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Issue #10 of Robert Archambeau's
magazine Samizdat
arrived today, always welcome. In it he has one of his "thematic
reviews" titled "The New Modernists", covering books &
anthologies such as Manifesto
: a Century of -isms
(ed. Mary Ann Caws), 21st-Century
Modernism, by Marjorie Perloff, & poetry
by Kruchenykh, Moxley,
Archambeau's general point, in simplified summary, is
that literary Modernism never died (contra Postmodernism) and that an array of good poets carry on its methods of innovation
& renovation. In his discussion of Moxley, he
notes how her allusive style, her attachment to Hart Crane, her melding of
Romanticism & the avant-garde, and other characteristics underline a
poetics in which all time (in art, at least) is simultaneous - which Archambeau calls a "profoundly modernist idea".
This last is true: but I don't think he takes it far enough. There are a number
of ironies inherent to the whole modernism/postmodernism question. Literary
modernism could be described as poetry's attempt to catch up - technically, thematically - with the
social/scientific realities of the 20th century, with the speed of the zeitgeist. It was, as they say, a
"modernizing" effort. It was an heroic &
dazzling endeavor. But now it is also "historical". In a sense,
poetry has caught up - and the "modernizing" effort, as it fades into
historical memory, now becomes oddly dated itself. This is one of the insights
of postmodernism, the motto of which might be, "OK, now what?"
Because postmodernism provides no answer to its own question, it abides in this
limbo or symbiotic dependency on its predecessor. Thus to suggest a proper
title for advanced poets of today to be "the new Modernists" - as Archambeau wants to do - adds another layer to this Zeno's
paradox of labels, since clearly a new
modernist has still not quite "caught up" with the zeitgeist, is still engaged or
identified to some extent with the heroic laboriousness of an era which is now past.
It may be a modernist critical cliche that "all
time is simultaneous", but, as time goes by, such articles of faith sound
more and more like just that, articles of faith. And we know that in poetry, or
art in general, faith is not enough : we need the
"proof" provided by aesthetic rightness, the "certainty" of
the achieved art work. The question for contemporary poets may not be the
postmodernist one ("What next?"), but rather - "if time is
simultaneous - How so?"
Is there some aspect of spirit or self which measures/transcends time? Is there
some aesthetic equilibrium (beauty?) which really (or only metaphorically?)
supercedes or triumphs over clock time? How, exactly, is this revealed in
poetry?
My own sense is that what will be really "new" in the near future is
not a new modernism, in which innovative technique is foregrounded
as a gesture toward the modernizing value of invention. The "new"
poetry will explore and reveal the meanings & values - on many different
levels, both thematic & technical - of "literary time", as
something characteristic & distinct from clock time. When this contemporary
work comes into its own it will be a new era, distinct from both modern &
postmodern. I don't have a name for it.
Our mini-mini-essay is dedicated to Gravity
Probe B, launched today (cf. para-sestina posted here
last week, "A Waiting Game").
Notes Toward...
I want to elaborate on yesterday's post. I'd like to try to do this in a way
that doesn't wear both of us (you & me, dear reader) out. So I'll try to
limit myself to short propositions or statements.
1.
A new poetics would have to start with a concept or
understanding of what modernism & postmodernism are (or were). Let's think
of them in terms of their relation to Time itself. Yesterday we sketched a very
simple diagram: modernism was an aesthetic effort to "catch up" with
contemporary reality understood as accelerated
time: accelerated industry, science, social activity, and
especially, communication.
One facet of this accelerated communication involved the displacement of poetry
by prose (journalism, fiction, scientific discourse). Suddenly romantic-victorian poetic discourse seemed irrelevant to the new
realities. Poetic modernism was in part an effort to reassert that relevance by
catching-up with contemporary time. Literary postmodernism, on the other hand,
exhibited symptoms of uncertainty: once art had caught up with contemporaneity,
it was faced with more essential doubts & questions about its nature and
purpose.
2.
Modernism exhibited three basic strategies in its
response to modernity. I will use a Russian schema
to diagram them:
a)
Symbolism. This strand posited
a clear split between worldly time/material life, and eternal time/spiritual
life. Poetry's strategy was to withdraw from worldly time into a realm of poesie pure - anti-prose, anti-journalism:
attaching itself to music
(somewhat like a leech) in such a way as to fuse beauty with non-referentiality ("supernal beauty").
b)
Futurism. This strand
opposed symbolism in dialectic fashion. Modernity and modern time were
understood as irresistible force and materialist vitality. "The word
itself" would act as a speed-machine or flight-mechanism, imitating
technology in order to reproduce, in art, the existent vitality considered as
ruling force or the primary order of reality.
c)
Acmeism. This strand
sought a middle path between the first two. Acmeism
recognized essential distinctions between Word and Matter, Word & Time; but
rather than surrendering (or transcending) matter & time (as in symbolism),
the acmeist believed that poetry could accept,
incorporate, celebrate, and finally transfigure time & matter by means of
the word. The Word is the binding, illuminating force between two distinct
realms - time & eternity. The existence of eternity sets limits on futurist
contemporaneity; the mediating role of the word
liberates poetry from symbolist otherworldliness. Acmeism
is grounded in a Bergsonian concept of reality as
itself grounded in a time-transcending spiritual vitalism
(consciousness).
3. Elena Glazov-Corrigan (in her book Mandelshtam's Poetics : a challenge to
postmodernism -
a)
Poetic production evolves out of a process of
reading, and reading involves forms of subjective time-reversal: the distinct "verbal time" of the
poet's model (what is being read) begins to absorb the reader, to take priority
over the reader's own time.
b)
The poetic word or logos
is always dialogic, in that it spans disjunctive times or aspects of time: the
model's and the reader's; eternity (or recurrence) and clock time. Mandelshtam's primary example is Dante, whose poetic
process M. describes as a continual shuttling - an experimentation - between scripture and physics,
between the assertions of faith and the experience of earthly time:
essentially, the poetic logos
bridges the disjunctive realms of nature and grace. What philosophy &
theology propose in speculation, poetry asserts in verbal action: the harmony
of poetry exhibits the actuality (the aesthetic "proof") of this
bridging process, this dialogue, between two phases of reality.
4. Mandelshtam's poetics is simply the most theoretically
elaborate and exemplary version of the modernist stream I am calling acmeism. This approach to poetry is found more generally
wherever poets assert the reality of two things: a) an eternal time ("duration",
"eternal life") distinct from successive clock time; and b) the
capability of the poetic word to represent such duration. The approach can be
found strongly in Emily Dickinson, for one example: she is continually
meditating on and mimetically "harmonizing" disjunctions/conjunctions
between natural, seasonal, human clock-time, on the one hand, and eternal
duration on the other; she repeatedly addresses mysterious absent interlocutors
in the most forceful, anachronistic way, asserting the capability of the poetic
word - as a kind of Bergsonian vital consciousness -
to transcend clock time.
5. Once a poetics
asserts this more complex or duplex notion of Time, it must of necessity move
beyond a simple reproduction of either modernist "catch-up" or postmodernist
contemporaneity (stasis). The motive or function or
role of poetry moves beyond merely a mimetic representation of contemporary
active reality; reality is understood as more than either
"contemporary" or "active" (in the futurist sense). Reality
itself appears approachable or representable only
through a kind of double vision, or dialogic bridging process, which is the
harmonic action of the poetic word itself. Thus, "innovation" or
"modernization" (in style, in technique, in subject-matter) are revealed as insufficient as a basis for aesthetics,
since the duplex reality of time is not exactly subject to the progress or
succession of eras or periods. Poetic style, aesthetic technique, will result
from the same interrogation, the same experimental bridging process, as was
applied by Dante in his time. This humbling of
"modernization" will eventuate in a period of literary
"catch-up" organized around a completely new frame or time-scale.
Will follow up on modernism/postmod
comments of last Tuesday as soon as I have time. I realize that a
postmodernist might accuse me of gross oversimplification. If you look at
modernism merely as an aesthetic adjunct to the zeitgeist, and postmodernism as merely an adjunct to
modernism, then you are slighting or avoiding the central philosophical
interests of postmodernity, such as the status of
Being and the subject, the priority of text over speech, the inherent tautology
or irreferentiality of text, etc. And these
theoretical developments, of course, have had a remarkable influence on
late-20th-century American poetry.
Glazov-Corrigan addresses these issues in the
final chapter of her Mandelstam study. She shows how the poet - despite his
fascination with pre-text and intertextuality -
differs from such theorists as Barthes, Bloom,
Culler, Kristeva, in that Mandelstam - rather than
seeing writing as the site of otherness, disconnection, or embattlement with
the spectral echoes of past texts - understands poetic tradition as a living,
affirmative phenomenon, based on kinship, affinity, admiration - on love. Glazov-Corrigan
underscores this with some marvelous quotations:
"If
Dante had been sent forth alone, without his dolce
padre, without Virgil, scandal would have inevitably erupted at the
very start." (Joseph Brodsky)
"From
then on, yes, from then on, since the time in Naumov's
picture, when, before my very eyes, they killed Pushkin...
I have divided the world into the poet - and all of them; amd I have chosen - the
poet - have chosen the poet to be among those I defend: to defend the poet -
from all of them, however
they all are garbed, however they are named." (Marina Tsvetaeva)
One
of the best:
"Tradition
has appeared to all of us; to all it has promised a face; to all, each in a
different way, it has kept its promise. We
have all become people in the measure in which we have loved people and had the
opportunity to love." (Boris Pasternak) [my
italics]
Pasternak, again:
"A
step forward in science is taken according to the law of repulsion, from
refutation of prevalent errors and false theories... A step forward in art is
taken according to the law of attraction, from the desire to imitate, follow
and worship well-loved percursors."
Brodsky,
again:
"The
real poet never avoids influences and indebtednesses, but often nourishes and
emphasizes them by all available means. There is nothing more physically (and
even physiologically) pleasing that repeating in one's head or aloud (in full
voice) someone else's lines. The fear of influence, the fear of dependence -
this fear - and sickness - is characteristic of a wilderness inhabitant [dikar]
and not of culture, which is all - receptivity, all - echo. Let someone pass
this on to Harold Bloom."
The
postmodernist may ask what this has to do with theory; and in reply I would
point to the first Pasternak quotation above. The law of
attraction or literary kinship - and the
law of "identity" (or "ontological status of the Subject")
- are both grounded in love. As love is an "established"
spiritual reality, so much so is poetic tradition a living phenomenon.
(...
& inevitably, when I look back at my own development in poetry over 30
years, I witness the acting-out of these principles: from early attraction to
& imitation of the NY School poets, to absorption (to the point of
psychological breakdown) with Shakespeare's sonnets, to complete immersion in
the language of the Bible, to a return to poetry-making through the
unpredictable influence of Mandelstam (leading, after a long time, to the
"literary encounter" with Elena Shvarts),
to the long-drawn-out exploration of modernist poetry & the long poem, to
the recurrent return to Mandelstam as to a first principle of inspiration. Glazov-Corrigan [p. 146]:
"We
can now begin to see why Mandelshtam speaks about
Dante's writing as a 'bird's mating call', a fife. 'The
fife is nearly always sent forth to scout ahead.' Dante's poetry does not
transmit a message: it awakens, stretches out, and develops a response. It is a
generative principle of literature.... the poem awakens into writing a
generation of writers to come. It precontains, as it
were, its subsequent history:'The miracle-ship left
the shipyard with barnacles adhering to its hull.'")
4.23.2004
Inching
Along
I'd like to continue the speculations on future poetics begun a few days ago. I
don't have time today for more than a couple brief notes.
I
think I've made some progress, but there's a need for more interrogation.
First,
I've suggested how a sense of living tradition could be built on a notion of
active reading/affinity - grounded in love,
which undergirds a different attitude toward the
origins, identity and presence of the poetic voice (different from major
strains of postmodern theory and writing).
Such
an approach opens up the possibility that literary style and technique might be
generated not solely by the chronological succession of the New, or a
deterministic notion of innovation, but by anachronistic connections of
affinity (what Mandelstam describes as the "opening of the Bergsonian fan" across widely separated eras).
Secondly,
and related to this, I've characterized the "poetic word itself" in (Mandelstamian) Acmeist fashion,
as the crossing of two strands: time & eternity, nature and grace, such that
poetry is the emanation of harmony, or the evidence of the harmonization, of
these two spheres.
Yet
this theoretical framework is incomplete, and as such it short-changes poetry.
How so?
By
forcing poetry to bear the burden of what is basically a metaphysical doctrine,
one inhibits poetry's freedom, to some extent. Poetry needs to be free in its
autonomy, in its capability to be whatever it wants to be. And yet I don't want
to surrender the theoretical grounding which this description of the duplex nature
of the poetic word provides. How am I going to resolve this?
Let's
say that this notion of the Word as grounded in anachronistic affinity is the vertical axis of a broader definition.
When we described Modernism as a literary effort to "catch up" with
the zeitgeist, we were overly
abstract, since we neglected to focus on the "how" (how this was accomplished).
How this was done involved what we might call an effort of circumference. Let's make this the horizontal axis of our poetics. What do
we mean by circumference? The modernist innovations in style & technique -
grounded to a great extent in poets like Browning and Whitman - vastly expanded
the range of both subject-matter and level of diction. Whitman, in a sense, can
be understood as
What
were the modernist and postmodernist long poems, but experiments in
capaciousness, in extending the range of what poetry could include? No wonder
that, over the last 50 years, the squabbles between traditionalists and
experimentalists have been so divisive and continuous: contemporary inclusiveness
clashes sharply with longstanding concepts of traditional poetic technique.
Every poet has to find their own center of gravity or path through these
differing perspectives. Inclusiveness, taken as a kind of stylistic absolute,
leads eventually to a condition of no-style
(anything can be called a poem). Tradition, taken as an absolute,
leaves no room for either originality or genuine change.
So
perhaps we approach a theory of the poem as something autonomous,
self-creating, self-defining; open to both empirical and metaphysical meaning &
interpretation, but only in the sense of something possible, potential,
discoverable (rather than being defined
by a higher or exterior meaning). The poem is evidence of creative labor -
labor which in itself is a kind of freedom from prior definitions &
orientations.
With
such an undefined definition, have we come full circle? Are we back where we
started, with nothing to show for it? I hope not... For me, anyway, that
vertical axis opens at least a possible path beyond both modern &
postmodern, while the horizontal axis allows poetry to build on the capacious
circumference of its accomplishments.
My thoughts on the basic motives & purposes of poetry after the movements of the 20th century can be juxtaposed with these interesting remarks at Boston Comment. As Kent Johnson & Stephen Burt in particular pointed out, the demand to innovate originates, not entirely but to some degree, in a political stance. One could say that literary innovation and difference, as we have come to know them, have two roots: first in what I described before as the attempt to catch up with contemporary historical change, and secondly in the notion that literary "experimentalism" (as opposed to simple experiment) marks the boundary of political opposition to mainstream institutions or allegiances.
If
one accepts the notion of the poetic word as harmonizing a duplex form of time
& reality, then the first motive for innovation noted above has to be
revised. I'm not sure how such a poetics applies to any specific political
stance.