I realize I posted a lot yesterday, a slightly manic day. I was at my desk a lot. I came up with a plan to write an article in six or seven days. Yesterday I came up with a title, "Fragments of a Late Modernity," a critical problem: what does it mean to be a late modernist poet like José Angel Valente, who died in 2000? I re-read some poems and wrote a brief outline. Today I make some more notes. Day 3, I write a first draft on the computer. Day 4, format and revise for style. Day 5, put in some footnotes and bibliography. Day 6, write a cover letter and send to a journal. The only hitch is that the days will not be consecutive, since the weekends are not free for unfettered work.

I can write very fast. I've written publishable articles in a few days before. Of course, I'm cannibalizing from my own conference papers and unpublished notes and I'm writing about poets I've been reading for more than 20 years. So will the article take 6 days or 20 years? Don't try this at home.

Publishing in the best journals in my field was never a problem for me. It came relatively easy. Which made me suspicious of the "best" journals. (PMLA took a relatively dull one, while rejecting my more interesting submissions.) What business did these journals have accepting the articles of a 30-year old kid who knew hardly anything? The journal in my field I most respect is now edited by my wife, so I cannot publish there any longer. We don't do nepotism.

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I might as well take a few notes in the blog itself, so I can pretend to be working:

Valente is a late modernist. What does that mean? The main parallels are late Beckett and Celan. Since I've already done my Celan/Valente and Tàpies/Valente articles, I will concentrate on Beckett here. The sense of not being able to go on, but forcing oneself to go on, becomes a metaphor for a belated modernism, more crepuscular and elegiac than forward moving. Avant-garde as arrière-garde? (is arrière even a word? note to self: look it up) Modernism as medievalism (Barbara Guest). (Bloom's idea that modernism is already belated in some sense; Perloff's sense that modernism is coming back (21st century modernism)). Valente's evocations of his son Antonio death dominate his last book Fragmentos de un libro futuro. Valente's own repetitions, like his friend Antoni Tàpies's endless crosses and walls! Or even John Ashbery, who has been known to repeat himself a bit. While the poetry of this posthumous book (and a book INTENDED to be posthmumous) can be as compelling as his earlier work, there is nothing fundamentally new here: a re-capitulation of his typical motifs and genres. Prose-poems, translations and apocryphal translations, elegies for Antonio, aphorisms, recastings of motifs from mystical traditions from Sufism to Taoism and Zen.

I'll have to discuss modernism in terms of the "Blanchot canon." Pretty much a Mallarmé-to- Celan vision of European modernism that takes shape in Blanchot's essays from the 40 to the 60s and beyond. Blanchot did not devise this canon all by himself, but that's the most convenient place to locate it. I'll have to explain why postmodernism is not relevant to this discussion. (By the way, I've come across the misspelling "cannon" or "canon" twice in the last week, in a review of Milosz on Bookslut and somewhere else I don't remember: a cannon is a large gun, a canon, a collection of sacred or approved texts. We used to pun on the two words a lot during the culture wars of the 1980s.)

What does it mean that the most prominent poet in what could be called the late modernist mode (in Spain) practices a belated or recycled version of modernity? One conclusion would be that this sort of poetry is "dying out." This could be symbolized by the death of the son. (I'm not sure whether that's my metaphor or Valente's.) The other conclusion: it lasted this long, there must be something to it. It even outlasted an increasingly weak "postmodernism," which never took off in Spain. A third conclusion: poetic "modernity" in Spain in the 21st century might not look like Valente's modernism any more. It is too soon to say what it might look like.