Ball Versus Joyce: The Riposte

***

Dear Stan,

Having discovered that we differ regarding the entire way of viewing the tradition of world poetries, it is not surprising that we also differ profoundly regarding Joyce!

I do not even recognize James Joyce in the portrait of the artist you have given us. For me, it’s as if you’ve confused James Joyce with a personage called Stephen Daedelus. Also, and I hope this won't sound aggressive, but I’m afraid that I see “Joyce the elitist” as being one of the most unsupportable misconceptions in the history of the modern humanities. I feel that I’ll bore you by enumerating these justifications again, but before getting on to the question of sound, let me just try to prick a little what I see as an enormous proverbial bubble.

Firstly, a personal account, which I don’t feel is irrelevant here: if one has ever been in Dublin on Bloomsday, has ever seen young and old Irish men and women, workers and businessmen, Jew and gentile, laughing and drinking, singing and dancing, while taking turns to read extracts out loud, in pubs and parks, in homes and offices, snickering at Bloom’s dopey mistakes regarding the Catholic Mass, getting all the very funny jokes about the horse race and Macintosh, shaking their heads at Stephen’s silly intellectual pretensions, being frightened by the Cyclops, marveling at Molly’s abundant life and complexity . . . if one assists in this glorious spectacle, this profusion of our at once important and ridiculous quotidian lives, then it is, to my sense, impossible to argue this, ironically largely academic, line, that Joyce’s view of language comes from books. It is perhaps only possible to be convinced of Joyce’s elitism if one has passed through a pedagogical system that takes the initial Telemachiad, then jumps straight to Circe, and then on to Finnegan’s Wake, and considers all this to be the apogee of Joycean experience, without pausing for a minute to giggle and groan and be turned on and to roll one’s eyes at all the manifold, highly accessible joys of The Lystrygonians or The Wandering Rocks.

Moreover, this vision is entirely unsupported, in my view, by Joyce’s correspondence, which unlike that of Pound and Eliot, shows a generous and good-humored man, and the utter opposite of a cultural snob.

And now we get to the question of sound. You know of course that The Sirens – that is, Episode 11 – one of the most famous chapters in Ulysses, is entirely occupied with the question of sound in the world and in language, and presents an utterly different view of sonority from the one you generate Stan from your remarks – with no examples – on the Wake.

In fact, The Sirens is so important in the modern history of thought regarding sound in language, that I am stunned you left it out: it influenced, most importantly, the birth of Structural Linguistics, that is Saussure and the Prague School, and was a major point of reference for both Trubetzkoy and Jakobson in the development of Phonological Theory after 1940.

Moreover, if your definition of Joyce is that he is above all interested in etymology, in The Sirens, Joyce throws one back by showing words in all their entirely current sonorous aspects: often “divorced from reference”, often bouncing off references, sometimes, though rarely, chained to them. Even one may say that Joyce’s main preoccupation in this extraordinary chapter is that of language as Onomatopoeia, (given that Onomatopoeia was a fascinating and very profitable subject generally for Saussure and the later Phonological linguists, generally).

Here, in The Sirens, we are confronted not only with the sounds of language, but the sounds of language in connection to every other sound in the world, from the rattle of trams to the ebb of that vast epi oinopa ponton, right on through to our relationship with music itself (on this point see James Conely’s very helpful: “Sounding of Sirens Again: An Evaluation of Music in the Sirens Chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses”)

Let me quote some brief passages from The Sirens to demonstrate some of these points. (The full e-text of the chapter may be found here). It opens like this:

BRONZE BY GOLD HEARD THE HOOFIRONS, STEELYRINING IMPERthnthn thnthnthn

I don’t see any etymology yet. Nor do I see any enslavement to reference. But let’s look a little further:

She sipped distastefully her brew, hot tea, a sip, sipped sweet tea.

Does this remind anyone of anyone? Perhaps one of Joyce’s very close friends? (Alice is Alice touching timid or then teeming Toklas?)

Then, to prove that this position regarding language’s sonority is not exclusive to The Sirens, let’s take a look at the sound explorations – rooted in Anglo-Saxon poetries, yes, but astounding without this extrinsic insight– in Oxen Of The Sun:

In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid. Lo, levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland's westward welkin. Full she dread that God the Wreaker all mankind would fordo with water for his evil sins. Christ's rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe infare under her thatch. That man her will wotting worthful went in Horne's house.

That to me is better than your Ball: at once richer, though in no way “weighed down” by its enslavement to any “reference”, by its actual or by its perceived significations. When it’s obvious we’re in the maternity hospital, we always know what’s going on here, and the results are sonorously glorious. “Christ's rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe infare under her thatch.” How is this magnificent treatment of childbirth “academic”? Every Irishman in every pub, at this point, giggled themselves silly. . .

Also, to return to my first point, it is in no way necessary to know what tradition Joyce is drawing on here, and this even makes me think that, as Jim Behrle said at one point, you seem sometimes Stan to be even more dependent on “the tradition” than those of us who are precisely arguing for its usefulness. I feel able to enjoy this passage, sitting in a park, or on a commuter train, without ever reminding myself at any point that it’s an ingenious, if mildly amusing, undergrad Beowulf pastiche.

Again, is it necessary to understand the entire history of the deployment of rhetorical figures, from Gorgias through Aristotle and Hermogenus, to get the explicit richness and fun of "Aeolus"? Of course not. How absurd. Without this, "Aeolus" is an excessively amusing and interesting chapter.

Same for words with or without their etymologies. There are layers to traditions and histories, and the condemnation of history pretends there is only one.

Ball’s an amazing artist, and so is Joyce. To see them as being in competition is begging for a fight which does not, in my view, exist.

Also, and this is important: it’s exceedingly difficult to argue that “Joyce's vision . . . is cribbed from Ball and the Dadaist gang” when the entire initial drafts of The Sirens, which you failed to mention Stan, predate Ball. I had a chance to work on manuscript proofs of Ulysses here in Paris last year, and if you want the exact manuscript facts, here they are: Joyce begins initial notations for Ulysses in 1906, and the first ideas regarding The Sirens begin occurring around 1909. Ball begins writing sound poems in late 1915 or 1916. So, if we’re going to attack histories, we need to get our histories right. And thus, for me, Joyce’s view of sound in language would be more profitably traced to another illustrious name: Gertrude Stein.

Peace and sonorous love from Paris!

Nick

(P.S. An important postscript. You note that: "Joyce's vision of a Europe united in dreams, a Europe united in glossolalia, is a fascinating one. But, representing it the way he does, he makes the vision seem unachievable, a dream vision that can only be comprehended by the laborious interpretations of experts."

Firstly, I have never had the impression that Joyce dreamed of a Europe unified under glossolalia. Let's remember that he more or less rejected Roman Catholicism because this is what Roman Catholicism attempted to do.

The idea of Joyce as a Poundian uniter of Europe by means of its Hellenic/Latin traditions seems absurd to me. Joyce even suggests, via Bloom, that it was this desire for unification which led to the problem of the Jews, and the question of a specifically European homeland.

Secondly, is Joyce really so silly as to think that, in 20th century Europe, what we needed was a Rousseau-esque Enlightenment effort of unification via pedagogy? This is nowhere in Joyce, as it is in Eliot. Joyce's relationship to the tradition is much more playful, postmodern, humanist, but in many ways more sad: it is not the moral unifier, nor the debris shored against our ruin, but rather an image of all the many, daily human lives, which, across time, divide us by their differences as much as they unite us.

***

P.P.S I also think Christian Bök is extraordinary, and in no way "turning sound-poems into speeded-up academic show-pieces", and I can't fathom why he merits Stan's "rear-garde" nomenclature. But, apparently, what you're about to hear is what a "rear-gardiste" sounds like. With thanks to the International Exchange for Poetic Invention:

Even Yves

Yves Bonnefoy has won this year's $10,000 Franz Kafka Prize.

For a newspaper article, they competently summarize Bonnefoy in 30 words or less: "one of the most influential French poets of the second half of the 20th century, for works that use simple imagery to express complex spiritual ideas."

Anti-Platonists, rejoice.

NEW! Jill Jones In The Continental Review

There’s no doubt for me that Jill Jones is one of Australia’s finest contemporary poets, (and those who know me will know that I’m not often tempted by such formulations). There is a sparseness and surety to her work - evident too in this assured video reading - which is often mesmerizing, as well as such a strange mixture of lyrical allure and hard-headed realism that you’re sometimes not sure whether to feel comforted or to cry:

What goes on
is not forever.
Who is on the phone?
Is it history
some kind of novel?
Anyway – a decision!

The Australian print-journal Southerly puts it well: "one of those poets who is beginning to move Australian poetry into new directions - towards a greater trust than ever in the poet's own responses, a quietening of judgemental implications, and to find ways of exploring the rhapsodic."

Moreover, Jill is one of those few contemporary poets who has occasionally provided me with truly “memorable” forms of poetic expression: those few words or lines that you carry with you, as a discrete and desired distillation. In brief, something we used to look to poetry for: the song-book to remind one of certain situations' melody and words. Such as this, the last words of her poem Displacements in the collection Broken/Open, written in September 2001:

God bless the veil
of dust.

It’s a couplet which remains with me as one of very few summaries of the only sentiment I felt possible faced with the historical reality of that time. It’s a moment which, in its simultaneous historic weight but also its elegance of poetic realization, makes most of the other atrocious poetic responses to such tragedy – usually from “famous” poets moreover – seem rather coy.

This is the thing itself, and here is Jill in windy Paris weather, braving the elements, the song of leaves and police sirens, to diffuse herself via video’s emerging form.

So, please do watch a special poet, who is a joy to read, to meet, and to film.

Review And Respond: Repeat

Very heartfelt thanks go to the marvelous Jean Vengua and the very key-keeper herself, Eileen Tabios, for their responses to my review of Eileen's book. Eileen's growing list of texts which each have helped to (re)formulate the notion of radical autobiography - Juliana Spahr's THE TRANSFORMATION , Ron Silliman's UNDER ALBANY , Jennifer Moxley's THE MIDDLE ROOM etc. - is an important list: I hope you'll look over it, and certainly add your own suggestions. And to conclude, this stimulating extract from Jean:

I’m interested in [NM]'s description of [ET]'s work as a “poetry of profusion,” as well as its potential “risk of failure”; there is also his awareness of a centrality to the work which is yet a poetry of “relation.” He asks, “Does such profusion, in the end, have a definable tradition, ontology and object?” In Filipino terms, we might call this profusion an expression of loob. As I wrote about how I perceived the activity of blogging back in 2001, loob is: “a Filipino term that refers to the center of power within a person [which is, however] intensely relational, and associative.” At the time, I was trying to grasp what this thing called the “internet” was, trying to understand what meaning blogging could have for me. Leny Mendoza Strobel describes it as being “…in a dialectical relationship with the loob of our others/kapwa through pakikiramdam (the capacity for compassion, empathy, and sympathy).”

Notes from the Isola

I've been meaning to post John Latta's interesting response from a few months back to some of The Continental Review's video musings and movings, but somehow, amongst other things, it slipped my mind. Here, then, are the Isola's thoughts:

Looking into a couple of The Continental Review’s little image-repertory repeatables, I think: “mostly I am only curious what so-and-so looks like.” (The “texts” “illegible.”) So: there’s Tom Beckett in the middle of an Ingmar Bergman film. There’s Jon Leon doing a kind of crank’d up (amphetamine-illegible) version of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” out of the D. A. Pennebaker film. There’s Allyssa Wolf looking either sultry or surly or petulant or fetching whilst lights come on and go off and words populate the screen, not the words of the voice-over. Conceptually notable, with “a welter of disconnect.” Is it simply that one is unaccustom’d to “reading” “text” thus? There’s a prior / parallel thing occurring with audio: Steve Evans’s Lipstick of Noise studies of particular readings, complete with “audia” demarcations (kin to Barthes’s S / Z’d lexia—“units of reading”) and “audia transcripts”—and, recently, Eric Baus’s To the Sound (Baus looking to “allow various issues related to poetry audio recordings and literary scholarship to emerge out of particular moments of listening”)—attempting to define a field. (I think of Dylan again: and poet’s of the future—“us”—stretching the vocables, sassing the vowellage, mucking up continually and uproariously our own read “versions,” creating an ornery inimitable “body” of audio texts, all of the same piece. All to deride and disperse any too pat voice-taming by the audio profs.)

And in the current TCR pipeline: readings by Susana Gardner and Jill Jones, filmed in Paris; powerful poetic/political dirge and testimony by Simon DeDeo; an interview/documentary and reading with poet and visual artist David-Baptiste Chirot, and more

Also, our most-viewed video is, at the time of writing, a measly 4 hits away from the big 1,000.

For immediate updates on new videos, remember that you can easily become a TCR subscriber from our YouTube home-page.

Stay T=U=N=E=D.

Review of Eileen Tabios

My review of Eileen Tabios' The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes is now available in the magazine Cordite.

Tom's Avatar

Given recent exchanges and discussions, it seems a time to share this.

***

.................................."Language is Delphi."
..................................{for Tom Beckett}

announcing
inability * is a paradox
proved : that I am « incapable »
by dispositio powerless by
admitting it destroys
itself
such song . . . while to a
-vow * a limit is not
to surpass
or to ensure what’s
« past » this * strict bordure :
erasure’s razing the gauze of life
while rhetorical buttons
brave
-ly scintillate (in) such
heritage . . . as if I cannot sing with
-in this * darkness : at least may I
birth the birds beyond
such song ?


***



..................................(extracted from the manuscript HOMO SENTIMENTALIS : A GUIDE IN VERSE TO MODERN EMOTIONAL INTIMACY)

It Continues . . .

* * *

In this post Stan there is, I think, the very heart and keystone of our disagreement. And it turns out to be not merely about “tradition”, but rather about fundamentally different conceptions of language itself:

“Language” you say, “isn't like law, isn't driven by precedents” :

* Haggle, noun, 1577, "to cut unevenly" (implied in “haggler”), freq. of haggen "to chop" (see “hack” (1)). Sense of "argue about price" first recorded 1602, probably from notion of chopping (away).

* Malignant, adjectival, 1568, in ref. to diseases, from L. malignans, prp. of malignere (see malign (adj.)). Earlier in the church malignant = "followers of the antichrist," from L. “ecclesiam malignantum” in early Church writing, applied by Protestant writers to the Church in Rome (1542).

If you do not feel this weight, this preponderance of modifications both latent and explicit in language's “advance” or simple changing . . . if these changings for you don’t constitute in any way "precedents", and the language you have inherited is somewhat lighter as a result . . . then I can only think that perhaps you’re lucky Stan, and I really mean this, sincerely.

Language is sometimes, often, heavy for me, and it seems that maybe for you it is often light. This “lightness” is not meant pejoratively: it’s just perhaps something you more easily feel, or desire, or may make of your "fantasy", a lightness which innovation, you hope, could render inherent to poetic practice.

But I don’t feel it. Not even as fantasy.

In the verb “to write” I feel Old English “writan” : "to score, outline, draw the figure of” or later, and even more beautifully, “writanan” :"to tear, or to scratch." And in the verb “to create” I feel and hear “crescere”: to arise, or to grow

You say: “A word can be invented which is entirely interchangeable with any other word.” In every word I hear often its history, and each of these histories is specific and distinct.

“Previously unknown words” you note, “that record sounds and associations but are not in any dictionary can be written down.” Yet in every new “Ptyx” that I invent, in inventing it, then in writing it, I fix it, and I freeze it. Before I made it, it meant everything, or anything! But in making my own “Ptyx”, I write it into the infinitely extending blank of the dictionary in my mind, or in the minds of my friends – my culture – and then that word begins to mean something more specific than it ever did, before it existed, for others and for me.

Do you see what I mean? It is us who fix language, who limit it, much moreso than it limits us. All our “inability” with regard to language is less its controlling of us, than our inability to stop ourselves controlling it.

I am thus not a “prisoner” of tradition, or of words, as you put it. Actually, I think of myself more as the “jailor”. I am the one who locks language up. I can’t help it. I don’t want to use it just for one, or for several, things! I don’t want “apple” or “pomme” just to mean this fruit.

But, I lock up words – I must, and feel sad for it – into the specific instances of their usages. Sometimes, and joyfully, I let them out, and they run around and play. (This is what we call, among other things: poesis). But then, in those “infinite spaces” of reference, my words seem to get scared – perhaps of their own abundance – and they run back home, desirous, in the evening, of the jailer's reluctant key.

* * *

Eliot And The Objects Of Poetic Experience

[the discussion continues]

***

Dear Stan and all: there’s so much to get through. This will take a moment.

First, my take on Eliot. I’ll speak clearly as to how I see it, though I think this position may appear rather idiosyncratic. And yet, it’s a playful hypothesis, it’s what I personally feel, and it may, I think, make us hate Eliot less, and pity him a little more. What a wretched life. I wouldn’t be Eliot for all the tea in Faber and Faber.

Firstly, I wasn’t so much defending Eliot as attempting to imply that Eliot didn’t actually revise our view of how literary history functions in any important way at all. This doesn’t mean he wasn’t detrimental to the fostering of positive approaches regarding our relationship to traditions. He was, and I’ll try to explain why, and why I think that’s important. My only defense of Eliot was that he admitted his debt to Surrealism and Symbolism. As I said: “he doesn’t in any way reject all contemporary heritage.” And nor would he, because he wanted one heritage, which was his own.

So . . . Eliot, as Ben’s wondrous Greenberg quote so aptly demonstrates, was an utterly ridiculous cultural critic. He was also a fairly sloppy literary theorist, who couldn’t close-read, and who couldn’t really find much textual evidence for his historico-literary generalizations.

His idea of the present changing the past is true; so true is it that it’s a truism: an utter cultural evidence. Did anyone really dispute this at the time of the publication of The Sacred Wood, as Eliot pretends? Eliot does everything he can to present this rather commonplace idea as a massive literary-theoretical novelty. But look at Eliot’s own heritage in the immediately preceding “apogee” of the English Decadence. Walter Pater had already ably, and equally eccentrically, demonstrated this double movement of literary historical reflection in a text like Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Of course it wasn’t new. It’s also just a sort of diluted Hegelianism.

What made The Sacred Wood seem so new, to my sense, was not the ideas it presented, which were actually rather commonplace – let’s remember that the Georgians were already anti-Romantics, as was pretty much everyone – as the fact that Eliot was writing some very new and interesting poems.

There was thus the presumption, common to eras including our own, that new poems must come from new ideas.

But Eliot’s criticism was not, very unfortunately, seen as a simple justification or proto-explanation of his own poetic: it was seen, as Eliot wanted it to be seen, as culturally and aesthetically prescriptive.

But to what degree is The Sacred Wood a valuable prescriptive text? Did it teach anyone anything about how to write poems differently?

To my sense, the apparent pedagogical, prescriptive agenda of Eliot’s criticism was nothing but a pose. It was perhaps one that Eliot himself believed in, but a pose nonetheless. For Eliot – and this is clear for me already by his silly tone of false martyrdom in the opening of Tradition And The Individual Talent – it would be very good indeed if nobody used the tradition the way Eliot himself did, or was planning to, or pretended that he wanted others too. In any case, he felt that the whole of Hellenic and Judaeo-Christian culture was dying, and that late Christianity – Anglicanism – was its last vestige.

We can’t then think that Eliot wanted to instruct a generation: the pedagogical tone is a feu-follet. It’s a ruse, and we can’t fall for it. It is self-justification wrapped in the robes of pedagogy. We cannot fear the “prescriptions” of The Sacred Wood simply because The Sacred Wood makes no coherent prescriptions whatsoever.

Though many claim then its “profound influence” on them, The Sacred Wood helped no young poet discover their own type of poetry by entering into a complex and dynamic relationship with the tradition. It only helped them to respect Eliot, to write like Eliot, and to accept Eliot’s canonical revisions. Nobody was really encouraged to revolutionize the tradition for themselves, in the same way Eliot had done for himself. Nobody came out, after The Sacred Wood, with a diverse number of canonical revisions of the type Eliot himself had attempted. No. They simply accepted Eliot’s own, very specific, and thus quite poisonous, revision. They were encouraged by The Sacred Wood to accept Eliot’s new canon, as if all the work of thinking through traditions had already been done for them.

In this way, it’s like Eliot constantly wants us to think that he’s writing an Aristotelian Techné on the art of poetry, which other poets should heed, when in reality what he’s doing is the exact opposite: a purely personal and eccentric Modus Operandi. The evidence for this is the simple fact that The Sacred Wood is entirely absent of concrete, tangible strategies which may help us to enter into a real, complex dialogue with a variety of diverse and changing poetic and cultural institutions, heritages and values.

Eliot does not help us integrate different poetries into our own. He replaces one tradition by another, and cloaks this move in the ermine of a “new” theory about the symbiosis of the present changing the past, mutatis mutandis.

But what does all this mean for our discussion about “the tradition(s)”? It means that we are rightly skeptical – as you are Stan, and Mark, and Ben perhaps, and others – about anybody who wants to tell us that we should maintain a complex, dynamic, varied approach to diverse traditions, because behind these apparent “dynamic” approaches, we already sniff the specter of Eliotic trickery. That is, we suspect that any call to the tradition, no matter how “dynamic” or “engaged” or apparently “varied”, risks being not a call, as it presents itself, for diversity and tolerance, but rather the intolerant installment of a new univocal canon. The real diversity we dream of is lost in this critical war, and it seems difficult to preserve it: so we want to throw out the notion of traditions themselves, and find ourselves left with an innovation which is not based necessarily on any tradition at all.

And thus we get to the, as you put it Stan, “appealing notion” of the “many traditions, many canons, and that we should be responsible to more than one of them, or even all of them”:

“To be responsible to all traditions at once is probably impossible; Eliot's idea of being responsible to culture is part of an argument that people should be responsible to their own culture; this argument is part of an overall argument that racializes culture. I won't be responsible to European culture until I can be equally responsible to Mayan culture. Do you see what I'm getting at? I won't be responsible to Mayan culture until I can be equally responsible to indigenous Sumatran culture.”

The idea of “responsibility” is misplaced, because we’re applying a term which Eliot is fond of to support a theory of diversity and variety which he personally abhorred. “Responsibility” and “Diversity” won’t function together, and we can’t and shouldn’t make them. I admit it feels like we have to make the terms clash, because it’s what we’ve inherited. But let’s do away with this, and instead replace the idea of “responsibility” by the rather prolix idea: “that which constitutes the limits of poetry’s world”.

The poet can draw from the phenomena he or she sees in the current world. Equally, there are things which have happened before, which also constitute lived and poetic “events”, and this too makes up part of poetry’s possible object. Equally still, there are other individuals who have had certain positions, thoughts, feelings and ideas regarding these different phenomena, in and across time, synchronically and diachronically.

We do not have a “responsibility” per se towards the temporal and spatial scope of this experience: but the world of poetry – all its possible objects – is vast. To limit this world, either spatially or temporally, is to run the risk perhaps of making oneself as bad as Eliot, to the degree that Eliot wanted to limit the range of poetic objects to suit a specific aesthetic agenda. To innovate without a temporal or spatial spread, does this risk then the sort of hegemony of singular revisionism which we find in Eliot himself? (In this way, the “pure innovator” can be a “pure regulator”: there is no larger framework of experiential objects and contexts, both present and past, to stop such innovation being simply the creation of a new, unequivocal heritage.) Is it to run the risk of installing a univocal canon: be it the very “canon” of our own restricted experience?

“Yes”, you say, “but our experience will always be restricted!” We can, nevertheless, dig down into this experience, into ourselves and into others, into time and into a variety of human and cultural timelines, to try to expand this subjective limit, this sad event horizon of our perception. And it is this more expansive vision which Eliot, if he had really cared about creating truly complex relationships with traditions, would himself, in The Sacred Wood, have expounded.

On the Current Poetic "Rear-Garde" : A Response to Stan Apps

***

(For Stan's original, interesting if controversial, post, go here).

***
I don’t know Stan, I’m a bit shocked by this. Let me try to get out some objections.

It’s like you’re implying that the only relationship possible to “THE TRADITION” is of the Eliotic/Poundian variety. Every avant-garde has an articulated relationship to the tradition, even the most “radical” or “divergent”: just look at Duchamp, or Abstract Expressionism, or Zukofsky, or Clayton Eshleman.

Is Clayton Eshleman, because he thinks Vallejo’s poetry is “good” and “valuable”, and may be helpful for our current production, a “rear-gardiste”? Come on.

To state it simply, I’d posit that this “non-backward-looking” avant-garde you’re talking about simply doesn’t exist, could not exist, and indeed never has. As isn’t its very existence impossible? Isn’t this the one most common myth of all the avant-gardes and their diverse productions: namely, their desire to give the impression of having sprung, utterly ex nihilo, from aesthetic space? (This is precisely the paradox Rosalind Kraus famously had to point out).

This “we have no predecessors” is what Marinetti says for Italian Futurism, for example, and it’s one of the reasons that brand of Futurism was perhaps the most recklessly naïve and dangerous avant-garde of the 20th century, (“dangerous” in the most conformist, non-revolutionary sense of the word).

And I think you really misrepresent Eliot and Pound here. “They are profoundly influenced by Futurism, Dada, Symbolism, and Surrealism, yet they reject all of these as being unrooted in the best of traditional poetic culture”. Where do E or P ever say this?

On the contrary, Eliot explicitly recognizes his debt to symbolism, especially of the French variety (look at the first Eliot French poems, or his proto-influences such as Laforgue, which extend on, in a diluted form, through to his translations of Saint-John Perse).

The debt Eliot doesn’t recognize, on the other hand, and in a very underhanded way on his part, is his debt to western Romanticism of the Wordsworth/Coleridge/Goethe variety. Moreover, he pretends that Byronian or Pushkinian ironic Romanticism just didn’t exist. But he doesn’t in any way reject all contemporary heritage in favour of the grand canon. He’s not Racine, and he’s not a member of the Pléiade. No Eliot scholar could maintain this. He’s more like Dryden actually. The idea of Eliot being a complete conservative traditional nut seems to be a popular one at the moment, but it's reductive, and for all the reasons to dislike him, his adherence to a strict Bloomian canon isn’t one of them. Nerval, Laforgue, Mallarmé, were not recognized as being the equals of Shakespeare in 1922. Eliot’s revision of the tradition, for all his conservatism in other areas, was a radical revision. That’s why the question is complex.

Eliot thought English poetics sucked because the Georgians and the conservative War Poets sucked – and you have to give him some credit here – and so he went to France for his most recent dead idols. The closest thing he could find in the English tradition which he liked was Pope and then Herbert and Donne. Herbert and Donne were not, before Eliot, such a big part of the 1922 Grand Canon. They were outsiders. Though he often did, he wasn’t, in this particular case, just towing a line.

So, for you, rear-gardists are “reliant on notions of traditional value to construct a concept of good writing which they are eager to expound upon.” So, is “rear-gardisme” simply the idea that there has been good artistic production in the past, production which may teach us something? Isn’t this called “reading”? If rear-gardistes are thus “reliant on notions of traditional value to construct a concept of good writing”, I thus declare Clayton Eshleman, Andrew Joron, Susan Howe, Pierre Joris, Alice Notley, Ron Silliman, Emmanuel Hocquard, Lyn Hejinian, Charles North, Linh Dinh, Rae Armantrout, to be died-in-the-wool “rear-gardistes”.

Lastly, “I want to imitate science, in its fantastical escape from prior knowns, in order to achieve an art that can pursue new goals by new means.” Stan, have you mentioned this idea of yours of what science is to any scientists? May I suggest that they might giggle? Science is very dependent on prior tradition, and any researcher in quantum mechanics would, I suspect, need to see this research as being both in opposition to, and as a continuation of, Newtonian physics. Do “avant-garde scientists” for you sit in laboratories and “invent”?

Perhaps I’m not understanding you correctly. This is sincere: I may seriously be missing a point, or a larger irony. You name Schaeffer and Hoy, for instance, as examples of the rear-garde. But I’d love some examples of the true “avant-garde”? And let’s be frank here. Are we talking about someone like Gary or Kasey? Because I adore them both, but I suspect they might both be “reliant on notions of traditional value to construct a concept of good writing”. I’m just saying!

***

Why We Need Video Poetics

It is appropriate that our last words are "cut".

The dead poets are gone.

Long live the dead.

Enclosures

Jennifer Dick has a new e-book out from Blazevox. Maybe you should check it out. I mean if you're having dinner then maybe you could read it after dinner? I think it's really interesting. Fine, eat your food then. Just remember I tried to help you, and that poetry is sacred.

FourW 18

Thanks to Derek Motion, David Gilbey, Sandra Treble and others for their inclusion of my work in this year's FourW anthology of new Australian writing.

I only wish I could be there in Sydney for the launch, but a wide ocean and the preparation of courses on rhetoric and metrics prevent me. Helas! . . .

NEW! Jim McCrary At The Continental Review

This magnificent little video by none other than one of the great renegade American poetry icons, Jim McCrary, was doing the rounds a few months ago, after having been notably linked to from Tom Beckett's blog.

To bring to it some even greater exposure, we're delighted to be currently featuring Jim's reading from his most recent book, Being Frida Kahlo, at The Continental Review.

As a little introduction, I enthusiastically recommend Tom Beckett's interview, as well as John Fowler's brief but enlightening survey of Jim and his work. An extract:

The simplicity of language, the sparseness of the word on the page, the waya few words stretched my mind across big spaces, all this is here. But it is as if the whole process has been abstracted, has become abstract, even philosophical in a high- flown, that is, on a "high" philosophical level. The interconnectedness and continuity of image and idea is so strong on first reading that the fact that one piece ends and another begins, and exactly where that occurred, may be missed. He speaks of light and suddenly the lines are even shorter than before, often only one word, and we hear the breath working, the tension of in-taken air caught at the top of the lungs before the word is exhaled or expelled or let gently and softly out to assume the shape of the meaning that Jim is causing to arise in our mind by his choosing of it. And because of his choosing we are drawn to focus, or into focus, by that image, abstract or seemingly immaterial as it may be.

See you in the real.

"Oh Christ" Exclaims Laureate

You have to love the new Laureate. Accompanied by man with arm in sling holding artichoke, Lessing reacts to some news from Reuters:



Reuters: "Other prizes like The Booker..."
Lessing: "Which one?"

Lessing: "When is The World at 1?"
BBC: "In 5 minutes"

Also, just to prove how hip the new Laureate is, it's important to note that she has her own MySpace.

The Editorial Questions

Why do poets not make an email address for themselves available anywhere on the web? I mean, are they really that snowed under with fan-mail and editorial invitations? There are myriad ways to avoid the spam spiders, and I can tell you, with The Continental Review sending out a few more invitations this week, the utter impossibility of contacting someone rather limits the choice. So poets, for God's sake, would it kill you to open a gmail account?

The Mosaic Of Simplicities

I’m interested in the dialectical tension which is possible between simplicity and complexity. Simplicity as compressed complexity, complexity as unwoven simplicity. I suspect this is the reason why I’m fascinated by the image of the decorative design: interlocking arabesques, woven unwovens: self-weaving shapes.

In oriental mosaic or cloth-work, for example, the pattern may be initially simple, but in its overlaps, its defenses and offenses against the competing barriers which surround it, it becomes increasingly composite and intricate, even to the point where the initial simplicity is all but invisible. Though it may be invisible, however, or at least transparent, it is extremely important that this simplicity remains there, en puissance, a still spot in the moving waters, to be detected or returned to at the appropriate moment.

And, in language, what are these “barriers” which the designs cross, or if defeated, defer to? They are barriers of form, barriers of syntax, barriers of expression, against which the language, like the design, pulls and gives. This tension is perhaps even one of the reasons why mosaics have long been considered a symbol of eternity: their simplicity seems finite, and yet it is repeatable, and in its repetition is contained an eternal potentiality.

Language is also like this: it is at once synchronically discrete and yet also infinitely diachronically modifiable. Interestingly, the “language of the tribe” seems as modifiable as the most grandiloquent phrasings: everything is good for the creation of the design, though mere taste may mean one has a preference for one diction (pattern) over another. It’s good then that there are other poets who use more, or less, “ordinary” expression: anything may serve as the base pattern; it is the structuring, the interlacing, the interacting of this pattern. This is not formalism: it is simply a recognition that what makes a truly radical poetics is less the words used (lexicon) than their lacings.

The Parisian Reading

25

More posts to come on Plato's Gorgias and then the Phaedrus, followed by the more pleasurable territory of Aristotle's Rhetoric. (I'm teaching all this again in my history of rhetoric class at Strasbourg Uni this semester).

But: it's my birthday today. I'm 25. I was 20 when I came to Paris. How quickly those years have passed! But how full they have been. Anyway, here's what the Four think about that.


From the online astrologers:

(I know everyone always finds these "accurate", because they usually go out of their way to be hyperbolically flattering. But at least this one includes faults; and it is for me, more than usually, weirdly accurate).

Libras born on October 6 are dreamers who need to express their inner drives through imagination and creativity. They are lovers of fantasy and illusion -- what appears true is more interesting than what actually may be true. They are idealists who love beauty in all its forms.

Careers: Individuals born on this date usually gravitate to a career in the arts; these talented men and women have an unfaltering concept of beauty and harmony. Money isn't usually important to them, except to provide them with the beautiful things and luxurious surroundings they desire.

You should embrace: Reality, purposefulness, a plan of action

You should avoid: Frittering away time, escapism, unwise love

Oh yes, mystical internet astrologers, oh yes...

Socrates On Current American Politics

According to Socrates, George W. Bush would be considered a man with absolutely no power. None whatsoever: either political or personal. How is this possible? From the Gorgias:

(Socrates is currently disputing Polos over the sense of rhetoric, power and truth. Sorry for the purists: my translation of extracts from the French)

Gorgias 466d-467b

SOCRATES: I declare, Polos, that orators and tyrants have at their disposal in their States only a miniscule degree of power. . . In fact, they do not 'do as they wish', so to speak - though I will add that they do do what to them seems to be best.

POLOS: Precisely, and that means that they are all-powerful!

SOCRATES: No. In any case not according to what you yourself, Polos, have already said.

POLOS: But that's not what I'm saying, I'm saying the exact opposite!

SOCRATES: Ah no! You did indeed say it, for you affirmed that all-powerfulness was a good thing for those in possession of it.

POLOS: Okay. I did say that, yes.

SOCRATES: Listen: if a man, entirely deprived of good sense, has the means to do whatever he thinks to be best, will you say that he is all-powerful?

POLOS: No, of course not.

SOCRATES: Prove then to me that the orators have good sense. That way, you will have refuted me by showing me that rhetoric is indeed an art and not a form of flattery. But if you cannot show me that I am wrong, then neither the orators nor the tyrants, who in their States do whatever they please, will profit in any way from their power! You yourself state that having power is good; but on the other hand, being able to do everything one wants to do, if one's head is not properly screwed on, you agree that that is bad, I should think?

POLOS: Yes, indeed.

SOCRATES: So then, how may we admit that the orators and the tyrants are all-powerful in our States, if Polos cannot refute Socrates . . . ? . . . For, does the tyrant really do what he most wants to do, if it turns out that the acts he has accomplished are in fact bad for him? You don't respond.

POLOS: Well, no, it would seem that he does not perhaps do what he wants.

SOCRATES: Well then, how may such a man be all-powerful in his own State?

New Video Readers

Well, the initial call for submissions several days ago for The Continental Review has already borne fruit. Of 14 submissions, we've accepted 4 for future video-readings, and we're excited by this list. There will be video-readings by:

Paul Hoover
Adam Fieled
Kiki Petrosino
Chris Pusateri

(Nota Bene: Still only 3 submissions - one of which was Kiki's - out of 14 were from women poets. I'm a little stumped at this. Any theories, anyone? Please, wonderful women writers of the web: get bitten by the video bug!)

Also, as soon as we sort out a few technical difficulties, we will also be featuring a reading from the marvellous Jim McCrary.

So, for all that and more, stay tuned.

Can Think Of Few Modern Artists I Admire More