Adding a link to the left to "as is," since I'm now a member of this blog.

Cahiers de Corey - poetry, language, thought:

"The fictional 'ideal speech situation' of Habermas, free from conscious and unconscious sources of domination, sounds pretty darn close to what I've been thinking of as the space of postmodernist pastoral, in which writers at least try to fantasize a deliberately miniature utopia in which these conditions of speech prevail."

That would be a fascinating idea to see developed, but I wonder whether any language poet would want to sign up for a Habermassian discussion group in which enlightenment ideals prevail. Wouldn't that be too close to comfort to the "ideational mimesis" that Bernstein is always denouncing? Habermas's theory of language (such as it is) is hard to reconcile with the practice of language poetry. Putting on my professor's hat, I would say you might want to look (Josh) at Christopher Norris, who argues that Derrida and Habermas are not as far apart as they would seem to be.

The great Luddite controversy at Star Lines

I woke up up at 4 in the morning and this poem started to write itself in my head:

Ballad of the Language Poetry Hater

Language poetry
is not my cup of tea.
It fills me not with glee.
Like gruel or hominy,
it doesn't nourish me.
I love humanity
not Silliman-ity
All those who hear my plea
with me they must agree
that ancient poesy
is cattle on the lea
or green leaves on the tree
not gallic théorie
or postmodernity
(I hate John Ashbery).
It's pleasant harmony
and winsome melody
not strained obscurity
and vile diFFICulty...

That's all I can remember of it, fortunately.

***

Update 4:26 p.m.: I just this moment remembered the line "I hate John Ashbery" which I've inserted in the appropriate place.

***

The next day: I've added some more lines I remembered: "Like gruel or hominy / it doesn't nourish me. / I love humanity / not Silliman-ity"

***

The day after the next day. I remembered the line: "It fills me not with glee."

Getting to take a writing workshop with Harry Mathews. How cool that would be. Lucky Shanna Compton.

A lot of google searches today for poems in Yusef's BAP , from which I surmise some college prof out there has assigned students to analyze a poem from this volume: the students are led to my blog, where they will attempt to plagiarize me. The professor will then google the phrase "plagiarized essay about a poem from Yusef Komunyakaa's Best American Poetry 2003" and will nab the student.

Clearly the WSJ will get flarf poetics before Critical Inquiry gets language poetry.

Eeksy-Peeksy:

"I was late for the bus and it was cold and dark, but there were two skinny boys pulling a handcart full of bricks and they were stuck on a curb, rocking the cart, flexing little bums and failing.

I put down my pack and got my hands under the back and heaved while they pulled the cart over the curb. One said 'we thank you' and they went round a corner.

Just down the walk, I found a hole knocked in a garden wall and a hundred bricks missing. The weeds spread through."

This is an impressive little prose poem.

Ok, I've calmed down a little now: What is known as "language poetry" constitutes a range of aesthetic practices that cannot be reduced to a single theoretical construct. "It" is rooted in the avant-garde poetics of the New American poetry, in continental and American modernism, in Marxist thought, in Wittgenstein, in Russian formalism, and in post-structuralist theory. "It" is nothing if not literary. To say that "its" theory is more successful or meaningful than its poetic practice ignores the fact that the "theory" "it" invokes is itself inspired in avant-garde poetic practices. (I don't think Chomsky is even in the top 20 list of language poetry influences.)

I am not the defender of all things "language poetry." Some of "it" is better, more compelling, etc... than other parts of "it." It would be astounding if that were not the case. What I object to is the casual oversimplification. It seems to me clear that, of the poets who number among my favorites, Silliman, Howe, Howe, Coolidge, Hejinian, Armantrout, Palmer, and Scalapino have a significant investment in aesthetics as an act of perception involving beauty. This is not an insignificant swath of the language writers. Others I have not listed either are not my personal favorites, or are ones I haven't invested as much time in reading, but my list could easily be expanded four-fold. These are not poets of thin poststructuralist gruel; you can get a substantial logopoetic meal from them.

None of this is directed at Josh Corey, of course. I am grateful to him for pointing out this article, which I will read in its complete form when I have a minute. I may even write a response and send it in the CI.

Cahiers de Corey - poetry, language, thought, quoting an article from Critical Inquiry : "Language poetry considered under this description is simply not a literary practice, for it does not produce objects that belong to any category of language use. Nor is it, properly speaking, an aesthetic practice, for it is not oriented toward aisthesis , or perception. It is, rather, an ontological and ethical practice. Language poets produce poetry that is precisely equivalent to language, where language is considered as a kind of creatural knowledge or potential; therefore Language poets tend to treat the objects of their art--poems--as epiphenomenal evidence of a constitutively human capacity for free and creative agency that is the real object of their interest."

This, not to put too fine a point on it, does not even rise to a basic level of theoretical competence. How does reading a Robert Lowell poem involve an act of aesthetic perception that is somehow absent from reading a poem by Coolidge, Howe, or Silliman? How can a poem be "precisely equivalent to language"? I'd say very imprecisely equivalent. What can a "constitutively human capacity for free and creative agency" be if it excludes aesthetic practice? How can an ethical/ontological use of language not be aesthetic? Why are these terms opposed in this way?

(If language poetry were "precisely equivalent to language" in this respect, it would be the most wonderful poetry in the world: imagine capturing all of human creativity in one poem!)

But the argument seeks to demonstrate the old canard: the theory is interesting, but the poetry's not. In Critical Inquiry no less!

Jack DeJohnette once explained his very sophisticated broken-time approach to me by using an analogy from a laundromat. He called his concept “washing machine time” and told me to visualize it like this: in a laundromat the washers and dryers have windows through which you can see the moving clothes. This motion is caused by the clothes being moved by the regular rotation of the machine’s inner chamber, but the clothes never fall to the bottom of the chamber at the same point in the rotation. One time the clothes will be carried 1/4 of a revolution, then they will fall to the bottom. Another time they may travel 5/8s of the way around before they drop. Another time they could travel completely around without gravity pulling the clothes to the bottom. Jack told me that the fixed rate of the rotation of the machine, in real time (seconds), was analogous to the fixed duration of a musical phrase; i.e., one measure or four measures or eight measures, etc., and that he can feel “musical time” in terms of seconds, --not just in terms of counting a certain number of beats per phrase. His ideas can fall anywhere in a phrase, just as laundry can fall at any point in the machine’s rotation, without disrupting the musical flow.

--John Riley, Beyond Bop Drumming

Whew. . . Finished that tenure letter. Now I can get back to my student papers and exams, NEH proposals. Or actually not. Leave those for tomorrow. Collect poetry for Bad Mickey Television Sock! Edit my paper on metrical styles. Jazz it up with some quotes by drummers.

Now that one article/chapter is out of the way for the time being, I will go back to my piece on "metrical signatures" in Rodríguez and Valente, written the summer before last. Each poet has a particular "feel" for the passage of time. If I can define that signature with some precision, mixing objective and subjective analysis at my whim, I will have a convincing study.

***

The virtues Jordan sees in Mary Ruefle remind me a lot of his own poetry. See his review at the Constant Critic site.

I got an invitation to join a blog, but the link I followed gave me an error. What's up with that?