CLAYTON ESHLEMAN
Wind from all Compass Points
Not long ago in an issue of the politically
liberal New York Review of Books,
the poet/reviewer Charles Simic praised as a major
achievement a poem by the then Poet Laureate Billy Collins which basically
expressed Collin's "sensitive" surprise that cows actually moo. In a separate
article, Simic dismissed Robert Duncan's inspired confrontation
of the American destruction of Vietnam in 1967 in his
poem "Uprising" as "worthless." This
downgrading of Duncan's imaginative engagement with power, and the extoling of Collin's work, which is hardly even sophisticated
entertainment, sadly exemplifies much of what is supported these days by
editors, reviewers, and judges as endorsable American poetry.
Some years ago, in Sulfur #10, Charles Bernstein defined the officially sanctioned verse
of our time as characterized by "a restricted vocabulary, neutral and univocal
tone in the guise of voice or persona, grammar-book syntax, received conceits,
static and unitary form." This definition is still good today, some twenty
years later. In the academic writing programs, the post-Confessional and
Language poetries of the 1970s have fused to produce, in the main, a poetry
that is an abstract display of self-sensitivity, the new "official verse."
Such programs produce hundreds of young writers
each year eager to be accepted, get jobs, and win prizes (virtually the
only way a poet can get a first book published today is by winning a contest
judged in most cases by a well-known conventional writer;
poetry editors who actually edit hardly
exist any longer, especially in the service of first books). To my knowledge,
few writing programs back a genuinely international viewpoint, exposing
novices, for example, to the range of materials one finds in the two volumes
of Poems for the Millennium (ed. by Jerome
Rothenberg and Pierre Joris). More commonly, student-poets
are taught material by the same names that reappear with deadly regularity
as featured writers at summer retreats, as judges, as grant recipients and
as those invited to festivals as key-note speakers.
The extent that Harold Bloom's pronouncements
have had a direct effect on contemporary American poetry is hard to determine,
but given the extent that poetry readership is oriented to critical admonition,
a case can be made that Bloom's and Helen Vendler's failure to back the innovative push at the end of
World War II--I mainly have in mind here such poets as Louis Zukofsky,
Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Muriel Rukeyser,
George Oppen, and Jackson Mac Low--has skewed
readership to several generations of basically conventional writers. While
Bloom has brought his considerable erudition to bear on Blake and Shakespeare,
his role in the evaluation of several decades of American poetry can be
summed up in a statement he made on the poetry of Jay Wright: "His most
characteristic art returns always to that commodius
lyricism I associate with American poetry at its most celebratory, in Whitman,
in Stevens, in Crane, in Ashbery."
Bloom's primary position is that we are
at the tail end of a great English tradition, with Wallace Stevens as the
last major Romantic figure, trailed by John Ashbery
as his radiant ghost. The implication of Bloom's position is that English
language poetry has culminated and that what is occurring now, or has been
for the past one hundred years, with the above-cited exceptions, is a belated
and fractured caricature of it. Such thinking is Koranic,
as far as I am concerned, in as much as it treats a great complete tradition
(five hundred years of English poetry) as the Koran is treated by its disciples:
as a sacred incomparable text. The upshot of such a position is to tell
the young poet that he would be better off doing something else, that all
his language tits are dry. There is a powerfully-repressed Urizenic
poet in Bloom that must account for some of the respect given to his pontifications.
Of course if the young poet can be defeated by the likes of Harold Bloom,
he would clearly be better off doing something other than writing poetry
Ever since I discovered the poetry of César
Vallejo in the late 1950s, I have intuited that poetry is at a very early
stage in its potential unfolding. The depth of "I" has only been superficially
explored. Ego consciousness is inadequate to write innovative poetry. Rather
than the Freudian hierarchical model, a kind of totem pole consisting of
super-ego, ego, and unconscious, I would propose the antiphonal swing of
the bicameral mind which in a contemporary way relates to shamanism, the
most archaic mental travel. While the idea of poetry as a spiral flow, with
simultaneous interpenetrations of what we call perception, intuition, feeling,
and imagination, is too demanding for most writers, I think it may be one
key in enabling a poet to write a poetry that is responsible for all of
his experience.
Most poetries prized in any particular
decade perform conventional pieties and thus unwittingly bolster the position
of someone like Bloom. Given what the American government has been doing
throughout the world from the end of World War II on, the American subconscious,
into which news spatters daily, is now, more than ever, a roily swamp, at
once chaotic and irrationally organized. The fate of American Indians and
African-Americans is at the base of this complex. There is a whole new poetry
to be written by Americans that pits our present-day national and international
situation against these poisoned historical cores.
There are, in 2006, a significant number
of poets doing inventive work in their mature years and young poets who
look as if they are capable of contributing a fresh body of work. The first
names who come to mind in this regard are Adrienne Rich, Robin Blaser,
Gary Snyder, Jerome Rothenberg, Jayne Cortez, Robert Kelly, Rachel Blau du Plessis,
Ron Silliman, Ron Padgett, Paul Hoover, Nathaniel
Mackey, Michael Palmer, Lindsay Hill, John Olson, Pierre Joris,
Andrew Joron, Forrest Gander, Will Alexander,
Wang Ping, Christine Hume, Linh Dinh,
Jeff Clark, Cathy Wagner, Susan Briante, Kristin
Prevallet, and Ariana Reines.
I should also mention the poetry of the
late Tory Dent and Gustaf Sobin, and the extraordinary English poet, Peter Redgrove,
who died at 71 in June, 2003, whose writing is hardly known here. In France, the poet Michel
Deguy continues to expound a multifaceted, philosophical
poetics (a recent translation of a major Deguy
work, Recumbents, by Wilson Baldridge,
received the 2006 PEN Poetry Translation Award). Recently, I discovered
the writing of the Spanish transplant, Gerardo Deniz,
who has lived in Mexico City for many years
(in Monica de la Torres' fine translation, poemas / poems). Also recently Joannes Göransson sent me his translation of a young Swedish
poet, Aase Berg (Remainland), some of whose linguistic deftness evokes the late
poetry of Paul Celan.
Civil poetry in the 20th century
is associated with the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
In his Foreword to a selection of Pasolini poems
translated by Norman MacAfee (Vintage, 1982), Enzo
Siciliano writes: "Civil poetry is poetry in which abstract
subject matter--'moral' and 'religious' in Dante's case, and as we know,
these can also instantly turn 'political'--becomes fused with an entirely
personal sensibility, which absorbs every detail, every shading of inspiration
into itself and into the transformation of its content into poetic language."
Without the qualifying clause, Siciliano's statement could refer to Stevens or Ashbery as well as to the Pasolini
of "Gramsci's Ashes" (recently retranslated by
Michelle Cliff in NO: A Journal of
the Arts #4). As I see it, the "fusion" involves the figure of the writer
against the ground of society. Or the figure of the writer as a kind of
moving target in relentless evasion of those forces society uses to disarticulate
him: self-censorship as well as editorial censorship, the shying away from
materials that disturb a predictable and aesthetically-acceptable response.
For example, I wanted, in my poem "The Assault,"
to get the possible government conspiracy on 9/11 into the poetic record.
Beyond that, I seek to build an atmosphere of political awareness into much
of what I write--to write a civil poetry as a citizen-writer, something
I have done for several decades. I want a sense of my own time, on a national/international
register, to permeate my language. One way that the American poem can remain
human, in a social sense, as our government expands its imperialist domination
in the world (and space) is for the poet to assimilate and imagine the monstrous
interventionist framework within which, as a tiny and impotent god, he mixes
his "potions" and proceeds. Siciliano's "fusion"
also involves, in my sense of it, not only a porous mixing of perceived
and imagined materials, but keeping an experimental poetics intact when
addressing civil concerns. The European poetry of César
Vallejo reverberates with a social awareness contoured and spiked with associationally arresting metaphors.
In the fall of 2004, I spent a month at
the Rockefeller Study Center on Lake Como, Italy, studying a large
reproduction of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych, "The Garden of Earthly Delights,"
the most challenging painting I have studied. My 60 page improvisations
on the triptych, in prose and poetry, tip it, at points, into the 21st
century so that, for example, the American assault on Fallujah
is there as a disaster of Bosch's Apocalypse. In a section called "Fantasia
off the Force of Bosch," I sense the presence of Bush and Rumsfeld
in the apocalyptic mayhem to be found in the triptych's right-hand panel:
The
intoxications of immortality
light
up the switchboards when
another
is killed, for the furnaces of “immortality”
are
fed with the bodies of people who look a little different than us.
How
does this work, Donald Rumsfeld?
Does
your Reaper retreat an inch
for
each sixteen-year-old Iraqi boy snipered
while
out looking for food?
Men
in power are living pyramids of slaughtered others.
Bush
is a grinning mountain of carnage.
The
discrepancy between literal suit and
psychic
veracity is nasty to contemplate.
Imagine
a flea with a howitzer shadow
or
a worm whose shade is an entire city ablaze.
Reading these lines today, I realize that
"living pyramids of slaughtered others" evokes the tortured body piles of
Abu Ghraib.
Being caught up in an agenda can be as undermining
to imagination as self-censorship. Traditionally, so-called "political poetry"
tends to express a formed, and thus predictable, viewpoint that the writer
locks in place as a poem. Such in effect displaces an imaginative openness
to spontaneity and notions, images, associations that come up during writing.
If I am going to use George Bush in a poem I have to figure out ways to
imagine him and to absorb him into my sensibility. This is close to thinking
of him as a text that must be translated. Bush creates his own reality (at
odds with what we might call real reality) which millions of Americans induct
at the same time its repercussions undermine their lives. Bush's "language"
is the collision between what he proposes to be and what he actually legitimizes.
Or let me put the problem this way: how
get Colin Powell's language odor into the poem? How layer the lies, the
distorted research, the sighs and implications, the black uncle in a My
Lai stained uniform, his heil-thin integrity,
his good duped intentions, the extent to which slavery is still in his saliva--how
ladle all of this, not into proclamation, but into the poem's very climate,
into its feelers, its tonalities?
Visually, Botero's
recent bringing of tortured Iraqis in the Abu-Ghraib
prison into his invented pantheon of the obese (which is starting to look
like "real reality" in America) strikes me as
a valid example of such translation. And of course, for several decades,
until his death in 2004, Leon Golub had been envisioning
American power as the dirty work carried out by mercenaries and "white squads"
in Central America.
Another of the responsibilities of the poet
is to believe that writing remains significant, that significance is not
the enemy. The enemy is the eternal game of sticking our heads in the sand
and pretending not to know what is going on. In an essay in American Letters and Commentary, Ann Lauterbach
stated that her response to 9/11 was to stop watching television--a doubly
curious statement, since mainstream television has stopped watching life
as we know it to be. 9/11 opened up not merely a can of worms but a silo
of hydras, and the event itself should drive every artist crazy with curiosity
not only about the "official" account of the destruction of the World Trade
Center but about what has been done in our name to make them, apparently, assault us.
I think these are the initial commands. One then might ask: why do we now
have people in our government who would sacrifice thousands of American
and Afghan and Iraqi lives for greedy, global ambitions the repercussions
of which they themselves do not understand? I think that one has to face
such commands and to risk being overwhelmed by what one finds out during
one's investigations. Then one must assimilate them, and, as Vallejo writes, "see if
they fit in one's own size.
It is wrong to believe that an event like
9/11 provides justification for a poetry that avoids meaning, or to believe
that 9/11 changed the world just because it happened to us. Of course those
directly impacted by the assault on the WTC and the Pentagon must grieve
and work through their grief, but the rest of us should not feel sorry for
ourselves. If anything 9/11 should make us investigate our foreign policy
of the past 50 years. Relevant to the Middle East: over the past 20 years,
we have shot down Libyan and Iranian planes, bombed Beirut, created a Vietnam
situation for the Russians in Afghanistan, aided both Iran and Iraq during
their war in the 1980s so as to maximize the damage each side could inflict
on the other, bombed Iraq, imposed grueling sanctions upon its population,
blown up a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan (that as I understand it provided
half of that impoverished nation's medicine), established a hi-tech military
presence in Islam's holiest land, Saudi Arabia, and given 10 million dollars
a day to Israel. The quality of life in Palestine has been so ruined
that it is no wonder that many of the humiliated and the abject young there,
as well as the educated, can only think of themselves as ammunition.
9/11 aside (if that is possible, at this
time), responsibility has to involve responsible innovation, a poetry that
pushes into the known and the unknown, making not non-sequitur nonsense
but uncommon sense. Wyndham Lewis's view of the basis of art is still true:
that of clearing new ground in consciousness. Blake's "Without contraries
there is no progression" likewise still holds. Unless poets stave off and
admit at the same time, keeping open to the beauty and the horror of the
world while remaining available to what their perceptivity and subconscious
provide them with, one is pretty much left with an unending "official verse
culture." Here I think of a statement by Paul Tillich: "A life process is the more powerful, the more non-being
it can include in its self-affirmation, without being destroyed by it."
Affirmation is only viable when it survives repeated immersions in negation.
At the point one says "I am an American artist" one finds oneself
facing the daily news in which what is true and what is untrue, what is
necessary and what is human, blur into an almost imponderable palimpsest.
Such is outer negation with its acidic rivulets of guilt. Inner negation,
far more complex, plays the abyss off against one's own hedged gestation
and decay.
Poets do not lack an audience because what
they write is difficult and demanding--they lack an audience because the
poetry that is published and reviewed in mass media publications is often
superficial and seldom innovative. People who read
The New Yorker for its terrific investigative
reports, its witty movie reviews, and its often excellent fiction, must
find much of the poetry in its pages boring, rococo entertainment. My notion
here is that very few readers of complex fiction and commentary seek out
poetry because they have a limited view of what it can be, based on examples
or reviews of it in publications like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, or
The Nation--which often publish
sophisticated and pertinent material in other areas they address but not
poetry.
In response to my complaint about the pathetic
poetry reviewing policy of The New
York Review of Books, a young poet friend wrote to me: "But who reads
it for poetry reviews?"
Indeed, since there is so little real news
there, as far as poetry goes. This raises the question, however, of what
to read for news of or incisive commentary on complex collections of contemporary
poetry. First-rate poetry magazines today, like New American Writing and No: A Journal of the
Arts, do not publish reviews. The American
Poetry Review, with its huge circulation, publishes some commentary
on books and authors, but no reviews. Ron Silliman's
blog and John Trantor's on line
Jacket magazine (based in Australia) review a range
of books, including contemporary poetry. Silliman's
Argus-eyed daily also includes whatever dance, music, and films the editor
is attending to, and his daily bulletins and commentaries remind me more
of an arts newspaper than a journal. While I find things to gripe about
in the way that Silliman categorizes, extols and
dismisses (he tends to peck about the edges of contemporary poetry, sniffing
out small issues to dispute or affirm, rather than offering in-depth perspectives
on accomplished and demanding works) his blog
is the best vehicle we have at this point for news on what is new. And he
is a more engaged editor than John Trantor. While
I appreciate the international range of Jacket,
the magazine lacks an argued vision of poetry as well as a core group
of savvy reviewers. Saying this I recall the excitement with which I would
open new issues of Kulchur in the 1960s, eager to see what Gilbert
Sorrentino or Leroi
Jones had to say in their pungent reviews, which included bristling polemic
as well as praise.
Earlier I spoke of the increased irrational
turmoil in all of our minds. There is palpable guilt everywhere, and we
poets must make ourselves conscious of it. If we feel that we must express
it, we should work such out in our poetry and not thoughtlessly take it
out on others in vicious literary commentary. Not too long ago, Peter Campion, in Poetry
magazine, ended a trashing of Jeff Clark's book, Music and Suicide, with the following: "Clark writes and publishes
these poems for the same reason that Kim Jong
Il shoots missiles over Japan: simply because he can." It is of course outrageous
that Poetry would publish such
crap, in which a writer with whom the critic disagrees is compared to a
Stalinist dictator. Of course, who knows, Mr. Campion
might say the same thing under any circumstances. But the times are ripe
for a lot of projected, misplaced bile...
We might ask with Nietzsche: "Are we forced
to be conquerors because we no longer have a country we want to remain in?"
Writing on Henri Michaux's
art in 1977, Octavio Paz stated: "His paintings
are not so much windows that allow us to see another reality as they are
holes and openings made by powers on the other side." At 70 now, I
continue to work on accessing one kind of the language I hear in
dreams, a kind of magnificent nonsense, non-English English which, in the
dream, makes perfect uncommon sense! Such language is super-egoless, and
potentially the presence of that "other side" that Michaux
seems to have visualized. I believe this language relates to the language-twisting
of shamans, and that it is still writhing, in our subconscious, on the ground
floor of poetry. However, like all dreams, it does not transfer directly,
effectively, into writing. The dream mind is a rapt spectator which does
not reflect on the meaning of what it is beholding or hearing. The same
can probably be said about shamanic trance. Thus, if in trance, the poet
has to keep a shit-detector active, a bird's-eye critical view, that injects
invention with responsibility.
When not dreaming these days, the American
artist is confronted by a plethora of new information daily on the misdeeds
of the Bush administration at home and abroad. Unlike the Vietnam era, there are
no artistic mobilization units like "Angry Arts." One is on one's own. To
really follow the news as the writers Eliot Weinberger and Mark Crispin
Miller have done is a fulltime job. Aesthetically, one of the most vexing
aspects of the present administration is that an artist is forced to give
up a lot of traditionally creative time just to keep up on new revelations
about the war, torture, renditions, the Patriot Act and the 2004 national
election (with probable voting irregularities in 2008 now on the horizon),
or to disregard this political nightmare completely, and subsequently live
as an artist in one's own little bubble. And if one does not go the bubble
route, the more roguery one uncovers or tunes in to, the more one may confront
extreme emotions of rage, despair, and bafflement. The news has become an
unfollowable roadmap of facts crisscrossing
opinions. I realize that one reason that I have written poems about art
and artists over the past decade is that, complex as Bosch, Caravaggio and
Golub may be, one is
at least on firm ground facing their imaginative elaborations.
It would now seem that with the 20th
century re-discovery of the Ice Age painted caves in Europe, we have made contact
with what could be thought of as the back wall of image-making which, especially
in its hybrid aspects, evokes mental travel and thus the roots of poetry.
While it is possible that there are even older imaginative materials in
Africa and Australia, the chances are
that researchers will not uncover on these continents the ancient creative
range and quality to be found in such caves as Lascaux and Chauvet. While it is thrilling to know where one is ultimately
based as an artist, it is equally horrifying to realize that one may also
be witnessing the ecological destruction of the fundament that made art
possible in the first place. As these massive vectors shift into place and
cross, a disturbance in my mind challenges the convictions that I held as
a young man: that the most meaningful way I knew of to deal with myself
and with the world was to explore poetry and to write it. This is not a
back-handed way of suggesting that poetry or art at large is dead, but a
recognition that I may be of the first generation to be witness to one of
the recuperations of the roots of culture and
to the devastations that may make culture as we know it today a thing of
the past. Rather than resonating with the magnificent aurochses
of Lascaux, the abyss that
opens before us today declares itself through the potential extinction of
frogs and honey bees, and the accompanying sensations of the empty and lifeless
space that humankind has always suspected fueled depth and its analogues
of loss.
An earlier
version of this essay appeared at AlligatorZine.
TYPO 10