Saturday, April 18, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
And, then, of course, there is this, what I’ve already noted once in the past month just may be the finest poem William Carlos Williams ever wrote:
The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air – The edge
cuts without cutting
meets – nothing – renews
itself in metal or porcelain –
whither? It ends –
But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry –
Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica –
the broken plate
glazed with a rose
Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses –
The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end – of roses
It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits
Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness – fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching
The place between the petal's
edge and the
From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
the Milky Way
without contact – lifting
from it – neither hanging
nor pushing –
The fragility of the flower
Labels: William Carlos Williams
Thursday, April 16, 2009
In 1997, with the help of a co-worker at IBM who’d become something of the semi-official genealogist for the Silliman clan plus the ample resources of the internet, I finally was able to track down & meet, for the first time ever, a half-brother & -sister I’d sort of known had to exist somewhere.
It was a strange occasion for everyone involved. When my father died in 1965, Nancy & Buddy were just ten & nine respectively. Buddy is ten years younger than me to the day. What they knew about my full brother, Cliff, and me consisted of a single blurry photo my mother must have sent sometime in the 1950s.
One of things that Buddy & Nancy acquired, of course, was a poet in the family. I sent both of them copies of my books. These puzzled Nancy some (tho this past month she’s told me that the book club at her church tells her that I’m the real deal), but Buddy and I had a good conversation about it when I was down in Charleston later that year. Monday’s note here reminded me of that conversation, because Buddy’s occupation is doing yard work, specifically focusing on rose gardens.
Reading my poetry, he noted, was a lot like a walk in a garden. “You notice one thing, then you notice something else” was the way he put it. I’d never thought about my writing in those terms before, but his characterization rang true to me then, and still does twelve years later.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
“All conceptual writing is allegorical writing” argue Rob Fitterman &
But if all conceptual writing is allegorical, does it then follow that the reverse is also true? If Ours represents a booklength allegory, does this mean that it is a form of conceptual writing? And is Cole Swensen a conceptual poet? As the co-editor of American Hybrid, an anthology that seeks to define a middle path between post-avant & quietist poetics, one might think Swensen exists outside of the flarf vs. conceptual debate, or that her work & vision of poetry in some way precedes it. It’s difficult to imagine the precision of her writing alongside the loud (and knowing) nonsense of Kenneth Goldsmith typing up (or, more likely, scanning in) The New York Times, or the Hugo Ball-meets-Daffy Duck aural pyrotechnics of Christian Bök’s Eunoia, the thinking man’s Mel Blanc.
Like Goldsmith’s work, which makes extraordinary use of facts even as it problematizes that category, Swensen’s poem is obsessed with external detail:
The first orangerie in
but the form reached its height in the 17th
coinciding with what’s called “The Little Ice Age,”
a series of exceptionally cold winters
But where Goldsmith’s work – and to a lesser degree that of Bök & the other poets who are normally (or normatively) implied by the rubric conceptual – strives to demonstrate form without ever being at all “literary,” Swensen is writerly as all get out. Its demonstration of “the literary” is its claim to form. One could write a book about how Swensen uses the line in Ours, and of the balance between prose & verse evident in so many of its sections. That book would be much larger than Ours, and would never be completely equal to its subject. Consider the second of these three lines: The circle of philosophers / in stone; riven by voices, they stand at crossroads; they incite fountains. The voices / grow louder whenever someone lives. A line with not one but four hard stops – Swensen offers the most complex verse line since Olson, but never does so with the wheezing lunge that propels the bard of
Allegorical writing is necessarily inconsistent, containing elaborations, recursions, sub-metaphors, fictive conceits, projections, and guisings that combine and recombine both to create the allegorical whole, and to discursively threaten this wholeness. In this sense, allegory implicates Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem: if it is consistent, it is incomplete; if complete, inconsistent.
At which moment Place & Fitterman insert their claim that heads up this note.
All of this is true – in spades – of Swensen’s Ours. Is she therefore a conceptual poet? One might think so, and yet
One might as well argue her role in the history of flarf on the grounds that, long ago & far away, she was Nada Gordon’s junior high school teacher.
Flarf & conceptual poetics have been treated as antitheticals, except where they’re not. In five years (or minutes) no one will remember that they were once imagined to be oppositional, rather than as flavors of a larger investigative poetics. Flarf will discover that conceptualism expands the terrain of writing by valuing the extra-(and anti-) literary, conceptualism will discover that flarf’s ruling framework – “badness” – is an inherently conceptual move.
Hybrid poetry, by definition, brings alternative paths together: Pound’s Mauberly not perceived as satire. The first hybrid poet, almost by design, was Marianne Moore, old friend of Pound, advocate of Williams, but working a day job as editor of The Dial, the magazine that invented “dull” long before
If allegory assumes context, conceptual writing assumes all context. (This may be in the form of an open invitation, such as Dworkin’s Parse, or a closed index, such as Goldsmith’s Day, or a baroque articulation, such as Place’s Dies.) Thus, unlike traditional allegorical writing, conceptual writing must be capable of including unintended pre- or post-textual associations. This abrogates allegory’s (false) simulation of mastery, while remaining faithful to allegory’s (profound) interruption of correspondences. Allegory breaks mimesis via its constellatory features – what scattershot this is. Conceptualism’s mimesis absorbs what Benjamin called “the adorable detail.”
This suggests instead good vs. bad allegory. On the one side are a series of texts that might be called instances of mastery (Ours would be a case in point), on the other a series of texts that approach (indeed seek) unreadability in the name of breaking mimesis. A literature of works that one might have no particular desire to read, not unlike the idea that not everyone will want a urinal in their living room, even if it is signed “R. Mutt.”
Swensen reminds us that the old fashioned approach to extraneous (non-lyrical) data invading the text is called research. Ours sits like an ice flow atop a surface beneath which lies all of her reading & thinking on the subject of gardens. If, in fact, there are “adorable details,” they arrive via selection, precisely what the conceptualist counter-examples listed above seem to call into question.
What is the role of selection in poetry?
When I moved to
As an aesthetic dynamic, symmetry is inherently stable, even static. Asymmetry by definition is unstable, it tends to lurch about. La Bayadère vs., say, Sally Silvers, Simone Forti or even Twyla Tharp. Symmetry is the driving principle of all closed works of art, indeed of closure itself.
One might argue that the conceptualist works figured above are themselves obsessively symmetrical – completeness is a value in & of itself (it’s not enough to do just a page of the New York Times). Just as one might argue that they are nothing but catalogs of adorable detail.
And one might argue that Swensen is no less obsessive than, say, Goldsmith, in the projects she takes on – Ours is not a poem about a garden, but a book, and one that leaves unspoken what is surely its largest single claim – that writing poetry is essentially (I mean this adverb literally) a process of gardening. From the forest of language to arrive at a garden of text, a poem.
Is Cole Swensen a conceptualist or the disproof of conceptualism? Or is conceptualism the proof or disproof of Cole Swensen?