ALH Online Review, Series XXI 1 Poetics and Practice 'After'

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ALH Online Review, Series XXI 1

Poetics and Practice ‘After’ Objectivism, eds. W. Scott Howard and Broc Rossell (Iowa City: City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 240 pp.

Reviewed by Stephen Fredman, University of Notre Dame

How can an earlier literary movement be said to influence later writers? We know that specific precursors exert a powerful call to subsequent writers and that there are many ways to account for literary inheritance—whether it is seen as emanating from the earlier writer or as invoked by the later one. But what about the case of a movement as a literary influence? This may be a matter of ethics as much as aesthetics, for the later writer chooses the earlier movement because of what it stands for—as he or she conceives of it. In this way, a movement may be seen as modeling ethical/aesthetic stances that a later writer wishes to emulate. In broad terms, this is the issue broached by the authors of the essays in Poetics and Practice ‘After’ Objectivism. The question before the critics is not so much did particular poets who have been classified as Objectivists influence later poets, but rather has the movement of Objectivism exerted a decisive pull?

Objectivism is a particularly tricky movement to consider because some of its practitioners and some of its later critics have denied that it ever existed. Louis Zukofsky first applied the term to a group of young, mostly unpublished poets whom he gathered for the February 1931 issue of Poetry. None of the assembled poets was consulted about the term, and in fact Zukofsky called them “Objectivists” but refused to delineate an “Objectivism.” Even the manifesto that he printed to introduce the issue, “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff,” was a shorter version of an essay on Reznikoff that had been rejected by the Menorah Journal. Although Reznikoff professed great difficulty in understanding Zukofsky’s gnomic essay, should he nonetheless be designated the sole bona fide Objectivist; or, more broadly, does his spare, socially engaged poetry represent the ideal Zukofsky was reaching for? Not exactly. Among the principal poets who have continued to be called Objectivists—Zukofsky, Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Lorine Niedecker, and Basil Bunting—stylistic variations are so wide as to make the definition of a movement nearly impossible, prompting Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain to argue (in their edited volume) for an Objectivist Nexus. And to muddy the waters further, both Pound and Williams (especially) participated directly in promoting an Objectivist movement that they saw at times as containing their own poetry.

Yet, no matter how slippery the designation, it refuses to go away. In some ways, this literary-historical conundrum is less worrying and instead attractive to later poets, who may be partial to one or more of the six main poets associated with Objectivism and

© The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] 2 ALH Online Review, Series XXI may also find a movement with fuzzy boundaries more welcoming than one more clearly defined. That is, later poets have the possibility of claiming their Objectivism, and this claim has helped authorized the production of a large variety of new work, from the 1950s to the present. As the editors of the present volume put it, “Our work here concerns the relevance of the Objectivist ethos to poetic praxis in our time, and so we must grasp the most essential characteristics of this legacy” (11). Each essay has a dual focus, then, of clarifying “the Objectivist ethos” and of demonstrating its “relevance . . . to poetic praxis in our time.”

In her essay, DuPlessis explores the initial bond between Oppen and Zukofsky and its subsequent dissolution, detailing their disagreements especially with respect to the long-poem and the poetics supporting it. Like many of the contributors, DuPlessis employs the two notoriously ambiguous terms coined by Zukofsky, “sincerity” and “objectification” as engines in her analysis. She proposes Oppen as primarily occupied with sincerity, emphasizing his existential commitment to lived reality, and Zukofsky as objectifying “crucial cultural materials” into the complex structure of a “summa” (28). She locates these differences particularly within long poems: Zukofsky’s obsessively imbricated “A”, in 24 sections, versus the serial form of Oppen’s sequences, “Of Being Numerous” and “Some San Francisco Poems.” To demonstrate how such “Objectivist” antinomies play out in contemporary work, she questions four poets about the influence of Oppen and Zukofsky on their long poems: her own Drafts, Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading, Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet, and Anne Waldman’s Iovis. Each poet locates a model in the structures of “epic” complexity or modular seriality, or sometimes both. Likewise, they find inspiration in the ways Zukofsky and Oppen test authenticity through personal relations among family members and activate political ambitions by close attention to language and to the objects of everyday life in an urban setting. Complementing this essay, Alan Golding offers a masterful reading of DuPlessis’s Drafts (a long-poem in 114 sections) as a “Post-Objectivist Serial Poem,” showing how urgently her obligations to Oppen and Zukofsky drive central features of the poem.

A number of the other essays discuss relationships between a particular Objectivist poet and a contemporary poet. Graham Foust examines poems of Oppen’s involving plants or flowers in order to show how Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris “seems to engage with— and often deviates sharply from—Oppen’s work” (40). Foust accounts for the subtle ethics of Glück’s relationships to flowers and to other people by tying her poems directly to the opening sentence of Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous”: “There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / Is to know ourselves’” (42-43). Jenny Penberthy discusses the ways that Lisa Robertson’s poetry and her reading of Niedecker establish a fascinating dialogue that illuminates the ambitions of both women poets. Amy De’Ath

© The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] ALH Online Review, Series XXI 3 gives a reading of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen as activist political poetry, contrasting it especially with Oppen’s work. She resists seeing Objectivists as predecessors of new black poetry because a work like Citizen takes sides in a racial struggle that Objectivist poets did not consider head-on.

No matter how provocative chapters that pair an Objectivist with a later poet may be, they sidestep to some extent the central question I see this book as addressing: How does considering a movement as an influence on later poetry simultaneously affect our reading of that movement and of subsequent work? Again, this seems to be a question of ethics as much as aesthetics. Four essays consider more directly how social and political stances of Objectivism open up territory for later poets. Jeff Derksen argues for an “Affective Poetics of Social Sincerity,” especially in the work of Oppen and Reznikoff. Rather than pointing to specific poets influenced by these Objectivists, he demonstrates the continued relevance of Oppen and Reznikoff to contemporary social conditions and to theory addressed at amelioration. Robert Sheppard likewise marshals the examples of Oppen and Reznikoff (and to some extent Bunting) to account for the complex documentary poetry of John Seed’s English “Mayhew Project.” Julie Carr explores a less-considered feature of Objectivist practice—its “homemade quality” (something Hugh Kenner, however, had noted in A Homemade World in 1975)—using the example of two homemade books by Lorine Niedecker created as gifts for Zukofsky and Cid Corman. As antidotes to alienated labor, these books were greatly satisfying to their maker and their recipients. This practice resonates, Carr notes, with the contemporary movement of craftism, in which “needlepoint, knitting, book making, sewing” stand as practices opposed to commodification, to the constant acceleration of work, and to patriarchal assumptions of value in the art world (134). Like Niedecker, each of the three poet/artists discussed by Carr— Linda Norton, Jill Magi, and Maria Damon—have crafted a “handmade poem/object . . . in direct response to war—specifically to the wars on terror” (142).

The impact of the Objectivist example for confronting the most gruesome and challenging aspects of war, specifically in Holocaust representation, is treated by Steve McCaffery. Here the severe means that Reznikoff adopted in his documentary long- poems, Testimony (1934, 1978-1979) and Holocaust (1975), which McCaffery calls “appropriation and retranscription” (149), are models for many poets wishing to engage with what Zukofsky calls “historic and contemporary particulars” without imposing an authorial point of view. McCaffery claims that Holocaust, Heimrad Bäcker’s transcript (1986), and Robert Fitterman’s Holocaust Museum (2011) modify poetry by situating it “within the limits of history and ethics . . . ; they speak not directly but rather through extracted material evidence and facts that are reorganized in a different discursive context from that of their sources” (150). This austere discipline, first practiced by

Reznikoff in his lineation of courtroom testimony, is an act of poetic self-abnegation, which McCaffery designates as “Objectivist sincerity as it must be ‘after Auschwitz’” (166).