founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

May 2011

&/5.$%$ ).  "9 (!22)%4 -/.2/% volume cxcviii t number 2 CONTENTS

May 2011

0/%-3 kay ryan 103 All You Did Linens The Obsoletion of a Language dana gioia 106 Pity the Beautiful Special Treatments Ward sasha dugdale 110 Dawn Chorus Asylum franz wright 114 Our Conversation james arthur 116 The Land of Nod fanny howe 117 What Did You See? stephen yenser 120 Preserves Psalm on Sifnos Wichita Triptych josh wild 124 Self-Portrait after Paul Morphy’s Stroke sophie cabot black 125 The One Turn That Makes the New World Dominion Over the Larger Animal Bird Left Behind tess taylor 128 Elk at Tomales Bay malachi black 130 From “Quarantine” wendy videlock 132 The woman with a tumor in her neck sarah lindsay 133 Hollow Boom Soft Chime: The Thai Elephant Orchestra Without Warning mark irwin 136 Poem Beginning with a Line by Milosz # /--%.4 clive james 139 Product Placement in Modern Poetry robert archambeau 150 The Great Debate: Progress vs. Pluralism carolyn forché 159 Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art letters to the editor 175 contributors 180 Editor christian wiman Senior Editor don share Associate Editor fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Editorial Assistant lindsay garbutt Reader christina pugh Art Direction winterhouse studio

cover art by art chantry “A Portrait of Video Art Pioneer and Fluxus Member Nam June Paik,” 1986

0/%429-!'!:).%/2'

a publication of the POETRY FOUNDATION printed by cadmus professional communications, us

Poetry t May 2011 t Volume 198 t Number 2

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kay ryan

All You Did

There doesn’t seem to be a crack. A higher pin cannot be set. Nor can you go back. You hadn’t even known the face was vertical. All you did was walk into a room. The tipping up from flat was gradual, you must assume.

+!9 29!. 103 Linens

There are charms that forestall harm. The house bristles with opportunities for stasis: refolding the linens along their creases, keeping the spoons and chairs in their right places. Nobody needs to witness one’s exquisite care with the napkins for the napkins to have been the act that made the fact unhappen.

104 0/%429 The Obsoletion of a Language

We knew it would happen, one of the laws. And that it would be this sudden. Words become a chewing action of the jaws and mouth, unheard by the only other citizen there was on earth.

+!9 29!. 105 dana gioia

Pity the Beautiful

Pity the beautiful, the dolls, and the dishes, the babes with big daddies granting their wishes.

Pity the pretty boys, the hunks, and Apollos, the golden lads whom success always follows.

The hotties, the knock-outs, the tens out of ten, the drop-dead gorgeous, the great leading men.

Pity the faded, the bloated, the blowsy, the paunchy Adonis whose luck’s gone lousy.

Pity the gods, no longer divine. Pity the night the stars lose their shine.

106 0/%429 Special Treatments Ward

i

So this is where the children come to die, hidden on the hospital’s highest floor. They wear their bandages like uniforms and pull their iv rigs along the hall with slow and careful steps. Or bald and pale, they lie in bright pajamas on their beds, watching another world on a screen.

The mothers spend their nights inside the ward, sleeping on chairs that fold out into beds, too small to lie in comfort. Soon they slip beside their children, as if they might mesh those small bruised bodies back into their flesh. Instinctively they feel that love so strong protects a child. Each morning proves them wrong.

No one chooses to be here. We play the parts that we are given — horrible as they are. We try to play them well, whatever that means. We need to talk, though talking breaks our hearts. The doctors come and go like oracles, their manner cool, omniscient, and oblique. There is a word that no one ever speaks.

$!.! ')/)! 107 ii

I put this poem aside twelve years ago because I could not bear remembering the faces it evoked, and every line seemed — still seems — so inadequate and grim.

What right had I, whose son had walked away, to speak for those who died? And I’ll admit I wanted to forget. I’d lost one child and couldn’t bear to watch another die.

Not just the silent boy who shared our room, but even the bird-thin figures dimly glimpsed shu±ing deliberately, disjointedly like ancient soldiers after a parade.

Whatever strength the task required I lacked. No well-stitched words could suture shut these wounds. And so I stopped ... But there are poems we do not choose to write.

108 0/%429 iii

The children visit me, not just in dream, appearing suddenly, silently — insistent, unprovoked, unwelcome.

They’ve taken o≠ their milky bandages to show the raw, red lesions they still bear. Risen they are healed but not made whole.

A few I recognize, untouched by years. I cannot name them — their faces pale and gray like ashes fallen from a distant fire.

What use am I to them, almost a stranger? I cannot wake them from their satin beds. Why do they seek me? They never speak.

And vagrant sorrow cannot bless the dead.

$!.! ')/)! 109 sasha dugdale

Dawn Chorus

March 29, 2010

Every morning since the time changed I have woken to the dawn chorus And even before it sounded, I dreamed of it Loud, unbelievably loud, shameless, raucous

And once I rose and twitched the curtains apart Expecting the birds to be pressing in fright Against the pane like passengers But the garden was empty and it was night

Not a slither of light at the horizon Still the birds were bawling through the mists Terrible, invisible A million small evangelists

How they sing: as if each had pecked up a smoldering coal Their throats singed and swollen with song In dissonance as befits the dark world Where only travelers and the sleepless belong

110 0/%429 Asylum

For Marina

You say the old masters never got it wrong, But when Goya painted the death of the imagination It was a lost dog against a usurious yellow sky And the dog, a hapless creature who had drawn itself Ten miles on two legs, stared in amazement To see the man who once fed him from his plate Reduced to this.

So I felt this week, the vile soil and everything upon it — The beggar guest kicked from the table Before his own dog, and even the honest unpicking Of art performed nightly and in seclusion. Like any Penelope my armor is resignation Although I thought I would lift the bow myself And draw.

By the morning he is gone And what to make of this? The prostitutes hang from a beam like mice The suitors are piled unburied in the yard. And some say that it is now much better And others, that it is worse. So order was restored I stared in amazement

š

Perhaps Akhmatova was right When she wrote who knows what shit What tip, what pile of waste Brings forth the tender verse Like hogweed, like the fat hen under the fence Like the unbearable present tense

3!3(! $5'$!,% 111 Who knows what ill, what strife What crude shack of a life And how it twists sweetly about the broken sill: Pressingness, another word for honeysuckle But housewives? Has poetry Ever deepened in the pail Was it ever found in the sink, under the table Did it rise in the oven, quietly able To outhowl the hoover? Does it press more than the children’s supper The sudden sleepless wail? Did it ever? It lives. It takes seed Like the most unforgiving weed Grows wilder as the child grows older And spits on dreams, did I say How it thrives in the ashen family nest Or how iambs are measured best Where it hurts: With the heel of an iron On the reluctant breast Of a shirt?

š

112 0/%429 michael blann

There was a hush, then Michael Blann Stepped out onto the stage. Michael Blann, with his pipe and his jukebox head Oh, he’s your man.

He has a song for all weathers, a pipe And a voice, and he sings and he roams He sings to the wind and a dog of how The trees are all bare and Jack’s come home.

He’s a thin voice, like a spider thread On days when the sun is late and fine Live and let live, sings Michael Blann The wind yields not, but the hills is mine.

He’s no call for fate passing over His sheep are all angels, the stars are his Lords He’ll play any part the clouds should fancy To humble tunes and hand-me-down words

The acts are written in briar strands And the Pharisees are leaves in the air I likes a drop pipes Michael Blann Sing follow hark forward the innocent hare.

He wore to his end a clutch of sheep’s wool To show the gods that Michael Blann Went alone, alone for most of his years But crossed the hills a singing man.

3!3(! $5'$!,% 113 franz wright

Our Conversation

Pure gaze, you are lightning beyond the last trees and you are the last trees’ past, branching green lightning of terminal brain branches numened densely with summer’s hunter color, as night comes on, the ocean they conceal gone berserk, wind still rising. Pure seeing, dual vortex doors to the blue fire where sex is burned away, and all is as it was and I am being o≠ered in your eyes, as in cupped hands, the water of to never thirst again. Again I turn away, and the future comes, all at once towering around me on every side, and I am lost. Pure looking, past pain (this is promised): we must have wed on poverty’s most hair-raising day delighting, flashing risk, risk unfailingly lighting the way, anything possible in that dissolving of seam between minds, no more golden time — each step I took the right step, words came to me finally and finding the place you had set for them, once again wrote themselves down. Till true word’s anvil ring, and

114 0/%429 solid tap of winged blind cane come, I wish you all the aloneness you hunger for. That big kitchen table where you sit laughing with friends, I see it happening. And I wish that I could not be so much with you when I’m suddenly not; that inwardly you might switch time, to sleep and winter while you went about your life, until you woke up well, our conversation resumed. Ceaseless blue lightning, this love passing through me: I know somehow it will go on reaching you, reaching you instantly when I’m not in the way; when it is no longer deflected by all the dark bents, all I tried to overcome but I could not — so much light pulled o≠ course as it passed within reach, so much lost, lost in me, but no more.

October 2, 1999 – October 2, 2010

&2!.: 72)'(4 115 james arthur

The Land of Nod

Growing up, I barely knew the Bible, but read and reread the part when Cain drifted east or was drawn that way, into a place of desolation, the land of Nod, there to begin, with a wife

of unknown origin, another race of men, under the mark of God. As a boy, I thought Nod would be a place where the blue scillas would bloom gray, a country of the rack and screw,

the serrated sword, where the very serving cups were bone. As a grown man, I’ve heard that Nod never was a nation — of Cain’s o≠spring, or anyone — but a mistranslation of “wander,” so Cain

could go wherever, and be in Nod. Far more than in God, I believe in Cain, who destroyed his own brother, and therefore in any city could have his wish, and be alone.

116 0/%429 fanny howe

What Did You See?

For Peter S.

I saw the shrouds of prisoners like baptismal gowns buried outside the cemetery.

On the canvas frills exhaled singed wool and cardboard.

The angels arrived as lace.

Took notes, then stuck. Awful residue from a small cut.

š

The veil has been ripped from the skin where it was burned in.

The skin is the veil, the baby-material, imprinted on, as if one dropped the handkerchief and it was one’s wrist.

The cu≠ is frightening. Stu≠ed onto oil. Water-stains might fence its ghost in.

š

“The barbed wire complex” I understand. Winged and flattened at the same time, poor things!

&!..9 (/7% 117 Some leftover specters of blood.

Remember Blake’s figures like columns with heads

looking around for God? When events are not as random as they seem.

š

The article of clothing is only half there, it’s not full, but when it falls forward, it is.

Terrible emptiness of the spread neckline and little sleeve. Half-cooked squares.

Was this religious fire and is this where it passed?

Maybe they are floating on water of paint, pool-sized, blue and ridged like foam.

You would have to fly to see them flat as a map.

The rib and hem. Rained on for eons. Noah’s children’s floating forms.

š

118 0/%429 Angels die? It’s a frightening-miracle because here they are. The Upper God

has let them drop like centuries into space.

And I recognize them!

Note: To hear the editors discuss this poem, listen to the May podcast at poetryfoundation.org/magazinepodcasts.

&!..9 (/7% 119 stephen yenser

Preserves

Nervy, sparrow-like, Eyes Cherokee, Blackberry black, Arrow-quick, Picky eater, Lean in spirit, Converted Quaker, She taught her grandson Arithmetic And checkers tactics And let him touch Through her cotton nightie Small, tense nipples. Her hands, arthritic, Knitted doilies, Breaded tomatoes, And put up apples, While the hoarded guilts Made for bright quilts, The torrid migraines’ Counterpanes.

120 0/%429 Psalm on Sifnos

One does not want, O Lord, to heap Up by still waters Of words a cairn But hopes to attend A small covert Of tamarisk Whose leaves salty Yet feathery Will shed light over A thickened plot.

One wants at last To cede the field To tamarisk And mastic tree, To olive and stone, Stones in the fruit, Seed in the stones.

34%0(%. 9%.3%2 121 Wichita Triptych

Sometimes the rain shines Just when the sun reigns, And that was the way it is Beyond those French doors That late afternoon here In this mind’s early evening Where they still fade in That cool color Polaroid, Pastel shades of her prom dress, A bowl of double peonies, Promising, precocious, Trying, trying to open.

š

Their friend and he were tight Tight-rope walkers, self-taught Taut-trope-talkers, stalking Jamb-up, arm-in-arm And caroling to lucky stars Their bars and rebars, The night a carousel Of tryst and troth, Of casual carousals, Cocky arousals, Pitching the dark to the dark. (Streetlight and moth, Reader, she married both.)

š

But then there he was, In the morning’s mourning, Soi-disant Proustian mignon,

122 0/%429 Aesthetic ascetic And Kansas rube Reducing his thought To a bouillon cube That no one hot Ought ever pore over.

34%0(%. 9%.3%2 123 josh wild

Self-Portrait after Paul Morphy’s Stroke

Paul lost his footing, turned out a spectacular corkscrew. It looked like he was acting out a series of renga

in the air. The general theme was prevenient grace. But the white rim broke his form, and he hit

the bathtub water like a big charred bough of a tree. A semicircle of his shoes — Oxfords, monk straps,

bluchers, a lone boot — crowded in to get a look. After that, Morphy was only surface. You can look

into anything and see what you want. For example, Pierre swore he could read stock returns

in the little channels of Morphy’s pruned thumbs. He even called in Schiaparelli’s niece. She entered

with a shoe on her head, I swear. There are pictures, look it up. My uncle, my unfortunate uncle,

says the whole event — Morphy in the tub — looked floral, with shoe petals. Just to be di∞cult, I said

“saucer of milk”: a teacup on a dish, alone in the quiet, waiting for a cougar to come by. I

always bank on something parched and ambling to make my point. Or else something with a

broken heel, covered in wet newspaper and huddled up next to the highway. All thumbs.

124 0/%429 sophie cabot black

The One Turn That Makes the New World

Maybe the light from a small window Tucked at the utmost eave of the barn Could be misunderst00d; if only I had pulled

In by the other way or not looked up Against such darkness. The animal I brought Into this no longer mine, the task

Each day was to confine enough, from harm Or from each other as night loosens Over the assemblage. But in the pasture

One wrong step was taken. And those who remain Are weary, heads low, torment nowhere To be seen, not even in the illumination

Of men who have come to help, Who behind the double doors keep watch By the body so it does not become

Anything for those who scavenge, to follow back The acts of blood right up to the locked stall And light where each shaft lands precisely again

Through the again. The horse was in the snow, The rock was underfoot; all the unknowables Made whole and apparent by one who stumbled.

3/0()% #!"/4 ",!#+ 125 Dominion Over the Larger Animal

How many times I have provided For your death; the apple turned one way Then the other, an arrangement made,

The softer ground. To hold your head As if this mattered, to say what I think Essential into your ear,

To watch the eye look everywhere to find What it does not know it looks for. To fasten you down in the one place

Where no one can say anything more, Being nothing else but breath leaving, While the man with the needle stands by

Until the signal of how it is time. To believe I know what will happen next; to leave the hill As the body sti≠ens; to pass each blossom

Of blood in the snow as if I understood All I was capable of.

126 0/%429 Bird Left Behind

As for her, the circumstances must be ordinary And so the return. Door unlocked. The path mowed Right to the oiled gate; the pasture

Cleared of stone and alder. All untouched Enough to enter. The man or woman O≠ down the valley or working above

Treeline. No other sound but a few strays Hurrying through the dusk as if the end Will begin, certain and with nothing

More to say. She does not know she does not know. Having come back to find her kind And none being left she took herself up

Into a tree unclear what to do next save only Sing the song she wanted sung back to her.

3/0()% #!"/4 ",!#+ 127 tess taylor

Elk at Tomales Bay

Nimble, preserved together, milkweed-white rears upturned,

female tule elk bowed into rustling foxtails.

Males muscled over the slopes, jostling mantles, marking terrain.

Their antlers clambered wide, steep as the gorges.

As they fed, those branches twitched, sensory, delicate,

yet when one buck reared squaring to look at us

his antlers and his gaze held suddenly motionless.

Further out, the skeleton.

The tar paper it seemed to lie on was hide.

Vertebrae like redwood stumps — an uneven heart-shaped cavern

where a coccyx curled to its tip. Ribs fanned open

hollow, emptied of organs. In the bushes its skull.

128 0/%429 Sockets and sinuses, mandible, its few small teeth.

All bare now except that fur the red-brown color of a young boy’s head and also of wild iris stalks in winter still clung to the drying scalp. Below the eye’s rim sagged

flat as a bicycle tire.

The form was sinking away.

The skin loosened, becoming other, shedding the mask that hides but must also reveal a creature. O≠ amid cli≠s and hills some unfleshed force roamed free. In the wind, I felt the half-life I watched watch me. Elk, I said, I see

you abandon this life, this earth —

I stood for a time with the bones.

4%33 4!9,/2 129 malachi black

From “Quarantine”

lauds

Somehow I am sturdier, more shore than sea-spray as I thicken through the bedroom door. I gleam of sickness. You give me morning, Lord, as you give earthquake to all architecture. I can forget. You put that sugar in the melon’s breath, and it is wet with what you are. (I, too, ferment.) You rub the hum and simple warmth of summer from afar into the hips of insects and of everything. I can forget. And like the sea, one more machine without a memory, I don’t believe that you made me.

130 0/%429 prime

I don’t believe that you made me into this tremolo of hands, this fever, this flat-footed dance of tendons and the drapery of skin along a skeleton. I am that I am: a brittle rib cage and the hummingbird of breath that flickers in it.

Incrementally, I stand: in me are eons and the cramp of endless ancestry.

Sun is in the leaves again. I think I see you in the wind but then I think I see the wind.

-!,!#() ",!#+ 131 wendy videlock

The woman with a tumor in her neck

has a moth in her palm, a river on her tongue, a scalpel in her boat, a lump in her throat, a gamble in her shoe, a fire in her den, a shadow in her flesh, a flutter in her breast, like everybody else.

132 0/%429 sarah lindsay

Hollow Boom Soft Chime: The Thai Elephant Orchestra

A sound of far-o≠ thunder from instruments ten feet away: drums, a log, a gong of salvage metal. Chimes of little Issan bells, pipes in a row, sometimes a querulous harmonica. Inside the elephant orchestra’s audience, bubbles form, of shame and joy, and burst. Did elephants look so sad and wise, a tourist thinks, her camera cold in her pocket, before we came to say they look sad and wise? Did mastodons have merry, unwrinkled faces? Hollow boom soft chime, stamp of a padded foot, tingle of renaat, rattle of angklung. This music pauses sometimes, but does not end.

Prathida gently strokes the bells with a mallet. Poong and his mahout regard the gong. Paitoon sways before two drums, bumping them, keeping time with her switching tail. Sales of recordings help pay for their thin enclosure of trampled grass. They have never lived free. Beside a dry African river their wild brother lies, a punctured balloon, torn nerves trailing from the stumps of his tusks. Hollow boom soft chime, scu≠ of a broad foot, sometimes, rarely, a blatting elephant voice. They seldom attend the instruments without being led to them, but, once they’ve begun, often refuse to stop playing.

3!2!( ,).$3!9 133 Without Warning

Elizabeth Bishop leaned on a table, it cracked, both fell to the floor. A gesture gone sadly awry. This was close to fact and quickly became symbolic, bound to occur in Florida, where she was surrounded by rotting abundance and greedy insects. One moment a laughing smile, a graceful hand alighting on solid furniture, a casual shift of weight, the next, undignified splayed legs. The shell of the table proved to be stu≠ed with termite eggs. True, it was a fall from no great height — merely the height of herself, and although the hollowed-out table failed, at least the floor held, though probably infested by termites as well, and possibly built on a latent sinkhole, how can you tell? And how could she, smiling and easy, arm moving without forethought and permission, have forgotten fear, apparently let go of a hard-learned lesson? Enter a room as though it is strange. What you recognize may have changed, or may change without warning. Trees fall in hurricanes and on windless mornings, breaching houses where people you knew have vanished or died or stopped loving you. She regained her feet, already composed, brushing dust from an elbow. There would be a bruise, but it would remind her that words are full of holes; flung hard, like paper they fly sideways. And a call to joy — a landscape, a face —

134 0/%429 may, though scarcely moving, perhaps by not moving, go in one breath from heartening to ominous, proving to children who need more proof that we don’t know what we know.

3!2!( ,).$3!9 135 mark irwin

Poem Beginning with a Line by Milosz

“The most beautiful bodies are like transparent glass.” They are bodies of the selfless or of those newly dead. What appears transparent is really flame burning so brightly it appears like glass. What you’re looking through is the act of giving: One thing in life needed desperately, given to another, or perhaps life itself. The most beautiful bodies are not transparent, but sometimes the color of lead, like the elephant whom a child with some peanuts lifts by the trunk in his hand in the swirling dust, so that it appears he has lifted a monument or a city with all its pain. The bodies that seem transparent are made of an ice so pure it appears to be glass sweating, where you, desiring another, glimpse your own face that weighs nothing and is burning.

136 0/%429 #/--%.4

clive james

Product Placement in Modern Poetry

Early in the twentieth century, E.E. Cummings was as hot against materialist society as only a poet living on a trust fund can be. Along with his love lyrics that achieved notoriety by fragmenting all over the page like sexy grenades, he wrote poems that were meant to be satires. In his 1926 collection Is 5, the star among the would-be satiri- cal poems was “poem, or beauty hurts mr. vinal.” (Always playing tricks with typography, Cummings might have put the title in capitals specifically so that later editors of anthologies, when they cited it accurately in the contents list, would look as if they had made a mistake.) In the poem’s opening stanzas, capitalist America is mock- ingly addressed:

take it from me kiddo believe me my country, ’tis of

you, land of the Cluett Shirt Boston Garter and Spearmint Girl With The Wrigley Eyes (of you land of the Arrow Ide and Earl & Wilson Collars) of you i sing: land of Abraham Lincoln and Lydia E. Pinkham, land above all of Just Add Hot Water And Serve — from every B.V.D.

let freedom ring

All those brand names were fresh contemporary references at the time. Any American reader would have spotted them with ease. Later on, it would have taken consultation with an old-timer or several trips to the library. Reading the poem for the first time in Australia in the late fifties, I committed the lines to memory without having a clue what the proper names referred to, except perhaps for Abraham

#,)6% *!-%3 139 Lincoln and Wrigley’s Spearmint gum, which had been handed out by American troops all over the Pacific area with such liberality that it was a byword even in Japan. Nowadays we can all look up the names on a machine. The reader will come away from an hour of Googling with a lot of information. In 1929, a few years after the poem was writ- ten, Cluett Peabody, makers of shirts, took over the Arrow brand, and in 1985 the remnants of Cluett Peabody were absorbed into the gtb (Gold Toe Brands) Holding Corp, which today still holds the licensing rights to the “Sanforized” process of pre-shrinking fabric, originally devised by Sanford L. Cluett himself. In the advertising for Arrow shirts, the Arrow man, a predecessor of the Marlboro man but dressed up for an elegant evening out instead of being dressed down for the West, was a painted fantasy by the eminent commercial artist, J.C. Leyendecker. Though he didn’t exist, the Arrow man drew up to seventeen thousand fan letters a day: a fact worth filing away if you are trying to convince yourself that there will never be enough American voters to put Sarah Palin in the White House. Securing an immortality some- what more certain than the one conferred by Cummings’s poem, the Arrow man can also be encountered in chapter seven of The Great Gatsby. Ide collars were manufactured by George P. Ide & Co. and had nothing to do with today’s Integrated Drive Electronics. Lydia E. Pinkham’s highly successful herbal medicine might have owed some of its popularity among women to an impressive ethanol content. The standard treatment for acute menstrual pains at the time was to remove the ovaries, so getting slightly blotto was no doubt an attrac- tive alternative. The poem was a few years too early to record that the firm of Bradley, Voorhees & Day hired Johnny Weissmuller to be the face, as we would now say, of their product, bvd men’s under- wear, but their advertising already carried the slogan “Next to Myself I Like bvd Best.” Since bvd was purchased in 1976 by Fruit of the Loom, and since, in 2002, Fruit of the Loom was in turn purchased by Berkshire Hathaway, the original acronym is currently under the control of none other than Warren Bu≠ett, one of the richest men in the world. Bu≠ett, judging from his parsimonious ways, probably wears the product under his business suit. But in a sense he would be wearing it even if he dressed more expensively, because bvd has entered the American version of the English language as a general term for any brand of men’s underwear. Today we are used to the idea that a free market economy, except

140 0/%429 when it collapses, goes on changing and growing inexorably, with a multifariousness that can be analyzed only up to a point, and never fully described. No matter how dumb, every artist and intellectual has caught up with what Ferdinand Lassalle tried to tell Karl Marx: that capitalism was something far more complex and productive than he, Marx, could honestly reduce to a formula. Marx preferred to believe that capitalism was heading towards extinction. And indeed, in the twenties there was a crisis on the way, but it was still boom time when Cummings was writing satirical poems in Greenwich Village. The commercial world had a creative force of its own, to which the creative artists could not help responding, even when they despised it politically. Hart Crane scattered brand names throughout his long poem The Bridge. A monumental novel much less read now that it once was, U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, is punc- tuated with free-form poetic rhapsodies full of industrial facts and names. Those passages are by far the liveliest parts of the book. Many of the names are unrecognizable now, but strangely they remain as enticing as when he first transcribed them. The same applies to the trademarks in Cummings’s early poems. There is a paradox here, which needs to be unpacked on the level of language, because by now there is no other level on which it exists. My own solution would be to say that the writers were taking on a fresh supply of vocabulary. As a sponge can’t resist liquids, they were bound to respond to the linguistic bustle of the printed adver- tising and the radio hoopla. Theoretically they might have despised the land of Just Add Hot Water And Serve, but in practice they loved the slogans. Readymade cheap poetry, the scraps of advertising copy, properly mounted in a poem, could be made to look expensive, in just the way that Picasso could mount a scrap of newspaper in a col- lage and make it look as interesting as a pot carried by a slave girl on a Pompeian wall — ephemerality perpetuated. Not all poets since that time of discovery have taken immediately detectable advantage of the fresh supply of language. Like all new tricks it soon looked old hat if pursued to excess, and Robert Frost, who can plausibly be put forward as the greatest modern poet of them all, never touched it: in his verse an axe was just an axe. Not even the achingly up-to-date W.H. Auden supplied brand names for “the tigerish blazer and the dove-like shoe.” But many poets, and some of them among the most striking in their diction, have, at least partway, followed the same course in connecting now and always. It’s

#,)6% *!-%3 141 one of the biggest di≠erences I can see between the English language poetry of the modern era and the poetry of all the eras preceding. In pre-modern poetry, Shakespeare, who mentioned everything, would probably have name checked products if he could, but there were few goods with the maker’s name on them: though he would specify the street or town which had given origin to a certain cut of sleeve, Lady Macbeth at her most wild would never have been the face of Vivienne Westwood, even if Shakespeare had known that a louche female designer of that name had a studio under the castle eaves. You do get the sense, however, that Milton, though he could stu≠ a verse paragraph full of classical furniture until it groaned, wouldn’t have raided a supply of contemporary proper names, had such a thing existed. There was a conviction, which he inherited and concentrated, that too much concern with the evanescent blocked the way to the eternal. It wasn’t remarkable, then, that Pope, a meticulous recorder of the knickknacks on a young lady’s dressing table in The Rape of the Lock, named no name that might not have been remembered. Nor, moving on, is the same forbearance remarkable in Tennyson, whose infallibly musical ear would certainly have picked up on, say, an Emes & Barnard sterling silver mustard pot if he had thought such a reference advisable. Hopkins, who could see everything, seems not to have seen an advertisement in a newspaper. Hardy, in his poem about the Titanic, never mentioned the ship’s name, though you might have thought that it sounded classical enough. But then sud- denly, only a little further into the twentieth century, poets in the English language were pulling words o≠ billboards the way that late nineteenth-century French painters had put billboards in their paintings, and probably for the same reasons. There had been a philosophical shift: if not in philosophy, then in the arts. It had finally been recognized that the artificially generated language of here and now could be continuous with the everlasting. It didn’t guarantee the everlasting, and even today so keen-eyed a poet as Seamus Heaney will tell you everything about a plough except the name of its manufacturer: but a reference system in the temporal pres- ent was no longer held to be the enemy of a poem’s bid for long life. For poetry, the modernizing process had begun in France, and well before the painters made the same change visible. Victor Hugo began the breaking down of the standard poeticized diction that the French call poncif, and the brilliantly original Tristan Corbière, for whom

142 0/%429 Paris was one enormous brocante full of used objects crying out to be mentioned, led the whole of his short life while Renoir was still getting into his stride, and Monet was still editing the landscapes in front of his eyes so that smokestacks were magically eliminated. In all histories of modern literature, it’s a standard theme that modern poetry in English really got started when Pound and Eliot picked up on such Frenchmen as Laforgue, but really the influence was already operating in the fin-de-siècle English poet Ernest Dowson, in whose poems the protagonists were drowsy with absinthe. Dowson, however, never quoted the name on the label of the bottle. That came later, and after it did come it never went away. In Eliot’s poems there weren’t just sawdust restaurants with oyster shells, there were abc restaurants with weeping multitudes. Eliot didn’t care that the abc restaurants might not be there one day. As things have turned out, the name abc for restaurants has proved hard to kill — you can visit one in Buenos Aires — but the original chain of restaurants that Eliot was talking about is long gone. He wasn’t bet- ting on their durability, though. He was betting on a sure thing: the way they sounded. The noise the set of initials made was as important to him as the picture it evoked. New words made for new phrases, and did so with an abundance unseen since Elizabethan times. We need to bear this in mind when getting deeply involved in academic discus- sions about whether the modern poets reintegrated the sensibility that had become dissociated since the metaphysical poets — a key notion of Eliot the critic. Listen hard enough to Eliot the poet, and you can hear something more fundamental than a soldering iron reconnecting loose wires in the apparatus of sense: you can hear an incoming surge of fresh linguistic forms. Even those poets who did not refer directly to the manufactured names of the commercial world referred to the world of manufac- tured things. Poetry took in more and more of what was already there, instead of leaving it out in order to remain uncontaminated by evanescence. If the expansion was incremental, it still happened awfully fast. In the poetry of Pound, the revolutionary who now looks merely transitional because he was so far outstripped by what he started, skyscrapers were never mentioned. Yet Pound was still in his manic prime when Auden, in September 1939, took it for granted that he could use skyscrapers for decor:

#,)6% *!-%3 143 Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man.

Actually, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both already demonstrating elsewhere, Collective Man had more daunting ways of proving his strength than to erect the Chrysler building, but even if the thought was superficial (a weakness that the later, self-punish- ing version of Auden would have admitted) the phrasing sounded all the more classical for being so contemporary: a seeming anomaly that we will have to deal with eventually. For now, enough to say that Wordsworth and Coleridge had wished to reopen poetry to common speech, and might even have done so, to some of it: but modern poetry did so to all of it, including the common names for all the trappings of energy, illumination, entertainment, and transport. (Tennyson traveled frequently by train but he never mentioned it in a poem: perhaps the thought of the pu∞ng locomotive that took him to see the Queen might have disturbed the landscape of the Idylls of the King.) And this must have been at least partly due to the surrounding centripetal pressure of commercial language, which was just as busily inventive as poetry was, and more energetic for being better paid: for being the product of competition in a stricter sense than any art. It also had the advantage of being so undeviatingly utilitarian in its aims that it was begging to be hijacked, as an aesthetic duty. Of all the poets of the thirties, John Betjeman pulled the most daring heist. Auden, MacNeice, and Spender were either praised or blamed as Pylon Poets, but they themselves never said who made the pylon. Betjeman unblushingly said who made everything. It was the big- gest di≠erence between him and his pre-modern predecessor Kipling. Both of them wrote performance pieces meant to be recited by an amateur standing beside the piano after dinner, but Kipling, though in his poems about India he carefully specified the colonial equip- ment of the sahibs, seldom mentioned the London shops where they bought their kit. Kipling’s Empire was full of British exports (“In the name of the Empress, the Overland Mail!”) but he rarely cited a brand name for e≠ect. Betjeman never stopped. He wrote whole stanzas full of trademarks, and there were lines that di≠ered from advertising slogans only in having a more finely judged lilt. Even when evoking the immediate past, he brought to the task the cataloging eye and ear of the present.

144 0/%429 Scent of Tutti-Frutti-Sen-Sen And cheroots upon the floor.

Sen-Sen was an Edwardian breath-freshener, so by citing the name he was harking back to a time when no poet would have cited it. After wwii, Betjeman was often disparaged as a social throwback, and today, although his prominence is no longer seriously questioned, there is still a remarkable list of important anthologies which do not include any of his work. But at the time his fellow craftsmen knew that he was at least as up-to-date as they were. Geo≠rey Grigson might have turned down Betjeman’s poems for New Verse, but Eliot wanted them for The Criterion. There would have been no doubt of Betjeman’s originality if he had taken Faber’s o≠er when it came. With Eliot in command of the editorial board, Faber already had the power of an establishment institution specifically equipped for deciding which new poets were modern enough to last. But as Alexandra Harris outlines in her excellent book Romantic Moderns — and if only all cultural analysts had her style, scope, and concision — Betjeman stuck with the more fustian house of John Murray because, as a cul- tural conservationist dedicated to the preservation of a vanishing England, he didn’t want his books to look modern at all. He didn’t want a front cover showing nothing but a typeface: he wanted little drawings of herbaceous festoons and time-honored architectural doodads, like illustrations from Ruskin. He did, however, from with- in the neat boxes of his four-square stanzas, sound more modern than anybody. And later on Philip Larkin picked up on it. Larkin admired Betjeman so much for his intelligibility and poise that today whole platoons of busy scholars tend not to notice how the admiration was also reflected in a deep technical homage. Larkin might be indebted to Yeats and Hardy, but to Betjeman he is enslaved. The obeisance can be traced through the use of proper names. Betjeman’s longing for beautiful women was translated, when he failed to attain them, into the sensual pleasure of naming their accoutrements: in his war- time poem “Invasion Exercise on the Poultry Farm,” the mouth he yearns to kiss is still, today, otherwise occupied:

Marty rolls a Craven A around her ruby lips.

A reader from outside the British Empire might have needed telling that Craven A was a brand of cigarette, but Betjeman was working

#,)6% *!-%3 145 on the assumption that the Empire was still a big enough audience for an act which was, on at least one level, vaudeville: he came on, made a topical reference, and paused for the laugh of recognition. Larkin borrowed Betjeman’s gaze in order to read the seaside billboard that featured the beautiful girl who will not survive the seasons and the gra∞ti artists:

Come to Sunny Prestatyn Laughed the girl on the poster, Kneeling up on the sand In tautened white satin.

Her threatened image is pure and tragic Larkin, but Betjeman’s merriment bubbles underneath. Verve travels. It could be said that verve is the only thing that does travel. Perhaps we need a more expensive word for it. The word “rhythm” is over- worked for something so hard to pin down, but at least it gives you the idea that vocabulary is not enough. The fresh words must lead to a phrase, and the phrase must have impetus, which must help to propel the line, and so on. Otherwise nothing is being built except a lexicon. In twentieth-century America, especially after wwii opened up the old world to young hopefuls armed with the gi Bill, there were lexi- cally gifted American poets who could join the us (the country whose beauty hurt Mr. Vinal) to a greater, more Europeanized sophistication. In brute fact, the European glossy magazines — French Vogue was the prime example — were already under the control of American capital, but it remained true that Americans were still in search of cultural vali- dation. L.E. Sissman, whose name first came to prominence in the sixties, was an expert at bringing to a poetic narrative the luster of high-end products then deemed exclusive. Here he is in a plush hotel, about to receive his dinner companion, a dizzying young fashion plate called Honor, whom we might imagine as a version of Holly Golightly with her own money, or Paris Hilton with taste:

The maitre d’ Steers for my table, bringing, in his train, Honor in Pucci, Guccis, and Sassoon Hair-do, a little younger-looking than I saw her last at twenty. — From Pursuit of Honor, 1946

146 0/%429 Blah blah blah, and bling bling bling. Even then, none of the exclu- sive stu≠ excluded anybody who could a≠ord the tab, and it’s all terribly familiar to us now; but it was quite exciting at the time. Just not quite exciting enough. In prose, social notation through the listing of products had been taken a long way by John O’Hara, and J.D. Salinger had already pushed it to its limit. (The limit is reached when anybody can successfully parody the style except the author himself.) In poetry, Sissman was already mining the depths even while he was getting famous for it. There is a big hint here that vocabulary isn’t enough: there has to be a phrase, and quite commonly to be too fascinated with words is a bad preparation for the forming of phrases. When not banging away with a stack of names out of showcase maga- zines, Sissman could use words from other sources — restaurant menus were a favorite — which told you all too well that he had no real notion of connecting with his readers, except, perhaps, for the purpose of leaving them with the nagging sense that they should get out more:

Aboard, they dine o≠ Chincoteagues, Dover Sole (hock), endive, rare entrecôte (claret), And baked Alaska. — From New York: A Summer Funeral

Not only does it sound indigestible, the sound is indigestible. Sissman had all kinds of gifts — including the rare one of cramming a socially complex narrative into a small space — but he lacked the crucial one that makes you remember a poem. He could place a word so that it stopped you cold, wondering why you were bothering to read him at all. Since his vocabulary was so desperately modern — modern beyond now, more modern than tomorrow — we are forced to deduce that the crucial gift has something to do with establishing an impetus which draws the reader in, and along. The most spectacular American poet at the moment for his use of blue-chip commercial properties is Frederick Seidel. One of those poets who get discovered late in life, he made things hard for himself by neglecting to write separately memorable poems. Instead he wrote, and still writes, poetry: poetry notable chiefly for its rich incidence of branded products so relentlessly top of the range that you and I could never reach them with all our credit cards combined. Now of advanced years, Seidel makes it clear that the writer behind the work still shares the same expensive tastes as the persona within it:

#,)6% *!-%3 147 like Malcolm Forbes in his dotage, Seidel goes everywhere by motor- cycle, but the motorcycles in Seidel’s case are masterpieces by Ducati, built like jewelry and described that way. Eerily unru±ed by the raging slipstream, his suits, when he arrives at his appointment with some young countess who leaves Sissman’s Honor looking like a waitress, are from a firm of Italian tailors you won’t have heard of. The same goes for his shoes: John Lobb pro- duces work boots compared with the things on Seidel’s feet. None of this, alas, sounds very far from product placement: for all the un- doubted vigor of his urge to register the minutiae of the privileged life — like Cummings he started o≠ with the support of money from home — there is a stickily over-made-up heaviness to the pictures he paints, rather like a sumptuous yet depressing visual odor that assails you when you flick through an issue of Vanity Fair in search of the articles among the glamour spreads: and somehow the articles, sup- posedly factual, seem less so in a context where not even Kate Winslet or Anne Hathaway is deemed quite perfect enough, and needs to have her waist trimmed and her legs lengthened. Photoshopping and airbrushing reduce things to an essence, but it is the essence of falsity. The overload of high-society notation in Seidel’s verse, however, would be less onerous if he could more often develop his phrases into lines. Despite his unfortunate propensity for kiddie rhymes, he can do phrases that pull you in like an Inuit fisherman whose hook is suddenly taken by a killer whale, but only very seldom do you find complete lines forming, and hardly ever does one line generate another, as it once did in an early poem called “Morphine”:

What hasn’t happened isn’t everything Until in middle age it starts to be.

Seidel, if he had wanted to, could have done that in every poem; have made whole poems instead of piles of glittering fragments; and have never needed to regret being “late for a fitting at Caraceni,” whose bottega — but of course you knew — is situated in Milan. Reading Seidel now, in my own old age, it saddens me that I have spent my long life dressing like a student: like a slob, in fact. I should have put more art into the everyday. Seidel would have given us the makers of Auden’s tigerish blazer and dove-like shoe. But he was never impressed enough that Auden didn’t. Auden didn’t need to give us the names, because he could give us the rhythm.

148 0/%429 In his greatest single short poem after wwii, “The Fall of Rome,” Auden carved one line after another that was as contemporary as a Boeing Stratocruiser yet as classical as the tomb of Augustus. The poem concluded with one of his most beautiful quatrains:

Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.

He didn’t even say where the reindeer were: they were just else- where. The rhythm welded the now and the then together. Evocation needs more than notation: it needs impetus. You can’t Just Add Hot Water And Serve. Looking back with as much penetration as I can now achieve with tired eyes, I think I must have guessed that already, during those days in Sydney when I walked around reciting E.E. Cummings to an audience of trees, tra∞c, and puzzled pedestrians. I didn’t just go for the bric-a-brac satires and the crazily lush love lyrics, I went for lines that verged on nonsense. “To eat flowers and not be afraid.” Not good advice in Australia, which has flowers you should be very afraid of indeed. But whatever he was talking about, even if it was nothing, his phonetic force drove whole poems into my head like golden nails. Fifty years later I’m still trying to figure out just how the propulsive energy that drives a line of poetry joins up with the binding energy that holds a poem together.

#,)6% *!-%3 149 robert archambeau

The Great Debate: Progress vs. Pluralism

Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, by Marjorie Perlo≠. University of Chicago Press. $32.50.

A Martian Muse: Further Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, by Reginald Shepherd. Ed. by Robert Philen. University of Michigan Press. $21.95.

Imagine yourself settling into a seat at the back of a crowded audito- rium to attend a debate between two speakers, each known for his wit, intellect, and the striking novelty of his argumentation. They will debate the nature of poetic history. On the stage stand two lec- terns, and behind them hangs a banner with the title of the evening’s events: “Poetic History: Progress or Pluralism?” The first speaker takes up his position behind the lectern to the right, taps the microphone, and makes his opening salvo:

Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the build- ing. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has re- turned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve ... yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flat- tened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry.

This, you think, must be the “progress” side of the debate. The speaker has boldly dismissed the disjunctive kind of poetry we’ve come to think of as cutting edge, declaring it passé. It has waddled out of the forum of relevance like a jump-suited, late-period Elvis, and the next phase of poetry is upon us, in the form of a new kind of intertextualism. This all seems very exciting, but you make a mental note to sell your copies of In the American Tree and American Hybrid

150 0/%429 on eBay before the price drops too far. The next new thing has already arrived. Or has it? The other speaker has stepped to his lectern and has already begun to speak. You’ve missed the speaker’s opening sentences, but you catch this:

Compared to the art world where, after Duchamp, anything can be art, there’s a sense that in poetry world — even within more innovative camps — that certain things are poetry and that cer- tain things are not [sic]. Coming from the art world, this strikes me as an untenable & unsustainable stance, both aesthetically and historically and one that is bound to implode any moment.

He makes a good point, this art world refugee. The notion that some things (like disjunction) can stop counting as poetry when something else (intertextualism, say) starts counting does seem unsus- tainable, both aesthetically and historically. Maybe it’s not the price of your anthologies of disjunctive poetry that’s about to implode, but the notion of poetic history as a kind of progression, with new forms rendering old forms obsolete. At this point, you notice something funny. The two speakers look like identical twins. And they both seem remarkably familiar to you, longtime reader of Poetry that you are. And then it hits you: they’re both Kenneth Goldsmith. The first Kenneth Goldsmith in this little drama is the author of “Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Poetry is Apollo,” an essay that appeared in the July/August 2009 issue of this magazine. The second Goldsmith is the author of “The End of History,” an essay posted on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog in April 2007. Marjorie Perlo≠ quotes the first passage in Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, her latest book of criticism, while Reginald Shepherd quotes the second passage in A Martian Muse: Further Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, the posthumous collection of his essays edited by his partner Robert Philen. Perlo≠, of course, has long been the best and most prominent critical spokesperson for a whole range of poetries associated with experimentalism and the avant-garde, and implicit in her book is a view of poetic history as, at bottom, progressive. Unsurprisingly, the version of poetic progress she presents valorizes the types of poetry for which she has been such a passionate and e≠ective advocate. In contrast, Shepherd consistently refused to be the poetic spokesperson

2/"%24 !2#(!-"%!5 151 for anyone but himself despite (or perhaps because of) how, as a gay black man from the Bronx, he seemed to fit neatly into the identity politics paradigm of race, gender, and class. Perhaps it is because of this refusal to a∞liate with any group that Shepherd takes a very dif- ferent view of poetic history, seeing it as a perpetual state of muddled pluralism, in which multiple kinds of poetry flourish at all times. In the end, Perlo≠’s version of literary history is the greatest flaw in a book that has many virtues, while Shepherd’s version of history is among the strongest points in a necessarily uneven gathering of the prose he left uncollected at the time of his death from cancer at the age of forty-five.

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Perlo≠ begins her book with the premise that things have changed for poets in the last few years due to a revolution in information technology. It’s not just that almost everyone now writes with a computer — as Perlo≠ points out, she put the finishing touches on her book Radical Artifice on an old Kaypro two decades ago. Rather, it’s that we’ve had a revolution in electronic communications. When she was writing Radical Artifice, says Perlo≠, “surfing the Web, googling, blogging, viewing or making videos on You Tube [sic], writing on Facebook walls, or Twittering: these were still in the future.” These new things matter for poetry because they change the question from how one should express oneself to “how already existing words and sentences are framed, recycled, appropriated, cited, submitted to rules, visualized, or sounded.” In Perlo≠’s view, new poetry will increasingly concern itself with forms of writing amenable to the capabilities of the new online environment (sound poetry, concretism), with the ease of international communication (exophonic writing — that is, writing in languages other than one’s mother tongue), and above all with intertextuality. Here one might pause and consider the long history of intertex- tual allusion in poetry. Hadn’t Eliot composed much of The Waste Land by assembling fragments of other old texts? Hadn’t Ezra Pound so larded The Cantos with quotation that it spawned a minor aca- demic industry of annotation? Hadn’t Roland Barthes theorized that, after the death of the hallowed idea of the author, writers could only really assemble their works by mingling pre-existing pieces of writing? Perlo≠ doesn’t deny any of this, but she does think

152 0/%429 there’s something new in the way poets have started to feel about intertextual borrowings and transformations. From the modernists right up through the heyday of l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry, says Perlo≠, poets believed in originality, even when they were looting other people’s writing for fragments to shore against their ruins. The imperatives of originality are being replaced by what Kenneth Goldsmith calls “uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropria- tion, plagiarism, fraud, theft.” One might argue that the purported new emphasis on unoriginal- ity and theft is not, itself, particularly original: T.S. Eliot’s famous claim — “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” — comes to mind as an antecedent. Fortunately, though, the bulk of Perlo≠’s book is not spent trying to support this slightly shaky argument. Rather, it consists of a series of examinations of texts that can be seen as anticipations of emerging poetic trends. These chapters exhibit Perlo≠’s characteristic strengths: immense erudition, attentiveness to international movements in poetry, and care in describing fine distinctions between varieties of experimental poetry. Plenty of Perlo∞an erudition is on display in a chapter devoted to Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, that thousand-page collage of quotations. Benjamin claimed that the method of his project was literary montage, and therefore he “needn’t say anything” — and this, says Perlo≠, marks his project as a precursor to later experiments in textual appropriation and the assembly of found sources. But Perlo≠ takes the argument further, arguing that the marginal markings in Benjamin’s manuscript — a system of more than thirty di≠erent sym- bols such as squares, triangles, and crosses in various colors — indicate alternate routes through the immense text, linking part to part in the manner of online hypertext. Surely Perlo≠ is right in saying there is much about The Arcades Project that points forward toward methods of composition more common in the age of the Internet, and one is inclined to agree with her when she says:

The repeated juxtapositions, cuts, links, shifts in register, fram- ing devices, and visual markings conspire to produce a poetic text that is paradigmatic for our own poetics.

There’s at least one moment in Perlo≠’s reading of Benjamin, though, when she seems too willing to kidnap Benjamin and drag

2/"%24 !2#(!-"%!5 153 him from his own time into ours. Consider the following passage from Benjamin’s essay “One-Way Street,” which Perlo≠ reads as a commentary on the laborious copying-out of passages that consti- tuted so much of Benjamin’s method of composition:

The power of a country road ... is di≠erent when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of text is di≠erent when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text.

For Perlo≠, these words anticipate the way “the Internet has made copyists, recyclers, transcribers, collators, and reframers of us all.” But there’s something very di≠erent about the process Benjamin’s describing and the kind of electronic copying we do now, with a quick flick of the wrist on a mouse or the twitch of a finger on a laptop’s touch pad capturing as many pages of text as one pleases. Benjamin thinks of the closeness of the scribe to his text, and of how that slow-moving attentiveness can transform the copyist. While there are certainly moments when the Benjamin of The Arcades Project looks forward to our time, the Benjamin of “One-Way Street” looks the other way, back to an earlier era before Gutenberg and the dawn of print culture. Perlo≠’s chapter on concrete poetry makes the point that it is only now, in the twilight of print culture, that concrete poetry can truly come into its own: online publication o≠ers a more flexible and less expensive environment for the distribution of visual texts than we had under the old dispensation. But the real value of the chapter lies in the fine distinction it draws between di≠erent move- ments within concrete poetry, separating the work of poets like Eugen Gomringer — who wanted concrete poetry to be a mode of immediate communication across language barriers like the signs one sees in airports — from the work of poets like Augusto de Campos or Öyvind Fahlström, who wanted concrete poetry to follow Italian Futurism’s destruction of syntax and Russian Zaum’s notion of set- ting words free from ordinary constraints of meaning. Concrete poetry is rarely discussed in Anglo-American literary criticism, and still more rarely is it taken seriously. Not only does Perlo≠ provide

154 0/%429 fine, sensitive readings of individual poems, she charts the di≠erent shadings within a much-misunderstood realm of poetry. It is one thing to be an advocate for neglected types of poetry, but it is another to see the history of poetry as a kind of progress, in which old forms become obsolete when new ones come along. While there is no sustained argument for the progressive view of poetic history in Unoriginal Genius, the view persists as a kind of background noise throughout the book, occasionally coming to the fore in Perlo≠’s comments and assertions. When, for example, she examines a poem in which Susan Howe erases most of a Yeats poem, leaving only a few columns of syllables, Perlo≠ concludes by saying:

Howe’s “writing-through” of “The Folly of Being Comforted” implies that however “cold” the emotion of Yeats’s 1903 poem, a century later its rhetoric inevitably demands revision: love poetry can no longer be so direct and passionate.

Nothing in Perlo≠’s reading of the poem shows that Howe makes this incredibly broad implication. The interpretation seems imposed, the sense of the impossibility of passionate directness more Perlo≠’s than Howe’s. It is also, one hastens to add, a false sense of impos- sibility. One would indeed be hard-pressed to find someone writing love poetry as well as Yeats did, since Yeats was one of the greatest love poets of any era. But as for passion in poetry about love — well, one hastens to assure Perlo≠ that it still exists. Ten minutes search- ing in the online archives of the Poetry Foundation will provide the requisite evidence. Again and again in Unoriginal Genius we encounter the notion that poetry is a matter of generational erasure, with the last generation of poetic techniques rendered obsolete. When Perlo≠ says that Ron Silliman’s New Sentence replaced the free verse lyric, and that “the New Sentence has been in its turn replaced by citational or docu- mentary [writing],” one gets the sense of a narrowly progressive kind of history, a history like that of record companies giving up on the cassette for the compact disc, then giving up on the com- pact disc for the mp3, whereas the actual history of poetry is far less clear-cut. Perlo≠ yields the progressive notion of history with great confidence, though, making sweeping statements such as “It was in the next or Conceptual generation, however, that constraint,

2/"%24 !2#(!-"%!5 155 visual as well as verbal, became central.” It’s not that there aren’t conceptual poets, or that their work has nothing to say: Perlo≠’s comments on Caroline Bergvall alone prove otherwise. It’s just that Perlo≠ writes carelessly, claiming a whole generation for conceptu- alism when the majority of poets from that generation write more traditional kinds of work. I’m sure Perlo≠ is right to think there’s something new stirring in poetry, that it has to do with the Internet, and that citation and in- tertextuality play a role in it. It’s a shame that a sustained argument never fully emerges from the deeply informative, often insightful chapters of Unoriginal Genius. It’s a shame, too, that a narrowly progressive version of literary history creeps into the book. The im- plicit notion — that now that we have poetry type y, poetry type x is no longer valid — is, as the second speaker in our imaginary forum on literary history might say, unsustainable, both aesthetically and historically.

š

Reginald Shepherd’s A Martian Muse takes its title from Jack Spicer’s essay “Taking Dictation from a Martian Muse,” in which Spicer meditated on the sources of poetry, but it would be wrong to assume that this is a collection of essays on the sources of poetry. Rather, it is a somewhat miscellaneous collection, including essays on topics as diverse as poetic ambition, the teaching of creative writ- ing, the social position of the poet, the significance of names, the definition of post-avant poetry, The Tempest, Wilfred Owen, and the meaning of illness — the essays on this last topic coming from the period leading up to Shepherd’s death. Most of the essays are short, and some are adapted from entries on Shepherd’s blog. Many, in fact, bear the marks of the emerging world of constant electronic commu- nication that so interests Perlo≠: Shepherd’s is a reactive intelligence, always building o≠ of a remark on someone else’s blog, a citation to a text in critical theory or gender studies, or a conversation from the comment stream of a poetry website. As miscellaneous as the collection is, though, its center of gravity coalesces around a couple of big questions: what is the nature of poetry, and how do di≠erent kinds of poetry relate to one another? The first question, says Shepherd, can never have a single answer, and we should be suspicious of those who provide one:

156 0/%429 When we say, “This is what poetry is” or “This is what poetry does,” we almost always mean, “This is what the kind of poetry that interests me is” or “This is what the kind of poetry that I like does.” I know what I value in poems, what I want poems to do. But I also know that what I value isn’t the definition of poetry, if only because there are so many poems that do other things, that aim at other goals.

Perhaps it is because of Shepherd’s deeply felt sense of social, eco- nomic, racial, and sexual otherness (one of his books of poetry is called Otherhood) that he finds himself so predisposed to pluralism and tolerance in poetry. Pluralism is a matter of principle with him, even when faced with works he cannot make himself enjoy. “The vast majority of poetry out there doesn’t interest me,” he says. “Much of it I actively dislike.” But, he adds, “except in my grumpier moods, I don’t begrudge it its right to exist.... I don’t even mind if Jewel and Ashanti and T-Boz want to write poetry, though it would be nice if Jewel knew what the word ‘casualty’ meant.” Shepherd has his pref- erences, as do we all. But he doesn’t mistake those preferences for the whole truth about poetry, which has always been many things to many people. This pluralistic attitude toward poetry is necessarily opposed to the idea of poetry as something that progresses, shutting down old possibilities as it opens up newer, more up-to-date ones. However, while Shepherd doesn’t embrace the progressive idea, he does un- derstand it. In a remarkable essay called “What Is Progressive Art?” Shepherd sets out to explore the origins of the progressive idea of aesthetic history, finding its roots in Hegel. Hegel saw art as an ag- es-long struggle between spirit and material, culminating in the tri- umph of Romantic poetry, in which the pure spirit of imagination left all material constraints behind. For Hegel, this was the termi- nus of all art, which would henceforth cede its territory to philoso- phy, the discipline of pure concepts. We can see the parallels with Perlo≠’s implicit view of poetic history in Unoriginal Genius. For his part, though, Shepherd is more inclined to agree with the great Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno, whose words he quotes: “the concept of progress is less directly applicable to art than it is to technical forces of production.” For Shepherd, the history of poetry isn’t a series of erasures. Rather, it is an accretion of styles, many of which persist long after newer styles have risen. As he puts it in the

2/"%24 !2#(!-"%!5 157 essay “What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry,” “the definitional incoherence at the core of the modern notion of poetry is a sign of its historical evolution.” The short essays of A Martian Muse o≠er fascinating insights into many subjects besides poetic pluralism. One expands on Adorno’s idea of art as necessarily standing outside the realm of usefulness and propaganda; another reflects on the fate of the long poem in our time; several argue on behalf of di∞culty in art, which Shepherd refuses to see as elitist or oppressive (“Growing up in the Bronx ghettoes,” he says, “I have been oppressed by many things in my life, but not by art”). It is a pleasure to have these essays gathered together, and we owe Robert Philen our thanks for completing an editorial task that was clearly a labor of love. Both Unorginal Genius and A Martian Muse have wonderful mo- ments, and at their best each shows us a remarkable critical mind at work. In the end, though, each book leaves one with a bit of regret. In Perlo≠’s case, the regret comes from a sense that Unoriginal Genius was written less carefully than her strongest work. In Shepherd’s case, the regret comes from knowing that the writer will never have the chance to follow up, on a more ambitious scale, the most promising moments in an intermittently brilliant collection of essays.

158 0/%429 carolyn forché

Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art

The letter arrived on a series of plain postcards in Joseph Brodsky’s penciled cursive, mailed separately from his newly imposed exile in Ann Arbor, Michigan, very near the township of my childhood. They contained his advice to a young poet brash enough to send her youthful e≠orts to him. You should consider including in your poems more of your own, well, philosophy, he wrote. And on another card: It is also a pity that you do not read Russian, but I think you should try to read Anna Akhmatova. It was, I believe, two years earlier that I had read excerpts from the transcript of Brodsky’s trial in the former Soviet Union, condemning him to forced labor. When asked on what authority he pronounced himself a poet, he had answered that the vocation came from God. Now he was advising me to read Akhmatova, and so that winter I went into the stacks of the Library of Congress and found a vol- ume of her poems, translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Kneeling on the floor between the shelves, I read a passage no doubt well known to readers of Poetry:

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (every- one whispered there): “Can you describe this?” And I said, “I can.” Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

Akhmatova referred to this passage as Vmesto predisoviia (Instead of a Preface), adding it as prologue to her great poem, “Requiem,” written during the years of her son Lev Gumilev’s imprisonment. The poem was her podvig, her spiritual accomplishment of “remem- bering injustice and su≠ering” as experienced within herself and as

#!2/,9. &/2#(³ 159 collectively borne. Anna’s friend, Lidiya Chukovskaya, remembers her subsisting on black bread and tea. According to the research of Amanda Haight:

She was extremely thin and frequently ill. She would get up from bed to go and stand, sometimes in freezing weather, in the long lines of people waiting outside the prisons, hoping against hope to be able to see her son or at least pass over a parcel.... The poems of “Requiem,” composed at this time, were learnt by heart by Lidiya Chukovskaya, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and several other friends who did not know who else was preserv- ing them. Sometimes Akhmatova showed them a poem on a piece of paper which she burnt as soon as she was sure it had been committed to memory.... In a time when a poem on a scrap of paper could mean a death sentence, to continue to write, to commit one’s work to faithful friends who were pre- pared to learn poems by heart and thus preserve them, was only possible if one was convinced of the absolute importance and necessity of poetry.

As I was still in my early twenties and educated in the United States, I hadn’t thought of poetry in these terms. I had not yet encountered evil in anything resembling this form, and had not yet, therefore, imagined the impress of extremity upon the poetic imagination, nor conceived of our relation to others as one of infinite obligation: to stand with them in the hour of need, even abject and destitute, in sup- plication and without need of response. If it were so — if description were possible, of world and its su≠erings, then the response would be that smile, or rather something resembling it, passing over what had once been her face. “Requiem” meditated on the fate of Russia in her torment, marking the stages of su≠ering, as one would visit the stations of Christ’s pas- sion. Akhmatova wrote it in the cry of a woman who had become all women. In the poem’s progression, Akhmatova takes leave of herself and becomes vigilant beyond all wakefulness. By turns she accepts and disowns her pain, survives, forsakes the tribute of remembrance, and consigns her monument to a prison wall. I was as yet unaware that most of the prominent twentieth-century poets beyond the English-speaking countries (and even some within them) had endured such experiences during their lives, and those

160 0/%429 blessed to survive wrote their poetry not after such experiences but in their aftermath — in languages that had also passed through these su≠erings; languages that also continued to bear wounds, legible in the line breaks, in constellations of imagery, in ruptures of utterance, in silences and fissures of written speech. Aftermath is a temporal debris field, where historical remains are strewn (of large events as well as those peripheral or lost); where that-which-happened remains present, including the consciousness in which such events arose. This is writing to be apprehended “in the light of conscience,” as another Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva, once wrote. As such, it calls upon the reader, who is the other of this work, to be in turn marked by what such language makes present before her, what it holds open and begets in the reader.

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In his Ethics and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas writes:

The witness witnesses to what is said by him (through him, or as him). For he has said “Here I am!” before the other one; and from the fact that before the one other he recognizes the responsibility which is incumbent upon him, he finds himself having manifested what the face of the other one has meant for him. The glory of the Infinite reveals itself by what it is capable of doing in the witness.

This witness is a call to the other (perhaps in both senses, as the other within the poet, and the one other whom the text addresses), very much as in the face-to-face encounter of Martin Buber’s I and Thou, later elaborated and extended by Levinas as

an awakening that is neither reflection upon oneself nor univer- salization. An awakening signifying a responsibility for the other, the other who must be fed and clothed—my substitution for the other, my expiation for the su≠ering, and no doubt for the wrongdoing of the other. An expiation assigned to me without any possible avoidance, and by which my uniqueness as myself, instead of being alienated, is intensified by my irreplaceability.

This awakening is also a readerly coming to awareness before

#!2/,9. &/2#(³ 161 the saying of poetry which calls the reader to her irrevocable and inexhaustible responsibility for the other as present in the testamen- tary utterance. A poem is lyric art, but Levinas claims that

a poetic work is at the same time a document, and the art that went into its making is at once a use of discourse. This discourse deals with objects that are also spoken in the newspapers, post- ers, memoirs and letters of every passing age — though in the case of poetry’s strictly poetic expression these objects merely furnish a favorable occasion and serve as pretexts. It is of the es- sence of art to signify only between the lines — in the intervals of time, between times — like a footprint that would precede the step, or an echo preceding the sound of a voice.

This voice is the saying of the witness, which is not a translation of experience into poetry but is itself experience. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, writing on the work of Celan, proposes

to call what [the poem] translates “experience,” provided that we both understand the word in its strict sense — the Latin ex- periri, a crossing through danger — and especially that we avoid associating it with what is “lived,” the stu≠ of anecdotes.

But a poem, in its witnessing, “arises out of experience that is not perceived as it occurs, is not registered in the first-person ‘precisely since it ruined this first person, reduced it to a ghostlike status, to being a “me without me.”’” So the poem’s witness is not a recount- ing, is not mimetic narrative, is not political confessionalism, and “it is not simply an act of memory. It bears witness, as Jacques Derrida suggests, in the manner of an ethical or political act.”

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The “poetry of witness,” as a term of literary art, had not yet had its genesis, but soon after learning of Brodsky and Akhmatova I began an epistolary friendship with the late Terrence Des Pres, author of The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, in which he cites Akhmatova’s preface to “Requiem” as epigraph to a chapter on the survivor’s will to bear witness. Within months of meeting Des Pres in the summer of 1977, I traveled to Spain to translate Claribel

162 0/%429 Alegría, herself a poet in exile, and in January of 1978 was welcomed by one of her relatives to El Salvador, where I was to work as a docu- menter of human rights abuses in the period immediately preceding a twelve-year civil war (working closely with associates of Monsignor Óscar Romero, then archbishop of San Salvador, and with my contact in the International Secretariat of Amnesty International.) If asked when I returned from El Salvador for the last time in those years, I have said March 16, 1980, a week before the assassi- nation of Monsignor Romero. After thirty years, I now understand that I did not return on that date, that the woman who traveled to El Salvador — the young poet I had been — did not come back. The woman who did return wrote, in those years, seven poems marked by the El Salvador experience, and also an essay, published in the summer of 1981 in American Poetry Review, in which this return- ing poet states: “It is my feeling that the twentieth-century human condition demands a poetry of witness.” Two years later, Czeslaw Milosz would publish his monograph, The Witness of Poetry, and a phrase, “poetry of witness,” entered the lexicon of literary terms, re- garded skeptically by some as a euphemism for “political poetry,” or as political poetry by other means. “Witness” would come to refer, much of the time, to the person of the poet, much as it refers to a man or woman testifying under oath in a court of law. “Poets of witness” were considered by some to be engaged in writing documentary litera- ture, or poetic reportage, and in the mode of political confessionalism. As compelling as many such “witness” poems are, “poetry of witness” originated in a very di≠erent constellation of thought, in which it was not regarded as constituting a poet’s identity, nor prescribing a new littérature engagée. “Poetry of witness,” a term descending from the literature of the Shoah and complicated by philosophical, religious, linguistic, and psychoanalytic understand- ings of “witness,” remains to be set forth. In my sense of this term, it is a mode of reading rather than of writing, of readerly encounter with the literature of that-which-happened, and its mode is evidentiary rather than representational — as evidentiary, in fact, as spilled blood.

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While the solitude and tranquility thought to be the condition of lit- erary production were absent for many twentieth- and twenty-first century poets, even in the aftermath of their survival, writers have

#!2/,9. &/2#(³ 163 survived and written despite all that has happened, and against all odds. They have created exemplary literary art with language that has also passed through catastrophe. The body of thought that informs “the poetry of witness” suggests, moreover, that language can itself be damaged. This idea of “damaged language” appears in George Steiner’s Language and Silence, when he considers the German lan- guage “being used to run hell, getting the habits of hell into its syntax”:

Languages have great reserves of life. They can absorb masses of hysteria, illiteracy, and cheapness ... But there comes a break- ing point. Use a language to conceive, organize, and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanize man during twelve years of calculated bestiality. Something will happen to it.... Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of the language. Imperceptibly at first, like the poisons of radiation sifting silently into the bone. But the cancer will begin, and the deep-set destruction. The language will no longer grow and freshen. It will no longer perform, quite as well as it used to, its two principal functions: the conveyance of humane order which we call law, and the communication of the quick of the human spirit which we call grace.

The damage need not be regarded, however, as always irreparable. In the words of Paul Celan in his speech at Bremen:

One thing remained attainable, close and unlost amidst all the losses: language. Language was not lost, in spite of all that happened. But it had to go through its own responselessness, go through horrible silences, go through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.

It was this language, this poetry that had passed through death- bringing speech, that I set out to find and gather in my anthology, Against Forgetting. I hoped to discover the trace of extremity that might remain legible in these poems. Common among them is an explicit will to bear witness. Here is Wislawa Szymborska:

Write it. Write. In ordinary ink on ordinary paper: they were given no food, they all died of hunger. “All. How many?

164 0/%429 It’s a big meadow. How much grass for each one?” Write: I don’t know. History counts its skeletons in round numbers. — From Hunger Camp at Jaslo

There are inventories of losses, as in Akhmatova’s “Requiem”:

Nothing I counted mine, out of my life, is mine to take:

not my son’s terrible eyes, not the elaborate stone flower of grief, not the day of the storm, nor the trial of the visiting hour,

not the dear coolness of his hands, not the lime trees’ agitated shade, not the thin cricket-sound of consolation’s parting word.

The di∞culties of forgetting and remembering are marked. Vahan Tekeyan:

Forgetting. Yes. I will forget it all. One after the other. The roads I crossed. The roads I did not. Everything that happened. And everything that did not. — From Forgetting

Guillaume Apollinaire:

Memories composing now a single memory As a hundred furs make only one coat As these these thousands of wounds make only one newspaper article. — From Shadow

Of the self’s fragmentation, we read in Angel Cuadra:

#!2/,9. &/2#(³ 165 The common man I might have been reproaches me now, blaming me for his ostracism his solitary shadow, his silent exile. — From In Brief

Early in the twentieth century, there is evidence of faith and prayer in poetry, and of belief in the sacred. Toward the middle of the century, there is a discernible shift toward alienation from the deity. Celan:

They dug and they dug, so their day went by for them, their night. And they did not praise God, who, so they heard, wanted all this, who, so they heard, knew all this. — From There Was Earth Inside Them

The temporal sense seems changed. In Velimir Khlebnikov’s “Suppose I make a timepiece of humanity,” we read this:

I tell you, the universe is the scratch of a match on the face of the calculus. And my thoughts are a picklock at work on a door, and behind it someone is dying.

There are many other shared qualities, such as the experience of consciousness itself as fragmented and altered, and for the first time, soldier poets write of the extremity of the battlefield explicitly in terms of its horrors. Poetic language attempts a coming to terms with evil and its embodiments, and there are appeals for a shared sense of humanity and collective resistance. There are many poems of address: to war as figural, to death and evil, memory and hunger as figural, and of course to the world to come:

We speak loudly but no one understands us. But we are not surprised For we are speaking the language That will be spoken tomorrow. — Horst Bienek, from Resistance

166 0/%429 š

In conditions of extremity (war, su≠ering, struggle), the witness is in relation, and cannot remove him or herself. Relation is proximity, and this closeness subjects the witness to the possibility of being wounded. No special protection can be sought and no outcome in- tended. The witness who writes out of extremity writes his or her wound, as if such writing were making an incision. Consciousness itself is cut open. At the site of the wound, language breaks, becomes tentative, interrogational, kaleidoscopic. The form of this language bears the trace of extremity, and may be comprised of fragments: questions, aphorisms, broken passages of lyric prose or poetry, quota- tions, dialogue, brief and lucid passages that may or may not resemble what previously had been written. The word “extremity” (extremus) is the superlative correlative of the word “exterior” (exterus). Extremity suggests “utmost,” “exceed- ingly great,” and also “outermost,” “farthest,” implying intense su≠er- ing and even world-death; a su≠ering without knowledge of its own end. Ethical reading of such works does not inhere in assessing their truth value or e∞cacy as “representation,” but rather in recogniz- ing their evidentiary nature: here language is a life-form, marked by human experience, and is also itself material evidence of that-which- occurred. This evidence continues to mark human consciousness. The aftermath is a region of devastated consciousness of barbarism and the human capacity for cruelty and complicity with evil. In this aftermath, we are able to read — in the scarred landscape of battlefields, in bomb craters and unreconstructed ruins, in oral and written testimony and its extension in literary art — the mark or trace of extremity. In the work of witness, of writing out of extremity, the poem does not become a means to an extra-literary end: the poet, according to Maurice Blanchot,

is excluded from the facile, humanistic hope that by writing, or “creating,” he would transform his dark experience into greater consciousness. On the contrary: dismissed, excluded from what is written — unable even to be present by virtue of the non- presence of his very death — he has to renounce all conceivable relations of a self (either living or dying) to the poem which henceforth belongs to the other.

#!2/,9. &/2#(³ 167 Terrence Des Pres would not have relinquished the “humanistic hope” of transformation, but Blanchot’s reading of the poet’s renunciation, of the poem as address to the other to whom it henceforth belongs, corresponds radiantly for me to formulations in the ethics of Levinas, and also to the thought of Derrida (after his ethical turn). “This will be about bearing witness,” Derrida writes in an essay on Celan, “and about poetics as bearing witness.... A poem can ‘bear witness’ to a poetics. It can promise it, it can be a response to it, as to a testamen- tary promise.” Derrida imagines the poem as a singularity, marked in its date, “that, in the reference that carries it beyond itself toward the other or toward the world, opens the verbal body to things other than itself.” What the poem lays open to the other is an unending address, a call to the other, which manifests that-which-happened. Witness, then, is neither martyrdom nor the saying of a juridical truth, but the owning of one’s infinite responsibility for the other one (l’autri). It is not to be mistaken for politicized confessionalism. The confessional is the mode of the subjective, and the representational that of the objective, and it is necessary to move beyond both and place ourselves under and before the other in an ethical relation that precedes ontology (Levinas), an understanding that humans come into being through relation. In the aftermath of Auschwitz, we begin with a heteronymous self and understand Descartes’s subject / object construction as a two-century-old denial of the primacy of the other and of relation. We abandon this denial to enter an inter-subjective sphere of lived immediacy. In the poetry of witness, the poem makes present to us the experience of the other, the poem is the experience, rather than a symbolic representation. When we read the poem as witness, we are marked by it and become ourselves witnesses to what it has made present before us. Language incises the page, wounding it with testimonial presence, and the reader is marked by encounter with that presence. Witness begets witness. The text we read becomes a living archive.

168 0/%429 Q & A

Your connection of the poetry of witness with the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas suggests that, for you, poetry has a distinctly moral purpose, that it should awaken us to the plight of other people. Is this true? Do you be- lieve that a right reading of poetry leads to this kind of moral awareness and openness?

Poetry begins in a not-knowing rather than a moral impulse. A poet’s consciousness is, in this sense, improvisational and open to transfor- mations, felicitous accidents, and an intuitive response to language generating meaning and music — that is true whether the spark ignit- ing the poem comes from a word, a phrase, an image, or a moment in experience, present or remembered. This spark is what Mandelstam calls poryv, or impulse, and what Emerson thinks of as what is oldest and best in us, the alien visitor. This not-knowing is a hovering and receptive state of consciousness without intention (in the traditional meaning of that word). Levinas proposes an ethics based on our infinite and inexhaustible responsibility for the “Other,” whom we meet in the face-to-face encounter, and for whom we are also the “Other.” The thought of witness proposes that we consider what is made present to us in cer- tain poetic texts, what is opened up to us, transmitted to us. In this sense, it might resemble the face-to-face encounter and its attendant obligations. If we read a poem as witness (and there are many other ways of reading), we open ourselves to another way of knowing. We read in response to an ethical imperative. We are not bound to read this way, of course, but if we do, we are responding to the poet’s call to the future, to a writing from the past that addresses the reader to come, addresses the one who will lift the corked bottle from the sea waves and read its message. I don’t know if there is a “right reading” of poetry, but rather many readings, many ways of reading, and one of them is a read- ing of the poem as witness that is perhaps also testamentary, but is certainly always evidence of that from which it arose. Whether this way of reading leads to moral awareness and openness, I don’t know. In Levinas’s sense, certainly it would provide an occasion for ethical awareness. Mandelstam and also Bakhtin would say that the poet is always writing in response to a listening from an unknown future reader. This means that we can’t know what the poem means because

#!2/,9. &/2#(³ 169 we can’t know what it will mean later. We are writing what in the future will be the irrevocable past.

Does an “evidentiary” reading preclude an aesthetic one? Can a poem be successful as evidence and yet a failure as art?

No reading precludes another. When poetry is read as witness, the poem is judged by its truth as a poem, and what this truth does in the reader. This is Mandelstam’s criterion. If the poem is true in Mandelstam’s terms, it doesn’t fail as art. If it does fail as art, it isn’t a poem, but remains a piece of evidence. If one reading of Kant sug- gests that the categorical imperative demands a freedom that can be found through the aesthetic experience of the sublime, then aesthetic experience o≠ers the freedom that is the ground of ethics, so perhaps it — the poem — can o≠er a sense of responsibility or blessing.

You say that “most of the prominent twentieth-century poets beyond the English-speaking countries (and even some within them) had endured such experiences during their lives.” Does that mean that the greatest poetry somehow depends upon having su≠ered some extremity of expe- rience? And how would you respond to John Berryman’s idea that the “luckiest” artist is the one who is presented with the worst possible ordeal that will not actually kill him?

Great poetry might in part depend on engagement with the extremity of existence, but this does not necessarily entail the greatest su≠ering; these extremes can be experienced meditatively and involve awareness of the radical contingency of all human life. There are poets — and in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries they have been many — whose engagement includes man’s inhumanity to man, and this was the form of extremity I collected into the anthology Against Forgetting: warfare, military occupation, imprisonment, and other forms of extremity endured through the depredations of the state. Not all extremity is of this kind. As for John Berryman’s statement, I would guess that he was referring to those artists, such as confessional poets, who view their experience as material, and perhaps “su≠ering” is then also material and provides a more resonant self-expression. He might also be re- ferring to the necessary education of the soul in certain poets, who seem almost determined to subject themselves to all manner of pain

170 0/%429 for reasons that may partly have to do with their literary art. But this isn’t about the economy of converting personal experience to literary art. No one is a great poet because she is a miserable drunk. No one is a great poet because he has had a nervous breakdown. Su≠ering, however, can be experienced as a curse or a blessing; the luckiest is the one who can experience it as a blessing.

You say that not only the poets “pass through” their experiences but also their very languages, which continue to “bear wounds, legible in the line breaks, in constellations of imagery, in ruptures of utterance, in silences and fissures of written speech.” Can translation convey this? What is the e≠ect of reading, in translation, all of these poems that trauma has so sin- gularly shaped and stamped?

Poetry is an art of words but also the energy that moves through them — what comes from spirit or noumena, the impulse, the spark, and this is what makes the poem unparaphrasable. A successful trans- lation allows the spirit or impulse of the original to enter and flow through the new language. The poem will not sound like the original, and the music of the original will be lost (together with connota- tive resonances), but in a good translation a new music is found, and the new language is su≠used with the original impulse. If you have faithful and literal translation by itself and without this energy, you have paraphrase. Hans Magnus Enzensberger said “Was nicht sel- ber Poesie ist, kann nicht Ubersetzung von Poesie sein” — what is not poetry, cannot be a translation of poetry. According to Walter Benjamin, translation is the afterlife of the original, and is marked by its ongoing life (and in this sense, language is a life form). In witness, this afterlife is the poem’s survival in another language, along with the mark of extremity.

Can the “poetry of witness” transcend trauma? Can it include joy, or at least an uninhibited shriek of being (the late work of Mandelstam, say)?

One cannot transcend trauma. Trauma is trapped and clings to that which happened. We live not after trauma but in its aftermath. There is a process, which some imagine as the work of “healing,” which is not perhaps accurate. This process is one of trans-memberment: one is always attending to the metamorphoses: the nausea and psychic ruin of trauma moving into wisdom and strength, again and again;

#!2/,9. &/2#(³ 171 every day one does the work of turning trauma into what might be called grace or fortitude or wisdom. Can poetry of witness be experienced or read as joyful? I don’t know why not. A better term might be as blessing. In many poems read as witness, there is an a∞rmation, a fullness of life. The poet writing in the mode of witness is never within the trauma. The poem is marked by it and bears the remains of what has been endured. In this sense, it might produce “more life,” more of what life is. It isn’t subject matter that makes a poem witness; poems are not what they are “about.” If they were, that would be paraphrase and not poetry.

Can the poetry of witness be a purely spiritual phenomenon? That is, can the dynamic that you’re describing in this essay, the permanent wound- ing of consciousness and language, occur from metaphysical, as well as physical, trauma?

If we think of the spiritual as a way of knowing, one can be wounded spiritually. Jean-François Lyotard would argue that the language of the Torah is permanently wounded by the experience of the divine. Jacob endures wrestling with the stranger, his angel. The slightest shock or event can send you from one thinking to another; trauma is said to occur when this shock is su∞ciently strong as to overwhelm. If the experience of God is traumatic, it is because we meet with the incommensurate.

In 1981 you wrote, “It is my feeling that the twentieth-century human con- dition demands a poetry of witness.” Do you still feel this way? How well does a poet like Elizabeth Bishop, who is easily the most highly-regarded American poet of the second half of the twentieth century, meet this demand?

Witness is not demanded of every poet. Witness, as a mode of reading, is a response to certain works — those that bear the mark of extremity, and often those written in light of catastrophic experience. The work of Wallace Stevens, one of the greatest poets of our language, would not often be read as poetry of witness, but rather of contemplative states, formal turns of mind, and poetic accomplishment. However, if we think of witness in light of catastrophic events, we would have to consider The Auroras of Autumn and its implicit confronta- tion with the violence of wwii. Charles Altieri reads this work in part as Stevens’s need

172 0/%429 to explore in what ways imagination may be complicit in one mode of evil and then to see how he [Stevens] might reconstitute his projections so that he could foster an imagination capable of taking responsibility for this complicity and so working toward a di≠erent mode of self-consciousness.

This seems to me a species of the reading I have in mind. Works of witness have something to do with the intimacy of world engage- ment. In Bishop, there is a confrontation with radical otherness: the moose in the road, the fish pulled into the boat still wearing the hooks of his past struggles. She writes out of her shock at coming upon these creatures. The shock that shifts thinking from one to an other.

Your essay is full of major postmodern thinkers but veers far from post- modern thought, which typically asserts the instability of the self, identity, and language. The notion that a particular poet or poem could be witness to, could in some way express, general su≠ering — many people will find that a hopelessly Romantic notion. What would you say to that?

Rather than postmodern thinkers, I would say that those I have cited are continental philosophers of the war years and after: Benjamin, Levinas, Lyotard. These are thinkers who re-read Heidegger. Poetry read as witness does not become “protest poetry” or, necessarily, “poetry of resistance.” This work involves a reading that isn’t post- modern; it is, perhaps, post-Shoah: writing in the aftermath of events, or what Walter Benjamin would call their “afterlife.” In any event, su≠ering, in literary art read as witness, is not gen- eral but specific, what Blake would call “particular.” In English it is akin to a Wordsworthian perception that still holds in contemporary American poetry: that the past has a way of coming back, and pro- ducing what will happen in the future. In Wordsworthian terms, the poetry comes out of returning memories one doesn’t plan to have, and if you imagine that what these memories bring with them aren’t simply instances of childhood but historical extremity, then yes, this is a Wordsworthian — or Romantic — idea. (Here is how Wordsworth’s sense of memory enters continental philosophy: Wordsworth influences Ruskin, Ruskin influences Proust, Proust in- fluences Lanzmann and also Levinas. Benjamin was a translator of Proust, but also Baudelaire.) This has nothing to do with stabiliz- ing or destabilizing selfhood. If you wish to think in terms of self, it

#!2/,9. &/2#(³ 173 is the self in Levinas who comes into being through the address of the other. The self who grounds her existence in otherness is not so much unstable as dialogic. The permeability of self and other in such work might be profoundly disturbing if one wishes to control one’s own thoughts, but this is instability of a di≠erent kind: that which comes when your existence is involved with another’s. Witness can welcome an intimacy that might seem, to some, o≠ensively invasive. There is nothing, in my view, that is not personal. Witness might be read as a public voice, but also a deeply intimate one. This might not be public oratory but lyric whisper.

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Dear Editor,

I was sorry to see that Adam Kirsch [“How Ya Like Me Now,” February 2011], like other prominent reviewers of The Anthology of Rap, failed to note that the volume is so rife with transcription errors that it is impossible not to conclude (as Paul Devlin did in Slate) that in many instances the editors simply relied on notoriously inaccurate online lyrics databases. More important, from my perspective, is Kirsch’s misreading of Frederick Seidel as “finally so ethical, despite the sexual hostility that [he] express[es], reprove[s], and atone[s] for.” This repeats the com- mon error of regarding Seidel as a mere inheritor of the confessional mode of masculinist self-reproach, rather than as the much more dis- turbing and provocative poet he actually is. Seidel’s descent from his confessionalist forebears is complicated by a swerve away from them that allows him to stake out his own poetic ground: he adopts, and amps up to absurd proportions, their theatrical self-regard, but pre- cisely in order to refuse the expiation that confession seeks to secure. Many of his most o≠ensive lines cleverly build in the possibility of redemptive readings, but only in order to more gleefully refute them with ever more exuberant assaults against taste. To read Seidel as atoning for the sins he so exhaustively chronicles for us would be to read him as just another memoirist of bad behavior, ready for his appearance on Oprah, where he will urge the impres- sionable young not to follow him down that lost highway. What could be triter, more expected, than that a poet should salivate over his lurid excesses only to, sigh, reprove himself in a moralistic e≠usion of rectitude? No, Seidel is closer to Sade than most of our critics are quite comfortable with — which is to say, he does indeed have an eth- ics, but it is one opposed to the ethics Kirsch has in mind (perhaps a closer analogue is Machiavelli, forever being read as if he did not mean a word he wrote). Seidel’s repudiation of a morality based on taste is total: he sneers at the illusions of our decorum in order to con- vert the self’s worst impulses into sources of power and even delight. We should at least attend honestly to what his poetry demands of us; de-fanged, it would hardly be worth reading at all.

,%44%23 175 “I hate seeing the anus of a beautiful woman,” Seidel writes. “I should not be looking. It should not be there.” Only out of context can these lines seem sincerely apologetic. In fact, he is looking into the anus as into a mirror, and what he sees there is: I’m the asshole. What value there is to be had from this insight lies in our taking it seriously.

michael robbins chicago, illinois

Adam Kirsch responds:

While Michael Robbins warns against taking the lines he quotes from Frederick Seidel “out of context,” I think he has done just that, and that a closer look at the poem from which they come — “God Exploding,” from Area Code 212 — will reveal how completely he mistakes Seidel’s sensibility. The poem takes its place in a series deal- ing with political violence and trauma — the previous poem in the book mentions the Kennedy assassination, and the following one addresses the September 11 attacks. “They all claim responsibility for inventing God, / Including the ruthless suicides who call themselves God Exploding,” this poem begins, before describing the invention of rock ‘n’ roll (half, but only half, ironically) as another kind of “terrorist act.” Between these two poles — the sacred and the profane, here imag- ined as equally violent and lawless — Seidel then suddenly introduces a third, redemptive possibility: the sacred music of the medieval carol “I sing of a maiden that is makeles,” whose full text makes up the next three stanzas of the poem. The introduction of this song at this point in “God Exploding,” and in the book as a whole, is very moving — it is a reminiscence of a lost mode of being, whose serenity contrasts painfully with the torment that is Seidel’s usual keynote. Then come the lines Robbins quotes:

Wel may swich a lady Godes moder be. I hate seeing the anus of a beautiful woman. I should not be looking. It should not be there.

176 0/%429 The whole point lies in the switch from the medieval reverence for the Virgin Mary to the poet’s insistence on her humiliating corpore- ality. This is a truly modern kind of debunking or vandalism, and one with a long poetic history (Seidel alludes to Swift, who lamented the fact that “Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” as long ago as 1732). What we see here in miniature is the compulsion to disgrace and vandalize what once was, or could be, holy — above all, sexual love — that runs through all of Seidel’s work, and gives it its terrible power. Robbins sees Seidel as a happy vandal, a sadist; but genuinely untroubled transgression is possible only for psychopaths like Sade, and it has little appeal to other kinds of readers except as a clinical study. (Who now reads Justine?) Seidel’s precursor is, rather, the Baudelaire of “L’Héautontimorouménos,” (“The Self-Torturer”), who declared: “I am the wound and the knife! I am the blow and the cheek! I am the limbs and the wheel, and the victim and the torturer!” What T.S. Eliot said of Baudelaire can also be said of Seidel: his Satanism is more than a pose insofar as it a∞rms the old, discredited language of good and evil. Sin is only painful if one is conscious of it as sin; and few poets have given more terrifying objective correlatives of that consciousness than Seidel, with his constant imagery of isolation, living burial, and su≠ocation. To me, one of the most memorable Seidel poems is “Contents Under Pressure,” which describes an astronaut cut loose from his ship:

Absolutely nothing can be done. The spacecraft is under orders not to try and to return and does. He urinates and defecates And looks out at the universe. He is looking out at it through his helmet mask.

Could even Robbins read this nightmare emblem of solipsism as an image of “power and delight”? This is not a confession of suf- fering — Seidel’s advance on Berryman and Lowell is to distort the autobiographical basis of “confession” in the funhouse mirror of his self-made myth — but it is an expression of su≠ering. To a serious reader, I think, it is only this kind of honesty that can make a poem “disturbing and provocative,” not the kind of obscenity which, based on this letter and his other recent interventions in Poetry, seems to strike Robbins as so delightfully transgressive.

,%44%23 177 Dear Editor,

I teach Old Testament to sophomores at Fordham University. One of the points I try to make is that irrespective of one’s religious views, one cannot be an educated person without familiarity with these an- cient texts. They are woven through the fabric of our culture. As we study the Old Testament, I try to support my position with examples from film, art, and literature. Rarely do I have examples as timely as Paul Hoover’s poems in your March issue. In fact, I have just revised my Hosea assignment to include “The Watchman of Ephraim.” As helpful as that poem is, Hoover’s Ezekiel poem, with its blend of ancient subject and modern references, will be even more so. My thanks to Poetry and of course to Mr. Hoover.

kenneth share scarsdale, new york

Dear Editor,

Your March issue caught my eye because of Kabir and Gottfried Benn. I never thought I would read Benn in English. I loved Michael Hofmann’s note and the translations, particularly “People Met.” Also, Anna Kamienska’s “Industrious Amazement: A Notebook” was a surprising, intriguing read. And as to Kabir: while walking from the bookstore to the subway with my young friend George, I mentioned worries about a dog whose household we both know, and who had been badly limping lately, and o≠-handedly G. said: “Well, then the cats will have to carry him.” Down on the platform we both opened our purchases, his graphic novel, my Poetry magazine. And there, on the first page, in the middle of Kabir’s “Brother, I’ve seen some”: “A cat carrying away / A dog,” and concluding “This verse, says Kabir, / Is your key to the universe. / If you can figure it out.” Lovely, to walk around New York City with poetry in your pocket and walking right next to you, too.

ursula zwicker new york, new york

178 0/%429 Dear Editor,

I read with great interest Daisy Fried’s piece “Torment” [March 2011], and I enjoyed every line and every detail, along with every little thing it left unsaid. My question is: In what way is this a poem and not a modern short story? Is it because of the line breaks? And who ultimately decides, the writer or the editor?

fani papageorgiou london, united kingdom

The editor responds:

The reader! (But we’d argue for the use of the line, the sense of timing and pacing, and the great compression.)

Dear Editor,

I had to do a double-take when I saw the asterisk by Carolyn Forché’s name, indicating “Travel Papers” [February 2011] to be her first pub- lication in Poetry. I thought it had to have been a mistake. The poem is a lyrical powerhouse and true testament to why she is one of the great voices of our age. Congratulations on landing her and thanks for publishing this very fine poem!

vernon fowlkes mobile, alabama

Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we cannot reply to every letter.

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robert archambeau’s books include the study Laureates and Heretics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) and the poetry col- lection Home and Variations (Salt Publishing, 2004). He is professor of English at Lake Forest College. james arthur’s * first book, Charms Against Lightning, is forth- coming from Copper Canyon Press. He will be in residence at the Amy Clampitt House in 2012. malachi black was the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2009. Other recent awards have come from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, and ut-Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. sophie cabot black is the author of the poetry collections The Misunderstanding of Nature (1994) and The Descent (2004), both from Graywolf Press. She teaches at Columbia University. art chantry’s * work has been published in over five hundred books and magazines and been collected and displayed worldwide, including at MoMA PS1, the Library of Congress, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and the Louvre. sasha dugdale’s new collection, The Red House, will be published by Carcanet Press / Oxford Poets later this year. Her play about Wil- liam Blake is being produced at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow as part of a major retrospective of Blake’s work. carolyn forché is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2004). She directs the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. dana gioia has just been appointed the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. His opera, Tony Caruso’s Final Broadcast, with composer Paul Salerni, has just been released on Naxos. fanny howe has written several volumes of poetry, fiction, and essays. Her newest collection of poems, Come and See, is due out from Graywolf Press this spring. She teaches at Georgetown University.

180 0/%429 mark irwin is the author of six books of poetry, including Tall If (New Issues, 2008) and Bright Hunger (boa Editions, 2004). He teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Southern California. clive james’s latest books are a selected poems, Opal Sunset (W.W. Norton, 2008), as well as a collection of essays, The Revolt of the Pen- dulum (2010), and a fifth volume of memoirs, The Blaze of Obscurity (2009), both published by Picador. sarah lindsay is the author, most recently, of Twigs and Knuckle- bones (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). She works as a copy editor and plays the cello in Greensboro, North Carolina. kay ryan’s Odd Blocks, Selected and New Poems, will be published by Carcanet Press in Great Britain this August. tess taylor* is the 2010 – 2011 Amy Clampitt Resident. Her chap- book, The Misremembered World, was published in 2003 by the Poetry Society of America. wendy videlock’s first full-length book of poems, Nevertheless, is published this spring by Able Muse Press. She lives in Colorado. josh wild* is the co-editor of poetry for Sycamore Review and is currently finishing his final year in the mfa program at Purdue University. He lives in Lafayette, Indiana. franz wright’s “Our Conversation” is the final piece in his forth- coming collection of sixty-five prose poems, Kindertotenwald (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). He recently published the chapbook Entries Of The Cell (Marick Press, 2010), and has two more on the way: Transfusion (Chester River Press) and Kore (Back Pages Books). stephen yenser is the author of, most recently, Blue Guide (Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 2006), a collection of poems. He has written three critical books and co-edited five volumes of James Merrill’s work, and is a Distinguished Professor at ucla.

* First appearance in Poetry.

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