What Are Poets For?: An Anthropology of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Contemp North American Poetry) [1 ed.] 1609380800, 9781609380809

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"Gerald Bruns, one of our most distinguished phllosophlcal critics, here turns his ~at tentlon to the cutting-edge poetry and poetics of the past few decades, seen throug the prism of su h theorists as Adorno, Blanchot, and Levinas. Bruns's readings are everywher- animated by his profound learning and his knowledge of the larger po"': etlc tr 'itlon. For anyone Interested In the avant-garde today, What Are Poets For? ndlspensable book."-Marjorie Perloff, author, Unoriginal Genius "Gerald Bruns's learning Is prodigious, and tie seems not only to have read but to recall on command just about all of eveh mln5r.aesthetic,documents (and the basic scholarship on them) since Kant. Yet he holds his learning lightly, bringing it to bea only when It Is called for to Illuminate a point. Moreover, he writes elegantly, fluidly, and lucidly on quite difficult material, and he has excellent taste. Most Important, Bruns makes the strongest and richest statements I know of an aesthetic that driv~ the work of his authors." -Charles Altieri, author, The Art of Modern American Poetry

. ~~rltf,(\..fl' n " Rli '[tr Is the WIiiiam P. and Hazel B. White Professor Emeritus of English

at the University of Notre Dame. A prolific author, ~ Is works Include Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language, Inventions: Writing, Textuallty, and Understanding In Literary History, H,irmeneutlcs Ancient and Modern, Tragic Thoughts at th• End of Philosophy: Languag•, Literature, and Ethical Theory, The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Phllosopltlcol Poetics, On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy, and On Ceasing to Be Human. In 1974 and again In 1985 he received Guggenheim fellowships and has been a fellow at the Institute fo Advanced Study at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1985-1986), the Center for Advanc Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1993-1994), and the Stanford Humanities Center (2007-2008). In 2008 he was elected to the American Academy qf Arts and Selene

ISBN-13: 978-1-60938- 080-9 ISBN -10: 1- 60938-080-0

Cover lmqe from A._mlc Magazine #2, 1, Is used courtesy of David Dellaffora and Tim Gaze.

II II 111 9 781609 380809

90000

HIIIIIIII

GERALD L. BRUNS WHAT ARE POETS FOR?

····································· ··· ··················· ···· ··· ·· ···· ·· ····· ··········· ······· ··· · an anthropology of contemporary poetry and poetics

............................................................................. ............... ... ...... univettsity of iowu press iowa city

CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICAN

POETRY SERIES

Series Editors Alan Golding, Lynn Keller, and Adalaide Morris

For Steve Fredman

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2012 by the University of Iowa Press www.uiowapress.org Printed in the United States of America Design by Omega Clay No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bruns, Gerald L. What are poets for?: an anthropology of contemporary poetry and poetics / Gerald L. Bruns. p. cm.-(Contemporary North American poetry series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-60938-080-9 (pbk) ISBN-JO: 1-60938-080-0 (pbk) 1. American poetry-21st century-History and criticism. 2. Poetics. I. Title. PS326. B78 2012 8n' .609 23 2ono39541

contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Abbreviations xvii 1

What Are Poets For?

2

Should Poetry Be Ethical or Otherwise? 18

3

Voices of Construction I On Susan Howe's Poetry and Poetics (A Citational Ghost Story) 35

1

4

A Poem about Laughter and Forgetting I Lyn Hejinian's A Border Comedy 56

5

Among the Pagans

6 7

I The Polyvocal Poetry of Karen Mac Cormack 72 The Rogue Poet's Return I On John Matthias's Poetic Anecdotes 91 Adding Garbage to Language I On J. H. Prynne's "Not-You" 106

a Anomalies of Duration in Contemporary Poetry 123 9

10

Nomad Poetry I ALudie Miscellany from Steve Mccaffery 137 On the Conundrum of Form and Material I Adorno'sAestheticTheory 152 Notes 167 Bibliography 201 Index 219

preface

Literature is a concern for the reality of things, for their unknown, free and silent existence; literature is their innocence and forbidden presence, it is the being which protests against revelation, it is the defiance of what does not want to take place. In this way, it sympathizes with darkness (l'obscurite), with aimless passion, with lawless violence, with everything in the world that seems to perpetuate the refusal to come into the world. In this way, too, it allies itself with the reality oflanguage, it makes language into matter without contour, content without form, a force that is capricious and impersonal and says nothing, reveals nothing, simply announces-through its refusal to say anything-that it comes from the night and will return to the night. -Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death" One of my first attempts to write about poetry-more than half-a-century ago-carried the title, "The Obscurity of Modern Poetry." My first book, Mod-

ern Poetry and the Idea of Language (1974), pursued some of the various ways in which this topic emerged in literary history, from the ancient conception of language as a "substantial medium," through Stephane Mallarme's poetry and ix

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preface

······· ········ ··· ····· ···· ··· ··············· ··· ········· ······ ················ ···· ····· ···· ··· ···· ·· ··· ········· ··· ··· ······ ·· ··· ······ ·· · poetics, to the writings of Joyce, Beckett, Wallace Stevens-and Maurice Blanchot, whom I began reading as an undergraduate at Marquette University in the 1950s, thanks to my Francophile roommate, Dan Finlay, and to my Jesuit teachers, who were in those days deeply under the influence of French intellectual culture. Later came a study of Blanchot's work, particularly his theory of ecriture-the materialization of language in fragmentary writing of the kind that we find in the poetry of Rene Char and Paul Celan, as well as in Blanchot's own work (for example, L'attente, /'oubli [1962]). More recently, in The Material of Poetry (2005), I attempted something like a traditional apology for recent experiments in sound poetry, visual poetry, and poetry as a form of conceptual art. And in The Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy (2006), I tried to clarify an argument about literary modernism that turns up in different forms in the writings of many European thinkers, namely that the work of art (one of Duchamp's readymades, for example) is something absolutely singular, that is, outside the alternatives of universal and particular, refractory to categories and distinctions, anarchic with respect to principles and rules: in a word, anomalous. In Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard's words, modernism makes "pagans" of us all: "When I speak of paganism," Lyotard writes, "I am not using a concept. It is a name, neither better nor worse than others, for the denomination of a situation in which one judges without criteria. And one judges not only in matters of truth, but also in matters of beauty (of aesthetic efficacy) and in matters of justice, that is, of politics and ethics, and all without criteria."' The present volume of essays continues this nominalist line-and tries to cope with its consequences. For if there is no one thing that can be called poetry-ifit is made of anomalies (a one-word poem, for example, or a collage ofletters or letterlike scribbles)-then one's study ofit must proceed, like an anthropologist's progress through an alien culture, at ground level, from one local practice or artifact to another, without subsuming things into a system. 2 Of course, at ground level pitfalls and double binds are waiting at every turn: remember the sculptor Donald Judd's famous remark: "If someone calls it art, it's art."3 Anything goes, even if not everything is possible at every moment: hardly an intellectually defensible thesis, at least in respectable academic circles. As a dodge I take recourse to Wittgenstein's idea that things (games, for example, but also philosophy itself) have a history rather than an essence, and that history is made of family resemblances, so that as one proceeds along the ground one finds connections in which different forms of words and things shed their light on one another. 4 In this event the simple juxtaposition of citations often proves more fruitful than lengthy exegeses on behalf of some unified field theory.

For this reason I have often found myself following, often against the advice of mentors and friends, Walter Benjamin's program: "Good criticism is composed of at most two elements: the critical gloss and the quotation. Very good criticism can be made from both glosses and quotations. What must be avoided like the plague is rehearsing the summary of the contents. In contrast, a criticism consisting entirely of quotations should be developed ."5 Unfortunately exorbitant permission fees occasionally prevent one from putting good criticism into practice. My first chapter tries to locate some ingredients that recur in the disparate essays that follow-displaced subjectivity, found texts and open forms, not to mention the many diversions of materialized language. The second chapter is, basically, an argument against efforts (including my own) to ground poetry upon any philosophical justification that would efface the singularity of its forms and events-a kind of iconoclasm that both philosophy and literary studies are prone to. As for subjectivity, a main point of interest in my chapter on Susan Howe is her recuperation of Yeats's conception of the poetic subject as a receptacle for the voices of others, which is one of the forgotten features of romantic poetics-recall Keats's "negative capability." "For something to work I need to be another self," Howe says. Meanwhile she locates her "self" within a "constructivist" context offound texts and para tactic arrangements of words within thewhitespaceoftheprinted page (asin The Midnight). Found texts and paratactic arrangements-but in very different renditions-characterize the work of Lyn Hejinian and Karen Mac Cormack. John Matthias's poetry, as Matthias himself notes, is composed of quotations and pastiche-and of anecdotes: a form to which very little thought has been given. Matthias, interestingly, is an American poet who seems most at home among the British: he is a major scholar of the work of David Jones, and thinks of himself as being in perpetual transition back-and-forth between the United States and England, neither here nor there. It seems right to place him alongside J. H. Prynne, the recondite "Cambridge" poet whose work is influenced very much by American poets like Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn, although Prynne's way of putting words together (if "together" isn't exactly the wrong word) seems peculiarly , his own. The chapter on "Arrhythmia" takes up George Kubler's challenge in "The Shape of Time" to "imagine duration without any regular pattern." A good deal of poetry-Michael Palmer's, Tom Raworth's, among others studied here-is an exercise in just such an irregular imagination. The chapter on Theodor Adorno might at first seem out of place in this book, but much of it takes up Adorno's essay on paratactic form in Holderlin's late hymns as well as his essays on two experimental German poets seldom or never studied in

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········· ························ ············ ··· ······· ····· ······ ·· ······ ·· ········· ·· ·· ······· ·· ··•, this country, Rudolf Borchardt and Hans G. Helms. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is perhaps the most important work of philosophical aesthetics since Kant's third critique and Hegel's lectures on aesthetics, but its major weakness is its poverty of examples. Happily there is nothing impoverished about Adorno's literary essays, which are remarkably in tune with the "nomadic" innovations of the Yorkshire/Canadian/Buffalo poet Steve Mccaffery, who reminds us that if contemporary poetry bears anything like a distinctive feature, it is that freedom from determinations of any kind is a condition of comedy-and a form of the good life.

acknowledgments

I owe a great deal to a number of people for their help and encouragement on this project, particularly Marjorie Perloff, Herman Rapaport, Charles Altieri, Ralph Berry, Charles Bernstein, Dee Morris, Steve Tomasula, and John Wilkinson. I remember especially a course on experimental poetry that Romana Huk and I taught together at Notre Dame several years ago, which made me realize that, left to my own devices, I would never find my way through the complexities of contemporary poetry and poetics. This book is for my friend Steve Fredman, in memory of our quarter-century of conversations, the courses we taught together, the poetry readings we organized-not to mention the perpetual round of administrative duties, committee meetings, and visiting lecturers, none of which, to my amazement, ever seemed to defeat Steve's serenity and good humor. His writings on American art and poetry-Poet's Prose (1983), The Grounding ofAmerican Poetry (1993), A Menorah for Athena (2001), and Contextual Practice (2010), among many others-have been and will remain the best of intellectual companions. Meanwhile there is his own incomparable contribution to "California" poetry, Seaslug (1973). Xiii

xiv

acknowledgments

xv

acknowledgments

········· ··· ······· ···· ····· ········· ······ ················· ···· ·· ·· ···· ········ ·· ··· ······· ···· ····· Several of the chapters in this book were completed while I was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2007-2008. My thanks to John Bender, then director of the Center, and to the Center's marvelous staff, particularly Robert Barrick, Nichole Coleman, Susan Sebard, and MatthewTiews. Chapter 2 appeared in Substance: A Review ofTheory and Criticism, 38.3 (2009), 72-91. Chapter 3 appeared in Contemporary Literature, 50.1 (2009), 28-53. Chapter 4 appeared in Textual Practice, 23.3 (2009), 397-416. Chapter 5 appeared inAntiphonies: Essays on Women's Experimental Writing in Canada, ed. Nate Dorward (Toronto: The Gig, 2008), 194-213. Chapter 6 appeared in The Salt Companion to John Matthias, ed. Joe Francis Doerr (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2011), 12-29. Chapter 10 appeared as "The Conundrum of Form and Material in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory" in The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, 66.3 (2008), 225-35. I'm grateful to John Ashbery for permission to reprint the following: "Crazy Weather" and "Syringa," from Houseboat Days. Copyright© 1975, 1977 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. "The System," from Three Poems. Copyright© 1972, 1985, 1997, 2008 by John Ashbery. All rights reserved . Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. "Scheherazade" and "No Way of Knowing," from Self-Portrait in aConvex Mirror. Copyright© 1975, 1990 by John Ashbery and Viking Penguin, Inc., reprinted by their permission. My thanks to Charles Bernstein for permission to reprint lines from his Dark City (Sun & Moon Press, 1994), Rough Trades (Sun & Moon Press, 1991), "Poetic Justice," Republics of Reality, 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000 ), and With Strings (University of Chicago Press, 2001 ); to Christian Bok and Coach House Books for permission to reprint some lines from Eunoia (2001); to Dal key Archive Press for permission to reprint some lines from Shorter Poems (1993) by Gerald Burns; to Suhrkamp Verlag, for permission to reprint several poems from Paul Celan's Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983); to Kenneth Goldsmith for permission to reprint some passages from Soliloquy (2001); to Tim Gaze for permission to reproduce the image of an "asemic poem," from Asemic, vol. 1 (KentTown Australia, n.d.); to Lyn Hejinian for permission to reprint passages from ABorder Comedy (Granary Books, 2001) as well as lines from The Cold of Poetry (Sun & Moon Press, 1994), The Fatalist (Omnidawn Press, 2003), My Life (Sun & Moon Press, 1987), My Life in the Nineties (Shark Books, 2003), Slowly (Tuumba Press, 2002), and Writing ls an Aid to Memory (Sun & Moon Press, 1996); to Susan Howe for permission to reprint poems from The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (Sun & Moon Press, 1989), Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974-79 (New Directions, 1996), The Midnight (New Directions, 2003), The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993), Pierce-Arrow (New Directions, 1999), Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), and Souls

ofthe Labadie Tract (New Directions, 2007); to Simon Jarvis for permission to reprint passages from The Unconditional: A Lyric (Barque Press, 2005); to Eduardo Kac for permission to reproduce both his digital poem, "Letter" (1996), and his holographic poem, "Adhuc" (1991); to Karen Mac Cormack for permission to reprint poems from At Issue (Coach House Books, 2001), lmplexures (Chax Press, 2003), Quill Driver (Nightwood Editions, 1989), Quirks and Qui/lets (Chax Press, 1991), and Vanity Release (Zasterle Press, 2003); to Steve Mccaffery for permission to reprint poems from Seven Pages Missing, II: Previously Uncollected Texts, 1968-2000 (Coach House Books, 2002), Slightly LeftofThinking (Chax Press, 2008), The Cheat ofWords (ECW Press, 1996), and Theories ofSediment (Talon Books, 1991); to John Matthias for permission to reprint poems from Turns (Swallow Press, 1975), Crossing (Swallow Press, 1979), Northern Summer: New and Selected Poems (Swallow Press, 1984), AGathering ofWays (Swallow Press, 1991), Swimming at Midnight: Selected Shorter Poems (Swallow Press, 1995), Beltane at Aphelion: Longer Poems, (Swallow Press, 1995), Pages: New Poems & Cuttings (Swallow Press, 2000 ), Working Progress, Working Title (Salt Publishing, 2002), New Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2004), l