondo of Garcia Marquez holds for the West is more “magic” than “realism.” But he might have taken the next step and have recognized that those “sacred texts” of modernity he writes about are perhaps no more “flawed” thanParadise Lost or even The Aeneid – just different. And how could it be otherwise, given the transformations of culture in the past two centuries? For that matter, the modernist world-system to which Moretti refers is in fact already a thing of the past: surely at the end of century the collage, bricolage, and polyphony Moretti describes are no longer central. Free verse, for example, which Moretti treats as the signature of the “experience of complexity” is now on the way to being replaced, not by traditional metrics but by a visual layout that takes the page rather than the line as poetic unit. And so on.

Ironically, then, Moretti himself resorts to a model that is excessively encyclopaedic to account for the particular complexity systems he discusses. “Halving” modernism may not be enough. What, for example, is the relation of Ulysses toFinnegans Wake? On such questions, Moretti is curiously silent. Where he does excell, however, is in his ability to define the peculiar pathos of the modern epic’s quest to be at once individual and encyclopaedic, and to distinguish that quest from that of the more conventional bourgeois novel. Neither solemn nor in any way doctrinaire, he is a superb analyst of rhetoric as well as of the political unconscious of his chosen texts. And his own style is so lively, so informal and conversational, that he draws us easily into his own admittedly monologic orbit. Modern Epic is a bravura performance by an unusually engaging as well as learned critic.

Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art.

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 298 pp. $35.00 cloth. (VW)

Johanna Drucker, The Alphabet Labyrinth. The Letters in History and Imagination.

London: Thames and Hudson, 1995. 320 pp. $45.00cloth. (AL)

Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artist’s Books.

New York City: Granary Books, 1995. 377 pp. $35.00. (CAB)

Johanna Drucker, ThroughLight and the Alphabet. Druckwerk, 1986.

Johanna Drucker, Narratology. Druckwerk, 1994.

Available through Granary Books, New York.

Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff

Textual Practice, Volume 11, Issue 1 Spring 1997 , pages 133 – 142.

In 1986, the year she received her PhD in Visual Studies from Berkeley, Johanna Drucker produced a letterpress book, in an edition of fifty copies, called Through Light and the Alphabet. In her recent Century of Artist’s Books, she recalls:

I was intent on using contrasts in scale as a way of introducing hierarches of meaning and forms of movement into the printed text. [The book] disintegrates linear reading by the addition of a new typographic element on each successive opening. Once a typographic theme is introduced, it is sustained, so that by the time the book is finished, there is a complex multilinear text on the page. The differences in typographic scale allow these to be read at different rates but prohibit their ever being read all at once. (CAB 251).

The main such device, one Drucker discusses vis-à-vis Modernist experimental typography in The Visible Word, is paragonnage– ‘the incorporation of several different typefaces and/or sizes within a single line or word’ (VW 96). Thus the first two pages Through Light and the Alphabet look like this: (Figures 1 and 2)

The first page looks normal enough until we stop to take note of the repeated phrases in this ‘from A to A’ text. ‘A’s and ‘O’s (alpha and omega) predominate, and the visual field includes pairs like ‘conversations / conventions’, ‘amorphous’ / ‘various’, ‘according’ / ‘accounts’, ‘with’ / ‘wild’, ‘articulation’ / ‘imagination’. Visual and sound repetition thus serve to enact what the page ‘says’: this particular ‘conversation’ uses ‘conventions the others could be party to’, but takes off ‘on its own trajectory to mind the business being left out of the accounts.’ The new poetic world, Drucker suggests, is ‘too amorphous for repose inside of sweet articulation’; the material signifier is not just a transparent conduit to some ‘meaning’ above and outside it, but a ‘figure’ in its own right, whose various intensities haunt the retina. Inevitably, then, (page 2), paragonnage sets in, the isolated letters creating their own configurations– ‘NO’–’NO man’– map’–’manage’–’age’– ‘tO’ and, most interesting, ‘mage’, which calls upon us to hunt for the missing initial ‘I’– of ‘Image’, an ‘i’, in fact, available right above the ‘mage’ constellation in ‘na ming’. which also gives us ‘ming’. At the same time, the targeted words — ‘beguN’, ‘escaped’, ‘sle ep’, etc. –lose their identity; ‘begu’, ‘escaed’, ‘slep’: these have now become one-dimensional, there being no way to render them ‘meaningful’ except by restoring the original. But given the urge to take on the ‘business being left out’, typographical deformations become more and more marked until we come to the last page where ‘the’ provides its ‘e’ to produce ‘expEriEncE’ and simultaneously modifes the words ‘ sitE’ and ‘ReSPOnSE’. Experience–site–response: the reader is left to construe the relationship of these nouns in this particular narrative.

Of the many visual poets and book artists now working in the U.S. Johanna Drucker may well be the most important, especially given her range, from ‘letter’ texts like Through Light and the Alphabet and The Word Made Flesh (1989) to the complex ‘illustrated’ narratives like The History of the/ my Wor(l)d (1994) and the computer manipulated, ‘quarked’ and hand-painted Narratology (1994), whose ‘True Romance’ and science fiction stories and multiplex images are those, Drucker tells us, ‘acccording to which I thought my life would be lived, which shaped my expectations, the psychic disposition according to which the narrative of experience took its responsive form, in synthetic dialogue getting at the peculiar, particular condition of the imaginary in which living one’s life was in/through writing/ representation, not outside it, inside it, or in opposition, but in something which was a version of the real as the represented.’ [1]

But what makes Drucker even more remarkable is that she is also a scholar-critic-theorist, a Yale art history professor who has produced the three books under review here as well as Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition (New York: Columbia, 1994)–all of them published by major presses within the two-year span 1994-95, although, as Drucker points out, The Visible Word was originally written some ten years earlier as an outgrowth of her Berkeley dissertation. Considering that Drucker also edits (with Brad Freeman) the Journal of Artist’s Books, continues to publish her own artist’s books (the most recent I have seen is The Current Line of 1996), and writes frequently for various art publications on visual poetics and related topics, she might be considered a one-woman growth industry: the verbal / visual text of the nineties: c’est elle.

Such staggering industry (one wonders how Drucker managed so much as to proofread her four scholarly books, let alone write them, in such a short period!) is not without its risks. As a theorist, Drucker is, by her own account, derivative. The Visible Word, the earliest of the three books to be discussed here, tries to ground avant-garde visual poetics in post-structuralist theory, tracing the line from Saussure and Jakobson to Derrida and Kristeva. Central as Derrida is for the theory of signification, Drucker argues, his notion of trace structure as différance leaves no room ‘for the apprehension of materiality’ (VW 39). Kristeva’s distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic, on the other hand, allowing as it does for the extralinguistic, ‘reincorporates into the system of signification elements which had been eliminated or neglected by classical semiotics’ (VW 42). But Kristeva was thinking of the extralinguistic within language rather than of the insertion of visual elements into the intermedia text, and the fact is, that when Drucker turns to the discussion of specific avant-garde texts, she relies less on Kristeva (or any other theorist) than on the theories and manifestos of the poets themselves.

Chapter 1 might thus be skipped: the real argument begins in Chapter 2, in which Drucker outlines the history of experimental typography, its origins in late nineteenth-century poster design, advertising graphics, and lithography, coupled with such ‘high art’ forerunners as William Blake’s illuminated plates and William Morris’s Kelmscott Press book designs. The ‘visible word’, Drucker argues, was part of the larger subversive attack on art as representation of external reality; by the end of the century, she suggests, the technology of letterpress typography had produced a distinction between two kinds of texts, ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’– a distinction that roughly corresponds to the split between commercial and literary uses of typography. The ‘unmarked’ text is the normal ‘undisturbed block’ of uniform print, the text as vehicle for the straightforward conveyance of meaning. ‘All interference, resistance, must be minimized in order to allow the reader a smooth reading of the unfolding linear sequence’ (VW 95). The ‘marked’ text, on the other hand, uses varieties of type faces, ‘the breakup of the page into various zones of activity,’ the use of diagonal and vertical lines, and so on, to call attention to its materiality; it the text one cannot ‘read through’.

This is a useful distinction because even today, when advertising relies on increasingly sophisticated use of ‘marked’ texts, discussion of ‘serious’ literature rarely pays attention to the ‘look’ of the page rather than what that page ‘says’. But it is also a simplification: the marked / unmarked distinction could just as well apply to purely linguistic texts: George Eliot, say, versus Gertrude Stein, whose print blocks, uniform as they may look, can hardly be ‘read through’. Still, if we give Drucker her donnée here, we need not worry the case, for her real concern, which she now goes on to detail, is the development of experimental typography and layout from Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés to the Dada configurations of Tristan Tzara, and beyond. Her discussion of Marinetti’s parole in libertà (pp. 105-40) is perhaps the best analysis of these controversial works we have to date. Admiring Italian Futurist technique, its inventiveness, its genuine breakthrough, Drucker nevertheless recognizes the limitations of what she refers to as Marinetti’s ‘linguistic mimesis’, its faith in the visual representation of specific referents, as in Marinetti’s rollcalls of nouns connected by mathematical symbols (e.g., ‘baisers + – x + + caresses + fraicheur’) in Chair, or in his onomatopoeic sound effects (‘Karazouc-zouc-zouc / nadI-nadI AAAAaaaaaa’) in Dunes (VW 121-22). Marinetti’s poetics, she suggests, ‘was predicated on a faith in the capacity of typography to produce adequate analogies’ (VW 117), a ‘mechanistic insistence on the rapport between the look of a page with the sensation it recorded’ (VW 140).

Apollinaire’s experiments are judged to be less literal, less iconic: among the Calligrammes, often criticized for their obvious mimesis as in the figuration of words as raindrops in ‘Pluie’, there are collages like ‘Lettre-Océan’ and ‘Visées’ that create a highly complex visual / verbal field that requires complex deciphering. And in Ilia Zdanevich’s hermetic cycle of plays called Ledentu (1923), avant-garde typography, here based on the concept of the letter rather than the onomatopoeic word or the visualized referent, creates a ‘performance on the page’ even more striking. Zhdanevich’s astonishing zaum texts, Drucker suggests, defy all attempts at linear reading; morphemes and words interact in intricate patterns. Although Drucker relies on others for the meaning of the Russian words and phrases, her readings of Zdanevich strike me as more valuable than those of a more conventional art historian like Susan Compton (see Worldbackwards: Russian Futurist Books [British Museum, 1978]), who writes well on Russian avant-garde visual forms but slights their linguistic play.

Drucker next turns to Tzara’s particular incorporation of public discourse into Dada typography (the beginning of the rapprochement between ‘high’ and ‘low’), and she concludes with what she takes to be the end of first-stage avant-garde visual poetics that occurred with the coming of Surrealism, and its ‘repression of typographic enunciation.’ (VW 225). André Breton ‘feared the material pollution of writing, fearing that its voluptuous appeal might interfere with the purity of language’. His own poems and fictions marked a return ‘to the authority of logocentric discourse’ (VW 225). I find the suggestion that there is something ‘retro’ about Surrealism very provocative and fruitful and wish Drucker had developed it more fully. Strictly speaking, however, the notion that the non-visualized verbal text is necessarily logocentric is one that few critics would accept. Was Rimbaud, whose typography is fairly conventional, less ‘innovative’ than Mallarmé? Kafka, whose texts are visually ‘unmarked’ less revolutionary than Marinetti? Or can, as in the case of Beckett, language itself embody the ‘making strange’ Drucker takes to be the property of the verbal / visual text? [2]

Related questions may arise from a reading of The Century of Artist’s Books. As the history and anthropology of an important modern and especially postmodern genre, this beautifully produced book could hardly be improved upon. In the Introduction, Drucker carefully distinguishes the twentieth-century genre from its forerunners, from the ‘editorially controlled’ deluxe livre d’artiste, often the commissioned collaboration between an artist and a writer who have little in common, and from the book made by an artist that is still not quite an ‘artist’s book’, its ‘bookness’ not being of primary concern. ‘Artists’ books are almost always self-conscious about the structure and meaning of the book as a form’ (CAB 29). In subsequent chapters, Drucker studies, in minute and telling detail, the subgenres of artist’s books: the ‘democratic multiple’ (as in Isidore Isou and Ed Ruscha), the ‘rare and/or auratic object’ (Marcel Duchamp, Christian Boltanski), the Codex (Michael Snow, Lucas Samaras), the ‘self-reflexive’ book (Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams, Michael Goodman), the book as ‘visual form’ (Bruce Nauman, Sol LeWitt), as ‘verbal exploration’ (Steve McCaffery, Madeline Gins, Bernard Heidsieck), as ‘sequence, narrative and non-narrative’ (Janet Zweig, Holly Anderson, Ida Appelbroog), as ‘agent of social change’ (Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke, Suzanne Lacy), and finally as ‘conceptual space’ (Bill Tuttle, Lawrence Weiner) and as ‘document’ (Daniel Buren, Alison Knowles, Bill Burke). Drucker admits that these are not hard and fast categories: indeed, her own work is discussed under the rubric of Codex (Bookscape), self-reflexive book (From A to Z), and book as verbal exploration (The Word Made Flesh and Through Light and the Alphabet). Similarly, the Ed Ruscha artist’s book, a primary exemplar of the ‘democratic multiple’, also figures prominently as ‘narrative’ and, in the case of Stains, as ‘document’.

Given this fluidity, the concluding chapter, ‘Metaphor and Form’ may strike us as slightly over the top. The artist’s book, Drucker twice claims, no doubt theorizing her own brilliant art practice, is ‘the quintessential 20th-century artform’ (CAB 1, 362). The ‘critical tension between the apparent conventionality of the book and its capacity to be reinvented anew through creative practice’ is unique, as is the ‘tension between the seeming simplicity of [its] conventional form and the unlimited complexity produced through the relation of elements to each other in a finite arrangement’ (CAB 359). The artist’s book, Drucker concludes ‘is unparalleled for its richness of detail, variety, and repleteness’.

Such specific characterization of a genre seems out of sync with the very postmodern spirit that produced the books in question, including Drucker’s own. Unlike such basic modes as painting and sculpture, the ‘artist’s book’ is a hybrid, a genre largely used by artists and poets as ancillary to their other work–witness Duchamp and Boltanski, Max Ernst and Marcel Broodthaers, Robert Smithson and Sol LeWitt. Dick Higgins’ Of Celebration of Morning (1980), for example, (see CAB 271) is one of a series of the artist’s Fluxus works, perhaps more appropriately grouped with other Fluxus works–postcards, installations, manifestos, broadsides– than with, say, the feminist political artists’ books of Suzanne Lacy or Martha Rosler. Genre, in such instances, may well be subordinate to larger stylistic and ideological choices.

What artists’ books do share–and more might have been said about this aspect of book production –is an economic imperative. The artist’s book can be (though it isn’t always) inexpensive to make, it can be produced from limited materials, it does not depend on the dealer-system and gallery system as do other kinds of art and so it is especially appealing in today’s harsh market environment where dissemination of an artist’s work becomes ever more problematic. Artists’ books can be made in multiples, they can be owned by more than one museum; yet they retain the aura of the unique art object. And certainly Drucker’s superb descriptions of actual printing and computer techniques, materials and bindings, make The Century of Books a reference book anyone interested in contemporary art practices must read. Indeed, the author’s knowledge and expertise are dazzling: she seems to have personally examined every significant artist’s book made over the last few decades and is able describe the minutiae of their respective modes of production.

Considerations of production brings me finally to The Alphabetic Labyrinth, which is my favorite of Drucker’s scholarly books. Beautifully produced by Thames and Hudson and lavishly illustrated, The Alphabetic Labyrinth is a pure pleasure. It takes the most familiar of materials, the alphabet we use every day, and traces its 4,000-year history as a set of visual symbols that have been ‘construed as indices of the most profound mysteries of the universe’ (AL12). The all but universal drive to visualize the alphabet is especially startling given the fact that the alphabet is, by definition, a phonetic series: each letter represents a single sound of a spoken language. Further, ‘in spite of the vast variety in contemporary visual appearance which is the result of centuries of specialized adaptation, all alphabetic forms share the same origin and possess structural properties: they consist of about twenty-four to thirty signs used to represent the sounds of spoken language’ (AL 13). All the more fascinating, then, the elaborate encoding of cosmological and philosophical truths attributed to these basic signs.

The Alphabetical Labyrinth makes no claim to being a work of original scholarship; it is dependent on the researches of archeologists, paleontologists, sinologists, as well as Hebrew, Classical and Renaissance scholars. But Drucker uses her eagle artist’s eye to rethink the findings of these scholars on everything from Pythagorean assimilations of letter-forms to number theories, to Gnostic doctrines of the word as emanation of the Divine Light, to the Runic alphabet of the Anglo-Saxons and the Merovignian miniscules of the eight century, right down to the typography of advertising and various alphabet myths in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Since I cannot possibly do justice to the wealth of material in The Alphabetic Labyrinth, let me give just one example, the discussion of the Kabbalah in Chapter VI. The last few decades have seen countless treatments of Kabbalistic mysteries, doctrines, symbolisms, and yet Drucker’s treatment is remarkably fresh. ‘In the Kabbalah,’ she reminds us, ‘the contemplation and manipulation of the letters is considered a means of approaching God through meditation and esoteric interpretation; the alphabet is granted a high degree of sanctity since the twenty-two letters are considered to be the very elements by which God brings the world into being’ (129). A discussion of various Sephirotic trees from various sixteenth and seventeenth century sources (gorgeously illustrated) is followed by a detailed account of the esoteric alphabet symbolism of the Sefir Yetzirah or Book of Creation, adding, where relevant, the more common, exoteric meanings ascribed to each letter by later Kabbalistic writers like Aryeh Kaplan, Perle Epstein, Johann Reuchlin and Carlo Suares. Here is Vau ( ):

Vau is associated with Taurus, with thought, the right kidney, property, and the tribe of Simeon. Exoterically, Vau represents a nail, which reflects the light from its polished head. Nailheads were used as a system of divination in which the figures made in these reflections of light were interpreted. Vau can also signify a doorknob, thus a means of opening a door of understanding or insight. In its visual form it resembles an impregnating, fertilizing agent. (AL 149)

A seemingly simple ideogram with complex symbolic possibilities. Drucker now studies these in relation to the gematria (the numerical values of the letters assigned to the alphabet according to their sequence) and then to the making of the golem.

Like the Kabbalistic letters, The Alphabetical Labyrinth participates in more than one sequence. As an accessible, marvelously illustrated history of the alphabet’s visual symbolism and a compendium of hermetic and esoteric lore, it should have enormous appeal for the lay reader. But for artists, poets, and students of postmodern culture, the book has a rather different interest. Read against Johanna Drucker’s own artists’ books, particularly the ‘lettrist’ books like Through Light and the Alphabet, as well as her critical studies, it shows us how powerful the tradition of the ‘visible word’ really is and how great a potential it has for poetics today. Although Drucker never says so (and she may not even have been aware of it when she began work on The Visible Word some ten years ago), it now appears that it is the ‘unmarked’ text– the standard novel, critical essay, biography, autobiography, and so on– that is exceptional. The visualization of the letter and the word, the reliance on the page rather than the line or stanza or the gray block of text with justified margins as unit, this ‘new’ phenomenon, still treated with enormous suspicion in the discourses of literary and cultural criticism, is really quite ancient. One needn’t mount elaborate semiotic theories of verbal / visual relationships to conclude that the materiality of language–the way a given text looks on the page or, more recently, on the computer screen– should be, as it was for many centuries, intrinsic to its meaning. As these ‘Druckwerks’ compellingly show, not word and image but word is image.

Party in the Blitz: The English Years.

By Elias Canetti

Translated by Michael Hofmann. With an Afterword by Jeremy Adler. New York: New Directions. 249 pages. $23.

Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff

published in Bookforum, Dec/Jan 2006.

The autobiographical trilogy takes us from Canetti’s childhood (he was born in 1905 to a well-off Sephardic Jewish merchant family in Ruschuk, a village in what was then an Eastern outpost of the Austro-Hungarian empire and is now Bulgaria) to the late ’30s in Vienna, the once imperialist capital, now on the verge of being absorbed into greater Nazi Germany. Party in the Blitz, the fourth and posthumous volume of Canetti’s autobiography, a book his German editors cobbled together from various drafts, still incomplete at the time of Canetti’s death in 1994, carries on in the earlier mode, although in much more fragmented diary form. Its focus is on Canetti’s “English” years: He arrived in London as a refugee in 1939 and remained there for the four decades. Writing in his mid-eighties about people and events closer to his present than those of the earlier volumes, Canetti is as engaged as he is deeply ambivalent.

Party in the Blitz , admirably translated by Michael Hofmann, begins and ends on a savagely pessimistic note: Contemporary England is characterized as “a country now stuck in its deepest wretchedness, its best institutions, which once were models to the rest of the world, now in pieces,” a “country going to the dogs, not through any foreign occupation and oppression, but by its own volition and choice.” Again and again, Canetti mocks the English Gefühlsimpotenz (emotional impotence), as he experienced it at the countless parties he attended over the years—those Nichtberührungsfeste (no-touch festivities) characterized by the “distance” of those who “sheathe [themselves] in ice.” Indeed, Canetti’s raillery against the bloodless English, intellectually and sexually active but emotionally deficient, recalls the D. H. Lawrence of the World War I years, who writes his friend S. S. Koteliansky that he must leave an England that “oppresses one’s lungs,” an England where “one cannot breathe.”

But unlike Lawrence, Canetti, familiar as he was with the violence and chaos of Central Europe, admired and envied the discipline and order of his adopted country. Then, too, England was the place he had lived as a small boy, his father having removed his family to Manchester on a business venture with his maternal uncles—a decision that called down on his head the curse of Grandfather Canetti. The childhood English idyll, described so movingly in The Tongue Set Free, ended abruptly, after a mere two years, with his adored father’s sudden death at age thirty-one—a death that spelled expulsion from paradise for this high-strung child, whose favorite books were already Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. Canetti’s young mother, with whom he was to have an excessively close relationship for the rest of her life, took him and his younger brothers to Vienna, but although Canetti regarded German as his native tongue and lived in the German-speaking world (Austria, Germany, Switzerland) until the Anschluss, he was, like Wittgenstein, convinced that England was a better, juster nation than any other, a nation that in World War II, “gave the world the best of itself, the first resistance against the maniac who threatened to stop at nothing.” Indeed, whatever unkind things Canetti has to say about Britain, The Party in the Blitz is also a memorial to the courage and decency—if sometimes coupled with absurdity—of ordinary Englishmen in wartime.

Take, for example, Gordon Milburn, the stingy but kind-hearted retired vicar at whose country house in the New Forest the Canettis boarded during the worst months of the London Blitz, when their Hampstead house was considered inhabitable:

[Mr. Milburn’s] conscience was as inexhaustible as his feelings were atrophied and withered. Whilst in India, he had become interested in the Upanishads. . . [but] he had rapidly come up against what was in his nature: discriminations, separations, sharp distinctions. So the Upanishads could not quench his thirst for feeling either, and he gave up on them too, without however condemning or decrying them. What never failed to astonish me about him was the richness of the sects he had tried out. He pulled on each one like a jacket, and then took it off again, he didn’t throw any away, he kept them all, just as if they had been old clothes, I think that was the source of his avarice, the fact that he could never bear to part with any of the beliefs he had ever worn.

Mrs. Milburn, by contrast, is a blank slate, an innocent who believes war and evil don’t exist. Many comic misapprehensions take place, not the least involving the local prophetess Miss Slough as well as Mr. Milburn’s attempt to “understand” the poetry of Hölderlin, Canetti acting as his tutor. Then, too, the village boasts a street sweeper Canetti befriends, an expert on the Bible and the religious writings of George Fox.

Pastoral interludes such as the New Forest stay are remembered as largely happy, even as the parties which Canetti attended assiduously, all the while complaining that he loathed such affairs, were more problematic. At one level, Canetti enjoyed meeting famous artists, writers and intellectuals—William Empson and his “benevolent” Communist wife Hetta, who generally seemed quite unaware of her husband’s views or occupations, Bertrand Russell, Herbert Read, the historian Veronica Wedgwood, and the Sinologist Arthur Waley. His openness to those who might have been considered political enemies is surprising: He was, for example, a frequent guest of Diana Spearman, the “ex-wife of a Conservative Member of Parliament,” where he met, among others, Enoch Powell, later known for his notorious racism. Canetti engages Powell in conversation about Dante and Nietzsche, and admires the young M.P.’s intellect even though “I don’t know that I have ever encountered anyone quite so antithetical to everything I stand for.”

In a brilliantly terse chapter, Canetti describes a party given during the Blitz by the “famously wealthy patron of the arts” Roland Penrose at his three-story mansion on Downshire Hill in Hampstead. As Canetti makes his way from the top floor to the basement, he realizes he is descending from the dancing-and-drinking circle to the orgy on the lowest floor, where sexual couplings are carried on quite openly against the sounds of bombs falling outside. But this is not all. “The door into the garden was ajar, men in firemen’s helmets reached for buckets of sand, which they carried out very fast, with sweat on their faces. They heeded nothing they saw in the room, in their haste to protect the burning houses in the neighbourhood, they reached blindly for the sand-filled buckets.” And yet it turns out that this fire brigade, so alien to the self-absorbed couples, “consisted of volunteers from the same street, including the odd young poet, whom I would never have recognized in his exertions.” And now we read:

After about an hour, I left the house, I was neither frightened nor indignant, though I was embarrassed by the unflappable lovers beside the puffing firemen; but as the latter showed not the least surprise, merely plunging in and out again, they didn’t try to bust anything up; leaving the others undisturbed seemed to be at least as important to them as it did to the lovers that they remained entwined. On each side there was determination, I was amazed by the self-control of the English, who refused to be distracted by anything or anyone, then I was embarrassed by my own embarrassment, and thought I felt what English Puritanism really was, which I had always been frightened and in awe of.

Here the sense of privacy, of emotional non-contact Canetti decries elsewhere in the book is shown to have, after all, some value. Perhaps what Canetti calls “English Puritanism” made it possible for the island culture to persist.

Such incidents, in any case, give the reader a superb sense of what day-to-day-life was like during the Battle of Britain. People, as Canetti sees them, are known, not by their stated principles but by their behavior. It is in this context that we must understand the author’s portrait of Iris Murdoch—a portrait, so Jeremy Adler tells us in his excellent Afterword, that enraged many of Canetti’s German reviewers (the German edition was published in 2003) as did his even more vicious representation of T. S. Eliot. True, the image of Eliot, whom Canetti  barely knew, as “a libertine of the void, a foothill of Hegel, a desecrator of Dante . . . thin lipped, cold hearted, prematurely old,” is too mean-spirited to be taken seriously: One senses that Eliot plays a purely symbolic role in the Canetti pantheon of artists and their avatars. The Murdoch chapter, on the other hand, is as memorable as it is devastating. The two writers meet through the poet and ethnologist Franz Steiner, Canetti’s closest literary friend in England and Murdoch’s fiancé, who dies prematurely in his early forties. Sharing their grief, Canetti soon senses that Murdoch is using the occasion to make overtures to him:

She visited again in the course of that winter, she was always talking about Steiner, and we kissed. I don’t remember when exactly it happened, but it happened very soon, and it was the familiar pained face. . . .

But the extraordinary thing happened as soon as we had kissed. The couch I always slept on was to hand. Quickly, very quickly, Iris undressed, without me laying a finger on her, she had things on that didn’t have anything remotely to do with love, it was all woollen and ungainly, but in no time it was in a heap on the floor, and she was under the blanket on the couch. There wasn’t time to look at her things or herself. She lay unmoving and unchanged, I barely felt myself enter her, I didn’t sense that she felt anything, perhaps I might felt something if she had resisted in some form. But that was as much out of the question as any pleasure. The only thing I noticed was that her eyes darkened, and that her reddish Flemish skin got a little redder.

No sooner was it finished, she was still lying flat on her back, than she became animated and started to talk. She was caught in a peculiar dream: she was in a cave with me, I was a pirate, I had snatched her away and dragged her back to my cave, where I had flung her down and ravished her. I sensed how happy she was with this pretty commonplace story. . . .

However cruel this passage may seem so far as the “real” Murdoch is concerned, Canetti’s is a profound portrait of a woman who practices what Lawrence called, with reference to his own character Hermione in Women in Love, “sex in the head.” It is neither Murdoch’s aggressiveness nor her promiscuity that shocks her passive lover; rather, he is repulsed by her lack of feeling, her intellectualizing of what should be a sensuous pleasure. Just so, he argues, Murdoch’s philosophical writings are parasitical, absorbing Wittgenstein or Heidegger or Hegel and drawing what she extracts into her own all-too-clever system. “Everything I despise about English life is in her,” says Canetti. “You could imagine her speaking incessantly, as a tutor, and incessantly listening: in the pub, in bed, in conversation with her male and female lovers.”

This could hardly be nastier—and after all, Canetti is complicit—but Party in the Blitz has to be understood in the context of the previous volumes of Canetti’s memoirs. His “earliest memory,” recorded in The Tongue set Free, is “dipped in red”—a reference to his young Bulgarian nanny’s boyfriend, who teased the two-year old baby every morning with a jackknife, threatening to cut off his tongue. This “red” memory is soon echoed by his mother’s stories of youthful sleigh rides, where wolves could he heard in the distance, presumably sticking out their “red tongues,” a world where a crowd of gypsies fills the Canetti house every Friday night, receiving food from their benefactors, and where the little boy picks up a workman’s axe and threatens to kill his slightly older, much ly loved cousin Laurica because she taunts him for not yet having learned how to read.

It is a world of violence and extreme emotional states, and the mature Canetti cannot ever suppress his essential “Eastern” temperament, however much he admires the West, and especially an England so antithetical to his own make-up. Party in the Blitz is thus much more than a set of incisive but unrelated portraits; it is the culmination of Canetti’s exile narrative—a narrative completed, hard as it is to believe, by an eighty-seven-year old man, still swinging that axe at his detractors. The “serenity of old age,” Canetti admits on his final page, is a quality “which I don’t possess, or only sometimes, all too rarely.”

Marjorie Perloff’s most recent books areThe Vienna Paradox (New Directions, 2004) and Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (University of Alabama, 2004), cowinner of the 2005 Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award.

]]> http://marjorieperloff.com/reviews/elias-canetti/feed/ 0 http://marjorieperloff.com/reviews/songs-in-flight/ http://marjorieperloff.com/reviews/songs-in-flight/#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:57:01 +0000 marie http://www.wp.amaranthborsuk.com/?page_id=357 THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE

Songs in Flight, The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann.

Edited and translated by Peter Filkins.  Marsilio.

Translated by Donald Revell

Wesleyan University Press, 1995.  $30.00 (c), $15.95 (p).

Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff

published in The Boston Review 21, no. 1 (FEB/MARCH 1996): 33-34.

There is a further paradox.  From Samuel Beckett, who was commissioned to translate “Zone,” to Paul Blackburn and W. S. Merwin, a good number of poets have tried their hand at translating Apollinaire, even as other poets like Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg have claimed this “father of Dada” (O’Hara’s epithet) as their master.  Yet, just as Padgett was the first poet to take on Cendrars in anything like systematic fashion, Revell is the first poet to give us a full-scale Apollinaire–an Apollinaire, moreover, who is very much our contemporary.

“I chose,” Revell explains in his preface, “to translate many passages in Alcools as ‘incorrect’ mixes of high and low diction, of latinate and slang, of abstracted concretes and concretized abstractions, because it is just such mixes that have made Apollinaire so enabling to our contemporary poets.”  And again, “I have tried, in translating Apollinaire to the end of his century, to present him a new suit of grammars, a suit cut after his own audacious style.”  Such updating is necessary, Revell posits, today when “an exaggerated sense of ‘now’ suppresses the more genuine, more useful sense of “for now” inscribed within the etymology of ‘modern.’” (p. xi).

Let’s see what this means in practice.  Here is a passage  roughly halfway through the volume’s opening poem “Zone” (1912). It is the moment when the exuberance of the poet’s stroll through the noisy Paris streets begins to give way to something darker:

Maintenant tu marches dans Paris tout seul parmi la foule
Des troupeaux d’autobus mugissant près de toi roulent
L’angoisse de l’amour te serre le gosier
Comme si tu ne devais jamais plus être aimé
Si tu vivais dans l’ancien temps tu entrerais dans un monastère
Vous avez honte quand vous vous surprenez à dire une prière
Tu te moques de toi et comme le feu de l’Enfer ton rire pétille
Les etincelles de ton rire dorent le fond de ta vie
C’est un tableau pendu dans un sombre musée
Et quelque fois tu vas le regarder de près

Aujourd’hui tu marches dans Paris les femmes sont ensanglantées
C’était et je voudrais ne pas m’en souvenir c’était au déclin de la beauté
(ll. 71-82)

Anne Hyde Greet renders this as follows:

Now you stride alone through the Paris crowds
Busses in bellowing herds roll by
Anguish clutches your throat
As if you would never again be loved
In the old days you would have turned monk
With shame you catch yourself praying
And jeer     your laughter crackles like hellfire
Its sparks gild the depths of your life
Which like a painting in a dark museum
You approach sometimes to peer at closely

Today in Paris the women are bloodstained
It was as I would rather forget it was during beauty’s decline  (Alcools, p.7)

Compare Revell:

You are walking in Paris alone inside a crowd
Herds of buses bellow and come too close
Love-anguish clutches your throat
You must never again be loved
In the Dark Ages you would have entered a monastery
You are ashamed to overhear yourself praying
You laugh at yourself and the laughter crackles like hellfire
The sparks gild the ground and background of your life
Your life is a painting in a dark museum
And sometimes you examine it closely

You are walking in Paris the women are bloodsoaked
It was and I have no wish to remember it was the end of beauty

Greet’s translation is the more accurate of the two:   “Des troupeaux d’autobus mugissants” literally means “bellowing herds of buses,” “dans l’ancien temps” means “the old days,” not quite Revell’s “the Dark Ages,” and in line 82, the reference is, as Greet translates it, to “beauty’s decline,” not to its “end.”  But the great feat Revell has brought off is to render Apollinaire’s racy, nervous, colloquial French in comparable paratactic clauses, specifically in simple subject-verb-object units that render the sense of presence and simultaneity central to Apollinaire’s montage.   “You are walking in Paris alone inside a crowd”:  given the cataloguing of images in the stanza, the reference to “Now” (“Maintenant”) is gratuitous, “are walking” is much more effective than “you stride,” and “alone inside the crowd” emphasizes the poet’s growing alienation much more fully than “you stride alone through the Paris crowds.”  In the next line–and here is a favorite Revell device–the modifying participle becomes an active verb: “Herds of buses bellow and come too close,” the latter construction signifying the underlying meaning of “près de toi roulent.”

Throughout the stanza, the “as if”s and “which” constructions, constructions that rationalize the fluidity of Apollinaire’s unpunctuated verse, are replaced by a collaging of equally weighted fragments.  In lines 79-80, for example, Revell dispenses with Greet’s cumbersome simile (“your life / Which like a painting” and lets the observation stand alone: “Your life is a painting in a dark museum / And sometimes you examine it closely.”  The covert reference here is to the painful scandal in which Apollinaire was accused of having stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and had to spend a few days in jail before being cleared.  It was the sort of incident that made the poet, himself an exile, “examine” (Revell’s rendition of “regarder”) himself in a rare moment of introspection–a moment that leads to the vision of Paris as a city of “femmes ensanglantées,” followed by the famous line in which the second-person self- address (whether “tu” or “vous”) abruptly switches to “je” echoing Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre.”  The dissolution of self is prefaced by “C’était,” the verb left hanging with no predicate.   It was . . . what?   Greet rationalizes this famous line by turning the “et” into an “as”–”as I would rather forget it was during beauty’s decline.”  Revell restores the ambiguity and again proceeds paratactically: “and I have no wish to remember it was the end of beauty,” which is more matter-of-fact, less posturing than “during beauty’s decline.”

Revell thus gives us an Apollinaire who is, in David Antin’s words about Charles Olson, “a man on his feet, talking.”  “You are ashamed to overhear yourself praying,” for example, has the note of actual conversation–a note absent from Greet’s  “With shame you catch yourself praying,”   And so this remarkable poet of the avant guerre, an urban poet whose proto-Dada, proto-Surrealist, comic-fantastic inflections look straight ahead to O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” poems, to Ginsberg’s manic catalogues, and to John Ashbery’s journeys to mysterious places that turn out to be right in the poet’s own backyard.  Once unencumbered by the baggage of neo-Victorian diction characteristic of most earlier Apollinaire translation–for example, ”you stride alone,” “With shame you catch,” “jeer,” “peer at closely” in the Greet translation above– the his outsider status by becoming the most patriotic of Frenchmen and rushing to enlist in the Great War, a decision that led to his premature death at thirty-eight from the head wounds he had received in battle.   Again like Cendrars, his poetic diction is an amalgam of solecisms, archaisms, foreign phrases, street slang, and eclectic religious and mythological vocabulary.   The precariousness of his sense of identity is the subject of many of his finest poems, especially “Cortège,” where the poet in a dream-vision sees “Tous ceux qui survenaient et n’étaient pas moi-même” (“The many who passed and were not me”),  and who “carried fragments” of a  self that could never come together.

Apollinaire’s Paris is a long way from Baudelaire’s; it is the Paris of refugees, whose odor fills the hall of the “gare Saint-Lazare”, who carry “red eiderdowns” even as the poet himself carries his heart.  It is also the Paris of “Christs of another shape another faith / Subordinate Christs of uncertain hopes” in the form of South Sea and Guinean fetishes.  And, most of all, it is a Paris that the poet adores but is always leaving–to go to Marseilles, Coblenz, Amsterdam, the trenches–almost anywhere.  It is thus that Baudelaire’s imaginary voyage has become real, only to be even more disillusioning than its precursor.

Revell’s translation is not without its faults.  The rendition of the last line of “Zone,”for example,  the famous “Soleil cou coupé” as “Sun cut throated” strikes me as awkward compared to Greet’s “Sun   slit throat,” or Shattuck’s “Sun a severed head.”   The great last stanza of “Cortège” is marred by the translation of “Rien n’est mort que ce qui n’existe pas encore” as “Nothing has died that never existed,” which undercuts the poet’s conclusion that nothing dies except that which has never existed.”  In the same poem, “Baisse ta deuxième paupière” is curiously rendered as “Abase your other eye,” where “Lower” would, I think, have done nicely.   And in “Les Fiançailles”: “la lune qui cuit comme un oeuf sur le plat” (“the moon that sizzles like a fried egg”) is deprived of its sizzle and, contrary to Revell’s usual predilection for active verbs, becomes “The moon is a fried egg.”

But these are minor flaws in what is an ambitious and important poetic project.  My own hope is that Revell will now take on the Calligrammes as well  and give us a Collected Poems.   We need one and Revell, whose visual sense is as acute as his verbal, is just the person to do it.

MARJORIE PERLOFF

published in Thumbscrew, 18 (Spring 2001): 46-48.

John Ashbery: Your Name Here. Manchester: Carcanet. £7.95

David Herd. John Ashbery and American Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. £45.00.

* * *For the past decade, John Ashbery has been producing a new book of poems almost every year—a situation that, for just about any other poet, would signify excess. Can the lyric poet, one wonders, continue to produce at this rate? Has Ashbery’s vision changed dramatically, his experience taken a new turn? Has there been a noticeable stylistic shift? Have the poet’s advancing years (Ashbery is now over seventy) brought the wisdom Yeats claimed as the compensation for what he called ‘bodily decrepitude’?

It is probably too soon to assess the overall trajectory of Ashbery’s poetic career. But as this dazzling new collection makes clear, his ability to produce memorable poems uniquely his own remains undiminished. True, one could argue that there is a generic Ashbery poem. The speaker usually begins with an observation — ‘Disturbing news emanates from the wind tunnel’ or ‘Out on the terrace the projector had begun / making a shuttling sound like that of land crabs’—an observation that involves seemingly absurd detail or non-functional simile. An Ashbery poem characteristically collages childhood memories, present conversations, and interweaving narratives —almost always non-sequiturs that nevertheless add up to the sensation of being alive, here and now, in the bizarre, media-filled culture of the late twentieth century. The bemused and beleaguered Ashbery voice is immediately recognizable in such locutions as ‘I know I shall one day come to the reason / for manners and intercourse with persons. / Therefore I launch my hat on this peg’, or ‘I am wondering where to stand—could that group of three / or four others be the beginning of the line?’ Ashbery’s demonstrative pronouns remain largely indeterminate, so that when we read a line like ‘We doctored it all up’ (‘A Suit’), we cannot know what ‘it’ refers to. The preferred verse form continues to be a stanza of irregular length made up of long, loose free-verse lines, most of them enjambed. As for wisdom, the ‘I’ of these poems is just as uncertain, hesitant, self-deprecating, and receptive to new possibilities as was his younger self. He never pronounces, never generalizes, never claims to have the truth or even to experience the privileged moment when the poet sees into the life of things. If anything, these poems end, as does the brilliant ‘Sonatine Mélancolique’ with the memory of

A time when we too were out of step
and the whole sentient world offered to bathe us—
pale bluster, flubbing today again and again.

Despite such marked continuities, the new poems are recognizably different as well. For one thing, they are more relaxed, more humorous, more willing to let it all hang out than were those in, say, The Double Dream of Spring or Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Memory has become increasingly obsessive, playfulness and camp more acceptable, and dialogue with a ‘you’ who is a close friend or lover becomes the normal lyric mode as does the telling of tales that invokes a shared past. Bowdlerized citation used for burlesque effect—from pop song, poetry, newspaper headline, opera libretto, French novel, advertising jingle–has become a stock-in-trade: every line points to something we have heard before—but where? In this free-wheeling new landscape, the anxiety of such poems as ‘These Lacustrine Cities’ and ‘”They Dream Only of America”’ has given way to a certain measure of serenity. ‘Yes,’ we read at the conclusion of ‘A Suit’, ‘I could have told you that some time ago.’ But since we have no idea what ‘that’ is, the ending is not exactly reassuring either.

Take ‘Redeemed Area’, whose suggestive title encompasses all sorts of possibilities, from actual ‘redemption’ to its antithesis—an area ‘redeemed’ for the sinister uses of others. The poem opens with an absurd bit of dialogue, or is it monologue?

Do you know where you live? Probably.

How can one not know where one lives? Never mind: the narrator goes on to tell a more or less realistic story about one Abner (Li’l Abner of the comic strip?) ‘who ‘is getting too old to drive but won’t admit it’ and who goes out in search of ‘ cough drops / of a kind they don’t make anymore.’ But the ‘drugstore has been incorporated into a mall’ and ‘All the houses / are owned by the same guy, who’s been renting / them out to college students for years, so they are virtually uninhabited.’ It all makes good sense: students are known to wreck rental units and urban blight has brought decay to the ‘old’ neighborhood.

But just when we think that the poet is giving us a ‘normal’ account of suburban sprawl, a surreal note is introduced:

A smell of vitriol and socks pervades the area
like an open sewer in a souk. Anyway the cough drops
(a new brand) tasted pretty good—like catnip
or an orange slice that has lain on a girl’s behind.

If this sounds like mere clowning around, the drawing of absurd comparisons and making of foolish similes, think again. The smell really may be a mix of sulfuric acid and sweat (from dirty socks), thus reminding the poet—in a moment of comic alliteration, of an ‘open sewer in a souk’—a souk or Oriental bazaar. Cough drops do taste medicinal and hence perhaps like extract from the catnip plant, and as for that orange slice—how, one wonders, would lying on a girl’s behind affect its taste?

Here, as so often in Ashbery’s lyric, ‘nonsense’ turns out to be oddly apropos. For, as in Joyce’s ‘Araby,’ exoticism soon mutates into the merely tawdry. Consider the next stanza:

That’s the electrician calling now—
nobody else would call before 7 A.M. Now we’ll have some
electricity in the place. I’ll start by plugging in
the Christmas tree lights. They were what made the whole thing
go up in sparks the last time. Next, the light
by the dictionary stand, so I can look some words up.
Then probably the toaster. A nice slice
of toast would really hit the spot now. I’m afraid it’s all over
between us, though.

This is at once hilarious and poignant. By the time one comes to the last line, one realizes that the speaker has been fooling around so as to ease the pain that parting from a lover is about to bring. The absurd suggestion about the Christmas tree lights suggests that the loss of electricity has marked the end of a holiday season, a season of love and pleasure. The inconsequential shift from the Christmas lights to the dictionary stand and then to the toaster, turns the ‘redeemed area’ of the title into a space of chaos and impending trouble. But the poet refuses to mourn: ‘Gradually,’ he declares, “everything will return to normal.’ Indeed, ‘I have adjusted the lamp, / morning’s at seven’.

This last line illustrates the thickness of Ashbery’s poetic texture. ‘Morning’s at seven’ comes, of course, from Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes: ‘The year’s at the spring, / And day’s at the morn; / Morning’s at seven . . . God’s in His Heaven– / ‘All’s right with the world!’ But Ashbery isn’t drawing a simple contrast between Pippa’s cheeriness and his own chaotic life. For ‘Morning’s at Seven’ is also the title of Paul Osborn’s 1939 Depression drama—a Midwestern family tale where things get a bit more complicated. Perhaps, the poet suggests ruefully, a bit of distance will give him the perspective he needs:

the tarnish has fallen from the metallic embroidery, the walls have fallen,
the country’s pulse is racing. Parents are weeping.
the schools have closed.
All the fuss has put me in a good mood,
O great sun.

Again, the absurd quickly yields to pathos and back again. Tarnish is what is left when the metal flakes off, not vice-versa. The ominous and generic news—‘the walls have fallen . . . parents are weeping / the schools have closed’—is never explained; indeed, these are no more than generic signs of doom. And yet ‘all the fuss has put me in a good mood’: if the world is indeed in such a sorry state, how sorry can the poet feel for himself? And so, in a wry allusion to Apollinaire’s ‘Soleil cou coupé’ (in Zone), we have, finally the invocation ‘O great sun.’

Ashbery has many imitators both in the U.S. and the UK but not one who can match these tonal shifts and thick allusions. Indeed, it is the density of reference and vocal range that also makes Ashbery’s poems—early and late—so hard to talk about. David Herd’s new full-length study makes a valiant effort to chart the poet’s entire career to date, to determine ‘What are the continuities? What are the differences? . . . . How does one volume lead to, or away, from another?” He proposes to do this by examining the relations of the poems to their period and rehearses, with great skill and thorough scholarship, what Ashbery was doing when, whom he spent time with, what he was reading, and what was happening on the political and cultural front. The anomalous Tennis Court Oath (1962), for example, is read in the context of the poet’s alienation in his early Paris years—an alienation heightened by Cold War culture in the U.S., as defined by critics like David Riesman, Vance Packard, C. Wright Mills, and Philip Rahv.

But compelling as is the attempt to link Ashbery’s poems to The Lonely Crowd or The Hidden Persuaders, the poems don’t quite come alive as a result. Why, after all, is The Tennis Court Oath so different from the work of Ashbery’s Paris friend Harry Matthews on the one hand, his Harvard /New York friend Frank O’Hara on the other? Why is his response to Philip Rahv so different from Robert Lowell’s? Nor does it help to posit generalizations like ‘How and whether to risk the sublime in a cultural climate in which poetry is failing to communicate are problems which persist throughout Ashbery’s poetry of the 1970s.’ To what poet would this diagnosis not apply? In his first chapter, Herd notes that Ashbery himself has repeatedly expressed the desire to be more fully understood. But understanding can only come from reading the poems themselves, word for word, and line by line, with as much knowledge of genres, conventions, and poetic topoi as possible. Indeed, Herd’s comparisons of Ashbery to Pasternak or Pascal are finally no more satisfying than earlier links drawn between Ashbery and Keats, Ashbery and Emerson. No labels seem to stick to this great mercurial poet, who has, in his own words,

. . . wriggled farther into an indeterminate space
that was actually a mood, or many moods, one overlaying another
like gift wrap.