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The Argotist Online |
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Responses
to A. C. Evans' Essay Marjorie Perloff A.
C. Evans is quite right to complain about the purported denial of “voice” in
contemporary poetry, but the issue is not, I think, the refusal to engage with
popular culture. First, in the best
“language” or other experimental poetries, of course there IS voice, despite
all the claims to the contrary. A
Tom Raworth poem is easily distinguishable from one by J. H. Prynne, and so on.
I¹ve written about this in my essay on language poetry for Critical Inquiry,
reprinted in DIFFERENTIALS. But
secondly -- and more important -- why should poetry, or any art, just cave in to
pop culture? I realize it has
happened in the visual arts, and look at the results.
Not exactly works of genius. The
key example here -- and one that Evans does mention, not in this article but in
his interview
with Jeffrey Side, is that of Beckett.
Beckett never compromised with anyone or anything, and yet, although his
writing is very “difficult”, it is also enormously popular and today read
and studied around the world. That¹s
because Beckett has a unique vision of life and unique language usages.
Now, for Evans, Beckett is a “prose writer” and hence not quite part
of the present conversation, but I maintain that Beckett, who began as a poet,
even though not a satisfactory one, remains first and foremost a poet, in that
it is the density of language -- its sound, multiplex nature, visual aura, and
so on -- that is foregrounded.
It¹s
not a matter, in other words, of using this mode or that one, being part of this
school or that one, but having individual genius. There are plenty of very fine poets today -- perhaps just not in England
at the moment or in the U.S. But in less likely places.
Still, Evans is on to something important which is the utter nullity of much that currently passes for poetry. I have a different diagnosis, though. I think, at least here in the U.S., the real fault is not the refusal to engage pop culture but the unliterariness of “poetry” so-called. Most of our poets NEVER READ ANY POETRY or other literary work. It¹s so absurd. They want to be “poets” but heaven forbid they should read any when they can be reading theory or political tracts or whatever. Contrary to Evans, I believe it's the wanting to be “with it” that is destroying the poetry scene. If you want to be a poet, you have to have some sense of the poetic tradition. Look at the de Campos brothers in Brazil, Augusto and Haroldo, those marvelous poets who have also translated everyone from Dante to Rimbaud to the writings of Boulez and Cage. But Evans's historical analysis (1968 etc.) is very useful.
Jake Berry My
initial take on Evans' essay is that I agree with some of it, disagree with some
of it and don't care for polemics, so his argumentative position doesn't
persuade me one way or another. I am persuaded by what he says, not how he says
it. That is, I prefer an "authorial" voice to an "authorial"
scream. I
would agree, and so would Dana Gioia, that poetry took a wrong turn by
retreating into the academy. In an interview late in his life Pound was asked
what he thought about poets working in the academy. He said they had to get
their rent somehow. If all they were doing was getting the rent by teaching the
poetry they loved then there would be no problem. However, in this country, and
I assume in the U.K. as well, the academy became the only legitimate position
for a poet. This is Gioia's complaint in his essay, "Can Poetry
Matter?" As
long as the Beats and those that followed their lead were influential then
poetry remained, at least in part, the domain of "Whitman's wild
children." I think that influence is still with us, here as well as in Europe.
Michael McClure sent me, a couple of years ago, an issue of a Beat poetry
magazine devoted to him. The magazine had enough money behind it to support
being filled with photos, many in color, and some decent essays and interviews,
as well as poetry. That movement manifests in the U.S. in things like the annual
Burning Man festival, regular Beat retrospectives at major museums and
institutions and the slam poetry movement of the last 15 years or so. Poetry
with a strong authorial voice is still alive and well. Most people who
participate in any of these events couldn't care less about the academy since
they are romantics. They may feel like outsiders, but they are not nearly so far
outside as Ginsberg was when he wrote "Howl". Even in a small town
like Florence, Alabama, one is likely to see various manifestations of the romantic
persona, and they have various hangouts, including a coffee shop. Olson
has been co-opted by various factions, each claiming the genuine article. Olson
was one of the first, if not the first, to use the term post-modern. It is my
feeling though that he used the term as a means of distinguishing what he was
doing from the work of modernists like Pound. Olson befriended Pound for as long
as he could stand him and as The Maximus Poems will attest his
worked continued to develop what Pound had done in the Cantos. Olson's
"Projective Verse" essay has been appropriated to mean whatever the
movement that used it wanted it to mean, but he clearly remains attached to the
body of the author. After all, he makes the syllable, as a unit of breath and
sound, the basis for his poetics. Although his work is often abstract and draws
on many voices there is definitely an Olson sound, or rather a congregation of
voices that he drew from. He used his own ancestry, his personal voice in
letters, voices of others taken from various sources. Perhaps it is fair to say
that he did not hold to a singular authorial voice. He did not make his voice
primary or exclusive in his poetry, but it is there, and has many shades and
variations depending on his intentions. The
move away from the primacy of the ego, or a singular sound in one's poetry,
seems to me to make perfect sense. It isn't a feature of postmodernism though,
it's a feature of modernism. In a culture that was predominantly agricultural
(by which I mean that most people lived outside cities in either small towns or
on farms) a singular idea of the self is easier to maintain, as is a linear
narrative idea of time. One day follows the next, one season, etc. By the middle
of the 20th century as we became an urban society that singular idea of self
became more difficult to maintain. The ego was not eliminated by the relocation
though, it was fragmented. There was a persona one used when working in the
factory, one at home with the family, another when alone with one's wife or
husband. This is a gross oversimplification, but it makes the point. The reality
is even more complex because the traditional family begins to break down in an
modern urban environment. Roles change constantly. There is some tragedy in the
attempt to maintain a singular persona in the face of this state of perpetual
change. It's a holdover from the rural past that no longer works very well. Just
as one has to be on one's toes when walking around in a city in order to adapt
to frequently changing circumstances, street to street and moment to moment, so
in a rural setting one could reside in one's self going through the day in an
environment that demanded not change, but stability and perpetuity. Still, to
assert that the ego has been eliminated from creative work may make for an
interesting thesis, but it doesn't hold with reality. Instead, we all carry a
number of egos, or variations of ego that we use depending on the circumstances. Postmodernism
as elaborated in the academies is a selective reading of the authorities it
quotes. Derrida usually gets credited with being the father of postmodern
philosophy, but he rejected the term himself. He saw his work as a continuation
of his mentors, Levinas, Heidegger, etc. Postmodernism as it is currently
propagated, whether in the academy or as pop culture is foolishness. Heidegger
may have posed the question of the end of philosophy, but he answered it with
philosophical questioning. I
suppose every generation, every decade, wants to think it stands at the crux of
time, at a vital moment in the culture's history, or even the world's history.
This is a very egotistical position to take. Yet it happens with every
generation, especially in a culture where sensation is the essential currency. Is
there still a high and low culture? Certainly there are some in the academy that
would say that there is, and in other factions as well. One might ask, is a song
by a vapid pop singer as important as a poem by a prominent poet. Again,
fragmentation is the issue. The pop singer's audience shares an almost religious
devotion to the singer and the poet's audience holds the poet is such high
esteem as to grant him or her the heights of Olympus (albeit in contemporary
terms). Both audiences are hyperbolic in their fascination, yet there is
nothing wrong with respecting a person for a job well done, regardless of what
that job may be. The
ego as a human phenomenon is thriving, but it is different from what it would
have been 200 years ago, just as the world it inhabits is different. I do
believe that it is possible to create work that is not purely of the
individual's ideas, work that surprises the individual, which the individual
cannot recognize as the product of personal intention. Still, even using chance
methodology, we can often discern the maker, or rather the means of the maker,
of the work. As Duchamp said, "My chance will be different from your
chance." This does not mean that the work is the result of the ego. It does
mean that we cannot escape the reality that we are organic creatures and that
there will be an organic aspect to everything we do. The shift is personal
before it is paradigmatic. Further, the kind of shift we are talking about, away
from singular self toward multiple or no self, is not a product of postmodern
genius, but of a change in perception that is at least as old as Buddhism.
And Buddhism may have been a re-emergence of something ancient even to Gautama.
Perhaps it is a mode of being that has its origins in pre-agricultural society.
It is impossible to say for sure, but we can be certain that just as urban
culture requires an adaptation from rural culture so rural culture required an
adaptation from hunter-gatherer culture - and the art, science, and religion of
each culture adapts as well, even as it shapes and defines that culture. It
is important, at least for me, not to place too much emphasis on terms like
'avant-garde', 'experimental', 'traditional', or 'formalist'. The question I ask
when reading or hearing a poem or song, or viewing a painting or piece of
sculpture, etc, is not how to categorize it, but do I enjoy it? Do I learn from
it? Am I inspired by it? I have answered yes to these questions to poems by both
Robert Frost and Charles Olson, as well as paintings by Edward Hopper and
Jackson Pollock. These
are the etymologies I find for 'author' and 'authority.' They come from the Online
Etymology Dictionary, but the Random House, Webster's, and Oxford
American are more or less the same. The interesting thing beyond the
etymologies was the inclusion at OED of the quote from Kafka. It may say more
about the idea of the author and writing than the etymology. I
believe that the modernism does throw into doubt what it means to be an author,
just as it throws the idea of a singular ego in doubt. That doesn't invalidate
the authorial voice it just changes its context and fragments it into many
possibilities. author c.1300,
autor "father," from O.Fr. auctor, from L. auctorem
(nom. auctor) "enlarger, founder," lit. "one who causes to
grow," agent noun from augere "to increase" (see augment).
Meaning "one who sets forth written statements" is from c.1380. The
-t- changed to -th- on mistaken assumption of Gk. origin. The verb is attested
from 1596. authority c.1230,
autorite "book or quotation that settles an argument," from
O.Fr. auctorité, from L. auctoritatem (nom. auctoritas)
"invention, advice, opinion, influence, command," from auctor
"author" (see author). Meaning "power to enforce obedience"
is from 1393; meaning "people in authority" is from 1611.
Authoritative first recorded 1609. Authoritarian is recorded from 1879. John M. Bennett It
seems to me this article really has nothing new to say, and that its main
"point" misses the point, so to speak. Of course authors have a
voice; the "denial of authorial voice" is simply a slightly dramatic
way of describing a particular style or, better, attitude; one that is not new
in literary history, in fact. I see no "polemic" here at all.
Jack Foley This
polemical stance—doesn’t lead anywhere. The
main problem with the essay is that Evans is so hung up on his binary opposition
(ego vs. non ego) that the concept of voices (as opposed to "the
voice") never even occurs to him—and this despite the fact that much of
the energy of the 20th/21st century has been devoted to
finding forms expressive of "voices." The Waste Land and The
Cantos are not poems about non ego but poems about many voices—about, to
use Pound’s term, "personae." The "self" of these poems is
understood to be something like a radio receiver bringing in many stations
simultaneously. Pound: "Confusion of voices as from several transmitters,
broken phrases, / And many birds singing…." But to say, as these poems
do, that there is no central ego is not to deny that ego exists. (Someone said
to me recently, "For a man without an ego, you certainly have a lot of
opinions." I answered, "I have multiple egos, and they all
talk.") On the other hand, there is considerable documentation to the experience of ego loss—not only in mystics but in athletes, whose experience of intense physical activity sometimes brings them to a sense of the disappearance of the ego. There’s no reason why such experience can’t be represented in literature. As for Olson, all you have to do is to read "The Kingfishers" to discover that the tension between ego and non-ego is at the very center of his poetry. There is an "I" at the beginning of the poem, but it is uncertain, non-assertive. There is also an I at the conclusion of the poem, but it is an extremely assertive, authoritative I—one which keeps insisting on the repetition of that pronoun. In the rest of the poem, there are many things—quotations, images, speculations, etc.—but there is no I: the pronoun doesn’t appear. The authority of the I at the conclusion comes from the fact of its having witnessed its own dissolution. Of
course, Evans doesn't actually quote any passages: he just keeps making
assertions. Ira Lightman I
can think of poetry in films, Auden's poetry in Four Weddings and a Funeral,
or e.e. cummings in Hannah and Her Sisters. This is poetry from a
previous period that mass popular culture has caught up with, so that it's ready
for it to appear. I can perfectly imagine any of the poets Evans mentions being
quoted in films, but not for some time. It takes a while for unacknowledged
legislators to matter more than they did at the time. Am I supposed to feel
morally upbraided because I can remember lines from poems from several of the
poets disparaged here? I go to church for that. Termed
blue is perfectly blue. The bee … evades the half-light. Brag, sweet tenor
bull. I can see things in these lines. In song lyrics, I can always see the
singer looking at them. In songs, words follow an emotional logic, as they do in
playwriting. Songwriters usually reach for description and write either a
good screenplay - you can see it in a film - or badly. They don't linger like a
painter. And all the painters who have made it into mass popular culture still
do make you linger. There's
surely a gridlock of I in the world, and rage of the sort in this essay behind
it. Where does Evans show he has any time for any of these poets? Who do you
love, as Eric Clapton once said, Is it me, is it him, babe, I don't know. Is
Evans saying that postmodern poets fear to face an audience? Look at Ron Mann's
film Poetry in Motion. It shows people using non-I language tactics, but
being very much on the spot in performance. I
see the younger and older generation of American postmodernists wrestling with a
LOVE for (not an obedience to) postmodern poetry (which after all had the label
thrust upon it). And then a desire to go out far and wide. Sure, people play
safe. But that effort makes my pulse race, makes the writer's pulse and the
audience's pulse race. Surely that is the world of personal risk in poetry.
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