Rethinking Poetics Notes (pre, during and post)
Here is everything I've typed up around the Rethinking Poetics conference, at which I presented on the Poetries and Ecologies panel (the conference was held June 11-13 at Columbia University, in NYC, 2010). This is NOT a summation of everything I found of interest at the conference, especially on the last two days when I wasn't "live facebooking." There are, additionally, copious handwritten notes in my brown muji notebook--covering other interesting things not noted here--that will have to wait another (less sunny) day for transcription . . .
Play by play posts (from my iPod, June 11):
"not to make the invisible visible, but to peruse and multiply the channels of its invisibility" -- Jennifer Scappetone
Talking of the shit we flush away, Tonya Foster asks, "what is to be done with experience, with what is past experience?"
Kasey Mohammed is into the phatic, uncertain, er, hemming and hawing, function of tradition.
The politics of remembering and creating counter-traditions, where more is at stake than aesthetics . . . (Elizabeth Willis)
Barrett Watten: what, what, what? (what is it we are rethinking here?)
Joan Retallack: "no questions, no conversation"
"I sought to refunction Krauss's derivation of new sculptural genres [for poetry]" (Barrett Watten). Radical particularity in relation with critical regionalism -- a differential negative poetics that transmits the rift of the negative . . . Poetry as site construction that demonstrates non-identity [in the face of the global]"
"hay una historia de arte conceptual que date del epoco baroco" (is the ghost of concrete poetry currently haunting conceptual poetry? it's a powerful exchange of global currency -- that conceptual poetry sound bite). --Monica de la Torre (who delivered half her presentation in Spanish . . . rawk!)
Joshua Clover "seeks only to antagonize" . . . "rethinking is a question of mediation" that relies on a fundamental antagonism -- whose terms are concrete and material . . . American Hybrid displaces post-avant vs. S.O.Q to a higher level . . .
Rebecca Wolff: Joshua [expletive deleted]
Rodrigo Toscano: what to do about what happens when people walk away after the reading . . . Material translocative permissivity (?) vs. the overbearing postmodern [emphasis on] the now now, always the present.
Osman (read by Spahr) is interested in echolocation (listening, hearing rather than sculpting an environment one has come into contact with that one doesn't know) as a possible trope for (rethinking) poetry--with examples from Nowak, Cobb, Sand, Spahr, Rankine, Buuck, Templeton . . .
"a poetics of courage now must include enactments of reciprocal alterity" -- Joan Retallack
Rachel Blau DuPlessis thinks we should reappropriate fixed forms. "Vulnerability is good, vulnerability is a kind of trust."
Precious moment: DuPlessis (eloquently) defending the value of creative writing programs to Perloff . . . [see further discussion on this below]
subway snafu! missed most the first panel of today's Rethinking Poetics (sorry: as I'm presenting on the next panel, I won't be facebooking notes again until the afternoon). oh for Haussmannian transport transparency!
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Notes for Poetries and Ecologies Panel (Rethinking Poetics)
[I covered most but not all of these notes in my presentation. A couple of things I inadvertently skipped or hadn’t yet thought to note. And I probably said a couple of things that aren’t reflected here.]
ecopoetics is dedicating to exploring creative-critical edges between writing (with an emphasis on poetry) and ecology (the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings). That’s the original masthead, launched almost ten years ago.
ecopoetics was conceived as a site, not a genre. In the sense of site-specificity as developed out of the 1960’s art world, but also in the sense of theories of distributed consciousness, as explored by philosophers such as Bruno Latour, Edwin Hutchins, Richard Taylor, N. Katherine Hayles, or Donna Haraway. Theories exploring the idea that consciousness, and maybe agency, are distributed “out there,” amongst the “objects” of the world, rather than “in here” (tapping skull). So I don’t aspire to publish “ecopoems” or to identify “ecopoets,” but to offer an overtly-dedicated site, to which different kinds of practices can contribute.
A principal organization for ecopoetics has been edge effect: the enriched life along an edge between biomes or habitats.
One edge is the invisible slash or hyphen in eco/poetics. Do eco and poetics interrogate and rethink one another? See the just-out Ecolanguage Reader, ed. Brenda Iijima (Portable Press at Yo-yo labs and Nighboat Editions) for some current, edgy examples of writing that in different ways rubs the eco against poetics, and vice versa.
Another one of the edges is determined by the ambiguous status of “eco” itself (here and everywhere). Ecologies are nestled inside of ecologies. Ecology also speaks the language of capital by which it aims to extend systems of command, communication, control into bodies and their visible relations. If ecopoetics is tasked with making visible the invisible relations, then it faces a challenge — in naming them can language withhold our relations from biopower? How is ecopoetics more than (yet more) browning the world in the name of green? How is it more than business as usual?
Consider President Obama’s remarks on expanded offshore drilling, delivered at Andrews Airforce Base, March 31st, where he praised a biofuel-powered F-18, “appropriately called the Green Hornet,” to be launched on Earth Day: is this the greening of the military industrial complex? What is ecopoetics the greening of?
I like what Jennifer Scappetone had to say yesterday: “not to make the invisible visible but to peruse and multiply the channels of its invisibility.”
ecopoetics is not an activist journal—though it often is considered such (mostly by people who may not have read it). Yet, more than with other labels, the question of use value looms large. What can poetry do here? This question emerges sharply in a recent debate on the UB Poetics listserv around Amy King’s and Heidi Lynn Staples’s online Poets for Living Waters anthology. One member of that list questioned the value of writing, publishing and reading poetry in the face of the magnitude of the BP/Deep Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Staples published an eloquent defense of poetry to the same listserv that I encourage you all to read. I’m not sure I buy her argument—that poetry makes nothing happen therefore subtracting from the damage of production—but it’s definitely one I’ve considered. (I at one point identified “entropology” as a fourth writing dimension, alongside the topology, tropology and anthropology [ethnopoetics] that the site of ecopoetics opens.) I don’t think entropology or Stevensian negativity—which after all might include the school of quietude—adequately addresses the plight of the pelicans, who just want the oil removed from their beach. Or of the bats who are dying from some mysterious fungal pathogen called White-Nose Syndrome. (They don’t give a damn if I can write beautiful, smart or whatever poems about their plight.) In any case, however we pin it, the “eco” today remains both totally generic and persistently marginalized.
Taking on faith that “eco,” which ultimately just signals the big house we’re all learning to keep together, does offer a useful site for specially focused attention—one of the revisions poetry offers in responding to inadequacies, as Charles Bernstein (in his “pata queero normative way”) noted yesterday—then the term “eco” itself presents the ambiguity that these special markers always do: does an “eco” poetics need an eco index? Is it primarily a thematic interest? The dominance of nonfiction prose in the area of environmental literature seems to confirm the thematic emphasis. This is an emphasis that the journal ecopoetics indeed set out to challenge.
I was struck that Jena Osman yesterday, for the Social Location/ Ethics panel, as re-echoed by Juliana Spahr, chose to ask about echolocation as a possible trope for poetry coming into contact with an unknown environment—also echoing Joan Retallack’s ideas about experimental writing (“What is Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?” in Jacket 32). I myself asked the same question a while ago. I was looking for examples of experimental poetry that engages echolocation as a form but no one seemed to have any ideas at the time. In my talk on Poetry and Biodiversity, for Poets House last month, for which I was preparing the example of echolocation, I resorted to two instances that might seem to establish limit cases—for a poetry engaging the sensorium of other species (in this case, those of the chiroptera order, which as mammals and “vampires” are like us, but in every other way seem so different, even repellant). We discussed Mary Oliver’s “Wings” (where the speaker of the poem removes a dying bat from the road, as an occasion for reflections on mortality) and Bruce Andrews’s “Dizzyistics” (a collaborative-improv “language” piece, echolocating within the syntagmatic slippage of [English] language itself). In between I had presented Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” (where the musician records a recording of a recording of a recording of a recording, etc. of his own voice explaining the piece, until nothing is left but a standing wave, the resonance of the room itself). Between Mary Oliver and Bruce Andrews, where is the ecopoetics? This is the edge that interests me—not a third way or a hybridity, but an editorial intervention. And then there’s the question of what this does for the bats. Let the synthesis, if we want to think that way, happen elsewhere, probably not in poetry.
The edge is thick, and situated differently in relation to those different points of the classic compositional triangle: theme; form (or author, if you wish); and, perhaps most importantly for questions of ecology, audience. In regards to the latter, it could be argued (and some skeptical, hard-nosed scientists do) that “ecology” is primarily a mode of rhetoric.
Specific themes are important because “eco” really is too general, just as “ethnicity” is general or “gender” is general. (Can you imagine proposing a panel today called Ethnicities of Poetry, or Genders of Poetry? Not long ago, yes, but today the preliminary questions have been asked and more specific investigations are underway. Even so, ecology still seems to offer a space for the most unexamined kinds of generalization.)
Overall the range of themes seems to be governed by an edge between what one might call Thoreauvian and Emersonian tendencies. Do we sound the pond or do we vision our will, examine the entangled bank or the locomotive? As Spahr has asked, is it more ecopoetic to write of the bird or to write of the bulldozer about to destroy the bird’s habitat? I envisage some tension between those who would write rainforest or coral reef poems in face of the BP oil disaster and those who would write oil platform or petroleum poems. A third main thematic category, not necessarily a synthesis of the first two, involves poems of place, including the urban but also including sustained attention to the non-urban.
Not to stop at three, some other themes, that I have identified in reading through ecopoetics or in my own practice, include:
abandoned landscapes and the poetics of weeds (you can find examples in “Thoughts on Things,” my essay for the Ecolanguage Reader);
immunity or boundaries between organism and environment (Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, “Pollen”);
oil (Marcella Durand, Anatomy of Oil);
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Evelyn Reilly, Styrofoam, “Key to the Families of Thermoplastics”);
urban planning (Ed Roberson, City Eclogues, “The Open”);
urban green open space (Allison Cobb, Greenwood);
agriculture and migrant labor (Yedda Morrison, Crop);
extraction industry labor (Mark Nowak’s recent books);
the presence of animals in media environments, including that of human languages (Brenda Iijima’s recent books, also something I have been working on).
Before I thought I had enough to say at this forum, I was planning to read from my essay “Poetry Animal” (published in the recent boundary2). I’ll just read from the beginning and end of it here:
Animals—as form, as function, as affect, as intensity—are saturating our media-machine environment. They are images, they are sounds, they are rhythms and textures, they are tastes and odors, models and products.
Observe Moore’s glacier “picking periwinkles, spider fashion,” an octopus harvesting textual ice.
They are structures of feeling, structuring our feeling, or lack thereof, for other humans, not to speak of the animals themselves—structures that distort or subvert our uses of them. . . .
The cultural work our age of extinction calls for is not to promote habitat preservation, but—as Ellen Crist forcefully puts it—to ourselves become island preserves of animality.
To attend to “language’s animalady. . . . when the performance of language moves from human speech to animate, but transhuman, sound” (Bernstein).
Poetry animals allow foreign organizations into the sphere of our nervous system. Whether as Artaud’s parasites, as William Burroughs’s virus, as Maria Sabina’s mushrooms, or as other forms of possession or “becoming.”
When they speak, let us listen as animals; when animals enter our writing, they do so humanly, when we become machines for reading and writing.
Deconstruct the singular “animal”—that criminal “confounding of all non-human beings under the common and general category of the animal.” As a protest, Derrida’s Ecce animot lodges the humanist’s cogito acoustically, between animals (“animaux”) and word (“mot”).
Even on this virtual horizon, which might be the very fabric of their extinction, animals trace the affect that cannot be subsumed to human purpose.
With form, the emphasis is determined at least partly by audience — as Ben Friedlander wrote on Facebook today, in response to Barrett Watten’s pronouncement that “genre trumps form”: “form is genre.”
The dominantly thematic orientation of environmental literature—or of “ecolit” as Jack Collom likes to call it—has dictated certain counter-emphases (that are not exclusive) in my editing of the journal: non-“I”-centered poems; significant attention to language, what it frames, connects, separates, occludes, how it has a body; attention to languages, the translation zone that explores an intertwining of linguistic and biodiversity (see contributions to ecopoetics by Ak’abal, Ochoa, Tornero, Zemborain, amongst others).
Recently, I tried to catalog these as different instances of procedural writing (for more on “procedures,” see the noulipian Analects, ed. Wertheim and Viegener):
listing (Tim Atkins, “Emulsion Defect”);
translation (Mayan poet Humberto Ak’abal, “Xirixitem chikop”);
transcription (Jonathan Stalling, “Wolf howls”);
frame shift (Kenny Goldsmith, The Weather);
concrete/ page-based (Alec Finlay, Mesostic Herbarium);
machine-based (Juliana Spahr, things of each possible relation hashing against one another);
situationist (Joan Maloof, “September 11th Memorial Forest”; Patrick Jones, Slow Dragging);
site-specific (Jennifer Scappetone, in collaboration with Kathy Westwater, PARK!; Brenda Coultas, The Bowery Project; Peter Culley, Hammertown; Slow Poetry [Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen in Austin, TX]);
“species saturation job” (Jonathan Skinner, Warblers);
and collaborative procedures (Marcella Durand and Tina Darragh, Deep eco pré; BARGE, Bay Area Research Group [D. Buuck et al]; PILLS, Pacific Institute for Language and Literacy Studies [Aaron Vidaver, Roger Farr and Steve Ward]; Philly Sound Poets [CA Conrad, Frank Sherlock, et al]; Movement Research [Robert Kocik and Daria Fain]).
Finally, the audience-based, or rhetorical, dimension of ecopoetics:
Up front, one is dealing with the “environmental”/ nature writing crowd, the avant-po crowd, and, perhaps most importantly, with one’s immediate community — the community one engages on an everyday basis, not just one’s elected virtual community. In regards to immediate community, we might want to reconsider the value of “occasional” work, the work of the poet in response to community occasions.
When we consider ecopoetics rhetorically, we rethink venue. These gatherings of poets are a joy but also part of the problem. As Robert Kocik likes to put it, we need more “poetry outsource.”
A practice that brings together the thematic, formal and rhetorical dimensions would be something like Joan Retallack’s “enactments of reciprocal alterity,” as she articulated them yesterday—where the edge or boundary becomes a generative site rather than an objective in itself.
I’d like to end with two quotations from a poet whose collected works were published this year, in an act of heroic editing by Robert Grenier and Curtis Faville. The poet is Larry Eigner, who reminds us that writing for writing’s sake is kind of “over,” and that professionalization may be doing us in, as a species:
“Enough it seems has been produced. Enough writings, enough cars, enough music, enough of a lot else. Production or creation is a human quality or whatever, anthropoid, mammalian, vertebrate, proceeding through time. Contact outwards or something, besides bringing in and familiarizing.”
(“Arrowhead of Meaning,” Areas / Lights / Heights)
“And then too there’s the matter of Overexcitement. Every hour or two is a new day around the world, but by now I opine you can have overkill in anything, for example there’s no shortage of any kind of writing that l can see. Nor is Work any longer a very great good – life or living is its purpose. Career or Profession seem obsolete in enough ways by now and now I think of a return to amateurism.”
(“not / forever / serious,” Areas / Lights / Heights)
12 June 2010
Facebook comment stream posts:
Perloff, who (as we know) has been a huge champion of risky and adventurous poetics--in the arena of canon and career-making academic power--largely served as a rearguard gate-keeper at this "rethinking," directing us back to traditional markers and evaluative criteria like genre distinctions and the pattern-making evident in "good writing." Her support of con-po, and of Goldsmith's work specifically, has surely been a curse as much as a blessing.
One of my favorite moments was when Burt Kimmelman, in one of the many overlong "questions" that were really statements from the audience (almost supplementary presentations), said that Perloff wasn't reading conceptual poetry, when she claimed (as she often has) that Goldsmith's The Weather is poetry, very figured out poetry. Perloff just looked incredulous, like Kimmelman was calling her bluff. But what I took Kimmelman to mean was that you can't have it both ways--you can't buy the conceptual point *and* sell it to the literary taste-makers. You might be reading poetry, but you're not reading "conceptual poetry," when you admire the literary art sometimes found within these works. I'm sure this point has been made many times before: an easy target.
Perloff's role was very mandarin, to invoke literary values in the face of a "lot of cross-overs by people who don't know what they're talking about." She basically (implicitly) criticized most of the proceedings at the conference as "sloppy thinking" and "loose terms" (those aren't necessarily the exact words she used, but my paraphrase). So I didn't take Perloff's comment, that "ecology and poetry" don't seem to have much to do with poetry, as specific to Bitsui's or Schelling's or my presentation on the Ecologies of Poetry panel or to anything but her inability to really hear whatever rethinking might be going on. (Perloff did look up from her iPod, during my presentation, when I invoked Goldsmith.)
Participants flocked to the mikes at this point to defend their respective rethinkings (for which I was grateful, relieving me of the charge to respond). As Vidaver notes, *this* was the gaffe. Many of us were too focused on whatever it was we'd already brought to the conference (including our iPods, mea culpa) to attend to what was really going on.
Before a rush to judgment, on the basis of fragmentary accounts and summaries in Facebook comment streams, it might be best to get some more holistic reports. There were lots of poets/ thinkers present who were not represented on the panels. And there were many who did not get a chance to speak. (Question period etiquette was hideously lacking.) I saw many younger poets, amongst others, still holding a mike when sessions wrapped up, never getting to ask their question.
In this respect, I don't think Vidaver's judgment of the group is fair: there simply wasn't time, in the narrow space of a crowded Q & A, to absorb and effectively respond to a comment made in the course of that Q & A. Anyone who had stepped up the queue at one of the mikes immediately after Perloff opened her mouth wouldn't have made it to the mike. (That's NYC for you: crowded!)
I was particularly moved by Bitsui's discussion of the power and dangers of negative speech, from a Navaho perspective: that language is physical and makes things happen. In that respect, the negative talk (different from dissatisfaction) already swirling around Rethinking Poetics, especially on the part of those who didn't actually attend, seems particularly premature--if not lacking in precisely the kinds of attention and generosity the organizers showed, by putting this thing on in the first place.
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I think the intergenerational character of such a gathering presents particular challenges. In Perloff's case, I wouldn't blame her for not getting ecopoetics or for not hearing whatever rethinking was struggling to be born. She comes from a different moment. (I personally took it as a badge of honor: there might be a real problem with ecopoetics if Perloff liked it!) The presence of other elders at the conference was similarly at the same time instructive and confounding. (Just as the efforts of my generation may have seemed of very mixed value to the younger poets present.) There was a lot of "correcting" and "setting the record straight."
I myself believe a "rethinking" needs as diverse a committee as possible, intergenerationally as well as otherwise. (An aside: more than one of the attendees commented on the overwhelming whiteness of the audience.) At the same time, that diversity, such as it is--as I am well familiar in my own efforts with ecopoetics--will both enrich and diffuse the thinking. It was interesting, in this regard, that some of the discussion following the final panel turned around questions of temporality.
On another note, I appreciated the efforts of the coordinators to break up organized "thinkerships" (such as Con-po and flarf) in their arrangement of the panels--like exasperated teachers who separate trouble-makers by rearranging the seating--which for the most part presented striated assemblages of individuals rather than group formations. (A bit of "edge effect"?) So it wasn't "a bunch of panels about F-Con Po telling me how to rethink F-Con Po."
But with some exceptions, rather than generating new perspectives, conversation tended to gravitate toward renewed defenses (or, let us say, "fine tunings") of the thinkerships in question. (Leading an exasperated Perelman, at one point, to plead: "Amidst the positive and negative reaction, let's not reify the terms . . .")
Needless to say, I was disappointed by the apparent lack of interest in ecological contexts, a not surprising but increasingly egregious silence in light of developing events. Not to mention the lack of interest in anything outside the hermeneutic scrim set and maintained, if not policed, by the academic big-shots.
A notable exception was Richard Doyle's out-of-left field "ecodelic" account of his entheogenic revelation about the "plant matrix," on an NPR-reporting trip to investigate "Ayahuasca tourism" in the Amazon, on the final "interdisciplinary" panel. Almost totally dismissed by the "rethinking" audience, no doubt, except when it was handled in the Q & A with the clinical gloves of structuralist, Marxian and psychoanalytic analysis (addressed as a "return of the repressed").
I hope that postmortem critique can avoid making the organizers feel bad, who I cannot imagine having gone the lengths to organize this gathering (a thankless and consuming task), amidst insanely busy job lives, out of anything but their generosity and a wish to do all they can to facilitate some ground-breaking discussion. Even if what they helped produce ends in a failure to rethink, Golston and Perelman and the grad students who collaborated have my own thanks and congratulations. (The burgeoning comment streams seem to testify to *something.*)
To figure out why this failed and how we might, one day, "rethink" poetics, I'd say we need to look at the environmental and organizational unconscious of the conference design: the space in which it was held, the way that space and time were organized into discrete units of discussion, the lack of an explicit convention for managing the discussion.
If we really want to "rethink," we need to be much more deliberate in precisely those areas that tend to come as afterthoughts to what is given. We might attend to the ecologies of poetry (and not so much the poetry of ecologies), which is where I might have directed more of my own presentation.
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I agree that drawing generational lines doesn't amount to a critique. That said, it was not my intent to put Perloff down for being "old." Nor, for the record, do I think "ecopoetics" to be all that hip! (To the contrary, the Ecologies of Poetry panel remains the least discussed in the wake of RP.) My mistake may have been in conflating two issues I wanted to raise:
1) Perloff's role at this gathering was quite conservative--perhaps appropriately so--and there was a bit of the patronizing "if you young people don't get your terms straight--like we used to, back in the day--who else is going to defend poetry from the philistines?" So I was probably just engaging in a bit of immature eye-for-patronizing-eye there. I was also reflecting on the fact that respondents seemed to react more strongly to this tone than to the actual content of what Perloff said (viz. rapists and their victims, or whatever else).
2) and perhaps separately, my phrase "from a different moment" was an awkward use of fuzzy language to refer to but avoid directly addressing the question of intergenerational lines at the "rethinking." I was being fuzzy because it's such a difficult issue, maybe to the extent that it does personalize the argument a bit. What kind of gathering would it have been without the integrated presence of senior poets and critics who, let's face it, have already made a significant mark on poetics?
Again, I'm all for the intergenerational mix, and would even question the drawing of generational "lines." (Especially as I myself fall increasingly into that perilous middle-aged ground between young and senior.) And yet, I think we'd have to agree that the significant role given to senior poets and critics, perhaps even to middle-aged poets and critics (and I'm using these terms as relative to trajectories of visibility, not to literal age), at this "rethinking," is bound to constrain as much as it aids in our understanding of where today's poetics might be headed . . .
Probably just a useless (even stupid) thought experiment that I am not all that invested in pursuing.
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"We are, instead, producing an enriched sense of language, convention, and the literary field as a zone of community, communication, and traditions of praxis” (Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in post-conference discussion).
Two thoughts: 1) what can we do about how these very values and formations drop away or balkanize in the "long-term, intense, saturating" work of becoming poets? (What happens *to* the values of creative writing/ praxis in the field of poetics?) There was a certain community on display at Rethinking Poetics (RP) but I don't think it pointed toward this sense of enrichment. (Not that it needed to or that this was the particular work of that gathering. Instead participants focused on the meta-discourse of the "long-term, intense, saturating" work of poetics.) The borders of this zone, I'm afraid, remained fairly closed. Perhaps some grad students (I hope) felt included. But I don't think much of the community outside RP (and there were several there) felt invited in. Also, perhaps due to certain organizational constraints and decisions, a representative variety of perspectives comprising the zone itself was not, I think, able to manifest.
2) How does the production of values you outline differ in the creative writing and the literary seminar? At least in the small liberal arts college context, I feel the sense of community produced in my creative writing-oriented classes and in my literary seminars (when they work) is comparable. (And yet, there are differences.) Ideally, I combine creative and critical pedagogical approaches, so perhaps when these courses are at their best, there is not much difference. And students will express to me that they value above all the intellectual/ creative community (with their peers) that they discover, in either kind of class. Overall, I wonder about the value of inserting that slash between the critical and the creative vectors. I'm not sure that's the direction of Perloff's critique of CW programs, but it's how I'd state it. I think the separation is damaging to both vectors. But I'd be interested in hearing about the specific differences between creative and critical community.
Further attempts to clarify that I did not mean to suggest Perloff has "bad ideas because she is of a certain age or belongs to a bad generation” (nothing of the sort! I myself think she has some good ideas and some bad ideas):
When I wrote Perloff comes from a "different moment"--and here's something I forgot to mention in my earlier post--I was also appealing to the philosophical sense of "moment," a moment in a movement of concepts. So that Perloff's conceptual frame, where she works best, might not accommodate work emerging from other moments without some radical restructuring. (Which might explain the awkwardness of her embracing KG and Conceptual Poetry.) Just as the conceptual moment out of which I work probably isn't equipped to deal with what's emerging amidst the youngest generation of writers.
Barrett Watten complains about "poetics = aesthetic community that assumes experimental practice as a norm/ground." If I may jump in here, I think there were other assumptions in play at RP -- notably, an assumption that "thinking" = critical theory as received through a lineage of Euro-American theorists. This may or may not align with academic affiliation. (In any case, in my limited experience, it seems to have become the norm for "poetics" discussions, in OR outside of the academy.) Whatever the organizers did or did not do to mitigate the exclusiveness of the venue, whatever the limitations of the academic frame (& I agree that they are real and powerful), the exclusivity in question is, I think, trans-institutional.
What are some of the ways in which a listener/ participant might feel excluded by the vocabulary of a sentence like "I sought to refunction Krauss's derivation of new sculptural genres"? Or of phrases like "radical particularity in relation with critical regionalism," "a differential negative poetics that transmits the rift of the negative," and "poetry as site construction that demonstrates non-identity [in the face of the global]." Now, I think Barrett Watten’s presentation (from which these quotations are drawn) was/is actually exemplary in its efforts to locate schematics outside of the received critical frameworks (e.g., repurposing, or refunctioning, Krauss's "expanded field" diagram, which would be familiar to any student of art history but not, perhaps, to many students of poetry and poetics). He also took care to define terms like "critical regionalism." I'm only picking on his examples because I find them amongst what I noted down, and I only noted down what I could hear clearly.
I actually didn't find anything too abstruse in Clover's talk (who began by saying he set out to give the "least sophisticated" talk at the gathering). Mohammed seemed to offer us an example of one of his (undoubtedly excellent) introductory lectures on semiotics. But a good deal of the Q & As and of the panel on Affective Economies & Prosodies, which I've seen singled out for praise in many of the early reports, operated at a level of meta-discourse guaranteed to exclude anyone not privy to the genealogy of its base terms, beginning with but not limited to "affect." There’s hierarchy at work here, an admittedly necessary hierarchy in the demanding work of critical theory, but all too often it becomes the framework for an exclusive game of out-bidding one's peers, in the trade of academic currency, or of out-ranking one's peers, in the EGO poetics of performing theory in a race up the eristic ladder (let me out-meta your meta). One I've seen played out (and probably participated in a bit myself) all too often, both inside as well as outside of the academy. I don’t mean to suggest that this was the mode of the Affective Economies panel, by the way, but it did tap into the critical meta-hierarchy.
Stefans, in a recent comment stream, noted that the "discourse has become too baroque," i.e. hard to follow. Now I don't necessarily consider "baroque" a pejorative qualifier, but I get his point. At the same time, someone else in a related comment stream (can't remember who) complained about the amateurism of a lot of the theorizing at RP. I'm afraid that probably is true of much of the way "theory" has been used by poets, since langpo or before. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, except in the case of the above-mentioned ego poetics. In which case, more often than not, the "winners" end up being absorbed by the academy, where they will get the training and resources necessary to keep dominating such a race (and becoming less amateur). A race that may, in the end, have little to do with poetics, except where it engages experimental practice--which brings us back to Watten’s tautological conundrum: what then is the norm/ground for poetics outside of experimental practice?
The question of amateurism could lead into an extended discussion on the history and mixed value of American poets' exceptionalist, pragmatic engagements with Euro-critical traditions (see Carla Billitteri's work here), that would be an important part of "rethinking." (Too bad Carla wasn't at RP!) I myself (along with Carla and several of the presenters at RP) just came from a Charles Olson conference in Vancouver, where the archive of one of US poetry's greatest critical amateurists was opened for sometimes joyous, sometimes painful inspection. Olson's methodological amateurism can be painful but perhaps more painful might be the failure of his postmodernism, in the face of all it was reaching for, to think outside the Euro-American box. In retrospect, that conference may have been a fitting prelude to RP.
At RP I myself called, via Eigner, for a "return to amateurism." But I was thinking of a different sort of amateurism, a truly cross-disciplinary, as in cross-divisional, amateurism. And maybe a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic amateurism. (I said: "professionalism is doing our species in.") How can one pretend to “rethink” ecopoetics, for instance, without a meaningful representation of perspectives from, say, the sciences and the social sciences? (And what possible common discourse is there for such representation?) Perhaps more importantly, how can one "rethink" poetics while implicitly upholding a largely monolinguistic and monocultural forum? (In the confines of a space that, on the material architectural plane as well as on that of institutional structure, was so clearly not designed for poetics?) Can we let go of our presumed expertise long enough to reach out toward, and into, a translation zone rife with inevitable (even wished for, as productive) misunderstandings and, let's face it, with embarrassing gaffes?
Monica de la Torre's presentation, half of which she delivered in extempore, untranslated Spanish, constituted a powerful counter-move to the some of the critical assumptions at work in the prevailing notion of "poetics" (as a certain lineage of critical theory). Rebecca Wolff's performative intervention may have been aiming, from another direction, at the same sense of exclusion. Can these antagonisms be worked out within the prevailing critical hierarchies?
While I agree with Watten (as he noted in a comment stream) that "the leveling constraints of the panels . . . jammed too many people together with too little time to develop and discuss ideas," I would like to know more about some of the assumptions behind the notion that "parallel sessions, and stronger not weaker senses of critical engagement and articulation" would have helped open up a real rethinking.
What does Watten mean by "stronger . . . senses of critical engagement and articulation"? Is he calling for a more professionally academic level of organization and engagement? To what extent can we "rethink" poetics in that disciplinary format? (What used to be called "comparative literature" showed some promise in the 'nineties--its disappearance from contemporary literary studies, and/or absorption by "critical theory," seems to point to some failure there.) If not, what organizational alternatives might we consider? How can those we are not hearing from, and who we critically need to hear from, get invited in, i.e. effectively heard? Can we redo poetics outside of disciplinary hierarchy?
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I wondered about the reinscription of "voice" in some of what Lisa read . . . Meschonnic was a fairly reactionary figure in France, when I discovered him, doing translation studies in the 90s. He argued violently against écriture (and was in turn rejected by the Tel Quel movement--hence the lack of international attention paid to him) and attacked some of the writers I was working on, like Albiach and Royet-Journoud. Critique du rhythme reads (at one level) like an argument for spoken word, avant la parole, with all the arsenal of the language poets, but without Bernstein's generosity and nuance--an ideological version of Close Listening. He alsoa argued for a different Mallarmé, from the one the poststructuralists had claimed. (Golston reminded us of some of Meschonnic's possibly less savoury affiliations, via eurythmics, etc. At the same time, I could see some of the point of Meschonnic's arguing against the "terhorie" of Tel Quel.) Definitely an interesting mind. I'll have to look at Critique du Rhythme again and check out his other books. Anyways, Lisa's translations are great. It's interesting how authors & thinkers can escape the ideological entanglements of their moment via translation, finding a new, different life in another language, perhaps one they might never have envusaged or even willed . . .
Labels: amateurism, creative writing, ecologies, ecopoetics, Meschonnic, poetries, Rethinking Poetics
posted by JS at 10:46 AM
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